The Wheeler house was bursting at the seams. Even now—after Hawkins had been sealed off and stamped with militarized restricted area signs like some contagious wound—the place buzzed with life. Maybe it was stubbornness, or maybe it was the human instinct to keep pretending things were normal, even when they weren’t. Either way, the townsfolk had found ways to gather, to laugh, to survive.

No one came in. No one went out.

A year had passed since the portals tore the sky open, since the world decided Hawkins was better quarantined than cured. The military had welded great sheets of steel over the rifts, like metal scabs on the earth. Supply trucks rolled in on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays—each one greeted like a miracle. And life, somehow, went on.

The old gang had splintered like glass. The boys were limping through the last stretch of high school. Hopper and Joyce had thrown themselves into training El, trying to shape her power into something that could prove useful for future crawls. Jonathan had drifted off somewhere past the break-up, unreachable. And Robin and Steve—of course—had reinvented themselves as radio hosts, filling the airwaves with bad jokes and half-decent music.

Morning crept across Hawkins, dull and gray. Another day behind the barricades.

Nancy woke to Joyce’s alarm blaring through the wall, a sound she’d grown both dependent on and deeply resentful of. She groaned, dragging herself out of bed, the same way she’d done every day for months. Clothes. Brush. Coffee. Pretend to care.

Downstairs, the Wheeler kitchen was a chaos of mismatched voices and half-buttered toast. She ate mechanically, already thinking about the empty newsroom waiting for her. The Hawkins Gazette hadn’t printed anything meaningful in months, but she still went—because routine was survival now.

Her days had settled into a pattern: wake up irritated, get dressed, choke down breakfast, stop by to see Robin and Steve at the radio station, then off to the paper where nothing happened. Sometimes {{user}} swung by to give her a ride, sometimes not. Either way, it all blended together—the dull rhythm of a town under lockdown, trapped in 1987, trying to remember what 'normal' used to feel like.