Chapter Text
Out of all the nightmares Mike has had over the years, there’s one that repeats, that he’s so familiar with it’s almost not a nightmare anymore. Depending on how he looked at it, it almost never was.
Falling.
When you’re facing certain death, the brain releases its happy chemicals to ease the anxiety and stress associated with dying. Mostly endorphins, some serotonin as well. Even a bit of DMT, a psychedelic.
Mike has been in many life-or-death situations, but only one which surpassed the uncertainty into certain death territory. Only one which it was a miracle that he survived. And in that moment, as he stared down at the water in the quarry, he was calmer than he’d been in a long time. He was going to die. He was going to do it for Dustin. For El.
For Will.
Falling. Plummeting. Wind whipping past his face, rocks catching at the edges of his jacket, his chin stinging despite it all.
In real life, it only went on for half a second before El caught him, but in the dream, it goes on forever. He can almost start to lucid dream, to recognize the memory for what it is and realize he’s in a dream, though it doesn’t make it any less horrifying.
The scary part about this memory isn’t the falling. It’s the fact that he jumped.
What if it really was Will? What if he’s dead?
Mike wakes, not with a start, but eerily slowly. Like pushing through the viscera that covers an Upside Down gate, knowing he can get through if he applies enough force, but not quite knowing if he wants to get to the other side. Peeling back his eyelids is a Herculean effort, and he grips at his sheets as he swallows back a wave of bile, then pushes himself up to sitting.
4:33AM. Bedside water cup. Counting his fingers and toes and the glow-in-the-dark stars on his ceiling. He’s still shaking when he pulls his walkie out from under his pillow and turns it on. It’s only static, but that’s what he wanted. White noise. Loud proof right next to his ears that there’s no Code Red. Or even a Code Yellow, or a Code hey wanna hang later? Radio silence.
He feels tears on his cheeks and pulls his shirt over his face to dry them. It’s just a physiological response to the nightmare. He’s ok. He’s awake, and there’s no Code Red, and Will is downstairs, and he’s ok. They’re all alive. They’re all here. It was just a dream. Dreams can’t hurt you. They can’t.
Mike is much more likely to hurt himself first.
Mike squeezes his eyes shut and shakes his head, mentally batting the thought away. It was just residual, from the dream. That’s been happening a lot lately, like when he thought there were vines in the Squawk at movie night, or last week when he thought a red shirt he’d thrown onto the ground of his room was a pool of blood.
If this continued, they’d have to send him to Pennhurst until he caught up with sleep.
When this was all over, maybe they should all just go to Pennhurst anyway. Maybe that’s what the government should’ve done with them all along to keep them quiet. Hell knows Mike deserves to be there for more reason than one.
Crazy together, he remembers saying to Will, long ago. As if El coming back could’ve ever solved the way he felt that long year between 1983 and 1984. It definitely couldn’t solve how he felt going forward. It only prolonged his deterioration.
Sometimes Mike feels like he’s decaying on the inside, rotting in his core, and one day everyone will wake up and see that rot has spread to the outside, like when the Wrights’ pumpkins rotted overnight in November of ’84. He feels like his brain is oozing black-brown pumpkin guts, and it’s only a matter of time before his eyes fall out of his skull.
He swallows down another bout of nausea and hugs his knees to his chest with his bedsheet over them so he doesn’t have to encounter his bare legs. The hard plastic of the walkie is warm now with his skin, and he clutches tighter to it as he watches the minutes tick by on his alarm clock. He’s ok, he’s awake, he’s alive. They’re alive.
The shaking has mostly stopped by the time his mother gets up, and he makes sure to wash the red blotches off his face before he joins her downstairs.
Like everyone, Mike has been visiting Max in the hospital pretty regularly. Obviously not as regularly as Lucas or El or Max’s mom, but he’s surprised himself by coming in a pretty close fourth.
Somehow, in that last eight months, when she’d been pulling away from everyone, when Will and El had been in California, when Mike had felt the most directionless he’d ever been in his life, they grew close. Not in a talking way, or a hanging out way. But they had some sort of quiet understanding of each other. Where Dustin was loud and proud, and Lucas was trying to move on and try new things, they were both stuck. Max, in the memories of the summer before, and Mike, in the loss of two of the most important people in his life.
He wishes he’d known what the nosebleed meant at the time.
Now, he sits at her bedside, taking Lucas’s usual spot on a rare day he’s not visiting, and he reads to her the words he’s never been able to say out loud, that he was never able to send.
He couldn’t explain why he was reading his unsent letters to Will to a comatose Max, or how it really started. All he knows is that the words have felt like they were choking him, ever since he wrote them, and if anyone would understand, it would be Max. And if she was still in there somewhere, maybe one of these letters would prompt her to fight her way out of her sleep or Vecna’s lair or wherever she is just so she can slap him and call him stupid.
He is. Stupid.
“I miss you,” he reads, voice low enough that he’ll be able to hear anyone approaching the room before they get close enough to be in earshot. “I mean, obviously I do. I can’t remember a time when you weren’t in my life. I almost feel like I don’t exist without you beside me. We’re Will and Mike, you know? I sound crazy, I should stop writing this.
“To tell the truth, Will, I haven’t been doing so well. High school is hard, Hawkins is still a pit, especially after the ‘mall fire’ (bullshit, but whatever). And you’re gone. El’s gone. And every time I try to call, I get the busy signal. Why won’t you call me? I promise I’d pick up. I miss you so bad.
“I’m losing it. I feel like I’m losing you, and I’m losing it, and I can’t even send this letter because I’m writing it at 2AM on a school night and that makes me too honest about some things that I can’t be honest about. Friends don’t lie, and I’m not a friend to anyone right now. I can’t tell the truth. I can’t even write it.
“I can write a version of it. Have you seen how I sign off my letters to El?
“I miss you, Will. Write me a letter, call me. I’m too cowardly to do the first, and the second has been impossible.
“Love, Mike.”
Mike pauses after finishing the letter. It’s dated November 4th, 1985, and Mike can’t remember the specific night he wrote it, but he can remember many similar nights. Lying awake, plagued by guilt and despair, and goddammit so much longing. It was a different kind of sleeplessness, a different kind of torture from what he’s enduring now. The world is actively ending around him, but he felt like it was already over, back then. Like his organs walked out of Hawkins without him, and he was just a puppet, skin without insides, ribs without a heart.
Will called Mike the heart, but he didn’t see him when Will had left. The party had no heart, because Will took it with him.
Mike carefully folds the letter back into a square and slides it into his back pocket, looking at Max. Unmoving as ever. He wonders if El is in the bath right now, looking for her. He wonders if, somehow, one of these days El will be looking when Mike is reading one of his letters. Maybe she already has. She’s been busy lately, though. The end of the world is her only focus. She has her priorities in order.
Mike wishes someone would ask him about it, straight up. No, he’d probably lie again. He wishes someone could just know. The fear that wraps itself around his mind like tin foil won’t let anyone in, but if they could just puncture it. If someone could just rip it open…
But he knows he could never ask someone to do that. The foil is sharp; they could get cut.
Shoes clack on the tiled floor of the hospital’s hallway, and Mike looks up as a Candy Striper walks into the room with a bouquet of sunflowers. Lucas. He always finds a way to show up for Max, even when he’s too busy to actually show up.
Mike sits back from the bed as the Candy Striper places the vase at Max’s bedside, even though he’s on the other side of the bed from the table, and pulls his lips into a tense smile to acknowledge the volunteer. She’s petite, with short red hair and bright red lipstick that’s a bit smudged at the corner. He’s seen her before, in the hospital and at school, and he thinks she’s in Pep Band with Robin, but he’s never heard her mention her name, so they must not be close.
The girl smiles back at Mike after fluffing the flowers out in the vase, and she gestures toward Max on the bed. “She’s strong, you know,” the girl says. “She’s held on this long—that’s pretty miraculous in itself.”
Miraculous. That was one word for it. It’s a bit hard to see the state Max is in as a miracle when her body is only alive due to the latent heart-starting powers that El forced herself to discover when Max died last year, and her consciousness is nowhere to be found in the universe. But Mike smiles anyway, appreciating the sentiment.
“Yeah,” he says. “Max is stubborn.”
“And she has good friends to come back for,” the girl says, stepping back from the bedside. “There’s someone in here every day for her. I know some awake patients who would kill for that.”
Mike nods, looking at Max. “We’re all very… close.” He twists his lips to one side, takes a sip of coffee from the vending machine paper cup. “It hasn’t been the same without her.”
The girl nods. “I get the feeling. I mean, I think we all do, with all the deaths and people leaving and…” she trails off. “Sorry, you’re trying to have some quiet time with your friend, and here I am yammering. I’ll get out of your hair.”
Mike smiles to himself as she turns to go. He knows the feeling of his own mouth getting him in trouble, opening it just to be talking, saying things he doesn’t even really mean just to fill the silence. It’s comforting, in a way, to hear someone else struggle with the same thing.
“Thanks,” he says as the girl reaches the doorway. She pauses and looks back, and Mike continues, “It’s… good to hear sometimes, that we’re all going through this. Even if it’s not the same for everyone.”
She smiles and says, “That’s what I’m here for. We could all use a little company right now, I think.”
Mike nods, and the girl finally leaves. It’s only once she’s gone that he allows himself to squeeze the moisture from his eyes, wiping away the excess with the long sleeves of his favorite blue flannel. He looks back down at Max and whispers, “You’ll be back. I know it.”
He sits there for a few hours more in silence, until Max’s mom shows up, then leaves after giving her a quick hug.