Archive of Our Own

Chapter Text

The smell reached him before consciousness did, threading itself through sleep. Eggs cracking into butter. Cedar.

His head was already wrong. The headache had apparently moved in while he slept and made itself at home. He sat up and it sloshed. The cold of the floorboards bit through his socks as he shuffled toward the kitchen doorway, and the picture that assembled itself in the frame of it was one he had walked into too many times: Mike at the stove, turned three-quarters toward the eggs, one hand braced against the countertop and the other working the spatula. El on his left, her hair pinned up. His mom on the other side of Mike, quartering fruit into a bowl, the radio on low behind her.

Mike in his kitchen, Mike in his house, Mike's cedar and coffee soaking into the walls and the curtains and the dish towels, it was so thoroughly domestic it momentarily cut through his headache.

Mike turned the moment Will appeared in the doorway."Hey."

Will produced a noise. He moved toward the stove because the stove was warm and Mike was warm and the morning was doing its worst to him and he was cold, the kind of cold that coats and blankets never quite addressed.

Mike leaned toward him, dropped his nose toward the junction of Will's neck and shoulder, and inhaled. Will was too fogged to process it.

"You smell nice," Mike said, pulling back to attend to the eggs.

He turned for the table.

By second period the headache had recruited a collaborator, a slow nauseating lurch in his stomach that came in swells and receded and came back worse and he walked through the halls between classes with all his attention focused inward. He had slept, more than ten hours of it too, and yet fatigue clung to him, insistent and absolutely miserable.

Winter always did this to him. His immune system had been compromised since he was twelve. He was always colder than everyone else. Always slower to recover. Always the one with the scarf in October. He hated October. He hated December more.

He dropped himself into the chair beside Mike at lunch and stared at the tray in front of him. Spaghetti. He moved a noodle from one side of the plate to the other. Mike glanced over.

"Why aren't you eating?" Mike demanded.

"Stomach."

"You should still eat something." Mike said, because Mike was fussy, had always been fussy, overprotective and overattentive, and Will used to think that meant something specific, used to read it as an alpha attending to his omega, wanted to read it that way, until Mike got with El and Will watched him redirect all those same careful gestures toward her. Then as the pack formed he'd watched him extend them to Max too. He'd understood then that he had just been the nearest person, and he was mostly okay with it now, except when Mike looked at him the way he was looking at him right now and the okay became a bit harder to locate.

Mike forked a mouthful and extended it toward his face. Will leaned back and pressed his lips together, and Mike pressed forward, and the fork connected with the corner of his mouth and left a smear of marinara sauce across his lower lip. Will produced a high, unhappy sound from somewhere in his throat.

"You're being such a brat," Mike said, and dropped the fork against the plate with a small clatter that conveyed his dissatisfaction succinctly, before returning his attention to the table's general conversation.

Will dragged the napkin across his mouth. He was aware that refusing food from an alpha was a social infraction but his stomach was pulsating and if Mike's alpha ego was bruised, well. He'd live.

Lucas slid his applesauce cup down the table. Will’s stomach lodged a quieter objection to applesauce. He pulled the tab and spooned a small amount and let it sit on his tongue until Lucas eased off, then set the cup down without swallowing.

Mike's hand appeared on his stomach a couple minutes after.

The heel of his palm pressed flat against Will's abdomen, pushed him back into the chair, and started working in slow circles, bearing down into the muscle, and the heat of it moved through the fabric of Will's shirt and into the churning thing underneath and the churning thing began, reluctantly, to quiet.

He knew what this was. He had seen it before, sitting at this exact table, watching Lucas press his hand to Max's stomach during her heats, watching her face competing between frustration and relief. He had jotted it down then as something that happened to omegas, something that happened between alphas and omegas, watched it detachedly because it would never apply to him anyway.

Mike was doing it to him now, in front of the pack, and nobody reacted, conversation continuing at its normal register around them. Will sat there and let it help him because it was helping, let his body go limp and let Mike's hand dismantle the clenched-up thing his stomach had been doing all morning.

The next day Mike materialized in his bedroom before Will had achieved full sentience, which Will considered an act of mild aggression. The smell of cedar and coffee crowded into his room, displacing the usual faint madeleine-and-citrus smell it kept. Big hands found him in the tangled dark of his covers, peeling him loose from the mattress.

He navigated to the kitchen by cedar, eyes at minimum capacity, and sat at the table and looked at the bacon.

The bacon smelled wrong, something underneath the fat and smoke that his stomach found immediately hostile. The toast was also wrong. He chewed only because he was expected to chew.

The problem with chewing was swallowing. He chewed and chewed until his jaw ached and stored the food in his cheek and went for another bite and chewed some more and excused himself and deposited all of it into the bathroom sink and rinsed his mouth and brushed his teeth and stood at the mirror and looked at the face looking back, which did not look particularly well.

When he got out of the car at school, Mike came around to his side before he could make it to the bike rack. He shrugged out of his coat, peeled his zip-up hoodie off, handed Will the hoodie, and put the coat back on.

"Wear it," Mike said.

It was an order.

Will put it on. The smell of Mike's skin worked into every fiber arrived all at once and his head went quiet. Mirkwood. He brought the sleeve to his nose twice before first period and told himself both times that he was just checking whether the smell was fading.

At lunch Dustin said, with complete serene innocence, the blue of his eyes bare and sincere, "You sure you're not pregnant?"

"Leave it to me to birth Jesus," Will replied.

"The Antichrist would be more appropriate," Max said from across the table, bouncing off the joke, and Will's mouth cracked into a genuine smile for the first time in days.

Mike's hand found his stomach again. Will leaned into it, opened his mouth and the words came out before he'd run them through any kind of filter: "Is it kicking?" and yeah, okay, that was a mistake, a real genuine stupid mistake, because you did not joke about that with an alpha, especially not with your pack’s head alpha, especially not in front of everyone within that specific pack.

Mike's scent curdled; sour coffee, something metallic threading underneath it. The table went quiet and Mike's hand on his stomach went still, spread out, possessive and heavy. Will's chin dropped before the thought was finished, tipping his head forward and to the side to expose the line of his throat, and the submission of it was more alarming than the joke had been, because Will had not decided to do it and his body had done it anyway.

Mike's hand moved in circles against his stomach and Will breathed again. The table's noise rearranged itself around the moment and resumed.

Mike stayed over after dropping them off, attached to Will's side as he crashed against the couch. El put on a VHS and sat on Mike's other side and the movie ran in front of them and Will's stomach started making itself known again, worse than at lunch, something pulling at his organs, and he thought for a genuinely terrifying second that maybe Dustin was right, maybe he was pulling a Virgin Mary, before Mike's hand moved to his stomach and the thought dissolved, Will goggled at him in legitimate puzzlement. "How can you tell?"

"I can smell it," Mike said. "You're hurting."

Betas didn’t have a smell.

Betas didn't communicate pain through scent.

“Breath in for me.”

What Mike's hand did over the next several breaths was not soft or light in any way. The heel of his palm worked in leaden downward strokes from just below Will's navel to his lower abdomen, indenting the skin, depressing the muscle, and Will could almost feel his organs shifting around it, his stomach concaving between his hip bones, skin pulled taut around Mike's hand, but the deeper Mike pushed the better it felt, like he was detaching the muscles from the bone, like he was carving space for himself right in Will's core. Will needed that hand deeper.

Mike murmured something over at El that Will’s ears couldn’t quite catch and then his attention went back to where it belonged.

“I know it feels good to hold it in but exhale, come on.”

He heard Mike curse as his other hand came around behind him, palm cupping the back of his neck, and something turned off in Will's head. The grinding overhead static he'd been running on for days going from screaming to silence in the span of one exhale.

He didn't feel it when Mike pressed his wrist against his neck, just felt like a big house cat getting gripped by the scruff while someone worked at its stomach, almost wanted to purr, was building toward an actual purr when the front door slammed open and Mike's hand dropped from his neck and Will's brain rebooted badly, blinking, the fog peeling back.

He was sitting on his couch and Mike's hand was still on his stomach and his parents were in the doorway and El was on Mike's other side looking at the TV. His eyes dragged back to his mom, she was saying something, she was asking if Will's stomach was still hurting—oh.

“Hmm," His tongue felt too big and puffy for his mouth.

She gloomed, disappearing into the kitchen.

Hopper settled on Will's left and smelled like old stone and pine resin, something very large and very steady underneath both of those, and Will's body, still dumb with whatever Mike had done to it, listed toward him. He was a foot away from putting his face against Hopper’s arm when Mike's hand slid from his stomach to his waist and drew him back. His scent spiked. Hopper's eyes moved to Mike's hand and then to Mike's face and something passed between them.

His mom came back with pills and tea and the liquid hitting his empty stomach woke him up by degrees, clarity returning, and Will looked at the living room around him with clear undiluted hazel. He bounced off the couch. Tried very hard to ignore the way Mike's cedar went moldy as the distance between them grew.

What the hell.

He had been about to press his face into Hopper’s arm. He had almost purred, he could feel the vibration of it still sitting in his chest, and he was a beta, he was a beta male, betas did not purr, that was not a thing betas did.

He sat on the edge of his bed and said to the wall: what the hell.

He discovered the first discrepancy in the low angle of his bedside lamp.

He was just pent up, that was all of it, the weird symptoms and the fog and the near-purring; he was pent up and he needed to deal with it and then everything would recalibrate.

He palmed himself through his boxers, slipped his hand beneath the waistband and wrapped his fingers around his dick.

He was dry. Which he wouldn't have to deal with if he were an—

He licked along his palm and went back to it, his other hand traveling to his stomach, clawing at his lower abdomen, boring his fingers in the way Mike had, trying to recreate the pressure, and he thrust into his fist with Mike's scent still all over him. He was close, getting close—his hand froze.

He felt smaller.

Not enough to be certain at first. Except he looked once, then a second time, then a third.

He had never been large. Even by beta male standards he had always run modest but this was definitely a different kind of not-large.

He told himself it was a fever. Fevers did things to perception. He was not well. He would sleep and wake up and it would be the same as it had always been.

He closed his right eye, then the left.

The scent marking campaign, which was what Will had come to call it once he could no longer pretend it was coincidence, had been running for approximately a weekt.

Every piece of clothing he owned had been handled by Mike's hands, even his school bag. The hoodie exchange had become daily ritual. Mike also had a new habit of stopping Will in hallways, mid-sentence, to press his wrist briefly against his, always with some adjacent excuse, always with the casualness of someone who knew exactly what they were doing and found the pretend-to-not-know really entertaining.

The obvious explanation was rut. Alphas in approaching rut did irrational things, territorial things, compulsive and not always sensible things, and whatever omega Mike usually spent his ruts with was presumably receiving the appropriate end of these attentions, which meant Will was receiving the overflow, which was annoying but at leats explicable.

He also kept stopping Will to feed him things throughout the day, which on the other hand was nice? Except Lucas was doing it too, and with his ongoing stomach situation he was growing rapidly irritated with being handled.

"Not to bring up the pregnancy again," Dustin said one afternoon, "but you sure you're not—"

"If I had another slug in me I'd have known by now, thanks Dustin," Will said, without inflection.

"I'm just worried about you, man. You look rough."

Will sighed. He had in fact avoided Mike's hand today, having spent the morning assuring him that he felt substantially better, and Mike's scent, in response, kept doing something severely antagonistic. Was still at it right now, at th edges of the cafeteria table.

Those sour notes, cold coffee and burnt copper, hit the back of Will's throat and his body could only take so much, his stomach lurched upward in protest, his chair scraping back.

He made the bathroom with seconds to spare and bent over a toilet bowl and produced nothing except heaving that left his ribs sore. Mike's hands found his back while he was still bent over, moving in long strokes from the base of his neck to the small of his back, and Will heard him say, close to his ear, "It's okay, baby, you're okay."

Baby.

He looked into the bowl. He looked between his shoes. No slug. No second coming. Mike pulled him upright and walked him to the sink and soaped his hands and ran the tap and kept a continuous, low murmur going, just nausea, there's nothing wrong with you, you're fine, and Will held onto his arm because the headache had returned in white flashes, and he was not actually certain his knees were going to behave themselves.

The infirmary smelled like antiseptic, and the nurse asked the pack to wait outside, and Mike had…refused.

Will heard the subsequent negotiation in fragments through the pounding behind his temples. The nurse's increasingly strained reasoning. Mike's immovable patience. Eventually the suggestion of bloodwork, hospital, malnourishment, and Will's stomach made a decisive statement about needles that required no translation.

Then Mike was there, and he tucked Will against him and pressed his face to Will's neck and the white noise in Will's skull reduced to something distant, his body unclenching like a roly-poly, and then Mike pulled back and Will heard himself make a snappish sound about it.

Lucas appeared at the bed's other side with a tray. Will looked at it without appetite. Mike stared at Will for a moment, his eyes going very dark, and then he said, in a register that was not his usual register, "Eat."

Will ate a full meal for the first time in four days. His body hated every second of it.

That became another constant. Next to the scentmarking and the stomach rubbing, Mike used his voice to feed him, and however much Will resented it, he felt himself regaining ground little by little. The headaches pulled back.

Two weeks in, Will woke up to Mike's hands already on him, already peeling him out of the bedding, Mike's face already angled toward his neck before Will had confirmed that he was conscious.

He stretched in that grip, hands going over his head, leaning back against the arm around him, and Mike pressed them flush stomach-to-stomach.

Will cracked his eyes open to find black eyes running over his body, Mike's belly rising and falling in fast tight increments, and Will's brain produced its little alarm, danger danger danger, and he ignored it because it was Mike, and Mike had never been dangerous to him specifically.

He bent down to grab his pants off the floor and felt the cedar behind him combust, heard the low growl Mike pushed out from his chest.

Will straightened and left the room and pretended he didn’t.

Max stole him when Mike was occupied, folding herself against his side and running her thumb in slow lines across his knuckles, and the rest of the party took cues from her and stayed close. When anyone got too demonstratively physical, Mike would recalibrate his position and the touching would resolve itself without a word being said.

Lucas pressed his temple to Will's shoulder at the lockers going on about practice and Andy specifically and how if Andy confused his head for the hoop one more time he was going to put him through the net himself. Will laughed at that.

"He bothering you, baby?"

Will's spine pulled straight. Lucas stepped back with a sigh that contained multitudes and left.

"Stop calling me that," Will mumbled, turning his back to Mike to face his locker.

Mike's finger found a belt loop at the front of his pants and turned him back around.

"And you. Should stop turning your back on me," Mike said, and his voice had that resonance again. "I can only hold myself together so much before I hurt you."

"Sorry," Will said, and meant it, only a bit.

Mike hummed and kept his finger in the belt loop.

"You've been scentmarking me," Will said.

"I have," Mike said.

Which was not the response Will had prepared for. He had prepared for deflection. For the smug what are you talking about, Will, for the practiced obliviousness that Mike deployed left and right.

His ears burned. He extracted himself from the belt loop, moving with conscious prudent care to stay face-forward, and walked away with all his prepared sentences emptied out behind him.

He made his second anatomicaldiscovery that night.

He had Mike's jacket draped over his face and he pressed at the base of his cock through his boxers, just taking stock of himself, getting out of his own head. He slipped his hand beneath the waistband and wrapped his fingers around himself and stilled again.

He sat up, frustration rolling off him, and threw the jacket off his face and looked down at himself, pulling the waistband out to see, and the loss since the first discrepancy was too obvious by now. He lifted himself to look at the anatomy below, his balls had also changed, had drawn upward toward his body.

Will pulled his boxers back up and lay flat on his back in the dark.

He was going to sleep, and in the morning everything was going to be the same as it had always been, just like that first night, he forced his brain to turn off and he closed his eyes. Left. Right.

Oh, to wake up to a prissy alpha every single morning, getting manhandled off the comfort of his beautiful beloved bed.

He'd had a terrible night and the last thing he needed was to get engulfed in alpha pheromones at six in the morning.

"You're mad at me," Mike observed, setting him on his feet.

Will made a dismissive noise.

"What did I do? Why are you mad, baby—"

"I told you to stop calling me that."

"I take care of you, I protect you, I feed you. Doesn't that make you my baby?"

"No," Will said, and he hated how it came out. "It does not. I am not a baby," too young, reedy at the edges.

"I made you cry like one."

Will went still.

"Are you proud of that," he said, after a moment.

"No," Mike said. "And I've been thinking about it. I should have had you crying on my cock instead."

Will's face caught fire. "Mike!"

"Big tears, big big ones" Mike said, his voice dropping several scales, doing that thing it did that went straight to some older and stupider part of Will. "Big hiccups, too big for you. I should have been fucking them out of you. I could fuck you, Will. I fuck you and you let me call you baby. Deal?"

Mike stepped forward. Will stepped back.

"No! No deal!"

Mike took another step and Will pivoted sideways and grabbed for the clothes he needed from his dresser, and the pivot was a mistake, he knew it was the instant his back presented itself, his body knowing before his mind did, and Mike snarled, a sound that was not human, that came out of the chest rather than the throat, and it moved through the entirety of his house.

Will spun back around. He held his clothing against his chest. He took very small, very alert steps backward toward the door, keeping his eyes on Mike, keeping his throat accessible, which was the only piece of body language he had available to him that functioned as an argument against the snarl.

"Mike," he said, as a warning, as a plead, as a prayer.

Mike moved. Will moved faster. He cleared the hallway and nearly collided with Hopper, who had his head out of the living room doorway like he’d been tracking the acoustics of this situation from several rooms away, and Will went past him into the living room and stood there in his boxers with his clothes pressed to his chest and his heart running at a pace that was medically inadvisable.

Hopper moved into the hallway. Mike's growl went sharp and territorial and mean. Hopper's answering sound was lower and older and carried none of Mike's urgency. "Calm the hell down, kid," Hopper soothed. "He's not going anywhere. He's not running from you."

Mike's growl continued for a moment and then subsided, his breathing returning to something recognizable. Will could smell the cedar, still poured out in quantities that exceeded all proportionality, permeating the air of the living room, finding him where he stood, wrapping around him despite the distance.

His mom’s smell, bergamot and cinnamon tried to override it, Will absorbed it by reflex, his muscles unknotting increment by increment before his brain had confirmed it was safe to do so. She was talking, attempting to put a shirt on him, threading his trembling arms through the sleeves, saying something low and continuous, her hand moved to the back of his neck, and between the two of them the fear finished draining out of him the way bathwater drains.

Mike came back into the room.

They looked at each other.

Will glared.

Mike glared back, which was frankly outrageous, which was so cosmically unfair that Will's mouth dropped open slightly before he remembered to close it. Mike was the one who had chased him through his own house at six in the morning. Mike was the one who had snarled at him hard enough to rattle the furniture and sent him sprinting down the hallway like a rabbit with a hawk on its tail. Mike was the one who had needed Hopper to physically intervene, and here he was, glaring like he was the one that had been wronged.

They glared at each other through breakfast and through the ride to school in the back of Hopper’s truck, he sat in the backseat and burned holes in the headrest on his diagonal the entire ride.

What was truly beyond him was Mike, at the end of the drive, extending his jacket again, hoodie dangling from one finger, like Will was going to—

Will took the jacket.

He stuck to Max like a barnacle. She appeared at his elbow the moment he cleared the car and he folded himself into her space immediately, because Max was safe and her pheromones did not make demands of him, and Mike kept his hackles flat when Will was with Max in a way he did not keep them flat when Will was with anyone else. He ate lunch sitting next to her and he forced himself to eat without anyone using their voice on him.

He took Mike's hoodie off during last period. The collar kept brushing against his neck, and every time it did he felt it in his teeth, felt his skin prickling irritably under the fabric, he stuffed it into his bag and sat in class in his own sweater and breathed his own air and tried to get his stomach right.

He was not overreacting. He knew he was not overreacting. Mike had come at him in his own bedroom.

He got out of class and the big bad wolf was immediately there, filling the hallway outside the door, and the smell hit Will like walking straight into a wall. Charcoal and burning wood, acrid at the back of his throat, making him want to cough it back out. Students were already giving Mike a wide berth, leaving an empty arc around him, good instincts, Will thought distantly, nobody wants their nostrils painted black.

He kept his body angled toward Mike and walked past him to his locker.

Mike followed. Of course he followed. The charcoal intensified with every step, burning into ash, something beneath it going hot and dense and filling the hallway like smoke, and Will leaned his shoulder blades against his locker and focused on him.

"You took my hoodie off."

"You chased me," Will retorted.

"You turned your back on me."

Back and forth. No beginning to it and no end in sight.

"I can do that," Will said, and he could hear the edge in his own voice, sharper than was normal for him, sharper than he'd been before all of this started. "I'm a beta, Mike. I'm not an omega." He held Mike's eyes. "I'm not your omega."

"No you can't."

"Why."

"I warned you." Mike gestured at the locker at Will's back. "Right here. You said okay. You went against my word."

Will let his head fall back against the metal with a dull clank. His stomach was pulling at him again, clawing at his insides, and the smell was making it worse, the charcoal shifting now, going wet and dark, the forest after a flood, cedar waterlogged and caving, something rotten surfacing from underneath it. He pressed his fist into his own abdomen and swallowed.

"I don't think you heard me," Will said, and he did not know where the steadiness was coming from, the stomachache chewing through the rational part of his brain probably, leaving nothing behind that knew what a good idea looked like. "So I'll say it again. I'm not your omega. I don't have to listen to you."

Something happened in Mike's face.

"Keep telling yourself that," Mike said, and his voice had dropped in temperature. "Play whatever game you want in your own head. But don't you challenge my authority, Will. Lying to yourself is one thing, being a rude little bitch is another. But what you're doing right now is too far. Stand down."

Mike’s eyes widened threateningly, the black of them swallowing Will’s hazel, dimming them out. The storm poured out past them, washing over the students in the hallway who were now talking in hushed urgent tones, their own sharp notes of discomfort and anxiety bleeding into the atmosphere Mike was generating, the whole hallway going taut and bad.

Will's neck was about to dislocate itself from how hard he was straining against it. Mike was right that challenging him, an alpha, in public, was not a thing that ended well, and even if he didn't have to perform the submission the way an omega would have to, he was supposed to stay broadly agreeable, was supposed to keep the peace, and he knew this, and it was still unfair.

He wanted to bite something.

Then pink pepper arrived. Coconut milk laying itself over the charcoal and washing down the ash, pouring into his nose and coating his throat and pulling the tension out of his shoulders. Max moved to his side. El moved toward Mike, his eyes recovering some brown in her presence. The rest of the pack closed in around them, putting their bodies between Mike and Will and the hallway.

Will wrapped his own hands around his throat, keeping it straight by force. He held it until the last possible second, until the apology was building at the base of his throat with the nausea, and then he dropped his eyes and muttered: "I'm sorry."

Mike clicked his tongue against the roof of his mouth. Stepped back.

And with that the origin of Will's rebellious streak arrived from wherever it had been waiting, ascending the ladder from his stomach into his throat, and then Mike's hand was around his mouth before he'd registered Mike closing the distance, palm pressed firmly against his lips, and Will could feel the humiliation of it, of Mike knowing before he did.

He was dragged to the bathroom by those same hands and lowered to a stall and there went lunch, such as it was.

He couldn't feel embarrassed about this anymore, not in front of Mike, not after everything they'd been through and everything his own body kept doing to him without consulting him first. Mike was behind him, hand on his arm, one hand on his forehead, and Will heaved around nothing, the force of it rattling through his whole ribcage, and he was scared.

"I'm s-so—rry," he managed, between one heave and the next. He could barely breathe and he was so scared and he was bent over again before he got the next breath in. "I'm— I'm so—orry."

"Shh," Mike said. "Breathe."

They ended up on the floor and he was breathing, one painful hiccup at a time, each one smaller than the last.

"Are you sure your bomb worked," Will said eventually, to the wall of the bathroom stall.

"Don't start."

Will relaxed by degrees against Mike's shoulder. "I'm glad you're here."

"Me too."

A moment.

"You're not going to apologize back."

"No," Mike said. "You should have known better." Will pulled back slightly and Mike's arms tightened around him and then, almost immediately after: "I'm sorry. Not for anything I said or did. I'm sorry you're hurting and I'm sorry I don't know how to fix it."

Will pressed his face back into Mike's shoulder, cheek squashing against the bone of it, and breathed cedar in. His mouth was wet against Mike's sweater, he was wiping his face on Mike's clothes, small revenge.

"I'm telling your mom," Mike said.

Will whined, the sound scraping raw against his sore throat. "Please don't."

He was gotten to his feet. The conversation with his mom that followed involved several iterations of why would you not tell me earlier and two separate versions of what the hell, Mike, one from his mom and one from Jonathan by phone, and a very serious discussion about it could be something serious which produced from Will a series of sounds that were more animal than language.

He negotiated for an at-home doctor, which the circumstances of their lives had made possible in a way they hadn't been before, one of the Hawkins lab doctors reassigned to them free of charge. He was fine, he kept saying, he could get up in the morning and he could talk and study and worry and get mad and be an idiot, he was not bedridden, his stomach was just doing its thing. His mom tried to keep him in bed. He kept getting restless and wandering through the house, collecting grumbles from everyone in it, including the party who had apparently annexed his living room as their new headquarters.

The doctor came and went and came back with colleagues and went again. They wanted tests. Will said yes and meant maybe. They prescribed things he was certain he would forget to take and his mom frowned through every appointment. His headaches were mostly explained, they said, by poor nutrition and the teeth-grinding he apparently did at night, which he had not known about. The vomiting and the dizzy spells were reactions to emotional overstimulation, mostly psychological in origin, which Will found only slightly insulting.

The only symptom he had not mentioned to anyone, was what was continuing to happen in the dark of his own room, in his underwear. He had kept that observation entirely to himself and he intended to keep it that way.

He was a beta. He had grieved the omega he'd been preparing to be, had grieved it properly and completely, had grieved the sweet-scented biological legibility that would have made everything with Mike simple and possible and socially unremarkable, and he had arrived on the other side of that grief as a beta, and betas had it easy, betas didn't run heats or get flattened by pheromones or have the whole alpha-omega apparatus making decisions about their lives, and he had genuinely made his peace with it.

He had. He really had. He wasn't going to let it crumble.

"Hi, baby." The mattress dipped and Will pulled the comforter over his head in one continuous motion, and felt arms reaching over the blanket for him, trying to guide him, and he wriggled sideways and wormed his way out from underneath the opposite end, dropped off the side of the bed and onto the floor, and blinked up at Mike sitting on his mattress.

"We're not doing a second take of last time," Will said, from the floor. His legs were bare against the cold wood and he was already shivering.

"Behave and we won't have to," Mike said.

"I behave fine. You're the one who—" Will stopped.

"Who what."

"Who said those things to me." Will's face was doing the octopus thing again, cycling through colors in the morning dark of his room that he was grateful Mike probably couldn't fully see.

"What things?" Mike looked insufferably pleased. "Tell me. What did I say, Will."

"I don't understand what you're doing."

Mike got up off the bed and came around to Will's side of it.

Will went backward across the floor on his palms. Mike came forward and Will went back, keeping the distance, until Mike was standing over him with his feet almost touching Will's and he had run out of room, and his back was against the nightstand.

"Alright," Mike said. "Get up. The floor's cold, you're already sick."

He bent down and reached for Will's arms and Will drew his shoulders in and pushed back against the hands finding him, batting them away, and Mike tried again, reaching for his shoulder, his face, his arm, letting out small frustrated sounds every time Will's hands redirected his, the two of them conducting a mindless puppyish squabble on the bedroom floor.

"Come on, sasquatch," Mike said, making another grab. "Stop being difficult for five seconds."

Will scowled at the name, shuffled further sideways until his shoulder connected with the nightstand with a dull thud.

Mike's hand shot out and closed around his arm, and he had Will off the floor and upright before Will had finished processing the contact, and then a flat palm against his sternum walked him backward until the backs of his knees hit the mattress and he went down onto the bed. Mike's hand stayed on his chest a beat longer, pressing him into the sheets, and Will could feel Mike's thin growl reverberating through it.

"Stop," Mike said, above him, breathing faster. "Stop fighting me off. It makes me feel like I'm losing my mind."

He had been scratching and rejecting and fighting back in ways he had never done before, not with Mike, not when Mike was being this open about what he wanted, and some part of Will knew that he was the one making this worse, that his own body was generating a signal and then refusing the response, and that this was, from a purely biological standpoint, a fairly maddening thing to do to an alpha.

Mike adjusted himself in his pants.

Will turned his face away. He pulled his legs up onto the bed and sat cross-legged and put the blanket over his lap and looked at the wall, because Mike was getting worked up and Will's body was already responding to it, and he needed somewhere else for this to go, fast.

"When's your rut," Will said.

Mike froze.

"When's your rut," Will said again, looking at him now, setting into the question.

"You don't know?" Mike said.

Will grimaced. "Why would I know?" What good would it do him, tracking Mike's weeks of in another omega's sheets?

Mike looked away, frowning.

He said nothing else. Will got up slowly and pulled his clothes on and left the room without Mike behind him.

He had an actual conversation with human beings outside his immediate circle for the first time in weeks, because Mike was too distracted to intercede, which was so profoundly out of character that Will couldn't even enjoy it at the volume it deserved.

He leaned into Lucas's side during lunch.

"Is it weird, talking about ruts?"

Lucas looked at him. Looked him up and down. "I mean."

"Not embarrassing weird," Will said, then exhaled. "Just. Would it offend you."

Lucas made a sound in the back of his throat, scratched the back of his neck. "No. No, it's just." He stopped. "Why do you want to talk about that."

"I don't wanna." Will groaned. "Forget it."

"You should ask Mike."

"You're also an alpha."

"No shit." Lucas straightened. "I'm just saying, he wouldn't like you asking me." He looked sideways at Mike down the table and back. "Don't tell him you asked me."

"Why."

Lucas shrugged.

"I really want to hit you right now," Will said.

Lucas grinned at him. "You've been really aggressive lately. Spend some of that energy on something."

"Like basketball?"

"Like basketball."

Will rolled his eyes but he smiled back anyway.

Not being submerged in Mike's scent had finally left enough room for Will to notice his own.

He had his wrist up to his nose in the parking lot, waiting for Mike and El to finish whatever conversation they were having near the school doors. He smelled creamy. Heavier than the light madeleine-and-citrus combination his room usually maintained and that he'd always assumed was just him and his mom's remnants mingling. An earlier stage of it, like being in a kitchen when the butter and sugar and milk were still being incorporated, before anything had gone into the oven, dense and unfinished.

El called his name. He looked up and found both of them watching him.

"Why are you sniffing yourself?" El asked.

Will extended his wrist to her. "Can you smell anything."

She dropped her nose to his wrist, took a breath. "Hmm. Smells good. Did you change soaps? Share it with me." She pulled back and headed to the car, already losing interest.

He turned to Mike. Extended his wrist. "Can you."

"I don't need the wrist to smell you," Mike said, and got in his car.

Huh.

He climbed in.

When Mike pulled up in front of the house and El had gotten out and gone inside, Will didn't follow. He leaned into the driver's side window, forearms on the door, and looked at Mike.

"What did you mean by that," Will said. "You can smell me."

Mike muttered something under his breath. Then his arm came out the window and found Will's wrist, pressed his own wrist flat over the delicate inner skin, rubbing a slow circle against it. "Lean over," he said. "Show me your throat."

Will gripped the door and leaned down into the car window.

Mike's hand came up and cupped the side of Will's neck, his left going over his own neck, pinching the skin red, right over his scent gland. Then he brought them together, his neck against Will's, and rubbed, and where Mike's neck pressed against Will's it itched, a deep-skin itch that sat below the surface, and Mike's scent went up his nose and into the back of his skull and Will felt something liquid trail along the path it made like drops of perfume pressed directly into warm skin, potent and suffocating, mixing with Will's own sweat.

Mike leaned back and his thumb came up and pressed over the spot, rubbing the pheromone in, his nail scratching over the sensitized skin and leaving red lines that stung the way an open cut stings when you press alcohol into it, Mike physically forcing Will's body to receive him, pushing his scent through the skin and into the blood.

Mike leaned away. He looked at Will, his hand still at Will's throat. His eyes were crow dark.

"My next rut is in three weeks," Mike said. "Learn them."

He pressed his hand against Will's windpipe, a push, and Will straightened up from the window. The engine turned over. The car backed out of the driveway and Will stood in the fading afternoon watching it go, the cedar thick in his nose, on his skin and beneath it, moving through his neck.

He rushed to the bathroom, locked the door behind him, got his clothes off, and climbed over the sink. He ignored the sting at his neck and looked in the mirror at his cock sitting there, and it was erect but he almost couldn't tell anymore because it was so small, genuinely so small, and then a sudden pull at his stomach had him lose his balance over the sink, catching himself against the mirror with both palms.

He looked at himself as his abdomen contracted visibly.

The pulling so visceral he could finally see it with his own eyes, could watch his belly spasm and contract and release, his skin moving over what was happening underneath. Will clawed at his stomach, his nails dragging over the skin and then broke through as it became unbearable, small sounds crawling out of his throat that he didn't recognize as his own voice, eyes burning. He got himself off the sink on shaky legs and down onto the floor on shakier ones.

He couldn't ignore it anymore.

He was presenting.

He was fucking presenting as an omega.

Almost a decade too late, he was sitting on his bathroom floor and his body was rearranging itself and he thought: of course. Of course out of everyone this would be him. Of course the Upside Down would save its consequences for him specifically, everyone else got to come out the other side and be happy and move forward and he was on his bathroom floor while his body filed the paperwork it had been sitting on since he was ten.

He had already been an almost-omega and then a grieving-omega and then a resigned-beta and now he was going to be a late-onset-omega and he had lived too many lives already, he was so tired, he couldn't do it again, couldn't dismantle another version of himself and build something new out of the rubble, he'd done it too many times, the materials were getting thin.

This wasn't fair.

This wasn't fair.

He woke up in his bed with the blanket tucked around him and the fear almost overtook the indescribable amount of pain he was in.

Before his brain could start eating itself alive generating possibilities of what had happened, who had walked in, who had seen, he caught the smell of stone through the door, a second before the door creaked.

And he should have known, should have caught that from further away than he had, should have understood from his own heightened sense of smell how far along the process already was, how far he had deluded himself just to escape the possibility of the impossible.

Hopper came into his room with a mug, the same mug his mom always used for tea, the one that looked small in her hands, which looked miniaturized in Hopper's. He set it on the nightstand and dragged the desk chair over to the bed, and Will's eyes filled up at once, tears finding their usual residence.

"Hey, hey," Hopper said, looking at Will's face going an ugly shade of red, breathing starting to stutter. "Relax. Don't do that."

Will hugged the comforter closer to his chest. "You saw?"

Hopper shook his head slightly. "It's okay."

Will sobbed. He saw, he saw, he saw.

"Hey." Hopper leaned forward. "It was only me, alright? Nobody else walked in, nobody else knows. Just me."

Will's sobs caught on themselves. He tried to regulate his breathing and actually tried, pressing his face into the comforter and breathing through it until his chest stopped seizing.

"You were just—I was trying to get in and it was locked and no one was answering," Hopper said, "so I forced the lock."

"You broke the lock?" Will said, in a tiny voice, because he needed to go somewhere else for a second, needed the distraction.

Hopper straightened slightly in his chair. "Don't tell your mom."

Will exhaled. In another timeline entirely, it might have been a laugh.

"You were bleeding," Hopper said.

He could feel the old blood flaking on his abdomen with every breath, could feel the itch of the shallow wounds beneath it. "Can you—I need you to not tell anyone." He kept going before Hopper could answer. "I don't tell about the lock and you don't tell about what you saw." He knew it was unreasonable. The two things were nowhere near equivalent and he knew that. But he needed to make it seem like they were. "Please."

Hopper looked at him for a long time. Grabbed at his own mouth, just sat there regarding Will with that steady attention that Will had never fully known what to do with but had always found easier to hold than most things. "I won't say anything." Will breathed. "For now. I'm giving you a few days to get yourself together. But you have to tell your mom. You have to let someone know what's happening." He paused. "Hell. I barely know what's happening. What did I walk into, Will."

This was the cop who had found him. The same one who had believed his mom when nobody else had, who had spent a week putting his own life on the line to find him, who had performed CPR on the floor of that place and brought him back. Maybe the order of things wasn't as strange as it felt. His secondary gender, his second life, offered back to the person who had returned him his first.

"I think I'm presenting as an omega," Will said.

Hopper just looked at him. Looked at him like his brain had vacated the premises, which Will understood completely, he also wished his brain would vacate the premises.

He said: "Huh."

Will stared back until something more intelligible made its way out.

"Yeah," Hopper said. "That makes sense."

Will raised his eyebrows at that. The stretch of his face made the dryness of his skin noticeable, tugging uncomfortably at his cheeks.

"You always had a smell."

Will scoffed. Again with the smell.

"I always figured you'd be one."

"Everyone did," Will said.

"Do you—"

"Can we not talk about it," Will said. He felt somewhat bad about the interruption and not bad enough to take it back. His stomach hadn't fully settled and he'd just come out to his stepdad for the second time and he really needed to sit in the dark of his room and concentrate exclusively on the physical dimension of his misery for a while.

Hopper got up like he'd been waiting for permission. Took something out of his pocket and set it on the nightstand next to the mug. Painkillers. "You'll let your mom know in a few days."

Will nodded and turned away, facing his posters on the wall.

He genuinely liked Hopper, probably more than he'd been prepared to admit, because for the rest of the evening nobody came in. No mom checking on him, no El asking about school, no calls from out of state, just him and the thing forming inside his abdomen, which was starting to feel less like an organ reconfiguration and more like an actual occupant. If he looked down and something was actually kicking, he didn't think he'd even have the decency to be surprised at this point.

He'd thought he was going to enjoy being an omega.

What a joke.

He barely left his room over the weekend. He leaned fully into the sick angle, fake-coughed around his mom, acquired the I'm-contagious privilege and got everyone to keep their distance. The excuse worked on everyone except Mike, because life was not bright blues and yellows when it could be black and midnights and forests on fire.

Mike came into his room like it was his own and gathered the Will-shaped blanket bundle and lifted him, rocking him up and down against his chest in a slow rhythm. "You skipped dinner," he said, into his hair.

Will didn't answer.

"I know you're not asleep." Mike's breath was warm and damp.

His arm worked its way through the blanket and traveled over Will's belly, splaying his hand against the naked skin of his stomach.

He was burning up. The blanket was making it worse but it was like his body needed to combust and he wanted heat wherever he could get it, Mike's palm just another source of it, and he stopped trying to keep his mouth shut and let his body talk instead, because Mike could help and he knew it, and he lifted his weight onto the soles of his feet and pushed his stomach up into Mike's hand.

Mike pressed back. Rearranged them both, maneuvering Will between his legs to get a better angle, and dug in.

Kept digging. Past what felt like the bone, pressing toward his spine. He alternated between the heel of his palm and the pressure of his fingers, working a thorough back-and-forth just under Will's navel, right over where Will now knew his womb was assembling itself, the heel of his palm distributing weight across the general area and his fingers targeting specific smaller points, finding things and slotting them, and Will could feel the tendons of Mike's arm shifting against his torso with every change in angle. Will's breath thinned. He felt his legs spreading against the constraint of the blanket, pushing outward.

Mike's hand eased off slightly and Will felt the vacillation of Mike's voice before he heard it, right above Will's head: "Ready to talk now?"

Will whimpered. His neck stretched long, his cheek squashing against his own shoulder, throat bared completely.

Mike made a pleased sound low in his chest, scooted Will further up his lap, and slotted his face into Will's neck. Will breathed him in and tried to reassemble something resembling a functional human being.

"How—" He couldn't get traction on the word. Mike rocked him once in his lap, patient, coaxing, like Will was a small child that needed to be calmed, and Will tried again. "Why—How do you know what to do." How do you know the exact pressure, the exact place, how does your hand always know where it hurts.

"I don't think you'd like the answer," Mike said quietly into his shoulder.

Will was sweating through his shirt and the citrus of his room turned medical, acidic, and he wondered if this was what Mike had been reading off him every time he was in pain.

Mike's other arm clasped over the front of Will like a seatbelt, gripping his upper arm and using it as an anchor, and drove the pressure of his other hand deeper, pushing Will's back flush against his chest at the same time, and Will keened, a sound that went up and out the top, high enough that it was almost certainly carrying through the walls, through the floor, probably into the neighbor's kitchen.

Mike swayed them side to side, grip just as tight, oscillating slowly as he chanted against Will's cheek: you're okay, you're okay, you're okay.

Will didn't like coffee. Had never liked coffee, had always found the black bitter smell of it too aggressive, too much. But right now as it mellowed over him, the bitterness overthrown by the salt of Mike's skin and the resin of the cedar underneath, he wanted it. He wanted to drink it straight from the source. He turned in Mike's hold, and his mouth found Mike's scent gland at his neck and closed over it.

He sucked there. Got drunk on it. Mike's scent crashed over him in waves, over his tongue and down his throat, and there was moisture gathering in his mouth that tasted so good, so unreasonably good, and he wanted more, he was tuning out the gritting vicious sounds Mike was making above him, had never felt this particular species of greed before, and he nipped at the skin and he hadn't realized his gums had been itching until he was biting down.

Mike detached him by the scruff of his neck, and Will saw the thick film of drool and pheromones that stretched between his tongue and Mike's neck before it snapped, and he sat there with his tongue still lolled against his lower lip, spit streaking down his chin, the pinch at his nape rendering him stupid and boneless. He made small continuous sounds because his mouth was empty and his gums were throbbing and he needed to bite something and he had been so close, he sobbed, and then a wrist was inside his mouth.

He only realized it was Mike's when the cedar hit his tongue again. He gnawed over the raised skin at Mike's wrist, feeling his teeth pushing against his own gums, and Mike's other hand went back to his stomach.

He stayed there in that near-unconscious warm stupid place, Mike's hands working at his stomach and his mouth at Mike's wrist and Mike's lips pressing against his temple at intervals.

He fell asleep.

It was the first night in almost a month that he didn't hurt.

He woke up to cedar and didn't register it as unusual because cedar in the morning had become as normal as the alarm clock, and then his eyes focused and Mike was in his bed.

In his boxers, on top of the covers, asleep, his dark hair pushed sideways against the pillow. His neck red, raw on one side, bruised up toward the jaw, and there was blood smeared at the corner of his mouth.

Will sat up slowly. His brows pulled in. He raised his hand to his own neck and pressed at the skin there, checking, and found nothing broken, nothing tender, and he looked at the blood on Mike's mouth, the state of his neck, and tried to piece together what his own mouth had been doing last night before he'd gone under.

The motion of his hand against his neck woke Mike up. He blinked up at Will once, closed his eyes again, and reached blindly for Will's stomach.

Will thought about how automatic this had become, how his body had started organizing itself around it, and how Mike could remove it whenever he decided to, had watched Mike retire his attention from people before like it cost him nothing, he had done it to Will. He could not afford to let himself need this.

He closed his hand over Mike's anyway.

Mike dragged him back down without opening his eyes, maneuvering Will by feel, and his hand resumed its slow sleepy circles across Will's womb. Will breathed into his own hands. Mike's mouth found his shoulder, an instinctive press, then another, and then it became deliberate, Mike kissing across each knob of his spine from the nape of his neck downward, following the curvature of it, mapping the ridge of each vertebra south toward his waist.

Mike reached the halfway point, right where Will's waist went narrowest, and rubbed his face into Will's back like a cat, and then kept going lower.

Will twisted. Got himself onto his stomach and put distance between Mike's mouth and the bottom of his spine, face going into the pillow.

Mike didn't let him go.

"Why won't you let me take care of you," Mike said, very quietly, into the back of his shoulder.

Will moved his face sideways out of the pillow so his voice had somewhere to go. "I do. I did yesterday." He stopped. Started again. "You helped a lot… Thank you."

Mike got up on his elbow, hand migrating from Will's belly to his hip, and leaned above him. "I can help in other ways," he said. "I know you want it."

He didn't say I can smell it. He didn't have to.

Will got himself up and off the bed, taking the blanket with him as precaution, and then made the mistake of looking back.

Mike was just. Sprawled there. Like he had no bones and no shame. He'd repositioned when he felt Will looking, shifting onto his elbows, legs stretching out and spreading across the sheets, and the boxers hid nothing, his cock straining against the fabric, and Will's mouth flooded with saliva so fast it was almost insulting. Mike looked devastating against the white of the sheets, all that pale skin and dark hair, his chest rising and falling slowly.

He shook his head, physically, and reached for his clothes.

Mike threw himself back against the mattress with a groan that came from his very core.

"I'll get breakfast going," Will said, because he needed to say something and that was what came out, and he knew immediately how stupid it was, his mom and El were probably already in the kitchen, and also—

Mike's eyes opened. "You don't know how to cook."

"I can make scrambled eggs just fine."

He absolutely could not. His scrambled eggs had a documented history of becoming something plastic-adjacent because he got into his own head mid-cook and simply forgot he was holding a spatula until the smell reached him.

"Just get up and do it yourself," Will grumbled, reaching for the door handle.

Mike hummed. "I gotta jerk off first, my dick hurts." Will's hand froze on the handle. "I help you with your stomach, you could help with my—"

Will grabbed Mike's pants off the floor without turning around and threw them in the direction of the bed and heard them land on something.

"I'm not even asking you to suck me off, you could just use your—"

Will left the room.