Archive of Our Own ^beta

There’s something wrong with Will.

Mike knows this, as much as he knows his own name and age, yet no one believes him. Well, no, that isn’t entirely correct. Joyce believes him, because it’s Joyce and she’ll always listen if someone is worried about Will. But Joyce is living at the radio station with Hopper and El, so she doesn’t understand the full extent to which something is wrong with Will.

Mike understands, though. Mike has been paying attention.

It started three weeks ago, almost four. Will had woken up from some sort of nightmare and, instead of seeking comfort in Mike the way he usually would, he’d rolled out a sleeping bag from the closet and chosen to sleep on the floor. He’d done it all in silence too, no acknowledgement of the questions Mike had asked about if he was okay, or if he needed anything. That had been the first thing to alert Mike about something being wrong. His confidence in the fact had only grown the following night, when Will opted to sleep on the floor again after the pair had headed up to Mike’s room to sleep.

Will hadn’t spent a single night not sleeping in Mike’s bed since the Byers brothers had begun staying with the Wheelers. He’d been funny about it at first, sure, but Mike had told him it’d be weirder for him to sleep on the floor when he had a perfectly good double right there.

For an entire week after the nightmare that sent Will to sleep on the floor, he’d woken up screaming or sobbing. More than once he’d physically recoiled when Mike crawled out of bed and attempted to offer him comfort.

Mike had stopped trying.

The second thing Mike had noticed were the bruises. He’d accidentally walked in on Will changing and seen several dark, purple-black marks littering both of his biceps. It looked like someone had been digging their fingers deep into the flesh of his upper arms, regularly enough that some of them had clearly begun to heal to a faded yellow-green while others were still fresh. Will’s hands had immediately shot up to hide them, and Mike couldn’t help but note the way each bruise seemed to match the shape of his fingers a little too perfectly to be a coincidence.

Mike hadn’t asked.

Then Will had practically stopped eating. Whenever Mike tried to offer him food, he’d turn it down. If Mike tried to force him to eat he’d claim he wasn’t hungry, or say he’d already had something. He’d say he felt sick, or that he’d eaten back at the Wheelers when everyone else ate together on patrols or at the station. His weight loss has been so rapid that his clothes—which had once been a bit tight around his chest and shoulders—now have visible give, sagging off of his frame. His cheekbones and jaw are prominent on his face. His eyes are sunken in their sockets, red rimmed with purple smudges underneath.

Mike had tried to stop worrying.

Recently, he’s been talking to himself too, and it isn’t the way that people normally talk to themselves. It’s more like he’s arguing with himself, fighting himself. His voice is always quiet muttering, too soft for Mike to make out the actual words, but he can hear the rage there. It’s awful, angry and biting in a way he hasn’t heard since he was thirteen watching Will screaming from a hospital bed.

Mike has tried to ignore it.

The most obvious sign of all, however, that something is wrong, started up not even two days ago. Out of everything, it’s what scares Mike the most, more than the anger or the weightloss or even the floor-sleeping. No, it’s that Will doesn’t seem like himself anymore. He’s almost always zoned out. He still speaks when spoken to—only when spoken to—but there’s a lack of emotion in his words. Sure, he still goes about his usual daily routine but it’s jerky, like he isn’t all there, like maybe… something else is there instead.

The previous night when the two boys had come home from the station in the early hours of the morning, he’d just stood in the kitchen staring off into space. When Mike had asked him if he was coming up to bed Will had just looked at him for almost a full thirty seconds, a complete lack of recognition clouding his green eyes.

So, yes, something is wrong with Will, and it’s starting to scare Mike.

He’s drawn from his spiraling thoughts when Nancy cuffs him lightly on the shoulder, smiling as he startles, “you okay? You’ve been quiet tonight.”

“Yeah, no, I’m fine. I’ve just been—thinking, you know.”

“Oh, no, I get it. There’s a lot going on at the moment—I mean, we’re literally in the middle of an apocalypse. And now with this new plan to kill Vecna and shut the gates happening in a couple of days… I’m sure you’re worried about El.”

Mike tilts his head to the side, feeling guilty. He actually hasn’t been thinking about El, like, at all. Not a single thought. He’s been so consumed with his worry about Will this past month that, really, he hasn’t thought of anything but the boy. He swallows, “yeah, yeah it’s. A lot.”

Her smile turns sad, “well, I’m going to bed,” she bumps his shoulder with her own as she passes him, “good job on patrol tonight, you’re starting to get a hang of that gun.”

With that, she’s off up the stairs, leaving Mike staring at the spot she had just been.

He shakes his head to clear it, almost immediately putting all El-related thoughts—and thoughts about his status as an absolutely terrible boyfriend—aside to focus back on what really matters right now. Will.

The older boy hadn’t joined them tonight on patrol because of an apparent headache, and when Mike had attempted to contact him via walkie throughout the night he’d been met with nothing but silence. Something like dread sits heavy in Mike’s gut. He doesn’t like the implications of Will’s radio silence.

He fills a glass with water and grabs a couple of ibuprofen to take with him up to the bedroom for Will, pausing only to turn off the lights with his elbow before climbing the stairs two at a time. He pushes open the bedroom door and stops a moment before heading in. The lights are off and the curtains are drawn tight against the full moon outside. It must have been making Will’s headache worse, he thinks, as he gingerly picks his way over to the bedside table to deposit the medication and water.

Mike makes it across the room without tripping over anything in the dark, placing the glass on the wood and whispering into the darkness, “Will, are you awake?” There’s a sound of shifting material and a small noise, “I’m just gonna turn on the light, okay? I brought you some ibuprofen for your headache.”

Silence answers him, so he assumes he’s in the clear to click on the lamp. Soft golden light bathes the room, and Mike blinks a couple of times to adjust. He turns from the bedside table and towards Will’s sleeping spot on the floor, eyes trained on the two small pills sitting in his palm. He shifts his hand and watches how they roll across his palm before closing his fist around them and inhaling sharply, making a decision.

“Look, Will, I know things have been… well. A bit of a mess lately. And you haven’t wanted to talk to me about—whatever is going on in your head but—” Mike raises his eyes and immediately cuts himself off.

There’s blood on the floor. There’s blood on the floor and Will isn’t in his sleeping bag. Mike's stomach lurches and he lets his eyes drift further across the room. The medication falls to the floor, forgotten. A strangled noise rips itself from the center of his chest.

“Fuck—Will—what—what’s happened? Shit, shit,” he stumbles forward and lands heavily on his knees with a loud thud. The pain doesn’t even register through his haze of panic.

Will sits half propped up against the nearby dresser, his skin pale, eyelids heavy and fluttering. Sticky, deep red blood paints half of his face, his left eye looks to be filled with the liquid. His breaths are coming out in little puffs, rapid and shallow.

Mike watches, stricken, as Will attempts to shuffle himself further away when he reaches towards him. He chooses to ignore the look in the injured boy’s eyes, the wild fear like a cornered animal, and continues to reach for him, gripping his face between his shaking hands.

“Shit, shit, shit,” Mike doesn’t think, turning Will’s head from side to side on auto pilot, attempting to assess the damage.

He can’t see the injury past all the blood. It’s still oozing in thick, half congealed rivulets. Not fresh, then. How long had Will been sat like this, bleeding out on the bedroom floor, alone in the dark? Mike swallows back bile.

This is his fault. He knew something was wrong. He should have been keeping a better eye on him.

Mike blindly prods about Will’s head, searching for the wound. He finds the edge and his finger accidentally sinks in between the separated flesh, pressing against bone. Will moans and flinches, his hand swatting weakly outwards with no real destination.

Mike withdraws his hand like he’s been burned, “Will, shit what happened—” he finally catches sight of blood on the knob of the drawer.

He feels ill, his eyes snapping back to Will's head. He doesn't know how he didn't notice it before, but the spot he'd found the cut is very clearly dented, slightly caved in from where Will had obviously been slamming his head against the fucking drawer. Mike swallows thickly. He can feel his heart pounding in his throat, his finger tips, his belly.

He gathers Will into his arms, who again attempts to swat him away, “d’n’ookit ee-mph.”

His words are barely understandable, sounding more like a string of slurred vowels than anything. Mike doesn’t really care what he’s trying to say. He looks down at Will, hooking his arms under his armpits and hefting him up. He has to get help.

He begins dragging Will to the door of the room, arms screaming, muscles already burning with the effort, the entire weight of the barely conscious boy cradled in his arms. He’s reminded, suddenly, of a night which had felt just as terrifying—though for different reasons—from three years ago, standing outside Hawkins Lab waiting for Joyce and Bob to exit the doors. Will had been so heavy in his arms then, like he was dead. Mike tries not to think about the similarities right now.

He screws his eyes shut for a moment, battling back the wave of panic that comes with remembering that night—running from the demodogs, being screamed at by a possessed Will, not knowing if any of them were safe. He takes a deep breath, reminding himself where and when he actually is, before continuing his shuffle-drag, shuffle-drag to find help. Or, at least, he attempts to.

Will’s body suddenly goes stiff and rigid in his arms, before a mangled scream rips itself from his throat. It doesn’t sound like him, not entirely. Sure, there’s Will’s easy timbre, a sound Mike would know anywhere, but below it is a guttural rumble. There’s something ancient and angry making itself known through Will’s mouth.

Mike almost drops him when he begins to thrash.

Will’s hand shoots up to his own head with such violence it startles a yelp from Mike, who doesn’t have time to stop him before the injured boy begins to claw at the split skin of his scalp. Mike watches in horror as he digs his fingernails into the bloodied meat of his wound and begins to rip. The sound is sickening, the wet squelch of blood. The visuals are worse, still, and he can’t help but notice the way the skin ripples as Will’s fingers wriggle beneath it.

“Stop! Will, stop, please!” Mike is frantic, yelling, trying to make himself heard over the sound of Will’s howls. He doesn’t spare a thought for anything but trying to get Will to stop mutilating himself—not his own parents, not Nancy, not even Holly, all asleep in adjacent rooms.

Will stops clawing at the wound, pulling his viscera coated hand back. It lasts only a moment before he begins to slam the heel of his palm into his skull. Mike can hear the grinding noise of the bones as they’re further mangled by Will’s violence.

Mike hadn’t realized at first, but he’s crying. There’s tears on his cheeks, a shuddering hitch to his breathing as violent sobs free themselves from his chest. He pleads for Will to stop, attempting to hold him upright with one arm, using the other to try and wrestle the older boy’s hand from his head.

A third hand enters his field of vision, and he’s suddenly made aware of another person yelling in his ear. It’s Nancy, telling Mike to hold him still as she attempts to keep Will’s arm away from his head. It just makes the boy thrash harder, kicking out against them, desperately trying to free himself from their grip.

Mike doesn’t know when Jonathan gets there but one moment he and Nancy are struggling to keep Will still, and the next Jon is there, wrapping himself around Will’s torso, pinning his arms to his sides. His breath is heaving in his chest, and Mike assumes he sprinted from the basement to the second floor as soon as he heard his brother scream.

Almost as quickly as it began, everything goes still. It’s eerie, the way Will clams up. The screaming has cut off abruptly, the thrashing, the anger. It all drains from Will in a single moment, like entering the eye of the storm. Mike almost lets himself believe it’s over. Stupid of him, really.

Will begins to seize.

It’s just a twitching at first, a spasm of the hand that had just clawed at his head. Things escalate rapidly from there, his body violently convulsing, head thrown back into Mike’s chest, mouth open wide but silent. His eyes are rolled back so far Mike can only see the milky white of his sclera.

Everything devolves for Mike, after that. The world feels like it’s moving both too fast and too slow at once. It’s like watching a stop motion film, the way his mind cuts in and out.

Will is lowered to the floor. Mike has his head cradled in his lap. He’s crying, his tears are falling on Will’s distorted features. Jonathan is crying too. Nancy is gone. Both boys are calling Will’s name, trying to snap him out of it. Nancy is back. She radioed Joyce and Hop. They’re carrying Will downstairs, Mike refusing to let go of him, carrying him bridal style. Jonathan is helping, Mike isn’t strong enough to carry him alone, but refuses to let go.

They’re in the car. Will has stopped convulsing. His eyes are still rolled back, his scalp is still leaking dark red. They’re tucked together into the back seat, their siblings sitting together up front. Will’s head is in Mike’s lap again. There is blood coating his jeans. Some of it has dried to make the denim stiff—some is fresh and wet and warm. Will’s head still leaks the dark red fluid, it’s slow, but it’s not stopping. Mike had tried to press on the wound to stop the flow, but cringed away when he felt the bone beneath his hand shift at the lightest pressure.

“Hey, we’re going to be okay, you know? We’re going to the radio station. Your Mom is there. She’ll look after you. I’m sorry I wasn’t good enough at it. Please be okay. You’ve been through Hell and back before, you’re gonna be fine. It’s just a little cut. It’s all going to be okay. I’ll get you cleaned up. The whole party is coming. We all love you so much, you know? You say I’m the heart. Well, you’re the soul. Can’t survive without one of those. You’re going to be okay. Everything is going to be fine. It’s going to be okay.”

Mike doesn’t notice the way both Nancy and Jonathan glance back at him during the drive. He just keeps murmuring to Will, rambling assurances. He’d be embarrassed if he remembered there were other people in the car, but his focus is solely on the boy in his lap. He cards his fingers over his cheeks, through his blood-matted hair. He keeps murmuring.

They’re at the station. He still refuses to let go of Will. Lucas helps him carry the boy this time. They’re downstairs in their makeshift bunker. Everyone is yelling. Mike keeps his eyes glued to Will, laid out on the couch as he is. His hands itch to grab for him again, but he’s already been told off for it twice since coming inside. He needs to give Lucas and Joyce space to help Will.

He finds it surprising how on to it Lucas is with the first-aid stuff. Mike voices this opinion to Dustin, who just gives him a flat look and responds with a clipped the love of his life literally died in his arms, you think he wants to experience something like that ever again?

Mike shuts up after that. The only time he kicks up a fuss is when they have to clean the wound. Lucas is grabbing disinfectant and wads of rag. Mike makes a strangled noise, stumbling forward and throwing out a hand to stop him.. The whole room goes silent, all eyes trained on Mike.

“I—I told him I would— would clean him up.” He doesn’t look anyone in the eye, just stares at his shoes.

There’s a pause, like the room is inhaling, before a rag is shoved gently into his periphery. He looks up. Lucas stands in front of him, hand outstretched.

“I get it. I told Max the same.” His voice is quiet enough that only Mike and Joyce seem to have heard.

He tries not to think about the implications.

Mike gives Lucas a grateful nod, taking the rag from his hand. He kneels beside Will and, with a kind of reverence reserved only for the divine, he begins to clear the blood from the other boy’s face and scalp. Will, barely conscious, makes whimpering noises at each soft touch. The silence in the room is heavy, suffocating, knowing. Mike doesn’t fucking care anymore. He takes his time, is as gentle as possible. Lucas hands him new rags every few moments.

No one speaks until his task is complete.

Once Will is clean, Mike rests his forehead against the sofa cushion, puffs out a breath, and closes his eyes, “I told you I’d get you cleaned up. Lucas is going to stitch you up now, I think. It might hurt. I’m sorry if I hurt you. We’re going to get through this. You’ll be okay.”

He looks up, almost hoping to see green eyes looking back at him. They’re not. Will’s eyes are shut tight, his face twisted into an awful grimace of pain. Mike steps back, lets Lucas take his place with the needle and thread. He swallows. El places her hand at the small of his back. Dustin’s rests heavy on his shoulder.

He continues to watch Will.

—☉—

Mike feels like he’s been standing here watching over Will for days. A sentinel keeping guard. A mourner holding vigil. In reality, it has been maybe a few hours. Will is unconscious. He appears to be in less pain than before. At least, Mike hopes that's the case.

El comes and tugs on his hand. He allows himself to be led away from Will and to the other members of the party, now down two instead of just one. His eyes stay firmly planted on the sofa.

El helps him settle down next to Lucas, who places a hand on his thigh. He tries to let himself relax as she leans her head on his shoulder, snaking her arms around his bicep. Dustin stretches out a foot, to touch Mike’s, snaking his leg over El’s to do so. The four of them all touch one another in some way, purposefully. Tangled together, a united front.

It’s grounding.

It feels like family.

But it doesn’t feel like home, not without Will. He chokes on a sob. Lucas hushes him. Together, they sit in silence, watching Will’s chest slowly rise and fall. In a strange way this all reminds Mike of simpler times. Of that awful Fall of 1983. Of these three other kids—because that’s all they are, really, both then and now—helping him search for his best friend, fighting monsters with him.

He scoffs. Simpler times. He can’t believe that all of what happened that year can be described as simple. But compared to this? Compared to this, it was easy.

Hours pass in silence.

—☉—

Will is still asleep the next evening. Mike hasn’t left the station once. None of the party have, nor have Jon and Joyce. They take turns waking Will and checking his responses—Lucas had explained to everyone that after the level of head trauma Will had likely suffered, there was almost no chance he didn’t have a concussion, likely a pretty bad one at that. They had to make sure he wouldn’t end up in a coma.

Joyce was the first to notice the wrongness of Will’s left eye. His pupil is blown wide, the black of of it entirely engulfing the usual hazel-green. The sclera is bloodshot. If Mike hadn’t been told that it happens sometimes after damage to the head, he would have assumed the eye wasn’t Will’s at all.

Mike watches as Will lets out a disgruntled huff, clearly not appreciating the brief bout of consciousness, before falling back into his heavy sleep. The dark haired boy sighs and walks away from where he had perched on the edge of the sofa to check on him. He comes back to the group, sitting in his assigned spot between El and Lucas. El ghosts her hand over his, making him startle. She smiles sadly when his eyes meet hers.

“Come with me, please?” Her voice is soft, trying not to wake Dustin who snores to their left. Mike turns to Lucas, who nods his ascent. Of course he’ll watch over Will.

“I’ll come get you if anything changes,” Lucas’ voice is solemn, his hand quickly squeezing Mike’s as he turns back to face El. Mike gives his hand a squeeze in return.

The pair stand, and El leads him up a flight of stairs to the first floor, then outside and up the fire escape to the roof. They settle in side by side to look out over the field surrounding them, tinged pink by the sunset. The air is still. Mike’s mind isn’t really here. It’s still two floors below them, tucked up on the ugly green sofa with Will. He hates it.

His girlfriend has just asked him up to the roof, is sitting beside him while the sun sets, and all he can think about is his best friend, injured and unconscious downstairs. He knows exactly why. He feels sick.

“You are worried.”

Mike is pulled from his thoughts by El’s words. He looks to her, but she’s still staring across the field at the setting sun. He swallows, “I.. yes. Yeah. I’m worried.”

El finally looks at him, not sad, but not exactly happy either. Her mouth tucks into a downturned smile, “so am I,” she admits, “but he will be okay.”

“I hope so,” he takes another breath, glancing towards the horizon, “it was… really weird yesterday.”

“What happened?” She reaches out a comforting hand, placing it softly on his knee.

“I don’t know. He was okay when I left him to go on patrol. He said he had a headache but things seemed… he seemed fine. I didn’t ask. I just left.” Mike draws in more air—he feels like he’s not getting enough and it makes his head dizzy—and it catches itself in his throat. He places his own hand over El’s, “I came back and he was on the floor. There was so much blood, El, and then..”

“He had a seizure?” Her voice is quiet, a little sad. It’s a question, though they both know the answer.

“Yeah. He didn’t want me to touch him, and he started—” Mike swallows thickly, remembering the sickening crunching sound of Will’s skull, “—hitting himself. Hurting himself more. He did this to himself, El, and I wasn’t there to help him.”

“It is not your fault, Mike. You can’t blame yourself for this.”

Mike nods his head, more so that she won’t worry about him than because he truly believes her. She sighs.

“How was he, before he passed out?”

“Angry? Scared, I suppose. A little frantic.” He shrugs, tears are brimming in his eyes. “He wasn’t himself. He didn’t seem like himself.”

“Do you think… it could have been Henry?” She rotates her hand, letting their fingers tangle.

“I hope not.” He looks down at their hands, then back up at her face.

There are tears in her eyes now too. Neither of them are coping with this well. Mike, in all of his selfishness, had almost managed to forget that Will meant the world to El too. They really are just like twins, Mike thinks, right down to the way their lower lip wobbles when they cry. He swipes his thumb over the back of her hand in comfort.

“I think… I think it could have been. I hope it was not. But Will is not like this. He would not hurt himself like this for no reason. He may not always be… happy. But he would not do this for no reason.”

Mike bites his lip, “I’m praying you’re wrong,” her hand squeezes his, “but if you’re right… what do we even do in that situation?”

“Well… what would you do? In one of your… your Dee and Dee campaigns?” She says D’n’D as if it’s three separate words, dragging out each syllable. It makes him smile fondly, “that was how we helped him the first time. You had a plan.” She isn’t looking at him, her eyes fixed on the pink and orange clouds.

He takes a deep breath. He knows she’s trying to help, to make him feel better. To give him a purpose, something to do other than worry about Will. He knows this, and he indulges her.

“Well… the heroes would fight. Some might—we might not all make it. But we’d get to the end of the quest, and we’d give it our all. We'd protect each other, we’d defeat the—the bad guys. We’d do it together. We’d save Will and then…” He trails off, finally looking back to El who smiles back at him with a sad fondness.

“And then?”

“And then, if we win, we live happily ever after, I guess.”

“Happily ever after?” She snorts.

“Well… usually what happens… the party doesn’t return to the local village. Too much has happened. They’ve seen too much, you know? They travel to a faraway land, a peaceful land. Somewhere beautiful. With, like, three waterfalls or something. They’d get to enjoy it, together.” Mike grins at her, but it doesn’t reach his eyes. Tears slip down his cheeks. He feels stupid saying it.

They’re never going to get their happy ending. It’s been five years of monster after monster, fighting against demons and Hell itself. He’s seen everyone around him suffer so fucking much and he’s been helpless to stop any of it. What sort of paladin is he? Unable to protect a single person from anything.

El knocks his shoulder with hers, “three waterfalls? That seems like… a lot.”

Mike laughs through his tears, “okay, maybe not the three waterfalls thing. But the other stuff.” He shrugs, “Will deserves to get away from this place, far away from Hawkins. It’s like we’ve spent years trapped here, suffering and afraid. He should get to be free.” He wraps his arms around himself, raising his knees to his chest. El’s hand falls away, back to her own lap. Mike startles, realizing what he’s just said, “I mean, shit, you deserve freedom too. Everyone does, all of us. Lucas, Max, Dustin—everyone. Obviously.” He trips over the words, rushing to get them all out.

El’s laugh is sweet. A little choked. She hugs her own knees to her chest, resting her cheek against them and watching Mike intently, “I understand, Mike. You do not need to… worry so much.”

“I don’t—El I don’t know if you actually do. Understand.”

“I do, Mike,” she takes a breath, moving to look out at the field once more, “I think.. I want to stay. In Hawkins. After all of this is over. And I do not think that you do.” She sighs. Picks at a loose thread in her sweatpants. “Not just that. I—Mike, I love you. But I—I do not think I love you the way that I thought I did, at least… not anymore. And I do not think you love me that way either.”

“El—”

“No, Mike, do not try to tell me otherwise. You are only hurting yourself. Hurting me. I was hurting you too, by asking you to love me in a way that you do not—cannot. It is okay,” there are tears in her eyes again, her lower lip wobbling.

Mike leans forward, taking her hand in his. He squeezes it, kissing her cheek, resting his forehead against her temple, “El I’m so sorry.”

“Do not be sorry, Mike. It is okay.”

He huffs a breath against her cheek, “friends?”

She turns her face towards his, their foreheads now bowed together, “always.”

The sob Mike has been choking back escapes his throat, and the dam breaks. El wraps her arms around his shoulders, and he buries his face in her neck. He loves this girl, so, so much. But he knows she’s right. He thinks everyone likely knows.

Mike cries into her shirt, his whole body shaking. He’s been forcing himself to play this role for too long, and he thinks it may have been slowly killing him. It’s like finally taking a breath of air after being held beneath the water for too long. Like a pressure that had been slowly building inside of his chest, inflating him like a balloon, has finally found release.

El pats his hair with one hand, the other still resting around his shoulders. He can feel a wetness on his scalp - she’s crying too. They sit like this for so long that Mike loses count of how many minutes have passed. The sun has almost fully set, its last dying rays clawing across the earth.

Something settles within Mike. A permanence, an ending, a beginning.

He finally raises his head from El’s shoulder, and they smile at one another, watery and snotty and so gross, but happy. Finally happy.

“I love you, El.” He wipes his nose with the sleeve of his shirt.

A wet laugh bubbles out of her, “oh, now that we have broken up you can say it.”

Mike shoves her shoulder, a lopsided grin on his face. She grins back warmly, holding his hand once more, not letting go.

The moment is shattered by the sound of loud, clanking metal. Someone is scaling the fire escape, and they’re doing it quickly. The pair snap their heads around to look behind them, watching as Lucas’ head pops up over the edge of the building’s roof.

“He’s—awake—Will he’s—awake,” he pushes the words out through deep, huffing breaths. He must have raced the whole way here.

Mike stands immediately, El following quickly behind. He lets momentum carry him forward, and doesn’t stop, doesn’t remember anything between running for the edge of the roof and falling down beside the sofa, once again thudding to his knees. The bruises from yesterday ache, but he ignores it.

Will is sitting up, clearly rather disoriented, his hands balled into fists in his lap. There’s a wet bowl next to him, freshly cleaned of sick. Mike throws caution to the wind, snatching Will’s hand up in his own, bowing his head to press his forehead against it. From the outside they must look like a knight bowing to his king. To Mike it feels more like an unworthy follower begging forgiveness at the feet of his God. He stays like that for longer than he likely should, longer than is normal.

Lucas clears his throat, and Mike sighs, sitting back on his heels to put a small amount of distance between himself and Will. He refuses to let go of his hand, though. Will’s fingers twitch against his palm, like he wants to grip back, but it stays limp in Mike’s.

When Mike looks up, Will’s eyes are on him, a small crease between his eyebrows. Something about the intensity of his stare makes Mike melt.

“What are you doing?” Will’s voice is rough, his throat obviously dry and scratchy from the day of sleep.

“Oh—uh—you just—you scared me yesterday, is all.” Mike can feel his neck heating up, becoming hyper-aware of the many pairs of eyes trained on his back, “you scared all of us.”

Will frowns for a second longer, extracting his hand from Mike’s, turning his eyes to the rest of the group as El helps Mike back to his feet.

Mike feels his chest tightening again, his throat closing. He blinks for a few moments, keeping tears at bay—god he must still be emotional from his talk with El, that has to be why he feels like breaking down—before straightening.

“How are you feeling, baby?” Joyce’s voice picks up from across the room. She’d gone to bed only an hour ago, and only because Jonathan and Hop had manhandled her there. She sits herself down beside Will, grasping his hand how Mike had only moments before. Mike can’t help but notice he doesn’t pull away from her touch. “What happened?”

Will’s throat clicks as he swallows, “I—I’m sorry. I’m so sorry. I didn’t—everyone is going through—and I just thought—but he wouldn’t—and I couldn’t—I’m sorry.”

Mike frowns at the disjointed sentences, the way Will seems to stumble over what he wants to say. His breath is hitching with panic, his eyes roving his mother’s face without really seeing. Mike doesn’t care if the older boy doesn’t want him close by, he sits on the other side of him and takes Will’s free hand, a mirror image of Joyce on the right. He rubs the back of Will’s hand with his free palm, aiming for reassurance.

“Hey, it’s okay, Will. Breathe. Like this,” he places Will’s palm against his sternum, taking a deep breath in and letting it go slowly. Will is staring at his palm on Mike’s chest, and Mike can see the way the gears in his head turn. After a moment his own chest begins to rise and fall in tandem, if more shaky. Mike smiles, “yeah, like that. In and out.”

Mike knows how to deal with Will’s panic better than anyone, maybe even better than Jonathan and Joyce. He’s been witness to many of his breakdowns, from tantrums to panic attacks, ever since they became friends. In some ways, Mike misses when the panic stemmed entirely from Will’s piece of shit father, rather than literal demons from Hell. But, really, both feel much the same to Mike - seeing Will afraid or upset for any reason makes him feel sick to his stomach.

Will’s breathing finally begins to even out, not perfect, but no longer at risk of a full blown panic attack. He goes to withdraw his hand from Mike’s chest. Mike holds on more firmly, keeping him in place. Will sends him a look of confusion, but stops trying to tug his hand away.

“I’m… I’m sorry. I’m so sorry.” Will turns his eyes to the rest of the group once again, clenching the hand pressed against Mike into a fist. “I just couldn’t take it anymore. I didn’t mean to—to worry you all. I was—I thought you might be—angry.”

Mike rubs his thumb against the pulse point in Will’s wrist, watching him intently, “couldn’t take what anymore?”

“Them. Him. They’re in my head. They’re both in my head and they’re so loud.”

“Henry?” El’s voice is small, her head tucked into Dustin’s shoulder, Lucas’ arm around both of them.

“And the Mindflayer.”

There’s a sharp intake of breath from everyone, followed by a heavy silence.

Dustin is the one to break it, “they’re… different?”

This is news to all of them, except for El, maybe. Mike’s hand spasms, tightening around Will’s, “what do you mean they’re in your head?”

Will shuts his eyes and leans his head back against the sofa, drawing both of their hands—still tightly wound together—away from Mike's chest and to his lap. Mike and Joyce make eye contact, concern etched deeply across both of their faces.

“I mean they’re in my head, Mike. They’re… talking to me. It’s mostly Hen—” his voice catches “—Vecna. The Mindflayer just… connects me to all the other creatures in the hivemind. There’s a lot of—of noise,” his face screws up into a grimace of pain, “chittering, clicking, screeching. I can hear all of them communicating. The Mindflayer itself, too. He’s… loud. Angry. Commanding. But Vecna is louder. Worse.”

Dustin, Lucas, and El have come to sit at their feet, El reaching out a hand and placing it against Will’s ankle. Everyone is silent for a while, thinking. Mike feels rage brewing deep within his gut, sinking its teeth in and not letting go. Rage at Vecna, at the Mindflayer, at life for being so cruel to Will. More than anything, it’s rage at himself.

He knew something was wrong with Will. He knew that something was happening, and he’d ignored it. He’d let Will push him away, make up flimsy excuses, let him suffer in silence. For an entire month. Mike had made Will feel like he wasn’t a safe space, like he would have been angry at Will for suffering. He wants to throw up. Will was going through Hell alone again and this time Mike could have helped him but didn’t. In that moment, he makes up his mind. He’s going to keep Will safe from here on out.

He’s going to kill Vecna with his own bare hands if he has to.

—☉—

It takes time for Will to disjointedly explain what has been happening to him for the past several months. By the end of it all, Mike is even more set on his promise to protect the boy sitting next to him.

Will told them about how it had all started back in March, with sporadic migraines and even more vivid nightmares than usual. Things had only spiraled from there. The migraines had gotten far worse and far more frequent, by June he could barely see from his left eye due to the almost constant visual aura. He was taking ibuprofen like it was candy, keeping sheets of it hidden in the pockets of his clothes. By July the nosebleeds had started, staining his sleeves and pillows. He told them that had been much harder to hide than anything else. Mike’s so angry with himself for not noticing it, he grinds his teeth together till his jaw aches.

It was August that the voices started.

That was how Will described them. Voices. Even though originally it had only been the sound of the creatures of the Upside Down. Apparently, he could understand the clicks and chirps they made to one another inside of his head. Mike realizes that this is clearly why they’d stopped running into trouble with democreatures on patrol for the last three months—Will had been listening to them, tracking them inside of his head, and steering any patrol group he was in away from harm.

The real voices had started in September, two whole months ago. Apparently it had been negligible at first. Will had told them about how Vecna tried to taunt him, how he’d comment on things he did, thought, said. He didn’t tell them what Vecna actually said, but he didn’t exactly need to—they all knew just how awful he could be. Will said he’d been able to ignore it until the visions began.

He didn’t go into much detail at all, just told the gathered group that Vecna had shown him things that had slowly driven him insane, and had started speaking to him more directly through whatever psychic link the two seemed to share. Will shuttered himself off as he spoke about this part, staring at his lap, barely breathing. It had been when his nightmares had gotten worse, when he’d stopped eating, stopped sleeping, started pinching his skin until it bruised. He said the pain helped. It let him focus on something other than the insipid voice.

Whatever Vecna had shown him last night - Will refused to even speak about it - had been so awful it had driven him to slamming his head into the knob to cleanse it from his mind. In his delirious state afterwards, he said he’d felt the Mindflayer beginning to sink into him further, the way it had when he was thirteen. It was that which had driven him to claw at his own wound, to shove his fingers under the skin and dig.

Everyone sits in silence after Will finishes. His chest is heaving, and it’s all Mike can do to squeeze his clammy hand where they still sit intertwined. El had, at some point, slunk forward and rested her head onto Will’s lap, and Mike presses their connected fingers into her hair.

Mike feels empty, like someone has taken a spoon and agonizingly dug every last ounce of feeling from him. He is scraped clean. That hollow pit begins to fill with a violent mix of anger and agony. He had let Will suffer alone for months. It had taken him months to notice that something was wrong. He hates himself for it, can’t help but berate himself for not paying better attention, for not being there.

They need to fix this now. Mike doesn’t think he can bear to see Will suffer for a moment longer.

Everyone else seems to agree.

—☉—

Days pass before Will is well enough to go through with the plan they’ve concocted. They’d had to adjust the original slightly to factor in the new information regarding Will’s… possession.

Mike has spent his time alongside the other members of the Party, evenly split between meetings and planning with the older teens and adults, and huddling together quietly. The mood tends towards sombre, they play cards sometimes, but more often they just curl around one another and speak in hushed tones.

For almost five whole days, it’s shocking to see any of them apart for longer than a few minutes. El falls asleep in Dustin’s lap while the boys discuss D’n’D in an attempt to keep the mood light, Lucas ends up half on Mike’s lap and half on the sofa when they all clamber onto it to watch a VHS that Nancy brought them from the Wheelers home. There’s five sleeping bags rolled out over five barebones camping cots, all jigsawed together so that they could whisper with one another late into the night.

None of them are sleeping well; Will because he’s still being plagued by horrors unseen, and the rest because they did not want to let him suffer through those horrors alone. More often than not, Mike finds himself wedged between Will and El, her feet across his lap and his head tucked into Will’s neck. They speak about school, complaints about which teachers they hate and which ones give out the most homework. They gossip about the other students, filling El in on what she’s missed whilst in hiding. Music plays gently from a nearby radio at all times. Sometimes Dustin and Lucas will put on impromptu performances, sending all of them into giggling fits.

Will still winces with pain more often than not, and that glazed look comes to his eye more frequently than Mike would like but, all things considered, the days pass without much fanfare. If it wasn’t for Will’s injuries—and the fact they were living out of the basement of an old radio station with the literal apocalypse raging outside—Mike could almost trick himself into pretending they were just a group of normal sixteen year olds having a prolonged sleepover. The same way they used to at twelve, thirteen, fourteen.

Before any of them quite realize, it’s the sixth of November, and the day of their plan has come to fruition. If Mike is completely honest, he couldn’t care less about what anyone else has been tasked with doing today. His entire attention is focused solely on the task which is set for him.

Don’t get him wrong, he knows the plan inside and out. He knows that El is in charge of the real battle, going directly head to head with Vecna in hopes of killing him once and for all. She’ll be closing off the gate afterwards—the mother gate—in hopes of finally severing the hold which the Mindflayer has upon Hawkins. She’s been even more intense in her desire to kill Vecna than even Mike has been. It isn’t surprising though, considering that for her Will’s silent torture is only part of the reason she wants those creeps dead.

He knows that Hop and Joyce are her backup—there had been plenty of fighting about whether Joyce would stay with Will or not, but eventually Mike had put his foot down. He’d told her, in no uncertain terms, that he would be remaining by Will’s side through this entire endeavor. He didn’t care that she wanted to stay by her son’s side, he didn’t care that she felt like it should be her at his side, looking after him. He was not letting the boy out of his sight, not again. Someone needed to go with El, to keep her safe as well, and there was no one Mike or Hop trusted more to look out for the girl than Joyce. She’d looked between where Will was sleeping—his head nestled against Mike’s thigh—and Mike’s hard set frown, and finally conceded.

She and Mike have a mutual understanding - Will is the most important thing in the world, and neither of them would let any harm come to him. It didn’t even shock Mike, not really, when he realized this—between him and Joyce, there is no one in the world who loves Will more. It was like he’d just always known this, accepted it as a small child and never questioned it. He hopes that after everything is said and done, Will won’t hate him for his love.

Mike knows that Jonathan and Nancy will be backup-to-the-back up. They’ll be going into the militarized zone of Hawkins, guns blazing, in order to keep things clear for El’s A-team. It’s taken some time for Mike to realize how much of a badass Nancy is, and how devoted Jonathan is to those he loves. Now that he’s aware of it, though, he knows now that there’s no better team for the job. Nancy could probably kill ten men without breaking a sweat, and Jonathan? Knowing his siblings and parents are at risk, knowing he’s side by side with his love, that his job is to help and protect? He’d burn the whole world down to keep them safe, Mike just knows it.

He knows that Dustin, Steve, and Robin have been tasked with creating distractions. They’ll be running radio interference via the WSQK van, and making their way around town to not only keep people away from the worst of the danger, but also to draw as much attention from the military and government as possible. Mike is terrified for them, but he knows that Steve would never let anyone harm his two closest friends, and that between Robin and Dustin no one stands a chance of keeping up with their quick-fire brains and rapid antics.

And he knows that Lucas is going to the hospital. He was originally meant to be joining the distraction team, but Vickie had radioed them early that morning well before sunrise with news that Max was awake. No one knew how, or why, or what Vecna had planned by letting her go free, but they couldn’t risk leaving her alone. More than that, Lucas could not have been kept from her side even if God himself had decreed it.

Mike would be lying if he said he wasn’t terrified for all of his friends. If he wasn’t worried about the danger they were all putting their lives in. He wishes that he could be standing there alongside each and every one of them, keeping them safe, fighting for them in any way that he could. A true paladin for his Party. But he won’t be. Surprisingly, he’s okay with that for once.

Because in his mind, he has the most important job of all—keep Will safe, and get those Upside Down monstrosities out of him.

Everyone had agreed that the best place to start in getting them out of him was with a burn, just like the first time. They’d started running out of places Will wouldn’t recognize, so Hopper had taken Mike aside and given him the keys to his old trailer. He had warned him it would be a mess in there, had told him that he’d been the night before and filled the place almost to bursting with every space heater he could find. He’d said that he’d blacked out the windows as best as he could. He hadn’t had time to do anything else.

With everyone busy gearing up and preparing for battle, Mike has had to blindfold Will and settle him on the back of his bike, rather than being driven to the trailer. Will’s arms are wrapped tightly about his middle, his head pressed in against the back of Mike’s jacket. Fitting two grown boys onto the bike had been a bit of a struggle, but they’d managed to work out the safest positioning - Mike standing on the pedals and Will sat on the seat directly behind him. Will’s knees dig into the back of his thighs more often than is comfortable, but he doesn’t really care as long as Will stays safe.

It takes them much longer to reach the trailer than it probably should have, but Mike had refused to bike quickly for fear of jostling his precious cargo too much, or causing him unnecessary pain. Mike already knows he’ll be making Will suffer horrendously today, any small thing he can do to make Will more comfortable in the meantime is worth it in his opinion.

He lets everyone know that they’ve arrived via walkie, before dropping his bike unceremoniously out front and leading Will up the stairs and inside the small space. He flicks on the lights and locks the door, finally removing Will’s blindfold.

The brown haired boy blinks a few times, eyes adjusting to the sudden change in light. Mike gets stuck once again on that damn eye, colour all wrong, and he nudges Will’s shoulder, “you look a bit like Bowie, y’know, with your pupil all funny like that.”

His attempt at lightening the mood falls flat when Will’s frown deepens. He hadn’t had the best reaction to the realization his eye had been messed up. He’d lost his shit, to put it mildly.

“It’s the one I can’t see out of anyway,” he shrugs, moving deeper into the space.

Mike trails behind him. They both stop short when their eyes land on the bed that’s been dragged into the middle of the room. It’s small, metal, and looks like Hop probably stole it from the hospital or something. Mike honestly wouldn’t put it past him. That isn’t what makes them both halt, however.

It’s the thick metal cuffs sat squarely in the center of the bed that give them pause.

“I—I broke the ropes. Last time. I don’t actually… remember any of it but—I remember Jonathan told me about it when I asked him about the bruises on mom’s neck. Apparently I choked her.” Mike watches Will’s throat work as he swallows.

Mike places a hand gently on Will’s shoulder from where he stands pressed against his back, “that wasn’t your fault.”

“I let him in in the first place, Mike. All of this—everything. It’s my fault.” His voice is hard, devoid of emotion. He sounds like he’s stating a fact, reciting some sort of universal truth.

“Look, Will, I don’t know what kind of—of fucked up bullshit the Mindflayer or Vecna or anyone has been filling your head with, but—” Mike uses the hand on Will’s shoulder to turn him around forcefully “—none of this is your fault. None of it has ever been your fault.”

Will’s face pinches into a frown, his eyes searching Mike’s face. Mike doesn’t know what he finds there, but Will is suddenly turning away from him and moving towards the bed, “let’s just get this over with.”

Mike closes his eyes and pulls in a deep breath. He doesn’t know how he’s going to convince Will that he isn’t lying, that Will is innocent in everything that has happened to him. He supposes it can wait until after they make sure Vecna is dead.

He approaches the bed slowly. Will has kicked off his shoes and thrown his jacket across the room, and is now fiddling with the cuffs. Mike kneels at the end of the bed, holding his hand out, shuddering at the heavy weight as one of them is placed in his waiting palm. He tugs, seeing where Hopper has chained it firmly to the leg of the bed. He looks around and notices the other three are much the same.

He swallows thickly, reaching a hand out towards Will’s ankle. It's the first time in days that he doesn’t flinch from Mike’s touch, instead pressing his leg forward into his waiting palm. Mike slides the cuff around his ankle, biting his cheek as he padlocks it in place. He makes quick work of the other remaining cuffs, turning away to get started with turning on the heaters.

“If I hurt you,” Will begins to speak, but Mike cuts him off sharply.

“You won’t.”

“You don’t know—”

“You. Won’t.” Mike’s voice is firm, refusing to let Will finish his sentence.

He doesn’t turn to look at the boy on the bed as he continues his task of cranking up each heater. A sense of dread settles itself in his gut as he reaches the final heater, “hey, I—I know this probably isn’t what you want to be thinking about but—” he cuts himself off, mulling his next words over for a moment before speaking again, “do you know how they got the Mindflayer out, that first time? I remember it took awhile before we heard news that you were safe.”

“Your sister stabbed it out of me, I think. I still have the scar.” Will’s voice is so low Mike barely hears it.

He feels the heated sting of bile in the back of his throat and swallows harshly. That’s what he was afraid of.

He hadn’t seen it till now, with the way this heater was tucked back further in the room, partially obscured by the upturned sofa. There’s a firepoker, tip firmly shoved into the front of the heater, perfectly positioned to soak up all of the heat into the dark metal surface.

He turns it on and tries to put it out of his mind.

—☉—

Mike and Will haven’t spoken a word to one another for almost a full hour. The cloying heat within the trailer is suffocating. Mike had kept his own jacket on for as long as possible, determined to suffer alongside Will in any way he could, a show of solidarity. He’d shrugged it off when Will had told him he was being stupid, had said firmly that he needed to take the jacket off before he made himself faint.

Sweat has made the fabric of his shirt see-through, it clings to his skin, sticky and uncomfortable. He’s leaned up against the wall across from Will, trying to observe him. There has been no sign of the Mindflayer or Vecna from Will yet, at least not physically. He winces and shakes his head for the fourth time in as many minutes, and Mike can’t take it anymore.

“I know something is happening, Will, you can’t keep pretending everything is fine. This piece of shit literally thrives off of secrets, Max told everyone that. Just talk to me, please.”

Will makes a whining noise in the back of his throat, his hands clenching and unclenching a few times. Mike pushes onto his knees and shuffles over to the side of the bed. The other boy glances over at him before quickly looking away.

“You wouldn’t want to help me, not if you knew.”

“You could tell me you’d murdered a thousand innocent babies, Will, and I’d still choose to be by your side over anywhere else in the world.” He sighs as he rests his head on the bed near Will’s calf, watching the older boy wriggle around to get comfortable.

It clearly doesn’t work, which doesn’t surprise Mike. Will’s definitely worse off than him right now—without even taking into account his week old head injury and the current state of partial possession—his long sleeved shirt completely drenched, the white sheets beneath him turning dark with his sweat. He snorts when Mike’s words finally register, and rolls his head on the pillow to look the younger boy in the eyes.

“Why the Hell would I be killing a thousand babies?”

“I dunno. It was the worst thing I could think of, okay!”

Will grins at him, but it doesn’t reach his eyes, “well, either way, I don’t know if this is something you’d—be able to forgive me for.”

Mike frowns at the way his voice catches mid-sentence. His body violently disagrees with Will, his stomach lurching and chest tightening at his words. It’s the first time in a while that Mike has thought that Will is genuinely a little bit stupid. How can he not see that Mike would do anything for him? That Mike could never hate him? That there is not a single thing in existence that he could do which would require any level of forgiveness from him?

If either of them had any sins to atone for, it was Mike.

He reaches out his hand, nudging Will’s leg with his knuckles, “Will, I’d kill a thousand innocent babies for you if you asked me to. You couldn’t say anything to me that I wouldn’t be okay with.”

Will’s smile is sad when he responds, “again with the babies. What is it with this weird baby-murder obsession?”

“I’m just trying to—I don’t know! Explain, somehow! That I couldn’t hate you even if you asked me to!” Mike knows Will’s avoiding telling him what’s wrong. He doesn’t want to let him get away with it.

He doesn’t get a choice when Will just sighs, turning his face away once again.

—☉—

Mike isn’t sure how much time has passed once Will finally begins to really fight his bindings. He jerks violently against the bed, his leg smacking into the top of Mike’s head hard. The singular spasm quickly turns into more, and before Mike even knows what’s happening, Will is thrashing himself around with more vigor than a fish caught on a line.

He scrambles away from the bed, startled, and watches as Will yanks his arms and legs towards himself, wrenching his joints at angles Mike didn’t even know were possible. There’s an audible popping noise and Will lets out a moan. It’s that sound of pain that drives Mike back towards the bed, scrambling across the floor on his hands and knees.

He gets his hands on Will’s chest, trying to push him back down into the bed, “you’re going to hurt yourself again, Will, stop.”

Will struggles against him, grunting with effort, continuing to twist his limbs sickeningly. Mike notes that his left humerus has clearly dislodged itself from the socket, a large lump where his arm connects to his shoulder, the skin bulging over the protruding bone.

“Fuck, Will, stop. Please, shit.”

Mike presses against his chest harder, lifting one knee onto the bed in order to gain some leverage. Will continues to struggle beneath him, and Mike swears he can hear the bones in the dislocated joint grinding against each other, an awful clunking crunch sound.

“Let me go.” The voice that crawls from Will’s throat is not his own. It’s deeper, angrier, a growling, grating bass to Will's usual gentle baritone.

Mike stops breathing. His hands tighten their grip on Will’s dripping shirt, and he presses the struggling boy down with more force, attempting to pin him to the bed. He shifts himself, pulling his second knee up onto the bed, swinging his first over Will’s wriggling torso, straddling him. He drops his weight onto Will’s hips, his chest, everywhere he can get a point of contact to keep him still, to stop the way he can hear Will’s joints popping in and out of place with each horrible movement. Hollow, thunking clicks.

“Get out of him you fucking bastard.” Mike’s voice is dripping with vitriol, he doesn’t know if he’s ever felt this angry and this afraid in his entire life, “get out of him.”

He almost throws up when a laugh is ripped from Will’s chest. It’s not that familiar, huffy sound that Mike has come to associate with a warm tingling in his entire body. No—it's rather comparable to claws being raked down a chalkboard with agonizing slowness. He watches in horror as Will’s face twists itself into the ugliest smile Mike thinks he’s ever seen—so awful because those are Will’s eyes, his lips, his teeth, but the shapes they are making do not belong to him. They belong to some fucking creature. Some once-human thing that has slipped beneath Will’s skin and is wearing him like a suit, marrionetting him like some sort of fucked up puppeteer.

He is looking at Will, his Will, but he is seeing only Vecna in all his glory.

“Oh, Michael, if only you knew the truth…”

Mike tries to ignore everything as that grin on Will’s face only gets wider. The skin of his lips is chapped from dehydration, and it begins to split and bleed with the way Vecna forces his expression past the point of anything remotely natural.

“I said,” Mike’s teeth grind together around his words. He presses his forearm hard against Will’s chest, his body flattening against him, “get the fuck out of him!”

More sick laughter rings out, “as you wish.”

Will’s body goes rigid beneath him and Mike eases himself back slightly so as not to hurt the boy. His breath is coming hard and fast, a combination of the rage and the heat of the room bringing him to breathlessness. Just the slight exertion of trying to hold Will still is enough to make him feel like he’s just fought ten demogorgons barehanded.

The reprieve doesn’t last long. Will’s entire body begins to convulse so violently that Mike is bucked off of his hips almost immediately, thrown to the side with such force that he doesn’t get the chance to catch himself. He shoots his arm out as he rolls from the bed, his wrist twinging painfully with the awkward way he lands on it. He sits up and immediately moves back to the side of the bed, ignoring the pain, thinking about nothing but Will.

The way he throws his head from side to side has torn the stitches in his scalp, and fresh blood leaks onto the white pillow, staining it a rusted red. His eyes are fluttering again; Mike can only see his sclera, one white and the other so fucking red. The muscles in his neck bulge, his entire body straining against the cuffs.

Mike doesn’t know what to do, his hands are fluttering all over the other boy’s body without touching. Watching Will in pain is possibly the most difficult thing he’s ever done. He feels so helpless being unable to stop it. Being, in a roundabout way, the cause of it.

The screaming starts and Mike has to cover his ears, pushing himself back from the bed, eyes screwed tightly shut. It’s awful, high pitched, so very non-human, so very loud, that Mike can only assume it’s the entirety of the hive-mind crying out in unison. It doesn’t last long. Within minutes the noise becomes choked by a bubbly, wet sound.

Mike removes his hands from where they’re pressed against his ears, and inches forward warily. Will’s shoulder is even worse, the deformed joint looks sickening, twisted so severely out of place Mike worries the muscle may have torn. That isn’t what catches his eyes, however. No, what catches his attention is the black sludge bubbling up from Will’s throat, leaking out of the corner of his mouth and dripping down his cheek.

He’s on him in an instant, pushing him onto his side as best as he can. Will is drowning and Mike can’t stop it. He tries to keep it from choking him, holding his body and head in place. He feels sick, seeing how he’s pulling Will’s shoulder joint even further from its correct alignment in order to keep him on his side. It doesn’t matter, he’d rather Will have a fucked up arm than die because Mike let his lungs fill with Vecna-sludge.

It feels like an impossible task until Will’s eyes shoot wide open and he begins hacking and spluttering and spitting the liquid from his throat. He twists himself further towards his left, the same way Mike had tried to push him, and Mike has to watch in abject horror as his right shoulder wrenches so far from its socket that it flattens itself, the deformed bulge shifting beneath the skin like an animal beneath a blanket. He doesn’t move as Will expels the sludge—blood?—from his throat. Wet coughs fill the silence of the room for several long, agonizing moments.

Once Will’s throat and lungs seem to finally be emptied, Mike reaches out a hand and slowly helps him onto his back once more.

The smell in the room is putrid. Mike doesn’t know what that black shit was, but it smells like nothing he’s ever experienced. It’s both sickeningly sweet and sour at the same time, the way that wet garbage smells on a hot day. Underneath it is something decayed—rotted. That awful scent of death that had lingered in the tunnels back in that horrible fall of 1983.

Mike gags, his mouth flooding with saliva, his body preemptively preparing to be sick from the smell alone. He turns his head to the side and spits on the ground, sucking in a breath to dry his tongue and throat to stop the roiling nausea. He lowers himself to his knees, pressing his forehead into the mattress until it passes.

“I’ll be back. One sec, just lie still.”

He uses the bed to lever himself up slowly onto shaking legs. He has cloth and disinfectant in the bag he had dropped by the door—in case he’d needed to reclean Will’s head wound—and he feels immense gratitude towards Lucas for insisting on giving him the makeshift first aid kit.

He drags a hand down his sweaty face and grabs for a wad of cloth and the bottle of alcohol in his bag, carrying them back towards the bed without really looking at Will, afraid of the pain he’ll see. He places the items down near the other boy’s feet, steeling himself. He gulps down three deep breaths before finally looking up and making eye contact.

Will’s eyes, one green and one almost black, look back without really seeing. He seems slightly delirious, heavy lidded and drifting. He’s panting, from both the heat and the exertion of what his body has already gone through. It’s only going to get worse. Mike is almost certain this nightmare isn’t over yet.

The older boy is whimpering pathetically, small moans of pain being carried out on each exhalation. He sounds like a dying animal, hit by a car and left to bleed itself dry on the side of the road, licking its own wounds as if that could save it from its fate. It makes Mike’s heart twist painfully, feeling like Vecna himself has shoved a clawed hand inside of his ribcage and pierced it, squeezed it to bursting.

He steps back and retrieves his jacket from where he’d thrown it earlier. He needs to clean the sheets near Will’s head, already staining a reddish black from the viscous sludge. He kneels beside the bed again, reverent, a priest kneeling at a sacrifice laden altar, and begins to sop it up with his jacket. The texture is somewhere between honey and jell-o, and the way it moves reminds him, disturbingly, of the mashed up fish guts he’d seen the one time he’d gone fishing with the Byers’ boys and their dad.

Mike spits another gob of saliva onto the floor and fights off further nausea. He has to get the space as clean as possible for Will, he can’t risk letting his injuries get infected.

Once he’s satisfied that he can’t make the space any cleaner, which, really, was never something achievable anyway, he reaches blindly for the cloth and bottle.

“This is going to sting, I’m sorry.”

Will blinks at him, and Mike takes it as acknowledgement, dousing the cloth and bringing himself eye level with the bound boy. He shrinks, curling in on himself, trying to make himself less threatening. He can’t help but think of the way Will has continuously flinched from his touch since all of this started. He’s terrified of the way he’s made Will so afraid.

“I—” the sound catches in Mike’s throat, he feels the way his larynx clicks, and he swallows down the next words. He reaches towards Will’s face, his left hand coming up to cup the boy’s right cheek, his right hand clenched tightly around the cloth, hovering, not ready to press down yet. “I didn’t… that was worse than last time, in the shed.” He whispers.

Will’s brow furrows and he blinks, seemingly a bit more ‘there’ than before, but his words still slur very slightly as he speaks “wha’d’you mean?”

Mike shudders at the way Will’s voice rasps, still sounding clogged from whatever bloody-sludge remains in his throat. A violent cough wracks his frame, and Mike watches with a sense of sick fascination as he spits tainted saliva onto the pillow beside him.

It should be disgusting. It is disgusting. Yet, Mike can’t help finding it slightly endearing the way Will’s face scrunches up afterwards. His heart flutters violently, three forceful beats followed by a racing patter, when Will turns his face back into his left hand and nuzzles.

Mike lets out a puff of air, a slight whine escaping alongside it. This seems to startle Will, even though Mike could have sworn it wasn’t that loud. The shorter boy immediately stops his movement, eyes screwed shut, whole body tense. Slowly, like watching a snail extend its eye stalks, he relaxes, eyes finally opening and locking on Mike’s.

“Well?”

It’s Mike’s turn to startle.

He shakes his head and finally presses the cloth to Will’s wound and begins to swipe, “oh—it’s just—He was—inside of you. Last time it felt like you were still in there too, like I could still… feel you. But this time it was just him. He was inside of you and you were gone and I—”

Mike cuts himself off when Will sucks in a violent breath through his teeth, nostrils flaring, body freezing and going taught. He frowns, looking from the wound to meet Will’s eyes. He knew this was going to hurt, but he didn’t think it warranted that sort of reaction.

“Shit, sorry, did I press too hard or something?” Mike begins to withdraw both of his hands from Will’s face.

“No! No. Fuck—no. You didn’t—Mike you didn’t do anything—I’m…” His voice trails off and he looks to the side, defeat clear on his features, “if it’s anyone's fault it’s mine.”

Mike feels confusion paint itself plainly across his face, “I feel like we’re having two different conversations right now. Why would any of this be your fault?”

Will sighs, but doesn’t speak again. Mike frowns, and lets him get away with it. They exist together in silence—the only sound is the buzzing of the heaters and Will’s soft hisses, the only movement is Mike’s hands as they delicately work their way over Will’s face.

—☉—

The quietness, the stillness, it all only lasts for fifteen or so minutes. Mike spends the time sat on the bed beside Will, hands clenched together, nails digging small bloody crescent moons into the skin. His head is bowed. If he believed in any God other than Will, he supposes he would be praying. Will has been fading in and out, his eyes drifting shut for minutes before springing open, his breathing cycling between steady and rapid.

After cleaning Will up and sitting in silence for a few minutes, Mike takes it upon himself to get Will’s shoulder back into place. He’s never actually done it before - Will’s shoulder is the only dislocation he’s ever even seen - but he’s determined.

“I’m going to. Put your arm right.” Mike’s voice comes out halting, stilted. Will just rolls his head and nods, semi-conscious.

He grips Will’s arm and jerks it slightly, flinching and letting go when Will gets out a sharp, strangled yelp and arches his back.

Shit, okay. Not easy. Mike thinks to himself, reaching once again for the limp arm. It’s pretty clear that this will hurt the older boy no matter how gentle Mike attempts to be, and he gives up on any pretense of not causing him pain.

He returns his hands to Will’s bicep, gripping it tightly and steeling his nerves, “this is probably going to hurt like a bitch.”

He tries to think about how it’s done in movies. They pull, right?

And so he does. He tugs the arm slightly, swallowing down the twinge of regret as Will winces and wails quietly. Okay. That's… better at least.

He continues to pull, being firmer with his actions, desperately ignoring the way Will groans, the way his breath grows laboured. There's resistance, and Mike finds himself having to pull harder than he thought he would have. He’s concerned his hands will slip given the slick of sweat coating Will’s skin, drenching his shirt sleeves.

When he feels like he’s pulled the joint far enough apart, feeling the muscle resistance ease slightly, he begins to twist. He manoeuvres Will’s arm outwards until it looks about as right as Mike is able to get it, then eases the tension on the arm slightly—not fully releasing it—trying to slide it back into place.

He hears an audibly loud clunk—the opposite of that popping crunching sound he’d heard earlier—something that seems to resonate throughout Will’s entire chest cavity. The injured boy lets out another quiet wail, expelling what appears to be all of the air from his lungs. His face softens with relief, and Mike feels the tension within his gut subside, just a small amount.

That look of relief melts back into pain and Will lifts his head and, no warning given, vomits. Mike can do nothing but reach his hands forward and hold Will’s head up in an attempt to keep him from choking as his cheeks bulge and his stomach spasms. He makes wet hiccoughing noises as the gooey chunks of half-digested breakfast spill out down his chin, his throat, his chest. He coughs, not turning his head in time, and Mike feels the way the liquid sprays onto him.

He feels it on his chin. His cheeks. He can feel the warmth and the wet. Some has pooled in the seam of his lips and he does his best to wipe it away with the back of one hand. His hand begins to slip from Will’s bloody, sweaty head, and he has to bring that free hand back to help cradle it. He’ll deal with the vomit on his lips later.

“Hey, you’re okay,” Mike keeps his voice soft, almost crooning, barely loud enough to be heard over the retching gags as Will heaves up more of the stinking puke, “it’s okay, just get it out. You’re doing so well,” the vomit that had caught in the seam of Mike’s mouth gets inside as he speaks, and he gags. The bitter, acidic taste coats his tongue, and he has to swallow and spit multiple times to keep down the bile trying to crawl its way up his own throat, “it’s—you’re okay—just let it out.”

Mike continues his ministrations, fingers rubbing soothing circles into the back of Will’s scalp, until the boy has emptied the entire contents of his stomach. He dry heaves for a minute longer, not even bringing up bile, before Mike gently lowers his head back to the pillow.

“See? You did so good,” He murmurs as he grabs for a clean cloth, pouring a small amount of water into it, “you’re okay now.”

While he’s holding the bottle he takes a quick swig, swishing the water around and spitting it out onto the carpet to dispel Will’s acrid puke from his mouth.

“Let’s clean you up again.”

Will’s breath is shuddering, tears collected in the corners of his eyes. Mike is soft as he drags the cloth over Will’s face and neck. He can’t do much about the vomit all over his shirt until they get the Mindflayer and Vecna out, but Mike does what he can.

He strips off his own shirt once he’s done—stained now with Will’s hours-old food—and uses it to wipe the remaining sick from his face, throwing it down alongside his soiled jacket.

The heat of the room is becoming unbearable. Now that they’re both clean, Mike gulps water hungrily from the water bottle he’d procured from his bag. Will refuses to drink when offered the bottle. His skin is blotchy and red, and Mike can see thick black veins - vines - pulsating beneath.

Mike sighs and sits back on the bed, his lower back pressed into Will’s thigh. He closes his eyes, continuing to take small sips of water to wet his dry throat. He fiddles with Will’s ankle cuff.

“He isn’t telling you the whole truth, Michael. He lies.”

Mike splutters, inhaling water into his lungs, coughing it back up. It splutters down his chin and chest. He feels the way the muscles in his neck snap and crack with the speed that he turns to look at Will.

It’s him again. Vecna. If Mike hadn’t already recognised the change from the sound of his voice, seeing Will would have clued him in. It hasn’t even been half an hour since the last invasion of his body, and it’s already worse.

Mike finds himself frozen this time around, Vecna exploiting his exhaustion. Not only is the creep possessing his best friend, he’s now using those fucking mind powers to trap Mike in place as well, to keep him from reaching for Will, to keep him from protecting the boy. Vecna has found Mike’s weakness, and he’s making sure to use it against him—to torture him for his own personal satisfaction.

He’s begging his limbs to move, voices screaming from inside of his own head, but he stays stuck, watching in horror at the way Will’s body wriggles in its constraints. It’s like he’s caged inside of his own body, clawing at the fleshy walls trying to escape, heart beating so hard he feels like he’s dying. His mind races as he tries to scream again.

You fucking pig, he’s screaming, get out of him, leave him alone.

That grating laugh bubbles from Will once more, and his head jerks itself upwards so that Vecna can look him in the eye. He rotates Will’s arm and wrist—the right one, the freshly dislocated-and-relocated arm which needs to be kept still—and Mike watches as the cuff finally breaks the skin, as blood wells up and slicks under the metal. Mike is unsurprised; the skin beneath all of the cuffs has been rubbing raw this whole time, but seeing the blood, seeing Will’s blood, sends his stomach plummeting.

“Oh, Michael. You think I would let you move after that little display earlier?” Vecna pushes Will’s body up onto its elbows, “How foolish. No, I quite like you like that. Still. Quiet—” a deep chuckle, throaty and bubbly.

It’s horrifying, watching Vecna puppet Will’s body. He stares at Mike unblinking, eyes held so wide that each iris is surrounded entirely—the right eye by white and the left by red. It’s the first time Mike notices but his left eye looks close to bursting, as if there is so much pressure building up within it that one wrong move and it would pop the way a grape does when teeth pierce its skin. It's bulbous within the socket, filled with blood.

The awful grin is back, twisting too high at the corners, spreading too wide across his cheeks. There are chunks of vomit still stuck between his teeth which are so brightly on display, blood and black sludgey gunk caked into his gumline. The muscles in his neck ripple. Vecna has taken Will’s soft, lovely features and morphed them into the wild, violent shape of a monster.

The worst part of it all is the movements. They’re all wrong; too jerky, too unnatural. Mike feels like he’s watching Will’s corpse being piloted by some sort of alien parasite.

Will’s head tilts to the side in a way that makes his neck look broken, the angle seemingly painful, “A parasite, you say?”

Mike’s entire nervous system suddenly feels like it’s on fire. Adrenaline floods his body, his mouth fills with saliva.

Get out of him.

“Oh but why would I do that when William was so kind as to let me in?”

Mike feels like he’s drowning, like he’s choking on his own tongue. His throat is closing up on itself, air getting trapped between his lungs and his oesophagus. He feels the way panic claws at the spot in his gut, tugging right behind his bellybutton like a fishhook.

Vecna is sick, twisted. Will would never willingly let him do the things he was doing. Even if the asshole had tried to convince him that he had.

I said get out of him. Take me instead.

More laughter as Vecna throws Will’s head back against the pillow with such force that Mike internally flinches.

“You think you could handle that? How… naïve. You do realize I have been preparing young William to be my host since he was twelve years old, and even his body cannot take it?” He twists Will’s injured arm again, and Mike can hear the bones crunching against each other—he clearly hadn’t relocated it very well. “I can feel the way his innards are leaking.”

Mike feels like a puppet with its strings cut. The only thing keeping him upright is whatever hold that Vecna still seems to be exerting.

If Mike could vomit, he would. His body is trying to. His stomach roils and bubbles, burning hot bile crawling slowly up his throat. He can’t do anything to stop it, not swallow it back down with his tongue frozen how it is, not open his mouth to let it drip out. He feels the way his nostrils burn, his eyes water. The idea of Will suffering, of him being… prepared, like some sort of sacrificial lamb since they were twelve years old has made Mike feel so sick that he may actually drown in it.

He feels the way his mouth floods first with saliva, then with the thick, hot, liquid puke. It’s bitter on his tongue, not dissimilar to Will’s earlier, and that thought just brings more up his throat. His mouth is still firmly shut, but he can feel the way it leaks from the small spaces between his lips, dribbles hot and wet down his chin, thick but runny, like a microwaved smoothie.

Vecna must notice this struggle and take pity—no. Never pity. He realizes that if Mike drowns right now, chokes to death pathetically on his own rancid sick, then there will be no one left for him to torment.

He lets Mike go, partially, the muscles in his face and neck once again his own.

His mouth opens involuntarily and the vomit gushes out and down his front, coating his already sweat covered skin with the yellowish-brown soup. It sounds wet and squishy when it lands on his skin and the bed. At some point it becomes nothing more than a thin, watery film, trickling slowly from his opened mouth, some pooled on his tongue. He feels as though he’s never done more spitting in his life than tonight, as he once again splutters to get his mouth as clean as possible.

“Stop,” Mike begs, voice sticky in his throat and mouth. A thread of vomity saliva hangs attached to his bottom lip, he can feel how it sways with his words, “please. He doesn’t deserve this.”

“If only you knew, Michael, the things inside of this head. The thoughts he thinks about himself… others… you.” Will’s body coughs up sludge like earlier, only this time it’s more watery, more grainy. Mike is reminded of Vecna saying Will’s insides were leaking. “You would know that he deserves this and worse. You would inflict it upon him yourself—” Will’s head raises slowly, those wild eyes locked directly on Mike’s, that too-stretched mouth dripping blood from where the soft flesh of Will’s lips has ripped, "—sometimes he wishes you would.”

“I don’t care,” Mike seethes, his neck straining, trying to rip his body from Vecna’s invisible clutches, “he could never deserve this. Never.”

“Yet, you seem to think that you yourself do? Now why may that be?”

Mike’s body is trembling with the strain of fighting Vecna’s hold, and he realizes that he must be getting weaker if Mike is able to remotely fight back against it. He feels relief for the briefest of moments before realizing the full implications of that.

Even his body cannot take it.

Will’s body is literally shutting down, dying. Vecna’s sway over the room is only diminishing because he is putting so much effort into just being there.

He ignores Vecna’s taunting, refuses to think about what he is accusing Mike of, refuses to acknowledge what he—and everyone else, really—knows about himself deep down. He is solely focused on Will’s body, Will’s safety.

Will’s eyes are fluttering, but that violent grin is still spread across his face. Mike watches as blood—actual blood this time—begins to leak through the gaps between his teeth. Vecna is clearly losing control, Will’s body proving to be uninhabitable for him at the moment. In one last ditch effort to do… something—god know what, scare Mike? Hurt Will? Both?—he throws Will’s entire upper body back and forth so violently that Mike genuinely fears for Will’s arms and spine.

The chains connecting the cuffs to the bed creak, but they don’t break. A guttural, animalistic scream rips from Will’s throat, that fucking grin still plastered on his face, eyelids still pried wide despite the way the eyeballs themselves roll around wildly. Blood is coming from his mouth steadily now, the scream becoming wet and bubbly, red froth sliding its way down Will’s chin, staining his shirt.

Mike watches with growing dread as Will coughs on the blood, splatters of it painting his torso and legs, getting on the bed, Mike himself, like some morbid Jackson Pollock painting. The movements grow more erratic, more violent, more desperate. Mike can see where Will’s limbs strain against the force with which his body is thrown about.

The room suddenly becomes still. Will is as upright as possible in his bindings. He stares forward, eyes no longer rolling about. Mike knows that it isn’t over yet, this isn’t the stillness that comes after a storm. This is the kind of stillness of a predator stalking its prey.

Will’s head snaps towards Mike so fast that he startles, falling from the bed, realizing that whatever hold Vecna had has finally ended.

“LET ME GO.” The voice is no longer Vecna’s. It doesn’t sound even vaguely human—more like a thousand animals screaming atop one another, Will’s soft voice a part of the chorus. “WHY AM I TIED UP? LET ME GO.”

Mike remembers this voice from that horrible day in the shed. Will’s entire body strains towards him, he snarls and grinds his teeth, snaps his jaw like a rabid dog attempting to bite. Mike’s frozen on the floor for a moment before scrambling up and climbing atop Will once more, forcing him down with all of his remaining strength. Will fights against him, struggling, teeth still snapping, head being thrown left and right, legs kicking. He tries to buck Mike off with his hips, but Mike holds firm, prepared for it this time.

A howl of agony is pulled from Will, something so basal, so inhuman, that Mike has to stop himself from shying away. Will’s body goes rigid beneath him, eyes rolling back in his head. Choking gasps escape him, his body wracks itself with convulsions. Mike continues to press him into the mattress to keep him from hurting himself.

He’s vaguely reminded of the exorcist, of the night he and Will had sat curled up under a shared blanket alongside the rest of the party back on Halloween in 1985, only a few days before the Byers had left for Lenora. El hadn’t joined them, and Mike remembers curling his hand into Will’s for comfort. He loved horror as much as the others, but it had always made him a little uneasy.

Seeing this happen in front of him—for real, to Will—makes that film seem like a fucking joke. A movie for babies. Something Holly would watch with her friends while they played with their dolls.

He feels a wet heat spread under his thighs and swallows thickly. Will has pissed himself. Mike can smell it beneath the bodily stench of sweat, the metallic tang of blood and acrid vomit, under whatever the putrid smell was that came from the black sludge. It’s overwhelming how awful the whole room smells—he’s choking on it, his eyes watering. The heat does nothing to help the festering stink. Mike feels the way Will’s warm piss soaks through his sweatpants and into the seat of his own jeans. He still refuses to let go, to move himself. Nothing is more important to him right now than Will.

Will’s body finally gives up its fight, his back flattens itself against the mattress, his eyes slip shut. The howling finally ceases. Everything goes quiet. Mike stares at Will’s chest to make sure it’s rising and falling. His breathing is so shallow that there’s barely any movement at all. He feels so tired—so empty—looking at the older boy beneath him.

Mike slowly, gently, lowers his head, pressing his cheek into Will’s chest. He feels the way the warm sticky blood and vomit slides against his skin, soaks into his hair. He listens to Will’s faint, fluttery, stuttering heartbeat. His short, gasping breaths.

Mike begins to sob.

—☉—

It has definitely been hours by now. Will’s lucidity hasn’t fully come back in the time that has passed. It’s only gotten hotter—Mike himself feels like he’s suffocating, he cannot imagine what Will must be experiencing right now. The space has become an oven, cooking the pair alive. Mike is refusing to shed his clothes any further than he already has, in an attempt to show Will—even if he was barely conscious most of the time—that he would suffer alongside him, always. A show of solidarity that Will would call him stupid for if he could.

Will’s skin has finally shed its red, splotchy appearance from the heat—has instead grown deathly pale. Mike isn’t sure which is worse. Those thick, bulging black veins have returned, snaking up from under his shirt, across his throat, his cheeks, his forehead. The only place spared of their wriggling pulsations is Will’s right eye—the one that’s still green. The veins look sickeningly close to bursting.

Will has woken up only a few times—struggling to look around himself—blearily blinking at Mike. Recognition has only lit his features half of the times that their eyes have met. He’s cycled through never ending loops of convulsions, screaming, struggling against his bonds. He’s sicked up on himself, and on Mike, so many times that all his stomach can produce now is awful, frothy burps. He’s wet himself twice more—at this point Mike doesn’t understand how he has any liquid left inside of him to keep leaking everywhere.

Mike has been forced to watch on in complete devastation and horror as Will has repeatedly begged for the pain to stop. He’s thrashed against his bindings, rubbing the skin of his wrists and ankles so raw that thick red-black blood seeps almost constantly from beneath the cuffs. There’s so much blood and spit and piss and bile that the once white sheets are now absolutely disgusting. Mike wouldn’t be surprised if there was shit there somewhere too—although he supposes he’d be able to smell that.

He'd snorted to himself at one point, thinking about how even when half out of his mind, delirious and in pain, Will could make art out of anything—even if his only paints were bodily fluids, his only canvas a horrible hospital-esque bed.

This burn is killing him, and Mike knows it. He’s passed out more than once, the pain and exhaustion becoming too much. Each time Will loses consciousness, Mike feels fear claw at his chest, panic flooding every inch of his body.

What if he doesn’t wake up?

It’s one of these quiet moments that Mike now finds himself in, sitting beside Will and attempting to use whatever clean material he can find to wipe the blood from his wounds every now and again. To keep him sort-of clean. It’s quiet, only the sound of Mike’s occasional sniffle to break the silence that has descended upon the trailer.

His eyes are filled with unshed tears. He reaches out a shaking hand and lets it settle against Will’s chest—softly—hoping to feel the rise and fall. He can feel the fickle pattering of Will’s heart beneath his sweat soaked shirt, under the thin, pale skin that stretches out across his chest. Underneath those fragile bones that hold said heart, encasing it within a tightly bound cage. There is absolutely no doubt in Mike’s mind at that moment. The burn is killing Will. This brief moment of respite—the third or fourth time Will has completely passed out, body unable to handle the possession, the exhaustion, the levels of stress it is being put under—feels impossible to Mike.

It’s been at least three hours since they began this horrid endeavour. Three entire hours in which Mike has had to watch Will suffer—useless to help in any way. He can taste the warm salt of tears combining with sweat, dribbling into the seam of his lips. Will, like this, is so fragile beneath his fingers.

A thought crosses Mike’s mind then, unbidden. All he would need to do right now is push downwards. One swift movement. It’d require barely any of his strength. He’d be able to end Will’s suffering.

The thought lasts for barely a second, yet Mike still rips his hand from Will’s overheated, sticky body as violently as if he had genuinely been about to do it. He feels the gnawing fear thicken in his belly once again. That deep rooted worry of hurting Will, his Will. He knows, deep down, that this burn is necessary—he knows that hurting Will in this way is the only way to guarantee his safety. It doesn’t make the knowledge any easier to stomach. These hours that have passed have been nothing but pure agony for Mike, he can’t even bear to imagine the Hell Will has been experiencing.

The walkie which Mike has propped near the bed on a stool crackles to life.

“How are things going over there? How’s Will?” Lucas’ voice breaks through the all encompassing silence.

“Still working on it.” Mike grits out.

“I’m really sorry to push you, man, but you need to work faster.” The sound of gunshots ring out through the static—Mike spares a moment to question how the Hell Lucas went from looking after Max to being near gunshots—before Lucas speaks again, “things are starting to get dicey out here and we really need to get this gate shut.”

Mike kicks the walkie across the room in frustration, not bothering to respond. He threads his fingers into his hair, curling and tugging violently at the strands. Any more of this and Will is likely going to die, Mike just knows it.

But if they stop, he’s definitely going to die.

He has to suck it up, he has to get this thing out of his best friend.

“Please,” the word is choked and desperate. Mike’s eyes snap up from the floor, “it hurts.”

“I—I don’t—I can’t—Will.”

A sob. Will’s chest convulses with it, shuddering and heaving. Mike shuts his eyes, biting his tongue, letting the sweetness of his own blood pool in his mouth. He can hardly bear to look at the other boy—not now, not in this rare moment of lucidity.

There’s spit—and bile, black blood, and chunks of vomit—crusted into the corners of Will’s mouth. Mike feels something tugging deep within his gut at that moment. He can’t help but think that—despite it all, despite the horror and the pain, the fluids and the sweat and the one bulging, bloodied eyeball—Will looks beautiful.

Burning hot skin brushes his own. He opens his eyes and meets Will’s soft ones. One is still that deep pool of terrible black, the pupil so bloated that it has consumed the iris in its entirety. It reminds Mike of the way his eyes had looked all those years ago when Will had last been possessed. He swallows and chooses to focus on the one remaining hazel-green eye. The shade Mike has come to associate with home.

Will’s hand snakes itself around Mike’s wrist.

“It hurts so—” a cough wracks Will’s frame, wet and bubbly “—so much.”

That beautiful hazel-green eye reflects the pain Will feels, the fear. He’s afraid to die. His Will—usually so full of life, bursting at the seams with it—is afraid to die. Mike chokes. He can’t do this.

“You have to,” Will gasps shakily. “I trust you.” It’s barely a whisper, “you could never hurt me, Mike.”

Mike’s resolve shatters. He has to do it, he knows he does. There is no other way. They need to get the Mindflayer out—now—and this is the only option left.

He turns from the bed on shaking legs, shuffling to the corner of the room. He sees the black metal poker still shoved into the heater.

Just like Nancy did.

He turns back to look at Will, and something inside of him breaks. It’s his soul, he supposes, splintering like glass at the pure unfiltered trust in the older boy’s eyes.

God, Mike is in love with him.

He hopes he’ll get the chance to tell him that.

Will smiles up at Mike—a small but nonetheless beautiful, radiant thing—before his face contorts violently into a picture of anger and agony. The screaming starts yet again, ripping through Mike and leaving him haunted. Will’s own pain layered over that deep, guttural cacophony of animalistic fear and hunger and anger. He once again begins to writhe.

Mike hurries to find the walkie, sending out a quick message—burn the fuckers—to anyone who might hear, in hopes that putting as much of the hivemind as possible into a state of distress with help in getting the Mindflayer out.

He raises the poker, steeling himself.

Three deep breaths, in and out. His own heart stutters in his chest, beats so forceful he feels like it’s about to crawl out of his throat. His hands shake with anticipation and fear.

He shoves the poker forward, not paying a great amount of attention as to where he shoves it—just aiming in the general direction of Will’s midsection.

It finds its home between two of his lower ribs, and Mike feels the way the metal grinds against the bone. He smells burnt cotton. He smells burnt flesh. He didn’t use too much force—he was scared to pierce too deep—but it doesn’t matter, the poker is lodged in between those two bottom ribs.

Will lets out the most horrific noise that Mike has heard yet tonight. It is not the deep, awful bass of Vecna, nor the multilayered braying of the Mindflayer.

No. As Will throws his head back and wails in agony, it is only him.

His mouth grows wide around the howl, thick black particles of dusty sand being violently expelled. Mike watches the way Will’s throat squirms and pulsates, the direct opposite of how a throat bobs when swallowing. It looks painful. It looks horrible.

The particles must be tearing his throat to shreds, because Mike sees even further blood dribbling down Will’s cheek from his mouth.

It takes several minutes—Mike still standing near the bed, hand gripping the handle of the poker, twisting it slightly every few moments to ensure the whole Mindflayer is gone. That every single speck of dust is ejected from Will. He feels the way the metal grinds against the bone. Hears the anguish in Will’s horrible screams. Once he’s sure the Mindflayer is gone he rips the poker out, perhaps a little too aggressively.

Will sobs and wriggles in pain. He tries to curl in on himself. Mike can only dejectedly note that the wound was cauterized by the heat of the metal, even with his manipulations.

He feels numb.

He wants to die.

—☉—

Mike is going to kill someone.

Likely himself.

All of that pain, that torture, that horror, had been for nothing.

Mike sits with his back against the far wall across from Will, who continues to sit on the bed—body finally unbound. The Mindflayer might have been burned out of him, fleeing from the searing heat and pain of the firepoker, but Vecna is still in there. Will says he can still feel him.

They’ve relayed this message to the team, and received back possibly the worst response Mike can imagine.

“You don’t have to do this,” his voice is almost pleading as he watches Will take in deep breaths.

The sweat is cooling on both of their skin by now—they both sit in nothing but their underwear. As soon as he had been able Mike had peeled off the remnants of his and Will’s clothes, discarding them in a sweaty, disgusting pile in the corner. All sense of self consciousness thrown to the wayside in the wake of what they’ve just experienced together.

Mike has turned off the heaters, thrown the door and windows wide open—tried to circulate the air. He’s gotten them both water, which Will has still barely touched. He’s offered Will clean clothes and been turned down. The remnants of the burn are still permeating the air, the stench and the cloying heat not yet dispelled.

Mike can tell Will is still coming down from the effects of it all by the way he trembles. How his hands flutter about without finding a spot to land. How if Mike couldn’t see him moving, couldn’t hear his ragged breaths, he would think he was looking at a corpse.

He wants to hold him—smooth down his hair, clean the mess from his face, his skin—but he doesn’t think it will be appreciated. After all, Mike is the one who inflicted all of this on him. If he had shied away from Mike’s touch before, if Mike had somehow given him a reason to be afraid… well.

After everything that has just happened, Mike will be lucky to ever spend another moment in Will’s presence after they exit this trailer.

“He wasn’t lying, you know.” Will’s voice is quiet—rough like sandpaper, his throat clearly screamed raw.

Mike raises an eyebrow at him, tilts his head in encouragement, as if to say go on. Will slides himself slowly down from the bed, using it to brace his back as he slumps on the floor. He shudders, face screwing up in pain as he draws in a slow breath. Mike sits patiently, it’s clear Will is about to say something important, and he doesn’t want to interrupt.

Will seems to work the words in his mouth. He takes a sip of water. He taps his knee with his finger tips. Finally, for the first time since Mike removed his cuffs, he makes eye contact.

“I let him in. I didn’t fight back, and I let him inside of me, and everyone has suffered the consequences.”

“But what does that even mean?” Mike’s confusion is palpable, he knows Will. He’d never willingly endanger his friends and family—at least not knowingly.

“It’s all my fault, is what it means, Mike!” Will’s voice sounds somewhere between angry and desperate. Like he needs Mike to understand, and he’s frustrated that he just isn’t listening, “it’s my fault he’s in me! It’s my fault he pumped me full of those fucking demoslugs! It’s my fault the demogorgon caught me! It’s my fault I couldn’t kill it! It’s my fault I got taken to the Upside Down in the first place! It’s my fault I was cornered in the shed and my fault I ran home of all places and my fault I fell off my fucking bike and it’s my fault I left your house that night! It’s my fault, it’s my fault, it’s all my fucking fault!”

Will’s chest is heaving with the gasps he takes, like he’s tasting air for the first time in his life. His cheeks are shiny and wet. There’s spit on his lips. Mike watches the way his hands thread up into his brown hair, how he begins to tug.

“Hey, hey, Will,” Mike’s voice goes soft—something so practiced, so ingrained in him since they were young that he doesn’t even do it intentionally. “No—no, none of this is your fault. None of it.” He scoots forward towards Will, gently untangling his hands from his hair, bringing them down to his lap. He lets go, afraid to cross a line or make him uncomfortable.

Will’s face screws up in frustration, “you—you say it’s not my fault—you say it doesn’t matter the awful things I think—you say—you say it doesn’t matter but you—you—” he lets out a grunt of frustration “—you can’t even touch me, Mike.”

“That’s—that’s not true I’m—”

“It is true! You only touched me before because you thought I was—that I was helpless—that I needed you to—to touch me for comfort while Vecna—”

“—I’m trying to respect your boundaries—”

“—my boundaries?! What does that even mean—”

“—since you’ve seemed so fucking scared—”

“—I’m scared? I’m scared. Mike? You still can’t touch me—”

“—of me for the past month, and it’s only gotten worse these past few days—”

“—because you’re scared that I’ll jump you or something just because I’m a queer—”

Mike’s brain grinds to a halt.

He stares at Will—mouth opening and closing around words that have died in his throat—his mind having gone completely blank. He couldn’t hope to remember what he was saying if he tried.

Will has also gone silent, tears brimming in his eyes. His chest is heaving, breaths so laboured Mike can hear the way they wheeze in and out. The look of absolute terror on his face only grows the longer Mike stays silent. His whole body begins to shudder with panic.

It’s clear he hadn’t meant to say that.

“Wh—at?” Mike’s voice comes out sharper than intended, his voice catching in his throat mid word.

“You heard me.” Will’s voice is hard, but the way his lip wobbles and his eyes shine betray his fear.

“You’re—”

Mike doesn’t get to finish his sentence before Will begins to hyperventilate. His whole body is wracked with heaving sobs, he gasps for air like a drowning man. He’s working himself up so badly that his face is growing purple, the tears streaking down his face mixing with the grime of the past few hours. At this rate he’s going to make himself sick.

Mike shuffles closer to him, resting one arm across his shoulders and pulling him into his chest. Will resists—wriggling in Mike’s grasp—but Mike holds firm. Will is too weak from the burn to pull himself away.

Mike’s head rests atop Will’s, his chin pressed into the older boy’s soft brown hair. He rubs circles into the soft flesh of Will’s wrist—just above where the cuffs had shredded the skin—with the thumb of his free hand. They sit like this until Will’s breathing slows from its rapid speed, Mike whispering soft comfort to him all the while.

Mike finally steels his nerves once he’s sure Will is calm enough, “I don’t—I—I don’t care, Will. I don’t—care. If you’re. Queer.” His voice comes out jerky, halting, detached.

God, he’s fucking this up so badly already, he can tell by the way Will goes from being soft and pliant against him to rigid in less than a moment.

“Well, it’s a pretty big fucking deal to me, Mike,” he detangles himself from the dark haired boy, drawing his knees up to his chest and resting his forehead against them. He takes a deep breath, preparing for something, “you don’t care, huh?” Laughter bubbles from somewhere in Will’s gut, “of course you don’t. It doesn’t fucking affect you. You get to go on and live your life with El. You'll be allowed to get married. You’ll be able to have kids. Your family won’t shun you for being a fucking freak,” the way he says the word makes it sound like a death sentence, “so what, your best friend is a queer? At least you aren’t.”

I don’t think that's true, Will. I don’t think it ever has been.

Not since the day we became friends. Not since the second I saw your stupid yellow rain jacket on that swingset. Did you know I’ve never seen yellow the same way since? I was five years old and in the span of a single word—a quiet yes—yellow became the most beautiful colour in the universe. It became so much more than just yellow, Will.

It became what I picture when I think of love—you, bathed in yellow.

The words stay caught in Mike’s chest. He can’t fucking spit them out. It feels like his heart has lodged itself in his throat, and no sound will be able to escape until he somehow chokes it back down. The longer they sit in silence, the harder Will’s body trembles.

Mike swallows once. Twice. Three fucking times and still the words refuse to come unstuck.

“It’s—God, Mike, it’s fine. You don’t—you don’t have to be okay with it,” Will’s fingers have snaked back into his hair, twisting into the silky brown, balling into fists, “I’m not even okay with it. I’m—I’m a fucking mistake, Mike. I know. I know. Dad—Dad made sure I’d always be well aware of that.” His throat works, and Mike is violently reminded of a similar conversation held in the back of a weed and blood soaked pizza van, “it’s the one thing he did right—”

“No.” Mike’s voice finally fights free, it’s so quiet he’s not sure Will hears him.

“No?” More of that sickening laughter, that self hatred wrapped up in soft puffs of air, “no? Mike, you’ve got to be fucking kidding me. Stop. Just—stop. Stop this… this bullshit act of trying to—to treat me like I’m—like I’m not disgusting. Like i’m not a—a dirty fuck—ing fagg—faggot.” His voice is so fucking raw, so broken, his words carried from his chest on deep, aching sobs.

“You’re—you’re not—”

“But I am, Mike. Stop treating me like I’ll break if you’re just—fucking honest for once. I know it’s true, I know it is!” His voice rises, the vocal fry of overuse starting to grow stronger with each decibel he climbs, “you wanted to know what shit Vecna’s been filling my mind with for the last few months?” His chest heaves, his words growing harsh and seething, “he’s been showing me the truth, Mike. The truth!

“I’m unclean. I’m unworthy. I’m broken and wrong and a pathetic mistake. It is all my fault, Mike, everything that’s happened to us all. If I wasn’t—if I wasn’t made wrong—” he swipes the back of his palm across his dripping eyes, the right leaking tears, the left leaking blood, “—none of this would have happened. It’s my goddamn fault Vecna possessed me! Punishment for—for the way that I am. It’s—He violated me, Mike,” the way he says the word violated makes Mike’s stomach drop, make nausea roil in his stomach, “shoved a fucking vine down my throat and pumped me so full of slugs I spent a year throwing them up into every available drain and pipe and sink and toilet—and it’s what I fucking deserved!

“And what did those slugs grow into? What was I spitting into the sewer system of Hawkins? Demogorgons, Mike. Demogorgons that used their insipid little claws to dig tunnels all over, that killed so many people—that killed Bob—and it was all my fault because I couldn’t tell anyone. I couldn’t! What was I meant to do, tell Mom that I’d been—been fucking impregnanted with demon slugs? Left to carry out the plans of some fucked up monster… I didn’t even think he was real, Mike. I thought I’d made him up to avoid admitting that it was all just. Me.

“And when I tried to stand up for myself? When I tried to—to fight back—to believe I—I deserved to be okay? Not even happy, Mike—just fucking okay—what happened?” He snorts derisively, a bubble of snot mixing with the salted blood on his face, “I get possessed all over again. Another punishment. Dad knew exactly what I deserved, he was the only one who fucking knew it. It’s all I fucking deserve, Mike, don’t you get that?”

Mike’s never heard Will swear this much—he’s probably sworn more in the previous five minutes than in all eleven years that Mike’s known him. His heart is pounding, rabbitting away in his chest. Mike can see the way the skin flutters at the base of his throat with each forceful beat.

Mike swallows, throat clicking, “no. No, Will, I don’t get it.” His eyes are firmly trained on that dip of skin between Will’s collarbones.

He has no words, nothing to say. His heart is aching. There's a dull pain deep in his gut, a wound ripped larger with each word Will had spoken. He feels violently ill, a nausea he doesn’t think he’ll ever be able to rid himself of. Hearing Will speak about himself this way fucking hurts. He sees Will as nothing less breathtaking than the stars—nothing less miraculous than the creation of life itself—and here he is thinking that he deserves torture and Hell solely because he likes boys.

Because he sees himself as a mistake.

Mike understands, he supposes—he’s contended with his own inner demons about his sexuality, especially in recent years as he’s come to realize exactly what his true feelings for his best friend are. But that’s all he’s ever had to deal with; his own inner shame.

Mike wants to kill Vecna, the Mindflayer, Troy and Andy and Chance and every other bully who’s ever made Will feel like he deserves any of the horror he’s been forced to endure in his life.

More than anything—and not for the first time in his short life—Mike wants to kill Lonnie Byers.

“Don’t feel bad. I didn’t expect you would understand. All I’m trying to—” Will cuts himself off, tilts his head, wipes at his running nose and dripping eyes, “I’m just trying to explain, to make you realize that… that I do have to do this. Dustin is smart as Hell, there’s no chance he’d risk suggesting something like this if he wasn’t sure of it working, or if we had no other options.” He’s beginning to settle a bit, the tears—and blood—still flowing, but the hiccoughing breaths and trembling muscles have eased, “and I deserve it, anyway. It’s just another punishment for thinking and feeling the things that I do.”

He takes a deep breath and finally, finally, makes eye contact with Mike. His face is streaked with diluted blood, smeared across his cheeks and jawline where he’d been furiously wiping away his tears. It’s already beginning to dry down on the delicate skin, and Mike feels a little mesmerised with how it highlights his features in a gross, morbid sort of way.

Will’s eyes close, briefly, and his right hand comes to rest against his left cheek, “The eye doesn’t work, anyway. I’ve barely been able to see out of it for months and now…” he closes his right eye, his good eye, the one that is still his, and sighs, “I can’t see out of it at all.”

Something about the sadness in his tone finally spurs Mike into movement. His hand darts forward, covering Will’s. His other clenches around Will’s bicep, sliding upwards to cup the side of his neck. He uses a thumb to swipe at a tear that’s settled on his jaw.

“Before you—before you do it,” Mike can’t even say the words, can’t even think them. It’s like if he doesn’t acknowledge what Will is about to do, then it doesn’t have to happen, “I need you to listen to me, okay?”

He presses the tips of his fingers into Will’s neck when he doesn’t get a response. Will nods minutely.

“Okay. You need to understand that I wasn’t lying before. There is nothing—” Will tries to move his head, to break eye contact, but Mike holds him still, searching his features with earnest, “—absolutely nothing that you could do, that you could say or think, or feel… there is not one single goddamn thing in this universe that could make me hate you, William Byers, not a single fucking goddamn thing.”

I love you. His throat closes up around those final three words.

God, he hates himself. He really can’t fucking say it even when he does mean it. He can’t help but think that this time it’s because those three words don’t encapsulate his feelings well enough at all. They cannot express the pure devotion Mike feels towards Will with every fibre of his entire being—the way that his heart hums at a frequency only echoed back to him by his best friend.

He doesn’t say anything else. Neither does Will. The older boy is sobbing again, shaking, little broken gasps escaping his lungs every few seconds. Mike doesn’t move his hands from Will’s face and neck, instead drawing him close and pressing their foreheads together. He nudges the tip of Will’s nose with his own, just briefly.

“You’re okay,” Mike’s voice is a whisper—his eyes are closed—the moment so intimate he fears that just looking at Will will ruin everything, “it’s okay. You’ve never deserved a single second of this. Never. I promise you this.”

Will’s breathing slows again, but still judders with his sobs. Mike feels the way each puff of air tickles the skin of his lips, an indirect kiss.

“You’re going to be okay. I’m here. I will be here every step of the way. I am not going to leave you, Will, not for a second. We’ll be okay.”

Will makes a soft noise, almost a whine, something so pathetic and laced with fear that Mike can’t help but tighten his grip.

“I’m serious, Will. I promise you, everything will be fine. You’re the strongest person I’ve ever met. The bravest. I would raze the entire world to the ground to keep you safe.”

In a moment of pure courage, he tilts his head just so, catching the tip of Will’s nose with his lips. A light graze, something that Will can read as accidental if he so wants. Mike presses their foreheads together once more, poking out the tip of his tongue to catch the tear that had sneaked onto his bottom lip from Will’s nose.

The moment feels so intimate, so fragile. Mike wishes they could stay here, like this, forever. That what’s about to happen isn’t real, that he isn’t about to witness something so awful.

But Will is right.

Dustin would never have suggested something so extreme if it weren’t the only viable option. He never would have told Will to do something so horrible—so risky—otherwise. Mike may be the only one in love with Will, but he isn't the only one who loves him.

Either they do this—get rid of Will’s connection to Vecna once and for all and give El the chance to kill the fucking bastard… or they let Will die right alongside him.

They don’t actually know if Will’s connection to Vecna would kill him when El finally stops that interdimensional creep’s heart from beating, but it isn’t a risk anyone—let alone Mike—is willing to take.

Will’s eye has to come out.

It’s the only option they have left.

—☉—

They’ve been sitting in silence for a few minutes now, just holding each other and breathing, when Will finally draws himself away.

“I appreciate it, Mike. I really do but—but you need to stop lying just to make me feel better. This won’t be easy, I’m not going to be okay I’m—” he shifts, getting himself more comfortable, wetting his lips, “—I’m not sure what’s going to happen after this but. Thank you. For being here.”

Mike has given up on trying to argue. He supposes it’s just another thing to add to the list of shit to deal with after Vecna is in the ground. He nods, removes his hands from Will’s face, twines his fingers together in his lap.

“You—you don’t have to watch this.” Will’s voice has begun to tremble again.

“No. I don’t. But I already told you, I’m not leaving you.” Mike rests his hand gently on Will’s shoulder, and the boy shudders. “You cold? I can shut the door?”

It’s still quite hot in the room but Mike knows how Will feels about even the slightest hint of cold—it’s why he’s continued to layer up even in the summer for the last couple of years. Will nods slightly, and Mike stands up, his knees popping. He shuffles about the room, closing the front door and half of the windows. He’s surprised nothing has come to attack them yet, though he supposes that all the creatures are likely busy with the full scale war that El and the others are apparently waging downtown.

He shifts some of the heaters around as well, still trying to avoid what is about to happen. He hears Will make a hissing noise and snaps his head back towards him. He’s gently prodding at his eye socket with one finger, and Mike can see the way his bulbous left eye moves with even the slightest touch, shifting within Will’s face.

He makes his way back over, settling down beside the older boy, knees pressing into the side of his thigh.

“You’ve got this.” He tries to hide the fear in his own voice.

Will nods—shifting his weight from side to side for a moment—drawing in a deep breath. Mike watches the column of his throat as he swallows, watches how his adams apple bobs. There’s still bloodied tear tracks streaking across the skin there, and Mike wishes he could clean them up. It’d be useless, he knows.

Will is about to get ten times bloodier.

He tracks the movement of Will’s right arm, the way he moves it gingerly, wincing with how his shoulder must be smarting from the recent dislocation. He brings it up—slightly behind his head—lets his hand come forward, resting his fingertips just above his eyebrow. He screws his eyes shut for a moment. Mike watches with a combined sense of dread, disgust, and awe.

Will uses his right fingers to gently tug at his own skin, one finger below the eyebrow, the rest above. His upper eyelid shifts upwards, makes a wet clicking noise as it separates itself from the surface of his eyeball. He draws in a quick breath, and uses the ring and pinky finger of his left hand to pull on his cheek, his lower eyelid also separating from his eyeball and being tugged downwards. It’s like a morbid version of a stink eye.

The blood vessels on the inside of his lower eyelid still pulsate thick and black. There’s already a thick line of congealed brown-red blood pasted where the globe of his eyeball meets the bottom of the fleshy lid. The eyeball itself is so much worse to look at now that so much more of it is exposed.

Mike notes the way something inside of it seems to wriggle just below the surface, almost like watching a worm sliding beneath skin. The entire sclera is red with black veins, like an infected wound. It’s definitely larger than it should be, looking ready to pop at the slightest touch. The green of his iris is entirely non-existent now, a large black pool of nothing but pupil filling up the center of the monstrosity. Mike can see his own face reflected back at him. He swallows thickly.

He thought he’d prepared himself for this as well as he could, yet somehow the reality is so much worse than he could have imagined.

Will lets out a gasp of pain as he digs his left pointer finger into his eye socket, wriggling and sliding it into the space next to his nose, in between the bone and the eyeball itself.

It takes him a surprising amount of effort, a sickening squelching noise ringing out with each microshift of his finger. The sound reminds Mike of stepping in mud barefoot as a kid, the wet sucking sound as it gets stuck between your toes.

Will sucks in a breath, halting his movements for a moment, before going back to digging with more fervour than before. He grunts with both effort and pain. Blood begins to trickle down his face—slowly at first, then more steadily, like water when you open a sluice. Mike watches Will gag. Whether the nausea is coming from pain or the feeling of the wet flesh that’s likely getting stuck under his fingernails, Mike isn’t sure. He stays silent. It feels like if he speaks now, something bad will happen.

He holds his breath and continues to watch with both disgust and fascination.

Will’s eyeball shifts to the side, moving to accommodate for the finger now taking up residence beside it. Will begins to shove his middle finger in beside the first. His grunts and gasps make Mike feel woozy, but he digs his fingernails into his palms and tries to keep his rolling gut at bay. He has to stay strong for Will. This whole experience is definitely far worse for him.

Will’s eyeball continues to move within his socket, Mike is horrified to note that Will’s fingers are now knuckle deep, buried in blood and meat. He’s making horrid, keening noises in his throat—soft pained whines. Each noise makes Mike’s stomach flip harder. He wants to help but he knows he can’t do anything other than sit here.

The sounds are somehow worse than the visuals, Mike finds himself thinking. Really, he can almost ignore the oozing blood and blackened puss, pretend he isn’t watching the globe of Will’s eye pulse back and forth with each wriggle of his finger—digging deeper into the viscera that lies in wait in the back of his socket. He’s spent three hours watching Will vomit and bleed and piss himself, watched him writhe in pain inflicted by Mike himself. He can handle this.

It’s the fucking sounds. The squishy noises of digging into flesh, the wet schlopping sounds each time his eye moves from its intended location within the socket. A soft, rhythmic sliding noise, like a wet stone being pushed into and pulled from mud over and over.

The black puss must be similar to whatever the sludge was earlier—just more watery in texture. It leaks out alongside the blood, and smells absolutely horrific. Rotting cheese and fruit, the sweet stink of something dead and bloating in the heat.

Will begins to work his thumb into the opposite corner of his eye, and Mike watches the way that the eye begins to break free of the socket, protruding forwards as Will’s fingers work to get behind it. The older boy’s body trembles, heaves with each gag, each retch he makes as he finally gets all three appendages buried into his eyesocket, right the way up to the final knuckle.

Mike didn’t realize there was that much space behind an eyeball. He thinks, vaguely, there likely isn't. Will’s fingers are probably buried deep into flesh and muscle, curling around his own eye from the inside of his head.

Will’s body visibly convulses from his jaw to his spine, his breath coming in sharp, broken bursts. His eyelids flutter violently like the wings of a live moth pinned to a board.

The schlopping wet sounds grow louder—more intense—as he begins to pry his left hand forward, pulling harder than Mike would have thought necessary to get the eyeball free of his face. It dislodges itself slowly, inching forward with each tug. The entire left side of Will’s face is covered in a mix of blood and black puss, smudged where his fingers have been anchoring themselves, where he presses to gain some sort of leverage to rip his eyeball from the socket.

One final, sharp tug finally loosens the eye. It comes with the tearing, ripping sound of muscle, and a sickening, wet pop, like raw meat being slapped onto a hard surface. Will whimpers, his front teeth clenched so hard into his lip that they’ve almost bitten clean through.

Mike stares with detached curiosity at Will’s fingers and thumb. There’s flesh buried under his fingernails, the blood that’s caked up to his knuckles looks almost jellified where it clings to the skin. They’re twitching ever so slightly with exertion. He stares at those fingers for what feels like an eternity. It’s likely only thirty seconds.

He shuts his eyes for a moment, takes in a breath, and finally looks to Will’s eye socket. He immediately swallows down bile.

Will may have freed the eye from its prison, but it isn’t over yet. The eyeball hangs—uselessly—against Will’s cheek. It’s still anchored to the socket by threads of muscle, nerves, and veins. It’s like looking into a gaping hole—wrong, too deep, a cave never meant to be seen.

The eyeball moves along with Will as he shifts, sliding against his cheek, just… dangling there. The viscera still tethering the eye in place trembles like it’s alive—pumping and pulsating and writhing—the muscles contracting themselves of their own accord. It makes the eyeball look like it’s twitching, as if it’s still trying to look around, to see. It reflects the room around them warped like glass—Mike can see his own face staring back at him from the glossy, red surface.

Even worse, than all that, the empty socket itself begins to twitch like something in there is alive.

Blood dribbles down Will’s chin from his split lip, “I can't—I can’t do the—rest.” He speaks through gasps.

His face is pale, he looks like he’s going to pass out.

Mike is frozen where he sits, until Will’s eye—his functioning eye, the one that is still actually inside his head where eyeballs are meant to be—catches on his. He slowly shuffles himself forward, pressing right up against Will, and lets his hand come to rest against Will’s bloodied fingers.

“I’ve got you,” it’s hardly a whisper, almost lost to those pained noises Will keeps making.

He slides his hand up along Will’s arm slowly, putting off the inevitable. He doesn’t stop the contact once, not as his fingers slide over Will’s shoulder, up his neck, over his cheek. Trailing through that awful, bloody, puss.

His finger lightly grazes the eyeball, and it takes everything in him not to pull away. Will flinches at the touch, but keeps his face firmly pressed into Mike’s hand. He sighs, closing the lids over his still-intact eye.

“I’m sorry if this. Hurts.”

Mike’s fingers slowly slide around the eyeball, pulling it into the cage of his palm.

He brings his other hand up to brace against the opposite side of Will’s face.

He takes a deep breath. He swallows. He tugs.

It’s like trying to pull taffy.

Mike swears it shouldn’t be this tough to snap the muscles connecting the eye to the socket. He tugs a second time, and Will wails. The eyeball doesn’t move at all. He tugs again and again—three, four, five times. The eyeball doesn’t budge, the muscles stay firmly in place. All it does is pull sharper moans from Will, makes his body shudder with pain.

His hands are beginning to shake, the eyeball slipping through his fingers on the seventh tug. It makes a dull thudding slap as it lands back against Will’s cheek. The older boy lists forward slightly, the pain clearly beginning to overwhelm him.

Mike looks around desperately, trying to spot something that could help him with getting the eye out. He can’t see anything, it’s just him and Will and too many fucking space hearters. His teeth grind together. His heart sits so heavy in his throat it feels as though he’s going to puke it into his lap.

“Guys please tell me the eye is out, we really need to finish this shit now,” Dustin’s voice crackling through the walkie startles both of the boys.

Mike blindly flails one hand out for it, pressing down the button with his blood slickened thumb, “—just a sec—” he hiccoughs, “—second.”

He drops the walkie unceremoniously and looks back to Will, who looks completely out of it, delirious with pain. An awful idea settles itself in Mike’s mind. He scans their surroundings again hoping that he’ll spot something to pry and slice this eye out. He spots nothing. His stomach twists, realizing what he’s going to have to do.

“I’m—Will,” he places a hand gently back against the side of Will’s face, angling them so they’re looking at each other head-on, “I’m—I have to—I’m about to do something and—I—I’m going to need—you’re going to have to—trust me, okay?”

Will blinks. He nods his head slightly. Mike tries to ignore the way the eyeball moves.

Mike screws his eyes shut for a brief second, and then surges forward. He refuses to let himself think. He knows that if he does, he’s going to chicken out. Which is something he absolutely cannot do. He cannot leave Will to deal with this alone.

He grips the eyeball tight, and brings it towards his parted lips.

Will’s eyeball sits heavy on Mike’s tongue. It’s slightly-round, slimy and smooth, the slightest bounce of give when Mike prods at it with his tongue out of curiosity. He gags.

There’s still chunks of bloodied meat clinging to it, some dislodging itself in Mike's mouth. He swallows reflexively and then has to hold back vomit as he realizes what he’s just done. The image of a hardboiled egg comes to mind, and he realizes he’s never going to be able to eat eggs in any form ever again without remembering this moment. He impulsively runs his tongue along the surface once more without thinking and almost spits it right back out.

He can’t, though. The eye needs to come out and the only thing he can think to use to do that is his teeth.

He works his jaw slightly, biting at the muscle experimentally. It has a clammy slickness to it, like wet leather. As his teeth pierce the surface, there’s an almost skin-like snap—the meat slumping inward slightly, as if the fibers have partially dissolved—but the resistance still persists. His tooth hits a strange pocket of gas within the muscle and it bursts, releasing a sickening warmth against his gums.

Mike isn’t sure why he expected it to taste like meat, but it doesn’t. It’s just a metallic gush filling his mouth, sharp and coppery and coating everywhere. There’s an almost bitter, sour tang, too. He’s inclined to describe it as fizzy, without the actual sensation of fizz.

Beneath that tang and blood, though, is something absolutely rancid. It’s a truly rotten, putrid note—warm and dead and heavy within his mouth. His body tries to recoil at the fundamental wrongness of the taste, but he holds himself still.

He’s afraid to hurt Will more than necessary.

Every nerve in his body is screaming at him to stop, his jaw instinctively stuttering and locking. He can’t commit to the bite. His stomach clenches. His throat begins to tighten, attempting to reject whatever the fuck he’s doing right now.

Basically eating your best friend's eyeball, that's what.

He needs to get this over with quickly if he has any hope of doing it at all. He bites down harder, chewing on the viscera, trying to hack his teeth through it. There’s no way this is normal. If it were, he’s certain he would have been able to pull the eye out with enough force using only his hands.

The difficulty he’s having in getting this eye out has to be related to Vecna in some way.

The odor is an entire experience on its own. Up this close to the stinking, gaping hole of Will’s eye socket, he can smell nothing but the rising, sweet rot. It’s thick and sickly, prickling his nostrils the same way that his mother’s cleaning chemicals do. Each time he bites, his mouth is flooded with a dense, corpse-heavy stench. It’s greasy and choking, and Mike knows it’s going to linger long past expulsion.

The eye itself warps in his mouth, spongy but hard. The entire mouthfeel is fucking horrendous. Mike is hyper aware of a juice that seems to be seeping from both the muscle and the eye—lukewarm, thin and watery like broth.

For some reason, Mike is reminded of the vines that snake through the Upside Down. He thinks that what he’s currently experiencing would be pretty close to attempting to chew through one of those.

Definitely a Vecna-thing, then.

He’s been gnawing at the muscle for what feels like too long when it finally gives, the strands tearing apart. Mike had expected it to come apart with some sort of snap—so far the experience has been surprisingly close to biting through undercooked steak, yet the last few bites feel almost waterlogged and sludge-soft, separating like dampened tissue paper peeling into mush. It’s unsettling to say the least, a weird combination of softness and sinew.

The moment the eye comes free, Mike pulls backwards. He intends to spit the fucking thing from his mouth immediately, but stops himself when he hears Will begin to croak.

“It’s gotta—make sure you—needs to be—destroyed. Can still—feel’im.” His voice is heavy, fading.

Mike nods and, without thinking too hard, he bites down.

The eye pops with far less resistance than he expected, like biting an over-filled water balloon.

His mouth is immediately flooded by the gooey texture of whatever the fuck is inside an eyeball after his teeth pierce through the thick outer membrane. It coats his tongue in a slimy, gelatinous film, stubborn and sticky. It’s somewhere between the texture of warm jell-o and soft cartilage, distinctly offputting. It dissolves quicker than he’d expected.

He feels what he can only assume is the lens of the eye, like a hard piece of rubber between his teeth. He rolls it over his tongue. It’s distinctly chewy, a strange and overwhelming mix of slick and smooth.

Everything about it is grittier than he expected it to be, which he supposes must be the connective tissues breaking down with each bite. It’s almost gristly, like overcooked meat—amusing in a disgusting way, considering the muscle had felt the exact opposite.

The taste only grows stronger, the putrid fat-like flavour becoming overwhelming. He’s fighting his own body right now to keep his stomach at bay, gagging and retching as he works the eye between his teeth.

His throat spasms as he chews and swallows as quickly as possible, instinctively attempting to reject the substance. He forces it down. It leaves a lingering oily, thick feeling throughout his mouth. It won’t go away no matter how many times he attempts to spit it out.

He’s startled when Will snorts, slumping forward into Mike’s chest, getting blood and puss all over the skin there, “I didn’t mean eat it—” he gags, “—that was—that was fucked up.”

“Shut up. I panicked.”

“Mmhmph.”

Mike holds Will’s head gently, guiding it into his lap with as much care as possible. The older boy sighs with relief. This entire day has taken such a toll on him, Mike doesn’t even know how he’s still fucking alive. Again—probably some Vecna-related bullshit. Mike wouldn’t put it past the psychopath to keep Will’s body alive through all of this just for the sole purpose to fuck with him more.

It doesn’t surprise him when Will’s eyelids slip shut and he falls into what Mike assumes is a state of unconsciousness.

He sits there, watching Will’s face, fighting down the waves of nausea that plague him. His mouth still tastes of whatever vile shit was infecting Will, his body is finally coming down a bit from the adrenaline that had been keeping him going since he closed the first cuff around Will’s ankle. He swallows, trying to be strong for the severely wounded boy he now has to look after. He feels about for the walkie.

“Good to go guys—it’s—it’s done.”

There’s the crackle of static, a gruff affirmative from what sounds like Steve. Mike swears he hears Dustin’s voice in the background calling out a far too cheery, “kill Vecna, ho!”, reminiscent of the stupid chant they’d used while planning this entire fucked up mission. He can’t believe it’s been less than twenty four hours since they’d all yelled those words together, the whole party—sans Max—alive and safe and right within his grasp.

Mike doesn’t know how long he sits and watches Will, caressing his face with his fingertips, letting his thumb slide beneath the pulpy wound of his eyesocket. It still weeps blood—the pace far slower than before—but enough that it makes Mike concerned for the level of blood loss Will has been subjected to today.

He chews on the inside of his cheek, deciding that fuck it Will isn’t even conscious anyway. He can allow himself some small comfort. He shifts himself slowly across the floor, shuffling slowly so as not to jostle Will too badly. He manages to situate them against the wall near where the bag has ended up, across from the door, slightly behind the bed now.

He uses his shaking arms—so tired from everything he’s experienced in the last four or five hours—to drag Will closer to his chest. He extends his legs—bracketing them on either side of the shorter boy—slumping himself slightly to cradle Will close against himself, his back pressed into Mike’s torso. He nuzzles his face into the top of Will’s head, not giving a fuck about the amount of shit thats matted in there after everything.

He inhales deeply, pretending the smell of vomit and blood doesn’t suffocate him, pretending all he can smell is Will’s generic shampoo and Joyce’s stale cigarettes. Maybe a hint of some acrylic paint. He imagines them sitting in this position in a very different situation.

They’re ten years older, in Mike’s mind, curled up on their sofa. Their sofa. Because whenever Mike imagines the future, everything is shared—theirs, together. Will is pressed into his chest, dozing, while he reads aloud from a well loved copy of Lord of the Rings. They’d woken up in one another's arms, and found themselves that way again by the end of the day. After a full day of work and being apart, they’ve come back together like the tide being drawn by the pull of the moon—always finding their way back to one another, always coming right back home.

Mike closes his eyes, and lets himself pretend.

At some point he must have dozed off, if only briefly. The angle of the light pouring in from outside hasn’t changed, so it can’t have been more than a few minutes. Clearly he’s fucking exhausted, even if he hasn’t physically been through as much as Will.

Which reminds him why he’d woken in the first place.

Will is whimpering against his chest, his head rolling gently from side to side, his heavy limbs trying and failing to curl in on themselves. His eyelids flutter. Small puffs of air, quick and shallow, barely pushing between his lips. Mike sits himself up a little, gently lowering Will until his head is once again in the younger boy’s lap. He lets his hands rest on either side of Will’s head, gently trying to keep him as still as possible.

“Hey, hey Will, you’re okay—hey.” His voice is soft, his head bowed so close to Will’s that their noses almost touch.

Will whines once more, halfheartedly. His movements begin to slow, like he’s wriggling through custard, his wounds still dribble blood. Mike watches as, finally, Will’s movements come to an eerie stillness. His eyelids stop fluttering, the grimace on his face dissipating. His chest stops rising and falling.

Mike’s heart stops.

“Will—shit—fuck. Will, hey. Hey c’mon,” Mike’s voice starts to climb into a whine, like when they were kids and Will pretended to ignore him after Mike had said something silly, “Will, this isn’t—this isn’t funny. Will, seriously.”

The boy in his lap continues to play the role of a dead man.

Mike feels himself begin to spiral. He should have expected this. Will’s body was literally shutting down on itself even before the Mindflayer was burnt out of him. A sickening thought crosses Mike’s mind—he’d already thought that Will had looked like a corpse when Vecna had been puppeting him. What if this entire time—

Mike stops that train of thought there. He refuses to think like that. He refuses to believe that.

“Will, please—” the word almost gets stuck in his throat as he begs.

He traces his thumb over Will’s eyebrow, his jaw, flattening his hand down to cup his cheek. His hands are coated in Will’s blood but he doesn’t care. He bows his head further, planting a kiss on Will’s forehead, fear be damned. Tears sting his eyes and he can feel the telltale burn of sorrow in the back of his throat.

“Will, please, wake up. You—you have to,” his voice is already choking with tears, but he has to get this out, he has to say it. He’s wasted far too much time—four years, five, six, seven, so long he doesn’t even know anymore—forcing his feelings down, ignoring them, telling himself the way he feels about Will is no different to how he feels for Lucas, or Dustin. “You have to wake up because I can’t—I can’t fucking do this without you,” a broken, sobbing laugh, though it holds no happiness.

He shuts his eyes tightly, pressing his forehead against Will’s, nosing at his hair.

“If you’re… if you’re gone then—then so am I. I—God Will I don’t think you—no. I know you don’t know. Because I never told you. Because I’m a fucking coward. Because I’ve spent eleven years loving you and not once have I been able to just say the fucking words. If you’re—if you’re really go—” he can’t bring himself to say it, his body rejecting the thought more violently than it had rejected eating the eyeball, “If I’ve missed the chance to fucking say it I’ll never forgive myself, Will.”

A bubble of snot pops in his nostril, his cheeks are absolutely drenched. The sweat, blood, and other fluids that have dried on his skin are making him feel claustrophobic. He refuses to open his eyes, refuses to look at Will’s—at Will. His entire body trembles and heaves. His head already aches from the pressure of his sobbing.

The room is too silent, quiet in all the wrong ways. It’s the kind of quiet that means absolutely nothing good. The entire world has stopped just to watch him fall apart over the boy in his lap. His heartbeat is clawing its way up his throat. Will’s skin is clammy, growing cold.

A cold rush floods through him. His ears ring. His heart vacuums inwards and starts to beat far too fast—too heavy—each thud bruising his ribs.

No, no, no, no—

“It’s—fuck, God, Will, I’m obsessed with you. I wake up every morning and the first thought that crosses my mind is your name, it’s the first instinct my body has. Not to open my eyes. Not even to fucking breathe. All of it, everything, it all comes after you.” He heaves another choking, half laugh-half sob, “not to—to be self referential but—that first day on the swingset? I wasn’t—I wasn’t lying when I said it was the best thing I’ve ever done. Choosing to be your friend. Asking you—God,” another broken laugh, “it’s still the best thing I’ve ever done, to this fucking day. “

A shudder runs down his spine, he feels dizzy and breathless. He swallows thickly, his throat clicking, and sighs into Will’s hair. It’s like hacking up a lung, the truth violently ripping itself from his chest where it’s been building for years, jammed up behind his ribs like a fist he’s refused to unclench.

Mike presses his forehead further down against Will’s, trying to share his breath, his warmth, anything he can, “you’re not allowed to leave me, Will. Not you.” Tears are spilling into Will’s hair now, Mike can feel the dampness, “I should’ve—” his voice hitches, “—should’ve told you earlier, should have swallowed my fucking stupidity and—and just told you. God, Will—I should’ve just fucking told you.

“I should’ve told you that night you disappeared, before you left my house on that fucking bike. I should have told you when you came back, when you smiled at me from that awful hospital bed, when you looked at me like you weren’t sure if I was even real. I should’ve told you before the Mindflayer that first time, I should have told you after your Mom got him out. I should’ve told you before you moved to Lenora. I should’ve told you in that stupid fucking pizza van, consequences be damned. I should have told you a thousand times. Every time I looked at you and I felt it, I should have told you.”

He blindly reaches a hand out towards Will’s, encircling the scabby, blood covered wrist. “You told me I was the Heart but you were wrong, It’s you, Will, you’re the Heart. You’re my Heart.” He pulls the hand up desperately towards his chest, over his heart, as if he can somehow make Will’s beat the same way via osmosis.

“You feel that?” His voice is deseperate, pleading, “it’s for you, Will. It’s always been for you.”

His breath is coming harder now, ragged and uneven. Every inhale makes his ribs feel like they’re cracking. The words he’s been burying for years are finally clawing their way free.

“I was so scared,” Mike whispers, “scared of losing you. Scared of everything that was happening to us. Scared of what my feelings meant. Scared of everything except for you. You’re the only thing that’s ever made any fucking sense to me, Will.”

His hand begins to grow numb with how tightly he’s holding the other boy’s hand in his.

“And somehow you’ve never seen yourself, not how I see you,” his voice is trembling worse and worse with each syllable he speaks, “you—you keep thinking that you’re nothing. That no one wants you. That you’re a mistake. You listen to all those awful words that have been spit at you, but you never listen to me.” He’s barely aware of anything anymore, just the feeling of Will’s hand in his own, Will’s forehead under his. “I’ve always seen you, Will. I see you. Every goddamn version of you,” his breath stutters, “and I’ve loved every single one.”

The word hangs in the air like a wound. Loved. He’s finally said it.

Mike lets out a broken laugh, shaking and wet, “and I’m too late. I can finally say the fucking words and it’s too late. Of course it is! Mike Wheeler’s impeccable timing strikes again.” His shoulders shake violently, “you can’t even hear me say it.”

He brings Will’s hand up, lifting his head to press a shaking kiss to his pale knuckles.

“You’re my best friend,” his voice is barely a whisper now, “but it’s also more than that. It’s always been more than that, Will. You’re—you’re my home. You’re the one place I’ve always felt safe.”

His sobs are coming hard now, ripping from his throat with no rhythm, no dignity. His back aches from how he’s hunched over Will, but he refuses to move. He feels like he’s been cracked open, each rib pried apart, like someone is dissecting him.

“You can’t leave me, Will.” His voice is muffled against Will’s fingers, hopeless, “I don’t—I don’t know how to be in this world without you, do you understand? I don’t know who I am without you. I don’t want to know.”

He slowly lowers Will’s hand once more, finally opening his eyes to look down at his face. He lets his fingers softly brush the brown hair from his forehead.

“And—and I have to—tell you that I’m.” His voice catches in his throat, “I’m sorry. For—for everything. For every time I made you feel like you weren’t enough. Made you feel that I didn’t care about you—that other people were more important than you. The truth is, you’ve always been too much. Too good, too brave, too… everything. It’s me who has never been enough. I don’t deserve you.”

The sob that wracks his body now is so violent that he almost folds in half.

“I love you,” Mike finally lets the words rip out of him with devastating force, “I love you, Will. I don’t care if you can’t hear me anymore I need to fucking say it. To stop being such a coward. I love you. Not as a friend. Not just some stupid childhood puppy crush like when we were five on those swings. No. I—I love you like—like I’ve been drowning my whole life and you’re the first breath I’ve ever taken. I love you like it’s the only thing keeping me alive.”

He feels so fragile that he could shatter at any moment, he reaches his hand back to Will’s, tangling their fingers together, “and I’m too fucking late to do anything about it.”

A flicker. Barely there. Will’s fingers twitch weakly against his own.

Mike freezes, his throat spasming.

“Fuck, God, Will,” he’s terrified to hope, “Can you—? Will, are you—?”

He sees the way Will’s chest stutters on a breath. It’s shallow, but it’s undeniably there.

Mike’s heart free falls, “Oh—oh my God, Will—fuck, oh, I thought—I thought you were—”

Will’s eyelid barely cracks open, that one green eye unfocused but searching. It lands on Mike. There’s a few moments before recognition kicks in. A puff of air slides between his lips and Mike shushes him, “no, fuck, Will—shh. You don’t need to talk, shit don’t talk. God I thought you—I thought you died.”

His sobbing is raw with relief as he pulls his head back to wipe his face, smearing blood and puss and snot and tears everywhere. He doesn’t care. Will is alive.

“Did you—did you hear—?”

Will’s head moves ever so slightly, the barest of nods, making him wince with the effort. Mike tells him to stop, cupping his jaw with his hand, holding his face still.

“I love you, William Byers. I love you, I love you, I love you.”

The ghost of a smile crossing Will’s lips spurs Mike’s courage.

Consequences be damned.

He presses his face forward, his lips catching against Will’s. It’s soft, it’s quick. The angle is awful—upside down kisses suck. Yet, it’s perfect. Will makes a muffled noise against Mike’s mouth. Then a second, more disgruntled sound as he pulls away.

“I’m not—I’m not going anywhere Will. Never again.”

Mike adjusts them, lifting Will’s head slightly so that he can move himself around, his thighs parallel with Will’s shoulders. He gently lowers his head back to his thigh, keeping his hands cradled on either cheek, like he’s holding the entire world between his palms.

He supposes he is.

He bends down, pressing a soft kiss to the eyebrow above Will’s pulpy eye socket, to the temple he’d smashed in all those days ago, to his cheekbone. He sighs, his heart thudding a rhythmic WillWillWillWill over and over. Will’s eye is half lidded and glassy with pain when Mike pulls away, and yet he still strains towards the younger boy.

It’s not much, but it’s undeniable that Will is attempting to lift himself up towards Mike, despite having just fucking died. Almost died. Mike can feel the effort, his whole body is straining and trembling beneath Mike’s fingers, as he tries to make his limbs obey his heart. He grins stupidly down at the injured boy, that gentle warmth he’s come to associate with his love for Will blossoming from deep in his gut. It threads itself slowly throughout his entire being, winding itself around each and every one of his cells until his whole body is a tingling, jittery mess.

Mike leans down again, meeting him halfway. He’s terrified to hurt him, but the fear that he won’t get another chance to do this, to kiss him, wins out.

Their lips slot together again.

It’s gentle at first—a barely there brush—but the moment Mike feels the coolness of Will’s mouth against his own, everything begins to unwind. The tension, the fear, the discomfort and pain. All of it. It’s just them. Just Mike and Will.

Will is alive. Alive and kissing him. After everything they’ve been through together—not just today, but in the eleven years they’ve known one another.

Mike tilts his face ever so slightly, feeling the way Will’s blood makes their lips slide against each other. The kiss deepens by a fraction, messy and trembling. Mike can taste salt and blood and fear, but underneath it all is just… Will. Will, warm and soft and real and alive. Will, with his shaking gasps at each small movement. Will, his hands scrabbling uselessly at Mike’s arms, attempting to cling on to him with whatever strength he has left.

Mike’s hand slowly finds its way to the back of Will’s neck, fingers shaking so badly he can barely keep them steady enough to do so. He draws Will up towards him just so—not roughly, but enough to ease some of the strain on the boy as he tries to press closer to Mike. Just enough to say I’m here, I’m here, I’m here, over and over without words.

Will makes a small noise—almost lost to the sound of bloodied lips sliding over one another. It’s half whimper, half desperate exhale. It nearly undoes Mike right there on the trailer floor. He presses his face in closer to Will’s, nose bumping his cheek, their breath mixing. Will’s hand has finally found purchase against Mike’s side—fingers weakly digging into the flesh over his ribs, like he’s afraid Mike will disappear if he lets go.

Mike wonders if Vecna had made that happen in Will’s mind over the last few months. Giving him this and then taking it all away. Mike thinks that would have sent him over the edge. He feels sick at the thought.

He puts it in the later pile along with everything else that isn’t kissing Will senseless.

The world narrows to heat and trembling lips and the sharp, unbearable knowledge that Mike could have gone his whole life without knowing how Will’s lips felt, how he tasted. That he almost never got this at all.

Mike kisses him again and again—slower this time, trying to memorize every second, every taste and smell, each uneven inhale and tiny shiver, every noise he can draw from the older boy. He feels the way Will melts into the touch, pain and relief and want all tangled together.

Mike pulls away for a moment to breathe and Will tries to chase him, wincing in pain. Mike watches his own thumb trace through the blood beneath Will’s empty eye socket. His heart is slamming against his ribs. His breath catches when he sees Will’s tongue dart out to wet blood soaked lips. He dives back in.

It’s not as soft and easy this time. This kiss is more trembling, more messy. It’s desperation and fear and relief. It’s an I love you without words. Mike and Will are both shaking, both clinging to the last solid thing left in the world—each other. Will’s breath hitches against Mike’s mouth, he feels how Will shifts again, attempting to get himself closer despite the pain he must be currently riddled with. Something inside of him finally snaps, in the best and worst way possible.

His fingers sink into the hair at the base of Will’s neck, his other hand softening to cup Will’s cheek, fingers brushing against the skin—frantic but gentle—being careful to avoid the wound. His mind is filled with nothing but a repeating, desperate, don’t let him go, don’t let him go. Never let him go again.

Will’s lips are warm and quivering, and Mike kisses him harder. Not rough, never rough. Just… full. Full of every unsaid word, every look, every charged touch. Full of everything that he is, pouring it all into Will, letting it spill between them.

Will makes a broken, keening noise that punches the air from Mike’s lungs. His breath shudders. His fingers dig—softly but firmly—further into Will’s hair. Mike lets himself feel it, all of it, not just the physical sensations but everything—how much he loves this boy, how long he’s loved this boy. How empty the world would feel without him.

Will’s hand shifts, weak but determined, around his torso and up his chest to his neck. The touch is barely there but it sends a heat through Mike. Will is choosing him. Will is kissing him like he’s afraid it will all be ripped away from him soon.

Mike kisses back with the same fear burning through his veins.

Their foreheads bump, and Mike inhales another soft, desperate sound from Will’s lips, deepening the kiss. He needs Will to know—to feel—just how much he matters to Mike, how much his existence means.

It’s slow, desperate, lingering. Mike is certain they’re both crying, based on the warm wetness he feels on his own cheeks, on Will’s. He feels so alive that it makes him dizzy.

He kisses him like the world is ending.

He kisses him like he’s finally found the truth he’s been running from all these years.

Mike finally, agonizingly, draws himself back from Will. They’re both shaking, Will’s eye half lidded and fluttering.

“Hey, hey—stay—stay with me. Please.” His breath catches in his throat again, fear sinking its sharpened teeth into his gut, “I’m not losing you again, Will. I’m not. Stay with me now.”

Will’s body presses ever so slightly closer to his. Mike wouldn’t have felt it if he hadn’t already been so in tune with every small movement the other boy made. If they hadn’t been so closely pressed together. He lowers Will’s head from his hands back to his thigh, his hands fluttering about uselessly.

He tries to breathe deeply though his nose to keep himself calm. No way was Will going to die after that. Mike won’t let him. He needs Will. He needs a long life with Will by his side, filled with kisses—lazy, desperate, sleepy, angry, all of it.

He needs to know how it feels to sleep with him held in his arms, how it feels to soothe the boy with the sweet nothings that he’d never let himself say before. He needs to know what it will be like to live with him, to wake up by his side, to make him his awful sugarless black coffee and then kiss the taste of it from his half asleep mouth. He needs to know what it will feel like to grow old with him, to live a life with him—to love him freely, without fear.

Mike settles one hand against Will’s sternum, making sure he can feel the shallow breaths, the barely there expansion and deflation of his lungs. His other hand finds the walkie once more, his fingers so slick with blood and shaking with fear that he can’t get the button pressed down on his first or second try.

It finally clicks on the third, and his voice is thick and desperate, as he speaks, “code red—co-code red. We need—we need help here. Someone, please, anyone. It’s—Will he’s—we need help.”

The walkie stays silent.

Will doesn’t wake up again.

—☉—

It’s thirty minutes before Mike hears anything other than his own ragged breaths.

The dirt outside crunches beneath tire tread. Mike doesn’t know who’s arrived—doesn’t really care—just hopes it’s someone coming to help. He’s been sitting here, bent over Will, whispering to him. His hand hasn’t left the other boy's sternum the entire time, refusing to let even a moment pass without being able to feel the fickle heartbeat, the shallow breaths.

Will is alive, even if he’s not conscious, and Mike refuses to lose the proof he has of that fact.

Mike has manoeuvred them yet again. His knees are drawn up, Will cradled between them. His head rests heavy against Mike’s chest. Mike’s forehead presses into the crown. His head aches, his throat is raw, he’s almost sicked up twice now from sobbing too hard. There’s a deep, festering pit of ache in his chest.

He hears footsteps coming up the wooden stairs, the scrape of the door opening. Then nothing. Mike raises his head slowly—pulling Will’s body closer to himself—holding on tighter as if whoever has just shown up might take him away. He blinks his eyes blearily.

It’s Lucas.

The boy stands in the doorway, one hand still on the doorhandle, expression unreadable. He just stares. Mike can only imagine how things must look right now. Himself curled around Will, both of them covered in sweat and blood and black watery puss, stripped down to their underwear. Will with a gaping, pulpy hole where his eye should be. Their vomit and piss covered clothes piled up in the corner. The stained no-longer-white sheets of the bed.

“Lucas, help.” His already barely there voice breaks on the word help, another sob is violently ripped from his throat.

His heart breaks in his chest as he watches Lucas’ face harden. He turns away, walking back out the door. For a brief, awful moment, Mike thinks he’s leaving Will to die.

Until he hears the sound of hiccoughing retches as Lucas throws up onto the grass.

He finally re-enters the trailer, stumbling on shaking legs, his knees buckling. Mike watches as he wipes his mouth with the back of his hand. Was it the smell that set off his gag reflex? Was it the sight of the two boys—almost naked—one clinging to the other?

“Is—is he—Mike.” Lucas’ voice is pleading as he drops to his knees beside the bloodied boys.

Mike is suddenly reminded of words that Dustin had spoken—hushed—in the corridor of the hospital all those months ago. Max had died in Lucas’ arms. Lucas had watched her limbs snap, had watched her eyes bleed, had held her just as Mike now held Will, had begged her to stay, and she’d died in his fucking arms.

Mike can’t bring himself to speak, only shake his head.

He reacts on instinct as Lucas reaches out his hands slowly towards them, pulling Will closer to himself, turning his body to the side to shield him. Lucas makes a noise in his throat, half annoyed, half broken.

“I’m not going to hurt him Mike! I just—I just want to help.”

They make eye contact over Will’s head. Lucas’ eyes are shining with tears. God, seeing Will like this is probably fucking him up just as much as it’s fucking Mike up, and here’s Mike being an absolute douchebag. He furrows his brow, looks down at the top of Will’s head, looks back up at Lucas.

He raises a hand and swipes aggressively at his cheeks, trying to get rid of the tears that still leak from his eyes. He gives Will’s torso one gentle squeeze, preparing to move and give Lucas better access. Mike looks back to Will, whose head lolls to the side briefly. He notes the way the blood around his mouth is smudged and spread, made slightly thinner with spit. He startles, looking back up to Lucas, eyes wild.

There’s no way the blood isn’t all over his mouth and chin as well, smudged just the same.

He attempts to wipe away the evidence with the hand still on his cheek. Lucas gently raises his own hand, resting it against Mike’s forearm, “Mike,” it’s soft, sad. But not disgusted. Not angry. “It’s okay.”

Mike’s entire body shudders once,—violently—from head to toe. The tears begin to spill down his cheeks with even more fervour.

“You’re okay. It’s okay.” Lucas keeps his voice quiet, steady.

Mike doesn’t know how he does it, how he stays so calm when everything is falling apart so thoroughly.

He finally relents, kissing the top of Will’s head and slowly loosening his grip on the boy. He begins to slump down the wall with exhaustion. He won’t leave Will’s side. He won’t let him go. But he isn’t the only one who cares for Will—he doesn’t have to be the only one to look after him.

Lucas smiles. It doesn’t quite reach his eyes. He helps Mike clean the blood and gore from Will’s skin, from his face. He says they should probably leave the eye socket because he has no idea how to flush it properly and doesn’t want to do more damage than Will and Mike have already done. They redress him in clothes that Joyce had forced Mike to pack before they left, and he finds himself grateful to her now.

Mike didn’t bring himself clothes. Lucas makes him wipe the viscera from his chest and arms before giving him his own jacket.

“Don’t know why I had to clean myself when this thing needs to go in the trash anyway.” His voice is a mumble. He’s trying, okay?

Lucas snorts, “yeah, it’s gross from killing demodogs. Not whatever the fuck happened here.”

Mike stops for a moment, looks at him. He slips his arms into the sleeves of the jacket and goes back to where they’ve propped Will against the wall, sliding one hand behind his back and one beneath his knees.

“A lot happened here.”

“I can tell. Do you need help carrying him?”

Mike is about to say no, hoisting Will up in a swift movement, but his knees immediately buckle. He grimaces. Lucas reaches out his arms, coaxing Mike to pass Will to him.

Mike frowns.

Lucas rolls his eyes, “oh my God, you can hold his hand or something. I’ll give him back when we get to the car.”

Mike doesn’t stop frowning, but he helps to situate Will into Lucas’ waiting arms.

He holds Will’s hand.

For the second time in less than a week, Mike finds himself coming in and out of awareness—the world jerking around him—everything happening all at once, and not at all. Flashes of moments barely registering in his mind. They make it to the car. Lucas tells him to get in. He obeys. Lucas deposits Will in his lap. Mike cards his fingers through Will’s hair, kisses his forehead. Lifts him closer to himself and nuzzles his cheek.

“Jesus, what happened?”

Mike startles when a woman’s voice speaks from the front seat. He makes eye contact with Vickie through the rearview mirror. He’d forgotten Lucas had been with her—forgotten that someone had to have driven Lucas here.

“Hey, hey—it’s fine Mike. It’s—” Lucas looks to Vickie helplessly. She nods at him, “it’s all good, she’s—she is too.”

Mike looks rapidly between both of them. God what the fuck had happened while he and Will were facing their own personal Hell. He blinks at her.

“Uh. Robin.” She fidgets with the steering wheel as Lucas climbs into the passenger seat, “so… what happened?” She repeats herself, eyes flicking to Will in Mike's lap, then back up to his face. She starts the car.

He blinks at her again. Twice. Thrice. He says nothing. She sighs and focuses on driving.

She and Lucas speak back and forth in hushed tones, occasionally glancing into the backseat. From what they say to one another, Mike gathers that Vecna has been defeated somehow. He doesn’t really care enough to listen after he hears that everyone is still alive. Dustin and Jonathan were both apparently injured, and Hopper had almost died protecting El, but they were all alive.

All of his focus is on Will’s face. One hand is tangled in brown hair, one hand pressed firmly against his sternum—making sure he can still feel that faint thump thump thump of Will’s heart.

He doesn’t speak the entire ride.

He’s jolted back to reality when the car door is opened. They’re at the hospital. Mike didn’t even register they’d properly left the trailer yet.

Lucas gives him a calculated look, and lifts Will from his lap. Mike trails behind them listlessly, Vickie at his side. He supposes the whole final battle must have somehow been less devastating than he would have expected considering the hospital is still, well, operational.

Mike fades in and out of cognizance, as Will is assessed and admitted. There’s a flurry of doctors and nurses and people coming and going. He sits in the waiting room staring at the wall whilst Will is taken into surgery. They’d asked what had happened, where the eyeball had ended up.

Mike had shrugged.

Will gets out of surgery at some point after the sun has started to dip. He’s still unconscious and there’s gauze over the eye wound. His shoulder is looking more… correctly placed. His arm is in a sling. He’s clean, he’s safe, he’s in a bed and hooked up to so many monitors but—God—Mike can’t even spare a moment to hate it because Will is alive. He can hear the steady beeping of the heart monitor reminding him of this every second, and he’s so fucking grateful.

He doesn’t leave Will’s side for almost the entire night, not as people filter in and out of the small room, not when he’s directly spoken to, not when he’s asked to leave. Joyce somehow gets the doctors to let him stay well past visiting hours.

At some point Nancy comes in with clothes for him to change into. He just stares at them until she grips his hand in her own and draws him along to the bathroom.

“I’ll wait out here. Let me know if you need—anything. Okay?” her words come out stilted. He nods.

She sighs and shoos him through the doorway, pulling the door shut behind him. He’s finally alone. Entirely alone. For the first time since he’d found Will on the floor of his bedroom. He lets himself stand in the silence—the emptiness—for a few moments.

Everything feels wrong. The room feels distorted. It’s both too large and too small all at once. Panic begins to surge in his gut, crawling up into his lungs, his throat. His heart thuds. His vision pulses at the edges. He stands there in the small hospital bathroom, feeling hollowed out.

He walks on shaking legs towards the sink. He lets his hands come to rest on either side of the porcelain, gripping so tight his fingers go white and numb. He feels like he’s going to be sick again. Slowly, painfully, he forces himself to meet his own eyes in the mirror.

You did this to him. You put him here. You couldn’t save him, couldn’t protect him.

His features are hard where they reflect back at him from the mirror's surface. Angry. Bitter.

Useless. Fucking useless.

He grunts. He smacks the side of the sink with one hand so hard his palm tingles. The thoughts hit him right in the chest, heavy like a stone. They also feel… expected. A conclusion that had been waiting just outside his reach until this moment. His chest tightens painfully. He doesn’t move at all, just continues to stare himself down.

You’re the problem. You’re always the problem. You hurt everyone, not just Will. You can’t do anything right. Can’t even be wrong right.

The room feels like a pressure cooker, slowly crushing him under an unbearable weight. He can’t tell if the room is collapsing, or if he’s collapsing in on himself. Why should Will suffer when he doesn’t?

If anyone deserves punishment, it’s Mike.

A pulse of shame hits him so hard that he physically sways with it. He’s trying to breathe but the air in the room suddenly feels thick like syrup. The room around him is shrinking, the walls pressing in on him inch by inch. His vision is beginning to blur.

His world falls apart. His chest begins to collapse, pressure crushing inwards and outwards all at once. He tries to force in a breath, but his lungs refuse. His every inhale breaks halfway, hitching sharp and fast. He feels like he’s going to pass out. Like he’s going to explode.

He’s not okay. He’s not even close to okay. He’s only vaguely aware of this fact. He should call for Nancy. The words stick in his throat. He can’t do anything but focus on the frantic, ragged pulls of air that won’t come in right.

He lifts one hand and digs the heel of his palm into his eye socket, trying to ground himself. He’s shaking so hard his fucking teeth are clicking together. His breaths keep catching in shallow, painful bursts.

“I’m sorry,” he gasps. The words tumble out into the empty room. “I’m sorry, I’m sorry—please—I didn’t mean—” his voice breaks off into an ugly sob, ripped from somewhere deep that he’d never let anyone else see. It’s ugly and sharp.

He leans forward, hands returning to the edges of the sink, shaking violently.

He catches a glimpse of himself again in the mirror. Sees his eyes staring back from a clean face. It feels wrong. If Will had to lose an eye, he should too. He’d gouge his own out and give it to Will if he could. He shouldn’t be healthy and whole while Will has lost something so vital. His lip wobbles.

The thought spurs him on. His body moves on autopilot. He doesn’t know why he does it—not really—he just knows that it makes sense.

One deep breath.

Two.

He slams his head against the edge of the sink. Once. Pain blooms through his skull, radiating from his forehead back. It sinks in behind his eyes. Twice. He feels the sickening crack more than he hears it. Three, four, five times. Each is harder than the last.

He isn’t aware that Nancy has thrown the door wide open until her arms are around his middle, pulling him backwards. Warm blood trickles down his face, some getting in his eyes. The room spins, he feels like he’s going to throw up.

He stumbles, sinking to the ground. Nancy goes down with him, still holding him tightly.

He breaks cleanly down the middle at that. The kind of break that’s devastating, but makes no noise at all. He collapses fully into her, shaking, crying until all of the air in his lungs is gone. Mike heaves against the fabric of her jacket. She rubs soothing circles against his back. She whispers softly to him. He can’t hear a word she says over his own gasps, but he feels her words all the same. Something inside of Mike snaps again, sharper this time, like a bone re-breaking under a strain it never properly healed from.

His lungs catch, stutter, refuse to work. They tighten so violently it causes his whole body to seize up.

Mike jerks backward suddenly—out of Nancy’s arms—like he’s been shocked. He digs his nails into the tile to steady himself, but the world is already tilting—hard, fast, merciless. The edges of his vision blur, tunnel, pulse in and out. A shredding, metallic taste floods his mouth

His chest convulses. His throat closes so tight the air won’t go in, won’t go out. He sucks in a thin, broken gasp that snags on something sharp inside of him. Another. Then another. His ribs burn like they’re splitting apart, cracking open to reveal everything ugly and useless inside of him.

Can't breathe, can't breathe, can't breathe.

His heartbeat pounds in his ears, blood thumping so fast the entire world around him grows muffled. It's like his head is being held under water.

Nancy is trying to speak to him but he can't hear her voice. He can tell that she's scared, though. Really scared.

He shakes his head frantically, eyes wide and unfocused, breath shattering in sharp, useless bursts. “I—I can’t—” His voice curls inward, strangled by panic. “I c-can’t—Nance, I can’t—”

Nancy is instantly in front of him again, hands hover­ing near his shoulders, not touching yet - waiting for permission he can’t give. His body is pulled taut like a wire stretched to the breaking point.

She tries to speak again, to tell him something. Probably to fucking breathe, Mike. Maybe something kinder. She's trying to tilt his head to look up at her and—oh. Look at me. She's telling him to look at her.

He tries. God, he tries. But the moment he lifts his gaze the world swims grotesquely, the floor seems to tilt, and all he sees behind his eyelids is Will - bleeding out in his arms, barely breathing at all, poised right on the brink of death.

I let him get hurt. I let him get hurt. I helped to fucking hurt him.

It beats through his head like a mantra.

He folds forward, arms wrapping around his stomach, curling in on himself as if trying to physically hold in the panic contorting inside him. His hands tremble uncontrollably. His fingers go numb, then burn, then go numb again.

“Mike,” Nancy says, and he actually hears it this time. Her hands close around his upper arms before he can flee from her touch.

He flinches anyway. He feels disgusting, wrong—like a stain she shouldn’t risk smearing onto herself.

“I’m—” he gasps, chest spasming, “—’m so sorry—Nancy—God, I’m—I'm—”

He can’t find the rest. The words dissolve into a choked wheeze. Tears fall hot and constant, blurring Nancy’s worried face.

She squeezes his arms, anchoring him. “Breathe with me,” she orders softly, voice a little clearer now. “You hear me, Mike? Right here. I’m right here.”

He tries. He really does. He drags in a harsh inhale that scrapes raw down his throat. The air feels too thin, too sharp, like his lungs have shrunk to the size of peanuts.

A sob cracks through him—loud, broken, ugly.

His heartbeat trips violently. His vision whites out. He presses his forehead to the cold tile to ground himself, but even that feels like it’s slipping through his fingers. He can feel the wet slip of his blood.

“I can’t—Nancy—I can’t do this—” he stammers, panic splitting through each syllable. “I can’t see him like that again—I can’t-—if he doesn’t… if he doesn’t wake up, I—” His breath fractures, splintering into hitched, tiny gasps. “I need him—I need him so much—it’s pathetic—I’m pathetic—”

Nancy shakes her head fiercely, cupping his cheeks despite his attempts to pull away. “You’re not pathetic,” she says, voice breaking. “You love him. That’s not pathetic. That’s human.”

He recoils like the word love is something burning hot.

But Nancy tightens her grip, grounding him with her stubbornness.

Mike’s breath stutters violently. His panic latches onto the words like barbed wire. She can’t know the truth. Of course he loves Will—he loves all of his friends. He loves his parents, and Holly. He loves her. That must be what she means. It has to be what she means.

He squeezes his eyes shut. He doesn’t deserve Nancy's kindness.

A vicious, poisonous thought erupts within him—one he often finds himself thinking when he's alone in his room. One he's thought so many times, over and over, since that day at the quarry.

Everyone would be so much better off without Mike Wheeler.

The moment it forms, Mike’s whole body goes cold. It consumes every inch of his mind.

Everyone would be so much better off without Mike Wheeler.

Nancy must see something shift in his eyes—some dangerous, inward twist—because she almost immediately cups his face harder, thumbs sweeping his damp cheeks, palm pushing his blood soaked hair from his forehead.

“Mike,” she whispers, terrified, “whatever you’re thinking right now—stop. Please.”

Something about the way she says it—the slight tremor in her words—finally makes him crumble. Completely. His shoulders collapse inward, shaking. His whole chest convulses. He can’t stop the sob that rips out of him—an embarrassing, wet, keening sound that doesn’t even feel human.

Nancy pulls him into her arms again—no hesitation this time—and holds on as if she can keep him from dissolving entirely, as if she can keep his unraveling body together through sheer force of will.

He clings to her with desperate fingers, fists tangled in the fabric of her jacket, holding so tight his knuckles ache. His tears and his blood soak her collar, her shoulder, her throat. He can barely see. He can barely breathe. Panic claws at him until his body begins to give out under the force of it.

Nancy strokes the back of his head again and again, whispering nonsense, whispering comfort, whispering love he doesn’t feel he has a right to—but clings to anyway, because it’s the only thing keeping him from being swallowed up by the darkness that festers inside of him.

It takes a long time—minutes stretched thin and trembling—before his lungs finally start to drag air again in ragged, uneven shudders. Not full breaths, but breaths all the same.

When he finally stops shaking so violently, the panic fading into something more exhaustion-heavy, Nancy still doesn’t let go. Not even when he’s limp against her. Not even when her knees must be aching from the hard tile.

The fluorescent lights above them flicker and buzz. The room around them—the whole damn hospital—is glitching. It’s like reality can’t hold itself together any more than Mike can. His fingers are balled so tightly into fists that they’ve gone numb, and he can feel the bite of his nails piercing his skin.

His chest tightens again, a crushing, twisting ache. Mike swears his ribs are about to crack from the inside. He feels like he’s floating through a void and it’s swallowing everything warm inside of him. The air shifts as Nancy settles herself tighter around him. She’s slow, careful, treating him like he’s something fragile. How can she not tell that he’s already fucking broken?

“Mike,” she starts gently.

He shakes his head, once, the motion sharp. It makes his head fucking spin. He’s running entirely on adrenaline by now, and he can tell it’s finally starting to fade. He digs the heels of his palms into his eyes until he sees stars. “Don’t,” he manages to gasp, voice cracking mid-syllable.

The world caves in around him. Nancy holds him close to her chest, arms wrapped around him with a quiet strength that he doesn’t deserve. A sound tears out of him, raw and ugly and uncontrollable.

“I’m here,” she murmurs against his temple, folding herself closely around him, “I’ve got you, Mike. I’ve got you.”

Mike presses his forehead into her shoulder, and everything spills out between them. His heart bleeds all over her denim jacket, her hands. It bleeds a terrible, awful black. His head bleeds a more real, literal red. He’s absolutely getting snot and tears in the ends of her hair right now.

“It’s—it’s my fault, Nancy,” the words scrape his throat raw. “I should’ve—I should’ve done a be—” he hiccoughs, “—better job of protecting him. I was sup-supposed to protect him.”

Nancy’s arms tighten around him, her breath hitches. She doesn’t let it turn into a sob. She won’t, she’s too strong. She’s always been willing to take the weight of the world for him—even when he’s been a little shit towards her.

“Hey, no.” She whispers fiercely into his hair, “Mike, no. You were there for him. That’s what he needed. He didn’t need a shield. He didn’t need some sort of hero. He just needed you, and—and I don’t know what- what happened between the two of you in there but—”

“I kissed him, Nance.” he speaks around a sob. He needed to tell her, he couldn’t just sit here and let her comfort him without her knowing what he was. What he had done. The kind of person she was holding in her arms.

She doesn’t say anything for a moment, just pulls him even closer. She kisses the side of his head. It smarts a little where her lips graze broken skin, already beginning to bruise. He savours the pain.

“Okay.”

“That’s—that’s it? Okay?” He spits, anger and grief climbing their way up his throat.

“Mike,” she sounds… surprisingly fond, “I—I know this probably isn’t what you want to hear but—I mean I’ve kind of always thought that—you two were always different with each other, you know? I did just say that you weren’t pathetic for loving him. And—before you say something stupid—I don’t love you any less. You’re still my shitty little brother.” She pulls back from him, cupping his cheeks between her small hands.

She forces him to meet her eyes. They’re red rimmed and shimmering. She’s also been through hell in the last twenty four hours, and he’s just piling more onto her shoulders. He’s awful. It hurts to look at her, but it makes him feel a little steadier. He can see the love in her eyes, the care.

“Besides, I—again you’re not going to like this—but I think everyone kind of… knows. After your little performance when he cracked his head open. I suppose you both match now,” she frowns at his forehead.

Mike burrows his face back into her shirt and snorts. She’s not wrong. He can feel the blood and snot sticky on his face from her jacket.

“I—suppose so.” His voice is muffled against the denim of her jacket. He’s silent for a moment before he dares to speak again, “I thought I’d lost him, Nance. I don’t—I don’t know what I’d do without him-”

She hushes him again, running a soothing hand over the curls at the back of his head, “hey, you don’t have to think about that right now, Mike,” she speaks softly, “you’re not going to have to know. Not right now, not today, hopefully not for a long time. Right now you just need to breathe.”

They continue to sit, tangled together, until Mike finally calms down. Nancy gives it a few more minutes before she makes him stand, ushers him towards the shower.

“Now, let’s get you cleaned up. Then we’ll sort… that out.” She motions vaguely at his head. He feels like a fucking idiot.

She turns on the shower. He stands, staring at the water. He doesn’t move.

She sighs, telling him to take off Lucas’ jacket. He does. He still doesn’t enter the shower. She frowns and pushes him under the water flow, tells him to take off the blood soaked underwear and turn around. He does. She makes him sit on the little chair which folds down from the wall. He does. She washes his hair for him. It stings his split skin but he says nothing. She helps to soap his upper body, makes him wash his lower half himself.

Afterwards, she helps towel him off. Helps to clothe him. He should feel embarrassed, being showered and clothed by his big sister like he’s three years old again. He doesn’t. He doesn’t feel anything at all. Until he does.

Tears brim in his eyes once more and she pulls him close. She’s a good head shorter than him, but he folds into her anyway, letting her rest her head atop his.

She presses her cheek into his hair. Her voice is hoarse.

“Mike… you’re not alone. I swear to god, you’re not alone in this.”

A fragile heartbeat passes as she waits for him to respond. He doesn't.

“You're not alone. Not tonight, not ever. I've got you, okay?”

It’s only as his sobs begin to taper off into quiet sniffles, that Mike realizes Nancy is crying too. Her tears are warm against his hair. She’s hurting for him, hurting with him.

For the first time since he’d locked those cuffs around Will, he doesn’t feel completely terrified.

Mike lets himself believe her. He's not alone.

—☉—

Mike awakens the next morning in the same position he’d fallen asleep the night prior—after a surprisingly grumpy nurse had stitched his head up—hunched over, half in one of the uncomfortable hospital chairs, half on Will’s bed. He blinks as his eyes adjust to the sunlight. There are fingers in his hair, scratching at his scalp. Voices speak in hushed tones around him.

“Wha—?” He unfolds himself, sitting upright. He’d slept on Will’s hand most of the night. He notes the shine of drool drying on his skin.

He wipes at his own face, and sure enough there’s drool there too. He glances toward Will. He’s still asleep. Somehow in less than twenty four hours he’s already looking better. Mike supposes it makes sense, what with Vecna no longer possessing him and him receiving proper medical attention.

“Hey there, Sleeping Beauty!” Robin stands across the room, grinning at him. Her hand is wound tightly with Vickie’s.

Huh. So she was telling the truth.

The hand that had been scratching his scalp slides out of his hair and down his neck, coming to rest between his shoulder blades. He tilts his head to find it connected to El, which isn’t surprising. What is surprising, however, is the redheaded girl she sits beside, arms linked together. After everything, he’d forgotten that Max had woken up.

“You snore and you drool, Wheeler. I swear every new thing I learn about you is against my will.”

Mike doesn’t even care that she’s being her usual abrasive self, he’s out of his seat and kneeling in front of her before he can even think to stop himself. His arms twist around her middle and he pulls her against himself. She stiffens for a moment, and Mike is momentarily worried he’s overstepped some unspoken boundary between the two of them. He realizes they’ve never actually… touched before.

He’s about to pull away when he feels her relax against him, her hand falling heavily against his head. Harder than a pat, but not quite a smack. He grins into her shirt, “you’d think you’d be less grouchy after an eighteen month long nap.”

“Hey, I’m never grouchy. You’re lucky your boyfriend almost died last night or I so would have just hit you for that. ”

It’s Mike’s turn to stiffen. He slowly untangles his limbs from around her, sitting back on his heels. “What did you just say?”

“Shit, sorry—too soon to joke about the almost death thing? Sorry—I—kinda—I’ve been making jokes about my own death for the last day I forgot—”

“—no, the—the other. Thing.” His throat clicks.

“Oh—uh—was I not supposed to know about that yet…?”

Mike whips his head around to look at Lucas, who stands at the foot of Will’s bed with Dustin at his side. He raises his hands, a placating gesture, “hey, no man, it wasn’t me! I’d never—not without your permission—”

He whips his head towards El who just frowns at him.

“Oh my God, really? No one told me anything, Mike. I have something called eyes.” She pulls a face, “well. Had.”

Mike’s face feels hot. By being so defensive he’s basically just admitted to a room full of his friends and Steve Harrington that he’s a raging queer. Not only that, but he’s outed Will too for good measure. God why is he such fuck up.

“We’re—we’re not—”

“—no one here is going to care if he is, Mike. They all know about me and Vick. They’re all okay with it too—”

“—we just—kissed—he didn’t—we didn’t even get a chance to talk about it—” he’s starting to panic, his throat closing up, his breath stuttering, “—and—and it was me who kissed him not—he’s not—don’t blame him—”

“Mike!” Max’s hand shoots outward, just missing his chin. It skates across his neck, coming to land on his shoulder, “you need to breathe, oh my God.”

Mike continues to not-breathe.

“Jesus, Wheeler—” Max shifts herself forward, raising her second hand and feeling her way to his other shoulder, like she might shake the air back into him. There’s a surprising edge of worry in her voice, “in through the nose, out through the mouth. It’s not rocket science.”

El’s hand reaches out to touch him too, her hand pressing firmly against his back, steady and warm. “Mike,” it’s soft, “you are safe.”

“And it’s not even a lie for once,” Robin mutters, before wincing as Vickie elbows her in the side. “Well, I’m not wrong! He is safe for once! Vecna is literally dead, El made sure of that! Will’s alive! We’re all alive!” Mike catches the look Steve sends her way and she snaps her mouth shut. Opens it again just as fast, “look all I’m trying to say is—is that El is right okay! You’re safe. And—and you’re safe here too. Everything’s cool. No pitchforks, no torches, no angry mob, just…” her voice trails off and she gestures vaguely towards the room at large, “just us. And everyone here is good with it. Right guys?”

The room fills with the sound of multiple people agreeing at once.

Dustin slowly circles around the edge of the bed like he’s approaching a wild animal, “dude, seriously, you need to chill out or you’re going to pass out. None of us are—are mad or… or think any less of you—honestly I’m surprised this didn’t happen sooner?—I guess with you dating El that sort of complicated things but—”

“This is you being helpful?” Lucas cuts him off with a pointed look.

“I’m trying my best, man, I didn’t plan for this! I never thought they were gonna, like, tell us they were gay, I just assumed one day they’d start holding hands around us again like back in middle school and that would be that! You cannot tell me you thought they’d never get their heads out of their asses and—”

Mike squeezes his eyes shut and tries to ignore Dustin and Lucas arguing. He hears Steve tell Dustin to just be quiet, dude and ignores that too. He focuses instead on the way El’s thumb moves in slow, grounding circles between his shoulder blades. On the heavy weight of Max’s hands on his shoulders. He forces air into his lungs with deep sips—shaky, but more than he was getting a few moments before.

“That’s it,” El whispers, “good.”

When Mike finally opens his eyes, everyone is staring at him with varying degrees of awkward sympathy. Steve has somehow materialized right beside him holding out a paper cup of shitty hospital coffee, giving him an encouraging nod—a little hey, man, emotional breakdowns happen to the best of us!

Mike wipes a hand down his face, reaching for the cup, “sorry,” he croaks out, “I just—I didn’t want you to think any less of—of me or of—of Will… I didn’t want you to think—none of this is his fault, okay?”

Max snorts, leaning back in her chair. “Yeah, because if there’s anything that Will Byers is known for, it’s corrupting the youth of Hawkins.”

“Max,” Lucas, who has come to stand at her side, nudges her.

“What? I’m being supportive!”

Mike sniffs, taking a small sip of the awful coffee —Steve hadn’t added any sugar, and he pulls a face as it burns its way down his throat—breathing deeply to try and calm himself before he feels like he can speak without getting worked up again.

“No, you guys… you don’t understand, okay? He—when we were in the trailer—he—” Mike drags his hand down his face once more, “—he told me that he thought—he thinks—that this, all this, everything that’s happened since 1983… he thinks it’s his fault. That it’s punishment—for—for being—” Mike can’t finish the sentence.

The silence that follows speaks volumes.

“Well that’s bullshit,” Steve snorts.

“Dude, read the room,” Dustin hisses back.

“No, seriously, that’s bullshit. If Vecna was, like, punishing people for liking guys then pretty much everyone in this room sans Henderson, Sinclair, and Rob would have been fucked up and possessed, not just him! No… Vecna’s just a dick. Will is a victim, yeah, but not because he’s gay.”

Once again the room falls into an awkward silence. Mike’s pretty sure Steve just told everyone he likes guys but right now he’s dealing with his own sexuality crisis, so he doesn’t have time to unpack that.

“Moving on from that… rousing speech,” Robin leans forward slightly, eyes kind but sharp, “Mike… what everyone here is trying to say is… none of us are thinking anything bad about you, or Will, or anything like that, okay? That’s—that’s not how we roll. Besides, if they had an issue with it then they probably would have been a lot more grossed out when we almost died yesterday and I kissed Vickie.” She lets her rambling trail off when Steve shakes his head in her direction, a clear not the time.

“I told you last night that I love you no matter what, Mike. I’m certain that extends to everyone in this room.” It's the first time Nancy has spoken, her voice just as fond as the night before.

Mike’s breath hitches again, but it isn’t with panic this time. It’s more like something warm cracking open in his chest. He stares at his hands, twisting them together. “I just—I don’t want to… ruin anything. Or make everything weird. Or—or for you guys to—to hate him—” his voice cracks.

There’s a beat of silence.

“You’re not going to scare us away or lose us, Mike, and you’re not going to lose him either.” Max’s voice, soft and steady.

Dustin pipes up, nodding so hard his curls bounce wildly beneath his cap, “Yeah, man! Will literally woke up, let you kiss him, and then didn’t immediately die again. That’s, like, scientific proof he likes having you around.” He tilts his head thoughtfully, “plus, we’ve all felt the electricity.”

Mike lets out something between a laugh and a choke.

“All this? The freaking out? The apologizing for being human, for having feelings? You don’t have to do that, Mike. Not with us.” Max’s voice is pointed.

“We all love you and Will very much, and it is sweet that you care about each other as much as you do.” El nods.

There’s a rustling noise from the bed.

Mike’s head snaps up as Will shifts, the eyelids on his good eye fluttering. He doesn’t wake up, but his fingers twitch against the bed sheets, as if he’s reaching weakly into the space Mike had previously occupied, searching.

Mike’s whole body softens, he can’t help it, his voice coming out on a gentle breath, “Will…”

He begins to inch towards the bed. Stops. Hesitates. Turns to look back to the party once more —Dustin and El’s hands are entwined, Max is leaning into Lucas’ side, eyes shut.

El nods at him encouragingly. Every single one of them follows suit, except Max who just shoots a sarcastic smile and a thumbs up vaguely in his direction, “not sure if you’re doing what I think you’re doing, but go for it. He’s doing what I think he’s doing, right?”

Lucas shushes her with a soft yes.

Mike sucks in a deep breath and finally sits on the edge of the bed, placing his hand near Will’s.

Will’s fingers find his almost instinctively. Mike’s heart slams against his ribcage. His whole world zeroes in on the warmth of Will’s hand against his own.

El leans her head against Dustin’s shoulder, grinning, “now breathe again, Mike.”

He does.