Chapter Text
Sunday, November 5th, 2000
The candle in the center of the table had burned down into a glossy puddle, its flame a steady, stubborn little thing that refused to gutter out no matter how many times the server swept past and dragged cold air in her wake.
Mike watched it anyway.
He watched it the way he watched a lot of things lately, like he could hover just above the moment and still count as being present. The light made the glass votive look bruised at the edges. It caught on forks, on the rim of Nancy’s wine glass, on the bright, clean silver of a retirement plaque propped near the centerpiece like an afterthought someone had tried to dress up with greenery.
Chief Jim Hopper, it read, in letters that meant something heavy and official.
Somewhere to Mike’s left, someone laughed too loud. Somewhere behind him, plates clinked, and a chair scraped the floor. The restaurant smelled of hot bread and butter and the kind of garlic you could taste in your sinuses. It was warm enough that Mike had taken his blazer off and draped it over the back of his chair, the sleeves hanging down like tired arms.
Across the table, Hopper’s face was red from a combination of pride and wine, and the fact that he never quite knew what to do with being celebrated. His hands, still the same hands, thick and blunt, built for gripping and holding and hauling people out of danger, rested on either side of Alice’s drawing as if he was afraid it might blow away if he didn’t anchor it down.
Alice was explaining it to him in great detail.
“And this,” she said, tapping hard enough to dent the paper, “is you. Because you’re tall. And this is Mommy and Daddy. And this is Grandma Joyce, look, her hair is really big because it’s pretty.”
Joyce’s laugh was soft, delighted in that way that made Mike feel, for a flicker of a second, like he’d been transported backwards into a kitchen full of Christmas lights and frantic warmth. She leaned in, cheeks pink, and kissed the top of Alice’s head.
“That’s me?” she said. “That’s beautiful, honey.”
Jonathan sat close enough to Joyce that their shoulders brushed when they shifted. He kept his voice low, his eyes on Hopper, he clearly didn’t want to interrupt the orbit of attention around him. Every now and then, he murmured something to Joyce or Nancy, their words getting swallowed by the room.
Nancy sat beside Mike, knees angled toward the table, posture neat, the way it always got when she was in public, and someone might be watching. She had her hair pinned back with one of those clips that looked effortless but definitely wasn’t. Her hands were busy tearing bread into pieces she didn’t eat, stacking the torn edges neatly like she couldn’t help herself.
“You want some?” Nancy asked at one point, nudging the basket toward him with her elbow.
Mike blinked like he hadn’t heard her. His gaze tracked the bread anyway—the white napkin, the steam rising faintly, the shine of butter on the crust—and his stomach gave a belated, irritated twist.
He didn’t touch it.
He didn’t touch much of anything. His plate was half-full and cooling. Pasta, or chicken, or whatever he’d ordered because Nancy had ordered it and he’d nodded along. He couldn’t remember. He’d been hungry when he’d walked in, he knew that. Now, his stomach felt like it had been filled with damp wool.
“Mike.”
Nancy’s voice cut through the fog, close enough that it startled him. Not loud. Sharp, like she’d said it twice already.
Mike blinked. His eyes found Nancy’s hand waving in front of his face, a torn piece of bread pinched between her fingers like a tiny flag.
“Hello?” she said, eyebrows lifting. “Are you—” She waved again. “Are you in there?”
“What?” he said, because it was easier than admitting he’d been nowhere at all.
Nancy leaned closer, lowering her voice not wanting Joyce to hear. “I have been trying to get your attention for the past two minutes.”
Mike’s throat felt tight for no reason he could explain. He shifted in his chair, the wooden edge digging into his spine, and forced himself to look around the table.
Hopper was still laughing at something Alice had said, loud and genuine. Joyce had her hand on his arm grounding him. Jonathan’s gaze flicked to Mike for half a second, quick, warm, the kind of glance that said You okay? without making it a question anyone had to answer. Alice was already reaching for another crayon, scribbling new lines with serious concentration.
And Mike sat there with the untouched basket of bread, feeling like the wrong kind of guest.
Nancy lifted her bread again, practically shoving it into his line of sight. “Why aren’t you scarfing down the bread like usual?” she asked, half amused, half genuinely puzzled. “You always do. You’re like—like a starving 18th-century peasant every time they bring it out.”
She waved it again when he didn’t respond.
“Mike,” she said. “You are completely zoned out.”
Mike blinked, the room snapping back into focus with a faint sense of vertigo. He dragged a hand over his face and let it fall to the table. “Sorry. What were you saying?”
Nancy snorted and dropped the bread back onto her plate. “Forget it.” Then, after a beat, she tilted her head, studying him that made his shoulders tense on instinct. “What is going on with you?”
“Nothing,” Mike said automatically.
Her expression shifted, subtle, but unmistakable. Nancy Wheeler had always been terrible at pretending she believed him when she didn’t. One eyebrow arched, her mouth flattening as she leaned back in her chair.
“Uh-huh,” she said. “Sure. Nothing.” She tore another piece of bread, chewed thoughtfully, then glanced back at him. “Is this about that girl you were seeing a few months ago?”
“No.”
“Okay,” she said easily, too easily. “Then, is it about the other girl from your Magic group? What was her name? Stacy? The one who keeps asking if you’re coming to game night and definitely wants to go on a date?”
Mike stared at her. “How do you—”
“You are bad at secrets,” Nancy said. “And Mom talks. A lot.”
Mike groaned, dropping his forehead briefly into his hand. “You need to stop asking Mom about my love life.”
“I don’t ask,” Nancy said, shrugging. “She volunteers. It’s like a reflex.”
“Well,” Mike said, straightening, “it’s not that. And for the record, I'm not seeing her anymore.”
Nancy’s mouth twitched, but she let it go, tearing her bread into smaller, neater pieces. “Fine,” she said. “So what is it, then?”
Mike’s mind snagged on the question, on the simple insistence of it. He could feel the answer sitting in his throat like a stone, heavy and unhelpful.
He said nothing quickly enough that Nancy opened her mouth to try again—no doubt another pointed question he wasn’t ready to answer—when a small hand tugged at his sleeve.
“Uncle Mike!”
Alice stood beside him, her chair abandoned, her drawing clutched carefully in both hands. Her cheeks were flushed with excitement, curls already escaping their clip.
“Alice,” Nancy said immediately, firm, reaching out to hold her by the arm. “Hey—no running. We don’t run in restaurants.”
Jonathan leaned forward from his seat, smiling even as he echoed it. “Hey, hey, slow down, kiddo.”
Alice skidded to a stop right in front of Mike anyway, barely containing herself, and held the paper up between them.
“Look,” she said, breathless. “I made another one.”
Mike’s chest loosened without him quite meaning it to. He smiled and reached for her automatically, lifting her up and settling her onto his lap. She fit there easily, warm and solid, her sneakers bumping lightly against the leg of the table.
“Wow,” he said, taking the paper and holding it up with exaggerated reverence. “This is incredible.”
It was a mess of crayon lines and stick figures, but it was unmistakably them: a round table, a cluster of people with wildly different hair colors, Hopper drawn twice as big as everyone else. Mike recognized himself by the floppy dark scribble that could only be hair and the crooked smile Alice always gave him in her drawings.
“That’s you,” she said, pointing proudly. “And that’s Mommy and Daddy. And Grandpa. And Grandma Joyce. And—” She frowned, tapping the edge of the page. “I didn’t know where to put Uncle Will, so I’m gonna do him next.”
Something warm and complicated pressed against Mike’s ribs.
“I love it,” he said, honestly. “You’re getting really good. If you keep this up, you might be just as good an artist as Uncle Will. Maybe even better.”
Alice gasped, delighted. “Really?”
“Really.”
She beamed, then glanced down at the table. “Can I draw more?”
“Sure,” Mike said. “You can—” He looked around, then slid his paper placemat out from under his plate. “You can use this.”
Her eyes lit up. She scooted closer on his lap, already reaching for a crayon Joyce handed over without missing a beat.
Nancy watched the exchange with something soft and knowing in her expression. Mike caught it out of the corner of his eye and felt the familiar, uncomfortable urge to deflect.
He cleared his throat. “It’s not my love life,” he said quietly, once Alice was absorbed in coloring broad blue lines across the placemat. “Before you ask again.”
Nancy’s gaze pointed. “Then what is it?”
Mike hesitated.
The way the year was ending in a hum he couldn’t quite get used to, the turn of the century in newspaper headlines and late-night jokes about flying cars, people acting like the future was something you could predict if you made the right punchline.
Mike kept catching himself thinking, We’re here. He’d been bracing for the future to arrive like a storm, and instead it had come quietly, sliding in while he was busy doing laundry and paying rent and writing pages that didn’t always behave.
He was twenty-nine years old.
That still didn’t sound real.
In Chicago, his life was small in the way he liked it. A one-bedroom apartment with a desk shoved against a window because he’d learned he wrote better with light. Mornings that belonged to him. Coffee, fingers clacking against typewriter, then computer keys, the rhythm of sentences building like brickwork. Deadlines. Editors. People who called him by last name. A shelf dedicated entirely to his own work, spines lined up in a row, his name printed cleanly and confidently on each one.
Moderately successful, his agent liked to say. Mike had started repeating it because it was easier than breaking down the word successful until it cracked open and bled.
He wrote science fiction, technically. That was where the bookstores filed him. That was what the convention panels introduced him as: Michael Wheeler, award-nominated author of—and then a list of titles that sounded nothing like the real thing.
Because what he actually wrote were ghosts.
He wrote monsters and other worlds and kids who learned too young what it meant to survive. He wrote about remembering and losing and finding each other again. He wrote about a girl with a shaved head and a stubborn jaw, her hands shaking with power and resolve, and he never called her Eleven on the page. But he honored her anyway, the words were his offerings. Hoping that building her into stories meant she stayed real.
He’d told himself, for years, that it was enough.
He taught the occasional class at his local community college because someone had once told him he was good at explaining things, and also because standing in front of a room full of eager strangers talking about story structure was easier than standing in a room full of old friends and trying not to look for someone who wasn’t there. He had college friends he saw every few weeks: drinks, poker nights, and the occasional Cubs game. He’d fallen in with a group of writers and editors who argued about books like it was religion. They’d convinced him to play Magic: The Gathering, which had felt ridiculous at first until he’d realized it gave his hands something to do, gave his brain a harmless kind of strategy to chew on.
It helped, too, that Magic didn’t come with the same bright ache that Dungeons & Dragons did.
Mike hadn’t played D&D in years.
He saw the Party three or four times a year. Usually, back in Hawkins, when the holidays dragged them in like gravity, and they all pretended they weren’t doing it out of habit, out of nostalgia, out of that lingering fear that if they didn’t check in, something awful might slip back through the cracks.
Everyone except Will.
Will had turned away from Hawkins the second nothing tied him there. Joyce and Hopper had done the same. Hawkins was a town that held on with both hands. It was also a town you had to claw your way out of if you wanted to breathe.
Still. It meant that for a long time, Will existed in Mike’s life as a voice over the phone, as Christmas cards with neat handwriting, as the occasional brief visit when schedules and stars bothered to do him the favor of lining up.
Except that had changed.
Nancy and Jonathan had broken up during their final fight against Vecna when they thought endings were permanent and pain was proof. Then, years later, Nancy moved to New York with a job offer and not enough money for the kind of apartment you didn’t share walls in. Jonathan needed a new roommate. Eight years ago, they’d made the kind of practical decision that shouldn’t have turned into anything more.
But it had.
Five years ago, there’d been a wedding, small, messy, full of laughter and happy tears. Three years ago, there’d been Alice. And suddenly Will was around too, showing up on Thanksgiving and Easter because Nancy had asked their parents if they could start doing holidays in New York, since that way Jonathan could see his parents too. Now every holiday was a Byers-Wheeler ordeal, and Will was there.
Mike had gotten used to seeing him in those moments. Used to the jolt of his presence, the way his face had sharpened with adulthood, the way he laughed more easily now but still held something far away behind his eyes.
But Will never came for Christmas.
Christmas was for his boyfriend’s family, Will had explained once, a simple logistical detail. Instead it lodged in Mike’s ribs and stayed there.
Mike nodded back then, telling it didn’t matter.
And now, here he was, at Hopper’s retirement dinner in New York City, a restaurant nicer than Mike ever chose for himself, a table of people he had fought monsters with, a celebration that should have felt whole.
And it didn’t.
Because Will wasn’t here.
Mike wasn’t even supposed to be here.
He’d only come to New York because a science fiction convention had asked him to panel—something about Writing Trauma Into Genre Fiction—which had made him snort when he read the email and then agree because his agent told him it would be good for sales. He’d planned to fly in on Friday, talk about aliens and grief for two days, then fly back to Chicago and disappear into his manuscript again.
Then Nancy had called.
Hopper and Joyce are coming down, she’d said. It’s his retirement. We’re doing dinner. You’re in the city anyway. Come.
Mike had said yes without thinking. Because of course he had.
And in the middle of the afternoon, between a panel and a book signing, he’d logged into his AOL, and messaged Will without overthinking it.
I’m in NYC. Hopper retirement dinner tonight. You coming?
The response had come fast, which had made Mike’s heart do a strange little stutter.
Wish I could. Stuck in LA fixing set stuff for reshoots. Tell Hop congrats, and mom that I miss her. Tell Alice her drawings are better than mine.
Mike had stared at the screen longer than necessary and then typed back something stupid. Obviously, her drawings are better than yours, and then logged out, like that settled it.
But as he sat at the table now, watching Hopper’s big hands cradling his granddaughter’s paper, watching Joyce’s eyes crinkle when she smiled, watching Jonathan lean in close, in the same way he once protected the people he loved by sheer proximity, Mike couldn’t stop noticing the empty space Will should have occupied.
If Will had been here, he would’ve sat across from Mike, probably, because someone always put them across from each other like it was still 1983 and they were kids at a basement table with dice and character sheets. Will would’ve smiled at Alice’s drawing like it was the most important thing in the world. He would’ve said something dry under his breath to Mike, something that made Mike huff out a laugh he didn’t realize he’d been holding back.
He should’ve been here.
Instead, Mike was here, feeling like an extra piece someone had forced into a puzzle that was already complete.
He hadn’t known how to admit, even to himself, that being included didn’t feel like relief. It felt like displacement. Like he’d arrived and taken up room someone else should have had.
Nancy’s gaze stayed on him, unrelenting.
“Seriously,” she said, quieter now. “What is going on?”
He hadn’t said it out loud yet.
Ever since he’d finished the fifth and final book in his first series, something had stalled inside him. The story had ended the way it was supposed to, earned, yet devastating. Readers loved it. Critics did, too. His publisher had called it a satisfying conclusion.
He’d signed a three-book contract on the strength of that series alone. A spin-off, loosely pitched. Familiar world, new angle. Everyone involved had been enthusiastic enough that Mike hadn’t questioned his own uncertainty. He’d assumed the words would come like they always had.
They hadn’t.
Every new document felt like standing at the edge of something vast and blank. Every sentence collapsed under scrutiny. He’d delete entire pages without saving, close his laptop with his heart racing, convinced he was finally out of stories. Convinced the part of him that knew how to do this had been a finite resource, and he’d used it all up already.
“I can’t write,” he said finally, the words sounding wrong out loud.
Nancy blinked. “You can’t write?”
“I mean, I can,” he amended. “Physically. Typing still works. But nothing sticks. Every time I open my computer, I feel like I’m losing my mind.”
He dragged his cell phone out of his pocket and turned the screen toward her, tapping the down button on his Nokia through the missed calls he’d been pretending not to see. His agent. His editor. His agent again.
“They’ve been on my ass about deadlines,” he said.
Nancy’s eyes widened and Joyce’s head snapped up at the word, their eyes narrowing instinctively toward him and then flicking to Alice.
Mike hooked up a finger over the speaker. “—butt,” he corrected quickly.
Joyce relaxed, slightly, though the look she gave him was fond and unimpressed all at once.
Nancy shifted her narrowed eyes from Mike, to the screen, then back at Mike. “Have you tried your usual stuff?”
“Yes,” he said. “All of it. The coffee shop. The other coffee shop. Writing at home. Writing not at home. Going for drives. I even went back to Hawkins for a weekend like going back would magically fix it.”
“And?” she prompted.
“And nothing,” Mike said. “It’s all bad. Or empty. Or both.”
Joyce leaned in then, careful not to hover and pull Alice’s attention away from the drawing she was building in waxy blue layers. Her voice dropped instinctively, the way it always had when something mattered.
“I’m sorry,” she said. “I didn’t mean to eavesdrop.”
“It’s okay,” Mike and Nancy said at the same time.
Joyce smiled at that—not amused, exactly, but warmed by it—and then her attention settled fully on Mike. The room seemed to dim around it. She had always looked at him like that, like she could see the outlines of things he hadn’t said yet and was waiting patiently for him to catch up to himself.
“You know,” she said, gently, “sometimes it isn’t the writing that’s wrong.”
Mike felt his shoulders tense before he could stop it. He shifted slightly, Alice’s small weight grounding him, her crayon dragging across the placemat in determined arcs.
“Sometimes,” Joyce continued, “it’s where you’re doing it.”
He huffed a humorless laugh. “Yeah?”
“Yes,” she said, without hesitation. “You’ve been in Chicago a long time, honey.”
The word honey landed softly, familiar enough that it hurt. Mike had never questioned Joyce’s right to it.
“Maybe you need something different,” she said. “A change of pace. A change of air.” She paused, then added, almost casually, “Maybe the sea.”
The sea.
The word immediately conjured something vast and restless, something that never stayed put. Mike pictured it unbidden, the sound of waves folding in on themselves, the smell of salt, the constant motion. He felt a reflexive resistance rise in his throat.
“That doesn’t really—” He stopped, exhaled. “I don’t know if that would actually help.”
Joyce watched him carefully, not interrupting.
“What if it just makes it worse?” Mike went on, the words coming faster now, defensive. “What if I just sit there for a week and don’t write anything? That’s just wasting time in a different location.” He swallowed. “And I don’t even know where I’d rent something on such short notice.”
Joyce waved a hand, dismissive but not careless. “You wouldn’t have to rent.”
Mike frowned. “What do you mean?”
“Our place,” she said simply. “Hop and I are going to Europe for a five-day trip after this weekend. You could house-sit. Watch the dogs. Just to see if it helps.”
The suggestion sat between them, heavier than it had any right to be. Mike’s first instinct was to recoil, to say no quickly, decisively, before it turned into something else. Before it turned into expectation.
Hopper, half-listening from across the table, grunted without looking up from Alice’s coloring. “Keep the pipes from freezing,” he said. “Or whatever.”
Mike snorted despite himself, then caught Joyce’s eye again.
“You’re only saying that because you still don’t have anyone lined up to house-sit,” he said, lightly, teasing in the way he does when he was trying to deflect. “You and the Chief definitely waited too long to figure that out.”
Joyce didn’t deny it. Her smile turned wry. “Maybe,” she admitted. “But that doesn’t mean it wouldn’t be good for you.”
Nancy leaned forward, clearly pleased. “It really would, Mike. You’ve been stuck in your own head for months.”
Mike bristled, instinctively. Stuck felt too close to broken. He glanced down at Alice, at the blue stretching across the placemat, a crooked yellow sun hovering above it all.
“What’s that?” Joyce asked, following his gaze.
“The ocean,” Alice said proudly, not looking up.
Joyce tilted her head, eyes soft. “Do you think Uncle Mike should go to Montauk?”
Alice’s entire face lit up. She bounced on Mike’s lap, clapping hard enough that he had to steady her. “Montauk! Montauk! Montauk!”
Mike laughed, the sound escaping him before he could stop it. It startled him, how easy it felt, how genuine. He looked around the table then, really looked: Joyce watching him, hope and patience tangled together in her expression; Nancy grinning, already counting this as a win; Jonathan meeting Mike’s eyes for just a second before offering a small, warm smile and a subtle thumbs-up from where he sat; Hopper pretending not to care while very clearly caring; and Alice warm and solid against him.
He felt the familiar urge to retreat. To say no and mean I’m fine. To choose the safety of stasis over the risk of wanting something to change.
But Joyce was still watching him. Not pushing. Just waiting.
“Okay,” Mike said finally, the word feeling strange in his mouth. He swallowed and repeated it, firmer this time. “Okay. I’ll go.”
—
Tuesday, November 14th, 2000
A week later, Mike’s silver 1996 Ford Focus crunched its way up the gravel driveway in Montauk and came to a stop just shy of the house.
He turned the engine off and sat there longer than necessary, hands resting on the steering wheel, the quiet pressing in around him. He’d driven the whole way from Chicago under the guise of practicality—I’ll need a car while I’m there—but he knew better. Every mile had been a postponement. A way to stay in motion a little longer before he had to sit still and face the blank computer screen waiting for him.
The house rose gently out of the landscape modest and weathered. One story. Two bedrooms, two bathrooms. Hopper’s deck stretched out behind, bleeding into a narrow path that wound down toward the shoreline. The sea was just barely visible from here, a sliver of blue-gray beyond the tall grass.
Mike grabbed his duffel from the backseat. He’d packed light: a week’s worth of clothes, swim trunks he wasn’t sure he’d use, his laptop, and the thick folder of handwritten notes that were supposed to become something resembling a book. The sparseness felt appropriate. The house, too, seemed to breathe in that same restrained way.
He shut the car door and crossed to the front step, lifting the mat where Hopper had promised the keys would be. Sure enough, there they were. Mike shook his head fondly as he unlocked the door, thinking of the email Joyce had sent him since the dinner, typed carefully, line by line, complete with bullet points and reminders. Feed the dogs. Walk them twice a day. Water the plants. Take out the trash on Tuesday morning. Write.
The door swung open, and the silence shattered immediately.
Buster and Daisy barreled toward him, nails skittering against the wood floor, tails wagging with such enthusiasm that their entire bodies seemed involved. Mike dropped his bag just inside the doorway and crouched down without thinking, laughing softly as they crowded into his space.
“Hey,” he murmured, rubbing ears and scratching bellies. “Yeah, yeah. I missed you, too.”
He stayed there a moment longer than necessary, grounded at their level, letting their warmth and uncomplicated joy settle him. Then he stood and made his way down the short hallway, the dogs flanking him like sentries.
He set his keys down in the bowl on the entry table, his car keys clinking softly against the house keys, and turned toward the opposite wall.
The photographs stopped him short.
The left side of the hallway was crowded with frames, some crooked, some carefully aligned. Old and new. Joyce and Hopper’s life, laid out in glossy rectangles. Mike’s eyes skimmed them at first, half-avoidant, until they landed on the two photos Joyce never moved.
The first was impossible to miss. A family photo from the fall of 1986, centered, anchoring the whole wall of pictures. Joyce, Hopper, Jonathan, Will, and El. The only picture of all of them together.
Mike’s chest ached.
El’s smile in the photo was small but fierce, like she’d been daring the camera to see her. Mike had memorized that expression years ago. Seeing it now, in this house she’d never stepped foot in, made his throat ache. It always did.
His gaze slid to the other frame, the one he knew too well. The same photograph he’d kept on his desk through his first novel, then his second, then his third. El, younger and still looking straight into the camera.
Tears pricked unexpectedly, immediate. The house suddenly felt like a mausoleum to someone who had never set foot inside it. A shrine built out of love and absence.
Mike forced himself to look away, breathing through the tightness in his throat. He scanned the rest of the wall, grounding himself in what had changed.
There was a newer group photo now, Lucas and Max’s wedding, bright and crowded, joy bursting at the seams. That had replaced the old one from Nancy’s baby shower. Joyce had added a picture of Alice mid-toddle, arms thrown wide, and another from Disney World where she wore oversized mouse ears and a grin to match.
Mike lingered over older photos, too. Jonathan and Will as boys. Will especially—so small, so narrow-shouldered, always half-hidden behind someone else. Mike remembered that version of him vividly. The way Will had hovered close and observant, how Mike had felt, instinctively, that it was his job to make sure nothing ever touched him too hard.
There was something about that Will he’d never wanted to let go of.
And yet.
The newer photos told a different story. Will, taller now, shoulders squared, posture easy. Confidence worn, like it belonged there. Mike felt a swell of pride so strong it surprised him all over again. Will had gone to New York. He’d found his footing. He was leading teams now, bringing entire worlds to life on movie sets. He’d refused to shrink himself to fit anyone else’s expectations, ever since that day thirteen years ago when he’d told the truth and trusted the people who loved him to meet him there.
Mike’s gaze lingered on one picture longer than the rest. Will held Alice, her small hands fisted in his jacket, smiling. Mike stood beside them, caught mid-laugh, holding Alice’s Easter basket overflowing with plastic eggs.
The memory came back with painful clarity.
How he and Will had decided, without speaking, that Alice was going to win the egg hunt. How they’d split up the lawn, whispering directions, getting far too invested. How other parents had laughed and gently scolded them for cheating, while Alice squealed in delight.
Mike remembered watching Will that day. How Mike’s stomach had knotted as he watched Will crouch beside Alice, concentration etched into his face.
He shook his head now, forcibly pulling himself out of it.
It was strange, standing in this house, surrounded by proof of a life that kept moving forward—how much he wished Will were here. How the place felt incomplete without him, despite being warm, livable, and full of history.
Mike turned away from the wall and walked into the living room, the space opening up into the kitchen and dining area beyond. Sunlight filtered in through the windows, dust motes drifting lazily in its path. To the right, a sliding glass door led out onto Hopper’s deck. To the left, a short hallway disappeared toward the bedrooms.
He exhaled. Enough stalling. Mike bent to pick up his bag, moving through Joyce’s list, referencing it every so often to make sure he didn’t miss anything.
Feed the dogs. Walk them down the narrow path toward the road and back again, the salt air settling in his lungs, Buster tugging ahead like he had somewhere important to be, and Daisy stopping every ten feet to investigate a scent only she could understand. The sky hung low and bruised, clouds dragging themselves east.
He drove to the grocery store afterward, the bell over the door chiming too cheerfully as he stepped inside. He grabbed what he needed without thinking—eggs, bread, coffee—and then, on impulse, a six-pack of Coors Banquet.
Back at the house, he watered the plants Joyce had labeled with careful little notes. Once a day. Don’t overdo it. He answered a handful of emails at the kitchen table, fingers hovering before typing polite half-truths about progress and inspiration. Then he stripped his clothes off and stood under the shower until the water went lukewarm, steam curling around him.
By the time he emerged, hair damp and skin flushed, it was already dark.
It was warm for mid-November, wrongly warm, the kind of night that made the air feel suspended. Mike took that as permission. He pulled Joyce’s casserole from the oven, grabbed one of the beers, and carried everything out onto the screened-in part of the deck.
He opened his laptop. Spread his notes out. Took a long pull from the bottle.
Mike tried again.
The screen glowed into the dark, the white of the document too bright against the night pressing in from all sides. The ocean moved somewhere beyond the deck, steady and vast, a sound that should have been soothing but instead felt like breathing, too loud when he paid attention to it, too quiet when he didn’t.
He scrolled through his notes, fingers hovering as he reread fragments of ideas he’d once been convinced were good. Villain. Origins. Motivation.
He followed the thread where it wanted him to go, down into the rot of it. Childhood. Loneliness. Power discovered by accident and then seized with both hands. He wrote a paragraph, then another, trying to convince himself there was something useful here.
His stomach twisted.
The words felt wrong. Forced. Like he was lying to himself in real time.
Sympathizing with Vecna made his skin crawl. Trying to understand the Mind Flayer felt worse, like pressing on a bruise just to prove it still hurt. These weren’t tragic figures who’d made bad choices. They were entities that consumed. That hollowed people out and wore them like skins.
This wasn’t a hero’s fall. There was no moment of hesitation, no flicker of doubt to cling to.
This was just violence.
The cursor blinked.
Mike’s vision blurred, and suddenly he wasn’t on the deck anymore. He was tearing his body away from soldiers holding him back as his screams ripped into the MAC-Z. He was watching El disappear into darkness, her body disappearing with the Upside Down, like she’d never been real at all. He was looking at Will’s face when it wasn’t his, eyes glassy, voice wrong, something else looking out through him.
He shoved his chair back hard enough that it scraped loudly against the floor.
“Nope,” he said aloud, like that might banish it.
He slammed the laptop shut and reached for his beer, draining it without tasting it. Only then did he realize the casserole sat untouched, congealing on his plate. The ocean breeze had gone cool, the wind picking up in uneasy gusts, and somewhere beyond the deck the first fine drizzle began to fall, soft and persistent. The warmth of the night was slipping away, carried off with the rain.
He stood abruptly, a restless energy buzzing under his skin.
Inside, the house felt darker than it had before. The quiet pressed closer, heavier now that he was keyed up. He dumped the cold food into the trash, glass clinking as he set the empty bottle to do so.
The lights flickered.
Once.
Twice.
Then everything went black.
Mike sucked in a sharp breath.
The sudden absence of light felt jarring, like being shoved underwater. Outside, the wind howled against the house, rattling the windows hard enough to make the glass shiver in its frames, the distant crash of waves rising and falling like something restless and alive. Joyce’s voice echoed in his head—If there’s a storm, the power might go out. He stood there, plate still in his hand, heart thudding too fast for a rational reaction, the storm pressing in from all sides as if the house itself were holding its breath.
Then he heard it.
A sound from the front of the house. A soft, deliberate click.
The door.
Mike froze.
“Hello?” he called, instantly regretting it.
Silence answered him.
There was movement again. Fabric brushing against fabric. A foot, shifting carefully on wood.
His pulse roared in his ears. His mind filled the dark with shapes and memories it had never learned to distinguish from reality. Flashlights slicing through the dark. Government agents moving without sound. Monsters that learned how to stalk.
He let the plate drop and reached blindly for the counter.
His fingers closed around the beer bottle.
You’re being stupid, he told himself, even as fear crawled up his spine. You’re an adult. This isn’t Hawkins. This is Montauk. This is—
The bottle shattered violently against the countertop.
The sound was explosive in the silence. Glass bit into his palm. He barely noticed.
Mike stepped forward, gripping the jagged neck like a knife, breath shallow and fast. The house was completely dark, no moonlight, no spill from the street. He’d drawn the curtains earlier, sealing himself in.
Every step toward the hallway felt like stepping back into another life. Another version of himself. Twelve years old. Terrified. Ready anyway.
There was a shape ahead of him now, barely visible. Human-sized. Still.
Something metallic caught what little light filtered in through the open door.
A blade.
Mike’s heart slammed so hard it hurt. His mouth tasted like blood. His body didn’t know which instinct to obey, run or fight, so it did both, every muscle coiled and screaming.
The figure shifted.
Mike lunged.
The lights snapped back on. For a fraction of a second the world was overexposed. The entryway resolved itself in brutal clarity, a suitcase abandoned on the floor, the knife held aloft in an shaky hand.
Will.
The name didn’t even fully form before Mike skidded to a halt, his body locking up as relief tore through his body, disorienting and painful in its suddenness. His breath hitched, lungs burning. Will stood there frozen, eyes wide, fear etched so deeply into his face that Mike recognized it instantly. The same fear. The old one. The kind that lived in the body long after the danger passed.
Will inhaled, shuddering, like he’d just surfaced from deep water.
“I—I’m sorry,” he started, voice thin, breath uneven. “I thought you were—”
Mike’s hand went slack.
The broken beer bottle slipped from his fingers and shattered uselessly against the floor. The sound was small now. He barely registered it. His gaze stayed locked on Will’s face, on the way recognition slowly replaced terror, on the way Will’s shoulders sagged as the truth landed.
“Oh,” Will breathed.
The pocket knife slipped from Will’s hand a beat later, clattering harmlessly to the floor.
Neither of them moved.
They stood there, staring at each other, letting the adrenaline drain inch by inch. Mike became aware of his own breathing and forced it even. In. Out. The house came back into focus around them. The hum of the refrigerator. The faint sound of waves beyond the walls.
Will scrubbed a hand over his face, blinking hard. His eyes were glassy, lashes dark with unshed tears. Mike knew that look.
“God,” Will murmured, a shaky laugh threading through the word. “I—”
Mike swallowed. His throat burned. “Yeah,” he said softly, because he didn’t trust himself with anything else yet.
Mike let out a breath he hadn’t realized he was holding, his shoulders easing as the tension finally began to drain from him. His hands still shook faintly at his sides. Across from him, Will’s mouth tipped into a small, disbelieving smile, tentative enough that it looked like he wasn’t sure he was allowed to have it yet.
Mike felt his own expression shift in response, the corners of his mouth lifting without him quite meaning to.
Their eyes stung. Neither looked away.