Chapter Text
By the time Mike is five, he knows everything there is to know about soulmates. His dad says they’re a hoax, and the only people who ever actually find theirs are the hippie dreamers who have imagined that they’re hearing each other’s voices in their heads. His mom says that his dad is wrong about that, and soulmates are real, but they’re also very rare, so he shouldn’t expect too much when he gets old enough to start looking for his. Nancy says they’re very romantic, and she and all of her friends are always talking about which boys in their class will turn out to be their soulmates in a few years time. Given those three opinions, which are at this point in his life equivalent to all the information anyone could ever need, Mike has determined that he probably won’t have a soulmate, and even if he did he’s not sure he would like some random girl hearing his every thought.
And then, on the first day of kindergarten, he finds himself alone at recess, and he sees the boy on the swings. The boy, with brown hair and big eyes, is alone, too, and he looks as sad and scared as Mike feels, and Mike has never wanted to talk to anyone more. Putting his fear and loneliness aside, he marches up to the swings and asks, “Do you want to be friends?”
The boy nods, and from that moment onward, everything is perfect. Mike learns that the boy’s name is Will, Will Byers. The two of them are in different classes, but they find each other every day at recess and lunch and before and after school. Will lives further from school than Mike does, so sometimes when Mike and Nancy bike home, Will comes with them and he and Mike will play outside or in the basement until Will leaves just before dinner. They like to play pretend as wizards and knights, making themselves costumes out of cardboard boxes and old blankets.
When it starts to get cold out, they play in the snow together, making snow forts that they call castles, getting into snowball fights between them and Nancy and Will’s older brother, Jonathan. For Christmas, Will gives Mike a drawing of a knight and a wizard, fighting a dragon together. Mike puts it on the wall in the basement.
Weeks later, on Valentine’s Day, their teachers tell them about soulmates, and how they may start hearing another person’s thoughts in their head when they get older. Mike decides that his initial dislike of soulmates was wrong, because he and Will are already so in sync that hearing each other’s thoughts could only make their friendship stronger.
“Do you think we could be soulmates?” he asks Will at recess that day.
Will frowns. “I thought soulmates had to be a girl and a boy? That’s what the teacher said.”
Mike shrugs, because he doesn’t really care what soulmates “have to” be. “Well, yeah, but my dad also says that they don’t exist, and obviously they do. Maybe the teacher is just wrong.”
“Maybe.” Will’s frown becomes a grin, and Mike smiles because he knows the change is his doing. “I would like to be your soulmate, someday. If that’s allowed.”
There is something about the way that that affects Mike, that he is far too young to understand, so he just grins even wider and says, “I’m sure it is. And one day when we’re older, we’ll start hearing each other’s thoughts, and then we’ll be unstoppable.”
Only, when Mike goes home that day, and he says to his mom that he and Will are going to be soulmates, his dad overhears. As it turns out, it’s not allowed. Will was right; only boys and girls can be soulmates. Two boys can’t be, and if they say that they are—well, Mike doesn’t know what the word “queer” means, but his dad says it like it’s a bad thing. The next day at school, Will tells him his dad said the same thing. Together, they mourn the idea of being soulmates, but Mike can’t really let go of it. Apparently everyone has soulmates, and most people just never meet theirs. So if he has a soulmate no matter what, what’s the point of it all if it’s not Will?
A couple months later, for his birthday, Mike’s mom gets him a new game set, one for him and Will to play together. She warns him that they might still be a little too young for it, but the second Mike reads the words “Dungeons and Dragons” on the box he falls in love with it. He and Will spend hours upon hours figuring out how to play it, reading all the rules and making sense of the new world that’s been presented to them. When they actually get to playing for the first time, they decide to ignore half the rules and just do what’s most fun, and they spend every weekend for the rest of the school year rolling dice and making Will the Wise and Mike the Brave fight monster after monster.
That June, right after school ends, they’re riding up and down Maple Street on their bikes, and a few houses down from Mike’s there’s a boy making something out of sticks in the front yard. Mike vaguely recognizes him from school, and as they ride by, Will says, “That’s Lucas. He’s in my class, we sit next to each other.”
Mike frowns. He hadn’t realized Will was close with anyone in his class. “Are you guys friends?”
Will shrugs. “We don’t talk a lot, but he seems cool. I wonder what he’s making?”
As they reach the end of the street, they turn around and start riding back, and impulsively Mike says, “We should ask him.”
So they do, and it turns out Lucas is building a catapult like one he saw in a movie, because apparently he likes fantasy stuff, too. Mike and Will take one look at each other and agree to stick around and help him. The catapult itself doesn’t end up being very successful, but it looks pretty cool anyway, and the three of them bond over it. Over the course of the summer, Lucas becomes an increasingly frequent presence on Will and Mike’s adventures across town, and a third member of their party when they play DnD.
When the summer ends and the three of them end up in the same first grade class, it’s a cause for great celebration. Their existing DnD campaign ends, and they start a new one with plans to follow more of the rules this time, at Will’s insistence. At school, their teacher lets them choose their seats, and Mike immediately takes the seat next to Will, forcing Lucas to sit across the table, next to Jennifer Hayes. Whenever the three of them get too loud (really, it’s Mike and Lucas, Will is always respectful enough not to talk when the teacher is), Jennifer is the one who quiets them down. She also keeps making jokes that aren’t really funny, but Will laughs at them anyway. Mike decides he doesn’t really like Jennifer.
First grade passes quickly. On Valentine’s Day, they talk about soulmates again, and while Lucas is wondering aloud what his soulmate will be like (“Do you think she’ll be pretty?” “If she is, she’ll definitely want nothing to do with you,”) Will and Mike share a look, and Mike is sure they’re both thinking about last year, and how they wanted so badly to be soulmates, but their dads told them it was impossible. Mike still secretly hopes his dad was wrong. He wonders if Will does, too.
And then suddenly it’s summer again, and Lucas spends it complaining about his baby sister, Erica, who’s turning four in August and grows more obnoxious by the day. Mike and Will tease him endlessly about it, but in July Mike’s mom tells him and Nancy that they’re going to have a younger brother or sister in six months or so, which Mike thinks might be karma. He just hopes it’s a girl, so that he doesn’t have to share all his toys with her and Nancy does.
Second grade passes even faster than first grade did. Baby Holly is born in late January, and Mike does everything he can to stay out of the house and away from the constant crying, which means DnD gets temporarily moved to Lucas’s house. Will tells him once that he prefers the basement, and Mike doesn’t stop smiling for the rest of the day. In March, Will turns eight and gets a massive set of crayons for his birthday, and he doesn’t stop talking about it for a week. Mike’s birthday comes around shortly after and he gets another drawing from Will, like he always does, and it’s the best art Mike’s ever seen, a colorful portrait of a wizard and a paladin and a ranger. It’s too good to put in the binder of Will’s art that Mike has started, so it goes on the wall next to the first drawing Will ever gave him.
In third grade, they learn that soulmates start to hear each other’s thoughts during puberty, which is still a far-away concept. They also learn that soulmates can talk to each other on purpose, in their heads. Mike wishes, for far from the first time, that Will could be his soulmate, because the two of them are already good at talking to each other without words, and if they could talk in their minds then they wouldn’t need the walkie talkies they’ve started using to communicate from home. But as far as Mike knows, nothing has changed since kindergarten, and two boys still can’t be soulmates.
It’s in fourth grade that things start to change again, when a new kid joins their class. His name is Dustin Henderson, he moved to Hawkins from Indianapolis, and he has a condition that means he doesn’t have any teeth or collarbones. Mike takes one look at him and knows he’s going to get bullied, especially when he introduces himself as being interested in science. Mike glances at Will and Lucas, and the three of them come to an unspoken agreement, because they’ve been bullied a fair amount, too, and a fourth member of their party couldn’t hurt.
At lunch, they invite Dustin to sit with them, and then spend the entire meal and following recess telling him all about their DnD campaigns and asking him about his science projects. They’re having a great time, until Troy and the other mouthbreathers come over near the end of recess to pick on them. Mainly on Dustin. Troy calls him “Toothless,” and Mike is about to stand up for his new friend, but Will stops him because, “They’re not worth getting in trouble over.”
Mike still wants to fight back, but he knows Will is right. Troy and the others get bored quickly enough without a reaction and back off, calling the four of them nerds as they walk away. When Dustin turns around to face them again, his eyes are watery. Automatically, Mike pulls him into a hug.
“Ignore them,” he tells Dustin, as Will and Lucas join in on the hug. “Troy is just a jerk, and the others are too stupid to do anything but stand there and listen to him. They don’t know what they’re talking about.”
Dustin sniffles. “Thanks, guys. I really hoped I’d left all the bullies behind at my old school, but…”
They all break away from each other, and Lucas says, “Don’t worry. We’re used to Troy and his band of idiots, and we can make sure they stay away from you from now on.”
That’s a lie, and they all know it. Mike glances at Will, who tends to get the worst of the bullying. He’s frowning, but he doesn’t speak up. Mike follows his lead. Better to comfort Dustin now, he decides, than to tell him he’s just signed up for a lifetime supply of name-calling and being tripped in the halls.
After school that day, they all bike home together as far as they can. It turns out Dustin lives pretty close to Will, so the two of them split off together while Mike and Lucas head towards Maple Street. Mike is glad that Will has someone else to ride with, now, but he’s also a little worried that since Dustin is so much closer, Will might want to go to his house all the time instead of Mike’s. Hopefully, Will still prefers their DnD basement, like he said he did back in second grade.
It turns out Mike had nothing to worry about. Will still comes over every chance they get, normally with Dustin and Lucas in tow, but sometimes on his own, so it’s just him and Mike like it used to be. Mike thinks he likes it better that way. Not that he doesn’t like his other friends, of course; he would easily consider all three of them his best friends, even though Nancy says he can only have one (he thinks it’s because she only has one best friend, probably because no one else likes her. Why would they?), but there’s still something different about his friendship with Will. It comes easier than it does with Lucas or Dustin, somehow. Mike isn’t really sure if it’s because Will was his first friend, or if it’s something else entirely. Something like soulmates, he sometimes dares to think. To hope.
Dustin joins their campaigns as a bard, and he gets added to Will’s drawings of the party whenever Mike sees them. The four of them feel more complete together, somehow, than they ever did before Dustin joined them. Mike thinks they’re more balanced now, with two duos between them. Before, it was Mike and Will together and Lucas there alongside them, but now Lucas and Dustin are a pair, too. Not in the same way Mike and Will are a pair, though. Mike isn’t really sure how it’s different, but it is.
The four of them make it through the school year and the summer and then they’re in fifth grade, middle school. The first thing they do, as a group, is try to join the AV club. Technically, fifth graders aren’t allowed to join clubs or activities, so they should have to wait another year, but the last members of the AV club were in eighth grade last year, so the four of them are allowed to join to prevent the club from being shut down. AV club is fun, because they get to mess with all sorts of technology they’ve never seen before. Somehow, Dustin already knows what all of it is.
Troy and the others are bullying them a little more this year, with more evidence than ever that they’re a bunch of nerds, but they take it in stride. Well, more accurately, they don’t get into any fights. More specifically, Mike doesn’t get into any fights. It’s a near thing, when Troy dares to call Will a fag on a day that Mike knows Will is already upset by his father calling him the same thing, but as always, Will talks him down and says it’s not worth it. Mike isn’t sure he believes him, when Will is quiet for the rest of the day, but he’s not going to argue with him, either.
That spring, Will’s dad finally leaves. Finally may sound bad, but Mike knows how awful Mr. Byers is to Will. And though Will is upset about it, of course, Mike can tell that he’s also kind of relieved. They’ve talked plenty about how Mike’s dad isn’t great and how Will’s dad is ten times worse. And Will has something to be excited about, too, because the day Mr. Byers left, Jonathan and Will built a fort in the woods outside their house. It’s called Castle Byers, and Will practically begs the Party to come over and see it.
Mike loves Castle Byers. Really, he loves that Will has a space like this, a place for just him. He also loves that when the four of them get there, Mike is allowed to walk right in, while Dustin and Lucas are asked to provide a password. They both complain about it endlessly, especially when they can’t guess it immediately. Mike is pretty sure it’s “Radagast,” after Will’s favorite obscure character from The Hobbit. Will had named the unnamed road to his house “Mirkwood,” after all, and Mirkwood is where Radagast lives. When Lucas and Dustin still can’t guess it, Mike voices his own guess, and Will grins at him. He’s right. Of course he is.
Sixth grade is a much happier year than fifth grade was, except for the part where everyone is suddenly ten times more obsessed with soulmates than they were last year. It makes sense, Mike thinks, given that they are getting close to that age, and a few girls have already claimed to have heard their soulmates’ thoughts (which Mike calls bullshit on, though no one at school cares what he has to say on the matter), but it’s still annoying. By now, Mike has pretty much accepted that within the next couple years, he’s either going to start hearing Will’s thoughts, or he’s not going to hear anyone’s. If Will isn’t his soulmate, he’s sure whoever it actually is doesn’t live in Hawkins, or else he would’ve met them by now, and supposedly soulmates can connect with each other even before they start to hear any thoughts.
Lucas and Dustin, unfortunately, seem just as enamored by the idea of soulmates as the rest of their grade does. Only Will seems as uninterested as Mike is. Whenever their friends are gushing about their future soulmates at lunch, the two of them will make eye contact, silently judging them. They never talk about it to each other, though. They haven’t really talked to each other about soulmates since kindergarten.
By seventh grade, no one has really grown out of the soulmate obsession yet, but their new science teacher, who also happens to be the patron of the AV club, Mr. Clarke, promptly forbids all discussion of it in his classroom. Mike is eternally grateful for this, and he’s pretty sure Will is, too. It’s so much easier to avoid that conversation when they’re not even allowed to have it.
In early October, Mike starts planning a campaign that he really hopes his friends—mainly Will—are going to like. Since they first started playing DnD, they’ve gotten much more advanced with the game, and Mike thinks of this campaign as proof of how much he’s grown. It’s set in a world not exactly like the one in the book, with all sorts of dungeons and castles and friends and enemies that Mike is sure his friends will be impressed by, assuming they actually take the time to notice it instead of just rushing into every fight like they often do.
It takes so long to plan the campaign that they don’t end up playing it until the first Sunday of November, and even then they barely get halfway through it before Mike’s mom is telling them to stop because they have school in the morning. Will tells him the last roll he got right before he leaves, and it’s a bad one. Sometimes, Mike wonders why he and Will are as honest with each other as they are. It gives him a bad feeling, somewhere deep in his chest. That night, he lies awake, feeling vaguely like something is very, very wrong.
The next morning, Will is gone. He’s not at home, or at school, or anywhere. The cops show up. They say he’s missing. Mike feels his world crash down around him.