( tw; angast )

After everything he’d lived through, everything around him began to seem bland and faded, not vivid enough to catch hold and leave a mark on Mike. A chapter had appeared in his life, an event, and it sat inside his small chest like a black hole, pulsing and collapsing into itself within the reflecting crystals of a corrosive void. Mike would have preferred that this had never entered his life — no Demogorgons, no Upside Down, no government people with evil eyes, and no disappearance of Will; but, on the other hand, had the Universe given him the choice, he would have rewound time and lived through it all a second time.

Because in the end, back there, in those tangled and cramped school corridors, he had left Eleven all alone.

The snow circled slowly in the sky, fell unpretentiously to the ground, and covered the gray landscapes of Hawkins in clean whiteness. Winter in Indiana was always apathetic, something inexplicably vast on the map of a small town. Slippery frost crept viscously through his clothes, chilled the edges of his memories, and doubled his loneliness.

Mike stood a little way from the entrance to the house, gazing thoughtfully at the blue thread of the evening horizon, filled to the brim with myriads of stars. Nancy wasn’t trying to walk quietly or sneak up behind him unnoticed, and yet Mike didn’t register her right away, only feeling her solid presence after she had come to stand beside him, barely touching his cold hand.

"Don’t you think winter is strange this year?"

He shifted listlessly from foot to foot, not giving a thought to going back inside, where it was warm. On his shoulders he wore a warm t-shirt that did nothing against the soft press of winter and the cold that burrowed down to the bone and stayed as frost on his joints. Maybe afterward Mike would get sick and end up in bed with a high fever.

"I mean, it’s like it’s a little… different." His teeth clattered against each other, biting the ends off his words and making them choppy. Mike exhaled, and a small cloud of steam escaped his mouth and dissolved into the sky. "Special. And it reminds me of El."

Nancy could be trusted with secrets like these — they were tiny, like seashells, but felt too loud — trusted with scraps of what was going on inside his soul, the stuff that made him want to cry in the arms of a deaf silence, every single time. There was a kind of relief in knowing that Nancy, like him, knew about the Upside Down and about Eleven. A huge relief, because now the weight of that secret was trying to crush him with its mass.

Everything around him, the whole of Hawkins, reminded him of El, picked at the festering wound — the blanket fort in the basement still stood untouched — as if a little piece of her had stayed with him, lodged between his narrow ribs and refusing to let go of his thoughts. Sometimes, in the most intimate moments, when the grieving for her grew unbearably long-long, she would appear to Mike in the distance, like a holy spirit (or a forest one. Eleven was always involably mysterious).

"I miss her — I miss her unbearably."

This winter would be long — so long that Mike was afraid he wouldn’t live to see its end.