Chapter Text
Will felt a distinct emptiness that night when it came time to sleep. He had to stay in the hospital overnight and wait for the drugs to fully exit his system, and at 9 p.m. when his mom began standing up to pack her things and go home, he realized with a start that it had been ages since he’d slept in a place without his family.
And Will wasn’t necessarily clingy, or frightened - he wasn’t scared of the dark anymore, wasn’t shivering in the absence of his mom. That was childish, he thought, and weak. No, there wasn’t any fear in his chest. But there was loneliness.
He hated hospitals, he’d spent his whole life begging his mom to keep him away from them at all costs. No hospitals , he’d pleaded, even when he was having hyperrealistic visions and reeling trauma responses. Even when he was being burned alive on the pumpkin farm he’d been screaming partly from the pain and partly in protest of the ambulance. Maybe it had to do with the cold, sterile, and unfamiliar walls. Maybe it had to do with the dozens of strangers in masks and blue scrubs.
Or maybe it was because being in a hospital meant paying attention to what was wrong with Will.
But that probably wasn’t it.
He shifted in his bed, still feeling a bit shaky from the day’s events. The lights were off, and the room was dark. He’d requested for the blinds to be kept open so that the moonlight and street lamps would provide their minimal lighting. He closed his eyes.
One thing about the last few months - Will had stopped dreaming. It was good in his books, because his dreams most often turned into nightmares. He no longer had visions of Vecna gnawing at his psyche, and he never woke up crying in the way that he did during the days leading up to Mike’s regaining of consciousness.
But as he fell asleep on the scratchy hospital sheets, he felt the slow and steady onslaught of a dream flooding his mind. And it wasn’t a nightmare this time. Just a memory.
“Where were you?” Mike asked as Will entered Mike’s bedroom - their shared bedroom, for now. Will was slightly out of breath, having biked a long distance with a heavy box tied to his basket.
“Shelter,” he said. “I had to pick up some food for your mom.”
Mike nodded, eyeing him carefully from where he sat on his bed. Will ignored the apparent tension in the air as he shrugged his jacket off and walked over to the dresser. He opened the top drawer and searched for a t-shirt to change into. Facing away from Mike, he unbuttoned his flannel, feeling the dull, un-conditioned air against his bare skin.
They’d started changing their clothes with the other in the room. These days, privacy was the least of their worries.
“Saw El today,” Mike said. Will grabbed the t-shirt and pulled it over his head.
“Nice,” he said. “How is she?”
“Fine,” Mike said. Will turned around and leaned against the dresser. Mike’s tone was clipped.
“Did something happen?” Will asked, furrowing his brows. “You seem…”
“Nothing happened,” Mike said. “I just…”
Then he took a deep breath and got out of his bed, his socks hitting the floor with a quiet thump. He walked over to his desk and reached for the painting that was hung above it. Will’s heart quickened its pace. His throat felt like it was going to close up, like he was allergic to that damn painting, allergic to the lie he’d thrown at Mike’s unassuming face.
Mike took the painting back to his bed and sat down again. Will cautiously walked towards the bed as well.
“What’s wrong?” Will asked. Mike brought his index finger down to the canvas and gently touched his own figure, traced the outline of the heart on his shield.
“El didn’t commission this,” he said.
And there it was. Will stopped before he could sit down beside Mike. He waited for the other boy to keep talking, not sure if he was ready to say anything back.
“I… I’d figured it out a while ago, I think,” Mike said. “Or suspected it, at least.” He chuckled, but there was pain behind it. “I don’t know if I even believed you when you first told me.”
“Mike…”
He tore his eyes away from the painting to look at Will.
“Why would El ask you to make a painting of just the four of us as our D&D characters? She doesn’t know jack shit about that. She would’ve wanted her and Max to be included. So why-- why would she come up with this, how would she be able to explain what her, her vision was? It makes no sense, right? It makes no sense.”
Will hated confrontation. To his frustration, he felt tears building up behind his eyes. He turned to face the door.
“Will, don’t walk away, please,” Mike said, standing up. “I just want to know why .”
“I wanted to help,” Will said.
“You didn’t have to lie about it,” Mike said. “You know how I feel about--”
“ Yeah , I know how you feel!” Will said, turning around angrily. “You think I wanted to lie? You think it didn’t hurt, when your face lit up as soon as I mentioned El? I-- fuck.”
“What do you mean?” Mike asked frantically. “What the hell does that mean ?”
“Nothing,” Will said, trying to cover his tracks. “I didn’t mean anything by that, I just… I knew that if the painting had just been from me , it wouldn’t have… it wouldn’t have mattered as much. And you’d been venting that entire trip about how you and El weren’t doing too great, so… I just wanted to help you out.”
“Of course it would’ve mattered,” Mike said.
They were standing face to face in his quiet room, in that huge, silent house. And Will wanted to call bullshit, say no, it wouldn’t have mattered, you wouldn’t have cared even half as much . But of course he just stayed quiet.
Mike sighed.
“I asked El about it today, and… I was right. She had no idea what I was talking about. And then I thought back to this letter she wrote to me…”
He turned to his desk and opened a drawer. It was filled to the top with folded up pieces of paper. Will swallowed down the hurt when he realized that Mike had a drawer full of El’s letters but had never written to Will. The pain was dull now, anyways. No longer a sting.
He pulled out the one from the top of the stack and unfolded it. He began reading from the middle of the page.
“Will is painting a lot,” Mike read. “But he won’t show me what he’s working on. Maybe it is for a girl.” Mike clenched his jaw. He swallowed thickly. “I think… there is someone he likes. Because he has been acting weird.”
There was a beat of silence as Mike brought his eyes back to Will.
Will felt an anger boiling inside him - he felt trapped, he felt like Mike had prepared all of this to expose Will as thoroughly as possible, to bare all of Will’s feelings for him instead of letting him do it himself.
He took a step back.
“Please don’t walk away,” Mike said again. “Come on, Will, I know how--”
“You don’t know anything ,” Will said shakily. He turned and walked out the door.
Will woke up to the sound of the door opening. He blinked his eyes open, squinting as he adjusted to the white lights and white walls.
Mike was there, wearing his school bag even though it was a Saturday.
“Can I come in?” Mike said. Will furrowed his brows.
“Sure,” he said quietly.
Mike walked over to his bedside and brought the backpack down to his lap. He opened it and began pulling things out - four comic books, all of which Will had read in Mike’s bedroom as a kid; a Rubik’s cube, which Will remembered learning how to solve from Mike; and a walkman. With a mixtape in tow.
“Oh, I’ve been meaning to ask,” Mike said, holding up the mixtape. It was labeled Autumn of ‘84 . “Do you know The Smiths?”
Will was unable to stop the small, disbelieving smile that threatened to overtake his face.
“Yeah,” he said. “Why?”
Mike laughed. “You won’t believe it, but I don’t remember making this tape. Look at the tracklist.”
He handed him the tape and Will looked at the back.
“Either you made this,” Mike said, “Or… it’s about you. So I thought you’d like to borrow it.”
The two of them spent their Saturday afternoon reading the comic books quietly and occasionally showing the other a cool strip. Mike seemed to understand that Will didn’t want to talk. He’d always been intuitive like that.
Will didn’t mention the dream to Mike - a part of him was grateful that in losing his memories, Mike had lost that specific one, too.
But after Mike left, Will put on the headphones and played the mixtape. He hadn’t known that Mike had made it.
And the familiar, echoey intro of Back to the Old House made the cold hospital room feel a little bit warmer.