Chapter Text
November
The hours immediately following the collapse of the Upside Down are a horror show painted in fluorescent lights and green army camouflage.
The military takes them into custody, herding them into the main building that passes for their headquarters, guns raised and pointed at them despite the lack of threat they pose now with Nancy and Hopper disarmed. A soldier pushes Will against the wall of the lobby to Mike’s right side, Dustin at his left; both of them crying, tense and shuddering in their own private worlds though they are pressed against him shoulder to knee. Mike thinks he might be crying too but he can't tell, can’t feel anything at all, his body tingling and strange like his arm falling asleep when he sleeps on it wrong, but all over.
Soldiers start pulling individual members of the group away by their arms, and it's not long before someone grabs Mike's upper arm, hard enough to bruise, and drags him to a small room with nothing in it but a metal table and two folding chairs on either side. The man shoves him down into one of the chairs and leaves him there alone, locking the door behind him as he leaves. Mike turns his head to the left and sees himself in a giant mirror.
It's like looking at a stranger. The green beanie he borrowed from Lucas is askew, slipping off to the side, exposing his matted greasy curls and a long bloody bruise down the side of his face that he can no longer remember acquiring. He is not crying, but his eyes are bloodshot as though he could start at any moment.
He doesn't feel like he will, though. He thinks he will never feel anything again.
He turns his face away from the mirror and toward the scratched, cold surface of the table. Seeing it but not seeing it. He drifts, floating painlessly inside his own head. Wonders idly if the military men are going room to room questioning everyone, grilling them, interrogating and torturing them; wonders how long it will take for them to reach him and do the same. It seems clear that they're all going to prison after this, at the very least; the military would never just let them go home. He’d seen the terror on Robin’s face as they dragged her away, heard the shake in Steve's voice as he muttered to himself pressed up against Dustin’s other side. Those two knew better than any of them what governments would do to cover their messes.
He wonders if the military would go so far as to kill them. He wonders what it's like to die. Something to ask Will, maybe, if he ever sees him again.
Mike loses track of time. His head lolls forward; he jerks it back, forcing his eyes open. He can't remember the last time he slept; possibly yesterday, possibly the day before yesterday, depending on what time it is, which he has no sense of. At some point, Lucas's borrowed beanie finally gives up and slips all the way off, falling limply to the floor. Somewhere in the silence Mike lets go of his life.
Suddenly, he realizes he can hear something other than his own breathing. Voices in the hallway, coming closer; people arguing. They reach his room and, in a flurry of noise and action, the door is shoved open.
An older man, vaguely familiar, bustles into the room, says Mike's full name like a question. Several soldiers in camo follow behind, disgruntled, muttering angrily amongst themselves.
"Yeah?" Mike says slowly.
"I'm Dr. Owens," the man says brusquely. "I don't know if you remember me. I treated your friend Will a few years ago at the lab." He quirks a small smile. "You've surely gotten taller, haven't you?"
Mike just gapes at him.
"Come on," Dr. Owens says, "Let's get you home."
"Home?" Mike says, numb and stupid. He can’t have heard that right.
One of the soldiers standing behind Dr. Owens speaks up. "This is highly irreg—"
"I'll thank you to call me Sir when you address me, Lieutenant," Dr. Owens interrupts, sharp. "I believe we've already established that, one, this whole outfit is a rogue, illegal operation under the command of an illegitimate authority, and two, I outrank all of you anyway and my orders take precedence. I am ordering that you let all of these people go, right now." Owens turns back to Mike, softening a bit. "Come on, kiddo," he says, almost kind. "Up and ‘attem."
The next several minutes make very little sense in the moment and only marginally more sense looking back on it later. Mike is hustled back out into the lobby, joining a huddle of all of his friends as they are also pulled out of their individual rooms. Their faces flit in and out of Mike's vision like a dream. Snatches of muttered conversation float between uniformed officers. Mike spots Nancy, her eyes determined, making her way through the crush of people toward Dr. Owens; Robin, teary and relieved, burying her face in Steve's shoulder as he joins the huddle. Near the center of it all, Dustin and Lucas hold each other tight. Mike catches the moment when Hopper and Joyce link hands.
Mike realizes he has begun to shake, hard enough that he hears his teeth clacking together. The edges of his vision white out, then flash purpley-black like a film negative; he wonders if he is about to pass out. The world sideslips, his knees turning watery.
"Mike."
A familiar hand on his back, keeping him upright. Will's voice swims up out of the noise and steadies him; without looking he reaches toward the sound and locks his fingers into the fabric of Will’s sleeve.
"Hey, it’s okay," Will soothes. Slowly his face comes into focus; blotchy cheeks, hair a mess, but eyes clear and firm. "We're okay. Dr. Owens is here, he’ll take care of everything."
Mike nods dizzily, opens his mouth to speak, when he feels a small strong hand on his shoulder.
"Mike, Will," Nancy says as Mike turns around to see her. "We're going home, come on."
"But... What about everyone else, we can't just—" Will protests.
"Don't worry, Will. I talked to Dr. Owens. They’re letting everyone go. It's all on the condition that we come back tomorrow, the eighth, and sign a bunch of stuff." She herds them through the crowd as she talks, grabbing Jonathan on the way, and leads them through a side exit, where a line of black SUVs are waiting, apparently to take everyone home.
Mike has no memory of the ride home; he just remembers crawling into the SUV, Nancy pulling the door closed; and the next thing he knows, she’s opening it again and the Wheeler house at the end of Maple Street appears like magic before him.
Dr. Owens sends them off with a reassuring wave. Mike watches the SUV drive off into the night until it turns a corner and disappears from view.
Slowly, like moving through water, Mike follows Nancy inside, barely feeling his feet touching the ground, barely feeling the rattle and shake of his bones. Someone behind him, Will or Jonathan, flips the kitchen lights on to light their way, and everyone, even Nancy, stops in their tracks.
The demogorgon that took Holly and nearly killed his parents carved a path of destruction like a tornado through the house, ripping open the guts of it, leaving the wound gaping, innards exposed. Karen Wheeler's blood paints the kitchen a dark, sticky red. Seeing his mother's blood like that, sprayed across the place where she stood to make breakfast every morning—there’s a limit to what Mike can take, and he realizes that that limit is fast approaching, as though he is speeding recklessly toward a brick wall.
Nancy moves first. With Holly still asleep in her arms, she steps gingerly around broken glass and leads Mike, Jonathan, and Will upstairs to survey the rest of the damage done.
"My room..." Mike says faintly as soon as they hit the top step. Even from here he can see that at least half of it is destroyed.
Will comes to stand beside him, presses close, lines up his shoulder against Mike's. Giving him something to lean on, more solid than anything else in the world right now. Mike himself feels insubstantial; a child puffing out their cheeks and blowing could break him apart like dandelion fluff.
"Okay," Nancy says, "okay." Her voice shakes, but she wrestles it back under control with a clearing of her throat. "Here's what we're gonna do. Mike, you sleep in the basement with Will. Holly and me in mine. Jonathan can have the living room. We’ll figure everything out after we’ve slept and cleared our heads. Mike, shower, now. Then Will, then Jonathan, then me and Holly. I’ll find clean clothes and leave them outside the door for you, Mike. Will, please make up the pullout downstairs."
Mike moves through showering on autopilot, trusting his hands to do the work while his brain is on vacation. He dresses in the pajama pants and t-shirt that Nancy left for him, brushes his teeth. Too tired to even look in the mirror. Steps out into the hallway, the first grey light of early morning peeking through the windows of the house. The clock in the living room says 6:05. It must be the seventh. Four years to the day since he discovered his best friend had gone missing; four years to the day since he found a little girl with a shaved head in the woods, drenched and freezing and desperate, gave her his coat and carried her on his bike back home in the middle of the storm, despite the constant thrumming anxiety of not knowing what had happened to Will.
For a moment he examines that thought: pictures El as he first knew her, a shivering little lab mouse, then deliberately pops the image like a bubble: El is dead.
Nothing happens. No tears, no rage. Just a low deadened ache at the base of his skull, his exhaustion expressing itself physically. He pinches himself to make sure he's awake. Fatigue makes the movement slow and clumsy, the effort akin to moving deep underwater.
He gets stuck watching the morning light creep in for so long that Will has already showered, dressed, and made up the pullout for them when he finally descends the basement stairs. He drops down onto it silently. Will looks up when the mattress moves; he's clearly been stuck in his own way, tears steadily rolling down his cheeks, but to Mike's amazement a ghost of a smile plays over his face when their eyes meet.
"Your shirt is on backwards and inside out," he says.
Mike looks down. The tag pokes his chin.
He blinks. Once, then again. He doesn't know what to do. There's some way to fix this, he knows, but he has hit the wall and cannot grind the gears of his mind forward the one additional inch needed to figure it out.
"Here." Will scoots over to Mike. "Arms up." Directions he can follow, easy and simple. He obeys. With tender, gentle hands, Will gathers the hem of Mike's t-shirt and pulls it off over Mike's head. Mike doesn't even have it in him to feel exposed; he just watches as Will flips it inside out and turns it around. He gestures for Mike to raise his arms again, which Mike obeys, again, and pulls the shirt down, fitting Mike’s head and arms through the right openings with the ease of a mother dressing a toddler.
"Thanks." The word comes from a thousand miles away. Will just nods. They lay down next to each other, Will’s favorite blanket draped over their legs.
"What now?" Mike asks the air.
Will draws in a shaky breath. Mike can tell he's crying again because he doesn't try to respond, just covers his eyes with his arm.
This Mike knows how to do, has known how to do since he was five years old, could do in his sleep, is more like instinct than conscious action: he knows how to care for Will Byers. His right hand is brushing against the back of Will's left, and despite being so tired he couldn't dress himself, it is still the easiest, most natural thing in the world to lift his hand and take hold of Will's. Immediately Will accepts the touch and threads their fingers together; they cling to each other the same desperate way Jonathan snatched Steve out of the air when he fell from the top of the tower—they hold on as if their lives depend on it.
They fall asleep like that.
A little before nine a.m., Mike, Will, Nancy, and Jonathan pile into the station wagon. They pick up Lucas first, then Dustin, both joining silently, clicking their seatbelts into place obediently when Nancy reminds them. No one speaks other than that.
Mike feels Will tense next to him when Nancy pulls up to the bullet-riddled wreck of the Mac-Z; he supposes he should feel something similar, should be haunted by the place he lost El. He searches inside himself for a reaction, a feeling, anything, and comes up empty. His hands shake when he reaches for the car door, though.
Dr. Owens steps outside to meet them as soon as they get out of the car, businesslike but still warm, and leads them through the fence and across the open area to the main building. Mike’s head turns almost against his will to look at the library, the huge hole in the front of the building where the gate once was. Scans the area for… He’s not sure what. A body, maybe. Creeping vines. Some evidence that it all happened. His heart starts to race, airway squeezing tight, anticipating something—but there’s nothing. It’s not a crack that’s healing, it’s not a recently closed wound in reality that needs time to knit itself back together properly: it’s just a partially collapsed building, bombed out and desolate in the overcast November morning light. Bricks and glass and dust litter the ground. Pieces of tarp, strewn haphazardly over the damage, flap in the icy wind like homeless flags.
An officer in uniform leads them to a small conference room and seats them at a long table, several paperclipped packets of paper and a pen stationed at each chair. Dr. Owens stands to the side and directs the proceedings, explaining each packet of paper in detail as they go through and sign on the indicated lines. Mike listens silently, just as he did the first time El disappeared, just as he did after the Starcourt battle; he signs where he is told to sign, nods when he is expected to nod. The instant each packet is handed off and filed away, he forgets what he was just looking at. This happens half a dozen times. Listen, nod, sign. Listen, nod, sign. He feels distant from his own body, the way a dream feels. He watches his hand move over the papers as though it belongs to someone else.
By the time they finish, the room has gone stale and stuffy, making it hard to breathe. Mike leads the party outside, grateful for the cold air; they gravitate toward a bench nearby and sit down to wait for Nancy to finish talking to Owens, despite the deep autumn chill keeping the temperature just above freezing. Squeezed between Lucas and Will, their body heat mingling with his, Mike feels a bit more present, a little bit more synchronized with himself.
After a few minutes, Hopper emerges with Joyce. Looking as though he's aged twenty years in a day, he and Joyce come over and sit down on a concrete parking bumper by the bench.
Slowly, halting and hesitating, taking pauses every few minutes to steady his voice again, Hopper starts to speak.
“The woman who ran this operation was named Doctor Laura Kay. Just another Brenner. She caught El's sister, Kali, and had all of her friends killed. Right in front of her. Tied her up and experimented on her, trying to use her blood to make more numbers. Even when it didn’t work, Kay wouldn’t stop. There was a new lab. She just kept trying. Kali… I didn’t see it fast enough, or maybe I just didn’t want to see it, but she lost hope by the time we found her. She just had nothing left. It was like she was still stuck there in her mind. She got into El’s head. That it would be the same with her. That they’d never stop. That they’d kill all of us and trap her and make more of her.”
“That is such… Bullshit,” Mike hears himself say. A match strikes and lights inside his chest; he reaches for it, desperate to feel something beyond the yawning El-shaped void.
“I know,” Hopper murmurs, his voice failing. He tips his head back and sighs.
"There are so many holes in that theory it’s not even—”
“I know.”
“She stayed hidden all this time.” The struck match flares into a roaring flame and Mike clenches his fists tight. "Why couldn't—"
"I don't know," Hopper says. He closes his eyes, exhausted, the weight of a thousand years on his shoulders. "I don't know.
"Maybe I let her push herself too hard, I don't know. When we started the crawls, she just turned on this... switch. It was like she was her own papa. Nothing mattered but the goal. She drained herself constantly, you all saw it—”
“Did you know?” Mike asks suddenly.
“Know?” Hopper repeats.
“Did you know she was planning to kill herself?” Mike spits the words at him, and he flinches, as though Mike threw something physical at his face. It sparks an angry flash of triumph in Mike’s head, and the fire in his chest screams for more, more.
“I—“
“You did, didn’t you,” Mike says, flat.
“Mike,” Lucas says, low and warning.
“You knew.”
“I tried to stop her.” Hopper’s voice is nothing but a whisper, just a breath on the cold wind, and the weakness of it, the weakness of him, the uselessness of him, makes Mike furious. “I tried.”
“Fuck you,” Mike says.
“Yeah,” Hopper says, utterly defeated. Not even trying to fight back.
Mike launches off the bench and half-stumbles away, ignoring the sound of his friends calling for him.
Hawkins blurs around him as he walks away, not consciously toward anything, just away—past the stores and the bank and the fire department and rows of houses—he needs to be somewhere else, right now; he needs to punch something; he needs to—
“Mike, wait up.”
It’s Dustin.
Coming up to him at a half-jog, stopping a few feet away when he sees the look on Mike’s face, hands up in an okay I’ll stay back gesture.
“Leave me alone,” Mike snarls, and keeps walking.
“No can do,” Dustin says grimly. He follows at a slight distance, a couple of arms lengths away.
“I mean it, Dustin, go away.”
“Dude, are you serious?” Dustin says, incredulous. “El just died. You think I’m going to let you walk toward the quarry alone?”
For the first time, Mike looks up and realizes where his feet are taking him. Petulant, he turns left toward the woods instead, toward home, and stalks into the line of barren trees.
“Okay,” Dustin says, and follows.
Sticks and dead leaves crunch under Mike’s feet, loud and grating. Whatever barrier was keeping him separate from his body has dissipated, but now he feels almost too present, his surroundings too immediate and close despite being outside in the open air, everything bright to the point of pain, jittery energy crackling through him like little lightning bolts. He feels incandescent, lit up with fury that has nowhere to go.
As they approach Mike’s house, close enough to see the basement door through the thinning trees, Dustin speaks.
“Hit me,” he offers, out of the blue. When Mike stops and turns to look at him, he opens his arms wide, like preparing for a hug, but he stands back instead of walking forward. Making himself a target.
Mike stares. “What?”
“Come on, man, I know you want to,” Dustin says. “It’s okay, I can take a hit.” He gestures to his face, still bruised and healing. “Obviously.”
Mike has never thrown a real punch in his life, not against someone his own size. He pummeled Hopper once in a blind rage, when he weighed about 90 pounds soaking wet, and Hopper barely felt it; he’s scuffled with Lucas and Dustin, even Nancy when they were younger, just kids stuff, really—pushing and shoving and tackling and pinning until someone cried Uncle—but he’s never lashed out with his fist closed, actually trying to hurt someone.
Dustin barely flinches when Mike shoves him.
“Pathetic,” Dustin says, shaking his head. He shoves back with both hands, forcing Mike into a graceless backward stumble.
Before Dustin can goad him again, Mike rushes forward and tackles him, and they both go down hard. Leaves and dirt spray outward as they land. Mike wrenches his arm back and swings down, the movement wild and uncoordinated; everything is moving too quickly, he can’t see what he’s aiming at, but his fist connects with some part of Dustin’s torso, hard enough to draw a pained grunt out of him. He pulls back and throws his fist forward again—
And it’s over almost as soon as it started, because Dustin flinches away and Mike misses completely, sending his fist crashing into a half buried rock instead.
The pain is instant and obliterating.
“Fuck!” Mike hisses, rolling off of Dustin.
“Shit, you okay?” Dustin asks as he scrambles up to his knees.
Mike cradles his hand, knuckles wet with fresh blood, against his chest. Curls his whole body around it, kneeling, ducks his head down toward the ground, as if in prayer. The pain backs up into his throat, begging to be screamed out. “It’s fine,” he grits out through bared teeth. “I’m fine.”
“I’m sorry, man, I was just trying to help.” Rustling leaves—Dustin crawling closer, reaching for him. “Lemme see.”
“I said it’s fine.” His voice is scraped raw, down to almost nothing.
Sighing, Dustin drops his hands.
“Are you okay?” he asks again, quieter.
What do you think? Mike almost says, but bites it back. Bitterness sticks in his throat. It’s hard to breathe all of a sudden; Mike’s vision blurs as the rage starts to burn out. A small pool of blood gathers in a curled dead leaf on the ground as his hand throbs.
He wants so many things he can’t have. He wants to hurt Hopper, for real this time, not just a child’s punch but a real one, bones breaking under the force of him. He wants to tear apart the military piece by piece until they’re nothing but ribbons in the bowels of a paper shredder. He wants his mom, healthy and whole. He wants El. He wants—
“Will?”
Mike looks up at the sound of Dustin’s voice.
Will is there, standing a few feet behind him.
“Hey,” Will says uncertainly. “We just got back, I saw you guys through the basement window… Did something happen? You guys okay?”
“Yeah, we’re good,” Dustin replies. “Just trying out some ill-advised coping mechanisms.”
Will’s face scrunches up with confusion; wordlessly, Mike turns and reveals his hand, streaked with blood and already starting to bruise.
Will’s eyes widen. “Oh, ouch,” he breathes. Worried, he kneels down and reaches for the hand, and Mike lets him; he’s gentle, always so gentle, cradling his hand like it’s something precious and delicate, an injured bird or a newborn kitten. Mike feels absurdly close to tears as Will touches his knuckles and winces with sympathy.
“Can you move your fingers?” he asks.
Mike flexes his fingers a couple of times—painful, but not impossible. Will prods the back of Mike’s hand with his thumbs, presumably feeling for something out of place, which makes Mike draw in a quick gasp through his teeth.
“Sorry.” Will whispers the word as though he’s afraid speaking aloud would hurt Mike more. “I don’t think anything’s broken. What did you even hit?”
“A rock.”
“Why?”
“Obviously it wasn’t on purpose,” Mike retorts.
“Dummy.” Will shoots him an exasperated look, but he’s still handling Mike’s injured hand with almost exaggerated care, his thumbs brushing so gently over Mike’s knuckles that it feels like a warm breeze rather than skin-on-skin. “Come on, let’s get it cleaned up.”
Will leads them back to the house and straight to the basement bathroom, where he opens the mirror cabinet and looks through the meager supplies. He pulls out an ancient roll of gauze and some medical tape. Then he grabs a clean washcloth from under the sink.
“Here,” he says, turning on the tap, “run it under cold water for a minute.” He pulls Mike’s hand under the running water, which instantly turns the sink bowl marbled pink and red.
“I’m gonna go, uh… use your upstairs bathroom,” Dustin murmurs.
Mike barely hears him go. Will is still holding his hand, his thumb rubbing the streaked blood and dirt away. With his free hand Will picks up the washcloth and starts smoothing it over the cuts. The gentle repeating motion, Will’s instinctive compassion—it soothes some of the chaos still rioting through Mike’s bloodstream. He sneaks a glance at Will’s face in the mirror.
He has changed so much over the years; his jawline is sharper, shoulders more broad, standing taller than everyone in their party aside from Mike himself. But this has never changed: the soft look in his hazel eyes as he tends to Mike’s hand, the undivided attention to his work of mapping every detail in order to patch it up. He looks like this when he’s drawing or painting, sometimes, something more involved than their D&D characters. It feels strange being looked at like one of Will’s canvases, but not unpleasant.
“There,” Will murmurs. “Doesn’t look as bad as I thought at first.” He’s careful as he examines the damage, more clear now that the blood and dirt have been washed away. The scrapes are shallow and ragged, the bruise blooming dark around them. Mike looks at Will in the mirror again, letting himself look longer this time.
Will grabs the gauze and unwinds it deftly. He has a small smear of Mike’s blood on his thumb. His fingers, confident and graceful, move through and around the gauze. Hypnotized, Mike allows Will to begin wrapping his hand.
“So, why did you punch a rock?” Will asks.
Mike looks at Will, dazed. “Huh?”
Will gestures wordlessly at the injury. Very suddenly Mike crashes back to earth, where El is dead and the US military just forced them to sign a bunch of documents that will let them get away with everything.
“I was aiming for Dustin.”
“Why? Did he say something?” Will looks up, concerned.
Mike shakes his head. “No, he—it doesn’t matter.”
Will furrows his brow, but accepts it. “Okay.”
Will finishes wrapping Mike’s hand and holds the gauze in place with his thumb and forefinger while he tears a piece of medical tape with his teeth. Then he places the tape, right in the center of Mike’s palm, and squeezes lightly. Mike swallows.
“Better?” Will asks.
“Yeah. Thanks.”
Will lets go of his hand and starts to clean up the supplies.
“I don’t know what to do now,” Mike says softly. He feels wobbly on his feet, all his righteous fury abandoning him. Will looks at him, worry in his eyes. Mike keeps going. “Are we just supposed to, like… Watch tv and eat around the dinner table and go to school?”
“I guess we have to,” Will murmurs.
“How?”
Will shrugs helplessly. His eyes fill with tears. “I don’t know, Mike,” he whispers.
Mike’s vision starts to blur. He sucks in a breath and steps back. “Um,” he starts, and his voice cracks on the simple syllable. He has to get Will out of here. “Um, I think I’m gonna take a nap,” he says, mentally begging Will to politely ignore the wobble creeping into his voice, pitched too high to be natural, and leave him be.
Will gets it immediately. “Okay,” he agrees, closing the mirror cabinet. “I’ll take these washcloths to the laundry, then I’m gonna go help Nancy in the kitchen. Let me know if you need anything.”
Mike nods. His voice has utterly left him. He struggles to keep his breathing plausibly steady while Will steps out of the bathroom and walks up the stairs.
Once he hears the upstairs door close, he lets out a shaky breath. Then he leaves the bathroom, kicks his shoes off, crawls into bed, throws the covers over his head, and cries.
December
The holiday season of 1987 hits Hawkins like a freight train.
The quarantine finally lifts the week after Thanksgiving as the last of the metal bandaids are pried up from the scarred ground and taken away by the last few military men left, almost sheepish in their escape, their green trucks and black SUVs seeming to slink out of town, taking back roads rather than the main highway. Mike catches a single-file procession of them on the bike ride to school; he also sees several families—parents with their children, old folk walking their dogs, business people on their way to work—standing on front lawns or sidewalks as the vehicles pass by, all of them to a man with their middle fingers up, one last collective Fuck You to the government that made their lives a claustrophobic hell for nearly two years. Each person's face is filled with relief Mike can't feel.
The city explodes with Christmas cheer like never before. Every lamppost and streetlight choked with garlands like multiplying living vines, plastic snowflakes and ornaments and candy canes dragging down every tree branch within arm's reach. Almost overnight, little red fabric bows attach themselves to the door handle of every downtown business. Wreaths overstuffed with holly and glitter-dusted pinecones adorn every window. The smell of Christmas pine overwhelms Mike every time he steps outside, both smothering and utterly alienating.
"It's not right," Dustin mutters as they walk into school one morning in early December. Even the railings on the stairs leading into Hawkins High have not been spared; they, too, have been wrapped in multicolored strings of garlands by some overzealous city worker elf, leaving no room to hold on without being poked.
"What's not right?" Lucas asks.
Dustin starts to answer, then just shakes his head and grabs a handful of garland at the top of the railing and yanks, pulling a fistful of loose fake needles out.
"Dude, come on," Lucas objects, but Mike understands, and the look on Will's face says he gets it too. They lost someone important; the world should have stopped with them and waited until they had caught their breath and were ready to get up and keep going. Instead it insists, it forces itself forward, inexorable, leaving all of them stumbling and winded and disoriented, trying desperately to catch up.
At night he thinks about El’s body.
Is it just gone like the rest of the Upside Down, as though it never existed? Did reality collapse back into place around her when the anomaly of her vanished? Was she violently blown out into space, flung thoughtlessly into nothingness, floating forever, encased in ice? Was she torn apart by flying debris, the explosion taking her arm, her legs out from under her, her beautiful face slashed to the bone? Did it hurt? Did she scream in pain or go silently? Was she conscious long enough to feel it?
No one can answer him. The military scientists slunk out of town like children chastised for throwing a baseball through a neighbor’s window, Dr. Owens cracking the whip behind them; anyone who knew anything about the Upside Down is either dead or forced into silence. Mike approaches Dustin once, Mr. Clarke a couple of times, but can’t find the words to convey his questions—the fear that the answers will be Yes, her body was destroyed and thrown out into space like garbage and Yes it probably did hurt is too much to bear. So he agonizes in uncertainty instead, praying to a God he doesn’t really believe in that wherever she is, if she is anywhere at all, that it doesn’t hurt anymore.
He has so little to prove that she was ever here. Just the painting she commissioned for him has survived, plus a few scattered letters from her time living with the Byers in California, the rest of them carelessly crumpled and cleared away on trash days or shoved in school notebooks and tossed when the school year ended. The ones he has are random, torn, missing pages. He pores over every carefully penned word with new eyes; El’s death infects every word like spreading rot, the rainbow print at the bottom of her favorite stationary ringing of false cheer.
The stories in the letters aren’t real, he knows, has known since that awful trip to California—but reading them now, when they’re all he has left to prove she was alive at all—the lies take on an almost malicious quality. Like she’s mocking him for ever thinking he knew her.
He rescues them from the ruins of his bedroom anyway, before the remodeling starts, picking his way through the mess and gathering them in a small pile. Dusty and tired, he looks up and sees the painting Will made for him, at her direction, still hanging on his wall, miraculously untouched. Something seizes his heart to look at it; he wishes it were a stuffed toy instead of delicate paper so that he could crush it in a hug. Instead he takes it down, gingerly, corner by corner with careful fingers so the tape doesn’t rip, and carries it downstairs with her letters.
He puts together a binder of her letters and stores it on a shelf in the basement. The shelf sits next to an empty space on the wall and he tapes the painting up there, where he can see it, touch it.
When Will comes downstairs for bed that night, it stops him cold.
“You still have that?” he asks, a strange note of apprehension in his voice.
“Yeah, of course,” Mike says. “I keep all your art.” Will blushes briefly. “And… I dunno, it’s kinda all I have left from El, aside from her letters, you know?”
Will’s face does something complicated, before smoothing out into kind understanding, and the moment passes before Mike can formulate a question.
January
“Truth or dare,” Mike declares without knowing he’s going to say it.
Will’s eyes don’t open, but he does lift one curious eyebrow.
“Mmph. Are we still playing?” he mumbles. The game had petered out as Lucas, and then Dustin, dropped off into drunken sleep; the snoring from the sleeping bags in the corner is now loud and droning. Lucas rolls over and hits one empty wine bottle with his arm; it rolls gently away from him in a smooth arc over the carpet.
The wine had been Joyce’s idea. It’s New Year’s Eve, she’d said. You boys deserve a fun night. Holly’s staying at her friend’s house, I’ll be at the cabin, and Jonathan and Nancy are going to Steve’s, so you boys can have the run of the house. Play games, watch movies, steal Mrs. Wheeler’s wine.
Mom! Will had said, scandalized.
No one had loved the idea of a party, but it was better than moping around alone.
“Yeah, we’re still playing,” Mike says. “So pick one.”
“Hmm. Truth.”
“Tell me something you’ve never told anyone ever before.”
“You did that one already,” Will objects.
“Yeah, for Dustin, not for you.” Mike nudges Will’s socked foot with his own. “C’mon,” he wheedles. “Play.”
Will drags his eyes open with effort and stares at the tv. Onscreen, Luke Skywalker wanders into a bar filled with scumbag aliens and dust, a scene they’ve both seen a hundred times. Will’s eyes wander away from the screen and slide briefly to the right, almost involuntarily, looking up at something on the wall. Mike follows his gaze; the painting stares back at them, the blood red dragon eternally screaming its multi-headed rage, the original party members wielding their chosen weapon against it.
“What?”
“Nothing.” It’s too quick to be the truth, and Mike senses an undercurrent of panic drenching the room suddenly. Will's fingers twitch and pull on the edges of his sleeves.
Mike looks up at the painting again, then back to Will, whose eyes have gone wide and shifty. “Something about El’s painting?”
“No, I—”
“Bullshit, I saw you look.”
Will pushes himself to sit forward on the edge of the couch. Ready to bolt like a nervous horse. It plucks at Mike's memory, seeing Will like this; an early evening two months ago with the sun going down at the end of the world, Mike's own heart in his throat as Will begged everyone, terrified and alone, not to abandon him for not liking girls.
“What, Will?” Mike asks, utterly baffled now.
“I—can’t.” His eyes are going glassy and red, color high on his cheeks even in the washed out tv light. Idly Mike notes how quietly beautiful Will is, even in distress. He wants to take Will's hand, to rub calm into his shaking fingers, remembers resisting the same impulse when Will came out, the same impulse but bigger; he'd wanted to whisk Will out of the room and let him break down in peace, to hide him from prying eyes until he'd put himself back together.
He’s always been selfish, though, and he has to know. So he presses: "Why not? Is it about El?"
"Yes. No. It's stupid. It doesn't matter."
Mike feels some new information about El trembling just beyond his grasp, held in Will's white-knuckled fist. A flash of anger rages through him but he refrains from snapping and instead puts on his softest pleading voice.
"Will." He gets down on his knees on the floor so that he is at eye level with Will's knees. Bows low, his hair brushing the loose fabric of Will's sleep pants. Clasps his hands together. Desperation and fear and want and confusion and grief seep out of him. "Please, Will. Please tell me, I need—"
"Mike—"
"Will, please." Tears spill from his eyes before he even realizes he's begun to cry.
Will is crying now too. He takes a deep, long breath and lets it out slowly. Then he loosens his fist and drops the knowledge into Mike's open hand.
"She didn't commission it."
A long beat of silence. Mike can only stare up at Will from the floor where he still kneels, stunned.
"What?"
Of all the things Will could've said, Mike never could have guessed that.
"She didn't know anything about it. She didn't know it was for you. She never even saw it."
Another long, long moment where both of them breathe.
"No," Mike says. "That's not right." He's sure that Will has gotten it wrong, somehow. Is talking about a different painting, or is misremembering, or is just drunk.
"I think she thought I was painting it for some girl," Will says, seeming to have not heard Mike at all. "She kept making these little insinuations about girls she thought I liked at school."
"No," Mike insists again. "That's not true." Will finally seems to hear Mike's objections and looks at him. "Not about the—her insinuating that you liked someone, I mean—I thanked her for it, the painting," he tries.
Will cocks his head a little, not in confusion but the first part of a no motion, like he's utterly certain Mike is wrong. "But. No. But. She... She didn't say anything?"
Mike thinks about it.
"Hey, El."
"Yes?"
She turns her warm brown eyes to him and his heart skips. There’s something different about her; after Brenner, after Henry tore Hawkins open and killed Max. She’s still El, but Mike can’t get over the sense that some door in her has closed itself to him. Why can't he just talk to her anymore, he wonders, when did that change? "Um. I just wanted to say... thanks. For the painting. It, um. Really meant a lot to me."
She watches him, unblinking, steady, a small enigmatic smile playing at the corner of her mouth that he takes as encouragement. "What you said, what you... felt," he stumbles on. "Anyway, sorry. I loved it. Love it." He thinks about Will's words, the way his lips moved as he formed them, the passion with which he spoke, how he looked with the sun streaming in over his face; suddenly he can feel himself starting to choke up, some unspeakable joy, so strong it almost feels like anguish, coming over him and grabbing him by the throat. The world feels brighter, closer, more real and wide open than it ever has before. He wonders if this is what birds feel like just before they lift into the air and fly, a lightness pulling their chests toward the blue sky above.
"Mike?"
Just like that, at the sound of El's voice, Mike snaps back into himself. He laughs a little, and looks at El, who is waiting quietly for him to continue. The world dims a bit, lets go of his throat. "Sorry. It's just... It's like the nicest thing anyone's ever done for me," he says, still a bit breathless with the emotion.
"You're welcome," she says simply, and hugs him.
Looking back now, Mike wonders. Had he sensed something off about the conversation at the time? Had he felt something was being held back, kept from him, like movement in the corner of your eye that you can't see but can sense all the same? Did she seem strange in that moment, older somehow, beyond him in a way that mattered? He doesn't know, can't tell if this new understanding is changing his memory of the past.
Had he also suspected something when Will was giving it to him, that it meant something more than what he was being told it meant? Or had he just accepted Will's words, blinded by Will's apparent sincerity?
His head swims with wine and revelation. There's something else Will isn't saying, something else that this means but he can’t parse it right now. Will has gone deathly pale, his mouth dropped open in horror.
"She must have seen," he gasps. "She must have been spying in the van, when I... She knew this whole time. Oh, El." He holds his hand out to empty air, beseeching El’s memory. "I'm so sorry. Oh, my god." To Mike's shock, Will keels over like he’s been shot in the stomach, buries his face in his knees, and sobs.
On instinct, utterly lost but needing to soothe, Mike reaches out. Their heads are level now, and Mike presses his forehead gently into Will's temple, shushing him, threading his fingers through Will's hair.
"She kept my secret," Will whispers brokenly into his knees.
"What secret?"
Will sits up, and Mike pulls his hand back.
"It wasn’t from her at all, none of it. I made it, the painting, I mean it was my idea, and everything I said was…"
Will swallows. Mike can't take his eyes off of him. He feels everything fall away, just the two of them in their own little pocket dimension, the way he often feels when he's with Will, like the world knows that it's the most important thing for them to be alone together and wants to leave them to it. He felt like this in the van too, transfixed in the beam of Will’s hazel gaze, only remembering where he was when Will turned away to look out the window.
"I mean, it was all true, everything I said," Will says firmly, "it just wasn’t about her. It was from me."
Mike's body runs hot, then cold, then hot; he is feeling the loss of El all over again, watching her erase herself, one more connection to the reality of her severed, but there's also something else invading here, some dawning realization trembling at the back of his mind that is going to push forward in a moment and break everything.
"I'm sorry, Mike," Will whispers. "I just—"
Silence. Will doesn't finish the sentence.
Mike's brain splits itself in two: one half remains with Will in the present, grieving once again the person he thought El was, while the other half tries desperately to recall exactly the words Will said, exactly how he looked with the sunlight behind him, pouring in over his shoulder, illuminating every inch of him like a halo; carefully, he takes Will's words in his hands and examines them from all angles, replacing El and the party and us with me and I.
"Why did you say it was from her?" Mike barely recognizes his own voice.
Will sniffles and wipes his eyes, exhausted. "I just thought it would... I don't know." Will gestures helplessly. "I thought it would mean more to you, coming from her, you know?" More tears slide down his cheeks and he gives up trying to scrub them away. "I mean, you loved her. Love her."
There is no bitterness in Will's voice at all, nothing, just a profound grief that slams into Mike like an axe to the head. He can't believe he couldn't see it before. The thing in his mind pushes forward and it's like a curtain has been pulled back, like Dorothy in the Wizard of Oz opening her front door to a whole new world full of colors she hadn't known existed.
When Will says you loved her, what follows in Will’s mind, unspoken but there plain as day, tinged with sorrow and yearning, is and you didn't love me.
It’s so obvious it’s like Will actually said it aloud. Mike’s eyes meet Will’s; an understanding passes between them. He may not have said I loved you and you didn’t love me, but he didn’t have to. Mike knows, and Will knows that Mike knows.
Mike feels his whole world tilting off-axis.
Will’s eyes go huge and round. “I—I mean, you were so upset,” he says, trying to backtrack, then sighs and gives up. “I just… I was just trying to help. I just wanted to help. I'm sorry." More tears fall; he groans in frustration and pushes the heels of his hands into his eyes. "I'm sorry. It all seems so stupid now. Just... Stupid."
"Will."
Will looks up and locks eyes with Mike.
Will loves me, Mike thinks, and that strange pulling lightness tugs at his sternum, just as it had when he thanked El for the gift, just as it had when Will had given his heart to him in the form of a painting in the back of a van.
Mike wants to say so many things. The words crowd his throat and clamor to be spoken but the only thing he can get out is—"Why?"
"Why what?" Will asks, bemused.
Will loves me, Mike thinks again, but this time something black and awful creeps up under it, poisoning it. Will loves me and I'm not worth that. I've never done anything before in my life. His painting was wrong. I can't lead anybody. I can't do anything at all. Every time I try, I fuck up. Something's broken in here and it killed El and it'll kill him too.
Will loves me, and he shouldn't.
Will loves me, and I think I love him too.
"Mike?"
Instead of answering, Mike bursts into tears.
It cripples him instantly, the kind of crying that bends the body forward until the head hits a surface and can go no lower, the kind that grips the throat with too tight of a grasp for proper sobbing and all that can happen is tiny openmouthed whimpers that want to be wails but can’t get enough air to release. Everything in him clenches and shakes.
Will is saying something, something that sounds like “wait, no, don’t, come here, shh” as he drops to the floor and pulls Mike’s head into his lap; the function of the words is not to command, Mike understands, but to soothe with the sound itself, to shore him up around the edges and keep him from breaking apart. He can’t tell if it’s helping. He feels like he’s dying, gasping like a beached fish in Will’s arms.
“I’m sorry,” Will whispers. “I’m sorry.”
If he could, Mike would shake his head. He would tell Will he didn’t do anything wrong, that he is one of the most selfless people Mike has ever known. That Mike has loved him for years but was too stupid to know it and figured it out too late, and now everything’s fucked. That El’s gone and there’s nothing left of himself to give to Will. That Will deserves better than this, that he deserves someone who doesn’t have a useless, empty void where their heart should be.
He cries himself to sleep in the early hours of New Year’s Day, and Will holds him through all of it.