A/N: SPOILERS for Season 4 ahead!
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Neither Will or Mike says a word to each other for all of junior year.
It sucks at first, but Will has to admit that it helps a little that El isn't on speaking terms with Mike, either. Now that El and Mike aren't dating anymore and Will and El are friends (sort of), it kind of feels like Will's got a buddy in his attempts to Get Over Mike Wheeler. Everything Will is feeling, he's pretty sure El is feeling, too. She may not end up in the hospital like Will did, but Will can tell in the way El keeps trying to shrink herself down to nothing that she doesn't exactly have a whole network of support outside of Mike, either.
Now that Will and El are on the same side, it's not such a struggle or so awkward anymore to see her around the house every day. Now that Jonathan is taking classes at community college, he's not available during the daytime to homeschool El anymore, leaving her to have to be her own tutor until Will gets home every afternoon and can keep her company as they do their homework. El is sixteen now, old enough to be home alone, but Will doesn't like thinking about El being stuck alone in the house all day, struggling to understand novels and algebra and United States history that are already a few grades below where she's supposed to be. So he talks to Mom halfway through September—convinces her to allow Will to homeschool, too, so that El has somebody to keep her company for the long hours of school every weekday. It's not like Will ever made any real friends here in Sullivan whom he's going to miss seeing every day.
They don't talk about much at first. Even when they settle into their routine and start to get more comfortable around each other, they stay focused on their studies, only breaking their concentration whenever Will offers to look over El's work. He gets in the habit of doing so as regularly as he can without falling behind on his own schooling after he notices that El is too shy or embarrassed or self-conscious to come right out and ask for his help—but she seems to be willing to accept it when he extends it. Will doesn't think he's a very good tutor, but the lines in her forehead smooth out a little when they work together, so his help must be better than nothing.
But then Will notices El starting to hang behind at the dinner table to listen to Will, Mom, and Jonathan talk, even if she won't speak up herself, instead of shoving down her food and bolting for her room as soon as possible like she used to. By November, Will is pretty sure that El wants to be a real part of their family, just that she—doesn't know how to ask for it or make her intentions known.
So he starts following her into her bedroom after dinner, setting up shop to paint and draw and write in there where he can keep her company. It means he sees less of Jonathan, but Jonathan doesn't seem to mind—even encourages it when Will tries to apologize to him for not being there for him in the evenings like he used to be. "I'm happy for you two," Jonathan insists one night as they're lying in bed staring at the ceiling and waiting to get tired. "It's about time we all started acting like more of a family to her, and I know that you've been lonely ever since…"
"Ever since Mike."
"Yeah," Jonathan mumbles. "Ever since Mike."
"You can say his name," Will says. His voice, surprisingly, sounds clear and confident. "I'm not going to crack up if I hear it."
Jonathan hesitates. "I just worry about you. You were in the hospital, Will. I don't want to see you… lose yourself like that again."
"I know." Will doesn't really know how to talk about that time in his life—the addiction—but it feels like he's over some invisible hurdle, like he's admitted to himself that he and Mike are done and is becoming… if not fully okay with that, then at least more okay with it than he was. He feels like he could cry when he remembers that he's probably never going to see Mike smile ever again, but if he takes it in chunks—thinks about lasting the day or the week without him—well, that much feels like something Will can handle.
And he is handling it, even if it's hard to believe when he thinks about it that he'll last much longer than this. The trick is not to let himself step back and consider it—keep living life one moment at a time.
It doesn't take long for Will to figure out that the thing with Mike fades out a little when he finds other things to put his attention on. Becoming proper friends with El is one of them, though he doesn't want her to take up the entire space that Mike used to occupy. He's probably too gay to risk falling in love with her, but Will still doesn't want to find out whether it would be possible for him to form the kind of dependency he had on Mike for a girl instead.
The mental space left over he throws into his art and his writing. He considers giving Zombie Boy a boyfriend—the happy ending that Will didn't get to have—but on second thought, he leaves Zombie Boy single, single and happy about it. Isn't that what Will wants for himself? Not some crippling dependency, but to be able to stand on his own two feet and not need somebody else to give his life meaning.
Will does not need Mike to give his life meaning. Not anymore.
On the other side of Christmas, it starts to really set in that Will's got a whole life ahead of him full of decisions to make that don't involve Mike one bit. He knows that the next couple of years won't be all that exciting—that he'll probably follow in Jonathan's footsteps and take a gap year to save up for community college—but Will knows he's smart, maybe even smart enough to score himself a scholarship, especially if he puts his writing skills to good use and pens himself a convincing personal essay to submit with his college applications.
He daydreams about telling the story of what happened to him in the Upside-Down, maybe spinning it to look like a metaphor for some trauma that the admissions committees will think is more plausible. It's kind of tempting to think about telling his story, the real story, even if nobody who reads it will believe that it's literal. But he'll save that decision for the summer, when it's time to actually start his applications. For now, Will needs to be putting his attention on studying for the ACT.
Jonathan starts working late shifts at the restaurant, leaving Will and El to study together, just the two of them, in Will and Jonathan's bedroom before bed every night. Will is pretty sure that El is fed up with school and doesn't really want to study with him, but it doesn't click until February that she's probably doing it because she doesn't know what else to do with herself. She doesn't have anything, not like Will has his stories or his art.
"We need to get you a hobby," he informs her the day before Valentine's Day. He's in a good mood: he's been pleased all week to find that he doesn't feel terribly distressed about being single for the holiday.
"A hobby?"
"Yeah, you know, like how I have my writing and drawing and painting and stuff. You could use something to do with all your free time. Everybody could. Is there anything you like to do?"
El pauses. "I used to play a lot of chess, but now, it just reminds me of… of the lab."
Will smiles gently and tries not to look shocked or distressed on her behalf. He knows quite well from experience that that'll just make it worse. "Not chess, then. What else?"
Another pause. "I like Eggos."
His mind races for something constructive to make out of that. "Do you think you would enjoy cooking? There's a lot more that you can learn to make besides waffles."
El bites her lip. "I guess."
She doesn't sound too enthusiastic about this, so Will tries for a real smile this time and says, "It'll be fun. We can do it together, just you and me. Cool?"
Something breaks through behind her eyes. "Cool," she repeats.
So he gets Mom to show him some easy stuff he and El can make from the recipe book that Mom almost never uses, and he picks one out for him and El to make for lunch on Saturday. It's some kind of casserole with macaroni and hamburger meat, and even though they burn the hamburger, the macaroni and vegetables actually taste pretty good when you scrape the meat off to the side. More importantly, El laughs a lot as they're making it. Will decides he likes El's laughter—thinks it'll do them both good for him to take it upon himself to get that sound out of her more often.
He doesn't have time to cook with her every day, not with the ACT coming up in April, but El takes it upon herself to make them both lunch every day that week. It gives her a break halfway through the day from the hell he's pretty sure she considers school to be, and it gives him a break, too, every time the smoke alarm goes off and he has to make sure she's not going to burn the place down. El isn't a very good cook, not yet, but she doesn't seem to get frustrated with it like she gets frustrated with her homework. If anything, she seems to enjoy the challenge.
"You should become a chef after you graduate," Will tells her on Friday as they're opening all the windows in the house. "Or maybe a chemist. You'd like it, I bet."
"A chemist?"
"Well, chemistry is a lot like cooking. Would it bother you to work in a lab every day?"
"As long as it's not the Hawkins lab," says El fervently. Will cracks a smile.
He does well on the ACT—like, really well—scoring a 33 out of 36. To celebrate, Mom takes them all out to dinner the day Will's scores arrive. Will feels a little bad about this, like he's flaunting his success in El's face when she's not on track to graduate from high school until she's twenty-one, but her smile looks genuine when she congratulates him, at least.
Maybe he will score that scholarship. As much as Will would love to escape the Midwest, he'll probably still have to go somewhere in state—a full ride seems unlikely with the way his grades dropped in freshman year, and a partial scholarship wouldn't be enough to cover out-of-state tuition—but with a 33, he might be able to afford a public school with a good reputation, somewhere like the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign.
And then, one day in June, a week after he finishes school for the year, El goes missing.
He notices it right away because El pretty much never leaves the house. Will just—wakes up one day to find her bed empty and no trace of her anywhere. The timing couldn't have been worse. Mom is out of town on some business trip of some kind, not that Will can understand why her job would need her to travel out of town for any reason, and what are Will and Jonathan supposed to tell her if she comes home and El is gone? The whole reason they moved to Sullivan in the first place was to keep El safe away from Hawkins, and now she's missing, and Will doesn't have the first clue where to look for her—
—or, at least, he doesn't until agents show up on his doorstep four hours later claiming to have taken El into custody so that she can get her powers back and save the world again.
And all Will can think is—
"I have to call Mike," he tells Jonathan in an undertone while Wallace and Harmon are laughing loudly at something on the TV they're busy watching. "This is El. I know they broke up, but he'd want to know, wouldn't he? Besides, if Owens's people are worried, there's got to be some major shit going down back in Hawkins, doesn't there?"
"I guess," says Jonathan, "but I don't like it. Are you sure you don't want me to call over there instead? I can—"
"No," says Will firmly. "Thanks, but no. I should be the one to tell him."
If there really is something major happening in Hawkins right now, Will is sort of offended that nobody bothered to call him and tell him so. To be fair, Dustin probably will tell him all about whatever's happening during their usual weekly call this Monday night—but shouldn't he have thought to call sooner? Shouldn't someone? For a lot of years, Will didn't know how to extricate his life from the Mind Flayer's. He's got as much a right to know if there's trouble in Hawkins as Mike does to know that El has been kidnapped by Owens's people.
God, he doesn't feel ready to make this phone call. Will has firmly relegated Mike to the background of his mind these days, and he's not looking forward to dragging him back to the forefront. But Will made a promise to himself months ago to be better—do better—and being better today looks like including Mike when his ex-girlfriend might be in mortal peril.
Is this going to make Will backslide? Is he going to become that person again who did nothing but obsess over what Mike Wheeler did or didn't feel for him? The more Will looks back on how he felt and what he said and how he behaved when he used to be in love with Mike, the more humiliated he feels. It's not just that he made himself vulnerable to Mike in a way that Mike never reciprocated, although that's certainly part of it. It's also—
Will knows he screwed himself up, but did he hurt Mike, too? Did he put too much pressure on him? Punish him for not feeling something that wasn't Mike's fault? Mike didn't ask not to love Will any more than Will asked to love Mike, after all. All those times Will was cursing Mike for making Will feel what he felt, it wasn't like Mike was deliberately manipulating him to feel that way—that was all Will and his brain and his insecurities building Mike up as the villain in his mind. Did he treat Mike unfairly? He can't remember, and even if he could, he wouldn't trust his memory, not when his addiction to Mike stupid Wheeler used to warp the way he viewed, well, everything.
The more he thinks about it, the more terrified he feels to make this call. His heart races. His palms sweat. He suddenly really needs to pee, and the feeling doesn't go away even after he does.
But it's just going to get worse the longer he puts it off, so Will sucks up his everything and drags the phone through the doorway into his room, where maybe Harmon and Wallace won't be able to make out every word he says. "Do you want me to stay?" Jonathan offers as Will swallows hard and wipes his sweaty palms on his jeans.
"No. No, I think this is something I need to do alone."
Jonathan accepts this. "You know I'm here for you, right, buddy?"
"I know," Will croaks.
He doesn't recognize the voice of the young girl who answers the phone; a moment later, he makes the connection that this must be Holly. "You're all grown up," he tells her. "You were still a little kid the last time we saw each other."
"Do I know you?"
"It's Will, Will Byers. Remember me? I was best friends with your brother."
If Holly doesn't recognize him, she doesn't say so. "MIKE! PHONE!" Will hears her holler behind her.
"I'M COMING!" Mike hollers back. Even muffled through the phone and at a good distance, the sound of Mike's voice brings back the feeling like Will's going to piss himself with nerves.
It seems to take Mike much, much longer than the few seconds it really is before he comes to the phone. "Hello?" he says into the transmitter. Will is expecting Mike to sound totally unprepared for the shock that hearing from Will is about to give him, but there's an undercurrent of anxiety in Mike's voice—probably because of whatever bullshit is going down in Hawkins this week that nobody bothered to tell Will about.
"Hi, Mike," Will tries to say, but all that comes out is a phlegmy, guttural noise. He clears his throat and tries again. "Hi, Mike. It's, uh… it's Will."
Mike meets him with silence that drags on for so long Will starts to wonder whether Mike heard him. "Hello?"
"Sorry," says Mike quickly. His voice sounds totally different—high-pitched and shaky. "I just—I wasn't expecting—it's not happening there, too, is it?"
"Look, you're going to have to be more specific than that," says Will with exasperation. "All I know is what Owens's agents told us—"
"Owens's people are there? Doctor Owens? The one who—?"
"Never mind that," Will says. None of this feels real, not any of it. "What's going on in Hawkins?"
Mike pauses. "There have been a couple of deaths this week. I can't really…"
In a flash, Will understands that Mike can't talk freely, not in the kitchen with his parents and Holly around to hear it. "I'm sorry to bring more bad news, but—it's El. She, um… they took her. Owens's guys took her to bring back her powers and—and save the world."
Silence rings out for another second. Then, finally, Mike declares, "I'm driving down there. I can be in Sullivan in three hours, four tops."
"But you said Hawkins is—"
"Forget Hawkins. They can handle it without me. I need to—I can't just—"
Will waits for the jealousy to set in, but it doesn't. All he really feels is hollow and sad; he knows cognitively that he should be envious of Mike's desire to drop everything for El, but it doesn't seem to be registering with the rest of him. "I guess I'll see you in three hours," Will echoes. "Four tops."
His hand shakes as he drops the phone back into its cradle. He needs to pee again.