Chapter Text
“You can’t be serious.”
“I am very much serious, young man, and I’d start now, if I were you. Unless you’d like to join Nancy in the garage?”
Mike groans, just barely stifling the urge to kick the sofa. He’s pissed off enough as is without a stubbed toe to match, and besides, he really doesn’t want to clean the garage; he’s pretty sure there are at least two tons worth of rat poop in there and he doesn’t want to deal with Nancy’s borderline dictatorial cleaning style. She’s been extra tetchy ever since learning the Byers’, Jonathan specifically, would be staying at their house for the time being, and for her “extra tetchy” is essentially just mania in a trenchcoat.
The real thing bothering him, of course, isn’t that he’s being forced to clean the basement. Well, that’s not exactly a plus, but it could be worse (see: garage). The actual reason he’s in such a terrible mood is that he shouldn’t need to clean the basement in the first place when his bedroom is a perfectly fine size to accommodate two people, not to mention a hell of a lot warmer, and Will probably doesn’t want to share with Jonathan anyways, and it’d be easier for the two of them to be in the same place, and Mike can make sure that Will is safe, because he’s probably having a hard time being back in Hawkins, and it’s drafty down here, besides, and–
“Michael!”
“I’m going, I’m going,” he grunts on instinct, grabbing the first thing he sees, which happens to be a plastic popcorn bowl lined with kernels that could be anywhere from a month to two years old. He wrinkles his nose. No one has spent much time down here recently, not since high school started and the party seemed to break apart in Will’s absence, only held together by cafeteria lunches and Hellfire sessions with Eddie in the old Spanish classroom no one used with the leaky pipes. The air smells musty, untouched, and the room as a whole feels stale, like a childhood toy left in the shed too long. The couch bed is lumpy, which Mike knows firsthand from many a sleepover, and he doubts the twin mattress they’ve dragged down from the attic is any better. The squat windows do little to illuminate the dust motes floating through the air, what with it being so dreary and gray outside. It isn’t exactly welcoming.
Which is extra sad, he thinks as he gathers up the broken crayons and old blankets strewn across the floor, because this place used to be home, once. He used to spend more time down here than he did in his own room, playing D&D with the party and having movie nights and playing make-believe. Will’s childhood drawings are still plastered across every square inch of wall, the only blank spots being behind the TV and along the side of the stairs. He absentmindedly brushes the back of his hand against a loving rendition of the Byers’ old dog, Chester, as a dragon. He replaced the masking tape holding them up not too long ago, as the old strips had lost their stickiness and were beginning to peel, but the age of the paper is clear from the way the worn-soft edges curl upwards.
He’s so caught up in nostalgia that he jumps about a foot in the air when he hears his mother call for dinner from the depths of the house. He hasn’t made as much progress as Karen Wheeler would probably prefer; there’s still a few cobwebs in the darker corners and the coffee table could use a wipedown, but he’s sure Jonathan and Will have bigger things to worry about than their living situation.
Taking the stairs two at a time, Mike hardly manages to hold back a long-suffering sigh when he enters the dining room and the only seat left is sandwiched between his father and Holly; the latter of which is currently going through a pinching stage and seems to have chosen Mike as her favorite target. The table is extra crowded with the number of occupants, the foldout chairs from the closet squeezed against the corners, and everyone’s plates are so close together that he’s pretty sure if the water pitcher gets knocked over it’ll flood straight into the meatloaf.
Frowning as he shimmies his way into place, he pokes halfheartedly at the instant mashed potatoes and tries to ignore Holly’s swinging feet knocking against his legs. The Wheeler family have always had dinner together as a rule, which Mike hated even as a kid, but on the nights Will would sleep over, it felt almost bearable, the two of them giggling as they competed over who could shovel the most peas onto Ted Wheeler’s plate without him noticing. Now, it feels like Will is an ocean away even though he’s right across from Mike, staring into the bottom of his cup and refusing to make eye contact. Jonathan guards him like an unmoving sentinel, glaring at Mike even while he chews, missing every other bite and jabbing his own cheek with his fork instead. The majority of the chatter is coming from Mike's mother, who is almost impressively committed to pretending all of this is normal, and Joyce, who is equally as committed to humoring her.
Disregarding Jonathan’s increasing attempts to burn a hole through the side of his head through sheer will alone, Mike watches Will as attentively as he can manage, scanning his face as if he can find the answers to his friend's dogged silence if he only looks hard enough. Will’s hair has grown longer in the past few weeks they’ve been back in Hawkins, edging from bowlcut territory into something more shaggy and handsomely tousled. It suits him. His shoulders are broader, his legs longer, his skin still clinging to the golden tan it had gotten from the California sun. His lashes cast long shadows across his cheeks, hiding round hazel eyes kaleidoscoped with brown and green and gold specks. He’s started wearing an old jacket of Jonathan’s lately, something blue and yellow with a red collar, and seems to carry it with him wherever he goes. Mike wonders if it’s warm enough, if it protects him from the persistent chill brought on by the Upside Down’s intrusion into Hawkins.
The Byers had been staying in Hopper’s newly refurbished cabin, but as time went by it became increasingly obvious that such a small space was in no way suited for five people, and it was suspicious for them all to be going in and out of the woods so often anyway. Mike suspects Joyce will still find a way to split her time between the two buildings pretty evenly, but as far as he’s aware Jonathan has been following Will like a watchdog, and doesn’t seem too inclined towards letting him go that far across town very often. At least that’s one thing they can agree on, though in Mike’s case it’s more about wanting Will close than thinking he can’t handle himself. He knows how Will feels about being treated like glass, and, well— as worried as he gets, as many hours as he spends agonizing about his best friend’s safety, he also knows that keeping him cooped up like he’s on house arrest isn’t going to help.
Speaking of being best friends, and knowing people, Mike feels like he’s failing spectacularly at both as of late. He’d thought things between him and Will would get better since their conversations, and they have, but only in the sense that Will seems less actively miserable around him and more resigned, like he’s come to accept some inherently disappointing part of Mike that he himself can’t see, much less figure out how to fix. He’s still avoiding being alone together, and every time Mike tries to catch him in conversation, or at the very least a shared moment of commiseration– like right now– he finds an inanimate object in the room and gives it all of his attention. It’s endlessly frustrating, and Mike can’t figure out what he needs to do, what he needs to say, for things to just be normal. He doesn’t want to push too hard, but all this sitting around on his hands and waiting for Will to come to him is becoming more excruciating as the days go on. He’d hoped they could rectify whatever’s been going on with the Byers moving in, but then his hopes of Will staying in his room had been summarily quashed, his mother insisting that the boys “needed their space,” despite literally everyone knowing that Jonathan would be sneaking up to Nancy’s room every night, no doubt.
Dinner passes without so much as a word from Will, and the food tastes like ash in Mike’s mouth. Holly regales them with a story about some asshole kid at her school trying to push her off the swings, and Joyce practically leaps out of her seat to help Karen with the dishes. The moment Will gets up, Mike rushes to do the same, only to get stuck between his father and the side of his chair, stumbling his way through an awkward shimmy past and ignoring Ted Wheeler’s shout of alarm when he accidentally knocks him in the shoulder with an elbow. He’s in the home stretch, already reaching out to catch Will by the wrist, when he’s suddenly blocked by a looming flannel and the lingering smell of weed.
“Where are you going?” Jonathan has had the disappointed-but-not-surprised look perfected for a long time, but Mike doesn’t think he’s ever experienced it as much as he has these past few months. Desperate, he tries to peek around him, but the basement door is already closing and Jonathan is blocking the way forward with that jut of his chin that means Mike isn’t getting through.
“I thought you might need help,” Mike tries anyway, trying to keep the pleading tone out of his voice. It’s a step above outright anger, but he doubts it’ll be received any better. “With, y’know, unpacking and stuff. Since you guys are…moving. It’ll make things faster.”
Jonathan levels him with an unimpressed expression, shaking his head before Mike even finishes speaking. “We’ve got it covered.”
Mike grits his teeth, fingernails biting into his palms with frustration. He knows he doesn’t manage to keep it from bleeding into his tone this time; he can tell because Jonathan’s eyes narrow into slits, like this is just another fatal mistake in a long line of other fatal mistakes Mike Wheeler has made while daring to try and interact with his brother. It’s infuriating. Mike always liked Jonathan as a kid, saw him as a worthy substitute when Mike himself wasn’t there to protect Will, but as of late he’s become nothing short of a thorn in his side, absolutely relentless in his mission to prevent Mike from so much as looking at his brother. “Well, another set of hands couldn’t hurt,” Mike grinds out, haunches raised as he tries to push past, only to be stopped again when Jonathan moves to the side to better block the way through. Mike’s about to make a mad dash to the left and sprint down the stairs, manners be damned, when Nancy calls over to him from the table, words laced with irritation. “Mike! Come help clear the dishes!”
He doesn’t bother hiding his annoyance this time, scowling darkly as he whips around and storms back to the table, snatching up dirty plates with an aggression so intense that his mother chides him for being too rough with the glassware. He hardly hears her, too busy stewing in his own self-pity. Jonathan is so angry with him for messing up, but Mike can’t fix it if Jonathan doesn’t let him. Besides, who said he gets to make the choices for Will anyways? Last Mike checked, Will was his own person. Jonathan isn’t helping by lashing out at the people who actually understand him.
Still, Mike can’t exactly do anything about it with his mother’s new insistence on them helping with chores around the house, and he doesn’t think it’s worth it to force his way downstairs when the entire point was to talk with Will alone, not with Jonathan hovering like a helicopter mom the entire time. He kicks at a chair leg for good measure anyways, yelping and hopping up and down on his good foot when he’s left with a stubbed toe for his troubles. So much for holding back earlier. Nancy eyes him with something approaching concern, but ultimately doesn’t say anything. Thank God. Mike’s not sure he can handle another meddling older sibling.
***
Mike isn’t sure what time it is when he lurches out of bed with a gasp, damp with sleep-sweat and shivering all over, but he can tell it’s late because he can’t see shit and he’s caught in the throes of a deepseated panic that only arises after a glimpse of Will’s pale, water-bloated corpse being lifted out of the quarry. It used to haunt him nightly, back in the beginning, visions of blue and red lights illuminating the forest in gaudy pop-art colors, rain slicking the handlebars of his bike and mingling with the tears in his eyes. Now, his bad dreams are interspersed with a variety of other horrors: Max, suspended midair as her bones snap, Lucas beaten bloody with no one to save him, El strapped down in a lab with electrodes stuck to her shaved head, Nancy speared through by Vecna’s claws. If it’s any mixture of gruesome, hopeless, and bizarre, he’s seen it. But Will seems to star almost exclusively in the majority of his nightmares, a fucked up celebrity cameo over and over again. Every time they get better and he’s able to sleep a full eight hours, something new happens, like Will’s possession or the Mind Flayer at Starcourt, and suddenly he’s up all night again like nothing changed.
He’s developed a weird sort of fight-or-flight mechanism that doesn’t actually do anything besides leave him standing on shaky legs, poised to fight or run or do something other than stay frozen panting for air, leaving him hot with shame at his own inability to just grow up. Almost every person in his life has gone through terrors unimaginable to him, things he knows he wouldn’t survive in a million years, yet he’s still freaking out over the most trivial things. He can’t watch any of the Ghostbusters movies without feeling a heavy sense of dread. His grades plummet every November. For a good six months after the Byers’ moved, he chewed on his pencils so relentlessly that his mouth always tasted like wood shavings. His mind is little more than a hoarder’s house of the things he doesn’t think about, always bursting at the seams.
He’s gone through a plethora of increasingly desperate coping skills to deal with nightmares, with lukewarm success at best. White noise doesn’t do anything except make him paranoid he won’t be able to hear danger, eye masks have him thinking he’s been blinded by a Demogorgon for a good five minutes after he’s woken up, and working himself to exhaustion just has him trapped in dreams he’s too tired to escape from. The only thing that’s worked with any sort of consistency is the small nightlight he’d stolen from Holly’s room after she professed she was too old for one anymore, and he’d moved that to the basement yesterday afternoon in the hope that Will would use it if he didn’t have to ask for it.
Now, his chest feels tight and his skin is covered in goosebumps, and he knows there will be dark circles under his eyes come morning. There’s no way he’s getting back to sleep at this rate, and without any light to read by or at least cling to for some semblance of comfort, every shadow looks like a monster. He stares at the heap of clothes on his desk chair for a terrified two minutes, frozen in place and convinced there’s something there, before he finally manages to move his feet from the ground and run past so fast he almost slips and falls facefirst on the carpet. Luckily, he somehow manages to get out his bedroom door and down the stairs to the kitchen without breaking any bones, dodging the creaky parts of the steps.
The room looks washed out and colorless in the dark, the tiles cold under his bare feet as he mechanically grabs a glass from the cupboard and fills it in the sink. His sleep shirt is sticking to the sweaty skin of his back, and he shifts uncomfortably. He doesn’t know what to do with his hands. His legs are aching, but he doesn’t want to sit on the floor, and something in his hindbrain is convinced that moving to the living room is going to leave him exposed. Instead, he stands with eyes glued to the red glow of the digital clock above the stove, hunched over and trembling intermittently.
It doesn’t help. There isn’t enough to distract him down here, now that the adrenaline of moving has passed, and he can feel his nightmare sneaking up on him from behind like a spectre. The water tastes metallic mixed with the blood from where he’s been gnawing at his lower lip. Will is staring at him with white marbles for eyes, dark veins pulsing beneath the pallid skin of his neck, fingernails broken and slick with crimson like he’s dug himself out of a grave. Mike is rushing towards the basement and has his hand on the doorknob before he can even blink, breaths rattling in and out of his chest so quickly that he feels lightheaded.
There’s a brief moment where he wonders if it’s really a good idea to barge into where Will is sleeping in the middle of the night, but reason is easily overruled by the primal need he feels crawling up his throat, telling him he has to check, he has to be sure, because what if Will is gone and he isn’t doing anything to stop it? What if it’s happening all over again, and Mike is curled up in bed like nothing’s wrong, like they’re twelve years old and he’s failing to keep Will safe like he always promised he would? He can’t do that to Will. He’s the protector, the paladin, the heart. Will can run away from him to the ends of the earth, avoid him like the plague, push him away over and over, and that won’t change. Mike won’t let it.
Predictably, the basement is dark, even darker than the kitchen since the windows are so much smaller. The nightlight isn’t on. Mike’s heart is in his throat, convinced he was right, that Will was taken after all, and he’s about to sound the alarm, wake up the rest of the house, when his eyes adjust and he hears the steady rhythm of breathing. In, out, in again. It soothes him like a balm, because he could recognize Will’s breathing anywhere. It’s like all the fight drains out of him, and he’s slumping against the top of the banister, head lolling against his own shoulder as he watches the ever so slight rise and fall of the figure silhouetted on the sofa bed. His heartbeat slows in his ears, his fists unclench, and suddenly he’s just in his house, sitting at the top of the basement stairs at four in the morning. There’s no one else in the room other than he and Will, Jonathan having escaped to the second floor at some point earlier in the night. Nothing can get in or out without Mike noticing, not like this. If Will so much as twitches wrong, he’ll be there to help him in an instant.
He’s safe. Mike will make sure of it.
***
He startles awake to a phlegm-y snort a couple hours later, jolting so hard that he bangs his head against the railing he’d been leaning against. Hissing and bringing his fingers up to the tender spot on his scalp, he freezes when the noises stop before slow, heavy footfalls approach from behind, and he scrambles to open the basement door, stumbling outwards and just barely avoiding slamming it shut behind him.
Ted Wheeler stares at him with bleary eyes, silver hair riddled with cowlicks in a truly impressive bedhead. His glasses are lopsided and there are red creases along his face where it must’ve been pressed snoring into his pillow. They stare at each other for a moment, Mike’s cheeks steadily flushing, before he ducks his head down and rushes past, practically bolting up the stairs and back to his own room without even a word of exclamation. Heart pounding, he locks the door and throws himself on his bed, groaning with embarrassment. He isn’t usually a fan of his father’s unobservant nature, but hopefully this time it’ll come in handy and Ted won’t say anything; barring that, he’s probably so tired he didn’t even register what just happened. Because– what did just happen? He found his own son crouched and spying on Will Byers like an absolute creep? Mike shudders all over with shame, stomach curdling in self-disgust. There’s a crick in his neck and his ass is numb from sleeping sitting up. A worthy penance for his own bad decisions. God, what is wrong with him?
Breakfast is a similar affair to dinner, albeit a bit more rowdy with everyone yelling across the table to pass the bacon or the salt. Ted looks disgruntled more than anything that there isn’t enough space on the table to read the newspaper. Breakfast is not something the Wheelers usually have together, and Mike isn’t sure how he feels about the change. It’s nice that Will is here, he supposes, but he isn’t any more talkative than he was last night. At least he’s eating something, drizzling syrup over his eggs and tucking in; that’s better than the miserable sort of prodding at his food he was doing last night. Mike is stuck between Holly and Joyce this time, the former of which is bordering on ecstatic about the fact that school is canceled for the foreseeable future. Mike chances a glance out the window and grimaces at the blanket of ash coating the grass, clouds heavy and looming. He’s sure the district will be back to acting as if everything is normal again soon. The military has already done a bang-up job at slapping sheets of metal over the gates spanning Hawkins like bandaids over open wounds, and just the other day, Mike overheard two old women grumbling about ‘the weather these days’. He can’t tell if it’s better than the alternative. He doesn’t want everyone to feel the same panic he does, following him like a second shadow, but at the same time, he wants to grip the cashier at the grocery store by the shoulders and just shake. This isn’t normal! You’re all in danger! Why are you acting like all of this is okay? For a town that accepted a stuffed body identical to Will Byers without a second thought and blamed every gruesome death from the past three years on a senior in high school, he guesses he shouldn’t be surprised.
He’s wiping at a stubborn spot of jam stuck to the counter (why his mom decided now is the best time to rope the rest of the family into house chores, he isn’t sure) when Will, Nancy, and Jonathan pass by in a neat little line to the front door, bundled up in jackets and scarves even though it’s late August. Jonathan looks grumpy, Will even more so, and the two of them keep trading stubborn glares when the others’ back is turned. Nancy is clearly exhausted, her dark hair lank around her face in frizzy ringlets and foundation hastily slapped on to hide the bags under her eyes. She’s wearing some ungodly combination of leggings and a patterned shirt with one of Jonathan’s flannels thrown on top. Mike is about to follow when his mother gives him a sharp look and points aggressively at a ring of flour on the butcher block. Heaving a sigh, he goes back to sullenly moving the wet rag in sluggish circles, mind a million miles away.
When he was younger, Mike always thought that adults and older kids were from another planet. They didn’t care about anything important, they weren’t any fun, and they seemed to operate under some mysterious set of rules that nobody else understood. That was what made the Party so important; they got it. Mike didn’t need to be worried about crossing some invisible line every time he spoke, because they were the same. When he said something, they heard it, and vice versa.
He used to be scared he’d become just like Nancy and all her friends one day, but now he’s terrified that the opposite might be true. That he’s been the alien all along and he just didn’t know it. As everyone grew older, started to follow those godforsaken rules that it still seems everyone but him has access to, Mike lagged behind. He overcompensated for nights spent tossing and turning over the prospect of never playing D&D anymore by filling his summer with El and kissing and having a girlfriend, because that was what he was expected to do. He couldn’t please his father by being into sports, or his mother by getting good grades, or his friends by being normal and well-adjusted. He felt like he was playing a role in a movie without a script, like he was missing every line, every table read. El was easy because she knew even less than he did, but he’d look at Will and how his jaw was getting sharper and his legs longer and his voice deeper and think I’m being left behind. Every interaction was a minefield, every conversation a losing game, and he became antsy whenever someone looked at him for too long. His palms were always too sweaty during movie nights and he felt nauseous when he thought about growing up. He’d lashed out at Will because Will could miss the golden days of childhood and be normal about it; he could roll his eyes at talks of girls and crushes, change in the locker room without turning firetruck red, talk to his mom and his brother without pissing someone off every time he opened his mouth. He could still go to the arcade and dress up in his Will the Wise costume and he would still be Will. Mike couldn’t do any of those things without feeling like he was trying to crawl back into a skin he’d unwittingly shed long ago, one that didn’t fit like he wanted it to.
It didn’t matter, anyways. All his best efforts to act like he wasn’t drowning under the tide of what he couldn’t understand only resulted in him pushing his only life rafts away. He’d hurt Will, ruined their friendship, treated El like a cure to all his problems, and it had just made things worse. Will had gone on without him regardless. Mike had been trying so hard to let go, but really, he was holding on so tightly that he left claw marks on the things he loved.
Time passes by torturously slow. There’s nothing to do, no one to talk to with Will gone, and he can’t even be comforted by Joyce’s presence, because she’s left the house on an errand run during which Mike suspects she’ll just meet up with Hopper and El. The rest of the party is probably already at the cabin, barring Lucas, who’s been all but living in Max’s hospital room. Mike wants to visit, but the thought of seeing another one of his friends pale and sickly and unresponsive without the buffer of all the others to cushion the impact makes him feel dizzy with something he doesn’t want to name.
Instead, he spends the rest of his day listlessly trailing through the hallways of the house he grew up in like a ghost. His mom is worried about him, he can tell, because she keeps shooting him looks and trying to give him free time instead of extra tasks, which Mike hates even more because at least cleaning means he has something to do besides haunt his own damn room. He can’t bring himself to go down to the basement, because suddenly the idea of doing so makes him feel bare and vulnerable, and it’d be weird, anyways, considering it’s essentially Will’s room for the time being. At the same time, it draws him in like a siren’s call, and he keeps finding his loops around the first floor ending with his fist poised to knock at the door like there’s someone there to answer him.
He isn’t really hungry come lunch, but at this point Karen looks like she’s about to call a psychiatrist and his father is giving him an impressive stink eye after he’d accidentally woken him up while walking through the living room, so he eats. The ham sandwich his mom makes him feels dry and each bite sticks to the roof of his mouth. When dinner rolls around and everyone begins to trickle back into the house, he can’t take his eyes off Will, as if he’s suddenly lost all object permanence except the other way around, because he doesn’t feel like he exists in the room unless Will is in it.