UPDATED ST Fanfic Guide
I am JustMyName on A03! (some people have told me they had no idea) I have really come to love writing for Mike and Will these past two years. Hope you find something to enjoy! 🖤 I also enjoy Madwheeler and some other unique ships so if you're up for something different this might be the spot for you!
✨Demons of Change and Wildflower Eyes ▻ rating: E ▻ status: Complete ▻ words: ▻ship: Byler, Troy x Mike, Madwheeler, minor Lumax and Henderhop ▻description: AU. High school hasn't been easy for Will Byers. He’s had to live with the emotional scars of a loveless father and supernatural worlds, as well as the physical ones from the hands of the bullies that make his everyday existence hell. One night, when he's looking for some peace and quiet Will comes upon one of them.
Sparks fly and Mike and Will can’t stay away from each other. Yet, there are things Mike isn’t saying: about his past, about his family, about his peculiar friendship with Troy. Things aren’t always what they appear to be, and loyalties born from violence will be rigorously tested.
Will, Mike, Troy centric. (This fic is very near and dear to my heart. <3)
✨Scum Rises ▻rating: E ▻ status: Ongoing ▻ words: 6,293 ▻ Separated Byler, Mike Wheeler/ OC ▻ description:
DEMONS OF CHANGE & WILDFLOWER EYES: PART II
"I should have just killed him, Will always lamented bitterly with tears in his eyes when he was having one of his dark spells. The guilt slowly crept up between them and they broke up the year after college. It was drunken and volatile and spiteful. And shattered his heart." * * * Just before Mike turns 26, Will kicks him out. With nowhere left to go, Mike must return to Hawkins alone. There he will have to face all the demons of his past, finding a bit of grace along the way.
This story will chronicle the year that Mike and Will breakup, and how Mike finds his way back. Takes place post Demons, pre Epilogue.
✨moonflower ▻ rating: M ▻status: Ongoing ▻words: 30,913 ▻ship: Byler ▻description: Will Byers hasn't been back to the town that haunted him since he ran away to college. But years later, after he is fired from his job and his drinking starts to effect his daily life, he has no other choice but to return home. There he'll face his past full on: his family, old wounds, and a long-buried lie he told his best friend one care-free summer's night in 1987.
✨Touch Me Like You Know Me ▻rating: M ▻status: Complete ▻words: 14,894 ▻ ship: Byler ▻ description: Mike doesn't go home anymore, not unless absolutely necessary. Instead, he stays far away from Hawkins, quietly shutting himself off from the world, and burying the pain of the things he never said to the boy he'd left behind. But when his mother convinces him to return home for his thirty-fifth birthday, Mike is finally forced to confront just how much he'd given up when he runs into Will by accident. Mike-centric. Estranged Byler reconnection fic. Soft and Sweet
✨Certain Slant of Light ▻ rating: M ▻ status: Ongoing ▻words: ▻ship: Byler, Will x OC. description: Will just wants to get through his last year of high school without incident, to feel normal for once in his life, and try to survive the building tension between him and Mike that grows with every word left unsaid. On the first day of school, Will meets someone new who may finally offer him the acceptance he craves, but he’s unsure what to do when it causes his relationship with Mike to hit a breaking point, forcing them both to confront their true feelings. And to make matters worse, Vecna is always there, whispering in his ear, and letting him know his fated role in the inevitable fall of Hawkins. Slow Burn. Will-centric. Mike-centric later chapters.
✨Lay Me Down Slow ▻rating: M ▻status: Complete ▻words: 10,821 ▻ship: Byler ▻description: It's 1998 and Will is anxiously making his way to a bar to meet up with Mike, who he hasn't seen in over a decade. Emotions run high as he shares a drink with him, and when a confrontation turns violent, it leads to truths being told and the two of them finding each other again. Will POV.
✨A Burning Thing ▻rating: M ▻status: Ongoing ▻words: 5,677 ▻ship: Byler ▻description: Will and Mike are childhood best friends. As summer fades, the two join their friend group at a lake house for a birthday celebration. There, Lucas's sister Erica is making a student film. The scene she asks them to act out---a passionate kiss---will alter their relationship forever.
In the aftermath, Will, struggling with caring for his abusive father, has to come to terms with the fact that he is set to leave the country for two years. Meanwhile, Mike has a crisis of sexuality and both men will grapple with their inescapable feelings burning just beneath the surface.
✨Heatwaves ▻ rating: M ▻status: Ongoing ▻ words: 18,567 ▻ship: Byler, Platonic Madwheeler ▻description: It's the summer before the Party are all set to move on to the rest of their lives: college, jobs, leaving Hawkins for good. Will isn't sure if it's the heat or his own self-torture, but one night on Mike's stubborn, idiotic campaign to get El back, Will agrees to pretend to be her so Mike can work on the speech he has planned. When the two of them get carried away, it leads both of them to exciting and terrifying insights into who they are and what it is they truly want.
✨Beautiful Things From Broken Soil ▻rating: T ▻status: Complete ▻words: 2,175 ▻ship: Byler ▻description: Mike and Will get caught in a rainstorm on a lazy summer's day.
✨I Don't Require A Definition ▻rating: M ▻ status: Ongoing ▻ship: Byler, Will Byers/ Original Character ▻words: 2,750 ▻ description: Will reminisces about his past and a friend he met at college as he reconnects with Mike on a camping trip the summer after sophomore year.
✨An Unspeakable (Of The Oscar Wilde Sort) ▻rating: E ▻status: Ongoing ▻words: 7,125 ▻ship: Byler, Mileven ▻description: They sit there for a long second in awkward silence, and Mike bites his bottom lip. He eyes the movie. “So what did you pick?”
Will fidgets with the tape nervously in his hands. His voice catches. “Uhm, yeah—it’s just this movie that’s based off of a book I read last year. I really liked the story.”
Will’s eyes find Mike’s and he blushes. “I don’t know. It’s kind of serious. We don’t have——“
Mike interrupts Will’s shy backpedaling by snatching the VHS out of his hand and turning it over like he is going to find the summary. Instead he just finds a Family Video logo. “What’s it about?”
“Uhm—well it’s about these two guys at Cambridge in the early 1900’s and they’re—-friends.”
Mike blinks. “Friends?”
Will’s eyelids flutter and he presses his lips together. “Yeah—-like—really good friends.”
or, Will brings over a movie to watch with Mike and it leads to certain truths being addressed. Complete with a Mike Wheeler in crisis.
✨Helpless ▻ rating: T ▻status: Complete ▻words: 2,973 ▻ship: Byler ▻description: “Hey,” Mike says, shutting his bedroom door behind him gently and padding over to the bed where Will lays, freshly showered and in his undershirt.
“Hey,” Will murmurs back as he burrows himself further into the bed and pulls the sheets up under his chin, trying to ignore his heart pitter-pattering inside his ribs. He smooths the fabric over his chest nervously.
Mike smiles over at him, something shy and sweet in the way his eyes crinkle. He breathes out and folds his thin arms across his chest, rubbing along his rigid hip with his thumb.
Will tries not to stare where Mike’s worn white tank top he always wears rides up, revealing pale skin and a shock of dark hair lining his belly and disappearing underneath his stupid Star Wars pajama pants.
It’s hilarious, really, Will thinks bitterly. Stuck in a bed with your friend at the threshold of the Apocalypse, and only able to think about what hides underneath his pajamas.
It’s so unfair. It’s fucking torture.
✨You're The Only Shape I'll Pray To ▻rating: E ▻status: Complete ▻words: 3,160 ▻ship: Byler ▻description:
Hands pulling at shirts in a darkened room, a tongue licking along burning skin, moans and pants and belt buckles being unclasped.
Mike presses his knees together so hard his bones grind.
“Tell me," he gasps. "—Confess—to God—-all of your sins.” Priest AU.
✨The Pact ▻ rating: M ▻ status: Ongoing ▻words: 97,440 ▻ship: Madwheeler, Byler, Elumax ▻ description: A pact between Max and Mike gone wrong gets them both unanimously voted out of the Party and they find themselves stuck with each other the summer after Graduation: fighting, commiserating, and begrudgingly discovering they are a lot more alike than they originally thought. .
✨Death Lies in Wait ▻ rating: M ▻ status: Ongoing ▻ words: 13,322▻ ship: Arranged Madwheeler, Byler, Lumax, Mileven, Secret Ship ▻ description: Massachusetts, 1890. Max Mayfield is twenty-six years old and at the hand of her parents, settles for a marriage of convenience to a widowed lighthouse keeper. A stranger she'll be trapped with for the rest of her life on a lonely strip of land surrounded by nothing but endless, lonely sea. But, as she settles into her life, and she and her new husband try to coexist, they get wrapped up in a mysterious presence on the cape. It calls to them. It's lulling and coaxing and sings to them at night. Max discovers the secrets her new husband keeps. Mermaids and ghosts of the past come to haunt them. Madwheeler/Byler//Lumax Gothic AU- Mermaid Will.
✨the winter tree resembles me ▻rating: E ▻status: On Hiatus ▻words: 2,706 ▻ship: Byler ▻description: The Revolutionary War is underway, and the upstanding Byers family, devout Quakers in their divinity, have expressly kept themselves out of the War of Rebellion. But newly rutted Alpha Will Byers has a grave secret he keeps from his parents. He has been recruited by his twin sister into Commander Washington’s clandestine ring of Rebel spies. But when he meets an English officer possessing bewitching brown eyes at the boarding house he’s assigned to, he slowly discovers the stranger has a secret of his own, as well as a tantalizing scent Will can’t resist. Lines will be drawn-loyalties tested and allies betrayed -no one is who they seem.
✨A Derelict Mind ▻rating: M ▻status: Ongoing ▻words: 8,259 ▻ship: Byler ▻description: Will wakes up to find himself chained to a chair in a room he doesn't recognize. There are orderlies and patients and a doctor with blonde hair and a terrifyingly sweet voice. But Will is not in one of his nightmares or one of Vecna's visions. He's a patient in Pennhurst Asylum, and everything he's known to be real: his friends, his family, the Upside Down... has been nothing but a delusion of a very sick patient.
Part of "A Certain Slant of Light" Universe.
✨Kind of Best Friend ▻rating: G ▻status: Complete ▻words: 1,206 ▻ship: Madwheeler (platonic or romantic) ▻description: Mike reads his letter from Max after returning to Hawkins.
✨ Mashed Potatoes ▻rating: G ▻ status: Complete ▻ words: 1,352 ▻ ship: Byler ▻description: "Wait," Mike says, grabbing the carton of milk out of Will's hand. Will blinks, his brows creasing in confusion. "What?" he asks with uncertainty. "We need milk, don't we?"
Mike stares at the carton Will has chosen. It's labeled with red lettering and a stamp of a picturesque farm across the front. Whole milk. Mike shrugs. "I mean----yeah. But-----" he raises an eyebrow. "Whole milk?" Will huffs and rolls his yes. "Yes. Whole milk? What milk did you want?" Mike shifts on his feet and pulls at the waist of his usual black jeans. "Well, I mean----we always drank skim at our house." Now, Will's mouth opens up a little. Offended.
"Skim?!" he asks, completely appalled. "Who actually drinks skim milk? You might as well drink water."
OR, Mike and Will really think the other is wrong in their grocery shopping decisions.
✨I Held On As Tightly As You Held Onto Me ▻ rating: T ▻ status: Complete ▻ words: 7,014 ▻ ship: Byler ▻ description: After years of life getting in the way---be it by distance or choices made--Mike hasn't seen Will in almost a decade. But one cold winter's night, he's back in town and Mike cooks him a meal.
✨When We Wake Up ▻ rating: T ▻ status: Complete ▻ words: 23,428 ▻ ship: Byler ▻description: Will and Mike having to share a room while waiting for the impending apocalypse and the utter torture it is for both of them.
✨Come Away With Me ▻ rating: T ▻status: Complete ▻ words: 18,760 ▻ ship: Byler ▻ description: “Two shots ring out! BAM!-then a pause-BAM! Mike’s head snaps towards the sound, squinting his eyes to orient himself to the darkness. A guttural, pained wail echoes through the trees as if some forsaken wraith howls at him in this lonely forest, it’s voice sounding all too familiar. Then, a loud screeching roar follows close behind it. Another shot! Mike sucks in a wretched, frightened breath, his heart thrashing in his chest so hard that it feels as if it might shatter his ribs. Dread settles sickeningly in his belly. "Will….” OR: The one in which Mike gets to be Will's knight in shining armor. Tending Wounds Fic.
✨ We Are All Fools In Love ▻ rating: T ▻ status: On Hiatus ▻ words: 13,098 ▻ ship: Byler ▻ description: Fifteen years after being forcibly separated as children, William Bennet recognizes a familiar brooding face, plucked from another lifetime across a crowded ballroom. As his and Michael Darcy's paths begin to merge once more, they discover they are now separated by more than only time and distance, but faults which lie within their own hearts. Matters of pride and prejudice. Regency au of our dreams.
✨First of All ▻rating: G ▻status: Complete ▻words: 1,772 ▻ship: Madwheeler ▻description: Mike's home from break during college and he and Max have to babysit his baby cousins. It's going as well as you can imagine. Set after the events of "The Pact."
