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The outside world was a beautiful world, yet a cruel one, specially for demigods like Mike and company who, when out of Camp Half-Blood, were in Hawkins, a small town in Indiana.
Mike's first day at camp had been nice, cool, he hadn't known about the threats that surrounded him and his friends. He had been seven, his favorite and only sister disappeared every summer in every year and came back either sad or hurt and Mike was mad, because who dares hurt his big sister like that.
When he left for camp, dad had been angry at mom, they screamed so much Mike ran to his best friend's house and stayed over the night until his mom went to grab him to get him to camp. He discovered then that his best friend was going to camp too, but not his older brother, Jonathan.
He learned at camp about how the Greek gods were real, not myths that wouldn't ever be real.
Icarus was a real boy, Theseus was a real hero, Zeus is a real god, and Mike's father is not his real father. It had been a month after he and his best friend Will went to camp, and Mike was already familiar with everything at camp, with the kids going out and sometimes never returning, with the cabins and the symbols for the Olympian gods.
Will had been claimed not so long after he had been at camp, which left Mike alone with the other kids crowding the Hermes’ cabin. Robin Buckley was a cool daughter of Hermes, she was very blunt and she was Nancey's age, and she called him Little Wheeler, that was cool, but Mike acted annoyed every time she called him that.
It was quite obvious who his godly parent was when Nancey was a daughter of Ares, the god of war. And Mike wished he could be claimed sooner so that the pitiful looks would stop being sent in his direction, like he was a poor soul, an abandoned puppy in the rain whenever Nancey left the Ares table to talk with an eight year old Mike.
When Mike was claimed, there was no scandal, it was expected already, but the people were happy for him and they cheered, so he felt special even if for a mere moment. But he wasn’t like the other kids. Of course, he was blunt, and he protected his friend from his meanie siblings, but the other kids were good at fighting and they were bulky and strong and really mean, and Mike didn't want to be mean like they were. He was still small, so it was normal that he wasn’t bulky like them, or strong like a rock, but he was supposed to win a fight violently like his father who never did so much as give him a sign that he knew he existed until he accidentally stabbed a kid in the training.
That was when he was claimed by Ares like his sister.
Mike was fast and lanky and skinny, ugly, and he was not dumb like his brain dead half siblings. He spent a lot of time with the Athena kids if he wasn't hanging out with Will or his sister and her friends, or other friends at camp that he never grew up with because they went outside camp and never came back.
In Hawkins, the kids were mean to him, and even more so to Will, so Mike decided that if he was a child of Ares, then he had to be violent with idiotic kids, so he pushed them away, kicked them or punched them like he learned in camp. He always ended up in the principal's office, his parents were called and Ted got mad and at home he wondered why mom was still married with him when her two children weren't even his.
He couldn't think of any reason when it came to how his mom had two children from the same god. Not twins. And she hadn't even known it was a god.
Not many other demigods lived in Hawkins, but Mike knew who they were, at least their names. Nancey was obviously one of them, as well as Will and Robin. Mike usually talked with Robin more at camp when she spent time with Nancey and Barb- another demigod in Hawkins. Barb was a nice daughter of Athena and Mike liked to spend time with her, especially when Nancey wasn't there to call him a nerd.
Nancey acted like their siblings sometimes, but she wasn’t mean unintentionally like they were, she wanted to fit in, and Mike knew and he wanted that, too, but he would never act like them and treat his friend badly. Will was kind and forgiving, Mike would hate to make Will sad.
Nancey was also having boyfriends, and Mike didn’t like her boyfriends, especially the son of Aphrodite, Steve Harrington, who also was one of the demigods in Hawkins. Mike also hated when Nancey stopped hanging out with him for her little romances.
Mike loved to think that was just a mean phase, that Nancey would stop pushing him away. But as Mike got older and Nancey just continued to drift away and close the door of her room to him, he realized that maybe she wouldn’t ever become his Nancey again, she was acting like the other mean daughters of Aphrodite.
(He didn’t know at the time, but in a few years Mike Wheeler would act exactly like his siblings who he disliked so much, push everyone away for a stupid romance, hurt the ones he loved the most, act like the son of Ares he thought he wouldn’t ever be.)
Dustin and Lucas weren’t demigods like Mike or Will, but they were cool friends and they protected each other. At some point Mike stopped punching back their bullies. His mom was getting disappointed at him because of the many times she got called, and Mike hated when she got disappointed in him. He wouldn’t care if it was Ted, mom’s husband, because his opinion didn’t matter when he barely even looked his way, but Mike loved his mom and he couldn’t bear to look at her and know she wasn’t happy with his actions.
In the summer of 1983, Mike went on a quest for his father, alone. He came back with a nasty scar on his arm, but he completed the quest and his father was proud of him and Mike received a dagger from him.
That had been his best year at camp, so of course it would be his worst year in Hawkins.
In November of 1983, Will Byers went missing for a week. The monsters they knew were after demigods weren’t the ones who disappeared with the boy, but instead unknown creatures that received the names of demogorgon. That was also the same summer Mike realized why he couldn’t tell anyone about his godly parent, his lineage, where he went every summer. Eleven was a demigod, and she had been taken by mortals to test on her powers. They weren’t sure which god or goddess was her parent, but that she was a demigod was pretty obvious, and she had powers related to her mind.
She went missing later, after they found Will, but the lab wasn’t what had taken her.
Barb was dead, Will was alive, El was missing, and Mike went back to camp next summer.
In the summer of 1985, Mike stayed in Hawkins, along with Nancy, Will, Steve and Robin, who finally got involved in the mess that was the Upside Down, and El still hadn’t got the chance to go to camp.