Archive of Our Own

Chapter Text

First and foremost, Mike Wheeler is a dumbass.

No, he’s not an idiot–that’s a completely different thing–and he’s not stupid, either; he actually gets decent grades, and he’s got more on the ball with science than, say, 95% of the rest of Hawkins High.

No, Mike Wheeler is a dumbass in the strongest social sense of the term: he’s impulsive, emotionally obtuse, and he never quite knows when to shut his mouth. He also lacks a decent amount of common sense. All four of these traits work together to his detriment, in due time.

This is the story of how Mike Wheeler got stuck in the Upside Down.

Did he mention that Will Byers was there, too?

The day is not going how Mike Wheeler had planned it at all, which, considering his hometown has become an active supernatural warzone, shouldn’t be a surprise. School hasn’t been in session since it let out for spring break, people are moving out faster than they can pack, and did he forget to mention there were giant cracks in the ground leading directly into the hellish dimension he and his friends affectionately called the Upside Down?

And yet, Mike’s biggest problems of the day are as follows:

1.) Somebody had lied to him about something very important,

2.) Somebody else had decided that now was the time to break up,

and

3.) He doesn’t entirely know how either of those things make him feel, but he does have enough sense to realize that the way he feels about both of them is not how he should feel, by normal standards (whatever that means, anyway).

Shielding his eyes from the ashy sky, Mike steps off the wilting porch of Hopper’s cabin and scans the surrounding woods. Before she and Mike had parted, El had said Will was out wandering the woods. Something about a weird noise and he’d be back in just a few minutes, even though everyone had agreed that Will absolutely should not be left alone right now. He and El are the most vulnerable to the Upside Down, and neither of them should be wandering off to go chase weird noises or be heroic or whatever. Everyone’s lives are at stake, especially theirs.

“Will?” Mike calls out. Though the clearing is full of trees and piles of dead leaves, his voice still sounds too loud in the clearing, like everything around him is slowly being hollowed out from the inside. He takes a few tentative steps through some dead leaves and grass before trying again, “Will?”

He should be dwelling on the not-insignificant emotional roller coaster he had disembarked no more than ten minutes ago, but no. Now, he has to scour the woods for his best friend who decided to wander alone in the woods while the world is literally crumbling to dust at their feet, and who, apparently, has been keeping a most peculiar lie up for the past week or so.

Until all of this is over, you kids need to stay together, at all times. Understood? Hopper’s words echo in his head. He’s never been one to listen to Hopper much, though, so it’s pretty easy to tune him out. Sure, it would be safer if he and Eleven both searched for Will together, but after the conversation they just had, he thinks he’d rather risk dismemberment or radiation poisoning than have to face her. Before he’s thought too hard about it, Mike’s already several yards from the cabin, one hand shielding his eyes from the near-constant rain of ash and the sun’s dusty gray beams, the other cupped around his mouth to project his voice through an already dead forest, “Will Byers!”

For a brief moment, he’s taken back to these same woods, just a couple years ago: search parties scouring past every tree and shrub calling for Will, looking for any signs that he’s still alive. Gray sky and ash turn to navy blue and a downpour of rain, and he’s suddenly half a foot shorter, Dustin and Lucas at his side, and there’s a child with a shaved head standing in front of them.

My life began the day I found you in those–

“Will!” he yells, breaking the chain of thought.

There’s a faint rustle nearby, and Mike’s heart temporarily shoots up into his throat. They still don’t know what all the effects of the Upside Down being open and in the process of swallowing Hawkins whole right now are, so who’s to say there couldn’t be demogorgons or demodogs on the loose? His hands nervously reach for his pockets, but he knows he has no formidable weapon on him, not even in the backpack slung over his shoulders. Hell, he couldn’t even pelt Troy with a rock when he was only a few feet away three years ago. Oh, shit, he really didn’t think this through–

“Mike?”

He wheels around to find Will just a few paces from him. There’s a shotgun gripped in his hands and a faint dusting of ash on his flannel-clad shoulders. He’s clearly been out here for more than just a few minutes.

With all the poetic irony the universe can muster at this point, Mike notices there are paint smudges on his hands.

—

“What painting?” El narrows her eyes, “And what’s a commission?”

Mike mirrors her confusion, eyebrows furrowing. “Uh, you know? The painting? The one that Will did, that you asked him to paint for me? It had the dragon and our D&D characters on it?”

El crosses her arms. “Mike. I never saw what Will was painting–I told you that in my last letter. And I don’t even know what your D&D characters are.”

Oh shit oh shit oh shit. “Wait, hold on. So you’re telling me you don’t even know about this painting?”

She nods, eyes still narrowed. “Yes. I told you.”

Now Mike’s running his hands through his hair as he begins connecting the dots, realizing the picture they form is a vastly different one than what he was led to believe. He opens his mouth, pauses, chews on his words for a few moments, then strains out, “A-and all those things about…about needing me and being the heart or whatever–you never said that?”

“Mike, what’s going on?”

He takes a deep breath, then says, “When Will gave it to me in the van, when we were heading to the Nina Project to get you, he said you commis–asked him to paint it for me. Like you told him what to paint and everything. And then he said you’d felt so different since moving to California, but being with me makes you feel…normal, I guess? No, wait–like you’re better for being different, he said. And he said that you said I was, like, the heart of the Party or whatever, and…” He trails off, not knowing what to do with all the information that’s suddenly come into his hands. He’s surprised smoke hasn’t started trailing out of his ears yet.

El shakes her head again. “I never knew anything about the painting, Mike. And I never said those things.” In a split second, her eyes snap up to his, brimming with sympathy. “He lied.”

Mike’s incredulous. “But–no, that’s ridiculous! I mean, why would he even lie to me? He’s, like, the most honest person I know!” The thought follows in his mind but goes unspoken: And why wouldn’t you say those things about me?

El reaches out a hand and pulls him onto the bed with her. They face each other, but there’s a space between them–safe, comfortable, but distant nonetheless. She keeps a hold on his hand, but there’s no reassurance in her fingers, just a dim sense that this will be the last time they speak like this for a very long time. “Actually, Mike. I needed to talk with you–”

—

Mike clears his throat and points at the gun in Will’s hands, “Uh, is that a gun, or are you just happy to see me?”

Will stares at him in confusion. "I don't think that's how the joke goes."

“Oh, right.” Mike responds, now at a loss for how to steer this conversation where he wants it to go. When his eyes catch on the smudged paint on Will’s hands again, though, he hastily continues, “So…been painting lately?”

Will glances down at his hands and a few places on his shirt with paint streaks on them. When he looks back up at Mike, his eyes are narrowed, perplexed. “Yeah…?”

“Cool.”

There’s a flash of lightning in uncharacteristic shades of red, another fun side-effect of the Upside Down’s takeover. Will briefly reaches for the back of his neck before gripping the gun again. “Listen, Mike, is there any particular reason you’re out here?”

Now the emotions of the past half hour flood back into him. For a moment, it feels like there’s a steady, uproarious whirlwind in his chest and head, screaming a thousand different things at once. He purses his lips and tries to settle all the noise in his head before choking out, “Uh, yeah, actually. There’s something I wanted to talk about.”

Will’s posture briefly stiffens, and his grip on the gun seems to grow tighter. After a few moments, he nods. “Um, okay. Could you maybe walk with me, then? We can talk about it while I look around. Just, uh, maybe we should try and be a bit quiet?”

Mike holds his hands up. “Oh, totally. No problems here.”

Will shoots another glare at him, but a lazy grin pushes at the corners of his mouth. “You’re literally one of the loudest people I know.” Then he turns and begins to go back the way he came, his head slightly inclined to listen for any strange noises. Mike follows close behind.

Mike follows close behind, hands awkwardly fiddling with the straps of his backpack. “So, I guess I wanted to talk about your painting?”

Will briefly stops, shoulders rising towards his ears.

“Okay…?”

Will’s a few inches ahead of him, and Mike can only watch the back of his head and imagine what kind of expression is on his face. Sure, Mike isn’t the most emotionally observant person, but there is something to looking in a person’s eyes for answers they don’t feel like confessing.

“Yeah,” Mike says, his words now gaining momentum, “I mean, first of all, I love it, dude. It’s amazing! I’ve always loved your art, but it just keeps getting better, and I find myself loving it more every time you show me a piece.”

A flush of red creeps into Will’s ears, and it’s not because of the freakish lightning in the distance. “Oh, thanks,” he mutters.

Nervousness creeps into Mike’s limbs as he nears the precipice of confession, his hands clammy enough that he needs to swipe them down the front of his jeans. Trying to swallow against the steadily increasing beats of his heart, he continues, “Yeah! And, remind me again: you said El commissioned it, right?”

Halting to a stop, Will turns to face him but, finding they’re majorly infringing on each other’s personal space, he takes a step back. When Mike looks into his eyes, they appear distant, their usually lively hazel dulled to a flat, unknowable sheet. Will nods.

Mike nods back in turn, biting the inside of his cheek. He glances around the clearing–no signs of any monsters yet, but he might be praying for one to show up depending on how this conversation goes. “And she said all those things? The ones that you said when you gave it to me?”

Will’s eyebrows scrunch together. “I mean, not in those exact words, no. But the general ideas, yeah.”

“Ah, okay,” Now Mike’s hand is at the back of his neck, trying to ease the tension that’s gathered at its base. “Well, I guess that’s kind of odd.”

Will bristles. “What?”

Shrugging, Mike explains, “It’s just…odd, I guess. Because I just got done talking with Eleven, and she had no idea what the painting was. Oh, also, she just dumped me, so I’m guessing the whole ‘you-make-her-feel-better-for-being-different-she’ll-always-need-you’ line wasn’t necessarily true.” His gaze has steadily dropped down to the ground; with most other people, he’d glare directly into their eyes and demand answers, and even though he’s pissed as hell–well, Will is still Will, and being that confrontational with him in the past has always made him feel exponentially worse than when he’s been like that with anybody else. Now, he peeks through his bangs to meet Will’s face, which has quickly paled, its expression even more distant than the look in his eyes. “Would you say that’s right, Will?”

The thing about him and Will is this: they’ve always been able to talk. Well, except for that one time Will moved to California and they didn’t talk for, like, six months, but that was different! They’d just made up and spent several days together in a van on an end-of-the-world roadtrip, talking about the things that mattered most!

But Will clearly doesn’t want to talk right now. He never even tries to respond, simply shifts the gun in his arms (not at Mike, thank God) and swivels back around. He starts walking without any indication to Mike to follow.

“Hey–!”

“Listen, Mike,” he starts, one hand dragging against a dry-rotting tree, eyes still pointed as far away from him as possible, “Let’s just talk about this later. I still don’t know what was making that noise–”

“Hey, in case you hadn’t noticed, there’s nothing in these woods because everything’s already dead or in the process of dying, and all the gates are at least a mile away from us, and, what the hell, the world’s ending, so we might as well talk about this right now!”

When Will turns back to look at him, there’s a rosiness to his cheeks. He looks…almost kind of scared? “Mike, please.”

Mike throws his hands in the air. “I just don’t understand why you’d lie to me like that, Will! And over something like that? Really? Did you think giving me a painting would be–” he stumbles for a moment, trying to push down the tide of venomous words he knew everybody else would associate with something like that, “–be weird, or something? C’mon, man, you’re my best friend! And I love your art! It wouldn’t have been weird or stupid or whatever!”

Will closes his eyes and takes a deep breath. “I don’t know. It just–it didn’t feel right?”

“But why?”

Will shrugs.

Mike tries to soften his voice, “Did I make you feel like you couldn’t give it to me?”

After a moment, Will mutters, “Well it’s not like your greeting at the airport helped much.”

The silence is stiff in the clearing. Mike has to close his mouth to keep any stray ash from traipsing in. “So that’s why you lied? Because I acted weird at the airport?”

“Not entirely–”

“Then why–” “Mike,” Will’s voice cracks, and the look on his face tells Mike he needs to calm down, “Can we please just talk about this later? Preferably inside?”

Mike runs a hand through his curls. “Okay, fine. Let’s talk about the painting later.”

Will sighs with relief.

“But what about what you said? About me being the heart or whatever, and El needing me? Where did that come from?”

Now, Will groans, rubbing an exasperated hand over his face that’s quickly turning beet red. His shoulders are bunched up towards his ears, and a fine coating of ash has turned his hair from chestnut brown to an almost sandy, dirty blonde. He opens his mouth to respond, then seems to think better of it and merely shrugs. Again.

Mike pinches the bridge of his nose. “So, you lied to me about El commissioning the painting and saying all those things, and your reasons for doing so are because I treated you weird at the airport and you don’t know?”

And why is Will’s face turning redder by the second?

Another spark of lightning flashes against the sky. The clouds are growing thicker, slowly shading the woods into a grainy darkness.

Will considers for a moment, “It’s clearly what you want–” He stops, swallows his words before continuing carefully, “–Needed to hear, at the time.”

Nevermind the ash, Mike’s mouth has dropped open again. “You said that El said all of those things because that’s what you thought I wanted to hear?” He tries to hide the fact that, well, Will had been correct–those were exactly the words he had wanted to hear. But he had wanted them to be true, dammit.

When Will sighs this time, it’s with great frustration. His grip on the gun is tight enough to cause a few veins on his hands to jump out and his fingers to grow red. “Yes, Mike! You were super upset about your relationship with El and feeling useless, so I told you what I thought would make you feel better, okay? And I thought that’s how she felt about you!”

“Well clearly she didn’t since I’m newly single as of,” he checks the watch on his wrist, the same model Will wears on his, “Twenty minutes ago!”

Their voices have raised far past the quiet tones Will had initially wanted them to keep. If there were any stirrings from supernatural creatures in the woods, neither of them would be able to tell.

Will throws his free hand out. “And I’m sorry, okay? I know how much you…” he takes a moment, and it looks like he has to strain to get the words out, “How much you love her, okay? And I know that must suck for you right now, but she didn’t know I said that, and I didn’t know her feelings had changed for you, and I didn’t know that you didn’t know any of this!”

“What the actual hell?” Mike scrunches his eyebrows up, trying to follow along the web of associations Will seems to naturally have been able to devise and keep up with. El didn’t know that…So Will didn’t know that…And so Mike didn’t know…what?

Everything, apparently.

After several moments of trying to parse it all out, Mike finally shakes his head, hoping the torrent of thoughts spills out of his ears so he can get back to the main issue at hand. “I’m just confused, okay? Why would you lie about just giving me a painting? And why would you say all of those things? It’s obvious you’re hiding something.”

For the third time, Will shrugs, but he offers no response. Instead, he turns back around, and walks further into the woods.

(iii) Never quite knows when to shut his mouth

“Hey!”

Mike trots after Will, coming up next to him. Both of Will’s hands are back on the gun now, and his eyes are wary, purposefully glancing everywhere except at Mike.

“Will!”

His friend’s pace picks up. Mike might have longer legs, but Will sure knows how to get his to take three steps for every one Mike manages. After several paces, he angles his course slightly, pushing back towards Hopper’s cabin.

Mike groans before trying again, “Listen, I’m sure whatever your reason is, it’s a good one, okay? And I’m sure I won’t be mad about it! What I’m mad about is the fact that you felt like you had to lie to me in the first place!”

Will’s steps falter. Once more, he turns slowly, but it’s not to gaze at Mike. His eyes shoot just over Mike’s shoulder, into the slow, encroaching darkness of deep clouds and the oncoming night. Just like he’s done countless times since they got back, he cups his hand against his neck, and a shiver seems to shake his entire body.

Mike tilts his head to try and meet Will’s eyes. “Are you okay?”

His hand slides from the back of his neck to where his shoulder and neck join, more a look of nerves than supernatural terror. He looks exhausted, and Mike knows he should stop pushing the point, but also–well, if the end could come at any moment, he’d rather have this mess straightened out in his head, both of their emotions be damned.

“Can we please just talk about this later?” Will pleads.

Mike shakes his head. “I mean, what was that thing that El–oh, sorry, you–said in the van, the thing about ripping a bandaid off? Getting it over with? Can’t we just let it all out in the open? No more secrets, no more lies!”

“Mike, you don’t understand–”

“I’m your best friend! What could I not understand? That’s the whole point of best friends–we try to understand each other no matter what!”

“No, Mike,” Will gestures the gun, presumably in the direction of the cabin. “I get where you’re coming from, but I’m not doing this right now, not with everything else going on!” Now, he starts to stomp away. “So I’m going to go back to Hop’s cabin because, like you said, everything else here is clearly dead, and you’re free to join me if you want, so long as you don’t keep up with this–”

“Will–”

“–This sudden desire to understand everything! Can’t you just shut up for once?”

Mike throws his arms out. “What’s that supposed to mean?”

“It means–”

(iv) Lacks common sense

Mike doesn’t catch the rest of the sentence, though. Will is mid-stomp when there’s the sound of a crack, and the earth begins to shake. Shimmering amber light slices a wayward path through the woods’ grounds, just a couple yards from where Will is. Chattering clicks and spiky black tendrils seep out wherever the light touches, and a gravity of its own draws in debris from the surrounding areas: dead leaves, old bullet casings, the bones of small animals.

Then, several things happen at once.

Will briefly whips around and locks eyes with Mike, eyes wide.

The shaking stops, and Mike lets go of the tree he had clasped on to.

Ever so faintly, the sound of a discordant, chiming clock reverberates through Hawkins.

“Wha–”

One of those inky tendrils shoots out, wraps itself around Will’s ankle, and before Will can lift his gun and shoot, he’s already being dragged against the ground.

Before Mike can even think about moving, Will’s already falling through the freshly formed gate.

“Will!” Mike scrambles forward, oblivious to the knowledge that what happened to Will could also happen to him just as easily. He skids to a stop where his best friend had been standing moments before. Heart pounding, his eyes latch on the gate, its hazy light, and, just beyond those ember-colored rays of light, a chilling darkness.

“Will?” he asks the empty clearing. His voice sounds like it did when he was twelve, scared in the woods on a rainy night, looking for the very person who just disappeared again.

Struggling sounds emanate from the gate. He hears a couple of grunts, what sounds like a shot firing off, and–maybe he imagines it–his name. Mike.

Without thinking, Mike Wheeler, with no plans, very little experience, and a tattered backpack, jumps through the gate.

He’s never been good at discerning odds, anyway.