Chapter Text
The moment Will opens his eyes, all he can see is red. Red rock soaked in red mud, red vapour misting over once-white sneakers, red creepers coiling, snake-like, around his ankles.
Thunder rumbles above him, bringing with it a slow, sticky dread as Will blinks his way to awareness. His shoulders ache from where his arms are spread above his head, bound at the wrists by cold, slimy tendrils. Slowly, he raises his head, wincing at the stiffness in his neck.
Before him, he sees the thing that woke him: a broken grandfather clock, chiming discordantly. It floats in the distance, backdropped by gathering storm clouds in the red, red sky. Bits and pieces of the Creel house are sprayed over the landscape like an explosion frozen in time, with gnarled, dead tree trunks stabbing through the empty spaces.
And then—
Mike.
Ice runs down his spine.
Mike is just a few feet away from him, tethered to a thick trunk. Like Will, his arms are spread, suspended on either side by taut vines that hang from the branches of the tree, with more vines coiling around his ankles at the roots. But the worst thing, the thing that makes Will’s breath catch in his lungs, is the collection of vines as thick as his wrists, wrapping around Mike’s neck.
“No,” Will breathes.
“Oh, yes,” says a booming voice filled with gravel, and he feels the sickening crawl of goosebumps rising over the back of his neck. His head turns slowly toward the sound, and his heart nearly stops when he sees him.
Vecna emerges from the floating debris, the ropes of his skin slithering and winding around him like living things. As he grows closer, Will can hear them—the vines, they’re vines—crackling wetly in time with the ones around his own arms, like they’re all moving in tandem.
Will straightens against whatever surface he’s bound to and forces steel into his voice as he says, “Let him go.”
Vecna keeps moving toward him like he hadn’t spoken, his eyes milky blue and void of emotion. Then he stops between him and Mike, and looks at Mike over his shoulder.
“Don’t,” Will says, his voice trembling now despite himself. “Don’t touch him.”
Vecna raises a hand toward Mike and clenches his fist in the air.
Mike begins to choke in his sleep. The vines around his neck tighten, and the sound of his gagging and struggling sends a rocket of horror through Will as he flings himself against his bonds.
“Stop!” He screams. “Please, stop!”
Vecna unclenches his fist, and Mike slumps, wheezing, as the vines loosen their hold. He hangs there, somehow still unconscious, his inky hair plastered to his pale forehead.
It had only been a few seconds, but it felt like a lifetime, and Will takes in a shuddering breath as hot tears skip down his cheeks.
In the corner of his eye, Vecna cocks his head curiously as he looks at him. “So…upset.”
No shit, Will wants to scream, but he’s frozen with fear, with dread, with the knowledge that this monster, this thing, could take Mike’s life with a wave of his hand.
“So very upset,” he continues. There’s a pause as he observes Will in his peripheral vision. “When he wakes…I want you to tell him.”
Will’s eyes snap toward him, his stomach bottoming out. “What?”
“I want you to tell him why you're so upset," Vecna says, and Will swears he sees the curl of a smile in the webbed scars of his face. “I want to watch you lose him.”
Then he turns, slowly, and starts toward Mike.
Will’s fists clench as he lurches against the vines again. He growls in frustration, his heart beginning to hammer as Vecna blocks Mike from view. He raises his gnarled hand above Mike’s head, and before Will can even scream, he hears Mike gasp like he’s surfaced from under water.
“Mike!” Will calls desperately, but Mike has launched into a coughing fit, and when it subsides, Vecna steps out of the way just in time for Will to see the grimace of pain on Mike’s face as he leans his head back against the tree.
“Mike?” Will says, panicked. “Mike, are you okay?”
“Will?” he rasps. He tips his head forward, opening his eyes. Before he can properly take in Will, his gaze darts to Vecna still towering beside him. Even in the blood-red hues of this place, Will can see his face pale even further.
Mike’s eyes whip back to Will, raking over him like he’s checking for injuries. He strains against his bonds, grunting. When he gives up, his eyes are wide and filling with dread, like an animal caught in a trap.
Will hates that look on his face so intensely that he looks away, looking into Vecna’s horrible eyes instead.
“You—you can take me,” Will says, his voice trembling. “You can do whatever you want, just please let him go.”
“Will,” Mike says.
Vecna begins to move, slow and deliberate, toward Will. But when he speaks, his words aren't for him. “Do you see, Michael, how he tries to save you? How he cries for you. How he wishes to sacrifice himself for you.”
A whirlwind kicks up in Will’s stomach, making him nauseous. He knows what Vecna intends to do. He didn’t expect anything less.
Vecna raises a crooked finger, places the sharp point of his nail at Will’s temple.
“Hey, leave him alone!” Mike yells.
Will doesn’t breathe as Vecna trails his fingernail, featherlight, down his cheek.
“Tell him why, William,” he says, his voice like rubble and glass.
“Get your hands off him, you bastard!” Mike screams from somewhere behind him, grunting as he struggles against his bonds.
The sharpened point of Vecna's nail rests at Will’s jaw as his cataract eyes bore into his, and Will has to suppress a shiver. He closes his eyes, swallows against his heart in his throat.
“He’s my best friend.”
“No,” Vecna growls, making Will flinch. His finger curls, the nail digging deeper into his skin. “Tell him the real reason.”
Will hears him step away, leaving only a sting on Will's face. He opens his eyes to see Mike, whose face is scrunched up in fury as he stares daggers at Vecna.
“What the hell are you saying?” Mike spits at him.
Tell him, Vecna says again, and this time Will knows that the gravelly voice grinding through his head is only for him. Or I will flay him alive.
Mike's eyes dart back to Will, and the horror must show on Will’s face, because there’s a wary uncertainty smoothing out the rage on his own. “Will, what’s going on?”
He’s staring back at him, his brow tightening. Will knows that if he could, if he wasn’t pinned by the vines, he’d be shaking his head in that way he does when he’s trying to ask Will what’s wrong without words. But words are failing Will just the same, and when he opens his mouth, nothing comes out.
Then, the panicked widening of Mike’s eyes. A horrible choking noise as the tendrils around his neck begin to tighten, slamming his head back against the tree. He thrusts his chin into the air, wheezing as he tries to suck in a breath.
“No. No, stop!” Will screams, straining his neck to look Vecna in the eye, as if it’ll make any fucking difference. “Just stop! I…I’ll do it! I’ll tell him, just please—”
His voice breaks off.
This has to be a nightmare. It has to be. It can’t happen like this.
But when he squeezes his eyes shut and opens them again, they’re still in Hell, and Mike is still choking, and Will—
Will won't watch him die. He won't.
He will do anything.
"Mike," he says roughly, and Vecna must feel his renewed determination, because the tendrils at Mike’s throat slither back just slightly, letting him gasp and cough as he sucks in air.
Relief flushes through Will for only a moment. Then Mike’s recovered, his head hanging forward and his eyes dragging up to Will’s from under his lashes, and the relief is just as quickly snuffed out by the tumbling dread of what he’s about to do.
“You already know,” Will says quietly. It’s not a question—it’s a plea. “Mike, tell me you already know so I don’t have to say it.”
He didn’t know he could sound like that, so ragged and despairing. Mike must wonder at it too, because his eyes are turning into those round pools of concern, that same look that he’s directed at Will so many times before, like he’s the only thing in the whole goddamn universe; the look that Will has never felt he deserved.
Mike catches his breath and says, so gently despite the fresh hoarseness of his voice that it might actually drive Will insane: “Will, what…?” He shakes his head as best he can and starts again. “Just tell me, okay? Just tell me whatever, and then we’ll kick this fucker’s ass from here to the edge of the Upside Down, all right? It’ll be okay.”
the heart the heart the heart, Will thinks. Even in here, even tortured and bound and fearing for his life, he is the heart.
It takes everything in Will’s power not to sob. His next words sit like a grenade on his tongue, his hammering heartbeat threatening to set them off. It’s suicide, it’s suicide, it’s worse than suicide—
But he remembers the vines tightening around Mike’s neck, remembers that horrible noise he made when he was trying to suck in air, and he can’t watch that again. He can’t.
So he says, just loud enough to be heard above the rumbling thunder: “I love you.”
And Mike—
Mike furrows his brow like he’s trying to solve a particularly stubborn math equation.
“I mean…” Mike says, “I love you, too, man. You’re my best friend, you know that.”
Will feels a hot tear trickle down his cheek. His chin wobbles dangerously. “Not like that, Mike.”
Mike’s mask of confusion and concern twitches, just a little. Will knows it isn’t full comprehension of what he’s said, not yet.
What Will thinks he sees on Mike’s face at that moment is the first stage of grief:
Denial.
Keep going, Vecna booms through his head again. He’s disappeared from Will’s line of sight, but Will can feel him looming somewhere behind him. Tell him.
Mike is staring at him, waiting, his eyebrows still knitted in confusion. Will feels stripped down to the bone. He feels, in this moment, like he’s never going to recover. And maybe that—the knowing that this is the end, that he’s lost everything and nothing he does now can change that—is the only reason the words start pouring out of him almost uncontrollably now, like a runaway train.
“I love you like—like Jonathan loves Nancy, and like Lucas loves Max, and Dustin loves Suzie, and like you—” his voice breaks. “Like you love El. All the ways I’m not supposed to. And I never would have told you because you’re the most important…Mike, you’re the most important thing in my whole life. You always have been, and the thought of losing that…the thought of losing everything? I never would have risked that, not for anything, you have to believe me. I only ever wanted you to be happy and I would have died—I would have died before I ruined this, and I’m so sorry, Mike, I’m so sorry—”
He does sob this time, cutting himself off. He squeezes his eyes shut and shakes his head and he wants to scream, he wants to wail, he wants to rip Vecna’s head off his neck with his bare hands, he wants to do anything but open his eyes again and see the look he knows is on Mike’s face: the look of disgust, of disbelief, of outrage. The look that’s never going to go away when he looks at him.
The silence stretches on so long, too long, and not even the crack of thunder in the distance or that horrible chiming of the Creel house clock is enough to fill it, until—
“You’re a real piece of shit, you know that?”
Will feels a dagger driving into his heart, and his eyes fly open as all the blood leaves his face.
But Mike isn't looking at him. Mike is looking beyond Will, to where Vecna is likely looming behind him, proud as a cat with a mouse between its teeth.
Mike’s voice is a quiet, dangerous thing, shaking with rage as he says, “And I’m going to kill you. I’m going to rip your fucking head off, asshole, just wait. Just wait—”
For the first time, Vecna laughs, and the sound is like rocks in a blender.
“How you’ve upset him, William,” he says, the smile in his voice making Will squirm in his shame.
“No, fuck you,” Mike spits, lurching against the vines. “Fuck you, you know that’s not—”
The rest of Mike’s words are drowned out by a strange, warbling sound, flooding across the sky. It reminds Will, briefly, of a voice from a tin can on the end of a string, but quickly resolves into something else, something familiar that makes his heart leap against his ribs.
It’s a guitar. A looping, flanging guitar, the melody gentle and dreamlike even as it echoes as eerily as everything else through this place. Will’s eyes dart to Mike’s face despite himself, but Mike is looking at the sky, his eyes wide and his lips parting slowly.
A drum beat rolls in, shaking the world around them. Just as a drawn out synthesizer hums through Will’s bones, Mike laughs. A short, high-pitched giggle, drunk with astonishment, and it’s the best thing Will has ever heard.
“Holly,” Mike says, and he breathes another laugh as his shining eyes meet Will’s. “It’s Holly.”