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No one is in great shape after the fight, but they’re all still alive. That’s more than can be said for Vecna and his Demo-armies.
Will isn’t sure how he’s doing. He’s bloodied and bruised, scorched in places, scarred in others (that necrotic damage is no joke). Everyone took a beating tonight. No one took one quite like Will, who somehow had to win a battle of wills with Vecna just to cast any kind of spell.
But now his patron, unwilling though the patronage had been, is dead. And it’s not like before, when he was “dead” but Will could still cast magic. Now, when Will closes his eyes and tries to summon a spell to the surface, he just hits dead air.
He’s both relieved and strangely disappointed. Both of those emotions are going to have to wait, though, because the primary thing he is is hurt.
Looking around the battlefield, he’s not the only one. Jonathan is doing a Healing Word on Steve; Nancy and Robin are on their feet, at least, but both could visibly use ten or twenty consecutive hours of sleep; Max has darted over to support El, who’s on the brink of collapse; Erica and Dustin are kneeling over Lucas, who took a really bad hit in the midnight hour and didn’t get back up, and is now (hopefully) stable under the Spare The Dying Dustin sweeps across his forehead.
And Mike…
Mike is coming towards Will with a drawn, determined look.
“Don’t,” Will croaks as he realizes too late what this is about to be. “Mike, I’m fine. Go heal Lucas or El—”
It’s too late. Mike grabs Will’s wrist and heat floods Will’s body. In the absence of his own magic, the sensation of someone else’s across his skin is a shock, but the fact that it’s Mike doesn’t exactly help matters. Everyone’s magic feels different. Jonathan’s Bless is a splash of water on the back of the neck. Robin’s Fly has the zing of biting into a lemon. Dustin’s Bardics are the twinge of laughing so hard your stomach hurts.
But Mike’s Lay On Hands just feels warm. Like the sun just before it sets, casting the world in golden light; like the glow of torchlight, or a campfire, heat without danger.
Will must have been more hurt than he thought, because he almost stumbles at the heal.
“You could have died,” Mike says in a low voice. “Never do that again, you hear me?”
“Mike, the others are in worse shape,” Will says. Mike has stopped insisting his healing upon Will, but, Will notices, he hasn’t let go of Will’s arm. And he’s standing really close. Too close. Will begins to wonder if that heat he’s feeling isn’t from something else.
Mike looks Will up and down. His brows slowly un-furrow, and he says, “Jonathan and Dustin are handling it. Everyone is fine.”
“I’m pretty sure Jonathan just used his last heal on Steve.”
“Everyone is fine,” Mike repeats.
“Including me, Mike.” It occurs to Will that Mike might not be fine, and he glances around in confusion. “Where’s your sword?”
“Somewhere over there.”
“You’re unarmed?”
“Will, we won.”
It’s on the tip of Will’s tongue to argue how many times they thought they won before, how many times they’ve been wrong. Instinctively, his hand goes to the back of his neck.
Nothing. No tingling ache, no ominous sixth sense, no whispers in his mind.
Mike tracks the motion and his eyes go wide. “We won, right?”
“He’s dead,” Will confirms, dropping his hand. Mike’s eyes are searching. “I think…your guess was right. My magic, it’s— it’s gone.”
“Oh.” Mike chews his lip. “Are you…okay?”
“It’s weird,” Will admits, and even that feels like a betrayal of their cause, their whole crusade. He can’t say I’d gotten so used to casting magic that I kept forgetting I could only do it because I was tapping into the spellcasting abilities of a supremely evil undead lich. Thankfully he doesn’t have to; like he’s done every day since they met, Mike understands immediately and without needing elaboration.
“Maybe you can learn magic,” he offers. “Robin could teach you.”
Will breathes a laugh and shakes his head. “I don’t think I could learn the component parts of magic if my life depended on it.”
“Oh, I don’t know, you’ve done some pretty epic things when your life depended on them,” Mike says, smiling a little.
It’s not until Mike smiles that it fully hits Will: they won. Vecna is dead.
They won.
“It was worth it,” Will says. He knows that’s true, at least. He’ll miss casting spells, but— there’s more to life than magic. (Mike is still holding his wrist, but inching ever-closer to holding his hand.) “I’d choose killing Vecna every time. Casting magic is overrated.”
“Don’t let Robin hear you say that,” Mike says teasingly.
They might as well be on a different planet, the way the world seems to fall away on every side. Just Mike and his fingertips on Will, sun-warm in the dead of night. There’s blood on the both of them, but it all blends into the scenery now. It’d be faster to count the things that aren’t covered in blood and Demogorgon guts.
Will forces himself to tune back in to their surroundings.
Erica and Dustin have propped Lucas up against the stump of a former tree that had the misfortune of being in the path of El’s Lightning Bolt. It has that in common with Lucas, although Lucas is breathing and his eyes are fluttering open; the tree will never recover.
Will hopes El doesn’t blame herself for being Dominated by Vecna and forced to cast that spell, but in a twisted way, he would understand if she did. He blames himself for most of this shitshow, even knowing logically that it isn’t his fault.
(But isn’t it?)
(No. It isn’t. It’s Vecna’s fault.)
(Is it?)
Anyway, whatever damage Lucas took from the Lightning Bolt, he obviously survived, and Erica and Dustin have a handle on things. Will’s eyes cut over to Max and El again. He’s never seen Max as gentle as she is with El, and it makes him wonder, but he’s also never seen Dustin as manic as when Lucas went down, and that makes him wonder too, and he can’t even get into all the wondering he’s been doing about whatever the hell Nancy and Robin’s deal is. He’s not touching Jonathan’s love life with a ten-foot pole if he can help it.
The end of the world has made it tough to plan for any future. That’s how Will has felt, at least. Until now, he was pretty sure he wasn’t surviving this battle.
We’re connected, is what he’d told Mike last night, on what had been, for better or worse, their last shared watch. Me and Vecna. If he dies…
No, Mike had cut him off. It doesn’t work like that.
It might. We just have to be ready in case it does. I don’t want to… I can’t…
Will, you’re not sacrificing yourself just to kill Vecna. I won’t let you.
If it’s between both of us living or both of us dying, Will had said, and looked Mike in the eye, more serious than he’d ever been, we both have to die. You understand that, right? Vecna has to go. For good. No matter what it costs.
There had been a second, between the end of that sentence and the start of Mike’s next one, where Will had thought maybe there would be…something. A moment. Mike had leaned in so close his freckles were all Will could see. He’d said, Nobody’s dying. Worst case scenario, you can’t do magic anymore. But I draw the line at your life, Will. We don’t sacrifice party members.
Something unspoken in that statement registers only now: If anyone’s going to make the sacrifice play, it’ll be me.
He can’t retroactively be mad that Mike wanted to be the one to fall on his sword, and he’s also not surprised. But man, nobody throws stones from glass houses like Mike.
“I can’t believe it,” he says, forcing himself back to the present. When he’s done looking around, he looks back at Mike, who’s already looking at him, wondrous and curious about whatever Will can’t believe. “We all lived. We…we didn’t just beat Vecna. We really all survived. I didn’t think…”
“I told you,” Mike says quietly. “We don’t sacrifice party members.”
Will feels overcome with an urge to kiss Mike right there, covered in Demo-blood and viscera. He tamps it down. He steps away. “So…now what?”
Mike’s lips twist. God, his smile is beautiful.
“Now we go home,” he says. “And take some showers, because phew!” He waves his hand by his nose.
Will shoves Mike and laughs too hard at that, just to see Mike smile some more.
Even though losing his access to magic feels weird and, yes, a little disappointing, Will has to admit that the relief is growing greater by the minute.
It had been a weight he’d been unaware of carrying. This crawling tightness over the back of his neck—he hadn’t realized just how tense and permanent it had been, until now, when it’s gone. He’s lighter than he’s been in years. No more looking over his shoulder, wondering whether Vecna is spying through his eyes. No more eerily-precise radar for evil. No more voices in Will’s head seeding doubt in a garden of weeds.
It’s quiet, and Will is— Will is free.
He makes the rounds, checking in on the various party members who wound up in various different places tonight. Lucas looks way better, though still not all the way good, and his head is in Dustin’s lap on the living room loveseat. Both acknowledge Will with a silent nod. In the kitchen, Robin hugs Will, whispering how proud she is; Steve fist-bumps him, something Will is still getting accustomed to doing (because only Steve ever requests it); Erica eats a bowl of cereal, but she’s got a careful eye on Lucas through the doorway to the living room.
Max is icing her knee, her foot propped up on El’s lap at the dining room table, and El for her part isn’t doing much of anything, just staring into the middle distance while Max keeps up a steady one-sided conversation between them. Will gives El’s neck a comforting squeeze.
“Don’t forget, you got the kill shot on him,” he tells her, and drops a kiss on the top of her head.
Max’s unilateral dialogue breaks to interrupt, “That’s what I keep saying!” and Will smiles. The two of them will be fine.
He doesn’t know where Jonathan and Nancy went, but it’s a safe bet Jonathan is patching Nancy up, and the less Will knows about that, the better.
“Have you guys seen Mike?” he asks the kitchen/dining room collective, because of course he can’t find the one person he’s looking for.
The fight is well and truly over. There’s a moment Will would like to finish having.
“Shed,” Steve says. Everyone looks at him, and he scowls. “What? It’s basically my entire job to know where you kids are at all times!”
“Thanks,” Will says, and doesn’t stay to hear the bickering match about ‘helicopter babysitting’ that ensues between Steve and Max.
This was the Wheelers’ shed before it became the party’s armory, but calling it an armory felt silly and overly self-serious, so they all still call it the shed. Will approaches, brushing a hand over Dustin’s Arcane Lock, and whispers, “Radagast.”
The lock glows, and Will pushes the door open.
As promised, Mike is inside, methodically cleaning his longsword with a cloth that has probably never seen a worse day. Come to think of it, Will hasn’t seen Mike since they got back from the battle. Everyone else bathed and got patched up by the nearest healer, and Mike apparently ignored his own advice and came straight to the shed without bothering to get cleaned up first.
“You stink,” Will says when Mike looks up. “Hypocrite. What are you doing in here?”
“Sword’s not gonna clean itself.”
“Okay…but neither is your body.”
“Equipment first. It doesn’t bounce back like I do.”
Will used to have Prestidigitation at his fingertips. Now he wiggles his useless fingers and says, “Half the party could have that done for you in seconds.”
Mike shrugs. He rubs at a dried streak of, ugh, is that intestines? Will could never be a melee fighter.
“Mike, what’s the matter?” Will steps closer, confused. “I promise you, it’s over. I wouldn’t say that lightly. You don’t— this can wait.”
“Nothing is wrong, I just like to take care of my stuff,” Mike insists. “I’m almost done, I swear.”
“Mi-ike.” Will’s limbs move without thought. He rounds the table and hooks his chin onto Mike’s shoulder, wrapping his arms around Mike’s middle. Mike’s movements all jerk to a stop. “I’m serious. Come inside. Take a shower. Put something on that isn’t covered in undead monster guts.”
“You shouldn’t…you shouldn’t touch me, you’re clean and I’m still gross,” Mike says breathlessly.
Yes. That’s a good point. Except Will wants to touch Mike. Isn’t that reason enough to do it?
He used to carry the invisible weight of Vecna’s magic like a ball and chain around his neck. He feels so buoyant without it. Things that seemed ill-advised before—who cares anymore? He’s been a prisoner. He’s done his time. No more answering to anyone but himself.
With his front and Mike’s back lined up, it’s like they’re sharing one pulse. It zig-zags between their ribcages.
“Will.” It’s barely a sound, an exhale as Mike tips his head back to lean against the hollow of Will’s throat. “Did you hear me?”
“Yes,” Will murmurs. A tremor goes through Mike; Will feels it in his whole body.
Quietly, Mike says, “I thought you were trying to die out there. I thought you wanted him to kill you. That’s why I was so scared.”
Will huffs. “I didn’t want to die, Mike. I just wanted to make sure Vecna did. Believe me, self-sacrifice was a last resort. And don’t act like you weren’t also thinking about it.”
“I’m supposed to die for you,” Mike says.
Will seizes. “What?”
“No, I mean— I didn’t want to, I don’t want to. I’m just saying…Vecna ruined your life. He took everything from you.”
“Not everything.”
“But I mean—” Mike wrests himself free of Will’s grip, only to turn a full 180 and face him, eyes blazing. “Will, I would die to save you every single time. And I’m not sorry about that.”
“You should be sorry!” Will says, suddenly, irrationally angry. “I don’t want you to die for me, I want you to live for me! For yourself!”
“It’s not about living and dying, it’s about right and wrong. Justice.” Mike grabs Will by the shoulders. “The things that happened to you were out of your control. If I made that sacrifice, at least it would be my choice. If you died—”
“Stop it. Stop it, stop talking about dying for me, just stop!”
“It would be worth it for you to—”
“Mike, you asshole,” Will seethes, and he doesn’t know his next move, if he’ll shove Mike or storm off or just keep yelling, and then he doesn’t do any of those things, and instead does one of those insane new things he would never have done before, and grabs Mike’s grimy face and kisses his blood-stained mouth, so hard they both trip against the table.
Mike hisses and breaks them apart, fingers flying to his lips. It had one desired effect at least: Mike has stopped talking about dying, and in fact has stopped talking at all. He’s just staring.
“Oh,” he breathes. His tongue flits out to wet his lips. “Sorry, I— the table, my back is—”
“I didn’t mean—”
“You didn’t?”
“To hurt you,” Will finishes, as self-awareness joins the party too little, too late.
“But you did mean to kiss me.”
“I…”
“Or you were just trying to shut me up.”
“Kind of both?”
“Will,” Mike says like it’s a prayer, pressing their foreheads together, breathing sharp and shallow. “Don’t fuck with me right now.”
“Me fuck with you? Are you kidding me?”
Will can barely breathe, and then Mike clutches his face and he really can’t breathe, like he has smoke inhalation and the fire is Mike. His chest is burning, but it doesn’t hurt. More like readying a spell that needs a trigger. It just hovers in anticipation. Waiting. Wanting.
Vecna was a big, bad asterisk on every good thing Will had. Wanting was a luxury he couldn’t afford. But Vecna is gone. And all of that want is trembling in Will, a tidal wave against a dam that no longer serves any purpose.
The dam bursts. The wanting washes over him. Years of holding back, looking away, staying in control—it all drowns in the moment it takes for Will to crash into Mike, a tsunami kiss to insistent lips, at the mercy of the rolling tide.
Mike gasps and breathes life into Will’s lungs before he gets with the program and kisses back. He tastes like iron and stale air; Will was just clean, and has never been happier to be filthy again. Mike’s skin is still painted with dust and dirt, blood and guts. He presses flush against Will’s front, angling his head to make this perfect thing better, which it does.
Magic never lived in Will’s chest, anyway. The feelings were all crowded in there; magic lived in his skin, prickling at the surface, arcane claws under fingernails. For the first time, he doesn’t miss it. It was as much a curse as a blessing. He suffocated in shrink-wrap for years, and now he can breathe. And kissing Mike is the opposite of the magic he had. He’s floating outside his body; he doesn’t know where he ends and Mike begins.
He did this without magic. He had to lose it to know.
The desperate hold Mike has on Will’s jaw eases up. Slowly, the kissing stops, but slowly is the operative word. It takes a while. They have a while. They have so much time, now that the world hasn’t ended.
They have so much fucking time.
“Um,” Mike says, his voice cracking on just the one syllable, “truce?”
Will bites his lip and grins. He tips their sweaty foreheads together. “Okay. Truce.”
“You don’t even know,” Mike begins to say.
Will can’t stop smiling, it’s ridiculous. He runs a hand through Mike’s hair, greasy and gross as it is. “What?” He kisses Mike again. It’s a rush every time. “Know what?”
“It’s embarrassing.”
“Your tongue was in my mouth like twelve seconds ago.”
“That’s not embarrassing,” Mike says, but he’s blushing.
“I’ll trade you a secret for a secret.”
“Your secret’s just gonna be some bullshit like ‘it’s free to take a shower.’”
Will laughs. “Just tell me. I won’t laugh, I promise.”
“You don’t know how long I’ve wanted that to happen,” Mike mumbles, looking anywhere but in Will’s eyes.
The statement goes through Will’s body not unlike any number of spells Mike has cast on him over the years. Heroism. Warding Bond. Protection from Evil and Good. As far back as he can remember, Mike has been protecting Will. Before Vecna. Before magic. Their roads diverged a thousand times, and a thousand times they walked the same path in lockstep.
Mike is right. Will has no idea how long he’s wanted this, because he’s never known Mike to be anything but what he is: a paladin, a knight, a sworn and certain defender. Before sacrifice was a word in their vocabulary, Mike was taking hits meant for Will. There’s no Mike in Will’s memory that isn’t both sword and shield.
“Oh,” it’s Will’s turn to exhale.
Words aren’t enough, but thanks to recent developments in the last four minutes, Will doesn’t need words. Kissing Mike may never lose its shine.
KNOCK KNOCK KNOCK raps on the door of the shed, and the pair of them leap apart. Mike hits the table so hard his sword tips and clatters to the floor, and Will has to grab him to keep him from following suit.
“Oh my God,” Will giggles, feeling giddy and floaty and out of his mind.
“Will, Mike? I’m not coming in, in case you’re…busy…just checking to make sure you’re still, y’know, alive.”
“We’re fine, Steve!” Mike hollers, his eyes wide and bright with laughter. “Will’s helping me clean my sword!”
“Gross, I don’t wanna know that!”
Mike’s eyes go, if possible, even wider. The sound he makes is a combination of choked laughter and absolute revulsion. “My real sword, you animal, holy shit!”
“Okay, okay! Jeez, sorry if everyone’s a little jumpy, could you guys just come back inside soon? Nancy won’t admit she’s worried about you, Mike, but she is definitely worried about you, and Will—”
“I know, I know,” Will answers. Jonathan is always worried about him. “We’ll be in soon, Steve, promise.”
“I’m leaving now,” Steve’s voice declares. “Have fun with Mike’s sword. Eugh—”
“Go away!” Mike shouts.
“I’m going!”
Mike and Will break into uncontrollable laughter, holding each other as they unravel into teary-eyed messes. Some of it is the hilarity of the situation, but a lot of it is fried nerves with no outlet after the fight. It feels so good to laugh this hard.
“Oh, man,” Mike says, wiping his eyes. He giggles again, which makes Will giggle again, and the whole thing falls apart a second time. It takes two minutes to pull themselves together, at which point Mike goes, “Okay, we really have to go inside.”
“Yeah, ‘cause you really need a shower.”
“You don’t think I should stay like this? Eau de Demogorgon? Maybe it’s an aphrodisiac, I mean, it did get you to kiss me.”
“Trust me, it’s not. I kissed you in spite of…all that,” Will says. “And mostly because you wouldn’t shut up about wanting to fall on your sword.”
“Hilarious.”
“But it’s the same for me.” It’s less stressful to admit it after Mike already did. “How long I’ve wanted to. Kiss you. Be…like this.”
Mike groans. “We’re never getting out of this shed, are we.”
“No, we are. We are! We have to, come on. Let’s go.” Will loops their arms together. He hesitates, glancing at Mike’s sword, which is still on the ground. Yesterday he could have grabbed it with his Mage Hand and polished it with a Prestidigitation.
Today Mike retrieves it on his own and says, “I’ll see if Robin can work a little magic while I get cleaned up.” He smiles sidelong at Will, then kisses his cheek. “Ready?”
Will knocks their shoulders together. He could kill Vecna again right now, no magic necessary.
“Ready.”