Chapter Text
After everything else that's happened, the thesslehydra, the Upside Down leaking more into Hawkins, Max’s damn sociopath of a brother torturing them, he can't take this on top of everything else. Too many unbelievable things have happened, his brain is basically on disbelief overload. It’s too much for him to comprehend the resurrected telekinetic girl standing in front of him.
She's dead. She died. He'd repeated those words to himself for almost a year, convinced they were accurate, convinced he had to, as his parents phrased, “accept the reality of the situation and move on”.
But this is a new reality, one in which she's alive, with slightly longer hair, looking a bit older, wearing a strange mish-mosh of clothes, standing in the basement of the cabin Chief Hopper had lead them to, and looking at Mike with those eyes he'll never be able to forget in a thousand years.
He's reminded of their first meeting her in the woods last year, the way he and the guys had just stared at her and she at them, none of them really knowing what to do.
She hadn't said anything that fateful night in the woods, not even when they'd peppered her with questions before Mike decided that no matter what, no kid deserved to spend that freezing cold night out in the rain and took her back to his house.
Then, like now, he sensed the guys waiting for him to say something, do something. But Mike’s brain feels jammed.
Fortunately it's Eleven who breaks the silence this time. “Hi, Mike,” she says tentatively.
That at least temporarily unsticks his brain, though it unfortunately doesn't help his twisted up tongue, “Wha- El!” he splutters. “But. How? You - you're, I mean, you're alive?”
In her typical, maddening fashion, she offers him a one word answer that at once erases any doubt he has over whether she's the real El but does nothing to illuminate the mystery surrounding where she's been or what happened to her.
“Yes.”