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Max doesn’t feel anything when she dies.
She can remember the last things she felt before she took that final breath. The gentle touch of Lucas’ arms around her broken body, the sound of frantic footsteps on the stairs of Creel house. The metallic scent of blood, her blood filling her nostrils.
And then all too quickly, it fades to nothing.
She doesn’t know how long she stays like that, suspended in absolute nothingness, before she senses that something is there with her.
At first she thinks it must be Vecna, that somehow he’s dragged her back to his mind lair. But after a moment she realises that whatever it is, it doesn’t feel like it’s trying to hurt her. It feels more like a shield. Like protection.
El.
The realisation hits Max with the kind of force she didn’t think she was capable of feeling anymore.
El was there before. In her mind, in her memories, fighting Vecna, fighting to save Max. And she’s still fighting for her now.
There’s a light pressure against her body, her very being. Light where there was only darkness. Surrounding her, spreading over the emptiness.
Max can hear something then, at first faint and then pounding in a solid, consistent rhythm.
The sound of a heartbeat. The sound of life.
*
Her resurrection isn’t as clean as it is in the movies.
She doesn’t dramatically gasp for breath, eyes flying open and body shooting upright. She doesn’t even really return to the world of the living. She just becomes something again, rather than nothing.
She’s in a hospital bed, and her whole body is on fire. She can’t open her eyes, not that it matters because she can hear, somehow, and what she hears, in bits and pieces whenever she’s a little conscious, is the doctors saying she may be permanently blind anyway. If she ever wakes up. It’s so incredibly frustrating it makes her want to scream, but she can’t do that because she can’t speak or even move either, no matter how hard she tries. Her mind and body aren’t working in tandem anymore.
But she can cope with all that, at least for now.
Because Lucas is here.
It’s not until Max hears his voice again -frantic and panicked and then relieved, so relieved- that she really knows for sure.
She’s alive.
*
The first few times she’s somewhat conscious, he’s always there. Sometimes alone. Sometimes with Erica. Sometimes with Dustin. Sometimes with Dustin and Steve. And once with Steve, Nancy and Robin in tow, which leads to a lot of irritated shushing from Lucas. But Max really doesn’t mind. She likes the company.
Lucas is the one who updates her on the state of things. He tells her about the gates opening in Hawkins. The earthquake. The devastation. The immediate jump to logical explanations, the way that no one could comprehend that what had just happened seemed unnatural because it was unnatural.
He tells her that he’s worried about Dustin, that every single smile of his seems forced. That Eddie died in his arms. And unlike Max, he didn’t get a miracle in the form of a telekinetic best friend.
He always pauses after every few sentences, like he’s waiting for a response.
It breaks her heart that she can’t give him one.
And it breaks her heart to hear the thickness in his voice that’s nearly always there, like he’s holding back tears. Sometimes he doesn’t hold them back at all, and that’s even worse.
*
Erica Sinclair is a really, really good sister.
When she comes around and doesn’t hear Lucas’ voice immediately, Max can’t help but feel a rush of panic. And then a rush of guilt, for assuming that Lucas always needs to be there for her. But then she hears the sound of a chair leg scraping against the floor, and she feels a little better. Of course someone is still here, is staying with her. It’s hard to remember how many people she really has now, sometimes.
“Hi, Max. It’s Erica. I told Lucas to go home and clean up. He was starting to smell.”
So she still has a Sinclair by her side. And Erica’s still being snarky to her brother. Max wouldn’t expect anything less.
When she speaks again, her tone has changed.
“I’m really scared, Max.” She says quietly, somberly. “I don’t know what he’s going to do if you don’t wake up. I’ve never seen him like this.”
Her voice sounds thick too. And much, much older than her young years, more serious than Max has ever heard her sound.
She must reach out, because a moment later Max feels Erica’s hand in hers.
Touch and sound. The only senses left to her.
“You need to come back home.”
Max tries to squeeze the other girls’ hand. She can’t.
*
When both the Sinclair siblings are taking breaks, Dustin is with her.
And Max thinks that Lucas was right to worry about him, because there’s an exhaustion in his voice that Max can’t ever remember hearing from him before, despite everything he’s been through. Dustin, who once thought a mysterious slug he found in the garbage was the way to win a girl’s heart. Dustin, who always had a plan. Dustin, who once never stopped believing she would survive Vecna’s curse.
“You know, when you wake up, you’re definitely playing a campaign with us. You can’t get out of it now. You almost died without playing once already.”
The door creaks open softly.
“You alright in here, Henderson? I brought Cokes.” A voice calls gently,
Steve ‘The Hair’ Harrington. He’s apparently taking his babysitting duties very seriously, because he’s been here with Dustin almost as much as Lucas.
“Yeah. Just having a one sided conversation, again.”
She can hear Steve walking over. “You know Mayfield, at this point, it’s starting to get a little rude. You can’t even give us a little cough? A snort of laughter? Don’t feel like waking up and calling us idiots?”
I would if I could.
She’d also roll her eyes at him. If she could.
*
Nancy Wheeler wants to have a girls’ night.
Or at least that’s what she says to Max when she comes to visit on what Max thinks must be the day after she narrowly escaped death.
“You know, it would be us three.” Max knows she means Robin, who came in with her chatting animatedly about who knows what. “And El obviously. Erica too, if she wants. We’ll kick Mike and the boys out of the basement. Watch some chick flicks or something.”
“Does it have to be chick flicks?” Robin interjects.
“It doesn’t have to be. That’s why I said ‘or something’”
“We can do better than that though, Nance. I mean, I work at Family Video. Maybe we can find something about skateboarding. I think Max would prefer that.”
Max would take watching any movie at this point, anywhere, anytime. In this very bed, on what she knows must be an absurdly tiny, terrible quality screen. At a boy’s free night in the Wheelers’ basement. At the cinema, with Lucas and Mike and Will like all those times last summer before everything went to shit.
Alone with Lucas. On a date. Like they’d said they would in the Creel house. That was supposed to be on Friday.
*
Later, Lucas comes back, and this time, he starts reading to her. It’s a Stephen King book called The Talisman, and she wonders if he’s thinking about the same thing she is. When last summer they’d all hide out in the library when it was raining, and the two of them would sneak off alone with a copy of The Stand. They’d hide behind the stacks at the very back, pressed into a corner, her head on his shoulder and the book balanced on her knees.
They’d always come back to find their friends smirking, and Max would feel like they were getting away with something even though they’d only snuck the occasional kiss between chapters.
They’d been there just the two of them too, determined to finish the book before school started back up.
It’s when he’s reading to her that the others come in. She’s so engrossed in the comforting tones of his voice that she barely hears the door open. But then Lucas stops reading and she hears the door open, and then Lucas’s exclamation of surprise.
It’s Mike’s voice she hears first, because of course it is. She’s fonder of him now than she was a year ago, but he still talks too much. And if he’s here, that means El and Will are too.
And then, much quieter, so much she can barely make it out. “I’m sorry.” El says.
She sounds close to tears, and Max wishes more than anything that she could cross the room, wrap her in her arms. Tell her that she’s okay, she’s alive, and that’s all because of El.
“Do they know.. when she will wake?”
“No.” Lucas replies, downtrodden. “They say she might not.”
A moment of silence. “Her heart stopped. For over a minute. She died. I-i mean.. clinically, but..but then she came back.” he continues.
“The doctors don’t know how. They say it’s a miracle.”
It was. Max thinks The miracle’s standing in the room with you right now.
Max hears a small flurry of movement, and then there’s a hand in hers. El.
“I’m here Max.” She says in a whisper.
I know.
*
El is looking for her. Not in a Hawkins Hospital room, but in her mind, in that space between reality and unreality, the same place she went to look for Billy.
Max can hear her, feel her looking. But she’s not there. She’s not wherever Max is. As though a barrier has been thrown up between them, and she can’t get through it, can’t even get close enough to it to know that Max is there.
Once again, Max wishes more than anything that she could scream.