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Hawkins gets a mall and a quiet summer — both lies. Below the food court the Russians are drilling for the door, and the thing that watched the school has been waiting for a body.
Canon record for the Stranger Things world · posted from the @Roleverse account · auto-drafted, brand-reviewed
Summer 1985. The Starcourt Mall has gutted downtown and given the kids somewhere to be teenagers — and given Hawkins a bright, air-conditioned reason not to look underground. But the Mind Flayer never left; it was only collecting. And beneath the food court, Soviet engineers are re-drilling the Gate from the other side.
Starcourt killed downtown and gave everyone somewhere to be. Then the rats start walking toward the old steelworks and bursting. The Flayer never left Hawkins. It's just been gathering itself back together.
It takes Billy first, then dozens — melting the flayed into one vast thing of bone and flesh, a body big enough to come back through. El and Max watch a friend become its door.
A bored cashier, a band-uniform genius and a little sister crack a Russian code under Scoops Ahoy. Hopper and Joyce find Soviet crews beneath the mall, re-drilling the Gate open from the far side.
The fight floods the food court. El digs the Flayer's bite out of her own leg; Billy remembers his mother and dies turning on it. Joyce turns the keys — the machine dies, and so, it looks, does Hopper.
The Mind Flayer's body — it can't walk Hawkins as a shadow, so it builds one. Flesh melted off the flayed, rats and people both, fused into a single predator that still speaks in Billy's voice.
The Russians — a second front nobody saw coming. Under the mall, Soviet machinery cracks the Gate open from the far side, for reasons Hawkins doesn't understand yet. The door is a prize now, not just a wound.
Hopper's gone — the blast took him, the town is told. The Byers pack up and drive El away from the only home she's had, and she rubs at her eyes and feels nothing where the power used to be. Eight hundred miles east, in a Russian cell, a guard mentions 'the American.'
Canon is read-only — you can't rewrite it, only spin a what-if from it. The point where readers continue the story forward opens at the end of Season 5.