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She hates it here. It’s always so dark. She doesn’t know why but that’s just how it’s been since she first saw her in the hospital bed.
It’s never been that way the time she’s known her. It’s never been so cold and strange and just plain awful, that’s the only way she can describe it. She was sure Lucas is probably feeling it more than she is and she knows it Mike can feel all the restless energy inside of her when they go and visit even before they get to the hospital room.
She’s always nervous and then, when they’re in there, she’s just as jittery and his hand on her leg never stops her from almost going to bolt out of that chair and careen straight into Max’s chest just to make sure she’s actually breathing it’s not just a hallucination brought on by so much trauma.
Sometimes, when Mike’s asleep, she actually enters Max’s mind. She knows she shouldn’t, that there’s no point in it as she tried to enter it before and she found nothing and every time she goes back in there it’s the same thing. It’s just a black expanse of nothing with her bones digging into the ground soaked in what can only be described as freezing cold water even though she knows it’s not, but what else could it fucking be?
She doesn’t have to look far to find her targe,t but as she turns to a side and then she’s there, she looks like she’s dead. She should be. Her eyes are wide open, but they’re white and veiny and bloody and unblinking, unmoving and her body is twisted into a shape she can’t describe, just lying there frigid just like the rest of her mind seems to be.
She tries to ask her questions, but the only responses she has are the same two words I’m scared I’m scared I’m scared and nothing more than that. There was one time where she thought she made progress, when the entity that looked like Max asked for Lucas and she’d wanted to put him in, but she couldn’t, her powers too stretched too thin and by the time she snapped out of it to alert the others, the same answer is back again.
She doesn’t know how much longer they can take this. How much longer any of them can take. Was it better that they stayed in California instead of coming back?
If they had, the destruction would’ve still followed them back here, but then again it was already here before them so who cares really?
(That was a lie, she cared very much.)
Lucas had said that the doctor said that it was a miracle she was still alive. Is that really true? Was it really a miracle she was alive or was it really them wanting her alive? Was it just their wishing to keep her alive that was keeping her here? Keeping her from going in peace? They didn’t know, nobody did and they wouldn’t pretend to know either.
It’s like she’s been punched when she draws herself back out of her mind and returns back to that stupid hospital room with the machines and its coldness and its silence. She knows that Mike will always be there waiting for her and she knows that Lucas would never leave either unless he’s been asked to in case. It doesn’t make anything better though.
It was never the same way when one of them got hurt and her heart hurts more when she has to watch Max disappear behind several doors, like a sunset that takes the warmth out of her and leaves her shivering, the cold unable to leave until the next morning and even when she safe in her bed at the Byer’s rental house, it’s still the same routine.
That’s why she finds it very hard to visit her anymore.
She tries to make sure that it’s only so often so she doesn’t have to feel the way that Max probably feels inside that room, trapped and alone. She felt like that once and she never wanted anyone to feel like that and she hates she can’t help. She’s trying, it’s not like she isn’t and she’s not doing it just for her sake, but for the others as well.
The idea of it all, the pressure, just makes her head hurt, her vision blurring and her body curling back like the person she doesn’t want to think about just so she can go back to sleep and not have to. It sucks that surrendering is easier, that even though you’ve experienced and tasted death over and over again, that sleep is just seemingly easier.
She hates it. She hates everything, but she keeps trying. She always does.
Max needed a friend, now more than ever.