Chapter Text
****
Mike’s POV
Mid 87’
Hawkins was still standing. That was what people kept saying.
From a distance, it almost looked true. Storefronts reopened with new glass, fresh paint tried to hide old fractures, and construction crews moved through town like a quiet apology. The streets filled again with cars, with voices, with routines that pretended the world had not cracked open.
But nothing sat quite right.
Some buildings remained boarded up, their signs faded and crooked. Empty lots marked where homes had been, now reduced to dirt and debris. The arcade felt dimmer, even when all the lights were on. The high school buzzed with students again, but the hallways carried a strange hush, like everyone was afraid of speaking too loudly in case something answered back.
People called it a disaster, a tragedy or a freak event.
Others avoided naming it altogether, as if silence could make the memories less real.
Mike noticed the small things. The way neighbors talked more quietly than they used to. The way adults kept glancing at the sky, at the woods, at the edges of town. The way every conversation eventually circled back to what had happened, even when no one said it out loud.
There was grief everywhere, but not just for the people they had lost.
It felt like the town was mourning a version of itself. A Hawkins that had once felt safe. Predictable. Normal. That version seemed gone now, replaced with something fragile and uncertain, like a set that had been rebuilt too quickly after a fire.
On the surface, life kept moving.
Lawns were mowed. Mailboxes were fixed. Kids rode their bikes again, laughing too loudly, trying to force normalcy back into existence.
But underneath it all, something still felt unfinished.
As if the worst part was not just what had happened, but the fact that it had never really ended.
Since Jonathan and Will had moved in, the Wheeler home carried a different kind of energy. There were extra footsteps in the hallway, more voices at the dinner table, more movement in the rooms that had once felt too quiet. The change was subtle, but Mike noticed it in the small details. The sound of Will’s laugh coming from down the hall. The low murmur of his voice late at night. The soft rhythm of someone else existing just a few rooms away.
He found himself listening and waiting for it without realizing.
Some mornings, he woke up already half-aware of where Will might be. In the kitchen. On the couch. At the table with a sketchbook open. The thought came automatically, like his mind had quietly adjusted to follow Will’s presence.
He told himself he should not need that.
Back in Lenora time, after the way the goodbye had felt, after the knot in his chest and the things he had not been able to say, he had tried to pull away. He had leaned into the confusion instead, convincing himself that distance might make everything quieter and easier. That if he focused on anything else, on anyone else, the feelings he did not understand would eventually dull.
It had not worked.
No matter how much he tried to keep his thoughts elsewhere, they always found their way back to Will. The effort to stay detached had only made him more aware of what he was trying to ignore.
Now, with Will just a few rooms away, the truth felt harder to outrun.
He stayed longer in shared spaces. Stayed in the living room even when he could have gone back to his bedroom. Sat closer on the couch than he needed to. Found excuses to stay nearby, to hear Will talk, to catch the shift of his expression when he smiled or went quiet.
It was not an obsession. Not exactly.
It felt more like reassurance. Like something in him settled more easily when Will was in the same room, even if they were not talking.
At the same time, that realization unsettled him.
He did not understand why Will’s presence seemed to matter more now than it ever had before, why the distance in Lenora had only sharpened the feeling instead of erasing it, or why he had been unable to hold onto the space he had tried so hard to create.
He told himself it was stress, trauma or habit. Maybe it was even his breakup with El last year.
But deep down, there was a quieter and unsettling thing about it.
That whatever felt fractured inside him lately seemed easier to survive when Will was nearby.
And whatever he was afraid to admit about himself felt impossible to ignore the closer Will stayed.
Mike did not realize how visible his confusion had become until Will started looking at him differently.
It happened in small, quiet moments. At the breakfast table, when Mike lost track of a conversation halfway through a sentence. On the couch, when he stared at the television without really watching it. In the hallway, when he stopped walking for a second too long, like he had forgotten where he was going.
Will noticed all of it.
Living under the same roof made it harder to hide. They crossed paths constantly now. In the kitchen, reaching for the same mug. On the stairs, brushing past each other. In the living room late at night, when everyone else had already gone to bed and the house felt softer, more honest.
Mike caught him watching once.
Will looked away quickly, but not before Mike registered the concern on his face. It was not pity. It was not curiosity. It was something gentler. Protective, maybe. Or worried.
It unsettled him more than it should have.
Later, they ended up alone in the kitchen, the hum of the refrigerator filling the quiet.
Will hovered near the counter, pretending to focus on a glass of water.
“You’ve been kind of quiet lately,” he said. The words were soft. Careful.
Mike shrugged too fast. “I’m fine.” It was automatic, defensive and incomplete.
Will did not argue. He never did. But he did not look convinced either.
There was a pause for longer than necessary.
“You know you can tell me if something’s wrong,” Will added, almost under his breath. “Right?”
Mike swallowed.
For a split second, he considered it. Considered saying something real. Something messy. Something he did not fully understand himself.
Instead, he looked away.
“Yeah,” he muttered. “I know.”
Will studied him for another moment, then nodded, letting the subject drop. But the worry did not leave his expression.
****
Mike was stretched out on the couch pretending to follow whatever was playing, but he had already lost track of the plot.
Will sat on the floor with his back against the couch sketchbook resting against his thighs. The soft, steady sound of pencil on paper filled the silence.
Mike found himself listening to it.
He glanced back, head tilted slightly as he worked, hair falling into his eyes. There was a smudge of graphite on his fingers.
“You’re staring,” Will said, without looking up.
Mike scoffed. “I’m not.”
Will turned the sketchbook a little, showing him anyway. “You always do that when you’re zoning out.”
Mike hesitated, then shifted closer so he could see.
The drawing was half-finished. Hawkins, but warped. Streets bending the wrong way. Telephone poles leaning. The kind of place that felt familiar and wrong at the same time.
“That’s messed up,” Mike muttered, tilting his head to the sketchbook, but not unkindly.
“It’s how it feels,” Will replied.
Mike swallowed. “Yeah. I get that.”
Will glanced at him, more direct now. “You’ve been spacing out a lot lately.”
Mike looked back at the screen. “I’m just tired.”
“You say that every time,” Will said quietly.
Mike frowned. “What, are you keeping track now?”
“Someone has to,” Will answered, softer. Not joking.
Mike shifted his weight, words slipping out before he could overthink them. “It’s just… it’s been weird. This year. With you guys here. With you.”
Will went still. “Weird how?”
Mike hesitated. He picked at a thread on his sleeve. “Not bad. Just… different. Like I keep thinking I’m gonna turn around and you won’t be there anymore. It still feels like a surprise everytime I bump into you”
Will’s expression changed. Gentler. Careful. “I’m not going anywhere.”
Mike let out a quiet breath. “I know. I just… Forget sometimes.”
“Yeah… I forget sometimes too” Will says.
Mike stared at the TV, then at the sketchbook again. “It feels easier when you’re around,” he admitted under his breath.
Will blinked. “Easier how?”
Mike shrugged, too quickly. “I don’t know. Just… Quieter in my head when we’re together.”
The room felt warmer all of a sudden.
“Good,” Will said, softer. “Because I like being around you too.”
Mike looked back at him and their eyes met for a second too long. Neither of them looked away right away.
Mike turned back to the TV eventually, heart beating a little harder than it should have. Will opened his sketchbook again, the pencil resuming its quiet rhythm.
Mike did not question the relief curling in his chest this time. He just let himself feel it.
Later that night, Mike lay awake staring at the ceiling.
The house had gone quiet. Pipes settling. A door closing somewhere down the hall. The faint creak of floorboards as someone shifted in their sleep.
He listened longer than he needed to.
His mind drifted back to small moments from the day. Will’s voice in the kitchen. The sketchbook on the couch. The way it had felt to sit beside him without having to explain anything.
It should not have meant as much as it did.
Mike rolled onto his side, pressing his face briefly into the pillow as if he could smother the thought. It did not work. The same quiet questions resurfaced, persistent and unresolved.
When did this start? Why does it feel heavier now? Why does it feel like I am already too late?
He did not have answers. Only the growing sense that something important had been hovering just out of reach for a long time, waiting for him to notice.
Across the hallway, a floorboard creaked again. Maybe Jonathan. Maybe Will. Mike found himself picturing the second option before he could stop himself.
He let out a slow breath.
There was comfort in knowing Will was close and fear in realizing how much that comfort mattered.
Mike turned onto his back and stared up at the dark, heart beating a little faster than necessary.
It felt like something had already ended.Or begun.
Or both.
****
Nov 87’
The hospital smelled like antiseptic and burned coffee.
Mike sat hunched forward in one of the stiff plastic chairs, elbows on his knees, hands clasped together. Across from him, Nancy paced in tight, restless loops, her arms folded, jaw clenched, eyes sharp with exhaustion and fury.
Every few minutes, a nurse passed by. A monitor beeped somewhere down the hall. A distant intercom crackled overhead.
None of it felt real.
Their parents were behind a set of closed doors into surgical rooms. Holly was gone. Taken. Pulled into something Mike did not fully want to picture yet, because if he did, he was not sure he would stay upright.
Nancy stopped pacing abruptly.
“This is all our fault,” she said, voice tight.
Mike looked up at her. “We got there as fast as we could.”
“I’m not talking about tonight,” Nancy snapped. “We could have acted yesterday, last week, last fall. We could have tried to get them out of Hawkins, or at least told them the truth. We could have done something. Anything.”
Mike swallowed. His throat felt dry. “We could not have known, Nancy. We could not have known any of this would happen.”
She turned to face him fully, eyes blazing. “Do you really believe that, Mike?”
He hesitated. The words tumbled out anyway. “After all this time, it comes for Holly? Holly, who has nothing to do with any of this. I mean, it makes no goddamn sense.”
Nancy let out a sharp, humorless breath. “It makes perfect goddamn sense. Vecna told me this would happen. He showed me. Not just the four gates. Holly. Mom. Dad. Dead. And we just chose not to believe him.”
Her voice wavered, then hardened again.
“But now it is all coming true,” she said. “Don't you get it, Mike? Vecna has come back to realize this vision, to punish us. He did it with Fred and Chrissy and Max, and now it is our turn. And he is not going to stop. No, he is not going to stop until we are drained of every last ounce of suffering.”
Silence settled between them.
Mike stared at the floor. Her words pressed in on him from every direction, piling on top of the guilt already sitting in his chest.
Punish us.
He thought of Holly. So small and alone. Trapped there. He thought about the conversation they had at school. How she was scared.
He thought of how their mother had kissed his cheek that morning.
Of how normal it had all felt.
Mike dragged a hand through his hair, trying to steady his breathing.
This was not supposed to be happening to them. Not to Holly. Not to his mom.
Not to anyone. Not to Will.
And yet, here they were.
Sitting in a hospital waiting room, waiting for answers they were terrified to hear, while something ancient and cruel moved freely through their lives.
Mike looked at Nancy again. She looked like she was holding herself together by sheer will.
He wondered distantly how long he could keep doing the same.
****
Mike left the waiting room because sitting still felt unbearable.
He grabbed a paper cup of coffee from the vending machine down the hall, more out of habit than actual interest. The liquid was too hot, the lid barely secure, his grip slightly off.
The corridor hummed with fluorescent lights and distant voices. A nurse passed him. A gurney rolled by. A television murmured somewhere behind a closed door.
He was halfway to nowhere when he saw Robin.
She was walking toward him down the hallway, head lowered, focused on something in her hands. They were on the same path but moving in opposite directions.
“Hey, Robin!” he called, a little louder than intended.
She didn’t look up. Instead, she turned the corner into another hallway, disappearing from view before he could say anything else.
He saw her step into one of the rooms.
The door was almost closed, but not entirely, a thin sliver of light cut through the gap.
As he stopped in front of it, he glanced through the opening without meaning to intrude, really.
Inside, Robin stood close to another girl. Someone Mike didn’t recognize. A stranger, her features softened and blurred by the flat hospital lighting.
He glanced up absentmindedly, opening his mouth to say ‘hello’, but his attention caught on movement through the narrow gap.
A tilt of a head, a step closer, Robin’s hand lifting, hovering, resting against the girl’s arm and they kissed.
For a second, Mike’s brain stalled.
It felt more like static. A skipped beat. Something happened faster than he could process.
His focus fractured, snagging on odd details instead of the moment itself. The soft change in posture between the two of them. Their arm skin touching.
His chest tightened for reasons he could not place.
A thought started to form and dissolved halfway through. This does not concern you. Why are you still standing here? Why does this feel strange?
Then another image pushed forward without warning.
Will, leaning over a sketchbook.
Will, laughing at something in the living room.
Will, looking at him like he was waiting for Mike to say something he never did.
The connection felt arbitrary. Illogical. Like his brain had grabbed the wrong file.
Mike frowned faintly, unsettled. Why him? Why now?
WHAT?
His grip on the coffee cup tightened. The lid shifted. Hot liquid spilled over the rim onto his hand and floor.
The noise of the coffee spilling splattered.
Mike looked away quickly.
He turned sharply and started back down the hallway, steps uneven and fast as possible, coffee cup was dropped on the floor, he didn’t look.
His pulse had picked up, but he could not trace it to a single reason. Too many things collided at once. The waiting room. Holly. Will drawing. Nancy’s voice. Will laughing. Vecna. Will looking at him. Robin and another girl kissing. Lenora. Their goodbye. Will’s house empty. Will at that airport. Will’s face. Green-ish hazel eyes. Hands. His lips.
‘It’s not my fault you don’t like girls’
Rain. Will leaving. That feeling. Him and Lucas going after. Castle Byers destroyed. Will’s face all drenched.
It all blurred into noise.
He did not understand what had just been triggered,something inside him had slipped out of alignment.
And no matter how hard he tried to steer his thoughts elsewhere, they kept looping back to the same person, uninvited and unresolved.
William. William. William. William. William. William. William. William.
Mike slowed only when the hallway bent back toward the waiting room.
He forced his breathing to even out before turning the corner, as if someone might notice how fast his heart was going. The fluorescent lights felt harsher now. The hospital noise sounded louder. Every footstep echoed too clearly.
Nancy was still there when he returned. Still pacing. Still wound tight. Still waiting for bad news.
She looked up the moment she saw him.
“Did you get it?” she asked, voice thin with strain.
Mike blinked. “Get what?”
“Coffee?” she clarified, rubbing at her temple.
Mike glanced at his empty hands.
For half a second, his brain stalled again. Too many thoughts were still colliding. Robin’s hand touching another girl’s arm while she leaned to kiss her. The sliver of light through the door. The sound of coffee hitting the floor. Will’s eyes. Will’s mouth. Will’s laugh.
He swallowed.
“Yeah,” he said automatically. “The machine’s messed up. It kept spitting out watery crap.”
Nancy scoffed under her breath, rubbing her forehead. “Figures. Of course it’s broken too.”
Mike dropped back into the chair beside her, elbows on his knees again, mimicking the posture he had been in before. He tried to reconstruct himself into something that looked normal. A concerned brother. A worried son. Someone who was present.
But his thoughts would not stay put.
Nancy exhaled sharply, staring at the floor. “I feel like I’m going to crawl out of my skin,” she muttered.
“Yeah,” Mike replied, a beat too late.
He clasped his hands together, pressing his thumbs into each other harder than necessary. The smell of coffee still clung faintly to his skin. The image of that door would not leave his head.
Neither would the sudden, unwanted cascade of Will.
He focused on Nancy instead. On the tremor in her knee. On the tight set of her jaw. On the fear she was trying not to show.
He knew he should be fully here. For her. For Holly. For their parents.
He tried.
But every few seconds, his mind slipped sideways again.
A kiss he had not meant to see. A thought he had not meant to have. A name he could not stop replaying.
William.
Nancy leaned back in her chair and stared up at the ceiling. “If Mom and Dad…” Her voice broke off. She shook her head once, hard. “I can’t even finish that sentence.”
Mike nodded, even though his chest felt like it had been hollowed out.
“They’re going to be okay,” he said, because it was the kind of thing someone was supposed to say.
Nancy looked at him skeptically. “Do you actually believe that?”
He hesitated. “I want to.” That part was true.
He sat there beside her, trying to keep his body still, trying to keep his expression neutral, trying not to let the storm in his head spill outward.
The waiting room TV murmured. A nurse called someone’s name. Somewhere down the hall, a door opened and closed.
Mike stared at the floor again.
Every time he blinked, he saw that sliver of light through the door.
And every time he tried to think about anything else, his mind betrayed him by circling back to the same impossible, unwanted center: Will.
Nancy kept talking, but her voice slowly dissolved into background noise.
Mike stared at the far wall, eyes unfocused, nodding at intervals that felt correct even when he had missed half the sentence.
The waiting room lights flickered faintly.
Then something inside him slipped.
The first memory did not arrive in full. Just fragments.
A basement. Dim Christmas lights. The hum of an old TV. Will sitting on the floor, knees pulled in, laughing at something Mike had said, eyes bright and warm.
Another cut.
School hallway. Lockers slamming. Will walking beside him, shoulder brushing.
Another.
A bike ride at dusk. Wind in their faces. Mike yelling something dumb over his shoulder. Will laughing, breathless, chasing after him.
Another.
The movie theater. Their arms brushing in the dark. Will leaning closer without realizing. Mike noticing and pretending he did not.
Another.
Rain pouring outside. Will standing on his porch, soaked, shivering, eyes red. Mike pulling him inside without thinking. Hands on his shoulders for a second too long.
Another.
A late night. The living room lit only by the TV glow. Will half-asleep on the couch. Mike watching the rise and fall of his chest and not understanding why he felt like that mattered.
The memories came faster now.
A look held too long. A joke that landed softer than it should have. A silence that felt heavier than conversation.
Mike’s chest tightened.
He could see it now in retrospect. The throughline he had never allowed himself to notice.
Will had always been there and Mike had always been looking.
“Mike?” Nancy's voice echoed.
He blinked, dragged back to the present. “Yeah,” he murmured, voice slightly off.
But the flashbacks did not fully retreat.
Now they felt rearranged. Reframed. Recolored.
What he had once labeled as comfort felt like something more specific. What he had dismissed as closeness felt suddenly intentional. What he had called normal felt newly suspicious.
His heart beat faster. He pushed himself upright, restless.
“I’m gonna grab coffee somewhere else,” he said, already standing. “The machine here is trash.”
Nancy frowned. “You just went.”
“I need air,” he added, too quickly.
He turned away before she could question him further.
As he headed toward the exit, more images flickered through him.
Will smiling at him like he was his home.
Will watching him like he mattered.
Will’s eyes. Pretty perfect eyes.
Mike swallowed hard.
He told himself he just needed caffeine.
But what he actually needed was distance from the realization pressing too close.
That this had not come out of nowhere, it had actually been building for years.
He had been circling it long before he ever let himself see it.
And that the name at the center of all of it had always been the same.
Will. William Byers. His Will. His best friend Will.
Cold air hit Mike’s face the second he stepped outside.
The hospital doors swung shut behind him, muting the beeping machines and low voices, but not the noise inside his head. The sky looked wrong. Too wide. Too indifferent. Cars passed on the street like nothing in the world had fractured.
He walked without a destination.
His thoughts kept looping, colliding, doubling back on themselves.
Robin’s hand on that girl’s arm. The door left slightly open.
Then Will. Always Will.
It felt like his brain had been ripped open and rearranged while he was not looking. Every memory seemed altered now, recontextualized, heavier. Conversations he had once brushed off replayed with new weight. Moments he had considered harmless now felt charged with something he had never allowed himself to name.
It was messy. Embarrassing. Disorienting.
He dragged a hand through his hair and let out a shaky breath.
This is ridiculous.
Stress. Grief. Trauma.
He tried to cling to those explanations. They did not hold.
Because no matter how he framed it, the same pattern kept emerging. The same person. The same presence threaded through everything that felt safe, familiar and necessary.
But he was his best friend. His boy best friend.
Mike slowed to a stop on the sidewalk, chest tight.
He pictured Will’s face again. The way he listened. The way he noticed things. The way he had always been so nice to everyone. So gentle. So sweet.
The thought scared him more than Vecna did.
He exhaled slowly, trying to steady himself.
Something had cracked open, and it refused to close again.
Mike turned back toward the hospital, steps slower now, heavier.
The spiral had burned itself out into a dull, persistent ache.
By the time he reached the entrance, he had settled on one quiet, terrifying truth: Whatever this was, it was not going away. It hadn’t gone away.
Had it always been there?
When he came back, coffee in hand and head spinning, Nancy already had a plan. They went over it together and connected the dots.
That’s how their mom told them Mr. Whatsit was Henry.
It was not exactly a shock.