Chapter Text
They’re going to die. Of that, Mike is painfully certain.
They’re going to die, and because death begs for curiosity—curiosity for the unknown, what could be and never ever would—Mike allows himself the mercy, for just one brief moment, to wonder what it would be like to kiss his best friend.
The ceiling is coming down on them, great islands of rock leering like stalactites, and Mike is thinking of pillow-soft lips. Someone—Johnathan, his brain supplies distantly—yells for everyone to hold on! and he imagines pressing his mouth to Will’s. He imagines the stilling of his friend under his grip, one hand curled around his jaw, the other clutching his shoulders, cords of muscle suddenly so broad it’s jarring. He thinks he can feel the sharp inhale Will takes, surprise laced into the oxygen swirling in his lungs. He doesn’t know what happens after that. If the kiss is sweet and gentle, a lapping of waves on a white-sand beach, or rough and desperate, possessing the kind of intensity that accompanies holding on for your dear life as a radio tower collides with solid rock.
This is it, Mike thinks. No one will ever know. Not even me.
It’s not the first time he’s been faced with the prospect of falling to his death. He fully expects it to be his last. A gruesome lineup of bodies, scattered across the Upside Down. A meagre attempt to save a dying planet. He only wishes Will wouldn’t be among them. He deserves so much better.
But then, the grating screech of metal ceases, and Mike opens his eyes to find the dust has cleared. Steve Harrington, asshole turned demon slayer, is being embraced by a shaking Dustin.
Mike searches for Will.
****
Mike scuffs his beat-up sneakers on dry rock. It’s the colour of sand, but so very unsand-like in nature that nothing is stirred up. Meanwhile, the sky is a hazy yellow. But not, Mike amends, like the brilliant yellow of the sun or the checkers of Will’s shirt or anything good in this world. It’s sickly. Dimension X is the Grand Canyon on laced steroids. He wants to tell Will as much, to reaffirm his belief, but when he looks over at him, it is to see the floppy chestnut hair falling into his eyes, teeth worrying at his bottom lip, and Mike’s tongue fixes itself to the roof of his mouth.
Friends? No thanks…
Best friends.
He doesn’t consider why the memory makes him simultaneously want to double over in embarrassment and punch himself in the face.
I had this crush.
Mike doesn’t know what to do with the pit that has begun to eat away at his gut, like a slowly spreading disease. He tries to plant himself more firmly in the memory. Will, teary-eyed and shaking, and the confession that had followed, landing like a punch to Mike’s horribly weak stomach. He feels that sensation, but not much else. It’s like sand slipping through his fingers, a dream he can’t quite grasp. Mike inhales deeply. There’s something like a ringing in his ears, but the frequency is so low that he thinks he might be imagining it.
A gentle nudge of the elbow brings him back to Earth—or wherever the hell it is that they are. He blinks at Will a few times, who frowns at him in concern.
“Are you okay?” Will asks. Their elbows brush again.
Licking his lips, Mike nods once. “Yeah. Fine. Don’t worry about me.”
He was just my Tammy.
Images flash in his mind until he’s dizzy, girls with twisting, bubblegum smiles, cheerleaders with curlers in their hair, leaning in. The smug sense of satisfaction as Will pulled back. What did it mean? Faces of boys, nameless—he tried to place them. Were they of interest to Will—did he turn his head, did his cheeks flush pink and rosy for them the way they sometimes did for Mike?
It’s not my fault you don’t like girls.
He squeezes his eyes shut, rubbing a hand along his jaw.
Was it me? he wants to ask. It sits there in his brain, insistent, bouncing back and forth. Was it me?
The ringing in his head has grown louder. It’s pulsing faintly, enough to make him feel slightly nauseous. He turns to Will again, opening his mouth to ask if he hears it too—it must be something in the atmosphere, surely. That’s when Will drops to the ground. Mike’s stomach drops with him.
Things are a blur after that. Somehow, Mike’s feet drag him away—away from Will, towards the fight. Leaving him is a fight in itself, like ripping his own arm off and carrying on without it.
In recent years, Mike has felt that his body is a puppet. He pulls the strings, leading himself along the path ahead, the straight one, the one along which he won’t lose himself. He’s not sure when he entered Mirkwood. Maybe it really was the day he found Eleven in those woods, the day he lost Will the first time. Or maybe it’s been inside him all along, lurking, taunting, hypnotizing him into rendition. All he knows is that every fibre of his being has been urging him off the path.
****
You understand me. Better than anyone.
In the aftermath of the Upside Down—in the absence of Eleven, Mike does his best to stay upright. He fixates on the loss of her like a moth to a flame. It burns the most in his throat, a lack of oxygen more than anything else.
It’s drowning. It’s the rug being ripped out from underneath him.
The guilt—it consumes him.
He thinks of their arguments, the frigid months after his love profession in the pizza restaurant, the mutual understanding of the dying breath of a relationship coming to an end. He thinks of these things, and he wonders, the guilt eating him alive.
If it truly was that Mike understood her better than anyone, did anyone really know her at all?
And then: if he couldn’t even say I love you before she died, what did that say about him?
He doesn’t know. It’s like he has the answer right in front of him, but he can’t quite put his finger on it.
They graduate. Mike’s not exactly sure how any of them manage it, least of all Max, who somehow passed all of her classes without attending half of them. No one else seems to question it, though, so what can he do but let it happen?
****
There are moments, like wrinkles in time, when Mike is convinced he’s stepped into a different reality. It’s the liquor on his wedding night, the odd strangled laugh that tumbles out of him as his wife—his wife—climbs into his lap, nimble fingers slipping between them to the silver of his belt buckle. It’s the awful sweep of his raven hair in photos—what had ever possessed him to cut it that way? The squeak of his La-Z-Boy, the smudge of lipstick, the crinkle of the newspaper in his spotting hands at the breakfast table.
He tries not to look in the mirror—even goes as far as to forbid them from the bedroom. He knows what he’ll see there if he does. If his hair isn’t anything to go by, it’s the waistline of his pants, or the thin-wired reading glasses—he doesn’t remember ever needing them.
When he looks in the mirror, he doesn’t recognise himself.
Years pass, somehow, like the flip of a switch. Mike continues down the path. He's not entirely convinced he’s in control anymore. He thinks he fell asleep somewhere along the way, headfirst into the river.
Mike blinks, and he is thirty, forty-five, fifty. It’s as if he is watching a television series to which he’s only half paid attention.
The only escape he finds is through his writing. He writes of a sorcerer with enough courage to power a steam engine, and the young paladin who would follow him to the ends of the Earth. He writes of treacherous but irresistible adventures into foreign wonderlands, of deserts and oceans far and wide, of the three waterfalls and the quiet life the mage builds for herself. He writes in metaphors, loose enough to be interpreted however the reader sees fit.
He writes of Will.
He remembers him as he was, chocolate eyes, pink mouth, broad shoulders that carried mountains for a boy of seventeen, and still that laugh like choral bells when it finally rang out. The Will of eighteen had been just as devastating, of course—more so when you factored in the ‘charming’ guest he’d brought home for the holidays.
It was after that miserable Christmas, after dinner at the Byers, during which a stranger had occupied Eleven’s seat at the table, and Mike had plastered on a grin so forced it had nearly split his face in two, that they begun to drift apart.
“I wanted you two to get along,” Will told him. “But you can’t even look me in the eye, can you?”
“I can look you in the eye,” Mike said. His gaze was fixed on an indistinct point across the room, a yellow flower on the wallpaper maybe, or the shiny handle of the board game cabinet.
He couldn’t help but wonder if this was the reason he’d hardly heard from Will these past months—if this was why it had only ever been Mike calling and Will picking up. If all of the lacking, what felt like a gaping hole left on what was now Mike’s side of the country, had been filled by Carlton and his stupid, unfunny jokes in New York—on Will’s side. Did they touch pinkies when nobody was looking like he and Will used to do? Did they sit with their knees pressed together on the couch? Did they sleep over? Oh God, did they sleep over?
He could feel the frustration effervescing inside Will. It had begun to exude into the air, making Mike feel wired in a way only he could. Will snapped his fingers in front of his face, eyes hardened and dangerous. “I’m over here.”
Mike looked at him, held his gaze for one, two—no, he couldn’t do it.
“Tell me I’m wrong. Tell me you’re okay with it.”
He bit back bile in his throat. “I can’t.”
Will nodded, eyes growing reflective, pain clearly visible there. Mike didn’t know who it belonged to.
“I have nothing to say to you.”
The return of the daffodils, Easter, saw Will back in Hawkins. Mike, however, didn’t see him once—didn’t receive a dinner invite, despite the tradition they’d had since kindergarten. He didn’t ask for one either. How could he when it would mean facing it again? The shared intimacy in the touch of an arm, the smug grin of the boy with the dark curls and the beige jacket, a cheap knockoff. Mike couldn’t have forced himself to stomach it if he tried.
“He looks a bit like Mike, doesn’t he?” He overheard Max say to Lucas one movie night when he’d climbed the stairs to the kitchen for a drink, needing a distraction from the Will-shaped space on the sofa. “Or is it my bad eyesight?”
Mike clutched his can of Coke so hard it indented the metal, splashing sugary bubbles out of the opening. He cursed, licking the sticky liquid off his hand. “Yeah, don’t tell that to Will, though,” Lucas warned.
“I mean, I think he knows.”
“You think Mike does?”
Mike leaned further into the opening in the door, wishing he could see whatever reaction Max had given.
“You know, sometimes I wonder if…”
He strained his ears, heart in his stomach.
“What?” Came Lucas’ reply.
“Never mind.”
“No, really—”
Mike pushed the basement door open so hard it slammed into the wall behind it. “Well, we didn’t have Diet!”
They looked up as he descended the stairs, quick on his feet, two cans of Coke tucked against his side, the other, now half-empty, in his hand. Lucas adjusted his arm around Max, grinning a bit nervously. Max let him pull her closer, looking for all the world like a cookie thief with crumbs at the corners of her mouth—an expression Mike hadn’t been aware she had in her repertoire.
Later, over the months of silence, between the polite, horribly stilted conversations when the Party reunited the following summer, Dustin and Lucas tried to talk some sense into him. But just say you're sorry turned to dude, it’s the eighties, accept it already. By the time the nineties had rolled around, Mike had lost not only Will, but everyone else, too.
There remained only one path after that. He followed it blindly, as if he had buttons for eyes. For as long as Mike had known it, Mirkwood had held a sickness. Deep down, he knew he did too.
On the eve of his wedding, beneath a moon hung heavy in the sky, Mike downed half a mickey of vodka and picked up the phone. Church bells rang in the distance, a sort of haunting reminder of what was to come, as he dialled a number he hadn’t called in years. The memory muscle was still there.
The odds were not in his favour, but it was nearly Christmas, and Mike—he just needed—with an ache so raw he could barely breathe—to hear his voice.
“Hello?” The word was softly spoken, as if hushed for the sake of a house already fast asleep.
Mike still felt it like a punch to the stomach.
“Will,” he breathed out, a tone he hadn’t used in so long it made his voice hoarse.
He heard a sharp intake through the speaker, followed by a long, ringing silence. Then, finally, “Mike?”
“Yeah, it’s me.” Mike twisted the telephone cord around his finger, blinking harshly as he waited for the response.
“Um, hi.”
“Hi.”
“Why—” Another loud breath could be heard then. “Why are you calling me?”
“Oh! How rude of me.” Mike laughed loudly. “‘M getting married. Thought you might wanna come.”
This received the longest delay yet. Lifting the phone from his ear, Mike examined the earpiece, tapping it impatiently as if that might make Will’s voice come through.
“Will?” he asked. “Wacha doing? ‘Can’t hear youuu.”
“I know,” Will replied eventually, bypassing the rest of what he’d said. “Mom told me.”
“Oh, cool. Yeah, finally shackin’ up. Great, right?”
“That’s—yeah, that’s great. I’m happy for you.”
“Thanks. ‘M happy for you too.”
Mike heard him scoff at that. Finally, he thought, a reaction.
“That’s good of you,” Will said, if nothing a little bitter. “Not that I’ll be getting married any time soon.”
“Why not?” Mike pouted. Swivelling his desk chair, he fiddled with the lever on the side, dissatisfied with its positioning. “You don’t love ‘im?”
“No,” Will said. “Because it’s illegal to marry another man. In case you’ve forgotten.”
“Oh.”
“Mhm.”
“Marriage is overrated anyway.”
“Says the guy who’s getting married… when is it that you’re getting married again?”
For some reason, this caused Mike to laugh, a helpless giggle that tumbled from his lips without his control. “Tomorrow.”
He was expecting some reaction, some outburst of surprise, maybe even regret on his behalf. Mike himself was experiencing considerable amounts of regret, though he hadn’t actually gone through with the deed yet.
For some reason, Will didn’t focus on any of this. Instead, what reached Mike through the phone was a light huff of disbelief, and, “Are you drunk?”
“Noo.” Mike giggled again. “I don’t drink.”
“Right.”
“I don’t, I don’t, I swear.”
“Uh-huh, well, I hope the promise you make at the altar tomorrow is more sincere than that.”
Mike gasped indignantly. Something vibrant and alive zipped in his veins, a sensation he grasped for like a pool of water in the desert. “Do you doubt my intentions?”
Unfortunately, he’d drained it all much too quickly. “Why did you call me, Mike?” Will asked abruptly, ignoring his question.
“I told you. To invite you to my wedding.”
“Seems like a bit of late notice, don’t you think?”
“Well, you’re in Hawkins, are you not?”
“That’s besides the point, Mike.”
“And what’s the point then?”
“The point is you’re drunk, and you’re calling me when you should be thinking about your future wife.”
“Can’t I think about my best friend, too?”
“We haven’t been best friends in a long time, and you know it.”
“That’s just not true.”
“Oh, really? This is the first time we’ve talked in what, five years? And you’ve called to tell me you’re getting married. I don’t even know the girl’s name, Mike.”
“Rachel. Her name’s Rachel,” Mike said, the memory recalling through him like a bell.
Will gave a long, exhausted sigh. Did he run a hand over his face? Mike wondered. Were his knuckles white, grip like a vice where he clutched the phone? There was an awful, miserable part of him that didn’t care. Didn’t care if he cared. Mike only longed to see him, to feel the burn of Will’s eyes on his raw, naked skin.
“I feel sorry for you, Mike, I really do. And, you know something? I feel sorry for me, too.”
“Wait, Will, what are you—” Desperation reigned down on him, until he was scooping grains of sand away with his hands, submerging his body in it, holding onto the last drop of water on his tongue like liquid gold.
“Goodbye, Mike. I hope you will be very happy.”
The phone went dead, the eerie ring of the dial tone as bone-chilling as a graveyard. Wobbling slightly in his hard-backed chair, Mike stared at it for a long moment, grinning as if he’d just experienced the amusement of a lifetime, and prepared to dig himself into the ground.
It’s only years later, when his daughter, Eleanor, a lively, bright thing with familiar waves of raven hair and a pointed jaw, pulls a dust-covered photo album out of the attic and asks who Will Byers is, that Mike truly contemplates killing himself.
It’s not just the reminder that Will isn’t in his life anymore that makes him want to curl into himself and sob like he only had the innocence to do as a little boy, watching as a fragile body was pulled out of poison black water. It’s that his daughter doesn’t know Will’s kindness, his humility, the quiet strength of his support or embrace. She doesn’t know his smile, his real smile, the one that shone through with the brilliance of a thousand suns, before being shunned by shadow. And when Will’s light had made its long-awaited return, Mike had fumbled it as horribly as anyone could. He’d landed back in the dark, and in the dark he’d stayed. Others continued to be graced with Will’s warmth, the blinding flash of pearl-white teeth, the indent of a cheeky dimple. They felt the curve of his lips against their own like a promise, even when Planet Earth turned away from the sun.
“Dad? Are you okay?” Eleanor asks when he doesn’t respond. She’s as sharp as knives, his daughter, so much so that sometimes Mike feels threatened, has the instinct to turn on his heel and run.
He can’t remember whether he ever responds.
The second time death calls to him, a violent thing with teeth and utterly inviting, it’s because of a song.
If Running Up the Hill is the melody that brings Max back to the land of the living, Good Luck Babe is the track that could ensure Mike a life sentence away from it.
The first time it touches his ears, it’s through the crackling speakers of his beat-up Ford, a car he’d held onto for the mere shred of sentimental value it provided, rejecting change like a gateway drug.
It’s fine, it’s cool. You can say that we are nothing, but you know the truth.
Mike frowns, adjusting his grip on the steering wheel. The line feels a bit like an itch he can’t quite scratch, can’t quite understand why it bothers him.
The forest passes by in a blur, dark blue shadows extending onto the paved road he speeds across. It’s approaching dusk, the last rays of the sun peaking through the lowest branches of the oak trees.
He needs a drink, he thinks.
You can kiss a hundred boys in bars. Shoot another shot, try to stop the feeling.
He rubs a hand over the back of his neck, a nagging feeling creeping over him like goosebumps. By now, the urge to turn off the radio is overwhelming. A car crash he watches willingly, unable to look away.
A flash of pink enters his vision, the delicate pout of lips. The Ford swerves suddenly.
“Get a grip,” he mutters to himself, hearing his father’s voice as if he were sitting next to him in the passenger seat, not buried in the Baptist church cemetery.
He passes by the parking lot and its overflowing ring of restaurants, heart aching like it’s the plague. It doesn’t make much sense to call it Mirkwood anymore, but he still does.
You'd have to stop the world just to stop the feeling.
Stomach lurching, Mike thinks of the baking heat of the summer of eighty-five. One reason among many that he’d spent his time holed up in the low glow of a lampshade, a spinning record to fill the silences and lower the suspicions of certain watchful eyes. He remembers these sensations with relief, keeps them above ground, in a well-lit storage facility he can frequent as often as he wishes. The woody scent of the cabin, musty knitted blankets, the brush of candy-sweet lips. Above all else, the high that came with total, unbelievable normality. Normality despite the underlying twinges of doubt, the flashes of long, pale legs extending from much too short shorts, the knock of knobbly elbows, jolting through him in the same horrifying way they’d brought the demogorgon back to life two years later, as shadows stooped toward them, closer, closer, closer…
The summer of eighty-five gave Mike the feeling of inserting an iron knife into the narrow slots of a high-power toaster and playing keep away with the edges.
“What are you staring at?”
They were at Lover’s Lake when Max asked him the question, harmless, not inherently accusing.
Mike had his feet in the shallows, swishing his legs back and forth. The sun beat down, searing the back of his pale neck, but it was a pleasant sensation, welcome with the relief of the water always there to return to.
Some of the others were tossing a football over the surface. Now and then, Lucas would spike it in someone’s face, provoking an enraged outburst and a fair amount of swearing, especially from Dustin’s part. On more than one occasion, Max had taken it upon herself to tackle him, not one to let such tomfoolery fly without a bit of good, fun repercussion. Will hadn’t bothered to involve himself. He floated some distance away, eyes closed as if in sleep. A small frown decorated his face, and Mike didn’t know whether the plague of emotions was an effect of the sun’s strong rays or some worry beyond Mike’s knowledge or control.
It was easier to look at Will like this, without pressure or expectation for him to follow the social rules of engagement; nod when he spoke, respond with appropriate responses to comments and questions, try not to stare at the thin sheen of sweat clinging to his upper lip. Mike had found himself thinking it probably tasted salty—a bit of an unnecessary thought; of course, it was salty. His own sweat was surely of a similar chemical balance.
It was also easier with Will like this, slim shoulders and the arch of his back submerged beneath the deep aqua blue. There was less of him to look at this way, less to focus on, allowing Mike to stick to what was important.
Still, for some reason, it was still too much—or it appeared that way when Mike tore his eyes away to find Max’s green ones watching him.
What are you staring at? He’d realised she’d said. The words echoed in his head, bouncing around, waiting to be halted with an answer.
Max cocked her head at him expectantly, lifting a juicy, purple grape to her lips from the makeshift picnic basket his mother had insisted on preparing for them.
It would have been easy to speak the truth—Will, I’m staring at Will, and what about it?—but some protective instinct inside him said to hide, that she wouldn’t find his reasoning quite as reasonable as he knew it to be.
“Nothing,” he snapped. “I was staring into space.”
Will had been floating closer to the shallows, but he surfaced just then, shaking his mop of chestnut hair out, movements not unlike those of a dog—something he’d surely held onto from another life, Mike mused. He had the brief thought of golden retriever Will curling up in his lap, but cast it out as quickly as it had come.
Max’s grating voice sounded again, distant words that caused his blood to boil further as Will pulled himself out of the water, chest gleaming.
Turning away from both of them, he swerved his gaze to Eleven. Her delicate fingers picking at the grass, damp curls sticking to the soft skin at the back of her neck. He needed… something, and she could give it to him. He needed her.
El’s eyes lifted to meet his, as if sensing him watching.
“Do you wanna go?” he asked her. Grinning cheekily, she nodded.
When she tugged sweetly on his hand, he scrambled to his feet, feeling like he could breathe again.
He didn’t look back, didn’t feel the need to see the amused flick of Max’s eyebrows, or the gaping mouths of their friends as they so regretfully abandoned them.
“Well, bye then?” Max called.
Unclenching his free hand from its stubborn fist, he lifted it in farewell.
The shameless, infuriating girl’s joining of the Party the year before had completely altered the dynamic. As far as everyone was concerned, what Mike felt for Will in the in-between of childhood and what lay beyond had been completely normal. If Mike wrapped a protective arm around Will’s shivering shoulders, if he ensured it was him and only him that took him home, that was simply the way things were, like the fall of leaves in the autumn or the echo of a seashell against your ear, a tidal pull. But when an outsider stepped in, they had the unfortunate ability to view daily occurrences and long-term constants from the outside.
“Why does your voice change when you talk to Will?”
Mike remembers the shock of the remark as if it were yesterday.
“My voice doesn’t change!” he’d protested at once. She was the only so-called ‘member’ of their Party that didn’t follow the friends don’t lie rule. Even so, he had the urge to press the can of pop in his hand to his traitorous cheeks, or retreat upstairs to stick his wobbly bobble head in the freezer. The summer temperatures still clung to the air, Mike acknowledged, and they coated everything in a sheen layer of sweat—just as much the coke can as the back of his neck. November be damned.
“I mean,” Lucas scratched his head, giving him a sheepish sideways glance. “It kinda does, man.”
“It doesn’t!” Mike squeaked.
“Uh, yeah, it does. You’re all like, oh, Will,” Max said, clutching her hands to her chest convincingly (not!). “I love you so much! Let’s be best friends forever and ever.”
“Jesus, what?!” Mike looked around at Dustin and Lucas, searching for some kind of support they seemed reluctant to provide.
“I talk to all my friends the same,” he tried next.
“You sure as hell don’t talk to me like that,” said Max.
Mike glared. “Wonder why.”
“Yeah, I wonder.”
“No!” He said, frustrated. “It’s because I dislike you.”
Max let out a sharp, amused laugh. It sent a chill through him. “Because I clock you like a nail on the head.”
“Whatever that’s supposed to mean!”
“It means whatever you think it means.”
Wait! Mike thought. You haven’t met El yet! I’m different with her, not Will. You’ve got it all wrong.
He squinted down at the orange spot on the carpeted floor, a cheeto stain, parsing the fizzing taste of Coke in his mouth. He was entirely unsure from where that thought had arisen. El wasn’t even around anymore.
The basement door creaked open, that hesitancy that Mike had come to associate with Will since his disappearance.
“Hey, guys.”
Mike had never felt uncomfortable with Will around, had never been unsure of what to say to him, but suddenly it was as though every thought threatening to spill out of his mouth was the wrong one.
“Hi Mike.” Despite himself, a rush of warmth swarmed through him at the individual greeting meant just for him.
Mike smiled and bit his tongue. Hard.
Retrieving his favourite blanket from the footstool, a baby-blue material that carried too much lint, Will made himself comfortable on the couch next to him. He tried to stifle the guilt as Will’s posture sagged a little at the lack of an audible greeting.
“So, what’ll it be?” Lucas asked. “Jurassic Park or Empire Strikes Back?”
An hour into the movie, Mike and Will sat with their arms pressed against each other, just like they always had. The awful self-awareness Mike had carried had drifted away just as quickly as Dustin in the rocking chair in the corner, his soft snores providing a chance to grin at each other in amusement. After one of these shared giggles, Mike glanced back at the screen where the towering T. rex stooped towards the shattered tour car, now flipped on its back. He took a breath. It felt safe to be needed, and as Will’s shoulders rose and fell against his, he had never been more so.
“Are you cold?” he asked softly as the shiver that ran down Will’s spine travelled through their arms, flush together and up his own.
“A little,” Will admitted.
Mike grabbed the extra blanket from the back of the couch, wrapping it around himself before offering Will the other half. He relaxed further as Will accepted, pulling it tight around both of them.
Love you, he thought. It was an aftereffect of a childhood together, having spent enough of their lives with their hands clasped. Effectively, it had also been together that they’d learned that boys didn’t tell each other those kinds of things. The first time Will hadn’t said it back, Mike, juvenile and unsuspecting of such heartbreak, had gone home and cried. He never did tell him how much it had hurt.
“Did you like it?” he asked Will, brushing aside his thoughts as the movie credits rolled.
The question earned a confused smile. It lit his chest from the inside. “Did I like it? We’ve seen this movie five times at least.”
Mike shrugged, shooting him a brief smirk. “But did you like it this time?”
“I did,” Will said.
Just then, Dustin piped up, having jerked awake with the sudden tv static. “Max’s right, Wheeler.”
Mike froze. “Right about what?”
“You know what.”
And if that wasn’t the most damning crime to be painted in. Because, while being caught red-handed was sufficiently unfortunate in itself, Mike had absolutely no idea what he was doing wrong, and thus, no way of knowing how to stop. He couldn’t hear it. He didn’t notice the change. It was as if Will lit a part of him that no one else could touch, not even Mike himself.
When you wake up next to him in the middle of the night.
With your head in your hands, you're nothing more than his wife.
It’s the year twenty twenty two, and Mike mutters a complaint that goes unheard, switching on his windshield wipers as his vision obscures. No one mentioned the rain, he thinks, the loudest thought he can muster. He squints as the windshield wipers squeak over dry glass. Blinking hard, Mike tastes salt on his lips.
“Shit,” he swears, dragging a palm over his wet cheeks. “Shit.”
And when you think about me, all of those years ago.
You're standing face to face with ‘I told you so’.
He pulls the car over. A transport truck zooms past his window, honking erratically. His own vast capacity for emotion has always been his downfall, something that’s brought more shame than anything else, but when Mike sees his reflection in the rearview, his misery is downright ugly.
He holds eye contact for a long, perilous moment as his reflection shakes their head at him. He breaks first.
“Oh God,” he sobs. His forehead meets the cold material of the steering wheel, hands still clutching for dear life. Chappell Roan continues to assault him through the radio. He considers the hard metal of the gun tucked into the back of his desk at home, a wedding present from his father years ago. He’d never seen a use for it, never even agreed with the idea of keeping a gun after the demolition of the Upside Down, but now the ‘household essential’ calls to him like a siren out at sea. He thinks that if it were kept in his glove box, he would have used it.
You’d have to stop the world just to stop the feeling.