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The mid-morning sun peeks in through the windows in the Wheeler basement, and Will shifts his position on the couch to alleviate the glare on his sketchbook page. As he shifts, Mike looks up from his book, but lowers his gaze again without a word. The only sound in the basement was the scratch of pencil on paper and the occasional page turn from Mike. The quiet was nice compared to the often deafening environment that the Wheeler house carried in the mornings; however it also made Will acutely aware of every movement he made.
The silence soon was broken by the door at the top of the stairs opening. Will didn’t glance up, but heard Mike huff from the other end of the couch and slam his book closed, as though already annoyed by the interruption without knowing who it even was. Will figured it would likely be Holly or Karen, which could be a contributing factor to Mike’s premature annoyance. As the footsteps reach lower on the stairs, Will lifts his eyes and is surprised when Joyce is standing at the base, smiling at him. “Oh, hey mom, what’s up?” he asks, sitting up slightly straighter.
“Actually,” Joyce begins, moving her focus from Will to Mike. “I’m here for Mike. El asked me to bring you with me to training today,” she said, shrugging while she spoke as though to communicate in advance that she wasn’t sure the reason for the request. Will swallowed and glanced at Mike, who leaned forward in his seat with his eyebrows drawn together.
“Oh,” was all he said, glancing between Will and Joyce for a moment. Will avoided eye contact. “I’ll uh, I’ll go throw on some different clothes and we can head out.” He added after a moment, standing up and awkwardly sliding past Joyce to head up the stairs.
When the basement door came to a close, Joyce looked back to Will, wandering over to his side to peek over his shoulder at what he was sketching. “That’s looking great, Will.”
Will smiled at her, flipping his pencil to erase a line. “Thanks, I’m just trying to pass the time really.”
Joyce nodded. “Well did you want to come to training too?”
Will quickly shook his head, looking at her. He swallowed again. “Um, no, I’ll just have a quiet day here today.”
Joyce looked at him, question clear in her gaze, but the door to the basement opened again and Mike’s voice came from above. “I’m, um, I’m ready to go.” Joyce smiled, leaning down to kiss the top of Will’s head, and headed back up the stairs.
Will sighed, leaning his head back against the couch and staring up at the ceiling. He thought to the prior week, when he had visited El himself, and she had opened up to him about her feelings about Mike.
“I am going to break up with him,” she had said decisively just before he had left that day. Will hadn’t been able to get the sound of her voice saying this out of his head. It filled him with immense guilt that he had not given his best friend any sort of warning despite having known this was coming, but he also knew that it wasn’t his place to get involved. It was somewhat selfish, anyway, to have wanted to give Mike a warning. The waiting, not knowing how Mike would take the news, was unbearable. Had he been able to warn Mike a week ago, maybe he could’ve been spared from the uncertainty looming overhead.
Ultimately, Will knew he should brace for an upset Mike. A devastated Mike, even. He thought back to the fight that El and Mike had had in California; how much Mike had obsessed over every action he had taken to find every place where he could blame himself for El’s disappearance. Will knew that this break-up was likely to result in an extended period of Mike obsessing over every detail from the past few years to figure out what he had done wrong. Will was not looking forward to it, but he would be there for Mike through it regardless.
Will continued sketching for a while but time was moving forward at a crawl, the activity not enough to occupy him from the nervousness he felt at not knowing what the evening would hold. With a sigh, he placed his sketchbook on the small table and stood from the couch, heading up the stairs. He peeked his head into the kitchen and was unsurprised to see Karen there, chopping vegetables. Karen looked up at Will, smiling. “Hi Will, can I get you anything?”
Karen had turned down Will’s offers of help many times since the Byers had moved into the Wheeler’s house, insisting that he did not need to worry about anything and that she had it covered. That said, Will was hoping to convince her to let him help today, in need of the distraction. “Um, I was actually wondering if I could help you with anything? I’m kind of bored.” He hoped the insistence of boredom would be a convincing factor.
Karen’s expression softened in the same way it always did when Jonathan or he offered to help her with housework. Will made a mental note again to give Mike a hard time for never offering his mother any help. Will was used to everything being done for him, having his mother coddle him ever since he returned from the Upside Down years ago. Before his disappearance, he had helped with chores regularly. Joyce and Jonathan had never really expected him to help, but he had always told them it was more fun to do chores together.
“You are so sweet, Will. I was just getting things prepped for dinner and preparing to make lunch. I’d love an extra pair of hands to keep me company,” Karen said, and Will breathed out a sigh of relief, stepping into the kitchen ready to follow Karen’s orders.
—
Chores and cooking with Karen turned out to be much more of an ordeal than similar tasks with Joyce or Jonathan. Karen was used to doing things herself, and was very particular about things. Will was fine with being bossed around for the afternoon, as exhausting as it was. Time marched on quickly with how busy Karen kept him, and it was while Will was putting away dish towels that he had just fetched from the dryer that he heard the front door open. A moment later, Mike appeared in the opening to the kitchen, raising an eyebrow at Will. “Are you doing laundry?” he asked, an amused tone in his voice.
Will looked up at Mike in surprise, putting away the last towel he had folded exactly to Karen’s specifications. That was definitely not the tone of an upset Mike, or a self-pitying Mike, or an angry Mike, or even a confused Mike. Will stared at Mike, who was still raising his eyebrow and smirking. “U-uh yeah, I was bored so I was helping your mom with the housework,” he said, eyes following Mike as he walked further into the kitchen and grabbed a drink from the fridge. El must not have broken up with him, Will determined. That was the only possible explanation for the unfazed boy in front of him.
Mike continued past the fridge with his drink in hand, heading out of the kitchen. A moment after Mike disappeared around the corner, he doubled back and looked at Will again. “Hey, I’ll be in the basement, whenever you’re done, uh, helping my mom.”
Will counted to ten after Mike disappeared from his line of sight again. At ten, he hurried out of the kitchen and up the stairs to the second floor, where Karen was putting away bath and hand towels in a closet. “Um, Mrs. Wheeler, I finished putting those away. Mike is home, is it okay if I…” he trailed off, not sure of the polite way to say ‘Can I stop helping you now?’
Karen smiled over her shoulder at him. “Of course. Thank you for the help. I might actually get some downtime before dinner now,” she said, before turning back to her chore. Will headed back down the stairs, resolving in his mind to insist on helping her more often.
—
Mike looked up from his book immediately as Will opened the door to the basement, setting it gently on the table in front of him. Will stepped down the final step and made his was back to his corner of the couch slowly. Mike said nothing, and so Will reached to pick up his sketchbook again, figuring that Mike had wanted to return to their earlier routine. Will was only able to pick up the pencil from the table before Mike finally spoke.
“El broke up with me.”
Will dropped the pencil that he had barely lifted, his breath stuttering. He felt confusion wash over him again. The Mike he had expected to come home from such an event and the Mike sitting a few feet away from him were very different. Will leaned back on the couch, sans sketchbook, and willed himself to look at Mike. Mike was looking at his own lap. “She broke up with you?” he repeated cautiously. Maybe this was some sort of weird joke on Mike’s part, and it just happened to coincidentally be a joke about the same thing Will thought would actually happen today.
Mike continued staring at his lap. “Yeah. I went and watched her train for a while, and then we took a break for lunch so she could recharge her battery, and while we were eating she dumped me, right there in the junkyard.”
Will couldn’t glean how Mike was feeling. His voice was completely steady, but his unwillingness to make eye contact seemed to indicate sadness. Will swallowed, trying to determine the right thing to say in that moment. “Mike… I’m so sorry,” he decided on, and he meant it. Even with the inner turmoil he had felt watching El and Mike together, he would never have wished they would break up. He knew how much the relationship meant to Mike and he would never dream of wishing that happiness be taken away.
Continuing to complete subvert his expectations, Mike looked up at him and shook his head. “Don’t be… it’s okay.” He let out a sigh and wiped his palms against his pant legs. “It was probably overdue,” he admitted. “I mean, I don’t know. Things haven’t been the same. They haven’t been the same for a while, and clearly we’ve both been feeling that. El was just the one with the actual courage to say something about it.” Mike was now leaning forward with his elbows resting on his legs, hands clasped together out in front of him. His posture a sense of déjà vu to the talk he and Mike had had in his room in Lenora after El had gone with Owens to regain her powers, though Mike seemed to carry less guilt in his shoulders now, from what Will could tell.
Will struggled to find a response again. If you had asked Will to write down every way he could’ve expected this conversation to go, he never would have come up with a scenario where Mike said that the break-up was overdue. It seemed implausible, and Will wondered briefly if this was reality. He knew it must be, though, because his dreams were never anywhere near this kind to him.
“I…” Will started, just to break the silence, even though he still hadn’t landed on what to say. He had been hopeful that starting to speak would help the words come, but he found himself falling silent again. After another moment, he sighed. “Sorry, I guess I’m just surprised to hear that,” he spoke, deciding it was as good an answer as any.
Mike let out a gentle laugh and looked Will in the eyes. “Well, you can’t be that surprised. El told me you already knew she was going to dump me.”
Will froze, his body temperature rising rapidly in a panic. “Mike-“
Mike sat up straighter, removing his elbows from his thighs in order to reach out and put a hand on Will’s knee. “Relax, I’m not upset. Really. It’s important that El has people she can talk to about these things, and it’s not as though Hopper or I would’ve been a neutral third party.”
'I’m not exactly a neutral third party either,' Will thought disdainfully. Despite this, he felt the panic in his chest easing at Mike’s gentle voice and honest expression. He broke the eye contact to look down at Mike’s hand which was still resting against his knee, unmoving.
“Well, I’m still sorry,” Will said, willing his voice not to crack. “I really am. I felt guilty keeping it from you. Are you… sure you’re okay?” he asked, still struggling to believe the reaction he was witnessing.
Mike’s hand withdrew from Will’s knee, and his skin felt cold at the absence of the touch. He ignored the feeling. “I’m okay. I mean, sure, I’m a little sad. It feels a bit like failing, you know? And maybe that’s stupid, but… you know how I told you before that I was scared of her not needing me anymore? I think that’s finally happened. She doesn’t need me now, and I feel like a failure because of it. But I’m also proud. I don’t know, I’m not making much sense, am I?”
Will shook his head, initiating the eye contact this time. “No, you’re making sense. I understand.” Their eye contact felt too intense and lingered for a moment before Mike cleared his throat and looked away.
“Anyway, thanks for listening to me,” he said, leaning forward and grabbing his book he had been reading. It was a clear end to the conversation, so Will didn’t respond, instead grabbing his sketchbook and pencil from the table.
The pair were now in the same positions that they had been in that morning, sitting in silence participating in separate activities in each other’s company, but Will felt that the atmosphere was completely different than it had been previously. His pencil hovered over his sketchbook but didn’t make contact with the paper, uncertain. Will wasn’t sure how long he sat like that, holding his pencil but not drawing, before Mike shifted on the couch beside him. Will looked over and watched as Mike shuffled closer to him on the couch, leaning sideways briefly and bumping their shoulders. Mike gave him a small smile, glancing at him out of the corner of his eye, and Will let himself finally relax against the back cushions of the couch. Mike was okay. Things were different, but Mike was okay, and El was okay, and Will would be okay, too.