Work Text:
Typing feels free, liberating. Mike feels the world he's building pouring out of his pores as he hits the keys on the typewriter, the fast rhythm so similar to the fleeting moments he had during the time El shared with them.
Mourning was hard, but he tried his best. As he lets his thoughts turn into words on paper, he revolves around the fact that she'll never be here anymore. And it pains him so much that he wasn't the best for her. He let his own insecurities get in the way, and didn't offer her what she needed. Not really.
He would have, if he knew what was about to happen. He would have taken her away and let Hawkins be consumed by whatever hell the Mind Flayer would bring them. He'd take her far, to live a life settled in a faraway land, like the person she deserved to be.
Mike realized too late that all El didn't want to be was a superhero. She never intended to be one, and it pained her every time he said it. He realized too late. He would have given her the world.
A few days after her death, Hopper told him in detail what was happening in a lab in the Upside Down. El mentioned it briefly, and Hopper's details just made the situation look even more dire, justifying what really moved El to stay behind. It was unfair, so unfair, to have the world's safety hanging on her shoulders like that. So young and too selfless for her own good.
But guilt gnawed at his heart when a tiny voice whispered inside his head, "Didn't you do the same, you hypocrite?"
He did, and it was what almost made him give in to the unforgivable thoughts of not living anymore. But he wouldn't go to the same place as her. She deserved heaven, and his path was straight to hell.
"Don't you dare give up, Mike." She defied him the first time, and she still does to this day. So he keeps going.
From the beginning, he put so much hope and despair on her shoulders, like she was the key to saving Will, then to saving Hawkins, then their entire dimension. He knew she was capable of everything, but it was her choice to make, and she should've learned what she was doing first. The party should have prepared better. Fought harder. Not let El be at the vanguard, facing the evil high above them. They treated her like a force ahead of them. But she was part of the party, and the way he treated her was too much for him to face all at once.
He figured that maybe, when the Mind Flayer died, so did her powers - much like what happened with Will. But they never got the chance to test this theory. That just makes it worse.
And all he has is his hallucinations, and his words.
There's a thing nobody tells you. How when you don't see and don't touch the dead person's body, it actually makes you insane.
It's a concept not that hard to grasp. How, if someone dies and you see them in the coffin, touch them, then you know it's real and you can fully move on. And if you don't, you never feel like that person truly died.
It happened first with his grandma when he was too young. His mother didn't let him attend the funeral, and for some time he haunted his mom with the idea of, "Did she really die? Can't we go meet her in heaven?"
His mom fixed her mistake at the next one. Unfortunately, it was Will's fake funeral, so no lesson learned on that front.
When Bob died, taking his bubbly personality with him, the government didn't let them see his body. A funeral with a windowless coffin. His presence still looms at RadioShack every time he passes in front of it.
With Eddie, there was no body either. Mike still feels his presence bickering around him sometimes. Oh, he'd have loved to prepare an adventure for Holly and her friends.
So many bodies, and no closure.
No matter how hard it is to let someone go, when you don't feel their death with your fingers, it feels hard to believe. And he lives in this uncertainty. Going from moment to moment of his day, much like those machines that sew tapestries and, at the end of the day, give you a finished piece without you having to think about it.
So he writes and writes, disconnected feelings and moments, and slowly - as the days pass by and the stack of paper under his bed grows - his heart beats again. Slowly, the tight clench of guilt letting him go. He lets his theory fly, even tells his friends about it, and truly starts believing in it a few years later.
He sees her in the woods of Hawkins. In a model in a magazine from Spain someone in front of him reads on the subway. Running after a cab in New York. Buying a book in a shop in Paris.
His work makes him travel the world, and at every curb he stops and unconsciously looks for her.
Time, family, and friends slowly heal his wounds, and at 35, when he types the last lines of the novel he wrote about her, he thinks that finally he did her justice.
Elle, the main character, faces very different situations than El, but they are very similar in their core. The girl between those lines finds friendship and, above all else, a family that learns to love her unconditionally. And it's special, seeing her living and thriving through the world's memory, as the book reaches bestseller status. The world knows El, and how she saved them. But above all else, she saves him. Brings him to life again. And saves lots of people's lives as her story becomes motivation for many to be strong, to fight for their individuality and for their values. They fight to be seen as human beings, just as she did. And Mike knows she's proud of her own steps.
When he's on tour in Europe, he sees her for the last time. Taking her book from a shelf, and smiling at him from over her shoulder. He watches as she leaves the shop, beautiful as the day he lost her.
He never sees her again, but he doesn't need to, since she lives in everyone's minds now.