Chapter Text
Mike Wheeler was flunking college.
Well, not flunking, exactly. He attended all his classes, did his reading, completed every assignment promptly. The problem, the college counsellor had tried to tell him, was that he was just too miserable.
“It’s wonderful writing, truly, Michael,” she said, words slipping out with that sickly coating you hear in the voices of movie stars—sweet but hollow, meaningless smiles stretched tight across the face. She gave him that pitying look he hated, and he could already sense the words coming out next.
“I know what you’ve been through has been…hard—”
Hard. Not hard. It was unbearable: a deep pit of grief and guilt and anger tugging constantly in his gut. It was all he had been able to write about—that unshakeable sorrow which even at that moment he couldn’t lift. It was there, buried in the earth of his body, indistinguishable from the words he wrote. It was a part of him, bleeding into everything he did. Of course his writing was steeped in the pain. Since that day, it had been all he was.
Mike swallowed this thought, stretching an empty smile across his own face and nodding in assent. The counsellor—Emma, her name was—pushed a box of tissues across the table towards him as if it were muscle memory.
“I know losing your friend has been hard,” she repeated, “and I understand that this…sadness…inevitably comes through in your creative work, but I’m afraid this means your writing simply isn’t reflecting the range our teachers expect from students at your level.”
What the fuck did that mean?
“I’m sorry?” Mike swallowed again but his throat was rapidly drying, and his words stuck there like shards of glass, digging painfully at his insides.
“What I’m trying to say, Michael, is that I—we—think it would be best for you to take some time off. Maybe go home…”
Go home?
“…take a break, see some friends. Come back for next semester with a fresh sense of purpose? This is a competitive course, you know.”
Her facial muscles tugged themselves into that stiff smile again, and Mike’s body began to seize up. He thought it would be impossible for her not to hear his heart beating out of his chest at that very moment—it pounded violently at his ribs like a sledgehammer, and Mike imagined each bone cracking, snapping loudly like when-
“Michael?”
“Sorry.” Mike took a shaky breath. “OK.”
When he returned to his room to pack, silent and numbed by a feeling he couldn’t name (Fear? Grief? Longing?), his roommate shot him a look that was part bewilderment, part concern. “Where are you going?”
“Uh—back home,” Mike said, and the word felt foreign on his tongue. He had a home once; he knew this as an immutable fact. But he didn’t have one anymore—sure, the place was still there, but he didn’t think his home was ever really a place. It was something else, something intangible that was warm and kind and quiet but that now dissolved into nothingness if he ever reached for it in the corners of his mind.
In a matter of hours, Mike had packed a rucksack with a week’s worth of clothes and had been put on a train heading straight to Hawkins. Back home. The situation was almost laughable, really: the grief that had driven him like wildfire away from his home had chased him back to his roots once more.
There was truly no escaping it, no escaping her, the face that floated in his head every time he closed his eyes, her voice trapped at the back of his throat. But even worse, there was no escaping him, either. The one person Mike wanted so desperately to share his grief with; the one person who knew El—knew Mike— and not only knew them but had always seen them. Seen right through them, to their very core. He would know what to do.
But Will Byers was long gone, and here Mike was, hurtling back into that void he had never really escaped, with nobody to catch him. Outside, the sun began to dip behind the horizon, and it was only when darkness fell and the train pulled into the station that Mike realised he had nowhere to go.
---
“Goddamn oils,” Will cursed to himself as he threw open the windows of Hopper’s cabin, desperately trying to rid the wooden walls of the pungent smell of turpentine. If the still-wet pieces lining every available surface weren’t enough to stink out his makeshift art studio, the massive canvas propped up in the middle of the room surely would.
For a secret homemade sanctuary, the cabin was more than sufficient—after Will’s mom and Hop had moved to Montauk, they deemed the (almost wreck) of a cabin unsellable and left it to rot there in the woods. Unbeknownst to them, Will really hated college. And Will really, really loved to paint. What started as a sneaky weekend trip back to Hawkins here and there had escalated at a breakneck speed, until, before he knew it (though in all honesty it was a calculated choice), Will had dropped out of college without telling anyone, and had begun to hole up in the cabin-slash-art-studio full time.
Will’s logical rationale behind this was that college was expensive—and in his opinion, virtually pointless. What he didn’t admit, even to himself, was that he could no longer take the all-consuming sensation of complete and utter isolation he felt there. Will was different—he knew that. He hadn’t expected to seamlessly fit himself into a new life, but he had underestimated just how much he would begin to loathe himself for it. In the cabin, he could finally learn to live with himself—it was safer, that way, away from the others. From the guys at college who threw around words like fag and queer: a joke to them, but a searing reminder to Will of just how much he despised himself. And most importantly, away from the party; away from Lucas and Dustin. Away from Mike.
Well, not really away from Mike. It was always him Will pictured with his brush hovering over the canvas, as if Michael Wheeler’s infuriatingly beautiful image was permanently burned behind Will’s eyelids, flashing clear as day every time his thoughts wandered to those rich brown eyes, the angular planes of Mike’s face that Will so desperately wanted to trace with his fingertips.
It felt like Will was constantly chasing that desperate need, spilling out the pictures in his head onto the canvas until Mike’s face was captured in every way imaginable. These paintings he put in a box—blue painted wood, a gift from Jonathan which had once held all his comics.
Apart from Mike, the only other person Will ever wanted to paint was his twin sister. He spoke to her through his paintings, breathing out Dear Jane, with the first touch of his brush against the canvas, and ending, always, with I love you. I’m sorry. Her paintings were lovingly smoothed and stuck to the walls of the studio—he woke every day and stood in front of them, committed to making sure he never, ever forgot her face. Will would keep his sister alive if it were the last thing he did.
As the light outside began to dim and the hazy violet dusk seeped into the sky, a chill crept into the cabin through the open windows, and Will accepted that the turpentine smell would have to linger. He packed away his paints, closed the windows, and placed his current painting on the dining table to dry: this one was of Mike—specifically Mike the Paladin, clad in armour and greatsword in hand. Will felt a surge of humiliation rise like bile in his throat as he looked down at it.
No matter how many times Will forced himself to accept that Mike would never love him the way he loved Mike—that Mike wasn’t like him, that he isolated himself for a reason—the deep stirring in the corners of his heart reserved for his paladin wouldn’t go away.
But soul ties mean precious little in real life, and Mike Wheeler was long gone.
---
As rain pounded against the windowpanes, Will jerked awake to the sound of heaving sobs coming through the bedroom door.
He lay frozen, heart beating at a thousand miles an hour, but as moments passed he realised that it wasn’t because he was scared. There was something about those sobs, those ragged breaths that he recognised. He’d heard them before, and something deep in his body was responding.
Somehow, instinctively, he knew. He should have been scared that someone else was in the cabin, but instead a sharp pang wrenched at his heart as he half leapt, half fell out of bed, the name Mike tumbling from his lips. He threw open the door and, sure enough, there was Mike. Mike fucking Wheeler, curled up in a ball on the floor of Hopper’s cabin. The light had been flicked on, illuminating the pictures of El lining every wall and creating a devastating tableau: Mike, body wracked by sobs, surrounded by paintings of her on every surface.
Will stood there, paralysed by shock as Mike trembled on the floor. What the fuck?
After what seemed like hours but was mere seconds, Will regained control of his body, dropping to the floor beside Mike. Unsure of whether to touch him, Will’s hand hovered uncertainly over his back, whispering his name again and again like a prayer that fell on deaf ears.
Mike couldn’t hear him, couldn't hear anything over the noise in his own head. Seeing her again, being greeted by her face as he flicked on the light of Hopper’s cabin—the only safe, empty place Mike could think of—had knocked the wind out of him. The pounding of his heart came first, followed by the shortness of breath—quick, shallow breaths, taking in what felt like painfully miniscule amounts of air—and then the rush of blood into his ears, so loud he had hardly noticed his legs giving way.
Will noted all of this, and compelled by an almost involuntary urge, took Mike’s hand from where it was wrapped around the back of his head, hair damp from the rain outside, and grasped it as tight as he could.
“I’m here, I’m here,” he repeated, trying his best to keep his voice soothing. What the hell. “Mike, it’s me. It’s Will.”
Mike felt his heart begin to pound faster.
“It’s not real, Mike. You’re safe. They’re just paintings, I—I made them.”
Mike didn’t respond, but his breathing began to slow, ever so gradually, and Will could tell this was working. So he kept talking.
“I’ve been painting a lot, recently. This—Hop’s cabin—it’s kind of like a studio, I guess. Well, my home, but also my studio.” Will felt self-conscious, almost as if he were talking to himself, but the sensation of Mike’s hand wrapped in his grounded him, and the urge to help his friend was stronger than any embarrassment.
“I can show you, if you’d like. It helps me, to remember what she looked like. I miss her too, Mike. I miss everyone, but that’s different. I miss…”
I miss you.
This confession Will didn’t speak, but somehow hoped it would pass between the two boys anyway, in that way they always used to communicate without words. Seconds ticked by agonisingly slowly, maybe a minute, before Mike sat up, pushing dripping strands of hair out of his eyes and taking deep, purposeful breaths. As he turned slightly to meet Will’s eyes, Will became acutely aware of where their hands were still wrapped together and released his grip, jerking his hand backwards as if it were red-hot.
Mike cleared his throat. “Um.”
Will thought this summed up the situation quite aptly.
There were a million questions he wanted to ask, but he settled on the most obvious one.
“What are you doing here?”
Mike, at that moment, became all too aware that he was sitting, dripping wet and soaked in his own tears, on the floor of Will Byers’ makeshift art-studio-slash-home. He knew, deep down, that Will would see right through him, but the lie spilled out far too easily, slipping from his tongue like honey.
“I wanted to visit home.” The first lie. “My friends—” Second lie. There were no friends. “My friends all went on vacation, so I went home, but the door was locked and I think my parents were away.” Third lie. His parents never went on vacation—Mike just couldn’t face them. “So, I came to the only place I could think of.”
He paused. “Sorry. I wouldn’t have come if I knew you were here.”
Mike didn’t know if this part was a lie. Will took it as the truth—not daring to hope— and stood, eyes fixed firmly to the space behind Mike’s head.
“You can stay here,” he started. “If you haven’t got anywhere else to go.”
Mike glued his own gaze to the floor.
“You can have my bed,” Will continued, forcefully flattening his tone. “The window in Hop’s room is still broken, so you can’t sleep there. I'll sleep on the couch out here.”
His matter-of-fact tone cut sharply through the space between them, and the temperature in the room suddenly seemed to drop. Defeated, Mike nodded, too tired to protest. The urge to reach across, to disrupt the cold gulf of emptiness between them and grasp Will tight—an urge he couldn’t explain—settled to dormancy in the pit of his stomach. He got up, opened his mouth to thank Will, and—
“Don’t worry,” Will said with a sense of finality. “I’ll leave in the morning.”