Chapter Text
***
el’s still not talking to him.
he sneaks a glance towards her through the corner of his eye, watching as she places fresh sheets on her bed in her newly cleaned old bedroom. it’s bare, he notes.
not lived in.
just give it time, mike, will had told him. but how much time?
she’s his girlfriend. shouldn’t he be the one she turns to? especially in times like these?
“mike,” hopper grunts. mike moves immediately, helping will carry his side of the couch. they set it down with a loud thud, and then hopper’s stretching his back and moving lazily into the kitchen, presumably to get a can of beer. and will’s gone to el’s bedroom, probably to see how she’s feeling. and mike’s alone.
a plastic bottle crashes through his vision abruptly, and lost in his thoughts as he was, he barely manages to catch it before it crashes into the floor. he looks up, and hopper grunts at him in acknowledgment again before disappearing into el’s bedroom too.
***
it isn’t long before mike is in his own bed, the day long gone in helping hopper and el move into their cabin. he is clean. freshly showered. yet, the ashen sky feels as if it is weighing down on him incessantly.
he turns his head, ready to will himself to sleep, when his eyes catch the frayed brown spine of the book resting on his bedside table, almost toppling over the edge.
he reaches out, feeling the felt cover brush against his fingertips. its dull gray contrasts everything surrounding it. he had borrowed it from the town’s library during spring break, struck by the simplicity of the preface.
“you must beware of thinking too much about style," said my kindly adviser, "or you will become like those fastidious people who polish and polish until there is nothing left."
"then there really are such people?" i asked, lost in the thought of how much i should like to meet them. but the well-informed lady could give me no precise information about them.
i often hear of them in this tantalizing manner, and perhaps one day i shall get to know them. they sound delightful.”
how cool, mike thinks, must it be to be so certain of your craft? he has his campaigns, and he has been writing for them for longer than he can remember. but, between his inability to come up with ideas that aren’t stolen from the distant dreams of boyhood, and the words that always feel rehearsed from a foreign tongue, he sometimes wonders if he has ever written anything at all.
the page is turned, and in the dim glow of his lamp, mike reads.
he is sitting up, knees drawn with the book in his lap. in the distance, red lightning continues to flash, tearing the world apart. soft sounds of life can be heard through the stillness of the evening. his mother, likely doing the dishes. the snores that seem to drift in every now and then—his father. the water slushing through the bathroom—nancy. holly has probably been asleep for hours.
and then, the sounds he can’t quite identify. brief footsteps. a laugh here and there—the byers. it has to be, because his family doesn’t laugh. not like this.
he turns his attention back to the words he had been reading without reading, like a litany that won’t stop echoing through his brain.
cricketers on village greens, haymakers in the evening sunshine, small boats that sail before the wind—all these create in me the illusion of happiness, as if a land of cloudless pleasure, a piece of the old golden world, were hidden, not (as poets have imagined), in far seas or beyond inaccessible mountains, but here close at hand, if one could find it, in some undiscovered valley. certain grassy lanes seem to lead between the meadows thither; the wild pigeons talk of it behind the woods.
the old golden world? he almost wants to scoff, but something about the words settles warmly into him despite his derision. what undiscovered valley was even left? when you have walked the same path a thousand times, and run around in the same woods since you could walk. when you have, with you, what you had thought was inaccessible.
what was left, except you?
but the words do paint a beautiful picture, and mike thinks of a different world where hawkins wasn’t on fire and his words existed outside of him. he thinks of el, of brushing her hair away from her face. when it was brown and soft and he could feel it rest against him when she was close.
the familiar heaviness settles into his chest, and he exhales with the knowledge that he had said the wrong thing. that has to be why she isn’t talking to him, isn’t it? because, she’s talking to will, even if a little. he just knows, that this isn’t just her taking what happened to max really hard. this isn’t just what happened with brenner.
he feels like he got a failing score on a test that was supposed to determine his entire life.
he’s flipping the pages before he realizes, hands gripping the edges firmly, until his eyes rest on the word fate and his movements still.
when i seek out the sources of my thoughts, i find they had their beginning in fragile chance; were born of little moments that shine for me curiously in the past. slight the impulse that made me take this turning at the crossroads, trivial and fortuitous the meeting, and light as gossamer the thread that first knit me to my friend. these are full of wonder; more mysterious are the moments that must have brushed me with their wings and passed me by: when fate beckoned and i did not see it, when new life trembled for a second on the threshold; but the word was not spoken, the hand was not held out, and the might-have-been shivered and vanished, dim as a into the waste realms of non-existence.
he has no idea why he finds his heart racing. the words settle themselves into his chest like a puzzle piece falling into place.
he thinks of i think my life started that day we found you in the woods.
he wonders why ever muttering the words again would feel like chewing glass.
trivial and fortuitous the meeting. except meeting el hadn’t been trivial. it hadn’t been fortuitous.
it had been chance. it had been fate. it had been dumb luck.
it had been the worst night of his life. it had been the most extraordinary thing that ever happened to him?
what would his life be like if he had never found her at all?
his eyes scan the page once again. what if she was a moment that passed him by? what if fate beckoned him and he didn’t see it?
dread settles into him, as does relief.
he doesn’t know which feels worse.
what if the might-have-been had shivered and vanished?
what if it still could?
he feels a tiredness settle into him, the day finally catching up with him.
in the delirious haze of half-sleep, his mind still sifts softly through the mess of words clouding his thoughts.
light as gossamer the thread that first knit me to my friend.
***