🧍♀️anyone else thinking about mike visiting will in nyc in the 90s
—
It’s something Will talked about a lot before the apocalypse: secrets.
Like the word itself was being wrenched out of him to the tune of the quiet undoing of their world, Hawkins seething outside the sun-drenched windowpanes. (Mike has no right to claim much as his own anymore, and definitely not the whole world, but old habits never die, just starve). Evening was a stab of panic back then, time a funeral procession. Inevitable ruin. It was also a catalyst. It had to be Will’s choice, to tell them. He had to be the one to say it in the end. Mike knew, feeling too far away, that it had to be him.
The world ending colored secrets differently to the usual dusky mauve of concealment. Honesty made rungs of a ladder, really, just a means to an end, a safety net. It meant Will letting go of secrets. All of Mike that went unspoken gathering dust.
Secrecy thrives on moments breaking, slipping under the surface and crystallizing in averted gazes. Secrets relish in reassuring yourself it’s for the best.
Lately, Mike’s most dangerous one is thinking, fleetingly, maybe.
Crisp, silvery shades of the morning lounge across the countertop, flecks of bright rain drumming on the glass with renewed fervor, snapping out of a lull. Will’s plants, arranged in a tunnel-straight row on the sill outside, sit stamped with drops, and tranquility can ache sometimes, whenever it sneaks up on Mike.
After the battle, when normalcy unfurled onto the shock of longer days, nobody really knew what to do with themselves. There’s a lesson wedged in there somewhere, Mike is sure of it, but to survive is to be tired, and without momentum and machinery and the shooting stars of bullets strewn over the MAC-Z, he can figure it out later. Mike startles at too-loud noises, and Will falls silent when the lamplight spasms in a storm. Nothing ever really gets much easier in aftermaths, but most of all they learn to adjust, if slightly, so it feels like it does.
The slab of butter crackles on the pan. Shit, way too hot.
He’s still fumbling with the stove when Will materializes in the doorway. “Mike?”
He glances over twice, three times, at Will’s fond smile playing out like an old film reel, flickering back to life. Gold swirls and sizzles gently in the pan, the smell curling around them, and ostensibly it’s enough for Will to trail over to the stool, hair still sleep-mussed and soft, eyebrow raised. His shirt is dull from washing, the now-illegible print flaking like cheap paint.
Their eyes meet. Mike thinks, right on cue, maybe.
“You didn’t have to do this,” Will begins, one hand rubbing idly at his face and the other gesturing around them to what’s become of his already eclectic kitchen, Mike’s best attempts at tidying as he goes along not enough to avoid the outcome. Will’s colorful bowls stack haphazardly by the sink.
“What, mess up your place? I absolutely did.”
Will shakes his head, eyes darting away. In his head, Mike maps out the silhouette of our place, how it’d feel on his tongue, and shoves it away immediately. Blush erupts in its wake. No.
“You know how to make pancakes? Like, without a recipe.”
“They’re so much easier than I thought.” Mike points the spatula at him as he says it. “I should have learned before you moved away.”
Something in Will’s expression melts, but he doesn’t say anything, just crosses to stand at Mike’s left. As the mechanical cohesion of the city rumbles distantly to itself, shrouded in sunlight, two brief moments pass in stasis.
Will rests his head on Mike’s shoulder, fingers brushing his elbow, and Mike’s breath catches.
Maybe. Maybe.
He can’t remember not knowing Will. His heart speeds up, fidgeting with the end of his shirt, and trying not to let his mind traipse away from the arduous task of not cremating their breakfast, trying not to imagine tilting to the side to press his mouth to Will’s hair, because maybe would tip toward yes, and he’s not sure what that means yet. Will, hesitant, wraps a hand around Mike’s arm, and then he’s trying not to implode in the middle of this tiny apartment that he’s not ready to leave just yet.
Will’s body is lingering on the wrong side of cold, especially near winter. After effect. Mike brings his free hand to clasp Will’s, thumb sliding back and forth across his skin, and it’s so impossible, how the jut of Will’s knuckles was ever split or bloodied, that Mike’s palms had ever been scraped cadmium red, how they’ve been anywhere but right here, standing too close at the address Mike could write down while sleepwalking by now, way above Will’s cluttered, pre-noon street.
“By the way, if you leave another shirt here,” Will says, low, just for them, “please know you’re not getting it mailed back. Sorry.”
He’s never sounded less sorry for anything. Mike smiles a bit too wide for someone whose already dwindling shirts may be held for ransom in his very near future.
“I apologized for that.” He prods the edge of the misshapen pancake they’re both staring at, and it slides easily. “If I recall. Profusely.”
Will laughs, tightening his grip. Mike deposits the pancake onto the rest, and pours the dregs of batter in as Will picks off part of the newest one to eat, informing him: “This is pretty good.”
He squeezes Will’s hand. They watch the pan for a while.
“I don’t want to go.” Mike flushes, nerves skating electric along his skin, reminding him of the shitty sparklers his mom buys at New Year’s, the fizz of sparks grazing his skin hot and ephemeral, miniature suns burning up to welcome January home in the dark.
“I know,” Will replies. Sometimes Mike isn’t sure if Will knows he’s in love with him, but he doesn’t think he does. For the best. The sentence tastes hollow, echoing with maybes and maybe-nots all the way down. “Me neither.”
Mike flips the pancake, though it takes a few tries, and midway through his valiant attempts, Will’s head pivots to plant a kiss on his shoulder while he dislodges their hands to step away, so Mike almost drops it.
Maybe.
Mike couldn’t get it out of his mind last night, maybemaybemaybe, a sweet chorus of never-ending, never-spoken possibility. The words are whorls of smoke, intangible, caught in his throat. He reached up to kiss Will, who was perched on the island, not like last time, both lying on the floor, or the time before, half asleep on his ancient couch— and maybe snagged in the hinges of his deafening want then, the two all encompassing syllables, the unavoidable, the crowded hush, the springtime breeze, the way talking around something is a volume of its own, the way it’s a kind of sculpture, whittling away the rest until the precise shape of what you mean remains. Maybe, he thinks, desperate, again and again, this could all be real.
Mostly, maybe is a way for Mike to sever the rest of the sentence before his mouth and courage dry up. Maybe is loudest when he wakes slow with Will’s cheek on his chest, right above his heart, breaths even, in synchrony, curtains wide open and bleeding daytime into Will’s room, the ceiling fan stationary. Maybe he could tell Will about it now, I mean it, I want to stay with you, and maybe Will might even agree, and maybe the next time he sees Hawkins could be the last time he lives there. Maybe is quick, unrelenting, always leaves him spinning.
“Hey, Mike?”
Mike faces him, arms folded, leaning against the counter. “What’s up?”
Will watches the pensive rain die down. “I miss you.”
Mike blinks, voice the way it always is whenever it’s Will he’s talking to. “Yeah?”
“I just,” Will whispers, “I mean, yeah. So much. I guess I’m not… I’m still not used to not used to not having you around. Which is crazy, right, because I see you all the time, and it’s been years, and we write letters, and you haven’t left. You’re not gone until tomorrow, so I don’t know why I feel so— oh, shit, you should flip that, it’s going to burn.”
He’s talking about the pancakes, Mike registers, as Will slides in front of him to turn off the stove, sweeping his hair out of his eyes.
He spins, and Mike forgets how to breathe.
They’re close. Mike’s gaze skates across his face, searching for their wordless understanding to tell him if he’s reading this right, catching over and over on the look in his eyes. Hazel, deep, between the blurred boundary of green and brown. Mike’s never kissed him in the morning, they never talk about this. He’s not sure when his hand came up to hover at Will’s side, drifting to the back of his neck, that thread of want slicing cleanly through maybe, when Will’s short nails started tracing absentminded shapes into Mike’s waist, the small of his back.
“Will,” he says, hardly recognizing himself. Will’s lips part, breaths grazing Mike’s face. He’s warm. Mike pitches close enough that Will’s eyes shut, then back, hand cupped against Will’s shoulder. “If you don’t want to, I get it— it’s fine, but I really—”
Will kisses him, and Mike’s reflexive gasp is lost between them.
He hasn’t known anything like this, not even gravitating toward Will late after hours of chatter scraped out the drowning feeling Hawkins stirs up in him and filled him with something new. Night makes things easier, taking risks or ruminating. Not even leaving his eyes closed after waking and groggily holding Will just to lie there, not even making pancakes for him the morning after, brimming with want, the lengths he’d go to for keeping the dawn from being siphoned out of reach.
He’s loved Will from a distance, but it has nothing on this. Mike’s fraying excuses for never bringing it up disintegrate, and maybe is replaced by—
“Yeah,” Will says, pulling back to ease off Mike’s glasses, folding them and setting them down somewhere. “So do I.”
Mike closes the gap again, almost shaking with the certainty lacing that want now, almost flooded with the need to be closer again. Will’s hands are under his shirt. Mike’s are in his hair. The ebb and flow of it, the rhythm. In time, in love, and Mike thinks Will has to know it by now, but just in case he doesn’t, he draws back just to say it against Will’s mouth. I love you, pause, so much. Everywhere they touch is alight. Will inhales, sharp, and Mike tastes it. Wrapped in Mike’s arms, Will responds, I love you too.
Later, they eat fresh fruit on pancakes, shins pressed together under Will’s cramped dining table, laugh so hard Mike doubles over, disagree about nothing in particular. They walk. Mike watches Will sketch the landscapes in a pocket-sized notebook Jonathan bought for his birthday, cataloging the buildings, the droop of power lines, the uneven rooftops, the drift of people. He kisses Will on the threshold of his apartment, kisses the space between his brows that furrows in concentration when he draws, kisses his forehead. Morning fades fast, but everything else is here to stay.
