Chapter Text
“Hi Max,” El whispers as she sinks onto the end of the bed. She reaches out a hand and curls her fingers around her friend’s lifeless ones. “It is day twenty seven.” She squeezes Max’s cold fingers gently and hastens a look around the hospital room. Very little has changed in twenty seven days. Max’s drawing is starting to peel off the wall (El makes a mental note to fix that before she leaves), and each week someone replaces the flowers on her bedside table with new ones. Sometimes Lucas brings in a new book to read. Besides that, the same machines beep monotonously, the same irremovable dark lines are etched onto Max’s face under her eyes, and the same threatening red clouds storm in the sky outside. The same spores that float through the air in the Upside Down move around in Hawkins as though in slow motion.
An unprecedented scientific disaster, they’d called it on the News. Not one professional could explain the sudden earthquake that rocked Hawkins, a small town far from the nearest tectonic plates. Certainly no one could explain the way the sky turned red during an electrical storm two days later, nor the appearance of particles that floated through the air like snow, only less pretty. They could only guess at why these discoveries affected Hawkins and only Hawkins. The mysterious particles stopped at the border of the town - at the signs that read ‘You’re Leaving Hawkins - Come Again Soon!’ As though they were on probation, unable to exceed town limits.
People fled.
The fear of the unknown was too much, so they packed up their homes and they drove away, not sorry to bid goodbye to the town they had once called home. “Hawkins is cursed,” they’d tell their new neighbors over glasses of wine the next week. “We’ve been thinking about moving ever since that Byers kid vanished all those years ago. Thank God we could find a house so quickly.”
Some doctors and nurses stayed out of moral obligation, but mostly the ones who didn’t have children. A few of the police stuck around, again, out of obligation. One particularly lazy supermarket manager wasn’t keen on packing up his house, so there was still food. Trade was stilted - most delivery people weren’t keen on entering the town - but it continued nonetheless. Schools ran out of both students and teachers and were forced to close. Most of the people who weren’t going to leave had to anyway. They needed jobs.
“Did you hear that the Byers moved back?” The same busybodies would say on the phone to ex-neighbours a few days later. “I always thought it was their family that cursed the damn town to begin with. Why you’d come back now is beyond me.”
“I heard all of that lot - the Wheelers, the Sinclairs, the Hendersons - all only moved about a half hour out of town. Kids threw a fit when they found out they’d be leaving and pretty much refused to go, so they didn’t have much of a choice.”
“Yeah, Karen told me that she’d forbid the kids to go back, and they told her they were meeting the Byers outside of the town, but I bet you they’re all running around the deserted town square drinking and graffiting the place.”
“Weren’t their boys a part of that club anyway? The one lead by the boy who murdered all those kids? Hellfire, wasn’t it?”
“Oh yeah, nasty that was. That was when I knew it was time to get out of there. I’m not having my kids being drawn into that lifestyle.”
The thing is, there’s been nothing else. No sign of Vecna. No demogorgons running wild. Nothing except Will’s sure feeling that Vecna is still out there, hurt, but alive. Waiting. But they’ve all agreed it’s a good thing people are leaving. Townspeople who don’t know what’s going on aren’t the only ones suffering from fear of the unknown. Both Will and El are on constant high alert, and the whole group is feeling the effects of their collective loss.
So. Hawkins population twenty seven days ago: 12,872
Hawkins population today: 2,134.
Everything has changed, except Max’s condition.
“It is day twenty seven,” El says again. “Lucas will be here soon. I’m going to try again before he gets here, okay?” She asks the question, knowing full well that Max can’t reply.
“Okay,” El says. “Give me a sign. Anything at all. I’ll see it.”
She leans over to fiddle with the dial on the radio. It only takes a second to find the static. El takes a deep breath, holds tight onto Max’s fingers and shuts her eyes. She allows the familiar sinking feeling to fill her up.
When she exhales and opens her eyes, she’s standing in the usual blackness.
The floor is wet beneath her and everything is dark. Empty. Always Empty.
“Max?” she calls. “Max, are you here?”
Nothing.
“Max,” she says again, louder this time. “It’s me. It’s El. Leave me a sign. I want to find you.”
Silence. Emptiness. Always.
“Max!” she shouts. “Max! I’m here!”
She waits, all of the motivation draining out of her the longer she stands in the blank nothingness that should be Max’s mind. El shuts her prickling eyes, sighs, and allows the weighted feeling to release from her chest. When she opens them again, she’s back in the hospital room and Lucas is watching her.
“Hi,” she says.
‘Hi,” he replies. His voice is rough. “No luck?”
El shakes her head.
She moves away from the bed and onto the chair beside it to make room for Lucas.
“Y’all are still here?” Ellen, the young nurse in charge of Max, pokes her head into the room later that evening. “Thought you’d have to be home by now.”
El and Lucas, where they’ve been talking quietly on the chairs by the window, look up at the sound of her voice and smile at her. Ellen is nice. The hospital is understaffed but Ellen manages to make everyone her priority.
“El’s dad is gonna come get us soon,” Lucas says. “We’d rather wait for him in here.”
“Of course,” Ellen says, tying back her blonde bob. “Of course.” She stares out the window behind the teenagers for a moment before shaking herself out of her trance and moving to check the machines that Max is hooked up to.
“Is there anything-” Lucas begins to ask, but Ellen shakes her head sadly at him before he can finish his sentence.
“Nothing’s changed,” she says softly. “I’m sorry honey.”
She bustles around for a few more minutes. El and Lucas stay quiet, watching her work. They’re used to the feeling of discouragement.
El watches Lucas stare at Max, watches the sadness tug at his face and wishes desperately there was more she could do. She expressed these feelings to Lucas last week, after a particularly hard day, and Lucas had sighed and squeezed her hand and told her she was doing more than enough. They’d spent long days together in the last month, and El had eventually opened up to him about what she was doing - piggybacking - and how she’d restarted Max’s heart that night. While he stares Max, he starts to hum under his breath subconsciously. Ellen looks up and frowns like she’s thinking.
“Ya know,” she says after a moment, once she’s finished checking Max’s vitals. “Some people like to play music when their loved ones are in comas. Makes them feel connected. Music can reach parts of the brain that speech and touch can’t.”
Lucas whips around and meets El’s eyes, which widen.
“See y’all tomorrow,” Ellen says, but her voice is distant to both of them. As soon as the door swings shut behind her, Lucas stands up.
“Do you think-” El starts.
“Maybe,” says Lucas, grabbing the walkman by Max’s bed. Jonathan had replaced it with his old one a few days ago, but Lucas hadn’t been able to bring himself to use it. “Worth a shot, right?”
“A shot,” El nods seriously. She stands up and moves across the room to lock the door and Lucas opens the top drawer of the bedside table where he shoved the cassettes Jonathan brought over. He goes through them until he finds the one he’s looking for. He stares at it for a moment - purple cover, hair splayed out behind a woman holding two dogs. Max’s copy had been crushed by Jason, but people had pitched in to buy her a new one.
“For when she wakes up,” Lucas tells El when he catches her staring at him. She nods earnestly and moves over to the bed. She sits on the end in her usual spot and hooks her fingers around Max’s. Lucas exhales slowly and pushes the cassette into the walkman. He puts the headphones over Max’s ears and shuts his eyes tightly.
He presses play.
The all too familiar opening notes of Running Up That Hill reach his ears - muffled and tinny through the headphones, but there. He swallows and looks over at El, nodding once.
“Do it,” he says.
El shuts her eyes and lets the darkness swallow her up.
When she opens them again, Lucas is gone and she’s surrounded by the familiar emptiness of Max’s current state - except that she can still hear the music. Kate Bush’s voice echoes around her. It sounds distant, like it’s coming from far away, but it’s there.
“Max?” El calls tentatively. “Max, are you here?”
Nothing.
“Max,” El says, louder this time. “It’s me, It’s El. Help me find you.” She shuts her eyes tight.
“Help me find you,” she whispers again. She opens her eyes again and everything is the same. Still empty. Dark.
Except.
She frowns, crouching down to floor level. There on the ground, interrupting her reflection in the shimmering puddles, is a glass coca cola bottle. The one she and Max used to play their game last summer. El reaches out a shaking hand, grips the bottle tightly, and twists it.
The bottle spins in circles for a few seconds, the sound echoing around her. When it stops, it’s pointing in the direction opposite to El. The music stops too, and El looks up from the bottle to the direction it’s pointing. In the distance, she can see two tall figures standing a few feet apart. She rises from the ground slowly, taking a wobbly step closer to them.
“Am I dreaming, or is that you Harrington?” A familiar voice asks.
“Yeah, it’s me. Don’t cream your pants.”
Just as she takes a step closer to attempt to confirm who the voices belong to, they disappear foggily.
“No!” She calls out. “Wait!”
But they’re gone, and so is the bottle. And suddenly she’s back in Max’s room at the hospital. The song is over and Lucas is staring at her from the other side of the bed, awaiting her return anxiously.
“What is it?” he asks, his voice rising excitedly at the look on her face. “What is it?”
“She wasn’t there,” El says. “But she left me something. A memory, I think.”
“How? How’s that possible?” Lucas says, his voice shaking. He’s staring at his friend, hardly daring to believe what she’s telling him after all this time.
El thinks back to the night she and Max played their game with the glass bottle.
“We make our own rules,” Max had told her confidently.
“I think,” El says slowly. “She is making up new rules. She cannot tell me where she is, but she is trying to show me.”
“She’s… leaving us… clues?” Lucas says, his voice unsure, but his eyes glimmering with what El recognises as hope.
“Yes,” El says. “I think.”
“Oh my God,” Lucas says, reaching a shaking hand up to his face. “So she’s in there somewhere. She’s hiding.”
“Hiding,” El repeats. “Maybe.”
They sit in silence for a moment, trying to convey the significance of the step forward they’ve just taken, before Lucas speaks again.
“So what was it? The memory?”
El frowns. “I don’t know.”
Lucas’ shoulders visibly sag. “What do you mean?”
“I wasn’t there. I don’t remember it.”
“Well, who was?”
“I knew the voices. I think… It was Billy.”
“ Billy ?” Lucas asks, a strange look on his face. “Who else? When was this? Was she there?”
“He said… ‘Harring-tin,” El says, repeating the unfamiliar name slowly. “But I thought I knew the voice.”
“Harrington? As in… Steve Harrington?” Lucas’ eyebrows shoot up in disbelief. “Why would Max leave you a memory of Billy and Steve together? What were they saying?”
El repeats their dialogue the best she can, and Lucas’ apparent confusion only grows.
“What kind of clue is that?” he says. “Who does she think we are, Sherlock and Watson?”
“Who?” El says, but Lucas doesn’t have time to answer before the door swings open again.
“ Steve ?” They ask at the same time incredulously.
Steve, who stands in the doorway, a bouquet of flowers drooping in his hands, stares at El and Lucas.
“I thought, er,” he starts, then stops. “Isn’t it kinda late for you two to be here?” he says eventually.
Neither Lucas nor El respond. Both of their eyes travel to the flowers in Steve’s hand.
“It’s - you. you’ve been replacing the flowers. Every week.” Lucas says in a tight voice.
“What? Oh, no, no, er, I just…” Steve gives up on his lie quickly and moves past the two teenagers, without looking at them, pulling the old flowers out of their vase and replacing them with the new ones he’s bought. They’re pink, yellow and white, blossoming beautifully and adding some much needed color to the room. “Sorry, yeah. I hope that’s okay,” he says eventually to Lucas.
“It’s… fine,” Lucas says, his voice uneven. “It’s… thanks.”
“‘Course,” Steve says uncomfortably, then looks around the room, searching for something else to say.
“Billy,” El says quietly, and Steve’s eyes come to rest on her. He gives her a confused look.
“Er-”
She repeats the dialogue from Max’s memory again, and Steve’s eyebrows crease more. He looks at Lucas with an open mouth. “What is she-”
“Just listen,” Lucas says, his eyes still on the flowers.
“When did that happen?” El asks. “When did you talk to Billy?”
“Uh,” Steve says, clearly trying to get past how strange the question and circumstances are. “Uh, God, I think that must have been… at Mrs Byers’ place? Yeah, yeah, right after you left to close the gate. When the big shadowy monster was in Will.”
“Ohh!” Lucas exclaims, looking up. “Duh! Before he absolutely annihilated you in that fight.”
“He didn’t annihilate me…” Steve mutters, looking put out, but El and Lucas are already looking at each other excitedly.
“Do you have your car?” Lucas asks Steve.
“Yeah,” he says, still looking back and forth from Lucas to El with an almost comically confused look on his face. “Is someone gonna tell me what the hell is going on?”
“We’ll explain on the way,” Lucas says, grabbing his jacket. “You got a walkie?” He asks El. She nods, pointing at her pile of things on the chair. “Good,” he says. There’s more life in his eyes than there has been for twenty seven days. Finally, he has a purpose. A lead. A way to help. “Call the others. Tell them to meet us at the Byers’ old house.”