Chapter Text
Mike Wheeler has to die.
That’s the only thought Will can think about right now, and every brief interaction the two have only further cements this truth. He thinks back to the boy he once knew– to the one that asked him to be friends on the swingset, the one that ditched Trick-or-Treating just to make sure he was okay, the one who said they’d go crazy together.
Whoever is standing in front of him is not that boy.
The boy standing in front of him is an asshole, and that’s all there is to it. There’s nothing interesting about him, no layers to his personality or background or trauma, there’s nothing there. Talking to a brick wall would probably be more riveting than even looking at Mike.
Even now, as Will holds a machine gun that he made the same way Mike knew how to make a bomb, there’s nothing behind his eyes. No care, no fear, nothing. Good lord, it’s so bad. It’s so, so bad. So he has to die.
“Say something meaningful,” Will asks, a final plea to bring back the Mike Wheeler he’s pinned over for five seasons straight for no goddamn reason, “something that’ll change my mind about all of this. To prove you’re not just some– some dickhead.”
Mike Wheeler, as he has anytime Will has gone through something this volume, says and does nothing.
Will unloads every single chamber into the thing that he once called his best friend, hardly even flinching as blood and guts and gore splatter the pavement. Mike’s face, as it always is, remains stagnant, because that boy can’t emote to literally save his fucking life.
Even when his corpse is nothing more than a pile of blood on the ground, he shoots it a couple more times, just to make sure. His chest heaves, rising up and down in sporadic breaths, but despite the general disarray and fact he’s covered in the remnants of Michael Wheeler, he feels nothing but relief.
Thank fucking God.
Suddenly, there’s a hand on his back. He turns around to see Jane staring at him, a smile on her face.
“You did the right thing,” she says, having more emotion on her face now than she ever did in any scene with Mike this season, “he had to go. This is the best ending.”
Will turns back to the blood on the ground, feeling nothing. “Yeah. I mean, I’ve done Stranger Things–”
“WILL!”
The boy in question doesn’t even have time to react before there’s someone barreling into his side, wrapping him in a tight hug. He hears Jane gasp in shock besides him, and as he feels a familiar rush of warmth, his body stiffens.
No fucking way.
“Will, oh my god, oh my god,” says Mike Wheeler, alive and not a red stain on the ground, “oh my god, Will, you’re not gonna believe this–”
“Mike?!” He rips himself out of the hold to see Mike’s face– his actual face, that’s moving and emoting and crying. “Mike, what– is that– you’re not–”
“I was locked in a basement for years, Will, years!” Will’s shoulders are shaken for emphasis, and now that he’s actually looking at him Jesus Christ this guy was probably fed the same amount of times the Duffer Brothers gave him any kind of happiness. “These– these guys, they came and they– and they cloned me, made me into some fucking robot–”
“That wasn’t you?” Jane’s eyes are wide as she also takes in Mike, a finger pointing to the puddle of blood on the ground.
“No!” Mike’s voice peaks with panic and relief, a complex mix of feelings that’s so foreign to hear coming out of his mouth. “No, whatever– whoever that was, that’s not–”
He turns around to where Jane was pointing, and visibly buffers at the gore on the ground.
“Oh. You killed him?”
Will lifts his weapon up. “I made a machine gun and blasted that fucker.”
“It was for the greater good,” Jane nods.
Mike squints at Will. “How the hell do you know how to make a machine gun?”
Will rolls his eyes. “The same way you knew how to make a bomb.”
“I didn’t make the bomb,” Mike corrects, “my fucked up and evil clone did.”
“Who even did that?” Jane’s eyes flick between the blood on the ground and Mike’s face. “Who would do such a thing?”
Mike throws his hands up. “I have no idea! They were brothers, I think, and they kept saying a faggot like me couldn’t be happy so long as I was a “self-insert”, whatever that means.”
Will feels something in his release, and his shoulders go slack as he drops his weapon. “They called you a faggot?”
Mike nods. “Yeah. Really weird, since they both said it, and I think only one of them is gay?”
Will looks to the side. “Is it, uh… True?”
Mike blinks, and then stiffens. “What does it matter?”
“Oh, you missed it.” Jane puts a hand on Will’s shoulder. “Will came out to the entire town. Actually, it was more like he begged everyone to still think he was normal despite liking boys.”
Some of Mike’s tension releases and he tilts his head. “Seriously?”
Will hides his face in his hands, groaning. He feels the pain of twelve hours he never spent filming that scene weigh on his back. “I don’t know why I did that, did Murray really need to know I’m gay?”
“You didn’t even say you were gay,” Jane adds, “you just said you didn’t like girls.”
“Which is something the evil you told me,” Will spreads apart his fingers, glancing at Mike through the cracks.
Mike’s brows furrow. “I told you you didn’t like girls?”
“You told me it’s not your fault I didn’t like girls,” Will amends, trailing off before he can say something stupid like and you were wrong.
Mike looks genuinely disgusted. “Why would I say that? That’s the same stuff those bullies at school told you.”
Will feels invigorated. “That’s what I thought!”
“I think we all thought you were battling with some kind of homophobia,” Jane removes her hand from Will’s shoulder to cross her arms, gnawing on her cheek, “and you kept ignoring him as a way to cope with it.”
Will turns to her, baffled. “How the hell do you know what any of that means?”
“The Party’s talked about it before.” Jane nods. “Max called you “so repressed his queerness is infecting Hell.””
“But that was evil me,” Mike says, a foreign emotion to his tone (which is also something to get used to– complex feelings from Mike Wheeler?), “not me me.”
Jane shakes her head. “No, we talked about real you too, the one present in Season One and Season Two.”
Mike squints at her. “Seasons One and Two?”
“Don’t worry about it.”
“Mike Wheeler.” The question burning in the back of Will’s throat is brought to the forefront, and he grips Mike’s shoulders with something akin to desperation. “Are you a faggot?”
Mike’s mouth opens and closes, aborted words stammering out as he visibly struggles to hold eye contact. He swallows once, twice.
“Ye–”
The word can’t even properly leave Mike’s mouth before Will meets it with his own, clashing their faces together in a kiss. It’s messy and desperate and probably not nice to look at, but if it isn’t better than whatever the hell those brothers were cooking up in that writing room while high on so many drugs.
“Wow.” Jane smiles, resisting the spirit of Millie Bobby Brown telling her to kill the two boys in front of her. “I support my faggot brother and his faggot boyfriend.”
“You can totally say that, Eleven aka Jane Ives aka Jane Hopper,” Joe Keery says, who’s also in this episode, “and I think this calls for a song.”
And as the bodies of the Duffer Brothers are used as fireworks in the distance, Joe sings his iconic song, and Will thinks things have gone from strange… to alright.
Just one more tear to cry
One teardrop from my eye
You better save it for
The middle of the night
When things aren't black and white
Enter, Troubadour
"Remember twenty-four?"
And when I'm back in Chicago, I feel it
Another version of me, I was in it
I wave goodbye to the end of beginning
This song has started now
And you're just finding out
Now isn't that a laugh?
A major sacrifice
But clueless at the time
Enter, Caroline
"Just trust me, you'll be fine"
And when I'm back in Chicago, I feel it
Another version of me, I was in it
I wave goodbye to the end of beginning
(Goodbye, goodbye, goodbye, goodbye)
You take the man out of the city, not the city out the man
You take the man out of the city, not the city out the man
You take the man out of the city, not the city out the man
You take the man out of the-
And when I'm back in Chicago, I feel it
Another version of me, I was in it
Oh, I wave goodbye to the end of beginning
(Goodbye, goodbye)