Work Text:
Finn and Noah sit in silence in Noah's trailer. They've just wrapped the last scene, cheeks still wet with tears.
Noah is the first one to speak up. “So, are we…just not going to talk about it?”
Finn blinks slowly with his face blank. He looks…oddly 2D. Like paper, maybe. Cardboard?
“Hello?” Noah waves at him.
He starts, turning to Noah and rubbing his face. “Sorry, I'm still coming out of character. What…did you want to talk about?”
Noah looks meaningfully at him, gesturing between them. “Us?”
Finn chuckles. “I'm not gay—I’m not—that’s a—that's a…”
“No, idiot!” Noah shoves him lightly. “Our characters. You know. Mike and Will?”
“Oh yeah,” Finn remembers. “What about them?”
“I could've sworn Mike was in love with Will.” Noah throws up his hands, frustrated. “All those touches, and looks, not to mention the lip glances…why would the Duffers direct you to do that if Mike was never interested?”
“Um,” Finn says. He tries to revert back into his lobotomised character, but a single sweat drop rolls down his forehead, and even though there's only one, it's not CGI, which would already be too much for Mike. “They…didn't?”
“Huh?” Noah stares at him, baffled. “It was all accidental?”
“Lowkirkenuinely, yeah.”
“So why didn't we redo the scenes?”
Finn Actingishard winces. “We just kinda accepted that it was the best I could do.”
Noah keeps staring. “How did you manage to keep your job.”
“Well, I mean, I also thought Mike was in love with Will,” Finn explains, eyes flitting down a few times towards the lower half of Noah's face as he talks. “Which is why they kept all those takes in. But now, my running theory is that either they didn't care or because I'm hot.”
“Because you're—”
“Yeah I'm leaning towards the first option too.” He stops to consider for a moment. “I mean, Gracie Abrams seemed to agree with the second, but I’m 22 now so maybe not anymore.”
“Jesus,” Noah mutters, rubbing his brow. “So you sitting down in season four, biting your lip and looking at my ass—”
“Did I do that?”
“Yes, Finn, you did.”
“Huh. I don't remember. Must've been instinct.”
Noah, despite the conversation they’ve been having in the previous two minutes, is still taken aback for a moment before he shakes his head. They can come back to this later.
“And all those times you glanced down at my lips and noticed when my arm brushed yours in the van—”
“Filming had already taken so long at that point.” Finn shrugs. His eyes flick down, as though to prove his point. “I think we all just wanted to go home.”
“That's not—”
“The Duffers just told me to act natural, I dunno.”
“Act natural.” Noah stares at him like he’s really become season 5 Mike. “You were never told that Mike liked Will back.”
“Nope.”
“And all of those-those gay ass acting choices…were just you?”
“Well, I’m not gay, that’s—that’s—that’s a…but yeah.”
“So what does this mean? Does this mean the internet analysed and took apart every little detail of our interactions for nothing?”
“Not all for nothing…” Finn draws closer. His eyes flick down. There's a little white heart in the shine of his eye.
“I'm not gay,” he whispers. He reaches down to pull up his pant legs, revealing socks with a familiar striped embellishment. Pink, purple, blue. Noah's eyes widen. “I'm bi, actually.”
He closes in. Their lips meet. Noah frowns; Millie was right. He really isn't a good kisser. Ah, whatever. This is close enough to Byler endgame. He’ll take it. He closes his eyes. This is for you, Will Byers.
…
No, not whatever. He really can't take it.
He pulls back. Finn’s eyebrows are going crazy.
“Um,” Noah says. “I think it'd be better if we were just friends.”
Finn's eyebrows drop. Noah kinda feels bad for him, so he tries to amend it with, “No, actually—”
Finn's eyebrows perk up.
“—best friends?”
They drop again. He looks even sadder than he was when Mike was watching El sacrifice himself, which isn't really saying anything, but anyway he looks sad.
"It's okay, Finn, I was just your Tammy," Noah says consolingly, before wiping his mouth and sighing. He’s almost glad Byler didn’t happen and that it was Mileven all along. Wait. Maybe Mileven didn’t kiss until the finale because Finn’s kissing was too shit. Well, either way it only sucked for Millie all this time. “The Duffers should’ve at least let me do that with #epilogueboyfriend.”
“Maybe it happened offscreen,” Finn offers.
“Everything happened offscreen,” Noah replies, frustrated. “Isn’t that weird to you?”
Finn shrugs nonchalantly. At this point, Noah is really questioning how much he was actually acting in season 5 and how much was just more of him ‘acting natural’. It doesn’t help when Finn blinks at him slowly, eyebrows spazzing for a moment before he takes a big ass gulp and glances down at Noah’s lips again. Noah sighs. And he’s the one who’s publicly out.
“Nah,” Finn says confidently. “We’ve seen stranger things.”