Chapter Text
“--and then she was like, Mike Wheeler, do you have something productive to add to this conversation or would you rather be spending your time elsewhere, and I was like, well, of course I don’t want to be sitting in this Medieval Poetry discussion at eight-thirty in the morning on a Wednesday, but grad requirements are no joke. Well, I didn’t say that, but I was definitely thinking it. And then–”
Will likes to think that he’s picked up a few skills since he’s come to college. The first being how to drink copious amounts of caffeine every day and still keep his heart pumping at a somewhat healthy rate. The second thing is knowing when to actually pay attention to something Mike is saying, and when to tune him out.
“--and even though they’re encouraging us to indulge our creativity, or whatever, for some reason it was wrong of me to insinuate that maybe the poem wasn’t about, like, finding God or whatever and it was just about two people boning in corsets and chainmail–”
This, as Will realized, the second Mike flounced into his dorm room some hours ago, is an example of a time the second skill comes in handy. “Yeah,” he says dutifully, right as Mike pauses to take a breath, not looking up from the charcoal drawing on his desk. “No, you’re totally right.”
The third skill he’s learned, more so of late, is knowing exactly the right thing to say at specific intervals of time in order to keep Mike thinking that he’s listening.
“Right?” Mike flings himself down on Will’s ancient dorm bed as he throws his hands over his head, springs and frame creaking loud enough that for a second Will is genuinely concerned that Mike will fall through the bottom of the bed and onto the floor. “Like, how are any of us supposed to find this shit interesting if all these poems from seven hundred years ago are literally just taken at face value, like come on, people back then would drink one sip of slightly gross water, shit their brains out, and die of dysentery, nothing cool ever actually happened, I’m going to need to use my imagination a bit here–”
Will does not have much of an interest in dysentery, but he does, unfortunately, have an interest in Mike. In Mike’s presence, that is. And also, maybe Mike. So he gladly bears the constant onslaught of words flowing from Mike Wheeler’s mouth if it means he stays like that on Will’s bed, on top of the generic plaid sheets he’s pretty sure every guy on this floor owns, and just talks at him for hours like he’s just really glad to be here. Like there’s nothing else he’d rather be doing on a Friday night than just hanging out with Will. And not even necessarily hang out, like, at a party or with anyone else or doing anything that most college students would be doing on a Friday– just, hanging out with him.
Will frowns at his drawing. The shading is off but he can’t tell why.
“Hey!” Will looks up just in time for a crumpled piece of paper to hit him on the side of the head. Mike is sitting up now, and glaring at him. “You’re totally not even listening to what I’m saying right now.”
Okay, so maybe some of his skills still need a little fine-tuning. “No, no, I’m listening,” he says hurriedly, putting down his charcoal pencil and trying his best to plaster an intrigued expression on his face. “Dysentery,” he recites duly, “you were saying that thing about dysentery.”
Mike frowns. “That was at least three minutes ago,” he says, and hops off the bed. He looks over Will’s shoulder at the 2x3 charcoal drawing on the desk, due at the end of Intro to Drawing III at noon the coming Monday. “Hey, this is really good,” Mike says earnestly. He reaches down to touch it, and Will slaps his hand away before any of the black comes away smudged on his fingers. He tries very hard not to think about Mike’s hair grazing his neck as he leans in, or the smell of the Calvin Klein cologne that Nancy got him for his birthday.
“Thanks,” says Will. “It’s a bowl of fruit.” The shading on the grapes has been bugging him for hours now, but he can’t quite figure out what’s wrong with them. Did he make them too shiny? Too round? Too oblong? He sighs and picks up his eraser again.
Mike laughs and puts a hand on Will’s shoulder, blows some of the excess charcoal dust off the page and says, “yeah, it sure is,” while Will tries to not have a conniption at the feeling of Mike’s fingers against the bare skin of his neck. “Hey, do you wanna go do something? How long have you been working on this?”
The answer is way too long, long enough for Will’s limbs to have gone stiff, his neck permanently cemented in this rounded, hunched position from being curled over his desk for hours, shading in these goddamn pears. “Do you think the grapes look weird?” Will asks, holding up the giant sheet of paper, tilting it so it catches the light in all the different angles his tiny dorm window will allow, “I’ve been working on them forever–”
“Your grapes look fine,” Mike says, rolling his eyes, and he grabs the drawing from his hand and flings it back onto the desk. Will makes a very affronted noise, because charcoal smears, thank you very much, and goes after it, checking to see if there are any creases in the paper. “Come on,” Mike begs, “Lucas is having a thing tonight, we should go! I feel like I’ve barely seen you all week, and you look like you could use a change of scenery.” And then Mike is looking at him with a very soft, pleading expression, and is putting one hand on Will’s wrist to tug him towards the door, his fingers pressing delicately against Will’s pulse point. The bottom line is that Will has never been able to say no to Mike, especially not when he’s looking at him like that.
“Fine,” Will says with a long-suffering sigh, and Mike cheers, slips his hand into Will’s as he tugs him out the door, and, God, okay, Will sincerely hopes that Lucas’ thing will have enough tequila shots available for him to forget about the feeling of Mike’s fingers squeezing his, all tight and steady like some sort of promise.
Lucas lives in a frat house, so of course the tequila, among other types of booze, is flowing freely by the time they arrive. Mike actually also lives in this frat house–if you could even say that, since he spends most of his conscious hours in Will’s dorm, and a good amount of his unconscious ones too, lately– and Will’s spent the last year of his life trying to figure out what motivation Mike Wheeler could possibly have for joining a fraternity.
Lucas was a no-brainer– he’s tall, extroverted, jacked, the youngest player on the men’s basketball team, and he somehow got unbelievably hot the summer before college started, which made him start doing things like wearing muscle tanks and aftershave while Will was still figuring out how to shave his nonexistent facial hair and tuck his shirt into his pants without it looking lumpy around his crotch. Lucas is also just an outgoing, friendly person–at least to strangers he hasn’t known for a decade and a half–and the combination of his natural charisma and smile could probably light up Rockefeller Center on Christmas Eve. So yeah, Will gets it.
He doesn’t, however, get the Mike thing. Mike is tall, but the similarities between them end there. He’s not jacked, does not play sports–unless competitive sarcastic commentary gets added to the Olympics one of these years—and while he’s a pleasant and charming enough person, Will supposes, objectively or something, he doesn’t carry that certain type of aura around him that makes Will want to fist bump him or say hey, bro as he passes him in the halls. And, well, Will is probably the wrong person to ask if he thinks Mike is hot, because to be entirely honest, he’s spent at least the last few years of his life fantasizing about Mike pulling him into a dark corner of a room during a party and going Will, I’ve been thinking a lot about you lately, and not just as a friend, which leads to them making out aggressively under some stranger’s coat rack, all wrapped up in thrift store leather and wool.
This is, however, a crisis that Will has been putting off dealing with for just as many years, and will continue to do so, at least until Thanksgiving break, because he simply does not have the bandwidth to deal with whatever these feelings are when he has his illustration midterm due at the end of next week. Which he has not yet started, so he’s seriously starting to regret coming to Lucas’ thing when Mike pushes open the front door and the overpowering smell of sweat and cheap vodka fills the air.
Lucas, true to outgoing student athlete form, is waiting at the door to greet them. “Will!” he cheers, patting him on the back. “We haven’t seen you in forever!”
We meaning the house as a whole, because Lucas and Will hung out just yesterday, watching A New Hope for the umpteenth time and talking to Dustin over the phone as he apartment-sat for his neighbor. “Mike!” Lucas says, after a second of mild surprise, “you too, man.”
Mike rolls his eyes. “I live here, Lucas,” he says, but accepts the cup of mystery substance Lucas is thrusting into his hands. He takes a tentative whiff and crinkles his nose. “Ew, what is this?”
“Jungle juice,” says Lucas nonchalantly, which is probably exactly what he could call it to make sure that Will definitely is not going to venture near the stuff. “Plus, you definitely don’t live here, Mike, you’re never even around. I think there might be legit cobwebs growing in your room.” Lucas tosses back the last sips of his own cup, watching Mike sip gingerly at said jungle juice, and laughing when he gags.
He’s very tall now, Will notices, and even though he’s always been the shortest one of the friend group, it’s like he and Lucas have been racing to see if one of them will finally catch up to the other in height. Will grew, and then Lucas grew some more, and then Will got the last stages of his growth spurt, and thought they’d finally be the same height, and then Lucas started playing basketball and got taller and ripped and then Will declared it a lost cause.
Mike laughs, loud enough to be heard over the cacophony of the frat’s living room. “It’s a lot nicer at Will’s,” he says easily, shooting Will a sideways smile with a glint in his eye, like they’re sharing a secret, just between the two of them. Will tries very hard not to think about that smile. There are a lot of things he’s been trying not to think about, lately. “It’s quiet and it smells better and he lets me talk at him for hours without complaining, and at least has the manners to pretend like he’s listening.”
“Hey!” Lucas exclaims, “it’s not my fault you never talk about anything interesting or for less than an hour at a time!”
Will feels something very warm and bubbly expanding in his chest as Mike says this. It’s true, Mike has almost replaced Will’s actual roommate, whom he hasn’t seen for more than ten minutes since the first week of classes, because he’s always fucking off somewhere to do God knows what that Will doesn’t care enough to find out about. Privately, he doesn’t think his room is all that great. There’s barely any natural light and the walls are all painted-over cement so it feels a bit like a dungeon in the throes of the plague—or freshman flu— especially now during the fall when the sun sets after a measly eight hours of daylight.
But Mike doesn’t seem to care about his eternally growing laundry pile or his perpetually unmade bed or the strange smell emanating from his roommate’s closet (Mike did, at first, check to see if there was a dead body hidden inside). He seems perfectly content with perching atop Will’s bed as he works and Will talks, or as Will works and he talks, or both of them try - keyword try - and get their work done in comfortable silence. He seems fine with lying side by side on the duvet cover that’s been washed and used so long that it’s started to pill at the seams and zipper, and even brought back a sleeping bag at the start of the school year that’s been stashed in Will’s closet.
Mike has been sleeping on his floor a lot, the past couple months, in lieu of the walk back to the north side of campus where the frat houses are lined up, in this biting late fall cold. He doesn’t seem to mind the floor. Will certainly does not mind him on the floor. He does, however, consistently wish that his bed wasn’t just barely large enough for his own five foot nine frame; he has a lot of half-awake dreams, on nights where Mike stays over, where he tells Mike to forget about the floor, there’s plenty of space up here, and then they spend the entire night pressed up back-to-chest against each other, but then he always wakes up to the crinkling of Mike’s sleeping bag as he rolls over in his sleep and decides to not address it until the morning.
He still hasn’t gotten around to addressing it.
“Calm down,” Lucas is saying to Mike, who’s still having a coughing fit over his mystery punch. “It’s really not that bad, you’re just a crybaby.”
“Lucas, I don’t know how to tell you this but this tastes like straight gasoline,” Mike chokes, thrusting the empty cup back at him. “Who the hell made this?”
Lucas thinks for a minute, then says, “Tyler? Robbie? I have absolutely no clue but they did dump at least ten full bottles of booze in the keg–”
“--no wonder it tastes like shit then, fuck–”
Will mostly just finds this entire exchange amusing. Mike never gets drunk at these things, barely even tipsy, if you could call it that. He just takes a couple drinks of something or the other and wanders aimlessly around with Will happily in tow until he gets tired and they both inevitably retreat upstairs. Sometimes it’s like Mike genuinely forgets he lives here, like he thinks his room in the house is just good for acting as a motel, when it’s more convenient to stay than leave.
Will has been trying to figure out for forever why Mike even decided to rush. The only plausible reason he’s been able to think of so far is that it has less to do with the everything of a fraternity, and more to do about ensuring that Lucas doesn’t turn into the sort of douchebag that wanders around the halls spinning basketballs on his fingers and saying things like do you have a name, or can I just call you mine? to random girls he passes in the halls. Will knows Mike misses Lucas, misses the easy familiarity of his friend living next door to him, especially since Mike felt a bit left out after Lucas started getting close (and really good) with the basketball team in high school, so he tries to keep his griping about it to a minimum. But honestly, does everyone in this place have to be so skeezy?
“Do you want a cup?” Lucas asks Will, but he’s grinning toothily like they're in on some joke together.
Will raises his eyebrows. “Absolutely not,” he says, just in case Lucas was serious and Lucas laughs.
Mike groans. “Good call,” he says, and hands Will an unopened can of beer from a table. “You can have this instead.”
“Thanks,” Will says, more so because he just likes having something to hold in his hands than because of the drink itself. He doesn’t know what to do with his hands otherwise, whether to keep them awkwardly at his sides or crossed or on his hips or wherever else. Mike’s always said that looking at Will’s hands move makes him feel nervous, gives him secondhand antsiness, whatever that means. “Let’s go somewhere else, yeah?” he suggests, as another barrage of already inebriated college students pour through the front door. It’s getting very loud in here, and Will is starting to wish he’d brought along his sketchbook so he could retreat to the dilapidated bathrooms and start that midterm he procrastinated working on all week.
“Good idea,” says Mike, and then they’re waving goodbye to Lucas and weaving through the crowd. Sometimes even Will himself forgets that Mike technically lives here, forgets his vague familiarity with the building and all the good corners to go to when you don’t want to be swamped with a tidal wave of questionable body odor and sweat. Will tries very hard to focus on the countless other points of stimulation in the room– the clusters of bodies, the weird smell in the air, the uncomfortably loud music– everything but Mike’s hand on his lower back as he guides them to the back rooms of the house.
For all his griping about needing to drown his sorrows in tequila shots or whatever, Will doesn’t drink. More than like, a few sips of beer anyway, and only to fill in awkward gaps in conversation. First, because beer is nasty, and he isn’t convinced that anyone who says they’re enjoying it isn’t just in on some massive joke to fool the unsuspecting masses and then laugh at their expense. There’s no reason, as he’s explained to a very exasperated Mike countless times, for a drink to be both fizzy and taste like pond water at the same time.
But under all of that, the bigger thing is that Will just really hates feeling out of control in his own body, hates the feeling of losing track of time or sensation, and hates the memory loss after a night out. It terrifies him to know that he can’t fully control what he says or does, reminds him too much of waking up drenched in sweat, after a grueling, nightmare-filled sleep, and hearing that something happened during those hours that went missing from his memory like the final pieces of a very complicated puzzle.
The first and only time Will got drunk had ended with him freaking out so badly at the sensation that Mike had to take him into the bathroom and walk him through a series of deep breathing exercises, and the whole thing had just been humiliating to another extreme. He considers it almost as bad as the time they had to sweat the Mind Flayer out of him and his entire group of friends and family had seen him sobbing, sweating, and convulsing hard enough to consider calling an exorcist.
“Is it Mark? Or maybe Martin?” some guy across from them is asking, pointing a bit woozily at Mike. “You look real familiar. Do we have a class together?”
“Hey, Robbie,” Mike says, sounding entirely uninterested. “It’s Mike. I’m a member of this fraternity, actually.”
“Oh shit!” Robbie says, face lighting up, and Mike turns to Will, mouths jungle juice in a very overexaggerated way, miming throwing up, and Will has to hold back a laugh. “You’re the ghost!”
Mike frowns. “What the hell does that mean?”
Robbie the Jungle Juice Creator grins. “You know, because you’re never here and no one ever sees you but sometimes stuff moves around in your room and food goes missing from the kitchen that no one sees anyone take.”
Mike’s frown deepens. “The food could be anyone,” he points out, but doesn’t acknowledge the rest. “It’s a house full of college guys, and most of you guys are athletes.”
Will tries his best to hold in another laugh. “Nice to know you’re annoying them all even when you’re not here,” he says with a smile, and finally does laugh when Mike leans across the sofa to hit him on the shoulder.
Robbie turns to Will like it’s the first time he’s noticing him. His eyes narrow suspiciously. “You don’t also live here, do you? Do we have a second ghost?”
“Nah,” Mike interrupts before Will can open his mouth to say hell no. “This is my best friend, Will.” He slings an arm over Will’s shoulder, pulls him off the arm of the couch so forcefully that Will topples halfway into his lap. Ah, okay. He concentrates very hard on thinking about how gross the couch is and not the warmth of Mike’s body or the lingering scent of his cologne. “He lives on south campus.”
Will tries to ignore the bittersweet tug at his stomach that he feels at the phrase best friend. Sweet, because Mike is his best friend. He has been for almost fifteen years, and something about Mike announcing it freely to the room makes Will’s heart feel a bit like someone has pumped it full of helium. But also bitter because, well. You know. He still hasn’t gotten around to thinking about it.
Robbie nods politely. “Nice to meet you Will,” he says, and holds up a red cup full of, Christ, more jungle juice. “Do you want some of the punch I made?”
“Um,” Will says, most of his brainpower currently devoted to extracting himself from Mike’s lap without making a fool of himself. “No, I’m okay, I don’t really drink.”
Robbie nods again. “Respect. I’m gonna go top this up, I’ll see you around Will. See ya, Mark.”
Will is about to start laughing and then he sees Mike’s scowling face, and this simultaneously makes him try to hold in his laugh and also burst out laughing even harder, resulting in a very strange and strangled noise emanating from his throat. “It’s Mike,” Mike calls out after him futilely, throwing himself back into the sofa with a roll of his eyes. He turns back to Will and says, “I never liked him.”
“He seems harmless enough,” Will says, getting a bit distracted by Mike’s arm still lingering around his shoulders. “Even if he should never be allowed around mixed drinks again.”
Mike hums noncommittally, sinking into the cushions of the sofa. The half-cup of death punch/jungle juice/mystery poison from earlier seems to be hitting him a bit, causing his skin to flush a bit pink, hair splayed across the back of the sofa like a spill of ink. He pulls Will back towards him, successfully voiding all of the progress Will had made to peel himself off of Mike. “It tasted like sewage on fire,” Mike whispers theatrically, which Will has to lean in very close to hear over whatever hip hop remix is currently playing on loop. “Maybe you had the right idea tonight.”
Will laughs lightly, watches the flex of Mike’s throat as he stretches his head back, follows the movement of Mike’s hand on his own arm with an equal mixture of wariness and something warm and spiked bubbling in his stomach. It’s in moments like these, moments where Mike becomes warm and pliable, mouth slack with drink and a dusting of pink across his cheeks that Will reluctantly indulges the sour, unwashed parts of himself, the ones shoved so deep down that he’s a wrong breath away from choking on them.
Mike is not not an affectionate person, but he’s not a particularly touchy one. Will has grown up with him for over a decade, which is what he attributes Mike’s apparent ease at throwing arms over his shoulders, stretching out all one hundred miles of legs onto Will’s own extended limbs. These are also things he tries very hard to not think about. But sober, Mike is never this generous with touch, never this wide-eyed and blushed and so within reach , so for one second, Will lets himself think about it. Lets himself think about maybe, possibly, someday wanting, watches Mike’s lips part as he swallows–
–and then snaps immediately back out of it. What the fuck? “What?” Mike is saying, his expression going from a bit tipsy to Mom just called me by my first, middle, and last name in less time for Will to even think that thought in full. “Do I have something on my face? Did the juice stain?”
Mike does have a little smear of some unknown red substance on his cheek but Will didn’t see it until Mike turns to him, now, so that their faces are barely a foot apart. Here, on this moth-eaten sofa that’s surely contaminated in part with at least three venereal diseases, this is where Will is going to die. He’s sure of it. “Um,” he says, gesturing to his own cheek, “yeah, right here.”
Mike frowns and swipes at it with the sleeve of his university pullover. “Did I get it?”
He did not, in fact, get it, only smeared it further across his cheek in a very amusing imitation of Joyce applying makeup to her face before she’s fully woken up. “No,” Will grins, “you’re so useless. Here, let me–” he reaches out with his own hand, rubs it across Mike’s cheek hard enough for Mike to scowl and bat his hand away. Their faces are very close. He resolutely does not think about it.
“Um,” Will says intelligently, hand still hovering awkwardly somewhere around Mike’s shoulder. Mike just looks back at him, a bit blankly, but eyes widening slightly. Neither of them say anything. Mike blinks, once, twice in slow succession. Will feels vaguely nauseous. “I’m–”
“Fries!” Mike blurts out, and Will startles backwards. “Uh. Do you want some? To go get some that is, we obviously don’t have any here–”
Will lets out an exhale. Mike is giving him an out, and he’s going to take it. “Yes please,” he says, smiling. Mike gives him a small smile back, stands up from the couch and stretches, long and lean. Will watches the sinuous movement of his torso, the thick mess of hair curling around his the nape of his neck, and very intentionally does not look at where Mike’s sweater rides up from the top of his jeans.
The diner is the only place on campus open past eleven p.m., even on weekends. This, in Will’s opinion, is just bad business practice on the part of every other restaurant in the area, because they could be making bank off the hordes of inebriated college students looking for their fix of something deep-fried, battered, and slathered in butter and/or copious amounts of salt. As it is, the crowd is already spilling out the front door, and Will wouldn’t even be considering braving it if it weren’t for the little piece of heaven that exists as a plate of the house curly fries.
“Oh no,” Mike says, a bit wearily. The minute traces of alcohol that were even in his system seem to have mostly worn off on the walk here. He’s still pink-cheeked, but it’s early November and nearly midnight, so that’s probably why. “It might be a while.”
Will rubs his hands together and blows on them. It was a mistake to not bring a jacket. When Mike had dragged him over to the Theta house, it had only been around nine, a bit chilly but nothing that the walk uphill across campus couldn’t fix. The same walk, in fact, that prevents Mike Wheeler from sleeping in his own goddamn room for half the week. Now, however, is another story. His cable-knit sweater, while thick, doesn’t stand a chance against an Indiana November chill.
Will watches a couple slowly inch forward in line. The crowd inside doesn’t look like they’re going anywhere. “Definitely going to be a while,” he frowns, silently lamenting the premature loss of his curly fries.
Mike looks at the people, and then over at Will, where he’s trying his hardest to clench his jaw to keep his teeth from chattering. It’s a losing battle. “Are you cold? Do you want to head somewhere else?”
“But my curly fries,” he whines, and it sounds so pathetic even to his own ears that he can’t blame Mike for doubling over in laughter. “Mike,” Will says, trying to sound annoyed, but he can’t keep a grin from spreading across his face. “Mike, shut up!”
“You and those fries,” Mike laughs, shaking his head. “I’ll never understand how you get so crazy over them–”
“You don’t understand, Mike,” Will says. This is a conversation they’ve had too many times for Will’s liking. “The shape is what makes them so good! There’s more surface area, ergo more seasoning, and they’re just so fun to eat–”
“Fine, fine!” Mike relents, throwing his hands up. “We’ll go! Nowhere else is even open anyway.” He shoves one hand deep inside his hoodie pocket, and throws the other over Will’s shoulder and pulling him against his side as they approach the warm, inviting glow of the diner signs. “We’ll just have to huddle together for warmth, or something.”
“Like penguins,” Will agrees, breathing in the scent of Calvin Klein and secretly wondering if it’s too late to suggest they just go back and pick at the miserable collection of Lays products inside the dorm vending machines instead.
“Were they worth the wait?” Mike raises his eyebrows, staring Will down over the top of his stack of pancakes, slathered in butter, syrup, and something that could maybe, in the Upside Down, pass for fruit puree. Will crinkles his nose looking at it. He doesn’t get how Mike eats this stuff– he tried it once and it was honest-to-God a dentist’s worst nightmare thrown up over a stack of, admittedly, pretty good flapjacks. “Was it worth the frostbite and the penguin huddle?”
Will does not reply, because his mouth is stuffed full of gloriously fried, salted, seasoned, and irregularly shaped potatoes. He nods, swallows. “Absolutely,” he says. This is his comfort food. He could eat this same plate of curly fries every day for the rest of his life and be satisfied. Hell, if he died right now, sitting on these sticky, vinyl-covered seats in a diner booth across from Mike Wheeler– a very flushed, rumpled, happy-looking Mike Wheeler, his brain pipes up, in an extremely unhelpful way– he would die a happy man. He squirts more ketchup on his plate, and Mike watches him with a vaguely amused expression as he shovels more potato into his mouth.
“I thought I was the one who got drunk tonight,” Mike jibes, smiling as he slices his pancakes into a neat triangular stack. “You’re eating like you haven’t seen food all week.”
“I haven’t,” Will says, “the stuff they serve at the dining halls does not count as food, and I’m pretty sure serving it is a violation of the Geneva Conventions,” but he puts his fork down and picks up a fry with his hands. Just eat them like a normal person, Mike always says, but Mike Wheeler also thinks pineapple on pizza is worse than steamed brussels sprouts, so Will takes all of his food-related opinions with a grain of salt, thank you very much. “Plus you weren’t drunk,” he points out, taking a sip of water. “You got mildly annihilated by the jungle juice for approximately an hour, and then you were fine.”
Mike makes a face. “I’m never trusting Lucas again.” He shovels pancake into his mouth, and gets a smear of strawberry across the corner of his lips. Will looks at it, and then when Mike licks it off, very intentionally does not look at it anymore. “I think he was trying to poison me.”
“It was revenge for leaving him there with those guys and hanging out with me all the time,” Will says, even though the idea of Mike hanging out with him all the time and only him all the time is not an entirely unappealing thought. “Why do you always just stay at my place instead of going back?”
Mike’s fork and knife freeze in midair, hovering over his plate. A faint look of hurt flashes briefly over his face, and he frowns. “Is it bothering you?” he asks, more quietly than usual. “Am I– do you not want me to? As much?”
“No, no!” Will says hastily, “no, you know I love having you there, it’s just–” he trails off, as Mike starts to look a bit confused. “–nothing! Nothing, I promise it’s nothing.”
Mike still looks a bit unsure as he takes his next bite. He seems to be very deep in thought, and then after a pause, where he swallows, he says, “--because I can like, screw off if you’re tired of having me around–”
“No!” Will says, so loudly that someone at the next table turns around to look at them. “I promise I didn’t mean it like that,” he says, softer, trying his best for reassuring and not just exasperated, “you know I love hanging out with you.” He does not think about what other things, relating to Mike, he might have certain L-word feelings about. “It just came out weird, I’m sorry.”
Mike stares at him for a moment, and then seems to decide that it’s not worth Will Byers’ infamous stubborn-headedness and smiles. “Good,” he says, scraping strawberry mush off his fork with his teeth. “You definitely aren’t getting rid of me anytime soon.”
“Good,” Will smiles, lifting a fry to his mouth, “I–”
He freezes. The fry drops slowly from his mouth.
“Will?” Mike says, frowning, but he doesn’t stop cutting into his pancakes. “What’s up?”
Will lifts a tentative hand to the back of his neck. Something is wrong, he thinks, but he can’t quite put a finger on it, on what’s out of place. He feels suddenly on the verge of throwing up the unreasonable amount of potatoes he just consumed. His ears are ringing faintly, vision tunneling back and forth like he’s having a serious case of vertigo. The hair on the back of his neck is standing up, prickling, like it did whenever–
Mike’s eyes widen, just as Will comes to the realization himself– “Is it that feeling?” Mike whispers, dropping his utensils with a sharp clattering noise. “Is something wrong?”
“I don’t know,” Will says, feeling very thrown off balance. His ears are definitely ringing. “I– it hasn’t happened in so long–”
“We’re half a state away from Hawkins,” Mike says, looking frantically around the room, as if the Mind Flayer might be casually waiting in line to order the Deluxe Omelet Special with a side of hash browns. “It’s been years–”
“I know,” Will hisses. His skin feels covered in pins and needles, and he feels a bit like he’s on a boat stilled in the middle of the ocean, like everything inside him is getting sloshed around while his body stays still. He grips onto the table for balance, even though he knows he isn’t moving. “I- I don’t know why–”
“Hey,” Mike says, reaching across the table and grabbing onto his forearm. He pushes his almost-empty plate of food aside. “It’s probably nothing. Probably just some regular Upside Down activity across the gates or something. If something weird was happening back home, your mom or Hopper would have given you a call, right? Just take a deep breath.”
Will nods weakly. This whole thing is starting to remind him a bit of the drunk bathroom freakout fiasco. He gets an uncomfortable flashback to sitting fully clothed on the toilet with his head between his knees, trying not to throw up, from pure panic more than the alcohol, even. He takes in a breath. “Okay,” he says, still gripping onto the table for dear life. The weird sloshing feeling inside his stomach starts to recede. Across the table from him, Mike’s expression is tight, eyebrows furrowed with worry. He still has some strawberry smeared across his lower lip, Will notices, from what feels like very far away. He squeezes his eyes shut. “Okay,” he says again, “you’re probably right, it’s probably nothing.”
“It’s probably nothing,” Mike echoes, smiling a bit tentatively but still looking concerned. “Just… try and breathe. ”
Will takes in a shaky breath, exhales. Really, the thing that’s freaking him out the most is not the sensation itself, but how it caught him unawares, so off-guard. Back, during everything, it was really only noticeable by the uncomfortable tickling sensation on the back of his neck, and a weird feeling that someone was watching him. He had gotten used to it after a while, learned to constantly be aware of what was around him, sleep lightly in case it came back and tried to catch him in his dreams. But in the years after, the home stretch of high school as Hawkins repaired itself, even here at college, he had let his guard down. It had been quiet, the kind of quiet that had released all of the tension left in the air. “Breathe,” Mike is saying again, but his voice sounds closer now. “Are you feeling any better?”
Sometime in the last five minutes, all of Will’s muscles have tensed up, clenching so tight that it feels physically painful to relax. “A bit,” he says truthfully, even though his ears feel a bit like they’re full of water, and he’s suddenly very cold. His muscles all feel sore, but his voice doesn’t sound shaky to his own ears anymore. “That was–”
“--weird,” Mike finishes with a nod, still frowning. He hasn’t let go of his grip on Will’s arm, and his fingers are curled around his wrist in a firm, comforting grip. “Was that- has that happened before? Lately?”
Will shakes his head. “No, not since- you know.” You know meaning the bloodbath that was the near-end of the world, taking place in Hawkins, Indiana. “It felt different this time too.”
“Different? How different? Bad different?” Mike’s hand slips down from Will’s wrist into his palm. Will holds his breath, like small movements might scare Mike away.
“No just…” he stops, and Mike tilts his head as if to say go on. “More intense, but less threatening.”
Mike pushes a stray piece of pancake around on his plate with his free hand. The bottle of maple syrup sits, abandoned, on the side of the table. “Huh?”
“Like…” How does one explain the intricacies of hive mind possession to their friend? Even if said friend has been with them through the entire possession ordeal, this isn’t most college students’ idea of a Friday night out. “I don’t know, I was just feeling more of everything , like more nauseous, more dizzy, more off, but it wasn’t as scary as usual. Usually it feels a bit like when you think someone is watching you? Or when you hear a weird noise in the dark and all your senses are on high alert, but now I just felt weird. I still feel a bit weird,” he adds, eyeing his curly fries a bit sadly. “A little dizzy, maybe a bit nauseous, but okay.”
Mike watches him carefully, eyebrows slowly returning to their normal position. “So like, kind of like a bad hangover?” he asks slowly, smiling slightly. His hand is still in Will’s. “Or…”
“Kind of,” Will says, cracking a small grin in return. He’s suddenly very aware of how sweaty his palms are, and wrenches his hand out of Mike’s grip with a slight grimace. Mike quickly moves his own off the table. “I have no idea, honestly,” he says, “it was really sudden. Plus, I only have that one hangover to go off of, so—”
“Oh my God, shut up!” Mike laughs, and just like that, the unease and tension hanging over them, in the little booth in the corner of the diner, breaks like shattered glass. “You weren’t even that hungover, I swear most of it was just you freaking out about how much you freaked out.”
“It was bad, Mike,” Will insists, “I couldn’t get out of bed all day.”
“I know,” Mike groans, reaching for his pancake scraps again, swiping them across the remnants of berry and maple syrup on the plate, “you made me bring you soup and complained about it for a week. It was a mild hangover, not the goddamn flu—”
Will sips his water as he watches Mike chew. Out of the corner of his eyes, he sees a brief flash, like light reflecting against metal or mirrored glass. When he looks, he sees a boy staring at them from the corner of the restaurant, maybe their age or a couple years younger, with large glasses and neat brown hair, the former of which is sporadically reflecting the fluorescent diner lighting as the neon signs buzz. His face looks mildly alarmed, but mostly caught frozen, somewhere in between fear and shock. Will frowns. “Great,” he mumbles, “I freaked out so hard that someone’s totally staring at me right now.”
Mike looks around the room, and then shakes his head. “No one’s staring at you, don’t worry,” he says, and then pushes his empty plate away. “Come on, let’s get you a box for these, I know you’re going to regret not bringing leftovers back tomorrow, and I refuse to walk back here so you can get more.”
Will looks back at the corner, maybe to stare the boy down with what he hopes is a convincingly intimidating glare, but the boy is gone. “Huh,” he says, and then, when Mike makes to steal a fry off his plate, “hey, you’ve already stolen like half of this entire plate—”
The Theta house is much closer to the diner than Will’s dorm, so that’s where they head. The eleven-thirty chill has given way to a biting, one a.m. cold that has Will wrapping his arms around himself and pulling his sweater tight against his body as they walk, this time unable to keep his teeth from chattering wildly. Mike isn’t faring much better—his hoodie doesn’t seem to be doing much to keep him warm, even with the hood pulled up and drawstring tightened, causing his head to look rather small and also rather bald against the rest of his body. If Will’s skin wasn’t freezing and about to peel right off his own body, he might’ve laughed.
“H-how m-much longer?” Will says, teeth clacking almost comically in between syllables. The air is coming in through the holes in the knit of his sweater, piercing his skin like minuscule little bullets.
Mike rubs his arms. “T-ten minutes?” he replies, voice also wavering a bit. “Y-you’d think it would be warmer, w-walking uphill.”
Will nods in agreement, silently lamenting his own fate as he thinks about the journey across campus back to his own room. The streets are still fairly full, as drunk college students trickle out of whichever building they’ve chosen as their hub for dangerous amounts of drinking games for the night. It’s really fucking cold, wow. And then, as if he can read Will’s mind—he probably can, Will wouldn’t be surprised at this point—Mike says, “d-do you just want to stay at mine tonight? So y-you don’t have to walk all the way back in the c-cold, and it’s late and I don’t want you to, like, get mugged or something, that would suck.”
Will doesn’t say anything for a second, just stares at the red flush across Mike’s face, high on his cheekbones and visible even in the dim glow of the streetlights. “Uh, y-yeah,” he says, feeling suddenly very nervous even though Mike’s slept over at his place countless times. But Mike’s room in the frat is uncharted territory; he barely ever sleeps there himself, forget bringing Will along. But then Mike grins, wide and easy, and all of Will’s anxieties melt away like a pat of butter on Mike’s favorite Berry Delight Short Stack.
“Cool,” says Mike, and then falls silent. They walk the rest of the distance quietly, the silence punctuated only with the occasional huff of breath, ghosting white and lush in front of their faces or a gentle wheeze as the incline of the concrete grows too intense for their non-athletic lungs.
They go in through the back entrance, something Will forgets Mike knows about, because oh right, he actually lives here. Kind of. The party is still going steady, albeit a bit quieter as people have started to either retreat to the safety of their own rooms to nurse their impending hangovers, or have fallen asleep right on the spot, splayed across the moth-eaten, disease-ridden couches and beanbags scattered along the the main floor. Mike raises his eyebrows as they pass a couple laying perpendicular to each other on an armchair, the girl’s head crooked sideways into the boy’s shoulder, and both pairs of legs dangling off the chair. “That’s gonna hurt tomorrow,” Mike remarks, over the now-quieter thrum of music, “imagine lying in that position for hours on end.”
Will glances at the red cups in their hands and the now-empty vats of the jungle juice from earlier, and scoffs. “It’ll be nothing compared to the headache,” he quips, as he follows Mike up the stairs, feeling an odd mix of trepidation and nervous excitement in his stomach.
For all the time Mike spends in his room, in Will’s dingy, dark dorm on south campus, Will rarely comes up to Mike’s. It’s decorated plainly, with all the un-enthusiasm of a young boy decorating a bunk at a penitentiary. The wall next to his bunk is adorned with a Carmen Sandiego poster, which strikes Will as weird, because he doesn’t think Mike has ever even played that game, but also kind of hilarious because of how out of place it is. Everything else is still cement brick, painted over in a dull white, like Will’s own walls, but at least his are plastered with drawings, magazine cutouts, movie posters, some of Jonathan’s old record covers. Mike’s sheets are navy blue and plaid, whereas Will’s are gray—and also plaid. He’s almost certain their moms picked them out together.
Mike’s also got Star Wars sheets, something which, upon seeing it, makes Will’s heart grow three sizes like the fucking Grinch or whatever. “I forgot about these,” Will crows, as they step through the doorway and into the room Mike supposedly shares with three other guys. None of whom, Will notices, are here right now. God, okay. “I love these sheets, why didn’t you tell me you still had them?”
“Because I knew you’d get like this,” Mike grumbles, and moves to tug his duvet so the sheets are covered up. “I don’t know why it amuses you so much–”
“It’s because I can’t believe Mike Wheeler, Creative Writing major extraordinaire, hater of Medieval Literature and any poetry ever, self-proclaimed to now be too cool for Dungeons and Dragons and all television involving cartoons, has bedsheets with the Star Wars logo all over them–”
“Shut up Will,” Mike says, and then lobs a pillow at his head. Which only makes Will laugh harder because the pillow is shaped like goddamn Chewbacca, and then before he knows it he’s collapsed on the bed in a fit. But Mike is smiling too. “It’s not funny,” he insists, even as he grins down at him. “They came in a set, with the pillow, and it was on sale, okay? You know how my mom gets! She can’t pass up a good sale– hey, stop laughing– you’re the only person ever who can know this!”
“Me and the three other guys who live here,” Will says, gesturing to the empty bunk beds placed around the room. “I forgot you have roommates. Is that why you’re always at mine?”
Mike pauses. “Oh,” he says, and then brings a hand up to the back of his neck. His face is still very pink from the cold, hair a tousled mess from the chilly wind. He looks suddenly very caught off-guard. “Yeah,” he replies at last, “it’s a lot quieter there, I guess.”
Will makes a noncommittal noise in the back of his throat. Mike’s sheets smell clean, if a bit stale, like they haven’t been used for a while, like his own room when he visits back home. “No wonder everyone here thinks you’re a ghost,” he comments, sprawling across the bed, “if your stuff is so unused.”
Mike nudges him over enough to perch on the edge of the bed. He kicks off his shoes, lets them fly across the room and land with a thud next to the far side of the wall. “Most of these guys don’t even spend half their time here either,” he huffs, and then, kind of all at once, “they’re always off spending the night with whatever girl they’re currently banging.”
Will raises his head slightly off of where it’s currently buried in Mike’s plain navy cloth-covered pillow. He looks, a bit warily, at the back of Mike’s head. “Is that where they think you are?” he asks, trying to sound lighthearted, but it comes out a bit flat. Look, he’s joking, okay? Mostly. Kind of. He very pointedly does not think about others thinking about Mike sneaking off to have sex with a different girl every night. Or the same girl every night. Or any girl, ever. “Boning?”
Mike wrinkles his nose. “Will, I know it’s my fault for saying the word boning all the time and introducing it to your vocabulary, but it doesn’t sound right coming out of your mouth,” and then, “and probably, yeah. Who knows. Maybe they think I’m out, like, clubbing or doing drugs or–”
“--attending back-to-back Star Wars matinees,” Will finishes for him with a grin, which is enough to get him smacked with the Chewbacca pillow again. “Okay, okay, ow, sorry! I’ll let it go!” He shoves his head back in the pillow for protection, and only raises it back up again when he sees the Chewbacca pillow being set safely down next to him. “You’re not boning, though, right?” he says, suddenly. He doesn’t know why he feels such an urge to bring it up again, as if the thought of Mike boning is not something that is CODE RED #1 at the top of his list of things to absolutely never think about. But also. Look–
“What? No, of course I’m not boning,” Mike splutters, turning a violent shade of scarlet, “how would I even hide that from you, I’m with you all the time–”
And then he falls silent, so fast that Will gets tonal whiplash from how fast Mike just went from saying boning over and over again to just clamping his mouth shut and staring at the wall across from them with such a determinedly neutral expression it was like he had just caught great-grandma Wheeler sitting down in the shower for a sponge bath again.
“Right,” Will says, that Grinch-like feeling in his heart growing ever-so-slightly. He smiles to himself, and shoves his face back in the pillow. “You’re with me all the time.” This is not a displeasing thought to have, so he lets himself dwell on it for a half-second, turns the words over on his tongue. I’m with you all the time. They taste sweet, like a fraction of a victory.
“Anyway,” Mike says, jumping off the bed, “um. Are you tired at all? I know it’s been kind of a weird night for you–”
“Right, weird,” Will starts, and then looks down at his thick cable-knit sweater and carefully starched jeans. “Yeah, a bit, I guess.” He picks at his sweater a bit. “Should I take the floor, or–”
“No!” Mike shouts, and then, when Will stares, he purses his lips and goes, “well you can take the bed and I can take the floor, you’re my guest–”
“That’s bullshit and you know it,” Will says, “you sleep on the floor of my room all the time, I’m not letting you do it here.”
“The bed isn’t big enough for two,” Mike frowns, and Will feels a very unwelcome pang of disappointment at the ease with which Mike says it. “You can take the bed, I’ll take the couch.” He points to the couch near the door, currently sagging under the weight of what looks like at least twenty points of assorted clothing tossed haphazardly onto it. At Will’s questioning glance, he adds, “it’s pretty comfortable, I slept there my first night before the beds got assembled,” and then, “and no, there are no STDs on the couch,” to which Will barks out a laugh.
“Wouldn’t it be funny,” he says, kicking off his own battered Vans, “if you got herpes but from a couch.”
Mike pulls a face. “You’re disgusting,” he says, but his face looks like he’s considering it as he pulls his hoodie off. He’s wearing a blue t-shirt underneath, which gets pulled up a bit as he stretches his arms out of the sleeves, and his hair falls down around his neck and onto his shoulders as he shakes it free from the hood. Again, Will does not look. Or even think about looking. Seriously. “How would that even work, would you have to, like, open-mouth-french the sofa? Or—”
“I don’t want to talk about this anymore,” Will decides. He feels very awkward, sitting on Mike Wheeler’s bed in his frat house room while said Mike Wheeler starts undressing in front of him. And look, it’s not like they’ve never undressed in front of each other, but there’s a difference between seeing your middle school best friend in his tighty-whities for a few seconds versus seeing your college best friend of almost fifteen years who you’re in lo– might have feelings for start taking his clothes off after an entire conversation about boning and STDs on couches. Will stares very determinedly away from where Mike is rummaging through his dresser, top button of his jeans undone like he forgot where he was and was about to just rip them off right then and there.
“Do you want to borrow something?” Mike is asking, and Will, painfully, tears his gaze away from Mike’s roommate’s Chicago Cubs poster and onto where Mike is holding out a t-shirt that’s so huge that the bundle is enveloping his entire forearm.
“Uh,” says Will—and yeah, not his most intelligent moment, he gets it. Mike’s eyes drop down to Will’s sweater, where the yarn has gone a bit itchy against his skin from all the sweating and walking he’s done tonight.
“I’m not letting you sleep in that,” Mike says, and throws the t-shirt at him so that it hits him straight in the face. And then, a second later, follows it up with a pair of plaid pajama pants.
“God,” Will says, holding the pajamas up. “These are huge, whoever fits into these has gotta be, like, eight feet tall. Did you steal them from the Demogorgon?”
Mike rolls his eyes. “I like them baggy,” he says, turning around and slipping off his t-shirt before tugging a different one on, and wow, okay, that’s Will’s cue to book it to the communal bathrooms. “It’s more comfortable that way.”
“Right, comfortable,” Will mumbles, a bit weakly, as he trips over his own feet trying to get up and get to the door before Mike takes anything else off. “I’m- Um, It’s- I’m. Bathroom.”
Later, when Will is tucked into the safety of Mike’s bundle of blankets, staring down a small decal of Han Solo’s face on the far left pillow, the room finally stills.
“Lights on or off?” Mike is asking, from where he’s situated himself on the couch with a pile of blankets and one of the pillows off his own bed. He’s drowning a little bit in his pajamas, Will notes, which makes him feel something that he does not think about any further.
He never actually sees Mike in his pajamas anymore, because he’s taken to just passing out on the floor of Will’s dorm in his jeans and whatever sweater/jacket combo he wore that day, which makes Will a bit nauseous to think about but whatever. It’s better than the idea of seeing him in Will’s own borrowed clothing, and whatever mild headache he gets by seeing Mike Wheeler fall asleep in his stupid skinny jeans and socks is surely nothing compared to the hives that threaten to break out across his skin by thinking of him wearing Will’s sweaters and pajamas to bed , so he just grits his teeth and very stubbornly does not offer to share.
“I can’t believe you also have Star Wars pajamas,” Will says, not answering the question. “You’re making this really hard for me, you know–”
“ Shut up,” groans Mike, and then, again, “so, um. Do you want me to keep the light on? Or are you okay if it’s off. Because either— either one is cool with me.”
Will is a bit taken aback. He prefers to keep a light on, even a small one, but he hasn’t told anyone this but his mom, Jonathan, and El, who shares a room with him sometimes, back home. Plus, in his own dorm room there’s always enough light coming in under the door from the hallway that it doesn’t really matter. But here, in Mike’s bedroom that he shares with three other guys, there is no hallway, and there is no other light. He’s never liked the dark, and especially not since he went missing. He wonders how Mike knows. “Oh,” he says, voice coming out very quietly. Mike is watching him, expression very neutral, as if he’s genuinely waiting for Will’s answer. “Um. Off is fine. But could– could you leave the lamp on?” He gestures to the small lamp on the desk next to Mike’s bed.
“Of course,” Mike says easily, and hops off the couch. It comes on with a soft click, filling the room with a soft yellow glow when he reaches over to turn the room light off as well.
Here, under the glow of this lamp in a room nestled off the north campus of their university, surrounded by the last vestiges of a party with the soft thrum of music reverberating through the floor, Will thinks that nothing could possibly reach him again. He watches Mike climb back under his nest of throw blankets, absentmindedly pulling on a pair of fuzzy socks. Not the Demogorgon, not the Mind Flayer, not even Vecna and his entire Upside Down army. He’s protected by Mike’s irritatingly endearing Star Wars sheets and plaid duvet and the singular video game poster on the wall, kept safe by Mike’s steady presence across the room, the vague scent of generic brand laundry detergent and dust. The episode in the diner seems so far away, seems like it happened to a Will of years ago, a Will that was scared and alone, grasping for straws wherever Mike Wheeler was concerned, terrified of his friends leaving him behind. All of that, everything, disappears in an instant when Mike turns and smiles softly at him.
“Goodnight,” Mike says simply. All of his energy from earlier seems to have been drained out of him, his eyes looking a bit tired as they catch the lamplight, the curve of his cheekbones looking deeper than usual. He has a nice face, Will thinks, but only like, objectively. It’s just interesting to look at. Will blinks. These are dangerous thoughts to be having while sleeping in Mike’s bed.
“Goodnight,” he replies instead, watching Mike turn around on the couch. He lets out a deep breath. God, okay, he doesn’t know why this is setting him so on edge. It’s just a sleepover. He’s slept over at Mike’s all the time when they were younger. And Mike always sleeps over at his place now. And just because he’s in Mike’s bed doesn’t mean anything, because Mike isn’t even in the bed with him, he’s across the room on the couch—
As if he’s tuned into Will’s internal monologue, there’s a rustling noise from the couch. And then a small voice says, “hey, Will?”
Will cracks a smile. It hasn’t even been five minutes since they said goodnight, but Mike has always been like this— chattering up until the second they drifted off to sleep, mouth moving a mile a minute. He was always the first one up at sleepovers, would wait patiently for Will to stir sleepily and then bombard him while they waited for the others to get up. “Yeah?” he says, “what’s wrong?”
“Nothing,” comes Mike’s voice. He’s still facing the back of the sofa, but then he shifts, so that his face is kind of mushed up against the pillows. “It’s just—” There’s a pause, and then his next words come out muffled, like he’s talking directly into his pillows, and are entirely unintelligible.
“What?” Will sits up in the bed, watches Mike’s frame shuffle around a bit until he finally raises his head off his pillow.
“It’s just—” Mike starts, a strange expression on his face. The light catches against the down-set curve of his brows, the jut of his lips where his teeth are tugging against it. Will watches Mike worry at that spot on his lips with a strange fascination, hoping his stare gets lost in the dim lighting. “I just— it’s why I don’t like sleeping here as much,” he continues, voice coming out a bit unsure. He sounds very nervous. “I just like your room more because there’s so much you everywhere, and mine is just sort of nothing. And, you know, yours feels so much more like home that I just never want to come back here after hanging out with you. It feels like something’s missing.”
All of this comes out in one big rush, like it was threatening to burst out of him and Mike just had to let it run its course. He looks up, looks a bit surprised to see Will sitting up and looking back at him. There’s something very vulnerable on his face. “Sorry,” Mike blurts, “that was random and you were trying to sleep, I was just thinking about it and, I don’t know, I felt like telling you. I always feel like telling you whatever I’m thinking. You’re just so easy to talk to.”
Will feels a bit overwhelmed. Sometimes he thinks he has a handle on Mike Wheeler, thinks he knows him and is comfortable in this weird limbo his brain seems to enter whenever Mike is around, somewhere stuck between adoration and devotion and a kind of bittersweet longing for something that’s always just out of reach. And then there are other times, times like these, times where Mike says things that pull his brain out of that limbo and send it hurtling towards feelings and thoughts that are very dangerous, send his heartbeat spiking and something tasting a bit like hope flooding his veins . It’s a gray area that he can’t risk leaving the comfort of, and he’s usually good about it, doesn’t think about things he shouldn’t, except for where Mike Wheeler is concerned. Will has never been able to say no where Mike Wheeler is concerned.
“Oh,” he says, and it comes out sounding a bit strangled. He clears his throat, tries again. “Oh that’s— that’s really— Mike, I didn’t—”
Mike is watching him carefully, face dipped down between his shoulders so it’s almost unreadable with the shadows cast across it. “I didn’t expect that,” Will finishes, smiling. His heart feels like it’s sprinting the last leg of an Olympic 500 meter dash, seven steps from the finish line with the entire world watching. “That was really sweet.”
Mike looks a little surprised by his own words. “Thanks,” he says, frowning slightly. “Cool. Um. Goodnight, then. For real.”
“‘Night, Mike,” Will says quietly, sinking back down onto the pillows. Neither of them say anything after that.
Okay, so maybe there are some things Will should really start thinking about.
He wakes up the next morning with a headache, which immediately puts him in a shitty mood for the rest of the day because the only good thing about being the only sober person at a party is the gleeful knowledge that you’ll be the only one without a hangover the next morning. But here he is with a headache anyway, because Will Byers cannot, apparently, have nice things.
Speaking of nice things. He spots a vaguely Mike-shaped form on the couch, buried under a mound of blankets and curled in on itself. Mike always sleeps all rolled up into a little ball. Will’s thought that was hilarious for forever, how Mike can tuck in all of his six-foot-long disaster into a humanoid shape roughly the size of a large pillow, and he’s always loved watching Mike wake up and stretch out because it’s like watching a baby alien come to life, all gangly limbs and hyper-accelerated growth.
And then— oh, right. Will groans softly, rubbing at his eyes. It can’t be too late, because the mid-November morning light is just starting to come in through the windows. Mike’s roommates are still M.I.A., and Will feels a rush of relief that no one walked in to find the two of them like that. Not that there was anything to see— Mike was on the couch and Will was far away on the bed. By himself.
But with a feeling of growing unease and trepidation, Will’s starting to realize that he might have to accept that that’s the problem— that there wasn’t anything going on, that there wasn’t anything to see. Because he probably— no, definitely— wants there to be.
“Fuck this,” he mutters, going to extract himself from the sheets he’s managed to weave intricately between his legs during the night. His head throbs faintly with every movement and he groans again. He’s still wearing Mike’s t-shirt and pajama pants from the night before, and they’re so big on him that he has to physically hold up the legs of the pants before moving so he doesn’t trip. He considers leaving Mike’s clothes on, but then thinks about walking across campus to his own room wearing someone else’s clothes, and how he’ll definitely be channeling a real walk of shame kind of aura around him and he immediately shakes that idea off and reaches for his own pants.
He folds Mike’s clothes up after, and then, in a moment of something feeling a bit like guilt, maybe regret—or something hollower, more bitter, because you can’t regret something you never had, can’t feel guilty over something you never had the chance to do—he makes Mike’s bed too, tucks in the corners of the duvet all tight around the edges of the bed. It looks untouched, like Will had never spent the night. His presence in the room would be left unmarked, if it weren't for the two items of clothing left neatly stacked at the foot of the bed.
Will extracts his shoes from the wall, locates his wallet and room keys from where he stacked them on Mike’s desk while changing, and pauses, briefly, by the couch as he’s about to step out of the room. Here, Mike’s face is visible over the top of his blanket, and his normally guarded, tense expression is more free. His eyebrows are, for once, not caught in a frown, mouth a bit slack and open, hair spilling over his cheekbones and pillow. A few strands move with every breath he takes, and Will can feel his heart stagger in his chest, stuttering like it’s caught in a fishing net with the wires all tangled up and cutting into it. And here, he lets himself think about it, pauses with one hand on the doorknob— I like Mike Wheeler, he thinks to himself, feeling his head throb. And then, because that sounds a bit childish and naïve, even to his own brain, no, I think I love Mike Wheeler. I think I love my best friend.
The revelation does not hold the weight he thought it would; this entire time that he held the words back from his own conscious mind he’s always been a bit afraid that thinking them would unleash the wrath of Armageddon upon him, like time would stop and collapse onto him. But the world does not go up in flames, plague and pestilence do not descend upon this room, and no divine voice from the heavens speaks to condemn him. It’s a Saturday morning, the week before Thanksgiving break. The world is not ending. Mike Wheeler continues to sleep, and he doesn't love Will the way Will loves him. These are the facts.
“Fuck,” Will mutters again, and steps out the door.