Chapter Text
They say the world ends with a bang, but Mike always knew it would be a sound.
A scream.
A crack.
A snap of something that wasn’t meant to break.
Tonight, it’s all three…
The sky over Hawkins is wrong.
It’s the color of a healing bruise, purples and blacks and an ugly red that bleeds along the horizon. Lightning forks silently across it, cracking through veils of floating ash. The air tastes like pennies and smoke and something else, something alive and angry.
“Mike!” Dustin’s voice is almost lost in the roar of the wind. “You good?”. Not really, Mike thinks, but he nods anyway, tightening his grip on the thing in his hands.
It doesn’t look like a bomb. That’s what everyone keeps saying.
It looks like a suitcase someone took a crowbar to and stuffed full of nightmares: stolen Russian circuitry, scavenged lab capacitors, a plastic Ghostbusters trap housing, one of Murray’s old shortwave radios, wires in colors he didn’t know existed. Taped along the side is a cracked Walkman, half melted knobs from an arcade cabinet, a row of humming blue vials that glow like the particles that used to pour out of the Mind Flayer’s gate.
He spent hours on his bedroom floor with graph paper and notebooks, drawing it and redrawing it, staying up until his eyes burned, until pencil smudges were ground into the heel of his hand. This screw goes here. This circuit feeds that one. This is where it all funnels, like a spell circle. Like a plan, the way a Dungeon Master makes plans: dangerous on paper. Alive in his head. Now it sits in his palms, heavy and vibrating softly, the little red countdown display flickering between numbers and static. It looks like something built by a kid who loved stories and then grew up too fast. Mike Wheeler, age seventeen, knee deep in hell for what he really hopes is the last time.
Behind him, looming up like a whole night sky made into a shape, is the core of Dimension X: a swirling throat of darkness, teeth of rock and bone, a million points of scarlet light flickering like distant stars. The Upside Down hangs off it like a tumor, hooks of frozen Hawkins stuck in the sludge of an alien universe.
The wormhole shudders and groans. The air bends toward it.
“Mike.” Will’s voice is closer than he expected.
He turns. Will’s standing next to him, close enough that their shoulders almost brush. Close enough that Mike can see every fleck of ash in Will’s hair, the streak of blood along his jaw, the way his eyes, the same deep, honest green brown they’ve been since kindergarten- glow faintly gold around the edges every time the dimension pulses.
“You ready?” Will asks.
His voice is steady. That’s the thing that gets Mike. After everything, after being taken and possessed and used like a radio tower for a cosmic monster, Will still sounds like himself.
Mike swallows. “Yeah.”
He isn’t. He does it anyway.
He’s been doing things he’s not ready for since he was eleven.
The bomb doesn’t tick down like in the movies. There’s no dramatic beeping.
It hums. The vials along its side flare, each one blooming with the same eerie blue from the old Gate. The Walkman sparks and the tape reels inside spin backwards. The shortwave radio shrieks once, then goes completely silent. Heat floods through the casing, searing Mike’s palms. He grits his teeth and holds on. Across the clearing, the wormhole’s throat convulses.
It’s like watching a storm pull itself inside-out. The red lights collapse inward, streaking toward the center, forming a spinning disk of seething color. The black around it gets darker, more dense, sucking in ash and bone and shattered chunks of Hawkins. The Upside Down groans like a living thing in pain. El is the fulcrum. The energy from the bomb funnels straight toward her outstretched hands, arcs invisible lines through her body, out through her fingers to the gates, to the vines, to every open wound between their world and this one. Her eyes snap open.
There’s no pupil, no iris, just white light laced with cracks of gold.
For a second, Mike isn’t afraid of her. He’s afraid for her.
“El!” he shouts. “Don’t—”
The world explodes.
Not outward. Inward.
The sound is too big to be called a noise, it’s an event. His teeth rattle in his skull. His vision burns white, then negative, like someone took a photograph of his soul. The ground leaps up and punches him in the chest.
He’s falling up, down, sideways, he can’t tell. There’s a tearing sensation in his gut, like invisible hooks are being yanked free one by one. Around him, everything is motion: red sky, black vines, pieces of houses, frozen vines, the snow of ash, all dragged toward the shrinking point of the wormhole.
He can’t breathe. His lungs don’t work in this kind of reality.
He realizes he’s screaming, but he can’t hear himself. Then: a hand catches his sleeve. Mike latches onto it without thinking. His fingers curl around Will’s wrist, grip desperate and clumsy. He feels Will’s pulse under his thumb, fast, human, anchor-strong. Will’s eyes flash gold. He’s crying, tears streak through the grime on his face, carving clean lines. “It’s working,” Will mouths. Mike can’t hear it, but he reads his lips. “It’s working.” The wormhole shrinks. The Upside Down shudders again and then begins to… crumble.
Not like something breaking apart, but like something being erased. Streets, trees, whole neighborhoods dissolve into a cloud of black dust that twists and vanishes into the funnel. The great, looming spider-shape of the Mind Flayer, coiled above, is yanked down, unfurling its legs in a last, furious spasm before it too is sucked into the singularity. For a heartbeat, Mike sees it differently. He sees it as lines of light and shadow, as threads stretching between worlds. He sees El, at the center of those threads, every neuron in her brain lit up like a galaxy. He sees Will as a ghost overlaying the whole scene, the outline of his younger self trapped in the Mind Flayer’s silhouette, screaming without sound.
He sees himself, small and bright, holding the bomb that isn’t just a bomb, it’s a story, a choice, an ending.
Then the funnel slams shut.
Silence.
The ash stops falling. The red tears in the sky stitch themselves up with a nauseous, glistening hiss. The black ground beneath them cracks, then breaks like glass underfoot, revealing glimpses of… normal. A dark blue sky. Real clouds. The crooked treeline of the woods outside Hawkins. Mike blinks. His ears ring. They’re back. Not at the Wheeler house or the Byers’ old place, but in the Mac-Z. Except now the portal is just back to being a destroyed library. Around him, the others groan and move.
Steve coughs. “Christ,” he wheezes. “Is it… is it over?”
Dustin drags himself up on his elbows. “Did we win? Tell me we won.”
Lucas is crying openly, one hand on her shoulder, shoulders shaking. Robin flops onto her back and stares at the sky like she doesn’t trust it.
The sky is just… clear.
Mike turns, wild panic in his chest.
“El,” he gasps. “El?”
She’s lying a few feet away, half on her side. Her nosebleed has slowed to a smear. Her eyes are closed, lashes dark crescents against her cheeks. There’s blood at one ear.
For one terrifying moment, she doesn’t move. Then she breathes in, shivering, and opens her eyes. They aren’t glowing. They’re just dark and tired, familiar.
“Mike,” she rasps. He drops the dead, smoking weight of the bomb and scrambles to her, knees sliding in the dirt. He doesn’t think. He just hauls her up and into him, arms locking around her.
She’s shaking. He’s shaking.
“You did it,” he whispers into her hair. “You did it, El. You closed it. It’s gone.”
Her hands clutch at the back of his jacket, fingers twisting in the fabric like she’s falling and he’s the only solid thing. Behind him, there’s a small, sharp sound that might be a laugh or a sob. Mike turns his head. Will is standing a few feet away, one hand pressed to his chest. He’s looking at them like he’s seeing a sunrise from inside a storm shelter. The air between them is packed with everything Mike hasn’t said: I love you. I’m sorry. I don’t know how to be without this. Please don’t disappear.
He wants to let go of El and stand up and go to him, wants to put his hands on Will’s shoulders and say something, anything, that isn’t coming out. Instead, he just stares back, helpless. Will scrubs a hand over his face, smearing grime and tears together. Then he nods at Mike, once, small but sure, and looks up at the sky.
They did it.
They actually did it. For about thirty seconds, there is nothing in the world except relief. Pure, stupid, giddy relief. Steve is laughing a little hysterical bursts. Robin is talking nonstop about hot showers vickie and pizza. Dustin is trying to check everyone for injuries like three people at once. Nancy and Jonathan are locked in an embrace that looks like it might break bone. Hopper is hugging Joyce so tightly she might disappear into his chest.
Mike feels something unclench in his spine that he’s been carrying for years.
Then the helicopters arrive. He hears them before he sees them: the thump-thump-thump of rotors, heavy enough to make the ground tremble. Shadows ripple over the field. Dust and ash swirl back into the air. Hopper pulls away from Joyce, squinting up. His jaw does that thing that means he’s assessing, calculating. Fear flickers in his eyes, under the cop instinct.
“Shit,” Robin mutters. “That was fast.”
“Who is that?” Steve asks. “Is that Owens? Please tell me it’s Owens and not, like, the federal government.”
The first helicopter sweeps low, wind from the blades flattening the grass. A floodlight washes over them, too bright after so much red darkness. Mike throws up an arm to shield his eyes.
“Stay together,” Hopper yells over the noise. “Everyone stay together!” For half a second, it looks like they’re just going to land and… talk. That’s what Owens always said, isn’t it? We’re the good guys.
Nancy and Jonathan gather the other kids Holly, Debbie, Thomas, Wendy, Rebecca, Josh, Derek, Mary, Glenn, Valerie, Benji, and Roger. The kids are obviously panicking, crying and clinging onto each other after being in the abyss for who knows how long.
Then the hazmat suits start pouring out. They’re worse than the ones at the lab. Bulky white plastic, black visors, oxygen packs hissing quietly. They move in formation, practiced, weapons held close. Some kind of gun Mike doesn’t recognize, sleek, dark, with cartridges along the side that glow pale green.
“This doesn’t feel very ‘you saved the world, thanks, here’s a medal’ to me,” Dustin says thinly.
“Run?” Robin suggests.
They don’t get the chance.
“DOWN ON YOUR KNEES!” a voice booms through a megaphone. “HANDS ON YOUR HEAD! DO IT NOW!”
Mike flinches. El stiffens against him. Will takes a step closer, like instinctively moving between Mike and the men. Hopper steps forward, hands up, palms out. “Hey! Hey! It’s okay, we—these are kids. We’ve been through enough. Talk to us.” One of the hazmat guys, higher rank, maybe, his suit marked with a stripe approaches, weapon leveled but not quite aimed. His voice when he speaks is distorted by the mask.
“Jim Hopper,” he says. “Joyce Byers You’re to come with us. All of you.”
“Come with—where?” Joyce demands. Her voice is shredded but furious. “What is this? Owens didn’t say—”
“We’re under new protocols,” the man says. “Post-Event Containment. Move to the transports. Now.”
“Like hell,” Hopper says.
He doesn’t get more than that out before something whistles through the air and hits him in the neck. Mike doesn’t recognize it for what it is at first. It’s a tiny dart, barely bigger than a mosquito. Hopper slaps at his neck like at a bug, staring at the hazmat man in disbelief. Then he sways.
“Hop!” Joyce screams.
He collapses to his knees, then forward, heavy and limp.
Everything explodes into motion. Joyce lunges toward him and gets a dart between the shoulder blades for her trouble. Steve steps in front of the younger kids, bat raised, and another hazmat soldier fires, the dart sinking into his arm. Nancy aims her gun and it’s knocked from her hand by a crackling net of some kind.
“El!” Mike yells. “El, do something!”
She tries.
He feels her gather herself, that familiar pressure like the air being sucked out of the room. Her hand lifts, fingers trembling. For a split second, the first line of soldiers halt as if hitting an invisible wall. Then El gasps. Blood pours from her nose, sudden and heavy. She doubles over in his arms, hands going to her temples. The men in suits don’t even flinch. One of them levels his weapon, not the dart gun, something bulkier and fires. The dart hits El in the side of the neck. Her eyes meet Mike’s, dark and shocked and so, so tired.
“Mike,” she whispers.
“NO!” he chokes. “El—”
She slumps in his arms, weight sudden and frightening.
“Will!” Mike shouts, panicking. “We gotta—”
But Will is already grabbing at him, trying to drag him backward, away. “Mike, we have to—”
The hiss of another dart. This one hits Will in the back of his shoulder. He stiffens. His eyes go wide, not with pain, exactly, but with a weird kind of clarity, like something inside him recognizes the chemical and hates it. Mike’s hands close on his jacket. “Will—”
“Don’t—” Will fumbles, trying to shove him back. “Don’t let them— the kids”
He doesn’t get to finish. His knees buckle. Mike goes down with him, still clinging, ending up half on the ground, half sprawled over Will’s chest, El limp against his side. For a second he’s just… tangled up with them, arms around both, like if he holds on tight enough the world can’t rearrange them.
“Don’t touch the boy in the middle,” a hazmat voice says sharply, somewhere above him. “Not yet. His readings are off the charts.”
“I thought the target was 011,” another says, almost bored. “The girl.”
“The subject parameters changed. This one, Wheeler, Michael. He was at the center of the implosion field. We need to see how the dimensional exposure affected his hippocampal—”
Mike isn’t listening. His world has narrowed to the hot sting in his own neck where the dart finally finds him. He slaps a hand over the spot, but it’s too late. Cold spreads from the injection site, racing through his veins like ice water. His limbs go heavy and distant. He fights it. Of course he fights it. He’s fought monsters with nothing but a flashlight and a nail-bat backup. He’s argued with creatures older than the planet while holding a walkie-talkie. He’s not going down because some asshole in a plastic suit wants him to. He digs his fingers into the dirt. He focuses on everything real: the weight of El’s head against his ribs, the scratch of Will’s jacket under his hand, the sound of Dustin yelling somewhere, high and furious the clatter of Robin’s boots. The smell of char and burned ozone and Hopper’s aftershave, somehow still there under the chemicals.
Don’t forget, something in him says.
It’s not a voice he recognizes. It feels like the part of him that has kept scores and stats and storylines straight for campaigns that lasted years. The part that remembers every time Will smiled at him like he hung the stars.
Don’t let them take this, too.
“Mike!” Dustin’s voice cracks. “MIKE!”
A hand closes on his shoulder, trying to pull him away from the tangle of bodies. He snarls and twists, managing a weak, sloppy punch that glances off the hazmat suit.
“Resilient little bastard,” someone mutters. The cold reaches his chest. His heart thuds once, twice, then each beat feels farther apart, like the spaces between them are being stretched out. His last clear impression is of Will’s face, turned toward him even in unconsciousness. Lips parted. Brows drawn together, like he’s still worried, even in whatever dark they’ve pushed him into.
“Don’t,” Mike mumbles. It comes out thick. “Don’t touch him. Don’t touch—”
The world folds in.
White.
That’s the first thing he knows when he surfaces again. Not the soft white of clouds or curtains, but the painful, antiseptic white of hospital lights and painted cinderblock. It hums at the edges of his vision. Mike is lying on his back. His wrists and ankles are strapped down with thick, padded restraints. There’s a band around his chest too, not tight, but snug enough that he can feel his own breathing against it. His mouth tastes like chemicals and cotton.
“Subject is awake,” a voice says, distant and clinical. “Elevated heart rate. Respiration normalizing.”
“Good,” another voice replies. “Let’s begin.”
Mike licks his lips. It takes more effort than it should. “Where… where are—”
A face appears in his line of sight, upside down and haloed by the fluorescent glare. A man in his late thirties or early forties, dark hair, rimless glasses. No hazmat suit now, just a white lab coat, an ID badge with too many acronyms, a neutral expression.
“Good morning, Michael,” the man says. “Do you know your full name?”
Mike stares at him. “Yeah,” he croaks. “Mike. Michael Wheeler. Where are my friends? Where’s El? Where’s—”
The man doesn’t react at the names. He glances at something out of Mike’s field of view. “Cognitive baseline is intact. Proceed with Stage One.”
Mike turns his head.
It takes a second to register that there’s a machine beside him, looming over the narrow bed. It looks like someone crossed an MRI scanner with the kind of halo device he’s only ever seen in comic books: a circular array hanging over his head, dotted with small, blinking lights, cables snaking from it into a bank of consoles. A nurse maybe, she’s in scrubs, adjusting electrodes on his temples, sticking cold, gel-slick patches to his skin.
He flinches. “Don’t—”
“Please lie still,” she says calmly. “This will go more smoothly that way.”
“What is this?” His voice cracks. Panic sharpens it. “What are you doing?”
“We’re going to help you,” the man says. “These experiences you’ve had, these delusions of parallel dimensions, monsters, psychokinetic children—”
“They’re not delusions,” Mike snaps. The strap across his chest keeps him from sitting up, but he strains against it anyway. “They’re real. You know they’re real. You were there. At the lab. At the… at the base near the gate. You sent us in.”
“The gas leak in Hawkins has had unfortunate neurological side effects on several patients,” the man continues smoothly, like he hasn’t heard. “We’ve been authorized by the Department of Energy and other relevant agencies to perform a cleansing protocol. We call it the Clean Slate Project.” He says it like it’s a kindly charity, like they’re washing graffiti off a wall. Mike feels cold in a way the sedative never achieved.
“Clean Slate,” he repeats. “You mean—what, you’re gonna… you’re gonna erase us? Our memories?”
The man’s mouth twitches, but not quite into a smile. “We’re going to help you let go of damaging, fabricated narratives that your brain has constructed around a traumatic event,” he says. “Without them, you’ll be able to reintegrate into a normal life. College. Family. A future.”
“I have a family,” Mike snarls. “And they almost died. We all almost died. More than once. I am not letting you—”
The nurse presses a small plunger on the IV line in his arm. Coolness spreads up his vein, mixing with the residual chill of the tranquilizer.
The silver ring of the machine above him starts to hum.
“Relax, Michael,” the man says. “This is going to feel like falling asleep. When you wake up, you’ll be… better.”
Mike’s vision blurs at the edges, but his mind, his mind snaps into a sharp, terrified focus. HIs first thoughts are of Will, years ago, standing in the middle of Castle Byers with a flashlight, telling him about a drawing. He thinks of El on his doorstep in the rain. Dustin’s stupid hat. Lucas’ eye-rolls. Max’s laughter. The smell of Eggo waffles. The Christmas lights blinking like morse code. The snow of ash in the woods. He thinks of Vecna’s hollow eyes and the way his voice felt inside their skulls, promising them that nothing they did mattered, that all roads led here. If they take this, if they take everything that happened, who is he? Who are they?
“Don’t,” he croaks. His tongue feels too big. “Don’t do this. I remember. You can’t— you can’t just—”
“Begin extraction,” the man says.
The world shatters into light.
It isn’t pain, exactly. If anything, it’s too much feeling. Too many feelings, all at once. The machine’s hum ramps up into a roar. The lights strobe, and with each pulse something yanks inside Mike’s head, small at first, little threadlike tugs behind his eyes. Images cascade: Will, soaked and shaking, in the Byers’ living room, coughing up what looks like slug. El, head shaved, in a hospital gown. A Demogorgon in the school hallway, its petals opening like the worst flower in the world. The Mind Flayer towering over the town. The mall burning. Billy’s face as he— A jerk. That memory blurs, then smears, then slips between his metaphorical fingers.
“Stop it—” he gasps.
He tries to hold on, tries to mentally grab each image as it surfaces, cling to it. But they come faster: blood and snow and bike rides at dusk, Will’s laugh, El’s uneven handwriting, Max’s mixtapes. Christmas lights on the Byers’ wall, spelling out letters. A cabin in the woods, under siege. A hospital hallway with too much blood. Hopper disappearing in a wash of light and smoke. Each time his brain touches one, the machine snaps onto it like a hungry thing and pulls. Outside the flickering tunnel of his vision, voices argue.
“Spike in neural activity,” someone says. “The subject is resisting.”
“He’s a kid,” another voice says. Younger, less flat. “You’re pushing him too far. His hippocampus is lit up like a Christmas tree.”
“We warned you,” a third voice, smooth and irritated cuts in. “Their experiences are entangled with the dimensional matrix. If you start pulling threads too hard—”
“We don’t have the luxury of being gentle,” the first man, the lead, Mike’s tormentor says sharply. “Not with this many exposed civilians. We’re burning the infection out at the root. Increase amplitude.”
The hum spikes. The light goes from bright to searing. Mike screams. He’s not sure how long it lasts. Time doesn’t work right inside the ring. His body sweats and trembles, tears leak from the corners of his eyes. He tastes copper. His heart gallops, then stutters. Memories pop like soap bubbles: Lucas at the Snow Ball, rolling his eyes but smiling as Max drags him onto the floor. Steve teaching Dustin how to do his hair. Robin, laughing and terrified. Erica monologuing about communism. Jonathan developing film in a darkroom, the red light painting his face. Hawkins. The Upside Down. Dimension X. All of it is pulled, dissected, sorted. His mind fights back in weird ways. Random phrases stick, loops of sound that have nothing to do with the monsters: Will’s voice saying “It was the best thing I’ve ever done,” El whispering “Friends don’t lie,” Dustin yelling “Never tell me the odds!” during a campaign. Holly’s tiny voice crying “Mike? Mike, I’m scared.”
Holly.
The light falters. Just a flicker. But enough.
“Did you see that?” a voice snaps.
“Electromagnetic interference?” another suggests. “Residual from the implosion?”
“Reading’s off. His waveform’s not aligning with the others.”
“There’s a reason we told you not to run full scrubs on the primary subjects,” the smooth voice says. “Their neural patterns are now… let’s say, partially fused with extradimensional residue. You start reformatting that, you risk backlash.”
“We’ll deal with backlash later,” the lead says. “We need him clean. If any of them remember—”
If any of them remember. That sentence hits something in Mike like a thrown rock. It’s a phrase he knows from somewhere else, remixed: If any of them remember, we’re dead. We’re exposed. He latches onto it. Uses the anger to claw his way up through the drugged haze, through the ripping whirl of memories. He thinks of Holly, younger, laughing as he pulled her in a wagon. He thinks of her later, pale and shaking, clinging to his arm. He thinks of her now, hopefully asleep in a bed in a world where the sky is finally not red. He wants her to never know any of this again. But he wants to remember. Someone has to remember. Someone has to keep the story straight, to know what they fought for, who they lost, who they saved.
Something deep in the machine whines. The lights flicker harder, struggling between two frequencies.
“Sir,” the young voice says again, urgent now, “if we keep pushing at this intensity, we risk permanent cognitive fragmentation. He might never pass as baseline. He’ll end up in a cage forever.”
“Then adjust the parameters,” the smooth voice murmurs. “Mask, don’t erase. Put a veil over it. You don’t burn a house down if you can just… wallpaper over the bloodstains.”
The lead hesitates. Mike groans, the sound raw. Suddenly the pressure eases. Not completely, but enough that he can drag in a breath without feeling like his memories are being flossed out through his tear ducts. The light stabilizes into a steady glow. The machine’s hum drops into a lower, constant throb.
“New protocol,” the lead says tightly. “We’re initiating partial overlay. Target: suppress conscious recall. Maintain core identity, family, educational history. Flag anomalous recollections for therapeutic intervention. Satisfied?”
“Ecstatic,” the smooth voice says dryly.
Mike doesn’t fully understand what they’re saying. The words filter through like radio static. But he understands one thing: they can’t do it. Not all the way. Something has gone wrong. Or right. He grabs onto that. Clinging to the memories is like clinging to barbed wire now. Every time he touches one, it hurts, and the machine tries to smother it in cotton. He feels it laying down layers: false explanations, softened edges, dreams instead of experiences. He forces images into weird shapes, tries to twist them so the machine won’t recognize them as what they are.
The Demogorgon becomes a dragon, the Mind Flayer a storm giant. The lab turns into a wizard’s tower. Vecna is… still Vecna, because of course his name is already the name of a lich from D&D some things are too on-the-nose to edit. He turns the whole nightmare into a campaign in his head. If it’s “just a story,” maybe they will let it slide.
He doesn’t know if it works. After a while, minutes, hours, days, the hum fades. The lights dim.
His body sags against the restraints, exhausted.
“Stage One complete,” the nurse says quietly.
“How much?” the lead asks.
“Eighty percent of relevant trauma-associated content suppressed or rerouted,” she replies. “Structural memories intact. Family. Pre-event schooling. Basic autobiographical continuity.”
“And the… extradimensional index?”
“Residual activity,” she says reluctantly. “Some nodes remain highly active. Particularly those associated with two individuals: Subject 011 and Subject Byers, William.”
Mike’s heart stutters at their names.
“Try any harder and you risk cooking his brain,” the smooth voice adds. “We’ve reached optimal compromise.”
A beat of silence. Then the lead says, “Fine. Move to verification.” The nurse leans over Mike. Her face is softer than the man’s, her eyes less hard. There’s a faint crease between her brows.
“Michael,” she says. “Can you hear me?” He swallows. “Yeah,” he whispers.
“Do you know where you are?” He hesitates. The true answer—In the bowels of some government black site where they’re erasing my life—sticks behind his teeth.
“A lab,” he says instead. His voice sounds small. “A… hospital? I don’t know. It’s… bright.”
“Do you remember Hawkins?” she asks.
He pictures the town: the main street, the arcade, the school, the woods. He also sees vines choking the streets, snowing ash, gates. Forcing the two images together makes his temples pound.
“Yeah,” he says again, carefully. “That’s… where I live.”
“And do you remember,” the lead cuts in, “anything unusual happening there recently? Anything… out of the ordinary?”
Mike looks at him. He thinks of monsters and gates and soldiers and blood. He thinks of the mall burning, of Hopper’s letter, of El’s tears on his shoulder. He thinks of Will standing in his doorway in the rain, holding that stupid painting he never got to see until much later. The machine hums faintly above him, like it’s listening.
“Gas leak,” he says, letting the words the man used settle over his tongue. “There was… a gas leak. People got sick.”
“And before that?”
He frowns, pretending to reach. He lets some of the fuzz curtain drop, like he can’t quite get his fingers on the images.
“Nothing,” he lies.
The nurse’s eyes search his face. For a second he wonders if she can tell that he’s faking. If she can see how hard he’s gripping the frayed ends of his real memories, wrapped tight around the scaffolding of his mind like secret knots. She looks away.
“Subject appears compliant,” she says.
“Good.” The lead’s shoes squeak faintly as he turns away. “Initiate family reintegration protocol. We’ll move him to debriefing.”
“What about the others?” the younger voice asks. “The Byers boy? The girl?”
“Subjects 011 and William Byers require additional containment,” the lead says. “Their… unique conditions necessitate longer-term observation. For now, we focus on returning as many of the secondary witnesses to their lives as possible. Get them off the board.” Mike’s fingers twitch uselessly against the restraints. He has just enough strength left for one, half-formed thought:
I’m not off the board.
Then the world goes gray again.
They don’t put him back in his own clothes right away. First there are interviews. A room with a table bolted to the floor, a glass wall that is definitely a mirror. A man in a suit who asks him the same questions in slightly different ways.
“How do you feel about your friends?”
“Have you experienced any recurring nightmares?”
“When you think of Hawkins, what’s the first image that comes to mind?”
He answers like a good boy. He talks about school, about being in the AV club, about D&D campaigns that he frames as “just games” even as he lists battles that sound a lot like what actually happened. He talks about his family. He talks about normal stuff—bikes and homework and stupid fights with his sister. The man in the suit nods, writes things down, makes little satisfied noises. They show him pictures on a screen.
A regular forest. He says, “That looks like the woods out by Mirk—uh, by the quarry.”
A Demogorgon, heavily redacted, blurred, shadowed, someone’s idea of what might have been there. His pulse spikes and he fights it down and squints.
“That’s… from a movie?” he hazards. “Looks fake.”
A shot of the mall in flames. He feels that one like a punch. Smoke, sirens, El bleeding. Billy.
“Gas leak,” he says stiffly. “There was a… fire. I don’t… really remember.”
“You’re doing very well,” the man says.
He wants to punch him. They keep him there long enough that he loses track of time. The lights never change, there’s no window, no sense of day or night. They feed him bland food that tastes like cardboard and metal. They give him pills that they say are vitamins. He hides them under his tongue and spits them out in the bathroom when he can.
Once, just once, he sees Will. They’re wheeling Mike down a corridor, his wrists cuffed to the rails of the chair “for safety.” The halls are the same antiseptic white, the same hum of fluorescent lights. Doors line the walls, some open, some closed. They pass a doorway where the curtain isn’t quite drawn. In that narrow wedge of space, Mike sees a profile: Will on a bed, electrodes on his temples, eyes closed. His hair is longer than it was a couple weeks ago, curling onto his forehead. His hands are clenched in fists on the sheets. There’s a man standing beside him, speaking quietly to someone Mike can’t see.
“…neural patterns are unique,” the man is saying. “No matter how we reroute, his system keeps re-accessing certain pathways. It’s like there’s a… memory of a memory. Some kind of echo.”
“We can’t have him remembering the event,” another voice replies.
“He won’t,” the first man says. “Not consciously. But the residue may manifest in other ways. Nightmares. Somatic symptoms. Artistic expression.”
Mike jerks against the cuffs.
“Will!” he shouts. “Will!”
His voice ricochets off the hallway walls, too loud in the sterile space. The orderly pushing his chair swears, trying to steer him away. A guard at the far end turns, hand going to his weapon.
Will’s eyelids flutter. For a fraction of a second, his gaze, heavy-lidded, drugged, meets Mike’s through the gap in the curtain.
Mike doesn’t know how much Will sees. If he recognizes him. If the name “Mike” means anything to him right now. But Will’s fingers uncurl, reaching a bare inch, like a muscle memory. Then the curtain snaps closed.
“Do not engage with other patients, Mr. Wheeler,” the orderly says, breathless. “For your own wellbeing.”
“For my—” Mike laughs, a harsh, cracked sound. “For my wellbeing?”
His hands won’t stop shaking. He knots them into fists. He doesn’t know me, Mike thinks, wild, nauseated. He looked at me and he didn’t—
He shoves the thought down so hard it aches.
Later, hours, days, whatever, they finally give him his clothes. They escort him to a locker room, unlock a gray metal door, hand him his jeans and sneakers and plaid shirt. They’ve been washed, they smell like generic detergent instead of smoke and fear. There’s a mirror over the sink. He stares at himself.
He looks… normal. Stupidly normal. Seventeen. Tired. Eyes bruised underneath, hair a mess, a fading bruise on his neck from the dart. If he squints, he can almost pretend all of this was just some freak accident at a lab he happened to be touring.
A gas leak.
He curls his hands on the edge of the sink until his knuckles go white.
“I remember,” he whispers to his reflection. “I remember you. I remember them. I remember everything.”
He says it again. And again. Like a spell.
Finally, a guard clears his throat. “Time to go, kid.”
They walk him down another corridor, this one with fewer doors. At the end is a pair of heavy doors with a palm scanner. Beyond that, a loading area. The air is different there, less artificial. There’s a hint of outside in it, of oil and wet concrete. Waiting next to a nondescript black car is a man in a crisp suit. Not the one from the interviews. Someone higher up, air of authority fitted to him like a second coat. His hair is thinning, his expression bland. He holds a folder under one arm.
“Michael,” he says as the guard brings him forward. “You’ve been very brave.”
Mike glares at him. “Where’s my family?”
“In a moment.” The man gestures, and the guard steps back a pace, still close enough to grab Mike if he bolts. “First, I want to talk to you. Man to man.”
Mike says nothing.
“We’ve evaluated you,” the man continues. “You’re a smart young man. You’ve been through a distressing experience.”
“That’s one way to put it,” Mike mutters.
The man ignores the sarcasm. “You’re going to go home now,” he says. “You’re going to finish high school, go to college, live your life. The… fantastical narratives your mind constructed to cope with the gas leak will fade in time.”
“They’re not narratives,” Mike says through his teeth.
The man’s eyes sharpen just a touch. “No one will believe you,” he says, almost gently. “Even if you remember them clearly, which, I assure you, will be… difficult, you won’t be able to prove any of it. Your friends, your family, they don’t remember. We’ve made sure of that.”
Mike’s stomach lurches.
He knew. He half-knew. But hearing it confirmed knocks the air out of him.
“They didn’t ask for that,” he says hoarsely. “You just—you just took it.”
“We’re protecting them,” the man says. “Ignorance is, in this case, not just bliss but safety. There are… people in high places who would very much like to study you and your friends for a long, long time. Our work here, what we’re doing, is the compromise. You get your lives. We get… peace of mind.”
He steps closer. There’s something in his eyes Mike doesn’t like. Not cruelty, exactly. Conviction.
“As for Eleven,” he says, and Mike’s heart clenches. “She is being placed somewhere secure. Somewhere she cannot be hurt by people like Brenner, or the entities that used her. Somewhere… safe.”
“Where?” Mike demands. “I want to see her.”
“That won’t be possible,” the man says. “Her situation is… delicate. She’s extraordinarily powerful, even now. She needs to be monitored, for everyone’s sake. Including hers.”
Mike wants to grab him by the lapels and shake him until something gives. Until the man stops talking in smooth, reasonable tones and admits what this really is: a prison for all of them.
“You can’t do this,” he says, but the words feel empty. He’s sixteen, seventeen. He has no power here. Just a head full of half-erased nightmares and a heart that feels like it’s cracking.
The man studies him.
“I understand you care about her,” he says. “And about your other friends. That’s commendable.”
He leans in, lowering his voice.
“But if you care about them, you’ll keep your mouth shut. You’ll accept the cover story. You’ll tell anyone who asks that you don’t remember anything beyond the gas leak and a bad dream.”
He lets that sink in. Then he adds, “Because if you don’t, there are people above me who will gladly take that second option. The one without Clean Slates. The one that involves cells, and restraints, and tests that make what you just went through look like a mild headache. For you. For your friends. For your little sister.”
Holly’s face flashes in Mike’s mind: sleeping in her bed clutching a stuffed animal, eyes wide as Vecna whispered to her, hands reaching for him in the dark.
He swallows bile.
The man straightens. “Do we understand each other?”
Mike’s hands shake. He could say no. He could spit in the guy’s face, yell, make a scene. But that wouldn’t change anything. It would just paint a red target on everyone he loves.
He stares at the man for a long, burning moment. Then he forces his jaw to unclench.
“Yeah,” he says, voice dead. “We understand each other.”
The man nods, satisfied. “Good.” He snaps the folder open. Inside is a stack of papers, official seals, typed paragraphs. “You’ll be given a counseling referral. Use it or don’t, that’s your choice. You’ll be monitored for a while, but if you keep to the script, things will… settle. You’ll… forget.” He says it like it’s a kindness.
Mike says nothing. He is too busy engraving the man’s face into his memory. The car door opens.
And there, stepping out uncertainly, is Karen Wheeler.
For a second, she looks wrong. It’s the setting, maybe. The stark concrete of the loading bay, the black car, the men in suits. See Mom here feels like seeing an NPC walk into the wrong campaign. She’s wearing a blouse and skirt like she just came from some meeting at school or a parent-teacher conference. Her hair is perfectly coiffed, only slightly mussed by the drive. She clutches her purse like a shield.
Her eyes find Mike. They go wet instantly.
“Oh my god,” she breathes. “Mike.”
She rushes forward, and the guard barely has time to step aside before she’s on him, arms around him, pulling him into a crushing hug. He stiffens, then sinks into it despite himself. He hadn’t realized how much he wanted this, something normal, familiar, until right now. He presses his face into her shoulder.
“Hi, Mom,” he mumbles, voice muffled.
“You scared me half to death,” she says, voice shaking. “They said—they said there was an accident at the lab, that you’d been exposed to something, that you were unconscious—”
Her words blur. She pulls back, cupping his face in her hands, scanning him for visible injuries.
“I’m okay,” he lies. “I’m fine.”
Her gaze flicks to the man in the suit. “Is he really? Is he… is he going to be okay?”
“He’s stable,” the man says smoothly. “There may be some lingering trauma and confusion. We recommend counseling. But with time, he should recover fully.”
“Trauma from… what?” Nancy’s voice cuts in.
She’s standing a few steps behind Karen, arms crossed, eyes sharp. Steve is there too, hovering awkwardly, looking like he’s not sure whether he’s allowed to be present. His bandaged arm is in a sling.
“Nance?” Mike blurts.
She gives him a tight smile. “Hey.”
There’s a bruise on her forehead. She must have been here too, in her own white room, under her own ring of lights. But when he says, “Do you remember—,” she tilts her head.
“Remember what?” she asks.
He swallows.
“Nothing,” he says. “It’s… nothing.”
She watches him for a second longer than feels safe. He wonders if some part of her knows, like his mom’s random panics, like the way Will’s art will later. If there’s a splinter lodged under the skin of her mind that won’t quite come out. The man in the suit clears his throat. “You can take him home now, Mrs. Wheeler,” he says. “There will be follow-up appointments. We’ll be in touch.”
Karen nods, but she’s not really listening to him. Her attention is all on Mike, on the way he’s holding himself, on the exhausted slump of his shoulders. She wraps an arm around him. “Come on,” she says softly. “Let’s get you out of here.”
He lets her steer him toward the car. He glances back once. The man in the suit stands where he was, hands folded behind his back, watching. Beyond him, through a briefly open door, Mike catches a glimpse of another corridor. For a heartbeat, he sees a figure in a hospital gown, small, with dark curls, sitting on a bed with knees drawn up. A girl’s profile, turned away.
“El?” he whispers.
As if she hears, the girl shifts. He catches a flash of brown eyes, solemn and hurt and searching. Then the door swings shut. He doesn’t know if it was really her. If his mind, scrambled by drugs and machines, is just filling in blanks. He doesn’t even know if she’d recognize him if he walked into that room. He presses his hand to the car doorframe as he gets in, fingers digging into the metal.
I won’t forget you, he thinks, fiercely. Either of you. I don’t care what they did. I won’t.
They may have scrubbed and scoured and rearranged. But underneath the fresh paint, the old graffiti is still there, carved deep. As the car pulls away from the facility and the gray bulk of it recedes in the rear window, Mike sits between his mother and his sister, feeling the ocean of normalcy closing in around him. Holly swings her legs, humming tunelessly, oblivious. She’s got a coloring book in her lap. The picture half-finished on the top page is of a house with a bright blue sky and a yellow sun, red flowers in the yard.
“Hi, Mike,” she says, like nothing terrible ever happened. “You were gone a long time.”
“Yeah,” he says, throat tight. “Yeah, I was.”
She smiles at him, gap-toothed. “I made you a picture.”
He looks. Her crayon sun has too many rays. They’re jagged, curling inwards. He feels something cold at the base of his spine.
“Thanks,” he says, forcing his voice calm. “It’s… it’s really good.”
He reaches into his pocket. His fingers close on nothing. They took his dice, his walkie-talkie, the little scraps of paper he carried everywhere. They took the bomb, his blueprints, his notes, his maps of the Upside Down. They took his drawings. They tried to take his memories. But they didn’t take the part of him that remembers how to tell a story. He leans his head back against the seat and closes his eyes. In the darkness behind them, he starts to retell it all to himself from the beginning. A boy disappeared in the woods. A girl appeared out of nowhere. Monsters, and gates, and other worlds. A boy who was taken and came back wrong, and the stupid, stubborn kid who refused to stop looking for him. He tells it like a campaign recap, meticulously, each session logged, each important NPC noted. He tells it like a bedtime story. He tells it like a confession.
His mother reaches over and squeezes his hand.
“Everything’s going to be okay,” she says softly.
He squeezes back.
“Yeah,” he lies. “I know.”