Archive of Our Own

Hawkins breeds ghosts. Will thought moving to New York meant ridding of them. Actually — he was so certain, cramped into Jonathan's new-not-new Chevy that's red like wine and that smells both of weed and pale cherry. The government offered hush money and if their mama taught them anything, it's to take when the opportunity comes to do so. To let themselves deserve things. They start sharing an apartment, they create so much art there's barely any room for it after seven months of cohabitation. Films, photos, paintings, portraits, portfolios. Everything resurfaces. Every feeling he has ever eaten and chewed up over the last twenty years of his life finally finds its way back.

It feels like he's cutting, working at something that doesn't bite back. Merciful work.

He smokes his first cigarette the day he arrives in the city, he has his first kiss by the end of the week. Sometimes he just stops to watch: the dark blue belly of the sky, the way the wind works around the bars of their window that Jonathan always forgets to close for the night. The chill that settles around the bare skin of his neck where collar and hair don't reach, the parts of him that are exposed and that want to be.

People look at him differently now. Less with the intention to fix, but also not to break. A middle ground. Something entirely new. Dismantle. Allowing to let him dismantle them. Everything exists in innuendos now. Will stumbles over his words when he's nervous and one thing leads to another.

New York is fast. It eats everything and it doesn't mind the taste, just wants the fullness. He can disappear in a bloated crowd and not feel alone. The lights are cruelly bright; when he turns too quickly, it all blurs into one. He translates that into watercolor, lets the critique in school wash over him, kisses somebody he has kissed before to forget about harsher things.

(Jonathan's music is loud enough to hoard most secrets.)

His head isn't an altar anymore. There's nothing valuable left in it that doesn't solely belong to him. There's an altar at his hips, the way two hands can wrap around the outline of his hip bones and not let go. There's one where his palms form into a bowl when he rinses his face in the morning. Some nights he forgets to call his mom. She forgives him.

And Will forgave Hawkins, somewhat. There's things he doesn't want to be tender-hearted about anymore. But he thought moving to New York meant leaving it all behind in that concentrated orbit of awful things, following Hopper's advice, living outside of the pain.

But then Will clicks the button on the intercom, and he recognizes it right away. It fires like a gunshot just down the street. Too close for comfort.

'Will, it's me.'

It's the certainty in his tone, the way his voice scratches and invades the quiet space of the apartment. Certain that Will will realize and therefore accept, open the door, let a ghost haunt. He lets the moment drag out instead, wants to be on the inflicting end too. But it's Mike, so Will answers.

“Mike?” He asks like he doesn't know.

Inundated from the cold, he breathes: 'Yeah. Bad timing?' 

Will looks around the vacant, shadow-licked rooms of the apartment as if he needs confirmation that he's alone and nobody gets to know about this skeleton in his closet. Mike's name melts awkwardly in the back of throat. Only when he's turned away from the yellowed plastic casing does he notice the rain splattering against the living room windows. The sky is a deep violet.

Will pushes the button that unlocks the front door, accepts it. He listens to the echo of Mike's steps, which blend perfectly into the pulsing in his ears. His heart has always existed outside of him, angry and loud. Like the old cassette player their father left that always came alive with a roar. Jonathan used to joke about it catching fire, that it was vengeful. Will can feel the burn of that now.

Mike appears out of the shadows, soaking wet, tall, with droopy curls glued to his forehead. It's only March, so there still hasn't been enough sun to bathe the paleness out of him. His freckles are blooming again however, preserving a sort of innocence that does not belong to them anymore. Mike's face is a museum. They're similar in that regard.

Sun-kissed, pale, purple around the eyes. Mike isn't growing anymore. His eyebrows form involuntarily with a feeling. He looks like he's standing in front of headlights.

“Hey.” Will says. Mike counterproductively brushes the moisture from his hands off on his damp jacket and pulls him into a hug, firm and uneasy. Will gasps softly around the suddenness of it, the discomfort from how wet Mike's clothes are, how cold his nose is pressed against the crook of Will's neck. He wraps his arms around him regardless. Beneath his layers, Mike's body is warm. Lukewarm. Never just one thing. Will pushes a bit into him in homage to a boy that wanted this space. Mike makes a small noise, like a guitar chord.

They break apart when it feels too indulgent. Will knows this game. It is a losing game.

“Why are you here?”

Mike shrugs. He chews on his lip out of habit, and Will's glad that some things stick around.

“Urge.”

He's not sure how that's supposed to make him feel. Urge. Instinct first. Senseless.

“Nobody ends up in New York City on an urge. It's a ten hour drive.”

“I have relatives who live on the way here.” Then it seems to click for him. The absurdity of him standing here. “I should've called.”

Not just for this, but for other things too. Will doesn't say it. He's gotten too old to wait for efforts he doesn't expect to be made. Back then it was easier to romanticize. Pluck a blanket over his head and press his face against the scent of notebook paper that arrived after months of uncertainty if it would ever come. He'd put his lips against the ink and wait to be tattooed.

The words never held true weight. It took Mike months to send him a simple, passionless recollection of a few school weeks. A photo of their new party. Will let the pain of being replaced sting until it felt good.

(He doesn't know what hurt more: the wait or knowing Mike could write much better than that.)

“Yeah.” Will looks down at the small puddles forming on the floorboards. “I'll get you a towel.”

His stomach softens as he walks away, not relieved, just always torn apart like cobwebs are when Mike comes around. He doesn't even have to be present, just the mention of his name feels like an invitation to feelings that Will has shunned, buried in the name of what he wants to believe is adulthood and liberation and self-respect.

He grabs a fresh towel from the cabinet and returns to find Mike peeling his jacket from his body. His shirt beneath is drenched too, molding after him where the rain hit. His hands strain under the weight of the jacket. Will laughs softly, exchanges towel for jacket, denies himself Mike's scent that rests on the inner fabric. His pockets jingle when Will hits them with his knees by accident. He hangs it up while Mike treats his curls — unkindly, because no one ever taught him.

He still looks like a teenager. They both do. Mike peeks at him when he notices that Will is watching. It never felt like performing, living with Mike. He remembers that now. It was always slanted and wobbly, hushed whispers and the wet noise lips produce as they speak quietly. Knee to knee, sharing glasses and forks. But if it's not performing, then it's confessing. And that's the part that always scared him.

“You live here with Jonathan?”

Will nods.

“Just Jonathan?”

Will smiles. “It's not a big apartment. It's just us.”

Mike presses his lips together and pats the towel against his forehead.

“Are you going to ask me for a tour next?” Will asks, cocking his head. He dries his wet fingers on his jeans. He continues to watch. Mike swallows around nothing.

“Obviously.” Mike folds the towel against his lap, apologizes under a mumble for bringing the rain inside. Will just looks at the coils of his hair, how they respond to every movement now that they're rogue on his head.

Then he adds: “If that's okay with you.”

“Yeah, of course.” As if Mike showing up unannounced isn’t anything but chivalrous. “Leave your bag by the door, we can get it later.”

He listens and props the wet thing against the cabinet in their hallway. Will finally figures to turn on a light, but then everything gets so raw. The bulbs are old, laced with dust and wear from however long the previous owners were here, and Jonathan promised to switch them out about two months ago because one of Will's friends pointed out the poor job of a glow they provide. But he loves these lights, they look great on camera and evoke something nostalgic. Like racing around the small confines of their home with blankets pulled over their shoulders. Like tripping and a bloody nose and being asked about it at school.

Will's mind, and he has enough self-awareness to realize this now, is trying to fixate on anything that isn't Mike, how blunt and how heavy his presence is. He gets a feeling akin to how it feels to knock over porcelain and wait for the shards. Helpless, responsible, wronged. He wishes his brother was here, or someone else, someone new to prove to Mike that Will doesn't need it anymore.

He starts walking, he leaves the light on.

“Alright, that's the bathroom.” Will points to the door standing ajar. He doesn't really feel the need to further elaborate on the space. There's nothing worth noting except for maybe the generous supply of melatonin in various forms that's buried in the shelves, brushes Will has been trying to salvage because they were pricey and he loved them straight to death, and the little stash of earrings he has put together like a crow hoarding treasure. Small things that shine if he lets them find the sun.

Mike nods, but his eyes find Jonathan's framed photos on the wall instead. They're in all sorts of sizes and all black and white, some mundane, some editorial. There's a small family portrait: Hop on the left, with an arm bound like ribbon around Jane's shoulder. Jonathan next, then mom, then Will. Jonathan said he fills corners nicely now. Whatever that means.

Mike lingers on that. Will clears his throat to get the attention back on him, leading them further into the small maze of their atelier.

“Here's the kitchen.” A petite thing, with lime cream counters and cabinets, a kettle that looks thoroughly abused and some cutlery smiling back in the moonlight. Will clicks the light on, brushes some crumbs from the small dinner table and flicks them into the trash can. There's magazines stacked on the wooden body, fashion, photography, art as it moves through another month in New York. Robert Mapplethorpe, Lorna Simpson, Andy Warhol. Those are for Jonathan. Will is moving so fast through so many artists that he can't commit to one just yet, not through physical means at least.

There's a sketch left unfinished on the table. The pencil is cheap so the lead is already fading away where it wasn't etched in well enough. Will is trying to master proportions, anatomy, understand bodies in a way that isn't solely emotional. Personal. Good art wants detachment.

Funny, he thinks. Because Mike is in his kitchen throwing a shadow over things he has never seen before. The more he takes it in, the deeper his breaths seem to get. Like he's trying to make space for it in his heart.

“It smells like pot in here.”

Will grins into his palm. “Yeah, I know.”

He has never felt this useless in his own home. And Will knows useless: he was bedridden for weeks, muscle with no movement, a head too heavy to carry. He was sad before he was anything, and sadness was always the most crippling thing in his life. It was his birthright and the week spent trapped in another dimension just fed it, that mouth that always needs. So being on his own, like this, moving through the city like so many boys who come here to make art and love and peace, means the world. And he's not going to let Mike change that.

Just two days ago, he was wandering over a sticky dance floor, cramped between the mingling notes of inexpensive cologne and sweat, all talk coming together as a mass of language, pressing hungrily against the heart of the music. The drums were harsh. The lights were flashing. Will felt ready to bleed.

So he can survive this. Will wasn't the only boy sad and useless in Hawkins. He sees that now.

“Are you hungry?” He asks. Mike shakes his head almost immediately, but he's not as unnerved as he was when he came in.

“I had a coffee before I got here.”

Will scoffs, occupying his hand by letting it toy with the steel of his earring, demure and hidden, a small crystal in the color of his mother's birthstone: topaz.

“That's not exactly dinner.” It's not anything, really. But that's his best friend, or friend, or whatever they silently decided on when they couldn't breathe around each other during the months that lead to graduation. Self-destruction in the name of nothing. Will painted something about that.

Mike shrugs. “I'm not hungry.”

“It's fine if you are.”

He declines, again. They leave the room. Once they're in front of Jonathan's bedroom door, Will just stops, musters the notes and bills hung up on it as a reminder. Their fridge is overfull with magnets and half-assed sketches that Jonathan found endearing enough to put up. Scenes in Montauk, quiet and coastal, where Hawkins only exists in anecdotes. Where they hide Jane and she gets the opportunity to draw a blank slate, but with enough ties to her old life to not make it all feel like sacrifice.

Will never wanted them to make a martyr out of his sister and he is so thankful it didn't happen.

Which makes him turn around to Mike, who has no idea what he could be thinking about. Will wishes he was the sort of person devoid of conversation and curiosity after being treated with radio silence, but he isn't. He wonders what Mike wonders about. If almost two years of avoidance can make someone grow new skin, a new mantle.

(It makes him think of that chipped matryoshka doll Robin sent him for Christmas. An ode to hiding. So they don't forget that you start everything scared. Will liked its colors.)

“We probably shouldn't go in there. He develops all kinds of projects in his room and he'll kill me if I ruin any of it.”

Mike tilts his head, like a pup. “Jonathan's not home?”

Will does not like how real the timbre of Mike's voice is when he's merely inches away. It's fine through the phone. Through videos on flimsy cassettes. Even through the intercom, despite the whiplash. But he's not distilled right now, not stripped of anything — just real, and here. Where Will supposed he'd never hear him. He also doesn't like the implication hiding in his question.

“Was the absence of music not a giveaway?”

“True.” Mike combs through his curls to no avail. They've never obeyed him. They always go flying like arrows. “Show me yours.”

He wishes he could say that, in addition to Mike's audacity, he hates how demanding he can get, but some deranged, most likely self-loathing part will always like it. So he nods, pouting lightheartedly as he swings around to his door.

And that's that then, getting naked. Except it's always figurative with them because Will has never been good at being purely honest with Mike. So if stripping a shirt means pushing down on the handle, then let it be that. Will turns on the light, even if he rarely uses the big light. It's too oppressive. He moves forward and clicks a desk lamp on, tells Mike to kill the big light.

The intimacy of the corners left dark, a burnt copper, does not pass him by. Mike's stomach is illuminated in the orange glow, there's a heavy shadow beneath his jawline. Caravaggio.

He's so tall. Elongated, not uncanny, just something Mike learned to grow into.

“Wow.” He breathes, and there's a genuinity to it that makes Will feel ill. He's fine with presenting himself. He can deal with being the exhibitionist.

But that's Mike, who has known all his childhood bedrooms, who makes this sacred space feel less sacred because out of everyone, he is the one who has Will figured out the most. He can connect patterns here, he can probably figure out what Will truly likes and what he puts up just to feel cooler. And that is so terrifying.

Mike brushes a few droplets away that are drooling down his forearms and folds his arms as he looks at the canvas placed onto an easel.

“It's for school.” Will blurts out, as if he has to justify his work. Mike nods, absent-mindedly.

The prompt for this one is: Immaterial things you will never possess. The power of limitation. Will shuffled through several things in his mind that he has never had, but a lot of it felt like he was trying to put a nuzzle around himself, make himself a dog to unfortunate things. He thought of painting a playground, claim his childhood robbed. But that is not true. He has a witness for that standing in this very room. He thought about love, but not finding love as a teenager does not plague him as much anymore.

He thought about quiet, but he has quiet now. He promised himself to stop blaming Hawkins, so then he ultimately settled on girlhood. He never exactly envied El, or Max, or any of the girls that mattered in his life. But there was nothing about boyhood that felt jubilant either. He was not a hero, he was just trying to survive. There was something else to peel from the cracks of those two extremes: the fleeting feeling of understanding Will used to get when he was eight and Nancy started painting her eyes in pinks. How Erica's voice dipped whenever Lucas said something snarky. The childhood photos his mother would flip through with Will rested against her arm while a cigarette was sitting stuck between her lips. Her bangs swallowed her eyebrows.

That's the painting: a girl braiding her sister's hair while their baby brother watches. Learning that fingers do not only cramp to serve. The colors are dreamy, Will used up an entire tube of white acrylic paint just to mix what he needed. He intends on finishing it next week.

“It's great, Will.” Mike's hand springs forward and jumps right back, hovering above the canvas. It's always touch with him.

Will decides to give him the okay. “Go ahead. The paint dried this morning.”

And he is so fast Will laughs beneath his breath, brings his fingers to the figures, traces the mountains and valleys where paint layers, where it seeps. Mike can't fight a smile of his own.

For a moment, it's complete peace. Will loves creating art and Mike has always held that dear to his heart. He's a writer, his pictures start in the mind and never gain color, no physicality past the black print on paper. Everything Mike cannot do, Will does. And vice versa.

“Do you still write?” He allows himself to ask. He's sure he already knows the answer.

“Yeah. Yeah, of course.” Mike doesn't pry his eyes away from the painting. His index and middle finger land on the boy. That's us, Will wants to say. But he doesn't think Mike would get it. Not like he does. “All the time.”

“Is fantasy still your genre of choice?” Will folds a stack of paper on his desk. He has never noticed how much mini chaos Jonathan and him exist in until now. His eyes flicker over to Mike.

“Do you even know me?” He laughs. But Will doesn't return the energy, just smiles.

“Maybe I don't.” He teases, moving closer so he can appreciate his own work too. Mike's breathing is shallow, there's a slight tremble to it. Will takes a good look at him.

“Mike, you're shaking.”

A soft noise of protest rings in Mike's throat, but he knows he can't win this. The shiver along his skin is undeniable. There's two fields of goosebumps running along his arms, propped up and neat where the water doesn't suffocate them.

“Didn't want to interrupt you.”

Alright. Will kisses his teeth, looking to his closet that has a slightly broken door. It always wails open. “You should've.”

He leaves Mike standing by himself, heading for the drawers of his closet. Ebony, vintage. Another gift left by the previous homeowners, and he made it his own, even though Will barely had enough clothes to fill half the closet with when they moved in. Now it's different.

(God bless the thrift stores lining the streets like teeth. One by one.)

He finds a thick gray-blue wool pullover, a pair of clunky jeans that were too long for him. A gift from a friend. He gets a pair of socks too. Mike is taller than him, but Will got broader once he turned fourteen (even if he didn't want it), so it'll fit. Pullover short around the hips, but it'll fit.

He places the stack of clothing on his arms and lifts himself again, turning to his best friend. Mike musters him, realizes where this is heading.

“Will, I have spare clothes.”

He shakes his head stubbornly. “Your bag is mopping my floor right now. You'll get sick.”

And Will knows Mike's immune system: it fucking hates him.

Mike sighs, defeated, as Will hands him the clothes. He places them on the bed beside them in a careful motion so unlike him and brings his hands to his belt. The silver buckle reflects the red burn in his palms as he undoes it, and Will feels his breath catch.

Habits, habits, habits. This used to be normal for them, he knows that. Standing half naked, back to back, chuckling quietly in the womb of Mike's bathroom on the second floor. The house was always full and time grew sparse. They got ready in tandem a lot, and even if it razed through Will back then, made his abdomen snarl right back at him with liquid heat, he liked the normalcy of it.

But now's not then. And Will hasn't seen him for so long, and he doesn't know what it'll do to him if he sees Mike like that right now.

Mike must catch his apprehension, because he stops, thumb and middle finger holding the buckle in place. The apples of his cheeks are rose with returning blood.

“Sorry.”

Will swallows, focuses instead on the feeling of spit traveling down his throat.

“It's fine.” He looks around, coddling the posters of The Cure and David Bowie with his eyes. He's acting like a fool. “I could—”

He gestures to the door.

“Oh,” Mike says. “I just thought, since we—”

“Yeah.” Will nods, vehemently. Something about them disrespecting their teenage selves by shaming their dead habits makes him feel guilty. “Yeah, no. It doesn't bother me if you get dressed here.”

“Okay, sure.” Mike sniffles. “But I don't mind if you stay.”

Will chews on his lip. He's not acting like this for no reason, he has been untangling all his shame over the past two years, and this wouldn't normally matter to him — if there was no history to it.

He doesn't know when it stopped. After Vecna died, they still lived with the Wheelers. A lot of renovations were taking place, Mike was more quiet, and he slept with his back pressed to Will's in the basement. He quivered a lot in his sleep now. The high was wearing off, the only thing left fighting was themselves. Will never woke him up.

They still met in the bathroom, but it was quicker, there was no laughter. Sometimes he caught Mike looking at his naked spine in the mirror. He doesn't know if it was judgment or wonder. All he knows is that Mike eventually left him by himself on the tiles, under the green bulb.

“You sure?”  

“Jesus, Will.” Mike slips his belt out of the loops and lets it land on the ground. “I want you to stay.”

Oh. Will just shuts up after a curt nod of acknowledgment, sits himself down on the bed. He toys with the blanket between his thighs. The button of Mike's jeans comes open with a pop and he can't fight looking up while Mike works his legs out of his pants.

His skin is damp and he's more willowy than scrawny now. Time sculpted something of him and Will never really understood that when he looked at the photographs where Mike is always bent down to accommodate the string of people wrapped together with arms and awkward grins, swallowed by clothing that does not allow a single chance to let him be seen.

He's not sure how it happens, but his heartbeat settles in the flesh of his tongue. Mike turns around and clears his throat. Will hands him the dry pair of jeans. Their eyes lock momentarily, and that makes it different from the secrecy of the bathroom where they always refused to look at each other in some unspoken rule.

(Eurydice and Orpheus?)

He slides into the denim with ease, and it settles nicely by his hip bones. Mike is standing sideways but twisted enough towards Will so that he can see it: his hands working the zipper up, his concentrated face with brows furrowed.

They fit him perfectly.

“You should keep those.” Will says, too fast for his mind to circle around the idea of giving.

Mike looks up, and his face contorts with an indecisive smile. “No way.”

“But they look good on you.” Will rubs his thighs and bites back a grin. “Keep them. They don't fit me anyway.”

Mike gazes down at himself, then to the mirror propped up in the corner. He's never been good with being perceived, so his shoulders fold up a bit, like wings refusing to fly. But he looks really good.

“Alright. Thank you.” He says after a short moment, exhaling into the warm air of the room.

“It's nothing.” Except it is, but Will doesn't want to make him feel bad. Habits.

Mike slips out of his shirt next, which is a lot more reluctant to let go from his skin. He laughs silently when he peels it over his head while Will unfolds the pullover for him and hands it over.

He lets his eyes linger a bit on Mike's chest, his stomach and hips, the parts of him that swerve into softness. He's freckled all over, and so pale, but Will recognizes the kind of need in himself he thought distance could cauterize. He still finds Mike attractive — but now it's different, because he's not forcing it into a plastic container sitting deep in his heart that wheezes with every guilty heartbeat. This time he feels it. It collides in his abdomen like two stars fighting for space.

Mike finds his way inside and the hem stops just above his pelvis. The sleeves cut off before his wrists. The back of his hair, which Will realizes now that it has been drying for a bit, is kissing the collar of the pullover. He's been growing it out again.

He takes it in, studies it and uses the guise of an art student to let all of Mike's palette blend together in his view and pulse against the light that exists there too. Will is not stupid. He knows what this feeling means, and that is what is bothering him.

Why is Mike here?

“You forgot your socks.”

Mike looks at the white bundle of cotton forgotten on the bed and laughs. “Shit. Right.”

He gets into those too, quickly, and it's entertaining enough to push some laughter out of Will. Mike points out the small collection of D&D dice he neatly stores on his shelf, which he thrifted together over the course of a few months.

“There's lots of people in the city who play. It's not just us anymore.”

Mike breathes. “Turns out the entire world isn't just Hawkins.”

They share a knowing look, and suddenly Will recognizes another truth amongst the many: nobody is going to understand like they do. When Will grows paralyzed underneath another person's touch, even if the evening went so well and everything was perfect and he knows he's fine — it still comes — and he just excuses it as something bleak: Something happened to me when I was a kid. I don't really talk about it. I want this. I really want this.

Or the mornings where he wakes up impossibly nauseous, as if his body doesn't even want to give him a chance. He'll call his mother with a trembling hand around the telephone. Sometimes Jane picks up, cries with him over the line. The motion sickness, the random muscle sores, standing under the shower for hours, which Jonathan doesn't stop him from doing, but he tends to keep the water bills away from his door.

Will doesn't want to be known as a survivor. Most people he meets know him as the painter from the city with ‘the earthquake’. He tells them it was hard, but he doesn't tell them that it was supposed to be impossible. To survive, like they did. Like he did.

Which makes this all so paradoxical: he doesn't want to be known as a survivor, but he will never forget. He can never learn to exist around it; that's not how this works and he knows that.

And maybe he's at fault too. Seeing Mike now, wallowing somewhere in his mind where it's probably thorny, dark-red, purple-blue, he knows that he left him behind in pieces. Mike, like a tree split in half by lightning. They had escape plans, but Mike never indulged, and so he stayed back. His idea of a future always revolved around a pale romance with a girl that gave up on him and whom he gave up on, too. They only held on to hold. To know they're capable of doing it. Jane let go eventually.

And Mike's a writer. They're both artists. You can't make without seeing. You can't tell the same story over and over. Mike is punishing himself by staying in Hawkins, and Will has known for a while now that he does so because he's scared of washing up somewhere new, creating purpose through things that do not require maring himself.

And the guilt — Will knows it like breathing. He recognizes it in Mike every time.

In the silence, which arches over them deafeningly, he rises from the bed and takes a last glimpse at Mike's discarded clothes on the carpeted floor before he pulls him into a hug, something that's like water, where Will does not have to make himself bigger, where he can mold into Mike and pull him closer so there's no space left for the cold.

Mike's breath hitches, but he falls into it, sighs when Will puts a hand to his hair. It comes down with beautiful intensity, like a wave splitting against a cliff. Will makes a shushing noise as if he's trying to soothe him. He looks down the slope of Mike's back and sees the exposed skin of his lower back where the pullover has dragged upwards. Will tries fixing it for him with cautious fingers, but he still ends up touching Mike, who tenses under that contact. They breathe in unison, as they always tried to do underneath their blankets at sleepovers.

Will remembers being seven. He remembers brushing lips with Mike when they got too close.

“I missed you.” He admits, running his fingers over the wing of Mike's shoulder blade like he's playing a harp, or something that wants to thrum. Mike's face finds its way back to the bridge of his shoulder and neck, where his breaths are wet and trapped by choice. His hands cramp around Will's back. Will doesn't want to know what kind of tempest is stirring in Mike's mind, if he can even think of anything that does not ruin him.

The ends of Mike's curls, the ones that coyly shield the sides of his face, leave streaks of dampness on Will's cheek. He twists his head towards it, the warm scent of rain where it melts with Mike's skin, the shampoo he uses that he knows Nancy uses too. His mouth is close to his scalp and he feels Mike's hair dangle against his lips. He kisses his own fingers just to feed himself something.

A hand pushes on his back and pushes him closer. Will goes with it.

“Why didn't you show up for Christmas?”

Will can feel Mike's heartbeat where it speaks back to his: Why. Didn't. You. It's rhythmic and dedicated. That's probably a habit too, not letting mysteries go unsolved.

“It was their first Christmas in Montauk. I couldn't have missed it.”

That's the easy answer. And it's true, but not complete. Montauk is closer, cheaper, less complicated. The beach was all gray and they had cameras who could almost do justice to the feeling of a coast slowing down. They arrived at the door to their mom in wool knit socks and her body balanced on her toes as she hugged both her sons. Will, whom she lovingly has deemed her very own Empire State with how tall he has gotten (although he's still quite short) and Jonathan her Hitchcock.

Jane snuck around the corner like a fawn and held Will with a hand to his nape and head. The parts of him she knows will hurt in phantom every now and then. She kissed his forehead and told him about girls she has befriended, how she's going to graduate soon. Will knew this already, but things are always different in person. Hopper put a firm hand to his shoulder, told him he appreciates the self made postcards, said he shows them to his colleagues and that most of them don't get Will's drawings.

(“But I do.” He reassured, once, twice. Will doesn't mind being misunderstood as much as he did a few years ago. And he doesn't need Hop to understand everything. That man saved his life.)

He gets a shawl, new charcoal pencils, a collage of photographs. He gets good food that is no longer made on a budget, he tells Jane about New York, tells her she should come visit. She puts her head in his lap as they sit on the couch and lets him ramble about the city. The living room smelled of sandal wood and dry clementine peels.  

When it's close to midnight, and Jonathan shares a cigarette with Hop, he slips and calls him son. Not in condescension, not with strained intention, just an accident. He peered over the lip of the couch to see Jonathan's expression through the milky window: struck, but gently. Like a hand to snow. Something that welcomes, despite it all.

He barely left the old man's side for the remainder of their visit, flaunting the mysteries he solved that Hopper wasn't even fully aware of. They watched movies together that Jonathan loved and that Hop got to see in theaters.

Will liked him too, but he was still his mama's boy at the end of it all, and she didn't mind if he randomly came up to her, placed his head on her shoulder and waited for her arm to wrap around him. Being away from her for so long, and for more miles than he ever thought he'd be away from his mom for such a long period of time, he really began to understand what all her panic meant. All her restless nights and the hits across his face to snap him out of a trance. The caution, the prohibition, the way she could snag him up by the collar if she wanted him away from the world.

He's grateful they outgrew it, but he's still glad she cared for him enough to drive herself insane. Or maybe she was the sanest one, for keeping an eye on her son like she did. For fighting. For axing the head off of that goddamn bastard like she did.

So, Will had every right to be in Montauk. It made sense to be in Montauk. He would do it again. But still —  there's fragments of feelings he did not want to rearrange to something that he could feel in entirety. He did not want it to be apparent enough so that he could dwell on it. Not until he got home and the snowfall was so thick it swallowed the streets of busy New York terrifyingly well. He had nothing left to do but to sit with himself, trying to combat his thoughts with a CD player that always seems to skip over his favorite parts in his favorite songs. That's how it became apparent, though he could've guessed it: he was way too scared to come back.

Not because of Lucas, because Lucas writes him letters monthly and he lets Max kiss them with semi-sheer lipgloss by the corner of the paper every time to let him know they're both thinking about him. Not because of Dustin, who rings up the telephone during the same hour every week because he knows Will's schedule. They'll discuss school for a minute before it delves into new comic releases, something-something D&D, over-analyzing a show they agreed on watching together.

Not even Hawkins is to blame, even if it's a small-town shell that Will broke through, even if he thinks of it unkindly sometimes and he doesn't correct anyone if they trash on it, although they've never been there, they've never lived Hawkins.

He could return home. Sometimes it's all he wants to do, just sit with the scent of pine cones crushed under thick outsoles and gasoline. He wants the sick-yellow glow of the lanterns, wants sweat trailing down the plane of his forehead as he pedals his bike underneath a headache sun. And he wants—

“Mike,” He speaks softly into his hair, against the gaps of his own fingers. Will doesn't know what to do next. He hardly understands if it's his heart going rabbit or not. He doesn't want to think about what it would mean if it was Mike's.

Thankfully, he doesn't have to make that decision. Mike wraps his hands around Will's shoulders and pushes them out of their entanglement, as if he's brushing crumbs from a table: effortless, precise.

“I'm not mad.” For a moment, he keeps his hands on Will. “I don't even believe you think I'm mad, so this is stupid.”

His hands retrieve to his sides, cramping with loss. Will says it, because he deserves to: “I don't really think you have the right to be.”

Mike nods, much to Will's surprise. There is understanding where he can recognize it. “Yeah, exactly. I'm sorry.”

They stand in front of each other, and Will takes the apology in silence. It's too vague and there's so many things to be sorry for. He hates himself for a second because he does not even want it — apologies. All he wants is this. His own space, and Mike who can be witness to it.

“I smell like you now.”

Will's stomach answers to that, coos something soft back. His face molds with a smile. “What do I smell like?”

“Dried paint. Like a picture frame, also. I don't know.” Mike stalls for a moment. “Like Will.”

The way he says his name feels like a promise. It always has.

“I like that.” Once again, eyes to the puddle of clothes Mike has put on his bedroom floor. It makes Will's head churn. It makes him think about other things, pocket-sized thoughts he had in the months leading to graduation that he loathed himself for. Mike would put a simple hand to his back and Will could build entire cities on that. The party was scattered and beaten and somehow all he could think about sometimes was the space where Mike's collarbones meet.

(Sometimes, when they shared the couch in the basement, Will would turn around and wake up to Mike's naked back. His shirt would ride up while he slept and he kept sleeping and Will had to share the view with the cold sunrise outside. He became a cartographer. He knows the road of Mike's spine perfectly.)

“Do you wanna head to the living room? I'll get a blanket and some extra pillows for you.”

The tips of Mike's ears are flushed pink. Might be the cold, might just be him. “You don't have to keep me here until morning.”

Will scoffs. “What, are you gonna spend a night at the Chelsea? It's fine, Mike.”

“I'm just saying.”

“I have no lectures tomorrow and I don't have anywhere else to be. And you're my best friend.”

He dares to say it, and Mike's face flourishes with something that goes unsaid in return. It's all in the brows, the way they can't settle on his face and he has no control over himself anymore. Involuntarily confessor.

“Okay.”

“Okay?” He asks, just to make sure.

“Yeah. Let's go.”

Mike picks up his duffel bag in the hallway and Will picks some feather-filled pillows and a blanket from his closet where he keeps them mushed into the corners.

The living room connects to the kitchen. It's not exactly a chic transition from one room to another, but it serves its purpose. A lot of their daily routine consists of just moving in zigzags past each other. New ideas come all the time and the city doesn't sleep so the speed at which inspiration hits is multiplied by a hundred. Will loves running across their space and feigning panic when he can picture a new painting in his mind: he loves his ideas enough now to be willing to run for them. There's beauty in that.

They meet there, Mike with a moist palm around two flimsy handles and Will half-hidden behind clouds of navy blue and white. One of the pillows gets taken from him and he breathes a quick thanks as they dump the bedding on the sofa.

The living room is also, by far, the biggest room in their apartment. Everything's quite compact, but here there is space to breathe (and, well, run).

Will follows Mike's line of sight. It goes like this: First the sofa, with the other small mismatched pillows they've collected ever since they started living here. Jonathan, and it feels like such a cliché, found the sofa standing by the edge of the street. There's stains of faux blood dried into its periwinkle skin from the time when Jonathan filmed his first movie. Before Will, when he was all by himself. Him and his camera.

Next is the coffee table. Will notices his quarter-full cherry coke that he was very eager to finish before all of this set into motion. Unsurprisingly, there's an array of small portraits, still-lives, practice sheets. A folded up shirt for whatever reason, a broken cassette. The ashtray they clean biweekly, a viridescent thing Jonathan snagged from a bar.

Then the boxy TV, the VHS tapes circling it, Hellraiser 2 and The Lost Boys being on repeat like mass, like religion. Will would tell Mike that, that he still likes scary and campy stuff like that, but he's too immersed in his own exploration and Will doesn't want to interrupt that.

His eyes stop by the windows, opening up to a slim view of the city. Textbook New York, skyscrapers and whatnot. Colors of gray and silver but not in an oppressive way, not something that demands too much space and that makes living more unbearable than it already is. Just something massive. An ant’s nest.

The school-lent expensive paint dried into the floorboards that they desperately tried to scrub out, a jacket that Jonathan forgot about that probably isn't even his own. Tenacious glitter-dust from another project, the smell they both simply know as Hawkins, more tenacious than anything.

“I really like your place. Way better than Dustin's stuffy dorm room, that's for sure.”

“You visited Dustin?” Will asks. Both in interest and the uglier thing he hates to name. Jealousy.

“A few months ago. It was the only time he was really able to show me his place.”

“Oh, cool.”

Will still feels it linger, the warmth of Mike that pooled together at the center of his body. The way his breath was warm despite the cold he must've been trudging through for a while, how close they got because they always got close but this time there was something lethal like lead in their proximity. He can feel Mike's hands like two separate animals still ghosting over him, unsure but willing with a tremble. Will will probably be haunted for the rest of his life, but this is a different kind of haunt.

Because he wants it. Has always wanted it, when he props himself up against his closet at night and puts two fingers to his teeth to ground himself, all he thinks about is Mike and he lets the sharp-cut pain of that wash over him. It replaces the harsher things on most nights. It lulls him to sleep, sometimes he just cries until dawn cracks because he feels like a fruit without a pit. Hollow, with an incessant reminder that something is missing. He's breathing around empty space. When he pulled Mike in, when Mike pulled him in without even knowing if it's okay, he could feel it pouring back in.

That's such a horrible realization to have as he stares at Mike's downturned, blood-full face. He subconsciously gnaws at his bottom lip and Will wants to be the one who's doing it for him and—

Will grabs his own wrist and drills his thumb into the space between his radius and ulna (anatomy classes pay off) without causing any deliberate pain. His chest raises and he knows something is changing. He knows why wanting Mike here was always a gamble. And now he couldn't even choose when, how, where. He's just here, and he's beautiful and he lost that fucking haircut that Will hated. He looks entirely like himself and if he didn't know any better, he'd cry. Cry like Odette, like Eurydice, like Penelope, like the rusalka because this isn't what he can have and he decided against fighting for it.

“Wanna sit down?” He asks, letting go of himself. The odd pressure between his bones wheezes out until it stops.

“Yeah.”

They take their place on each end of the couch, Will pressed into his favorite corner on the right, while Mike lets himself be taken by the cushioning of the left side. He lays back and his body goes lax with that. Their feet tangle where they meet in the middle, and Will allows that.

“Did Jonathan ever finish that cannibalism movie of his? I never really asked Nancy about it.”

“The Consumer.” Will corrects, because it definitely goes deeper than mindless cannibalism. The first time he watched it, he just couldn't stop crying. Firstly, because it was Jonathan's and it was so obviously his and Will was so proud of him. And he knows that the movie is one big metaphor for how consumerism is a weapon used against the people to fuel capitalist interests and Jonathan has made him his disciple when it comes to media literacy, but Will was relating to it beyond that.

He was watching some NYU actress eating fake guts and something about it shook him to the core. Something about not stopping. Something about hunger for things that will ruin him.

“And yeah, he did. A few months ago.”

He can't see Mike's face because his neck is curved to mold after the armrest. “That's cool. I'm definitely going to use that as an icebreaker later.”

“Use what?”

“That a major movie director is my best friend's brother.”

Will wants to crack a joke about Stacey's party and how reluctant Mike was to go, but another memory of that night resurfaces and it resurfaces like bile. So he lets it go.

“Do you think he'll do it? Get famous?”

Will thinks about it, but he can scrape an answer together easily from bits and pieces Jonathan left at the breakfast table. “I don't really think he wants to be famous. He just wants to make stuff.”

“And you?”

Will's breath stutters, caught off guard. It's what he gets stuck with after three successful semesters of not really being acknowledged as an individual artist. Everything in college is so impersonal.

“I'm not sure. I really want to do art for a living, but I don't know.”

Mike adjusts his hips on the couch, and Will watches as the denim rolls with him.

“I don't even doubt it. Like, at all. That you could get famous. I had this dream where I was walking around a gallery and you wanna know which name was written under every single painting?”

“Which one?” Will asks, settling into a grin.

“William Byers. Each and every one.”

He laughs, knocking his shin to Mike's. But Mike has always been surprisingly good at predicting things, so he lets that idea enter the realm of possibilities.

You're more like a sorcerer.

“We'll see.”

“I saw it.”

A momentary silence settles in, like it always can between them. Will never really had friends outside of the party, so New York rumbled up like a storm. He never attempted befriending anyone in Lenora, though there were other timid boys whom he shared glances with across quiet classrooms, a mutual understanding existing between them. But he wanted to grow outside of himself, so he made friends here. A good handful, a new friend group.

But silence always feels like failing with them. Here, it is just another byproduct of knowing, of comfort. Not speaking does not mean that he is failing Mike. And it's not too silent, not with how hard the pounding in his ears persists even now.

Will is anxious, more than usual. And it makes sense. This is uncharted territory. He looks back to the ashtray, and the packet of cigarettes positioned neatly next to it. It speaks to him, he feels.

Will slides back a bit, shin to shin with Mike for a moment, bending sideways with a hand stretched out to get to the packet and ashtray. Jonathan always leaves a lighter with his cigarettes and Will is so thankful for it right now. He returns to his original position, the green glass on his stomach. Some specks of ash jerk out of their confinement and onto his shirt. He flicks them away.

He's not sure if Mike takes notice of it until he adjusts his seating a bit, propped up on his elbows.

“You smoke?”

Will shrugs, fishing the lighter out of the packaging. “Not often. Like, once a month maybe. I only ever really do it when other people are smoking too.”

Mike's face goes firm. “And now?”

“I'm just nervous.”

His lips form around an oh, but there's no sound to accompany it. Will puts the cigarette in his mouth and lights it. The earthy taste crawls down his throat but he knows better than to take too much, he has practiced. His mama doesn't know about this. He's not entirely proud of it either.

“It's fine, it's not because it's you.” Will tilts his head with one eye pinched close as he exhales. “Or kinda is, but it's not as bad as you probably think it is. Just unfamiliar.”

Mike trains his eyes on him, and unfamiliarity exists in a thousand different things now. Does he think of a younger Will when he sees the smoke, like how Will thinks of twelve-year-old Mike when he sees the sharp lanes of his eyes?

“I'm nervous too.” Mike admits. Will nods in acknowledgment.

“You've always been.” Will says, not as a tease, or a taunt. Just to remind him of what he knows.

“Same with you.”

They're best friends again, or so they've established verbally, although Will thinks it's almost perverted in nature how often they've misused those two words in all the previous years of their friendship. It was easy to call Mike his best friend in the beginning when there was no expectation that came with those words, when it felt like an easy oath to make and less like a strenuous promise breathed in a rush. Mike refused to call Lucas and Dustin his best friends for years because none of what they felt for him measured up to what Will showed him. And now Will knows that there was nothing to measure, that it just went deeper and they couldn't distinguish one thing from another. And it didn't matter then.

Not as it did eventually. And then best friends was a failsafe. Just something to toss up in a conversation to make sure they were not less and not more, never moved outside of what was already safe. The world was ending. It was easier to say things and not mean them than to admit the wound and try to mend it. So acknowledging these truths about each other hits, right where it wants to. It rings out like a stick to a cymbal.

He mostly forgets about it when Mike wraps two hands around his calves and hoists himself up until he's mirroring Will's position on the sofa, their legs further intertwined than before, the pair of hands on his legs slowly slithering back as Mike runs them through his puffy hair. The rain gives birth to curls he probably worked hard to straighten out.

“Let me have a drag.”

Will would hate to see his own expression right now. He feels the strain of his eyes widening as he tips the cigarette off in the ashtray.

“Never.” He says, quick. He would love to remind Mike that he's the older one, even if only by two weeks.

Mike sighs and reaches back to grab his bag, rummaging around as he pulls out a flimsy packet of his own, slightly ruined by the weather and halfway finished. Will settles into a frown.

“Only when I'm stressed.” He justifies, but seeing the light kiss of lavender beneath his eyes, Will doesn't know if that really means much.

“Seriously?”

“Yeah,” Mike gives him a lopsided smile. “Sometimes I share one with my mom.”

“No way.” Will gasps, putting the cigarette back to his mouth.

Mike fingers the sleeve of his pullover with a continued grin on his face. When he grows bored of that, his hand moves to twirl at a loose thread on the hem of Will's jeans. It's another leftover from their shared time in Hawkins when he lived in the Wheeler basement. They used to sit like this almost every night.

“You should stop.” Will says.

“I will. Soon.”

“Good.”

Some of the smoke travels into Mike's nostrils where Will can see it. It's different from when they breathed around Jonathan's and Argyle's collective cloud in the van, because now it's Will who's doing this to him.

“C'mon, it'll warm me up. Just this once.”

He surrenders to the demand, adjusting his grip on the thing as he puts it to Mike's mouth. His fingertips touch the valley of his lips, fleetingly. It's different from when they'd get too tactile in a campaign play and he put his hands to Mike's face in a frenzy and his thumbs ended up brushing his lips on accident.

He swears Mike's mouth falls open before he even feels the cigarette press against him. He accepts with little error and then there he is: Mike Wheeler, smoking on his periwinkle sofa, and he just keeps boring his eyes into Will while the city answers cacophonously outside.

He almost curses when Mike throws his head back a bit, fingers wrapped around the half-finished cigarette, the curve of his throat exposed and gradually taking shape. He blows the smoke out, away from Will's face, and they watch it collect on the ceiling.

Mike, in simple curiosity for the cracked paint above them, Will in avoidance.

When his head lowers again, Mike offers back. Will decides to be bold and disgusting. He grabs Mike’s wrist and maneuvers it so the cigarette aligns with his lips and takes it back.

He's so fixated on Mike's throat that he sees the undeniable bob of his Adam's apple. Will releases his wrist and smiles as he inhales.

“Warmer?” He asks as he respires.

Mike hums. “Definitely.”

Then he lifts his hand, pointing a finger at Will's ear. “When did you get those?”

“Oh.” He places the cigarette back in Mike's hand and puts his fingers to his earrings. The metal greets with a harmless prick to his fingertips. “A year ago? It was kinda spontaneous and stupid.”

“How?”

"A guy from art school pierced them for me, he's..." Someone I shared a bed with? He looks a bit like you when the room's dark enough. Will would never admit to it, but it settles over his head like a halo. There's nothing holy about this. “He's nice.”

“That's cool.” Mike's fingers unfurl and he has an expectant look on his face. “Can I—”

Will nods fast. And then his head is tilted just slightly to the side and Mike puts two careful, icy fingers to his earlobe while he smokes with his other hand and something about it is so intoxicating that Will becomes increasingly aware of his lower stomach, how it chooses to respond.

“Did it hurt?” He asks, sniffling, brushing his nose with the web of his thumb. He looks way too unaffected by all of this. Mike, the impenetrable wall. His best friend.

“No.” Will mutters.

He lets go and drills the butt of their smoked cigarette into the ashtray that’s now sitting in the crook of Will’s thigh and hip. He can feel the slight press. When Mike looks up again, his bangs fall over his brows, mingling with his lashes. Will snorts, feels courageous enough to reach out and brush them away for him. His stomach twists in on itself, eats itself, becomes Ouroboros. They used to do this too, when Mike was doing math homework for the both of them and he asked Will, just under his breath, if he could push his hair out of his face so he wouldn’t lose focus. It was normal. This could be normal for them, still. But distance is a hungry thing. They did nothing to fight it.

For a small moment, as his fingers leave the curtain of Mike’s hair behind, he hates him.

“So,” Will starts. “Hawkins.”

Mike gradually loses the easy smile on his face, but he doesn’t appear to be irritated by anything. It’s just the perpetual sadness that comes with their hometown. How it’s never gone, how it’s integral to them as arteries, how Mike is still there and Will is here and the idea of distance enters the room again and finally dawns down on them. For a moment he grows afraid that he truly does not know Mike anymore, even if it’s only been a year.

“What about it?”

Will puts a weak fist to Mike’s knee, as if he’s urging him. “Must be lonely, with everyone gone.”

“It’s fine.” Mike grabs the ashtray and places it on the table again. “I’ve been making campaigns with Holly.”

“She still plays?”

“She honestly can’t get enough of it.”

“Wow, she really is your sister.”

Mike grows a little bashful and it tugs on Will’s soul. His hawk-like smile, something sharp and pretty.

“But outside of that,” He fixes his bracelets and Mike watches. “Have you, like —”

“What?”

“Been seeing someone?” He diverts his gaze, and comes back. “Or tried?”

Mike’s face falls into a very subtle grimace. Will’s embarrassment finds him as a wave of nausea.

“No. I don’t —” Mike clears his throat. “I haven’t really been thinking about that.”

“Oh, okay.”

“... Is that weird?” He asks like a boy.

“No, not at all.” Will puts his hands up in denial. He clasps them together when they feel heavy and aimless. “After everything that happened, it makes sense. It makes a lot of sense.”

“What about you?”

He should’ve expected it, but it still puts him on the spot and Will exhales with a light tremble. He can smell Mike, even through the clothes that smell just like he does. Why does this feel like battle?

“I’ve been seeing someone. It’s nothing serious. Not yet, I guess.” Will looks down at his hands, and that leads him straight to Mike’s hands. Loosely crumbled in his lap. He feels like he’s swallowing around a knife. His face is burning, burning, burning. “I don’t know.”

“Do you want it to be serious?” Mike asks, and the blade twists.

“I don’t know.” Will replies after allowing himself a second. “It doesn’t feel like it truly matters.”

He has been having a hard time admitting that, but the way Mike’s fingers work around the scuffed ends of his jeans again tears it right out of him. There was a time where he could’ve asked Will for a kidney and he would’ve given him his heart. Will wants to be kinder to himself, now — and forever. But talking to Mike is like navigating a minefield. And the worst part is that he wants this too. Be brutally honest.

(Well, almost.)

“It’s scary.” Mike utters. Will nods in agreement. And then he studies the small changes in Mike’s expression. He sinks into himself, deflates, hides.

Will is the best at disappearing, but Mike’s good competition.

“Is it because you feel guilty?” He asks, so sudden his breath is ripped out along with it.

Mike’s eyes shoot up. His brows furrow. “What?”

“After everything that happened with El,” In fact, Will is sure his breath is rapidly shortening as he speaks. Like a noose. “Maybe you feel guilty, maybe that’s why you’re not letting anyone in.”

“That was two years ago.” Mike releases the threads of denim he has been twirling between his fingers and Will laments that contact immediately with a soft sigh. “I’m over it.”

“Are you?”

“Will —”

“Do you still love her?”

Whatever he was about to bark back, he stops himself from doing so. For a split second, Will swears he can see his reflection in the dark, dark pool of Mike’s eyes. Maybe it’s illusionary. Maybe it’s what he wants to be true. Maybe, he’ll never not go insane with Mike close. He is too close. Will can breathe him.

Mike’s voice enters the silence like rain-soaked snow being crushed under running feet. If that means anything. “I don’t think I was ever in love with her.”

Will believes him so fast it feels like betrayal. But El told him about it too, the words he couldn’t write, couldn’t speak, couldn’t make up for in touch. The way his confusion existed as a second skin, the way he kissed like he was eating something spoiled. How young and round-faced he had been when he kissed her for the very first time. For a week straight, Will thought it to be ridiculous that he ever fell for Mike like he did. But memory came ashore and the rest is this: the hitch in his throat, the way his index finger touches Mike’s wrist in one swift, calculated brush. Mike’s desolate stare.

“Sorry.”

Mike doesn’t accept. Doesn’t budge much. “Why does that even matter so much to you?”

Or: Wasn't this the thing that killed us in the first place?

But Will would never blame El and he doesn't think it began with her and, very obviously, it didn't end with her separating from Mike either. This existed long before her. This. He can't even put a name to it. All he knows is that he loved Mike and it almost killed him. A thousand times.

Loves Mike, he remembers. He is still allowed to love him, just differently. Just something more clement. He can have things and they do not have to hurt for him to know that they're there.

Easier said than done.

“Are you happy?” He asks, and he feels like something shifts. He was always the problem child, the injured bird, whatever comes up weak and angry. But he found his exit, lives in the aftermath, sheds skin when he has to.

An image materializes in his head: Mike lets the words register. Gets up. Leaves. After Vecna died, he barely ate for two weeks. He slept through the day and he became a vampire until he made them all pretend that it never happened.

But Will remembers it, he remembers leaving Mike on the couch under the soft glow of dawn and wondering if there's secret code in the ridges and bursts of his cracked lips, if he sleeps to dream.

“I'm fine. It's fine.” Mike says, more timid now. Will's body is echoing it back, the touch to his earlobe and two hands gliding over his back like they're smoothing out feathers.

“It's just…” Will puts a finger to his mouth, bites at the nail. They're still boys. They're still boysboysboys and Will is about to turn twenty-one but somehow now he's twelve again, or godforsaken fourteen.

“You were miserable when we left. I saw it.”

“Was. I worked through it.”

“By yourself?”

Mike's hand wraps around his ankle. That's a habit from when they were ten. It doesn't even feel like it belongs to them anymore. But if Mike is trying to do something here, maybe eliminate Will's confidence, he's winning.

“My mom saw it. Holly saw it. We talk about it sometimes.”

Will shakes his head. “They didn't see everything.”

“Well, I'm glad they didn't.”

Mike runs his thumb over the round, pearl-like bone and Will swears he's going to cry. Mike is still here. He's talking about it.

“Mike,” Will runs the backs of his fingers over his forearm. “Are you happy now?”

Because if he was, why show up? Why fill the void that has destroyed everything in its wake? Making amends is important, but Will wouldn't blame him if he didn't. It never worked for them before. Why stay hooked on a theory that has always ruined them in practice? Why wait a year and wait for Will to get better and find life outside of everything — why let him move on and then come crashing back in like thunder?

“Stacey's party.” Mike starts, and he brings lightning too. Will pulls his hand back and fixes his posture. His heartbeat climbs and nestles into his throat.

“No—”

“What you said about the painting.” Mike's voice is firm now. “I just—”

“I was drunk, Mike.”

“But not drunk enough to forget, and neither was I.”

Mike didn't touch a single glass. He drove Will home that night. He pulled the car to the side of the dirt road and held Will's shoulders as he emptied his stomach, painting the spring grass.

But Will doesn't care about that right now. He gets caught up in some kind of catatonia and waits for the bullet. All monsters are dead, buried. He has nobody to blame for this.

“I never stopped thinking about it. I put all these pieces together and,” Will pulls his ankle from Mike's hold. He can see his chest make room for his lungs. His body is so demanding.

“Mike, I really don't want to talk about it.”

“We have to.” Mike insists, his voice bordering on something desperate. “I can't stop thinking about it and we have to.”

“I don't owe you anything.” Will mumbles, and the sofa feels like a cage.

“You don't. But—” Mike's eyes shut for a second. “But we're best friends and I don't want to lose that.”

“Then don't talk about it. Please?”

Once again, Mike shelves his bottom lip underneath his teeth and his brows set in deep and heavy on his face.

“I'm fucked up, Will. It feels like my life goes in circles now that you're gone."

You’re. There’s ominosity that comes with the word. Does he mean everyone, or is it only Will?

“Maybe that's a good thing.” Will half-whispers. He's scared of his voice cracking. He doesn't want to leave any evidence that this is getting to him, not more than he already has. “Bad things always happen when we're together. I noticed that in Lenora.”

He becomes possessive over Mike's words. He needs them to be about him, just him.

“That's not our fault.” Mike counters. "And I don't want circles. I'm tired of Hawkins.”

“Of course you are. That's why I'm telling you to leave.”

“I don't think you understand what I'm trying to say.”

“Mike, why are you here?”

The silence afterwards is deafening. Truly deafening, not feasible, not easy to move through as it was in the bedroom. Mike's clothes are in his bedroom. He thinks back to fourteen, how that would've been his dream and how he folded and tucked that away to the space behind his ears, the gaps where his spine is allowed to move without a grind.

The painting was supposed to be the one secret he needed to keep. Robin told him to come clean, but she doesn't understand that this relationship, this friendship that Will's overbearing love colonized, is a force. It would swallow itself just to prove a point. It doesn't understand that give and take comes as a balance, not a competitive sport.

Their breathing is metronomic, tick, tick, tick, clock-like and going by the seconds. Will gapes at the boy he hasn't seen in a year. He feels spooned.

“I—” Mike falters, mouth an oblong and a still tongue within. His hair transitions from dampened to frizzy and he looks like he's still surviving things. Another misfortunate truth to string onto the chain.

“Look, I'm not here to torment you.” His eyes flicker over to the floor, just once. Will can taste cherry as it resurfaces in his mouth. He's going to be sick. That's a forever-feeling too. “I get what you mean, that things can get so awful so fast between us.”

Will likes it more when he's the one claiming it. He doesn't like hearing it from Mike; mutual awareness feels too real.

And it's an unfair claim. He thinks of those eighteen months that dragged on in some kind of leniency. Hawkins broke apart with a moan and they were shut away from the rest of the world, but none of it mattered to Will. When he was pressing a flat back to the carpet of Mike's childhood bedroom and Mike stood above him like Will was an entire star away, he forgot about quarantines and school and hearing the word zombie cough up in the hallways again.

He wanted to tell Mike that he loved him then, every single day. He had this feeling, that the door was open. That he simply had to elbow it and he'd be there.

“I know you probably…” Mike's hand cramps into a fist. It burns white where he is unkind to himself. “I don't like doing this. I never wanted to pick fights with you, and when I did, I never felt good about it afterwards.”

Racing through the rain with an apology. Sliding into Will's room. That's why Will let it happen. Forgiving Mike comes to him like sleep, like something he needs to fall into if he wants to keep living. He remembers earlier, when he told himself he didn't want to be so forgiving anymore.

But that was about his old hometown, Mike doesn't measure up in cruelty. It's not his fault Will fell for him and never clawed his way up again.

Will’s jaw clenches. “Okay.”

Mike faces him with mild desperation. His breath is labored and competing with Will’s rise and fall of frustration. Clad in his clothes, so invasive. He wants to guess what he’ll say next, now that Mike’s got him figured out and has been sitting on it like Hendersen’s princess on a pea.  

“I know you don’t need me, I can see it in everything you’ve built here. I don’t think you ever really needed me.”

“That’s not true.” Will says, rushed, obviously pained. “I did need you. You saved me, like, a million times after I came back.”

Mike kisses his teeth, looks to the floor again. “And I hurt you a million times too, so that’s that.”

“We were kids, Mike.” And Will puts a finger back to his teeth, gnaws at the skin.

What if being a teenager isn’t a temporary state? What if, all the hormonal chaos and its ramifications aside, this is it? What if Will will be fourteen forever? He can barely sit passenger in the early morning without it resurrecting a familiar feeling of unchained, reckless sadness. Every road to Montauk that is too heavy with pine trees makes him ache. Some shadow of him is deer-like, trembling limbs and eyes wide open and waiting for a broken neck.

Time passes, and it never comes. Will knows time mends, he knows he can sleep in the dark without having to make a challenge out of it. But time exists in eternal ambivalence, and this is a testament to how easy it is to make an enemy of it. He hasn't seen Mike in a year, and he swore he stopped loving him two years ago as his fingers colored pink from carrying heavy luggage into Jonathan's car.

Nothing mended. Mike just settles in his eyes like a car crash would: inexplicably enchanting, in the most grotesque way. A can't-look-away face, two years of speculating about how adulthood is carving him and nothing he has ever imagined or drawn or seen in photos will ever do justice to this.

He intends on speaking his best friend's name again, but it dies in his throat like a flame blown out.

“Will,” As if by some kind of telepathy, Mike does what he can't, although his voice falters too. How long they stayed silent — Will can't really tell. He didn't even notice that Mike had pulled his bag into his lap, tugging on the zipper of a smaller side compartment. The mouth of it opens up to paper, a stack of disorderly pages of different sizes and kinds, checkered and lined.

The rain has contributed to the mess, sucking on letters that he cannot make out from the distance and curling the edges. Will's eyes oscillate between the paper and Mike's determined face, furrowed brows and pouty lips that come to be as he examines the mess in his bag. He slides a gentle hand into the pocket and pulls the thick stack out, glancing up at Will for a simple second that seems to rattle through him regardless.

The bag drops to the floor again. The paper jangles in Mike's fingers and Will becomes aware of something: Maybe it was never the cold. Surely it played a part, but the living room is so warm and here he is shaking, long fingers suddenly so fimble.

“This is honestly my last resort.” His voice trembles like he's about to be taken outback. “You know I suck at speaking, and I really don't know how I'll ever make it up to you.”

“Mike, you don't—”

He hands him the stack and Will grabs around it without protest, silenced by the gesture. His fingers brush against Mike’s knuckles. His fear vibrates right through Will. He’s rarely seen Mike this dismantled.

“They’re not really sorted. I—” Mike clears his throat. “I don’t know. I don’t even know if this is a good idea.”

Will doesn’t really listen to him anymore, just looks down at the first sheet of paper facing him.

The date reads: 06/19/1990

That’s just shortly after they met up, briefly, and Mike stopped sending letters altogether. The amount he had sent had already grown sporadic over the months before, but then it stopped. It felt like Will had been spat in the face, not moving as it slithered down his cheek.

He continues to read.

Hey Will,

How are you? I’m sorry for always taking so long with these. It’s just a lot of effort, finding the right words.

It ends with that, and Will flips the paper over but the back is blank. He slowly puts it aside, lets his mind wander around the possibility of confronting Mike for not sending anything. Right now, he just wants to make sense of what he’s been given. Mike’s breath is the accompanying instrumental to the text, heavy and beaten.

06/19/90, again.

Will,

It just started raining here.

It ends just as abruptly as the last. Will flips over, musters the empty back and puts another page aside.

06/19/90

Will,

Ends. Another.

06/19/90

Will,

I'm sorry if things were a bit awkward. And I'm sorry for starting my letter to you like this.

Another. A new date.

07/07/89

Hi Will,

First of all, I really appreciate the little sketch you added to your last letter. It's nice to see New York hasn't killed the nerd in you. I'd send one back, but you probably remember what Nancy said — my drawings feel like a crime against humanity.

Will recognizes these words, he's got a letter similar to this one stashed in his desk where all of Mike's letters are kept from sunlight, from humidity. From anything that could threaten to ruin them.

It's crazy to think you're starting college soon. NYU. Feels big, like something that's big enough for you. You're really talented. Can't let that go to waste. Speaking of accomplishments, Holly and I are fleshing out a new campaign. She loves flipping through your binder! It's nice to have another cleric, but obviously no one could ever compare to you. Sorry if all of this reads as a little sappy. I guess all this free time's got me thinking. My mom says I'm going to have to get a job if I want to continue living with them. It's kind of funny, because every time we do bring up me going to college, she just frowns.

I don't feel ready yet. I mean, it's a big shift from having to repeatedly save the world to not worrying about it anymore, at all. Do you also get this feeling like you never had the time to think about yourself with everything that happened? It's not like we were constantly being messed with, but maybe that's the problem. The gaps between, the uncertainty. I never thought about where I want to go (realistically speaking) after all of this is over, because I never really thought about it being over. I wasn't hopeless, but it was hard to be overly optimistic too. I don't know. But that's why I'm still here, probably. Hawkins is like a goddamn membrane.

He doesn't remember that segment in the letter he received, and Will starts to understand. They promised to be honest with each other before Will even knew Mike's address, but that was also before they grew up and something must've cracked Mike open like two fingers prying into a plum, into an orange, into something that doesn't open without bleeding. Mike is a liar, and Will has known this for long enough to not have it hurt him anymore.

But it hurts. The words are written, unsent. He doesn't dare looking up, just flips to the next letter.

04/27/90

Will!

We're seeing each other next month. Maybe a letter is unnecessary if you consider that, but I

Something is crossed out violently and Will is not able to decipher what it could be. A thick blotch of ink, enough that it shredded the paper where the pen scratched. Mike was by no means a very pretty writer, but it never was like this.

guess I forget things I want to tell people and it would be a shame if I left you in the dark. So:

1. I'm a quarter into my novel. I'll probably tell you about that. I also don't even know if that's true, maybe it'll end up being way longer than I intended.
2. I saw Mr. Clarke recently, in the grocery store. He asked about you. I said you're doing well.
3. It's safe to swim in Lover's Lake again. It's still a little too cold to go, but I guess that's a small victory after all the collateral damage Hawkins received. Maybe we could go when everyone's here?
4. I get to intern in the new library. It's better than that cashier job my mom kept urging me about. But since the Upside Down swallowed the entire archive, I doubt there's going to be anything exciting there to read. Money is money, I guess.
5. Holly found your old drawings that you drew for her. She's been drawing nonstop, that is if she isn't being the second best DM in the Wheeler dynasty.

That's really it. I look forward to seeing you.

— Mike

Will never received a list like this one. Mike also barely talked to him the entire weekend that they all spent reunited in Hawkins. They never went to the lake, no one ever brought it up. Holly did show Will the drawings she found. She showed him her own and he could see where she tried mimicking him. He slept in the basement. Mike went to his room. He ate breakfast with Nancy and before he could do anything else, he was already getting back into the car while Mike waved lazily, still in his pajamas while Will's wristwatch read two in the afternoon.

Next letter, though Will feels the thorny, unpleasant prickle beneath his eyes. A harbinger. He knows where this is going.

06/20/90

Will,

The ink is smeared by rain, his name in baby blue.

08/20/89

Will,

How's New York? I've been seeing lots of movies lately that take place in your city and (I guess this is kind of stupid) you know how a lot of them have these shots where the main character is walking through a crowded street? Sometimes I pause the movie and look for you in those crowds. Imagine how cool that'd be. I haven't spotted you yet, though.

Hawkins is ever the same. Healing, still. It will probably have to heal until they tear this place down and turn it into a second Silicon Valley. Or a theme park. Or a historical site? Hawkins: The Temporary Gate To Hell. Fucking awful to think about.

I'm surprised so many people stayed after the quarantine ended. They were treated like complete crap and they stayed. And as far as they know, it was an earthquake. Wouldn't they be scared of another one happening? I guess it's kind of like how people continue living close to active volcanoes.

Maybe I'm also a huge hypocrite. Maybe I want to walk through a huge crowd in New York and wonder if I'll accidentally end up on the big screen.

Maybe I could come visit you? I know it's only been four months, and it's only four more until we'll definitely see each other again, but it gets pretty lonely with everyone gone.

Another abrupt end. Will's initial frustration materializes as a globe in his throat, unrelenting in size and cruel with pressure. He puts the letter away, lets the idea of Mike wanting to come here much earlier simmer, musters the postcard that faces him. It's familiar. It's Dustin's school.

He has one of those too, with Dustin's strange handwriting and a small drawing of his D&D character as Will always drew it beneath his message. It's up on the fridge.

Will turns the postcard and recognizes Mike in the way he swings the initial letter of his name. W, as if it holds all the love Mike has ever known for Will. Whatever that means.

Will, it's Mike. I miss you.

09/29/90

A small noise tears through Will's throat. It's words you'd expect from your best friend you barely see now, who promised to send letters. Who promised honesty. Loyalty. Smaller things that could mean the world nonetheless.

It's Mike. I miss you. Will traces his finger over the indentations of the ink, where it is pressed into the thick paper. He closes his eyes and feels the ridges of his name, the spaces between the letters. He doesn't forget that Mike is there, becomes increasingly aware of it again. But he deserves this. He deserves to know things. He deserves Mike driving ten hours to deliver him all the letters he couldn't send himself. He—

Will's eyes reopen. They're coated with a first wave of tears, just barely there. It takes everything in him to keep his composure.

He puts the postcard away.

03/22/90, his birthday. Mike did send a letter for that last year. It arrived a little late.

Will,

Happy birthday. Nineteen is such a weird number. I hope you're having a blast and you're able to celebrate with all those friends you've told me about. Do they have that honey cake over there that you love? Or is it a Hawkins speciality? Maybe I could mail you a piece.

I wish I could be there. I guess I'm a bit jealous of all those new friends of yours. But then again, imagine me standing between all those people who are probably so much cooler than I'll ever be.

Not that being cool is a goal of mine. I wouldn't even know where to start.

But this isn't about me, it's about you. Happy nineteenth birthday, Will. Remember when we were twelve and we didn't even believe we'd make it past sixteen? We beat the odds. I hope you're okay.

I'll give you your gift when you get here in May. I guess now you've really got no choice but to come to Hawkins.

Also, just know I think about you. All the time. You can always talk to me, or call me if you have to. You're my best friend, even if you're a couple miles away. You could move to the other side of the world and it wouldn't change anything.

I Another word crossed out. Then one more. hope you get all the things you wished for.

(Ironic, Will thinks. Especially since it's coming from Mike.)

Mike is like a statue across from him, the only sign of life being the slight hitch when he inhales. Will blows the air out of his throat through pursed lips, and his body is starting to malfunction. It always thinks sadness has to be followed up by panic, that's what it has been conditioned to. His heartbeat speeds up fast and he's thinking about car crashes again.

Everything's a ram raid. He's both the car and the storefront. He can't believe he let Mike inside knowing what it would cost him. His mama also taught him that nothing in life comes for free.

06/21/90

Will,

I know you probably don't want to hear from me.

The next few letters follow the same exact pattern.

Hey Will— 06/21/90

Hey Will— 06/21/90

Hi Will— 06/22/90

Hey— 06/22/90

Will— 06/26/90

Will—  07/01/90

Will flips through them in a way that feels almost animalistic, like he's hunting for something. The rain has crippled the paper. Some of the ink stains the pad of his thumb.

Will—

Three pages left. Unlike their predecessors, they’re filled out from top to bottom, stuffed into the cracks with slurred handwriting and something Will has felt before: hitting the canvas, adding a color not knowing if it’ll fit. It always feels like an attack. Will is not a violent person, but sometimes he wishes he could be. Less scars that need explaining. Less bleary-eyed, foggy days.

He swallows, hard enough that it hurts. He’s fighting the pull of looking up and just seeing, trying to understand why Mike could let so much go unsaid if none of the things he wrote had ever been wrong. Why close the door on honesty? Why is Will always swinging by the neck and why is he never allowed to know things?

Mike is a liar, he knows that. But why with Will? Why not everybody else? Why him?

He has no other choice but to read, he supposes. His body and mind prepares him for disappointment. Three pages abused with writing, but he needs to stop expecting. After all, Mike used to send letters without any questions for Will to answer. He used to make it look like a chore. He barely cried when Will left for Lenora. He did not even find it within himself to properly hug Will at the airport after a year of sparse phone calls and blurry polaroids exchanged for other blurry polaroids. He only sought him out when he needed to save himself.

(I feel like my life started that day we found you in the woods. But what about before, before, before? What about unintentional sunbaths until Mike’s nose would bleed and Will used the back of his small hand to brush him clean? What about exchanging notes in dead-silent physics classes while their knees met like shore and wave, licking anew? It’s unfair that Will’s life started with Mike, that he would never claim anything else. It’s unfair that he gets this unhinged urge to rewire Mike, to make him believe that maybe his life did not start the day Will’s ended.)

Will gathers his last amount of courage, composure, all the things he had to relearn and that is now being demanded of him. He went through inexplicable, horrible things, and yet this slashes through him more than anything. He does not even know what Mike wrote, but judging by how a strained sigh leaves his best friend’s lips in response to recognizing the pages, he can only guess.

12/31/90

Will,

Happy New Year’s Eve. I know how much you hate fireworks and how loud they are. Actually, the clock just struck midnight here and while my dad is lighting all and everything on fire in our frontyard, I’m staying inside writing this. I hope you have a great time despite the noise. Maybe Montauk is more quiet.

I’m sorry for being so bad at this. At keeping regular contact, I mean. I tried writing letters, but I never sent them and now it’s been six months and I’m too embarrassed to send anything at all. I know that probably makes me a bad friend. I’m sorry for not calling either. I haven’t forgotten your number, I promise.

Also, I do not blame you for not sending anything back or calling me. You’ve got better reasons than me, with college and all the new things that you’re still discovering in New York. I really have no excuses. I’m just bad at this. You don’t have to forgive me.

I don’t even really know why I’m writing this anyway. My guilty conscience won, I guess. I won’t be sending you this letter. When I started writing it a few minutes ago, I thought about it. But I can’t do it. This is more of a confessional for myself. I’m sorry, Will. There are things I need to understand first before I can ever feel good about sending you a letter.

Something happened at Christmas dinner. That’s why I’m writing this in the first place.

We went to Enzo’s. Dustin, Max, Lucas and me. I sat down and Dustin was just about to take the chair next to me and I said: Wait, I’m saving that one for Will. You should’ve seen their faces. They probably think I’m insane… and maybe I am? You’ve been gone for almost two years and here I am saving seats for you. Will, I really do feel insane. Nobody said anything afterwards, but I think they wanted to.

I’ve been thinking since then. I’ve been thinking ever since you left, maybe even before that. But I guess something ruptured when you got into the car and I had to go back inside without you. I spent the first few days barricaded in my room, eighteen, apparently an adult but not quite. I don’t know.

I’m just confused on how fast things can go wrong with us. Me, not calling. Not writing. You, not sending anything back either. Maybe I am a little angry. I’m really trying not to be, because you deserve better than that. After everything that’s happened, and I’m sorry for regurgitating things you’ve probably heard a million times at this point, you deserve everything. I guess I just wanted to be part of that. I still want to be. I’m so bored without you. Not in a bleak, obvious way. I’m so bored and it sucks me in and I start thinking about everything, from start to finish.

It makes no sense, I know. How good I am at pushing you away and pretending it’s nothing. I know it’s not nothing, it used to keep me up when you moved to Lenora just as much as it does now. It might be a little different now, because I have no excuses left. No girlfriend to hide behind. None of that justifies how much of a jerk I was back then, but I guess being scared and awful at fourteen isn’t half as pathetic as it is at nineteen. Nineteen is such a weird number.

Will finishes the first page with a quivering lip. His heart feels like a nuclear power station that is being overloaded, that is bloating with something bad. He discards the paper with a shaky hand onto the pile, runs a quick hand through his hair and continues onto the next.

Well, after Christmas it suddenly all became so much more apparent. I look for you in the corners of my house where you’d always sit drawing things you never wanted to show me. It was the first time I realized we keep secrets from each other. You don’t have to tell me everything, but I think I want to tell you everything. Does that make sense? I wish I stayed more true to that.

Sometimes I just say your name. In the grocery store, in my room, mostly in the basement. I go through your binder and I memorize your hand writing until I can write my name the way you would and I cover an entire page with it. I know it’s not the same. You’re more careful with your pen. And I know it’s disgusting, and you’d probably freak out if I ever told you. But I guess you should know, even if you won’t.

I don’t tell anyone anything, actually. It feels like every little thing I do is something to be ashamed of. I feel like I take up so much space, even when I say nothing. I think you’d know best. So writing this is my best attempt at putting all of it somewhere.

Why address it to you in the first place? Because, out of everyone, you’re the one I’d want to tell these things to. I’m sorry if I’m repeating myself. Part of me feels like I owe this to you. I wish I was as brave as you are. Also, I think you understand more than everyone, which is why I haven’t been writing to you. You see right through me almost all the time and it’s why I avoided you all weekend when you were here in May. And I need to address this to you, because truthfully it feels like you are at the center of everything.

Will, I miss you. I’ve been missing you ever since the day you went missing and I took you for granted so many times and now it’s backfiring more than ever. I don’t miss the old version of you, I don’t miss the Will you were before you were taken to the Upside Down, I just miss you. Even when you’re in a room with me, I miss you. I missed you when you sat right beside me while we were watching a movie in my basement. I missed you when your eyes went all white and brilliant and you were standing right in front of me. I was twelve and missing my best friend more than anything while you were asleep in front of me in that lab hospital that almost killed us.

I hate reminding you of it, I hate reminding myself of it, but that day they pulled you out of the water haunts me. That’s why I pushed you away and I keep on doing it. I’m so overwhelmed with how much I need you to be close to me. I don’t just miss you, of course I do, but I need you.

I meant what I said, and I can still see your terrified face when we bound you to that pillar in the shed — I haven’t done anything that has ever measured up to the decision of asking you to be my friend. Has it ever felt like marriage to you? I feel like I promised a million things to you that day. I wish I could make up for all the times I broke those unspoken promises. I’d do it for the rest of my life if I had to. Hence marriage. Maybe I’m just old fashioned and I can’t really think of another way of describing it.

There’s this part of me that scares me like nothing else does. I always thought it would go away when we killed Vecna and the Mind Flayer and anything else that wanted us dead. But it honestly got worse now that everything’s over. Seeing you alive and well at the end of it all made me realize that there’s something I always wanted and that I could have it if I wanted to, now more than ever. I tried burying it, I tried to call it something else and I was so good at ignoring it until we shared the couch at night again and it came back.

And then you said what you said about your painting and I think that broke me for good.

I had a hard time opening up to the idea of you ever feeling anything for me that went beyond what we already have. Not because I thought you to be incapable of it, I guess I just didn’t want to let myself deserve that. You are so full of love, and you’ve always been so kind to everyone no matter what. I don’t know how you do it. I have never been able to and I probably never will.

Do you get what I’m saying here? I don’t think I deserve it. But that’s different from wanting it. And I think I want it, Will.

The fireworks outside just stopped. It’s one in the morning and my hand hurts, but I need you to know. I think about you so much it gives me hours of headaches. I push it too far sometimes. I deserve it, I think. If anything though, I’m weak and I can’t stop my brain from opening up to the possibility that you loved me. It makes me feel like those guys on TV who are trying to prove that there’s life after death. Admitting to it on paper makes my skin burn. I can’t imagine myself ever facing you saying all of this. Please forgive me.

I miss you. I don’t think you’ll ever love me again, I guess you already sort of told me that. I’m glad we can stay best friends even if nothing I have ever done will do justice to how much kindness  you’ve shown me. The fact that you did not hesitate to call me your friend the moment I asked you, or the patience you showed me when I thought the whole world hated me and I thought I had to hate it back. I still feel like that sometimes. I want you to know that I never once hated you. I never wanted to hurt you.

That’s why I can’t tell you this. I can’t tell you that I think about all the other guys you’ll meet that you’ll want to call your best friend. I think about the ones who want even more from you and that you might want that back. I think about what they say to you, why you like them, how close you let them be with you. I think about the sun spilling on your bed and how you’re not alone in the morning.

I imagine I’m them. I don’t even really know what you look like right now, but I can picture it. It breaks my heart. I have no place in those spaces you have created for yourself, yet here I am selfishly inserting myself in them. I’m always so selfish. I’m sorry.

I don’t need you to do anything, you don’t even have to come to Hawkins once a year if you don’t want to, but I just need you to know. I miss you and I need you. And I love you, Will. I’m in love with you.

Do not let that stop you, it doesn’t have to be a sad thing. I just know it’s a forever kind of feeling. I don’t think I’m ever going to feel this way about anyone else. I don’t want anyone else. I just want you. I’m sorry.

Happy New Year. 1991 should be yours. All yours.

Mike.

Before he knows it, he has read through both of the last pages. He could hardly fight through the thick, syrupy well of tears that flooded his waterline and only trembled loose with a sharp blink as he reached the last sentences.

The first thing that comes is the release: a wrecked breath, something like a whimper.

Will feels displaced from his body and, then again, disastrously attached to it. It doesn’t debate on either fight or flight, it just gives into every sensation that it fires like a sinking ship shooting the night sky with flare guns, hoping there’s still time, still a way to undo. He can’t stop crying. He’s both boat and ocean, unaccepting of each other. Fighting…

Because this is all he has ever wanted, what his hands are currently trembling against, in Mike’s hand writing. That’s why he dares to look up, face wet and torn with shock, facing his best friend. The one who loves him, who has loved him in secret no so differently from how Will knew to love him before it all detonated.

Mike is beyond misty-faced, his sadness a dictator as it forces his face to contort. A solitary tear rains down to his jawbone and his lips are unbuttoned to make way for air. More of it leaves than it enters. The sight of it sets him back immediately. His eyes crinkle and bring a fresh wave of tears. It hurts and Will can’t stop. He can barely use his voice, but he knows he has to. So this moment can’t be forever.

He looks to his lap covered in paper, takes the confession in his clammy hands and raises it in one, weak accusation. His eyes find Mike’s again. “You can’t do this to me, Mike.”

Mike’s eyes close in defeat before he ventures into a small nod, but Will’s not done yet. “You really can’t. After everything…”

His throat is rocked through entirely, wobbling around every syllable until all that’s left is a sludge of splintered noises and words not properly arranged yet. Mike’s name raises spit to the very barrier of his lips, makes him choke. Will can’t believe this is real. And so, so late.

“You can’t, because it took everything in me to leave and to build all of this. I’m going to spend the rest of my life trying to—” He wipes at the corners of his mouth. “—come to terms with it. Make peace with it. It’s so much.”

Mike nods. Will’s not done yet.

“You were the only one who made it worthwhile. I got bullied, you held my hand. I disappear, you find me. I wake up screaming, you’re there. I vomit. You clean.” Will’s eyes feel like they’re about to burst from the sockets. “Even if it hurt me a million times. Even if it got to the point where I felt like I wasn’t even allowed to be in the same room with you.”

Mike breathes an almost-silent Why, but Will shakes his head.

“It had to die and it had to die with you. You staying behind felt like a confirmation.” He shudders, suddenly feeling the cold too. In himself, a brooding force. Winter passed so quick, but then again.

The tears come as they are, endless, too much. The room shakes in the blur of his view. He can only make out Mike’s silhouette.

“I wanted this so badly,” A sob that has been building in his chest blows apart in the globe of his mouth. “I only wanted you. All the time. It never seemed to stop. I never asked for anything else.”

And he truly never did. He stopped believing in good things for himself once Halloween had passed and the Mind Flayer started targeting him relentlessly, making him nothing but a vessel. He wanted to stop being saved. It all boiled down to having to save himself, and Will couldn’t allow himself to wish for impossible things if he wanted to do that. But Mike was there.

He presses the heels of his palms to his eyes and tries to reconstruct himself to something that functions well enough to function. His heart is pumping blood like it never has before. The entire city could probably hear it if it stopped to listen. All the noises Mike makes, the small symphony of fabric moving and a tear-slick face being touched. Mike loves him. Enough for devotion. Enough to travel ten hours to New York with unsent letters in a duffel bag that he insisted should stay hidden. Enough to hand them over. Not enough, too much. It's too much.

Two cool hands wrap around his wrists, detach him from the deep-orange darkness of his skin. The light is raw when it enters his vision. Mike is even worse with bent brows, restlessness. Will can’t help the pang of guilt that shoots through his skull. There is dread, too. Will does not know to understand it, he just lets it enter the room.

“When did it stop?”

When. Did. It. Stop. Will can somehow feel Mike’s heartbeat on his skin again. Maybe it seeks him, maybe because they’ve always understood each other better than anyone could. Will knows the story behind the scar on Mike’s collarbone, he knows there’s a tooth in Mike’s mouth he cannot chew on without a little pain. Mike knows that Will’s hair gets darker in winter, that he transforms, that everything is metamorphosis. He knows the mole on the left side of Will’s hips. He knows his favorite color is yellow, but the pale kind, the one that’s a bit dirty with love. Will knows the long curve of Mike’s spine, knows that he stutters when his voice cannot match up to the tempo of his mind. They both know things that they won’t tell other people because they can’t. Will knows he loved Mike through the entirety of an apocalypse and that he does not regret it. Mike is willing to love him beyond that, long after too. Willing to deny himself anything that doesn’t demand a fight.

They somehow survived. Will also knows he can’t afford to let anything drag down with the mud any longer. He came to New York City to make art. He holds himself when he has to. He finds Mike again, and he finds him.

“That’s the problem. I don’t think it ever did.”

He watches Mike’s face change in real time. His expression blossoms like a tiger lily, a kind of wonder that only comes with survival. Will thinks he’s going to be terrified forever as he moves his hands through the barely-there restraint of Mike’s fingers around his wrists to bind his own hands around Mike’s bicep and forearm, aching to touch. His cries come alive with noise again, and Mike answers back. His hands reach for Will’s shoulders, press against him as if he’s attempting to prove to himself that Will is real.

And Will understands that. Dreams are resilient. They stick, they love to stay unrealized. Will recognizes every little wish he has ever made in Mike’s face, how his body answers with a shiver when Will touches bare skin. Mike’s hands feel their way down to his hands where they rest around his elbows. He peels them back, builds a bowl with Will’s palms, buries himself in it as he leans forward. Will gasps at the tears that paint the cracks of his skin. Mike reaches around to the back of his hands and pushes them further into his face, filling the hollows, the places where he dips.

“I’m sorry,” He cracks, muffled. His breath heats up in the tightness of the space. “I’m sorry, Will. I’m sorry. Please say you mean it.”

Mike’s body builds and he cries out, a small shriek accompanying the violent snap of his composure. Will is both horrified by and immensely drawn to it, to how much he can tell that Mike wants this. “I’m so sorry. I just don’t—-”

Will scoots closer, just a little. Mike quiets when he notices the movement. “Look at me.”

He slowly gathers Mike’s head with his hands and props his body up with it. There is something powerful surging through Will as he holds him like this. He used to be Mike. He used to be the one who needed holding. But he doesn’t think Mike is weak. He no longer believes that he was ever weak either.

“I mean it. I don’t—” Want to? Will’s eyes flutter shut for a handful of seconds as he tries to find his words this time. “I don’t know what to do with myself, Mike. Without you.”

A small bout of broken laughter exits Mike’s mouth and he nods as his iris splinters in the reflection of his wet eyes. “Yeah.”

They look at each other for far too long, and Mike’s gaze travels to his hands, to Will’s collar, to his lips. He drops his hold when he figures Mike is stable enough. Will’s breath grows erratic again, as if he’s falling and he can finally make out the pavement beneath him. It’s not a bad feeling, just new. Just is. Recycled from something that refuses to die.

“Mike,” He pleads through his next exhale. “Please kiss me.”

It feels like nuclear war. So catastrophic, the way Mike does not hesitate to kill the distance between them, his hands finding Will’s face in unspoken repayment as he kisses him whole. They both sigh in tandem, and Will begins to well up with everything again, shaking with a new weep as he pulls Mike closer by the shoulders, tilting his head so he can kiss him more. There is no coordination, no rhythm, just the urge to claw, to eat. Mike’s breath stutters and Will feels it in his throat. He’s suffocating on hunger.

Mike’s even warmer here, the cold can’t find him, and he’s so brutally alive too. Will swims in it, lets his teeth find Mike’s lips, lets his teeth find teeth. He deepens the kiss when he can no longer hold back, a pearl diver, someone who seeks. He gets a groan in response and something slow like honey drips in Will’s stomach. His hand glides over Mike’s shoulder, presses into the heart of his wings and gets him impossibly close. Mike’s entire body convulses, and Will’s mind can’t decide if he’s safe. His heart is bleeding with something good, but it’s still bleeding, so he pulls out, breathless and halfway to asphyxiated as he looks at Mike.

His pupils are wide and black, competing with the sky outside. Every little part of him moves in reaction to Will, understands it is being watched, understands that it wants to be. Will’s going to spend the rest of his life believing that he gets to have this.

He just needs to know something.

“Are you sure?” Will asks.

Mike pants, expression shifting into gentle confusion. He brushes a few of the wild, wispy strands from Will’s forehead. He looks dazed. “What?”

“That you want this. Me.” Will leans into the hand that comes to cup his face again. His brows twist into something sad. “It’s hard work. I’m not…”

Done healing? He’ll never be. Will’s entire life is going to feel like open-heart surgery. He knows this. He doesn’t need to be told by anyone. He also doesn’t have to be told that he wants life in a way that is almost perverted, overripe with longing. He wants to live and he is somehow kissing Mike in a home of his own. His soul rips apart under the weight of that realization.

He just needs to know something. He can’t stand Mike’s concerned expression as the tips of his longest fingers touch the space beneath his ear where he caves.

“I still wake up screaming. It doesn’t happen often, but you know. It does.” He looks at the crack of the sofa between them. He puts his finger there, runs over the line. “Sometimes I’ll spend two days not sleeping after.”

Mike doesn’t say anything yet.

“I get scared when people touch me. Even when I want it. It started after they found me and—” He looks to the ceiling next. “I guess it’s different with you.”

Will’s voice cracks like an egg in his mouth. “I always want you to touch me.”

Mike respires, fixes his posture with eyes that slowly widen.

“I don’t know. There’s going to be days when I don’t want to talk to you. There’s going to be moments where I break just like this. It’s not because I hate you, it’s just who I am.”

His chest rattles, it hurts a bit. “It gets easier, but I don’t think it’ll ever go away. And I don’t want to pretend and wait until you notice. So I’m telling you now because—-”

“Will, I know.” Mike’s voice becomes surprisingly firm. His face is covered in the ghosts of his tears, the skin around his eyes pink and irritated. “I know, I saw all of it.”

Oh. It would be hilarious if it wasn’t so sad. Will tends to forget that his sadness never existed in a vacuum. Mike brought sleeping bags and glasses of water into his bedroom to help him through the night. Mike put his hands to his ears when Will ruptured his vocal chords in possession. They spent nights awake together, reading, Mike’s fingers drumming nonsensical music on Will’s thigh. They didn’t question anything when the sun rose. Will didn’t tell Mike that he’d bury his face in his pillow when he left the room, that it’d haunt him for the rest of the week.

“It gets really bad for me too. I can’t forget any of it.” His gaze softens, melancholic. “I don't think I was ever okay, even before you disappeared. And I can’t even begin to imagine what it’s like for you, but I don’t want to do this by myself. Not without you.”

Will nods, covering Mike’s hands in warm tears. “I feel so alone sometimes. Even with Jonathan here, it’s…”

“Not the same?” Mike’s head falls slightly to the side. The light finds him differently. “I know.”

“It’s like I want you to be the only one who understands. Apart from me.”

I just want you. Car crashes. Ram raids. Nuclear war. Love is all about collision, Will figures. For the longest time being in love with his best friend felt like punishment, the biggest of all he had ever endured. He is reminded of a feeling, it slithers into the space in tip-toes, in care. He used to be eight and loving Mike felt just like this: like he was being fed, like being carried to bed on your birthday under a warm afternoon sun. And he feels it again.

(Pearl diver.)

Mike gasps softly when Will’s lips press against his palm. Will, for one, honestly doesn’t even truly understand what he’s doing, and why he’s doing it. He just wants. “Will.”

He hums, warmth like a cloth on his soul as he kisses again. Mike catches his eyes with new eagerness. It scares Will in the most brilliant way.

“Let me want you, okay?”

Will pulls him back in.

His hand tangles into Mike’s hair while the other seeks the naked skin of his neck. Mike’s mouth opens like curtains do, easy, flowing through it. Something in the color of magenta floods Will’s senses, merges with red, with blue, with the whole palette of his feelings. He recognizes desire as he does everything: in complete clarity, so sharply it cuts.

Mike tastes like their shared cigarette, he tastes like the open waters in Hawkins and there is something that is just him, like how Will thinks his heartbeat must taste. He fixates on the feeling around his hips as Mike shifts so his back finds the sofa and he can sit Will down on his lap. Their bodies tangle, their limbs are awkward and Mike thinks he's able to defy the capacity of his own breath as he doesn't stop kissing him. He rubs circles into Will's thighs. Some of them feel like I'm sorry.

Will leans out eventually to properly catch his breath. Mike runs his hands up and down his legs, head falling lax against the lip of the sofa. When he grows bored of it, he leans forward and kisses the space underneath Will's eyes. It makes him pull together, grip tightening in Mike's hair as he laughs. He kisses his cheek, the mole above his lips, the corner of his lips, the mole again, and again.

His hand finds Will's jaw and he tips his head back a bit so he can find his neck. Will was about to say something, but it extinguishes in his throat and is replaced with a small noise of acceptance. Mike makes his way down, leaves a road of glistening kisses along his throat. He stops and just puts his tongue to Will's pulse point. Will's mouth floods with hot air and he purses his lips as he breathes out. Mike lets go of his jaw, unclasps his lips from skin and puts his forehead there instead. He nuzzles Will's collarbone.

Will looks down at the feather-like bundles of dark hair beneath him and combs through it gently. He puts a kiss to the crown of Mike's scalp. “Move in with me.”

It's a bit unhinged, maybe. Too fast.

“Thank God,” Mike whispers. “Because I just got accepted into NYU and I know nothing about finding apartments here so—”

“You applied for my college?” Will asks, peeling Mike back by hair in a way that he hopes doesn't hurt him. Shock finds him like a tidal wave.

“Yeah, Will. You drive me crazy and I had to get you back into my life somehow.”

“Jesus, Mike.” He brushes his bangs back and presses a kiss to his forehead. “You can't just say stuff like that.”

“Sorry.” He apologizes, genuine. Will shakes his head in dismissal. Mike plays with his earring again. “Are you sure it's okay? I feel like I'd take up too much space.”

“My bed's big enough.”

“And your brother won't mind?”

“He's barely here anyway. And he wants me to be happy.”

“I don't think he's a big fan of me.”

“Well, I want you here.”

“Okay.”

“Bedroom?”

“Yeah.”

They get up, a bit disoriented and fingers barely hooked together. Will takes a sip of his cherry coke and he puts the can to Mike's mouth so he can have the rest. A drop escapes and trails down his jaw. He laughs, then he kisses it away and he kisses the vertical bone of his neck. They travel through the living room. Will clicks the light off and Mike's shadowy figure makes him excited to see him again, in fullness. He pushes the bedroom door open, urging Mike's head down once they're inside to kiss him again.

They stumble backwards until Will's calves hit the bed and he carefully climbs into it while Mike searches the switch on his bedside lamp. Once the light returns, Mike exists in smears of soft orange. He looks perfect for this space. He works his way into the gap between Will's legs, grabs a handful of his hair to prop his head up and kisses him again.

Will goes with it, puts himself on two elbows and meets him. They finally find a rhythm. Mike is a little fast, but it makes sense for them. Will wants it to be inundating too. Wants it to take him as water would. For the first time since he moved here, it feels truly sacred.

It is the ultimate homage to the boy who envisioned this during long drives home, who deserved to bleed on his own terms. Will smiles into the kiss.

When they're truly spent, and it gets too worked up, Will pushes him away by his chest with no malice at all. Mike goes with it, holds him by his wrist with one hand as he sits up and just admires Will. It makes him bashful, how incessant it is.

“Okay.” Will drawls in obvious embarrassment. Mike's other hand runs over and between his pliant fingers.

“I'm sorry, you're just—” He jerks his head to deal with the mess of his hair. His forever enemy. “I don't know.”

“You don't have to know.” Will frees his hand, lets it fall to his side, then lets it trail up to Mike's waist. “Or you could write me a letter.”

Mike laughs, flushing. Then his face lights up. “Wait.”

He gets up from the bed, tugs his pullover down again. Will moves to the headboard, placing himself against the pillows as he lazily puts his hands behind his head. A merciful stretch trickles through the skin that hugs his ribs.

Mike finds his jeans in the sea of his clothes and fishes something out of the front pocket. Paper, once again. Will cocks a brow in amusement.

The mattress molds after Mike's body as he splays himself down sideways at the opposite end. He stretches his arm out to Will with the page in between two fingers. Will refuses it.

“Read it to me.”

Mike's mouth goes slack before it grows into one, narrow line and he gives a quick nod, unfolding the paper. “I was fourteen when I wrote you this. I actually planned on giving it to you in Lenora, but then everything that happened happened and I was just carrying it around with me until it felt too late.”

Will lets that flood his soul, that Mike always tried honesty. That he wanted to admit to things. That the world has made him feel like he can't.

(He remembers what it felt like to share a breakfast table with Ted. He remembers the nervous taps of feet underneath whenever Mike was asked something. He remembers gliding his hand over. He remembers being warned with just a look that he couldn't, not here. He remembers the betrayal of it, that Mike could perceive his touch as something worth hiding.)

“Must've been one hell of a letter.” Will says, to lighten the mood. Mike's lips quirk nervously as he scans the content.

“It's just very honest.” Mike bites a part of his lower lip. “And messy.”

“That's good.”

Mike nods absent-mindedly. “I wanted to give it to you in case I'd chicken out and not give you any of the others. So you'd have something.”

Will finds the possibility of that too terrifying to joke about it. “Okay.”

“Okay.” Mike echoes, clearing his throat. “February twenty-second, 1985.”

Will leans further into his pillow.

“‘Hey Will, it's me Mike.’” Mike stops, scoffs. “That's so stupid. Who else would it be?”

Will kicks Mike in the stomach, softly. “Leave him alone.”

After feigning annoyance, he continues reading, one of his hands sliding into Will's pant leg to hold him there.

“‘If you're reading this, we just spent a week together in your new home and we hopefully had a chance of hanging out as we did before. As best friends, who don't live on opposite sides of the country.’”

Mike looks at him for a second. Will gives him a sympathetic smile.

“‘I'm sorry for not calling as much and if I made you feel like I forgot about you. I didn't. It's just that I'm trying my best with El, and our DM is merciless. I have nightmares about our campaign. It's coming to an end soon and I would hate to lose.’”

Mike swallows. “‘I don't want to make excuses. I just wanted to tell you that I'm also sorry if I was ever mean or condescending towards you in the week we've spent together. After what happened last summer, and honestly everything before that, I haven't really been feeling like myself. What does that even mean, anyway. I don't even know what myself is. But something doesn't feel right and that's why I might get weird with you.’”

Will almost says his name, as if he can still console a fourteen year-old Mike now. But he lets him continue.

“‘I don't want you to worry for me. I have always felt different and being different is our thing, so maybe I should just grow up and make peace with it. I'm glad you're in a good place. I'm glad you can be happy without worrying about monsters and assholes in lab coats. I mean, they're all gone, and it's not like you really had a choice with moving, but at least you're somewhere sunny and cool.’”

Something in Mike stirs, Will catches it like the flicker of a bulb.

“‘Probably a stupid question, but do you feel normal now? Now that it's all over and you don't have to run and scream and kick all the time and you can do all the fun and boring stuff you want to do. It's just that I get this feeling like I can't do it. Move on and be normal. I feel like it's going to happen again, and I'm scared but mostly I'm almost anticipating it?’”

They both stop to hold their breaths. Mike mouths a Sorry. Then he reads, and his past self does it for him. “‘Sorry, that's an awful thing to say. I don't want bad things to happen to any of us. Definitely not you. I don't want anything bad to happen to you ever again.’”

“‘But I guess being chased by interdimensional monsters distracted us from the rest. The Upside Down existing always made me feel like our world wasn't as crazy and awful as it is. Or can be, I don't  know. But now we don't deal with that and I have to pretend it's okay. Mike The Brave literally means nothing. I'm not brave like that, Will. So sorry if I get mean, I just don't know what I'm doing. I can't tell you what's wrong with me. Maybe it's a Hawkins problem.’”

His voice drops with the last words. “‘I miss you a lot. You would love Hellfire. You would love our campaign and you'd be real good at it. See you in summer. Hopefully. Mike.’”

Mike huffs out air like he has just received a blow to the gut, placing the sheet of paper down and rubbing at his eyes.

“You were so scared.” Is the very first thing Will says, sitting up and fishing Mike's hand out to hold it. “Who knows?”

“Just Nancy. I was drunk and I called her. I spent the entire night trying not to choke on my own spit from crying.”

Will runs his hand up to his shoulder, gives it a squeeze. Mike lies down fully on his side and reaches out to play with the hem of Will's shirt. He doesn't look up at him.

“The first time I realized it was at the snow ball. I wanted to dance with you, even though I hate dancing. I just dismissed it as me being overprotective.”

“You made me dance with a girl who called me ‘Zombie Boy’ right in my face.”

“I panicked.” Mike laughs weakly. Then he stills. Will wants to gather him up like a string of yarn and hold him in the palm of his hands, this boy, this man who's taller than him, who spent every year of his life running from himself.

“I truly realized that this could be real for me when you told us you're gay. Like, I'd seen it in movies. And I've read it in books and comics and all of that. But I never thought it could be something I could have. Be.”

“Until me.”

“Until you.” Mike falls onto his back again and puts his fingers to Will's face like a child pointing at stars. Will puts his lips to his fingertips and watches the smile break out on Mike's face. “Always you. Always us.”

Hawkins breeds ghosts. But Mike's not one of them, not when he tugs Will down to smother his face with open-mouthed kisses, not when he flips through Will's college portfolio and can't help commenting on every piece. Not when he undresses once again as they stand spine to spine in the bathroom, brushing teeth, with foamy kisses that keep appearing on Will's back.

Not when he's alive, breathing into Will's neck as he sleeps against him, in the heart of New York, though they could be anywhere and it wouldn't change anything. Always you. Always us.

Words turn into oaths. Dawn bleeds into dusk. He watches Mike's body lose form in the heavy sunlight spilling from the window he's standing in front of, the one that bounces from the gray towers outside. Will is going to be terrified forever, but he welcomes it. It's part of the life he desperately fought for, the life that is all his and that can shatter worlds as much as it can rebuild them.

And he rebuilds. He gets up and joins him in the sun.