His Best Kept Secret | FACK [COMPLETED]

Chapter 28: Finn gets a text

"Can you use this?" Hopper said to Jonathan Byers. Hopper was holding up a rifle. Dustin, Lucas, Joyce, Steve, Max, Nancy and Mike all stared at Jonathan. "What?" Jonathan asked.

"Can you use this?" Hopper clarified with his strained voice.

A blaring moment of uncertainty passed. Jonathan looked around at everyone else, hoping for someone to speak up for him. Then Nancy spoke up: "I can."

Without any doubts or second thoughts, Hopper tossed her the gun. Steve readied his nail-studded baseball bat while she cocked the rifle. Lucas held up his slingshot. Max stood behind him, her eyes glued to the window glued to whatever could and eventually would break in. Mike looked around him for something, anything. Shit, there's nothing, he thought. Then he saw something big and gold, a candlestick. He picked it up and stood ready. Hopper pulled up his AR-15 and pointed it toward the window. Something was out there. Something was coming for them. Something could kill them. They all knew that of course, but they had each other and trusted each other.

A moment passed before they heard another noise that was more like a painful exotic scream, metallic and dangerous. Whatever it was had to have been quick. They heard it move from one side of the house to the other in nearly an instant. Everyone in the room followed the noise, followed whatever was out there. It squealed again, this time in pain, this time something had hurt it. Could it have been Will? Nancy thought. No, it couldn't, they had sedated him because he was possessed by something from the upside down. The upside down had found them, hadn't it? All because of Will Byers, the little boy who had the bad luck of going down the wrong street at the wrong time. Nancy tried to shake this thought, tried to shake the terrible memory of her lost friend Barb. Will had come back different and Nancy wasn't sure if Will was the lucky one anymore after seeing him tormented from this thing that wouldn't leave them alone.

Then something crashed through the window, a monster that looked half dog and half Demogorgon flew over the couch and onto the ground. Everyone fell behind Hopper, he pointed his gun at the thing that lay limp on the ground. It had four slits that formed its mouth, each slit housing thousands of little teeth. The monster's skin was slimy, it's arms curled up against it. It had to of been dead.

When it finished rolling it didn't move. Hopper slowly walked forward and placed his foot out and pressed it against the demodogs head to check if it was still alive. Then from behind, the lock on the door slid open. Everyone turned with their weapons to face this new threat. And when the door opened, when it finally opened, Mike Wheeler couldn't believe his eyes. No, it wasn't a Demogorgon, perhaps that foreign exotic thing felt more real than the person who had just walked in front of them. He had a feeling inside him. It spurred when the demodog flew through the door. Could it be her? He thought, but he shook that thought away. All those days with no answer. It couldn't of been her, he knew that, how could it have been? He saw her die when she killed the Demogorgon nearly a year ago. What he saw in front of him must have been an illusion, something the mind hoped for, like when a man sees water in a desert when it actually is just a mirage. She couldn't be alive, she couldn't be

Mike first saw her shoe. It was a pink hightop converse, then he saw her rolled up jeans, and then her bloody nose. He told himself that it was a ghost, it was something else, his mind had to have been playing a trick on him. But everyone around him started just as him, at a girl with a bloody nose and runny makeup. Even if what he was seeing was a ghost, even if he was imagining something, he had to check, he had to make sure that the love he lost so long ago was actually there. He kept walking forward, he lost control over himself, something else pushed him forward. His eyes remained on her, because if he looked away she might disappear, and if she had he'd remember what it felt like on each of those 352 days. He'd remember feeling her so close, yet so far away. Each of those days, Mike thought, each of those days felt like an eternity.

When Mike saw Eleven, or Jane Hopper as she would come to be called in a couple days, love flowed in him from a place deep within that he hadn't felt in so long. His face looked as if it had finally found peace, love joy and happiness all at once. In front of him stood Jane, a year older, prettier, bitchin. He hugged her, not only because that's what you do when you see someone you haven't seen in a while, but because he needed to feel her again–to make sure she was really there. And they hugged, for a while, and everyone let them. It was their moment, their time alone, in front of everyone. He wished he could kiss her there, as he did on the night he thought she lost her forever.

-2-

When Finn Wolfhard played Mike Wheeler, he felt a lot like Mike. He felt the pain of being away from someone he loved–of being unable to find the necessary control to find the person he loved again. He felt the urge to call every day, to try relentlessly for the person he loved. Except, Finn wasn't a movie character or even a T.V. Character, he was a real person who had real anxieties and real regrets. He regretted ever trying to help Josh, ever trying to listen to him and hear him out. He regretted not telling Jack how he felt earlier. He regretted wasting so much of that summer wishing he could feel Jack's skin and wishing he could hold him on those rare cold summer days. It seemed to him that before he and Jack had started dating, that there were more cold days then there were when they actually were dating. This pained him, like a splinter that he couldn't remove. Time is like that, unchangeable, and it was beginning to wear on Finn more and more as he was apart from Jack.

But, when Finn saw Millie Bobby Brown walk through those doors as Eleven, he wasn't acting. He saw Jack walk through that door, and unlike Mike Wheeler, what he was seeing was his mind playing a trick on him–imagining what it most desired. At first, he actually believed it was Jack Dylan Grazer who had walked through that door onto the set of Will Byers house.

That look of pure love and pure happiness all encompassed in one longing look only came because he hoped that it was Jack that walked through that door. That is the only hope any actor can have, to channel their own emotion into their art.

-3-

Finn was laying in bed a few hours after they filmed the scene. He thought about the way Jack would giggle when he said something witty; about the way Jack would cuddle up next to him, and try to siphon all of the warmth from him. He missed when Jack would feel his chest and lay his head on his shoulder as they watched a movie together or listened to the air and the movement of cars that drifted in from a cracked window. He didn't miss how secluded and lonely they felt. How they couldn't go out and hold hands without a barrage of angry or non-angry tweets. He just wanted privacy. He just wanted the world to be gone for one moment so that he could treat Jack the way Jack deserved to be treated.

He felt sleep tug at him, as it did on those nights. He felt it draining away at his thoughts and pulling at his eyelids. He hoped for another good memory to drown out the last bad one, the one where he felt like he was trapped in a small shipping container. So he imagined Jack next to him, holding onto him under the covers, lightly breathing. He missed listening to Jack fall asleep.

He was almost asleep when his phone buzzed on the wooden side table next to his bed. For some reason, it had buzzed harder than he ever remembered it could. He sat up, rubbed his eyes and noticed that as his phone buzzed a green light poured up and into the darkness from the screen. Weird, he thought, so he rubbed his eyes again, and the green was gone. The light was a light blue hue and shined up and onto the ceiling. He picked up his phone and read: A new iMessage from Fred Savage.

He didn't think twice about the name, though he thought, Why is Fred Savage Messaging me?

Finn unlocked his phone and immediately remembered who Fred Savage was. The message read: "I still love you." And that look, the same one Mike Wheeler had when he first saw Eleven, shined across on his face, except this look was much more powerful–much more profound. He held his fingers above the keyboard, unsure of what to reply, trying to take this all in. How could so few words make me feel so much, he thought.

"I know," he wrote almost instantaneously. This wasn't the time for a joke. It was time for him to fix this, joking will have its place later. Then he erased it, smiled, then typed and sent: "I couldn't ever stop loving you."

To be Continued.