Archive of Our Own

El had told him she loved him before she vanished.

Vecna was dead. The Upside Down was collapsing around them. They ran, as a group, towards the gate. All they had to do was pass through, and this was over.

El grabbed his arm and pulled him to a halt.

He whipped around and her hand went to his hair and she kissed him. Fierce, desperate. He was breathless when they pulled apart.

He remembers, more than anything, the look in her eyes. It was pure devastation.

“Mike,” she said. Her voice was quiet, but Mike could hear her clear as anything, even with the world falling apart. “I love you.”

“I love you too,” he said. It was an automatic response, like there was some impulse in him that couldn’t let her I love you go unreturned. But he was instantly filled with cold, heavy dread. But what he really wanted to say was: “El, what are you doing?”

He was halfway through the sentence when her hand raised and he was thrown backwards.

He landed on the other side of the gate, by Dustin’s feet. The wind had left his lungs with the force of her throw, but she’d let him land gently.

He was a magnet snapped back towards her: on his feet in an instant, scrambling towards the gate.

On the other side, the Upside Down was in pieces, torn into the ether. And she was closing the gate, with her still inside of it.

“El!” he screamed. “No, El!”

Arms grabbed him, hauled him back. Lucas and Dustin. The top of the gate sealed over, and Mike screamed out to her, desperate, devastated. “No, El, please! Please, don’t go! El!”

“Mike – ” Lucas started, words strained with effort.

“Let me go!” Mike struggled against them, a wild, thrashing animal. “Let me go with her!’

She was all that was left, the Upside Down was almost gone, the gate was almost sealed. And Mike doesn’t know if he managed to break free of Lucas and Dustin, or if, in some sort of act of mercy, they let him go. But he was suddenly racing toward it. The last slither of the gate. His arm reaching out. Towards her.

And then he was in the air again. Thrown backwards. But he didn’t land gently this time. He hit the concrete, hard. And it all went black.

He woke in a hospital with a concussion, broken leg, and fractured shoulder. Lucas had been by his bedside when he woke. Hunched over with his forearms on his knees and his head hanging. He’d looked tired.

“Where’s El?” Mike said, immediately. And Lucas’s head jerked up, realising Mike was awake.

“Mike – ” Lucas started.

“Where is she? Is she here?”

“Mike,” Lucas said again, gentler this time.

Mike knew what it meant. And it was like nothing else existed. Not his pain, or his body, or the bed beneath him, or Lucas. It all fell away and there was nothing left. She was gone. What else was there?

Mike stared at the ceiling. A hollow shell of himself. “You should’ve let me go with her.”

“Man.” Lucas shook his head, breathed out shakily. “It would’ve been suicide.”

Mike said nothing.

Days passed and Mike knew days passed because the sun came up and then went back down. He did nothing in those days. He barely ate, barely slept. He was visited by his friends and he barely spoke.

His shoulder healed, then his leg. His parents took him to physical therapy, and he did all the right movements. He went back to school, and his hand wrote all the right words. People would worry about him, and he’d say all the right things. And the sun went up and then it went down.

And then he started to look for her.

He scoured all of Hawkins. Every inch of it. The Party would join him, but his searches would always go well into the night, and he’d end up on his own. Just him and his flashlight in the woods, stumbling over tree roots, ducking his head against the rain. Nothing would ever stop him. Even when his healed leg would start to ache, or his sleep deprived head would start to swim. His search for her became his whole purpose, in a routine, mechanical sense. Get up, look for El, go to bed. It was like he couldn’t focus – always one foot out the door – whenever he was doing anything else.

He got a job at the video store with a good reference from Robin, and then he graduated high school, and then he got into college. His parents bought him a car as a graduation present, and his searches left Hawkins. He went to all the surrounding towns, joined by Lucas or Dustin or just by himself. Would spend his weekends out there, looking for her.

He knew that everyone else thought she was dead.

Hopper had searched, too, in those first two years. But then it all got to be too much for him, and he and Joyce and Will moved away. It was then that Mike realised that all his friends were probably humouring him. If Hopper had given up hope, then there probably wasn’t any hope left.

But there was just something…wrong about it all. Mike felt that if El was dead, he would truly know it. Feel it. But there was just some part of him that could sense she was still out there. Once, he’d woken sharply from his sleep and had peered out into the black, as though he thought he might see something, someone, in the shadows of his room.

All around him was her presence. Like catching a whiff of her apple-mint shampoo.

He said, “El?”

And it all went away, like the floor pulled out from under him, like the clouds eclipsing the sun. But somehow, he knew that she had been there.

When he turned nineteen, he went to Russia. It seemed like a logical thing to do at the time, and he had enough in his savings to buy a ticket. But once he was there, armed with only a photo of her and a Russian-to-English dictionary, he realised how stupid this whole plan was. He went into cafes and clothing stores and wandered the streets and showed people El’s picture, but all he got was blank stares, shaken heads, confused looks. Russia was huge, and he was searching through the major cities, and she could be anywhere but why would she be there? Because Hopper was in prison there once? Because there had once been a Russian base under Starcourt Mall? The Russians had been long gone by the time she vanished.

The more he thought about it, the less convinced he was that he would find her there. And there was also this emptiness that he felt there, like flinging your arm out wildly in the dark and only meeting air. It was like he could feel the absence of her, deep down, under the beat of his heart.

He stayed a week and then he went home.

Now, at twenty years old, Mike Wheeler thinks he should maybe get his life together.

This is what his dad tells him, over bacon at the breakfast table. College is close enough that he can still live at home, and his bank account is empty enough that he doesn’t have a choice.

Last year’s failed trip to Russia still sits like a bad taste in his mouth. He’s beginning to lose sight of any other logical places to look. Nothing really makes sense. She could be anywhere.

Or maybe she really is dead.

“Are you going to Lucas’s game tomorrow?” Dustin asks over the phone that evening. Mike is in the basement, which has become his bedroom, which has become the place he spends all his non-searching time in.

“Yeah, I’ll be there,” says Mike.

“You sound so excited,” Dustin says, sarcastically.

“Sorry. I’m just tired,” says Mike.

“You’re always tired.”

Because he hasn’t slept properly for fours years. Mike rubs his eye, rests his head against the wall. “I think I don’t know how to sleep anymore.”

“Hey, that’s great for getting stuff done, at least.” Sometimes, Dustin in the best person to talk to, because he doesn’t let Mike wallow. “I’ve always thought of how much time I’m wasting by not being awake for the full twenty four hours of a day. Imagine, you’re in like, Iceland, or something, and you don’t sleep, and the sun doesn’t set. You know, how they have those summer days where the sun doesn’t go down. If I had all that time, I’d have probably found the cure for cancer by now.”

“In Iceland?” Mike doesn’t know why, but he gets stuck on that.

“Yeah. Or Norway, actually.”

“Do you know much about it?” Mike asks. “Iceland?”

“It has a population of around 230,000 people,” Dustin lists off, automatically. “You wanna go? We can see the Aurora Borealis.”

“Yeah, maybe.” Mike’s heart is thudding so persistently, you’d think Dustin had told him something else. “Hey, I’ll talk to you later.”

Just like every other night, Mike doesn’t sleep. But it’s the first time in four years he’s truly felt awake.

Then it goes like this:

Mike finds himself possessed by some sort of inexplicable, almost delirious drive. He picks up extra shifts at the video store. He completes all his college assignments. He goes to all of Lucas’s games and helps Dustin run their DnD sessions and he does extra housework for his parents and then he retreats to the basement and counts his savings. He sells his car. He buys a plane ticket. And he goes to Iceland.

Like Russia, he is armed with a photo of El, but he couldn’t find an Icelandic-to-English dictionary. It leaves him feeling a little vulnerable as he steps off the plane. He’s truly out of his depth here.

Thankfully, unlike Russia, Iceland is a small country, and hitting all the major towns seems doable. He goes, one by one. Routine, methodical. Reykjavík. Kópavogur. Hafnarfjörður. He shows people El’s photo, looks for her in every face he passes, turns down alleyways and peers through windows.

He searches, searches, searches. Iceland is beautiful. It is snow-capped mountains, clear bright winter skies, picturesque cottages. Standing outside a church, he breathes in the crisp, cold air and lets himself look out at all of it. But it’s only for a second, before he’s moving again. Pushed by that drive. He doesn’t stop. He moves, moves, moves.

Two weeks in and he finds himself stumbling over cobblestones in a tiny seaside town, shrugging his shoulders up around his cold ears. There’s something about the cold that makes the night feel so dark. Like the cold itself is a physical presence, a black tarp hanging over the little village, pressing in.

Each pocket of light from the little square windows is a gasp of warmth. He staggers into the splintered shapes of light on the cobblestones, pretends its sunlight. If he focuses hard enough, he can almost feel it, that heat soaking into his cold-bitten skin.

Some of the buildings are covered in Christmas lights. Twinkling merrily at him from their lampposts and rooftops. It should be cosy. But mostly, he’s just cold.

It hits him. All of it, catching up to him. His body almost buckling under the weight of his exhaustion.

What is he doing here?

Sidestepping slush and chattering down the bone. Staggering around like a drunken man. He looks out at the unfamiliarity of this place. The squat buildings and surrounding cliffs and breathes in that distant brine of the sea. There’s nothing, nothing that ties him here.

Is this what it has come to? His delirium, shipping him off to Iceland, to die of frostbite on the sidewalk. What is he expecting to see? There’s no one around. No one as stupid as him. They’re all tucked away, in their warm homes, probably curled up by their fireplaces, beside their Christmas trees. With their family, friends. Mike could have that. He could go home tomorrow and pretend this never happened. Invite Lucas and Max and Dustin over, play cards at the dining table and drink eggnog. None of them even know he’s here.

But he’d look at the empty seat beside him, over and over, a tongue poking at the gap where a tooth used to be. But he’d toss and turn all night, not letting her slip from his mind in the hopes that she’d at least appear in his dreams.

But his heart pounds, insistent, as he stumbles around the town, like it knows something.

At the end of the street is a building larger than the others, and the light that bleeds from it’s windows is brighter, warmer than the rest. It seems to be covered in a bubble of sound – muffled chatter and laughter and a tune played on the piano. Mike steps into that bubble.

The windows are a little foggy, and the scene of the bar is a bleary picture. People drinking at little wooden tables and lounging on squashy chairs in front of a fireplace and puffy jackets hung up on a rack and a bar on the right with glittering bottles sat on the shelves and framed photos of residents and icecaps hung up crookedly over the wooden panels and a girl sitting at the counter drinking a steaming cup of tea.

She’s in a blue fuzzy sweater and a mishappen, probably hand-knitted, pink beanie. Her hair is in two braids, but curls spill out around her face. She’s smiling and chatting to the bartender. She’s leaning forward, eagerly, to hear him over the rest of the bar’s noise. She’s flushed from the hot tea. She’s wearing big, chunky snow boots. She’s the most beautiful girl Mike has ever seen.

Holy shit. Mike’s knees almost buckle, give out right from under him.

He’s found her.

He’s frozen except for the eager, eager press of his gaze. Drinking every last detail of her in.

El, he thinks. He can’t say it, because he’s pretty sure it’ll come out as a sob. That his whole body will rattle and break and he’ll collapse. I found you.

And then, she moves. It’s barely-there, but he knows, immediately, that she can feel him looking. That she is turning to look back at him. And he stumbles away from the window and runs before she can.

There’s a phone in the little common room of the inn. Mike collapses into the armchair beside it, breathless, trembling, and dials Lucas’s number.

“Come on, come on, come on,” he mutters, over the rhythm of the phone ringing. He actually think he might die, waiting for Lucas to pick up. He needs…something. All this energy bursting out of him. He needs to run back and fall into El’s arms. He needs to scream from the top of the mountain. He needs Lucas to answer the fucking phone.

“Hello?”

Mike frowns. “Max?”  

“Yeah.”

“Where’s Lucas?”

“He’s out. Who’s this?”

He knows she recognises his voice. “Mike.”

“Hmm. Doesn’t ring a bell.”

Normally, he’d go along with her annoying bit, but his whole body is buzzing and he’s found her. “Max, I’m in Iceland.”

“What the fuck?”

“I found her. She’s here, Max. I found her.”

Dead air on the other end of the line. Mike wonders if Max dropped the phone, if she’s frozen with it stuck to her face, if her eyes are wide, if her mouth is hanging open.

Finally she whispers, “you better not be fucking with me right now.”

“Why the fuck would I joke about this?”

“Oh my God.” Max laughs wetly, like she’s crying. “Give her the phone! Oh my God. Put her on the damn phone, Wheeler.”

Mike’s heart drops a little bit. He feels like an idiot. “She’s…not here.”

“Where is she? I want to talk to her.”

“I…well…I saw her. In a bar. But…I left before I could speak to her.”

Dead air again. This time Mike knows Max’s eye is pinched, that she’s probably trying to figure out how she can reach through the phone and strangle him. “And why the fuck would you do that?” she asks.

Why would he do that? There’s some sort of thread hooked to his heart, tugging and tugging, trying to pull him back to her. To the door of the bar. He should’ve opened it, stepped inside, met her gaze.

He keeps seeing her smiling. The energetic press of her body against the bar’s counter, how she’d pushed up in her seat to send her laughter over to the bartender.

“She’s happy,” he says.

“And what? That means she won’t want to see you?” Max scoffs. Sometimes Mike thinks the reason they get on each other’s nerves is because they can read each other so easily.

He says nothing. The thick reality of it is that her warmly lit laughter on the other side of the glass made him feel like if he got any closer, he’d only bring the cold in with him.

“Mike,” Max continues, “she’s loved you since she was twelve years old. She’ll want to see you. Hell, when I was trapped in Vecna’s memories, I would’ve killed to see your weird looking face.” 

Mike laughs, the same kind of wet laughter that had escaped Max earlier, but he’s not sure when he started crying. “If I was in Vecna’s memories, I would’ve killed to see your weird looking face, too.”

He almost feels good – maybe because there’s few moments where he gets to be vulnerable with Max - but there’s still a rock sitting heavily in his stomach. And he falls back into silence, watches the phone cord twirl around his fingers.

The thick reality of it is that maybe El is happier without him. It is: maybe she’s got a life here that is better than the one she could ever have him. It is: if she had wanted to see him, then she would’ve seen him.

She’s happy, healthy, safe. So, the only reason she never came back was simply because she didn’t want to.

“Maybe it’s just enough to know that she’s okay,” Mike says.

“No no no. If you don’t talk to her, then I’m getting on the next flight and finding her myself. Look, if she doesn’t want to see you, then she’ll tell you, and you can come home. But are you really going to leave without even trying?”

“You spend too much time with Lucas,” Mike says. “You’re starting to sound just like him. March back into battle." 

“If I call you an idiot, does that sound more like me?”

“No, that sounds like him, too.”

Mike doesn’t sleep. He lies awake and stares up into the black and thinks about how somewhere in this tiny village, El is also lying in bed. Is she sleeping? Dreaming? Tossing and turning?

The thread in his heart tugs and tugs.

He doesn’t know what to do.

Some sort of restless, wakeful sleep crashes over him and the sun rises and he gets up, showers, spends a long time fixing his hair only to shove a beanie over it. And he doesn’t know what to do.

All he wants is to see her. To wrap his arms around her. Hear her say his name. But there’s still that doubt. That guilt. Maybe seeing him will only bring up a past she doesn’t want to remember.

He tugs on his jacket, supposes he can find some food, for starters.

The village is far more alive in the morning. The sun a crisp white apple in the winter sky, the streets glittering with snow, the air sea-scented with the hint of something sweet, like baked goods. People hurry up and down the sidewalks, front doors open and close, a truck bumps past.

He wanders aimlessly, glancing at storefronts, looking for a place to eat breakfast.

And then it happens.

He spots a bakery and stops, peering in through the front window. The thread in his heart pulls once, twice, and he looks over. And he sees her, almost completely obscured by the two large grocery bags bundled in her arms. Her little pink beanie peeking out over the top. And she sees him.

Her brown eyes meet his and it’s like a hand clutches his heart and stills it. He doesn’t know how to breathe, for a second. He can’t say anything, but his whole body is screaming her name.

She’s frozen. A pair of wide, startled eyes. And she drops her groceries onto the cobblestones.

For a moment, they are the only two things in the entire world that aren’t moving. Everything else rushes past in a blur of colour and sound and it’s just them, staring at each other. But somethings kick-starts inside Mike. Because when he’s thought of this moment, and he’s thought of it a lot, he thought she’d smile or gasp out his name or throw her arms around him. Pull him in for a kiss. But she doesn’t move. So he drops down in the slush, flustered, instantly wet and cold at the knees, and tries to scoop all her groceries back into the bags. Some sort of innate impulse to fix any and all of her problems.

“Sorry,” he says, automatically. Grabbing at cans of soup by her chunky snow boots.

She makes a little sound. Like a shudder. Mike can’t help it; he looks up at her. And she’s looking down at him, her eyes wet with tears, a dimple in her chin.

She whispers, “Mike.”

Mike’s throat closes over. He whispers, “El.”

Now when he stands, his arms are full of her groceries, so she can’t throw her arms around him, or kiss him, even if she wanted to.

He thinks about dropping them.

She stays firmly rooted to the spot. “You’re here.”

“I’m here,” he says. Then, “I hope that’s okay.”

Her eyes flicker all over his face, her chin tilted up ever so slightly to see him, and a little smile comes over her mouth. Disbelieving, but amused, like what he said was funny. It falls quickly, deeply, into a frown, and she shakes her head.

“How?” she says. “How did you find me?”

“I…don’t know.” Mike says. “I just knew. I just knew you’d be here.”

She lifts up on her toes, only slightly, but enough that Mike catches the movement and holds his breath. But she lowers back down. Twists her mouth. Her eyes watery and clinging to him.

“You knew,” she whispers, more to herself than to him. “Of course you did. I thought, maybe…” She breaks off.

“What?” Mike asks, has to keep the beg out of his voice.

“No, I don’t know. I just…didn’t think I’d see you.” There’s a distant look in her eyes, like she’s deep in her thoughts.  

He wants, desperately, to know what is going on inside her head.

When they were young, he’d just ask her. Sitting cross-legged on her bedroom floor in the cabin, surrounded by snacks and magazines and comics, listening to the radio. He’d see the furrow in her brow, and he’d reach over and poke her knee.

“Whatcha thinking about?” he’d ask.

And with El, it could be absolutely anything. It’d always surprise him, in a way that didn’t really surprise him at all. Bees, she’d say, how do they fly?

Or, I don’t think I ever returned Max’s jacket.

Or, I wonder where my father is. The real one.

There was a never a question they couldn’t ask each other.

Standing here now, arms heavy with her groceries, his face frozen from the cold, those days seem so, so far away. El says nothing and he wants to ask her what she’s thinking and he wants to ask her if she’ll come home and he wants to tell her he loves her and he knows he can’t.

It hurts. How can he do this? Be here with her but not be here with her? He doesn’t know how to be strangers.

“El,” he starts.

“We should get out of the cold. Would you mind carrying those for me?” El interrupts. “My place is just over here.”

“O-oh. Okay.”

He blinks – she’s already on the move. He follows El down the street.

An old man almost bumps right into her, bustling toward one of the stores. And he reels back, blinks, flashes her a smile. “El!” he says, in a thick accent. “Good morning!”

“Good morning, Gunnar,” says El. Gunnar’s gaze slides past her, to Mike.

“Who is this?”

El says something in Icelandic. Short, quick, Mike only catches a “kah” sound, maybe something rhyming with “rusty.” Gunnar frowns, gazes back at Mike with a little more consideration. Looks him up and down for long enough that Mike begins to worry if his hair looks alright. Then he says something in Icelandic back. Mike doesn’t catch a word of that, but it makes El giggle. Which makes his brain stop working for a little bit.

“You speak Icelandic?” Mike says, hurrying to catch up as El starts moving again.

“I’m not fluent,” El says. “But I’ve picked up enough to get by.”

“That’s really cool,” Mike says, and he means it. “What did you say to him? Gunnar?”

El glances sideways at him, and a little smirk dances at the corner of her mouth. “Nothing,” she says. And it’s just all so El that Mike can’t bring himself to pry.

El lives above a tiny clothing store, in a tiny apartment.

When you enter, there’s a kitchen (nothing more than a fridge, counter, sink, and some wall-mounted cupboards) to your left, a table with two chairs connected to the kitchen, and a squashy couch and coffee table facing a fireplace.

It all feels very cosy. Soft rugs and thick curtains, cups in the sink and her shoes by the door. The walls and couch are a matching shade of dark green; the rest of the furniture made of dark wood. And everywhere there are…things. Books stacked on the dining table and stuffed into a bookshelf by the couch, half-knitted scarves on the coffee table, a painting of a bird on an easel by one of the windows.  

“Wow, nice place,” Mike says.

“Shoes off,” says El. Mike kicks his shoes off.

“So this is where you’ve been living for all these years?” Mike continues. He places the grocery bags on the kitchen counter. Starts unpacking them, then realises he doesn’t know where anything goes. So he just stands there with canned soup in his hands. “That’s a crazy collection of books.”

El lights the fireplace. “My friend collects things. He got them for me.”

“Gunnar?”

“No, another friend.”

“Who?”

El smiles, shakes her head. “You don’t know him, Mike.”

“But he’s an old guy like Gunnar, right?” Mike thinks back to the bartender she’d been chatting to last night.

“No.”

“He’s not old?”

“Why does he have to be old?”

“How old is he?”

“I don’t know! Probably around my age. Why does this matter?”

So El has a male friend, her age, who collects books for her. Mike’s hands curl tightly around the soup cans. Be cool, Mike, he thinks, sharply. But his stomach is churning.  

With the fire going, El shrugs off her puffer jacket and yanks off her beanie. A mess of curls escaping from her braids fall over her face. She undoes her braids and rakes her fingers through her hair, which is almost as long as it was when she was in Lenora. Just as fluffy and messy.

She glances over at Mike, who doesn’t even bother trying to hide that was he watching her with rapt attention.

“You really haven’t changed,” she says.

“You haven’t either,” Mike says. “But then, you also speak Icelandic now. And you collect books and knit. And…is that a keyboard? Do you play?”

“I’m learning.”

And she paints birds, and she likes French onion soup (there’s five cans of it in the grocery bags), and she lives in Iceland where she spends time with a male friend her age, and all this time has passed, and Mike hasn’t been part of it.

It’s like there’s still a chasm between them, a rift of time and space. He stares across it and she’s a tiny pinprick on the other side of it, way out of his reach. And the ache is so deep that he’s sick with it.

He’s missing her even as he looks right at her.

“I always knew you were still out there,” Mike says. “I knew you weren’t dead.”

“Mike –”

“I should’ve come sooner.”

“You’re here now.”

“I wasted so much time. I mean, I went to Russia. Did you know that? No, of course you don’t. You don’t know anything about anything these past four years. Because I was trying to be logical and I wasn’t listening…I mean my heart knew where you were but I wasn’t listening –”

“Mike, it’s okay.”

But it’s like a dam has burst open. “No, it’s not okay. It’s not okay, El. I should’ve found you. You’ve been here, all alone, while the rest of us, the party, we’ve all been together. Doing things that just…don’t matter. Because you’re the only thing that’s ever mattered. And I was wasting time, going around in circles, going to Russia. I should’ve found you.”

His chest is heaving, eyes stinging, the words tumbling out of him. All these years, he’s locked it all down, gone in and cut the heartstrings and not let himself feel any of it. Not like this. Ragged and wretched, pure emotion. He puts down the stupid soup cans and meets El in front of the fire. She’s all washed over in the warm glow, eyes glistening.

He reaches out for her. And she steps away.

He drops his arms, his stomach falling to the floor. “El.”

“I wasn’t all alone. I’ve got a life here, Mike.”

“No, I know, I just mean – ” He pauses, letting it sink in. “Did you ever…try to come home?”

“This is my home now,” she says, and her chin dimples in that way it does when she’s trying very hard not to cry. Mike shakes his head. She gets in before he can say anything: “tell me, about those four years. Did you graduate? Go to college? Write your book?”

Mike humours her only because he can’t stand seeing her upset. “Yes, I graduated. I’m in college –”

She gives him a watery smile. “Studying writing?”

“Teaching.”

“Like Mr Clarke.”

“Yeah. El, why didn’t you ever come home?”

“Some things just aren’t possible. Did you write your book?”

“No. And why wasn’t it possible? What happened exactly? When you closed the gate? I mean, how did you end up here?”

She gets an odd look over her face. Suddenly stern. “I was stuck in the Upside Down until I found another gate, and it led me here. Why didn’t you write your book?”

“Because I haven’t been able to focus on anything for four years. I was too busy trying to prove that you weren’t dead.”

There’s a hundred, million, things surging inside him right now. Can’t decide if he wants to cry or shut down or throw something out the window. He loves her and he hates her and he wants to kiss her and he can’t bear to look at her for another second. Standing here in her tiny little apartment, her new home. She was painting birds while he walked way too close to the edges of tall cliffs.

Why did you let me think you were dead?

There’s a knock at the door.

El’s gaze is drawn to it, in a quick, almost panicked sort of way.

“Who’s that?” Mike asks.

Another knock, a little more insistent.

“The morning pastries,” El mutters.

“The what?”

She frowns at the door, almost like she’s willing whoever is behind to to go away. And Mike probably would’ve left it if she hadn’t looked at it like that. But now he has to know who’s on the other side.

“Mike – ” El starts. He’s already crossing the room and yanking the door open.

A man about his age stands there, holding two pastries wrapped in napkins in each of his hands. He’s shorter than Mike, on the stockier side, with light brown curls. He blinks in surprise.

“Who are you?” Mike asks, not bothering to be polite.

“Isak,” the man says.

“Is one of those for me?” Mike gestures wryly at the pastries.

Isak looks completely confused. “Where is El?”

“I’m here,” says El, appearing beside Mike. “Sorry, Isak. Would you mind coming back later?”

Isak’s gaze holds on Mike, just as Mike’s holds on Isak. “I can wait,” Isak says.

“Yeah. He hasn’t given me my pastry yet,” says Mike.

“It’s not for you,” says Isak. Then he turns to El and says something in Icelandic and Mike clutches the doorknob, bristling.

“Actually, we were in the middle of a very important conversation, so you should really get out of here,” Mike says.

And then El nudges her hand against his arm and he goes completely silent. The gentle brush of her knuckles, her warm, soft skin. It makes everything inside him catch alight, every hair on his body stands up on end. It’s the first time she has touched him in four years.

Mike swallows thickly, tries to sneak a glance at her, but she is still looking at Isak.

“Well, first I give El her favourite pastry,” Isak says. “That I get for her every day.”

“Thanks,” El says. She all but snatches it from his hand and steps away from the doorway. “I’ll see you later.”

Mike feels the doorknob pull away in his grip and realises that she is trying to shut the door. He closes it the rest of the way. Then he stands there like an idiot for a moment, staring at where she had touched him, like he can still feel it. Then he thinks of Isak’s smug face.

“Is that your friend who collects books?” he asks.

El tosses the pastry onto the counter without much care – Mike tries not to smirk – and stomps across the room. She collapses onto the couch and runs her hands over her face. “Stupid boys.”

Mike loses the smirk. “Sorry.”  

She drops her hands and looks at him. “Why are you here, Mike? I’m not leaving. I think you know that. You always knew. I was never going to come home. So why are you here?”

She looks annoyed, red in the face, hair frizzing at the temples. Ice spikes through Mike’s heart. “I didn’t know that.”

“Well, this is my home. I’m staying here. And you should go.”

“But, why, El? After four years…”

“Because I built a proper life here. I’ve started over. You’re…you’re just a reminder of my past.”

Mike feels himself flinch, swipes a hand under his jaw like he’s been punched. “You’ve built a proper life? What, with Isak?”

She throws him a sharp look. “Maybe. It doesn’t concern you. I also have this apartment. And I have a job.”  

“Where?”

“At the bar.”

“And, what? You love it?”

“Yes.”

“You make drinks?”

“I clean the tables.”

“There’s no way that you love it.”

“You don’t know me, Mike.”

Mike tries his best to steel himself. “How is that any better than what you can have back home?”

“Because it’s mine.”

“It could be yours back home, too.” I was always yours.

“But I want it here,” El says, with some finality. “And you should go and let me have it.”

“Is…is that what you really want?”

She nods. Mike focuses on the clench of her jaw as she turns her head to look out the window. On the twitch of her throat as she swallows. On the downturn of the corners of her mouth. Focuses on every little detail of her to stop himself from throwing up.

He’s fucked up. He’s ruined it. Why did he have to be rude to Isak? Why did he have to push her about why she didn’t come back? Why didn’t he just leave her a letter? Why didn’t he just leave it at seeing her through the bar window? Knowing she was alive and happy? Now he’ll have to live with this, the knowledge that she doesn’t want him.

“Okay.” The word barely makes it out of him.

He wants her to look at him, but she doesn’t. He wants…he wants. But all he can do is take one last good at her, at all the little traces of her in the apartment. All he can do is keep himself upright, while everything else feels like it’s breaking away. And he leaves.

Isak is waiting outside, leant against the brick wall of the clothes store under El’s apartment. Mike stuffs his hands in his pockets as he walks past. He’s not a violent guy, but he’s overcome by a very strong urge to punch Isak in the face.

But he knows, deep down, that the anger he feels toward Isak is really just anger that he feels toward himself. That it’s not even just anger, but disappointment and loss and grief.

So he shrugs his shoulders around his ears and he keeps walking. Doesn’t look back. Doesn’t know if Isak slipped back inside to go and see her. And it shouldn’t matter. As long as El is happy. As long as she’s loved. But it matters. Like a knife in his gut, it matters.

It hits him like a wave on the way back to the inn, and by the time he’s back in his room, he’s wrecked by it. Shoulders shaking, chest aching, emotion overcoming him. He collapses onto his bed and he cries. He can’t remember the last time he sobbed like this. Maybe he never has. It tears through him, so thick at the back of his throat that he’s sure he’s going to vomit.

Time passes and he lies there. At one point he thinks about going downstairs and calling Max, but he doesn’t really know what he’ll say. Hey, you were wrong, and El didn’t want to see me? What’s the point? All that’s left to do is to go home. He wonders if he can find out where Isak lives first and throw rocks through his windows. That thought makes him feel better for a second. Then he thinks about El touching his arm and how he’ll never have that again and everything is pure misery once more.

But that night, he dreams. He’s running towards the gate, towards El, and he makes it through.

He doesn’t get out of bed until the late afternoon the following day. And it’s only because he is so hungry it hurts. He never did eat anything yesterday.

Out on the street, he looks for her. Then he shakes his head, tries to focus on finding food, because she doesn’t want to see him.

He finds the bakery from yesterday, but it’s closed. So he goes in the direction that El came from, trying to find the place where she bought all her groceries. It’s a tiny little store, smells of dust and wood.

He buys himself a plain bread roll and calls it day.

On the way back to the inn, he runs into Gunnar.

“Ah!” says Gunnar, in recognition, then he says the Icelandic word that El had used to describe Mike yesterday, the way that he might’ve said, ah, Mike!

Mike almost keeps walking, ready to once again sink into his own misery. But he stops, almost sliding on the icy street, and whips around to meet Gunnar’s eye.

“What’s that word?” he asks. “The one you just said.”

Gunnar looks a little surprised. “Kærasti,” he says.

“What is it?” Mike says.

“Kærasti,” Gunnar repeats, and Mike tries to copy it.

“What does it mean?” Mike asks. Gunnar just shakes his head.

“Talk to El,” he says. He opens the door to the nearest building, which seems to be a little apartment, and goes inside.

Mike stares after him, then he whispers the word over and over to himself, trying to keep it fresh in his mind. He hurries back to the little grocery store and accosts the man behind the counter.

“What does kærasti mean?” he asks. “In English?”

The man just stares at him.

Mike groans, pushes away from the counter, spotting a woman by the shelf of soup cans. She startles when he sidles up next to her.

“Hi, sorry. Do you speak English?” he asks.

She frowns, glancing behind Mike like she might be able to find something there that’ll explain why he’s talking to her. She finds nothing. “Some.”

“What does kærasti mean?”

It seems to be the last thing she expected him to say. Then she smiles almost knowingly. “A girl said it? To you?”

“Yes!” Mike clears his throat, tries to quell his excitement. “Yeah, a girl said it.”

“She says you are her boyfriend.”

“What?” Mike’s brain stops working. “Kærasti? Right? That means boyfriend?”

The woman nods.

Mike rushes back outside, reeling. The winter sun seems to be spinning in the sky. Boyfriend. El described him to Gunnar as her boyfriend.

So why would she tell him to leave?

He begins to move in no particular direction. None of this feels right. From the moment he first saw her on the street. She didn’t react like the El he knew, the one who pulled him back to kiss him, tell him she loved him, before she sacrificed herself. The one who looked at him, hopeful and wanting behind the tears in her eyes, as he planned to run away with her on that rooftop. And sure, four years had passed, but his love for her hasn’t budged one bit. There is no way she just doesn’t love him at all anymore. No matter how cosy her apartment is, or how many books Isak gives her. She must still feel something. She does feel something.

Some things just aren’t possible, she’d said.

It’s like a hand claws its way through all the messy emotion and heavy baggage and the churning, nonsensical thoughts, and turns on a switch in his head. Suddenly, he knows.

It’s nearing dusk when he runs back to her apartment. He bangs on the door but she doesn’t answer. And he knows, somehow, that she’s not ignoring him. She’s just not home. So he stumbles back onto the street, his ragged breathing a white cloud in the cold air in front of him, and he tries to feel the pull of the thread hooked in his heart. Take me to her, he pleads.

He’s once again stumbling along the cobblestones. The sky darkens and he’s lead by the window-pockets of light. He can smell the smoke from the chimneys and the sea…the sea. He turns down a squashy alleyway between two tiny buildings, stumbles out onto another road. The smell of brine grows stronger. He follows it until he’s on a road overlooking the docks, and the still, dark water.

His heart pulls. He can’t move fast enough.

El is sitting on the edge of the dock, her legs dangling over the water. She can definitely hear him approaching, but she doesn’t move. Mike stops behind her.

“What is it? The thing that’s keeping you here?” he asks, breathless.

She cranes around to look at him. Her eyes are rimmed red, mouth downturned and miserable. “Isak,” she says.

“No.” Mike shakes his head. “You’re just saying that to make me go away. What’s the real reason? Why can’t you come home?”

She looks back at her legs over the water. “I just don’t want to go back, Mike.”

“I don’t believe you. You’re wearing your hair like Max always does. You were painting the birds we always used to see outside of Dustin’s house. You told Gunnar that I’m your boyfriend.” He can see her tense, and slowly approaches, sits down next to her. “You miss home,” he says, softly. “You just can’t come back.”

Her hand clutches at the wood panels of the dock by her thigh. Mike slowly, tentatively, folds his hand over hers. Her fingers bitten cold, but somehow so warm under his. She stares at their hands but doesn’t pull away, doesn’t move. Mike swears he can feel his heartbeat in his palm, wonders if she feels it too.

“Is it Vecna?” he asks.

“No,” El whispers.

“Tell me, El. Please. What is it?”

She seems to debate with herself, biting her lip, before giving in. “I have to close the gate.”

“What do you mean?”

“The one that got me here. I closed it as soon as I escaped, and then stumbled into town. I wasn’t in good shape. Gunnar found me and nursed me back to health. And I was going to come home. To you. But I had a feeling I needed to go back and check that the gate was fully closed. So I did and it wasn’t. I thought maybe it was just because I’d been so weak when I tried to close it the first time. I closed it again. I decided to wait a week and check it again. And it was open. It doesn’t stay closed.”

She sucks in a shaky breath. Mike squeezes his hand over hers.

“I have to stay here, because I have to keep closing it,” she continues. “If I don’t, then this town will be in danger. I’m stuck here. And I didn’t want you to be stuck here, too. I wanted you to finish high school and to go to college and live a normal life. But I knew if you knew I was here, you’d throw it all away to be with me.”

“El…”

“This is my burden. That gate opened because of me.”

“How do you know that? Maybe a demo opened it, or Vecna before he died.”

El smiles sadly. “It opened behind a waterfall.”

Mike knows he can’t argue with that.

“Just the one?” he asks, to make her laugh. And she does. Though she also starts crying.

“And I know what you’re thinking, Mike. I know you’re thinking that you don’t care about throwing everything away, and that you’ll stay here with me. And you just can’t, okay?”

Mike clenches his jaw. “That’s my decision to make.”

“But you can’t let a major life decision revolve around me,” she says.

“All of my major life decisions revolve around you.”

El wipes her tears with her free hand, shakes her head. The sun sets over the water, so brilliant and gold, ripe and orange, even in the bitter cold grey. It catches in the water and in El’s eyes and washes over their joined hands. And El is achingly beautiful, even with all her sad. She looks at Mike and it’s like nothing else in the whole world matters. How can she think he’s throwing anything away to be with her? This is all he’s ever wanted, right here.

“Besides,” he says. “I’d really like to see that waterfall.”

She laughs again. It’s like bird song over the water. And in a quick series of movements, she cups his face, leans in, and kisses him.

At first, Mike is frozen. It’s like all the wind has been knocked out of him. Then all of his synapses fire at once, and he puts his hand on her waist, draws her closer, and he kisses her back.

It’s everything he’s dreamed of for the last four years. It’s like releasing a tightly held breath, like stepping into a warm bath. He sinks into the kiss, into her, all his muscles relaxing. But his heart pounds. Like some desperate, hungry animal. He tries to pull her closer, but she can’t get any closer. He tries to deepen the kiss, but it can’t get any deeper. His heart pounds, pounds, pounds. Finally, he has to pull away, because he thinks it might explode.

He presses his forehead to hers, tries to take a breath.

“That’s a really terrible way to get me to leave,” he says.

“I couldn’t help it,” El says. She brushes a finger under his eye, as though catching a tear. When did he start crying? “You’re so stubborn.”

“Coming from you,” Mike says.

“What is?”

“I mean, that’s rich coming from you. Like, you’re the most stubborn person I know.”

El frowns. “You wouldn’t even let me close the gate by myself. I’m sorry about the broken bones, by the way.” Her hand drops to his shoulder, the one he’d broken. Rubs circles by his collarbone with her thumb.

“It gets a bit stiff and sore in the cold,” he says, pathetically, just to keep her touching him like that.

“Let’s go inside, then,” she says. “I’ll light a fire.”

Which means, come back to my place. Which means, maybe she does want him to stay.

“Okay.” Then, because he’s an idiot, “there’s no afternoon pastries, are there?”

El cocks her head quizzically, just like she always used to do. And she gets to her feet, and the loss of her body beside him is like a gaping, open wound, but then she holds out her hand and he takes it. She pulls him up, and he’s barely all the way upright before he’s pulling her in and kissing her again. Their joined hands are squashed between them.

She pulls away with a little no-nonsense El expression and says, “we still have to talk about this.” Then, watching as he unfurls from his bent-back, kissing position, “why are you so tall?”

“We still have to talk about why I’m so tall?”

“No. Yes. We still have to talk about what we’re going to do – ”

“I’m going to stay.”

“ – and I think you grew since I last saw you.” She rises up on her toes, tries to place a hand above Mike’s head as though measuring him, but she can’t reach.

“Maybe my leg bone grew back taller after you broke it,” Mike says. El’s eyes widen, apologetic, and Mike scrambles. “Bad joke. Sorry. It’s okay. I’m actually totally fine. Losing you was the worst part.”

“It was the worst part for me, too,” El says. And Mike thinks, then, that they’re going to be okay.

El’s apartment is not big enough for two people, but Mike doesn’t mind having to squish together on the couch, or in the bathroom as they brush their teeth, or having to wrap his arms around her, their bodies flush, in her bed.

With his nose buried in the nape of her neck, her breathing gently against his chest, he has the best night sleep he’s had in four years.

And the next night, and the next.

Each day comes and Mike stays. And he watches El flick a finger to shut a cupboard door from across the room, grab him a piece of bread from the counter with a small jerk of her head. All her casual, easy uses of her powers. He watches her paint and knit and fall asleep on the couch. He watches her leave for work and come home with snow in her hair and glassy, tired eyes. He watches her do all her usual things, her new life unfurling around him. And he stays, rooted, in the middle of it. Thinks that there is nothing strong enough in this world to move him.  

“Do you have to get back? For college?” El asks him one night, their legs tangled together on the couch, fire crackling.

“College schmollege,” Mike says. “I’ve decided I’m going to be an author. I’ve already come up with a really good idea for a book. And Isak said he can help me find a part time job.”

“Isak?” El asks, surprised.

“Yeah. We had a good chat in the bakery the other morning.”

The truth is, Isak turned up at the door the morning after Mike’s first night at El’s place, with his usual morning pastries. And so Mike had gotten up early the following morning and found the bakery himself. Isak had already been there, so Mike had smiled at him – probably a little too nicely – and said, “I can get El’s pastry, don’t worry.”

And Isak had looked a little disappointed, and Mike couldn’t help but feel bad. Because the truth was, there was nothing to be jealous of; the poor guy never had a shot.

So Mike struck up a conversation, and by the end of it, he figured that he and Isak could actually become friends.

“Maybe the three of us can hang out sometime,” Mike says now, nudging his socked foot against El’s.

“That’d be nice,” says El. “But you should know, Mike. Isak and I did kiss once.”

“What?”

“Yes. It was just a quick one.”

And to think, Mike had offered to buy this guy’s pastry yesterday. Maybe he needs to return to the fantasy of throwing rocks through Isak’s window.

“We’re just friends,” El adds, at Mike’s stewing silence.

“Except he’s very obviously in love with you,” Mike says.

“But I’m in love with you,” El says.

“I’m in love with you, too,” Mike says, immediately. His heartrate picks up like he’s back there, in the Upside Down, eyes glued to El as the world collapses around them. “I love you, El.”

And nothing else matters. Least of all fucking Isak.

Two days later, El shows him the gate, behind the glistening waterfall, and he holds her hand as she closes it.

And three days later, Max comes and visits. Lucas joins her two days after that. Then Dustin. Then Hopper and Joyce and Will.

There’s hugs and tears and laughter and way too many people squashed together in El’s tiny apartment and it’s the happiest time of Mike’s life.

He sees them all off, as they head back home. Waves goodbye with his arm wrapped around El’s shoulder.

And he stays.