Chapter Text
“He’s arriving at 8:30 right?”
“That’s what he said.”
Max is fluffing the pillows — scratch that, she’s turning the whole couch upside down. Lucas observes this from the kitchen as he washes the dishes from their dinner. His view now is a mass of red waves diving down and Max is disappearing to be nearly engulfed whole into the crevices of the lounge as she vacuums out what appears to be — popcorn kernels?
Lucas is finishing up the last of the washing up, towel drying one of their white bowls.
He glances at the light orange stained surface, a curse of spaghetti sauce, brokenness and only being able to afford cheap plastic.
He shrugs, putting it away anyway, “Babe, I mean no offence by this, but when are you ever this tidy? It’s just Will. He doesn’t care about that kind of thing anyway.”
“I know—I know it’s just—I always feel the need to impress him or something. It’s weird, I know.”
“It’s not weird, it’s sweet, but like do I need to be worried? Have I got myself some friendly competition?”
Max lifts herself up at that, staring Lucas dead in the eyes with a poker face that could bring someone home millions in Vegas. A moment later and a pillow is hurdling towards the other, only slightly missing a glass to hit Lucas square in the chest. His shocked reaction has her hunching over in laughter, tension releasing off her and loosening the tightness that had been unknowingly resting between her shoulder blades. It doesn’t take her much longer to recompose herself, realising her mistake.
“Hey, actually could you pass that back?”
“Pass what back?”
Lucas is actually grinning, that smug son-of-a-bitch.
“Oh this?” He dangles the pillow out to the side, like he’s teasing a dog with a bone. Problem is, he’s slightly afraid this dog may bite.
They’re in a dance now. They both know this. Lucas stays right where he is, protected by the safety of the kitchen island’s defence. Max leaves the lounge, socked footsteps intimidatingly loud against the wood floor in the silence that has fallen.
Step by step, Lucas tries to calculate his next move, but he fails. He has no time to think when she comes running at him and suddenly they’re sprinting round the kitchen island like children, with Lucas screeching and Max giggling like a madwoman.
“I’ve had a lot of practice running Lucas. Don’t think you can win this.”
“This ain’t no hill though!”
Right when Max is nearly close enough to grab Lucas by the shirt, there’s a knock on the door.
Saved by the bell.
With heavy breaths, both freeze and their eyes flick in complete synchronisation to the door followed by the clock on the living room wall.
8:28 PM
“Fuck, that’d be Will.”
“Shit. Shit. Shit. I think I got everything done. Okay. Cool. He’s here!”
He knocks again, a little louder than his first previous gentle knocks.
“Hey guys?” His voice is muffled through the wooden door, but it’s Will, no doubt about it.
“We should probably let him in if we want to see him.”
“On it. Going to let Will in now.”
“WILL!” Max is wrapping her arms around him before he has the time to even process her opening the door.
“Max! Hi!” His brain has begun to catch up to his body now and he almost collapses into the hug. It’s been a long day of travel and his exhaustion is clear despite his enthusiastic return of Max’s greeting. She steps aside, giving him space to welcome him in and grab his bags. Will moves inside, pausing for a moment to look at Lucas, who is holding a pillow?
“What’s that about?” Will says gesturing to it, unable to hide the amusement in his voice.
“Oh this? Nothing.” Lucas throws it behind him without a glance and by some miracle it lands on the couch. Thank you basketball.
“Come here, dude. How are you? How was the flight?” Lucas says pulling Will in now that his arms are free.
“Good yeah. Flying is flying. I’m just happy to see you guys. Wait—why are you so sweaty?” He looks to Max, “What’s—should I even ask?”
She’s shaking her head, “He’s an idiot is why.” but her words don’t match her expression which is full of love and directed solely towards the pillow hoarder.
She looks back at Will now, her features still soft, “Anyway, the idiot will take your bags and show you to your room.”
Will laughs as Lucas starts wheeling the suitcase down the hall to the left. They are a few steps from the room when there’s another knock on the door.
“Expecting more company?” Will asks, curious.
“Nope. No clue who that’d be… Babe? Look through the peephole before you open it, okay? Remember Creepy Jeff!”
Both Will and Lucas move back out of the room once Will’s bags are situated in the corner.
“Creepy Jeff, huh?”
“Don’t ask.”
Neither have any expectations of who the mysterious arrival might be (other than Creepy Jeff) and Max has been suspiciously quiet so when they leave the hallway to find out who it is, they’re shocked to see…
“Dustin?” Max’s confusion bleeds into her voice, her hand still lingering on the door.
“That’s my name, don’t wear it out.” He smiles, taking off his cap and walking in.
It’s not long either for him to stop in his tracks at the sight of a third person in the room.
“Will?”
“Dustin?” The three of them, Lucas, Will and Max (again) say in unison.
Everyone is looking at the other expectantly for some form of explanation. No one gives it.
The time to discuss details ends before it begins because before they’re able to even begin to breach the conversation of whateverthefuckisgoingon another knock sounds against the door.
“You’ve got to be fucking kidding me.”
Max is swinging the door open now with an unexpected burst of rage-induced energy, which may or may not end up directed at whoever reveals themselves from behind the door.
“MIKE?”
Now Dustin, Lucas, Will and Max are all shouting simultaneously, like a damn church choir.
Will mutters a question under his breath, “What is he doing here?” only to be buried under the sounds of multiple people talking at once, the sound of the door slamming shut and the squeaky wheels of Mike Wheeler's suitcase rolling in.
“Are we all just going to keep saying names or can someone explain what’s going on?” Dustin asks a decibel louder than the rest.
Mike looks on in plain confusion, taking in quickly the presence of the full Party in front of him in a single crowded entryway. His eyes make a triple take when they land on the individual in the back, someone whom he has not properly spoken to for the past four months.
They both take in the other’s dishevelled post flight appearances. Mike, with his dark curls sticking out in all directions, partly tucked behind his ears and definitely not cut since the last time Will saw him. Will, with his characteristic faint dark circles and paint stained jumper, looking as if he was about to fall asleep and had simultaneously just drunk three shots of espresso.
Mike watches as Will abruptly turns his head to share a look with Max. He follows his line of sight, taking in the sight of the seething woman in front of him and then to the others — Lucas and Dustin who look conflicted between welcoming him in and questioning everything.
“Hi…?” He decides on, awkwardly lifting his gangly limb to do a small wave.
Thousands of questions are erupting, multiple conversations going at once. Side hugs and full body hugs and handshakes? Lucas begins to explain that they had been expecting Will, not the others. Dustin explains it had been a last minute thing — this science conference he was called to speak at over the span of a few days — his hotel booking cancelled — and that he knew they had a spare bed so he thought it’d be okay if he crashed there. Mike says bewildered, that they’d invited him to stay this week.
“No? It was next week!”
“No, I wrote it down, it was for this Monday until Friday.”
“No. It was for next Monday, Monday the 8th.”
“No—“
A loud bang. Max stands with a metal pan in each hand, still vibrating from the collision.
Everyone turns to face her in surprise — except for Will who in his withdrawal from the conversation had been watching as she searched the drawers, tapping each individual pan to see which would be the loudest.
“What? Had to get you meatheads attention somehow.”
Mike and Lucas scoff, Dustin sighs and Will looks like he wants nothing more than to just collapse into the floor.
“Obviously there’s been some confusion! I’m not asking anyone to book a return flight—stop looking at me like that. Just um, Lucas?”
Pleading is the only way to describe the look she gives him.
“Max and I are more than happy to host all of you.”
“—well ‘more than’ is a bit of an—what I’m trying to say is the only problem we have is sleeping arrangements. There’s one couch and one double bed. So…I guess take you pick. And for my sake, do it quietly—please.”
Mike picks at the skin on his thumb. It’s been on the verge of bleeding since he got on the plane.
Will has nightmares. Mike knows this — or well he used to know this. He thinks logically he should take the couch. He also knows — judging by the lingering bags under Will’s eyes — that Will is likely still suffering from these said nightmares. Mike knows he can help him through them. He can’t be sure if he can say the same for Dustin. He bets on Will being given guest privileges of the bed and acts on it.
“I’ll take the bed. My legs won’t fit on that couch anyway.”
Will rolls his eyes at this. He doesn’t think anyone sees him. Mike does, of course.
Dustin shrugs, “I’ll take the couch then, since Will was the only one meant to be coming anyway.”
Mike also catches Will’s sharp intake of breath at Dustin’s statement.
Will cannot appear sane and argue with either of their logic so it seems he’s resigned to accepting his fate. Four nights sharing a bed with Mike Wheeler. All he wanted was to catch up with his two good friends, Lucas and Max. Why does that have to come with added extras like ‘be forced to deal with the awkward tension between you and your best friend who you haven’t spoken to in months by sharing a bed with them’?
“Fine with me.” He says instead.
Lucas decidedly does not take Mike’s suitcase to the room.
“Will can show you the way.” He says, walking off towards his girlfriend who he feels urged to remove from the kitchen before she gets her hands on the utensils.
Mike hangs back a few more steps than necessary as he follows Will down the hall to the room. He can see a small leaf on the back of his head. He stops himself from reaching and removing it.
Now that he thinks back on it, it was strangely windy on his walk from where the taxi cab dropped him — about three streets over by his fault.
He wonders if Will had to walk here too and if that’s why nature has taken refuge in his hair. Did he take the train or taxi from the airport? Had they been there at the same time? Also the room is not the most spacious room he’s seen and the bed appears smaller than he imagined but it'll be fine.
“What side do you want?’ Will says bluntly, almost coldly, from the other side of the room.
It’ll be fine.
“Uh, I don’t mind, I’ll—just take the left I guess.”
“Perfect.”
“Great.”
“Cool.”
They stare at each other. This is going to be a long four nights.
“You’ve got a leaf in your hair by the way.”
“Really?” Will says, sounding suddenly self-conscious as he feels the back of his hair; his previous cold exterior melting for a moment.
The leaf drops from his hand onto the white quilt cover. It’s ironically in the shape of a heart.
“Are you kidding me? Did you plant that on me?”
“What? Why the hell would I do that?”
“Whatever—let’s just get ready for bed and go to sleep Mike. It’s been a long day and I cannot do this right now.”
Mike does not respond for a while, as if he’s thinking very hard on a correct response to Will’s honesty.
“Don’t worry Will, I’ll leaf you alone.”
“Oh my god.”
Despite everything, this situation — everything — Mike is still cracking bad jokes. Will doesn’t give Mike the satisfaction of making him laugh, only allowing himself a slight, very undetectable smile to the naked eye in return. What drowns out the normalcy of this interaction, the lingering nature of their past, easygoing friendship, is bitter tasting. Navigating their new dynamic is like the lights in the room are both turned off and clinically bright.
They go their separate way to get ready for bed. The leaf lies unmoving on the bed as the sink turns on for Will to brush his teeth and as Mike unzips his suitcase to get changed.
Once they are both ready for bed they sit side by side on top of the sheets, backs painfully straight against the headboard. Will wishes he had shut the window; the breeze blowing in has taken with it something he secretly wished to keep. It is also tickling his neck but he’s set on not being the first to move. Why won’t Mike move?
A small knock sounds on the door that is not quite shut, hanging an inch or two open as if that makes the space slightly less suffocating.
Lucas has come in to check on them. Like magnets repelling each other, they are sitting painfully far apart in bed, staring at the wall in front of them.
They both shift awkwardly now to stare at him instead.
“Right, so Max and I are heading to bed. Just wanted to check and make sure you guys were settled in. You both seem pretty comfy so I’ll just—“ he gestures with his thumb out to leave.
“Wait—Lucas,” it’s Will who speaks.
It makes him linger in the doorway a moment longer. He looks expectantly at Will.
“Goodnight.”
“Goodnight you two.”
He thinks he hears Mike mutter out a ‘Night’ on his way out.
Lucas shuts the door behind him, hoping to be able to keep the weird energy leaking out of that room trapped before it infects the rest of them. He sits on the couch where Max and Dustin appear to already be engaging in a hushed conversation. He can gauge it’s on relatively the same topic he’s currently concerned about.
“What the fuck is going on between them?” He asks, looking over in the direction of the shut, white door in the hallway.
“No clue, all I know is I’ve had Mike asking me about Will for like the past four months.” Dustin returns.
“You too?”
Max chips in now, “Last I heard they were catching up and then boom…any mention of Wheeler and Will completely shut off. Don’t get me wrong I was fine not talking about him…but it was fucking weird. No explanation—nothing.”
All of them ponder this for a moment, perhaps attempting to remember one of them mentioning something happening. Nothing comes to mind.
“Anyway—whatever it is we’re all agreeing it’s Mike who’s in the wrong right?”
Flashbacks of Mike — boyfriend of El Hopper — Wheeler seem to still haunt them all.
“Yup.” They say in unanimous support.
“So…now that we’ve discussed that…Dustin, anyone you ogling at Oglethorpe?”
They've shared beds smaller than this before. They had to share a bed smaller than this when Mike stayed with Will that last time. It shouldn’t be a problem…it wouldn’t be…had four months ago not happened.
Their distance apart, the empty phone line, the stories they held alone with no one else they wished to tell more than the other — all that is felt in the space between them now. Both hang on the edge of opposite sides of the mattress, turned on their side.
With the window shut now, the room is stuffy and stagnant. Heat collects beneath their sides and leaves at their hands which dangle in the open air. Will’s hand twitches. He lets the cold turn his fingers stiff and ignores the cramp forming in his arm. Mike retreats his own hand not a moment longer, his lingering childhood fear of the monster under the bed surfacing in the complete darkness of the room.
Mike’s breathing has evened out and it appears to Will that he finally has time to breathe himself. He wants so badly to turn his body around but he does not allow himself that indulgence.
He wraps his side of the quilt around himself tighter. Will dreams of being held — almost as much as he has nightmares. In these dreams he always looks down before he feels it; sees arms around his waist, but never the owner. He doesn’t have to in order to know who they belong to. How many times has he sketched those arms — those hands — and excused it as simply practicing drawing anatomy?
Part of him wishes for a nightmare tonight to ensure he won’t dream of that. Another part of him begs himself not to, focusing on the safe things in the room to ground his subconscious. The freshly washed sheets. The light of the bathroom softly filtering in through the gap under the door. Mike — well, a bit of a gray area in ‘safety’ there. He decides he does not want to have a nightmare tonight. He does not want or need the other’s sympathy.
As it turns out, Will is wrong. Neither of them can seem to sleep tonight.
“Hey Will?”
Will does not respond. But in his mind he can’t help but hear his hopeless voice ring ‘yes?’ and it only grows louder and louder inside his own head when Mike doesn’t continue straight away.
“I’m sorry.”
“For what?”
Mike’s intake of breath at the question seems like he thought he was the only one awake in this conversation.
“For everything.”
“You don’t have to be sorry for everything Mike.”
“Then for what?”
Will’s silence is an answer in itself.
“I should’ve called you. I should’ve reached out,” Mike pauses to catch his breath, or calm down, “I just—I made everything so fucking weird between us and I didn’t know how to fix it. I wanted to so badly—I just—I didn’t know how to fix it this time.”
“Mike. It wasn't all on you. You have to know that. I shouldn’t have—“
“You did nothing wrong Will.”
The statement doesn’t leave much space for argument. They lay in silence for a long time then.
It’s only when he feels a slight movement in the mattress beside him, between him and Will, that he knows Will is still awake. He turns now, facing the boy beside him and looks down at what he can only vaguely see through his widened pupils.
A hand — Will’s hand — is clenched shut in a fist with the exception of a pinky finger.
He’s asking for a promise without as much as even saying so. Mike wonders what it could be. How Will can still trust him after everything — glad Will still has it within him to trust him.
“Promise me.”
“Anything.”
“Promise me we won’t go this long without talking again.”
When their pinkies touch it’s nothing like their awkward handshake from earlier tonight. Their fingers curling around each other, slotting together like a perfect fit. It’s entirely different from a short, forced exchange of sweaty palms.
Will reaches his thumb to touch Mike’s. He’s always had that superstition — ever since they were kids. The childish paranoia still here after all this time seems to ease the tension between them both. Despite everything, they are still them. They will always know each other at their cores despite periods of not sharing a single word.
“I promise you Will Byers, to never go this long without speaking to you ever again. No matter the circumstances.”
“I promise too, Michael Wheeler.”
“Come on, my full name?”
“Yes, Michael, this is serious business we are talking about here.”
“Whatever you say William.”
“Idiot,” but it’s said with a fondness that challenges Max’s own insulting of Lucas, “let’s just sleep now. I was not kidding earlier—I’m fucking wrecked.”
“Me too,” he yawns, “Goodnight Will.”
“Night Mike.”
“Is that Dustin fucking snoring?”
“Huh? Think so.”
“Far out, you don’t know how I’m grateful it’s you in bed with me and not him.”
A soft pink paints Will’s neck and ears — he is lucky for the dark.
“Go to sleep Mike.”
“I’m trying to.” He says rolling to his other side in a huff, consequently moving closer to the other boy's side. His outstretched hand that still lays between them; a taunting proximity to Will’s own body.
The gap is being bridged, the lines are already blurring. Will predicts he’ll likely wake with a headache if he thinks too hard about the things Mike Wheeler says.
Sleep would be a single mercy for him tonight. With Mike next to him, he isn’t sure if he’ll ever get it.