Archive of Our Own ^beta

It’s Hawkins. It’s always fucking Hawkins.

“We shouldn’t have come back,” El says as she slings her bag over her shoulder. “Can you feel it?”

His honest reply sticks in his throat, and he sniffs. Easy enough to pass off as a result of the cold weather. “It just sucks here.”

She regards him steadily, her brown eyes melting into him. “Come on, Will,” she steps in his path, forcing him to stop as he steps away from her. “You do feel it. I saw it as soon as we drove past the sign.”

Will accidentally bites the inside of his cheek too hard, blood touching his tongue. He flattens his lips into a line. “Yeah, El, I felt it,” he concedes. “But it always feels like that here.” He can’t remember a time that Hawkins has felt not like a prison, a graveyard. Before the Demogorgon, before the Mind Flayer… “And they’re gone now, anyway, remember?”

“Right.” She does nod, albeit slowly. “In the lab… I could sometimes still feel things after they were gone. Like echoes.” Her explanation, maybe this is that, goes unsaid but understood.

“Will! El!” Jonathan calls from the hotel’s front door. “Hurry up!”

El tosses Will one last look before she slams the car trunk closed.

He doesn’t know what he expected, coming back.

The Wheeler’s house, yes. A holiday celebration there with the Party, of course, it’s tradition.

But it’s different, this year, because after the party is over, Will can’t go home. That’ll take hours of driving, so he knows he instead will return to an unfamiliar hotel bed. It’s also different this year because Will has a sister with him—El was around for Christmas the year before last, but kept in the cabin. This is her first real holiday with everyone (and Thanksgiving doesn’t count, because Mike made everything awkward, Mom burnt the turkey, and it’s a day to celebrate a guy who killed Native Americans anyway).

It’s also different this year because at some point, Will ends up in Mike’s basement. With Mike. Alone.

And Will is used to the universe tempting him with these prime opportunities, so he knows how to handle it. He’ll give Mike a friendly, boundary-heavy hug, tell him he’s happy to see him, and then go back upstairs and collapse next to El on the couch until their mother wakes them up to shuffle back to the hotel. Then he might scream into his pillow a little. It’s a skewed version of his routine, but relatively familiar nonetheless.

But Mike kisses him, and the world goes upside down.

He’s practically vibrating the whole car ride from the Wheeler’s, jittery with shock. And also nerves. Can his brother see a change behind his eyes, the feelings he’s kept bottled up for so long finally spilling over? Can his mother tell that he’s not quite the same son who she spoke to that morning, that there’s something ugly yet so intensely sweet crawling under his skin?

El can, for sure. If Will didn’t know for a fact that it wasn’t true, he would believe the rumors at their new school that they have twin telepathy. But they don’t need it to know each others’ secrets, anyway. She’s sitting next to him, in the backseat, and the proximity of their shoulders makes him certain she can feel his incessant moving, secrets fluttering in his bones.

Plus, she had walked in on them.

Will had jerked away at the sound of abruptly halted footsteps on the stairs behind him, Mike’s hands on his shoulders keeping him from moving back enough as he might have.

“El, I—”

Her eyes wide but mouth closed. Frozen in place.

“El, can you give us a minute?” And Mike—gangly, awkward, beautiful Mike, clearly panicked but not afraid.

A nod.

He found her upstairs, after Mike kissed him again, and he only semi-consciously bit his lip hoping she couldn’t tell that he had kissed back.

“It’s okay,” she had told him before he could say anything, quietly, underneath the sound of Dustin and Erica arguing. “I’m not mad. Just surprised.”

“You should be mad,” he told her. “But I don’t know if you should be surprised.”

She takes his hand, now, her fingers sliding into the spaces between his, and rests their wrists on the upholstered seats. Will thinks that’s as close to an I love you as he’s going to get tonight.

He wakes up on the floor of the hotel room and immediately feels weird. His watch says it’s only half past three, but rays of light are shining through the room as if it’s sunrise. He closes his eyes again and instantly his stomach twists, and he thinks, fuck. Stumbling to his feet, he casts a quick glance around—his mother and El are still in their respective beds, Jonathan on the couch. They’re fine, but everything looks hazy, for some reason, and Will gathers enough strength to stagger away.

He stumbles to the bathroom, eyes burning, fingertips buzzing. The ground tilts beneath his feet, and he catches himself in the wall before forcing his body through the door. He locks it behind him.

“What’s wrong with me?” he splutters to no one, his palms digging into the hard tile of the sink counter.

Through the pounding in his head, he pries his eyes open, glaring at his image in the mirror.

It shatters.

He’s running before he can even think about it, his hastily shoved-on shoes slapping against the pavement, and he tears across Hawkins until he spots the familiar house ahead.

Will has seen Jonathan climb the house enough times to know exactly where to step, how to avoid knocking a panel on the roof loose—except now he creeps away from Nancy’s window and over to Mike’s.

He doesn’t remember how he gets in. Mike locks his window, as far as Will can remember, but suddenly he’s sitting on the windowsill, and Mike is awake.

“Will?” Mike says through a yawn, and even though the room is dark Will can somehow see him struggling to sit up. “What are you doing?”

“I don’t know,” he answers honestly. “It’s been—it’s been a weird night, I don’t know what—I couldn’t find someone—”

Mike cuts him off with a gentle hey. “C’mere.”

Will has never been good at ignoring Mike. He slides off the windowsill and perches on the side of Mike’s bed. Mike wins his battle against the sheets and sits cross-legged next to him.

“I’m just—”

“You don’t—“

They speak over each other and falter for a moment, until Will makes a little gesture like go ahead.

Mike flushes, and it should be impossibly to see any hue of pink in this dark, but somehow Will does. “I just. I didn’t mean to freak you out or anything,” Mike says, almost stumbling over his words a few times. “Earlier. If that’s what was making your night weird.” His fingers open and close into a fist multiple times, a nervous tick Will has noticed for the past couple of years. “I just…” The red reaches his ears. “I mean, you’re you. So, I’m sorry if that was, you know, too—“

“No,” Will interrupts, because Mike is about to cross the line into self-deprecation, and he can’t stand that. “That wasn’t what made it weird.” He laughs, suddenly, a little snort of air escaping him. “I mean… it was kinda weird, but only because I never thought you’d do that.”

“That being…”

“What I’d always wanted you to do,” Will shrugs, because he feels a little braver at this hour of the night, and Mike looks a little haloed in this nonexistent light. He feels the corner of his mouth tip up. “Which was, you know. Kiss me.”

He was answering a question, but he was also asking, and somehow Mike knows it—and that just makes Will love him more. Mike shifts forward until his breath ghosts across Will’s face, and then he finally moves forward that last half-inch and fits their mouths together. Their noses bump but Will doesn’t really mind, minds even less when Mike’s hand comes up to rest on his jaw, right below his ear.

It should be weird, or uncomfortable, or scary. They’re two boys, after all, lifelong friends, in Indiana. But it’s four in the morning, and they’re lifelong friends, and it doesn’t matter that Mike sort of knows what he’s doing and Will almost definitely doesn’t.

He dreads his mother’s wrath the whole walk back. With any luck, she won’t be awake yet, it’s only six o’clock. But if she is, and she finds Will’s empty bed and a shattered mirror…

He picks up his pace just a bit, shoving his hands into his pockets as he rounds the last corner into the hotel parking lot. Despite the smell of snow in the air, his skin feels uncomfortably warm. He tries to think about Mike; he didn’t break anything when he was with Mike.

It works, kind of. He can hear the cracking of a hairline fracture as it spreads across the side mirror of the car he passes, but other than that, he makes it back inside without a problem. He doesn’t have a key, he realizes halfway down the hall, but it doesn’t seem to matter because as he approaches, the door swings open and El pokes her head out.

“There you are,” she hisses. “You’re lucky Ma isn’t awake. What did you do?”

“El, I—“

“Not the sneaking out to kiss Mike thing,” she says quickly. “I said I don’t care and I mean it. I was talking about the mirror.”

Will self-consciously rubs his mouth. “I didn’t do anything.”

“You’re making it worse,” she tells him, pointing at his face, and he lowers his hand. “And yes, you did, I walked in there and I could feel you everywhere.”

He wrings clasps his fingers together, unsure what else to do with his limbs. “I really don’t know. I just… it just happened?”

“You need to do it again.”

They sit across from the vending machine, tucked away in the corner of the back hallway. El’s hand is on his knee, watching him intently, and Will feels infinitely stupid.

“I don’t know how to do it,” he says.

“You better,” El replies, “or that means that the Mind Flayer did it.”

Her theory, apparently, is that Will either has powers or the Mind Flayer is back. Neither option sounds awesome, honestly, but Will would rather have some glass break around him every once in a while than have a demon chase him. Again.

“Are you sure it wasn’t you?” He regrets it as soon as he says it, watching her face fall.

She sighs. “It wasn’t me.” To emphasize her point, she lifts a hand in the direction of the vending machine. Nothing happens. “You try.”

Will refuses to raise a hand like she does, because it feels so dumb. But he does glare at the machine, fists clenched in his lap.

“What were you thinking about, the first time it happened?”

He can’t really remember. Mike, probably. It’s always Mike.

“At first, I thought of things that made me angry,” she continues. “My mother. Papa. My sister. But Hopper taught me it doesn’t work like that. So now I think of him.”

Will hopes his mother won’t be too mad if she finds out her children exploded a vending machine.

“And I think of Lucas, and Dustin, and Max. And Mike.” Her voice softens. “You should, too.”

His fingertips start to tingle again as he remembers the curve of Mike’s nose in the darkness, the way he smiles softly when Will does something ridiculously and inexcusably infatuated. His dark hair, waves and loose curls claiming Will’s fingers—that Mike had insisted, as he clasped them to his cheek, were not girl hands, but those of an artist.

“A lot of the time, I think of you.”

Will doesn’t have to look at her to hear the fragile fondness in her words. “I never knew how much I needed you,” he says. “Not just someone like you. Actually you.”

“Me, too,” she answers, and then there’s a sharp snap and the glass of the vending machine crumbles. It collects like a pile of sand on the floor, and El blinks up at him.

“What?” he asks, finally loosening his fists.

“I think that answers that,” she grins.

In the next few days, Will gets better at crushing cans and unraveling bows on Christmas gifts from ten feet away. He also gets better at kissing.

Mike is very affectionate—which Will already knew, but this is to a whole new level. He remembers being annoyed when Mike would steal away with El for hours at a time, wondering what they could possibly be doing. He kind of gets it now. It’s a little gross, sometimes, because Mike is so much taller that the angle gets a little awkward sometimes and he’s got a very spitty mouth, but Will is mostly just swept up in the fact that he’s allowed to know that.

For the first time in his life in Hawkins, he doesn’t want to think about leaving.

It’s when El shows up to the Wheeler’s basement with a bloody ankle that things really go to hell. Lucas radios Max and Dustin, patches her up as Will holds her hand and Mike freaks out.

“I couldn’t see it,” she explains, tamping down the tremor in her voice. “Not like, it was hiding. I mean it was actually just… clear?”

“Invisible.” Will is used to supplying El with these words by now.

“Yes. Invisible.” She hisses out a breath as Lucas dabs antiseptic onto her broken skin. “I ran to find Will.”

Will leans forward, and Lucas pushes him back out of the way. “Do you think I could see them?”

“Yes,” El says, at the same time that Mike makes a confused noise.

“Why would Will be able to see them?” he asks, and oh right, powers might be an important detail to mention. “Is it true sight?”

“Uh, yes?” he says. “But also…” He glances around the basement before spotting an old hourglass, and he glares at it. It collapses into pieces.

“Holy Jesus Christ,” Dustin says from the top of the stairs, and Max’s eyes are as wide as El’s were that one night.

It has Mike, it has Mike, it has Mike.

He vaguely hears his sister screaming Max’s name, but being so near the lab seems to have awoken something inside her, pebbles shaking on the ground as though she has her own gravitational pull. She can handle herself.

So he tears through the trees after Mike, shoves a hand through the shadows until he finds warm human skin, and pulls. It’s Mike’s arm that comes free first, and Will zeroes in on the birthmark beneath the band of his watch, and pulls again. With a horrible squelching sound, the darkness gives way and Mike tumbles free, and Will wants to kiss him but he also wants him to stay alive so he yanks him to his feet and runs.

They make it back to the clearing when El shouts, “Eat shit!” and something burns so brightly for a minute that Will has to close his eyes, noticing a moment later that Mike has curled his entire body around Will’s—to protect him, probably. The heat dies down and Will shakes free of Mike’s clutches, searches for his sister, finding her just a few feet away in the singed grass.

“‘M fine,” she insists, though her eyes are screwed shut and the tips of her hair are smoldering. “Make sure everyone else is.”

Dustin is shaken, as is Max, who is clutching Lucas so tightly he might not be fine in a few minutes. But Mike is sprawled out on the forest floor, his chest heaving and his face blank.

“You okay?” Will asks, leaning over him.

“Awesome,” he deadpans, a little spark of life returning to his eyes. He plasters on a goofy grin. “As long as I’m with you.”

Will does something absolutely stupid, which is kiss him, in full view of everyone else. They’re gonna hate you, a voice in the back of his head says. It sounds like the rasp of the Shadow Monster. You’re just proving that you’re a huge fucking queer.

Here’s the thing: he beat the Shadow Monster once already. Mike doesn’t seem to mind, he snipes back, because Mike’s hand is clutching the front of his shirt, dragging him down.

“The hell?” Max says, but she doesn’t sound grossed out, just annoyed, and Will pays her no mind. “We almost just died, people. Snap out of it.”

Will has never been so eager to drive away from this hellhole. It makes it really weird that he also doesn’t want to get in the car.

The burning forest has been attributed to a natural forest fire, the Mind Flayer has been ripped to shreds. But smoke still hangs heavy over the town, and every shadow makes Will jump.

“I’m going to come visit you soon,” Mike says into his hair, his arms wound tightly around Will’s shoulders, and Will takes a deep breath. He wouldn’t mind staying in this moment forever, in a bubble of warmth to protect from the cold, surrounded by the lavender soap smell Mike inherited from Nancy’s abandoned things when she left for college.

“I’d say I’d visit first, but I really don’t want to,” Will grins into his shoulder.

Mike laughs. “Yeah, I don’t want you to, either. Every time a Byers crosses county lines, monsters start to smell you.”

Will senses El hovering behind him and steps away from Mike, letting his sister get a classic Wheeler hug.

“We’re gonna miss you,” she states, tilting her head up to look him in the eye. “Visit soon, okay?”

“You’re amazing,” he tells her earnestly. “You know that, right?”

She offers a tight smile. “Thank you.”

Will gives Mike another hug, feeling confident enough to kiss him because Jonathan and his mom are checking out at the desk, and Mike’s parents are at home. “See you,” he says.

“Soon,” Mike promises. “As soon as I can.”

His mother and Jonathan appear at the door and clamber down the steps to the car, and Mike steps back. Will tosses him a smile, as bright as he can muster with the melancholy welling in his chest, and climbs in next to El.

“You okay?” he asks her. Girls are confusing—she says she doesn’t care that Mike likes him, she says it’s fine, but she’s obviously lying—and sisters aren’t much better.

She shrugs. “I don’t know,” she replies, and Will can somehow tell that she’s being more honest than the last time he asked. “I will be.” She splays her fingers, and Will takes her hand. She taps his knuckles. “You know we’re never coming back, right?”

Mike was right: Hawkins knows where they are. They’re never going to return—not for Max’s birthday, not next Thanksgiving, not even in ten years for their school reunion.

“I know,” he says as Joyce climbs into the driver’s seat and starts the car. “I think it’ll be good.”

As they peel out of the parking lot, Will’s heart aches for Mike. Mike, stuck in Hawkins for the next couple of years, with parents who fight all the time, no sister old enough to really talk to. Mike, who will go through the next few months of high school knowing that he kissed a boy, loves a boy, hearing other kids sling slurs at him and knowing they’re true, not having someone to understand.

Will is lucky. He has El.

She tightens her grip on his hand. “I love you,” she says quietly, almost drowned out by the radio that Jonathan has turned on. “So differently from how I loved him. More, even.” She offers him a rue smile. “You were right, I wasn’t surprised. And I am happy for you.”

As they streak past the back of the Welcome to Hawkins! sign, he squeezes her hand. “I love you, too,” he tells her, and he knows that he won’t break a single thing.