Chapter Text
Joyce couldn’t leave his side, where Will lay unconscious on the worn couch in the radio shack’s basement.
The plan for today had been simple, as simple as plans for disarming and destroying an alternate dimension that’s plaguing your small town and snatching the light from your son’s eyes could be. Will would give into the pull towards that awful place, let his mind be entered by Vecna, identify the weakest spots under his control to target at the next burn, before pulling himself out of it undetected.
Plans never seem to just work out, though.
Standing there, his eyes rolled back and breath coming shallowly, minutes and minutes passed with no sign of Will snapping out of the otherworldly trance. The group had forced themselves to look away, keep planning for every eventuality of what information Will could gather, when Will’s knees gave way and he collapsed onto the bunker’s concrete floor.
Mike had been by his side in an instant while the others stood in stunned silence, hands shaking his shoulders and terror laced in his voice.
“Will? Holy shit, Will! Are you okay? Get out of there, please! Will, can you hear me?” he cried.
Joyce heard herself follow suit as she drew closer, staring at her son’s limp form, in a terrifying state between alive and dead.
Mike had shifted to pull Will’s head onto his lap, cautious fingers lingering at the side that had cracked into the floor, mirroring the scrape on Mike’s own temple.
“He’s not waking up. We’ve got to get him back to safety,” she had urged to him. Tearing his shining eyes away from her son’s face, Mike nodded once, and they hauled Will up, each with an arm around his back.
Mike had always hated when Will had to go through anything alone.
Falling off the monkey bars in kindergarten, being whisked away with tear-streaked cheeks and an arm bending in too many directions. Hearing hushed laughter and names thrown around in school corridors, long before he knew what any of them meant. Shaking the dice that would determine if the cleric would lead the Party to victory or into the clutches of the monsters they once believed to be fictional.
Being dragged into an alternate dimension and forced to spy for its undead god. Finally escaping the darkness but having no choice but to return east and relive years of the line between peace and horror blurring.
Mike never wanted Will to be alone, not because he was weak or couldn’t handle himself. Because Mike knew that as long as he was there, he could throw himself between Will and any semblance of danger — self-preservation instincts out the window — and protect the person he needed more than anyone.
Which ended up including protecting Will from Mike’s own heart. Pushing him away and shoving the terrifying thoughts he refused to dwell on into a distant corner of his mind had been easier without the constant threat of destruction.
He took a deep breath as he padded towards the room that he and Joyce had hauled an unconscious Will to an hour earlier, hands shaking slightly as he saw familiar, grass-stained trainers hanging over the edge of the couch.
Joyce was kneeling by him, hunched over and sniffling gently, unaware of Mike’s presence. He lingered back, gaze flicking between her and the boy led out behind her. He’s not sure how long he had stood there, guilt and worry and heartache fighting for a home across his features, before Joyce turned, startled but unsurprised by his presence.
“Hey Mike,” she started, voice cracking slightly on his name, “are you alright, honey? How’s your head?”
Mike almost smiled in spite of himself. How she could be so selfless, gesturing towards the scrape he’d suffered at a soldier’s crude hand that morning, while her son was facing yet another brush with supernatural fury.
“Oh, it’s— I’m fine,” he mumbled, fingers coming up to brush the dried blood at his cheekbone as he cautiously approached the two. “Is he… has he…”
She shook her head slightly, a sad smile ghosting across her face. “Not yet, but he’ll come around. Just gotta give him some time.”
“He has to wake up, I— we need him to,” Mike said softly, glancing towards Will as he knelt beside Joyce. Anyone else would think he was just asleep, but the slight furrow of his brow and his unnaturally straight stature betrayed him to Mike.
Any other time Mike saw Will sleeping, he looked so peaceful, curled up on one side with his lips slightly parted, the way he had done at every sleepover since they were five years old. When they had been small enough to share a sleeping bag in his basement, Mike would wake up, his fingers sticky from midnight snacks and face chilled by the early morning but feeling warmed to the core by the head resting gently on his shoulder and the breaths fanning across his neck. When they were old enough to steal horror movie tapes from their elder siblings and fall asleep under the same quilted blanket against the couch cushions, Mike would wake up, his throat scratchy from screaming and laughing at low-quality CGI with small fingers threaded between his own under the covers.
When Will had moved back to Hawkins with nowhere to call home, he had shared the Wheeler’s basement with Jonathan as the unlikely group learned to coexist. Rarely a week would pass before Mike heard creaking doors, hushed footsteps and gentle knocks against his bedroom door, when he’d welcome Will in to whisper about his most recent vision-slash-nightmare or just lie next to each other in the moonlight, both seeking comfort in steady breathing. When Mike would wake up a few hours later, he could see the peace in Will’s expression a few inches from his own face, or could feel it in his long, slow breathing and loose arms wrapped around his waist. The sight, the feeling, always left his pulse and mind racing as he allowed himself to feel all that his heart wanted, and would pray for the early morning stillness to drag out forever.
Anyone else might think that Will was just asleep on the couch, but Mike knew what safety and comfort looked like on Will. Flat on his back with short, shallow breaths and a pinched expression couldn’t be further from it.
“Thanks for being here, honey. You always were so good with looking out for my boy,” Joyce’s gentle voice pulled Mike from his memories and his eyes away from Will’s face. “He won’t admit it, I bet, but I know how much you always meant to him. Still do.”
Mike’s breath hitched at the correction, eyebrows drawing together and tentative hope blossoming in his chest, an uncontrollable feeling that had become second nature whenever his and Will’s relationship was brought up.
“He really needed you, Mike. Last year, in California. I know the move was hard on you boys, Karen was always complaining about how long you spent holding up the landline,” Joyce continued, and the hope shrivelled up, leaving him feeling less than whole, “but something… changed between you both that summer before we left.”
Joyce didn’t look upset, or angry with him, or wary of his renewed closeness with her son, just quietly somber as she spoke. “When we first moved, Will would check the mailbox twice a day, hoping for a letter from back home. Every time he shuffled back through the front door holding a letter with your return address and handing it to El, he just… drooped a bit, you know? I mean, you boys did write to him, but the letters were always in Dustin’s or Lucas’ handwriting.”
The implication in her words was stifling.
“I don’t know what happened,” Mike said softly after a pause, looking towards the floor to avoid Joyce’s patient stare. “I don’t know why I pushed him away, I think it was just, um,” he tripped on his words, wringing his hands together and sighing, “easier than trying to deal with my…” he trailed off, unable to say ‘feelings’ and unable to settle on any other word. “I need him to wake up and be fine again so I can apologise again, properly this time, say it was all my fault we drifted apart, so I can make it up to him, so he’ll forgive me—”
“He’s a survivor, Mike. All we can do is protect him while he’s out and be there for him once he’s awake,” Joyce interrupted Mike’s spiralling. “I know hearing that from you will mean a lot to Will, honey.” She patted his arm as she stood, placed a hand on the back of the couch for a moment, before heading to the door. “You stay with him for a bit, I’ll check on El.”
And with that, Mike was alone, nothing on his mind aside from Will’s unmoving form led out behind him. He twisted round, slowly lifting his gaze from Will’s knuckles brushing the worn carpet up to his face, still slightly twisted in something like pain or restlessness or fear. Mike wanted Vecna’s heart, if he still had one, on a plate for Will’s expression alone.
“Hey, Will, I— can you hear me? Is it like when Max was in hospital and the doctors said she could hear whatever we were bickering about and to cut it out to give her some peace? If you can hear Dustin and Steve debating how long canned food in a disused bunker even lasts, you must be going stir crazy not being able to tell them where to shove it,” Mike rambled with nervousness, a habit that has been made very clear to him by the Party. He argued that it was a gift, being able to fill any silence, but was more often than not met with disbelieving raised eyebrows and splintering conversations.
He sighed, a hand coming to rest on the edge of the couch cushion, Will’s jacket lying a hair from his fingertips. “God, I’m so sorry this plan didn’t work. Maybe I was stupid to think that I could get us through this madness without a scratch. I don’t know, I just needed to make myself useful, be a leader again, help you as much as I could.”
He forces himself on.
“Everything’s gonna be fine, El is next door in a makeshift deprivation tank, even more makeshift than a paddling pool in the middle school gym or— or a pizza dough freezer, if you can believe it, I mean radio shacks don’t exactly have baths, but she’s gonna come and find you and help you out of wherever you are, and you’ll wake up safely, and I have to be… I will be brave and properly apologise for freezing you out, Will. I need you to know it wasn’t you, it was me. I was just… scared of things I didn’t understand yet. You’ve always been my very best friend, ever since the swings, no amount of distance could ever change that,” Mike continued, sniffling slightly. He thought he noticed Will’s eyebrows twitch up at the mention of their friendship, but equally plausible to Mike was his lovesick wishful thinking or a trick of the ancient lighting.
“If you can hear me now, you must have heard me and your mom a minute ago, right?” Mike sighed. “About— about me not writing to you. I am really sorry, Will.
“The thing is, I did write. To you. Even more than I did to El. I wrote pages about Hellfire, and Nancy’s articles in the paper, and Holly getting her hands on my D&D manual, and Lucas ditching us to bench-warm for the Tigers, and the Blackburns’ cat getting stuck up the same tree four times in one day, and anything that Mr Clark taught us that I thought you’d love to learn about. But everything I wrote just felt too boring, too poorly written, and never… worthy of you. Even though writing is literally all I’m good for, it was never good enough to send.”
It wasn’t a total lie. Reading back over his letters, Mike truly thought they weren’t worth Will’s time. But he wasn’t naïve enough that he didn’t compare his unsent letters to Will with what he did send to El.
The box in Mike’s mind of things he can’t think about, that he pushes as far away as he can and attacks with metaphorical parcel tape as soon as the lid threatens to budge, opened slightly for the first time since restless nights with no warm body curled up next to him. And he let it.
“I think I’ve got one with me, that I never took out my backpack,” Mike said decisively, jumping up to rummage through the bag leaning against the couch by Will’s feet and producing a slightly crumpled page of his spidery scrawl.
He sat back down by Will’s side and cleared his throat.
October 13th, 1985
Dear Will,
‘Dear’ sounds so formal, why did I write that? I don’t know. Whatever. Anyway, hey.
How is California? It’s finally actually fall here, I’m not so hot and sticky and showering like three times a day any more, which is good. Do you even get seasons out there? I hope it feels like fall for Halloween at least.
Guess where I’m writing this? On that tree stump in front of the newly renovated Castle Byers. I think it got blown to bits by a storm sometime this summer? I’ve spent all week after school coming here and putting my terrible DIY abilities to the test. Now that there’s new people living in your house I just wanted somewhere for you to call home when you come back. Do you know when you can come back?
It’s still really weird without you here. At school, in my basement with the others, at Hellfire, just everywhere. Lucas is always with the basketball douches now, Max never wants to hang out— I’ve still got Dustin but, I don’t know. I just don’t feel whole these days.
I bet you’ve made a bunch of arty nerdy friends. You’re so great to hang out with. Do you give them your art? Are you still drawing a lot? You should send me a I’d love to see what you’ve been working on.
Mike reached the end and flipped the paper to keep reading. Impulsive as ever, like stepping off a cliff or standing in the dark garage with the words he couldn’t take back, he couldn’t stop his eyes from flicking to the bottom of the page where he had signed his name, even though he knew full well what admission was there. It still made him screw his eyes shut for a second before carrying on in a slightly shakier voice.
It might actually be Halloween by the time this gets to you. El said you’re going to someone’s house party. What are you dressing up as? Mom’s making me take Holly trick-or-treating. She’s being a princess and she wants me to be either a dragon or a knight in shining armour. I remember when we were like 8 years old and we went out in our D&D costumes, and your cleric hat kept slipping into your eyes, and my cardboard chest plate kept falling off, and we stayed up for hours eating candy and watching Nightmare on Elm Street.
I wish we could go back to then. Before everything with the Upside Down, before you had to leave Hawkins. I really miss you, Will. I miss us.
Tell your mom to spend less time on the phone so we can chat. I don’t care if it’s her job.
Mike swallowed. He’d reached the point of no return. He resolutely didn’t look at Will’s face as he finished the letter in almost a whisper.
Love, Mike
He let the admission sit in the air for a minute or two, as if he was waiting for Will to reply. When he couldn’t stand it any longer, he looked up from the paper and saw Will’s mouth had quirked up into a slight smile. The sight of it made Mike’s heart ache.
Before Mike could stop himself, he reached a hand out and brushed Will’s bangs slightly out of his eyes. His palm came to rest ever so gently at Will’s cheek, fingertips finding a home in his hair and thumb brushing over his cheekbone. The touch was electric, the closeness sending a shiver down Mike’s spine. He felt his face heat up.
There was no denying it any more. The box containing the thoughts he once believed were normal feelings of friendship turned repressed unrequited desire had burst open, longing completely evident on his face.
He was throwing caution to the wind. Mike had held back for years and simply didn’t have it in him to care. He bent closer to Will, so close that he could smell the lemongrass shampoo and fabric softener and something completely Will, and pressed a gentle kiss to the furrow of his brow.
Will’s eyelashes fluttered, and he opened his eyes.