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El hears about the new arrival in the village without ever seeing her.
She uses an abundance of caution, these days. There have been scares before- new arrivals, the occasional tourist who’s heard about the falls. It's not likely that anyone who comes by is going to be a security risk- a random American visitor is hardly going to report to the government that they saw a girl in Iceland, much less that they’ll make the connection that the girl was their escaped experiment- but she can never be sure. At the very least, she wears her sleeves long. Her tattoo has no easy explanations.
But she keeps an ear to the ground. She always does. When the gas station attendant mentions a new arrival to the village, in the midst of El purchasing tanks for the cabin and for her bike, it piques her interest, lets a cold sliver of what is only half fear trickle down her spine.
El isn't entirely sure why. If she let every new tourist freak her out she'd never get anywhere. But- she tries to trust her instincts, and something about the way that the gas station attendant's nose wrinkles, the heaviness of the way he says American, it- it feels strange. It feels wrong. It feels like something has come to this idyll, and disrupted it.
So in the first days after the whisper spreads through town, El ducks away from the village. The other inhabitants of Flúðir are used to her absences by now, her desire for solitude. They don't ask too many questions about why she keeps to herself at times. And she doesn't need to go into town often- she keeps enough supplies in the cabin for a month at least, enough for her and for Kali if she drops in to visit. It would be more, but she can't exactly raid the grocery store. If all else fails, she tells herself wryly, she can forage.
(Never mind how badly the idea of that scares her, how much she hates it. Yes, she knows things now she didn't back then- what plants are safe to eat, how to prepare them, how to harvest them. She will never again be a child crouched over a squirrel's corpse, so hungry that it hurts- but the memory still haunts her.)
(Never mind that even this caution makes her heart hurt, that it aches. The loneliness has not left her.)
If the new arrival is a tourist, or visiting family, then El can just wait her out a week or two. If the new arrival is moving in- then that'll be a different situation entirely, she thinks, but one that she can adapt to.
So. Waiting her out it is.
Three weeks pass before El begins to contemplate going back into town.
Her pantry is not quite bare but getting there- places where she'd stack cans are empty, the flour and rice bags grow light when she picks them up, hefted over the muscle of her biceps. If it were up to her she'd have more stocked regularly, but she relies far too much on the villagers not asking questions of her. And as discreet as they've allowed her to be thus far, even they would raise their eyebrows if she came in and tried to purchase half their stock of non-perishables.
One of the downsides of living in Iceland, maybe, but when she saw the three waterfalls during the long trek she made with Kali, back when they were still looking for a place to go, she couldn't picture anywhere else. She couldn't have Max with her, and she couldn't have Hopper with her. She couldn't keep Jonathan, or Nancy, or any of her friends and family. She couldn't have Mike. But like this, she'd thought, she still had a piece of him with her. She'd fulfilled his promise, even in one small way.
El liked to imagine that he would be happy with that. She still likes to think that- a small comfort on the hardest nights.
But none of this solves the problem that she faces now, she thinks as she clears her plate and washes it in the sink. Going back into town or toughing it here for a little longer. She can stay here another week without supplies. Maybe two. But she needs to know the situation- if the new arrival to Flúðir is a tourist, or a permanent fixture she'll have to learn how to live with.
Winter is coming, and quickly. Already the sun sets earlier and earlier as October turns to November- soon she will only have a few hours of sunlight a day. By then she will be able to operate under relative cover of darkness. It will be safer then, in just a week or two- and she can wait it out. She knows she can.
That's what Kali would tell her to do, but- as much as El loves her sister, Kali's paranoia can be stifling at times.
El pours water and salt into the tub anyways. The fire roars in the fireplace, crackling loudly as the flames jump high enough to keep her warm. She takes a moment to look at it- at this small, cozy cabin that has become her home- and it makes her heart squeeze, an emotional ache so tender and poorly healed it’s like a physical wound.
It looks so much like home- like her very first home. That’s all. There are wooden walls and ceilings, and a big couch and a fire place and a linoleum table against the wall, in that same shade of red, which happened without her even trying for it, and a TV in the corner. There are quilts, and big lamps with old and wearied lampshades, and a bed that keeps her warm even when the temperature drops and ice spreads across the windows. It is so, so similar. Maybe that’s what makes the emptiness of its differences hurt all the more.
Suddenly she can’t get in the water fast enough. She almost slams the top down on her fingers as she closes it on top of her. After that it’s just a matter of trying not to think about anything at all as she floats in pure, unfiltered darkness.
The Upside Down does not exist anymore. She made sure of that. But she still has her powers, and Kali still has hers, and this is a far safer way to contact each other than through the phone lines. Those have gotten them caught before- something that was her fault. Kali won't let her apologize for it, but she won't buy a phone, either. There is no one here anymore, and aside from her and Kali, there never will be again.
El opens her eyes after an eternity of complete nothingness, and begins to walk.
It only takes a little time before she finds Kali- sitting on a bed, fidgeting with her watch. There is a crease on her forehead as she rewinds it, over and over again, and El takes a moment to just- look at her.
Sometimes it hits her like a train, the sheer breadth of how much her sister wanted to die. How Kali never expected, never wanted to be here- years older, gaining laugh lines and worry lines, hair getting longer again. It makes her heart hurt, to think that Kali was convinced the world would be better, safer, if she didn’t exist. When she thinks of such things it chases her own doubts about everything away.
That aside, El can’t resist the urge to tease her a little. She leans close, close enough her breath tickles Kali’s ear, and whispers, “Boo!”
Kali shrieks and nearly falls off the bed, and El dissolves into peals of laughter. “El!” she scolds, but she’s visibly fighting back a smile still. "You scared me!"
"Sorry!" El tells her, and is not sorry at all.
Kali can't see her like this, not without immersing herself in a sensory deprivation chamber too, but she doesn't need to. El can talk enough for the both of them. And she'd be lying if she said that she wasn't glad for the fact that Kali can't look at her- the way her mouth twists, crumples on occasion when she can't stop herself from feeling things hard enough she can't keep the emotion off her face.
"I should have expected you," Kali admits, eyes scanning blankly over the space in front of her. "You're certainly early for a check-in, but I know you must get... lonely up there, Jane." A moment's pause. "El. Apologies."
"Thanks," El tells her, grateful at least for the fact that she doesn't have to correct Kali herself. This point of contention has never really gone away, but it has... dimmed, somewhat, in the intervening years since their escape from America. They don't talk about it, and El doesn't want to. "No, I know I'm early. I'm just- worried. There's someone new who arrived in Flúðir, and--"
Kali's eyes go wide. "Has the military caught wind of you? Are you in danger?" She reaches out as if by instinct, as if she can grab onto the sleeve of El's jacket and pull her down to sit next to her on the bed, can hold her tightly to prove she's there. "El, tell me everything."
El's eyes prick with tears. Even though Kali can't feel her, can't touch her, can't hold her the way she might if they were truly in each other's presence, she lets herself fold into the projection of the bed and curl into Kali's side and pretend- even if for a moment- that she's being held.
"There's a new arrival in town. A girl. I don't know who she is, but she's American, or where she's from, or how long she's staying, but I've been worried ever since she arrived. I haven't gone into town since she got here- I haven't even seen her- but my food's running out soon, I have to go eventually. I don't want to leave here, I like this town. I just- I need your advice."
She pauses for a moment, squeezing her eyes shut before she opens one, tentatively, to look at Kali. She's sure she knows exactly what look she'll find there, and- yes, there is pity there, pity that makes her stomach hurt, her lip tremble. Pity that makes her want to curl up into nothing, because she can feel exactly what Kali is going to say before she says it.
You know what you need to do, El. Your safety matters most. We didn't come this far to only come this far.
And she'll agree, she knows she will, because she's not just living like this for herself- she has to protect Kali, too. She can't let either of them be alone in this world ever again.
The other children are dead. One is dead- Henry is dead. Henry is dead, and she couldn't save him, never even got the chance to know enough that she had to try, that she should have been trying harder. She and Kali are the last of Papa's children. There will never be anyone else on Earth who knows what it is to be like this, except the two of them. With everything in her, she will fight to make sure that the number never drops to only one.
Kali opens her mouth, and El braces herself. But instead of saying any of the words she’s steeled herself to expect, she says, "El, I think- my paranoia has perhaps rubbed off on you too much."
El opens her mouth. Closes it. Opens it again, and says, "What?"
"I'm never going to tell you that it's wrong to be cautious," she says, reaching out as if to touch El's wrist before remembering that they can't quite touch like this, not without El pulling her into the void too, and pulling back. "I'll never tell you it's wrong to want to be- safe. That's the whole point of this. But I..."
Kali's mouth twists and she looks away. "I've been happy," she says at last, a confession breathed out with no small amount of guilt. "I'll never have my crew again, they're gone, I can't bring them back. It wil never be as it was. I will never be as I was, and I can never tell the people here who I am no matter how close I grow to them. They will never know what happened to me. We can never go back to America, I think. But I do not believe anymore that we should prevent ourselves from- living."
There are tears in her eyes, and blinking El finds tears blurring her own vision, too, dripping down her face slowly. Even a year ago she never would have thought she would hear those words. Not after Kali's fervent, desperate plea of a planned suicide attempt in the middle of Hawkins Lab, and the way she'd had to be persuaded to come along when they'd devised the alternative, El knitting together her guts with telekinetic force and a dream. She never thought Kali would speak this way about living ever again.
She should be happy- she is happy- but still, a lump swells in El's throat, bitter and unable to be dislodged, as Kali keeps talking.
"You should go into town, and you should see if she is a tourist, or if she is here to stay. And if the girl who's come to your town is connected to the American military, then of course we must pack up and leave. If she is a security risk then we can run again, and find somewhere new, and we will start over again. But I do not want you to suffer like this, El, worrying constantly as I have. You are my sister. I want you to be happy."
It should be like a weight off her chest. It should be like a wave of relief. She should feel so much better, having heard that. Why doesn't she?
El has never been gladder that Kali can't see her when she takes a deep breath. She doesn't have to force a smile, doesn't have to put on a face that is pitiful in its attempt at performance. She says, "You're- right. That makes me feel better. I'll go into town tomorrow morning."
They must speak for some time, then, about everything that's happened since they last spoke- Kali's latest illusionary tricks, which have turned out to be tremendously useful in the age of digitized banking. The women that Kali now considers tentative friends. El talks about the weather and the changing of the seasons in a dull empty voice, which Kali does not call her on. They wrap up slowly, exchanging unspooling goodbyes as they wait for El's tether to tug her back.
And yes, eventually the egg timer goes off. It is just loud enough that it breaks through the soundproofing of the tank, and she wakes with a splash, darkness dissolving all around her into the faint woodgrain texture above her face, and she pushes the top off and steps out into the warmth of the cabin, drying herself off with a towel as she goes.
The fire is dying slowly, and with a twitch of her fingers she revives it. It's not cold in here at all, and yet she can feel herself trembling as she strips out of the wetsuit and wraps herself in towels. She drains the tank- slowly- and doesn’t think. Doesn’t feel. Moves like a robot from task to task. Exactly like Papa's most perfect daughter.
In bed, wrapped in blankets and with a hot brick warming her feet, she can finally let herself admit it. She’s not scared of going back to the village at all. She never has been. No- she’s frightened by exactly how unafraid she is.
Maybe the girl in town is some agent sent by Dr. Kay, or whoever her successor has turned out to be. Maybe she’s a secret operative in league with the American military. Maybe she's just bait, or maybe she's nothing at all. It doesn't matter. It doesn't scare El anymore, and that's the problem.
That's why she had to call Kali, she thinks, staring up above her blankly. Remind herself that it's not just about her, not just about the fact that she would let herself get taken if it meant she could talk to any of them one last time, because she's got another person depending on her continued freedom in this world. No matter the fact that she is so completely, utterly empty.
The ceiling provides no answer to the wound in her heart. El doesn't let out the cry rising in her throat. She won't give herself the satisfaction. Instead she rolls over and looks at the photos on her nightside table.
The last memories she has of them, the only photos she could take with her. Only three. Hopper and her in the cabin, smiling up at the camera- her hair was curlier then, frizzy with the summer Indiana heat and no A/C. He'd just shaved. She remembers the way his stubble rubbed up against her cheek as they smiled for the photo, the flash of light, Jonathan's low voice telling them to say cheese.
Then the one outside, with the rest of the party. That was the day before the move, and her arms had been sore from lifting boxes. They'd all clung to each other on that hill of yellow flowers and sweetgrass, reassured everyone they'd keep in touch, given promises and talked about California like it was a day's drive away only. Max had clung to El's side just as Lucas had stuck to Will like glue, and El hadn't been able to stop herself from crying on the bike ride home, her head buried against Mike's back. He'd been sniffling too. Dustin had bawled even before they left. In the picture, they're all smiling, but their eyes are wet.
The last one is the most precious. Mike smiles up at her from glossy paper and a glass frame. This one she took herself, in the middle of her room, as he smiled up at her. His smiles grew rarer and rarer in those last days, so she'd treasured that picture, the soft lighting, the way he'd tucked his hair behind one ear and not the other.
If she tried- her eyes go to the tub, emptied out of water- she could find him, now. But in the few times she did exactly that, in the days after her disappearance, it only seemed to make things worse. He never slept, rarely showered, went silent at bizarre times and talked far too much at others. He always seemed to know she was there- would go wild-eyed, would call out her name as if she could answer. And the others, too, seemed to grow dimmer the longer she stayed to look.
El loves him. Has loved him for as long as she's ever known how. It was the first choice she ever made, and she keeps making it, like this: choosing not to hurt him with her ghost, as much as she wants to see him. She can't let herself haunt him out of self indulgence.
Still, it is a hard choice. It sticks in her throat as she goes to sleep.
She makes her way down into the village the next day. Early in the morning, before the sun has pulled itself out of bed. It would be harder, but she knows this trail almost as well as she knows herself. She knows every step of the way down.
The general store is open by the time she gets there, but just barely. Which is nice- she hardly wants to loiter outside the store waiting for it to open. She ducks inside and grabs a cart.
Bags of rice. Cans of beans, even though she hates the texture of them, because they're filling and they keep well. Flour, chicken breasts that she'll freeze when she gets home, noodles, tomatoes, cans of tuna, soup stock and frozen peas. All of it shoved into her cart until it's piled high with foodstuffs, and only then does she make her way to the cash register.
Isak's on shift today- he normally is, this early in the morning, while the store is empty of almost anyone but her. He raises an eyebrow as she comes up to the counter and starts lifting her haul onto the conveyer belt, but starts scanning it almost immediately regardless.
"Hey, Ella. Big restock today?"
”I forgot to go shopping," she says, wincing exaggeratedly to cover up the internal grimace that hits her when someone uses her cover name. He laughs.
"I still don't understand how you get all your stuff up there in one trip. I know you have your wagon, but it must be heavy."
She rolls her eyes. "I'm just strong."
"Clearly!" he laughs, and scans the last can. Canned pineapple. "There you go. Total's on the screen."
El pays, but she pauses for a moment afterward as he starts bagging. "I heard that there was... a new person in town."
"Oh, yes," he says, nodding as he cinches a bag of flour tight. A ripple passes over his face, tightening, before it smoothes away. "She's.... uh..... definitely... different.”
“Not that I have any problem with that!” He adds at the look of confusion on El’s face. “Everyone free to live as they want, that's what I say. Just don't understand it myself."
Well, that provides no clarity whatsoever. El waves it aside- she has no idea what he's talking about, and no desire to learn. "No, I mean... is she a tourist? Does she have family here?"
"Oh! No, no family," he says, flushing a little in what she thinks- might be embarassment? So many years and she's still not entirely sure how to navigate social situations, the nuances that come to others easy but never to her. "But she's been hanging around a while now. Definitely not a tourist. She's a writer or something. Keeps going up to look at the falls, writing in the coffee shops. Not the first amateur author we've ever had come up here looking for inspiration."
Yes, okay, that makes sense, even if it- nibbles at her, a strange pinging in her brain. El ignores it in favor of nodding. She hefts a couple of paper bags as Isak finishes up.
She doesn't know why there's a shiver running down her spine. They have had amateur authors come by before, after all. So... things might be fine. Things might be perfectly alright.
"Sorry for my absence," she says awkwardly as she starts to walk toward the exit. She would lift up one hand to wave but she very much doesn't have any available, so she tries a full body shrug instead and regrets it, badly, when it nearly unbalances her. "I've been so busy this month, but I'm more free now so you'll see more of me, I'm sure."
"I'm not sure about that," Isak laughs, voice growing fainter as she nudges the front door open with one precarious hip. "Once snow hits you'll never want to make it down from your cabin!"
He might be right, but El hums all the way home anyways.
In the cabin she unpacks everything- flour refills, sugar poured into jars, cans stacked high. Her head aches the tiniest bit, and she has to wipe her face with a cool cloth to get the dried blood off her upper lip. It's a long trek back up here, and floating the wagon starts to take a toll near the end. The bleeding has never gone away, no matter how her skills have grown since she was nothing but a lab rat. Perhaps it never will.
But it's a good day, it's a happy day. The newcomer isn't a tourist, but isn't a military operative either. A writer. Entirely and completely harmless- here for the falls. She can understand that, herself. They're beautiful.
What matters is that she's still safe, and that means so is Kali. It means so is everyone else she loves and can no longer see. It means she hasn't blown it- it's something to celebrate. She eats a full can of pineapple with dinner just to savor the sweetness of it, that enduring morsel of her joy.
Still, she finds herself curling up tighter than normal in her bed that night, a hot brick wrapped in towels nestled next to her toes. Her arms wrap around her torso, clutch tight enough that it hurts.
Mike was going to be a writer, she thinks, and her eyes prick with tears. He was going to write books. He had notebooks upon notebooks of ideas and chapters and character concepts- he used to show them to her in the cabin. She'd put her head in his lap and he'd pet her hair as his voice got soft, and he'd tell stories about elven girls fighting against the forces of darkness. Mages and bards and healers and thieves and knights. Paladin women who never stopped trying to protect and support their friends.
Once in those last few months before the end, his hand stopped in her hair and his voice dried up. She waited for a moment for him to keep going, but he didn't. Instead he bent to kiss her forehead, and as he did he touched her hair again, smoothing it down.
His hand lingered- here the scalp, the place where she'd bruised herself during a run through with Hopper and Joyce. Here the neck, the smoothed ridge of bone behind the ear- scarred from a time when the clippers dug too deeply, back when she had been a lab rat and not a girl. Here the split ends, the places where her hair was still growing out. El held her tongue and did not make a sound. Something was happening in him- something that she did not fully understand. It felt important, whatever it was, something precious and easily shattered. The last thing she wanted was to break it.
There was the low, broken wretch of a sigh, breath that gave away the sound of longing more than anything else possibly could. It twisted her heart to hear it. Mike's lips moved- she could feel them against her scalp. There was the whisper of something that sounded like I wish...
Worry rose in her and she couldn't stop herself. "Mike?" she said softly at long last, and it was a mistake.
His hand fell away. He scrambled back. The moment- whatever it was- was broken, and there was no recovering it. She tried to lever herself up anyways, just to look at him, but he was already turning the page of the notebook, making some half-laughed excuse.
El thought- for a moment- that she saw something wet in his eyes. The beginnings of tears.
But she'd never been sure, and what could she possibly ask him? Why were you crying while touching my hair? There were a hundred reasons that he might give her, and some of them even felt plausible as she thought of them. Those were the days where it felt like the end was closing in on them, like with every subsequent crawl they got closer and closer to a future that had always been a dead end. Mike acted like he didn't feel it, but she knew that it wasn't just her.
It could so easily have been just that- the doomedness of their future- if she didn’t think about it.
"I just want to start over," he said weeks later, this time on the roof. One of the last times they ever saw each other, before she orchestrated her own false suicide in front of him. He had his shoulders hunched, and he was looking into the horizon. "You and me, and no one else."
"Not... your sisters?" El said. She could have said anything about his mother and father, about her own father, but she didn't. Instead she added, "The Party? Our friends?"
Mike's face crumpled a little, but he shook his head. "I mean. I'd miss them, it'd kill me, but... don't you ever think about just... starting over? Getting to be someone entirely new?"
El looked at him for a long moment. Part of her thought yes, yes, yes- get out of this life, get out of this town, where she couldn't be normal, where she woke screaming from nightmares more nights than not, where she thought she'd always be different. Out of this life where she couldn't go to school with the other kids, where no one else could possibly understand what it meant to be more force than human being. Sometimes she thought she could just pick up her whole life and run, run from all of it, until she wasn't Eleven anymore but just a perfectly average girl.
But the other half of her had already seen where indulging that impulse got her. Hadn't she tried that, in Lenora? She had been perfectly normal there. She hadn't had powers. She hadn't been able to hurt anyone with her mind. Jane had only ever been normal, but the other kids had known exactly what she was regardless.
She could try to be Jane, but it was an impossible wish. She would never be the girl that Terry Ives had named, the one for whom she’d stormed a government facility and lost even her mind for. She had kept a bedroom years past the point at which Jane Ives had died, or been killed, or anyways stopped existing entirely in whatever manner meant anything. And El did not want it anymore- she had been stripped of the ability to want it. The place where that desire- foolish, warm, as fluffy and insubstantial as a cloud- had lived was empty now, dried up in the California sun.
No, she wanted to be El. The girl that Hopper had seen in the snow. The kid that Nancy and Steve ruffled the hair of. Will and Jonathan's sister, Lucas and Dustin's friend, Max's best friend. The shivering girl in the blanket fort, to whom Mike Wheeler had extended a name and a future without knowing the breadth of it.
"I want it all to be over, and I want to be with you,” she said at last. The only truth she could give without reservation.
For a moment she thought she might continue, even beyond that, but then she saw that Lucas was biking up the trail to the station. She stood to wave at him. After a long moment, Mike stood and joined her too.
Even thinking about that moment makes her eyes prickle and ache.
Mike would have loved it here with her- and simply by being here he would have made it bearable. He would have dragged her to the falls and cut her hair himself in the bathroom, would have watched her work on her bike, would have picked her up and twirled her around to the sound of a mixtape blaring from the scratchy speakers. He would have picked her brain as he wrote his first novel, would have asked her for input, would have sat puppy-eyed on the bed as she made her way through it, trying not to ask what she thought but asking it nonetheless with the look on his face, begging her to say something, trying not to smile.
She misses him. She misses him so much it aches, but that's not new, and if she falls asleep with tears on her cheeks then that's old news too.
In the morning, after breakfast and chores, she finds herself drawn to her bike.
Her baby is a beautiful thing- shiny, hand built. It was pieced together from a multitude of different parts, and she treasures it. Soon she's going to add a sidecar- for the groceries- but as it is the parts lie in a jumbled mess inside a shelf in her closet, to be worked on later.
(If El had been able to live that happy, idyllic life she’d once dreamed of, the kind of life where she would never have to worry about the government or the military again, she would have been a mechanic. Maybe she will be someday here, too, if she ever feels safe enough to truly become part of this town. And if the idea someday stops feeling like a betrayal.)
Today, she finds herself sliding onto the back without thinking about it, without even knowing where she's going. It's still dark out- sunlight is scarcer and scarcer now. She has to flick on her headlight just to be able to make her way down the trail.
After a leisurely drive she finds herself stopping near the falls. There's a strange directional twitching in her chest and she follows it, turning her light off and leaving her bike at the end of the trail. From there she follows through the brush and the forest onto the open mountain plain, drifting over to the rugged side of the cliffs. From this side of the falls, she can see the water pouring in huge cascades, foaming in white peaks as it clashes against the rocks.
This side is only accessible by hike. The other is for the tour guides and their crowds of new people- a paved parking lot not too far from the edge of the cliff. There are hardly any groups this early, so she lets herself enjoy the climb up to the edge, free of any and all worry that she's being watched.
El lets herself take a moment to enjoy it- the wind in her curls, the salt spray that only scents the air this high up. It is so peaceful here, with nothing to disturb her- she almost feels like she could drop into the Upside Down right here, right now, by just laying down.
Instead she squints after a long moment, and looks across the falls to the tourist side. The lonely expanse of grass, the guard rail- and beyond it, the touch of gravel on the horizon. A place completely empty.
Except when she raises her eyes to the horizon, it’s not empty at all.
Faint, but there. A figure stands near the railing on the far side, far enough away that El can’t make out any distinguishing features. Maybe dark hair, maybe a slim frame, maybe some height. Maybe a girl. Nothing more than that.
More important is the way her heart opens, her chest tugs. She nearly falls off the waterfall with the force of it, like a fishing line caught on the inside of her ribs and pulled taut. It's dizzy, it's wonderful, it's entirely exhilarating and it hurts. Everything goes awkward and far away, dazzling sets of bright lights behind her eyes.
El isn't sure how she gets back up on her feet, how she pulls herself away from the ledge. She knows only that she blinks, and somehow she is ten feet from the cliff and still backing up, and with each step backward it hurts even more. Little fireworks pop and crackle in the corner of her vision, swelling and bursting like blood vessels.
What's happening to her? What's going on?
She has to stumble back to her motorcycle. It hurts with every step, every movement towards it, like a tether hooking harder into bone with each foot in front of the other. Her vision is blurry with tears- she can barely see, the whole world swaying around her. She's not sure if it's emotion or the physical feel of it, the reminder echoing through her body.
But she gets on the bike anyways, and if she has to let a sob as she kickstarts it and pulls away, back onto the trail, then no one can hear her.
It wasn't the dampener, she thinks, pacing in her own room an hour later in strident steps. Because it got worse when she started moving away from the ledge, and the dampener’s effect was concentrated at its center.
Unless it was in the woods- but there was no one who accosted her as she broke her way through the underbrush and to her bike. That was the moment where they could have gotten her, if it truly was the dampener, the kryptonite. And the only group with the foresight and ability to use it would have been the military, American or otherwise. She knows what they still want from her.
But it wasn’t. No- she could never forget what the dampeners felt like, the way the noise closed around a muscle in her brain and shut it off, like a wriggling limb made to still. Not that exhausted amputation, what happened in the summer of ‘85- no, it was something more brutal in its subjugation.
This was not like that. It was a pulling like nothing she’d ever felt before- comparable only to the longing of her youth, when she’d still been so young her head had been a fuzzy mess of nascent curls. She'd felt that sort of untameable pull then, the knotted tugging behind her ribcage, and it had brought her so many places- Hawkins Middle School, her mother's house, the building where she'd pressed her wrist to Kali's and seen the way the ink had matched.
Something is wrong. Something has gone terribly wrong, probably, but the inside of her chest aches pleasantly, a queer warmth like the aftermath of too much exercise. The muscles burn enough it feels like remembering, feeling, KNOWING life- that simple pleasure of lungs inflating, deflating, air so crisp it burns.
She should call Kali again. Kali, whose voice she longs for, Kali, who is still her sister, always, Kali the brightest thing in the darkest place that El can go. Kali who speaks sense, always,
Kali, who is happy, and no longer entirely alone.
El looks at the tub, looks at the half full bag of salt, looks at the dripping faucet. She turns it off, and starts to make herself lunch.
A week of complete and utter normalcy after that.
Which is good. It takes at least that long for El to relax, to let her haunches down. She's been jumpy before, a father's paranoia instilled in her by months of waiting at windows, hiding below the panes of glass. Even in California, assured that it was all over, she woke up early in the morning gasping out no, no, no. The nightmares she couldn't shake- she saw Papa's face in the warped woodgrain of her closet door, gore in school dance decorations, had flashbacks at the doctor's office as Joyce tried to reassure her it would be alright.
This has not changed. The nightmares never left and she is sure, now, that they never will. The only change has ever been the substance of them. It used to be the closet, but walking out into the world- as wide and beautiful as it is- only broadened her nightmares to match. Red on kitchen tile, hurting animals in rooms turned sickly green by their lighting, Mike's tear-streaked face. The flashing lights of the mall. That dissolving tether inside her, like a rope turned rotten under so much wet mishandling, the power she'd been bled dry for flaking and falling apart.
After Henry- after Max- she dreamed of attics and bloody eyes, Henry's pounding words and the splattered hallways, except this time the bodies were her friends, her family, skinny and shrunken in their red-soaked hospital gowns. She dreamed of a vast and endless desert marked by mounds of rock and sand, a place no human had ever touched and a place that no human could ever survive in without being changed, forever.
And it's not as though she doesn't dream of those still, but these days she finds herself plagued by the last days she spent in Hawkins. Guns, bombs, the tick tick tick of a metronome. The hot dread of feeling Kali's blood beneath her palm, trying to knit together skin with her mind the way she'd only done once before, with Max's stopped heart. Pregnant women with her mother's face, left to die in a long, long line of blood. She had not saved them. The screaming noise of the kryptonite, wailing as it crushed part of her insides. Running through the tunnels, at the end of everything, hoping against hope that illusion would hold.
It is a wonder she gets as much sleep as she does.
But the normalcy helps. Every moment of confused anxiety, of looking over her shoulder for something she doesn't even recognize- it dims over time, and by the end of the week El feels herself moving through the world without pain, without worry. It's going to be okay, she tells herself, and aches a little for it, but she makes it down into the village on Saturday evening anyways.
Maybe she just needs to be around people, she thinks. Needs to be reminded that the people here are not her enemy. That she is safe.
The streets are empty when she arrives in town, but that's not a surprise when it's this dark. El kills the engine of her bike and drifts over to the town's one singular bar, which is humming with noise. Inside, she slides up to the bar and waits till Ana- the bartender- spots her.
"Ella, honey!" she cries, swooping over when there's a lull in the drink requests. "I haven't seen you here in ages! What do you want from me, what can I get you?"
"Just a Shirley, please," El tells her, smiling back a little helplessly in the face of Ana's cheerfulness.
"It blows my mind that whenever you stop in here you never get anything alcoholic," Ana tells her, even as she reaches for the lemon-lime soda and scoops a shaker of ice. "Not that I mind it, honey, so long as you keep tipping. I guess I wouldn't be getting anything too strong either if I was biking all the way back up that trail this late."
"Mmm," she hums noncommittally, digging in her pocket for her wallet. "What's... all the party about?"
"Oh, Yvonne is turning twenty," Ana tells her, nodding to one of the corners of the bar. When El turns to look she can see the girl in question with a cluster of a few friends, laughing loudly, raising glasses. "And you know how anyone takes any excuse to celebrate this late in the year."
El nods- she does understand, after all, that need to find something joyful and hold onto it when there's no sunlight to rely on any longer. How many times did she and Mike take any excuse to see each other, make a day special, in those months under quarantine?
"Here's your drink, hon," Ana says as she pushes a tall glass into El's hand. "By the way, you hear about the new kid on the block?"
"Yes, Isak mentioned her when I last came into town," El tells her, scanning the room.
Is the girl here tonight? She probably is. No one could miss the way that this town- normally sleepy and quiet- has lit up at the opportunity to celebrate even something as small as a resident's birthday. Light spills out, golden and warm, from inside the bar and into the street, and with it the sound of laughter, liquor, voices raised in joy. The darkness of night seems to inch back a little further here, even as it encroaches with every passing day in the turning of fall to winter.
"New kid's a weird one," Ana says, pulling El's attention away from the throngs of people and back to her. "Asks a lot of strange questions. And obviously there's the-" she gestures up and down her front in a movement that El can't parse.
Something cold gathers at the base of her spine, numbing in her lungs. When she blinks she can see bright lights flashing and popping, fireworks she has to shake off. "Strange questions?" she repeats.
"You know, writer stuff mostly. Geography of the area, about the forests, about the waterfalls, all that. If there are any ghost stories 'round here, old myths, any weird animals in the forest."
El's shoulders relax, a low shudder of tension unknotting. "That's not that strange," she says, a little doubtfully. Other writers have come through before, inspired by the beauty of the falls and the isolation of this town. They ask questions like that too- pulling at the fabric of this place for scraps of truth to take into themselves and their work, in whatever small ways they can. "I think writers... are just like that."
"Yeah, but..." Ana flounders for a moment, cheeks flushing. "Well, maybe those questions are normal, but questions about tattoos aren't!"
Every muscle in El's body goes rigid. It's a miracle she doesn't shatter the glass in her hand, let alone accidentally explode a light fixture with the force of her own mind. The taste of the Shirley temple sours in her mouth, the fuzz of carbonation turned painful by the way it feels like her tongue has swollen up, stoppered her voice. Tattoos.
It takes her a moment to work her jaw, croak out, "What kind of questions?"
Ana's grin comes back in full force. "Weird questions, honestly. Like if I knew anyone here who had numbers tattooed on their arm?"
El's heart- stops. For a bare moment she swears it's true, as literal as possible- an organ stilled in her chest, frozen. The pump of her blood halted by the cloak of dread that falls over her, that precursor to terror. They've found me.
And then it starts again, rabbit-fast, a wild beat that thuds in her wrists, her neck, the underside of her jaw. Every part of her thrums double-time with a sick, feverish cast, like an allergic reaction or the beginnings of nausea. She wants to throw up. The floor tilts, dangerously- it is only sheer instinct that has her grabbing the wooden counter to keep her from spilling in a heap of limbs to the floor.
"Numbers," she repeats, faintly.
Ana says something. She must. It swims in one ear and out the other, underwater noise corrupted by the repeated mantra of they found you they found you they found you they found you they found youtheyfuckingFOUNDYOU that sounds so much like Hopper's voice, furious that she's been peeking out the window again. So much time here- this place that she loves, really, for the way it's welcomed her, the way it's drawn her in and never asked questions. It could never have been Hawkins, but Hawkins wouldn't have been home without the Party either, without Hopper, without Mike.
But it will hurt, she thinks anyway, slightly hysterical, to abandon it.
"-and say, are you alright?" Ana is looking at her now, brow furrowed with real concern, and El shakes her head. She must look pale- her hands are trembling enough that she nearly knocks over her drink.
"I don't feel well," she ekes out, and shoves her hand in her pocket to slap a wad of bills on the counter. Maybe more than she should. It doesn't matter. "I think I have to go."
Ana calls her name. Or doesn't. El can't tell. Anything could happen and she wouldn't hear, feel, see it: she is blind and deaf, the only sensation left in her relegated to the tremble of her hands and the thrumming of her pulse. It's all a blur, all an empty shudder of noise as she makes her way from the bar, through the tables of happy, smiling people, out into the chill of the night-time breeze.
The door slams shut behind her with a bang as she shoulders her way out. Her feet crunch on the sidewalk, snow footprints tracked to her motorcycle. Above her, the first snow of fall is tumbling down in perfect, storybook flakes.
Behind her there is the sound of the door opening and shutting again, quieter this time. But she is starting her motorcycle by then, thighs quivering against the sleek metal sides. The engine turns over once, twice, a rumble of noise. It drowns out any possibility of her hearing the door, or the footsteps crunching their way in the snow to her- moving faster, and faster.
Not fast enough. She roars out of the parking lot without hearing any of it- not the footsteps slowing, nor the fumbling of keys as someone stops, and then decides for their car.
On her way to the cabin she flickers the head lamp on. Every moment in the dark she can see figures in the trees, stalking in flickers that make her gasp and swerve down the hiking path. More than once she nearly veers off the road entirely, flinching at ghosts. But when she turns the headlamp on, cutting a beam of light through the woods, it only takes a few minutes of driving before the fear that they can see her now begins to build to a fever pitch. And then she has to turn it off again.
A vicious cycle. Small mercy that the drive is not so long. By the time she brakes in front of the cabin, almost forgetting to put down her bike stand, she's gone from lights on to lights off at least three times.
Once her engine is off, the world is quiet- silent except for the general hum of animalia, mostly the birds in the surrounding trees. In summer there would be the buzz of bugs, but it is cold enough now that the only noises are those creatures hardy enough to withstand the chill. For a moment El pauses, half off the bike and half on, straining her ears for the sounds of-
Of what? Feet crunching in the powder of snow, the shifting of plastic or cloth, a snapped twig? As hard as she tries she can hear none of the above. Her heart calms- not entirely, but enough that she makes it up to the front door and inside with her breathing coming clear and steady.
El has to take a moment, in the doorway, to collect herself. To scan the room that she has called home for the last few long and lonely years and commit it to memory. Once upon a time she did this in a different cabin, for similar reasons- she knew she would never see it again.
She will never see this cabin again either. Not its tub, not its bed piled high with quilting, not its makeshift shelves full of various dried herbs. Her heart pangs even as it dangles in her throat.
There's no time for delaying, though, so she forces herself to start for the end of the room, where the loose panel comes up with a jerk of telekinesis and reveals the hidden compartment beneath. She kneels and pulls out the duffel bag first.
It's already packed, for the most part. Batteries, clothes, flashlight, portable radio- hand crank, because the batteries need to be saved. A first aid kit. A sleeping bag, rolled up into a tiny cylinder, shoved in a side pocket. Not for the first time in the past few weeks she curses the fact that she hadn't finished the sidecar. This would be so much easier if she had more room- to shove a tarp, rope, the tent bag. As it is, she finds herself throwing things in a pile.
Was it this easy the first time? Was it this simple? She doesn't think so. Back then there was no desperation, just a sort of resigned determination. It had left her empty to the very pit of her soul but had driven her forward nonetheless. And she'd had the memory of Mike to hold onto- the taste of his mouth, the kitchen scent of his hair, the warmth of his body even though they hadn't truly been touching.
Clothes in the bag. Shirts, flannels, jeans, her work boots. Cash, bundles of it, unmarked. Have they found the accounts? Better to bring the credit cards with her just in case. She's muttering to herself, moving across the room in wide arcs, when she finds herself stopping at her bedside table.
There's a lump in her throat as she picks up the triphoto frame and unfolds it. Mike's face stares back at her, smiling gently. So many months spent not even allowing herself to think of looking in on him, or anyone else, and for what?
For the loneliness of an empty cabin at the center of the woods, and it didn't even matter in the end.
Her eyes prickle. She can't afford to cry, to let her vision be blurred, so she swipes her hand across her face. But she cannot turn away from the photo, from her fingers splayed across his face, that smile that lights up the room, sends old nerves to buzzing.
Stupid. She does not hear the sound of snow crunching outside until it's too late to run, or to turn the light off, or even do much hiding. No- she hears the creaking of the porch under the weight of booted feet, and her heart turns to ice.
No time. No chance. El throws herself to the ground and crouches behind the dresser, tucked away in the corner of the cabin. Across the room, the door bangs open.
A pair of shoes scuffle on the welcome mat- the girl's, no doubt. El's breath comes rattling in her chest as she scrunches herself down as far as possible. There is no rumbling engine outside, which is- something at least. Is this just a scout? An errant soldier, roaming foreign countries looking for an experiment long thought dead?
Whoever she is, she stops in the middle of the room. From this angle El can see a little bit of her- the side of her shoulder, the curve of her neck. Taller than most women, in a sweater vest and jeans. If not for the things El knows, she might take her for an ordinary woman, walking the streets of her makeshift town, and think nothing of her.
A moment of silence. The woman's shoulders quiver and then shake, a display of emotion that strikes El to her chest as being distinctly off. Then she says- quiet, like she expects no answer- "El?"
Every muscle in El's body locks up and then relaxes, completely, in one moment of pure confused joy. She knows that voice. She hasn't heard it in years.
"Mike?"
The woman turns. And it is that face that stares back at her, the same one that haunts her dreams and nightmares both, the one that smiles from her bedside table and who she last saw at the very end of the Upside Down. Changed, certainly- a softer face, rounded by fat and with more lines than she last saw it, and hair longer than El's ever seen it.
But it is Mike's face.
She scrambles to her feet, moves toward him in halting steps. Mike is frozen in the middle of the room, eyes fixed on her- El throws herself fully into him, grabs onto the lapel of his sweater vest and doesn't let go.
There's a moment where Mike doesn't move, just stands there as El holds on. Their height difference means that El can tilt her head and press her ear against Mike's chest and feel the drumbeat of his heart, going fast fast fast as she clutches him, fingers digging into his back.
And then a pair of arms come up around her, and Mike says into her ear, "Are you real?"
She laughs, slightly hysterical. "Are you?"
It hurts to pull away for even a few seconds, to detach herself from the warmth of the arms around her even if just to look at him, drink him in. But seeing Mike's face- wet brown eyes, high cheekbones and the curls that fall in disarray about his head, the disbelieving curve of his mouth- it's everything she could have wanted and more.
Eyes search her face. Whatever Mike sees there it must come as some reassurance, because he says, "Yes, yes, it's me,"and even as he says it he starts to cry.
Eventually they move to the bed, a pile of flesh and cold clothing and warmer quilts. El's fingers are numb with holding onto Mike, and she has to flex her fingers slowly to unattach herself in gradual, minute measures. Even on the bed, she has to keep a hand on Mike's knee, at least, just to reassure herself she's not imagining anything.
In the void, there is no touching, El reminds herself. The face pressed into El's curls is real. The hand in her own is real.
She hasn't asked any questions yet. But even without doing such a thing, she can feel for the way the pieces begin to slot themselves in together now. The strange girl in the village, whose face she had never seen. The questions about the tattoo, the comments from Isak and Ana, the tugging in her chest- of course, she thinks. This is not the first time she has been untethered and lonely, and felt whatever power that Henry's blood gave her stretch far out and away to what she loves.
"I should tell you to leave," she says at last, but even to her own ears it sounds weak and unconvincing. And pointless. Mike knows she's alive now, and she can't exactly make him unknow it. Running wouldn't make him any safer.
His hands tighten around her own. "Don't," he says, but she's already shaking her head.
"I won't. You ... already know I'm alive. There wouldn't be a point."
The breath whooshes out of him in a sigh, but she continues. "Mike, what's- what's happened?" She needs to know everything, but she doesn't even know where to start. "How did you know? When?"
"It was- when we were in the void," Mike says, strangely shy. When she looks up at him his face is flushed and he's avoiding her gaze. "You couldn't have pulled me in, you couldn't have used your powers like that, if you were there with us. If you were where we saw you. The sirens, the kryptonite. It took me longer than it should have," he says in a broken rush, the words spilling out from his mouth like offerings. "I'm so sorry. I should have known, I should have figured it out sooner. It wasn't until graduation, with the speakers... but I swear, I never gave up on you. I couldn't."
"I didn't plan for you to figure it out. At all." El tells him gently, her heart fit to burst. Her stubborn, brilliant Mike. Of course he would know. Of course he would take all the pieces she'd left for him without knowing she was doing it, and divine the truth from them. "I just... couldn't leave without saying goodbye."
Mike looks at her for a long, silent moment. "Did you... there were times I thought, maybe, you were watching me. Were you?"
"No," she admits. "At first... but it only seemed to hurt you. You are the only one besides Kali who could- who felt me. In the void. And I didn't want to hurt you by making you feel me there when I knew I couldn't... come back."
And it had hurt her, too, to drag herself over the coals of what she couldn't have, a slow and terrible torture that she'd nonetheless put herself through. She doesn't tell him that. The guilt shading his face is bad enough as it is.
Mike doesn't say anything, but he squeezes her hand. Hard, but not enough it hurts. There's a strange look on his face, half-confused, and he opens his mouth and then closes it.
"So you looked for me," El prompts, as gently as she can, and whatever state of mind he's trapped himself in, her words snap him out of it.
"Any way I could," he says, a little rueful. "Mom said I had to go to college, and Nancy agreed. Which was so stupid, because she already dropped out by the time I graduated high school, so I don't get why she wanted me to go- but whatever, I guess it was useful anyways. Some of those reference libraries I could have stayed in for days at a time. I- learned a lot. About experiments- things the government was doing, had done. If it was safe for you to come back. What was the point of looking for you if I didn’t know what kind of danger you were in? I tried to learn more about your powers. About the theory behind them.” He chews his lip, and then says, very fast, "And also, about- myself."
El opens her mouth to say- what? To say anything, because she still knows him, can read the tension in his shoulders and the hesitation in his voice. There's something wrong.
But he is already talking again, saying, "Once I graduated I had to come find you. I went to Niagara and Ban-Gioc but I could tell the minute I got off the plane, both times, that it wasn't right. You weren't there. I stayed a week in Canada, a month in China and Vietnam, and then I came here."
"But you stayed," El says, and thinks back to the figure of a girl on the far side of the waterfalls, of the tug in her chest, of the way she'd stayed holed up in her cabin and when she'd emerged the new face had not yet left. "You stayed here for longer."
Mike looks at her as if it's all simple, as if it doesn't need explaining at all. "You were here. I could feel it."
Her heart flutters. Did Mike feel it too? Did he look at the far side of the waterfall and see some hazy-edged figure on the far shore, and know it was her? El reaches up and puts a hand on his cheek, cups the curve of bone and soft skin. "I felt you too. I didn't know."
He sniffs, wet-eyed, and she has to resist the urge to kiss him, to wipe the sadness from his face. But instead he says, "you don't..."
She waits a moment, for him to finish his sentence. Tilts her head when he looks away. "Mike. What's wrong?"
"You have to have more specific questions than that," he says, tilting his gaze away to look at the wall. "About everything. About-"
An aimless gesture down at himself that El can't, doesn't parse. "The others?" she says, quizzical. "I thought you would tell me, if there was anything wrong." Fear strikes her then, as hot and as paralyzing as lightning. When she’d stopped looking in, Max had still been confined to a wheelchair, had still been in recovery. “They are okay, right?”
“What? Oh, yes,” Mike says, startled. “Everyone’s okay. Max has to use a cane now, but everyone's still alive. Still happy. They all miss you," he adds. “If you want- we can call them.”
“Yes. Later,” Eleven tells him. The thought of hearing Max's voice, Lucas and Will and Dustin's, of hearing Hopper's words gruff against the speaker of the phone- it's almost too much to bear. She knows as sure as she knows anything that if Mike pulled out the bulk of a cell phone right now and by some miracle of signal managed to call one of them, whatever is left of her would pour out in tears. It will happen eventually, she knows, but- later.
Instead El says, "I'm just glad you're here," and it turns out that staving off the tears of hearing everyone else means very little, because it all comes out as one great wet sob.
Mike holds her as she cries for a long moment, as the tears run down her face until they dry up entirely. It feels like the undamming of a river, as powerful and as clean as the flow of the waterfalls. Her eyes hurt- her heart hurts. A healing type of ache, a tired burn. So many years alone. With every moment, with every touch of Mike's hands on her back, her hip, her shoulder, she can feel the weight of them slip away from underneath her.
After her eyes dry, when she can't cry anymore, she turns to Mike, crawls into his lap. She's got snot all up and down his sleeve, for which she whispers an apology and he waves away. His eyes are wet too, and she finds herself with her head on his shoulder, hands in his hair.
He's so changed, she thinks, looking up at him. Face softer, rounder, more like the women El has met in the course of her life than any of the men. His hair reaches past his shoulders, soft and smelling slightly of oranges. It's an excellent disguise, and Mike looks- beautiful. More happy- despite the wetness in his eyes- than she could ever have wanted, an ambient aura that suffuses the air between them. Perfectly at peace with his own self, in a way that he wasn't as a teenager.
It feels strange to think that, as if she's betraying him somehow. Raw and unnerving, and she shies from it enough that she sniffles, and says- as if she can put distance between herself and the thought by saying it out loud- "I like your disguise. As a woman."
The arms around her go rigid, as hard as steel. Mike lets out a little noise, half wounded half resigned, and something in El's brain sits up and says something is very very wrong.
"Mike?"
He turns away from her, but she can see the wet glittering in his eyes. "Don't-"
"Mike."
"It's not a disguise," he says in one burst of noise, and covers his face with his hands. Behind it, the muffled sound of a drawn out cry, stumbling through the teeth. El's heart drops into her feet. Into the floorboards, into the center of the Earth.
The woman standing across the waterfall. The moment in her bedroom years ago now, hands in her hair. Stories about paladin girls, and Mike preferring to be a GM than a player, and the way Mike had wondered if she'd been looking, watching- because she hadn't asked any questions about how different he looked now. She'd said, once, that she needed more girl friends, and Mike's face had twitched like it had hurt. It hadn't made sense, then, but-
Mike saying, "don't you ever think about starting over? Getting to be somebody new?" on the rooftop, with a look that she can recognize now with the benefit of hindsight as desperation.
"Mike," she says, a third time, somewhat uselessly. "Did you want to be-"
She doesn't even have to say anything else before Mike nods, a jerk of movement that takes her whole body. El can feel her own face crumple in on itself, feel the moment take hold of her as Mike shivers and they fold into each other, bodies at rest, bodies that have changed so much.
Mike, a girl. It was Mike who had helped make her a girl too, as opposed to a lab experiment- Mike who had thought of her as a human being, who had given her a name. In the window seat she brushed makeup, pink brushes and lipgloss gliding over El's face. Those hands slid a wig over her bare scalp and zipped up her dress in the back, and unfiltered longing splayed across her face in a way that a newly human El could never had deciphered. It was Mike who had offered a hand up and a way into being human- into a girl herself. Knowing her had opened up the world into a place where El could make the choice to be more than the instrument of a monster.
It hurts, that El was not there to see it- Mike's own metamorphosis, a transformation El had only been vaguely aware of the possibility of. Derogatory comments made in Hawkins- news stories here, with an air of half disgusted fascination. She had not understood it. In Lenora, she asked about it once, with Jonathan.
"Sometimes people want to switch," he said, hands shoved in his pockets. He didn't meet her gaze. The memory blurs now in recollection, between interpretation and illumination. "They call 'em transsexuals. People are cruel about it, a lot of the time. You shouldn't be."
It seemed like a distant, unimportant quirk of the world, then. An exception to something she hadn't entirely understood. She never asked Mike about it. She hadn't known that she could, or rather that she should. What regret fills her now that she didn't, holding Mike in her arms- it can't quite dampen joy, but it comes the closest anything can.
"I should have looked," El says, mouth brushed up against Mike's ear, and the shudder that runs through her body is like a lightning bolt, like a strung wire attached to a million volts. "I should have been there. When you were changing. Becoming a girl."
A pause- is it too much? No, she decides, it's not.
"You're beautiful."
She'll say it over and over again. She knows she will, just because of the way it gives her the shudder again, like fabric put to work on a clothesline. "You know," Mike mumbles, a weeping laugh pressed into her skin, "I always wondered if you'd- ever say that to me. If you'd- like me like this."
"I do," El says. One leg around Mike's waist, and she gently- gently!- rolls the two of them over on the bed, till they're no longer sitting upright but two prone bodies pressed together. "I do. You look happier."
"That isn't all that matters, to everyone," Mike says, half plaintive, as if arguing for El to treat her worse. It's a useless argument, though, and El shakes her head.
"I'm not everyone," she says. Once she's said it, it seems a pitiful rejoinder- not sufficient for all that had welled up, continues welling up inside her. "You're happy. It's you."
It was not all she felt- how could it be? The feeling of complete and total euphoria, of every worry she hadn't known was a worry slotting back into place. Looking at Mike, it seems so obvious- the apple flush of her cheeks, the way her face twitches toward a smile instead of a frown, an invisible burden lifted from those shoulders. How could it not be obvious how happy she is? How good it is, to see Mike unshackled? But she finds herself tongue-tied, flustered, shaking her head.
"It's you," she says again, and laughs, and bends her head to Mike's to press a kiss- lingering, gentle- to the corner of her mouth, catching the edge of her cupid's bow and her dimple. So many things that they will have to say to each other- all the stories of the past years run through with both hands. The others, how they're doing. Kali so many leagues away, who will want to know everything Mike does about the state of America's experiments, and if it is safe or not. Why El left, and where they go from here. If Mike still wants her, the way El wants her, wanted her when she was walking into the wide open world and calling herself part of it for the first time.
(Somehow, she thinks, buoyed by so much euphoria that hope comes to her like breathing, she thinks she knows the answer to that already.)
So many things to say to one another. But for the first time, they have time- so much of it. The rest of forever. So El says only, "I'm so happy," tremulous, and smiles so wide it feels it might break her face.
Mike- beautiful, radiant, more herself than she's ever been- smiles back.