Chapter Text
Summer, 1999.
Familiar little footsteps creak down the hallway, trying to be sneaky in the way only a child who knows she’s breaking the rules can be. Mike hears every one of them anyway.
He leans back in his chair on instinct, vertebrae protesting as the stiffness finally catches up with him. He’s been hunched over the typewriter for hours—for so long his coffee turned ice cold. For so long that the words on the page have stopped meaning anything at all.
Not even a fantasy to refuge to.
The door cracks open.
His niece peeks in, curls flattened on one side from lying, blue eyes bright with mischief. When she sees him looking, her smile spreads like she’s won something.
Mike’s mouth tilts up despite himself. “Aren’t you supposed to be asleep?”
She slips inside, bare feet padding across the floor. “You promised,” she says, pouting in a way that always manages to make him cave. “You said you’d read me a story.”
He glances at his watch and winces. “Shit,” he mutters, more to himself than her. The hours have bled together again, lost in writing the draft for his new book. He’s been stuck in a constant loop of rewriting sentences, abandoning them altogether and rewriting once more. He rubs a hand over his face. “Yeah. Yeah, okay. Let’s do that.”
She pads closer, curiosity tugging her forward. Her gaze locks onto the typewriter like it’s a living thing. She’s only four, but she misses nothing. She’s so damn curious and smart, asking questions and searching for answers all the time. She must’ve gotten that from her mom. “What are you writing about?”
This, usually, is his favorite question in the world.
Because for a moment, he gets to invite her into the landscape of his fantasies. He’s tapping into what he does best: extending fictional realms to spread beneath her feet.
That’s something she got from him. Her love for stories.
But this time it reminds him that the answer has been the same for months. He doesn’t get to pretend that the story still accepts him as a writer, that he’s building a world where he still understands the heroes.
Mike glances down at the page in the typewriter. It’s always half a paragraph, crossed out, rewritten, crossed out again. He’s simply stuck.
Every approach, every alternative, every version ends the same way.
A Paladin who can’t protect.
A Paladin who’s too late.
A Paladin whose armor feels like a lie.
A Paladin who always loses. Always the one person that matters.
Hope used to come so easily to him, it would gently nudge him forward during his darkest times. Now every word turns bitter and mocking, like the story itself knows better than to trust him with a happy ending.
And maybe the story is right.
There’s nothing he can do to spin it back around, everything he writes is devoid of optimism, simply dripping in failure.
He forces a smile and pushes his chair back. “Still figuring it out,” he says lightly. “Come on, let’s get you to bed before your mom scolds me for corrupting you.”
She giggles, ready to turn on her heels, before abruptly freezing. Her attention snaps back to the desk, eyes narrowing while staring at the picture frame beside his typewriter.
She rises onto her tiptoes, fingers careful as she lifts it like it might be fragile. “Who is this?”
His breath is stuck in his throat.
It’s ridiculous, it’s just his niece, but a surge of protectiveness hits him anyway. The irrational urge to take the picture away, to keep it safe, protected from the world. As if it isn’t just a beautiful moment frozen in time that survived when everything else didn’t.
But it’s more just a picture.
It’s her.
Her question sinks between them and his throat clogs up, entirely out of his control.
Who that is?
His mind races instantly, dragging him through a tunnel of memories reserved for her only. Her laughter, her fierceness, her resilience, the way she looked at him like he was someone when he felt anything but.
Who is she?
She’s the warmth of dusk on long summer days, the breeze that sways wildflowers.
She’s a walk back home after a bad day, the blanket to slip under.
She’s every wish written down in a journal, every prayer on his tongue.
She’s the ink in his pens flowing like blood in his veins, the reason the ink still works at all.
The reason he still tries to write at all.
Where does he even begin?
She’s everything.
“That’s El,” he says finally. His voice wavers, so he clears his throat and tries again. “She was—” He stops and breathes. “She’s the bravest person I know.”
“Really?” His niece tilts her head, studying the photo like she might find the answer there. Or maybe just because she’s so very pretty. “Why?”
The back of his eyes burns, but it’s been so long since anybody wanted to talk about her.
Ever since that godforsaken night in 1987, everyone’s been walking on eggshells around him. Scared that the tiniest reminder of her would set him off, scared that he’d revert to his old ways of coping. Conversations reroute themselves if she gets brought up, as if her name should never be uttered.
They think they’re protecting him.
They’re wrong.
“She’s… well… all those superheroes I tell you about, right?” he says slowly. “She is one of them. She saved me. She saved everyone.”
Her eyes widen, scanning over the picture in her hands. “How?”
He almost laughs, or almost cries. It’s hard to tell what exactly the memories of El elicit out of him. “She just did,” he says. “She understood me when no one else did. She saw me, the good things, the bad things, and she still liked me.” His voice softens. “I don’t think I knew who I was before her.” And I think that I lost myself when I lost her. “That is just part of her superpower, you know? The other part is her kindness, her heart.”
His niece smiles at the picture. “Will I ever meet her?”
Pain flares behind his eyes. Fuck, this hurts.
Time heals all wounds is bullshit. Time doesn’t heal anything, it just teaches you how to live around them. The bleeding never stops, you simply grow accustomed to your new reality.
It’s been years. Years. And he still can’t—he’s still unable to—
“I don’t know,” he admits. “She moved far away. I don’t think she’ll ever come back.”
She considers this seriously, then nods, putting the picture back. “I hope she will.”
He blinks the tears away, trying to shake the hollowing ache in his chest. “I hope so too.”
The humidity of summer presses down against the back of his neck. The air sticks to his skin no matter how still he sits, sweat gathering slowly, stubbornly, like Hawkins itself refuses to give him the smallest of mercy.
It’s been like this all season.
Everybody’s been anticipating the heat long before it arrived. It’s been gradually getting hotter each and every year. Mike came to the quiet conclusion that Hawkins must be some forgotten, exiled circle of Hell. The deepest one probably.
That must be why it is so cursed with devils and monsters.
But he’s still unable to leave.
He’s tried to picture himself somewhere else—a city far away from here, maybe, somewhere anonymous where no one knows his name or what he’s lost. But every time he gets close to imagining it, something inside him recoils.
Leaving feels like betrayal.
Like abandoning the last living proof that she was ever real.
Hawkins hurts him in a way nothing else does. Every street corner is memory-ridden, every building is a reminder. It’s a deep punishment that seeps under his skin, a constant ache that never lets up. It’s a prison built out of nostalgia and grief—and he doesn’t know how to escape, or if he even wants to.
Everybody else left years ago.
They enrolled in different colleges, started new jobs, quit their jobs, found better fitting ones. They dated, they broke up, they got married, they have kids. Their lives keep moving forward because they have the luxury of doing so.
Not like Mike. None of them has lost like Mike.
He stayed.
He tells himself it’s because he has someone to remember. Because, if nothing else, this place still echoes with her presence. These are the sidewalks she walked on, the houses she stepped inside, the places where she laughed, fought, loved.
Hawkins is the fucked up town that took her from him.
But it’s also the fucked up town where they met.
How do you leave the only place that held so much of her? When it’s all he has left?
Nancy stopped trying to convince him years ago. She fought at first, gently, then more desperately, pointing out opportunities. She spoke about cities that would welcome him, places where the past wouldn’t breathe down his neck every time he stepped outside. She talked about his career and how much more beneficial it would be for him to be a big-city author with big-city connections.
But she learned, eventually, that it was a losing battle.
So she compromised.
She visits every few months, always over a weekend. She never says it’s to check on him. Never asks outright if he’s okay, if he’s sleeping, if he’s eating properly. She just pretends that it’s casual.
Mike knows better though.
He leans back in his chair now, the wood creaking beneath him, and watches as his niece runs wild through the backyard. Her laughter is bright and unburdened, sweeping through the summer air as Nancy chases her, mock-scolding, pretending to not let her win.
For a moment, it almost feels like happiness.
A smile pulls at Mike’s lips but it doesn’t quite reach his eyes. Something familiarly heavy settles in his chest instead, a longing so deep it feels bottomless.
This could’ve been their life.
The thought hits him without warning, it always does.
He’s imagined it so many times it feels rehearsed. A version of the present where he never lost her, where she never left. Where the world didn’t demand such a cruel price for everyone else’s normalcy.
Maybe they would’ve had a kid by now.
A daughter, always a daughter in his mind.
He pictures her with El’s eyes, shining like autumn leaves in the sunlight. El’s soft, careful and dimpled smile. He hopes, selfishly almost, that she’d take more of her mother than him. That she’d inherit El’s steadfast strength, her limitless kindness, her unwavering resilience.
If El were… If she were here… If she never left…
They would’ve been married. He knows that with a certainty that still hurts to acknowledge. He’s always known. It’s what he envisioned when he wanted to run away with her.
She would’ve been his wife.
He would’ve woken up next to her every morning, gone to sleep with her every night. They could’ve had a life full of ordinary things, full of sacred things. A life built out of shared routines and small moments that only the two of them would understand.
The ache returns, hitting him so mercilessly when the fantasy collapses under its impossibility.
Because it’s just that. Fantasies.
Mike squeezes his eyes shut, breath hitching as he fights the sting behind them. He’s so tired of crying. Tired of the way grief ambushes him when he least expects it, still, after all these years.
He’s tired of mourning. He’s tired of missing her.
He doesn’t want to miss her. He wants her to—
Something brushes against his hand.
A caress so ghostly he almost misses it. No, not quite a caress. Like a current of air slipping over his skin in an intentional, achingly familiar way that makes his heart stutter.
His eyes fly open.
His pulse slams against his ribs, loud enough he’s sure Nancy must hear it from across the yard. His gaze darts wildly, scanning the empty space around him with shallow breaths and trembling hands.
“El,” he whispers before he can stop himself.
He waits for a sign, a second gust of wind to hit him, or something more concrete. He waits to hear her voice, to see the ghost of her, to feel her touch.
Nothing.
Just cicadas, the heat, the distant sound of his niece and sister laughing, no more wind.
You’re losing your mind, a voice inside him says quietly. It’s just the wind. You’re just sick with grief.
But another voice—the cursedly optimistic and hopeful one he’s never really been able to silence—whispers back, what if it isn’t?