Chapter Text
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november 12, 1983
She’s gone.
The next day, he calls her for the first time.
Antenna up, Supercom set to the static channel she conjured Will’s voice out of, he asks her where she is. If she’s okay. To please, please come back. He tells her he’ll keep her safe, it’s okay, she can come back now - yeah, they bugged the phones, but he hid the Supercom from the agents swarming the house and it’ll be okay, he promises.
Months later, he looks back and feels almost crazy, being so certain that she was right there.
Months after that, he’ll look back and be proud of his faith.
-
In December, he calls her. The first snowfall of the year has blanketed Hawkins by breakfast and it just keeps falling, all day. He tells her about the snowball war at lunch and how Lucas totally nailed Troy right in his mouth breathing face with the wrist rocket. He describes how it feels to crunch the snow under his boots and to be the first person to leave tracks on the sidewalk home. This feels important to him. It’s just, he’s not sure if she knows what snow is. If she’s ever seen it before. She needs to know.
He calls her quietly after he’s supposed to be asleep, the night of the Snow Ball. He almost hadn’t gone, but the Party had pulled democratic majority on him after Dustin swore up and down he could hack the sound system from the A/V room. It was okay, but it would have been more fun if she was there. He calls her on Christmas Day and New Years Eve because she’s probably never celebrated them, and just thinking about that makes his insides feel kind of shriveled up and even sadder than before. He knows you’re supposed to kiss someone you like at the start of the New Year. She should know that too.
When he can’t sleep he looks up at the ceiling in the dark and makes lists of things he wants to tell her all about. Like presents, and Christmas carols. All the movies she needs to see to catch up. What a best friend is. The members of the Ghostbusters and the different kinds of dice you need to play D&D and the tree behind his house that slowly grows small, sour apples in the spring. Where Sweden is. Ice cream. Homework. Biking to Lake Jordan in the summer and how you can’t help screaming a little when you first jump in, but it’s the kind of shock that makes you want to leap off the warm rocks again and again.
-
It’s not summer yet, though. The weeks tick by, always the same day after day. He always forgets how March and April feel like the longest months of the year until they come again, cold and damp and grey. The nightmares start again too, and he wakes up shaking, panicked about things he’s not supposed to worry about anymore. Some nights there’s blood all over the floor, so much blood, and he’s watching again and again as Papa picks her up and tells her she’s sick and Mike’s struggling against the solid arms holding him back. He can’t do anything to help her and this man who stole her whole life is touching her again and he wakes up so angry he hurts.
He calls her on a Friday night in May when it smells like rain outside, and he feels this creepy prickle on his skin, like someone’s watching him. His back is against the panel wood wall of the blanket fort and everyone else is asleep, the house silent. He calls her the next day, and the next, but he doesn’t feel it again.
-
He starts to realize how often he does things while already thinking about telling her later, and how maybe that’s kind of fucked up. He feels off-kilter these days, anger spilling messily out of him everywhere he goes. No one else seems to remember her and that makes her feel even more distant, like something he dreamed one day in November and can’t forget.
“This is stupid,” he hisses to himself in the dark, slamming the antenna down and tossing the Supercom onto his bedroom floor. He's stupid. Everything about this situation and everything he can’t stop feeling is fucking stupid.
-
He still calls.
-
It’s first thing Sunday morning on some random weekend in July. He had a dream they went sailing together and then got lost at sea and ran out of fresh water, but just in time a giant creature with tentacles rose out of the surf and nudged them back toward shore. He’s bleary-eyed, flipping through his Dungeon Masters’ Guide with one hand and holding down the broadcast button with the other - “I know it starts with a K, I think it’s like Krake or Krack or something” - when he feels a hand touch his fingers where they’re splayed on the book. He’s cold all over and he doesn’t realize he’s trembling until his thumb slips, losing his page, and she’s gone.
In August he doesn’t feel anything. He still calls. Steve pulls into to their driveway one night and has his windows down while he waits for Nancy, He’s blaring a power ballad to match his stupid hair, and Mike catches snippets of the lyrics from where he sits at his desk: "...dream of a girl I used to know...closed my eyes and she slipped away.” Before he’s finished having the thought his body is already up and slamming the window shut.
-
In early September, Nancy comes down to rummage in the basement for an old board game, and finds him telling an empty channel full of static about getting detention for writing KOWALSKI BLOWS on the wall of the boys’ bathroom. The look of kind pity she gives him is unbearable.
He’s pathetic. He’s been having conversations with a ghost for over 300 days. She’s never coming back, and he barely knew her to begin with (but still, he felt something wordless drawing him to her like gravity, like the earth’s powerful core). Some days it feels just as fresh as it was the moment the dust cleared and the wall was whole, the room quiet, El nowhere to be found.
He’s losing it. Dustin and Lucas and even his mom keep asking him what the hell is up, and he doesn’t know what to say.
-
He still calls.
-
On Halloween, he swears to fucking God or whoever that he feels her breath on his cheek, so close he can almost feel the heat of her skin as she reaches out to touch and shit, shit, his vision swims with tears as he slams the antenna back into the Supercom and jumps up out of the fort. He takes the stairs two at a time all the way up to his room and tries not to think about stupid dramatic shit like the sensation he’s missing a piece of himself. At least now he knows Will is losing his mind too. Someone else remembers. At least there’s that.
-
After Halloween, though, shit goes sideways. Fast.
It feels kinda good in some sick way; he doesn’t have to pretend to be normal anymore, like everything’s fine. They’re all back in the catastrophe together and he falls into the lead just like he used to. But he’s watching Will slip away minute by minute, and they stare at the tunnel vines on the walls and try to make sense of a shadow monster, and mostly he’s so, so scared. Last week things were bad, but at least they weren’t this supernatural, primal evil kind of bad. Suddenly, he’s helping Mrs. Byers rig up lights in the shed like an interrogation room in some spy movie, and they sit with Will, dredging up the earliest of their faded memories, trying to get to him without alerting that thing.
But then it knows. It knows, they gave it a hint and now it’s outside the Byers house where they’re trying desperately to arm themselves against something barely imaginable. He can hear them chittering and roaring, surrounding the house, and it sounds like a swarm of death.
They’re armed but it won’t be enough. He remembers how a long time ago El stood fiercely next to him, tiny and almost bald in Nancy’s dress. They can’t win but he’s ready, he holds up the heaviest thing he could find and crouches, tense behind Hopper who’s trying to decide where to aim the gun, and -
And then it’s silent.
A corpse crashes through the window and they all stare. Hop nudges it bluntly with his foot, limp and wet. The seconds tick by slow, so slow, and then the lock on the front door
turns
all by itself.
They all look and Mike, his heart stops, his breath goes silent, the door swings open without a touch, and he sees his own old sneakers on the step and holy shit. He’s crying, he doesn’t know why because this can’t be real but it’s too much for his body to contain and he can’t blink, she’s so beautiful he can’t understand what he’s seeing. And then she says his name and she’s real it’s real it’s real, he reaches for her and she fits easily into his arms, just like that. His heart is going to pound right out of him as he holds her because it’s been almost a year but (El) she’s warm and solid and there. Now they’re both crying (El, El) and her face is smudged with makeup and her nose is bleeding on his shirt (I knew it, I knew you’d come back) and he’s so happy and so scared he doesn’t know what to do. So he tells her.
I never gave up on you. I called you every night. Every night, for -
Three hundred and fifty-three days. I heard.
-
Hours later, he sits quietly in the dark at the end of the sofa. Everyone is asleep in a scattering of air mattresses and sleeping bags on the floor, no one willing to leave anyone else alone. Not tonight, not at the end of the world. The streetlight filters through a gap in the front curtains, just enough to see her by, and he catalogues the familiar features and small changes. She looks a little older, her features filled out, her cheekbones and elbows less sharp and thin. He’s dying to know what Hopper meant when he asked her where she’d been. There’s time enough for questions tomorrow, but the part of him that can’t sleep is the same part that worries she’ll disappear again without a trace. He hasn’t even found out what her hair feels like in his fingers yet. She didn’t have any to touch, before, and he never would have been brave enough anyway. Now, brave seems irrelevant.
She stirs slightly and opens her eyes, squinting into the darkness. “Mike?” she whispers.
“Hey. I’m right here,” he whispers back, and she nods and closes her eyes again, turning into the pillow. Like she just wanted to know he was there.
Something unknots in his chest, something that’s been tense for so long he forgot what it’s like to breathe all the way out. Right now, the world holds still around them.
-
He falls asleep thinking about how to ask her to the Snow Ball.