Will can practically feel Mike's rage in the air, like humidity. It's fiery and hateful, all of it directed at Will.
"Mike!" El smiled radiantly, running into his arms, before kissing him intensely.
"Hey, El." Mike returned, embracing her. Good. He wasn't angry at El, at least. Then again, Will didn't think it was physically possible for Mike to be mad at her.
Mike glared at Will, and Will shrunk slightly, as Nancy quietly slipped in, evidently having been made aware of the situation, before slinking silently off to Jonathan's room.
Good. Less witnesses.
"El…" Mike gently pushed her away, staring at Will. "Can Will and I talk? Alone?"
The girl rolled her eyes, but acquiesced, going to help Joyce in the kitchen.
"Your room…" Mike shook with anger once El was out of sight. "Now."
"You slept with her!" Mike threw the moment the door shut behind them.
Will sighed, sitting on his bed. "Yeah."
"Yeah!?" Mike repeated. "You slept with El, my girlfriend, and all you can say is 'yeah!?' I can't believe this!" Mike yelled. "You were my friend, Will, my best friend, and then you go and do this!?"
Will couldn't keep his snappy retort held back. "Friends? I didn't think that was the case when you threw that in my face!"
"Threw what!?"
"'It's not my fault you don't like girls!'" Will quoted, pointing.
"You're focused on that!?" Mike incredulously stated. "Get serious, Will, this isn't about you!"
"Oh, that's just fantastic!" Will angrily retorted. "If it's not about me, then who is it about, huh!? El!? You!?"
"Goddammit Will!" Mike seethed. "You're being an asshole right now! You and El have been fucking behind my back, I had to find out from her, and you can't even say sorry!? You're a bastard, a sick bastard!"
"That's fine!" Will spat. "Call me whatever you want, but while you were busy running like a coward, I was making sure she was actually happy!"
Mike pinned Will against the wall. "Shut up! Shut up!"
"It took you ages to finally talk to her again!" Will continued. "You waited until moving day, the last possible second!"
"I was trying to give her time!"
"You gave her time!" Will replied. "But you weren't there when she needed you the most! I was, not you! I was the one who helped her in the middle of the night when her own nightmares woke her up, I was the one who got her started healing, not you, Mike!" He screamed. "And I never, ever expected to get anything for it! I not once asked her for anything, or pressured!"
Mike stood, shaking with rage, balled his fist "You kissed her!"
"I did." Will admitted. "But I didn't pressure anything out of her. She did it herself, Mike, because I was the only one she could turn to! Because YOU! WEREN'T! THERE!"
Mike roared with fury and swung his arm.
A crash echoed throughout the house, and El looked to Joyce.
"Will." They both said, minds going to the worst outcome.
The two charged down the hallway, Nancy and Jonathan emerging from his room half-dressed and in a panic.
Joyce jiggled the doorknob, as another crash and pained grunt reverberated throughout. One of them had locked the door.
"Here, let me!" Nancy raised her foot, still clad in a tennis shoe, and kicked the area above the knob, the door flying open.
The four entered as Mike rammed Will into the wall head-first.
"RRRRAGH!" Will roared like a wild animal, kicking Mike in the shin, sending him to the floor.
"Holy shit, Mike!" Nancy yelled.
Will dove onto the floor, about to go whaling on Mike, as the boy rolled out of the way. Will hit the floor and Mike spun him over, going to town on his face.
"Will!" Joyce ran in, as splatters of blood were sent flying.
El stood there, frozen in horror at the sight before her.
"Don't just stand there!" Joyce commanded the others, as she tried to break up the fight.
The other three were sent into action, Nancy and El pulling Mike away from Will, while Jonathan and Joyce kept Will held in place even as he kept trying to lunge at Mike.
Will had expected things to get this bad, yes, but seeing El standing back, looking more shocked and appalled than he'd ever seen her…
It destroyed him.
The emergency room, fortunately, is going through a slow day.
Despite the fight only lasting a few minutes at the most, Will and Mike had done enough damage to each other to necessitate a hospital visit.
Mike had fared better out of the two, with a broken leg and a giant gash down one arm being the worst damage he'd sustained.
Will was… not as unscathed. He got a concussion from where Mike had slammed his head into the wall, his face was bruised and bloodied to the point where he looked more like a corpse than anything else, and his nose was broken.
Mike's mom had been notified, and while she was worried if he was alright, was much more concerned about the damage he'd caused.
Will sighed as much as he could, glancing over to Mike's hospital bed. They'd been lobbed in the same room. Extra punishment, it seemed.
"Mike?" Will addressed hoarsely, forcing himself to speak up. "I didn't do it to hurt you."
"Like that makes it any better." The Wheeler boy seethed in response, not looking back.
"Yeah, I know…" Will looked on. "I was being selfish, not explaining to El what made it wrong… but trust me. Not once did I do it to get back at you. I thought about it… but I never did."
"Then why?" Mike questioned jaw set in a grimace. "If you didn't want to hurt me, why'd you keep doing it?"
"…I could never say no to El." Will reflected, quietly looking upon the girl asleep in the hospital chair. The others were out, madly scrambling to find a way to pay the hospital bills, but El?
El had been by their sides the whole time.
"She saved my life…" Will said, tearing up. "I owe her more than I could ever repay… I think I might've been deluding myself. I kissed her, yeah, but… I thought maybe she might've actually liked me back instead of it being a hormone thing…" He looked down, shaking his head. "Stupid me."
Mike looked at Will, still angry, but curious. "You like her?"
"…Yep." Will shrugged sadly. "…I kept doing it, because I liked it. Cause… well… she was a connection, I suppose."
"Will…" Mike seethed. "You better start making sense, right now."
Will licked his lips, thinking. No better time to do it. Mike would never want to speak to him again, regardless.
Might as well get it off his chest a while.
"Mike… I've known you for a long time." Will began. "Right?"
"Since kindergarten." Mike replied, not sounding too happy.
"And… we've been through a lotta shit." Will continued, sighing. "Together… You know, when I was stuck in the Upside Down, there was one thought that kept me going."
Mike blinked, raising an eyebrow.
"…it was you." Will confessed, looking away. "I survived because I had to… I had to get back to see you again."
"…Will?"
Will took a deep breath. "I love you, Mike. Just like El loves you. Just like how I love her. I know that doesn't make what I did right-"
"Will?"
"Or that this means you're suddenly going to forgive me-"
"Will."
"Or that things are going to go back to how they were before-"
"Will!" Mike finally shouted, and Will flinched.
"I just…" Will sighed. "I thought you should know. Before I never get the chance to say it."
Mike stayed silent for a couple of moments. "…You know, when you were stuck in the Upside Down, Dustin and Lucas hadn't really wanted to look for you at first. It was all me."
Will furrowed his eyebrows. "They didn't?"
Mike shook his head. "I had to call them up on the supercoms and drag them out to look for you. That was the night we found El… She helped us look for you, you know."
"Yeah."
"Even when they pulled that body out of the quarry…" Mike continued. "I only gave up for a little while. That whole time… mostly the only thing I could think about was bringing you home."
Will felt his face go pink as considered Mike's words. Did he dare hope?
"I suppose… what I'm trying to say is…" Mike swallowed. "I love you too, Will."
Will's heart could've stopped. "You… really?"
"…It's difficult sometimes," Mike slowly replied, "And I didn't know how to put it into words… but yeah. You'll always be my friend, Will, even if you did the most horrible thing on Earth."
"You… forgive me?" Will dared to hope.
Mike thinned his lips and nodded.
"I don't…" Will sniffled. "I don't deserve it."
"You don't." Mike concurred. "You betrayed me… you betrayed my trust… You betrayed our friendship and everything we ever stood for."
"Then… why?"
"…Do you think I care for you so little that betraying me would make a difference?"
Will took shaky breaths as he felt himself tear up.
"Aw, no, no, come on!" Mike groaned as Will pushed himself out bed, limping over in his rush to embrace Mike. "Ack!" He grunted in pain.
"Sorry." Will apologized. "I would kiss you, but, um…" He gestured to his bruised face. "You probably don't wanna deal with all this mess."
Mike rolled his eyes. "Just shut up." He ordered, pulling Will in.
Slumped over in the chair, listening to the sound of lips against lips with her head tilted down, El smiled.
She was awake, of course she was awake, she'd never went to sleep in the first place.
Why was she just sitting there observing, do you ask? Well, Will and Mike needed their moment. And it was to ensure that everything worked out.
Oh, you hadn't realized by now?
El had a plan.
It all went something like this. El had been immensely, immensely grateful to Will for helping her through the time after Hopper's death, to the point where she started genuinely feeling the same way around him as she did Mike.
At the time, it was all terribly confusing, and a little bit frightening. Because while she'd said differently to Will later, she'd been told (By Max, not Mike, so it wasn't like she'd technically lied.) that when people got boyfriends and girlfriends, it was a one-to-one pairing, and El had no idea how to reconcile her love for Mike and her newfound feelings towards Will.
She'd loved Mike because he was her first. The first being she'd ever seen that was her own age, and the first one to show her kindness without asking for something out of her in return.
She'd loved Will because he was there for her when she needed someone the most, and much like Mike the first go around, he did it without any hope of a reward, but just because he'd wanted her to be happy again.
Max had then told her there were tons of people in polyamorous relationships, even if they didn't share that fact with the outside world. She'd told El that it was possible to love both Mike and Will with the same intensity, if it wasn't strictly for the same reasons. She just used the one-to-one example as a baseline, because it was 'normal,' whatever normal was at that point.
El didn't know what to do, in any case. She wanted both of them, but she didn't know how to achieve that. Then, Will had kissed her, they had done it in his bed, and she got an idea.
It was all very similar to what she'd glimpsed in one of Mrs. Wheeler's romance novels during a sneaky visit to Mike's house. In that one, a woman had fallen in love with two men, and one of the men harbored feelings for the other. The woman let it slip to one of the men that the other was having a relationship with her, the men had gotten into a fight, but they realized that they loved each other as well.
Spooky how works of fiction in the Wheeler house mirrored reality sometimes.
Anyhow, El had feelings for both Mike and Will, strong ones, but she didn't know if Mike or Will felt the same way about the other.
According to Dustin, the answer was: 'Yeah, totally. Me and Lucas are taking bets on whether or not it'll happen. Lemme know, would ya?'
So, all that had to happen was Mike had to find out, he and Will would get into a fight, Will would confess his feelings while he had the chance, and they could all live happily ever after!
In all seriousness, not that El had truly realized it, she was playing with Fire. The real world is not a trashy romance/fairytale novel. Things very rarely, if ever, work out like that.
But, this one time… it looked like it was.
El felt proud of herself, actually. She had her boys all straightened out now, she got to keep both of them, and while Joyce was mad at Will for taking advantage of El (which was a fallacy. El had known exactly what was going on every step of the way, and could've stopped it if she'd wanted), the woman would no doubt loosen up about it now that things were being worked out between the three of them.
Mission accomplished.