Archive of Our Own ^beta

This is Will's favorite time of day: dusk, with the sun kissing the horizon, about to disappear below it. The sky in hues of orange and maybe a little purple, reflecting gold on the buildings of the city. A shining reflection on the Hudson, if he's in the right place at the right time.

(The truth, though? He usually isn't. This is one of his many secrets.)

It tends to be quiet around this time, too. He knows home is a busy city, and it definitely never sleeps, but there's something a little unifying in thinking that everyone takes a moment to breathe every day, just once, maybe at the same time. A reminder that everyone has at least one thing in common — like an appreciation for beautiful sunsets.

" — Will? Hellooooo! Spidey! Come in, Spider-Man!"

Will yelps at the noise, loses his balance, and tips off the edge of the rooftop.

"Jesus. What's the point of the comms system if you're gonna ignore me anyway? Are you dead? You better be dead if you're not — "

"I copy! I copy. I'm here." He's out of breath, for sure, but sue him. He's upside-down, webs sticking to the underside of a lion statue hanging off the top of a taller-than-average contribution to the New York City skyline. "Sorry. I got distracted."

"Distracted? Doing what?"

Jane cuts in. "I bet you he is ogling the skyline again."

"Ohhhhh," says Dustin, like that makes all the sense in the world, drawing out the word for way longer than necessary. "He's arting out. Got it."

Will groans. "That's not a word."

"Okay, sure. You're right. Hey, you know what is a word? Robbery! Robbery on — "

Dustin fires off an address, but the display behind Will's mask is already computing the fastest route. He pitches forward, somersaulting in mid-air until he's rightside-up, and extends a hand to aim webbing at the next ledge.

So maybe he doesn't get as long of a break as he'd like. That's the business, and it's been that way since he put the suit on for the first time. He doesn't mind it; in fact, Will loves it. There's no better feeling.

That is, of course, until a fleshy gateway opens up on the side of a building and bodies tumble out onto the concrete.

=

It starts when Will is fifteen, a sophomore in high school, and on a class-wide field trip to CreelCorp.

The morning is his typical routine: get up, grab breakfast, wait for Dustin's mom to pick him up on the corner. On lucky days they take the subway, but when Mom's doing her overnights she likes to stay on the safe side. They get to Hawkins Tech twenty minutes before first bell, split ways to their lockers, meet back up in the cafeteria.

"Dude, I'm telling you, we're about to see some real freaky shit in there." Dustin's been saying this for a week now, ever since they got their permission slips signed and turned in. "There's rumors that there are entire underground labs accessing alternate dimensions underneath the building. All the basic bitch science stuff is just a front for funding."

Will has never really cared about conspiracy theories, so he's only half-paying attention, both in the cafeteria and on the bus to get there. Science and tech aren't really his areas of expertise, not the way Dustin's passionate about it. That was always the joke, though: he's right-brained, and his best friend is left-brained, so together they could do anything.

Besides: Lucas brought a stack of comics for the bus ride, since Max's mom didn't sign her permission slip, so Mike and Dustin's superhero fascination will be enough to convince Jane to read at least one or two. This means Will can look out the window on the bus, let his right-brained imagination follow the blur of the trees and the falling leaves, and let Mike nudge him when he wants to show him something important.

(Anything gets thrown out the window on the CreelCorp tour, because here's another one of Will's secrets: halfway through the field trip, he shivers, feels something crawling on the back of his neck, feels something bite — and this is the moment Will's life is changed forever.)

=

"You're late, Byers. Again."

By less than a minute, Will wants to protest, but with the look that Nancy is giving him, he knows it's better to hold his tongue. Instead, he holds up the paper bag in his hand, holding it out like an olive branch. "I brought apology bagels?"

This softens her schooled expression, but only a little. Nancy Wheeler runs The Daily Post like a well-oiled machine; it's terrifying and impressive all at once. She takes the offered bag with a satisfied nod. "Okay, fine Forgiven, today, but — "

"Oh, shit, bagels!"

The only person slightly more terrifying than Nancy Wheeler might be her brother. Mike is almost the complete opposite; loud where she's quiet, long-limbed and pointy, chaotic and disorganized and fortuitous, especially where Will's concerned. He swoops in, invading the crevice of space between Will and Nancy's desk, shoulder and arm brushing against him as Mike reaches inside the bag. Nancy is unsurprised and unimpressed; Will's ears feel ridiculously warm.

Mike's smile is blinding when he finally stops making contact and being so, so close, holding a slightly-smashed bagel in a free hand, waving in greeting with the other. "Hi. Morning. You're the best!"

He's gone as quickly as he arrived, and Nancy's exasperation is now brother-based instead of focused on Will. "Asshole!" she calls after his quickly-receding form, crossing her arms, and Will takes this as his sign to slip back to his desk before he has to figure out what apology bakery item is next on the list.

=

That starts on a swingset in kindergarten, almost eighteen years ago, when Will is five, very shy, and sitting by himself during recess. Mike Wheeler slots himself into Will's life like he was always meant to be there — shuffles beside him, asks if he wants to be friends. He is the first friend Will ever makes, and they don't know it yet, but Mike will change his life forever.

Mike's also the reason Will has a job at the Post at all, and even though he still denies it, he's pretty sure there wasn't even a graphic designer position at the paper before Mike said something about it. Mike swoops in with coffee on Will's worst days and with lunch on unsuspecting ones. He hangs out at Will's desk until Nancy swats at him about deadlines. He wants to write a novel, and he swears he's working on it, but right now his career is based in investigative journalism. After all, New York City's got a handful of vigilantes to be fascinated about. And someone has to write their stories.

(And, well, Will has a few secrets from Mike. One: that he's the friendly neighborhood Spider-Man, and two: that Will is hopelessly in love with him. The latter happened long before the former, and that's almost exactly the reason why Will hasn't said anything at all, and probably never will.)

=

The first thing Will notices about the two new arrivals via strange fleshy portal is that they're both masked, dressed similarly to his own suit, and marked with spiders emblazoned across their chests.

The second is the feeling.

It's a familiar one — Dustin calls it his Spidey-sense, while Jane calls it their tingle. It makes him snap to attention immediately, and he finds that both of the visitors do the same thing.

"You're like me," he breathes.

"We are," says the Spider-person on the right, and she glances around them with a sense of urgency that starts to grow a pit in Will's stomach. She gestures to herself, and then her partner. "Ghost-Spider, Spider-Man. You got somewhere we can all speak? Privately?"

Will finds himself frowning. "But I'm Spider-Man."

He doesn't have to see Ghost-Spider's face to know that she's staring at him like he's an idiot. "You think you're the only one?"

"I got a location for you." Dustin's in his ear again, sing-song, and a route triangulates itself behind Will's eyes. "Follow the yellow brick road!"

Oh, thank God. "You're the best guy in the chair ever."

"I'm your only guy in the chair. And I'm doing twice the work, don't you forget, so we should really — "

"No time." Jane cuts in, always the eavesdropper. "I am en route. Meet you there."

Which is, officially, the beginning of the end. Again.

"A high school? Seriously?"

"It's spring break," Will tries, but all he's met with is an unimpressed pose, hands on hips. "Look, you wanted private. Our apartment's too small to fit all of us, and my mom's off work today, so that was out of the picture. And Dustin — "

"Hell-o! Secret identities, much?" It's much louder when Dustin interjects now, the audio feeding outward like a speaker instead. "Dude. Call me The Bard."

Will wants to die of embarrassment. "I'm not calling you that."

"You're Will Byers," says Ghost-Spider, and Will sort of wishes he could see the look on Dustin's face in this exact moment. "Spider-Man. Dustin Henderson is... The Bard, or whatever, I guess, and she's Jane Hopper, also known as Spinneret."

Jane's posture shifts enough that Will notes her surprise. She turns her head towards Will, tilting slightly, and behind the mask she asks, "And how do you know that?"

"Because," says her Spider-Man, dressed in red and black, and together they reach up to take their masks off at the same time. "We know you."

=

Max Mayfield enters when Will is thirteen years old.

She skateboards everywhere she goes; she doesn't care what anyone has to say about her. She has a shitty older brother, an equally shitty stepfather, and a slightly-absent mother. She's almost everything Will wants to be, and they become fast friends.

Will ends eighth grade with a solid friend group: Mike since kindergarten, Dustin and Lucas since first grade, and Max Mayfield, who joins their D&D sessions out of spite, often complaining about being the only girl in a group full of nerds. They're all-but fused together; Max gets less sleepover privileges than the rest of them, but constant begging wears their parents down eventually. When their first semester schedules of freshman year drop, they spend all day comparing, figuring out just how many friends they'll each have in their classes. Will would call each one of them his best friends individually and together, and never once has he ever felt like he didn't belong.

Max's complaints about being the only girl don't last very long, though, and neither does their solid number of five. She's the one to expand their circle within the first semester, in typical Max Mayfield fashion. She brings Jane Hopper into their friend group shortly after she sets her mind to it. Jane is the daughter of the chief of police, quiet, beautiful, shy. Will knows Mike's going to ask her out before it happens. They're officially boyfriend-and-girlfriend, one unit, by the time they're finishing freshman year at Hawkins Tech. She's their mage in their D&D group with a strange habit of rolling elevens, and the nickname sticks. And Will tries not to like her, really, because he's got the sick pit of jealousy in the bottom of his stomach, but Jane is incredibly hard to feel anything but love for — and just like that, six is the magic number.

=

It's been twenty minutes and Will can't stop seeing ghosts.

It's Max and it's Lucas, faces he hasn't seen in years. Jane is even more silent than usual, but she sniffles every once in a while in a way that tells him she's crying. They're waiting on Dustin to get here from his house, because he refused to believe it until he was seeing them with his own eyes.

Will doesn't blame him. He wouldn't, either.

"I — I don't understand," he says, and his throat feels so tight. "How are you here? How is this possible? I saw — we all saw — "

"I'm from another dimension." Max interrupts, stretching the fabric of her mask between her hands. She looks uncomfortable in a way Will recognizes. "A really shitty one, but definitely different. I was bitten by a radioactive spider, and… well. You know the rest."

But Will doesn't. He doesn't, because Jane's story is different than his, and Lucas apparently has powers, too, and his Max Mayfield died in his sister's arms six years ago. "And I'm — not." Lucas says, but he glances at Max when he says it. It's almost indistinguishable; her hair is shorter, curlier with the lack of length, but otherwise she looks exactly like Will remembers. Jane feels so far away. "I'm your Lucas, but it's… complicated?"

Jane speaks for the first time in twenty minutes. "So uncomplicate it."

Dustin gets there before anyone else can say anything else, and it's another terse handful of minutes. He remembers that summer; Will remembers the move, the goodbyes, the hugs that lingered on his skin for weeks. The Daily Post articles asking where New York's masked vigilantes had gone, but that the also-apparent defeat of the One meant a time of lasting peace for the city. Gratitude that had fallen flat in a failed attempt to fill the Max-shaped hole in their lives.

When Lucas speaks, he takes a deep breath. Max shifts next to him. They move as a unit, Will realizes, like they've been working together for a long time. And maybe they have. "What I'm about to tell you is gonna sound really crazy, but I need you to believe everything, and believe it as fast as you can. I don't know how much time we have, but I know it's not a lot."

"Then start talking." El points out. Max's eyes flit to her face.

Another breath. Another pause. A serious look in his eyes, and dread when Lucas speaks. "The One's alive. He's — going by a different name now, but it's him. And he's coming. For all of us."

Will's heart beats so loudly in his chest that he's sure all of them can hear it. The One's alive, Lucas says, and then continues to explain the rest: the death of Henry Creel, CEO of CreelCorp, in the disappearance of the villain antagonizing New York City had seemed a little too convenient, and he'd never believed in coincidences. When the party split ways for college, Lucas dove into his research, and had stumbled across something insane — a gateway between dimensions being used as a base of operations and a space to recoup. It's where Lucas has been, popping his head out every once in a while for the cell service and the proof of life. Well, there, and —

"My dimension," says Max. "My dimension is on the other side of it. He wants to combine them, control them, use the weaknesses to his advantage. We've been trying for months to get back here, but I have no idea how to navigate that place, and he's got all these creepy little scientists around every corner in there, poking at his supercollider, or whatever he calls it, and he's got this goo — "

"We think that's his plan." Lucas adds. "The collider. He's almost ready, and when he is, he's going to destroy the bridge and use the reaction to fuse our dimensions together."

"Okay. So. We need to get in there." Will says. Jane nods at his shoulder. "Find a way to stop the reaction, and stop him once and for all."

Max is nodding, too, and Lucas is finally looking a little relieved to actually be here. "Exactly. Easy."

Dustin holds up a hand. "Sorry. Back up. Did you say he's got a fucking collider? How the fuck are we supposed to gain access to a collider for long enough to shut it down?"

"You said he's going by another name, now," says Will, and Max nods again. "What is it?"

She spreads her hands. "Vecna," she says. "He calls himself Vecna."

Will doesn't like it. It sends a chill down his spine; he looks at Jane, whose expression is still unreadable. "Vecna," he tries, and only feels worse.

"Hell-ooooo?" Dustin waves his hands. "Is anybody gonna answer my question? Collider? Does anyone even know what a collider is besides me?"

"Exactly." Max turns her attention on him. From a compartment in her suit, she extracts a small item: pink and white, like her own colors, but very obviously broken. "This is — was — everything we could get on the collider. It got a little broken."

Dustin blinks at her. "A little?"

"My fault." Lucas says, and his expression is sheepish. "I landed on it funny."

"You landed on it funny."

"Are you going to keep repeating everything we say, or are you going to take it?" Max snaps, and that brings Dustin to attention, making a face as he reaches out for it. "Yeah, it's broken, but if anybody can still extract the information and figure out how to use it against Vecna, it's you."

"Me," he repeats, and then makes an apologetic face at the recurring behavior. He looks touched, though, and wistful in a way Will recognizes, the grief that hangs low in his chest, too. "What, has Lucas been talking me up in his time away?"

There's that look again, the one Max and Lucas share that means they know more about each other than anyone else in the room. Will has a feeling he's going to be seeing that look a lot from now on. He can't believe this has been happening the whole time — that Lucas has been lying to them about where he was, and in a way, who he was. That he's had a version of Max with him this whole time, that he's explored another world, or technically two, if they're counting the bridge, and that Will and the rest of the party has lived their lives completely unaware.

Then again, Will supposes, everyone else in the party has also been keeping pretty big secrets, too.

Except Mike.

"I know more than you think." Max says. Lucas looks away. "So? Can you do it or not?"

"Of course I can. Jesus." Dustin pockets the broken drive. "It'll take me a while. I'll need some time. How much can you give me?"

Lucas is shaking his head. "No idea," he admits. "Last glance we got, he was close. Couple weeks, at least, but at most… maybe a month?"

Dustin meets Will's eyes. It's not the first time they've had stakes this high, and it won't be the last, either, but it makes it no less stressful. "Heard," he says. "I'll get to work. First, though — is anybody else fucking starving?"

=

Mike (5:32PM): heyyyy free for dinner??? :)

"We should tell Mike." Will points out, hours later, safely tucked on his and Jane's shitty couch with five boxes of pizza on the table in front of them.

Max points at him. "No," she says. With each passing minute she continues to prove that she is everything like their Max, and it makes his heart hurt every time. "No way. No Wheeler."

"Oh, come on. He's the only one in the Party who doesn't know — "

"And for good reason."

"Lucas." Will attempts, turning toward his friend. He's sprawled out on the floor in a self-induced pizza coma, head dangerously close to pillowing itself on Max's thigh. "Come on."

Max's stare turns on Lucas, who winces as he holds his hands up. "Sorry, man. Don't look at me."

Dustin's shrug means Will glances right over him and straight to his sister, pleading. "El," he says, and he knows he doesn't have to say much else. "He's the only one. And he's gonna show up here one day unannounced, because you know he will, and he's gonna see Max here, and he's gonna be so pissed and hurt that we didn't say anything."

Jane looks around the room. She sets her pizza down and levels her gaze with Will's, and he knows before she speaks exactly what she's going to say. "It is dangerous for people to know the truth, Will," she tells him, and he knows this, but it doesn't change his opinion. "When he has to know, we will tell him — but for now, this keeps him safe."

Will (6:04PM): Sorryyyy just saw this!!! Busy tn :( next time!!!

Mike (6:07PM): 💙

=

Life moves on. Jane gives Mom an excuse about missing home and wanting to come stay for a little, so Max and Lucas take her room. Dustin goes back to his apartment. Will tries not to jump every time Max rounds a corner, and is still relatively late to work the morning after, and the one after that, but he brings muffins and donuts, so Nancy lets him off the hook again.

"Dude, are you seeing this?"

Mike sits down right on top of Will's desk, holding a pre-printed copy of tomorrow's release. He's so close that his side is pressed right up against Will's arm, hovering over with half a donut in his other hand.

God. It doesn't get easier. The feelings or the secrets.

"Seeing the headline facing you and not me?" Will asks dryly, to which Mike rolls his eyes a little. "Enlighten me."

"Yes, my sorcerer," Mike responds, and flips the paper; the nickname and the paper both make Will's stomach flip, just a little. "Nancy actually let me have a front page posting, isn't that insane? Four different spider-themed superheroes spotted in the last three days. Pretty sure she just wants to know why. I don't care. I think it's cool. Hey, you think they're taking applications or something? I wonder if…"

Tell him, Will's mind whispers. Just be honest. It'd be so easy.

But Will thinks about Max, and Jane holding her close, and the hollow in her eyes for months after, and he knows he can't. Not yet.

"We should celebrate," says Mike, and that gets Will out of his head. "You owe me a dinner. Are you free tonight?"

(And the thing about Mike these days is that sometimes Will feels like he catches him looking. Sometimes he says things that make Will pause with hope. It's funny, because it used to be the only thing Will ever thought about, and now it feels so low on the list of things he has to worry about that he almost forgets, in a sad way, that this is something he could still have.)

"I might be," he replies, and watches the way Mike beams. "You got something in mind? Please don't say pizza."

"Pizza-free evening." Mike vows. "You and me. I just feel like it's been a while, you know? I miss you."

Will feels warm all over. "Yeah. I miss you, too."

Mike gives his shoulder a little shove. "Cool. I'll pick you up?"

"Yeah. Cool."

The warmth stays long after Mike leaves his desk. It carries over until Will's leaving the Post, smiling into the sun and down at the sidewalk. It carries for so long that he forgets about the state of his living situation, and forgets to tell Mike he'll meet him outside the building.

"It's a date!"

"It's not a date." Will says, and Max only sticks her tongue out at him in response. "I'm serious! We're just friends getting dinner celebrating a work accomplishment. We do this sometimes. It's not a big deal."

"It does sound like a date." Jane muses. She's on FaceTime, only half-in frame, the pink wall of her room at Mom's behind the top half of her head.

Will makes a face. "Don't take her side!"

"Oh, please. I am pointing out the obvious." Jane sniffs. Max is still smiling, still a little smug. "Max, what about your Will and Mike? Are they like this, too?"

Max quiets at this. She looks down, something she does often when she's reminded about her home. "Like I said, it's a shitty dimension," she says, and it comes out so quiet it makes Will's heart twist. "Things are different there. So I wouldn't know."

Silence. Jane's facing Will, not Max, so her guilty expression is on full display. Will tries not to let it show too much on his own face, but he's sure he's failing. He opens his mouth to say something —

And there's a knock on the door.

The awkward moment is broken, at least; Max leaps up from the couch, snatching the iPad. Jane is giggling from the speaker. "Good luck, Byers," she calls over her shoulder, and closes the door to Jane's room behind her.

Will supposes a warning text would have been nice, but he also knows giving Mike a spare key is exactly what warranted the circumstances of this situation. He wipes his hands on his jeans, clears his throat. Not a date. Max and Jane don't know what they're talking about.

Mike's on the other side of the door, as expected, wearing the same smile he always does. "Hey," he says, eyes lighting up. "Sorry. I know I'm a little early, but I'm starving."

"You're good." Will smiles back. It's as easy as breathing. "I just have to grab my jacket."

"Cool. Yeah." Laughter erupts from Jane's bedroom; Mike's expression only wavers a little while Will's heart falls into his ass. "Is El around? I could say hi if you need another minute."

"She's on the phone," Will says, almost a little too quickly, and hopes Mike doesn't insist on being typically obnoxious and interrupting. Fuck the jacket. "You know what, it's not even that cold outside. I'm good. Let's go."

He distantly registers that it might be a little suspicious to rush him off the doorstep, but Will has always found it harder to lie to Mike Wheeler than anything else. It's ironic, he knows it is; he tries not to think about it as they leave the hallway and half of Will's secrets behind.

=

When Will is out sick from school after the incident, Jane brings him soup, Mike brings his homework, and Max and Lucas, also boyfriend-and-girlfriend at the time, bring enough movies to keep him entertained for a week.

Another secret, one very few have discovered: Will wasn't actually sick. He doesn't know it at the time, not really, but the CreelCorp field trip was rewriting his DNA, altering his gene sequence. Dustin will call him a human mutate when he accidentally stumbles into Will's bedroom, finds him stuck to the ceiling, and then subsequently lecture him on Superhero 101 and demand to be his partner-in-crime. As if he wasn't already.

Dustin isn't the only one, though. He isn't even in the first.

The first is Jane, long before she's ever his sister.

"I made it myself," she says proudly, smiling between Will and his mother as she steps inside. Mom shuts the door behind her, excuses herself from the living room to let Will have a little privacy. She's been hovering the typical amount, but has at least let Will and his friends hang out when they stop by. "Mostly because Dad does not know how to make soup. It is from a can, but I added some seasoning so it will taste less bland, if you can taste right now."

"I can." Will says. The croak in his voice is real, even if the general sickness is not. "It's not my sinuses."

"Oh! Good." Jane's been over enough times to know where the bowls are, so she transfers it into a microwave-safe dish and places it inside. Once the microwave begins to hum, she rinses out the Tupperware she'd carried over. "Are you up for a movie? I can stay for a while."

He is; he feels less weak than he had earlier in the week. What he can tell his friends is that he caught a bug, and he's shaking it off; what he can't tell them is that the bug technically caught him, and that he's pretty sure he broke one of the sinks in the third floor bathrooms at school like it was chalk in his hands before they sent him home sick the first day.

Jane descends toward the couch with the bowl in her hands and a spoon tucked inside. "Here," she says, extending it towards him. "It's only a little warm. It shouldn't burn."

"Thanks, El," he answers, matching her slight smile. Will reaches for the bowl, and their hands brush — and if he was the only one holding onto it, it would have shattered on the floor.

It's like two notes combining into one, two frequencies aligning. Lining things up perfectly. He's never felt anything like it.

"You…" Jane breathes, and Will has never seen so much wonder on her face. She breaks out into a bright smile, and this is another one of the dominos falling perfectly into place. "You're like me."

She says it with such relief that it calms Will for the first time all week. And that makes him feel a little nervous. "I am?"

Her expression softens; she moves to place the bowl on the coffee table, coming back to hold his hands. "I will teach you," she promises. "And if you still do not want this, you will never have to do anything about it. I promise."

This is what he means when he says it's hard to feel anything other than love for Jane Hopper. Her smile stays reassuring, her thumb sweeps across their joined hands. Will takes a deep breath. "Okay," he says, and she nods in encouragement. "…What do you mean by this?"

=

If Will allows himself to hope, he'd say he could understand exactly why Max and Jane were adamant about it being a date.

It feels like one. It feels like hands brushing, like standing too close to be anything platonic, like trading secret smiles and hushed words. It carries onto the subway, when Mike insists on getting Will back to his doorstep in one piece.

"We should celebrate more often," Mike muses, pushing the door open to Will's building.

Will laughs. "Celebrating would mean we'd both have to accomplish more at work. I don't think there are enough pastries to bribe Nancy for that."

"Okay, well. Not celebrating, then." The words echo through the staircase on the way to the second-floor apartment. "But just… that. You know? Dinner. Or maybe a movie. Or dinner and a movie. Coffee, if it's earlier. Stuff like that."

That is suspiciously date-like. Will wishes it would be less obvious to turn around and gauge his reaction right now. Mike's reaching for his own spare key as they near the door. "Just you and me?"

"Well, yeah." Mike says, and his voice has gone all soft. "Don't you like it when it's just you and me?"

This is the second time in the same day that Mike Wheeler has distracted Will from more important matters. His throat goes dry; he thinks about how exactly to respond while Mike pushes Will's apartment door open, and there's somebody standing in his kitchen, in plain view from the entryway, who is not supposed to be there.

Shit.

This is the lesser of the two scenarios, but no less confusing. And Lucas isn't fast enough; Will can see him out of the corner of his eye as he darts for Jane's bedroom, which means Mike can, too. And this is exactly what he was talking about, by the way, when he brought his concerns up to the group in the first place.

"Hey, is that — " Mike frowns. He shoulders his way inside before Will can do anything. "Lucas?"

Shit!

Jane's door creaks open. Lucas's slightly-panicked glance at Will is gone as quick as it arrives; he lifts a hand in greeting, slightly sheepish. "Hey, Mike."

The look on Mike's face is not reassuring. "What… how are you… When did you…?"

And Will does his very best to do damage control. "He got here last night! El's at Mom and Dad's so he's crashing in her room." Mike finally looks away from Lucas, but the frown is still there, eyebrows furrowed, an expression in his eyes that Will can't focus on. "It was supposed to be a surprise dinner after work tomorrow, but…"

"Oh." And Will can see the gears turning; he just prays they're turning fast enough. Mike's face settles a little. "Man. I kinda ruined it for myself, then, huh?"

Thank God for Lucas Sinclair. He smiles like the stakes are not incredibly high at the moment, reaching out to give Mike a hug. "Just means we can fuck with Dustin a little tomorrow. Not a big deal. It's good to see you, man."

"You too." Mike hugs him back and holds on. It makes Will realize he hadn't even hugged Lucas or Max with everything going on. Not that Max would probably take it, but it had been a long six years without her, and a long four and a half without Lucas. He knows he's probably smiling a little too much at his friends, but he doesn't care.

Lucas holds out an arm without even looking. "Get in here, Byers," he says, and Will doesn't need to be told twice; he steps into the embrace, holds on just as tight, and breathes.

Will (9:28PM): Emergency party dinner tomorrow and call me ASAP

Dustin (9:29PM): ?????

Will (9:29PM): CALL ME

=

Will: I'm Spider-Man

Will: Hey I have something to

Will: Was tonight a

Will (10:48PM): I had a really good time tonight :)

Mike (10:51PM): me too. lmk when you're free to do it again :)

Will (11:02PM): 💛

=

(The surprise dinner goes well, considering it's actually not a surprise to anyone involved. They do it at Mom and Dad's, under the pretense that Will and Jane's apartment is way too small and both of their parents are working, so that Max doesn't have to relocate. Will tries very hard not to look at Mike the entire time.)

Jane can't crash the empty nesters forever, though. That's what Hopper told her, verbatim, which she tells Will over a little bit of wine when he's cleaning up the kitchen.

"You could always come up with a reason to stay with Mike," she says, and her mouth curves upward in a smile when Will drops the forks in his hand.

"That is so not funny, and so not helping." Will levels a glare over his shoulder. Jane shrugs, swings her legs back and forth from where she's perched on the counter. "Also, not happening. I hate when you do this."

"Oh, please." She rolls her eyes. "I want you to be happy. And I want Mike to be happy, too. This is the best-case scenario. We cannot bring more people into this friend group."

It wouldn't be the same. That part goes unspoken, but is evident in the glance they share once Will turns the sink off. He wonders what Max is doing, all alone in their apartment. He hopes she's not snooping in his room.

"So?" Jane prompts, when the silence becomes too much. "Mike is here. Tonight. Talk."

It's almost like magic, the way Mike appears in the doorway with a suspiciously innocent look on his face. He stops next to Will by the sink, looking between the pair with slightly raised eyebrows. "I heard my name," he says.

Will hangs his head, while Jane brightens. Of course he did. "I was just talking about you!" she says, raising her cup to her mouth.

"Oh, yeah? What about me?"

"About how bad of a boyfriend you were to me the entire time we were together."

Mike blinks. "Oh. Jesus. Ouch."

It's funny. Will can't help it. He tries to suppress the laugh as Mike keeps talking. "I'd like to present evidence to the jury? We were teenagers. Kids. I've been to therapy since then! I'm a changed man! I would be a way better boyfriend now!"

"I hope you are not trying to convince me."

"No! I mean, I guess, but in, like, an apology kind of way, not in, like, an I-want-to-date-you kind of way."

"Is that your idea of an apology?"

The rest of Mike and Jane's teasing argument is tuned out as Will looks up. Mike is pink in the face, oddly focused on staring directly at Jane and no one — or nothing — else. Something blooms in his chest, just a little, and he leans to his right so their sides are brushing as they talk. Mike presses back, subconsciously or intentionally, and that's more than enough.

It's nearly midnight by the time they stumble back to their apartment. Jane beelines to change into pajamas, and Lucas is asleep on the couch, arm outstretched over the edge. Will is about to duck into his own room, but he stops; there's a flash of fiery hair on the fire escape, just outside the window in their living room.

His footsteps clatter on the metal when he steps through the window. Max shifts a little, acknowledging his presence, but she waits until he's slid the window shut behind him to speak.

"It looks almost the same at night," she says. "It's — weird. Everything feels a little more vibrant here, in the sunlight. So less light means I can pretend, just a little."

Will has no idea what it's like to be living in a universe that isn't his own. She said it was shitty, but that doesn't mean it's not still home. The breeze kicks up around them. Will resists the urge to shiver.

She clears her throat. "How was the date?"

"It wasn't a date," he protests, and she just rolls her eyes. "You know, it feels kinda unfair that you've only been around for a few days and you're already meddling in my love life."

"I'm just calling it like I see it, Byers."

"Bullshit! No way! What happened to not knowing — "

"I know what I said." Max retorts, and her voice gets quiet. They're not really teasing anymore. "I never said that I didn't used to know."

Oh, Will thinks, and almost doesn't want to ask, but he can't stop himself. "So… you did know us?"

Max's silence says all he needs to know, but she speaks before he can think of some kind of topic change. "Back home, my best friend is Jane Hopper. Spinneret."

"Yeah, that's here, too."

"Yeah." Max echoes. She wraps her arms around herself. "And back home, just like here, too, her brother was Will Byers. But Will Byers wasn't Spider-Man; I am. And in your universe, I die, so in my universe…"

It takes him three seconds. Was. "Oh."

Max nods; she lifts a hand to wipe at her face, clears her throat. "We couldn't save him."

"Who…" Will feels sick, but he has to know. He can't not know. "Was it Vecna?"

She finally turns to face him, shifting so she's still leaning against the cool fire escape railing. "Except my Will really killed him. Which is how I know that you can do it, too."

"I've never…" Max's eyes are shining, so he takes a deep breath. "I've never done that before. Killed anyone. Even when it was Vecna… when we thought it was Vecna, it wasn't even us. I don't think I can — "

"Hey." Max puts her hand on his arm. "Not that you need the reminder, but Vecna is going to destroy both of our worlds if he succeeds. There's no telling what's gonna happen to any of us. That includes me, and you, and your family, and all your friends. Mike and Lucas. Dustin. El." Will swallows. "It's him or it's us, Will. So it has to be us."

She's right. He knows. He nods once, and this seems to satisfy her, so Max turns back to the night air, closing her eyes. Not for the first time, Will wishes he could be anyone else.

A beat.

"I couldn't save the Will Byers of my world." It's raw, and honest. Shaky.

It makes Will's throat tight. "I couldn't save Max Mayfield in mine."

She bumps his shoulder with hers. "So make me a deal. Let's look out for each other, kick some ass, and kill Vecna, once and for all. Okay?"

"Okay." Will says, and bumps her back. "Sounds like a plan."

She smiles, then, for the first time that evening. Will smiles too, returning his gaze to the skyline. He's about to suggest they kick Lucas off the couch when something hits him, gets him to stand straight up with a puzzled expression.

"Hey — wait." He frowns. "You said your Will Byers wasn't Spider-Man. But you also said he killed Vecna. How is that possible? If he had no powers, how did he… you know."

Max studies his expression. "I didn't say he didn't have powers," she says after a moment. "I think it's technically spoilers if I tell you the whole story, though. Do you think it counts as spoilers if it's from another dimension?"

The concept of it already makes his head hurt. His heart thuds in his chest. "Max."

"Will," she returns, and all teasing is void from her face again. "Do you trust me?"

"You know I — "

"Not just Max. Me." She takes a deep breath. "Me, me. My universe's me. Not just because you trusted your Max, so you have to trust me."

Max — Max, please, please — wake up, please, come back —

"Yes," Will says, and he means it. "I trust you."

He can tell by her expression that she believes him. She nods, once, and pulls away from the railing. "Okay," she answers, and then grins a little. "You wanna kick Lucas off the couch with me?"

=

It's the memory Will sees the most when he closest his eyes.

Jane diving before Will can, the world winding down into slow motion. His sister slicing through the air, but it's not fast enough. Will scrambling for the ground, hoping there's a chance he can reach it before Max does. Maybe he can catch her from underneath. Praying he can break her fall. Maybe — maybe —

He'll hear that noise for the rest of his life.

When his vision stops blacking out, Will is kneeling beside his sister, and his sister is cradling the body of Max Mayfield. He's holding Jane's mask in his hands; she threw it off the minute she scooped Max into her arms. She's sobbing, rocking back and forth, fingers smoothing Max's fiery hair back from her lifeless face.

"Max," she cries, and Will shakes with sobs of his own. "Max, please, please — wake up, please, come back — "

They have to leave when the sirens begin to echo too close. Will knows his stepfather will find her here. He'd give anything to let it be someone else. Anyone else. But their lives are never so lucky, these days.

A change of scenery, is what Mom says. Hopper echoes the sentiment, but Will knows he's reliving the death of his first daughter every time they say Max's name, knows that the suffocation might plague him, too.

Jane wants nothing to do with the suit. She tucks all of it away into a box and tells Will that she's dropping it at Dustin's before they go; she urges him to do it, too. She can't move on. Will can't, either. He doesn't want to.

He keeps it as a reminder. Someone he couldn't save.

That will never happen again.

That was the first time they fought Vecna — back when he still called himself the One.

The second was a year later; a year after they lost Max and all their hope. Vecna been more deranged, then. Will and Jane were clued into his own secret identity by that point, but desperate to keep theirs hidden. Henry Creel's reemergence was the reason they came back to the city in the first place. They'd fought, and they'd bled, and Nancy Wheeler had thrown a Molotov cocktail from the window of her boss's office at the Post. The villain had disappeared, no one had asked why Nancy Wheeler was still in the office in the middle of the night or how she had access to the materials needed for a Molotov cocktail in said office, and Will and Jane had believed that was it.

Nearly six months after the One's second defeat was when Lucas told the Party he was going to travel abroad to get his head back on. Jane was still reluctant to wear the suit except for the big moments, but Will — Will was soaring. Even operating independently, with or without Dustin in his ear, he loved it. He stayed local for college, while Jane gave herself a couple hours for a commute. Dustin shipped up to MIT, but Mike stayed, too, and Will figures that was really the time he and Mike got to connect in a way they hadn't really, before.

That's when Mike scored him an internship at the Post, which fed into a full-time graphic design job on graduation. Nancy eventually moved into that boss's office shortly after that. Lucas was still gone, but popped into the group chat every once in a while with an update. Dustin came back to the city swearing about top-secret technical advancements. Jane had an interim assignment at the Post while she got settled, but was looking at applying at elementary schools.

Everyone was… well. Not moving on, but moving. Growing up. Never once did Will think that Vecna could still be out there, lurking, planning his next move.

=

The nightmares start seven days after Lucas and Max spill out onto the pavement.

Will sees things he's never seen before: tunnels, equipment. Sharp teeth and a vast room with a giant machine in the middle. Vecna, almost unrecognizable, but Will knows by gut feeling. Voices whispering at the corners of his mind, loud and soft all at once. Flashes of light. Max, smiling and happy. Max, falling. Jane, falling. Mike, falling. Will, fall —

He wakes up screaming on the first night and opens his eyes to see both of his friends poised in the doorway. Jane is beside him, hand on his arm, worry etched between her eyebrows. He can't get the words out to explain what he's seen.

He doesn't sleep again that night. Or the night after. The pattern repeats.

"You look like shit."

Will has no apology offering today. He's not even late for once, just tired. Nancy is scrutinizing him like she's about to analyze his entire life in one sentence, and he doesn't have the energy to deal with it.

It's like she read his mind, though, because she drops her arms from where they're crossed and says, "Coffee machine's out. I'll get Mike to run you something."

He wants to protest that it's not worth it, but he just nods instead. Nancy squeezes his shoulder as she flits past, and he lets autopilot steer him towards his desk, where he rubs at his eyes and tries not to see endless tunnels behind his vision.

It's all he can see, though; the same thing every night. Tunnels and teeth and trials and technology. None of it makes any sense.

"Coffee delivery for one Will Byers," says Mike from somewhere above him.

Will doesn't remember closing his eyes at all, but the bleariness in his vision tells him he's had them closed for a minute. When his sight clears, Mike is still there, wearing the same Wheeler concern as Nancy with the addition of a little something different. He offers the coffee out, and once Will takes it he lets his hand fall to Will's shoulder instead, thumb sweeping over the curve of it. "You look — "

"If you say like shit, Mike, I swear to God — "

"Hey!" Mike puts his free hand up. "I wasn't, Will, I swear. I was going to say really tired. I'm the nicer Wheeler in the building, remember?"

It's a joke, and Will knows it, but he just hunches a little more, places both palms flat on the cup in his hands.

Mike worries at his lower lip. "Is everything okay?"

God.

No, Will wants to say. Not even close. You remember the guy that killed our best friend? He never died in the first place, because Spider-Man and Spinneret didn't do their job right, and now an alternate dimension version of our best friend is here trying to make sure he dies for good. Oh, and did I mention your hand is on Spider-Man's shoulder and that you've kissed Spinneret before? Let me know if you want to kiss Spider-Man, too. I'm pretty sure he'd be into —

"Will."

It's so soft it makes Will want to burrow away. Mike's staring at him in a way that sits low in Will's stomach, leaving behind a familiar warmth.

"Sorry." Will says eventually, but even the proof of life isn't enough to soothe the worry between Mike's eyebrows. "Yeah. I'm okay. Just — tired. Not sleeping."

He wants Mike's hand to shift from his shoulder to his cheek. He wants to lean into his best friend's touch, and stay there forever, and pretend like the rest of the world can be left up to someone else instead of him and his friends for once. He wants to ask Mike Wheeler on a date, or wants Mike Wheeler to ask him on a date, and he wants to be able to feel normal for the first time since he was fifteen years old.

Mike doesn't do any of the things Will wants, though. He squeezes Will's shoulder just like Nancy did, but he lingers, because that's Mike. "It's your mattress, isn't it?" he decides, and the moment of yearning has passed. "I told you it was a shitty mattress."

Will scoffs over a mouthful of caffeine. "It's not shitty."

"Is too. It kept poking me the last time I crashed there."

"That was New Year's, and you were way too drunk. Your memory's messed up."

"is not! I know a shitty mattress when I feel one."

The joke's right there — something about coming back over to test out his mattress again, or about Will testing Mike's mattress to see if his is just as shitty — but then he remembers both of his house guests, and the fact that he's currently getting paid to do work right now, and decides better of it.

He's only brave with the mask on.

"I'm too tired for you to be talking shit about my mattress," he says, and Mike laughs anyway, even if it's not that funny. "Nancy's gonna yell at you if you keep lingering."

"Nah. Turned in my assignment early this week."

"Overachiever."

"As if you're not stupid good at your own job." Mike points out, rolling his eyes. "That's why Nancy lets you get away with coming in late and accidentally napping at your desk."

"Really? I thought it was the apology pastries."

"Sometimes, yeah. Sure. I also think it's because she knows I'd be, like, twenty times worse if you didn't work here anymore."

"Wow." He knows Mike's joking, but it feels warm anyway. "Twenty times."

"Yeah, I know." Mike agrees, and he finally removes his hand from Will's shoulder to wipe his palms on his jeans. "I really meant a hundred."

They lock eyes for what feels like forever, until Will feels his face heat and he has to look away. "Well, overachiever, are we celebrating this one?"

"I don't think you should be out in public. What if you fall asleep in the middle of the street?" Will cracks a smile, which makes Mike's widen. "You wanna come over to my place? We can watch movies. I don't mind if you fall asleep."

"That actually sounds perfect." He lets out a breath. "What, tonight?"

"Tonight works for me. You need to swing by your place after work or do you just want to come back with me?"

Will doesn't think he can take another close encounter of the alternate dimension kind. "I should be fine."

"Cool." Mike finally kicks himself off Will's desk, standing up straight. "I'll let you get back to napping."

"Oh my God, I wasn't napping."

"Sure, sure. Whatever you say." Mike grins; Will's heart skips a beat in his chest. "See you in a few."

It's an afterthought, really, after Mike walks away, and it shouldn't be any kind of surprise at all after eighteen years of friendship, but his coffee order is exactly the way he always likes it.

And Mike, well. Mike is always exactly the way Will has always loved him.

=

"Do we even know how Vecna got his powers?"

It's another Party-sans-Mike night, huddled around Will and Jane's coffee table. Music is coming from the speaker in the kitchen, but it's drowned out over the discussion.

Dustin blinks at Lucas. "You're the one who spent how many years inside his freaky gateway dimension, dude. Shouldn't we be asking you that?"

"We were a little busy hiding from his minions." Lucas points out, resting his arms on the top of his knees, drawn up. "And we weren't in there the whole time."

Jane straightens up. "You weren't?"

"We?" Will adds, looking over at Max, who just shrugs with a mildly embarrassed glance. "How long have you guys been — working together? How did you even get your powers?"

He figures the added clarification helps both of them with the awkwardness. They share a look; Lucas speaks first. "The first time I crossed into Max's dimension. It was an accident. I was snooping around the labs underneath CreelCorp, looking for literally anything left behind that could be useful, and I fell through this — gate. Portal. Thing. When I woke up, I was in this… giant lab, with this freaky huge machine, crawling with scientists. I didn't know what to do, so I just kinda started running — and then I ran right through another portal, into what I thought was our dimension, but it was actually Max's. I figured that one out pretty quickly."

"He started following me." Max interjects, to which Lucas groans. "Real stalker behavior."

"I did not! I thought I was hallucinating!"

"Stalker," she reiterates, but the smile on her face is soft. Quiet. "Anyway. It was pretty easy to realize he was from another dimension. And even easier to realize what he could do, because he was stupid obvious about it."

"I don't actually remember getting bit." Lucas admits, reaching up to rub the back of his neck. "When I fell through the portal to her dimension, I was still in CreelCorp, and it still had a bunch of people in it. I was running for my life. But I spent the next week thinking I was hallucinating Max and sticking to stuff, so."

"Yeah, including my hair."

"Hey, the half-shaved look was pretty cool!"

"I had to cut off years of growth because you — "

They keep bickering. It's so Max and Lucas. Jane is smiling beside him, and even Dustin looks fond. He just wishes Mike was here, but he knows bringing that up won't be worth it. He grins at them both when they step out of their own little world, fidgeting with his sleeves. "I'm so glad I didn't get that. The randomly sticking to stuff thing."

Max looks over at him. "You didn't?"

"No, just, like. My nervous system overheating and the proportional strength stuff. I mean, I can stick to stuff, but it wasn't like I was ripping off door handles because my hands were made of glue, or anything."

"Lucky you, Byers." Lucas mutters, still a little shameful about Max's hair incident. "Hey, can any of you turn invisible?"

Jane sets her soda down. "No," she says, and then blinks at his triumphant expression. "Can you?"

His smile gets wider. "Maybe."

Dustin hits the table. "Bullshit! Show me right now!"

The room erupts in exclamations and awed laughter when Lucas does, in fact, disappear right where he's sitting. It goes on for the rest of the night, Lucas popping in and out of sight just for the hell of it.

(There is a little voice that gnaws at him, though. Max swings around with a skateboard on her back, uses it to be faster, uses it as a weapon. Lucas can turn invisible and uses something called a Venom Strike — and Jane is the most effortless hero Will has ever seen. He doesn't know about Max or Lucas, but he knows Jane's webs are organic, where his are synthetic. It's not a competition, not really; he knows what he's doing, and he knows he can do it well.

He just feels a little less… special, maybe. And he knows what Jane would say; he isn't. But that doesn't stop the feeling.)

"We never actually got an answer," says Dustin, when he's tugging his shoes back on hours later.

Lucas lifts his head from the couch to blink at him. "For what question?"

"Vecna." It's just the three of them in the communal space, Will and Dustin and Mike; Max and El are in Jane's room. "His powers. Where they came from. He didn't use them all that much in the beginning, remember, Will?"

"Right. I guess." Will doesn't like to think about it. All he can see is Max's body, her pale hands. "That was before we knew he was Henry. He relied on tech, mostly. The bombs. Hoverboard."

"Right. Yeah." Dustin hovers in the doorway. "He's always had telekinesis, though. He used it more after senior year. Less tech-focused. That was the — "

"Fire. Yeah." Nancy Wheeler's Molotov cocktail had caused a minor explosion; very little was hurt beyond who they thought was Henry Creel, but Will remembers the burnt flesh, the unrecognizable corpse. How it probably wasn't him after all, and how he's been secretly regaining power, all this time.

"Yeah. Exactly."

Will takes a deep breath. Both of his friends turn to face him, expecting. "My — nightmares. I keep seeing this face. It doesn't even look like him, not really, but… it is him. I can feel it."

Dustin straightens up. "Each time he's come back, he comes back stronger," he says, and Will knows; knows he should have said something earlier, doesn't know why he didn't, knows it would have been useful information from the first night.

Lucas says what they're all thinking, which means he doesn't know the answer, either. "You think we actually have any idea what we're up against this time?"

And Will wants to say yes. He wants to believe that they do, and it'll be okay, and they'll all walk out of here alive.

He can't, though. He's tired of lying. He locks the door behind Dustin, and then it's just him and Lucas, tugging at a stray thread poking out from the couch cushion. "We'll figure it out," he says, and Lucas looks up again. "Come on. When have we ever not been able to figure it out?"

"Did she know?"

Will swallows. "Yeah. She did."

The silence between them feels unbearable. Will wants to poke it until it bursts, but he doesn't know what he could say that makes it better. He knows nothing will. It's been years — the wound has been stitched shut, but it's haphazard, and the tiniest strain could have it ripping itself open. This conversation, he knows, is dangerously close.

"Okay." Lucas says finally. He reaches up to wipe at his face, sniff a little. "Yeah. Okay."

"I'm sorry," Will blurts, and he means it so earnestly that he hopes Lucas can hear just how much. "I should have told you. El and I both should have told you."

"Nah, man," says Lucas, and he waves a hand before putting it right on Will's shoulder. His eyes are brimming with tears, and Will's vision is quick to blur after realizing. "I get why you didn't. I mean, I really do, now. It wasn't until I met Max — this Max — and went to her universe that I realized who was under the masks back home, and by then I'd already started sticking to shit. And she taught me a lot, you know? About what it means to be a hero. The power, the responsibility."

Will nods, once, reaching up to wipe at his own eyes.

Lucas keeps going. "She's so good at it, man. I think about it all the time. About our Max. She would have loved doing something like this. You know? If her mom had just signed that permission slip, and if she'd gotten to go on that field trip with us, maybe she'd still be here. Now. With us."

Why her? Will thinks, not for the first time. It's so strange to grieve someone right in front of you, especially when the someone you have now isn't actually yours. Why did it have to be her? Why couldn't it be —

"But," says Lucas, and Will's line of thinking cuts off there. "Dominos, and all that. And from what she's told me about her universe, if things played out here like they did there…"

His silence is guilty, Will realizes. He swallows. Lucas is thinking exactly what Will is. "I'd be dead," he says.

"And I don't want that, either. I would never want that."

"I know, Lucas." Lucas's expression is wretched. Will reaches out to put his hand on top of Lucas's, and squeezes. "Hey. I know."

Lucas shuts his eyes tight. "I wish we could, like… combine universes, or something. Max, alive. You, alive. All of us, together again, without Vecna hovering over our shoulders."

And Will is so tired of the guilt gnawing at his insides. "I don't know," he says, and Lucas opens his eyes again, puzzled. "Four Spider-people in one universe? Kinda makes us seem overpowered, over here. Too good to be true. Plus, no publication would ever get our names right. Especially if two of us are named Spider-Man."

The sheepish expression pops up on Lucas's face. "Yeah, well. They needed to call me something, and there's not a Spider-Man in her dimension." He shrugs, trying to aim for casual, but Will still knows him like the back of his hand after all these years, and he can see the apprehension laced in his shoulders. "You don't really mind sharing the title with me, do you?"

"Dude." Will says, and Lucas looks up, wide and hopeful. "Greatest honor of my life, Spider-Man."

=

When Dustin finds out about Will's powers, and Jane's with her permission, he jumps at the opportunity for analysis. Studies the differences between their abilities. Jane won't admit how she got hers, but Will and Dustin gather enough, something about a laboratory experiment and a spider and powers she's had for five years at the age of sixteen. She suspects they've always been there, but only really emerged after she turned eleven.

Dustin Henderson is the best possible addition to their team; he lights up at the idea, nearly jumps when Jane proposes the idea. He studies Jane's webbing formula for three weeks before he presents Will with a synthetic alternate, manufactured from stealing chemicals from school. The shooters he hands over fit Will's wrists like gloves — or, well, like a second pair of gloves, since Dustin's involvement in their after-school activities also involved a suit upgrade beyond a pair of sweats and a shitty-sewn hoodie. Will doesn't want to know where half of this stuff is coming from; between the suit upgrade, the webbing, and the comm system implemented before Will really starts getting out there with Jane, he feels like a real superhero.

It's empowering in a way he's never felt before. Dustin maps out routes, comes up with convenient excuses when they need to get somewhere fast. They're quick to split responsibility as often as possible, so it's not increasingly obvious that half the Party is hiding something from the other. Will doesn't love lying to any of his friends, especially not Mike — but Jane has shadows behind her eyes when she talks about loss, and Will remembers the way his mom grieved over her last boyfriend, and he knows it's better to take her advice in this scneario.

(Coincidentally, too, Jane and Will getting closer happens at the same time as her dad asks out his mom. They're affectionally dubbed the Wonder Twins, and Dustin is the only one who knows just how much wonder they really have.)

=

This one's not under the pretense of some sort of celebration.

There's cool air coming in through the cracked windows of Mike's studio. They're shoulder-to-shoulder on his bed, laptop pillowed on Mike's thighs, angled so they both can see.

Will is so, so sleepy. "I should get you a couch for your birthday."

"Why?" Mike murmurs back, and he sounds just as drowsy, just as comfortable. "You don't like cuddling on my very comfortable bed?"

"Don't start the mattress thing again." Will elbows him, and Mike laughs. "And this is hardly cuddling."

"Oh, of course, my sorcerer. Hold, please."

Will rolls his eyes as Mike shifts, lifting one arm to slide it across Will's back. He lets himself lean into Mike's side, head pillowed on his shoulder. "You always call me that."

"What?" At this angle, Will feels Mike's voice more than he hears it. "Sorcerer?"

Yours, he wants to say. "We haven't played D&D since we were in high school. And I was a cleric, not a sorcerer."

"I remember. I also remember your powers being innate, so, sorcerer."

"You're getting me on a technicality. I don't like that."

"Okay. My cleric, then. Sounds less enchanting if you ask me."

He hasn't actually paid attention to the movie on the laptop in several minutes. "Am I?" Will asks, and it's easier to focus on the honking horns in the distance than the pace of Mike's breathing. "Yours?"

This, he thinks, is scarier than any battle. Mike hasn't stiffened, though, or tried to pull away at all. And Will isn't crazy; he knows flirting when he sees it, even if his love life is practically nonexistent, save for his recurring feelings for his best friend over the past nine years — and things have been increasingly stressful, lately, but for the first time, Will has also felt just a little more than hope.

"Yeah," says Mike, and it's breathy. "If you want to be."

And this is terrible timing. The worst timing in the last four years. It's selfish of him to take this now, with everything else going on. To start something with his best friend without all of Will's cards on the table, because not all of the cards in his hand are his to give. But Will has always been selfish — and he wants. More than anything else, he wants.

A couple of weeks. A couple more weeks, at most, and once Vecna is dealt with for good, he'll tell him. He'll tell Mike everything, no matter what the others say.

The angle sucks. Will can't really shift to face Mike, not from where he's sitting. He reaches for Mike's arm, though, and winds it around his own waist, threads his fingers through Mike's, squeezes, holds tight. "Of course I do," he says. Mike relaxes a little more. "Yeah, Mike. I want to be."

"Okay." Mike squeezes back. Will can hear the smile in his voice. "Cool."

"Will?"

"Hm? What?"

"You fell asleep. Do you wanna stay?" A warm hand brushes Will's hair from his face, ghosts along his cheek. "You can. Or I can walk you home."

He's so warm. Still so sleepy. It's Mike's laugh, soft and fond, thumb sweeping across his cheek. "Okay. Stay it is. Come on."

Will hardly remembers it; Mike's hands, gentle and guiding, getting him up and to the drawer of spare clothes he's left here over the years (and, really, even in his sleep-addled brain he laughs to himself at the idea that he had the equivalent of a spare drawer at Mike's apartment and still mostly thought they were platonic). The lights shutting off, enveloping them in darkness. The warmth at his back that lulls him back to sleep, accompanied by Mike's arm over his waist.

Two weeks. He can give them two weeks.

(Staying means Will walks into work on time the next day with Mike by his side. Nancy gives them eyes as they walk in. He's too busy grinning to notice.)

=

The look on his face must be enough to give himself away, because Jane descends the minute he gets home after work.

"You didn't come home last night!" she pokes his shoulder as he kicks off his shoes. He'd momentarily forgotten about their houseguests; it would have been easier to deflect if they weren't sharing his mattress like they used to during sleepovers in high school. "Where were you?"

"Hi to you, too. Jeez." Will hangs his keys on the hook. "I was at work. You know. Doing my job?"

"His location was at Mike's apartment until, like, eight this morning, though," says Max helpfully from the couch.

Will leans over Jane's shoulder to blink at her. "Okay. One — how do you have my location? And two, stay out of this."

She holds up the iPad in her hands and grins the biggest shit-eating grin he's seen in a long time. It gnaws at the stitched wound on his heart. "Find my iPhone. Two, no."

"So you did spend the night." Jane's expression is nothing but smug. "He doesn't have a couch."

"Don't remind me."

"Or an air mattress. Or spare blankets." She continues to poke, arms crossed over her chest. "So?"

Lucas sticks his head out from Jane's bedroom. "Are we talking about Will breaking curfew? Hey, man."

"What — curfew?" Will blinks at them. Max's grin just widens. "Okay, I'm not in middle school, I don't have a curfew. How long have you guys been talking about this? Why are we talking about this?"

Jane does what she does best, which is give Will the most innocent of looks. "Because we want you to be happy," she says, and it's so simple that it almost makes his resolve crumble. "I want you to be happy."

"Me too." Max adds from the couch. "Even if it's with Wheeler. Shithead in every universe."

It makes Will laugh, which makes Jane giggle. He feels so light; happy, whole. It's the closest he's gotten to full party since they were juniors in high school with so many less cares and obligations.

And then his phone dings.

He fishes it out of his pocket. He wants it to be Mike, wants it to be anything other than something that could ruin this feeling — but it's Dustin, with news, and he can't help the way his face falls.

Dustin (6:54PM): FIGURED IT OUT

Dustin (6:55PM): coming over make me food

"Will?" Lucas prompts. "What is it?"

"It's Dustin," he says, and puts his phone back into his pocket. "Developments. He's on his way."

Dustin slams the door open and slams the door shut in his excitement; Max's "Jesus!" from the couch goes unacknowledged. He's breathing hard, all-but throwing his backpack onto the chair beside him, reaching into his pocket to present a small thumbdrive.

"Behold," he says, still panting. "The trinket."

Lucas eyes him up and down. "Did you run all the way here or something?"

"Not important." Dustin waves it around a little; it's black, adorned with a silver hand-drawn spider. "Trinket!"

"We heard you the first time." Max's arms are crossed over her chest, eyebrows raised. "So you fixed it?"

"Oh, no. That piece of shit was broken beyond repair — thank you, Lucas — so I had to make a new one." He places it on the counter. "That thing is the answer to all of our problems."

A blanket of relief settles over the group. Will looks to Max, who is wringing her hands. "So, what, you PowerPoint night us with the info, and then we know how to shut it down?"

"Did you two even look at the drive before Lucas crashed it?" Their expressions say no, so Dustin continues. Will hasn't seen him this excited about something in a long time; hope swells in his chest. "When I say it's the answer to all of our problems, I mean all of our problems. It doesn't hold a powerpoint on how the collider works. Guys — it's an algorithm to shut the shit down."

"So all we have to do is get back to Vecna's collider and plug it in." Will realizes. Dustin snaps his fingers in agreement. "I mean — it's gonna be swarming in there, right? It'll be a big fight."

"We can handle it." Jane says, eyes shining. "And then we can be done with all of this for good."

"And then Max can go home," says Lucas, quieter than everyone else, but he's only looking at her.

Max's nervous habit is still going: she's tugging on her sleeves until her hands disappear beneath them, suddenly mildly embarrassed with everyone's gaze flitting between them. "Yeah," she says, but where Lucas is only looking at her, she can't quite meet his eyes. Or anyone else's. "I guess I can."

Oh, Will thinks. Dustin is already locking eyes with him, and he knows he doesn't have to speak for him to understand.

"Hey, look, we're not jumping any kind of gun, here, right?" he says, and the mood shifts when the attention does, too. "We have to be one-hundred-percent correct before we do this, so I'm gonna run the algorithm a couple more times to make sure. Vecna's still laying low. We're not up on our timetable. Give me a few more days to figure this out. Besides — we need a portal to get in there, don't we? Unless the one you guys fell through is still open."

Jane sighs. "It isn't. I passed it yesterday."

"That's okay, actually." Lucas's hands have moved to his pockets. "I know one that should still be open."

"You do? Where?"

"Same place I fell in the first time," he says, and they all exchange glances around the room; another puzzle piece falling into place. "CreelCorp."

=

Two days pass without incident — and then Mike's leaning on Will's desk when he gets to work the next day, coffee in his hand and a smile on his face.

"Hi," he says, stationary while Will places his bag down. "Morning."

"Hi," Will parrots. He holds the coffee out; when Will takes it, he lets his hand linger for longer than usual. "Sleep okay?"

Mike's smile widens in a soft, inside sort of way. "Could have been better. You?"

His face feels warm. "Yeah. Same."

They share a look. Will sits in his desk chair while Mike turns his head over his shoulder, probably surveying in case his sister comes out of nowhere like a bat out of hell, as she does often.

"So." Mike drags out the word, softness still playing on his mouth. "Are you free tonight?"

It's only been three days since Dustin presented the party-sans-Mike with the trinket; he's expecting a mission launch any time now. But. "Not as far as I know. Why?"

"You should get dinner with me," he says. He's not looking Will in the eyes, so he's trying to be casual and trying not to be nervous about it. "I mean — do you want to get dinner with me?"

Will hums. "Depends. What are we celebrating this time?"

"No celebration." Mike vows. "Or, I guess it is, but… I was thinking — you know. A date."

It feels a little too high-school to thrill at the words, but. A date. Mike's cheeks are pink, just a little, but he's stopped looking at the floor, which is a good sign. "I think I could squeeze you in," says Will thoughtfully. "Yeah. A date."

"Yeah? Okay. Good. Awesome. Cool."

Fuck it. Will deserves this. He shares Mike's smile, reaches out to nudge him with his arm. Their eyes meet; he will never get used to being looked at like this. "Cool."

Nancy, predictably, ruins the moment.

"Michael!" She's on a typical Wheeler warpath, skirting around Suzie and Argyle in the middle of their desks. But Mike's hands are already in the air as surrender, yelping as he scurries away, narrowly avoiding a direct hit from his older sister. She's not actively trying to hit him, not this time, but the scene unfolding is still one Will wishes he was filming for proof forever.

"I'm going, I'm going!" He says, and Will can't help it; he laughs, maybe a little louder than usual, grin stretching across his features. "I'll pick you up at seven! See you later!"

"See you," Will calls back, and turns to his own computer before Nancy can get him, too.

The nerves get him when he meets Mike downstairs, learning his lesson from the last time he'd shown up at Will's doorstep. It's a beautiful night, and it's fitting, and Mike is reaching for his hand when he's near enough to hold it. "Hi," he greets, and Will's heart flutters in his chest.

"Hi." Will can't help the smile that forms on his face. "You look nice."

"So do you." Mike laces their fingers together. "You ready?"

Honestly? He doesn't know. This is another step that feels bigger than most. And he wants this, so much, but it's a feeling so intense that it scares the shit out of him. He nods, trying to keep the smile genuine, trying to push the nerves away. "Yeah. Let's go."

Maybe Will wasn't as good at hiding it as he thought, though, because Mike doesn't budge when Will tries to start walking. "Hey." Mike squeezes his hand. His eyes are soft. "It's just me. It's you and me."

He doesn't know how to convey how that is exactly part of the problem, but in the best way possible. In a way that he hopes Mike understands when he finally tells him the truth about everything. "I know," he says. Mike squeezes his hand again, so he squeezes back. "It's us."

Mike is the first to move, this time, after lifting their hands and pressing a kiss to the back of Will's hand. He tugs him along, and Will clings on, lets himself float in the MikeandWill of it all, and pushes the looming threat of the future out of his mind.

(Will doesn't know what he was worried about. They eat outside, talk shit about the table next to them that ordered pineapple on their pizza, hook ankles under the table, hold hands once they pay the bill and leave the restaurant. It's no different than before. It's still Mike, and it's still Will — it's still two people who love each other, best friends since the very beginning.)

Mike meets Will at his apartment to start, so Will insists it's only fair he walks Mike home at the end.

"So?" Mike prompts, thumb brushing back and forth across Will's. "

Will groans, and it makes Mike laugh. "I knew El's comment was gonna come up eventually. You know she was mostly joking, right?"

"I know, I know, but she's right." Mike says, sobering. "I mean, we were kids, it was high school, but I was a bad boyfriend. I owe her a real apology for that."

"She'll forgive you." That's who Jane is; the most forgiving person they know. "You know she will."

"I know that, too, but not my point." They stop walking when they get closer to Mike's apartment building, pausing at the last crosswalk. "My point is that I know I was a bad boyfriend then, but I'm not going to do that, now. I really — Will, I really like you. It kind of scares me how much. I'm not going to mess this up."

"I know." Will says, gently, and then cracks a smile. "You went to therapy. You're a changed man."

Mike tips his head back. "I'm serious. Asshole."

"Oh, you're off to a great start."

"Dude!" But they're both laughing as they cross the street, tugging each other by their entwined hands. Mike's smile takes up half of his face; it's the most beautiful thing Will has ever seen. "So the date was okay?"

He loves him. "Yeah, Mike. The date was more than okay."

"Good. Cool." The shyness has crept back into his expression; Mike lets go of his hand when they near his apartment door, hovering just outside of it. "So… you'd go on another one? With me?"

Will pretends to think about it for a minute. "Yeah," he repeats. "Yeah, I think I would definitely would."

"Double cool."

"So double cool."

"And… you know, typically," says Mike, and he's faux-casual on purpose, scuffing his foot on the pavement, "I think most people end a first date with a kiss goodnight."

"Is that really what this was, though?" Will tilts his head. "A first date? Because it kinda feels like you've been trying to date me for months, now. All those celebrations or whatever."

"Hey, those were genuine reasons to celebrate!"

"Mike. We got drinks after work one night because you said Nancy didn't yell at you once all day."

"And that is a very serious cause for celebration." Mike says, so seriously that Will's laughter bubbles up without even thinking about it. "Seriously. She's always looking for a reason to yell at me. It was a genuine improvement in our dynamic!"

"Oh, of course. Big improvement." Will steps closer. Mike zeroes in on his face. "So none of those were practice dates, then?"

"Well," he says slowly, and Will's smile only widens when Mike's gaze flits down to what could very easily be Will's mouth. "I wouldn't say none of them."

"No? Do you have a number in mind, or…?"

Mike pouts. Will would like to kiss it off. "You know, it kinda feels like you're making fun of me here. And that feels pretty unfair."

"Oh, sorry. I'm sorry." He reaches forward, catching Mike's hand in his. "How am I supposed to make it up to you?"

He shrugs. "I could think of a few things. Maybe like that thing I just mentioned, that people usually do at the end of a date."

Will can't help it; he frowns, faking confusion. He knows the teasing is working when Mike scrunches his nose in return. "What thing are you talking about? I don't think I remember."

"Will Byers." Mike threads their fingers together. The night air is cool on Will's flaming cheeks. "Are you gonna kiss me or not?"

The truth is that it's not even close to the two-week deadline Will gave himself, but this is Mike; Mike, his best friend of almost twenty years, who has sat on the floor of his bedroom and read comics until they were both passed out with the lights on. Mike and Will, the DM and the notetaker in every campaign they'd run. Mike, who had done half of Will's homework himself when he was out sick after the field trip that changed everything, who has always been there since that day on the swingset, who's looking at him like no one has ever looked at him before, and how Will wants Mike to look at him for the rest of their lives.

Mike, the only one of Will's friends — of their collective friends — who doesn't know the truth about him, and Jane, and Lucas, and that an alternate dimension's Max Mayfield is probably sitting on Will's shitty apartment couch as they speak.

Mike, who takes the stretching silence as a reason to take initiative instead, taking the final step forward to close the space between them. He's nervous. So is Will. He knows, though, that it's mostly for entirely different reasons — because Mike doesn't. Not yet.

"Mike," says Will, almost the softest he's ever been, and they're so close he can feel Mike's breath on his mouth. "I have to — "

And they say good things come in threes, but Will thinks bad things happen lke that, too.

One: Mike leans forward; and Will wants it, so badly, but the minute Mike moves the hairs on the back of his neck stand up. Two: It's the sick nausea of his Spidey sense, one that sends him leaning back, rocking back on his feet, away from Mike's mouth, even if it feels like it physically hurts to do so.

Mike frowns. "Will?" he asks, and it's not confusion of rejection, but worry. "What's — ?"

And three: a horribly familiar sound of metal rolling on pavement comes just after Will's sixth sense, and he barely has time to let the dread settle in before the world is engulfed in flames, and Mike Wheeler's hand is ripped from his.

"Will! Will!"

Everything is muffled, like he's submerged under water; his limbs ache as hands try to position him.

"It's all right," she says, and it's Jane outside of her suit. Blurs of red and white behind him tell him that Max and Lucas are on the job for this one. Her concern swims in her gaze, fingers skimming over his face, his hair, scanning for injuries. "I'm here. What happened? Was Mike with you?"

"I — I don't — " Something inside him feels like it's screaming, squirming; everything is too loud. Too much. Too much.

"Will," Jane repeats, as her hands press into his upper arms. "I know. I need you to breathe for me, please. Focus. We have to focus. You know where we are, right? What's the last thing you remember?"

"I…" Will blinks, hard. There's dust in his eyes. His face feels wet. "Walking Mike home."

"We are outside of his building." She confirms, and that's it: the sinking feeling in his gut materializes, and he gasps, fresh tears springing to his eyes. "Hey — it's okay. It's all right."

"It's not." Jane's hands swipe at his tears. "El, I was walking him home. We were out here, together."

She gets it, then, expression dawning horror before she reels it in in a desperate attempt to keep her composure. "The paramedics were already here when we arrived. Maybe they took him to the hospital."

"No." He's heaving; she presses a hand against his chest, firm. "No, El, they didn't."

"You don't know that."

"I do." Wrong, wrong, wrong. He pushes himself up, missing the feeling of her hands when he does, but he feels sick. He might be sick. "El. I know. It was a flower bomb."

Jane freezes. There's no more attempt at composure; her eyes are wide, horrified, as she sits back. "What?"

"It was a flower bomb," Will repeats, and the memory comes rushing back to him, the slow-roll of the silver sphere across the road, the way its petals opened, revealing blood red and metallic teeth. "It was Vecna. He knows."

"How is that possible?"

"I know how."

Will feels himself stiffen. Ghost-Spider is standing beside them. She's tilting Will's head to the side under the pretense of checking on a civilian; they both know any of his injuries will heal within the hour. "I know how he knows," Max murmurs, quiet enough for no one but them to hear.

Jane's tears have stopped. She looks at Will, wide-eyed and wary, before her expression steels momentarily. "Explain," she says. It's not a request.

Max turns her head. "Not here," she answers, and then stands up. "Lucas is gonna get us through the portal. Dustin's meeting us there. Are you guys ready?"

No. Will's not ready. He doesn't want to be ready; he wants to snap his fingers and have Mike back, happy and healed, and not have to fight his way to his best friend, who was still dragged into the middle of it all despite not knowing a single thing.

"We will meet you there." Jane says, when Will's silence isn't broken. Max nods, once, and then she's gone, leaving Will and his sister hovering in the aftermath of his biggest mistake.

CreelCorp is suspiciously empty when they arrive, but Will doesn't have time to think about it. They follow Lucas's plans to the basement labs; Dustin is already there, first to arrive, sitting in front of one of the computers on the boot-up screen.

"I'm setting up base," he says, once he spots them. "Once the trinket's plugged in, I should be able to monitor and control it from here. Lucas has it for now. I don't care who keeps it as long as you plug it the fuck in."

The door flies open, then; Lucas and Max, masks down. Max's expression is solemn, hands raised. "Okay," she says carefully. "I can explain."

Will's sister puts her hands on her hips. "Yes, do!"

"Wait, what?" says Dustin, looking between them. "Explain what?"

Jane juts her chin out. "Max has not told us everything."

Lucas doesn't seem surprised by this; Dustin does. "What?" he asks, straightening in his seat.

"Max knows how Vecna got his powers," she continues, before Max can even speak. "And she didn't tell us."

"Okay. El." Will starts, and Max's eyes flit to him gratefully. He doesn't necessarily want it; he knows tensions are high right now. He's sick to his stomach about Mike, and he knows how Jane is feeling. This is the second time this has happened to them. He barely survived it when it was Max. He knows he won't if it's Mike. But this Max must have had a reason. "Hold on."

"This whole time! She never said anything, and this is information that could have helped us!"

"El," says Max, imploringly. "Come on — "

"No. Only my friends call me that," she snaps back. "You are not a friend. Friends don't lie."

That stops Max in her tracks — and everyone else, too. It's something they used to say to each other all the time, as kids; a reminder of a time before everything fell apart. There are tears in Jane's eyes, but not sorrowful ones.

"I didn't lie," Max says, and Jane scoffs, looks away. "I didn't. I couldn't tell you yet. You weren't ready."

"This is our fight!" Jane shouts. She throws her hands up. "Our villain! He killed our friend!"

"He killed mine too!"

"This isn't helping." Lucas cuts in, and his expression doesn't waver when both of them turn their glares on him. "We need to be a team, right now, and we aren't. So we need to fix this before we can get in there."

"He's right." Will says. Max turns to him, then, but Jane doesn't, instead looking at the ground, away from everyone else. "Max. Please. Can you tell us now?"

This softens her a little bit. She takes a deep breath, shifting weight from foot to foot. "He gets his powers from a symbiote. They're — well, symbiotic alien life forms that feed on the emotions of their hosts. Mostly negative emotions. That's what makes him so strong, and that's how he plans to take over once the collider does its job. They're virtually invulnerable. Only two weaknesses. They work in tandem with their host, form a protective exoskeleton, or something."

Max's admission is met with silence, so she keeps talking. "I've known the whole time." She's only looking at Will. "And I'm sorry that I didn't tell you until right now. But I asked you if you trusted me, and you said yes."

"And I do." He means it. "I still mean it."

"I'm almost done." It's Dustin from behind them, face illuminated by the computer screen. "Wrap this up. You have to get in there."

"If you have anything else to say," urges Jane, but the bite is gone from her voice, "say it now."

Max nods once, takes a deep breath. "Spoiler alert," she says, and squares her shoulders. She meets Will's eyes. "Henry Creel's not the only one bonded to a symbiote."

=

This is how Max knows:

It starts when she is fifteen, and her mom signs her permission slip for the class field trip to CreelCorp. Her whole friend group is on the bus; she sits next to Jane, and then it's Dustin and Lucas and Will and Mike. When Jane and Mike are being grossly couply, and she notices the look on Will's face, she drags him halfway across the room in an attempt for distraction.

It continues when she wakes up the next morning and her comforter rips in half because it won't stop sicking to her hand. Will is out sick, too, so their friends have split up responsibilities, and her mom complains about germs and modern medicine in the meantime.

It changes everything when Jane brings her soup and their hands brush, and something feels alive within Max. It's more than she's ever felt — senses on edge, hair on the back of her neck standing up, a dissonance finally resolved. "You're both like me," her best friend breathes, and Max has no idea what that means.

She finds out soon, though. It's only the three of them; Jane's had her powers her whole life. She explains this to them both, when they're sitting on the roof of Tiger High, expression shadowed in moonlight. She tells them about Martin Brenner and the experiments that span decades, ones including a Terry Ives and a sister named Kali and how Jane had lost so much before Jim Hopper came into her life. She talks about radioactive spiders and mutates and locks her arms around her knees, which have been drawn up tight to her chest.

Max's powers are a mirror of Jane's; they both have organic webbing, they can both stick to things like glue. She adopts the moniker Ghost-Spider, and Jane has always been Spinneret, but Will is slow to choose an alias. They realize early on that Will's powers are a little different. Super strength, agility, and all the basics, but the more they work together as a team, the more they realize something else must have gotten to him on that field trip.

This revelation, though, is when things start to change even more.

Will starts to lose sleep. He gets pale. He looks so sick with every passing day, and he pushes everyone around him away. He stops showing up to patrols, and a new villain in a slimy exoskeleton suit starts destroying the city and killing people: Vecna, whose identity they can't figure out.

It ends in a terrible battle against Vecna, one that almost ends Jane's life with his tendrils around her neck. Max is running, running as fast as she can — and then something shifts. Vecna freezes up. He recedes, and this is when they deal the final blow — she swings forward, Jane at her side, and something explodes around them, and then everything goes black.

When the smoke clears, and Max sees Jane bent over the body, the slimy suit finally receding, finally revealing — everything stops.

It's Will's face, gaunt and pale, eyes barely open, chest caving. Jane is sobbing so loud Max can't hear him breathing; she falls to her knees beside them, reaches for his trembling hand with one of her own.

"Max," he says, in a thin voice, desperation in his eyes. "Do you trust me?"

"Yes," she answers immediately. Jane is crying so hard she can't get a word out. "Yes, of course I do."

"Okay." It eases the expression in his eyes. He takes a rattling breath. "I'm sorry. I'm so sorry."

"It's not your fault." Jane is sweeping his hair back. He's fading. Max wants to scream. "Will. It was never your fault."

"It's a hivemind." There's one last fire in his eyes. He locks eyes with Max, urgent. "He's like me. And he's coming here."

Max's eyebrows furrow. "Who?" Will just coughs. "Will, who's like you? Who's coming?"

"Find him. Find me. I'll be both. It's a hivemind." He coughs again, and Max's heart breaks. "You'll know. It's a hivemind. It's a…"

Will Byers does not speak again.

They have to run before the police arrive. Joyce Byers is inconsolable when the news breaks; Jane is hollow, empty. It's her father's idea to move the Byers-Hopper family out of the state for a new start. The party kind of falls apart, after that; Max doesn't have the strength to stitch everyone together. She can't stop seeing her best friend cradle the body of her brother in her arms.

Senior year passes in a blur, plagued by her guilt and everyone's grief. She stops seeing Mike in the halls after third period. Dustin graduates into early admissions at MIT. Lucas tries, he really tries, but he gets out, too, and Max's mom takes photos of her by herself with her diploma in hand. Max tries to keep defending the city, but Ghost-Spider is close to public enemy number one. She doesn't blame anyone for that one.

And then, almost two years after the death of Will Byers, Lucas Sinclair drops into her life. Literally.

But it's not her Lucas.

This is what Will was talking about. Max knows it in her bones. Everything changes, again, and hope blooms in her chest for the first time in almost two years.

In Max's universe, Henry Creel was never Vecna. He was an industrialist, a borderline mad scientist, a man with hands in the pockets of all the others: Martin Brenner, Sam Owens, Linda Kay. His labs were hosts to man experiments, including Brenner's radioactive spiders, including alien lifeforms referred to as symbiotes, including Owens' serum to regenerate missing limbs. On that field to CreelCorp all those years ago, Max Mayfield was bitten by a radioactive spider; and Will Byers, by proximity, was chosen by a barely-breathing symbiote who had travelled between worlds looking for this dimension's version of Henry Creel, but had found someone else instead. Will becoming painfully aware of his differences caused him to isolate, caused the symbiote to take over more of his mind, caused Henry Creel from another dimension to poison and control and spy and plot, all completely under the radar, and it took until Jane Hopper was almost gone for Will to break free for good.

In Will's, Henry Creel was the mastermind. The one in communication with his symbiote, which called itself Vecna, with a plan to conquer worlds one at a time, beginning with Max's dimension. He was so close — if Max's Will hadn't been able to regain control, things would have been much different. Max was never on the field trip, but Will was always meant to be found by a symbiote — so while that spider did bite him, the symbiote still masked parts of it. If Dustin hadn't been able to fill the gaps in the differences between Jane and Will's abilities, the isolation would have worked here, too — but it didn't. There was no time for Will to feel alienated, and so he never knew, and so Vecna could never control him, not like he once did. And Will's abilities stemming from more than one origin meant it was harder for the symbiote to latch as a parasite, the way it had happened before.

=

"It's a hivemind." Max says. Blood is roaring in Will's ears. "When Lucas showed up in my dimension, I thought… no, I knew that this is what my Will was talking about. But I didn't know about you until that day on the couch, when we were talking about our powers, and you said you never stuck to anything."

"So, what?" Will says, and everything feels too warm. "I have this — symbiote? I was never bitten by a spider?"

"Yes, and no." Jane seems to catch on before he does; she inhales while Max keeps talking. "Your Max never went on the field trip to CreelCorp. Your Max was never there when that spider got loose. So it chose you. The symbiote just chose you, too. Will — my Will — said I'll be both. He was talking about you."

"But I'm still…" Different.

"In the best way." Max says, like she knows exactly what he was trying to say. "Will. Having both is what has kept Vecna from taking over. And you — if it's a hivemind, then you can find my Will's memories, and you can find Henry's. So you can fight him different than any of us can."

"Oh," says Jane.

"The earlier you knew, the faster Vecna would catch on." Max angles until her eyes meet Will's. "If you knew, then he would know too. But keeping you in the dark — I couldn't tell you any sooner than this, Will. I couldn't tell anyone. I could only go off of what my best friend told me in his dying breaths, all those years ago, and hope it would bring me to this moment, right here, right now."

The numbness in his body is replaced by a firm warmth; it starts in his hand, where Jane is holding on tightly, and spreads throughout his body until he's able to lift his head normally again, without the cotton cloud of shock. Max is still staring at him.

"Mike is waiting for you." She says, enunciating each word. "You have everything you need to get him, to kick some ass, and to — "

"Kill Vecna," he finishes, and she nods once, a flicker of hope in her slight smile. "Once and for all."

Jane lets go of his hand for them to pull their masks over their faces; Max lifts her hood, too, and they all turn to Lucas. "Portal time," he says. "Dustin, you good?"

"I copy," says Dustin, and it's both from the computer and the comm piece in Will's ear. "Go kick some ass, guys."

Lucas leads them further from the computers, halfway down the corridor. He stops in front of a doorway and reaches for the knob, pushes it open. On the inside is a room adorned with rainbows on the walls, but otherwise empty. There's a mirror across from them, but it's shattered; behind it is an observation room, the wall cracked and tile chipped.

"There," he says, and pushes through the second door, the one that takes them into the observation room and right up to the cracks.

Jane's disbelief is palpable through her mask. "Are you sure it is here?" she asks Lucas. "This is just a broken wall."

"That's the point." He reaches out his hand, and Will watches as he keeps going — and presses against the tile, until his hand begins to disappear, and the air ripples, wall splitting in two as the space where Lucas's hand has disappeared turns red and stretches, leaving more and more of a gap. "See? Gate."

"Gate." Will echoes. He looks at his friends; at his sister, at the one he couldn't save, at his ranger, elbow-deep in a portal. "Let's do this."

"Remember." Dustin, in his ear, as Lucas disappears through the gate. "Get in, plug in the trinket, and get out. You have to get out before it's at max capacity, or it'll destroy you along with the pocket dimension."

"Get in, trinket, get out." Max is next to push through the gate, and then Jane.

"Hey, Will?"

"Yeah?"

"Good luck." Dustin says, and then Will's pushing through the wall himself, and gasping when he comes out the other side.

He's here, a voice whispers in Will's mind; he sees a giant machine he's never seen before, sees a flash of Mike's face, a streak of blood. His stomach churns. Here, here, here. Follow me, here.

Will doesn't know what he was thinking; a quiet space, maybe, or at least a dark corridor to get their bearings before shit really gets started.

None of this is the case, though. As soon as he comes through the portal, and his senses realign, his friends are frozen in front of them — because, only feet ahead of them, stand dozens of bodies, all inky black with wide gaping mouths. They're covered in spirals, in spikes, faceless except for the rows of sharp teeth.

Max inhales. "Symbiote army."

The bodies all turn, slowly, and start running right for them.

"Oh, fuck," says Lucas, and promptly blinks out of visibility.

Jane whirls on Will. "Find Mike," she says, and pushes on him a little. "We will distract everyone. Okay? Go!"

And just like that, that's the plan: Spider-Man, invisible, skirting around everyone until he finds the collider. Ghost-Spider and Spinneret as the distractions. And Will, Spider-Man, relentlessly hunting until he finds Mike, and gets him to safety.

Here. And that's not Will's voice whispering. He's running before he can really process where he's going. Here, here, here. Follow me.

He shouldn't. He shouldn't follow the instinct, shouldn't follow the random fucking voice in his head, but he's desperate. All he can think about is Mike, and if this is his only lead, he has to take it.

(He doesn't notice that the symbiotes dodge around him, not the other way around. But he really, really should have.)

Will's feet take him to a door; he presses a hand against it. It's already ajar, which seems like a troubling sign to begin with, but Will pushes it open anyway. It's dark in the room, but his eyes are adjusting, scanning for anything, for —

"Mike!"

There he is: pressed against the wall, cocooned in vines and tendrils that cover the entire wall. He's unconscious, face pale and hair sticking to his forehead. There's a cut above his eye. The rest of his body is hidden underneath the flesh.

"I found him," says Will, to whoever the fuck is listening, and he darts forward. He has no idea how to break him out — there's nothing sharp nearby, nothing to tear and rip and stab at the cocoon to break him out. "I got him."

"Good." It's Max, breathing hard, distant snarls in the background. "Get him the fuck out of here, and come help us."

"Copy." He reaches out; there's enough space to slide his fingers against Mike's neck, feel for a pulse. It's there, steady, not as faint as Will was worried it would be. "Dustin, can you — sorry, guys — can you just let me have a minute?"

"Yeah, man." Dustin says. "Take it."

Not that his friends don't know about how he feels about Mike Wheeler, but this feels oddly intimate, and he's half-convinced he's going to out his own identity in this room. Mike's forehead feels like a normal temperature, so Will's pretty sure it's just holding him in place. "Okay, how do I…" He tries tugging at the tendrils, but they don't budge. "Fuck. Okay. Mike? Hey, Mike — can you hear me?"

Mike, to Will's absolute fucking relief, groans just a little.

Will could sob. He reaches up to cup Mike's cheek in his hand, smoothes his hair back from his forehead. "Hey. Hi. I'm gonna get you out of here, I promise. Just hold on."

Another groan. Something mumbled, too unintelligible to make out.

Pull, the voice whispers. Ask. Pull. Think.

It's an instinct. The first one brought him to Mike; the second one he has to trust. "Please," he whispers, and shuts his eyes tight. He wishes the tendrils would recede, would pull away, would free Mike from the wall.

And then — Mike pitches forward.

Will yelps. He's already standing in front of him, so catching Mike is no problem — the problem is that they both go sprawling onto the floor. Will cushions Mike's fall, arms around his torso, but the jolt of it has Mike's eyes flying open, has him gasping for breath, has him scrambling off of Will to his own hands and knees.

"You're okay! You're okay." Will doesn't know half of the shit he's saying, right now; all he needs is Mike's breathing under control, his panic subsiding. "Hey. You're safe. We're in a pocket dimension, and everything is kinda crazy right now, but I promise you're okay. Just breathe. I'm gonna get you out of here. I swear."

Mike blinks. Will can tell the exact moment he realizes just who exactly is sitting in front of him. "Hoooooly shit," he says, very slowly. "You're Spider-Man."

Will raises his hands. "Guilty."

"That's — okay, for a moment I thought — " Mike cuts himself off. Will has never wanted him to finish a sentence so badly. "Okay. Hey, Spider-Man. Jesus. Sorry. Did you say pocket dimension?"

"Pocket dimension." Will confirms. "And, uh, there are a lot of bad guys out there, so it's gonna be kinda scary, but my job is to get you out of here."

Mike looks unconvinced. "Shouldn't your job be to fight the bad guys?"

"I have friends for that."

"Your friends are fighting the bad guys," repeats Mike, and Will watches the flash of emotion on his face, and knows exactly what his line of thinking is. "And you, Spider-Man, are saving me?"

"Pretty sure you're the one who tagged me as the friendly neighborhood Spider-Man, didn't you?" Will points out, and to his delight Mike flushes, just a little. "Yeah. I read the Post. Can't be about the neighborhood if I'm not saving the neighborhood, can I?"

"Like Spider-Man is my neighbor."

Oh, you have no idea, he thinks, and shakes the wistful desire from his mind. There's no time. "You're actually currently impeding me from doing the saving, and the longer we take in here, the longer it'll take me to help kick some ass out there." Will stands up. He feels so wrong, for some reason, standing here in front of Mike with a suit that hides his identity, and the protection of anonymity blanketing his feelings. He extends a hand, though, because Mike is still on the ground, and it's the perfect excuse. "So are we gonna move, or what?"

Mike takes his hand. "Okay," he says, and uses Will's arm to pull himself up. "Let's move."

Relief floods through him. "Great. Stay behind me. D — uhhh." What was that alias he wanted? "Bard?"

"Present. Good job remembering, by the way."

Will ignores the second part as he pushes the door open. "Got him. On the way. We're a minute out to the gate."

"Great." Dustin breathes. He hesitates, though, and Will can hear it, before he adds: "You, uh, might wanna find a way to explain why it's me he's seeing on the other side of the portal."

Will's an idiot.

"Fuck," he says. This makes Mike jerk in panic.

"What?" he asks, and looks around, frantically, like something's coming for them. "Fuck, what?"

"I…" It can't be Max's identity. It can't be Lucas. It can't be Jane. So it has to be him. The rest, he can deal with. "Hold on. I have to tell you something, but I need to get you to the gate first."

"I'll tell the others to push it." Dustin says gently. "Are you sure about this?"

"I'm sure."

Mike doesn't look any less panicked. "Tell me something? Tell me what?"

Will loves everything about Mike, really — but right now he needs anything except for his impatience. "Gate first. Please."

"Or we can walk and talk."

"We're not walking and talking, Mike. We're in a pocket dimension. I need to get you out of here."

"Lucas is at the collider." Dustin says in Will's ear. "You gotta hurry, man. They're getting their asses kicked."

"Shit." Will exhales. "Okay."

"What? Shit, what? What's happening?"

Mike, at least, is hot on his heels as they sneak back through the hall. "I need you to be a little more patient, please," says Will. "It's stuff that doesn't concern you. It's fine."

"I'm here. It feels like it concerns me."

"Well, it doesn't, and I need to focus in case any of those symbiotes come at us, so can we wait until we get to the gate before I answer your questions?"

Mike snorts. "They're moving around you, dude."

This makes Will pause. "What?"

"They're moving around you." Mike repeats. "Are you not noticing that? We've passed, like, four on the way down this hallway."

Will, to be very honest, had not. At all. "I guess I was just too focused on a pretty face."

That makes Mike's face pink. "I — um — I have a boyfriend."

"I know," he says simply. "Thirty seconds, Bard, you copy?"

"I copy."

"What do you mean, you know?" Mike isn't giving up. "I literally haven't told anyone. Not even my sister. And we were literally ending our first date when — "

"Dude." Fucking Dustin, eavesdropping. "You were on a date with Mike? Why didn't you tell me?"

"Shut up." Will says, and Mike falls silent. Shit. "Sorry, not you. I was talking to — my friend. In my ear."

"Right," says Mike. "Your Bard."

"Yep."

"Is he another superhero?"

"He's the mastermind behind everything I do," Will says, and Dustin coos in his ear, which makes him roll his eyes. "He designed our suits. My webshooters. The programming I use. The comms. Everything."

Mike hums. "That doesn't sound very bard-like."

He's so sure. "Mike, I really don't have time for this."

It's clear Mike doesn't care. "You keep doing that."

"Doing what?"

"Saying my name like that."

"I'm just saying your name."

"No," says Mike, as they round the last corner, and there's the cracked wall, the portal to home. "You say it like you know me."

This is the moment of truth, anyway; Will takes a deep breath. He stops them when Mike's back is to the portal, Will standing between him and the rest of the pocket dimension. "It's not very bard-like," he agrees, and wants to look anywhere except for Mike's face, which is naturally the only thing he can focus on. "We used to play D&D in high school. That's his class."

"Oh. Cool." Mike says, and he very clearly does not get it yet. "I played. I'm a paladin."

"Yeah," says Will, and swallows, hard. "I'm a cleric. But my best friend — my, uh, boyfriend, now, as of hours ago, really — says I'm a sorcerer, on a technicality."

"That's funny. That's — "

And it clicks.

It shifts in Mike's face. His posture changes. He inhales, sharply, and there's a myriad of emotions in his dark eyes, and Will wants to throw up.

"I say your name like that because I know you," Will says softly, because he can't take the quiet, can't take the way Mike is looking at him. "I do know you. I know you better than I know anyone, and you know me better than I ever thought I could be known, except for this one really big secret, and I'm so sorry I didn't tell you until now. I am. There's — there's so much you don't know, and so much I have to tell you, and I will, I swear I will, but right now, I need you to step through that gate so I can help my friends."

"I…" says Mike, and every extra second of silence feels like torture. "I just…"

Will holds his breath.

"You're a superhero," Mike says, finally, and Will sees the shine in his eyes. "A real-life, honest-to-God superhero."

Oh.

It's still the last thing Will feels like right now. He's thankful for the mask hiding his face, even if he feels like Mike can see right through it. "I am," he says, and he hates to say it like this, but there's a hell of a storm behind them, and Will's the only one running right into it, so: "And I love you, and those are the two reasons why I have to do this."

The awed expression disappears almost immediately. "Do what — Will, you're crazy if you think I'm leaving you here — "

"You have to." Will reaches out. He smoothes Mike's hair away from his forehead, fingers skating over the cut above his eyebrow. "I can't focus if I'm worried about you getting hurt. I'm sorry, Mike. I'm so sorry."

He shoves before Mike can do anything about it; he uses all his strength, even as Mike's hands start to come up to fight back. He steps them backwards, further and further, until he knows Mike's back is pressing into the portal, and he's about to come out on the other side.

"Dustin." Will says, and hates the way his voice shakes when he does it. "Keep him out. Please. And patch me back in."

"You got it, man," says Dustin.

Will rolls his shoulders. He takes a deep breath. Mike Wheeler has so many reasons to hate him, and he'll deal with all of them on the other side. For now, though? His friends are waiting, and Vecna is waiting, somewhere in there, and Will's not leaving until he's dead.

"Hey, guys." He says, turning his back on the portal, moving forward. "Mike's out. I'm heading for the collider. I'll — "

He doesn't get to finish his thought, though, because a blinding pain shoots up the back of his neck; everything flashes, white-hot, Will keeling over from the surge of it, and then everything goes black.

Here, whispers the voice. Here, here, here.

When he comes to, everything happens in slow motion.

There are bodies on the ground; symbiotes. Torn tendrils scattered. Will can't hear anything. He feels like himself — feels real, in a way he hasn't in a long time, but hasn't noticed until just this moment. He feels warm, too warm. He looks up, higher than the ground, and freezes where he's hunched over.

Vecna, in his full form, slow stepping around the carnage. Tendrils that slide across his body. Teeth, white and bloody and sharp. Large white eyes that curl at the ends, claws born to tear flesh apart.

Vecna, descending, on Jane's bloodied and scrambling form. Beside her, Max, flat on the ground. Unconscious.

No, he thinks, miserably, and there's bile in his throat, in his lungs.

Here! It's still in his mind, swelling. Here, here, here!

He can't hear anything. He wants to scream. To throw up. To cry. His limbs feel so heavy; he can barely move. Jane is going to die. He doesn't see Lucas, Max isn't moving, and Jane is going to die.

It's a hivemind. Mike's face flashes in his mind; so does a swingset, and so does Max Mayfield, and his sister, and Dustin and Lucas, and his mom, and his brother, and it's a hivemind, and if it controlled Will Byers in another universe, why can't he control it, too?

Will shuts his eyes tight — and when he opens them again, he's staring down at Jane, and he's no longer in his own body.

Good. The voice whispers, and then: break.

It's quick, after that. Will jerks an arm up. Through Vecna's eyes, he can see Jane pause, recognize the situation, and then jump into action; she punches, hard, and Vecna goes sliding across the floor. Will feels it when it happens, but he knows it's not his own body. He feels the pressure when Vecna's arm snaps. He feels the twinge when his leg goes, feels the wind knocked out when Jane descends again, blow after blow.

Through the eyes of the hivemind, he watches the rest: Max, weak, pushing herself up, bleeding through the whites of her suit. Jane, continuously relentless. Lucas, popping up from nowhere, palms blue and sparking, and Will's own body jerks from the voltage, just a little, though it doesn't hurt. None of it hurts. None of it hurts, and none of it makes noise, and all Will can do is push, push, desperate to hold onto the hivemind for as long as possible.

Mike, he thinks, and the tunnel to Vecna's vision is closing, but he can see Lucas's hand close on Max's wrist, and Will is fading but Jane is following them, and he's drowning, falling, fading. I'm sorry.

=

He fades in and out, nothing stronger than muffled sound and pressure on his arm, on his legs. Everything is cold, and then it's warm, and then Will drifts, sleep taking back over. There are no nightmares, no dreams. The distant sound of footsteps. He thinks he wakes, once, to raised voices outside his bedroom, to someone calling his name. He's back under before he can register any of it.

=

The door creaks, and his eyes fly wide open.

Will knows it because he hears it. Hears it. The revelation hits him as Jane's face swims in the doorway, for just a moment, and then she's by his side in an instant.

"Will," she breathes, and he feels the pressure of her hand in his moments later. "You're awake. Hi. Are you okay? Can you hear me?"

"Hi," he croaks. "Yeah. I'm okay."

"Oh, good." She's crying. She wipes at her eyes with her free hand. "You really scared me. It's been four days."

Four days? "What… what happened?" His throat feels so sore. He drops to a whisper.

"Let me get you water." Jane squeezes his arm. "And I will call Mike. I forced him to leave," she adds, before Will can feel anything about the idea that he isn't in the living room right now. "He was pissing me off and Max hates his moping, so he is taking a lap. Or several. Dustin is with him."

Wait. "Max is still here?"

Jane smiles, then. It's not necessarily a happy one. "Water first," she says. "Then I will get everyone else, and we'll tell you everything."

Max had been right; the minute Will knew, Henry did, too. Just like Will Byers in her dimension, the hivemind had taken over. The final battle had taken place in the lab just outside of the collider. They'd been fighting off Vecna, distracting him from seeking out Lucas's heat signature, when the doors had flown off the hinges, and Will had joined the fight — but he'd gone straight for Max.

It was tight, for a minute. Lucas had to break away from the collider's control panel to step in, to keep Will from killing Max. He's sure the look on his face is horrified, but Max's hand is in his, and she shakes her head every time he starts to feel the guilt bubble up. Jane was focused on Vecna. They were holding Will back long enough to find a way to break him from the hivemind's influence.

"That was Dustin's play," she explains, and she still looks guilty, even after Will has already told her not to be. "We weren't about to burn you to a crisp to break you free, but he could isolate and fry your comms, and we hoped that the frequency in your feed would be enough to snap you out."

This was another thing Max had never told him: Will had known that symbiotes had weaknesses, but she'd never told him what they were. It fell under the category of things he didn't need to know about, just in case. A contingency. He gets it. He nods, once, as her thumb sweeps over his knuckles.

Dustin's move was right. This part, he knows, because it's when he woke up on the ground, palms flat on the bloodied ground. He'd been unresponsive for five minutes, says Jane; in that time, Lucas ran back to the collider, Vecna struck Max so hard she fell, heavy, and he was descending on Jane, who had been scrambling back with fear in her heart.

"Sorry," he says, hoarsely, and all three of his friends shake their heads. "I should have been stronger, I should have — "

"No, man." Lucas cuts him off, and he sits at the edge of the bed, hand patting his leg once, twice. "Don't do that to yourself. We all made it out."

"And you were strong," says Jane, firmly, and Max nods beside her. "You broke free, and you fought back. You saved us just in time."

He feels itchy in his bed, all of a sudden. "Thanks, guys," he says, and it seems to satisfy his friends enough. He remembers some the next part, too, through Vecna's eyes, but they tell him anyway: Lucas plugging the trinket in, tugging Max out of the lab. Jane reaching for Will, throwing up over her shoulder as he slumped. Vecna was still alive, but incapacitated, and the rest of the symbiotes were sluggish in movement, easily dodgeable as the four of them came back to the portal.

It had been dawn in New York City when the collider imploded in on itself, destroying the pocket dimension and blinking the portal out of existence, like it'd never been there in the first place. It had been morning when they'd all gotten back to Will and Jane's; Will, still unresponsive, carried to his bedroom by his sister, who pulled him out of his suit and did the best she could before letting him rest. At this point, Jane explains, Mike had figured out Spinneret's identity, which meant Max and Lucas were filling him in on the rest by the time she left Will's room.

Will's voice is quiet. He's not sure he wants to know. "How did he take it all?"

Jane, Lucas, and Max all exchange a glance. "Better than I thought." Lucas admits. "But… still not great. Understandably."

"He is upset." Jane agrees, taking a deep breath. "But he does understand, for the most part. He'll have a lot of questions for you."

"Okay." That's fine. He can deal with that. "Not to, like, kick you out or anything, but — I really need a shower, and five minutes to myself, if that's okay?"

"You got it, Byers." Max says, and they rise. He'll be a little sore, and might stumble, but Will knows he's got people to catch him when he needs it. "Glad you're up. We'll order food when you're ready."

Lucas is the last one out, reaching out for a hug before he shuts the door behind him. Will grabs a pair of sweats and a t-shirt from his dresser before he shuffles into the bathroom, carefully, peeling off the pajamas clinging to his skin for the past four days, making a note to throw those and his sheets in the washing machine later.

The water is scalding against his skin; Will feels like he empties half the soap just trying to get the feeling off of him. He lingers for as long as he can without putting a new dent in the water bill; stands until his legs feel weak again, scrubs until it feels raw. Brushes his teeth twice, too, just in case. Most of the bruises on his torso are yellow, fading fast. His hearing feels next-to-normal,

Are you there? He thinks, and wonders if the voice will whisper back, but it doesn't, never comes,

Dressed, hair damp, and ready to get out of the humidity of his bathroom, Will reaches for the doorknob, and pulls.

And it comes right off.

"Shit!"

"Will?" The voice on the other side of the door is frantic, muffled. It's Mike. Will's heart thuds. "Are you okay?"

"I'm okay!" he calls back. "I'm just — uhhh — sticky!"

A pause. "What?"

"Just hold on!" He puts the doorknob back as gently as he can, unfurls his fingers one by one. It works, thankfully, and he doesn't really want to risk it again for fear of an angry landlord. "I — sorry. Can you open the door for me?"

He takes a step away so he doesn't get smacked when it opens. "Sure," Mike calls back, but when he twists the doorknob from the other side the one in the bathroom clatters to the floor. Will winces; he bends down to grab it, narrowly missing the swing of the bathroom door as he does so. "Oh, shit, sorry, I didn't — are you okay?"

"I broke it." Will says, half-miserably, half-laughing. He holds the aforementioned doorknob up, and Mike's knotted eyebrows smooth out as Will sets it on the counter. "Sorry. Thanks."

"Yeah." Mike says gently. Will steps out of the humid air, into the safe space of his bedroom, and then it hits him: Mike is right there, here, staring at him.

He clears his throat. "Hi."

"Hi." Mike parrots, and then launches forward. The air's knocked out of Will's lungs, but he doesn't care; he leans back into the embrace, the feeling of Mike's arms around him, the hook of Mike's chin over his shoulder. "Do you normally do stupid shit like that?"

"Yeah," Will admits, and they both laugh a little. "I do. I'm sorry. I do a lot of stupid things, all the time."

"All the time," he echoes, and Will catches the note in it, the hurt. "And I never knew."

"Mike." It hurts to, but Will pulls away, just enough to meet his eyes. the cut above Mike's eyebrow is barely visible underneath dark curls, but he can see that it's bandaged.

Mike doesn't let him keep talking. He pulls out of Will's arms to sink down on his bed, knee bouncing. "Everyone knew. I mean, everyone. Dustin's your, what, guy in the chair? El's your partner. Lucas and Max — Max — "

Will shakes his head. "We never told Lucas," he says. "And Max found only out on accident, two hours before she… died."

Mike looks up at Will, eyes shining. "Max is alive."

Will shakes his head again, sits down next to him on his bed. "She isn't," he says, and reaches over to take Mike's hand as carefully as he can. "Our Max did die, Mike. Max out there is from another dimension — one really like this one, but also really different. Things happened differently over there."

He sniffs. "She called me an idiot, like, four times already."

And Will laughs, watery, despite it all. "Yeah, well, she's really like our Max."

Mike clings to him, too, and suddenly their joined hands is the only thing Mike can look at it. "That was a really shitty way to say you love me."

There's no laughing anymore. Will closes his eyes for just a moment. Mike presses on. "You thought you were going to die. You can't just tell someone you love them because you think you're going to die."

"I told you I love you because I do." When Will's eyes are open, Mike is staring at him, instead. It's a gut-wrenching feeling to be seen like this. "I wasn't planning on dying. I just wanted you to know. I've never had — anything like this, before."

"You have, though." Mike says quietly. "You've had me. All this time, you've had me. You just didn't know it."

Will doesn't want to play the blame game; he doesn't want to ask Mike whose fault that is, because he knows he could have said anything at any given moment, just like Mike could have. Maybe they were both scared of things changing, even if it was a good change.

"I was fifteen," he starts. "That — field trip, to CreelCorp. That's when it started. And then I was out sick for a week, remember? El brought me soup, and she realized we were… like each other. Our powers."

Mike listens. He holds onto Will's hand, keeps his focus on Will's face. Will does his best to explain everything, trying not to stumble over his own story. He explains Dustin finding out on accident, too, and explains how Jane taught him everything he knows about being a superhero. He talks about Brenner and his mechanical limbs, about Owens and the serum, about Henry Creel and his flower bombs. He talks about Max Mayfield and the determination in her eyes, the insistence on helping when the city was ablaze; about losing her, about the rotting guilt, about Jane giving up her suit and Will being unable to let go. The year in California that was harder for more reasons than Will could ever explain. Coming back because of Creel, thanking Nancy for her Molotov cocktail from the office windows of the Post, reuniting with their friends. Jane's slow return to wear the mask again, and refinding their place at home.

And all this time, Will thinks, at the wondered look on Mike's face, at the way he hangs onto every single word Will says, all along, I've loved you.

He describes the first portal, and Max and Lucas stumbling through, and the return of Vecna after all these years. The trinket, every moment Will has ever wanted to tell Mike the truth, Max and Will vowing to look after each other, because they'd both failed the first time around. A beautiful night for a first date, ruined by a rolling bomb, the terror that had come with Mike's hand slipping from his. The truth about what really happened on that field trip culminating in a moment of desperation in the pocket dimension, with a spider and a symbiote and a hivemind and a swingset.

"I wanted to tell you. Please never think that I didn't want to tell you." Will is so tired, and so hungry, and Mike's expression has only shifted minutely in however long they've been talking, so it's harder for Will to tell what he's thinking. "More than half of it wasn't my secret to tell, not really, and the last time a friend found out about any of this she died hours later, and — and you've always been more than a friend, to me, even before I knew what that meant, so — "

"Will," Mike interrupts, speaking for the first time since Will began, and Will's mouth closes immediately. "Will. It's okay. I understand."

Oh. "You do?"

"I do," he promises, and reaches up with his free hand to press it softly against Will's face. "Yeah, it — sucks. It sucks that you didn't tell me, that we've known each other for eighteen years and you've kept this from me for eight of them, and it sucks that I was so stupid that I never even noticed anything this whole time — "

Oh. "Mike — "

"Let me finish?" he asks, softly, and his thumb moves back and forth across Will's cheek. "It sucks that I was such a bad friend and a bad boyfriend to the two most important people in my life, and I never noticed just how much you were dealing with, and I'm so sorry. I trust you more than anyone I've ever met, and I understand why you couldn't trust me, too."

"I do trust you," Will starts, and Mike is already opening his mouth again, so he gets to the point. "No, Mike, listen. I've never told anyone the truth on purpose. Dustin found out on accident, because I was careless, and Max found out because of El, technically, and clocked me immediately after. Lucas found out on his own from being in the other dimension. If it had been up to me, I wouldn't have told anyone. Being — being Spider-Man is dangerous, it's so dangerous, it killed one of my best friends and it killed my mom's boyfriend and it almost killed you, and I never wanted to subject anyone to this knowledge. It's my burden. It's my power, so it's my responsibility. But if I had ever — and I mean ever — decided to tell someone on my terms, the first person I would have told was you. It's always you. I never wanted to make you feel like it wasn't."

Before Mike can respond, though, there's a gentle knock on the door. Will wants to snap, to lock it shut, to tell everyone to fuck off, but when the door creaks and Jane stands in his doorway, all of his frustration dissipates.

"Hi," she says. "Sorry. I know. But the food is here, and you both should probably eat something."

Will looks back at Mike, whose walls are already back up, but he keeps a hold of Will's hand when they stand up. "Later," he promises, squeezing Will's hand once before letting go. "Friends first."

It feels something like a celebration. Pizza, as is their go-to, sprawled around Will and Jane's couch and the carpet beside the coffee table. Dustin's in control of the music, so nothing but happy noise is streaming from the speaker in the kitchen. Mike is sitting beside him, knocking into his shoulder every once in a while, like he needs a reminder that this is real. Will knocks back, every single time.

It is the first time since they were seventeen years old that the full Party is together. Max and Lucas are sitting beside each other, knees brushing. She's in some of Jane's clothes, but she doesn't look out of place. He missed seeing Max Mayfield looking happy. It settles in his ribcage, soft and warm.

Mike has gone quiet beside him, too. When Will glances over, he's looking at Max. He's probably thinking the same thing. "Hey," he says. "You keep staring, she's gonna say something mean."

That makes Mike crack a smile; he looks at Will instead. "Sorry. I just…"

Will gets it. "I know," he says. He reaches for Mike's hand, settled on his knee. "I know."

They're cleaning up the aftermath of dinner and bickering about movie choices when Will realizes Max is missing. Not missing, exactly, really, but just not around everyone else. So he heads for the one place he's pretty sure she's at — sliding the window open, ducking out onto the fire escape, and grinning sheepishly when he looks up to Max staring at him.

"We keep meeting out here," he muses, and Max snorts.

"You keep following me out here when I'm trying to have a moment alone, you mean," she retorts, but it's not malicious.

"You want me to go?"

"Whatever," she says, which is Max code for no, so Will settles beside her, eyes on the night sky.

Silence passes between them. Through the open window, Will can hear the opening title a Star Wars movie. He's pretty sure it's Empire Strikes Back, but he'll figure it out when they get back inside. "So," he prompts, without looking. "You're still here."

"I am."

"In our universe."

"Yeah, dummy." Max says. "In your universe."

"On purpose?"

She ducks her head. "We were running out of time. Lucas grabbed me. I knew where he was pulling me. I let him do it."

Will doesn't even want to ask, but he does anyway. "Are there any portals still open?"

"The only one we knew about was in the basement." A dog's barking on the sidewalk underneath them. "And I watched it close for good."

She sounds carefully apathetic. Will turns, then, but the shadows are too dark to show her expression. "Max."

"It's," she says, and clears her throat. "Yeah, I… I mean. It's shitty, but it's home. You know? I don't have any friends, I'm not the only one protecting the city, but… I grew up there, so. It's fine. I made my choice, and I'm here now."

"Max."

"Besides. I have you." At this, she turns to face him, and the crooked smile on her face is genuine. "I mean it when I said I don't have friends there anymore. Here, I have you, and I have Dustin, and I have El and Lucas, and I even have Wheeler, I guess. This is — I mean, you have no idea how much this means to me."

There's a tear, though, tracking down her cheek. Will reaches out to swipe it away. "Yeah," he says quietly. "Except I really think I do."

He reaches for her, then, pulling her into a hug they both need. "I can't exactly pretend to be your Max," she points out. "Her family here. They can't know about me. And, like. I can't get a job, so I can't pay anyone rent."

"Dustin's a fucking genius," he says, when she sniffles into his shoulder a little. "You know he is. He'll figure it out, or find someone to figure it out for you. So if you want to go home, you can. And if you don't? We'll figure that out, too. But you're Max Mayfield. There's nothing you can't do, in any universe. Including this one."

"You're a really good friend, Will Byers." Max says quietly. She squeezes him tighter.

Will squeezes back, drops a kiss on the top of her head. "I learned from the best."

"I'm crashing here tonight," Dustin announces two hours later, shifting on the couch to take the entire thing up after Lucas stands, follows Max into Jane's room. "Sleepover! Blanket me."

Jane rolls her eyes. "You are so needy," she says, but she grabs their spare blanket from the closet, and then another, and a pillow, which she deposits on the other side of the coffee table. "Don't snore so loud. I will punch you if you wake me up."

"What are you doing?" Will frowns at her. "Aren't you staying with me?"

She blinks at him. "Max and Lucas are in my room," she says. "And Mike is with you in yours. Isn't he?"

"Oh." Mike says. "I mean — "

"You're more than welcome to stay," Will blurts out, before Mike can say he doesn't want to intrude, or even worse, doesn't want to stay at all. "Or, I mean, I can walk you home, if you — oh, shit, is your apartment even okay? The bomb?"

Mike snorts. "Yeah, it's okay. The block's kind of fucked, but the actual explosion didn't touch my building past the exterior. So everything's fine."

"Oh." Will relaxes a little. "Okay. Good."

Dustin groans. "Jesus, you two are so awkward now," he says, and raises his hands when Jane turns her glare on him. "What? They are!"

"Shut up," she says through her teeth, and then drops the stern expression when she turns back to Will and Mike. "So?"

Will doesn't know why she's looking at him. He looks at Mike. "Yeah," he says, and tries to put on a pleading expression, just a litle. "So?"

Mike meets his gaze. Will's not all that tired, and they still need to talk, but he'd throw it to the side if it meant he'd get to just hold Mike for a few hours. "Okay, yeah," he says. Will exhales. "I'll stay."

So they shuffle into his bedroom as Jane threatens Dustin about his snoring again. It's dark, and it's quiet; Mike steals something to change into from Will's dresser, and Will's already in comfy clothes, so he slides into bed on his normal side and tries to breathe like a normal person, and tries not to think too much when Mike steps into the bathroom.

Are they being awkward? It would make sense, Will guesses; given everything that's happened over the last week and all the ways that it's changed both of their lives, individually and together.

Light spills into Will's room as Mike steps out of the bathroom. He switches the light off, then, and makes his way over to Will's bed. Moonlight shines through the blinds, leaving streaks of light on the floor; it's enough for Will to see the curve of Mike's face, the shine of his eyes, to watch as he peels the comforter back, slides into bed beside him, turns on his side and face Will.

"Hi," he murmurs.

Will smiles a little. "Hi," he murmurs back. "Are we — "

"Can you — " Mike starts, and then they both stop at the same time, break into laughter. "Sorry. What were you going to say?"

"No, no, you go first."

"Okay." he lets out a breath, and then unfolds his arms, expression hopeful. "Come here?"

Will's heart twists. "Oh," he says, and then slides over. It takes three seconds for them to tangle together; Will's chest against Mike's, head tucked into his neck, a leg thrown over Mike's. One arm tucked against his own chest, the other over Mike's waist, and both of Mike's arms around him. He feels Mike's mouth press against his hair, and the warmth of it spreads. "Hi, again."

"Hi, again," Mike whispers back. "What were you gonna say?"

"I didn't know if we were going to keep talking about it," he admits. "But — this is better. Or we can do both. Whatever you want."

"Well." Mike drags the word out. "What I want right now is to hold my boyfriend for a little while."

Will grins. He hopes Mike can feel it against his neck. "I think I can allow that."

"Yeah? Okay. Good."

And it's so nice, to feel the rise and fall of Mike's chest underneath his own. It's so nice to feel his heartbeat, to smell his shampoo, to be encompassed in MikeMikeMike the way he's always wanted to be. It's so nice to be held, to be cared for, to be wanted in the way he can feel like he's wanted here, and now, and Will finds that he doesn't mind not talking at all, because he could stay in this moment for —

"I love you."

Will's breath hitches.

"I love you," Mike repeats, and his thumb traces back and forth low on Will's back. "I love you so much that it scares me, and the only reason I was so mad when you pushed me through that portal and away from you was because you didn't even give me the chance to say it back. I love everything about who you are, and finding out you're an actual superhero wasn't even that much of a surprise to me, because of course it's you, Will, who else could it be if it wasn't you? You're the best person I've ever known, and I've loved you for longer than I can even remember."

This is everything Will has ever wanted, which is why it feels to good to be true. "It feels like there's a but coming."

Mike presses another kiss into his hair. "No," he says softly. "No, I — I mean, earlier, yeah, there was. I wish I'd known sooner, but — oh, I guess that's the but — when I said I understand, I meant it. I could never do what you do, Will. You're so strong, and you're so brave, and you're right: with great power comes great responsibility. The more people that know, the greater the risk. Not for your identity, but for their safety. I could never be a superhero, but I get that much. So I get it."

"I mean." Will says quietly. "You're, like. My superhero."

A beat, and then Mike laughs, the action shaking Will, too. "That is the sappiest thing you have ever said to me."

"Sorry. Was it too much?"

"No, my sorcerer." His laugh is gone, replaced with fondness, replaced with love. "No. It wasn't too much."

"Oh, now who's the sap?"

"Pretty sure it's both of us."

"Yeah," says Will, and Mike kisses his head again — once, twice. Hums a little, and holds him tighter. "Yeah. It's us."

=

Dustin does figure it out, because he is a genius. He presents Max with a wristwatch just over a week after Vecna's defeat. They all knew this day was coming, but it makes it no less easy; even for Max, who puts on a brave face, braver than the rest of them.

And that's it; she has her suit on, mask down, skateboard slung across her back. She came with nothing, but she leaves with a backpack, and even though Will doesn't know what's inside it, he's sure it's their belongings, things to remind her of them. "We'll see each other again," Max promises, after she's hugged everyone goodbye, after Lucas has hovered close, looking like he wants to say something but hasn't done it yet. "Come on. I gotta get system upgrades every once in a while, right? And my friends are here. I'll be back before you know it."

"You'd better be," says Mike. "I just started getting used to being annoyed by you again."

"Screw you, Wheeler." But Max is smiling, beaming, as the portal materializes open behind her. "See you on the flipside."

She steps through, then, and the portal disappears behind her. Mike's the first to reach out to Lucas, hand on his shoulder. "Come on, man," he says, and squeezes. "I have an idea. Let's go."

They sneak onto the rooftop of Hawkins Tech at sunset, all five of them. There's a new Max-shaped hole, now, but Will knows she's there, on the other side of that portal, and that she'll be back. Dustin will find a way to make interdimensional communication effortless, probably, and then it's just like another long distance friendship. Something they can manage.

That's the difference, though. In a way they hadn't had in so many years, there's hope there. Hope that brews in Jane's laugh, in Dustin's jokes, in Lucas's smile, in the feeling of Mike's hand in his. Dusk has always been his favorite time of day, to bask in, but this is his favorite place: wherever his friends are. His home.

They stay until sunset turns to dusk turns to night, until they're out of the soda they carried up and the food they brought along. They have to part eventually, though — because if they stayed until they'd get tired of each other, well. They'd stay up there forever. That one isn't a secret — it's a shared sentiment, treasured, held in their hearts since the moment they all met.

Will wouldn't trade it for anything else.

=

It's a beautiful day in New York City — and a beautiful day to ambush the love of his life on his walk home.

He swings from building to building as the city breathes beneath him. Will loves it here; he loves knowing it like the back of his hand. He loves recognizing his boyfriend by the top of Mike's curly hair, and loves attaching himself to the nearest fire escape and letting the webbing stretch until he's closer to the ground, shrouded by the shadows in the alleyway, and shouting: "Hey, you!"

Mike yelps. Will grins to himself, watches as his boyfriend looks around before his eyes flit up, watches as he stomps halfway into the alley, stopping right before where Will's hanging. "Oh, you asshole," he says. "You scared the shit out of me."

"Sorry," says Will innocently, except he's not sorry at all, and he slides down the webbing a little further, until he's closer to Mike's head, still upside-down. "You weren't texting me back."

"I — it's been ten minutes."

"Your point?"

"You're unbelievable, Will Byers," he says seriously, but he lowers his voice when he uses Will's full name.

"Hey, lovebirds," says Dustin, and Will sighs. "I hate to break it up, I really do, but I need you en route to an anomaly I'm picking up across from our old high school."

"What kind of anomaly?" Will asks.

"I don't know! I don't have eyes on it!"

"I'm going," says Jane, before Will can get another word in. "Will, kiss your boyfriend goodbye and meet me here. Lucas is beating us."

Lucas sounds triumphant. "Not my fault I'm the fastest."

"Okay, okay." He refocuses on Mike, who has gotten significantly closer, and he sighs again. "Duty calls, sweetheart."

"Typical." Mike says sadly, but he's reaching up for the steam where Will's mask meets his suit, fingers slipping underneath it, tugging it until it's resting on the bridge of his nose. "I'll see you at home?"

Will lets him. "I can't believe you actually like kissing me like this."

"It's romantic."

"It feels weird."

"Are you gonna kiss me or not?" Mike complains, impatient, and Will just laughs.

"C'mere," he says, and Mike happily obliges, mouth pressing against Will's. The angle is weird; Will is hanging upside down, holding onto the webbing keeping him dangling from the fire escape above them, and Mike still never really knows where to put his hands.

Mike kisses him one more time, soft and quick, and then pulls his mask back into place. "Go get 'em, tiger," he whispers, and then he walks out of the alley, and Will swings away, grinning.

"Loser." Jane sing-songs, when Will finally lands in the park across from Hawkins Tech. "You're the last one here."

"He was busy," mocks Lucas, before Will can defend himself. "Making out with his boyfriend in an alley, probably."

Will splutters. "I was not!"

"Were too," says Dustin, still patched in, and both of his friends cross their arms, triumphant. "I was tracking your location. That was definitely an alleyway."

"You guys are unbelievable," he mutters. "Seriously. I don't — "

And then he stops, and they all freeze, because the air changes.

"Spiking!" Dustin shouts. "What's happening? Reading's spiking!"

"Something is happening," says Jane carefully, and Will watches as the space in front of them ripples, shifts; it stretches apart and explodes with color until it's distinctly circular, churning, and then a very familiar masked individual pokes their head out.

Lucas laughs. "Hell yes!"

"Hey, guys," she says, and pulls her mask down, and Max Mayfield grins at them, raising a hand in greeting, in invitation. "You got a minute?"