Chapter Text
Michael Wheeler realised he was gay at the end of an apocalypse.
The body of his girlfriend was still fresh in its grave six feet under the earth. Every ‘almost’ moment with his best friend still carved a deep gash into his porcelain skin which would split open with every effort made to move his body from the safety of his bed. His body still felt like lightning had struck every time he tried to stand, or breathe, or talk. He was torn between mourning the people he loved the most—one no longer alive, the other no longer in his life.
All factors of grief and unresolved trauma aside, in 1989, Mike was a closeted, gay, coward.
Mike realising he was gay was the equivalent of having a bucket of cold ice tipped down the back of your shirt in the middle of a winter storm. The frozen water burned and ripped at his flesh, leaving nothing but the remnants of red, raw welts across the expanse of his pale chest—an immortalisation of the way he once tried to claw at his skin for a way out.
Michael Wheeler had always been a queer.
Every single person who uttered that word and his name in the same sentence was right.
Mike didn’t want to live in the skin of a gay man. He didn’t want to exist as the flesh and bones of a sinner. He wanted God to love him, to accept him, to see him as a follower rather than a flaw in the system; though, no matter how often he attempted to pray his way out of corruption, even the marrow of his bones, nestled among the spiderwebs that had weaved their web, knew the cold, rubbery truth. There was nothing he could do to avoid the man in the mirror staring back at him.
Each time he looked at himself in the glass of his closet door, his reflection was nothing but a constant reminder of the nakedness—of the sheer vulnerability that had bubbled its way to the surface, displaying his very soul back to him through a mere sheet of substrate. It reminded him he was a curly-haired, lanky man who loved other men, and there was nothing he could do to stop it.
He started throwing a towel over his mirror to stop himself from staring at the truth, though he could only avoid it for so long. The truth always has a way of climbing its way out of closed mouths.
It wasn’t his fault, though. Regardless of his actions growing up as a teen, he didn’t understand the world around him, let alone himself. He lost the majority of his adolescence to a monster in another dimension. The evil sprouted in everything he ever found to be pure and tainted it all with its vines.
Living in a nuclear family, under nuclear family rules, ideals and morals, Mike was served a steaming heap of heteronormativity for dinner—presented with a side of blatant homophobia, and if he was lucky, just green beans. He was then forced to wash it all down with a glass of conformity in the form of collared shirts, side parts and television news reports.
The evening prayer circle at the table was initiated by Karen Wheeler, a woman who painted her lips with a ruby red stoic expression and wore her indifference like it was a brand new dress, and each meal was delivered on a silver platter by the personification of a piece of cardboard—Ted Wheeler himself—the only kind of service he provided as a ‘parent’.
Each and every dinner time Mike was taught to avoid brussel sprouts at any cost. His parents refused to cook them, quote, they were “nothing but bitter green balls of mush.” Personally, ever since he had tried brussel sprouts for dinner at Will’s house when he was thirteen, he would choose brussel sprouts over green beans any day. He still ate the green beans though—because they told him to.
He’d go hungry that night if he went against their wishes. Mike soon grew afraid of dinner time—afraid to swallow, afraid to digest.
His psyche soon became malnutritioned. His body, too.
He was conditioned to be afraid of the disease. He never knew it came from green vegetables.
When Mike was ten years old, his best friend, too, had consumed the brussel sprouts, though he thought the disease was only able to cling onto Will Byers and Will Byers only. He never thought he’d catch it—become the next host. He thought he was immune. After all, he ate his green beans like he was told to. He sang along to the hymns in the stained-glass chapel every Sunday. He received his vaccinations each year.
Why wasn’t that enough to protect him?
He was taught that being… queer… was the disease, and homophobia was simply the vaccine to cure it. He was taught that if he was… gay… he’d be too… wrong. Mike wasn’t afraid of being gay, per se, he was afraid of sin.
And being gay was nothing but a sin. An abomination against God.
To appease God, Christ, and Karen and Ted Wheeler, Mike spent year after year injecting the antidote into his bloodstream with his own shaking hands. He ignored the sting of the needle that came in the form of green eyes, brown hair and full lips piercing through his skin.
To speed up the healing process, he kissed a girl before she even knew what pudding was. He held the hand of the girl who hadn’t even discovered the origin of her own name. He tried to teach the girl what love was before she even knew she liked flannels and purple eyeshadow—before he even knew what the word tasted like on his own tongue. He shouted self-projections at his best friend under the shelter of a rainstorm; it’s not my fault you don’t like girls! He started dressing in plaid shirts, he started wearing glasses, and he started parting his hair like his father.
He tried anything he could to cure himself. He couldn’t let anyone think of him differently because of this… disease.
He even let Will Byers inject the vaccine with his own two hands.
No matter the confession he uttered to heal his soul, whilst kneeling quietly onto the uneven carpet of the dark booth with his hands pressed together in front of his sternum, he was not ever to be cleansed of his sins, of his impurity.
Of his corruption.
With each brush of his calloused fingers against his best friends’ soft, small ones, the disease grew stronger. The hatred became more prevalent. With each shirt that was lifted off of a body in the men’s bathroom before swimming in the summer, the self-loathing weaved deeper. With each gasp, whimper, and prayer he echoed into the hushed silence of the night as he lay on his bed, regret took over the lease in his body and stole the keys from him.
The rot festered quicker.
The Holy Book would often whisper of his kind. Not once did any God out there cure him. Instead, the harsh gospel mocked and taunted him through the mouth of a Pastor standing at a pulpit every Sunday.
Through gritted teeth he would whisper, “you are sick and your condition is terminal.”
In 1989, at eighteen years old, a small, miniscule part of Mike Wheeler started to heal. He had spent over a decade living in a confined box—barely staying conscious alongside all the lies, deceit and grief being packed tightly beside his frail body.
In 1989, at eighteen years old, he learnt he was never sick—he was actually the healthiest he had ever been. He didn’t need medication, or a vaccine, or stupid fucking green beans shoved down his throat, he needed to live. To love. To experience life outside of the cursed walls of Hawkins, Indiana.
He needed to find himself outside of the Mike Wheeler who had survived an apocalypse, and, in order to do that, he had to admit to himself that he, Mike Wheeler, was a gay man, and that was a fact that sin would never touch again.
God would never have him in the Heavens if he couldn’t learn to accept Mike for who he was.
As he packed up the boxes labelled internalised homophobia, self-loathing, and painfully in love with his best friend (containing a painting of a dragon and a Party of four) that were strewn across his childhood bedroom to pursue his dream in New York City, he took a Paladin’s Oath to stop running from himself, to tear down the walls he had built around him in his adolescence, and to never buy a packet of green beans again.
Michael Wheeler may have realised he was gay at the end of an apocalypse, but it was also at the start of his life.