Chapter Text
He sees her everywhere.
In his dreams that refuse to fade with the morning light.
Faces in crowded places, only long enough for his heart to stutter.
In warped reflections of windows and buildings he walks past, always half expecting her to turn and yell out his name.
The grief is so heavy, it feels like being chained to the bottom of an ocean with no source of air, lungs burning, no hope of breaking the surface.
Do you carry grief? People say you do.
Mike thinks this is a lie. Grief carries him. Grief decides where he goes, what he does, how long he sleeps, how much of the world he’s allowed to hold…
The dreams he sees her in aren’t even dreams, not really, but they are nightmares. They become punishments.
Mike Wheeler has watched El Hopper die over and over again, a thousand and one deaths, every single night in a million different ways. His mind replays them on a loop, reminding him that he could not save her.
He watches the bomb explode.
He watches her fall from the radio tower because his fingers slip, because he’s not fast enough, he’s never fast enough.
Sometimes bullets tear through her chest, and when he wakes from those dreams his hands shake so badly he can't hold a glass of water without spilling it everywhere.
Sometimes she drowns in her own bathtub.
Sometimes Vecna's hand spears through her middle.
Sometimes a demogorgon rips her apart, flesh and bone tearing like it’s meaningless.
Sometimes the military guns her down where
she stands.
And always… the bomb.
He sees that more than any of the others.
The bomb he made.
The bomb he believed in,
the thing that was supposed to save all of them.
But it killed her.
The outcome is always the same in every nightmare.
Mike cannot reach her.
He cannot stop her.
He cannot make her stay, no matter how much he begs, no matter how desperately he breaks himself open trying, and the guilt is eating him alive.
She dies.
And he’s left behind to live with it.
Overtime the nightmares rot into something worse.
Memories.
Because your memory is quiet. It Sneaks. It waits until he’s awake, until he’s walking, breathing, pretending, while he’s writing… and then it whispers a single, unbearable truth:
No one ever found her body.
And he’s not sure if that should relieve him or tear him open even more.
Then something strange happens. The carousel of nightmares shows him something new. It makes Mike question if he’s even dreaming now.
The world goes quiet in the way it only ever does in his nightmares, the punishments, sound draining out until there's nothing left but the thud of his own heart. The walls of his room stretch, pale and indistinct, like they've been dipped in milk. Everything around him turns black and the floor beneath his feet is wet.
The void.
He hasn't been here since she died.
And then he hears it… her.
"Mike."
Her voice is wrong. Thin. Distant. Like it has to travel too far to reach him.
He turns.
She's there and not there all at once, edges blurred, face flickering like a memory his brain can't hold still. Blood drips from her nose, she seems unsteady in her own body.
He can’t move, because if he moves she’ll disappear.
“El.”
His voice is strained like it hasn’t been used in weeks.
“I’m sorry, I should’ve-” he starts then stops.
Her mouth opens and closes like she’s trying to get words out. The flickering of her image becomes worse, more frequent.
He tries to reach for her, but his hand passes through cold air and static then she’s gone again completely.
Mike wakes up screaming her name.
He doesn’t believe it at first, thinks it was just a new nightmare his brain has formed to torture him.
But then Mike notices it two days later while Dustin makes sure his friend eats lunch in the Wheeler’s basement.
The clock is frozen on 3:53am.