Chapter Text
THE MAGE
MONTAUK — NEW YORK
1992
Eleven, having long since grown used to being called that again, was bound to a hospital bed.
Her wrists and ankles burned where the restraints confined her in her place as a mere blood bank for a fresh set of scientists and doctors who all seemed to revel in the apparent success she brought to their project.
Eleven was told not much to nothing at all, but from what she had learned from Dr Kay in her first year of captivity was that the old, white-haired woman smiled a lot more these days, and women like Kay never smiled like that unless things went their way.
Had things gone her way? Had Eleven managed to do what her poor sister couldn't? Had she become just like Henry now?
Her stomach ached with a sickness that had not been common to her since she was a small girl with buzzed hair in a white hospital gown, but it made full and utter sense — that is what she had become again. A small girl with buzzed hair in a white hospital gown. She was not El, no, not anymore, and not for a while. She was not Jane. She was not Giselle.
She was Eleven, and her beautiful, long auburn hair was shaved off to their scalp, her lovely knee-length skirt and brown winter coat she once wore in an old life were thrown into a furnace.
Gone, like she had no right to happiness or peace. There was nothing left of her that was truly her. Eleven was nothing but a shell. An empty, gaping, hollow shell that spent her days watching the white ceiling with an intensity that made no sense even to her.
Iceland had become a forlorn, distant memory that had bled into something that no longer quite felt like a memory, but a hazy reverie and half-memory of childhood. But she only ever allowed her mind to stray there and no further. The last time she'd thought of Mik— him, she'd accidentally tapped into the void where she'd seen him fast asleep, peacefully, beside another girl.
She wanted him happy, she truly did, but she'd never expected it like this. God, that made her so sick that she'd sobbed and heaved until an orderly dosed her with something that knocked her out for the rest of the night.
And so she tried to think of other things that brought her happiness; the smell of the barn back in Iceland, Hopper's warm and heavy hands on her shoulder, Joyce's cooking on a Sunday evening, arguing with Will over shotgun, Johnathan recommending Benji to her back in Lenora.
Anything good. Everything good.
But her thoughts strayed again to him. Always to him. She couldn't help it.
Eleven had developed a system for this — whenever she felt the need to think of him again — she'd count to fifty, then fifty more, and by the end of it she'd have fallen asleep.
But this time it was different, and she couldn't do it again. She just had to see him once more. And there he was, tall, slender, painfully handsome, and. . . awake. Wide awake.
Shit.
"El." His voice trembled, "El. Please."
Mike's dark, gleaming eyes bore right into her own, and her stomach dropped what felt like one thousand feet from the sky. He could see her. Mike could feel her.
"El. I love you too." He said, lips quivering as the words escaped him. "Did you hear me? I love you. I love you too."
Eleven yanked herself out of the void hard enough that it made her head throb. Her thoughts spun incoherent, crazed and sorrowful. He loved her, he loved her still — he was still hers, right?
Blood streaked down her nose.
"Doctor, she's accessed it again." A voice rung out beneath her, urgent and demanding.
Eleven knew she should brace herself for what came, but the numbness or sickness she'd been afflicted by mere minutes ago was replaced by something else. Something she hadn't felt in the year she'd spent in this makeshift lab in a place she was unfamiliar with.
𝄪
THE PALADIN
NIAGARA FALLS
Mike tried to take deep, steady breaths to contain the sudden outburst of feelings he submitted to, but it was as helpful as a broken hammer. Part of him revelled in it, but more of him urged him to focus on devising a plan to understand what this had meant.
She’s alive. She’s alive. She’s alive.
He didn’t smile, he didn't trust himself to. He knew then and there that if he did, he wouldn't be able to stop.
Mike picked up the telephone at the Niagara Falls International Airport. He'd been there for hours, unable to fully bring himself to leave. He took another deep breath, trying to compose his thoughts.
He always believed El was out there; everyone who knew him knew this — El was out there, somewhere, because the kryptonite couldn't have possibly allowed her to wield her powers at such a strenuous degree, because she came to him in his mind and bid him farewell, because the more he remembered, the more he realised her nose never bled and her wrist tattoo was unaccounted for.
He only ever told the party once, at a D&D campaign the night of graduation, and they tearfully smiled at the prospect of such a hopeful outcome of a tragic event. But they'd moved on. All of them.
Lucas had joined the Air Force after college and was stationed somewhere in Texas, while Max had left for California again, where she worked between mechanic repair and retail — they were still together, though petty break-ups were common occurrences between them. Dustin had enrolled in postgrad at MIT for Quantum Physics, and he made the most effort out of everyone to check in on Mike at least twice a week. Will had moved in with Johnathan in Manhattan and gotten a job as an Illustrator.
They probably thought of El on the rare occasion when they ran out of thoughts and had nothing left to do but reflect on their shared, painful past.
Robin was working as a radio host in Colorado. Steve, still in Hawkins, had gotten married earlier this year and welcomed his first child.
They moved on, of course, they did. Mike thought bitterly. He knew Hopper certainly did with Joyce; they were married now, with two dogs and a cat. They moved to New York, too, conveniently enough for Joyce, but a little further out — Montauk, or something — fortunate enough for Will.
His fingers dialled Nancy's number; he knew she'd listen, no matter how much of an asshole he was to her or how much of a pain in the ass she was to him.
"Nancy Wheeler speaking," She answered on the third dial, half-groggy.
"Nancy. It's me." His voice shook as he spoke.
"Mike. . . What's wrong?" Her voice almost trembled with concern. She must've thought he was suicidal again. If only she knew that now, he was anything but.
“Nothing,” he said too quickly, then winced at himself. “I mean— not nothing, but not… bad. I don’t think it’s bad. It’s—”He cut himself off because the word alive was burning the back of his throat, and he was suddenly terrified of saying it wrong, of jinxing it like a kid blowing out candles.
“Mike?"
“I need you to listen and not…Just listen.” He swallowed hard.
“Okay,” she said, before adding another eager “I’m listening.”
He closed his eyes. The airport announcement boards flickered above him, departures and arrivals ticking over while his whole world narrowed to the plastic phone pressed to his ear.
“I think she's alive,” he said, softly enough that it felt like a confession to God. The silence that followed wasn’t disbelief, not entirely; it was something else.
“You think,” she repeated carefully, not needing to ask for any further context. She knew who this was about, what this was about. Only one person or subject could have her baby brother push aside his stubborn pride and call her after a fight.
“No, I know it.” Mike said, “I’ve always… believed it, yeah, but I felt it this time again. I was on the plane, and I felt this. . . this thing that I always felt when I knew she was near. Like a tingle in my chest, in my heart." He laughed weakly, ran a hand through his hair. “It’s her, I'm sure of it. I don't know how — but she's out there somewhere, Nance, and she needs us. I know she needs us," he finished.
He braced himself for logic. For slow, careful words. For the gentle dismantling of hope. Instead, Nancy simply exhaled.
“Okay. Okay. Let's just take a second to gather our thoughts here. She's out there, now what?"
The breath he’d been holding left him in a rush. He had to sit down, or he might fall over.
“I need you to come to the house,” he said. “Niagara. Today if you can. I’ll pay. I don’t care how much it costs, or if Jonathan can’t— I mean, bring him, but if he can’t I don’t— just you, then. Or everyone. Hopper, get Hopper, and Joyce, Will, Dustin, Lucas, Max. Please, call them." His words slurred together the way they did when he was nervous. He made no sense, but Nancy understood. A beat. Paper rustled. She was already moving.
"Look, I'll see what I can do about the rest, alright? But I'll be there tonight," she said. “And Mike?”
“Yeah?”
“Please don't do anything stupid.”
𝄪
Mike Wheeler was well and truly pathetic. He surely felt it as he drank in the sight of the — his — house, and he steadily comprehended it by the mere thought of Hopper having to take it all in too within the matter of hours.
He stood solemnly and expectantly at the end of the drive, all narrow windows and weathered trim, as if it, too, were bracing for judgment. The thought of Hopper having to take it all in within the next few hours made something small and mortifying twist in his gut. The photos. The decor. The way the place had been built around a girl he'd dreamt of now longer than he had her for.
He wasn’t trying to make a shrine. That would have been easier to explain, at least, but shrines were for the deceased — and Mike's girlfriend wasn't dead, she was simply missing.
He hadn’t planned on purchasing it two years back. He’d told himself that more than once, as if repetition could turn impulse into reason. But he’d also known, with the same quiet certainty that haunted most of his decisions, that leaving it untouched would’ve been an equally unforgivable mistake.
He already owned a place in San Francisco, a loft wedged into the heart of the city, where he’d grown accustomed to knowing the nature of his quarrelling neighbours’ lives better than his own; where mornings often awoken him with horns blaring; where he woke to the prime specimen of road rage and the rattle of garbage trucks instead of birds.
But San Francisco was so loud. She would have hated it. She wouldn't have felt like she belonged. And Mike didn't want that for her.
The thought settled in his chest, heavy and familiar, and for a moment he could almost see it — the way she’d flinch whenever Hopper barked out a string of curses after stubbing a toe; the way her hands rubbed together when rooms grew too full, too close; the way she’d quietly, deliberately change the radio station the second metal rock crept in, her mouth pursed in concentration.
El liked softer things. Slower ones. It was exactly why he brought this house.
Mike swallowed and let his gaze travel up the façade of the house, to the narrow upstairs windows beneath the slanted roof. He’d chosen this place because it was quiet. Because the walls were thick and the street rarely busy. Because the garden out back caught the sun just right in the late afternoon, and because the air near the falls always carried a coolness that felt clean. Because it felt like somewhere she could breathe without nervously looking over her shoulder.
Inside, every room told on him.The parlour with its pale walls and too-carefully chosen furniture. The kitchen arranged for two — always two — even when he ate standing at the counter, even when no one ever took the second mug. The staircase lined with photographs he pretended were just memories and not proof of devotion.
Upstairs, behind locked doors, the worst of it waited, and it wasn't the ensuite he never slept in. It was the spare rooms he hadn't meant to touch at first. They started out as harmless, empty rooms that held no true purpose besides holding old junk like Mike's old D&D campaign books — but he made the mistake of standing there too long and allowing himself to envision something more. The second had followed in a quiet, shameful spiral — tiny hangers, folded clothes, books stacked low where small hands could reach them. He’d told himself it was hypothetical. Symbolic. A writer’s indulgence.
Nancy’s face when she’d opened the door had told him otherwise. He’d locked them both that night and hid away the key where no one would ever think to look, except him. Especially him.
Now, standing in the drive with the house looming and the party on their way, Mike felt something shift within him, but not shame this time, but a fragile, reckless hope threading through the ache. If she were alive — which he knew now was true — then the house wasn’t pathetic, and nor was he. It was waiting, just like him, waiting for its owner to come home.
Mike closed his eyes and, just once, let himself imagine her there without flinching. Not as a memory. Not as a dream. But real — moving through the rooms, touching the walls, leaving her floral and balmy milk scented soap aroma behind.
He closed his eyes despite himself. He could see her, suddenly — not as a memory, but as a presence. El in the doorway, shoulders hunched inside one of his sweaters, eyes wide and uncertain and bright with that careful hope she carried like glass. El padding barefoot across old wooden floors. El touching things gently, as if afraid they might disappear if she wasn’t careful. His chest ached so badly it bordered on nausea.
Please, he thought, not to God — never to God — but to the universe, to the thing that had taken her and might still give her back. Please let me be right.
She's alive.
The thought didn’t feel fragile. It felt inevitable, like something that had been true all along and only now had language. The house unspooled in his mind, the parlour warming, the stairs no longer lonely, doors upstairs not locked but opened by a hand he knew better than his own.
He felt it; her mismatched socks (one polka-dotted purple, one striped yellow) on the kitchen chair, her raspy laugh ricocheting off old wood, her standing in the blue room doorway — not afraid of it, not turning away this time — simply breathing in the life she should have had with him. The life he'd been so, so ready to give her.
The image didn’t hurt the way it used to, and he supposed it was because he no longer had to envision her with life. He knew now, and that steadied him like a guiding light. He opened his eyes again, heart thudding, and stared at the front door like it might open at any second.
He was ready. The ache inside him didn’t hollow him out anymore. It filled him, dense and electric. Love like gravity. Love like direction. Love like he hadn't felt it in years.
𝄪
The phone rang when Mike was standing in the kitchen, fingers curled hard around the edge of the counter like it was the only solid thing left in the world. The marble was cool beneath his palms, grounding in the way pain sometimes was. He let it ring once. Twice. He answered on the second ring, not the first — because answering on the first would mean admitting how long he’d been waiting, how tightly hope had wound itself around his ribs.
“Nancy?”
There was a pause on the other end. A breath drawn in and held too long. He could hear movement — the soft rustle of papers, the scrape of something being set down, maybe a jacket shrugged on and forgotten. Proof that she hadn’t stopped moving since they’d last spoken. Proof that she’d taken this seriously.
“I’m sorry,” she said immediately, like the words had been burning a hole straight through her chest. “It took… it took hours to get through to Max and Lucas.”
Mike closed his eyes. His forehead dipped forward, hovering just shy of the cabinet door. He stayed very still, as if moving might knock something loose inside him that he couldn’t afford to lose yet.
“They’re okay,” Nancy added quickly, too quickly. “They’re both okay. They just—” She exhaled, slow and controlled, the way she did when she was trying not to editorialise. “They’re worried, Mike. Really worried. Lucas can't leave base without a proper basis, and Max is completely slammed with work, but she said she'll make it this weekend."
Mike swallowed. That helped. A little. Only ever a little.
“They believe me?” he asked, quietly.
“They believe that you felt her, yes. Nancy corrected. “And they want to help you get to the bottom of this, whether it be finally getting some closure or —"
His grip on the counter loosened by a fraction.“And Dustin?” he asked, already bracing himself.
Nancy hesitated again.
“I didn’t get him,” she admitted. “I tried. I called about a dozen times before I reached his roommate. Dustin's buried under finals right now, Mike. Like— underground. He practically lives in his campus library."
A ghost of a sound left Mike’s throat — not quite a laugh.
“Yeah,” he murmured, his tone a little too bitter for his own liking. “What's new?”
“Will and Jonathan—” Nancy continued, and her voice softened in that way it always did when she talked about them. “They said yes. Immediately. No questions. They’re in. They just… need help covering it. Money’s tight right now, especially with Jonathan freelancing and Will’s lease renewal coming up.”
“I've got it,” Mike said without hesitation. The words came out sharp, decisive, like he’d been waiting for the opportunity. “All of it, whatever they need. Tell them not to worry."
“I know,” Nancy said gently. “I told them.”
There was another pause. Longer this time. Heavy. Mike felt it settle in his chest before she even spoke again, like a storm pressure drop.
“And Hopper,” Nancy said. Mike’s jaw tightened, bracing for impact.
“I sent Will,” she went on carefully. “I didn’t want to do it over the phone. I thought— I thought that might be worse.”
Mike nodded once, even though she couldn’t see him.
“What did he say?” he asked.
Nancy swallowed. He could hear it: the hitch, the recalibration.
“I don't know the specifics. Will said he just. . . he got quiet at first,” she said. “Frozen, almost, I guess, taken aback.”
Mike’s eyes slid shut again, and this time his forehead pressed fully into the cabinet door. The wood was solid. Unmoving. Unimpressed by grief.
“And then he snapped,” Nancy continued. Mike exhaled through his nose, slow and controlled, like he was diffusing something volatile inside himself.
“He told Will you had no right,” she said quietly. “That you shouldn’t have said something like this. That it was cruel — that you were cruel — for even suggesting it without proof. He said—” She broke off, then forced herself forward. “He said he’s buried her once already, and he won’t do it again just because you can’t let go.”
The words landed like a bruise. Deep. Spreading.
Hopper’s words — you have no right — echoed even though he hadn’t heard them himself. Mike swallowed hard. Maybe he didn’t have the right. Maybe loving El didn’t entitle him to reopen old graves, to rip at scars Hopper had barely learned to live with. The man had lost a daughter once before. But another selfish voice in him stirred. Mike had loved El differently, perhaps even more, but certainly fiercely, foolishly, completely enough that he could sense her in proximity.
And God, didn’t that count for something?
“But,” Nancy added quickly, “Will said he was shaking, Mike. I don’t think he even realised it. He kept asking where you were. How long you’d been thinking about this. He told Will to tell you—” She hesitated. “He told Will to tell you to get help.”
Mike let out a breath that felt like it scraped his lungs raw on the way out.
“So that’s a no,” he said softly.
“For now,” Nancy replied. “He just— he can’t hear it like this. Not yet.”
Mike nodded again, alone in his kitchen. Alone with the photos on the fridge. Alone with the staircase just out of view. Alone with the locked doors upstairs that held too much hope and too much grief to touch.
“Thank you,” he said, his voice rough. “For trying.”
“It was the least I could do for you,” Nancy said, and there was something fragile and earnest in it, something that reminded him she was tired too. “I’m still trying.”
“I know,” Mike replied. “That’s why I called you.”
She was quiet for a moment.
“I’ll be there,” she said finally. “No matter what, Mike. No matter the outcome. I'm here for you, and we're going to get through this together.”
Mike’s gaze drifted toward the hallway, toward the bend in the stairs, toward the rooms that had never stopped waiting — for footsteps, for laughter, for a girl who had once changed the shape of his entire life.
“Yeah,” he said softly. “I know.”
Mike drew in another sharp breath and seriously regretted calling his sister a pain in the ass. He had been wrong — embarrassingly, spectacularly wrong. Because of everyone he’d least expected to care this much about El at a time like this, Nancy won. She cared. She trusted him. She believed him when belief was easier to dismiss as delusion.
She hadn’t asked him for proof. She hadn’t told him to move on. She hadn’t said it’s been years, Mike. She had just listened — and then she’d acted.
He wondered, distantly, how many nights she’d spent lying awake thinking of El too, and felt something twist in his chest at the thought. How many nights had all of them spent lying awake thinking of the girl who'd saved the world four times over?
𝄪
THE MAGE
MONTAUK — NEW YORK
"I'm going to ask you one more time, subject Eleven, and I expect to hear the truth of it this time around. Who exactly did you pay a little telepathic visit to?"
Eleven’s mouth clamped down so hard that it hurt, her jaw tight, her teeth nearly biting through her own lips.
"Was it your cop, James Hopper? Owens? Your friends?"
She said nothing.
"What were their names? Michael Wheeler, Maxine Mayfield, Lucas Sinclair, Dustin Henderson. Yes, and your stepbrothers, William and Johnathan. No? I suppose I'll just have to send my men to pay each and every one of them a visit."
No. No. No.
"Mama," She rasped, "I was visiting my mama."
"Mama, huh? Your mother's catatonic, Eleven. You couldn't have possibly have risked your privileges here to visit an unresponsive woman you hardly know.
"I know her well," Eleven spat back, defensive, clinging to the lie as though it were oxygen. "She fought for me. She loves me." Her throat closed. The word strong hovered there, unfinished, useless. She felt it slipping, dissolving into the air, and Kay’s smile deepened ever so slightly, faintly predatory.
“How touching. Maternal visits, sentimental impulses. We do see that sometimes in subjects with… attachment residue.” Her pen tapped against the clipboard once. “Though it is curious.”
Silence stretched thin, tense enough to scrape the sterile, white walls. Eleven didn’t react, nor did she take the bait, instead, she kept her gaze fixed on the blank ceiling above.
Kay tilted her head, watching her like a cat watching a moth that fluttered against glass. “James Hopper,” she said mildly, “a paternal figure for you, was he not?”
Eleven’s pulse betrayed her. A single, traitorous jump. Kay did not need to look; she saw it on the monitor. A green line twitched.
“Mm,” Kay murmured, pleased. “Yes. I thought so. The nervous system is terribly honest, even when the mouth isn’t. You lived with him for some time,” Kay went on, smooth, unhurried. “A cabin. Remote. Isolated. He fed you. Sheltered you. Protected you. That does create rather intense bonds in children deprived of early stability.”
Another flicker on the monitor. Kay’s smile deepened.
“But perhaps not him,” Kay continued, voice soft, deliberate, each word measured. “Perhaps you reached out to someone your own age. Individuals do prefer their peers when frightened.”
Her pen slid down the page.
“Maxine Mayfield.”
The monitor trembled slightly.
“Lucas Sinclair.”
Another tremor.
“Dustin Henderson.”
Sharper this time. Kay’s brows lifted faintly.
“Oh, this is useful,” she said quietly, pleased.
Eleven’s jaw clenched harder. Don’t react. Don’t think. Don’t remember.
Kay’s voice softened, deliberate. “William Byers.”
The spike was faster now. Kay’s eyes gleamed. “Yes. I suspected as much. You were fond of him. Gentle boy. Sensitive. Lonely children do gravitate toward one another, don’t they?”
Eleven’s chest scraped as she forced herself to breathe, slow and steady. “And Jonathan Byers,” Kay continued.
The machine chirped. Kay let out a satisfied breath. “Mm. Protective. Observant. He watched you closely, didn’t he? Like an older brother should.”
Eleven’s fingers twitched, leather creaking beneath them. Kay didn’t miss a thing.
“Temporary stepbrothers,” Kay added lightly. “Comforting, was it not? A ready-made family. How rare for people like you.”
Pressure rose behind Eleven’s ribs, a tide she could not stop, a rising water threatening to drown her. Not panic, not yet. Something worse. Something that felt like blood pooling in her ears.
Kay tapped the clipboard. Then, almost casually, as though listing a fact of the day: “Michael Wheeler.”
Everything froze. The monitors didn’t flatline, didn’t scream. They held, a taut wire in the silence, and Kay’s eyes lifted from the chart, slow, predatory, to meet Eleven’s.
“Oh,” she breathed. “There you are.”
Eleven’s stomach dropped, bile rising. No. No, no, no.
Kay stepped closer. “The report filed by Martin Brenner in ’83 is that he hid you in his basement. Lied for you. Kept you safe,” she said softly, each word pressing down, pressing in, pushing the air from her lungs. “That sort of loyalty at such a formative age,” she added, reverent, almost reverent, “does leave a neurological imprint.”
The machine stuttered. Eleven’s vision blurred. The edges of her world shook.
“You care for him,” Kay said, reading her mind, not asking, not even curious. Eleven’s lips parted, then closed again, uselessly. She tried to shrink into nothing.
Kay leaned in, shadow stretching across her face. “Did you visit him?”
Silence. The monitor ticked faster. A heartbeat she could not control.
“Ah,” Eleven whispered. One word, broken, trembling. Then the name tumbled out before she could stop it. “Michael Wheeler…”
Her heart slammed, too fast, too hard, a hammer against fragile ribs.
“Yes,” Kay said softly. “I thought so.”
Eleven’s chest heaved, the restraints biting into her wrists as she tugged, leather screaming under tension, lungs on fire. Kay straightened, turning, already writing.
“Prepare observation logs. Subject Eleven has established a long-distance psychic tether to Michael Wheeler. Emotional channel. Stable frequency.”
Eleven’s eyes widened. No. Not him. Not him, not him, not him.
Kay glanced back, voice pleasant, teasingly cruel. “And if she can reach him, we can reach him.”
The room tilted. Leather shrieked as Eleven struggled, desperation thrumming in her veins, heartbeat so loud she could hear it in her skull.
“Don’t—” she gasped, sound raw, ragged, spilling from her throat.
Kay’s smile sharpened, surgical, dangerous. “Oh? You don’t want us to?”
Eleven’s chest heaved, every muscle taut, lungs on fire, mind screaming in panic and love and terror all at once. Too late. Kay always knew.
“Well,” Kay said lightly, final, irrevocable. “That settles it.”
The clipboard snapped shut.
“Send a team to locate Mr. Wheeler.”
Footsteps echoed behind her. A chair scraped. A phone lifted from its cradle.
Eleven’s world narrowed to the single, unbearable thought of him, miles away, unsuspecting, untouchable, just there. Her chest tightened, mind spiraling, heart hammering, lungs desperate for air. The word locate reverberated, a drumbeat of fear and longing in her skull.
“No,” she whispered.
Kay didn’t even look back.
“Immediately.”
And Eleven stayed there, trapped, the room closing in, her love and panic and helplessness for him twisting, coiling around her heart, threatening to crush her from the inside out, leaving only one thought in her mind, repeated over and over like a mantra she could not escape: He’s out there. He’s out there. And they’re coming for him.