Chapter Text
Days lengthened into years, the sky winnowing into ash. Bloodied footprints and newspaper pillowcases marked the apocalypse of Mike Wheeler’s boyhood.
Hawkins had been cleaved in half, split into a before and an after. The air was dust-ridden, webbed over with spores and suffering. A nightmare bleeding into a daydream.
All anyone could do was learn how to survive. Most fled, if they could. The rest were trapped.
Their cage was bright and burning, jagged gashes of cracked Earth that boxed them into an inferno. From these rifts came the monsters—big, hulking creatures like ancient beasts of Grecian myth. They prowled in packs and couldn’t be killed by bullets alone.
Gone were the days of biking to school and eating lunch out by the lake. Life, instead, was warfare. Mike slept with windows boarded shut, woke up to the distant ringing of alarms, and walked outside to the curdling smell of fire. He lived by the sword, and he wasn’t the only one. Mike watched as his friends, once children, became weapons. Together, they worked as a unit, standing in the face of the end of the world and fighting it the only way they knew how.
They shared bullets, shared wounds, shared tears.
Mike watched Max wake up in a trench, watched Lucas build shields to protect her. He watched Dustin’s wisdom become a lantern, ushering them in and out of conflict. He watched El and Hopper work as admirals, watched them orchestrate an army of amateurs.
He watched Will. Most of the time, he watched Will.
Will wasn’t like the others. Rubble parted in his wake, pain cobbled over at his touch. Vanishing into the lampblack depths of the Upside Down at only twelve years old had permanently changed him, acquainting him with horrors that the rest of them had no idea how to comprehend. Through monsters and massacre, Will was always himself. Kind, sweet, completely whole. Though tender and compassionate, he was strong and resilient—more of a man than Mike in all of the ways that counted. A warrior in his own right.
Will. Messy hair, broken glass. Smiles, gunsmoke.
“You’ll kill yourself with that, if you aren’t careful,” he had said, the very first time Mike held a gun in his hands. They’d been young, of course, soft and vulnerable. Like undiscovered stars. Or, at least, something else very close to it.
“It’s just a gun,” Mike’d said, shrugging haphazardly. “Using it is sort of simple.”
“Not if you’re doing it the right way.”
At this, Mike had dropped his stance and let Will rearrange him, let Will show him the right way. He’d have let Will do anything.
Of all of them, Will was the best shot. It was a proficiency that had been instilled during early childhood, when he should’ve been counting stars and wandering distant meadows, not being punished and molded by his father’s cruel hand. Still, he learned to be at home with a rifle in his hands, or a shotgun hidden in his back pocket. Mike often suspected that he kept a gun stowed beneath his pillow at night. For protection, maybe. Or comfort. Mike never had the heart to say anything about it. After all, they all had different ways of coping.
Jonathan got high, Nancy got drunk. Lucas ran, and Max took pills. Even Dustin needed drugs, sometimes, to escape the despondency all around them.
Mike’s coping mechanism was simple.
“Mike?”
He looked up.
Will was up on the roof. Soft smile, hands curled loosely over mismatched shingles. Spackled eaves and concave gables. “It’s one in the morning, you know.”
Mike smiled back. It wasn’t a difficult thing. “Yeah?”
“That means it’s your birthday.”
“Almost forgot about that, if I’m honest.”
“Well, I didn’t forget,” said Will. “Come up here.”
“I’m supposed to be on watch.”
“I’m already doing that.” Will’s feet swung back and forth, the laces of his boots untied. “You might as well join me.”
Mike had nowhere else to be. Stepping forward, he caught onto the rain gutter and scaled the length of it, releasing a strained grunt once he’d hoisted himself fully up onto the roof next to Will. Dust rose around him.
Will’s smile was crooked up close. “There you are.”
“Sort of high up, aren’t we?”
“Yeah, we’re practically in the Alps.”
Mike bit the edge of a grin. “Well, most people don’t make sitting on the roof a regular habit, Will.”
“I’m not most people.”
“No,” said Mike, very glad of that. “It’s been a while since we’ve been on watch together. I never see you anymore.”
“Most people would enjoy that.”
“Not me,” said Mike. He was very sure of this. Time with Will was indispensable. A lifeline, something to cling to when all he could feel was that he was going to fall apart.
This, Mike thought, was what made it a coping mechanism.
“Right.” Will chuckled, like he only half-believed it. His self-deprecative tendencies set Mike’s teeth on edge. Will was the only good thing in their godforsaken town, and it was exasperating that he couldn’t ever see that. But, that was his way. He was humble, more so than anyone else Mike had ever met.
The late spring wind ran warm and mild, a sorry echo of what it’d once been. April in Hawkins had become an empty chrysalis, a jimmy-rigged month of vermillion skies and stripped-bare sweetgum trees. Carnage everywhere you looked, and yet all Mike missed were the spiky yellows of the sweetgum tree in what had once been his backyard. His house was gone, now, though he didn’t exactly know that for sure. When he had left, he’d never gone back again.
“I don’t feel older,” said Mike. “Not really.”
“Neither did I, at first. It sets in eventually.”
Mike wondered when it set in for Will, if it would be the same for him. “Strange to be a kid one day and an adult the next.”
“A man,” mused Will.
Mike laughed. “Do I look like a man now?”
Will sent him a long look, squinting playfully. “Not at all.”
“Fuck. Guess I’ll have to start from scratch, then.”
“I think that might be best.”
Nighttime looked different, now. More grey than black, scabby and clouded like the thick surface of a dragonfly's wings. You could hardly see the moon anymore. You couldn’t inhale twilight and watch the stars shift. Really, you couldn’t breathe at all. The air had been infected, filled with irrespirable toxins and great big snowflakes of soot.
“It’s wrong, though, isn’t it?” said Mike aloud. “To come of age at a time like this.”
Will stared down at the ground below them, densely clustered with dirt and junk. Steve and Robin had spent the past few days disassembling a broken-down Chevy found just outside of town. Spare parts were valuable–you could make a weapon out of anything, if you really tried. “Yeah.”
“We were just kids when it all started. I see that now more than ever.”
“I don’t know if I was ever truly a kid,” said Will. “Not after I got taken.”
Mike’s heart twisted painfully. He could remember twelve-year-old Will clear as anything, just big eyes and tiny hands, swallowed up in ratty hand-me-downs from Joyce and Jonathan. Mike’s best friend from the moment they met.
“Now, none of us will be kids again,” Will continued. “We’re too far past that.”
“Maybe not,” Mike agreed. Something about Will’s presence, though, made an optimist of him. “But there’s still a chance for us to have a normal life.”
Will’s shoulders twitched, a halfhearted shrug. “Guess so.”
“Don’t sound like that.”
“Like what?”
“Like you don’t believe me.”
Will leaned back against the rooftop, tucking both hands behind his head. “When we first met, I believed everything you said. You could’ve told me that you had a pet unicorn, or that Harrison Ford was your dad, and I would’ve believed any of it.”
Mike chuckled. “Grew out of that, eventually.”
“Somewhat.”
“One of us should be asleep,” said Mike, after a lingering beat of silence. “We’ve thrown the schedule off.”
“Can’t sleep anymore,” said Will. “Forgot how.”
By way of creaking floorboards and unmussed sheets, Mike had already deduced this. He noticed a lot more about Will than Will ever seemed to realize. Maybe it was because he didn’t usually comment on any of it out loud. Everything was safer in his head.
“You should try,” Mike said. “I’ll stay and keep watch.”
“What, sleep on the roof?”
“Sure.”
Will laughed. “And if I fall off?”
The answer to this was easy. “I won’t let you.”
Something about this had Will settling, shrinking into his own skin. His eyes opened and closed. “I guess I could try,” he said. “Dunno if it’ll work, though. Haven’t really slept in weeks.”
Hearing this, Mike felt selfish, thinking of how obscenely well he always slept after a long, exhaustive day. He only ever had good dreams, too. It was Will who was plagued by nightmares, endless and terrifying.
“Maybe the starlight’ll help,” said Mike.
“Maybe so.”
Will closed his eyes in earnest, then. With a ghostly sort of quickness, sleep swept him up into its eager palms. Will slept, and Mike, propping his elbows up against the slant of the rooftop, watched him. Eyes rolling beneath closed lids, his face veiled in a lambent glow that sometimes made Mike want to reach out, but never did. Instead, he waited for morning.
Mornings were tense and tedious, at the end of the world. Jonathan made breakfast–or sometimes Max, if she was feeling up to it–because they were the only ones who knew anything about cooking, and everyone sat at a big table to eat in reticent silence. The birds didn’t sing, the sunrise didn’t gleam. Once everyone had cleaned their plates–food wasn’t something that could be wasted anymore–Hopper would stand at the head of the table and read through everyone’s positions for the day. Mike was rarely sent outside, relegated instead to the backrooms with Dustin to repair weapons or formulate nostrums.
Mike built a lot of bombs. He got to be sort of an expert on them. To him, they were just puzzles, Rubik's cubes to deconstruct and piece back together. They worked well, though never well enough to make a difference, to banish the Upside Down from their world and release them from the eternal damnation they had been imprisoned by.
With his first bomb, Mike had killed someone. He didn’t know who. A son, maybe. Or a daughter. It hadn’t been on purpose. Just a burst of red and yellow, then emptiness.
Hopper told him, after, that this was part of it all. That they’d done what they’d set out to do—the demos were gone, everyone was safe. Everyone but that son. Or daughter.
If you looked, death was everywhere. Rotting inside the walls, lit crudely beneath summer sun.
Mike’s father had died at the very beginning. It was the inescapable sort of tragedy that you could only be sad about if you forced yourself to be. Mike hadn’t cried at the funeral, because there hadn’t been one at all. Things were moving too fast. As Ted Wheeler’s body cooled against concrete, everyone was already moving on. Steve and Jonathan smuggled Karen and Holly off to a safe house on the border of Ohio, and that had been it.
Afterward, Mike only had Nancy. He didn’t mind it. Much. She was different, now—practically a boy. Always with her hair swept back, always with her sashes of bullets and pockets lined with grenades. She’d become violent. But Mike was violent, too. On this, they were the same. It brought them closer together. Nancy taught Mike everything he knew about weaponry, about hand-to-hand combat, about perseverance.
Eighteen-year-old Mike wasn’t the same as twelve-year-old Mike, or thirteen-year-old Mike, or even fifteen-year-old Mike. He was hardened, so sharp and violent by nature that it was almost as if he had been born that way. It was a product of his environment, undoubtedly, but that didn’t make it any less austere. His thoughts were darker, too, now–permanently changed. For the best that he never spoke them aloud. They would scare people, surely. Better to leave darkness be, and never bring it to the light.
Mike stayed on the roof with Will until the sun rose, its ominous filter staining the skyline. Mike could hear the distant growls of hellhounds, could see bats disrupting the trees. Hopper’s cabin was their sanctuary, grown over with such a thick tangle of moss and flora that it was hardly visible to the naked eye. The rooftop was one of the only parts of the whole not covered in twisting branches of ivy.
The sun was only halfway up when Will stirred, yawning and stretching his curled-up heap of limbs.
“Good morning,” said Mike, charmed.
“We’re on the roof,” said Will. His voice was clogged with sleep, more dense and solid than it had been in at least a week. He always sounded so far-off and airy when he was sleep-deprived. Mike was glad to hear the difference even a few hours of rest made.
“We are.”
Will kicked his legs out, letting them hang off the rooftop’s edge. “Happy birthday.”
“Think you already said that.”
“Not properly.”
“Well,” said Mike, “thank you.”
“Of course.” Will sat up. Hesitated. “Is it, um. Is it morbid if I say I’m surprised we’ve lasted this long?”
“No.” Mike’d had the same thought more times than he could count on one hand. Often, he had dreams of dying, of fate following through with all the near misses he’d encountered over the years. Even more often, he thought to himself that, if death ever did come, he’d deserve it. “It’s not morbid.”
“I’m glad we have, though,” said Will. “Especially you.”
Mike couldn’t say much to that. His chest was full of gravel, his throat lined with sand. Leave darkness be. Never bring it to the light.
They climbed off from the roof–Mike offering cupped palms as footstools, guiding Will down like a sherpa–and slipped inside. The kitchen smelled like cinnamon sugar, though it still seemed like nighttime with all of the windows covered by slabs of wood and tarp.
Joyce and Nancy, huddled by the running faucet, turned when Mike and Will entered. Immediately, Mike was pounced on, accosted with happy birthdays and the heavy wave of expired perfume that always crashed into him when one of the girls pulled him in for a hug.
Mike chuckled into Joyce’s hair. “It’s my birthday, not D-Day.”
She swatted at him with a ratty dish towel. “It’s special. You’re eighteen!”
“They grow up so fast,” sighed Will.
Mike leaned into him, pinching his elbow. “Smartass.”
“Where’ve you two been?” asked Nancy.
Will coughed. “Sleeping.”
“On the roof,” said Mike.
At this, Nancy appeared less than amused. Joyce just laughed, flicking Mike with the dish towel again, and then, for good measure, sent another swat towards Will.
“Well, we’ve got birthday muffins waiting,” she said. “Not quite as sweet as cupcakes, but they’re apple cinnamon.”
“Muffins are better than cupcakes, anyway,” said Mike, breezily. “No chance of a toothache.”
Will beamed at him, a sight which Mike made sure to steal away for later. He knew how much Will appreciated the way he treated Joyce—like she was his very own mother, sometimes. Besides, Mike knew the pain of losing Will just as well as Joyce did, and it had changed both of them irrevocably. Just like her, Mike would have done anything in his power to keep Will safe. That resolve to protect was the sort of thing that brought two people closer together.
Nancy stuck a candle in Mike’s muffin, illuminating the cabin’s dingy matchbox walls. Mike blew it out.
“Did you make a wish?” Will wondered. His hair was sleep-mussed and windswept, the tips of it catching at his smile.
“‘Course.”
Will didn’t ask what it was. He’d been Mike’s best friend long enough to know that he’d never be told.
Everyone else was awaking and filing in soon after, clapping Mike on his shoulders and smiling as tenderly as their faces could allow. Mike didn’t expect a celebration, didn’t expect anyone to even try to feign happiness. He hadn’t since he was fifteen. Purgatory was long, and it was harrowing. Their purgatory was triple that. Birthdays didn’t make it any better. Nothing made it any better.
Well. Some things did.
The day passed long and lazy, as if trying to stretch itself out for the special occasion, though Mike was uneasy to think of his own birthday as anything special at all. He, certainly, wasn’t special. Dustin had rigged a little Matchbox car with a microphone so that you could talk through it like a walkie, and he bestowed it upon Mike as a doorjammed birthday gift. Besides that, there weren’t any big, shiny, just-bought gifts like the kind Mike had always gotten before everything had gone to shit. But, he thought, when Will slipped him a shard of watercolor paper with a painting of a tiger on it, that wasn’t so bad.
Mike ate and he fiddled with his tools and he draped himself over the back of the couch. Happy birthday, he thought to himself, staring up at the ceiling.
When there was nothing else to do but cry, Max and Mike would play chess. Checkers, too, if El wanted to sit on the arm of Max’s chair and chirp little tidbits of advice. They kept track of how many wins each of them had, carving a running tally into the loose floorboard over by the foot of the couch.
“Really don’t want to go out on my rounds tonight,” Max grumbled, checking Mike’s king.
Rounds were broken up two-by-two, and always the same pairings every time. El and Lucas—for strength. Nancy and Jonathan—for familiarity. Max and Will—for precision. Mike was stuck with Dustin on the off nights they were assigned nighttime rounds instead of getting locked up in the backrooms to tinker or sent to the junkyard to scrounge for scraps of weaponry.
“Why not?”
“Exhausted. Everything hurts,” Max said. A little gruff, because she tried not to let anyone see her weaknesses.
“We could swap out,” said Mike, eager. Too eager. “Um. If you want.”
Max didn’t look at him, still scrutinizing the chessboard. “You’re sure? It’s been hell recently.”
“It’s always hell.”
This, she couldn’t argue with. No one could have. “We can swap, then. I could use a break.”
Mike’s chest bloomed with excitement. Will—all to himself.
“Better not cheat me out of my queen, again, though,” Max huffed.
“I’ve never done that.”
“You did it at least twice last week.”
“You’re making shit up.”
“Don’t lie to my face right now, Wheeler.”
Though his words never betrayed this, Mike didn’t mind the rude, peevish way Max always spoke to him. Bickering with Max was, sometimes, the only normal part of Mike’s day. “You’re the liar.”
“You are the bane of my existence, did you know that?”
“I take pride in it, frankly.”
“Shut up,” said Steve from the kitchen, “and play your game.”
Glowering, they ceased conversation. Max let Mike win, in the end, because it was his birthday, and he knew that, secretly, she was fonder of him than she liked to let on. Besides, she hadn’t gotten him a present.
Soon enough, it was dark out, and the house began to shuffle–people washing up, getting ready for bed. Letting their guards down. It had taken some getting used to, everyone sharing and polluting one compact cabin, but nowadays it was the only place that ever felt anything like home.
Will was putting his boots on when Mike cornered him. Frayed shoelaces, dusty hardwood floor.
“What are you doing?” Will asked, like he’d known it was Mike from the sound of his footsteps alone.
“Getting my shoes.”
“Why?”
Mike kicked at Will’s ankle with his socked foot. “Why else?”
Will looked up, his hands falling still. “You’re coming with me?”
“Yup.”
“Is Max alright?”
“Fine. Just tired. I volunteered.”
“Oh,” Will said, moving to stand. On his rounds, he wore combat boots and a big green military jacket—a relic from Hopper’s days in the army. Sometimes, too, he’d wear a bulletproof vest, which was more of a placebo than a genuine layer of protection. If a monster caught you, there wasn’t much that a Kevlar vest could do. Still, there was comfort in armor.
Mike strapped a rifle to his back, then fished Steve’s old baseball bat out from the back of the closet. The handle was rubbed raw, the nails black with rust. Mike had always liked it.
“Ready?” Will asked. Hair pushed off his forehead, pocketing a silver pistol.
“Yeah.”
Because Mike possessed a streak of bad luck that ran so deep he couldn’t tell where it even began, Hopper caught him by the sleeve on his way out the door.
“Stop.” Crossing big, meaty arms, eyeing Mike up and down. “Where are you going with him?”
“Outside,” Mike deadpanned.
“If you don’t give me a real answer, I will knock your teeth out.”
Old crone. “Max isn’t feeling well. She asked me to cover for her.”
Asked was something of a stretch. Mike had basically begged her to let him go in her stead. It wasn’t the whole truth, but Mike lied to Hopper all the time, and it only ever became a problem if he was found out. He was good at not being found out.
“You were on watch last night,” Hopper grunted. “You shouldn’t be out again.”
“I’m not tired.”
“You’re a human. Humans get tired.”
Mike flicked a curl out of his eye. “I’m barely human.”
Warningly, “Wheeler.”
“I’m serious, I should be studied.”
This tactic had a very low failure rate. Mike would annoy Hopper so badly that he’d just give up and move on. It was quick, usually, and mostly painless.
“No one else can go?”
“I’m the last resort.”
Hopper’s eyebrows dropped very, very low. “Clearly.”
Mike blinked innocently at him and wondered how many times he could do this before Hopper really did try to kill him.
A beat, and then the acquiescence. “Just keep an eye on him,” Hopper said to Will, who was leaning up against the doorframe, watching them with a sheen of mirth in his eyes.
When Hopper had padded out of sight, Mike grinned and turned to Will. “That was easier than I thought.”
They left, let someone else lock the door behind them. Robin was always good about that—keeping the place sealed tightly shut. No ins, no outs. Not unless you had to.
The night was navy blue, wavering with a trembling sort of uncertainty. A firefly shot past them, its little white light glitching on and off. Loose leaves crunched beneath their feet, mislaid gravel scattered across tightly packed dirt. The air was thin and quiet, stretched-out and corroded.
“Dark out,” said Mike.
“Astute of you to notice.”
“Shut up. There’s nothing else to talk about.”
Will adjusted his collar. “We don’t have to talk.”
“But I want to talk.”
“Well,” hummed Will. “I guess it is dark out.”
Talking softly from then on, they cut through the woods into town, trudging up onto the overpass. Every street in Hawkins had been deserted, the highway speckled full of abandoned vehicles with bashed-in windshields and wide-open doors. Mike stepped in and out of shattered glass, guiding Will along so that he wouldn’t be cut.
The higher up they got, the worse everything looked, as if a bird’s eye view only augmented the dizzying effect of their hellscape.
Through the nighttime chill, Mike began to sweat—his body caught up and overheated by the swift rhythm of his footsteps and the back-and-forth friction of his coat sleeve against Will’s. His breathing got labored when there were so many spores filtering past. He pulled a handkerchief from his pocket and tied it over his mouth, though this usually only half-worked.
They stopped near an empty car with its headlights still on—some stroke of luck that the battery hadn’t died after however much time it’d been left alone. Mike leaned against the passenger door for a moment of rest. Will sat on the hood and tilted his head toward the sky.
“Once in a blue moon. Why do people say that?”
“‘Cause the moon is never blue,” answered Mike.
“Sometimes it is, though.”
“Red, maybe. Not blue.”
“It’s blue, now,” Will insisted. “Wouldn’t you say?”
Mike looked at it. The moon was as big as a saucer, as white and smoky as a just-lit cigarette.
“No,” he said. “It’s white.”
He looked away from the moon’s dusty, mottled surface, back down at Will. Understanding struck. The entire length of Will’s face was lit with moonlight, a pale blue glow like the reflection of the TV at the living room window. Blue in Will’s eyes, blue in Will’s mouth. Blue everywhere.
“Oh,” Mike said.
“What?” Will asked.
There was something there, something that indicated he knew exactly what Mike had just seen. At first, Mike didn’t give an answer. Let a simple oh hang between them like it had been nothing but an accident.
Then, he was propelled. Starting to speak, “Well—”
A crack, bright and resounding. Both heads whipping sideways, and there it was. A monster, big and hulking, wrapped around a streetlamp and poised for attack.
Mike stumbled away from the car, grasping for his bat, and Will’s pistol was raised and cocked in less than a second.
“Open fire,” Mike whispered.
Will didn’t hesitate.
The air fissured with the force of his gunshots, aimed for the center of the creature’s wet, toothy mouth. It leapt from the streetlamp and charged toward them, screeching and snarling. Will kept firing even as it lurched closer, ducking just in time for Mike to step up to it and swing his bat hard, casting the monster backward.
Will backed behind the still-open door of the abandoned car, glancing over it to where the demogorgon was shaking its limbs and readying to charge at them all over again.
“Grenades, Mike?”
Would probably be smart. Mike plunged a hand into his pocket to seize the small hand grenade he’d tucked away before they’d been apprehended by Hopper. It seemed like a lifetime ago, now, that they’d left the cabin. In the midst of battle, time sped like a freight train.
Quick, steady. Mike ripped the safety pin from the grenade and hurled it at the demogorgon as hard as he could. A burst of red and orange, flames everywhere. The creature emerged charred and blistered, but remained on its feet.
“‘M going to get behind it,” Will called, voice taut. Calculated. When he fought, Will was passionate, but never wired or overzealous. He was smart enough to always be five steps ahead, and quick enough on his feet to make up for any ground he ever lost. “Better if we strike from both sides.”
“Be careful,” Mike returned, spinning the bat in his hands and curling forward with the power of his swing. A distinct splatter—he’d hit the monster hard enough to draw blood. Mike felt a swell of self-satisfaction, which mixed nicely with the thrum of adrenaline he always felt when he fought side-by-side with Will like this. The sensation was sharp and delicious, had the effect of driving him forward as nothing else did. He sidestepped a swipe of the beast’s claw and moved to swing again.
Sound ruptured, quick and brutal—Will was shooting again. You could always tell when he was shooting.
The demogorgon shrieked, whirling around so that its back was facing Mike. Will was right in deciding that they should flank it on either side—it twisted this way and that, disconcerted by the stream of bullets pouring from everywhere it looked. Blindly, it tore at the air, ferociously trying to knock one of them off their feet and turn them into prey. Gritting his teeth, Mike reached in his pocket for his ace. Tossed the grenade, and that was it. The creature collapsed in a heap, undeniably dead.
He released a long breath at the sight of its oozing, twitching corpse. “Fuck. We did it.”
“Yeah,” said Will. “Fuck.”
It was then that Mike looked up, noticing, like a bucket of ice-cold water, that Will was bleeding. His pistol was still cradled loosely in one hand, the other pressed flat to his chest to try and block the rapid flow of blood. It wasn’t working.
“Will? Will!” Mike surged forward, skidding over broken glass.
Blood. Glass. The rotting smell of a dying monster. They were both on the ground, now, though Mike didn’t know when it was that they had fallen to their knees.
“It nicked me, I think,” said Will. “Just a scratch.”
“A scratch,” Mike scoffed. “Right. Why didn’t you wear your vest?”
“Forgot.”
“Forgot.”
Mike untied the handkerchief from his face and folded it over Will’s wound, putting pressure on the fabric with both hands.
Will blinked hazily down at what he was doing. “You’re bleeding, too.”
With a start, Mike noticed the cuts all over his fingers. “From the glass,” he said dismissively. “Don’t worry about it.”
“There’ll be bandages at home. Why don’t we have bandages, Mike?”
Why didn’t they? Mike had been too eager to leave for rounds, too eager to get as much time alone with Will as possible. Mike had been an idiot. “We’ll get you a bandage.”
“We’ve got to go home, first.”
Deep red, all over Will’s body. His face, still, was blue. The pretty, spidery blue of the waning moon, rare and flickering.
“I’m gonna get you home,” said Mike. “Promise.”
“Okay,” said Will, and then he smiled. He smiled. Reached up and laid a thin, bloody hand over Mike’s own. Pressed down. Their hands against his wound.
“Don’t,” rasped Mike. Unconvincing. “You’ll make it worse.”
Will looked at him. Blue moonlight. “Your blood is my blood.”
Wet and trickling, their blood mixed—blending what was Mike and what was Will until it was all indistinguishable. Mike stayed crouched there for longer than he should have, letting his wounds touch Will’s, feeling the jump of Will’s pulse beneath his fingertips. Living, breathing. The two of them.
Swallowing, “Can you stand?”
“Yeah,” said Will. “‘M not dead yet, Wheeler.”
“Didn’t say that,” Mike smirked. He tugged Will up onto his feet, slinging one of his arms around his shoulders so that if Will needed to lean on him, he could. He always could.
Slowed by the rush of blood and gleam of the moonlight, they returned home. No one was awake, and Mike was careful when he closed the door and deadbolted it behind them. He didn’t want anyone to stumble out of bed and happen upon them, breathless and hobbling and covered in blood.
Balancing Will’s weight at his side, Mike led them to the bathroom, depositing Will against the sink and making sure to turn the lock. He didn’t have to rifle through the cabinets for long before he located a first aid kit.
“Take this off,” Mike instructed, thumbing the hem of Will’s shirt. He wrenched the first aid kit open, strung out with worry.
Will smiled, wry, but did what he was told.
Sullen: "There's nothing to smile about.”
“Not true,” said Will. “We killed the demogorgon. That’s good.”
“You got hurt,” retorted Mike. “That’s bad.”
“A scratch, like I said.”
Mike let his gaze lower to the damage, a deep, purpling wound cut just beneath Will’s heart. The exact shape of the monster’s merciless talon. “More than a scratch.”
Will sighed. “Fix it, then.”
Thick white gauze, sharp sting of ethanol. Save for the big angry gash, Will’s skin was smooth and pallid, corded with muscle. Working resolutely, Mike cleaned and disinfected the abrasion until it was thin and almost colorless. Reached around Will to wrap him in the gauze, to pad him until he never felt any pain ever again.
“Could probably do it myself,” said Will. He shrugged a shoulder, then winced immediately after.
Mike kept his eyes on his work. His veins were still full of energy, his heart pounding with the lingering thrill of adrenaline from the fight. “You don’t need to.”
Will exhaled after this, and Mike felt it on his face. The air smelled rusty, clotted with blood and muck and moonlight. Mike’s heart kept pounding. Over and over, like an echo in an empty sea cave.
Joking, Will shifted and said, “We should go on rounds together more often.”
Mike let the slightest of smiles slip, though when he met Will’s eyes, they were sort of dark, more shadowed than he was used to seeing. Pupils big and blotted, eyelids dusted with soot from the grenade. Too close to the action. They were always too close to the action. Too close to each other, too.
Unthinkingly, Mike brought a thumb to Will’s face and wiped the soot away from his eyes. Will’s lashes stuttered, whisking against Mike’s skin. His hands were still cut all over, little nicks at his palms and knuckles that had dried up on the walk home.
Mike drew his hand away and didn’t understand why his heart wouldn’t just sit still. Pulse like a jackrabbit, like one of his bombs set for an early detonation.
“Um. Yeah, we should.”
A nice thought, though it seemed unlikely that Hopper would allow it again, after Mike had let Will get injured this badly on his watch. Mike cursed his own carelessness, wished he’d had the foresight to step in between Will and the monster and take the damage himself, but there wasn’t anything to be done about it now. Besides, Will wasn’t one to be kept from a fight. He liked to protect himself. That didn’t stop Mike from trying to protect him, too.
Mike began to unravel the roll of bandaging, stopping only when he had enough to wrap around Will twice over. He leaned in to apply it to the wound, brushing the line of his body against Will’s, and that was when they felt it.
Rigid, inexcusable. Mike was hard. His nostrils were rusty with the tawny scent of blood, and he was hard against Will’s thigh. He hadn’t even noticed it until now, the heat of the bathroom too suffocating and all-encompassing.
Violently, Mike flinched backward. “I–Sorry. I’m.”
Will just blinked at him, his mouth a little ajar. There was no anger in his face, nor disgust, but he did seem marginally shaken. Fuck. Fuck.
“‘S just the adrenaline,” said Mike. The ghost of an excuse.
“Um. Yeah,” said Will. “Me too.”
Mike crushed a strip of bandaging in his fist. “You–?”
“Just from the fight,” he said. Slow, obscure. “And the injury. I’m lightheaded, short on blood.”
“Then that’s all,” said Mike.
“Right.”
“Right.”
Mike’s heart was still racing. He was thoroughly keyed up from the fight, tense and buzzing like a live wire. That was why this was happening.
“I need to–” His throat was so dry. “I need to finish this.”
“Okay,” said Will. Soft and forgiving, like he always was. “Go ahead.”
Sort of hurriedly, Mike wound the length of the bandage around Will’s chest, fastening it securely by his heart. Tried to shun the itch that scaled the inner lining of his bone marrow when he touched Will’s skin, all damp with sweat and rubbing alcohol. When he couldn’t ignore it, not wholly, he finished and pushed away from the sink. Still turned on, his resolve fracturing in places he had never known it could be fractured.
“There,” said Mike. “Good as new.”
Will smiled, though his eyes were still sullied by darkness, the kind that Mike couldn’t recognize, and certainly couldn’t ask about. Better if he didn’t speak at all. The itch in Mike’s bones twinged, scratched at him from the inside.
He can’t know. He can’t know.
So, they parted in silence, retreating diffidently to their respective bedrooms. Mike got on top of his bed without untucking his sheets and sat on his hands so that he wouldn’t be tempted to touch himself. Remained still and unbreathing, on and on until he fell asleep.