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Will isn’t necessarily trying to make a habit of wandering the woods while it’s raining, but it’s kind of funny the way things are turning out.
And look — with his track record, at this point in his life, he’s definitely smart enough to know better than to start walking around when it’s dark outside, and he knows even better than to do it when the rain has started to come down like it’s the second coming of Noah and his stupid fucking ark. The dirt under his feet turned to mud forever ago, all too easy to lose footing on. The batteries in his flashlight haven’t been changed in so long that Will is pretty sure it might die on him any minute now. His backpack is heavy and waterlogged on his shoulders, the contents shuffling around with every step he takes. It’s unsafe in the obvious sense — monsters roaming the woods, spontaneous, interdimensional portals opening up under his feet — but also, more simply, there is a nonzero possibility of Will just slipping on the mud and hitting his head on a rock and getting concussed so hard he dies.
It would be really embarrassing if, after everything, that’s how he goes out. Usually, Will is smart enough to avoid getting fatally concussed. Usually, Will knows better than to be in this situation at all. He’s not the thinker here; he’s not a strategist, or anyone who really gives a second thought about what to do before doing it. The fact of the matter is this: tomorrow brings with it a Hail Mary — their last-ditch attempt at saving the world before they pull the plug. Tomorrow, Will is going to walk into the Upside Down, and he might not make it out.
So he’s usually smarter than this, but what has it gotten him? Nothing, probably. If a creature wants to pop out from behind a tree to eat him — or worse — Will figures it can’t really be all that worse than it doing the same thing twenty-four hours from now anyway. It’s hard to remember to be smart, sometimes, when your whole body is itching for you to run into the woods, screaming at the top of your lungs, and to start hitting something with a large stick.
The good news is that Will is not currently partaking in running, screaming, or any other activities that are so stupid that he simply would not have an excuse for seeing them through. He does possess a little bit of self restraint, and he might be an idiot, but he’s not downright suicidal. Mostly, it was just that he just couldn’t stand to be in the house for one moment longer — everyone pretending to sleep, all tucked away in their respective rooms, but refusing to admit they couldn’t. The house is usually too full of noise to sleep — soft snores, and then ones that were less so, and the rustling of sheets as people tossed and turned, and chatter, sometimes, floating down the hallway from the kitchen or a bedroom, when the pretense of rest was finally dropped — but it had been silent, today. No snores. No rustling. Everyone awake, but no one brave enough to say so.
Will kicks at a rock on the ground, and hears it move more than he sees it, a wet splashing as it rolls through the water. The hood of his jacket is not doing much against the onslaught anymore, the wind blowing the rain kind of sideways and right into his eyes, which makes the flashlight kind of pointless too, because Will can’t really even see where the beam is pointing. The backpack had been precautionary more than anything else — maybe just to prove to himself that he really isn’t stupid enough to start wandering around with nothing, that he is capable of rational thought — but now that’s rendering itself to be heavy and inefficient too, awkward to carry around and too wet to dry out by the time they leave tomorrow. It’s fine, Will tells himself. Whether or not things go according to plan, a soggy backpack will be the least of his worries anyway.
There is, also, the slightly more pressing matter of the fact that Will has no idea where he’s going. The thought comes to him far later than it should — so much for the rational thought thing, he supposes — but it hadn’t been the first thing on his mind when he’d left, silently shrugging on his coat and his boots, then, almost as an afterthought, grabbing the bag that had been sitting by the door, already packed, zipped up and ready to go. He’d been thinking, in the moment, that he’d just need a quick walk to clear his head — maybe scope out the area ahead of time, keep a tab on things. Will had grown up here, after all. He knows his way around.
What he hadn’t accounted for, though, is that Hawkins no longer looks like it did when he last lived here. The landscape is flattened where it wasn’t before, the woods overgrown in some places and sparse in others, and neighborhoods Will knows like the back of his hand are razed completely, reduced to rubble that hasn’t been cleared out since that first earthquake, a year and a half ago. The dark isn’t helping, and neither is the storm, and there’s a compass in his backpack, somewhere, but Will doesn’t know why they bothered keeping them around. None of the compasses in Hawkins have been functional in months.
“Shit,” Will says aloud, then kicks at another rock in his path. Whatever. He’ll find his way back eventually. It wasn’t even the entire house he’d been trying to avoid. Mostly, it had just been—
“Will?”
Will whirls around, the circle of the flashlight’s beam skating over trees and rocks and bushes, highlighting a million little drops of falling rain, before landing on a figure standing about ten feet away — raincoat on, face shrouded, both hands automatically raising in surrender. Will tenses, instinctive and immediate, but his free hand has already dropped from the strap of his backpack down to his side again. He would, unfortunately, know that voice anywhere.
“Jesus,” Will huffs. “You scared me.”
“Maybe don’t creep around the woods in the middle of the night if you don’t want to be startled,” Mike says, lowering his arms and stepping forward, directly into the light. “What are you doing?”
He’s still wearing his pajama bottoms, Will notices, and instantly feels guilty about it — about the fact that Mike is standing here, getting drenched head to toe because of him — before he fully processes the fact that he had not asked Mike to come out here, and he did not know Mike was out here, so logically, none of this is actually Will’s fault. It doesn’t quell the guilt though, which only rises, growing steadier with each second that passes. Will blinks some water out of his eyes and asks, in lieu of a response, “Are you following me?”
“No,” Mike says immediately, and then, “not on purpose, anyway. It’s just” —he takes another step closer, and now Will can see the furrow between his brows, the way his lips are a little pursed in confusion— “I woke up and you were gone.”
“I could’ve been in the bathroom,” Will replies.
“You weren’t,” Mike says.
“Maybe I was getting some water,” Will presses.
“You weren’t,” Mike says again.
Mike’s pajama pants, which had been light blue when they’d gone to sleep, are so streaked through with rain that they’re almost black now. Will sighs, then lowers the flashlight a little. It’s intense, looking Mike head-on like this, all of the minuscule detail of his features in full beam. He just needs to turn things down for a minute. Give his eyes time to adjust. “Go back to sleep, Mike.”
“I wasn’t sleeping,” Mike says, even though this directly contradicts what he had just said. “I— maybe for twenty minutes at a time, here and there, but— come on. It’s not like any of us are—” He pauses there, and even without the flashlight right on his face anymore, it’s unmistakable, the way his eyes finally land on the backpack, widening as they take in Will’s boots, his coat, his hair dripping water everywhere, even under his hood. When Mike speaks again, his voice is low, incredulous. “Were you running away?”
“No!” Will exclaims, and then, when the word comes out too harsh, too loud— “No,” he says again, a hushed, snapping whisper. “Not— not really. No. I wasn’t.”
“Not really?”
“I wasn’t,” Will insists. “I just— I needed some air. How did you find me?”
“I heard something pass the house,” Mike says, reaching up to push some hair out of his face as he crosses the rest of distance between them. It’s already wet, starting to drip rivulets down his face. “It went by three times, and then on the fourth — because nothing had tried to break through a window and kill us yet,” he adds, one corner of his mouth twitching upwards, “I figured maybe it was you, going in circles or something.”
“It’s not funny,” Will says. “Stop— don’t smile at me.”
“I’m not!” Mike says, even as the other corner of his mouth twitches upwards too. Nothing about this entire situation is funny. Will wants to hit him, a little bit. The hand holding the flashlight spasms slightly. “Were you? Going in circles, I mean.”
“No,” Will lies. Mike raises an eyebrow at him, which is a downright deadly combination alongside that smirk, all pleased and smug and knowing. Will looks away. “It’s not funny,” he says again. “How did you know it was me? You didn’t even bring a weapon.”
Mike looks away, down at the ground, then bends, picking up something with one hand and turning it over, examining it closely. “Here,” he says, then holds up a perfectly ordinary tree branch. “Plenty of sticks to go around. I can make do.”
Will scowls. “Not funny,” he says for a third time. “Go away.”
Mike drops the stick unceremoniously. It falls to the damp forest floor, tumbling over itself before coming to a stop, splashing a few drops of water onto the hem of Will’s pants. “Okay fine,” Mike says. “I’ll bite. What’s your deal?”
The other fact of the matter is this: tomorrow, Will is going to walk into the Upside Down and not look back. Tomorrow, he is either going to kill Vecna or die trying — and Mike is not going with him.
“I don’t have a deal,” Will says, entirely untruthfully. The guilt is back, full swing, at the thought that he might be awful enough to sacrifice his last night with his best friend to mope by himself out in the woods. The facts are almost embarrassing, now — how he’d been lying there next to Mike, knowing he was about to go face to face with any number of monsters, but still couldn’t muster up the courage to wake Mike up, to press in closer to him, to reach out and take his hand where it had been splayed there, open and palm up on the mattress, waiting — just waiting. “I just— wanted to be alone for a bit.”
It’s funny how bravery works. There’s a flash of memory, blurry but distinctive, of Will at twelve years old, in a shed with a gun in hand — trembling and scared half to death, with terrible aim and barely enough strength in his arms to hold it steady enough to shoot at all, but ready to fire, if he’d had to. How had he been brave enough to do that, but not this?
“Well, tough,” Mike is saying, more sharply than Will would have expected from him after the first part of their exchange. He shoves his hands into his pockets and stands up a little straighter. “You don’t get to be. Not tonight.”
Will holds his gaze for what feels like an eternity, but Mike doesn’t budge. There’s the sound of water hitting the underbrush and a crackling from far away, like thunder, like there’s a storm closing in. “Fine,” Will acquiesces, and Mike’s silhouette relaxes visibly. He turns in place, presumably to walk back towards the house, but Will reaches a hand out, grabbing Mike by the forearm. It’s maybe the bravest thing he’s done all day, and Mike’s coat is slippery and wet under his palm, but he holds fast. “Not yet,” Will says softly, and Mike pauses. “I can’t— I can’t go back in there yet.”
“Okay,” Mike says easily, then falls into step beside him. He’s properly soaked now, and Will doesn’t know how he isn’t shivering. The hood doesn’t seem to be doing him much good anymore either, and he keeps reaching up to rub water out of his eyes, or to tug said hood down over his head, or to pull the sleeves of his coat down farther over his wrists. Still, he lets Will set the pace, take the lead, as he flicks his flashlight back onto high beam and starts picking his way through the trees again. “Did you still just want to do some laps around the woods, or—”
He’s teasing, and it isn’t very good teasing, by either of their standards, but Will feels himself go a little warm anyway. “I don’t care,” he says. “At first, like, when I couldn’t sleep, I figured I might as well scope things out for tomorrow. See if there was any gate activity, anything weird going on. There wasn’t, but I didn’t want to go back just yet, so—” He trails off, shrugging, not looking over at Mike. “It’s whatever. It doesn’t really matter where we’re going. There’s nothing out here anyway.”
“Right,” Mike says. “Yeah, well— that’s good. I’m glad.”
Will shakes his head, fighting back a smile Mike can’t even see. Knowing him, he’d be able to tell anyway, and then he’d feel all encouraged and enabled to be even more of a Grade A moron. “You didn’t even bring anything with you? God, Mike, you’re an idiot. A stick? Really?”
“What would I need to defend myself from?” Mike leans in, bumps their shoulders together. It’s not forceful in the slightest, barely more than a tap, but it’s unexpected, and the touch, even through layers of shirts and coats, is enough to startle him, to send him tilting slightly in the other direction. “You just said there’s nothing out here.”
“Yeah, but you didn’t know that,” Will snaps. “For all you knew, I could’ve been, like—”
“What, a bear?” Mike laughs. “All the bears are probably dead by now.”
“A monster,” Will corrects, barely avoiding tripping headfirst over a rock in the path and potentially getting concussed to death after all. It would be a lot more embarrassing to do that with Mike next to him — but maybe Mike would catch him, then. He presses a hand to his forehead under the pretense of wiping some water off, and immediately pulls it away when he finds the skin there warm and flushed instead of the expected chill. “A demodog. A demogorgon. Vecna himself, I don’t know.”
“Well, I saw you,” Mike counters. They’re going a different way than Will had been before, due to Mike steering them a little to the right — whether intentionally or not, Will doesn’t know — and this stretch of the woods is something a little more familiar, even in the dark. “For just a second, but I figured you weren’t a demogorgon or Vecna, probably.”
“Maybe I’m one of Vecna’s puppets,” Will offers. “Did you ever think about that?”
“Are you?” Mike asks, audibly uncaring.
“No,” Will says. “But I’d probably also say that if I was.”
Mike hums thoughtfully. He’s close enough that their shoulders keep bumping when they walk, over and over, moments of fleeting contact that should not feel as grounding as they do, before they separate again. “Okay, well,” Mike says. “Prove it, then. Tell me something a puppet wouldn’t know.”
“Mike.”
“I’m serious,” Mike says. “You brought it up, so— if you’re really worried about it, then go ahead.”
Will exhales through his nose, a soft whistling sound that immediately gets drowned out by the sound of Mike stepping on a twig. Will’s instinct would be to brace himself, to keep an eye out for danger that the noise attracted, but he’d meant it when he said that there’s nothing here. He can sense it, how empty this entire stretch of the woods is, and probably farther still. It doesn’t make him feel better about the long term — thinking about where all those creatures are, currently, and what they might be preparing for — but at least this is okay. At least he can have a moment of rest before shit hits the fan. “I,” Will starts, then pauses. He’s dug his own grave with this one, but he’s always been better at collecting secrets than he has been at letting them go. “Well, I— I’m gay, so. There’s that, I guess.”
It’s not the first time he’s said it, not by a long shot, and not even to Mike, specifically — although it doesn’t ease the way his stomach flips at the admission, even now. Will has a feeling that this is something that might never fade in time — the reaction he has at the reminder to Mike of what he is. Still, he doesn’t flinch this time, and maybe that’s the whole point — like, exposure therapy and whatnot.
Surprisingly, Mike doesn’t really react at all. “Well, yeah,” he says — not dismissive, but more like this wasn’t the point he’d been trying to make. “But if Vecna was digging around in your head, he’d know that. I’m talking, like, something small. Something he’d miss, because it’s not big enough to pick up on.”
“Oh,” Will says. “Whatever. This is stupid. I’m sorry I said anything.”
“Hey.” Mike laughs, just a little, then turns so he’s walking backwards, facing Will the whole time. He’s in danger of slipping and falling for sure, but maybe if that happened, he’d finally learn to leave Will alone when he’s trying to sulk. “Now that really does sound like something a puppet would say.”
“Oh my God,” Will says, and then— “fine. Halloween, 1985. Someone mistook your Doc Brown costume for Princess Leia.”
Mike blinks. “Okay, well— yeah, but there’s no need to relive that, thanks. How did you—”
“Remember?” Will suggests drily, then shrugs. “It’s not like you didn’t write at all when I was gone.”
He’d pored over Mike’s letters when they did come, trying to eke every last ounce of information from them to hold him off until the next one. Usually, they had been pretty barebones, but when Will had found a small detail like this, a little window into Mike’s life back in Hawkins, he’d sunk his teeth into it and held on tight. Halloween, 1985, for example, or when Mike did go to Lucas’s basketball game, and he got pissed off at getting jostled around by the crowd, or Holly’s birthday party, or that first A he’d gotten on a geometry test, after he’d studied for it all week — how secretly proud he’d been, while simultaneously griping about the impracticalities of geometry as a subject overall.
A year ago, Will would have held on to this information, but only to let the resentment keep washing over him, a wound that he never let close. It faded, somewhat, after he learned that El’s letters had even less substance to them, despite the regularity. Mostly, he’d just been left a little confused — but he’s let it go, now. It’s probably as good a time as any.
Mike opens his mouth, but Will interrupts him with a “Don’t,” and then, “it’s okay,” Will adds, surprising himself by how much he means it. “I didn’t mean to bring it up all over again or anything. I really did just— remember.”
“Well,” Mike says. They’ve both slowed down now, and Will grabs Mike’s arm again, bringing him to a complete stop before he topples over. “Summer of 1984. You listened to Rosanna by TOTO on repeat for two months and you made me promise not to tell Jonathan. So you know I’m not a puppet either.”
“Okay,” Will says slowly, as Mike’s face splits open into a wide grin. “Thank you for bringing that up again. I would prefer to not relive that stage of my life.”
“You asked,” Mike says, still smiling. Will’s hand is still on Mike’s arm; he would have dropped it by now, in any other situation, but there’s something that urges him to keep his fingers there, pressing into the soaked material of Mike’s jacket. Up close, in the flashlight’s periphery, Mike’s lashes are casting long shadows against his cheeks, distorted by all the drops of water reflecting light.
Will swallows, once. “You shouldn’t have come out here,” he says quietly. “Really.”
Mike’s smile dims, just a little. “Why?”
Will shakes his head. “I wanted to—”
“Be alone, I know.” A pause, where Mike gets a contemplative look on his face, and then, “You wanted to get away from everyone, which is— self destructive, maybe, but I kind of get it.”
Maybe Will hesitates too long before nodding, or maybe he’s forgotten how good Mike is at reading him. Realization sparks in Mike’s eyes, and he says, quietly, “You wanted to get away from me.”
Suddenly, Will feels like the biggest asshole in the world. He lets go of Mike’s arm, taking a few steps backwards. When Mike says it like that, it sounds immature, but he’s not sure how else to explain it — how he couldn’t lie in that bed next to him for one more second, not after how weird Mike has been with him this whole week, ever since their final strategy meeting a few days ago. He assumed, at first, that it was maybe Mike’s old insecurities making a brief resurgence — that he’d been annoyed with them all for excluding him from the action, for carting him off to Hawkins Lab instead of into the Upside Down with Will and El — but that didn’t seem like the kind of thing Mike would get hung up on anymore. But if not that, then Will doesn’t know why Mike has been so quiet around him lately. He might die tomorrow, and Mike might be upset with him. Will only has the capacity to deal with one of those problems at a time.
“Not like that,” Will says, looking around the little clearing they’re standing in instead of at Mike. The flashlight’s beam lands on a tree, and Will is about to glance over it when he realizes, with a start, that he knows that tree. He’s walked by it a million times, maybe more. His stomach sinks, and he points the flashlight at the ground instead, scanning the detritus until it lands on a familiar shape.
Bingo.
“Are you mad at me?” Mike asks. “Because this is kind of bad timing for you to be mad at me.”
Will bends, squatting low to the ground, and brushes the debris away. “I’m not mad at you,” he says. The wooden plank is still mostly intact — a little rotted away at the corners, stained dark by the soil, but the writing is as legible as ever. Unmistakable.
“Well,” Mike is saying, “if you’re not mad at me, you’re acting really—” He stops, eyes finally landing on where Will is tracing over the curve of the letters with his pointer finger. Castle, this board reads, before it splinters, the other half of it scattered somewhere else in the clearing, surely, or blown away, or kicked around by a visitor, or decomposed altogether. “Oh,” Mike says softly, almost reverent. “Oh, wow. Is that—”
“Mhm,” Will says, then stands up. In his grip, the flashlight could almost be a baseball bat — the slick, smooth feel of it — but it’s not weighted enough, can't do nearly the same damage. A few feet away, there are some more pieces of wood he recognizes: too regularly sized to be felled branches, too evenly cut. “Yeah. I feel bad, you know, that I didn’t realize where we were sooner.”
“It looks so different now,” Mike muses, then points at where a few trees have fallen over in the distance — or maybe they’ve been cut down — logs and debris and overgrowth where there wasn’t any before. Will remembers Mike’s face when he’d found Will there, the shock, the confusion. He’d wondered if Mike had known, then, what Will had done, if he’d seen the baseball bat and the look on Will’s face and put two and two together — the even blows to the wood, the way so many of the sticks had splintered right down the middle, or the fact that they’d split at all, instead of being blown over into a pile like they would’ve if the wind had knocked them down. “Has it been like this since—”
Another plank, a few feet away. Friends welcome, it reads. “It wasn’t the storm,” Will hears himself say.
Next to him, Mike goes still. “What?”
In all honesty, Will doesn’t really know why he said it. Maybe it’s just not worth keeping a secret anymore, not when there are much higher stakes elsewhere. Maybe he’s just tired of carrying that guilt around. Maybe, just a little bit, he wants Mike to put two and two together — maybe he wants it to sting, a little, when Mike remembers the sequence of events that had transpired, just a taste of what he had felt when he’d done it in the first place.
Mostly, Will just wants a clean slate. “I destroyed Castle Byers,” Will says, then laughs. “See? I don’t think Vecna’s puppet would admit to that.”
“Will.”
“Don’t” —Will sighs, then bends down, picking up friends welcome and flipping it over in his hand— “make that face.”
“What face?” Mike is definitely making the face.
“The poor Will face,” Will says. There’s water in his eyes, but his hands are dirty now, and he can’t rub it away. “It’s fine. It happened years ago. It’s in the past.”
“You loved Castle Byers,” Mike says. He’s not making the face anymore — his expression is schooled into careful nonchalance, which is almost worse — but he does sound unmistakably devastated, which is definitely worse. “I just don’t— why?”
Will wants to tell him, about the rage and the tears and the burn of it, deep in his chest, but then he catches a glimpse of Mike’s face again — wide, earnest eyes, the concerned tilt to his brows — and the spark inside him fizzles out, suffocated by the rain. He might have wanted Mike to feel hurt by it before, when he was younger, back when that sort of thing mattered, but it doesn’t anymore. “I was just angry.” Friends welcome. The others are probably here somewhere too — Castle Byers, home of Will the Wise, all— “I regret it,” Will admits quietly, grip tightening on the wood — like this will turn the clock back, somehow. Like this will return to him what he’d so recklessly thrown away. “All the time, I just—”
His grip around it goes tighter and tighter, like this will bring back the nails Jonathan hammered into the wood, over and over until he broke out into a sweat; like it will bring back the hours Will whiled away in there when his house had been busy erupting into a cacophony of shouting; like it will bring back the drawings and the books and the comics and the countless hours of laughter. Will might die tomorrow, and none of these things can ever be brought back to life. They’re as dead and buried as he is about to be.
A sharp pain erupts through the heel of his palm, spiderwebbing outwards. It’s searing — Will gasps, dropping the plank as his eyes smart and immediately begin to water. “Fuck,” he gets out, cradling his hand to his chest. The blood isn’t that visible in the dark, and there isn’t much of it, but he can still see where it’s starting to bead up, then immediately seeping outwards across the rain pooling there. “Shit.”
“You okay?” Mike asks, and then there is a hand peeling his own away from his chest, angling it towards the flashlight in Will’s other hand to get a better view. He takes in a sharp, hissing breath through his teeth when he sees it — a shallow cut, barely more than a graze, but stinging nonetheless.
“Yeah,” Will says, watching the red grow paler and paler as the rain waters it down. “Yeah, just— a nail, I think, or a sharp edge. There should be bandaids in my pack.”
“Will,” Mike starts, and he’s been saying this a lot — just Will’s name, spoken in that concerned, halting tone — but he takes the flashlight anyway, watches Will swing the backpack off of one shoulder and unzip it, injured hand still held gingerly in the air. “Hey, come on—”
“It’s fine,” Will insists, but the first bandaid he pulls out loses its adhesive the minute he peels the backing paper off, and he lets it flutter to the ground, soaked through. The second, he is able to plaster to his palm, barely covering the entire cut, before the rain loosens that too, rendering it useless. He balls it up, throwing it off into the distance with a frustrated sound.
“Will,” Mike says again, more forcefully this time. “Just— just stop. Are you okay?”
Will’s chest is heaving, and he doesn’t know from what exertion, exactly, but he feels out of breath anyhow, strangely winded, like a phantom pain. “I did it,” he confesses again, blurted around a shaky breath. “Two years ago, I— I took a baseball bat to it. It took Jonathan so long to get it up and I knocked it down in twenty minutes. I just— I had to tell someone. Before—”
The second half of the sentence goes unsaid, but Will knows that Mike is picking up on it anyway. He’s silent for a while, still holding the flashlight in one hand, face cast into shadow, unreadable. Two years ago — or one, even — this would have felt like the ultimate form of catharsis. It would have been all Will wanted. But now—
“Okay,” Mike says simply, and then he’s sliding an arm across Will’s shoulders, guiding them towards the opening in the path from where they’d come. It’s embarrassing, how quickly Will’s body leans into the weight of Mike’s, the solid shape of him, tall and steady. “It’s okay,” Mike says again. “Come on. Let’s go inside and fix that up, yeah?”
Anger is an easy emotion to waste your time on when that time feels endless. Will thinks about it, sometimes, those six months in California — all that time and energy he had wasted trying to keep his anger from fizzling out, to try and keep that cheap source of fuel alive — and wishes he could get it back. Nothing easy has ever yielded good results in the long run, anyway. Nothing born of anger has ever served him well.
The silhouette of the house becomes visible through the trees, and it hits him — how late it is, how soon they’ll have to be up again, and just how many hours he has left with Mike, maybe forever. “You’re drenched,” Will says apologetically.
“Doesn’t really matter,” Mike says, pushing the front door open, then dropping his voice to a whisper. Will isn’t really sure how many people are asleep at all, but it’s endearing that Mike is trying to stay quiet anyway. “We have towels, don’t we?”
Will bends down to peel his socks off too, wincing as his injured hand flexes with the movement. Mike mirrors his movements, clicking the flashlight off and setting it on the floor. He doesn’t once remove his arm from Will’s shoulders. Will tries not to think about it.
In the living room, one of the figures on the sofa stirs lightly, lifting its head up as they breach the entryway, starting down the hallway towards the bathroom. El’s voice — faint, hoarse — calls out, “Will?”
“Yeah,” Will replies. “Go back to sleep.”
El lifts a hand to her face, rubbing at her eyes. “Mike? Why are you guys wet?”
“Couldn’t sleep,” Mike replies. His hand squeezes Will’s shoulder, once. “Will’s got a little cut. We’re just going to go clean him up.”
“It’s fine,” Will tells her. “I’ll see you in a few hours, El.”
The bathroom is as sparse as it has always been, except for their first aid supplies, which are almost spilling out of the cupboard under the sink. Who needs toilet cleaner or extra hand soap or spare toothpaste when that space could be used for burn cream and bandages and peroxide and gauze? There isn’t room on the counter to sit on, and Will thinks it’s maybe a little awkward to perch on top of the closed toilet lid, so he hovers by the bathtub instead, stepping neatly out of Mike’s way as he digs around in the aforementioned cupboard for the aforementioned gauze and bandages, for adhesive wrappings and antiseptic ointment.
“Here,” he says, reaching out a hand as Mike emerges, victorious, with his prizes. “I can just—”
“Let me,” Mike interrupts, ignoring him, looking down at Will’s injured hand. The blood has clearly been trying to clot, but it hasn’t quite been successful, leading to a mess of red all across Will’s palm that looks a lot worse than the actual area of impact. Will opens his mouth to protest, to say that he can handle himself, that he appreciates the company, but Mike can go back to sleep now — and then he sees Mike’s face: twisted up, anguished, no longer cloaked by shadow or rain or the profile of his hood. It hits him, then, that this hasn’t been easy for Mike to hear, either. Nothing Will has said to him since he went outside has been easy for Mike to hear. Will hasn’t been taking it easy on him at all. So, when the divot between Mike’s brows deepens — when he asks, “Can you just let me do this for you?” — Will nods wordlessly, lets Mike take his hand, and trails him back over to the sink. The water from the faucet is cold, which is fine, because when they were outside, Will’s hand had already been feeling a little like he’d stuck it into a block of ice. He’s just now starting to come back to equilibrium, the warmth returning to his extremities — but it’s making the wetness of his clothes undeniable, the chill unignorable, and he doesn’t even realize he’s started to shiver until Mike asks, concerned, “Too cold?”
“The water’s fine,” Will says. “It’s just— my jacket is soaked through.”
Mike winces, even though he’s just as drenched as Will is. “Sorry,” he says, entirely needlessly. The water in the sink had started off a light brown — barely drying blood, a little bit of dirt — and then it had turned pink, but it’s slowly starting to run clear. Mike lets the tap run for maybe another minute before turning it off, reaching for a clean rag he had grabbed from under the sink, and dabbing at Will’s hand with it. Will fights back a wince the best he can when the fabric grazes over the wound, over the rough, split edges to his skin, but he must not be successful, because Mike makes an apologetic noise, deep in his throat, and eases up on the pressure. “Sorry,” he says again.
“Don’t be,” Will says immediately. There hadn’t been much fight in him to begin with, but whatever was left is all drained out of him now. “I— I’m sorry.”
Mike pauses, just for a second, but Will notices. “You didn’t do anything,” he says.
“I wasn’t mad at you earlier,” Will promises. “When I left, I mean. I just—” Will sighs. “You were confusing me,” he admits. “And I don’t— want to be confused about you. Not tonight.”
At this, Mike looks up, frowning. “I was confusing you?”
“Yeah,” Will says. “I don’t know. You’ve been acting weird the past few days. Like— you’ve been quiet around me, and you crack jokes with the others, but you stop when I’m around.” He pauses, waits for Mike to jump in with insistence that he hasn’t been, or that Will is imagining things. Instead, Mike stays silent, looking up at Will through his lashes, waiting for him to continue. “I didn’t know what to do. I just— I needed a second to think.”
“Yeah?” Mike puts the rag down on the counter and picks up a tube of ointment, but doesn’t move to uncap it. “What were you thinking about?”
What Will had been thinking about was Mike’s hand on the mattress, outstretched, and the sliver of moonlight that had been streaking down the side of his face, and his hair fanned across the pillow, and how it would be pathetic to die unwanted and rejected by the boy he loves, but it would maybe be worse to die a coward, to not say anything at all. The lightbulb in the bathroom is on its last legs, tinny and a little cold, making the whole room feel strangely liminal, outside of time. Will hadn’t been brave enough to say anything earlier, back in his room or outside, in the woods, but maybe he can be brave in here, instead. “I was thinking,” Will says. He reaches out, touching the underside of Mike’s palm with his, and lets Mike’s fingers curl down into the touch, around the wound. “I’ll miss you, tomorrow.”
Mike exhales, sudden and forceful, like it’s been punched out of him. “When we had that meeting,” Mike starts, those first few syllables coming out all shaky, “you didn’t even hesitate before splitting us up. You and El were the obvious choice for the Upside Down, obviously, obviously you were, but you just— I couldn’t even open my mouth before you were saying it. You said Mike should go down to the lab, and then it was done, and it was decided, and we were ending the meeting, and I couldn’t even say anything because I was just so— I didn’t expect you to be so okay with it, let alone to come up with the idea.” Mike lets go of Will’s hand, just for a second, to unscrew the tube of ointment and squeeze some out onto his finger. “I guess I thought— well” —he laughs wryly, a little embarrassed— “I can’t imagine being away from you when shit goes down. I guess I just thought it was the same for you.”
Will’s heart stops. “Mike,” he says softly, then nothing else. What is he supposed to say?
Mike shakes his head. Will’s palm stings again, just a little, when the ointment reaches it, but Mike’s touch is gentle and steady, and his hands are warm. “I’ve been trying to tell you,” he says, hushed, quiet. “I need to go with you. I can’t lose you again, not when I don’t know if—”
He breaks off, voice cracking like the Castle Byers sign, right down the middle.
Softly, Will asks, “You were trying to tell me?”
Mike peels a couple of sheets of gauze away from the stack. Will doesn’t know when he got so good at first aid, but he supposes they’d all gotten there eventually, at some point down the line. His movements are practiced, fluid, but his hands are shaking as he presses the gauze into the cut, reaching across the sink for the adhesive wrapping. “Yeah,” Mike says. “I just didn’t know how to, like— I guess I got nervous. That’s why I was—” He waves his free hand aimlessly in the air. “Is that stupid?”
“That’s not stupid,” Will says. Mike secures the wrapping, three times around for good measure, then tears it off the roll, tucking the ripped edge back into itself. His hand lingers there, even when he’s done — even though the wound is dressed now, clean and harmless and tucked out of sight.
“Really?” Mike says. He runs his thumb back and forth along the square of gauze. “It felt stupid to me.”
Will swallows, his throat dry. It is easier to be brave in here, more so than it was back in his room anyway, even with the light on and Mike standing with their faces barely even six inches apart, holding his hand. Will doesn’t know if he’ll ever get used to the way Mike makes him feel, but that stomach-dropping feeling — the adrenaline, the rush of blood through his ears — does feel easier now to take in stride than it ever has before. He bends his fingers upwards again, trapping Mike’s hand in his, and says, quietly. “You have to go, Mike. It wasn’t that I didn’t want you with me” —he takes a deep breath in, closing his eyes— “because of course I do. Of course. But they need you more,” Will finishes.
He hears rustling, damp hair brushing against his nose as Mike shakes his head. They’re close enough, now, for Will to feel Mike’s breaths ghosting across his cheeks, a warm exhale against his lips. “They don’t,” Mike insists. “They’ll be okay. Just— I need to go with you.”
In this moment, Will doesn’t know which is worse: for a boy like him to die unwanted and rejected or to die a coward — or to get everything he has ever wanted for a few short hours, before it’s taken away from him forever. Will’s eyes are still closed when he feels Mike’s nose bump against his. It’s a relief, more than anything, to know Mike is meeting him where he is. It’s that age-long churning in his gut, that anxious fluttering in his chest, finally coming to a standstill.
“They do,” Will murmurs, and then, again— “they do. It won’t work if you’re not there. You’ll see me after. I promise.”
“What I was trying to tell you,” Mike starts, his lips brushing against Will’s. “I—”
It’s the third option, Will decides, that is the worst, no competition: to have the one thing you’ve wanted the most in the whole world for a moment, before you risk it all vanishing in the blink of an eye. He’s spent so much time angry, but it never occurred to him to be angry about this, because it hadn’t really occurred to him that he would have this at all — Mike and him, standing so close that they’re practically speaking against each other’s mouths — much less lose it again so soon after. Usually, the anger would be a burning thing, fuel for a fire that is always too easily exhausted. Now, though, when Mike touches him, it’s quieting down — a dimmer blaze, but steady, sustainable, enough to carry him through.
Mike’s hands move up, cupping his face. Will knows what’s about to happen. “After,” he promises quietly, as Mike closes the gap between them. “Not now. Tell me then.”
Mike kisses him softly, like an answer, like an agreement — like he’s taking Will’s instructions and running with it, saying everything he can without actually using the words for it. There’s a sharp, metallic scent that’s flooding Will’s senses, like dirt, like rain against parched earth, like blood; it’s overwhelming, and it’s the best thing Will has had, and he already knows, seven seconds into his first kiss, that it might be the best thing he will ever have again. Mike cards a hand through Will’s hair, uncaring of the fact that they are still in the same clothes they came back in, or that Will’s hair is still dripping water all down his neck, or that his own hair is doing the same thing. Will’s palm is stinging again — he realizes, belatedly, that his hand has made its way to Mike’s hip without him realizing, is holding him steady there — and the counter is digging into his back, and there are still first aid supplies scattered everywhere, and suddenly, it doesn’t matter that Will might die tomorrow. He has this for now.
The last drag of their lips is slow, hesitant, like neither of them want to part, to put that space back between them, lest the bubble burst altogether. Mike kisses his bottom lip, and then his top, and then just stays there, their breaths intermingling, resting his forehead against Will’s. “Okay,” he says at last. “Okay. After.”
Will’s heart is pounding, and he’s out of breath, and the pain in his hand has subsided to a dull throb, and air still smells sharp and metallic, but it all feels unmistakably alive. Will tries to hold on to that feeling, committing it to memory. “After,” he agrees. “I promise.”