Chapter Text
This isn’t how Will had pictured it, the summer after graduation.
At summer’s end, the party will be splitting up, everyone taking off in search of new lives that aren’t stained crimson and haunted by ghosts.
Dustin to Massachusetts. Max and Lucas to California. Will to New York.
Mike hasn’t decided yet, too distracted by the pit of sand that’s swallowing him whole. Will wonders when Mike will figure out it’s been his own hands shoveling it in, burying himself deeper everyday.
Sand pits aside, this is their last summer together. It’s supposed to be the kind of summer you never forget, the kind that leaves a mark on you, the way a sunburn leaves freckles in its wake.
The kind of summer where you laugh so hard you pee your pants. Stay out in the sun too long. Eat ice cream until you feel sick. Get drunk for the first time. Regret it the next day.
As he stares at the open duffel bag on his bed, trying to figure out how to pack for a trip that has no end date, Will grieves memories he hasn’t even made yet—all because he decided to follow Mike across the country as he tries to outrun his grief.
Mike never asked him to come.
He doesn’t have to. Will can see it all over his face—he doesn’t want to do this alone.
This being the thing he had been planning, alone in the basement of his parents’ house, for nearly two weeks since graduation. Will hadn’t known there even was a this until two days ago, when Mike finally took his call after days of radio silence.
“I’ve figured it out,” Mike had said, his voice dry and raspy, as if a layer of dust had settled onto his vocal cords over days of disuse. There was a lilt over it, though—a manic energy disguised as hope.
“Figured what out?”
“How I’m going to find El!”
The day after graduation, Mike had gone to the library in search of waterfalls. He left with a stack of books, all of them containing at least one entry about a location with at least three waterfalls.
After ten days, Mike had emerged from the basement with a list and a map and a smile on his face.
Will doesn’t have the heart to tell him.
It’s a nice story, the story of the Mage.
How she’d escaped and found peace somewhere new, away from a world she believed would never stop hunting her. Will wishes he could believe it—Jane was his sister, after all. If there was a chance, Will would stop at nothing to find her. But it’s just a story.
It’s been so long since Will has seen Mike smile, though.
So Will stands in his room at the foot of his bed, staring at the faded duffel bag that won’t zip up no matter how hard he tries. He wonders if he’s packed too many socks. It doesn’t seem like enough.
“I do have more bags, you know,” Joyce says, leaning up against the paint-chipped door frame that she plans to refinish while he’s gone. “If it doesn’t fit, you don’t have to force it.”
Will collapses onto the bed with a sigh.
“Yeah, I know. I’m just… not sure how to do this.”
“What? Pack for a trip?”
“No. Just… I don’t know. This. It’s… a lot.”
“Oh, honey,” Joyce says, knitting her eyebrows together as she steps into the room and sits next to him on the bed. “Are you sure you want to go?”
Will turns his head to look up at her. “I don’t think I have a choice, Mom.”
Joyce pushes a stray strand of hair out of his face, a soft smile tugging at her lips. “It won’t make you a bad friend if you don’t.”
“I know.”
“Okay,” Joyce says, the springs beneath Will wobbling as she stands. It seems as if she’s going to leave the room, but she stops just short of the doorway to turn around. “So… what do we think… extra bag or no?”
The overstuffed bag taunts him out of the corner of his eye. It’s comically small, the kind of bag you take on a two-day trip, not one that could stretch on for a month or more. He knew its size when he picked it up, but he tried anyway. Stretching the bag to its limits, stuffing it with shirts and pants and socks until it’s nearly bursting at the seams, because the car is heavy enough without the extra baggage.
Skimping on socks won’t keep them from collapsing in the middle of the highway, though.
“Yeah. One extra bag won’t hurt.”
The car is lighter than expected.
For his eighteenth birthday, Mike’s gift was a used forest green station wagon with ample trunk space. Will knew it could hold a lot, but it didn’t stop him from feeling like he was going to suffocate every time he’d been inside it since Mike got it in April. No matter how empty it was, it always felt so crowded.
When Mike picks him up about three hours late, Will is surprised to find that the car doesn’t feel crowded at all. Mike loads his two bags into the trunk with a smile, as if it’s nothing at all. As if it can handle the extra weight. As if Will could have brought three bags, if he wanted to.
Will can’t shake the feeling that it’s an illusion, like a moving box with the wrong label.
Like the day they’d moved to Lenora, when he’d picked up a box marked Clothes but found it three times heavier than expected, because there were books on the bottom, buried under t-shirts.
As Mike pulls out of the driveway, Will wonders if there are books stashed under the floorboard of the station wagon, too.
They haven’t said much since they started driving a few hours ago. Mike spent about ten minutes fiddling with the deck, calling it a piece of shit until he finally got it working and popped in a tape. He kept the volume low so Will could take a nap, but his brain was too distracted trying to figure out when Mike had started listening to The Cure to properly doze off.
He must have fallen asleep at some point, because the next time he opens his eyes, the sky has changed color. Through heavy eyelids, Will peers out the window, taking in the golden-pink hues. Sunset. His breath is hot against the glass, so when he yawns, it leaves a cloud-shaped silhouette. He draws a smiley face with his finger into the temporary film.
“You’re up.”
Mike has his eyes fixed on the road, but Will can see the hint of a smile on his lips.
“I’m up,” Will says, stretching his arms overhead. He shifts in the passenger seat, bringing his left cheek against the headrest. “Didn’t miss anything exciting while I was out, did I?”
“Oh, y’know,” Mike says, keeping one hand on the wheel as he gestures to the vast farmland on both sides of the road. “Fields. Grass. Corn. I think I may have witnessed some pretty brutal cow-on-cow crime back there, though. You think I should report it?”
Will wrinkles his nose, scrunching up the corners of his eyelids. “Maybe,” he laughs. “Depends on the crime, I guess. Who would you even report it to? The cops?”
“Pssh, no way. Cops are useless. Cows would totally have their own criminal justice system that’s way better than ours.”
“Okay, but… you’d have to know how to speak cow if you’re gonna go that route, though.”
Mike smirks, glancing at Will before giving his best imitation of a cow, a pathetic, broken MOOO in a register far lower than his vocal cords are used to.
It’s ridiculous. Ridiculously adorable. Will erupts in a fit of laughter, clutching at his sides.
“Hey, I thought that was pretty good,” Mike says, his eyes on Will more than the road. “Maybe we shouldn’t try to track down the cow police, then, if it was really that bad.”
“Better not,” Will says, fighting the urge to reach out and give Mike a playful nudge. He hasn’t tried that in a long time. “You might accidentally insult one of them and land yourself in cow jail.”
“You mean you wouldn’t bail me out?”
Will shoots him a cheeky grin. “No.”
“Ouch.” Mike curls his hand into a fist and makes a dramatic show of slamming it into his chest, as if stabbing a dagger into his heart. “The lack of loyalty astounds me. For the record, I would totally bust you out of cow jail.”
“With your smooth cow talk?”
“Exactly.”
They lock eyes for a moment. Will catches a glimmer of something he hasn’t seen in a long time when Mike smiles, a genuine toothy grin so warm it sends a bead of sweat down the back of his neck. Warm enough to melt a bit of Mike’s cool exterior, the first crack of hardened wax since he put it in place two Novembers ago.
Maybe he left the books at home.
Mike fixes his gaze back on the road. “I think we might be coming up on actual civilization soon. Which means—”
“Oh, thank god,” Will groans. “I’m starving.”
Silence falls over them again, a quiet so comforting he almost forgets why they’re in the car. Almost.
Will presses his forehead to the window and exhales against the glass, a puff of hot breath in the same spot as before.
At first, he can’t see it.
But when he looks closer he can just barely make it out.
The remnants of a smiley face in the fogged up window, staring back at him.
“Civilization” turns out to be a bit of a stretch. The nearest town is more of a whistle-stop, the sort of place you’d miss if you so much as blink while driving through it. Single-pump gas station that looked ten-years abandoned. Derelict church, its rotted wood swallowed up by twisted tendrils. Population of no more than fifty, surely.
There’s a diner, though. It even has a fully-functional neon sign.
The grilled cheese is fine. The fries are less, a little soggy. Will sips at a vanilla milkshake, the best part of his meal, through a chewed-up straw with bite marks so deep they nearly cut through the plastic.
Mike has barely touched his burger, his attention centered on the map splayed out on the table in front of him. He’s pointing at a spot, leaving grease stains on the paper, rambling about possible motel options.
Will is zoned out, his gaze singularly focused on Mike’s fingers. Pads saturated with oil and salt, nails bitten into oblivion. Disgusting, he thinks, as if he wouldn’t happily chop off his left pinky toe for a chance to lick the salt from his skin.
He’s tried, in earnest, to get over him. He really has.
Told himself—and a room full of people, under emotional duress—that it was just a crush.
It wasn’t, though. Will knows it. Henry knew it, which is why he’d exploited it, just like he exploited his mind and body for four long years.
But Mike doesn’t know. If he did, Will can’t tell.
Will had looked him in the eyes when he said it. He’d wanted so badly to get it off his chest, to shed his dirty secrets like a molting snake, to move on. But Mike didn’t seem to get it, which just twisted the knife in deeper. How is he supposed to move on if he can’t even get a proper rejection?
There wasn’t time to try again. Just hours after Will had emptied his guts onto the cold floor of a radio station, they were saving the world alongside Jane until they weren’t. Jane saved hundreds of future Elevens from a life of torture, a life she never asked for, and it cost Mike everything.
Not long after that, Mike started drowning himself in sand. Will couldn’t bear to burden him with his own pain, not on top of everything else. It would have buried him deeper than if Will had stepped on his shoulder, pushed him down, and dumped a truckload of granules on his head.
So he never brought it up again. He stepped back into his stuffy molted skin and watched Mike bury himself in sand. Both of them suffocating, day after day, too busy surviving to pull each other out.
Will is long overdue for a molt.
He’d planned to do it this summer, to shed both the old layer of skin he wears around like a mark and the one underneath, to make room for new growth. New skin for a new life, like a fresh coat of paint on the peeling, chipped wood of the doorway to his bedroom. Only Will has to do it himself.
But it’s hard to shed when he’s sitting in a diner across from the very person he’d slipped back into his old skin for, accompanying him on a journey that he worries might bury them for good.
“How does that sound?”
Will doesn’t know what Mike said. He nods anyway, as he latches onto the straw in his mouth, inhaling a vanilla milkshake as if it can coat his organs in syrup. If they’re going to be torn open anyway, he’d rather they taste sweet.
“Yeah,” he says, nibbling at the plastic as the cool syrup drips down his throat. “Sounds good to me.”
Mike keeps his eyes glued to the map, burger untouched save for a bite.
Will doesn’t bother asking him to eat.
By the time they happen upon a motel that doesn’t look like it’s full of either bugs or murderous psychopaths, it’s almost midnight.
Mike looks exhausted. Six hours behind the wheel wouldn’t have been so bad if he didn’t already have a sleep deficit so severe you’d think he drove semitrucks for a living. He’s been surviving on caffeine and anxiety alone for eighteen months. Of course he’s tired.
He launches himself face-first onto the bed closest to the door.
Will almost drops his bag on the carpet until he notices the stains. He settles for the dinky swivel chair at the desk and rummages through his duffel bag for the small bag of toiletries inside.
“Mind if I shower first, or—”
Mike rolls over, yawning as he stretches his lanky frame across the entire expanse of the bed. “All yours. Think I’ll shower in the morning.”
“Thanks.”
The light in the bathroom is harsh, the fluorescent bulbs over the sink emitting an irritating hum. One of them flickers, casting a strobing pattern against the cream-colored tile. It’s already giving him a headache. Will rubs his temples and considers showering in the dark, but the idea of slipping makes him think otherwise. His eyes will adjust.
Pushing the shower curtain to the side, he leans down, squinting at the markings on the faucet that have been nearly eroded away. The letter carved into the left side looks like it could have been an H at one time, maybe. Shower temperature is typically a gamble for him anyway. He can never trust faucets to tell the truth.
He flips the handle in the direction of the H, as far over as it will go, crossing his fingers for water hot enough to scald his skin. It’s the only way he can enjoy showering anymore, with the sting anchoring him to reality, reminding him he’s still in control.
When the steam begins to flood the room, obscuring the reflection in the flimsy mirror on the wall, he sticks his hand under the water. The pressure is a bit weak, but the temperature is hot enough to cook him from the inside out, so it’s perfect.
Will steps into the small enclosure, closing his eyes, the bittersweet relief of blistering skin grounding him to the coarse acrylic below his feet. He doesn’t bask in it for too long, lest he find himself shivering under a lukewarm stream, hair still foamy with shampoo.
He goes through the motions. Shampoo. Rinse. Condition. Suds up his hands with bar soap. Scrub himself raw. Watch the soap spill down the drain, carrying with it the daily grime that collects under the molted skin he wears to protect Mike from his feelings.
After a few minutes, Will can feel the temperature shifting, his cue to exit. He dries himself off with the tiniest towel imaginable before stepping into a pair of plaid boxers, throwing a loose grey sleep shirt over his head.
Just for the night, he leaves the snakeskin on the soaking wet tile. Mike is probably fast asleep, anyway.
Through the thin bathroom walls, without the cover of water, Will swears he can make out a muffled sob. When he turns the doorknob, the creak of the hinges drowns it out, and only a sniffle remains.
Will shuffles across the room, discarding his dirty clothes on the floor, and hovers in the space between the beds. Maybe two feet apart.
It had felt like miles when they walked in. With Mike burying his face into a pillow, desperate to stifle the evidence of his vulnerability, the mattresses may as well be stacked on top of each other.
“Mike?”
Will waits. It’s quiet. Maybe he’s fallen asleep.
Then, a sniffle.
He reluctantly sits on the edge of the stiff bed.
“Mike,” he whispers. “Are you awake?”
Will watches Mike breathe, the rise and fall of his frame beneath the cheap polyester blanket unsteady as he tries to pretend like he’s sleeping.
He wants to reach out, to comfort him, but he can’t remember the last time they’ve slept in the same room. Mike feels more like a stranger to him in some ways, after everything. Will doesn’t know what he needs from him anymore, if he needs anything at all.
It feels pointless to try. Mike is committed to staying buried.
The bed creaks as Will slides off the edge, admitting defeat. As his feet hit the floor, he hears the rustle of sheets behind him just before he feels a tugging on the back of his shirt.
“Wait, don’t—”
Will turns to look as he lets himself be pulled back down into the mattress.
There’s a streak of light peeking out between the curtains. With Mike facing away from the window, he’s little more than a shadow, the edges of him backlit by the moon.
Mike releases his grip on Will’s shirt. His arm comes to rest on the bed, still outstretched in his direction. “Can— can you stay?”
Without being able to see Mike’s face, Will has never felt more in the dark. But he’s facing the window, so he knows Mike is watching him, every expression on his face a tell.
Will feels naked. He remembers the snakeskin on the floor of the bathroom, how he’d thought it was safe. He hasn’t felt so exposed since that day in the station.
He knows he’s taking too long to respond. Mike shifts around. Will can’t see it, but he can feel it—the regret seeping out of him, dimming the outline of his shadow. He isn’t sure what would be worse—to lay himself bare for the comfort of his best friend or to deny him what he needs so he can keep his darkest secret.
Mike is making himself vulnerable, reaching his hand out from the depths of the sand. Testing the waters, to see how it feels to be free. If only a hand, if only for a moment, Will can’t deny him that. Mike wants to know if it’s safe outside.
It seems it is. Will hasn’t perished without his snakeskin yet.
“Yeah,” he says, his voice barely audible over the soft hum of the rattling air conditioning unit. “I’ll stay.”
Will slides under the covers. He doesn’t shift closer, keeping his body stiff.
Another sniffle. “Thanks.”
“‘Course.”
The air in the room was stuffy enough to begin with, but it seems to only grow thicker as the heat of their bodies compounds, like a radiator between them. Too hot.
Mike turns over, the freedom from his gaze washing over Will like a cool breeze.
It’s quiet in the room for a long while. With Will next to him, Mike goes silent. Will assumes he fell asleep. He closes his eyes and tries to drift off.
Next thing he knows, Will opens his eyes and finds himself drenched in sweat, much closer to Mike than before. He’s in the same spot, which meant Mike must have moved in his sleep.
Will tries not to breathe as he looks over his shoulder at the alarm clock on the table. 3:18 AM. He rolls back over, letting his eyelids fall heavy.
The blanket on top of them shifts.
“Will? You awake?”
His eyes flutter open.
Mike is turned toward him again, their faces just inches away.
Will swallows the lump in his throat. Too close. “Yeah.”
“Thanks. For, uh… coming with me. I know you probably expected your summer to go a lot differently and I—”
“It’s fine, Mike,” Will says. “I’m… glad I’m here with you.”
Even in the dark, Will can tell a smile is forming on his face. A small one, but a smile nonetheless. “Me too.”
Silence again. Heavier.
Will lets out a shaky breath. It hangs in the air, mixing with the thick tension. “Can I… ask you something?”
“What?”
Free of his old skin for once, Will isn’t suffocating anymore, drowning in his own sweat and tears. No longer just surviving, he finds he has the strength to extend his hand out above the sand, offering it to Mike.
“Are you okay?”
Mike hesitates for a moment.
Will inhales sharply, holding it. He keeps his hand outstretched, waiting for Mike to take it.
And then he does.
“I don’t think so.”
Mike is crying again.
It isn’t much more than a sniffle, but he isn’t hiding. He’s letting Will see it.
Will wants to pull him in, but it’s too hot, and he still feels too naked without the snakeskin armor he’s been carrying around for eighteen months.
Mike moves closer anyway, letting his forehead fall against Will’s chest, saturating his shirt with tears. Will doesn’t push him away. Mike’s curls tickle his chin, the scent of his shampoo filling his nostrils.
“That’s okay,” he whispers into Mike’s hair. “You don’t have to be."