Chapter Text
“Goodbye Mike.”
Thrust backward and back into my physical body, I’m screaming. Screaming so loud, yet I can barely hear anything, see anything but her. Standing at the edge of the gate, just barely out of reach and I wish nothing more but to be standing there beside her. In that moment, I think that if she dies, I do too. I would rather throw myself into obliteration, if only to be with El. It was supposed to be us. A Hawkins, a life in which she does not exist isn’t worth a single fucking breath.
I watch helplessly and desperately as I fight and scream harder than I ever have in my life. I know that the bomb, the one that I fucking built is on the verge of detonating. 3 seconds. 3 seconds in which time quite literally slows and I look straight into the eyes of the first and only girl I’ve ever loved. Love. In the present tense and in the forever.
3…I see not a 16-year old El, but an 11-year old El standing helplessly in the rainy woods behind my house under the glare of the Party’s flashlights. I see that giant Benny’s Burgers t-shirt drowning her tiny frame instead of the skin-tight diving suit. I see the girl I sheltered in my basement who I wanted to care for so fiercely.
2…I feel the first fluttering of my heart that day when she turned around, adorned in a blonde wig and Nancy’s pink dress. I feel the exhilaration of that first kiss in the cafeteria at school. I feel the contentment of simply being together, holding each other in her bedroom in Hopper’s cabin, stupid smiles painted on our faces as we try to discreetly close that 3 inch gap in the door.
And then..I see her, El, in that moment, feet planted to the ground at the gate. I look at her face as if to memorize her features. Her eyes that were always filled with so much fondness and trust. The softness of her jaw that I have held so many a night. And I mouth to her, my throat now raw, hoping she might see it but knowing she may never hear it, “I love you, El,” her face free of any dirt or blood – “Wait. No blood…” My thoughts are interrupted as the final note runs on the record..
1…
“Mike. Hello? Mike!”
I snapped out of my head, out of the haunting memory of that fateful night, the night a part of me died, the night she disappeared…again and this time I’m not so sure if I’ll ever find her again. I looked around at the scene before me. Graduation. I’m not quite sure how I got here. To be frank, I’m not quite sure how a lot of things happened over the past 18 months. I’ve been existing in the in-betweens. Somewhere in between consciousness and sleep, in between the shock and grief, in between the maybes and the idea of giving up on my craziest hopes, but nothing close to living. I looked over at Dustin, whose seated beside me looking at me with that same expression that everyone has looked at me with every day. Concern masking a little shred of pity. Like I’m on the verge of breaking. Well funny enough, I’ve already been broken. The moment I was thrust out of the Void and pulled away from her was the moment I, the Party leader, the heart, had broken. I spotted Lucas and Max a few rows down holding hands and giving each other a look, a private one meant for only their eyes. At the sight of them, something tugged at my heart, hard. We used to look at each other like that.
To my right, Will is looking at me with an expression mirroring Dustin’s, his brows furrowed with worry, looking almost identical to his mom.
It’s not the first time I’ve gotten lost in my head. That night at the gate has been all I can ever see behind my eyelids ever since the military trucks dumped us back at my childhood home afterward. The one that also became a home to the Party, to El.
As Dustin clapped my shoulder and got up on the stage to deliver his valedictorian speech, I let myself wander around in my thoughts once more. I think of that day in the cabin, us two sitting on the rim of her bath as I tell her of how we would escape. Our utopia far, far away from Hawkins. Somewhere with 3 waterfalls. Bullshit. Fantasizing like that was a waste of my time. I should have been coming up with a real plan. One where she could have escaped Dr. Kay and her fucking kryptonite. One that ended in her beside me, every waking moment. But no, I had been too afraid to feel. Too afraid to face the severity of our situation. I just wanted to meander in the hope of escapes and “maybes”.
“So this, is OUR YEAR!” I looked up to see Dustin flipping off the school admin as cheers erupted all around me. My mouth quirked up in a small, prideful smile. Dustin's always been a trailblazer. Standing up and cheering him on, I allowed myself a rare moment of release, the loudest my voice has been in a few months. While everyone around me was whooping and yelling with glee and freedom, I screamed too, but my voice was laced with frustration. No one could really tell, not when my voice was drowned out and mixed with my classmates’ joyful cries all around me.
As cheers began dwindling and students–no graduates ran off to find friends and family, I began trailing Will to where our families stood in the stands. But something stopped me in my tracks. A low buzzing static tickled my ears. Looking around, trying to find the source as my heartrate picked up. Static. Found it. The speaker on the left side of the stage, emitting a crackling sound that was all too familiar to my ears. Suddenly, a white-hot burst of hope shot through me as I felt…I felt...something. Ever since that day in the woods and every one afterward, I swore I could always feel her. I could always sense when it was El trying to communicate to me. And in this very moment, I felt her. I couldn’t tell anyone just yet, they would tell me I was 100% going fucking insane. They would tell me she had died, in the explosion. But every time the memories of that night would resurface in my head, which by god was a lot, I would stutter at the end. Maybe my mind is playing tricks on me and tainting the real memory with my desires, but I swear on my life, El’s nose was not bleeding.
My heart began racing in the middle of the Hawkins High field as my brain tried to frantically piece together what it’s been subconsciously building these past 18 months.
If her nose wasn’t bleeding, then how could she have brought me into the Void for our last goodbye? Her nose bleeds every single time she uses her powers. Wasn’t the kryptonite blaring in her ears? How could she have possibly slipped from my view with full strength in the mere seconds it took for Kay’s men to take hold of us?
Unless.
“Mike, you understand me better than anyone.”
“One day..you will understand.”
Inhale. Exhale.
One thing suddenly became clear in my head for the first time since that day: El is alive. And I will find her. I always do.
___
“But, there’s a story I can never tell. And that’s the story of the Mage.” I said to the Party as we gathered around our table for one last game. Their faces faltered when I mentioned this, all flickering with the memory of that night.
“At least not the real one.” I said with caution, gauging the reactions of my closest support circle. The ones I should have been leaning on but instead have shut myself off from. Never saying a word about that night. Never opening up. Dustin looked at me with a peculiar look in his eyes, as if he was trying to piece together what I was implying. My heart thrummed with more excitement and hope than I’ve felt in…I can’t even remember how long. Lucas and Max exchanged weighted glances, eyes alight and invested. And Will moved forward in his seat, beckoning me, “What real story?”
So, barely being able to make sense of the rapid jumble in my head, I explained under the guise of D&D terms how Kali had used the last remnants of her powers to create one final illusion. One with the power to sustain and take place during those minutes before the bomb’s detonation. I recounted how Kali’s illusion created a masked version of El that stood at the entrance of the gate. Whilst the real El was rendered invisible and thus able to quietly escape to the Radio Shack where she hid in the tunnels. El is out there. god, I’m so sure of it, it hurts.
“So the Mage lives on. No one know exactly where but, she escaped fooling everyone around her.” Looking up at my friends, for a second I expected worried glances filled with pity but after 3 seconds Dustin said, “Holy shit. Shit. Shit. Shit.” A teary-eyed Max said “Shit, Mike are you sure?” Lucas had an incredulous half-grin on his face. “I mean the military thinks she's dead. But we never saw exactly what happened when the bomb went off.”
“Mike, did El speak to you? I mean before the explosion?” Will asked, his brain whizzing at record speed. “And that's more to my point guys, she brought me into the Void to say goodbye, which means she was using her powers, which also means she should have had a nosebleed right?” I burst out and continued, “But I swear to you, I was looking straight at her when it went off and her nose was definitely not bleeding.” I was frantic at this point, “Also how could she have gotten to the gate that fast and undetected if Kay’s kryptonite was on at the time? Unless the El standing at the gate was truly just an illusion and she brought me into the Void from a hiding place nearby.” Everyone nodded and suddenly we were all standing, pacing in my childhood basement.
Dustin asked, not really expecting an answer but just getting his thoughts out, “Okay well if she is really alive, then where did she go?” “Well that’s the thing,” the blood rushing in my ears, “I heard static from one of the speakers at graduation.”
Just as that sentence left my mouth, my walkie that had been sitting on the table next to the sofa stuttered to life, the steady hum of static filling the room.