luvbyler
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Mike Wheeler and the Mortifying Ordeal of Being Obsolete by Pseudologia
Fandoms: Stranger Things (TV 2016)
31 Oct 2022
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Summary
“All right, Wonder Twins, prepare to meet your maker.” Dustin points a finger at El and smirks. “Never have I ever had a crush on Mike.”
Mike keeps his face neutral while El drinks, as is his ex-boyfriend-turned-best-friend duty. He sees a little movement out of the corner of his right eye, though, and he turns to follow it.
Will is taking a hit off his joint.
“Wait…” Mike says, cutting off Lucas in the middle of his never-have-I-ever announcement. His gaze doesn’t waver from Will’s face. “What?”
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- Part 1 of Byler Week 2022
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- English
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- 3,142
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- 1/1
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Bookmarked by luvbyler
13 Jan 2026
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This is the first girl who’s ever asked Mike out — something he had, in the not too distant past, been terrified would never happen. And Mike just stands there, feeling like his dining hall dinner is about to crawl back up his esophagus.
Jeremy, Saint Jeremy, nudges him with an elbow. “He’s kind of private about it, but Mike actually has someone back home.”
Mike turns his head to look at Jeremy, expecting a knowing smile or the hint of a wink. But Jeremy actually looks sincere, which makes Mike’s eyebrows sink down, almost to the top of his nose.
“Will, right?” Jeremy supplies, forever trying to be helpful. “He’s at CalArts?”
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- English
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- 4/4
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Bookmarked by luvbyler
13 Jan 2026
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On Monday, Will shows up to school wearing glasses.
After a lifetime of getting bullied for being a nerd, he’d rather show up to school covered in live ants, but it actually goes fine. Weirdly well, even. Jennifer Hayes asks him to carry her books to Geometry, and Denise King enthusiastically volunteers to be his lab partner in Chem. Will is all too aware of the attraction he somehow poses to the school’s most sought-after girls, but this feels like another level. Maybe it’s a charity case thing now, because of the glasses.
“It’s not,” Max tells him frankly at lunch. “You just look really hot with glasses.”
Bookmarked by luvbyler
13 Jan 2026
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“It’s stupid,” Will admits. He can already see Mike frowning, ready to refute him, so he continues before he loses his nerve: “But I was thinking about how I can’t believe that I’ve been through everything I’ve been through, and I’ve still never even kissed someone.”
Mike looks consummately surprised, his mouth a round O and his eyebrows halfway up his forehead. Will can hardly blame him, it’s not like they ever talk about this stuff — a boundary Will once set up very much on purpose. He’s ready for Mike to ask him what brought this on. Just as he’s mentally cataloging possible answers, Mike asks him an entirely different question.
“Never?”
Bookmarked by luvbyler
13 Jan 2026
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Summary
They’d graduated and Will had disappeared — not just to Mike, to everyone. It’s not like it was mean-spirited. He needed to leave Hawkins in the rearview, to figure out who he was without the ghosts of monsters at his heels. Mike had stayed in Indiana. Dustin and Lucas and Max had ended up in Chicago. Will had gone the farthest, all the way out to California, and he’d tried to become a different person.
In some ways, he insisted, he was. He was different from all of his friends — always had been. There was a reason he’d been singled out on the playground, and they would never get that. They would never know what it felt like for Will to realize, one day, that all those bullies and his own dad had been right. They didn’t have friends and mentors dying right now. It wasn’t their fault — they were just normal. They’d never understand.
Except, well, now Mike is sitting here, at a gay bar, getting elevator eyes from two bears and a leather daddy.
Series
- Part 4 of Byler Week 2022
- Language:
- English
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- 3,185
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Bookmarked by luvbyler
13 Jan 2026