Chapter Text
Will Byers knows a lot of things.
He knows that he likes boys.
He knows that his childhood was taken from him.
He knows that his sister is dead.
But most of all, Will Byers knows that Mike Wheeler is definitely not his Tammy Thompson.
The thought comes to him uninvited as he presses the tape gun down the seam of another cardboard box, the sound loud in the quiet of his bedroom in Hopper’s cabin, the room that used to be El’s. It’s strange how quickly a place can stop feeling like yours once you start emptying it.
The box is labeled BOOKS in his careful handwriting, the letters slanted slightly to the right. He hesitates before setting it down, fingers lingering on the cardboard.
He exhales through his nose and forces himself to straighten up.
College. That’s what this is. When Will goes to College, he can decide what parts of himself are important enough to carry forward. It means leaving Hawkins.
They’d all promised each other that this wasn’t goodbye. The five of them, Mike, Dustin, Lucas, Max. Their last game of D&D, feeling like an epilogue, Mike predicting their futures, Will’s vaguest of all. Wondering about their mage. Will believed.
He hadn’t said much. He had laughed, and cried, and with his friends those emotions felt lighter, to be shared. But packing alone, the weight of it all settles in his chest.
He reaches for the next thing on his bed and stops.
It’s an old D&D manual, the cover creased, corners soft with age. The spine is cracked right down the middle from the night they spilled soda on it and Mike laughed so hard he snorted, and Dustin said that was not what a paladin would do.
Will remembers that laugh vividly, those happy crinkles under Mike’s eyes and the ones from the sides of his nose spreading down, level with his mouth, ones Will had memorised again and again and again. Dark brown, almost black curls falling into his eyes, curls that Will had drawn hundreds of times over the years, most thrown away, rotting secrets in landfills or torn up, but a few, tucked away in boxes or under his bed.
Will sits down on the edge of the bed, the manual resting in his lap. As he opens it, a crinkled, yellowed old drawing drifted to the floor of his room.
He must have been ten or eleven when he did this. A small, bowl-cut brown haired boy holding hands with his best friend. On the front it says, in little Mike’s scrawly, messy, unmistakable handwriting; ‘Will the Wise and Mike the Brave.’ Will always loved how Mike would write Will’s name first. Because back then, putting Will first was something Mike would always do.
He remembers Mike again now, but smaller. Will coming round for unexpected sleepovers, when his Dad was being mean. Mike used to hold his hand if Lonnie was too loud for Will. Will liked that Mike would speak quietly for only him.
He hadn’t known then what that pull in his chest meant back then.
On the back of the drawing was written ‘The Paladin and The Cleric’.
He sets the manual and the drawing gently into the box and adds a sweater on top of it, folding it with unnecessary care.
It’s one of Mike’s, technically. Or it was, once upon a time. He never asked for it back. Will never offered.
The fabric smells faintly like laundry detergent and something that’s just Mike. Will presses it to his face before he can stop himself, eyes burning.
He remembers when he was possessed, the way he’d shake and burn and scream and Mike would hold his shoulders, voice steady, eyes terrified but never leaving him.
That was about the time that Will acknowledged what he felt for Mike was more than just friendship.
But Mike had El, so Will buried it, suppressing it, focusing on saving the world and being what people expected of him more, but that only turned into growing pains and slammed doors and the feeling of being left behind while everyone else surged forward, Lucas and Max, Dustin and Suzie, El and Mike. Will remembers standing in the rain,
“It’s not my fault you don’t like girls!”
Tearing down Castle Byers because its safety suddenly felt childish, like the safety of Mike has suddenly felt childish, because he’d realised—too late—that wanting things to stay the same was a kind of crime.
And then, in Lenora, in the absence of Mike’s gravitational pull, he made the painting. God, the painting.
It’s still on Mike’s wall. He never told Mike that it was all him, all his feelings, because El was gone, and Mike needed something to cling onto rather than Will making it all about himself.
He’d said what he said in that van, and at the Pizza restaurant, because Mike needed it. Because Mike needed to believe in El, so she could save everyone. Will had been able to give him that, even if it meant carving pieces out of himself to do it.
It’s not for me, he’d told himself. Some things are bigger than me.
And then eighteen months later, standing in a room with what felt like half of Hawkins, terrified of what they would think of him.
“I don’t like girls.”
And them accepting him, but then because he so desperately wanted it to be true, needed it to be true, saying
“He’s just my Tammy -“
But that was a lie.
He was in love with Mike Wheeler.
He is still in love with Mike Wheeler.
Will Byers has been irrevocably, irreversibly, profoundly, acutely, desperately, painfully in love with Mike Wheeler for as long as he can remember, and there is nothing he can do about it.
That’s the cruelest part.
He doesn’t let himself think about it for long. If he does, he might not be able to breathe.
Instead, he tapes up the final box and sits back on his heels, looking around the room one last time. The walls are bare now. Quiet. Normal in a way they never really were.
There’s a knock on the doorframe.
Joyce and Hopper have been packing up the car for him.
“You ready, kid?” Hopper asks, leaning in, hands shoved into his jacket pockets. He looks older now. They all do. Like the years finally caught up with them all at once.
Will swallows. “Yeah. Just—finished.”
Joyce meets his eyes and smiles a little. “We’ll give you a minute.
After the door clicks shut, Will sinks down onto the floor among the boxes and lets the tears come, quietly, like he always has.
Will Byers knows a lot of things.
He knows that he likes boys.
He knows that his childhood was taken from him.
He knows that his sister is dead.
He knows that loving Mike Wheeler, even knowing it will never be returned the way he wants—is something he will carry with him, unshakable, for the rest of his life.