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Between the end of Mike’s world (a little wonder, alight with flickering hope) and the End Of The World (a giant, encroaching darkness promising to blot out any of that radiant light), there's a good chunk of time for Mike to wade through. From the glint of tears in Will's eyes to the slow-sink parsing of Will's confession, to the realization that in Mike's moment of unmoving shock, Will had been wrapped up in other, surer arms. By the time Mike gets to him, there isn’t a place he could rest his hand and meet Will’s body. And he wants Will to be held — after that? obviously, of course — but he feels so impossibly separate.
He gets to him, after.
Most of their team are idling on the truck, or else helping load up and prepare for the venture out. Mike is dallying outside, just in view of Will and Jonathan. The brothers talk in the low, hushed voices of people with a bond too close for anyone else to be invited in. They reach a lull, and Mike says, "Will?"
All the gentleness he put in his voice is lost, morphed into something more threatening when carried through the wind and the dark. Will looks at him. His wide eyes lack any of that steely resolve he'd had in moments of his confession; he doesn't put that on for Mike. He doesn't, or he can't.
"Oh," his voice, raised from whatever whisper he'd had with Jon, is still tremulous. "Sorry. Should we get in the truck?"
"I wanted to talk to you." Will hasn't stepped any closer to him. Jon's sharp-edged glaring at Mike seems to prevent his own moving-forward, and Mike only hopes his expression is something nonthreatening and gentle. (He hopes, deeper, that Jonathan knows whatever threat and ungentleness lives in him could never be turned on Will.) (Deeper than that, even, he hopes that that is true.) "Nancy said we have some time."
"But not much, right?" Jonathan asks, keeping his shoulders pressed against Will's.
"It should be a while. Hop's stalled." Ducked-head and lowered-voice, he asks, "Please, Will."
Will's looking at Mike like he's the headlights of the car about to flatten him into the pavement. Jon speaks for him, "Only if you want to," with an imploring note that's more of an encouragement for than against. Mike is grateful.
"If it's worth factoring in, we're pretty squarely in apocalypse territory now." With Jonathan's implicit blessing, Mike takes the steps forward until he is stood in front of the brothers. "I kinda wanna talk to my best friend, first."
Will's breath catches in his parted mouth, and all that held emotion comes out in the hurried insistence of his nod. "Yeah. Yeah, Mike."
"Hm." Jonathan doesn't leave Will's side without squeezing his hand first, but then he walks over. Tilts his head towards the door back inside, "Be ready to go when you're done," and gives Mike's shoulder a soft shake.
"Thank you," Mike says. Jon nods, something indicative in the dip of his chin, and he walks away.
Mike, when they were smaller, would have taken Will by the wrist and dragged him about anywhere he needed them both to be, at the given moment. On braver days, he'd have taken Will's hand. Today, he's half the man he was at seven, and he doesn't touch Will at all, as he leads them both off to the emptied room.
It's when Will's stood leaning against the back of a couch, looking at him expectantly, that Mike realizes he really didn't plan a thing beyond the getting-Will-alone. He has no idea what to say. Sometimes he feels this way, like he has a muscle trained just for understanding Will Byers. It very well might've been his strongest muscle, until the year he'd encouraged it to atrophy in a desperate attempt to destroy the part of him that wanted Will. It hadn't worked, of course. For all the misunderstanding, anger, and fighting, he hadn't loved Will any less. He'd only gotten worse at showing it.
Which is a long, melodramatic explanation for why the first thing his dumb mouth blurts out is, "So, who's Tammy?"
"That's not…" Will shakes his head, slowly. His eyes dart about — Mike to the door to the windows to the floor to Mike. "That's not his real name."
"Yeah, no, I figured." He's figured a bit more, a hope-drenched but seemingly fair guess at what that real name might be. At some point, that might've been enough to guess with. But, as just-fucking-proven, his Will-communication muscle is still a bit flabby. "What's the deal with that?"
Will huffs. Incredulity is a difficult look to pull off with eyes still tear-red, but, well. Will is magic. "The 'deal'?"
"Like, are you over him?"
Will's back and forth glance gets a bit desperate. "I… Why are you interrogating me?"
Trying to guess if you're in love with me, nixed. Trying to figure out if you'd even want me to love you back, nixed also. Trying to figure out if I wasted the years you wanted me convincing myself you never could, way too fucking pathetic, nix! He stumbles out an old reliable: "I'm your best friend." He hopes. "Can't I be worried about you?"
"I mean, it is the thing I said I didn't want!" Will throws a hand in the air, then looks at it like it is something offending. He drops it. "I don't want you, you to worry and get weird and ask all these questions…"
"That isn't what I meant," Mike defends.
"What I just, the conversation I just had, Mike, it sucked." Will shakes his head. His eyes are blistering, mouth curled, and post-apocalypse-resolution, Mike's gonna do any damn thing he can to keep the world and himself from putting that look back on Will's face. "And so I don't need this, right now, okay? I don't need you interrogating me, or worrying about my safety or—"
"Will."
"Can we just go?" His eyes blink through tears. "Please. I don't know what all your questions are, I just…"
All his questions. Will's right — there's just one, really, the one earth-shattering wondering that has Mike so tilted on his axis he doesn't even know how to talk to his best friend. "One more." He can hear his own breath in the space between them. "Tammy. Is...
"Is it me?"
Will looks at Mike, mouth parted before it reforms into a small, resigned smile.
He nods.
Through the glaze of tears, Will's eyes have the same grizzled determination with which he'd stared down friends and family and complete fucking strangers, carving his innards open for them to view, just so some terrible monster couldn't do it first. He'd looked them all straight-on, firm in the belief that it is better to see the horror than have it left unknown behind closed eyes. He didn't like to be stared at. But he'd stood there, every set of eyes on him, and done it.
Fuck it.
"Can I hug you?" Mike asks, for probably the first time ever, to Will. Maybe anyone. He doesn't give a lot of hugs, not since he and Will were little, since he could wrap them up together without fear, without asking first. "Please," he adds, because politeness has merit, and he needs Will to know he wants this.
Will says, "Yes," and Mike doesn't waste a second tangling him up in his arms.
Will is slack in his hold for a moment, but comes around quick. He ducks his face into Mike's neck — no need to force eye contact — and curls his fingers into Mike's shoulders. The imprints will last for days, Mike hopes. Mike hopes, that he will always have some part of Will that holds onto him, that these tears will stain his shirt, that his heartbeat will adopt the tenor of Will's unburdened breath. He hopes Will can hold this relief, forever.
He hopes, selfishly, that Will wants it.
Mike doesn't pull away. What a joke — like he'd pull away from this Will, here, for anything less than the actual fucking apocalypse. But he brushes his hand over the top of Will's head, over his hair, the slope of his shoulder and down to his waist. He promises, "I got you, I got you."
"I'm so sorry, Mike."
"For what?" Every word is a mouthful of bowlcut, and he doesn't even care. "I mean, I guess I feel a little snubbed. Brought in the loop at the same time as Murray. And that Candystriper!"
Will laughs and backs out of Mike's arms. Mike doesn't let himself take it as rejection, and instead just rests his hand on Will's shoulder. Something for Will's gaze to hold on, while he can't look at Mike. "Well, then, I'm sorry for that," Will says. "I'm sorry I didn't tell you sooner."
"About all of it? Or," testing the words, his guess at their implication. "About the Tammy thing?"
Feeling the fear-press of Will's gaze, Mike misses the manifest trust of those same eyes, closed against the skin of his neck. "I… That didn't matter. I shouldn't have said that."
Mike, poking at an implication, "C'mon, dude. You had to spend like, a year, listening to our crush drama. You don't get a turn?"
"That was awful," Will admits. Despite every shared interest Will had desperately laid out before them, there had been a summer (longer than a summer), where the only thing anyone wanted to talk about was the one thing Will couldn't partake in. And then Mike had gone and made it worse. "But you know this isn't the same."
"Why not?" Mike shrugs. "It's my best friend, worked up over a crush on someone who can't begin to deserve him."
Will shakes his head. "That's not true."
"It's so true. Word on the street is this Tammy guy was a real dick about you not liking girls, which puts him easily below anyone else in that room." In the space between them, Mike puts his hand down to grab hold on Will's. "I bet he feels really fucking sorry about that, for what it's worth."
"Yeah, I know," Will is looking down at their tangled hands, like the place they're held together is breaking his heart. "I hope he knows I'm not… Upset at him, at all. He isn't more than I deserve, because he gives me, his friendship is so important to me. It's enough for me, I realized that, that, I'm enough, all on my own. I'm gonna move on."
"But what if you didn’t." It falls from him with the same sudden surety as an off-cuff scheme, an improvised side-quest. Something he wants to work, but can't trust, on virtue of it being an idea of his.
Will sniffles. "What?"
"What if you stayed… right… here." He runs his hands down Will's forearms, until he can tangle their fingers between them. "No moving anywhere. Definitely not 'on'."
When they were, like, ten, Mike and Will drew up an entire secret alphabet, complete with an additional cipher, to write each other — and later, the party — messages. They didn't have big secrets, then, but the privacy was the joy itself. Knowing that he could make no sense to the entire world, but still be known to Will.
Will looks down at their tangled hands for the message in them. "...Why not?"
"Because I'm here too," Mike confesses. It isn't the half of it, but it's a start. It's something honest and it will, hope to God, make Will happy. "So if you moved on, you'd be leaving me behind. And I already had that happen once, when you ran off to California."
He supposes he owes that God some thanks, when Will smiles. "That wasn't my fault!"
"You should have hidden in my basement, I never would've told," Mike teases.
"And give your mom an extra six months of hosting a Byers? I need your parents to like me, Mike."
"Gotta get in good with the future in-laws," Mike says, which is a bit of a choppy water to test, but who, upon seeing the ocean, doesn't dive straight in? (Genuine question. Mike has never seen the ocean; he wouldn't know.)
"You're really sweet, Mike." Will smiles, which Mike takes as a positive, for as long as it takes Will to untangle their hands and take two heavy steps backwards. "But this… isn't how this goes."
Mike blinks. "What?"
Will is looking at him again, arms crossed-over-chest. Defensive. Protecting something curled up in his chest, and it's the worst thing in the world, that he thinks Mike might break it. "You're acting like this is normal, I don't know how, but it isn't. This, what we're talking about, Mike? This isn't normal, I'm—"
"No shit you're not normal," Mike interrupts. "So what? I'm not normal. We never have been."
Will shakes his head. His pointer fingers play a game of rubbing under his eyes, predicting tears that haven't yet come. “You like girls, Mike!”
“Maybe." This is another thing Will has that he lacks: that form of surety. That confidence, of a self known so well it can be spoken out into open room — known so well it's a threat the enemy can make. "I dunno, but that doesn't—"
"Exactly. And, and now I have these powers, and maybe I remind you of El—"
"Dude."
"Or, or maybe it's — I don't know! But Vecna showed me how it goes. I saw it.” Will shakes his head. “And I don't get this.”
"So… You're believing Vecna over me?" Mike spreads his arms in a wide are we for real? gesture. "His MO is lying to children. C'mon. There is no way he was showing you the real, true future.”
“Are you sure?”
“His story doesn't even make sense! What, everyone was so crazy worried that we all abandon you? Total contradiction. Bad character work. Henry can't write for shit."
Will laughs — goal achieved — but he steps further away, until he can sit on the arm of the couch. "It's not that crazy of a scenario. People like to worry, and like to care... until they get tired. Mike, you nearly killed yourself trying to find me when we were twelve, and two years later, couldn’t be bothered to give me a call." His gaze is cast out across the room. Hands curled-to-fist in his lap. "I know I’m difficult. This is all — not what any of you signed up for, and even if you care about me now, I wouldn't ask you to in five years.”
"But I will."
"But, you understand why I'm scared."
"I guess. I never thought about that one," Mike admits. He rests his back against the couch's, he and Will looking in opposite directions. "I just imagined everyone — being hated by everyone."
“Oh.” Will chuckles. “Well, yeah, he showed me that one too."
"You didn't say."
"If Mom knew I could even imagine her hating me over this, she'd be so upset she'd take on Vecna single-handed, for daring to show me a world where she does." Mike snorts, and feels Will's elbow brush back on his. "Besides, I know she wouldn’t. Really.”
Mike looks up. Chipped paint on the tiles, cobwebs in the corners. He misses the sky, without all the clouds and wormholes and other sci-fi terror. He wishes he and Will weren't talking about this here and now, but somewhere outside, sun-heated pavement under unhurried bike wheels. “You weren't sure I wouldn’t hate you." He doesn't deign to phrase it as a question; he knows, and he knows it's his own fault.
Will sighs. “It's not an easy thing to be sure about.”
"I get it," Mike affirms. It's the least of his penance. "I'm sorry. And I'm — I'm really proud of you. For saying it all.”
In gentle answer, Will just barely bumps the back of their heads together. "It's a lot easier when you know you're not alone."
"Good thing that many people showed to your coming out."
Mike can feel the chest-full of Will's laugh before it's exhaled to air. "God, I can't believe you brought Murray."
"I thought you wanted to say something about the mission!"
"And, I mean, everyone was so nice about it but — no. It was meeting someone else like me that mattered, knowing that she was there. It made it feel… possible." Mike feels the push of Will's shoulders from behind, and he turns in tandem, so they are looking at each other again. "Is it possible, for you?"
There again; the things they speak without a word. "It is." Will, kneeling on the couch, looks down at Mike. Fluorescent-haloed. "Does that mean you believe me?"
"It means that I can't come up with any good reasons why it wouldn't be true. Which is a leg up on Vecna, who you did just prove wrong…" Will leans in like an offered conspiracy. "Which is making it seem like I kinda have to believe you, right?"
"Sound logic."
"Okay." Will puts his hands on either side of the military vest, so he is holding tight to the space just above Mike's heart. "In that case… It seems like you're in love with me."
Mike laughs.
"Sorry!" He says, immediately, pre-empting the fall of Will's face. "No, I — yes. I am. I just… I didn't even have to say it."
"I mean, you can also say it, if you want," Will says, an obvious prompt that Mike knows he could refuse, were he unready. Which is Mike's first instinct — that he isn't ready. Loving Will is the best thing about him, and he spent over a year doing his damnedest to look like that wasn't part of him at all. All because of the fear of a few peering-in gazes.
There's none of those, now.
So maybe...
"I love you."
He's ready.
And thank god he is, because the full stretch of Will's smile, chapped lips further-splitting in the chasing of that joy, is the most gorgeous thing he's ever seen in his life. He'd say about anything to see Will this happy; how could airing out one terrifying truth, to one grateful person, not be worth it?
"Mike." He tucks his face, once more, in that space of shoulder and neck and unseeing trust. "I love you, too."
"Take that, Tammy," Mike says, and relishes Will's laugh on his collarbone, his fist punching at Mike's chest in dull punishment for a cheap joke. All that does is tickle Mike's ribs — damn you, Will, now we're both laughing. (The odds are looking up, of Mike being able to keep that laughter going for a good long while.) "Okay, we did confessions, can I be in on the joke now? What's the deal with Tammy?"
"I guess." Will laughs. "Tammy Thompson. She went to Hawkins High. She was Robin's first crush." This doesn't do much to answer his question, at first, until he remembers who Robin is and puts the pieces together and, Oh.
"Wait, Robin's…?"
"Yeah." Will grins, pressing his fingertips onto the couchback. "I mean, I probably shouldn't have told you. But you're like us, and besides, her girlfriend knows about me."
Robin, for whom he'd had a fleeting moment (or two) of jealousy, after her quickly setting in closeness with Will. Idiot. As far as things to be wrong about go, though, this is a good one. "Robin has a girlfriend? An actual girlfriend."
"Yes!" Will is beaming. Mike, when picking reasons why Will couldn't love him back and tired of the obvious, sometimes fell to the excuse that Will just wasn't a romantic. He was annoyed by girlfriends, uninterested in rom-coms, Mike had heard him, on more than one occasion, say he would never fall in love. Which, makes sense now. But it's nice to see him so excited about two people in love. "Vickie — the candystriper — that's her. I saw them making out at the hospital, it's how I found out about Robin. It was the first time I'd ever seen anyone like me."
"Holy shit." Mike is still floored. "She has a girlfriend. In Hawkins."
"Miracles can happen," Will follows the line of Mike's shoulders, triceps, elbows to forearms, so he can hold their hands in the middle. "This feels kinda like one."
"You can expect being a real-life sorcerer to bring some miracles with it." Mike will never be bothered by anyone calling him a nerd ever again, if it means he can see Will's cheesy grin at lines like that. "Seriously. Will, you're the magic."
Will surely knows Mike would argue if he tried to actually combat that, so he leaves it with a shake of the head. "Thank you, for telling me." He laughs, and runs the back of his hand over his nose. "I can't believe we both… Doesn't it feel impossible?"
"I really thought it was," Mike nods. "I never would've said anything, so thank god you're braver than me."
"It really wasn't brave. I just — did what I had to."
"If Vecna put a gun to my head and ordered me to tell an empty room I've thought about kissing a boy, I'm not sure you ever would have seen me again." He appreciates Will's snort of a laugh. "I'm serious. Will, on top of being a literal sorcerer—"
"Mike."
"On top of that, you're, like, the bravest person ever. Like, I'm barely getting the words out saying it to you, when I already know you're like me."
"I'm sorry," Will says, again. As if Will was giving him anything worthy of anything less than ecstatic excitement. "That, that you have to go through any of this, too. This sucks, having to be this, this thing, that's different." He doesn't let go of Mike's hands. "But you're right. It's alright, because we're both here. Yeah?"
"Not going anywhere." Then, with a glance towards the door, "Well, except the Upside Down, I guess."
Will chuckles, then leans away, so his weight is fully shifted on to the couch. "We should probably go, right?"
"They must be almost done, yeah," Mike says. He doesn't move. He will, soon — Holly's there, and the other kids. He'd seen them, and promised himself he'd never let them go through what Will did, for the fat lot of good that did. And yet, selfishly, he desperately wants to stay right here.
"Honestly?" Will turns back to the windowless door, as if Vecna gave him some power to see through walls. Possible. He is the magic. "I bet they're waiting around for us. I don't think Jonathan would let them interrupt us."
"Does he know?"
"How I feel? I think so. And I'm pretty sure he hopes you feel the same." Will offers him a hand. Mike's not really sitting, just leaning, but he takes it anyway. Feels the steady hammer pulse underneath Will's skin. "You really are winning with the in-law thing," Will tests out the choppy water with a shy smile and, there we go. Braving the ocean's a lot easier when you got a boy you love beside you.
"How about this? If we're still alive, after everything, you can teach me how to come out to people," Mike offers. It feels like almost too big a promise, the hope of something he could never follow through on. But he wants to follow through on it. He wants to be as brave as Will. "I think I want to."
Will is flushed and smiling, shoulders-raised-to-ears as he demurs, "I don't know if I'm an expert."
"I don't want expert advice. I want yours."
"Then, I think I can do that. And, Mike?"
"Yeah?"
Will pulls Mike in, stands on his toes, and presses his lips to the high point of Mike's cheekbone. Which basically makes this whole fucking apocalypse thing worth it. (Not, like, actually. People died.) (He really likes Will, is the point.) "If we don't die, and you come out, and you still want to, then maybe, after all this, you can come over and kiss me senseless."
"Yeah." It's maybe the quickest thing Mike's ever agreed to. What can he say, Will's got an eye for strategy. "Yeah, I think that'll be good."
"I think so too," Will agrees.
True to Will's guess, everyone is already on the up-and-running truck when they step out. Mike has every instinct to duck his head and try to not be so blatantly conspicuous — the familiar feeling, that anyone looking at him could read off his posture, his gait, his wandering eyes, that he was bent at all the wrong angles. But Will is next to him. He shares those same bending angles, that seem to tilt him in towards Mike, and Mike towards him.
Mike lifts his chin. He's with his Will, and they'll go together.
To the end of the world.