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“you can never have the sort of friends you have when you’re fifteen ever again. even if you keep them for the rest of your life, it’s never the same as it was then.”
—beartown, fredrik backman
“i think you’re worth keeping around / i think you’re worth holding onto.”
—“soap”, the oh hellos
🝔
Back in ’83, for months after he got out of the hospital, Will couldn’t go to sleepovers.
It wasn’t that he didn’t want to, because he did—God, he did more than anything. He wanted to go back to the way things were before, when everything was simple and the only monsters he’d faced were in Dungeons & Dragons campaigns. He wanted to fall asleep listening to the sound of his friends’ breathing, to the comforting sensation of being in a room with other people. He wanted someone there to listen to when he woke up in the middle of the night, terrified and convinced he was back in That Place, the other place, like home, but cold and dark and empty. The place everyone else called the Upside Down, which was just one of so many, many things Will missed when he was lost. He wanted so badly to stay in the comforting safety of the Wheelers’ basement for the rest of middle school, and maybe longer—he’d already spent hours or maybe days there, or in the other version of it, when he was lost. When he was hiding. It’s one of the safest places he's ever known, and always will be, even years later, even when it’s been years since he’s last been there.
At twelve years old, Will Byers, simply put, would have loved nothing more than to spend every night with his friends. But he couldn’t, and that was because of the screaming.
Every night, Will went to bed, and every night, he woke up screaming. For obvious reasons, this put a damper on any invitations to stay at his friends’ homes, even if Mom had at least looked really sorry every time Will asked. But Mike was stubborn, as stubborn as Will’s nightmares, maybe, or even more so, because the first night of winter break, he wheedled his way into sleeping over at Will’s house, since Will couldn’t stay at his. Mike might not have been the sweetest kid in Hawkins, but he sure knew how to work Joyce Byers when it counted.
(Looking back, Will wonders if it was just that Mom could tell maybe Mike needed it as much as Will did. He doesn’t know it and won’t for a long time yet, but Mike woke up from his own fair share of nightmares those days, and for many yet to come.)
Will, thrilled and a little nervous, resolved he’d stay awake the entire night if he had to, just to keep the nightmares away; to keep from waking himself and Mike and the rest of the house up with his yelling. With his problems.
In the end, he fell asleep around two-thirty, not an hour after Mike dropped off mid-conversation, and jolted back awake sometime after three, already screaming himself hoarse. It woke Mike up, of course—woke him before Will, even, because he was right there when Will opened eyes already blurry with sleep and tears and terror. He wasn’t fazed. Nothing much seemed to bother Mike back then. He just crawled out of his sleeping bag and settled in the bed next to Will and held his hand until Will could fall back asleep again. Held it for the rest of the night, and squeezed it reassuringly in the morning, like he didn’t mind one bit that Will couldn’t go a single night without being a burden. Knowing Mike, he probably hadn’t.
Will had woken his mom and Jonathan up that night, too—like always, because their walls were thin and all the Byers slept poorly for a long time after that fateful week in November—but by the time they’d come in, Mike already had it handled. It went like that the next night he stayed over, too, and the next—because he kept staying over, and Will couldn’t bear to ask him not to—until eventually Will stopped screaming himself awake, even if the nightmares have never really gone away.
Will’s never forgotten it.
He wonders if Mike has.
He hates that he might never know the answer.
🝔
Will makes it three days after seeing Mike before he goes back to the bar. Three days—not even a week. That’s the effect Mike has on him, he guesses, and maybe always will. He’s not even sure what he’s looking for at this point—closure, maybe? Except he was supposed to have that already, he thinks, after finally confessing, finally telling the truth after all these years. After laying his past to rest.
(Why does it feel like he’s exhumed a body instead? Why does it feel like he’s opened up the back door to find an old friend with new light in their eyes? Why is the book still fucking open, the story still writing itself after so many years gone by?
Most importantly, why isn’t Will upset about it?)
Maybe it’s not closure he’s after, then, but a third chance, since he so obviously blew his second. A chance to do what, exactly, he doesn’t know. He’s starting to think he never will, because it’s been two weeks of sitting at the bar and staring at that empty corner booth, spurning everyone who makes a pass at him, the bartenders freezing him out every time he tries to ask, and Mike hasn’t shown.
He’s gone again, and this time Will hasn’t the first idea of where to start looking for him. This time, he feels the furthest he’s ever been.
🝔
He didn’t immediately end up like this, let’s get that straight. Will’s not the same person he was at fifteen, meaning it takes more than a single conversation with Mike Wheeler to bring his carefully constructed life crashing down around his ears.
It takes one conversation, three nights, and a concerning amount of time reflecting on the aforementioned conversation, to be precise, which isn’t much, but this is Will, and this is Mike, and it’s a hell of a lot better than he was expecting things to go, to be honest. Not that he was expecting anything, mind you. Maybe he really had gotten over Mike, he’ll consider when he reflects on it later, or whatever idea of Mike some part of he still clung to for years because nothing haunts you like the person you loved best as a child, no matter how it was you loved them, and no matter how it ended up. But that was a Mike who was half idea, half hope, and all memory. This is a Mike of flesh and bone and leather jackets, a Mike who wore his heart on his sleeve above a stack of corded bracelets, dark eyes full of fondness and maybe regret when he looked across the table at Will. That’s not something Will was equipped to handle, much less forget.
In the end, it went like this: not even five minutes passed before Will shook himself awake and stood up from the booth, but Mike was already gone by the time he made it to the sidewalk outside, a hundred half-formed questions already dying on his lips. If they were back in Hawkins, maybe Will would have known where to look, because he still remembers all Mike’s old hiding places like the back of his hand—but they aren’t in Hawkins. They’re in fucking New York, and he’s not even sure he should go looking, much less where to start, to say nothing of if Mike would even want to be found, after everything.
So, Will went home, and he sat on his ratty plaid couch and stared at his hands for a while, just thinking. Turning the conversation over in his mind, poking at it from every angle, like maybe if he found the right one, everything would become clear, the hidden meaning revealing itself, the riddle solved; the enigma of Mike Wheeler and his newfound softness and his disappearing act from years before finally laid bare.
It didn’t.
He went to bed, then, and thought about it some more. He tried not to when he woke up the next morning, but it was a lost cause. Will figures if you look up the definition of lost cause anywhere, it’ll probably have a picture of him beside it—him and Mike, because that’s how much of a mess things are between them, and have been for years.
Three days later, he was still thinking about it; and two weeks later than that, he still doesn’t have any answers. It doesn’t make any sense. They talked, and Mike gave Will an answer for every question he’s ever thought about asking him since high school. They were good answers, too—honest, for the most part, if Will were to guess. Once upon a time, he wouldn’t have had to, because Mike would never lie to him, and never could. It’s not that time anymore, though. So, Will questioned, Mike answered, and then Will got his biggest secret off his chest, after years of holding it there like a canary in a cage, in a coal mine, slowly suffocating in the darkness where he buried it to keep it from singing out and giving up the game.
Maybe it was a conversation years late on both sides, but better late than never, right? It’s the perfect recipe for closure, like something straight out of a movie. Will should be happy. He should feel fine.
He doesn’t.
He’s beginning to think that perhaps closure is just a thing made up for movies, because real life is full of ghosts. For years, Mike felt like a ghost to Will—a thing that haunted. That lingered. Something made possible by both love and regret, because it’s impossible to grieve something you never loved, and there’s very little Will regrets more than the way things ended between them, the slow and miserable death of their friendship at both their hands. Now, it's Will who feels like the ghost, more stuck on Mike Wheeler than ever before.
It feels like he opened a door he can’t shut. Pandora’s Box and all that, right?
Except Will forgot about the end of that particular story. He forgot about what stayed behind in the box after it opened, after it released all its tragedy into the world, let go of everything it couldn’t hold inside anymore, everything it couldn’t take back. Will forgot, and now look where he is.
He let his secret go, opened the cage to let out all those feelings into the wild, and yet he’s beginning to think that the bird, that his heart, that the thing with feathers that he’s been clutching tight and trying to smother all these years flew right across the table into Mike’s hands, instead of where it should’ve gone, like away. Like anywhere else.
(It was never going to, he knows.)
And now, Will wonders, just a little, if Mike understands that’s what happened. If Mike knows, and maybe he hasn’t let it go on purpose. If he left with Will’s heart in his jacket pocket because he wanted to keep it, not because he didn’t know it was a thing capable of being kept. It’s a foolish thought, he knows. It’s an even more foolish hope, but since when has hope ever been anything but? Hope is foolish and feathered and full of teeth. Hope bites down and holds on, even after there’s nothing left to hold onto, and still it clings. Hope is the thing that stays behind, even when the box is open. Even when the coal mine is collapsing. Even when it should leave.
It's a lot like love, hope is.
Is it hope that Will feels? He wonders.
He’s gotten good at that.
🝔
Here’s the thing: Will couldn’t tell you when he first fell in love with Mike. For a long time, he wouldn’t even call it that. It was hard, figuring out what love was supposed to look like when it didn’t apply to friends or family or pets or things. Supposedly, his parents loved each other once, but it was long gone by the time Will came around, replaced by bitterness and obligation and screaming matches in the kitchen while Will hid under his bed with paper and crayons and shaking hands. He didn’t know what love was supposed to look like for someone like him, either—he always thought it would be different, somehow, when he was younger. When he still had his father’s voice ringing loud in his ears and hadn’t yet tried his hand at anything more than longing.
When they were kids, he knew he loved Mike, obviously, because Mike was his first and dearest friend. Will loves all his friends, because how could he not? How can it be a friendship without love? But being in love, well, that came later.
When he was fourteen, he called it a crush, because anything else felt too big, too unwieldy, too able to leave him wrongfooted and awkward and afraid. By sixteen, crush felt too small, because crushes aren’t supposed to last so long, he thought. Fixation felt creepy, and infatuation childish, so for a long time, Will tried not to call it anything at all. It was a problem to be solved if it was anything at all. It was six inches between his leg and Mike’s on the couch. It was sleeping in the basement every summer instead of bedding down on Mike’s floor like before. It meant he didn’t quite know how to write letters that didn’t sound too distant or too raw, so he didn’t write many letters at all. It meant a lot of things, and Will hated every last one of them, even when they eventually paid off. Even when, years down the line, he was able to kiss other people without always having Mike on his mind. When he stopped hanging on the mailbox three times a month, chest squeezing whenever his mom yelled the phone was for him, palms sweating every time they flew back to Hawkins in June.
He only called it love in hindsight, and he only said so aloud two weeks ago, in a booth in the corner of the bar.
For a long time, he wasn’t even sure it was love. Part of that was fear, yes, but most of it was that he’s in his twenties, now, edging toward his thirties, and despite being surrounded by love or what people claim to be so his entire life, despite seeing it in books and movies and fucking TV commercials, in middle school dances and high school prom, in college and at home and on the street every day, Will’s still not sure what counts and what doesn’t, or when you become old enough to call something love. If that’s a thing that you can put an age to.
Will called a lot of things in his twenties love, partly out of hope and partly out of obligation; mostly because he’d wanted to move on from other things he’d been afraid to call love, once. It didn’t always work.
With Mike, back in high school, back when he couldn’t hide from his feelings quite so easily—was it love? Maybe. He was fifteen, and nothing you feel at fifteen lasts forever, not like it feels like it will. Not even if you want it to. That’s true for a lot of ages, he’s learned, but maybe fifteen more than anything. He’s certainly not going to go crying in the back of any more pizza vans over Mike, at least.
He's felt things, sure. Things about Mike. Things he didn’t know how to name, was too scared to shape into any thoughts that weren’t I want to kiss him, or He’s beautiful, or even I miss him. Maybe it was love. Probably it was, since it’s been years and years and it’s still with him, tucked deep down in his pocket where he never touches it except on melancholy days, only brushing up against it unexpectedly, like a foot coming down, looking for a stair and finding only emptiness and the memory of a fall. Will was in love, maybe, probably—but he was also fifteen, and eventually he wasn’t. Eventually it went away, as much as love can.
Will was in love, and then he moved on.
Of course, Will’s not fifteen anymore, is the thing.
🝔
The last time they saw each other was Thanksgiving of the year before they graduated. The year before Mike went to Chicago and stayed there.
(Will kept expecting him to come back nearly the entire way through college, though he could never articulate why. It just seemed like their group was going to stay friends forever after everything they’d been through. And for the most part, they did.
But Mike was never anywhere but Chicago if the Byers were anywhere near Hawkins.)
Mike’s last letter had come sometime in September, and Will had never gotten around to answering it. He hadn’t even felt bad about that by then, not yet, because the entire visit, Mike had seemed miles away—from everyone, it felt like, not just Will. And Will, selfishly perhaps, because he was still trying to get over the snarled knot of feelings he knew would never be reciprocated, let Mike drift. Everyone had, he’d thought, because no one could quite figure out how to talk to Mike that winter.
Now, Will knows better. He knows Max held on when no one else could. Sometimes, Will wonders if he would have done things any different if he knew how they were going to end up. He’s not sure, even now, and that’s not something he’s sure he’ll be able to forgive himself for.
Mike hardly talked to him outside of group settings that visit, something Will hadn’t even clocked at the time because he was so determined not to be alone with Mike. It was a two-way street they were walking, he realized later—or maybe it only led one way, and that was apart. The next time they’d come back, the weekend after the Party’s graduation—Will’s in California and the rest of theirs in Hawkins—Mike was already gone. Maybe he’d been going for years. Maybe Will just hadn’t noticed until it was too late.
In fact, the last time Will can remember talking, really talking, just the two of them, had to be the summer after sophomore year. The first year after Nancy and Jonathan and Robin started college, and after Will started his quest to get over the thing he was starting to worry wasn’t just a crush.
(It was the last summer when things felt anywhere near normal, before Mike started to disappear without any of them realizing that’s what was happening. The summer before it all fell apart—but even then, Will thinks, the cracks were showing.)
“Are you mad at me?” Mike had asked one night in his bedroom, quieter than Will had ever heard him, or has since.
Will hadn’t been expecting that. He whispered, “No.” It wasn’t a lie. “Why would I be mad at you?”
Mike was quiet for so long that Will had to bite at his lip to keep from speaking again. In that moment, he was so, so afraid that all it would take was him saying Mike’s name for the jig to be up, the secret out. For just a heartbeat or two, there on his back on Mike’s floor, Will thought: he knows.
He didn’t.
He could hear Mike swallow before he said, “I don’t know. I feel like we don’t talk anymore.”
It sounded like I miss you, but that was probably just wishful thinking.
Will remembers that he closed his eyes, then, pressing back the prickling heat building there behind his eyelids, the ache in the corners of his eyes. “We talk plenty. We’re talking right now.”
Let it go, Mike, he didn’t say. He wanted to. He wanted Mike to. He also didn’t. Will’s always been bad at figuring out what he wants, really.
“Not like we used to,” Mike whispered back. He was never very good at letting things go. Will knew this. He’s always known it. The worst part was that Mike was right, and Will knew it, but it wasn’t like he could explain why.
Instead, he sighed. “You didn’t do anything wrong, Mike.”
You’re doing everything right, he wanted to say. Still does, sometimes. Everything except what I want you to do, but that can’t happen. That’s not your fault. It’s mine.
I’m sorry, he thought about saying more than anything. But he couldn’t, not without explaining the reason for the apology, and at that point Will Byers had no intention of ever telling anyone how he felt about Mike Wheeler—least of all Mike himself.
So instead, he just said, rather weakly, “I’m just…I’m figuring some things out, is all.”
And all Mike had said back was a strangled sort of sorry, even though he didn’t have a damn thing to apologize for. Will had to leave after that, before he did—well, he doesn’t know what. Anything. Something stupid, probably. Something like ruining their friendship for good.
Later, he realized he didn’t need any help with that particular problem. Hindsight’s a bitch like that.
🝔
The thing he keeps coming back to, well, there are three of them, to be exact: three perpetual drains he’s circling, three black holes at the center of it all. The first was the look on Mike’s face that night, and the second, the way he said it felt like I missed my chance.
Your chance to what? Will wishes he’d thought to ask. Mike had certainly been on a roll that night; maybe he might have answered.
The obvious answer is, of course, to be Will’s friend—no, to be their friend, more likely, all of them; or maybe to stay their friend. His chance to be a part of things, never mind that Will knows everyone would welcome Mike back with hardly a second thought if he came back now, or maybe ever.
And still, it nags at Will. It won’t leave him alone.
It’s just—well. There was a look on Mike’s face, and it might have been there the entire night, or it might have come on so slowly or suddenly that Will hardly noticed when, but it was there for certain when Will said I was in love with you. It was a look Will doesn’t know what to do with, is maybe scared of, even, because it’s not a look he would expect to see on Mike Wheeler’s face, at least not directed at him, and certainly not in that context. Not in anything but his dreams, really. It was a look that Will hardly dares to think might have been wonder, before it turned into something else, something Will spent so many years of his life trying to keep off his own face. Something a little like resignation, and a lot like regret.
Which doesn’t make any sense, because Will knows the score. He knows how this story goes. How it went. He’d said his piece, and then Mike had left. That’s how it’s been going, more or less in that order, for the last fifteen-odd years of their friendship, or the lack of it, anyway. Mike’s not supposed to be looking at Will, looking like he wishes things were different. Will knows this.
But how well does Will know Mike Wheeler, really? How far does childhood friendship go? It’s true that when they were five or eleven or even sixteen, Will knew Mike better than anybody else in the world. They aren’t kids anymore, though, and they’ve spent a long time apart, growing up. Growing into new people. How different can a person become in five years? Ten? Twelve? How much of the old self remains in the new?
Dustin always likes to tell Will that scientists know more about deep space than Earth’s own oceans. That understanding the shape of the universe is simpler than that of the self. It’s always been the same for Will, in a sense—easier for him to focus outward, that is. To know Mike better than he knew himself. But now, after seeing Mike again, after locking eyes with him across the bar and having revelation after revelation about the person he used to know best in the world, Will has to wonder if maybe he ever knew Mike at all. Could he have, if he missed so much?
What of Europa, then? What of oceans on other planets, other moons? Oceans so deep in space their depths lend unfathomable new meaning? What happens when the rules fall out from under you, when there’s water on distant moons? When you’re not the only one sustaining life and love anymore? When Mike Wheeler turns up in a gay bar, what awaits in the depths?
Maybe Will’s being dramatic. Maybe he’s making it all up. It only takes an inch of water in which to drown, after all.
Honestly, it's probably nothing. But—
I guess we missed each other, Mike had said. That’s the third thing Will keeps remembering. The thing Will’s stuck on just as surely as his teenage self was stuck on Mike all those years ago. What did he mean, We missed each other? It was obvious they’d missed each other, sure; they’d been missing each other for years, because that’s what you do when you’re apart. When you grow that way. When you love someone and you’re away from them. You miss them. And they’d been away from each other for years, hadn’t they?
But why say that? Why then, after everything? Why the look in his eyes, his fingers on Will’s elbow outside the bar, his foot just barely nudging Will’s own under the table? Why all the talk of chances and missing them?
Of all the ways Mike could have reacted, all the things he could have said to Will telling him that he was in love with Mike, why—
Why—
Oh, Will thinks, because the thing about hindsight is that it’s a bitch, sure, but it’s also twenty-twenty.
Maybe Mike hadn’t meant that kind of missing at all.
🝔
That night, he goes looking for Mike’s book again. He finds it in the jumbled mess on his closet floor, where it’s been since the second time he saw Mike at the bar. Will’s been trying to ignore its existence for far longer than just a few months, but he’s tried much harder than usual since the last time he looked at it.
Not anymore, though. Not tonight.
Tonight, he opens the book, the unworn spine creaking in protest, and flips to the dedication page in the front.
For my best friend, it reads in tidy ten-point font. I’d play games in my basement with you any day.
🝔
(He sits on his couch for a long time that night, just holding the book. Holding Mike’s words in his hands, or maybe his heart.
It’s a message in a bottle. An apology of sorts printed right there in the front of Mike’s book. Right there for the rest of the world to see.
An apology, and maybe, Will hopes—maybe more than that, too.)
🝔
Back when he was twelve and screaming himself awake, Will knew he loved Mike, and Mike loved him. He doesn’t know if he was in love back then, because he doesn’t know if that’s something you can be when you’re twelve and the world is no bigger than your best friend and the distance between his house and yours. What he does know is that it was a moment when he loved Mike, who sat beside him and held his hand at his worst, or what they thought was his worst at the time. In whatever way, Will had loved him.
Friendship and romantic love, he thinks, might not be all that different, to the point where he hadn’t noticed when one had morphed into the other, or maybe had sprung up beside the first in the fertile field of his heart. They’re like homonyms, maybe—shaped different, but sounding the same. Maybe they’re nesting dolls, or conjoined twins, or stages of a star. Maybe all of this is true, and all of this is wrong. Maybe love is impossible to define in any way that matters, any way past this: love is a thing that leaves a mark. Love predates grief, and often ends in it. Love is a thing that leaves collateral damage.
And sometimes, love is a thing that leaves, but often, it’s what stays. Love’s very good at staying. It’s a lot like hope, that way. A lot like Will.
What he’s learned is that love is a different look on everyone, and love is also a thing that sticks with you, even when you don’t want it to. Some part of Will has always stayed with Mike, he thinks. He wonders if Mike felt the same. If he still does.
I guess we missed each other, Mike had said. Will wants to know what he meant by that. Wants to hear it from Mike’s own mouth. Needs to, maybe.
He decides maybe it’s time he stopped wondering. Stopped wanting.
Maybe it’s time to start asking instead.
🝔
(It’s a nice enough sentiment. It looks good on the page, felt good in his heart and the hush of his apartment both. The only problem, of course, is that Will has spent nearly half his life trying not to act on his feelings for Mike. That’s not something that goes away overnight.
Not even if he wants it to.)
🝔
“You are acting weird,” El tells him bluntly the next time she calls. She has far more patience for Will than she should, because she waits to say this until the third time Will’s completely zoned out and missed half of what she’s saying, all in the space of less than fifteen minutes.
He winces, staring down at the orange he’s been forgetting to peel for the last five of those minutes. “I’m sorry. I’m just—thinking.”
“About the thing?” She sounds so knowing that it’s unnerving, really, especially considering Will feels like he knows fuck-all right now.
He squints at nothing, twirling the phone cord around his finger absentmindedly. “What thing?”
“The thing you have been thinking about since March,” his sister says.
So she hasn’t forgotten, then, how much seeing Mike that first time unbalanced him. Is still unbalancing him. Am I so obvious? he thinks, more than a little miserably. It’s a little mortifying how well El can read him, even over the phone, and it makes Will feel more defensive than he should. It’s just El, after all.
“How do you know it’s the same thing?” he counters fruitlessly. “It could be anything.”
“Will,” El says, very seriously, voice tinged with the slightest bit of exasperation, “you have been distracted for fifty-two days. I know.”
Of course she was keeping track, Will thinks, resigned. She reminds him so much of their mom sometimes it’s scary to think they aren’t actually related by blood.
“Sorry,” he says automatically, wincing. “I just—”
“Have a lot going on right now?” El finishes dryly, and Will lets out a long, measured breath through his nose. “Yes. You said.”
It’s not accusatory, the way she says it, but Will still feels chagrined, somehow.
“El,” he begins, setting the orange down before he can squeeze it to oblivion. She doesn’t let him finish.
“Oh, look,” she says brightly, in a tone that means nothing but trouble for Will, “Mom is here. I think she wants to talk to you.”
“Oh my god, Eleven—” he tries again, but there’s a muffled commotion in the background, a few snatches of indistinct conversation, and Will knows it’s no use. He’s doomed. El’s committed the ultimate betrayal: telling on him to their mom.
It might also be the ultimate kindness, because just as his forehead thumps forlornly into his kitchen cabinets, Joyce Byers’ voice filters down the line, and Will feels about two weeks’ worth of tension drop from his shoulders, just like that.
“Hi, sweetie,” Mom says. “Your sister’s worried about you.”
She says it kindly, but it still makes him feel guilty, still makes shame curl in his chest, tight as his fingers around the receiver.
“I’m okay, Mom, I promise,” Will says softly, forehead still leaned against the cabinet. He sighs. “Things are just confusing right now. It’s distracting, I guess.”
Mom hums sympathetically. “Confusing how?”
“Just work things,” he replies, picking a piece of pith off the half-peeled orange and flicking it away. He’ll have to clean that up later. He doesn’t really have the energy to care.
Mom waits. She knows him too well—her and Eleven both. Will’s almost surprised Jonathan’s not suddenly turning up on his doorstep at this point, asking if he wants to have A Talk, because everyone in his family has a sixth sense for when Will’s having problems, and he doesn’t know if he loves or hates it. Sometimes, he thinks it’s both.
Will sighs. “I saw Mike, too. We, um—we ran into each other.”
There. The cat’s out of the bag. He hopes, suddenly and fervently, that El’s not listening on the other line, because if so, everyone in Will’s life will know about this development by the end of the week, and that’s not something he’s equipped to handle.
All his mother says is, “Oh?”
But the kind of knowing the Byers family has goes both ways, and though he knows she’s trying not to pry, Will can hear the curious edge to her voice. It’s impossible to miss that old fondness she’s always harbored for the kid who used to be joined at Will’s hip, right below the scar from a white-hot poker that saved his mom’s life and his own so many years ago. Two scars, two absences. Neither of them hurt anymore, not really, not like they used to—but the memory of the pain, the ache of it, endures.
What Will knows is that Joyce has never stopped loving Mike. None of them have, really. He wonders sometimes, but especially now, if some part of all of them isn’t just waiting for Mike to come home. He thinks Mike might be waiting for it, too.
“And how is he?” Mom asks, when it becomes apparent Will isn’t going to offer any further details.
“Good, I think,” Will says, softly enough that he worries she might not hear it over the phone. He can’t make himself speak any louder, though, because then everything will be so obvious, and Will is tired of being a lot of things, but most of all, he’s sick of being an open book. “He looks good.”
Mom doesn’t say anything again, just stays on the line and breathes, in and out, in and out. Will tries to match his breathing to hers, but he’s feeling shaky, suddenly. With some difficulty, he swallows, steadying himself with a palm flattened on the countertop.
“How do you know if something’s worth it?” he asks. His eyes are closed. He doesn’t remember shutting them.
There’s an intake of breath audible over the line. Not harsh, really; not like a surprise. More like a release of tension. Like Mom’s been waiting for this a long time.
Mom says, very gently, “I wish I had an easy answer for you. I think—honey, I think it depends on the thing.” A pause. Then, knowingly, but no less gentle, “On the person.”
Will’s fingers curl into a loose fist against the counter. He really needs to wipe them down. There are breadcrumbs pressing into his knuckles, pith from the orange beneath his nails.
“What,” he begins, and then stops, moistening his lips. “What if I ruin things?”
“What if you don’t?” Mom counters calmly. She’s kind enough not to point out there’s hardly much of anything left to ruin between him and Mike at this point.
Will breathes in, but not out again. He holds his breath between his teeth for a moment, and when he lets it back out, it comes as words that are very small and very rushed. “I’m scared, Mom.”
It feels like taking off his skin. Like cracking open his ribs to let her look inside him the way only his mother has ever been able to. Like when he was thirteen and standing in a field as a great, dark thing reached inside of him and rummaged around in his brain for all his tender spots and breaking points and he couldn’t do anything to stop it. Will feels a sudden sympathy for the orange still sitting on the counter, halfway peeled. He, too, feels exposed, segmented, pulled apart and devoured by his own feelings.
“I know, baby,” says Mom, and her tone feels almost as good as if she were here right now, running her hand through his hair. Will really, really wishes California weren’t so damn far from New York. “Do you want to know what I think?”
He chokes out a laugh. “Always, Mom.”
“I think,” says Mom, “nobody but you can make this call, and I’m sorry for that. I really am. I’d make it for you if I could. You just have to decide if the risk is worth the reward.”
They’re both quiet for a long, long time, letting that sink in.
Finally, Will finds his voice again, quiet though it may be. “I really miss him. I didn’t— I don’t think I realized until now, you know. How much.”
Mom sighs. “I know,” she says. “I know you do.”
There is, Will decides, some comfort in being known after all.
🝔
The way Will sees it, he has three options for finding one Michael Wheeler. Four, if he wants to count sitting at the bar every goddamn night in the futile hope that Mike might decide to show up again despite going on three weeks of obvious avoidance, but he figures that shouldn’t, since it hasn’t worked so far.
So, just the three.
Option one: Max Mayfield. If she and Mike have been in touch like Mike said, she probably knows his phone number, if not his address. That would be a start. Will could use a start. But also, Max scares him. One time when they were seventeen, El made the mistake of letting Joyce cut her hair, which she’d been growing back out so dedicatedly after the Nina Project and everything with Vecna. The results hadn’t been pretty, and Will had made everything worse by trying to tell El she still looked just fine. She’d been inconsolable, and Max had practically threatened to skin Will alive with his mom’s shears for it. And that was when it was Will’s sister, who he was on very good terms with. So, like, he loves Max, but also he shudders to think of having to ask her about Mike, whether or not she knows about them running into each other again.
Option two: he could always ask El to find Mike. He has a sneaking suspicion that she’s checked up on him a few times over the years, but if he asks, it’s likely she’ll say no. El’s gotten very big on privacy since they were kids. That was partly due to maturity, Will knows, but also thanks to a long, hard talk with their mom years ago—after Joyce had given Hopper an earful about not having a conversation about privacy with her a hell of a lot sooner. (Boy, was that a day to remember in the Hopper-Byers household.) And that was also before El went to school and took classes on things like ethics, mind you. It wouldn’t be fair to her or to Mike to ask that of El, no matter how convenient it might be.
This leaves him with option three, which is probably his best and only bet: the Wheeler family. Not Ted, obviously. Will’s never liked him, but especially after talking to Mike, he never wants to speak to Ted Wheeler again. He could ask Jonathan to ask Nancy, but then Nancy would probably bypass Jonathan to interrogate Will herself, and frankly, Nancy’s just as scary as Max. Plus, Will doesn’t want to explain to Jonathan or Nancy why he’s asking about Mike after so long, because that would mean explaining everything that’s going on, which is something he’d prefer to keep to himself for once. Just for a little while.
All this to say, it’s been nearly three weeks since he saw Mike, and Will is calling the Wheelers’ house in Hawkins, a number he still knows by heart after ten years. He figures Mrs. Wheeler always did like him, so at least there’s that, right?
It’s not Karen Wheeler who picks up the phone, though. It’s not Ted, either.
“Wheeler residence,” says the youngest Wheeler sibling.
Will forgot Holly still lives there. She’s going to community college in Hawkins, he thinks. It’s been six months since he’s been back to Indiana, and he hardly sees her when he’s there, so he’s never quite certain what to make of Holly Wheeler. Hopefully, that won’t end up being a bad thing.
“Um,” Will says, and winces. Strong start, really. “Hey, Holly. It’s Will Byers.”
“Oh,” she says, sounding somewhat perplexed. “Hi.”
“Is your mom there?”
“No, she’s on a girlfriend spa trip for the weekend. They’re up in Indianapolis or something. She gets back Sunday night, I think. I can take a message if you want?”
Will shifts from foot to foot, biting his lip. What’s the worst that can happen, really? “That’s okay—actually, maybe you can help me? I wanted to know Mike’s address.”
There is a profoundly surprised silence from the other end of the line. Will regrets every choice that has led him to this moment, just a little.
“I just—I saw him the other day,” he rushes to explain, hoping against hope he isn’t somehow making this worse, “and I forgot to ask him then. I figured your mom would know it. So I called. Obviously.”
“Okay,” says Holly, still sounding confused. “I mean, I’d be happy to tell you, but I…don’t actually remember it, I don’t think? I’ve never been there by myself.”
“Oh,” Will sighs. It’s embarrassing how disappointed he sounds, but he can’t help it. He guesses he’ll just have to wait until Karen’s back, then, and relive this entire experience. That means an entire weekend of waiting, which shouldn’t feel like that much in comparison with the last ten years, but then, Will didn’t spend all ten of them feeling like he was going to crawl out of his own skeleton if he didn’t get answers as soon as humanly possible.
“You could ask Max,” Holly continues. “She’d know. I think she was up there, like, a couple months ago?”
As established, there is very little that remains in Will’s life that is quite as scary as one Max Mayfield provoked. But Will wants to talk to Mike, needs to, maybe, and if D&D taught him anything, it’s that sometimes you have to take a risk. Sometimes you have to face the dragon.
“Thanks, Holly,” he replies, trying not to sound like a man who knows he’s walking to his execution. It’s just Max, after all. They are friends. “I’ll do that.”
🝔
The line is busy twice and rings four times when Will finally gets through. Max picks up on the fifth.
“I need Mike’s address,” Will blurts before Max can even say anything. Then, belatedly, he adds, “It’s Will, by the way.”
Max is quiet for just a beat too long before she asks, “What makes you think I have it?”
There’s a guardedness to her tone—a hostility, almost—that Will hasn’t heard from Max since they barely knew each other. Usually, it was a tone she reserved for Mike and Mike alone. He’s not sure she’s ever been so cold to him. All at once, he’s frustrated and overwhelmed and one hundred and ten percent done with the sheer amount of obstacles life keeps throwing between him and getting to talk to Mike again.
“Cut the crap, Max,” he snaps, and then immediately feels bad. He sighs. “Look, I talked to Mike. I know you still talk to him, and Holly said you’d know where to find him. You can drop the act.”
“Oh, can I,” Max says bitingly. “Gee, thanks for your permission.”
“Look,” Will says again, squeezing the phone cord impatiently in his palm. “I really need his address. I need to talk to him.”
“Do you.” It’s not a question, the way she says it.
Will presses his lips together and counts to five. He’s trying to fix a friendship, here, not destroy another one. “Yes, Max.”
“You need it, huh.”
He groans. “Jesus. What’s your deal?”
“My—what’s my deal?” Max asks incredulously. “Look, I don’t know what you think is going on here, but my deal is that I’ve been doing damage control for what you—for whatever the fuck you said to him for the last month, Will.”
It was a little slip, and quickly course-corrected, but he catches it, nonetheless. She knows what they talked about. What Will said. He doesn’t know how to feel about that. About knowing that Mike went to Max afterwards. About Max doing whatever she means by damage control.
About Mike needing damage control after seeing Will.
“I’ve never seen him like this,” Max continues, softer now, but no less fierce. “And if I could get away from work for even two days without things going to shit without me, you wouldn’t even be able to reach me right now because I’d be up there with him myself.”
“Max,” Will breathes. He feels like he can’t move. He’s a statue in the middle of his kitchen—a monument to regret.
She sighs more than a little angrily, the sound crackling over the line. “I’m sorry.”
“No, you’re not.”
“No, I’m not,” she admits. Another sigh. “Look. You fucking hurt him, okay? And he’s my best friend.”
He was Will’s best friend, once. Will bites back the words and the bitterness they bring. Instead, he says, very quietly, “I know. And I need to fix it.”
“Yeah,” she says bluntly. “You do.”
“Max.”
She says nothing. Will closes his eyes.
“Max, please.”
Max gives him the address.
🝔
The irony of it all, Will thinks, is that Mike’s been two subway stops away this entire time. In all of America, they wound up in the same city, and in all three hundred square miles of that city, they’ve been living closer together than they have since they were kids. The world is both impossibly large and impossibly small, he thinks, once he’s finally standing in the hall outside Mike’s apartment, dripping rainwater from his coat and trying to find the courage to knock.
Will’s never been lacking in courage, but it still takes him longer than he wants to admit.
It’s a nice apartment building, though not anywhere near as nice as Will might’ve expected from how well he’s heard Mike’s books are doing. The building’s in better shape than Will’s, but the carpet’s a little faded and the paint on the door is scuffed and the place has an overall feeling of well-worn familiarity that the Wheelers’ house back in Hawkins never really possessed outside of the basement. The brass of the forty-seven on the door is tarnished. One of the screws in the seven is missing, and Will still hasn’t knocked.
It's just Mike, Will tells himself. Somehow, that doesn’t make it any easier.
Steeling himself, he knocks once. It’s so quiet he can hardly hear it over the rushing of blood in his ears. Where was this trepidation, he wonders, when he hung up the phone with Max? When he hurried through the rain to the subway? When he stood in a crowd of strangers and waited for his stop? It was dogging him like his own shadow, it seems, waiting for the worst possible moment to pounce.
Well, fuck that, he thinks. Will’s survived too much shit to let this stop him now. He raises his hand and knocks again. And again, when there’s no answer, though he swears he can hear something move inside the apartment.
A fourth knock, just short of pounding, and still, there’s nothing.
“Mike?” he calls, a little hesitantly, leaning closer to the door. “Mike, are you there? It’s Will.”
There’s no answer.
Of all the potential outcomes he considered, Will can’t say he ever anticipated the possibility of Mike not opening the door.
“Mike, please,” he says again, glancing down the hall on either side and hoping no one else can hear him. “I really need to talk to you.”
Only stillness from behind the door. Stillness and silence and Will in the hallway, alone.
Groaning, Will tips forward until his head thuds against the door, right below the apartment number. He closes his eyes and lets out a breath, trying to steady himself, but he’s never felt shakier in his life.
“I’m sorry,” he says to the door and the empty hallway and the general direction of his shoes. He doesn’t know if Mike’s in there, or if he can hear Will. He doesn’t know what he’s supposed to do if he can’t get through. If, after all these years, it’s a shitty apartment door that stands between him and some fucking answers. A deadbolt and a chain lock shouldn’t be enough to stop this thing that’s been growing in Will’s chest, waking up and putting out new leaves and buds and branches under the furtive ministrations of hope and foolish wishing, but life, Will’s learned, has a way of surprising us in some of the best and worst ways.
This is not one of the best.
Will pushes off the door, rocking back on his heels and pushing his palms into his eye sockets until he sees fireworks, stars, Pollocks spattered across the backs of his eyelids.
“I’m sorry,” he says again, into his wrists. It’s like he can’t stop the words now that he’s started saying them. They just keep coming, an inevitability; an unstoppable force meeting the immovable object of Mike Wheeler’s apartment door. “I’m sorry for what I said in the bar, I—I said it wrong. I didn’t mean it like that. I didn’t mean to upset you, I swear. I’m sorry I wasn’t there.”
No answer.
“I’ve missed you,” Will whispers. “I miss you.”
Let me in, Will wants to say. He’s just opening his mouth to say it, fingers pressing mercilessly into his temples, when someone clears their throat to his right, making him jump in surprise. Lowering his hands, Will turns sheepishly to face the sound, and—
Well.
He’s found Mike.
Mike, who is standing there in the hallway with a handful of grocery bags and his rain-damp hair tousled and sticking to his cheeks. Mike, who is stiff and unsure and wide-eyed, watching Will like a rabbit with a fox, a fox with a hound, a hound with the boot that kicks it.
It’s not a look Will likes being on the other end of. It’s not one he likes to see on Mike at all.
“Um,” Will says, a little weakly, toying with the cuff of his raincoat. “Hi?”
“What are you doing here?” Mike asks, quiet and strained and more uncertain than Will’s ever heard him.
Will shuffles his feet a little. “I, uh—I wanted to talk to you. Max gave me your address, and I—yeah. Turns out we live pretty close to each other. Crazy world, right?”
Mike flinches a little, at that, and Will swallows down every terrible thing that makes him feel. He has no idea how much of his stupid speech Mike just heard, if any. Worse, he has no idea how to say it again, now that he’s face to face with Mike, seeing firsthand that Max was right when she said you fucking hurt him, because Mike is looking at Will like he thinks Will is going to hurt him again. Like Will is a person capable of that.
He never thought of Mike as someone he could hurt before.
People change, Mike had said in the bar. Will didn’t realize how true that was until now.
They stand there in silence a little longer. A bead of rainwater rolls down Will’s sleeve and sinks into the carpet at his feet. Mike’s hand flexes around his keys. The quiet is a living thing, a third person standing in the space between them. A third and a fourth, Will thinks, shaped like two little kids who used to be so close they could have merged into one and been happy like that. Two kids who didn’t know they were going to have to grow up, someday. Two kids who Will would do anything to get back to.
If they were still those kids, Mike would have said something by now, because he was always the brave one, forever fearlessly forging ahead. The trailblazer. The leader. The heart. The best of them, Will always thought. The best and the boldest and the bravest, too. But maybe not anymore, not here, because he looks at Will with the wariness of a prey animal, a wariness Will doesn’t know what to do with. Because there’s nothing brave in the way Mike stands six feet away from Will, looking like he’s poised to bolt at any second.
Or maybe, Will thinks, remembering what Max said, remembering I’ve never seen him like this and the expression on Mike’s face in the bar before he left—maybe it’s taking all the courage he has just to stand here. To stay.
Well, Will can be the brave one for once, if that’s what Mike needs. What they both need, maybe.
“Mike,” he says, so quiet it’s almost a whisper. “Can we talk?”
That’s all.
That’s enough.
And Mike says, very softly, “Okay.”
🝔
Mike’s apartment is not what Will expected it to be. He’s not certain what he was expecting, mind you, but Mike just keeps surprising him. It’s surprisingly neat, for one—so different from the jumbled mess his room used to be when they were growing up. For another, Mike doesn’t live there alone.
When he unlocks the door after a few seconds of fumbling—Will could swear Mike’s hands are shaking—he says, “Shit, hang on,” and then grabs Will’s wrist and all but yanks him inside. Will stumbles, caught off-guard and off-balance both, and barely manages to catch himself on the doorjamb.
“Mike, what—” he starts, and then yelps when something tries to squeeze past his leg into the hall.
“Pippin, you bastard,” Mike is saying, wheeling around, and when Will looks down, there’s a grey-and-white cat making a break for it. Without thinking, he tugs his wrist out of Mike’s fingers and leans down to grab the escapee around the middle. The cat yowls, offended, but makes no attempt to wriggle out of Will’s hands, so maybe this is a normal occurrence.
Swearing, Mike ushers Will the rest of the way into the apartment and kicks the door shut with a thump. He turns to face Will, pushing his hair off his forehead with his free hand.
“Sorry,” he says, a little breathless. “I forgot to warn you about her. She always waits by the door.”
“Aw,” Will can’t help but say, hoisting the cat up to rest against his chest and letting her sniff at his fingers. “She’s cute.”
“She’s a menace,” Mike says, but it sounds fond.
“Don’t listen to him,” Will whispers to the cat, just loud enough for Mike to hear. “You’re perfect.” Then, to Mike again: “What’s her name?”
“Peregrin K. Wheeler,” he replies, kicking off his shoes and tossing his keys onto a hook, “but I should have named her Houdini, because she’s always trying to escape.”
“That’s not what you called her a minute ago.”
“She’s Pippin for short,” Mike explains. He heads past Will to the kitchenette, flicking on the light with an elbow and dumping his handful of bags onto the counter. Still holding Pippin, Will follows and lingers in the doorway, unsure of where Mike wants him to go. It’s been so long since he’s gone over to someone else’s home that he feels like he’s forgotten how to behave around—and this is a thought that shames him—non-Party members. Mike was one of them, once. Mike was also someone Will knew how to act around, or simply knew at all. Now, Will is fiercely grateful for the armful of purring feline in his grasp, because he can’t imagine what else he’s supposed to do with his hands right now.
Looking back over his shoulder, Mike says, a little wryly, “I tried to name her Gandalf at first, but she causes too much trouble for that.”
It’s such a Mike thing to do—Mike, who tried to insist Will should have named Chester something like Beorn or Grip or Frodo when they were eight—that Will can’t help smiling. He hides it in Pippin’s fur, giving her a kiss on the top of her head, right over a heart-shaped patch of grey between her ears.
“What’s the K stand for?”
“Kermit,” Mike says. “Holly’s idea. You can let her down, if you want.”
“Okay,” says Will. He doesn’t let her down. He could use something to hold onto right about now.
Mike drums his fingers nervously on the counter, gaze fixed pointedly away from Will in the doorway. The line of his shoulders is tight and tense under Will’s gaze.
“I’m going to put these away,” he says, at length, half-gesturing at the bags on the counter, still speckled with rainwater, handles twisted together where he’d held them. “Then we can talk, okay?”
He sounds like he’d rather do anything else, but Will made it this far. He doesn’t plan on backing out now.
“Okay,” he echoes softly. “I’ll just, um—”
“Yeah,” Mike says quickly, and starts pulling things out of the bags.
As weird as being in Mike’s apartment is, it feels weirder to stand there and watch him put away groceries, so Will pivots and wanders back into the lamplit living room, Pippin still purring in his arms. He can’t help the curiosity he feels, now that he’s here, able to see pieces of the years of Mike’s life that he’s been missing. Pieces of the person Mike’s become.
The funny thing is that there seems to be an awful lot of the person he used to know mixed in with the rest—a mishmash of familiar and foreign, past and present, so much like that kid Will loved and yet also not at all. There’s a beat-up copy of Moby Dick on the coffee table, along with a jumble of Green Lantern comic books. Annie Dillard books lie open on top of Discworld novels, which are stacked next to the same old battered copies of The Lord of the Rings Will remembers from when they were kids.
Pippin wriggles out of his arms, then, and he lets her go, reaching out to trace his finger down The Hobbit’s cracked and tattered spine, remembering the ketchup stain he left on the pages of “Riddles in the Dark” when Mike lent it to him to read. Mike hadn’t even been angry. Mike was angry a lot when they were kids, he remembers, but almost never at Will.
Mike doesn’t seem very angry anymore. Mostly, he just seems tired.
Will keeps wandering, taking in the pictures on the walls—how there are a few of him and his sisters, a graduation picture with Karen where he’s, as usual, not smiling; but mostly, there are pictures of their friends. Mike still has their science fair pictures from sixth grade, and the year they dressed up as Ghostbusters for Halloween. There are high school graduation photos and Polaroids from Nancy, and there’s a picture of him and Max from what can’t have been very long ago, side by side as she points to the Statue of Liberty in the background. They’re both grinning. Will tries not to feel too jealous about that.
Then he catches sight of what sits on the top of the bookshelf, and he forgets all about Max. It’s been years since Will’s last wondered about the whereabouts of his D&D figurine, but there his old wizard is, standing on top of a stack of Mike’s books. Mike’s own character is placed neatly next to him.
Out of everything, this is what surprises Will the most. It’s a tiny detail, so easily missed if someone isn’t paying attention, but Will was, and Will feels like he’s had the breath punched out of him. He thinks back to the bar, to Mike admitting, I think about you all the time. He wasn’t lying. He wasn’t even exaggerating, Will thinks, because his apartment is stocked full of memories, remnants of their childhood tacked to Mike’s walls as surely as they’re plastered on Will’s heart.
It's a good sign, he thinks—a sign that his hope might not be entirely in vain; that whatever answer Mike gives him will be the one he wants to hear. But something about it makes him sad, too. The photos are all happy, but it’s impossible to miss the fact that most of them are from so long ago. If it’s possible to capture absence in a photograph, or maybe the lack of one, Will thinks that’s happened here.
Will’s got a lot of regrets about the way things have been between him and Mike for years now, and all of them are displayed here on the walls of Mike’s apartment.
Swallowing hard, Will moves on from the shelf and the photos, eyes sweeping over the rest of the room, wondering what other surprises Mike might have in store. The opening and closing of kitchen cabinets has gone quiet, but Mike hasn’t emerged from the kitchen yet, so Will keeps wandering, taking everything in.
When he sees the painting through the open bedroom door, he stops dead in his tracks.
The first thing Will notices is that Mike framed it. The second is that it’s the only thing on the entire wall, centered above the dresser in some kind of place of honor, visible from anywhere in the room, and from the rest of the apartment as well, if the door’s left open. The third thing he realizes is that his hands are shaking. Will fists them tight and shoves them into his pockets. It doesn’t help much, but it at least hides the trembling.
Behind him, Mike clears his throat. Will can’t bring himself to turn around.
“You kept my painting,” Will says, eyes straining to make out the details in the rectangle of golden light spilling in through the door. Sure enough, there’s the heart on Mike’s shield, just as red as the day Will painted it. It was Will’s heart that he painted, maybe. It was also Will’s heart that he pulled out and molded into the lie he thought Mike needed to hear, halfway between Salt Lake City and a secret government bunker in Nevada.
Will’s heart is in his throat now, and in Mike’s hands, and on Mike’s wall, framed and carefully displayed.
“Was I not supposed to?” Mike asks. It sounds like he means for it to be a joke, but it comes out too subdued for that.
Will clears his throat, flexing his fingers in his jacket pockets. “It’s not that.”
“Then what?”
“I lied,” Will says, pivoting a half-step to the side, so he can see Mike out of the corner of his eye without having to look at him full in the face. He’s more than a little afraid of what he’ll see there if he does. “I lied about El commissioning it, when I gave it to you. She had nothing to do with it. I made it myself, and then I lied when I gave it to you because you seemed so upset, and then even after you broke up I never told you the truth, and I never saw it again, so I guess—I guess I’m just surprised, is all. That you still have it. That you kept it.”
“Of course I kept it,” Mike says like it’s something incredibly obvious, like compasses point north and birds fly south for the winter and Mike Wheeler kept a painting Will gifted him fifteen years ago. “You made it for me.”
Will doesn’t know what to say to that, so he doesn’t say anything at all. They stand there in silence for a minute, Will on one side of the room and Mike on the other and too many years of radio silence in between. This is different from the bar, Will thinks. Different, and maybe worse, because this time there’s no buffer of noise and music and the patrons all around them. This time it’s just Will and Mike and Mike’s very quiet apartment, and the silence pressing in all around.
The quiet is so heavy it’s like a weight on Will’s chest, crushing him, applying pressure—but to a wound or to a bruise, he doesn’t know.
Finally, Mike sighs.
“Will,” he says. “Why are you telling me this? Why are you here?”
“To talk,” Will replies, and now he finally turns to face Mike, to meet the heavy scrutiny of his dark-eyed gaze. There’s more sadness there than Will expects to find, and it stings to see, once again, that Max was right. “Like I said.”
Mike doesn’t fold his arms so much as wrap them around himself, like a shield, or like he’s holding himself together. He looks a lot like the kid he used to be, wide-eyed and guarded and secretly terrified of all the monsters they were facing every day.
There aren’t any monsters anymore. There’s only Mike, and Will, and all their regrets—or maybe just the one, really, so all-encompassing it’s coloring every part of their lives.
Mike says, very softly, “So talk.”
Here, Will thinks, comes the hard part. Here is the thing he came for.
“In the bar,” he begins, moistening his lips nervously, “what did you mean when you said we missed each other?”
Mike presses his lips together for a moment before saying tightly, “I thought it was obvious.”
“It wasn’t.”
“Jesus,” Mike mutters, more to himself than Will. He drags a hand through his hair, which is more distracting than it should be, the way the dark strands twist and tangle around his long fingers. “Forget it, okay? I shouldn’t have even— I wasn’t thinking. It doesn’t matter.”
He sounds like he’s trying to convince himself as much as Will.
Will takes a step forward, and Mike takes a step back. The worst part is it’s like he didn’t even have to think about it—like part of Mike is always seeking to retreat from Will. It aches. It burns.
“I think it matters,” Will says, proud of how firm his voice comes out.
Mike won’t look at him. He snorts, self-deprecating. “You don’t really want me to say it, Will. Come on.”
Will raises his chin stubbornly. “I do, actually.”
He steps forward again without thinking, and Mike backs up again, halfway to the apartment door. Will wonders, somewhere in the back of his mind, if Mike would leave his own apartment to get away from Will. If things are really that bad between them. It’s not a thought he relishes.
“Don’t,” Mike says, very quietly. He’s curled in on himself, like he’s retreating from a blow. There’s something pleading in his eyes. “Don’t make me say it.”
But Will needs him to. Maybe they both do. Nobody made Will say it, back when they were younger, back when they could have avoided all of this. Sometimes, he wishes he’d said something anyway. He wishes he hadn’t waited as long as he did.
“Mike,” he says, a plea of his own. Mike just shakes his head as Will takes another step closer.
“I can’t,” he whispers.
“Can’t, or won’t?” Will whispers back. He wants to reach out, to step forward and touch him, but he keeps his hands firmly at his sides.
“You don’t want me to.”
Will frowns. Why wouldn’t he—what? He stays his advance for a moment, brow furrowing. He feels like he’s missing a piece of this conversation, somehow.
Will says, very slowly, “I don’t understand.”
He lets out a strangled sort of laugh. “What’s not to understand?”
“Why wouldn’t I want you to tell me?”
Mike says, bafflingly certain, “Because you’re not in love with me, and I’m not—I’m not going to do that to you. Or to myself.”
Will blinks. Opens his mouth, and then shuts it again. Finally, he says, “What?”
Mike just stares at him, caught somewhere between annoyance and anguish. He raises his eyebrows, just barely, at Will’s bafflement.
“Mike,” says Will, “what the hell do you mean, I’m not in love with you?”
Everything about this conversation feels backwards. Not so long ago, Will would have been convincing Mike of this, or even himself, not the other way around.
There’s a flicker of something in Mike’s eyes, something snuffed out all too quickly by an emotion Will knows very well: fear.
Mike says, “You said you were in love with me.”
“Yes?” Will confirms, because that’s what he said. It was pretty obvious, even if Mike hadn’t known. He knows now, or Will thought he did, anyway. “That’s what I said. I’m in love with you.”
“No,” Mike says.
“Wh— no?”
“You said was. ‘I was in love with you.’ As in, past tense. As in, not anymore. As in, my timing fucking sucks.”
Leave it to Mike Wheeler to pay attention to the tense Will used. But he can’t really blame Mike for that, not really—not when he used it on purpose. Not when he thought it was true.
“I lied.”
Mike stops talking. Will clenches his fists. Unclenches them.
“Or—I was wrong. It doesn’t matter.”
Mike says, “Will,” but nothing else.
“It’s not was, Mike,” he says. “Or, no. Yes, was. But also am.”
They stare at each other for a moment. Will’s not sure either of them are even breathing at this point.
For good measure, Will adds, “Present tense.”
Mike says, “Oh,” and there’s a kind of wonder in it.
There’s fear, too.
Will takes another step closer, and then another, until he’s so close to Mike he can make out every freckle, every eyelash. Until he can see the way Mike is trembling from head to toe.
“Hey,” he whispers, “it’s just me.”
Mike closes his eyes, and Will watches the bob of his throat as he swallows. He smiles weakly. “Exactly.”
Will takes a risk, then, though it doesn’t seem like a big one anymore; he reaches out and places his fingertips against Mike’s hipbone, warm through the fabric of his shirt. Mike shudders, but doesn’t move away, so Will leaves them there, four tiny points of contact to ground himself by.
“Mike,” he whispers, “what did you mean in the bar?”
Because Will still needs to hear it. Mike still needs to say it.
Mike’s eyes stay closed, but he reaches out towards Will, slipping his hand inside Will’s open raincoat. His fingers skate over Will’s ribs, featherlight against his sweater, until his palm settles right over the spot where Nancy once jabbed Will with a fiery poker, when he was thirteen and not himself. Thirteen and had his hands around his mother’s neck. Sometimes, he thinks he can remember what it felt like. Sometimes it feels like he’s got hands around his own throat instead, trying to talk himself out of squeezing.
When Mike speaks, it sounds like he’s the one with hands around his throat.
“I can’t.”
His fingers shake against Will’s side, and he shakes under Will’s fingertips, like he’s going to fall to pieces right here in his living room, and Will’s going to have to watch.
“Why not?”
“What if it doesn’t work?” Mike asks. Will opens his mouth, but Mike’s not done yet. He keeps talking, like he can’t help himself. “What if you leave? What if I do? What if I, I—I get my best friend back and I just fucking lose him again?”
His eyes finally open, now, and he looks terrified, this person who faced down alternate dimensions and monsters and Russian conspiracies when they were kids, unflinching. All that, and losing Will is the thing that scares him?
“I thought I lost you so many fucking times,” Mike says, and his voice is the only thing steady about him. “I can’t— I can’t.” Then, quieter: “I’d rather be friends for the rest of our lives than”—here, he finally falters, but doesn’t stop—“be lovers for a while.”
Will thinks, just a little, he might have forgotten how to breathe.
For years, he thought they could never be together because there wasn’t enough love. Now he wonders if there’s too much.
“I’m scared,” Mike says, so softly Will might have imagined it.
He remembers, suddenly, his conversation with his mom not so long ago. He thinks he understands what she meant, now, about risk and reward. About choosing.
“Do you think,” says Will, leaning forward just a little so his fingers are in full contact with Mike’s hip, “that I’m not?”
Mike’s brow furrows a little, but some of the panic fades from his eyes. “What?”
“Mike,” he half-laughs, “I’m scared, too. I’m fucking terrified, okay? But you know what my mom said when I told her that? She said I had to decide if the risk is worth the reward.”
“Is it?”
“Well, Mom says it depends on the person. And,” Will hesitates, presses his fingers a little firmer against Mike’s shirt, “I think it is. I think this, us—you. I think you’re worth it.”
Mike says, “Will.”
“No, listen,” Will insists. “What if we fuck it up, sure. But what if we don’t?”
Mike doesn’t say anything, but he’s not saying no. He’s not bolting from the apartment and out of Will’s life again. That’s not a yes, but call Will an optimist—he’ll take it as a start.
“I’m not going to leave again, Mike,” he says, holding Mike’s gaze. “You’re not going to lose me.”
“You can’t promise that,” Mike says, rather hoarsely.
Will can, and he just fucking did, actually. He can’t really blame Mike for not believing him just yet, but—they’ll work on it. It’s a start.
“How’s this,” Will replies. “I promise to stay for today. As a start. Ask me again tomorrow, but the answer’s not going to change. Look, I—I missed you, okay? I want to be your friend again, and I will be, no matter what happens, yeah?”
At some point, Mike’s switched from resting his hand against Will’s side to gripping a fistful of his shirt. His hands are still shaking, but there’s hope in his eyes. It might be the most beautiful thing Will’s ever seen.
“If I’m lying,” he adds helpfully, “you can sic Max on me.”
Mike says, “Will?”
“Yeah?”
“Stop talking.”
Will stops talking. He just watches as Mike works to steady himself, grappling with everything somewhere in that head of his. One thing about Mike Wheeler: he’s always been an overthinker.
Finally, Mike says, “Are you sure?”
He’s never been surer of anything in his life. He’s sure enough for both of them. He’s sure enough for the entire fucking world.
Will steps impossibly closer, and Mike shivers, but he doesn’t retreat. He watches—watches Will watching him, eyes wide and dark and fathomless. They’re so close they’re practically breathing the same oxygen. Will can feel the warmth of Mike’s breath against his cheeks.
“Tell me no,” he breathes.
Mike doesn’t. They’re closer, somehow. He has to tilt his head back a little to maintain the eye contact.
“Tell me no,” Will says again, “and I won’t.”
Tell me no and I’ll still take whatever you’ll give me. I’ll still give you whatever you want. Tell me no.
Or don’t.
Mike says, “Will,” and then, “please,” and then he doesn’t say anything else because Will’s kissing him, or Mike’s kissing Will, or either way it doesn’t matter because kissing Mike Wheeler is like coming home.
Mike’s free hand settles against the side of Will’s neck, and Will throws caution to the wind and wraps his own fully around Mike’s hip, bringing the other up to trace the line of Mike’s jaw, cheekbone, temple, before tangling in his hair, soft and just a little damp. He tugs at it without even meaning to—gently, because there’s some part of him that still fears Mike will break into a hundred pieces if Will touches him wrong—and Mike gasps, and Will thinks he could probably die right here and now, with his hand in Mike’s hair and Mike’s cat circling his ankles, and he wouldn’t even notice. It would be a blip on the fucking radar compared to this.
He pulls on Mike’s hip, like they could possibly get any closer, and shifts down to Mike’s neck, right over where his pulse flutters, birdlike, under Will’s lips. Mike makes a noise like a wounded animal, then, like he’s dying and this is the thing that is killing him, or maybe like Will’s touch is the only thing left holding him together. Will knows the feeling, knows what it is to be anchored to life by the points where he touches Mike—knew it as a thirteen-year-old in his bedroom, with Mike’s hand covering his, and knows it now, in wrists and lips and open palms.
This is what makes Will Byers real: fingers against his ribs, a pulse in his wrist, a hand on his neck. It’s like his entire existence is affirmed by it, defined by it. He’s a study in touch, only real in contact, and this is his creation. This is genesis. This is the Garden of fucking Eden.
He pulls away from Mike’s neck for a breath, and by the next, Mike’s saying Will’s name like it’s been punched out of him. He sounds wrecked. Will’s dizzy with it, with him. Then Mike’s kissing him again, tracing patterns behind Will’s ear like he doesn’t even realize he’s doing it.
Mike Wheeler is an idiot, Will decides, because there’s no way Will could ever leave again, not when Mike kisses him like this. Not when Mike says his name like that—like a wish. Like a prayer.
He doesn’t know how long things go on like that, but he pulls away when he tastes salt and finds Mike is crying.
“You okay?” Will asks gently. One hand is still pressed against Mike’s jaw, the other gripping his shirt.
Mike tips forward and buries his face in Will’s neck with a sigh. His nose is cold, but that’s not why Will shivers at the touch.
“Yeah,” Mike says, lips moving against Will’s collarbone. “I just missed you.”
Wrapping his arms around Mike’s waist and resting his cheek against the top of his head, Will says, “I missed you, too.”
🝔
(“So,” Will says at length, halfway into Mike’s hair, “are you ever going to answer my question with actual words, or should I learn lipreading?”
Mike groans into his shirt, pulling back a little to say, “Jesus, that was terrible.”
“You like it.”
“You’re the worst. You are insufferable.”
“And you still haven’t answered my question.”
Raising his head the rest of the way, Mike meets Will’s gaze steadily. He looks surprisingly serious.
He says, “I already did. Every story—every story I wrote, Will. They were all about you.”
A breathless oh is all Will can think to say. He can feel his face going red as Mike watches.
“I was joking,” he manages. “But—”
“I’m not,” says Mike. He leans his temple against Will’s and sighs. “I love you.”
Will kind of wants to explode. Sure, he already knew that, since Mike had already all but said it, and even if he hadn’t, the kissing would have been a pretty good indication on its own. But hearing it said simply, easily, is an entirely different thing. Will’s not sure he’ll ever get used to it, but he’s damn well game to try.
“In that case,” Will replies, and if he sounds a little strangled, that’s his business, “could you maybe tell Max not to kill me in my sleep? She’s already given me one shovel talk, and I don’t think I want her to dig my grave, too.”
Mike laughs, and it’s the most beautiful sound Will’s ever heard. “If she did, I’d have to help her.”
“You’d help her bury me?” he gripes, mock-offended.
“It’s the best friend code,” Mike says, still laughing. “But I’d be really sad and say a lot of nice things at your funeral.”
“Yeah?”
“Yeah.”
“God,” Will says, shaking his head, hugging Mike tighter, wondering how inconvenient it would be to never let him go again, “you’re ridiculous. I can’t believe you’re best friends with Max.”
“Get used to it,” Mike says. His hands are still shaking, a little, but he’s smiling. He’s here. “You’re stuck with both of us now.”
Will wouldn’t have it any other way.)
🝔
Later, curled up on the couch with Mike against his side and Will’s hand in his hair, Will says, “You were wrong, by the way.”
Mike doesn’t move, but he hums into Will’s shoulder. “About what?”
“We didn’t miss each other.”
“No?”
He can hear the smile in Mike’s voice, and it pulls an answering one over Will’s own cheeks.
“No,” he replies, tugging Mike a little closer. “We found each other.”
🝔
“you have friends when you’re fifteen years old. sometimes you get them back.”
—beartown, fredrik backman