Chapter Text
“I’m about to do something really shitty,” Will said. “But I think we might die today. And I guess I’d rather live with you hating me than die without you knowing exactly what I am.”
The air was acrid. Everything reeked of death. Will’s face was blood-flecked and his eyes were hopelessly determined. Mike’s organs seemed to chafe against the walls of his ribcage, as if equally desperate as he was to escape this new flavor of scrutiny.
“Okay?” Will asked, his voice trembling.
Mike nodded a little, as if compelled. Then, Will’s hand came up to cup the back of his neck, digging into the hair at his nape, holding him in place.
***
El breaks up with him on a Saturday.
Something about that feels paradoxical. The world is bright and full of possibility, and in one sour moment, Mike’s vision for his future is spatchcocked, spread out in a way a fantasy never should be, highlighting all his little false assumptions.
“It’s too hard to date you, Mike,” El says.
Mike’s ears fill with static. El’s not looking at him, sitting cross-legged on his bed and staring at a dirty t-shirt he’d left on the floor.
“It’s supposed to be hard,” Mike tries. “That’s what makes it, like. Worth it. Right?”
El just shakes her head. “It’s hard for the wrong reasons.”
“What are you talking about?”
“The hard part should be that everything gets in our way, but we keep trying. But instead it’s like … we’re always in each other’s way, even when everything should be perfect,” El says, slowly. “I think we’re always trying to be different for each other.”
“So, what, I’m a villain now for wanting to be better for you?” Mike says, incredulity poisoning his voice.
El gives him a look which distinctly lacks warmth. It’s a little sad, a little tired, like a face someone might make at an exhausting toddler. She’s never directed that expression at Mike before. It jades him a little.
“I still love you,” she says. “You don’t have to say it back, though.”
Then, Mike’s left standing like an idiot in the doorway while his girlfriend walks away from him.
He hears El say goodbye to his mom. He hears the front door shut heavily, the sound reverberating, the shift in the space-time continuum making itself known.
***
The last music store Hawkins had burned down with Starcourt, so Dustin has to drag Mike all the way to Indianapolis to get his fix.
“Lucas won’t even touch metal anymore, man. He rolls his eyes whenever I try to put an album on when he’s over,” Dustin says, running his eyes over the neat stacks of tapes. “I can’t believe he turned out to be such a poser.”
“I mean, was he ever that into this stuff?” Mike asks. “We were just kids. Trying to fit in, you know.”
“I wasn’t,” Dustin says with that slightly haughty air of stubbornness that was always his, but sharpened as he got older. “Hey! New Anthrax.”
With Dustin absorbed in combing every last section of the store, Mike’s left to wander. He’s a little scared of telling Dustin that he doesn’t listen to metal much anymore, either. At least, not as religiously as he used to. He gets why Dustin would react so strongly to the idea: it’s a betrayal of sorts. But it’s hard enough for Mike to keep living in this town, without also holding himself accountable for every one of his embarrassing phases. Most people probably don’t have to tie their various hair and music-related teenage urges to the legacy of a friend.
Besides, half the appeal of the music — to Mike, at least — had been its spokesperson. It had been Eddie who breathed life into the whole metal scene, just like he did his campaigns.
Mike reaches up to touch the back of his neck, where his hair used to hang. The style had been inconvenient at the best of times. Mike vividly remembers the California heat, curls clinging to his skin with sweat. It makes him a little uneasy to think of all the discomfort he endured for a haircut that now, he can’t remember why he wanted so badly. For a time, long hair had just seemed so cool. Effortless, attractive.
Mike lets his hand drop, shakes off the ruminations. Just for something to do, he glances over the alternative rock titles. A bit of cover art catches his eye — gloomy, sort of gothic. He plucks it from the shelf.
“Dustin?” he calls.
“Yeah?”
“You ever heard of Pixies?”
“Uh, yeah. I think so. Boston, right? They’re supposed to be kind of punk.”
That’s code for total horseshit, at least to Dustin, who reads music magazines religiously these days and applies his knowledge liberally. Despite his dismissal, Mike feels compelled to look the tape over. Come On Pilgrim, the side reads, in small handwritten letters. The tape only has eight tracks.
“Will would probably like them, you know,” Dustin says, appearing suddenly at Mike’s side.
Embarrassingly, Mike finds himself flinching, not sure at what.
“Okay?” he says, hoping the defensiveness of his tone is obvious only to him. Dustin raises one eyebrow.
“I just mean, he likes that kind of stuff, right? Artsy, angry stuff,” Dustin says.
“I guess,” Mike replies. He shoves the tape back in its place on the shelf and looks pointedly in another direction.
Dustin’s silent for a while, but Mike’s not fooled. After all these years of living through a world at war, he can tell when he’s being watched.
“He knows you’re avoiding him,” Dustin says, finally. “Look, I don’t know what happened between you guys. Like, back then. But I know he doesn’t deserve this. Even if he was a total asshole to you, or something. He’s … you know.”
Mike doesn’t respond. His jaw clenches a little, involuntarily, and he crosses his arms, firmly refusing to meet Dustin’s gaze. Soon enough, Dustin’s footsteps retreat again, heading back in the direction of the new releases.
Suddenly, without thinking, Mike slides Come On Pilgrim free again. Then, after a moment, he puts it back. Then, he pulls it out once more and makes for the till like he’s fleeing a crime scene, sweating through his winter coat.
***
At first, Mike puts the tape with the rest of his collection. He stares at it for a while, innocuous among the rest of his albums, like deadly nightshade in a trough of blueberries. So he picks it back up and shoves it in his desk drawer. But then even that becomes too close for comfort, and it ends up in a shoebox under his bed, buried under old Christmas and birthday cards that he never bothers to reread but can’t bear to throw out.
Mike lies on his bed, stares at the ceiling, and tries his best not to feel the presence of the tape that he has no intention of listening to and no idea why he bought.
He rubs a hand hard over his face, a tic he’s picked up over the last few weeks. It’s only that his lips still tingle sometimes. It’s like muscle memory, the way he’s periodically assaulted with an echo of the desperate press of Will’s mouth on his.
It’s not like he hasn’t tried to erase it. When Mike first saw El, after it was all over, relief flooded his limbic system. Once she was in arm’s reach, he grabbed her, and he kissed her and kissed her and kissed her.
It had been too much, even for a reunion. El’s surprise edged on confusion; Mike could feel it in the way her lips went lax against his. That didn’t matter. He’d been desperate to cover himself in her. Her girlish scent, her touch. As if she could somehow absolve him, rid him of the stain that now penetrated him all the way to the bone.
Mike turns over in bed, tucks his knees to his chest. He tries his best to feel like a person again. Solid, grounded, not floating up and away from his body. Instead, he finds himself straddling two planes of existence. Part of him exists here, in this moment, and another dwells on that one dark night when the world was ending.
***
Warm and dry. That was what registered first. Then, it was Will’s hair against his forehead. Will’s chest brushing against his. Will’s fingers, cold as ice, unmoving on the back of Mike’s neck. Will’s mouth wasn’t moving either. It was a stiff sort of kiss, but then again, Mike reasoned, it was doubtful Will had kissed anyone before.
Less than a second passed before Will pulled back. His soft eyes soon went large. He might have been red-cheeked — it was hard to tell in the dark.
Mike was paralyzed: rooted to the spot by the same panic that had quickly turned his heartbeat erratic and painfully loud. Will turned away from him, running a hand through his hair.
“Sorry. Oh my God, I’m sorry,” Will said. “Holy shit, that was the worst idea I’ve ever had.”
Mike blinked. He tried and failed to swallow the saliva that was pooling in his mouth.
***
The four of them used to go on double dates. It’s a detail Mike let slip from his mind the past week, hollowing out to make room for the memories which more aggressively demanded his attention.
“So, I was thinking we could all watch a movie at my place, or something,” Lucas says, his voice tinny over the phone line. “Saturday?”
“Oh,” Mike says. He’s sitting at his desk, hunched over a stack of notes for an upcoming campaign. Working on them is a good excuse to camp out in his room for hours after every school day. “Um. I thought Max would’ve told you, or something.”
“Told me what?”
Mike leans back in his chair. “That, uh. El and I. We’re, um, not together anymore.”
“Oh,” Lucas says. “Wow. I’m sorry to hear about that.”
Mike waits for a little, then says, “That’s it?”
“What do you mean?”
“It’s just —” Mike bites the inside of his cheek. “You don’t seem that surprised.”
“Oh. I don’t know.”
“Wait, did you know this was going to happen?” Mike asks. “Did Max tell you El was going to dump me?”
“No! Jesus, you’re paranoid,” Lucas says. “Look, I’m surprised. I swear.”
“Fine,” Mike mumbles.
Silence stretches between them until Lucas fills it.
“So, uh, maybe we could all get together and watch something, then. The whole Party,” Lucas says. “We haven’t seen you in a while.”
“You see me every day at school.”
“Okay, yeah, barring twenty minutes for lunch during which we’re all shoving food in our faces, we haven’t seen you in a while,” Lucas says. “Come on. It’ll be fun.”
Mike sighs. “Yeah. Okay.”
“Awesome. I’ll call Dustin and Will,” Lucas says. “I was thinking Close Encounters again. But is that too close to home?”
“That’s been too close to home since we were twelve,” Mike says. He tries his best to keep his voice steady, but his ears are ringing with the casual mention of Will. “Life of Brian?”
“Not again,” Lucas says. “How about Clue?”
“Yeah, okay,” Mike says. Clue had been a favorite of Will’s the year it came out. He’d go on for hours about Tim Curry’s knack for physicality, and Mike would listen indulgently. “I mean, if everyone else is fine with it.”
“Cool,” Lucas says. “Well. See you tomorrow.”
“Yeah,” Mike says. “See you tomorrow.”
The line goes dead. Mike clutches the receiver, his knuckles going white.
***
Mike is pretty sure Max hates him again, which doesn’t seem fair, since he’s the one who actually got broken up with.
When he shows up to Lucas’s house on Saturday afternoon, she’s already there, sitting on the couch with her arm around El’s shoulders. Mike knows it’s common curtesy to announce himself to her, but the moment he does, her expression sours. Even through her dark sunglasses, he can feel her death glare.
It’s made worse by the fact that El actually smiles at him, and offers him a little wave. He waves back, but can’t figure out how to force a smile. He feels desperately self-conscious, his limbs too long, like he’s in the way of everyone and everything.
The couch is out of the question, but when he tries to sit on the armchair, Erica storms into the room and steals it out from under him. This prompts a loud argument between her and Lucas about whether or not she should be there at all, at which point Mike decides to just slink around the furniture and sit on the floor in the margins of the room.
It’s not long before the doorbell rings again and Lucas has to dash off to answer it, leaving Erica sitting smugly atop her throne. As two new sets of footsteps approach, Mike pointedly avoids looking at the doorway, instead picking at a fraying lace on his Chucks.
It’s not like he doesn’t know who it is. Process of deduction, first of all, but also because Will and Dustin are practically joined at the hip these days, ever since Will’s mom found a house to rent down the street from the Hendersons’ place. They show up everywhere together. It makes Mike weirdly bitter, a feeling he tries to ignore as he recognizes the added distance for the blessing that it is.
“Dibs the couch!” Dustin shouts.
The sudden outburst draws Mike’s eyes. He sees Dustin diving for the free space next to Max.
“Hey! She’s my girlfriend,” Lucas says. He pushes Dustin insistently towards the side of the armrest.
“Boys, boys, please,” Max is saying. “There’s enough space for both of you.” She pats El’s arm. “Cavemen, honestly.”
So, not without bickering, Lucas crams himself awkwardly into the space between Dustin and Max. Even through Dustin’s complaining, Mike can’t help but notice how, almost instinctively, Max lets her head drop to Lucas’s shoulder. How Lucas’s hand finds Max’s knee and squeezes a little.
Then, Mike’s eyes drift over to Will in the doorway.
The Sinclairs have central heating, so he’s already shed his coat. He’s in one of his frumpy sweatshirts, the ones with the open collar and the sleeves he’s habitually stretched out until they start to slip over his palms. He’s shifting his weight from foot to foot, eyes darting awkwardly between the couch and the armchair and finally landing on Mike.
Mike’s not sure what expression he wants to see on Will’s face when their eyes meet, but it disappoints him anyway. That’s nothing new. Each day when they’re forced together in the cafeteria, Mike is torn between his desperate desire for everything to remain the way it always was — for no one to notice anything amiss — and the pathological, almost subconscious way he searches for some change, some sign in Will’s face that might confirm the truth of what happened between them.
Will doesn’t go red. He doesn’t avoid eye contact, doesn’t rub the nape of his neck. He doesn’t overcompensate by grinning or clapping Mike on the shoulder. He just smiles a little, without teeth. Gives Mike a cursory nod.
When it becomes apparent, though, that the only open space in the living room is next to Mike, Mike is almost gratified to see the flash of panic that crosses Will’s face. A secondary reaction, of course, to the anxiety that simultaneously seizes Mike by the throat.
Will shoves his hands in his pockets and slumps on the floor, closer to the armrest of the couch than to Mike. Mike watches as El gives Will a warm smile, reaching out to ruffle his hair. Will laughs his dorky, toothy laugh and bats her hand away.
Something about it makes Mike feel sick to watch. He tucks his knees to his chest.
As it turns out, Mike never has to worry about making conversation. Once everyone’s settled, Lucas inserts the tape into the VCR, and the opening credits start to play.
***
Halfway through, Mike whispers that he has to go to the bathroom and slips out through the front door. Sitting on the curb, the sky purpling over the lines of suburbia, Mike tries to remember if Will wears cologne.
He doesn’t think so, but how else could Mike explain how Will smelled so strongly of something? Not sweat — deodorant, maybe — a sort of heady, woody musk that kept clouding Mike’s nose to the point of suffocation.
Winter air, biting as it is, seems to clarify Mike’s lungs as he takes grateful drags of it. He presses his face to the rough denim that covers his knees, letting it absorb some of the warmth and perspiration that had accumulated on his skin, and he tries desperately to remember who he was before the world started ending.
Ever since the sky stopped bleeding red rain, and the wounds in the ground and trees and walls sealed up, no longer alive with infection, Mike has thought back to the amorphous good times. The simple years, when he and Will never argued or let anything get all knotted-up and unfixable. When was that — ’84? ’82?
The more time passes, the more Mike convinces himself that he and Will just aren’t meant to be friends anymore. That maybe they haven’t been for years. That maybe, getting along when they were twelve doesn’t mean as much as Mike has always thought. Looking at those old pictures, he doesn’t even recognize that kid anymore.
“Hey.”
Mike stiffens.
“Hi,” he says, shortly.
Will’s scuffed sneakers shuffle against the pavement and come to a stop on the curb next to Mike. Will leaves about six inches between them as he sits, arms folded on top of his knees. His cheek rests on his elbow; it pushes his remaining baby fat up around his eye. Makes him look soft, like some kind of innocent kid.
“You’re not peeing,” Will says, pointedly.
“I just needed some air,” Mike replies.
“Right,” Will mumbles. His voice is half-muffled by the fabric of his sleeve. “Hey, uh. I heard about the break-up. I’m sorry.”
Mike tries to communicate with the tension in his expression just how badly he does not want to discuss this with Will, of all people.
“It’s fine,” Mike says. “People break up. It’s whatever.”
“Yeah,” Will says. “Um. I hope it wasn’t because of —”
“It wasn’t.”
“Oh. Good.”
“She just didn’t want to be my girlfriend anymore. That’s it. I didn’t tell her about…” Mike swallows. “She just doesn’t need to know.”
“Okay,” Will says.
His voice is clipped, and for a while, he’s pointedly silent, which tells Mike how strongly he disagrees. Mike bites back his instinct to make some jab about how it’s really none of Will’s business what Mike does or doesn’t tell his girlfriend, because the only thing Mike wants more right now than to shatter Will’s holier-than-thou air is to never, ever talk about this again.
“Mike. Um, I know that you’d rather just, like, forget everything. And I get that. But … I do just need to say one thing,” Will says.
Mike says nothing. In his peripheral vision, he sees Will’s eyebrows draw together a little, his mouth twist, until he steels himself into something steadier.
“I’m sorry. About what happened. About … what I did,” Will says. “And I’m sorry that I did it. And I’m sorry about when I did it. But … I’m not sorry that you know what you know now. About me.”
Slowly, Mike turns his head. Will is looking at him with that characteristic staunch determination. It almost gives him deja vu. He has to stop himself from rubbing his thumb over his lips, of which he is suddenly hyper-aware.
“Like, even if everything would’ve been easier if you didn’t know, I think that distance would’ve still been there. You know? Like, even if you didn’t get why we couldn’t be friends like before — why I couldn’t — we still would’ve …”
Will bites his bottom lip. It’s not soft or coquettish — his skin goes white under his teeth — but Mike’s heart jumps into his throat anyway.
“So. I guess what I’m saying is that I get it if it’s over. That’s up to you,” Will says. “I’m not gonna make you talk to me or anything if you don’t want to. I just wanted to say that I swear I’m never, like, perving on you. And, you know, just like you’re moving on from El now, I’m gonna move on from …”
Mike feels his brow furrowing. Will just smiles a little, without his eyes.
“Yeah. So, you don’t need to worry about me forcing you into anything you don’t want,” he says. “We can be friends again, if you want. Real friends. But I get it if that’s too weird.”
Will stands up and starts to make for the Sinclairs’ front door again. Mike can’t stop himself from turning his head to watch Will go, and he can’t make himself stand up. He knows he needs to say something, anything, but no words are coming to mind. It feels like a desperate scrabble for a foothold on a cliffside. It feels like something is slipping irretrievably away.
“Thanks for not telling her,” Will says, quietly. “Um. Thanks for not telling anyone, actually. I think I’m a little young to screw up my life like that.”
He’s gone before Mike can muster up something to respond with. The front door shuts heavily, and Mike’s alone again, staring out into the empty, silent road.