Chapter Text
“Mike! Will!” Johnathan calls up from the stairs. “I’m leaving, I’ll be back later! There’s some leftover pizza you can– .”
“Yeah, thanks, Johnathan!” Will calls back. “We’re adults, we’ll survive!”
After a pause, Johnathan laughs. “All right, well, don’t be too adult!”
Will chuckles and glances over at Mike, who’s sprawled in his bed next to him.
“See you guys later!” The front door shuts with a clack that makes the house rattle slightly.
Mike and Will lie together on Will’s bed for a minute, enjoying the silence. Mike cuddles closer up to Will, dropping his head onto Will’s shoulder. He lets his hand fall onto Will’s chest.
Will sighs in contentment and kisses the top of Mike’s head. The scent of his coconut shampoo seeps into Will’s mind and makes everything tingly. The warm fuzzies kind of tingly.
“So…” Mike starts. “What do you wanna do?”
Will shrugs. “I don’t know. What we’re doing is nice.”
“We have the whole house to ourselves.” Pause. “We just can’t be too adult.”
Will laughs and covers his face. “Oh, my God. Leave it to Johnathan to embarrass me.”
Mike laughs along with him. “Don’t worry about it, it’s cute.”
“What, Johnathan embarrassing the shit out of me?” Will mumbles through his hands.
“No, your reaction.” Mike snickers. “Come on, show your face.” He grabs Will’s hands and starts to bring them down.
“Hey!” Will laughs, fighting with Mike for a moment before Mike starts mercilessly tickling his sides.
Will squirms and cries out, recoiling away on instinct. He scoops Mike into his arms and wraps both his arms and legs around Mike’s entire frame, trapping him in his embrace. “There. Haha, can’t tickle me now, asshole.”
Mike goes limp against Will and accepts his fate. He peeks up at Will through his dark curls. “Embarrassment looks adorable on you. You are bright red over there, sorcerer.”
Will scoffs and runs a hand through Mike’s hair. “Yeah?”
“Yeah.”
Will plants another kiss on Mike’s head and releases his boyfriend from his tight grasp. Mike slumps to the side and finds a more comfortable position. He curls up to Will’s side and finds a home there, a moth to a flame.
They lie there for a while, together, listening to the spring birdsong outside the Byers house. Will’s mixtape that Mike had given him for his birthday plays faintly from his radio nearby. No sound of Johnathan playing his music through the walls, no clatter of his mom doing dishes downstairs. It sinks in fully that they’re alone, with the house to themselves, and hours of confirmed free time for them to spend together as they please. This doesn’t happen often. Especially with his mom still being the worrier that she is, especially about Will.
Quiet is often achieved, but peace? And the two together? A rarity in this household.
For now, peace and quiet is theirs to share.
Will hugs Mike slightly closer to him, suddenly feeling both grateful and intensely possessive, even though there’s no one here to take him. But Mike doesn’t seem to mind. In fact, he happily snuggles closer, and he even starts tracing shapes on Will’s flannel.
Will watches, a soft lovesick stare. He can’t believe Mike is his. Especially after all the years of pining and the crippling fear and doubt that he carried, he never thought he could have this. Love. Much less Mike’s love.
Mike blinks up at him. “What?”
“Hmm?”
“You’re staring.”
“What? Oh.” Will looks away. “Sorry, I’ll stop staring if you don’t like it.”
“No, I…” Mike chuckles. “I like it. You just looked…”
Will frowns. “What? Go on.”
“You looked…really, really happy. Like…glowing.”
Will’s heart swells. “Yeah?” he whispers. His eyes flick to Mike’s lips.
Mike nods. “Yeah.” He scans Will’s face and smirks. “Still glowing.”
“Well, whose fault is that? You’re really easy on the eyes. At not too hard to snuggle, either.”
Mike laughs and drops his face onto Will’s chest. After a moment’s pause, he lifts his head and meets Will’s eyes. He smiles. A soft, beautiful smile. He glances at Will’s lips, then eases forward and closes the distance with a soft kiss. Will hums in satisfaction and brings a hand over to stroke Mike’s cheek. He rubs his thumb along Mike’s cheekbone, and the boy in question shivers under Will’s touch.
They break apart and Will goes in again, breathing in on their next kiss. The dizzying combination of Mike’s cologne and his minty toothpaste sends warmth flickering through his face. Mike does the opposite– he sighs into the kiss, his breath fluttering onto Will’s cheeks like butterfly wings on a gentle spring breeze. Will inhales hints of his mouthwash, a tingle of elation runs down his spine, and he wants more.
Will pulls apart briefly, angles his head to the side, and fits his mouth and Mike’s together, clasping perfectly like a key to a keyhole. Mike responds by bringing a hand up to Will’s head, gripping a handful of shaggy hair, and pulling just enough to spark bits of pain.
A little whine exits Will’s mouth, breathless, and Mike hears it. He pulls away just enough to look Will in the eye. “Oh, you liked that, didn’t you?”
Will licks his lips and nods sheepishly. He feels a bit of crazy building in the back of his mind, and Mike could be the witness to all of it.
Mike goes in for another kiss and at the same time pulls at his hair again. Fluttery pain scatters through Will’s scalp and this combined with Mike’s mouth on his draws a moan out of him.
Mike smiles against Will’s lips, and he pulls again– Will gasps into Mike’s mouth, his heartbeat picks up– God, his boyfriend learns fast.
Mike finds a good rhythm. Pulling, then kissing, pulling, then kissing, back and forth, and every kiss grows deeper. With each one, their mouths ease wider, more eager, more starved for each other.
Mike pulls again, and Will breathlessly gasps, “Mike…”
Mike pauses. He pulls back. “Yeah?”
Will stares at him, breathless and panting. “Mike…” Everything else fails him. It seems that Mike’s name is the only thing he remembers how to say. His mind is reeling, his arousal building.
Mike smirks. “You’re red again, but for a different reason.”
“I…” Will forces out. “I want you.”
Mike smiles wider. Without another word, he props himself up on his elbows, swings a leg over Will, and mounts his boyfriend. He buries a hand in Will’s head of hair and pulls with a bit more force, threading his fingers through different sections of Will’s hair.
The little sparks of pain combined with the weight of Mike on top of him and his boyfriend’s legs straddling his torso brings another moan out of Will, louder, a real sound of pleasure.
Mike hooks his mouth into a kiss and the rest of Will’s moan is swallowed up by Mike’s lips. Mike’s chest presses against Will’s, their hearts beating so fast, so close, and Mike applies the fatal combination: pulling, and kissing, this time with a quiet noise of his own into Will’s mouth. Will gasps as heat rushes into his lower body and his hips buck up into Mike’s, a sudden crazed response that Will didn’t even know he could have.
Mike laughs, somewhat scandalously, and kisses him again, harder, this time moving his free hand down and gently but firmly grabbing Will’s hip. Mike lightly pulls at Will’s hair, delivers a breathy kiss, and in one fluid motion rolls his hips against Will’s, a gentle, intentional, yet experimental grind.
The sound that leaves Will’s body is a sound he didn’t even know he could make, and suddenly he’s glad no one else is home, because he’s panting hard, the breathless noises spilling out of him not quiet at all, and then he and Mike are sloppily making out again as Mike moves his hips against Will’s with agonizing yet intoxicating slowness. A foreign pressure builds in Will’s abdomen, tender, throbbing, and he’s not sure what it is or what to do or frankly how to think anything at all with Mike grinding their hips together like he is, but alongside the blinding sensations sending him hurtling towards a gorgeous fucking high, Will feels an abrupt and overpowering urge to move.
Will tests it out, rocking his hips up against his boyfriend’s, riding Mike’s movement and timing his own, an aroused pattern of back and forth between them.
They’re both panting like starving wolves, coasting along to each other’s rhythm and also finding new rhythms and songs and chords, trading moans and gasping into each other’s mouths.
In the middle of it all, Will realizes with a rush that this is the first time they’ve really done anything like this– at least, like this. Intimacy beyond just making out here and there. It feels weird and foreign and almost a bit forbidden with Mike being a boy and Mike being his best friend Mike, but Will manages to think between the breathless gasps and full-throated moans that he could get used to this, that maybe this is okay, maybe he is okay, and that he’s finally okay with letting someone love him like this, even when for a long time, he didn’t think he deserved it. Maybe…maybe having this is–
Mike cuts off his thoughts by trapping him in another kiss. He opens his mouth, Will does the same, and they find each other in the heated craze of their arousal. They pull apart, Mike has barely enough time to whisper Will’s name before Will is charging forward with yet another kiss. Mike lets go of his boyfriend’s hip and his hair and clasps Will’s face, his hands nestled under Will’s cheekbones, and Mike lets out a sort of half-growl, half-moan on their next kiss. Mike uses his jaws to pry Will’s open, digs one hand in Will’s hair, pulls like normal, and slips his tongue into–
The terror is instantaneous. Everything vanishes– all the lust, the arousal, the love, the pleasure, the enjoyment, everything is ripped violently away, overpowered by the single slimy thing poking around in his mouth. Suddenly all Will can think is not again, not again, not again, he can’t do this again–
Will’s eyes fly wide open, the ceiling swerves, fear catches in his throat, he feels the weight of Mike on his chest on his arms on his legs on his torso on his head on his FACE, and all he can feel are VINES, pinning him down, trapping him, there’s someone ON him, moving against him, forcing themselves onto him, TOUCHING him, there’s something fat and slimy and ALIVE in his mouth, and he can feel it EVERYWHERE–
All four of Will’s limbs erupt into action and shove Mike away, flinging him off the bed entirely. Will snaps upright as soon as the weight is lifted, and out of the corner of his eye, he can see Mike struggling in a heap in the corner. Will hears a distant, “Jesus, what the hell was that for?” but there’s a shrill ringing in his ears and a white haziness to everything. His vision gets fuzzy and he faintly realizes he’s gasping for breath, although now from something entirely different.
The weight is off, he should feel better, but he can still feel it, he can feel it everywhere, the vines holding him in place, the haunting voice of Vecna, the penetration of the Mind Flayer– “Will? What’s wrong?” –the hand caressing his cheek, the disgusting shiver along every inch of his skin– “whoa, whoa, whoa, hey, what-what happened?” –the violation, the horror, the slugs crawling around in his stomach, incubating, hatching, wriggling up his throat, slime oozing along his tongue–
Saliva gushes into the back of his mouth, slimy and warm, nausea slams into him so hard the room whites out, and by the time his stomach heaves, Will is already rushing for the hall bathroom. Through the white haze, Will fumbles with the door lock, and he’s not even sure if he succeeded before his stomach heaves again and he’s scrambling for the toilet.
Bile dribbles from his chin as he sobs over the toilet, blindly feeling around for any kind of support. He can still feel it everywhere, the nasty tingle in his limbs, the fossilized crust of Vecna’s touch that can never be peeled off, Vecna’s awful voice purring in his ear, and Will lets out a sob. Pain rips through his stomach and Will’s sob cuts short, turning into a wet, disgusting heave that sends vomit pouring into the toilet.
Will gasps for breath and the toilet bowl echoes his own sobs back at him. His body doesn’t let up. His stomach folds, thick vomit surges up his throat, his sobbing morphs into horrible gagging noises, and then he’s puking up his memories, over and over.
The haze of white static is still over his eyes; the harsh ringing still his ears, so he can’t quite make sense of anything besides his pain, but he can faintly hear Mike banging on the door, crying his name.
Will sobs. He spits into the toilet. He wipes strings of yellow saliva from his chin. He burps up half-digested food and heaves so hard he almost passes out at one point. His stomach squeezes him dry. And even then, one worm of a thought about Vecna or the slugs or Mike’s tongue in his mouth sends him in a pathetic spiral again, hyperventilating and crying and puking with the little energy he has left.
The panic eventually fades, though not through endurance, through the fact that Will physically and mentally cannot handle any more of…anything.
The white fades. The ringing falls away.
The bathroom clears and his hearing opens up.
A fist thumps on the door. “Will! Will, please, whatever’s happened, let me help you, PLEASE.” His voice cracks and he sounds on the brink of tears. “Just-just unlock the door, Will…”
Will blinks. Below him is a toilet full of his own vomit, with globs of discolored bile and saliva scattered along the toilet rim, the floor, and his own forearms.
A surge of disgust overtakes him, disgust towards himself.
Despite not thinking he had any energy left, his body proves him wrong. Will starts crying again, and before he knows it, he’s sobbing harder and louder than he’s allowed himself to for a very, very long time.
Mike doesn’t know what the fuck happened.
How can he?
One minute he and Will were grinding up against each other and kissing each other senseless, and the next Will’s throwing Mike off the bed and freaking out and then running into the bathroom to puke his guts up.
What…what the fuck? Things were going so well, perfectly, even. He knows Will was enjoying it, he knows it. So what changed? How in the hell did they go from begging for each other’s bodies to Mike now listening to Will sob uncontrollably from behind a locked door?
Mike should be hurt. Sure, his head hurts from kinda being thrown into the wall, but no, Mike should feel betrayed. Or angry. Or something. But instead, Mike is at a complete loss. Confused, yeah, but mostly worried out of his damn mind, because what the hell happened?
Will’s sobs lessen to exhausted hiccups and shaky breaths.
Mike thinks back to the moment that everything went up in flames.
It was going great, they both were hot and breathless and swept up in it, both of them rolling their hips together in oscillating harmony, both high on each other. Then Mike had decided that since it was going so well, he would kiss Will again, except deeper, more intimate and yet more intense. He’d coaxed Will’s jaws open– which Will reciprocated, he’d felt it– then Mike had snuck his tongue past the drawbridge of teeth and deepened each kiss with intermingled tongue. It had only been a few kisses like that before Will’s limbs erupted underneath him and thrown him off the bed and everything had stopped.
…Was it him? Was it Mike?
Mike curses under his breath. No, of course it was him. He’d obviously done something… Or had Will just decided that he was done? Or that he didn’t like it anymore? Or that- God, was Will disgusted with him? Was Will just forcing himself to like Mike, and during their intimacy it got to a point where Will couldn’t hide it anymore and maybe he never liked kissing him at all and now Mike’s done too much? Was this all a lie?
Does Will actually like him? Or was it all fake, and it just took Mike getting a bit too eager for Will to realize enough was enough?
Tears prickle in Mike’s eyes, threatening to fall.
Shit.
His irrational thoughts are sounding pretty rational after whatever the fuck just happened.
Mike is jerked out of his thoughts by a collection of sounds from inside the bathroom:
Will shuffles around inside, sniffling. The toilet flushes. A few seconds later, paper towels rip. More shuffling. A longer pause. Then the faucet turns on. The soap dispenser rattles a few times, the water turns off.
The silence that follows is deafening. Mike can hear his own breath shaking. He inhales to speak when–
CLACK! The doorknob rattles. A click.
The door opens with an almost mocking squeal.
Mike has his questions locked and ready. Will, what’s wrong? What happened? Are you okay? Do you need some water? Is it Vecna?
But everything prepared on Mike’s tongue dies at the sight of Will.
His boyfriend has aged twenty years in thirty minutes. His eyes are ringed in a black, bruised exhaustion so deep Mike can see the aftershocks in his jawline, which is clenched to hell. His skin is tough and patchy, all flushed blotchy and pale from throwing up. Even his cheeks are sunken, sudden and unexplainable starvation of a traumatized mind, and Will looks both sickly and ready to collapse at any moment.
Mike almost wants to scoop him up and carry him to bed, but he knows better than to touch him right now. Instead he opens his mouth and…lets out a tiny pathetic sob of pity, of heartbreaking guilt, because deep down, he knows this is because of HIM, something HE did, and Will looks absolutely awful for it.
Will’s eyes flick up to Mike’s face. The white of his eyes is flecked with red, and his mouth twists into a pained frown. “Mike…”
Mike swallows back his emotion and takes a breath. “Yeah? Are you-are you okay?”
“Mike, I’m…” Will whispers, his face crumpling. He opens the door all the way, stumbles out, and with a whimpered apology, falls into Mike’s arms.
Mike embraces him immediately, cradling him in his arms and pressing Will’s face into his shoulder where Will starts weakly crying, gasping tired, broken sobs into the crook of Mike’s neck.
Mike whispers consolations into Will’s ear, simple ones, but it’s all he can muster.
He was blindsided, he still doesn’t know what the fuck happened, and the worry charging every bone in his body demands to be quelled the only way he knows how:
Answers. And if they won’t come from Will, he’ll have to seek answers– or the start of some– from the next person closest to him.
Johnathan.