Chapter Text
A demogorgon is floating above Mike, frozen mid-leap, but he’s not looking at it. He’s looking at Will.
There he is, across the square, standing with his arms outstretched. His posture radiates power. His arms shake with the effort of whatever the hell he’s doing. Something strange is happening to his eyes.
A feeling starts around Mike’s sternum and flows out in all directions, down his arms and legs and up his neck, tingling through his fingers and toes and scalp, a feeling so loud that Mike wants to scream about it. He doesn’t have the wherewithal to precisely define the feeling at the moment. Something like pride. Something like I told you so, directed at all of Hawkins. Every asswipe kid who called Will “Zombie Boy.” Every teacher who spoke to Will with that overly gentle condescension that became commonplace after the first Upside Down incident. Lonnie Byers. Hopper. Owens. Mike’s own dad. Hell, even Dustin and Lucas, and Jonathan, and Mrs. Byers. Even Will himself. Mike looks at Will and thinks, I told you so. I told you so, I told you so, I told you so.
Will thrusts his hands down, and the demogorgon breaks, bones snapping at horrific angles. Mike exhales a single syllable of laughter. The demogorgon crashes to the ground.
Across the square, Will falls to his knees. He wipes his nose, just like El does after she gets a power-nosebleed. Mike’s stomach does a strange little flip that feels entirely incongruous with the moment.
Then Will crumples. He falls to the side, and he’s on the ground.
Mike’s moving before he has the chance to think about it. He crosses the square, dodging debris, jumping over dead bodies.
Will is unconscious. His skin is cold. But his heart is beating.
The next half hour is a blur, but Mike keeps his thumb on Will’s pulse point for as long as he can. He and Mrs. Byers carry Will into the tunnels. They find an injured Lucas. Mrs. Byers runs ahead to call an ambulance from a payphone, Mike and Lucas following with Will. All the while, Mike presses the pad of his thumb under Will’s jaw and catalogues every heartbeat.
When he gets into his second ambulance of the day and the men pull Will away from him, he watches Will on the gurney and keeps sending his attention to his thumb. If he imagines hard enough, he can still feel that phantom pulse.
They arrive at the hospital, and the men push Will out of sight into triage, and Mike feels like he’s forgotten to do something very important, but he has no idea what.
“Mike, honey.”
Mike jolts upright. They’re in the waiting room. Mrs. Byers’s hand is on his shoulder.
“Sorry,” she says. “I didn’t mean to scare you. I was just wondering if you wanted to try to visit your mom.”
“Oh,” says Mike. “Um. But I don’t want to miss…”
“How about this,” says Mrs. Byers. “If they let us into Will’s room, I’ll make sure the receptionist tells you where to go.”
“Okay,” says Mike, “but—”
“And if she forgets to tell you, I’ll check back here in 30 minutes and bring you back myself.”
“Okay,” says Mike, nodding. “Okay. Thanks, Mrs. Byers.”
It turns out that they do allow him to see his mom, but she’s sleeping, just like before. Mike pulls up a chair and leans forward, soaking in her familiar scent.
This is all his fault. His mom, his dad, Holly. And now Will. He told Will about his theory of tapping into the hivemind. Clearly, Will listened. If he hadn’t—if Mike hadn’t said anything—
Well, probably, he and Lucas and Robin would be on gurneys, or dead. But maybe Will would be okay.
Part of Mike is tempted to wake his mom. She’s always been the person he comes to when terrible things happen, not to talk, but for physical comfort. Like when El and Will left Hawkins for California, or when they found the body they thought was Will’s in the quarry. But his mom is recuperating from a near-fatal attack because he and Nancy failed to protect her. He can’t wake her up just to cry into her arms.
Earlier that day, when Mike, Nancy, and Lucas arrived at the Squawk after being at the hospital, Will pulled Mike aside into a soundproof studio.
“What?” said Mike, scanning Will for any sign of distress or injury. “What’s wrong?”
Will shook his head and hugged him.
Will was warm against his chest, his arms strong around him. Even though he’s been living with Mike, Will’s still using his own shampoo (classic Will, ever mindful, not wanting to impose). It’s Herbal Essences, Mike knows, because they use the same shower. In the hug, Mike could smell it, citrus and another type of fruit. Pear, maybe. He made a mental note to read the label when they got back home.
Not that he knew when that would be. Fuck. His wrecked home.
“I’m so sorry, Mike,” said Will. He didn’t let go. “I’m so sorry all of this happened.”
At the hospital, Nancy had been a mess. Understandably. She’d been the one to find their mother ripped to shreds. Nancy is reliably stalwart, but on the rare occasion she breaks down, Mike’s walls go up. He doesn’t have to think about it. It’s as if his body knows that somebody needs to be the stable one. So, as they’d ridden in the ambulance, as he and Nancy had argued in the lobby, as they’d sneaked up to their mom’s room and wrestled information out of her, Nancy had been falling apart, and Mike had stayed solid, so solid that he’d hardly taken any of it in.
When Will hugged Mike at the Squawk, Mike’s body relaxed and everything hit him at once. His father, half-dead. His mother, too hurt to speak or move. His baby sister, gone, taken by that asshole wizard who seemed intent on fucking with everyone Mike loved most. As Will hugged him, Mike had one delusionally self-centered moment of wondering if he’d been the target all along, if he’d unknowingly crossed Vecna when he was a little kid and that was why Vecna messed with El and took Holly and Will—
It was nonsensical, of course. The timeline didn’t work, and not everything was about Mike, but in that moment it kind of felt like it was about him, because Christ, he didn’t know how much more of it he could take. And once he couldn’t take any more? What would happen then?
Mike choked on a silent sob. No noise, but he was pretty sure Will noticed, because he gave Mike an extra squeeze.
“We’re going to find her,” Will said into Mike’s jacket collar. “Holly. We’re—I’m not going to stop until we do.”
Mike forced himself to let go and step back.
“I know you won’t,” he said, meaning it.
That’s just Will. Will cares for Holly like family, and he knows what it’s like to be abducted by Vecna. But even if none of that were true—if some random girl had been taken instead of Holly, or if Will had never been taken himself—Will would’ve made the same declaration. Because that’s Will, the moral center of the universe. Obviously.
It was then, as he looked at Will and registered the extent of his determination, that Mike sensed the thing.
The thing. The thing has been looming over him, stalking him, for the past two or three years. Or maybe his whole life, Mike isn’t sure. The first time he sensed it, the day the Byers and El moved away, it had felt familiar, like it had always been there, in the corner of his eye. He thinks of it like the Mindflayer, except his thing isn’t a literal interdimensional shadow monster. It’s something mental, something in Mike’s head. A piece of knowledge, or an emotion, he doesn’t really know. But he knows it’s unfathomably massive, and whenever it’s close by, an apocalyptic sense of doom paralyzes him. He’s certain that if he looks directly at it, if he ever truly comprehends it, that’ll be the end of him. And he’s been sensing it more and more these days.
“Come on,” said Will. “Robin and I figured out some stuff. We’re going to tell you all our idea.”
Mike swallowed against the thing and, somehow, it worked. It retreated. He was safe for now. He followed Will down into the basement, back into the fold, where they tried to figure out how to be heroes yet again.
So much for that plan. They lost the kids. The only heroes among them are his mother—who, based on what they found at the house, must’ve hurt the demogorgon enough to draw an impressive amount of that black blood—and Will. And look where their heroics got them.
Mike hais a nurse and asks if he can leave a message for his mom. The nurse digs through a drawer and hands him a notepad and pen.
“Oh,” says Mike. “I meant leave a message with you. My handwriting is terrible.”
She smiles at him. “My shift’s almost over. Write it. Bad handwriting is distinct handwriting. She’ll know exactly who it’s from.”
Mike gets stupidly choked up by this. Once he collects himself, he writes,
Stopped by again. I love you.
He pauses, then he adds, I’m sorry.
“It’s strange,” says the doctor, peering at Will’s chart. “According to the EEG, he appears to be asleep.”
“But he’s not asleep,” snaps Mike.
“No, he is not,” says the doctor, peering at Mike over his glasses. “If he were simply asleep, we’d be able to wake him.”
“Sure,” says Mike, because apparently he can’t stop talking, “but also, when Will sleeps, his eyebrows move around all the time, and he makes these tiny little sighs every now and then, like, aah.”
He does his best Will sleep-sigh imitation. It’s ridiculous, he barely stops himself from saying. It’s like he’s a goddamn cartoon woodland creature.
Lucas, Robin, Mrs. Byers, and the doctor look at him. Mike's cheeks go hot. Maybe the inability to shut up is a side effect of his concussion.
It’s true, though. Will is an animated sleeper. Since he passed out at the MAC-Z, his face has been blank, his body still. Mike is fucking terrified about it.
After a beat, Mrs. Byers says, “You’re right. He does do that.”
The doctor clears his throat. “In any case, we’ll keep him comfortable here for the time being. I’m sure our neurologist will want a look at him when she arrives in the morning.”
Mrs. Byers thanks the doctor and he leaves, casting another befuddled look at Will on his way out.
It’s been a couple hours since they got to the hospital. They’ve all been assessed for injuries. Mike and Robin both have minor concussions, and Mrs. Byers has some nasty bruises and scrapes. Murray’s somewhere around here, too. Lucas got the worst of it. After the doctors stitched and dressed his chest wound, he refused further treatment, opting instead to be at Will’s side.
“We should get him out of here,” says Lucas.
A flare of panic goes up in Mike’s stomach, followed closely by anger. Because what does Lucas know? When has Lucas ever been the expert on Will’s wellbeing? Where was Lucas when Will was infected by the Mindflayer, and they got dragged to the lab and had to protect Will, first from those half-wit doctors and then from a flock of invading demodogs?
“I agree,” says Robin.
Now Mike is mad mad, because if Lucas isn’t an expert on Will’s wellbeing, Robin doesn’t know jack shit.
“There have got to be a hundred cameras all over the MAC-Z,” says Lucas.
“Yeah,” says Robin, “and from what you guys described, the tapes will show pretty clearly that Will’s the one who snapped those demos like twigs. And then they’ll be looking for him.”
“Man, I wish I’d been there,” says Lucas.
“What do you think?” says Robin, looking between Mike and Mrs. Byers.
Mrs. Byers looks at Mike. They’ve been in this position before. The pair of them, Will’s keepers, at least when Jonathan and Hop aren’t around.
When Mike doesn’t say anything, Mrs. Byers seems to make a decision.
“Okay,” she says, and it feels like a betrayal, but Mike knows they’re all probably right. “Okay, if we were to move him, though, we’d need a way to feed him.”
“Right. Like El’s battery,” Lucas says. He points up at the IV bag. “We’ll take that.”
“What if we need more?” says Mrs. Byers.
“I've got it covered,” says Robin.
“What? How?” says Lucas.
“Don't worry about it,” says Robin. “Just leave it to me.”
They plan for a few more minutes. Mike stays silent, worrying, stewing in what he's well aware is misplaced anger. Then Robin goes to do whatever she’s going to do, and Mrs. Byers steps out to coordinate with Murray about a car, leaving Lucas and Mike alone with Will.
“How’s your mom?” says Lucas.
“I don’t know,” mumbles Mike. “Sleeping.”
Lucas leans his forearms onto his knees. “You don’t want to move him.”
Mike sighs. No, he doesn’t want to move Will. But he knows they’re right. If he actually disagreed with them, he would’ve spoken up.
“I just—there won’t be any point in saving him from the military if he ends up dying anyway.”
Mike spits out the last few words. Will dying, after all of this. He hates to even speak the hypothetical.
“He’s not going to die,” says Lucas. “He’s just recharging, like El.”
Mike eyes him. They both know that El has rarely lost consciousness after using her powers, and every time she has, she’s never been out for more than a few minutes.
“Okay, not exactly like El,” amends Lucas. “We don’t know how his powers work yet. Didn’t you say something happened to his eyes?”
“Yeah,” says Mike. “They went all...white, maybe? I was too far away to tell for sure.”
Lucas shakes his head and whistles. “Seriously, man, I wish I could’ve seen it. I mean, I saw the demo, but Will. It sounds awesome.”
Mike smiles despite himself. He’s guilty for feeling this way, because that moment might be the thing that finally kills his best friend, but…
“It was,” he says. “It was the coolest shit I’ve ever seen.”
Lucas grins.
The door bursts open, and there’s Robin.
“That was fast,” says Lucas.
“Told ya,” says Robin, panting. “And, look—”
She kicks the door open and rolls in a wheelchair.
“I picked up a sweet ride.”
They bypass the usual discharge procedures. Robin and Lucas distract the receptionist while Mrs. Byers and Mike wheel out Will to where Murray is waiting in a nondescript sedan. Finagling Will into the car is a challenge, especially since they’re trying to maintain the IV line in his hand, but they eventually manage it. Robin, Lucas, and Mike all squish into the back with Will.
“Where to?” says Murray.
“Hopper’s,” says Mrs. Byers.
She turns to check on the kids and catches Mike’s eye. He gives her his best reassuring smile. If, when it comes to his family, either he or Nancy needs to be the stable one, the same is true of him and Mrs. Byers when it comes to Will.
They’re so cramped in the backseat that Mike decides it only makes sense to put his arm around Will, and once he’s done that, he may as well rest his hand against Will’s pulse point. Every heartbeat is a promise: Will Byers is still here, still here, still here.