PLAY THE PART | mileven

fifteen

fuck.

this wasn't how things were supposed to go — none of this was planned to happen or should have happened. none of this should have escalated to this degree.

from the very beginning of this game, he set boundaries that he was adamant to keep. some of them he voiced out - others were reminders to him internally.

he never wanted to bring his friends into his mess, he didn't want to drag them into this deceiving play that was supposed to anger none other than kai myers. he never wanted them to accept el or get used to having her around.

he never wanted el to plant herself in the middle of his life as if they were actually in a relationship, he never wanted to deal with her brother or with the pain that came along by having her in his life.

but those were the boundaries that he made obvious since the beginning - there were others which weren't as obvious, some of them were silent promises he told himself to keep.

yet those same walls of promises were made of nothing but a thin layer of paper it seems — because slowly they were laying on the ground, crumbled and trampled, giving him no protection anymore.

one of the biggest promises he ever gave himself was to stay the fuck away from el hopper.

he promised himself to never trust any person he knew back from hawkins, to never get too close to them, to always be guarded when it comes to them.

and now he comforted el, promising to protect her from kai's violence.

what a clusterfuck of a situation.

he didn't want to protect el, hell, he didn't even want to help her. she was another silent puppet wandering through hawkins high and laughing alongside kai as he turned his teenage years into poison.

he was trapped in an invisible cage for those years; unable to move, unable to live. he was a prisoner in his own life, sentenced to exist in the shadows.

she didn't give a fuck when her ex-boyfriend was abusing his popularity by trampling down on people, she didn't give a fuck that he was keeping his hands bloody by sucking the life right out of others.

she didn't give a fuck about him.

then why is he giving a fuck about her now? why does he want to protect her when he could simply throw her in at the deep end and let her see the ugly side of her ex-boyfriend herself?

he really shouldn't — but he gives a fuck. he cares enough to promise to keep her safe from him when she never did the same in all those years of hell.

stupid, foolish mike still trying to take her under his wing.

but he isn't the hero of this situation, god, not by miles. everywhere he goes, he leaves trails of hellfire behind.

there were bad things he did in life and he could wholeheartedly say that he doesn't regret any of those.

rumours about him were flying around back then like paper planes in the wind, each time he stepped on the school ground, new whispers were meeting his ears. a lot of them were entirely made up, others were closer to reality.

in his freshman year, people were talking about how they saw him killing birds with a pocket knife — how that rumour stared? he had no idea. he was sure that he would never even be able to catch a bird in his hands.

in his sophomore year, some group of boys vandalised the girls' changing room during pe and splattered their underwear all over the school campus. somehow that fell back on him and he got suspended for a week.