END OF BEGINNING- a byler fanfiction/ stranger things s5

I Love You So

Summary: Mike's S4 Monologue and the Aftermath of S4

a/n: I feel like now is a good time to clarify that I think Mike is bisexual and did have romantic feelings for El, they just faded or weren't as strong as his feelings for Will (like vs love). He always had feelings for Will though and is just beginning to understand them. Also, I hope the painting comes up again in s5. 

Word Count: 811

She needed me. For the first time in a while I felt like someone needed me, and it was nice but it was also hard. Because sometimes to help other people, you have to hurt yourself. As long as I'm the only getting hurt, then I guess that's okay. That's the logical I've been operating on for pretty much ever and I'm not saying it's totally worked out, but I don't know how else to be.

"El? El?" She kind of looked like she might be having a heart attack so I wondered briefly if Surfer Boy Pizza had a defibrillator.

"Mike." Will's hand was on my shoulder. "Don't stop, okay. You're the heart. Remember that, you're the heart!"

The heart. That painting blew my heart up. It was amazing.

Will had brought the painting along with him, like he knew he would need it. I think it was his best work yet.

"Did you paint this?" Michael Wheeler- Master of Stating The Obvious.

"Uh, yeah. El basically commissioned it- she told me what to draw."

That was surprising to me. Why would El commission a D&D painting? I also thought about what she said in her letter, about Will painting something, but she explicitly said that she didn't know what it was. She also said it was for someone he liked, so I guess it made sense that this wasn't that painting. Jesus, if this was what he did in his spare time, the painting for that girl must be astronomically good. (clueless Mike is canon)

Then he told me about all of these things, things El must have told him I guess, about her feelings but I had a hard time keeping track to be honest. When Will was talking like this, he was mesmerising. I think that was the moment.

Those feelings from that summer had been pushed down far, but they burst up bigger than before now. I came to the terrible realisation; I wasn't in love with El because I was in love with someone else.

I couldn't breathe suddenly. For some beyond fathomable reason, it felt a painful kind of good though. To look at him. It felt right.

Now, I was going to have to shove those feelings back into their corner again.

"I love you!" There. It ripped from my chest, like that stupid Band-Aid metaphor.

I didn't even know what I was saying to be honest.

The first time I saw El, my first though was That's not Will. My second thought was Must be cold to be out here in just a t-shirt. My third thought was Wait, this is a girl? A girl with a buzzcut apparently.

Nowhere near the prospect of love. I didn't even think of El like that until Lucas said it first. "If you love her so much, why don't you marry her?" "What are you talking about?"

I did mean the end though.

El could fly and she could move mountains. She could do anything she wanted.

But she didn't need me. Any idiot could see that.

It was just dumb luck.

***

Okay, so maybe I'm crazy but I think El knows I lied.

She's barely spoken to me since the fight with Vecna, which is fair I guess because of the emotional trauma and strain but she also doesn't really seem to want to be near to me either.

El's touchy-feely usually. Now she's more aggressively telekinetically slamming doors and grimacing in my direction.

In Hopper's cabin, Will and I were sitting on an upside down couch (oh, the irony) and talking about everything, when he said literally the scariest shit ever.

Vecna's not dead, in a sentence.

I would rather face off with all of the demodogs and the full-sized demogorgon and that weird gross flesh-made mind flayer all at once than go up against Vecna. Mind-screwing is the worse kind of screwing. And I definitely don't want Vecna in my head right now. Or ever, but you know, in the context of being a total mess. I also don't want to die by means of disfiguring and exploding eyeballs. Or by any means.

Seeing Max was hard. I know I've said that I wished death on Max Mayfield in the past but I didn't mean it literally. I also got kind of freaked out when Lucas said she wasn't even supposed to be alive, and that it was miracle she was. Since when could El bring people back from the dead?

I try not to be scared of her, I really do, but sometimes it's hard.