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He doesn’t get a headstone. Max would feel bad about this, but it’s not as if she’s going to drop by to leave flowers. She stands there in her too-pinched shoes and her too-worn black sweater and the skirt that her mother loaned her, and listens to the pastor pray for William Hargrove’s soul. Neil’s arm is tight around her shoulders. She shrugs it off.
He grips her arm tighter. A warning. Max’s mother lays her hand on her back, as if to say, can’t you just let him have this?
Max hates him. She hates her mother, too, a little, and she hates Billy for being awful when he was alive and then dying heroically so she doesn’t know how to feel about him, and she hates herself most of all.
Because Eleven, looking small and forlorn without Chief Hopper on the other side of the grave, tucked into Mrs. Byers' side, is alive, and Billy is not, and every time Max sees her she breathes a little easier knowing that the girl with the world on her shoulders will live to fight another day (What does it say about Max, now, that she knows there will be another day?). Because Max is glad about it. What she cannot say-- not to El, or Lucas, or her mother, is that when she sobbed in Eleven’s arms after the Mind Flayer dropped dead, and Billy with it, her tears were not of grief but relief at Eleven’s continued existence.
Eleven.
Eleven, rejecting her hand, brushing past her in a flurry of dark makeup and worn denim at the Byers’. Eleven, wide-eyed, Max’s skateboard in her arms, looking delicately out of place in an oversized flannel in the middle of the road. Eleven, curled next to Max in bed, reading Wonder Woman: Judgment in Infinity, throwing Billy into a wall, facing down the Mind Flayer with nothing but her own abilities. Eleven, soft and furious and brave.
Once, when Max was eight, she had found a bird the color of the sky crushed on the sidewalk outside her house, fallen victim to some predator unknown. When she’d realized the bird was still half-alive, she’d held it in her bare hands until it finally, mercifully stopped breathing. At Star Court, watching helplessly with Mike as Billy and the Mind Flayer loomed over Eleven, Max had thought of the bird once more, feathers the same shade of blue as the scrunchy El always wears on her wrist. She had imagined El’s body as broken as the bird’s, shrieked her name until she was hoarse.
Eleven could be a bird, winged and delicate, bony and small, trapped in a cage or out free in the open air. Now, with Neil’s fingers digging into her skin and visions of Billy’s final moments every time she closes her eyes, Max thinks she might know the feeling too, just a little.
Maybe Billy had thought of a cage, at the end. Maybe saving Eleven was just his final attempt at beating his wings against the bars.
She doesn’t know.
She’ll never know.
She allows herself to cry when the pastor finishes the sermon, because it’s expected of her. Because it’ll make Neil release her.
Not because of him.
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“Do you want--”
El stumbles over her words again, starts at the beginning for the third time in a row. Max kicks at the Byers’ rug, fiddles with her hands and tries not to look impatient.
“Do you wish it was me?” she finally asks, triumphant. Max blinks, confused, and El seems to realize that more context than this is needed. “At Starcourt,” she continues, a lengthy pause between each word. “Do you wish it was me-- not Billy?”
Max is briefly annoyed at the other girl’s tone until she realizes that this is probably how other people talk to El when she doesn’t understand-- slow and patronizing, as though she’s a child. Only after this does she register the question, the worry it implies. El won’t look her in the eye, staring down at her blood-stained shoes with the question evident on every line of her face.
“No,” Max says, much too quickly. “No,” she repeats, trembling with the emotion of it, the memory of the fear she’d felt when Billy had dragged El into danger kicking and flailing, his fist clenched around her ripped pant leg. “Never.”
She must look fierce, her face heated, her hands clenched into tight fists. El’s expression is almost afraid.
“He was your brother,” she whispers, sounding out the last, unfamiliar word carefully. “Like-- like Jonathan and Will.”
“Not like Jonathan and Will,” Max hisses before she can stop herself. Eleven flinches, jerking backwards, her curly hair flying in her face.
“Sorry,” Max says, once she’s regained control of herself somewhat. “But Billy… was nothing like Jonathan.”
Eleven nods. “So-- not me.”
Max curls her knees up to her chest on the couch, considers hugging El and decides against it. “Not you. Better that it was Billy.”
As soon as she hears the cruelty of her words, she thinks El should hate her for it, (and she hates herself for it, doesn’t she?), but instead the other girl just throws her arms around her and holds on tight. El hugs like she is afraid the other person will be snatched away from her if she doesn't keep a good grip.
Usually Max isn’t a hugger, but now she lets El stroke her back and cry softly into her shoulder. She’s not even sure why El’s crying, really-- because of Billy or the Chief or the flayed or maybe because she’s been expecting Max to have some sort of twisted resentment towards her this entire time.
“Not you,” Max says, again, the idea that Billy could ever be worth El’s death burning a choking hole in her throat. “Never you.”
When Mrs. Byers wanders in and sees the two of them like that, curled together on the couch, tears running down both their faces, she starts crying, too, pats their shoulders and sits down next to them and doesn’t promise that things will be better.
Max doesn’t know what healing feels like. Maybe like this.
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One day, after they’ve laid in the grass for hours without speaking, Lucas says, “I’m sorry about Billy.”
The words sound wrong in his mouth-- not like he’s lying to her as much as he is desperately trying to mean it. Max hadn’t expected this, knowing the special kind of hell Billy had put Lucas through. She bites her lip, stares up at the sky and tries to ignore Cerebro blocking half her view.
“You don’t have to be,” she finally replies. “Billy was…”
She’s not sure how to finish. Billy would have killed Lucas, if he could have-- she knows this the same way she knows that the hate in his eyes when he looked at her in Starcourt was real, beyond possession or monsters.
It wasn’t the flaying that had made him that way. She didn’t know whether Neil had snapped something vital and shining within him, before she’d even known him, or whether he’d always been furious and angry and ready to hurt.
He’d saved Eleven, at the end. Did one act of heroism make up for the horrors he’d put them all through, for Lucas’s back slammed against the wall, Steve’s face battered and bloody, the bruises that had dotted her wrists for days after he was angry?
Max leans her head against Lucas’s shoulder, reaches for his hand and squeezes until her fingers hurt. “I hated him,” she confesses. “Most days. And he hated you. You’re not wrong to-- I’m not wrong”--
She’s almost crying with the emotion of it, her voice shaking with sadness and anger and a hatred that ebbs and flows beyond the days.
"Alright," Lucas breathes out, looking more than a little unsure. "I'm not sorry. But I was trying to be, for you."
And Max isn't sure what to say to that, so she just shakes her head, rolls over to face him, and kisses him until she can't breathe.
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Sometimes, her nightmares are so awful she’s afraid to go back to sleep. Billy dies before her again in some of them, but more often it’s El, or Lucas, or even her who lies bleeding and dull-eyed on the Starcourt floor as the Mind Flayer rages unchallenged. After one particularly bad dream in which Billy chokes the life out of her, she screams so loudly she wakes up the whole house.
Neil grouses about it the next morning; her mother says nothing.
Max is not surprised. She knows, now, that her mother will never take her side. Not against Neil-- not against anyone. She remembers the way he lashed out at Billy again and again-- with his words, his fists, his belt. She remembers how her mother had stood there, and covered her mouth in shock, and done nothing.
Her mother is weak, slow, too fragile to be counted on, nothing but an example of what not to be. Max has fought monsters her mother would faint at the sight of, seen horrors beyond her mother’s comprehension.
She tells herself this when she hears soft crying late at night, when she observes her mother carefully applying makeup to bruises turned a stark shade of gunmetal. She tells herself this when Neil knocks her against the wall in a fit of anger; if he had done what she had-- had faced down demo dogs in the dark, crawled through the tunnels of the Mind Flayer and witnessed Billy at his worst, at the end-- he would break.
It does not make home easier; it does make it bearable. She lives in a world her mother and Neil will never know.
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She hangs around the video store more than she does almost anywhere else, even the arcade. Not for the videos, but for Steve and his friend Robin, who let her sit behind the counter with them and make fun of the more difficult customers after they leave and don’t ask why she wants to be anywhere but home. Robin laughs soft and lovely when Max complains about the boys in fits of temper, and Steve calls her a little shit and ruffles her hair, but he also drives her around without (much) complaint, Robin usually curled in the passenger seat, feet on the dash, singing along ever so slightly off-key to the radio.
Robin is not Steve’s girlfriend. This is important and Max learns it very quickly. She is his best friend, and as best Max can tell their friendship consists of many sharply thrown elbows and shouts of dingus.
She asks Steve about Billy, after one of those days, and Steve winces at the memory of Billy beating him to a pulp with a dinner plate in the Byers’ foyer, but he must think that this is important to Max (and it is, but in an entirely different way than what he believes), because his eyes crinkle soft around the edges, and he mumbles something about Billy “maybe not being such a bad guy”.
Max digs her fists into the seat of his car and shouts, “Bullshit!” and Steve doesn’t correct her, just looks a little sad.
“You hit him with your car,” she adds, leaning out the back window, her arms braced on the sill as the road flies by.
“We did,” Robin laughs, a little proud and a little nervous. “Although he was possessed at the time.”
Max says, “My brother was a piece of shit,” and the silence that follows tells her she is right. She feels furious with the righteousness of it all, the sharpness of grief.
She still doesn’t know exactly what she’s grieving.
She thinks maybe one day she’ll be able to figure it out.
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They go up to visit the Byers for Christmas. El looks happy, a little, and Max tries not to be too annoyed when she and Mike escape upstairs for their third fifteen minute makeout session in two hours. She refuses to kiss Lucas under the mistletoe, and teases Dustin mercilessly about his dramatic break-up with Suzie (that she, Lucas, Will, Erica, and Mike all had the distinct displeasure of being privy to).
She thinks of Billy more than she wants to. El cries at dinner when she sees an ad for cigarettes that reminds her of the Chief, and Mrs. Byers cries, too, and the rest of them wait in the silent commiseration shared by those who understand that some wounds will never truly heal. Later that night, when Max and El are huddled together under the covers in El’s bed, El asks her if she’s alright.
“I will be,” says Max, and she means it.