Chapter Text
They were finally free. The sky had returned to its natural blue, the ground closed up, and the fog of black smoke no longer hung over Hawkins. Mike had to keep reminding himself of that fact—that they were free.
They were done. There would be no more gates, no more demogorgons, no more Upside Down. The alternate dimension was blown up, courtesy of Mike himself. He finds himself struggling to think about that night. Watching El vanish, as if into thin air, as a result of the bomb Mike had built. It had all worked perfectly. It would have been too perfect for El to make it out unscathed as well, he supposed.
Too perfect to watch her graduate with them, too perfect to have her here, with all her friends and family.
Everyone was quiet after she died. The party couldn’t meet for a few months in the wake of that night. No campaigns, no movie nights, and they avoided the cabin like a plague. Her death had changed them, and their hope that she miraculously lived faded with each day that passed.
She was gone, and this time they were sure. So Mike didn’t bother trying to communicate with her by walkie talkie, even if he distantly wanted to. It was futile, he knew it deep down. Even though no one deserved to live more than her, El had sacrificed herself for all of them.
When the party did meet, in Mike’s basement, it was sobering to see the empty seat El used to occupy, knowing she wouldn’t take up that space ever again. Mike had pretended not to see Max wipe her eyes when they all timidly gathered down there to hang out and watch movies.
None of them spoke about her all that often. Not only did the government forbid them from saying anything, but talking about her hurt, it killed their morale almost instantly.
So for months, they stopped talking about her all together. And, somehow, it really did get better.
Way faster than Mike would’ve expected, too.
Eventually, maybe six months after the whole ordeal, he was able to go several days without thinking about her. It was even easier when he distracted himself—he still had to finish high school, after all. He also needed to start thinking about colleges, his future approaching fast.
He could tell the rest of the party was moving on, too. Eventually, they were all able to hang out without the oppressive cloud of El’s memory haunting them with every breath they took. Sometimes, Mike’s lungs would burn, but he was able to ignore it when he was watching Lucas jab his fingers into the buttons on the Space Invaders arcade machine, or when Dustin was building another bizarre gadget, the names always slipping from his mind too fast to remember when he mentioned it later.
Max had managed to regain her sight and her mobility, and she’d done so in record time. In just a few months, she was walking along with them, racing them to Melvald’s for milkshakes, and skating alongside their bikes when they’d go to the woods outside of Will’s house.
And in no time at all, graduation was looming over them. Mike had already sent out his college letters—his anxiety of waiting for the responses wasn’t as bad as he had expected. He was weirdly calm about the entire thing, which was a pleasant change.
Like no time had passed, Mike was walking to his graduation. He could’ve sworn he was going to be late, but the ceremony hadn't begun until he entered through the ajar wire fence to take his seat. It came so fast, he didn’t even remember practicing the ceremony like he had been dreading. The idea of waking up at seven in the morning just to walk around their practice field had sounded awful.
The principal was done talking in no time, and then Dustin was up there, talking about conformity, about the nerds and the jocks, about how their childhood was stolen from them. Mike nodded along, and he chalked his difficulties breathing to his excitement, his nerves of walking the stage.
Then Dustin was done, and Mike squeezed his eyes shut as confetti rained down on them. The sea of orange gowns fluttered as people jumped out of their seat, shouts and claps for Dustin echoing through the field. Confetti lodging itself in his peers’ hair. He blinked and he was by the stage, running toward Dustin himself, enveloping him in a hug. Their friends joined them a second later, their arms tight.
“That was great!” Mike says, clapping Dustin on the back.
Dustin preened under their attention. The gold “valedictorian” embroidered into his stole looked glossy and official. His Hellfire shirt, in contrast, looked worn and aged, and the collar was sewn up from when it had ripped that one time. “Thanks, guys,” he says bashfully, his excitement palpable.
Lucas and Will were about to speak when a girl approached them. Mike thought she looked vaguely familiar, but her name eluded him. Had he ever known it? Had he just seen her around? Didn’t she have black hair?
When Mike tuned back in, he realized his friends were looking at him expectantly, and she’d already walked away. He racked his mind for some indication as to what they wanted from him.
She invited us to a party, he recalled, though he was sure he hadn’t heard her.
“No, screw that,” he says, nodding to himself. “I have—”
Mike blinked, and they were in his basement. The overhead light was bright, and he blinked a few more times to adjust himself. He felt a slight tug at his skull, and he smoothed a hand over the back of his head. The feeling was gone before he had time to register it was even there.
“Just get it over with and roll. I don’t wanna hear his shit anymore,” Lucas says, pulling Mike back into the moment. Mike watched them discuss, a small smile playing on his face.
“All right,” Will sighs, like he didn't want to bother trying because he knows they’ve lost. He cups the dice reluctantly.
Dustin shoots straight up in his seat, like he’d been electrocuted, and grabbed Will. “The mage,” he says reverently, “From the Abbey of St. Markovia. She said we can summon her—”
Lucas shoots up next, grabbing onto Will as well. “When at our lowest depth!” Lucas finishes for him.
Max, borderline shouting, says, “The incantation to summon her—what’s the incantation?”
They all fall into a panic, yelling over each other until they all surround Will and the book he shuffles through, letting page after page fall to the side like a waterfall of paper.
Time seems to slow, then, as all his friends crowd on the opposite end of the table, away from Mike, humoring him. Will was reading something to Mike, but he couldn't really hear his voice. Mike may as well have been underwater, his ears stuffed full of cotton. He notices then that there are lights playing at the edge of his vision. They're purple and red, and they swirl around each other rhythmically, purposefully.
Mike blinks, and his friends are wiping their eyes, staring at him warmly, but it’s like they’re seeing through him, too. Like they’re thinking, fondly. Mike smiles, too, because he wants to believe in what he’s told them. About the mage. The mage? About El—
He’s in his college dorm, a type writer in front of him. He doesn’t remember what he was writing, but he has to get back to it, because he has a deadline soon. He—
His friends all file out of the basement, and Mike lingers behind, forlorn, wistful. He misses the simplicity of their childhood, sometimes. He misses going to Melvald’s for milkshakes, and playing arcade games, and biking to Will’s house. He misses the summer of ‘85, when he’d helped his friends assemble Cerebro on that big hill, and when El was still around.
His face was wet with tears, and he didn’t know why. He hadn’t realized he was crying.
He climbs the basement stairs with a finality, his childhood coming to a close.
Mike blinks once more, and he’s back in the basement, surrounded by his best friends. Will came in costume, this time. His purple robes almost glow under the fluorescent light above their heads, his hat a little smaller on his head than it used to be, a result of their growth. No one else questions it. Mike wipes his clammy palms against his pants and continues.
“Time to join your friends, Sorcerer,” he says around the plastic teeth in his mouth. They feel slimy in his mouth, and he grimaces slightly.
“All right,” Will sighs, like he doesn’t want to—
“The mage,” Dustin is saying, but Mike is frowning. His head starts hurting again, and he winces, squeezing his eyes shut and he’s—
He’s at graduation. Their gowns look magnificent together, a pool of jewel greens fanned out over their small practice field. Mike is settled in his seat, his hands resting easily in his lap, a smile on his face as Dustin takes the podium to give his speech as Valedictorian. His golden sash looks a little funny against his green gown. Mike wonders why they didn’t pick a different color.
Out of the corner of his eye, Mike sees a big yellow sign. He tears his eyes away from Dustin out of curiosity.
The sign is blank.
Mike stares. Who brings a blank sign to graduation?
He’s in the basement again. The vampire teeth are digging into his gums, and he can taste blood. His friends are all frozen on the basement stairs, looking down at him like he’s weird for sitting there. They’re supposed to be leaving. They were going to get pizza at Melvald’s and…
The glint of Will’s necklace catches his eye. Was it always silver?
He clambers out of his seat wordlessly, he doesn’t want his friends to wait any longer than they have to. He puts his book back on the bookshelf and hurries up the vacant stairs. He’s about halfway up before he stops in his tracks. He struggles to inhale, suddenly, his lungs burning, wrung like a sponge. He chances a glance behind him, and for a second, nothing looks different. It’s the same basement he spent his childhood in, the same boxes of board games scattered around, the same low couch, the same art hung up along the walls. He blinks, once, and that changes quickly. Now, instead of the fluorescent lights, the room is full of purple and red lights. They dance around the room, like the lights on a stage.
He takes a step closer, but he’s stopped by the desk in front of him. His head stings, and he’s sitting in his dorm, and there’s a typewriter in front of him. He’s writing a manuscript. Oh no, he let himself getso distracted, it’s due tomorrow. He sets away to start typing, but he looks up at the wall and the painting stares right back at him.
The painting of the dragon, and the party fighting it. Mike’s shield with a little blue heart on it.
Mike’s hands freeze above the type writer.
A blue heart? Why was it blue? Wasn’t it—
Red, some deep recess of his brain says, and his body runs cold, like he’s being hunted.
There’s a deep, resonate pain in his head, and then the fear Mike felt vanishes. The heart is red. What had he even been worried about? In fact, he should know better. The painting had been on his wall since he started college. He doesn’t remember a time when it wasn’t on his wall. He doesn’t even remember hanging it up. Now that he thinks about it, he also doesn’t really remember how it got to his room at all. How he got to his room at all. Did they drive?
What school does he go to?
Who gave him the painting?
Mike’s head screams at him, and he clutches his head, squeezing his eyes shut.
When he opens them, he’s standing beside the projector in the basement of the WSQK. Mike hadn’t been here in… years, and Robin is sitting on a table in the projector light, and Will is at his side, and Ms. Byers is somewhere on the other side of the room, he knows that, but he can’t seem to get his eyes to focus over there.
The projector displays a map of Hawkins, the map of the tunnels Will made overlaid so they can figure out how to save the kids and Holly. Mike inhales deeply, but he feels like he can’t breathe again.
Again?
Mike couldn’t breathe.
He glanced at Will, who was nodding along to what Robin was saying. Her words were faint, though, and he couldn’t quite tell what she was saying.
Mike felt like he hadn’t seen Will in years. When was the last time they talked?
When Robin stops talking, Mike grabs Will’s arm and tugs him aside. Maybe Will can sort out what’s wrong with him. He was always good at that stuff.
Will is immediately concerned, his face contorted with worry. “What’s wrong?” he asks gently, glancing down at where Mike is still gripping his bicep.
Mike glances around the room. Everyone else is still talking, but they sound even further away, now. “What’s going on?” he says, his voice low.
Will frowns and leans a little closer, almost conspiratorially. “What do you mean? We're making a plan to rescue Holly,” he says, his voice pitching a little lower than usual.
When Mike tries to swallow, he finds that his mouth feels like sandpaper. He licks his lips, but that also brings no relief. “Didn’t Holly graduate two years ago?”
Will’s eyes widen. He opens his mouth to speak, but Mike catches sight of his necklace. Why is it gold?
Mike blinks and he’s at graduation. His graduation. Their gowns are green. He’s pretty sure they’re supposed to be orange. Mike sees purple and red lights again, right behind Dustin, where he talks and talks about something that Mike can’t hear. There’s a single black cloud in the sky, and Mike stares at it, his head throbbing. Somewhere in his chest, he feels his heart beat once, twice, too hard. Something’s wrong, he knows. He knows it, deep down.
Will, he thinks. Will would know.
Mike stands up abruptly, and through the green gowns, he sees Will up at the front row. Now, he notices that some people have orange on as well, the colors mixing in the crowd of graduates. He ignores it in favor of shoving his way through the row and marching up the center aisle. Dustin’s voice tapers off as he sees Mike moving.
Will must have seen Dustin’s frown, because he glances over his shoulder. Once he spots Mike, he stands slowly, a deep frown plastered onto his face. Once Mike is close enough, he grabs both of Will’s arms and squeezes.
“Mike?” Will asks, his voice soft.
“Will, something’s wrong,” Mike says, but his ears are full of cotton again, and his voice sounds far away. Could Will even hear him?
Will surveys him, his eyes widening. “Are you okay?”
Mike realized then that everyone’s eyes were on him. Their gazes were oppressive, calculating. Wrong. Wrong, wrong, wrong wrong wrong—
“How did we meet?” Mike asks suddenly. Because he can’t remember, he can’t—
Will cocks his head to the side, confused. “What are you talking about?” Mike notices then that the green of his gown makes the green in his eyes pop.
Mike shakes him, just a little. “How did we meet?” The pain in Mike’s head is growing oppressive.
Will swallows, and it looks like it hurts when he does. “In kindergarten,” he says slowly, like he’s unsure. Mike realizes then that, actually, Will’s eyes look more brown than green.
“How?” Mike asks imploringly. He’s basically begging at this point.
Will’s eyes darken, just a little. “We—”
Mike blinks and he’s in the basement again. Will, across from him, looks confused. Mike glances around them, his heart racing. Their DnD figures, hand-painted by Will, sit arranged on the board. Mike’s paladin in shiny gold armor, Lucas’ ranger holding a spear, and Will’s sorcerer in gray robes.
Gray?
Mike notices then that they all look confused. Max is glaring a hole through the board, like she’s missing something. Lucas and Dustin are looking at each other like they don’t quite get what it is they’re looking at, and Will is still staring off in the distance, his brow furrowed.
They’re all uncharacteristically silent, until Mike says, “I think—”
Mike blinks and he’s on the basement stairs. There are purple and red lights around the basement again. Will is wearing gray robes, like his character. Mike is alone on the stairs though, and he knows that’s wrong, completely wrong. Something is missing, he needs to…
He can’t remember. Mike glances at the table, and all his friends sit around it. They’re looking at Mike, where Mike is sitting. Mike looks at himself, sitting at the table. He’s looking at himself from the stairs, looking at his own slicked back hair, his own blue shirt. There’s a grandfather clock in the corner of the basement. Mike’s head hurts. He can’t breathe.
Mike keeps staring at himself, but now his friends are also looking over at him, too. They’re looking between him, between the one standing and the one sitting.
He hears himself, still sitting, say, “I think—”
“Something’s wrong,” he finishes for himself, before he blinks and they’re all at graduation. Orange gowns. Everyone but the five of them is sitting. They look at each other over the sea of green gowns.
Everyone else is quiet, moving on as if nothing happened, as if the five of them weren’t standing weirdly at their own graduation, when everyone else sat politely, their hands folded in front of them.
Mike felt out of place. They all looked out of place. Something in him screamed for him to fall in line, because he’s fallen out of time with everyone else. It was like they weren’t even there. Like they weren’t real.
Mike opens his mouth to say something when the pain strikes him again. He sees the others wince, like they felt the heavy cloth that was squeezing his brain, crushing him the longer he thought about it.
Thought about what?
He looked to Will, who reached up to grasp at his head, and Mike felt his own mind throb in unison, causing him to double over. He heard his friends double over, too. All Mike could see was stage lights roving in front of his eyes. He saw rocky, red cliffs, like the ones Max had told them about when she—
Mike saw lamps with blue lights, dusty floorboards, someone floating—
He saw a California beach. He’d never gone there, not when he visited that spring—
He was in the Upside Down, inside Castle Byers. Faint singing from his own lips, and he knew, right then, these weren’t his memories, these were—
Mike was crushed by an oppressive, agonizing pain, and then he was falling. He was weightless through it all: colors, voices he was too familiar with, voice’s he’s never heard before. It all surrounded him, and he fell through memory after memory: a diner, the Creel house, the Upside Down, a bunker in Nevada, a basement, a basement, a beach in California, the arcade, the quarry cliffside, a trailer—
He stopped in his basement. Plastic teeth in his mouth, they tasted like blood and chicken. His shirt was a lighter blue than it should be. Lucas was the only one there with him.
Lucas’ eyes were wide, his hands splayed wide on top of the table as if to steady himself.
Mike peeled the plastic from his mouth, his fingers coming away wet, to say, “Lucas?”
“Something’s wrong,” he whispers.
“What do we do?” Mike whispers back, his heart hammering against his ribs.
Lucas swallows thickly, like it hurt. “I can’t breathe,” he says quietly.
Mike shakes his head. “Where’s everyone else?”
“We’re… it’s like we’re stuck,” Lucas says. He was shaking.
“Like a…” Mike began, but he couldn’t remember the word. He could see what he meant, though. He could see Max, floating high up, her eyes rolled back into her head.
“Try hiding,” Lucas says suddenly. “Hide in a good memory.”
Mike looks around. The basement was eerily still, the corners too dark, too hidden, as if the details were fuzzy. At the edges of his vision, he could see the stage lights again. When he looked back at the table, Lucas was gone.
Mike opened his mouth to say something, anything, but he chokes. His throat constricts, his head burning and his vision spotting. He closes his eyes tight and holds his breath against the pain. Good memory, he tells himself.
When he opens his eyes, he's staring down at his feet, at green and yellow grass. There's faint laughter all around him, the sources of the sounds far away. He was in a park. A playground? There was a red brick building, a few paces away. Directly in front of him was a swing set. Something burned in the back of his mind.
He couldn’t remember what any of this was.
Mike’s head pounded, his skull throbbing like it might explode right then and there. Before he passed out, he stumbled to the swing set. Yellow bars. Faded, sun-bleached blue seats. He dropped into the seat to his right.
As soon as he landed in the plastic seat, the world evaporated in front of him, and he fell again.
He fell faster, faster, faster, until—
His eyes flew open. He scanned his surroundings urgently, his heart racing in his chest. He tried to breathe, but something fleshy, alive, was covering his nose and mouth, was buried deep inside of his body, twisted and coiled through his intestines. He couldn’t breathe, he couldn’t think, and his head hurt like he’d been hit by a car.
Above him was… the sky?
A blue sky, far, far in the distance, but it was blending with a too-bright yellow sky. There were too many suns. The clouds were black and they hung low, but right beside it was a perfectly white cloud.
Mike’s hands were barred to his sides by whatever cocooned him. It was damp and it reeked of metal and rot. It tasted like blood.
He clenched his hands, but his whole body felt weak and drained. Everything hurt, but he refused to go back to… whatever the hell he’d been in before. He could feel sleep pulling at him again, but he fought it. He mustered all his strength even though his limbs felt like jelly, and he tried to free himself.
He pushed one arm forward, leveraging his body weight against his cage, until his arm punched through. There was a hiss, like gas was being released, and his skin burned at the light breeze that grazed him. Mike flinched as his skin stung, and he tried and failed to inhale, instead choking on the thing lodged deep within his body. He flailed in panic and freed his other arm. He immediately clawed at the long, tube-like thing and pulled.
Mike retched on it as it was pulled from his body. It scraped the walls of his esophagus as he dragged it out. It took far too long to fully remove it from his body, but once he did, he gasped a full breath. Bile climbed from his stomach, and he doubled over to vomit.
He didn’t make it far, because a sharp, agonizing tug on the back of his head made him recoil and cry out in pain. He clutched at the back of his head and felt something else attached to him. This thing was burrowed into his skull, his flesh bruised and bubbling around it.
He didn’t hesitate to grab it with both hands—the vine-tube-thing fitting easily in both hands, no wider than a thermos—and tug.
His vision swam with stage lights and a gray, rocky cliffside.
Mike grit his teeth and pulled again. Something warm trickled down his head and the back of his neck. He almost passed out this time, but he could still feel the other memories creeping into his mind.
He pulled one more time, using all his strength, and the thing grabbing him was detached. He pulled it away, and he felt thin tendrils drag along the space between his skull and his brain. It was inside of his head, like a parasite.
Mike screamed as he yanked it the rest of the way, and he didn’t stop until the creature was flailing and trying to get back inside of him. He pushed himself away as soon as he could, his body hitting the ground in a limp heap of limbs. He sucked in air greedily, and his vision was no longer spotted with purple and red. His head spun, and he could vomit again if he wasn’t too weak to move. He felt thin trails of blood leak from the back of his head.
The creature still hissed behind him. Mike needed to drag himself further away, the idea of getting caught again making his stomach twist painfully. He climbed to his feet on shaky legs, and for the first time he noticed that the ground was a mix of lush, green grass, shale, and red rocks.
Mike chanced a glance around him. He was in the middle of his neighborhood, the one he knew like the back of his hand. His house would be just around the corner. He wondered if he’d even make it as far as his house before his foot landed in a puddle.
He glanced behind him, his eyes widening.
No, not a puddle.
The ocean.
Mike staggered backwards, looking out at the beach, but… but it wasn’t a beach. The water stopped after a few feet, replaced with a wide stretch of the Upside Down. It wasn’t just the Upside Down, either. To his left, there was a giant rocky mountain, like the kind they’d seen in the Abyss. And there… there was the Creel house. It shouldn’t be this close to his house. And that was Argyle’s van, parked along the side of the street, right in front of another red, mountainous cliffside.
Mike looked around him, spinning in a slow circle. There was another car on the other side of the street, but it looked too old, like it was from the 50s, not the 80s.
It dawned on Mike, then, that he wasn’t in Hawkins. At least, not just Hawkins.
The dimensions had crashed together, just like Vecna had planned, and now…
Everything had converged, right on top of his home.
Every time had converged.