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Will hadn’t been dealing so well for the past few days. He didn’t know where Mike was. It was not an easy thought to deal with for him.
Mike once told him that turning into a clicker was probably more likely than people thought in quarantine zones. Now Mike turning into some inhumane clicker was the only thing on Will’s mind in days.
Will groans, trying to suppress himself from getting too deep into emotions. He rolls over in his bed, shoving his face into his pillow but immediately looking up when he feels a touch on his arm.
He shifts to grab the (pretty much useless) pocket knife laying on his bedside table, and promptly stops in the process of movement at the sight of Mike.
Not a clicker. Not a dead body. Just Mike Wheeler, in front of his bed. In the sunlight. Alive. Safe.
“Mike!” Will blurts, not even bothering to care about his friend’s audacity in scaring him like that. He pulls him into a hug, which Mike thankfully does not pull away from—Will doesn’t think he could ever recover from something like that happening. He’s already in too deep. He’s just lucky Mike’s never noticed it.
“I was just—I didn’t mean to abandon you, you know that, right?” Mike asks Will, pulling back from the hug with a nervous look of sorts. Will just nods, brain more on the fact that Mike is back and he’s not dead, so there are worse things in the world. “My mom got me assigned to one of those city job things. They were during all the worst times of the day. Next time I ever get roped into that shit, you’re coming with me. Being in this place without you is the worst. But, anyways, I wanna take you somewhere today. Bonding trip and all, right?”
Will agrees much too easily, and he’s following Mike off to some place with ease.
Mike brings Will to an abandoned mall. They wander through, having all too much fun with the multiple random things in the old wreckage of a building.
They start with wandering into an old arcade that is unsurprisingly not functional. Will wanders onto a plethora of very pixelated 80’s games, and Mike says he’s read about one of them. He talks Will’s ear off about it. It’s nice.
Will tries a bit of a hand at playing the game, even if he can’t do so properly. He messes around with the controls with some vision of an actual game in his mind as Mike describes some details of it to him.
The second thing they do is get to a picture booth. This thing was very surprisingly in actual function despite a lack of electricity. Will and Mike spot it pretty quickly when they’re in the same room as the thing with all the bright colors.
They shuffle into the booth, and Will feels all too close to Mike with the two of them pressed against each other, but he tries to brush it off.
“Which one should I pick?” Will asks Mike as the question of the theme pops up on the screen in front of them. Friends, love, cool.
“You pick,” Mike nudges Will with his shoulder. Will stares the options down. First strike is love, picking that one would be awkward. Picking the friend option would be normal, but at the same time, it feels like he’s just friend-zoning himself by his own choice.
So…the “cool” theme it is. The one with a very cartoonish rabbit wearing sunglasses as the icon.
“What’s cool about that guy?” Mike snickers, but doesn’t protest as Will presses confirm on the option he picked.
“Lots of things.”
The thing in front of them says “3…2…1…” and the pair of them go for as cheesy of a pose as possible, and continue on with random poses before the thing says they’re done. It asks Will if he wants to share the picture on “Facebook”, which he’s never heard of. He says yes, but then it says something about accounts. He clicks out of it, and then gets asked about printing the pictures.
He puts in yes. He puts in yes about five times and is told each time that the printer isn’t working.
The next thing that Will stumbles upon is a pun book. It’s horrible, and both Will and Mike have lots of fun going through the increasingly bad jokes in the thing.
They go through the rest of the abandoned mall without issue, and end up in some massive library looking place before finding some waterguns in another store. So, they do what any logical person would do and land on a watergun fight.
They bicker over who’ll win a bit, but Mike wins by 1 point in the end, and Will can only find it funny.
And then Mike and Will are sitting on a glass table that looks too fragile, and Will really does wonder how it ever survived in the wreckage of this mall from about two decades ago.
“I know we already talked about this a little bit, but, you know, being in this city without you just wasn’t the same,” Mike confesses to Will with a soft smile, feeling much more comfortable in the safety net of being “platonic” than Will could ever be. “It was so weird having to run around this place without you by my side.”
Mike is dizzying when he talks like this. Will always feels like he can’t get a grip on himself, and that he should know Mike just means it platonically, that Will’s always reading into their conversations too much and too often. It makes his head spin.
There was that part of Will that wanted to just be with Mike all the time, and listen to him talk about the new D&D thing he dug up from an old rule-book on it that was older than the two of them.
And then there was a part of Will that felt like Mike would hate him for what he felt. He knows Mike wouldn’t, really. But he still considers it. Maybe Mike says he’d support Will no matter what, and really wouldn’t.
Was the friendship unconditional?
Will really hoped so. Desperately so.
“As long as we don’t get separated again, you won’t have to be in any version of Hawkins without me,” Will mused after what felt like a minute of over-thinking. He kind of wanted to bash his head into a wall for making a comment like that, but knowing that he’d never figure out how Mike felt if he didn’t try a single thing.
The two of them sat in awkward silence, like a version of a staring contest with more tension and less humor. Will briefly noticed Mike’s eyes dropping somewhere, but he was too focused on everything about Mike to follow his gaze.
Staring. Staring. Staring.
Mike pulls Will’s face to his, chapped lips on each other’s for about three seconds before Mike pulls back, managing, “I’m sorry—I shouldn’t have—” and things of the kind while Will feels the warmth flood into his face.
“It’s—” Will didn’t know what he could possibly say in a situation where Mike actually did this. “I wanted you to do that. It’s fine. It’s more than fine.”
Will was done rambling when they were kissing again. Maybe this would be their only chance to ever do so, in an apocalyptic world like this. Or maybe they would just dismiss it afterwards and pretend that it never happened.
But Will decided that it was better for him to sink into such a moment than worry about it, and he let the happiness wash over his thoughts, hand in the curls of Mike’s hair.
They broke apart, sunlight through the broken window spilling onto the view of the pair of them as they caught their breath. It’s an almost normal looking thing to the average person; but to Will it almost feels like an antiquity of a past he’d never known, where he would’ve only had to worry about love and no, well, deadly fungus.
The whole mall feels reminiscent of a moment somebody’s trying to capture in their memory properly, and Will feels that he’ll be trying to keep a handle like such on the memory of this moment.
Before Will could ever consider trying to talk to Mike about what just happened, they both catch onto the startling noises of runners and clickers galore heading their direction. Will catches the sight of one—coated in blood—and without a chance to panic more than he currently is, Mike takes him by the wrist.
Will barely avoids tripping over all the scattered papers and belongings around the abandoned mall's floor, dread setting in, but he attempts to get a little comfort into his head with the fact that Mike's still here, and Mike's still alive.
Yeah. They can survive this. Together.
Crazy together, or whatever Mike said.
Will’s breaths turn shallower, partly through running past doors and broken tables all around; partly from simple, overwhelming panic.
Him and Mike finally reach a point where it’s not as bad, the runners and clickers, the whole crowd of them, have lagged a bit behind the two of them. Mike points out a shelf to scale up to a ledge, suggesting that, “they can’t follow us if we knock down the shelf after.”
Which Will can’t disagree with. So he gives a nervous nod, glancing behind his back repeatedly as Mike climbs up first, successfully, and Will follows as quickly as possible.
That choice might have been his undoing in the end, because he falls. With the shelf. Onto the ground.
Before he’s had more than five seconds to even try and get out of being squished by this thing properly, he’s struggling against a runner with what seems like no hope of success or survival.
He finally reaches the knife in his pocket, and stabs it in the neck.
His arm aches.
Without a chance to relax, consider why his arm is hurting, or find another exit, his eyes land on Mike in the same struggle with a proper clicker. Did he really jump down to try and help Will? He should’ve just gone.
Will rushes up to get in the neck with the pocket knife—more useful than he gave it credit for, he supposes—and they both stand there to just catch their breath, luckily not being taken by surprise for the moment.
Will slumps down next to where Mike is leaning against a wall.
“Will,” Mike starts simply, looking more than a bit troubled. “Your arm.”
“My—what?” Will lifts his arm to glance at it, seeing nothing until he turns it; and there it is, the mark of teeth sunk into his forearm with light pink around the marks, only a slight bit of blood.
“Oh.”
In all due credit to the runner that bit Will, it certainly didn’t look as bad as Will would’ve expected.
“What are we gonna do, Mike?”
Without saying anything other than a hopeless sigh, Will’s attention is caught once again by Mike, and he’s a bit quizzical before he watches Mike shift the collar of his shirt to the side, revealing a much deeper, gashing bite wound.
Will pauses in his thoughts. Mike getting bit is so much worse than Will getting bit could ever be me. Will’s worst fear a few hours ago was coming true. Mike. Bitten. Mike. Clicker.
Mike. Gone.
Will. Gone too.
“The way I see it,” Mike begins, letting go of his shirt. Will feels slightly less sick not actively seeing the bite mark, but it still feels burned into his mind somewhere, a blood coated bite from a clicker on Mike.
“We can take the easy way out,” Mike muses, not seeming particularly enthused about the concept—but who would be? “Just grab a gun, and avoid any of the hard things about this. I don’t really like that option much.”
Will nods in agreement, much too likely to choke up if he even starts talking.
“Or we can just…make the most of our one or two days we have. Do something like this again. It’s not like we have many clickers to worry about getting us with these things. We should probably do the whole “make the most of life” thing.”
Two days. Yeah, Will would much rather have two days with Mike Wheeler than one more minute right now with an easy way out.
“Yeah. The second one sounds a lot better,” Will agreed hopelessly, turning his head to Mike with a slight, watery attempt of a smile.
“Crazy together, right?”