Chapter Text
The nightmares, Will had found, were the one thing that had perfected the art of the long-distance call.
They bypassed the clumsy machinery of phones and stamps and the fragile goodwill of busy lives. They tunneled directly through the bedrock of shared memory, a psychic landline that rang in the dark, connecting his small Lower East Side apartment to the echoing, black-water silence of Lover’s Lake, to the veined, breathing walls of the old Byers house, to the particular, greasy chill of a dimension that should not exist.
He woke as he often did. Not with a jolt, but with a slow, viscous surfacing as if pulling himself out of tar. The digital clock bled 4:17 AM into the dark. The bed beside him was a warm—Evan, asleep, was an even tide of a man untroubled by nightmares from a small town in Indiana. The monster that haunted his dreams tonight had been the Mind Flayer.
Will lay still, waiting for the feeling of icy particulate to recede from his bones as he took in deep breaths. It was a familiar ritual. In, hold, out. He told himself that the fear was just a chemical echo. He was twenty-six, for Christ's sake. He was away from Hawkins and he was safe.
He slid from the bed, the floorboards cool under his feet. The city’s orange-gray glow filtered through the blinds of their apartment, painting stripes across his drafting table. It was littered with pages for the latest Midnight Paladin issue—gothic spires, figures cloaked in shadow, the kind of beautiful gloom that paid his half of the rent. He was a staff artist for Nebula Comics. It was a good and quiet life that he built brick by brick over a crater.
Last weekend, he’d taken the train to Boston. Lucas and Max’s apartment was a glorious proof of everything they survived: dense, highlighted law textbooks and physical therapy manuals tangled with various potted plants and the scent of burnt coffee and exhaustion. Lucas, buzzing with a mix of caffeine and legal adrenaline after a mock trial, was dissecting a witness’s contradictory statement.
“It’s all about the timeline,” he’d said. “You find the crack in their story and you can make the whole thing crumble. My professor said it was the most elegant cross-examination she’d seen all semester.”
Max had watched him with a smirk that held galaxies of fondness.
They’d talked for hours, the three of them, a bottle of cheap wine passing between them. They did not speak of the Upside Down. They didn’t need to. It lived in the grammar of their silences—in the way Max’s good eye would sometimes lose focus, staring at nothing, and Lucas’s hand would find hers without him even looking. It was the way Lucas checked the deadbolt twice before bed.
“How’s everything at work for you, Byers?” Lucas had asked, feet propped on a cluttered coffee table. “Still making a living off moody guys in capes?”
“Someone has to,” Will had smiled. It was an old script. It felt good to run the lines.
“And Evan?” Max had asked. “How’s the history of the Peloponnesian War going?”
“He’s…good. Excited about the trireme unit.”
Max had held his gaze, then taken a slow sip of her wine. “Yeah,” she’d said, the word a neutral, unreadable landing pad. “Sounds thrilling.”
The memory faded as the sky outside his window began to soften from black to a deep blue. The nightmare’s residue clung, a fine psychic silt. Will moved to the bookshelf, his fingers bypassing the graphic novels, finding the familiar, worn spine without looking. The Echo Realm. By M.J. Wynthor.
He’d found it three years ago in a cramped bookshop, lost and aching for a language his own life didn't seem to provide. It was a fantasy about a prince and a boy from a shadow world who spoke through paintings, but really, it was about silence. About the agony of a connection that defied logic, dimensions, and simple words. It was about being seen in your entirety, and the terrifying vulnerability that came with it.
Will had done fan art once—a sketch of the prince, Alden, staring into a canvas where the shadow-boy, Kael, looked back. He’d never shown anyone. It felt like reading someone else’s mail, finding his own secrets neatly typeset on the page.
It was his private ritual where on nights like this, the melancholic, poetic prose turned into a balm. Evan would listen to the nightmare’s details and say, with a gentle, logical care, “It’s not real anymore, Will. You’re safe here.” M.J. Wynthor’s words whispered something else, something truer to the scars: I know it will always be real. And so do you.
He read until proper dawn began to turn the stripes on his floor to a pale gold.
By 8:15 AM, he was a catastrophe of good intentions. He’d lingered too long in the Echo Realm and had to scramble into paint-splattered jeans, plant a kiss on Evan’s stubbled, sleeping cheek, and dash out the door of their Lower East Side walk-up. He could still feel the effects of last night’s terror still chilling his veins.
He took the train uptown in a daze, packed shoulder-to-shoulder with other grim commuters. He surfaced at Grand Central into Midtown. Outside, winter's final winds cut down the street. The coffee shop on the corner was his usual—a cramped, steamy cave that made a decent dark roast. He was mentally drafting an apology to his editor as he shuffled forward in the slow-moving line, the morning crowd a blur of urgent fatigue.
“Large black coffee, to go,” Will said, finally at the counter as he turned to dig for his wallet in his back pocket.
His elbow connected solidly with the person behind him. There was a sharp, hot sting on his own hand, followed by a wet splat and a hissed intake of breath—“Fuck!”—that wasn’t his.
He spun. A full paper cup was crumpled on the scuffed floor, its lid popped off, a geyser of near-scalding coffee erupting across the floor and onto two pairs of shoes. Will’s own hand was instantly on fire. The entire left sleeve of a worn, brown corduroy jacket was drenched, steaming. A barista yelled, “Whoa, careful!”
“Shit, I’m so sorry—” Will began, clutching his stinging hand, looking up.
He felt like time fractured.
The chatter of the shop, the hiss of steam, the smell of burnt beans all melted into a single, high-pitched tone in his ears. He was looking at a ghost. A ghost aged eight years, taller, leaner, dressed for a colder city, his hair dark with the same beautiful, hopeless mess. But the eyes were the same. Deep, dark, and wide with a shock that was an exact mirror of the ice currently flooding Will’s own bloodstream.
Mike Wheeler was staring at his own soaked sleeve as if it belonged to someone else. A violent red flush was spreading from his wrist up his forearm under the wet wool.
The name left Will’s lips on a breath he didn’t own. “Mike?”
Mike’s gaze snapped to his face. His mouth opened, closed, then opened again. “Will?” he said, the word sounding punched-out, hollow. “Holy shit.”
“You two okay?” The barista was leaning over the counter with a wad of brown towels. “Gotta move—you’re blocking the line.”
Time snapped back into its proper rhythm, but the world felt tilted and suddenly, painfully public. The noise of the coffee shop rushed in—too loud, too bright.
The air between them seemed to thicken, charged with eight years of old conversations and phantom laughter. Will’s mind scrambled for a timestamp, a last known location. The mental file was embarrassingly thin. Not since…the New Year’s party three years back?
“Your arm—” Will stammered, the practical horror cutting through the shock. “It’s burning. You need cold water.”
“It’s fine,” Mike muttered, but he was flexing his hand, his jaw tight with pain.
“It’s not fine. Here—” Will grabbed a dry napkin from the counter and thrust it at him, then turned back to the barista, his heart hammering. “I’m so sorry. Can we get… two large black coffees, to go. And a cup of just ice water, please. Now.” He pulled some cash from his wallet, his fingers clumsy. “For his too. I’m paying for both.”
The barista nodded, already moving. Will took the ice water first and handed it to Mike. “Put your wrist in this.”
Mike, looking dazed, took the cup. He didn’t argue. He plunged his reddened wrist into the ice water with a sharp sigh that was half relief, half something else.
They stood there, in a bubble of shared, surreal catastrophe. Mike, holding a cup of ice water to his burn. Will, holding his stinging hand against his own chest. The barista mopping the floor around their feet with a tired sigh.
“You’re… here,” Mike said, blinking as if trying to resolve a mirage. He glanced from the soggy towels on the floor back to Will’s face. “In the city, I mean. I knew you were in New York, but…”
“Yeah,” Will said, and his voice sounded too casual, too practiced for the circumstances. “For a couple years now. Are you… I’m so sorry. Does it hurt bad?”
“It’s okay,” Mike said, but his eyes were watering slightly, whether from pain or the shock of the encounter, Will couldn’t tell.
“How long have you been here?” Will asked.
“Six months. I’m in the West Village. For a… job.” Mike’s eyes finally focused back on him, but they were guarded, performing a quick, impersonal scan—taking in the paint-splattered jeans, the graphic tee, the overall shape of the adult Will had become. It was the look you gave an acquaintance whose name you were struggling to recall, even as he was treating your second-degree burn.
“Cool. What do you…?” Will gestured vaguely, the sentence dying in the thick air between them.
“Writing. For a magazine. You?” The questions were rapid, clipped, a social volley meant to keep the ball in the air until the buzzer.
“Comics. At Nebula.” Will watched the name land. A flicker—something like recognition, or maybe just polite surprise—crossed Mike’s face before it smoothed over into a neutral mask.
Their order was called and the barista slid the fresh cups across the counter. Will took them, handing one to Mike. Mike carefully extracted his wrist from the ice water, shaking it dry before taking the coffee.
“Thanks,” Mike said, his voice low.
“It’s the least I could do,” Will replied, the understatement of the decade.
An awkward pause descended. They were now two men holding coffees, one with a bright red forearm, standing in a cleared space while a mop swished near their feet. They both glanced at their watches in a pathetic, synchronized mime of I have places to be.
The silence was empty, accusatory, and filled with the all the words they used to have—midnight comic reading in a basement, frantic whispers in the dark. This was the shape of their now: a clumsy, painful collision in a coffee line, a conversation born of damage control.
“We should… grab a drink sometime,” Mike said, the sentence tilting up at the end like a question mark. It was the obligatory line, the socially-mandated olive branch you offered to someone who had just scalded you.
“Yeah, totally,” Will echoed, the lie automatic. “Call me. You still have my number?”
Something—a wry twist of the lips that wasn’t quite the old, brilliant Mike smile—flickered and vanished. “Yeah. Yeah, I do.”
Another beat. The silence now felt like a physical discomfort, a shirt that didn’t fit right. This was worse than strangers. Strangers didn’t know each other’s pain thresholds.
“You should put some aloe on that,” Will said, nodding to Mike’s wrist.
“I will.”
There was an awkward, short pause.
“Well,” Mike said, taking a deliberate half-step back, reclaiming the some inches of personal space. “I’m… late.”
“Me too.”
A nod. A tight, not-quite smile that didn’t reach his eyes. And then Mike Wheeler was turning, carefully sidestepping the wet patch on the floor, and weaving back into the current of people on the sidewalk, absorbed by the city as if he’d never been there at all.
Will stood holding his fresh, searingly hot cup, the picture of Mike’s scalded wrist vivid in his mind. He pushed out onto the street, the the sounds of the city a welcome blanket over the ringing in his ears. The wind hit him immediately. His own hand still throbbed. He looked down at the red mark forming there, a perfect, stupid mirror to the one he’d left on Mike.
It was the first thing they’d shared in eight years: a matching burn.
The three-block walk to Nebula’s office on West 44th was a study in autopilot. His mind, however, was a riot.
Six months.
He’d been here six months. In the same city. The same grid. Will knew, logically, that New York was massive, that you could live a lifetime a few blocks from someone and never cross paths. Their neighborhoods weren't even that close—the curated, tree-lined intimacy of the West Village was a universe away from the gritty, shouting energy of his Lower East Side walk-up. But this felt intentional. A silence so loud it was a statement: You are not part of this chapter.
Will had thought he’d made peace with the new, quiet geography of their lives. He had Evan. He had his art, his own quiet kingdom of ink and shadow. He had built a life where his heart was a settled country, no longer a warzone. He’d folded that old, desperate love for Mike Wheeler up like a map to a place he’d sworn never to revisit, and tucked it into a drawer labeled Before.
But seeing him didn’t bring any nostalgia. It felt more like a seismic tremor taking place. It was the feeling of standing on solid, familiar ground only to have the an earthquake ripple up through the soles of your feet, a reminder that the bedrock was fault-lined with everything unsaid.
He thought of Evan. Steady, kind Evan, who was probably already at the high school, patiently untangling the causes of the Peloponnesian War for a room of drowsy teenagers. Evan, who loved him in a clear, untroubled way. Evan, who had never once looked at him and seen a problem to be solved, a haunted boy to be fixed, or a secret so terrifying it had to be locked away behind a smile and a pat on the back. Evan, who had never made his heart feel like a haunted house.
Guilt, immediate and sour, coated the back of Will’s throat. It wasn’t fair. Not to Evan, and not to the peace he’d carved out for himself. This sudden, visceral lurch in his chest at the sight of Mike wasn’t about love. It was about a conversation that had ended almost ten years ago, clinging to the rusted girders of the WSQK radio tower.
The memory began to resurface. They’d been gasping, the upside-down storm churning around them, the fate of the world literally hanging in the balance of their next move. And Mike had looked at him with that painfully earnest look—the one he used when he was trying to sound profound but just sounded like he was reciting a line from a bad movie.
“No, not just friends… Best friends.”
Best friends.
Will nearly scoffed aloud at the memory. It had been the emotional equivalent of a participation trophy. A cheap, shiny sentiment handed out after Will had laid his heart bare on the battlefield. Best friends. It was a safe, platonic box to shove the sprawling, terrifying, all-consuming thing that had lived between them for years.
They’d never been just friends. They’d been co-conspirators, twin engines, two halves of a single, desperate hope. And then Mike, with his dorky, desperate smile, had tried to reduce it all to a yearbook superlative.
And they’d been this ever since. Two people who used to know everything about each other, now bumping into each other in coffee shops and having nothing to say.
By the time he pushed through the glass doors of the Nebula Comics office, the familiar scent of ink and paper a comforting blanket after the sting of wind and memory.
It was a coincidence. A weird, Midtown Manhattan coincidence. Mike was here for his own life, a life that had nothing to do with Will Byers. And that was fine. It was better than fine. It was the natural order of things. They’d both moved on. The proof was in the perfect, polite awkwardness of their exchange—a script written for people who used to be important, and no longer were.
He made it to his cubicle, a small sanctuary of organized chaos—pencils in a mason jar, lightbox glowing softly, a pinned-up page from Midnight Paladin showing a knight silhouetted against a fractured moon. He dropped his bag and sank into his chair, pressing the heels of his hands against his closed eyes until he saw stars. The look on Mike’s face, that guarded, startled look, floated behind his eyelids.
Enough.
Work. Work was real. Work was lines on paper, problem-solving, the tangible weight of a pencil in his hand. He pulled the current page of Paladin toward him, focusing on the knight’s cloak. The inking was tricky here; he needed to suggest movement, and shadow without muddying the linework. He began to work.
For a couple of hours, the world narrowed to the tip of his pen. The coffee shop, the man in the corduroy jacket, the hollow echo of we should grab a drink sometime—it all receded and was locked out by the fortress of his concentration.
The spell was broken by a sharp rap on his cubicle wall. His boss, Marianne—a whirlwind of scarves and sharp intelligence—leaned in, her eyes bright.
“Will! Good, you’re here. I need you in Conference Room B. Now.”
Will carefully set his pen in its rest, a flicker of annoyance cutting through his calm. He was on a deadline. “Is it about the Paladin edits? I’m almost done with page twenty—”
“Better. It’s about your next project. The big one. The Lost Knight graphic novel.” She grinned, sensing his resistance. “The writer just got here. Hotshot novelist, young, broody, the whole bit. His people are very excited about this collaboration. So let’s make a good first impression, yeah?”
Will swallowed a sigh. He’d been lobbying for the Lost Knight project for months. It was a standalone, prestige graphic novel with a dark, emotional fantasy script. It was supposed to be his chance to really lead, to put his stamp on something from the ground up. The last thing he needed was some prima donna writer from the literary world looking down on comics.
“Who is it?” he asked, pushing back from his desk.
Marianne glanced at a sticky note. “Says here… Wheeler. M. Wheeler. Came highly recommended. Now come on, don’t keep our future bestseller waiting.”
She was already striding down the hall, expecting him to follow.
Will stood up, his knees feeling strangely weak. The noise of the office seemed to tilt sideways.
Wheeler. M. Wheeler.
It was a common name. It had to be. New York was full of Wheelers. The universe wasn’t that petty, that precise in its cruelty. It couldn’t yank the same person from his past into his present twice in one morning, then plant it squarely in the middle of his professional future.
But the cold certainty pooling in his gut, the same feeling that had once whispered the demogorgon is close, told him a different story.
He followed Marianne’s retreating back on numb legs. She stopped at the door to Conference Room B, threw him a final, encouraging smile, and pushed it open.
“So sorry to keep you. This is Will Byers, our lead artist. The one I was telling you about. Will, this is—”
The man at the conference table, who had been staring intently at a copy of Midnight Paladin left out as a sample, looked up.
It was Mike.
Not the startled, polite stranger from the coffee shop. This was a different version. He was paler, the hollows under his eyes more pronounced. He’d shed the corduroy jacket for a black sweater, but he looked just as cornered. The magazine writer. The one who was in town for a job.
The puzzle pieces Mike had handed him in the coffee shop—writing, for a magazine—clicked into a new, devastating configuration.
Mike stood up slowly, the movement stiff. His eyes, wide and dark, locked on Will’s. There was no surprise in them. Only a grim, resigned dread. He’d known. He’d walked out of that coffee shop and come straight here, to Will’s place of work, to sit and wait for this exact collision.
“—Mike Wheeler,” Marianne finished, beaming, utterly unaware of the tension. “Will’s our fantasy specialist. I’ll leave you two to get acquainted. The future of The Lost Knight is in your hands!”
She slipped out, pulling the door shut with a soft, final click.
The silence that followed was absolute, a vacuum sucking all the air from the room.
Will couldn’t move. He stood just inside the door, his portfolio a dead weight at his side. The anger that had been simmering since the coffee shop—the anger at the polite distance, the wasted years, the best friends lie that had hung over them for a decade—boiled over.
“A magazine,” Will said, his voice dangerously quiet.
Mike flinched. “Will—”
“You said you wrote for a magazine.” Will took a step forward. The professional mask he’d worn for Marianne was gone, incinerated. “What’s the matter, Mike? ‘Hotshot novelist’ doesn’t fit the humble, just-passing-through vibe you were going for this morning?”
Mike’s jaw tightened. He looked down at the table, then back up, and Will saw a flash of the old, stubborn defiance. “It’s a side project. The magazine pays the bills. This… this is different.”
“A side project,” Will repeated, the words dripping with disbelief. “That my boss is calling the biggest opportunity of my career.” He took another step forward, until he was standing across the table from Mike. The distance felt both too vast and not nearly far enough. “How convenient that you forgot to mention it when we were doing our little catch-up performance.”
“I didn’t know it was you!” Mike shot back, his own voice rising, frayed at the edges. “You said ‘comics’! You could have been working anywhere! Freelancing from your apartment! How was I supposed to know it was here?”
The excuse was so flimsy it was almost impressive. A memory, sharp as a shard of ice, stabbed through Will’s anger: the fluorescent glare of the Rink-O-Mania, the annoying pop music, the smell of cheap pizza and despair. Mike’s bewildered face. You called maybe a couple of times. It’s been a year, Mike.
He’d said it then with a heartbroken teenage exhaustion. He could taste the echo of it now, bitter on his tongue. You never change.
“You knew I lived here,” Will said, his voice low and dangerously calm. “You knew I lived here in the city. You knew I was in New York. For years. You knew the name of the company I worked for ten minutes ago, because I told you. ‘Nebula,’ remember? So you walked out of that coffee shop, knowing you had a meeting at Nebula, and it just… didn’t occur to you that it might be the same place? That I might be the person you were meeting?”
Mike opened his mouth, then closed it. No clever deflection came. He just stared, trapped.
“Or maybe,” Will continued, voice cracking in hurt, “you thought you’d just walk in, do your meeting with some stranger, and walk back out. And you wouldn’t have to deal with me at all. Again. Just like you didn’t have to deal with calling when you moved to the same city. Just like you didn’t have to deal with anything that was too hard or too messy after Hawkins.”
The mention of that final year hung in the air.
Mike flinched as if struck. All the color left his face. “That’s not— Will, it’s not like that.”
“Then what is it like, Mike?” Will’s hands were clenched at his sides. “Because from where I’m standing, it looks exactly the same. You drift away. You make your choices. And I’m just supposed to… be okay with being an afterthought. A ‘hey, how’ve you been’ in a coffee line. A professional obligation you have to grit your teeth through.”
The raw hurt in the words was a physical thing in the room, throbbing between them. Mike looked utterly shattered, the defiance gone, replaced by a guilt so profound it seemed to bend his shoulders. “I’m sorry,” he said, the words barely audible. “For this morning. For… all of it. This is… I’ll tell them I can’t do it. I’ll quit. They’ll find another writer.”
For a second, Will was tempted. To let him run. To let the door stay shut. It would be easier. Safer. It would prove his point: Mike Wheeler, when faced with something real and difficult, chooses the exit.
But the graphic novel was his project. His chance. He’d fought for it. And a deeper, more stubborn part of him—the part that had loved Mike with a fierceness that had once felt like his entire skeleton, the part that was so furious because that love had never fully calcified into indifference—refused to grant him the escape. Refused to let him disappear and make Will the reason, the difficult thing he had to avoid.
“Don’t,” Will said, the word a blade.
Mike looked up, confusion and a flicker of something desperate in his eyes.
“We have a job to do,” Will continued, forcing a flat, professional neutrality into his tone that felt like laying planks over a bottomless pit. He walked to the table, pulled out the chair opposite Mike, and sat down. He unzipped his portfolio with deliberate calm, the sound loud in the silent room. He laid out his character sketches for The Lost Knight—the knight, a faceless figure of grief and armor, standing in a rain-swept, gothic ruin. “We’re professionals. So let’s be professional.”
He finally met Mike’s gaze across the polished wood. The air still vibrated with the aftershock of their words. But for now, the work was the only bridge they had, and Will, his heart a clenched fist in his chest, stepped onto it.
“So,” he said, his voice devoid of all warmth. “The Lost Knight. Tell me about your vision.”
Will’s hands were still trembling, but not from the cold or from the faint sting from this morning’s coffee burn.
He’d practically marched home from Nebula, rushing up the four flights of stairs to his apartment. The quiet of the space felt like a sanctuary after the warzone of that conference room. He needed to talk to someone.
He yanked the cordless phone from its cradle on the kitchen wall and punched in the familiar number, pacing the short length of the floor.
It rang twice before a voice, sharp and slightly out of breath, answered. “If this is about the alumni donation drive, I graduated on sheer force of will and a sympathetic professor, I have no money.”
“Max,” Will said, the word coming out as a weary sigh. He leaned his forehead against the cool wall.
A beat of silence. Then, her tone shifting from defensive to alert. “Will? What’s wrong? Did something happen with Evan?”
“No…it’s Mike.”
Another, longer pause. He could practically hear her processing, the gears turning. “Mike. As in Wheeler. What did he do?”
“He’s here. In New York. Has been for six months.”
“Okay,” she said slowly. “And you found this out how?”
“I bumped into him. Literally. Spilled coffee all over him this morning at Java Junction on my way to the office.”
A snort came through the line. “Classic. Did he give you a lecture on pedestrian traffic flow?”
“Worse.” Will squeezed his eyes shut. “He did the whole… polite stranger thing. ‘We should get a drink sometime.’ The whole performance. And then I went to work. Only to find out that not only was he at my coffee shop, but he is now also in my office, Max. Working on my fucking project.” The words tumbled out, sharp and jagged. He slumped against the counter, running a hand through his hair. “Mike. Wheeler. Is here. Writing a graphic novel. At my company. With me.”
“He said he writes for a magazine,” Will spat, the memory fueling a fresh wave of indignation. “This morning, he looks me in the eye, coffee all over his sleeve, and says he writes for a magazine. Like that’s the whole story. Then three hours later, he’s sitting across from me as M. Wheeler, hotshot novelist, here to ‘collaborate’ on the biggest break of my career.”
He could almost see Max on the other end, leaning against her own kitchen counter, a wry twist to her mouth. “Classic Wheeler. Master of the strategic omission.”
“It’s not an omission, it’s a lie!” Will argued, though he knew she was agreeing with him. “And then he had the audacity to look wounded when I called him on it. Like I was being unreasonable for expecting basic honesty from someone who used to be my best friend.”
“Used to be is the operative phrase, Will.” Max’s voice was softer now, but no less direct. “You guys haven’t been that in a long time. You know it. He knows it. Dustin tries to pretend it’s not true when he’s playing mediator, and Lucas gets all sad-eyed about the ‘glory days,’ but you and I? We live in reality.”
She was right. Of course she was right. Will pinched the bridge of his nose. “It just… it brought it all back. It’s the same thing. He drifts, he makes it my problem for noticing, and then he acts like I’m the one making it difficult.”
“Because you are,” Max said, not unkindly. “You’re the living, breathing proof that his choices have consequences. That you can’t just downgrade people from ‘heart of the party’ to ‘birthday voicemail’ without someone getting hurt. He doesn’t like facing that. He’d rather just… change the subject. Or in this case, the continent.”
Will let out a shaky breath. “What do I do? I told him we had to be professional. But, Max… I’m so angry. I look at him and I see every unanswered call, every missed holiday, every time I bit my tongue because I didn’t want to be the needy one clinging to the past.”
“Be angry,” Max said simply. “You earned it. And be professional. Get your graphic novel. Take his brilliant, broody words and make them into something even more brilliant and broody with your art. That’s your power. You don’t need his friendship to do your job. And you definitely don’t need his approval to be pissed off.”
It was the perfect Max soon-to-be-Sinclair advice: unflinching, pragmatic, and fiercely on his side. A small, genuine smile touched Will’s lips for the first time since the coffee shop. “When did you get so wise?”
“Surviving the end of the world will do that. So will being engaged to a guy who’s just as stubborn as I am.” She paused, her tone shifting. “Speaking of guys… does Evan know the ghost of boyfriends past just materialized in your conference room?”
The smile vanished. Guilt, that familiar, cold sludge, pooled in his gut again. “No. Not yet.”
“Might want to get ahead of that. Before ‘Mike from Hawkins’ becomes ‘Mike, the tormented author I’m spending forty hours a week with.’ Just a thought.”
Before Will could respond, the jingle of keys sounded at the front door. His heart leapt into his throat.
“He’s here,” Will whispered into the phone.
“Good luck. Call me tomorrow. And Will? Don’t let him off the hook. Not even a little.”
The line went dead just as the door swung open.
Evan stepped inside, his cheeks flushed from the early spring chill, holding a brown paper bag that smelled of garlic and sesame oil. His smile was warm, immediate, the sight of Will clearly the best part of his day. “Hey, you. Thought we could use a night off from cooking. Got the dan dan noodles from that place you like.”
He leaned in for a kiss, and Will met him halfway, trying to pour all the normalcy he could muster into it. It felt like a performance.
“That sounds amazing,” Will said, taking the bag from him, hoping his voice didn’t sound as strained as it felt. “Long day?”
Evan shrugged out of his coat, hanging it neatly on the hook by the door. “The usual. Trying to make the Peloponnesian War compelling to a bunch of kids who think history started with Nirvana. How about you? You finished the inking on that cloak?”
Will busied himself getting plates from the cupboard, his back to Evan. “Almost. Got pulled into a big new project meeting. The Lost Knight thing got greenlit.”
“That’s fantastic!” Evan’s enthusiasm was genuine, bright. He came up behind Will, wrapping his arms around his waist and resting his chin on his shoulder. “I knew they’d give it to you. You’ve been pitching ideas for that for months. Who’s the writer?”
The question hung in the warm, fragrant air of their kitchen. Will stared at the dishes in the sink, the domestic intimacy of the moment suddenly feeling like a cage. He could lie. He could give a name, make something up, protect this calm little island they’d built.
But Max was right. That was Mike’s move. Omission. Drifting.
He took a slow breath, turning in Evan’s arms to face him. He tried to keep his expression neutral, but the storm of the day must have shown in his eyes, because Evan’s happy smile softened into a look of concern.
“It’s… it’s someone from Hawkins, actually,” Will said, his voice careful. “An old friend. Mike Wheeler.”
Evan’s eyebrows lifted. “Mike? The best friend? The one from all the stories?” His tone was open, curious. He had no reason not to be. To him, Mike was a character from Will’s past, a name attached to epic tales childhood adventures. A nostalgic figure, not a live wire.
“Yeah,” Will said, the word tight. “Turns out he’s a writer now. A novelist. He just moved to the city a few months ago.”
“Small world!” Evan said, giving him a squeeze before letting go to grab forks. “That’s kind of cool, isn’t it? Getting to work with an old friend like that? Catch up on old times?”
Will focused on scooping noodles onto the plates, the rich smell suddenly turning his stomach. “We… we already caught up. Sort of. Bumped into each other at the coffee shop this morning. Before the meeting.”
He left out the scalding coffee, the suffocating silence, the decades of hurt that had exploded across a conference table. That wasn’t a story for a Tuesday night over takeout.
Evan, perceptive in his quiet way, paused. He watched Will’s too deliberate movements. “Is that… a good thing?” he asked, his voice gentler.
Will finally looked at him. He saw the kindness in Evan’s eyes, the simple desire for him to be happy. He saw the stability, the love that asked no difficult questions about monsters or repressed feelings or paintings that were silent screams. He saw the life he’d chosen.
“It’s just… complicated.” Will struggled for the right words, words that wouldn’t sound like he was mourning a lost love over kung pao chicken. “We were really close. And then we weren’t. And now we have to work together intensely. It’s awkward.”
Evan nodded, taking it in. He reached across the small table and covered Will’s hand with his own. His palm was warm, his touch solid. “Well, you’re the most professional person I know. If anyone can handle an awkward work situation, it’s you.” He gave Will’s hand a reassuring squeeze. “And if he’s a jerk about it, you can always draw him as a goblin in the background of a crowd scene. Subtle revenge.”
Will let out a real, if small, laugh. The tension in his shoulders eased a fraction. This was Evan’s love: practical, supportive, slightly dorky. It didn’t set his world on fire. It kept him warm. It was safe.
“Thanks,” Will said, turning his hand to lace their fingers together. “I might just do that.”
He sat down, the chair creaking under him. Evan followed, his concerned gaze still on him, but he didn’t push further. As they ate, Evan chatted about his students, about a new exhibit at the Met he thought Will would like. Will listened, nodded, laughed in the right places. But his mind was a room away, still in that silent conference room, staring across a table at a pair of dark, guilty eyes.
Evan’s love was a steady, sunlit porch. Mike’s presence, even in anger, was still a lightning strike. And Will, fork clinking softly against his plate, felt utterly, miserably, caught between the calm and the storm.
The next morning, the conference room felt different. The air was still tense, but it was a working tension now, underscored by the practical realities of the project. A brutal timeline had been slid into their mail slots—a photocopied memo from Marianne, the due dates highlighted in frantic yellow marker. First round of character designs and a revised plot outline were due in two weeks.
Will arrived first, claiming the same side of the table as yesterday, spreading out his large-format sketchpad, pencils, a fresh pot of ink. He was building his fortress of professionalism one tool at a time.
Mike arrived five minutes later. He’d traded the black sweater for a button-down, this one a soft grey, sleeves rolled to his elbows. He looked like he hadn’t slept. In one hand was a leather satchel bulging with papers. In the other was a small cardboard tray holding two paper cups and a white paper bag.
He set the tray down in the no-man’s-land of the table, carefully avoiding Will’s artistic demilitarized zone. “I, uh… went back to the scene of the crime,” he said, not quite meeting Will’s eyes. He nudged one cup and the bag across the table. “Black, right? And they had these almond croissants. I remember you… you used to like those.”
Will stared at the offerings. It was such a blatant, clumsy peace offering it was almost pathetic. “I have coffee,” he said, nodding to his Nebula-issued mug, already full of bitter, office-pot swill.
Mike’s shoulders slumped a fraction. He started to pull the offerings back.
Then Will’s stomach, traitorously, growled. He’d been too knotted up to eat breakfast. And Java Junction’s almond croissants were, objectively, a religious experience.
With a sigh so deep it felt dredged from his soul, he reached out and took the bag only, leaving the coffee untouched. “I don’t need the coffee,” he clarified, his voice flat.
A tiny, almost imperceptible smile touched Mike’s lips. It was a quick flash of victory before he could school his features. Will saw it and rolled his eyes, shoving the pastry bag to the far corner of his workspace. He wouldn’t give Mike the satisfaction of eating it in front of him.
“So,” Mike said, the fragile truce established. “The Lost Knight.”
And so, they began. And it was a disaster.
Mike, the planner, launched into his twenty-page series bible—a dense treatise on the kingdom’s socio-political collapse.
Will, whose head was throbbing with a hunger-induced headache from not wanting to eat the croissant in front of Mike, finally snapped. “I don’t need to know the grain tax, Mike. I need to know what he feels when he looks at his reflection in the armor. Is it disgust? Is it safety? That’s what I draw. Not a pie chart.”
“It’s all connected!” Mike shot back, his own frustration boiling over. “The context is the character! You can’t just draw a sad guy in a metal suit without understanding the world that made him that way!”
“I’m not drawing a history lesson! I’m drawing a person! You’re giving me the instruction manual when I just need the heartbeat!”
They glared at each other, the ghost of a hundred basement arguments swirling in the air. It was their oldest dynamic, stripped bare of affection: Mike, the relentless architect of logic; Will, the guardian of emotional truth. Once, it had been a perfect, balanced engine. Now it was just two opposing forces, grinding each other down.
The silence stretched, thin and hostile.
A memory, unbidden and viciously sharp, cut through Will’s anger. They were eleven, maybe twelve, sprawled on the dusty floor of the Wheeler basement. A stack of X-Men comics between them, the pages smelling of ink and cheap paper. Mike had been ranting about Cyclops’s leadership, about the narrative potential. Will had been sketching in the margins, trying to capture the sleek line of a Sentinel.
“When we grow up,” Mike had said, his voice bright with absolute certainty, “we’ll make our own. You’ll draw the best art. And I’ll write the coolest stories. It’ll be better than any of this.”
He’d gestured to the comics like they were a challenge, a blueprint. Our own.
The memory was a physical ache. This was it. This was the dream. They were in a real conference room, at a real publisher, making a real graphic novel. And it felt like a hollow, bitter parody. The boy who’d promised to build worlds with him had become a stranger arguing about grain taxes.
Will looked away first, the fight draining out of him, replaced by a cold, weary sadness. “Just… read me the knight’s first monologue. The one by the well.”
Mike stared at him, thrown by the sudden shift. He found the page, cleared his throat, and began to read, his voice losing its defensive edge, turning inward with the character’s despair.
Will listened. He picked up his pencil. This time, he didn’t argue. He let the words, the raw feeling Mike had somehow managed to translate onto the page, sink in.
His hand moved. Not the broad-shouldered hero. A figure of sharp, unforgiving plates, the helmet a faceless, hollow shell. The pose was closed off, knees drawn up, arms wrapped around them—a man trying to make himself small inside a cage of his own making. He was sitting not on a throne, but in a ditch, murky water seeping into the joints of his armor.
He turned the sketchpad around.
Mike stopped reading. He looked at the drawing, and his face did something complicated—the residual anger melting into shock, then into a deep, startled recognition. It was the exact, unflinching visual of the emotion in his prose.
“Yeah,” he said, the word a quiet exhale. “That’s… that’s him.”
It was a ceasefire brokered on the only neutral ground they had left: the work. For the next few hours, they found a stilted, efficient rhythm. It was less collaboration and more a delicate, mutual translation.
Mike would read a line, and Will would scribble a note about a character’s slouch. Will would question the logic of a shadow, and Mike would sharpen his description. They were two brilliant, fractured pieces of a single machine, forced back into alignment by the sheer force of a deadline.
By 4:30 PM, they had a stack of Will’s thumbnails and pages of Mike’s manuscript covered in edits born of those visuals. The air, while not warm, had lost its glacial hostility.
Mike leaned back, rubbing his eyes. “Okay. That… actually works.”
“It does,” Will agreed, the concession surprising them both. The work had been good. It was infuriating how the old alchemy still functioned, even now.
The fragile professional calm was shattered by Mike’s next move. He gestured vaguely toward the door. “This was… productive. We should keep the momentum. Maybe grab an early dinner? There’s a ramen place down the street. We could talk through the antagonist’s design. I’m stuck on making him feel like a real threat, not just a symbol.”
It was a work invitation. A continuation. But it was outside the walls. It was personal space.
Will was already capping his ink, the shutter slamming down. “Can’t,” he said, his voice stripped of the collaborative tone of moments before. “I’m meeting my boyfriend. We have plans.”
He didn’t look up, but he felt it—the sudden, vacuum-quick stillness from Mike’s side of the table.
“Oh,” Mike said after a beat. The word was carefully empty. “Right. Of course.”
Will finally glanced up. Mike was looking down, intently organizing his already-neat papers, his jaw tight. The shutters Will knew so well slammed down, turning his expression into a polite, unreadable mask.
“Tomorrow then?” Mike asked, his voice all neutral courtesy. “Same time?”
“Same time.”
Will slid the untouched pastry bag into his own portfolio, a silent act of petty theft, and left Mike sitting alone in the silent room.
Walking to the subway, Will pulled the now-cold almond croissant from its bag and took a bite. It was still flaky, still perfect. A peace offering. He ate it all, savoring the sweetness, and tossed the empty bag in a trash can on the corner.
The taste of almonds and apology lingered on his tongue all the way home.