Hey everyone! This story was originally posted on Archive of Our Own, but I decided to post it here as well in case there are some ST/Mileven fans who exclusively read fanfic on this site. This is an AU that is mostly canon to the show in terms of El having her powers, but it's set in High School, grade ten for the Party. I'm going to post the first five chapters, and depending on the response I'll go ahead and post the rest. I hope you enjoy it! :)
Hawkins, Indiana - 1986.
Mike strode down the quiet hallway, lazily swinging his key ring back and forth. The clubs secretary had yet to give him a separate set of keys for the AV room, and it was becoming a real pain. Until then, he was stuck with this big clunky thing that also held the keys to a bunch of storage rooms, some electrical panels and, he suspected, a few fire extinguisher cases.
The secretary had given him a long lecture on not using any of the other keys to cause "any sort of ruckus" - that this was an exception made because of his reputation (among teachers, Mike thought, not students) as a good student with a so-called "clean record". It was embarrassing, but she was right.
Neither Mike nor any of the other members of the AV club, who also happened to be his three best friends, had even thought about breaking into a storage room or using a fire extinguisher to pull some kind of prank.
He knew a handful of kids in the tenth grade who would definitely view the key ring as a gold mine. But by the time AV club rolled around each week, Mike and his friends were so eager to escape the daily minefield of Hawkins High that they could care less about what went on outside of their little haven. Sure, it made them nerds - but granted, that's what they were. Tech-savvy nerds who made up a pretty kickass AV club. Mike smiled at the thought.
As club President, it was his job to head to the room each Wednesday to make sure it was ready and the equipment was all working for the next day's meeting. Not many people used the AV room, but sometimes the kids from student radio made a mess that they always failed to clean. It was annoying, but Mike didn't mind the chance to duck away from lunch each week for some peace and quiet.
It was the end of September and still warm enough to eat outside, so the hallways were blessedly clear and Mike whistled as he rounded the corner towards the room.
As he approached he spotted Barry, his favourite janitor, mopping up a spill. He looked up as Mike approached, alerted by the obnoxious jangling of his keys. That was how they'd become friends in the first place. Mike had passed Barry a few times on his way to the AV room, and each time Barry proclaimed: "Thought you were a janitor, with all those damn keys clanking!" Each time, Mike smiled, joking back: "Nope, just President of the most important club at Hawkins."
Barry took a liking to him after enough of those exchanges and would even help him out sometimes, carrying equipment or secretly reporting students if they made a mess of the AV room.
"President Wheeler," Barry said, his usual greeting. "Sir Barry," Mike shot back, grinning. It took him a few minutes to locate the proper key - he'd been steadily improving his time each week - before he finally found it and slid it in the lock. He opened the door and tossed his backpack on the table beside it like always.
His next move was to flip on the light switch, but as he turned to do so, he saw that it was already on. He glanced around the small room to find the source of this unexpected break in routine.
A girl was crouched at the far right corner of the large equipment table, looking at Mike with frightened eyes. He frowned at her stance, thinking maybe he'd scared her - but then he realized she must have been getting up to leave when he opened the door.
She was clutching a brown paper bag in one hand, a half-eaten sandwich and bottle of juice in the other. She stood frozen, curly brown hair falling in her eyes. There were about seven feet between them, but Mike could see that her hands were shaking.
"Um…. hi?" He said, mentally kicking himself at how it sounded like a question. It wasn't wrong for her to be there, of course, and it wasn't like Mike had free reign over this room or anything. But who would want to be in here during lunch on a day like today?
The girl shook her head, and it seemed to snap her out of her trance. In a frantic manner, she started to gather up some things on the desk in front of her, clumsily placing them in her arms. "I-I'm so sorry," she said, sounding breathless. Mike stayed by the door, a little taken aback but not nearly as flustered as she seemed to be. He didn't recognize her, but that didn't surprise him; Hawkins was a big school, and she looked like she could be in either a grade above or below him.
"It's uh - no worries," he offered, stepping into the room a little more. She didn't respond, and collected the last of her things. He noticed that her clothes seemed a little too big for her - the jeans worn in, the plaid shirt hanging almost to her knees. Knowing that no other clubs met on Wednesday at lunch, Mike wondered how she got into the room.
"Are you a club President or something?" He asked as she shuffled around the table toward the door. But his words seemed to throw her off even more and she stepped forward cautiously, glancing up and him and back down again, like she was afraid to meet his eyes. God, had he scared her that much?
"I-no, no… I just…" she looked back at the table where she'd been sitting, then back at Mike. "I'm sorry, I won't come in here again," she mumbled, her voice trailing off so that Mike could barely hear her.
"Oh - no, it's really fine," Mike replied, feeling bad that she seemed to think she'd done something really wrong.
"I just was wondering how you got in here, I mean - I have this stupid key ring the clubs secretary gave me. I mean it's not stupid, it's more like - it's so annoying that they can't just give me the individual key or whatever. They said something about collateral, but I really think they're just lazy, or they don't want to give out the good key rings because people keep using them to pick the locks to the girls' locker rooms, which is super weird and perverted - and I don't know, anyway, sine I'm AV club President I'm here a couple of times a week, usually just…" but before he could finish, the girl was rushing past him and out the door.
He turned around, but she'd already rounded the corner and was out of sight. Mike stood for a moment, his hand still on the doorknob.
He had a tendency to ramble, which everyone - mostly his friends - told him was super annoying. Clearly this girl had thought the same, and maybe that's why she hurried away without saying anything. "Smooth, Wheeler," he muttered to there had been a question at the beginning that she hadn't answered. How did she get into the room?
Mike closed the door behind him, and got to work preparing the space for the next day. As he cycled through the usual tasks, he realized how silly he was being. She probably just slipped in earlier if someone was in here, or if a previous club had accidentally forgotten to lock the door behind them. There was really nothing strange about it. Except for that look in her eyes; a mix of surprise, some embarrassment, but mostly… fear.
It stayed with him the rest of the day as the lunch bell rang and classes resumed. I couldn't have scared her that much, Mike kept telling himself. At nearly six feet tall with lanky limbs and an unruly mess of black hair, no one had ever called Mike scary or intimidating - his friends would probably burst out laughing if he tried to suggest so. If anything, most people at Hawkins High were either unbothered by or didn't notice his presence at all, what with his ever so popular title of AV club President. So what, exactly, had she been so afraid of?
The next day, Mike made his way down the same hallway, but this time he was trailed by three other boys - Dustin, Lucas, and Will, his fellow AV club members, his best friends since childhood.
True to form, Dustin and Lucas were arguing about who last borrowed a certain comic from the other. Mike was only half-listening, and he tuned in to hear Lucas's voice rising in pitch: "First of all, you owe me from our last trip to the arcade when I saved your ass so you could keep the high score on Dig Dug. I basically protected you from a lifetime of ridicule!"
Lucas lived with a fierce sense of right and wrong, good and bad, just and unjust. He was the one you always wanted in your corner, the one you knew would never violate any sort of friendship code unless circumstances were, as he called it, "Divinely ordained".
Dustin, on the other hand, was prone to doing things like forgetting to return comics, begging for someone to cover him for quarters at the arcade, and grabbing the last french fry from your lunch tray. But those were just his quirks. He was the most thoughtful person Mike knew, and always had a pulse on what was going on in everyone's lives. It wasn't unlike him to radio Mike on their Supercomms the night before a big test to wish him luck, or to be the first to make peace and mediate any disagreements the four of them had - except for when it was him and Lucas head-to-head, which was a different story altogether.
Will, who was walking up beside Mike and away from the devolving argument, was his closest friend. He could tell Will things he couldn't tell Dustin or Lucas; not because he wanted to exclude them, but because Will just seemed to get things.
Having grown up with a volatile and then absent father, and a single Mom who sometimes struggled to keep things together, Will had his fair share of heartache early on in life. While some people grow hardened by that kind of experience, Will came away with the opposite; patience, sensitivity, and a keen ability to read people and situations with an empathetic eye.
Mike trusted him more than anyone, and vice versa. Plus, Will's rational and level-headed disposition had come in handy for their crew many, many times.
As they all clambered into the room, Mike flicked on the light switch and was reminded of what had happened yesterday. He hadn't told anyone about it yet, and he was almost hesitant to bring it up and take time away from their precious two hours in the AV room.
"Was someone sitting in my seat?" Lucas said from across the room. Mike looked up and saw him standing in the same spot the girl had been yesterday.
"What?" Dustin asked, unpacking his bag.
Lucas looked down and crossed his arms. "My chair wasn't pushed in all the way."
There was a collective eye-rolling, and Mike sighed. Of course Lucas would notice - something in his ever-righted world had been upended, and he wouldn't stop until there was an explanation. Luckily, Mike had it.
"Yeah actually, when I came in here to do prep yesterday some girl was sitting there." All of them stopped what they were doing and looked up at him, wide-eyed. He knew what was coming next. "Was she cute?" they said in unison like a well-rehearsed choir.
Of all the inside jokes they had, this one was most popular of late. It was born out of the fact that, as their spot on one of the lowest rungs of the social ladder at Hawkins would have it, interaction with girls was mediocre at best.
While they'd gone to a few parties and had friends they talked to in their separate classes, the group mostly kept to themselves, meaning dating wasn't something any of them had quite mastered yet - give or take a few awkward spin-the-bottle encounters.
So to make light of the sort of pathetic situation, they'd started applying the question to any and all interaction with any and all members of the opposite sex. So if Dustin said something like, "My Mom had a friend over last night," they'd all shoot back, "Was she cute?" Or when Will complained that the lady at the post office gave him a hard time about his Popular Science subscription renewal, they'd commiserate and then ask, "Was she cute?" Or if any of them ever went to the school nurse, who was a known curmudgeon, they'd say each time, without fail, "Was she cute?"
It was kind of a rhetorical question that always got them laughing. But this time Mike was genuinely thinking about it, unable to recall detail from the rushed encounter.
"She was - I don't know, actually," he told them. "Her clothes were too big," he added lamely.
"Her clothes? So you got a real chance to check her out then, huh?" Dustin teased, but Mike waved it off.
"No, I mean - I came in and she was at Lucas's seat, but I think I scared her or something because she like, ran out and kept apologizing."
"Well, with that terrifying presence of yours," Will teased, and the rest of them laughed.
"What was she doing in here?" Lucas asked, having finally situated his chair the way he liked it.
Mike remembered the brown paper bag she'd scooped up off the desk. "I don't know, I think she was just eating lunch."
"Wow, that's depressing," Lucas retorted, "Even we have each other to eat lunch with."
Mike's heart sank a little. It hadn't occurred to him that maybe she'd come into the AV room to avoid the embarrassment of eating alone, or even just to find some refuge from the intimidating and sometimes ruthless nature of Hawkins High.
That, he understood.
"Maybe she's just new here," Dustin offered. "Actually, come to think of it…"
He went on to explain that on Monday in third-period English, Ms. Williams had hastily introduced a new student, who had looked like she wanted to die of embarrassment. The teacher said something about homeschooling, but that was all Dustin remembered. "And that she looked really…."
"Scared?" Mike offered
Dustin looked up at him and frowned. "She had that same look yesterday, like a… deer in headlights, or something."
Dustin pointed up to his head, "Curly brown hair? Just a bit longer than mine?"
Mike nodded.
"Well, I guess it's fine that she didn't push in my chair all the way," Lucas said – immediately adding 'I'm just joking!' when they all rolled their eyes again. "Being new sucks, I don't blame her for wanting to just avoid it all. Plus, who starts at a new school three weeks into the year? All the prime friend-making opportunities are basically gone," he said.
The rest of them murmured in agreement.
They launched into their usual tactics, goofing around with the microphones and making up fake radio-show personas. Mike forgot all about their conversation, the rest of the world disappearing like it always did during AV club.
But as things came to a close and they packed up to leave, he kept thinking about the girl - about how Dustin had also noticed that skittish look in her eyes. Pangs of guilt hit him – I should have been nicer, he thought. She was new, eating lunch alone, and obviously needed a friend, and he'd just barged in all accusatory and frightened her instead.
If I see her again, I'll say Hello properly, he vowed to himself. He fumbled with the key ring as his friends teased him for being so slow, like always, before finally locking the door behind them.