Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

“Looks good, I think,” Mike says, looking out across the half-barren living room, cream walls and dusty baseboards staring back.

“You think?” Will asks, wiping his brow as he comes to stand next to him.

“Yeah, I mean. The walls are pretty bare. You’ll have to paint us something to hang up there.” He motions to a few different places, already planning. “And we’re gonna need a table at some point. But we have a sofa! And a chair. We might be the richest kids on campus.”

He promptly hops up onto the arm of the sofa, grinning as he turns to face Will. 

Will returns the smile, eyes crinkling as he leans against the recliner chair they picked up off the side of the road, though they’d told Mike’s mom that they found it at a thrift store instead, so she didn’t have a heart attack. “Who says I’m painting the art for the apartment? We can always just buy something.”

“No way. Nothing at Walmart is gonna be half as good as what you make. Besides, you already did all the art in my room. It’s gotta be cohesive. We’re adults now.”

Will raises an eyebrow. “So the living room art needs to match the art in your room, which is basically all D&D stuff. Because we’re adults.”

“And because you’re the best artist in the world,” Mike says with ease, surveying the walls again. “I bet you could make us something really cool.”

He looks back to see Will doing his best to fight off a pleased smile. “I’ll see.”

“Yeah?”

“Well, it’s not gonna be our D&D characters, that’s for sure.”

He scoffs. “Can’t imagine why not.”

“You want Will the Wise staring down at you every time we watch TV?”

Mike leans back, flopping over the side of the sofa and collapsing across the cushions, legs still dangling from the arm. “I want Will the Wise staring down at me every time I bring a girl over. Really set the mood.”

There’s a short, tense pause, and Will gapes, half laughing and half stuttering as he tries to respond. He quiets after a moment, before eventually settling on, “Weirdo.” 

They share a short chuckle before falling into a comfortable silence, both exhausted from a full day of moving. The worry that had been hovering over him for the past couple weeks settles as they fall into their familiar friendship, and he relaxes into the couch, content. He had thought—well, he’d thought a lot of things. It doesn’t matter now. What matters is that everything is okay. 

And everything is okay. Now. 

When the war had ended, the government’s first priority was covering up the mess that had been made. While most of the efforts were spent towards rebuilding the town, there was also the issue of a handful of kids who knew way too much. Mike is pretty sure Owens pulled whatever strings he could manage, but somehow, part of the deal had come out to near-guaranteed admission and scholarship to just about any college in the country, in exchange for their silence.

It was probably the best deal they were gonna get, all things considered. They hadn’t exactly had a lot of time to study for their SATs or work on entrance essays while they were busy fighting demons from another dimension, and you couldn’t really add ‘saving the freaking world’ as an extracurricular on your application.

Though Will was a little wary at first, having always been disinclined towards charity, it hadn’t taken much to convince any of them, and they all began researching potential colleges. Will had focused on schools with good art programs, because it had been his dream for as long as anyone could remember, and Mike had focused on schools Will was interested in, because he didn’t know what else to do. 

It wasn’t like Will was the only reason he’d chosen this school. It had already been on his list, after all, though he hadn’t spent a whole lot of time focused on college decisions the past few years, anyway. Still, the thought of having his best friend by his side certainly helped, and he’d accepted his possibly-bribed admission letter without hesitation. 

It had sounded like the ideal plan. He’d get to escape the trappings of Hawkins, leave his small town life behind and explore his newfound adulthood with the comfort of Will’s company, the two of them leading parallel, successful lives as they took on college together. Going out of state, away from the horrors they’d faced back home, would be good for both of them. A clean slate. A chance to start anew. 

Except.

Except he’d made an assumption. And maybe that was on him, but really. Was it so unreasonable to think that his best friend of thirteen years would want to be his roommate? 

“Oh,” Will had said, wide-eyed and frozen, when Mike brought it up. “I didn’t realize—um. You didn’t say anything.”

“What?”

“Um, rooming together. I just figured, you know, that we’d do random roommates. Meet new people and all, right?”

Mike blinks at him.

“I submitted my form last week,” he continues.

“Oh.”

“Yeah, but, this way, if you get really annoyed with your roommate, you can just come hang out in my room, right?” Will chances a tiny, tight-lipped smile at him. “And vice versa.”

“Right. Makes sense.”

“We’ll still see each other all the time. We’d get so sick of each other if we lived together.”

“Yeah,” Mike says, mouth feeling numb. “Totally.”

So Mike had moved into his stupid dorm with his stupid random roommate, and started his stupid classes in his stupid major that his dad somehow had convinced him wasn’t stupid, and tried to make the most his stupid freshman year.

But once the school year started, Will became little more than a ghost, always running around with different friends and groups. Unlike the general asshole population of Hawkins, the art students on campus seemed to immediately recognize Will for what he was, and were clamoring to be his friend. And just like that, his every waking moment seemed to be occupied by this new clique—new party, something bitter in him thinks—and left him with little time to spend with Mike. 

On the other hand, Mike’s semesters were significantly lonelier. It’s not as though he didn’t make any friends—in most of his classes he was successful enough at finding someone to study with, and the people on his dorm floor were social and kind enough to include him whenever he felt up to hanging out. But every connection he tried to make felt shallow, surface-level, and mind numbingly boring. 

It seemed ridiculous to try and have a conversation about the weather or when their paper was due or whatever other bullshit normal people talked about when there was an entire other universe no one even knew about. What was the point? Why even bother? It wasn’t like he could ever become real, actual friends with any of these people. They were all so fucking dull, completely uninteresting and unstimulating, and it wasn’t like Mike could liven up the conversation, either. He couldn’t talk about anything that had happened to him from ages twelve to eighteen, and he could only have the exact same conversation about majors and classes so many times before he felt like shooting himself through the skull. 

And the one person that understood, the one person that would’ve made things easier, always seemed to disappear whenever he got too close, surrounded by gaggles of students whose names Mike barely knew.

It sucked. And it was pathetic, and embarrassing, and Mike had gathered up all his pride in his hands to practically beg Will to find an apartment with him for their second year. And Will had given him a serene smile, and said Of course I’ll live with you, and that was that.

And now they’re here, and even though he’d left his first year completely dejected, it doesn’t stop the flicker of hope he has for this one. He has Will, and they have an apartment that’s way nicer than any of the dorms, and they each have their own bathroom, and they don’t have to rely on dining hall food, and he’s going to try really hard in all of his classes, and he’s going to get really good grades, and this year is going to be perfect, and everything is going to be okay. 

Their parents had dropped them off yesterday—neither of them had been blessed with a car on campus—and they’d spent the past two days unpacking and furnishing their apartment before hugging their families goodbye. 

Mike’s father only made two snide comments about the fact that he was choosing to live with Will, and did it out of earshot of the Byers, which is a significant victory by his standards. Will’s sexuality isn’t exactly a secret anymore, though he’s not quite sure if his dad actually knows, or if he’s just being an asshole. Either way, Will had come out in the midst of the war, a rushed, tearful confession as a preventative measure, in case Vecna tried to use it against him.

And Mike had hugged him, and told him he was his best friend, and then they never really spoke about it again.

It’s not a topic they avoid, exactly, it’s just that Mike doesn’t quite know what to say about it. Every now and then it will come up in passing comments and brief acknowledgments. He tries, he really does, to be as normal about it as possible. And he is normal about it. Completely. Totally. That’s why he doesn’t bring it up, because it’s normal, and there’s nothing to talk about. Because it’s normal.

He’s not worried. There’s nothing to worry about, so there’s no reason he would be worried. He’s living with his best friend, and he’s excited for the semester ahead, and everything is going to be okay.

“Should we make dinner?” Will asks, now slouched in the armchair and looking rumpled.

“Uh, we should eat dinner,” Mike says, “but I don’t know about make. Chinese?”

“Yes, please.” At that, Mike stands up and walks to the kitchen, ruffling through the handful of takeout menus he’d grabbed from the apartment office to find the right one. “You know what I want?”

“Has it changed in the last ten years?”

“Nope,” Will says with a laugh.

“Then I know what you want,” Mike responds, and starts to dial. 

It doesn’t take long for them to settle into their routines. Though they don’t share a single course in common, their schedules align every couple of days, allowing them enough time to spend together without overwhelming each other. Tuesdays they’re both out of class around four, so they make dinner as a team, which usually entails heating up a can of soup. Occasionally, they make grilled cheese to go along with it, but only if they’re feeling particularly lavish. They spend the first two Saturday mornings cleaning the apartment, but by the third week that energy fizzles out, and the dishes seem to pile up quickly after that. 

He and Will make their way to the library almost every Wednesday evening, either catching up on or trying to get ahead of their work for the week. There’s nowhere on campus quite as majestic, with huge, arched ceilings and stunning skylights. Something about the familiar, woody smell radiates comfort, safety, security, even now, years after he’d hidden in his middle school equivalent and lost himself among the stories.

After a few hours of studying there late one week, a freckled girl with long, red hair makes their way up to their table, twirling a pencil in her hands. 

“Hey!” she says, bright but quiet enough not to disturb anyone else. She looks directly at Mike as she speaks. “You’re in my Orgo class, right? With Professor Walker?”

“Huh?” Mike blinks, looking up. “Oh, no, I’m not taking that course, sorry.”

“Oh, really? You looked so familiar, I could’ve sworn.” She frowns, peering over his book. “So, what are you studying?”

“Right now I’m working on, uh—” He leafs through his papers, finding the rubric for the essay he’s currently researching, “Legal Environment in Business.”

She hums, tilting her head to look. “Business major?”

“Yeah, you?”

“Chemical engineering.”

“Oh, wow.” He raises his eyebrows, impressed.  “You must be smart.”

A hot feeling of shame washes over him as she looks him over. Business is a perfectly respectable major. No one would make fun of a business major, not the way they might roll their eyes or sneer or raise their eyebrows at an art or creative writing major. Still, he can’t bring himself to quite meet her eye, looking back and forth from his textbook to her chin. 

Will is watching him from the other side of the table. Mike doesn’t look at him, either.

“Not that smart, since I’m nearly failing Walker’s course.” She sighs, leaning one arm on their table. “I really was hoping you were in that class. I was going to see if you wanted to study together.”

“Sorry, I’d love to help, but I’m definitely not gonna be of any use.”

“Oh, well. I’ll figure something out.” She tucks a hair behind her ear, adjusting the bag over her shoulder as she looks around the rest of the library. “But hey, it was nice meeting you. Maybe we could grab coffee sometime?”

He shrugs. “I’m not really a coffee drinker. Thanks, though.”

“Oh.” She blinks, her smile falling and her eyebrows drawing together. For a quick moment, she glances over at Will, before snapping her eyes back to Mike. Her grin returns, though it seems a little more stilted this time. “Okay, well, I’ll see you around, then.”

“See you!”

He waves as she leaves, and turns back to the table to find Will gaping at him, incredulous. “What?”

“Mike!” he whisper-shouts.

“What?”

“You didn’t even want to get coffee with her?”

“I don’t like coffee! You know that!”

“She was asking you on a date!”

“What? No! She was asking me…to study.” But even as he says it, he trails off, the realization dawning on him. 

“Yeah, and asking you out.”

“Fuck. Was she really?”

Will gives him a long, contemplative look. “You really are oblivious, aren’t you?”

“Well, why didn’t she just say that?”

“She said, ‘do you want to get coffee with me?’ How much clearer could she have gotten?”

“Fuck.” He rests his chin on his hand, playing the conversation back to himself. Will rolls his eyes and returns to his work.

“She was pretty,” he says in a quiet voice a few moments later, not looking up from his paper. Mike narrows his eyes at him until Will glances back up. “What? I know when girls are pretty.”

“Yeah, but what do you care?”

“I was just saying. I thought you’d care.”

“She was. But not really my type.”

“No?”

“No.”

Will shrugs, looking out towards the direction she left. “You probably could still catch her, if you wanted to.”

He thinks it over for a moment, considering the option. Will was right, she was pretty. And nice, and intelligent, and way bolder than almost any other girl he knew. He’s never been asked out so plainly before, and he couldn’t pretend it wasn’t nice, a warm, fluttery feeling spreading through him as he thinks the conversation over again. 

But still, something about it felt off. The thought of going out with this girl, sitting with her at a coffee shop and trying to get to know her, to somehow get past the awkward first conversations and find something in common, felt like the closest thing to torture he could imagine. He thinks back to all of the failed, surface-level friendships he’d tried to form last year and immediately feels exhausted.

“That’s alright. She’s definitely too smart for me.”

Will tucks a small smile down at his work. “Definitely.” Mike kicks his ankles under the table.

The next hour passes without any more disruption, and once they start yawning, they decide to call it a night. 

“You finish your paper?” Will asks as he puts his work into his backpack.

“No, but I got all the citations I needed. I should be able to finish by next week.”

“Cool,” Will says, throwing his bag over his shoulder. He hesitates for a moment, fighting off a smirk, before looking back at Mike. “Should we go get coffee, then?”

Mike shoves him in the arm. “Fuck off.”

Will’s resulting laugh gets them shushed by three different people, and they both duck their heads in embarrassment while they make their way outside. The late summer air is still sticky and humid as they begin their walk back to the apartment, clinging to their skin, and Mike decides that must be the reason his cheeks are so hot. 

The dreams come and go.

They’re not bad like Will or El’s were. At least, not as bad. He doesn’t wake up screaming and shaking and sobbing, unable to tell whether or not the dream has truly ended. They don’t happen every night. They’re not so bad. It’s nothing to worry about.

He didn’t suffer like they did. He wasn’t possessed, or tortured, or lost in an alternate dimension, or taken from his family and raised by a psychopath. He just had to sit by and watch, helpless, as horrific things happened to everyone around him and he did nothing to stop them. 

It’s nothing to worry about. What’s a dream or two? Dreams can’t hurt him. They can show him his worst fears, over and over and over, a thousand iterations of the same terrifying scenario, but it doesn’t matter. It’s not real. Nothing they show him can hurt him.

It can’t hurt him to see Will, eyes wide and unfocused, tied to a chair as he screams words that aren’t his own. It can’t hurt him to see El, small and terrified, facing down a monster twenty times her size. It can’t hurt him to see Max, stoic and brave, lifted into the air as her limbs twist into horrible angles. It can’t hurt him to see Eddie’s lifeless body devoured by winged beasts. It can’t hurt him to see Nancy clutching her stomach as blood pools on the floor around her. It can’t hurt him to see Lucas and Dustin and Steve and Robin and Jonathan and Erica and Mom and Dad and Holly and every single person he cares about, everyone that he loves, ripped to pieces by any number of monsters, mangled and bloody and broken. It’s not real. None of it is real. It can’t hurt him.

His clock glows 3:23, and nothing he saw is real. Everything is okay. Everyone he loves is safe. Nothing his dreams show him can hurt him.

3:24. Everything is okay.

3:25.

He throws his covers off of him, standing and grabbing the half empty glass on his nightstand. He makes his way to the sink by the soft amber of the nightlight that he plugged into the kitchen wall on their second night. Will’s never mentioned it. Mike likes to think it helps him, too.

He fills his cup with ice and fresh water, taking a large gulp and letting the familiar feeling relax him. He keeps his eyes on the nightlight. It’s 3:27. Everything is okay.

A stray drop of water slithers down the glass onto his hand. He breathes in, then out. In, then out. Everything is okay. 

He finally moves from the counter, but instead of heading back to his bed, he walks up to Will’s door instead. He turns the knob as slow as possible, pushing until it opens just a crack.

The warm glow of the Christmas lights hanging from the ceiling spills out onto the kitchen floor. Will is sound asleep, curled up in his bed and clinging on to the stuffed tiger that he hides under his pillow whenever Mike walks into his room. He breathes in a perfect, steady rhythm. Everything is okay.

Will is okay. Everything is okay.

Will is okay. That thought should be a balm to him, easing his worries and smoothing everything over. When Will had gone missing, he’d known he needed to protect him. Protect everyone. That was his job. And he’d failed. And he’d failed to save El from the Demogorgon. And he’d failed to keep Will from being possessed. And he’d failed to stop the Mind Flayer from using Will to spy back. And he’d failed to save Bob from being ripped apart by monsters. And he’d failed to keep Brenner away from El. And he’d failed to keep Vecna away from Will. And he’d failed, and he’d failed, and he’d failed to do anything but watch everyone stronger and braver and smarter and more talented save the day while he sat by and did nothing.

Will had told him, after everything, that he’d helped, even though he hadn’t done anything. He’d talk about the searches for the gate and burning the tunnels and how he kept the Party together. But none of that mattered when he still could have done more. People were hurt, people were dead, and he could have protected them. He could have done more. Every mistake, every misstep, lead to another demise, and all of that is on him. 

Will is safe in his bed. Everything is okay.

He closes the door as silently as he opened it, turning towards his room.

There’s no war. There’s no one left for him to protect. There’s nothing for him to do. There’s no use for him anymore.

He lays back in bed. It’s 3:31 in the morning. Everything is okay. 

“Have I met Tonya?” Mike asks, shifting to fix the way his shirt is tucked. 

“I don’t think so.” Will pauses a couple steps ahead on the sidewalk, looking back as he waits for him to catch up. “Um, short, long brown hair, freckles? I’ll introduce you when we’re there. It’s actually her boyfriend’s house we’re going to.”

“Have you met him?”

“Yeah, he’s really nice. His name’s Ryan. He’d eat with us in the dining hall when we went after English last semester. I’ve never met his friends, though, so I don’t really know what to expect. But it’ll be fine, I’m sure.” Mike can’t help it; he turns to look at Will with a fond smile on his face. “What?” Will says, shooting an odd look back.

“Nothing, nothing.”

“What?” he insists.

“It’s just—I’m glad you’ve made so many friends. And that you’re excited to go to a party, even though you don’t know everyone.”

Will raises an eyebrow. “Okay?”

He doesn’t know how to explain it, exactly, but there’s a new confidence to Will that he can’t help but admire. Something about the way he stands, the way he holds himself, shoulders backs and chin up, is so drastically different than the Will he grew up with that it’s almost jarring to see, as though another person has swooped in to take his place. Mike shrugs. “It’s just good to see you happy, is all.”

“God, you sound like my mom,” he says, ducking his head, and even under the dim streetlights, Mike can see the blush forming. And there he is again, the Will he knows so well, shrinking back into himself to hide from the spotlight.

There’s a twinge of guilt in him for that. He knows he’s pricked at an insecurity somewhere, which is the last thing he wants. “Sorry,” Mike says. “I won’t embarrass you in front of all your cool art friends.”

“You won’t,” Will says, almost defensive, as though he was trying to convince himself of that instead of Mike.

Maybe he’s imagining things. He’s sure that has to be it. Will doesn’t have a cruel bone in his body, and is even less likely to hang out with anyone who did. Friendship with Will in and of itself is an endorsement of being a good person, and Mike knows that anyone he’s deemed worthy of going to a party with wouldn’t be unkind. Probably.

It’s not like he didn’t see Will at all last year. They caught up every few weeks or so, both blaming busy schedules and crazy workloads, and pretended that it wasn’t awkward. And it wasn’t, as long as they avoided the fact that Will had been avoiding introducing him to any of his friends.

He met one or two of them in passing, but Will never extended an invitation to anything with the rest of his group, and Mike could only stave off the hurt from that for so long. It could have just been an oversight. It could have just been Will thinking he wouldn’t enjoy…whatever it is that art majors do. But he couldn’t help feeling like Will just didn’t want him around his friends, and he wasn’t sure why.

“You okay?” Will asks, snapping him out of his thoughts.

But still, he was invited tonight, and that’s what matters, right? They live together now. They’re still best friends. And tonight is going to be fun. Everything is okay.

“Yeah, yeah. I'm good,” Mike says breezily, rolling his shoulders back. 

Will looks at him for a long moment before nodding. “Alright. C’mon, it’s this one.”

The steps up to the house are large, concrete slabs that have seen better days, cracked and uneven. They make their way carefully up towards a small house with the telltale sign of booming bass blasting through the walls. Will knocks, but when they don’t get an answer, tentatively pushes the door open.

“Byers!” a loud voice calls just moments after they enter. Will is then tackled into a bone crushing hug, lifted several inches in the air by a wall of a man.

“Ryan!” he says between laughs, breathless as he wriggles in his grip. “Put me down!”

The boulder that Mike assumes is Ryan obliges, setting Will back on his feet and clapping him on the back. “Good to see you, man! How you been?”

“Good, good. It’s good to see you!” Will is beaming with a bright smile, already picking up on Ryan’s infectious energy. “This is my roommate, Mike! I’ve mentioned him before. We grew up together.”

“Oh, Mike! Yeah, man, nice to finally meet you! Ryan,” he says, extending a hand.

“Ryan, nice to meet you.” He goes to meet him in a handshake, but as soon as he reaches Ryan’s grip, he’s pulled into the tightest hug he’s ever experienced in his life.

“Alright, let’s get you two party animals some drinks!” The more Ryan talks, the more it seems like his normal speaking voice is at a constant shouting level.

Will gets dragged into the kitchen by an arm around his shoulder, and Mike follows a few steps behind, shifting sideways to avoid knocking arms as he passes through a sea of people.

There’s a clear divide between the crowd of guests in the living room and in the kitchen. While the living room seems to be full of Ryan’s friends, loud and uninhibited, the kitchen clearly hosts Tonya’s crowd. Quieter, more subdued, but no less drunk, the group is made of an artsier sort, with fun-colored hair and the sort of outfits that Mike would see on TV and think about wearing, but was too scared to ever actually try. 

The girl that matches Will’s earlier description of Tonya wraps him in a hug that’s as warm as Ryan’s, but significantly less dangerous, and another round of greetings and introductions begin. Mike learns everyone’s name in quick succession—Tonya, Lori, Danny, Megan, Craig, Erik, Valerie—and forgets them all immediately. 

Ryan returns to shove red cups into his and Will’s hands, and when asked what was in it, only replies with, “a surprise!” They look at each other, shrug, and clink their plastic cups together before drinking.

It’s a fruity mixture with a combination he can’t quite place, like someone took five or six different juices and poured them all together. The burn of liquor hits a moment later, and he coughs as it stings down his throat. “How much alcohol is in this?” he asks Ryan, eyebrows drawn together in pain. 

“Enough,” he says simply. “Now, c’mon! You two have some catching up to do. Drink up!”

Will is immediately pulled into the art majors’ ongoing debate about one of their professors, and Mike does his best to keep up, but it becomes clear soon enough that he doesn’t have much to contribute to the conversation. Though Will tries every now and then to include him, Mike loses focus rather quickly, and finds himself milling back out towards the living room, not wanting to intrude. 

He takes another taste from his cup, chokes, and decides it’s absolutely not a sipping drink. Tilting his head back, he takes a deep breath and downs the rest of it in one go, forcing himself to look as normal as possible when he swallows. 

After a quick trip back to the kitchen for a refill, he leans against the living room wall again, too sober to try actually joining in on the party. The crowd dances around him, thumping music ringing in his ears, and he wills the alcohol to kick in faster, begging for it to make things more tolerable. 

One of the girls from the kitchen finds him (Megan? Probably Megan) and does her best to make polite conversation. They go through all the usual topics—What’s your major? How are your classes? Do you like your professors?—before Probably Megan gets distracted and joins a different group of friends. Mike doesn’t blame her. He wasn’t being very interesting. He refills his cup again.

He’s being weird, and a terrible party guest. He needs to get his head out of his ass and at least try to socialize. But Will is still in the kitchen, surrounded by his cool art friends, talking about things he knows nothing about, and Mike doesn’t really feel like pretending to care about anyone else. 

He’s on his fourth refill when Ryan appears to take pity on him, coming up and slapping him on the shoulder. “C’mon, man, I need a partner for beer pong. You any good?”

“No,” Mike replies honestly.

“Perfect. Tonya’s gonna kick our asses anyway.”

He’s pulled over towards the table, where the cups are already lined up and Tonya stands opposite them with another girl he wasn’t introduced to. “Ladies first,” Ryan says, rolling a ping pong ball across the table to them. 

“Thanks, babe!” Tonya grins at the two of them before tossing her ball, sinking it clean into one of the cups. Seconds later, her friend’s ball plops into one as well. 

“I feel like I just got hustled,” Mike grumbles, pulling the cups out of formation and taking a drink.

“C’mon, dude, is it hustling if I told you we were gonna lose?” Ryan laughs, downing his cup as well. “I hope you don’t have any money riding on this game.”

He feels like he’s supposed to hate Ryan. Everything about him echoes the confident, boisterous ways of his high school bullies. His voice is obnoxiously loud, grating against his ears, and he walks around the room like he owns it, like he’s never even considered that it might belong to anyone else. It should be infuriating.

Mike throws next, missing spectacularly, while Ryan’s ball just skims the top of a cup before sliding off. Ryan groans dramatically, throwing his head back. 

It should be infuriating, but instead, he finds himself genuinely having a good time. Ryan is loud, and incredibly energetic, but he’s also nice, and the girls aren’t making fun of him, and even though he really sucks at beer pong, no one seems to care, laughing and shouting at every throw, whether or not it’s a miss. 

The rest of the game does not get much better for them. Mike does not make a single cup the entire time, while Ryan only manages three before the girls snag their easy win. 

“That’s alright, man.” Ryan claps him on the back. Mike’s knees buckle below him. “That was just a warm up. We’ll throw better once we’re drunk.”

Mike is already drunk.

There’s a bright sort of buzz in the air that he can just half-feel as he looks around the room. He searches through the sea of bodies before spotting Will on the other side, perched on the arm of a sofa where a handful of his friends sit. There’s a glow in his cheeks as he laughs at something one of them said, and Mike can’t help but stare. Will looks so happy. He loves when Will is happy. 

Will glances up, catching Mike’s eye and grinning. Mike grins back. He’s about to walk over to him when Ryan nudges him to tell him the cups are set back up. 

They start and lose another game. And another. But Ryan never gives up on him, teaching him new techniques and helping him on his aim. 

“You have to line your elbow up where you want it to go,” he says, taking Mike’s arm in his hand and adjusting it. He stands behind him, back pressed up against his shoulder, as he points to one of the cups. Mike doesn’t know when his face got so hot. “Here, try now.”

He throws. He misses. But it was closer this time. 

“Nice!” Ryan cheers, giving him a high five. Tonya and her friend, who Mike finally learned was named Beth, give encouraging nods. “That was so good. Next time for sure.” 

The grin that spreads across his face is involuntary, but he doesn’t know how he’s supposed to help it. He’s had more fun at this party than he did almost his entire freshman year, and he finally gets why Will loves these people so much. They’ve been so welcoming, so fun, and for the first time in months, Mike feels engaged. Interested. Ryan managed to sink hooks into him and drag him out of the droll undertow he’s been swimming in for the past year, and it’s exhilarating. 

He gets one cup the next game, much to everyone’s excitement. Ryan, Tonya, Beth, and the rest of the small crowd that have gathered explode into cheers, and he earns another back-breaking shoulder clap from Ryan.

Mike looks up to check if Will saw, but he’s nowhere to be found, half the sofa now empty where he’d sat. There’s no stopping the immediate feeling of dread that rushes down his back. Fuck. Fuck. Did something happen? How could he have let something happen? It didn’t matter that they were hundreds of miles from Hawkins, that years had passed since Vecna’s defeat. He’d still been stupid enough to let his guard down for a single moment.

Tonya sinks the last cup of the game, and he leaves the table without an explanation, peering into the kitchen and finding nothing. He tries the rest of the first floor without any luck, and stops at the base of the stairs, remembering the boy with the striped shirt Will had been laughing with. The feeling shifts, subtle but noticeable, as he looks up toward the second floor and his throat seems to clench. Was it possible—?

He does another look around the house, and out the back window onto the porch, he catches a glimpse of the back of Will’s shirt. Wave after wave of relief washes over him. He makes his way out the door, finding him with the same striped shirt boy, who holds a cigarette between his fingers.

“Mike!” Will’s eyes are glassy and his cheeks are pink and he looks impossibly happy to see him. Mike sort of feels like he should hug him. Should he hug him? He should hug him. People hug their friends, right? “Did you win your game?”

Mike forgets to hug him. “No.”

“Yeah, Tonya and Beth are undefeated,” says striped shirt boy, whose name Mike is pretty sure he learned earlier in the night. It would be weird to ask again.

“Yeah, I worked that out myself,” says Mike. 

“I think Tonya trains in her spare time. And Beth is just super competitive, so she’d rather die of alcohol poisoning than admit defeat,” striped shirt boy continues. Mike doesn’t understand why he’s talking to him.

“Cool,” he says. He turns back to Will, who’s giving him an odd look. “Are you ready to go?”

“Oh, already? Is everything okay? I thought you were having fun.”

“No, I am, just—” He actually doesn’t know why he wants to go home. He doesn’t really want to go home. He just wants Will off of this porch. Something about it seems dangerous. He shrugs.

“Okay,” Will says without further question. He turns back to his friend. “It was good to see you, Danny.”

“Seriously?” Danny says, grabbing Will’s wrist with his free hand. He runs a light finger over his pulse point. “Leaving already?”

“Yeah, it’s—” He glances back at Mike for a moment, cheeks pink. “I’ll talk to you soon, okay?”

Stupid Striped Shirt Danny has a stupid smirk on his face as he lets go. “Sure. Talk to you soon.”

Mike is drunk, but he’s not drunk enough to miss what’s going on here. Something coils in the pit of his stomach. “Ready?”

“Yeah, let’s go. I just wanna say bye to Tonya and Ryan.”

They return to the house and begin a round of goodbyes, but Tonya starts talking about an assignment they have due next week, and Ryan asks if Mike plays any sports, and suddenly twenty minutes have passed. Beth and Probably Megan join them at some point, and they chat about nothing until Mike can’t remember why he ever wanted to leave.

He turns from his conversation with Beth back to Tonya and Will, where Danny now stands. Mike remembers why he wanted to leave.

“Ready to go?” he asks again. 

“Oh, yeah, um—okay, bye, guys!” Will calls as Mike drags him out the door.

The early fall air is the perfect temperature as they stumble home together, hips knocking into each other as they try and fail to walk in straight lines. Mike can’t find it in himself to care, laughing every time they nearly knock each other over. “That was fun,” he proclaims, grinning.

Will’s eyes light up. “Really? I thought you weren’t having a good time.”

“No, I don’t know.” He shrugs. “Just tired.”

“Oh. Well, I’m glad you came. I’m glad you had fun. And I’m glad you finally got to meet my friends.”

“Hey,” he drawls. Something about that sentence doesn’t sit right with him. “I'm your friends.”

“Just the best one,” Will chirps, resting his head on Mike’s shoulder for a brief moment before their uneven strides pull them apart from each other. “Ryan liked you.”

“Really?”

“Well, he likes everyone, I think. But he liked you.”

“Yeah, he’s cool. Danny liked you,” he says before he can stop himself. Will tries and fails to fight the bashful grin that grows across his face. He really doesn’t want to have this conversation, for some reason. But if Lucas or Dustin had spent the entire night talking to a girl, he would ask. He pushes down the strange, tightened feeling in his chest and plows forward. It’s only fair. “Did you get his number?”

“No,” he says, shaking his head, and Mike is flooded with an immediate sense of relief. “But we have class together Tuesdays. We’ve just never, like, talked before. So I’ll see him Tuesday. I can get his number then, I think.”

Oh. “Oh. Nice. That’s good.”

Will nods towards the ground, trying to keep a straight face, but it’s not long before that slow, soft smile appears again. With careful consideration, he looks up and whispers, “I really think it went well.” For the first time in a very long time, he looks hopeful.

Something about that settles uncomfortably in his stomach. He can’t help the ominous feeling he gets about Stupid Striped Shirt Danny and the heavy, dangerous looks he gave Will. But Will is glowing in a way Mike hasn’t seen in months, and he can’t find it in him to bring it up. “Cool. I’m happy for you.” That’s all he needs to say. He doesn’t need to say anything else. He shouldn’t say anything else. He’s not going to say anything else. “As long as Danny knows that I’m the one you come home to.”

A long beat passes before Will breaks into nervous laughter, shoving Mike in the side. “Weirdo.”

Mike stumbles, just managing to catch himself before hitting the ground. He rebounds, using the momentum to throw himself back at Will, wrapping his arm around his shoulders. 

He’s not being weird, no matter what Will says. He’s being normal. Will does come home to him every night. They’re roommates. They’re best friends. And if Stupid Striped Shirt Danny thinks for one second that that’s going to change just because he figured out Will is cute, he’s in for a rude awakening.

“Whatever,” he says. “Should we get pizza?”

Will turns to look at him with nothing short of awe, eyes wide and lips agape. “Yes.”

There’s only one pizza place on campus that’s open this late, and they’re clearly not the only people with the same idea. The line spills out of the tiny counter service restaurant, and they go to join the back of it, chatting lazily above the noise of the crowd. Either they’re moving quickly, or Mike is too drunk to care that it’s slow, and they make their way to the front, where Will debates over getting one slice or two.

“Just give us a large to go,” Mike says instead to the cashier, handing him the money.

Will blushes, looking back and forth between him and the worker. “Mike! We don’t need a large.”

“Sure we do.” He grabs the box, motioning with his head towards the door.

Will follows, grumbling and insisting on paying for half, while Mike shoots down every attempt. They bicker their way back to the apartment, where he throws the box onto the counter as Will goes to grab plates.

He comes back with two paper towels instead. “All of our plates are dirty. We need to do dishes.”

“Yeah,” says Mike with a shrug. They catch each other’s eye and start laughing, even though neither of them said anything funny. 

They take their pizza over to the couch and sprawl out across it, legs tangled but too drunk for either of them to care. A silence falls over them as they eat possibly the most amazing pizza Mike’s ever had in his life. Holy shit. Holy fucking shit. He’s never known true joy until this moment. It doesn’t seem like it should be legal. It doesn’t seem like it should be possible. Someone should give this place an award. Whatever the equivalent of the Nobel Peace Prize is for pizza joints, they deserve it.

He looks back at Will to share this observation with him, but he can’t quite figure out how to make words come out of his mouth. Besides, something about Will at this angle, the way the light is glinting off the side of his face, is…different. Something about him looks different. He looks—

Handsome. The word comes to him unbidden, as though someone else had thought it for him. Mike does not spend a lot of time thinking about how other men look. That would be—well, that would be weird, so he does not do that. In fact, he makes an active choice every day not to think about what other men look like. Ever. But he supposes there’s nothing wrong with thinking his best friend is handsome. Will is handsome. That’s a normal thing to think. Anyone with eyes would look at him and think he’s handsome. And that’s why Mike’s gaze hasn’t left the sharp edge of his jawline for the last two minutes. 

He’s being normal. Okay, sure, he’s drunk. But he’s being normal. 

“Isn’t it weird?” Will starts out of nowhere. Mike blinks back into reality. “Like, having normal friends.”

It takes him a moment to remember he’s supposed to respond. “I guess,” he says, because it sounds better than I wouldn’t know. 

“It’s so strange just to talk about…classes,” Will continues. “Or dining hall food. It’s like, they don’t know, you know?”

“Yeah, really strange.”

“It’s kind of nice, though. They don’t treat me any different.” Mike sits up, looking directly at Will and nodding. He knows what that means to Will, knows the importance of that sense of normalcy. “But it kinda sucks, too. Knowing I can’t ever tell them the biggest thing that’s ever happened to me. That they’re never gonna understand, really.”

Mike gets this. More than anything, he gets this. And he’d like to contribute more to this conversation, really, but his brain is kind of fuzzy and his mouth is really dry, so he just says, “Yeah.”

Will, who had been staring off in the distance, snaps his eyes back to Mike’s. “Well, that’s why I’m glad you’re here.” He scooches a little closer, their knees knocking together. 

Something about this feels intimate, charged with an energy he doesn’t know how to name. There’s a odd current running through them, sending sparks up through Mike’s leg, but Will doesn’t seem to notice. And really, what is there to notice? Everything about this is normal. Will is his best friend. Of course he should feel comfortable sitting next to Mike on a sofa. That’s a normal, friendly thing to do.

“Why’s that?” he asks.

Will has the faded scent of cigarettes and stale beer clinging to him, acrid and dull, which Mike knows because Will is now sitting close enough for him to smell. Which is normal for friends to do. Probably.

Will gives him a light smile. “I need someone to keep me sane.”

What an interesting choice of words, considering how insane Mike feels right now. Nothing is happening. There is nothing happening in this moment. They are two friends sitting on a sofa eating pizza and having a normal conversation. This is the most unremarkable thing that has ever happened to either of them. This is what friends do. This is so normal. 

So why does it feel so important?

“Yeah,” Mike says, swallowing around the words. “I’m glad you’re here, too.” 

He is glad Will’s here. He’s so glad that Will is his friend again, actually his friend, that he thinks about it a lot. He thinks about Will a lot. All the time, really. It’s a constant stream of consciousness somewhere in the back of his mind, always picking out little things that Will would like or wondering what Will would say or thinking about how he’d react. 

Like everyone does for their best friend. He assumes. 

Will is smiling at him, eyes glazed but unwavering from Mike’s. He’s usually so reserved with his emotions, afraid to show too much, afraid of being too much, so used to having any vulnerability taken advantage of and used against him. But the alcohol has lowered his walls just enough for him to be unashamed in his happiness, and he looks at Mike with so much warmth and affection that it almost doesn’t seem real.

Mike wants to kiss him.

Okay. That’s a weird thought to have. He’s not being normal anymore. He must be even drunker than he realized, because there’s no other reasonable explanation for why that thought would even cross his mind. He clears his throat, tossing his crust and paper towel onto the table, and Will’s eyes follow it with a frown. Will’s always been a little touchy about wasting food, but he doesn’t seem to care enough to comment.

Mike wants to say something else, change the subject, do anything to get rid of this weird, wriggling feeling in his stomach. He tries, he really does, but he can’t tear his eyes away from the way Will’s lips have twisted, gaze trained on the smudge of grease at the corner of them.

“You’ve got something,” he says, motioning. 

Will blinks, looking back at him, and goes to rub it. “Good?”

“Not quite. Here.” Before he realizes what he’s doing, he reaches out, catching Will’s chin in his palm. Quietly, so subtle that he never would’ve noticed if he wasn’t already paying such close attention, Will’s breath hitches. Mike is suddenly aware how much closer they are. 

Mike is suddenly aware of how easy it would be to kiss him.

He blinks, then forces himself to focus on the spot. It’s nothing, really, just a bit of grease from the pizza that probably would have rubbed off when he washed his face, but it had caught the light and Mike’s attention and it’s too late to take it back so there’s nothing he can do about it now. 

He runs his thumb at the smudge, Will’s mouth tugging along in one long, slow motion. As he releases, he watches Will rub his lips together before he rewets them gently with his tongue. The whole time, Will’s eyes don’t move from Mike’s face, boring holes into him. Mike does not allow himself to meet them. 

“Got it,” he says, not knowing why his voice dropped so low.

“Thanks,” Will whispers back. 

They both move away to separate corners of the sofa. He’s done something weird now, he’s sure of it, and he knows Will can tell, too. No amount of alcohol would be capable of undercutting the tension that’s suddenly between them, familiar and foreign all at once. It’s an echo of something he’s felt before, and he knows it, recognizes it, and can’t seem to put a name to it. It feels like there’s something he’s supposed to do here, something he’s forgetting, but for the life of him he can’t remember what it is.

He swats the thought away, collapses back into the couch, and decides to deal with it another time.

Chapter Text

Mike wakes from his dreamless sleep with a start, alert and tense. He sits up, listening with careful ears as he tries to figure out exactly what startled him awake, the slow, familiar dread beginning to creep down his back.

Everything is quiet for a minute, then two. And then the slight sounds of someone moving through the living area reach him. He rises slowly from his bed, alert and cautious, and tiptoes his way over to his desk, where he arms himself with his lamp and prepares to take on whatever monster is waiting for him out there.

He opens his door and finds himself looking out at the pajama-clad silhouette of his roommate, bathed in the glow of the kitchen nightlight, standing in front of the freezer and dropping ice cubes into a glass as quietly as possible. Mike watches for a moment, silent, until Will turns and jumps at the sight of him. 

“Jesus,” Will says, leaning back onto the counter and clutching his chest. “You’re the lightest sleeper in the world, you know that?”

Mike manages a weak laugh, bending down to lean the lamp against the wall. “Everything okay?”

“Yeah. Fine. Just…sorry I woke you up. I was trying to be quiet.”

“Not your fault. I am the lightest sleeper in the world.”

Will’s eyes fall towards the wall, an amused grin growing. “Were you going to kill me with a desk lamp?”

“Well, I was gonna kill someone with a desk lamp.” Will lets out a short chuckle, turning back towards the counter with his cup. “Laugh all you want. You’ll be begging for my forgiveness when someone actually does break in here and try to kill you.”

“All the things that try to kill me are supernatural. I don’t think the lamp’s gonna be much help.”

“Well, maybe we’ll get lucky this time,” says Mike, matching his dry tone. “Maybe something normal will try to kill you next.”

“That’d be a nice change of pace.” Will stares at his now-full glass of water. “I’m alright, you know. You can go back to bed. Sorry I woke you.”

“It’s fine, seriously.”

“Well, still, I’m sorry. I’m just getting some water. I’m okay.”

“Nightmare?”

Will considers his response for a moment. He opens his mouth to say something, but buries it under pursed lips. There's a brief pause, before he sighs and gives a curt, “Yeah.”

“Do you wanna talk about it?”

“Nothing to talk about.” He shrugs, still not facing Mike. “It’s not like it’s anything new.”

Mike frowns, because he can’t do much with that if Will won’t even tell him what the issue is. He debates for a moment, doing his best to gauge Will’s mood—if he’s particularly irritable, he’ll be upset if Mike tries too hard to push him into opening up. But if he’s putting on a false front because he feels bad that he woke Mike up, he’ll be left to struggle with this on his own.

He goes with the safest option he can come up with. “Do you wanna watch a movie?”

Will furrows his eyebrows. “It’s four in the morning, Mike. Don’t you have class in a couple hours?”

“Who gives a shit? It’s just my history credit. I can sleep during the lecture.” Will looks at his feet, then at the ceiling, lips in a tight line and arms folding into himself, which, if he’s interpreting correctly, translates to I want to, but I’ll feel like a burden if I say yes. “C’mon,” Mike says, not bothering to wait for a response, “let’s watch something.”

Will gives him a small, tired smile and nods, following without further hesitation. They migrate over toward the living room, Mike heading towards the haphazard stack of tapes they have shoved in a corner. “Anything you’re in the mood for?”

“No, just pick something easy to watch. Did you want something to drink?”

“Yeah, I’ll grab water in a sec. Come sit.”

Will, of course, does not come sit, unable to let anyone fuss over him without at least trying to reciprocate. By the time Mike has the VCR set up and has forwarded past the trailers, Will has coasters under both of their glasses and is already on his side of the couch.

Mike steps back into his room and grabs two of his pillows off the bed, tossing one at Will once he exits. Settling in on the opposite side, he gets comfortable before unpausing the tape, the end of the last trailer petering out before The Empire Strikes Back begins.

The familiar theme blasts as the opening scroll appears, making them both jump and scramble for the remote. They laugh as Mike turns the volume down to a reasonable level for four in the morning, but it's stilted, and Mike knows his heart isn't the only one that's racing.

As they each fall back into the cushions, Mike tries his hardest to focus on the movie in front of him, but it’s so hard when he’s seen this one a thousand times and Will is sitting there, arms wrapped around his legs and shoulders up to his ears. He’s doing his breathing exercises and drumming his fingers on his knees, but even when he stops, he doesn’t untense. 

“You’re not relaxed.”

Will shoots him a quick glance out of the corner of his eye before looking back at the television. “Sorry, I just relived being possessed by a multi-dimensional demon. I’m a little tense.”

“Well, I’m trying to get you to relax. I’d appreciate it if you helped me out a little.”

Will lets out a tiny laugh, which Mike counts as a victory. “I’m alright,” he says, voice soft, as though Mike is the one who needs reassurance. “It just takes me a minute to come down. I’ll get there.”

He nods, but he can’t relax if Will isn’t relaxed. He’ll spend the next two hours checking on him, completely unable to focus on anything else, if he doesn’t do something about it soon. 

“Here. Come here,” he says, sitting up and reaching out his hand. 

“Huh?”

“Just—come here.” He grabs Will’s arm and tugs him towards the center of the couch, meeting him in the middle. They sit shoulder to shoulder, Will stiff as a board and casting a furtive glance out of the side of his eye, until Mike jostles him with his arm. “I said relax.”

“I’m relaxed,” he says, voice tight.

“Oh, very convincing.” Before he can think too hard about it, Mike wraps the same arm around his shoulder, forcing him to lean in towards him. Finally, finally Will gets what he’s trying to imply, and tilts his head onto Mike’s shoulder, pulling his legs up onto the sofa and getting comfortable. 

They sit together in silence, both refusing to look away from the television, and Mike tries to tell himself his heart is still pounding from—something. The movie, probably. That makes sense. It’s an exciting movie, and that explains it, because what he and Will are doing is incredibly normal.

After a few moments, Will speaks in a low, uncertain tone. “You know, you don’t have to—”

“I know I don’t have to.”

“I’m just saying, if you want to go back to your bed—”

“I don’t.” It comes out a little harsher than he means it too. He can feel Will tense up again, and he sighs as he controls his next words. “I want to watch the movie, and I want you here with me. Okay?”

He melts just a little next to him. “Okay.”

It’s the most comfortable Mike’s felt in weeks, Will’s warmth radiating from his shoulder and spreading throughout the rest of him. There’s something so reassuring about it, and he revels in the feeling of having someone pressed to his side.

He hasn’t had anything close to a romantic relationship since El broke up with him, and that had been years ago. He’d been busy, with the whole apocalyptic war thing going on, so it seemed pretty fair. And there had been that one girl he kissed at a party last year, even though it had been short and…not unpleasant, but not particularly fulfilling.

The point is, it’s been a while since he’s felt this level of closeness to anyone. Which has to be the explanation for why his stomach is tightening into coils, taut and twisted, at the mere ghost of Will’s breath on his neck.

It has to be the explanation for why he’d want to kiss him.

Will adjusts his position, snuggling in closer. He must be tired, or he must be really freaked out by his dream. Will never gets this close to him. Not anymore, at least. “Thanks, Mike,” he whispers, eyes closed. 

It’s a normal thing to say, so Mike gives him a normal answer. “Any time.”

Not kiss him kiss him, because that would be insane, right? Will might be gay, but…but Mike likes girls, so there’s no reason he’d want to kiss him. Right? 

But still, the thought plays itself over and over, insistent and intrusive, running circles through his mind. It feels like it should be the easiest thing in the world. He’s right there. All Mike has to do is tilt his head up, one finger hooked beneath his chin, and he could press his lips into his. Easy.

That doesn’t seem like a normal thought to have. His brain must be addled from lack of sleep, confusing Will with…someone else. A girl, probably. Maybe El. They do look a lot alike, fake siblings or not.

He and El used to watch movies just like this, with her head on his shoulder. That’s gotta be the issue. Sometimes, when she’d fall asleep against him, he’d turn and press a kiss to her forehead. Of course. It’s muscle memory, or something. It’s only natural he’d want to kiss Will. On the forehead. Of course.

But still. It would be weird, right? It doesn’t exactly feel like it would be, but it would be. Wouldn’t it? It’s just a small show of affection, of comfort—it’s not romantic by any means. He doesn’t mean for it to be romantic. Just a way to say I’m here. It’s okay without actually saying it. Will would let him. It wouldn't be weird. 

But it would be.

And he knows that. So he draws another line on Will’s shoulder and forces it to be enough. For him. For Will. For them both.

It used to be easier than this. He used to know Will better than he knew himself. And it used to be so simple to curl up together and watch Star Wars and forget about everything else for two hours. There was a time when being with Will was the most comforting, most freeing feeling in the world. He’d never had to hide parts of himself around Will, never had to parse himself down to smaller, more manageable pieces, the way he did around his parents, his sister, his other classmates. 

Except he’d screwed that up, somehow. Somewhere in the chaos of the Upside Down, mixed in between the monsters and magic and destruction, he’d lost that part of Will, and even though they were still friends, it’s never been the same. The reality of this late night thought hits him harder than he expects, because he can’t fight the wave of sadness that comes with the memory of what he’d lost. He sighs.

“Hm?” Will’s eyes are still closed, but even he can sense the shift in Mike’s mood. 

Mike takes another deep breath. He doesn’t have the energy to lie. He doesn’t see why he should have to. “I miss you, you know.”

Will’s voice is quiet but clear when he answers. “I’m right here.”

He’s not, though. Not really. There’s something between them, he can feel it, no matter how close they are. They’re friends, and everything is fine, but there’s still a wall there that was built sometime around the summer of ‘85, and never really came down. Maybe he’d never felt he had to hide parts of himself around Will, but Will clearly felt he had to hide parts of himself around Mike.

Which is no one’s fault but his own. It doesn’t stop it from hurting. 

He wonders if that’s the reason he’d been kept at arm’s length for the past year. It’s not the first time he’s had that thought—though, to be fair, he’s considered just about every reason under the sun and still arrived at no conclusion. It wasn’t his finest moment. And even though Will said he forgave him, the guilt of it ate away at him for months, only growing in his absence from Hawkins, multiplying into something that gnawed at him from the inside out.

He couldn’t bring himself to call. 

Or write, or reach out, or hug him like a normal person at the airport. It had taken him a while to place the feeling, the strange, squirming sensation in his stomach whenever he stood too close to him. But he’d figured it out, and he apologized, and things were fine. They’d made up, they were good, and they went on to save the world together. And the feeling in his stomach subsided. For the most part. 

Everything between them is okay.

Han and Leia escape from Hoth. Will’s breathing evens out. Mike keeps his mouth shut. 

When the early morning light begins to creep through the curtains, Mike awakens to a sharp pain in his neck. 

At some point in the night, he must have slumped back towards his side of the sofa—and at some point, Will must have followed him, because he is currently curled up against him, stomach to stomach, one hand fisted in his shirt. He breathes slowly, chest rising in and out of tandem with Mike’s, and he looks so comfortable that he doesn’t have the heart to wake him up. 

He can’t remember the last time that Will has seemed so at peace, and it hits him that he’s had a similar thought before, walking home from the party and seeing how he glowed with happiness, cheeks rosy and reddened with the excitement of the night. 

It’s only at his most vulnerable—when he’s drunk and when he’s asleep—that Will lets his actual feelings show. He’s had so much practice over so many years, dodging counselors and doctors and well-meaning mothers and siblings and friends, that hiding it must be second nature at this point. And it’s been a while since Will has come to him for something like this. The nightmare must have gotten to him way more than he’d let on, because for the past few years, Will barely got close enough to touch Mike. If someone had told him yesterday that Will would spend the night with his head tucked onto his shoulder, Mike wouldn't have believed it himself. Because Will doesn’t trust him like that. Not anymore. 

Mike frowns. It’s entirely too early for this, and he really doesn’t want to question this, because clearly, Will does trust him. He trusted him enough for this, after all. Maybe he didn't come to him first, but still, he opened up in the end, didn't he? Everything between them is fine. He has to stop second guessing their interactions, finding spaces between them when there aren't any. Besides, there’s another, more pressing matter. 

Mike wants to kiss him. And he’s not drunk this time.

He’s tired, of course, which comes as the next obvious reasoning. He’s—he’s sleep deprived, or something. Confused because he just woke up. It's just like last night. He's getting things mixed up, wires are being crossed, and really, Will is snuggled up to him like a girlfriend would be—not that he minds, of course, he’s just doing Will a favor, keeping him calm after a nightmare—and it’s an easy mistake to make. 

Maybe he should wake Will up. Because this is getting weird, and…maybe he shouldn’t be this close to him if he’s gonna have creepy, unwarranted thoughts like that. He shouldn’t be thinking about other guys like that, especially his best friend, especially when said best friend is asleep against him.

But, on the other hand, Will looks so comfortable, and really, it’s not like he’s doing anything wrong. He’s not thinking about kissing him, he’s thinking about how weird it would be to kiss him. Because it would be super weird to kiss him. And that’s a perfectly rational thought for him to have.

And he needs to fall back asleep before he thinks about this any more.

He lets his hand fall to rest on Will’s back, and Will responds by snuggling closer to his chest, and the fluttering sensation that follows in his stomach is definitely entirely unrelated. Odd. He must be tired. He closes his eyes and allows the rhythm of Will’s breathing to lull him back to sleep.

When he awakens again, probably several hours later, Will is gone and he is alone on the sofa. 

A concerning number of his joints pop as he moves to sit up. The distinct, fatty smell of bacon wafts from around the corner, where he can hear Will open the fridge. He stretches, cracking his neck and his back before standing and heading towards the kitchen. 

“Morning,” he groans.

Will closes the fridge and turns to face him. “Morning! Um, you missed class. It was already, like, forty-five minutes past when I woke up, so I didn’t wanna wake you. Sorry.” He kicks at his feet, looking a little ashamed. “I know you must’ve been tired.”

“No worries, I’ll just grab the notes from someone next week.” He reaches his arms above his head, bending backwards as he tries to get a kink out of his spine. When he comes back down, Will is looking pointedly at the floor, face tinged pink. “I can’t believe we used to be at high school before eight every morning. There’s no way in hell I’d be able to do that now.”

He laughs in agreement. “I know. Thanks again for staying up with me.”

“Did you sleep better?”

“Yeah. My neck’s gonna be sore for like the next three days, though.” To emphasize his point, he rubs at the back of his neck, tilting it both ways. “Um, I made you breakfast. Bacon, eggs and toast. You still have an hour ‘til your next class, but it’s okay if you don’t want to eat it. But it’s there if you want it.” 

“Thanks, that sounds great.”

“Yeah, I just wanted to say thanks. For helping me out, I mean. I know it’s annoying to deal with, and I appreciate it, is all.”

“No, it’s fine. It’s not annoying.” Will ducks his head as he turns to start washing his dishes. “Does that still happen a lot? Your nightmares?”

“I don’t know what a lot is,” he says with a shrug. “I guess. Usually I’m fine.”

“You should wake me up next time. I’m serious,” he says when Will shoots him a look that clearly says absolutely not. “I don’t mind.”

“I’m not gonna wake you up.”

“Seriously! I don’t mind. You can just come sleep in my bed, if you want.”

“What?” Will looks thoroughly confused, pulling a face. “Mike, I’m not gonna bother you. Seriously.”

“No, really, I don’t mind. My room gets super cold. I swear, our AC just blasts into there. You’ll be keeping me warm.”

“Okay, weirdo.” Will laughs, rolling his eyes. “Your egg is gonna get cold.”

It’s a Thursday in late September when Mike decides he’s had it. 

He can’t take this stupid class anymore. Integrated Marketing Communications is probably the dumbest name for an even dumber course, and he can’t stand one more stupid second in it. How anyone could give a single flying fuck about any of this is genuinely beyond him. 

Fuck Professor Adams for asking the stupidest discussion questions in the entire world, and fuck stupid fucking pig-nosed Brian for disagreeing with him in front of the class, and fuck Professor Adams again for agreeing with stupid fucking pig-nosed Brian, and fuck everyone in that class and this major and this school. 

He never listens to his dad about anything. He never takes advice from him, ever, under any circumstances. Why he’d lifted that restriction to choose his college major of all things was a mystery to everyone, himself included. 

When he’d mentioned to his parents he wasn’t sure what he wanted to declare as his major, he hadn’t expected his father to participate in the discussion at all. But he’d put his newspaper down for long enough to actually look Mike in the eye and say, “If you don’t know what you want to do, you should pick business.”

Which, even at the time, sounded about as appealing as shoving his fork through his eye. His father continued, “Listen, son, everything in the world is a business. Anything you want to do after school, you can do with a business degree. Those computer games you like so much? You can get a job marketing them. All those stories you like, they need salespeople. Publishers. Business opens you up to every opportunity. Any field you want to work in will have a job that needs a business degree. Set yourself up for success.”

Against all odds, this advice was what stuck with him. For once, Mike couldn’t argue with his dad. It genuinely seemed like a good approach. He’d be able to buy himself more time to figure out his real passion without being locked into a narrow decision at age eighteen. The only issue, the only caveat, the only real problem with the whole thing is that Mike can’t fucking stand business.

He cannot imagine doing this for the rest of his life. He can’t even imagine doing it for one more minute. Every part of it is genuine bullshit. His next class starts in half an hour, and he already knows he’s not going. 

The way back to their apartment doesn’t take long, but it’s muggy and damp out from the rain that rolled through this morning. He stomps along campus, shoes squelching with every step and doing absolutely nothing to improve his mood. 

Will should be home already, so he shoves the door open in a huff without bothering with his key. When he enters, he finds Will on the couch, leaning down over another—

“Oh my God,” Will gasps, jumping up from the sofa. His button up is notably not buttoned up. “Um, hi! You’re home early.”

“Yeah, I was gonna, uh—” Mike actually isn’t sure what he was going to do. Whatever it was, he doesn’t think it involved staring at Will’s chest.

“Right, yeah, o-of course. You live here.”

That’s a fair statement. Mike does live here. “Yep,” he agrees. 

“Okay, um. This is Danny!” Will says, motioning to the man now sitting up from the sofa. “You guys met at Tonya’s. Not sure if you remember.”

“Good to see you again, man,” Stupid Striped Shirt Danny says, nodding at him. Except he’s not really Stupid Striped Shirt Danny anymore, since he’s not wearing a striped shirt. He’s actually not wearing a shirt at all. He also does not look like he thinks it’s good to see him. Mike jerks his head in an attempted response.

They all stare at each other. No one seems capable of speech.

“Yeah, cool.” Danny stands from the couch after an uncomfortably long silence and goes to retrieve his shirt, which is not striped but is definitely still stupid, from the corner where it had been thrown. “Uh, I think I’m gonna head out, actually. Bye, Will.”

“Yep, bye,” Will squeaks, his face a furious, splotchy red.

Neither of them say anything as they wait for Danny to close the door behind him. 

“Holy shit,” Will groans as soon as the lock clicks, burying his face in his hands. “Sorry. I really didn’t expect you to be home so soon. Um, I never would’ve, like, been out here if I thought—usually you’re not back ‘til dinner, so, I mean—”

“No, yeah, totally, I just, like, kind of felt like skipping, so, I’m here—”

“Right, cool, yeah.”

“Sorry, I didn’t mean to, like, interrupt—”

“No, it’s fine, it’s not your fault,” Will insists.

“Cool,” Mike says again. They stare at each other for a long moment. “Um, so, I’m gonna go to my room.”

“Yep. Same.”

Mike shuts his door behind him, feeling like his whole body is on fire. He glances in the mirror and sees his entire face lit as bright red as Max’s hair, the blush spreading from his cheeks and down his chest. Holy shit. Holy shit.

Realistically, he knows he’s overreacting. It’s not like he saw anything that intimate—they really had just been kissing, and he’s definitely seen his friends kiss other people before. Lucas and Max had been together long enough that he’s seen them do so plenty of times, and—well, it was really just them. But he’s seen people kiss before. It’s kissing. It’s not a big deal.

But still, something about it is different. It’s Will. And Will making out with someone else is…weird. Strange. It’s the oddest feeling that he can’t quite place, because—because it shouldn’t feel like anything, because his best friend finally finding someone shouldn’t affect him like this. He shouldn’t feel anything but happiness that Will is having success in the relationship department. That’s great for him. Really. Seriously. Mike can’t imagine anything better. 

Which doesn’t explain why his skin feels too tight for his body, squeezing him down until he’s ready to burst. It’s a horrible, aching sensation that spreads from his chest down to his fingertips, and it’s angry and raw and sickening and he can’t stand himself for it. It’s ridiculous of him to feel this sort of way about Will of all people, whose only crime was being conspicuous about his…escapades. Even thinking about it feels wrong, intrusive, and he knows he’s an awful person for thinking about the way Will had leaned over him, the way his hands had grasped his chin and—

Nausea rolls through him in waves, which is for sure an entirely too dramatic response to all of this. It feels almost like it did, years and years ago, when he’d been beating himself up over what he’d said that day in the rain. That sickening slithering in this gut, twisting it’s way up into this throat. He’d attributed it to guilt back then, but that didn’t make sense now. He hadn’t done anything wrong, and Will hadn’t done anything wrong, and there was no reason for anyone to feel guilty. Maybe he should have knocked? Well, no, he lives here. But maybe he should have tried his key in the lock, anyway, or made enough noise as a warning.

Or maybe they shouldn’t have been out in the living room. Sure, he gets it, he wasn’t supposed to see, but really. He lives here too. They could at least have the decency to be a little more discreet.

Either way, none of it stops the churning in his stomach. The image of them kissing flashes through his mind, and it rushes over him again, hot and horrible. 

He punches that feeling down, over and over, until it settles into something quieter, though not quite extinguished. He’s not going to ruin this for Will. Not anymore than he already has, at least.

He throws himself face down on the bed, and tries and fails to think about anything else. 

The next few weeks pass in a blur stained by the presence of Danny. 

Maybe that isn’t fair, all things considered. He actually barely sees Danny at all outside of The Incident, a memory he’s shoved into the furthest reaches of his mind but keeps creeping out, slinking into the forefront of his thoughts like a predator on the prowl. But still, he’s there, even if he isn’t present. He hears Will talking on the phone—laughing, even—way more often than he had before, cutting into times he’d usually spend hanging out with Mike. Will had even almost missed the new episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation last week, and probably would have, if Mike hadn’t reminded him three times to hang up. 

And last Wednesday, he’d blown off their standing study date to work with Danny, instead. “We’re both doing the same subject for our still life,” he explained, looking apologetic.

To which Mike replied, “Cool,” and immediately left the room.

He really tries not to hate Danny. He barely knows the guy, and besides, Will is the happiest he’s been in ages, giddy and bright, almost reminiscent of a younger Will, from before their lives went to shit. It’s genuinely nice to see him like this, even if it comes with the provision of having to tolerate this random man uprooting their routine.

“Oh, I forgot to tell you,” Will says one evening as they flit around the kitchen, preparing an intricate meal of spaghetti and canned tomato sauce. “Megan thinks you’re cute.”

Mike stops stirring the pasta, turning to look at him. “Megan?”

“Yeah, my friend Megan? She’s got short black hair? You met at the party.”

“Oh, right,” he mutters, turning back to the stove. “Megan.”

“Yeah, she said you two talked for a while,” he continues.

“Yeah, no, I remember.”

Despite everything seeming to fall into place for Will, Mike can’t claim the same luck. His classes were only getting harder—and by harder, he means stupider, because it’s getting harder and harder to care about any of them. On top of that, he’s just so fucking exhausted all of the time, barely dragging himself out of bed to get to class and fighting to stay awake once he’s there. 

And whenever he’s home, around Will, he has to be reminded that Danny exists.

“Well?” Will says, snapping him out of his thoughts.

“Well, what?” He takes the pot of pasta over to the sink to drain it.

“She thinks you’re cute!” he repeats, nudging him in the side with his elbow.

“Yeah. Yeah, that’s cool.”

“Okay,” Will says, looking at him with concern. “I mean, I was gonna offer to set you up, but…I guess you’re not interested?”

“Sorry,” he says, shaking his head. He returns to the stove, grabbing the warmed sauce and dumping it over the spaghetti. “I’m just still thinking about class.”

“Everything okay?” he asks, grabbing bowls from the cabinet.

“Yeah,” he says, sighing. “I think I want to drop out.”

“What?” Will stops, forks half out of the drawer as he turns to look at him.

“Okay, not really.” Will relaxes, shutting the silverware drawer. “But I want to change my major, I think.”

“To what?”

“Anything. I don’t know.”

They take their dinner over to the sofa, still in need of an actual dining table in their apartment. As soon as Will settles in on his side, he turns to look at Mike with an odd determination.

“I always thought it was kinda weird you went with business,” he starts.

“I don’t know.” Mike shrugs, because it is weird that he went with business. “My dad convinced me it was a good idea somehow.”

“I get it. But you’ve wanted to be an author since forever. We were gonna make comic books together, remember?”

He can’t help but smile. The comic book dream dated back to their elementary school days, but it hadn’t ever truly faded, and they'd joked about it even through the apocalypse, citing the Upside Down as fantastic inspiration for a story. “I remember.”

“Well, I’m holding up my end of the bargain,” Will says pointedly, and even though he’s joking, Mike doesn’t miss the implication.

“Do you really think it’s worth it, though?” He twirls his fork in the spaghetti, circle after circle, but makes no move to take a bite. “I mean, not a lot of English majors really make it, you know? Like, what if I switch, and go through all of this to get a degree, and then I still can’t find a job?”

“Well, it’s the same for art majors. I don’t know that I will have a job after this. But I know I’d drop out of school before I was able to get a business degree.”

“Yeah, but, you’re—” He waves his hand vaguely in Will’s direction, as though this explained everything. 

“Used to being poor?” Will tries, raising an eyebrow.

“No!” he yelps, gaping at him. Will fights a wicked smile and shoves a bite of pasta into his mouth. “I meant you’re, like, an amazing artist. And of course you’re gonna find a job, because anyone that doesn’t hire you is objectively stupid.”

Will looks posed to argue, and Mike prepares himself to combat the self-deprecation he knows is coming, but Will quiets himself. “Thank you,” he says after a moment. “But you’re also an amazing writer. All the campaigns you’ve done, all the stories you’ve written—I mean, they’re incredible. You could easily be a famous author. If anyone could, it’s you.”

“I don’t know. You don’t need an English or creative writing degree to write a book, you know?” He takes a bite, giving himself time to think. “Like, if I could stick it out and get a business degree, then I’m basically guaranteed a job somewhere. Maybe not a job I love, but a job that will keep me alive. I could always keep writing as a hobby.”

“That’s true. But can you keep doing business for the rest of your life?”

This is probably supposed to be serious, but the way he says it just sounds funny. “‘Doing business’,” he snickers. 

“Shut up. You know what I mean.”

He does, and he knows he’s deflecting. “I don’t know. It’s a safety net.”

“Yeah, but you hate it.”

“Yeah.”

“A safety net at the cost of your happiness? For the rest of your life?” Will asks, watching him with careful eyes.

Mike can’t meet them. He stares back down at his bowl, twirling again. “Yeah, I know, but what happens when I fail? When I get out of college and there's no one hiring English majors? I’m gonna be really grateful I have it then.”

“Until you have to spend the rest of your life doing business.” They share a short laugh, but Will’s face falls to one more serious. “It’s scary, I know. And, I mean, it doesn’t have to be English, either. There’s more than two options here. But if you’re not happy, better to do something about it now than finish your degree and realize you made a mistake.”

“Yeah, you’re right.”

“We’re too late in the semester to do anything about it right this second, anyway. You have time to think about it.”

“Yeah.” He really should have talked to Will weeks ago. He hasn’t made a decision, hasn’t really gotten anywhere towards solving his problem, but still, having it laid out like that seemed to take a huge weight off of his shoulders, and he feels lighter than he has in a while. “Thanks, Will.”

“No problem,” he says as he stands, taking his bowl back over to the sink. 

Mike smiles at him as he goes. “How did you end up the most well-adjusted out of all of us, anyway?”

He shrugs. “Probably all the government-mandated therapy I had to go through.”

“Oh, is that all?”

“You should try it sometime!” Will calls from around the corner. 

“What, getting put on a government list?”

He pokes his head back into the living room. “You’re already on a government list. Like, several, actually.”

Mike laughs, sinking back into the couch. “And yet I still can’t pick a major.”

He comes home later than usual one Monday, having stopped by the grocery store located incredibly inconveniently on the other side of campus. What he doesn’t expect to find is Danny grabbing a glass of water at their sink, Will nowhere in sight. Already drained from a long day, he can’t imagine anything more aggravating than this.

“Hi,” Mike says pointedly, bags balanced precariously in his arms. Danny gets the hint and jumps away from the counter.

“Hey!” he says with a half-wave. “Matt, right?”

He wants him dead. “Mike,” he corrects, voice clipped.

“Mike, shit, sorry. I’m the worst with names. How’ve you been, man?”

“Fine,” he says, beginning to unpack. “Good. Great, actually.”

There’s a pause, just slightly too long, and then, “Cool, man, glad to hear it.”

“Where’s Will?” he asks, not turning to face him.

“He’s just getting changed,” Danny says, nodding his head towards Will’s room. “We’re meeting up with some friends for dinner.”

“Awesome.”

Mike busies himself with the groceries, doing his best to ignore Danny’s presence. Only a minute passes before he has to break the silence, voice grating against Mike’s ear. 

“So, you and Will,” he starts, leaning against the wall. “How do you two know each other?”

“We grew up together. We’ve been best friends since kindergarten.”

“Oh, really? That’s sweet.” But he says it the way someone might say quaint, where it’s supposed to sound nice but really just sounds like they couldn’t imagine anything more embarrassing. “So, did you transfer here this year, then?”

“What?” Mike says, bending down to place a couple things into the fridge. “No, I went here last year, too.”

“Oh,” he says with a thoughtful frown. “I guess I just assumed. Will never really mentioned you before.”

“Yeah, well,” he drawls, no longer bothering to hide his contempt, “I’m here.”

The atmosphere changes in sharp contrast. Gone is Danny’s easy going demeanor, and he stands up straight. “Everything okay, man?” he asks, eyebrows drawn together. “You seem kinda angry.”

“I’m not angry,” Mike says angrily. 

“Right, sorry,” he says, holding his hands up in mock surrender. “Not my place.”

Mike doesn’t care enough to respond, slamming the fridge shut. Out of the corner of his eye, he can see Danny wince.

“Look, man,” he tries again, voice softer than before, “if I said something weird, I’m s—”

“No, man,” he spits, cutting him off. “Everything’s fine.”

“Cool,” Danny says, but his eyes move over to where Will now stands in his open doorway. “Hey, I’ll see you tonight, okay?”

Will gives him a long, indecipherable look before nodding. Bile rises in Mike’s throat. He swallows it down. 

Danny makes a quick exit after that, and the second the door shuts, Will rounds on him.

“What the hell is wrong with you?” he snaps, arms splayed in exasperation.

“With me?” Mike gapes at him. “He—he was—”

“He was what, Mike?”

“He was being a dick!”

“How?”

“He kept—you didn’t hear the way he spoke to me, Will, he’s such a smug little shit. You should’ve heard him!”

“Mike, my room is five feet away from the kitchen. I could hear everything! Danny was having a normal conversation, and you were being a total asshole.”

“I wasn’t—”

“You were. Why?”

“I don’t—” he splutters, searching for an answer. “I wasn’t.”

Will takes a long, slow breath. When he speaks, his voice is controlled. “Look, I’m sorry if you had a shitty day, or you’re upset about something else, but you don’t get to act like that towards anyone, especially my friends.”

He lets out a derisive snort. “Friend. Right.”

“Holy shit.” It comes out so small, almost a whisper, and Will looks directly at him, mouth agape. “This is about Danny being a guy, isn’t it?”

Mike blinks, completely lost. “What? N-no, that’s not—”

But Will’s expression has shifted into something that Mike has never seen before, eyes narrowed and unforgiving. He’s seen Will scared, upset, hurt, and angry. He’s seen Will possessed. But he’s never seen Will look at him so coldly, lips a thin, harsh line. “Yes, it is. You’ve hated Danny from the start. At the party. You were a dick to him then, when you pulled me away. You’d never even talked to him. You just saw us flirting.” 

Mike doesn’t mean to flinch at the word, he really doesn’t, but something about it feels like being smacked across the face. “What?” Will laughs, merciless. “That’s what we were doing. We were hitting on each other. Because we’re gay, Michael.”

“That’s not—I don’t—”

Will lets out a tiny, incredulous laugh. “You know, I did my best to keep you out of all of it. You wanna know why I never introduced you to my friends last year? For exactly this reason. I didn’t want you having a heart attack every time someone so much as mentioned the word gay. Or, worse, have a fucking meltdown and attack one of them for no reason.”

There’s a ringing in his ears, and his words feel heavy in his mouth. He knew, he knew there was a reason. He knew that something had been keeping Will away all these months. But he’d never expected this, this apparent taint on him that made him—made him what, exactly? “That’s not—Will, that’s not what this is about, I swear.”

“So what’s it about, then?”

He needs to say something. He needs to say something. “I—I don’t—”

“You don’t know?” Will supplies with another fake laugh. “So you just decided to be a dick to him for fun? You barely know him. The only thing you actually do know is that he’s gay.” 

This is ridiculous. How did they get to this? Danny comes into his kitchen, acting like a dickhead, and Mike’s the one getting yelled at for it? “This isn’t about your stupid boyfriend,” he snaps back, frustration boiling over. 

“He’s not even my—whatever! What is it about, then, Mike?”

He’s falling, grabbing onto every foothold and cliff edge he can reach on the way down. “I mean, not for nothing, I live here, you know. I don’t exactly enjoy walking in on you two making out, or god knows what else—”

Will rolls his eyes. “Oh, right. Like I haven’t seen you make out with my fucking sister a thousand times.”

“What does that have to do with anything?”

“What does me making out with Danny have to do with anything?”

“I don’t care what you do, Will, I just don’t want to be forced to watch.”

“And that’s why you decided to have a gigantic stick up your ass today? Because you saw us kiss weeks ago? How can you possibly expect me to believe that?”

“No, I’m mad there’s some random man walking around my apartment and flaunting all the things he does to you!” Of all the wrong things he’s said in the last ten minutes, this is clearly the wrongest, if the way Will’s expression drops is any indicator. 

“Flaunting what?” His voice cracks, and he stares at Mike, open-mouthed. “He asked how we met, Mike. What the fuck are you talking about?”

“No, I’m talking about everything he was implying about being here.”

“Which is what, exactly?”

He doesn’t have an answer. Fuck, he doesn’t have an answer. All of this fighting, everything he’s mad about, and he can’t even come up with the words for why.

“Okay,” Will says, moving from the counter towards his door. “Great talk. So glad we cleared that up.”

He marches into his room and doesn’t bother shutting the door. Mike can’t see him, but he’s certainly doing something, clothes shuffling and drawers slamming every few seconds. 

He should say something. He needs to say something, anything. He needs to fix this. 

Will reappears just a few moments later with a bag over his shoulder. He shoots him another icy glare, opens his mouth to say something, but his lips quiver and he closes them again, frowning. He tries two more times, anger melting into hurt, before he finally manages to speak in a voice barely above a whisper. “You would never treat Lucas or Dustin like this.”

Something about those words, the pitiful expression he wears when he says it, shoots Mike right through the heart. It’s true. He knows it’s true. He knows it’s different, but he can’t explain why, so he can’t speak at all. A half-thought crosses his mind, and he considers just reaching out and hugging Will, apologizing, brushing his tears out of his eyes.

He doesn’t move.

When Will realizes he isn’t getting an answer, he straightens his back, gaze cold as he adjusts his bag. “I’m going to Danny’s. Let me know when you decide to stop being the biggest asshole in the entire world.”

Mike swallows. He doesn’t know how he manages to speak. “You do whatever you want.”

“Great,” Will says, stopping with his hand on the doorknob and turning back over his shoulder to meet Mike’s eyes. “So you’re okay with me doing whatever I want with Danny, so long as it’s at his place and not here, right?”

He stares at him for a long, breathless moment. “Of course.”

The door slams, and Mike collapses against the wall. 

Chapter Text

Everything is fucked.

Will avoids him for a week with ease. Perhaps the worst part of having such a set routine together is that Will knows exactly how to maneuver around him, making sure they never see each other. He skips their dinners and walks across campus and study sessions, and Mike tries very hard to pretend this does not hurt.

He must come back to the apartment at some point, because Mike returns from class one day to find Will’s bedroom door firmly shut where it had once hung open, a taunting reminder of their fight. He hovers by the door for a moment before knocking gently, but there’s no noise on the other side, and he knows Will wouldn’t have taken the chance of running into him, anyway.

The loneliness of the past week begins to creep up on him, and spending another evening alone in their dimly lit apartment fills Mike with that same, gaping ache in his chest that he’s come to know so well in the past year. He wishes, not for the first time, that he had another member of the Party here with him—or, perhaps, another friend in general. Though he couldn’t really imagine trying to explain this situation to someone, even if he wanted to, he didn’t have a single other person on campus that he could talk to about this.

It’s embarrassing, maybe. Definitely pathetic. Despite being a self-proclaimed loser, embracing the title with pride throughout his grade school years, he’d never truly been alone. He’d always had someone, Dustin or Lucas or Max or Will, to keep him company, and now, with the last one of them ripped from his side, he can safely say with confidence: it fucking sucks.

The actual worst part of their routine is that Mike can now feel Will’s absence in every second of every day.

He probably shouldn’t have gotten so angry. Mike is a mature adult, he can admit that much. Will never liked conflict, and maybe it wasn’t fair of him to get so upset. But then again, Will’s the one who actually got mad first, raising his voice and accusing him of all these different, outlandish things. Of course he’s going to defend himself. So really, who is Will to be so upset with him?

It isn’t fair.

It’s not like Mike really did anything, after all. Okay, fine, he was kind of rude to Danny, but whatever. Danny was a douchebag in the first place. And besides, none of this would have been an issue if Will had just—if Will wasn’t—

Because Will would do all these things, little stupid things that shouldn’t mean anything, but for some reason they just did. The way he tucked his head onto Mike’s shoulder while they watched the movie. The coy smile he’d sent him when he pretended to ask him to coffee. The way he’d stared, heavy and focused through a haze of alcohol, as Mike rubbed at his lip.

And then, after all of that, he goes and makes out with Danny? Why—?

Why does this make him so mad?

It’s so stupid. There’s no reason Will can’t have a boyfriend—well, not a boyfriend, like he said. But, well, whatever he has with Danny. It hits him that he doesn’t actually know the nature of their relationship. He thinks about it for just a moment, trying to compile the information he does have into an answer, before deciding he’s much happier not knowing.

But whatever he has going on with Danny. he’s allowed to have that. Of course he is. That doesn’t have anything to do with their friendship.

There’s an obvious answer dangling just in front of him, and he knows it, and he’s doing everything in his power to avoid it. He knows what this means. He’s seen it coming for years.

Maybe it’s to be expected. After all, look at how he was raised, the town he grew up in, the news Dad would watch after dinner. Look at his peers, look at everything happening in the world, the AIDS crisis, the fucking president. He gets that heady, sickening feeling running through him again, and it fills him with dread.

Of course he would be homophobic. It’s the only explanation.

He’d tried so hard to fight it for so long. Even before Will had come out, he’d decided he didn’t agree with his parents on this. He really couldn’t see the harm in two men being in love. So what? Sure, maybe it was a little uncomfortable to look at, and he’d get that weird feeling in his stomach whenever he thought about it too much, but that shouldn’t matter. It didn’t affect him, so he didn’t care.

And…he doesn’t care. Not really, at least. He knows Robin and her girlfriend, and he’s never felt anything like this towards them. In fact, he loves seeing them together; they’re nice and they’re funny and he actually really likes it when Robin teases him and ruffles his hair. And nothing about being around them makes him want to throw up.

Jesus Christ. Is this really what it is? Has he just been walking around a secret homophobe this entire time, hiding that fact even from himself? Then again, he couldn’t have been that good at hiding it. Will didn’t seem surprised at all. He’d expected it, even, had made plans for it, kept him from meeting his friends to avoid an incident just like he’d caused. Does everyone else know? Is it that obvious?

His thoughts swirl in circles for days, repeating themselves over and over until he wants to tear his hair out. He gets nowhere, reaches no conclusion, and nothing happens except he drives himself crazy, his nerves spinning into overdrive as he tries to puzzle this out. He goes to his classes and learns nothing, and sits at home and waits for the door to open. It never does.

And on top of it all, along with all of the guilt and confusion and stress and anxiety, nothing stops him from being angry.

Every time his thoughts land back on Will, his chest burns in that horrible, infuriating way, and he hates himself for it. It’s wrong, and he knows it’s wrong, but he’s just so frustrated, and he can’t even figure out why.

He needs someone smarter than him.

“Hey, Lucas, how’s it going?” he says, twirling the phone cord around his finger.

“Not bad. Me and Max are about to make dinner. We’re having a night in. You?” There’s something so calming in the familiarity of Lucas’s voice. It’s been a few weeks since they last spoke, but somehow Mike feels like no time has passed at all.

“Oh, yeah, yeah, I’m good. Um, yeah, just wanted to catch up. See how you guys were doing. Anything new?” He doesn’t mean for his voice to come out breathless and panicked like that. It just sort of happens.

“Uh, you okay, man? You seem, like, really freaked out.”

“Yeah, I’m fine. I’m fine. I just, uh. Have you talked to Will lately?” Yep. Good. That seemed casual.

“Not since last week. Why? Is everything okay? Did something happen?”

The way Lucas’s voice quickens with alarm makes Mike’s heart sink. “No, no, he’s fine. I mean, sort of. It’s nothing like that, don’t worry.”

“The more you talk, the more I’m starting to worry. What’s going on?”

“Nothing, nothing. Just, uh, we had a fight.”

Lucas waits a beat for him to elaborate, but Mike can’t find the words to continue. “Okay? Roommates fight.”

“Right. Yeah, no, they do. Roommates definitely fight.”

“Alright,” Lucas says, sounding a little annoyed. “What is going on?”

“Um, okay. So, it’s just that—I mean, it’s not even that big of a deal, it’s just, like—”

“Mike.”

“I walked in on Will making out with another guy and now everything’s weird,” he spits out in a rush.

Lucas takes a moment to consider this. “What do you mean, weird?”

“Like, I don’t know, weird! It was weird to see! It was just…weird.”

“What, he won’t talk to you or something?”

“No! Well, yeah, but no.”

“Jesus Christ, Mike, just tell me what happened.”

“Okay, so I came home from class early, which is why he wasn’t expecting me, and he was like, super embarrassed about it. And I mean, so was I. He just kept apologizing, and I told him it was fine, because it was.”

“Okay, so how did that lead to a fight?”

“Because it was fine, but then he brought that guy over again. Danny. And he was just, like, in our kitchen. And he kept trying to talk to me. And he finally got weird and left and then all of a sudden, Will starts yelling at me and telling me that I’m a dick. But it’s like, fucking Danny was being a dick, but every time I tried to tell Will that, he just got angrier.”

“Well, what was Danny doing?”

“He was just in our kitchen. But like, smirking, you know? Just being a dick.”

“What did he say?”

“Well, he didn’t, like, say anything bad, really. But you could just tell he was being a dick, you know?”

“I really…don’t know.”

“Yes, you do. You know when someone has, like, a douchiness about them. When you just know they’re a dick.”

Lucas takes a long moment to process this. “Hey, Mike?”

“Yeah?”

“Did you yell at Will’s boyfriend for no reason?”

Mike splutters, outraged. “It wasn’t for no reason! And he’s not his boyfriend!”

”But Will was mad at you,” Lucas continues. “Did he hear the whole thing? And was he mad at Danny?”

“Yes, and yes, and no.”

“Okay, then it sounds like you yelled at him for no reason.”

He scoffs. “What, so you’re on Will’s side? I thought you hadn’t even talked to him!”

“I haven’t! I just know that I can count on one hand the amount of times Will’s actually gotten angry with someone, and he’s always been justified. So if he’s actually mad at you, it’s probably for a reason.”

“Gee, thanks,” he grumbles. “So glad I called you.”

“Mike. Do you think there’s a chance you could have overreacted?”

He resists the urge to say something stupid, like I don’t need you to tell me that. Instead, he deflates, too exhausted to be angry at Lucas as well. “I don’t know. Will thinks it’s because he’s gay.”

“Is it?”

“I don’t know! I don’t think so. I mean, before all of this, I didn’t think I would have cared.” He groans, running a hand through his hair in frustration. “I don’t know. I don’t even know why I’m telling you. I just feel like shit about it.”

“I mean,” Lucas starts, sounding a little exasperated, “we know he’s gay, dude. You knew that going in! I’m just not sure what you expected.”

“I don’t know! I’m okay with him being gay. I mean, I thought I was okay with it. And I am, like, in theory. It’s just that suddenly, I don’t know, I’m not.” He huffs, slumping back against the wall. “I think I’m a homophobe.”

A long silence is his only answer.

“Lucas!”

“Look, Mike, I don’t think that’s it. I don’t think that’s what’s going on here. Not really.”

Mike frowns at that. “What do you mean, not really?”

“I mean when you were twelve, you tried to fist fight Troy Walsh because he called Will a fairy. And you’ve seen Robin and Vickie together all the time, and that’s never bothered you, has it?”

“No, I know, but—”

“Mike, you’re a lot of things, and one of those things is a very supportive friend. Especially to Will.”

“Yeah, but, I mean—I did freak out on him. And seeing him with Danny…it made me feel sick,” he whispers, ashamed of himself. “What if I am a homophobe?”

“Okay, you know it’s not, like, a condition, right?” he asks, and Mike does everything in his power to bite back a retort. “If you think you’re a homophobe, you can always…stop being one.”

“Yeah, but—” He cuts himself off, frowning, unsure of how to explain it any better.

“You’re obviously upset about something,” Lucas tries, saving him, “but I don’t think it’s about him being gay.”

“Okay, what do you think I’m upset about?”

“I don’t know, exactly, but—” Lucas stops, and he seems to be considering his words with care. “Well, you hate change. And you always get upset whenever Will gets distant. Maybe you’re just worried that you’ll lose the balance the two of you have.”

“I…guess. That does make sense.” And it does, sort of. But still, he can’t imagine feeling this level of anger over the idea of Will slacking as a roommate. He definitely does not feel like explaining that to Lucas, though.

In the background, he hears Max’s distant voice grabbing Lucas’s attention. “Is that Mike?”

“Yeah,” Lucas responds, sounding muffled as he moves the receiver away from his mouth.

“He’s still alive?”

“Somehow.”

“What’s he want?”

“He saw Will kissing another guy and he can’t figure out why he’s upset by it.”

“Oh my God. Can you tell him he’s an idiot? Tell him ‘Max says you’re an idiot’. I want him to know.”

Lucas’s voice returns to full volume. “Max says she misses you.”

“Hey!”

“She says she hopes classes are going well, and that we should come visit soon.” There’s a grin in his words, and the familiarity of it makes Mike realize how much he missed the both of them, although that does little to ease his frustration.

“That is not true! Stop slandering my good name!”

“Tell Max to go fuck herself,” he shoots back.

“Mike says thank you, and he misses you too, babe.”

“Tell him to choke.”

“Max says she really hopes you have a good day! And to tell Will she says hi!”

“Wait, actually tell Will I said hi. I miss him.”

“Um, can you actually tell Will she says hi?”

“No,” he groans. “Can you two fuck off?”

The other end of the line bursts with laughter, and he rolls his eyes, though he can’t find it in him to truly be upset.

“I love how well you two get along,” Lucas says as he comes back to the phone, sounding fond.

“Yeah, as happy as I am to be an unwilling participant in your relationship, can we get back to mine?”

“Your relationship?” he says, a teasing lilt to his tone.

“A friendship is a relationship, Lucas, stop being annoying. You know what I mean.”

“Do you know what you mean?”

“Alright, what? What the fuck are you trying to say?”

That seems to stop him in his tracks, and the line is silent for a moment before Lucas finally sighs and says, “I’m really not sure I’m the person to help with this.”

“What?” he asks. “Why?”

“Just…feels a bit outside my wheelhouse, you know?”

“No, I don’t,” Mike says, that familiar frustration beginning to bubble up inside of him. “You’re friends with both of us. Since first grade! I called you first for a reason.”

“Right, I get that, but—”

“But what? You’re our oldest friend and you’re not even gonna help me?”

“Okay, relax,” he snaps, matching Mike’s attitude, before taking a deep breath and continuing in a calmer voice. “If you’re worried about your friendship with Will, then you need to talk to Will, because I can’t fix that for you. What I can tell you is all you have to do is apologize, because Will will forgive you in two seconds, because he always does. But your other issue? Where you’re angry with him for having a boyfriend? I can’t help with that.”

“He’s not his boyfriend. That’s what Will said.”

He hears Lucas sigh for possibly the thousandth time. “Right. Yeah. I cannot help with this.”

“I can!”

“Max, no! Stop! This is not your discussion—”

“Just give it here, Lucas! I’m helping.” The sounds of them scrabbling for the phone continue for a few moments until Max’s voice appears right in his ear. “Hey, Wheeler! You’re dumb as fuck.”

He heaves a heavy sigh. “Hi, Max.”

“You’re jealous and you need to deal with that instead of interrupting my boyfriend during our date night.”

He furrows his brow, completely lost as to where she was going with this. “What? I’m not jealous. Stop being stupid.” But something about her words sends dangerous prickles down his spine, a chilling rush of warning. He doesn’t want to continue this conversation. He does not want to know what she’s thinking.

“Give it back, Max, I swear—Hey. Sorry about that.”

“How did you lose a fight to a blind girl?” Mike asks instead, desperate to make sure that discussion does not continue.

“Oh, right, because you would’ve won,” he says without any bite. “Look, Mike, I love you, man, but I gotta go. Um, maybe try talking to Nancy? I feel like she’d be more help.”

“Wait, Lucas, c’mon.”

“Sorry. We’ll talk later, okay?”

“‘Kay. Bye. Enjoy your date night.”

The line goes dead, and once again, Mike is alone in his apartment. He lets out a long, slow exhale, places the phone back in its holder, and ignores the stupid, bitter voice in his ear that whispers Will never would’ve hung up on you like that.

But Lucas has a life outside of him and his problems, and so does Will, and so do Dustin and Max and El and the rest of his rapidly shrinking number of friends. He flops down onto the sofa, reaches for the remote, and settles in for a long night with perhaps the last person left who still cares about him.

Talking with Lucas doesn’t exactly solve anything, but it does help get his head back on straight. The thoughts that had been storming in his mind, swirling in an unfocused, unintelligible rage, finally settle into something more manageable, and he walks away with two conclusions.

The first is that he may have overreacted. Slightly. Danny might be a smug asshole, and definitely not good enough for Will, but Mike probably shouldn’t have spoken to him like that. He really…didn’t do anything. At least, not anything that bad. And it’s very possible that Mike might have left that conversation looking like a humongous piece of shit.

The second conclusion is that he owes Will an apology. He’d known that from the start, had figured it out halfway through the argument itself, but he’d been fighting admitting it to himself. Regardless of what he’d said to Danny, what he’d said to Will was a thousand times worse, and he’d struck to kill, knowing him well enough to know exactly how to hurt him. He’d done it without thinking.

He doesn’t think he likes that part of himself very much.

After weighing the possibilities, he thinks Thursday is his best bet. Will is done with classes midday, while Mike isn’t supposed to finish until five. He blows off his afternoon classes to wait in the living room, shooting for the off chance that Will decides to return home.

He doesn’t know what else he’s supposed to do. The odds of Will confronting him are slim to none at this point, and if they don’t talk things out soon, they’ll spend the rest of the semester awkwardly dodging each other and never making up. But he doesn’t know where Danny lives, and he doesn’t know any of his friends’ numbers, and, short of stalking the art building trying to figure out where his classes are, he’s not sure how else to reach Will.

He sprawls out across the sofa, and, to assuage his guilt for skipping class, decides to get caught up on some of his work for the week. Around two hours pass of him staring at his textbook and retaining almost no information, straining his ears each time he hears the stairwell door slam or the sounds of someone walking through the hall.

Eventually, the telltale jingle of keys chimes right outside their door, and he sits up straight, heart suddenly pounding in his throat. He watches as Will pushes the door open and freezes, half in the hallway and half terrified.

“Will, hey! Oh, good, you’re alone.” Will’s eyebrows shoot upwards, and he stares at Mike, incredulous. “Wait, okay, wait, that is not what I meant, I swear. I know what that sounded like, but I swear I didn’t mean it like that. I just wanted a chance to talk to you, alone.”

Will stares at him for a long moment before sighing and entering the apartment fully, letting the door swing shut behind him. He places his backpack on the ground before looking back at Mike and making an unenthusiastic go ahead gesture with his arms.

It’s not exactly the reaction he’s hoping for, but he supposes he can work with it. He swallows, preparing himself, when he realizes he’s somehow managed to forget everything he rehearsed all day. A moment passes, then two, before he just decides to start talking and see where it takes him. “Listen. I’m really, really sorry about how I treated you and Danny the other day. I didn’t—I mean, I just—I don’t know! I don’t know, okay? I keep trying to figure it out, and I really don’t know why I was being such a dick. But I was. I was a huge dick, and Danny didn’t deserve it and you definitely didn’t deserve it and it’s not fair. But I’m just really, really, really sorry. And I hate that I fucked it up and now we’re, like, not even friends, which fucking sucks, because you’re my best friend and I hate this, I fucking hate this, and I know it’s my fault, and I just wanna know what to do make it better because I’m so fucking sorry.”

When Will entered the room, Mike had thought he was angry, expression tight and shoulders tense. But now, staring at him, Will just looks exhausted. He wears a controlled face forced neutral, with dark circles under his eyes and rumpled clothes. At the very least, this week has been just as bad for Will as it had for him.

He hates himself for thinking it as soon as it enters his mind. Of course it was worse for Will. He’s been under the impression that his best friend has secretly hated him this entire time, lying in wait to strike at his lowest.

Mike had been doing his best to hold onto his anger for the past week, gripping tighter every time it slipped from his reach, determined to blame someone or something else for the way he’d acted. But here, face to face with Will, it all melts away, evaporating into thin air, and he’s left only with the guilt he’d been desperate to bury. He should’ve known better. He’s never had a chance, not when it comes to Will.

Will doesn’t say anything. Mike doesn’t even know what he could say. He just stares at Mike, face blank.

“It’s not about you being gay,” Mike continues, desperate to get him to respond. “Or Danny. I know it wasn’t fair to either of you. And I get why you thought that. Seriously, I do. I—I know I haven’t always…been the best friend to you. And I know I’ve said things in the past that made you think that—” Fuck. Fuck. This is not the time to start crying, but he can’t seem to stop it, hot tears welling up in his eyes and threatening to spill if he says another word. He presses the palms of his hands to them, willing himself to stop.

“I’m sorry. I hate knowing that you’d even think that I care about you less because you’re gay. Or that I’d hate you because you’re gay. I don’t,” he says, insistent. If nothing else, he has to get this point across to him. Even if Will decides to hate him for the rest of his life, he needs to know. “I could never. I know I don’t always understand everything and I don’t always get it right. But you’re so important to me. You’re my best friend in the entire world. And ever since—for so long, I’ve felt like I was always on the brink of losing you. That you’re always one step away from walking out of my life forever. And I’m just so sick of losing you. I don’t wanna do it anymore. So, I’m sorry. And I’ll do whatever I need to do to make it right. I’m just sorry.”

Will’s voice is scratchy when he speaks, coming through like static on an old radio. “It’s fine, Mike.”

Mike had braced himself for a thousand different answers, from screams to tears to the end of their friendship. Despite Lucas’s flippant prediction, it had never actually occurred to him that Will would just…forgive him. “It’s not fine. What the fuck? You should be—I don’t know, yelling at me!”

Will looks more tired than he’s ever seen him. “I don’t want to yell.”

He draws his eyebrows together, frowning. “No, I want you to yell at me. All the stuff you said. I mean, it’s stuff you were thinking for years, right? But you never told me. I don’t want that again. I want you to yell at me.”

“Mike, I’m exhausted. I don’t want to yell.”

“And I don’t want you bottling stuff up.”

“Look, we can talk more about it later. Maybe when we’re both not so…emotional. But, seriously, I don’t want to yell.”

“I just…you should be mad.”

“Yeah, I should be.”

“But you’re not?”

“But I’m not. Anymore.”

“But you were?”

“Mike, you were being a huge douche. Of course I was.”

Mike nods, taking the insult without complaint. “You sure you don’t wanna try yelling?” he asks, lip quirking. “I really feel like it’ll help.”

He can see how hard Will tries to fight his smile, but it wins out in the end. “You’re so—”

“So?” he prompts, when Will doesn’t finish.

He shoots him a flat look. “Annoying.”

“Annoying…” he tries, testing the waters, “and forgiven?”

“Ugh. Yeah. Dickhead.” But there’s no venom in it.

Mike allows himself a small, victorious smile before becoming serious again. “Do you need me to talk to Danny? I owe him an apology, too.”

“I’m not sure he’ll wanna come over anytime soon, honestly.”

“Right. Yeah. Sorry.” Which should make him feel bad. And he does. Really. He’s very upset that Danny won’t be here any more. “Well, let him know, okay? I’ll talk to him if you need me to. If he wants me to jump off a cliff instead, I mean—”

“I’m sure we can figure something out.”

“A time to talk?”

“No, a cliff for you to jump off of.”

“Ouch.” Mike tries to sound upset, but even he can’t fight his chuckle. “It’s like you don’t even want part two of the apology.”

Will raises an intrigued eyebrow. “Part two?”

“C’mon,” he says, reaching for his jacket.

The french café on the far side of campus had opened last year to rave reviews and astronomical prices. Mike knew how much Will loved their fancy coffee and pastries, but also knew how seldom he could afford the extra expense. While Mike never bothered to make his way out here, since paying stupid prices for a drink he didn’t even enjoy felt counterintuitive, making the trip for Will only seemed fair.

He gets himself a hot chocolate and a chocolate croissant, while Will orders both a drink and a pastry that Mike can’t even begin to pronounce, and they slide in on opposite ends of a table outside. The weather’s just barely nice enough for them to do so, the last echoes of summer sun eking their way through the clouds.

They pick at their pastries and sip their drinks with no real rush, making occasional comments on passersby and the taste of their food. It’s not quite comfortable, sitting there with a thousand things still hanging between them, but it’s not quite awkward, either. Still, Mike knows they need to get back to their discussion, though it takes him several minutes to work his courage back up.

“I think I was scared,” he finally says. “Of losing you. I know it’s stupid. But you have so many friends here. And you have so many people that care about you. And it’s great. I mean it, you deserve it. I’m happy you found a place you fit in. I guess I was just used to it being us against the world, you know? And I guess I’m just used to being the person that knows you best. I think it freaked me out when I realized that wasn’t always gonna be the case. It was stupid, seriously, I know. I just don’t wanna lose you again.”

Will is looking at him with quiet, contemplative eyes. “You’re not gonna lose me, Mike.”

“I am, though. I mean, it’s stupid of me to get worked up about, but I am.” He tries not to sound bitter when he says it. “You are gonna find someone. You’re gonna get a boyfriend that loves you more than anything. And…I really do want that for you. I think you deserve it more than anyone. But eventually there’s gonna be someone out there that knows you better than me. And I think it’s just…hard to wrap my head around. That we’re really adults with separate lives.”

“You make it sound like we won’t even be friends anymore.”

“Of course we will. It’s not about that at all. Just…it’ll be different, is all.” He shrugs, ripping a piece of croissant but leaving it on the plate. “I don’t know how to explain it, but I freak out when people leave like that. Especially you. And it’s not your fault, and I know I shouldn’t have reacted like that, but…I don’t know. I’m always worried about losing you.”

Will sets his drink down. He takes a long time before he answers, and Mike watches as a handful of leaves scatter by, tossed by the wind. “I think that might be true for someone normal. But…I don’t know. I don’t know how I’m ever supposed to explain what happened to me back in Hawkins to someone. I don’t think they’d ever believe me. It’s not like I can prove it. I wouldn’t believe it if someone told me.” He places his chin into his palm, frowning. “I’ve thought about it a lot. I could probably come up with a story that sort of matches. Maybe I got kidnapped, or something. And it’d make enough sense to explain all of the nightmares and panic attacks and shit. But it doesn’t matter. No matter who I date, they’re never gonna understand.”

Will’s face, which had remained relatively neutral almost the entire time, is suddenly swept with a wave of sadness. He looks away, blinking away abrupt tears. Mike swirls his cup and pretends not to notice.

When he composes himself, he continues as though he’d never stopped. “The point is, yeah, if I fall in love, it’ll be different. And they’ll probably know a lot about me. But, I mean, we’ve literally been to hell and back together.” He pauses, debating the next line, before looking up at Mike and smiling. “No one’s ever gonna know me quite like you.”

Something in Mike’s lower belly twists at this. He can’t for the life of him figure out why.

“Guess you’re stuck with me, then,” he says, and shoots him a tentative smile.

Will meets it with his own. “Guess so.”

The silence between them is comfortable now, and Mike relaxes back into his chair. Their conversation turns back to easy things, the dog walking by and the rapidly changing weather, before it fades and they work on their pastries instead of chatting.

“I want to apologize,” Will says suddenly, setting his cup back down after a long sip.

Mike narrows his eyes at him. “No.”

Will blinks. “Um, yes?”

“No,” he repeats, huffing. “You don’t have anything to apologize for.”

“Yes, I do. What I said to you about my friends, and why I kept you from them. I said that to hurt you, and I’m sorry.”

“So, it didn’t have anything to do with me…?” he trails off, too embarrassed to finish the sentence.

“I know it makes you uncomfortable,” Will says in a tiny voice, twisting a sugar packet in his hands. “And I don’t want you to feel like that when we’re supposed to be having a good time. But my friends shouldn’t have to hide who they are. I shouldn’t have to.”

“I’m not uncomfortable with you being gay. I’m not,” he insists, when Will shoots him a flat, disbelieving look. “I mean, I know I can be—like, look, it’s not that—it’s just—I don’t mean to be—”

“Mike,” Will says with a soft smile, holding his hands out as if to say look at yourself!

“Okay, fine! I’m…uncomfortable with it. Sometimes. I don’t mean to be. I don’t want to be.” He slumps towards the table, catching his chin in his hands. Somehow, admitting it out loud feels like failure. “I like your friends. And what I did to Danny was wrong. And obviously, you’re, like the most important person in the world to me. But I just…I don’t know.”

“Well,” Will starts, sounding tight, “what about it makes you uncomfortable?”

Mike blinks. He’d spent so much time avoiding it, fighting off every passing notion about even the briefest concept of homosexuality, that it never occurred to him that he could just…think about it. “I’m not sure,” he says honestly. “I guess…maybe that I’ll say the wrong thing? I don’t know what, like, the rules are for this kind of stuff.”

Will lets out a small laugh. “There’s no rules.”

“Yeah, I know, but like, what if I say something stupid?”

“Mike,” Will says, looking at him with great concern, “you say stupid stuff to straight people all the time.”

“I—hey!”

“Sorry, sorry,” he manages between laughs.

“Whatever,” he snaps, but in truth, he’s happy Will’s feeling comfortable enough to tease him like this. “Look, I’ll figure it out, okay? Whatever it is that’s making me act like this, I’ll figure it out, and I’ll stop it. I’m…gonna be a better friend, okay?”

He watches him for a long moment before nodding, a small smile on his lips. “Okay.”

Mike takes a sip of his hot chocolate, frowning as he swirls it around. He doesn’t want to ask the next question, the implications of which had been bouncing around his head for the past week, but he’ll drive himself insane if he doesn’t get the answer. “Is this why you wouldn’t live with me last year?”

A guilty look crosses Will’s face, and he stares back down at his sugar packet. “I mean, a little. But I didn’t really know my friends back then, so it wasn’t that. Honestly, though, I was afraid that you didn’t want to live with me because I was gay.”

His chin ends up back in his palm, and he drums his fingers against the side of his mug. “And here I was, thinking we were so on the same page that we didn’t even need to talk about it.”

Will lets out a short laugh before becoming serious again. “I don’t know. I did want to live with you, but I was just worried, especially after we hadn’t talked about it. And I kept thinking about what would happen if I wanted to bring a guy over, or something, and I got scared.”

Mike begins to bristle, immediately defensive. “I wouldn’t have—” he starts, but stops himself as he remembers the events of the past week. “Okay. Maybe that’s fair.”

The resulting smile he gets from Will, warm and wry, is worth it. “I figured if some random roommate ended up hating me, I could live with it. But if we lived together and it ruined our friendship, I’d—” he cuts off with a frown.

“You really think I’d do that?” Mike asks, and he tries not to sound upset when he says it. “Stop being your friend because you’re gay?”

Will picks up on his tone anyway. “I-I hoped not. But I don’t know.”

There’s an insinuation there that rankles him. “Why would you even want to be friends with me if that’s what you thought?”

He gives a little shrug, looking down at the table. “I don’t know. I mean, it’s not like I have a lot of options. There’s a lot of people that do hate me for being gay. I didn’t want to lose you. And I figured if all I needed to do was not talk about it in front of you, that wasn’t such a bad trade.”

“Not a lot of options? Will, of the two of us, you’re the only one who actually made new friends here.”

“Yeah, but we just went over this,” Will says, waving an impatient hand. “They’re not you.”

A breath passes between them before Will seems to realize what he said. His eyes widen for a moment, and it looks like he’s about to take it back, but he hardens his mouth into a resolute line and refuses to say anything else.

That strange, fluttery feeling in his stomach starts up again, and he forces himself to look away, too confused and embarrassed and flushed to know how to respond.

“Well, I don’t want you to feel like that,” he finally manages when he remembers how to speak. “Like you have to hide part of yourself from me. That’s not fair, and—and I hate that you feel that way around me. A good friend wouldn’t treat you like that. I’m sorry. I want you to be able to talk to me about this kind of stuff, okay?”

Will raises a wary eyebrow. “Even if it makes you uncomfortable?”

“It’s not going to,” he replies, determined. “I’m gonna fix whatever’s making me act stupid, and I’m gonna be better. I promise.”

“Alright. Sure. That’d be cool.”

“Cool?” he asks, just to be sure.

“Cool,” Will says, eyes alight with something familiar, and it feels so much like a memory that Mike can’t bear to meet them.

“I really am glad you asked to be roommates,” Will continues a few moments later. “You’re so much better to live with than Thomas.” He speaks the name of his freshman roommate like a curse.

“Well, you’re ten times better than Paul, so we’re even.”

“Good. Let’s stop messing it up, then.”

“Deal.” Mike leans back in his chair, stretching his arms above his head. “Well, I think I said everything I needed to say. What about you? Any other secrets you want to share?”

Will looks at him for a long moment, a warm grin growing across his face that stops just short of his eyes. “None.”

They gather themselves up, tossing their last bits of trash on their way out of the café. Something comforting settles over him, the warm blanket of Will’s friendship finding its way back over his shoulders. He hadn’t even realized its absence, hadn’t realized exactly how anxious and upset he was about it, until it returned. He never wants to lose this again.

“By the way,” he says as they head back home, “Max says hi.”

Will is pacing.

It’s never a good sign. He only does this when he’s really anxious, typically around finals or when his mom takes too long to call him back. These days, he tends to be good about managing his stress, channeling it into his next art project or going on a cleaning spree of the whole apartment, but all of that seems to have gone out the window, and he barely acknowledges Mike when he comes home.

“What’s wrong?” Mike asks, dropping his backpack in his room and coming back out.

“It’s Tonya’s birthday.”

“Oh, that’s tonight? Aren’t you guys going to the movies?”

Will shakes his head, beginning another lap of the kitchen. “No, she changed her mind. We were supposed to, but then she heard about a haunted house not too far from here.”

“That sounds fun,” Mike says, but Will shoots him a look that clearly says he does not think it’s going to be fun. “You still gonna go?”

“I mean, I want to. Tonya’s been a really good friend to me, especially lately. And I already agreed to go to the movies, so it’s not like I can just say I’m busy. And, y’know, maybe I’ll have fun. And I’ll be mad at myself if I don’t go. But what if it triggers something? What if the costumes look too much like something from the Upside Down? Or if it’s just too dark and I panic because I’m pathetic? I don’t know what to do if I have an episode around my friends. They’re not gonna know what to do. But I can’t just live my whole life never doing anything just because I might have a freak out.” He says all of this in record timing, and Mike does not hear him take a single breath.

The pacing makes sense now, and it starts again immediately after Will finishes talking. He does another lap of the kitchen, wringing his hands raw.

“Okay, breathe. Do you want to go? Genuinely? Or do you just think you’ll feel bad if you don’t?”

Will thinks this over for a moment. “Yes,” he says, mouth set in a determined frown. “I want to go. It’s Tonya’s birthday, and I want to be there.”

“Alright. Do you want me to go with you?”

Will stops in his tracks, turning to look at Mike as though he’d never considered this before. “Would you want to?”

“Sure, I don’t mind,” he says with a shrug. “Would that help? I’ll know what to do if you have an episode.”

“Um, yeah. Yeah, that’d be good.” He allows himself one small, relaxed smile before it drops, and he turns back to Mike. “You know Danny’s gonna be there, right?”

“Relax, I’ll behave,” he says with a wave of his hand, though he can’t deny he’s not exactly looking forward to it. “Plus, I owe him an apology, so it’ll be good to see him.”

“Okay. You’re sure you don’t mind?”

“I’m sure.”

“Cool. Thank you.” He smiles again, and it’s still strained, but it almost looks genuine. “We gotta get ready, then. Megan’s driving, she’ll be here soon.” With that, he heads off towards his room.

“Megan, the one that thinks I’m cute?”

Will turns in his doorway, shooting him a flat look. “Yes, the one that thinks you’re cute.”

Mike tucks a smug little smile away, but only after making sure Will’s able to see and roll his eyes back.

Unfortunately, Megan does not make any comments about him being cute on the way there, but Mike does his best to engage her in conversation anyway. Though he’s been trying to avoid thinking too hard about anything she said, there’s always the chance that Max has a point. Maybe he is jealous. It’s been years now since he’s had a romantic relationship, and it’s possible that seeing Will and Danny happy together brought that irritation back to the forefront of his mind. He might just need to put himself out there, or whatever it is that his mom would say, and it’s worth a shot to see if there’s anything there.

He asks about her art, and she goes into a long explanation about a large watercolor piece she’s been working on for over a month now. It sounds interesting, and like she really knows what she’s talking about, explaining some of the finer details in terms even he can understand, but halfway through, his thoughts drift back to how their apartment still doesn’t have any art up on the walls. Has enough time passed since their fight that it wouldn’t be weird to bring it up to Will? It’s almost the end of October, and they’ve lived there for nearly two months. It’s bad enough they still don’t have a dining table and have to eat all of their meals on their sofa. The least they could do is decorate a little.

It’s also been a while since he’s seen any of Will’s artwork. Their week of avoiding each other non withstanding, he still has to turn in most of his work for a grade, meaning his professors would hang onto it for weeks at a time. He reminds himself to ask Will to show him some of his newer stuff when they get back home.

All things considered, they’ve been good. Mike had expected things to be tense between them, but after their discussion at the coffee shop, they fell right back into their routine as though they’d never left, making meals and studying together and talking about everything under the sun. Well, almost everything. Will still hasn’t mentioned Danny, bar confirming he’ll be there tonight, and it doesn’t seem like he’s been going out to see him too often, either. If they’re talking on the phone, it’s never when Mike is around. Despite what Mike told him about wanting to be more involved, he’s secretly a little glad Will isn’t cluing him in to all of this. Maybe they’ll get to that point eventually, but he’s okay with being kept in the dark for now.

By the time they arrive, Mike realizes he hasn’t heard anything Megan’s said in the last ten minutes, which is probably not a good sign for any romantic endeavors in their future. Still, he tells her how cool her painting sounds, and then walks next to Will to the ticket booth.

When Will had said haunted house, he’d expected a little local event, and figured the entire thing would probably take less than an hour, wait time included. However, as they get close, Mike realizes exactly how much he misjudged. It’s a whole thing, apparently. In addition to the house, there’s a haunted corn maze and hayride, as well as multiple concession booths and a handful of small bonfires for people to sit by while they wait. Will’s friends are gathered around one of them, and they head over to join the group.

“Hey, Tonya, happy birthday!” Will says as they approach, and she looks up, already grinning at the sound of his voice.

“Will!” she cheers, rushing to envelop him in a hug. “Oh, and Mike’s here!”

“Yeah, I hope you don’t mind.”

“No, no,” she says, waving a hand. “I said bring whoever. And any friend of yours…” She trails off, pursing her lips, before turning to Mike with the exact grin that his mom wears when she doesn’t like someone but doesn’t want them to know. “It’s great to see you again.”

So she knows about their fight, then. “Yeah, happy birthday,” he says, trying to sound warm.

He’s saved from a longer conversation by Ryan cracking his spine in two with a hug, and he says a quick hello to everyone he knows before stepping back a smidge, allowing them to chat without him getting in the way. A few minutes pass, and he listens without really remembering anything they say, focusing his gaze to the left and working himself up.

Danny sits on the other side of the bonfire, talking aimlessly with someone Mike doesn’t recognize. He waits until their discussion peters out and, after a few words of affirmation to himself, walks over to join him.

“Hey, Danny, how’s it going?” he says in a tragic attempt to sound casual.

Danny turns to face him, raising one cold eyebrow. “Not bad. You?”

“Good, good. Um, listen, about the other day.”

He holds up a hand to stop him. “It’s cool, man.”

“It’s really not,” Mike insists, shoving his hands in his pockets. “Listen, I was already having a bad day, and I came home and completely took it out on you, and that really, really wasn’t cool. You really didn’t do anything to deserve that, and I’m sorry.”

“It’s fine, really.”

“Look, Will’s my best friend, and all I want is for him to be happy. So I really don’t want anything I said to mess things up between you two, okay?

“Between me and Will? No, don’t worry about that,” he says in a breezy voice, waving a hand and staring off in the distance.

“Okay, cool,” Mike says, and he feels like he can exhale again. “I’ll see you around, then?”

“Sure, I’ll see you.”

Mike takes his hands out of his pockets and then shoves them back in, uncomfortable and unsure of what to do with himself. He drifts away from Danny towards the other side of the group, hovering near Will and Megan without wanting to get too involved in their conversation. Things between him and Danny definitely aren’t great, and, to be fair, he’s not sure they’ll ever be. Which is cool. Fine. Understandable. They don’t need to be best friends, they just need to tolerate each other, for Will’s sake. And Mike can do that.

They mill around for a while until the rest of Tonya’s friends arrive, and eventually make their way over to the line for the haunted house. Mike pulls Will to the side and whispers, “How do you wanna do this? Should we go in front?”

Will shakes his head. “Then if I have an episode, everyone behind us will see.”

“Back, then?” Will nods. “I’ll walk behind you, so you’re not exposed. And if you start to freak out, I’ll be able to tell. Just grab onto me if you’re worried. It’ll probably be too loud to really talk.”

“Got it.” He nods again. “Thanks, Mike.”

They make their way through the line, getting closer to the strobe lights and fog machines scattered across the outside of the house. Mike takes a deep breath, the familiar fusion of fear and excitement twisting its way through his stomach. He nudges Will, gets a nervous but reassuring smile back, and they enter.

It’s as dark as he expected, with only small, sparse areas lit with red or green lights. Up ahead, they hear distant screams of the groups before them, echoing through the hallways. He takes a deep, slow breath. Everything is fine. They’re good.

At the very back of the group, they’re saved from the brunt of most of the scares, with the actors choosing to pop out more towards the middle of their friends. It’s not until the second room that someone lunges at them from behind, causing Mike to shriek and Will to jump.

“Fucking zombies, are you kidding?”

He doesn’t even mean to say it out loud, but he hears Will laugh in response. Fuck this. It could have been anything, and it had to be fucking zombies.

It’s not that scary, really, but zombies jumping into his face isn’t exactly a peaceful way to spend the evening, either. They get him two more times, and one of them even grabs his shoulder, causing him to scream, “Motherfucker!”

Will turns around at this point and grabs onto Mike’s hand, dragging him away from the zombie he was absolutely about to fight. Okay, maybe not fight, but definitely start an argument with. Fuck this place. And fuck that zombie in particular.

“C’mon,” Will says, tugging him along. “We’re almost out.”

Mike looks down to where their fingers are laced together. They’d both been outside in the brisk October air for a while, and both of their hands were cold enough that this shouldn’t feel like anything. His fingers were practically numb before they entered, and—and there’s no reason why this should warm him so completely, shooting up his arm all the way to his face, his cheeks flaring red. It’s supposed to be the other way around, Mike protecting Will, but he really doesn’t mind this change of pace, allowing him to lug him along without complaint.

Another zombie jumps out at him. He doesn’t notice.

When they finally make it back outside, Mike’s heart is thrumming a thousand beats a minute. The zombies really must have gotten to him.

A minute passes before Will realizes their hands are still linked, and he unlaces their fingers, looking up at Mike. “Good?” he asks.

“Fuck haunted houses,” Mike says in reply.

“Fuck haunted houses,” he agrees, but he’s laughing when he says it.

“So stupid. Why would zombies be in an abandoned house, anyway? Shouldn't they be out looking for brains to eat, or something?”

“Well, they were trying to eat your brains,” Will points out helpfully.

“Whatever. It’s not logical.”

“Okay,” he says, still grinning. Mike’s heart does a weird little flip-flop that he’s pretty sure has nothing to do with the zombies. “This is what you get for watching Dead of Night way too young.”

“Nancy had it on! It’s not my fault,” he grumbles, which gets him nothing but another laugh.

“Thanks for keeping me safe,” Will says, and it’s mostly genuine, though there’s a lilt to his voice that he knows is meant to tease.

He raises his arms in a half-hearted shrug. “Any time.”

The group makes their way back over to the bonfire, chattering amongst themselves about the haunted house. They sit for a little, warming themselves against the chilly autumn evening, when someone suggests doing the haunted hayride next.

Will turns to look at Mike, who shakes his head immediately. “You go ahead. I’m good.”

“You sure? I’ll wait here with you.”

“No way,” he insists. “Go have fun.”

Only a handful of them stay behind, and Mike prepares himself to be bored for the next half hour or so when something ice cold touches his neck, and he nearly shoots out of his skin.

Ryan stands behind him, laughing and holding out a bottle of beer. “Here, man. You looked like you needed this.”

Mike accepts it gratefully, clinking his bottle with Ryan’s in thanks. They each take a sip, staring at the flame in front of them.

“So, you and Byers,” Ryan says, in such a casual way that Mike immediately recognizes there’s something off about it.

“Huh? What about us?” he says, trying and failing not to sound too defensive.

“Relax, man. I’m being sent on reconnaissance.”

“What?”

Ryan makes a blatant and unsubtle motion towards where Tonya stands in line for the ride, and she responds with a burning, withering stare.

He turns back to face Ryan, eyes narrowed in suspicion. “What do you know?”

“I know he was staying with me and my girlfriend for a week.”

“You?” Mike asks, surprised. “I thought he was staying with Danny.”

“A little. I know he saw Danny, but I also know they fought. So he slept at our place.”

“They fought? What about?”

“I mean…you,” Ryan says bluntly. Mike blinks at him, too stunned to remember to respond. “Look, I only got the secondhand version, so I don’t know all the details, but I think Danny said something about you being a dick, and Will…also thought you were a dick, but he didn’t like Danny calling you that.”

“I didn’t know that,” Mike mutters, more to himself than anyone else. His heart is pounding again, and he’s pretty sure it has nothing to do with the zombies this time.

“Yeah, he…cares about you a lot,” Ryan tries again, looking carefully at him. “Will’s a great guy, you know that?”

“Yeah, I know,” he says, trying not to sound too indignant. Of course he knows. He’s known since kindergarten. He knew before anyone else.

“Right, of course. I just think he’s the kind of kid that goes unappreciated a lot, you know? It’s easy for a nice guy like him to get trampled over. I know you guys are best friends and all, but I’d really hate to see what would happen if you hurt him like that again.”

Oh. Ryan is threatening him. It takes a second for it to click, but it does dawn on him eventually. He thinks he should be scared, considering Ryan is just as tall and three times as muscular as he is, but Mike is mostly just touched by how polite of a threat it is.

“Well, I’m not gonna do that again,” he says, looking directly at him, “so nothing to worry about.”

“Cool,” Ryan says, and he smiles approvingly before taking a swig of his beer. They’re silent for a few moments, staring at the bonfire, before he continues. “So, what’s the game plan?”

“What do you mean?”

“You and Byers? What’s the plan?”

Mike has absolutely no idea what’s going on. “No plan.”

“No plan,” Ryan repeats, mulling over the words like he’d never considered that a possibility before. “Is there gonna be a plan?”

“Plan for what?”

He shrugs. “For what’s next.”

“I—I already apologized. I’m only here because I already apologized. So we’re good. We’re friends again. Best friends.”

“Great. That’s great, man.” He looks like he wants to say more, but takes a long sip of his drink instead, tilting his head back to finish it off.

There’s something Mike is missing, and he knows it, but Ryan really isn’t giving him any hints here, either. Uncomfortable with the strange silence, he takes a drink as well, so he doesn’t have to talk.

“He likes champagne,” Ryan says suddenly.

“Huh?”

“Will. He really likes champagne. It was my roommate’s birthday when he was staying with us, and he tried it for the first time. He’s a big fan. I don’t know if he told you.”

“Uh, no. No, he didn’t tell me.”

Ryan studies him for a moment. “Well, just something to keep in mind. Maybe so you know for his birthday, or something.”

“His birthday’s not ‘til March.”

“Well, whatever. It’s just good to know, right?”

Sure. It’s always good to know the things that your friends like. “Right. Thanks, man.”

Ryan is still looking at him like he’s trying to figure him out, and Mike is too embarrassed to keep making eye contact, so he stares back at the fire and finishes his drink as well. They’re quiet for a little until Ryan brings up the training he’s doing with the baseball team, and Mike is content to listen to him until the rest of the group comes back.

Will and Danny fought. Are fighting? He’s not sure. He hasn’t seen them speak all night, and it seems his suspicions about them not talking much are correct. This information shouldn’t make him happy. It doesn’t. Will’s his best friend, and he wants Will to be happy, and if Danny makes him happy, then Mike is happy. But Danny isn’t making him happy, because he and Danny fought, which means he’s allowed to hate Danny. Right? That’s what friends do. Hate your shitty boyfriend when they’re mean to you. Well, not-boyfriend. Whatever. Are they done, then? Is their thing over? Is Mike a bad person for being happy about that? Is he just being homophobic again, cheering over the fact that he can ignore Will being gay easier? Does he care?

When the hayride rolls back around, he can see Will seated snug between both Tonya and Megan, with Danny several bales away. He really should feel bad about this, but he mainly just feels bad that he doesn’t feel bad.

Good, he thinks fiercely, glaring at Danny from a distance. He’s not yours.

Something about that sets off alarm bells in his brain, ringing bright and terrifying. There’s an implication there, and he knows it, knows what the rest of that statement is supposed to be, and—

He shoves that thought to the side as the rest of the group rejoins them, and he sits around the fire and shoots the shit and convinces himself not to revisit that idea. Will presses up against his side, smushed together on the cramped benches, and Mike knocks their knees together lightly and doesn’t think about it at all.

“Thanks again for coming,” Will says when they get back to the apartment, shucking their coats and shoes by the doorway. “I mean it. I know nothing happened, but I’m glad you were there.”

“Yeah, no problem. It was fun.”

“You’re not mad at me for making you deal with the zombies?”

Will’s nose is still pink from the cold, and Mike is having a hard time thinking about anything else. “Nah,” he says with a shrug. “But if I get nightmares tonight, I’m waking you up.”

“Sure. We can watch a movie. How’s Dawn of the Dead?

“I’ll pass,” Mike says dryly. “We don’t need a movie. I’m just gonna come snuggle.”

He means it as a joke. It sounds like a joke, light and airy, and he expects Will to laugh, to shove him in the side and call him a weirdo and tell him he’s keeping his door locked. What he doesn’t expect is Will’s cheeks to flush, a rosy pink blooming across his face and matching his nose. If he hadn’t seen it happen, he could have been convinced it was just the temperature.

A second too late, Will laughs and shrugs his shoulders, aiming for casual and somehow missing the mark. “Any time,” he says, heading towards his room, and it’s supposed to be a joke. He says it like a joke. It sounds like a joke.

It doesn’t feel like a joke.

It takes him a long time to fall asleep.

Chapter Text

Everything is okay.

They’re good. Fine. Great, even. Not only are they back to where they were before the fight, they’ve surpassed it, falling back into habits they haven’t had since they were preteens. Mike starts it tentatively one evening as they turn on the television, and, exhausted from a long day and, wanting to stretch out the length of the sofa, waits for Will to sit before promptly swinging his legs up into his lap. It’s motivated in part by selfishness and in part by an odd, intrusive desire to break through whatever barrier still stood between them, that kept them distant and afraid of touch in a way they hadn’t been before. It used to be so easy for him to sling an arm around Will’s shoulder or reach for his hand during a scary movie. But that small source of comfort had been just another casualty of the war, something they’d lost and forgotten along the way.

Or maybe the war isn’t to blame for this one. He’s not entirely sure.

Will watches in mild shock before casting a glance over at Mike, one curious eyebrow raised. He gives him what he hopes is a charming grin in return, and it must work, because Will rolls his eyes and sinks back into the sofa, turning his attention back to the show.

It starts from there. It’s slow and cautious, but it builds, a soft but powerful force that begins to erode that irritating wall in smooth, sure strokes. Mike chips at it, little by little, breaking it away with every stray touch. He’d always been a touchy person, and he hadn’t quite realized how much he’d missed the simple feeling of contact with another person until he had it back.

He tries to be subtle about it. One morning, he uses one of their two big bowls when making breakfast, and leaves it in the sink to wash later. But he just so happens to forget to do it before their movie that night, and when he pops popcorn for them to snack on, there’s only one clean bowl to pour it into. Instead of sprawling across separate ends of the couch, legs overlapping somewhere in the center, they sit shoulder to shoulder in the middle, popcorn between them and sides pressed together for a whole two hours.

And when Will takes too long in front of the coffee machine one day before class, blocking the cabinet that Mike needs to get into, he hip checks him out of the way, and revels in the feeling of Will shoving him back, hands pressed into his side and choked laughter escaping both of their lips.

It’s nice. It’s fun. Things are finally where they’re supposed to be, they’re back to normal, they’re Mike and Will again. Everything is okay.

He gets home from class a little early one day, his professor letting them leave as soon as they finished their quizzes, and he opens the door to find Will in the kitchen, leaning against the wall with the phone to his ear, looking slightly annoyed. He seems startled to see Mike enter, but he waves a quick hello before leaving for his bedroom, stretching the cord almost to its limit as he closes the door behind him.

Mike kicks off his shoes and is just about to head towards his room when he hears Will’s voice raise in pitch, and a frustrated, “No, Danny, listen—” echo from his door before fading out. Mike freezes. He doesn’t hear anything else, and something about that scares him even more. Either Will realized how loud he was being and lowered his voice, or he moved from the door, and now Mike needs to know what they’re talking about. Is it weird if he goes over and tries to listen? Would that be eavesdropping? Obviously yes. That’s the exact definition of eavesdropping. But would it be so bad if he eavesdropped? He’s just—he’s being a good friend, making sure Danny isn’t being mean to Will, or something. Will sounded upset. Maybe he needs Mike to listen. So Mike can help. That makes sense, right?

Despite his best efforts, he knows he’s lying to himself. It takes every ounce of determination and moral righteousness in his body to force himself to walk into his own room, shut his own door, collapse onto his own bed, and scream into his own pillow.

He’s right back to where he was. Images of Will and Danny on the couch bounce back and forth around his head, and every time he tries to swat them away, they’re replaced by the thought of Danny’s stupid, smug smirk as he stood in their kitchen. And all at once, the blinding, white-hot anger surges back through his blood again, burning at him from the inside out. The heady, motion-sick churning follows shortly after, and it takes everything in him not to walk right back out there, to tiptoe up to Will’s door and find out exactly what is going on.

He thinks, just maybe, he might not be over it.

Fuck. He’d done everything right. He apologized to Will, he made amends with Danny, he’s tried so hard to be a better friend, to be better, and he’s still just sitting here, alone and angry.

He fixed it. It’s supposed to be better. It’s not supposed to be like this. He doesn’t want to be like this. He doesn’t want to be this angry anymore.

Lucas had told him Nancy would be more help. It’s a last-ditch effort at this point, but Lucas was otherwise useless in this regard, and he doesn’t exactly have any other friends here to discuss it with. So two days later, when Will is still at class, he digs through his papers to find where he’d scrawled her number and dials.

“Hello?”

“Hey, Nance.”

“Mike?” She seems surprised. Which is fair, considering he’s called her exactly twice since she moved out, both on behalf of their mother asking for answers to questions only Nancy knew. “What’s up?”

“Um, hey, uh—is Jonathan there?”

“No, why? You need to talk to him?”

“No! Uh, no. I need to not talk to him. Wait. No.” He takes a breath. “I need to talk to you, but I need you to promise not to tell Jonathan anything.”

“I really don’t make a habit of keeping secrets from my boyfriend, Mike.”

“Okay, that’s a fucking lie, but whatever.”

“What the hell do you want?” she snaps.

“I just…needed some advice.”

“Oh.” Her voice is a little softer when she next speaks. “Is this about your fight with Will?”

He blinks, too surprised to feel ashamed. “How do you know about that?”

“Uh, Will talked to Jonathan. But I guess he didn’t swear him to secrecy, since he told me everything.”

“Cool.” That does make it easier, now that he doesn’t have to explain everything once again. “Yeah, it’s about our fight.”

“Great. What the hell is wrong with you?”

“Hey!”

“Why were you being an asshole to his boyfriend?”

“He’s not his boyfriend,” Mike says, gripping the phone tighter. “Did he say he was his boyfriend? Because he told me he wasn’t his boyfriend.”

“No,” says Nancy, “I just assumed.”

“Alright, well, he’s not his boyfriend.”

“Okay, why were you being an asshole to his not-boyfriend?”

“I…don’t know.”

“You don’t know?” she repeats. Mike wonders if she would hang up on him if he told her how much she sounds like Mom.

“No, I don’t know! That’s why I’m calling you.”

Nancy quiets. He lets her sit there in it, feeling justified in her placation, before he continues.

“Look, it’s not even—I already apologized. Me and Will are good.”

“Okay, so what’s the problem, then?”

“Because I don’t know. I don’t know why I freaked out like that. I know it was wrong. And I know I shouldn’t have. And I wanna make sure I don’t do it ever again.”

“Well, you’ve always been…emotional.” It takes every ounce of self control Mike possesses not to snap back. He remains silent until she continues. “But, I mean, you said you apologized. And you said you and Will are good. So all you have to do is…not be an asshole to his boyfriend. What’s the problem?”

“He’s not his—okay.” He takes a deep, steadying breath. “Because…of that. I still get angry when I think about it. And, I mean, Will’s my best friend. I’m gonna have to be around this guy at some point. So I need to fix it so I don’t fuck everything up again.”

“Okay, well, what about it is making you so angry?”

“I…” he trails off.

“Don’t know?”

“Yeah.”

“Alright. Let’s go a little at a time, then. Think about the whole situation. Remember when you walked in on them? What was it that made you angry? Were you angry at Will?”

Against his better judgment, Mike unlocks the memory of The Incident, allowing himself to fully explore it for the first time. But he really doesn’t remember feeling angry at all then. He’d been embarrassed—almost mortified—and uncomfortable, and he’d felt sick to his stomach, but not anger. Then, at least.

“I don’t think so,” he finally says. “No.”

“Okay, were you angry at Danny?”

At the time, he had mainly been annoyed with Danny’s presence, and he’d immediately felt better about the situation once he was out the door. And then, of course, when Mike had come home to find him in their kitchen—well.

“Yes.”

“Why?” Mike doesn’t mean to, but he lets out a little scoff. If he knew that, they wouldn’t be having this conversation. “Is it protectiveness? You think he’s not good enough for Will?” she suggests when he doesn’t answer.

“I don’t think he’s good enough for Will, but I don’t think that’s it, either. Because…when I first met him, at the party, I didn’t really know him. But I didn’t like him as soon as I saw him and Will talking.”

“Talking?”

“Well,” he says, fighting back a grimace, “flirting.”

“Hm,” Nancy hums, and even though he can’t see her, he knows exactly what expression she’s wearing. Privately, he calls it her Nancy Drew look, though he’d never be brave enough to say that to her face. “It kinda sounds like you’re jealous.”

Jealous. There it is again. That word sparks a dangerous, needling feeling inside of him, the same way it did when Max said it. You’re jealous and you need to deal with that.

“Jealous? Of what?”

“I don’t know. You’ve always been kinda jealous over Will.”

“Jealous of Will? For what?” he asks again.

“Not jealous of Will. Over him.”

He frowns. “I really don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“Don’t you remember when you guys became friends with Lucas?” she says, voice almost uncharacteristically fond. “He was in Will’s first grade class, and he’d bring him to play with you guys during recess, and you used to get so mad about it. I’d walk you home from elementary school every day and the entire time you’d talk about how this kid was trying to steal your best friend.”

“What? I don’t remember that at all. I remember me and Lucas getting along right away.”

“It only took, like, a week. He invited you guys over to his house one day and when you came back you couldn’t stop talking about how cool all his toys were and how you had two best friends now.”

“How do you remember all this?”

“I’m telling you, it’s all you talked about.” She laughs, sounding lighthearted. It’s the happiest he’s heard her in a long while, and he’s hit with a sudden, strange homesickness. “The point is, you’ve always wanted Will’s attention all to yourself. I mean, he usually gives it to you, so I guess it makes sense.”

He lets those words wash over him. It’s true, they’re usually a package deal. But Will’s his best friend. Of course they’re always together. Of course they give each other their attention. That’s hardly a groundbreaking observation.

“Okay, but…I mean, that’s not fair. I can’t just live my whole life getting mad at every guy that looks at Will. That’s not fair to him or me. And that’s stupid, anyway! Why would I care if he has a boyfriend? I guess I get the friend thing, because he’s my best friend, and we were six, but—”

“Hey, Mike?” There’s a long, weighted pause. He doesn’t know why, but he wants to tell her not to say anything else, to hang up and insist they never speak of this again. “I’m gonna say something that I don’t think you’re gonna like. Just…don’t freak out, okay?”

He swallows. “Okay.”

“Are you upset that Will was kissing someone else…because you wanted to be kissing him?”

“No!” is his instant response, practiced and easy and immediate on his lips. Of course that isn’t it. He knows that isn’t it. He just needs to tell her that isn’t it. “I—Fuck.”

Tell her that isn’t it.

He tries. He tries so hard to say something, anything. Tries to deny the single, terrifying thought that’s been taunting him for months, echoing louder and louder every time he tries to silence it. He’s seen it coming from around the corner, caught it lurking in the shadows, persistent and dangerous and—and—

And it would have been fine, if she just hadn’t said anything. He could have caught it, shoved it back into its cage, locked it back up and tucked it somewhere far away, unreachable and ignorable and perfectly content.

But she’d said it, and the floodgates broke. Because now she knows, and if she knows, then—then what is he supposed to do? How is he supposed to go own now that she knows—?

Does she know how many times he’d thought about reaching down, catching Will’s chin in his hands and pulling his lips up to meet Mike’s? Does she know how badly he aches to reach out and grab his hand as they walk across campus, to feel his fingers laced together with his and feel his heartbeat in the pulse of his wrist? Does she know? Does she know? Does she know how hard he’s tried to fight it, how many times he’s thought it, months and years of friendship tainted by some invisible stain that he couldn’t get off, no matter what he did?

“Nance, I— ” He needs to answer her. He needs to tell her something. He needs to tell her that isn’t it. “I don’t know,” he whispers instead.

“Okay.” Her voice is so careful, like she’s speaking to a wounded animal, cautious and calming but ready in case it attacks. “Okay, you don’t need all the answers right now. You don’t even need a single answer right now. It’s just…something to think about.”

“Okay. Okay. Okay. Even if—if that were the case…I just…what does it mean? Like, let’s say—” He stops. Swallows. Breathes. He doesn’t want to say anything else, at all, but somehow he manages. “Let’s say you’re right. What do I do? What am I supposed to do?”

“Well, I guess it depends. What do you want to do?” What does he want to do? He wants to kill himself, probably, so he never has to deal with this again. “You don’t have to answer that, either. Just think about it. But I can tell you one thing.”

Think about it? What the fuck is he supposed to think about? There’s nothing to think about. He just needs to get this under control, to tame it into something manageable and make sure it never gets out again.

“What?” he asks, his mind lightyears away from whatever she’s trying to tell him.

“There’s one person you know who has a lot of experience with this sort of thing.”

A moment passes before he realizes what she means. “Oh, you’ve got to be shitting me.”

“I know, I know. I’m not saying you tell him you’re in love with him—”

Panic rises in his voice. “Who said anything about being in love?”

“Right, no, yeah, I didn’t mean—look. You can just ask him. How he knew, or how he dealt with it. You don’t even need to tell him what you’re thinking. Just…another perspective might be good, you know?”

Mike cannot imagine a worse idea if he tried. “I…guess,” he says, mainly to acknowledge she’d spoken.

“Relax, okay? You have time. You don’t have to figure everything out right away. There’s no rush, and there’s no wrong answer. Just…take a deep breath, and take your time.”

“Okay,” he murmurs, more out of habit than anything else. “Thanks, Nance.”

“Are you okay?” she says in that same hesitantly calm voice.

That might be the final straw for him, and he feels so exhausted he wants to collapse onto the kitchen floor. “Fine,” he says, doing his best to sound as blank as possible.“You have plans for your birthday yet?”

“Nothing yet,” she says, surprised at the sudden topic change. “It’s not for another month, why?”

“Just wondering. When Mom calls and asks me what to get you, what should I tell her?”

“I haven’t thought too much about it. Give me a little, and I’ll let you know, okay?”

“Sure.”

“Alright, we’ll talk soon.” She’s silent for a moment, and he hears a soft little sigh. “It’s gonna be okay, Mike. You know that, right?”

And he hates how small his voice gets, hates how pathetic he sounds, when he asks, “Is it?”

“Yes.” She speaks with so much confidence, so much clarity, that Mike can’t help but believe her, at least a little bit. “Whatever you decide, whatever ends up happening, you know I’m on your side, right?”

“Yeah, I know. Thanks, Nance.”

“Okay, call me soon.” She hesitates for a moment before she adds, “Love you.”

“Love you, too,” he says, and means it.

The next few days pass in a whirlwind of emotions he doesn’t know how to even begin to dissect. He avoids Will to the best of his ability, making up excuses about his upcoming midterms—which actually are upcoming, and he should probably focus on those, but he really does not have the capacity for that at the moment, so that’s out of the question. In the quieter moments, when he has the space to breathe, he remembers that Nancy told him to think.

So he thinks.

The first step is to parse down their discussion into something palatable. Nancy hadn’t outright accused him of being gay—a thought that sets off bright red flashing alarms in his mind—she had simply asked him if he wanted to kiss Will.

And he wants to kiss Will. Okay. Fine. That one is easy, because he’s been thinking about it for a long time. But, really, who can blame him? Will’s a handsome guy, and anyone could admit that. There’s nothing inherently romantic about that, it’s just a fact of life. Like, is he really expected to spend all of his free time around Will and not want to kiss him? That’s not gay. That’s called having eyes.

But—okay. If he wants to kiss guys, even just one guy, that’s…a little bit gay. Isn’t it? Like, one percent gay, maybe. Is that allowed? Does the amount of kisses he’s imagined change that number? And it’s not just kissing he thinks about, either. Because…sometimes he thinks about other stuff, too. Like how good it had felt, how natural it was for Will to lean against him during their movie the other night. He’d spent way more time than he’d care to admit reliving that night, thinking about the warm weight of Will on his shoulder, and trying to imagine scenarios in which he could convince him to do it again. And maybe…maybe that’s not something friends do.

Will is his friend, and he loves him. He knows that. He loves all of his friends. And sure, his friendship with Will has always been a little different, a little more, but…it’s them. They’re Mike and Will. They’ve always been like that. And maybe all of that, mixed with all of the time they’ve spent together since moving in, left him confused.

Besides, if he was actually gay, he’d like more than just one guy. At least, he thinks. He’s not entirely sure how being gay works, but he was entirely sure he was straight until very, very recently, and he’s liked more than two girls before. It doesn’t sound right that he could be gay if he likes girls and also one single man.

His thoughts turn inexplicably to Ryan, and the carefree, confident way he’d thrown his arm around Mike’s shoulder, or wrapped Will in a hug. The memory of Ryan standing behind him as he tried to teach him to throw fills his mind, the way his hand wrapped around Mike’s wrist, the way his chest pressed against his shoulder, the way his breath, hot and stale with beer, had ghosted across his ear, down his neck—

Okay. Maybe he’s two percent gay.

But he doesn’t feel the same way about Ryan that he does about Will. He barely knows Ryan, and though he does enjoy his company, the little they’ve interacted is nothing in comparison to what he and Will have been through. And just because he can admit that another man is attractive doesn’t mean anything. It’s not like he has a crush on Ryan.

So whatever his feelings are for him, they’re not a good measurement for whatever this weird little crisis is. And with that dead end, he finds himself stuck in another of his feedback loops, going around in endless circles without coming any closer to an answer.

He’s almost asleep one night when his mind drifts to Eddie, an old wound he tries not to reopen too often. By the time he died, he’d already known several people lost to the Upside Down, but never had it been someone so close. He’d admired Eddie so much, his creative mind and the way he truly didn’t care what anybody else thought of him. He was confident, too, not unlike Ryan, but his had been earned over years of torment and torture, bullies and their apathetic onlookers sneering down at him whenever they had the chance. And he’d taken that confidence and used it to shield other kids from the same fate, nerds and outcasts like him, and Mike had always looked up to him and the way he’d stared his attackers right back down, unafraid.

He misses Eddie, now more than ever. It’d be nice to talk to someone like him about this. Sure, he has his sister, and she did her best, but trying to explain to her that he might have feelings for her boyfriend’s brother was possibly the most mortifying experience of his life. If Eddie were here, he’d throw an arm around Mike’s shoulder and give him a speech about how, actually, being gay was about as nonconformist as it gets, and if Mike was gay, it would make him ten times cooler. He’d make fun of him, of course, but Mike sort of missed that as well. He’d always kind of liked it when Eddie teased them, making jabs and tousling his hair, and it always sort of settled in his stomach, twisting and squirming in a weird, giggly sort of way.

Oh.

Alright. Three percent, then. He’s three percent gay.

Nancy gave him one more piece of advice. He’d tried so hard to ignore it, but as a week passes and he doesn’t come near having an explanation for his behavior, he knows what he needs to do next.

He comes home from class one day to find Will sitting on the floor of their living room, legs sprawled out beneath the coffee table and hunched over a textbook.

“Hey,” Mike greets him, locking the door behind him. “How come you’re working out here?”

“I don’t know,” Will says, eyes still glued on his reading. “Lighting’s better.”

Which might make sense if he was working on an art piece or something, but it really just looks like he’s taking notes. Mike decides not to question it.

He joins Will in the living room, kicking his legs up as he lies on the sofa, which leaves him staring at the back of Will’s head. They haven’t hung out much since his talk with Nancy—he’s been too anxious and embarrassed to risk being around him that long, afraid he might let something slip.

But he needs to do this. He takes a moment, gathering all of his courage, and says, “Can I ask you something?”

“Hm?” he says, not looking up from his work.

“Okay, just—just don’t get mad, alright?” Will whips his head around to face him, raising one eyebrow. “It’s not bad,” Mike is quick to assure him, “it’s just—not something we talk about a lot.”

“Okay?” Will says, still wary. “What’s up?”

“How did you know? That you were gay?”

“Oh.” Will’s eyebrows draw together, looking a little concerned. Whatever he’d expected Mike to say, it clearly wasn't that. “Why?”

“You’ve never told me.”

“Yeah, but—why?”

“I mean, I guess I just accepted it when you told us,” he says, doing his best to come up with a plausible explanation. “But I’d like to understand, you know?”

Will takes a minute to answer, thinking it over. “I’m not really sure. I mean, how did you know you were straight?”

Wow, what a great question, Will! Mike shrugs, not trusting himself to give a better answer verbally.

“I don’t know, I guess. It’s not like I had one specific moment where everything clicked into place. I think the Snowball was kinda the first time I really had to face it, you know? When Hannah asked me to dance and I nearly shit myself.” He’s talking fast, a light blush on his face. “So I knew then, but it’s not like I didn’t know before. Because even before that, when I’d think about it, I…always imagined I’d get asked to dance by a guy.”

“Really?” he asks with a smile, thinking back to little middle school Will in a sweater vest and tie. “Who?”

He flushes even deeper than that, averting his gaze. “I mean, it wasn’t, like, anyone real. Just a guy. I don’t know. He always kinda looked like Keanu Reeves.”

The smile on his face turns fondly teasing as he leans in. “Really?”

“Shut up,” he groans, burying his face in his hands. “This is worse than coming out. God.”

“Sorry, sorry,” he says, nudging his shoulder. “Go on.”

“I don’t know,” he continues, resurfacing from his palms. “It’s easy to look back now and think that I’ve always known. But it’s something I avoided thinking about for a while. Until I couldn’t, really.”

“Which was when?”

“Y-you know. Like, the Snowball. And when everyone started getting girlfriends and I had to face the fact that that’s not what I wanted. It wasn’t just one moment.”

“Okay, but when you knew. How did you know for sure? How did you know it wasn’t a mistake?”

“Why are you asking all of this all of a sudden?” Will says, shifting uncomfortably.

Mike frowns, not wanting to lie, but definitely not wanting to give the real reason, either. He tries to stick as close to the truth as possible. “I don’t know. I was just thinking about how you asked me what made me uncomfortable. And I didn’t know, because I hadn’t ever thought about it before. And the best way to figure something out is to gather more information, right? Analyze the data. That kind of thing.”

He nods, not making eye contact. “Makes sense.”

“Sorry, if you don’t want to talk about it—”

“No, it’s fine. I just—no one’s really asked me this before, is all.”

Something about this simple statement strikes Mike through the heart. While he’s never been asked about how he knew he liked girls, people would ask about girls all the time. Friends, parents, distant relatives at holidays—their first question was always Have you met any cute girls lately?

It’s annoying, and stupid, and he hates it every time the topic comes up. But something about the fact that Will probably never gets asked, at all, seems so depressing. He wonders how lonely Will feels. He wonders if it’s similar to how he’s felt all through college.

“I don’t know. I did feel like it was a mistake. I felt like I was—” His voice breaks, and he pauses for a minute, composing himself. There’s something familiar in his words, a distant memory he’s buried deep, but before Mike has a chance to explore that, Will takes a deep breath and continues. “But I also just…didn’t have a whole lot of time to think about it, you know? It’s not something I really thought about until after everything with the Upside Down started, and by that time, we were always so busy with that, I just kinda tried to forget about it. I figured I could deal with it when it was all over. Or I’d die, and wouldn’t have to deal with it at all.”

He says the last part so flippantly that it shocks him, and he looks at him in alarm. “Will.”

“Relax, I didn’t mean it like that. I just meant there were a lot of things that were trying to kill me back then. I kinda thought at least one of them would succeed.”

Having been to one funeral for Will already, the thought of that is less than comforting. “Morbid,” he mutters.

Will shrugs, unfazed. “I don’t know. It sounds bad, but I kinda think it helped, in the end.”

“Really?”

“Yeah, I mean, it sucked, obviously. But after getting trapped in there, and then possessed, and then everything that happened after that, everything that happened to me, I just sort of…accepted it. Because if I could handle all of that, I could handle anything, right? Nothing anybody says to me about being gay is going to be any worse than fighting monsters from another dimension.”

“Really?” Mike asks again. “That easy?”

“It wasn’t easy. I don’t know. That’s the quick version of it, I guess. But when I realized it wasn’t going to change, I stopped fighting it.” He twirls his pen in his hand, staring at it. “And I think when I finally told you guys about it, and nothing bad happened…I don’t know. I just stopped having anything to worry about, after that.”

“Did you really think we’d all just abandon you, or something?”

“It sounds bad when you put it like that,” Will says, looking a little ashamed. “But, I mean…kind of. I’d been preparing myself for it for so long. Worst case scenario and all, right? And when you all supported me, it took a really long time for me to start believing it.”

Mike leans back against the arm of the sofa, watching Will carefully. He doesn’t want to interrupt, but Will just looks so sad, so defeated, that he half considers reaching down and wrapping him in a hug.

“I don’t know. Sometimes I think I’m over it, and sometimes I’m not. I think some of it came back up the other day. When we were fighting? I had told myself for so many years that I’d lose you—all, that I knew it was too good to be true. That it was only a matter of time. I kept waiting for the other shoe to drop. I was so convinced that if I was too much, if I was too gay, that you’d all freak out and I’d lose you anyway.”

“That’s not—” he tries to explain, tries to reassure, but Will holds a hand up, and he falls silent.

“Sorry. I just was thinking about it recently. The second I thought that might be the case, I—well, you saw what happened. I kind of blew up on you before I ever gave you a chance. And I guess that wasn’t really fair to you. I was just convinced that this was the end. That it was inevitable. I knew it was coming, and I just wanted to get it over with. Push you out before you had the chance to decide whether or not you were gonna leave.”

“Yeah, well, I guess I get it. You were scared. And I kinda deserved it.” He really doesn’t want to spend any more time thinking about that fight, the hot shame of it creeping back up on him again. “I came back, though.”

Will tilts his head back onto the sofa, looking at him with warm eyes and a soft smile. “You always do.”

Mike has to turn his head to hide his grin, the heat rising up his neck and onto his cheeks. He knows this, they both do, but it’s still a lot to have Will point it out so bluntly. They always find their way back to each other.

They sit in comfortable silence for a few minutes, and Mike plays with the button on his flannel sleeve, doing and undoing it a few times before his thoughts drift back to the phone conversation he heard the other day.

“Have you talked to Danny?” he asks, trying to sound light.

“Some,” Will says, looking at him with mild suspicion. “Why?”

“I apologized the other night, at the haunted house. I don’t know if he said anything. But I just wanted to make sure everything was cool.”

“Oh. Yeah. He’s fine. Everything’s fine. We’re cool.”

“You’re sure? He didn’t seem super happy to see me last time.”

Will huffs a sarcastic laugh. “He probably wasn’t. But it doesn’t matter, he won’t start anything.”

“Yeah, but…” He takes a deep breath to prepare himself for the next sentence. “I mean, I don’t want things to be weird. I know he’s not your boyfriend, but if you guys start dating for real, I don’t want there to be tension between us, or something. I’ll be cool about it, I promise.”

“We’re not…gonna start dating. It’s not like that.”

Oh. Well, this isn’t the information he was hoping to get, but it’s very interesting information all the same. “But…I thought you liked him.”

“I do like him, it’s not that. But it’s also…just not like that. We both know it. We’re not right for each other.” He shrugs. Mike must be giving him a look, because he sighs and leans in conspiratorially. “He likes country music, Mike.”

“That’s your reasoning?”

“I can’t spend the rest of my life listening to Kenny Rogers. It’s not going to happen. You know I tried putting on The Cure once? We didn’t get through one song before he was complaining about it.”

“Wow,” Mike says, sarcasm oozing from every syllable. “Sounds rough for you.”

“I know your music taste has its own issues, but at least you let me pick when we’re together.”

“Country music’s really a dealbreaker for you?”

Will struggles to come up with an explanation before he ends up shrugging again. “Look, it’s not that big of a deal.”

“You guys are just done, then?”

“We’re fine,” Will says, which is the most frustrating non-answer he could have possibly given.

“And you’re just…cool with that?” Will shrugs once more, shrinking in on himself again. Mike has to stop himself from rolling his eyes. “Why? And don’t say country music.”

“Because—” Will stops, sighing. “I know it’s stupid and I know I won’t ever get it, but, I mean—” He cuts himself off, frowning.

“What?”

“Nothing.” He waves a dismissive hand. “It’s stupid.”

“C’mon, it’s not stupid.”

“You’re gonna laugh.”

“I won’t.”

“Okay, I just—want something a little more romantic than that. I know it’s not realistic for me to expect someone that’s gonna be able to hold my hand walking down the street. And that’s fine, really. But, I just—” He stops, biting his lip to hide his smile. “I don’t know. Something a little more. I don’t want college dorm couch makeouts for the rest of my life.”

“And he won’t do that for you?”

“I mean, I don’t expect him to. He’s not my boyfriend.”

“But…you want him to?”

“I’d want my boyfriend to. And that’s just not the kind of person Danny is.”

“So, you don’t want to date him because he’s not romantic?”

“Yeah, and he told me he doesn’t want a relationship. And that’s fine, seriously. I’m not…expecting anything. He’s nice, but I’m not holding my hopes out for someone that I know it wouldn’t work out with.”

“So…if he was willing to be romantic, it’d be different?”

“If he was, he wouldn’t be Danny,” he says with a quick laugh. “Regardless of my feelings, I already told you it’s mutual. Danny doesn’t wanna date me, either.”

“Well, that’s bullshit. It is,” he insists, when Will shoots him an exasperated look. “Anyone that gets to know you and doesn’t want to date you is a dumbass.”

Will stares at him, expression unchanging. “What are you talking about?”

“I mean, seriously. He got to know you, knows how nice and smart and kind and handsome you are, and doesn’t want to date you? His loss.”

He gets a small thrill watching Will’s blush deepen and trail its way down his neck. “Mike, you’re being ridiculous.”

“What? I’m right. I’m just saying that I figured out that you were the best person in the world when we were five. And if Danny doesn’t realize that, then he’s stupider than a kindergarten.”

“Stop,” he mutters, turning back to his paper to better ignore whatever Mike is saying.

“No! You can do better. Anyone that gets to know you and doesn’t want to date you is a dumbass.”

“Anyone?” Will asks, drawing out the syllables in a dangerous tone.

Mike decides to double down. “Yes.”

Will places his pen down with a little snap on the table and twists around with a withering glare. Right before he speaks, Mike gets the sinking feeling that he is really not going to like what he has to say. “You know me and don’t want to date me.”

It’s always a bit of a shock whenever Will manages to snap back at him. He’s normally so demure, and though he’s not exactly a pushover, it’s rare for him to go on the offensive like that.

Mike splutters for a moment, somewhere between offended and completely called out. “Well, that’s—whatever. We already established I’m a dumbass. Stop making fun of me.”

Will laughs, but it’s stilted and short and sounds nothing like his normal one.

He’s pushed too far, and he knows it, because Will only ever gets bold enough to say something like that when he’s truly annoyed. And he should stop, he really should, but Will still hasn’t said anything about the supposed fight with Danny, and Mike doesn’t know how much longer he can last without knowing what happened.

He switches tactics instead.

“Are we sure Danny doesn’t secretly want to date you? Like, do we think he’s just hiding it because he’s too embarrassed to say it?”

Will looks at him like he’s lost his mind. “Yes, we’re sure.”

“No, we aren’t. I’m not convinced.”

“Oh, my god,” he groans.

“Okay, so, if Danny comes and asks me for advice—”

Will snorts. “Why would he ask you for advice?”

“For my best friend wisdom!” Mike says, touching a hand to his heart as his ego bruises. “Obviously. Let’s say he calls me up and asks—”

“He does not want to talk to you. Why would he be asking you for best friend advice?”

“Because I’m your best friend. Now shush. If Danny comes to me, begging on his knees, asking me how to romance you—”

Will’s doing his best to fight off a smile, which means it’s working. “Really unlikely scenario, but go on.”

“You want me to tell him you want the full nine yards? Big, romantic candlelit dinner? Rose petals on the bed? Champagne and chocolate-covered strawberries?”

The smile’s still there, but it’s frozen, like he’d stopped halfway through. “I knew you’d make fun of me,” he says, voice low as a whisper.

“I’m not making fun of you!” Mike says, sitting up and leaning in. “Seriously, I want to know. This is gonna be my in with Danny. This is how we make amends.”

“Alright, on the off chance Danny ever speaks to you again, please tell him absolutely none of that.”

“What? You don’t like strawberries?” he says, moving closer and pointing an accusatory finger. “I know you like strawberries! I know they’re your favorite fruit. Well, they are now. It used to be peaches, until you got the stomach flu and threw up peaches when you were visiting your grandma one summer.”

“Why would you make me think about that?” Will says, looking suddenly nauseated. “I didn’t say I didn’t like strawberries, I just said—why are we talking about this? He didn’t even ask for your help!”

“What, I can’t try and help my best friend find love?”

“Not if you’re gonna be weird about it!” He’s always gotten flustered about this sort of thing, romance and dating and love. Mike stares at him, doing his best attempt at puppy dog eyes in lieu of response. It must have some effect, because Will sighs and continues. “Look, if he asks for advice, tell him to stop playing Kenny Rogers.”

Mike laughs. “Deal.”

“Since when are you a romantic, anyway? Where’d you get champagne and rose petals from?”

“Hey, I’m a great boyfriend! Super romantic.”

“I know you didn’t do any of that stuff with El.”

“I got her flowers!” he protests, but Will just raises one eyebrow in response. “Okay, so I’m prepping for next time. What do you want from me?”

He shoots him a smirk. “Not rose petals.”

Mike punches him in the shoulder. “So what do you want, then?”

“I don’t know. I don’t, like, think about it much, since I know nothing’s ever gonna happen. No one’s gonna do some big, romantic gesture for me, so I don’t have any ideas. I don’t think it needs to be one specific thing, though. Just…” He trails off, gaze wandering somewhere towards the ceiling. “Someone who knows me well enough to know what I like. Does that make sense? I don’t really care what it is, just that someone knew what I liked and cared enough to do it.” He shrugs, cheeks still faintly pink.

“Yeah, that makes sense.”

“Not that it matters, though. It’d just be nice.”

“Why do you keep saying it like that?” Mike asks, frowning.

“What do you mean?”

“Like, you keep acting like it’s so weird that someone would want to date you. Like it’s never gonna happen. Or that you don’t deserve all the romantic things you’re talking about.”

“I—”

“‘Cause you do. Deserve it, I mean. You’re not crazy for wanting rose petals, or for your boyfriend to like, take you on dates. You do deserve it. And you shouldn’t convince yourself that you don’t.”

Will isn’t looking at him, refusing to turn, but Mike can hear the quaver in his voice when he speaks. “I really don’t want rose petals, though.” He’s half laughing as he wipes his eyes.

He grins back. “You keep saying that, but I really think you’re gonna come around on this.”

“Imagine cleaning up rose petals. That’d be so much work.”

“It’s about romance, Will, stop being so practical.”

“What’s romantic about dead leaves?”

“Petals. And they’re roses! That’s, like, the most romantic flower.”

“Whatever you say, Mike.” But he’s got this stupid, warm little grin on his face when he says it, and suddenly Mike’s stomach is doing somersaults, and he has to collapse back onto the sofa and stare up at the ceiling until it passes.

A few minutes pass before Will breaks the silence. “Thanks, by the way,” he says, eyes trained back on his textbook.

“For what?”

“Asking.” He does that same, self-conscious shrug again. “It’s just nice that you care.”

“Of course I care,” Mike says, voice low, and it earns him another smile.

“Have you eaten yet?” Will asks, and he shakes his head, suddenly realizing how hungry he is. “We should order something. I really don’t want to cook.”

“Sure. Pizza?”

“Works for me,” Will says, closing his textbook and stretching as he stands, before heading to the phone to place the order.

Mike relaxes into the sofa, feeling oddly settled. He’d spent all week freaking out over the thought of being in love with another man, the implications of which had shaken him to his very core. To find out he might have been wrong about something so fundamental to himself had turned everything on its side and left him walking through a world upside down—okay. Maybe he should use a different metaphor.

Will joins him on the sofa a few minutes later, kicking Mike’s legs out of the way and spreading a blanket over both of them. They spend the rest of the night watching Indiana Jones and chatting, and Mike can’t help but to think about how easy this is. How everything feels so natural, so comforting. And really, if they were dating, what would be different? They’d probably be cuddling instead of lying on different ends of the couch, but so what? They already do that sometimes, too. Barely anything would change.

Who said anything about being in love? he’d asked Nancy, breathless and panicked. But here, looking at his best friend, it’s not quite as terrifying a thought as it should be.

Maybe, if being in love is something like this, there’s nothing terrifying about it at all.

Chapter Text

He's already awake when he watches the shadow cross in front of his door, two patches of darkness following two feet in the quiet hallway of their apartment. The remnants of his own nightmare have been cast off, faded into the nothingness of the early morning, and he waits, almost breathless, almost desperate, for the knock.

The shadow hesitates. Hovers. He watches as the shadow raises its arm, prepares itself, and stops. Waits. Lowers. Waits.

The shadow steps back, turns, and begins to leave. Before Mike has a chance to think about what he’s doing, he’s out of his bed and reaching for the lamp on his desk, still unplugged and ready from the last time. He reaches his door and pulls it open to find the shadow following Will back to his bedroom.

“Will,” he whispers, but it crosses the room and catches him, hand frozen on the doorknob.

Will turns to face him, frowning. “You really are the lightest sleeper in the world.”

“Guilty,” he says with a shrug. Will’s chuckle is almost silent in the still air of the apartment. “Everything okay?”

“Yeah, sorry, I didn’t mean to wake you.”

“Nightmare?”

He casts a sheepish look to the side. “Yeah.”

“Okay, c’mon.”

“Oh, it’s okay,” he says, waving a hand. “I’ll be f—”

“Will,” Mike interrupts. “Come on.”

He’s grateful it doesn’t take any more convincing than that, and Will makes his way back to Mike’s room, shoulders hunched and looking ashamed. It stings just a little, tiny pinpricks across the surface of his skin, that Will still won’t trust him fully. If he hadn’t already been awake, Will would have gone back to bed by himself, forced to deal with this on his own.

He wants to grab him by the shoulders and shake him, to scream and tell Will to wake him up. That he would never be mad at him for asking for help, even at three in the morning. That he doesn’t care, that this is what he’s made for, that this is what he’s best at, that sometimes the only thing that makes him feel good about himself is knowing that he can help others. That he can help Will. That he wants to.

He does none of that. He stays silent as Will walks past him into his room, instead.

“You’re really going with the desk lamp for your weapon of choice, huh?” Will says as Mike places it back on his desk, forcing a bit of levity into his voice.

“Look around!” he says, gesturing to his pitch-black room. “You tell me when you find something better.”

“I can show you how to shoot a gun.”

An image comes back to him, Will in the midst of the Upside Down, shrouded in the haze and darkness and carrying a shotgun. He’d watched Will’s deft hands load and unload and clean it with the utmost care, and it had caused a confusing and terrifying rush of emotions he didn’t have a name for at the time.

Now, in hindsight, he has a name for it. It’s still a little bit terrifying.

“Oh.” He remembers the way he’d blushed when Ryan had stood behind him, teaching him to throw a ping pong ball, and wonders if he’d ever be able to keep his composure if Will did something similar while holding a gun. “Um. Maybe.”

Will goes to climb into bed, and Mike walks to the corner to flip on his nightlight. He really never uses it, despite his own nightmares, but he always keeps it plugged in. Just in case.

He joins Will in the bed, and they get settled, pulling the covers up around them. Will faces the center of the mattress, arms curled close to his chest and gaze distant. He doesn’t seem as though he’s in the mood for conversation, which is probably to be expected, but Mike can’t help feeling just a little disappointed. It’s just that he’s always in the mood to talk to Will, especially after his most recent revelation, and there’s something about conversations at three in the morning that seem so much more intimate.

It’s been a while since he’s had a crush—or, at least, since he knew he had a crush—and it’s honestly sort of thrilling, in a roller coaster stomach dropping kind of way. He’s still plagued with constant doubts, and every time he catches Will’s eye to laugh at an inside joke or their hands brush when they walk to class together, his thoughts immediately turn to You shouldn’t be feeling that way and That is another man, what is wrong with you. But as the days go on, it gets easier and easier to push that voice aside, especially when he looks at him and it feels like his heart is going to beat out of his chest.

Because it’s not just another man. It’s Will.

He’s spent a long time thinking about what Will had told him the other day, and how he had always sort of known. But Mike never had that luxury, having spent the last nineteen years of his life always sort of knowing he likes women. And he does. And maybe that makes him a freak of nature or an idiot for not figuring things out sooner, but…it’s Will. He doesn’t understand how he’s supposed to feel any other type of way about him.

Really, he’s done enough overthinking these past few months to know it never actually gets him anywhere. He could spend weeks trying to figure out exactly what percentage of him is attracted to men, or how his parents would react if they found out, or if he’s going to hell like that random man who stands on the corner of campus near the library likes to shout at passersby. At the end of the day, none of it matters.

He wants to kiss Will. And maybe that’s supposed to be scary or sinful or evil or whatever else they want to tell him, but he just wants to kiss Will. And he doesn’t understand why he’s supposed to feel bad about that.

Will’s eyes are still far away as he counts his breaths, and it’s all Mike can do not to wrap him in his arms and pull him close. “It must’ve been bad,” he says instead.

Will seems to remember where he is, gaze shifting to meet Mike’s. “Oh. Yeah.” He shrugs a little half-heartedly, shoulders shifting against the sheets. “Time of year. You know how it is.”

“I’m glad you came to me,” he says before he can stop himself.

Will’s eyebrows draw together. “Yeah?”

“Yeah.” He pauses, already flushing. “I like…helping.”

“Even though I woke you up?”

“I was already up,” he says. “Besides, I don’t need sleep.”

Will stretches just a little before pulling the comforter closer to his chin. “No, what you need is a heater. Why is your room twenty degrees colder than the rest of the apartment?”

“I told you! It’s crazy.”

“No wonder you never hang out in here. We should call someone. Get it fixed.”

“Yeah, we should.” He turns his head to stare up at the vent on the ceiling. “Who are we supposed to call?”

“Oh.” Will frowns. “No idea.”

“Cool. Well, until then, I got all these blankets for a reason.” He shifts the covers around as well, pulling one of the heavier ones from the bottom of his bed and readjusting them. “Do you want to talk about your dream?”

Will takes a long breath to consider this. “No,” he finally says, sounding short but not upset.

He tries not to let that sting too much. “Do you want to talk about anything else?”

Will raises one eyebrow. “Do you?”

“I’m just here to help. I mean, if there’s anything else you want to vent about, I don’t mind.”

All of which is completely and totally true. And if Will happens to want to talk about the alleged fight with Danny, which Mike still doesn’t have the details on, he’s willing to listen. Because he’s a really good friend.

Will stares at him for a long, breathless moment. “Why don’t you just ask?”

Mike does his best not to grimace, embarrassed with himself. Will is always a touch more irritable after anything Upside Down related, nightmares very much included, and clearly Mike is not being quite as subtle as he’d thought.

There’s no point in being coy. It’s never worked well for either of them. “What’s going on with you and Danny?” he asks.

“Nothing,” he says simply, quick and clipped. Mike stares at him, breathless and desperate for more. He’s silent for a long while before he finally takes pity on Mike and continues. “We…well, we weren’t dating, so it’s not like we broke up. But we’re, um, not seeing each other anymore, I guess.”

He waits for Will to elaborate, to explain why, but nothing more comes. He knows, if he wants the answer, he’ll need to ask. “Is it because of me?”

His mouth twists into a small, sad frown. “Yes.”

If you had asked him the day before, Mike would have thought he would be elated, jumping up and down in victory at the news. But seeing Will here, dejected and passive and not even angry at him about it, makes him feel like shit, guilt spilling out from his chest and creeping through his body in crawling tendrils. “Shit, Will, I’m so sorry.”

“It’s…fine, I guess. I mean, it sucks, but whatever.”

He needs to fix this. Will’s fallen silent again, and Mike doesn’t want to push him any more than he already has, but he can't make it right if he doesn’t even know what went wrong. “Will you tell me what happened?”

Will considers his answer for a minute. “He’s not a big fan of you.”

“I did pick up on that, yeah.”

“When I went to his place after our fight, he…had a lot to say about you.” In the pause between words, he places his thumb on his lower lip, chewing lightly on his nail in a resurgence of an old nervous tick. “I let him vent for a while, ‘cause you were a dick, and I was mad at you. But he just wouldn’t stop. I wasn’t even as upset as he was, and I’m the one you were actually mean to. And I guess I was just annoyed about everything, ‘cause I finally told him to stop, and it sort of just devolved from there.”

There’s a thousand things he needs to say. He needs to apologize for putting Will in this position in the first place. He needs to apologize again about the fight in general, just for good measure. He needs to tell Will that Danny’s a fuckhead and he could do a thousand times better than him. Instead, he settles on, “Well, that’s what he gets for listening to country music.”

Will bursts into laughter, clearly not expecting this response. “Mike!” he chastises, swatting lightly at his chest.

“That’s it? He’s still mad that I was kinda mean?”

“I mean, sort of. He couldn’t understand why I was defending you. I couldn’t understand why I was defending you.”

“Why were you defending me?”

The question pulls Will up short, and his face falls. “I don’t know. Benefit of the doubt, I guess.”

“I’m sorry. I really wasn’t trying to—”

“I know. It’s…fine,” he says in a way that sounds a lot more resigned than fine. “We were never gonna work out in the long run. I knew it, and he knew it. I wish it hadn’t fallen apart like that, but…whatever, I guess.”

Nothing else Will could have said would make Mike feel quite as guilty as that. He really, really needs to apologize. Again. A thousand more times, to make up for ever causing him to feel like this. He opens his mouth to do just that, and say, “God, fuck Danny. He sucks.”

Will rolls back on his side to give him a long, plaintive stare.

“What?” Mike says, unapologetic. “If that’s all it takes for him to call it quits, then he sucks.”

“Mike.”

“I’m serious! I don’t understand what you saw in him.”

“That’s because you don’t know anything about him.”

“I know enough.”

“Name one single fact about him.”

He combs through his memory, searching for anything relevant he might have retained about the most boring man in existence. “He’s an art major,” he finally says.

Will looks at him, mouth pressed into a thin line. “Wow. Great job.”

“And he likes country music.”

“Jesus,” Will says with an exasperated groan, but it’s followed by a reluctant chuckle. And really, what else is Mike supposed to know? It’s not his fault that trying to have a conversation with Danny is about as interesting as trying to have a conversation with a mannequin. Actually, that’s not fair, because at least the mannequin might be wearing an interesting outfit.

“I’m just saying I think you can do better.”

“Okay, well, you let me know when you find another guy that I have a lot in common with, that I actually like, and is also interested in me.”

It takes everything in Mike not to scream. “Yeah, sure, I’ll keep my eyes peeled.”

“Well,” Will says, no longer trying to hide the annoyance in his voice, “if things ever do work out for me, can you maybe try not to run them off this time?”

The pause between them is heavy. “Will, I—”

“Never mind. Sorry. I just—” He presses his palms to his eyes and takes a few deep breaths before turning back to look at him. “It's different for me, okay? I don’t get a bunch of options. I don’t…want to be upset with you. And I don’t regret what I did. But I only get so many chances. I can’t—you can’t ruin them all for me.”

“I won’t,” he says, trying to sound as sincere as possible. “I’m serious. I-I promise.”

Will lets out a long sigh. “Okay.”

They’re both silent for a long minute, and Mike knows, if he rolls over and keeps quiet, they’ll fall asleep and never talk about this again. It would be so easy. But something keeps him staring at Will, and somewhere in the quiet dark of the morning, he finds the courage to ask, “You don’t regret…choosing me?”

Will’s eyes seem to stare straight into him. “Of course not,” he says, and something blooms in Mike’s chest, warm and flowering, and he can’t help the smile that follows. Will’s grinning back, and he leans in, half-laughing, to say, “We still have ten months on this lease.”

Mike scoffs in mock offense. “That’s it. I’m kicking you out.”

“You can’t,” he says, trying and failing to fight his grin. “I’m on the lease.”

“No, out of my bed, dummy.”

“Fine,” Will says, rolling towards the edge and sitting up. “Maybe I’ll be able to sleep without freezing to death.”

They’re both joking, and they both know it, but it doesn’t stop the brief moment of disappointment at the thought of Will leaving his room. He lunges for him, grabbing his arm and tugging him towards the center of the bed. “Get back here,” he says between chuckles, pulling so that he falls onto his back. Will turns to swat him away, but Mike catches his wrist in his other hand and twists it just enough to be annoying.

Will looks at him with a mixture of incredulity and irritation as he figures out what Mike intends, but when he tries to push him away with his free arm, Mike catches that one as well and goes to pin him down.

Even as kids, they’d never wrestled much, and when they did, it was usually started by Lucas or Dustin as well. He and Will had always been gentle with each other, and their roughhousing typically didn’t last longer than a few minutes. But that doesn’t hold either of them back now as they fight to pin the other down, bony limbs knocking into each other in between their laughs.

In all honesty, Will is stronger than him. Mike may still be a little taller, but he’s always been on the scrawny side, which does not lend itself to physical fights of any kind. Which is why, once he gets one knee around the side of Will’s hip, he’s surprised to find them falling back towards the bed, Will pinned beneath him.

“Alright,” Will says, rolling his eyes. “You got me.”

“Good.” Mike says with a grin, choosing to revel in his unearned victory. “Don’t try to leave again.”

“You told me to leave!” He laughs, trying to wriggle out from under him, but Mike uses the small amount of leverage he has to push him right back down, preventing his escape. Will gasps in surprise, lips parted and eyes wide, before he breaks into another breathy laugh, and god, he wants to kiss him.

He could do it. It would be so easy. Will is right there, right beneath him, smiling and flushed and looking up at him like when they were kids, bright and unfettered by anything around them. He could do it. He could lean in, slowly, give him enough chance to back out if he wanted to—but Will wouldn’t. Would he? Mike isn’t sure. He’d like to think he wouldn’t.

Mike would like to think that he could lower himself down, steady and deliberate, just enough to watch Will’s cheeks flush that same reddish-pink as they had the other night, rosy and warm and horribly tempting. He’d like to think that he could move his fingers up only a touch from where they lay, wrapped around his wrists, and slide them just a little further, until they meet Will’s and he could intertwine them together, tangling them so tight they could never be undone. He’d like to think that he could catch Will’s lips in his own, that he could press them both into the mattress, that he could kiss him until the morning light without a second thought, without a single care in the world.

It would be so easy. He could do it.

Will’s looking at him like he knows Mike’s mind is elsewhere, asking the question without saying anything. Their eyes meet, and Will’s widen for half a second, and that’s enough to take the wind out of his sails, to destroy whatever fantasy he created, and he rolls from over top of him and flops down beside him instead, insides churning with fear and want and something he doesn’t have a name for.

Fuck. He’s so stupid. He’s stupid for missing his chance and stupid for thinking he has a chance in the first place. Will just told him how upset he was that Mike ruined his relationship, and now he’s—what? What is he expecting? That Will would just be okay with Mike suddenly deciding he’s in love with him? That’s just like him, really, to overinflate his self-importance and convince himself there’s any possibility of something happening. Just because Will likes guys doesn’t mean he likes him.

He turns back to the center to find Will looking at him with an expression he can’t quite read. His brows are drawn and his eyes are wide and his mouth is tilted and he almost seems—

Will isn’t disappointed. That’s a ridiculous and stupid and conceited and idiotic thing to think, so he stops thinking it.

“We should go to sleep,” he says, because if he’s asleep he can stop his thoughts from banging around his head like one of those toy monkeys with cymbals.

Will agrees without argument. “Yeah, we should. Good night, Mike.”

“‘Night,” he whispers back.

He lies there with his eyes closed, willing his brain to shut off and give him some relief, something to help him relax and not lose his mind over the idea of his very handsome best friend being asleep just inches away from him. They fall silent as they each try to drift off, but Will continues to shift under the covers for several more minutes, and it keeps Mike up, knowing that he isn’t comfortable.

“Everything okay?” he finally asks, opening his eyes, and finds Will with a light blush, looking embarrassed, like he’d been caught doing something wrong.

“How do you sleep in here every night?” he asks, shrugging the covers up higher around him. “Don’t you get cold?”

“No, I get hot when I sleep, usually. It’s actually kind of nice.”

“Oh. Well, glad it’s your room and not mine, then.”

“You’re still cold?” Mike asks.

Will immediately shakes his head. “I’m alright.”

He’s being stupid. He knows he is. He knows this is only going to hurt in the long run, giving him false hope without any sort of payoff. He knows, he knows, he knows this is a bad idea, but Will is right there, and he’s cold, and Mike can help, and before he knows what he’s doing, he’s reaching out across the darkness and saying, “Come here.”

He grabs the arm pressed into the mattress, so that when he tugs Will closer to him, he has to turn and face the same way Mike is. He pulls Will until his chest is pressed against his back, and he throws his arms around him, wrapping him up and keeping him close. Mike is flooded with his own sense of warmth immediately, skin burning wherever it touches Will’s, and he steadies his breathing and fixes the blankets around them before settling back into the bed.

“Better?” he asks, trying not to sound too hopeful.

“Better,” Will whispers.

He’d expected Will to be tense beneath him, uncomfortable with the unfamiliar territory they’re crossing, but instead, he’s melted into him, pliant and relaxed and exhausted. Will’s spent so long putting up false fronts, convincing everyone and even himself that he’s okay, that he doesn’t need help, that no one needs to baby him. Mike knows exactly how difficult it is for him to allow someone to take care of him like this, even if it’s something as simple as helping him fall asleep, that his heart feels like it’s going to beat out of his chest. Will trusts him. And he might be the only person who realizes exactly how special that is.

“We really should just go to your room,” he says, to offer him an out. To let him know the choice is still his, if he wants Mike to leave.

“That’s okay.” He can’t see exactly what’s happening, because their arms are under the covers, but he feels Will shift, one hand hovering just above them. He waits for a moment, then two, then he slowly lowers his hand to cover Mike’s where it lays wrapped around his waist. Another breath passes before Will interlocks their fingers together and pulls both of their hands close to his chest. “This is better.”

And Mike forces himself to fall asleep before he can do something truly stupid, like kiss him.

Everything is okay.

For now, that is. It’s a delicate balance along the side of a double edged sword. Mike has spent months, years wishing things between him and Will would just go back to normal, and they could fall into the ease of their friendship. No one knew him better. No one knows him better. And now that they’re finally back to where they were, now that they’re finally best friends again, Mike feels sick to his stomach.

Now that he finally got what he wanted, he wants more.

It shouldn’t be so goddamn hard. He’s an adult, and a stupid crush shouldn’t be ruining his day like this. He shouldn’t be daydreaming in class, unable to pay attention to anything his professors are saying because he’s too busy thinking about how nice it would be to spend another night with Will wrapped in his arms. Nor should he be flipping between that and the abject fear of Will deciding that maybe Danny is the perfect guy for him after all—or worse, the idea of Will finding someone else who actually is perfect, that Mike has no chance of competing with.

He doesn’t know how to fight it. All he knows is that next to Will, things make sense. He knows that every time they try to pull away from each other, something magnetic snaps them back together, a force neither of them can control. He knows that every time he sees Will with someone else, there’s a clawing in the pit of his stomach that aches and gnaws until he’s able to throw his arm around his shoulder. He knows that every time Will isn’t there, he misses him the way the moon misses the sun, lost and desolate, forever chasing after him.

He knows that when he’s with Will, he’s happy.

And not just that, but—well. He’s no expert on emotions, he knows that much, but sometimes he catches Will’s eye and thinks that maybe he thinks the same things. Maybe he’s reading too much into it. They’re best friends of a decade and a half at this point, so of course Will enjoys spending time with him.

But is it so outlandish for him to think that maybe, possibly, he makes Will happy, too? Is it so crazy to think that they’d be good together? That the decade and a half of friendship might mean something here? That he knows he can be a better boyfriend than fucking Danny, would was apparently never a boyfriend option to begin with?

Mike is a good boyfriend. Maybe not perfect—everyone knew he and El had their issues, and certainly had no qualms about informing them—but Mike can be a good boyfriend. That’s the kind of stuff he’s good at. Little gifts and presents, and planning fun dates, and all the romantic stuff that Will wants and deserves but thinks he’ll never get. He can do that. Of course he can do that. He wants to do that. He could be so good to Will.

And isn’t that what Will deserves, more than anything? Someone that treats him right? He could do that. He would. He wants to.

Does Will see that in him? Would it be too weird for them to take the leap and change what their friendship means? Mike knows he isn’t the most attractive guy in the world (especially not when he swallows his pride and compares himself to Danny, whose dark curls and toned arms put him to shame), but Will had never been superficial like that. And if he could get over that, if he could look past all of Mike’s numerous shortcomings, couldn’t they be something more? Something better?

Because it’s them. They’re Mike and Will. And if they’ve been through hell and back, traveling across multiple dimensions to save the world together, they can figure this out.

Mike makes a decision.

The next day, he bribes the twenty-one year old in his marketing class to run to the beer and wine store for him, paying probably double what he would have if this country wasn’t an affront to the very idea of freedom and he could’ve bought it himself. In exchange for a car wash and full tank of gas, their across-the-hall neighbors lend him their car so he can get the rest of what he needs, and he spends his free morning on Thursday running errands around town to gather everything.

He’s done with classes at noon the next day, hours before Will finishes, and he takes that time to start preparing everything.

It has to be perfect. He’s risking everything for this, this pipe dream of a scheme he’s concocted. If it doesn’t work, if Will tells him he’s crazy and decides their friendship is over for good, it’s not just a potential romance he’s losing. It’s everything. It’s his best friend. And as scared as he is, as much as he doesn’t want to lose everything that they have, he has to try. It’s worth the risk.

Because he can’t just go back to how he was before, drifting aimlessly day to day and without direction, hoping for anything to wake him up from the monotony. He’s spent so long caught in the droll of what was supposed to be a normal life, dragged down by all of his heaviest hopes, unable to break away and figure out what he’s supposed to be.

And maybe being with Will isn’t his purpose in life, maybe it’s not the answer to all of his problems, maybe it wouldn’t fix a single thing for him. But he and Will have always taken care of each other, and maybe this is just another step forward for them.

Also, he just really, really wants to kiss him.

He’s been done for an hour by the time he hears the key in the door, and his stomach clenches with a new wave of nerves. He shoots up and stands awkwardly in the middle of the living room, hands swinging back and forth as he waits for the door to open.

“Hey! You're back!” he says once Will enters, in a super casual and normal kind of way.

“Yeah, what’s all this?”

“Oh, just thought it would be fun,” he says, voice coming out way too quickly. He takes a deep breath, steadying himself. “We never have sleepovers anymore, you know? Like we used to. I mean, we live together, so duh. I just thought it’d be fun to stay up all night playing video games and watching movies ‘til we fall asleep in the living room. Kinda like we used to.” He waves his arms in a hapless circle around him, motioning to the setup. “You in?”

It takes a moment, but it’s not long before a slow, genuine grin grows across Will’s face. “Yeah, sounds fun. Just let me change.”

He emerges out from his room just a few minutes later, looking much comfier in a pair of sweats, and joins Mike on the floor, crawling his way into the blanket fort that spans the length of their sofa, their recliner, and both of their desk chairs, which Mike had taken without asking. “How long did this take you?”

“Not that long,” Mike lies, having spent over an hour with increasing frustration trying to make sure the centers of the blankets didn’t concave on top of them.

“Lights are a nice touch,” Will says, motioning to the fairy lights he’d also spent way too much time stringing along the inside of the fort.

“They were on sale!” he explains excitedly. “I saw them on clearance and had to grab them. Sets the mood, right?”

“And what mood is that?” he says between laughs.

“The mood for Mario, I guess.”

He glances back at the lights. “Yeah, it’s working.”

They share another laugh, and it helps settle the nerves firing off like rockets inside of him, bright and dizzying. He pulls the NES out towards the center of the room and turns it on, stretching the controllers out so they reach into the fort, and, even though it’s his console, hands the player one controller to Will.

Love really does make you do crazy things.

Just a few minutes later, Mike jumps up and darts over to the fridge, having remembered the two bottles of champagne he’d paid an exorbitant sum for. Will gives him an odd look as he brings them over and sits back down.

“I don’t remember doing this at any of our sleepovers.”

“Shut up. I just—” He pauses to struggle with the cork. “—thought it’d be fun.”

“I’m not complaining,” Will says, moving closer to look at the bottle, peering over Mike’s shoulder as he leans in towards the label. “Champagne,” he reads dramatically, his breath hot against Mike’s neck. A shiver runs down his spine. “What’s the occasion?”

“No occasion. Just thought—” He stops again, tugging against the bottle with all his might. A frown grows across his face when the cork does not budge. Mike deflates.

“It’d be fun?” Will finishes for him.

“Something like that.” He turns the bottle back towards him, leaning in to inspect the top to try and figure out how this was so difficult. The cork explodes into his face.

“Mike!” Will says at the same time Mike lets out a strangled yelp. Foam and alcohol blast from the bottle, spraying them in a fizzy mess. They sit there for a moment, stunned, before Will bursts into laughter, flicking some of the champagne off, and heads towards the kitchen.

Mike remains seated, frozen with the half-empty bottle of champagne dripping onto his lap. There’s a throbbing pain near his temple where the cork hit, and he thinks he should be grateful it wasn’t any closer to his eye.

Will returns, taking the bottle from Mike’s hands and replacing it with paper towels. He stifles another laugh as he wipes down the glass and Mike begins to clean himself off. “Are you okay?”

“Spectacular,” Mike grumbles. Will puts the now-dry bottle down and kneels to his level, grabbing Mike’s chin in his hand and tilting it up to get a better look.

“Is your face okay? That cork must’ve hurt.” He runs his thumb over the reddened splotch on his forehead, frowning with concern.

Mike forgets how to breathe. “Uh, yeah, um. All good.”

Will allows his hand to linger for a second too long before dropping it and standing back up. “Okay, well, I’m gonna change. Again.”

“Yeah, me too.”

When his bedroom door swings shut behind him, Mike only has enough brainpower to whip off his soaking wet shirt before grabbing his pillow and letting out one brief but powerful scream. God, he hasn’t even done anything yet and he’s already fucking everything up. Maybe this isn’t a good idea. He doesn’t actually have to tell Will anything. His excuse is believable enough, and they can just have a nice, normal night hanging out like they used to, and Will would be none the wiser.

That thought does ease the pressure a little bit, and he finishes changing his clothes to meet Will back out in the living room.

“Our next apartment needs to have a washer in it,” Will says, now in an entirely new pair of sweats. “I’m so sick of having to hang out in the basement for two hours every week just to make sure no one steals my clothes.”

Something about the words our next apartment sends Mike’s heart into a whirlwind. He laughs in agreement, and then they spread a blanket out over top of the wet spot where the champagne soaked into the carpet, and settle back down.

They don’t have champagne flutes. They also don’t have wine glasses. They also don’t have any cups made out of glass at all, so they pour their stupid bubbly wine into stupid plastic cups that Will’s mom had gotten them from the dollar store.

They make their way through the remainder of the first bottle, and even though there’s definitely a certain way that champagne is supposed to be enjoyed, and sitting in a blanket fort playing Mario with your childhood best friend who you’re maybe in love with definitely isn’t it, neither of them seem to mind. Mike immediately understands why Will prefers this over beer, the tart, tangy bubbles popping over his tongue as he takes another sip.

They take turns attempting to get through levels, joking and talking the whole time. It feels like old times again, before they had monsters trying to kill them every couple of months, when they could just hang out in the basement for an entire weekend and not worry about anything until school came around on Monday.

When it comes time to open the second bottle, he makes Will do it over the sink, still feeling a soft throb on his temple from before. Somehow, Will manages to get the cork off with a perfect little pop, and though a stream of soft white smoke trails out, not a drop of liquid spills.

“Show off,” he mutters. Will beams at him.

Hours pass. They get farther than they ever have before, but as the levels get harder, they get tipsier, making stupid mistakes and dying faster than they were ten levels before. Somehow, each passing death gets funnier, and they get stuck laughing harder and harder at every one until they’re sprawled out on the floor, breathless and useless.

Mike finds himself just gazing over at Will, his reddened cheeks and bright grin and eyes sparkling with tears of laughter.

“What?” Will asks between his giggles, hunching his shoulders slightly, an old, nervous tick that Mike recognizes immediately.

“Nothing,” he says, shrugging.

“You’re staring.”

He’s probably supposed to be ashamed of that. If he’d had a little less champagne, he might be. Instead, he shrugs again, refusing to look away.

Will’s eyes are wide as he looks back, the flush on his cheeks deepening before he tucks his head down and looks away. He grabs the controller for his turn and begins, leaving Mike to continue staring unabashedly, admiring the way the light catches the wisps of hair on the back of his neck or the strong curve of his nose from the side.

A few minutes pass before Will glances back and catches Mike still looking at him. “Stop,” he whines, shoving him in the shoulder, which gives Mike permission to shove him right back, and before they know it, they’re giggling on the floor again.

“I think I figured it out,” Mike blurts out before he can stop himself.

Will turns to face him, tilting his head in confusion. “Figured what out?”

Wait. Fuck. He didn’t mean to say that. Everything feels a little blurry, a little too bright, and his mouth is dry and this is not how he wanted any of this to go but fuck it, he can’t think of another way out. “Why I was so—um, uncomfortable. And why I was so upset about Danny.”

“Oh,” Will says, recognizing the shift in tone and sitting back up. “Okay.”

“I just—fuck. Okay. Listen. I’ve just been thinking about it a lot, and you were right. I was being weird, and uncomfortable, and it took me a while to figure it out, but I think I know why. And it’s not what you think. I don’t think so, at least.”

Will stares at him, expectant. “Okay,” he repeats.

“Um, right, okay, so the truth is, um, it really wasn’t about Danny at all. It was about me, and, um, what really happened was—um, the truth is—” There’s no point in holding back, right? He’s done everything he could. Nothing he says now is going to change Will’s answer. “I was jealous.”

There. He’s said it. He’s done it. He’s put it out there, he’s told Will, and now he knows, and the rest of it is up to fate. But he’s done it. He’s past the hardest part. He lets out a tiny sigh and looks at Will, waiting for his answer.

Will is frowning, looking back between him and the controller. “Mike…we talked about this already. I mean, you didn’t say the word jealous, but like, context clues. You said you were afraid of losing me to someone else. I get it. You don’t need to keep apologizing, or trying to make it up to me. It’s okay.” He gives him a soft, genuine smile. “I already told you, you’re never getting rid of me.”

Wait, what? “No, no, that’s not what I meant. I mean, yeah, everything I said at the café was true. But that’s not all of it.”

“Oh.”

Waves of hot shame wash over him, and he’s embarrassed that he had to explain again, but now it’s out there. “Yeah.”

“I mean, that part’s kinda your fault,” he says with a small laugh. Mike gapes at him, dumbstruck, but he doesn’t seem to notice as he continues. “You get hit on, like, every time we walk outside. I know you’re not into casual hookups, but I bet it wouldn’t take long for us to find you someone.”

“No, no, no, you’re not getting it.”

Will’s eyebrows draw together, now thoroughly confused. “What?”

Fuck. He’s not getting it. He needs to explain himself, needs to tell him exactly what he means, but his tongue feels so heavy in his mouth and he can’t remember any of the words he’s supposed to use and why doesn’t Will just know? Why is he being so difficult? Can’t he see how hard this is for Mike, can’t he figure it out?

“Look, can I just—” He’s going to chicken out if he has to say it. He scooches closer until they're side by side, and leans forward, catching his weight on the floor with one hand by Will’s hip. “Can I just try something?”

Will’s gaze leaves his hand and rises to meet Mike’s. “Um, sure?”

“Just—okay.” He can do this. It’s just a kiss. He’s kissed plenty of times. And it’s just Will. And he’s imagined kissing Will plenty of times. He can do this.

He raises his other hand to cup Will’s chin, fingers spreading just down his neck, and he hears his breath catch. There’s no air between them. Will’s eyes are locked on his.

“Mike,” he whispers.

Will’s skin is so warm beneath his hand. One finger rests on his pulse point, and he can feel it racing as fast as his, tapping a furious rhythm that only picks up when he leans in.

“Do you trust me?” he asks.

For a moment, neither of them move. Mike can count every heartbeat beneath his finger. Then, so slow and so small he almost misses it, Will nods.

Every fiber of his being aches to rush in, to grab Will and pull him close and never let go. But he can’t. It takes everything in him to restrain himself, to force his movements into something controlled, and he leans in with agonizing precision.

The last thing he sees is Will’s eyes fluttering shut before his follow suit, and he lets his hand guide him the rest of the way. Still, he stops just short of the kiss, letting their foreheads fall together. Electricity sparks from everywhere their skin touches, running a current through him that makes him desperate for more.

Will lets out one shaky breath, hot air rushing out from his parted lips, and that’s the final straw before Mike closes the gap, surging forward and pressing down and finally, finally kissing Will.

It’s nothing like he expected. He’d thought it would be like kissing El, sweet and bubbly like the first sip of soda on a summer day, something easy and refreshing. He doesn’t want to compare them, but it’s so different, so jarring—not in a bad way, but unexpected.

Will is so much more solid, from the sharp line of his jaw to the tiny pricks of stubble on his chin to the sturdiness of his form, unyielding as Mike leans in closer. He tastes like a mixture of the champagne, bright and tart, and some so familiar, so distinctly Will that he doesn’t have another way to describe it.

His lips move against Mike’s but it’s all tentative. Unsure. He’s second guessing everything, thinking so loud Mike can practically hear him. He’s kissing him back, but barely, so hesitant that Mike can’t bear to continue. He’s seen what Will kisses like when he wants to kiss someone, and this—this isn’t it.

Ice melts from his throat down his stomach. Will doesn’t want this. He pulls back, forehead resting on Will’s and he sighs, heart cracking.

“I can stop,” he whispers, trying to give Will the easiest way out. “Do you want me to stop?”

“Mike.” His voice is so low, almost imperceptible, and he doesn’t look up, gaze plastered on the carpet between them. “What are you doing?”

Well, he was kissing him. He kind of thought that was obvious. That doesn’t seem like the answer Will is looking for, though.

“Is…is this a joke?” Will continues, voice quavering with suppressed tears. “Are you making fun of me?”

“No!” Mike pulls back now, sitting up straight. “Will, no, I would never. I—”

“Then why are you doing this?”

Why is he doing this? Because he’s an idiot, apparently, who doesn’t know when to leave well enough alone. They were fine. Everything was fine, they were good, they were best friends and he just had to go and fuck it up again, like he always does.

“I—you said,” he tries to explain. Maybe if he makes it make enough sense, Will won’t hate him for the rest of his life. “You said that you wanted someone that would know what you like and…and care enough to do it. And I know you like Nintendo and blanket forts and getting to hang out like we used to, and then Ryan told me you liked champagne, and—fuck,” he groans, his hands running through his hair in frustration. “I forgot about the strawberries. I got chocolate strawberries in the fridge, because I know you like strawberries, and I know we were joking when we talked about them, but everybody loves chocolate strawberries, and—” His voice falters when he looks back at Will, who’s still staring at him in some mixture of disbelief and something he can’t place. It takes the breath out of his lungs.

“Why?” Will says again, so low he can barely hear it over the tinny static of the television.

“Because I—I care enough to try.” That’s all he has the courage to say. It doesn’t feel like enough.

Will leans away, sitting back on his hands and looking out somewhere in the distance. He doesn’t exactly seem upset with that answer, but he doesn’t seem thrilled, either. The silence stretches between them for longer and longer until Mike can’t take it anymore.

“Please say something,” he whispers, almost a plea.

Will seems frozen, unable to move and unable to speak. Every second that passes feels like another rejection, and he swallows down the shaky, sickening feeling that rises in his stomach. Fuck. He just needs Will to do it, to shut him down so he can leave and wallow in his room about how he destroyed his entire life in one night.

“This isn’t funny,” Will finally says, voice crackling like cellophane. “You can’t just say that kind of stuff, Mike.”

“I'm not being funny. What are you talking about? Why would this be funny? I worked so hard on this, I’ve been so nervous all day, how is this funny?” He thinks he might be angry. He’s honestly too confused to tell. All he knows is that his entire body is trembling like it’s about to burst, and he’s so embarrassed and stupid and he feels like a fucking idiot for even trying, and now Will’s telling him his feelings are a joke?

Will looks at him with the widest eyes he’s ever seen, ringed red like he’s about to cry. “You still don’t know?”

“Know what?”

“I have spent”—he takes a deep, shuddering breath—“so many years trying to get over it. And I did. I was—I am. I…I moved on. I made friends and I found guys that were interested in me and I was doing so well. And then I let you convince me to be roommates. And I knew it was a bad idea. And I knew—I don’t know. Because you would make all those stupid jokes about how I always come home to you. Or…or how you want me to spend the night with you. And it just drove me insane. I almost thought you were doing it on purpose. To torture me, maybe. And rub it in my face. Because how could you say that stuff so casually? How could you not know?”

He’s so rapt in his words he forgets to breathe. “Know what?” he asks again.

“Mike,” he says, voice low and hoarse. “You can’t say these things if you don’t mean them. I’m serious. This isn’t—you can’t just—”

“Know what, Will?”

Will lets out a heavy breath, facing toward the television, refusing to make eye contact. “How badly I wanted you.”

The words hang between them for a moment. Everything feels heavy, weighted by some outside force, and it takes him longer to process what Will said. Wanted. It spins around in circles in his head, over and over, almost perfect. Almost exactly what he wants to hear.

“Wanted?” he asks, barely more than a whisper.

Will takes a long, shaky breath. Swallows. Looks directly at Mike.

“Want.”

He’s kissing Will before he knows what’s happening.

Somewhere in the back of his mind, he thinks he should be embarrassed by how eager he is, grasping Will’s face in both hands and pulling him close. But he’s never been known for his impulse control, and he certainly isn’t about to start now. Not when Will is kissing him back.

It’s worlds apart from the first one, which had been so tentative, like dipping a toe in the pool to see if the water’s warm enough. This one is a cannonball, running headfirst with no preparation, fearless and wild and exhilarating to feel the fall through the air before being caught in the sharp chill of the water.

Every time he presses forward, Will presses right back, just as impatient, like he’s been yearning for this exactly as long as Mike has. And it’s so many things all at once—as warm as the hot chocolate Will makes him on chilly mornings while he pours his coffee, as bright as the string lights that twinkle above them now, as sweet as the dull taste of champagne that still lingers between them—that he’s almost overwhelmed, almost unsure of what to do.

But it’s Will. And haven’t they always known what to do? Haven’t they always been a perfect pair, inseparable for as long as either could remember? Hasn’t this been their inevitable end since the very beginning? Weren’t they always meant to find each other like this?

Mike would like to think so. No—he’s sure of it. They’ve chosen each other, time and time and time again, to the point that there’s no choice any more. Not for him, at least.

He shifts, and it causes Will to lean back, reaching one hand for the ground and landing on his controller, instead. It slips out beneath him, making him land on his back, and they both stare at each other for a moment before they’re bursting into laughter.

“Are you okay?” Mike asks.

Will’s cheeks are red, but he’s not sure if that’s from embarrassment or something else. “I’m okay.”

He goes to sit up, but Mike leans down instead, hovering over him as he lies back onto the floor. A lazy grin spreads across his face, and he presses one long, slow kiss to his lips before lifting back just a touch.

“Did that feel like a joke?” he asks in a breathy voice.

He barely has time to laugh before Will’s fists are in his shirt, and he’s being pulled right back down again.

He really can’t find it in him to complain.

By the time Mike’s alarm goes off the next morning, they’ve already been up for an hour, tired and scratchy-voiced but too enveloped in each other and the novelty of their relationship to fall back asleep. They’re curled up together in the cold air of his bedroom, legs tangled and arms wrapped around each other with their backs propped up on his pillows. All of his extra blankets are still being used as the walls of their fort, which just gives them more of an excuse to stay close under the one comforter he has left.

“I can’t believe you were jealous,” Will is saying, twisting the sheet in his hands. “If I’d known there was a chance, I—” Will can’t seem to finish his sentence. He swallows, staring at Mike with such intensity that he has to look away.

“I mean, I didn’t even know I was jealous,” he deflects instead, which just causes Will to laugh.

“I can’t believe you were jealous and you didn’t know.”

“Hey, you’re not allowed to make fun of me, not after being in love with me for a decade.”

“That’s not—hey!” Will says, shoving him lightly with his shoulder. “That is not what I said.”

“You just said you’ve had a crush on me since middle school!”

“I said I had a crush on you in middle school, not since.”

“Right, and when did you get over that, again?” he asks, not bothering to hide his smirk. He’s doing the smug thing because he knows it will get Will flustered, which is so—cute. It’s cute. And he’s allowed to think that now.

It looks like it’s working for a moment, but then Will narrows his eyes back at him and says, “Whatever. For all we know, you’ve been in love with me for a decade and literally didn’t know.”

Oh. Huh. He’s never thought about that before, but to be fair, he can’t remember his feelings for Will ever changing, at least not noticeably. Maybe it was too gradual for him to pick up on, little bits and pieces of their friendship shifting into something else, familiar but just different enough until it transformed into this. Or maybe he’s really just been in love with Will for as long as he can remember. “That’s actually probably true.”

Will pulls back, clearly not expecting that response. “What?”

“I don’t know. It makes sense. I was your first crush. Maybe you’ve been mine all along, too.”

“Oh.” Will looks like he has no idea how to process this information. “Maybe?”

“Well, I don’t know! I mean, I’ve always—like, it’s you, you know? So I guess I might have, you know…”

“No, I don’t.”

“Shut up. It’s just…it’s you.” He doesn’t mean to sound so sappy when he says it, but then again, he feels pretty sappy. All of his words taste sticky-sweet in his mouth, dripping in honey and spilling out between them before he can think them through. He’d tell Will every stupid thought that crosses his mind if he could figure out a way to say it coherently.

“Oh,” Will whispers again, looking away to hide his growing grin. He shrinks back down into the crook of Mike’s arm, burrowing himself in the covers, before turning back and darting up to press one quick kiss to the underside of Mike’s jaw.

It’s the first time Will has kissed him, and it sends the butterflies in his stomach into a tailspin. Even though he’s been more than a willing participant when Mike kisses him, it’s still so—so much, to imagine the possibility that Will wants this as much as he does. But it’s not imagination, it’s not just a possibility, it’s real and present and if Will thinks he’s getting away with just that, he’s insane.

Mike swoops down and captures Will’s lips in his own, fighting the giddy urge to laugh into it as Will brings his arms to wrap around his neck. It’s crazy to him that they haven’t been doing this for forever. Why haven’t they been doing this for forever?

Will pulls back suddenly, eyebrows knit together in concern. “You weren’t my first crush.”

The butterflies in his stomach die a quick, sudden death. “What? Who was?”

“Lucas.”

“What?”

“Relax. It was just a little one. Back in first grade. It’s why I always wanted him to play with us at recess.” Will’s fighting off another grin as he leans back in, one finger running through the hair at the nape of his neck. “Don’t be jealous.”

He tilts his head back and lets out a low groan. “I’m never living that down, am I?”

“Never,” Will whispers against his lips before pulling him in for another quick kiss. Mike is just starting to lean in when Will moves back again, which is going to get old very quickly if it doesn’t stop soon. “How did you know, anyway?”

“What?”

“How did you know that you were jealous? You said it took you a long time to figure it out. I’m just wondering when you knew.”

Mike sits back a little, frowning. “Oh. I actually talked to Nancy about it. She’s the one that pointed it out.”

“Oh, yeah. Jonathan mentioned that.”

He whips his head around, ready to commit a murder. “Jonathan knew?”

“Not any details. He just said that Nancy mentioned you called, which is weird, because you never call Nancy.”

He leans back with another groan, running his hand through his hair. “Oh, no, this isn’t gonna work.”

“Huh?”

“Us dating while they’re dating. It’s way too much.”

When he turns to face Will, he finds him looking back with a small, disbelieving little smile. “We’re dating?”

Mike stares at him. Had he not made that clear enough? Had they not had that whole discussion yesterday? Well, now that he thinks about it, he actually didn’t get around to asking, and Will didn’t exactly answer. They just kissed. A lot. Which is sort of an answer, if you think about it.

“Not while they are. We have to break them up.” He tries to sound lighthearted about it, but judging by the way Will’s face falls, this isn’t something he can joke about. “Yes. God. I mean, I’d really like to. That is, if you want to.”

“Yes,” Will says immediately, followed by his cheeks turning a bright pink. “Yeah, I do. Wanna date you, I mean.”

He tries so hard to be casual about it, but he can’t help the stupid grin that grows across his face. “Cool.”

Luckily, the one on Will matches his. “Cool.”

And really, what is there left to do but what he’s been dying to do for months? He lets his hand spread across Will’s cheek as he pulls him back in, and despite the chilly air around them, he’s never felt warmer. He kisses him slow and lazy, because there’s no rush, because he can take all the time in the world, because he’s allowed to do this whenever he wants to, now. Vaguely, somewhere in the back of his mind, he thinks this is the best kiss he’s ever had.

Which makes him pull away with an embarrassing pop, leaving Will looking a little forlorn. “I have a question,” he says, sounding a bit more frantic than he wants to.

“Yeah?”

“Who’s a better kisser?”

Will’s expression falls from concerned to annoyed in remarkable time. “Are you serious?”

“I’m just wondering! It’s a normal question.”

Will looks like he's gearing up to say a hundred different things, and none of them anything Mike wants to hear. Instead, he shrugs and says, “I don’t know.”

“What?”

“Yeah, I don't remember,” he says, a wicked grin spreading across his face. “You’ll have to remind me.”

Well, that’s definitely something he can do. But as he leans in to close the gap, Will tilts his head back, his dangerous expression only growing. “I’ll have to call Danny, too, so I can compare—”

Will’s suddenly cut off by a pair of lips against his own, pushed down into the mattress. And Mike knows it’s a joke, but there’s no way he’s letting Will think that’s ever going to happen. Really, the only solution is to kiss him until he forgets Danny ever existed. Which, again, is definitely something he can do.

He does his best, but Will is making it very difficult by laughing against his lips, childish and carefree. It’s so fucking adorable that he wants to crush Will against his chest and never let him leave. He can’t believe there was ever a time that he would deny himself this. He can’t believe there was ever a time he thought he didn’t want this.

He switches tactics, pressing his lips to the hollow of Will’s neck and relishing in the shiver that runs through his body. So he does it again, and again, and again, just to see how many times he can make Will let out that soft, fluttery little sigh.

And if it leaves a mark where someone else might see—well. That’s just a bonus.

Will’s hands, which have twisted themselves in his hair, tug him back up until they’re level. He tries to guide Mike back to his lips, but instead, Mike insists on kissing every other inch of his face first, peppering them across his cheeks and nose and forehead until Will is laughing again. Finally, he makes his way back to his lips, where Will leans up and meets him halfway.

It’s new, and it’s different, but it’s still them. It’s safe, and warm, and feels so much like home that Mike never wants to leave. Something quiet settles in him.

For the first time in a long, long time, everything is okay.