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Micheal Wheeler died November 6 1993.
Ten years after Will Byers had gone missing and 10 hours after he’d said goodbye to him for the last time.
He’d taken his revolver from where it had sat in his safe, nestled away in case of an emergency. He had never quite shaken the sense of dread he’d gotten from the Upside down.
He never would.
He was a far cry from the seventeen year old boy who’d never held a gun before, who had watched his sister wield a weapon whose destruction he couldn’t quite comprehend yet.
In a world of monsters, both human and other, the metallic sheen of the gun pierced through his psyche. He had a connection with this unfeeling metal, just as he had a connection to death, just like they all had. To wield the power of death in his hands was still incomprehensible despite the carnage he’d seen, the death he’d witnessed first hand.
Yet death, to him, had always seemed like an inevitability, he’d spent so much time running from it he’d nearly forgotten why. Fighting a war he’d never asked to be drafted in, a soldier, an unwilling witness to death, brutality. He witnessed the massacre and desecration of others, watched as the pain blended into one mass. As flesh became one, as people were reduced to parts, he continued forward. Because he had to, because he was the heart.
The heart had stopped working, ceasing its endless rhythm and he'd grown fatigued a long time ago, a little boy fighting forces beyond his control for a third of his life.
It was in the same town of Hawkins that he’d never truly escaped from that he wrote his last story, an homage to his life if you will.
He told of a boy lost in a world he couldn’t quite understand, surrounded by monsters, broken down by the crushing weight of that same world which had never accepted him, of friends who made it bearable. He wrote of another boy who lived in fear of what was out there for him, of a world that had tried to hurt him before, and would hurt him again. Of all the endless things that would have been, could have been, had he known how to say it all back then. Of love he never let himself have.
He left this story on his desk, beside all of his unfinished works, writing he’d never complete. Next to a letter from the boy he loved, news of an engagement.
He grabbed the pistol, the cool weight of the metal in his palm reminding him of what awaited him, the cold release of death.
He was twenty seven when he put a gun in his mouth, felt it press against his tongue, bitter, heavy. A finger wraps around the trigger as the gun rests in his mouth. It feels like the would be kiss he could have gotten from his lover when he’d had the chance. The warmth accompanying his surrender, an embrace he could have had.
He thought of the two boys in his story, hoping that there is some world out there where things were different. Where he’d made the right choice all those years ago, extended a hand and told him the truth, for once. Where he’d been nicer, unafraid.
The television set in his living room crackled loudly, like a time forgotten.
Like a girl he’d failed.
The moment stretched out in one infinite second, the difference between life and death.
He pulls the trigger.
The gun going off is a loud reverberating sound, one he doesn’t get to hear. His brains coating the wall behind him, the shitty wallpaper of the even shittier trailer. Like some morbid abstract art piece. His body crumpling forward as the light leaves his eyes, he’s dead in seconds.
He's alone when he dies, just like he has been for nearly a decade now. Alone in the place he’d always wanted to escape from, resembling his father more and more each day. His friends got out, moved on.
He’d always felt like a part of him died that day Will had gone missing, and again when he jumped off that cliff, and again and again each time chipping away another piece of him until the boy he’d killed wasn’t quite him at all.
The phone rings but there is no one to get it, someone pounds on the door but nobody lives in this house anymore.
Micheal Wheeler remains dead.
It’s two days later when he is found, his slumped over body pale, he no longer resembles himself anymore. His jaw had been decimated by the impact of the bullet as it tore through his skull.
It’s his mother and father who find him, their little boy, not so little any more, gone. His mother holds him in her arms like she did when he was so little. When he’d sit on her lap and tell her stories, her little boy had always had such a beautiful imagination.
She too has been a witness to such terrible, excruciating violence, to the gore of a blood thirsty monster. He doesn’t resemble her baby anymore, becoming disfigured in death, but still she holds him. She holds him because she knows it will be the last time she can, the last time she can run her fingers through his soft hair like she’d done when he had nightmares, and she’d kissed his tear-ridden cheeks and promised him she’d protect him. She hadn’t known the monster under his bed was real. Hadn’t known she needed to protect him from himself.
She does not find the note he left.
Each of his friends receives a phone call that day. Asked to return to Hawkins one last time, the heart was gone and they all felt it. That hollowness in their chests, the world felt the loss of Micheal Wheeler, a piece missing.
It rained the day of the funeral, the sermon was being held in a church, more for his parents than anything else.
Will Byers steps inside, a rush of air leaving his lungs, being here made it more real. From here he can see the casket, its lid tightly shut. Just a few days ago he’d spoken to Mike, apparently the day he’d taken his own life, they’d talked about his wedding, how unfortunate it was that he couldn’t legally do so just yet, how he had hope for the future. He remembered now how Mike’s breath had drawn in at the word future, something akin to a gasp, how he heard something was off as he said his goodbyes. How Mike had uttered the words
“I love you…”
Before the line went dead. He’d known something was different but he couldn’t be sure. He didn’t say anything, just slipped into bed beside his fiance trying to find comfort in sleep that would never come.
He walked up to the casket where the dead body of his once closest friend now rested, wiping tears from his face as he spoke four words to him, a response to the last conversation they’d ever had.
“I love you too…”
He would never hear it, words spoken into a void, directed at a corpse who could not appreciate what they both longed to say in life.
They’d both love each other until the day they died.