Chapter Text
As Will blinked his eyes open to sunlight streaming through the gaps in half-shut blinds, he was overcome with a unique sense of contentment. It was the sort of peace that is short-lived, soon to be disturbed by a rather unpleasant and shocking realisation. He allowed the smells and sounds of the place to wash over his senses until suddenly, an understanding dawned with a kind of dreadful swoop as though he’d missed a step going downstairs. He was not at home.
At once, the calm was broken.
Will sat up straight. The last thing he could recall was going to bed, tucked under his bedcovers in Hopper’s cabin in the woods as he switched off his bedside lamp. But he was not in his bed—nor, it seemed, was he in Hopper’s cabin at all.
He looked around. The room around him was not one he recognised, its walls painted a calm, pale green, with an expensive-looking glittery chandelier on the ceiling and a large, ornate window on the opposite wall, which appeared to be the source of the dilute sunlight streaming into the room.
Stranger still, the room was filled with the sound of soft breathing, and as Will looked over his left shoulder, he abruptly froze.
There was somebody else lying in the bed beside him. He was quite sure that he had not fallen asleep with anyone in his room the evening prior, and so he leaned forward slightly, holding his breath, attempting to glimpse the face of the stranger who was facing away from him.
Before he had the chance, however, the door to the bedroom inched open with a creak. Will whipped his head around. Standing in the darkened doorway was a girl—she couldn’t have been older than twelve or thirteen—with long, wavy brown hair down to her shoulders. She caught sight of him and brightened.
“Dad,” she hissed into the near-darkness. Will looked around. She was looking at him. Will said nothing.
The girl rolled her eyes, nudged the door the remainder of the way open, then skipped into the room until she was standing beside him. He stared up at her. There was a beat, and when he continued to say nothing she clicked her tongue disapprovingly.
“Dad, please will you do my hair?” she whispered, presumably to avoid waking the other person sleeping beside him. Will glanced around the room again to see who she might be talking to, but the girl was looking very firmly at him.
“Who? Me?”
The girl blinked, then laughed. “Yes, you,” she said, as though it were obvious and not completely insane to ask a stranger to touch your hair, “am I speaking gibberish?”
There were many things Will would have liked to say in that moment, for example: who are you, why do you want me to do your hair, whose room is this, whose house is this, what am I doing here, how did I get here, who’s next to me—
“I don’t know how to do hair,” he said instead, because he was finding it a little difficult to articulate everything else into just one sentence. The girl stared at him incredulously.
“Oh, don’t start playing that game again, it’s not funny,” she said petulantly. “I just want to do it now so it’ll be wavy by lunchtime.”
There was a loud yawn and movement beside Will, before the other person in the bed—who he had almost forgotten about in his anxiety to answer the girl’s questions—sat up and stretched. Will dared not look over, in fear of perhaps being punched once whoever it was spotted that a stranger had snuck into their bed (although, in Will’s defence, he had not been aiming to get here). He wondered whether if he stayed really quiet he’d evade their notice.
“Jeanie, stop bothering your dad and go back to sleep,” the stranger said tiredly, and Will hardly had time to process the phrase ‘your dad’ before the voice of the person speaking registered and he snapped his head around so fast he nearly injured his neck.
“Mike?” he said, gaping, sure that his eyes were deceiving him.
It was Mike. It was ostensibly Mike, dressed in a navy blue nightshirt with his dark hair almost down to his shoulders; only he seemed to be twenty or thirty years older in appearance than the Mike who Will had seen less than forty-eight hours ago.
“‘Will’?” Mike said back to him, parroting his disbelieving tone. His eyes crinkled amusedly. “You look like you’ve seen a ghost.”
“What are… who’s the…” Will stared back and forth between the older version of Mike and the young girl beside him. Slowly, things were beginning to slot into place. Mike ignored his strange behaviour and looked over at the girl, who Will quickly realised must be his daughter—and, if the shared bed, repeated use of ‘dad’ and worn silver band on Mike’s ring finger were anything to go by—she was Will’s daughter too.
“Jeanie," Mike said, "I told you we aren't going to the Sinclair’s until tonight. It's six. Go and find something to do for four hours or I'll make you do some of your dad’s paperwork."
"I can't. I want Dad to braid my hair."
“Why don’t you start by yourself?” Mike suggested.
"No!” The girl, Jeanie, complained. “My arms don't reach right. I need Dad to help me."
The bed shook as Jeanie clambered up onto the mattress. She wormed her way underneath the duvet and wedged herself between Mike and Will, pouting up at them. Will was flooded with warmth as he noticed she had big, dark brown eyes just like Mike’s.
"Daddy…" she said imploringly.
"No,” said Mike firmly, answering in response to Will’s silence, “Ask him again at eight."
Jeanie, unfazed, responded by sitting up and shuffling closer to Will, so she could tug at his shirt. "Please."
Mike huffed with annoyance.
Jeanie let out a shrill mixture between an outraged cry and a laugh as he attempted to pry her out from underneath the covers. She stuck her tongue out at him defiantly when he failed to move her more than a few inches, but moved over to his side a moment later, curling up against him like a cat. Will’s heart softened despite himself.
"Pretty please," she said again, her voice quite small, and her first yawn that morning spilled from her lips.
Mike gently stroked her brown hair, clearly being mindful not to make it any messier than it already was. He tiredly rubbed between his eyes. "Okay, fine," he relented. "Go wait for us in the kitchen."
Jeanie leapt up, delighted, then scampered towards the door.
"And don't wake up your brother!" Mike shouted after her.
There was a brief pause. "Too late!" Jeanie called.
Mike flopped back against his pillow tiredly. Will stared at him. He felt strangely exposed and his heart was hammering away in his chest—it was so loud Will almost wondered whether Mike could hear it. He dared not touch him, for fear that Mike would somehow figure out from Will’s nervousness that there was something wrong with him, and that he wasn’t the Will he knew; or worse still, the skin-to-skin contact would cause Will to wake up and discover this had all been a very cruel and unusual dream.
“Well, we’d better get moving then,” said Mike, feeling around blindly beside him on the bedside table, before his hand landed on a thin, leather wristwatch. He lifted it and held it up to his face. “Six thirty. I was close enough.”
He sat up with a sigh. Will continued to watch him as though he was something out of a zoo exhibit. Eventually Mike must’ve sensed Will’s gaze on him because he looked over, brow furrowing, and tilted his head slightly.
“Are you okay? You seem a little moody this morning.”
Will could not help the question that burst from his lips, it had been ricocheting around his brain like a stray tennis ball and was simultaneously causing him the most excitement, distress and exhilaration he had felt in his entire life.
“Are you my husband?” he blurted. Mike blinked in surprise.
“What?”
Will lost his nerve slightly. He wondered if he had been horribly wrong about this, and maybe in this strange timeline he was just a friend staying over and maybe he’d made a mistake and the daughter wasn’t really his daughter and—
Will faltered. “Um, I — well, I just thought you were — I mean, you are my husband, right?”
Mike looked very alarmed. He was staring at Will as though he had grown a second head.
“Obviously…?” he said, “Are you feeling alright? Did your mom make you try her D-I-Y coffee again?”
“No!” Will exclaimed, flustered. So he was Mike’s husband! “I’m fine! I’m—“
The reality of Mike’s confirmation suddenly floored him. Mike was his husband. He was Mike’s husband. That little girl was their daughter and this was their house and they were married and Mike loved him, Mike loved him, Mike loved him, Mike loved him—
“Wait… you’re my husband!” he exclaimed, so irrepressibly elated that he couldn’t refrain from saying the words that were rushing through his head. He smacked Mike’s arm several times in quick succession. “You’re — so, we’re — so you… you love me!”
A thought hit him. If he said he loved Mike, and Mike was his husband, would he…
“I love you?” he tried, blinking imploringly at Mike. There was a pause. Mike seemed torn between amusement and concern at Will’s undoubtedly strange and uncharacteristic behaviour.
“I love you, too…?” he replied, his mouth quirking up at one corner. “Have you had a drink this morning?”
Will could not bring himself to respond. There were fireworks going off in his mind. His head was spinning. He was planning a Mike Wheeler themed party that was simultaneously a wedding anniversary and also a festival.
“You’re my husband!” he said again, then let out a slightly hysterical laugh. He gripped Mike’s shoulders, beaming. Mike looked a little disconcerted, though he (quite kindly, in Will’s opinion) beamed right back, even though Will was acting like a crazy person.
“I’m your husband! Yay!” he replied, apparently trying his best to sound as enthused as Will clearly was. “Is there, um… why are we excited about this, again?”
Will did not hear the end of Mike’s sentence. He was replaying the way Mike had said ‘I’m your husband’ over and over again, as though if he thought about it enough times he might be able to remember it forever.
“Could you just say that again?” he asked. Mike’s brow furrowed.
“What?”
“What you just said. Can you say it again?”
Will was sure he was pushing his luck now, and any moment Mike would catch on to the fact something was amiss. He would ask why Will was acting so strange, why he didn’t seem to remember he was married, or who their daughter was, but to his surprise—
“I’m your husband, yay?” Mike repeated. Will beamed so brightly his cheeks were beginning to ache.
“One more time?”
Mike was grinning now too, and for whatever reason it seemed he was beginning to find Will’s bizarre behaviour very funny indeed. He took Will’s hands in his own, stroking one thumb gently over Will’s knuckles in a way that had every hair on Will’s body standing on end. His heart rabbited in his chest, and a little shiver raced down his spine.
“I’m your husband,” Mike said calmly, watching Will’s smile widen with fondness. “Are you feeling a bit needy again? Do you want me to tell you in extreme detail how much I love you like last Friday?”
Will had no idea what had happened last Friday, but his mind was currently too overwhelmed with adoration to do much of anything besides grinning and nodding. Mike rolled his eyes, but there was no malice behind it, and in the next moment he had pushed Will gently back against his own pillow and clambered over him. Will’s thoughts had turned to a sort of melty puddle, and he was helpless to do anything but follow Mike’s lead.
Suddenly, without warning, Mike leaned down and kissed him. There was a split-second where Will wondered whether it was strange to be kissing a forty-year-old before he registered that, of course, he must also be forty, and he started kissing back with enthusiasm at once. Mike’s lips were surprisingly warm and soft, and his frame was almost exactly the same as the version of him Will was familiar with—perhaps only slightly broader around the shoulders.
Best of all though, was that he smelled quite wonderfully identical to the Mike that Will knew. Clean and cool but with a flowery sort of undertone that was reminiscent of the Wheeler’s living room. Will could even smell a hint of the almond body lotion Mike applied after showers—a scent he’d become familiar with in the time he’d been living with Mike’s family.
Mike broke away and stared down at him. Will was sure his face was flushed and splotchy red. He’d never kissed anyone before, and so, unsure what to do with his hands, he’d settled them both beside Mike’s neck. If this was the wrong move Mike didn’t say so, and instead he smiled warmly. He let his head drop down so that his forehead was brushing Will’s.
“I love you,” he said softly, easily, as though it was the simplest thing in the world. Maybe it was. “I love you so much, all the time. I love your eyes.” He looked down and studied the depths of them. Will gazed right back at him. “I love your face, and your hair, and your body—“ Mike’s hand came to settle on Will’s cheek, stroking over the apple, before he leaned down and kissed him again; a brief press of their lips— “I love your beautiful mind. I love how you bite your lip when you're sketching, I love how you snore like a bunny rabbit, I love how you’re so passionate about everything you do.”
Will was feeling very hot all over, but he could not tear his eyes away from Mike’s. He had never felt so richly desired by anyone in all his life.
“I love your little vegetable garden even if all the tomato plants die before they flower—“ Will laughed, though he knew nothing about this supposed vegetable garden. It did seem like something he would do. “I love how you paint a different building in every city we go to. I love how you do Jeanie’s hair…”
“I should probably do that now,” Will said quietly, hoping this sounded like something the real Will would’ve said. Mike laughed.
“Probably,” he agreed, “She’ll start burning the house down soon if you’re not careful.”
Will knew he looked stupid, beaming up at Mike like he’d never heard any of this before. The real Will probably heard this particular speech all the time, but this was Will’s very first time hearing it and he very much wanted it to keep going. He wanted both to flinch away from Mike’s piercing gaze and welcome it, to breathe it in. He leaned in again.
“I really—"
"Dad! Jeanie is out of control! She—AH! Argh!"
The door slammed shut almost as quickly as it'd opened. Will had only caught a tiny glimpse of what looked like a teenage boy with brown-ish hair before he was gone again. Mike rolled off him and sighed.
“We’d better get downstairs before something explodes,” he said darkly.
He rose, quickly changed from his pajamas (Will tried very hard not to stare at his body), and then left the room.
"Hugo?” his voice called from the hallway. There was an abrupt bang from downstairs. Mike’s footsteps suddenly turned hurried as he raced down the stairs. “Jeanine Byers-Wheeler!” he shouted, “You’d better not be antagonising your brother when I get down there, or I swear I’ll—“
Another bang followed these words. Will wrestled a smile back. Of course he and Mike would have excitable children—he really should’ve seen that coming.
He felt another flood of some indescribable emotion at the thought of his and Mike’s children, before he managed to push himself up onto his elbows and out of bed. As he made to move towards the set of drawers Mike had retrieved his clothes from, presuming they shared the storage space, he took the opportunity to survey the room properly.
It was actually a rather beautiful room. The walls were clad in forest-green wainscoting, the same colour as the built-in bookshelves on the right-hand side, and the bed was plush, covered in blue silky sheets and decorated with oversized pillows made of a soft, downy fabric like stroking the underside of a cat. The floor was carpeted in soft white and green velvet, Will’s footsteps silent as he walked around and retrieved what he deemed to be a fairly normal-looking outfit from the drawer.
In one corner of the room was an expensive-looking sofa; carved walnut, upholstered in a cream fabric that perfectly contrasted the room’s greens. On the opposite side was a walnut bureau, and on its top shelf was a line of elegant, leather-bound books. Will squinted at their spines, all printed with fine, gold lettering except for the first two, which appeared to be homemade. The closest book to the end read:
The Byers-Wheelers: 2012-2013
Will blinked. Was that the current year? Or had these books stopped being made after a certain point? Will lifted the book in question off the shelf and flipped it open at random, landing on what appeared to be a title page. It read: Autumn 2012, in fine black calligraphy, and when Will turned the page he realised with a start that it was a photo album.
He glanced briefly back up at the remaining tomes. They must all have been photo albums, clearly made by the same person or business, documenting the lives of Mike—and apparently Will—and their children for the past fifteen years or so. He stared down at the book in his hands. The page he had turned to had six photographs, all captioned in the same black font.
The first was Mike, and it was clearly a somewhat recent photograph because he looked almost identical to how he did when Will saw him that morning, standing before a backdrop of a large and clear lake, with an arm each around the young girl Will had seen earlier, and a boy with dark hair who looked to be a few years older. All three were smiling more brightly than Will had ever seen any teenagers, or indeed Mike, smile in his entire life. The photo below was Will himself with the same two teenagers, both with one arm around his back, on a bench in what was presumably in the same location, judging by the similar red-and-orange-leafed trees in the background.
He continued to flick through the album. It was entirely full of beautiful family pictures—some were of just the two kids and some were of only Will and Mike, but they were all equally lovely. There was one that Will liked in particular of he and Mike lying asleep in two separate chairs beside a campfire, surrounded by a blurry group of friends, but the thing he was drawn to most about it was the mere millimetres of space between their arms. It appeared as though, despite being separated, they’d fallen asleep holding hands.
Will shut the book and put it down back where he’d gotten it. His eyes felt oddly wet. It did not seem possible that such a wonderful thing could ever happen to him. Not only the unprecedented idea that perhaps, someday, Mike would ever actually fall in love with him, but also the idea that they could raise a family together—that Will might someday manage to be a good father, after his own had been such a terrible role model. What did he have to go off? How were you supposed to be a dad when all you knew was what not to do?
He could believe that Mike was a good father. He would have always seen that coming; Mike had helped raise a younger sister who utterly adored him, and being around young or vulnerable people always seemed to bring out a strangely instinctive sort of gentleness in him that he didn’t present himself with normally. It was as though it was natural to him. Will felt it did not come naturally for himself, though.
There was another sharp bang from downstairs. Will realised suddenly that Mike and his children would probably be wondering what he was doing, as he’d been standing beside the bureau for nigh on fifteen minutes now. He hurriedly rearranged the albums back as they’d been previously and tugged on the clothes from the drawer.
When he shuffled out of the room and into the hallway, he was momentarily rendered speechless. The house was absolutely enormous. He was upstairs, and yet there was another large, dark wooden staircase leading to a third floor, which judging by the grandeur was clearly more than an attic. The walls were decorated with several beautiful and undoubtedly expensive paintings. What on earth did Mike do for work? Where did they get all of this money?
Will shuffled downstairs silently on socked feet. The ground floor was, if possible, even more grand than the upper levels. The enormous oak front door had a brass handle and stained-glass panels in the window frame above. The velvety carpet continued down the stairs but stopped at the bottom, where the floor was a smooth, dark wood like much of the rest of the house. The walls were a pleasant cream colour downstairs and all of the large windows looked outside onto a ludicrously large garden.
When Will reached the downstairs landing, he could hear Mike reprimanding their two children in the kitchen. He followed the sound of his voice to find him holding aloft what looked bizarrely like a large bag filled with sand. There was a pile of colourful broken glass on the kitchen floor beside Mike’s feet, and both teenagers were standing in front of him with their heads held low guiltily, each of their hands clasped behind their backs.
“—banned when you’re in the house!” Mike was saying, “I’ve told you a hundred times! It’s not a real game and if you absolutely insist on playing it, you can play it outside where you can’t break anything!”
“It is a real game though,” the boy—Hugo, Mike had called him earlier—toed the wooden floor miserably, “just because you don’t think it is, doesn’t mean—“
“It is not a real game!” Mike said testily, “Steve just made it up to get you both to leave him alone!”
“But it’s real now,” piped up Jeanie, “That’s what a game is! One person makes it up and then you all start playing it!”
“A real game is coming up with a new way to play cards, not trying to beat each other to death with a bag of sand,” Mike said flatly, and Will had to try very hard indeed to keep from bursting out laughing. That had been the cause of all the ruckus?
“I wouldn’t have beaten him to death,” Jeanie rolled her eyes. “It’s called a physical alarm-clock.”
“Oh, is that what that was?” Hugo said, affronted, and the two siblings turned toward each other with narrowed eyes.
Will got the feeling they were close to fighting, and his eyes widened anxiously, but when he glanced over at Mike, Mike did not seem perturbed at all. He merely placed a hand on each of their shoulders to keep them firmly apart, then said loudly:
“I expect you both to clean up the glass with extreme care. Then write me three paragraphs each on why sand-battery isn’t an acceptable game to play inside the house.”
There was a joint groan of exasperation from the two kids. Mike was unaffected.
“If either of you fail to do these then you can spend the duration of the camping trip sharing your tents with each other rather than your friends.”
Both teenagers let out gasps of horror. Apparently this was such a terrifying suggestion that neither could even think of a rebuttal—they did not so much as groan before getting to work collecting pans and brushes to clean up the glass fragments on the floor. Mike sighed disapprovingly and leaned back against the kitchen table, both arms crossed. He spotted Will in the doorway and brightened.
“Hey! You’re up.” He gestured vaguely to the kids kneeling on the floor behind him and the pile of fractured glass. “You missed all the fun,” he said sardonically, walking over to where Will was standing. Will was struggling to come up with an appropriately married-parent-who-loved-his-husband response to this, when Mike suddenly looped his fingers through Will’s belt loops and pulled him in for a kiss.
Will hardly had time to register this new development, that it was okay to kiss in front of their children, before the soft and deeply satisfying pressure of Mike’s lips on his own was gone, and Mike was pulling away again.
“You’re wearing one of my shirts,” he observed amusedly, glancing down at Will’s outfit. “And are those my jeans?”
Oh. Apparently he and Mike did not share storage space after all. He really should’ve anticipated that, given the size of the house.
“Um… yep,” Will said awkwardly, “just — uh — wanted to feel… closer… to you?”
Mike gave him a soppy sort of look which Will had never, in his fifteen years of knowing him, seen him wear before, but the delight of witnessing it directed at him was slightly hampered as Jeanie mimed vomiting where she knelt on the floor behind them. Hugo snickered.
“You two better watch yourselves,” Mike said dangerously, his eyes narrowing. “I can still expand the terms of my threat.”
“You can’t tell us off for laughing at that!” Hugo complained, “That’s like telling the sky not to be blue!”
Mike rolled his eyes, “You should be more grateful that your parents love each other so much, my parents were—“
“Oh, here we go,” said Jeanie.
“Someone call the divorce attorney,” said Hugo.
Both teens shot each other an amused look then high-fived, their earlier rivalry briefly forgotten. Mike clicked his tongue disapprovingly.
“Completely spoiled, both of you,” he said, though it was clear he was wrestling back a smile. “I just don’t know where we went wrong.”
“It was the choice to have a second child,” said Hugo absently, sweeping some of the glass into his dustpan. Jeanie let out a gasp of offence, and the mutual glaring resumed, their short truce immediately broken.
“Don’t you have your meeting this morning?” said Mike, ignoring them as he brushed some dust off Will’s shirt. “I thought the Andersons were coming for a mock-up.”
Will blinked. It was growing increasingly difficult to pretend he knew what was going on. “Um, do I? I — wait, do you have work today too, then?”
Mike stared at him. “Work? What work?” he said blankly.
Will paused. He glanced at their kids, who were both staring up at him with expressions of bewilderment on their faces. Will swallowed, forcing himself to relax.
“Uh — I meant, like, the — the work—“ he wracked his brain for a believable excuse— “for the — for the camping trip! That work! Because you — you don’t… work?”
Now he was very confused. Mike didn’t have a job? How on earth did they afford such an enormous fancy house? Will had immediately assumed, for some reason, that it would be Mike who was making the most money between the two of them. Mostly because he’d come from a wealthy family, and perhaps because his dad could have swung something (although judging by earlier comments, maybe his relationship with his parents wasn’t exactly brilliant anymore). Their house was bigger even than the Wheeler’s house in Hawkins, which was the largest house Will had been inside in his life.
Did that mean he was the one who made the money? Doing what?
“I — I can’t remember the meeting, it totally slipped my mind,” Will said, hoping that Mike was an attentive enough husband to know when, where, and possibly even what this meeting would consist of. “What was it about again?”
“The Andersons?” Mike repeated, a hint of worry colouring his voice this time, “For a mock-up? You were telling me about it last night.”
“A mock-up..?” Will repeated vacantly.
“Have you hit your head?” Mike touched the back of his hand to Will’s forehead anxiously, “Or — oh, has something happened again? If they’re being difficult just have the agent drop the project, I promise you don’t need to be nice to everyone.”
“What? I — no — uh—“
“I told you these people were assholes, I knew it from that dinner party last Saturday! They switched up as soon as they realised you weren’t a stuck-up socialite, I swear it, I’ve been saying for the longest time that these ‘old-money’ type clients always want to take advantage of your kindness—“
Will had absolutely no idea what Mike was rambling on about now. By the sounds of it Will was some kind of businessperson, which explained the house—but how could he have ended up doing a business job? He’d always wanted a creative job. That was very important to him. It made him a little sad to think he was now dealing with boring ‘fancy’ clientele and business people… did he even make art anymore?
“What time’s the meeting?” Will said, cutting off Mike’s anti-client spiel. “I’d better go anyway. Just to… see what they want.”
Mike pursed his lips as though he disapproved, but he held back from saying whatever it was that was bothering him.
“Okay,” he sighed, “they should be here in twenty minutes. Do you want me to come with you to get the studio ready?”
Will blinked. Studio?
“Um — yeah, okay,” he said in lieu of any questioning. It seemed the more questions he asked, the more confusing the responses became. Mike turned towards their children again, who looked down hurriedly as he did so; they were doing a very poor job of pretending not to eavesdrop.
“I expect this to be cleaned up by the time I’m back. Don’t start playing again just because we’re out of the house.”
There was a mumbled combination of sighs and agreements as Mike confidently led Will from the room, striding away down the hall towards the door.