Chapter Text
He spent years preparing for this. A year and a half before graduating high school. And then years of college, of writing in the dark or with the sun beaming in his face, with the picture of her face always right there, next to his typewriter.
Summers of travelling and going from waterfall to waterfall, not really searching, but always hoping. Always hoping.
Years of putting money aside, from the books he published. Years of smiling and laughing and acting as if he was living to his family and friends, when, inside, he was just surviving.
Because Michael Wheeler could not live in a world without her, without El Hopper. And he could not live with that voice, that one voice in his mind, telling him she could have survived. Telling him she could be out there, living, waiting.
He could not live and move on when there was a chance she was out there in the world. Because Mike had waited and hoped and called for her a whole full year when he was thirteen, and Mike would not give up on her again. He never would.
So, Mike Wheeler prepared for years. Traveled the world and saw waterfalls. Wrote books of magic, and powers, and monsters, and a mage that disappeared and wasn't found, and a paladin who was in love with her and still wished for her, even years later.
And Mike tidied up his apartment and his things year after year. He tidied up all loose ends. He crossed over countries and cities where he didn't find her, didn't see her, didn't feel her.
He looked around his apartment. It was almost fully empty now. There was no trace of him, just furniture that he would leave behind and a few letters he knew Nancy or his mother would find. Or maybe one of his best friends that came around to see how he was, to check up on him.
A few letters which didn't explain what he was doing or why or where he was going, but which told the people he loved that he loved them and he hoped one day they would be able to see each other again.
His clothes were in a suitcase or his backpack, or donated. His belongings too, or left at his parents' house, in his childhood bedroom he'd surely never see again. Not after this.
Maybe no one would understand his choice. Maybe they would. But it was a choice he had been willing to make years ago, when he talked of running away with El. It was a choice he would have made in a heartbeat. And it took him years this time around, but it was still the same choice 16-year-old Mike believed in.
He barely looked back at the empty apartment, that hadn't felt like home. Nothing had felt like home, like safety, in years. Not even his dreams, not when he dreamt of her at the gate, not when he woke up to the emptiness and the reminder that he was alone and she wasn't here with him.
He didn't listen to the voice mail Will left him, when Mike didn't answer. Or the one Nancy had left him this morning, when he was packing. He didn't call, not one last time.
Mike had already said his goodbyes, to himself, a few weeks ago, when they all gathered for Max and Lucas' wedding. He had smiled and hugged and laughed. He had taken the pictures and eaten the cake and reminisced on their past.
And no one had evoked El, like she had been a fragment of his imagination, like she had been a ghost no one dared to talk about. A phantom haunting their lives, lingering around, never brought up in fear of what it would feel like, what it would do to them and to him. And it had been the last push, the one that told him to go. To leave. To find her.
Because his heart had squeezed and torn in his chest, again and again. Because she should have been there. Because she wasn't just a fragment of his imagination. She had been real. She had been human. She had been everything good in the world, everything true.
"Still chasing waterfalls?" Hopper had asked, those observant eyes on his face, when he caught up with him. And Mike had only hummed, because they both knew what he was really chasing after. What he was really going after. "Kid, you need to...you need to live. This isn't living."
But acting like nothing had happened wasn't living either. He had tried it, when they graduated and he went to college. He tried to forget, he tried to live, but how could he when he still felt her right beside him? When every ray of sun reminded him of how she looked in the light? When he turned to a sound of laughter that sounded like hers or to the sight of soft curly brown hair? When he woke up with the sounds of her breaths in the dark? When his hand tingled, like a phantom limb, with the weight of her small hand in his?
He couldn't. Mike couldn't act as if she had just been an illusion. He couldn't go forward. He never could without her.
He closed the door to his apartment, leaving behind the lies of the past years, the act he had put on for his family and friends, taking only his suitcase and his backpack. And he disappeared, just like she did, to everybody he loved and everybody that loved him. Everybody that had loved her too.
He left no trace, careful the whole way to the airport and to Iceland, because he hadn't tried there. Because he barely had any countries left in his list of places with waterfalls and places they had talked about, when he still believed in his plan. When everything seemed possible still, or when he lied to himself that it was possible.
Mike drove around the island with a rental car, visiting the bigger cities, driving deeper into small villages and everywhere he could find waterfalls.
"You would have loved it here," he whispered to no one, like he always did when he wasn't writing in his notebooks, the ones he wrote to her, to talk to her. He looked up at the two waterfalls. It wasn't three like he promised, but he didn't mind.
Even if he didn't find her here, he would keep looking. He wouldn't stop.
Mike was ready to go back to the car, walking up back to the village, when something made him stop. A feeling. A connection. An inn from afar, at the top. Small. Warm.
Something made him walk there instead. Something guided him there. An itch, an ache, right there, in his gut, in his chest.
Something pulsed, rang in his mind. This was important. This was it.
He walked in, and the first waitress he saw talked to him, and he didn't understand, smiling apologetically at her. She smiled back, sat him down without a word at a table, handed him a menu.
There were no tourists in there except for him. Only locals, drinking a coffee or eating lunch. He didn't understand any word, but he didn't feel out of place, like he had to be right here, right now.
Footsteps approached his table as he looked over the pictures in the menu, and a voice rang.
"Hello, how can I help you?" The voice said, so softly.
A bolt of lightning. Sitting straighter. Head snapping up.
And Mike Wheeler swore his heart broke only to be put together when he looked into familiar brown eyes, again, for the first time in years. Because he had prepared himself to look for her forever, but he hadn't prepared himself to find her.
He hadn't prepared himself for how it would feel to find El Hopper again. And he felt his heart come back to life.