Chapter Text
Things are easier when it’s not real—when Mike tells a story through a campaign. It’s what he does, what he’s good at: storytelling.
For his entire life up until now, storytelling seemed to work in his favor.
The problem is, when you become an adult, no one wants to listen to stories anymore. They want to live them.
Things are easier when it’s not real. When it’s not lived. Safer, you know? You can’t hide as much when it’s you, not him.
When it’s him, him can make mistakes, act out of character, course-correct if things go wrong. Him is stronger than Mike ever was, you see. Him is someone brave, someone who isn’t afraid of living life, of failing and getting back up, of trying again.
That’s why he always chose Paladin. But a Paladin, beyond his obvious characteristic of being a knight, is also sworn to oaths. One of them is honesty.
What a joke.
But of course, it isn’t funny. Mike always chose Paladin as his role in D&D, because he got to be Mike The Brave. Mike, Leader of the Party.
You’re the heart.
It was easy to believe himself to be these things, eight hours at a time in the safety of his basement, with his best friends.
The back of his throat feel acidic with irony and bile.
What would his friends think, if they knew? How much of a lie all of this is? How much of a coward Mike The Brave really is?
It was nice though, to embody characteristics he wished he had for himself. As Paladin, he didn’t need to wonder whether he was brave enough; the oath had already decided that for him. The courage was baked in. Pre-written. Guaranteed.
Paladins don’t hesitate. They don’t second-guess. They stand between the danger and the people they love and they stay there. Even when they’re scared and the end result isn’t certain, when the danger might concretize into something real and lasting.
Paladins do not let their best friends come out, in tears, for minutes, and say nothing.
Paladins do not have internal crises in the middle of a very complicated war.
Paladins do not watch their best friend’s face take a dive from hope to fear to whatever the fuck awful kind of soul-destroying expression Will Byers made when Mike The Coward dared to hesitate and retreated at the last moment. No, best friends. The Mind Flayer should have taken him out right then. He would have deserved it.
Paladins do not let their best friend leave their basement without knowing that—
So.
Paladins are nothing like Mike. Mike feels the fear, and lets it subjugate him. He feels fear’s fingers around his throat and he chokes on his bravery. Every single time, Mike has choked on his bravery.
He wants to be good. He wants to be brave, but Mike’s hands are constantly shaking.
Sometimes, he catches glimpses of the Paladin in himself—but only reflected in Will’s eyes. Never in the mirror. The mirror only ever shows him the hesitation, the doubt, the coward’s way out.
It’s Upside Down, ha, Mike only ever gets to be a hero in someone else’s story. Will’s. It’s good, probably, that that someone else is Will.
There seldom is anyone else Mike would want to be heroic for.
In his own life though, he is the small, terrified kid who isn’t like everybody else. He learned that early.
There are signs, in a household, that express when something is okay, and when something isn’t. There’s a language in a house, subtext and details you do not learn the mechanics of until later, when you go to someone else’s house for play time and discover that that house has a completely different set of words and subtext used on the daily.
Language, in many ways, is the least evolved of tools. It’s archaic. Humans still rely on sounds they make with their mouths—teeth and tongue and lips—to approximate understanding between two separate consciousnesses, which is absurd. How is anyone supposed to understand anyone in these conditions? Where is the guarantee that the meaning will survive the journey?
But, of course, the world is unfair, and language is what humans have.
When you’re born into a family, you absorb its language, its tone, its shorthands, its subtext. You absorb the rules long before you know they are rules at all, and for years, you speak the language of that family—yours—fluently, without noticing it’s a dialect at all.
But as you grow, you begin assembling a new one through exposure. Friendships, school, a war with another world where your best friend got kidnapped and almost died and got threaded into the mind of an evil god who successfully blinded one of your friends and killed a sensible amount of people and also kidnapped your sister and almost killed you several times over and remember that one time where you were so sure you were dead meat but your best friend stood there and controlled three monsters with his mind and tore them apart and you realized he was becoming something else something more and oh god he is going to outgrow you he already has he is stronger than he ever was and you are still hiding from yourself you coward he is going to leave you he is growing stronger and better and more handsome day after day and you are going to lose him—
You gather fragments of other dialects and cultural elements from other people. These ecosystems overlap and merge until you’re living inside something entirely new and unstable, something that doesn’t quite have a name yet. A half-built world you’re entirely responsible for.
So when you go home, you’re re-entering an ecosystem that becomes like a legacy system. Old rules and assumptions. The system technically functions, but it cannot support the person you’ve become. Every attempt to update it risks a crash.
Mike met Will first.
Will’s house had a very specific language, just as broken as Mike’s own, until Lonnie left and took some of the worst syntax with him.
But between Mike and Will, something else happened.
Over time, they made their own language. An fully hybrid tongue the both of them could speak without words, made out of glances and shared references, jokes no one else could ever understand, without the input from their respective families.
And over time, Mike’s basement became a liminal space where they got to try on versions of themselves without consequence, through D&D. Where they practiced choosing words, and roles, and who they wanted to be and how they wanted to be remembered.
Too bad they never learned to translate that skill into the real world.
It’s just—the real world is hostile to dialects it doesn’t recognize.
There have been moments—more and more over the past few years—where has Mike felt like he’s outgrown his family. His internal world has expanded beyond the parameters they taught him, his understanding of himself beyond the boundaries of what his family could possibly understand.
Could he make them understand?
See what happens Michael?
What happens when what!
Mike Wheeler knows the way he feels about his best friend is not… normal. He also knows that he himself does not feel normal, either. The problem is that normal is a word with heavy, dangerous implications.
There are clues, when you are an outsider to yourself.
You start monitoring your own speech, make sure every word has plausible deniability. It’s not my fault you don’t like girls. I like girls. You see? I like girls. I have a girlfriend, even. It’s not my fault, because I’m not like yo—that. I’m not like that.
You feel your heart turn away from you in shame.
You watch yourself from the outside, constantly auditing your behavior. Kiss your girlfriend. Do not hug your best friend too tightly. In fact, don’t touch him at all.
You enforce the rules before anyone else has to. Don’t look too long. Don’t want too much. Don’t say anything. Avoid avoid avoid avoid—
He remembers when he used to stand up for people. When did that go away? What happened to him?
Avoiding Will has always been a problem, because Will is everywhere. He is in his real life, in his D&D campaigns, on his walls, in the Upside Down, and he’s trampled all over Mike’s heart so many times there are grooves made from Will Byers’ footprints. He is at the heart of the fear Mike hosts in his body. Will is Mike’s own, personal Mind Flayer.
Yes, avoiding Will has always been a problem.
But so has wanting him.
Of course, this wouldn’t be a problem if this were a campaign. If it were, the Paladin wouldn’t hesitate. His oath would force the truth out of him, would burn the lie out of him like a cleansing fire. The Paladin would choose honesty even if it cost him everything, because that’s what heroes do.
Mike doesn’t want to lose everything, so he tells himself it’s nothing. A misinterpretation. A leftover closeness from surviving so much together. They’re friends. Best friends. He buries the Nothing under old labels like stacking furniture against a door. It’s a very, very strong door.
It’s a door like an Upside Down gate, terrifying, and it feeds all of Mike’s fears back to him in an infinite loop, every time Mike even starts to consider, possibly, opening the door and seeing what’s beyond. If it’s as scary as he thinks it is, or if there’s a chance—however small—that it might be—good. Or at least, manageable. If there were some kind of certainty that Mike The Coward might be able to get through that door and find himself on the other side without losing everything else. Too much. Too much of everything else.
There are compromises to be made in D&D, Mike isn’t under any delusion that he might cross that door with no damage. It’s just—he doesn’t know what kind of monsters waits beyond. How hard he’ll have to fight.
If this were a campaign, Mike knows what he’d do. First, he would describe the door to his party.
In D&D, there are common doors that are either barred or locked, and secret doors, and portcullises. Each door can open under a specific set of rules, according to specific types of attacks. And if this were a campaign, Mike wouldn’t be alone. He’s talk to his party about what do we do now, how do we approach this?
Well.
Technically, Mike isn’t alone anymore.
That is, he is.
Alone.
On the side of the door that’s safe.
Where Will used to be.
But Will has crossed the door—without him.
Of course, he has. Of course. Will is better Will is stronger Will has gone through so much all alone and where have you been and where were you then and where are you now you absolute coward of a man Will will leave you know he will he already has but he will move on eventually Will is going to move on and you will still be staring at that godforsaken door—
The door is a monster with a mouth, and it tells him that honesty will take everything he has. It tell him he can be brave in every other way—as long as he never, ever names this alien feeling.
And sometimes, when Will looks at him—really looks at him, Mike feels that impossible thing rise up in his chest. The Paladin thing. The stand-your-ground thing. The it-might-be-worth-it thing. The cross-the-door-before-it’s-too-late thing.
And then fear gets there first, you know the one. The fear of being exactly who he is, and so he retreats. Hesitates. Lets the moment slip through his fingers.
Over and over and over again, Mike’s hands have let the moment pass, slippery, scaredy-cat fingers clutching on to nothing but his terror of what if.
But recently, there have been moments. More precisely, that night after Will became a Sorcerer, after Will told everyone his secret, told Mike, where Mike tossed and turned, and thought—what when.
This had not happened before.
What when. Like an inevitability opening. Like Will The Wise, from beyond the door, all alone in the unknown, had turned back and given a kick to the door, cross with me. Cross with me. Please. I am stronger. I can protect you.
Mike stares at his name right next to Will’s, in the safe world of the basement.
Will is leaving, Mike. Will is leaving he’s leaving he’s going to leave he’s going to go somewhere else somewhere were you aren’t do you get it yet Mike Wheeler if you do not do something Will is going to forget about you he’s going to move on—
His heart is pounding. His hands are shaking. He’s sweating, now.
This is unfortunate. In his campaigns, when Mike The Brave decides to do something really fucking brave, or really fucking stupid, Mike feels himself fill up with excitement and a little bit of anxiety, but mostly excitement, let’s see what I can do.
In his real life, Mike doesn’t feel any sort of excitement. He’s looking at Max, and Lucas, and Dustin, and Will and Mike’s names together, so close, so much closer than they’ve ever been in the real world, and he really wishes he could stop shaking.
There are rules to bravery in the real world, it seems. One of them, apparently, is that courage doesn’t arrive fully formed or pre written at all. And—worse news, it doesn’t replace fear, either.
Mike just has both fear and courage flooding his veins in a heady cocktail of epinephrine, norepinephrine, cortisol, but also dopamine. He could vibrate through the door right now, all without power, probably, with the amount of energy that is coursing through his body. He’s surprised he’s not luminescent with chemicals.
Mike swallows, and looks around the basement. The table, the chairs, the walls that always hid his bravery, and allowed him to be brave at the same time.
His legs feel wrong, like they belong to someone else, as he starts the climb up the basement.
Mike Wheeler, if you do not do something, Will is going to forget about you.
His chest feels caved him. He can’t breathe right. Is he going to do this? Surely, not. Surely not.
But the door inside him has splintered under the pressure of Will’s bravery, of his invitation, of him paving a way for Mike to follow because Will is wise and brave, and Mike loves that about him.
Oh, god.
He’s in motion.