Chapter Text
Sunlight filtered its way through the swaying curtains, blinding the fluttering eye of Mike Wheeler, lying face down in his bed. Strung out like a starfish, his arm rested over the lump at his side. He cracked an eye open, letting out a groan at the ungodly hour. It was too early. Why couldn’t the week just be over already? He didn’t have time for something as ridiculous as—
School.
“Shit,” Mike shot up, bleary eyes squinting at the alarm clock on his desk that was not making a single peep. “Shit, shit, shit.”
A whine filled the room behind him as he pulled loose pages and books off his desk, stuffing them into his backpack, wearing nothing but his briefs.
“Get up,” Mike said in a hurry, scurrying around his full-sized bed to grab the jeans bunched up on the floor. “El, you gotta get up, we’re so late.”
The brunette made another noise, huffing as she sat up slowly and palmed at her eyes. “What time is it?”
The morning light highlighted her frizzy bed-head gold, curling in every direction from her slumber on wet hair. And wasn’t it a blessing to see her like that.
“Late enough Hop’ll kill me,” he answered, hopping one-legged into his pants as he tossed her purple overnight duffel bag onto the bed, careful not to trip over the never-used sleeping bag on the side of the bed. “I’m supposed to leave for class in like, ten minutes.”
El’s doe eyes found the clock, widening in delirium. “Shit.”
The two wasted no time in dressing and repacking their bags, hurrying out the door to the bathroom as the rest of the extended Wheeler bunch ate in the kitchen with Jonathan speaking the loudest. The bathroom was empty, everyone else already ready for the day as the couple moved rhythmically around each other to brush their teeth, clean up, and tame their wild hair. It was one of the rare nights El and Joyce got to switch places and spend respective time with their partners, a deal only agreed upon by Hopper based on his own desires now that he and Joyce were together, and the Byers still had no official residence.
“Can you drop me off at Dustin’s?” El whispered on their way down the stairs, their quickened pace like a herd of elephants, trampling over the four different conversations happening at the table. “I can tunnel it. I was supposed to meet Joyce and Hop at the junkyard almost thirty minutes ago.”
El had only recently been allowed to stay at the Wheeler’s house a few months ago when El and Hopper had a frustrated face-off—both equally distraught over how hard it was to speak privately in the hollow cabin. But the agreement was settled on every night she stayed at the Wheeler’s, Mike had to drive her to wherever she needed to go, discreetly at 6:45, before circling back to pick up the others from his house and head to school.
But they were already late. So there was no chance of circling back without making Will and his sister late. And as the youngest in the party, Will didn’t have a car yet, so if Will had to take a bike because of Mike’s terrible timing, then he’d feel even worse. But there was no way to stop at Dustin’s house for her to use the closest tunnel. Well, there was a way, considering it was on the route to school. But that would mean she would walk underground, alone in the tunnels for over an hour, and that was just not something he was going to do. Sorry Will.
They grabbed plates, filling in the two empty seats across from one another at the table, and dug into the remaining scraps of eggs, bacon, and pancakes.
“Well, look who finally joined us?” Ted grumbled. “You know sleeping late is only ruining your grades.”
Nobody responded. Mike wasn’t even sure if anyone else was listening to his father. He’d only heard half of it, eyeing the conversation his mom started with El.
“How’d you sleep, sweetie?” Karen asked, leaning over into El’s space and whispering something about extra blankets that made El shake her head. The two had taken a liking to one another after meeting ‘officially’ upon their return from California. Holly was off doing her own thing most of the time, ignoring all the extra company, and Nancy always moved in multiple directions at once, planning the finest details in the same way as her brother— only for reasons unknown to Mike, she looked significantly more miserable than him. And Joyce, at least when she was here, seemed unrelatable to Karen in her constant frazzle-mindedness and need to be somewhere else. But Eleven, Karen couldn’t resist. On the days she stayed the night, Mike nearly had to pry his mom off his girlfriend and out of their elated talks about magazines, and movies, and Mike. And if Max was over too, he wouldn’t see El the rest of the night.
He thought that it was because El was quiet and secluded, but talkative when alone with someone, something Holly and Nancy were too busy to bother with in the past year. But for someone not in school or pulled in different directions, the girls fit strangely well. Especially since Max wasn’t fully healed, and at times still cold with the group, grumpy over the amount of school she had missed in the hospital, with every limb broken and still relying on physical therapy. El liked to think that Karen treated her and Max the way her birth mother would have if she got the chance.
“Will, can you ride with Lucas? I can’t drive you today,” Mike said, voice loud enough for the rest of the table to hear. He’d had a car for almost a whole year now. After the majority of the people in Hawkins left when the rifts opened, numerous cars were left behind, abandoned, or with occupants no longer alive. For the sophomores in high school saving up a few hundred, the junky resales without legal registration were a gold mine. The government had the town so locked down on nobody escaping, they seemed to care very little about what happened on the inside unless it was at the border or the MAC-Z.
Karen’s attention snapped back to her son. “What did you say, Michael?”
“I can’t drive them today, I have to take El to an appointment.”
“I thought you were done with those now that your hair grew back,” Ted said, and El didn’t know if it was a statement or a question.
All she could do was grimace and shake her head, offering the man the two strips of bacon she had gotten before Jonathan rudely handed him an empty serving dish. Trying to be considerate while also knowing everyone at the table held secrets from the man was a hard task, especially when it regarded almost every detail about her being fabricated for his sake.
While Karen had bonded well with El after being sat down and told everything the day of their return, Ted was mostly in the dark. It wasn’t that he didn’t like El, he just found Joyce’s adoptive daughter, Elanor, to be quite odd. But nonetheless a perfect fit for Michael, strange as ever. She did look similar to that girl he met at Chief Jim Hopper’s funeral a few years ago, but her name was Janie or Jenna or something with a J. But good for Michael for getting around and meeting new girls.
“I can bike with Holly to school. It’s not a big deal,” Will suggested, more for Mrs. Wheeler than his friend, who was talking to him but not paying much attention. “I think Lucas already left anyway.”
“Is that okay, Mom? I know it’s last-minute, we just missed my alarm, and she can’t be late.”
Not that he really should be either, given his GPA had already dropped with how much he’d missed in this quarter of his junior year. His priorities were just…elsewhere. And while his mom knew most of what happened in the past, he hadn’t told her yet that he didn’t really see college as something he needed to worry about. He wasn’t ready to argue about that one. Not until his other plan was figured out at least.
“I just wish you had told me yesterday, I could’ve rescheduled my hair appointment and driven them,” Karen said, but Mike’s attention was now stuck on Eleven, staring down at her plate in a bland focus all too familiar. Nostrils slightly flared, she didn’t exert herself, only took a deep breath with practiced precision, and he waited, listening.
‘You don’t need to drive me.’
His jaw clicked as her voice filled his head. Still, one of her powers that stunned him the most, even if he was the one to suggest they try it a few months ago after reading a book that featured mind-speaking. Even Hopper didn’t know about it.
‘You’re not walking the tunnels alone.’
‘You sound like a dad right now. Maybe I want to walk alone.’
‘If I sound like a dad, then at least you know I’ll be a good one. And that’s bullshit cause you hate being alone.’
El’s lips parted in a gawk before she pursed them together and reached for water, eyes meeting him with a squint of mock offense. She did hate it, and they both knew it.
Will had accused them—before they even knew this was a possibility—that they looked to speak without words, entirely through their eyes. Maybe it was self-righteous to keep this one thing to themselves. That, and the rings they’d switched to their right hands after last year's spring break fiasco. The meaning behind them hadn’t changed. It just was easier not to hear other people’s input or theatrics when it was their right hands, not their left.
There was no time for conversation as the kitchen clock read 7:30. Mike scarfed down the rest of the eggs on his plate before collecting dishes to put in the sink, and El followed, cleaning up after herself with Holly, Will, Jonathan, and Nancy joining the train of kids rushing to head out.
“Holly, are you okay biking with Will?” Karen asked as everyone gathered their bags.
“Whatever,” the eight-year-old called indifferently, and they were all out the door, splitting in pairs of two.
The junkyard was a thirty-minute drive from his house, a walk that used to take hours through the woods when they were younger. He’d miss his first period, probably the second as well, but El seemed to care more than he did.
“I just think that if you have the opportunity to go, you shouldn’t skip it so much,” El said, changing into her training clothes in the back of the car, still trying to flatten her hair that’d grown to her shoulder blades.
Mike sighed and glanced at her in the rearview mirror. It started becoming a point of conversation between them recently, and he didn’t enjoy the dull feeling in his stomach every time the topic came up. She’d never said it to him, never complained. But he pitied the fact that she’d barely had a few months at school in Lenora before they came back to Hawkins, and she went back into hiding. Before that, she’d barely had a few days of normal the summer before the Byers moved. If she could go out in society or attend school for even a day without worrying about the government killing her family, she would. And he hated that it wasn’t an option.
“Going to school is a privilege, I know,” he admitted, shaking his head as they turned on Cornwallis. “But with the direction we’re heading, it’s not something that I think will matter that much in the end. I feel like I’m wasting my time. Hop could teach me how to shoot, how to fight back, how to be useful.”
“You know how to shoot,” she said under her breath, climbing into the passenger seat. It wasn’t something they talked about, but it was certainly something Mike would never forget.
“Then how to shoot better,” Mike tossed his left hand in the air, bracing his elbow on the windowsill as he dragged his fingers through his hair. “I asked Nancy if we could go to the range together the other day, and she laughed in my face. It’s like—I mean—She knows what I did. So does Hop, and it’s still like they see us as kids. That we’re the ones who need to be protected by them. Me, a lot more than you.”
“They’re older than us,” El answered, not sure what to say when even the two of them were on different levels of protective or controlling family members. Hopper might be protective, but she still felt like the older she got, she could see his reasoning, sometimes even agree with it. Mike’s family was a little harder to justify or understand, considering he didn’t have a reason like El or Will to be so protected. “I’m sure it won’t be like that forever.”
She certainly didn’t think Hopper or Nancy would infantilize Mike by the time they started popping out kids. But even the idea of that future, or how they’d make it to that point, was hard to imagine these days.
They’ll regret it when they don’t hear from us again, Mike said to himself, confident in one way to see their dreams through.
“Camera up ahead.”
“Already angled it,” El said, but ducked down to re-tie her shoes anyway to shift out of a possible shot.
“Our time is running out,” Mike kept going, more agitated by the second. “And nobody’s really talking about it. It’s crawl after crawl, and you can’t find him, Will hasn’t felt shit, and we graduate in one more year. If it gets to that point, I don’t want to pretend like we’re all just gonna stay here and wait for him to come back. I mean, I can see how badly Jonathan wants the hell out of here, and I can’t really blame him. That might be, like, the one thing we’ve agreed on in two years, but…”
“Mike, stop,” El cut him off. “You’re thinking too far ahead. I know you love planning things, but this type of thing just has to play out. We don’t know what’s going to happen in an hour or in a year from now. We’ll talk about our plan for after you graduate, when you are actually closer to graduating, and not missing five classes a week. So for right now, you’re going to take me to the junkyard and—”
“Take a verbal beating from Hopper about how late you are, unless he’s already at my house ready to scalp m—”
“Talk to Hopper,” she corrected, “and then we’ll have a night just us, okay? What’d you say yesterday about it being hotter than normal?” Thanks to the four rifts of exotic magma throughout the town, yeah, it was hotter than normal. “Maybe we head over to Lake Jordan, and you can teach me how to swim. Something just us, no planning, no spiraling, no Vecna. I really don’t want to think about it before I train, while I’m training, and after.”
He almost slammed on his brakes at her mention of swimming. His jaw hung as he looked at her and turned into the open lot. “Seriously?”
“Well, Lovers Lake sounds nice and all, but Watergate isn’t really—”
“No, I’m not talking about… You want to swim?” he asked, genuine interest rolling over his features, washing out the face of a boy carrying too much weight and anxiety. His dark brows were so high on his forehead that his wavy bangs covered them.
“I told you I’d want to learn at some point,” she said sweetly, voice soft. “Might as well try now, assuming nobody's there.”
“You don’t have a bathing suit,” he said, putting the car in park. Hopper and Joyce stared them down with their backs pressed into the side of a bus, disapproval firmly on Hop’s face.
El leaned over to balance her left hand on his thigh and cup his sharp jaw with her right hand, giving his cheek a brief kiss. “And doesn’t that sound fun?”
She was out of the car before he could respond.
Hoping to boost his mood, she didn’t mention that she did have a wetsuit thanks to Murray. Not the same as a normal bathing suit, but it was the closest thing. If what she would wear, or not wear, to the lake was on his mind the rest of the day and not Vecna, or the government, or the nuisance of his multi-family household, she’d consider it a win.
Mike sat in silence for only a moment before Hopper’s voice made its way through the thin glass of his 1972 Beetle.
“You’re late!”
He stayed for the first hour, too distracted to watch her sessions as Hopper went on about discipline, sticking to the schedule, and how skipping class didn’t make him look very responsible—entirely hypocritical given what Hop was doing when he was Mike’s age.
If the day had gone Mike’s way, and he had the money to spare, he would’ve gone to the shooting range on his own and just rented something to practice with. It’d probably be worth the money in the end, and maybe he could run a few lessons with whoever owned the place. But the days never went his way, and it was on his way back to school that Robin made the announcement over the WSQK radio channel.
“...echnical difficulties. But to make it up to you, we have a very special treat that is sure to turn your world upside down…”
So much for their plan to swim. Another crawl awaited!
Raincheck, he sighed, spinning his ring with his thumb in exhaustion and trying to send the word along what El called their ‘tether’, but he wasn’t the telekinetic, telepathic, super-human, so nothing sent.
It wasn’t until he showed up in his lunch period to meet the party outside that he felt a response.
‘Set your stopwatch right now. Don’t stop until I say to,’ El’s voice rang through, panting, clearly exerted. He clicked the button on his watchband in a heartbeat, checking it every few minutes as Dustin talked through the tail end of the plan.
“We don’t stop looking. Even if it takes a hundred more crawls. A thousand. We don’t stop until we’re damn sure he’s dead and gone and never coming back,” Dustin said, fire in his eyes.
Mike held his tongue. It was too much.
“You didn’t really miss anything. G1 at ten tonight. You and Lucas are at the church,” Will whispered, filling him in.
His hands felt like they were about to start shaking. This shouldn’t be any different than usual, so why did it feel so wrong?
“Everyone in?” Dustin continued, throwing his hand over the table and pledging to the cause.
Then Lucas joined. Then Will.
And they all looked to him.
The paladin, who for the first time wasn’t leading the party.
All he could do was nod and put his hand on top. He was in. He would do it. Do this one last crawl.
“To seeing Vecna’s heart on a platter,” Lucas said, fury lighting his steady words over the misery he caused Max and every single one of them.
“For Eddie,” Dustin said. And to that, they all agreed, raising their hands in a final hoorah.
The bell rang, signaling the next period, and they dispersed to gather their belongings. Dustin collected his smaller version of the map, knocking the substituted twigs and leaves he used off the page and into the dirt.
“Sorry, I was late,” Mike apologized. Maybe he was lucky he was. He wasn’t entirely sure if his book of maps and figurines were in his backpack to begin with. He was in such a rush to pack this morning, he could see his supplies sitting perfectly on his desk, forgotten in his irresponsibility.
“We’ve all got our own shit going on,” Dustin said with a forced half smile, something unspoken in his tone. He’d been hiding plenty from the party, Steve included. “It’s all good. And, what, you think we’ll die if I take over for one crawl?”
“No, no–”
“I mean, we all know you were in Higgins' office making up for all the mornings you’ve been missing,” Lucas laughed, dragging Mike forward with a shove as he started to walk at his friend’s side. “I take it El had a good time last night.”
“Fuck off,” Mike grimaced, chuckling to himself all the while scrunching his nose in disgust.
Dustin and Will were behind them, probably still packing up as the two continued.
“I’m just messing,” Lucas smiled, hoping to get the recent stick out of Mike’s ass. “But seriously, man, you can talk to me, you know. We can all see something's not right with you.”
They were out of earshot from the others when Lucas added the next part.
“Is she okay?”
Lucas had grown far from the kid he was when they first met El. Where he’d rat her out and call her names, now he knew he’d throw himself headfirst into the fire for her. Most of them would. For what she did for Max to bring her back, he’d do it a dozen times over.
“El? No, no, she’s fine. It's not—It’s not her.”
“You made a face,” Lucas said, understanding in his eyes as he tried again. “When Dustin said a hundred more crawls. Are you okay?”
“We had a date tonight,” Mike kicked a rock as they made their way through the trees, neither in any rush to return to class on time. “I know that that doesn’t mean jackshit compared to fighting Vecna. It's just… It’s been a year and a half. We’re thirty crawls in, and we’ve gotten nowhere. She can’t find him, Will’s mostly fine, Max is doing her physical therapy.”
“You think he’s dead?” Lucas paused in his steps.
“No, I don’t. I know he’s not,” Mike defended, turning his back on the school. “But we’ve been doing this a long time now. We’re seventeen. Nancy wasn’t even sixteen yet when this all started, and she’s still here. Stuck here. I don’t want to be here when we’re almost twenty, still on lockdown, still doing crawl after crawl.”
Lucas waited, furrowing his brows at the sudden change in Mike’s mood, but if he thought about it, he guessed it really wasn’t so sudden. “So, this is about El then, right?”
Mike took a long breath. “Like I said, we’re seventeen. Her birthday’s not till next year, but even then, no car, no license, her face is all over this town. What’s she supposed to do? Live with Hopper, who’s legally dead, in that cabin forever? That’s not a life for either of them. She’s missed out on enough already, and I don’t see a thousand more crawls making it any better for her.”
“I get it, it just might take a hundred crawls to get that type of freedom,” Lucas muttered, crossing his arms. “You really want out of here that badly?”
“If I can get her away from Hawkins, I’d do gas station food, motels, and live out of my damn car the rest of my life if it meant she could actually have a chance. If there’s no future for her here, then there isn’t one for me either.”
Lucas swallowed and looked to the school, imagining himself in a position like that. Max didn’t have the same lunch period, well, she didn’t have one at all, given she was still only doing half days, and PT in the other half. It’d be another two to three years for her. “I feel like it’s hypocritical of me to give you relationship advice, given your one breakup compared to my, like, a hundred, but… time might just be the thing you have to sacrifice to get to where you want to be. If El didn’t bring Max back, and she was stuck there with Vecna, I’d play that song for her a hundred more times. A thousand more, even if I was sick of it. So, you'd better be willing to suck it up, and do however many more crawls for her as you have to do to get there.”
“I’ve done that before,” Mike sighed. “353 days, and I would’ve kept going.”
“Then what’s the problem?”
‘Stop.’
Mike’s fingers moved like they were conditioned to her voice, pressing the button as he thought through his answer to Lucas. ‘12:29,’ he sent her way, lost in two worlds at once.
Mike looked back at the boys in the distance with sorrow-stricken features. Will stared up at the trees while Dustin zipped his backpack, turning to Will in conversation. “I can’t see a world where staying here works out.”
Here as in Hawkins? Or here as in with us?
Lucas didn’t have time to ask before Will’s stiff face hit the ground in a hurtled thud, and everything went to shit.