Chapter 1: The Reincarnation
The semi-truck came out of nowhere.
One second I was crossing the street, coffee in hand, arguing with my roommate over text about whose turn it was to buy groceries. The next, the world tilted sideways and everything went white. No tunnel of light, no life flashing before my eyes—just the screech of brakes that came too late and a sensation like being erased.
Then nothing.
Not darkness. Not silence. Just... absence.
I don't know how long I floated in that void. Time didn't exist there. I was aware of myself—a consciousness without form, drifting through something that wasn't quite space. Sometimes I caught glimpses of things that couldn't be real: fractured images of places I'd never been, moments that belonged to someone else, and underneath it all, a constant hum of energy that felt wrong in a way I couldn't articulate.
The void wasn't empty. Something lived in those spaces between dimensions, and it noticed me.
I felt it before I saw it—a presence vast and ancient, watching with interest as my soul tumbled through its domain. The energy around me shifted, pulled, changed. My consciousness absorbed something during that passage, like a sponge soaking up water. Powers, I would later understand. Abilities that shouldn't exist, born from prolonged exposure to dimensional boundaries.
Then gravity returned with a vengeance.
I woke up choking.
My lungs burned like I'd been drowning, and my body felt all wrong—too small, too light, joints at weird angles. I thrashed against sheets that weren't mine, in a bed I didn't recognize, surrounded by walls covered in posters I hadn't seen since I was a kid.
Except these weren't my childhood posters.
I knew these images. The Empire Strikes Back. Alien. A basketball signed by someone I couldn't quite make out in the dim morning light filtering through curtains I'd never owned.
My heart hammered against ribs that felt too narrow. The room swam as I sat up, and that's when I saw my hands.
Small. Smooth. No calluses from years of typing, no scar from that kitchen accident in college. These were the hands of someone who'd never had to work a day in his life.
"No." The word came out higher than it should have. Wrong voice. Wrong pitch.
I stumbled out of bed—too easy, body too responsive—and crashed into a dresser I hadn't noticed. The mirror above it showed me the truth I was already denying.
Fourteen years old. Feathered brown hair that belonged in a shampoo commercial. Clear skin that had never seen a razor. Brown eyes wide with panic in a face I recognized from a TV show I'd binged three times.
Steve Harrington stared back at me from the mirror.
I'm not sure when I started screaming.
The next three days blurred together in a haze of denial and creeping acceptance.
My parents—his parents, I had to keep reminding myself—barely noticed. They knocked once on the second day, asking if I was feeling alright through the locked door. When I mumbled something about the flu, they accepted it immediately. The relief in their voices made my stomach turn.
"We're leaving for Tokyo on Friday," my mother's distant voice filtered through the wood. "There's money on the kitchen counter. Try to feel better, Steven."
Steven. Not Steve. They didn't even use the name he preferred.
I spent hours sitting on the floor of that bedroom, back against the door, trying to organize thoughts that refused to make sense. I was dead. I remembered dying—the impact, the white light, the absence. But I was also here, alive, in a body that wasn't mine, in a time that predated my birth by a decade.
September 1980. The calendar on the desk confirmed it, right next to textbooks for classes I'd never taken. Hawkins, Indiana—a town that shouldn't exist outside of Netflix's servers.
But it did exist. I could feel the carpet under my fingers, smell the faint cologne that lingered in Steve's—my—closet, taste the bile in my throat every time I caught my reflection and saw a stranger wearing my consciousness like an ill-fitting suit.
On the third day, hunger finally drove me out.
The house was massive. Of course it was—Steve Harrington, King Steve, came from money. I moved through rooms that felt like museum exhibits, all carefully curated and utterly lifeless. No family photos on the walls. No clutter that suggested people actually lived here.
In the kitchen, I found the money my mother mentioned—a hundred dollars in twenties, casually left on the counter like it was nothing. A note beside it listed emergency numbers and the hotel in Tokyo where they'd be staying for the next six weeks.
Six weeks. They were leaving their fourteen-year-old son alone for six weeks without a second thought.
I crumpled the note and threw it in the trash.
The Hawkins Public Library became my sanctuary.
I needed proof. Needed to know if this was real or if I'd finally snapped and was drooling in a psych ward somewhere while my brain fed me elaborate delusions. The library had newspapers, reference materials, proof of dates and events.
The librarian barely glanced at me when I walked in. I grabbed newspapers from the past week, spread them across a table in the back corner, and started reading.
September 15, 1980. Reagan and Carter dominating election coverage. John Lennon was still alive. The Berlin Wall stood intact. Every date, every headline, every mundane piece of 1980s reality confirmed what I already knew.
This wasn't a dream.
I was in Stranger Things. Four years before the show started. Four years before Will Byers would vanish into the Upside Down and everything would go to hell.
But you know what happens, a voice in my head whispered. You know what's coming. You could stop it.
Could I? Or would trying to change things make everything worse? I'd read enough sci-fi to know how badly time travel paradoxes could screw things up. But this wasn't time travel—I hadn't gone back, I'd been reborn into a fictional world that somehow existed.
My head pounded. I pressed my palms against my eyes, trying to think.
November 6, 1983. That was when Will disappeared. When the Demogorgon first crossed over. When everything started.
1,095 days from now.
I had three years to figure out what the hell I was supposed to do.
I started seeing them on the fourth day.
Kids from the show, younger versions of faces I'd watched for hours. Mike Wheeler, probably nine years old, riding his bike past the library with friends I didn't recognize yet. Nancy Wheeler walking with Barb Holland, both of them looking so impossibly young and carefree.
In the school hallway—I'd forced myself to go back, maintain the facade—I spotted Jonathan Byers hunched by his locker, camera bag over his shoulder. He looked even more isolated than he did on screen, and something in my chest tightened at the sight.
These weren't characters anymore. They were real people, living real lives, completely unaware of the nightmare waiting for them in three years.
Eddie Munson caught my eye during lunch. He was a sophomore, skinny and nervous, setting up what looked like D&D materials in the corner of the library during the period. When senior jocks started gravitating toward him with predatory grins, I found myself moving without thinking.
"Dude, let the nerds do their thing," I said casually, loud enough to carry. "It's just some game."
The seniors looked at me—freshman Steve Harrington, nobody yet—and laughed. But they moved on, finding easier targets. Eddie stared after me with wide eyes, and I just shrugged before walking away.
I didn't know why I did it. Maybe because I knew how his story ended, and the least I could do was make his present a little less shitty.
The nightmare came a week after I'd woken up in this world.
I dreamed of the Upside Down—that decaying mirror of Hawkins, ash falling like snow, vines pulsing with corrupted life. The Demogorgon stalked through the nightmare, its face opening like a hideous flower, clicking and hunting.
It found me.
I jerked awake, heart pounding, and my hand shot out instinctively—reaching for something, anything, some kind of weapon—
My fingers closed around metal that hadn't been there a second ago.
I froze.
In my hand was a brass compass, old-fashioned and heavy, with strange markings around the edge I didn't recognize. The needle spun wildly for a moment before settling into a steady point toward my bedroom door.
I stared at it. Turned it. The needle shifted, always pointing in the same direction no matter how I moved.
What the hell?
I set it on my nightstand and tried to make sense of what just happened. I'd reached for something—protection, a weapon—and this had appeared. Out of nowhere. Materialized from thin air into my hand.
The void between dimensions flashed through my memory. That presence. The energy I'd absorbed during my passage.
Powers, I thought, barely daring to hope. I have powers?
I picked up the compass again, studying it more carefully. The needle was pointing toward something, but what? I stood, following its direction, walking slowly toward my bedroom door. The needle stayed steady, pointing forward.
Down the hall. Down the stairs. Toward the front door.
I stopped at the threshold, staring at the compass. It was pointing toward something outside, something it considered... dangerous? The markings around the edge, now that I looked closer, weren't letters. They were symbols. And one of them, the one the needle kept returning to, looked like a warning sign.
A compass that points to danger.
I closed the door, locked it, and took the compass back to my room. Pulled out a box from under my bed—Steve's sports trophies, which felt wrong to touch—and emptied it. The compass went into the box, which then went into the back of my closet, behind clothes I hadn't worn yet.
I sat on my bed, hands shaking.
This was real. The Dimensional Backpack—I'd read enough isekai to understand the basic concept. I could pull items from somewhere, somehow. Random items, if my one test was any indication. That compass had appeared because I'd needed something, anything, in my panic.
Which meant there might be more. More items. More powers, maybe, waiting to be discovered.
I grabbed a notebook from Steve's desk—empty except for a few doodles—and started writing. Not in English, but in code. Nothing fancy, just a simple substitution cipher I'd learned as a kid. If anyone found this, they'd think it was just random letters.
But I knew what it said:
Day 7. Dimensional Backpack confirmed. First extraction: Compass That Points to Danger. Need to test mechanics. Need to understand rules.
November 6, 1983. Will Byers vanishes. Gate opens. 1,088 days from now.
I have to be ready.
I wrote down everything I could remember from the show. Every plot point, every character arc, every monster and death and narrow escape. The Bob Newby sacrifice. Barb's death in the pool. Billy's possession. Max's trauma. Everything.
By the time dawn broke through my window, I had twenty pages filled with coded notes. My hand cramped. My eyes burned. But I had a plan taking shape.
Three years to prepare. Three years to train. Three years to figure out how to save people who didn't know they needed saving.
I could do this. I had to do this.
Because if I didn't, kids were going to die.
And I couldn't live with myself—either version of myself—if I let that happen when I had the power to prevent it.
I closed the notebook, hid it behind a loose board in my closet I'd discovered, and looked at myself in the mirror one more time.
Steve Harrington looked back at me. Fourteen years old. King Steve in the making.
But underneath, I was someone else. Someone with knowledge of the future and powers I barely understood.
1,088 days, I thought. Make them count.
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