Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

A high school cafeteria had never been quieter the day before Christmas break. There wasn’t much to celebrate as of late, Mike supposed; your town splitting right down the middle did that to you. 

Most kids at Hawkins High wouldn’t be getting presents this year. They wouldn’t be going somewhere new or visiting grandparents, or touring colleges. They’d be here, buzzing with anticipation of a new apocalypse. The thing about living through the end of the world—the thing nobody told you—was that it was very boring. Waiting to die was dull.

Most kids at Hawkins High knew someone who had died, or knew someone who knew someone. A few of the more affluent families had packed up and abandoned ship, which left those who didn’t have the means or energy to run away. And so, their kids murmured at lunchtime, the canteen a sea of sunken faces. It smelled like tuna, like war and metal. Lucas and Dustin had both barely said a word the whole hour. 

Will, for his part, was smiling. It didn’t reach his eyes, though. Mike hadn’t seen Will truly smile since before he was taken. Maybe he had. Just, Mike didn’t know how to make Will laugh anymore. 

“...didn’t even study. Just sheer intuition.” 

He was in desperate need of a haircut, the more unruly strands falling in front of his eyes, likely obstructing his vision. Maybe Will liked it, though. He’d had the same uniform trim his entire life. All straight lines, smooth and catching the light. This version of Will looked a bit more roughed up. His mom would probably fix that within the week, put a bowl over his head, and tell him to stay still. 

Will elbowed Mike’s side. “What about you?”

“Eighty-nine.” Mike shrugged. “Could have been worse, I guess. I still keep my A, just not getting into A-plus range.”

“Aww, don’t pretend you’re not mad Will beat you,” Lucas said, and the fact that he was actually speaking, teasing, made Mike’s subpar grade completely okay. He’d’ve taken a 0 in the class if it meant Dustin would tease him, too. But he sort of just huffed and picked at his sandwich. 

“If it were English, sure,” Mike said. “That’d be like me wiping the floor with Will in ceramics or something.”

“That would never happen. You especially suck at pottery,” Will pointed out. “You made that wonky bowl and then told your mom it was a jewelry holder, remember?”

“It wasn’t that wonky. And I painted a heart on the back—it was for Mother’s Day.”

Lucas raised his eyebrows. He had the most expressive eyebrows Mike had ever seen, which meant he only talked if what he wanted to convey couldn’t be expressed silently and with intense facial judgment. 

“It had a nub right in the center of the base, dude,” said Lucas, because apparently facial judgment wasn’t enough. “You’d hit your spoon on that shit and crack it and then bam—breakfast ruined. Your milk tastes like nub. Nub milk.”

“What fucking spoons are you using that they crack that easily?”

“Right,” Will grinned at Lucas as if Mike weren’t right there. “The spoon would be way stronger than Mike’s jewelry holder. You’d crack the bowl.”

“Man, fuck you guys,” Mike said, but he was laughing, so how could he be upset? “I’m just not good with my h—.” He stuttered. Too late—Lucas caught it. 

“Ooh, you not good with your hands, Wheeler?” Lucas poked Mike’s arm, and now two of his friends were touching him, joking with him; and even though they were the only lively group in the cafeteria and he should probably feel self-conscious about the volume of their happiness, he couldn’t help but revel in their company. Even Dustin was looking up now, still not talking, but reverently engaged. “Poor El.”

“Nah, not ‘poor El,’” Mike said. “Not anymore anyway.”

“What?” Lucas asked. His fork clattered to the table. 

“What did you do to my sister?” Will asked. He was having trouble looking Mike in the eye, and Mike was a bit surprised they hadn’t talked about it, but he supposed El was rarely home these days, and even when she was, they weren’t allowed to make frequent contact. 

“It was mutual,” Mike promised. “Really. It hasn’t been, like, romantic for a while. She’s too busy saving the world to have a boyfriend.”

“Yeah, I guess she’s got better things to care about.”

Mike hit Lucas. He didn’t care much where his backhand ended up. Just that it hurt a little. 

Lucas was really laughing now, sucking in air between wheezes. He was getting a few dirty looks from a group of girls behind them. Will pointed it out to Mike—a small glance, a slight curve of his lips: Mike and Will had always been able to speak without words—and Mike joined in. Maybe their laughter would infect Hawkins High, and then all of Hawkins, and things would go back to normal again. Maybe Mike could make his friends smile, really smile.

Dustin cleared his throat. “I’m sorry to hear that, Mike.”

Three pairs of eyes fell on Dustin. His words were raw, vocal cords rusty from hours of idling. Mike’s lips parted, and he exhaled, searching for the right thing to say. “Thanks, Dustin.” He turned to the other boys; he didn’t want to scare Dustin into silence again. “Really, though, I’m okay. We ended things on good terms, and it wouldn’t have been fair to keep dating her when I’m not sure that I… see a future together.”

Nowadays, it was difficult to see a future at all. But with El, Mike couldn’t picture a lifetime of lazy days and making out during commercial breaks, and El deserved to be with someone who loved her with their entire being, whose heart beat for her, whose soul cried out for her. That’s what love was supposed to be. That’s how all of the best books described it. This life-altering, world-shattering thing. And Mike would know love when he saw it—he’d seen worlds shatter before. 

“Damn, Mike, you’re saying all that to El’s brother, you know.” Lucas finished off his pudding cup and tossed his tray aside. “He could narc on you.”

“Will wouldn’t do that,” Mike said at the same time Will promised, “I won’t narc on him.” They shared another look, and Mike felt warm despite the chill seeping in through Hawkins High’s thin walls. The heater was shit, too. It really only worked in the gym, the one place you probably wanted to be a little cold. 

The bell rang. Students filed out of the cafeteria as if on autopilot. Mike almost missed when he was scared of this place. When the worst things about it were the people who could hurt him. At least back then, he knew it was coming, and he knew how to fight back. 

Mike clapped Will on the shoulder. He turned to Dustin and Lucas, the latter of whom was stacking their trays and balancing them with one hand. They teetered a little, and he gave up and steadied them with a firm grip. “Will and I were gonna hang around in our backyard after school. Throw ice at each other. Freeze to death.”

“Our backyard,” Will laughed. 

It was quite a funny concept, the two of them living together. Mike used to beg his mom to let Will sleep over on school nights, and now, he was right downstairs, or just in the kitchen, or in the next room over. Sometimes, they got really crazy and sat in the same room. They were friends, or whatever. 

“That’s a tempting offer,” Lucas drawled, but he turned to Dustin anyway, searching his eyes for an answer. If Dustin went, Lucas would come, too. 

“Wanna join?” Mike asked. His voice was embarrassingly high and youthfully hopeful, and his fingers—still balanced on Will’s shoulder—tapped in the taut limbo of an unanswered proposition. 

Dustin sucked in his cheeks and exhaled. “Yeah, sure. I’ll come over. Give me until four, though, okay?”

Mike’s cheeks hurt from smiling. The world had ended, but sometimes, living in the aftermath wasn’t so bad. Sometimes, it wasn’t all that different at all. 

“Okay,” Mike said. 

Gray skies blanketed Hawkins in an early evening chill; the fairy lights carefully strung from Mike’s roof lit up delicate snow flurries that kissed the tip of his nose and melted on his tongue. 

It was five o’clock. Lucas wore Mike’s old knit cap, Dustin donned Mike’s second-favorite jacket, and Will was dwarfed by Mike’s chunky scarf, which he swore wasn’t itchy but the inflamed red scratch marks down his neck said otherwise. The air nipped at Mike’s skin, and he couldn’t have cared less. His friends were all here, together for once, and Mike wanted to build a glass dome around the four of them, a snow globe untarnished by the Upside Down, just his house and his Christmas lights and his favorite people. 

“INCOMING!” 

A giant snowball smacked Mike in the face. He turned just in time to see the back of Will’s head ducking behind Holly’s old playhouse. 

“Oh, you’re dead, Byers!” Mike hollered, trying his best to sound menacing. “Dead and buried!”

“Be careful what you wish for,” Will called back, sing-song. “Or it just might come true.”

He’d been able to make a few more jokes about his trauma lately—the word sounded severe, but that was what it was. Mike was grateful. The second they took things too seriously, the day was shot. They’d get stuck in their rigid, cyclical world of what-if. 

Across the yard, Lucas and Dustin were building a snow barricade. It was several feet tall now. A fortress. 

“Hey! You can’t team up!” Mike protested. “That’s not fair.”

“Team with Will,” Lucas shouted uncaringly, launching a few pre-made snowballs in the direction of Holly’s playhouse. Mike ducked behind it and found Will there, curled up along the wall. His cheeks were flushed pink—the cold doctored his complexion and drew blood. Up close, Mike could see a few snowflakes perched on Will’s eyelashes. His eyes were closed, and he was breathing a bit too quickly. 

“Hey,” Mike said, his voice softening. He couldn’t let his opponents know his partner was vulnerable, after all.  “You okay?”

Will nodded. “Yeah, yeah, I’m fine. It’s just, the cold.”

Mike sputtered. “Oh, shit. Is it what I said? I was just talking smack. I didn’t really mean it—you know that. You’re the opposite of dead and buried.”

“Mike,” Will laughed. 

“You’re alive and on top, my friend.”

“On top is not the opposite of buried.”

“Alive and… on higher ground.”

“Shut up.”

“Looking down on us all. Mocking us.”

Will puffed out a quiet laugh, and Mike could see it in the still, cold air. Mike hated the cold, but he loved it when he could see his own heat. It was a reminder of the living moment. Grounding, almost. He imagined, on his next inhale, that Mike was breathing in what Will had just expelled, that they were recycling the same two breaths over and over.

“You’re an idiot,” Will said.

Mike wrapped his arm around Will’s shoulder. “You feeling good? Because I’d like to team up against the Tweedles over there, but I can’t effectively start guerrilla warfare without you.”

“Which one’s Dee and which one’s Dumb?”

“Let’s ask them. Might cause a civil dispute.” Mike squeezed Will’s shoulder and then let go, and the two packed snow tight until they both had balls of ice. Mike looked at Will, and Will at Mike—they nodded in unison and launched their ammo over Holly’s playhouse. Dustin yelped. 

“Jesus fuck, what did you put in those?” Dustin yelled. 

“Burning hatred!” said Mike.

“Victory,” called Will. Mike chuckled into his hand. Will’s brow furrowed. “What?” 

“You’re so cheesy,” he said, pinching his top lip between his fingers to keep from biting the dead skin. Will stuck his tongue out. 

“Bite me.”

“Cannibalism is considered taboo, even in war.”

A barrage of snowballs splatted on the playhouse roof. Mike threw his arm across Will’s chest and ducked down. “Stay low. They’re pre-loading and firing in waves.”

“Did we ever establish how to win this fight?” Will leaned his head against the plastic wall. His hair was damp with snow now, sticking to his forehead in clumps. Mike reached forward and tightened Will’s scarf around his neck, using the fat end to cover his mouth. 

“I think it’s just whoever taps out first.” Mike ruffled Will’s hair. “So keep warm.”

Mike wasn’t sure when he and Will became so close again. They’d had a lot of time to work things out in and after California, but their relationship hadn’t immediately gone back to the way it was before El, before all of this started. He couldn’t pinpoint a moment, but he knew it had something to do with Lucas’s preoccupation with Max and Dustin’s all-consuming grief—he’d never described it like that but Mike knew better than to trust Dustin when he downplayed his emotions. Somewhere along the way, Will and Mike realized that all they had was each other. Nothing else really mattered after that. 

He loved Lucas and Dustin. He really did, and he wasn’t afraid to say it, even if it sounded lame. But Will was something that, for Mike, Lucas and Dustin could never be. He was home. 

“If they’re pre-loading, we should do the same,” Mike said. “Build a pile and then open fire.”

“But then it’ll just be a stupid back-and-forth. There’s too much time to reload.”

“Right. Which is why we pre-load, and then we rush ‘em.”

“Rush ‘em…” The apples of Will’s cheeks swelled. Will rubbed his hands together. “Yeah, let’s do it.”

Will’s fingertips were cold, too. Mike covered Will’s bare hands with his gloved ones and rubbed them, hoping the friction might help. Mike could feel Will’s eyes on him—on his face, not his hands. Eventually, when he realized he wasn’t helping much, Mike took off his gloves and handed them over.

“Mike!”

“You can’t get frostbite. You’re better at making snowballs than I am.”

Will hesitated for a moment, but his teeth were chattering, and his nose was practically glowing red—he put on the gloves. “If your fingers fall off, it’s not my fault.”

“Of course not. Now get packing, soldier.”

While they worked, rolling snowballs from nearby piles of fresh powder, Lucas and Dustin launched another attack, dozens of balls arcing over the wall and onto Mike’s head and lap. By the end, he was covered in melted ice, but they’d somehow missed Will entirely. Will giggled. 

“Fuck you,” said Mike. “I’ll turn on you so fast.”

“No, you won’t,” Will said, so sure of himself, and handed Mike a snowball. “Ready?”

Mike and Will grabbed as many snowballs as they could, nodded, and then ran at Dustin and Lucas’s fort as quickly as the foot of snow—a new, fluffy layer on top of the hard, older one—allowed. Dustin’s curls popped up over the barricade. 

“Ambush!” He called out. “This is DEFCON 1, Lucas! DEFCON 1!”

Lucas made a break for it, rolling out from behind  just as Mike and Will descended on their base. Dustin flopped to the ground, curling up to protect his face from the attack. After a dozen snowballs, he called uncle, laughing harder than he had in months, and Mike felt like a winner in all the ways that mattered.

Later, Mrs. Wheeler made them hot chocolate with marshmallows, and they all warmed up by the fire. Will wore fuzzy socks over his ands and feet, and while Mike dipped a giant marshmellow into his drink and lodged it inside his mouth, Lucas told them about Max, how the doctors said she might wake up soon because her brain activity looked promising, but he didn’t want to get his hopes up, and how he’d gotten her a Christmas gift anyway. 

“It’s a necklace. Silver. I don’t know if she wears silver or if she really wears jewelry at all, but I was out shopping with my mom and saw it and it made me think of her.”

“Lucas,” Will cooed. “That’s so sweet.”

“She’s gonna love it, man,” Mike added, curling into Will’s side, his mug cradled in his hands. A few years ago, he would have found such vulnerability embarrassing, but now, he didn’t even think twice. Things were just different. Sometimes, that was good. 

Lucas glanced between the two. “Mike, dude, relax, he’s not gonna run away.”

Mike clicked his tongue. He shrugged, faux-defensive. “Shut up. I’m being affectionate. You should try it sometime.” To punctuate, he grabbed the side of Will’s head and pressed a smacking kiss to his temple. Will swatted him away, his wrist flimsy and uncommitted. 

“You’re weird,” Will said. 

“You smell like snow,” came Mike’s reply. 

They finished their hot cocoa and afterward, all lay before the fire on Mrs. Wheeler’s new rug, letting its gentle warmth hug their faces. It was nice. It was perfect. 

But nothing ever stayed that way. 

Will hasn’t been acting weird all evening. He went on his nightly walk with Jonathan—a tradition they’d started after first moving in, when the Wheeler house felt a little too crowded—and then said his cheerful goodnights and went to bed early. Mike had figured the school week and the snowball fight had tired him out. 

Mike hadn’t seen the point of staying in the living room if Will wasn’t there, so he’d called it shortly afterward, giving his mom an uncharacteristic kiss on the cheek, which she’d beamed at. But then, he’d found himself alone in his room, pacing, waiting. 

Mike had been doing that a lot lately, but he could never pinpoint what he was waiting for or on. He blasted music and tried to clean his room but just ended up throwing everything into his hamper for later. The night wouldn’t end. He turned off all his lights and climbed under his sheets and covers and shut his eyes and still, the night would. Not. End. 

When Mike’s digital clock read 2:00 a.m., he gave up on sleep for the night. It was winter break, after all. He could catch up tomorrow. He grabbed a sweatshirt from his desk chair—his homebase for clothes he’d already worn but weren’t quite dirty yet—and padded into the kitchen. The fridge light blinded him. Mike rubbed his eyes and grabbed the carton of milk, squirted a shit ton of chocolate sauce into the container. He shook it up and chugged—it was great. The shaking had made it all frothy. His mom would probably chastise him for wasting the rest of the milk. He could probably get away with blaming Lucas, though (he wouldn’t). 

A handful of potato chips and one stalk of celery with peanut butter later, Mike was ready to try to sleep again. So, of course, that’s when the shouting started. 

It was incomprehensible at first. Mike thought it might have been the wind, the rattle of the gutter. But then, he heard the clobbering of footsteps, and the basement door slamming shut. Will’s screaming only got louder from there. 

He’d had night terrors before, but this one felt different. For one, Will hadn’t had one since moving into the Wheelers’ house. Secretly, Mike liked to think there was a correlation, that something about the place made Will feel safe. But he’d been naive. 

Mike knew Jonathan was down there with him, that he’d be fine eventually, and that he probably shouldn’t interfere. But even with his bedroom door closed and a ratty blanket wedged between the crack to block out sound, he could hear Will screaming, and the guttural noise moved through the air directly to Mike’s throat, where it lodged itself and refused to dissipate. Fuck that. Will had been through hell already; he didn’t deserve to relive it in his sleep, which should have been a respite. Mike found himself so irrationally angry that he had to punch his pillows to release it, and even then, his fists shook each time he wound back. 

He wanted to go down to the basement, but he knew what he’d find: Jonathan at Will’s bedside, sweat beading on Will’s forehead and upper lip, his eyes glazed over and his mouth slack in perpetual confusion until he came back from his horrific dream world. Jonathan would give him a fresh t-shirt and rub his back, and Will would tremble, his lower lip quivering, and he’d bite it, refusing to cry. Maybe he would, but he’d be too wiped out to produce real tears, so he’d sort of just rock back and forth, fighting the parasite within him, the black death that had plagued his body since the day he’d disappeared. 

Then, Will would see Mike and immediately feel embarrassed, and Mike didn’t want to make his agony any worse. He needed to put his energy somewhere, though. 

The screaming stopped; Will must have finally woken up.

Mike pushed the clothes from his desk chair, sat down, and ripped a page out of his science notebook. He clicked his pen about a hundred times before he could finally put words to paper, and even then, it didn’t feel like enough. But he couldn’t come out and tell Will what he’d heard—it would just depress him. His handwriting was awful, and the pen was almost completely depleted of ink, but he wrote. Mike wanted Will to know he was there for him. 

Hey, Will! Was just thinking but didn’t want to wake bother you. Do you and Jonathan ever see anything on your walks together? Like deer or something? I’ve never actually asked where you two go. I’d imagine it doesn’t feel scary walking at night after everything we’ve witnessed. I haven’t spotted as much wildlife since they installed the metal bandaid. What an eyesore, right? Anyway, knock on my door tomorrow morning. We should do something to celebrate the start of winter break. I don’t know about you, but I definitely needed the whole month, even if we’re only getting that much time because Hawkins High knows we’re all kinda depressed as fuck. 

See you tomorrow! Sorry if this is weird. 

Mike. 

He folded it, ran downstairs as quietly as he could, and taped it to the basement door. When he returned to his bedroom, the digital clock read 3:10 a.m., and he found that he could finally get some sleep.

In the morning, Mike awoke to find his note slipped under his door. He rubbed his eyes and rose to pick it up, mentally kicking himself for writing it. Mike had embarrassed Will. He probably wouldn’t be knocking on the door today. 

He grabbed the note and unfolded it, cringing prematurely, to see if the contents had been way cheesier than he remembered. 

He didn’t get to reading. 

Below Mike’s note, Will had drawn a doe in a forest clearing spotted with evergreens, its eyes closed, its head burrowed in the stomach of a weary traveler, who looked a lot like Mike, lanky arms and all, just with a birthmark on his cheek, a ratty cloak, and a chipped shield. Mike—the character—caressed the doe's forehead but looked beyond him to a rocky indent, almost like a cave, where purple gemstones shone from the earth. He’d colored it in with pencils and signed his name at the bottom. Below it, Will had written, I’m a bit tired now. I’ll knock later today! Beside that was a small red smiley face with a crudely-drawn tongue sticking out. 

Mike traced the lines of the grass Will had drawn below the doe’s hooves. He’d used three different shades of green—it looked real. Will painted more than he drew now, but when he did draw, it always looked real, even if it wasn’t realism he was aiming for. Mike wanted to live inside all of Will’s drawings. He wanted them to be the only alternate universes that existed. 

Mike turned the page over. He wrote back. 

Will, 

I wonder what your traveler experienced before running into the deer. His shield is cracked and his clothes look awful! Maybe this deer wants to help him with that? I think animals probably have an affinity for the traveler—otherwise, why would the baby deer feel so comfortable around him? 

And behind the traveler, the purple gems! They look almost like stalagmites. They must have formed in that rocky enclave over decades. There’s definitely moisture in there. Maybe a magical pool of water? I’m curious if he decides to go in, and what exactly he’s looking for. 

I look forward to your knock.

Mike :)

Chapter Text

Mike didn’t know how it happened, if he was honest. 

By the third day of Christmas break, they were passing notes and drawings nonstop. Mike would speculate something about the world, and Will would create more of it. The traveler, as they decided, had a special affection for animals, and in times of crisis, they would come to his aid. The purple gemstones he found in the cave were able to be melted down and turned into an elixir that cured anyone who drank it of wild infectious diseases that plagued Willow, the fantastical nation Mike had named after a beautiful tree Will drew on their second day. It made him smile that night during dinner, and afterward, he gave Mike another note, not a drawing but a declaration.

The traveler looks like you on purpose, by the way. If you’re gonna name a whole nation after me, it’s only fair. 

Will didn’t have the energy to do much those first few days, but Mike didn’t mind. He liked this game they’d begun to play, and he hadn’t felt so creative in a long time. At breakfast, Will tore a piece of cardboard off an old cereal box and sketched a rough map of Willow; Will slipped it to Mike while he was helping his mom wash dishes, and Mike zoned out for the rest of the chore, dreaming up new possibilities. 

Truthfully, Mike loved having a collaborator. Usually, when he planned campaigns, he did it by himself. His party members were always engaged, but they didn’t participate in the generation of ideas, just the development of characters. But Will seemed to care about Willow—and god, that wouldn’t get confusing—just as much as he did, and it was nice. It was an escape. 

Finally, after over two days of build-up, Mike heard a knock on his bedroom door. It was embarrassing how quickly he ran to answer it.

“Will!” He exclaimed before the door was even open, convinced of his friend’s presence by the rhythm of the knock alone. Sure enough, there he was, clad in plaid pajamas and an old, thin t-shirt, the collar of which was worn, the thread pulled loose from too many wash cycles. Mike had half a mind to toss him one of his own shirts, but then, Will would probably feel embarrassed that he’d noticed. “You feeling better?”

Will eased the door closed behind him, briefly obstructing Mike’s view of his face. When he turned, his cheeks were a little bit pinker. Mike wanted to press his palm to Will’s forehead—he could have been feverish. It would have explained Will’s lethargy, at the very least. 

“I’m good,” Will said, breezing past Mike, and it was then that Mike finally noticed the shoebox full of their notes and drawings. Will had written “WILLOW” on the lid in purple Sharpie. He sat on Mike’s bed, positioning a pillow behind his back. “This is good stuff, I think.” 

He patted the cardboard box, his movements endearingly jittery. Will used to do this little dance when he was younger and got especially excited about something, his legs and arms swaying back and forth, his hips jutting out a bit awkwardly, eyes always alight with whatever it was that had captured his interest. Selfishly, Mike was thankful for definitive proof that he could still make Will happy like that, like he used to be before the bad years. 

Mike’s laughter was light and earnest as he sat beside Will, nudging him over so they could share the broken-in part of the mattress on which Mike usually slept. It hardly bent with him, used to the indent of his body. 

“I really like the drawing you did of the Forbidden Isle.” He rummaged through the shoebox and pulled out a poorly folded piece of cardstock; Will had drawn an island off the coast of their little country, the final destination for their wary traveler, which was guarded by sea monsters and some sort of magical barrier. "It's sick. And the forest you sketched on that yellow sticky note—where is it? Ah!” Mike pulled out the art piece he spoke of and stuck it to Will’s forehead, eliciting a gentle chuckle from his favorite artist. “So fucking good. I always forget how good you are, and then you remind me, and it’s just like… goddamn.”

They were cheesy now. They’d been able to compliment each other before, save for their rough patch, which Mike had secretly dubbed The Lost Year, when Will and El were in California and Mike felt like he’d forgotten a fundamental part of himself. And then, Mike had been an idiot at the airport, unable to close the distance between them, barred by time and a busy signal and something else he couldn’t quite articulate. It would have felt embarrassing, though, opening up, admitting how badly he’d missed Will—it was fine that he’d cried over El; they’d been dating at the time—so he pushed it down and said nothing and made everything worse.
Now, not only were they close again, they were like family or something. Like two halves of the same painting, or comic books in the same series. And fuck, if Mike wasn’t gonna hold Will tightly and never let him go. 

Well, that was a little cheesier than anything he’d willingly say out loud, actually. Mike was suddenly very aware of how close they were sitting on his bed, sharing a thin blanket, which Will had draped over their knees, the Willow shoebox open between them. He scooted over, just a bit. 

“We should probably change that name. ‘The Forbidden Isle.’ So stupid.”

“Why is it stupid?” Mike asked. And then, a better question. “Wait, change it for what?”

Will rolled his eyes, head lulling back with the force of his playful annoyance. “Mike!”

“What?”

“What part of, ‘This is good stuff,’ do you not understand?”

“‘Good,’ I think. Most teachers don’t accept half-assed world-building in place of Calc assignments.”

Will grabbed Mike’s arms and jostled him. “We should write this. As a comic book.”

Mike swallowed. “Oh, yeah! Yeah, cool. Are you sure? You have, you know, the energy for it and everything?”

Will coughed, turning his head away. “Why—” cough, “Would—” cough, “Wouldn’t I?” 

He drew his bottom lip into his mouth, rifling through the other notes and letters. He pulled out a couple of pages Mike had ripped out of an old sketchbook from middle school. He’d gone deep into his character-building there. The traveler’s name was Reed; he was young and naive, and he was the only person who could save Willow from Muriel’s Plague, a dire illness named after the witch who’d developed it, which caused citizens of the country to transform into unrecognizable beasts before dropping dead within the week. Reed, for whatever reason, was immune. 

“Like this. I love this. It’s great. And, you know, what else are we gonna do this month? We don’t have class. Lucas and Dustin aren’t exactly jumping at the bit to, like, hang out, or whatever, which I know isn’t their fault, but. We’re kind of all we’ve got.”

Mike felt himself light up at Will’s words, his smile pulling at his eyes, his insides growing all warm and fuzzy and soft, like static from an old radio. It was one thing to believe such a concept, and another to hear Will confirm it. 

“Aww,” Mike said, shoving Will, his hand pressing lightly on his friend’s heart. “You’ve gone soft.”

Will leaned back a little, moving languidly with Mike’s pressure, then grabbed Mike’s hand and pressed his thumb into it. Mike felt a little bit like Jesus Christ, like some Roman had hammered a nail into his palm and it would start bleeding when Will pulled his finger away. He thought he might look down at their hands and find them red and slick with iron, so he didn’t look. He didn’t look and he couldn’t say why, really. 

“Maybe,” Will said, and let go of Mike’s hand. He stood up from Mike’s bed. “Wanna go get something to eat? It’s not as cold as it has been now and I really want a burger.”

“With what money?” Mike asked. 

His hand was burning. What was Jesus’ hand hole called again? His dad was the Christian, not him, and even then, Mike was pretty sure he only called himself one because the religion aligned with his stupid politics. Mike thought that was about the dumbest reason to believe in something—because it made sense to believe it. If Mike ever decided to get all religious, he’d make sure he really meant it, or he’d just stay wondering. 

Will reached into his pocket and pulled out a few ten-dollar bills. “Birthday money,” he said, grinning. “Come on. I’ll pay.”

“Well, as long as I’m being spoiled.” Mike stood too. He thought about fixing his covers, but he wanted to leave the proof of life there, the crinkled sheets and blankets where they’d just sat together. That was art too, in its own way. Mike decided then that art could be whatever he wanted. “I deserve that.”

“Yeah,” Will grinned, lopsided. “You do.”

They biked farther than Mike thought they would, but Will had been right—it wasn’t too cold today. Just a bit chilly, enough for a solid jacket but not dire, not enough to freeze to death. And definitely not cold enough to forgo a chocolate milkshake. The second he mentioned it, though, he felt bad. Will had already spent so much of his money on him, and he probably wanted to save it for something special, like the arcade, and not waste it all on their little outing, but Will insisted, and soon, after the Cokes and burgers and fries, their waitress was bringing them two large chocolate shakes covered in whipped cream and topped with extra cherries. 

Mike thought he should’ve probably found the waitress really pretty, with her blonde hair in two buns and her pink, old-timey uniform dress, but he couldn’t really bring himself to look at her that closely—Will was plucking all the cherries off of his shake and stuffing them into his cheeks. They bulked awkwardly, and when he smiled, juice seeped from behind his teeth, and Mike laughed harder than he thought possible. The waitress was gone when he looked back. So, whatever. 

They migrated to the soda bar after they finished eating, sipping Coke refills and taking turns writing in a brand new notebook, which Mike had bought from a bookstore nearby. There were stars and planets on the cover, and it had coiled binding. He felt young again, like he was jotting down short story ideas in Spanish class.

(To be fair, Mike still loved writing, but he couldn’t translate any more than que tal and donde esta la bibliotheca and he wasn’t really sure where those fancy accent marks went. So maybe, not paying attention had been worth it).

“It’s gotta start with a prologue,” said Mike. “You know, the first few people to get the plague. Maybe the first signs of their physical transformation, but we can leave the explicit details a bit mysterious until Reed enters the picture.”

“Right,” Will nodded. “Hey, you still good with Reed kinda looking—”

“—exactly like me?” Mike finished. Will blushed, a reward for Mike’s effective teasing. “You’ve drawn me, what, ten times already? What’s a gajillion more?”

“I’ve drawn you more than ten times,” Will said. “When we were kids, I used to sketch the three of you guys to get good at noses and hands, remember?”

“Why’d you need to practice noses? You can draw a wonky line on a guy’s face and it’s basically a nose. Noses look fucked up anyway.”

“They kind of… all looked like…” Will had a serious staring contest with the counter. “Phallic?”

“Oh,” Mike said. Then, it really hit him, and he roared, and it wracked his whole body. “You were drawing dick noses?”

“Shut up!” Will whined. “It wasn’t on purpose, obviously. I didn’t even notice it until Jonathan pointed it out when I was, like, ten, and I freaked out and told him to ‘go to hell.’ That’s probably the worst fight we’ve ever had, honestly.”

“You were drawing dick noses,” Mike repeated. 

He was so telling Lucas and Dustin about this. Maybe Dustin would even crack another smile. Mike knew that grief wasn’t something you could cure, that there were good days and bad ones (and really bad ones) and the best thing to do was give Dustin time and space—or company, if he wanted it—but god, it hurt knowing Dustin was hurting. It hurt worse knowing Mike couldn’t make it better. 

Will nudged Mike’s arm. “Why’d you just frown after saying, ‘dick noses.’” 

Mike huffed. “Oh. Did I?”

Will took a long sip of his Coke and spoke around the straw. “That’s, like, probably the saddest anyone’s ever sounded saying that phrase.”

“What, should I have said it like,” Mike made the most obnoxious, clownish face he could and yelped through barred teeth, “Dick noses!”

“Michael.” Will glanced around. “People are looking.”

“Yeah? They probably have dick noses.”

Will huffed, but he was happy, Mike could see it—could hear it—and he would have done a lot worse in public to provoke that reaction. “You’re ridiculous.”

“So, the prologue?”

“Oh!” Will said. “Right…”

They had a complete outline by day five of their Christmas break. Mike’s mom had called both Mike and Will various times for dinner or dessert or to help with groceries, and she’d gone unanswered more than anything else. He wasn’t trying to be rude, as he told her—they were immersed. And it felt great to deal in fantastical worlds that wouldn’t potentially kill them both. Mike almost forgot about the state of Hawkins when he and Will sat together, at the dining table or on Mike’s bed or in the basement, their heads close, bent over the space notebook, writing The Magical Purple Healing Crystal With Super-Cool Powers.

(That wasn’t the real title. Mike and Will could agree on everything except for the title, so instead, they came up with increasingly bizarre nicknames while they waited for inspiration to strike. So far, Mike’s favorite monikers were been, The Curious Case of the Guy Who Knew Stuff He Probably Shouldn't and Help! My entire magical nation is going to die if I don’t find the antidote to a super deadly plague! They were artists. Visionaries, really). 

To celebrate their efficiency, Mike decided to take Will ice skating. Jonathan was, of course, required to go with him, but he brought Nancy—who claimed the passenger seat on the way there but mostly left them alone—so it was alright. 

The rink was outdoors and fairly empty. To be fair, it was four-thirty and pitch black except for a couple of stars, and freezing, so most sane people were likely sitting by the fire drinking tea or some other nerd shit. Not Mike and Will, though. Mike and Will were ice warriors. 

Which is to say, they both lost their balance immediately. 

“You are so fucking bad at this!” Will called, hugging the edge of the wall, his skates pointed inward towards each other. 

“You’re so fucking bad at this,” Mike parroted, inching along with choppy, pathetic movements. Jonathan and Nancy were giggling on the other side of the rink. Somehow, they were decent at this, the pricks. “At least I’m not clinging onto the wall like a—”

Mike didn’t get to finish his sentence; he was too busy eating shit. 

The ice burned, weirdly enough. Mike was in too much pain to remember the science behind that. Luckily, he was wearing jeans, so he didn’t scrape his knees or anything, but he wasn’t wearing gloves, and his hands got roughed up pretty badly. Will approached Mike, his movements effortful, made more difficult by the full-body laughter he wasn’t even trying to hide. Maybe Mike hated Will, actually. Maybe they should have been mortal enemies instead of best friends.

“You’re dead to me,” Mike deadpanned. Too scared to stand, he’d decided to flop onto his ass, his legs spread and skates pointed outward, almost defensively. “You hear that, Byers? You and your giddy-ass laughter are totally dead to me.”

“You and this obsession with my death,” Will said, shaking his head. He held out his hand for Mike to take. “Come on, Bambi. Stand up.”

Mike reached for Will’s hand too quickly, and Will retreated. “What?” Mike asked.

Will raised his eyebrows, sliding backward on the ice. “You were totally gonna pull me down with you.”

“Why the fuck would I do that? This isn’t a pool? You’d crack your head open.”

“And that would make you sad, right?”

“Yes, Will, my best friend spilling his brains out at an ice rink would devastate me. You’re not allowed to die before I do.”

The second part hit them both a little too hard. Will got this serious look on his face, and his mouth fell open like he was going to say something, but no response was forthcoming. So, he inched towards Mike, and Mike watched, his gaze trailing the pink flush of Will’s cheeks and ears—Will’s cap should have been covering them, but Will was adamant that it made his head look too big—marveling at the life in his face as his lips stretched and curled, and god, despite the cold, Mike was sure Will’s face would be hot to the touch now, that maybe the pink was—

Will’s right foot slipped out from under him, and he fell onto his ass. Whatever spell Mike was momentarily under—one that suddenly preoccupied him with the color of Will’s face—broke pretty immediately after that. But he still pulled Will’s cap over his ears, and Will sat there, and let him, and they never acknowledged it again. 

They decided after about fifteen more minutes of flailing that skating was evil and most definitely not for them. Instead, sacrificing the low cost of their tickets and a bit of dignity, Mike and Will decided to go to the movies, but the only theater in walking distance was this tiny arthouse place that strictly played oldies. They wanted popcorn, though, and the tickets were really cheap. 

So that’s how Will and Mike found themselves in a tiny theater with two older women watching Sunset Boulevard. Mike had never seen it before—Will had. This was bad for the two older women, since Mike leaned over at least once per scene to ask clarifying questions. He heard them scoff a couple of times. It only made him laugh. Why did they care? They’d definitely seen the movie.

“Will,” Mike whisper-shouted, tapping his shoulder incessantly. “The opening scene was a flashback, right? It’s nonlinear?”

“Have you been paying attention at all?” Will responded, taking on the same whisper-shouting tone in solidarity. “Yes, now watch. This scene is important.”

So Mike watched, but he was having trouble lending his attention to the movie when Will was sitting there, so transfixed despite knowing how the movie would end. It should have been an endorsement for the film’s quality, but instead, Mike sort of just watched Will watch Sunset Boulevard.

Will glimpsed Mike out of the corner of his eye, then did a double-take when he saw Mike looking right at him. “Hey,” he chastised. “You’re not watching.”

“You are, though,” Mike said, as if this was a good explanation for why he was staring down Will like he wanted to explode him with his mind or something. Mike turned back to the silver screen just in time to catch a line that was probably vital to the plot. As a storyteller, he should have cared about these kinds of things. “Oh, wait, shit. Is her man-servant her—?”

“Yes,” Will confirms.

“And all of her movies, he—”

“Yep, he directed them.”

“So—”

“Shh!” 

The two older women were looking back at them now, eyes narrowed disapprovingly. They both had short, white hair and identical frowns. They probably spent a lot of time together. Mike stifled the rude sound that escaped his mouth with his palm. Will buried his face in his hands. They let the movie play on.

But a few minutes later: “Will. Will. Will?”

“Jesus, what, Mike?” Will was grinning, though. A beautiful, pearly grin, which Mike easily returned. 

“What the fuck is a ‘talkie’?”

That night, Will invited Mike to go on his and Jonathan’s nightly walk, which Mike took as a huge honor. Will didn’t elaborate on why Mike had received such a generous offer, but Mike speculated that it had something to do with his initial note from a couple of nights ago, after he eavesdropped on Will’s nightmare-induced screaming. Or, overheard, he supposed. It still felt intrusive, like he’d witnessed something he shouldn’t have. 

Still. They didn’t see any deer. Or purple stalagmites.

“You can’t watch a movie for shit,” Will said. 

Will, Jonathan, and Mike were walking down the ill-paved street in a line, Jonathan lighting the way with a strong camping flashlight. Dead leaves crunched beneath Mike’s boots. The snow hadn’t melted, and the roads had been poorly paved, so it kind of just sat on the edges of yards, freezing into ugly mountains that neighborhood kids had carved paths into for body sledding. Mike made a mental note to take Will sledding later this week, maybe after they finished the first part of their comic book. Their most recent joke title was, Reed Needs Backup But Everybody’s Dropping Dead, So Fuck Him. 

“Yes, I can. Good movies, I can.”

“Sunset is a good movie. You’re just close-minded because it’s old.”

“It’s black-and-white.”

“Lots of good movies are like that.”

“Oh, really? Like what?”

Will stopped walking to ponder this. Mike stopped with him. He cocked his head to the side, his tongue playing on his top teeth. Will said nothing. 

“Exactly.”

“Shut up. I’m thinking.”

“Yeah?” Mike kicked Will’s boots ever-so-lightly, more of an I’m here than anything else. He’d been doing that a lot recently. Reminding Will that he was there, just in case Will suddenly started to regret all the time they were spending together. “Think harder.”

“You know, sometimes I think you don’t even like me.”

Mike scoffed. “Right. I’m just hanging out with you for shits and giggles, then?”

“Yup.” Mike watched Will’s lips ripple as he popped the ‘p.’ “And one day, you’re gonna realize you’ve mined all the jokes you can out of me, and you’ll pay me no mind.”

And that… that made Mike’s chest go tight, like his ribcage was closing in on his lungs; they might burst if he moved. They might deflate if he spoke. 

Did Will really think that? Did he believe that their sudden closeness, which Mike thought they’d established hadn’t been sudden at all, was a fluke, and when things finally started improving in Hawkins—Mike had no proof that better days were coming, but he had to hope—they’d drop the best and go back to being just friends? 

Mike didn’t want to be just friends. He remembered the argument they’d had back at the roller rink, after he’d accused Will of ruining the day because he’d been a little quiet. It’d been so stupid. He’d just wanted to provoke a reaction from the boy, who’d been largely ignoring him, shirking his gaze and letting Mike’s statements linger without further comment. It had driven Mike crazy, and he’d just wanted… he just…

Mike had thought about that day a lot since. Even after he’d apologized, even after Will had moved back to Hawkins. Mike couldn’t shake the feeling that he’d rather Will be mad at him than be indifferent to his presence. 

All that was to say, he could never “pay Will no mind.” The thought was hysterical. It was maddening. It was awful. 

“Jesus, Will. Do you actually think that?” Mike put a hand on Will’s shoulder, more to ground himself than Will, and squeezed. “Because, like, I thought we’d kind of… established this. But you’re my favorite person. Ever. So.”

Will looked at Mike’s hand on his shoulder. He looked at Mike. It wasn’t too dark, but Mike still couldn’t decipher Will’s expression. He missed the laughing. What happened to the laughing?

“Sorry. I didn’t mean to, like. I was just joking. I know you wouldn’t.”

“Yeah,” said Mike, his jaw set. “I wouldn’t.”

“Okay.”

The air felt heavy between them. Like there was something Mike was supposed to say, but he didn’t know what it was, so the words lingered there and weighed down the foggy night. 

“Boys!”

They both looked up at the same time—Jonathan was yards away now, the beam of his flashlight shining in their eyes. Mike shielded his face with his hand. The beam was fierce. Blinding. 

“Sorry!” Mike yelled. “Sorry, Jonathan.”

He glanced back at Will one last time before moving forward. The soft pad of Will’s footsteps followed soon after.

That night, Mike and Will lay on Mike’s bed—Mike’s legs at his headboard and Will’s at the foot of the mattress—Mike’s radio between them. They took turns asking Lucas questions, some about winter break, but most about Max. Lucas wasn’t like Dustin—he wanted to talk about her. It made him feel better, Mike thought. Like bringing her up in casual conversation would keep her alive, and like maybe, just maybe, she could hear that they still cared. That they wanted her to keep fighting. 

“The nurses are tired of me, I think,” Lucas admits, his voice coming through a bit broken up, marred by static. He sounded good, though. Like he’d slept in his own bed that night, not a stiff hospital chair. 

“I’m sure that’s not true,” Will offered. 

“Well, they’re tired of Kate Bush, at least.”

“They’ll get over it,” Mike promised. “How does she look? Any different?”

“She smiled today.” Lucas cleared his throat. “Well, that’s an exaggeration. I swear I saw it, though. Her lip curved up. I saw it.”

Mike and Will shared a look. It said, I wanna believe him. I really do.

Mike could tell that Will didn’t know what to say, so he took one for the team. 

“That’s great, man. That’s great news.” A beat. Lucas breathed on the other end. So, Mike continued: “Hey, guess what Will used to draw…?”

That night, Mike and Will finished the first panel of their comic—currently dubbed, I Love Animals and Hate Sick People—and included a young redhead in one of their rectangles, a character who, Mike promised Will, would live to see all of Willow healed. 

Chapter Text

It was Joyce who reminded Mike’s mom that Christmas was only a couple of weeks away, and if they wanted to decorate for the holiday, it should have probably happened right after Thanksgiving. 

The issue with Joyce’s logic was that they hadn’t really celebrated Thanksgiving that year, mostly because Mike’s mom had been sick and Mike’s dad was useless, so Nancy and Mike and Will had pitched in and made turkey sandwiches on rye. Nancy had even cooked up a cranberry sauce for the sandwiches, which Holly had refused to eat, and they all sat around the table and told each other they were thankful for the day, and for each other, and it was all bullshit really. Ted hadn’t so much as glanced up from his newspaper. 

But Christmas was a holiday everyone could get behind. During wartime, soldiers had put down their weapons and played games in the no-man’s land, soccer or football or something like that, and then kept on killing each other the next day. Nobody in the Wheeler house was at that point yet, but the tense cold war between the older Wheelers and Byers briefly ceased for the afternoon, and they all came together to decorate the Christmas tree.

(Mike would have never called it a “cold war” in front of his father, who sat, feet up, on his La-Z-Boy, watching Holly pull ornaments out of a plastic bin. He didn’t know much about the world, but he did know that if his father believed something, it was probably half-false, at least). 

Warm light cast a hazy glow over Mike’s living room that made everything look like an old photograph. His mom had put on a record, some 50s jazz she’d found in a charity shop, and it made Mike feel floaty and peaceful. Jonathan and Will held either side of a yellowish string of lights, trying their best to wrap it around the banister. Will caught Mike’s eye mid-wind, and the two took turns trying to make each other laugh with increasingly absurd expressions. 

Will won. Mike refused to explain what was so funny to his mother, though, because the gesture had been quite inappropriate for little ears. 

Nancy was, for once, participating in family activities, a novel perched on her knees as she advised her mom on how to hang an old wreath that had seen better days and, if Mike remembered correctly, used to have a few pine cones. Mike didn’t blame her for being mostly MIA, but he was glad she was there (he would have rather died than admitted it, though). 

The house smelled like pine needles and cinnamon, candles shedding wax on the windowsill, the fire burning low and steady, crackling as wood shed its charred bark, and it was as if this was the way it would always be—this blended family, wearing knits and pajama pants and checking on Chamomile tea brewing in the kitchen, harmonious.

Will came over to Mike after his lights were wound and plugged in. He’d been rifling through old storage bins searching for the shoddy angel with one-and-a-half faded wings they usually put on top of the tree, but it wasn’t with the fake cobwebs from Halloween or the delicate, painted eggs from Easter, and Mike was beginning to lose hope. 

“You look conflicted.” Will perched on the hard arm of the couch and poked Mike with his toe. He was wearing fuzzy socks; otherwise, Mike would have ruefully opposed.

Mike stood, catching Will’s heel in his hands and gently moving it back and forth, to which Will surprisingly did not object. “I am debating,” he said as the downy Santa Claus covering the sole of Will’s foot pressed into his ribcage, Mike embracing him at the heel. “Whether or not I should have Holly make a new angel out of a toilet paper roll.”

“It’s certainly inventive,” said Will. He was wearing a light gray sweatshirt, a white tee underneath, and this close, Mike noticed a vague outline of sweat on his collar. He let go of Will’s foot and sat beside him on the couch’s arm, reaching out to rub the fabric between his fingers, which prompted a quiet, “Mike,” from the boy.

“You’re sweating,” he said. 

“I know.” 

“It’s thirty degrees outside, and this house’s insulation is shit. How are you sweating?” Mike stood, then, and speedwalked to the laundry room, where the thermometer his mom used to check his temperature lay in a dusty bin. Mike rinsed the metal tip under warm water and returned to the living room, where the smell of pine and the sound of ivory keys returned and charmed him. He went straight back to Will. “Here. Take your temperature.”

“Mike, I’m fine,” he said. “Really. The fire’s on and everyone’s in here at once. It’s probably just body heat.”

“Just do it,” Mike insisted, and he didn’t really know why he cared so much except that he couldn’t stand the idea of Will suffering silently, and now Jonathan was watching them, and Mike had to quickly avert his gaze. “Please. It would give me peace of mind.”

Will stared at the thermometer for a long time. Finally, he took it from Mike and shoved it under his armpit.

“Dude!” Mike trilled. “That’s not where that goes.”

“Well, I’m not gonna put it under my tongue; that’s where it usually goes.”

“I don’t have cooties, William,” Mike said, skulking forward, preparing for his attack. He waited until Will’s eyes squinted a bit with his laughter before he charged forward, his thighs pressed to the hard edge of the sectional—right between Will’s legs—and pressed his palm to Will’s forehead.

“Mike!” Will shrieked, fending him off with his elbows, but he was no match, really. It was just as he’d suspected, though, and now, even Will’s cheeks were red.

“You’re such a liar—you’re burning up!” Mike felt unrighteously indignant. Why did Will always feel the need to prioritize everyone else’s comfort above his own? He’d’ve liked to have a word with Will’s servitude, tell it to take a long, foreign vacation. “Will, you have a fever.”

Will shook his head. “I don’t feel sick. Maybe I just run hot.”

“You’re—Will, your cheeks are—” Mike turned to find Jonathan in the same spot he’d been in last and waved him over. “Jonathan, please feel your brother’s forehead.”

Jonathan came over and did as he was told. He looked a bit concerned, but Jonathan sort of always wore a permanent frown. He’d probably age poorly because of it—that’s something his mother would say. Wipe that sour look off your face, Michael. Frowning gives you wrinkles.

“Yeah, you feel a bit warm,” Jonathan confirmed. Mike couldn’t see either brother’s face, but Jonathan didn’t sound that surprised. “Do you need to lie down for a bit?”

And then Will mouthed something to Jonathan that Mike couldn’t make out, and gave a small shake of his head. 

“I’m fine. I want to stay. I’ll drink lots of water and—here.”

 Will peeled off his sweatshirt, his white tee hugging the burning skin underneath. It must have been an older shirt because it was tight around Will’s waist. Mike made a mental note to ask his mom to get Will some new t-shirts for Christmas. It was the kind of thing she’d get for Mike, anyway, so it wouldn’t seem out of place, and Will wouldn’t have too much cause for embarrassment. 

Then again, he supposed it didn’t look too bad. 

“There,” said Will, and god, he was already turning the sweatshirt outside-in and folding it in his lap, and Mike wondered how they’d ever become friends in the first place, the fucking dork. “I’ll be fine, promise.” Will glanced around his brother to Mike and said it again. “Promise,” one for each of them.

And so, because he’d received his own special promise, Mike was inclined to believe him. 

He poured Will a large cup of tea from the kettle once it whistled, stirring in a spoonful of honey, and Will took the mug without question. Mike stared at him until he’d downed at least half, and then, standing, ruffled Will’s hair on his way to the kitchen. His mom needed help grabbing the chocolate chips, which she’d hidden from herself in the event of midnight snacking.

When his mom plated the desserts, Mike rolled an extra-large ball of dough, stuck more chocolate on the outside, and gave it more than enough room to breathe on the sheet pan. 

His mom snorted. “Is that for you, Michael?”

“No,” Mike said, forming another dough ball. “It’s Will’s.”

The snow resumed at a quarter ‘til midnight, long after Will should have been asleep. Mike had been adamant throughout the night, after cookies and milk and after the kids sat down with Holly to watch Gremlins, which she was too young to watch a few years ago when it came out and still scared her half to death now. 

Mike wanted to tell Will that they should call it a night, but in truth, the day had been so perfect, the whole family together and happy for once, and Mike wanted to keep it that way, which meant he and Will had to sit criss-cross on his bed, facing each other, with their comic outline between them forever. Right now, the faux-title was Reed, The Guy Who Lives in The Woods Alone Like a Fuckin’ Voyeur.

“I think we need to give Reed a better motive,” Mike said. Will was adding superfluous details to their first panel—darker greens to the trees, shadows in the foreground—with his newly sharpened colored pencils. “His parents died of Muriel’s Plague, right? So, then, why is he so adamant about finding the cure? Especially when, you know, the Isle is so dangerous? Like, literally no one has made it back from there alive, and he’s kind of lanky and young and he thinks he’s gonna be the first?”

“Kind of a self-own there, don’t you think?”

“We agreed that Reed only resembled me physically.”

“Yes, so let’s keep it that way,” Will said, chuckling. He put the prologue in his lap, his brows drawing closer together. “I guess you’re right. He gets stronger, but when he starts off, he’s kind of puny.”

“Right. He’d have to be crazy to do this by himself,” said Mike, and then, in the same breath, found the solution to his own problem. “Unless he was in love.”

Will coughed. He rubbed his hand down his bare arm, now covered in goose pimples. Maybe he was missing his sweatshirt. 

“Yeah,” he said. “Yeah, maybe his, uh, his girlfriend is infected, and he has to get the cure back to her before she dies.”

Mike whistled. “That’s a lot of pressure.”

“Yeah, especially because now he only has a week to get to the Isle, find the purple gemstones, get home, melt them down into an elixir, and save her life.”

“Well, he’d better get going then,” said Will, leaning over to grab a ruler from Mike’s desk. He took a blank sheet from their pile and started laying out the next page, referencing their outline between sketches. “What makes her so special, do you think?”

Will didn’t look up as he said this, his tongue poking out of his mouth in concentration, his mouth pursed and stretching the skin of his cheekbones. Mike followed the lines of his face to the veins in his arms and wondered when Will had gotten so… old. Mature. Most days, Mike felt like a really long kid. 

“Uh, I don’t know. I guess he probably wants to propose or something.”

At that, Will glanced up. “Mike, he’s like twenty.”

“So? That’s a normal age to propose, I think. Maybe a bit young, but like, they’re in love. Maybe he’s known her for a while. Maybe they’re childhood sweethearts, so it’s been a long time coming.”

“That could work,” Will said, penciling a vague silhouette in the first box he’d drawn. Somehow, that silhouette would become Reed, who Will had already mastered the art of drawing. Mike didn’t know how he did it—Will was magical, basically. “Why do you think they’ve stayed together so long?”

Mike shrugged. “They just have.” The muscles in his back tensed. “I don’t know. The only girlfriend I’ve ever had was El, and we kind of just… fizzled out.”

Will’s pencil stalled. His mouth fell open a little, then closed again. He exhaled through his nose. “Yeah. Shit, sorry.”

“No, no, hey, it’s fine. I don’t mind talking about it,” Mike rushed to assure him. Outside, the snow picked up speed, splatting against the window with full taps, creating constellations of flakes on the windowpane. Mike wanted to build a snowman like he and Will would have done as kids, but it was late, and also, Mike was still sure Will secretly harbored an illness. “She’s your sister, anyway, and I’m your best friend. Of anyone, you probably deserve to ask as many questions as you want.”

“Right,” Will said, leaning into his fingertips, his squished lips curling around them. “I mean, I assumed you didn’t really want to talk about it with me. That it might be awkward. I’m sorry. You’ve probably been wanting to talk about it, and Lucas is hurting, and Dustin is hurting, so it’s like, how do you even tell them—”

“Whoa,” Mike said, his arm extending out to Will before he could even process the motion. He grabbed Will’s hand, the only way he knew how to steady him. “Will, you’ve felt about all the guilt you deserve to feel in this lifetime. Please, relax.” Mike’s voice went soft and smooth, like putty. He breathed out, hot and slow. “What do you want to know?”

“What do you want to talk about?” 

“Will!” Mike squeezed Will’s hand, and he giggled. Normally, Mike might have given a friend shit for that, but he couldn’t bring himself to tease Will now, especially when the sound of his laughter was so light and musical. Who would Mike be, really, to strip Will of his joy? A bad friend, that’s what. So he let the boy giggle, sue him. 

He supposed his friends had been laughing and smiling far more than he’d realized. Just, the somber moments stuck out more, weighted down by this severity that made it seem as if they’d never be happy again. Mike had been fixated on it, though, treating each bout of misery as a personal affront.

“Fine! Fine! Uh, when did you guys end it?”

“A couple months ago. The first time we visited her,” Mike said. 

“Are you serious?” Will jerked forward, and Mike realized that he hadn’t let go of Will’s hand yet. He retreated, imprisoning both of his hands in his lap, where they belonged and where they should remain. “Mike, what the hell?”

Mike had the sudden inclination to watch the snow fall outside his window again. If he ran his finger along the sill, it would probably come away dusty. He needed a paper towel. 

“It’s like you said—everyone has their shit right now. My breakup hardly seemed relevant.”

“Yeah, but you still could have said something. It’s your first breakup. Did you even talk to your mom about it?”

Mike thought about lying, but it would have been fruitless. Will had this nasty habit of seeing right through him. He shook his head.

“She would have asked all the wrong questions. You know my mom. She cares, she’s just not my kind of people.”

“Cheerleader,” Will said sagely, and really, that was all the explanation necessary. 

“Right. So, no, but I talked to Nancy about it.”

“Oh?”

“Yeah. She told me the first one’s weird. Like with her and Steve, she knew they shouldn’t be seeing each other anymore, and he made her so mad, but she’d gotten used to seeing him almost every day, so it was just… strange. You go from spending every day together to not talking and if you’re friends, that hurts too, because you’ve lost both in one go.”

Will resumed his sketching. This time, it was Reed’s log cabin, already covered in graphite whisperings of moss. 

“But you guys are okay, though, right?”

“Yeah. I wasn’t lying when I told you guys we ended on good terms. It didn’t feel like a relationship anymore, anyway. Started to feel like I was kissing my sister.”

Will’s laugh sputtered like a rusty engine. He rubbed the back of his neck, his tongue poking into his cheek. Mike felt his cheeks grow hot. 

“God,” said Mike. “Do not tell her I said that.”

“I won’t,” Will promised. “Did you cry about it?”

Mike shook his head. “I think I’d known the relationship was over for a long time, so when it happened, I was pretty much already done mourning it.”

“Right,” said Will. He drew a crescent moon low in the starry sky. “You mourned it before it died.”

“Very profound, artist,” Mike said, drawing out his words, making them syrupy, which made Will smile. “Maybe you should do the writing, too.”

“No,” Will said firmly. “I definitely need you.”

And really, who was Mike to say no to that?

Will fell asleep before Mike did. Together, they’d finished the whole first scene, in which Reed finds his girlfriend, Tayla, has come in contact with Muriel’s Plague, so he sets out to confront the witch, ill-equipped for what’s to come. 

Will had only drawn rough outlines of each individual drawing, planning to go over them again before coloring them in, but Mike would have loved the thing regardless. He marveled at the eyes Will drew in the margins of his school workbooks and the stick figures he sketched on the notes they passed in class. But Will was a perfectionist, through and through. 

Quietly, so as not to disturb his friend, Mike turned off his desk lamp and closed his blinds, wincing at the slight squeak of the tilt wand. He turned, feet light on the floor; moonlight bathed Will’s face in blue. His forehead and mouth were relaxed, his eyelashes fanned over his cheeks. He looked far too peaceful to be disturbed, Mike reasoned, as he took a few steps away from the door. 

He had the sudden urge to kiss Will goodnight, like Mike’s mom used to for him when he was little—a gentle peck smack-dab in the middle of his forehead—but he shook away the thought. Will would never let him hear the end of it if he woke up mid-smooch. And anyway, Mike and Will were a lot of things, but definitely not in forehead kiss territory. 

Still, Mike pulled his blanket up to Will’s chin and let it out at his feet so he didn’t overheat. He hesitated—Will was usually a light sleeper—then felt his forehead for fever. He was a bit cooler now, which was good, though a sheen of sweat glimmered on his upper lip. Mike had half a mind to wipe it away.

He had half a mind a lot nowadays, he realized.

Mike grabbed his other pillow, tucked it under his arm, and eased the door closed behind him. He thought he might sleep on the couch that night, but then, his dad was snoring on his La-Z-Boy, so he figured he’d have better luck in the basement. He and Will could swap lives for the night. 

Jonathan was on his mattress, half-curled into a ball on his side, when Mike entered. Despite his best efforts to tiptoe, he stepped on the wrong plank—it creaked and Jonathan stirred. He was a lighter sleeper than Will.

Jonathan turned over, probably expecting his brother and finding Mike, his long hair tousled and his eyes heavy, instead. 

“Sorry,” Mike whispered. “I didn’t mean to wake you. Will fell asleep in my room, so I thought… I’d…” He gestured to Will’s mattress in lieu of words.

“Okay,” said Jonathan, his words slurred from sleep. “That’s fine.”

Jonathan shifted again, and Mike, figuring the conversation was over, plopped his pillow down onto Will’s mattress and slipped under the covers. Will’s covers. They smelled a bit like him, and Mike felt awash with the realization that he knew what Will smelled like. 

“Mike?” Jonathan whispered. 

Cinnamon from the candle, Joyce’s citrus laundry detergent—orange or grapefruit or some other—and his inherent musk, the breath of vanilla lotion he lathered on his dry hands in the wintertime, the minty chapstick. 

“Yeah?” Mike asked, a bit caught. 

“Thank you,” came his earnest reply. “For being Will’s friend.”

“Oh,” said Mike. “Yeah. Obviously. No thanks needed.”

“No, really,” Jonathan persisted, his voice a bit harder this time. “He really loves you a lot.”

And Mike didn’t know what to say to that, so instead, he hummed assent, buried his nose in Will’s sheets, and buzzed with a vague sort of satisfaction until the night faded away. 

Chapter Text

The weeks leading up to Christmas were sort of boring, honestly, when Mike wasn’t with Will. They talked about the comic when they weren’t working on it, but then, while they were, they’d talk about something completely irrelevant. 

For instance, December 18th, Mike’s room, after dinner.

Mike wrote a tearful exchange between Reed and Tayla while Will rambled about the artists Jonathan had gotten him into, The Clash and The Sex Pistols, Ramones and Pink Floyd, even Tina Turner, who Mike had admittedly grown to detest, what with the amount Holly played her music. But unfortunately, Will was right—he always was—and Mike admitted defeat on Will’s fifth off-key rendition of What’s Love Got To Do With It? Mike, through hysterical tears—his vision blurred, nothing more than a kaleidoscope of blues and plaid and carpet, a rash of Will—begged him to stop, so Will grabbed Mike’s purple comb and used it as a pretend microphone. 

“What’s looooove but a second-hand emotion?” Will crooned, his dry voice cracking on the vowels. He didn’t care one bit, though, just jumped around the room—buzzing with this paranormal energy—sinking to his knees and thrashing, his head bobbing with his body. Forward, back, forward, back. Mike was wheezing so hard, he thought he might pass out. Will was so fucking strange. 

Will grabbed Mike’s hand, which hung from his bed limply, as if Mike had lost all control of his limbs. He shook their hands in rhythm with the lyrics, grinning through the cheesier bits.  “Whoooo needs a heart when a heart can be brokeeeeeeeen?”

“Shut— the fuck— up, Will,” Mike managed between gasps, snatching his hand back from his evil friend’s evil grasp. This was hell, really. His ribcage would burst open any moment, his lungs a popped balloon, his whole body hot with their proximity. Mike felt a bit like a fangirl being serenaded by their favorite singer. Like maybe he should have a poster board that read, Play My Favorite Song, or Flash Your Nipples! The concept made Mike collapse into himself, his abs aching, but Will had no idea why he’d suddenly lost all ability to function, so he probably thought Mike was also fucking strange. They were perfect, really. 

To Mike’s quip, Will sang, cartoonishly sad, “Oh-oh… what’s love… got to—”

And the comb was out of Will’s hands. 

Mike buried it beneath his body and lay face-first on the bed, his arms concrete at his sides. Will shrieked, digging his hands into Mike’s side in an attempt to pry him away from his contraband. Mike was steadfast, though. Years of living with an older sister had prepared him for moments like these—that comb would remain his. 

Will climbed onto the bed, perched on his knees, legs on either side of Mike’s ankles. For a moment, there was nothing but their sharp breathing—and the waiting, which had its own sound, too. 

Mike wondered what Will would say if he knew Mike secretly classified his laughter as giggling. Probably call him a couple of choice words. But really, there was no other descriptor. Will’s laughter was breathy and surprisingly high, given his vocal range (this was new, and Mike still couldn’t get over Will’s voice being deeper than his. Primal instinct, probably. He felt deeply emasculated by his best friend, who’d once been half a foot shorter than him), and oh-so-fucking charming. 

He should have known what was coming when he felt the most gentle graze on his lower leg, accidental, light, an unbroken pinky nail. 

The attack was swift and impossible. 

Mike had just enough foresight to twist his body around, pinning the comb behind his back, before Will came in for the kill. It made sense. They’d known each other for a decade. Will knew most of his deep, dark secrets—including the fact that he was extremely ticklish.

“Will— no, please— no—”

Mike swatted Will’s hands away, kicking his feet up and mostly missing horribly. Will attacked Mike’s side first, and Mike squeezed his biceps to his ribs so Will wouldn’t have access to his armpits. They were sparing, one sloppy hit after another, bubbling laughter between heady gasps for glorious oxygen. Will launched at Mike—too high—a miscalculation. 

No. No, Will had done exactly what he’d planned to do. He hadn’t been aiming for Mike’s side, for the comb; he’d been aiming for Mike’s wrists. 

Will pinned Mike’s arms to his pillow, his hands closed around the slimmest part of the bone, thumbs digging into the part that jutted out near the joint. Will’s torso heaved above Mike’s, his flannel loose and hanging between them. One of Will’s knees rested between Mike’s legs; Mike was close enough to see the small blemish on Will’s cheek, a fading pimple. He couldn’t catch his breath. Will’s face caught the sunlight, prismatic through his bedroom window, so that for a brief moment which stretched on into some inconceivable infinity, a splash of color danced across his cheekbone. A projection, like glitter or pixie dust. A rainbow. 

Had Will’s eyelashes always been that long?

Mike had been frozen for too long—a fatal mistake. In one swift movement, Will released Mike’s left wrist and made his own hand flat, pushing it beneath Mike’s back. Mike felt Will’s knuckles flex against his spine as he grasped the plastic comb.

“Ha!” Will cried out, pushing himself off Mike and settling towards the foot of the bed. He brandished his trophy before running it through his hair. “I can take you in a fight now. Thank god. You used to be so much—”

“—stronger,” Mike finished for him. “Yeah.”

The comb collected dust in Mike’s sock drawer after that. 

On Christmas Eve morning, Mike and Will reached the halfway mark of their project—I Hope You Can Sail a Boat, Skinny Freak—and decided this was cause for celebration. It was early, the kind of gray winter morning that bled from twilight, the sun sheltered behind a thick sheet of fog. Nobody was awake. Or, they were, just awake and lying in bed, safe beneath a duvet.

Not Will and Mike, though. They had several thin blankets stacked on top of each other, and none did the job when temperatures dropped below thirty-five. 

Also, they were very much awake, dressed in thick snow pants and jackets, trekking through the snow towards the Band-Aid. It might have ruined their lives, but it would make for a fine sledding hill. 

Mike only had one sled, an old wooden piece of junk with red metal tracks that he hadn’t used in years, mostly because as a kid, he’d been far too small for the thing; the aerodynamics hadn’t worked right or something. But now, it would be perfect.

He figured he and Will could share. Or, well, take turns. 

Will huffed and puffed the entire way up the hill. Mike encouraged him along, figuring that if he asked if Will wanted to stop, he’d only get defensive or embarrassed. Will was very capable of telling Mike he needed a rest, and anyway, it was probably just the temperature. The air was thin. 

Mike planted his sled at the top of the hill, anchoring it into the snow before extending his hand for Will to grab. He was only a few steps behind Mike, but whatever. He still took it, and smiled as he did. Mike swore that smile was what made the snow start to fall again. 

“Okay,” Mike said, dragging Will by the hand to their trusty steed. His lips were dry and pink so they’d definitely be making tea after this. “Have you done this before?”

“Mike,” Will whined. His tongue dragged along his mouth before he drew in his lip, biting back some mirthful look. “I know how to ride.”

God, the air really was thin. Mike couldn’t seem to drink in enough of it.

“Right! Well, this sled, it’s kind of different. It’s old. Like from the early 70s, I think. You’ve got to be careful how you handle it.”

“Okay, show me then,” said Will, and Mike had never denied a challenge. 

Mike lowered himself onto the sled, bracing with the heel of his hands until he felt steady. “It can get unpredictable, so you might have to lean to steer a bit, like this.” Mike demonstrated, trying not to take Will’s teasing grin to heart. If Will had a camera, he would have definitely been taking pictures now. Mike probably looked like a dork. “I promise, you’ll thank me later.”

“Good luck, soldier,” Will said with faux-sincerity. “If you don’t make it back, I’ll deliver a telegram to your address and leave flowers on the sill.”

“You suck. You’re a bitch. I hate you,” said Mike. 

Will put his hand over his heart. “Aww, you can’t even try to sound like you mean it.”

“I can, too!”

Will squatted down a bit so that he and Mike were more eye-level. “Okay. Mean it.”

And for some reason, Mike couldn’t figure out how to reply to this. Will’s eyes were bright among the rest of this gentle white, this endless gray—he was all the color in the world. Fuck, Mike hated losing, even as a joke, even while playing pretend, because it meant that there was something else he should have said, something he should have done. He was pitiful, at the end of the day. He was eleven years old, playing D&D in his basement, eager to please everyone, but especially Will.

So, he didn’t respond. He turned his head and kicked off.

The wind slapped against his face, drawing loose a few unruly strands of hair that had come untucked from his beanie. He knew his knuckles were probably white beneath his gloves. Snow licked his nose and neck, and the rush of everything clogged his ears, made it impossible to think about anything at all, which was fine by him. 

Mike didn’t break in time. He was heavier than he had been the last time he’d gone sledding, and this was a bigger hill, so he kept sliding where he thought he’d naturally slow down. He veered right, trying to drag the tracks, and wiped out with a loud groan. He didn’t want to look back up the hill—Will was probably getting a kick out of his misery. 

He’d know in a minute. He just wanted to lie there, white below him and gray above him. A void. Voids were nothing, least of all confusing. 

His heartbeat thumped in his ears like a broken instrument, like there was some young kid hitting it to a rhythm that hadn’t been invented before, because it was dragging and awful and way too fucking inconvenient. 

Why couldn’t he have just said I hate you? Because Will’s eyes would have hardened, because his breath would have caught, because there was a bitch of a sentiment buried deep in the unsaid? Will probably wasn’t thinking this much about it. Just a small moment. Just a conversation. 

Except, Mike and Will were closer than ever now, and there had been times when Mike wondered if they’d ever be best friends again. The thought wrapped around his throat and squeezed; he bit his cheek to quash it. Only stopped when he tasted blood. 

Finally, Mike stood, grabbed the sled, and dragged it back up the hill, where Will was waiting. 

“You wiped out,” Will said, taking it from Mike’s two-handed grasp. “Like, really wiped out.” He set the sled down and adjusted his gloves, and Mike just sort of stood there and watched him, and then a snowflake landed on the tip of his nose, and he couldn’t help it, really. He pulled Will into a hug. 

“Oh.” It was quiet, raspy. Mike would have seen the word in the cold air if he’d been someone else. A breathy realization. “Hi. What’s this for?”

“I missed you.”

“While you were going down the hill?”

“I’ve been worried about you,” Mike admitted. 

It was something he hadn’t allowed himself to think, let alone vocalize. But Will had been so tired this month, and not like he was burnt out. His energy levels had dropped and just never rose back to normal. He’d been feverish and jaded, and Mike knew Will liked him best now, so maybe it wasn't as prevalent when they were together, but it was still a clawing fear, and he had to ask—he had to. 

“Are you okay, Will?” His chin fell to the crook of Will’s shoulder, arms tightening around the small of his back. “Because you can tell me if you’re not. If the nightmares are getting really bad again or if— if there’s something else— and I can help you deal with it. Really. I’d feel so stupid working on the comic with you while you were hurting, because then it shouldn’t be a priority. Then, you should be resting, not sledding or skating or anything like that.”

“Mike…” His name was a question already answered. 

Mike drew back, steadying himself on the hard muscles of Will’s arms, enough to look him in the eye. “You’d tell me, right? If something was wrong?”

Will searched Mike’s face for irony, a clue that perhaps he shouldn’t take his fervency seriously.  But there was none, so Will let his hands rest on Mike’s biceps, too, and gave a gentle squeeze.

“I’m okay, Mike. I promise.”

“Is it the nightmares?” He asked.

Will took a second, nodded while he fought to speak. “Yeah.” The skin around his eyes crinkled. “Yeah, they’ve been really bad recently.”

“Shit. God, I’m sorry. I wish there was something—”

“There’s nothing you can do for me,” Will interrupted, “except for what you’re already doing.”

“And that’s what?”

“Being my friend,” Will said. “My best friend.”

The muscles in Mike’s face relaxed, softened by his own thoughts echoed back to him. Sometimes, it felt like Will could reach into his mind and pull out anything he wanted, any sentiment or secret. It was out of grace that he didn’t, or maybe trepidation, because how scary would that be—to know someone completely?

“Doing things with me. Mike, seriously, you’re doing everything right. I haven’t had this much fun drawing in… I don’t even know. I like creating with you.” He pressed his lips together, the ends of them curving upward, a smile suppressing something else entirely. “It makes it easier to go to sleep at night, knowing that even if I have a bad dream, there’s a lot of good waiting for me in the morning.”

And for the second time that hour, Mike was left speechless. Drawing Will back into his embrace felt like a decent cop-out. 

Eventually, they cut the shit, and Will mounted the sled, giving Mike a tiny wave before he charged down the hill. Mike didn’t let Will out of his sight, watched as the sled picked up speed and spat snow in every direction until he was a dot on the landscape, small and unreachable, which was—Mike hated to admit—how Will had been classified in his head ever since he went missing.

Small and unreachable. 

It’d been a perfect ride. Mike wouldn’t hear the end of it from Will. 

They took turns descending the hill for the rest of the morning, the time between rides increasing with each one because trudging to the top again was no small task, especially with the snow reaching halfway up their boots. Finally, they settled on one last ride each, but then some younger kids showed up at the Band-Aid, and they figured they should be generous and give them the space.

“You take the last one,” Mike said before Will could do his whole selflessness act. Not a chance. Around Mike, if Mike had it his way, Will got exactly what he wanted. End of. 

Predictably, Will protested. “No, no, Mike. It’s your sled.”

“Yeah, exactly. It’s my sled. I can do this anytime I want.” He gave Will a gentle shove towards it. “Go. I’ll meet you down at the bottom.”

“Okay,” said Will, inching towards Mike’s sled like he thought it might bite him. “If you’re sure.”

“I am,” Mike said, already starting for the base of the Band-Aid, walking a bit sideways so he could see Will, as he spoke. “Don’t wipe out like I did. You’ve got a perfect streak so far.”

“Best not break it,” Will agreed. His knees were bent, his hands wrapped around the grab bar. But he wasn’t moving. “Mike!”

Full-body turn. Like Mike was possessed or something.

“Yeah?”

“Ride down with me.”

Mike scoffed. Fuck Will. He was too kind. “You’re a piece of shit.”

Will just shook his head. “There’s room for two. C’mon.”

Mike didn’t care to argue. He scampered over and squatted down, his legs pointed outward, heels digging into the snow. There were a few inches between him and Will’s back. Will craned his neck.

“Not sure we’re gonna get anywhere like this.”

“Well, forgive me for respecting your personal sp—”

Will tugged Mike’s arm forward and wrapped it around his waist, then groped for the other one. Mike, to save Will the embarrassment of grabbing the wrong thing—he was getting dangerously close to Mike’s crotch—did it for him, and now he was hugging Will from the back. But there were still a few inches between them.

“Jesus, Michael, are we at the prom or something?”

“Shut up,” Mike said. It was a weak retort. He knew it. He didn’t know why he was hesitating. The thin air was making him stupid.

Resolved to be up close and personal, Mike pressed his chest into Will’s back and planted his feet on the wood, boots squeezing Will’s hips. Mike thought about their hug and how maybe he could put his chin on Will’s shoulder again, but then he saw Will’s hot puff of breath fade into the atmosphere, and for some reason, that prevented him from doing so. 

“Ready?” Will asked. The wind was loud up here. It would be louder in a moment.

“Yeah,” said Mike, and they kicked off.

Immediately, Mike pressed his head into Will’s back. He’d never sledded with someone else before; he was convinced he’d tumble right off. 

They were faster together, too. Mike’s grip on Will’s waist was deadly, more of a restraint than a seatbelt—Mike was half-scared Will would asphyxiate.  He didn’t see their descent so much as feel it, the air twice as alive now, their bodies fused into one kinetic being. Mike was vaguely aware that this was the only time he’d ever hold Will this way, and for some reason, it made him hug him impossibly tighter. Will howled and Mike whooped and both voices got lost in the undertow, a propulsive current, pushing them to the bottom, to the end, as all things eventually did. 

At home, Mike and Will took steaming hot showers, changed into PJs, and radioed their friends. They tried Lucas first—he was closer to Mike’s house and more likely to answer. Will and Mike were facing each other, both in a half-prone position, their stomachs on the mattress and their feet above their heads. The walkie rested between them. Mike held the push-to-talk.

“Come in, Sinclair. Come in, Sinclair.”

A bit of static. Will tried next.

“Sinclair, this is Byers and Wheeler. Do you copy?”

Another burst of static. Then: “This is Sinclair. I copy.”

“Aww, fuck you, man. You like Will more or something?” Mike teased. He let Will press the PTT for him, since Will knew everything about him anyway, including when he wanted to speak and for how long, apparently. 

“Yes, but I also wasn’t by my walkie. I just got home.”

From the hospital was implicit at this point.

“How’s our girl?”

“Hey, my girl, Byers. Don’t get smooth on me now.”

Will hummed pleasantly. “Hey, you tell Max that if she wakes up, she can have whomever she wants—”

“Okay,” says Mike, his laughter a bit hard. He grabbed the walkie from Will and held it to his mouth, and Will didn’t object. “That’s enough out of Byers, I think.”

They talked for a few more minutes. There was nothing much to catch up on. Lucas already knew that he and Will were working on an untitled comic—Jesus Christ, Do NOT Go Into That Cave Unarmed—and that they’d been hanging out a lot, and that was pretty much it. Lucas lived in limbo nowadays, hovering between home and the hospital, which was a pretty stagnant existence. Still, they found new things to talk about, ways to take Lucas’s mind off of his girlfriend in an ICU suite, in a coma. 

Eventually, Lucas signed off to eat lunch, and Will and Mike decided to try Dustin. They’d done so a couple of times over Christmas break, and he had always answered but given some polite excuse for why he couldn’t talk. Mike almost wished Dustin would be honest with them—Love you guys, but I feel like shit. He’d hate hearing it, but at least it would be true. 

This time, though, nothing. 

“Should we call his house?” Will asked. 

They took the walkie into the living room with them and dialled Dustin’s house from the rotary. No answer. Will pressed the PTT a million more times, just in case, but they couldn’t get through.

No matter how awful Dustin felt, he always answered. Something was wrong. 

Back in Mike’s room, they radioed Lucas again. 

“We’re worried about Dustin,” Will said upon Lucas’s reply. “He’s not answering the phone or the walkie.”

“But he always answers,” Lucas said. “Even when he’s half asleep or like, really deep in it. He still gives some bullshit about how his mom wants him to help peel cucumbers.”

“Exactly,” Mike said, but goddamnit, he didn’t like getting Lucas’s confirmation. “Should we go to his house?”

“Nah,” said Lucas, static splitting the word. “He’s not home if he didn’t answer the phone.”

“But maybe his mom—” Mike started, but Will was already pulling a crewneck over his head. Mike looked to Will for the reason why. 

“Tell Lucas to put a jacket on,” Will told him. “And to meet us at the cemetery.”

The bike ride to Hawkins Cemetery wasn’t as bad as Mike had assumed. It’d stopped snowing, and with layers on, with hot blood pumping, he didn’t feel too cold. 

Mike took the lead, Will cycling close behind. They ran into Lucas halfway through, and the three of them rode in silence, center of the road, cars be damned. Nobody was outside anyway. Mike was getting pretty sick of being one of the only living things in Hawkins, Indiana.

They dismounted their bikes at the curb and dragged them through the snow to Eddie Munson’s grave, tracing three parallel tire tracks into the sludgy terrain. Mike knew where to go, and—he could tell by the way they never wavered—so did Lucas and Will.

Dustin was sitting a foot away from Eddie’s grave, still as a rock, barely breathing. Mike tossed his bike and approached him like someone might approach a skittish pet. One wrong move, and Mike was worried Dustin would bolt. 

Except, maybe that was stupid, because Dustin didn’t even look up when Mike kneeled beside him. 

Dustin’s jeans were soaked. He must have been sitting in the snow for a long time, and he was ill-equipped, wearing only a t-shirt and flannel. Will kneeled beside Mike, and Lucas, across from him. Mike turned his head and saw what Dustin was looking at. Not just Eddie’s grave. 

Someone had spray-painted it again. Dustin was used to that. But usually, the message was something like “ROT IN HELL!” or “GOOD RIDDANCE, SATAN!” spelled with an "e," and Dustin didn’t believe in hell or in Satan, so he could generally mutter and scrub the grave and curse his town for being so fucking close-minded.

But this message wasn’t like the others. This one read, “No one will remember you.”

“Whoever did this used cheap paint,” Dustin said, his voice even, broken.

Lucas put his hand on Dustin’s shoulder. “That’s good, yeah?”

“What a loser,” Mike added. “I mean, really, do these cretins not have better things to do with their time?”

“Time?” Dustin bit back, giving his attention to Mike, though now Mike wished he hadn’t. His jaw was tense; his gaze was cold. “All we have is time, Mike. We’re doing nothing—we’re doing nothing!”

Dustin’s head fell to his knees. His shoulders shook with the force of silent tears. But would it have been so awful? To cry out loud?

“I’m sorry,” Dustin muttered. “I’m just… I’m sorry.”

The silence that followed was a funeral march, a prayer—reverent and apologetic. 

“They’re wrong, you know,” Will said softly. “As long as you’re— we’re alive, he’ll be remembered. We’ll keep his memory alive, Dustin. We don’t need anyone else.”

“Yeah,” Mike agreed. “When have we ever needed anyone else?”

Dustin lifted his head then, his mouth pinched, his undereyes puffy. “Yeah.”

Lucas scooped up a handful of snow. “Look,” he said to Dustin. “It’s cheap shit, right?”

“So?”

“So, maybe it’ll come right off.” Lucas stuck the snow to Eddie’s headstone and rubbed it across the front. Some of it came away red; the words faded a bit. Lucas smiled. “See?”

Mike grabbed twice as much snow as Lucas had. “Jesus,” he said. “Shitty vandals.” 

Dustin scoffed at this, but his eyes squinted like they did when he laughed, so he called it a win. Mike ran his clump of snow down the grave, lathering it like soap, and the words got softer still.  

“Right,” said Will, gathering a small pile of powder. “You’d think such hateful people would do a little research.” 

Before long, a shadow of red remained over Eddie’s epitaph. Lucas, Will, and Mike looked to Dustin. 

“Hold out your hands,” Will said. Dustin did as he was told, and Will rolled some snow into a ball and put it in his palm. He nodded at Mike, then, and Mike knew what Will wanted. Maybe the whole reading minds thing went both ways. 

Mike padded Will’s snowball with some snow of his own. Lucas finished it off. And Dustin, after glancing at them each in turn, washed the rest of the paint away. 

Mike and Will hugged Dustin and Lucas goodbye, told them Merry Christmas, and rolled their bikes back to the street. Lucas was gonna walk his bike and Dustin back to Dustin’s house, where they’d probably have a sleepover. But Mike could tell Dustin didn’t want to be around many people now, and Dustin and Lucas had always been a closer pair. 

Well, he supposed it used to be him and Lucas who were the closest, but that was mostly because their houses were close, and their walkie-talkie signals were better in close proximity. 

Mike mounted his bike and kicked off slowly, waiting for the whir of Will’s gears before picking up speed. They didn’t say anything to each other, but Will’s presence was more comforting than Mike would ever articulate. He knew these streets by heart, sure, but everything appeared so foreign now, like a dark cloud had settled over Hawkins with no signs of lifting. But Will—Will was a constant. He was still himself.

So, just as he was pulling up to his walkway, when Mike found that he could not feel Will anymore, it absolutely terrified him. 

He heard it before he saw it—Will’s bike falling to the concrete, Will collapsing with it. 

Mike jumped off his own bike. He didn’t care if it got scratched or ruined or anything—he ran straight to Will, slumped on the ground, unconscious, his mouth agape. Mike kicked Will’s ride to the grass and dropped to his knees, his cotton pajama bottoms tearing as they rubbed against the grainy sidewalk. Mike lifted Will’s head onto his thigh and held his face in his hands, hovering a few fingers over his mouth. He was still breathing. 

“Mom!” Mike shouted, his voice coming out rough and gritty and not his own. Tears streaked down his cheeks, brimming and falling so fast that the world blurred, but he didn’t care. He couldn’t. It was the last thing he needed to worry about. “Jonathan! Joyce! Help me!” He cried. His vocal cords strained—his throat was like sandpaper. His lungs burned. Nobody could hear him.

Mike steadied Will beneath his body and rose, pushing through the pain in his calves. He had the strength of a superhero, he found, when he really needed it. 

“Help! Momma—please!” He hadn’t called her that since he was eight. “Please! It’s Will— Will!”

Mike’s body was tearing in two; he didn’t care. Will was all that mattered. 

Jonathan met him at the door, swinging it open so hard it slammed into the wall, and vaguely Mike heard the plaster crack, or maybe it was the paint but who fucking cared. Mike’s brain was an infinite feedback loop, a cacophony of Will, Will, Will. 

He’d lied. He wasn’t okay. His Will wasn’t okay.

“Jonathan!” Mike blubbered. “Jon— it’s— he fainted.”

Jonathan took hold of Will beneath his arms, Mike retained his grip on Will’s legs, and they maneuvered him to the couch. Jonathan cushioned Will’s head with a throw pillow just as Joyce charged into the room. 

“What happened?” She screamed, and the words almost didn’t make sense. This didn’t make sense. 

“Fainted,” Mike managed. He sat at the foot of the couch, limp. 

Jonathan felt Will's forehead. “He’s burning up. Mom, get the bowl from the basement.”

“Okay, okay,” she said, and rushed out of the room. Mike watched them like a tennis match.

“What—” Mike faltered. The lights were too orange. The Christmas tree was towering. Nothing made any fucking sense. He ran his hands down his face. “Jonathan—”

“Mike, can you get the thermometer, please?”

“Jonathan, has this happened before?”

“You know where it is, right?”

Just then, Will stirred, a low, terrible moan rumbling in his throat. Joyce ran back into the room as his eyes squeezed tight, then opened. She and Jonathan helped him sit up, and Joyce placed the bowl on his lap.

“He told me he was taking it easy!” Joyce hissed, eyes on her older son. “That he was drawing.”

“Mom, you know he has to try and move around—”

“He told me he wouldn’t do anything stupid,” Joyce cried, and Will retched and threw up into the bowl.

Only, it wasn’t vomit, wasn’t dinner or breakfast or stomach acid—Will gagged up a black tar-like sludge, viscosity akin to slime or honey, with sharp spikes that must have torn apart Will’s throat. 

Mike tried to speak, to say anything. Prove that he was here.

He tried to pinch himself, to feel anything. Prove that this was all a bad dream. 

He was paralyzed. 

Will retched into the bowl again. Jonathan rubbed his back, Joyce pinched the bridge of her nose, her expression kind of collapsed in on itself, and Mike was fucking useless. He couldn’t move.

Will lurched forward. He dry-heaved, but it seemed to be over. Jonathan took the bowl outside, and Joyce hugged Will tight. Mike caught his gaze—his eyes were so red.

He knew before he asked, but the not knowing—it was worse. It was unfathomable. 

“Will,” Mike choked out, barely a sound, barely anything. “You’re sick?”

And Will—the boy who knew him better than anyone—gave the smallest shake of his head. “I’m dying.”

Chapter Text

They didn’t talk about it for hours.

Will needed to hydrate on the couch, nursed back to temporary normalcy by his mother, and then they would have the conversation. Will needed to nap, crush his headache with the weight of his eyelids and his time, and then they would have to make it real. Mike knew these things, logically. 

But he returned to his room, and paced, and prodded, and tore his hair out—and then, when that didn’t work, he tore his room apart. 

The bed first. Everything Will had ever touched. The bedspread and the pillows and the fitted sheet Mike had always hated helping his mother with (because why did they never fucking fit). Mike balled it all up and chucked it at his door. 

And then, there were his clothes. Over the last few months, Will had borrowed quite a few of his sweatshirts—they all had to be burned now. And what a pity; Mike liked some of those. But the gray one with the old emblem on the breast, the forest green Nike hoodie with worn cuffs, the blue crewneck he’d gotten just last year and only worn once, himself—it all had to go. It was all infected now, gone with Will’s sick. So Mike tore them from their hangers and flung them across the room. 

And then, there was the thought that Will’s feet had probably touched every inch of his floor, and there was hardwood beneath the carpet, and it would all have to go, too. His parents would just have to replace it. They could use Mike’s college fund; who fucking cared? He was going nowhere, he was going nowhere, he was going nowhere…

Nancy found Mike in a mess of his own making, curled up below his bed. 

“Mike.” Her voice was soft. Mike couldn’t remember the last time she’d spoken to him like that. Maybe when she was little, and he was smaller still, and Nancy had thought Mike was a gift for her—called him “my baby.” Said things like, “My baby is hungry. My baby needs to sleep now.”

She sat beside him. Her skirt grazed Mike’s foot. He couldn’t look at her. His face must have been so red. So rough.

“He’s gonna be okay,” said Nancy, with such blatant uncertainty that it almost set Mike off again. “Will’s been through so much already. He’s survived so much. He can survive this.”

“How do you know that?” Mike said, because he hated himself, and he wanted to hear doubt in someone else’s voice. In Nancy’s voice, because she was strong and her resignation would break him. 

Nancy wrapped her arm around Mike’s shoulders and drew him close. “I don’t know,” she whispered, gentle near his ear. They’d fought just last week. She’d told him to go to hell. But siblings said that kind of shit all the time, and it never counted. Why was it that this did? “I don’t know.” She rubbed circles on his back. Mike felt the heat behind his eyes again. “But I do know Will. And if there’s one person who can outrun anything, it’s him. He’s come back from the dead before—”

Wrong choice of words. Mike pulled away from Nancy. “Right, which means he’s shit out of luck, probably.” 

“Mike—”

“You don’t even know what’s happening, do you?” 

“Jonathan told me—”

“Oh, well, good, as long as Jonathan told you,” Mike scoffed, mean, rough, like he wanted to be. “He collapsed right in front of me, Nancy. Did Jonathan tell you that?”

“Sweetheart…”

Mike swatted Nancy’s hand away. He was a child in the backseat again, desperate not to be reached, not to be touched. 

“Did Jonathan tell you that he threw up fucking needles, Nancy?” Tears, slick and hot, part of his skin now, his overall chemistry. His spit was salty, his sight muddled. “Did he tell you that it smelled like burning rubber? And flesh. Burning flesh. He’s scorching from the inside out, Nancy—did your boyfriend tell you that?”

He resented her. It wasn’t fair, but he did. She would get to keep her Byers for as long as she wanted him. They’d get an apartment together, when all of this was over, somewhere far away. New York, near NYU, a place with a balcony and a coat closet, where they could hide all of their things from home. 

“Did he?” Mike asked again, but his heart wasn’t in it. He collapsed into Nancy, his forehead against her shoulder, and she held him like his mother used to, before he got older and taller and ruder. 

“Mike,” she seemed at a loss, and Mike had done that, and he detested himself for it but that was what he had wanted. “Mike, I’m so sorry. I’m so sorry.”

They stayed like that for a long time. Mike didn’t count. Time didn’t mean as much as it used to. 

That night, Will knocked ever so softly. Mike said nothing. Will poked his head in. His undereyes were so dark, his cheeks so hollow. Mike was going to burn down the world. 

“Fuck you,” Mike croaked. Will was looking around at the mess Mike had yet to clean. “Fuck you, Byers. Why didn’t you tell me?”

Will kneeled in front of Mike’s closet and started folding his sweaters because he was a goddamn saint, placing them on top of each other neatly. He would have had his first job in retail, freshman year of college, with a double major in art history and business, or maybe architecture. Mike couldn’t stand to look at him. There was a halo above his head.

“I tried to,” Will admitted. “On the hill, when you asked.”

“When I asked,” Mike echoed. “This morning. But it’s been going on for a lot longer.”

Will picked up Mike’s hamper. He started uncrumpling Mike’s fitted sheet. Mike wanted to scream at him, but he didn’t want Will to go.

“Since around Halloween,” said Will.

“Fuck you,” Mike said wetly, and Will gave a little humorless chuckle. Not a giggle anymore. 

“I didn’t want you to feel like you had to handle me any differently. You’ve always seen me as strong, Mike. If you knew I was…” Will’s shoulders sagged. “You would have been too gentle.”

Something about this struck a cord with Mike. “You don’t want me to be gentle?”

And finally, Mike looked up, and Will looked over, and their eyes met. “No,” said Will. “Not if you don’t want to be.”

Will tucked a corner of Mike’s fitted sheet around his mattress, and suddenly, Mike felt like the biggest asshole in the world. He stood and took the other side of the sheet. 

“Here,” said Mike. “Let me help.”

Mike struggled with it a lot more than Will did. Of course, Will would be good at handling a fitted sheet, something everyone was universally bad at. Mike could have never known that about him, if he hadn’t torn his room apart. The secret would have died with Will.

They took the bedsheet next, spread it in the space between them, draped it nicely over the bedframe. The rest was easy. Blanket. Pillows. Mike was a dick, and Will was so kind. 

When they were done, they both climbed onto the bed, wordless, leaning against Mike’s headboard, knees up and barely touching. “You should have told me,” Mike said, a broken record.

Will took a moment to respond. Outside the window, snow flurries danced in the porchlight. Will watched them, and Mike watched Will. Finally, Will knew what to say.

“How do you know the Band-Aid is safe?”

That wasn’t what Mike had expected. “Uh. I don’t know. People walk over it all the time.”

“Right,” said Will. “Because they don’t really understand what’s below it. You do, and I do, better than anyone. It doesn’t make sense that we’d both walk over it without hesitation.”

“It’s secure,” Mike insisted. “People walk over it—”

“As a dare,” Will interrupted before Mike could repeat himself. “They do it because it’s fun to be dangerous, but not for us. We’ve all had enough danger to last us a lifetime.”

A lifetime. It should have been a measurable unit, something semi-predicable. Will was healthy. He ate well. He didn’t hate anybody. His heart should have given out in old age, overlooking a clear lake surrounded by evergreen trees. Instead, "lifetime" was completely arbitrary. It could mean anything. One hundred years, three days. Tomorrow. 

“So those kids who came after us—”

“—are just stupid,” said Will. “But we’re not.” He leaned into Mike’s side, and Mike was grateful for the assurance that, at least for right now, Will was here. “Mike, tell me you haven’t thought about it?”

“About what?”

“The ground opening up beneath you. Swallowing you whole. About death—”

“Will, no—”

“Death as a mercy. As an end to all of this. Tell me you haven’t thought about dying.”

Mike turned his head towards Will, and Will looked at him. The green in his eyes was like an answered prayer. Mike could see the textured skin on his forehead, his cheek. He trailed his thumb along Will’s jaw, a quiet question: are you here? Is this real?

“I wasn’t trying to get hurt,” said Mike. He toyed with Will’s earlobe between his thumb and pointer finger. He folded it in on itself. “But I wouldn’t have cared if I were.”

“Because there’s nothing to live for,” Will said, and it should have been a question, but he already knew the answer. Yes. Yes to everything. Mike nodded, and Will shook his head—they were a contradiction in motion.

Will put his hand on top of Mike’s, on the side of his own head. “Mike, you can’t do that. You’ve got to live for a really long time.”

Mike took Will’s hand and put it in his lap, and it should have been weird, but death was weirder and far less forgiving than touch. So he held Will’s hand like a lapdog and Will let him, and it didn’t change anything—it didn’t matter at all. 

“Don’t care. Don’t wanna.”

“Mike,” Will said again, and there was so much in his name, so much Will could infuse into it—on Will’s lips, his name was important and sweet and heady. It was everything. “You have to live forever. I can’t die for nothing.”

Mike squeezed Will’s hand, his fingers digging into the grooves between his knuckles. He shook his head. “You’re not gonna die.”

“Mike…” And there it was again, the weight of the world in one syllable. Will’s eyes were wide and close, like planets through a telescope, small saturns—a ring around the iris. “Mike, it’s only getting worse. There’s no cure for this.”

“No.” He pressed Will’s palm to his heartbeat, an offer, a plea—take my pulse. I don’t need it, not really. What’s mine is yours.

Will gave Mike the softest of smiles; Mike wanted to die.

“It’s in my whole body, but it’s not like cancer. There’s no chemotherapy. There’s no cure. It’s more like a punishment. Like the men in New York and Los Angeles, you know. Dying because they’re different. Broken.”

Mike’s lips parted for a question, but it did not file down his tongue. So instead, he held their hands over his chest and made it a prayer—and isn’t that what it was? A plea for something grand and impossible to a lifeform he did not fully understand. Give my best friend my strength. Give it all away. 

“It’s not a punishment,” Mike said. “It’s not a moral thing.” Fuck, he was bad with words now. That was his curse. He was a writer who couldn’t speak well when it mattered most. “It’s not a judgment. It happened for no reason, for nothing. He took you because he could, not because there was something about you. You did nothing.”

“Okay,” said Will. “I did nothing.”

Mike leaned into Will, pressing their foreheads together. It should have felt strange, the proximity, but nothing mattered in the shadow of death, he supposed. 

“Promise me you’ll try, though. Anything you can.” Mike’s breath was hot and close and Will tangled it with his own and exhaled, and Mike thought that might have been his lifeforce, seeping into Will’s lungs, antibodies at work. “Now that I know, I can help you. We can try everything we did when you came back the first time. We can purge it out of you.”

“Mike—”

“Promise me,” Mike urged, his voice breaking, his spirit alongside it. 

Will nodded against Mike’s forehead, and it was kinetic, so Mike nodded, too. And they were both crying, but that wasn’t important. 

“Okay,” he said. “If you promise me something.”

“Anything,” said Mike.

“Don’t treat me differently. Don’t start now.”

“Okay.”

“And I want to have a normal Christmas. And finish our comic.”

“Will…”

“Promise me.”

Mike wound his arms around Will’s neck. There was fever and fervor in the space between them. “Okay. I promise.”

Mike embraced him, his chin coming down to Will, the nook of his neck, body limp and unmovable. He couldn’t have been pried off of him for anything. Will did the same, head on Mike’s sweatered shoulder, likely entrenched in the scent of stress sweat, that pungent chemical the skin emitted when afraid. It had been their cologne for quite some time. What was a lifetime more?

He and Will were pretty inseparable after that. 

Christmas dragged itself into the daylight. It would have come regardless, but Mike found the holiday to be completely out of place. Will was sick; what use did Mike have for Christmas?

But they still woke early—Will stirring from where he’d fallen asleep at the foot of Mike’s bed—and they treaded softly down the stairs and to the living room, where Holly already sat beside the crackling fire and her meager pile of presents, her little fingers eagerly prodding at the loose bits of their mother’s wrapping. Mike and Will claimed the same couch cushion, Will curling his legs onto Mike’s lap, pressed unambiguously against his side and when everyone else entered and saw them, it wasn’t strange because they knew. They all knew.

Mike’s dad read the paper in his chair, Nancy and Jonathan sat beside him, Holly craned her neck up at everyone from the floor, and the parents stood in wait. There wasn’t much to open this year, so they took turns unwrapping gifts to make it last longer. 

Joyce and Mike’s mom had spent time on everyone’s stockings. These presents were from “Santa,” though Holly was getting to the skeptical age. They all received new socks and chocolate, chapstick and candy canes. From her pile, Holly got a set of glittery lipglosses, a fake pearl necklace, and a brand-new doll made of hard plastic with a toothy smile that Holly kept calling “American.” Nancy got two novels she’d been asking for and a hand-drawn bookmark—Jonathan whispered something in her ear, and she smiled. He probably had a present for her, to be gifted in private.

Jonathan got a few rolls of film and The Queen is Dead by The Smiths on vinyl, and then Will told him to wait, ran off, and came back with another wrapped record—Master of Puppets by Metallica. Jonathan ruffled Will’s hair and thanked him profusely, insisting that they listen to both records together after breakfast. Will hugged his brother and returned to Mike’s side—was it selfish that Mike had sorely missed the contact, even for the brief, wanting minute?

“You shouldn’t be running,” Mike mumbled into the side of Will’s head, into his hair, to claim it again. Will’s socked feet fidgeted on Mike’s lap as he got comfortable. “You said you’d go easy.”

“I’m fine, Mike,” Will said, his tone infused with such pity that Mike had to avert his eyes out of guilt, because Will should not have been the one comforting Mike. 

Joyce gave Will a fancy set of colored pencils, a new sharpener, and lots of paper, and Will immediately nudged Mike, gossiping about the surefire quality of their new pages. As Mike had requested, his mom gave Will a few nice shirts—a v-neck, two scooped tees, a blue polo, plus a button-down—with the flippant excuse that she thought Will might like them more than her son. Will was the happiest Mike had seen him in a long time, and Mike wanted to bottle his feeling and shake it and pour it all over himself. 

When it was Mike’s turn, his mom pressed her hands together and reached behind the tree. “Now, Mike, you only got one present, but it’s a big one, okay?”

Mike suddenly felt six pairs of eyes fixed on his face, Will’s especially, and his stomach lurched. His mom handed him a big box, heavy on his knees. The wrapping paper had a candy cane pattern, red with white swirling stripes. Mike pushed the gift over Will’s legs so he didn’t have to move and unwrapped it carefully. 

It was a Robotron typewriter. All his own.

Mike ran his fingers along the box, reverent. “How…”

His mom grinned from ear to ear. “Do you like it?”

Mike looked up at her. “How did you…?”

But then, Will adjusted his position at Mike’s side, and Mike knew. Of course he knew. Of course.

“Now, you’re gonna have to come to the store with me to get the right kind of paper,” said Mike’s mom. “I didn’t want to buy something you wouldn't use.”

Mike sprang up and towards his mother. He hugged her harder than he had in a long time. She let out a surprised laugh and cradled his head.

“Thank you,” said Mike. 

“It wasn’t just me; it was everyone,” said Mike’s mom. “Nancy, Jonathan, Joyce—”

Mike narrowed his eyes at Joyce. “You did not have to—”

“Hush,” came her breezy reply. 

“And Will. He helped me pick the right model. This one should last you a long time.”

Mike could never have prepared himself for the look Will was giving him when he turned around. His face was so soft, his embrace so inviting, his eyes alight with a servile, quaint kindness. But there was also the slight press of his lips, the flare of his nostrils—he was nervous. Maybe that’s why he’d been fidgeting. Will didn’t want to disappoint him. 

Mike stared at him for a long time—a moment, but it stretched and warped and allowed him room to breathe, merry Christmas. His throat wound tight, his temples pressed against his brain, his eyes burned near the ducts, and Mike wanted to pull Will to his chest and press his cheek into Will’s neck but that wasn’t something he could explain, so he idled in awe.

“Thank you, Will.” Mike finally spoke, a sighing ordeal. 

And Will nodded, shrugging, as if this was the least he could have done for his friend. “Of course.”

After breakfast, Jonathan and Will listened to Jonathan’s new records, and then, Mike and Will were right back where they started, criss-cross on Mike’s bed, writing and drawing well into the afternoon. They were having trouble with the ending, though they weren’t quite there yet. Will had just sketched Reed meeting a kind townsperson who quartered him for the night, offering stew and bread for supper and tea and fruit in the morning. Mike had just outlined the following page, in which Reed realized he’d lost Tayla’s locket, which he kept around his neck at all times. The concept depressed Mike, so he tapped Will’s shoulder.

“Hey,” Mike said. Will looked up, lips parted in question. “How were the albums?”

“Great,” Will said. “I mean, I’d heard some of the songs already, but it’s different on vinyl.”

“Nice. You’ll have to play me your favorites sometime.”

Will smiled, his mouth ebbing, gentle as a wave. “Tomorrow.”

“Okay.”

That night, long after everyone had gone to bed, Will climbed into the bathtub, clad in only his boxers—something Mike might have found compromising before, but again, different things were important now. He winced; Mike had drawn the hottest bath possible, but that was what he’d needed a few years ago. The heat, not the cold. Never the cold. 

Mike sat on the edge of the tub, leaning against the tiled wall, and entertained Will with talk of their newest scene—a swordfight that had prompted the joke title, En Garde, Parry, Attack, and Stab With Reckless Abandon—while Will breathed heavily through his mouth. Mike knew this wasn’t easy for Will, but maybe the effort meant something. Maybe it was working.

“I think it should be harder for Reed to seize the ship. Right now he just stumbles aboard.”

Will exhaled shakily. “Huh?”

Mike paused. “To the Isle. For the Sanitallium.” Which sounded fancy, but was really just a slightly doctored portmanteau of the Latin words for “healing” and “crystal.” Mike had looked up at Hawkins Public Library last week, when they’d gone there to work. “The gemstones.”

“Oh,” Will said. “Right, yeah. That makes sense.”

His face was red—flushed. Was that good? Would the sickness seep from his pores and down the drain, making him clean again? Making Will himself again?

“Yeah, so maybe he’s gotta convince a sailor to take him, even though it’s really dangerous and impossible. And he has to stay in the port city without any money until he does.”

Will let out a low, pained moan. “Okay. Yeah. I like that.”

He squirmed in the water a bit, obviously repressing what he would have liked to do—scream. Thrash. Curse Mike’s name, shaken and breathless. Mike's gaze traced over Will’s body, marred by the veneer of the bath water, but still lithe and porcelain, the figure of someone who would have aged into such impossible, enviable beauty. 

Mike slid further along the edge of the tub and reached for Will’s hand in the water, drawing it upward, exposing it, sheltering it. “You’re okay, Will. I’m here.”

“You’re here,” said Will, pained. He squeezed his eyes shut, so tight, and Mike didn’t know what but he had to do something because Will was aching and that simply wouldn’t do, ever. 

Mike brought Will’s hand to his mouth and pressed his lips into the small of Will’s wrist, beaded with bath water, soft beneath his breath. He squeezed it against his cheekbone, sliding up to Will’s palm and brushing him there, too. He felt the creases in Will’s hand against his skin, what Mike had heard some call a lifeline, and sighed against it. 

“It hurts so much,” Will mewled. 

“I know, baby. I know.” It’d just been the thing to say. “I’m here, Will. I’m here.”

“It’s all over. It’s everywhere.” Mike couldn’t tell which droplets were water and which were tears. Will’s face crushed and reformed. Mike was helpless, so he moved his mouth to Will’s knuckles and pecked them each in turn. It should have been bizarre. It should have been a lot of things. “I feel wrong, Mike.”

The words wracked his body, a full sob, unrelenting now. Mike’s tears fell down in kind. “No.”

“Broken. Polluted.”

“No, no,”  Mike wept. “Don’t say that, baby. Don’t.”

It was what his mother had called him as a young boy, and occasionally now. The word always made Mike feel safeguarded, and that’s what he wanted to do for Will. But it formed differently on Mike’s tongue. It was shaped differently between his teeth.

“Help me,” Will cried, over and over, an injustice—because there was nothing else Mike could do except be there, and hold his hand, and kiss him where his wrist joined, and hope that would be enough.

When the water cooled down, Mike guided Will up to the edge of the tub, drained it, and wrapped a warm towel straight from the dryer around his body. He rubbed the fabric into Will’s skin, and Will let him, his arms encased, his hair damp against his forehead. He was so subdued in this moment. So trusting and good.

Mike brought Will into his bedroom, closing the door lightly behind them. There, Will removed his sopping boxers and changed into one of his new tees and Mike’s sweatpants, a bit tight on Will’s thighs, but that wasn’t the point. He drew his covers back and tucked Will in, ignoring his reservations to press a soft kiss to his temple. Will’s eyes fluttered shut at the pressure.

“I’ll be on the couch, okay?” Mike ran his hand down the comforter, from Will’s shoulder to his hip. “Okay?”

“No,” Will muttered, his eyes still closed. “Stay here.”

Mike didn’t need to think about it. He rounded the bed. “Okay.”

The mattress dipped beneath him. Immediately, Will turned and curled into Mike’s side. Mike let his arm rest across Will’s body, facing him, too.

“Mike.” Will’s voice was like the buzz of the heater, barely there unless you listened for it, which Mike always was. “The baths won’t work. I was cold before. Now, I’m burning up.”

Mike had thought about that. The horrific underworld beneath their feet didn’t abide by their medical rules. “We have to try. Maybe it’s like a fever, and we can break it.”

Will sighed. Mike could feel the heat of Will’s body as easily as the warmth of the hearth downstairs. And that was awful, if he thought about it, so he didn’t really. 

“Yeah,” said Will, resigning to believe him. “Okay.”