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It had taken Will a while to notice it, to be honest.
In his defense, it’s not really like it is in the movies - dead people aren’t gory, creepy apparitions just hanging around all the time. For the most part, they just look like regular people, near-indistinguishable save for the occasionally-outdated clothes and an almost imperceptible sheen to them, a faint glow that you can’t really see unless you know to look for it.
Which Will hadn’t. Not at first, anyway. After the Upside Down was destroyed, he and El had both lost all their powers - or so it seemed - so he’d kind of assumed that was the end of his supernatural experience. Assumed, and hoped, to be honest. He’d gone through the rest of high school the first year of college spook-free, save for his night terrors, but nightmares aren’t quite so bad when you’re not living them out when you’re awake anymore. Plus, there was Mike. He helped.
There had been little signs, here and there, starting a couple months into college - Will would try to point someone out across a room and no one would seem to be able to spot them, or he’d catch a cold draft where there shouldn’t have been one. At first he’d chalked it up to paranoia and the stress of change, and the incidents had all been so minor that they’d been easy to ignore.
Then he and Mike moved into the apartment complex on Wisteria Street.
It’s an old building in the Chicago suburbs, exposed brick and pipes that creak and groan ominously when you turn the faucet on too fast. It’s shitty, really, badly upkept and not worth the amount of money they’re paying for it, but it’s cute, in a rustic sort of way, and close to campus, and plus, Will gets to live there with Mike, his boyfriend, which kind of makes everything else seem like a moot point.
The first morning after they’d moved in, Will had walked into the kitchen to find a pale girl in a white lace nightgown standing in their kitchen.
He hadn’t freaked out that hard, honestly. He’d yelped, more out of surprise than anything else, and the girl had scowled at him for it, and he’d scrambled back down the hallway to their bedroom with only a slightly panicked cry of “Mike, wake up, wake up, there’s a girl in our kitchen.”
Which had then turned into a bit of a puzzle when a bleary-eyed Mike followed him into the kitchen and saw no such person there. It would have Will feel like he was losing his mind - it did, a little bit, but less so than it might have otherwise for the way that Mike immediately and completely believed him, sitting him down on the couch and talking him down from a panic attack before suggesting, gently, that the house might simply be haunted.
The matter-of-fact way he said it was honestly kind of funny, and that had startled Will out of fight-or-flight mode enough for him to give Mike a look, which Mike responded to with a shrug. “Ghosts are pretty run-of-the-mill compared to what we’ve seen, right?” he’d said, and yeah, he’d had a point there.
After which Will had returned to the kitchen to apologize to the ghost, who introduced herself as Louise and was really altogether quite pleasant.
That was six months ago. And as it turns out, Louise is not the only ghost residing in 180 Wisteria Street.
Will rolls over in bed, groaning against the morning light streaming in through the window - Louise is always opening the blinds after Will tries to shut them, which makes sense, because she died of malnutrition and probably also a vitamin D deficiency, but is annoying nonetheless - and cracks an eye open to glare at the man sitting cross legged on the floor by the bed, humming to himself and stitching together the seam of a tattered old jacket with a needle and thread that Will’s pretty sure came from the junk drawer in the kitchen. “Peter,” he hisses, making the man jump, then look up at him with a sheepish glint in his eye. “What did I say about coming in here?”
“You said not to,” Peter says, ducking his head and hopping to his feet. “Sorry.”
“Yeah, no ghosts in the bedroom, man,” Will huffs as Peter shuffles toward the door. “That’s like, my one thing.”
“Sorry,” Peter says, seamlessly vanishing through the particles of the door. Will shudders; he hasn’t gotten quite used to the walking-through-walls thing yet.
Beside him, Mike stirs sleepily, one arm emerging from beneath the covers and reaching blindly for Will. “You talking to me?” he asks around a yawn, finding Will’s waist and pulling him closer.
Will smiles on reflex, leaning over to press a kiss to Mike’s bare shoulder. “No, Peter was being a pervert again.”
Mike crinkles his nose. “Fuckin’ Peter. We should kill him.”
“Funny,” Will deadpans, even though it is, kind of. Mike is endlessly annoyed that Will can see ghosts and he can’t - mostly just because he hates feeling left out of something, and also because, out of all the weird and horrible shit that’s happened to them, it’s by far the most benign, and therefore the cool factor can be further appreciated. Plus it’s just, like, weird that there’s all these people living in my house that I can’t see, he’d complained once. Will had offered to ignore them when Mike’s around so he could live in ignorant bliss, but Mike had argued that it’s too late for that, and anyway, that would be rude. In fairness, that was before he realized that some of the ghosts are a little too keen on the unseen voyeur thing, so maybe they should revisit that conversation.
Mike yawns again, his hair tickling Will’s skin as he nuzzles into his neck. “D’you think my parents’ house is haunted too?”
Will lifts a hand to card through his hair, which is all kinds of tangled from bedhead and- well, certain activities. “I don’t know,” he says truthfully - since he hadn’t known about the ghost thing until they moved here, he’s not sure how to pinpoint when exactly it started. As far as he can tell, it was a slow build, and had maybe not been a fully developed ability the last time they visited home. At any rate, he finds it hard to believe the Wheeler house isn’t at least a little haunted - Hawkins seems to be the go-to place for that kind of thing. “I guess we’ll find out at Christmas.”
“If it is, my mom is gonna be so annoyed,” Mike murmurs.
Will snorts, picturing Mrs. Wheeler - or Karen, as she’s been insisting he call her since he and Mike started dating - recieving the news that her picturesque picket-fenced two-story at the end of the cul-de-sac has dead people floating around in it without her knowledge. “Well, maybe we just won’t tell her.”
In some ways, it’s probably a good thing the ghosts thing didn’t start until after they moved away. He shudders at the thought of seeing Billy Hargrove again, or any of the Flayed army for that matter. Or maybe they wouldn’t be ghosts, after the Mind Flayer took their souls? Would Henry manifest as a ghost? Will hopes not. He personally thinks he served more than his fair share of time on Earth already.
He wouldn’t mind saying hi to Bob, though. And it might be nice to meet Eddie, whom he’s only ever heard stories about. And he should probably apologize to Chrissy and all the other Vecna victims, for setting it all in motion like that. Barb. Et cetera.
All of that is a little too heavy to talk about at nine o’clock in the morning, though, so instead of voicing it he pulls Mike further on top of him and closes his eyes. He can hear the low murmur of Peter and Louise talking in the other room, occasionally joined in by Gertrude, the old lady who sits in an invisible armchair in the corner of the living room stroking a fat tabby cat. (Will doesn’t have the heart to tell her about the newspaper article he found once that detailed how that same cat had eaten most of her body after she died.) Mike is like a human furnace, the warm weight of him lulling Will back toward sleep, a nice contrast to the drafty, unnatural chills that Will is prone to sensing in the apartment. He presses his face to the top of Mike’s head, breathing in the scent of his shampoo and sweat, flattening a palm against the broad expanse of his back. Will’s learned to live with ghosts, but it’s nice to feel something solid sometimes. Something real.
He presses his fingers into the ridges in Mike’s spine, not aggressively, just enjoying the way they fit together, and Mike makes a soft, questioning sound into his chest. “You okay?”
“Yeah, sorry.” Will slides his hand back up into Mike’s hair. Mike’s much more receptive to that - as usual, Will can feel all his muscles relax at the touch, like all his wires have been cut. He smiles to himself, nudging his face down to kiss the side of his cranium. “I’m just thinking.”
“Hmm?” Mike says, in a lilting tone that could either be a question or just an appreciative sigh at Will playing with his hair.
“Well, our lease is up next month,” Will answers, on the off chance it was the former. He winds one of Mike’s curls around his finger idly. “Do you think we should move somewhere, like… less haunted?”
Mike shifts around on the pillow to peer up at him. “It might be hard to find a place in our budget that’s not haunted,” he points out, which is a fair enough point. “But we can look? If you want?”
Will rolls them both onto their sides so he can face him, their noses almost brushing, two sets of morning breath mingling in the space between them. “I just feel bad,” he confesses quietly, “that you have to deal with this because of me.”
Mike shrugs, amiable as ever. “I’ve told you before, I think it’s cool. And it’s really not that big of a deal, to be honest.” He smirks a little. “So some dead people watch us do it sometimes, who cares? What are they gonna do?”
Will huffs a laugh. “Your blasé attitude is both inspirational and concerning.”
“Well, yeah, that’s kind of my brand.” Mike kisses the tip of Will’s nose, then the corner of his lips. “Seriously, though. I’d live with you anywhere, it doesn’t matter to me.”
“Oh.” Will flushes pink at that, still flustered by the way Mike talks to him sometimes even after nearly three years together. “Okay.”
“Okay,” Mike agrees, and kisses him again. His breath sucks and his lips are tacky with sleep, which should be gross - is gross - but Will is, above all else, a hopeless sap of a person, so he mostly just finds it endearing. “Can we wait to talk about it more until after I’ve had some coffee, though?”
Will laughs. “Is that your subtle way of asking me to make you coffee?”
Mike widens his eyes innocently at him. “I mean, if you were getting up anyway.”
“I wasn’t,” Will says, but he hauls himself out of bed anyway, grabbing Mike’s discarded old t-shirt from the floor and pulling it over his head. Mike grins at him smugly, already sprawling out to take up the space Will has just vacated.
Peter pokes his head through the door, looking vaguely disappointed when he sees that Will has put a shirt on. “Can you tell Gertrude that it’s my turn for the TV remote?” he asks, ignoring Will’s squawk of protest at his presence in the room. “She’s had it all morning.”
“You don’t even know how to use the TV remote,” Will sighs, “and I just told you not to come in here.”
“Yeah, Peter!” Mike chimes in emphatically, directing the comment somewhere off to Peter’s left, squinting like he always does as if he’ll somehow manifest the power to see ghosts too just by sheer willpower. Honestly, Will wouldn’t be surprised if he did - Mike is nothing if not persistent, and it seems to pay off for him more than one would logically anticipate.
Peter rolls his eyes. “Sorry. Will you tell her, though?”
“After I’ve had coffee,” Will promises wearily, which Peter seems satisfied with. He disappears back through the door, and Will glances back at Mike with mixed exasperation and fondness. “Hey. I’d live with you anywhere too, by the way.”
Mike smiles. “I know.” He raises an eyebrow. “You can tell me all about it after you bring me my coffee.”
“Okay, I’m going! Jesus.”
“Love you too.”