Chapter Text
Two years after the final battle in Hawkins, the world is still standing, but it feels hollow.
Mike Wheeler remembers the end too clearly.
The way he looked at him in those final moments, big loving eyes wide and soft, scared and trembling but brave, full of love and sorrow all at once. He had always looked like that. Gentle. Too kind for the world that kept hurting him. There was something unbearably precious about Will, the way he stood there accepting his fate with quiet grace, as if protecting everyone else mattered more than protecting himself.
He stayed behind instead of Kali and Eleven, so that Eleven could live, Mike could live, so everyone could be saved and freed from this misery at the cost of his "useless life", said by Will once cause Lonnie told him so back then. Unworthy of being loved, accepted, and cared for who he is. The day he came out to them, Will mentioned that he felt himself to be different than others for loving someone, felt unworthy of being loved
by Someone.....
But he never had the chance to know who it was that took his heart.
No words were spoken when they shared a look during their final departure. They never needed them. Mike had spent his whole life watching over Will, stepping in front of him without thinking, pulling him close when the world got too loud or too cruel. As if Will was built perfectly just to fit into his arms. It felt instinctual, like they were made that way. Little Will was nonverbal for a year when Little Mike met him, but he didn't realize it because all they needed was a shared look for them to understand each other. Will, soft and shy, offering his heart so freely. Mike, steady, and fierce, built to guard something fragile and sacred, never caring about what other said about them.
And now there was only a look. A look enough for Mike to understand who was that certain someone that Will had feelings for.
Or maybe not.
All Mike knows is that there was only a shared look of final goodbye that never loosened its grip on Mike’s heart.
Will was truly an angel sent to him from heaven.
That angel that got fell into the lap of a fallen angel, just like Icarus fell into the ocean with his melted wings. Locked away in the Upside Down with that being, alone for eternity. The not knowing whether Will was alive or dead hollowed Mike out from the inside completely. Hawkins rebuilt itself slowly, but the people inside it never did. Especially for Mike, it is becoming impossible to live normally.
Life moved forward for some. But It did not move forward for Mike.
It stopped the moment Will was taken.
Joyce Byers could not survive the loss of her son and took her own life, in hope of meeting her forever little boy in Neverland, where Will was forever playing DnD, all happy and giggly like he was before, before everything crumbled down, before Vecna could ever reach him, before El replaced her fate with him. Joyce died, leaving Jonathan behind as something barely human, breathing without purpose. And just like that, once loving, lively, and chaotic Byers family disappeared, and with them the warmth that once anchored Hawkins, anchored Mike.
Mike remembers when they were little. How the house on Lonnie Street never felt like a place you visited, only somewhere you stayed too long without realizing it. Karen used to call Joyce late in the afternoon, half laughing, half exasperated, asking when her mischevious son planned on coming home. She’d joke that if given the chance, he’d probably live there forever.
Mike would shout from the living room that he didn’t see the problem with that.
Joyce would laugh, warm and tired, and somewhere nearby there would be the sound of another precious, smaller laughter; light, breathless, contagious.
Will would appear from around a corner, eyes wide and hopeful, bouncing on his heels as if the idea itself were something alive. Forever sounded like a promise back then. Mike remembers Will taking it seriously, like something fragile that needed to be protected.
Mike remembers thinking just once, quietly, that maybe when they were older, it wouldn’t be such a strange idea.
That thought never got to grow up.
Now it lingers like a story without an ending, looping endlessly, refusing to resolve. Mike spends too much time wondering where it might have gone, how it should have finished, what shape it was meant to take. It’s a question that doesn’t ask to be answered, only to be carried.
If only it were true, he thinks sometimes.
He imagines a life where time didn’t steal what it touched. Where Will grew older beside him, not frozen in memory but moving forward, laughing, arguing, rolling dice across the basement table like they always did. The basement looks the same, but it feels wrong now. Too quiet, too full. Childhood toys line the shelves like witnesses. Empty bottles gather in corners. Will’s old D&D board lies open on the floor, warped at the edges, rescued from a trash can behind Lucas’s house when they packed up and left. No one noticed it was missing. No one cared enough about preserving Will. Only Mike did. No one really deserved Will. Not even him.
Everyone else left Hawkins to start over, to build new names and softer lives somewhere the past couldn’t follow so closely. Healing, they called it. And maybe it was. They were trying, at least.
Mike stayed.
Mike refuses to heal.
Not loudly. Not dramatically. He just… stops moving forward. His mind unravels in small, careful ways, missed calls, forgotten meals, nights spent awake in the dark replaying moments that never asked to be remembered so vividly. Replaying moments that even he thought once about them being childish. Not cherishing them when it was needed....When Will was beside him. The feeling inside him, unnamed and unspoken, the guilt and unknown yearning grows heavier the longer he refuses to bury it.
The tears come without permission. His chest tightens until breathing feels like work, until even sound feels impossible. He presses his face into his hands and lets it happen quietly, surrounded by relics of a childhood that never learned how to end. No one is there to hear him. That’s the point.
He tries. He really does.
Doctors, therapists, and expensive medications with names too long to remember. Day by day his family watches him like he’s something something that might shatter if handled wrong. Like an unpredictable ticking time bomb.
Eleven tries the hardest of all. She believes, stubbornly, that broken things can still be fixed if you want them badly enough.
One night, she crosses a line she doesn’t realize was there.
She asks Kali for help without telling him. Just a little won't harm, she thought. Just enough to show Mike something good, using her powers to mind control him, to manipulate him for his own good, something bright. Happy memories of them, perhaps. Familiar laughter. A reason to want to stay alive again. She tells herself it’s what he would also have wanted.
Mike finds out, and something inside him snaps.
He yells. The words come fast and jagged, tearing out of him before he can stop them, accusations about boundaries, about consent, about how grief isn’t something you can overwrite with pretty memories. He tells her she’s trying to erase what hurts instead of letting it exist, that pain is the only honest thing left.
Eleven yells back.
Her voice cracks in a way that startles even her. She says he’s dishonoring a sacrifice by wasting his life, by letting himself rot in the same room day after day. She says Will didn’t do all of that just so Mike could disappear. She says Will wanted him to live.
Then she hesitates....just for a second, before something sharper slips out.
She reminds him of something he once told her.
"My life started the day I found you…."
The same day Will went missing........
She asks him how that can still be true if he won’t let her help him now. How he can he cling to that moment like it saved him, but flinch every time she tries to do something good for him. How he looks at her sometimes like she’s a reminder of something he can’t forgive, not her, not really, but the way everything changed after she appeared.
Her eyes are wet, but she keeps going, voice trembling with confusion more than anger.
She says it feels like he’s pulling away from her. Like she’s standing in the same room with him but on the wrong side of something invisible. Like, he doesn’t want her help because accepting it would mean accepting the life that came after, accepting her.
She says maybe he’s already decided that some people weren’t meant to be saved.
That’s when Mike loses control.
The bottle shatters against the floor, the sound loud enough to slice through the argument. Eleven jumps back, startled, fear flashing across her face before she can hide it. The room goes silent except for Mike’s ragged breathing. His defined jaws clenching, one hand holding the broken bottle, another one formed a fist, veins popping in his neck, arms, and forehead. Dark narrow eyes covered with messy raven hair, were shooting hateful daggers at her, at everyone. His tall frame looking violent and dangerous. As if it was not Mike himself.
For a moment, no one knows how to reach him.
The thing Mike never says, the thing he doesn’t even let himself think out loud, presses hard against his chest, heavy and poisonous. He doesn’t deny what she said. He can’t. He just stands there, shaking, staring at the mess on the floor like it’s proof of something already broken beyond repair.
Eleven breaks first.
Her shoulders slump, all the fight draining out of her as she realizes she’s been pushing against something she can’t fix. Not with powers. Not with love. Not with memories.
And the distance between them, unspoken, unnamed, settles in for good.
His family decided he needed space. California happens without him.
Suitcases line the hallway. Voices move around him like he’s already gone. Mike watches it all from a distance, as if his body is present but his mind has learned how to stay elsewhere.
Before she leaves, Eleven stops in front of him.
Her eyes are red, swollen from crying she tried to hide. Her hands tremble when she cups his face, thumbs brushing his cheekbones with a softness that feels like goodbye even before it’s said. She looks at him like she’s afraid that if she lets go, he’ll slip through her fingers entirely.
She apologizes.
For crossing lines she didn’t know how else to reach across. For trying to force light into a place that needed darkness first. For believing too stubbornly that love was something you could fix people with if you tried hard enough.
She tells him she’ll wait.
That when he’s better, when he’s ready, he can come join them soon. That California will still be there. She will still be there.
Mike nods. Forces his mouth into something that almost looks like a smile. He apologizes too, for yelling, for scaring her, for being something she didn’t know how to hold. He doesn’t tell her that some wounds don’t fade with time, that some of them grow quieter instead, deeper, until they become part of the way you breathe.
Eleven leans forward and kisses him goodbye.
It’s soft. Careful. Final in a way neither of them acknowledges.
Mike doesn’t kiss her back.
Not because he doesn’t care, he does, more than he knows how to explain, but because his chest feels too full, too tight, like there’s no room left for anything new. Because his heart is tangled in a place that no longer exists, anchored to a past that refuses to loosen its grip, no matter how much he pulls.
When the door closes behind her, the sound echoes louder than it should.
Mike is left standing in the basement, surrounded by the quiet remains of a childhood that never learned how to end. Dice that won’t roll. Boards that won’t be played. Memories that don’t fade, no matter how long he stares at them.
A future waits somewhere beyond the stairs, but he doesn’t know how to step toward it.
All that remains is the longing, steady, unrelenting, almost gentle in its persistence. So constant it feels like breathing. Something he’s been carrying for so long that he never realized how much it costs… until there’s no one left to distract him from the weight of it.