#if you guys want to be added/removed from my improvised taglist please let me know

[prevdustinhendrsn]

she’s the sunshine in the rain

mike wheeler/el hopper 3.8k - read on ao3 requested by anonymous from this list: 90. ‘remember when we were little?’ + 97. ‘your life was my life’s best part’

Mike’s only here because he still can’t get over her.

This morning, he knew where he’d be right now. He’d be sitting at his mother’s shiny mahogany table in the dining room, surrounded by a hundred relatives all drinking some form of alcohol and complaining about the elections and the economy and asking Mike the most boring questions about his future. He knew it when he left his apartment, when he made the two-hour drive home, when he stood at the front door with rainwater dripping off the porch eaves and down his neck. He knew that it would not be pleasant, easy, or even manageable. He’s only here because, despite the disappointment of the last two Thanksgivings, maybe things will be different this time if he sees her.

His first Thanksgiving without her wasn’t unbearable, just because they had only been apart for a month and he was still holding onto the hope that they could piece things back together after a break. When his cousin asked where his girlfriend was, he just mumbled something about them figuring things out. Then came the second Thanksgiving. He was a mess at that point. His grades were slipping, his coworkers complained about him, he barely went out with Dustin and Lucas and Will. Everything was – is – bleak and colorless without her. She took all the sunshine with her and left grey skies over him.

Now he’s here, at his third Thanksgiving since starting college, three years and a month after they broke up. He’s still miserable, still lonely, still thinking of her every minute of every hour of every day, but his feelings are number and he’s better at hiding it.

He shifts in his uncomfortable stiff-backed seat at the table. Several extensions have been tacked onto it to make room for all the relatives and in-laws, cousins once-removed and forgotten godmothers, the oldest – his dad’s great-grandfather – and the youngest – his niece’s daughter. Cutlery clangs and glasses clink, toddlers whine at the kids’ table, the radio sings in the background because nobody has had the common sense to turn it off yet. Cousin Beth and uncle Nicki are having an argument about humane animal treatment on one end of the table, two octaves away from a fistfight. Every one of his relatives has an opinion, their voices made obnoxiously loud by both the wine in their glasses and their infallible belief that since they’re older than Mike (even his twenty-five-year-old cousin) they can’t possibly be wrong. He pokes halfheartedly at his turkey and gravy, wishing desperately he were anywhere but here.

“How’s the love life, Michael? Any lucky ladies out there?” Aunt Caroline asks in her raspy two-packs-a-day voice, the glass in her hand promptly returning to her lips every fifteen seconds.

Mike’s heart curls in on itself and he’s momentarily saved from answering by great-uncle Leonard’s impatient huff that really sounds more like a wheeze as he scoops another helping of mashed potatoes onto his plate. “Quit calling him Michael, Caroline. You’re making him sound as old as me.”

“It’s a proper name for an upstanding young man! Karen knew what she was doing.”

“Do you want him to have gray hair at eighteen years old? You’re eighteen, right kid?”

“Twenty-one, actually, but, um, it’s fine,” Mike says quickly, setting his fork down before Leonard and Caroline get into a cage match over the peas. God knows they would if they still had the build for it. “Michael is fine.” It’s really not, but like hell he’s going to say that at Thanksgiving dinner with his mom three seats away. His only saving grace tonight is Nancy, sitting directly across the table from him, her hair curled and lips colored an elegant red. She’s the one thing keeping him from walking right out the front door. Judging by the pleasantly neutral expression she’s had on her face all evening, he can see it’s just as painful for her to be here as it is for him, if not more so. Lying all day is exhausting.

She subtly raises her eyebrows at him and he realizes Caroline, sitting next to Nancy, has asked him a question that he still hasn’t answered.

Yes, there’s a girl, a girl too good to be true who I just can’t seem to let go but she isn’t here and she hasn’t been here for three years and I miss her so much and I want to talk to her and I need to talk to her but she’s too far away.

His El. She lives on the street behind him. She’s probably there right now. They’ve haven’t had a full conversation since their last.

“No,” he says past the tightness in his throat. “There’s no one.”

“Shame. You should ask Beth if she’s got any friends she could set you up with. Time’s a’wasting, you know. Twenty-one, you said? You’re practically dead already. Here, drink some of this. You’re legal so you might as well. Anyways, you should be getting a move on with life, Michael. You want to settle down quick with a good, fertile woman. Child-bearing hips, you know? Get those kids out quick and early so that you can start building a steady career. My first husband was the worst, absolutely horrible, he never had any idea what the hell he was doing…”

Mike nods, carefully setting down the wine she poured for him before he can shatter it. With any luck, if he nods and hums and agrees enough at all the right times, she’ll eventually get distracted by Beth and Nicki’s slowly escalating argument.

Get over yourself. El isn’t yours anymore. She’s not here.

Something taps his ankle and he looks up to see Nancy, a question in her eyes. He shrugs. She chews on her lip and Mike watches her glance around the table, searching for something. A way out, he guesses. A moment later she finds it and pushes her chair back, standing up with her empty plate in hand. “Is everyone ready for dessert?” she asks cheerfully.

The arguments and catch-up conversations around the table are briefly replaced with a loud chorus of approval, and as the noise resumes, Nancy glares meaningfully at Mike and jerks her head towards the kitchen. He doesn’t need to be told twice; obliging Caroline’s and his grandmother’s requests for more drinks just because he doesn’t have the energy to make an excuse not to, he takes their glasses and follows Nancy as fast as he can.

The kitchen is gloriously empty, his relatives’ voices reduced to an indecipherable chatter. Nancy tosses her plate into the sink with less care than usual and she blows out a heavy breath, letting the edge of the counter dig into her palms as she leans against it. Her poised façade is gone.

“This sucks,” she says after a moment. Mike nods, setting down the wineglasses and crossing to lean against the counter opposite her.

“Yeah.”

“They’re such…” She trails off, shaking her head. Mike, on the other hand, has no qualms about name-calling, especially not his relatives.

“Close-minded pricks?” he suggests. She snorts.

“Yeah. That.”

He hurts for his sister, he really does. Lying about the existence of the other parts of you hurts and tricks your heart into feeling much lonelier than it really is. That’s what he’s been doing with El for the past three years, except he’s not sure if he’s still allowed to say she’s a part of him anymore. “I’m sorry you can’t tell them,” he says.

She shrugs. “It’s not like I’m looking for their approval or something. But everything is so much easier with Steve and Jonathan around.”

“Why don’t you just tell them? I mean, if their opinion doesn’t matter, then…”

“Because that’s too much of a pain in my ass to deal with tonight. Can you even imagine? I’m tired of defending my life and my loves and my choices to everyone, Mike. Me and Jonathan and Steve are happy with what we have, and it’s nobody else’s business unless we want it to be.”

“Oh. Right. Um, sorry.”

Nancy’s lips quirk upwards in a no need gesture and they fall silent. Mike drags his finger along the bottom edge of a heavily decorated cake sitting next to him and licks the frosting off as Nancy rolls her eyes. She drums her dark red fingernails on the granite countertop, scrutinizing him.

“What’s wrong, Mike? Is it still her?”

Mike falters, letting his hand fall back to the counter. “Aunt Caroline?” he says to his shoes.

“Seriously.”

He heaves a sigh, looking up at Nancy’s concerned eyes. “Yeah. Of course it is. It’s been three years and it’s still her, Nancy. Did you think something would be different?”

“Have you talked to her at all?”

“Not really.”

“So…you’re just…done? Just like that?”

“Looks like it,” he says flatly. Nancy sighs.

“Mike, you two were…you just were. I don’t understand how it ended like it did.”

He shrugs. “I was going to college and she wasn’t and I was just dragging her down because she needed to figure out who she was without me. That’s how it ended.”

“Do you really believe that?”

“I don’t know. Maybe.”

“Do you still love her?”

“Of course I still love her. She’s it for me, Nancy. I’ll never love anyone else.”

It’s out before he can think about it, and the truth of it all hurts so much he’s suddenly afraid he’s going to collapse. El. Amazing, intelligent, clever, beautiful, telekinetic El. Not his anymore.

“I just want to see her,” he whispers, staring desperately at his sister, tears burning behind his eyes. “I just want to see her again.”

Sympathy crosses Nancy’s face for just a beat, quickly replaced with resolve for his sake. She strides across the kitchen to pull him into a hug. Despite the fact that he’s a whole head taller than her, he presses his face into her shoulder, welcoming the comfort.

“Then go see her,” she says, running a hand up and down his back. “You know she’s home. At least tell her happy Thanksgiving.”

Mike sniffles, half of him praying that nobody will walk in and the other half setting off warning bells about all the possible ways this could go wrong.

Just see her. You don’t even have to talk to her. Just walk by her house and maybe you’ll see her through the window and you’ll see her smile and that will be enough. It’ll be enough for now.

He manages to slip out the door just as Nancy carries in the desserts to draw everyone’s attention. The stark autumn air hits him like a brick wall, dark clouds roiling overhead, ready to spill. He runs, shoving his hands in his pockets and hunching his shoulders against the wind. Don’t think about it. Just run. Go.

All he sees is asphalt moving beneath his feet and before he knows it, he’s on her street. He stops at the end of it, breathing hard. It’s just as familiar to him as his own – perhaps even more so, since he consciously made an effort to avoid his house as much as possible in his teens. Five houses away from him sits the two-storied Hopper-Byers home, the lights shining warm yellow through all the windows. He looks instinctively to hers, the far right on the second floor. When they were sixteen, Dustin begrudgingly helped him hide a ladder in the scraggly bushes that separate the house from the neighbors. Hopper found it a week later, so El stayed up four nights in a row honing her powers so that by the fifth night, she could levitate Mike straight up from the ground to the windowsill without breaking a sweat. There was a lot of smothered laughter and purple bruises during those trial and error nights, but Mike would never trade them for anything.

A cold raindrop on his cheek refocuses his attention. The clouds above him are dark and ready to pour; the heady scent of promised thunder and lightning is thick in the air. He starts forward again. His heart increases its frantic beat with every step he takes, but the house is getting closer, closer, and he knows she’s there because he can feel it, he could always feel her.

He passes the windows that look into the dining room and stumbles to a stop again, his throat locking up at what he sees. It’s all of them, sitting around the table, cast in a cheery golden glow with laughter on their faces. Joyce, Will, and Jonathan, Hopper and his parents, and – her. Mike’s hands go numb. She’s leaning halfway out of her chair, wearing a loose yellow sweater, passing a bowl of mashed potatoes to her dad. Her soft pink lips spread into a smile at someone’s joke, and it’s that smile, angelic and full of love, that pulls on Mike’s heartstrings. She really is it for him. He’s never moving on. He can’t.

Every time he closes his eyes for the next few months, he’ll see this image of her, just like all the other times: when they ran into each other in the grocery store, at Christmas when their families exchanged casseroles and pleasantries, on that one spring day when she was levitating Max up to pick apples and Mike happened to be walking by with Lucas. Hey Mike, she had said to him, her voice soft and amiable, one hand outstretched behind her to keep Max aloft. Her nose didn’t even bleed anymore. Hey, El is what he had said back, barely allowing himself to breathe to make sure his voice was steady. And nothing happened, and his heart shattered all over again.

He’s seen her now. He can walk away and not make things any worse. But it’s just not enough, not like he thought it’d be. It’s never enough. These small glances across gaping distances are not enough to put himself back together. He needs all of her, because he loves her, he loves her, he loves her so much and he doesn’t like who he is when she’s not with him. His heart aches and yearns towards her, but the pain he felt when they fell apart anchors his feet to the concrete, and then – she looks out the window.

Oh.

He loves her eyes. They’re magic. They slow time.

He watches his name fall off her lips, and her family hasn’t yet noticed, and he mouths hi. She stares at him, and then he finds the will to move, dashing up the driveway and onto the porch.

He raises his hand to knock but the door opens before he can. She stands there, a head shorter than him, her curly hair tucked behind her ears and her cheeks steadily growing pinker from the sudden gust of cold air.

“Mike,” she says in a rush, at the same time he breathes, “El.”

He hasn’t been this close to her in a long time. Not enough. Closer.

“What are you doing here?” she asks quietly, her curious eyes still roaming his face like she can’t quite believe he’s standing here.

“Um, well, I just – I don’t know, actually. I – El…” He takes a deep breath. “I just wanted to see you. And talk to you. Just for a minute, unless you don’t –“

She shakes her head, and he steps backwards as she comes out onto the porch, gently closing the door behind her. “No, let’s talk. Please.”

They sit on the porch swing with the rusty chains and peeling white paint, a bitter foot of space between them.

“Happy Thanksgiving,” he says after a moment. El nods, staring out at the street.

“Happy Thanksgiving. How’s your family?”

“They’re fine, I guess. Yours?”

“Good.” El glances at him with a sad, knowing smile on the corner of her lips. “But you didn’t come here to talk about family.”

He shakes his head and she turns back to the street. The rain has begun to pour, thrumming on the roof and sliding off the eaves into the flowerboxes below. Belatedly Mike realizes they’ve started swinging back and forth ever so slowly, yet he isn’t pushing them with his foot and since Hopper accidentally hung the swing too high, El can’t reach the ground when she’s sitting on it.

“Are you doing that?”

She nods. To his surprise, a dark red spot of blood trickles down from her nose. “Sorry. I do it out of habit.”

“No, no, it’s fine, but – you have a nosebleed.”

“It happens, sometimes,” she says unconcernedly, pulling a tissue out of her pocket and dabbing away the blood.

“I thought you didn’t get them anymore. Not since you were sixteen, right?”

“Well, I get them now.”

Her voice is edged with a warning not to push any farther so Mike relents. For a long minute they watch the rain from their sheltered spot, and he can’t help but look over at her every few seconds. He could never stop doing that, not even when they were together. It wasn’t just because he loved watching her, but also because some part of him was always afraid that he’d blink and she would disappear again.

“Remember when we were little, when we did this?” she asks. Mike frowns.

“Sitting on the porch swing? Of course I remember that.” There’s not a moment with you I don’t remember, he thinks, heart aching. Not a good time, not a bad time, not any of it.

“No. Well, yes, but I meant this.”

He follows her line of sight down to the space between them, where his fingers have been absently wearing at a marking in the wood there. He lifts his hand and a dull three-year-old pang resounds in his chest. Roughly etched into the old wood is a faded, clichéd MW + EH, carved while she drank lemonade and then kissed his cheek with sticky lips.

“We weren’t that little,” Mike says, looking up at her. “We were fifteen.”

“Still.” She stares down at the mark, a faint smile on her lips.

“That was a long time ago,” he murmurs.

“Yeah. It was.”

His eyes fall to her lap, where her small hands twist around and around each other in the folds of her skirt. Hands that are calloused and gentle when they play with his hair and are always decorated in pink nail polish. Hands that can split mountains in two and lay waste to interdimensional monsters, hands that can build and destroy and hurt and love. Hands that he’s held since he was thirteen, that he wants to reach over and hold right now even though he can’t.

“El,” he starts, the tightness in his throat forcing him to pause. El looks up at him, and the grey rain falling in sheets behind her is a perfectly melancholic echo to the sadness in her eyes. He takes a deep breath. “I love you. I love you more than you’ll ever know, more than I’ve ever loved anyone else. And I don’t think it’s possible for me to stop loving you, really. I’ve missed you so much these past few years, because…you’re just a part of me. But if this is how you want it to be…I mean, if you’re happier this way, not being with me, then…I need you to let me know. I’m okay with that, because I want you to be happy, but you have to tell me.”

She furiously brushes away a tear that escaped her brimming eyes. “I’m not happy, Mike.”

“You’re…not?”

She shakes her head. “I miss you. I miss you all the time. I thought it was for the best, you know, at first, because we both thought we wanted it, but I’ve never been more alone and I didn’t know how to ask you if…” She trails off, wiping her nose with the sleeve of her sweater. “Your life was the best part of mine, Mike. My nose started bleeding again after you left because when I use my powers, I think of everything I love. But when I thought of you, I just…couldn’t do it anymore. I don’t know how to be me when you’re not here. You’re more than my best friend, you’re…mine.”

You’re mine. Mike blinks at her, unaccustomed to the fireworks his heart is setting off. He feels like he’s flying but hasn’t realized his feet have left the ground yet. Your life was the best part of mine.

He swallows. “So…it’s okay if I hold your hand?”

She laughs through her tears, nodding, and he swears her smile is just like sunshine breaking through the thunderheads above them. When she leans over to kiss him, meeting her halfway is second nature. His El. Her kiss is sweet, always sweet, deep and gentle and full of stars, just like her, and she places her hands over his on her cheeks to make sure he won’t let go.

How did he live without her?

“I’m sorry,” he whispers. She shakes her head.

“My fault.”

“It wasn’t.”

“Our fault,” she concedes with a small laugh. He opens his eyes and she’s looking at him, so much joy and love in her eyes, the happiest he’s seen her in three years.

“What were we even thinking, El?”

In response she kisses him again, and again, and again. “I missed you,” she says, punctuating it with another kiss. “I love you.” Kiss. “Three years was stupid. I’m not supposed to be stupid.”

“God, I love you.” He wraps his arms around her tight, burying his face in her hair. He doesn’t have any words that could convey what she means to him. He just got his other half back – how do you put that into words? “Promise me,” he says eventually, knowing she’ll hear the rest of it. Promise me we won’t be that stupid again. Promise me you’ll never leave me again. Promise me I’ll never lose you. Promise me you’ll always stay by my side. Promise me you’ll love me no matter what, because I promise you I will.

“Promise.”

By the time Mike feels calm enough to speak again, the rain has subsided to a sprinkle, thunder cracking in the distance. He glances at the front door, which has miraculously stayed shut through their whole reunion.

“Can I stay here for the rest of dinner?” he asks her. “I hate my family.”

She giggles, nodding into his chest. “Yes. You can even stay the night if you want.”

“Your dad might make me sleep on the floor in the living room.”

“No, Joyce wouldn’t let him.”

He breathes deeply, holding her tight to him. She’s warm in his arms against the cold stormy air.

“I love you, El.”

“I love you too.”

@calprnia @you-wont-lose-me @summer-in-hawkins @elizabthturner @formerlyjannafaye @she-who-the-river-could-not-hold @mikewheeler @el-and-hop @michael-hearteyes-wheeler

#SURPRISE #EMO MIKE STRIKES AGAIN #i actually wrote something for the first time in forever #if you guys want to be added/removed from my improvised taglist please let me know #i feel like my title game is slipping #stranger things #mileven #mike wheeler #eleven #anna puts words together