Work Text:
This is how it happens.
Will, thrumming with the thrill of doing something illicit, arrives home from the arcade, turns on his music, and, in his haste to open his bedroom window, closes—but forgets to lock—his bedroom door behind him.
The boy—named Avery, Will learned when they met last week—only half-makes it through the window, and Will gets his hands under Avery’s armpits and pulls him the rest of the way through.
“I think your window ledge cut my chest,” Avery whispers, but with a twinkle in his eye and a smile quirking at the corner of his mouth.
That little smirk gives Will a boost of courage. “Want me to kiss it better?” he whispers back. He looks into Avery’s intense green eyes, hoping he looks seductive and interesting rather than how he feels, which is half-exhilarated and half-terrified.
Avery tangles his fingers in Will’s flannel shirt and pulls him closer, until they are flush, chest to chest. With a little satisfaction, Will notices that he is taller by a couple of inches, and he revels in leaning down those inches to kiss Avery’s freckled, smirking mouth.
Avery pushes Will gently until his back hits the wall. His mouth is warm and smoky, the remains of the cigarette they shared outside the arcade only an hour earlier. His lips make a messy trail down to Will’s neck, and Will threads his fingers through Avery’s short red hair, hissing a little as Avery sets his teeth lightly against his collarbone.
And that is when Will opens his eyes and catches Mike standing, openmouthed and horrified, in the doorway.
Mike never knocked on Will’s bedroom door when he came over, is the thing. Will had never knocked on his either, or Lucas’s or Dustin’s; that’s just how they had all been since they were kids, trampling in and out of each other’s lives with little thought for privacy or space. Mike’s basement was as much Will’s as anything in his own house. Will knew the whorls in the carpet and the shape of the masking tape holding up Mike’s movie posters as well as he knew the same details in his own bedroom. He knows Mike thought nothing of it to run down the short hallway as he had done a hundred, a thousand times before and open the bedroom door as though it were his own. Everything that happens after this moment, Will thinks to himself as he and his childhood best friend stare at each other in mutual horror, is entirely his own fault.
Will is only dimly aware of Avery letting go of him like a hot potato and scrambling out the still-open window. He feels thirteen again, tiny and fragile, doused in cold, paralyzing dread, staring at his worst nightmare as it looms and descends on him.
“Your... You, uh...” Mike swallows and visibly pulls himself together. “You weren’t answering your walkie, so...”
“I’m sorry,” Will says automatically, as though his entire world hasn’t just come crashing down around his ears. He can’t believe he was so stupid; he was supposed to leave his walkie on at all times, now, to keep abreast of updates on the search for One. “Sorry, I forgot, I’m sorry.” He stares unseeingly at the carpet, unable to bear the disgust he’s sure is on Mike’s face. He’d said once that if he had to lose Mike, he’d like to do it quick, like ripping off a band-aid, and he supposes this is the rip. It doesn’t feel quick, though. It feels as though his skin is being slowly flayed, inch by agonizing inch. Two tears escape and slip down his cheeks as he closes his eyes.
“Will...” Mike’s voice is soft, but Will can’t take any comfort in it.
“Please don’t tell anyone,” Will says miserably. He blinks up at the ceiling, trying to clear away the tears. “You don’t ever have to talk to me again, I’ll leave you alone forever but just please don’t tell anyone that I’m. That I’m.” He can’t say it. “Please.”
“No, I won’t, but... But—”
“Did something happen?” Will interrupts before Mike can stutter through anything else. With titanic effort, he drags in a steadying breath and wipes his face. One still looms, and the dissolution of one of his most important friendships will just have to wait.
“What?”
“You were trying to call, over the walkie. Did something happen? El? Did she find One?”
“Oh. No, nothing like that, I just... We were all going to go see Max, if you... Do you wanna come?”
Will comes so close to just crawling out the window and heading for the woods, running after Avery and hiding with him, but it’s Max, and he finds himself nodding stiffly instead.
—
They tell Max’s unmoving body about the looming apocalypse—it’s a more gradual death than expected, the town bleeding out agonizingly slowly as though gutshot, which essentially means that they still have to go to school, but the military has cordoned off the space around the cracks so everyone takes the long way around them, and the air is filled with coughing when the ash storms come, and rumor has it the government is worried that the illness caused by the Upside Down might be contagious after all so they’re considering a county-wide quarantine. They’re rationing water now, and taking blood tests every other week, and El is working overtime to keep the cracks contained to Roane County, but she’s slowly losing ground and over half the population of Hawkins is just gone, fleeing down the highway to find somewhere else to hunker down and attempt to outlast the end of the world. There are other rumors circulating, too, that the government is going to cut their losses and kick everyone out, claim eminent domain over the town and evacuate it.
Then El takes Max’s hand and closes her eyes, and everyone falls quiet. Will usually doodles while he’s here; Max on her skateboard, Max happy and laughing, Max awake and alive with the party. Lucas always tapes them to the wall, wherever he can find a space; they’re covered in get well soon cards, bright artwork and letters that Max might never see. But Will can’t concentrate today, doesn’t even bother pulling his sketchbook out. He just stands stiff, arms wrapped tight around himself, staring critically at the last drawing he’d made, Max in mid-air, performing what she called a kickflip. He’d gotten the angle of her elbow wrong, he notices with distaste, and he’d drawn the lenses of her red sunglasses as two slightly different sizes. He wants to rip it down. He wants to scream, to shatter the awful silence El needs to search for Max in the void, to make everyone feel as raw and exposed as he feels.
Will begs off early, can’t meet anyone’s eye on the way out. He thinks he sees Mike out of the corner of his eye turning toward him to say something, but Will bolts through the door before he can. It’s a long bike ride home, and his walkie doesn’t crackle once.
—
He tries calling Avery when he gets home, but after eight rings it goes to the answering machine. Will hangs up without leaving a message. He sits down at the kitchen table, then walks to the front window and looks out. Nothing moves outside; it’s the same dull, late fall colors against the sick gray sky. Sudden helpless rage fires in Will’s chest and he wants to break something; he wants a storm from the Upside Down to whip up and destroy everything, for the end to finally arrive all at once, just to get it the hell over with. He paces to his bedroom and immediately regrets it. All he can see is the horrified look on Mike’s face, directed at him. Will’s best friend, his first love, disgusted by him. Frightened of him.
He turns to his easel; attached to it is a painting he started a few days ago, a colorful sunset against a mountainous backdrop. He looks at it and hates it for its cheeriness, for the hope it represents. That rage ignites in his chest again and, almost without thinking, he grabs a brush, squirts some black paint onto the bristles, and splatters his sunset with it, creating a satisfying ugly streak across the middle.
It’s a free-for-all after that. He splashes the painting over and over, with every dark color he can grab, droplets flying everywhere, hitting his face, his arms, his shirt. The painting morphs from an orange-hued sunset into a clumpy, streaky, almost violent mess, and it feels appropriate. An art teacher once told him that you put your soul into every piece of art you make, and here is his soul for the world to see: dark and dirty, everything good blotted out by everything bad.
It’s gotten dark outside and he’s out of breath, face streaked with paint by the time the canvas is completely covered. He stands back, chest heaving.
Suddenly his walkie crackles to life. “Will, do you copy? Over.”
Mike’s voice is like a bolt of lightning to Will’s system. His breath catches and he holds it for a moment. Listening. Maybe it’s One trying to mess with him. He leaves the walkie untouched on the desk and begins to clean up the paint droplets he’s left all over his room.
“Will, do you copy? Over.” A little more impatient this time; Mike never had the same patience that Dustin had when calling for people over the walkies. For Mike, it was Answer Now Or Die.
“Will, I know you’re there, pick up.”
Will drops the paper towels and lets his hand hover over the walkie, almost afraid to touch it, as though Mike will feel it.
“I’m not going to stop till you answer,” Mike warns, and he sounds so young and petulant that it makes Will smile a little. He takes a deep breath and finally picks up the walkie.
“Yeah, I’m here. Over.”
Silence. Will raises his eyebrows and waits for a long minute. Hits the talk button again. “Hello?”
Mike’s voice comes through again. “Hi.”
Will is totally baffled now. “…Hi?”
Another long pause, long enough that Will starts to look over his walkie for anything that might be wrong with it.
But then Mike’s voice crackles again, sounding as though he’s made a decision. “Meet me at the elementary school playground in half an hour, over,” he commands in his bossy Paladin voice, brooking no argument.
“Mike, it’s past curfew, over.”
“So what? The school’s nowhere near the cracks, no one ever goes there at night. Half an hour. Over and out.”
Will stares at his walkie for a long, long minute, a million possibilities screaming through his head. Then he throws the walkie into his backpack, walks out, gets on his bike, and starts pedaling.
—
It takes him almost forty-five minutes to get to the school. The playground looks haunted, lit with flickering dim floodlights, overgrown and rusty. Will’s eyes are drawn naturally to the swingset, his favorite place to play during recess when he was little, and there’s Mike, sitting hunched over on one of the swings, twisting and untwisting the chains.
He doesn’t look up as Will sits in the swing next to him, but he doesn’t recoil or move away either; he appears to be deep in thought, staring at the gravel ditches beneath their feet as though the pebbles will give him answers. He’s so tall now that he could almost touch the ground with his fingers without leaning over too far. Will lets his eyes wander over the playground where they spent so much time in their younger years; there was the hill where they had fought imaginary mountain trolls, there was the slide that Will had thought was so big and scary until Mike showed him how fun it was, there was the fort they’d commandeered and pretended was a pirate ship. The monkey bars they’d climbed and conquered, the jungle gym where Lucas fell and knocked out a tooth.
“Does anyone else know?” Mike finally asks.
For starter questions, it’s fairly harmless. “About me, you mean.” Will shakes his head. “I think... I think Jonathan might,” he admits quietly. “But we haven’t...talked about it, not really.”
“Not even El?”
“No. I’m not even sure she...” Will swallows, forces himself to say it: “I’m not sure she even knows what a queer is.”
Mike sucks in a quick breath, shocked at the word. Will’s face burns with the shame of it. “Don’t say that,” Mike says sharply.
Miserable tears sting at Will’s eyes again and he blinks them back; he knows he’s being self-pitying and hates himself even more for not being able to stop. “Sorry.”
“How long…”
Will waits for him to finish the question, but nothing comes. “How long… have I known?” Will guesses, and Mike nods at the ground. “I don’t know,” he answers honestly. “A while.”
Another long silence. The swing chains creak in the low wind. Mike looks up at him. “What did you—hey,” his voice changes, suddenly alarmed, almost panicked, and to Will’s utter surprise, Mike reaches up and brushes Will’s cheekbone with his fingers, almost as though feeling for a wound. “Are you okay? Is that blood? Did that guy hurt you?”
“What? No!” Will touches the spot where Mike’s fingers are still lingering and scratches the dried paint off, displaying the tiny flakes on the tips of his fingers. Mike leans down to see in the dim, washed-out floodlight. “It’s just paint. It’s not even red, see, it’s blue.”
Mike lets out a gusty breath. “Jesus, for a second it looked like—I thought—”
“No,” Will says firmly. “Avery doesn’t—he wouldn’t do that.” Actually, Will has no idea what Avery would or would not do. They’d only met a week prior, and while Will was drawn to his twinkly eyes and charm, he seemed to have a dark streak, too, something shifty in his gait, like he was waiting for everyone to turn around so he could pick a lock or steal something. Mike seems satisfied by Will’s answer, though, nodding at the ground. Not looking at Will, again, perhaps ashamed of his overreaction. But there’s a familiar, sweet warmth taking root in Will’s chest—the feeling of being looked after by Mike Wheeler. He hated other people fussing over him, but with Mike, it never felt stifling or strange, just lovely.
His heart aches a little as he watches Mike, but it’s more a memory of pain. He’s grown up a lot in the past six months, his confusing crush on Mike fading mercifully into the background, something Mike never needs to know about.
“Avery?” Mike asks the gravel.
“Hm?”
“That’s his name?”
“Yes.”
Mike sits with that, contemplates it. He appears to be turning something over and over in his head, and Will lets him be for the moment, pushing the ground gently with his feet so that he starts to swing back and forth a little. He hooks his arms around the chains and tips his head back. They haven’t been able to see the stars in Hawkins since the gates opened, and tonight is no different; a flat, ashy black sky stares back at Will, almost taunting. He sighs and looks down at the ground again. His foot starts jittering, bouncing his knee up and down in a nervous rhythm.
“What did you mean?” Mike finally asks, his voice low and hurt. “When you said I didn’t have to talk to you ever again?”
The previous summer, Will and Dustin and Lucas had been spending the night at Mike’s house, all of them eating dinner in the living room. They’d had roast beef and corn on the cob, Will remembers; he can still recall the feeling of the corn stuck in his teeth as Mike’s father read out a headline from People magazine to Mrs. Wheeler about Rock Hudson, some old timey celebrity that Will had never heard of. He doesn’t remember the wording of the headline, only the gist of it—Rock Hudson, whoever he was, was gay and dying of AIDS. But he does remember the dismissive, quiet disgust in Mr. Wheeler’s voice as he muttered, almost to himself, “That’s what he deserves, if you ask me.”
Will had frozen, terror flooding his system like ice water, visceral and tangible, and with the flood came a backwash of utter despair. It was not unlike his experiences with the Mind Flayer, except there was no ash in the air here and the lights were steady and bright; he was supposed to be safe here. It was like the first time Lonnie had slapped him—the sudden realization that he had wandered, whistling and oblivious, into a deadly trap and didn’t notice the danger until it attacked. Will glanced around briefly at his friends; Lucas was in the kitchen getting more roast beef so he hadn’t heard, and Dustin was scowling at Mr. Wheeler, but Mike, always the first to be annoyed by his father’s pronouncements and never afraid to show it, kept eating as though the words were nothing more than a reading of tomorrow’s weather.
It was stupid, Will knew, and totally unfair to pin any of Mr. Wheeler’s awful words on Mike. He might not have even heard what his father said; the tv had been on, Holly had been crying, Mike was distracted by his food. Still, the possibility that Mike, or anyone Will loved, would agree—it had scared Will terribly, and he locked up that part of himself tight, never quite feeling as safe as he used to under the Wheeler’s roof. Or he thought he had locked it up, anyway.
“Nothing,” Will says thickly around the lump in his throat. He is so tired of crying. “Just, if. You know. You don’t want to, then I... I get it.”
“Will.”
Suddenly, Mike twists toward him and reaches out, lightning fast, grabbing both of Will’s shoulders, turning Will to face him. Will stares, stiff and shocked, as Mike blinks hard, his eyes sweeping the ground, as though physically searching the gravel for the words he wants to say. Finally he finds them.
“Do you remember when the Mind Flayer—when One had you?”
That is not what Will was expecting at all. Mike shudders at the memory. His grip on Will’s arms is almost painful. “We tied you up in the shed and covered everything up so he wouldn’t know where he was. And we... We told you stories. About yourself. So that you would come back to us.”
They’ve never, ever spoken of that night, but Will remembers every second of it. The unspeakable horror of being trapped in his mind, able to see and hear but not communicate. The lights burning his skin, people with maddeningly familiar faces standing at the fringes of the tiny space; his mother and brother talking to him, telling him about his birthday and Castle Byers, calming Will inside his head enough to secretly slip all his control into one hand and start tapping out a message in Morse code. And he remembers Mike, ghostly pale skin illuminated, tears sliding down his beautiful face. Talking about the day they met.
“I said that...” Mike’s voice cracks, and he swallows, blinking fast. “I said that asking you to be my friend was the best thing I’d ever done. And it still is, okay?” He shakes Will’s shoulders once, gentle, always so gentle with Will. “It still is.”
The dam finally breaks. Will exhales in one big rush and then he is sobbing full-on, relief surging so strongly he feels faint with it. A wordless whimper of protest escapes Mike’s throat and he wraps his arms around Will’s shoulders, hugging him tightly. The rusty swings creak and rattle as they hold each other, and the darkness, for once, is kind.
When they pull away, Mike turns his head and tries to surreptitiously wipe his eyes on his sleeve. Will lets out a wet little laugh and lightly hits Mike’s knee with the back of his hand. “Come on, there’s only room for one crybaby in this party,” he croaks, wiping his own cheeks clean. Mike offers a shaky smile, but he doesn’t laugh along like Will expected. There’s a look on his face, something sad or guilty in his dark eyes that Will doesn’t understand.
“Hey,” Will says softly. “Thank you.”
“For what?”
“For not... Freaking out, or hating me, or whatever. And for knocking some sense into me.” A long silence settles between them, and Will rests his head on the swing chain for a moment. Then he looks down at his hands, catches a glimpse of his watch in the light and his heart sinks. “Ah, crap. I should get back. Mom will be home soon.” Hands on his back like an old man, he stands and stretches stiff limbs. “Working at the food bank tomorrow?”
Mike nods, but something is still off—he won’t look up at Will, and he keeps twisting his hands together and then untwisting. Will waits patiently, but whatever is stewing in Mike’s mind, he doesn’t seem ready to share. “Okay,” Will says quietly. “See you tomorrow.”
Will only takes a couple of steps before Mike stands up in a flurry of movement, calling, “Wait.”
Will turns back to look at his dearest friend, and he looks so heartbroken that Will’s chest tightens. “Yeah?”
“I’m—” Mike wraps his arms around himself, as though feeling a cold wind. “I’m sorry. For making you think you couldn’t tell me.”
Will’s heart hurts. How vastly he’d underestimated Mike in his own self-pity and fear, how severely he’d misjudged his friend. “It’s not your fault, Mike,” he says. “It’s just… it’s a scary thing. No matter who, you know?”
Mike nods. “I know. Just…” He kicks the ground, awkward. “You’re my best friend,” he finishes, a little helplessly, finally meeting Will’s gaze. “Nothing changes that. Ever.”
Something settles inside Will; for what seems like the first time all day, he feels able to take a full breath. “You’re mine, too,” Will says, soft.
Finally, Mike smiles at him, and it’s a little like the sun coming out.