Work Text:
“Wake… up…”
“Michael Wheeler…”
“Wake up, Mike…”
“Wake up”
“Wake… up?”
Hawkins.
1985? 1989.
Eighteen months after Henry was defeated and the world was saved once and for all.
They had all graduated.
All?
They were heroes.
Except something was missing now; without El’s presence, it all felt… emptier? Like the fight didn’t really matter after all, because the only person who deserved to live freely as herself, as Jane, wasn’t there anymore.
Wait.
No.
She is still around, somewhere.
She saved herself, and now she can enjoy her life in the middle of nowhere, where no one could ever find her again.
She did stop the cycle after all.
And that’s all that mattered.
Right?
Every time the alarm went off in the morning, Mike had to remind himself that he truly did believe his own storytelling of the final moments of his late girlfriend, whom he had lost once again.
One thing he wanted for sure was for their story to be set in stone somehow.
That was the reason why he became a writer.
That was not just a D&D campaign, for him, for his friends, that was how they became heroes.
Right?
So every morning he woke up, had his breakfast, and immediately sat at his desk, took out his typewriter, and started working on his novel version of their adventure.
Something he used to do before starting to write was listening to the radio for the news of the day. But that became a torture for him after the first few days, as the radio, right after turning it on, started distorting and the words became more and more twisted, like someone was trying to tell him something, to warn him.
“Wake up, Mike” were the words that he started to hear more often every day.
But, wake up from what?
He was sure he was wide awake.
I mean, they saw Vecna getting behaded by Ms. Byers Joyce. There was no way he could have survived those hits.
They had won.
They all saw it with their own eyes.
They witnessed Henry Creel’s death in the body of the newly reformed Mind Flayer.
They were finally able to live in a world where the Upside Down did not exist anymore, and demogorgons were never going to hunt them ever again.
Ever… again…
Ever…
Mike stopped typing.
No.
There was just something not right about that last battle. He couldn’t get himself to put his fingers back on the typewriter once his thoughts started becoming flooded with the memories of what had happened inside and outside of the Mind Flayer.
And now that he was thinking truly carefully about it… did they fight demogorgons at all?
How did they all suddenly disappear once they stepped into Dimension X?
Mike shook his head and started typing again
“We were very focused on Vecna, of course we didn’t notice demo-creatures around” he thought.
It just made no sense for him to be thinking about all of that right now. It had been months. If something was out of place he would have noticed way earlier.
But that eerie feeling just wouldn’t wash away, and he stopped typing again.
He got up. He looked outside his window.
Everything around the place was quiet and bright.
Then, after just a few minutes of inspecting the surroundings, Mike noticed his own reflection in the glass of the window, and he saw him: he saw his own dad in his image.
As soon as he realized, he immediately took off his glasses and smashed them on the ground, stared at them, then at the door, and he rushed out.
Out and away.
On his way back to his childhood house.
Back to the place where he had buried his childhood: the basement
He ran all his way back.
Nobody knows how far his new house was from his old one, but at that point, time just felt like an illusion, like it was being stretched by some omnipotent entity to feel like it was flowing naturally faster, and yet, nothing felt natural to Mike at the moment.
He got to his house and knocked fast at the door, his mom opened it after some
minuted with a worried face
“Mike, it’s you. I’m very happy to see you here, but… is something wrong?”
“Wrong? What? No, why would you think that?”
“Because the way you knocked made it look like you were here for something serious” she explained. Mike looked at her and just smiled
“No, I… I’m sorry I made you worry, I’m actually just here to… find something, in the basement” That was the best excuse he could make up at that point, before entering the house and letting his mom close the door behind him
“Holly is with her friends playing in there right now” Karen told him.
Ah, right. Holly had started teaching her friends how to play D&D just like her brother used to do.
“She’ll understand” Mike only answered before running into the basement, his mom calling his name didn’t matter, he needed to find his answers.
He opened the door and ran down the stairs
“What are you doing here, Mike? Don’t you see I’m busy?”
He heard his sister's voice, but did not turn around to face her. He only went for the shelf where the D&D folders of him and his party were lying vertically, so that their names were perfectly visible and readable to others
“You can keep going, Holly, I’m here for something else” he explained, with his back still facing her.
He did not hear a single complaint from his sister as he kept on looking at the names on the folders
Max
Lucas
Dustin
Will
Mike
Ok, cool, all of them were there.
Interesting how they even got Max to play at least for their last game ever.
…
…?
…Max?
That’s when the realization hit him: Max had graduated.
Max had graduated with them.
Maxine Mayfield had graduated the same year as all of them despite being 2 years in a coma.
How?
He did not remember her doing any extra activities to make up for the lost time.
He felt his head getting dizzy again and closed his eyes to recover.
“Mike can you tell me what you're even doing there?”
His sister’s voice snapped Mike out of his train of thought, except that, when he reopened his eyes something had changed in the folders
Max
Lucas
Will
Dustin
Mike
The way some of the letters were put together in a line spelled something…
X A L I E
“X a Lie”?
A lie?
What?
Mike blinked. Just blinked, and the folders were back at their original order.
Maybe he had imagined it
“Mike!” Holly shouted
“Can you at least say something?!”
Mike finally turned his head to her “I’m okay” he smiled at his sister to calm her down. But that smile faded when he noticed something else, lying on a table just behind Holly.
A board game he had never seen before.
Its name…
“Whatzit”
No…
Mike immediately left the room, climbed the stairs, and exited the basement, closing the door with a bang.
Upstairs, he found his mom again
“Mike, are you really sure everything is good? You have a terribly pale face right now” she stated, looking at his son and holding him by his shoulders
“Mom, I-I…” he wanted to explain something, anything, but how could he do that without sounding crazy?
Too many people had been involved in all that Upside Down stuff and he definitely did not want those people to suffer again just because his head was messing with him.
His loved ones had already been through enough stuff, starting from Will getting lost in the woods, his older sister losing her childhood best friend, his mother was attacked by that same monster that was chasing after Holly, El had sacrificed herself for a world that never even accepted her, all of his friends were-
Once again, wait…
His mother was attacked.
She was in the hospital and couldn’t speak at all.
He looked at her neck and chest.
The scars.
She should have scars there.
Disappeared.
He looked back up at her, she was still waiting for him to continue speaking
“I need to get some air” was the only phrase he could whisper before brushing his mom away and running out of the house and running away.
He did not know where he was going, he just needed to find a way out of there.
Out of that place, out of that reality.
Memories started coming back to him as if someone was trying to warn him, just like those messages on the radio.
Images of their graduation started to appear in his mind.
People seemed to change their appearance now and then.
The way all of the ex-students were sitting was too close to Vecna’s victim's stance.
All the parents looked like they were looking at something else, as if they were all staring at something out of that place.
For some unknown reason, they wore orange uniforms instead of the green ones they should have worn.
Dustin was wearing the Hellfire Club shirt, of course, he had to honor Eddie somehow, but the club logo had something wrong with it. It was not the logo he used to remember.
And he could have sworn he had seen an empty sign held by someone’s mom.
But why?
Why was all of this happening now?
Noticing a single detail made everything come back to him.
Plus, when was the last time he looked for the time? He couldn’t even remember checking a clock or watch to see what time it was.
”It’s because in dreams you cannot read the time”
That was it.
As he was running, he heard it.
The chime of a clock reaching 12.
So maybe he did not imagine it all, maybe the fight was still up and now he was the one trapped in Henry’s mind.
He stopped in his tracks again and looked back at this version of Hawkins.
He started admiring it. It was beautiful.
It was not their Hawkins, the town they had saved, the town El had saved, but it was still wonderful.
That was the version of Hawkins they could have had if they actually won
“There might still be time” Mike thought.
He couldn’t know at what point Vecna won but he could still find out by looking for the true exit of that place.
For a moment he thought about asking Max, she surely must be an expert in navigating inside Henry’s memories, but he remembered he did not want anyone else to know what was going on.
“Think, Mike, think…”
“You must find a way to wake up”
“You must not let Vacna win”
“Wake up, Mike”
“Wake up”
“…”
“Wake up?”
“Wake up!”
The radio!
There must be something hidden there at the Radio Station.
He started running again. If that message started coming out from the radio, he needed to at least check if there was something weird happening at “The Squawk”, and Robin still worked there so she could easily let him in.
He might still have a chance to bring everyone back to reality and fight Vecna for real.
Maybe his party could still win for real, maybe… maybe he could save El and they could still live their fantasy life, away from society, where no one would find her and take her away from him again.
He would stay by her side and never leave her. He would protect her from an unjust world and he would love her for what she truly is.
And his friends, they also needed a normal life. They all got involved in this shit situation and after all their efforts they fucking deserved to be happy in a world they saved. Mike didn’t want everyone to consider them heroes; they were the outcasts of society, those that the others would always judge negatively no matter what and nothing was gonna change that, but at least they would get to live their lives as they chose to live them, not conforming to the normality that the others wanted them to live.
His mind went to Will.
His best friend…
It all started with him, the night he got
lost in the woods. Ever since that day, he never had a single minute of a simple
life.
He also had to fight for him.
Maybe he could give him a normal life too, even if just for a few seconds.
Maybe…
Maybe…
Maybe?
What if they had already lost?
What if Mike returned to the real world and discovered that there was nothing he could do because everyone was already… dead?
At that point, would he really have given everyone a second chance?
No…
No.
As he was thinking, he found himself finally at The Squawk.
He could still turn back and let all these thoughts disappear.
He pushed the door open and entered the main room.
There was still a chance for him to keep on living.
He walked inside, following a faint red light that was illuminating the space around him.
There was no point anymore, he should just turn around and forget about everything; live in his fantasy forever.
He realized what the red light was when he discovered a door in the dark back of the room.
He never knew if that door was there before, he didn’t care, because the sign above it was clear: “EXIT”
That’s when he was faced with two options: he could either hope that it was the exit from the fake reality and see if there was still a chance for him and his party, or he could go back home, finish his novel, and pretend none of this had ever happened.
He could either get out of Vecna’s mind trap and win for real, or open the door just to discover his friends and his dead bodies scattered all over the Upside Down.
He could either let everyone live in a beautiful illusion, or be the one who would witness the cruel reality.
There were two options. Two possible outcomes.
Like Schrödinger’s cat, he was both dead and alive in front of that door, and he would only discover the truth if he ever decided to open it and watch whatever was hidden on the other side.
He put his hand around the door handle.
And yet…
Maybe, just maybe… in that illusion, everything was just like they all imagined the world would become after the final battle.
Maybe they didn’t choose to win, and their greatest enemy was letting them believe a lie.
So what?
They didn’t have to conform to Henry’s reality, they just needed to shape it as their own.
And the last “maybe”… El…
In that fake reality, Mike still had his chance to reunite with her.
That was all that he needed to think, to convince himself to remove his hand from the door.
At least for now.
“The door isn’t going anywhere”
“Probably”