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Will Byers is seven hours engaged to the love of his life, and he thinks this is the first time anything’s ever felt over.
It didn’t feel over when Vecna died on his mother’s ax. He didn’t breathe a sigh of relief when graduation caps went flying. No such thing as a sunset over the horizon when the government finally stopped giving him and his family monthly check-ups. There was always an edge, he thinks—a shoe that threatens to drop, a sword of Damocles that hangs over his head. Owens told him that it’s normal to feel that way. That he’ll take steps forward but he can’t help but double-take at the moving shadows.
For a long time, he felt that this would be how it is forever. He’ll have milestone after milestone, but he will never stop being the boy choking on vines from a Hell dimension. He prepared for it to never be over.
But surprise surprise—roughly eighteen months ago, when he was looking for a tie to wear at a friend’s showcase, wedged between an old pair of socks and a poorly patterned handkerchief was a little velvet box.
Will didn’t have to look inside to know what it was. Instead, he closed the drawer shut and stared at a wall with the stupidest grin on his face for the next half hour.
He left it be, but there was an undertone of something from that moment on.
He breathed lighter. There was a spring in his step that the people around him would describe as a cumulus lifting him by the the soles of his feet. He smiled easier. Laughed with more heart.
Mike noticed it. Will thinks he knew that Will knew, but just loved getting their kisses interrupted with Will’s splitting smile too much to be freaked out by it.
He was—is—so happy. So, so happy.
When Mike asked him—as he always loves to do first—seven hours ago on a swing set reminiscent to the one in his fondest memories, they both knew his answer.
When Will said yes (again, forever, over and over; for as long as Mike would ask), life finally snapped together in a single, clear line.
Oh.
It’s over, isn’t it? All along? Has it been over for so long?
Everything, everything? The fathers and the schoolyard bullies and the demons from Hell that melt into a single face? The needles and psychological assessments and the doctors who tell him the scorched brand of a poker will stick on his skin forever? The men in black listening in on his phone calls and the zeros on his family’s bank account that buys their silence for another year? Is it as over as it can be?
Oh.
It’s been over for quite a while now, hasn’t it?
For years now, Will has only been a normal young man with a normal young life in a normal old city. Will has lived—has been living, for years.
God. It sounds too good to be true.
But he feels a ring on his finger and a promise that holds him by the small of his back. He feels Mike’s knee accidentally brushing against his feet when he goes down on one. He swallows down a laugh and a bottle of red underneath a blanket of stars that never quite shows itself this far out in the city.
Will lets himself feel it. All of it.
He finds that love is the thing that remains.
Oh, what a relief.
He smiles, again, against all the odds that told him he should’ve died the first time when he was twelve. And he cries, again, for all the years after that convinced him he should die now to make up for everything else.
Will turns to his left and faces the man he’s loved forever, just to find him already looking back.
Mike Wheeler. His Mike. His best friend and his great love. The gasps between his laughter and the sighs between his sobs. The shield eclipsing his castle.
Mike raises his fingers to brush his tears away, and he smiles so wide because Will said yes and he’ll never take it back. He chuckles and raises his other hand to play with the overgrown hair at the back of Will’s neck. Mike touches where the evil claimed him most and Will is now only noticing that it isn’t fucking burning.
Something shatters across his vocal cords and he collapses into Mike’s arms, burying his nose on his fiancé’s shoulder. He holds onto him like he’s afraid something will take him away too, but along the edges of his mind is the distinct chime of a bell that signals the end of the day. A gentle wind that tells him everything is finally as it should be.
“Hey, hey,” Mike whispers into a kiss in his hair. “Not that I don’t love having you here, baby, but I thought we were past the happy crying?”
He doesn’t sound upset by it, not at all—in fact, it sounds like he’s got a stupid smile on his face as he says it, which only makes Will hold on tighter. He shakes his head, taking big lungfuls of air.
Mike hums, rocking them side to side, the hand on his nape trailing down to his spine. “I’ve got you.”
He does, doesn’t he? Will’s believed it all his life. It’s never been anything else. Just MikeandWill.
Will pulls back, keeping his arms loosely tied around Mike’s waist—artist’s fingers shakily tracing something nonsensical along his jacket.
He looks at Mike like there’s a moon burning behind his eyes. Like Will can travel to the zero-gravity in Mike’s eyes and stay there because Mike will let him. How Mike always lets him.
He let Will stay in his basement when it was the only quiet place left in his young life. He let Will read off his collection because reading comics feels no good when Mike’s doing it alone. He let Will speak with only his eyes and hands because Will doesn’t have enough words like he does. He let Will kiss him for hours and hours because nothing’s ever felt more right.
He does all of this because he loves Will.
Will forgets, sometimes, that he’s now allowed to let Mike’s love feel real between his lungs. He forgets that Mike loves him down to the exact nanogram that Will loves him in return.
“I love you so much.” He breathes, because it’s been exactly five minutes since he said it last, and that’s five minutes he’s never gonna get back.
Mike grins down at him dumbly. “I love you so much.” He places a kiss on Will’s nose, then on his right cheek, which of course means he has to kiss the left one—for symmetry, he says—and Will gets to laugh when Mike kisses a spot on his neck that tickles.
“Okay, okay, stop it—” and what a giddy thing it is to feel Mike listen when he tells him such, “—we’re gonna get eaten alive by the mosquitos. Let’s go home.”
“I’m so glad you said something, Jesus Christ, Will, this is ridiculous.” Mike pushes his hair back and places a little peck on his hairline. Just a little one. A sweet gesture before his hand slaps down his own thigh and revealing a bleeding spot. Mike kisses his teeth. “They offer, like, zero benefits to wildlife. I can’t believe evolution let them get this far. They’re so fucking greedy.”
As Mike waxes hateful poetic over other similarly useless insects and concepts, Will finishes off their wine with a slight buzz kicking up a fuzz in his head. He shrugs minutely—better he finish it than have a quarter worth of wine that satisfies nobody. Mike stopped drinking at around hour four so that he could drive them home.
Somehow, Mike joining the debate on wasps versus bees as a passionate ally of the bees is exactly how Will imagined their post-engagement conversation going. Listening to the subtle drawl New York City has given Mike after years of living in it with Will is how Will imagines the rest of his life.
His thumb grazes the warming silver of his shiny new ring and imagines their names on paper with a stamp declaring them together forever. His heart aches with a longing he’s not sure will ever leave his chest, but he tries not to let it overshadow the sheer joy of everything else.
They’ll figure it out.
A balloon arch over his parents’ garden in their Montauk house, a quiet spot in a rec center someplace safe, maybe even a fairytale ending in some part of the woods he’ll prepare himself to brave.
It isn’t going to go how they desperately wish it would go—with all the loud announcements and proclamations that all the other weddings get to have, but Will is fine with this. Truth be told, if it held no meaning at all, Will would be fine staying as Mike’s boyfriend on paper forever. He’s already his partner in soul. He doesn’t need a label greater than the one that sits at the core of their existence. He doesn’t need the government to know about his heart any more than he needs them to know his mind. Mike knows his mind. Mike knows him most. That’s the only thing Will could ever need, and one of the many things Mike knows to give freely.
He knows where he is, now.
He supposes there are worse things in the world than not having a piece of paper dictate what Mike means to him.