Chapter Text
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It’s even louder when they get inside the party, filled with an amount of noise that makes thinking feel like work. They take off their coats, throwing them onto a pile of more coats, left on a couch that will be a nightmare to sort through later.
Nick immediately finds three people he knows and pulls Mike and Will into it, and for a while Will stays in the loose orbit of that, standing near enough to seem like he's part of the conversation without having to contribute much to it. It's the closest to comfortable he's going to get tonight and he knows it.
He gets a drink mostly to have something to do with his hands.
The house is the same one as the first party, he's almost certain. Same low ceilings in the front room, same narrow staircase by the front door, same smell of old carpet and something sugary coming from the punch bowl in the kitchen. He hasn't thought about that first party in a while. He thinks about it now, standing in the same general geography of it, and takes a long sip of whatever is in his cup.
Mike is a few feet away, talking to someone Nick knows. He's quieter in here than Will would have expected, less performative than the version Will had been imagining existed at that first party in his head. Instead he's just standing there, a hand in his jacket pocket, listening more than talking. Nodding once at something the other guy says as he nurses a bottle of beer.
Will looks away.
The drink from the punch bowl is lukewarm and slightly too sweet.
Nick drifts by degrees, the way he always does at parties, pulled by some social current Will has never been able to navigate without him. One minute he's there and the next he's across the room with his arm around someone's shoulder, laughing at something, and Will watches him go without following.
Which leaves Mike, who has finished his conversation.
Not intentionally. Just by process of elimination, the party pressing them toward the same stretch of wall while the room fills up around them. Will finishes his drink and gets another one mostly because it gives him somewhere to be for thirty seconds. When he comes back Mike is still there, which he'd known he would be, and they stand next to each other and watch the room.
"I hate parties," Mike says.
"You go out with Nick all the time." Which is true, as far as he's aware. It seems like twice a week Nick is mentioning some party he went to with Mike and a few other people from their dorm or his English class.
"I’m trying to put myself out there more." He gestures vaguely at the room. "Nancy’s suggestion."
Will looks out at the crowd. Someone near the stairs is attempting to explain something with his whole body, arms going wide, nearly taking out the person next to him. That's kind of how he'd imagined Mike at that first party.
"How's putting yourself out there going?" Will asks.
"I've been here twenty minutes and I'm already against the wall."
"So…not great?"
"Not great," Mike agrees with a pained smile. "Do you know many people here?"
"No."
"Me neither. There's a girl from my Math class, but there are like two hundred people in that section. So just Nick, basically. Or people he knows."
The crowd shifts just then, a group of people pushing past them, and Mike steps closer to avoid getting separated. Close enough that Will can feel the warmth coming off of him through his sweater. Music starts up in the next room and Will already knows it’s useless trying to talk.
"Same." The word is barely out before the next ones follow, easier than it should be, easier than he'd have let it be an hour ago before the two cups of alcohol. "But, you know me, too."
"Sorry?" Mike asks, leaning in to hear better.
Why did Will say that?
Mike doesn’t know him at all anymore. Hasn’t and couldn’t know him if he tried.
Right?
Though he’s tipsy enough to admit to himself that he wonders if that’s true at all. If it wouldn’t be nice to see if Mike did remember him in all the little ways that made their friendship matter back then.
Will looks at him. Mike's head is tilted toward him, waiting. His whole body feels too hot, his lips parting around the words before he can stop himself from repeating them: "You know me," Will says again, and it's somehow worse the second time.
Mike goes quiet for just a moment. Not long, but just enough. His eyes search Will’s face and Will swallows instinctively.
"Yeah," he says, finally. His voice is so soft that Will has to read his lips to know what he's said—with the music and the other conversations crashing in around them. "I do."
Will looks back at the crowd, trying to catch his breath. Mike does too, he thinks, but they stay close, nearly pressed together. He takes another sip of his drink and doesn't say anything else. And, for a moment, neither does Mike. The moment settles into something he doesn't have a name for.
“Will, I—” Mike starts.
Nick materializes at his elbow from nowhere, or from everywhere, the way Nick does at parties, pressing into the space between them with a cup in each hand and the easy obliviousness of someone who was absolutely paying attention but is trying to appear like he wasn’t. He passes a cup to Will and one to Mike without preamble as they both step back to make space for him.
"Hey," he says, looking between them with an expression that gives nothing away. "You two good?"
Will takes a sip of the new drink, eyeing him suspiciously. "Fine."
Nick looks at Mike.
"All good," Mike says, and his voice is even, which Will both appreciates and resents.
"Great." Nick looks out at the room for a moment, and then leans in toward Will, close enough that Mike won't catch it over the noise. "You sure?"
Will meets his eyes. Holds them for a second.
"Yeah," he says, with a shrug. Like he's almost annoyed that Nick is even asking.
Nick looks at him for just a beat longer, something passing across his face that is neither doubt nor relief but somewhere between the two. Then he's straightening, turning to Mike with an easy smile. "I'm going to steal him for a second," he says, and steers Will by the shoulder into the crowd before either of them can say anything about it.
He takes Will as far as a group of people one room over—someone from his Psychology class, he says—and then there are introductions. Names Will immediately loses. And for a few minutes he's nodding along to a conversation he has no stake in while his pulse settles back into something normal. It helps, a little. The noise helps. The distance helps.
Then Nick leans in one more time, close enough to be heard. "Back in a sec," he says, and peels off toward the drinks, or the stairs, or somewhere Will stops tracking almost immediately.
Will stands with the people from Nick's Psychology class. One of them says something to him. Someone else answers. He has no idea what either of them said. There are three of them, a fourth that drifts between their group and another, and they're in the middle of a conversation that had clearly been going on before Will arrived and will clearly keep going after he leaves, and he nods in the right places and holds his drink and lets it wash over him.
His pulse is still doing something slightly inconvenient. He focuses on making it stop.
It helps, a little, having strangers around him. People who don't know anything about Hawkins or Lenora or the specific geometry of standing too close to someone that's been avoiding you for years in a loud room. People who look at him and see just a guy at a party, which is all he is, which is what he's been for three and a half years and what he'd like to keep being for the foreseeable future.
The thing is, Nick had known exactly what he was walking into. Will understands that now with a clarity the drinks haven't blunted at all. The new cup immediately shoved into his hands, the timing of it, the way he'd maneuvered Will out of that corner before leaving him again in a different one. He'd seen something from across the room and he'd come over and done something about it and then trusted Will to handle the rest on his own.
Will isn't sure if he's grateful or furious at himself for being so obvious. Probably both.
He stays with the Psychology class group for a few minutes longer than he needs to, contributing just enough to avoid being rude about it. Someone is explaining the premise of a book he hasn't read. Someone else disagrees with something about it. Will nods in the right places and finishes his drink and lets his eyes move across the room in a way he hopes looks casual.
Mike isn't where he left him. Mike is probably wherever Nick deposited him when he left Will on his own fifteen minutes ago.
He scans the room, the wall they'd been standing against, the space near the stairs, the doorway through to the next room. Nothing. He looks back at the person still talking about the book and nods again and decides he needs a fourth drink.
He excuses himself, makes his way toward the kitchen, through a narrow gap between two clusters of people and around a corner into what might be a dining room, someone's furniture pushed back against the walls to make space. He finds a table with bottles and cups on it and is reaching for one when he sees him.
Mike is on the opposite end of the table, talking to a girl Will doesn't recognize. She's laughing at something, leaning in slightly, and Mike is smiling. He looks relaxed in a way he hadn't looked against the wall with Will. Shoulders loose, head tilted, and the girl tucks her hair behind her ear and says something back and Mike laughs a little at that.
Will pours himself a drink.
It could be nothing. Mike is polite, and has always been polite. It's probably nothing.
It doesn't even matter if it is something, he reminds himself.
He takes a long sip and lingers for a moment anyway, watches the way she presses a hand against his arm and laughs along with him at something he says. Mike says something back and she tips her head and laughs again, easy, unguarded, and Mike looks pleased about it in a way that makes Will feel like he's seeing something he shouldn't.
He has to stop himself. It's too much and he doesn't know why it makes something ugly twist in his chest—he doesn't have the right to it and he knows that, has known that for a long time. He left that piece of his broken heart back in Hawkins a long time ago. He turns back toward the front room and he's almost through the doorway when he glances back without really thinking.
Mike is looking at him.
Not at the girl, not out across the room. At Will, directly, like he'd known exactly where he was the whole time. There's no particular expression on his face, though his eyebrows pull together when they lock eyes. The girl is still talking and Mike is nodding along, but his eyes are on Will across the length of the room and Will holds it for one second, maybe two, before he turns again and leaves, his heart hammering against his ribs.
He finds a spot along the opposite wall and stands there with his drink and stares at the middle distance and tells himself it was nothing. Mike had just happened to look up. People look up. It doesn't mean he'd been keeping track of where Will was in the room any more than Will had been keeping track of where Mike was, which Will had absolutely not been doing.
He takes a long sip.
He had not been doing that.
He is still thinking about the expression on Mike's face—the confused pull of his eyebrows—when he glances around and finds Nick across the room.
Will goes still. Nick is with Heather. He hadn't even realized she was at the party at all. He can tell it's her, even though she’s nearly lost behind his shoulders from where Will is standing. He can see her bleached blonde hair tangled in Nick's fingers. He’s pressing her up against the wall, making out with her in a way that makes Will’s stomach churn. He’s never witnessed Nick like this, not really.
He knows about Heather and the importance of her in Nick's life. Is aware of her in the way you become aware of things when your roommate mentions someone's name one too many times. He'd been glad for Nick, genuinely, in the abstract way that's easy when something exists at a comfortable distance.
It's less comfortable from here.
It's not jealousy, exactly. Or it is, but not the kind that's about Nick, even though it normally would be. It's something older and less specific than that. It's the feeling of watching someone step through a door you've been standing outside of for so long you've stopped thinking about what's on the other side and you're only thinking about the door.
Nick's hand is at Heather's waist, under her shirt. She's leaning into him. It looks so easy from here that Will almost can't look at it.
He looks at it anyway, for a second too long.
Then he turns, tips the last of his drink into his mouth and sets his empty cup down on the nearest surface as he swallows. He picks up a stranger's cup that still has something in it. He doesn't think too hard about the fact that it's warm and someone else's lips have touched the rim. He tosses the rest of it back and stares at the middle distance and waits for the feeling to pass the way feelings do if you don't give them anywhere to go. Dissipating into nothing.
He's still waiting when Mike appears at his shoulder, passing him a fresh cup.
"Thanks," he mumbles. He should try to make his voice sound normal, shouldn't he? He clears his throat and takes a sip.
"Hey," Mike says, drifting closer as to be heard. "I almost forgot, I spoke to Dustin yesterday. He wanted me to tell you hi."
Will leans away, only so he can give Mike an incredulous look.
"Dustin wanted you to tell me hi," Will repeats, annoyed.
"Yeah." Mike looks slightly uncertain now, like he wasn't expecting that reaction. "We talk sometimes. He mentioned he hadn't heard from you in a while."
Will looks back out at the room.
He does talk to Dustin. Not often, but sometimes—a call every six months or so, birthday cards that arrive a week late, the occasional letter that takes Dustin three pages to get to the point of. Will had even talked to Lucas twice this year aside from the phone call the night of that first party. The group hadn't so much fallen apart as spread thin, stretched across distances until the connections went fine and irregular, still there if you pulled on them.
He'd just stopped pulling on the one that led to Mike a long time ago.
And Mike had stopped pulling on it long before he had. Until this semester, until Nick, until Will found himself standing in the same university and then at the same party and now in the same corner of it. Which is nobody's fault and nothing to have feelings about.
The thing is…Dustin doesn't mention Mike. And neither does Lucas. But to hear that Mike and Dustin are still close enough that they talk more than any of the rest of them seem to talk to each other isn't something he would have bet money on.
"That's good," he says, voice tight. "That you guys stayed close."
"Yeah." Mike turns his bottle in his hands. "After Eddie it was sort of just—us. So."
Will nods. He doesn't say anything, a frown tugging at his lips. He'd heard about the missed basketball games. The way Max had pulled away and how Mike and Dustin had, too. After Eddie. He'd heard about it maybe three or four times over the phone before something in his calls with Lucas had suddenly shifted and Lucas had snapped at Will that he didn't want to talk about it anymore.
The music from the next room shifts into something louder and several people near them move toward it, opening up a pocket of relative quiet. Mike doesn't fill it. Will doesn't either. Someone across the room shrieks with laughter at something.
"Anyway," Mike says finally, awkwardly. "He just wanted me to pass it along."
"Sure." Will tips back the last of his drink. "Tell him I say hi back." It comes out a bit sharper than he had intended.
He's already moving when Mike puts a hand on his arm to stop him. "Will," Not loudly. Just—his name. The way Mike says it, which is the same as it always was. Which Will has had three and a half years to forget about and apparently hasn't, quite.
He stops.
"I'm glad you're here," Mike says. And then he quickly stutters out an anxious, "in Chicago, I mean. Here. At this school. At this-this stupid fucking party. Even though I'm here, too. And you don't—I know I—I just—" He stops. Starts again. "I know it's weird. I'm not trying to make it weird."
Will looks at him for a moment.
Four…Five drinks? He's lost count. Five drinks in, the honest answer would be something like you're not making it weird, it just is and has been and maybe always will be, or possibly something worse than that, something he'd have to think about later in the specific awful way you replay things said at parties. So instead he says, "Get some more drinks," and tips his head toward the table.
Mike looks at him, some sort of mournful expression slipping from his face as he blinks and looks away. Then he nods, once, and goes.
Will watches him and then looks back at the room and stands there with his empty cup and the noise and the warm press of too many people, and does not think about Dustin saying he hadn't heard from Will in a while, as if Will was the one who'd let the line go slack. He thinks about how that's probably the version of events that had made it back to Mike. He wonders what other bits and pieces had made it back to Mike over the years and tries very hard not to think about how it was never enough to make Mike pick up the phone or a pen.
He sets his cup down when he realizes it's empty.
The house is too hot and too crowded and the music is too loud and there are too many people who don't know anything about him standing between him and the door. He needs air. He needs the particular quality of quiet that comes from being outside in the cold with nobody near him. He needs the distance that Lenora afforded him for three and a half years, which had felt like exile at the time and feels, right now, like something closer to mercy.
He goes outside.
It's not something he decides with much thought, so much as his feet making a decision for him, carrying him through the hallway and past the coats on the couch and out the front door before he's fully thought it through. The cold hits him all at once and he stops on the porch and just stands in it, eyes closed, breathing.
Better. Immediately better.
He moves to the far end of the porch and leans against the railing and looks out at the street. It's quiet out here, or as quiet as it can be with the loud thumping bass line of whatever song is rattling the windows.
He becomes aware, slowly and then all at once, that the world is doing something it wasn't doing inside. Inside there had been walls and people and things to focus on. Out here there's just the street, which is moving slightly in a way streets aren't supposed to, and the railing under his hands, which he's gripping with more intention than he'd realized.
He should sit down.
He sits on the bench at the top of the steps—falls against it really—and puts his elbows on his knees and stares at a fixed point in the red brick of the porch and breathes the way he knows to breathe when this happens. The way Dr. Owens had taught him. Low and even, in through the nose. He counts. He keeps his eyes on the brick.
He is, he acknowledges privately and without any pleasure, very, very drunk.
The stranger's drink had been a mistake. He'd lost track somewhere in the middle of the evening of the part of himself that was supposed to be keeping count. Which is what happens when Mike Wheeler stands next to him saying things in that voice and also when Nick is somewhere inside pressed up against Heather. The whole night has the specific quality of something Will is going to be turning over for weeks.
He breathes. In and out. Most importantly, he tries not to throw up. It helps if he thinks about how cold his nose is, the air biting across his face and bare arms. He wishes he'd grabbed his coat.
He thinks about Nick and Heather, because that's apparently where his brain goes when left unsupervised. Nick's hand at her waist. The way she'd leaned into him. The way he had rolled his hips against hers as he pressed her flush against the wall. He'd picked up a stranger's drink about it, which in retrospect was not his most dignified moment of the evening, though there have been several contenders.
The thing is, he knows it wasn't really about Nick. Or it might've been a few months ago when Nick was the only person in his life that he allowed his thoughts to linger on. But he'd known it at the time, standing there watching them, and he knows it now. It was about wanting someone to look at him like that. To press him up against a wall like that.
He thinks, very briefly and against his better judgment, about Mike.
He shivers.
He thinks about the cold instead. The cold is helping, incrementally. The street has mostly stopped moving, but maybe that's because he's stopped moving. And sure enough, he shifts on the bench and wraps his arms around himself, and has to wait for the undulating wave of the world to stop again.
He tries so, so valiantly to not throw up.
He's still trying when the door opens. He doesn't turn when he hears footsteps on the porch.
"Hey."
Will closes his eyes for a second. Opens them. "Hey," he says, teeth chattering involuntarily.
Mike comes around and stops at the bottom of the steps, which puts him at eye level, which is somehow worse. He looks at Will for a moment without saying anything.
"I needed air," Will says.
"Okay."
"I'm fine."
Mike looks at him like he's not convinced, probably because he didn't ask. "You're really pale."
"It's cold."
"Will."
"I'm—" He stops. The street moves again, just slightly, just enough. "I think I had too much to drink."
Mike nods once, like Will has confirmed something he'd already worked out. "Where's Nick?"
"Inside somewhere. With Heather."
Mike sighs, taking the steps back up to sit next to him on the bench. "We should go." Will nods. "I'll walk you back."
"No. You really don't have to—"
"I know. I want to. To make sure you get back safe."
Will looks at him. Mike is looking at the street, hands between his knees, like this is completely normal. Like the whole evening hasn't been what it's been.
"My jacket's inside," Will says, instead of relenting outright. He rubs his hands together, blowing hot air into them to try and warm them up.
"Mine too," Mike responds with a small, reassuring smile. "I'll be right back. You stay here."
Mike stands and Will listens to the door open, the noise of the party spilling out briefly and then cutting off. He focuses on the brickwork. Counts his breaths even though it makes his eyelids feel heavy. A burp bubbles up out of his stomach and it tastes too sweet and a touch like vodka. He grimaces and tells himself to get it together. To not throw up in a bush when Mike Wheeler, of all people, comes back outside.
Mike does come back a moment later with his jacket already on and Will's in his hands. He holds Will's out and Will reaches for it. But the logistics of getting his arms into the sleeves are briefly more complicated than they should be, complicated enough that Mike ends up holding it by the collar while Will finds his way into it, which is humiliating in a way Will is choosing to defer until tomorrow.
"Thanks," Will says.
Mike wraps a scarf around Will's neck which gets in the way of the buttons he can barely get his fingers to work around. He doesn't remember having a scarf. It's warm, though, and so he thinks he must have brought a scarf. He's usually very smart and thinks ahead like that.
"Can you walk?" Mike asks once Will has gotten the top and bottom two buttons mostly done up correctly. He ignores that the three in the middle are still open.
"Yes." Will takes a step. The world tilts hard and he puts a hand on the railing and waits for it to correct. It does, mostly. "Yep."
Mike watches him with an expression that is very carefully not amusement.
They get down the steps and onto the sidewalk and Will focuses on walking, on the simple mechanics of it, one foot and then the other, staring at his feet. Mike walks beside him and doesn't say anything. He doesn't try to take Will's arm to steady him or make anything of the situation. Which Will appreciates more than he's going to say, because he's not going to say anything at all. The whole walk, if he can help it.
They walk half a block in silence. Until Mike breaks it, almost too loud even with all the late night traffic that breezes past them.
"Dustin really did say hi," Mike says. "I wasn't trying to—I just thought you'd want to know."
"I know," Will says. He did know that, even at the time, underneath everything else. "I'll call him."
Mike nods, this seems to make him relax. Will thinks that probably what he should've answered with in the first place. "He'd like that," Mike says softly.
Another half block. The cold is helping in earnest now, clearing the edges of things slightly.
"And…" Mike says as if there hadn't been a lull in the conversation at all. "About before. I know it came out weird. I just meant…"
Will doesn't say anything for a moment. "It's fine—"
"It's not, really. I know that."
Will looks at him, just briefly, but it makes his drunken feet take a curved path he doesn't mean to take, bumping into Mike's shoulder by accident. Mike glances over at him, a steadying hand at his elbow that he drops almost instantly. Their breaths are visible in the cold air. Mike's jaw is set in the particular way it gets when he's said something he means and is waiting to see what happens with it.
It's not an apology. And it is. In a very specific Wheeler way.
"Will? I just meant—"
Will looks back at the pavement and comes to a dead stop, swaying on the spot. He closes his eyes.
"Will?"
It's too much. He's too drunk and it's too much. It'll be too much when he's sober but it's more than he can handle right this instant.
"Not tonight," he says, taking a deep breath. He swallows down the wave of nausea. It's not even the alcohol. It's everything. It's Hawkins and Lenora. It's the party and that Christmas three years ago. It's Mike and it's him. "Not like this."
A beat. He keeps his eyes closed, squeezing them tight. He doesn't want to know what Mike's face is doing. It's probably looking like a kicked puppy. He still knows Mike well enough to know that.
"Yeah," Mike says quietly, and Will has never heard him sound so defeated. "Okay."
He has to start walking again. To just focus on his feet. But Mike's dejected voice rings in his ears.
They walk the rest of the way without talking. It's not comfortable in the slightest, but it's the kind of uncomfortable Will can breathe through, which is something. The city is mostly quiet around them, just the noise of cars and the distant sound of music from somewhere further down the street. Their footsteps and their breath in the cold air. Will watches the sidewalk and Mike walks beside him. The dorm building comes into view at the end of the block, its lit lobby visible from here. Will fixes his eyes on it and keeps putting one foot in front of the other.
Mike holds the door once they reach it.
They take the elevator because Will is not doing stairs right now and they both know it, though neither of them says so. The space feels too small. Mike leans against the back wall and Will stands slightly in front of him and looks at the numbers and can feel the specific quality of Mike's silence, which is different from other people's silence in a way Will has never been able to explain and has spent a long time trying not to think about. He is, however, perhaps the one person in the world most intimately familiar with the shape of it.
They reach his floor. The doors open.
"I've got it from here," Will says.
Mike looks at him. At the corridor. Back at him. "I'll just—"
"Mike. I know which room is mine."
"—make sure you've got your key."
Will checks his pocket. He has his key. He holds it up and shakes it a little petulantly. Mike looks at it and then looks at Will and there's something in his face that Will is too tired and too drunk to deal with tonight. Something that's been there all evening in different configurations. Something Will has been carefully not looking at for hours.
"Thanks," Will says. "For—" He gestures vaguely. "You know. Making sure I got home safe."
"Yeah." Mike's hands are in his jacket pockets. "Drink some water."
"I will."
The doors start to close and Mike reaches a hand out to stop them. Will exhales harshly.
"And eat something."
"Okay."
"Will."
Will stops and turns back. Mike has one hand on the elevator frame, still holding the doors.
Mike opens his mouth. Closes it. Something moves across his face, a decision made and then unmade, and then he says, quietly, "Goodnight."
Will holds his gaze for a second.
"Night, Mike," he says, and lets the doors close.
He stands there in the corridor for a moment afterward, key in his hand, the building quiet around him, rooted to that spot. The elevator hums behind the closed doors and then goes still. Somewhere down the hall a door closes and it snaps him out of it.
He walks to his room. He has to concentrate on the key in the lock more than he'd like to admit and he's glad Mike isn't here to watch him struggle.
Inside it's dark and quiet and smells like his own things: his laundry, the specific brand of soap he uses, the faint dusty smell of graphite that has worked its way into everything he owns at this point, his clothes and his bag and probably his hands permanently.
Nick's side of the room is neat and empty.
Will doesn't turn the overhead light on but he shrugs his coat off and turns the lamp on his desk on as he drapes it over the chair with the scarf. He fills a glass of water at the sink and drinks it standing up and then fills another one and sets it on the nightstand for later—because he's been this drunk exactly enough times to know what future-Will is going to want—and sits down on the edge of his bed and stares at the floor.
He thinks about the elevator. The porch steps. The wall they'd stood against at the start of the night with the music too loud and the other students pressing in.
He thinks about three and a half years and what they do and don't change.
Will becomes aware at some point that his face is wet, which is stupid. Which is the drinks and the lateness and nothing else. He wipes his cheeks with the back of his hand and lies back on top of the covers and stares at the ceiling and tells himself to stop, the same way he's been telling himself to just stop all night. With the same result. He waits and it doesn't stop and the look on Mike's face—in the elevator, on the street, at the party—doesn't help.
The room takes a long time to stop moving.
He's still waiting when he falls asleep.
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