Work Text:
Sometimes – not often, but sometimes – she locks all the doors, closes the blinds, turns the radio to static, closes her eyes, and looks for them.
Her life is good, a tiny cottage smaller than the cabin, a job at the local pub, people to talk to, to laugh with over lunch or drinks. But it is not the same as her friends, those who knew her, knew everything, and loved her anyway. There is so much these days she can’t say, can’t be, to keep safe, to keep them safe and mostly she can ignore the ache, but sometimes – sometimes –
So the doors, and the blinds, and the static.
At first, it’s Hop she looks in on most often, the man who was her father, who’d already lost one daughter, who she thought for nearly a year she’d lost in return. But he seems… happy, with Joyce, with Will and Jonathan, her family that almost was. She sees him, once, on the anniversary of that last battle, laying flowers on something, a monument or grave, and hears his quiet, “Miss you, kiddo,” and knows that he still grieves. But this time, he has not let that grief destroy him, and she is fiercely, guiltily glad. She writes him a letter she cannot, will not, send, and burns it in the stove, thinks of ash and smoke and reaching across the world and hopes some part of him hears her and knows.
Will too, more brother than friend, seems happy, away from the town that took so much from him and gave so little back. He laughs, freer than she’s ever seen, and she wants to hold him again, tell him how proud she is, but – well, she made her choice. She wrote her story, and it has no room for almost-brothers.
Dustin is fine, as she knew he would be, glad to see the curiosity and joy she loved in a boy making a reappearance in the man. Lucas and Max too, together and happy, Max walking for real, not just in her mind, healed and safe and smiling that wicked, easy smile that she could never quite imitate, even after she practiced in the mirror.
She does not look in on Mike. She cannot bear to. She knows he’s alive, and still friends with the others, but more than that –
As the years go on, she checks in less. They are safe, and she owes it to them to live, as best she can. They are the past, and all of them believed she deserved a future. So she tries, and mostly succeeds, but still there is an ache that flares up on certain days, at certain times, and sometimes she gives in, locks the doors, closes the blinds, turns on the static.
Max and Lucas have a child now, young, small, precious. The first time she hears Max call the child Ellie, she weeps. In a different world, a better world, she could hold her tiny namesake, spoil her, laugh with Max at the strange faces she makes, watch her grow into something extraordinary. She knows she will never have her own child, can’t risk passing on the powers in her blood, but she would have loved a niece. Does love her, even when she doesn’t really know this girl-child who shares her name but will never share her fate.
Dustin teaches now, bright and enthusiastic, and builds things she doesn’t understand, and never quite has. This non-understanding never hurt, not like it did in school – she knows if she could ask, Dustin would try to explain, tripping over words and drawing diagrams on napkins or flyers or his own hand, and when she still didn’t understand, he would try something else, a new way, until she could at least see the edges of it. She imagines him sometimes, at the tucked away table in the corner of the pub, paper spread around him, eyes bright, waving at her every time she passes. It hurts less than it used to.
Will is the one she looks in on the most now, maybe because the sight of him hurts the least. He draws comics, she thinks, or something else on a big table in a room filled with light. He himself is light, darkness and fear banished, and still the quietest of her friends. It is peaceful, to watch him draw with a half-smile on his face, contentment in the line of his body. She tries to breath it in, find her own contentment, her own quiet smile, but it is hard, sometimes, when she mutters mouth-breather at a customer and her coworkers give her strange looks instead of laughing, knowing eyes, when she goes home alone to her cottage without any pictures, when she wakes in the night and misses the sound of another body breathing in the next room, when she wakes in the night and there is no one to talk to, no one to radio, no one to hold her –
Hop, like Will, seems content, the lines of age on his face growing deeper but the lines of pain softer. She sees he and Joyce slow dancing and finds peace in his face, something she’s not sure he’d ever known before. She wishes he could see the woman she’s become, knows he’d be proud. Writes another letter. Burns that one too.
And Mike? Mike is alive, and she holds on to that, and tries to remember what his voice sounds like not filled with tears.
When she sees his named splashed across the cover of a book held in the hands of a stranger, she stumbles, almost drops a tray of glasses. Can barely take her eyes off it. There are certainly other Michael Wheeler’s in the world, it might not even be him, but the art on the cover looks like Will’s, and she knows, she knows. Asks the stranger where he got it, what’s it about, and he tells her it’s a fantasy novel – of course it is – by a new up and coming author, that a woman in the bookstore the next town over had recommended it. He asks if she likes fantasy, tries to flirt, and she brushes him off, is firmer when he keeps trying. For a little while her coworkers had tried to set her up with various men, but they know better now – thinks she’s still grieving a man dead and gone, which in some ways is true – and one of them takes over at her grimace and sends her to the back room, where she breathes and breathes and does not dare close her eyes.
She holds out less than a week before she enters the bookshop, asks about the book she’d seen, is horrified to realize she doesn’t remember the name, just the author and the striking cover – a woman, hair flowing, arms stretched towards the sky. The woman finds it quickly – apparently the book is pretty popular, even though it’s new, and several people have asked after it just based on seeing the cover – and oh, she is so proud of her brother – and she leaves with a paperback copy of The Mage tucked carefully under her arm.
It takes her longer to read than she thought it would, each page a memory and a blow, the words so obviously Mike’s that it aches. It’s their story, if you know how to look, hers and Mike’s and Will’s and Dustin’s and Lucas’s and Max’s and everyone else’s who fought monsters when they should have been safe. She cries at the end, when the mage dies, using the last of her power to shield her friends, her knight, from the dark army who wishes to destroy all. Cries harder when they take her body home and she’s awoken from her death-like slumber by her loved one’s mourning song. And then, for the first time since she kissed him goodbye, she locks the doors, closes the blinds, turns on the static, closes her eyes, and looks for Mike.
He is sitting at a table, pen in hand, smile only half real, signing copies of his book. She looks at him, older, filled out from his teenage lankiness, and lets something in her break as she feels something else heal. He’s exchanging murmured pleasantries with people she can’t see, can only hear muffled, but the words don’t matter, not really, not when she’s hearing his voice for the first time in years, untouched with tears and pain. Someone says something, and his smile drops, just for a moment, and she jerks herself away before she can reach out. This, this is why she hasn’t looked for all these years, she knew she wouldn’t be able to control herself, she knew –
She opens her eyes, already filled with tears, and reminds herself that it’s better this way, safer, for her and her friends, that she’s not really alone, even if it feels like it, even if no one in her new life understands, can ever understand, even if the other mage got to go home in the end, even if all she wants is her friends, to be able to go home –
She picks up the book, traces Mike’s name on the cover, opens it up to read again, to hear his voice in her head –
And sees her name.
It’s the dedication, tiny slanted words before the book even starts, on a page she’d skipped over in her eagerness. For El, it says, I wish your story could have ended the way it deserved. I’ll miss you the rest of my life.
She reads the words over and over and feels something in her give way.
****
If he’d known that publishing a book meant he’d have to do a book tour, he might never have done it. There’s something raw about having to talk to people about his story, about their story, especially when they think it’s all fiction. And it is, nothing for the government, or anyone, to get mad about, but if you know – well, Lucas called him after he’d read that first draft he sent and invited him up to visit him and Max and the baby. He’d gone, and Dustin and Will had been there too, a surprise, and they’d cried together a little, that night, the five of them, after Will helped Max put little Ellie to bed.
They didn’t really talk about it these days, their shared monsters, shared grief. For most of them, it had grown easier over the years. For him too, if he feels like honesty – or if not easier, at least more bearable, something that had worn grooves into his life but was no longer scraping those grooves out. He and Nancy and Holly and Mom don’t talk about it either, except sideways. Maybe none of them know how. It feels unreal, looking back – a nightmare, a shared delusion, something impossible. He knows Nancy still keeps a collection of guns in a safe in her closet, and Holly got really into martial arts, and Mom – well, the scars never did go away.
Dustin, right after he’d told him that he’d found a publisher, asked him if he was sure, if he really wanted this out there. If it would be too much. It was, he wasn’t wrong, but he’d needed to write it, needed it to be seen. Needed to face it. Will, of course, understood instantly. Right before his first comic was published he’d shown Mike his secret collection of paintings, the ones he’d never display, full of Demogorgon teeth and monsters made of melted flesh and ashy smoke and a world bathed in red lightning.
“Art comes from all of you,” he’d said, calm and a little sad and so, so sure. “Sometimes you have to get the horror out to get to the happy stuff.”
He’d had to get The Mage out if he wanted to get to the happy stuff, and unlike Will, he’d never been good at hiding the raw and aching parts of himself.
But it was out, and published, and according to his agent very popular in fantasy circles, and the book tour was finally over, and he was planning to hole up in his tiny studio apartment for at least a week, unless one of the Party banged on his door and dragged him back into the world earlier. They, of anyone, knew what this book really meant. None of them were any good at letting the others wallow.
Hopper had asked him, last time they’d all met up, if he was living the best life he could, the life she would have wanted for him. He’d told Hopper he was trying. And he was. Getting The Mage published was part of that. A grief, and a reminder, and a way to start maybe moving forward. One last adventure.
One final goodbye.
It was dark, but he didn’t bother turning on a light, just dropped his keys on the end table Nancy insisted on buying him and he refused to admit was useful and shoved his suitcase towards the tiny coat closet. It was good to be home.
A shape moved from the darkness into the dim streetlights coming through his window. He tensed, reached for something, a weapon, the doorknob behind him.
The lights flicked on.
“Hello Mike,” she says. “I decided I deserved to come home.”