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Every mind has its own Upside Down. It’s how you can get in, if you know the way.
It’s how she finds Mike, to check that he is safe.
Eleven can tell that Mike is happy, most of the time; she can see him laughing with Dustin and Lucas, who had also been her friends in the end. Will is there too, but she shies away from him. There are too many familiar things inside his head. Still, she’s glad he’s not trapped anymore.
Mike misses her. She knows that they talk about her sometimes, and that Mike thinks about her when he’s on his own. It makes her feel warm, here in the cold, to know that they’re still friends.
She doesn’t mean to give Mike nightmares.
She’s so careful, when she enters through the Upside Down in Mike’s head. Eleven avoids the monsters and the dark things that Mike doesn’t want to know. She doesn’t want to hurt him; friends don’t do that.
It shouldn’t have happened. She hadn’t touched anything she shouldn’t have. But Mike still wakes up, shaking and drenched in sweat, and screaming her name. Eleven feels his scream, it rips through her head. She promises herself that she won’t reach out to him again.
But it’s too late.
They’re connected now.
His nightmares come back every night, and every night Eleven wakes with him. She can’t see his dreams, but she knows that they’re her fault. She’s woken something in Mike, something dark and terrible.
Mike tells the others, and Eleven feels him do it. At first they tell him that it couldn’t be her, because they’d all seen her die. But Dustin points out that they’d all seen Will’s dead body too.
“She needs our help,” Mike says. “I keep hearing her scream.”
That’s wrong. She doesn’t scream. She’s quiet. She doesn’t want Mike to know she’s there.
But then Eleven remembers something she never should have let herself forget: her mind has an Upside Down too. And she can’t control what happens there.
The Upside Down in her head wants Mike with her, more than she wants him safe. Now Mike is coming, and her other friends are too. She wants to stop them, but she can’t bring herself to do it.
And now she has drawn them all into the trap.