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The first time Max wakes up is on a Thursday afternoon, blind as a bat and in enough pain she considers trying to put herself back into a coma.
Luckily, Nancy is the one there when she wakes up and Nancy is the best in a crisis out of all of them, still, even though they’ve all been through the end of the world like four times at this point (or two or three, depending on who you’re talking to). Nancy is also a girl, which is helpful because the first thing Max realizes while thrashing around in pain is that she feels naked even with a hospital gown on, paper thin and cold in the icy, air conditioned room.
The second thing she realizes is that she can’t see.
Nancy is the best one in this situation because she has the firm touch of an older sister and the steady confidence of an old woman and so when Nancy tells Max relax, stop fighting, you’re okay, you’re safe, Max listens, even though there’s nothing but Nancy’s word to confirm this. Max falls back against the pillows and breathes in and out, hard, and holds Nancy’s soft, strong hand like it’s the only thing tethering her to Earth.
Nancy tells her you’re in the hospital, you’re safe here, you’re okay, you can rest, and Max is so tired she falls back to sleep immediately, but even asleep again she doesn’t let go of Nancy.
The second time Max wakes up is noon on Friday. She knows this only from the pounding of a grandfather clock somewhere nearby. The clanging of the clock instantly recalls how her bones felt when they snapped in half in the air, the stench of Vecna’s rotting flesh, the chirps of bats circling all around and she doesn’t realize she’s not breathing until there are nurses circling her to sedate her, wiping her tears and pushing her firmly back onto the bed until it’s all dark again.
When she wakes for the third time, it is for good. Steve is at her bedside now and even though she can’t see him, she knows it’s him immediately because he’s talking. It gives her something to ground herself with, the sound of his voice as familiar as Lucas’ laugh and El’s confused tone and Dustin’s triumphant exclamations and Mike’s whines in the arcade when she used to beat him so badly. But different too. Steve has always been a little bit different to her than her other friends, a little older than them, and definitely cooler. There’s not too many people on the planet that Max considers herself completely safe with, but Steve has held that honor since the beginning. He was the first one out of all of them to save her life.
When she’s conscious enough to focus, Max realizes that Steve is babbling about, of all things, The Breakfast Club .
“All I’m saying is we could give them a run for their money, you know? Like, yeah, sure they’ve got a loser and a delinquent and a jock and a Molly Ringwald or whatever but if we dyed Nancy’s hair red and made Eddie wear a flannel… plus we have like a whole multiple dimensions thing going on which is way more interesting than detention. Multidimensions? Multiuniverses? Multiverses? Whatever. Anyways, great movie but El doing her hand thing to that song would be way better- woah, hey, are you awake?”
Talking feels like scraping nails down her esophagus but Max tries anyway. “Multiverse, dingus? Really?” she croaks out.
“Hey, okay, definitely awake. Do you need water or apple juice or something? I can definitely get apple juice, it's no problem. Actually let me just go get the nurse-“
“Don’t go,” she says, a flash of terror shooting through her at the thought of being left alone, in the dark.
“Okay, yeah, no not going. All good Mad Max, no worries. You need something to drink though, yeah?”
“Yes,” she groans. It hurts too much to say more, hurts to swallow. Her shoulders ache with the position they’ve been resting in for weeks, and when she tries to wiggle her fingers, she’s not sure if it’s working. There are knives in her wrist and weights in her legs and if she were to puke right now it feels like it would come out bright red, like her insides are all bloody.
“Okay, I gotcha,” he murmurs. “Fair warning, I’m gonna have to yell a little.”
She nods, slowly.
“Can I get a nurse in here?” Steve shouts, and she winces at the volume.
There is a flurry of sounds, the nurse calling others in and more people coming into the room and she can hear their footsteps and them touching things and telling her they’re going to lift her head and they do give her water, which is nice, but they also start checking her injuries, which isn’t.
“Steve,” she says, trembling.
Steve takes her hand not even a half second after she speaks. Max’s so stupidly grateful she could choke on it. He talks some more. Rambling on and on about Molly Ringwald’s dance moves and Don’t You (Forget About Me) and high school stereotypes for what must be at least ten minutes, and she hangs onto every word.
Steve holds her hand the whole time, while they check her legs and her arms and her eyes. They tell her that her arms are almost healed, that her legs will take longer. They tell her she is blind, for forever. Her eyes burn, but produce no tears. Steve squeezes her hand in his, and she thinks about how that same hand once punched Billy in the face to keep him from hurting her.
For the next few days, Max’s hospital room is a revolving door of members. Lucas is there a lot, Hopper and Eleven too, even Robin once, full of awkward chatter about movies that Max has never seen (and now never will, but that thought is easy to push away while Robin talks a mile a minute). Mike and Dustin come together a few times, but they are splitting their time between her room and Eddie’s, who’s apparently survived due to some typical Harrington heroics and fantastic luck, so she’s not offended. Steve is there the most though- holding her hand and talking shit about things that she couldn’t care less about except that they distract her from the crushing terror that fills her body whenever she remembers that she is blind, forever.
Her mom doesn’t come once. She doesn't want to ask the question, but by the third day of continued consciousness, it seems there is an inevitable conclusion anyway.
Max still isn’t ready when they finally begin to talk.
Hopper, Joyce, Steve, and Nancy, are all there which is how she knows it must be serious. Steve is silent for the first time since she woke up, and this above all is what makes her fingers start to shake.
Hopper is the one who bites the bullet, unsurprisingly. He doesn’t mince words, which she’s later grateful for. “Max, we haven’t been able to get in contact with your mother.”
“Did you try the trailer?” she asks, naively.
“We tried the trailer. We’ve tried calling and we’ve been by the park, but it’s not parked there anymore.”
She swallows hard. “The trailer’s not there?” she asks, just to double check, just to make sure.
“The trailer is not there, kid. I’m sorry. The best we’ve been able to figure out is that she must have left sometime after the battle. We haven’t been able to track her or get in contact. I’m very sorry.” His voice is firm, but he’s not unkind in the way he delivers the devastation to her. He smells like cigarettes, and bizarrely, she thinks of Eggo waffles and sleepovers for a second before she’s able to realize what he’s really saying.
What he is saying is that her mother left. Her mom left her.
Max’s eyes feel itchy. Her lungs are expanding but she can’t catch a breath.
“She left ?” her voice ticks up an octave. “My mom left ?”
“I’m so, so sorry Max. We think she did.”
He does sound sorry. It’s weird, because he’s barely ever so stoic. Hopper is gruff, Hopper is angry sometimes, joking sometimes, soft sometimes, but barely so solemn as he is now.
“I don’t believe you. She- she didn’t leave, she wouldn’t do that.” It’s hot, the room that they’re in, she realizes. It’s so hot. Why? Why is she still cold then? Where are her sweaters if the trailer is gone? Why can’t she catch her breath?
Steve’s voice breaks in. “Max, listen to me. You have to breathe, okay? I know it’s hard, but you have to take deep breaths.”
She doesn’t want to take deep breaths. She doesn’t want to breathe at all. She wants her legs to work, she wants her eyes to work, she wants her mom .
“What do you mean she’s gone?” Her voice doesn’t even sound like hers. She sounds like a little baby, like a toddler trying to understand why their lost dog isn’t coming back after all.
“Honey,” Joyce starts, but Max doesn’t want to hear it.
“Shut up. She’s not gone. It’s fine. She’s not gone, okay? She wouldn’t do that, she wouldn’t just go, I’m fourteen , she wouldn’t just leave a fourteen year old. She’s not dumb! She’s not dumb, okay? You guys are probably just too stupid to find her! She’s probably just waiting for the dumb hole to close and for it to be safe and then she’s coming back. I don’t understand why you guys don’t get that! She’s coming back, she’s probably just waiting for the stupid hole to close.”
“Max, honey, I’m so sorry,” Joyce starts again, but Max cuts her off before she can continue.
“ No. No, okay? I said she’s coming back, she’s coming back, she’s just waiting for the stupid hole to close! She has all my stuff! She wouldn’t just leave with all my stuff, I have clothes there, my skateboards-”
“ Max.” Nancy’s voice shuts her up. It sounds like she has glass shards in her throat. Why does it sound like that? Nancy never sounds like that, Nancy always has a plan, Nancy is always sure, why the fuck does she sound like someone’s died? No one has died, not even Max. Her mom is coming back - “Max. The hole in the ground did close. It’s been- it’s been weeks. Max, she’s gone. I’m so sorry.”
“But- but I’m fourteen. I don’t have anywhere else to go .” The admission is ripped from her throat without her permission. It’s the least like herself she’s ever sounded. “I don’t- I don’t want to go into foster care. Please. Please. I don’t want to go into foster care. Please .”
She’s begging, she thinks distantly. It reminds her of Vecna. It reminds her of Neil.
This is what people forget about Max: the Upside Down and Vecna and all their creations were not the first things, however nightmarish, to put Max’s life in danger. Max’s life was in danger from the first time her mother brought Neil home. Neil, with his big hands and loud boots and deep well of silent anger. Neil, who had been nice at first, but had a hand on her mother’s arm at all times, and eyes that had tracked Max’s like a hyena.
When Neil started coming around, Max had been ten and living in California. She was allowed to see her dad less and less after that. Her mother let Neil move in quickly. She let Neil decide things like what they had for dinner, and when Max was allowed to practice skateboarding and if she could see her friends and which ones. She didn’t have any money, her dad couldn’t afford to take her, so she was stuck. Stuck with Neil and his son Billy who was tall, muscled, angry. Billy stared at her like she was dead meat every time she so much as breathed loudly.
Neil hit her mother, sometimes. Neil hit Billy, more often than that. Neil never hit her, but she knew it was probably because she was a girl, and that it was only a matter of time before she became a woman in Neil’s eyes. Neil clearly didn’t mind hitting women. Billy hit her once or twice, but stopped after the incident with Steve ( thank god for Steve she had thought, more than once).
After Billy died, Neil had stopped hitting. He got quiet instead, and he got drunk more often, and he shot beer cans off of fence posts because even grief can’t completely quell the base urges of a human monster. Neil left, eventually. One more good thing to come from Billy’s death , she’d thought and been grateful and guilty and grief stricken and sick with all of it.
Max knew the truth of childhood more than most children ever would. Every child is born a puppet, strings attached to the cross brace held by the adult or adults in the house. A child who was lucky was only vaguely aware of the strings attached- having to eat vegetables for dinner, going to bed at 8pm, asking for an allowance for the arcade. A child who was unlucky knew the true holding power of those strings- that they meant every piece of the child’s life was at the mercy of another person. Where they lived, who they lived with, if they could see their friends, if life was happy and wondrous or filled with fear, forever avoiding minefields.
Max knows the strings that bind her intimately.
Foster care would mean the cross brace changing hands again. Foster care, Max thinks, would mean maybe another Neil. And the fear comes on fast then, knives in her stomach, an invisible hand squeezing her lungs into a chokehold and again, she thinks I. CAN’T. BREATHE.
Max’s eyes begin to burn and stupidly she thinks can blind people even cry , though she knows the answer must be yes as the tears start to fall down her own cheeks.
Fuck , she thinks, fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck. She tries to stop the tears, but they keep coming, as if her brain has separated its function from her body, abandoned ship at the sight of this latest disaster, and not for the first time, she thinks why won’t anything work the way I want it to , her broken arms and broken legs and broken eyes and broken heart on display for everyone in the room to see.
She feels someone grab her right hand, and then someone else grab her left. She knows it’s Steve and Nancy somehow, knows the shape of their palms even blind, even deconstructing.
“No. No, Max, no one is letting you go into foster care,” Steve says furiously. “Absolutely the fuck not. Do you hear me?”
“What?”
“Max, sweetheart, I would never ,” Steve pauses here, clears his throat.
“What Steve is trying to say,” Nancy breaks in, “is that we would never let that happen to you. It’s simply not an option.”
Nancy’s declaration cracks through her spiral like sunlight through a storm cloud. Nancy Wheeler could probably tell God himself to stop a flood, and God would . When she says something, the world listens.
Max listens. “Where- where am I going to live, then?”
“You’ll live with me, obviously,” Steve says, his voice thick.
Obviously? Max thinks, bewildered. Her sniffles start to slow though, and she feels Nancy wipe her face with a tissue.
“What do you mean?” She croaks out.
“Well, you’re not alone, okay? My parents left too.”
She hears Hopper inhale sharply through his nose, wonders if that’s news to him or if he just can’t fathom leaving a child behind. Then she thinks of Steve’s house, of how he always invites people over and keeps all the lights on and wants to be around people, and how that makes more sense then she’d ever really given it credit for now.
He’s still talking.
“You can have a room on the first floor to get around easily, and we can have the rest of the Party over whenever, and Joyce can check in on you every day and El can come over anytime and Lucas can come over too but if you don’t want him to that’s okay too. I mean- if you don’t want to, it’s okay, I won’t be mad but I thought maybe you’d like living there, you know. If you’d like. I could take care of you.”
And Max- Max has had men make her promises before. Neil in the beginning, promising her trinkets and clothes and a happy family, never saying the truth. None of it was freely given, just a bargain for control of her family and her mother had given it to him. Billy, promising to take care of her and watch out for her but doing so with sharp words and sharper threats. Even Hopper, for all his good intentions, had made promises he hadn’t kept. That things would be okay, that he was there for her no matter what because she was El’s friend, that nothing bad would happen to them again. Hopper had meant it, in his gruffness and goodheartedness, but then he’d disappeared anyway. It hadn’t been his intention to break that promise, but monsters don’t care about your best intentions and so Max couldn’t either.
But.
It’s Steve.
Steve, who had driven her to and from the arcade as many times as she’d asked for all of eighth grade. Steve, who had quietly gifted her new wheels for her skateboard for her last birthday because he’d noticed without her saying anything that hers were starting to wear through. He must have known that her mom would never have noticed or done anything about it if she had. Steve, who had gotten a concussion from her stepbrother and never once blamed her for it, never mentioned it again- Steve, who she’d written a letter to when she thought she was going to die because he had become important to her. Part of her group of Most Important People.
Steve, who’s been trying to prevent harm to her and all her friends since the day she first met him when she was twelve and the memory of Steve swinging a bat at demodogs, drawing them out and away to keep her and her new friends safe, so brave even at seventeen, rises to her mind unbidden.
Steve, who’s been holding her hand for three days straight, talking about The Breakfast Club .
A lot of men have made promises to Max, but Steve is the only one who’s kept all the promises he’s ever made to her. And now this- the promise of a home, of a family. No more walking on eggshells, feeling like a nightmare version of Pinocchio every time her mom yanked the strings. Maybe Steve is someone who would understand the weight of holding her cross brace in his hands.
His strong hand, still holding her broken one now. Tying her to Earth without her ever having to ask.
She takes a deep breath, testing the feeling of her lungs in this new type of world, this new place where she doesn’t have a mother.
Thinks maybe she could have a brother, instead.
She says yes.