Chapter Text
The transition from October to November is still a weird time for Will even after all this time. First with his kidnapping, then the Mind Flayer incident… it makes him think that something bad’s going to happen this time around too, even though that hasn’t been the case for years.
Everyone else seems to think similarly. Their last Crawl had been especially tense, with Hopper taking more precautions than usual. It had been almost anticlimactic when it turned out like any other Crawl, but Will was just relieved when he saw Hopper come back safe and sound. His mom, though less protective than she was back in 1984, starts telling him again not to stay outdoors for too long. Jonathan and Nancy even offer to drive him, Mike, and Holly to school, but they promise that they’ll be fine. Despite that, Mike refuses to leave him out of his sight for too long, waiting for him even when his classes run long just so they can leave school together.
The weather’s getting colder now too, and it’s kind of funny how his mom bundles him up just as securely as Mrs. Wheeler does with Holly. It’s too warm once he enters the school building so he ends up leaving his outer layers in his locker, but he’d much rather tolerate the uncomfortable heat than risk being possessed by the Mind Flayer again, no matter how unlikely.
“You look like you’re going to melt in there,” Mike notes one day, as Will approaches the bike racks outside the school. He adjusts Will’s scarf so it looks less like it’s about to strangle him. “Are you okay?”
“I’m fine,” Will says, feeling warm for a different reason. He closes his eyes and leans into Mike’s touch. He flinches, but does not move away. “It’s just… cold lately.”
Mike hums, letting his gloved fingers rest on Will’s cheek. “The basement’s not too cold for you yet?”
“Your heater works pretty well,” Will answers, “when your dad turns it on early, at least. Sometimes I go down there right after classes and it’s still freezing.”
He can almost hear the gears turning in Mike’s mind. “Wanna hang in my room after class, then?”
Will opens his eyes. He expected Mike to say something about telling off his dad next time. “I don’t want to impose.”
“It’s nothing we haven’t done before, man,” Mike says, matching his gaze. “So, you coming?”
“You say that like we don’t live in the same house,” Will says, stepping away from Mike’s hands. “But yeah, always.”
Now that he’s here, it’s actually really awkward being in Mike’s room. It’s changed from how it was in his childhood; his bed’s bigger, they’ve rearranged the desks, he has new posters up on the walls, and his shelves are no longer decorated with action figures like they were before. Will takes a seat at the desk as Mike sits across him on the bed.
“It’s warm here,” Will says dumbly.
“Yeah,” Mike replies. “It is.”
Silence ensues. Will looks around the room politely just so he doesn’t end up staring.
“What kind of stuff is in your art folder?”
Will’s eyes lock right onto Mike’s in surprise. “What?”
“You mentioned it to Holly last night. What kind of stuff do you keep there?”
“Oh…” It really shouldn’t be surprising. Mike does have a habit of focusing on the wrong things at the wrong time, like at Rink-o-Mania. “Just, you know, my drawings.”
“Mhm,” Mike says, leaning on his knees. “Like what?”
“Sketches of… anything, really. I started it in Lenora, just drawing the neighborhood outside our window or the cafeteria in our new school. Sometimes, paintings of Mom, of Jon, of Jane. The Party too.” When I missed you guys so much I just had to see your faces.
“The Party, huh,” Mike repeats. “Like… us in a campaign, like your painting?”
Will hesitates. “Sometimes, yeah. But sometimes it’s just drawings of us. Of… of you.”
He hears Mike inhale. “Of me…”
“You sent us the most pictures,” Will explains weakly. “El showed me the pictures in your letters all the time, so I had a lot of, um, inspiration.”
“Yeah,” Mike says quietly. “Could… could I see them?”
Will swallows. “They’re just boring sketches from your photos, it’s nothing new.” Not in a million years, he means, but what comes out of his mouth next dooms him for good. “What if I… drew you instead?”
Mike, impossibly, smiles at him. “You’d do that?”
Immediately, he backtracks, trying to save himself from the humiliation. “No, no, forget it.”
“Will,” Mike says, grabbing his arm with all the care in the world. “Please?”
And just like that, Will relents. He’s always been weak to him, after all.
“So do I just stay like this?”
“Yeah. Try not to move too much.”
Will can’t believe this is happening. Here he is in Mike Wheeler’s bedroom, drawing him up close. Still, he lets his hands work their magic, starting off with a basic sketch before working on the finer details of Mike’s face. He allows himself the quickest of glances at first, but the deeper he gets into it, the more focused he gets, and he ends up forgetting the embarrassment just to perfect the miniscule details of Mike’s face.
And just when things are going smoothly, Mike has to open his stupid mouth.
“You know, Holly told me something.”
Will’s hand slips and he curses under his breath, quickly erasing the stray marks. “Mhm?”
“She said that you make me look really cool in your drawings.”
“Mhm…”
“She also said you told her to look for all the special parts of the person you’re drawing, so you can make them as accurate as possible.”
Will stops moving. He has a sinking feeling he knows exactly what Mike wants to say.
“Holly told me you didn’t really… describe it in detail,” Mike says, voice barely above a whisper. “So tell me, Byers, what do you think about when you look at me?”
And the world stops for all the right reasons.
“What?” Will asks, laughing because if he doesn’t, he might cry. “What brought this on?”
“Curiosity?” Mike says, trying to sound innocent. “Come on, Will, it won’t hurt to tell me.”
He leans in just an inch closer, and Will, deliriously, feels his self-control slipping away.
“You’re not subtle, Wheeler,” he answers, putting away his paper. “You are just fishing for compliments.”
“You caught me,” Mike says, but his tone of voice speaks the contrary. “So? What do you think?”
Well, he asked for it.
“I think… you have a massive head.”
“Hey!”
“Your Cali mullet was not helping things, by the way. Nancy pulls off big hair well, but you–”
“Alright, that’s enough–”
“–needed some help. Actually, your whole outfit at that airport was atrocious, not just your hair. But it’s, I dunno, fun to draw, I guess. So is your face. You have very defined, um,” Will coughs, “cheekbones. And a nice jawline. It’s. Easy to draw.”
He doesn’t need a mirror to know how flushed he must look. He can see it reflected on Mike’s own face.
“O-Oh.”
“I also think of… your big sad puppy-dog eyes. That wrinkle on your brow from all the groaning and complaining you do, you hater. Your nose, which got you bullied in middle school. You’ve grown into it now, I think. Your…”
And for one deafening second, his eyes drop to Mike’s lips. They part with a sharp intake of air, and Will looks away. Change the subject, change the subject!
“Yeah. So, uh, there. Does that… answer your question?”
“O-Oh, yeah, it does.”
But Mike is still staring at him with something akin to wonder, and Will’s brain seems to be working on overdrive to embarrass him to death as quickly as possible.
Ah, fuck it.
“Mike.”
Mike’s expression is so sincere that it hurts Will to look at it. “Yeah?”
“What do you think… when you look at me?”
“...You’re my best friend.” Mike’s voice shakes at the end. Will doesn’t think he imagined it.
He tries again, leans in a little closer so Mike can’t ignore him. “I said my piece. It’s not fair if you don’t say yours.”
Mike swallows. He looks like he’s at a loss for words. “You… are so…”
He hesitates, then lifts his hands until they rest on Will’s shoulders. Slowly, he traces them, feeling over the bones that Will had been deeply insecure about until he grew into them when he turned fifteen. Mike’s hands ghost against his neck, and Will shivers. Unlike the goosebumps he gets whenever Vecna’s close, the heat radiating from Mike’s hands makes him feel safe. They move up, one hand cupping his face like it’s so fragile it could break in his hands, the other drifting higher to run through the strands of his hair. It drifts down, tracing the curve of his ear, the softness under his eyes, the edge of his jaw.
His thumb brushes Will’s lips for a fraction of a second, and impossibly, they move closer. Their knees bump, and Will feels the electricity run up his body at every point of contact.
Will’s eyelids flutter closed on their own accord. Mike has always been the most articulate of them, having developed that talent from storytelling his campaigns so vividly that it felt like they were really there in person, encouraging Will to fireball the Thessalhydra once and for all. And yet, with no words spoken between them, Will recognizes what Mike is trying to say.
This is what I see in you, as Mike’s fingers cup his jaw, pull his face closer by instinct if nothing else.
“Beautiful.”
Will’s eyes blink open, like he can’t believe what he’s hearing. All that eloquence, and just one word makes Will feel like he’s floating. He and Mike share one long, lasting look.
They’re so close that Will can feel Mike’s breath on his face. Will’s hands find Mike’s, steadying himself.
And for the first time since the shed, where Mike had been in tears, trying everything to bring him back, Will thinks he can see the boy he fell in love with all those years ago.
But he also sees the hesitance, the fear, the self-doubt that Will recognizes in himself. He feels Mike’s fingers tremble in his, and tries not to chase the warmth as they move away. Will wants to cry in frustration, but he can’t blame him. They haven’t even brought up Eleven or the stupid painting and whatever this means for them. Maybe this was a one-time close call that they can joke about when they’re fifty and Mike’s married to some other woman and Will is all alone because he wasn’t brave enough to take the only man he’ll ever want.
Who is he kidding? Will’s going to think about this for the rest of his life.
“Does that…” Mike’s voice is so unsteady. Will resists the urge to reach out and touch him again. “Does that answer your question?”
Will’s eyes burn. I can never tell him, he repeats to himself. “Yeah. It does.”
EPILOGUE:
“How did you know that Vickie wanted to–”
“To make out?”
“–to date?”
Robin looks at him in surprise, curiosity, and maybe more relief than she’d ever admit. “Oh. Well, we volunteered together. You know, there were, like, signals.”
“Signals?”
“Yeah, you know, like a brush of the knee, a bump of the elbow, a shared look.”
Will nods, watching her every move, making sure that this is real. That there’s another person like him in Hawkins who’s happy, who ended up with someone who loved her for who she really is, even behind closed doors; who smiles when she thinks about her girlfriend, so helplessly fond despite needing to keep their love a secret to everyone else.
“It all just sort of accrued, like a snowball rolling down a hill, until it was obvious.”
“How obvious?”
Robin looks out the window, making sure the coast is clear. “Let’s say, the, uh, snowball became an avalanche,” she replies, voice dropping to a conspiratorial whisper.
Will looks to the side, processing it all. The events of the past 18 months replay in his head against his will, and he feels like he’s brushing up against a revelation.
Their elbows brushing at the summer festival. Their knees bumping under the table at school. That look they shared in Mike’s bedroom, moments away from doing something they could never take back, the one and only time it’d felt like they truly saw one another.
And even before then… knees brushing as they sat side by side in El’s room, planning to save her, elbows bumping at the movies, the infinite shared looks between them because for the longest time, a look was all they needed to understand each other.
Robin looks back at him, and Will feels braver. His own feelings used to make him cry to sleep, but if Robin’s right, the signs were just looking at him all along, waiting for one of them to finally act on them.
If he’s being completely honest with himself, he thinks he has a chance.
He’s still absolutely fucking terrified, of course, and he knows what Mike’s father thinks of people like him, but he trusts in their friendship more than he’s scared of the consequences. He trusts Mike won’t cut him off, and if he dares to hope, if Mike’s grown at all in these past 18 months, maybe… they could really be something.
But he can dream about his happy ending after he saves Holly. They’ve grown closer than ever, and he really sees her as the closest thing to family alongside El. He knows exactly what it’s like down there, how cold and scary it is to fend for yourself in a world that tries to eat you alive. She’s younger than he was back then, and he’d barely survived a week; as the clock ticks down, Will is more and more desperate to save her and Vecna’s future victims.
“We really need some magic up here,” Mike tells him, and Will can’t help but believe it. If he can really use his powers to save her, then by god, he’ll be the superhero she’s waiting for.