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1985
Their first Valentine’s Day is the exchange of greeting cards and cheap gifts. Keepsakes, Mike calls them. Small tokens of appreciation. Things to remember people and moments by.
El handmakes him a valentine out of colored paper and glitter, and Mike gives her three in return. Store-bought, all red hearts and cute grizzlies. One of them plays a tune when you open it and El almost jumped back in surprise when she heard it.
He pulls a stuffed teddy bear and a smaller bunny from his backpack later in the evening too—says the extra cards and plushie are to make up for the year they missed. She sets them on her dresser with a smile and kisses him in thanks, the grin still etched across her face when they part.
“It’s no problem,” Mike tells her, gesturing dismissively. “I just, erm- I wanted to get you something, you know, for being such a cool girlfriend.”
Before she can offer a compliment back, pressing her palm to his cheek to share warmth, he’s grabbing her hand to thread his fingers through hers.
“I know that sounds lame, but- I mean, you’re awesome, El, and I like you… a lot.”
“I like you a lot, too, Mike,” she says, lips pursing in thought. “Isn’t that why we’re… boyfriend-girlfriend?”
“No, yeah, totally!” He beams, wide-eyed. “Yeah, I just, I dunno, I thought maybe you needed a reminder or something.”
Eleven shuffles closer, sock-clad feet dragging along the floorboards, and gives a quick glance over his shoulder where Hopper has turned the TV on in the living room. He has his back turned to the teens, a beer in one hand and the remote in the other. A rerun of Miami Vice is playing and the volume is slowly going up.
She nudges the door an inch closer to shut with a single tip of her head and pushes up on her tiptoes to kiss him again, longer this time.
El holds his gaze and asks, “did you bring it?”
Mike nods, color rising to his cheeks. He breaks from her embrace and makes for his backpack to retrieve the latest cassette while El gets comfortable on the bed. She kneels, hands folded in her lap, and twiddles her thumbs as he fumbles with her stereo.
The silence is soon filled by The Cars and the creak of mattress springs under their combined weight. When Hopper knocks ten minutes later they separate just enough to look collected.
The man’s not an idiot though, and when he asks El over dinner if she enjoyed her first Valentine’s Day, she blushes rose pink and asks him if Mike can come over next year too.
He says, “we’ll see,” and that’s the end of it.
1990
It’s a new decade and Valentine’s night is spent parked up by the edge of Lover’s Lake.
They went out for burgers and shakes first. — A small diner freshly opened up on Mulberry where Dustin works weekends. He gives El free refills whenever the boss isn’t looking but Mike is pretty sure he overcharges him anyway.
Her third banana milkshake is sat between them on the hood of the car—one of the straws flat where Mike has nibbled the end—along with a foil swan of leftover French fries that she’d quickly given up on unwrapping.
He grabbed a packet of Sweethearts from the glove box shortly after pulling up and she’s been munching on those ever since.
“Be mine,” El throws her boyfriend a sideways glance, popping the candy on her tongue with a waggle of her brows.
“Always.” Mike smiles, faintly. He’s stretched out beside her; leaning back on his elbows, the soles of his shoes scraping the gravel in front of the bumper. “Give me one.”
El rolls her eyes and digs into the small box for another heart, fishing out a green one to press it to his mouth. The sugar barely hits his tongue before she’s leaning down to steal a kiss, savoring the taste and the ghost of his breath along her lips.
When he gives her a dubious look, she shrugs and pulls at the sleeve of the jacket thrown over her shoulders. “It said ‘kiss me’.”
“Sure it did, liar.” Mike snags the boxes, tipping the remaining candies into his hand. Two yellow and one red. He picks up the one that reads ‘love bug’ with a snort. “New nickname?”
“No!” the brunette shudders. She pinches the red one with an appreciative hum and suggests, “marry me.”
“Yeah,” falls from his lips before he can catch it and El practically yelps in surprise. “I mean, you know, one day. Not- not right now.” Mike sits up until they’re at eye level, a hand working its way through his hair, tugging at the strands. “I kinda figured I’d ask you anyway, so…”
El nods, slowly. She tentatively bites into the sweet, almost as if she’s afraid something is going to come out of it. The air has shifted and suddenly she feels… not uncomfortable, but strange. “That sounds… nice.”
It’s not the first word he would’ve used to describe the prospect of marrying her, but Mike supposes they could do worse. Unless– “Do you… do you not wanna marry me?”
“No.” No, that’s not right. El catches herself, squeezing her eyes shut in a panic, “I mean, yes. I- I don’t know.” She shakes her head, a loose curl falling from her braid, and rests her hand on his thigh. “I haven’t thought about it. A lot.”
“Oh,” Mike swallows a sigh. He could swear his heart has dislodged itself from his ribcage and is now sitting in his throat—the thump in sync with the flow of a nearby stream, his ears ringing from the beat. “That’s okay.”
El worries at her bottom lip for a moment, watching as dejection washes over him, Mike masking his disappointment with a half-smile. She scoots closer, pushing the drink and swan aside so she’s flush against his hip. “Mike?” He doesn’t meet her eye but his brows dip and it’s a sign he’s listening. “I’m sorry.”
“No, hey, no, don’t be sorry. You didn’t- you did nothing wrong. I was just overthinking again, you know, like… jumping to conclusions.” He sighs, “of course, you haven’t thought about it. You still have school to finish and-”
“And I want to live with you,” she supplies, using the hand on his thigh as leverage to lean over and kiss his cheek. “First. For real.”
He pulls her closer by the arm, pressing his lips to her wrist with a huff. “You just want an excuse to be alone. Which I’m totally on board with, by the way. Can’t get out of this shithole fast enough.”
El cards her fingers through his hair when he lets go, chasing contact. “It’s not that bad anymore. It is… peaceful now.”
“Yeah, but… I dunno, I guess it’d just be nice to live somewhere that’s not, like, plagued with bad memories and stuff. We can make new ones.”
There’s a flash of light in his eyes then, and Mike holds up a hand to block the blinding glare. “Jesus!”
“You twerps start making new memories out here, I’m calling your parents.” Steve rounds the station wagon; one hand on his belt, and the other adjusting the settings on his light. He swings it back and forth between the teens with a raised brow. “You got that?”
El turns, pressing her face to Mike’s t-shirt with a shriek. Her cheeks burn hot, and she’s convinced they’re going to burn a hole through cotton. Her boyfriend cradles the back of her head in his hand. “Dude, we’re practically adults.”
“Not in my book, Wheeler. I don’t give a shit if you’re nineteen or twenty-nine—no funny business in public.” Steve snaps his fingers, then taps his watch with the butt of his flashlight. “Time for home.”
Mike scowls, “you go home.”
“I’m on patrol, asshat.” The deputy directs the light right at him.
“How long how you been a deputy now? What, like, a week or something?”
“Come on, man. I’m just doing my job.” He clicks off the light and pockets it. “You don’t want Hopper on your ass any more than I do.”
“He knows we are here,” El pipes up, fisting the lapels of her borrowed jacket. She shoots the older man a blank look, peeking one eye open. “It’s Valentine’s.”
The deputy nods, “yeah, I know that, Supergirl. So how about you be cooperative and cut me a little slack so I can make it to my date on time?”
“Holy shit, dude, you’re ruining our date!” Mike whines.
Steve eyes the two for a moment before his gaze lands on the foil swan. “What’d you have?”
Mike grabs the wrap and tosses it to him, the head flattening between Steve’s palms. He raises a brow, waiting for his sister’s ex to take the hint. “Enjoy.”
Two minutes later, Steve is getting back into his patrol car with cold fries and the remaining piece of candy on his tongue. — It said ‘bite me’ and Mike threw it at him with a wicked look.
Almost as soon as he’s pulled off the dirt track, heavy rain hits the area and they crawl into the back seat. It’s eleven twenty-seven and Valentine’s Day isn’t over. The melted milkshake is placed in the cupholder, some Vapors track playing to itself on the radio as they make out, and that’s the end of it.
1995
Valentine’s Day in their early twenties is movie marathons and waffles for breakfast, lunch, and dinner. Or at least that’s the plan.
They got married back in November and Karen’s wedding gift of an overpriced waffle maker has yet to be put to use. The box said it was multi-function and El found the heart-shaped plates adorable, so Mike braved the seven o’clock wind to venture out to the corner store for eggs and flour — plus three boxes of Eggos for good measure.
“You can’t eat the batter, Mike!”
“Says who?”
The black-haired man licks the spoon, eyebrows shooting up as the thick mixture hits his tongue. “Hmm.” He shakes his head to rid himself of the aftertaste and tosses the utensil across the counter. It’s a little too– “El, how much sugar did you put in there?”
El doesn’t answer, but the sheepish look on her face tells him everything he needs to know. She reaches for the recipe book, wanting to cover her tracks, but he snatches it from her hands before she can get a firm grasp and holds it out of reach above his head.
Mike squints, eyeing the list of ingredients. “It says three,” he deadpans.
“Yes, but if we add six they will be sweeter,” his wife says as if it’s simple math. She dips her pinkie finger into the mixing bowl and presses it to her lips. “Not bad.”
“Not bad?!” he gawks, lowering the book back down to her level in disbelief. He grabs the whisk from the bowl, letting droplets of beige goop land on the floor, and waves it about like a wand. “El, we’re supposed to be making waffles—not dying of, like, kidney disease or something.”
“Just let me make one,” El counters.
She tears the recipe page from its bind and nabs it from the air before turning her back to Mike, peering down into the ominous, crumby batter. She takes a sniff of the mixture, pushing her hair behind her ears to keep it out of the way when Mike sets the whisk back into the bowl. “Maybe if we add some chocolate chips–”
“You’re insane, I hope you know that.” He wipes dried batter from the side of his hand with a nearby cloth and throws it over his shoulder, snaking an arm around her waist to pull her into his front. “Like, genuinely insane if you think this is gonna be even remotely edible.”
“Eaten worse,” Eleven shrugs, slowly moving the whisk around, “trust me.”
“Yeah, I know, but the point is that you shouldn’t,” he tells her, nose nuzzling the crook of her neck. He places a kiss—then two more—against her pulse point and mumbles against her skin, “just start up the toaster and I’ll put Empire on.”
“Your mom bought this for us, Mike.” She reaches for his arm, fingers hooking over his elbow where he’s enveloped her, fingers plucking at the neck of her old tee. “We have to use it.”
“Why? It’s not like she’s gonna find out.”
“I’m serious.” El leans back against his chest for a moment, but in a flash, she’s twisting in his arms and lulling him into a deep kiss.
Mike is made of stronger stuff. “Don’t think you can just seduce me into forgetting you actually want to eat that shit.”.
“Not working?” El’s eyebrows pull into a frown, but her face remains otherwise unchanged. “How about…” She presses her lips to his jaw, just once, then down his throat when that doesn’t elicit a reaction. “No?”
“A little better… but still no,” Mike smirks. “You’re gonna have to do better than that if you want me to feed your sugar addiction.”
She rolls her eyes, worming her way out of his embrace, trapped between his body and the counter. “Boring.”
“Come on, we’ll try again later.” He strides over to the freezer and pulls a box of Eggos from the top shelf, peeling the cardboard open. “Just pop ‘em in and we can have breakfast over and done in minutes. Then we have all day to just, like, chill out.”
Eleven considers him then, eyes jumping back and forth between the frozen food, her husband’s shit-eating grin, and the bowl of batter. “You promise we can do it later?”
“Depends what you mean by ‘do it’ but- Yeah.” He nods. “You can practice all day if you want. I’ll go buy as many eggs as you need, all right? And chips or sprinkles too if you want those.”
“Fine.” She licks her lips, “but you owe me real dinner now.”
“Whatever you want.”
They throw three waffles into the toaster and El eats a couple straight from the box as she waits for them to heat up. She places the vase of flowers he’d come home with last night—red and white carnations. She hates roses—aside so they don’t block the screen, and Mike sets up the first movie.
They spend the better part of the day cozied up beneath a knitted blanket, and at six he goes out to pick up dinner—Thai food. The apartment smells like chilies and three kinds of sweat by morning—and that’s the end of it.
1999
By twenty-eight, they’ve sort of outgrown the whole Valentine’s thing.
Mike still buys her flowers, and El handcrafts him a card every other year if she’s feeling particularly novel, but they’ve got two children now and one of them is a newborn.
Their daughter comes home from pre-school with her own box of Valentine’s cards, signed and stamped by her classmates, and she shares her bag of candies with her mom when they sit down to watch Barney & Friends that night. Oddly, it helps put Theo to sleep.
The baby settles in Mike’s arms right around the time the kids on-screen have started singing about alphabet soup, and Sara-Jane escapes to her bedroom not long after, claiming she has to get ready for bed. Mike suspects she’s been secretly hoarding candy beneath her pillow for a while now, but he says nothing of it. Let the kids have their secrets.
When El checks on her five minutes later, she’s face-first on a frilly cushion with chocolate slathered across her cheek, right in the dimple.
The brunette flips the nightlight on with a flick of her wrist and leaves the door open a few inches behind her. Back in the living room, Mike has changed the channel to something decidedly less infantile, some black-and-white monster movie she recognizes but can’t remember the name of. Truthfully, she’s more interested in her husband.
“You think they will stay down?”
“I give it,” Mike rolls up the sleeve of his shirt to check his watch, “twelve minutes. You know she always wakes up when Artie’s dog starts barking.”
Their next-door neighbor, an elderly widower of seventy-two with a rottweiler, has a tendency to roll his trash cans around the front yard at the most ungodly hours of the night and it sends his dog howling.
“So,” El starts, pressing a knee into the edge of the cushion beside him. She swings a leg over his lap, latching onto his shoulders for balance. “We have time.”
“I don’t know about that,” Mike pulls a face but nevertheless grabs her waist and leans into the kiss. It’s soft—slow. “Not enough,” he grumbles.
El pinches the collar of his shirt, fiddling with the top button. “Don’t jinx it.”
“I’m not jinxing it — I’m just stating the obvious,” Mike opines. He presses his lips to her cheek and keeps them there, lazily tugging at the hem of her tee. “I mean, we can probably make out for a bit.”
El grins, pressing her forehead to his. “That works.”
“It does, doesn’t it?”
Nine minutes in, the baby monitor goes off and El slips out from beneath him to see to the tot. Six minutes after that, there’s a four-year-old with chocolate on her face wandering into the living room, her favorite stuffed bear clutched under one arm.
The girl barely spares her father a second glance, instead quietly plopping down on the rug in front of the television set. Mike can all but watch in amusement as she stares up at the screen where a swamp creature is crawling through sludge.
“Not Barney,” she casually announces after far too long, and Mike almost chokes holding in his laughter.
“No. No, it’s not.” He shakes his head with an adoring look, elbows digging into his knees as he perches right on the edge of his seat.
The house is quiet save for the sound of barking outside and the static hum of the television, but Mike can’t help but feel like he’s waiting for something to happen, to go wrong. The other shoe. A bomb going off. The inevitable.
He’d like it if it didn’t. If they could just tuck their kids into bed for the night and be done with their day. Well, maybe not be done with it. It’s just gone ten and they’re only human. — They still have needs and wants. They haven’t had sex since Theo was born, but El clearly had an itch to scratch so maybe there was an opening. All they would need is fifteen minutes to rediscover skin and bone and they’d be good as gold.
The chances of that happening go down the longer Sara-Jane stays awake watching an old Universal horror. She’ll be up all night.
Mike sighs, reaching for the remote on the coffee table to find something more mellow, or at least not nightmare fuel. Maybe a nature documentary or a Jetsons rerun.
But then something happens. The channel switches to something colorful all on its own—flashing lights and loud music. A poppy MTV music video—and Mike is stunned into silence, fingers twitching inches away from the remote.
“Did she just-” Mike whips his head around to see El standing in the doorway, one hand clutching the frame as if the pillar will keep her upright. Her gaze is locked on the back of their daughter’s head, a mix of emotions playing on her face: confusion, dread, and a little bit of awe.
“She did,” Mike confirms, “I think.” He swiftly makes his way over to El, leading her by the shoulders back into the hallway. “Maybe it’s just- like a one-off. A one-time thing”
“Powers do not just happen, Mike.” She thrusts the baby monitor into his chest and pushes up on her tiptoes to peer over his shoulder where their eldest child is peacefully watching Madonna twirl around, hugging the deep pink plush close to her chest. “What do we do?”
“I… I dunno. I mean, I haven’t exactly brushed up on how to raise a superpowered kid, El, that’s… I feel like you might have me beat there.” He grabs her face between his hands, pulling her attention back to him. “Look, we’ll figure it out, all right? Okay? In the meantime, it’s not like anyone else saw.”
“She goes to school. What if she-”
“Then we’ll homeschool her… or something. I don’t know exactly, just- Let’s just talk to her and see if she’s even aware of what happened. Maybe it was a fluke.”
She blinks, at a loss. “Fluke?”
“An accident,” he clarifies. “Yeah, I know, ‘powers don’t just happen,’ but, I mean, you and I probably weren’t supposed to happen either and we made that work, didn’t we? Got us this far. Between the two of us, I think we can handle a little telekinesis.”
El doesn’t say anything at first, and when he sees the teddy bear floating in the reflection of a nearby picture frame he understands why.
“Shit.”
The day is far from over.