[TW: mentions of suicide attempts, drug use and addiction, and b!mike]
The concept of Mike taking care of a kid that was dumped on his door step after he attempts with her mother and he survives but she doesn’t….
Hold up hold up let me back up, actually…
Okay so Mike doesn’t go to college. He takes a gap year and stays in Hawkins, but truthfully, he doesn’t want to go to college and he isn’t passionate about anything besides music and writing shitty poetry he turns into lyrics.
He’s fucking depressed. All of his friends are gone besides Max, who is working on finishing high school, and Jane, who is still in hiding.
He visits Max more. He visits the Hopper-Byers more. He starts smoking a lot. He drinks even more.
He still calls Will everyday but it’s not enough. Especially when those daily calls turn into weekly ones and especially because his roommate at Duke is Lucas.
Only Nancy, Lucas, and Steve go home for Thanksgiving. Mike’s anger at himself turns into a seething jealousy.
That January the Hopper-Byers move to Montauk. Hopper keeps the cabin and gives Mike the key and he goes there a lot but it’s fucking lonely and depressing.
He’s talking to Max one night and she tells him her plan to book it to San Diego as soon as she graduates. She wants to see some old friends and family plus Dustin and Steve are living together in Los Angeles.
Mike is inspired and leaves the next day. He doesn’t have any plan other than to make his way to LA before doubling back and hauling it to North Carolina to see Will. He’s gonna make it a big road trip. It’s going to be amazing. He’s gonna see all this shit and then see Steve and Dustin and then go see more shit and then Will and Lucas and then go up north to visit Nancy and Jonathan and Robin and it’ll be perfect, really.
It’ll be the push he needs. It’ll be what helps him finally get out of his head.
He doesn’t make it to the East coast. He doesn’t even make it to Los Angeles.
He stops for gas in Sausalito- a bit turned around and confused- and sees a piece of paper thumbtacked to the cork board inside. It’s a note looking for someone to hire at a bookstore in San Francisco. Free room and board for work. Only requirement is knowing French.
Mike took French in high school.
Sure, he didn’t really excel in it and he only took it to cheat off Nancy who absolutely adored the language, but he still knows French. Well, he kind of knows French.
He takes this as a divine sign, rips the note off, and takes off.
The store is a bookstore (fucking score) and in the French district (explains why French was the only requirement).
Mike goes in and hands the woman behind the counter the note. They immediately hit it off. Her name is Teresa. There’s a lot of lore to her but we won’t get into that right now.
They also bare a striking resemblance and everyone who comes in thinks that Mike is her son or grandson. Teresa is convinced they’re distant relatives that got separated during the war or smth.
Mike moves into the apartment above the store and just… doesn’t leave.
He visits Dustin and Steve and does fly out to the east coast like maybe once a year, but he gets completely hooked by the insanely diverse collection of books and music that Teresa has, plus her amazing cooking and baking, plus her insane stories about fleeing from the Nazis in war torn France, plus he really fucked with San Fran.
Plus he had drunkenly kissed Will and tried to confess to him in August before being brutally fucking shot down.
Plus he had tried again during winter break and had been shot down again. A little less brutally, but it still fucking stung and he needed to lick his wounds a bit and why not do it while working the chillest job ever and not having to worry about rent or utilities or food or his parents breathing down his neck.
(Will has his reasons btw and yes it’s because of miscommunication because it’s Byler so Ofc it is).
He starts to go out a fuck ton. Like literally every night. Teresa doesn’t give a shit and actively encourages it because she didn’t get to enjoy her 20s. He also doesn’t let it effect his work and is respectful about it because he respects her. He doesn’t bring any of his hookups home and doesn’t do drugs in or around the apartment.
Speaking of his hookups…. They’re all guys and they all look like Will or are named Will. Or remind Mike of Will in someway.
He explores… a lot… but he never goes all the way. He’s fucking terrified of having that intimacy with anyone other than Will.
(Mike does, btw, lose his virginity to Will one summer after a very long conversation and a lot of crying. Will is the only one in the party who visits Mike in San Francisco. He's the only one who meets Teresa. He's the only boy Mike ever brings home. Teresa loves him. Yes, Mike is a bottom. Yes, this is important.)
He goes home for Thanksgiving (1990) but storms out after a massive fight where he calls his parents facists and brainwashed bigots. Holly is crying. Mike’s face is bright red from anger and the mark on his cheek where Ted slapped him. Nancy is fucking appalled.
He goes back to San Fran and doesn’t go back home. Ever.
He starts doing cocaine occasionally when clubbing but his substance use is still under control.
It slips when Teresa’s cancer comes back the fall of 1992 and he become her sole caregiver and starts to run the shop. He’s always hated November.
Mike doesn’t go out anymore and he definitely doesn’t visit anyone or attempt to lie and tell them he’ll make plans. He stays with Teresa and takes care of her.
They hire someone to help out at the store. He lives a block away and is paid in borderline pennies. His name is Erik. He also has a lot of lore that we also will not get into right now…
Mike starts to smoke and drink more heavily at night on the stoop outside the shop. Only when he’s not actively with Teresa. When he’s allowed to feel numb.
However, as her condition worsens and wakes up more frequently through the night to pain, Mike becomes more and more functioning.
He starts to crack under the pressure.
Teresa passes the following spring and Mike really fucking spirals. She left everything to him. He starts showing up to work high as balls or drunk. Erik is worried. Patrons are worried. The party is worried. Everyone is fucking worried.
Erik offers to move in, to help more, to be there for Mike, but Mike refuses.
He can’t even bring himself to clean out Teresa’s room.
During that week, Teresa’s daughter, Edith, shows up. Mike knew she had a daughter but also knew that she wasn’t in the picture anymore.
They start going out a lot. 3 day benders a lot. Edith does a lot of drugs including heroin. Mike does heroin one night, snorting it in a line thinking it’s cocaine, and things spiral further.
Mike and Erik have a massive fight and Erik leaves to visit family in Louisiana for a week. Mike doesn’t open the store once.
Mike and Edith are both struggling with mental health and two days before Erik comes back, they jump off the Golden Gate Bridge. Edith doesn’t survive. He wakes up the next morning on the shore and drags himself back home. He has to crawl in through a window. He locks himself in his room.
After sleeping for 24 hours, Mike wakes up in cold sweats and the shakes. He sees the baggie with the rest of the heroin in it laying on the ground of his room.
Erik finds him the next day passed out in his throw up. He immediately moves in, cancels his lease and is there for Mike through his withdrawals which are brutal. He helps him find the local AA chapter.
Four weeks later and Mike is a month sober. Erik is downstairs in the store and he just woke up. There’s a knock on the front door and he opens it t a very angry woman holding a small child by the wrist.
Mike’s vision whites out and he comes back to the woman shoving the girl in his arms.
“She’s yours isn’t she? Her bum of a mother fucked off a month ago and the money she left me ran out last week. I’m not taking care of your goddamn kid. Tell Edith not to call me back.”
So…. Yeah, Mike has a kid now. Tbh Erik also has a kid now.
Staying sober becomes a lot easier for Mike.
A year later and no one in the party has seen him in around 18 months. Will, Lucas, and Dustin just graduated and everyone is flying out to Los Angeles for the yearly reunion.
An Archive of Our Own, a project of the Organization for Transformative Works
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