Chapter Text
“Goodbye, Mike.”
Two years later, her words still haunted him. They weren’t just memories — they were marks. They clung to his skin like invisible thorns, digging deep, tearing flesh, leaving wounds that never healed. Sometimes he woke up with the physical sensation of pain, as if someone had spent the entire night pressing both hands against his chest. Mike felt dead most days, as if only his body kept moving by inertia, while every piece of his soul had disappeared with her at the exact moment everything exploded. The world moved on after that day.
He didn’t.
During the first week without her, he never got out of bed. He didn’t sleep. He didn’t speak. The clock on the nightstand marked hours that no longer meant anything, and daylight came and went like an unwanted visitor. Nancy was the only one who entered his room. She always knocked first, even knowing there would be no answer. She forced him to eat, sitting on the edge of the bed with the plate in her hands and a constant knot in her throat. She stayed a few minutes longer afterward, watching him, waiting to see if Mike wouldn’t throw the food up — like he had in the first days.
Their mother couldn’t stand to see him like that. Neither could his friends. Mike hadn’t seen any of them. He didn’t want to. He knew it wasn’t their fault. Not any of them. It had been Eleven’s choice to do what she did. But he couldn’t look at them and keep breathing. He couldn’t face the fact that they were all alive. That they had all been saved. And that the love of his life hadn’t.
His first attempt happened one month after her death.
Mike was finally starting to feel the crushing weight of a possibility his mind had refused since the beginning: maybe… maybe Eleven had really died. Not disappeared. Not trapped somewhere between worlds. Dead. Forever.
The weight tightened around his heart in an almost physical way, like something was crushing him from the inside. He wouldn’t accept it. He couldn’t. She was still out there. She always came back. She always saved him.
That was why he ran to the quarry.
The wind was strong at the edge, and the sound of the water below echoed like an ancient call. He stepped closer, looked down. It was too high. Far too high. No one would survive a fall like that. Mike didn’t feel fear. He felt hope — one last, desperate hope. He needed her to still be there. He silently begged for her to come save him again. Like that time. Like every time.
And if she wasn’t there…
If she didn’t come to save him…
Then Mike would be satisfied meeting her in whatever idea of an afterlife might exist.
When he took the first step, starting to falling, an arm yanked him back.
Mike stumbled, heart racing, feeling arms holding him tightly, as if he might disappear at any second. A voice reached his ears, muffled, broken, furious, terrified.
“What the hell are you doing, Michael?!”
Nance.
Mike couldn’t hear properly. He couldn’t feel anything. Nothing but a vast, endless emptiness.
She hadn’t come to save him.
El.
With time, he became a problem. A risk. A burden to the family. After an entire year under constant alert, under CDC supervision, after five failed attempts to end the endless pain tearing him apart from the inside, Mike surrendered to the only refuge he could find: the pills.
Sleeping became a desperate necessity. The longer he was unconscious, the better. Sleep meant forgetting — even if only for a few hours — and, most importantly, finding her in the only place where she still existed whole.
His dreams.
She was there. She always was. With her silly little smile, her attentive eyes, the fondly and lovingly way she said his name. He held her, felt the warmth of her body, the weight of her head resting on his shoulder. He told her everything he never had time to say. Repeated everything he had always told her. In his dreams, Mike could breathe again. In his dreams, the world made sense.
Waking up was the punishment.
After the second year, it was as if no one else mourned her anymore. Mike watched people living. Smiling without guilt. Laughing out loud. Falling in love, dating, getting engaged, planning futures that seemed so simple to those who hadn’t lost everything. He even tried to keep up, to wear the right mask, to repeat that he was fine.
But he wasn’t.
He never was.
He couldn’t forget. He couldn’t give her up.
He didn’t want to.
Every single day, religiously, he held the walkie-talkie with trembling hands. He turned it on. Listened to the static. Like a silent prayer. He waited. He waited for her to call. He waited for her to still be out there somehow, in some impossible way.
The years passed in silence and survival.
Mike wrote. He discovered a refuge healthier than the pills — even though he still had an entire cabinet full of them. He worked on books like someone clinging to a life raft in open water. Writing was the only thing that pulled him out of his own reality. He invented other endings. Rewrote their fate. Created worlds where the explosion never happened. Where the Three Waterfalls existed as a promise of escape. Where they lived hidden from the world, together, untouched.
Stories where he could live.
Stories where she was still with him.
Until the signs began.
And for the first time in years, the emptiness in Mike’s chest didn’t feel permanent.