Chapter Text
It started one night when the only thing she could find in the house to eat was an old can of beans and slightly out-of-date milk.
Her mom was— not drunk, exactly, but on her way there, sitting on the couch staring absently at the TV and cradling a bottle of beer against her chest. She wasn’t in a bad mood— Max’s mom didn’t get into ‘bad moods’. But still, hungry and exhausted Max couldn’t fathom up the energy to try and coax a conversation out of her in this vacant state, it would be too tiresome and draining, the last thing she wanted right now.
So there Max sat, alone in her room, listening to the sounds of Kate Bush mingling with the occasional groan of her stomach, when she heard the tell-tale screeching of one Eddie Munson.
“Fucking shit fuck!”
Max smiled, it sounded like nothing out of character for Eddie, who had moved back in with his uncle into a brand new trailer (still in their old lot) after the whole Venca ordeal— courtesy of some government lady who had also, thankfully, put out an official statement clearing Eddie's name of the recent murders. Not that an official statement by some strange government official had really been enough to convince the by now very paranoid and superstitious community of Hawkins.
In fact, Max was no stranger to hearing the yells and laughter of Hawkins residents who now frequented the trailer park just to add to the constantly appearing and disappearing mural on the side of the Munson’s trailer— words like ‘murderer’ and ‘devil worshipper’ often appearing overnight. It seemed almost routine now for Max to leave for school in the morning only to see Wayne or Eddie scrubbing at their walls with an old broom and a bucket of water.
“Shit, shit, fuck!”
The thought of said vandals and trouble makers conjured a twist of worry in Max’s stomach, mingling uncomfortably with the already churning hunger. With a sigh, she swung her legs off of the bed and hastened towards the front door, if at least to offer to help wipe off the paint this time.
What she saw when she stepped outside, however, was a fire. Well, a small fire, in a pot, with one Eddie Munson attempting to swat out the flame with a kitchen rag.
With a snort, Max leaned against the staircase railing, watching humorously as Eddie failed to contain his burning dinner.
“Looks like you’re about as good a cook as I expected you to be!” She called over, sending him a sarcastic grin as Eddie glared back at her.
“Har har,” he replied, swatting at the pot again, “how the hell are you supposed to put out kitchen fires anyway. All I can remember is stop, drop and roll.” He twisted his hands as if trying to figure out how to roll the pot over to kill the flames.
“Dude, just put the rag over it. You’ll suffocate the flames— duh.”
Snapping his fingers at her as though she’d just jogged a crucial memory, Eddie did so, jumping back dramatically as though he expected the rag to combust in his face. After a moment, apparently satisfied that there would be no big rag explosion, he crouched down into a squat, wiping at his forehead in a performance of relief.
“Thank god for you little red, don’t think uncle Wayne would be too happy with me if I was the cause of the great ’86 trailer-park fire.” He glanced back at the pot, “though I don’t think he’ll be too thrilled I managed to burn the spaghetti either.”
“That was spaghetti? How the hell did you manage to set spaghetti on fire, wasn’t the pot full of water?”
“Ah,” he snapped his finger at her again, “you see I was about to add the water, but uh, I guess I got distracted for a minute.”
“Jesus—“ Max couldn’t help but laugh at Eddies’ absurdity. He was grinning back at her though, like he couldn’t believe it either. He tilted his head towards his trailer, eyebrows jumping up and down on his forehead.
“Guess I’ve got an excuse to order pizza now— you eaten yet?”
Max’s stomach rumbled then, as if to remind her— no you certainly have not. She shrugged, “guess I could eat.”
That was how Max found herself a part of the new weekly tradition of Friday night pizza dinners in the Munson trailer. And what had started as visiting one night a week, had turned into helping Eddie cook on Tuesday’s and Wednesdays (the nights he didn’t have d&d), which turned into letting herself in on Mondays and Thursdays, to start on dinner before either of the Munson’s got home.
She would always bring a plate of leftovers home to put in the fridge for her mom, who tended to work nights now anyway, because she felt a little bad about the whole thing. It was a weirdly domestic situation that she hadn’t managed to be comfortable participating in with her after— everything.
But it was nice to have the company, real, present company, even if a lot of the time it was just her and Eddie watching reruns on the barely functioning TV, or occasionally even just her and Wayne, talking about her classes and friends.
It was different because with Eddie there were moments where they both floated off a little, back to the place where they’d both nearly lost their lives, but at least with each other they knew what was going on, knew the truth. There was no guilt to be had in sitting next to him and thinking about all that had happened, unlike with her mom, who had to struggle with her own grief with only a smoky lie to give her any closure. And with Wayne— well, maybe he questioned it, maybe he accepted it, maybe he just didn’t care. Max thinks most of the time he’s just too relieved that Eddie’s back and alive to try and unbury all the shit that surrounded it. She’s heard them talking though, on nights where she’s fallen asleep on their couch. Woken up to soft whispers, Wayne imploring Eddie to tell him what happened, Eddie feigning some bullshit story that fools no-one.
Sometimes, she’s woken up to one of them crying. She feels a little uncomfortable when it’s Wayne, because he’s so stoic usually. But her heart still breaks because he cares so much but there’s no way for him to really know what’s happened to his nephew, why Eddie sometimes wakes up screaming in the middle of the night. Why he’s truly covered in scars.
When Eddie cries she’s sometimes jealous. She hasn’t got the energy to dissect why.
This routine has continued for the past semester. She wakes up in the morning, kisses her mom on the forehead and rides her skateboard to Lucas’s house, where Mrs Sinclair drives the three of them to school. In the afternoons she skates the whole way back— takes the time to be alone and be ok with it. She doesn’t even bother going home first anymore, just lets herself into the Munson trailer and prays that someone’s home because by then she’s sick of her own head.
Today was a Friday, pizza. She could hear Eddie shuffling around his room, music playing quietly but with a very present base note still vibrating throughout the trailer. Max liked how Eddie was never truly quiet, she found it comforting to know he was around somehow, even when she couldn’t see him. She’s been trying to spend more time with people lately. Decided that perhaps one lesson she could learn from almost being killed by Vecna is that it’s ok to rely on people.
She’s working on it. Baby steps.
Lucas and her arrange to go on dates, sometimes. They’re taking it slow, but she’s glad it’s happening. Once a week they try and take the time to hang out, the two of them. She also calls El, a lot actually. Regrets not doing it in the time she’s been away. Max almost cried when El had told them the Byers' (and Hopper) would be moving back to Hawkins as soon as Joyces contract with work was up. The rest of the party had a standing agreement to meet up every weekend. Doing whatever, anything to just be together. Even if they just sat together in silence she would be grateful.
Eddie comes along too now, although he usually gravitates towards Steve and Robin (who are always there because seriously they have no lives outside of a bunch of teenagers). She catches the way Eddie talks about Steve too, always out of the blue, like he’s been thinking about him and just let it slip by accident. She usually just smirks at him but chooses to remain silent. There’s kinder things she can rib him about.
Eddie comes out of his room then— waves absently at her as he shuffles past her into the kitchen, scribbling something onto a post-it note.
“How was uh—school?”
“Fine.”
“Cool.”
“Cool.”
He stands upright suddenly and her breathing stutters because for a second he looks like someone else, but it truly only lasts for a second because then he’s grinning.
“Got a job today.”
And that catches her even more off guard. She raises an eyebrow suspiciously because he better not be talking about selling drugs because she’ll personally make it her mission to beat the shit out of him if he ends of doing time for something as stupid as dealing after all the shit they’ve just been through.
“Really…?”
“Yeah,” he wags his eyebrows, “little record shop just outside of town, real old dude runs it. Don’t think he even reads the paper so he probably didn’t know who I was. It’s good huh?” He looks around the trailer, fiddles with a discarded letter on the kitchen bench.
“Finally contribute something, maybe. Help uncle Wayne out— a little at least.” He seems nervous. Like he wants Max’s approval that this is a good idea. Which would be ridiculous, ordinarily. He’s a 20 year old man, high school drop out. Yes, it’s good he’s gotten a job. But he’s not ordinary, he’s practically got a bounty on his head, FBI statement be damned. So Max feels a little uneasy, like she’s lying to him, when she replies.
“‘Course it’s a good idea. I dunno what you do with all your time anyway.”
She’s said the wrong thing, she thinks, by the way his gaze flickers to the floor, the way he winces. She hates that he’s so open. That she can read him so easy. Wishes she could just ignore it.
“Hey— look. It’s fine. It’s good. It might be, y’know an adjustment. Uncle Wayne’ll be nervous, but I think it’s a good thing. You, you like music. It’ll be nice for you.”
He nods, but she can tell he’s scared. God when did she start caring when Eddie Munson was upset about shit? Probably around the same time she started calling Wayne, ‘Uncle Wayne’. Probably around the same time they started helping her write her English essays. Probably around the same time Eddie bought her a toothbrush because she kept falling asleep on their couch.
He just nods. Glances at the clock above the door and then to the phone on the wall.
“Think I’ll call Steve. Let him know. He, uh, wants me to keep him updated. Where I’m gonna be.”
Max raises her eyebrows. “That’s just weird.”
Eddie goes bright red.
“No it’s not! He’s just worried.”
“Mmhm, whatever you say,” she doesn’t push it because honestly it's a little cute, mostly gross, but a little cute. She’s grateful for Steve being so vigilant though. Max would probably spend a lot more time worrying about Eddie getting ambushed out and about if she didn’t know that Steve was doing plenty of the worrying for her.
Instead she flops onto the couch, half listens to the TV and half listens to Eddie’s soft conversation, letting the sounds relax her.
Sometimes she dreams about Billy. Still. She sees him as well. There he is in the ferocity of the main character on screen, there he is in the cocky gait of the man that lives three trailers down from her. There he is in the way that Eddie leans against a wall.
She hates it when she catches herself comparing them. They both take up the same place inside of her, in completely different ways. She doesn’t want them to. Doesn’t want either of them there in the first place. But Billy’s in there, gripping on her lungs and tugging until there’re tears in her eyes and she has to move so they’ll open up again. And Eddie’s there to poke at her until she stops thinking so damn much.
She hears him hang up the phone, sees him retreat back to him room. She closes her eyes tight so she doesn’t see Billy instead. He doesn’t belong in this trailer. She refuses to let him in.
An hour or so later Max forgoes the couch to call for dinner, placing an order for two large pizzas and totally not freaking out when the boy behind the line goes a little quiet when she gives him the address. Music is still seeping out from under Eddies door when she hangs up, so she knocks first before she opens the door.
He looks up from where he’s hunched on the bed, painting a small figurine. Nerd.
“Hey.”
“Hey. Ordered the pizza. Wayne’ll be back soon right?”
Eddie glances at the clock on his nightstand and nods, “yep, he didn’t call to say he’d be late.”
Max nods, but lingers in the doorway. She spends most of her time here, in this trailer, but she can’t help but feel like she’s imposing sometimes. Like any minute she’ll be over-staying her welcome and Eddie will yell at her to leave him alone for one goddamn second. She thinks about heading back to her own trailer for a bit, maybe put on a load of laundry. She doesn’t want to be alone though.
Eddie of course, doesn’t overthink in the way she does, but he is surprisingly in tune with the crazy dialogue in her head, because just as she’s thinking that maybe Eddie just wants to spend some time without her for once, he beckons her into his room with a tilt of his head.
“Help me out for a second would ya? I need some extra light for these details.”
She rolls her eyes, because she has to, at this point. But she’s insanely relieved as she walks over and grabs the flashlight off of his nightstand clicking it on and shining it onto the monstrous face of the figurine in his hand.
“You are such a fucking nerd.”
“And all your friends are nerds so what does that say about you Mayfield?” His voice is warped because he has placed his original paintbrush in his mouth in order to pick up a finer one (for the details, Maxine!), which completely overrides the insult he throws at her.
“Whatever, nerd,” she croons, and he just mocks her back with a series of high pitch noises.
They sit in silence, Max moving the flashlight around occasionally when Eddie taps at her hand, and Eddie’s face scrunched up in focus as he adds eyes and teeth to his creation. She thinks, this is nice, which is weird because objectively she should enjoy nothing about this situation. The music would be grating, the fact that she’s helping someone with their d&d obsession would be annoying, and sitting so still would be infuriating, if it weren’t that she were here in the Munson trailer, with Eddie who played this strange role in her life, and this even stranger tradition where she pretended she still lived her own life seperate away from them at all.
The silence is only interrupted when a few minutes later, they hear the lock jiggle and the heavy stomp of Uncle Wayne cleaning off his boots at the doorway.
“Met the pizza boy on the way in! Come get some!” He yells as a greeting, and Max immediately hops off the bed, which incites an indignant screech from Eddie.
“I was in the middle of an eye!”
“Too bad loser, pizza takes precedent over your nerd painting.”
They’re gathered around the kitchen table, plates foregone in favour of making sure any crumbs land on the table and not the floor. They chatter idly, which is not unusual because what do you really talk about in Hawkins other than all the awful shit that happens in Hawkins? No one in the trailer wants to do that, so they have banal conversations that make Max a little sleepy.
But then Eddie’s glancing at her with big eyes that are obviously conveying a message, and she knows the next few minutes are not going to be fun. She nods encouragingly at him anyway.
“So, uh, Uncle Wayne,” Eddie coughs out awkwardly, “I got a job today. Tony’s record store.”
Uncle Wayne is a composed man, with minute expressions of emotions, so it’s hard to see what he’s thinking unless you’re actively looking most of the time. Max has become used to watching out for him, so she sees when he freezes a little, tries to school his features out of a furrow.
“Did you now.”
Eddie’s eyes are flashing between the two of them freakishly, she can tell he’s trying not to freak out. The silence stretches for a little too long to be comfortable, and she can see Eddie growing more visibly impatient as he waits.
Finally, “Wayne, look I talked to Steve, he’s gonna come and visit me during me shifts for the first couple weeks, make sure everything’s good. Family video is only like, a five minute drive anyway.”
“Lotta things can happen in five minutes son.”
Uncle Wayne may not know what really went down, during the Vecna ordeal, but he’s intuitive enough to realise that none of them are telling him the truth when they try and explain what happened. Max would find his hesitation over the top, if she hadn’t seen Eddie in hiding, fearing for his life from Jason Carver, or bleeding out from hundreds of demobat bites. If she herself hadn’t been so close to being Vecna’s fourth victim.
They drop the topic. Because that’s what they do when that point in time comes up, when the fact that things still aren’t quite normal becomes apparent. It remains unsettled, but they all know Uncle Wayne isn’t going to do anything to stop Eddie. But they can’t stop him from worrying in return.
When Max wakes up that night because Billy is dying again in her dream, except this time when she runs to his body, it's Eddie, lying dead on the ground, she thinks maybe the dam will finally break. Her eyes remain dry though, because her brain is really not so original and she’s had this dream a million times before. Sometimes he turns into Lucas, or Dustin or El, but it always starts out with Billy, sneering at her but then looking so damn scared, sorry maybe.
Nevertheless her room is suffocating her, so she grabs her blanket and heads out to sit on the front stairs for a little bit. She doesn’t say anything when she see’s that Eddie is already outside, sitting on his own steps with a lit cigarette in hand and a vacant look in his eyes. Instead, she silently walks across the narrow stretch of grass and gravel and sits adjacent to him on the bottom step.
The sun is almost rising, and maybe it would be beautiful if the colour red didn’t make her muscles go weak.
“What do you dream about?” She whispers, not fully expecting an answer because she knows she wouldn’t tell him if he asked her the same thing.
But Eddie isn’t her, and he can speak about his shit, apparently.
“Usually it’s Chrissy or Patrick. Sometimes the bats. Sometimes I stop running too soon and they kill me for real.”
She hums, knows that they’ve experienced the same situation from different positions. Sometimes she dreams of being in Vecna’s grip again, can’t imagine being witness to someone else dying that way.
Of course, he asks the question back, “what about you?”
Of course, she doesn’t answer, she just leans her head against his knee and prays that this time it’s over for good.