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The leaves beneath their sneakers didn't crunch so much as give way, damp from a brief morning drizzle that left the woods behind Cornwallis Road smelling of wet bark and rotting pine needles. It was a suffocating, heavy quiet, the sort that always seemed to settle over Hawkins when the sky turned the color of wet slate.
Mike kept his hands shoved deep into the pockets of his oversized gray jacket, his shoulders hunched slightly against the winter chill. His stride was intentionally slowed, a deliberate effort to match the shorter, familiar cadence of the boy walking beside him. Every few paces, his elbow would brush against Will’s jacket sleeve. It was a rhythmic, reassuring point of contact that had become his anchor for these last few months. It was a silent language they’d fallen into over the past few summers—a constant, wordless reassurance that they were both still here, grounded on the right side of the dirt.
Underneath the scent of the damp pine, Mike could catch the faint, distinct trace of classic yellow shaving cream that was a recent, jarring addition to Will’s routine, which always sent a strange, sharp ache through Mike's chest. It was a reminder of how fast the clock was ticking. They were aging, they were growing and soon they’ll be graduating and moving away from each other. Mike didn’t want this closeness to ever end.
Will’s hands were tucked into the pockets of his corduroy trousers, his head tilted down just enough that his overgrown bowl cut shadowed his eyes. He looked small against the towering, skeletal oaks, but he was walking with a steady, quiet resolve that Mike knew he'd stolen directly from the little boy who had been through so much.
Just a mile north, the rusted chain-link fence of the Hawkins National Lab sat rotting in the mist, a silent monument to everything that had tried to ruin their lives. Out here, in the dim light of the canopy, Mike let his elbow linger against Will's for a second longer. He couldn't shake the terrifying, underlying dread that if he stopped moving, if he let the silence build for even a minute too long, the baseline reality of their fragile, hard-won peace would simply dissolve beneath their feet.
It's been two months since the sky stopped bleeding. Two months since Henry Creel dissolved into nothingness, taking the gray ash and the vines with him. The military trucks had rolled out of Hawkins like a retreating army of ghosts, leaving behind an eerie, blinding sort of peace. For the first time since they were twelve, the horizon was just the horizon. Nothing more. Nothing hidden. Nothing suspicious that could lead to another dimension.
Even Mike's breakup with El had been quiet. It was a mutual, tearless understanding whispered on the porch of Hopper’s cabin, an acknowledgment that they had spent years holding onto the ghosts of who they used to be, the boy in the basement and the girl from the woods, rather than who they actually were. There were no tears, no dramatic fights; just the soft creak of the porch swing and the shared relief of letting a beautiful, heavy weight finally slip from their hands. For Mike, it was like a shroud had lifted from his chest.
"Dustin says the radio tower needs a new mounting bracket," Will said, his voice low and steady, cutting through the chatter of a distant blue jay. He was looking down at the dirt trail, his oversized denim jacket slipping slightly off one shoulder. "He wants to go up there this weekend before the frost hits again."
"His side quests can wait," Mike muttered, though there was no real bite to it. He glanced sideways at Will, watching the way a stray splinter of pale sunlight caught the edge of his jawline. "We've spent the last three years fixing things that were broken. I think we're allowed to just breathe for a while."
Will’s lips curved up at the corners, a small, private thing. "Just walking feels weird tho. My brain keeps waiting for something to jump out of the bush."
"Hey! Nothing’s jumping out," Mike said, his voice dropping into a softer, fiercer register. "We checked. El checked. It’s gone, Will. Really gone."
Will nodded, though a quiet, persistent voice in his mind told him Mike was wrong. After years of living under suffocating shadows and constant threats, the silence felt less like peace and more like a held breath. It felt fundamentally wrong that the terror could just... vanish. That the world could go on turning, ordinary and unaffected, while the phantom ache at the back of his neck remained.
They rounded a bend where the old deer path narrowed, choked by wild blackberry brambles that clawed at their jeans like tiny, rusted hooks. They were completely unaware that their world was about to turn once more.
The sound came first.
It was not like the wet, squelching roar of a Demogorgon, nor the thundering rumble of the Mind Flayer, or the lashing out terror of the vines. It was a heavy, metallic scrape, with the distinct, agonizing screech of steel dragging against stone and dirt, followed by a low, guttural groan. There was a wet sound that vibrated right through the damp earth beneath their sneakers, sounding entirely too human and entirely too exhausted to belong to any creature native to Indiana's soil.
The phantom ache at the back of Will’s head flared instantly; a sharp, icy needle of adrenaline that had him freezing mid-step. Mike’s hand flew out of his pocket, his arm instantly snapping across Will’s chest to fling him backward, a hard-wired, protective instinct that took over before his brain could even process the threat. They stood paralyzed, the smell of rotting pine needles suddenly choked out by the sharp, copper tang of fresh blood and something scorched, like burnt ozone after a lightning strike.
Instinctively, Mike forced Will back, making him step behind his taller frame. His heart, which had enjoyed sixty days of regular rhythm, violently slammed against his ribs. His hand flew to his belt, his fingers wrapping around the handle of a plastic flashlight that was a useless weapon—a habit he couldn't break.
"Mike," Will whispered, his fingers bunching into the fabric of Mike’s jacket from behind, struggling to articulate a sentence.
Through the dense curtain of ferns, lying face down in a patch of wild clover and blood-soaked mud, was a body.
It wasn't some skinless, noseless horror from the Upside Down. It was a man, or rather, someone who had crossed the threshold of youth into something far more formidable and ruinous.
He was broader than Mike, his frame thicker and visibly hardened, wrapped in heavy plates of blackened steel that looked like they had been forged by hand in a world without factories. The armor was deeply scarred, marred by jagged gouges and scorch marks that ran across the chest. On his shoulders, the pauldrons were massive, embossed with a faint, faded symbol that made Mike’s stomach drop violently: a crested shield and hammered crude and deep right into the center of the iron, there was the distinct, hand-drawn outline of a red heart.
The man rolled over with a wet, agonizing gasp, his metal gauntlets digging into the earth, tearing up roots just to find leverage.
Mike choked on his own breath, the air turning to ice in his lungs. The forest seemed to lose its color, the green of the ferns bleaching into a stark, sickening gray.
The face staring up from the dirt, haggard, blood-streaked and hollowed out by a lifetime of unfathomable violence, was his own.
It was a mirror image, yet entirely distorted. The jaw was sharper, shadowed by a dark, coarse stubble that Mike’s own skin had never produced. The cheekbones were identical, but the skin was weathered, marked by a thin white scar that sliced through the left eyebrow. Where Mike was lean and lanky, a collection of sharp angles and awkward growth spurts, this version possessed a dense, terrifying mass of muscle beneath the shifting leather straps of his armor.
He looked older. He looked like a version of Mike that had been put through a meat grinder and rebuilt for war. The stranger’s dark eyes, Mike’s eyes, flickered, swimming with disorientation before they locked onto Will.
The man’s chest heaved beneath the iron breastplate. A trembling, calloused hand reached out toward Will’s boots, the metal fingers caked in mud.
"William..." the man choked out, his voice a deep, gravelly baritone that vibrated with a desperate, ancient ache. "By the Heavens... William, you are whole."
Will recoiled as if lightning had struck him square in the chest. He staggered backward, his heels catching violently on an exposed oak root, his face draining of all color until he looked exactly like the boy who had been pulled from the quarry all those years ago, hollow, breathless and utterly pale.
His hands flew to his head, fingers tangling desperately in his hair as his chest rose and fell in shallow, panicked bursts that barely let any air into his lungs.
What was happening? His mind screamed, the thoughts colliding inside his skull like the frantic static of a radio’s signal.
The phantom ache at the back of his neck tingled and burned like a white-hot brand that throbbed in perfect, terrifying sync with the breathing of the injured soldier in the dirt. He looked from the blood-slicked, blackened armor to the Mike standing right beside him, his eyes wide and wild, trapped between a living nightmare and a reality that was actively tearing at the seams.
"No," Will breathed, his voice cracking into a sob. "No, no, no. He's back. Mike, he's back."
"Will, look at me, look at me!" Mike yelled, turning his back on the stranger for a split second to grab Will by the shoulders, his thumbs digging into the denim to ground him. "Who's back?"
"Hen-Henry! Th-The Mind Flayer... It's a trick," Will stammered, his eyes darting frantically from Mike’s face to the armored twin in the dirt. "It's a trap. He's using your face, Mike. He's inside my head again."
The stranger managed to push himself up onto one knee, the steel plate on his thigh groaning under his weight. He didn't look at Mike at all. His focus remained entirely, obsessively locked onto Will’s trembling form, his eyes bright with a frantic, feral relief. It was a look of starvation ending, an absolute, terrifying devotion that seemed to bridge a lifetime of distance in a single, unblinking stare. He reached out a single, mud-slicked gauntlet, his fingers trembling in the air toward Will as if trying to prove to himself that this wasn't just another hallucination born of the dark.
"Nay, gentle Cleric," the man said, his speech heavy, slow, and deliberately archaic, devoid of any cadence that belonged to the twentieth century. He pressed a gauntleted hand over his heart, a smear of dark blood staining the silver trim. "No phantom took my form to deceive you. I am Michael the Brave, Paladin of the Third Order of Avangardia. I swear it upon the altar of the High Crest."
Mike turned back, his teeth grinding together so hard the ache radiated straight up into his temples. A hot, ugly knot of irritation flared in his stomach, a sudden, blinding flash of heat that burned away the initial layer of paralyzing fear.
The way this... this Michael looked at Will made his skin crawl. It wasn't just relief; it was a profound, suffocating longing that felt entirely too intimate, entirely too heavy for a stranger to wield in the middle of the Hawkins woods. It was a look that stripped away everything Mike had tried so hard to hide, a raw, naked adoration that Michael wore right on his face without a single shred of shame.
It infuriated him.
A possessive, vicious spike of jealousy shot through Mike's chest, sharp and venomous. That look belonged to him. The agonizing, quiet devotion, the years of silent pining, the terrifying depth of feeling that Mike kept locked behind his ribs, this older, ruined version of himself was just bleeding it out into the dirt for anyone to see. Michael was looking at Will like he was his entire world, his holy grail, his only reason for breathing. He was looking at Will in the exact way Mike only dared to when Will was asleep or looking the other way.
Mike stepped directly into Michael’s line of sight, deliberately cutting off the connection. His arm barred Will’s chest again, harder this time, physically pulling Will back an inch until he was tucked securely behind Mike's shoulder.
"Shut up," Mike snapped, his voice dropping into a harsh, defensive snarl as he stepped squarely between Will and the armored giant. "I don't care what roleplay game you think you're in."
"Role—"
"Who are you? Who hired you? Is this some sick prank?"
Michael the Brave blinked, his blood-smeared brow furrowing as his gaze finally dragged away from Will to lock onto this version of himself. For a second, a flicker of profound confusion and then a devastating, heavy touch of pity crossed his weathered features.
He took in regular Mike with a slow, assessing stare that felt like a trial. He looked at the flimsy nylon of the gray jacket, the soft, unblemished hands, the messy, untamed curls and the total lack of stature. To a man who had been hollowed out by war, this version of himself looked impossibly fragile, like a ghost made of paper and smoke. A ghost who hadn't yet learned how much it was going to cost to keep the boy behind him alive.
"You are my countenance, a reflection," Michael murmured, his deep voice carrying the weight of a stone vault. "Yet you are... fragile. Like a seedling." He shook his head, a grimace of physical pain tightening his features as he clutched his side. "The rift... the stars did weep when the Mage tore the veil. I am cast out from my realm."
He stumbled, his great bulk tilting sideways as his knee gave out.
"Mike," Will said softly, the initial terror in his voice beginning to give way to that familiar, frustrating empathy that always defined him. He crept around Mike’s shoulder, looking down at the bleeding man. "Mike, look at his arm. That's real blood and the armor... it looks heavy. It’s... too real."
"Will, don't go near him," Mike warned, reaching back to catch Will's wrist.
The ever-kind Will was already dropping to his knees in the damp clover. He didn't touch the man, but his eyes were wide, scanning the deep gash where the leather met the iron sleeve.
"He’s hurt. If he was an illusion— Henry's illusions never bled like this. They smelled like sulfur and meat. This just... smells like blood."
Michael looked up at Will, his expression softening into something so tender it made Mike want to hit him. "Your heart remains a sanctuary, William. Even in this strange, grey land."
"Stop calling him that," Mike barked, his face flushing hot. He stepped forward, grabbing Michael by the leather strap of his shoulder guard with a strength he didn't know he had. "Get up. You're coming with us, but you're keeping your mouth shut."
Together, with Mike lifting from the left and Will supporting the stranger’s uninjured side, they managed to haul the massive weight of the Paladin to his feet. Michael leaned heavily on them, his iron boots dragging through the dirt, his breath coming in whistling gasps.
He was deliberately shifting his weight, inclining heavily toward Will’s side, a subtle tilt that Mike noticed instantly and hated with a burning, vicious passion. Every time Michael’s armored shoulder brushed against Will’s flannel, Mike felt a toxic spike of jealousy twist in his gut, his own grip on the older man's side tightening until his knuckles turned white.
"Are you a healer of the human body in this realm, too, my Cleric?"
"No. He is not!" Mike said even before Will could reply. "Keep your eyes forward!"
As they stumbled toward the edge of the tree line where Nancy's old car was parked, Mike's mind was racing, a chaotic mess of static. He reached into his jacket pocket with his free hand, blindly fumbling for his walkie. Then, he clicked the button twice, the harsh static tearing through the quiet afternoon air like a gunshot, desperation bleeding into his tone as he spoke into the plastic mic.
"Dustin," Mike whispered fiercely into the receiver, his eyes locked on the dirt path ahead. "Dustin, do you copy? This is Code Red. I repeat, a Code Red. Get everyone and meet at my house. Now."
As Mike aggressively shoved Michael into the backseat of the station wagon, he caught a glimpse of the Paladin's eyes through the rearview mirror. The older man was staring at Will again, but the look had mutated. It wasn't the frantic relief from the woods anymore.
This time, Michael was looking at Will like he was fodder to be devoured.
It was predatory and suffocating. Like something dark and twisted. Kind of like an obsession that made the hairs on the back of Mike’s neck stand completely on end. It had a distinct touch of the sinister, something rotting and wrong wrapped inside that desperate devotion. Mike slammed the car door shut with a vicious, metal-on-metal thud, his chest heaving as he stared through the glass.
Oh, he was having a very good day, indeed.
Dustin was pacing a groove into the floral pattern of the Wheeler family's living room rug, his hands furiously gesturing with a half-eaten piece of cold toast.
"An alternate reality. A literal bona fide parallel continuum," Dustin muttered, his voice cracking slightly under the weight of his own frantic excitement. "This isn't Upside Down, guys. That was a bridge. A tumor attached to Hawkins. This is a completely separate branch of the cosmic tree."
The house was uncharacteristically quiet around them, stripped of the usual background noise of Ted Wheeler’s evening news or Karen’s clattering pots. It was a miracle of timing; the family had packed the station wagon two days prior for a forced, quiet vacation in Maine. Karen had insisted on it because their family needed healing. An escapade Mike didn't want and Nancy conveniently missed.
Holly still woke up screaming from nightmares about vines wrapping around her ankles, her small face pale and hollowed out from a trauma she didn't have the words to describe. They needed to get out of Hawkins. Everyone did, but the Party was stuck to this soil like burrs. Until graduation at least.
Joyce sat on the edge of the velvet armchair, her fingers tightly interwoven with Hopper’s. Her eyes, shadowed by years of a mother's permanent vigilance, never strayed from the massive figure sitting on the colonial-style sofa. Jonathan stood behind her, his arms crossed over his corduroy jacket, a heavy, defensive scowl deeply etched into his forehead.
The couch groaned beneath the sheer mass of Michael the Brave. He looked completely absurd against the backdrop of pastel throw pillows and framed family portraits. His heavy, blackened iron breastplate was smeared with dry dirt and the dark rust of his own blood, catching the warm, amber glow of the table lamps. He sat with a rigid, military straightness, his massive hands resting on his armored knees, his dark hair falling in damp, tangled curls around a face that was a terrifyingly hardened portrait of Mike Wheeler.
Standing by the television set, the real Mike looked like a ghost in his own home. He was leaning against the wood-paneled console, his fingers digging into the plastic molding so hard his knuckles turned white. His eyes were narrowed, tracking every single breath the stranger took. Every movement, every blink from the Paladin felt like an insult. It was like looking at a version of himself that had been forged in fire while he had been left to grow thin and brittle in the shade.
Something about the man's posture, the smooth, unhurried cadence of his breathing, sent a low, vibrating alarm through Mike’s chest. He’s lying, Mike thought, the certainty settling into his throat like a bitter pill. He didn't know how and he didn't know why, but the man wasn't just a lost traveler.
"So, let me get this straight," Max said, her voice cutting through the tension like a blade. She was leaning back against the doorframe, her sunglasses pushed up into her red hair, her bright eyes sharp and entirely unimpressed by the medieval display. "You just... fell through a hole? Like a penny dropping through a grate?"
Michael tilted his head, his dark eyes meeting Max’s with a calm, unbothered dignity that made Mike’s stomach turn. "The fabric of the cosmos did rend, Lady Zoomer. A great magic shattered the pillars of my home. I did wander through a gray, unholy void where time hath no dominion, blind and drifting, until the earth beneath my feet turned solid once more. I know not the path back to the high gates of Avangardia. The way is sealed to my sight."
"Bull," Mike muttered under his breath, though it was drowned out by Lucas stepping forward.
Lucas was wearing his old tank-top jersey over a long-sleeve shirt, his arms crossed, his brow furrowed in deep concentration. "You keep saying 'magic.' Like, what kind of magic? Like El’s? Like a psychic link?"
Michael’s gaze drifted toward Jane, who sat quietly on the floor beside Will’s chair. El was wearing an oversized flannel shirt that used to belong to Hopper, her knees pulled tight to her chest. She had been staring at the stranger's face since they arrived, her brow knitted together as she tried to feel for a presence in the void of her own mind, finding nothing but an empty silence.
"Our Mage, the Lady Jane of the White Tower, wields the breath of the stars," Michael said softly, his voice dropping into a reverent, rhythmic tone that sounded like an ancient hymn. "She did stretch her hands to save me from the darkness when the rival banners breached our sanctum once. This was different. This spell of hers did fracture something, I believe. I am marooned in this realm until I find a way."
"Marooned," Mike repeated aloud this time, his voice sharp, cracking like dry wood. He took two steps away from the television, his long legs casting long shadows across the carpet. "You just happen to tumble out of the sky into the exact town, the exact woods, where we were walking? You look exactly like me, you have his name—" he pointed a trembling finger at Will, "—and we're just supposed to buy that you're a lost puppy who can't find his way home?"
Michael turned his face toward Mike. The contrast was staggering. The Paladin’s skin was thick, leathered by sun and wind, marked by the white crescent of an old blade across his brow. He didn't look angry at him; instead, he looked like he was pitying him. He looked down at Mike with the exhausting, patient disappointment of an elder brother.
"The threads of destiny are woven by hands wiser than ours, young Michael. The soul does recognize its own reflection across the dark waters. I seek no quarrel with you."
"Mike, sit down," Hopper growled from the armchair, his heavy hand coming down on Joyce’s shoulder to steady her. "We’re trying to figure this out. Shouting at him isn't going to fix anything."
Mike bit the inside of his cheek until he tasted copper, stepping back into the shadows near the hallway.
Lucas knelt down closer to the coffee table, his eyes locked on the intricate leather straps binding the stranger's gauntlets. "In your world... Avangardia... What were you doing before the rift opened? Who were you fighting?"
Michael’s shoulders shifted, the iron plates of his armor chiming like muffled bells. A shadow passed over his face, deep and cavernous, swallowing the light in his eyes until they looked like two pools of ink. His gaze drifted slowly, deliberately, across the room until it anchored itself onto Will.
Will was sitting perfectly still in a wooden dining chair he had dragged into the living room. His hands were tucked between his thighs to keep them from shaking. He had his chin tucked down, his hair falling forward like a curtain to hide the frantic, rhythmic pulse beating against the skin of his temples. He looked so small beneath the weight of the Paladin's stare.
"We fought to protect the sanctuary from Blackhands and we won," Michael said, his speech slowing, each word heavy with an old, bleeding grief. "The dark clans did circle our borders for three winters. We held the line... the Paladin and the Cleric together. For he was the light of my blade and I was the shield for his prayers."
He paused, a faint, tragic smile pulling at the corner of his scarred mouth. It was a phantom movement, a muscle memory from a lifetime ago when smiling didn’t feel like pulling a blade out of an old wound.
The silence that followed was heavy, thick with the suffocating weight of everything Michael was carrying behind his ribs. Every line carved into his face, every silver strand cutting through his dark, matted curls, was a monument to a loss so vast it had completely hollowed him out, leaving only the iron shell behind. He looked down at his own gauntlets, the metal caked in dried mud and old, dark flaking blood and his chest hitched a fractured, dry sound that caught in his throat.
The grief lived inside him like a terminal sickness. It was the weight in his arms that never went away, the terrible, echoing quiet of several nights spent staring into a campfire, waiting for a voice that was never going to call back to him. His mind screamed at him with the echoes of his loss. His heart bled like an oozing wound inside his chest, never to be mended.
Looking at the pristine, soft flannel sleeves just inches away didn't bring him peace. It only sharpened the agony. It was a cruel, beautiful mockery of the ash-choked wasteland he had left behind, a reminder of the exact moment the world had cracked wide open and let the dark eat everything he loved.
"In the grand cathedral of the High Crest, beneath the canopy of the silver oaks," Michael murmured, his eyes locking onto Will's face with a terrifyingly beautiful intensity, "William the Cleric and I did bind our souls. We were wed before the eyes of the realm."
The words seemed to solidify, turning the very air into stone.
Will went completely, entirely numb. The breath died in his throat, his chest freezing mid-rise. The small room, with its familiar, peeling wallpaper and the faint, lingering scent of Karen’s air freshener drifting in from the kitchen, suddenly felt like it was spinning on a wild, broken axis. His heart, which he had spent the last two months carefully wrapping in protective layers of feigned normalcy and fragile silence, felt as though it had been violently cracked open by a single blow.
For years, Will had been suffocating himself. Every laugh shared with Mike over the kitchen table, every quiet evening spent holding the flashlight while Mike greased his bike chain, every D&D session and every shared look of concern, it had all been an exercise in controlled agony.
He had forced his feelings down into the darkest, coldest trenches of his chest, brutally reminding himself of the baseline rules: Mike is straight. Mike loved El. Mike is your best friend. He’ll only date girls. You’re not one.
Will had convinced himself that to ask for even a millimeter more would be to destroy the only anchor he had left in a world that had already torn him to pieces. Now, this magnificent, terrifying ghost with Mike’s face was sitting three feet away, casually bleeding out a truth that felt entirely too heavy for the room to hold.
He was speaking of a world where those buried, shameful desires weren't a sickness, but something holy. A world where they were celebrated, where they were married. The sheer, impossible weight of that word, the terrifying beauty of it, made Will's head spin with a sickening, violent vertigo. It was everything he had ever starved himself for, dropped right into his lap by a man wrapped in a face he loved.
Across the room, Mike felt the blood drain from his face until his ears rang with a loud, piercing static.
Married. The word struck him like a physical blow to the sternum, leaving him hollowed out and gasping for air. His eyes flew instantly to Will, his heart hammering against his ribs in a panic that had nothing to do with monsters or interdimensions. Mike looked at the way Will’s shoulders had bunched together, the way his eyes had gone wide and glossy with unshed tears and a cold, suffocating terror took root in his chest.
Mike was a coward. He knew it.
He had known it since the day Will handed him that painting in the back of the van, a painting he still kept sprawled in his bedroom, its edges soft from where his fingers had traced the lines in the dark. He loved Will. He had loved him since they were kids on the swings, since the day he looked into the wooden castle and saw a boy who understood the world without needing a map, but he had been too afraid. He had convinced himself that the painting was just a lie to make him feel better, that whatever childish infatuation Will might have had with him was now burnt away in the fires of the final battle. He thought Will had finally moved on, that Will was finally free of him and Mike had accepted his role as the silent, distant guardian of a friendship he didn't deserve to keep.
To hear that in another universe, a better version of him, a stronger, braver, more honest version, had looked at his Will and dared to claim him, to love him out loud before the world... It felt like a judgment. It felt like being stripped naked in his own living room and shown exactly how much he had failed.
"Married?" Dustin whispered, the toast slipping from his fingers and landing onto the carpet with a soft thud. He looked between the Paladin, then to Will and finally to Mike, his mouth hanging open in an uncharacteristic loss for words.
The silence that followed was heavy and fragile, like a thin sheet of winter ice waiting for the first heavy step to shatter it completely.
Joyce’s hand trembled so violently that her silver rings clinked against the porcelain of her forgotten tea mug. She reached out blindly, her fingers finding the coarse denim of Hopper’s knee, squeezing until her knuckles turned a brittle, bloodless white. Beside her, the room seemed to shrink, the ordinary walls of the Wheeler living room suddenly feeling small against the tragic expanse of the stranger’s history.
Michael the Brave did not look down. He kept his spine straight, though a sudden, heavy tremor ran through the thick iron plates encasing his chest. His fingers, covered in heavy leather wraps, slowly curled into the fabric of the sofa cushion, squeezing until the seams groaned.
"The shadow fell upon us when the midwinter fires were burning low," Michael said, his deep baritone dropping into a rhythmic, solemn cadence that sounded like a funeral liturgy. "A rival clan, born of the ash-wastes, did breach our sanctuary by treachery. They sought not a fair test of blades. They did taint our water with a silent, burning poison, a creeping venom that no magic of the White Tower could purge."
He paused, a breath rattling in his throat. The sound was raw, a physical scraping of air that made Jonathan shift uncomfortably from his spot by the doorway, his arm dropping protectively over his mother’s shoulder.
"I found him by the altar of the fields," Michael continued, his voice cracking slightly, though his eyes remained wide, fixed entirely on Mike. "He was withering like a flower touched by early frost. I did gather him into my arms, his head resting against this very breastplate. The iron was cold, yet his skin was burning. I watched the light leave those eyes, the same emerald pools that had guided my sword through a hundred skirmishes."
As the Paladin spoke the words, his gaze shifted from the middle distance, locking directly onto Will’s face with an unblinking, heavy intensity. It was a look that bypassed everyone else in the room entirely, a direct line of sight that treated the living room as nothing more than empty fog.
"As the last breath did flutter from his lips," Michael whispered, his calloused thumb twitching as if he was smoothing a ghost’s cheek, "I did press my forehead to his. I gave him my solemn vow. I promised him that, as I had lived by his side, I would follow him into the dark. I whispered that he would be by my side and I by his, until the stars themselves did turn to ash."
A low, involuntary sound escaped regular Mike’s throat, like a sharp, defensive intake of breath that sounded like a cornered animal. Mike took a sudden step forward from the television set, his long legs tensing under his corduroy trousers. A hot, suffocating surge of possessiveness flooded his chest, a primal instinct that made his vision blur at the edges.
The way this man spoke of Will, the way his eyes seemed to trace the shape of Will’s mouth, the curve of his jaw, felt like a theft. It was an intimacy Mike had spent years craving in the quiet, agonizing dark of his own mind and seeing it displayed so boldly, so seamlessly, by someone wearing his own face made his blood turn to fire.
Michael’s shoulders finally slumped, his massive head dropping forward into his leather-clad palms. A single, heavy tear escaped his lashes, tracking a clean line through the dried mud on his cheek-boned face. The iron plates of his gauntlets shook.
"When the earth did swallow his shroud, the madness took me," the Paladin wept softly, the sound muffled by his hands. "The grief was an iron band around my ribs, crushing the breath from my body. I could not endure the light of the sun without his prayers to warm the air. I went to the White Tower to meet William's sister Jane. I fell to my knees before her and I did beg her... I did implore her by the ancient seals to open the forbidden paths. I told her I cared nothing for the law or the balance of the realms. I only wished to be sent somewhere, anywhere, where a version of my William still drew breath. Just to look upon him once more. Just to catch a single, fleeting glimpse of the light I had buried."
The room divided cleanly in that single breath, a silent chasm opening across the rug.
On one side, the weight of the tragedy broke the defenses of those who had spent their lives protecting children from the dark. Joyce was already crying, a soft, choked sob escaping her lips as she buried her face into Hopper’s flannel shirt. Hopper himself had his jaw set tight, his eyes unusually bright as he stared at the floor, his heavy arm wrapping tighter around Joyce’s waist.
Across the room, Lucas looked away, his throat working as he swallowed down a lump, while Dustin slowly abandoned all his lunch plans on the coffee table, his usual detachment entirely shattered by the raw, human agony of the tale. Even El sat with her head tilted, her large eyes wet with a profound, quiet sympathy for a love that had broken through the barriers of time and space.
Michael lifted his head again, his tear-streaked face turning back to Will.
Will’s eyes had completely filled with tears, the brilliant green of his irises swimming behind a thick, glossy sheen. A single droplet spilled over his lashes, tracing a slow path down his pale cheek. His heart felt oversized, clumsy and bruised within his ribs. He was looking at Michael, but his mind was trapped in the impossible reflection; he was seeing Mike’s features broken by an absolute, unyielding devotion that he had spent his entire youth believing was an impossibility for himself. The sheer, tragic beauty of it felt like a knife turning in an old wound.
On the other side of the chasm stood Mike Wheeler.
He had gone completely, entirely cold. The heat of his initial anger had vanished, replaced by a sudden, piercing clarity that felt like ice water in his veins. He didn't look at Will’s tears or Joyce’s face. His eyes remained locked on the subtle, minuscule movements of the Paladin’s face as the man wiped his eyes with the back of his leather sleeve.
There was a fraction of a second, a single, fleeting heartbeat, where Michael thought no one was watching him, but in that silence, Mike saw it.
The grief on the Paladin’s face hardened. The lines around his mouth didn't sag with the exhaustion of sorrow; they tightened into something sharp and cold. Beneath the wet sheen of his eyes, a dark, lingering focus remained fixed on Will, not with the soft longing of a mourning husband, but with the cold, measuring assessment of a hunter tracking a prey. It was a look of pure, unadulterated intent, a lingering darkness that sat behind the handsome, weathered features like a spider in the dark.
Mike’s hands dropped to his sides, his fingers curling into tight, hard fists. His teeth clicked together. The man portrayed himself as a grieving traveler looking for a memory. He was a threat and he was already wrapping his fingers around the only part of Mike’s world that mattered.
A sharp, metallic click broke the heavy stillness, the sound of Mike’s sneaker heel hitting the brass floor vent as he surged away from the wood-paneled television console. The cold clarity that had just settled into his bones turned white-hot, a violent electrical current snapping through his limbs.
"He’s lying!" Mike’s voice tore through the quiet room, loud and jarringly unvarnished, shattering the fragile, tearful atmosphere like heavy boots through glass. He pointed an aggressive, trembling finger directly at the center of the Paladin’s pristine, ornate breastplate. Everyone turned their faces to look at Mike's accusing finger. "Look at him! Look at his face! You guys are actually buying this? He’s evil! He didn't come here to just get a stupid glimpse. He’s here to take Will! He’s going to steal him away from us! From this world!"
"Mike, shut up!" Dustin hissed immediately, his face flushing a dark, embarrassed red as he threw his hands up in frustration. "What is wrong with you? The guy's husband literally died!"
"Are you out of your mind?" Max snapped from the doorway, her voice layered with deep disgust as she adjusted the collar of her yellow jacket. "Have a little decency for once in your life."
Joyce looked up from Hopper’s chest, her eyes wide, rimmed with red and brimming with profound disappointment. "Mike, honey, please... sit down."
Mike couldn't sit down. The small room was closing in on him, the floral wallpaper feeling less like a home and more like a cage where everyone was willfully blinding themselves. He could see the faint, almost imperceptible twitch at the corner of the stranger's mouth, the victory of a performer who had his audience exactly where he wanted them.
Michael slowly lowered his hands from his face. His expression didn't morph into rage. Instead, he allowed a deep, sorrowful sigh to lift his heavy shoulders, looking across the coffee table at Mike with a smooth, terrifyingly placid gentleness.
"I do possess a deep understanding of your anger, young Michael," He said, his voice dropping into a low, honeyed baritone that sounded like oil over a burn. He smoothed down the leather edge of his gauntlet with a slow, deliberate grace. "If I had lost my way within the dark as you have... if my spirit were as fractured and small, I too would harbor a bitter frustration. I bring no malice to this realm, or to William."
Mike’s throat locked up, a suffocating panic seizing his lungs. If I had lost my way as you have. The words were a quiet, targeted dagger. Mike wanted to scream at him, wanted to rip the armor off his chest and demand to know what he meant by that, what he knew about the silent, agonizing labyrinth Mike had been wandering for years.
A paralyzing terror held his tongue. If he pushed too hard, if his anger slipped and revealed the raw, bleeding core of why he was so desperate, his mask would shatter completely. The secret he had guarded so fiercely, the fact that he was utterly, helplessly in love with his best friend, would be laid bare.
Will had finally found peace. Will had finally moved on from the childhood crush that had caused him so much pain, finally standing on solid ground. If Mike broke the silence now, he would break their friendship forever. He would lose him entirely. So Mike stood there, his jaw locked, chest heaving, trapped in his own silence.
When the silence stretched too long, the polite, tragic mask on the Paladin's face vanished for a fraction of a second. Michael leaned forward slightly, his eyes narrowing into a sharp, freezing slit. A fleeting, sinister glare flashed through his dark irises. Something that felt like a look of pure, territorial dominance.
"But, I wonder, why do you even care so deeply, Mike?" Michael snapped, his voice suddenly losing its softness, turning into the hard, biting ring of struck iron. "He is not even betrothed to you!"
The words hit the room like a concussive wave again. Total, absolute silence dropped over the Wheeler house. Dustin froze mid-breath; Lucas’s eyes widened and Joyce’s mouth parted in a small, stunned gasp. The word hung in the air like it was heavy, foreign and entirely too revealing for a small-town Indiana.
Desperate to stitch the bleeding edges of the room back together, Will quickly leaned forward in his wooden chair, his fingers clutching the fabric of his jeans so hard they left white indents. His green eyes were frantic, swimming with a painful mixture of confusion and embarrassment as he looked up at his best friend.
"No... Michael, that... that thing... it doesn't happen here normally. In this realm, I mean and umm..." Will said softly, his voice a breathless, trembling tremor towards Michael. Then he looked at Mike with a sort of begging look to stop swinging at the dark. "Mike, please. I don't-I... I don't think that's what he wants at all. He’s just... he’s just grieving, okay? You two need to calm down."
Michael’s features instantly reassembled into the picture of a patient, suffering saint, suppressing any trace of the venom he had just spat.
Before Mike could yell back, Lucas and Jonathan stepped into his path, physically cutting off his view of the sofa. Lucas’s hand came down firmly against Mike’s chest, pushing him back toward the shadow of the hallway.
"Man, you need to back off right now," Lucas muttered fiercely under his breath, his eyes urgent and hard. "He’s a stranded traveler. He’s going to be stuck here for a few days until we figure this out. Just let it rest."
"You don't understand," Mike whispered, his voice cracking as he tried to look over Jonathan’s shoulder. "You don't see what he's doing."
"Mike," Jonathan spoke with softness that was never reserved for Mike ever before. "He's not taking Will, okay? None of us will let it happen."
Behind their backs, Michael slowly rose from the sofa, the metal plates of his greaves clanking against each other with a heavy, purposeful finality. He walked straight past the coffee table, ignoring the adults, ignoring the rest of the Party, until he stopped directly in front of Will’s chair. He towered over him, a mountain of blackened steel and ancient, tragic certainty.
He reached down, his heavy, leather-bound hand hovering just inches from Will’s shoulder, his gaze dropping down onto Will’s tear-filled eyes with a terrifyingly beautiful reverence.
"I am entirely devoted to you, William," the Paladin declared, his voice carrying the grand, echoing weight of a cathedral vow. "In every life. In every universe. My blade belongs to your light, always. I shall be wherever you want me to be..."
Mike went feral.
He violently shoved his way past Jonathan, his elbow catching Lucas in the ribs as he lunged across the rug, his face twisted into an expression of raw, unhinged fury. He didn't care about his friendship anymore; he didn't care about the mask he's been putting on. He just saw those massive hands near Will, and everything inside him screamed to tear them apart.
"Get away from him!" Mike roared, his long arms reaching out to physically corner the massive warrior, his fingers clawing at the air.
Before he could lay a hand on the armor, Lucas threw his entire weight onto Mike’s midsection, his arms wrapping around his torso and dragging him backward onto the hardwood floor of the entryway. Mike thrashed against the grip, his sneakers scuffing the wood, his chest heaving as he stared over Lucas's shoulder at the monster with his own face.
"He's not what he says he is!" Mike yelled, his voice raw, scraping his throat as he glared through the space between his friends. "He’s a liar! I will prove it to you! I’ll prove it to all of you!"
The linoleum of the entryway was cold beneath Mike’s sneakers, his heels skidding against the threshold as he fought Lucas’s hold. His ribs burned where Lucas’s forearm was locked across his chest, but the physical discomfort was nothing compared to the violent, roaring static in his ears. He was a wire stripped bare, sparking blindly at anything that came too close.
A sudden shift in the room cut through the frenzy.
Will moved. He stepped directly out of the massive shadow of Michael the Brave, his movements fluid and entirely unhurried, though his face remained terribly pale. He bypassed Jonathan, ignored Dustin’s frantic gesturing and came straight to the entryway. Before Mike could fling another curse across the living room, Will closed the distance between them and threw his arms around Mike’s neck.
The impact was quiet, a soft collision. Will buried his face into the crook of Mike’s shoulder, his fingers bunching tightly into the fabric of Mike’s gray jacket, pulling him down until their centers of gravity met.
The transformation was instantaneous. The violent trembling in Mike’s limbs died on the spot. The rigid, iron tension in his spine evaporated, his broad shoulders dropping as the breath he had been weaponizing left his lungs in a long, shuddering sigh. His hands, which had been clawing to get at the Paladin, rose clumsily, instinctively, wrapping around Will’s waist to hold him fast against his chest. He buried his chin into the soft thatch of Will’s brown hair, his eyes closing as the smell of woodsmoke and familiar lavender shampoo filled his senses, grounding him more effectively than any physical restraint ever could.
From the living room, a collective, heavy sigh rippled through the Party. Dustin let his chin drop to his chest, his shoulders slumping with a mixture of exhaustion and profound pity. Max leaned her head back against the doorframe, her sharp eyes softening into something resembling an old, familiar ache, while Lucas slowly uncoiled his grip from Mike’s waist, stepping back to give them space.
They all knew. They had known for years, watching from the sidelines as Mike threw himself into every fire, ran himself ragged and tore his own life to pieces whenever Will was even slightly out of reach. To everyone in the room, Mike’s outburst wasn't a calculated deduction of a threat; it was just the messy, chaotic overflow of a boy drowning in complicated, unresolved feelings he was too stubborn to name. They saw a jealous childhood friend, terrified of being replaced by a grander, more perfect version of himself, throwing a tantrum because he didn't know how to handle the quiet transition of Will moving on.
Michael watched the embrace from the center of the room, his massive form remaining perfectly still. The mask of the mourning saint did not slip an inch, but his eyes grew incredibly dark, tracking the way Mike’s fingers pressed into Will’s back, the way he breathed in the scent of his hair, the way his eyes widened to look at Michael. He took a single step forward, the steel plate of his greave sounding a solitary, somber note against the floorboards.
"You are fortunate, Mike," Michael said, his deep baritone echoing through the small entryway like a bell in an empty church. The sweetness in his tone was replaced by a cold, sharpened edge that sliced straight through the quiet comfort of the hug. "You will never truly comprehend the abyss where I reside. Not until your own hands do lower the one who holds your entire soul into the cold, unyielding earth. Not before the person you have buried takes half of your living breath into the shroud with him."
The Paladin paused, his scarred brow twitching with a terrible, heavy majesty. "You have never loved so deeply that your own mind did fracture, driving you to wander through the dark of foreign stars just to steal a single glimpse of the light you have lost."
The words struck Mike like a hammer to the head, bypassing his anger and tearing straight into the old, rotting foundations of his memory. The living room vanished around him; the warm lamplight dissolved into ancient gray.
Suddenly, he was twelve years old again, standing on the rainy, mud-slick edge of the quarry.
The phantom smell of wet stone and ozone rushed into his lungs, so vivid it made him gag. He could feel the cold rain slicking his hair to his forehead, his knuckles aching from how hard he had clamped his jaws shut to keep from screaming. It was the exact, crushing weight of that specific despair, the absolute, paralyzing certainty that the world had ended the moment they pulled that cold, bloated boy out from the water.
For years, Mike had locked that day behind a wall of defensive anger, burying the terrifying truth of just how completely he had broken when he thought Will was gone. He had spent his whole life pretending he was the leader, the paladin, the one who kept his head down and pushed forward, but looking at Michael’s shattered expression, the armor of his stoicism cracked wide open.
The realization tore through him like a serrated blade: his devotion to Will wasn't a new, fragile thing born of confusion. It was ancient. It was a terrifying entity that had been living inside him since childhood, forged in the mud of that quarry, waiting for the day it would finally swallow him whole.
He hated every glimpse that flashed through his eyes. The blinding, yellow flashing lights of the state trooper cars, the wet wool of his jacket soaking through to his skin. He remembered the exact shape of the stretcher being wheeled up from the black water, the horrifying, bloated outline beneath the heavy plastic tarp.
It’s Will, the wind seemed to whisper through the trees. They found his body.
He remembered the absolute, crushing weight that had dropped onto his chest, a pain so vast and sharp it felt like his ribs were snapping one by one. He remembered running through the front door of his house, his mother’s kitchen smelling of burnt toast and pine cleaner and throwing himself into Karen’s arms, screaming into her chest until his throat bled because the world had been emptied of its center. He remembered the small, agonizing gathering at the cemetery, the smell of wet dirt, the black umbrellas, the terrifying finality of a wooden box descending into a hole while he stood there, a hollow, useless shell of a boy.
Mike’s eyes snapped open in the present. He looked down at Will, who was still holding him. Slowly, Will’s face had pulled back just enough for Mike to see his eyes. They were swimming with tears, the brilliant emerald of his irises bright and fractured behind a watery sheen. The sight made Mike’s heart break all over again, the old grief twisting together with the current terror until he couldn't tell them apart.
Then, a second thing flared, deeper and far more dangerous.
He was back on that cliff edge. The rain was gone, replaced by the harsh blackening clouds of a different afternoon, the voices of Troy and James barking cruel, ugly words behind him.
Jump, the knife had commanded against Dustin’s teeth. Dustin had screamed for him not to do it, believing with every ounce of his heart that Mike was making a heroic, sacrificial leap to protect his friend from a bully's blade, but as Mike stood on the precipice, looking down into the terrifying teeth of the rocks below, the truth had been something far darker, something he had never confessed to a living soul.
The people at school were still whispering that Will was gone. His mother was still mourning and in that terrifying, fractured second, as his sneakers left the gravel, Mike hadn't been thinking about heroism. He had been thinking about the empty space in the basement. He had been thinking about the quiet boy who drew dragons and spoke in soft, gentle truths. The boy, who had been non-verbal for most of his childhood, but he only ever talked to him.
The fear that Will was truly dead had turned into an unendurable monster in his chest. If Will was in the dark, Mike didn't want the light. He had jumped because he wanted to be close to him. He had jumped because he wanted to join him in whatever quiet, black void had swallowed his other half, choosing the water over a life where Will Byers was only a name carved into a stone.
Mike’s grip on Will’s waist tightened until his knuckles popped, his chest heaving as he pulled himself out of the memory. He looked past Will’s shoulder, his eyes locking back onto Michael again. The Paladin was watching him with that same, lingering, calculated darkness behind his eyes, a hunter who knew exactly which old wounds to open.
He was malicious. He was not what he seemed to be.
Mike hated the suffocating proximity of him. When Hopper had ordered him to keep this broken, unsettling version of himself hidden away in the basement, Mike had felt his stomach drop violently. It was a logistical nightmare and a psychological torment. He’d been forced to raid Ted Wheeler's closet, tossing a pile of scratchy, ugly quilted jacket, a green button-down shirt and stiff corduroy trousers down the wooden stairs. It was a pathetic attempt to cover a warrior in the weird camouflage of suburban monotony. Now, they were sharing a roof for an indefinite, agonizing stretch of time, trapped together until the Party could figure out how to hurl this ghost back into whatever hellscape he crawled out of.
Mike couldn't wait.
He couldn't sleep a single wink. Upstairs in his bedroom, he stared blindly at the ceiling, his mind relentlessly pacing the perimeter of the basement below. Every creak of the house felt loud, every shadow distorted. Tomorrow, the rest of the Party would assemble again and together they would try to map out some semblance of sanity in this sudden, echoing lunacy.
The honeyed, poetic words he said to Will strung venom into his veins.
"My William used to paint when the ash stopped falling. I see that same hunger in your eyes, the desperate, beautiful need to create something pure in a world that only knows how to destroy."
"Your face is the only thing in this miserable realm that doesn't make my chest ache."
"You move through this world so quietly, William, as if you are afraid of leaving a footprint, but I see the way the earth bends to you."
The honeyed words of the Paladin clung to the dark of the bedroom, dripping a slow, toxic venom straight into Mike’s veins. They repeated in his mind like a flawless, agonizing loop.
Every syllable felt like a physical strike. No one should talk to Will like that. The possessive, territorial fury flared in Mike's chest, white-hot and wrenching. No one should be allowed to perceive the quiet, brilliant corners of Will's soul. No one should dare to offer him that kind of breathless, unyielding devotion. No one except Mike.
The next moment, his anger collapsed into a hollow shame before it could even clear his throat. Because Mike hadn't done it. Mike was a coward. He was a scared boy who had spent years choking on his own truth, letting his fear strangle the very words Michael threw around so effortlessly.
When it was stripped down to the ugly, bleeding truth, what hold did he actually have on Will either way? He was just his friend. Just a boy from a shared childhood, paralyzed by the boundaries he had built around himself. He had no right to dictate Will’s heart. He couldn't tell Will what to do, who to listen to, or whose comfort to accept. His own terrifying, claustrophobic thoughts had almost killed him tonight, trapping him in a prison of his own making and now the doors had been kicked off the hinges.
Down below, a warrior who bore his own face was offering Will a sanctuary without a single trace of shame. If Michael wanted to win his heart—if those heavy, devotional promises hadn't already stolen it away—Mike was completely, utterly helpless against it. He was just a boy hiding under a blanket upstairs, watching a ghost take everything he was too afraid to claim.
Tonight, for Mike, the house just felt like a bomb waiting to go off. He could hear Michael breathing and walking downstairs.
Down in the dark, Michael couldn’t sleep either. Ted’s clothes were a sensory nightmare against skin accustomed to heavy leather and cold iron; the cheap quilt and heavy corduroy itched relentlessly, feeling entirely too soft, prickly and fragile. Giving up on the illusion of rest, the Paladin stood up, his massive frame casting a long shadow across the wood-paneled walls as he began to pace the cramped floor. Kicking the cans of Coke and empty pizza boxes in his wake.
His eyes, sharp even in the gloom, caught on a familiar frame hanging near the laundry lines. It was a Polaroid of the Party. Young, gap-toothed, smiling widely as they crowded around a plastic AV Club trophy.
Slowly, Michael raised a calloused, trembling hand. His rough finger traced the contour of Will's face in the photo. So smiling. So devastatingly carefree. A sharp, stinging warmth pricked the corners of his eyes.
He remembered his own William at that exact age. Before the ash, before the red skies. He remembered how they used to run through the open fields of Hawkins and how William would smile at him with a luminous, secret warmth that was strictly reserved for Michael alone.
His eyes had held a pristine, untouched beauty and his face bore a breathtaking simplicity that the dark had eventually stolen away. In battle, those fingers used to twist through the air, casting brilliant, blinding magic and fierce prayers, the very same prayers that had shielded Michael’s chest and pulled him out of countless bloody trenches.
"I will see those eyes again," Michael whispered into the dark, his voice a gravelly vow that shook the quiet basement. "I have to see the light of your smile again, William, or it will kill me."
The heavy January night slowly bled into a pale, gray dawn. Neither version of Mike had found a moment of sleep, but as the first light cut through the trees, both of them were locked, loaded and ready to face the day. Whatever ruin it may bring.
A heavy stack of paperbacks slid across the Wheeler dining table, scattering a few loose library checkout cards onto the linoleum. Dustin dropped into a chair, his face a portrait of absolute defeat, his curly hair wild beneath his green visor and his eyes showed he didn't get any sleep either.
"Nothing. Zero. Zip," Dustin groaned, rubbing his knuckles into his temples. He tapped the top book on the pile. It was a well-worn copy of Robert Heinlein’s The Number of the Beast, flanked by several university-level physics textbooks he’d practically stolen from the library. "Every piece of actual, real-world science says dimensional displacement is an impossibility with our current technological matrix. Everything else is just... stories. Even Spock talking about the Mirror Universe doesn't give us a blueprint for anything."
"But that's bullshit. We even saw a whole other dimension trying to merge with Earth, just two months ago and now this..." Mike vaguely gestured to Michael, who was sitting on a chair, looking rather uncomfortable and eating cereal that he clearly didn't like the taste of.
"Yes, Michael, but-"
"It's Mike!" he countered, rather defensively.
"Okay… Mike." Dustin said, putting his hands up in surrender, earning a scoff each from Max and a very bored Hopper. "Science doesn't support any of these things yet. Even if we tell them about the shit we saw, they'll put us in the loony bin."
Two days had dragged by in a miserable, exhausting blur. Every morning, the Party converged on the empty Wheeler house like soldiers returning to a trench, their bikes slung carelessly across the lawn. They spent hours tracing old map lines, debating theoretical physics and trying to find a seam in the world that shouldn't exist, according to science. Max sat on the counter, her fingers idly spinning the wheel of her cassette player, while Lucas checked the weather channels, hoping for some atmospheric anomaly that might mirror the storm that brought the stranger here.
For Mike, those forty-eight hours had been a grueling exercise in territorial warfare.
The Paladin was a constant, suffocating presence. Every single afternoon, with a smooth, chivalrous grace that made Mike’s stomach churn, Michael would look toward Will and ask for a stroll.
'The meadows of this land are quiet, William. Let us walk beneath the pale sun.'
'The woods call for a quiet contemplation, Cleric. Accompany me.'
Every single time, before Will could even part his lips to answer, Mike was there. He would wedge his lanky frame directly into the space between them, his voice sharp and defensive, manufacturing any excuse he could find. He claimed they needed to check the bike chains, or that Joyce needed Will home early, or that they had to help Dustin with some bullshit. He became an unyielding wall, his eyes permanently locked on his alternate self, refusing to grant the warrior a single second of isolation with Will.
Now, the house had finally succumbed to the deep, silent hours of the morning again and Mike's throat was as dry as sandpaper.
The stairs groaned softly under Mike’s weight, a familiar, domestic sound that felt completely wrong in the dead of night. The linoleum was ice beneath his bare feet, but the heat in his throat was suffocating, thick with a panic he couldn't swallow. He stopped at the threshold of the kitchen, his hand gripping the wall until his knuckles turned white.
There, in the pale glow of the refrigerator light and the moon, was his worst nightmare. Himself, in a different packaging.
Michael was standing by the sink. The moon cut through the window, casting a jagged shadow over Ted Wheeler’s green button-down. The shirt looked ridiculously small on him, strained across his broad, scarred shoulders like a shroud too tight for a corpse. He looked like a monument of grief occupying a space meant for cereal boxes and cheap magnets.
"I figured you could not sleep," Michael said. He didn't turn around. His baritone was a low, scraping sound that seemed to vibrate through the floorboards of the quiet house. "The mind of a coward is a noisy place, young Michael."
Mike’s fists clenched in his pockets, his fingernails biting into his palms. Anger rising through his chest. "You need to get out of my house and my town."
"Not while William breathes in this realm."
The casual way the name left Michael's mouth, like he had any right to it, made Mike's blood boil. "You bastard. I knew you were up to something. You need to leave him alone."
Michael turned slowly. The movement was fluid, terrifyingly precise for someone his size. His scarred brow arched with an exhausting, patronizing pity that made Mike want to scream. "Leave him to what? A boy who breathes in whispers?"
"You don't know what you're talking about—"
"I have seen the way you look at him when the others turn their heads," Michael interrupted, his voice dropping into a devastatingly calm cadence. "You guard him like a dog guards a bone, yet you have not the courage to feel his hands with yours. You let him starve in the shadow of your silence."
"You don't know anything about us," Mike hissed again. He took a sharp step forward, the venom sharp on his tongue, his chest heaving.
"I know you," Michael murmured. He stepped closer, the old floorboards miraculously silent beneath his heavy weight. He loomed over Mike, bringing with him a faint, bitter scent of ozone and old blood. "I know the exact weight of the fear that makes your chest ache, but... where I chose the altar, you chose a closed shell. When the dark comes for him, you will let him slip through your fingers simply because you were too afraid to hold him fast."
"D-dark—What?" Mike’s jaw tightened, his breathing shallow and ragged. "Is that a threat, Michael? You're threatening Will without knowing the consequences..."
"Oh, no." Michael let out a soft, mocking huff, a dark glint in his eyes. "The seedling has me all figured out, but tell me, when you run to your little friends, who do you think they will believe? The stuttering, jealous boy throwing a tantrum? Or the grieving soldier who bears the scars of a war you aren't brave enough to fight?"
"That's where you're wrong, Michael. I've fought monsters bigger and uglier than you and I survived Each. One. Of. Them."
"See, you loathe your own skin even more than you love that beautiful boy. He deserves someone who knows how to claim him. Someone who dares to speak his name out loud, takes out his heart and puts it in a treasury where it belongs, not someone who lets him wither in silence."
"I will kill you if you talk about him like that again," Mike whispered, the words trembling but lethal.
Michael didn't even flinch. He just stared down at his younger self with an unsettling, clinical detachment. "You cannot kill me, young Michael. I am you. I am you, but a thousand-fold better. I am you, but courageous. I'm the reflection you refuse to acknowledge because it's better."
"You're an asshole!"
"Yet William looks at me the same way he looks at you," Michael said, tilting his head. The words hit Mike like a physical blow to his gut. "You know that, right? I can actually hold his hand and lead him to my world. It won't take me long to take your place, Mike. He'll forget all about your cowardness once he knows a real man is here to take care of him."
A blind, white-hot spark of rage shattered Mike's restraint. His hand shot out, grabbing a glass resting on the counter and hurled it straight at Michael’s face.
Paldin's hand moved like lightning. Crack. He caught the glass out of the air, his fingers flexing, crushing the thick glass within his palm. Shards rained onto the linoleum, glinting in the moonlight, but Michael didn't even blink as a thin line of dark blood began to pool in his hand.
He smirked, a horrific, twisted version of Mike’s own smile. He simply stepped forward, using his shoulder to shove Mike brutally out of his way. He was pushed back against the counter, his breath knocked out of him. Mike stood there, frozen, listening to the heavy, receding footsteps of the Paladin walking away into the dark. The kitchen was dead silent again, save for the hum of the refrigerator.
Mike stared at the broken glass on the floor, his body shaking violently. He didn't even realize he was crying until the first warm drop touched his cheek.
It won't take me long to take your place, Mike.
Down in the basement, the old plaid couch creaked softly. It's been grueling minutes since the heated encounter. Michael sat in the dim, yellowed wash of a single desk lamp, his heavy iron breastplate resting on the floorboards beside his boots. He reached into the leather pouch at his belt and drew out a small stone. It was smooth as obsidian, pulsing with a faint, violet luminescence that seemed to drink the shadows around it.
Michael cleared his throat, his gravelly voice dropping into a low, rhythmic chant, whispering syllables that felt too heavy for the midwestern air.
The stone flared. A thin, crackling ribbon of violet light uncoiled from the rock, widening into a shimmering, translucent pool above the laundry sink. Within the light, the silhouette of a woman materialized. She wore a high-collared velvet robe, her dark hair cropped close to a face that possessed the exact, striking features of El, yet her eyes were older, hardened by the cold logic of an ancient tower.
"Michael," the projection of Mage Jane spoke, her voice carrying an echoing, hollow timbre that vibrated within the concrete walls. "You appear like a beacon of faint. Why do you still linger in this pale kingdom? I have stretched my senses across the void, yet the threshold remains uncrossed every time."
Michael’s jaw tightened, his fingers dug hard into his breeches as a dark, frustrated snarl distorted his features. "My reflection," he spat out, his voice a low, venomous rumble. "The seedling of this world. He is a stubborn, vigilant bitch, Jane. He clings to the Cleric like a leech upon a fresh wound. He has not left his side for a single span of the sun. I cannot draw William away from his shadow."
Jane shifted, her brow furrowing with a sharp, urgent severity. "The stars do not wait for the bickering of boys, Paladin. The alignment fractures. Three days remain before the silver oaks wither entirely in our realm. If the ritual is not sealed within that hour, the soul of our William will dissolve into the great deep, lost to us for eternity."
She leaned closer, the violet light catching the cold determination in her eyes. "You know the price of the resurrection. We require the anchor. A heart from a vessel that shares his blood, his soul, his very countenance across the veil. Take what is required, Michael. If the boy with your face stands between you and William... strike him down. Shred him to pieces if you must, but bring me the heart."
"I will do it," Michael whispered, his chest heaving as a sudden, violent tremor ran through his broad shoulders. "I would tear the foundations of this world asunder to look upon him again. I will spill whatever blood is required."
His body trembled, a volatile mix of raw fury and desperate clawing need vibrating beneath his skin. He needed to see his William. He had to get to him before the boy's beautiful soul vanished entirely into the dark, before the crawling insects beneath the soil consumed his flesh. He had made a binding, blood-soaked vow on his final breath: he would bring William back from the dead, or he would gladly lie down in the dirt and join him. It was time to fulfill his promise.
"I know the burden you do carry," Jane said softly, her tone shifting into a gentler, pitying register as she took in the raw agony on his face. "It is a cruel jest of the fates that the vessel you must harvest bears the same face as the husband you mourn."
A single, heavy tear broke from Michael’s lashes, tracking through his scarred cheek. His large, calloused hands flew to his face, his fingers digging into his temples as his broad chest shuddered. The rigid, iron composure of the Paladin completely shattered, giving way to a genuine, weeping sorrow that tore out of his throat like a physical wound.
Jane’s words had violently shaken him.
He was living with the realization that the vessel he was supposed to harvest, the living body he was meant to tear apart, shared the exact face of his lost William. It was a cruel, sickening irony. It felt like a sick joke played by the dark. To look at this universe’s Will Byers was to stare directly into a mirror of his own greatest love and his most haunting failure. Every feature of the boy’s face was a living monument to the boy Michael had watched die, the boy whose cold hand he had held while the world burned around them.
How could he desecrate a body that wore William’s skin? How could he destroy the very image of the soul he had sworn an oath to bring back?
The grief was suffocating, a black tide that drowned out his anger and left him raw. He was trapped in a paradox of his own desperate devotion: to save his William, he would have to murder the only living piece of him left in existence. The sheer weight of the tragedy broke him, his heavy shoulders shaking in the dim light of the basement as he wept for a man who was gone and a boy he was meant to destroy.
"He is just like him, Jane," Michael cried out, his voice breaking into a ragged, pathetic sob that echoed softly against the concrete foundations. "When I look into his face... it shakes my very spirit. His eyes... they possess the same impossible innocence. The same tender, blinding love that my William gave to me before the poison took his breath. It turns my blood to ice to think of the brutal way I must end him."
The Mage Jane held her breath and then sighed softly. She reached out, her glowing, translucent hand hovering just over the side of his face as if she could wipe the moisture from his skin.
"Be swift, Michael," she commanded gently, her eyes unyielding. "Do not dwell within his gaze. Do not look into those eyes for longer than a heartbeat demands. Once his heart is ours and the blood is poured upon the silver oaks, our true William will be awake. He will return to our realm and those eyes will never lose their light again."
Michael wiped his face with the back of his calloused hand, his expression hardening back into a mask of lethal, desperate resolve. "I shall not fail him."
"Tap the stone when the vessel is broken... or if you want to take him to our realm to do the ritual," Jane whispered. "I shall be waiting."
The violet light snapped shut, plunging the basement back into the dim, stale shadow of the single desk lamp.
Up at the very top of the stairs, hidden completely by the pitch-black hallway, Mike Wheeler stood frozen against the doorframe. His hand was locked around the brass doorknob, his fingers so white they were bloodless. He heard and felt the words just right. They felt like an icy blade sliding right between his ribs. For the first time, he was mourning being right.
The basement below was quiet again, save for the ragged, trembling breaths of his monstrous older self, but the air in the hallway felt superheated, thin and it was impossible to breathe. The truth echoed in the dark like a death sentence: this warrior was a predator masquerading as a devout lover. He was here to harvest Will's heart for a dark ritual.
Mike’s teeth ground together so hard a sharp pain shot into his jaw, his initial shock instantly curdling into a toxic, terrifying rage. Michael wanted to tear Will apart to resurrect a ghost. He wanted to steal Will's future, his laugh, his breath, the very skin on his bones. Standing in the dark, Mike let go of the doorknob, his fists curling tightly at his sides.
Michael might have been a hardened killer forged in blood and iron, but Mike had spent his entire life learning how to fight the dark for Will Byers and he would damn well burn this town down around both of them before he let anyone, even a psycho version of himself, touch a single hair on Will's head.
His fingers were dug into the wallpaper so hard that a piece of the drywall crumbled beneath his nail. His heart turned into a cold, heavy block of ice in his chest. His breathing was non-existent, his ears ringing with the echo of the words that had just drifted up through the floorboards.
His heart.
The brutal way I must end him.
The image of his Will, the boy who drew in the basement, the boy who had held him in the entryway to calm him down, lying broken in the dirt while this monster tore the life from his chest, flashed through Mike’s mind with the force of a physical strike. A terrifying, absolute silence settled over his soul. The doubts and confusion were gone. He knew exactly what was coming and as he stared down into the black abyss of the staircase, Mike knew he would have to become a monster himself to keep that blade away from Will's heart.
So he jumped onto the seat of his bicycle before his mind could even comprehend. His fingers were tracing his walkie as he started peddling.
The rhythmic clack of bicycle tires over the cracked pavement of Maple Street was the only sound cutting through the morning freeze. Mike didn't look back to see if the others were following the frantic beacon of his flashlight; he just kept his weight thrown forward over his handlebars, his knees pumping rhythmically until the rusted corrugated metal of the Squawk loomed out of the dark.
By the time the kickstands slammed into the dirt, Dustin was already breathless, his face flushed under the pale moon as he dragged his heavy winter coat up his shoulders. Will was also panting. Mike flashed him a look of sad pouty innocence because he knew how much he hated the cold and yet, Mike made him peddle out in the chill of the morning without any explanation.
"Mike, it's three in the morning," Dustin panted, slamming his hands onto the wooden table inside the radio station. The small space smelled of old machine oil and damp insulation. "You can't just throw a Code Red into the airwaves like this. We’re all running on fumes. Did you have a nightmare?"
"It wasn't a nightmare," Mike said, his voice dropping into a dangerously quiet register that made Lucas halt mid-stride near the doorway. Mike stood under the single hanging bulb, his hair a tangled, chaotic mess, his windbreaker zipped crookedly up his throat. "I heard them. I stood at the top of the stairs. He has a stone, some kind of communication device like a walkie and he was talking to El’s- the- the Mage he mentioned."
Lucas frowned, leaning his hands on his knees. "Okay... so he found a way to call home. Isn't that what we wanted?"
"No," Mike snarled, his fist slamming down onto the wood, splitting a splinter from the edge.
"So did she take him with her? Back to their home?" El asked, her eyes skeptical.
"He doesn't want to go home, El. He- he- he wants Will."
Mike could hear several voices sighing and scoffing. He could even feel some of them rolling their eyes in annoyance because, apparently, it was too early to deal with this side of Mike. When he saw no one except Will listening closely and silently, he continued.
"His version of Will died of some rival clan's poison, as he told and they have three more days to complete some- some dark ritual to bring him back. He needs an alternate heart. His heart." He pointed frantically toward where Will stood. "He said he’s going to kill me if he has to and then he’s going to shred Will to pieces. He literally wept about how innocent Will’s eyes are right before he promised to rip them out!"
Max shifted her weight against her side, her brow furrowing deep. "Mike... that sounds completely insane. Are you sure you didn't mishear him?"
"Grief makes people talk to themselves," Dustin said, vaguely gesturing to himself. "Trust me. I know."
"I am not crazy and I didn't mishear!" Mike screamed, his eyes locking onto Dustin, then Lucas, his long arms flailing in frustration as he met nothing but a wall of heavy, exhaustion-fueled skepticism. "He’s a monster! He’s playing you all like a bunch of idiots because he wears fancy armor and talks like a poet, but he’s a butcher inside!"
He looked around the circle, his chest heaving, realizing the silence stretching between them was the same patronizing pity. They thought he was unraveling. They thought his brain was twisting shadows into swords because he couldn't handle the heat in his own chest.
They saw a jealous, insecure boy throwing a tantrum again!
Mike could see it in the careful, placating look on Dustin’s face, in the way Lucas wouldn't quite meet his eyes and worst of all, in the soft, devastatingly gentle expression on El's face. They thought he was acting out because Michael looked at Will the same way Mike always wanted to look at him. They thought Mike’s mind had cracked under the pressure of his own buried, suffocating feelings, manufacturing a monstrous conspiracy just to justify tearing the older man away from Will's side.
The disappointment was a cold, bitter sickness that settled deep in his throat. He had fought beside these people for years. He had bled with them, but right now, when the stakes were high again, they were looking at him like he was a petulant child who couldn't handle sharing his best friend. They were dismissing a literal death sentence as nothing more than a petty, teenage rivalry, completely blind to the wolf sitting amongst them.
"Fine," Mike whispered, the fury hardening into a cold, jagged wall. He reached down and snatched his walkie from the table. "Sit here. Believe the knight in shining armor. I’m going back and I’m taking him out myself before he can touch him."
"Mike, wait-" Lucas started, reaching out a hand.
"I'll go with you."
The soft, steady voice cut through the shed like a physical anchor. Will stepped out from the corner near the rusted drums. He hadn't said a word since they arrived, his oversized denim jacket hanging loosely from his sharp shoulders, his hands buried deep in his pockets. He walked straight up to Mike, his green eyes completely clear, carrying a quiet, unyielding gravity that made the rest of the room go still.
Mike froze, his fingers tightening on the rubber grip of his walkie. He looked down into Will's face, his voice cracking with a sudden, painful vulnerability.
"Will... you heard what I just said. He wants to kill you. Why are you... you shouldn't be near him and why are you trusting me when everyone else thinks I've completely lost my mind?"
Will took one more step, the worn floorboards of the radio station groaning faintly beneath his sneakers. He leaned inward, his shoulder brushing against the flimsy nylon of Mike’s gray windbreaker, a sudden, grounding warmth that broke through the icy dread paralyzing Mike’s chest.
In the dim, dust-moted light of the old hangout, Will didn't look at the rest of the Party huddled near the counter. He kept his eyes locked entirely on Mike, his voice dropping into a soft, private truth that belonged only to the two of them.
"Because you're my Mike. He's not."
To emphasize his words, Will reached out, his fingers catching the edge of Mike’s jacket sleeve. It was a firm, anchoring grip, pulling Mike just an inch closer into his personal space. With that single gesture, Will was drawing a line in the dirt between the past and the future, between a terrifying ghost and the boy who had stayed by his side. He looked up through his bangs, his eyes entirely clear of the doubt that had plagued him all morning, offering Mike a fierce, quiet allegiance that no warrior from another dimension could ever replicate or steal away.
The words traveled through Mike’s chest like an electric current, soothing the edges of his panic in a single heartbeat. Across the small room, Dustin let out a long, slow breath, his shoulders dropping as he looked at Lucas. The argument was over. If Will Byers was standing on the ledge, the Party had no choice but to throw themselves off it with him. They had to trust the Mike they knew, even when his theory felt like something born out of jealousy.
"Okay," Dustin sighed, dragging a stool over and flattening a wrinkled piece of notebook paper on the table. "Okay, if we're doing this, we need an actual strategy. We can't just charge into the basement with baseball bats against a guy who looks like a linebacker in full plate armor. We need a tactical advantage. We need... we need to use Will as bait."
"No!" Mike exploded, his voice shaking the loose tin of the roof as he lunged halfway across the table, his face twisting into an expression of pure, unadulterated terror. "Are you nuts, Henderson? Absolutely not! No way!"
Dustin didn't yell back right away. Instead, he snapped his mouth shut, a heavy, suffocating silence dropping over the table as he just stared at Mike. His chest heaved under the layers of his jacket, his mind racing through a volatile mix of exhaustion and deep irritation.
He was so incredibly tired of walking on eggshells around Mike’s hyper-protective, suffocating attachment to Will. Ever since Michael had dragged his armored carcass into Hawkins, Mike had been a live wire, snapping at everyone, seeing monsters in every shadow and letting his obvious, burning jealousy dictate every single strategy meeting.
The party wasn't blind. They knew exactly what was driving Mike's frantic behavior; it was written all over Mike's desperate, territorial face every time the Paladin breathed in Will's direction. Using Will as bait to test Michael’s intentions wasn't a game. It was a calculated, terrifying necessity and Dustin was sick of Mike letting his personal, unspoken baggage compromise their plans.
The annoyance boiled over, breaking through Dustin's typical logic and he threw his hands up in the air. A sign of pure and absolute finality.
"We know you love him, Mike!" Dustin screamed back, his face turning a dark, defensive purple as he stood up on his tiptoes to match Mike’s height. "But to prove your stupid theory that your alter ego is a literal murderer, we have to do this! We don't have a choice!"
The words exploded within the small space, leaving a ringing silence in their wake.
Will went completely, entirely numb. The skin of his face felt cold, the small heat of the hideout evaporating until his knees felt like water beneath his jeans.
We know you love him.
The words repeated in his head, a cruel, mocking loop that made his chest ache with a sudden, violent vertigo. It wasn't possible. Mike couldn't love him back. At least not like that. Not with the same consuming, terrifying intensity that Will had been burying under the dirt for years. He had spent so long forcing his own heart to stay quiet, convincing himself that Mike’s future belonged somewhere far away from him, that to hear it spoken so casually by Dustin felt like a trick. His mind spun into a labyrinth of sudden, unanswerable questions, his eyes fixing on the dirt floor to keep from breaking into tears.
Mike didn't say a word back. He didn't deny it. He didn't yell at Dustin for saying the word love. He just stood there, his jaw locked, his long fingers trembling against the edge of the wood, his silence offering a heavy, undeniable confirmation that made Will’s head reel.
"Hey! This is not the time for this conversation," Lucas cut in sharply, his voice hard as he stepped between the two boys, his hands flat against the table. "If what Mike heard is real- if he didn't mishear a single sentence, then Will’s life is on the line. We have less than forty-eight hours."
Will swallowed the lump in his throat, forcing his voice to return through the fog of his own confusion. "He's... he's been trying to get me away from the house... since the first day he got here. He keeps asking me to go into the woods behind the lot or out into the fields after everyone leaves." He looked up, his eyes finding Mike’s face through the gloom. "The only reason I haven't gone is that Mike... Mike was always there. He kept finding reasons to interrupt us."
Dustin tapped his pencil against the paper, his analytical brain clicking back into place despite the heavy emotion in the room. "Then that’s the play. Tomorrow night, you ask him for a walk alone. We’ll set the perimeter in the deep bush behind the Wheeler lot. Try to take him there. It's deep enough into the woods. We will all take hidden positions in the tree line. The second he draws a weapon, El drops him."
"We do it tomorrow," Lucas agreed, his face set in stone. "We need the whole day to watch him. See how his behavior changes when he thinks he’s finally getting what he wants, alright?"
Everyone nodded, the collective agreement settling like lead over the table.
Will actively avoided Mike's eyes, his gaze dropping instantly to his own hands, his fingers knotting tightly together. He couldn't look up; his mind was a frantic, swirling chaos of self-preservation, desperately trying to construct a wall against the words Dustin had just shouted into the open air. He avoided Mike's eyes out of sheer avoidance, terrified that if he looked, he might actually see a confirmation that what Dustin said could be true, that the love he had starved himself to hide was matched by the boy standing across from him. He couldn't risk the hope and he couldn't risk the heartbreak, so he stared at the wood grain of the table until his eyes burned.
Mike did the same. The fiery, defensive energy that had been keeping Mike upright vanished in a single heartbeat, leaving him hollow and exposed. He tore his gaze away from Will, a hot, suffocating wave of pure shame rushing up his neck and flooding his cheeks. He had been completely, brutally laid bare by Dustin in front of everyone. The secret he had guarded with his life, the terrifying depth of what he felt for Will, had been dragged out into the harsh light and weaponized. He felt naked, stripped of his anger and his pride, completely unable to face the one person whose reaction he feared more than anything else in the world.
"That was... assholery." Max chimed, striking Dustin's head with her hands.
"I agree," Lucas said, quirking his eyebrows in irritation.
"Me too. Dustin, you shouldn't have said that." Jane said, walking to her bike and watching as the two boys peddled away to their respective homes in complete silence.
"I'm sorry. I know. It wasn't my place to tell, but he... pissed me off so much."
Everyone sighed before pulling away on their bikes. Apparently, they had an early morning shift at the Wheeler house.
The next fourteen hours were another exercise in slow, agonizing paranoia. The Wheeler house felt larger, colder, its ordinary walls transforming into a stage where every character was playing a part. Again.
The Party arrived at nine, hungry and vigilant, their eyes never truly leaving the Paladin. They sat in the living room under the guise of studying their textbooks and eating junk food, but every movement Michael made was heavily noted. They watched the way his massive shoulders shifted beneath Ted's old green shirt, the way his fingers, thick and calloused, idly traced the edge of the coffee table.
He looked like a dormant volcano. He spent most of the morning pacing the narrow perimeter of the living room, a low, rhythmic thud of his heavy boots vibrating through the floorboards every time he took a step. When he finally sat down on the edge of the floral couch, the cheap springs groaned under his sheer mass. He didn't touch the snacks they offered, ignoring the bowl of Doritos as if it were alien food, his hands instead resting flat on his knees, always poised, always ready to draw a weapon that isn't there, out of habit.
Mike hid in the narrow hallway behind the lounge, his head pressed against the wallpaper, trying to stop the frantic, erratic rhythm of his heart. He'd been pacing the narrow surface for hours while the others held their eyes on the suspicious version of him. A soft scuff of sneakers made him snap his eyes open.
Will stood there, holding a glass of water for him, his green eyes dark and unreadable. He didn't look at Mike's mouth again out of fear that he would do something stupid; instead, he looked at his hands, which were still trembling slightly against his jeans.
For a long, fragile moment, neither of them breathed. The space between them was barely an inch, filled with the muffled sound of Lucas’ voice from the living room and the terrifying, lingering echo of Dustin from the night before.
We know you love him.
Mike swallowed, his throat dry as ash before he opened his mouth. "Will, I—"
"Drink." He interupted, holding out his hand.
Mike nodded and didn't take to heart that his words just got ignored. He took the glass of water and gulped it all down in one breath, before trying to gain composure of his heart again, but failing. "We need to talk." He said anyway.
"No—Not right now," Will whispered softly, his voice a breathless, urgent command. He didn't pull away. Instead, he leaned just enough that his sleeve brushed Mike's arm. It was a brief, grounding point of contact that felt like a lifeline. "Not until all of this is over, okay? Just... stand by me tonight."
"Always," Mike murmured, the vow solidifying in his chest like iron.
"Stick to the plan and we'll talk tomorrow."
Mike nodded ferociously. Will made sure he was sticking to the plan, which he wasn't obviously, but cute of Will to think so.
The surveillance from the Party was exhausting in its subtlety. Lucas sat with his history textbook propped open on his lap, but his eyes were constantly tracking Michael's hands, subconsciously calculating the older man's reach and reaction time. Dustin pretended to fiddle with the antenna of his walkie-talkie, but he was actually timing Michael's ragged, heavy breathing patterns, trying to gauge the true extent of the warrior's lingering stamina. Max kept her head down, chewing aggressively on a piece of bubblegum, but every time Michael shifted his weight, her eyes flicked up to the scars on his face, trying to read the dangerous history etched into his skin. El sat the closest to him, the most unnerved of them all. She could feel the heavy, oppressive static radiating off him, the raw, psychic bleeding of a person who had spent years in a war zone.
Every time Michael’s eyes drifted toward Will, the entire room collectively held its breath, the tension in the air ratcheting up until it was almost suffocating.
Every time Will crossed the room to do something, Michael’s speech would soften into that grand, archaic poetry that felt entirely too heavy for the house. He showered him with praise, his deep baritone filling the kitchen with words that sounded like a coronation.
'Your grace is a restorative balm, William.'
'Even the simple vessel you do carry looks like silver in your hands.'
Wil hated that word with a passion. It was the same word that Henry taunted and tainted him with. The same syllables that allowed cutting through his mind and vision.
By late afternoon, the suspicion had firmed through the entire Party. Running through their minds and veins like a sickness. They could see the calculation now, the deliberate, unhurried focus of a man who believed his prey was finally within arm's reach. The easy illusion of the living room had completely evaporated.
The clock in the hallway ticked with an agonizing, heavy rhythm, counting down the hours of their forced standstill. The positions had shifted throughout the day. Near the window, Dustin and Lucas were huddled together, their voices reduced to sharp, rapid undertones as they checked the batteries of walkies under the guise of spying. They were entirely consumed by the logistics of the trap, leaving the rest of the room buried in silence.
Mike was an island of static electricity by the mantelpiece; he couldn't stay still. The memory of the fight, of broken glass, a bloody hand and Michael's evil ambitions was beating like a frantic rhythm against his ribs.
I can actually hold his hand and lead him to my world.
Nervously, Mike ran a hand through his dark, tangled hair, his fingers dragging against his scalp before he shifted his weight to lean hard against the wood, crossing his left ankle over his right. He bit his lower lip, his eyes instinctively darting to where Will sat on the edge of the armchair.
A shift of movement from the sofa sent a violent prickle of dread straight up Mike’s spine, a warning bell screaming that the mirror was moving on its own.
Michael had shifted. He wasn't looking at anyone else. His dark, dead eyes were fixed entirely, predatorily on Mike.
With a slow, deliberate fluidity that felt deeply wrong for a body that large, Michael raised his scarred hand. He ran his fingers through his own hair. A second later, he shifted his weight on the cushions, crossing his left ankle over his right and bit his lower lip, exactly where Mike had just bitten his.
He was copying him. Down to the millisecond.
Mike’s breath hitched in his throat. It felt like looking into a rotting, monstrous mirror that refused to let him go. A wave of cold dread crashed over him, freezing the blood in his veins.
Don't let him get to you, Mike told himself, his chest tightening in a sudden, suffocating panic. He's just trying to mess with your head.
No matter how effective the internal pep talk was, Mike couldn't turn his eyes away. Michael knew it. The Paladin let the silence stretch between them, a private, twisted connection right under the noses of everyone. Slowly, the harsh, militant lines of Michael’s jaw relaxed. His eyes widened slightly, crinkling at the corners.
Mike felt his stomach drop violently. It was his own face. It was the exact, rare, devastatingly tender look he only ever saved for Will when they were completely alone, the expression that meant: I’m here, you’re safe.
Seeing that sacred look plastered onto the face of a cold-blooded killer felt like a physical violation. Michael let the tender expression linger, silently mocking him with it, sending a loud, clear message through the dark eyes they shared. Mike's mind kept repeating his words.
He'll forget all about your cowardness once he knows a real man is here to take care of him.
Mike knew Will wouldn't ever willingly choose Michael. At least not now that he knows his true intentions, but... would that be the case if ...?
Then, he held his breath. His thoughts screamed at him. His heart broke. Will wouldn’t choose him because Mike is a coward.
As if he knew what was going inside Mike’s mind, Michael's lips stretched into a wide, unnatural, teeth-bared grin. It was a grotesque caricature that Mike would never make. It was a promise.
You will lose.
The sheer terror that this monster actually had the terrifying ability to seamlessly pose as him, to slide into his life and steal the boy he loved while he was forced to watch from the dark, made Mike flinch. He violently jerked his gaze away, staring down at the floorboards, his hands trembling so hard he had to shove them deep into his pockets to hide it.
Sensing the sudden, sharp shift in the room's energy, Will snapped his head toward him, eyebrows frowning and twisting in concern. "Mike? You okay?"
Mike couldn't even look up to meet Will's eyes. If he did, he was terrified Michael would mimic that, too. He just nodded quickly, his heart hammering against his ribs like a trapped bird. He wanted to scream. He wanted it to be over. He wanted to rip the creature on the couch to pieces for threatening to erase him from the only boy’s heart that mattered.
When the sun dipped below the horizon, painting the western sky in a bruised, violet gray, Michael rose from the sofa. The heavy shift of his weight seemed to pull the remaining light out of the room. He looked out the window toward the dense, black wall of the woods behind the property, a faint smile touching his scarred mouth. It was the look of a man about to finish a very long journey.
Everyone in the room knew exactly what was coming next. He was going to ask Will for a walk again.
This time, the script had changed. Against every furious, protective instinct screaming in his chest, Mike didn't move. He sat completely paralyzed, his knuckles white against his knees, forced to stay on the sidelines. Beside him, Dustin and Lucas deliberately kept their heads down, suddenly fascinated by the open pages of their textbooks. Max stared fixedly at the television screen and El forced herself to blink away, everyone performing a fragile, agonizing charade of normalcy. They had to let the trap spring. They had to look away and let Michael take the bait, even if the silence of their compliance felt like a betrayal.
"The night air is a sanctuary for the weary spirit," Michael murmured, his eyes shifting back to Will with a low, intense heat. "The forests of this realm are devoid of the high towers, yet they possess a healing quiet. A walk among the trees is the perfect medicine for a heart that has known the winter."
"Yeah." Whatever the hell that means. Will nodded, his voice remarkably steady despite the frantic pulse visible against his throat. His eyes met Mike's across from him. He could see the fear in them; he could see the scenes already playing in his mind, but Will thought, What more can a mere human do to him that a monster hasn't already? "Yeah, let's go out. The weather's nice." It was not. It was cold and Will hated it.
The transition from dusk to full dark was swift, the shadows stretching from the woods until they swallowed the road entirely.
Inside, Lucas finally stood up under the guise of taking the Party home before curfew. It was a practiced, casual movement, but his voice carried a tight, strained edge as he said his goodbyes, leading the others out the front door and straight toward the woods where they were meant to take their positions.
Within twenty minutes, everyone was set. Out in the dark expanse of the trees, the Party members melted into the heavy brush, their dark winter coats blending seamlessly into the overgrown thickets. The January air had turned bitterly cold, but nobody moved.
A few yards out, El kept her hood pulled low over her face to hide the fierce focus in her eyes. Her fingers twitched rhythmically at her sides, her mind already reaching out, feeling for the empty space in the air around the backyard. Her jaw was set in a hard, protective line; she was hunting yet another monster tonight, wearing the skin of a boy she knew.
Mike didn't join the party immediately. Instead, he waited until the downstairs hallway was completely empty, the floorboards silent. He then turned and sprinted up the stairs, his long legs taking them three at a time, his sneakers making no sound against the carpeted risers. He bypassed his own room, his chest heaving as he lunged down the corridor and barged into Nancy’s bedroom.
The room smelled of old hairspray and lavender perfume, making him gag. It was entirely too normal for what he was about to do. Mike didn't hesitate before throwing himself onto his knees in front of her cedar wardrobe, his hands wildly thrashing through the neatly stacked boxes and old winter sweaters on the bottom shelf. He tore through a collection of old high school yearbooks, his breath coming in short, panicked gasps as his fingers clawed deeper into the dark corner of the closet.
Finally, his hand hit something solid.
It was a heavy, rectangular case wrapped in oilcloth, tucked beneath a false floorboard Nancy had used to hide her things since the old days when she used to look for Demos in the wild with Jonathan. Mike’s fingers locked onto the latch. He pulled it free, his chest tight as he unrolled the fabric, revealing the dull, cold gleam of the heavy weapon inside.
He didn't look at it for long. He tucked the heavy weight securely into the inner pocket of his windbreaker, pressing his arm tight against his ribs to conceal the bulk. Without a single glance back at the room, he turned and ran out into the waiting dark.
The wooden stairs to the basement didn't creak under Will’s sneakers; they groaned, a low, rhythmic complaint that felt entirely too heavy for the quiet house. Down below, the single desk lamp was still burning, casting long, skeletal shadows across the wood-paneled walls and the forgotten board games stacked in the corner.
The heavy, metallic screech of buckling straps and shifting iron cut through the quiet of the basement staircase, stopping Will dead in his tracks.
He took the final three steps slowly, his hand resting lightly against the cold wall as he entered the dim, fluorescent light of the basement. The scratchy, oversized clothes of Ted Wheeler were discarded in a pathetic, crumpled heap on the laundry table.
In their place stood the Paladin.
Michael was strapped back into his armor. The dark, battered iron plates looked massive in the cramped space, catching the dull glare of the ceiling bulb and reflecting a cold, unforgiving edge. He was kneeling on one knee, violently wrenching a leather strap tight around his shin guard, his thick, calloused fingers moving with the practiced, mechanical precision of a soldier preparing for a slaughter. The faint smell of ozone, dried blood and old ash immediately flooded the room, choking out the familiar scent of Mike’s basement.
As Will’s sneakers hit the linoleum, Michael froze. Slowly, his massive shoulders shifted and he lifted his head.
The scarred, weathered face that looked so terrifyingly like Mike’s stared up at him through the gloom. The tragic, weeping sorrow from the night before was locked away beneath a terrifyingly blank visage of steel and determination. His eyes, dark and bottomless, locked onto Will's face with that same predatory, consuming focus.
"Why are you... dressed like that?"
"I wanted to feel myself. This cheap material has given me nightmares." He said, gesturing towards Ted's clothes on the floor.
Will nodded slowly. Sighing and pacing in the area.
The Paladin got up instantly, his entire posture shifting from the heavy, brooding stillness of a trapped animal into something smooth, alert and terrifyingly eager. With a quick, practiced motion of his wrist, he slid the glowing obsidian stone back into the leather pouch at his hip. In the very same breath, his fingers dipped into the fold of his shirt, concealing a long, narrow iron blade in his belt line.
The metal had caught the light, just a brief, silver flash against the dull fabric, but Will’s eyes had already tracked it. His stomach did a slow, sickening flip at the sight.
"What’s that?" Will asked, his voice tighter than he wanted it to be. He pointed a trembling finger toward the warrior's waist.
"Oh, it's a mere blade, William."
"Why? We’re just going for a walk, Michael."
The Paladin smiled, a smooth, unhurried curving of his lips that didn't reach his dark eyes. He patted the leather hilt with a careless grace, his voice dropping into that deep, reassuring baritone he used like armor. "Think nothing of it, gentle William. A mere precaution for the wild beasts that roam the outer thickets. The shadows of a strange land are prone to have teeth."
A cold, involuntary shiver ran down the length of Will’s spine, but he forced his shoulders to stay loose, tucking his hands deep into his denim jacket to hide the shaking. "The woods are safe here. There aren't any monsters in Hawkins." A lie. "It’s not Avangardia."
"It is a soldier’s habit," Michael murmured, stepping past the plaid couch, his massive frame completely eclipsing the light from the desk lamp as he drew near. "A blade is a comfort to a man cast far from his realm. I feel a greater peace when the steel is closer to me."
Will nodded and let it slide, even if his intuition shouted at him. He'll be okay; he has friends waiting for him in the woods. His thoughts tried to leap, so he didn't bolt. He kind of wished he still had his powers, no matter how much he hated carrying a part of his abuse with him; they might've come in handy right now.
They walked out into the crisp, chilly night through the bulkhead doors, leaving the shelter of the house behind. The forest didn't feel like the familiar location anymore; it was tainted with so many bad memories. Will hated coming out here. The deeper they marched into the dark, the more the environment took on a cold, clinical hostility. The pale sycamores stood like skeletal fingers against the black sky, stripped of their leaves and the ground beneath their boots was brittle with a thin frost that snapped like small bones under every step. The gallant, poetic mask that the Paladin had worn in the warmth of the house began to peel away, leaving behind a stark silence that made the woods feel entirely foreign.
They crossed a narrow, dried-out creek bed. Will’s chest tightened as he caught the faint, rhythmic rustle of dead brambles about thirty yards to his left. A small shadow shifted behind an old oak; Dustin’s coat, or maybe Lucas’ cap. El was out there, hidden in the brush, watching his back. The knowledge was supposed to bring him comfort, but the massive, armored presence walking half a step behind him made the skin on his neck prickle with panic.
"This world treats you with cruel neglect, William," Michael spoke suddenly, his voice cutting through the dark like a wet stone over a blade. He didn't look at Will; his eyes were scanning the tree line, his expression hardening into an open, biting disdain. "I have observed the way they look upon you. They see a fragile bird, broken by the old storms. They do not know the majesty of the spirit that resides within your chest. This gray kingdom of asphalt and iron... it stifles the light of your soul."
Will kept his eyes fixed on the path ahead, his teeth clicking together against the chill. "My friends know exactly who I am. My family does too. I’m fine."
"You are living a lie," Michael sneered, a low, condescending laugh escaping his chest. He stopped walking, turning his great bulk to block the trail entirely. "You are wasting the devotion of your young years upon a lesser version of myself."
Will glared at him. The level of his fury was slowly building.
"A weak, unformed seedling who is too cowardly to even look you in the eyes and speak the name of his desire. He is entirely unworthy to touch the hem of your cloak, William. In my realm, you were a king's counselor. Here, you are nothing but a shadow clinging to a boy who cannot love you."
Breaking spirits and conquering through cruelty was an art Michael clearly excelled at. The direct insult to Mike stung Will. It instantly cleared the remaining fog of fear from his head, replacing it with a sharp, protective fury that made his vision turn white at the edges.
He took a definitive step backward, creating an intentional, icy distance between them. His face hardened, the vulnerability vanishing from his expression as he stared up at the warrior's weathered, scarred features. Will had been paralyzed by the ghost of what Michael represented, but seeing the Paladin casually trample over Mike’s worth changed everything. His posture straightened, his jaw locking into place as he silently drew his own line in the sand. Michael had just made the fatal mistake of insulting the one person Will would burn the world down to protect. He knew he would do the same in return.
"He is not a lesser version of you," Will said, his voice dropping into a fierce, ringing hiss that shook with years of unsaid truths. "He's a better man than you could ever be and I am not your William! You need to stop looking at me like I’m some kind of extended version of your dead husband just because we have the same face!"
Will turned sharply on his heel, intending to march straight back toward the house, but he didn't even manage a full stride. A heavy hand shot out from the dark, the fingers locking around his upper arm with the crushing, iron force of a vice. The grip bit deep into his flesh, the pressure so intense it bruised through his denim sleeve, pinning him to the spot.
Michael’s composure was finally shattered. The majestic, chivalrous knight vanished, replaced by a man with an unhinged obsession. Tears welled in his dark eyes, spilling over his coarse stubble as his face twisted into a mask of pure, desperate madness. He pulled Will closer, his chest heaving against his shirt.
"You are coming with me," Michael spat, his voice a frantic, breathless prayer that sounded like a curse. "I care nothing for your protests. The ritual must be sealed tonight."
"Michael, let me go!" Will screamed, his free hand clawing at the thick leather straps of the man's gauntlet, his boots sliding against the frost-bitten mud. "Let me go!"
The Paladin let out a long, shuddering sigh, his grip only tightening until Will gasped from the pain. "I knew you wouldst be feisty like my love. My William possessed that same fierce fire whenever the banners were raised. I do understand the fear that grips your heart."
"I want to go home!" Will roared, his voice cracking into a desperate panic as he threw his weight backward. "Mike! El!"
"Nay," Michael whispered, his features going completely flat, the madness hardening into a lethal, unyielding certainty. "You are not returning to that house. You are crossing the veil tonight and I shall have my William back in the high halls of Avangardia. You are the vessel that must be emptied."
"No!" Will screamed again, the sound tearing through the silent woods.
Before the trees could echo with his cry and before El could even raise her hand from the brush to fling the warrior aside, the thicket behind them exploded.
A long, lean shape charged out of the brambles like a wild animal. He didn't call out a warning; he didn't pause to think. He materialized from the dark with Nancy’s heavy steel dagger gripped in his right hand, his face completely distorted by a feral, protective rage. With a violent, upward swing of his arm, he drove the blade deep into the fleshy gap of Michael’s shoulder where the iron breastplate met the leather sleeve. Before Michael could catch his breath, Mike struck again. This time into Michael's thigh, where the armor had a gap.
The metal bit true. A spray of dark, hot blood splattered across the frosted ferns.
Michael yelped in pain, a sharp, gravelly sound that tore from his throat as his grip on Will snapped instantly. He staggered back a step, his heavy boots scuffing violently against the dirt, his eyes widening in total, unadulterated shock.
For a man who had survived a dozen bloody wars, who wore scars carved by monsters and humans alike, the physical pain was nothing. The true, crippling blow was to his monumental ego.
Michael was a conqueror, a hardened warrior who viewed this timeline’s reflection of himself as fragile, unbaked clay. A weak, coddled thing that had never had to bleed for survival. He had fully expected Mike to cower, to break under the sheer gravity of his presence. To be blindsided, to be physically overpowered and outmaneuvered by a boy he viewed as a mere tiny hurdle, was a sickening humiliation. It fractured his absolute certainty. As he stared at his own empty, trembling hand, the realization that he was not the undisputed emperor of this battleground rippled through him, turning his shock into a dark, volatile fury.
From the shadows, Dustin let out a sharp, confused yelp and Lucas’s flashlight flared wildly against the trees. This wasn't the plan. They were supposed to wait for El to immobilize him from a distance, but Mike had completely bypassed the strategy, rushing into the teeth of the monster with nothing but a stolen blade and his own raw fury.
What followed was a brutal, visceral slaughter of a fight.
Michael recovered with the terrifying speed of a trained veteran. He didn't check his wounds; instead, he drew his own narrow iron knife from his belt with a snarl, his massive frame lunging forward to meet Mike’s charge. They collided with the heavy thud of steel against steel. The Paladin was older, heavier and had spent a lifetime learning how to kill men with his bare hands, but Mike was fueled by a desperate, suicidal adrenaline that made him completely blind to his own safety.
They traded vicious, frantic blows in the dirt. Mike swung wildly, the silver blade of Nancy’s dagger whistling through the dark, catching the Paladin across the cheekbone, leaving a deep, bleeding gash that mirrored the one from his own history. Michael struck back with the precision of a hammer, his heavy elbow catching Mike squarely in the jaw, sending him stumbling back into a patch of frozen briars.
Mike didn't let the distance last long. Spitting blood, he surged forward before the Paladin could reset his stance, ducking low beneath Michael’s next blind swing. With a wild, desperate heave, Mike drove his entire shoulder into the warrior's wounded thigh, using the older man's own momentum against him.
For a breathless, triumphant second, the impossible happened: the massive Paladin lost his footing. Michael went down hard, the earth shaking under the weight of his armor as he crashed onto his side. Instantly, Mike scrambled on top of him, pinning the warrior's knife-hand to the dirt with one knee and bringing Nancy’s dagger down in a vicious arc. The silver tip sliced clean through the leather strap of Michael’s shoulder plate, drawing a hot spray of blood across his collarbone.
Mike had him. He couldn't believe his own eyes. The party couldn't believe their eyes either. Will was frozen, too. He had the monster pinned under his own weight, the blade poised to end it, but the advantage swung like a fickle pendulum.
Michael’s eyes flared with a lethal, ancient rage. Ignoring the blade at his throat, the Paladin bucked his hips with a violent, explosive force, his unwounded hand coming up like a vice to clamp around Mike’s throat. With effortless leverage, Michael flipped their positions entirely, slamming Mike flat onto his back against the hard, frozen earth.
The Paladin shifted his weight, his heavy knee dropping directly onto Mike’s sternum, pinning him into the dirt until the air rushed out of Mike's lungs in a wet gasp. The warrior raised his iron knife high above his head, his face covered in a mixture of sweat and dark blood, his eyes fixed on Mike’s throat as he prepared to drive the steel home to slit it.
"Mike!" Will sobbed, his voice a raw, broken scream as he lunged forward from the path, his fingers clawing at the air.
Before the blade could descend, El emerged from the tree line, her hand outstretched with a trembling, absolute force; her nose bled. With a sharp, violent snap of her wrist, she caught Michael’s descending arm mid-air, the telekinetic force sweeping his hand away just a fraction of an inch before the steel could cut the skin of Mike’s neck.
She snapped his arm and it crackled with the sound of a bone being crushed.
The redirection bought Mike the single second he needed to gain momentum again. With a desperate, convulsive heave of his hips, he drove his knee up into the Paladin's wounded thigh again.
Michael yelped in agonizing pain, his balance fracturing as his own narrow knife slipped from his bloody fingers, clattering against the stones right at Will’s feet. Will didn't hesitate before he dropped to his knees, his hands locking around the discarded leather hilt, aggressively wiping the tears from his eyes as he held the weapon himself, his breath coming in shallow, terrified gasps.
The fight was almost over. He didn't realize he had taken two blows from Michael's dagger. One near his thigh and another on his left forearm. The blood oozed frantically from the wounds, but he didn't even feel the pain until now. Mike had scrambled over the top of him, his long legs pinning the Paladin’s massive arms into the mud weakly, his face completely drenched in the stranger's blood. He looked like something wild and ruined, born of the dark woods.
Raining down heavy, brutal punches, Mike smashed his fist into the stranger's jaw, over and over, until the cartilage popped.
"YOU'RE NOT TAKING HIM AWAY FROM ME!" Mike roared, his voice breaking into a cracked, hysterical scream that shook the branches above them. He punched him again, the skin of his knuckles tearing against the teeth of his twin. "YOU'RE NOT TAKING MY WILL AWAY FROM ME! YOU BASTARD!"
Mike stopped for a second to catch his breath and heave at his bruised knuckles. Spitting a dark mouthful of blood onto the frost, Michael let out a ragged, bubbling laugh, the sound wet and mocking as he stared up at the boy who held his life in his hands. He didn't fight the grip; he just sneered, his voice a broken whisper of his former majesty.
"You are a fool, Mike... a pathetic coward and a fool. Sacrificing him is his only holy purpose... this world will never truly accept what he is or what you are! You cannot even speak the truth to your own soul... you can't even love him with your whole heart because it is filled with fear. What would you even do, keeping him in this world?"
The words were the final turn of the key, grinding into the lock of his chest until the mechanism shattered.
You are too weak to keep him.
You are too cowardly to love him.
These were the exact same words Mike's brain and heart replayed to him every night. The Paladin’s mocking taunts stripped away the last reserve of Mike’s sanity, leaving nothing but a blinding, protective void. It was a mirror holding up his greatest, most suffocating shame and laughing at it. The realization that this monster, this twisted version of himself, thought he had the right to take Will just because Mike had been too afraid to speak his truth aloud tore something vital from his soul.
Blinded by absolute fury, Mike didn't care about himself anymore. He didn't care about survival. If he was going to be a coward, he would be a feral, murderous one.
With a raw, animalistic shriek that didn't even sound like his own voice, Mike raised the dagger high above his chest. He didn't hesitate before driving the silver steel down with everything he had, burying it deep into the soft, unprotected flesh of the Paladin's neck with a wet stab.
Hot, dark blood immediately erupted over Mike’s hands, painting his knuckles and splashing across his face, but he didn't recoil. He just gripped the hilt tighter, his teeth bared, staring into the widening, shocked eyes of his older self with a terrifyingly blank, unhinged devotion.
From the edge of the tree line, the horror that choked the Party was instantaneous and absolute.
They had been waiting to spring a trap, waiting to rescue Will from a monster, but none of them had ever expected this. The blood-chilling sound of Mike’s fury had frozen them in their tracks, but the sight of the silver blade plunging into flesh sent a violent shockwave through the group.
Dustin staggered backward, his hands flying to his mouth, his stomach violently turning at the wet, tearing sound of the impact. This wasn't the Mike who wrote their campaigns or argued about radio frequencies; this was someone completely unrecognizable, someone hollowed out by a dark, lethal obsession. Beside him, Lucas’s flashlight dropped into the dirt, its beam cutting erratically through the trees as he stared in paralyzed disbelief at the sheer, brutal savagery of his best friend. Max's hand rested on her open mouth and wide-blown eyes, gripping Lucas tightly.
El’s hand dropped to her side, her focus completely shattering. Her breath hitched, her eyes wide with a profound, sudden terror. She had spent years running from monsters, fighting things from the Upside Down, but watching Mike, the boy who she looked up to as a representation of safety, warmth and unyielding morality, willingly drown himself in blood to destroy a man was a different kind of horror altogether.
Will couldn't move. He stood completely frozen against the backdrop of the dark woods, the spray of blood casting long shadows across his pale face. He stared at Mike, at the blood on his cheeks, at the blinding, protective madness in his eyes and felt a terrifying, breathtaking realization sink deep into his bones. Dustin had been right. Mike loved him, but the cost of that love was watching the boy he cherished transform into an executioner right before his eyes.
"I LOVE HIM!" Mike screamed.
He ripped the blade out and drove it down a second time, the blood geysering across his windbreaker. Stab.
"ALWAYS HAD!"
A third time, the metal scraped against the spinal column with a horrific, grating ring. Stab.
"AND I ALWAYS WILL!"
On the fourth and final strike, he threw the entire weight of his torso behind the hilt, burying the steel to the crossguard into the ruined throat. Stab.
"BURN IN HELL, MICHAEL!"
The warrior gave one last, wet rattle from his chest, his large hands twitching against the frozen dirt before his eyes rolled back, going completely wide, cold and unmoving under the pale Indiana moon.
The silence that followed the final strike was loud, a heavy, suffocating weight that seemed to press the surrounding woods straight into the earth. Nancy’s dagger remained buried to the hilt, its silver crossguard resting against a ruined collarbone.
Slowly, the frantic rush of heat left Mike’s limbs, leaving behind a cold, trembling hollow. He looked down at his own fingers, slick and dark with a warmth that didn't belong to him. Then, his gaze slipped to the face beneath him.
The realization arrived with a dramatic crash; it crept up his throat like a poison. The jawline, the structure of the nose, the messy tangle of dark curls, they were an exact, unyielding mirror. He had killed a man. He had taken a life in the dark, but worse than that, he had slaughtered a reflection. He had driven steel through his own neck, four separate times, until the image of his own self lay broken and empty in the mud.
Mike’s head tilted back, his shoulders shaking violently as he looked up at the tree line. Through the tangled blackberry brambles, the Party stood frozen. The flashlight on the ground was trembling with the wind, casting a frantic, dancing beam across the crimson smears on Mike’s jacket. Lucas had his arm thrown protectively across Max’s shoulders, his mouth parted silently, while El stood with her hands by her side, a single trail of dark blood frozen on the track from her nostril down to her lip. They were staring at him with wide, unblinking eyes.
A sickening panic took root in Mike’s chest, spinning his thoughts into a dark, frantic loop. They see it, he thought, his breathing turning shallow and ragged. They know what I am. A monster. A sick, psychopathic murderer. He had killed someone who carried his own face and the ease with which the fury had taken him made his own skin feel like a foreign garment on his bones. He was broken. He was something that belonged in a cage, far away from the light.
The spiraling thoughts were violently cut short.
The discarded iron knife clattered against a stone as Will dropped it, stepping past the carcass without a single glance at the ruin. He came straight into Mike’s space, dropping to his knees in the wet clover.
Will’s face was pale, his eyes wide and bright with an intensity that bordered on ferocity. Before Mike could pull away, before he could warn him to stay back from a killer, Will reached out. He grabbed the cuffs of his own oversized denim jacket, bunching the thick sleeves over his knuckles and began aggressively, frantically wiping the dark crimson from Mike’s cheeks.
"Mike, look at me," Will ordered, his voice a ragged, breathless whisper as his hands moved with a tender violence, dragging the coarse fabric across Mike’s jawline, his forehead, his nose, desperate to erase the stain of the Paladin from his skin. "Look at me. Are you okay? Mike, please, tell me you're okay. Talk to me."
Mike sat perfectly still under the assault of Will's touch, his jaw locked, his eyes wide, teary and swimming with a helpless, drowning confusion. Every nerve in his body was screaming, overstimulated by the sudden, soft friction of Will’s fingers wiping away the warm fluid on his cheek. He couldn't understand it. It defied every rule of logic and survival Mike had ever known.
He had just turned a human being into cooling meat right in front of him. He had stripped away the thin veneer of the nerdy, predictable boy and displayed an unhinged, bloody savagery that should have struck terror into anyone's heart. He had revealed the rotting, feralness of his own soul, proving that beneath the skin, he harbored the exact same capacity for monstrous violence as the Paladin he had just slaughtered. He did it all willingly and the horrific part was that he would do it again.
By all accounts, Will should have run. Will should have been looking at him with the same sweating, breathless horror that was currently locking the rest of the Party in place.
Yet, Will was here.
Will still had the incredible, terrifying audacity to be kind. It was a kindness that felt heavier and more demanding than any blow Michael had dealt him in the dirt. Even covered in the copper-scented evidence of a slaughter, with the Paladin’s blood still soaking through his windbreaker, Will wasn't flinching away. He wasn't retreating into the safety of the trees or calling for everyone else in horror. Instead, he was actively leaning into the gore, reaching directly through the dark and the horror to find the boy hidden underneath the murderer.
The touch of Will's hand was comforting, but it also felt like an interrogation. It forced Mike to face the terrifying reality that his madness hadn't gone unnoticed and worse, it hadn't been rejected. Will was looking at the blood on Mike's face as a map, a devastating testament to exactly how far Mike was willing to fall if it meant keeping Will alive.
"Will..." Mike choked out, his voice scraping against his throat like dry gravel.
Will’s hands shifted. The coarse sleeves dropped away and his bare, trembling palms came up to cup Mike’s cheeks again. The skin of his fingers was cool against Mike’s burning face. With a fierce, unyielding gravity, Will pulled Mike forward until their foreheads collided, their breaths mingling in the small space between their lips.
"I love you," Will whispered, the truth finally slipping past his defenses, raw and unvarnished, a beautiful, weeping confession that tore through the remaining fog of the woods. "I love you, Mike."
Mike’s eyes flooded, the hot tears finally breaking over his lashes, washing clean tracks through the dried blood on his cheekbones. The hollow in his chest flared into something vast and consuming. He forgot about his cowardice; he forgot about the years of silence or the painting on his wall. He just reached out, his long arms locking around Will’s waist like iron bands, pulling him close until there was no air left between them.
"I love you," Mike breathed against his mouth. "Always had. Always."
Their lips met in a fierce, passionate collision, a desperate, tearful sealing of a vow that had been written on the swings and tested in the battleground. It was a messy, frantic taste of salt, spit and the faint, copper trace of blood, a complete surrender to a truth they had both been too terrified to carry out loud. Around them, the tension finally broke; Dustin let out a loud, shuddering sob, burying his face into his hands, while Lucas pulled Max tight against his chest, their own tears flowing in profound, exhausted relief. Jane smiled, although the scene in front of her was partially terrifying. She knew the price of survival. More than anyone could ever do.
A sudden, high-pitched hum vibrated through the ground, cutting the fragile moment short. The frequency was so intense it made the fillings in Mike’s teeth ache and rattled the bones in Will's fingers, shattering the quiet aftermath of the violence.
The air behind the dirt path began to warp and twist, bending the shadows until reality itself fractured. A violet seam tore open with the wet, deafening sound of rending canvas. A brilliant, unholy light spilled out across the ferns, illuminating the ground in sickening shades of bruised lavender and electric magenta. It was a weeping tear in the fabric of the universe, a raw, pulsing pathway to another dimension that smelled heavily of sulfur, crushed ozone and old snow.
Through the blinding threshold of the rift, Mage Jane stepped into the world.
She was a vision of dark, otherworldly authority, wearing a high-collared velvet gown that seemed to absorb the light around it. Her fingers clamped tightly around a tall silver staff that hummed with arcane resonance, but the moment her leather boots hit the damp Indiana soil, her majestic, terrifying composure completely evaporated.
The staff tilted, nearly slipping from her grasp as her eyes locked directly onto the motionless, crumpled form of Michael lying in the dirt.
Seeing the Paladin, a protector, an anchor, the man who had crossed realities for a ghost, lying pinned to the earth with a silver dagger buried deep in his throat, changed everything. The severe, queen-like mask she wore crumbled into the face of a grieving woman. A soft, horrified gasp escaped her lips, a sound of pure, unadulterated ruin that echoed through the dark woods.
Within seconds, the cold magic radiating from her skin dissolved, replaced by a stream of genuine, hot tears that tracked rapidly down her sharp, weathered features. She fell to her knees in the mud beside the body, her velvet skirts soaking in the copper tide, completely oblivious to the terrified teenagers staring at her.
"Ranger!" she called out, her voice an echoing, grief-stricken cry that rattled the branches. "Ranger, come forth!"
A second figure slipped through the violet light, a tall man wrapped in dark leather armor, a heavy bow slung across his broad shoulders. He possessed the exact, striking features of Lucas, but his brow was weathered, his arms dense with military muscle. The Ranger halted the moment his boots cleared the portal, his eyes dropping to the bloody clearing.
"Paladin?" the Ranger whispered, his voice dropping into a hollow, disbelieving register. He fell heavily to his knees beside the corpse, his calloused hands hovering over the ruined scene. His eyes disbelieving and his heart shattering inside his ribs. "Michael? Nay... this... nay..."
"Take him away, Ranger," The Mage spoke, her gaze drifting slowly from the body to look at her own reflection, El, who was watching from the front with a quiet, solemn understanding. Jane’s shoulders sagged beneath the weight of her robes. "He is with William now, Lucas. That is the only end he truly desired."
"Not like this, Jane!" the Ranger cried out, his voice cracking as he gathered the massive, limp weight of the Paladin into his arms, his own tears dripping onto the blackened iron plates. "Not in this grey, silent land!"
"We knew the hazards... the risks," Jane whispered, her voice carrying the poetic, exhausted cadence of someone who had watched too many kingdoms fall. "We took this path because his spirit was already dead when we buried William."
"B-But.."
"He chose to risk the void because he could not draw breath without his husband beside him. He gave him his everything until his devotion bled him dry. Now... he has found his peace."
The sight of the Ranger weeping over the body made Mike’s grip on Will’s waist grow aggressive, a primal, defensive panic flaring back to life in his chest. He shifted his weight, dragging Will flush against his torso, burying Will’s head into his neck to shield him from the sight of the portal, his long arms wrapping around him like a cage.
The Mage took a slow, heavy step forward, her velvet robes sweeping through the wet clover. She reached out a slim, glowing hand toward Will, her fingers twitching with a desperate, sisterly longing to touch the face of the brother she had lost.
Before her fingers could come within a foot of Will’s hair, Mike’s arm shot out. With a fierce, violent motion, he swatted her hand away, the impact of his palm against her wrist sounding a sharp note through the clearing.
"Michael..." Jane murmured, her eyes wide and sorrowful as she looked at his blood-spattered face. "Please. Just let me look upon my brother one last time."
"It's Mike and he is not your brother," he barked back, his teeth bared in a defensive snarl as he tucked Will deeper into his chest, his voice shaking with an absolute, unyielding authority. "And you've done enough. You almost destroyed him for a ghost. Go. Take him away and don't ever come back."
Jane looked at him for a long, heavy second, recognizing the identical, terrifying ferocity in his eyes that had once defined the Paladin. She bowed her head in a silent, tragic acknowledgment.
"May your light remain unbroken, Mike," she whispered.
She turned, her gown swirling as she stepped back through the violet seam. The Ranger followed, carrying the heavy, silent bulk of Michael's body in his arms like a fallen king. The moment their heels cleared the threshold, the rift snapped shut with a sharp, concussive pop, plunging the woods back into the quiet, ordinary dark of a midwestern night. The dagger slipped from Michael's throat and fell onto the Earth before the seam vanished.
The clearing went perfectly still.
Mike and Will stayed exactly where they were, frozen in the dirt, their bodies locked together so tightly they shared the same ragged breath. A few feet away, Lucas and Max were still holding each other, their heads pressed together in the dark, while Dustin and El sat on an old log, El’s hand resting in Dustin’s sleeve as they let the trauma of the night wash over them.
They were all shivering, their clothes damp from the frost, their minds permanently marked by the violence that had just played out under the trees, but as the wind stirred the dry sycamore leaves, a quiet, undeniable truth settled over the clearing.
They were safe. The world was still whole.
Will was alive, his heart beating a steady, warm rhythm against Mike’s ribs, because Mike hadn't hesitated. He hadn't waited for the cosmic balance or the perfect strategy; he had struck first, turning himself into a monster for the single, holy purpose of keeping his world unbroken.
Mike leaned down, his lips pressing a long, lingering kiss into the soft curls on top of Will’s head. Will breathed out a hard, shuddering sigh, burying his face deeper into the crook of Mike’s neck, his long fingers reaching up to find the messy, tangled curls at the back of Mike’s head, holding him fast against the dark.
A fine dust of crushed lapis and silver leaf clung to the cuffs of a white linen tunic, staining the pale fabric a brilliant, celestial blue.
Far beyond the gray, barren lands of Indiana and the high-fantasy realm of Avangardia, stretched out an infinite, radiant expanse of a world. This was a kingdom constructed from light itself, where the horizon did not end in shadows but dissolved into shimmering ribbons of prismatic color. Massive, crystalline arches curved over fields of spun gold and the very grass beneath the high towers seemed to glow with a faint, iridescent glitter that rose like pollen whenever the wind stirred. It was a place of eternal, unclouded noon, a sanctuary where time had no dominion and decay was a myth forgotten by the stars.
Within a quiet alcove of the High Crest castle, a soul sat perfectly still before a towering wooden easel.
He bore the exact, delicate features of William the Cleric, his frame wrapped in the flowing, embroidered vestments of his holy order. His emerald eyes, deep and clear, were fixed entirely on the linen canvas before him. With a slender gray-hued stick, his fingers moved with a practiced, reverent precision, tracing the intricate filigree of a massive suit of paladin armor. Every stroke of the colored coal was an act of remembrance. A bittersweet longing pulled at the corners of his mouth, a quiet, ancient ache for a face he had left behind in the cold mud of a lower world.
A soft, rhythmic rap sounded against the heavy oak door of the sanctuary.
The stick stopped mid-line. William lifted his head, his chest rising in a sharp, sudden intake of breath as he turned toward the entryway.
The heavy doors parted and the real Paladin Michael stepped into the brilliant, glittering light of the alcove. The blood was nowhere to be found. The dirt and the terrible, ragged rot of his final moments in the Hawkins woods had been completely washed away by the crossing, his physical form entirely restored to its former, towering majesty.
He wore no armor now, only a simple, dark velvet tunic that shifted like midnight against the ambient glow of the realm. Yet, beneath the clean line of his jaw, four faint, pale silver marks remained etched into the skin of his neck, the ghostly, indelible signature of the dagger that had set him free from the mortal world.
William’s eyes went incredibly wide, the emerald depth of his irises swimming with an immediate, blinding sheen of tears. A breathtaking, radiant smile broke across his face, a look of pure joy that seemed to outshine the very crystal of the spires around them.
"You are early," William whispered, his voice a trembling, musical chord that shook with a profound disbelief. He rose from his wooden stool, his coal stick dropping forgotten to the marble floor. "The alignment... the paths would be- your life cannot be over, Michael. I cannot believe you are truly here already. It's... sooner than I... what happened, my love?" His words died in his throat. The happiness of seeing his love again and the terrifying realization that he died so soon in the mortal realm was pressuring his heart into an arrest.
Michael did not speak immediately. He crossed the marble floor with long, frantic strides, his heavy boots making no sound against the white stone. He reached out, his large, calloused hands trembling violently as he brought them up to cup William’s cheeks, his thumbs brushing against the soft skin of his temples. A heavy sob tore from the Paladin’s chest and genuine tears of absolute deliverance spilled from his lashes, tracking down his handsome, weathered face.
"I gave you my solemn vow," Michael wept, his deep baritone cracking with the immense weight of the journey he had endured. He pressed his palms tighter against William's face, as if to convince himself the man wasn't a phantom born of his own madness. "When the poison did take your breath... when you were leaving my arms for this high kingdom... I did swear to you beneath the silver oaks that I would find a path to bring you back. I promised I would move the stars—"
"—and you did tell me," William interrupted softly, a beautiful, tearful smile breaking through his own weeping as he placed his smaller hands over Michael’s wrists, "that if you could not force the gates of the living to yield... that you would simply come to me."
Michael nodded frantically, his broad chest shuddering as he pulled William forward with a sudden, desperate force. His massive arms locked around his waist, dragging him flush against his torso until the linen vestments and the velvet tunic melted into a single silhouette against the radiant sky. He buried his face deep into the crook of William’s neck, inhaling the familiar, holy scent of frankincense and silver leaf that he had spent an eternity hunting through the dark.
"Aye," Michael murmured into the warmth of his skin, his grip tightening until their heartbeats met in a single, unbroken rhythm. "There is no victory in the high halls without your voice, William. There is no life for me in any realm if you are not standing beside me."
The long, eternal embrace closed around them like a sanctuary, the brilliant, glittering light of the afterlife swelling to consume the alcove until the shadows of the lower worlds were entirely erased. They were safely, beautifully reunited forever, beyond the reach of daggers, dimensions and the small, fragile fears of poison.
A few days later, the shock finally wore off, or perhaps it simply sank deep enough into the marrow of their bones to become part of the background noise. The Party tried to grow out of this event just as they had tried to grow out of all the supernatural shit that had held them by their throats throughout their entire childhoods. They forced themselves through the motions of recovery, scrubbing the dirt from their sneakers, ignoring the phantom smell of iron and ozone and pretending that a Tuesday night in the Wheeler basement can be ordinary again.
Now, the hum of the television was the loudest sound left in the world, a low, mechanical vibration that anchored the room to a fragile reality. Dustin and Lucas had stayed until the eleventh hour, their presence a loud, deliberate distraction as they helped clean up grease-stained pizza boxes and discarded soda cans. When they finally left, riding their bicycles into the chilly dark, their headlamps cut thin, exhausted paths through the Hawkins night, silent proof that the world outside was still turning. El had quieted her own racing mind and slipped upstairs to sleep in Nancy’s old room, while Max remained quarantined at home, her body burning through a sudden, stress-induced flu. The house above them felt like a hollow, echoing shell, empty of parents, monsters and doppelgangers alike.
Down below, the basement was left to hold the only two boys who truly understood the depth of what had been broken. Mike sat on the edge of the couch, his fingers uncharacteristically still, his eyes fixed on the flickering static of the TV screen but seeing none of it. The phantom weight of the dagger was still etched into the muscles of his forearm, a permanent reminder of the feral, protective madness that had possessed him. Every time he closed his eyes, he could still feel the hot splash of the Paladin's blood across his face, a grim baptism that had permanently severed him from the boy he used to be.
Will sat a mere inch away on the floor, his back resting against the base of the sofa, his knees pulled tightly to his chest. He didn't speak, but his presence was an unyielding anchor in the quiet room. He didn't look at Mike with the fragile, tiptoeing pity the others had been sporting; instead, he occasionally shifted closer, letting the solid warmth of his shoulder press against Mike's leg. It was a silent, profound understanding. They were both survivors of a bizarre, mirrored tragedy, two boys who had looked into the darkest corners of their own reflections and chosen to stay right here, together, in the quiet safety of the subterranean dark.
Mike's lanky frame was hunched forward, his hands dangling between his knees. The blood was gone. It's been days. It was washed away with harsh soap under the shower until his knuckles were raw and pink, but his skin still felt hot, vibrating with a phantom adrenaline that wouldn't let him settle. He was wearing an old, oversized gray sweatshirt he’d grabbed from the laundry basket, the sleeves pushed up to his forearms, where a bandage was visible on the left one.
The space between the two boys felt vast, yet incredibly fragile, filled with the echoing weight of everything that had been shouted into the dark woods.
"I thought I was losing my mind," Mike spoke first, his voice dropping into a rough, gravelly register that barely carried across the rug. He didn't look up, his fingers twisting the loose hem of his sweatshirt. "When he first got here... when he sat on that couch and looked at you... I felt this thing in my chest. It was like this violent, terrifying panic. Because I looked at him- at how strong he was, how he talked like he knew every single part of your soul and I convinced myself that he was the version of me you actually deserved."
Will’s head lifted slowly, his brown hair falling away from his face, his expression softening into a look of profound, quiet sorrow. "Mike..."
"No, let me finish," Mike interrupted, his breath catching in his throat as he finally forced his eyes to meet Will’s. The tears were back, hot and clear, rimming his lashes but refusing to fall just yet. "I’ve been a coward, Will. For years. Ever since you came back from the Upside Down, ever since you went to Lenora, ever since the van... I spent every single day telling myself that I was just a burden. That my feelings were just friendly... normal because you were my best friend."
He exhaled, loud and sharp as if the words were falling short in his mind.
"I kept lying to myself that it's temporary because I never really lived without you so- so these are just withdrawals. I tried to- I tried giving them up. Then I- I thought the painting was a nice lie you made up to keep me from falling apart because that's what you do... you protect everyone. I knew it wasn't from El because she didn't know anything about D&D. Then you... you told everyone the truth about you. I felt like a burden had been lifted off me cuz I- I didn't know how to word it before you gave me words for it and then you said I was just a crush."
Will could see the way these words reflected hurt on Mike's face. He saw how hard it was for him to say these things out loud.
"I thought your childhood crush on me had burned out and I was so terrified of ruining the only friendship that mattered to me that I just... I stayed quiet. I let the silence build up like concrete around me. It was killing me from the inside. Like I was swallowing glass with each breath I took."
He took a sharp, ragged breath, his long fingers trembling as he reached out across the small distance separating the couch from the floor.
"But when he put his hands on you," Mike whispered, his voice cracking into a raw, bleeding honesty, "when he said he was going to take you away to some other dimension, to- to kill you. When he tried to put those sweet words in your head that this world didn't deserve you, so he could..."
Mike really thought it would be easier, but it wasn't. Never for him. The good thing was that the boy sitting in front of him was his Will, the ever-patient and sweetest.
"Everything else just burned away. I realized I’d rather the whole world hate me. I’d rather be a monster, I’d rather die in those woods, than live a single day on this earth where I can’t look across the room and see you drawing at that table. Where I can't look into these eyes because someone decided to steal them. Where I can't tell you how much I love you, that it hurts my very soul when I think about it."
The room held its breath. Anyone from the outside could hear every single breath, every heartbeat and every frantic nerve jangling inside their bodies.
"I love you, Will. I’ve loved you since the swings and I’m sorry it took a literal ghost with my face trying to murder us for me to have the guts to say it. I'm sorry I had to face and be a literal monster just to say these words out loud."
The words landed in the quiet basement with the absolute, solid weight of an anchor dropped into deep water.
Will stayed perfectly still for a heartbeat, his chest rising and falling in shallow, rapid breaths as the magnitude of Mike's confession washed over him. The doubts that had plagued his mind for years, the silent, suffocating belief that his own heart was a broken, shameful thing that could never be answered, had already melted away beneath the fierce, unyielding light in Mike’s eyes a few days ago. Hearing those words now was just a solid shockwave of words igniting his cells from within. Giving the dead ones another life.
Slowly, Will uncoiled his legs. He moved forward on his knees until he was resting directly in front of Mike, his hands reaching out to cover Mike’s raw, scrubbed knuckles.
"You're not a monster, Mike," Will said softly, his voice steady and beautiful, carrying the rhythmic warmth of a promise. He squeezed Mike’s hands, his fingers interlocking with his best friend's with a natural, seamless perfection. "And you never could be. You’ve spent your entire life running into the fire because you think it’s your job to keep the people you love safe. That knight... he loved his William to madness. He loved his ghost, too. He loved a memory he wanted to possess so bad, but you... you love me. The real me. The messy, broken version who still gets scared in the dark."
Mike's breath hitched in his throat for a single moment.
"You loved me so much that you... you made people believe in another dimension. You refused to acknowledge that they pulled a body out of the quarry. You refused it even after they had a funeral. You were so sure that I was out there somewhere that you tried to defy the laws of the universe. How can I not fall for you?"
A single tear finally spilled over Will’s lashes, tracking a slow path down his pale cheek, but his mouth pulled into a small, breathtakingly radiant smile.
"I never moved on, you know?" Will whispered, leaning closer until his forehead was just inches from Mike’s, his breath warm against Mike's lips. "I couldn't have, even if I tried. Everything I ever did... it was always about you. It was always for you. I spent years suffocating because I thought my love was a disease that would drive you away, but hearing you say it... it feels like I’m finally allowed to breathe."
Mike let out a long, shuddering sob, the final reserve of his terror dissolving into the space between them. He reached up, his palms sliding behind Will’s neck, his fingers tangling into the soft brown hair at the base of his skull and he pulled him into a slow, deep and fiercely passionate kiss.
It was entirely different from the frantic, bloody collision in the woods. This was quiet, deliberate and profoundly tender, a sealing of two souls that had been wandering through the dark for years, finally finding the hearth. The kiss carried the weight of summers spent in Castle Byers, of late-night D&D campaigns, of the silent, agonizing crawls, comic-book playdates and the singular promise of being there for each other. The kiss turned all the old pains into nothing more than fuel for the fire that was currently warming the room. Will leaned into the touch, his hands sliding up Mike’s chest to grip the fabric of his shirt, holding himself fast against the center of his world.
When they finally parted, their foreheads remained pressed together, their breathing synchronous and calm in the yellow wash of the single desk lamp.
"We’re gonna be okay," Mike murmured into the dark, his thumb idly tracing the curve of Will’s jawbone, his voice carrying a certain, unyielding gravity. "No more bullshit. Hiding behind words and stealing glances, okay? Just us."
"Just us," Will agreed softly, his fingers curling into the hair at Mike's temple, his eyes bright with a quiet, triumphant peace.
The baseline reality settled around them, ordinary, safe and entirely theirs. The world outside the basement walls was still scarred, still recovering from the shadows that had tried to tear it apart, but within the small, wood-paneled room, the future was different. They had struck first, they had survived the dark and as they sat together on the old plaid couch, wrapped in each other's arms, the light they had fought to protect belonged to them alone.
The gentle, rhythmic sound of water trickling into a ceramic mug was the first thing that drifted through the heavy fog of Mike’s consciousness.
The basement was bathed in a strange, pale blue haze, a soft, dreamlike luminescence that didn't match the familiar yellow glow of the desk lamp. Mike found himself standing near the edge of the laundry area, his limbs feeling oddly light, floating somewhere between wakefulness and the deep dark of sleep.
Beside the wooden work table stood Michael. He was shirtless, his massive, heavy-shouldered frame stripped of the black iron breastplate and leather tunics that had defined him. Without his armor, his torso was a map of a brutal, violent life. Thick, white crescent scars from swords and ancient spears crisscrossed his chest and back, catching the pale blue light like old silver, but the most striking marks were fresh, jagged and dark, four distinct, deep stabs ringed his neck, the raw, unmistakable signature of the steel dagger. The little mark on his face and forearm was also very evident.
The Paladin picked up the ceramic mug, taking a slow, quiet sip of the water. He looked at peace now. The predatory, desperate edge that had driven him to madness was completely gone, replaced by a profound, unbothered stillness.
He slowly turned his head, his dark eyes meeting Mike’s. A faint, knowing smile touched the corners of his scarred mouth.
Mike’s brow furrowed deep, a cold, familiar knot of confusion twisting in his stomach. He took a cautious step forward, his hands tensing at his sides. "What... what are you doing here?" Mike muttered, his voice echoing softly in the hazy room. "How are you even here?"
Michael set the mug back down onto the table, the ceramic clinking softly against the wood. He moved closer, his massive form gliding through the blue fog with a smooth, unhurried grace. He stopped just a few feet away, looking down at his younger counterpart with an expression of quiet, genuine reverence.
"I did step across the threshold to offer you my gratitude," Michael said, his deep baritone dropping into a soft, melodic cadence that carried no trace of the venom he had spat in the forest. "I do say thank you, young Mike."
Mike’s face twisted into an expression of utter, bewildered disbelief. He let out a sharp, incredulous breath, his head tilting back as he stared at the ghost wearing his own features. "Why... why are you thanking me?" Mike stuttered, his voice cracking with a sudden, defensive frustration. "Are you stupid? I killed you! I- I literally drove a blade into your throat!"
Michael’s smile only widened, a soft, tranquil light filling his dark eyes as he bowed his head slightly.
"I do offer my thanks precisely because your blade did strike true," the Paladin murmured, his voice sounding like poetry whispered in an empty cathedral. "You did stand as an unyielding wall before the one you cherish and your fury did release me from my torment. Consider the tapestry, Mike. If my plan had succeeded, if I had taken the life of your Will to buy mine's resurrection, the guilt would have turned the silver oaks of my home to ash. I would have returned to an empty kingdom, a monster unworthy to touch his hand. Not even he would ever look at me."
He took one more step, his gaze shifting past Mike's shoulder toward the shadows of the basement.
"We both did receive exactly what our spirits hungered for," Michael continued softly, his features softening into a look of absolute, eternal peace. "Your blind, ferocious devotion did keep your William whole within this realm and my own crippling, desperate love... it did finally break the chains of my exile, sending my soul back to the grand crest where my beloved was waiting. The dark paths are closed, Mike. The accounts are settled. All thanks to you."
Before Mike could part his lips to blurt another question, the pale blue haze began to dissolve, the edges of the Paladin’s massive frame softening into ribbons of brilliant, glittering dust. Michael’s dark eyes held his one final time, a silent parting blessing between two versions of the same soul, before he vanished entirely into the quiet dark.
Mike’s eyes snapped open with a sharp, sudden gasp.
The pale blue fog was gone. The familiar, comforting scent of laundry detergent and old dust filled his senses, grounding him instantly back into the baseline reality of the Wheeler basement. The yellow desk lamp was still burning, casting its warm, ordinary shadows across the wood-paneled walls.
A soft, grounding weight was pressed against his ribs. Mike blinked away the remaining fragments of the dream, his head shifting on the plaid cushions of the couch.
Will was asleep right on top of his chest. His head was tucked perfectly into the crook of Mike’s shoulder, his brown hair spilling across the gray cotton of Mike’s sweatshirt. One of Will’s hands was curled loosely over Mike’s collarbone, his breathing slow, deep and beautifully steady, his chest rising and falling in perfect synchronization with Mike's own heart.
A long, trembling sigh of absolute relief rushed out of Mike’s lungs. The cold knot in his stomach evaporated, replaced by a thick warmth that made his throat tight. He didn't move; he didn't want to disturb the quiet peace that had finally settled over the boy in his arms. He just allowed his long fingers to rise, gently wrapping around Will’s waist, pulling him just a fraction of an inch closer until there was no space left between them. A small, exhausted smile touched Mike's lips as he buried his chin into Will’s hair.
At the very end of the long, terrifying road, everything had sorted itself out. The cosmic balance had shifted, leaving the pieces exactly where they belonged. Far beyond the stars, in a kingdom made of light, the Paladin was where he was always supposed to be, standing beneath the silver trees, safely reunited with his William for eternity.
And Mike... he looked down into the quiet, sleeping face of the boy who had drawn dragons in the dark, the boy who had held him through his worst versions, the boy who had loved him through every fire and every shadow they saw. Mike closed his eyes, his heart beating a steady, triumphant rhythm against Will's cheek. He was exactly where his heart had always been from the very first day.
He was home. He was with Will. There was no universe where Will wasn't his soulmate.