Chapter Text
"Okay…" Will drawls as he adjusts the zoom on his camera. The lens squints at the space between Lucas' eyebrows before jumping back out to center him and Mike. "And… there, got it! Ready, guys?"
Lucas shoots him a thumbs up. "Always!"
"As I'll ever be," Mike grumbles. Why he let Will rope him into this is a mystery to him, on a Saturday morning, no less.
"Great," Will smiles as he holds up his fingers. "Three… Two… One… Action!"
"Hi! My name's Lucas Sinclair, and I'm here with…"
"Mike." He states, leaning into the microphone. Calling it a microphone is generous, to be honest. It's a cheap old voice recorder attached to a lime green pointer finger. Hardly high tech. "Mike Wheeler."
"And who are you, Mike?"
"I'm president of the A/V club," he says, flat as a door.
"Cut!" Will shouts, pinching the bridge of his nose.
"Come on, Mike, you gotta give us more than that," Lucas complains. "Let's start over."
Will holds up three fingers again, counting down and whispering 'action' this time instead, making Lucas nearly miss his cue.
"Hi! My name's Lucas Sinclair, and I'm here with-"
"Mike Wheeler, president of the A/V club and junior here at our very own Midtown High!"
"The A/V club?" Lucas asks with exorbitant curiosity. "What in the world is that?"
"Well, Lucas, the A/V club is the place to be for all things regarding digital media. I could tell you, or I could show you. It's best if I do both, though. It is the audio/visual club, after all. Haha!"
"Cut!" Will interjects again, annoyed. He drops his right hand to his side, closing the camera's LCD screen against his thigh. "'Haha'?"
"What was wrong that time?" He squeaks.
Will gives him a blank stare. "Mike. Come on."
"We're trying our hardest to get more members for the club, and you're doing nothing to help," Lucas scolded.
"Well, can you blame me? This ad is shit."
"You wrote it, genius."
"Yeah, after you guys rejected my first thirty ideas," Mike scoffs.
"That's because none of them actually showed people what our club was about. No one's going to be convinced to come to our meetings by some cheap word vomit PowerPoint," Will says, taking Lucas' side.
"If people are really serious about this, they'll find us. We don't need ads."
"Yes, we do," Lucas said, gently shoving Mike's shoulder. "If we don't have at least five people by the end of the quarter, they're gonna make us disband."
"Can't we just lie?"
"Not this time," Will shakes his head.
"Mr. Clarke already covered for us last year, and the year before that, remember? They're going to catch on to how we're the only three people ever giving the announcements."
Mike, still not convinced, rolls his eyes.
"Just do this one ad for us, Mike, and you'll never have to be in front of the camera again, okay?"
Mike weighs his options. He could, on one hand, just go home, crawl back into bed, and let the club crumble into pieces. On that same hand, he'd lose the only thing tying him to Will Byers.
And Lucas, of course.
"Fine…"
Will gives what they all hope to be the last countdown.
"Hi! My name's Lucas Sinclair, and I'm here with…"
"Michael Wheeler."
Mike for short. Sixteen years of age. Two and some change of them as just some guy, and one of them as a man. Spider-Man, to be exact. He's currently drenched in the head-splitting fluorescent light of the Midtown High School hallway, shooting a terrible ad for a not-so-terrible club. To his right is Lucas Sinclair, head reporter of the A/V club and Will's best friend. In front of him, about seven feet away, is William Byers, videographer of the A/V club and one of his closest friends. Best friend was a title Dustin Henderson had reserved in the fourth grade and had no intention of sharing.
"And what do you have for us today, Mike?"
"Well, Lucas, I could tell you, or I could show you, but it's probably best if I do both. Welcome to the A/V club, or audio/visual, if you want to be like that…" Mike powered his way through their filming, being extra careful not to misspeak. Just moments afterwards, Will was already burning through the editing process like a gender reveal in a California forest.
Watching Will edit was like watching the Sistine Chapel be painted, though he'd never let him tell him that. He joked about it being like witnessing the Mona Lisa's creation the first time he saw it. Will, instead of taking the compliment, went on a long-winded (but surprisingly educational) rant on the painting's fame compared to its technical difficulty. Then followed it up with some insecure comment about his own skills being nothing more than prehistoric. It'd caught him off guard at first, but now, two years into their friendship, he'd gotten used to Will's humility. Just because he respected it, though, didn't mean he had to like it. In just ten minutes, Will was almost finished. Almost.
"God damn it," Will mutters under his breath.
"Is something wrong? Did something happen? Do we have to start over?"
"Calm down," Will says, his focused eyes meeting Mike's worried ones. "Can you go grab me that box of cords from the computer lab?"
"The black one?" Lucas asks. "That one's pretty heavy; I can grab it for you-"
"I got it," Mike interrupts. He's not as muscular as Lucas, sure, but he had strength from another source. Mike slips out of the A/V room and into the computer lab. The weight of the box wasn't a problem at all; the shooting pain in his chest that follows, however, is. Of course, they just had to shoot this on a weekend. Weekends were sacred days for Mike, ones where he didn't have to bind or speak to anyone. Yet here he was, at school at nine a.m., talking into cameras and struggling to breathe. He lugs the cords into the A/V room and slams them to the ground with a loud thud.
"I told you, dude, I could've gotten it-"
"It's fine," Mike huffs. "You guys don't need me for anything else, right?" He asks, leaning against the door frame for support.
"Yeah, are you okay?" Will asks.
"Perfect! Peachy!" He says with a sharp breath.
"Peachy?"
"Don't worry about it. Just uh, got a text from my mom while I was in there. Gotta head back to help her with dinner," he lies.
"The day just started, Mike," Lucas stated.
"What can I say, early bird, worm, you get it. Good luck with the video, Will!"
"…Thanks?" He shouts to Mike, who's already halfway down the hall.
Mike jostles his locker open and digs out a hoodie before slinking into the nearest empty classroom. His top slips off as soon as the door shuts. Relief washes over him in an instant. He didn't have a large chest by any means, but anything other than concave was still too much. It wasn't far enough into the fall season for sweaters, but there wasn't much other choice.
The subway was, inevitably, sweatier than usual.
"Whaddya have all that on for?" His sister asks when he collapses to a puddle upon arriving home. He whips his binder out of his front pocket and flings it to the floor as Nancy gives a grunt in understanding.
"I hate them. I hate them so much."
"Who, Will and Lucas?"
As if. It's like she doesn't even know him.
"No, never. I'm talking about the principal. Or the president. I don't know," He says, each sentence punctuated by a heavy exhale, "Whoever made it so that we need more people and that I had to be on camera at the ass crack of dawn."
Nancy glances at the clock. "You do know that it's ten in the morning, right?"
"Well aware," Mike whines.
"You really have to be careful with those, okay?" She says as he picks himself up from the floor. "You could damage your ribs, or puncture a lung, or something. That kind of damage is irreversible, you know!" She shouts as he scampers off into his room. Binding was the least of his health concerns. Had she known the real dangers he faced, she'd bind his whole body in bubble wrap.
Right on time, his phone starts buzzing. It's Dustin, meaning it could be the end of the world or he stubbed his toe. Either way, Mike answers the call while keeping the speaker a safe distance from his ear.
"MIKE!!"
"Dustin…"
"LOOK OUT YOUR WINDOW, QUICK!!"
Mike rushes towards the other side of the room. He yanks open the curtains to find…
"There's nothing there."
"ARE YOU SERIOUS?"
Just then, a fleet of cops chases down a speeding car. Someone pops up out of the sunroof and shoots the police's tires out.
"Oh. Yeah, no, I see it now. What about it?"
"That's your cue, Web-Boy!"
"It's Spider-Man," Mike groans.
"Not according to BuzzFeed, you're not. Go get 'em, Spider!"
As if today couldn't get any worse. What kind of psycho decides to rob a bank on a Saturday? In the a.m. at that? Mike throws his sweater off, webbing down his chest before suiting up. It's red and blue, traditional, as Dustin says. He would've preferred it to be black, but Dustin, as the designer, insisted on the color scheme.
"You're basically Superman now; you might as well look like it," He explained.
"As long as I don't have to have that stupid underwear on the outside of my costume."
"Oh, of course not, I'd never do that to you."
"Or spandex, am I right?" Mike laughed.
Dustin, however, did not. As broke high-school students and giant comic book nerds, that one was, unfortunately, a non-negotiable.
Mike finished shuffling into his suit before swinging out the window. He quickly catches up with the thieves and slings their car into the nearest empty alleyway, the rubber tires igniting against the road. The trunk slams into a dumpster, popping it open and letting Mike yank out the duffle bags and throw them onto the nearest rooftop. It's going well, all things considered, until the front door flies open and hits him square on.
Mike's back slams into the alley brick. "Hey, I was standin' there!" He says in his worst Brooklyn accent.
They're not amused. The crew files out of the vehicle, eight of them total, all armed and ready.
"Whoa, how'd you all fit in there?" He asks, rising to his feet and rubbing his neck. "D'you steal some TARDIS tech from the bank while you were in there?"
They look around at each other, confused.
"Come on, this one knows what I'm talking about. You, with the glasses," he says, snapping his fingers before pointing at the smallest guy there.
The gang turns their attention towards him, now thinking he has some sort of advanced insider tech info. The young man points at himself, raising his brows as if to say, 'Me'?
"Yeah, you!" Mike exclaims, shooting a web and attaching him to the side of the building.
The remaining five rush towards Mike, yet meet the same fate as their accomplice. In true friendly-neighborhood fashion, he slaps a sticky note onto the human wall garland.
"Fuck you, f-" One of them starts before being cut off with another web.
"Watch your language there, big guy," he says, condescending as always, before drawing an asterisk on another note and smacking it onto his mouth. "Now, what was I doing… oh, right, those THOUSANDS of dollars you almost got away with. Wouldn't that have been crazy!" Mike looks up to the fire escape and pulls the bags down before noticing something, or rather, someone that wasn't there before.
A man sits on the fire escape right above the bags, his legs hanging off the side as he stares at the hero. His hazel eyes flick between the LCD screen and the person below him as he points his Sony camcorder at Mike for the second time today.
Shit.