Archive of Our Own

November, 1988

Will is dying.

Pain tears through him, again and again, and he writhes and spasms, twisting and hissing, contorting himself to get away from the heat. God, it’s so hot, ripping through him mercilessly, invasive and all-consuming. The only thing in the world is this heat. For all he knows, he could be on fire. He thinks he is; there’s no way it could hurt this much otherwise, no way he would be screaming himself hoarse, no way his skin could be so close to melting off, pink and white and viscous. It hurts, it hurts, and he’s so, so angry.

Something impossibly hotter pierces him, and he keens in pain, falling limp, the smell of burning flesh filling his nose. The pain strikes again, deeper, white-hot, and he—

Will wakes up.

He jolts forward with a rattling gasp, eyes flying open, and for a terrible, hazy moment, he thinks the bed he’s sitting on is the same one he was chained to all those years ago, that if he looks in the mirror, he’ll see a tiny, spindly figure, dwarfed by a hospital gown, staring back with brown eyes instead of hazel. Then the early November cool hits him, flooding his body with relief, and he huffs out a shaky sigh, drawing his knees up to his chest and resting his chin on them so he can look out the window. It’s shut tight against the worst of the cold, curtains hanging still to either side. Will looks down, sees the fleecy blanket tangled around his legs and the thick flannel of his pyjama bottoms, and realises with a bitter laugh that he must have overheated in the night. Before he knows it, he’s kicking off the covers and padding over to the window, undoing the latch and shoving it upward with the shudder of swollen wood. He breathes the night air in deep, lets it flood his lungs and breeze through his hair, slicked to his forehead with sweat. Anxiety still thrums through him, dancing jaggedly through his arteries with each beat of his heart, so Will sighs and turns to grab the pack of Camels and lighter that sit in his desk drawer, then climbs through the window and onto the strip of roof outside. He checks El’s window is closed next to him—Jonathan is away at college, no need to worry about that—then lights up, exhaling a plume of smoke into the night along with a breath he didn’t know he was holding. He takes another drag and closes his eyes, breathing in the smell that meant Mom for all those years and now means nightmares.

Idly, he reaches back through the window and picks up the Supercom he keeps on the far side of the sill, out of danger of being knocked over. He flips to the channel he and Mike used to use privately and toys with the idea of calling for him on it. He knows Mike keeps his own walkie next to his bed, always switched on like Dustin drilled into them when they were just kids, bright-eyed and mostly innocent. Bob was just the guy behind the counter of Radio Shack in those days, a kind but forgettable face, the same one that’s now burned into Will’s memory and shoved into the deepest recesses of the box in his head marked “1984–DO NOT TOUCH.” He shivers, inhales another lungful of smoke and nicotine to distract himself from the muddied recollection of so many people’s screams, the taste of their blood, the scent of it, rich and heady to a demodog’s nose, and so, to his.

Fuck it, Will thinks, and stubs the cigarette out on a roof tile. He picks up the Supercom. “Mike? Do you copy? Over.”

There’s only silence on the other end. Will sighs, lets his fall back against the window frame with a dull thunk. He considers the view of witching-hour Hawkins, the moonlight washing in only ink-black silhouettes, trees and buildings in a distant skyline. There are barely any lights on around town; it really must be the middle of the night. Mike’s probably just asleep. He tries not to feel resentful about it.

“Will?” Mike’s voice comes through the walkie, and Will starts violently, free hand flying out to brace against the roof tiles. “I’m awake, what’s up? Over.”

He sounds endearingly groggy, and Will’s guilt at waking him up is fast eclipsed by the relief blooming in him. “Just a nightmare,” he admits, smiling fondly as he imagines Mike, soft around the edges from sleep, answering in his own bedroom. “I didn’t now you were asleep, sorry. Over.”

“No, it’s okay,” Mike replies easily. There’s a shuffling noise as he continues, “I wasn’t really sleeping, anyway. Do you want to talk about it? Over.”

“Actually, is it okay if I come over?” Will asks, mentally running through the math of sneaking out. He could climb over to his parents’ window and use the trellis next to it to get down, but Mom is a light sleeper and he’d probably wake her—not that he thinks she’d mind Will going to Mike’s, even at, like, two am. “I feel like it’s weird to have, you know, this entire conversation over walkie. Over.”

“Okay,” Mike says slowly, and Will can see the cogs turning in his mind, or synapses firing or whatever, Bio was his worst subject anyway. “How about we meet up somewhere instead? It’s nice out.” 

“In the middle of November?” Will jokes. He doesn’t pretend to understand Mike’s tolerance for the cold, even though he guesses he’s sitting on the roof right now, so maybe he’s not one to talk. “Sure. Lover’s Lake?”

“Sounds like a plan,” Mike replies, grin audible, and, because he’s a nerd and a dork and a hundred other things Will probably is himself, he adds, “Over and out.”

Lovers Lake is one of the places most changed by the sort-of apocalypse. Its previously distinctive heart shape is now marred by supernatural rifts, a deep crack running straight down the middle and out either side, the grass around its edges burned yellow and dry. Given its newly unromantic appearance, the lake sees much less foot traffic nowadays, even as Hawkins’ population recovers from the bare hundred or so that had either waited out the two-year-long battle with Vecna or helped bring about its end. Often, the Party gets it all to themselves, or—as it happens to be tonight—just him and Mike.

The lake is still pretty, Will thinks, standing near the water’s edge and watching the moonlight play on the surface. Water is one of the things he finds most difficult to capture in his art: the hundred different facets, the way the light reflects broken across it, like a smashed mirror, like a seven and years of bad luck. He squints up at the sky, awash with stars. With fewer people in Hawkins, almost no lights are kept on at this time of night, and Will, for one, likes to see the extra stars. There were even less in Lenora than here before the evacuations. Of all the things he’d missed when he was living in California, the stars were one the least expected, along with the pattern of the arcade’s carpet and the stale-popcorn smell of the cinema that the one in Lenora could never hope to emulate. Will had always kind of hated it while he lived here, and he still wrinkles his nose at it now, but he guesses absence makes the heart grow fonder, or whatever the hell.

“Hi!” a voice calls breathlessly, and he turns to see Mike wheeling his bike towards him. The Byers-Hoppers’ new house is closer to Lovers Lake than the Wheelers’, so Will arrived a few minutes early. It looks like Mike took a detour, too, he notes, watching as he struggles with the blanket strapped to the back of his bike before letting it tip to the ground.

“Hi,” Mike says again, blanket bundled up in his arms haphazardly enough that it’s clear he was the one who tried to fold it in the first place. “I, um, brought a blanket so we don’t get our butts wet, because there’s probably dew on the grass or something, and you’ll get cold in the next twenty minutes anyway and refuse to accept my jacket.”

“I won’t get cold!” Will protests, helping him lay the blanket out on the grass. He definitely will, actually, and he’s already regretting not bringing something warmer than the first sweatshirt he laid eyes on, but Mike doesn’t need to know that.

“Yes, you will,” Mike counters, in the simple, assured tone of someone who’s known Will for the better part of twelve years. He plonks himself down on the blanket without any semblance of grace and looks up at Will, shaking his hair back from his face. “Do you want to talk about it?”

“Yeah, okay,” Will sighs, sitting down next to him with, admittedly, not a whole lot more coordination. “It was just the regular stuff, you know. This time it was… it was the Mind Flayer.”

Mike cocks his head and leans further towards Will, scooting his hand over for balance, near enough their little fingers are almost touching. It had taken time, after the disaster that was Mike’s visit to Lenora, to rebuild that physical trust with each other, but thanks to too many apologies for Will’s comfort and nearly a year of both physical and mental warfare, they’re finally there again. He won’t pretend it’s not a relief.

“It was about the heat torture,” he continues, quieter. “You know, when they burned it out of me. And it was just because I overheated in bed, but… it reminded me too much of everything that happened, not just with the Flayer, but with Henry.” 

He’s surprised by how easily Vecna’s real name slips out, surprised it’s the one that leaves his mouth, when he’s always Vecna in his head. He sees Mike’s mouth turn down at the corners and wonders whether it’s because of the nightmares, or the torture, or Henry. Maybe it’s because of the battle against Vecna, the way Will’s body was stolen from him in a single, swift motion, a metaphorical tablecloth whipped out from under a stationary table setting. Maybe it’s the way he’d seen one of his own hands reach out and twist, lift El in the air and steal the breath from her throat; watch her struggle, frantic and gasping, and feel his head tilt coldly to one side. Maybe it’s the way his other hand had flicked dismissively, sending Mike flying against the wall with a horrific crack. Maybe it’s—

“Will,” Mike’s voice says, right in his ear, and he flinches away with a gasp, reflexively throwing his hands up to guard his face like he used to when he was small, when Lonnie hadn’t left yet. He sees Mike’s face crumple through the gaps in his fingers; watches, frozen, as his pale, knobbly hand reaches out and closes gently around his wrist, tugging it down softly.

“Will. Look at me.”

Will doesn’t make a sound. He doesn’t think he could if he wanted to. His whole body is paused, paralysed, and he detachedly observes the way Mike lowers his other hand, takes both of them in his own. It feels far too similar to possession, watching himself from the backseat, driver’s seat empty, and he still feels the panic chafing at him, but he can’t move. 

“You’re safe,” Mike is telling him, shaking their clasped hands a little. “You’re safe. Nothing’s got you. It’s just me. It’s Mike.”

“Mike,” Will whispers, gripping his hands for dear life. He needs to not slip away. He needs to be here. He needs to be here.

“You’re Will Byers. We’re at Lovers Lake. We can see the sky, the trees, the moon, the water, this blanket. It’s blue. I can feel your sweater. It’s soft, probably cotton. I’m wearing my green jacket, and it’s fuzzy. Here.” Mike brushes the back of Will’s hand against the collar of his jacket. He focuses on the texture, the tiny pills that have gathered on the fabric, the bright colour, muted by the moonlight. “You’re wearing flannel pyjama pants, and they’re soft and worn because you’ve had them for years and they’re getting short on you. The grass is all prickly. You can feel it through the blanket. Um, I can hear a car in the distance, and the breeze blowing the reeds around, and the water rippling. I can smell the night air, mostly—it’s all fresh and cold—and the soap your mom has been buying forever, or maybe just since you were born. What’s your name?”

“Will Byers,” Will gets out, and he can feel the warmth of Mike’s skin now, a pulse in his wrist if he grips it in the right place. He breathes in deeply, does the slow, steady exhale that usually comes with a cloud of smoke, the opposite of his mom’s anxious sucking and puffing but the same smell as her, as her hugs. He lets go of Mike’s hands, drops his own back at his sides. “Sorry.”

Mike makes a face that’s probably supposed to look cross, but mostly comes across as worried. He scoots closer, again, so they’re pressed together from top to bottom, and Will sighs and lets his head fall on Mike’s shoulder.

“This feels like it should be over,” he mumbles. Mike makes a regretful, sympathetic noise, tipping his head on top of Will’s. “I just—I just keep getting all these nightmares about him, you, everything, and—it’s over, right? He’s dead. The gates are closed. This should all be over already, but it’s not.”

“It’s only been a month,” Mike offers, then scrunches up his face in distaste. Will can’t see it, not at this angle, but he can feel it, kind of, and he knows Mike, anyway. “That sounded so doctorish, ew. What I mean is, you’ve—we’ve—got a long way to go yet. This’ll just keep getting further and further behind us.”

Will sighs again. He’s heard that same little speech thousands of times at this point, from everyone from Mom to Doctor Owens. It’s true, he knows that, but it doesn’t make it better. “I know. I just don’t want to be different anymore, set apart from everyone else, you know? When we were thirteen, before I got possessed, I told Jonathan how everyone was treating me like glass, like I was fragile just because of the Upside Down, because of my episodes, even though what I wanted most was just to be normal again. And you never treated me like that, really, you always seemed to see me just the same, because I think you knew that’s what I needed—” he closes his eyes “—but now I know that I probably do need to be treated different, because I am. I just am. I wasn’t my own person for so long that I don’t think I know how to be again, properly. I don’t think it’s ever going to be the same, Mike. I feel like I’m stuck in between all over again.”

“You tell me,” Mike says, lifting his head up so he can look Will in the eye. “You tell me, and I’ll do everything I can to help you, I promise. I just need you to talk to me, okay? I know you tell me a lot, probably more than most people, but I need you to tell me what’s hurting you because you’re so good at hiding it, Will, you go so unreadable when you’re in real pain, you know that?”

Will nods, looking down at the blanket and picking a few blades of grass from near the edge. He does know. It was a defence mechanism he never unlearned, to not show weakness, and it’s kind of funny how much it’s shooting him in the foot now. He’s always had a dark sense of humour, though.

“So,” Mike continues, softer, bouncing his leg anxiously, “what made you space out just then?”

“The look on your face,” Will says immediately, “when I told you what my nightmare was about. You frowned, and it made me think you were unhappy because I called him Henry, not Vecna, and then I kind of spiralled into remembering when he had me, so… yeah.”

Mike’s eyebrows draw together and he bumps his shoulder against Will’s apologetically. “It wasn’t about that, promise. It was just the thought of them burning the Mind Flayer out of you. I wasn’t there for that part, you know.”

“When I woke up, the first thing I did was open my window and stand in the cold,” Will admits. “I felt so bad about it because that was the whole thing, that he likes it cold. It’s why they had to burn him out of me.”

“That wasn’t him,” Mike says confidently. “That was just you, Will. You overheated in the middle of the night because you slept with too many blankets. I know it felt real, but it wasn’t. You’d take a hot shower over a cold one any day, right?”

Will makes a face. “I still don’t know how you shower cold.”

“I run hot!” Mike protests. “Besides, it’s normal to have cold showers in summer. You’re the weird one there.”

“You shower cold in winter!” Will argues, then shivers hard. Mike crows in triumph and scrambles sideways off the blanket.

“I know you so well,” he proclaims smugly.

“Yeah, yeah,” Will grumbles, wrapping the blanket around himself, knees pulled up to his chest to minimise surface area. “I run cold. You run hot. What a revelation.”

“You still love me,” Mike says, pleased. He crawls back over to Will’s side, apparently determined to keep no more than a couple inches of space between them at all times. He pitches into Will’s shoulder clumsily, and Will scowls and pushes him off, but it’s really more of a smile, anyway.

“Thanks, Mike,” he says quietly. “For all this, I guess. Thank you.”

Mike grins, big and bright, and leans against him again. “Anytime, Byers.”

Cry, cry, cry, ‘til you know why

I lost myself, identify

“You never wrote me, Mike,” Will says, eyes wet and hazel. He throws a piece of paper at Mike: a letter addressed to El, signed From, Mike. “You never wrote me, and you never called. You never cared. I thought you forgot I existed.”

“Of course I didn’t, Will, how could I?” Mike protests desperately, taking a step forward. Will flinches backward, stumbling, and something in Mike’s chest tears in half. Then his face turns angry, accusatory, and he throws another screwed-up ball of paper at Mike. The From, Mike is just visible at the bottom. Mike swallows and tries again. 

“I didn’t forget you, I promise.” His voice breaks on the word, pleading. “I called you every day for months, Will. All I got was a busy line, I swear.”

“Prove it,” Will hisses. Mike blinks. He’s never seen him like this, not even when they’d fought in Lenora, not even during the summer of ‘85 when he broke everything without even realising and never properly apologised.

“What?” 

“Prove it,” Will repeats, louder, and tosses the rest of Mike’s letters at the ceiling light, one after the other, until they lie scattered around the room like snow. “Prove you didn’t forget about me. Prove you ever cared.”

Mike thinks he might be broken. It shouldn’t be possible for words to hurt this much, to cut this deep, to take something he thought he mended and tear it apart with a flick of the wrists. All the names other kids at school tossed at him pale in comparison: Frogface, moron, fairy, useless, queer, pussy. He thinks they might be true. He thinks he might be broken.

“I did write you,” he blurts without thinking. “I wrote you, Will, I wrote you so many times. I could never send them, not with El’s.”

Will’s face clears in shock. He shakes his head. “It’s not true. You would have sent them.” He sounds on the verge of tears again. “You would have. You couldn’t write me and not tell me.”

“I have them here,” Mike tells him, panicking, and Will’s eyes harden. He crosses to his closet, tears it open, finds the shoebox at the bottom from muscle memory. “I have them,” he repeats, holding out the box. “Please, don’t be mad. I couldn’t send them.”

Will looks up from the box, eyes still cold and closed off. “Why couldn’t you send them?”

“Read one,” Mike says, heart in his throat, stomach churning, every cell in his body screaming What the fuck are you doing? “Read them all. You’ll get it.” He isn’t sure why he says the last part with so much confidence, like he hasn’t put Will through hell so many times over already.

Will closes his eyes, opens them again. “Okay,” he says, and sits down on Mike’s bed, rifling through the box of letters until he finds the very first one. He unfolds it carefully, clears his throat, and reads aloud the words Mike has memorised by now, voice strong and even.

“Dear Will,

It’s so weird here without you. I keep turning around like you’ll be there, right over my shoulder. I think Dustin and Lucas forget you’re gone, too, because I’ll catch them opening their mouths like they were going to tell you something and closing them again. We miss you. I miss you.

Anyways, how’s California? Max says it’s warmer there, with beaches and stuff. Is Lenora near the beach? Have you been there yet? I know you don’t start school until Monday, but you have to tell me all about it. It’s the same old in Hawkins. Max has been distant lately, probably because of Billy, but nothing much has changed since you left. I think we’re all a little stuck without you, to be honest. I know I am. I feel like you know me the best out of everyone in the world, even Mom.

I’m sorry for what I said that day, by the way. I crossed a line and I never really got a chance to apologise for it. I hope we’re okay.

I’ll send this letter with El’s so you get them together. Write back soon, or call if you’re too busy, I want to hear what California’s like! Say hello to your mom and Jonathan for me.

I’ll talk to you soon, okay? Send me your phone number in your next letter and I’ll call you.

Love,

Mike.”

Will looks up from the paper, confused. “Why didn’t you send this?” he asks. “Why didn’t you tell me?”

Mike swallows, opens his mouth, scrambling for an excuse, but them Will’s eyes flit back down to the bottom of the page, to the signature, Mike thinks, nauseous. He shuts his eyes, steeling himself, hoping desperately that he’s right, that their friendship is strong enough to survive this. Surely Will would understand.

“So what they said was true, then, huh?” Will’s voice is quieter than he expected, more contemplative. Mike’s eyes fly open. Will is sitting perfectly still, eyes still trained on the letter. “You really were everything they called you, all along.”

He looks up, smile twisted, and Mike realises with a thrill of horror that his eyes are brown.

“I mean, what did you think I’d say?” he asks, still smiling that cruel, unfamiliar smile. “Did you expect me to jump into your arms, after being best friends for nine years? You abandoned me.”

Mike shakes his head frantically, words lodged in his throat, fear beating through him.

“Grow up, Mike,” Will snarls, and thrusts out his hand. Mike’s against the wall before he realises what’s happening, head meeting the plaster with a sickening crack. He swallows, hard, tries to inch away, but he’s frozen.

“Isn’t that what you told me, after all?” Will asks, mouth moving unnaturally somehow. Mike knows that’s not him speaking, not him pinning him to the wall. His heart throbs all the same. “Didn’t you say it was wishful thinking, that we’d sit in the basement playing video games forever, that we’d never get girlfriends?”

A noise escapes Mike’s mouth. Slowly, forcefully, as if there’s a string being pulled from the top of his head, he nods, up and down, controlled like a puppet by some invisible hand.

Will smiles, slow and even, and takes a step forward. “Good,” he says, all traces of Will removed from his voice, the words short and clipped. Mike feels a leaden pressure building behind his eyes, watches himself rise into the air under Will’s steady hand. 

“Goodbye, Mike,” Vecna says. He jerks his head to the side. Mike’s lights go out.

Mike pushes himself up to sit, digging the heels of his palms into his eyes and rubbing at them. The house is quiet; it’s the middle of the night, Nancy is at Emerson, and Mike’s dad fucked off nearly two years ago now, so it’s just him, Mom, Holly and a silent house. He groans in frustration, then swings his legs out from under the covers and stumbles to his closet anyway, even though he knows it was just a nightmare, because he has to be sure the letters are still there, that he and Will are still friends. His fingers close around the shoebox, the top dusty now from countless months of disuse, and Mike sighs in relief. He closes his eyes and lets it run through him, cool and calming, then closes his closet door, turns to go back to bed, and pauses. The shoebox thing was silly—he just needed the reassurance, the certainty—but there’s still something hyped up and antsy itching away at him. He sighs, plops down at the foot of the bed, and digs underneath for his walkie.

“Will? Do you copy?” he says into the quiet of the night, stomach lurching anxiously at the thought that Mom might hear him. “It’s Mike. Over.”

“Yeah, I copy.” Will’s voice comes almost immediately and Mike physically relaxes, his free hand easing out of the tangle he’d twisted into the blankets. “Did you have a nightmare? Over.”

Mike swallows heavily. “Yeah, I did,” he replies softly, hauling his legs up so he can cross them on the bed. “Do you want to maybe meet at Lovers Lake again? Over.”

“Of course,” Will says, like it’s that obvious he’d do anything for Mike, and his heart throbs despairingly like in one of the sappy romance novels his mom likes to read. “I’ll meet you there. Over and out.” The line goes silent.

Mike sighs and gets to his feet, slipping on a worn pair of Converse and one of his (Nancy’s) jackets that’s really, though he hates to admit it, more of a cardigan. But with a big sister—and the only one in this goddamn family that understands what he’s experienced these past few years—gone, what’s he to do? He misses her, not that she knows (and he’d never tell her), and anyway, he’s sure that she doesn’t feel the same way. For all he acts like he doesn’t, Mike needs Nancy a lot more than she needs him. 

Unlike Will, he’s kept the house he’s lived in his whole life through and beyond the apocalypse, and as such, knows all the creaky spots on the stairs. He pads down silently, checking his pocket for his keys and easing the door open with his hand presses flat against the panel near the hinge that always creaks. It is, mercifully, quiet today, not yet swollen from the damp or winter, and he slips through, shutting it behind him, then mounts his bike, without a hitch. The garage light flicks off behind him as he pedals away.

Will is waiting for him when he arrives at Lovers Lake, an old and ugly grey plaid picnic blanket spread out beneath him, and Mike notes with satisfaction that he’s wearing Jonathan’s old blue jacket over the same yellow sweatshirt he had on the last time they met up. There’s an opened packet of Camels on the blanket next to him, one between his fingers, the end burning an incandescent orange. He’s exhaling a careful cloud of smoke when he spots Mike, posture stiffening almost imperceptibly before relaxing again as he recognises him, waving with his free hand. Mike throws himself onto the empty side of the blanket with a relieved “Hi,” then stares critically at the cigarette.

“Want some?” Will asks by way of reply, misinterpreting Mike’s look and proffering the half-burnt smoke. Mike looks at him flatly, raising an eyebrow, and he rolls his eyes before stubbing it out graciously on the sole of his boot.

“You will die of lung cancer,” Mike tells him, because he would be a bad friend if he didn’t, then squints. “Why did you wear boots to ride your bike here? They’re the worst for pedalling.”

“The grass is wet,” Will replies simply, stretching out his legs and lying down on the blanket. He looks up at Mike expectantly. “You said you had a nightmare?”

“Yeah,” Mike sighs, flopping onto his back beside him. “It was about—well, the whole Vecna thing, but mostly about what happened while you were in California.” Quieter, he adds, “I did call, you know,” and tries not to make it sound like a confession. “Every day at first, but I kept getting the busy line tone, and eventually I figured you just didn’t want to talk to me.”

Will turns his head to face him, disbelief written in the crease between his eyebrows. “You did? Every day? Why didn’t you tell me earlier?”

“I thought you knew.” Mike tries not to think about the surprise on Will’s face, how it implies there was a time when he thought Mike didn’t want to be his friend, had forgotten him, just didn’t care enough to call. As if there will ever be a time when Mike Wheeler doesn’t love Will Byers with everything he has, even when he was just a boy on a kindergarten swing set, even when he was possessed by an otherworldly evil—twice—and almost completely lost in it, even when he beats Mike at Uno over and over again, even when he dies of lung disease before he’s thirty, Jesus Christ. (Not that Joyce Byers isn’t still going strong.) There’s never been a time when Mike hasn’t loved him, never will be, and he can only thank God that he realises that in time to mend their friendship, before they fell apart completely. “I called so many times and only got through, what, three or four? I knew your mom had that telemarketer job, but—statistically. Still. I don’t know.”

“I would have called,” Will says into the heavy silence, eyes still flicking over Mike’s face. “You know that, right? If I’d known, I would have.”

“Yeah?” Mike asks, smiling. “Yeah, okay.”

They lie in comfortable silence a while longer, Will’s little finger heart-stoppingly close to Mike’s on the blanket, and look at the stars. Mike doesn’t really know any constellations, he never has, but when they were kids they used to make up their own, ridiculous ones. There was a balrog, he remembers, and a Wookiee—fictional creatures that nevertheless populated their imaginary worlds, worlds that seemed neverending at the time. He sees now how naive they were, how shallow, how they could spin a universe in an afternoon but didn’t understand a single thing about how the world worked. He misses it, a little.

“Remember putting the glow-in-the-dark stars up in my bedroom when we were little?” Will asks, almost as if he’s reading Mike’s mind. “You didn’t know any constellations apart from the Big Dipper, and I could only remember which one the North Star was because Jonathan taught me to find it that one time, so we made up our own:”

“The same ones we dreamed up looking at the night sky that time your mom let us camp out in your backyard,” Mike recounts. “Yeah, I remember.”

“Hey.” Will’s pushing himself up on his elbow, suddenly serious, and Mike’s face goes hot even as anxiety rushes into his bloodstream. “Let’s make a promise to never forget that again, okay? No more fighting. No more lying. Just us, just like always.”

“Best friends forever?” Mike says tentatively, holding out his hand. “I know it’s childish, but—I really want that. With you.” God, he’s going to kill himself like this one day.

Will considers his outstretched hand for a along second, then gives Mike his of course, you idiot smile and takes it, firmly, strong artist’s hand gripping Mike’s bony, boyish one. “Best friends forever,” he promises, and it sounds all at once like a beginning and an ending.

I’m thinking too much again

I can’t sleep, it’s 4am

December, 1988

Will can’t sleep. 

He doesn’t even know why—it’s not a nightmare this time, just a restless something inside him that makes him toss and turn into small hours, blankets bunched around his legs even though it’s December now and there’s to be snow in the next few weeks. Every time he starts to nod off, something jolts him back: the creaks and groans of the house settling down, Jonathan’s grunting and mumbling through the wall, the trees blowing about in the wind. The whole of him feels storm-tossed, thrown relentlessly from one fitful stupor to the next, never quite settling. It’s a familiar feeling, one many years old, but never less frustrating, and especially not when he doesn’t know why he’s feeling like this. It’s Christmastime, their whole family is together and happy for the first time since 1982, ‘83 at a stretch; he should be fast asleep and content, dreaming of sugarplums or whatever the hell. Instead, he’s staring at the cracks in the plaster of his ceiling and longing for the comfort of Castle Byers.

He reaches for the walkie on his bedside table. He’s begun to leave it there instead of the windowsill as he and Mike continue to meet at Lovers Lake, to talk about nightmares. He wonders if this counts; it’s a school night, and while there’s no chance Will’s sleeping, Mike should be able to get a good night’s rest for once in his life.

Mike would want you to call, a tiny, persistent voice in his head points out. He told you to talk to him, remember?

Will relents, sitting up and calling for him. “Mike, it’s Will, do you copy? Over.” It’s the same greeting that starts every second conversation in their comms, the same radio language that Dustin, then Mike, had hammered into them all as kids. He wonders, inexplicably, where Mr Clarke is now. He wasn’t one of the few that remained in Hawkins after the call for evacuation was given. Maybe he’s taken a job teaching somewhere else.

“I’ll be there soon,” Mike says over comms, with no preamble whatsoever. It’s both irritating as hell and strangely comforting, because Mike has somehow gone back to being very nearly the same person he was aged thirteen. “Over.”

“Okay,” Will says, smiling as he gets to his feet and throws a sweatshirt and a jacket on, then a beanie for good measure. “I’ll get there before you. Over and out.” He grabs his gloves from his desk, unlatches the window and slips out into the bitter-cold night. If the sleeptalking from Jonathan’s room falters for a second, he doesn’t make note of it.

Will is gobsmacked to find Mike at the lake first. He sits smugly crosslegged on a heavy wool picnic blanket he must have dug out of a closet somewhere, and grins in victory when he sees Will. “You were wrong!” he declares triumphantly. “I did get here first.”

“And I have no idea how you managed it,” Will replies, puffing out an indignant cloud of steam and taking a seat beside him. “You have never in your life been known to haul ass unless someone’s life is at stake.”

Mike makes a face and shoves him. “I have so! And anyway, that’s not what we’re here to talk about. What was keeping you up?”

Will sighs and twists around so he can face Mike properly, their knees nearly touching. “I don’t know. That’s the problem. It was just one of those nights, you know? Every noise keeps you from falling asleep, even though they’re the same ones you doze off to any other night. I guess it’s probably just weirder because it’s a new house.”

Mike makes a doubtful noise, bumping their knees together. “You’ve lived in that house for nearly two years. I don’t think it’s that. I reckon you’re probably worried about something, but you don’t really know what it is well enough to articulate it, so the worrying itself is what’s keeping you up.”

“Okay.” Will keeps his voice soft, like Mike’s always done for him. There’s something in that statement that feels important. “What do you worry about, Mike?”

“You,” Mike replies, and it must be automatic, he says it so fast. “Your nightmares, I mean. And the rest of the Party. Nancy. Holly. Mom. Dad.”

The surprises Will. Mike’s relationship with his dad has always been strained, ever since they were little kids, and he’s never talked about worrying for him before, not even after he split up with Miss Karen and moved away. Will knows the Wheeler household was one where anything considered not normal was swept under the rug and kids were expected to be quiet, polite, model students—the prize offspring of a nuclear family. Ted always hated Dustin because of his blatant lack of respect for authority, and Mike has rarely met two of the criteria together, let alone all three at once.

“You worry about your dad?” he asks quietly.

Mike puffs out his cheeks, looking somewhere into the distance, before answering the question. “I mean, yeah. He was never really that nice to me, but he’s still my dad, you know? He taught me to play ball when I was little, even though I was really bad at it, and we’d always watch big games together because while it bored the shit out of me, it was some time with him, right? He actually paid attention to me once in a while.”

“Lonnie used to take me to baseball games.”

The shocked look on Mike’s face is almost too much to bear; it starts off as confusion, but quickly morphs into the kind of horror Will hasn’t seen on him for over two months now. Mike flinches away from him, seemingly without noticing, stuttering and stumbling over his words like not saying the truth will make it any less real. “No—it’s not—you can’t—it’s not like that, Will! It’s not like that.”

“I always went along with it,” Will continues, pushing on without entirely knowing why, “because I thought it was his way of showing he cared about me, after all. Jonathan had to actually sit me down and tell me I didn’t like baseball for it to make sense. He was raising a different son to me, Mike, the one he wanted. I’m not saying your dad’s the same, but come on. Do you think he watched the Super Bowl with you because he thought you liked it?”

“Will,” Mike hisses desperately, fingers curled in the blanket. His feet are dancing now, too, nervously jiggling his whole legs up and down. It’s the first time in as long as Will can remember that he’s been the one to make Mike fidget and shake like this. It feels awful, wrong, but he needs to understand what Will’s telling him. He doesn’t think he has the strength to bring it up a second time.

“I had Castle Byers,” he says firmly, holding Mike’s gaze tight so he doesn’t turn away. “You have the basement. There’s a common denominator here. You can hurt someone in more than one way.”

“Why?” Mike asks, fingers tapping on his shins.  His face is noticeably pasty, even in the darkness. “Why, Will? Why now?”

“I don’t know,” he admits, uncrossing his legs and hugging them to his chest. “I’m sorry. I think it really took me this long to realise.”

“He never liked me,” Mike blurts. His eyes are wide, terrified. “I—it was always stop fidgeting, Michael and be kind to your sister, Michael and cut your hair, Michael, you look like a girl. He knew I was different, Will. I thought maybe it was better that he didn’t treat me weird because of it.”

Will bites his lip. He can feel a frown forming on his face as Mike continues, working himself up into a frenzy. 

“I told him over the phone,” he’s saying. “I had to actually call his new number—for the first time, it was always Mom that called and got me to come say hi—and I was so nervous I didn’t even let him finish saying hello before I told him I’m gay. Just like that, two words and a phone line, because I couldn’t keep my shit together. And then he asked me to put Mom on. Nothing else. Just put your mother on the line, Michael. And I did. I fucking did. It’s like I was ten years old again.”

“I know,” Will says softly. “Hey, Mike—Mike—” and he’s pulling Mike into a hug, his face burrowed into Will’s shoulder, hands clasping the back of his stupid yellow sweater as he shudders and sobs, warm tears wetting the fabric. “Shhh,” Will murmurs, fingers pressing between Mike’s shoulder blades, anchoring, like his mom used to with him. “It’s okay. I’ve got you. You’re okay.”

Mike makes a desperate, jagged sound and smushes his nose further into the dip of Will’s collarbone, hanging onto him like a lifeline. Will keeps comforting him softly, pulling every trick he learned from Mom and Jonathan and everything he knows about Mike: how he gets embarrassed and touchy when he cries unexpectedly; his visceral need for physical contact—especially with Will; the destructive, festering self-doubt that he’s only recently been opening up about to other people. He hugs him tight, pouring everything he has into it, and waits for Mike to finish.

“Sorry,” he says thickly when they eventually pull apart, wiping under his eyes with the heel of his palm and drawing in a deep sniff. “I—that’s a really hard thought to face, Will, fuck.”

“I know,” Will tells him, fiddling with the hem of his flannel pyjama pants. It had taken him so long to be angry at Lonnie, even after the slurs and bruises and beer bottles, because there was always something inside him that was terribly, intimately aware that this was his dad.

It’s every car ride into Indy for a game, every mile he drove over the speed limit, every mile Will now drives under. It’s every ripped-up drawing and argument behind closed doors, every song Jonathan turned the volume up on to hide the noise, every sleepless night and pitying glance and minute spent staring into the bathroom mirror, wondering what everyone saw that made him different, defective, a mistake. It’s the word “regret”, which now haunts his dreams and lives in his bones, always tailed by “him” when Lonnie said it, as if even speaking Will’s name was too shameful. These are the things Will associates with his father, and they’re every reason he’s having this conversation with Mike now, because if he had learned earlier to turn all that hatred Lonnie had for him into his own anger at Lonnie, maybe nothing would have ever happened with the Upside Down or maybe it would have, but he’d almost definitely be a lot happier. He needs Mike to never know the same fear and disgust he had for himself for so long. He needs Mike to understand that this is abuse and he is not alone. He needs Mike to love himself every bit Will loves him.

“You have me,” he reminds Mike, fingers pressing red lines into his shins. “You have the Party, and Nancy, and your mom, too, now. You don’t have to go alone. You never do.”

He’s expecting him to say I know, to smile all watery and look away quickly so neither of them grows uncomfortable, but what comes out of Mike’s mouth instead is “Thank you,” a duck of the head, and a long, searching look, eyes dark and wet and fractured. Will is pinned in place, a butterfly under glass. He reminds himself urgently that he can want this, want Mike, he’s allowed to, but he can’t show it in his face, voice, words, art, anything. He counts to ten in his head, breathless, putting in every effort he can to banish the flush from his overheated cheeks, hoping he can play it off as from the December cold. It’s unfair to Will that Mike is so pretty after crying, the brown of his eyes turned liquid, his face not even going red and blotchy the same way Will’s does, hot and unstable. It’s unfair to Mike that Will can’t think clearly enough around him to help him properly, that he gets distracted by the glint of a teardrop on Mike’s cheek instead of talking him out of his spiral. It’s unfair to both of them that they’ve been dealt the hand they have, otherworldly monsters and fathers that never saw them for real, but what can you do with unfair?

“Of course,” he says, because he’d do anything for Mike, after all. They stay there for a while without talking, and then, sometime around two am, they go home. Mike is shallow-eyed at school the next day, but he smiles at Will, small and truthful, and Will knows he’s getting along anyhow.

It feels like nothing is easy, it’ll never be

That’s alright, let it out, talk to me

The thing about dreams is that they are not real, and sometimes you even know it in the moment. The other thing about dreams is that they are like stories, and if stories make Mike laugh and cry and live, dreams do the same.

Here is the dream: a flickering garage light, and Will’s small, serious face, and the words “It was a seven. The demogorgon, it got me.” 

Mike blinks, and the light is flickering blue-red, blue-red. A chill bites the air and sneaks up his back. Will holds his gaze, skin dull and sallow, hair plastered to his scalp, and says, “Why didn’t you ask me to stay, Mike?”

He opens his mouth to speak, to say I’m sorry and I didn’t know and I would have, every time over, but no sound comes out. He blinks.

The light is bright, harsh, washing out the rosiness in Will’s cheeks, the shadow cast by his browbone. His eyes are chestnut brown, boring into Mike’s skull. He looks tiny, defenceless, in the frayed hospital gown, but then he cocks his head to one side, and it’s such an unnatural, animal movement that Mike shudders, even as he realises Will’s stare is pinning him to the spot, paralysed. Will opens his mouth, and instead of speaking, he lets out a low, rumbling chitter, eyes still fixed on Mike, that morphs into a question, distorted and warbling and so unlike his real voice.

“Why didn’t you save me, Mike?”

Mike can’t move. Will is still tied to the chair, bonds right around his wrists and ankles, but as he watches, the tie around his left wrist unknots itself and unravels, floating gently to the floor. Will raises his hand without breaking eye contact and closes it, slowly, into a fist. A wet noise comes somewhere from Mike’s left and he remembers, bile rising in his throat, that Mrs Byers and Jonathan and Hopper had been in the shed, too. He doesn’t want to look. He can’t look. Will isn’t letting him.

“You could have saved me,” he whispers, voice by turns hoarse and pitchy. Mike’s never heard anything like it. He thinks he might be sick. “You knew something was wrong. Why didn’t you tell them?”

A memory: feet pounding down a corridor; soldiers in dark uniforms; distant screams. (It’s a trap!) Another: dark corridors; streaks of maroon smeared up the walls; Will, lying limp of bed Hopper’s shoulder. A third: Bob standing outside the lab, triumphant; a demodog leaping, pouncing; blood, gushing and dark, and so, so much of it.

Mike’s throat is dry, dry, dry. He still can’t swallow. He blinks.

The light is flickering again. Will leans back in his chair, one leg thrown over the other, arms crossed, flat brown eyes regarding Mike contemplatively. His face is harder now, any of the childish roundness he’d still possessed at thirteen, fourteen, fifteen lost to two years of interdimensional war. The sharp line of his jaw, the watchful expression in his eyes, the way his grown-out bangs brush over his temples—this should be an older, tougher Will, stronger, more self-possessed. The Will that Mike knows now. This particular Will, Mike knows, from the formal lines of his posture and the dull brown of his eyes, is not.

“Welcome, Michael,” Will says pleasantly, uncrossing his arms and propping his cheek up on one fist, elbow to the arm of the chair, in a way Mike’s never seen him sit before. His voice is formal, clipped, and terribly unlike everything he’s ever been to Mike. Every part of him is wrong. “I see you’ve decided to join me. Please, sit down. Make yourself at home.”

His right hand is tapping on his knee, Mike realises, as he’s forced into motion. He sits down stiffly, expression carefully blank, and counts the taps, silently thanking all the days they spent at the start of the war memorising codes and safe words.

H-E-L-P

“So,” Will says, hand curling forcefully around the arm of the chair, drawing tiny ditches in the upholstery. “Let me tell you how this is going to end.”

A tiny noise escapes Mike’s constricted throat. The assuredness in Will’s eyes disappears, quick as blinking, replaced by worried hazel. He stands, crossing the room in one swift movement, hands clasping at Mike’s frozen shoulders. “Mike,” he says, and his voice is his own. “Mike, wake up. Mike—”

“—can you hear me? Wake up,” Will repeats pleadingly. Mike gasps in a breath, chest heaving, legs tangled up and trapped by the sleeping bag he’s sitting up in. Will is kneeling beside him, his own sleeping bag crumpled and empty. It was a whole-Party sleepover, he remembers now; they were celebrating the night before Christmas Eve by staying up late and working their way through every half-respectable VHS tape they could get their hands on. He mustn’t have been asleep very long—they’d stayed up into the small hours, and there’s no light coming through the basement door, just the dimmest thread of fairy lights Joyce had palmed off to him nearly two years ago, left on by an unspoken—and unanimous—vote.

“Mike?” Will asks again, hazel eyes wide and searching. Mike shivers joltingly and scrabbles to free his hands from the sleeping bag, works them into the loose fabric at the shoulders of his sleep shirt instead.

“I’m okay,” he says, voice dried up and hoarse from sleep, and clears his throat. “I’m okay.”

“You were making noises,” Will tells him, the habitual concerned furrow still between his eyebrows. “They were pretty quiet, but you were rocking around in your sleeping bag like you were trying to get out.”

Mike sighs. “I had a nightmare. I thought I was paralysed, that’s probably it.” He glances around the basement, the light low enough that he can only make out the dark lumps of the other sleeping bags, Max’s dormant form on the couch. “I didn’t wake anyone else up, did I?”

Will shakes his head, gathering his knees up to his chest in a position so familiar Mike’s heart aches with a twisted kind of nostalgia. “I don’t think so. Nobody’s really moved or made a sound since I woke up.”

“Can we go outside?” Mike blurts, tugging a hand through his hair anxiously. It snags on a knot and he frowns. It’s getting long again, a few inches past his shoulders; he should get Mom to cut it. “I think I need some fresh air.”

“Of course,” Will says. His eyes are still roaming over Mike’s face, the green-brown of his irises turned murky and dark by the dim light. “Roof?”

Mike nods, turning his attention to extricating himself from the sleeping bag as quietly as possible. He fails miserably, the shiny fabric rustling with every movement, and gets stuck halfway after forgetting to unzip the bottom, but eventually he stands up, grabs the nearest article of warm clothing—it turns out to be Max’s hoodie; he’ll have hell to pay later—and tiptoes over to Will, who’s waiting silently at the bottom of the stairs. He’d moved like a wraith, the same way he always does, crossing the room noiselessly enough that Mike hadn’t even noticed.

They go up the stairs, avoiding all the creaky parts—Mike by instinct and a deeply ingrained memory, Will with some sort of intuition or possibly superpowers—and then up the second flight to Mike’s bedroom, carefully sneaking past Mom and Holly’s doors. (Nancy had fled to the Byers-Hoppers’ house as soon as she heard about the sleepover.) Mike opens the window, gritting his teeth at the screech it makes, and scrambles through with what he considers to be impressive coordination, all things considered. Will, of course, follows him almost soundlessly, apart from when he catches his foot on the window frame and almost plummets to his death. Eventually, they manage to arrange themselves in a relatively comfortable position, knees knocking against each other, forming plumes of steam in the frigid air. Will’s hand goes to his pocket, digging around for something, and Mike huffs judgementally.

“Suck it up, Mike,” Will tells him, unimpressed, retrieving the lighter. Mike watches him flick it, holding the flame to the end of the cigarette, and says defensively, “You’re still going to die of lung cancer.”

He’s half expecting Will to make a joke about if something else doesn’t kill me first, but instead he replies, “You’re still an idiot,” and at Mike’s wounded expression, laughs and adds, “and my best friend! Is that good enough for you?”

“Yes,” Mike grumbles, arms crossed in a way that he hopes looks disgruntled but is actually just because he’s cold.

Will grins. “Good,” he says cheerfully, and blows out a ribbon of smoke. “What was your nightmare about?”

Mike is suddenly very, very much regretting this whole no-bullshit thing they have going on, their rediscovered closeness, inviting Will onto the roof. His palms feel distinctly clammy, even in the freezing night air. 

“Um,” he wavers, and curses his shitty high school English class for still not teaching him to speak eloquently or even functionally, goddamnit. Will doesn’t say anything, just watches him, turning his head away every so often to take another drag from the cigarette. 

“I guess it’s that I kind of feel… guilty, or something, sometimes, because you and Max died, even if it was only temporary, and after ‘83 we all thought El had, too, and Hopper after Starcourt, and then Eddie really did even though he was barely mixed up in this at all,” he says finally. Saying the words out loud feels strange, like a weight’s being lifted off his chest but settling in the air instead, the tension pressing down on him and Will both. He hasn’t told anyone this before. “After everything that you went through, and when Max was in a coma and she still can’t see, and Lucas got beat up and Dustin broke his leg, and whatever happened to El at NINA, and even Nancy almost got mauled by demodog that one time—she still has the scar, I’ve seen it—my problems just seem so small, you know?”

Will makes an understanding sound and nudges Mike with his elbow, making him lift his hand up so Will’s can wriggle underneath, their fingers interlocking. Mike continues, the words rushing out now like someone’s released a floodgate, like his mind was a shaken-up can of pop waiting to be cracked open. “I mean, what do I have? Nightmares, fear of the dark, bad relationship with my dad, the inability to go anywhere high-up. Who among us doesn’t have those? Seriously? Like, Lucas for the dad one, Max for the dark one—obviously—and I’m probably the only one scared of heights, but so what? What’s happened to me that warrants me feeling so sad all the time, Will, I—”

“Shhh,” Will says, resting his head on Mike’s shoulder and pressing their sides together, the cigarette burning low in his free hand. Mike sighs and rests his head on top of Will’s, remembering achingly the last time they’d sat like this, when Will first called him out to Lovers Lake. That was over a month ago now. They haven’t gone a week without meeting up again, one or two or even three times, that stretch in early November. Maybe it’ll get better as time goes on, like he told Will that first night. He hopes so. 

“It’s not like I want to have had any of that happen to me,” he explains more calmly, twisting his right pointer finger through the curl of hair that always falls on his forehead, too short to tuck behind his ear. “It just feels like all this weight should be for a better reason.”

He’s aware of how ridiculous it sounds, and if Will was any of their other friends he’d probably snort derisively and tell him just how good a reason it is, but he’s Will, so he just hums encouragingly and stubs the butt of his Camel out on a roof tile so he can devote his full attention to Mike.

“You feel heavy?” he prompts, and Mike can feel the vibrations of his voice even through his jacket. He tries to gulp down the lump in his throat. He’s shaking all over now, though he’s warm enough in Max’s hoodie, which smells of the same strawberry shampoo Nancy uses. He doesn’t even have the space in his mind to store that information for ammunition later. 

“Yeah,” he says quietly, knowing Will can feel the shivers working their way through him but hoping against it anyway. “It’s… sometimes I just find it so hard to get out of the bed in the morning, you know? Like, I’ll wake up on time for school, but I won’t be able to convince myself to get up for ages because I keep thinking what’s the point? And then I run late anyway, and I get side-eyed by the teacher and the work just isn’t interesting, none of it seems to mean anything, and what’s the point of that, either? When am I gonna use calculus in real life anyway? Nobody’s going to care whether I turn on one assignment or not, except the teacher and my mom and maybe the guidance counsellor. It’s not going to affect anything. Nothing seems to have a point anymore.” He cuts himself off, staring at the gutter. “Sorry. It probably sounds stupid, anyway.”

“No,” Will says fiercely, and there’s such force behind it that Mike pulls his head away, to see his face properly. Will’s eyes are hard, bright, and Mike’s reminded startlingly of how his favourite animal is the tiger, because of their strength, their courage, their dangerous beauty. It’s how Will looks now, because he knows how to be gentle, but he has always loved Mike hard, differently to most people, pushing and pulling him, taking nearly as much as he gives. He’s always been the one to call Mike out on his bullshit, to press him to apply for Columbia and U of Chicago even though he’s almost certain he won’t get in, to shove him in the back and say Why don’t you give it a try, Mike? He hadn’t realised how much he’d missed it during those long eight months of ‘85 and ‘86—there were too many other things he missed about Will, his drawings and his sneaky smile and his weird music taste, so it just got lost in the noise, swept up in the massive tide of I miss you. He hadn’t realised until Will had looked at him in Rink-o-Mania, hazel eyes shining, and said We used to be best friends. They’ve always been different to everyone else, because Mike knows exactly where he stands with Will, because Will tells him, every time. In the same way, he knows what Will’s saying now: Me too.

“It’s not stupid,” he says firmly, and something in his stare keeps Mike still, makes him hold his breath. “I know what you mean. I know.”

How could you not tell me? Mike wants to ask. How could you be feeling this hopeless and not say anything about it? But he already knows the answer. The reason Will didn’t tell him is that long, hot summer, when the fought the worst they ever have and never properly made up for it. The reason is every letter Mike didn’t send and Will didn’t return. It’s every busy line and the hug at the airport and the back of a pizza van driving across the desert, and Mike remembers it so clearly even though it’s been two years since then. He’s apologised a thousand times a thousand ways and Will has accepted every one of them, but they were both hurting long before that rainstorm, long before they stopped telling each other everything, and they both knew it and still they didn’t say it. Mike knows, deep down, that he knew then how Will was feeling, but didn’t say so because he was afraid it might make it real for both of them. He knows Will thought the same thing. He knows he can’t be upset at him for not telling him about the darkness when he did the same, when they both knew anyway. It still hurts.

“I really hope one day it won’t be like this,” Mike whispers, his throat too raw to speak properly. “I want to wake up excited for the day all the time. I want to never dream about losing you again. I want to be able to walk around in a dark room or visit the quarry without that fear. I don’t care whether I’m normal anymore so much as that I want to keep going.”

Will nods, an almost imperceptible up and down. He, of all of them, knows this feeling best. He had the key to the Upside Down living inside him for five years, after all. Mike doesn’t think he’ll ever forget the way he’d screamed and thrashed in Joyce’s arms when they were thirteen, or what Henry Creel’s voice sounded like coming from his mouth just two months ago, not even if he forgets the rest—demogorgons and four burning gates and the Mind Flayer at Starcourt. It would be impossible to ever forget anything about Will. He’s such an intrinsic part of Mike, like something clicked together between them when they were five years old and fused shut permanently over time. Even across thousands of miles and months of silence, they’ve been tied together so tightly not even Vecna’s best efforts could undo the knot. Mike remembers learning about binary stars in middle school science class, how they orbit each other for nearly their whole lives, so close together they could be one star from a distance. That’s him and Will.

There are a million and one other things they could say, but they don’t need to, so they sit there, hands intertwined, until dawn breaks over the horizon in brilliant shades of orange and gold and they need to go back to the basement before anyone notices they’re gone.

The Party is still fast asleep when they pad down the stairs. Watching their torpid figures, Mike meets Will’s eyes and they share a smile.

Anxiety, tossing, turning in your sleep
Even if you run away, you still see them in your dreams

January, 1989

Mike lies in the dark, fingers knotted in the top seam of his duvet. It’s a pitch-black winter night, not a shred of moonlight to wash through his window and illuminate the room. He lies very still and counts steadily under his breath, trying to push the memories away.

Eighty-six… eighty-seven… eighty-eight…

He knows that there are no monsters in his room, that the gates to the Upside Down have closed—permanently this time. He knows there’s no way to open them again unless Will or El decides to. He knows there’s nothing dangerous in the dark, and still he’s reverting to making the same bargains he did as a kid, promising that he’s safe under the covers, safe as long as he doesn’t move a muscle, safe if he remains completely silent, safe safe safe. He hates the way it makes him feel, creepy-crawly, like there’s spiders walking up his spine. Mike has always liked spiders—the harmless ones, at least—and the tickly feeling that comes with them skittering across your hand, but it’s ghostlike to imagine at night, when the dark amplifies fears, makes it a swarm instead, an endless black tide of arachnids. He shivers, banishing the thought, and tries to imagine the next part of the campaign he’s planning to kick off winter term. Instead, he finds his mind wandering back to the painting Will gave him back in ‘85, the one that still hangs opposite his bed, so he can look at it when the night isn’t the soulless black it is now.

He lets his eyes fall shut, heart rate speeding up with it even though it’s no darker behind his closed eyelids than with them open. Fear is an irrational thing, gripping him just as tightly as it used to twelve years ago. He stopped being afraid of a lot of things when he met Will. The dark was one of them, because Will’s always been scared of it worse than him, especially after ‘83. Mike was the strong one for him, the brave one, because he had to be. He’s the paladin, after all—sworn to protect.

And that’s how Will has painted him, fearless and true, charging into battle with his head—and sword—held high. After everything they went through, after all the times Mike failed him, that’s how Will saw him. It’s as sweet as it is painful. Mike’s pleased that’s what Will saw in him, but the role of paladin was a heavy burden to bear. He’s glad, now, in an insane, roundabout way, that everything happened with Vecna as it did, that Will saw every last part of him, all the broken pieces and all the tape that held them together. Mike has been a coward and a fighter in this war. It was fortifying to prove to himself that he is useful, even more so to learn that he is wanted. 

At the same time, it was cathartic to let his weaknesses finally, finally burst out, to be reassured that they didn’t matter. Two years is a long war for, more or less, twenty people and paltry government support, and against an enemy whose greatest power is to turn your fears against you, there were a lot of feelings talks—almost too many for Mike’s liking. He and Nancy have never been good at that type of thing, after the armour they built for themselves as kids: Nancy’s one of authority, faultlessness, focused and driven; Mike’s fiercely protective and hotheaded, running deep in his friends, and steeped in fantastical escapes; both of them stubborn and ill communicators. It had been painfully, sinkingly awkward to sit down to talk to her and remain in silence, words drying up in his mouth, mind a blank, dark blackboard, dusted of everything he didn’t think he could tell her and so emptied.   

It had taken a long time for them to open up to each other, far longer than it should have for a pair of siblings, but they did. Nancy told him about the truth behind her ambitions for Emerson—the deep-rooted fear of becoming like their parents, trapped in a small town and loveless marriage—and her confusion, both about her relationship with Jonathan and her future. In turn, Mike had revealed to her, haltingly, the imposter syndrome he felt every day, the grief in growing up, and finally, tearfully, his feelings for Will. She had hugged him, genuinely, for the first time in years, and later, on the battlefield, both the physical and then mental ones, he had sent a glance her way and found her looking back, seeing everything he was feeling reflected in her eyes: fear, grief, love, anger, desperation. They still fight like cats, and avoid any feelings talks that aren’t strictly necessary, but it’s comforting, relieving, to know they have each other’s backs now.

A fizzling, crackling noise fills the room and Mike jolts upright, one hand already reaching for the light switch while the other scrabbles on his nightstand—for what, he doesn’t know—until it knocks into the cool plastic of his Supercom and he realises, stupidly, that that’s what was making the noise. He picks it up, squinting at the brightness, then notes the channel it’s on—the private one.

“Will?” he asks. “Are you okay? Over.”

“Sorry,” Will’s voice comes, out of breath, and a rattling sound permeates the static. “I’m wheeling my bike, the bumps are making the walkie go weird. Can you come to the lake?”

“Sure,” Mike says, confused, and glances regretfully at the warm, soft blankets he’s piled on his bed before sighing and throwing them off his legs. “What is it? Is everything okay? Over.”

“Fine,” Will replies curtly, voice faraway-sounding. “I just need to tell you something. In person.” Before Mike can press him further, he adds, “I’ll see you there. Over and out,” and the com reverts back to static.

Mike frowns down at it, worry curling in his stomach, then grabs his jacket and heads downstairs, careful to avoid the creaky steps.

Will is huddled up in a hall when Mike finds him, chin tucked over his knees as he gazes out at the lake. There’s no blanket today, just the jacket he’s wrapped in, and Mike fights not to make a face when he sits down and the dew immediately soaks through his pyjama pants. “Hey,” he says.

“Hey,” Will echoes, folding his legs down into a crisscross and turning towards Mike. His eyes are still lost somewhere else as they flit over Mike’s face before returning to the grass, face carefully blank in a way Mike’s gotten good at recognising over the years. This is a Will Byers who isn’t sure if he should say what he’s thinking, who urgently needs to but shies away instinctively. Mike knows who to be around this Will.

“What did you need to tell me?” he prompts gently, nudging his knee against Will’s. Then, because he knows what he’s worrying over, “I won’t be mad. You know that.”

“Yeah,” Will agrees, voice small. He takes a deep breath, then asks, “Do you remember the van?”

You sit close to me

I can finally breathe

And you rest your hand

On my pyjama pants

Mike’s brow furrows in confusion, but Will is too on edge to even want to reach out and smooth it. He rubs his hand against the flannel of his pyjama pants anxiously, resisting the urge to reach into his jacket pocket for his lighter. He’d left it and the Camels at home, knowing he wouldn’t be able to do this without succumbing to the craving for the nicotine’s release. This is something he needs to do himself.

“About all those things I said,” he starts, “about El—”

“I know,” Mike interrupts. He leans forward a little, eyes earnest, the sleeve of his jacket brushing against Will’s leg. “I know it was just you trying to keep us together, Will, it’s okay. We’re over now, for real this time.”

Will thinks he might scream, or cry, or punch something. Telling someone what he’s about to tell Mike should not require this amount of mental anguish, especially when he knows half of it—arguably the more difficult half—already.

“No,” he says, watching Mike’s face fall in confusion. “That’s not what I meant. Everything I said, about needing you, about—feeling lost without you, everything, that was all me. It was all about me.”

Mike makes an aborted sort of noise, eyebrows still all scrunched up, and Will can almost see a miniature Mike pacing up and down in his head. “You feel like a mistake?” he asks quietly, so soft and bereft Will nearly ceases to function, right then and there. Of course that’s the first thing Mike would think of. Of course.

“No, you dumbass,” he chokes out, clenching the grass in both fists like it’s all that’s keeping him tethered to this world. “I’m trying to tell you that I’m in love with you.”

Mike’s face freezes, eyes caught wide in the realisation. “Oh,” he says, the single syllable ringing loud, alone, in the silence of the night. Will’s heart seems to have stopped beating entirely, caught somewhere in his oesophagus, and he wonders, briefly, terrifyingly, if maybe this is all over, if he’s ruined his and Mike’s friendship once and for all.

“Oh,” Mike repeats, louder, then plants his head in his hands and moans to the world at large, “How could I be so stupid?”

“What?” Will says reflexively, a knee-jerk reaction to a response he’d completely unanticipated. Not that he’s been expecting Mike to, like, jump into his arms or something ridiculous like that, but maybe an apologetic turning-down, for example. This doesn’t make sense. What does he mean?

A thought occurs to him then, ice-cold and clawing, even worse than the last: what if Mike means that he was stupid not to see that Will liked him, just because they’re friends? What if he thinks their whole friendship is based on lies, that Will has liked him all this time and only said yes because of it?

Before he can say anything else, Mike is lifting his face from his hands and saying, impossibly, nonsensically, “That’s what I wanted it to be. In the van, I mean.”

“What?” Will says again, because maybe his ears are deceiving him or maybe he’s not understanding him properly because if he is, it can’t be real. Mike’s gay, sure, he knows that, but he can’t like Will. Not for all these years, not with dating El, not without saying something. 

(Hypocrite, a voice in the back of Will’s head whispers. He ignores it.)

“When you showed me the painting, it made me the happiest I’d been in months,” Mike explains, gesturing wildly like he always does when he’s making a point. “I felt lost without you, too, Will, honestly. Everything was just changing so fast and I didn’t know how to keep up. You and El moved away and Lucas joined the basketball teams and Max closed herself off completely, you know, so it was just me and Dustin left, and he’s great but it wasn’t enough. I felt so useless and so out of place, like everyone was growing up and moving on without me. When the shit with the Upside Down started up again, it was almost a relief, because it’s something I knew how to deal with. And then you were showing me this amazing painting you made—for me—and telling me that I was the heart of the Party, that I was needed, that someone felt lost without me? Even though I thought you were talking about El—man.” He laughs humourlessly. “That was the best thing anyone had said to me in ages. You gave me the courage to fight on, really. And I thought it was just because you were trying to help me and El.”

Will always thought when people said stunned they meant momentarily startled, shocked into silence for a couple seconds, maybe, but he’s starting to feel like he’s been actually, physically stunned by a taser or a blue bolt in a Star Wars movie. Mike’s okay with Will liking him? He really wanted that speech in the van to be from him, after all?

“I did?” he asks helplessly.

Mike laughs again, more genuinely, knocking their shoulders together. His eyes are so bright, even at night. Will could pick them out of a hundred pairs just alike, he knows. “Don’t you get it? I like you, too, Will. I was just too scared and too stupid to do anything about it. That’s why I even dated El in the first place. Everyone was telling me I liked her, so much I thought that maybe it was true, maybe it was worth a try if it could help me stop loving you. But it didn’t. It couldn’t.”

Will thinks he might be shaking. He didn’t think this was possible. “I knew I liked you when you said that to me in the shed,” he rushes out, heart racing to make up for the minutes it stopped, so loud he’s sure Mike can hear it from where he’s sitting. “It was the best thing I’ve ever done. You brought me back.”

“I brought you back,” Mike repeats quietly, almost reverently. Will can count his freckles this close, speckled grey in the moonlight over his pale skin. They look like reverse constellations. “I knew I liked you when you were sitting there in the lab, in that stupid hospital gown, and you couldn’t remember Bob or Hopper but you remembered me. That’s when I knew.”

“Why didn’t you tell me?” Will asks. They’re close, so close, the air between them warm from each other’s breath. “Why didn’t you say something?”

“I was so scared,” Mike whispers, something painful in his eyes. Will understands. He knows in that moment that Mike remembers their fight in the rain three years ago, remembers it wholly and vividly, time passing without the hurt dulling. He knows they remember it the same way, now. “I didn’t want to ruin this. I thought I would lose you if I told.”

“You wouldn’t have,” Will says, “you wouldn’t,” and Mike smiles. It’s cold by Lovers Lake, but his eyes are shining, and he’s still smiling as he closes the gap between them.

Will gasps a little when their lips meet, because of the heat more than anything. Mike’s lips are warm, chapped, and they send a flush running through him from his head to his toes. Kissing Mike feels familiar. It feels like he’s been doing it all his life.

He’s hyper aware of every part of the kiss: the curve of Mike’s palm against his cheek, the faint taste of peppermint toothpaste still clinging to the corners of his mouth, the tension of his silly green jacket as Will grasp, grasp, grasps at it. It could be forever before they break apart, breathless, Mike’s eyelashes long and doll-like against his porcelain face. Will’s lips tingle strangely, as if they’re already used to the gentle pressure of Mike’s mouth on his own, and he resists the urge to raise his fingertips to them, like the heroines do in El’s old soaps. 

“Wow,” Mike blurts, a flush spilling across his cheeks like watercolour paints. Something unspools inside Will, his laughter bursting, elated and half-believing, into the air.

“Holy shit,” he giggles, ducking his head, then looks back up at Mike. He’s wearing the same expression he had that day in the van, smile soft and adoring, and Will falls for him for the thousandth time, feels a smile spreading crookedly across his face, still giddy from the kiss.

“I’m guessing it didn’t feel like that with El?” he asks, letting his grin turn shit-eating when Mike flushes deeper, scrunching his mouth up in irritation. It doesn’t last long, the charade falling apart quickly as he pulls Will back in. 

They kiss again, hotter, deeper, slower. It doesn’t feel entirely real, that they’re allowed this, that they can really have it. Will never thought he would. The whole ordeal with the Upside Down is finally, finally over, and for the first time since 1984, Will knows they have all the time in the world. They don’t need to make this an urgent, stolen thing, desperate kisses snatched in the borrowed seconds free from battles and strategising and the long, hazy hours Will spent in the sensory deprivation tank, freewheeling and infinite and awake. They can savour it, draw it out, let it hang, thick and sweet, in the air between them. This is theirs. It doesn’t need anyone, anything, else.

Mike’s hands clasp Will’s jaw and Will’s fingers tangle in Mike’s hair and maybe they stay there a long time. It’s impossible to tell when every kiss is this long, this dizzying, lasting as long as they can go without breath. It is everything Will ever dreamed of having, everything he could want in a first kiss, everything he hoped-against-hope for with Mike. It’s everything. 

They must pull apart at some point, because they end up looking out at the lake, pressed together from knee to shoulder to temple. They don’t talk about it, just watch the stars reflect fragmented on the water and remember long-ago constellations. They don’t talk about it because they don’t need to, not yet. 

Will rests his head on Mike’s shoulder and he presses a kiss into Will’s hair. Will smiles. It feels all at once like an ending and a beginning.

I'll do anything for you

Anything you want me too

I'll do anything for you

Oh, oh, I'm sticking with you