this is a fic that takes place in the 90s, but it follows the canon of the show. so, everything that happened in seasons 1 and 2 also happened in this fic. it is somewhat inspired by Full Circle by LBorealis (phenomenal fic on AO3!) but of course with my own twists :)

Wednesday, January 10, 1996

It had been an ordinary day. He'd gotten up early, gone to work, worked, and was now on his way home. But then-

Michael Wheeler was only minding his own business picking up his prescription at the CVS down the street from work when those two women showed up. The purple-haired one, a little shorter than the blue-haired one, told the cashier there was a leak in the washroom.

Mike looked in that direction himself and didn't see anything, but the cashier ran off in a panic to check it out. By this point in his life, Mike had learned to trust what he saw. Something fishy was going on.

The purple-haired one started grabbing toiletries off the shelves as the blue-haired one went to the lone dry foods aisle with a swish of her bob. The two women hadn't seen him standing at the pharmacy counter in the back, and since the pharmacist seemed to be taking eons to find the exact same prescription Prozac that Mike picked up on the same day every month, he was the only one in the open store with them. But he was tired. He'd worked from nine in the morning to eleven at night and forgotten to take his last dose at lunch, and it was weighing on him. Plus, the women looked like the type of people who were probably armed. He wasn't going to stop them.

But he would investigate.

The pharmacist returned just as the door shut with a gust of cold air behind the women. "Here you are, Mr. Wheeler," he said, handing over the white paper bag that shook with the sound of pills.

"Thanks," he responded distractedly, handing over his payment before shoving the meds into his coat pocket and pulling his scarf up his face.

Outside, he didn't see anyone suspicious. The night was oddly calm for January in Boston, no snow falling in his eyes. The sky was inky black with a few stars in it. His boots crunched over ice as he walked to the nearest stop to catch a bus home.

"Weird," Mike said out loud, his breath puffing out in a white cloud.

Thursday, January 11, 1996

Mike woke up the next morning with his heart racing from the dream he'd had. He could only recall a vague idea of it, but he knew it was the same type of recurring dream he'd been having for the last seven years.

And he knew it was probably never going to happen. If she'd wanted to find him she could've by now. She was either dead or just didn't want to see him ever again.

He stretched on the futon and turned over to grab the TV remote from the floor. A small, used, TV sat on the ground across from him and he flicked it on to Channel 7, the glow from the screen bathing the water-stained and cracked walls of the shitty apartment he lived in blue.

There was a news report about some man in Florida who'd attempted to wrestle an alligator and ended up in hospital, but Mike wasn't interested in that. He wanted to see if there were any reports about the two women he'd seen the day before. Surely the CVS employees would've noticed that some things were gone, or that there was never a leak. The store cameras probably picked up on stuff. He was just waiting.

Mike spent the entire morning on the futon, obsessively watching the news for anything that might be suspicious. He ate a bowl of dry cereal he'd left out the day before, now stale, and an apple that was halfway to rotten. He didn't have much money left after paying rent and bills for the shittiest apartment in the world, so he had to stretch what was left in his kitchen before going grocery shopping. He left for work frustrated that he hadn't seen anything at all.

Macy's was a depressing place to work at, but Mike was kind of numb to things anyway. His meds helped, of course, otherwise he wouldn't be taking them, but they were never going to be able to cure him. He'd probably be better if he actually hung out with people, but his formerly-close friends were scattered across the country after college and the friends he'd made during weren't really close to him in the first place. He hadn't let them be. The only people Mike saw regularly were his coworkers.

His family was also estranged. He thought about them from time to time, wondering what they were doing. Nancy was the only one he still talked to. He'd seen her at Christmas when she came up to Boston to spend it with him in his tiny box of an apartment, but he hadn't spoken to his parents since the argument he'd had with them after graduation about staying in Boston indefinitely. Of course, that meant he hadn't seen Holly in about two and a half years either.

Since Nancy had left, his parents had wanted Mike to return to Hawkins and get a job so he could eventually settle down, but he couldn't bring himself to do it. He'd spent the second half of senior year of high school itching to leave, to search the world for her, and by going to college he could do something with himself that might be able to help him find her. Boston was close to MIT, and for some reason, he had a good feeling about the city. It was something he knew he needed to follow because he usually had good instincts, but his parents didn't see it that way. They threatened to cut him off if he didn't come back, and when he didn't they did exactly as they said. He was living off of what he made at Macy's, a little more than minimum wage.

Mike had gotten his degree in computer science and he knew he could probably get a better job than what he had, but if he did then he wouldn't have time to do what he really wanted. He'd learned to hack in college, so after he'd saved enough and bought his computer he would routinely hack into government servers searching for information. The Boston police never had anything of appeal, but the Department of Energy, his main interest, sometimes did. It was hard to crack into, though, so he wasn't able to do it often. He'd never been able to hack onto the FBI, though he was certain that if he ever did, he'd find a treasure trove of questionable things.

The afternoon and evening passed the same way they usually did: quietly. There was exactly one cranky customer, but Mike wasn't even at the register when that happened so it wasn't his concern. It was close to closing when something caught his attention: a bluster of cold air entered the store behind two women dressed all in black. He couldn't see their faces, just as he hadn't seen the blue-haired one's the day before, but he could see that one of them was the same purple-haired woman from the CVS. The other one could've been the same person except that she had long red hair reminiscent of Mike's old friend Max.

"Could be a wig," he muttered to himself, hiding behind a shelf. The two walked forward and the cashier didn't react. None of the employees in the front of the store did, either, which Mike thought suspicious until he realized they were all within the purple-haired woman's line of vision.

He wasn't.

She's doing something.

Mike watched as the redhead went to the other side of the store, her purple-haired companion following with her arms held up close to her body in what seemed to be a protective stance. To his luck, they hadn't spotted him, and he had a feeling that even if they did they wouldn't make a fuss about it. He decided he'd make use of their obliviousness to his presence and shuffled into the back as quickly as he could.

He got dressed and grabbed his bag, clocking out and running back into the store and then out the door with a yelled, "I gotta go!" To his confused coworkers.

The two women were still inside, so Mike hid around the corner of the building and waited for them to come out. They did before long, and he watched them walk away for a little, far enough that he could follow without them noticing. He suddenly had a burning desire to know who they were, why they were stealing from stores, and how they did it without anyone noticing. It was more intense than anything he'd felt in months, far surpassing the short thrill he got every time he hacked into private servers. The whole situation reeked strongly of X-Men type shit, things he'd dealt with at one point in his life and had thought were over when she left.

Once they were at a good distance, Mike started walking after them so as not to lose them. He trailed after them for a time, carefully noting his surroundings so he could remember how to get back there if necessary. The three of them ended up in a seedy looking neighbourhood full of shady houses and a big warehouse at the end of the block. Mike figured the women might be going in there, so he let them get further ahead as he watched.

He was right. As soon as they went inside, he ran after them, stopping upon reaching the door and trying to puzzle out how to get in without them noticing. He looked around and spotted a ladder bolted to the side of the warehouse, leading up to a balcony of sorts and a large window that was slightly opened. Mike climbed up and lifted the window the rest of the way, peeking inside before sticking one of his legs through. He'd been lucky the window was open and also that he hadn't fallen off the icy ladder.

His heart was pounding against his ribs as he prowled through the room, finding nothing and proceeding to make his way out onto another balcony. This one was shrouded in shadow, overlooking a large room downstairs that was lit up by floodlights pinned to the bottom of the platform Mike was on. If he stood directly over one he would be practically invisible in his black coat.

The women he'd tailed there were in the middle of the room. There were two ratty old mattresses on the floor and the redhead was laying on her side on one of them. Mike still couldn't see her face, which would make it a little hard to identify her if circumstance called for it, but he could see the purple-haired woman clearly now. Her features were twisted in anger.

"What do you mean, you don't want to come?" She snarled.

The redhead murmured something.

"We're sisters! We are a team! You cannot just leave everything to me." The purple-haired woman had some kind of accent that Mike couldn't place, and he wished he could hear the redhead speak to see if she was the same.

Suddenly, she sat up violently, her hair whipping around her shoulders. "I told you I'm tired! You can do it yourself, you were doing it for years before I found you! Leave me alone for tonight."

Mike felt like someone had cracked an egg over his head, a coolness flowing down and settling on his shoulders, making the hairs on the back of his neck stand up. The redhead's voice was shockingly familiar and had a decidedly Midwestern lilt to it, but he couldn't place her either. He watched as she lay back down and wrapped herself up in the raggedy blanket that was on top of her.

The purple-haired woman sighed and crossed her arms. "Is this about the boy again? It's been several years."

Her sister muttered something in response from beneath the blanket.

"I know you do, but hurting yourself like this isn't helping anyone." The purple-haired woman stood there for a second more before sighing. "I have to go. We will talk about this later. And we will get her back."

She walked through a doorway that Mike couldn't see from his position, and a few moments of breathless silence later he heard the outside doors open and close again. Something about these two women was pulling him in; he needed to know who they were. The redhead's voice seemed to reach out to him like a siren's call, beckoning him to her side. Maybe if he saw her face he'd know where he recognized her voice from.

But he couldn't expose himself just yet.

So he waited some more. Mike sat on the platform staring at this person he felt an almost magnetic pull to, seeing if she would fall asleep. After about a quarter of an hour of watching her, she stopped wriggling on the mattress and stayed on her side, facing away from him. Even better, because then if she wasn't actually asleep, she wouldn't see him.

Mike got up as quietly as he could and made his way to the iron stairs leading to the main floor, going down one step at a time as lightly as possible. He managed to get all the way down, glancing at the woman for any signs of consciousness every few seconds, and then absconded to another room through an open doorway he saw.

In there, he pulled the cord to turn on a weak lightbulb and looked around to see a box on a table. It was open and he peeked inside to see all kinds of IDs piled on top of some folders at the bottom. The folders caught his attention, so he dug through the plastic keycards and such to get them out.

The first one had newspaper clippings in it, with recent ones on top and old ones going back to the late sixties and early seventies, all about missing kids. Mike saw a few about a woman named Terry Ives, a woman he'd met before. She had introduced them. That was when he knew for sure that those two women, the one gone and the one sleeping in the other room, were connected to the lab in Hawkins. At least one of them, the purple-haired one, had abilities of some kind; that much was suddenly clear. Maybe they could tell Mike what had happened to their sister.

The second folder was just as interesting, if not more; it contained files on those missing kids. Files that looked like they had been kept by the lab, if the Hawkins National Laboratory logo stamped on the bottom of every page was anything to go by. Listed were names and dates of birth, blood types, the ability that each child seemed to possess, and results of innumerable trial experiments along with a picture clipped to the top of the first page. Mike sifted through the pile looking for one in particular, and when he came across number eleven he stopped short.

The picture had probably been taken shortly before she escaped because she looked about the same as she had when he'd first met her. Eleven's terrified twelve-year-old face stared back up at him and Mike almost felt like throwing up. He'd known about her past, of course, after she'd decided to tell him about it, but hearing it from her mouth and seeing tangible proof of it were two different things. He'd been in the lab as well, but by the time he'd first gone in there, all that type of equipment had been removed. Looking in the folder was horrifying knowing what had really been done to those kids.

Suddenly, Mike heard rustling and a quiet voice.

"Kali?"

It was the redhead. Mike's eyes shot to the doorway to see her starting to sit up. He shouldn't have stayed. He looked around quickly, heart in his throat, before spotting a window on the other side of the room that looked like it would be big enough for him to escape through. He plucked at the light cord, turning the lightbulb off and receiving an angry yelp from the other room. Darting in the direction of the window, Mike yanked it open and vaulted himself through it, landing in the snow outside in a heap of limbs.

He scrambled up and ran opposite the way he'd come as fast he could, stopping after a minute to catch his breath in a copse of trees. The freezing air burned his lungs and he bent over, wheezing. He stood there for a few minutes to let his heart rate go back to normal before standing back up and blinking furiously at the slew of feelings that had blurred together inside of him tonight.

Mike started to laugh; a deep rumbling laugh punctuated with wheezes as the cold air burned him some more. He probably sounded like a madman but he didn't care, there was no one around to hear! He felt delirious, like he was high on actually feeling something positive for once.

Only as he started to make his way home did it register in his mind that the name the redhead had called out had been Kali. That was a name Mike recognized. It was the name of her sister, the one she'd found when she'd run away to Chicago when she was thirteen.

He knew staying in Boston had been a good idea! If anyone was bound to know what had happened to her, it was Kali.

He'd be back.