Archive of Our Own ^beta

Mike didn’t really think the apocalypse would go like this, back when it was a vague concept and sometimes called armageddon. He didn’t think it would go like everyone said, exactly, because he read science textbooks and science fiction instead of the Bible, but he kind of thought he’d die. He didn’t think he’d live through the slow drag on a small town – this isn’t the apocalypse, if you look at main street and the food drives and community centers. It’s a natural disaster. 

The Lab says otherwise. Based on science, on provable fact, this is the end of the world. Mike, as a member of the Party and therefore hiding from the Lab and government, isn’t entirely in agreement. The end of the world implies a finality. Mike is still trying to plan their next move. In the end of the world, he doesn’t think there would be anything to do except lie down and accept your own death. Mike is planning. Mike hasn’t slept in days, and he’s definitely not going to give up. He’s going to plan until something makes sense and he figures out what to do about it. 

Will has been locked in the shed for three days. Hopper is the only one who can stomach tying new ropes around him every eighteen hours, so it’s him, Mike, and Jonathan at the cabin most of the time. El comes and goes, training in the sensory deprivation tank they made her at Mike’s house. Joyce stays with her, helps guide her through her void. Dustin operates out of the basement, which has basically been turned into his own personal lab. He and Mike are in constant communication, working on anything that can help. Sometimes Dustin sends someone over (usually Lucas – it’s probably an excuse to drag him from Max’s side) with samples from the Black Gate to test Will’s reaction. 

Will got posessed three days ago. Mike noticed first, how his eyes were the wrong color. Since then, Will’s veins have darkened to an almost purple color, and all other color has dripped from his skin in a slow fleeing of the body. His eyes are permanently red-rimmed. He looks sick, close to dying. 

The current mission, besides the obvious of closing the Black Gate and defeating Vecna – which Mike and Dustin have determined that Vecna must be defeated first unless they want to slap another band-aid on the Upside Down and return to the issue a few years down the line with no understanding of Vecna’s goals – is to figure out how Will is connected to the hive mind. They have a few data points: 

1. Will has eaten pieces of gates, vines, and demo-creatures (-gorgons, -dogs, -bats, and -spiders) 
2. Will’s blood is a dark purple-ish black color
3. He’s far stronger than he used to be
4. He’s near feral, practically rabid

Dustin calls Will’s issue a contamination. The Lab would have called it a virus. Mike just wants his best friend back. 

So he plans, alongside Hopper, who tries to force him to go to bed and then makes them both pots of coffee when he doesn’t. Mike doesn’t know how Hopper knows that he can’t do anything but this so intimately – doesn’t care, really – but he knows they’re a little bit the same. He takes comfort in it. But he and Hopper aren’t the same enough, so Mike hides his plan, the stupid one, under notes on the gates and hasty drawings Dustin sends over of how he thinks the hive mind might work. Textbook pages of mycelium, of neural connectors, of hormonal overrides, with ballpoint diagrams stapled to them. 

Every day, Mike feels more and more like they’re at a dead end. 

+++

They have to move the next afternoon. Mike is riding on caffeine and nothing else when Hopper tells him, via Joyce’s and El’s information, that the Lab is coming and they have to move. Mike watches Hopper jog out of the cabin over to the shed, coffee mug in hand and several of his papers under his arm. He’s already loaded several boxes worth of notes into Hopper’s truck – the rest, the unimportant stuff that they still can’t risk the lab finding, has been burned. Mike mourns its loss, just in case there was a grain of information in there that could help them, but he understands its necessity. 

He watches Hopper carry Will’s limp body – they don’t have much to knock him out with, so they use it sparingly – and set him in the backseat. His arms and wrists are red where the several sets of ropes they’ve been using to tie him down have bitten into his skin. He doesn’t look peaceful, not even close to asleep. It looks more like he’s waiting, silent and still for the moment. 

Mike sits in the front seat on the way to an abandoned barn they’re co-opting. He watches Will in the mirrors. His head is slumped against Mike’s papers. 

Hopper speeds. They don’t know if Will is going to stay unconscious for the entire drive – they planned, though briefly, this entire operation. There should be a large cage on-site with a post inside that they can tie Will to. If it isn’t set up right, they won’t be able to fix it later without Will attacking them. So many parts of this have to go right, and even though it’s usually more of a long shot for them, this one makes Mike’s foot tap against the floor incessantly. His fingers tap on the door handle. 

By the time they make it to the barn, Hopper has to run with Will in his arms. He’s started moving, his brow furrowing as though he’s dreaming, and by the time they hastily tie him up inside the makeshift cage the other Party members have thrown together, his dark eyes are slowly blinking open. 

As Will’s screaming starts up, Mike goes back to the car to get his boxes and dig his earplugs out of his pockets. They don’t block the screaming out, but they do enough to soften it that Mike can get work done when Will starts shouting at odd hours. He wears them almost permanently – he and Hopper don’t talk much, and Mike doesn’t talk with anyone besides him except for radio-ing Dustin and Joyce. He carries his notes inside and finds a table at one end of the barn to set up at – his walkie-talkie, his papers, a lamp, not much else. 

The Party heads outside to talk, mostly because Will can be extremely loud and no one except Mike and Hopper are used to it yet. Mike can see how distressed they are, and he wishes he could feel like that still. Will has become commonplace. 

Nancy, Lucas, Dustin, Jonathan, and Erica were the team on barn setup, while Joyce and El stayed behind to monitor the Lab and see if they found anything at the cabin. Joyce hasn’t radioed in yet, so Mike can only assume that the Lab hasn’t found their trail yet. Hopper details the plan for Will’s safety to them – they keep trying to make sure he eats and drinks, they keep him tied up, and if he looks like he’s going to seriously hurt himself in any way, they knock him out – and requests an additional person at the barn in a rotation. Hopper and Mike, obviously, are going to stay, but they need more help to defend a bigger space against attacks from the Upside Down. Mike has gotten pretty good at killing demo-dogs, and windows and vents are always boarded up in case of demo-bats, but the barn is sizeably bigger than Hop’s cabin. Eventually, they settle on Dustin, Lucas, and Erica being exempt from helping – Dustin on the basis of being the, quote, “brains of the operation,” Lucas because he wants to stay with Max and no one’s going to begrudge him that, and Erica because she’s too young to drive out to the barn and shoot things by herself. She protests a little bit, but Mike can tell she doesn’t really mind all that much. He gets it. It’s scary. He wishes someone had told him that he could step down when he was younger, that he could have trusted someone else to save the people he loved. 

Nancy drives everyone back to their house, which has become a sort of base camp for operations that don’t require being in the middle of nowhere. Mike hasn’t gone home in ages. He has a change of clothes, his toothbrush, and hasn’t had to go back for anything yet. He lives out of wherever Will is, survives off of what Will is given. He plans. He tries to save his best friend. That is the sum of him. 

Mike sleeps a little bit over the next two days. Mostly, though, he’s forming the scraps of an actual, good plan that has actual potential to work. When he needs a break from that, generally when he gets to the point that the letters on his page could be in Russian and he wouldn’t know the difference and he feels like smashing things, he goes out and shoots demo-creatures until he feels better, takes a power nap, drinks some coffee, and gets back to work. 

Hopper thinks it could work, too, and he’s been steadily gathering materials. Ammunition, mostly, and guns and flamethrowers and other fun gadgets that he’s acquiring from somewhere beyond the range of Mike’s notes, the barn, and Will’s cage – the entirety of Mike’s world these days. The stacks of rope by the door have been growing, and Mike and Dustin have done the calculations on how many they’re going to need several times over. 

The plan, in its simplest form, is this: 

1. They go for the Black Gate, using as many ropes as possible to ensure the team that enters Upside Down can get in and out quickly and reliably
2. A team is stationed outside to make sure no demo-creatures attack them from behind, to help pass supplies to the Upside Down team, and to help them get out
3. The team in the Upside Down attacks every vine and demo-creature they come across
4. They leave the Upside Down in flames
5. El, meanwhile, piggybacks into the hive mind
6. Ideally, she severs Will’s conenction to it
7. If there isn’t time, she goes straight for Vecna and attacks him
8. The Upside Down team evacuates through the gate 

They’ve tested the plan on a mini-gate, and discovered that setting the entire gate on fire impacted the entire hive mind and caused the gate to close in reaction. It only worked if the entire gate was on fire, and it worked faster when they brought down a demogorgon at the same time. So they’re combining the two. They’re fighting in the physical world and in the mindscape. Each fight will help the other. They have escape strategies, mapped routes for the Upside Down team and mental contingencies for El, and everyone has practiced the physical escape routes several times. The only real flaw is that they aren’t entirely sure what will happen to Will – Dustin is of the opinion that the hive mind exists in Will’s mind as a separate entity and its death won’t impact Will’s conciousness, but Mike worries. He worries. 

Mike is on the team outside the Gate, alongside Robin and Hopper – he wants to be able to get to El if she needs him, Mike thinks. Robin isn’t big on the Upside Down. Mike doesn’t know why he stays outside, only that he does. That he needs to. 

He doesn’t like the idea of leaving Will on his own, but everyone has important things to be doing. He’s needed. No one can stay behind. 

+++

Mike fidgets with his gun as the Upside Down team lowers themselves into the Black gate. They have ropes tied off on all sides of it, from the library to where Mike, Hopper, and Robin are camped out on the main and yet unbroken road. 

This isn’t goodbye, Mike reminds himself, They’re going to be fine. It’s a good plan. 

And then they’re through the membrane, and it’s closed over them and it’s as though they were never there at all. Mike sets his shoulders and turns to look down the ruins of Main Street. There’s too many bits of rubble, storefronts to hide behind. Mike can see a few demo-spiders scuttling around, but they don’t seem to have noticed the group entering the gate – they’re just wandering, directionless. 

Mike watches as they collectively freeze and look down the road. And then he hears the rumble of engines, and through the permanent gloom of the smoke and clouds, he sees Lab vans rattling down the street.

“Shit,” he breathes, tightening his grip on his gun. He glances over at Hopper for guidance – should he shoot? Run? Wait? He doesn’t know – but Hop just looks resigned. 

Oh, Mike realizes, He knew. 

He thinks of feeding his work into the fire. He thinks of the notepad Hopper left on the table. Of the ballpoint beside it. Of how Hopper would go outside and talk on the radio sometimes, and how he always assumed it was El, no matter how strange the hour. Of all the innocuous modes of communication Mike has dismissed because he trusted Hopper.

He gave us up. 

As the trucks pull up, a military-looking man jumps out and walks up to Hopper, extending a hand to shake. Mike wants to punch him in the face. The man or Hopper, maybe even both. Mike thinks of everything they’ve done to keep the government off their trails, to ensure that the Lab never found out about Will. Mike, ever paranoid, has been and remains fully convinced that the Lab will kill him. That they’ll decide he’s past the point of no return, unsalvageable, and let him die. Now, maybe, the Lab knows. Maybe they’re going to kill him right now. Mike feels hot tears prick at his eyes. 

“Hopper,” he calls, and Mike can see the guilt in his face. Hop excuses himself from whatever conversation he’s holding with the enemy. 

“Kid,” he starts, but Mike is angry. 

“Don’t,” he snaps, “I just need to know what you told them.” Not about Will, he prays, please say you didn’t tell them about Will.

“Just that we needed backup here,” Hopper says, “That’s it. Nothing else, I promise.”

Mike glares at him. “Good,” he says. 

It isn’t happy, nor is it really a truce, but Mike and Robin tolerate the Lab’s presence as they set up around the Black Gate. They have machine guns, flamethrowers, the same kind that Hopper has. Mike thinks of watching their weaponry stack up with pride, remembers thinking that now they really had a chance.

The clouds darken.

+++

Mike shoots a few demo-spiders, and the main body of demo-bats that flies over the Gate is taken down by the Lab’s machine guns. It’s a weak defense, which means most of the demo-creatures have fled to the Upside Down to defend against the fires that should be being set there. Mike can’t decide if that’s a good thing or not. 

The Upside Down attacks them like this: 

1. A swarm of demo-bats circling the gate, dive-bombing them in turns
2. Red lightning striking down from the swirling clouds
3. Vines moving slow, swallowing the bases of gun stands and tripping a few people

Which they counter by:

1. Shooting the demo-bats
2. Avoiding the lightning
3. Ignoring the vines

Mike would even go so far as to say that this has been boring, as far as hunts, burns, and Plans go. It’s the standard-issue shoot things until they stop attacking us mission, and it’s not like they have a goal beyond that. All they have to do is hold their ground until the Upside Down team returns. Until everything works out. Mike believes in them. 

He reloads his gun, scanning the street ahead. He’s fairly close to the gate, meaning there’s not a few Lab men in front of them. He thinks of shooting them. They wouldn’t expect it. He could disguise it as the demo-bats. He could do it. He doesn’t. Partially because he’d like to think he’s a good person somewhere deep inside, but also because he sees a larger shape moving through the fog a few buildings away. It’s larger than a demo-dog, Mike can guage that instantly, and it doesn’t move right. It’s the size of a man, but not skinny and tall like a demogorgon, and for a moment he thinks it moves the way demo-spiders do, scuttling over rubble. Then he sees that it’s running, fast, straight towards them. 

“On my one o’clock!” Mike shouts, “Watch out!” 

It’s too late. Mike watches as the thing crashes into a military guy and tears into his throat. Blood sprays up into the air. The creature lifts its head, dark eyes gleaming, face painted with blood. Mike’s heart pangs in fear as he recognizes – Will. 

“Don’t shoot!” Mike screams, “Don’t shoot!” 

As if anyone could. Will takes down the Lab men with ruthless efficiency, and he’s so fast that Mike thinks he maybe could dodge bullets if anyone was trying to gun him down. The demo-bats start dive-bombing the machine guns, distracting enough of them that Will makes it through everyone standing in front of Mike, hands and teeth drenched in blood. 

“Will,” Mike manages, and then he’s flat on his back, watching lightning crackle through the sky. He feels teeth bite into his stomach and bites his lip to keep himself from screaming. 

Will is there. Will is there, his mouth hard on Mike’s ribs, his canines dragging lines of fire into his flesh. Mike is crying. Will is there, his mouth open, his teeth digging deep into Mike’s skin and pulling out chunks. Blood spills out onto the street. Mike can taste it – Will can taste it – Mike is screaming, now. It hurts. It hurts. Why won’t Will stop? It hurts. 

“Please,” he chokes out, iron on his tongue, “Will, it’s me.” 

Will’s head lifts, and Mike can see his own blood dripping from his mouth. It’s all over his nose, too, all over his face. His eyes are black, but he hesitates. He pauses. For a moment, Mike breathes a sigh of relief, and then Will is leaning back down over him. Mike tastes blood from where he bit a hole into his lip. He remembers Nancy telling him that the demogorgon could be drawn in with blood, that it smelled blood like a shark and would go from one world to another for it. 

Shit. 

Will’s lips crash against his, and his teeth scrape over the corner of Mike’s mouth. He bites down, hard, and Mike gasps and chokes on his own blood, on Will’s mouth, on his teeth which scrape inside his mouth and bite his upper lip like an animal. 

“Will,” he pleads, his hands scrabbling at Will’s palms which pin him to the pavement, but it’s far too muffled on the taste of his own flesh. He can taste his blood on Will’s teeth. He’s crying. He can’t breathe. It hurts. He can’t breathe. 

Will jerks off of him. Mike spits blood out of his mouth, spits a chunk of skin out, spits out the scrape of Will’s teeth against his own. 

“Mike,” Hopper shouts. 

There is a needle in Will’s neck. 

Oh, good, Mike thinks, He’s not dead. 

And then he passes out. 

+++

Mike wakes up in a hospital. His face hurts. His torso hurts like it’s on fire. He’s got a headache. There is an IV in his elbow, another in the back of his hand. He’s wearing a hospital gown. 

There is a bandage on the right side of his face, taped halfway over his mouth and stretching up to his cheekbone. There are bandages wrapped around his waist up to his ribs. They are stiff. His head hurts. His head feels heavy. He closes his eyes and leans into the pillows. 

A little while later, a nurse walks into the room with a clipboard and a glass of water. 

“Hey,” she says. 

“Hi,” Mike croaks. 

She shakes her head a little, laughing, “Who’d have thought, huh? Our small town, and you got eaten by someone.” 

This hasn’t been Mike’s small town since Will went missing. Hawkins hasn’t felt right, hasn’t felt safe since then. He wonders if he should even be surprised. 

“You’re lucky it was a human,” the nurse tells him kindly, “We aren’t built to hunt people and eat them. If a bear or a shark or something attacked you like this, you’d be going to the morgue.” 

Mike thinks of the slide of Will’s teeth over his bloody skin and feels sick. 

“Yeah,” he mutters, “Lucky.”  

+++

He’s let out a day later. Hopper drives him back to the barn. 

The plan failed. They couldn’t burn enough of the Upside Down. Vecna attacked them, and they were lucky to escape with their lives. El saved them, but only barely. She’s been recovering for the past few days. 

Will was recaptured, and he’s been tied up at the barn ever since. He seems to be more controlled, less screaming, but he glares at everyone nearby. Mike thinks of the gleam of his brown eyes, of how they looked like stars in a town that hasn’t seen the night sky for over a year. 

He presses a hand to his stomach. There are dips in his flesh, bites taken out of him that won’t grow back. They’re scabbing over, but they won’t grow back. He cannot go back. 

There are more people at the barn than usual. Mike figures they tightened security after Will’s escape. Dustin’s lab appears to have moved over, too, and Mike can see his notes have merged with Dustin’s. It’ll make planning easier, at least, if they don’t have to work over walkie-talkie. 

He limps over to his table. Back to the drawing board. 

+++

Dustin, Mike, Will and Hopper are the permanent residents of the barn. For extra security, Robin and Steve are usually over, while Lucas has joined El and Joyce’s team. Nancy and Jonathan bounce between the two, but Nancy itches to go on hunts and Jonathan won’t leave her side. 

She has a scar all along the side of her face, and one half of her head had to be shaved to stitch it up. Her shoulder was dislocated in the Upside Down. She’s missing a large portion of her knee and calf. Mike’s sister, the one who wore pink frilly bows and made out with King Steve is unrecognizable. To be fair, King Steve is also unrecognizable, and Mike’s sure that he is, too. His hair hangs past his shoulders in stringy curls. He’s got scars, built up over the past eighteen months. None are worse, he’s sure, than the ones Will gave him will be. 

Will escapes again in the evening about three days later, when it’s just Hop, Mike, Dustin, and Steve at the barn. Mike is so close to another plan, another revelation, and he glances up at Will to find him halfway free of his ropes. 

“Shit,” he shouts, “Will’s escaping!” 

Hopper is closest to the door, and Steve is in the hayloft, so really, it’s just Dustin and Mike in danger. They knock their chairs over as they race to get to safety. 

Mike’s table is closer to the doors – he has the headstart. He glances back once, sees Dustin sprinting away and Will close behind him, and he realizes that Dustin is going to die if he doesn’t do something. 

He thinks of a forgotten plan. A stupid one he made on a bad day, when he was convinced Will was gone all the way and there wasn’t anything left to do. A plan where he would be the bait in a trap there was no chance of him surviving. 

“Will,” Mike shouts, “Will, over here. Remember me?” 

Will turns. He moves in a blur. Mike’s head hits the dirt floor. His eyes are almost black. The veins trailing from them could be tears.

And then he’s seated on Mike’s hips, and  his hands burn like claws when they scratch down his arms to keep him in place. One hand pinned out to the side. One elbow pressed into the soil. Mike can see Will’s eyes focus on the bandage on his face. 

In the new stupid plan, the one he’s making up right now, he needs to talk to Will. He reaches out and pulls at his own side, and lets himself scream instead of biting his tongue to hold it back at the risk of drawing blood. He lifts his head a little to check if he’s torn blood from his bandages – he can’t see any, though he thinks it hurts enough that he probably should be bleeding. 

He punches his wound until he bleeds. This time, he doesn’t even need to check, Will’s head shifts and lowers until it’s over his ribs. 

“Good,” Mike sighs, “Good, Will.” 

Will’s teeth tear through his bandages. 

“I know you’re in there,” he continues, “Do you want to know why, Will? Why I know it’s you? It’s because ever since I walked up to you on the swings – oh, shit – on the swings, I’ve known it was going to be you. It’s always been you, Will.” 

Will doesn’t stop, doesn’t slow, but Mike can speak through the pain. 

“Will, the worst day of my life was when you went missing,” he says, “Will, I knew you were alive because I know you. I know you, Will. I know when you’re there. I know better than to give up on you. I need you in my life, Will.” 

Hopper and Steve rush forward with rope lassoes, tightening them around Will’s neck. Mike’s head feels fuzzy. He’s losing too much blood. 

“Will, I know you,” he breathes as Will’s hands clamp down over his sides and score down to his hips, “So I’m asking you again.” 

He meets Will’s eyes, and for a moment, he could swear they were lighter than before. 

“Do you want to be my friend?” 

Green. He knows it. Green – his best friend. He’s in there. He’s alive. His Will. 

His body feels too light to hurt as badly as it does. Once again, with Will above him and his own blood beneath him, Mike loses conciousness. 

+++

He dreams of a swingset. 

+++ 

Mike wakes up in the hospital. He really needs to stop doing that. This time around, his face isn’t bandaged, but his ribs and hips are. He can feel little stings of pain in the shape of fingernails, like those claw marks people always use to try to look like they’re hurt for halloween costumes – the stupid straight lines that Mike used to make fun of because surely no scar would ever look like that. And now he’s going to have to pretend he never thought that at risk of being made fun of mercilessly. 

A calendar on his bedside informs him that he’s been out for two days. There is sunlight coming through the window. 

Mike thinks of Will. 

Nancy comes to pick him up a few hours later. They drive in silence. Mike looks out at the destruction of his small town, the wreckage of it, standing proud in the sunlight. He looks up at the sky – blue with cotton-colored clouds drifting lazily across it. The sun looks down at greying hills. Mike supposes it would be too much to hope for the grass to return so quickly, but he’s sure it will. His hands drum on the car door. 

They pull up at the barn. Mike throws himself out of the car. Nancy limps after him. He’s weak enough that it’s a struggle to open the doors, but maybe it’s the adrenaline, maybe it’s desperation that sends him stumbling through them. 

“Mike,” someone gasps out. Mike finds his eyes. They’re hazel, quite possibly the most beautiful color to ever grace the earth. 

Will crashes into him, his Will, and pulls him into a tight hug. Mike sinks into it, one hand buried in Will’s hair and cradling his head, the other around his waist and pulling him closer. 

“I thought you were dead,” Will babbles, “I thought I killed you.” 

“You’re okay,” Mike chokes out, “You’re back. I knew it.” 

Will pulls back just enough to bump their foreheads together. Mike watches his eyes, gold and green, and breathes with him. 

“How...?” he turns to look at the notes scattered over the table beside them. Will’s hand drifts from over his shoulder to rest above his heart. 

“You were right,” Dustin explains, “Will was still in there. We got him out. He told us how to kill Vecna.” 

“Superspy,” he says. Will laughs wetly, his head tucked againt Mike’s neck. 

“Stupid,” he says, “Don’t try to sacrifice yourself ever again.” 

“Promise,” Mike agrees. In front of everyone, in front of his mom, even, Will kisses him. Mike can't even bring himself to care that people are watching. He smooths his thumb over Will's jaw and kisses him back.