Chapter Text
It feels anticlimactic.
Not in the moment. There’s the adrenaline, the terror, the relief. But after it’s all over, after Vecna is dead, the Abyss' is halted, and the Upside Down is obliterated, when Mike’s driving back through the rift, it’s anticlimactic.
He expects something else to happen. For them to be stopped on the other side, probably, in the Right Side Up. For Vecna to come charging through the rift after them, headless as Joyce left him. Maybe Demos and Demo dogs, and hell, maybe even Demo bats, to come raining down on their heads.
It’s almost a relief then, a validation, when Dr Kay turns up.
But even that is swiftly dealt with. El and Will team up, and between them, with Hop and Nancy’s firepower, it’s over even faster than Vecna. Because of the convergence, they snap Max and Vicki back up, as well as Erica and Mr Clarke. So even that serves the paper-thin happiness flooding Mike’s body.
The whole lot of them cram into the truck, packed together in ridiculous positions. Lucas sits in Max’s chair and pulls her onto his lap. Her hospital gown is the cleanest piece of clothing Mike can see around them. Vicki shares Robin’s lap, apparently forgoing the illusion of friendship in this quiet, post-battle hour.
All the kids have huddled together, surrounded by Nancy and Jonathan. The discomfort on everyone’s face seems to override their tiredness. There’s a rasp of clothes brushing as bodies shift, the see-saw of heavy breathing, and the stale taste of recycled air. Mike can’t even remember the last time he brushed his teeth.
El is at Mike’s left, her head on his shoulder, and Will is at his right, their hips pressed together. Mike is certain his distress levels are the highest. His heart won’t slow down. His hands won’t stop shaking. He feels like he’s failing some test everyone else has passed.
He knows there are some real conversations he needs to have with El. He also knows he’s left Will on a cliffhanger of one. And he knows for certain that tonight isn’t the night, but that he wants it to be.
When the van stops for the last time, they all glance around at each other. Tight mouths and wide eyes, and uncertain smiles.
Now what? Mike thinks. I deal with the real world?
Of course, it’s the WSQK they end up at, after the little kids have been taken home. It’s big enough to hold everyone, and it seems to be an unspoken decision. Even though Mike wants a shower desperately. And he’s sure everyone else does too. He’s caught Steve sniffing himself a few times now.
Even still, they forgo the showers. They scrounge up food, and they eat in relative silence. A sense of defeat lingers in the room, despite being the winners. Mike can’t pinpoint what it is. El leans into him like always. Will doesn’t move away when their shins bump. Mike doesn’t know where to put himself.
When they all find places to sleep, on couches and floors and chairs, despite the discomfort, despite the downright stupid sleeping positions, despite the goddamn smell, it feels right.
It feels like they should spend this night together. This victorious, confusing night.
The next morning, and the preceding weeks, are stranger.
His parents come out of the hospital. His house gets cleaned up. The military leaves. The lockdown lifts. People flee town, and people return. Hawkins gets brighter. Mike, most unbelievably, has to go back to school.
Through all this, Mike knows he’s avoiding the conversations he needs to have. Knows he’s avoiding his insides because the outside is so overwhelming.
It’s the normality that seems to irk him. Things haven’t been normal for Mike Wheeler since he was a kid. He doesn’t know how to sit still in his classes, or look at his mom’s scars without tearing up, or stop routinely checking in on Holly sleeping.
And he doesn’t mean for it to, but time just keeps ticking on, and on. Weeks to months. And the pressure of it all eats at him. Will’s lingering eye contact and El’s voicemails. Long ones at first. Rambling, looping stories that don’t go anywhere. Then shorter ones. Then just her breathing for a few seconds before hanging up.
Mike listens to every single one.
He never calls back.
Doesn’t help that they’re all living together now: the Byers’ and the Hoppers’. Minus Jonathan, who takes himself out of Hawkins the first chance he gets. Mike knows that it’s hard on Will. He plans what he’ll say to Will, over and over in his head.
We should talk. Are you okay? I’m sorry.
He still doesn’t reach out. Coward. That’s all he is. He had a brave moment. One singular brave moment with Will, and now he can’t find that bravery again. It’s a jarring realisation that Mike Wheeler is brave in the midst of chaos and destroyed by the mundanity of normalcy.
Mike doesn’t initiate the first conversation he needs to have. El shows up at his house, at his bedroom doorway. He glances up from his typewriter and jolts out of his skin. She smiles weakly at him, her eyes roving over his face. He yanks his glasses off and clears his throat.
“El. Hey. Hi. What’re you – um, what’s going on?”
El stands quietly in the doorway for a moment, long enough that Mike fidgets uncomfortably in his chair. The sunlight streams in from his window, highlighting the first superhero he ever met.
“Are you busy?” She finally asks.
“No,” he says too fast. “I mean – not – not really. I’m just, y’know, writing and stuff. I – I’ve been doing it since… it just kinda helps…”
El nods, and Mike shuts up. His eyes glue to her as she walks into his room and sits on his bed. He turns in his chair to face her, eyeing the miles of floor space between them.
“You didn’t call me back,” El whispers.
Mike swallows, throat tight at the hurt in her voice. “I listened,” he mutters weakly. “I listened to all of them.”
“The Party’s worried about you, Mike,” she mumbles, holding his eye.
Mike’s chest hurts. “I just –” He rubs damp palms over his thighs. “It’s – well, you know it’s been a lot. School, and my parents, and – and everything –”
“I know,” El interrupts. “We’re not mad. I’m not mad.”
Mike smiles weakly, his stomach twisting. “Yeah?”
El smiles too, but there’s a frown dipping her brows. “It’s not just now, Mike. You… stopped talking. To me.”
He frowns back. “What do you mean?”
Her shoulders lift and drop. “You’re… somewhere else. All the time.”
“I’m right here,” he murmurs, though it sounds weak to his own ears.
El’s cheek dips, and the resulting smile is sad. “That is what you always say.”
Mike has no idea how to respond. He keeps wiping his hands on his thighs. His heart is thundering.
“I keep thinking it will go back,” she continues. “Like before. But – but it’s not. Everything is different now, Mike. We are different.”
He can’t help but nod. He can’t deny it. Mike feels different: altered. Rewritten.
“I don’t think you are doing it on purpose.”
Her eyes drift over his wall to the painting Will gave him. Mike’s heart thuds.
“I don’t want to lose you, Mike,” El tells him, still staring at that painting. “But… I think that I already have.”
Something tight twists in his chest. El looks at him again.
“I didn’t want to hurt you,” he tells her, voice cracking, eyes wet.
“It does hurt me, when – when you pretend.”
El stands from his bed then, and his head snaps up, following her. He can’t argue, and she knows it. Her hand strokes his shoulder as she walks away, and Mike’s struck with the realisation that this is happening right now: the ending.
If he doesn’t speak, if he doesn’t stand up, if he doesn’t run after her, it’s over.
Mike stays in his chair, and his first superhero, his first love, leaves.
It feels like a betrayal to see Will so soon after. Especially because Will’s new bedroom is right next door to El’s. But he also told Will it’s always been him, when he still meant something to El, so maybe Mike’s been moving in this vein for a while.
Despite being let in by Joyce, he creeps down the hallway as if he’s broken in. Light spills out from Will’s room, and quiet music too. Low and tinny, from a cassette player.
Mike stops just shy of entering. It’s selfish to be here. Because Mike hasn’t come with the intention to discuss everything between them. He wants comfort from his best friend. Because Will still is, and always will be that, no matter the tangled mess of feelings that accompanies the sight of him.
Right here, Mike could turn around. He probably should, before he hurts anyone else. Before he watches hope bloom on Will’s face, or catches El coming out of her room. His chest tightens at the thought of it – the turning, the pretending he wasn’t here.
His hand shakes when he raps his knuckles against Will’s door, and then pushes inside. Will’s sitting on the floor, his back against his bed, sketchbook balanced on his knees. He looks up when Mike’s shadow hits the doorway, eyes widening.
“Oh,” he whispers, voice careful. Braced. “Hey, Mike.”
“Hey,” Mike echoes, uselessly.
They stare at each other. Mike switches to manual breathing. He shoves his hands in his pockets. Takes a further step inside. Then another. Like he’s testing ground he’s not sure will hold.
“I, uh,” he starts. Stops. Tries again. Lowers his voice slightly. “El came by.”
Will’s grip tightens on his sketchbook.
“Yeah,” he mumbles. “I know.”
Mike nods. “She –” He swallows. His throat burns. “She left.”
Will nods and glances back down at the sketchbook, moving his pencil in lazy strokes.
“I’m sorry,” Mike blurts.
That gets Will’s attention – he looks up sharply.
“For what?”
Mike opens his mouth. Closes it. The truth crowds behind his teeth.
“For – for everything, Will,” he lands on instead.
Will exhales heavily through his nose, almost a laugh. It doesn’t sound amused.
“I know,” Mike rushes to say, kneeling on the floor.
Will startles and pulls his legs up tighter. A pang of hurt echoes in Mike’s chest. He deserves this. The distance. It still hurts.
“I’m sorry for everything,” he repeats. “For – for the years of saying nothing and then – and then for saying a bit of something, and then these months of just – of just –”
“Coldness?” Will interrupts, voice and eyes hard. “For me and El? Do you know how much it – it sucks, for siblings to be pining after the same guy?”
Mike winces, his face full of heat and his stomach with shame.
“I’m sorry.”
“That’s not enough, Mike,” Will snaps, hands slamming down on his sketchbook. “You can’t – you can’t play with people like this. Just because you’re – you’re scared or whatever. We’re all scared! Even still. Even now. I’m scared every night. El has the worst nightmares. And I bet you don’t even know that because you’ve been avoiding her!”
Mike rocks back from his knees to sit opposite Will. He wraps his arms around his lanky legs and resists the urge to bury his face.
“I know.” His voice is weak, shaky. “I – I suck, okay? I didn’t mean to disappear. I just – I thought if I stopped moving, everything would – would stop, too.”
“I – I don’t know what you want from me,” Will mutters, eyes wet and tired.
Mike’s chest tightens. “I –”
Will shakes his head. “I’m not – I’m not saying never, Mike. I’m just – I’m saying not like this.”
He looks back at his sketchbook, and Mike knows it’s a dismissal. He stays seated on the floor, frozen, as Will starts to draw again.
For months, I’m saying not like this, loops in Mike’s head. And for months, Mike doesn’t get it. He doesn’t understand what he has to do to connect now and then, that possible future when like this is right.
So Mike lives his absurdly normal life, because that’s all he can do.
He sees Nancy out of Hawkins to go off to school. He does his homework on quiet evenings. He sits with his parents at dinner. He teaches Holly how to play D&D. He sees the Party. Will is never cold; he’s just not as warm, and Mike feels body swapped, back to that younger version of himself, in California.
He sees El, too. And she’s not mean either, though Hopper is on her behalf. They start playing D&D again. It’s jilted at first, awkward, especially with the addition of El and Max. But time moves, and it forces them back into their comfort zone: on a quest together.
Time moves so much that Mike makes it to graduation before he can process it. Makes it to the stage, to a speech from Dustin that would have made Eddie proud. Makes it to their final night as high schoolers, before they make decisions about college and the cities they’ll live in.
Makes it all the way to this moment, in the aftermath of their final D&D game, where he adds his folder to the shelf with tears in his eyes.
This doesn’t feel anti-climactic, this part. This part feels like inevitability, like the closure of some of the worst and best times of his life. Feels like the ending they were always heading towards. And he lets himself have it, in his childhood basement, with the echoes of his memories, lets himself cry in the silence.
Then there’s a scuff of a foot on the stairs, and Mike turns sharply. Will, who left some minutes ago, stares at him, wide-eyed.
Mike stares back and then scrubs quickly at his eyes. “H – hey, man.” He sniffles. “Did you forget something?”
Will doesn’t answer immediately. He stands on the step, one hand hooked around the banister, eyes fixed on Mike’s face. Taking in the red rims of his eyes.
Mike hastily wipes at them again. “Sorry. I was just –”
“It’s okay,” Will says.
He comes down the rest of the stairs and stops a few feet away. Close enough that Mike can smell him: graphite and fresh paper, and the faint trace of soap. Far enough that he could still leave, if he wanted to.
“You don’t have to pretend,” Will adds. “I’m sad too.”
Mike lets out a shaky breath. “It’s just… I was kind of getting it together, you know? I was – finding my footing or whatever, and then I blinked and – and –”
“It was all over?” Will interjects, eyes roving the shelf and their binders.
“Yeah,” Mike breathes.
He takes his seat at the table again, and his eyes follow Will as he takes the seat opposite him. Will stares at him, expectant, and Mike, for the first time in his life, feels the opportunity as it bursts in front of him. Feels the chance of like this.
His mouth feels numb as he says, “I don’t know how to – how to do this.” His voice sounds young. “I keep thinking… that if I – If I wait long enough, I’ll just… wake up and it’ll all make sense. You know?”
Will nods slowly. “Yeah, Mike. I know. I’ve been waiting my whole life for things to make sense.”
That hits something deep and tender in Mike’s chest. He shrinks, hunching over the table. It brings him closer to Will.
“I don’t want to keep messing it up,” Mike admits quietly. “I don’t want to – to keep hurting people just because I’m scared.”
Will considers him for a long moment. An eternal moment where Mike’s heart pounds in his ears.
“Then don’t,” Will replies, simply.
Mike blinks. “What?”
“Don’t disappear,” Will clarifies. “Just –” He shrugs. “Stay. Even when it’s scary. Be…” he laughs softly. “Be Mike the Brave.”
Mike swallows hard. “I’m trying. I’m really trying.”
Will searches his face. Really searches.
“Okay,” Will says finally.
It’s not a promise, or forgiveness, or even permission. But Mike exhales sharply, something unclenching inside him for the first time in months. They sit there for a second longer. Will glancing briefly to the stairs, and then back to Mike again.
A smile begins to pull at Will’s lips. “Why don’t we start by talking about college? If - If you still want to go. Together. Somewhere..."
Mike’s eyebrows jump, and his grin matches Will’s. "Somewhere bigger."
Will's eyes soften, and he leans closer in his chair. "Yeah," he says, low and soft. "Somewhere bigger."