Chapter Text
There’s a certain darkness here, in the middle of a forest, that he has never seen anywhere else. The dappling of the trees above his head, and the way they seem to dilute the sun until it leaks out and seeps down elsewhere, leaving the patch of leaves and dead bark in the woods below cast into a blackness that is almost solid.
Will Byers is nine years old and he’s running. He’s running because it’s dark here, and he is scared of the dark. He’s running because it’s all part of the game, this running, and then hiding. He is running because the laughter of his friends floats through the tree branches, reminding him that this is all just a game, that they came out here to play, and soon they’ll be back in the Wheeler’s basement, eating pizza and drinking lemonade, and safe.
He’s running because it’s a game, and he is running because he’s scared of the dark. Both seem the same to him, in that moment.
He steals a glance behind him, to see if he’s being followed, but all he can see is the encroaching darkness and all he can hear is the wind whistling past his ears as he runs and runs, blood pounding through his legs to the soles of his feet, breathe pulsing wheezily in and out of his lungs.
He looks back again, and a tree root uproots him from his feet and sends him sprawling into the crusted mud. The woods seem to anticipate his fall before he even hits the ground. The whole place seems to hold its breath. His face collides with the leaves and he chokes, letting out a pained groan.
There are footsteps behind him, emerging from the darkness. Will sits up, wiping the mud from his trousers with a grimace. He stares up at the figure in front of him, who looks down at him with a grin.
He’s caught me, Will thinks glumly.
“I got him!” Mike shouts over his shoulder. He sounds breathless and triumphant and happy. He offers Will a hand, which he accepts begrudgingly.
“I got you,” Mike repeats after pulling him to his feet. “You didn’t even get to the hide part. I got you.”
“Are you sure you didn’t cheat?” Will says as Mike throws an arm around his shoulder.
He’s caught me, Will thinks. He’s caught me before I even got chance to hide.
As Mike pulls him by his arm in the direction of home, Will forgets to be scared of the dark.
“What are we doing here?”
The woods are quiet this time in the morning. It’s just gone six thirty on a Sunday morning, and even nature seems to still be waking up. A few birds circle overhead, but their pace seems lethargic, slow laps of the sky over their home territory. Underneath Will’s feet the leafs crinkle, the small noises they make being the only sound to punctuate the sleepy silence.
Mike walks just a few paces in front of him, bundled up in a hat and gloves and thick winter coat, despite the fact that the watery April sunshine is starting to push through the gaps in the trees. Will rubs his hands together and sticks them under his thin denim jacket, a hand-me-down from Jonathan that isn’t warm enough for the early hours of the morning. He should’ve brought a thicker coat, but this had been the only one on hand when Mike had appeared at his bedroom window earlier this morning like Damien from The Omen.
“It’s just a little further,” Mike says quietly, not turning to look at him. It doesn’t answer Will’s question, but he doesn’t press it any further. Things have been odd between them since the night at the diner. For the first few days after, Will had been expecting the other shoe to drop, for Mike to piece the puzzle together and figure him out. He hadn’t been able to sleep, or eat properly, or focus on anything, the whole time expecting Mike to corner him behind the art building or at his locker and just whale on him.
Nothing happened. Things with Mike stayed the same. If anything, Mike was unbelievably nice to him; saving him a seat at lunch, waiting for him outside his classes when they let out, inviting him to every single track meet, practise or competition. It felt odd, but Will wasn’t one to complain, not when he was getting what he always wanted – attention from Mike.
Still, it felt like they were both walking on egg shells around each other. Their usual casual conversation seemed to bubble away in favour of constant ‘are you okay?’ and ‘how are you feeling?’. In some ways, it felt like Will was talking to a psychiatrist. A very friendly but very professional shrink.
Until this morning. Will had been up asleep when he heard a soft rapping against his window. Bleary eyed, he had drawn the blinds and come face-to-face with Mike, all bundled up, face contorted into a sort of grimace. He had looked pale, like a ghost, with dark bags under his eyes. He looked worlds away from how Will had left him on Friday afternoon.
He hadn’t said anything in the car as he drove, and he didn’t say anything when he pulled up next to Mirkwood and starting walking in between the trees. It was then that Will had noticed he was still wearing a pair of plaid pyjamas, tucked into hiking boots.
Now he stops abruptly, in the middle of a clearing. He turns to look at Will, eyes bloodshot like he hasn’t slept, hat tugged down so far over his face that half of it disappears. He just stands there, arms limp by his side, staring. Staring and staring. Will stops a couple of meters away. He doesn’t know what to do, so he just stares back.
There’s something wrong. He knows this, deep in his bones. He knows this was all too good to last. He’s figured it all out. This is where Mike whales on him. He brought him here, to beat him up, to kill him maybe, because it’s so deserted, and no one would ever know it was Mike, and no one would even care, except his mom and Jonathan and maybe El. No one would even look for him, he thinks in a panic. No one would even know he was dead –
There’s a small sniffling sound that snaps Will out of his panic. He looks up and sees that Mike is crying, shoulders crumpling, nose running a river of snot down his face.
“I thought- I thought I cu-could do it,” Mike says through tears. Will has never seen him openly weep like this, not even when Will had pummelled his face and broken his nose. “I re-really thought I could do this.”
Maybe he was going to kill me, Will thinks, then immediately realises how insane that is. This is Mike. The boy who collects dinosaur stickers, and cries at little shop of horrors and can’t drink milk unless his mom pours it.
Will takes a few steps forwards and Mike takes a few back, pressing his face against the sleeve of his coat. He’s crying harder now, and Will doesn’t know what to do.
“Mike?” He says hesitantly. There’s no reply. He’s not sure Mike even heard him. “Mike? What’s wrong? How can I help you?”
Now who sounds like the shrink, he thinks.
Mike laughs through the tears. It sounds like a contorted sob. He peels his face away from his sleeves and stares at Will, a helpless kind of stare that makes him feel cold through. He doesn’t say anything, but the stare says it all. There’s nothing anyone can do.
Will knows that feeling all too well. His stomach twists, like an invisible hand is squeezing his insides tightly. There’s so much hurt on Mike’s face, so much pain that it scolds Will’s skin. Still, he presses forward, step by step. Mike steps back for each one, maintaining distance between the two of them until his back collides with a tree and he stumbles to the ground. Will follows him, dropping to his knees.
“Every-everyone is guh-gunna be so ma-mad at me,” Mike hiccups through sobs. Will reaches out to wipe the tears from his face but Mike flinches back so he lets his hand drop. That hurts more than anything he’s ever felt – Mike, flinching away from him, as though he’s scared. Mike, howling like a wounded animal, on his knees in the dirt.
“No one is going to be mad at you,” Will says gently, though he doesn’t even know what it is Mike thinks everyone will be mad about. Mike just cries harder, leaning into the mud as though the sheer velocity of his tears is forcing his body forward. “I promise. No one is going to be mad. I’m not going to be mad. Can you please just tell me what’s going on.”
His voice fractures on the last syllable. He feels close to tears too, cold and tired, on the floor of this woods with the boy he’s known since he was six crying like the world is ending and nothing can fix it.
Mike looks up then, and Will catches sight of his eyes, bloodshot like he’s been crying for quite some time – long before he drove to pick Will up from his house.
He doesn’t know whether it’s the tears, or Mike looking at him, but something gives him the nerve to reach out and take Mike’s hand. He holds it, limp in his palm, until Mike’s fingers begin to twitch, curling around his.
He’s holding my hand, Will thinks. He’s holding my hand, and he’s not crying anymore, and maybe its going to be okay.
“I wasn’t going to say anything,” Mike says. His voice is hoarse from the crying, but he’s not crying anymore, bar a few stray tears still caught on his eyelashes. “I really wasn’t. We graduate in two weeks, I’ve got my scholarship back and I am out of here, but-”
He stops abruptly. Will realises he hasn’t blinked in a few minutes. “But?” He prompts.
“But… the dinner.”
Will frowns. “The dinner? Benny’s dinner, a few weeks ago?”
“I wasn’t sure till then,” Mike says, voice wobbling like he’s dangerously close to tears again. “I thought I knew, but I didn’t then, until Rick and you, I wasn’t sure about either – about either of us.”
“Either of us what?”
Mike doesn’t say anything. Instead he drops Will’s hand, letting it fall limp to his side. It feels like a thousand small daggers through his heart, that simple act of letting go, of letting his hand fall.
And then Mike kisses him.
At first Will doesn’t realise what is happening. All he can hear in his ears is a tinny high-pitched whistle and his face feels numb, a warm tingly sensation spreading from his lips and up through his skull. He wonders if he’s dead, if this is what it feels like to be dead.
Then he feels something on his cheek, a heavy something, cupping the underside of his chin, and another something on his shoulder, holding him steady. Hands, he realises, then: Mike’s hand.
Everything clicks into place. Mike’s lips are warm and soft on his, and when he pulls back for air, Will pulls him right back in, hands cloying at his sides to keep him close, to hold him flush against his body. There is a siren in his head, blaring to never let him go, to keep this moment going as long as he can, forever if he has to.
Maybe this is what it feels like to be dead. Maybe this is what heaven falls back.
He runs his hand up Mike’s side to grip his shoulder
and tilts his head slightly to the left, and that’s when he feels it. Something wet against his cheek. He pulls back, frowning, and Mike crumbles, crying silently into his cupped hands.
“I’m sorry,” he sobs, pulling his legs up to his chest, holding himself. “I’m sorry.”
The wails penetrate the silence of their surroundings. Will doesn’t know what to do. What can you do, when the person you love kisses you and then cries like someone has died?
He reaches out and wraps his arms around Mike’s trembling body, feeling a twinge of victory when Mike doesn’t flinch away from him. Instead he leans against Will, buries himself against his chest and cries harder.
Will doesn’t ask him what just happened, or why now, with only weeks until graduation, and why here, their old childhood stomping ground. Instead, he just holds him closer and lets him cry.
“I’m sorry.”
They’re sat in Mike’s car, parked just off the edge of the quarry. It’s been about an hour since the kiss, twenty minutes since Mike stopped crying and said that they should move before they were spotted by any kids playing early morning make-believe or peeved hunters lost in the wrong neck of the woods.
Will isn’t sure why he chose to park up at the quarry. When he was younger, his dad had once yelled at him for going to the quarry with his friends. All they had done was drop things over the edge and watch them splash into the water, making the surface ripple. It was only when he got to high school that he learnt what happened at the quarry – cruising grounds for so-called “homos” to hook up, a boy called Terry had told him in home ec.
That’s what his dad thought he was doing?
They were kids, for god’s sake. They were fucking kids.
“I’m sorry,” Mike says again. Will barely even registered him talking the first. They’ve been sat in silence since the kiss, and Mike’s timid voice sounds booming in the quiet of the car.
“What for?” Will frowns. He’s not sure what Mike wants to take back. He wouldn’t be surprised if he was apologising for all of it. It wouldn’t be off-colour for Mike to regret kissing him, or even regret knowing him.
“Not for – not for kissing you,” Mike says quickly, like he can hear Will’s thoughts. “I’m not – I’m not sorry for that.”
Will takes a moment to study him. The light had risen further now, breaking out fully above the horizon and it casts Mike face into a watery golden glow. He looks angelic, even with his nose red raw from crying and his hair tussled from running his hands through it.
Will wants to kiss him again, scared that the kiss in the woods will be their first and last, but he can’t bring himself to move the final few steps.
“You can be,” he says, not unkindly. “I’d understand.”
And he would. It would hurt, but he would understand. He’d take it all back, given half the chance.
Mike just shakes his head, scrunching his eyes up. Will looks out onto the quarry ahead of them. It’s peaceful in the early morning. There’s a car pulled up the other side but he can’t see anyone in the driver’s seat. They’re alone.
“I’m not,” Mike looks at him, brow slightly furrowed in a way that Will can’t quite place. Despite all the days and nights spent together in this car, this somehow feels like the closest they’ve ever been.
“I’m just saying… I’d understand if you were.”
Will doesn’t know why he keeps pushing. He tries to imagine how he would feel if Mike said he did regret it, that he didn’t mean it, but all his mind keeps coming back to is the feeling of Mike’s lips against his and how no one can regret something as right as that.
“I’m sorry for a lot of things,” Mike says. Will studies his face for a minute, eyes stained red from crying, stray leaves still clinging to his jacket sleeves. His mouth is pulled into a tight pout, serious and wrecked and still somehow the most beautiful person Will has ever seen. “And that’s not one of them. That will never be one of them.”
He means it, Will thinks, and then he thinks: what does that mean for us now?
Mike turns his head away, staring out of the driver’s side window. He’s staring into the quarry, eyes fixed on where the rocks concave and give way, tumbling into the depth below. A few years ago a girl fell, not far away from where they’re parked. Lots of people think she jumped, and the catholic church in town refused to bury her. Will remembers her mom crying outside Hawkins General, her sobs so guttural it sounded like they were being snatched out of her. He remembers the girl too. She was only two years older than Jonathan and Nancy. She used to pick her little brother up from kindergarten sometimes. Will wonders sometimes, if she fell, or if she really did jump.
“I am sorry,” Mike says, suddenly turning around and making Will jump. “For waking you up at god knows what time and dragging you here. That was stupid of me. I wasn’t- I’m not in my right mind right now. I had a fight with my dad about – about everything really. You know how he is. I don’t think he likes me very much.”
There’s a sadness in Mikes voice, despite the small smile on his face.
“He loves you.”
“Yeah, yeah,” he waves his hand dismissively. “But I don’t think he likes me. If he did before, he certainly doesn’t now.”
Will frowns “Did you – does he know you’re…”
Gay? Is that what Mike is? Is that what he is? Even when he was too young to know what ‘gay’ was, he knew he didn’t want to be it. He still can’t even bring himself to think of himself as gay. All he knows is that he loves Mike, and for the first time in a very long time, he believes that Mike might love him too.
“What? No, no! He doesn’t know,” Mike shakes his head, scoffing slightly like the very idea is inconceivable. “He’s just mad I want to study film all the way out in LA. He says that there are plenty of great colleges out here where I can study something that’s actually ‘useful’ or just get a job at his company until I wither away and die. God, I think he’d kill me if he knew.”
Is that true? Will isn’t sure. He can’t imagine Ted Wheeler being the type to hurt his own son, but he can’t see him just accepting it if Mike told him he was in love with another boy. He isn’t sure what his own dad would do to him, if was still around. Judging by the bruises that used to cover Jonathan’s arms, it wouldn’t be good. Maybe his dad would kill him if he knew how he felt about Mike.
No, he doesn’t want to think about that.
“How long have you known… about me?” He points a finger into his chest, hard.
Mike blinks slowly at him. “A little while now. I didn’t know for sure until the other night, at the dinner. The look on your face when Max said that Rick was… I know that look. I invented that look.”
All this time, Will thinks. All those years, hiding this away from Mike, scared that he was the only one who knew what it felt like. And all this time, Mike hiding away too. Both of them too scared, both of them with this thing in them, this unknown terrifying thing that they couldn’t talk about.
“And… How long have you known about you?”
He expects Mike to go quiet, maybe cry again like he had earlier, sobs rocking both him and Will unsteadily. Instead, he smiles, “A couple of years. I met this guy at this sports camp my dad made me go to. It’s funny, the thing he made me do to stop me turning into a ‘homo’ is the thing that made me… it’s whatever. We shared a bunk and… He was just so kind to me. He reminded me off you,” he stops suddenly, breaking off to smile at Will. It makes him feel like his heart is on fire. “So kind like you, and quiet like he was always just thinking.”
“He was so much taller than me but he still insisted on taking the cramped up bottom bunk. He had these proper shoulders, like he’d already filled out. We were only thirteen but he was already defined, you know, like a full person. Ginger, too. More than Max. He was so ginger.
Some of the other boys tied him to a tree, wrote ‘fag’ on his forehead. They damn near hung him. He got sent home after that. I never saw him again.”
He tips his head back against the headrest. Will wonders if he should be jealous that Mike kissed someone else before him, but all he can think about is this kind boy, this shy ginger boy without a name, and his body hanging limply from a tree. All he can think about is the boy’s dad picking him up the next day unable to meet his eye. His mother scrubbing the words off his forehead with a wet towel.
“What was his name?” Will asks, but Mike isn’t looking at him anymore. He’s staring at the edge of the quarry again.
“I thought I could bury it,” his voice barely a whisper. “I like boys, but I still like girls. Like Bowie. Always thought I’d be able to choose who I fell for, end up with a nice girl and then I could just forget about all this crap. And then a couple of weeks back I realised that this is who I am forever. This isn’t reversible. I don’t get to pick who I fall for, I don’t have any say and I’m – I’m stuck like this.”
“If it helps…” Will says quietly. “So am I.”
He presses his lips together, letting his words sit in the silent vacuum of the car. Mike doesn’t say anything either. He’s still sniffling even though the tears have stopped falling and he’s still staring out of the window, into the abyss below them.
Will reaches out and grabs his hand, before he loses courage. Mike’s fingers are slender and bony, his nails short from biting them but dirty too, caked in the mud from where he had fallen earlier. HE wraps his own fingers around Mike’s and squeezes tightly. The very action makes him feel breathless and a little dizzy.
Mike doesn’t react, his hand still slack in Will’s. Instead he turns and says, a little teary, “You’re too nice to me. Why are you so nice to me?”
There’s no answer to that. Will presses his mouth shut even tighter, knowing that if he opens it, he’ll say something stupid, like ‘I love you’ or ‘I’ve always loved you’ or ‘forget about UCLA, let’s just drive away now, leave stupid fucking Hawkins and never look back’. And even though he’s kissed Mike, even though he’s holding his hand in his lap right now, that still feels too big to say.
Mike is still staring at him, mouth slightly downturned in a way that makes him look much younger than he is. It makes him look six again, sitting at Will’s kitchen table gluing pipe cleaners to milk cartons to make a space ship, legs swinging back and forth, still miles away from scraping the ground.
“Mike…” Will says because Mike won’t stop looking at him, his voice sounding pathetic in his own ears. “You know why…”
And he does know why. He’s always known why.
“You’re my best friend,” Mike says. His fingers close tightly around Will’s, squeezing so hard that he can feel his pulse thrumming through his veins, up his arm and down to his heart.
“You’re my best friend too,” Will says, voice barely more than a reverent whisper.
Mike kisses him then. Not a desperate, messy kiss like before, but something softer, lips barely even grazing his at first. He’s leaning over the gear stick, body twisted at an awkward angle, but he doesn’t even seem to care. Will lifts his hands, tentatively placing them on his shoulders, holding the both of them steady.
It’s still barely morning, the sun scraping low on the horizon and casting the whole quarry with a gentle orange glow. It’s barely morning, and he’s eighteen and there’s Mike kissing him, hands sliding up and down his shoulders, and the world has never been brighter than this.
He never wants it to end.