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It’s November 7th, and Will’s hands are shaking.
He doesn’t think that they ever really stopped, not even after the adrenaline wore off somewhere on the ride back to the Wheelers’ house, miraculously still standing even after everything. Quite frankly, the lack of adrenaline might actually be making things worse, but Will’s not really interested in the technicalities of it all – mostly, he’s interested in getting the chance to be alone, so when the attention diverts from him long enough to be able to slip down the stairs and into the basement bathroom without anyone noticing, he’s glad for it. Successful getaway secured, he’s still sure to be careful when he shuts the door, holding onto the doorknob and easing the wood cautiously back into its frame. The latch slowly slides into place, muted as Will eases his grip off the handle, and he lets go at the same time as a long, shuddering breath escapes him.
Will takes a moment, hands clenched into fists at his sides, to rest his head against the grain of the wood and close his eyes. Here, with the solid weight of the door to ground him, he evaluates the facts: the war is over, Vecna dead and gone for good this time. Max is awake, reunited with Lucas and El at last, who both rushed to return to their places at her bedside the moment they knew. The rest of his family is upstairs, the rest of his friends alongside them, alive and mostly well and rejoicing in the fact that a years-long nightmare has finally reached its conclusion. It’s a night for togetherness, for celebrating hard-earned victories, for finally looking ahead instead of back over their shoulders.
It’s also a night where Will almost killed Mike.
“Fuck,” he says to the door. It can’t respond, but the sound just barely echoes back at him, a resounding agreement. Fuck, indeed.
Will presses his forehead harder into the wood. He holds his breath for a moment, trying desperately to cling onto the tattered shreds of his composure, but he can already feel it: that familiar swell in his chest, the tightening in his throat, the flush that’s spreading through his face, his entire head going hot with it. When the sob finally tears out of him, ripping through everything else in its wake, he’s not surprised – just startled that a noise like that could come out of him in the first place, that it could take up so much space in such a small room.
There’s no way that anyone can hear him all the way from down here – the distance too far, the commotion of relief-laden reunions too loud – but Will’s hand flies up to cover his mouth anyway, stifling his next cry into the palm of his hand.
He usually feels a little stupid for letting his emotions get the best of him, the way he’ll cry over spilled milk and then some, but this one is long overdue, days in the making. Maybe that’s why it winds him the way it does, why he has to lean his entire weight against the door like it’s the only thing that’s keeping him standing – and then, figures out pretty quickly that this is exactly the case, when he attempts to push off of it and his knees buckle under him, a sudden, alarming loss to the bearings he’d almost managed to gain back. It wrings another choked sob out of him, resonating through the surrounding silence, and he bites down onto the flesh of his thumb in an attempt to quiet himself, regaining his balance with his other hand by clutching onto the edge of the counter.
Even with his gaze fixed carefully on the ceramic tiling of the countertop, he can still see his own reflection out of the corner of his eye: a sniveling, self-pitying thing, hunched over and hiding away with his hand pressed to his mouth.
He’s entirely alone, both inside this bathroom and also along the entirety of the basement floor, but that doesn’t make him feel any better, save him any embarrassment from the pathetic state he’s in. His chest is heaving with the force of keeping it somewhat contained, of crying and simultaneously trying to silence himself as he does, but the noises escaping him are growing so pitiful and broken that he ultimately abandons the effort.
Will reaches for the hand towel hanging on the rack next to the sink and sends a preemptive silent apology to Mrs. Wheeler for the incoming stains as he wets it under the tap, not bothering to wait for the water to run warm. It soaks through in just a few seconds, and Will goes through the motions of wringing it out in a strangely robotic way, feeling the chill of the excess water as it runs down towards his wrist, sniffling in time with the droplets hitting the porcelain of the sink bowl. Since all of this started – or, more accurately, since things got kicked up a notch, since Will and his powers and his associated emotional baggage got assigned significantly more active roles than they had in the last few years – Will’s really been making an effort about this – about the crying, about his reactivity, about trying to not let every single thing he’s ever thought or felt be written all over his face for everyone to see. For the most part, it’s actually been working; his poker face has improved, his eyes don’t well up at the first suggestion of an offense, and his lip doesn’t start quivering before he even speaks. But now, as he runs the washcloth over the back of his hands in turn, he catches another minuscule glimpse of his face in the mirror – at his downturned mouth, the glint of fresh tear tracks against the redness of his cheeks, cutting through the blood and dirt – and any last remnants of the bravado he’d built up over the last few minutes vanish, just like that.
Will’s vision blurs, so quickly it’s almost mortifying. He presses the cloth down harder against his skin as if in retaliation, scrubbing furiously, until the combination of the abrasion and temperature cause his knuckles to bloom bright pink under the running water. Flakes of dark, rusty brown slough off his hands, floating languidly down the sink.
His blood, not Mike’s, but still – each pass of the washcloth across his skin removes more of the grime encrusted there, until all of the brown is gone, and it’s just the tops of his knuckles that are left pale and pink. The water continues to run, so cold that his hands are starting to go numb, but he doesn’t turn off the faucet, doesn’t stop scrubbing at his skin. There’s nothing left to wipe away, all the muck that clung to his skin and beneath his nails long since washed down the drain, but it doesn’t change the fact that he still feels dirty – that not a single drop of Mike’s blood got on him, but his hands are covered in it anyway, an invisible mess that’s impossible to clean up.
“Will?” a voice sounds out from afar, piercing through the relative silence – it’s coming from the top of the stairs, Will guesses, if the creaking steps on the old floorboards a moment later are anything to go by. Will tenses, his entire body going rigid, and purposely doesn’t respond, hoping that whoever it is, they’ll go away, but the steps continue to groan as whoever it is starts to descend. When they speak again, it’s closer, clearer. “Will, you down here?”
It’s Mike. Of course it’s Mike.
Will’s heart soars just at the sound of him, its usual pavlovian response to Mike being anywhere within the vicinity, but the happiness is quickly soured with a guilt and shame so potent that it makes his stomach churn. Some nerve he has, to be so excited to see Mike – to have his heart flip and flutter when he’s the reason Mike’s almost stopped beating.
“Will?” Mike prompts again, oblivious and just outside the door.
Will closes his eyes, takes a deep breath in. It catches and sticks in his throat, and he swallows, trying to loosen the way. “Yeah,” he manages, and it sounds as small as he feels. Another inhale, his throat still tight, his stomach still sick. “Yeah, I’m in here.”
“Can I come in?” Mike asks.
He’s always been good about asking, about making sure Will gets a say in the matter, and usually he listens, even when he doesn’t agree. Will doesn’t think he’ll listen tonight, no matter what the answer is, so he might as well give them both the pretense that this was Will’s idea.
Will finally turns off the tap and levels with his reflection in the mirror. He might be able to stop crying in the next ten seconds, wipe at his skin until all traces of tears are gone, but it’d be a pretty pointless effort – his eyes are hopelessly red, his irises startlingly green in contrast, and as an all-too-experienced crier, Will knows well that those are the signs that linger, staying long past their welcome. He scrubs at his eyes with the back of his wrist anyway, turning away from the mirror and the pitiful scene in the reflection, leaning back against the sink for support. “Yeah,” he says finally, because Mike is waiting for an answer, and famously impatient to boot. Will grips at the edge of the counter, bracing himself with a sniff. “Alright.”
The doorknob turns instantly, and then it’s opening towards Will, and Mike’s head is peering through the space he’s created, smiling warmly. “Hey,” he starts as he’s stepping in, beginning to close the door behind him, “I missed–“
But then he sees Will’s face, and Will doesn’t have to still be looking in the mirror to know what he’s found: Will is the one who’s crying again after all, just from seeing Mike – Will’s the who can feel the hot rush of tears as they spill down his face, starting to burn where they meet the open wound on his cheek.
“Hey,” Mike is saying again, but he’s frowning now, his brows drawn together with worry. The door clicks shut behind him as his hands come up to Will’s face, mindful of the cuts on one side. “Hey, hey, hey, what’s wrong?”
He’s speaking so softly and with such care that it only makes Will cry harder, and, despite himself, he leans into Mike’s touch, his entire palm cupping Will’s good cheek. “Sorry,” Will chokes out. He tries to turn away, but Mike goes with him, angling his body between Will and the wall and forcing himself back into Will’s view. “I’m sorry,” Will says again, doing his best to meet Mike’s eyes before Mike makes him. “I’m fine, really – just feeling a little overwhelmed, is all.”
It’s not a lie. It’s not the whole truth, either.
“Yeah, I bet,” Mike says with a sympathetic click of his tongue, and Will is grateful he’s not pressing for more. His other hand turns over, the back of his index finger smearing more tears away from under Will’s eyes. “You come in here to get away from everyone?”
Will shrugs. His fingers are starting to ache where he grips the edge of the countertop, physically restraining himself from reaching out. “That’s kind of part of it, yeah.”
A beat, a sheepish curl of Mike’s lips, and then: “Am I included in ‘everyone’?”
“No,” Will is saying before he even has the chance to think it through. But even after the word is already out of his mouth, he realizes just how true it is – it hurts to have Mike here with him, the weight of what Will did sitting heavy on his shoulders, but it would hurt more to send him away, where Will wouldn’t be able to see for himself that Mike is still here in one piece. “Of course not.”
Mike’s smile widens. “That’s good,” he says, “‘cause I was trying to say earlier that I missed you.”
“We’ve been apart for, like, five minutes,” Will points out with a sniffly laugh.
“And they were gut-wrenching,” Mike insists dramatically, mimicking the same tone he used during their campaigns back in the day, when the monsters they fought were confined to the fold-out table in his basement. “Practically unbearable,” he continues with a sigh, still exaggerated. “You’re lucky I’ve survived.”
It’s the wrong thing to say. Will’s eyes drop to Mike’s neck without even thinking about it, drawn there, like much else, against his will. For the first time, he sees the extent of the damage he inflicted, the bathroom lighting lending visibility that the night shielded him from, and the small smile Will had managed to work up doesn’t stand a chance against the ring of ugly, mottled bruises that stain Mike’s skin. If Will were to lift his hands there, fit his palms to the sides of Mike’s neck and press his thumbs into the hollow at the base of his throat, it’d be a perfect match, a crime scene chalk outline in the worst way.
“Yeah,” Will says quietly, and his voice cracks, the pressure in his throat building suddenly and overwhelmingly, too much for him to hope to subdue. More tears spill, and Will doesn’t even try to stop them. “I am.”
To Mike’s credit, he recognized his error as soon as the words were out of his mouth. He ducks his head, forcing their eyes to meet again, and selfishly, Will lets him. “Anyway,” Mike says hastily, not even bothering to try to wipe Will’s tears now with how many more there are to keep up with, “what was the other reason?”
Will tilts his head with another sniff, not following. “Hm?”
“You said that getting away was only part of the reason you came down here,” Mike explains. “What was the other?”
“Oh,” Will says. Right. Before Mike got here, Will was– “Um, my face.” He lets go of the counter to gesture vaguely towards his lightly-maimed cheek, another victim of Will’s hands tonight. Four deep scratches run down his face in neat, parallel lines, lining up perfectly with his own fingers, just like the marks on Mike’s neck – his-and-his injuries, the most recent blow to Will’s already fucked-up psyche. At least Will deserved what he got; Mike didn’t. Not at all.
“Ah,” Mike says, and he moves his hand out of the way to get a better look, leaning in closer. “Yeah, those–“ he starts, but he’s interrupted by his own wince. “Geez, they’re pretty deep. Here, let me help.”
Will sighs. “Mike,” he starts, “you don’t have to–“
“Okay, let me rephrase,” Mike cuts in over him. His hands anchor either side of Will’s face, holding him steady. “Will, I’d like to help,” he says curtly, with no room for argument. “I’m helping. Okay?”
Will has had a lot of experience arguing with Mike – certainly more than he’d like – and so he knows, probably better than anyone, just how quickly that fuse gets lit, how annoying it can be to stand in the blaze of it, the right words to say to get it going. But beyond not wanting to pick a fight with Mike – Will is tired on a molecular level, weary enough from all the fighting he’s already done tonight without adding Mike into the mix for a second time. He doesn’t have anything left to give.
“…Okay,” he agrees.
“Cool,” Mike says, shoulders relaxing – he clearly expected Will to put up more of a fight. “Thank you,” he adds, a little stilted, and then– “I’ll go grab the first aid kit.” Despite his words, Mike hesitates for a moment, brow furrowing again as he looks at Will, still holding his face in his hands. Will recognizes that look, has seen it a million and one times: pure determination, that Mike-branded conviction when he sets his mind to something. Will isn’t sure what, exactly, Mike has set his mind to, until it becomes very apparent what exactly Mike has set his mind to, because suddenly he’s darting forward and his lips are meeting Will’s uninjured cheek in a gentle, close-mouthed kiss. “Be right back.”
“Okay,” Will says again, voice hoarse, a little dazed at the display of affection. He even manages a small smile, which is worth it for the way that Mike brightens instantly, from the line of his shoulders to the bounce in his step as he slips back out of the bathroom, off to retrieve the first aid kit.
Will slumps back against the counter the moment that Mike’s out of sight, feeling spent in every way a person can be. Mike’s steps lead away from the bathroom, and Will hears him stumble over something two seconds later, followed by a curse muttered just loud enough to make out through the door. There’s the sound of a cupboard being opened, of whatever contents inside it being moved around, and then a small, triumphant noise when he evidently finds what he’s looking for. A moment later, he reappears, rounding the door with a white plastic box held proudly in his hand.
“I’m back,” he says with a smile as he shuts the door behind him. He shakes the first aid kit around for emphasis, the supplies inside rattling against the sides of the container.
“Welcome back,” Will says. There’s a moment of pause, of apprehension and twitching hands, where he wants to reach for Mike, touch him somewhere, anywhere, just to prove to himself that Mike’s still here and not a cruel figment of his imagination. He doesn’t, still not sure that he’s allowed, but he’s pretty sure he can have this: “I missed you.”
Mike beams, his cheeks brightening with color. “Shut up,” he says, but clearly doesn’t mean it. He nods his head towards the bathtub, where the edge of it is just wide enough to be a seat. “Sit down, please.”
“You’re bossy,” Will complains, also in jest, but does what Mike’s asked of him.
“Yup,” Mike agrees easily, unbothered by the accusation. He watches like a hawk while Will settles onto the bathtub’s edge, and then, seemingly satisfied that Will isn’t going to make a break for it, deems it acceptable to move, too. He nicks a bottle of hydrogen peroxide from the medicine cabinet above the sink and sets it on the counter before grabbing Will’s discarded towel, abandoned at the sink’s edge. Towel in hand, he reaches down to lower the toilet lid, then sidesteps Will’s legs to be able to take his own seat. There’s a brief period of coordination where he has to slot his knees between Will’s, the space too narrow for both of their legs to fit naturally, and then, once that’s sorted, tacks on, “It’s because you’re stubborn.”
Will makes an affronted noise. “You’re literally the most stubborn person I’ve ever met,” he points out.
“We aren’t talking about my stubbornness,” Mike says dismissively without looking up, more focused on prying open the box in his lap. “We’re talking about yours.”
“I would like to change our topic of conversation to your stubbornness, then,” Will says.
Mike shakes his head as he sorts through various bandaid sizes. “Motion denied.”
“You can’t just deny my motion–“
“I can, and I did,” Mike interrupts cleanly. He finally finds what he’s looking for – a small package of cotton rounds, a bandage that’s almost comically large – and sets the kit, still open, on the floor by their feet. He balances his supplies on his knee, then looks back up to Will with a wink, who feels his face go hot with it, burning all the way to the tips of his ears. “Deal with it.”
“You’re getting way too much joy out of this,” Will says, unamused.
“You’re very observant,” Mike replies. “You should look into being an artist or something.”
“Shut up,” Will says with an eye roll.
“You shut up,” Mike quips back, taking hold of Will’s chin between his thumb and forefinger. He gently prompts Will to angle his head slightly to the side, inspecting the gashes that tear through his skin. As Mike starts to dab at Will’s cheek with tender, practiced movements, his face smooths out into something harder, more serious. When he speaks again, it’s still lighthearted, but it’s clearly for show. “You’re making my job difficult by talking so much, you know.”
Will huffs. “You’ve barely even started your job,” he complains, slightly strained with Mike’s hand on his chin the way that it is. He keeps wiping at Will’s face, and it kind of makes Will feel like a little kid again, whenever he’d managed to get dirt on his cheek and his mom would grab him by the face and rub her thumb at it until it smudged away. What Will has going on is a bit more serious than that, but it’s familiar all the same. “And anyway, it’s my cheek that’s hurt, not my mouth.”
“Right,” Mike says through an exhale, mimicking Will, “and all this frowning you’ve got going on is affecting my work area.”
“It is not–“
“Will,” Mike says, and there’s so much packed into it, that one word: exasperation, fondness, and something else, too – the same something Will saw written all over Mike’s face two nights ago, only a dozen feet away from where they are now. They were debriefing after yet another close call when Mike had suddenly scooted closer to him on the couch, crowding into his space. Will had been so focused on the way their thighs were touching – all denim against denim, the warm, solid weight of him – that he hadn’t realized that Mike hadn’t stopped leaning towards him until he’d hooked his finger under Will’s chin, tilted Will’s face towards his, and kissed him.
It had only lasted half a second – Will doesn’t think he even had time to shut his eyes. They were certainly still open when Mike pulled back, and he thinks he’ll remember the look on Mike’s face for the rest of his life: the fear that lived in his eyes, the vibrant flush to his cheeks, the way his lips were still parted, a little pink, a little wet. He’d looked at Will like Will held his life in his hands, unwittingly prophetic, but Will had been glad to take it then – so he’d careened forward and let their noses brush, giving a silent answer to a question unspoken.
Will doesn’t actually know which one of them ended up bridging the gap. He does know that by the time they finally pulled away for good, Will’s hand had itched to pick up a paintbrush for the first time in eighteen months.
“Mike,” Will says back now, matching Mike’s tone. Part of him feels strange being so open about it, the way he feels for Mike – but the other part of him is flying, giddy to know that Mike feels the same, that it’s really happening.
Mike’s response comes in the form of a kiss, a soft but intentional press of his lips to Will’s and more evidence that this is real, something that Will has a claim to. It’s clearly meant to quell any further protests, but what Mike doesn’t know is that he can get Will to agree to just about anything as long as he uses that voice – not that Will is complaining about his other methods of shutting Will up.
“I’m helping, remember?” Mike whispers once they pull apart, pressing their foreheads together.
Will has more arguments, all of them settled right on the tip of his tongue, ready to be spoken. But there’s still the feeling of Mike’s mouth on his, a pleasant buzz lingering on his lips, and there’s not an argument in the world that would feel better than seeking that out.
He cants forward, kissing Mike a second time. It’s just as good as when Mike had done it a minute ago, just as good as the first hundred times they did it two nights ago, when the end of the world had hit pause and let Will have something he wanted – the one thing – for the first time in his life. Two nights ago, Mike had kissed him like they were going to die tomorrow; tonight, they’ve survived, and Will kisses him once, twice, before pulling away, because he knows, now, that they’ve got the time.
“Okay,” he finally agrees, barely above a whisper. Mike pulls back enough for Will to see him smile, his eyes brightening with it in a way that makes Will’s heart do somersaults in his chest, and then he’s kissing Will’s uninjured cheek once more before he’s sitting back, completely oblivious to the fact that he might be contributing to more medical ailments than he is curing them.
He lets go of Will’s face for only a moment to trade his towel for the hydrogen peroxide still sitting on the counter, and then he’s twisting open the cap, holding Will’s gaze all the while. With the cap off and set to the side, he holds one of the cotton rounds to the mouth of the bottle and turns it over, soaking it in the solution. He sets the open bottle back on the counter and, with his free hand, gently cups Will’s chin again, gripping just firmly enough to keep Will’s face right where he wants it.
Will tries to let himself relax as Mike turns his head again to get a better look at what he’s working with. He keeps his mouth shut, as promised, when Mike lifts the damp cotton round with his other hand and lets it hover a few inches from Will’s cheek, hesitating.
“This might sting a little,” he warns quietly. Will hums in acknowledgement, and Mike gently presses the solution-soaked cotton into Will’s skin.
It doesn’t start with a sting – it starts out jarringly cold, so much so that Will unintentionally jerks back a little, flinching away from the feeling. The coldness stops being a concern almost immediately, traded for the sting Mike warned about and a hot, bubbling sensation that he didn’t. Will winces without meaning to, and Mike makes a sympathetic face, mumbling an apology along with it.
The peroxide ebbs out into a gentler fizz, the sensation dulling but still there. Will’s eyes land on a chip in the wall, one that’s been there for as long as he remembers, and uses it to ground his thoughts. It’d be easy to let them wander, stray towards a recreation of how he got here in the first place, the events that led him to practically gouging out his own cheek – but he forces himself to stay in the present, to focus on the variables right in front of him. There’s Mike’s hand on his chin, a strong, stable presence, and there’s his breath puffing out against Will’s skin, intimate in a way that has nothing to do with kissing. There’s the gentle care and precision he’s putting into taking care of Will, and then there’s that, too – how nice it is to be taken care of, truly taken care of, without being babied in the process. Only tended to.
Mike has always done that, has always protected and looked after Will by standing by his side, not in front of him. It’s one of the things Will appreciates about him the most – that he acknowledges what Will has gone through, offers his own shoulder for Will to cry on, but has never let it define Will or change the way Mike treats him.
It’s stupid how much Will loves him for that. It’s still unbelievable that he’s allowed to act on it, that he knows, now, what it’s like to kiss Mike, hold him, laugh in the dark with him. He knows what Mike’s hair feels like between his fingers, how safe he feels even as Mike cages him in, the soft, pleased noises he makes when his mouth meets Will’s, over and over and over. Will knows what it’s like to have Mike’s hand on his chin, Mike’s breath on his face, Mike’s undivided attention as he stitches Will back together, and the low, soothing tone he uses to giftwrap his apologies in when he hurts Will while doing so. He knows so much now, and it’s not even done – Will still gets to learn, gets to keep building on this thing between them, watch it stack higher and higher and never stop, a skyscraper towering over them in the middle of suburban, small-minded Indiana.
And then Will remembers just how close they were to losing that tonight – how it almost all came crashing down before it even took off from the ground, and how it would have been Will left standing in the rubble after it all, surrounded by a destruction of his own design.
Mike’s hand suddenly stills. Will can’t bear to look at him.
“Will,” he says. His voice is rough, gravely – a reminder. Will feels even worse.
“I’m okay,” he insists, but it’s wavering, tears rippling through the words the same way they stream down his cheeks.
Mike makes a soft noise. “It’s okay if you’re not, you know,” he says.
Will licks the salt from his lips, but doesn’t respond.
“I mean it,” Mike continues fiercely. Will usually loves when Mike gets this way, the bold resolve that has led them through so many campaigns, fantasy and otherwise – but today, now – the effect is undercut by the way the words scrape out of him, and Will is the reason for it. “You’re allowed to– to feel, after everything you’ve been through over the past few years,” Mike struggles to say. He clears his throat, the sound twisting the dagger Will feels already buried in his gut. “After tonight, even. No one expects you to be totally okay with all that’s happened.”
He’s not just talking about what happened between them tonight, what Will did. He’s referencing everything else, too – everything that’s happened to Will since that night four years ago, everything that Will’s tried to bury and forget and everything that’s been unearthed and forced on him, again and again and again. Will isn’t okay with it, not any of it, and he’s glad that no one expects him to be, because he doesn’t know if he ever will be. It feels like he’s always going to feel this violated, used – tainted – and now, it’s not just him; now, he’s let it spread, left his mark on Mike the same way the Upside Down has left its mark on Will.
“Will, come on,” Mike says. “Look at me.” But Will can’t – not when the reminder of what Will’s done to him is branded into Mike’s skin; not when the image of Mike, gasping for breath, is superimposed over his face every time Will glances his way. As if knowing what Will is thinking, Mike nudges at his chin in an attempt to get Will to face him again, but Will doesn’t budge. Mike’s fingers twitch, flexing, but he doesn’t try again. “Will,” he repeats.
Will pushes his hand away. “Would you stop that?” he blurts.
Mike retreats immediately. “What?” he asks, sounding properly concerned. “Will, hey,” he continues when Will doesn’t respond, leaning forward to try and tip back into Will’s line of sight, but Will still refuses to look at him. “Stop what?”
“Stop being nice to me,” Will snaps, uncharacteristically harsh.
“Stop… being nice to you,” Mike parrots slowly.
“Yes,” says Will. His trembling fingers wipe at the tears under his eyes, frustrated with Mike and himself and everything that’s happened in the last twenty-four hours. He sniffs, using his shirt sleeve to wipe beneath his nose, and thinks of a few days ago, when he syphoned Vecna’s powers right out from underneath him and done the same thing to wipe the blood from his lip in the aftermath. He thinks of tonight, when those powers he’d thought were an advantage were used against him, and how Mike was the one who paid the price for it. A bitter laugh bursts out of him at the thought, then turns into a sob halfway through. “Stop being nice to me.”
An abrupt, jagged silence falls between them, just the sound of the fluorescent buzzing overhead and Will’s labored breathing and the dripping of the sink tap in a steady, watery beat. “Okay,” Mike says finally, tone just as sharp. “So, that’s ridiculous. I’m not going to stop being nice to you–“
“Yeah, well, you should,” Will cuts in. He finally turns back to Mike, and his eyes drop immediately, zeroing in on Mike’s neck, the patchy purple of the bruises there so stark and angry against his skin. “I hurt” –a thick, garbled noise– “I almost killed you, Mike–“
“But you didn’t,” Mike continues, speaking fast. “I’m right here, yeah?” He grips Will’s shoulder, gives him a gentle shake. “I’m right here, Will,” he repeats. His hand trails down Will’s arm, fluttering over his bicep and elbow and then skipping right over to settle over Will’s own hand, curled into a fist in his lap. “Flesh and blood, alive and well, the whole nine yards.”
“Your neck is covered in bruises,” Will says, and it’s ironic, in a bitter, awful way, how they come out sounding the way they do – like they’re being choked out of him, like he’s the one with hands around his throat. “I did that. I did that.”
Mike shifts, dropping from his perch on the toilet lid to kneel before Will, balanced on one knee. At this angle, with Will looking down at him, Mike’s neck is no longer visible – a clearly intentional diversion on his part, a tactic Will has seen him use with Holly before, distracting her from something scary. If Will was able to forget what, exactly, Mike was shielding him from, his method might be more effective, but it’s too late.
“You didn’t do anything,” Mike says firmly.
“It was my hands, don’t you get it?” Will says, nearly hysterical. He knows what Mike’s trying to do, and loves him for it dearly, relentlessly – but that doesn’t mean that it’s helpful. He recoils from Mike for a second time, wrapping his arms around his torso and pressing his traitorous hands into his sides, trapping them in place between his biceps and his ribs. “It doesn’t matter that I didn’t want to,” he continues miserably. “It doesn’t matter, because they were my hands around your neck, and they almost killed you–”
“Will–”
“And here you are, acting like nothing happened,” Will barrels on, volume and vitriol rising in tandem with each word. “You’re taking care of me and cleaning my face and– and kissing me” –he falters on the vowel in kiss, still not used to saying it– “and telling me not to worry about the fact that you nearly died tonight.” His voice finally buckles in a true crack, a fissure that shoots straight down his sternum and splits him apart from the inside out. “You nearly died, and if you had, it would have been my fault. And you’re still…” Will shakes his head in disbelief, and his next words come out as a whisper. “Who the fuck does that?”
“Will,” Mike says again.
“I saw you dying in front of me, Mike.” Will’s eyes squeeze shut, and he sees it, clear as day – his own thumbs pressing into Mike’s neck, pinning him against the bark of a tree. Surprise taking hold of Mike’s face before morphing into panic, and then panic quickly dissolving into quiet resignation: It’s okay, Mike had been mouthing to him with lips turning blue, even with the awful, guttural noises coming out of him. “I felt you dying, and you were just letting it happen.” He shakes his head again, recalling the feeling of Mike’s fluttering pulse beneath his palms, slowing with each passing second. “You didn’t fight back.” Mike’s hands, loosely circling his wrists, doing nothing to pull Will off. “You would have let me kill you–“
“Yes, I would have,” Mike interrupts.
Will’s eyes snap open as an awful sound punches out of him. “Wh–“
“I would have let you kill me,” Mike repeats, like that isn’t a crazy, atrocious thing to say. But he’s serious, brows furrowed and mouth set in a hard line and looking up at Will with a challenge in his eyes. “If the only other option is hurting you, I would rather die.”
Mike makes big declarations like this all the time, earnest and commanding, so Will shouldn’t be so surprised to hear it. But he is, because usually Mike is saying it at the head of their campaign table, face half-hidden behind his Dungeon Master book; usually, he says it to the group at large, a projected, hand-drawn map of winding tunnels lighting up his face the same way that coming up with the plan lights up his eyes; usually, it’s not after Will nearly squeezed the life right out of him, with no one around them doing anything to stop it.
“What is wrong with you?” Will asks.
“What’s wrong is that for the past four years, I have sat and watched while you got hurt and taken advantage of and used for something that you had no part in,” Mike answers readily. “I’ve watched it happen, and I’ve been a part of it, and you–” He cuts off with a frustrated noise, looking away. Will watches his jaw tense, sees his fist clench in his lap, skin stretched white over his knuckles. “You just took it, over and over, even though you didn’t deserve any of it. Even when it wasn’t your fault.” He finally looks back up to Will, no less determined but considerably more angry – not with Will, but with himself, the circumstances. “So yes, Will, I would rather die than to see you get hurt again.”
It’s a noble sentiment. In another life, Will might have dreamed of Mike saying things like that to him, thought of it as romantic, and he’s right here, kneeling before Will and making every one of those fantasies come true. But the setting isn’t the same, the chapters that came before it all wrong. Here in Mike’s basement bathroom, one of the only parts of his house that’s still left standing, not even three hours removed from the fact that Mike really, truly almost died, it doesn’t feel very romantic or noble at all anymore. It just feels wretched – a sacrifice because of Will, not for him – and it doesn’t feel good no matter what way Mike is trying to spin it.
“It would hurt me if you died,” Will tells him. The idea of it has all of him shaking, and he curls in on himself further, tightening his arms around his torso and digging his nails into his sides, like he’ll fall apart completely if he doesn’t physically hold himself together. “It would hurt more than anything that’s ever happened to me.”
Mike shrugs. “And I’d be sorry for that,” he says simply. “But it still wouldn’t be your fault.”
Will has so much to say that he doesn’t know what to land on first. For starters, he’s unfathomably delusional – the lack of oxygen has clearly done things to his brain, and maybe their priorities should shift from arguing technicalities to getting Mike to Hawkins General, stat. Not that Mike would even go with how hellbent he is on being so completely careless with his own life, an attitude that literally almost got him killed tonight.
“Listen to me,” Mike says before Will has the chance to chew him out. “You were possessed, Will. You choked me because you were possessed.” Each word is careful, deliberate, matter-of-fact. “It was your hands, yes. But it wasn’t you.”
“My hands–” Will starts.
“Didn’t kill me,” Mike cuts in. “You stopped, remember?” The cry that Mike interrupted still worms its way out of him, and he looks away, biting at the inside of his good cheek. “Hey,” Mike continues, reaching up to tug on one of Will’s arms. “You stopped. That’s the part that matters.”
“I’m still sorry,” he says, because he is, he is, he is. He doesn’t know how he could ever stop being sorry. He doesn’t know why he would even want to.
“I know,” Mike says.
“I still think that you should be mad at me,” Will tries.
“You saved me,” Mike says incredulously. “You saved me,” he repeats, almost like an accusation. “Why would I be mad at you for that?”
Will glares at him. “Because you wouldn’t have needed saving if I hadn’t been the one to put you in danger in the first place,” he says.
“Vecna put me in danger,” Mike says. “He didn’t care about me – he cared about hurting me to get to you. But it didn’t work. Why is that?”
There’s a resolute silence from Will.
“Tell me why,” Mike prods.
Will’s almost starting to get annoyed, but he takes a deep breath, giving Mike the answer he’s goading for anyway. “Because I had to do something,” he says, voice coming out a little wobbly. He looks to the ceiling in an attempt to keep the tears at bay, swallowing the emotion that feels like it’s feeling him to the brim, trying its hardest to pull him under. “Because I couldn’t let you die.”
A rogue tear spills over. Mike hums, and then his thumb is right there, catching it before it even leaves Will’s lower lashline. “Sounds to me like you did more saving than you did killing,” he says.
Will finally looks back down at him, fixing him with a weary look. It doesn’t feel as simple as Mike is making it out to be, still doesn’t fully click in Will’s head, but it doesn’t feel straightforward from Will’s side of things, either. There’s no point in arguing.
“Besides,” Mike continues, suddenly spirited, “I wasn’t worried anyway.”
It’s official: the lack of oxygen has definitely done something to him.
“Mike,” says Will.
“Alright, I might have been a little worried,” he acquiesces with a sheepish grin. “But,” he continues with emphasis, holding his index finger up between them, “only that it would be too late before you pulled through. I was never worried about the you-pulling-through part.” He pokes Will in the chest and then winks. “Sorcerer, remember?"
“Shut up,” Will says, but his mouth is twitching at the corners.
“You shut up and let me finish cleaning your face,” Mike says with another poke. It’s lighthearted, flirty, but his expression softens, like he’s second-guessing his wording. “Please,” he adds politely, accompanied by a plasticky smile.
Will wasn’t offended to begin with, but Mike looks a little pathetic and Will likes him very, very much. “Okay,” he says, and frees one hand from his own self-imposed prison to push Mike back, just barely nudging his shoulder. Mike looks a bit too delighted to be pushed – they might seriously need to have an honest conversation about his apparent masochism later – but for now, Will is too tired to even think about it. “But only because you asked so nicely.”
Mike rolls his eyes, shaking his head, before reaching for the bottle of hydrogen peroxide and a fresh cotton round, the one he was initially using long since discarded on the floor. He pushes himself up to sit beside Will on the rim of the bathtub, throwing in a complaint about bony knees and bathroom tiles not meshing well together, and resumes his role as Will’s very own live-in nurse without complaint.
He found relative success earlier in distracting himself by rooting himself in the present, so he takes another crack at it now, attempting to catalogue everything around him as a way to stay there. His butt is kind of starting to hurt from perching on the edge of the bathtub for so long, too narrow to be a comfortable or effective seat. Mike smells kind of nice, even though he shouldn’t, and Will likes being near him, likes that their knees are knocking with the way they’re sitting. The tap is still dripping, and quiet, indistinct chatter still carries from upstairs. The hydrogen peroxide is prickling again now that Mike is reapplying it, and Will squirms a little as it starts to kick back in.
“I know,” Mike murmurs soothingly. “You’re doing so well. Almost done.”
He’s true to his word – the cotton round is gone a moment later, as well as Mike’s hand on his chin. Will waits patiently as he hears Mike start to tear at the bandage wrapper, followed by a quiet that goes on long enough that Will cracks open an eye to peek, revealing Mike’s hands a few inches from his face, bandaid pinched between his fingers and ready to be applied. Will watches through his eyelashes as Mike presses the gauze pad to his wound, feels his heart stutter at the way Mike’s brows are drawn in concentration and the tip of his tongue is poking out while he arranges the bandaid the way he wants it. Once he’s satisfied with the placement, he smooths the adhesive wings out, securing it to Will’s skin.
“There we go,” he says as he finishes, swiping both thumbs over the bandage one more time for good measure. His hand drops to Will’s chin again, tilting his head a little more to inspect his own handiwork. “Feel okay?”
Will scrunches his nose, adjusting to the bulky feeling of the bandaid sitting on his cheek. “As okay as it will be,” he answers.
Mike considers him for a moment, clearly not satisfied with Will’s answer. “Hm,” he hums, turning Will’s face even further as he continues to examine Will’s cheek. His eyebrow raises, an expression too exaggerated to be natural, and just as Will is beginning to put together the pieces, Mike presents him with the entire picture – suddenly his face is moving towards Will’s, and his lips are meeting the bandaid he so carefully placed on Will’s cheek just a moment earlier, and he’s lucky that Will doesn’t bleed right through it with how quickly all the blood in the body rushes right to his face. Mike pulls back slower than he went in, and he’s just as red. “All better?”
“All better,” Will agrees, flustered. Of all the things about tonight that are unbelievable, this really does take the cake – that Mike feels the same, that he’s doing something about it, that this is just something that Will gets to have now. An avalanche indeed. Will never thought he’d be so happy to be buried alive.
Mike ducks his head with a nervous laugh before he’s moving again, gathering up the bandage wrapper and cotton rounds and reaching over to throw them all in the waste bin. “Now that you’re all patched up,” he’s saying, though he’s still not looking at Will, equally affected, “what do you say we move this party to the other room?”
“Party,” Will repeats with a nervous laugh of his own, biting his lip. “Right, yeah.”
“You go on ahead,” Mike tells him, eyes flitting to Will’s for a moment before dropping back to the various medical supplies strewn across the bathroom. “I’m just going to get the rest of this cleaned up. I’ll be out in a minute.”
Will frowns. “Let me help,” he says.
“Will,” Mike starts.
“Let me rephrase,” Will interrupts, echoing Mike’s words from earlier with a sharp smile. “Mike, I’d like to help. I’m helping.” He nudges Mike’s foot with his own. “Or whatever.”
Mike shakes his head, but he’s smiling, too. “Okay,” he relents, grabbing the bottle of peroxide and twisting the cap back on. “You’re helping.”
It’s not the mess Mike made it out to be, but that’s a good thing – it means that they finish the clean up quickly, everything stored back where it belongs. Mike even goes through the extra effort of making sure all the bottles in the medicine cabinet are facing with their labels forward, and Will’s sure that when Mrs. Wheeler makes it back to what’s left of her home after she’s discharged from the hospital, she’ll notice and appreciate the extra touch.
With the bathroom sorted, Mike takes Will’s hand in his and laces their fingers together. “Alright,” he murmurs, then brings Will’s scabbed, bruised knuckles to his lips, because apparently he’s the one who’s trying to kill Will, now. At least they’re even. “Ready?”
Will manages to hum in confirmation, not quite trusting his words at the moment. It’s good enough for Mike, who leads them both out of the bathroom and into the den, heading straight towards the couch, the very same place where they’d shared their first three dozen kisses and a host of other memories before them. And although the sofa is clearly the end goal, Mike stops just short of their old campaign table, suddenly enough that Will collides right into him, taking a stumbling step backwards in surprise.
“Mike?” Will questions with a frown.
Mike whips his head around to face him, and there’s something frenzied behind his eyes, restless. “Listen, Will,” he starts, and oh, Will doesn’t like the sound of that, doesn’t like the look on Mike’s face, either. He grips onto Mike’s hand a little harder, squeezing their fingers together. “This…” He gestures towards his neck with his free hand, and Will’s heart sinks that much further. “This doesn’t change anything for me,” he says firmly. “Like, about how I feel. For you.” His voice splits on you, and Will’s first thought is that he’s to blame, that he’s mutilated Mike’s voice in some irreparable way – but Mike’s face is the brightest red he’s seen it all evening, and his speech is a bit stilted, and Will thinks maybe that this isn’t a byproduct of anything other than Mike’s vulnerability with his own feelings. “And it won’t. But if it– if this ruins us for you–”
Will’s heart completely bottoms out. “Mike–”
“Let me finish,” Mike says, squeezing Will’s hand in return. “If this changes things, if we can’t come back from it... I would understand.” But there’s a difference between understanding and acceptance, and Will can tell that Mike has a lock on the first and a feeble hold on the other – he’s smiling, putting on a brave face like he always does, but the devastation is right there, concealed to anyone who hasn’t spent the better part of a decade analyzing and then categorizing every expression Mike’s ever made. “I would hate it, but I’d get it.” He shrugs, defeated. “Anything for you, Will.”
Something changes behind his eyes, and it occurs to Will that devastation isn’t the right word: it’s ruin. Mike looks ruined at the thought of it, that something that neither of them can really be blamed for has the capability of ruining the thing they’ve been hesitantly stitching together for longer than either of them realized.
And that’s when it really, finally hits Will: this is something neither of them can be blamed for. It’s not Mike’s fault, and it’s not Will’s – it’s not Will’s, it’s not Will’s, it’s not Will’s. Just like so many other things, it’s Vecna’s fault, wholly and absolutely; it’s Vecna’s fault, and maybe it’s true, that Mike wasn’t his goal, but his casualty certainly would have made a nice side effect, wouldn’t he? To take one last thing from Will, add Mike to the miles-long list of things he’s already claimed, tie off the package of Will’s trauma with a neat bow and a gift tag so that Will doesn’t ever forget just who it’s from.
Vecna is dead; Will is sure of it. That doesn’t change the fact that his impact still lingers, determined to haunt him. Will isn’t sure that he’ll ever be able to completely banish those ghosts, not really – but this – them, WillandMike – is one thing that Will won’t let him touch. Everything Mike has been saying to him for the past twenty minutes suddenly gets through to him, all at once: it’s true that he’s always going to feel guilty for hurting Mike, but it’s also true that he saved him, that Mike is here – alive – and that’s the part that matters.
Will closes his eyes. He sees Mike’s face again, gasping for air, trying to comfort Will even on his dying breath. He hears his own cries, begging everyone around him to stop him, please, stop him – hit him, pull him off, something, please, anything. Don’t let me do this. He feels Dustin’s hand on his arm, trying to tug him off with an approach too careful – and then the moment his own nails dug into his cheek, tearing his skin open, punishment for a failure to go for the kill. Will remembers with startling, nauseating clarity the sound of Mike’s sputtered coughs, the way he gasped for air, eyes wide, as Robin pulled him by the arm away from Will – and then, Lucas coming up behind him, pinning Will’s arms to his sides. He thinks about how he had been crying so hard that he couldn’t breathe either, and he knows, too, that his hands had still been twitching at his sides, convulsing hastily in a desperate attempt to get to Mike. He doesn’t have to try to still hear it: the sick mantra of kill him, kill him, kill him echoing in his head, a never-ending loop.
But it’s not until right now, in this moment, that he remembers his own voice, finally answering the one invading his head: no, he’d said. I won’t. It couldn’t have been that easy, but it was – just as soon as he said it, his hands were his, and they’d stopped trying to kill Mike, and he’d turned in Lucas’s arms and promptly thrown up on the forest floor.
Will sets the memories to the side, a reserve he’s sure his nightmares are going to pull from later. He looks up at Mike, who looks just as sick waiting for Will’s answer as Will had been in the immediate aftermath.
“I want you,” Will says, and has never been more sure of anything in his life.
Mike’s expression finally cracks, broken by a relieved grin. “Yeah?”
Will beams at him – really, truly beams, easy for the first time tonight, and the movement tugs at his bandaid in a funny way, just enough to be uncomfortable. Will doesn’t really care at all. “Yeah,” he says.
“Well, you kind of already have me,” Mike tells him.
Will raises an eyebrow. “Kind of?”
“Okay, you totally have me,” Mike amends with a fond eye roll. There’s a pause, one wherein Mike’s expression takes on a contemplative edge, and then he’s tacking on, voice dropping to a murmur, “It’s actually a little embarrassing just how much you have me.”
Will hums happily, but as his eyes flit over Mike’s face, taking him in, they stray too far, and there it is again: the evidence of what happened tonight, right there on Mike’s neck. Before he realizes what he’s doing, Will’s free hand is drifting up, stopping just short of Mike’s collarbone. His eyes dart back up to Mike’s – he is watching Will intently, remaining very still. Go ahead, he’s saying without speaking, so Will does.
He cups the side of Mike’s neck carefully, featherlight in his approach. His thumb traces along that ring of purple and blue, the marks that belong to Will but are Mike’s to bear. Mike breathes steadily beneath his touch, audibly, his Adam’s apple bobbing as he swallows. Will finds his pulse-point and revels in the way it beats beneath the pad of his thumb – stable, unwavering, and undeniably alive.
“You’re okay?” Will asks, barely above a whisper.
“I’m okay,” Mike confirms. His chin tips forward, his mouth meeting the top of Will’s head, and he stays there, tugging Will closer by their hands, fingers still twined together. His next words are muffled, spoken into Will’s hair, but Will is listening for them. “We’re okay.”
It might take a while for Will to believe that without guilt creeping up his nape, one last parting gift from Vecna and the hive mind, but if Mike is the one saying it, it’ll get through to him one way or another. “Okay,” Will says, tucking his face into Mike’s shoulder while his hand wanders to Mike’s chest, resting just over his heart.
When Mike pulls back, seconds or hours or months later, Will moves with him, and doesn’t even realize he’s done it until Mike’s laughing breathily in his ear. “Easy,” he says, soft and brimming with tenderness. His hand comes up to Will’s shoulder, gently prying them apart, and smiles down at Will with such unbridled affection that Will feels his face go hot with it, likely setting a new record for the amount of times a person has blushed in a single hour. “Come on,” Mike continues, looking distinctly pleased with Will’s reaction, and finally tugs Will towards the couch. “We should get some rest.”
It’s not until Mike pulls him down to the cushions that Will begins to remember just how tired he is, but once it hits him again, it’s hard to ignore. He’s practically half-asleep as Mike situates them into a comfortable position, a near-perfect recreation of how they’d ended up after kissing each other stupid the other night. Will tucks his nose back into the crook of Mike’s neck, and in one of his last acts of consciousness, presses a closed-mouth kiss into the skin just above the collar of his sweater.
“All better,” Mike echoes from earlier.
Will makes a faint, indecipherable noise of agreement. Mike’s chest moves beneath him, proof of life, and Will bears witness to the even lilt of Mike’s breathing as he finally surrenders to sleep.