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suchastart · 6 years

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Just Another Sleepy Sunday

Stranger Things, Eleven/Mike and the whole party. For @artemisrae who has been holding my hand, and for @juxtaposie ♥

Game night, a few years into the future.

AO3

She arrives under cover of darkness, the way she used to when they were younger—after sunset, wearing an oversized coat with the hood pulled up, and accompanied by the growling of Hopper’s truck. They’re already late. She would’ve been here half an hour ago if he had let her drive herself, which she’s told him several times already tonight in her eternal, ongoing quest for her license. At this rate, she’s going to graduate high school first.

Hopper pulls up to the curb. There’s no more time to waste. El flings the door open and runs for the house in the space of a breath.

“You’re gonna give me a heart attack,” Hopper yells through the open window.

She’s heard that time and again. It’s been years, and he hasn’t had a heart attack yet. In seconds, she crosses the yard and knocks on the front door—three one two, habit now, solid and safe—and smiles when Mrs. Wheeler opens the door. She looks beautiful, as always, hair curled and perfect, in a long corduroy skirt and a pink blouse. She looks tired, too.

“Hi,” El says, slightly out of breath.

“Hello, Jane.” Mrs. Wheeler looks over El’s shoulder, at the prints she’s made in the clean, dewy grass, and at Hopper, tromping slowly down the same path. She smiles. “Nice to see you both.”

“You, too, Karen,” Hopper says.

A beat of silence passes. El rocks forward and back on the balls of her feet. Awkward, she thinks. It’s a good word, made for something uncomfortable, strange, itchy underneath her skin.

“Would you like to come in for dinner, Jim?” Mrs. Wheeler asks, stepping back. “We have enough pizza to feed the neighborhood.”

“Ah, no thanks, just dropping the kid off.”

“Date night?”

Hopper scratches at his beard. “Me and an empty house. Gotta enjoy the quiet while you can. You know how it is.”

Mrs. Wheeler laughs, a pleasant, sad sound that pulls at the corners of her lips but not her eyes, and then, like Hopper grumbles at El sometimes, it is good timing—there is muffled yelling from the house, and thumping from downstairs, and then Mike is there, just like that.

“El!”

It’s like magic, even after so long. Her shoulders relax. “Mike.”

“Hi,” he says, smiling, freckles crinkling across his nose. It occurs to her, sometimes, how tall he is now; he leans down to reach for her hand, and when he tries to take her bookbag from Hopper, they’re at eye-level now. There’s a second of tension—Hopper keeps hold of the strap, and Mike tugs—but finally one of them wins, relents or prevails, it’s hard to tell, the way they’re frowning at one another.

“It’s cold,” El says.

“Well, let’s get you inside,” Mrs. Wheeler says, and guides her into the house. Mike shoulders her bag, and Hopper presses a gruff kiss to her head, and then she’s free. She’s got a clear path to the basement, to Will and Max and Lucas and Dustin, to their tent and walls and table that feel like home. It’s been a few weekends since the whole party has been able to get together like this; they’ve all been so busy with family and finals that tonight feels almost like a reunion, even though she sees her friends almost every day.

She’s halfway there when Mike squeezes her hand. She’d almost forgotten he’d been holding it.

“Hold on a sec,” he says, dropping her bag by the basement door. He tugs her toward the kitchen. “I have to show you something.”

She follows, a trail after a comet, and feels just as brilliantly warm when they pass the refrigerator and he turns on his heel, pushes his fingers through her hair, and kisses her.

El hums, pleased. It’s easier to get to his face when she’s up on her toes, and more comfortable for him, too, though he’s always said he doesn’t mind travelling down so, so far if she’s the one he’s reaching for. She holds onto his waist, the thin cloth of his t-shirt, and tries not to let her grin ruin their kiss. He’s unhurried, though—happy enough to laugh, and to nudge her nose with his, and to kiss her again, and again, and again.

Someone clears their throat.

Mike pulls away first. El touches a hand to her racing heart, startled, and exhilarated.

Mr. Wheeler stands at the sink, looking down at a book of crosswords. He sips lazily at whatever’s in his ceramic mug. “Not in the kitchen, Michael.”

“Is there a room you’d like to designate—”

“Enough of that, too. Go on downstairs. Your friends are yelling loud enough to wake the dead.”

Mike huffs. He’s still standing close enough that El can feel his shoulders stiffen, like a dog raising his hackles; she’s close enough to hook a finger in his belt loop and pull.

“Come on,” she says quietly. They say it to one another often enough that it makes her feel a little smug: “Pick your battles.”

Mr. Wheeler, probably overhearing, snorts.

"You pick your battles,” Mike grumbles, putting an arm around her shoulders and guiding them both safely from the kitchen.

Whatever. She knows well enough now who the bad guys are, and how to handle them.

They turn the corner, out of sight. El sniffs. In the kitchen, Mr. Wheeler shouts in surprise, and his mug shatters on the floor. “What in the hell— ”

Mike snickers. “Enough of that. Come on, the party’s been waiting for you all night.”

Their basement set-up survived their transition to high school. The same worn couch rests against the wall. A few new posters have been hung. Their table has gotten a little bigger, a little better—it’s an old fold-up job that Mike and Will found at Mrs. Nelson’s estate sale last summer, and sits their whole party comfortably with more space for Mike’s maps and screens. There’s enough room, too, for everybody to write and carve and draw things all over it. DUSTIN + MS MARISSA 4EVR. Mike Sux. What’s spell casting modifier?? Why am I here????

The fort remains, too. Different blankets every month or two. Sometimes taller, wider, depending on its varied guests; sometimes smaller when the cold sets in, when nightmares crawl a little too close for any of them to manage alone.

El comes down the stairs first, and Will and Dustin cheer. Max throws popcorn kernels at her.

“And our ringer arrives!” Lucas says, tossing El’s mage figurine at her.

She catches it, looks at the little miniature, magic version of herself. The more magic version, anyway. She sat with Mike when he painted it--watched his slow, careful fingers on the paintbrush, watched him take his time with the brown hair, the dark robes, the hint of a pink dress beneath.

Mike nudges her shoulder. She continues down the stairs, places her mage gently on the map, right between the cleric and the ranger, where she knew she’d ended up the last game.

“Thought you weren’t going to show,” Max says as El finds her seat. “Hopper change his mind?”

“Drove too slow.”

“Just like a cop.”

El steals the slice of pizza on Max’s plate, chews happily as the party gets settled around her.

Across the table, Will has his face in his player’s handbook, and Lucas hovers over his shoulder, talking about prepared spells and emergency healing and the colder climate they’ve been preparing to venture into for this arc. Dustin, muttering obscenities, is in the corner, trying to find a clear radio station, while Mike sits behind his screens, scribbling intently into one of his many notebooks.

Max takes her slice of pizza back. She wrinkles her nose at a stray olive, picks it off, tosses it at Dustin’s back. He doesn’t notice. There’s a little smear of tomato sauce on his sweatshirt.

“Can we just, like, skip gym on Monday?” Max sighs. “I’m already dreading it.”

El nods. She holds her hand out for Max’s pizza. Max hands it over, and El takes a bite. She wouldn’t say no to skipping class—particularly the literal hurdles they’ll have to jump on the track right after lunch, and the awful woman that relentlessly blows her whistle at them.

Maybe they can spend the hour walking the railroad tracks instead. That’d be a much more fun use of their time.

“Okay,” El says.

Max grins. “Yeah?”

It’s enough to make El laugh, almost instantly ebullient—a word for the well of feeling, of happiness that almost bubbles free from her heart. She leans into Max’s shoulder, holds up the pizza slice so Max can bite into it. They share the crust, and El tosses the last bite at Dustin. It hits the back of his head, and he almost falls over, he spins around so fast.

“One of you,” he says, picking up the crust piece from the floor and eating it, “changed this damn radio in the past week, and you know how temperamental it is!”

“You did,” El says.

“I absolutely did not—”

“Yes, you did,” Will says.

Lucas nods. “You were waiting for Roger Lowe’s stupid new show.”

“That wasn’t—and it isn’t stupid, it’s transcendent—”

“I saw you change it!”

“Yeah, but it wasn’t on 96.3 when I got down here—”

“Dustin—”

“—I haven’t been down here since Mike’s dumb one-off campaign that we bombed!”

“You mean that you bombed?”

“You changed it to that awful AM talk radio woman before you went to bed, because you said her voice helps you sleep better,” Mike says finally, brushing eraser debris from his papers. He looks at all of them expectantly. Dustin sits, and Will puts his book down. A strange, solemn silence settles around the table. “Everybody ready?”

El likes this part of the night the best, right after kissing Mike hello, and right before their game begins. A little shiver of anticipation runs down her spine. This is their story, the story they’ve built together over months and years of fighting and teamwork and failures, after countless hours of eating pizza and conquering all odds and doing it together.

Much like real life, but slightly less dangerous. She looks around at her friends, her party, and couldn’t imagine feeling any more full.

“Alright,” Mike says, narrowing his eyes, slipping easily into his storytelling voice. “You’re all deep in the twisting, gnarled innards of the underground titan, and you’re struggling to find your way in the dark. Your zoomer has left you in the small tunnel to scout ahead…”

They’re completely engrossed in the story. Things are dire. They are down half their health, and even less their stock of potions. Their most dear, wild-haired NPC has just fallen. The night is growing late, and they’re all full of soda and pizza and sadness, and Dustin is wiping tears from his face, while El—

El is cheating. She sits close enough to Mike that she can just see over his screens, and happens to catch sight of the little figurine that he’s hiding being a pencil sharpener and a few other miscellaneous monsters. It bodes ill for the fate of their party, but she can’t help it—

She’s ready when Mike amps up the tension, when he lets his words build and twist and snap, when he paints a huge cavern and terrible, shifting shadows and something that snarls in the dark—

“You blink,” Mike says, “and before you appears the Mega Demogorgon!”

He slams the figurine on the table. The floor shakes. The lights flicker. A bulb in the corner lamp bursts.

Lucas screams.

Somewhere upstairs, there’s a loud crash, and Mrs. Wheeler says, frantically, “Is that an earthquake?”

Mr. Wheeler’s voice is slow, almost inaudible. “There aren’t earthquakes in Indiana, Karen.”

“El,” Dustin says, clutching at his chest. His hat’s fallen off. His hair is in a smushed disarray. “That was not cool.”

“Not me.” El points at the figurine. “Demogorgon.”

Will exhales a shaky little laugh, and Max punches her shoulder, and Mike—he smiles at her, soft and gentle and maybe sort of awestruck, too. He tucks a curl of hair behind her ear, and thumbs his finger underneath her nose, pulls it away clean.

“Told you,” she tells him.

If anything, he looks a little more in love.

El holds Max’s hand underneath the table. Max, for all she cares not to care about the story, is doing a terrible job of it—she squeezes El’s fingers hard enough to hurt, and curses as their cleric falls prone beneath the Mega Demogorgon’s relentless attack.

“Can I do anything?” Max says. “Can I reach him?”

“You’ve already taken your action—”

“But can’t I dash , what’s the point of being a zoomer if I can’t fuckin’ run —”

“I’ll be fine,” Will says. He taps his pencil rapidly on his binder—taptaptaptaptaptaptap, and his other knee is bouncing against the leg of the table, and shaking everything, and El can feel his anxiety from so far away, knows he’s lying, always knows when he’s lying. He’s two death saves down, and El is every day learning the ins and outs of this complicated game, but she knows that’s bad.

Will looks unafraid. “It’s fine, Max.”

“We’ll get you up,” Lucas says, flipping frantically through the back of the manual. He’s about to bite through his lip. “We’ll do something. It’s gonna be fine.”

Dustin nods. He doesn’t look like it’s gonna be fine, but he nods anyway.

“It’s not gonna be fine, ” Max says, but there’s nothing else she can do, and they all know it.

For his part, Mike looks like he’s sorry. Not sorry enough to keep the Mega Demogorgon from moving forward, though, ever closer toward their cleric, lying broken and bleeding on the cavern floor. His steps are thunderous. His arms stretch wide. The Mega Demogorgon takes a legendary action, and El holds her breath, looks across the table at Will—

—who clenches his jaw, and closes his eyes.

It’s a little too close to home, but they’re okay. They’re all okay, and this is a game. Will reaches sightlessly for his die. Lucas and Dustin hold on to one another. Max leans onto the table. El cannot take her eyes from Will’s steady fingers, the fist he makes around his die, the way he pauses, and waits, and lets go—

When the die settles, they all look.

“Natural twenty,” Will breathes.

“Natural twenty,” they all yell, grabbing onto one another in celebration, a mess of arms and hands and elbows, upsetting the map and the figurines and a half-full can of soda. Will’s got an arm hooked around El’s neck, and she’s falling forward onto the table, laughing, reaching for them all, for Max, immediately at her side, and for Dustin and Lucas and Mike, who’s not even upset, who’s yelling in celebration alongside them—

Small victories, she thinks, taking it.

They give up on the campaign immediately after the exhausting defeat of the Mega Demogorgon. It’s at a steep cost, but their enemy is dead while their party is mostly alive, and that’s enough for the night.

They change into their pajamas. Mike and Will move the table and chairs, while everybody else arranges the piles of blankets and pillows and sleeping bags on the floor. It takes ten minutes to play a heated six-player round of rock-paper-scissors for the coveted couch—it’s only after extensive debate, and a quick wrestling match, that El is decided the champion.

She doesn’t feel too bad. The couch is unreasonably comfortable after so many years of it being worn down, and it gives her a good view of the television. There’s a less violent argument about what movie to watch, and she’s happy to see the opening of Ghostbusters on the screen as she gets settled with her pillow and blankets.

“El,” Mike whispers, sitting beside her. “Scoot over.”

And it’s as easy as opening her arms—he slips beneath her blankets, arranges himself instead between her back and the couch, and hugs her to his chest.

She feels safe here. Safest. Three one two, the slow-quick beat of her pulse, the press of Mike’s palm to her stomach, warm over her shirt. Sleepy and safe, in the circle of his arms and the circle of their friends.

She tries to pay attention to the movie, to Venkman and Winston and Spengler, to Stantz and Dana Barrett, to Lucas and Dustin and Max and Will all fighting for space and blankets on the floor, to the sound of their voices, annoyed and familiar and affectionate as they quote their favorite characters, the best lines.

Through the hazy threat of sleep, El listens, too, to the dim creak of the basement stairs.

She groans, shifts around, turns her back to the television and presses her face to Mike’s shirt. He’s warm, almost too hot beneath their blanket, but she noses at his collarbone anyway.

“Holly,” she says into his chest, pulling her hands free from the blankets.

And there’s a beat, a second of confused silence, before Holly Wheeler bursts from the basement stairs, her arms splayed, her voice loud: “Hand check!”

She’s just in time to find everybody’s hands raised expectantly in the air.

Her brother’s weird friends are settled comfortably in their nest on the floor, while Mike and his weird girlfriend are closely intertwined on the couch, hands raised in the air, still pressed into one another.

“Well, shit,” Holly grumbles.

“Mouth,” Lucas and Mike warn, even as Holly continues down the stairs, makes herself at home in the pile of teenagers in front of the television.

“Mom’s still worried about your sleepovers,” Holly says, yanking a pillow from beneath Dustin’s head. She wriggles herself into a spot between Will and Lucas. “Since you losers actually know girls now. But, like--how do you guys always know? Do you have some stupid camera rigged or something?”

“You’re not even supposed to be down here,” Mike murmurs against El’s head.

“You’re not even supposed to be in arm's reach of Jane,” Holly says.

Dustin pulls a spare throw pillow from underneath the game table. He hugs it close, glares at Holly: “And you’re not supposed to be up after seven.”

“Uh, my bedtime was moved to ten,” she says, and then colors. “And I don’t listen to curfews, anyway, especially on a Saturday!”

Max sighs. “Shut up and watch Ghostbusters, kid.”

So Holly does—she shuts up, and watches Ghostbusters, and makes them all just a little proud when she joins them in quoting, seriously and without hesitation, “Total protonic reversal.”

The TV is cold. A stretch of moonlight filters in through the narrow basement window. Holly has shuffled herself back to bed, and Mrs. Wheeler has come to make sure everybody’s safe and in one piece and not doing anything too inappropriate, Michael Wheeler, do you ever listen, we’re going to talk about this in the morning, and the basement has finally fallen quiet. Someone shifts in their blankets, or rearranges their pillow. Will bumps into the table, whispers, “Sorry.”

It feels not quite like sleeping, this drifting, so comfortable that she doesn’t really feel her body. It’s opposite of the water tank, from so long ago—that water had been frigid, and she’d been weightless and cold and all too aware of her skin, her bones, the endless gazes upon her from the other side of the glass.

This is—better. She doesn’t have one good word for it. Warm. Easy. Serene, maybe. She listens to Mike’s breathing, and blinks in and out of sleep, and isn’t sure she’s ever felt such heavy silence between them all—

“Do you guys believe in aliens?”

“Dustin, man—”

Someone shifts. Dustin cries, “Ow!”

“Go to sleep!”

“I was sleeping, but like, what if we’re not alone out here?”

“It’s pretty obvious we’re not? Interdimensional shadow monsters ate your cat and tried to take over the town?”

“Okay, Lucas, but—”

“But universally speaking, right?”

“Yes! Right? Will, my main man—”

“Please, can we not.”

“I hate you all.”

Mike chimes in. “Theoretically and mathematically speaking? There’s gotta be life out there somewhere.”

“Practically speaking?” Lucas sighs.

“Interdimensional shadow monsters.”

Their conversation lulls. A cricket outside sings. In the distance, thunder rolls quietly along the sky.

“El, you think you could see if there’s aliens out there?”

“She’s not phoning in for aliens, ” Max snaps before Mike can chime in to defend her, and his shoulders relax. “Shut up, please, I’m only asking nicely once.”

“She could! I’m just saying that she could, theoretically and mathematically. ”

El closes her eyes.

The silence lasts for all of ten seconds. Will asks, almost hesitantly, “Is she doing it?”

Dustin sighs. “She fell asleep.”

Mike feels her huff of laughter against his chest; she can sense his amusement, the smile in his voice. “She’s not sleeping. Shut up and let her concentrate.”

So she humors them—she phones it in, as Max says, and thinks of E.T. phoning home and finding home, and steps into the void. For a moment, there’s the terrifying sweep of nothing, and El thinks she’s gone too far, that she reached out into space and got sucked right into the stars.

But Mike pinches her arm, and El takes a breath.

“I saw them,” she says. “On Mars. I was surrounded by millions of little squashy guys.”

It takes but a second. Lucas and Will burst into laughter, while Max groans loudly. Dustin simply sighs. “An E.T. quote? Eleven Jane Hopper, I am disappointed in you. So much of space to discover, and you with a tool that you refuse to utilize for this noble quest for knowledge and connection—”

“Go to sleep, Dustin!”

Dreams are tricky, terrible things.

El has nightmares, sometimes, of all that nothing—just her and that empty slip-stream world, that empty void, endless and aching, stretching as far and as infinite and as painful as the universe. She is alone there. Her body floats, and she screams, and there’s nothing, nobody to hear her.

It feels terribly like home.

And sometimes her nightmares are of blood and bodies and broken bones, of sightless eyes of people she knows, of the faces most dear to her drowning in their own blood, gasping for air, begging for help. Sometimes they blame her, and sometimes they ask her why, and she is never able to find any words. Sometimes the faces belong to Mama, and to Kali, and to Papa.

Sometimes they belong to herself.

And sometimes—

Sometimes she has good dreams, too. Gentle snowfall, and messy snowmen, and old tripwires dripping with icicles. A cabin lit in fairy lights. A flickering fire in a plain hearth, and a single picture on the mantle in a crude wooden frame. It always changes, the picture: her and Hopper, and her and Mike, and her and Will and Max and Dustin and Lucas, and her and Joyce and Nancy and Holly. Her and Mama, sitting together on a sunlit porch. Her and Kali, holding hands.

Sometimes her dreams are good, and she wakes up breathing, blinking, slow and even.

Sometimes her dreams are good, and she wakes up to another kind of dream.

A soft dawn light filters in through the narrow basement windows. The world is pink, and brown, and dark.

Mike’s face is so near, and slack in sleep.

Rarely do they have the opportunity to lie together like this, during the frenetic pace of high school; peaceful and at rest, twined at the ankles and legs, arms holding one another close.

She takes her time. She looks at the curl of his dark hair. She watches the pulse at his neck, the lines of his wide lips, the quick steps of the freckles across the bridge of his nose. There’s a tangle of them at his eyebrow, too, and two spots at his jaw. A tiny white scar at his jaw, and another on his chin.

Eventually she is driven by nature to pull herself carefully from him and their couch, to go to the bathroom, to sneak upstairs to the kitchen, where she grabs a glass of water and an apple, which she takes a halfhearted bite of. She returns quietly to the basement and unlocks the side door, makes herself comfortable on the small concrete stoop in the dim morning.

It’s raining.

El likes the rain. There’s enough of an overhang off the second story roof to keep her dry. She’s wearing soft sweatpants that Nancy gave her, and a hugely oversized t-shirt from Hopper. It’s the best set of pajamas she owns—hand-me-downed, and holey, and worn, and comfortable. She rolls the hems of her sweatpants higher, and scoots her feet forward, relishing the feel of the cool rain on her bare feet.

Her toes get muddy. A piece of grass sticks stubbornly to the side of her foot. She rescues a worm from the hard concrete of the patio.

The sun peeks through the nearby trees.

“El,” Mike says, eventually, opening the back door and sticking his head through. He sounds a little panicked, and a little amused, and a little like he can’t quite tell which one he wants to be. “There you are.”

She nods.

He steps fully outside and shuts the door. He nudges her over, and sits down next to her, and they lean into one another like magnets. He’s still wrinkly from sleep--there’s a pink line on his cheek, and his shirt is twisted, and one sock is almost falling off.

It takes her a moment to realize that he’s holding something.

He digs a spoon into the bowl on his lap. “Hungry?”

El peers into the bowl. It’s a waffle sandwich, with three healthy scoops of ice cream in the middle. Neapolitan, so there’s a little bit of everything. There are sprinkles, too, rainbow ones, and it’s topped with a healthy layer of syrup.

“Erica says it counts as breakfast food if there’s syrup on it,” Mike says, holding a spoonful out to her.

And El doesn’t cry—she almost cries, and there’s another word that she knows, overwhelmed, and also enamored, and maybe just happy.

They share ice cream and waffles for breakfast. It starts to rain hard enough that it sneaks into Mike’s socks, even though he’s got his legs tucked up safely under the protection of the roof.

“Ugh,” he says.

“I like it, the rain,” El says. “I found you in the rain.”

“I found you in the rain. All muddy and scared and weird.”

She bumps his shoulder into hers. “Mouth breather.”

He blows her hair back from her face. He smells like chocolate, like morning breath. It surprises her, how some things still feel novel, even after so much time. A cold bowl of sickeningly sweet ice cream and syrup for breakfast. The rain on her skin. A friend, and a shoulder to lean on.

Mike kisses her temple, and grumbles about his socks, and El thinks, yeah, happy is just the right word.

#Stranger Things #Eleven #Mike Wheeler #Mike and Eleven #you know it's for real when I post an AO3 link!!!!!!!!! I hope you guys like it #it's taken me so long and I'm so Excited to write for them???#I'm still a little nervous please be gentle #and it's so fluffy that it's kind of gross SORRY #Mina writes fic #yay here's some stranger things fic #I read through again cause I had to fix all the missing italics and I promise I'm not dunkin on Dustin I love that dude

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