Work Text:
“Vallaki, huh?”
Mike is laying on his front lawn despite the sprinkler having run earlier. It means that he’ll catch hell from his mother later for grass stains, but that is not his primary concern or even in the top five. She isn’t the one who found him anyway.
When he does open his eyes, he peers through the darkness. It takes a moment for his vision to adjust, but it’s not like he needed to look to know who spoke. As he looks up at the owner of the voice, the angle makes Will look like he’s upside down.
Fitting.
He didn’t even realize that Will was still there. Max and Lucas left a while ago. Dustin had stuck around for longer — Mike suspects out of an abundance of concern — before he left to meet up with Steve. Mike had stepped outside to get some air after dinner, figuring that Will had slipped out behind Dustin so that he could spend some time catching up with Jonathan.
Apparently not.
“Sorry for vanishing,” Mike suddenly says, not addressing Will’s previous comment. “I thought you left with Dustin. Where were you?”
“In the kitchen. With your mom,” Will says, shrugging. “She already did plenty feeding all of us. I figured the least I could do was help with the clean-up.”
A hint of a smile creeps onto Mike’s face. That is vintage Will. Thinking of others and how he can make their lives easier. He has done that since they were kids and it’s never left him, for better or for worse. It’s one of the things that Mike admires most about him.
More than “admires.”
“Do you want some company?”
Mike doesn’t need to think long before nodding. Will lowers himself onto the ground beside him and lays down with his head just a few inches away. Mike watches out of his periphery as Will carefully entwines his fingers on his stomach and releases a breath.
“It was a nice story.”
That’s what reminds Mike of what Will said before when he found him.
“Did I overdo it with yours?” Mike asks, uncertainly.
“Hardly,” Will replies. “Everything you described is what I’ve always wanted. The thing is, I think I underestimated how much of it I already had.”
“As for Will the Wise? He travels far and long to the bustling city of Vallaki. It’s overwhelming at first. So very different from the village where he spent his youth. But it isn’t long before he finds his place there. And with that, deep happiness … and acceptance.”
“Hawkins isn’t a place where I’ve ever felt truly happy and comfortable,” Will acknowledges. “But I have felt those things. When we’re all together as a Party. When you and I have hung out and I haven’t had to be anything other than myself.”
“I’m glad,” Mike says, quietly. “And same.”
“But maybe weekly festivals are overkill,” Will adds. Mike snorts. “Feeling happy and hopeful is important. But so is grounding ourselves in reality. Feeling pain rather than suppressing it.”
The smile slips off Mike’s face. He turns to look at Will.
“So, you don’t believe.”
It comes out more like an accusation than a question.
“I do,” Will says without missing a beat. “I wasn’t lying when I said it’s a nice story. A comforting one. But Mike …” Will rolls his lips, trying to find the right words. “I just … I worry.”
Defensively, Mike asks, “About what?”
“About these stories becoming your own stockade.”
Goosebumps erupt on the back of Mike’s neck. He barely resists the urge to raise a hand like Will did so many times when Vecna or his demon creatures from Hell were near.
“You’re saying I’m the burgomaster?”
Baron Vargas Vallakovich. The burgomaster who governed Vallaki and, when people expressed any ill about the festivals, arrested them and declared them as non-believers. He claimed that it meant they were in league with Strahd von Zarovich, the sworn enemy. The end result?
Non-believers were thrown into the stockades or taken to the burgomaster’s mansion to have the perceived evil purged from them.
“I’m saying you’re The Heart for a reason.” As if on cue, Mike’s heart rate quickens. “You feel so deeply. You express those feelings so clearly and without holding back, leaving no room for any misinterpretation. But there’s a fine line between leading with your heart and being ruled by it.”
“I’d hate it if it became what keeps you from living your life,” Will says with a trembling voice. “If you can only look backwards or you’re stuck. I’ve been there. It kept me apart from you guys. It was partly why I couldn’t grow up in sync with the rest of you.”
Mike’s jaw tightens and he blinks several times at the night sky. His eyes burn in the corners as he looks at the few recognizable constellations. It’s always astonished Dustin how bad he is at retaining their names despite knowing how to use them as a guide back home.
Mike is home right now, but not just in the literal sense.
“You were the one who asked how my story ends.”
“And the storyteller? What about him?”
Will shakes his head.
“That wasn’t how our stories end,” Will says. “It may be what’s next. It might not happen at all. Nothing’s written in stone, and nothing should be. We aren’t just … characters in some game. We’re complex. We contain multitudes. It’s what keeps us going and fighting and hurting and loving and …”
Mike closes his eyes. Each word feels like another hit to Mike’s chest. Whether it’s because he knows that Will is right, deep down, or it’s because he desperately wants him to be wrong, and he isn’t able to come up for air to prove it.
“I want to tell stories,” Mike finally says. His eyes remain closed. “I want there to be some … not point or recognition, because it’s not like anyone would believe they’re real. But some …”
Ironically, he struggles to find the words.
“The storyteller … keeps telling stories. Stories inspired by his friends. One day, he hopes their tales of grand adventure will spread far and wide across the land. So all can know of their great bravery.”
“Closure?”
Mike’s eyes spring open. He looks at Will and nods.
“It’s the same for me with my art,” Will says. “I pour everything into it. That way it’s still there, still exists in a moment, but it’s not taking up real estate inside of my head. I can acknowledge it and still let it go on some level.”
“Like the painting you made for me.” Will turns his head slowly to look at Mike. “The one that wasn’t actually commissioned by El.”
Quietly, Will asks, “Did she tell you that?”
“No,” Mike sighs. “We always danced around the bigger conversations.” He studies Will. “It’s on my wall. I look at it daily. Once things began to settle, I really saw it. That part of your story.”
Will’s face twists with something akin to grief. Mike isn’t sure if it’s what he feels now about this conversation or if it’s for the boy in the pizza van who was in so much pain. A boy who believed that he had to sacrifice an essential part of himself for the good of the Party.
“You’ve come over practically every day these past eighteen months,” Mike continues. “I always wondered if you planned to bring it up.”
“To what end?” Will asks, desperately.
Mike’s face slackens.
“Other than it being the truth? It was never just a crush,” Mike says. A tear slips out of Will’s eye. “I’m not trying to hurt you, I swear. I …”
Mike’s fist tightens around the wet grass. He rips out some and feels the wet soil embed under his nails. It’s unpleasant and messy. Not too different from their conversation that he didn’t plan on having tonight, if ever. Not when he isn’t sure how to articulate what he truly wants to say.
What Mike has held back on saying for nearly two years.
“I guess we all have stories we can never tell.”
“But … There is a story that he can never tell. The story of the mage. Or, at least not the real story.”
He swallows thickly, trying to dislodge the lump in his throat.
“Not without risking too much,” Mike adds.
“You’ll find a way to tell El’s story that’s authentic to her and for you,” Will says, fervently. “It might take time, but you’ll figure it out.”
“Yeah, but …” God. “That’s not the story I’m talking about.”
He’s met with silence. It’s so profound that, if he didn’t sense Will beside him, Mike might have thought that he stood up and walked away. He doesn’t dare to look at him. If he did, he worries that his face would crumble like when he stared at Will’s D&D character sheet binder.
They spent so many years sitting across from one another, just out of reach, that putting them side-by-side almost felt cruel. Like a final proof that there is nothing separating them anymore, aside from Mike’s inability to truly tackle his feelings and all of their complexities.
Because if he’s struggling to find the words to describe the importance of creating these stories, how is Mike supposed to explain loving two people and realizing that love for them isn’t different at all? It’s two sides of the same coin, but recognizing it comes with two-sided guilt as well.
How can he move on from loving El when her sacrifice was predicated on loving humanity and protecting others from the government and military’s monstrous ambitions? El is somewhere in the wind, but she’s also right beside them as a constant reminder that they can all live and love because of her.
Then, there’s his feelings for Will. Those feelings always felt bigger than the whole sky, but that was when it was strictly a friendship. When Mike thought they lost Will in ’83, his world cracked wide open. The ground beneath him shifted, in every possible sense, and rescuing him was as natural as breathing.
So was keeping him nearby once he returned, before things got complicated and they started to drift in different directions. It took the earth literally cracking open in ’86 to shock Mike into some version of his old self. Or at least close enough that he could spend those eighteen months that the Byers lived with them rebuilding what seemed permanently lost to teen angst and the perils of miscommunication.
Will let him put in the work, and that was huge. Yet somewhere along the way, it felt as easy as it did when they were kids. He wanted to be around Will. He wanted to catch his eye when they sat across from each other at lunch or strategized in The Squawk.
But, by the end of ’87, Mike mostly wanted to figure out how he had gone from being someone that Will had feelings for to those feelings seemingly evaporating in an instant.
The timing of it all felt cosmically cruel. Loving two people at once only to lose one and then not know how to express that love to the other. It felt like there were signs taunting him everywhere, but the worst was on the rare occasions that he’d sit down and watch football with his father.
He hates football. There’s genuinely nothing about it that interests him or makes any amount of sense. But after all of the lies and secrecy surrounding the Upside Down, it felt like the slightest effort to show he does give a shit about his family and realizes how close he came to potentially losing seventy-five percent of them.
So he sacrificed another part of himself — his sanity, mostly — and watched the game. Despite not picking up much, even with Lucas’ attempts to school him, the one thing that Mike did retain was the snap. Because that was too glaring of a parallel to miss how it mocked him.
In the analogy, Will plays the center, which is a little too on the nose since Will’s always existed as the center of Mike’s world, even before Mike realized the depth of it. Will snaps the ball back to the quarterback who — again, for the sake of the analogy — is Mike. The responsibilities are not all that different from being a Paladin. Each leadership role requires the person in it to direct plays and make quick decisions under pressure.
When Will snapped the ball, it was like he passed his feelings back to Mike. Only Mike never figured out whether he should throw the ball, hand it off, or run. He froze. Then, the weight of everything else tackled him. It left him a bruised and broken version of himself that he hardly recognized.
So now, as the two boys lie on the Wheelers’ front lawn, Mike can’t help but wonder who he’s cheating the most here. Is it El by not remaining solely devoted to her for the rest of his life? Is he cheating himself out of true happiness which, if he’s honest, is something that barely ranks as a worry, let alone a priority?
Perhaps worst of all is figuring out what it would mean for Will. Is Mike cheating him more by not telling him the truth of his own feelings, or would it be worse to drag Will back in with false hope or wishful thinking? How can Mike give his love to the person who has always stood by his side and deserves to receive love in its fullest form? Not by halves.
How can Mike love Will without risking that same love making Will hate him?
“Mike?”
It takes everything in Mike to meet Will’s eyes. There is so much happening behind them.
“What are you trying to say?”
Mike’s cheeks burn. He opens his mouth once, twice, several times. He closes it every single time before he can utter a single word. He looks desperately at Will, who clearly understands.
Of course he does.
“Just speak from the heart.”
“Mike. Don’t stop. Okay? You’re the heart. Okay? Remember that. You’re the heart.”
Wisdom was never an empty attribute for Will. But it’s just as true that he’s brave and strong in ways that Mike has never seen or felt within himself. Mike has always felt drawn to people who are more powerful than him in every way that matters. He accepted that as his fate.
Except, Will’s still here. He never left Mike’s side and is trying to help Mike escape from that self-imposed stockade. Before living in it becomes his entire personality, or lack thereof.
“I don’t think it’s a coincidence that I understood the painting when I was ready to,” Mike says. “Except, I don’t know that I’m fully ready to. I’m still … I still feel so much pain. When I think of what happened, it hurts like it just happened. And I know I’m not the only one, but …”
“You loved her,” Will finishes. “It’s different.”
“But she’s not … she isn’t the only person I’ve felt … feel that way toward,” Mike forces out. He stares up at the night sky, feeling Will’s eyes boring into him. “I didn’t love her right. The last … one of the last things that she said was I understood her better than anyone, but I didn’t. And it hurt her, but God, I swear I tried to. I really tried.”
“And there’s nothing that would guarantee I wouldn’t do that again or worse,” he says, “because I never saw this coming. Not just the feelings, but the person. I never thought of them like …”
“Mike.”
Mike is hyperventilating and has to sit up so that he can attempt to draw air. Will immediately shoots up and places a hand on his back. It’s probably meant to ground Mike, but it only tugs harder at his already frayed heart.
When he looks at Will, despite his blurred vision, he sees tears in the other boy’s eyes.
“They’re not a replacement,” Mike says, desperately. “Or some consolation. I know that door’s closed. I know it’s too late. I’m too late. They’re gone. Both of them are gone. I missed …”
“Mike.”
Will presses his right hand to Mike’s chest. He places it directly over Mike’s heart. Will inhales gradually and holds it for a few seconds before he exhales. He does it again until Mike tries to match the rhythm.
Crazy together.
It continues for some indeterminate amount of time. Despite the warmer June night, Mike feels the back of his shirt clinging to him. It’s not simply due to the freshly watered grass.
“Better?” Will asks after a while.
Mike nods, his eyes slightly downcast.
“Where’d you learn that breathing thing?”
“School counselor.”
Mike looks sharply at him.
“You never mentioned going to her.”
“There’s lots of things we don’t tell each other,” Will replies, though not unkindly. “At least until we’ve processed it, ourselves. Doesn’t mean it’s too late.”
Mike’s eyes grow wide. Will sighs, giving him a slightly weary but undeniably fond smile.
“I know what I said at The Squawk. I know how I framed it,” Will says. “I was protecting myself. You’re right that it was never just a crush. Even if it was, it’s ridiculous to think it would just go away like …”
Will snaps his fingers.
“Not for someone you’ve known your whole life,” Will finishes.
“You deserve Vallaki.”
“Endless happy days?” Will says. “Or acceptance?”
“Both.”
Will shakes his head. Then, he says:
“The first is a fantasy. No, listen,” he interjects when Mike tries to argue. “If we hold out for the happiness we believe others owe us, we’ll just spend our entire lives on the outside looking in on others’ joy.”
“We find ways to make our own happiness every day,” Will says. “And how it looks generally comes down to the happiness we feel we deserve.”
Will lowers his hand from Mike’s chest, which Mike had forgotten was there but immediately mourns its loss. Will’s fingers gently graze his wrist, making Mike’s breath shudder.
“Don’t get lost in the story,” Will implores. “Especially not one you’ve already written the ending for. I’m not sure what happened or when it did to make you think it, but you’re not an extension of the rest of us any more than you’re our voices.”
“You have your own voice. Your own feelings,” Will says, emphatically. “Your story matters, too.”
That’s what ends up breaking Mike. The first sob rips from deep within him. He barely has time to register the second one before he’s pressed against Will at a slightly awkward angle.
Burying his face in Will’s neck, he lets go. Mike releases so much repressed pain that it makes him wonder where he kept it all. It soars out of him like when the Mind Flayer leaves its victims.
Except, Mike doesn’t feel like a victim. Not right now with Will holding him together and rubbing soothing, steady circles on his back. Not when Will’s hold on him is so tight, both physically and metaphorically, without feeling the slightest bit suffocating.
No, he’s not a victim. Mike doesn’t just feel protected either.
For the first time in he-doesn’t-know-how-long, Mike feels seen. He feels understood and even feels validated. Like everything that he knew was real wasn’t all in his head. It wasn’t the worst trick imaginable or a pathetic, last-minute sleight of hand. None of what he went through these past eighteen months — or the past nearly six years — was a cop-out.
Because Will’s right here. Will hasn’t left, and Mike’s story isn’t him resigning himself to telling that of others. He can still do that, but it doesn’t have to be hollow. It doesn’t have to be in the forced isolation of his own mind and memories. All of these feelings are so overwhelming that Mike forgets where he is right now.
Which is why when he pulls back from Will, he shoots forward almost immediately and kisses his best friend. Hard. And Will, bless him, is only momentarily surprised before he easily melts into the kiss. It’s as though he is breathing air into Mike’s lungs.
It makes Mike feel lightheaded. There is an undeniable ringing in his ears. A voice screaming, He is your best friend! But that voice is silenced when he presses his hand to Will’s chest and feels the other teen’s heart thrumming beneath it. Beating as much for this moment as it is for Mike. As much as Mike’s heart has beaten for Will’s since that day on the swings.
When they separate, Mike doesn’t press his forehead to Will’s. First, he looks around nervously to check if anyone saw them. Next, he looks directly at Will. Mike meets Will’s eye, because he wants to see if they look as different as he thinks his own must look.
They’re darker than usual. Not as dark as when he was possessed by the Mind Flayer or after he syphoned Vecna’s powers, but unmistakably not the standard hazel. It’s something special. Unique to where they find themselves.
Just for Mike.
Mike isn’t sure what compels him to, but he presses a chaste kiss to Will’s lips. Then, another one to his left cheek. Finally, a lingering one to Will’s forehead. He hears a slight whimper.
“Are you okay?” Mike asks, worriedly.
Will nods, blinking some stray tears from his eyes.
“Are you?” Will counters. “That was … new for both of us.”
Jesus, right. Will’s never kissed anyone. Mike took that from him. He feels himself start to panic all over again, but Will is quick to reassure him. Will intrinsically understands what Mike needs.
“Felt like the perfect storybook ending,” Will says. Deliberately, he adds, “For this chapter.”
A smile creeps across Mike’s face. He tilts his head.
“You love a metaphor.”
Will laughs with delight. It’s music to Mike’s ears and makes his chest feel lighter.
“Yeah, I guess I do,” Will replies. “I did make your coat of arms a heart.”
That sparks a new thought.
“I bet you’d make an awesome illustrator.” Mike hesitates. “If you want to try it.”
Mike realizes that he’s asking more than one thing. He’s asking Will to take a big chance on two things that would change the trajectory of their lives, friendship, and everything that they’ve both known up to that point.
Maybe he’s asking too much.
Or maybe, just maybe, it’s only too much based on who receives it.
“I’ve thought about it,” Will replies. “It’d have to be with the right person. For the right cause.”
Now there’s a shy, familiar smile on Will’s lips. One that is so nostalgia-inducing for Mike, it would kneecap him if he were on his feet.
“We always talked about co-DMing,” Mike says. “It would obviously be different from any campaign we’ve run, but …”
“Exciting,” Will finishes. “New.”
Mike swipes his thumb under Will’s eye to brush away residual moisture. Will’s smile is wobbly, but it somehow makes Mike feel steadier than he ever expected to feel again. Not just because he was always afraid of ending up alone, but because he thought that he had failed.
“What are you thinking?” Will murmurs.
Mike’s hand glides to the back of Will’s neck. He gently tugs at the hairs at the base, making Will sigh in response. Mike stares at him with wonder.
The first thought is a quote from Frank Capra’s film, It’s A Wonderful Life. It’s what Clarence the angel inscribes in his copy of Tom Sawyer that he leaves behind for George Bailey.
Remember, no man is a failure who has friends.
Mike’s friendships have always existed as the best part of him. His friends inspire him to do and be better. They ground and humanize him when he loses himself. They fulfill and challenge him to expect more out of the world than the world might be willing to give him.
The Party’s friendship is Mike’s love story. But so is what’s being written on this summer night.
“That I’m grateful,” Mike eventually says. “For all of you but, especially right now, that you’re here. That you didn’t let me close the door on what could come next.”
“What will come next.”
Mike’s eyes dance in amusement. It doesn’t seem like Will has noticed his own choice of words or just how accurate they are for Mike. Echoing Will, he simply says:
“What will come next.”