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It’s almost funny.
It’s funny how oddly calm Max feels now.
Before, when Vecna’s curse had loomed over her as a silent threat—just a possibility, her hands had shaken.
Her hands had shaken, and her face had felt hot and prickly, just like it did every time she woke from a nightmare. Unshed tears gathered in her throat, making it hard to breathe, and every time someone looked at her with that look— the one that seemed to scream ‘We’re sorry, we’re so sorry!’ —they had threatened to spill out, blurring her vision and making her chest heave with breathless sobs.
But after coming face to face with Vecna, when the high possibility of her falling prey to his curse had shifted into a genuine and haunting reality… something had changed.
It wasn’t as though her fears had melted away. If anything, seeing everything come to life before her had been more terrifying than anything her imagination had been able to come up with. But now, the uncertainty of what to expect was gone, and with it, the desire to simply lie down and let him claim her as his next victim.
Seeing the fear on Lucas, Dustin, and Steve’s faces as she came crashing down had done a lot to help with that. Almost as much as knowing that some part of her still possessed the will to fight, to save herself, no matter how dried up and withered she initially thought that part of herself to be. Sure, her throat ached, burning like the time she had snuck one of Billy’s smokes to see what it would feel like, only to cough so hard she was sure she would hack up a lung. And her legs were weak, the same Jell-O-like feeling she got whenever she tried to skate up a tall hill spreading throughout them and making it hard to walk. But she was calm.
She was calm, and they were frantic.
Sitting on the hood of Steve’s BMW, Max watched as Lucas and Dustin paced in front of her like lions in cages, arguing about where they needed to go from here. Steve stood beside her, leaning back against the driver’s side door with a bored look that told Max he had seen this fight before and knew better than to think that his opinion would hold any weight in their argument.
Their voices seemed to grow louder; once more, Max found herself thankful for the soft comfort of Kate Bush’s voice in her ears as she nudged the volume up a hair higher. With them effectively drowned out, her mind was allowed to wander. Still marveling at the sudden change she felt, she thought back to being curled up in the corner of the Wheelers’ basement.
When she was writing her letters, the pencil felt odd in her hand, heavy and unnatural. She had to stop and steady herself as it tried to spill from her grasp more than once, as her sweat made the skin slick. She often had to remind herself that this needed to be done and that it was not something she could shy away from. But when Lucas had refused to let go of her hand as they walked back to Steve’s car from the gravesite, her hand hadn’t shaken once.
She didn’t have to readjust her grip. She didn’t shift awkwardly as she waited for him to let go. Instead, his hand felt right in her hand. Unlike the pencil, Lucas’ hand had felt like it belonged there. It was almost as if it was tethering her to reality nearly as much as Kate Bush’s voice as it played on a loop through the headphones over her ears.
The guilt that thought brought wasn’t a surprise. This wasn’t the first time she felt like she didn’t deserve Lucas’ warm presence near her. And while Max had grown all too familiar with the crushing weight of guilt these past few months, it still stung when it hit her, causing her to let out a heavy sigh before she had the mind to bite it off.
Luckily, Lucas and Dustin are still too busy arguing to notice, leaving only Steve, who seems to bristle the moment the sound rolls off her lips.
For the third time this afternoon, Max is grateful for Kate Bush as she says a silent prayer that the sight of the headphones covering her ears will keep him from trying to question her. Luck, however, has never been on her side, and she’s reminded of that when her Walkman pops as the tape runs out.
There’s no doubt that Steve heard it, too, and for the first time since she slipped from Vecna’s slimy grip, Max finds herself face to face with the cold rush of fear. The prospect of a conversation regarding her well-being is staring her in the face as she feels the older boy inch closer, and she has to resist the urge to run. She already knows what he’s going to say— she’s played this same song and dance enough to know that he’s going to ask her how she’s doing and then try to console her by reassuring her that everything is going to be ‘just fine!’ somehow, even though they both know better.
She knows he will give her the same pitiful look that everyone else does. The same look she got when her parents split up, and then twice over after Billy died. The same one that Ms. Kelly wears whenever she reveals just a bit too much of the truth in their weekly sessions.
With a curse under her breath, she fumbles with the rewind button and clenches her eyes shut to avoid seeing that look that does nothing more than make her want to crawl out of her skin.
She braces herself and waits for the barreling pity of ‘how are you doing, sweetie?’ that everyone had grown so fond of since she was little as he sits beside her on the car's hood.
Only it never comes.
Instead, she’s greeted with the unflattering sound of a snort. “Get a load of these two.”
She knows her confusion is plastered on her face as clear as a newspaper headline as her head whips around to look at him, but for some reason or another, Steve doesn’t comment on it as he thrusts a hand towards the direction of Dustin and Lucas.
“I’m willing to bet you five bucks that they’ll keep going at it for another ten minutes if we don’t interrupt,” he says.
This time, it’s her who snorts. “I’m not an idiot,” she counters, “No way I’m taking that bet.”
An awkward silence finds them and makes itself at home as they both stare ahead to where Dustin is now frantically waving his arms, squealing something incoherent as Lucas looks on with irritation.
The Walkman hums in her hand as it continues to rewind. Max does her best to focus on it, letting her eyes drift down to where it lies in her hands. She wills it to hurry up and finish as Steve makes no effort to move from the spot beside her.
His shifty eyes remind her of a spooked cat when it can’t decide if you’re a friend or foe. They darted back and forth, hovering between stealing curious glances at her and checking to ensure the other two boys were still there. Something about their uncertainty makes her think he’s not quite finished with… whatever it was he’s trying to accomplish here.
“Hey, so,” Steve proves her intuition right when he opens his mouth again. “You still skate and stuff, right?”
“Uhm... yeah?”
He nodded thoughtfully, turning her response over in his head for a moment. “Cool, that’s cool. Yeah, so maybe after we find this Vecna guy, kill him, and save the world and stuff, you can help me buy a good one.”
All thoughts of Kate Bush and her reservations about talking are long forgotten when Max turns to him, a wrinkle between her brows. His words didn’t make any sense. She had to have heard him wrong, surely.
Steve didn’t skate. She was even fairly certain she had seen him trip on air before.
“You don’t skate.”
He paused, tilting his head to the side. “Well… no. I mean, not technically, I don’t.” His face shifted into something that could only be described as a mix of frustration and deep thought. Had he not thought this through? “But I can. I mean, I wanna learn.”
“You want to learn?” Max asks suspiciously, a bubble of confused laughter climbing in her throat. “You want to learn how to skateboard?”
“What? You don’t think I could?”
Max’s laughter rises to the surface in a roar. “No!”
“What?! Hey! I could skateboard!” He replies defensively. “What? You don’t think I’m cool enough?”
She pretends to chew on his words for a minute, just long enough to cause him visible distress as she tries to hide the rest of the laughter that threatens to spill out. “First off, no. Secondly, skateboarding has nothing to do with being cool. It’s about coordination, and you have none.”
Max watches as Steve pushes himself off the car's hood and begins to pace, his hands resting firmly on his hips as he sputters to himself. She can’t make out most of what he’s saying, but the fire laced behind the words ‘ridiculous’ and ‘unbelievable’ is enough to catch her and the boy's attention.
Steve doesn’t seem to notice that Lucas and Dustin have stopped arguing or that their eyes are fixed on him as he suddenly stops in front of her with one hip cocked to the side in that way he likes to think is intimidating.
“Untrue. I am plenty coordinated. I’m like… a ninja!”
Now fully drawn into the conversation, Dustin chimes in. “Didn’t you almost break your neck climbing into Nance’s window one time?”
“How do you know about that?”
Dustin shrugs, “I know things.”
Steve swats a hand in the air. “Moving on!” He chooses to pointily ignore Dustin’s comment with a roll of his eyes before turning back to Max. “How can you not think I’m cool? I’m plenty cool!”
Max and Lucas broke into laughter while Dustin tried — and failed — to hide his behind his hand.
“Dustin! C’mon, man, tell her I’m cool.”
The way he scoffs only spurs them to laugh harder. Having given up on trying to hide his amusement, Dustin’s chuckle blooms into a full snorting belly laugh.
“Steve, tell me: do cool guys usually lose every fight they’ve been in?” Between laughs, he asks, and Max can see how a smirk threatens to fully take over his lips, already knowing the answer to his question.
“Seriously, dude, you’ve got to stop using that!” Steve snaps at Dustin.
Dustin replies by telling Steve that it’s a valid point, and the two begin to squabble just like Lucas and Dustin had mere minutes before. The boisterous bite of their voices nearly makes Max want to wince, but she fights it with brows raised. They’re nothing if not entertaining as Dustin reminds them all about the bruises Steve wore for weeks after his fight with Jonathan, animatedly acting out the bits and pieces he heard from Will, who heard them from Jonathan.
Steve can only accept his fate as he throws his hands up in defeat.
“All right, we get it. That’s enough!” The older boy bellows. “Henderson! Jesus, man, enough. Get in the car!”
Max is only vaguely aware of the fact that her cassette had finished rewinding at some point during all this. Mindlessly, she presses play and watches as Dustin huffs and heads for the passenger seat of the BMW. She’s the last to move, slowly sliding off the hood after Lucas makes his way towards the back.
Realization doesn’t strike her until she walks by Steve, and he puts a hand on her shoulder. When he offers her a reassuring but goofy smile, she recognizes she’s still wearing one herself. She’s surprised to find the guilt from before is gone and that the lingering remnants of her laughter still sit warmly in her chest.
It was a little strange, but she felt good considering the circumstances.
Whatever she had been initially expecting of Steve had been wrong. He hadn’t hovered the way adults usually did or poked at her the way the rest of the party had with their well-intended questions and concerns. He hadn’t laid on guilt or tried to be relatable somehow. There was no pity offered or overly drawn-out sympathy; he hadn’t even tried to get her to talk about it.
Instead, he just made her laugh.
And that made her distracted. It made her forget... even if only for a moment.
She couldn’t say for sure whether it had been his intention or not, but something in the nod he gave her as he climbed into the driver’s seat led Max to believe he knew exactly what he was doing. She considers it as she walks toward the backseat, mulling over the possibility that she just fell right into some carefully laid trap of his. She knows she should kick herself for not being on her guard better, but as she comes to her conclusion, she can’t find it in herself to be mad at his involvement.
All she feels is gratitude.
And her last thought as she climbs into the back beside Lucas is that if they survive this and manage to beat Vecna, then maybe… just maybe, she’ll try and teach Steve to skateboard as a thank you.
But only if he bought a helmet first—Max wasn't sure they could risk him getting another concussion.