Chapter Text
Chicago, December 22, 1999.
The Chicago winter possessed a cruel architecture, designed specifically to isolate. On the other side of the floor-to-ceiling windows of his industrial loft in the West Loop, the city vibrated with an electric anxiety. The Millennium Bug was two weeks away, and the paranoia of a digital collapse seemed to hum in the high-voltage cables down below. But inside Mike Wheeler's apartment, the air remained static, preserved by the clinical control of the central heating and the trail of sandalwood incense he burned to mask the metallic smell of an overly curated life.
He stood before the window, watching the yellow cabs and the mechanical movement of the L-Train slicing through the lead-gray horizon. Twenty-eight years weighed on his shoulders, but his posture was that of a man who had already given up fighting the gravity of his own secrets. The bluish light of the PowerBook G3 shone lonely on the oak desk. Blink. Blink. Blink. An electrocardiogram monitoring a patient who refused to wake up.
The world called this success. His literary sagas sold millions. The public devoured his words, seeking meaning in heroes who carried irreparable losses, never suspecting that Mike Wheeler was merely an exhumer of his own memories. He had become the face of a melancholic generation, the writer who kept Eleven's memory alive in ink and paper just so he wouldn't have to admit that, off the pages, he was a stranger in his own time.
He walked to the mahogany sideboard, fingers grazing the cold surface until finding the accumulated mail. There was an envelope from Hawkins. Max Mayfield's handwriting was there—decisive, slanting to the right, but now contained by a sobriety Mike still found hard to digest.
He opened the envelope, unfolding the single sheet of heavy cream paper. The message was warm, but in a way that made Mike's stomach turn.
"Dear Wheeler,
We finished renovating the nursery yesterday. Lucas chose a neutral tone that looks great in the morning light; I think we finally got the decoration right after arguing for so long. It’s funny how life boils down to these little things now, isn’t it? Choosing furniture, watering the garden, waiting for Sunday.We miss you. Lucas said he won't accept excuses about deadlines this year. The guest room is ready and warm. Stop hiding in Chicago and come see the friends you insist on keeping alive only on paper.
— M & L."
Mike lowered the paper, feeling the velvety texture under his thumb. There was no sarcasm, no cries for help, no boredom disguised as irony. There was only a genuine, lukewarm satisfaction. Max wasn't "surviving" in Hawkins; she was living. She and Lucas had found comfort in those little things—furniture, morning light, Sundays—that to Mike seemed only like the furniture of a waiting room for death.
That domestic happiness, patiently built over a decade, was the definitive proof that the problem wasn't Hawkins. The problem was him.
The telephone rang.
The sound cut through the sterile silence of the loft with a sharp, digital insistence, making him drop the letter on the furniture as if it burned. Mike sighed, the air leaving his lungs heavy, and massaged his left temple where a migraine was beginning to pulse.
"Hello?" He answered, his voice scratchy from disuse, raspier than he intended.
"Michael?"
Karen Wheeler's voice filled the line. There was that familiar tone, a complex alchemy of maternal relief and a perpetual guilt for being a bother. "I was trying to reach you at the office, but your assistant said you decided to work from home today. Are you eating, honey? With this cold in Chicago... I worry if you're taking care of yourself or if you're just living on coffee and those delivery boxes."
Mike twitched the corner of his mouth in a humorless smile, leaning his hip against the marble kitchen counter. The marble was cold, piercing through the thin fabric of his robe. "I'm fine, Mom. I had a sandwich a little while ago," he lied, ignoring his empty stomach. "It's just that the new manuscript is draining all my time. The deadline is before Christmas and the publisher is all over me."
"It's always the new book, isn't it?" Karen sighed on the other end of the line. Her concern was genuine, but it came filtered through layers of a routine Mike could no longer access. "I just... I wanted to know if you're okay. Is the building safe? How are things over there?"
"The building is a fortress, Mom. And life is... life." He swirled the empty glass on the counter. "And you? Everything the same?"
"Oh, the usual routine. Your father... well, is your father. I try to keep the house standing," she said, with a short, nervous laugh. "We received a card from Joyce yesterday, from Montauk. It's amazing how time passes... it's been eight years since they moved there, hasn't it? She wrote that Hopper is great, tending to a herb garden now and living the quiet life he always wanted. It's comforting to see how generous time has been to us, after everything."
Mike pressed his lips together until they lost their color, sensing the metallic taste of those words in his mouth. Comforting. Generous. Words that felt like shards of glass in his throat. Generous to whom? To the man who came back from the dead to plant basil? Certainly not to the boy who was left behind holding a silent walkie-talkie.
"Have you spoken to Holly?" he asked, cutting the subject before it suffocated him.
"I did. She's a bundle of nerves with university finals and complaining that you live thirty minutes away and don't return her pages. She said you're acting like a hermit," Karen paused, her tone becoming softer, almost pleading. "Oh, Michael... and try to call Nancy. I called the newsroom in NY and the secretary said she's gone on field coverage for two days. I get worried, it seems she never stops, never sits down to breathe. You two are so alike in that regard... you run from Hawkins as if the town were on fire."
"Nancy likes the adrenaline, Mom. She feels useful that way. It's her way of dealing with things."
"Well, I won't keep you any longer," Karen conceded, sensing the invisible wall her son had erected. "Your father sends a hug and I'm waiting for your answer about Christmas. Please, don't leave us alone this year."
Upon hanging up, Mike remained static, hand still flattened over the device, feeling the residual heat of the plastic dissipate. His mother's voice always left this trail of active melancholy, a domestic dust he tried to sweep away. Nancy, lost in an eternal crusade for a journalistic "truth" that would never sate her; Holly, navigating college with the defensive sarcasm typical of a Wheeler; and him, there, transforming his own emptiness into a literary fortune.
The gear turned. The future advanced, the trauma was left behind, but nothing vibrated.
Was he the only defective part in a perfectly lubricated machine? Sometimes, watching the snow fall outside, piling up on the sills like dirty bandages, Mike wondered if his melancholy was nothing more than an optical flaw. A clinical cynicism of a broken mind that refused to see the clarity everyone else had already embraced.
Perhaps he had simply unlearned how to translate the world. Perhaps his vision was so permanently burned by the grief for Jane that he insisted on projecting shadows where only herb gardens and calm lives existed. He felt like a colorblind man trying to discuss the color of the sky with people who described a vibrant blue he was simply incapable of seeing, leaving him only with the silent terror of being the sole terminal patient in a Hawkins where everyone had been miraculously cured.
He walked to the bar and poured himself some whiskey. The ice cracked upon touching the amber liquid, echoing in the metal and glass silence of Chicago. Mike Wheeler was the Heart that had stopped beating to the right rhythm; while the rest of the group had learned to scar over the void, he had transformed the void into his dwelling.
He brought the glass to his mouth, alcohol burning his throat, a futile attempt to warm the cold inside. His sporadic encounters with women in bars, the success, the money... it all ended with the acidic and nauseating sensation of betraying a ghost.
He was about to turn off the light in the living room and surrender to the safe darkness of another sleepless night when the knocking on the door stopped him.
They weren't the knocks of a neighbor or a delivery. They were three rapid knocks, a short pause, and three more. A muscular code. A rhythmic ghost he swore he had buried in the basement of his old house twelve years ago.
Mike approached the steel door but didn't open it. He looked through the peephole. The hallway was empty, except for a small figure. He unlocked the main deadbolt but kept the security chain engaged, opening a gap of only two inches.
There stood a child. Claire had sneakers soaked by the dirty Chicago snow and a backpack that looked too heavy for her narrow shoulders. The contrast was violent: Mike's dark silk robe against the shabby coat from an Indiana department store.
"If it's Girl Scout cookies, you're in the wrong building," Mike said, his voice hoarse and impatient. "And if you're a fan of the books, know that I call security on anyone who comes up unannounced after ten."
He started to push the door closed, but the girl didn't back down.
"I don't want an autograph. I want to know why you lied in the final chapter."
Mike stopped, the door still pressing against the jamb. He sighed, exhausted by this type of invasive interaction. "Look, kid... I don't discuss endings with readers at my front door. Go away. Your parents must be worried."
"My parents think the basement of our house is just a damp place where the boiler makes noise," she shot back, speaking fast, as if she had rehearsed this during the entire bus ride. "But I know it isn't. I live at 1224 Maple Street. I sleep in your old room."
Mike felt a slight discomfort but kept his expression closed, armored.
"Several fans know the address of the Paladin's House because of gossip magazines," he countered, using skepticism as a shield. "You read that in some interview and came here to try your luck."
"I'm not a liar. I didn't read it in any interview," she insisted, jamming the toe of her sneaker into the door gap to prevent him from closing it, demonstrating a stubbornness Mike recognized with a familiar chill. "I know things that aren't in the magazines. I know what you left behind when you ran away to the big city."
Mike looked at the dirty sneaker blocking the door. Irritation gave way to a tense vigilance. The girl didn't look like a hysterical fan; she looked exhausted, with deep dark circles and a feverish urgency. "Who are you?"
"I am Claire. I'm eleven years old. And I found you, because I need Michael Wheeler, the real one, to open this door for me. The rich writer in there is safe, but my town isn't."
Mike hesitated for another second, assessing the hallway. If the neighbors saw a wet child arguing at his door, it would be a problem. With a grunt of frustration, he released the security chain and opened the door completely.
"You have five minutes," he warned, stepping aside. "If I think this is a prank, the police will be here in ten."
Claire entered, walking cautiously over the oak flooring. She looked around the minimalist loft, absorbing the coldness of the place, the absence of personal life.
"It's all so... clean," she murmured, dropping her backpack on the floor with a heavy, wet thud. "It doesn't look like anyone lives here. It looks like a waiting room."
Mike closed the door and crossed his arms, maintaining physical and emotional distance.
"Time is ticking, Claire. What do you want? Money for a return ticket? Is that it? A teenage runaway attempt gone wrong?"
"I didn't run away," she said, turning to face him. There were marks of real exhaustion on her young face. "I came because no one there listens to me and I need you by my side. Things are wrong, Mike. There aren't monsters on Main Street, that's not it. It's... it's a silence. And underneath the silence, there's a hum. A sound that doesn't stop and that no one else seems to hear."
The word hum hit Mike like an invisible shrapnel.
His breath hitched for a second. He knew that sound. God, how he knew it. It was a phantom frequency, high-pitched and electric, that had started vibrating at the base of his skull in the early hours of January 1st, 1988, hours after the rift closed, swallowing Eleven. For twelve years, Mike tried to ignore that static noise. He had visited the best ENTs in Chicago and New York, spent fortunes on exams only to hear diagnoses of tinnitus caused by stress or acoustic trauma. He took sleeping pills just to drown out the white noise that reminded him, every night, of the energy he saw disintegrate the girl he loved.
Hearing that child say she also heard the sound threatened the only defense he had left: the belief that the noise was just a biological failure of his own broken body, and not a real echo of something that was still alive.
He needed to deny it. If she was right, then the diagnosis was wrong. And if the diagnosis was wrong, the nightmare had never ended.
Mike let out a dry, forced laugh, walking to the kitchen to get water, needing to occupy his hands which were now visibly trembling.
"Hums, silences... You have a fertile imagination, kid," he said, back turned to her, staring at his pale reflection in the dark window glass. "It's common at your age to project fiction onto reality, especially when living in a boring town like Hawkins. You read my books and start seeing shadows where there's nothing. That sound? It's the sound of boredom."
"It's not projection!" Claire raised her voice, frustration spilling over. "Why do you insist on pretending that all of that was made up?"
"Because it was!" Mike slammed the glass on the counter, water splashing onto the marble. He spun around to face her, the mask of calm slipping, revealing the open wound beneath. "Listen here. I created a mythology. Monsters, dimensions, heroes... it's all a metaphor for the trauma of growing up in a small town in the eighties. That is how I pay for this apartment. That is how I pay for my expensive whiskey. I sell comfortable lies so people don't have to deal with the ugly and monotonous truth of real life."
"You are a coward," she said. The word came out low, but cutting.
"I am an adult," Mike corrected, harsh. "And adults know that monsters don't exist. There are only bills to pay and pasts to forget. Now, get your backpack. I'm going to call a cab to take you to the station and they will contact your parents."
He grabbed the cordless phone. Claire didn't move. She just bent down, unzipped her backpack, and pulled out an object, sliding it across the wooden floor until it stopped at Mike's feet.
It was a journal. Blue cover, battered, with Ghostbusters stickers faded by time and forgetfulness.
Mike looked at the object as if it were a grenade with the pin pulled. The phone in his hand suddenly seemed to weigh a ton.
"Where... where did you get this?" His voice failed, losing all the artificial authority he had tried to project.
"It was stuck between the ceiling beams in the basement, behind the boiler," Claire said, her voice trembling now, exhaustion overcoming anger. "I read it, Mike. I read what you wrote when Will went missing. And I read what you wrote about the girl."
Mike crouched slowly, knees cracking, and touched the cover. The texture of the old cardboard sent an electric shock through his fingers, a direct connection to an ancient pain he kept anesthetized. He hadn't seen that notebook since the summer of 1985.
"This is private property," he whispered, but there was no strength in the accusation. It was just a defensive reflex, a last trench. "These are the ramblings of a traumatized teenager. It means nothing today."
"You wrote about her as if she were the only sun in Hawkins," Claire retorted, ignoring his denial, her voice gaining a frightening firmness for a child. "And in your books, you turned her into the Mage, a distant and untouchable figure. But in your journal, she is real. You talk about cold Eggos, the three-inch door rule, mental signals only the two of you knew. You write all these books not to give heroic endings to your friends, Mike. You write to try to convince yourself that she was just a chapter you closed. But she is so much more."
Her words hit him not like a physical blow, but like an electric discharge, reactivating circuits he had spent a decade trying to burn out. Eggos. Three inches. The only sun. The sterile Chicago loft seemed to shrink, the exposed brick walls closing in on him, suffocating the safety he had bought. Suddenly, the artificial smell of incense was replaced by the comforting mustiness of the Wheeler basement in 1983. He heard the rhythmic clatter of twenty-sided dice on the Formica table, felt the freezing panic of the night Will disappeared in the rain, and saw, with a painful and blinding clarity, the exact moment the flashlight beams illuminated a soaked, scared, shaved-headed girl in the woods. That spark, that primal intuition that had shaped his entire existence—the certainty that the world was bigger, stranger, and more terrifying than adults said—burned in his chest again. He had spent years trying to suffocate that flame with expensive whiskey, cynicism, and publishing contracts, trying desperately to be the functional adult who doesn't believe in monsters. But he could no longer silence his intuition. Not this time. Not when it knocked on his door in the middle of the night in the form of an eleven-year-old girl holding his most sacred memories hostage.
"In your new book, you say that Hawkins is a place of healing, that people moved on," Claire continued, ruthless. "But that is a lie. I see your friends. I see Professor Henderson every morning, smiling at the students, but he never looks anyone in the eye. I see Mr. Sinclair driving his patrol car, parked at the edge of the quarry for hours, staring at nothing. They aren't healed. They look... hollow. As if they forgot to wake up."
Mike felt a knot tighten in his throat. Hollow. Forgot to wake up. The words hit him harder than any monster from the Upside Down. He could formulate a defense, say that Dustin was happy, that Lucas was a pillar of the community, but the image of his friends' forced smiles over the last twelve years invaded his mind. Smiles of survivors who were just pretending to live.
Claire took a step forward, invading his personal space, her large, serious eyes fixed on his, seeing right through all his layers of protection.
"Now I just want you to see it, Wheeler. Not with their eyes, but with mine."
Mike remained crouched, breathing shallowly. The phantom hum in his head, the one he treated with medication and denial, seemed to have increased in volume, resonating in harmony with the urgency in the girl's voice.
He stood up slowly, the journal gripped in his hand with such force that his knuckles turned white, the old cover crumpling under the pressure. He looked at the manuscript of his new book on the laptop—a pile of well-written lies designed to sell comfort—and then at the dirty, terrified girl in his living room, who offered him only the inconvenient truth.
"Get your coat," Mike said. His voice was no longer hoarse; it was low, grave, and terrifyingly lucid.
"Are you going to call the police?" Claire stepped back, startled by the sudden change in atmosphere.
Mike went to the coat rack. His movements were no longer hesitant; they were precise. He snatched his leather jacket and the keys to the Audi. He turned to her, and for the first time in years, his eyes didn't hold the cynical, distant glint of the famous writer. There was in them the feverish intensity of the boy who pedaled through the rain against all odds to save his friends.
"No. I'm taking you home." He opened the loft door in a brisk motion, letting the cold hallway air in. "And if there really is something making noise in my basement, if there is the slightest chance you are right... we are going to find out what it is."
He paused, hand on the doorknob, looking at her with a seriousness that aged his face ten years.
"But if you're lying, Claire... if this is a cruel prank... this is going to end badly. Very badly."
Claire nodded, swallowing hard, and put her backpack on, the weight seeming a little lighter now.
Mike turned off the lights, plunging the loft into darkness, leaving behind the PowerBook blinking its useless cursor. As they walked to the elevator, he tucked the journal into the inner pocket of his jacket, pressing it against his chest, where his heart beat in an off-beat and painfully familiar rhythm.