this was a prompt sent to me on tumblr! the prompt was:
"You make every day worth living."
also i posted this so long ago on ao3 and tumblr but i never posted here so here it finally is!
El loses track of time quickly, all she knows with certainty is that Hopper is behind her defending her as she works to banish the Mind Flayer once and for all. It's been three years since she had to do this the last time, three years since she was able to start as normal a life in Hawkins as possible for someone like her. She hates that it's come to this point again- blames herself for opening the initial gate to the Upside Down in the first place and apparently not closing it properly afterwards- but she'll be damned if she lets anyone else get hurt because of it.
She remembers that Mike is outside in the hallway, having insisted on coming back to the lab with them. He refused to be separated from her again.
("I'm coming with you."
"Kid, no, it's too dangerous."
"I don't care! You're not separating me from El again. I'm not a kid anymore, you can't tell me what to do."
"You're sixteen!"
"I DON'T CARE!")
She isn't worrying about him too much, though- Hopper and Nancy had taught him to shoot a gun and it turned out to be the one thing he didn't have shitty aim for. Hopper and El had left him with one of Hopper's many weapons to guard the hall while the two of them went down to the gate to finish what had been started a while ago.
When she's finally done, the ever-looming presence of the Mind Flayer completely gone, El kneels on the ground gasping for air and trying to hold on to the last thin threads of her consciousness. She doesn't want to pass out right now, she wants to go find Mike and give him the tightest hug possible because everything is finally over- they'll finally get to live happily and peacefully without that constant worry in the back of their minds. Hopper lays a comforting arm over her shoulders and waits a bit with her until she can stand, what feels like fifteen minutes but is actually probably more like half a minute passing. Her head clears and she's almost good as new. Of course she's tired, that's only to be expected, but the overwhelming relief she feels is more than enough to tide her over until she gets home and eats and showers.
It's kind of surprising that Mike hadn't rushed into the room when everything was over, El's sure he would have been able to feel it. He would have known. He always knows. That's the first warning sign.
The second one is when El steps back into the hall with her father a minute later and sees no trace of her boyfriend anywhere. "Mike?!" There's no answer, the only sound a faint buzzing coming from the long lights in the ceiling. The noise only makes everything more ominous because Mike wouldn't have just disappeared like that, something happened to him. If the creeping nausea El feels means anything, whatever happened to Mike wasn't good at all. She sees a few shadows on the floor to her right that look like demodogs, kind of, but they're dead.
"MIKE?!" She yells, again getting no response. She turns to Hopper in a blind panic, tears welling up in her eyes. "Dad, where- where is he? He wouldn't have left, where did he go? We need to find him!"
Hopper's looking at the floor further down the hall, his jaw locked and what seems like a mixture of shock and realization in his eyes. El turns to look at what he's seeing and becomes even whiter than she already was. There are streaks of blood on the floor that turn the corner and disappear. "No," she mumbles, "No!"
She takes off in that direction and rounds the corner to see more blood leading to a half-open door that is also covered in bloodstains. She throws it open and the sight in front of her makes her want to throw up. Instead, she screams, and she knows she's going to have nightmares about this until the day she dies. Mike's coated in blood, but El would recognize his face anywhere. He looks dead and his left arm is missing below the elbow. She's shaking as she walks over to him and collapses beside him wordlessly.
A moment later, Hopper arrives in the room, sucking in a sharp breath and an "Oh, God".
"Is he alive?" He asks, making his way over and bringing out a pocket knife to rip his shirt to shreds.
El's eyes move away from Mike's paler than usual face and lock on his chest. Her vision is so blurry she almost can't make out anything in front of her, but then she sees that his chest is still moving a little bit, meaning that he's still breathing. She starts to cry, deep sobs wracking her body as she tries to get the words out. "Yes," she gasps. "He's breathing!"
Hopper grunts around the shreds of fabric he's holding in his mouth as he rips another. "El," he says, muffled, "I need you to come here and put pressure on his arm about halfway up." She doesn't react for a moment, the words not getting to her. "El!"
He reaches down to tie the rags around what's left of Mike's arm as tight as he can while El presses down on it with all the force her shaking hands can muster. Hopper eyes his handiwork warily before getting up. "Hold that down," he instructs. "I need to look for a windlass."
El watches as her dad rummages through the room and comes up with a broom. "Can you break this?" He asks, holding it in her direction.
"What?" El's panic is probably at the highest it's ever been. She can tell that if they don't get Mike to help soon he's going to die right in front of her and she doesn't know what the broom's for, she has no idea what Hopper is doing. The room is spinning around her and nothing feels like it's real.
"Can you break this? Clean break right about here," Hopper says, gesturing to a point about a quarter of the way down the handle. In a second it's sitting in his hands in two pieces, broken exactly where he needed it. "Good kid," he adds, kneeling back in his previous position.
He does something El doesn't see properly and the stick is somehow wrapped in the rags. "Should do it for a bit," he says. "Let's go." Hopper lifts Mike's limp form over his shoulder, making sure to watch the wounded arm.
They're in the Blazer racing to the hospital at what El thinks is probably an illegal speed, her choking on her tears and trying not to scream again every time she looks at the still-unconscious Mike in the backseat next to her, when El remembers that she once made Troy piss himself. And if she could do that, then… maybe she can stop the blood flow out of Mike's arm! Whatever Hopper had done had seemed to help, but she wants to do everything she possibly can to extend her boyfriend's chances of living. Oh my god… the thought of even having to extend his chances of living makes her want to vomit all over again. She ignores it. Mike's always been there for me when I needed it, now it's my turn.
El takes a stuttering breath and dredges up from deep within her a last shadow of power, focusing it on Mike's mangled arm. She can't really tell if it makes a difference because all of him is caked in his blood, but she hopes with every fibre of her being that it does. She looks at his face again, down where his head lies on her lap, and feels tears burning her eyes and clogging her throat again. She knows he isn't yet, but Mike looks dead. His hair is matted with blood and his face is painted with it; the skin she can see is white as a sheet. El can't even see his freckles anymore, and that forces another round of wracking sobs out of her chest. What if he never wakes up? She'll never see any part of him anymore, not just his freckles.
Her left hand lands on the side of his face, caressing it softly. "I love you," she chokes. "I love you so much, Mike, you have to be okay. You're gonna be okay, I promise."
She stares at him and decides that she has to kiss him. It might be the last chance she ever gets. She doesn't want it to be but she has no idea what could happen, and it's not like she cares that both of their faces are coloured red. Her nose is dripping now but so are her eyes, and she leans down as far as she can go to connect their lips. It tastes like metal and salt, the tears falling off her face mixing with the drying blood on his, and she kind of hates it because Mike is unresponsive and cold and it just reminds her of exactly the severity of the situation.
"I love you," El gasps again, squeezing her eyes shut so she doesn't have to look at his face and see that he won't answer. "You can't die, I won't let you. You make every day worth living, do you know that? I can't live without you."
She doesn't say anything else until they get to the hospital, Hopper making up some bullshit cover story about Mike getting attacked by a dog. All she does then is ask a doctor if he's going to be okay. The doctor gives her a pitying look and that's all she needs. She sits down heavily in the nearest empty chair and stares at the lines in the ugly linoleum floor. Her dad eases himself into the seat next to her and pats her back.
"He's gonna be fine, kid, just you wait. The doctors'll take care of him."
El certainly hopes so.