Work Text:
“What we call a beginning is often the end
and to make an end is to make a beginning.
The end is where we start from.”
—T.S. Eliot
.
“It feels like we’ve been here before.”
Mike glances over at the sound of El’s voice, turning his head so that he can see her face in profile. They lie on a blanket spread over a patch of soft grass. It is springtime, and there are wildflowers dotted amongst the endless, rich green. In the distance are mountains, jutting up from the earth dramatically, pointing up in sharp peaks towards an endless sky. It is one of the starkest differences between the Icelandic landscape and the landscape of the American Midwest, where he spent the first twenty one years of his life.
“What?” he says, confused. “I’ve never been here before.”
The clearing was at the end of an hour-long hike over rolling green hills. They had set off late in the morning, bundled in puffer jackets and knit hats— it was still chilly in the spring— and with sandwiches stuffed into the backpack that Mike carried.
“Something about being here with you… it feels familiar,” El says, turning her head, too, so that they are facing one another. Her dark brown hair is pulled back in a braid, but wisps of it dance around her face, spurred on by the wind.
Mike is quickly consumed by the feeling he gets anytime their eyes meet; as insane as it sounds, it genuinely feels, for a moment, like they are the only two people in the world. It’s like the ever-expanding universe, full of stars, planets, dark matter, and plenty of other things he doesn’t fully understand, shrinks down until the only two beings it can contain are Mike and El, El and Mike.
His lips quirk up in a cheeky grin, and he says something funny and stupid, only because he wants to hear her laugh.
”Is this your way of telling me you came here with some other nerdy yet effortlessly cool guy?”
He is rewarded with the sound of her giggle, still so girlish, like they are twelve, thirteen, fourteen. It may be his favorite sound, though it may tie with the way she whispers his name, breathless and reverent, when their bodies are entwined in the bed they share in their tiny Reykjavik apartment.
El shakes her head.
“You sure?” he asks, and she laughs harder, her eyes crinkling at the corners.
“Positive,” she says, pushing her head forward, until her nose brushes against his. “There’s no one else.”
He already knew this, of course. It was one of the things he’d asked her (after getting through the initial questions of How did you make us all think you’d died? and How did you get to Iceland?) in the days following the reunion they’d waited over four years for. She’d furrowed her eyebrows and shaken her head no with vehemence. When she turned the question around on him he’d had to recount the story of an extremely ill-fated blind date that Dustin had tricked him into going on, which luckily resulted in El laughing so hard she nearly cried, clutching her stomach when Mike got to the part about his date throwing her drink at him.
“I definitely deserved it,” he’d said. “I was such an asshole.”
Looking back, it was silly for Dustin, or anyone, for that matter, to think that Mike could just move on from the girl he’d loved since he was twelve.
“Why does it feel familiar then?” he asks her now, genuinely curious to hear her reasoning. She thinks for a moment.
“Do you remember when you first told me about the waterfalls? When you said we could run away together?”
He nods. Of course he remembers.
“The way you said it, it was like you were making a promise, even though it didn’t feel possible at the time. But you’ve always kept your promises to me.”
She looks at him with such bare, abject love and adoration that it steals the breath from his lungs, his pulse quickening. Even after nearly four months with her in this new place that has become home, he still sometimes can’t believe that she is really his.
“There’s just something about being here— it’s like this is what I was imagining when you said we would go somewhere far away.”
She looks around, at the swaying purple wildflowers and the black and gray mountains, taking it all in. If they walk a bit further, toward the jagged cliffs of the coast, they will reach one of the many waterfalls that the country is known for.
“Does it live up to your expectations?” he asks. Her eyes lock onto his. There’s that feeling again. An overwhelming feeling of rightness and belonging, simply because he is with her. Her golden-brown eyes are sparkling in the sunlight.
“Being here with you is better than anything I could’ve dreamed of,” she says.
His heart soars. His hand comes up to rest on her cheek, and— because she’s real, because she’s his and he’s hers, because he can— he kisses her.
His family had been surprised, to say the least, when he told them that he was going on a backpacking trip across Iceland a month after graduation. He’d graduated a semester early, something he’d planned since signing a three-book deal with a major publishing house when he was only a college junior. With the encouragement of his professor, he submitted a short story he’d written for his creative writing class to Asimov’s Science Fiction. His surprise at his story being accepted was only exceeded when a publisher reached out to him, asking Mike to turn his short story into a novella. That was how Michael Wheeler became a published author, the success of the novella leading to a fair bit of buzz in the sci-fi scene, as well as the book deal.
“It’s for the book,” he’d told his mom. “Research. It’s— it’s set in an ancient land similar to Iceland.”
His family had accepted that Mike was going to do what he wanted. There was nothing tying him down, and he could write from anywhere.
What his family didn’t know about was the non-descript envelope that had been sitting in a pile of junk mail on Mike's childhood bed when he visited his family after graduation, placed there by Karen just a few weeks before. If her curiosity was piqued by the excess of stamps in one corner and the return address of a P.O. box in Reykjavik in the other, she hadn’t done anything about it, leaving the envelope for her son to find.
He’d sat down heavily on his bed, running a finger over his name, written in careful print. Inside was a single, heart-stopping photograph, a Polaroid that showed a hazy view of a waterfall tumbling over mossy, volcanic rock. Written below, in the same careful print, were four words.
I found our ending.
Mike had laughed as he clutched the photograph, tears coating his eyes, because he’d always believed. He’d always known she could do anything.
“You wore this when you met me at the airport,” Mike says, tugging at the hem of the thick, lilac sweater El has on.
He can picture her so clearly that day. He’d walked into Baggage Claim and she was just there, ordinary and spectacular in the same breath. Her hair was longer than he’d ever seen it, past her chest. She wore the lilac sweater beneath a puffy, pink parka, and a gray wool skirt that went just past her knees. On her feet were a pair of tall, brown snow boots, lined with white fur.
El smiles and nods as she tugs the sweater off. She has on a camisole underneath, and Mike’s fingers reach up to toy with the thin strap at her shoulder.
“What did you think when you first saw me?” she asks as his lips replace his fingers, dotting her collarbone and shoulder with kisses. He pulls back from her, kneeling in front of her on their bed.
“That you looked impossibly beautiful,” he says, his voice low and soft. “It was like I was seeing you for the first time all over again.”
He thinks of the scared little girl in the woods. There’s a certain amount of pain in those memories, for all of the loss and trauma that came after. Seeing El in the Reykjavik airport after four years apart stood in sharp contrast to that first meeting. There were tears in her eyes but she looked so unbelievably happy, and Mike knew with one look at her that something inside of him was healed.
She leans forward and kisses him, her mouth open and wanting against his. He kisses her back with everything he has, hands clutching her as he lays her down on the mattress. She pulls her mouth away from his to catch her breath, then says, “I think that was the happiest moment of my life.”
His hands glide over the bare skin of her thighs as he settles between them. She helps him pull his shirt off, then runs her hands over the expanse of his chest. Mike leans down, trailing open-mouthed kisses along her neck. It makes her giggle, so he does it again and again, until her laughs turn to soft, breathy moans. He kisses her chest, her chin, her lips, then pulls back, resting his forehead against hers.
“I want to keep giving you those. The happiest moments of your life,” he tells her.
Her eyes stay on his, and he sees an array of emotions play out: joy, hope, affection, but most overwhelmingly deep, unwavering love.
“Good,” she says, then wraps her arms around him to pull him close again.
It is summer, and they are enjoying the relatively warm weather by sitting outside on the patio of a café, the sun warming their skin as they sip their coffees.
An elderly couple greets El, speaking in Icelandic. Mike picks up a few words here and there. He is amazed, though he really shouldn't be, by how many people there are here that know and love her. Everywhere they go they seem to run into someone who knows Eleanor, and recently they've been remembering the name of the tall, dark-haired young man who is almost always with her, save for when she works her shifts at a family-run bakery.
When the couple leaves, heading toward their own little patio table, El turns to Mike with a smile.
“They asked me if my boyfriend is staying here permanently.”
Mike's eyebrows raise. At this point he's been in Reykjavik for nearly five months. He's been steadily chipping away at his book, and his agent is happy, always impressed with the pages he sends to her every few weeks. He's managed to publish two more short stories, too. He'd even been able to land a job teaching a summer creative writing course in English at a small university in the city, meaning he was able to obtain a temporary work visa. But it's just that– temporary, and they both know they'll have to figure out the question of his citizenship status soon.
As for El, she'd become a citizen after three years of living and working in Reykjavik; the forged birth certificate and American passport that she’d obtained before leaving had apparently been convincing enough to hold up under the Icelandic government’s scrutiny.
Mike realizes then that the only time they’ve ever actually talked about this was his first day in the country. She’d brought him from the airport to her apartment, and as soon as he shut the door behind him she’d kissed him fiercely, only pulling away to make a demand.
“Promise you’ll stay with me.”
His answer was not one he had to think about.
“I’ll stay. Of course I’ll stay.”
Now, he stares at El over his cup of coffee, not quite catching the gleam in her eyes.
“I think if I can turn this gig at the university into something more long term, I can apply for another work visa.”
“I have an idea,” she says, and he notices the way her lips are curved into a secretive smile. She leans toward him, almost conspiratorially.
He raises his brows as he sips his coffee, silently asking her to continue.
“Have you ever thought about getting married?”
Mike nearly chokes. His mind is suddenly running a hundred miles an hour, because of course he’s thought about marrying her. It’s been in the back of his mind since they reunited, and he would have asked her a week after he first arrived if he hadn’t thought it would be absolutely insane to do so.
“I— El, of-of course— ” he trips on his words, not quite sure what to say. “Yes, I’ve thought about it.”
There. At least he had sounded confident and sure at the end.
“I think we should do it,” she says plainly, as if she is declaring that they should go buy a loaf of bread from the store.
“That's not how it works,” he says around a disbelieving laugh, and he is reminded of being twelve and explaining so much of the world to the girl hiding in his basement. It had been a long time since something El did or said reminded him of that feeling, of needing to explain the how or why.
“Well, we'll have to be married for a few years before they'll grant you citizenship, but it's arguably the easiest way to go about it. I looked it up at the library,” she tells him with a proud smile.
“No, that's not–” he begins to say, but he can't help but smile back.
“A marriage proposal isn't something you just do casually over coffee,” he explains. “It's meant to be a big, romantic gesture. And… usually the man asks the woman.”
“So are you planning a big, romantic gesture for me?” she asks, blinking up at him innocently.
Mike's heart pounds away in his chest as he looks at the hope written on the face of the woman he loves. He had thought bringing up the topic of marriage was out of the question, thinking that El would be freaked out if they took the leap from teenaged sweethearts to two adults discussing a lifelong commitment. Yet here she was, asking him if he'd thought of it and if he was currently planning a proposal. It was like she could always sense what was in his heart, even the things he was trying to tamp down.
“Yeah. I am,” he says with a confidence gained from the truth of his statement. El positively beams.
“And to be clear,” he adds, reaching across the table and holding her hand, “I want to marry you because I love you. Not for citizenship.”
“I love you too,” she says, her voice resolute, as resolute as it was the first time she told him, and all the times in between.
Her love for him had always been a steady, unshakable force, as powerful as she was, and just as determined. It had sustained him through the worst hardships in his life. It had nurtured him even when they were separated by thousands of miles, even when they were in different dimensions. It felt, to him, that their love was a force much bigger than either of them. It should have been too big and cosmic for their hearts to contain, and yet— there they were, together after years and miles apart, talking about plans of marriage as if they were any other young couple planning their future.
He buys a ring by the end of the week.
He proposes by the end of the month. Next to a waterfall, of course.
The wedding is small and takes place in a courthouse. When El emerges from their bedroom, clad in a white dress, Mike is rendered speechless.
She had purchased it second-hand, neither one of them having the money to spend on anything extravagant for their wedding day— but Mike thinks that she is the most beautiful vision that any man has ever gazed upon. The dress is simple, with an off-the-shoulder neckline and a tulle skirt that falls to her feet. There are little pearls and bits of lace sewn into the bodice, and E wears a pair of delicate pearl earrings to match.
“What do you think?” she asks, and her voice is soft and shy. He thinks back to when they were kids, when she would ask him if she looked pretty.
“You look incredible,” he tells her, reaching for her hand. “God, you are so beautiful.”
He is rewarded with a smile that lights up her face and a pretty, pink blush on her cheeks.
He is reminded, suddenly, of the way she looked when they danced together at the Snow Ball, all those years ago.
He reaches for her, offering his hand, not unlike taking her hand to dance.
“Ready?” he asks. His bride nods.
“Ready,” she says.
When the officiant announces that they are husband and wife, Mike does not kiss El the way he did back in 1984, all awkward limbs and nervous energy. No, he turns to her— his wife— and places one hand on her waist and the other on her cheek, turning and kissing her in a fluid motion that belies the amount of practice they’ve had. He feels her grinning against his lips after a moment, and realizes that he’s grinning, too. And when he pulls back he sees tears coating her eyes, her happiness radiating out from her and enveloping him in its warmth.
One year later, after Mike has published his debut novel, they celebrate its success with a trip to the eastern side of the island, staying in a small town nestled in a fjord, surrounded by scenic waterfalls. They hike out to see the falls, and stand in awe together as they gaze upon the three streams cascading over the green, rocky cliffside.
Mike lifts the camera hanging from his neck and snaps a picture of El from behind as she takes it all in. A picture to match the one she sent me two years ago, he thinks.
When she turns to him there are tears falling steadily down her cheeks.
“El? What’s wrong, what—”
She strides toward him and wraps him in a crushing hug, sniffling softly against the fabric of his windbreaker.
“Thank you,” she says. “For everything.”
Mike holds her, thinking that he should be the one thanking her— for saving the world, for saving him, for finding him, first in the woods when he was twelve and again with a mailed photograph when he was twenty-one.
Later that night, they lie in bed in their rented cabin, the skylight directly overhead giving them a stunningly clear view of the stars.
“This is quite the upgrade from the blanket fort in your basement,” El says with a wry smile. Mike turns to her, letting out a surprised laugh, and soon they have both devolved into fits of giggles, laughing at the absurdity of their life and everything the universe has thrown their way.
When their laughter dies down and El snuggles against his chest, their arms wrapped around one another, she speaks again.
“Do you ever miss them? Your family?”
“Yeah, of course,” he says.
He remembers the surprised tone of his mom’s voice when he told her he was staying in Iceland, remembers how she had tried to conceal the edge of disappointment. He had apologized to her. He couldn’t tell her the full truth yet, that El was there. They hadn’t been sure if it was safe, if the government was tracing their calls and still trying to find her.
“You don’t have to apologize, sweetheart,” Karen had said. “If you’re happy there, then I’m happy.”
Mike remembers feeling that there was something unspoken between them. Perhaps she was just happy that her son was doing better after having witnessed the months-long depression he’d endured. Perhaps she had known there was more to it, even then.
After they got married, Mike sent a photo to his mom, to Nancy, to Hopper, and to each member of the party. The photo was taken outside of the courthouse, from across the street, making him and El appear quite tiny, their features hard to distinguish. But it was clear that they were dressed as a bride and groom. It would be clear to his family and friends exactly who was in the photo with him. And if the photos wound up in the wrong hands, they had plausible deniability. Mike Wheeler was legally married to an Icelandic woman named Eleanor Jónsdóttir. All traces of Eleven were gone.
“But I would choose this again and again,” Mike says to his wife, stroking her hair gently. “You’re my family, too.”
She looks at him and smiles, but he can see the unshed tears in her honey brown eyes.
“I think… one day, maybe a year from now, maybe two or three… it’ll be safe. I think we’ll be able to visit. Or we can have them visit us. We’ll have a proper wedding reception if you want.”
She puts her head against his chest, against his heart.
“I’d like that,” she tells him.
A short while later, they are wrapped up in one another, even more amorous than before, and without the barrier of clothing between them. He remembers being sixteen, remembers how they had urgently moved against one another when they were able to steal an hour alone in the cabin. He remembers how she had whispered into his ear that she loved him, he remembers whispering it back. They’d been so young, and already so convinced that in a world of terrifying uncertainty, the thing between them was real, was meant to be.
They move with less urgency as they make love beneath the stars. The air around them is charged, and Mike thinks he may even hear a faint, electric hum. She moves against him in a way that is agonizingly sweet and perfect, as if the molecules surrounding them are pushing them closer and closer together as their pleasure crests. He wonders, not for the first time, if El ever uses her powers when they—
Her high, breathy moans and cries of pleasure snap him out of his thoughts as she comes undone beneath him, Mike following her off the edge. In an instant, the small bedside lamp on the nightstand glows brighter and brighter, until the bulb suddenly bursts.
Mike stares down with wide eyes at his wife, who stares back at him, breathless and with an adorable guilty expression on her face.
“I’m sorry about the lamp,” she says later, when they are lying in bed and attempting to fall asleep.
“Why would you apologize for that?” he asks with an incredulous laugh.
“Losing control of it… it reminds me of before. It reminds me of all of the fighting,” she confesses.
“That’s over now,” he says resolutely, pulling her against his chest.
“Sometimes I can’t believe it,” she tells him. “It feels like such a gift, to not have to fight anymore.”
“Yeah,” he says, kissing the top of her hair. “It does.”
“You make me so incredibly happy,” she murmurs into his chest. His heart soars.
“No one deserves more happiness than you, El,” he says tenderly, meaning every word. She pulls back so that her eyes can meet his.
“I always knew, you know. I always knew that you would find me.”
“How?” He thinks he already knows the answer. It’s written in him, stamped onto his soul.
“Because it’s fate. You and me. We’re meant to be together.”
He kisses her, like he will thousands and thousands of times. It’s enough for him— to know that all of their pain and heartbreak, all of the turmoil of their adolescence had led them here. It’s more than enough. And the here isn’t an ending, isn't their ending, like she had written on that photo. It's their beginning. And it stretches out endlessly, like the number of stars in the sky, unconcerned with the past, only full of their yearning for the newness of this life together.
.
“We shall not cease from exploration
and the end of all our exploring
will be to arrive where we started
and know the place for the first time.”
—T.S. Eliot