Archive of Our Own ^beta

The sun is hidden, Behind the clouds

The sun goes down, I see it fall

Night falls. Mikes dad is asleep in his chair in front of a snowy television. His mother is crying in her bathroom for reasons unknown to him. Maybe it was something said under a harsh breath. Maybe it has something to do with him. Because he won’t talk to her, because he cant, and she doesn’t know what to do. Her only son is different now. Mike feels so different.

He takes the few dollars he has off of his night stand and heads outside.

It’s a warm summer night. The kind with cicadas and crickets, and everything is stained orange for a long time even when the sun is hidden behind the horizon. Somewhere in the distance a dog barks. Somewhere in the distance a car door closes. Everything is so quiet it feels like he can feel the entire earth moving and pulsing beneath him. He listens to the gentle ticking of his bikes spokes as he pushes it towards the road.

I write your name, At the grocery store

I want to see, What it’s like to be you

The general store is open later on the weekends. It’s yellowish, florescent lights hum as he walks down the aisles. He wonders why all grocery stores smell the same. A faint sweetness, mixed with something stagnant and musty.

He grabs a soda, and a small candy bar. He walks past the freezer section and stops. He stairs at those little frozen waffles for a long time. The picture on the side of the box is of a happy family sharing breakfast. He thinks about all of the content breakfasts he has taken for granted, and all of the happy meals she never got to have.

In the check out lane, the cashier asks if he wants to donate a dollar to raise money for a children’s hospital. Mike looks over at the wall. Plastered with hundreds of brightly colored balloon shaped pieces of paper with someone’s name signed across them. He donates, and on the line for his name he write “El” like it’s an inside joke he shares with himself.

The cashier asks who El is, and he smiles. “It’s a friend of mine. She’s not around anymore and she deserves the recognition. Not me.”

It feels like an offering. A memorial.

I’m lying down, It’s raining now

When things are gone, You can’t have them back

By the time Mike makes it back home, he can hear thunder rolling towards him. It starts to sprinkle as soon as he props his bike up against the house. Instead of going back to bed, he walks down into the basement. It’s much cooler downstairs, it feels so much emptier. He moves to sit in the fort, Her fort, and takes his snacks out of the grocery bag. He takes his Supercom, and turns it to the channel he always uses.

“El? It’s me. It’s Mike. It’s day 224. If you are out there just please. Let me know. You don’t know how much it kills me that you are gone. I miss you so much.”

Usually after a few minutes of waiting, he would turn the harsh static off and go to bed, but not tonight. He leaves it on, and he eats his snacks in the whispering white noise until they are gone. He let’s the waves of static fill the space, he gets lost in them, looking out for sounds he cant be sure are there.

He swears he can hear something, almost like footsteps echoing through the static, but after several minutes, when his eyelids begin to droop, he clicks off the receiver and goes upstairs.

I close my eyes, It’s late at night

I hope I won’t, Have that dream again

Lying in bed, he stairs out of the slots in the blinds at the pale moon. It makes him feel like maybe everything is going to be okay, and that someday soon he won’t feel so alone.

It’s just this strange feeling. Sometimes it just seems like she is so close. Like he can almost feel her fingertips touch his face, or sense her presence crouched next to him in the fort.

Maybe he is going crazy, but it doesn’t matter. He falls asleep thinking of her, and thinking of all of the things he would share with her. He prays he doesn’t have the same dream he has been having for months now. Since it all happened. The one where Will gets really sick, and this time Mike can’t fix it. The one where El comes back just to vanish again. The one where he's left alone in suffocating darkness, feeling like he is being watched.

He wishes instead to dream of her. just her. Existing around him. Near enough to see at least. To know she is safe. Tonight he hopes that wherever she is, that maybe she dreams of him too.