Chapter Text
DAY ONE - FRIDAY, 10/14/1994
Breakups are easier in fiction.
No, really; movies, books, comics, you name it: they’re all untied, really, all narrow this shit down to one of two things. Either a cheap plot twist like the author was playing a grand game of spin-the-wheel and decided, on a whim, hey! Let’s break up the good couple for some reason outside of their control to add an extra emotional getting-back-together scene at the end. Or else, it was generally, hey! These two are absolutely dogshit together, one of them should see sense.
This doesn’t fit the textbook examples of a breakup that Mike so carefully —and helpfully— sorted into two glaringly obvious categories, so, as is only natural, he’s a little out of his depth here.
The silence is the gaping, knowing, itchy kind— the one that swallows you whole, crashing against the walls of Mike’s room, making the scratching of his pen against paper impossibly louder. Annoyingly, even, because it does nothing to help quell the rising feeling of being absolutely fucking pathetic. He can feel the box vibrate beneath the nib of the pen as he drives messy strikes through the words in front of him.
Dear Will, I hate you.
This is not, Mike reasons with himself, true. Nor is it uncalled for.
He opts to try again.
Dear Will, the ink spells now, I wish we’d never met.
The sentence stares up at him in an incriminating way that has him slashing through it again.
Maybe if, in some fucked-up reality, one upsettingly distant to Mike, he hadn’t let eagerness bleed into his voice as he asked the fatal words that came out in a clump— “ Hi, my name’s Mike. Do you want to be my friend?”, or grinned so widely as the other boy answered with a resounding “Yes!” or if the moment hadn’t had the quality of something decidedly important, then he would not be in this situation now — propped up against his bed and spelling out something he may not like, but he’ll accept. Desperate times and all that.
Dear Will, he writes. He separates it one line extra from the others on the yellow paper of Mike’s notebook, as if that would somehow emphasize to Will Byers that this is the end of the two of them.
The fucking end. The close of the book. The final shaky breath in, of smokey, acrid air before everything fades away. The fall and every scattered sensation that comes with it— fear and shock like your heart just climbed into the back of your throat and made a home there, and the equally horrible acceptance, the knowing.
Standing so close to the edge might not have been worth it, after all, the last thought before the impact.
The end. It’s been a long time coming.
Other stupid metaphors swarm through his mind, but none of them matter all that much, really, because they’re addressed in his following statement.
Go fuck yourself.
And then as soon as another thought flashes into Mike’s mind, he’s scribbling down another shred of reality, truth that fell with him, truth that follows him like all the things he never did. Never said.
Love, Mike.
He frowns down at the paper, something frustratingly lonely stirring in his chest, and sets the pen down beside the lamp on his table. His alarm wakes, chirping out beeps as if Mike hadn’t been awake since the sun first streamed through his curtains in an intrusive slash of pale gold across his room. As if he hadn’t been up, padding into various rooms and creating a congregation of everything even vaguely Will in the shoebox at the center of his room.
He shakes off the thought of how full that stupid box is, how many of Will’s things he’d found amongst his own, the moments of hopeless clarity he’d have to search to check if some of those things belonged to him or Will.
Which generally led to him thinking of Will, of how long it’s been, of how he’d sworn to keep in touch, how Mike can’t really blame him, either.
He slaps the alarm, the shitty plastic device jolting into silence as Mike leaves the room, slipping the paper into the gaps in the painted cardboard.
He just waits for a second, overtaken by that faraway kind of grieving: the maybes and what ifs and can we just try again, please, because if he could just con one more chance out of this, he swears he can articulate the nameless sense of watching something so viscerally lonely happen, enough to snuff it out properly. The way he could spend the rest of his life trying to figure out how to fight it, go back and stop him leaving, but God, if it had never happened maybe he wouldn’t be taping up bloody knuckles now.
As it happens, he’s almost out of bandage.
The house isn’t empty, but it may as well be.
The news reporters on TV are squawking absently at the living room, their faces eerily void of emotion as they recount some shit Mike’s not too bothered about. A simple process ensues. He registers: “...Hawkins, earning it the nickname: Killer Capital USA. Last night, tragedy struck again—” and promptly fixes his attention on important matters at hand. Fixable ones.
His dad had the decency to vacate his La-Z-Boy before he dozed off, but didn’t deign to clean up after himself. There’s an unidentifiable cylinder, which, upon closer inspection is exactly what Mike feared: another empty beer can balanced on the table next to the armchair. The bastard is hugging the edge too closely for Mike’s liking, so he snatches it up and shakes the residual amber alcohol into the kitchen sink, the hum of the TV boasting through the walls.
“ Hawkins sits just beside Lenora Hills, one of the safest and wealthiest communities in the country… ”
He does everybody a favor, and clicks the damn thing off.
There are many things that can fall and are actively falling under a category clearly labeled ‘shitty’ in Hawkins, Indiana. Hell, the whole town might fall under that category, if Lenora’s opinion is anything to go by. Mike has spent a noble amount of his time, or at least the better part of his teenage years, trying to figure out why this is. His current hypothesis concerns the unyielding ideology that good things do not last. Not in Hawkins. Will, or rather, the absence of Will, is living proof.
But that’s irrelevant .
Relevant is Hawkins not being built to house or create or sustain nice things for long periods of time, apparently. Case in point: the car ride to school.
Let it be known that Mike does in fact have a car in his custody, (kind of)— a car he regretfully shares with his sister Nancy. Everything considered, it was an okay deal back when Nancy was, you know, still in fucking high school, and it was in Mike’s right to hitch rides instead of biking the two or three miles to school. But with his sister insisting that a car was a basic requirement for a college student to have, Mike was forced to reproachfully relinquish it.
But, hey. It’s fine. He has Lucas.
Lucas is, everything considered, his best friend at the moment, Mike admits as he slides into the passenger side. But today has already been turning out kind of shit, and the entire Will situation is still on the verge of bubbling over in the back of his mind, and it is seven in the morning and Mike is really just blessed with quality decision making skills, and always has been, really, so .
Halfway into the drive, Lucas starts to talk, drumming his finger along to the beat of a quiet pop song on the radio. “So me and Dustin were chatting to someone online—”
So . “You guys are still on that internet bullshit? Seriously?”
“It’s not bullshit,” Lucas protests. Mike pointedly flicks the window crank back and forth. Lucas ignores it, eyes fixed on the road ahead, skirting a . “It’s a community dedicated to the truth!”
Mike shoots him a glance. Lucas continues undeterred. “Some guy went crazy and killed a bunch of people at the mall last night.”
He gestures to the printed out sheet of paper trapped between the dash and windscreen in front of Mike. Mike tugs it out and finds himself saying, “holy shit.”
The paper is decorated with red marker, underlining sentences to draw Mike’s eye towards them.
“Last night, a bloody massacre at Starcourt Mall left at least nine people deceased.”
“An assailant, wearing a skull mask—”
The latter two words have an angry circle scribbled around them. So that’s what the TV was talking about.
“It was all over the news,” Lucas says. “Skull Mask killer. But the media won’t talk about the most important part.”
“Lucas,” Mike says, sensing where this is going and also concluding that it’s (once again) way too fucking early to be weighing in on a conspiracy theory. Usually he wouldn’t go out of his way to try and shut them down, but this conspiracy theory is just stupid. Hawkins isn’t cursed — there’s no eldritch entity lingering in the soil, cursing them with every footprint they make in the overgrowth. It’s literally just a shitty place to live, and they probably won’t be winning any Town Of The Year awards soon, but it’s fucking fine. “When are you and Dustin planning on stepping out of your internet fantasy nerd land?”
“When you step out of your depressoid ‘I’m gonna die alone land’,” Lucas says with his eyes fixed on the parking lot ahead. “And stop obsessing about Will.”
Mike blinks at him. He can’t really argue with that logic.
Mike doesn’t have a chance to retaliate, because Lucas is already pulling into their usual parking space and slinging his backpack over his shoulder. Mike returns the grin he’s thrown, and steps out of the car, the car door slamming shut over the shrill cry of the school bell. The American flag is hanging limply from its tether at the top of the pole, making half assed attempts to float in the breeze. Mike parts with Lucas at the door, which doesn’t really help him feel any better, because the only thing worse than walking down a corridor wearing a scowl with a friend, is walking down a corridor, scowling, alone.
The walk to his locker is an uneventful one, except for the pair pressed up against it, their matching maroon hoodies, her hand knotted in his hair, and Mike is seriously contemplating not bothering, because with the way this day is going, he’s honestly better off to just turn and walk straight out of the building. But Dustin and Max would probably kill him if he missed another day, so he sucks it up. He doesn’t really know who’s making out against his locker; he’s seen them around —always glued to each other’s side— and he’s either a Randy or a Brady, or a—
Yeah, he doesn’t really care. Mike just lets his head fall back in tune with the sigh he drags out. Nobody really catches the eye roll, so he just bashes the locker beside his, the rattling metal jolting them out of their own world. As they’re moving out of his way, Mike shoulders his way between them and the navy locker door, and promptly throwing them another glare in case they’d missed the first one (they had not, but Mike is nothing if not persistent) and the other guy loops an arm easily around his girlfriend’s shoulder. “What an asshole,” Mike hears Randy-slash-Brady mutter.
‘No PDA’ is a fucking lie. Mike doesn’t know why he bothers. They disappear into the crush of students as he slips some books under his arm, almost dropping them when an abrupt crash comes from a couple doors down.
A boy’s knife drives a sharp line into the gap between the notes and scraps plastered to the locker, scrawling RIP into the protesting metal. Mike just looks past the boy and takes in the mini shrine of photos and paper that details how missed the owner is.
Mike frowns. The girl, Robin, shared a couple of his classes. He always thought she was kind of cool, with her quick wit and general non-assholery. He took Will for a sort-of-date one time, if drinking milkshakes on the hood of Mike’s —and Nancy’s— car counted as a romantic gesture. After they’d picked up the shakes Mike stopped at B Dalton’s, the only bookstore Mike’s found so far that doesn’t have copious amounts of thick, musty volumes — those encyclopedias and autobiographies that he’s convinced nobody reads, how the hell do you have enough patience to ramble about one thing for that long—
Mike was mainly there to gawk at Insomnia’s Coming Soon! poster, and when Will slipped a rough hand into his, she just smiled at them.
Rain came halfway through the date anyway, fizzing on the ground as it fell in sheets, so they had to pile into the car together, but it hadn’t been all bad.
Well. He doesn’t know what Will thought of it. Hopefully–
God, he has to stop thinking about Will. Robin’s locker is freckled with we miss you s and rip s and Mike’s just standing there thinking about his best friend.
Massacre at Starcourt Mall—
Nine people deceased—
Another day in paradise.
“You see?” A voice in his ear says, a note of light mischief in her tone. “It’s the witch. Sarah Fier’s back.”
“Oh, Christ, ” Mike says, turning to Max, preparing to explain exactly how early it is, and turning to find her hair in that high ponytail she’s sworn some oath to wear since she got appointed as cheer captain. Because God knows cheerful is the only word that’s applicable to Max . He’s brought this valid point up on several occasions, and she’s denied it on every one. “Not you too.”
Surely he’s not the only one who has a shred of respect for Robin, is what he doesn’t say, and figures he doesn’t really need to, but she just makes a face and grabs his arm, dragging him away from the lockers and into the bathroom.
Which is horrible; because the bathroom is an equally horrible, dingy sort of place, and the white paint is yellowing where it peels off the stalls. The sink mirrors have mold sprawling along the edges, the ceiling is more water stains than anything else, and a chronic sting of cigarette smoke clings to the place. He’s heard that people have fights in here on rare occasions: scraps with no real meaning, but he’s only about ten percent sure that’s true.
There is now graffiti on the stall doors.
“She reaches from beyond the grave,” Max reads, even though all Mike really has to do is look at what is currently two feet in front of him, “to make good men her wicked slaves.”
“She’ll take your blood!” Dustin yells in agreement, the door to one of the stalls flying open at his kick. Mike starts, breath catching in a gasp, and Max’s grin widens. “She’ll take your head; she’ll follow you, until you’re dead! ”
Mike hasn’t really caught up with why he’s here, only that it’s seriously beginning to grate on him, and nobody else really cares all too much about Robin. Or Will. They must not, if he’s the only one walking down crowded halls and catching glimpses of figures long gone, or tossing over at night to feel the warmth of a tearstained pillow bleed into his cheek as he asks why, why, why, to nobody in particular. He’s the only one, to his knowledge, who’s lugging around a shoebox of everything he’s too scared to unfurl his fingers from. He’s the only one, to his knowledge, who sees it as more of a coffin than anything else.
He also knows Will mustn’t feel a thing, if the silence is anything to go by.
That would be nice, one day. Maybe not tomorrow, just—
One ambiguous day. Maybe a sunny one. One day to test the weight of the world and feel nothing. To just float along, numb. Happy.
“Wow,” Mike says instead of any of this shit, turning to face the two of them, “you guys are dicks.”
“It’s just fun,” Max protests, clutching her binder. Mike is itching to fight, to lash out at anyone, so even though he’s too exhausted to form a good comeback before his mouth is open, he rises to the challenge.
“It’s sick.”
“What?” Dustin chimes in, throwing the door fully open and disrupting the nursery rhyme they’ve written across it. “The dude was wearing a Halloween skull mask— how is that not fun!”
“People died.” Mike slips his denim jacket off, feeling unusually hot, for such a passionless place. “ Robin died. The dude was probably just some sad sack who hated his life, just like the rest of us. Except he decided, hey, why don’t I get out of here, and, hey, why don’t I take Robin and a couple other mall rats with me? There’s no angry, dead witch that made him go postal! The only thing that made him go crazy is this town. ”
It’s what he’s always been saying, and if Will were here, he’d back Mike up. If Will were here, Mike wouldn’t have this goddamn shoebox, and the stuff would still be scattered around Mike’s house and if Will were here, they’d still be talking and Mike wouldn’t have to blame himself for something that he doesn’t even know is his fault or not. If Will were here, Mike would do incredibly stupid things on a daily basis, but teetering on the good side of idiotic — smiling at him from across a room if they weren’t alone and kissing him spontaneously if they were. If Will were here—
Who the fuck am I kidding? He’d probably be miserable.
Maybe Lucas is right about his mindset, or whatever. From the way things are going, it feels extremely likely that Mike’s gonna die alone.
His jacket falls to the floor beside them with a soft thump. The mood goes flat, and Max and Dustin regard him with twin expressions of concern and exasperation.
“Are you okay?” asks Max. He thinks about laughing, but it seems like too much effort.
“Yeah.” Mike’s gaze snaps to the floor. “I’m fine.”
Dustin grins, looking at Max. “Seems like… maybe you’ve got a little witch in you.”
Mike scoffs, but it dissolves into a laugh. He turns to Max to find her adjusting her hair in the mirror, again with the damn hair, and—
“Dude, why are you even in here?” Mike asks. “This is the boys’ bathroom!”
“Candy store,” Dustin calls from behind him. Mike half turns to see the other boy reaching into the vent, metal grate abandoned. Dustin sticks his whole head in, and then his shoulders, too, and he almost slips where he’s balanced precariously on the toilet seat — ew— and emerges clutching a white box wrapped in red tape.
“Okay, you know we don’t actually believe this witch shit, right?” Max says beside him. “It’s just like, fucked up Santa Claus, or— what’s this?”
Mike’s offering the shoebox to her, pushing it into her hands. He keeps his tone neutral as he says, “I need you to give this to Will tonight.”
The second Will’s name hits her, she backs away, shaking her head. “Yeah, nope. No way.”
“Oh, come on, Max—”
“ No way, Mike— I am not getting mixed up in your ex drama. Do it yourself.”
He’ll talk to you.
Like he said he’d still talk to me.
In their defense, it’s hard to blindly trust in one promise, even a convincing one. Almost as hard as it’s been to try and prove that same promise.
Mike rolls his eyes, letting the thought go. “‘M not going to the game. Quit band.”
Max’s eyebrows knit together. “Since… when?”
He doesn’t really want to think about that. “Since who gives a shit!”
“Well, was band the only extracurricular you had left?” Mike doesn’t like the anxiety blooming on her face. He left the debate team a month ago — she knows that. He pulls a face, turning away, as Max continues. “Well you still have your uniform, right?” Unfortunately. “Just wear that shit one last time.”
She plucks the box from Dustin’s hands. “I’ve got something that’ll give you the balls to face Will and El.”
Mike executes a full-head eye roll, and then humors her. He peers into the box, frowning at the assortment of plastic bottles and sheen of bags glinting in the soft light, nestled amongst stacks of cash. Max is beaming up at him, like she’s selling chocolate cupcakes, half price with homemade frosting and extra sprinkles, and not—
“What? You’re dealing again? I thought you’d stopped,” Mike says, gesturing to Dustin, “when this dingus’ cousin OD’d.”
Dustin frowns. “ Timothy? No.”
“Well, Timmy wasn’t a real OD,” Max says. “Like, he didn’t actually die. They brought him back.”
Dustin mimes using a defibrillator.
“You’re both morons,” Mike reminds them, because he is friends with two absolute morons, two of the most idiotic people he’s ever met, and yet he’s smiling, too, as he grabs his things and sets his jacket on top of Will’s box.
Maybe they’re morons, but it could be worse. It could totally be worse.
“‘Scuse me?” Max pipes up, a mock frown blooming on her face. “Which one of us is valedictorian, again? Y’know, president of every club this shithole has to offer?” She looks between them, and scoffs at the lack of response. “I’m getting out of here. Off to claim my place among the stars, bitch.”
Mike raises his eyebrows, fixing her with a look. The bell rings again, and he bids them goodbye as he starts down the hall, thinking as hard as he can about anything other than Will, who’s going to the game, his mind being branded a traitor to all of his valiant efforts for indulging so much of the thought of Will looking for him, maybe, or Will thinking about him even a fraction of the same—
“Mike!”
Dustin’s arms are splayed wide, bewilderment etched into his expression.
“Where are you going?” Max chimes in. “Assembely’s about to start.”
Mike frowns back at her, trying to maneuver his wrist onto the shoebox and crane his neck to see the time. “It’s not…” When the numbers stare back at him, his whole body deflates, sigh huffing out into the stale hallway air, as he mourns the loss of his estimated three minutes of spare time sitting alone in the English classroom. “Bastard,” he says aloud, to nobody in particular.
Max tries to tug him by the bicep again, but he dodges out of the way, thanks mainly to his gift of prophecy and incredible reflexes, and not at all to the fact that she’s so far away that she has to lunge in order to make up the space.
“You don’t need to drag me places,” he reminds her, grinning, and he’s cut off by—
“Lucas!” she’s saying, her face uncharacteristically red, which actually, on second thought, might need some looking into.
Lucas walks up to them from down the hall, and three of them maintain conversation as Mike tries to keep up, but there’s no point, really. They’re shouldering open the double doors to the assembly hall, and the time flies when Mike has Will on the brain, and he’s surprised how rapidly everything filters out when the only thing he can focus on is the curve of Will’s smile around the words not possible and how they came out a bit strange, tinted with pent up emotion.
“Before tonight’s game, out of respect for last night’s tragic events…”
The football coach is absently waving his clipboard aloft, talking at the head of the small crowd in the otherwise empty gymnasium. He doesn’t sound like he’s assigning the ‘event’ (or, massacre, depending on how you look at it), as tragic. If anything the bored drawl of his voice just makes it seem like he’s reading his grocery list out for them. “Lenora will host a candlelight vigil for the victims.”
Mike’s eyebrows draw together in a scowl. Since when did they give two shits about Hawkins? There’s something innately frustrating about Lenora actively disliking them, but pretending to be in full undying support and hosting vigils was something that happens now, apparently. Whatever. Fuck logic.
“All player, cheer and band attendance is mandatory.” the coach concludes.
The gathering erupts into protest, but Mike just tilts his head toward Max, who is already wearing a look of disdain that he recognizes all too well. Mike’s index and middle finger stretch to form a finger gun, which he points to his head and jerks abruptly away from it in a way to let Max know that she is absolutely not alone.
Mike Wheeler makes a pact with himself as he boards the bus— that the second the candles of the vigil are extinguished for the night, and the Hawkins Witches disperse, he is going to personally shake the hand of their poor fucking bus driver. He could hear the commotion of the bus since he arrived at school, but he can’t even make out his Converse’s clang as they scuff against the metal step, not amidst the racket.
The football boys holler and chant, leaping from their seats and bouncing around to the tune of some upbeat song that trills from the boombox at the front of the bus, its rhythm leaking into every pore of the vehicle. Even Lucas is singing along. Mike has no clue why — it’s a shit song, in his opinion.
Dustin’s face is stained an obnoxiously fake shade of green underneath a spire of black fabric, which Mike identifies as the same hat he’d worn trick-or-treating back a good six or seven years ago. Nearby his over the top attempt at resembling their witch mascot, Max’s head bobs along to the music and she shoots Mike a look, quirking one eyebrow up. A footballer in front of her asks: “Didn’t you quit?”
Trust me, Mike would have told him, if he didn’t think it’d sound so spiteful, I really fucking wish I had too.
Because. Mike isn’t, like, world renowned for his patience, but he had, in fact, actually just quit band, with no intent to wind up back on this canary yellow bus where the pulsing beat of music and jeering kids his own age is all encompassing. Because you know what? Fuck band, and fuck his stupid feathery helmet, fuck the cramped, sweaty smell of a shit ton of teenagers crammed in together.
And especially fuck the seat three from the back where he and Will would be planted all the way to and from these events. Fuck how normal that had seemed to him. How second nature the easy chatter would come, how he’d assume things would never change.
He throws himself down on the offending seat, Will’s shoebox next to him, warding off company. Before Mike knows fully what he’s doing, his fingers have already closed around the edge of the box and lifted the lid to fish out the mixtape. The coiling wire doesn’t take much effort to untangle and he secures the headphones around his ears, drowning out the bus with the first song on the playlist. He fishes the standard band drumsticks out of his pocket and taps the staccato rhythm of Radiohead’s Creep onto the seat in front of him.
And pointedly does not think about Will.
Because fuck Will, too, fuck him and his wide, toothy smiles, and the quiet, endless sort of comfort he radiated as naturally as breathing, fuck how he’d never leave, not possible, my ass, and don’t get Mike started on—
Stop.
He forces that trainwreck to a halt, watching the rundown shopfronts of Hawkins past the musty window. The streetlamps paint the town a stark coppery color against the dusky gray sky. The bus jolts with a pothole and causes the rickety metal to vibrate, and Mike is convinced that one way or another he is going to learn if there’s an afterlife, and if so, what it’s like tonight. Be it the death machine he’s hurtling towards Lenora in, or the boisterous shits all around him, or the candlelight vigil that nobody wants to go to, or that in about thirty minutes, he’s going to catch sight of Will Byers and every rehearsed argument would dissipate like smoke.
The next few minutes his tapping becomes more sluggish, arrhythmical — Creep is still blaring in his ears, and he lets his head lean on the windowpane, eyes shutting in incomprehensible exhaustion. If he could just give up, back out now, he would. What’s Mike even gonna say to him? Hi, here’s your shit, I still need you like I need air in my lungs, I need you like I need to go home and go to sleep, like I need to come up with some better, less desperate ways to say this to you. Hi Will, funny seeing you here, remember when we were best friends, wasn’t that fucked up? Hi Will, that’s good to hear, I don’t really understand what the hell happened to us.
Hi Will, tried to call —yeah, no, went straight to busy. Crazy, right— but can you just confirm that you don’t wanna talk to me anymore?
Will, did you mean it when you said—
The window grows cold and fogged up, the condensation sticking to his cheek and hair, so he just takes a shaky breath and removes the headphones.
Move on. He’s gonna give Will the shoebox and fucking move on.
The residential area of Hawkins, burrowed in ditches and near forests, all wood frames and drafty interiors will soon melt into the telltale two storey, columned buildings, and buttery light from the houses onto neatly paved sidewalks.
Welcome to Lenora Hills indeed , Mike thinks as the sign retreats past his window.
It doesn’t take long to reach the towering football stands and dribble onto a field so comically green, a surface so cleanly level that Mike doesn’t know whether he wants to laugh or rip chunks of it out with his shoes. The Mayor of Lenora is giving some condolences wrapped up into a speech that started about football and probably rambles into something vaguely motivational.
But as hard as Mike forces himself to tune in, his eyes rake the red sector of the fairly large gathering composed mostly of Hawkins residents who wanted to pay respects to Robin.
Desperation creeps into Mike as his gaze sweeps the Lenora Devils, their stupid mascot heading them, and searches for the face who used to know Mike better than Mike knew himself.
Maybe he didn’t bother coming.
It’s so stupid, anyway, looking for Will. Mike’s the one who went and pushed him away. What right does he have to—
Oh.
And then he sees the tuft of brown hair, the outgrown bowl cut brushing softly at his neck, arms folded and expression vacant, like a snapshot of Will a few months ago but taller, less like his own ghost, more… present. Concrete. Mike isn’t breathing right now, because Will just looks so—
God, he’s so fucking pretty, and Mike hates thinking it but not as much as he hates how right it feels in his mind, and one thought leads to another, and all of a sudden he’s thinking about how real Will is, how he’s here , and Mike’s kissed him before and he wonders if it meant as much to Will as it did to him.
It doesn’t really matter anymore.
He’s out of place, Mike thinks selfishly, so lonely, so wrong in their red uniform, and something hot and dangerous and undeniably selfish fizzes in Mike’s arteries, clogging them up; Will should be somewhere he can stop staring into space with that blank expression, not—
A girl sidles up to him, whispering something that Mike can’t hear. Before Mike can do what he wants to, like scream or crumple to the floor, Will laughs, turning to her and replying with something evidently hilarious.
Oh.
She loops her arm around his, and Mike’s heart grows cold, suspended in his chest by nothing but spite. His stomach, on the other end of the scale, sinks to the floor. Tears prick his eyes.
Stupid.
Hi, Will, here’s your shit, I’m sorry, but it seems like you moved on all right, and everything.
This vigil is way too loud, and there’s so many bodies everywhere and Max might be saying something about how the only Lenora students that came were the ones who absolutely had to, but the noise is muted, unregistered, as if she’s underwater. Mike fights to tear his gaze away from Will’s gentle smile and the girl, the blonde hair, how when she ducks her head in some sort of bashful maneuver, it falls on Will’s shoulder. How Will doesn’t even flinch.
Mike—
Mike’s not pissed. He’s exhibiting a totally normal reaction here, actually. A girl is dead, his town is ground zero for murder, and Will’s prioritized flirting with some random girl.
So, maybe on account of the simple fact that Will hasn’t spared a single glance in Mike’s direction, the cogs of his brain begin to turn. Obviously, it was never out of the question for Will to get with someone else— someone else would be lucky to have him, but—
Does she treat him like she should? Do they like each other?
Is it like the time he sobbed as the evening light sunk past your curtains and told you that he loved you but that he never expected you, or anyone, really, to say it back—
And you kissed him, because you didn’t know how else to show it, because of course you didn’t, that’s part of the reason why you—
Lost him, Mike finishes as she presses a slow kiss to his cheek.
Oh. He gets it, now.
God, Mike can’t do this anymore. He doesn’t want to, either. Somewhere in the midst of his thought process, he slams directly into a wall of tired nausea, and briefly wonders if he’s stressed himself out so much he’s about to hurl.
But no, it’s not just stress— he’s pinned in the center of an adolescent sea. Arms and bodies press against his own as people jostle for room, and some kid behind him is taking loud, drawn out breaths and he can’t fucking concentrate. The uniform’s too tight and the feathers are too stupid; the patch of ground he’s standing on is a clump of grass that he can’t avoid no matter how he positions, and—
Sorry, Robin.
“Bathroom,” he mutters to Max, and turns on his heel.
He doesn’t wait to hear her response.
Mike tosses his band helmet onto the stone outside with a clatter and slumps against the concrete pillar. The cold seeps through the fabric of his ridiculous uniform, and an image of Will appears, unbidden, in his mind’s eye. Mike’s mouth contorts downwards and the area behind his eyes stings.
But no. He is not going to cry; not here on the ground outside the Lenora Devil’s stadium. He is not going to let the memory of Will, washed in candlelight, arm threaded through some girl’s— ruin his last night in band.
He just needs a minute. Reset and keep going. Like always.
So if a small tear streaks down his face, Mike swipes it away.
He cracks open Will’s shoebox again, even though every time he does he feels increasingly pathetic. He lifts the mixtape out, twirling it between his fingers. Will, clad in the wrong color. Will being kissed by another in red. Red is, historically, associated with everything that Will is not. It’s the epitome of anger, a symbol of resentment. And Will, smile stretching across his face, Will, so far from Mike and so fine with it—
It doesn’t matter. But thinking that doesn’t feel like the relief that it used to.
He sets down the mix, producing his lighter from his pocket, and turning it over a few times. It’s the one he’d snatched from the kitchen counter before the vigil. Because it had made sense to Mike a couple hours ago: vigil, candles; lighting candles, fire, lighter. But Mayor Kline insisted that the only way to stand ‘united’ in their grief-stricken heartbreak was to light candles from each other’s candles. The lighter sits dead in Mike’s hands, just a lump of misshapen metal, and Mike briefly wonders how moronic it would be to burn the damn box and fucking move on from Will. And El. Like literally everyone else in Hawkins.
It’s becoming an increasingly likely outcome.
Blonde hair. Hazel eyes. Mike still feels sick.
Footsteps approach somewhere to his right, and he screws his eyes shut briefly, about to tell Max or Dustin or whoever was just hovering there making this awkward for everyone, to just fuck off back to the field, when—
“Will.”
It’s the only thing that can leave his mouth as he pushes himself to his feet. He doesn’t trust himself to say anything more, right now. When Mike shoved his way out of the assembly, he hadn’t expected the other boy to follow. Or notice. Or, you know, speak to him ever again.
He’s here.
And, he’s beautiful.
Oh, my God. Stop it.
Will’s hands flutter at his sides in a bout of uncertainty. Maybe there had been a time where Mike would’ve reached out in silent offer. Maybe it still burns in the back of his skull. Maybe they’d promised, swore to each other to keep in touch and avoid some messy fallout that twists a knife in his heart whenever they glance at a phone. Maybe Will never called.
Maybe Mike’s hands remain still at his side as Will pipes up. “I, uh, didn’t think you were coming.” He sends Mike a hesitant gaze, clearing his throat. “Thought you quit band.”
He sounds different. Mike can’t place how, though. Distance, time, hard feelings took the voice that Mike plays over and over to decipher it in hopes to offer some respite, and changed it, and he doesn’t really know what to do with that.
“Yeah,” Mike says, letting a cool note blossom in his own voice. He has to be careful. After all, a clean cut is better than dragging a blunt blade through a connection, which is a principle that Mike’s not very good at staying loyal to, but respects all the same. “I did. Here.”
Mike aims a kick at the cardboard box, watching it skid over to Will and thump against his stupid, pristine tennis shoes. Will glances up, face half shrouded in shadow as drops down next to it with a soft, “what?”
He draws it closer, prising it open and his expression goes slack. “Is this my stuff?”
Mike stands motionless watching the exchange like he isn’t actually inhabiting his body, like he’s peering into the conversation and just watching biting assent lodge in his dry throat.
“Ding, ding, ding.”
Mike watches Will rise to face him, emotions colliding and forming an unreadable barricade across his face. The pitch’s floodlights extinguish one by one and Mike can’t take it, so he does what he always seems to do.
He turns on his heel and leaves.
“Can we talk for a second?” Will asks. Mike doesn’t stop walking. He barely even fucking knows where he’s going to . The band’s music wafts through the steep gray walls, and Mike is walking away from the boy who did so quite the same way, on that last day a million years ago. No, they can’t talk for a second. Mike can barely think past the words ‘fuck you’ which don’t seem quite apt in this situation. Appealing; yes, but apt—
“No.”
“You broke up with me!” Will insists, technically correct. But he’s only examining one layer of their dangerously fragile predicament, and doesn’t he understand. “Remember? So stop acting like I’m the bad guy.”
Mike bristles, pausing for once. Maybe he can let out some of the anger that’s filling up his body in harsh, scribbly lines drawn by aches and tissue boxes and feeling like a hollow, wounded kid begging everyone he knows for Pity Points. Just for a moment. “Well I’m not the one who moved to Lenora Hills, okay? You made the choice, I just made it official.”
He says it, and it should feel good, it should feel like a fucking break, but the anticlimax is sort of a constant, right now.
“My mom married Hopper! I didn’t have a choice— ”
“Oh come on,” Mike crows, not caring if he’s totally in the wrong. He can’t stop — not when everything just feels like such a cold and faraway concept and he’s taken all this in his stride for far too long, and Will can’t even see what’s going on here. Of course he can’t. As Mike’s rapidly learning, he’s fine in Lenora. More than fine. “You just couldn’t wait to start your new fakeass life, with your fakeass friends.”
Mike doesn’t want to go easily. He wants to drag everything else down with him.
The scariest part is that he fears he will, whether he wants to or not.
“I’m half an hour away,” Will is saying.
“Might as well be the goddamn moon, and you know it.” Realization creeps up on him that this whole conversation was hurtling towards him doing something he’d regret. He pushes it out of his mind. It doesn’t matter if Will harbors twinges of regret like splinters under his skin or not. He moved to Lenora. Lenora. Mike’s allowed to have a little bit of bitterness. Obligated, even.
“I don’t know anything!” Will splutters, indignant, exaggerating the point with hand movements.
It’s a low blow and he knows it, when Mike says: “Yeah, well. I do.”
He pauses, inhales shakily, and presses on. “I know you were always too afraid to tell anyone about us,” Mike offers, voice wavering. “I know that.”
He watches Will’s face fall, crumpling like a sheet of paper lodged in a cassette case, because he knows, too, of course he does. They never mentioned it — they didn’t have to.
Saying it still doesn’t feel like it should. But he can’t exactly stop now. “And I know that the douchebag out there was your fucking girlfriend.”
“She’s not my—” Will cut off. Like Mike doesn’t deserve the confirmation. He probably doesn’t. “You broke up with me.”
Okay. Fine. “What’s her name?”
“ You broke up with me! ”
“What’s her name, Will?” Mike steps closer. God, what’s he doing? “Your girlfriend, what’s her name?”
“Stop!” Will yelled.
Well. Whatever it is that he’s doing— he’s in too deep to let up now.
“What’s her—!”
“ Jennifer! ” he cries out, “her name is Jennifer Hayes, and it doesn’t fucking matter, Mike, because she is not my girlfriend!”
Mike nods, nose scrunching up.
“You don’t get it,” Will persists.
“No, no, no. I do. Yeah, there’s not much of a future in Hawkins with me. With a—”
Will just stares, waiting for the blow, breath drawn and chin raised. Mike continues, and pretends not to see Will’s flinch. “With a queer. Best case is what?” Tears swim in his vision. Will goes a bit blurry. He reaches up to clear them away. He needs to stop.
He can’t.
Well, at least he’s self aware, right? That’s supposed to be the first step to something. Getting better, probably.
He doesn’t want to be better. He wants to be—
Only most of the time, he wants to be nothing.
Maybe it really is as easy as it’s made out to be.
“Dead on the mall floor after a double shift? Or maybe, maybe if you’re really lucky, you’ll be the one carrying the knife.”
On second thought, he doesn’t know what the hell he wants.
That’s just a bit more terrifying.
Will looks at him with that same wide eyed horror, as if Mike is some stranger that just slapped him across the face. “Jesus, you’re doing it again,” he says, and he sounds low and shaken, like he doesn’t know who Mike is anymore.
“Doing what?” Mike practically spits.
“‘Welcome to the suck!’” Will imitates, even though his voice teeters on a break. “‘Shit is doomed!’”
Doesn’t he get it? “Shit is doomed!”
“It doesn’t have to be, Mike! It’s like you wanna lose.”
“Well,” Mike presses, grasping at straws, at the fragments of their friendship, the one that carried him through everything like the lifeline it was, and he finds he can’t quite reach it like he used to be able to. “At least I know who I am.”
“Stop.” Will’s eyes shine with a fresh layer of tears. Mike put them there. Mike did that. “Stop being mad at me for wanting a different future.”
Ouch.
I did that.
“It’s not your future,” Mike tells him softly, “if you’re pretending to be someone else.”
He plucks the shoebox from the floor by Will, and thrusts it into the other boy’s chest.
It feels like a goodbye. It feels like a fuck you. It feels like a colossal mistake.
They lock eyes. Mike’s nausea isn’t getting any better.
Before they can do anything, a scream echoes from the field, and they spin to face it. Will exchanges one last glance in harmony with Mike, and he hopes that Will knows just how goddamn stupid both of them are, before they bolt onto the pitch.
“Pieces of shit! ” Max declares to the bus returning home, receiving a resounding chorus of, “ Yeah! ”
She’s standing in the center aisle, ice pack braced against her forehead. From what Mike and Will gleaned, a fistfight broke out between Hawkins and Lenora. The other boy left him without a word. Probably off to find Jennifer or something. Mike, now splayed across the otherwise empty bus seat three from the back, head dangling off the edge and hair tumbling down to the floor, can’t blame him.
“They think they can do,” Max seethes, “ whatever they want.” (“No!”) “They ruin our vigil , and then they go waltzing back into their mansions, like we’re some reject pile they can just step on.”
“ No! ” The team yelps again.
“Well, we are not the reject pile.” Max turns a full circle, and Mike glimpses pure unbridled fury clouding her face. Mike doesn’t think she even notices he’s not saying anything, joining in like he usually does.
Max looks to all the world like someone who’s about to burn everything to the ground and collapse into the ash with a smile on her bloodied lips. Mike stares at her, and wonders if El ever reached out to her, either.
“NO!” The bus agrees.
“This shit ends TONIGHT. ”
“ YEAH! ” People are whacking the metal interior of the bus and causing so much noise that in comparison, Mike only feels emptier and more innately exhausted than when he boarded the bus in the first place.
(Why did you do that? Why did you hurt Will?)
Lucas stands to be level with Max, shaking her shoulder. “What are we gonna do?”
(It’s what I’m best at).
“We’re gonna go kill those preppy assholes!” Max screams.
The loudest cry of all reverberates through the bus. Max drops into her seat sideways, so that she’s still facing the other row. Lucas starts a chant of her name, and it catches on quick.
“Max, Max, Max, Max, Max, Max—!”
Dustin stands again, punctuating the chant with his own: “When I say Hawkins, you say witches. Hawkins!”
“Witches!”
“ Hawkins !”
“ Witches !”
“When I say Hawkins…”
Mike teeters on the edge of zoning out completely, as he stares up at the ceiling, and wonders briefly how El is doing. He hasn’t seen her since she moved away with Will.
Will, who Mike had yelled at barely an hour ago. Will, who just wants to start fresh, away from the town that brought nothing but bad memories and bruises. Away from Mike, who brought nothing but profound disappointment. Will should have seen it coming, that talking to him outside the stadium six months later would prove no different. If anything, it was worse than before.
Mike should have—
A beam of yellow light splits the night outside, spilling through the back window of the bus. Mike frowns, tilting his head to reveal—
Twin headlights, blazing like suns, their glow leaking onto the road in front. The car horn sounds, but Mike’s pretty sure he’s the only one who’s noticed. The rest of the team are too wrapped up in Max, Lucas and Dustin revving them up.
Someone keeps beeping the horn, and they have Mike’s full attention now, as he pulls himself up from where he’s lying, and perches at the emergency door at the back of the bus.
The red car swerves up, one boy wearing a skeleton mask hoists himself through the sunroof and hollers something unintelligible at the bus in front of him, holding a water bottle aloft.
“Goddamn Lenora shits,” Mike hisses to himself.
The boy in the sunroof sways dangerously and before Mike can process what’s happening next, his arm swings and the bottle in his hand releases a dart of water. Mike reels back faster than he’s moved all day, and the window of the emergency door is drenched in drops that run down it in small rivulets, blurring the car behind.
Mike snaps into action, whipping around and yelping, “ Guys! Come here, come here!”
The bus chants on, unperturbed.
“Come here, quickly!”
His friends’ heads snap back to him and they rush over, pressing up against the window and taking in the scene.
The sunroof boy moves to throw again. The whole water bottle slips from his hand this time, crashing against another back window with the sickening shriek of glass on glass. He whoops, and the girl at the wheel eggs him on.
“Oh, you have gotta be kidding me,” Max snaps, whole expression on fire.
“Hey,” says Dustin, “isn’t that, um—”
For the first time, Mike’s attention switches to the figure in the passenger seat, wide eyed with dread and fear and—
“Will.” Mike finishes for him.
Okay. What the fuck?
The world turns red with anger in that moment, perfectly synced in shade with Will’s stupid jersey. Its telltale haze rims logic and sense, and all Mike can make out is the crimson color as he darts to the side, warped beginnings of a great idea taking shape already, and fixes his hands onto the water cooler.
Dustin raises his middle finger, jamming it against the glass. “Lenora sucks.”
“Open the door,” Mike says, ripping the lid off the cooler. He was fine to just move on and forget about Will entirely and let him go live out some incredible life, never to think of Mike again. But now—
The water sloshes in tune with the uneven road as he turns to Max. “Open the door!”
If Will left, and then went out of his way to fucking follow them, Mike’s going to make it clear that he should make up his goddamn mind and leave them alone.
Max gapes at him for a split second, and his hair is all over the place, wild and in one eye and he can feel the scowl taking form. The car behind beeps again, and she unbuckles the safety latch without a word. They win the attention of the whole bus, people rising from their seats to watch the commotion unfold. Wind strikes the four of them in the face, blowing Mike’s hair out of his eyes.
Will is still in the passenger side, looking a bit green.
“This is definitely a good idea, right?” Max asks as she clutches the other end of the offered cooler. “Mike?”
It’s not. He’s not going to tell her that, though. His self awareness goes a long way, but not quite long enough to find the brakes.
The black sky and everything else melt away and all he can focus on is the car, the cooler, and Will fucking Byers. It doesn’t have to be a good idea. Mike doesn’t need a good idea. He wants to saturate their windscreen. It’s only retaliation. God knows, this town needs a bit more of that.
“On three, okay?”
“Are you sure? Mike?” Max blurts, as if Mike is about to set down the cooler now that it’s in the air, and say, oh okay, Max, you’re right; I’ll control myself next time.
The memory burns itself into Mike’s memory, right down to his navy band uniform. He knows this can’t end well. He also knows he doesn’t care.
“One, two—” Mike uses the countdown to swing the cooler, gaining momentum for the inevitable—
Max has been calling his name for a while now. He turns to face her. “What?”
She lurches back with a gasp, covering her mouth with the back of her hand. “Oh, my God, your nose!”
What happens next comes in a flurry.
The cooler, disbalanced, slips Mike’s grip, and the wind snatches the whole thing, tugging it right onto the hood of the rapidly approaching car with a horrifying smash . The vehicle lunges to the side, trying to get its bearings, and tilts 90 degrees and barrels off the road into the treeline. The cooler rolls away into the other lane, but that’s not really that relevant, because the car is already careening off the road, and Mike’s heart lurches, and—
Shit.
Mike springs to his feet, heart racing and guilt stinging him. Blood steals down from his nose to his upper lip in a metallic tang, and he roars with everything he has, “ STOP! STOP THE BUS! ”
Mike is out of the bus first, racing down to the blaring car alarm, because he has to run, he has to do something— because Will, he realizes, his heart skipping a beat and stomach plummeting, could be fucking dead on the side of the road, and it’s Mike’s fault, and God, he’s an absolute monster, and Will has every right to never want him in his life again.
Shit.
He bolts into the forest, almost tripping over himself, and finds the car at the bottom of the slope, settled between trees and bushes in a sudden lick of metal disturbing the landscape. The lights drip onto the surroundings and Mike rushes to the passenger side and has about his fifth heart attack tonight.
Will is on his hands and knees, horror blooming in his eyes as he stares at the trees ahead. Mike is on the ground next to him in an instant, clutching his wrist. Fuck, what’s wrong with him? Did he hit his head or something? Is he concussed?
“Will,” Mike says.
Will inhales sharply, flinching as if he just woke up from a living nightmare, and takes in his surroundings. He tears his hands away from Mike and they twitch at his sides again.
“Are you okay?” Then Mike notices the streams of blood from Will’s nose, two stripes of red running down his chin. “ Oh. ”
Oh, this is bad.
Mike’s hands gravitate to Will’s jaw, fingertips winding through his hair. “I’m so— I’m sorry,” he breathes, considering briefly how the hell he’ll ever communicate his regret properly to Will.
“Stay away from him,” mutters the girl from the driver’s seat of the car. “Fucking fag.”
Her skeleton mask sits askew against her hair, and Mike realizes belatedly that it’s the same type of mask that Robin’s murderer had worn. It’s a joke to them, too. Hot anger pulses through his blood, and he ignores the girl, ignores her shitty insults turning back to Will.
“Will, it’s me,” he whispers, cradling Will’s cheek with one hand and tilting it so that he can meet the other boy’s eyes. “I’m here.”
“Mike.”
“Yeah, it’s—” his face scrunches up. “It’s me. It’s just me.”
Just Mike. Always just falling short, always just him. And he understands now, dust settling.
Will’s eyes have lost their crazed quality, and his brow furrows as he asks Mike, between ragged breaths, “Did you… see?”
Mike frowns too, exhaling the word, “what?”
Fuck, maybe Will did hit his head or something. What do you do when someone hits their head? Elevation? Make them lie down? Sacrifice a lamb at the next blood moon? Will’s searching Mike’s eyes for any hint of agreement, when a twig snaps behind them. He whirls to face it, fear overtaking his expression. But it’s just—
“Oh, shit!” Dustin exclaims, kneeling beside them, and summing up Mike’s analysis of the situation. Dustin’s abandoned his witch hat on the bus, but his face is still caked in green makeup. It would be funny if Mike’s overwhelming worry for Will hadn’t kicked into overdrive.
“Okay, we should not be down here,” Max supplies. “Lucas is calling an ambulance, so we need to be gone. The cops—”
“Shut up and help me carry him,” Mike interrupts. Where he’d even carry Will to, besides away from this stupid red car, he doesn’t know. But if he doesn’t do something right now, indecision will clog up his mind and he’ll freeze, just like he did when he dropped the cooler.
“We need to leave, guys! Like, ten minutes ago?” Max is being rational, and Mike responds by tuning her out entirely. He needs to focus; needs Will to be okay. He can deal with the consequences of this God-awful night later.
“We need to clear his airway,” Dustin decides, hand hovering by Will’s nose.
Is he being serious? Mike slaps his hand away just in case. “Quit it.”
“Hey,” he says, “I got this. Chill out.” He turns to Will, and sounds more like he’s trying to convince himself rather than the boy who was just in a car crash when he repeats, “I got this.”
They all wait.
“How many fingers am I holding up?”
Mike wants to strangle him, but Will looks like he’s genuinely going to respond to Dustin’s question, so Mike just watches as Will swallows and correctly replies, “three.”
Dustin turned to Mike, I-told-you-so face equipped. “See? He’s totally fine.”
Before Mike can throw an insult at Dustin, a hacking cough claws its way out of Will’s throat and he retches a spray of dark red blood out on the nearest available surface— Dustin’s white t-shirt.
“Oh, my God!” He and Max cry in unison. Shock hinders Mike’s ability to comment.
Dustin seems to be in no such situation. “What the fuck? ” he adds as he leaps back, spots of blood creating a stark contrast on his shirt. Max runs a hand through her hair, turning to Will, as Dustin hurriedly wipes some of the red away. It doesn’t work. If anything, it smears it even more.
Sirens wail in the distance, and nothing about the scene helps any of the Witches, but Mike just tries to lock his gaze with Will’s.
Will’s eyes are screwed shut. The sirens screech on.
Welcome to fucking paradise.
Will’s stretcher is deposited in the ambulance, clearing a path for the sheriff to make his way over to Mike. The flash of blue and red lights has erupted across the road, dousing them all in color, and the radio chatter from the police cars is just barely audible over that stupid siren.
“Mike Wheeler?” Hopper confirms.
“Yeah. Two ‘e’s, one ‘l’ in Wheeler,” he says, just to be difficult about it. It’s Hopper . Being difficult with him may be a once in a lifetime opportunity, one Mike is not going to squander now.
Hopper’s expression remains neutral. “Wanna tell me what happened?”
Okay.
“The car crashed,” Mike comments innocently, unwilling to give his involvement away.
The man’s gaze, for the first time, darts up from his notepad in a glare that Mike mirrors. Hopper drops it first, scribbling away, and asks, “Was it pursuing you?”
“Well.” As annoying as Lenora is, if Mike throws them under the metaphoric bus completely, then their stories would blatantly contradict, so he goes with: “It was driving behind the bus. Does that count as pursuing?”
“The driver said that before the crash someone opened the emergency exit.”
Oh, well. If that’s how the girl, who Mike discovered was actually Jennifer, wants to go about this, then he’s happy for an excuse to fuck her over. “I don’t remember that.”
“No? She also saw you with the cooler.”
Mike’s eyebrows shoot up in fake confusion. “Did anyone else see that?”
Hopper gives a strained smile. “Maybe you were just, um… goofing around. Things got out of hand. Why don’t you just tell me what happened?”
Mike plants his hands on his hips. “I don’t know. I guess it was just an accident.” It’s an echo of the group consensus as to how they would explain all of this before the cops came. Keeping a straight face is undoubtedly the hardest thing he has ever done so far in his life.
Hopper doesn’t look happy about it. As in: the frown looks intended, and not just a permanent part of his face. “Alright. Well, if you do think of anything, give me a call.”
He tears the paper from his pad and hands it to Mike.
“I’m on your side,” he concludes. A number is splashed across the sheet.
“Yeah.” Mike smiles and hopes it didn’t look as forced as it is. “Totally.”
They part, and Mike’s gaze lingers over his shoulder, aiming a look of disdainful judgment at the Sheriff’s turned back, and collides with a blonde girl armed with a look of fury. Jennifer.
“My car is totaled.”
“Well, your mom will buy you a new one,” Mike says, trying to see past her to where Max is exaggerating some story to Lucas, hands aloft and gesturing around the road.
She glances past his shoulder and Hopper or someone must be watching, because she envelopes him in a hug, smiling cordially. “Hawkins trash. You are all fucking dead. ”
She shoves him and storms off, but Mike’s already turning on his own heel.
Jennifer doesn’t matter.
The ambulance is a small swarm of activity, and Mike easily slips by a couple paramedics, bound by tunneled vision to exactly one person.
“Will,” he says, half-jogging up to the stretcher, to where Will sits glassy eyed in perfect, pensieve silence. “Will, shit.”
The air is cold, biting, even for October. The breeze sails over the road and whips at Mike’s exposed ankles, his fingertips, the tip of his nose. It’s getting dark now, and he can see his own breath puffing out in miniature clouds. Skin reddening, stagger-worthy shit; exactly the weather Mike knows Will can’t stand.
“I—”
He can’t force words out. Maybe Will’s going to snap out of whatever weird in-between state of nothing that he’s in, and yell at him. It would, Mike laments inwardly, be much easier if Will would yell at him. Familiar territory, and all that.
Will stays silent, watching the trees from his stretcher as if they’re watching right back.
Haunted, is a word for it.
Mike, against every ounce of his better judgment, thinks about reaching out to him.
It’s a good idea, in all technicality, and it came so naturally when Will was crouched in the dirt and moss and shit, so easy to just let himself place his hands on Will’s face, so easy to show his desperation, apology springing to his tongue before he even knew what the fuck he was saying.
Now he can only stand, the adrenaline slinking out of his system, limbs growing leaden where he lingers on the road. He raises his hand, and it falls on the sheet of the stretcher, just an inch short of Will’s. Neither of them move, neither bridge the gap.
But there is a feeling, something that fits so naturally in his mind. Something he never said but always wanted to.
“Will, I—”
“Don’t.” Will doesn’t break his stare at the trees. “Please, don’t.”
“Okay,” Mike says, nodding, fist curling on the stretcher. “Okay.”
So he doesn’t.