i'll be your alibi tonight, i'll make everything all right (rp for onze)

[still_the_dm]

It was a little bit amazing when they got to the house and Mike got to take a look at El's treehouse apartment. It was an incredible piece of work, the kind of thing that the party had always dreamed of having except for the fact that Mike's dad couldn't be bothered and he was too old by the time Step-Chad came along, Dustin's and Lucas's yards didn't have any decent trees, and Johnathan was always working too much.

And according to El, she'd had this treehouse since she first showed up, and it had only gotten better. In the parent/grandparent lottery, she'd frickin' scored.

The only disappointment was that El would be sleeping out there his first night in town (she slept up there in cycles, according to the guy at dinner who was too damn young looking to be her grandpa), and he'd be in the guest room.

In the house. With her dad.

Alone.

Mike actually managed to not be terribly intimidated to the point of getting drowsy when the lock on the guest bedroom door quietly slid open, and El's big, dark eyes appeared around the edge of said door with a meek and questioning look that Mike remembered well.

All they did was talk, and not even about anything in particular. Sitting across from each other on the bed, cross legged and knees touching, Mike told her about everything from the course of Nancy and Johnathan's relationship to Dustin's first girlfriend, right down to every D&D campaign he'd run since she left. Somehow, they packed five years into one night, and at the end of it they were stretched out in bed, facing each other and still whispering in the dark.

Yet somehow, he was still surprised when he slowly came awake in the morning with a mop of dark hair shot through with rainbows shoved right in his face, filling his lungs with the smell of some kind of flowery, clean shampoo and the cotton of the pillowcase.

She was still there. Spooned back against his chest, his face in her hair...she'd even somehow managed to fling a leg backwards and hook her foot around his calf, meaning he couldn't move without waking her.

Once he slid a glance at the door and realized she must have TK-ed the lock back into place during the night, Mike contented himself with burrowing back in to sleep some more...and when he couldn't drift off again, instead ran his fingers through her hair, idly weaving the dyed underside of her hair into one tiny, brightly colored braid after another.

Comments

[onze]

Ellie was a light sleeper in general, and even then, things had to be Just So for her to rest easy. It couldn't be pitch black, for starters. She didn't do pitch black. She also couldn't do small bedrooms or feel like she had no way out.

It's why some nights she slept in her tree house. It was more open and the strings of small fairy lights were sufficient.

Mike's room didn't have that lighting, nor the open quality of her room, but it had Mike and talking until they drifted off and that was fine by her.

She didn't intend to fall asleep in there, just that she couldn't make herself leave. The more he told her about Hawkins and everyone there, the more she wanted to hear. And it was Mike. She still couldn't believe they'd found each other and worried that sleeping elsewhere meant he'd disappear in the night.

That didn't work for her, so imagine her relief when she woke up to him playing with her hair.

She waited until he was done a braid before she carefully rolled over, giving him a tired smile before tucking her head under his chin.

"Morning," she said sleepily, relaxing against him with a soft sigh.