Chapter Text
Mike Wheeler stood alone at the edge of the quarry cliff. He couldn’t stop himself from staring into the still, placid abyss below.
It was strange. Nearly three years had passed since Will’s disappearance, yet it felt as though Mike could still hear the harsh, terrifying wail of sirens echoing in his ears, the red and blue lights flickering across the rippling surface of the water, and Will, his pale face floating just beneath the surface. The memory made his stomach churn. Even though the body had later been proven not to be Will’s, this place always dragged those images back to him, no matter how hard he tried to resist.
He couldn’t protect anyone. The thought came to him with something close to self-loathing. In truth, no one really needed him. He was even convinced that many people would be better off because of it.
When the Byers family moved to California with El, it was only then that Mike belatedly realized his childhood had been nothing more than a daydream stretched across a long summer—one that was about to fade out of his life.
Panic set in. He tried desperately to save everything he felt slipping through his fingers. And all the things he cherished seemed to be bound tightly to Will Byers, to the very part of himself he had once wanted to discard in his hurry to grow up, to become “normal.”
Mike did his best to act normal. But sometimes he couldn’t stop himself from getting on his bike and riding clear across Hawkins, just to catch a glimpse of where the Byers family used to live. Of course, he went to Castle Byers too. It hurt to see that it was still nothing but the same ruins he’d found on that stormy night. An apology lodged in his chest, but he had nowhere left to go.
Joyce’s new telemarketing job meant that Mike could never get through when he tried to call the Byers’ house. As for the letters he wrote to Will, he revised and rewrote them countless times yet never found the courage to send a single one.
Writing to El was easier. Still, when it came to his own life, Mike remained deliberately vague. Friends don’t lie, but he could leave out certain details - how he still didn’t fit in at school, or how he was bullied by the same group of popular assholes as always - and fill the pages instead with stories from his D&D campaigns. He knew El was never really interested in them. Even so, they were enough to keep the letters from feeling empty. Joining Hellfire and rediscovering the joy of D&D eased the pain of being separated from his closest friends, if only for a while. Eddie was cool, and also an excellent Dungeon Master.
On nights without any sessions, Mike shut himself away in his room. He played David Bowie albums on repeat, then pulled out the black binder he had gone through more times than he could count—the one that held every single drawing Will had ever given him.
Worse still, there were times when he found himself wanting to sit at the edge of the quarry cliff. In fact, ever since Will’s disappearance had been resolved, he had gone out of his way to avoid the place, afraid it would stir up memories better left untouched. And now, to his despair, he realized it was becoming more and more tempting.
He knew that since Billy’s death, things hadn’t been easy for Max and her mother. When Lucas told him and Dustin that the two of them had broken up, Mike already had a sense of why Max had made that choice. So he told Lucas to give her time, and she would figure things out on her own.
What Mike hadn’t expected was to see Max at the quarry.
She was sitting at the edge of the cliff with her knees drawn to her chest, staring quietly at the calm water below. Her skateboard lay discarded nearby. Mike walked over and sat down beside her, their shoulders pressed close together. That day, they made a quiet agreement to keep what they were doing there a secret, not to tell anyone. It became an unspoken and somewhat strange understanding between them. At school, they still traded barbs like always, but every now and then they would sit together in silence at the cliff’s edge.
Max shared her Walkman with him without hesitation. As the tape began to turn, Kate Bush’s voice filled the air. It was so high and bright that it made Mike think of howling wind as it swept over distant hills.
He would never admit that Max had successfully introduced him to an excellent artist. Mike went to the record store on his own and checked out every Kate Bush tape they had. When Robin handed them to him, she wore that familiar smile of hers, the one that seemed to see straight through everything, as she took his coins. Mike could only hope that she hadn’t actually seen the mess inside his head.
He brought the tapes home and shut himself in his room. He lay down on the carpet, slipped one of the cassettes in at random, and put the headphones on. As he read through the track list printed on the back of the case, he noticed the album title: Lionheart. He found himself wondering whether it had anything to do with Richard the Lionheart.
Then Bush’s bright voice came in, and he froze, caught in a melody so gentle it felt like moonlight.
“Lives in sin, they say, with another man, but no one knows who…”
His hands trembling, he looked back at the track list on the cassette case. It read Kashka from Baghdad. In the song, the lovers fell into a passion filled with love beneath the moonlight, while Bush’s playful melody sounded almost like a blessing. Images rose in his mind without effort. A yellow moon hung in a deep blue night sky. He pressed his forehead against another person’s. They held each other and turned slowly, listening to soft, low laughter. He felt his own mouth curve in response, drawn by it. Then he lifted his head and met the other’s eyes.
Forest green, touched with a hint of brown.
Will Byers.
Panic overtook him. His stomach lurched, and he rushed to the bathroom, where he vomited.
After cleaning up the mess and brushing off Nancy—who had come to check on him after hearing the noise—with the excuse that he’d caught a chill from lying on the floor, Mike collapsed onto his bed, completely drained.
God. What was he even thinking?
Will had been mocked his entire life for not being masculine enough, for being mocked as queer, and Mike was really going to make those rumors real, make everything worse for him? No one did that to their best friend. And what kind of person even thought about a relationship like that with a friend? Especially when he had only just gotten back together with El. He should have been making it up to her, trying harder to become the boyfriend she expected.
And yet, somewhere deep inside him, a small voice insisted this wasn’t right. It cut sharply through his excuses. Was deceiving your girlfriend somehow more acceptable? You weren’t normal. You couldn’t even bring yourself to sign your letters Love, Mike, and yet you expected to pass as a teenager in a normal relationship? Six months ago, even your dad didn’t believe you were actually dating a girl.
He lay on the cold sheets, the rain tapping endlessly against his window like ghosts from the past, demanding to be let in, calling for the return of the true paladin Mike he used to be. He could only force himself to seal every narrow crack in that emotional window. Will had spent the past few years barely holding together, and El had never once been allowed a normal girl’s life. He could not allow that version of himself to surface and shatter the carefully constructed normalcy he had built.
His relationship with Max grew closer, perhaps because both of them were in worse shape than before. Sometimes he would even bike out to the trailer park in the middle of the night and knock on her window. In some ways, Max reminded him of Nancy, like another sister who never spared him her sharp remarks.
He knew Max had been having a hard time lately. She had even started seeing the school counselor on a regular basis. Still, he never thought she was incapable of handling her own emotions. What Max needed was company, and Mike promised her he would not tell Lucas or Dustin about the few times she had broken down. He knew that ever since witnessing Billy being killed by the Mind Flayer right in front of her, she had been plagued by nightmares. In response, Mike took on part of the role of an older brother.
After all, Nancy and Holly were his sisters, and Mike liked to think he had at least some experience in that regard. He believed that he might actually be helping Max. He also managed to play the role of a rebellious teenager convincingly enough in front of his family and friends. Everything seemed normal.
Then spring break in California arrived, and everything began to fall apart.
It began the day before the trip to California. El wrote to tell him that Will seemed to be drawing someone he had a crush on, and Mike’s jealousy spiraled out of control. A crush? Since when did Will’s drawings stop coming to him first?
Then it hit him that he hadn’t managed to get through to the Byers’ house in nearly three months, nor had he sent a single letter to Will. Mike was certain that Will had to be angry with him. Your best friend, and in less than half a year you were already this distant? When he thought of the argument they’d had on that stormy night last year, the thought left him almost breathless.
He packed Will’s birthday present into his luggage, only to remember at the last minute to buy El a bouquet of flowers before boarding the plane. He tried hard to live up to what he thought El expected of him. He put on the “California-style” clothes he’d bought in a rush, until he barely looked like himself anymore. Unsurprisingly, their reunion at the airport was painfully awkward. Mike didn’t even know what to do with his hands.
And after that, things only got worse.
And now, in Hawkins, the gate to the Upside Down had torn through the ground itself, triggering what was officially reported as a magnitude 7.4 earthquake. Eddie was dead. Max lay unconscious, leaving behind only the goodbye letters she had written in her own hand. Vecna, however, had not been confirmed dead. If anything, it felt more like he had gone into hiding, waiting for his next move.
Whatever problems he and El had been having were set aside for the moment, though Mike preferred to think of it as a clean break. The Byers family moved into the Wheeler house. There was always something more urgent than grief. The military occupied the town. Everyone volunteered at Hawkins High, helping displaced residents relocate and dealing with the immediate demands of survival.
It wasn’t until nearly a week later that Mike finally found the space to think about the letter Max had left him. That was why he was standing at the edge of the quarry again. This time, Max was not sitting beside him. Without her, the small stretch of gravel felt unbearably vast. He refused to consider the possibility that Max might never wake up. Instead, he stared blankly at the still water below.
“You might not want to stand so close to the edge,” a voice said, carrying a faint foreign accent.