Chapter Text
I shouldn’t have said anything in the basement.
That is the thought that keeps looping, soft but relentless, as he scoops up another bite of lasagna. He had been worried and the words just slipped out, aimed at what was still a mere concept. Talking about their endings made Mike feel like he was speaking them into existence, like he was writing them; and for all he knew, he could be.
He feels the tension beside him before Will speaks. He’s gone strangely still, shoulders pulled tight. Will barely touched his food, while Mike scoops heaping bites to try and force a sense of normalcy, to try and forget what he just did.
Will leans closer, careful and quiet, his voice threaded throughout the noise of the rest of the table.
“Mike,” he whispers. “Are you okay?”
Mike’s spine goes rigid. He keeps his gaze fixed on his plate, breath shallow, his mind racing ahead of his mouth. He can feel Will watching him, he can feel the concern his boyfriend has.
“I’m fine,” Mike says far too quickly.
Will drops his voice lower and continues, “In the basement you were talking. It sounded like you were… talking to someone.”
Mike finally turns and looks at him.
Will’s eyes are wide and unsettled, and it makes Mike’s chest tighten painfully. He sees it then, with sickening clarity, how close he came to something going wrong.
“I don’t know what you mean,” Mike says, his tone defensive before he can soften it.
Will flinches, ever so slightly, betrayal flashing momentarily through his eyes.
“I’m sorry,” Mike adds, quieter now, closer. “I just— the game ending like that. It messed with me more than I thought. I got emotional, that’s all.”
Will studies his face, searching for something Mike cannot give him, his hands trembling slightly against his jeans.
After a moment, Will nods. He leans back, but the tension doesn’t leave him entirely. He takes a sip of water and stares down at his plate.
“Okay,” he says.
Mike forces himself to smile at something Lucas says, though he hadn’t paid any attention to the party’s conversation. He laughs at the right moments for the rest of dinner, counting down the seconds until everyone leaves.
Later, when Mike is alone, the memory will settle heavier. The look on Will’s face, on his boyfriend’s face, as fear filled him to the brim and threatened to overflow.
The house is quiet in that very particular post-dinner way, Mrs. Wheeler’s lasagna long since cleared from the table, the echoes of voices faded away as the party disbanded. Nancy and the parents are watching TV, some reality show that they all find amusing. Mike doesn’t know where Holly is, so maybe she was taken again, which would be a very bad choice for the plot of their lives. Reality shows always made Mike uncomfortable, and he shudders just thinking about it. The way they are watching you at all times and control all of your decisions.
That’s exactly the problem.
Mike sits on the edge of his bed, elbows braced against his knees, fingers laced. His gaze rests on his hands, as though they might whisper the answers he can’t seem to find, and he thinks. He's been thinking a lot lately. So much that to everyone else it looks like absence and indifference. As if he’s drifting through moments half-awake, uncaring of the world around him, when in truth his mind is simply too full to leave
He hates the way he posed for his class’s graduation photograph.
He didn’t even realize he was posing in that fashion until later. His hands folded neatly in front of him, shoulders squared, and smile clearly practiced. The same polite, acceptable posture that everyone else wore along with their orange graduation gowns.
He had thought they were green. He remembers Nancy wearing green for her graduation, though she just looked at him confused when he tried asking. He remembers the flash of the camera, and the way his body had moved before his brain could object.
He also hates his new haircut. Mike’s jaw tightens as he reaches up and drags his fingers through his hair, curls springing back stubbornly. Everyone in his family has these middle-aged side parts. Mike remembers staring at them across the breakfast table one morning, fork frozen halfway to his mouth, a cold certainty settling in his gut.
Something isn’t right in Hawkins.
The words don’t feel dramatic or scary after years, almost an entire decade to be exact, of fighting the same evil in Hawkins. This time, it’s more subtle. Vecna isn’t ripping open gates across Hawkins, he isn’t sending his demo-whatever’s after innocent children, and he isn’t possessing Will like he did in season two. It’s subtle, it’s something you have to look out for carefully, and Mike is always looking.
Well, usually, he’s only looking at Will. In the short few months he started actually paying attention to the world around him, the biggest lesson he learned is to not believe in coincidences.
What frightens Mike most is the way his thoughts and actions feel nudged instead of formed. There are gaps in his memory and expressions he does not remember choosing, moments that slip past him before he can grasp them. Even when he tried, so desperately, to finally open up to Will, something resisted him more forcefully than ever before. A few moments managed to slip through, small mercies like the way he kept staring at Will’s lips in season four, but most interactions were altered, softened, redirected into something safer and more palatable.
Mike had been certain he would confess his feelings to Will. His relationship with El had ended gently and by mutual understanding. A quiet, offscreen closing of a chapter they chose to keep private, their emotions held carefully away from the rest of their friends. And, she had stood by him for support while he learned to name the feelings that had always been buried inside him.
Sometimes, though, Mike still blames himself for her death. It feels as though his honesty about Will, once leaving the walls of his mind, was the catalyst that wrote her away from the future the rest of them will get to have.
All the shared looks, the light touches, the moments where their eyes lingered a second too long, were supposed to mean something. Instead, they dissolved into nothing. It took Mike months to finally say the words out loud, and even now he finds himself haunted by the time they lost, wondering how much more they might have had if the world had not insisted on waiting.
With this ending, they just went upstairs for lasagna. After all the monsters, deaths, and alternate dimensions, all that remained was an unfulfilling ending and a fade to black that ushered them towards dinner. It felt wrong in a way Mike could not ignore, like a story stopping mid-sentence but insisting it’s finished.
The feelings pressed into his mind tell him to be happy and accept that everyone got the ending they wanted. Now, they can move on quietly and leave childhood behind, even as something in him resists the weight of that acceptance.
Mike exhales sharply through his nose, fingers curling into his palms. He doesn’t let himself think about it too long, because if he does, the anger comes back full-force.
The only thing that feels real to him now is Will. What he has with Will is both beautiful and intense, and beneath the comfort of it lives a quiet but persistent fear that it could be undone at any moment. A fear that even these last few months spent with Will might be taken away, revealed to have never truly existed at all.
He needs a way to give shape to these thoughts, to slip his suspicions to Will without placing him in danger. The sense of forced conformity, of lives being smoothed down and blurred into the background of something much larger, clings to him no matter how hard he tries to ignore it.
The pattern is too deliberate, just slightly too obvious to be reduced to a coincidence. What he really needs, what he feels clawing at his chest, is to tear open the silence and name the gate he can feel closing around them, trapping them inside a polished, false version of conformity.
If pulling at those threads were to cost him Will, if questioning the shape of things were to write him out of Mike’s life entirely, he is not sure he could survive that loss.