Chapter Text
The first time he met Mike was an accident.
It wasn’t like he had been avoiding him, especially not when there was trouble around. Mike needed protecting just as much as everybody else. Will had just been trying to move fast, swinging in and out of the picture before Mike could catch a good look at him.
That was the only backup plan he really had to keep Mike from finding out his identity. Mike Wheeler, who had known the sound of his sobs through the crackles of a radio speaker at twelve years old.
If anybody was going to crack that Will was Spiderman, it was him.
Things had been getting bad again for the past couple of months, even with the gate solidly closed. Everything had gone back to normal for two and a half years; for everyone except for Will. And now it was up to him to keep it that way for everyone else.
He had hoped, at least, that he would not have to save Mike from anything more than bullies stalking him home after school. But that wish required a level of luck that Will didn’t seem to have anymore, and with a full-body shock that he had come to recognise as danger, he saw a flash as if through someone else’s eyes; dark street, Mike’s head down and his hands in his pockets, swirling ashes and darkness piling on the pavement. It was all he could do to pull the mask over his face and swing off under the streetlights, arm outstretched.
He didn’t think about the fact that it was Mike until he was arcing through the dark sky with one arm around him, feeling his panicked breath against his neck and fighting to keep his focus on the creature forming on the side of the street, dark flecks and sticky fluids coming up from storm grates in the darkness.
Something had been wrong in Hawkins lately. Not in the way it had been a few years ago, with missing children and walls tearing open filled with dark vines and thick claws, but wrong nonetheless. Will hadn’t known what it was or where to look for it until after he’d donned the mask.
And that was when this—thing started to appear. Blood and ashes and goop coming together to make a monster, a giant fleshy spider with dripping limbs and roaring fangs. It prowled in the darkness, when most of the residents of Hawkins couldn’t see more than a few feet in front of them, and Will prowled silently after it.
Not the monster he was used to, but a monster nonetheless, and these days, it was him who needed to fight. Why else did he have these abilities, the ones that he desperately called powers, the ones that he needed to believe were there for a reason?
The monster formed to face him as he landed on top of the nearest building, Mike still in his arms, and roared into the night.
“What the fuck,” Mike breathed, his feet hitting the roof, arms still half around Will’s neck. “Oh my God—what the—”
Will didn’t have time to waste on him, not now that he was out of the action and no longer in imminent danger. He swung back on the same streetlamp that had propelled him there, feet out before him aiming right for the gaping maw of the creature.
Will was not like any Spiderman he had read about in his comics before. He didn’t think it mattered; he was still more Spiderman than any person he’d known in real life.
But Will Byers had never been bitten by a spider.
The truth was, Will drew his powers from a far bigger, far more dangerous threat. Spider-shaped, sure, hulking and massive and, hopefully, sealed away in its own dimension forever.
This dripping minion, however, with its matching spindly legs of more goop than flesh, had been sealed on the wrong side of the divide. Leftover ash and poison from the Upside Down, stuck here and regaining enough sentience to gun for the healing town just years after they thought they’d escaped.
Will wasn’t sure if the Mind Flayer was still in control of it, or if it’d just developed their own agenda in the years they’d been left here.
It didn’t matter. He was the only one who could destroy it.
Perched under a streetlight, legs wet with blood from the impact, Will clung to the metal and extended his free arm towards the monster. Black vines, thick and strong, shot forth from his hand, wrapping themselves around the creature’s long, spidery legs. It roared as the vines pulled taut, tripping it to the ground, and Will swung for it again, landing solidly on the goop that made up its face. It bubbled and howled beneath him, and he tightened the vines further, constricting it until it broke apart into goop once more.
The truth was, Will wasn’t really a Spiderman at all. His powers had been forged in the dark, festering evil of the Upside Down; the power of its vines, his vision in the darkness, the way that he sensed those horrible dark particles from anywhere across this idyllic, naïve town.
Will had stolen something from the Mind Flayer. But Spiderman was easier to stomach, so he donned the web-patterned mask and swung from buildings like the hero from his comics, and allowed the people around him to put together the rest.
Nobody had to know where he had really come from.
Speaking of people around him, Will looked up from the goop of the creature as it further liquefied, bubbling back towards the storm drain. Across the street, silhouetted on the top of the building, Mike was still watching him, half collapsed in his awe or fear.
If only he hadn’t put him up so high, Will thought bitterly, stepping away from the gross amalgamation of creature. He could simply nod at him and swing away into the night, no risk of exposing his identity.
But Mike needed rescuing just one more time, and Will knew that more than anybody else, he was going to have questions.
“What the hell was that?” Mike breathed, the second Will’s feet touched back down on the roof. “That—? Was—? Are you hurt?”
Will followed his gaze down to the soaking of blood on his lower legs, suit stained from blue to red by the gore of the horrible creature. He grimaced at the thought of washing it out when he snuck back home, but shook his head to signal to Mike that he was alright.
Mike was still looking at him with chest heaving and eyes blown wide, glancing across the street and back like he had any hope of piecing together what had just happened.
“What was that?” he asked again, voice breaking. “It just… came from nowhere… bubbled up out of the storm drain… how long has it been here? Is that what you’re here for?”
Will didn’t answer his questions. If anybody in this town had a chance of recognising him by his voice alone, it was Mike, and he wasn’t ready to risk that. Not yet.
He offered Mike his arm, and again Mike looked back and forth between it and him, like he was waiting for something else. When Will didn’t say anything, Mike seemed to catch his breath a little, taking hold of his arm and stepping closer.
“Oh,” he said, awkwardly situating himself against him, all long limbs and poking elbows and shoulders. This was so much worse without the speed and adrenaline of imminent attack. Will didn’t have anything to think about but the warmth of his body, the heat of his breath against his cheek.
Will held onto him enough not to drop him midair as he swung back down to the street, aiming the other direction now. He’d already lost his chance of getting home without talking to Mike; might as well walk him home safely while he was at it.
He tried not to think about the warmth of him when they touched down on the pavement, when Mike stepped away from him and he realised that was the closest they had been to each other in the last year, at least.
This was fine. The distance between them was the same.
He couldn’t be Will right now. He was Spiderman.
He still couldn’t stop noticing Mike’s eyes on him the whole way home, hands in his pockets and mouth slightly agape as he scanned him, head to toe, again and again. Taking in the blue and gold suit with its patches and bloodstains, the seam of the mask against his throat, his hands from which strong black vines had come.
Will wondered if he had noticed, or if in the dark they still looked just like spiderwebs.
“That—weird stuff happens in Hawkins sometimes,” he said eventually, unable to remain silent for long. He had always done enough talking for the both of them.
His hair fell in his eyes, and he shook his head as if to get rid of it. It didn’t work, only tousling it in front of his face. He had been growing it out longer these past few years.
Will liked it. He tried not to.
“Or it used to. We—I thought it was over now. But that… has that been going on the whole time? The whole time you’ve been here?”
The whole time he’d been Spiderman, Will corrected in his head. Of course Mike assumed that he had come here from somewhere else, that no one else in this town was strong or incredible enough to be a masked crusader.
To his question, Will shrugged, then nodded. Not always like that, but always something.
Mike seemed to understand, lapsing back into silent thoughts and heavy breathing.
“It looked like that thing will be back,” he warned, after another few minutes of walking.
Will would have laughed, told him that it wasn’t his first day here. Instead, he only released a little breath of amusement. He saw in Mike’s eyes that he had heard the rest anyways. Will had never needed to talk for Mike to understand him; he had thought it was something special, something them, but apparently, it was the same for Spiderman, too.
“You can’t kill it,” he said. Not as an accusation, but an insight. “You can only subdue it. We—you’ll need more than you to take whatever that is down. You’ll need a team.”
On some level, deeper and hidden away in the depths of him, Will knew that. He had been kicking these things into storm drains for months now, and it never seemed to slow them down any.
But he knew who his team would be, and he couldn’t ask that of them, not again. He couldn’t look his mother in the eyes after she’d stormed the Upside Down looking for him and burned the last of that creature out of him. Tell her that she hadn’t won, it was still here in Hawkins and, worse, still inside him, permanently and powerfully intertwined.
He imagined everybody sitting down in a ring around him, telling them they’d all failed. We didn’t kill the monster. We only made another one, and it’s coming for everyone now, not just me.
No. This was Will’s mess to clean up, for once.
If it hadn’t been Mike on his stupid late-night walk that he insisted on taking to brainstorm ideas for stories and campaigns, he could have fought this thing into the ground without anybody knowing.
He didn’t tell Mike any of this. He let the mask do his talking for him as he pretended to follow him on a path he knew like the back of his hand.
Mike didn’t say anything else, merely walking with his hands in his pockets and his bangs obscuring his eyes, turning his head to watch Spiderman (not very discreetly) with every step that they walked.
“Uh, this is me,” he said when they reached the Wheeler’s driveway. Will stopped, not sure how to finish this without being able to say anything like he usually would.
Mike seemed similarly lost, swinging his arms and bouncing on the balls of his feet. It reminded Will of the difference in height with every swing; eye level with his mouth, then his chin, then his mouth again. His hair bounced slightly along with him, swinging dark and lovely like the worst of Will’s vines around his face.
“Thanks for saving my life,” he managed. “I’ll, uh. Spread the good word, huh?”
He was adorable when he didn’t know what to say. Will needed to leave.
Equally unsure of himself, Will flipped him a tiny salute, and Mike beamed. Will could still see that smile in the back of his mind as he turned back to the streetlights and swung away into the night.
“Guys, meeting in the AV room before school. This is a code grey.”
Will groaned at loud at the crackle of his walkie talkie. A bleary-eyed glance at the clock on his bedside table confirmed his suspicions: 6.02am. Mike must have set an early alarm as soon as Will had dropped him home last night.
It hadn’t been one of his most gruelling nights, in all fairness. He’d certainly taken a couple of beatings in the past before he figured out the most effective way to take down the monster.
Unfortunately, un-beaten as he was, he was still stained with an ungodly amount of that foul blood, and had spent hours scrubbing his legs and soaking his suit after doing a final once-over of the city sometime around midnight. (He was certainly coming to understand why the original spiderman had chosen a predominantly-red suit.)
He’d also spent too much of that time thinking about the warmth of Mike’s breath on his neck as he swung with his arms around him, Mike’s smile when he had left him at home, wondering what Mike had been thinking.
All in all, not his best night for sleep.
He contemplated switching the walkie talkie off and staying in bed until his mom sent Hopper to forcibly drag him out, but he knew he had to be there for Mike’s stupid meeting.
He just had to sit silently and pretend it was all new to him when in reality, he’d been trying to deal with it before the rest of them could find out for months.
It took a monumental effort to drag himself out of bed, the daylight unfathomably bright against his exhausted eyes. He could feel Jonathan watching him closely as his mom pestered him about how late he’d been up and why he was up so early.
“Mike called a meeting in the AV room before school,” he mumbled into his bowl of cereal, half-mushed as he stirred it in aimless circles. “Uh—it’s a DnD thing, I think. We’ve got a new campaign coming up, now that Max finally agreed to try a session.”
“You’re not biking to school like this,” she fussed, poking at his face like she was checking for a temperature. “You look like you haven’t slept in a week.”
“I’m fine. I’ll take a nap after school.”
“That isn’t normal either!” She sat down at the table, chewing on her fingernails.
Will hated to worry her, even if her worry was infuriating at the best of times. He wasn’t a possessed little kid anymore, even if he knew that was what she still saw when she looked at him.
“Are you sure you’re going to bed on time? Maybe we should try and get you a sleep study.”
Will groaned. “Mom. I don’t need a sleep study. I’m a growing boy, I’m just a little tired, that’s all.”
She didn’t look convinced. “You’re not having nightmares again?”
“No, I’m not.” (Will’s dreams didn’t make very much sense to him anymore. Sometimes he was worried that instead of memories, they were prophecies.) “I’m fine. I’ll just take a nap when I get home from school.”
She still wasn’t assuaged, and stood from the table to cross to the phone on the wall. “I still don’t want you biking. Let me call Hopper before he leaves, he can pick you up and take you in with Jane.”
Will rolled his eyes, but decided that was a perfect place to leave the argument and said nothing more.
Hopper pestered him about it as soon as he slid into the backseat of the car, much to his chagrin. “What’s the matter, kid? You haven’t been sneaking out and going to parties, have you?”
“No,” Will muttered, sure that the idea was ridiculous to even suggest. The way Hopper glanced at him in the rearview mirror wasn’t quite humorous.
“I know school takes up a lot of your time right now, but you still need to get your sleep when you can,” he said, backing out of the Byers’ driveway. “Try some, I don’t know, warm tea or something. Something that helps you relax.”
“Yeah, okay,” Will mumbled. He leaned his head back against the seats and tried not to let his eyes slip closed.
The school was mostly empty when they arrived. It was just the kids outside the cafeteria waiting for the free soggy toast they dished out in the mornings and a couple of the newspaper kids milling about the hallways as they walked with quick steps towards the AV room.
“Do you know what Mike wanted to talk about?” Jane asked. Their steps fell into time as they walked, left, right, left, right.
Will swallowed hard. Thought of the monster under his feet, blood and gore up to his knees, Mike staring in terrified awe and moving to wrap his arms around his neck. “Not sure.”
Mike and Lucas were already in the AV room when the two of them arrived, Mike explaining something animatedly to Lucas where he perched on the edge of the table in front of him. He stood up when the door opened, his words cutting off in midair like he was afraid of being found out. He had the same look in his eyes as he’d had when he’d seen the monster last night.
“Shut the door,” he urged, serious. “Where’s Dustin and Max?”
“I don’t know,” Will muttered, covered by the sound of Lucas saying, “It’s not even eight, dude, they’re still in bed. Where Will should be right now. Are you all right, man?”
Will was indignant about being called out again, replying with, “I’m fine,” a little sharper than he meant to. It shut the questions down, at least, and he and Jane pulled out chairs around the table to look expectantly at Mike.
Mike swivelled to look at them before they even sat down. Will felt prickles on his skin, like he was about to be called out much more personally.
But Mike didn’t have any recognition in his eyes when he looked at him. He was just Will Byers, that weird art kid from the other side of town, and there was somebody far greater on Mike’s mind.
“He’s real, you know,” he said, apropos of nothing. “Spiderman. And he really does have powers.”
Will’s poker face was well-practiced by now. He was careful not to react.
Lucas made a sound like a tired grunt as he leaned back against his chair across the table. “I can’t believe how fixated on this you are.”
“I’m not fixated—”
“Fixated on what?”
The four of them jumped as the door opened, admitting Dustin to the room. Lucas cursed violently under his breath, one hand on his chest, while Mike sat up on the desk and hissed frantically, “Shut the door—this is a code-grey emergency, we can’t let anybody overhear what we’re talking about—”
“Relax, man! It’s, like, seven thirty. Anybody who is here this early doesn’t care what people are talking about.” He pulled out a chair, swinging his backpack under the table as he sat down. “What’s the big deal?”
“Mike went on a date with Spiderman,” Lucas said tiredly, leaning back in his seat.
Mike spluttered his outrage. “It wasn’t a date, you idiot, he saved me—we didn’t even talk—”
“Woah, wait, Spiderman? Like, for real?” Dustin sat up in his chair, eyes wide.
“Yeah, the Hawkins Spiderman. The one with the blue and gold suit.”
“Well, duh.” Dustin shifted slightly, and Will could practically feel the excited energy radiating off of him. “Did you get to swing with him? On his webs?”
“Oh, he swung with him alright,” Lucas said, batting his eyelashes obnoxiously. “He picked him up like a princess and carried him away into the night—”
“Guys, believe it or not, Spiderman isn’t actually the point of this story,” Mike said, glaring. His cheeks were flushed pink with embarrassment. “Where the hell is Max? I really don’t want to have to explain this a dozen separate times.”
It was hardly the first conversation Will had sat through, having to pretend that his interest in this ‘Hawkins Spiderman’ was the same as everyone else’s and not infinitely more personal.
While he’d managed to contain the monster problem from the public as much as possible over the last several months, he’d been spotted by passers-by more than once now. The rumours had spread fast and wide, and of course the Party—nerds that they were—had been more interested than anybody else.
He may not have been much of an actor, but he knew how to stay quiet and unnoticed. He knew not to flinch when someone commented on him being a hack or a wannabe or an escapee from an insane asylum with a suit and some fabric paint. He had plenty of practice in growing thicker skin by now.
Zombie boy. Spiderman. It was all the same.
By the time Max arrived, her hair unbrushed and mouth full of curses for waking her up so early, Lucas and Dustin were vibrating with frustrated energy, waiting to hear the full story. They directed her to sit down with overlapping whispers, and Max rolled her eyes as she pulled out a chair and sat down on it backwards.
“What’s the big deal, Wheeler?” she asked, scowling and tired. “You better not have dragged us out of bed this early to talk about your stupid campaign.”
“Screw the campaign,” Mike said. “This is real life, this is an emergency. There’s evil back in Hawkins again, for real.”
“Like, from the Upside Down?” she asked, brow furrowed.
“Maybe,” said Mike.
“I shut the gate,” Jane whispered. She sounded uncertain, afraid. Mike turned to face her from where he was sitting on the edge of the table.
“I know. But maybe there’s another gate, or something got in another way. Whatever it is, it isn’t from this world. And Spiderman isn’t even the beginning of it,” Mike warned, levelling a serious look at all of them.
Max made an incredulous noise. “What does Spiderman have to do with anything?”
“Mike got to swing around the city with him last night,” Dustin whispered.
“He rescued me last night when a huge fucking monster bubbled up out of a storm grate,” Mike corrected him hotly. “Call me crazy, but I think the massive, bloody creature living under the footpaths is a bigger problem here than me getting to swing around with Spiderman.”
“Wait, hang on a minute.” Max shook her head, eyebrows furrowed and hair frizzing into a curtain around her. “What kind of monster? And what do you mean bubbling out of a storm grate?”
Mike explained the creature from last night to them, even if he was limited to what little his eyes had seen in the dark street. He described the spindly legs snapping under the swing of Will’s webs, like it was something out of a D&D game, the way it seemed to melt back into the ground crushed under his feet, still bubbling and squealing as it dissolved.
The others went silent after the description, sharing concerned looks around the table. Will had been fighting these things for too long; he’d forgotten how horrible they truly were to behold.
“That doesn’t sound like anything we saw last time,” Lucas said slowly. “I thought you were going to say it was, like, a spider version of the demos.”
“Why, because Spiderman was there?” Dustin asked. “That doesn’t make any sense. Spiderman doesn’t fight spiders. He just got his powers from one. Usually he fights—”
“Guys, that’s not the point,” Max snapped irritably, holding up her palms to shut them both up. “Mike’s right, this is a big deal.”
Both her and Mike looked somewhat disgusted by the shape of those words in her mouth—Mike’s right—but neither of them argued with it this time. They really did have bigger things to worry about.
“What does this have to do with the Upside Down?” Lucas asked.
Will bit his tongue, the answer right on the end of it. The little black particles that follow it everywhere. The ones we’ve only seen in one other place.
The fact that they’re connected to me, and I still haven’t escaped.
Mike hadn’t seen them in the dark. He didn’t have an answer to Lucas’ question. “Where else could it have come from? It sure as hell isn’t from our world. Even in a version of it where Spiderman is real.”
“Is he real?” Max asked, leaning forward with her elbows on the back of the chair. “Did you see him shooting his webs? Did they come from his hand, or, like, a machine?”
“Actually, most versions of Spiderman in the comics don’t have organic web-generating powers, either—”
“There was no machine!” Mike interrupted. “And I wasn’t spending the whole time staring at Spiderman, alright?” (Will remembered being watched by him the whole way home and said nothing.) “There are much bigger problems here. Like the fact that even after Spiderman defeated that thing, it was still alive, just hiding out for the next time. We need to figure out how to take these things out before they get too strong for him. Who knows how many of them there even are.”
Just one, Will didn’t say. But he was right, Spiderman couldn’t defeat it. It only laid low for a couple of days and came back bigger than last time.
“So, you want Dustin’s cricket bat and Lucas’ wrist rocket?” Max scoffed. Both of them piped up on either side of her, arguing with her point, but she spoke over them. “If Spiderman doesn’t have a shot, why the hell would we? And why would he want us meddling in it?”
“He needs us,” Mike insisted. Will stomped down on the warmth fluttering inside his chest. “Even if he doesn’t know it yet. Besides, he can be the muscle, and we can be the brains. We need to work out where that thing came from and what it’s up to. It could be connected to the Mind Flayer—and we’re the only ones with the knowledge about that.”
Will didn’t tell him that Spiderman, actually, had been there too, more than most of them.
“What do you want us to do?” Dustin asked. “Just walk around at night looking for clues?”
Mike shrugged. “There might be something in the lab, even if there isn’t anybody there anymore. We could go take a look around.”
“No,” Jane said. Everybody looked at her. “It’s dangerous in there. Even empty.”
“It was a lot more dangerous when we were in there two years ago,” Mike pointed out. “Nancy has guns.”
“I’m sorry, are we roping everybody else back into this again, or are you planning to steal firearms from your very paranoid sharpshooter sister?”
Mike didn’t answer that, still looking at Jane. “Hey, I know you have a lot of bad memories in that place,” he said. “You don’t have to go back there. The rest of us can do that, and you can scope from the outside, or something. You still have your powers, you can keep us safe in case Spiderman doesn’t show up.”
He wouldn’t, Will realised, if they dragged him into this mission with them. Suddenly, the idea of the six of them meddling in this sounded worse than ever.
“I don’t know if I’ll be able to sneak out,” he said quickly, his stomach roiling. “My, uh—my mom keeps a pretty close eye on me still, after everything. Maybe I can monitor from town or something.”
Nobody even glanced at him. Believable, expected. Will wasn’t a hero like the others.
“Yeah, sure. You and Jane can check out the streets and the rest of us can get into the lab.”
“That’s not what I—”
“This still isn’t—”
The bell rang, followed by distant shouts and footfalls down the hallway. Will’s heart dropped into his stomach as everybody moved to stand up, stooping over to grab backpacks and jackets on their way to the door.
“Meet back here at lunch again!” Mike called as Max reached for the door handle. “Don’t tell anybody what was said in here, it’s—”
“Yeah, yeah, classified. Thanks, Wheeler.”
Everybody filed out into the hallway, the heavy door crashing shut every time somebody let go of the handle. Mike held it open as Will and Jane collected their things, and Will did his best not to look him in the eyes as he filed out, muttering a thanks under his breath.
He heard footsteps beside him as he made his way down the hallway, and looked up to see Jane at his side like usual, lips pursed as she stared at her feet on the sticky tile of the hallway.
“You okay?” he asked her softly. She startled slightly as she glanced up at him, then smiled, not quite well enough to fool him.
“Yes,” she said. “Thank you.”
He wasn’t sure if he believed her, but he didn’t know how much he could say without exposing his own concerns. She linked arms with him, and neither of them said anything else as they made their way towards geography.