Chapter Text
Mike’s legs are starting to cramp up. He’s been sitting in his dad’s shitty old station wagon for almost fifteen hours now, and they still have almost four left. His temple aches from where it’s pressed against the window. He’s wishing right about now that he followed Holly’s lead and brought along a walkman; somehow, he managed to forget just how atrocious their mother’s taste in music is until right now.
Karen pulls into a gas station, parks at a pump, and rifles through her purse for her wallet. She takes out a ten dollar bill and holds it out for Mike to take. “Bring Holly with you. Get something to eat.” The addition of stretch your legs and empty your bladder is silent, implied. Mike doesn’t respond with words. He just shoves the bill into his pocket and practically jumps out of the car, Holly following behind him.
It’s been nearly eight months since the final battle against the Upside Down. Eight months since the demogorgon broke into the Wheelers’ home, stole Holly, and killed their father. Eight months since Ms. Byers chopped off Vecna’s head with an axe. Eight months since The Party rescued Holly and the other kids from imminent death. Eight months since El…
Mike splashes the disgusting gas station water in his face, not wanting to think about it. For a second there, he was convinced that he never would, that he wouldn’t have to. He thought that since he still had The Party, still had his mother and sisters, that he’d be able to distract himself. But then they graduated, and Max and Lucas began their road trip across the country, and Will decided to spend the summer crashing on Jonathan’s couch in New York, and Dustin ran off to do God-knows-what…and now his mom is hellbent on torturing him by making him stay with extended family he hasn’t seen since he was eight-years-old. So that’s definitely fun.
For once in his life, he almost wishes Nancy were here. She’d agree with him that this whole thing is bullshit. Maybe he should’ve taken a page out of Will’s playbook and stowed away in Nancy’s luggage, forcing her to take him with her to Boston.
“Took you long enough,” Holly teases when he finally comes out of the men’s room. She’s got a fountain soda in one hand and a pack of Twizzlers tucked in her armpit, so clearly she didn’t need much time to think over what she wanted.
“What, were you timing me?” Mike gestures vaguely at her. “Mom’s gonna kill you if you only get candy.”
For a second, it looks like Holly is considering this, mulling it over in her head. But then she just shrugs. “Oh well.”
Mike tries not to roll his eyes too hard–migraines aren’t fun to deal with.
⚀ ⚁ ⚂ ⚃ ⚄ ⚅
They cross the border into Maine at 9:03 PM. Holly is already knocked out, lying down across the entire backseat. Karen pats Mike’s knee in a futile, awkward attempt to be comforting.
“Two hours left,” she says.
Mike nods.
There’s a brief pause. The music has been off since they got to New Hampshire; they ran out of cassettes to play and none of the radio stations their car could pick up were playing anything particularly pleasing to the ear.
Karen sighs. “I…know you aren’t thrilled with me right now,” she whispers, “but trust me, this will be good for you. You’ve been stuck in the house for months now, and…I don’t know. We all need a change of scenery.”
At first, Mike doesn’t intend to reply. He doesn’t want to. The walls he’s put up have started to feel normal, started to be a source of comfort for him. But now, tired out of his mind and on the eighteenth straight hour of bouncing his knee, he cracks. He gives her an opening.
“How long are we staying?”
“A few weeks…not too long. It’ll fly by.”
Deep down he knows it’s not true. He’s going to feel every single second that they’re stuck in Derry, because every second is another second that he’ll have to pretend everything is okay. Pretend that the little conversation he had with Hopper before graduation actually did anything at all, that he isn’t still all torn up inside. But he can’t say any of that to his mother, not after everything the Upside Down has put her through, too.
He says instead, “I don’t even remember these people,” because that’s also true.
Karen lets out a soft laugh. “I’m not surprised. It’s been so long.” She shakes her head. “I hardly remember them myself. That’s what makes this exciting.”
Exciting is certainly a word for it. Sure.
Finally, they breach the bubble of Derry at 11:49 PM. Holly’s awake again, gnawing silently on one of her Twizzlers, her eyes still heavy. Their cousins’ house is closer to the center of town, where all the “nice homes” are. It’s a two-story, white building with a blue front door and a manicured yard. Two cars sit in the driveway—a beigeish white Ford and a dark Honda, parked neatly, side by side. Karen pulls up behind the Ford, a little lopsided.
Margaret Tozier is an all-too energetic woman given the time of day. She bounds out of the house in her pajamas and slippers, hair in curlers, a wide smile on her lips. Despite being cousins, Maggie and Karen don’t have too many similar features aside from being short. Maggie has a bigger nose and a wider face, stumpier limbs, glasses…and a much, much louder voice.
She ecstatically shows them where they’ll be staying; Karen and Holly will be sharing the guest room, and Mike gets stuck downstairs in their finished basement—a cruel nugget of irony in this whole thing.
“Went and Richie are asleep,” Maggie explains. “But you’ll get to see them in the morning. For now, just…make yourselves comfortable, okay?”
Karen nods and pulls her into a hug. It’s been a decade since they last saw each other, but it’s as if no time has passed whatsoever.
The basement, as it turns out, is even more put-together than Mike had expected. He anticipated it looking like his own: a couch, a shelf full of board games, and a shitty old box TV that only works every other day. But it isn’t. The stairs lead down into a hallway. On the left, there’s a small half-bathroom, the laundry room, and a closet. On the right, there’s what Maggie referred to as the “game room.”
Inside, the pull-out couch has already been done up. There’s even a teddy bear resting against the pillows, which look like good pillows, not the crappy, flat kind that usually go on pull-out couch mattresses. The pillowcases and sheets are white, which is made even stranger by the fact that they’re pristine, fresh from the store. The comforter is black, nothing to write home about.
On the wall opposite the bed stands a large TV cabinet with an NES plugged in beneath it. The shelves surrounding the television contain rows and rows of VHS tapes. Some are movies, some home videos, and at the bottom, a few blanks. One shelf holds only game cartridges for the aforementioned NES. On top of the cabinet is a very obviously fake potted plant, the plasticky leaves dangling over the side.
Then there’s the matter of the rest of the furniture, which has all hastily been pushed against the third wall. A reclining chair, a coffee table, a large standing lamp, and most interestingly, a foosball table.
Mike sits down on the edge of the mattress, wincing as the springs creak loudly under his weight. He wonders how well his mom and Holly are settling in upstairs, or even just if their room actually has a window. He doesn’t bother to change fully because he has no interest in tearing apart his bag to find his pajamas; instead, he simply kicks off his shorts and discards them in the corner.
His head hits the pillow and keeping his eyes open instantly feels like a Sisyphean task. He throws the teddy bear to the same corner as his shorts, then stares at the ceiling until the rock tumbles back down the hill again and his eyelids flutter shut.
“Mike!”
He shoots back up, his ears filling with the sound of his joints popping. He helplessly searches the dark room for the source of the voice he heard–the voice he knows he heard.
“El?” He calls out, trying to make out any of the shapes surrounding him. But he can’t. It’s impossible. The entire room is black. “Eleven?!”
“Mike?”
With a shaking hand, Mike reaches for the lamp. He flicks on the light—
—and freezes.
He’s in his own home, in his own basement, on his own couch. He feels nauseous. Something clatters to the floor, and he flinches away. A few seconds pass, and once he gathers the courage, he looks down.
It’s his walkie-talkie.
Mike reaches down slowly, carefully, and picks it up. Water sluices down the sides, dripping down onto the floor. Drip, drip. His fingers still trembling, he presses down on the side button and speaks.
“El? Is that you?”
His voice sounds like gravel, and he instinctively clears his throat.
“El…?”
Nothing happens. The lamplight flickers, sure, but no words come from the walkie.
Drip, drip, drip.
Above him, the house settles.
Drip.
Mike’s grip on the walkie-talkie tightens a smidge. He looks around the room again. Yep. Definitely his basement, shitty as always. His gaze drifts to the bookshelf, to the names plastered across five distinct binder spines.
MAX. LUCAS. WILL. DUSTIN. MIKE.
Something draws him to them. He stands, ignoring the pins and needles in his feet as he crosses the room. Gently, oh-so gently, he traces the letters with his finger, thinking back to that final campaign. Really, he’d just thrown something together. He dragged it on longer than it realistically should’ve been, because he knew that after it was over, it was…his ribs seem to tighten. The gravel in his throat is even drier than it’d been before.
He pulls his binder from the shelf. Inside, pasted to the back of the front cover, is a letter. It’s nothing consequential, just one of the many that El had sent him while she was living in Lenora. His eyes graze over the wall of writing, the updates on Will and Joyce and Jonathan, the details he knows now were mostly lies, and instead land on the bottom of the page.
Love, El.
In his head, he can hear her voice so clearly, like she’s standing there next to him: “You can’t even write it, Mike.”
He’s never seen himself as a coward. He knows that if it came down to it, if he’d had the physical strength to free himself from the armymen, he would’ve ran over to El and stopped her. He knows he would’ve chosen to jump into the quarry a thousand times before he ever let Troy hurt Dustin. He would’ve spent a thousand nights down in this basement if he had to, even if he never got a response from El.
But there’s something so uniquely intimate about those three words. I love you. Something that, to him at least, means so much more than even laying down his life to protect his friends. He’s come face to face with a dozen demo-creatures, and he’s hardly—
The walkie-talkie squeals.
“MIKE!”
The voice he hears doesn’t come from it, though. He spins around, his heart pounding in his chest, and comes face to face with…
His throat closes up.
Eleven is still wearing the outfit he’d seen her in last, that awful, cursed wetsuit. Her hair is down, though, plastered to the sides of her face and neck. In fact, she’s soaking wet, like a squirrel in a pool. Her chest is heaving as if she’d run a marathon to get here.
Mike swallows. “…El?”
He notices the bruises then, and the gnarly gash on her cheek that her hair had half-hidden away. The cuts on her hands and ankles, the only visible skin on her body. The caked-down blood crusted under her nose.
Drip, drip.
She whispers, “Hi, Mike.”
Without another moment’s hesitation, he runs to her, pulling her into his arms like he’s longed to for the last eight months. She allows it, her head resting against his chest. He doesn’t even think about how the water is soaking into his clothes now, because he doesn’t care. This is all he’s wanted.
“Where have you been?” He demands, halfway to a sob.
“I’m sorry. I couldn’t come back sooner,” she replies, equally as emotional. “I had to…to be sneaky…if Dr. Kay thought—”
He doesn’t allow her another word, instead squeezing her so hard that the syllables die in her throat. She doesn’t seem to mind, though.
“I…” His voice cracks. “I talked to you every night. I knew you weren’t—I—”
El shushes him. “I know…I know…”
For a second, it’s just this. Just them, crying in each others’ arms like it’s the end of a sappy romance movie. Mike forgets all about the last eight months, about graduating, about the sleepless nights, about the sluggish feeling in his legs that never seemed to go away. That’s all the stuff of nightmares, and he doesn’t acknowledge nightmares anymore.
Behind them, something crackles to life. He knows the sound of a record player anywhere. His brows furrow; he doesn’t own a record player. Or at least, there isn’t one in the basement. Before he can linger on that inconsistency, though, he hears something else: a single note.
Purple Rain.
His eyes fly open and immediately look downward. His arms are still around El, one hand clenched around his walkie-talkie. Drip. Drip. Drip. But it isn’t water anymore.
It’s blood.
It’s all blood.
El’s wetsuit is soaked through with it, turning the soft gray into a vicious, deep burgundy. The smell of iron floods his nostrils. He shoves himself away, eyes glued to the figure in front of him now.
I never meant to cause you any sorrow
I never meant to cause you any pain
Whatever it is, it isn’t Eleven. Its face is gaunt, almost gray except for what’s stained with blood. Its eyes are black, bruised. Its hair is brittle, like he could reach out and snap it in half like a twig. He backs away even more, his eyes wide, his breathing uneven and labored, and trips over the edge of a rug, falling to the floor. It’s covered in about an inch of liquid—liquid he hopes is just water, but knows better.
“Wh…what is this?” Mike questions, his back hitting the bookshelf.
The thing says, “You failed me.”
“What?”
“You failed me, Mike,” it says again. “You let me die. You let this happen to me. You couldn’t save me. You can’t save anyone.”
Is this what lucid dreaming feels like?
He shakes his head, clamping his hands over his ears. “No,” he says, then again louder, “No! You aren’t her! You aren’t—”
“YOU FAILED!”
The voice isn’t even El’s anymore. It’s something terrible, something corrupt. Something demonic. He squeezes his eyes shut. This isn’t real. This isn’t real. It’s not real. It’s not Eleven. This isn’t real. He’s dreaming. He’ll wake up any second now and this will all be over because it isn’t real—
He reopens his eyes and sees a quick flash of red and…white? His ears won’t stop buzzing. His head is a beehive. Confused, he lets out a loud yell, hoping that if there is a God, he’ll send his mom or Nancy or Will to come help—
—and then he sits up.
Mike sucks in a thousand deep breaths. His body is drenched in a cold sweat. It’s summer, but he’s shivering, and there’s a dampness beneath his eyes that he can’t attribute to the heat. He flicks on the lamp, again, and looks down at his hands. No walkie-talkie. No blood. No El. It was a nightmare.
He runs a hand through his hair, not knowing what to do. He feels like he can’t go back to sleep. The clock reads 3:43 AM. Fuck.
With nothing else to do, he grabs his bag and pulls out his journal. It’s a hobby that Nancy suggested he pick up after everything. He’s only been doing it for a few months, and he already just started on his second one.
June 13, 1989.
Maine is going great so far.