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months had passed since the ground split open wide, carving gashes through streets, houses, people. months had passed since the older kids took on vecna, since they’d lost eddie, since will and el and jonathan had come home.
months had passed since max.
lucas, more often than not, spent his time holding vigil at her bedside. el had been there everyday, in the beginning, searching the void countless times. she’d screamed max’s name until she lost her voice entirely, but she always came up empty. it broke his heart, seeing her eyes open and the slow shake of her head. it broke hers too.
she started training to fight vecna in the real world, instead. she stopped coming.
and look, it wasn’t like his other friends didn’t show up- they did. they came, but max had shifted on their list of priorities. other things loomed larger; the lockdown and the military’s search for el and the way the red-and-gray rolled over hawkins in thick waves.
(the air felt noxious, now. sometimes lucas holds his breath for as long as he can, until all he sees are stars. he always gives in and gasps for air. it’s always sour.)
so yeah, the party showed up. but it was only lucas who was tethered to the hospital like he were the one on life support.
and the more time goes by, the more he feels stuck. why would he go home when he will find himself right here the next day? why would he drag himself to mike’s basement when he can’t ground himself there, can’t pretend that he shouldn’t be somewhere else?
(why would he eat, when he feels so hollow? why would he breathe, when the air outside was poison?)
lucas fucking lives there. his parents were beyond understanding at first, but as weeks bleed into months, their voices grow firm again. come home, baby. you need to let yourself rest. she would want you to take care of yourself.
lucas takes it in with solemn eyes and always shakes his head no. i need to take care of her, first.
but it was hard, feeling so helpless. try as he might, there wasn’t much he was actually able to do for her. he read until his throat was sore, played her tapes until he couldn’t stand them anymore. he learned from nancy how to braid her hair and fixed it every morning, he decorated the hospital walls with photographs of the party. at the end of the day, though, max remained still and silent and lifeless. and lucas remained devastated.
it was somewhere around the fourth month when things started to shift.
lucas has been sleeping at the hospital for awhile now. he goes home when he has to, but more often than not he spends his nights nodding off in the chair next to max’s bed. the nurses work around him (they’ve learned the hard way how stubborn he can be). they’ve formed a truce by now. he helps with whatever he can. he stays out of their way when he can’t.
this night, when he drifts off, he finds himself in a clearing. a forest yawns wide in front of him, trees so tall they’re dizzying when he cranes his neck to look up at them. behind him are rust-colored rocks piled just as high, nothing visible beyond. the more he looks up, the smaller he feels.
(he hasn’t dreamed since before).
something rustles from within the trees. lucas whips back around, instantly on edge. he backs up as a shadow moves between two trees, slowly coming into the open. lucas scans the ground for something, anything, to use as a weapon. coming up empty, he turns to face the shadow. the shadow with… red hair?
“max?” he whispers. his heart is lodged in his throat.
she steps fully out from the trees. her hair is wild, tangled around her face. there’s scratches over her arms and dirt caked into her skin, and too much fear in her blue eyes for lucas’ comfort, but it’s her, it’s fucking her.
“i knew you’d find me, stalker.”
and then she starts to run.
lucas is running, too, on autopilot, and they collide in the middle of the clearing. max’s head fits just under his chin and her heartbeat pounds fast, whole. alive.
“is it really you?”
he doesn’t know what he’ll do if it isn’t.
“yes, it’s me, what took you so long?” she says, muffled into his shirt, and she’s trying to hold it together but he can hear the splinters in her voice before it breaks completely. “i’ve been waiting for-forever….”
max starts sobbing, and lucas holds her tighter, wishing with everything in him that he could have been here this whole time. four months she’s been alone, waiting for someone- for him. four months.
“i’m here now,” he tells her, his voice thick.
“you’re not gonna leave me, right?”
and god, of course that would be what snapped him out of it.
lucas feels himself starting to wake up. he tries to fight it, digs his heels into the ground, holds max’s hands so tight he’s sure his nails have to be cutting into her skin. but everything starts to dissolve.
the colors blur like rain streaking over a car windshield. max is nothing now but a voice begging him to stay.
he wakes up with a hollow ache in his stomach. max’s body lies unmoving next to him. but he feels lighter now, almost hyper with his newfound hope. she’s still there. she’s just been waiting for him to find her.
the next night, he sees her again. and the next. and the next. and the next.
if you throw yourself headlong into your dreams night after night, hurtling into sleep like a speeding train-
if you squeeze your eyes shut just a few seconds longer each time, desperate to keep going-
if your dream world starts to feel sharper than anything you see with your eyes open-
could you just… stay there?
max cries every time he leaves her.
it only makes him that much more determined to come back.
(why did he never tell el? the party? anyone?
el would have been overjoyed to know he’d found max. she’d dive into the void with renewed strength and she wouldn’t stop until she retrieved her. their friends would rally around them, their hope restored, and max would become their priority again.
why didn’t he want that?
well, maybe it had something to do with the raspy whisper in the back of his mind. the one warning him that max would disappear if he told.
he was terrified it would come true.)
it was somewhere around the eighth month when he began to lose count.
mike comes around one day in the heartbeats between sleeping and waking up. “lucas, hey,” he says as he crashes through the door, immediately taking up space in the way only mike wheeler can.
the last bits of lucas’ dreams disappear like dandelion seeds blown into the wind. he isn’t mad about it, though, he’s glad to see mike. and he is eager for an update on the party, dustin had been by yesterday detailing their upcoming mission into a new tunnel.
lucas rubs his eyes and sits up. “how was the crawl?” he asks mike.
mike stares at him, openmouthed. lucas is too busy blinking the stars from his eyes to notice the disbelief on mike’s face, but not too out of it to miss his “what the fuck?”
lucas jumps in his seat. “what’s wrong?”
he instinctively glances to his left, at the hospital bed. but max is still motionless, still breathing.
he looks back to mike.
“lucas. the crawl was two weeks ago.”
it’s steve who they finally send in to snap him out of it. steve, who’d put his life on the line for them all more times than lucas could count. steve, who they all looked up to.
steve, who lucas used to want to be.
(it says a lot, doesn’t it, that lucas doesn’t give a fuck now.)
steve sits down with him beside max’s bed, and it doesn’t feel off at first. steve has spent more time there than just about anyone, giving max updates about their latest mission and occasionally taking over reading for lucas. usually, steve’s company was more than welcome.
but today, steve turns his chair to face him, and gets that stupid big-brotherly-wisdom look on his face. lucas knows he’s in for an intervention.
“look, man,” steve begins, and lucas’ brain shutters closed. he already knows what to expect. he’s not interested.
“your friends are worried about you. hell, i’m worried about you. i know you’re giving her your all, and she’d appreciate that, but honestly? you look like shit. you have to be feeling like shit. you can’t even look at me straight, sinclair- sinclair?”
steve says more things after that, things about him needing to get air and mess around with his friends. things about how they need him for the crawls. things about the party, about erica.
lucas doesn’t hear any of it.
the strongest part of his soul used to be his loyalty.
lucas went to fucking war for his friends, okay? he’d cussed out his share of people who’d made comments about dustin, about will. he’d beaten up a prejudiced boy or two for erica. he wouldn’t let anyone say a negative thing about his parents. he threw himself into this shit with the upside down over, and over, and over, because he would never let his friends down. never leave them alone.
he would’ve switched places with max in a heartbeat.
that’s who lucas sinclair was, alright? that’s who he was.
(was. maybe he’s not that person anymore.)
outside, all his friends fight for their lives, for hawkins, for max. but he’s done enough damn fighting. he’s done enough.
he fought so fucking hard and still, he lost her.
but now she’s coming back, she’s here, she’s-
only in his head.
so lucas doesn’t leave the hospital, and he doesn’t join his friends for their battle.
he drifts off to sleep instead.
the more he goes, the more his dreams come into focus. as he sees less and less of the waking world, it starts to feel less real. maybe where max was was home after all. because every morning his eyes were clouded over, the sky above him thick with fog. nothing moved and nothing changed and there was fucking nothing here for him.
(the less time he spent with his parents, his sister, his friends, the less they started to cross his mind.)
his life is and was and will always be max. he cannot see beyond that. he cannot see-
one day, lucas wakes and the world before his eyes is gray.
he didn’t see it as it crept up on him. color had been leeching away slowly, for weeks, just a little at a time. just enough for him not to notice until it was too late.
the world before his eyes is gray, and blanketed in layers of fog, and no matter how much he rubs at his eyes, the floaters at the edges of his vision don’t go away. fuzzy like tv static, they creep ever closer to his pupils. soon there will be nothing at all.
he sighs and goes back to sleep.
it’s been getting hard for him lately, the transitions.
lucas fades back and forth, his head splitting apart with the effort. his mind is a haze and his eyes are playing tricks on him and she is the only thing that’s real.
and it’s started to hurt, going there (it hurts worse, coming back).
when he tells her, she panics.
“my mom… she has pills,” max tells him, clutching his hands desperately. “she used them to go to sleep. nothing could wake her, when she took them. not until she was ready.”
“i wouldn’t have to go?” lucas asks her, and her eyes fill with hope, and it takes everything not to promise her the world. “not until i was ready?”
you’ll never be ready, lucas sinclair, says a raspy voice just through the fog in his mind. you’ll stay with her forever, won’t you?
he doesn’t know how he gets them. everything is cloudyandgrayandjustoutoffocus. lucas never leaves the hospital, he never leaves, but when he blinks hard enough to see through the blur he sees a bottle in his hands.
and in the back of his mind, a voice that sounds sort of like his own goes, what the fuck, lucas? because there is no way in hell that he went to max’s trailer and broke in and stole her mother’s opioids. there is no way in hell he did all of that, and doesn’t remember.
there is no way in hell he’s about to take them.
(one is already sliding down the back of his throat.)
max’s face beams when she sees him, and she holds him like he’s her fucking lifeline, and the world around them has never felt so warm.
the second he wakes up, he takes another.
everythingiscloudyandgrayandjustoutoffocus
the pills slide past his lips so fucking easily, like the skittles he and max once tossed into each other’s mouths in this very hospital. that was two years ago (that was lifetimes ago).
they go down like candy and settle like stones in his empty stomach. so fucking empty, he doesn’t remember when he last ate, he doesn’t remember when he last needed to. so fucking empty, and he doesn’t feel himself lay down, and he doesn’t feel himself fade from one world into the next, and he doesn’t feel himself leave.
for a brief moment, he sees her, silhouetted against a pulsing red sky. it’s never been red before, and if he could process that he would have alarm bells ringing in the back of his mind. this isn’t the sunlit world they’d lived in for the past months. this is somewhere else.
max is screaming his name, and her arms are reaching for him desperately. but she can’t move with the ropes around her feet (vines? roots? vecna?).
if lucas could still feel, the name for it would be dread.
the look on her face is pure terror.
but it’s only a brief moment, not long enough for him to move towards her or even say her name. it’s only a brief moment, and then he is so far away.
back in hawkins, the world begins to turn again, the sky bloodred and full of fire.
mike busts into the hospital room yelling, the rest of the party behind him. el scrambles towards the bed, her hand reaching for max’s. steve remains in the doorway with nancy, a gun in each of their hands, trained behind them at the hallway.
it rolls over them slowly, steadily, the haunting sound they had all heard once before.
four clock chimes.
el stares, stricken, at max’s heartrate. it holds steady.
dustin, on the other side of the bed, staring down at the floor, begins to scream.
max doesn’t wake.
neither does lucas.