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Mike is, for the record, having a really excellent dream. He’s warm, he’s comfortable, and he’s pretty sure he’s winning a campaign against a particularly nasty Demogorgon without even rolling a d20. His face is pressed against something soft that smells like vanilla shampoo and rain, and his arm is draped over a warm, solid weight. He sighs, nuzzling in closer, his nose brushing against skin that feels decidedly real.
"Mike..."
The voice vibrates right against his ribcage.
"Mike."
His eyes snap open. The comfortable haze evaporates, replaced immediately by the cold, hard slap of reality. He is not winning a campaign. He is not in his own bed. He is, in fact, wrapped around El like a vine choking a trellis. Fuck. He has somehow managed to cocoon himself around her, with his head buried in the crook of her neck and with one of his lanky arms thrown completely over her waist, clutching the fabric of her oversized yellow t-shirt like it’s a lifeline. And, most incriminately, his knee is wedged firmly between her legs, effectively pinning the savior of Hawkins to the mattress.
Mike Wheeler: Dungeon Master, Paladin, Nerd Extraordinaire and currently, a dead man walking if Jim Hopper decides to walk through that door.
He, of course, freezes. A total paralysis. Maybe if he doesn't move, she won't notice he’s practically climbing her like a tree (which should be a crime considering how vertical he’s grown compared to El’s shortness.) But El isn’t asleep. She’s awake. And worse, she’s finding this funny; he knows because feels her chest hitch with a silent laugh. She doesn’t shove him off or telepathically fling him into the wall (which, honestly, he would deserve). Instead, her hand comes up, fingers drifting lazily through the hair at the nape of his neck.
“Mike,” she murmurs, the vibration running straight down his spine. “Snuggly.”
Mike feels his face ignite. Snuggly. Hmm. He’s trying to be a cool, aloof boyfriend - the kind Steve would coach Dustin about, the one who leans against lockers and looks brooding - and she’s calling him snuggly. She probably learned that term from one of the cheesy cable shows she watches. He attempts a retreat; a strategic withdrawal by trying to slide his leg back, inch by agonizing inch, trying to restore a polite amount of space between them. However, El isn't having it. Her hand drops to his lower back, pressing him firmly back into place.
"Stay still. Don’t move," her eyes are brown and warm and she whispers it so carefully to his ear that his skin prickles. It’s not a command, exactly, but when a girl who can flip a van or throws down a helicopter with her mind tells you to stay, you stay. So, Mike stops struggling. He rests his forehead against her shoulder, admitting defeat.
The thing is, El has never understood the concept of personal space. (The Hawkins Lab didn't exactly offer a course on "Social Boundaries 101.") Since she came back in 1984, ever since she integrated in their lives so smoothly and so warmly, Mike has had to get used to the fact that El treats distance with him as a personal insult.
Oftentimes, she stands too close to him (with his mother often side-eyeing). Other times, she stares at him too hard (with no care about what other people would say). She steals food right out of his hand without asking (with Max rolling her eyes about how Mike is just dreamy-eyed about El even if she literally just stole his favorite snacks).
All those things would usually warrant a sharp, pulsing glare from him if it was any other person, if it was him when he was eleven, when she vanished in the classroom and left his heart bleeding in her wake; but she’s here now and he’s seventeen and it’s 1987 and she’s El, and she’s here, and they’ve had the privilege to be together for the past few years since her return. She’s here, she’s here, she’s here, and she hasn’t left him, even if his heart jitters a few too many times even when they are apart in school, almost as if he thinks when he comes out of History, she wouldn’t be there at the lockers waiting, with her back to the wall, brown beautiful eyes on him, her hands needy and clingy, with her lips automatically going to his as soon as they meet.
El has his raw, beating beating heart in her hand, whether he likes it or not.
If Mike is sitting on the couch, El is sitting on Mike. If he’s trying to read a comic, her chin is on his shoulder, reading it with him. (The party has grown used to this, fortunately and unfortunately.)
And Mike - oh, pathetic, lovesick Mike - lets her. When Dustin is around, or when Lucas is around, he pretends to be annoyed for about 1.5 seconds, rolling his eyes and making soft, love-laced sarcastic comments about boundaries to El as she glares at him (her face secretly tinged with humor). But secretly? Secretly, Mike lives for it. Oh, boy. He’s an addict, and her lack of boundaries is his drug.
His brain, currently running on overdrive, tries to catalogue the excuses for why they are currently tangled up on her bed like a pretzel (just in case Hopper would suddenly slam the door open and question their current state).
- Excuse A: They were reading one of the sappy romantic books he got for her from the library and they had "accidentally" fallen asleep. (On each other, sure. But classic, plausible).
- Excuse B: El had a headache and needed warmth and something human to comfort her. (Him, her boyfriend, obviously. But he’s 100% sure Hopper wouldn’t like this one. Not one bit.)
- Excuse C: It was cold. (It is mid-July in Indiana. It is humid enough to drink the air. This excuse is obviously fucking garbage. Hmm.. Might as well blame it on his hormones, then.)
"Mike," El whimpers. She shifts, turning in his arms until they are nose-to-nose. Her hair is a chaotic bird's nest of brown, long curls, and she has sleep crusted in the corner of one eye. She looks perfect. It actually bites him how perfect she looks.
"What?" Mike croaks, his voice cracking.
She is about to say something, but instead starts tapping a finger against his chest, right over the sternum.
“Hey, don't be scared.” She simply says. There’s a hint of amusement in her eyes.
"Yeah, well," Mike says, "That usually happens when you wake up realizing you’re violating a terrifying police chief's house rules." Door open three inches. No kissing. No hugging. Especially when I’m gone.
El rolls her eyes. She actually rolls her eyes. Mike taught her that, and he’s so fucking proud.
"Hopper has been gone for hours," she says dismissively. "You know that. His coffee and donut runs are essential to him."
"He is obviously coming back," Mike argues, though he makes zero effort to move. How sad if he moved. "He has guns, El. Several guns."
"I have superpowers," El counters simply, as if it was really that simple. (And honestly, it is. But still. He’s her dad.) She wiggles closer, eliminating the last millimeter of air between them. She tucks her face under his chin, uses a finger to trace the sides of his nose, and exhales a long, content breath. “Hey, pretty.”
“El,” Mike sighs into her touch. And just like that, his panic deflates, replaced by that crushing, overwhelming ache he feels whenever he looks at her too long. This isn't just them being close. This is almost too overwhelming, too much, but so so good anyway. This is the kind of stuff his parents probably stopped doing years ago (which is a thought he wouldn’t want to dwell on). It scares him, to be honest. It’s the scariest monster he’s ever faced because if he loses this, the Mind Flayer nor Vecna winning over them would be a mercy; he feels the warmth of her body seeping into his, grounding him.
He realizes, with a jolt of sarcastic self-awareness, that he is gone. Mike is totally, hopelessly gone for this girl. He’s not anything anymore, right at this moment. No leader of the party. Just a boy holding the only thing that matters. El. El. El.
"This okay?" Mike whispers into her dark hair, his voice, so used to sticking to a sarcastic edge for those 353 days of her absence, falls into a softness he always reserved for her only. "Can I stay here for a little bit? Maybe an hour or so before I go home?”
El pulls back just enough to look at him. Her eyes are dark and serious, stripping away his defenses layer by layer.
Obviously. He can hear her think.
"Wow," she says. “What stupid questions.”
"Well, what can I say? I’m the master of stupid questions."
"Mike," she says, and she says it in a way that’s so tender and loving that he just stares at her. She says it as if her saying his name explains everything. As if that’s a scientific fact on par with gravity.
The sentimental atmosphere lasts for exactly thirty seconds. Mike is just starting to relax, perhaps foolishly allowing his eyes to drift shut again so he can fully rest on her, when El shifts. It’s not a settling-in shift. It’s a purposeful, predatory shift. (Oh dear.) She props herself up on one elbow, the blankets falling away to reveal the sumptuous glimmer of space below her collarbones and fixes him with The Look.
Oh no. Mike knows The Look. It is usually reserved for Eggos, or when she wants to change the channel on the TV, or when she’s about to do something utterly beautiful and wonderful, to the point that he knows it will shake him to his core. Absolute, unwavering determination. She drops her gaze to his mouth. Then back to his eyes. Then back to his mouth. Code Red, Mike’s brain screams. CODE RED.
"El," Mike squeaks. He clears his throat, trying to regain a deeper, more masculine register. "Feeling a bit sleepy. I’ll get back to that nap–”
"Kissing," El states, like she’s reading a weather report. She leans in, her hair creating a curtain around them. “Us. Now.”
Mike’s heart does a traitorous backflip, but his survival instinct - honed by years of D&D campaigns and running from demodogs, he guesses - kicks in. He presses a hand to her shoulder, holding her back.
"Come on, you know we can't," He hisses, glancing frantically at the bedroom door. "Hopper."
El frowns. She looks at the door, then back at Mike, unimpressed. “You really worry too much.”
"I worry the appropriate amount for someone trying to avoid a homicide!"
She ignores his logic entirely. With a surprising amount of agility, she swings her leg over, effectively straddling his waist. "El!" Mike whispers, his voice pitching up an octave. "You can't just - we’re not - "
"Quiet, Mike," El commands, and a sort of need pools in his stomach. She leans down, her hands planting firmly on the pillow on either side of his head, boxing him in. She is close. Too close. He can see the gold flecks in her eyes and the stubborn set of her jaw. "Mike." Her voice drops. And no, holy. No. And of course, it’s no way scary I'm closing the gate voice, but in his mind, it is definitely close. It’s the I want this and I get what I want and you will not be doing anything about it voice. "Shut up."
Mike’s throat dries. He looks at the door one last time - a final, silent plea to the universe for safety - and then looks back at her. There’s a smirk to her freaking kissable lips; she knows she’s won, she knows as she starts pressing quick, clumsy kisses to his jawline, knows it when his voice hitches, a tiny moan leaving his lips. She knows he’s weak; He’s pathetic, really. An absolute slave to the whims of a girl who thinks 'mouth-breather' is a cutting insult. Mike makes one last, feeble attempt at resistance. "If he walks in, I'm blaming y –”
She cuts him off by crushing her mouth against his. Firm. Harsh. Needy.
Mike complies. Too eagerly.
And just like that, Jim Hopper ceases to exist. The cabin ceases to exist. The concept of danger, parental supervision, and breathing oxygen all vanish.
Maybe the way El clings to him now - how she reaches out to contain him, physically mapping the sharp angles of his shoulders and the curve of his jaw - is the universe finally balancing the scales. It is a necessary overcorrection. Dissolving is an understatement under her touch. He is all soft and putty in her small hands, a willing surrender that feels less like weakness and more like coming home. It is a frantic, chemical reaction to every solitary second she was gone when he first went to high school, a physical apology for the thousands of miles that lay between them like a massive, throbbing bruise on his psyche.
Her absence during his freshman and sophomore year didn’t just make him miss her; it unmade him. It stripped him down to the studs. He remembers the echoing hollowness of those months, the way the basement felt too big and too quiet without her breathing in the fort. He sought the chaotic noise of Hellfire not to forget her, but to build a bunker of distraction where he could survive until she returned. He buried himself in campaigns and fantasy because the reality - a world where El existed but wasn't with him - was too jagged to swallow. He was just treading water, lungs burning, waiting for the tide to bring her back.
But the reunion he had hallucinated about, the sun-drenched California dream, dissolved into a nightmare the moment he landed. He had been so blinded by his own corrosive insecurities - terrified that she had outgrown him, that some sunny, golden Californian boy saw her as the superhero he knew she was - that he missed the truth right in front of him. He missed how her soul was crying out to him in the margins of those "happy" letters, the ink hiding her loneliness. He missed the desperate way she sought his comfort at the roller rink, her eyes begging for him to step in, to be her shield. And he just refused to provide it.
The guilt of that still eats at him. He hates himself for wallowing in his own fear of inadequacy instead of holding El the way she needed to be held. He let her stand alone because he was too afraid to admit he was terrified of losing her.
But that fear - the paralyzing terror of how much power she held over him, the fear that saying I LOVE YOU I LOVE YOU I LOVE YOU would hand her the knife to destroy him - has finally broken. It had to break. The bullets, the dead body in the desert, the aching hole to find her across all that - it shattered all of his tight defences.
That is why, now that they are back in the remains of Hawkins, with ash falling like snow and the ground split open, they are magnetic. They are barely functioning as separate entities, and they are desperate. Are they not inextricably bound? Orbiting each other with a gravitational pull that scares everyone else but makes perfect sense to them?
Mike needs El. Needs her everything and anything. He needs the physical weight of her hand in his, the warmth of her head on his shoulder, the friction of her skin against his. He needs it to know she is real. He needs it to reassure the traumatized twelve-year-old boy inside him that she isn't a ghost fading into the mist like she did that night in the classroom. He needs to know she hasn't dissolved into the ether.
His hands, which were hovering awkwardly in the air, surrender instantly, finding purchase on her waist. He kisses her back with the kind of desperate, clumsy, burning need that usually results in bumped noses (which happens) and teeth clashing (which also happens), but neither of them cares. She tastes like sugar, from the candy they were just snacking on prior to their nap.
Mike realizes, somewhere in the melted slush that used to be his frontal lobe, that he never stood a chance. If there is a police cruiser crunching on the gravel right now, if Hopper’s heavy boots are on the porch, the thought of it doesn’t push against this happy place of his, doesn’t crack the walls against this glorious nirvana in his mind. El hums against his lips, a vibration of victory.
Yeah, Mike is totally dead. But what a way to go.
Later, when El is sated and happy and pressing lingering kisses against his jaw (and no, Hopper hasn’t come back. Not yet.), the possessiveness hits Mike like a sledgehammer.
It’s a sudden, fierce roar in his chest - a desire to build a fort around this bed, around this cabin, around her. He tightens his grip. He can't help it. He pulls her flush against him, burying his face in her neck again, inhaling the scent of El.
"Please don’t leave me," Mike mumbles against El’s skin.
It slips out before he can filter it, raw and teenage and desperate.
Suddenly, Mike is back there. The worst memory his life can provide – the dark, harsh desperation that divided his existence into three parts: Before El, After El, and El After El. Mike clearly remembers – The classroom. The darkness. He remembers the feeling of his palms crushing his eyes shut, trying to hide the shaking, trying to block out her final goodbye.
She came back to him anyway – after 353 days of his heart in calling. Essentially, it had walked that bad memory out of the door. But only for a moment. The fear of El leaving again never really left him. In the years since, the fear has continued to linger near the threshold, waiting by the door, knocking softly every time they say goodbye, reminding him of what he almost lost.
Please don’t leave me.
The words are a slip of a tongue, a confession, born out of pure wretchedness. How can it be anything else? Mike has held this life, this touch of hers, this love for her and vice versa – for almost too long now (years), yet he still feels like he’s at the precipice. If this is taken from him -
If he loses her again - it wouldn’t just hurt. It would end him.
He remembers the agony of being twelve, how a girl he’d known for only a week vanished and left a hole in his chest so deep that no game or distraction could fill it. But if it destroyed him then, what would it do to him now? Now that they have survived through the desert, the distance, the labs? Now that he has memorized the map of her existence, has cataloged every nuance of her beautiful face, memorized the specific weight of her hand in his, and discovered the thousand different ways she smiles. To lose her then was to lose a beautiful, wonderful, magical, tragic mystery from a little week of his childhood; to lose her now would be to lose his own heart.
Mike is tethered to her now. An invisible string ties them together, and he knows, with terrifying certainty, that it can never be severed.
Almost as if El had been reading his mind, he feels El pause for a split second, and Mike almost panics, almost apologizing for ruining the moment -
But then she melts into him.
He lets his mind drift, indulging in a fantasy far more vivid than any D&D campaign he has ever written. He pictures this - not the apocalypse, not the red lightning tearing up the sky outside, but this.
He imagines a future where the only monsters they fight are the ones on a movie screen on a Friday night. He imagines teaching her how to drive a car without using her mind to turn the wheel. He imagines grocery store runs where they argue over which frozen waffles to buy, and lazy Sunday mornings where the silence between them isn't heavy with trauma, but light with comfort. He imagines growing old. He pictures the gray creeping into his dark hair, and the lines deepening around her eyes - eyes that have seen too much horror, finally resting on something beautiful.
She is it, Mike Wheeler thinks. There is no version of his life that makes sense without her.
El lets go of her lips on his jaw, and presses her nose against his - an eskimo kiss - and it softens him completely. Her arms tighten around his ribs, squeezing him back with that surprising strength she has. Mike rests his forehead against her shoulder, closing his eyes, letting the future wash over him. It’s scary, and it’s messy, and the world is falling apart outside - but as long as he can touch her, and as long as she can hear him, it’s a dream he knows he can make real. A dear promise, one that he can understand despite the absence of words between them.
Please don’t leave me.
"Never, Mike," El whispers back. Her presence kisses his soul. "Never again."