Chapter Text
The airport smelled like burnt coffee and carpet cleaner, a combination that pulled Mike Wheeler straight back to the old AV club room - wedged between the teachers’ lounge and the janitor’s closet, where nothing ever quite aired out. He sat in a moulded plastic chair near Gate C17, his backpack looped around his ankle like it might try to make a break for it without him. Beyond the wide windows, a plane idled on the tarmac, its white fuselage streaked with grey from weeks of unwashed rain. It seemed tired. Grounded. Like he did. Overhead, a woman’s voice announced a delay for a flight to Minneapolis, cheerful in the way only people with nowhere to be could manage. Mike didn’t look up. Delays felt inevitable here - like the airport itself had decided it too was going to contribute to the list of unfortunate events that had plagued Mike's life.
Iceland.
It still didn't feel real. It still sounded like a place from a map he'd stared at too long, edges blurring, letters turning into shapes instead of a real name. A place of volcanoes and glaciers and...and...well, he didn't know. That's what he was going to find out.
Mike opened the notebook balanced on his knee, then closed it again without writing anything. He'd been doing that for the last twenty minutes. The book was finished, technically. The edits were done. The offer: a book deal, interviews, a cut of the profits - it had all been accepted weeks ago. All that was left was to get on the plane and complete this trip before its release.
But he hadn’t handed in the final draft. He couldn’t. Something was holding him back. One character’s storyline still felt wrong. The Mage. She was missing. Gone entirely from the story, when she had always been there, alive in his head. He just couldn’t find the words that didn’t feel like lies.
A week ago, they had met at the old bar in Hawkins, slipping into each other’s lives as if no time had passed at all. November 6th - the day Will had vanished into the Upside Down, and four years later, the day Eleven had disappeared to destroy it. That was why they returned every year. That was why they always came back. They promised, long ago, that no matter where life took them, they would try to meet here, in this little town that had raised them.
Mike was the only one still living there. Everyone else had gone on to somewhere bigger, brighter. Dustin was finishing his last year of college, chasing theories that might change the world. Will had moved to New York with the dream of filling galleries with drawings that seemed to bleed a part of himself onto every canvas. Lucas and Max had carved out a quiet life in California, the first home they could call their own. Even Johnathan and Nancy had grown apart, each exploring their own careers out of Hawkins.
Left behind were Mike’s family - his parents, his little sister Holly now navigating Middle School, and Steve Harrington, who had taken babysitting so seriously he’d somehow turned it into a career as a baseball coach and high school sex-ed teacher.
Mike stared at the streets of Hawkins as he waited for his friends at the bar and felt the slow ache of time. The town hadn’t changed, not really. But they had. Everyone else had moved forward. He had stayed behind, tethered by memories he couldn’t quite let go of, and by a story that wasn’t finished - one that refused to be written without them all together again.
It was beautiful. And it was unbearably sad.
A few drinks in, Mike had brought up his struggles with his book and about how he couldn't work out the storyline with the Mage. Everyone fell silent immediately, as though seeing into his soul and knowing the real problem.
Lucas had suggested it - because Lucas always had ideas when something truly mattered. He bumped Mike’s shoulder with his own, like they were twelve again, huddled in Mike’s basement with compasses and walkie-talkies, plotting battles no one else would understand. “Why don’t you go to Iceland?” he said. “To the three waterfalls. You’ve always talked about it, but never made plans. It could be…what do they call it? A pilgrimage. One final trip to pay tribute to El. Maybe then, your mind could finally rest.”
Max rolled her eyes. She leaned forward, red hair pulled back, eyes sharp in a way that reminded him of how he was always a little bit scared of her. “Mike,” she said, blunt as ever, “you’ll hate yourself forever if you don’t go.” And then, just enough to make it sting, she softened. Max rarely softened for him unless it was pity - or something close to it. “Maybe leaving is exactly what you’re supposed to do. This book, this trip…it’s your chance to finally grieve properly. Lucas is right. It’s like a pilgrimage. You can finally complete the side quest you and El always wanted to take.”
Dustin, half-finished pizza in hand, turned the idea into an adventure straight out of one of their old campaigns. He rambled on about Iceland: volcanoes, glaciers, myths, absurdly clean energy. “Statistically, safest place on Earth,” he said, grinning like this was the obvious solution to all of life’s problems. “If you’re going to spiral, might as well do it somewhere with hot springs and epic landscapes.”
Mike remembered Dustin’s endless enthusiasm for science experiments, the way he had once tried to convince Mike to make a homemade radar for spotting wildlife in the woods in elementary school. That grin carried the weight of their friendship - faith that Mike would do the right thing, even if he didn’t believe it himself.
Will sat back, quiet at first, glass in hand, shoulders slightly hunched, watching the others. When he spoke, everyone listened. “Look,” he said, “if you think going there means you’re running away, you’re wrong. You’ve been searching for answers since that night we ended Vecna. I know what it’s like to be lost and to find your way back. You helped me with that. You helped all of us with that at one point or another. Now it’s your turn.”
Mike half-smiled at him whilst he thought of Eleven: her laughter in the Hawkins sun, her hands warm in his, the way she’d always trusted him to protect her. And now…she was gone. He had never stopped blaming himself for not being enough, for not being there. For the bomb that he had created that had burned the Upside Down to the ground with her in it. Every word Lucas, Max, Dustin, and Will said weighed on him, echoing tightly inside his chest. They were asking him to grieve, for nothing more than his own happiness, and he didn’t know if he could do it.
Because leaving wasn’t just a trip, it was facing the memory of her. It was opening a door he had kept shut for far too long. And maybe, just maybe, he wasn’t ready - but a part of him knew they were right, and that he had to try.
Mike shifted in his seat and stared at the boarding pass in his hand. His name looked strange printed in bold letters, official and adult. Michael Wheeler. Destination: Keflavík International Airport.
Iceland had started as a theory. A fantasy Mike had clung to, a way to cope. He hadn’t wanted to believe El was gone, so he pieced together the fragments of that night and built a story of what could have happened. Kali, Eleven’s sister, had created a vision for them and the military while El escaped the tunnels, a vision meant to convince everyone she was dead.
The military. That was what had killed her. If they hadn’t been rerunning Brenner’s secret program, none of this would have happened. El could have felt safe enough to come out with the rest of the group. She could have lived in Hawkins with Hopper and Joyce. She could have gone to school, graduated, and maybe even be moving into her first house with him right now, like Lucas and Max.
That’s what Iceland had become. A theory. A promise. The plan he and El had made to imagine a bright future in a crappy reality. A place far away from the pain, from the memories - a place to hide. A place of beauty. Three waterfalls.
The gate agent announced pre-boarding. A few people stood, stretching, gathering coats and carry-ons. Mike stayed where he was, fingers curled around the notebook like it might anchor him.
What if he was wrong?
What if Iceland was just Iceland - just soil and rock and northern lights that didn't mean anything at all? What if he got there and found nothing but distance and the echo of his own hope?
And what if he was right?
Mike closed his eyes and remembered one of the last things Eleven had said to him.
I love you.
He owed it to himself to be able to say it back, whether it be through words or finally completing he mission she never could.
"Now boarding Group Three," the voice called.
Mike stood up. His legs felt steadier than he expected. As he joined the line, he felt the familiar mix of fear and excitement coil in his chest - the same feeling he'd had riding bikes into the woods, setting up traps for demogorgans, and writing campaigns. At the mouth of the jet bridge, he paused and looked back through the glass, at the waiting area he was about to leave behind. Hawkins felt very far away already.
"Okay," he murmured, to no one in particular. Or maybe to her. "Ready."
The plane waited, engines humming, pointed toward the cold and the unknown. And for the first time in a long while, Mike Wheeler didn't feel like he was running after the past.
He felt like he was going to confront it.