Chapter Text
Max watches as Billy confidently stares into the face of the Mind Flayer, while Eleven is layed on the ground behind him, face riddled with fear and confusion, and bleeding from both her forehead and leg. Max watches the scene play out with Mike at her side, both too scared and unprepared to do anything. Max watches as Billy puts his hands up in an attempt to stop the monster’s attempted attack on Eleven. Billy screams, struggling to hold it in place, hands and arms in the pain. Max feels the fear of the situation running through her veins, knowing that if she doesn’t do something, she may lose her brother.
No matter how much Max hates Billy, he’s still her brother, and family is the most important thing to her, and if Billy is her family, no matter how shitty he treats her, she still loves him.
Multiple new arms sprout from the sides of the Mind Flayer, moving towards where Max’s brother is holding its tongue. Max knows she should do something, distract it, scream at Billy to move, pull Eleven out of the way, in case the monster decides to try to attack her too, but Max is stunned. She can’t speak or move, like she’s in some form of paralysis caused by fear. She feels helpless.
Max hates to feel helpless.
One of the arms grabs onto the left side of Billy’s torso, he screams in pain. It’s a side of Billy that she’s never seen before. The side willing to show his pain, willing to sacrifice his life for someone that he doesn’t even know, someone that he’s been trying to murder all summer. This is who Billy used to be. Who Billy was before his mother died. Another arm grabs onto Billy’s right side, he doesn’t scream this time, but his knees start to give out, and his head falls sideways as he tries to stay conscious.
Still, Max can’t move.
Billy’s arms fall, and 3 more of the Mind Flayer’s arms attach to his back, his sides, and his stomach. Max knows what’s about to happen to her brother, her breathing becomes fast and shallow, heart racing, mind blank, unable to think about anything but what she should’ve done differently since her’s and Billy’s parents forced them to be a family, and in her eyes, that list was never ending.
The mind flayer brings Billy onto his knees, slowly, the barely conscious man unable to fight it off, only able to stare it in the eyes as it screeches at him. Billy screams once he understands what the creature is preparing to do. The Mind Flayer swiftly extends its tongue, going directly through Billy’s chest. Blood pours from his mouth, and every other part of him, really.
Max has never felt this terrified in her life.
“BILLY!” She screams, terror filling her entire being as the monster pulls its tongue out, and leaves the man bleeding out on the floor. Max stares at her brother’s unmoving body on the ground.
Slowly, she walks up towards Billy, quietly saying his name. He lays there, choking on his own blood, unable to move his body, trying, and failing, to breathe.
“Billy…” She whispers. Quickly the fear sets in again, and she starts to panic. “Billy,” She starts to beg. “Billy, please get up, Billy, please.”
Her begs aren’t working, and she feels tears prickling behind her eyes and her throat starts to feel swollen.
“I’m s-sorry.” He struggles to get out.
“Billy..” Max repeats again, tears falling continuously from her eyes.
Billy releases a long breath, eyes glossing over, body going limp, he’s officially dead.
“Billy!” Max’s eyes widen when she sees it. “Billy please wake up. Billy get up, please, please..” Her pleading becomes more and more quiet, understanding what’s happened, but refusing to admit it.
She finally stops shaking his shoulders, and starts to sob. She gasps in a breath and gets out and continues to repeat his name, in hopes that he will, somehow, hear it and wake up.
All she gets in return is a blank stare from Billy’s lifeless eyes.
—
Max jolts out of her regularly recurring nightmare, sweaty and breathless. It’s been a month since the “mall fire” (which was an utterly terrible cover-up in her mind, because there wasn't a single burn mark in all of Starcourt) and the image of Billy’s corpse still haunts her every night. She has therapy covered by the government once a week, but after school starts she has to start seeing the school counsellor instead of an actual therapist. None of the things her therapist told her to do has worked at all for her though, not journaling, not meditating, not reading, none of it helps. Her therapist says it’s because she “hasn’t allowed herself to start healing”, or something.
Max still blames herself for his death. After it all happened, she shut down, grief and guilt took over her, and she tried to stay herself for as long as she could, but she was too far gone into the spiral of depression. She broke up with Lucas, cut off the party, stopped wearing fun clothes, and her entire personality changed. She escapes through music, her walkman never leaving her person, always on her side.
She likes Kate Bush a lot, she really helps her escape.
Everyone who knew her could see the change, but Lucas could read it best. He had done everything in his power to keep her around, but Max still pushed him away. She still regrets it to this day. She wishes that she had just talked to him instead of pretending nothing was wrong and that she just didn’t want to be around any of them anymore.
Lucas knows none of that’s true, though. And Max is aware of that. She never was good at lying.
Max still sees Lucas wave at her whenever they pass each other on the street, a small smile on his lips every time. His smile always falls when she looks away without any reaction, and her chest tightens every time she sees it.
Max unhappily opens her eyes and glances at the alarm clock on her nightstand, it’s 8:00 A.M. She groans and reluctantly rolls out of bed to change her clothes. As she looks through her closet, she sees the blue shirt that Lucas gave her before… Everything. It’s her favourite shirt recently, it reminds her of the good times, when the two of them didn’t have a care in the world. She misses him dearly, but she knows she hurt him. That’s the only reason she hasn’t jumped into his arms and apologised one hundred times over. She can’t allow herself to be so selfish after leaving him behind.
She slides the shirt on with a sad sigh and makes her way out of her room. When she walks into her living room, she lets out, yet another, sigh at the sight of her mother still asleep on the couch with multiple beer cans scattered around the floor and the coffee table. She has to stop the tears from spilling when she thinks of what her life has become. She misses the times when she was young, running across the sandy beach in California, before her mom was an alcoholic, and before everything with the upside down.
Max picks up the beer cans from the floor and recycles them, sadness turning into irritation. She grabs her skateboard and Walkman and slams the door on her way out of the trailer, hoping it didn’t wake up her mom. She skates her way over to the corner store to buy some more tylenol for when her mom wakes up.
The corner store was mostly empty, only two or three people in there besides her. As she browses the medicine shelf she thinks fondly about the first time she came to this store. Mrs. Byers took me on a tour of the whole store. She smiles at the memory. That interaction is one of the reasons she wishes she had been closer to Will Byers before he and his family moved away to California. Before she can continue down her train of thought, there's a voice to pull her back to reality.
“Max,” The familiar voice speaks softly. “Max, can we talk?”
“No, Lucas,” She says with fake irritation in her voice. “I thought I made it very clear that we’re done.”
“I don’t care, Max. We never talked about anything, that’s what ruined us.”
“No, we weren’t ruined because we were never meant to be, not because of some lack of communication, we broke up four times after we started dating.”
“Yeah, but those were petty, shitty little breakups, we got back together within two days.”
“Yeah, so? It still happened so—“
“Why didn’t you just talk to me?” Lucas’ voice shakes. “I could’ve tried to help…” The last part barely came out in a whisper, almost impossible to hear.
But Max hears it, and she feels a burning sensation behind her eyes.
She takes a deep breath, not thinking about what she was saying next.
“Well maybe…” She hesitates. “Maybe I didn’t want to talk to you .” The venom oozed in the way she said it, quickly walking away from Lucas and towards the cashier so she could just pay for the pills and leave before she ran back to him.
Max took one last glance before she left the store.
As she rushes out of the store she allows a few tears to fall while the guilt plagues her mind. Max just wants to go home and curl into a ball under her bedsheets, wallowing in her own self-pity and depression.
And so that’s what she did. Curled up in the foetal position, sobbing into her knees.
For the first time in her life, Max truly wants to die. This is her lowest point, and she stupidly went and shut out everyone she had and everyone she needed. Max feels truly suicidal. She would never act on it, though.
That would be too much work for her friends and family.