Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

Mike has a thorough understanding of the events that transpired across November 3rd to 6th, 1987.  And everything that happened after.

Vecna is dead.  The gate is closed.  The upside down is gone.  And with it, Eleven.

People always told Mike that it wasn’t his fault.  Hopper, his family, his friends.  They said her decision had already been made, that there was nothing he could have said or done to change how everything unfolded. Mike understood their intentions were good, that they were trying to help him move through his grief in a way that would allow him to accept what happened, to find that sliver of closure needed to live a fulfilling life.

They told him that it’s what she would have wanted, for him, for all of them.  They told him not to blame himself.

Mike will always blame himself.

As days since November 6th begin to pass, turning into months and eventually years, Mike’s processing takes many forms.  He’s had the five stages of grief recited to him far too many times to be more than attuned to the normalcy in that, although he also believes simplifying something so encompassing like grief into a structured model makes the process seem far too rigid, too sequential.

He finds himself jumping back and forth between stages, lingering at some longer than others, floating away and being pulled back, all while uncovering new stages he doesn’t realize were there all along.  Like delusion.  Like resentment.  That’s the worst one.

From this journey, Mike knows his grief to be anything but linear.  

Instead, it’s like an endless, tangled thread he’s trying to unravel, searching for the moment the string finally runs clean through his fingers as he reaches acceptance.

But he never gets there.

No matter how much time passes, how much progress he thinks he has made, how much he convinces himself that he’s able to move on, Mike can never fully shake the nothingness that lies deep within him.  The guilt is an ever-present, omnipresent force, gnawing away at his insides like vultures scavenging the dead carcass of the person he once was, turning him hollow.

He may well have disappeared into the void with the upside down.

It becomes apparent very quickly to himself, and everyone around him, that the person Mike Wheeler was before November 6th, 1987, no longer exists.

Instead, what remains is the shell of a young man, once the shell of a boy, holding so tightly onto his regret as if he could use it to vanish his remnants completely.  Because that, Mike thinks, is what this all comes down to.

Regret.

Regret of what could have been, what should have been.  If only he had known.

There is so much he would have done differently.

***

November 6th, 1987

As the early morning sun soaks the grassy hill leading up to the radio station, Eleven can’t help but find the concept of arriving at the Squawk in a funeral hearse jarring.

Of course, she didn’t know it was a hearse at first.  She didn’t even know what a hearse was.  

When Hopper found it parked outside of the church in the upside down and somehow, miraculously, rigged the engine to start, she wasn’t really focusing on his choice of transportation more than she was just getting out of the upside down as quickly as possible.  Kali is the one to question it out loud during their drive back, only to be met with subtle grunts from Hopper in the front seat.

El isn’t sure if it's the image of their morbid mode of transportation driving towards a place that she associates so closely with everyone she loves, or the subtle connection between the vehicle and the conversation she had with Kali in the upside down.  Either way, there is an uneasy feeling in her stomach.

She glances over at her sister.  Kali is looking out the hearse window, out at the town and the world that Eleven had told her about so long ago, taking everything in.  Her expression is neutral, but with a hint of curiosity, as if connecting the dots from what she envisioned its depiction to be to its reality.  

Eleven can’t tell if expectations are being met.  She shifts subtly in her seat.  For someone she has known so long, she wonders why it feels like entering Kali’s mind would be the only way to properly read her. 

Alerted to Eleven’s squirm, Kali tilts her head away from the window and over towards her.  Their eyes meet, a cautious smile turning at the corners of Kali’s mouth.  It is here that Eleven realizes that Kali is nervous, and she understands a bit better now.  Meeting new people in new places, after being trapped for so long in the upside down lab, is a different kind of daunting than fighting military soldiers.  It's not rewarded with the same exhilaration and dopamine that escaping the upside down was, either.

Eleven returns Kali’s smile reassuringly, but quickly breaks their eye contact, looking back out of her window to notice the radio station come slowly into view.  She tries to disregard what Kali told her earlier, but her words remain as haunting echoes in her mind.

“There are no happy endings, Jane. Not for us.”

Eleven shakes her head, forcing herself to snap out of it. 

Not now. 

She looks towards Hopper.  As he drives, his gaze stays unwavering at the approaching radio tower.  There is a coldness to him, his hands gripping the steering wheel tightly as he stares straight ahead.  If Hopper is aware of Eleven’s eyes on him, he doesn’t show it.

As they pull up to the radio station, Eleven begins to mirror Kali’s feelings of nervousness.  She doesn’t know what they are walking into, how everyone will react to their discoveries in the upside down.  

The lab.  The wall.  The suction on the other side of the wall.

What does it all mean?

Then, as Hopper finally puts the hearse into park, she sees two familiar figures exiting the front door of the Squawk and her worry begins to fade.  Excitedly, Eleven quickly jumps out of the vehicle, slamming the door shut.

“Mike!” 

“El!” 

They crash into each other.

“Oh, Mike.” She releases a sigh of relief as she wraps her arms around him, breathing in his scent. 

Her time spent with Mike has been limited over the last year, but the initial feeling of comfort she gets when he is around her remains the same.

“You’re okay,” he says, pulling away from her, eyeing her up and down as if he needs to double check for himself.  She nods in response, quickly looking past to where Hopper and Joyce stand in an embrace, and then back towards him.  “I’m okay.”

There is the sound of another door slamming shut, startling El momentarily.  In the rush of excitement in seeing Mike, she almost forgets that she and Hopper didn’t arrive at the Squawk alone.

“This is Kali,” she begins to say, pausing to acknowledge the bomb she is dropping. “My sister.” Kali walks up behind them, stopping just short of El.

“And you must be the famous Mike,” Kali says, taking him in.  It isn’t in a way of judgement, but more so curiosity, putting the puzzle pieces together of the person that El described to her and the boy standing right in front of them.

Mike looks between the two of them, his dark eyebrows knotting in tight confusion as he processes, shaking his head as he tries to wrap his head around the words.

“I don’t, I don’t understand—” 

He is cut off by Hopper turning back to speak to them, still holding Joyce in his arms.

“It’s a long story, probably best just to tell it all at once. Where’s the rest of our greeting party?”

--

“He’s just in here,” Mike says as El follows him through the hallway of the Squawk towards the main seating area.  El keeps up, but her mind is a jumble of overwhelmed thoughts as she replays everything that Mike and Joyce just filled them in on outside.

Will had identified a boy from Holly’s class as the demogorgon’s next target.  The plan to save him had been messy—drugs, mild kidnapping, dozens of shattered wine bottles—but it worked.

They tagged the demogorgon.  Dustin, Steve, Nancy, and Jonathan followed it into the Upside Down.  Then the military took every kid in Holly’s year to the MAC-Z, to ‘protect’ them, so the group created another elaborate scheme to break out the targeted children.

This plan backfired, leading to them being caught by the military, and was followed by a blood bath.  Then, Vecna had stepped out of the gate, revealing himself for the first time in eighteen months.  

Demogorgons were about to slaughter Robin, Lucas and Mike, before Will, as if summoned by a greater force, siphoned the power of the hive mind—Vecna—to stop them.  

Will was a sorcerer.

El clinged to each word as Mike described exactly how it happened, giddiness and awe in his voice that felt similar to the way he’d enthusiastically tried to explain his D&D campaigns to her when they were younger.  

But this wasn't a campaign. This was real.

Her thoughts matched the excitement that was in his voice, as she thought about what this now meant.  How, with Kali, and now with Will by her side, she no longer had to face Henry with her powers alone.  

But her excitement had quickly faltered when Mike explained what happened next.  

How Will tapped into the hive mind again.  How, somehow, Will saw Max and Holly in Vecna’s mind, through his eyes.  How he was able to save them, but in doing so, fell into a deep, unshakable trance. 

They turn a corner and there lies Will on the yellow couch, eyes moving back and forth under his eyelids like he is searching for something he can’t see.

“Oh Jesus,” Hopper sighs as he takes in the sight before him.

El crouches down before him, studying his face.  Hopper, Joyce, and Mike, with Kali lingering a little behind, surround them, looking down at the boy.  

She was told Lucas and Robin have already left for the hospital, realizing from Will’s earlier tap into the hive mind that, even after all this time in a coma, a part of Max still exists, buried deep within Vecna’s mind, and she could be planning her great escape.  El can’t even find it in herself to summon any excitement over Max yet, not when Will is lying unconscious before her.  

“How long has he been like this?” El asks, her eyes not leaving Will’s face.

“A few hours,” Mike replied solemnly. 

Then Joyce asks El a question that feels unsettlingly familular.

“Do you think you can find him?”

***

As Will comes to, panic hits before memory does.  

He tries to move, but can’t.  

Vines coil tight around his chest and limbs, twisting and constricting his body, stealing the air from his lungs.  The harder he struggles, the tighter they pull, crushing him and making his vision swim.  He concentrates everything within him to force his eyesight back, and a room emerges in front of him.  It is suffocatingly dark, hazy with blue and grey hues.  Spores drift through the air like ash, and the surfaces around him are covered in the inky-black vines, pulsing faintly as if they have a heartbeat.  

It’s strangely familiar.  He can’t yet place the setting, though some part of him knows he’s been here before.  

Then, emerging slowly out of the shadows, he spots a figure moving towards him.

Henry.

He steps towards Will in an unhurried pace, hands clasped behind his back.  Even in his human form, he’s menacing and terrifying.  Will thrashes again, desperate, but the vines react like a boa constrictor, tightening with every movement until black spots dance in his vision.  Then it all comes back to him.  

The night the demogorgon took him.  The vines that dragged him against this wall, wrapping around his twelve-year-old-body.  The burning invasion of one forcing its way down his throat. 

This is where it happened.

“Do you remember this place, William?” Henry asks softly, stepping closer, though he already knew the answer.

“No—no, no—” Will gasps, fighting harder, though it only makes the vines bite deeper into his skin.

“Does it bring back memories?” Henry murmurs.

And with a blink, Vecna now stands before him in his full, monstrous form, towering and raw.  His body looks flayed and fused, sinew stretched over something barely human.  He walks with a faint limp, one leg not quite right.

Will notices, and clings to it.

“Max. Holly,” Will grits out, forcing the words past the pressure in his throat. “They got away, didn’t they? Did the leg slow you down?”

Vecna’s ruined flesh tightens into something like a scowl.

“You think you are clever,” he says, voice reverberating through the walls themselves. “But remember—I am the one who invited you in. You were my vessel. My spy. My builder.”

“Builder?” Will whispers, horror creeping in.

Vecna tilts his head, almost mockingly.

“How do you think the tunnels came to be, William? You built them. Each and every night you slept.”

Will shakes his head violently.  

Vecna lifts a mangled hand and brushes it along Will’s cheek.  The touch is cold and wrong. 

“There is great power within you,” He continues, voice booming and menacing. “But make no mistake, boy. They are my powers. And they are stronger than ever before. Much stronger.”

Vecna lowers his hand and Will keeps fighting, pushing to try and move further away from him, even as exhaustion sets in.  It’s no use.

“Now, at last, it is time,” Vecna says. “Time for my vessels to lead us to a new world. A better world.”

“Too bad your world will never exist now that Max has one of your vessels,” Will wheezes.

Vecna’s lips curl.

“There are ways to smoke a fox from its den, William.” He studies him for a long moment. “But you misunderstand my priorities.”  

Will tenses, his thrashing coming to a pause as he tries to understand what exactly he is being told by the monster in front of him.   

“Yes, Max is gone. But she is useless to me. Holly is only…temporarily unreachable. I will retrieve her.”  His gaze sharpens. “But now, I have you.”

The air seems to thicken.  

“It is your fault they escaped, William. Your power grows. That is true. So I must make you weaker.” 

Vecna’s voice drops lower. “I am going to find what it is you cherish most, and destroy it.  And in doing so, I will destroy you.”

Will feels his heart sink to the bottom of his stomach.

“No,” he mutters through clenched teeth.

“You are going to help me. One last time.” Vecna’s expression darkens further, beyond anything Will thought possible.  Slowly, he raises a clawed hand toward Will’s face. “The more you resist,” he says calmly, “the more this will hurt.”

Will trembles as the claws draw closer.  Vecna’s eyes roll back, white consuming black.

The vines tighten, and Will screams with everything he has in him.  

Pain detonates behind his eyes, and blood trickles down his cheeks as Vecna forces his way into his mind.  The room fills with the echo of Will’s cries, bouncing off living walls.  Flashes of white flood into him as Vecna digs deeper, pulling and pushing.  

Ripping his memories out of him, replacing them with his deepest fears, his darkest secrets.  

Peeling back the layers of Will’s mind, searching for what he is looking for. 

Until he stills.

A horrible, satisfied smile spreads across his ruined face, finalizing Will’s worst fear as he fades to black.

“Found you.”

Chapter Text

El tries to find Will, pushing deep into a shared space where her mind meets his, stretching until it burns.  

It doesn’t work.  No matter how hard she tries, he keeps slipping away.  

Every time El gets close, he falls through her grasp, like ice in her hands turning to liquid.

In a panic, her eyes snap open.  She rips the blindfold from her head, dragging in sharp, shaky breaths as the world slams back into focus.  Immediately, Mike is by her side, making sure she is okay while reassuring her that she will find him.  His voice cracks with urgency, with the same raw desperation from when Will first disappeared. 

When Hopper suggests El use the tank he built a few months ago to boost her signal, it makes perfect sense.

The group piles into the hearse and tear towards Hopper’s cabin.  Joyce and Hopper sit in the front while El and Kali sit besides each other in the middle row.  Mike sits in the back, with Will’s limp body rested over him, his head in Mike’s lap.  She studies Mike’s face which is tight with fear, jaw clenching, his eyes stuck on Will as if one look away might make him disappear.  He’s terrified for him.

They all are.

Soon enough, the cabin rises out of the trees and into sight.  Hopper helps Mike lift Will from the vehicle, the boy’s weight hanging heavy between them.  They carry him inside, and lay him carefully on the bed in El’s room. 

Then they move.  Eleven gets the water going and starts filling the tank.  Hopper and Mike haul in bags of salt, muscles straining as they drag them across the floor, slice them open and pour them into the tub.  Joyce stays rested besides her son in El’s room.  Eleven slips away to change into the wetsuit that Murray once smuggled into Hawkins in case of an occasion exactly like this.

She opens the bathroom door, wetsuit in hand, and stops when see Kali sitting there on the edge of the bathtub. 

“Oh. Sorry, I’ll change somewhere else,” Eleven says, stepping back to close the door. 

“No. Wait.” She sees a blue butterfly resting in Kali’s hands.  She watches it as it lifts up, and begins to flutter towards her, as if beckoning Eleven to come in.  Eleven follows it, her eyes tracing the faint veins on its wings as she steps into the bathroom and closes the door behind her. 

Eleven isn’t used to seeing powers being used like this, for the mere purpose of joy and comfort.  She hardly uses her own abilities in everyday life anymore; they’re reserved now, only for training.

For war.

Kali has traded the stiff lab clothing for a mismatched collection of borrowed things that make up El’s wardrobe—Will’s sweater, Hopper’s flannel, Joyce’s pants, maybe even something of Mike’s.  They hang loose on her small frame, oversized and imperfect, but El could tell she already feels more comfortable. 

“How are you doing?” Eleven asks her, as she takes a seat besides her on the tub.  Kali pauses, then shrugs.  El knows how overwhelming this must all be for her.  

“As good as I can be. And you?”  Eleven ponders the question for a moment, feeling its weight. Then she returns her shrug.  “As good as I can be.”  Silence settles between them, as they both sit deep in thought, about nothing, but also everything. 

“Mike seems…nice,” Kai says at last.  Eleven’s eyes narrow, just slightly.  There’s something in Kali’s tone she can’t quite pick up.  

“He is nice. He’s the best—”

“I don’t like how he calls you Eleven,” Kali interrupts.  “Or El, or whatever they all call you.  That’s not your name.  Your name is Jane.”  

That hits El hard.  

She knows it to be true, she knows that it’s hers.  But El never really minded not going by Jane.  

To her, Jane feels distant, like the shadow of a person with a life that she never got to live. Jane feels only like a possibility, an outline.  A ghost of who she may have been, not the person she is.  

And Mike, Hopper, everyone, they understand that.

“Do you love him?” Kali asks.  Her words hang heavily in the air, solid and unavoidable. 

“Yes,” El answers without a thought, almost too immediately, the word leaving her mouth on instinct.  But as she hears it spoken outloud, she notices the hint of hesitancy woven through her tone. 

Does she love Mike?  She couldn’t remember the last time she had said it to him.  Or the last time he had said it to her.  Had he even said it to her since Nevada?  Had he even had the chance?

El’s thoughts tangle in her head.  

She loves him, she has love for him, she knows she does.  But she isn’t sure what tense that love lives in.  She doesn’t really know what that word represents anymore.  It means something different then what it once did.

Since Nevada, things shifted between them.  El can count on one hand the amount of times they have been alone together in the last year and a half.  They don’t kiss.  They mostly talk.  A lot of the time, it was fine, almost normal, with Mike telling El about stuff that had happened at school, or broad conversations about the joyous things they were going to do after this was all over.  

But sometimes the conversation fractured.  Mike could tell something is off; he could see the distance growing between them.  He got frustrated when El wouldn’t open up, when she shut him out.  Once, El got really mad at him, and yelled that she has more important things to worry about than where their relationship stands.  He left in a huff, angry and hurt.  When she saw him next, they pretended the fight never happened.

Mike has always been such a precious person to her.  He was the first person who saw her as more than a weapon.

But over the past year and a half, as the distance between them grew, El discovered parts of herself she hadn’t known existed.  As she trained, she realized she liked being alone.  She liked being her own person, untethered and free from the pressure to be normal, or to live up to the unspoken superhero expectations she knew Mike had of her, even if he’d never admit it.

She liked discovering who she was, Eleven, El, or Jane, whoever, by herself.  

El has been debating to herself recently about having this conversation with Mike.  She almost did a few nights ago, when they sat on top of the Squawk, watching the sun bleed into the horizon.  Then he started talking about running away someday when this was all over, to a place with three waterfalls.  He described it like it was real, like it was waiting for them.  He looked so innocent when he said it.  So hopeful.

And she couldn't do it.  She couldn’t be the one to take any sort of hope from him.  Not now.  Not when Mike’s hope is something that the whole party leans on.

Kali watches her carefully. Understanding spreads across her face.

She doesn’t say I know.  She doesn’t have to.

But still, El finds herself unsettled by her sister’s gaze.  

She’s bothered by what Kali told her in the upside down.  She’s bothered by Kali’s insinuation that dying is the only way to ensure her blood doesn’t get used to create another Henry, and she’s bothered by the way Kali thinks she knows anything about El’s life here, or anything about Mike, and she is bothered by the simple truth that all she wants most of all is for this to be over, with her sister standing by her side. 

“I don’t agree with what you think,” El says finally, breaking the silence. “That for this to all end, we need to end, too.”

Kali pauses, weighing her words. “You know what they’re doing down there,” she says, quietly. “The lab. The upside down. You know what they’ll do if they find you.”

“Who says that they will find me?” El cuts in.  She turns on the edge of the bathtub to face her sister fully, taking both of Kali’s hands into her own.

She thinks about what Mike said, about running away to some far off land when this is all over.  She thinks about his unwavering confidence, the way that he wholeheartedly believes they’ll survive.  If he believes that it is possible, why shouldn’t she?  

She thinks of her family, Hopper, Joyce, Will, Jonathan.  Of Kali.  Of her friends.  Yes, their mission is to destroy Vecna.  And yes, the military is closing in on her.  But there has to be a way through this.  For all of them.  There has to be a way to win and still live.  To find happiness on the other side, and for her to be part of it.

Why can’t she have everything?  Who says they can’t stop Vecna, outsmart the military, and still build a life afterward?

“We have to have hope,” El says, her voice steady now.  “You have to have hope. I have hope. Because now I have you.  And we have Will.  And with the three of us, we can make sure this never happens again. Together.”

She swallows.  “We just have to get Will back first.”

Kali goes still, absorbing it.  El doesn’t let her speak before continuing.

“I believe it is possible,” she says. “Do you?”

El’s eyes search her sister’s face, pleading.  She needs her to see it, to believe that it can be done, to believe that there’s light ahead of them.  

At last, Kali lifts her head.  Something new settles into her expression, something that El hasn’t seen since Chicago all that time ago.  A newfound faith, a rediscovery of possibility.   

Her eyes catch the light as Kali nods, energy sparking back to life within her.

“I believe, too.”

***

If there is one thing Mike Wheeler could never hide, it was the fact that he was a mediocre writer at best.

His freshman-year creative writing professor had told him so himself.

Mr. Wellington was short and bald, with tiny eyes magnified by oversized glasses that made him look almost cartoonish.  He had a high-pitched voice and wore endless variations of the same plaid button-down to every one of Mike’s creative writing seminars during his first semester of college. 

When Mike received a C-plus on a short story he’d spent a month working on that he believed to be pretty goddamn epic (the goddamn epic short story in question: a battle set in the distant future where two-headed aliens attempt to take over the world), he marched right up to Mr. Wellington after class, paper in hand, demanding an explanation.  Mike was adamant its epicness and grandeur deserved at least an A-minus, a B-plus at minimum.

“Your topics are too broad,” Mr. Wellington had told him in his squeaky tone, skimming over the pages to remind himself of the assignment. “They’re too general.  Sure, aliens are taking over the world, but what does that represent? You need to learn how to write from experience, Mike. From the heart.”

Mike remembers tensing when Mr. Wellington had said that.  Easier said than done, when your ‘experience’ includes monsters, interdimensional travel, and a dead superhero girlfriend.  To any outsider, his ‘experiences’ were just as science fiction as his alien masterpiece.

But, Mr. Wellington’s words did motivate him to practice writing more so he could become better.  It had started with Mike incorporating fragments and subtle elements of his lived experiences into his school writing assignments, but very quickly those fragments had become near play-by-plays of actual conversations between friends, of specific events that had happened. 

Mike knew that the lines were getting too fuzzy, that he was beginning to tread too dangerously close to the truth within these assignments.  He knew that he had to move away completely from incorporating even metaphors of his lived experiences into his assignments, thanks to the big fat stack of NDAs the U.S. military had made him, and most of the people he knew growing up, sign in December of 1987. 

So, he started writing about his experiences just for himself.  Practice, he called it.   

When Mike had started, he had started at the very beginning—November 6th, 1983: the day Will disappeared, and the day he found Eleven.  And he wrote the events that followed as they happened in subsequent order.  

Once he started, he felt like he couldn’t stop.  He would write for days on end without break, if his body allowed him. 

Mike discovered that he had a suspiciously good memory.  He wrote in exuberant detail, like the words appearing onto the page in front of him were happening in real time as he typed them.  Maybe, somewhere, they are.  

Now, nearly two years later, Mike is halfway through his junior year fall semester, and he is only a slightly less mediocre writer than he was as a freshman.  But hey, at least his grades have improved.  The practicing paid off.  That counts for something.

He also knows that isn’t really the point.  The more he’s written over the last couple of years, the more he has found it to be a pretty helpful coping mechanism.  Writing was a way for him to help process the past, process everything that happened.  So, he writes.  A lot.    

At the end of his freshman year, Mike had saved up enough money from working part-time on campus that he could purchase himself a second-hand computer, a good one at that, to bring home to his college dorm and replace his dad’s old typewriter he had been using.  The computer helped his writing improve, big time.  Sure, it was huge and clunky, but as Mike slowly familiarized himself with the new keyboard, he became in awe at how much simpler it made the technical parts of the writing process, like being able to go back and edit his spelling errors or his accidental change of tense with such ease.  

Plus, he thinks the computer looks pretty good in his dorm and makes him feel more legitimate, no matter how much space it takes up on his desk. 

Mike had decided to stay in his freshman dorm for sophomore year, and he’d stayed there for junior year too.  Not every upperclassman got that chance, but since he worked on campus, he had the option to.  Plus, he got a rent discount from working on campus.  Not bad.

Mike likes his dorm.  He’s not the biggest fan of his roommate Johnny, a frat-boy who spends a lot of time drinking and going out, but it doesn’t really matter because he’s actually a nice enough guy and he isn’t around much.  Once, Johnny had invited Mike out with him to a frat party, and Mike had reluctantly gone after Lucas had convinced him to over the phone.  But being out and around all these people he didn’t know and, frankly, didn’t really care to know, only reminded Mike more of why he prefers being back alone in his dorm.  

Mike really likes his dorm.  He likes that his desk is propped up against the window, so he can stare out onto the college campus while pictures the details of his childhood friends in various world-saving scenarios.  He likes his various decor, the bits and pieces that he brought back with him from Hawkins after visiting for Thanksgiving, and Christmas, and for all the weekends in between and after.  He visits his parent’s house frequently, Hawkins is only an hour's drive away after all.  

He likes the WSQK sticker on his mini fridge, the ‘one way’ street sign on his wall that Eddie had convinced him to steal from Dustin’s street one night after Hellfire, the painting El had commissioned Will to make for him.  

He likes the polaroid he has taped to his wall of him, Lucas, Dustin, and Will and dressed as Ghostbusters for Halloween that one year before everything went to shit again, and another polaroid he has of him and Will taken in the summer of ‘87 taped right beside it, and the framed portrait he has of El on his desk.  It all reminds him of home.  Sometimes too much.

Mike cannot emphasize enough how much he truly loves his dorm, but sometimes it was all just too much.  Sometimes, when he reaches a painful stretch of writing and is really not doing well, he considers taking down the sign, the sticker, the painting, the pictures.  All of it.  He started to, once.  But then he got to the painting and he just felt so horrible that he would even have considered such a thing that he just traced back his steps, putting everything back where it properly belonged.  

When the WSQK sticker didn’t stick properly onto the fridge again, Mike spent the rest of his night screaming into his pillow.  Thank God Johnny wasn’t home. 

Overall, Mike isn’t doing great.

As therapeutic writing has been for him, it is also just another opportunity to drag painful memories back to the surface.  Sometimes, when he confronts the memories head-on, they start to not feel real.  This gets Mike to spiral, as he starts to question if any of it was even real, or if he is even real, before he slips back into denial, convincing himself that nothing happened in 1987, or before that, or after that.  Then he restarts his five or ten or however many different stages of grief that he had invented when all of this started.

When it all ended.

Yesterday, he finished writing about the eighteen months in Hawkins after returning from Lenora/Utah/Nevada/wherever else they went on that godforsaken road trip.  It was a period in time where reality had momentarily felt suspended.  Through his writing, Mike had realized it was the longest stretch since 1983 where nothing truly eventful happened.  Not in the supernatural sense, anyways.

He had written about what it was like when the Byers moved into his house.  How everyone developed new routines under the quarantine, once the threats of the apocalypse had died down within Hawkins.  And he realized, as he wrote about them, how much he enjoyed those routines.  

There were times, of course, where it was suffocating.  Chaotic breakfasts with far too many people sat around the table, bathrooms that were always occupied, awkward late-night encounters with Jonathan slipping in and out of his sister’s room, and spending pretty much every waking moment with Will.  

They had grown close again during those eighteen months.  Whatever weirdness that lingered from Lenora had faded quickly, and they returned to being best friends.  Will made the suffocation bearable.

Mike had also written about the rare times he saw El too.  They were limited, but mostly sweet.  If anything, it was actually pretty nice to focus his writing on something other than pain or suffering for once. 

But as he begins to write about November 3rd, 1987, for the first time since he had started this whole retelling of his childhood, Mike’s memory falters.  

He’s specifically trying to picture that morning, breakfast before school.  He remembers feeling embarrassed that he had almost barged in on Mrs. Byers using the upstairs bathroom, and he remembers sitting next to Will at the kitchen table, and he remembers arguing with Nancy about coffee, and he remembers his dad’s look of pure and utter annoyance when there wasn’t any bacon left for him, and he remembers Holly being in her own world, reading a book at the other end of the table but for the life of him, Mike can’t remember what book she was reading.

And that really, really bothers him.

He remembers all of the tiniest, most minuscule details.  How on earth was he able to picture the exact shade of turquoise Will was wearing that day, but not the book his little sister was reading the day she was taken by the demogorgon?

Mike glances away from the computer, his eyes taking a moment to adjust to the real world, as he looks around his dorm as if one familiar object might unlock the answer.

Instead, his gaze lands on the little analog clock beside his computer, and Mike realizes it’s almost ten-thirty.  He hasn’t been writing long, but it somehow feels like days.  

Then he looks at the computer screen in front of him.  It’s blank.  He’s been sitting at his desk for hours and hasn’t typed a word, too hung up on his inability to remember what his sister was reading that day.  

Hm.  This just won’t do.

He opens his desk drawer, hands rummaging around through useless pens, notepads, and forgotten graded assignments until he finds his brown leather address book.  He shuts the drawer and wheels himself over to Johnny’s desk, where his landline sits. 

Mike’s been too lazy to get his own phone.  Or too depressed.

He picks the receiver, listening to the dial tone as he flips awkwardly through his address book, finding it difficult to navigate through the different pages with just one free hand.  Finally, he finds the page that he’s looking for, and begins to dial Will’s number.   

Th line rings for a moment, then another, and then another, before being interrupted by a sound on the other end.

“Hello?”

“Will! Hey!” Mike says, almost too excitedly.

“Mike? Oh, uh, hey man. How’s it going?” If there is confusion in Will’s tone, Mike doesn’t notice it.  He’s too focused on how good the familiarity of Will’s voice feels against his ears. 

Mike can’t remember the last time they had spoken on the phone, but it hadn’t been long.  Last week, maybe?  The week before?

“Yeah, I’m good! I’m good. Listen,” Mike spins in his chair, turning towards his blank computer screen across the room.  The curled phone cord spins with him, wrapping around his body awkwardly as he does. “I’ve got a bit of a random out-of-the-blue question that I’m hoping you can help me with.”

Mike hears Will breathing on the other side of the phone.  He can almost hear him roll his eyes when he finally says, “okay. Shoot.”

And Mike can’t help but grin, at Will’s immediate acceptance, at the way he doesn’t even question it.  Will has changed a lot over the past few years, but for the better, Mike thinks.  His difference in experience probably makes him a pretty good foil to Mike (Mike knows Mr. Wellington would be proud that Mike knows that literary term).  But then again, Mike likes to think that he still knows Will better than anyone, that he's still the same kid he grew up with, that would probably follow Mike blindly into anything.    

“Okay. So,” Mike begins, twisting back on his chair to fully face Johnny’s desk, phone cord snapping back with him.  “I’ve been writing a lot lately. Just reflecting on everything that happened to us as kids, just telling the story, just for myself, just to help with…y’know.  Processing and stuff.” Mike lets out an awkward chuckle, though it’s really not all that funny.  

He’s met with silence on the other end of the line.  Mike clears his throat, and continues. 

“Anyways, I’ve written everything pretty much up to November 3rd, 1987. Setting the scene quick, just to remind ya—we’re all eating breakfast together as usual at my house before school, and Holly is reading this book, right? But for the life of me, I can’t remember what book it was. Any chance you do?” 

Will sighs into the phone as he digests Mike’s question. “God, Mike, I have no idea.”  He almost sounds disappointed, as if he had been expecting Mike to ask him something else, but Mike disregards it.  There are more urgent tasks at hand.

“Fuck!” Mike replies, almost too quickly.  He reins himself in, shifting his tone as he realizes he probably sounds a bit manic.  “I mean, uh, I remember…I just feel like it was important, somehow? Like, it had some sort of hidden message, or importance, or connection, or something…Like it meant something.” He trails off.

“Mike, I don’t remember what I had for dinner yesterday, let alone what book your sister was reading on a random day five years ago.” Mike couldn’t help but let out an agitated, “ugh!” into the phone to Will’s response. 

“Come on, Will. It wasn’t random, it was the day that the demogorgon took her. That’s a pretty significant day, I’d say.” Mike is half-expecting Will to laugh at his accidental rhyming.  He’s met instead with more silence on the other end of the line.

Frustrated, Mike begins to search through other names in his head.  Who else can he call who might know the answer to this stupid, random question, that is bothering him so much for some reason unbeknownst to him?  Holly?  She reads about thirty books a year, there’s no chance.  

Nancy?  No, she wouldn’t have noticed.  Neither of his parents would have even battered an eye, of course.  Will had always been the most attentive person in the room.  If he didn’t remember, then no one would. 

Mike decides to shake it off.  Whatever, it will come to him.  It always does.

“All good, all good. No worries, I’ll figure it out,” he says. “Anyways, how’re doin?”  he says, trying to continue the conversation, though is surprised when he is met with more silence from Will.  

Is there a bad connection or something?  Frowning, he pulls the phone from his ear to check that it’s still plugged in, then brings it back.

“Hello? Will?”

“Hi, yeah. Sorry,” Will says finally. “Uhm, things are good. Yeah, they’re good.” He sounds more governed then Mike had registered previously. “Sorry. I guess, uh, I guess I’m just a bit confused?”  

If Will is confused, Mike now is completely and utterly lost.  What is happening? 

“Confused about what?” Mike asks, as much innocence as there is questioning in his voice.  “Are you, like, good, Will?” Why is it taking Will so long to answer his questions?  Why does he keep pausing?

“Sorry, I—I’m just surprised, maybe. Surprised to hear from you, that’s all.”  

Mike is so beyond lost that it’s starting to really annoy him.  Could Will really be that pissed off—for what, not calling last week?

“What do you mean?” Mike asks, frustration starting to slip through. “We talk all the time. We literally talked like, two weeks ago.” Is Will drunk or something? 

Maybe he is, Mike decides to himself.  It’s a Saturday night afterall, and Mike knows Will is a lot more social than he is nowadays, that he likes to go out and have fun.  Which he deserves, of course.  He has lots of new friends at college, and those too, he deserves, of course.  And he is seeing someone now, apparently.  Whatever that means. 

Not like Will having a someone is bad, at all.  Mike has made it perfectly clear to Will, his friends, anyone that’s asked, that he completely supports Will and whatever it is that will make him happy.  

Will had just never mentioned it to him directly.  The someone, the boyfriend, that is.  Mike had found out about it from Dustin over the phone a while back.  Apparently they met in class and had been inseparable ever since.

Mike was happy for Will, of course he was.  And he wasn’t really surprised, or hurt, when Will hadn’t told him himself.  There had always been a sort of unspoken rule between them, that the two of them could talk freely about any topic under the sun, but they just didn’t discuss their love lives with each other.  Simple as that. 

Well.  Of course Mike had talked to him about El.  Multiple times.  Several times.  More than several.  Probably, now that he thinks about it, an annoyingly excessive amount for anyone to endure complaints about childish relationship problems that, in hindsight, weren’t really problems at all.  

And then there was that one time, when they were preparing to break into the gate in the MACZ, climb the radio tower in the Upside Down, enter the Abyss, kill Vecna and the mind flayer and blah blah blah, Mike doesn’t want to think about what happened next, or he’ll start spiraling.  

But Will had decided, for whatever god forsaken reason, that would be the perfect moment to come out to, what felt like, every single person he’s ever known.  Mike has never really understood why he did it like that, even now.  It was so, completely, unlike him.  

Not like it was Mike’s place to question how or when Will came out.  And yes, he knows he probably needs to take into better consideration the fact that Will being tormented by an evil humanoid monster who wanted to destroy the world as they knew it likely played a big part into that decision.  But to this day, Mike still thinks the whole thing felt…odd.  Out of place. 

The things he was saying during his ‘speech’ didn’t really add up to Mike, now that he was really thinking about it.  Everyone knows Melvald’s hasn’t served milkshakes since, what, the fifties?  And, when did Will ever like getting lost in the woods?  If anything, was he not traumatized from getting lost in the woods?  And he kept going on about this Tammy person, and Mike had no clue who on earth he was talking about.

Honestly, Mike had a little bit of trouble following the whole thing.  Before he knew it, he saw his friends getting up to give Will a comforting hug, and he realized he should probably be doing the same.  

Later, when they were climbing the radio tower towards the abyss, Mike had managed to catch Will alone and had brought it up briefly.  He figured they should at least talk about it, being best friends and all, though Mike realizes now his timing may have also not been the most appropriate (his timing: right before they were either going to save the world or meet their fatal end).   

Mike remembers standing there, leaning on the rusted metal rungs and overlooking the distorted version of the town he grew up in.  The sky above them was swirling into that horrible creeping red as the other world descended upon them, and he remembers having absolutely no idea what he was supposed to say to Will.  

What he did know was he wanted to make it clear to Will that who he liked, or likes, or doesn’t like, whatever, didn’t matter to Mike.  Even if he was awkward and horrible at communicating it.  Even if he wasn’t exactly great with the proper terminology, and kept awkwardly referring to it as, well, it.

So on the radio tower, Mike stumbled over his words, talking about it and not talking about it at the same time, and then made some stupid comment about how they weren’t just friends, they were best friends.

Cringe.

Even years later, Mike still physically cringes at himself every time he thinks back to that moment.

After that, the subject was quietly buried.  No more speeches.  No questions.  No discussions about love lives, about sexualities, about anything relating to that.  Just like always.

Mike’s spiraling thoughts finally grind to a halt when Will speaks again, bringing him back to current day, back to his dorm room, back to his spinny chair and the phone cord twisted around his finger and back to his phone call.

The words that come out of Will’s mouth are flat.  Stone-cold.  They catch Mike off-guard. 

From the sound of them, Mike realizes one thing very clearly: Will is unmistakably sober.

“What are you talking about, Mike?”  Mike’s breath catches when he hears Will say his name like that.  It feels unsettling.  

He’s heard that tone before.

“We didn’t talk two weeks ago, or even three or four weeks ago, Mike.” The way Will says his name is the same way he used to, right when he’s about to tell him something horrifying.

“I haven’t heard from you in over a year.” 

Chapter Text

It has been a few days since the impromptu phone call with Will, and Mike is slowly going insane.

He has tried to convince himself that surely, Will must be confused.  Mike talks to his friends, including Will, all the time, and he sees them pretty often too, considering they are scattered across the country.  There has to be some kind of misunderstanding.  Maybe Will is the one going through something.

Mike had ended the call with him that day in a hurry, almost in a panic, because he had no idea what else to say.  But his words have been gnawing in the back of his mind ever since.

The following day, Mike called his family just to make sure everything was normal.  He was nervous at first. but thankfully Holly picked up.  Within a minute she was confirming that yes, they had talked just the other week, and yes, everything was fine.  She also made a point of complaining that Mom and Dad were getting on her nerves, which felt reassuringly normal.

Mike talked to Nancy for a bit too.  She had been living back at home recently, taking a break after finishing her journalism masters while she figured out what is next for her.  Nothing about the conversation felt strange or out of place.  So at least on the family side of things, everything checked out.  

It was a relief to know he was not imagining it, that Mike really had been talking to his family and seeing them as often as he thought.  And yet, even with that reassurance, thinking about his phone call with Will makes him feel uneasy.  

The confusion of it lingers, leaving Mike with a quiet, persistent sense of something being very wrong.

After a few days of arguing with himself in silence, Mike decides to call Dustin.  Dustin is the smartest person he knows, if anyone can help him make sense of this whole situation, it’s him.  Dustin is over at MIT in Boston, because of course he is, studying engineering.  It feels exactly right for Dustin to be doing something like that, putting his genius to practical use.  If anything, the thought of it gives Mike a small, strange amount of faith in the world.

But when Mike finds Dustin’s Boston number in his address book and calls it, no one answers.

He waits a while and tries again later that day.  This time a stranger picks up, only to inform him he has the wrong number.

What the fuck?

Mike stares at the phone for a moment.  Surely he must have written the number down wrong, or maybe Dustin changed it.  Mike does not really understand it, but there has to be some perfectly reasonable explanation that he is just missing.  The same applies to his conversation with Will.

He is not ready to call Will back yet.  So he calls the next obvious person on his mental list of people to talk to when he needs a reality check: Lucas.

Mike flips through his address book until he finds Lucas’s Atlanta number.  Thank God for this address book, as the only numbers he ever had bothered memorizing were his friend’s old Hawkins home phones, not the new ones everyone picked up after moving across the country.  Sue him.

He dials.  To his surprise, a girl answers.

“Hello, Maxine speaking.”

“Max?” Mike blurts out before he can stop himself, unable to hide the surprise in his voice.

“Wheeler?” she says, the initial politeness evaporating from her tone. “What the fuck, you’re alive?”

Mike can hear the laughter in her voice as she processes…whatever it is she thinks is happening.  He rolls his eyes, forgetting she can’t see him.

He and Max have never been the closest in their friend group from home.  If anything, Max is pretty far down the list of people he wants to talk to about all this right now.

“Okay, I have no idea what you mean or why that’s so funny,” Mike hisses, already tired, “and honestly, I don’t even know why you’re at Lucas’s, but can you just pass the phone to him?”

He does not have the energy to deal with Max right now.  Sure, he finds it a little weird that she is at Lucas’s apartment, considering they broke up not long after high school, but Mike can’t find himself to care about that at this moment.  He just wants to talk to Lucas and figure out what the hell is going on with Will.  One problem at a time.

“Yeah, that’s right,” Max says, laughing again, though there is more of an edge to it now. “Of course, you wouldn’t know that Lucas and I got back together. And that we have been for, like, a year. Asshole.”

Mike feels another question mark pop into existence somewhere inside his skull.

“Because you never call,” she continues. “Or answer any of our calls.”

Mike’s head is already starting to hurt.  Max has to be messing with him, some weird, twisted joke that she and Will cooked up together for reasons Mike can’t even begin to comprehend.

“Whatever, Max,” Mike says, trying to keep the strain out of his voice and mostly failing. “I really don’t have time for whatever this is. Can you just pass the phone to Lucas?”

There is a little more desperation in his voice than he intended, and Max clearly hears it.  She goes quiet for a moment, and when she speaks again, her tone is different.

“Actually, he’s not home right now. He has a night class, sorry.”

Mike sighs heavily into the phone.

“Hey,” Max adds, more cautiously now. “Wheeler…are you doing okay?”

“It’s fine, Max,” Mike says quickly. “Just tell Lucas to call me back when he gets the chance, okay?”

“Whoa, wait a second, hold on,” Max cuts him off before he can hang up. “Look, I know we haven’t talked in a while, and yeah, you kind of disappeared on everyone, which was a pretty dick move. But are you, like, okay?”

“Yes,” Mike says immediately.  Then he pauses. “No. Actually… I have no idea.”

“Come on, Mike,” Max says gently. “You can talk to me. Are you having episodes again?”

Episodes.  That is what his friends had started calling them the first couple of years after everything happened.  Back when they were all still in high school, when Mike would sometimes lock himself in his room for days at a time, barely eating, barely talking to anyone.

While everyone else seemed to move forward with their lives, Mike had struggled to keep up.  Sometimes the weight of everything that had happened would crash down on him all at once, and he would retreat into himself, into his grief.  Those were his episodes.

“Uh, no,” Mike says awkwardly.

He knows he wasn’t a great friend during those early years after everything happened, when the episodes used to sometimes last more than a week at a time.  He still has bad stretches now and then, moments where grief creeps back in and everything feels too heavy again, but recently it has been… manageable.  At least he thought it had been.  

But what is happening to him right now?  Could this be some kind of episode?

“Yes,” he says finally, correcting himself with a sigh. “Maybe. I don’t know.”  He rubs his forehead.

Max is not the person he had planned on talking to about this.  She is not even close to the person he feels most comfortable opening up to.  Yes, they were friends, but it was always within the larger friendgroup.  Max and Mike had never really hung out one on one, and had never opened up to each other directly about personal things.  

But she does still understand things in a way most people can’t—everyone in their group went through the same nightmare, and that kind of shared experience leaves a strange kind of bond.

“I don’t know, Max,” he says quietly. “I think I might be having some kind of memory problem. Or something with time. I actually called Will the other day because I had a question about something I couldn’t remember right, and he started acting like I haven’t talked to him in years.”

He exhales slowly.

“And that kind of freaked me out. So I decided to call Lucas and see if he knew what was going on. Well. Actually I called Dustin first, to be fair. In Boston.”

“Boston?” Max repeats.

“Yeah,” Mike says. “Boston.”

There is a pause on the line. When Max speaks again, her voice sounds tight.

“Okay,” she says carefully. “I think I see what you mean about the memory issues.”

“What do you mean?”

“Dustin doesn’t live in Boston anymore,” she says. “He moved to the U.K., like six months ago.”

Mike suddenly feels nauseous.

“I… I…”

He stops.

Someone must have hit him in the head.  That has to be it.  He must have been in a coma for a year or something, like Max was all that time ago.  It is the only explanation that makes sense.  Somehow everyone else has lived an entire year without him, and he has no memory of any of it.

On the other end of the phone, Max must hear the panic in his silence.

“Hey, Mike,” she says quickly. “It’s okay. Seriously. You know what, I forgive you for not calling. It sounds like you’ve been dealing with some stuff.”

“I feel like I’m going insane,” Mike says quietly.

“Okay,” Max replies, her voice calm. “Then talk to me about it.”

So he does.

He tells her about the writing.  About how he has been spending more and more time working through everything that happened in the mid-eighties, trying to put the events down on paper in the exact order they happened.  How at first it felt helpful, therapeutic even, like finally organizing the memories might make them easier to live with.

Then he explains how he had written all the way up to November 3rd, 1987, but gotten completely stuck on a tiny detail, and how everything had started to unravel after that.

Max is quiet for a moment after he finishes.  “You know,” she says slowly, “maybe you’ve been living in your writing a little too much.”

Mike frowns slightly.

“Maybe it turned into an escape,” she continues. “Like you were spending so much time reliving the past that you kind of… lost track of everything happening in the present.”

The words settle heavily in Mike’s chest.

“So what did I miss?” he asks softly.

Max sighs.  Then she starts filling him in.

Over the next several minutes she walks him through everything that had happened over the past year.  Mike listens in stunned silence as she talks, struggling to wrap his head around how much had apparently changed without him even noticing.

How he had, somehow, disappeared from all of his friends.

Max tells him that she and Lucas got back together, that things between them have actually been going pretty well this time.  She moved to Atlanta and into Lucas’s apartment, and now she works at a small local shop instead of going to college like she had originally planned.

She talks about Dustin too.  Apparently he finished his undergrad early and got accepted into a master’s program in the U.K. Cambridge.  He moved there a few months ago, and is loving every second.

And then she talks about Will.  She says he seems happy.  Max admits she does not hear from him that often either, but still way more than she has heard from Mike over the past year.

“He’s doing good,” she says. “That’s the important part.”

Mike sits there quietly, absorbing it all.

“You know,” Max adds after a moment, “you should call him again.”

Mike blinks. “What?”

“Call Will,” she repeats. “Explain everything. I’m sure he’ll understand.”

Mike lets out a small, uneasy laugh. “I don’t know, Max. The last time I talked to him he sounded… I don’t know. Weird.”

“He sounded hurt,” she says plainly. “We all were.”

Mike doesn’t answer that.  The silence stretches for a moment before Max sighs softly on the other end of the line.

“Look, Wheeler. I’m not saying it’s going to be the easiest conversation you’ve ever had. But if you actually want to fix this whole thing, you probably need to start there.”

Mike rubs the back of his neck. “Yeah,” he mutters.

“And Mike?”

“Yeah?”

“Try not to hang up in a panic this time.”

Mike huffs out a quiet laugh despite himself.

“No promises.”

Max snorts. “Idiot.”

They say their goodbyes a minute later, and the line goes dead.  For a long time Mike just sits there at his desk, staring at the phone like it might explode if he touches it.

Call Will.

It sounds simple when Max says it.

But suddenly Mike is remembering the way Will’s voice had sounded the last time.  Calm, flat, almost distant.  Like he had already made up his mind about something.

Like he had already decided Mike wasn’t part of his life anymore.

Mike presses his palms into his eyes and groans quietly.

“Jesus Christ,” he mutters to himself.

Eventually, he reaches for his address book again.  He flips through the pages until he finds the number he had scribbled down for Will’s dorm during freshman year.  Mike hesitates, staring at it.  Then he picks up the phone. 

***

El knows that it all has to connect somehow.

Holly.  Max. Vecna. Will.

Whatever is waiting for her on the other side of this.

The thoughts spiral through her mind like a rushing river that refuses to slow, one idea crashing into the next before she can fully catch hold of it.  Nothing feels separate anymore.  Every piece is tangled together, even if she can’t yet see how.

She stands alone in the bathroom, pulling the tight wetsuit up over her body.  The material clings to her skin as she works it into place, feeling uncomfortably tight, pressing against her arms and legs, but she knows it will be better than regular clothes once she is in the water.

Still, it takes effort to breathe evenly while she adjusts it.  She looks at herself in the mirror, and sees a faint smile begin to form on her lips.  Despite everything, she feels a small thread of optimism in her chest now.  It’s fragile, but real.

Her sister is on her side.  That changes everything.

And for the first time in a while, the path forward does not feel quite so lonely.

When she opens the bathroom door and steps back into the room, Mike is standing by the tub, checking the cords and equipment, making sure everything is ready.  He looks up when he hears her enter.

She knows she has to deal with the Mike situation sooner rather than later.  She does not want his hope to grow in the wrong direction, towards a future that she has now come to realize will never exist between the two of them after this.  Not in the way that he had envisioned, at least.

His eyes land on the wetsuit as she walks toward him.  El feels the weight of his gaze, and the quiet expectation that seems to follow it.  “That looks nice. Murray find that for you?”

“Yeah,” she replies simply.

“Santa Claus has good taste.” Mike looks at her, a faint smile on his face.  When she doesn’t return it, it slowly drops.  His eyes move back to the tank, concentrated, like he is trying to funnel the thoughts moving around his head into something specific.  

“Hey, back at the Squawk…Kali, she said something weird. About this not being over, even if we kill Henry. Do you know what she’s talking about?”

“It doesn’t matter,” El interjects before Mike can say anything else, sticking her hand in the tub. “I should warm this up.” She walks away from him, over to the rusty faucet, turning it slowly to add more warm water.  

She knows she needs to talk to Mike.  The conversation is coming at some point, whether she wants it to or not.  But she is not ready for it yet.  

She knows she probably should be, yet it does not feel like the right time, or the right place.  There are too many things demanding her attention first.  Too many things that matter more right now.  Like Will.  Like getting him back.  Her focus needs to be on him completely if she is going to find him.  And Mike’s focus needs to be there too.

The rest can wait.

“Ok, well, if it doesn’t matter, then why was Hop so angry?” Mike pushes, not satisfied.  She sighs.  He is not going to make this easy for her.

“It’s nothing Mike, really.”

“Friends don’t lie.”

“I’m not lying.”

Mike throws his hands up in frustration. “You’re avoiding. That’s a cheat. I just want to help.”  

A pain of guilt hits her in the chest.  A part of her wonders if she should just be completely honest with him now and get it over with, like ripping off a bandaid.  But she pushes it back down.  Now is not the time.  

“You can’t help, not with this,” she says plainly.  

“Let me be the judge of that.” Mike urges.  He is making this really difficult.  El sits down on the edge of the tub, the wetsuit pulling tightly at her shoulders and knees.  

She can talk to Mike later, about them, where they stand, and what comes next.  But that conversation can only happen after she finds Will.  

Right now, Will is the only thing that matters.  If they want to have any hope in defeating Vecna, she knows she needs Will, standing besides her and Kali, to do that.

“El, come on,” Mike pleads now.  She turns her head toward him but keeps her eyes lowered, tracing the faint cracks in the tile instead of meeting his gaze.

If Mike is not going to let this go, if he is being so adamant about her telling him the truth, then she needs to at least give him something else. 

“There’s a lab in the upside down,” she says finally, releasing a heavy sigh. “They’re restating papa’s program. Trying to make new numbers.”

Mike exhales slowly as he sits down besides her on the edge of the tub. 

“The military?” 

She nods, watching him carefully as his shoulders slump forward.  

“Ok, so, after we kill Vecna, we destroy this new lab,” he thinks out loud, “end the program, like a little side quest.” 

If only it were that simple.

El shifts on the tub now, turning her body so she is fully facing him, finally lifting her eyes to meet his.

“Mike, no, you don’t understand.” She knows she needs to be fully honest with him, about this, at least.  That it’s not going to be that easy.  That they still have a long, scary road ahead of them.

“They don’t need a lab to make new numbers. Henry’s blood. It’s in me,” El explains. “I’m not a monster, I know that now. But with me, with my blood, they can make more monsters, they can make more Henrys.” 

Realization spreads across Mike’s face as he digests El’s words, the impact hitting him like a punch to the gut.  He sits with it for a moment, turning over his thoughts carefully.  

“The military will always be looking for you,” he says as soon as the words come. “We’ve always known that. Which is why we aren’t staying in Hawkins. When this is all over, we’re leaving. Escaping to some far off land, remember? Somewhere where they can’t find us. Somewhere where there’s at least…one waterfall?” The word ‘waterfall’ rises slightly at the end, turning a sentence into a question, asking El to confirm that she’s still aligned with his plan. 

It’s like Mike has been holding onto this fantasy of running away together because it gives him some sort of end goal to aim at.  Something concrete and visual to work towards, amid all this uncertainty.  Because El knows, deep down, that her feelings aren’t one-sided.  Even if Mike hasn’t realized it himself yet.    

This goal of his, this fantasy, is just that: a way for him to make sense of the unknown.  It’s a safe ground, a world where everyone makes it out of this nightmare unscathed and unharmed. 

That is the future Mike is really chasing, El thinks.  He has just needed to put a plot to it, for it to seem less ambiguous and more tangible.  

“Mike, this isn’t like one of your campaigns.” She places her hand on his cheek softly. “You don’t get to write the ending. Not this time.”

He holds her gaze, and El can’t help but notice how small he seems, his sad eyes and slight pout making him look almost fragile.  Mike’s face had changed the older he’s gotten, becoming sharper and more concentrated, but right now, he looks as soft as he did when El first saw him.

Then he shifts.  The pout softens, something steadier creeping in, like he’s starting to untangle what’s beneath her words: that the future he imagined, this fantasy, is bigger than just the two of them.  It’s a quiet understanding, tentative but there.

Does he fully grasp it?  El can’t tell.  Maybe not fully, not yet.  But it’s something.

She feels a level of closeness, of mutual understanding, finally begin to spark between them.  It’s been forever since she has felt that sort of connection with Mike, where she didn’t have to speak in order to explain herself to him.  

“Maybe I don’t,” Mike says, voice low, as El slowly withdraws her hand from his cheek. “But we do,” he says steadily.  “You, me, Lucas, Will and Dustin.” 

A weight lifts off El’s chest when Mike mentions their friends.  It’s a quiet confirmation that his fantasy, their plan for when this is all over, is no longer about just the two of them.  

That maybe, it’s never been about the two of them after all. 

“Because this is our story,” Mike says, sealing El’s feelings into place like the final strike of a hammer on a nail.  “And it starts with getting Will back.”

***

The sound of the phone dialing feels slower than usual, Mike thinks.  Each number presses into place with a soft mechanical click.  The sound echoes around his quiet dorm room.

Ring.

Mike immediately regrets everything.

Ring.

Maybe Will won’t answer.

Ring.

That would actually be ideal.

Ring.

Then the line clicks.

“Hello?”

Mike freezes at Will’s voice.  It sounds exactly the same as it always has, exactly how Mike was used to.  Soft, steady.  Just a little tired around the edges.  For a second Mike completely forgets the speech he had been mentally preparing.

“…Hey,” he finally says. 

There is a short pause, then “Mike?” Something about the way Will says his name makes Mike’s stomach twist.

“Yeah,” he says quickly. “Yeah, it’s me.”

Another pause.  Mike can practically hear Will thinking on the other end.

“Is everything okay?” Will asks.

The question is careful and polite.  It feels distant, like how you would speak to an acquaintance, not your best friend of over 15 years.  Mike hates it.

“Not really,” Mike admits.  Will doesn’t say anything. 

“I talked to Max today,” Mike continues, twisting the phone cord around his finger nervously. “And apparently I’ve been… M.I.A.  Like, I’ve just disappeared on you, on everyone, for a year.” Mike continues forward before Will can respond.

“I mean not literally missing, obviously. I’ve been here. I’ve just been… writing. A lot. And I guess when I was writing, I kind of lost track of time or something. I don’t know, it sounds insane when I say it out loud.” It does sound insane when he says it out loud.  Insane, and incredibly stupid.  Mike grips the phone cord tighter.

“Max said I stopped reaching out. That I didn’t answer calls. That everyone thought I just… left them.”

The words feel heavier the longer he talks, and the longer Will remains silent.

“I didn’t mean to,” Mike says quietly. “I swear.”

Another pause, and then Will finally speaks.

“I know.”

Mike blinks.

“You do?”

“Yeah.”

Will’s voice is softer now.  Not cold like it was the last time they spoke, but it has still yet to fully return to its lukewarm resting state. 

“You kind of do that sometimes, Mike. Do you not remember the last two months of highschool?”

Mike winces.  He does, unfortunately, remember, but not vividly.  His episodes had been especially bad during that time.  Maybe it was the looming reality of graduating highschool and having to move on with his life, or maybe it was the simple notion that El would never get that chance to graduate, even if she had been able to live a normal life and finish school alongside them.  

Whatever the reason, Mike had retreated deep into himself during those months.  He skipped a lot of classes and hardly spoke to any of his friends.  For a while, it felt like he’d simply disappeared from everything.

Honestly, he still isn’t sure how he managed to graduate, let alone keep his college acceptance.  He likes to think a few teachers were quietly looking out for him.  Or his friends, vouching for him.  The same friends that he disappeared from during those two months.

Just like he had done so for the past year, apparently.

“Yeah,” Mike mutters. “I recall.”

There is a faint exhale on the other end of the line—Will finally breaking.  Mike prepares for the worst of it. 

“I thought at first, that you were having another episode like that. I was worried sick about you,” Will says, voice wavering. “The fourth week in a row you didn’t call me back, I actually dialed up your mom in Hawkins to make sure you were okay.” 

That hits Mike harder than he expected. 

“Imagine how much it sucked to hear from your Mom that oh, you were actually completely fine! Imagine how much it sucked to come to the realization that, no, nothing was actually wrong with you. You just got tired of your friends.” 

That hit Mike doubly as hard.  

“That’s not true,” Mike says automatically, but it’s not enough. “I’m sorry,” he says right after.  

He doesn’t know what he can even say to Will.  He has no proper explanation or excuse as to why or how he disappeared for a year, but apparently he did.  Even if he didn’t even realize he did when it was happening.

“I’m sorry, Will,” he doubles down, voice breaking as his name leaves his lips. “I think I’ve been having some sort of memory loss. Or a time management problem. I don’t know how to explain it, really, other than…it’s like…I don’t know.  It’s like, one day I woke up, and I hadn’t spoken to any of you for a year. I didn’t mean to, and I know it doesn’t solve anything, and it’s not an excuse, not really, but I’m really, really sorry.”  

Mike is well-aware that he is rambling, but he doesn’t care.  He just needs Will to understand that there was no part of him that consciously pushed him away like that, that ignored him and all of his friends for the last year on purpose. 

“I’m sorry I didn’t call.”  

Will doesn’t respond right away.

Mike shifts in his chair, the phone cord wrapped tightly around his finger, almost cutting off his circulation.  He continues talking, because the one thing he can live with even less than Will being this upset at him, is the silence. 

“So… Max told me some stuff,” he says cautiously. “Brought me up to speed a little bit. About Dustin moving. About her and Lucas getting back together.”

“Yeah,” Will finally says.

“And about you,” Mike says, jumping on the opportunity. 

Another pause.  Mike stares at the wall.  He feels his brain is going to explode. 

“She said you’re doing good,” Mike swallows, still refusing to sit in silence if he can have anything to do with it.

“I am,” Will replies.

“That’s good.”

More silence settles between them. 

Mike clears his throat, preparing to keep the conversation going, trying to draw anything further out of Will that he possibly can.  The longer he keeps him talking, the better his chances of breaking through.  Not that Will doesn’t have every right to be angry with him.  But selfishly, Mike just wants Will to forgive him.  He wants his best friend back.

“Hey,” Mike started, clearing his throat. “I-“

“Wrinkle in Time,” Will interrupts him before he can continue.  Mike chokes on his words.

“What?”

“The book Holly was reading, the day she got taken by the demogorgon.  It was A Wrinkle in Time.”

Mike lets Will’s words settle, turning over them in his mind as he digests them.  

And slowly, a faint smile tugs at the corner of his mouth as the familiarity begins to return.  Mike can’t help it.  It’s not because he finally has the answer to his stupid memory problem, either.  

No matter how much time passes, some things will never change.

Will has never been able to lie to him, after all.

***

El feels the chill of the tub the moment her toes touch it, the cool porcelain pressing against her palm of her feet as she lowers her legs into the water.  The temperature of the water itself is manageable, but the surface of the tub hasn’t fully heated yet.

It doesn’t matter.  Soon her whole body will be submerged, every inch of her floating in the water instead of touching any hard surface.

Kali, Mike, Hop, and Joyce stand around the tub, watching as El slowly lowers herself further until she’s fully seated in the water, her knees just peeking above the surface.  One of her hands rests on the edge of the tub, and Joyce gently takes the other in hers.

“Thank you,” she says, holding tightly to the only hope she has to save her son.  El looks at the woman she has grown to know and love so deeply.  Joyce looks much the same as she did when El first met her—a kind, calm face that always seemed to hide a deeper worry beneath the surface.  The lines around her eyebrows are a little deeper now, the circles under her eyes darker, but she’s still the same.  

“I will find him. I bring him home,” El nods solemnly.  Saying the words out loud helps convince herself they’re true—that she will find Will.  The promise steadies her, filling her with the confidence she needs.

Joyce nods too, reassurance softening her expression.  

El looks past her then, to Mike.  For the first time she notices how tired he looks.  Worn down, like the world has been hitting him with one thing after another.  It shows in the way he stands, the heaviness in his posture.  

But on his face there’s a new form of determination, unmatching to his body language.  As if what they had talked about earlier, and everything left unsaid, had helped him come to some realization of his own.  And it’s a good kind of realization, El thinks.  The kind where he believes that, even if the plans change, everything will still work out for them in the end.  And El starts to believe it herself. 

She turns her gaze to Hopper, her father.  Whatever frustration he’d felt earlier toward her or Kali seems to have faded.  Now he seems more confident, matching Mike’s expression of determination with a sly, knowing smile tugging at the corners of his mouth.  Maybe he and Kali talked, maybe she had the chance to explain herself to him.  El makes a mental note to ask them about it later—after this.  After she finds Will.

Then she looks at Kali, the last person in the room.  Kali smiles at her, an expression written across her face that says: you’ve got this. See you on the other side.

El smiles back.

See you on the other side.

Hopper quickly runs through the safety protocols they had set months ago, but had yet to actually execute.  El already knows them, but she lets him explain them to her anyway.

Before she knows it she’s floating in the tank, her body lifting away from every surface, suspended only by the dense salt water.  The lid lowers slowly above her.

Darkness.

Chapter Text

The void is a strange place. 

Endless, depthless, without edge or ceiling.  Sound doesn’t behave, with echoes that should strike walls dissolving into nothing.  It allows no light, and yet sometimes, something flickers—a random object surfacing from nowhere, catching a glint that has no source.

As Eleven steps carefully through the never-ending shadows, she begins to make out something in the darkness.  It is a bed.  Her bed, at Hopper’s cabin.  Will lies stiffly on top of the covers, pale and eyes closed, his chest rising shallowly as if each inhale requires the utmost effort to even slightly fill his lungs. 

She quickens her pace, rushing up to him and crouching down besides the bed, speaking his name.

“Will, I’m here. I need you to show me where you are,” and, again, as if repeating her words will help him hear them, “show me where you are.”

She hears them before she sees them.

A wet, sliding sound.  Slow and deliberate.

Then the vines emerge, slithering from every direction and twisting at impossible angles.  They move past El, spilling over the bed first, then start climbing Will’s body.  They coil around his limbs and chest, tightening, until he is less boy and more outline beneath something living.  The vines continue to stretch outward, multiplying, weaving over everything until the dark itself seems to have texture, until the void rearranges around them, constructing a scene in front of her.

Will’s limp body is held up against a wall, the vines wrapped tightly around him so only his face remains visible.  Blood streaks down from his closed eyes in messy lines down his face.  

The wall is part of a larger room, resembling a version of the Creel house in the upside down.

Eleven stands up from her crouching position and outstretches her right arm, channeling her energy through it in an attempt to release the pressure of the vines off of Will’s body with her mind.  They don’t budge.  

In defeat, she steps closer to him, avoiding stepping on the vines where she can.  With a delicate hand, she reaches out tenderly to touch his red-stained cheek.

The moment she makes contact with his cold skin, her neck whips back with a sharp snap, as if an invisible force had yanked down on her hair from below with full force.  Her vision clouds, her irises disappear and her eyes turn fully white. 

And suddenly, she’s no longer in the vine-covered Creel house in Will’s mind.  She is somewhere else entirely. 

***

After a few-day hiatus that had felt like a lifetime in its own accord, Mike is finally able to start writing again.  He picks his story back up on November 1st, 1992, right where he left off, describing November 3rd, 1987.

He doesn’t even notice that he’s writing about five years ago, nearly to the exact day.  Not at first.  He’s too caught up in it, relieved to finally be back in it again to notice.

It was all thanks to Will.  The simple reminder of the book Holly was reading jogged Mike’s memory perfectly, and suddenly the block was gone.  He slips back into it like he had never stopped, replaying the day scene by scene in his head and onto his computer exactly as it happened, exactly as he remembers it.

It is, however, taking him much longer than usual to write about this day.  Hell, it’s almost taking him as long to write about the morning of November 3rd as it took him to write about the entire month prior.  

Because the month prior, October of 1987, nothing eventful had really happened.  Nothing supernatural, Mike corrects himself.  Other stuff had happened, that he had written about in great detail, too.  But writing about day-to-day life was far less complex, and it came to him with greater ease, because he was writing a lot about Will.  

Since all of his time that October, just like the months prior, was spent with Will.  So, obviously Will was written about a lot.  

And Will was just so easy to write about.  It was so easy to write about their friendship at that time, restored and fulfilled to its greatest potential.  About how comfortable Mike felt around him then.  How he never had to think too hard about what to say or how to act, because Will just understood.  

Somehow he always had.  

Those eighteen months had been full of that kind of quiet understanding, and putting it onto the page came naturally.

Writing about El during that same time had been harder.  Their interactions had been scattered, uncertain, paralleling the status of their relationship.  

But he doesn’t like to think about that too much, or linger too long on those details when he writes about them.

He doesn’t enjoy the process of writing down the uncomfortable memories when it comes to El.  He much prefers to preserve the ones he has of her as something clean, something perfect and untouchable.  

But the truth is, their time together during those months had been so limited that there simply wasn’t much to record.

Will, on the other hand, had been constant.

Will was there every day.

If El had been like a leap day—rare, fleeting, something that only came around once in a long while—then Will had been the other three hundred and sixty-five days of the year, steady and present and impossible to ignore.

And Will was just so easy to write about. 

He writes down little things about him, the fleeting details he isn’t sure anyone else notices, at least not in the same way Mike does.  Things he isn’t even sure Will notices about himself.  The small moments about him, who he was during that time and the way he acted, that stuck with Mike.  The little habits and quirks that made up the human, his best friend, most commonly known as Will Byers. 

Such as: how, in the early mornings before school when he wasn’t fully awake yet, Will’s eyes would hover in that in-between state for nearly an hour—not closed, but not fully open yet.  It was as if he was testing the waters, not quite ready to embrace the day, but wanting to make sure he didn’t miss a thing. 

Or: during that time, how Will started listening less and talking more.   Mike may have benefitted from doing the opposite, but for Will, it was actually a positive thing.  Will had always been the quietest one in their friend group, but during those months in limbo, he finally started to find the confidence to say how he felt out loud. 

Also: the low-key Coca-Cola addiction he had randomly developed over those months.  Access to Coke, like most branded products during the quarantine, was limited.  But one time, when Mike and Will had stopped by the hospital after school to visit Max, they had stumbled upon a forgotten stash meant for a broken vending machine.  While Mike much preferred a black coffee, Will said he didn’t like the taste and insisted that it made him too jittery, which was funny, because after two sips of Coke he’d be practically bouncing off the walls.  It was never anything too crazy though, because, well, it was Will.  His most hyper state was comparable to Mike’s resting state.     

And one more, for good measure: how, when Will’s trying to think of something to say, his eyes always turn upwards, scanning the ceiling or the sky as if something from above holds the words he is looking for.  Like he’s searching for hidden prompts on a teleprompter that are waiting to be read aloud. 

Mike wonders if all those things are still true about Will now.

He wrote about everyone else as well, of course.  He was just able to write about Will during those months in greater detail because, well, he was around him every waking moment.  And, as much as Will was just easy to write about, Mike found that he actually liked writing about Will the most.  

But November 3rd was different—it was the day everything started to fall apart.  And every single specific detail from that day matters.  Every small moment, every realization, every decision ultimately led to the events that unraveled two days later.  Unlike the months before it, full of general descriptions of easy conversations and good feelings, November 3rd requires the utmost, exact percision. 

So, when Mike writes to around the 1:00pm timestamp and realizes he can’t remember what happens next that day, he’s just about ready to bash his head into his keyboard.

How, how was this already happening to him again?  Aside from Holly’s little book detail from the same morning, he had remembered everything else perfectly fine, up until he was sitting in the high school cafeteria with Lucas, Dustin and Will, decoding Robin’s secret message communicated to them over the WSQK radio station about that night’s crawl.

And then…what?

The rest of the afternoon is blank.  A smear in his memory.  The next thing he truly remembers clearly is being in the watchout tower with Lucas, overlooking the military in the MAC-Z.  One moment he’s rolling his eyes at Lucas’s obnoxiously loud gum-chewing, and the next they are being radioed that a demogorgon was on its way to his house, heading straight for his little sister.  

Mike shivers at the thought.

The first time that anyone in his family (besides Nancy, of course) had come face to face with anything from the upside down.  After everything Mike and Nancy had done to shield them from it for so many years.

That part will be hard to write about, Mike suspects.  But he’ll deal with it when the time comes.  He’s not even there yet.  

Right now, he needs to figure out what happened leading up to that. 

Mike drops his forehead onto the desk with a dull thud.

How is it possible that, now, he can’t remember such a huge stretch of time?  Hours?  Important hours?   

Almost on instinct, Mike pushes his chair back and rolls across the room.  He reaches for the phone, picks it up, and dials Will’s number without a second thought.

Will answers after the first ring.

“Hello?”

“Hey, it’s me.”

“Oh. Hey.”

Like clockwork. 

There’s less stiffness in Will’s voice now, replaced with something more familiar.  Mike is relieved to hear it.  

After Will told him the name of Holly’s book the other night, Mike had apologized to him about a hundred more times and tried to explain himself a little better.  Will had listened to him calmly, carefully.

He isn’t sure Will has fully forgiven him, for ghosting him for the good part of a year.  But at the very least, they ended their call the other night with Will seeming open to the idea of forgiveness.  And now, he still hasn’t hung up the phone yet, and for the moment, that’s enough.  

Especially when Will’s ability to fill the gaps in Mike’s memory might be the only thing that keeps him from losing his mind entirely. 

“Hows’it going?”  Mike asks, dragging the words as if that might somehow make up for not being able to think of anything more interesting to ask.  As usual, Mike fidgets with the phone cord, weaving it through his long fingers like a spool of yarn.  He shuts his eyes tight.

“Pretty good, actually,” responds Will, not missing a beat. “I came back from the library not too long ago, finished up this essay I needed to get done, and now I’m just doing some painting. What ‘bout you?”    

Mike's eyebrows flicker upwards and he opens his eyes, surprised at Will’s levelness.  He sounds like himself again, like the regular old Will, not the one who’d been upset with Mike for falling off the face of the earth.  Thank God.

Grabbing the opportunity, Mike brushes past Will’s question and asks eagerly, “you’re painting again?”

“Yeah, I—yeah. Well, sorta. I picked it up a few months ago and was struggling to keep it up. But recently, I dunno. It’s like it’s been calling to me again.”

Mike didn’t know that.  He had thought Will had given up painting, drawing, or creating any sort of art for good, after everything that happened.  Which was sad, because Will was really talented.  

Mike turns his chair around to face his side of the room, to look at the painting Will had given him in Lenora, pinned to his wall.  It was so creative, so imaginative, even if the idea hadn't been his.  Mike gets easily lost in the details of the red dragon and his friends as their D&D alter egos every time he finds himself looking at it.  It was everything.

Will had said previously he’d just lost interest in his art, but Mike knew that wasn’t true.  After everything, all of his friends each had their own forms of grief, of ‘episodes,’ of poor coping mechanisms, even if they weren’t as toxic as Mike’s.  That had been Will’s.

“That’s great!” Mike exclaims, not even trying to hide his overeagerness. “What have you been painting?”

Will pauses, just for a second. “Well, uh, actually. I’m painting stuff from my memories.  They’re conceptual, mostly, but it represents stuff that happened five years ago. You inspired me, actually.”

Mike's brows furrow. “What?”

“Yeah, your writing.  You said that it helped you with processing…and stuff.  And I’ve just been thinking a lot about everything recently, too.  With it coming up again soon, and all that.”

“With what coming up?” Mike asks plainly.  Will takes a beat to answer, and Mike begins to wind the phone cord around his index finger as he waits.  He can hear the chatter of people walking by outside of his dorm room, so he presses the phone speaker tighter to his ear to block out the noise. 

“You know. November 6th. It’s almost been five years, to date.” There is silence for a moment, as Mike tries to wrap his head around the words.  He turns around in his chair to face Johnny’s desk again, and the calendar he had stuck to his wall.  Today was the first of November.  It was true.

“Wow. Shit. I didn’t even realize,” Mike murmurs softly, his mouth almost brushing the speaker as he rests his head into the phone.

Half a decade.  Half a decade of his life had gone by, and what did Mike have to show for it, really?  Half a decade has gone by, and Mike is still sitting in his dorm room, writing about things that happened half a decade ago.  

Five years since it all ended.  Which also means, nine years since it all started; the day Will was taken.  

“It’s kinda fucked up, isn’t it?” Mike says, staring at the calendar.

“Yeah. Pretty fucked up,” Will sighs in return. “Time is weird.”

Mike can’t help but let out a low chuckle. “Tell me about it.”

Will changes the subject.

“So how’s your writing going, then?  Got any more memory blanks you need filled in?  That is why you called, yeah?”  

Mike chokes on a gulp of air.  He had been trying to bury the lead, but still, Will knows him too well.  

“Yeah…well initially, yeah. Sorry. But it shouldn’t be.” 

“It’s okay, Mike.  You know, if we didn’t live states away from each other, we’d probably just be hanging out and talking about it in-person.”

Mike releases the phone cord from around his finger and drums lightly on Johnny's desk.  States away is a bit of an exaggeration—Will’s only in Philly, after all.  Mike had driven to visit him before, early into their college years, when Will had invited him, Lucas, and Dustin for a weekend.  Leaving from his college town near Indianapolis, Mike had only had to pass through Ohio. Ok, maybe a brief stretch through West Virginia too, but still, that was it. 

Sure, it wasn’t the quickest drive, just under 10 hours, but it was only an hour longer than the drive to visit Lucas in Atlanta.  Driving to Boston though, to visit Dustin, had been a much longer trek.  But now, he can’t even drive to Dustin, with him being in England and all. 

He’s wondered before, what life could have looked like if they’d all lived closer for college, or even gone to the same school.  Mike likes to think it would have been fun.  Maybe he would have been roommates with Will for the first year, and then the four of them would have rented one of those shitty college houses together for the rest of it.  

He knows college is the time for meeting new people, and his friends have done that, but Mike still feels the best people he’s ever met are the ones he knew before the age of twelve. 

Mike rubs his face.  He still hasn’t spoken to Dustin and Lucas.  He knows he needs to make up for his year-long disappearance to them too, but one thing at a time.  Talking to Max on the phone had been a lot on its own, and now he’s focusing on Will.  

One thing at a time.   

Pushing the thoughts down, Mike murmurs into the phone. “You think?

He’s still surprised at how normal Will sounds—any hint of disappointment or uncertainty in his tone almost gone.  Mike almost feels bad.  He’d been a shitty friend, he literally didn’t talk to WIll for a year.  And now, just as their friendship is back on the mend, the only reason he calls is because he needs something.

Selfish idiot. 

And yet, despite everything, WIll is willing to set it aside, to help him and to talk to him again.  Sure, they’re not 100% back to normal, which Mike hadn’t expected anyway, but right now it feels like a solid 70%.  A little awkwardness lingers, but not nearly as much as he’d feared.  He had expected it to be much harder, expecting Will to put up at least a little bit more of a fight before finally giving in.  He’d expected their friendship to stall around the 40% normalcy mark for at least a bit longer. 

“I mean, yeah,” acknowledges Will.  “That’s what we used to do all the time, wasn’t it?  Talk, figure things out, together?

A flashback quickly flickers through Mike’s mind, fleeting but vivid: the two of them, sitting together in Will’s room in Lenora.  

“Looks like it's up to us again.”

“It always is, isn’t it?”

Yeah.  It is. 

“So, hit me,” Will says, breaking Mike out of his momentary reflection. “What’s the little detail you’re stuck on, this time?

A soft laugh escapes Mike’s throat.  He starts rubbing the back of his neck with his free hand.  

“It’s more than a little detail.  It’s…a whole afternoon?  I can’t remember what happened after lunch that day—the same day I asked you about Holly’s book.”

He hears a chuckle on the other end of the line.

“What? You’re still writing about November 3rd?  Shit, you’re a slow writer!”

“Am not!” Mike huffs.

“I’ve finished, like, three whole paintings since we last spoke.”

“Well sorry that we’re not all artistic proteges,” Mike mocks lightly, throwing his hand up in defense even though he knows Will can’t see him. “The magic takes a bit more time to develop for some of us, sorcerer.”  He can practically hear Will roll his eyes on the other end of the line at the nickname.  

It had started as a one-off comment back in junior year of high school, and stuck.  Before long it had turned into an ongoing inside joke, one reserved only for Will’s closest friends.  It turned into a game—Dustin, Lucas, Max and Mike taking turns slipping it into random conversations.  They would see how many times they could absurdly reference Will as ‘the sorcerer’ without anyone else catching on, like in the middle of class, around people who had absolutely no idea what they were talking about.  As much as Will had acted annoyed and told them to stop, Mike knew better that it made him a special kind of giddy every time they did it. 

“Okay,” Will says, and Mike could tell he was smiling. “Time to put this magic to good use, then. Let’s talk through the rest of the day.”

So they do.

***

Eleven feels the light against the outside of her eyelids before she sees anything.  Blinking rapidly to adjust to the brightness, she opens her eyes. 

Sun is pouring through the open gaps of nearby tree branches, speckling on her skin like spots on a cheetah.  The morning air feels fresh, somehow both damp and crisp at the same time.

She hears the echoes of children laughing, shouting.  She sees a one story building made of brick, and in front of it, a small playground.  A merry go wheel.  A swing set. 

She recognizes this place.  She’s outside of Hawkins elementary. 

She walks cautiously towards the swing set and notices a little boy, no older than five, swinging back and forth by himself.  Eleven watches as he stretches his little legs towards the ground, struggling to reach, in an attempt to push off against it and give himself the momentum needed to sustain a swinging motion.  

It takes her a moment to recognize him, and she finds humour in the fact she didn’t identify his signature haircut sooner.

Will. 

She releases a deep, burdening sigh. 

She never knew him like this.  So innocent, his biggest struggle being too small to gain proper momentum on a swing.  Untouched by the darkness that would eventually take over his life, swallowing him whole and shaping him forever. 

From the corner of her eye, she sees another boy around the same age approach the swing set. His face was much softer than the angular features he would eventually grow into, the black mop of hair on his head far less contained, but the familiar, unwavering confidence in his step maintained over the years made Mike unmistakable.

She watches as young Mike takes a seat on the empty swing, turning towards Will.

“Do you want to be friends?” Mike asks the smaller boy tenderly.  Will nods, a smile creeping across his face.

Then suddenly, dense mist swirled around her, evaporating and disappearing the scene in front of her, changing the setting to someplace else.  A place she knows like the back of her own hand.

She was in Mike’s dimly lit basement.  She looks around at the familiar setting: the couches where El and her friends spent countless nights sitting upon watching movies, the corner where Mike had hid her the day he went off to school after they first met, the table where the boys play their game that, as much as Eleven tries to, she could never really understand.  The smell, though as musty as ever, was comforting to her.

She looked back at the table and noticed Will and Mike, sitting there, playing together, laughing, their emotions pure and honest.  

Then the scene changes again, and this time, Will is with a younger-looking Joyce, showing her a picture he drew.  She watches as Joyce reacts, slightly dramatically but incredibly sweetly at her son’s artwork, grins on both their faces matching the one El has plastered across her face as she observes them.  As she steps closer, she realizes she has seen that drawing before: an impressively well-coloured graphic of a spaceship that had been stuck to the Byers’ fridge with magnets, in both Hawkins and Lenora.   

That’s when it hit her. 

She wasn’t just in Will’s mind.  She was in his memories.

As the realization struck, mist appeared once more, presenting a new setting: Mike and Will, again in Mike’s basement.  They were sitting at the table playing together, just the two of them. El watches fondly as Mike enthusiastically explains the rules to a new game that was laid out on the table in front of them.  Mike rolls a D20 die back and forth between his hands as he rambles, clearly too excited to explain the game well.  Will was nodding along, but obviously struggling to follow, his brows furrowed.  Instead of getting frustrated, this just seemed to fuel Mike more, as he began to demonstrate the game methodically by acting out the different characters in a way that made Will’s eyes sparkle.

The scenes begin to change again, more quickly this time.

Will dressed up in a purple robe and wizard hat, waving a makeshift wand around as he frolicked outside, bouncing around with only the energy a boy under the age of ten could have.

Mike and Will, navigating the trials and tribulations of first grade.  Mike pretending to fall asleep at the desk in front of him, and Will laughing so hard that the teacher had to separate them for the rest of the class.

A young Jonathan, helping Will build Castle Byers in the forest outside of their Hawkins home.

Mike and Will, meeting Lucas for the first time, a cautious expression painted across Will’s face as Mike invites him into their party.  She watches a similar scene unfold with Dustin.  But Will’s  caution was quickly replaced with a look of pure joy in the next scene of the four boys playing D&D together in Mike’s basement for the first time.

El watches as the memories play back, unfolding before her as if she was an audience member to a film reel of an epic home movie: The Story of Will Byers. 

The Wonderful Adventures of Will the Wise.

Byers’ Strikes Back. 

The Return of the Cleric. 

The Sorcerer.   

Will was a reflection of herself, in so many ways.  

And somewhere inside this story, he’s waiting to be found.

So El keeps watching.

Chapter Text

The calls between Mike and Will begin to happen daily.  Mike calls him, even when he hasn’t forgotten anything.

Things feel almost normal again, and with that, the uneasy feeling Mike’s memory loss had initially given him starts to fade.  If anything, Mike is now almost grateful for his random missing memories, because it gives him another excuse to call Will.  

It’s nice talking to him.  Mike likes listening to Will’s voice describe moments and situations from his own perspective.  It’s interesting too, the little things Will mentions, the small details that Mike had completely missed himself when he was living through it.

They talk about other things now, too, about their lives in the current day.  It isn’t too specific, at least not on Will’s end.  Mike, on the other hand, goes into detail.  He has nothing to hide, afterall, his life is pretty uneventful.  He talks about his school assignments, what he had for dinner, and complains about how Johnny leaves his clothes scattered all over his side of the room, and they sit like that for days because he is literally never home.

Will talks about school, his painting, and other things of the sort, but it feels like he is holding back.  Mike knows he is.  He knows Will’s life is a lot more interesting than his is, and a lot more interesting than he is making it out to be.  Will has a social life, he has lots of friends, is in a full-on relationship, even.  But he never goes into specifics about any of it.

Mike doesn’t care, not really.  He can tell Will is doing it to spare him, to avoid making Mike feel bad about his own uneventful life, and he appreciates that.  He wishes Will didn’t feel like he had to, but it also makes sense that he still has his walls slightly up after Mike had abandoned him for a year.  Their friendship is healing, but it’s not what it used to be, not yet anyways, and Mike gets that.  

Honestly, he is just happy they’re talking again, and making progress.  And his writing is making progress, too.

The day is now November 4th, 1992, and Mike is now writing about the same day, five years prior: November 4th, 1987.  

He is relieved to finally be writing about a new day, even though it didn’t have the greatest start.  In fact, writing about the end of the night on November 3rd and into the early hours of the 4th had been horrible.  About finding his parents in his childhood home struggling for their lives after Holly was taken.  The furniture in the house he had grown up in, ripped up and destroyed.  The blood soaking into the floor.  Him and Nancy in the hospital waiting for the possible news that, in any second, they could lose both their parents and their little sister in one sitting.  

But still, he talked it through with Will, who was steady and reassuring.  Mike wrote while they discussed, speaking the details out loud as he typed them with Will filling in any of the blanks, all while reminding Mike that his parents, and Holly, are now alive and well. 

At one point, Mike even unplugged Johnny’s phone from his desk and dragged it over to his own so he could put Will on speaker while he wrote it all down.  He knew Johnny wouldn’t care.  Johnny doesn’t care about anything.

Since his last call with Will the night prior, Mike has made significant movement within the story.  He is currently writing about the group’s plan to try and stop the demogorgon from taking Derek Turnbow, and how they turned the Turnbow’s whole house into a trap for it.  Mike remembers it all perfectly.  He actually finds it pretty fun, writing about setting up the elaborate scheme and destroying the Turnbow’s home to do so.  Mike doesn’t really need Will’s help to fill in any missing blanks, but he’s going to call him anyways, to ask a made up question about setting up the trap.  Mike knows Will wasn’t even there with him at the Turnbow’s house then, but he doesn’t care.

As soon as the clock hits 7:00 p.m., when Mike knows Will will be back from the library, he reaches for the phone and calls him.

Mike hears shuffling on the other side of the line before Will answers.

“Hello?”

“Uhm, hey. It’s me.”

“Oh, uh, hey. One sec.” There is movement on the other end, as if Will is pulling the landline further away from the receiver into a different room, away from wherever he just was. 

“Look, uh, sorry. Now’s not really the best time,” Will says muffled, as if he is pressing his mouth into the speaker.  Mike hears laughter in the distance beyond him.  There is a group of people.  Music playing faintly.  It seems Will has people over, and Mike mentally thanks him for stating the obvious.  

“Can uh, can I call you back later? In a bit?” Will says.  Mike nods, before remembering that Will can’t see him.

“Yeah! No problem. No worries at all,” blurts Mike, almost too eagerly.  He adjusts his tone.  “I’ll talk to you later.”

“Talk later.”

Then the phone goes dead.  Mike sighs and puts it into the receiver.  As it clicks, he feels his body slack. 

Had Will not assumed that it was going to be Mike on the phone, even though they had been calling every day at this time for the past four days?  Then he remembers.  Will of course, now has a bubbling social life.  Just because he doesn’t mention it to Mike, doesn’t mean it's not there.  He probably has lots of people calling for him.

The next fifteen minutes pass, with Mike drumming his fingers along his keyboard, staring at the phone.  But they had never specified an exact time when Will was going to call him back.  Sighing, Mike decides to continue writing.

By the time the phone rings again, Mike had actually gotten into a pretty good groove.  He had finished writing about how they successfully tagged the demogorgon, despite their plan faltering slightly, and how the military collected the rest of the kids from Holly’s year and brought them to their base in the MAC-Z.  

Mike checks the clock on his table.  It’s just after nine.

He answers after the first ring.  Unlike Will, Mike knows it’s going to be him on the other end of the line. 

“Hey Will.” He didn’t mean for it to come out sounding as flat as it did, it just sort of slipped out that way.

“Oh, uh, hey! I’m sorry about earlier, I completely forgot I had plans,” Will jumps in apologetically.  Mike can hear he means it, and he feels himself soften.

“Don’t say sorry. You’re allowed to have friends,” Mike laughs.  And it’s true.  Just because his own life is quiet doesn’t mean WIll’s has to be.

There is silence for a moment, as unspoken words linger in the air.  Will changes the subject.

“So, uh, where are you at now with your writing?”

The conversation shifts, moving through the next part of the story: their plan to sneak the kids out of the MAC-Z.  As they discuss, moving quickly through common ground and familiar territory, the awkwardness once again dies down as quickly as it had arisen.  

They laugh at Robin’s bizarre tunnel innuendos—not because they’re funny, but because they’re so weird.  They laugh at how their plan depended on Derek Turnbow of all people.  They talk through how the night of November 4th stretched into the early morning of the 5th, walking through each step.  God, did the two of them sleep at all during those few days?

Will is matching Mike, memory for memory, fact for fact, bouncing ideas and recollections back and forth.  It feels normal, like it has been lately.  Like it was back then, when the two of them were riffing off each other and piecing together a plan to save the kids.

But then, Mike feels it—the familiar tug of his memory starting to falter once more.  Not the little ‘pretend’ lapses he’d used as an excuse to talk to Will more at first, either.

“And then, we walked over with everyone down the hill from the Squawk, to the entrance of the tunnel,” Mike says. “Actually, me and you, we were trailing behind everyone, I remember, talking about…” He stops mid-sentence, realization creeping in.  What were him and Will talking about?

“Actually… I just realized I don’t remember,” Mike admits, running a hand through his hair then tapping the edge of his desk with restless fingers. “Care to fill me in?”

“Uhm, I don’t remember either, actually.” 

What?  That’s a first.  

“Really? You can’t remember?” Mike presses, leaning into the phone.  

“Yeah, I don’t know. Weird,” Will mumbles.  But Mike notices it—the slight quiver in Will’s voice that makes it obvious he’s not being honest.  And, as Mike has always known, Will can’t lie to him.

Mike leans further into the phone, squinting at the computer screen in front of him as if Will’s face could somehow manifest there.    

“You’re lying.”

“I’m not.”

“Yeah, you are. I can tell when you’re lying. Your voice shakes.”

“Does not.”

“Does too. It’s obvious.” Mike's leg bounces under his desk. “You’re too honest to lie. You’re actually the most honest person I know. I don’t think you’ve ever lied to me—or anyone—a day in your life.”

“That’s not true.”

Mike scoffs, leaning back in his chair and staring at the ceiling for a moment, trying to gauge whether he was being serious. “Really. You’ve lied to me and I don’t know about it?” Silence. 

Huh. 

What doesn’t Mike know?

“Okay, then prove it,” Mike says, voice low but steady, gripping the phone a little tighter, knuckles whitening.

“...I can’t.”

What?

Then, as if to steer the topic away, Will speaks again.  Weirdly perfect timing.

“Oh! You know what, I remember now,” he says, laughing nervously into the phone.  Mike’s eyes narrow.  

He knows Will isn’t telling the truth, but he doesn’t press any further.  Right now, he’s just curious about what he’s going to say next.

“Uh, me and you, we were…just talking. You were asking what it was like…seeing from the demogorgon's, uh, perspective.  And then you asked if that could mean I have a connection to Vecna. And then we went into the tunnel and that was it.” 

As Will speaks, the memory rushes back to Mike all at once, as if it had never left at all.  Now, Mike is seeing it again, but from his own perspective, not from the extremely broad summary that Will had just brushed over.   

Him and Will had been trailing behind the group by a few steps, walking side by side.  Mike remembers the way their shoulders kept bumping into each other as they walked, not quite in sync, but close enough that they brushed together every few steps.

Mike remembers liking being that close to Will.  Especially after everything that had just happened, especially with his parents in the hospital and not knowing what was going to happen next.  There was something comforting about Will’s closeness. 

And it’s true, what Will had said about their conversation.  But he left out details that Mike can remember clearly now, like the exact words that were said, the cadence of their conversation, the subtle gestures between them.  Their conversation was light and teasing, although they were talking about something pretty serious.  

“Except I’m not Vecna,” Will had said in response to Mike, tilting his head as he tried to make sense of Mike’s logic.  

Mike remembers meeting his gaze, and thinking that the way the light was hitting his hazel eyes was making them look more green in that moment.  He had raised his eyebrows at him, half teasing but not entirely. “You sorta are.”

Will had scoffed, and broke eye contact briefly. “You’re trying to say I’m evil and hell-bent on destroying the world?” His tone was light, but Mike remembers the faint thread of sincerity underneath, like he was genuinely asking.

“Totally,” Mike had replied at first, deadpan.

Will’s face had stalled in confusion for half a second before Mike shrugged it off. “No,” he had added quickly, shoulders lifting in an obvious I’m-kidding shrug.  Will’s smile returned once he caught on.

“I’m just saying that, you know…You’re a wizard. Like him.”

Will rolled his eyes then, and did that thing he always did where he looked up at the sky like the answer might be written there. “In D&D Mike, not real life.”

“True,” Mike had nodded thoughtfully. “In real life, you’re more like a sorcerer.”

He remembers the realization hitting him even as he said it aloud, his eyebrows rising slightly as the idea started to make sense in his own head. 

“Your powers don’t come from a book of spells, they’re innate.”  

Will had laughed softly at that, like he didn’t quite take Mike seriously.  But something about it must have stuck.  Because later that night, Mike's words had come true.

“Listen,” Mike had said back then, shrugging to downplay his idea but also trying to get Will to take him seriously. “As far as crazy theories go, I’ve had crazier. And with Eleven in the upside down, we really need some magic up here.” 

Will had studied him for a moment after that, scanning him up and down.  Then he’d shoved Mike lightly in the shoulder, an affectionate shut up.

They were both smiling.

Mike had looked at him again.  Really looked at him.  

Because looking at Will made Mike believe that anything was possible.  

And then Mike had turned and walked ahead, heading toward the tunnels, and that had been it. The end of the conversation.

But clearly, the moment had meant more to Will than Mike had realized.  More than Mike had registered at the time.

“I compared you to a sorcerer,” Mike says suddenly, the words slipping out into the phone and bringing him back to reality before he even realizes he’s speaking aloud.

“So you do remember the conversation,” Will replied.

“I…” Mike pauses, switching the phone to the other ear.  His eyebrows knit tensely together. “Yeah, Will, I remember. Actually, you talking about it just now, it made the whole thing come back.”

Mike had never actually examined this specific conversation with Will this closely before, never really thought about what he had said, or what it might have meant in the context of what happened later that night.

What Mike wants to say next, is different from what actually comes out of his mouth.  

Was it my words that helped you find your powers? Mike wants to ask. Why couldn’t you just be honest with me and say that?  What else haven’t you been honest about?

If we’re supposed to be best friends, why are you lying to me?

But, he doesn’t say any of those things, because Mike remembers that they aren’t the same best friends they were back then.  Not yet, anyways.  

So, what he really says is clear and direct. 

“Why couldn’t you just explain it to me like it happened?”

Will’s words hit him next like a punch to the gut.

“Why did I need to?”

***

Time moves strangely in someone else’s memories.

Eleven is watching Will’s whole life unfold in front of her, but how long has it been?  Seconds?  Minutes?  Hours?  How long has passed in the real world, how long has she really been in the makeshift deprivation tank in Hopper’s cabin?  It seems like a lifetime ago—a distant reality to the one happening right in front of her.  

The memory changes once more in front of her.

She sees Will, twelve-years-old, lying in a hospital bed, Joyce at his side, sometime after, El assumes, was after he had been rescued from the upside down.  El tenses at first, surprised at the close association to this experience with his disappearance.  But then, Mike, Dustin and Lucas burst through the hospital door, charging at Will, and El understands.  She watches as Will’s face lights up.

“Byers!” Mike was the first to embrace him.  She watches the comfort that it brought Will, ignoring his mother’s cries to the boys to, “be careful!” 

The memories continue to change again, but showing Will a bit older now, and introducing new faces.  

The arcade.  Dustin, Lucas and Mike huddled around a game, screaming at each other.  Will was standing next to Max, overlooking the three boys from a short distance away.  She watches as the redhead observes the boys, rolling her eyes with unmistakable attitude as she turns to Will to whisper something in his ear.  Will pulled back, crying with laughter uncontrollably, Max joining him.  This caught the attention of the three boys who, originally oblivious, pulled back from their game and looked over to the two of them, expressions on their face that read: What could possibly be that funny?  

Seeing Max laugh like that makes El feel warm inside.  God, she misses her friend.  

As the next memory comes into view, El’s eyebrows raise.  For the first time, she sees herself. 

Seeing the portrayal of herself in someone else’s memory is strange.  She isn’t completely surprised that she hadn’t yet appeared, as her and Will hadn’t really gotten close until they moved to Lenora together.  She understands that, to Will, a lot of their earlier memories are too closely tied together with everything that he went through.  But soon enough, she remembers the scene that was about to unfold in front of her from her own memory.  

It was the summer of 1985, during El’s road trip to Lenora with the Byers’.  They were pulled over at a gas station, somewhere in middle America.  Will and El had been sent on snack duty, while Joyce filled up the car with gas and Jonathan used the pay phone to call Nancy.  

El remembers feeling down that day.  She had been thinking a lot about Hopper.  This sorrow showed on her face.  It was weird, watching herself like this, now being back in Hawkins with Hopper alive and well.

She watches as Will notices her hopeless expression, and determination encompasses him.  

Will had spent the rest of the day trying to make El smile.  He had been successful.  That day, that was a tipping point for the two of them, the beginning of their amazing friendship.  The day they became more than friends: siblings. 

More memories of their time in Lenora begin to filter through. The four of them, moving into their house.  That one time they went into town to purchase Will some new art supplies.  Will painting in his room.  The four of them, eating dinner at the kitchen table, Will and El uncontrollably laughing at Jonathan’s pathetic attempts to act normal and convince Joyce that he wasn’t high. 

Their time in Lenora was filled with moments like that.  Sure, there were tough days, but El hadn’t realized at the time how many good days there were, too.  Things were simple, back then.    

Then, the mist swirls once more and they are back in Hawkins, almost at present day.

Moments over the last eighteen months flashed of the Byers’ living in the Wheelers’ household, showing interactions between Will and Mike.  

Shared meals between the two families, chaotic but light.  Will and Mike biking to school together, conversations filtering through both the most random and most specific topics.  The times where they would hang back at the Squawk to iron out details for their next crawl, after everyone else had gone home.  The two of them curled up in Mike's basement, watching movies together, a duvet sprawled over both of their legs. 

A time where Mike rolled up to breakfast one morning, accidentally wearing his t-shirt backwards, and Will being the only one to notice.  The full household’s combined laughter when Will eventually pointed it out to him in front of everyone twenty minutes later.  Even Mr. Wheeler let out a chuckle.  

The countless times after where Mike purposefully did the same thing for seemingly no other reason than to make Will smile.  This being the beginning of countless other inside jokes that were only made for them to understand.  

Watching two of the closest people to her interact this way made El jealous.  Not of anything specifically said or done, and not directed towards either boy in particular, but of their shared experience.  The fact that they have been able to find any sort of comfort, of normalcy the past year within each other.  She shakes the feeling quickly.  Of course, it’s not their fault that El faces a different type of responsibility.

In these memories, there is a closeness between Mike and Will that El hadn’t picked up on during her limited interactions with the two boys together over the past eighteen months.  A closeness that resembles the interactions of Wil’s earliest memories with Mike.  A closeness that didn’t require words to be felt. 

It was expressed through shared looks.  Subtle, reassuring touches.  Deep expressions of mutual understanding, as if they were communicating to each other telepathically.

No one knows me in the way that you do.

I know you better than you know yourself. 

They looked at each other like they had finally found safe ground. 

For the first time since entering his memories, Eleven becomes painfully aware of her body, of her presence, that she wasn’t supposed to be seeing this.  It wasn’t for her.  She felt like she was prying, eavesdropping on a conversation made for no one else’s ears.  

She doesn’t mean to pry, of course.  She knows she couldn’t control the fact that these were the memories being shown to her.  But for the first time since entering Will’s mind, she feels like an intruder.

And then the mist appears and the scene changes once more, to a memory that took place less than a day ago, that Mike had described to her in the real world just hours ago.  And though El wasn’t there to experience it herself, she knows exactly what was about to unfold before her. 

It was the MAC-Z, or what was left of it.  It looked more like the center of a battlefield.  Night had swallowed everything, and the dark was thick, broken only by fire licking at the wreckage.  Flames burned in scattered pockets.  Smoke crawled upward from every direction.  The air reeked of ash.  Of burnt flesh.  Metal.  Blood.

The bodies of military men lay strewn across the ground, uniforms torn, faces turned toward nothing.  Blood soaked into the pavement, pooling in the cracks, catching the firelight in dull, terrible glints.

And as she stands there, breathing in smoke, El begins to recognize faces she knows.  Joyce, her body strewn across the pavement, alive, but hurt, struggling to find the energy to slightly lift herself off the ground.

A few feet away stood Mike, staring out at the nightmare that had just unfolded before him, eyes wide, defeated.  His gaze moved over the wreckage again and again, as if searching for something, an answer, an opening, a way forward.  He finds nothing.

Just beyond him was Will, on his knees.  His palms were pressed into the gravel, small stones biting into his skin.  His head hung low, and his breathing was slow, shallow, like each inhale had to be negotiated.

Then, El watches in horror as the gnarly claw of a mangled, monstrous hand emerges from one of the exposed gates, grabbing the ground to pull itself up.  A demogorgon begins crawling up and out from below, then charges directly at Mike.

Terror broke across Mike’s face.  He threw his arms up in a final, last effort attempt to shield himself.  

The monster lunged, its clawed arm arched backward, ready to strike.  Mike braced himself for the blow.

Then, everything slowed down.

El hears an echo, a whisper, swirling around her.  A voice she recognizes to be Robin’s.  It was in Will’s head, but somehow, it was in hers too.  

“I was looking for the answers in somebody else. But I had all the answers.”

Wind moved through the battlefield, low and constant.  Everything else was silent.  

The monster hung suspended in midair, as if caught by an unseen hand.  Its clawed arm was still drawn back, frozen an inch before it could strike Mike.  

Mike blinked slowly, confused by the absence of pain.  He opened his eyes.  The creature hovered in front of him, motionless, distorted in the firelight.  Shock spread across his face as he lowered his arms cautiously, studying it, trying to understand why he was still alive.

Then his gaze shifted.  Past the monster. Into the distance.

El watches as Mike’s jaw drops. 

Will stood there, eyes drained to white, one arm outstretched.  

He was doing this.  He was stopping the demogorgon with his mind.  El could feel it from where she stood: the force of it, the clarity.  But this wasn’t her kind of power.  It was something else entirely.

El had just walked through Will’s memories, his happiest ones.  The people he loved most.  The moments that mattered.  That was the source.  He wasn’t drawing from fear or from anger, like El has to when using her powers.  He was drawing from love.  

The power had always been inside him, he’d just been too afraid to reach for it.  He had pushed past the horror and found something stronger.

And then it clicked.

At the center of almost every bright memory, held Mike.  

Mike was the anchor.  The conduit.  The reason.

The answer.

Oh.

Will lifted his other hand, and then snapped his neck up.  The monster began to rise higher, suspended in the air.  At the same moment, Will pulled his elbows down to his chest, as if by instinct.  In perfect synchronicity, the creature’s limbs twisted.  Bone cracked at impossible angles, and its neck snapped with a sickening finality.  It dropped to the ground.  Will fell with it, collapsing to his knees.

Mike turned to him immediately.  The shock on his face had shifted, away from fear, towards awe.  Pure, disbelieving awe. 

It reminded El of the way Mike had once looked at her.  But this was different.  

This look was deeper.  Heavy with years of shared history and private language.  The kind of closeness you only build by growing up together.  A bond reserved for the one person you know better than you even know yourself. 

Will looked up slowly, his gaze meeting Mike’s as his eyes faded back to normal.  A thin line of blood trailed from his nose, and he wiped it away without breaking their eye contact.

There was something in Will’s look.  Not pride.  Not relief.  It was something quieter, something stronger.

It was a look that read: I did this for you. 

I would do anything for you.

El felt the realization settle in her chest, sharp and undeniable.  

It had been there all along.

Chapter Text

As the early morning light of November 5th, 1992 spills through his dorm window, Mike realizes he hasn’t slept.

He’s been up all night writing.  It had seemed like the best way to get his mind off of Will and their conversation.

But it isn’t really working.

The night prior, Mike had mumbled some half-hearted excuse to Will about needing sleep in order to end their call.  But the truth was, he just couldn’t bring himself to talk to him any longer.  

There were a few reasons why, Mike suspects.  Such as, the awareness Mike now has that Will isn’t being completely honest with him.  And the fact that Will couldn’t tell him what it was about makes whatever he is hiding from Mike feel more important. 

This also brought Mike to the sad realization that their friendship isn’t the same as it used to be.  Mike had already suspected that was the case, but having it placed so directly in front of him now was different.  And Mike had been trying so hard to try and strengthen their bond again, but every time they seemingly took a step forward into repairing their relationship, something makes one of them take ten steps back.  

And then there was the unsettling feeling that this most recent memory loss had given him: that something doesn’t feel right.  Mike had managed to ignore that feeling lately; talking to Will so often had made it easy to push the thought aside.  But now it was back, itching at the edges of his mind, like a faint, irritating brush of a loose strand of hair against his skin.  He couldn’t see it, but he knew it was there.  That feeling had crept back the instant Will asked him on the phone, “Why did I need to?”

Why did Will need to tell him exactly how their conversation five years ago went, as they walked towards the tunnels together?  Why hadn’t Mike been able to remember the memory on his own?    

That question leads him to more.

Why that memory, specifically?  Why the others?  What makes them important?

The more Mike turns the questions over in his mind, the more it begins to feel like something, or someone, is controlling them.  Deciding which memories he gets to see, which stay hidden, and which can return.  

And Mike hates that feeling.  It makes him feel more insane than he already is.  

So he writes.

He writes through the night, surviving on cup after cup of coffee, ignoring the heavy pressure behind his eyes as exhaustion begs him to stop.

He can’t sleep.  Not yet.

Not until he finds the answers he’s looking for.

He writes about trying to sneak the kids out from the MAC-Z, and failing.  The pipe bursting, the water flooding the bathroom.  How he and Will rushed up and out from underground, to try and stop water from going everywhere.  

The small flutter that stirred in his chest, the moment he felt Will’s hands wrap around his, as they gripped the pipe to try and stop it from leaking more.  How, despite all the chaos, and how much water was being sprayed directly into his face, Will’s hands on his were the only thing Mike really felt in that moment.

He writes about the military taking them, and the chaos that followed.  The terror that had flooded his body as he tried to maneuver the kids, Will, and Joyce, through an active battlefield.  Looking back, it’s a miracle that none of them were shot in the crossfire.  His mind had been working on pure instinct then, running on adrenaline alone.  Maybe it had been because of Will.

It had been unbearable to see him like that, limp in his mother’s arms as they tried to navigate towards safety.  Even now, the memory burns somewhere deep in his chest.  Mike doesn’t think it will ever vanish, not completely.  

He writes about the moment he first laid eyes on Vecna.

Mike had never thought it was possible to hate something at first sight.  But Vecna hadn’t felt like a person.  He had been something else entirely.  Evil, in the form of a figure.

Mike had just stood there, frozen, watching Vecna lift Will into the air and towards him with his mind like it was nothing.  Speaking to Will like he was nothing.  And then dropping him to the ground like nothing.  Mike hated that most of all.

And then a demogorgon had torn its way out through the gate and charged straight at him.  

Despite the shiver that runs down his spine as he remembers how scared he was in that moment, Mike doesn’t stop writing.

Not to think, not to breathe, not even to process the words that are appearing in front of him on the screen.  His fingers type on his keyboard faster than his thoughts, like they have a mind of their own, the memory pouring out of him like pressure releasing from a vacuum-sealed valve.  

It feels like he is there again, like the moment is unfolding around him.  Like the memory had been buried somewhere deep inside of him for years, and now that he’s finally dared to touch it, it’s all coming back in full.  

None of it makes sense.

Yet, suddenly everything does.

Mike pushes away hastily from his desk, the movement abrupt enough to shake his computer and knock his clock to the ground.

What did he just uncover?

It feels like something else had taken over for a moment, like a past version of himself had forced its way out the second he dared to relive that memory.  

Because, truly, it was the first time that he had relived that moment.  It’s the first time he has touched that memory: what really happened that night in the MAC-Z.  

He had never forgotten the events that had taken place.  But they existed only as basic facts, statements of things that happened.  

The demogorgon charged at Mike.  Will realized he could summon the power of the hivemind.  Will killed three demogorgons, saving Mike, Lucas, and Robin from meeting their untimely ends.  Will was a sorcerer.  Those were the facts. 

But Mike had never touched on the details.  Never the emotion.  What Mike had actually felt, living in that moment, watching the events transpire in front of him.  Those had been pushed down so far in Mike’s mind, buried so deeply, that he had forgotten they were there at all.  

But they were there.  They always had been.

Maybe it was his brain’s way of protecting him from something too complicated.  Maybe it had been easier to reshape the memory after, to turn it into something simpler.  Something safer.  

Maybe it had to do with knowing how the story ended, with El.  And the guilt that is always there.  Always inside him.  That is a part of him, forever.

He’s never looked back at that memory without knowing what came after.  He had never had the chance to.

Breathing slowly, Mike pulls his chair back towards the desk.  The document sits open on the screen, words filling the page.

And as he begins to read what he has just written, he allows himself to relive the memory.  He allows himself to be there.  He allows himself to discover what it was that he had buried away for so long.  The details, the emotions, everything he had felt.  

Not just the facts, but everything.  

All of it.   

***

The thought loops in El’s mind, relentless.  She can’t stop it.  It presses against her skull over and over, like something knocking from the inside, demanding to be understood.  The more she tries to push it away, the louder it becomes.

Will was in love with Mike.

The words feel strange to her when she strings them together like that, like a sentence that could fall apart at any moment.  

How had she not seen it?  How did she live side by side with Will for over a year, and miss something so obvious?    

Now, after replaying every look, every moment, every memory between the two of them, it’s blinding.  It’s painfully clear, and impossible to ignore.  She feels stupid.  

Will, her sweet, quiet Will, who had become her family, her brother in every way that mattered, had been in love with her… well, Mike.

His name snags.  It feels weird to her now.  Foreign. 

She doesn’t even know where she stands with Mike.  She isn’t his anything, not now, and especially not after the conversation she had with him before entering the deprivation tank and entering Will’s mind.  But the truth is, it had been like that long before today.

She hasn’t been his anything for a long time.  Not since Nevada, probably. 

So why does she feel so weird? 

As if El’s thought process is a trigger, mist begins to roll through once again, but this time, it isn’t light or clean.  It rolls in dark and heavy, gray like storm clouds, thick like smoke.  The air feels charged.  The scene sharpens.  

They’re in the Surfer Boy Pizza van, on the way to Nevada, to the Nina Project.  To her. 

Argyle and Jonathan sit in the front seat, Will and Mike in the back.  Mike looks hollowed out, exhausted, defeated.  His shoulders sag like he’s carrying something too heavy to name.

“Can I…show you something?” Will asks quietly.  Mike nods, and Will hands him a rolled canvas.  Mike unravels it carefully, and the painting spills open between them. 

It’s stunning.  A crimson three-headed dragon rears across the page, and four warriors stand against it, sword, shield, bow, magic crackling in their hands.  Dustin.  Lucas.  Mike.  Will.  Their D&D alter egos, immortalized in color and fire.

El recognizes the painting immediately.  She saw Will working on it for months in Lenora.  Late nights.  Careful brushstrokes.  Devotion in every detail.  It was the careful labour of an artist making a gift for someone they deeply care about.

Mike’s face changes as he takes in the painting, scanning the page and all its details.  His eyes light up, and a real smile breaks through.

“This is amazing. Did you paint this?”

“Y-Yeah. Yeah, I mean-” Will stumbles, scrambling. “El asked me to. She commissioned it, basically. She told me what to draw.”

El’s breath catches. 

That’s not true. 

She never asked him to do that.  She didn’t even know the characters well enough to describe them, let alone know what sort of dragons or monsters they would face.  Will is lying.

“My point is,” Will continues, pointing to the figure at the front: the leader, his sword raised, his shield braced. “See how you’re leading us? You’re guiding the whole party. That’s what you do.”

His finger moves to the shield.

“And your coat of arms…it’s a heart. I know, it’s kind of on the nose, but that’s what holds the party together. Heart.”

Mike isn’t looking at the painting anymore.  He’s looking at Will.  And again, El feels jealous.

“Because without heart, we fall apart,” Will says. His voice tightens. “Even El. Especially El.”

Mike’s gaze lingers on Will, and El feels herself tense.  

“These past few months she’s been… so lost without you,” Will continues. He turns toward the window, blinking fast. “She’s different. From other people.” His reflection trembles faintly in the glass.

“When you’re different… sometimes you feel like… like a mistake,” Will says, turning back to face Mike.  “But you make her feel like she’s not a mistake. Like she’s better because she’s different. And that gives her courage. To fight.”

His voice cracks. “If she was mean to you, or pushed you away, it’s probably because she’s scared. Scared of losing you. Just like you’re scared of losing her. And if she thought she was going to lose you, I think she’d rather just get it over with fast. Like ripping off a Band-Aid.”  He swallows, choosing his next words carefully.  “So yeah. El needs you, Mike. And she always will.”

It’s true.  El will always need Mike, in some way, she suspects.  

But not like this.  Never like this.  

Mike looks down at the painting. Then back at Will.  “Yeah?” he says softly, a fragile smile forming.

Will nods. Too quickly. “Yeah.”

And El doesn’t know what to feel.

The idea of Will loving Mike doesn’t make her angry.  That’s not what she is feeling now.  The concept of it doesn’t even feel wrong to her.  It’s just surprising.  

Joyce had explained the concept to her once in Lenora, when El had heard some kids talking about it in school and El had asked about it when she got home.  Joyce explained it like it was simple, that sometimes boys loved boys, and girls loved girls.  And El had understood.  It was pretty straightforward after all.  She just hadn’t realized that it could happen to someone she knows.  

Then, Joyce had explained a bit deeper.  She had explained how, unfortunatley, there are people out there in the world who don’t understand, and these people are hateful just because it is different.  And that made El sad.  El knew better than anyone what it was like to be hated because you were different.

Will hadn’t been in the room for that conversation.  El wishes that he could have been.

Will then turns away from Mike in the van, facing the window.  His shoulders shake once, almost imperceptibly.  He presses his lips together, forcing them into the palm of his hand to choke back any tears back before Mike can see.

But El sees.  And her heart breaks.

Because Mike, in his classic way that is sometimes so painfully dense and clueless when it came to things like this, had taken Will’s words and used them as the push he needed to finally tell El that he loved her, back in Nevada, back when she had been fighting for her life inside Vecna’s mind.

Meaning: the only reason Mike had told her he loved her then was because of Will’s words.

Confusion presses in from every direction, tangled with jealousy and guilt and something that almost feels like betrayal—except it isn’t.  Because Mike isn’t really her boyfriend anymore.  Not truly.  Not in any way that matters, even if neither of them had ever said the words out loud.

At the end of the day, knowing all of this doesn’t actually change El’s prior path her thoughts had already begun to follow.  She still wants the same thing she did before: to figure out who she is without Mike.  It hadn’t just been him—they had both drifted.  She can’t place all the blame on him, even if part of her wants to.

Then, for just a second, a small part of El wonders if she should be angry at Will.  But of course, she can’t.

You can’t control who you love, just like you can’t control who you are.  And once she acknowledges that, the anger never has a chance to take root.

So she forgives Will Byers.  And she lets Mike Wheeler go.

And as she does, gray storm clouds swallow the van whole, thick and churning, and the scene fractures again.

Now the memories come faster.

The mid-summer air feels heavy and humid, and rain relentlessly pounds against the driveway and the car parked on top of it.  This is the summer before she and Will moved to Lenora.

Mike and Will stand in Mike’s garage, facing each other.  The boys look younger, softer, yet their faces are twisted and ugly.  They’re arguing.

Will’s voice is tight, sharp with frustration, outlining his annoyance of Mike and Lucas not taking their campaign seriously.  But the agony in Will’s voice makes it clear to El that it wasn’t about the campaign, not really.

Mike fires back, defensive and careless in the way boys can be when they don’t understand the wound they’re aiming for. “It’s not my fault you don’t like girls!”

The words slice through the air.  El feels it like a slap.  She watches Will’s face fall, the pain immediate, raw, unguarded.  Her chest burns for him.  How could Mike have been so oblivious? So unintentionally cruel?

And it is there that El understands something else with quiet certainty.  Mike didn’t know the way Will felt about him.  He had never known.  Never understood it, not in the way that it needed to be understood.  Not then, anyways, and not in the Surfer Boy Pizza van either.

If he had known… would anything have changed?

El thinks back to when she watched Will first use his powers in the MAC-Z.  She could have sworn she saw something in Mike’s face as he watched him, like something clicking into place.  Something dawning on him.  It felt like a realization.

But then again, El isn’t completely sure it was that.  It’s hard to tell with Mike.  It always has been.  When he doesn’t say what he is feeling out loud, his true emotions usually stay locked inside him, impossible to read.     

The storm rolls in again.

Will sits alone outside Castle Byers, rain soaking through his clothes, plastering his hair to his face. Tears mix with the downpour as he begins tearing the fort apart, wood snapping, pieces scattering into the mud.  

He isn’t just destroying a fort.  He’s dismantling whatever was left of his childhood with his bare hands. 

The memory shifts.

Rink-O-Mania, in Lenora.  El’s stomach knots as she sees herself.

She’s skating hand-in-hand with Mike, laughing too loudly, smiling too largely, as they glide around the rink.  She was trying really hard that day, she remembers.  Trying to be normal.  Trying to be the girl she thought Mike wanted.

Will trails behind them on the rink, watching. There’s something in his eyes she hadn’t recognized then.  His gaze drops to their intertwined hands, and guilt floods her now.  

That day, before everything unraveled, she was so consumed with performing normalcy for Mike that she never noticed how completely she had sidelined Will.

The scene jumps forward to later that day.

After the humiliation El experienced of a chocolate milkshake being dumped all over her.  After she ran off to hide in some janitor’s closet.  Will and Mike stand outside of the rink, searching for her.  

“What, are you mad I didn’t talk to you?” Will asks approaching Mike, voice small and brittle. “Seems like you made it super clear you’re not interested in anything I have to say.”

“That’s not true—” Mike starts.

“You called maybe a couple times. It’s been a year, Mike. Meanwhile El has, like, a book of letters from you.”

“That’s because she’s my girlfriend, Will.” The word lands heavy.

Will chokes. “And us?” 

“We’re friends,” Mike says, but it’s too quick.  Too firm.  And, as if emphasizing it makes it safer, “we’re friends,” he repeats, sealing it shut.

Will swallows, searching Mike’s face for any flicker of recognition. “Well, we used to be best friends.”

Mike hesitates, scrambling as he tries to figure out what to say. “Then maybe you should’ve reached out more. I don’t know. Why am I the bad guy?”

The hurt that spreads across Will’s face is quiet.

The stormy gray fog surges in once more.

Now the memories blur together, faster, darker.

Will as a young child, curled in his bedroom while his parents screamed in the next room.  His father’s voice booms, violent and cruel.  A body slams against a wall.  Will presses his hands over his ears, small shoulders shaking, trying to block out the sound.

School hallways.  Laughter, and cruel voices.  The same boys from the quarry, by the cliff, El remembers she hurt one of them.  Those boys brush past Will, muttering slurs, sneering.

Then the shadow monster.

It pours into Will as he stands in the field in front of Hawkins elementary, filling his lungs, consuming him from the inside out.

Then the upside down, right after Will was first taken. 

Will hides inside Castle Byers’ decaying twin.  He runs from the demogorgon, branches snapping underfoot.  He climbs a tree.  The creature climbs after him.  He leaps for another branch and falls, knocking him unconscious.  The monster drags him back through the ash-choked air.

To the twisted version of the Creel House in the upside down.

To the same place Will is currently being held in Vecna’s mind.  

Vines wrap around Will’s small, twelve-year-old body, hoisting him up against the wall.  

El then watches in horror as Vecna emerges from the dark, long limbs unfolding, moving toward Will.  

“No!” she screams, lunging forward, even though she knows she can’t change what already happened.  Still, she reaches for the young version of Will, the version of Will before she ever met him, and her hand brushes his cheek.  And everything snaps.

***

When people say your life flashes before your eyes when you’re about to die, they’re not kidding.  As the demogorgon charged at him in the MAC-Z lot on the evening of November 5th, 1987, it was exactly what had happened to Mike.  

And it’s exactly what he wrote about.

As the monster ran at him, Mike remembers thinking: that’s it.  He’s about to leave this world.  Just like that, gone.  His existence cut short, erased in an instant, at the hands of the exact kind of evil he and his friends had spent years trying to destroy.

He thought he still had so much time left.  There were still so many things he wanted to do.  So much that he hadn’t gotten the chance to say.  Opportunities he had assumed he could still have.  Futures he had thought he would reach eventually.

But there was going to be no eventually.

He was at the end.  His whole life had led up to that exact moment, and this was going to be where it stopped.

There was still so much he wanted to do, so much he had thought he would have time to do.  So much he hadn’t said.  But he didn’t get to anymore, because this was it.  This was where his story ended.

And he saw the entirety of his life leading up to that exact moment in a split second.

He saw his family, his friends, everyone he had ever known.  He saw all of their faces, he saw all of their moments together.  He was every version of himself all at once, every age, every year, every emotion, every state.  He was a baby.  He was sixteen.  He was everything he had ever been.

But nothing that he could have.

And in that single split second, he mourned the way he would never know the ending—how everything would play out, if the world got saved, or even if it didn’t.  

The demogorgon leapt into the air and raised its arm to strike: the last thing Mike would ever see.  Then he shut his eyes tightly and braced himself for the end.

But the end never came.

At first, in the absence of contact, Mike remembers being just...confused.  Why was it taking so long?

He thought that, if death was going to take him, it might as well hurry up and do it.  If it wasn’t going to give him the chance at a fair fight or to at least fight back, then it could at least get it over with.

For a second he thought it was possible he had died.  That he was actually already dead. Maybe it had happened so fast that it was painless, and he hadn’t even noticed.  Weirdly, the thought almost excited him.  If he was dead and still aware, still thinking, still conscious, then maybe death wasn’t really the end after all.  But when he slowly opened his eyes, he realized that wasn’t the case.

He was still alive.  And the demogorgon was frozen in midair, right in front of him.  Its arm was raised and stretched back, with its sharp claws unleashed and ready to tear into him.  But it hadn’t, because it wasn’t moving.  It just hung there, suspended in the air like someone had hit pause on the entire world.

Mike had stared at it, studying every horrible detail of the thing.  Its stretched skin, the remnants of human flesh and blood embedded underneath its claws, the wet teeth, the drool and saliva dripping out of its mouth.  The way that its body twitched faintly like it was trying to move but couldn’t.

Slowly, Mike’s eyes had moved past the demogorgon, trying to take in the rest of the scene and understand what the hell was happening.

And that was when he saw him.  At first he didn’t really understand it.

Will stood a few feet away, rigid, one arm stretched forward, directed at the demogorgon in front of him.  His eyes were rolled white, like he wasn’t even there, like something had hollowed him out and was looking through him instead.  The air hummed—actually hummed—like the whole space had been plugged into a socket.

And it was coming from Will.

Mike’s brain tried to catch up, tried to force the moment into something logical and explainable.  But as he blinked, taking in what was happening right before his eyes, the truth slammed into him.

Will was doing this.

His jaw dropped.

Holy.  Shit.

Something was pouring out of Will—or through him—something Mike didn’t have the words for. The monster hung in front of Mike, suspended like gravity had forgotten about it.  And Will held it there with nothing but his outstretched hand.

Mike had seen power before.  He had watched Eleven flip vans, break bones with her mind, bring down helicopters from the sky, and close gates to other dimensions.  He knew what that looked like.  He knew the strain of it, the anger, the fear that always seemed to sit within her with each and every use.

This wasn’t like that. There wasn’t rage or terror in Will’s face.

Only clarity.

Will lifted his other hand slowly, almost like he was following a rhythm only he could hear.  The air vibrated harder.  Mike had felt it in his teeth, in his ribs, in his skull.

The monster started to follow Will’s hand, moving upward.  Mike had watched it in awe and disbelief as it lifted higher into the air.  Although he wasn’t looking at him at that moment, his mind was still stuck on Will.

He still didn’t get how it was possible.  All Mike knew was that he was doing this.  Will was doing this.  He had access to deep power; he had all along, and he had finally discovered how to use it.   

What Mike had said to him earlier that day had come true.  And his powers didn’t come from a book of spells, they were innate.  They came from within him.  He was not a cleric, like he had portrayed in all their D&D campaigns growing up.  He was a sorcerer.

Will was a sorcerer.

Mike couldn’t believe it.  He couldn’t fucking believe it.

Will.  His Will.  His best friend, a sorcerer.  A fucking superhero.  

God, it was everything they dreamed about when they were younger.  Five-year-old Mike and Will would have been shitting themselves if they could have seen this.  Hell, sixteen-year-old Mike basically was.

He just could not wrap his mind around it.  His best friend—the person he knew so well, maybe better than anyone—had superpowers. 

His eyes had found their way back to Will.  He watched as Will raised another arm, then jolted his neck up.  The monster in front of Mike floated higher and higher into the air.  Mike studied Will and his focus and concentration, fueled with pure determination.  He looked powerful, Mike had thought.  Powerful and in-control. 

And in that moment, Mike had felt something else stirring inside him, something louder than the battle that had just ended.

As he analyzed Will, he saw him—really saw him.  Not just the superhero standing in front of him, but Will, the person.  His best friend.  He saw everything.  

Every single time Will had looked at him, every single word he had ever spoken to him.  Every time he had stayed, even when Mike had said something stupid.  Every time Mike had said the wrong thing—and Will had forgiven him anyway.  

He was everywhere.  He was everything.  In every version of Mike’s life.  Like he always had been.

It was just becoming obvious now.

Mike pushes himself away from the computer screen, away from reading what he had just written, and back into reality.  Back to his quiet dorm, back to his quiet life.

But he can’t shake it.  He can’t shake Will.

If people say your life flashes before your eyes right when you’re about to die, then what is this?  A death of its own?  

Or something new being born?

Mike presses his temples into his hands.  He rubs his warm forehead, and feels a bead of sweat trickle down his face.  His head is pounding, and he feels his heart beating rapidly in his chest.  

When did that happen?  When did Will become the center of everything?

Mike had spent years thinking he was protecting Will.  

But it had been Will that had saved Mike’s life, five years ago.  All along, it had always been Will, silently looking out for him, protecting him.

And somewhere along the way, Mike had forgotten that.  

How had he ever forgotten that?  

As Mike shuts his eyes, he can picture Will so vividly in that moment five years ago, his messy hair drenched with sweat, grime, and blood, sticking out in every direction, as he stood in the battlefield of the MAC-Z, suspending the monster in the air with his mind as if the rules of the universe didn’t apply. 

And as if an alarm had gone off in his head, Will had then snapped his neck down and pulled his elbows to his chest.  In sync, the Demogorgon’s limbs had twisted and broken, its neck had snapped with a sickening, final sound.  The creature dropped like a puppet with its strings cut, lifeless, in front of Mike.  Beyond it, Will had fallen with it, hitting the ground to his knees.

Will’s head was bowed, his broad shoulders heaving as he drew deep breaths.  His bloody knuckles, clenched tight moments prior, slowly loosened.  And as he lifted his head, Mike had almost forgotten to breathe.  The light from the fire behind him caught his face, making him look almost angelic.  Like an angel, in hell.  

Then Will’s eyes returned to normal.  Hazel.  Familiar.  And he met Mike’s gaze.  

A thin streak of blood ran from Will’s nose.  He had wiped it away absently, as if it didn’t matter.  But he never broke eye contact.

And Mike remembers what it felt like, looking at him then.  It felt like he was seeing him for the first time.

Because in a way, he was.

As he thinks back to that moment, Mike feels his insides churn in a way he’s never known before.  There’s a pit in his chest, and he finally feels it.  He finally understands what it is—something that had been building for years without his awareness, like the answer to a question he hadn’t even realized he’d been asking his whole life.  Something he had pushed down for so long, something his mind had tried to make him forget, finally bubbling to the surface.

All at once, every feeling he had been too blind, or too scared, to acknowledge crashes down with crushing clarity.

In that moment five years ago, when his eyes had met Will’s, the avalanche finally broke.  And now, five years later, as he remembers it all—actually, truly remembers it—it’s breaking again.

The way his chest hurt whenever Will pulled away.  The way his heart aches at the thought of Will not being honest with him.  The way nothing felt right when they weren’t okay.

The way Mike looked for him in every room he entered without thinking.  The way Mike would have searched to the ends of the earth to find him when he first went missing.  The way Mike still would do that, even now.  The way he would do anything for him.  And it all becomes painfully clear.

Mike Wheeler had spent his entire life loving Will Byers.

He had known it all along.

He just hadn’t remembered it until now.

***

El’s head jerks violently downward.  Her eyes return to normal.  She’s back, out of Will’s memories, and back in his mind.  Back at the Creel House in the upside down.  The place where it all began.  

Will is in front of her, still held tightly to the wall by the tightly woven vines, but he is no longer twelve.  He is sixteen again.  

His eyes fly open.  He gasps in a sharp, ragged inhale.

“Will!” she cries.

She uses her mind to tear at the vines wrapped around him, ripping them away with every ounce of strength she has in her.  Finally, they snap and recoil.  Will collapses forward into her arms, shaking, gasping for breath.  His face is streaked with blood, and his eyes are wide with horror.

“Will, it’s okay. I’m here. I’m here,” El says, cradling him as he sobs, tears mixing with the red pooled at his lashes.

“El,” he chokes.

“It’s me. It’s me. I’m here to bring you home. It’s okay.”

“El—” His voice sharpens with urgency as they finally lock eyes with one other. “He was here. Henry. He went into my mind. He saw everything.”

“It’s okay. We’re leaving now—”

“No!” Will grabs at her, frantic. “You don’t understand.”

She stills.

“He saw…everything,” Will whispers, terror swallowing his voice. “He’s coming for him.” El’s heart stutters. 

“He’s coming…for Mike.”

The world tilts.  Now she understands.

That’s why she was shown those memories of Will’s. 

Henry digs into fear.  Into shame.  Into love twisted into vulnerability.  He finds the one fragile, beating thing inside a person, and uses it to destroy them.  

He is threatened by Will, El realizes.  He is threatened by the way that Will has been able to summon Vecna’s powers, and use them against him.  He is threatened by his potential, so he needed to break him.

And if Vecna wants to break Will, he’ll go after the heart.  His heart.

He’ll kill Mike.

“Will,” she says, grabbing his shoulders. “You need to go. You need to go get Mike. Now.”

Panic surges through her.  She forces every ounce of strength she has left into Will—pushing, pulling, dragging his consciousness back toward his body. “Go!”

And he vanishes from her arms, his soul snapping back into the physical world.  

But El remains.  

She can’t leave yet, not until she knows Mike is alive. 

The scene shifts one final time, back into the endless, suffocating darkness of the void.