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Beep.
Beep.
Beep.
The sound is as much a comfort as it is a reminder of just how wrong everything is.
Lucas thinks the situation is sort of like Schrödinger’s cat.
(He knows she’d probably bawk at the comparison. Take false offense at being talked about like she’s an animal, a pet… but she’d also probably smirk about the whole thing when she thinks he isn’t looking—as if he could ever take his eyes off of her).
Max is alive. The doctors don’t quite know how (because the doctors don’t know that superpowers are real), but she is. He can watch the rhythmic rise and fall of her chest, hear that constant beep, beep, beep, that means her heart is still pumping blood. As pale and cold as she looks laid out on the hospital bed, he can still reach out and touch her, there’s physical proof that some part of her came back with him that night.
But that’s the problem, isn’t it? Some part of her came back.
Her body is here, but Max is more than just a body. Not that she isn’t beautiful—she always has been, from the moment he watched through the fence as she skateboarded around Hawkins Middle School he thought she was beautiful (no wonder she calls him a stalker). But getting to know her—to see the passionate, sarcastic, and strong person behind the red hair and blindingly bright smile—that was when he fell for her. That’s the stuff that really makes her… her.
That Max isn’t here right now. He doesn’t have any way to prove that that Max is still alive.
He held her as that part slipped away, as her shaky voice faded into a deafening silence, as she trembled until going still. She died in his arms (and it’s going to haunt him for the rest of his life). Yet here she is in front of him, heart once again beating because of El—who visits almost as much as he does now that she’s back in Hawkins, who cries as she tries to find the real Max somewhere inside the shell in front of them.
So, like Schrödinger’s cat—Max is both alive and dead. Here and gone. An unknown.
He’s not quite sure what ‘opening the box to check’ would be in this analogy, though.
(She would probably laugh at him now, say that making the comparison was dumb in the first place if it was missing such an integral piece. But he wouldn’t really care, because she’d be there and smiling and laughing and everything would be okay).
Beep.
(God, he misses her laugh).
Beep.
(And really, he’d already been missing it over the last few months).
Beep.
(He’d only just gotten it back).
“So,” he speaks to her, needing sound to fill the room, to get out of his own head a little bit, “Since I knew we were getting close to finishing The Talisman,” he pats the book he’d set down a few minutes earlier, before he’d gotten caught up in the sound of the heart monitor, “I got your mom to bring over some of your comics.”
The stack of thin floppy issues sits on the ground in a plastic bag, which he hauls up onto one of the tables. Mrs. Mayfield had left them in the room this morning, presumably on her way to work, with a little note for him when he got there—Lucas, thank you for keeping her company.
“I’m thinking we save Wonder Woman for when El’s here,” he says as he starts untying the bag. While catching up with her one day she’d been visiting, El mentioned a sleepover last summer where they’d read an issue together, and he thought maybe she’d like to try reading the same to Max, now.
“But you’ve got plenty of other stuff to pick from,” he lifts up the bag again for emphasis, it’s a decently sized stack of books, “Wanna start with anything in particular?” He looks at her, waiting for a response he knows isn’t going to come, before sighing and picking one off the top at random.
As he flips it open, he’s greeted with the sight of a character suspended in the air in an unsettlingly familiar way. The guy is in some sort of green bubble, he's pale—kinda ghostly—and wearing something red that's almost like a circus uniform. Lucas can't quite come up with the name until he closes the book to get a look at the cover, but the title makes it come back to him—Deadman, Boston Brand.
Dead man. He shakes his head, exhaling in a way that's almost a laugh. The universe has a dark sense of humor. Or maybe it’s not the universe, maybe it’s just Max—who choose to leave this specific book right near the top of her comic collection for whoever was gonna look through these after… whatever the outcome of last week was gonna be.
Beep.
(She’s probably laughing at him again—)
Beep.
(—From wherever she is right now).
Beep.
(He’s okay with that).
He opens the comic back up, and starts to read from the narration box, “He can see nothing. He can hear nothing. His senses—his gateway to the material world around him—have been severed,” the words hang in the hair and an involuntary chill passes through him.
‘Lucas, I-I can’t feel or s-see anything.’
Her voice sounds clear as day in his head, it’s practically been going on loop in his brain ever since. He shifts his focus back to the book.
“But in his head, he hears a buzzing—like a million flies gathered together for some satanic choir. Chaotic, maddening. Its incessance slowly peels back the layers of his mind, exposing the frail spirit beneath.” He pauses, looking at her again, looking for a sign of anything.
She’s all unknowns right now, but they have theories. If her mind isn’t here, maybe it’s just trapped in Vecna’s. El told them all about how back before he became what he is now, he’d said he kept his victims with him. For most of them, there’s not a body to go back to even if they could be freed, but Max is different. With Max, there’s a chance.
Yet if that’s true, it means she’s trapped, scared, probably being tortured. He doesn’t want her to be suffering, he’d never want that. But if there was just a sign of something…
He turns back to the book, “And in his heart, he feels the fury of the burning pit—a fire that begins in his center and eats its way outward. All-consuming, never-ending, an eternal torture of the flesh.”
“Oh, now that’s just wrong,” Erica’s voice startles him from the doorway. When he looks up, she’s staring at him with a raised brow and crossed arms, “You couldn’t have picked her up an Archie instead?”
As he sets down the book he matches her judgmental glare with one of his own, “And since when are you a comic critic?”
“Since my nerd brother and his nerd friends’ nerdy-ness rubbed off on me,” she rolls her eyes and steps further into the room. The look she’d plastered on her face fades away as soon as her gaze drifts towards Max, the way it always does.
The two of them haven’t really talked about any of it, but he can tell they’re both trying to cling to some sense of normalcy. Hawkins is split open all around them, Eddie is dead, Max is here in this hospital bed, they just went through a week straight from hell, and they’re still bickering the way they always do.
Beep.
(But the bite behind it just isn’t there).
Beep.
(At least not like it used to be).
Beep.
(Something—more like everything—changed that night in the Creel attic).
Erica was the first person to… find them, to see how catastrophically the whole plan fell apart. When Lucas was frozen and clutching onto whatever was left of the girl he loves, the only person he could call for help was his little sister. And she did everything she could, he knows that—but really, what was a kid supposed to do?
Especially when it's not like she'd had an easy night either, when he later found out that those Basketball guys went after her... He already knew they were scumbags (the fact that they were willing to follow Jason through all of that made it abundantly clear), but attacking his little sister was a new low.
He just wishes she could be safe. She’s so young, she’s younger than anyone in The Party was when Will went missing in the first place, none of this should have ever been her burden to bear.
The look on her face now though, as she stares at Max’s still body, it shows the same sort of sadness and regret he feels.
“These are all her’s anyways,” he breaks the silence, gesturing to the stack of comics. Trying to be a distraction, if not for himself then at least for her, “So clearly Max likes them.”
Erica pulls her gaze from the bed back to him, and the slightest hint of a smirk tells him she knows exactly what he’s trying to do, and that she’ll play along, “Well, she’s got weird taste,” she glances between the Deadman issue and the stack of books still in the bag, “But I already knew that. I mean, she dated you.”
Lucas tries to look offended before starting to laugh. As he looks in her direction, he does catch sight of the paper he’d taped on the wall behind where she stands. Max’s drawing, the promise of a movie date they still need to have.
The movie date they will have.
“What are you doing here anyways?” he brings his gaze back to Erica, “I thought you were volunteering with Dustin and those guys at the school today.”
She looks at him like he’s got two heads, this time more genuine judgment rather than just playing along, “Uh, yeah. I did that all day,” she nods her head towards the window, and when he turns he sees the dim evening light coming through, “You’ve gotta keep better track of time, they’re gonna start actually kicking you out of here if you stay past visiting hours again.”
“Shit,” he groans, because really she’s right. He hadn’t had any clue how long he’d been there, the seconds and minutes and hours all sort of blend together—sure, working through the books can give him a few solid measurements, but it’s hardly anything that could connect to a clock. Not only that, but spring break feels like it was both minutes ago and years ago at the exact same time, everything’s all twisted up together.
Life just feels like contradiction after contradiction these days. Comfort and pain, then and now, alive and dead.
“Yeah, shit," Erica mimics his tone and takes a step towards the door. She turns in the doorway back towards the bed, and her voice gets softer as she says, "Bye, Max."
Lucas reaches for her cold hand and whispers, “Hey, I need to get going," he strokes his thumb across the fingers exposed out of her cast, "But I’ll see you tomorrow, okay?"
He waits for an answer that's not going to come, because he just doesn't want to go. When she's not there in front of him, it... Well, it feels like she's already completely gone. Or that she might go at any moment, as if him being there by her side kept her tethered.
It's such an odd thing to feel constantly on the precipice of mourning.
"C'mon," Erica says from the doorway, prompting him to finally stand up and follow her out of the room.
As they trail down the hallway, the sound of the heart monitor gets more and more faint. Even if it had been starting to drive him nuts a little bit earlier, now he's straining to hear it—to keep that one reminder that she is alive in at least some way with him. As they approach the elevator, he can just barely make it out.
Beep.
Beep.
Beep.