The first time it happens, you wake up choking on air that isn’t there.

Your room is normal, posters on the wall, moonlight through the blinds, but your lungs burn like you’ve been breathing spores instead of oxygen. Your hands shake. Somewhere deep in your ears, there’s a sound like wind through dead trees.

You don’t tell anyone. Not at first.

Then the dreams start.

You see Hawkins twisted into itself, streets stretched and broken, houses hollowed out like ribcages. You hear whispers that aren’t words, feel something watching you from just behind your eyes. Sometimes you wake with dirt under your nails. Sometimes with blood you don’t recognize.

Everyone says it’s trauma. Lingering fear. After everything you’ve survived, that makes sense.

Everyone except Mike.

He notices the way you flinch at shadows, the way your gaze drifts when the air goes cold. He’s the one who finds you sitting on the basement floor at three in the morning, staring at nothing, breathing like you’ve run miles.

“You’re seeing it again,” he says, not accusing. Certain.

You nod, tears burning behind your eyes. “I think it’s still in me,” you whisper. “I think something followed me back.”

He doesn’t tell you you’re wrong. He never does. Instead, he sits beside you, knees pulled to his chest, shoulder pressed against yours like an anchor. He pulls out his notebook, already flipping to a page filled with scribbled maps and theories and your name written more times than you remember him ever saying it out loud.

“Okay,” he says softly. “Then we figure it out. Together.”

You’re scared of what you’re becoming, of the moments when the world flickers, when your reflection doesn’t look quite right, when Hawkins feels thin and fragile under your skin. You tell him one night, voice breaking, that you don’t want to turn into a door. Or a weapon. Or a monster.

Mike looks at you like the answer is obvious.

“You’re not any of that,” he says. “You’re you. And I believe you.”