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Mike had never felt so distant from everyone around him, it’s as if there was a chasm between him and everyone else that he couldn't even begin to cross. They all lived with the constant fear that this time they weren't going to win, that everyone they'd ever loved was doomed. Staying awake at night worrying about Vecna, worrying that they'd get possessed and no one would be around to save them.
They all knew, deep down, that not all of them were going to survive this time.
He had no idea how to reach out and bring them all together; to reassure and plan, and push; Mike knew he was no longer the heart.
Tension runs through the air like a static current, it buzzes and burns every surface it settles itself on. He steps on eggshells around everyone , although none more so than El and Will.
His breakup with El had been somewhat mutual, which was a small comfort. They both knew and understood the spark that drew them together had extinguished itself, if it ever existed at all. The only difference between the two, was that El was prepared to let go, and Mike wasn't. El was ready, excited even, to go out and properly understand what it was like to be herself - a process which was started in the summer of 85. Mike, on the other hand was desperately clinging onto the delusion for just a little bit longer, hoping that if he pretended for just a few moments more he'd know how to pretend without El.
At least they were still on speaking terms. Awkward and stilted speaking terms, but speaking terms nonetheless.
It was more than he could say about him and Will.
The moment that marked the transition from friends to acquaintances would've been comical if it wasn't so tragic, so comically tragic.
Will and Mike stand gaping, staring at one another like fish stranded on land, as if there is a weight tugging their jaws towards the ground.
Will ambled forward, wanting to say, or do anything to dissipate the atmosphere surrounding them. He wants to apologize for upsetting Mike and desperately reach out to stop him from creasing his painting - Will's beating heart on acrylic and canvas - more than he already has in his iron grip.
Mike steps back.
Betrayal colours his face in lightening shades of pale, a sheen of tears settling across his wide eyes.
"What..?"
He whispers it slowly, like he can't quite believe what's happening.
"I'm sorry Mike, really I am, I thought I was doing the right thing," Will states, his voice neither quiet nor loud, yet still echoing in the silence of the room.
"You lied to me-! Everything you said in that stupid van was a lie -! El never thought those things about me, she never told you to paint this," he held onto the painting tighter as if to ground himself, thrusting it into the space between them "you just made it all up-!" his voice gradually becomes a messy mix of betrayal leaking into misplaced fury.
Rage furrows his eyebrows and hunches his shoulders as his eyes peirce will with a sharp expectation.
"It was real-", and Will so desperately wants to scream his love in Mike's face, that he was being as honest as he could allow himself to be.That everything he said, all the feelings he confessed , were real, and vibrant, and bright because they were his. But he doesn't. Because he is afraid to tell the truth. He doesn't, because Mike will prefer the lie.
"At least I thought it was real. I'm sorry, I wouldn't have said it if I'd known it wasn't true," Will's hands twitch at his sides.
"That’s exactly the problem, Will. You didn't know anything and you said it anyway! And what about the painting, you knew she didn't commission it but you still told me it was from her!" There was fear in his voice when he brought up the painting. A fear that was sharp, and loud, and violent, a deep rooted fear passed down by every generation before him.
A fear which stemmed from his inexplicable disappointment when he found out the painting was from El, yet he still treasured it as a gift from Will more than anything to do with her. A fear that reared its ugly head as soon as he realised what that disappointment could mean. A fear that only became more powerful when El revealed she'd never commissioned it.
Will hesitates , grasping for the right words with an anger of his own infecting his voice
"It was originally supposed to be a present, for when you arrived in California, but then you immediately made it super obvious that you didn't want to see me, so I didn't give it to you. Everything after that went so fast and- and then we were in the van, and I just wanted to make you feel better, and the painting was right there... I thought you'd appreciate it more if it was from El,"
Mike almost winces at the mention of how he treated Will in California, at the reminder of how he couldn't even hug his best friend at the airport, how he ignored him in favour of a girl he wasn't even sure he loved anymore. The care was there, as strong as it has ever been, but not love. Never love.
Maybe a better Mike would've ended the argument there. Maybe a better Mike would've taken a step back and had a conversation instead of a shouting match. A Mike that would’ve had the emotional intelligence in the moment, and not just in retrospect. But instead he continued to speak.
"Maybe I would have appreciated it more if it was from El," He spat in a petulant way that made him sound more like a toddler than a teenager. Will's face hardened.
"Just give it back if you don't want it-!" he exclaims , his heart seizing painfully every time Mike tightens his grip on the painting. Although the thought of taking back the painting makes him feel ill, almost as if he was taking back his feelings. He just wants it in his hands again, to smooth out the creases to the best of his ability, hold it to his chest and cry.
Mike tries to move the painting away from Will's hand as it comes arching down towards him. But he doesn't move fast enough, and Will latches onto the lower side of the canvas. Desperation squats like a lump in his throat that slowly expands and chokes him. He'd never gotten rid of art from Will, never, and the thought of starting now makes him sick. Even though he's angry, at the lies, and the painting, and himself, Will still made it for him. A fact which colours his face in a fiery red flush like a particularly nasty sun burn; and makes his heart thump louder in his chest, until he's sure everyone can hear it. A heat that never had anything to do with El.
They pull at the painting like a tug of war that neither of them are willing to lose.
"Just let it go-!" Mike yells, and it's almost loud enough to drown out the despair of the tearing painting, as both of their hearts flutter down to the dusty, grime caked floor; torn into two tattered pieces.
Will and Mike don't speak after that. Not to eachother, not with intention.
When Mike goes to bed at night and wakes up in the morning, Will is never in his sleeping bag. He would've thought he had just moved to a different place to sleep, if he hadn't woken up in the middle of the night after a disturbing dream to find him lying there fast asleep. Will was petty enough to avoid being alone in a room with Mike when both of them were still conscious.
His mum was still getting offered steadily increasing amounts of money to leave, to abandon Hawkins like almost everyone else into the hands of the military. Mike feared a day when she would accept one of these offers, and they'd leave the Byers behind to an unknown fate; without Mike ever being able to make himself apologize. Without him ever making himself fix him and Will.
El finds Mike after he had escaped the almost empty house for the fresh autumn air outside, pacing around his back garden moping over his argument with Will .
She slips through the gap in the door, with a soft squeak of door hinges, so quiet that he almost doesn't hear it. She doesn't say anything, and Mike stands there perplexed.
"El-?" He questions, his voice sounds awkward and raspy even to his own ears, while El stays silent standing on the steps.
"Mike," she says at last, her solemn expression breaking into a smile as she speaks his name, but wavering slightly as she continues to talk " I think we made a mistake,"
Silence is it's own sound. It's crowded and loud and overbearing, as well as entirely too quiet. It fills the void between them snugly, a void which steadily shrinks as El slowly paces towards him, reaching up to cup his face with soft tender hands. She just holds him for a second, and she holds him like he's fragile, and easy to break, like he's something that needs protecting.
"Mike," she repeats in a whisper, so sweet and reverent, bringing her forehead to rest against his. Mike just stands there, not sure what to do.
El sways on her feet as if she were dancing and her hands snake up and slither into his hair as she pulls them both towards each other into a kiss. Turbulent winds knock into them and rain smatters gently on top of their heads, icy coldness seeps into him from where El is pushed against him instead of the warmth of her body. Mike hates the taste of her lip-gloss, and the mix of saliva makes him feel sick, but he moves his lips against hers anyway, pulling her flush to his chest with an arm wrapped around her waist and a hand resting in the curls on her head.
When the wind begins to feel like its spinning them he scrunches his eyes closed. Mike doesn't notice as the body he's holding becomes slowly sturdier, as the hands holding him back become slightly rougher and stronger, as he doesn't need to tilt his head down as far to continue the kiss. The horrible taste of El's lip-gloss slips away and their fine soft hair seems to straighten out.
They pull away from each other, but instead of staring into El's eye's below him, he's staring into Will's.
Will, whose eyes are soft , yet hold something sinister within them, whose hair is messy and tousled from where mike's hands where buried in it, whose lips are red and slightly swollen as they speak in a voice that is almost his
"I love you mike,"
the words aren't hurried as they slip through will's mouth, flowing with a sweetness and adoration he isn't sure he's ever heard in any of his own or El's love confessions.
Desperately looking around him in confusion mike sees their surroundings melting around them like water flowing down invisible walls. His back garden gives way to darkness which gives way to something somewhere else.
"Don't you love me too-?" Will asks in response to Mike's silence, drawing his attention back towards him as he cocks his head to the side and stares at him as he hurriedly pulls away.
Mike takes a step back, and then another, unsure of what to say or do, and as his foot moves back he suddenly becomes aware there is no ground for him to step onto, and he plummets down into the dark shadow of the quarry as will stares at him apathetically from above.
He lands on his bed with a muffled thud and the sound of crinkling paper , for a moment he thinks it was a dream. A strange dream that will haunt him for weeks, but a dream nonetheless. It isn't until he sits up and looks around that he realises how horribly real it all is.
Every surface of his room , including the bedding he sat upon dumbfounded, was covered in letters. More letters than he was sure he'd ever written in his life. There were so many that when they layered over each other on the wall it made the room feel smaller, like they were closing in on him. The room was so still, yet it was moving so fast, and all mike could see in the blur of text of each notebook page and slip of printer paper were the words "dear will" and "love mike".
Mike launches himself across the room towards where the door should be, ripping the letters away in a desperation to survive just a few seconds longer, before he even hears Vecna's voice calling out to him from across the room.
"Michael,"
Vecna's voice is deep and threatening, it holds the air of someone who lacks the capabilities to feel fear, especially when confronted with such weak ,vulnerable prey. Mike refuses to turn around, he refuses to look Vecna in the face as he hears his footsteps echoing across the short space towards him, ignoring the sound of his leathery skin squelching as he walks, and hopes beyond all reason that the light he swears he can see appearing behind the paper isn't a comforting delusion.
"join me Michael," He rasps and Mike swears he can feel his pungent breathe on the back of his neck.
Descending in a slash across the paper, his hand breaks through into the hall and he uses his other to claw a large enough hole to drag the rest of himself through. The hallway lights are dim and they flicker relentlessly as Mike runs down the carpeted passage which seems to have extended itself. Flies surge and crash into his face, but he pushes through the thickening cloud, swinging his body around the banister to sprint down the stairs two at a time. The swarm of flies grows so large that Mike can no longer see where he's going, only feeling them move against his skin, and the floor beneath his feet.
He can only hope he's moving towards an exit.
Mike bursts into the dining room, leaving the incessant buzzing of the bugs behind him. The lights provide the same warm glow they always have, it bounces and shines off the wall, yet it's somehow unsettling. There a woman stood before him, with large bouncing curls that fall to her mid back. His mother is turned away from him, atleast he thinks the woman standing before him is his mother. She has the exact same hair, and the exact same clothes as when he last saw her. She carries herself the same, but when she turns around, it is elevens face that stares back at him. And it is elevens voice that begins to speak to him in a patient measured tone when he continues to stand there gaping and staring.
"welcome home from work honey, the kids missed you today,"
kids-? What kids -
It is then that mike notices the two other figures sat around the table. The first being max, sitting slumped and boneless in her wheelchair as her head lolled to the side, a useless IV jabbed into her arm. Flies and ants crawl and drag themselves across her sickly almost yellow skin, buzzing around where blood steadily flows from beneath her concave eyelids, thick and pulsing.
Beside her, with his head laying on the table to stare at him with dead glassy eyes was the corpse of Eddie Munson. Everyone seemed to forget about Mike's friendship with Eddie, that Eddie brought him into the hellfire club like he did Dustin and Lucas , gave him structure and a beacon to look forward to in the hell scape that was Hawkins high. He now seemed to haunt his subconscious, sat in mikes chair at the dining table with his hair laying matted across his face eaten away by wriggling silver maggots. A trail of dried blood and viscera oozes down the waxy skin on his chin and he stares right into mike's soul as if to say 'this is you're fault, you weren't here and look at what happened to us'.
Mike lets out a loud screeching sob , tears rolling into his open gasping mouth. He cries , mourning his two friends, before his eye's fall down to the table, and he screams.
He screams a watery cry of grief and terror, falling backwards against the wall and slipping down onto the floor , backing himself into the corner. Yet his eye's never leaving the bloated corpse of Will splayed across the wood of his dining room table.
The body wears the same clothes as the one that was pulled from the quarry all those years ago, but is the same age as him. His eye's see nothing else but the blue of wills lips and skin, and he can't help but think of how cold and afraid he must've been while zeroing in on the sound of water dripping off his body. He can't draw his gaze away from him, even as eleven calmly walks over to his fathers seat at the dining table and pulls his scraping chair across the floor, announcing with an evil trill
" Come sit down dear, dinners ready-!"
Scrunching his eye's closed he prays to wake up. He prays to wake up in his normal bedroom with his normal family and his normal will. He prays that any second now he's going to shoot up in bed panting for breathe with his heart thrumming in his ears and Will still asleep on the sleeping bag on the floor.
"you can join them Michael," is growled from above him and Mike's eyes flash open in an ice cold fear to stare into the decaying face of Vecna. Slimy vines slither over the top of his body faster than he can think to rip them off, restraining him and tilting his face up towards Vecna's clawed hand resting above him. Something Mike thinks is supposed to be a grim smile spreads across Vecna's face.
Mike lets sobs run throughout his body, as he slowly stops his useless thrashing and closes his eye's , waiting for the inevitable.
"You don't need to jump this time, just let yourself fall,"
Solemn and consumed by thought, Will sits at the kitchen island nursing a steadily cooling cup of tea. He stared , almost mesmerized, at the swirling milky surface and twirled the teaspoon lazily between his fingers.
Will didn't know what to do, if he was being honest with himself. He'd avoided Mike since their argument a few days before, turning and hurrying down the hall every time his pinched guilt ridden face came into view. He was still figuring out how to fix this mess, figuring out how to breach the topic without tearing into his and Mike's friendship even more.
Confusion ate away at his gut every time he thought about him and Mike . Over the last few years arguments neither of them wanted had coloured their interaction in an angry, volatile scarlet. Arguments that transformed Mike's sweet comforting presence into that of a snarling wolf, sniffing out his insecurities and throwing them back into his face with a vicious bite. Mike's protectiveness had been shifted over to El, and Will never knew how bare he would feel without it.
He tried not to think about El, tried to keep his mind blank of her. Because every positive thought about his sister came with a slew of unwanted intrusive hate. Until the Christmas of 84’ Will and El had never had to worry about each other, occupying the same space in their friends lives while the other was absent. Then for the first time they met and suddenly Will was being pushed away after he thought everything had returned to normal, constantly having to remind himself that it wasn't El’s fault. But he couldn't help the nights where he'd curl up in bed when he couldn't sleep, tears silently trickling down his face, and he'd wish El didn't exist. Wish that things could have stayed the same as they were before they knew about the upside down and Hawkins lab, before he went missing.
Will knew it was selfish and cruel. Because El was his sister, and he loved her. He wanted her to be happy and succeed in everything she did. He pushed her wants ahead of his own, to let her have some joy after a lifetime of misery.
The bitterness still lingered, it would always linger.
Looking up from his now lukewarm drink, Will sees Mike through the slightly dirtied kitchen window. He wasn't doing anything, just standing and staring into nothing. Anxiety bubbles up Will's throat, and he quickly stands up from where he's sat to rush out the back door, pettiness be damned.
"Mike-?" He calls out as he jogs towards him, reaching out to shake his shoulder. He doesn't respond, continuing to stare out into nothing as the wind wraps his hair around his face.
Will circles around In front of Mike, realising with an indescribable horror that Mike's eyes have rolled back in their sockets, twitching and spasming violently. After a moment of letting his blood and bone marrow freeze , permeating his body with an icy chill, he jerks to life hurriedly searching for the cassette – that they were all required to carry – in Mike's pocket, pressing play before slipping the headphones from around Mike's neck to over his ears.
For the first time in Will's life he prayed. He fell to his knees and he begged a God he didn't believe in – a God he'd often regarded as cruel – to show him mercy just once.
Sputtering, gasping breaths push themselves out into the open air as panic and acceptance fight inside of Mike. He stares up at Vecna's cold expression wishing that he could at least have someone looking at him with care as he died.
Mike thinks back on all those times he woke up and felt like a weight was pushing down on him, trapping him lying in bed with an explicable sadness and grief. He thinks back on all the days that something was wrong, but he didn't know what or why, just that it made everything hurt, made him hate everything. He thinks back to all those years he spent purposefully putting himself in harm's way, hoping that if anyone got injured it would be him, that his hurt was the trade for everyone else's. He thinks back to the quarry.
All those times and now as he stared death in the face he was scared. He realises too late that he wants to live, that sixteen years wasn't enough. He needed more time, just a little more time.
It starts off quiet and low, like a distant ringing in his ears, quickly ramping up in volume. He almost thinks he's going crazy when the room is filled with the blasting sound of smalltown boy before he remembers. Craning his neck to stare out the window he can see the wispy warping picture of home.
He can hear, very faintly under the sound of the song, Will's choked off watery sobs as he shouts out Mike's name to his unresponsive floating body.
A sudden burst of energy shoots through him, and he tugs hard on a tendril at Vecna's side. The vine's retreat from his body almost instantly as Vecna stumbles backwards in pain. Mike only wastes one second letting himself breathe before he is scrambling to his feet and sprinting towards the front door.
He yanks the slab of wood towards him , terrified that the outside would be sealed off, only to be greeted by the sight of his front garden. He'd never been so glad to see the short grass and neatly trimmed hedges in his life.
Mike takes off in a sprint towards the gate back home, hovering halfway down the road. As he runs, vines reach out towards him, and trees uproot themselves falling in massive echoing thuds that shake the ground beneath his feet, throwing him off balance and towards the cracking road. The sky thunders menacingly and for a moment Mike thinks that he isn't going to make it, a gaping split in the tarmac widens as he desperately sprints forward while smalltown boy begins to come to a close. He prays as he rushes closer, just needing to move that little bit forward and he'd be safe. Heaving himself in a jump over the break in the ground in a last ditch effort, he falls through the watery distorted image back home.
Mike crumples to the ground with a loud gasp of breath, collapsing in a useless heap of skin and bone.
“Will-! Will, Will,” he blubbers out grasping onto him the minute he is pulled into his arms, Will's tears dampening his neck.
"Oh god Mike I thought I lost you, I'm sorry I'm sorry I shouldn't have lied to you I-” his voice breaks off and he sobs into the cotton of Mike's shirt, looking up at him with wide watery eyes as he pulls away.
Mike brings his quivering hands up to cup Will's blotchy cheeks, watching as confusion floods his features. He acts quickly, not leaving room for second guessing or shame, he doesn't allow the what if’s to take root inside him and stop him from pulling Will towards him into a kiss.
It's short and sweet, barely a brush of the lips, but when Mike pulls away Will is a shocking red.
“I love you so much Will, I just had to let you know,” his voice trembles as he waits for any condemnation, ridicule or rejection to be spat in his direction. Instead Will rests his forehead against Mike's, the continuous flow of tears contrasting his giddy lovesick tone of voice as he whispers
“I love you too,”
Will wants to say more. He wants the last few years of longing and yearning to flood out into the small space between them, to fill the moment he can hardly believe is real. But those words jam in his throat, so instead he brings Mike into another gentle kiss, containing all the love in the world and tasting of the salt of their dripping tears.