Mike Wheeler awoke on July 14th, 1984 in a cold sweat, chest heaving up and down as he gasped for breath. The twelve year old sat up in his bed, shaking.

Eight months.

It had been eight months since the strange girl, Eleven, had come into his life, and then gone away just as quickly. It hadn't been... Easy.

On him, on Will, on anyone. Hawkins Indiana slept uneasily after the incident left several people dead in an alternate dimension, and a young boy back from the dead after his very public funeral. It was the kind of scandal that could ruin someone, if Joyce Byers actually gave a damn- she was achingly ecstatic that her boy came back home, and no one was going to keep her down, now that she was proven right (even if she couldn't talk about it with anyone).

Mike looked around, finally seeing his alarm clock- 5:37 AM. It wasn't even a school day, so he didn't have a reason to be up this early. But he was up, now, and he didn't want to risk going back to sleep, not when his nightmares were forcing him awake.

He wasn't sure what the Upside Down actually looked like- no one who had been there would actually talk about it- but he had this... Image of the place in his mind, and it was cold and lonely and wrong in a dark and subtle way. It was a place that haunted his dreams when he slept, a place that held the girl he knew hostage.

He sighed, flipping his legs over the side of his bed, sliding out onto the cold floor before moving to rummage through his dresser for some clothes to wear that day.

School would be over in a couple of weeks, and Lucas and Dustin were as excited as ever over the coming months of freedom. Mike was less so, and Will was...

Will was different.

It was a subtle thing; almost nothing, really, except for the way that Will would jump at long shadows, or how he refused to bike some areas after dark, no matter how quickly it went or how many of his friends went with him. It was how his eyes always roved around now, searching for monsters in the walls. It was in the way his lungs still wheezed and struggled for breath, even now.

Will Byers had left the Upside Down, but the Upside Down never left him.

But that was okay, to Mike's mind. It was still Will, still his best friend of six years, and still the person that he had risked his life to save from a terrifying hellscape. He just wished that he had done a better job at saving him. Maybe, if he had, Will wouldn't still be struggling to sleep at night, or to breathe deeply when they ran around outside.

Maybe he could have saved El, too. It had taken a long time, but there was a large part of Mike Wheeler that believes that Eleven, the strange, wonderful, brave girl with superpowers, was dead and gone.

Of course, there was still a deep and bitterly hopeful part of him that fully expected her to be in his basement, snuggled up in the blanket fort they had made, or eating eggos, or doing some other inscrutable thing that made her so amazingly special and unique.

He didn't like talking about that with the others, though. Will had never met her, and Lucas and Dustin assumed that she was truly dead. And he knew, logically, that they were probably right.
She had disappeared into that nether place, slaying the big bad monster just like some hero out of one of their D&D sessions. Except, of course, he didn't think that he would be up to kissing any of the Elf Wizards that the boys liked to play as.

The house was quiet as he picked his way downstairs, the sun shining sleepily through the kitchen window as he grabbed an apple to snack on. Later, he and the boys planned to go to Wills house, watching movies and playing board games and generally being the kind of nuisance only four preteen boys could ever hope to be; but that was many hours away, and Mike was nurturing that fickle sort of melancholy that only came with early morning introspection.

Stepping out onto the porch, he curled up with his back to the wall and his knees tucked into his chest, idly munching on his apple as he watched the sunrise.

The wind blew past, ruffling his hair, and he could have sworn (if it wasn't such a crazy idea, of course), that he heard it whisper to him.

Pretty.