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El didn’t sleep most nights anymore. She would tell Kali it was because of all the noise of their new home, but they both knew that wasn’t the truth. The bustling city beneath them they now call home is louder than Hawkins ever was. But that wasn’t the truth, she knew that she could stand how loud New York City was even in the middle of the night even when the world should be asleep, but she had grown used to it. But what really kept her up was knowing she wasn’t home anymore, and that there was no option to go back.
El falls asleep dreaming of her bed in their cabin, of her creamy yellow walls and green vanity with her boombox on it, her small collection of tapes they had been slowly rebuilding since the impromptu move away, since deciding no one could know they ever existed. Kali said a city was the best place to hide, no one cared about you in a city like this, no one looked twice if you were a girl with a shaved head like her, or a girl with a splattering of curls across her head.
El wakes up from dreams of her room, of movie nights with the party and frozen meals in front of the TV with Hopper, she even dreams of Lenora, but it’s not the town that was special, it was the people, it was her brothers doing everything they could to assimilate her to normal life, it was Joyce cooking dinner for them and Jonathan teaching her to ride a bike finally. El doesn’t care if it is in Hawkins or Lenora or New York City, what she wants is her family.
This night, not unlike the other two-hundred-forty-two other nights, she gets ready for bed after working at a place that didn’t actually have her on the payroll, didn’t care that she didn’t have an ID or a birth certificate, they just wanted a body. She was exhausted and brushed her teeth, got into her pajamas, and lay down on her bed, staring at the sticky stars on the ceiling that they had put up with their powers.
Kali is a night owl, and El can hear her running around the apartment doing whatever it is that she does, can hear the whirl of her old sewing machine and the soft snip of scissors if she really tries hard enough, the soft sounds of fast and hard music playing from their shared boombox that El always requests she turns down when she sleeps, and Kali always obliges. It’s only nine, not late at all, but El has an early start, so she rolls over, squeezes her eyes shut.
Sleep normally does not come easy for her, but tonight, with the mechanical humming of her sewing machine in her ears, El falls asleep fast. And when she opens her eyes it feels like minutes have gone by, but it was no time at all, because she’s standing in the void, in sleep shorts and a ribbed long sleeve, freezing, as she stares out at something in the distance of her dreams. Loud music blasts from the scene in front of her, and while she knows she shouldn’t, she goes to investigate.
What she finds is something she had only seen in movies and TV shows, a crowded living room in the dark, only lit up by multicolored lights all around, blasting music among a crowd of writhing teen bodies, she’s so close she can smell the cheap beer coming off of them, and the stronger smell of tequila and smoke. She doesn’t know where this is, doesn’t know who these people even are, but she takes a step into the living room, and the void disappears around her, all she has is this house party and the teens she steps through that begins to fade until she finds what must have dragged her here.
Max. Max is in the crowd, her hair has been cut short, like a boy might have cut it, choppy and messy and so Max, she’s dancing, freely and happily in the border between the living room and the kitchen, like there’s no one else in the world but her, red solo cup in her hand. She's beautiful, El thinks mildly, her best friend is so beautiful. She calls out to someone, and through the smoky bodies appears Lucas, hair tight to his head in rows of braids, smiling in a button-up shirt that’s a little too unbuttoned, and begins to dance with Max as well.
They laugh and kiss and smile into each other's mouths as they dance, happy to just be with each other, and it makes El a mix of happy and so grossly jealous that it makes her feel a little sick. A part of her wants to be here, wants to be with them, wants to dance with Max and Lucas, but what she wants more than anything, is to be with Mike.
She wants to go to her first-ever house party with Mike and dance badly in the living room and get drunk for the first time and kiss Mike until her lips feel hot to the touch, until she has to pull away to breathe or else she’ll suffocate and die but what a way to go out under Mike’s kiss.
Something catches her eye under the lights, a necklace on Max’s neck, a simple silver chain, with a charm at the end, just a small letter ‘E’ in cursive font, and a silver engraved locket dangling next to it. El thinks of Nancy for a moment, her jewelry box that she had looked through when the boys gave her a makeover, her necklace with a cursive letter ‘N’ at the end, and Mike telling her it stood for Nancy.
El reaches a hand out toward Max’s collarbones, her fingertips grazing the E before she pops open the locket, and inside, in the split second before Max begins to move, she sees the cut-up Polaroid photo strip they had taken in the mall, their faces squished together and making silly faces at the camera.
Max flinches and looks down, where the locket has physically popped open on her neck, reaching a hand up to clasp it closed.
“What the hell was that?” Lucas asks, and Max looks right at her, like she’s looking through her, and her face scrunches up like she’s searching for her.
“It was probably just the wind,” she whispers. El has to leave, she can’t be here anymore, so she slides past them, pressed to Lucas’ body and when she looks back she sees he’s looking at her too, not like she’s there but like he had felt it. El can’t stand to look at them anymore as her heart begins to race and her hands start to shake.
As she makes her way through the house she finds Dustin, who has cut his mullet back into a more manageable shape, like it was when she first met him. He’s on the couch with Argyle of all people, joint held to his lips as the two of them talk about things she can’t make sense of. She approaches them carefully, like they could ever see her, and sits on the edge of the couch, the song changes and the lights flash above her head and Argyle howls in delight.
El reaches a hand up, so slowly she can barely see it move, and places it in Dustin’s hair, running her fingers through the locks. Dustin’s head snaps up and just like Lucas and Max, he looks right past her, looks around, and stares right through her like she’s a ghost, because El knows what she is to them now, a ghost, an old story to be told.
They will forget her eventually, the four years they had known each other were such a small blip in the rest of their lives. El knows this because she has even forgotten what they look like, forgotten the shade of Max’s hair and the cut of Lucas’ jaw and the color of Dustin’s eyes. She’s forgotten the pattern of Mike’s freckles, the wave of his hair, and the bridge of his nose felt under her fingertips. They will forget her eyes and her hair and the way she sounded, their memories of her will blur and distort until there is just a murmur of her in the back of their minds.
“Dude I swear I just felt like… a hand in my hair,” Dustin chuckles, taking another hit.
“Man, you must be high as hell,” Argyle says, bemused, but Dustin is looking through her again, his eyes soft and sad, before he turns to the floor and smiles.
“Yeah,” he agrees, voice wispy, “must be high as hell.”
El has to leave, she stumbles up off the couch, feeling the cold from the void seep in, it’s not real, it’s never real, but when she’s here she can feel it, can feel the water lapping at her ankles and the bite of the endless abyss surrounding her. She tries every door in the house to find the one back to the void, but there’s nothing, she goes upstairs, tired and angry, feeling like she has led herself on, like she’s teasing herself with a life she can never have.
She opens the first door she sees upstairs and it doesn’t lead her to the void, but instead to Will, splayed out on the bed, making out with a boy in a letterman jacket, they both flinch when it opens, staring through her at the wall behind her, panicked and lips kiss bitten red. El realizes she had opened the door in their world, not just hers, but they were seeing it as they scrambled up and off the bed, making themselves look presentable.
“What the hell?” The boy cursed, walking to the door and through her, looking both directions to see if anyone else was there, but it was only her, who was looking at Will.
“It’s fine, Chance,” Will says softly, “someone probably left a window open to let some air in, it smells like weed and a couple of bottles of liquor spilled on the carpet.”
Chance pulls back, that panicked and guarded look on his face dropping.
“We would’ve seen someone if they ran,” Will says quietly.
“Yeah, we would’ve,” they stand there, looking at each other but knowing they can touch for a moment before Chance gestures to the door, “I’m gonna go do a keg stand with the team, wanna join?”
“Yeah, gimme a few, so no one sees we came back together,” and the other boy nods, leaving Will alone in this bedroom that is certainly not his, but covered in sports trophies and posters of bands Will would never like.
Will takes a second to sit on the bed, staring at the door, at her, his eyes well up as if he can’t help it, and he chokes as he opens his mouth.
“I know it’s not you,” he whispers hoarsely, and El finds herself stepping closer, crouching down next to the bed to see him, “but I kissed my first boy, and he really likes me, but I don’t think it’ll work out long term, but it’s fine, I don’t have to find the love of my life at 17, not many people do.”
He looks out the window, chewing on the inside of his cheek and El wants to touch him, wants to hug him and hold her brother close. She remembers what Kali said, that no one can ever know, not until they’re done, and even then it might be too risky.
“You did. You found yours when you were 12, Max and Lucas found each other at 13, that’s pretty sweet isn’t it? I know you can’t hear me and that this is so stupid, but I miss you. It’s not the same without you. We all wish you were here. But we’re happy. We’re getting there and we’re trying to move on, but how can we move on from you, El?”
El feels hot tears on her cheek, and she knows she shouldn’t, but she places a hand on Will’s, feels his warm hand beneath hers, his steady pulse and familiar hand in hers. Will gasps like he’s being choked and she has to pull back, Will looks around before settling on her, tilting his head, like he doesn’t quite know what he’s looking at. He sighs, running a hand through his hair before he gets up, walks through her, and walks out of the room.
He stops at the doorframe, hand against it as he turns around. “I know you’re not real, that I’m just imagining you, but I love you El, you were the best sister I could ever ask for.”
He leaves her there, on the floor of some random boy’s bedroom in her dreams, as she begins to cry in earnest. She hadn’t even fully realized how much she missed all of them, how much she needed them, how life without her friends wasn’t a life worth living, even if she was alive.
She thinks about it a lot, what if she had killed herself? What if she had actually gone down with the bridge? Would it be better than this? Then this life that she lives in solitude? Cursed to never make friends, never return home, never have a family or a husband or kids or a life unless she can lie her way through it? Is a life without any love besides her sisters a life worth living?
El doesn’t think it is. Sometimes she wishes she had just killed herself, so she wouldn’t to live in what is now a hell of her own creation, on the run from people who have seemingly forgotten about her, living with a board on their apartment wall tracking the movements of everyone involved in the lab to see if they really are doing anything, spending every night after work pushing herself into their minds to see what she can find, which is nothing. Their research and drive died with her, with Kali and Henry in the Abyss. Their abuse died with their victims.
And El realizes it now, in the void, she doesn’t want to live like this anymore, doesn’t want to live at all if this is what the rest of her life is going to be. She knew that life wouldn’t be like the movies, but she had barely experienced high school, she had a boyfriend but they couldn’t even go to the diner together on a date, they snuck into a movie once, but Hopper got so paranoid that she had snuck out of the house he tracked her down and made her leave, and she couldn’t see Mike for a week.
And there’s one person she has yet to see. Mike. He wasn’t downstairs partying, getting drunk or high, and she hopes he’s not upstairs making out with somebody like Will was. She gets up on unsteady feet, wandering the halls and opening doors until she reaches the end, and heads labored breathing on the other side. She doesn’t even open it, just steps through the wall like she is really a ghost.
The room is sparse, clearly an adult's room, but she doesn’t even care what the room looks like, because on the bed, illuminated by the light of the moon, is Mike, her Mike, sitting on the edge and breathing like he had just run a marathon, an all too familiar sound to El. He was having a panic attack. He had been getting them since Vecna attacked the first time, and over those eighteen months had gotten them at least once a month, seemingly spurred on by nothing.
He would just have these fits like an asthma attack, Mike described it as the world spinning off its axis and taking only him with it. His breathing would be rough and staggered, almost violent, eyes hazy, like he couldn’t get air into his lungs. If El were there she would sit with him and do exactly what they had figured out would work after the first few times. Before she can help it, El crawls over the bed to reach him, and maneuvers herself between his spread legs so his head is resting on her chest.
She wraps her arms around his head and shoulders and holds him tight to her like she’s really there, and forces her heart to be calm even though she can feel his long wispy strands of hair brushing against her hands. El can feel Mike’s hot breath through her long sleeve, and can feel as Mike slowly raises his arms, pressing his hands to her back as he had always done when he was like this, wanting her as close as possible, as real as possible, because he needed to know she was real to feel better.
And for the first time in two-hundred-forty-two days, El Hopper felt real. She didn’t feel like a ghost moving through a life that wasn’t hers, like an unwilling participant in her own life, but like she was there, like she was with him, his warm body pressed to her cold skin, the water lapping at her ankles forgotten, now she can feel carpet under her bare feet like she’s actually there.
His breathing begins to stutter before he evens out, breathing with her, and into her stomach he mumbles, “This is the realest it's ever felt.”
“I am real,” she can’t help herself, not when he’s like this, not when she needs him as much as he needs her.
Mike’s head snaps up, and for the first time tonight, he’s not staring through her like she’s a ghost. He’s looking right in her eyes, his eyes wide and already pooling with tears, the room fades around them, smoking away to the void. It feels all too familiar, being this close with him here.
“You’re not…,” he whispers, and glances around, at the endlessness of her world, and he staggers up. They're a foot away from each other but it feels like miles and nothing at all. They’re closer than they’ve ever been while somehow being further apart than ever.
“You— I knew it,” he collides with her, rough and hard as he wraps his arms around her like she might disappear, and she knows she will, but she hugs him back, arms winding around his back, somehow he’s gotten even taller, and she shoves her head on to his shoulder, resting it there.
“I believed. The whole time I believed you were out there, it’s been—“
“Two hundred and forty-two days,” she answers into his shoulder, and he sobs like a child. El can’t get any closer to him but she wants to be, she doesn’t want to be in New York, she wants to be in Hawkins, in some high school basketball player's house in his parents’ room with her arms around Mike. El doesn’t resist the tears in her eyes, wondering if the messy mascara she forgot to remove will stain his shirt or if it’ll all be just like a dream they shared.
Mike pulls back, his hands coming to either side of her cheeks, thumbing the end of her hair which has grown into a bob reminding her all too much of the summer before everything became bad. The summer she spent with her friends and Mike, kissing in her bedroom and cuddling until curfew, learning the rules for DND and studying so she hopefully start school with them in the fall, and now, come September, they’ll start their senior year without her.
“You’re so beautiful,” he pinched her cheek and El couldn't imagine why until he laughed, “you're real, you’re really here.”
El doesn’t have the heart to tell him that’s she not.
Mike kisses her before she gets a chance, pushing their lips together, he’s awkward, he’s forgotten how to kiss, and that makes her smile, because he hasn’t kissed anybody since her. She wraps her arms around his neck, hands threading into his outgrown messy mane of hair, and smushes their faces together so his nose is pressed to her cheek, deepening the kiss.
It might not be the best kiss they’ve ever had, but it’s Mike, and she can feel his hot skin under his hands, can feel his torn up black denim jacket as she runs her hands down his back and his ripped hand tee under her hands as she drags them up his torso. She can feel his hands on her hips, slipping under her long sleeve without meaning too. Maybe it’s too much, but she knows this won’t lead anywhere and it’s not like that, it’s just the two of them, trying to get as close as possible before they’re torn apart again, because they’re always torn apart again.
El wonders if maybe they’re not meant to be together. If maybe tearing them apart is the universe's way of telling them to give up. But El knows one thing, she’ll never give up on Mike Wheeler.
They fall on to the bed and laugh into each other's mouths as their heads hit the sheets, El pushes herself up so she’s hovering over him, just a few inches, but it still feels too far away. There is some song playing distantly in the background that she can’t really hear but hums the melody too, and Mike is smiling at her so softly, like she’s the only person he’s ever needed. They keep trading kisses between laughs as El hears a familiar tune she’s heard over the radio.
“What is this?” She asks softly.
Mike smiles dopily, “The Cure’s latest, Just Like Heaven.”
El leans up, ignoring his whine at the loss of contact. She wants to dance with him at a house party, trading kisses and laughing, so she tugs him up.
“Dance with me,” she demands, and he laughs.
“I don’t know how to dance. Neither do you.”
“We did pretty good last time,” she remarks, and he just grins, wrapping her in his arms.
It’s not the grinding writhing that Lucas and Max and all the other teens were doing downstairs, waving their arms and gyrating, but Mike spins them around and sings to her loudly as they share kisses, El jumping in at the parts she knows.
And as the song draws to a close, Mike sings to her softly ”you, just like heaven.”
They collapse onto the bed, curling up into each other as close as they can possibly get. Mike kisses her neck and collar bones and holds her wrist with his thumb pressed to her pulse point to remember that she’s there, that her heart is beating and her hair is soft and fluffy and her smile is bright and blindingly beautiful like always.
“Will you be here when I wake up?” Mike whispers, soft into the flesh of her neck.
She doesn’t answer him, because she knows the answer won’t be what either of them want to hear, she runs her fingers through his messy hair and kisses the crown of his head.
“I’m always with you,” El tells him.
The two of them fall asleep quickly, and when El wakes up she’ll have to wash her sheets because she got blood all over them from using her powers. She’ll call out of work and cry in the laundry room, sound hidden by the washer. Maybe she’ll pack a bag and sneak away, go home for them, for her friends who almost saw through her illusion, for Mike, who could feel her. Maybe she’ll argue with Kali and demand that both go, that they can start new-new life, away from all of this, they can be new people.
They could be Jane and Kali Hopper-Byers, but they’ll always know they’re El and Kali Prasad. Eleven and Eight.
Maybe El won’t do anything, maybe she’ll continue to live the life she feels trapped in because she knows it's better for everyone. It’ll keep her safe but miserable, and will keep her friends safe from even more adventures.
Mike will wake up feeling like he’s hung over with Max shaking his shoulder to get up, he’ll look around and see El is gone without a trace except for the wrinkle in the sheets and the feelings he had last night. It’ll feel like the best and worst dream he’s ever had, the realest thing he’s ever felt.
He’ll wash up in the bathroom and convince himself it was just the best dream he’s ever had, until he sees the collar of his Living Colour shirt, and sees wet marks on it, not fully dried, and clumps of dried mascara. He’ll keep the memory just for him, they all will, they won’t tell each other because they don’t want to lead the others on, but they felt her that night.
They believe she’s still out there. And they all know, whether they’ll admit it or not, that it’s just a matter of time until she comes home.