Chapter Text
At first, everyone takes turns keeping an eye on him.
They don’t call it that. No one says watch or monitor or make sure he doesn’t do something stupid. They say things like I’ll stay a bit longer, or I was in the neighborhood, or we thought we’d all hang out. Mike knows what it is anyway. He can feel it in the way conversations trail off when he walks into a room. In how people look at him first, before they look at anything else.
They’re scared.
Scared that if he’s alone for too long, something will happen. That if there’s silence, if there’s space, his mind will slip back into that dark, narrowed place. So they fill the house with bodies and noise and presence, like if they build a wall of people around him, nothing bad can get through.
There is always someone there.
His mom in the kitchen, pretending to reorganize cabinets that don’t need reorganizing.
Nancy on the couch, reading the same page over and over.
Dustin and Lucas arguing softly over a game they’re not really playing.
Will sitting close, not touching him, but close enough that Mike can feel the warmth of him.
Max leaning in the doorway, arms crossed, eyes sharp and watchful.
Hopper showing up with no explanation and no intention of leaving anytime soon.
Steve sprawled across furniture he doesn’t fit on, cracking jokes that land softly, carefully.
Jonathan quiet in the corner, like he understands that silence can be its own kind of company.
The most Mike is allowed to do alone is go to the bathroom. Even then, if he takes too long, if the door stays shut a few seconds past what they’ve decided is reasonable, someone will knock.
“Mike?”
“You okay in there?”
He always answers. Not because he’s afraid of what they’ll do if he doesn’t, but because he understands: they aren’t trying to control him. They’re trying to keep him. The fear sits heavy in the room, unspoken but shared, and he doesn’t resent it.
His mind is clearer now.
Not empty. Never empty. But clearer, like a lake after the mud settles. The sadness is still there, deep, unmoving, but it no longer drowns him the second he steps too close. He can feel more than one thing at once now, and that’s new.
He feels grief, sharp and aching, because she is gone and always will be. He feels guilt, because part of him still thinks he should have gone with her, or saved her, or known how to stop the ending. He feels anxiety, because the future stretches out in front of him like a road he doesn’t recognize.
But threaded through it all is something quieter. Steadier.
Peace. Not happines, nothing like that, not even close, but peace. And underneath that, something like purpose.
He’s not fighting the truth anymore. He’s not trying to undo it, or bargain it away, or punish himself for surviving it. Eleven is gone. The world is different. He is different.
When he’s finally alone in his room, really alone, for the first time, he sits at his desk and looks at the framed picture of her. He doesn’t break. He doesn’t spiral. He just breathes.
“I’m still here,” he says quietly, not as an apology, not as a promise. Just a fact.
And for the first time, that fact doesn’t hurt as much as it used to.
He goes back to school.
It’s hard at first. He missed so many days that the work feels like a mountain someone dropped in his lap without warning. Assignments pile up. Teachers pull him aside, voices careful, asking what he needs. He doesn’t always know how to answer, but he tries anyway. He stays after class and asks for extensions. He studies in short bursts, learning where his limits are now. And somehow, he manages.
Nancy watches him closely through all of it. Watches him come home tired but upright. Watches him complain about homework like he used to. One night, sitting at the kitchen table, she says quietly that she thinks it might finally be time for her to leave for college. The one she delayed. The one she put on hold because she couldn’t leave him.
Mike looks up at her and tells her to go. That it’s okay. That he’s not her responsibility.
She doesn’t fully believe him, not yet, but she smiles anyway. She hugs him for a long time. And later, he overhears her asking Steve and Robin, in low voices, to keep an extra eye on him once she’s gone. Mike lets it happen. He understands that trust comes back in pieces.
He goes to Dustin’s birthday party.
It’s loud and stupid and full of inside jokes that barely make sense anymore. He eats cake, too much of it. When Lucas drags him to a rager weeks later, he doesn’t drink. Not even when someone presses a cup into his hand and raises an eyebrow. Alcohol messes with his medication. That’s reason enough. He doesn’t feel like he’s missing out.
At some point, his mom stops locking his meds away. He notices one morning when he opens the cabinet and the lock is gone. He stands there for a second longer than necessary, then takes what he needs and closes the door.
Later, he realizes the knives are back in the kitchen drawers. No announcement. No conversation. Just normalcy returning, quiet and deliberate.
And one day, he takes a long shower. Longer than usual. The water runs until the mirror fogs completely, until the room is warm and quiet. No one knocks. No one calls his name through the door.
When he steps out, towel around his waist, the house is calm. Safe. Unafraid.
They’re trusting him again.
Mike sits at his desk one morning, the sunlight catching the pages he’s stacked like fragile little towers.
He’s been writing for months. Started back at the clinic, when the days were long and empty, when talking to anyone felt impossible. It began as something to fill the silence, but somewhere along the way it became something to fill himself. He holds the papers up to the window, letting the sun burn through them just a little, warms the ink in his hands.
Then he separates the piles. One for each person who matters. Some piles are thick, overflowing with letters, sketches, half-finished thoughts. Some are thin, delicate, but each meaningful in a way that only he knows. He takes a step back and looks at them all together. So many people. He lets himself feel that weight. He lets himself feel it like something good, not something that makes him ache.
Today is his graduation.
He sits with his friends, tassel swinging in rhythm with the murmurs of the crowd. Names are called, diplomas handed out, and when his turn comes, he takes it with both hands. He holds it like he’s holding himself together, and he lets the applause wash over him without flinching.
He hugs his mother tight afterward. “You’re a good mom,” he says quietly. “And you’re… so pretty. With the scars and everything.”
Then he hugs Nancy, a little firmer this time, and leans in close. “It’s a secret,” he murmurs, just to her. “But I love you the most of all.”
The basement smells like pizza, soda, and that faint old carpet smell you only notice when you’ve been down there too long. Mike sits on the floor, legs crossed, dice in hand, the string lights flickering low. Will, Lucas, Dustin, and Max are spread around him, papers and character sheets scattered like little islands.
Mike tells the story of the mage who survives. He doesn’t need to say her name. They all know who he means.
The mage had to pretend to die. Everyone thought she was gone, that no one would ever see her again. But of course she got away. Of course she did. Somewhere else. Somewhere with three waterfalls. Somewhere sunlight and water wrap around her. Somewhere she’s alive.
The air is heavy. Every word is a weight he carries, and even as he speaks, he feels it, feels the sorrow, the longing, the hope that maybe she’s really out there, somewhere, still alive, even if it’s not here, not with him.
He stops, and the basement is silent. Just the soft hum of the lights. He looks at them. They look back. For a single moment, she is still alive.
They push back from the table the way only children can. Dice and papers are stacked, maps folded, pencils scattered like tiny ghosts of adventures past. Mike glances around the basement, the walls, the shelves, the worn carpet. He feels it settle in: this is the last time. His friends will come back one day a year, every year, and they’ll remember it, and laugh, and roll dice again, but for him, this is it. This is his last time.
“Let’s eat upstairs,” Dustin says softly, almost reluctantly, as if he could see the truth only Mike knew then.
Mike doesn’t argue. He stands, stretches, feeling the weight of everything in his chest, welcoming it, really. They follow him up the stairs, the sound of feet echoing, small and familiar, carrying the ghosts of countless campaigns. Upstairs, the kitchen smells like his mom’s lasagna, warm and heavy and full of home. Plates clink, forks scrape, and for a little while they eat and talk and laugh, but quieter now. A bit careful, maybe.
Mike watches them. He eats, but he isn’t hungry. He’s holding onto the sound of their voices, the sight of them here, alive and whole. He watches Nancy pass him the lasagna, smiles at his mom, watches Lucas, Will, Max, Dustin, and even Steve, everyone alive and present. It feels fragile, like sunlight through a cracked window.
Later, after the last fork is scraped clean and the dishes are done, after his friends leave and the house grows quiet, Mike waits. The moon is high, silver across the roof.
He doesn’t take anything with him.
No keys. No shoes. No jacket. He opens the front door and lets it click softly shut behind him. The night air is cool and clean.
The shed door creaks when he opens it. His old bike waits inside, dust settled on the frame. It’s small now, awkward, but it still knows him. He wheels it out, swings a leg over, and pushes off.
The streets are empty. Houses sleep. Trees blur past. The ride feels endless and brief all at once. His legs remember the motion. His body remembers this version of him.
When he reaches the woods, he slows.
This is where it began. This is where he first saw her.
He leaves the bike at the edge of the trees, not careful to set it upright, knowing he won't come back for it. The path opens ahead of him, familiar and quiet. He walks until the night wraps fully around him.
For the first time, there is no noise in his head. There is no fear, no doubt.
Only trust. Only love. Only the certainty that some endings are really just crossings.
By morning, they’ll find the bike.
They’ll search the woods. They’ll call his name. They won’t understand at first.
But they’ll have his words. All of them, waiting right up there in his room, on his desk, the words he’d been writing for the better part of a year. And slowly, painfully, gently, they’ll realize he didn’t leave them with nothing.
He left them with everything he had.
And it will feel, in the quiet spaces after, like he didn’t vanish at all, but like he simply followed the wind somewhere it had been calling him for a very long time.
When Mike wakes, the first thing he hears is water.
He opens his eyes.
There’s a waterfall in front of him, tall and white and shining, mist curling at its base. Sunlight breaks through it in fragments, scattering across stone and green and air. He blinks, slow, careful, afraid that the image will collapse if he moves too fast.
Then he turns his head.
Another waterfall spills down beside it. Different, wider, softer, catching the light in a way that makes his chest ache. And farther still, beyond the trees and the open sky, a third one pours endlessly into nothing and everything at once.
Three waterfalls.
The thought settles into him with a strange, immediate certainty. Like recognition. Like memory.
He sits up. His body feels light. Whole. No pain. No weight. Just the steady rhythm of breath and the sound of water and the feeling that he is exactly where he’s supposed to be.
And then he sees her.
She’s standing a little ways away, barefoot in the grass, blue dress fluttering softly in the breeze. Her hair is longer than he remembers, darker where the light doesn’t touch it, lighter where it does. She looks real in the way nothing ever does in dreams.
She looks alive.
For a moment, she just stares at him. Her eyes widen, something like surprise flashing across her face, quick and human and unmistakable.
“Mike,” she says, breathless, like she didn’t expect him yet.
He stands. His legs don’t shake. He doesn’t fall. He just moves toward her, every step easy, every step certain.
“I thought…” She stops herself, smiling, small and soft and a little sad. “I thought it would be longer.”
“I know,” he says, and his voice doesn’t break. “I know.”
She was waiting anyway. She always was.
She reaches for him, and when her hands touch his, they’re warm. Solid. Real. Everything he ever trusted them to be. He laughs then, quiet, disbelieving, full, and she laughs too, as if she’d been holding it in for years.
The waterfalls keep pouring behind them.
It feels good to see her again.