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Lucas kept hope in a separate section of his mind these days.
In the first few days after Max’s bones snapped, after she died in his arms and her heartbeat fought its way back into her chest, it was all that kept him going. Lucas hoped she would wake so much and so fiercely that it made him sick. He sat next to her with feverish eyes and talked to her for hours, running on adrenaline until he crashed and burned.
The first day that El didn’t search for her in the void, exhaustion carved into the set of her face, Lucas sobbed until he threw up.
But still, he guarded that hope as though his life depended on it. She would wake up. She would.
(Denial was the first stage of grief.)
Now he didn’t quite like to call it hope.
Lucas dutifully visits her every day, playing her tape until the synths wind their way into his dreams at night. He talks to her like she can hear him. He holds her hand like she might squeeze back.
But he doesn’t dare to let that overwhelming rush of hoping overtake him. It fed him for weeks, in the beginning, his only fucking lifeline. He knows now, though, that he has to let it take a backseat. He can’t think about it too much or he finds himself immobilized, unable to drag himself to school or to Mike’s or to anywhere but Max’s side. For his part in their plans, he has to be focused. So he balls up that feeling and tucks it in a jar, and shoves it far into the depths of his mind. There it stayed, and most days Lucas could push himself through with some sense of normalcy.
(At nights, it was harder, and more often than not he sobbed himself to sleep).
But Will’s words brought it back, soft and steady like the flame of a candle as it finally caught hold of the wick. Lucas’ mind blazed warm and bubbled over with the feeling, rising up in his throat so strongly he had to physically choke it back (she would wake up, she would).
He has to be floating above the ground, he has never felt so light.
When Robin slides the Kate Bush record back into its sleeve, accompanied by the words Max will come back to life, it feels a hell of a lot like hope.
“Time to come home,” he tells her. His voice comes out a little too high, a little too rushed, but can anyone really blame him? He’s waited nearly two fucking years for this exact moment. And it’s playing out like a movie scene, like he’d dreamed it a thousand times, him next to her bed with his hand in hers and her heart monitor steadily rising. She’d open her eyes and he would be the first thing she would see. She would reach for him and finally, finally, let him back in. He’d hold her until they both stopped crying, tell her everything she’s missed until his voice gives out.
He’d tell her that he loves her. She’d be happy about it. Maybe, maybe she would say it back.
The waiting is so much harder, now that he knows this is the end. Every second feels like years.
Hope unfurls like ribbons from his chest, and if he blinks just right he almost sees it in front of him, surrounding Max in the streaks of fluorescent hospital lights. Hope is coating her skin like stardust, settling over her like a blanket, and maybe if Lucas just hopes a little bit harder he can will her back to him-
But the lights aren’t streaked from his watery eyes, they’re flickering.
Robin’s panicked voice bursts from the ceiling and slices the illusion to bits.
Lucas has only been this terrified once before, eighteen months ago in the Creel house attic as Max fell back to his arms from looking death in the face and slipped away just as fast. Now he is the one looking death in the face (for the second time in twenty-four hours) and he couldn’t stop the other demogorgon, but this one wasn’t coming for him. It was coming for Max.
Max, who might be moments away from waking in his arms.
Adrenaline turns Lucas’ blood to lightning, and he feels supercharged with it. She would wake up. She would. He just had to buy her the time to do it.
His feet leave the ground, lashing out, striking something solid-
and the doors slide shut and he falls back to earth in the fucking hopsital elevator, and they looked death in the face and this time she survived.
Max’s head falls back onto his shoulder, her lips letting out soft puffs of air, and every cell in his body is hardwired to protect hers. He’s supercharged, he could run forever, he’s getting her out of here. Nothing was going to touch her.
(He won’t notice that his stitches have torn wide open, trailing rivers of blood down his chest, until much, much later when he remembers to worry about himself.)
Max’s eyes are open and he knew she would wake up and hope is every quick flutter of her eyelids, every heavy breath pushed past her lips.
Her first word is his name. He fucking melts.
“Do you hurt anywhere?” he tries to ask her, but his voice hovers on the words and breaks completely, unable to believe that this is real. Max is here in front of him, eyes wide and filled with tears and she’s responding to him for the first time in endless months. He knows his eyes are overflowing with tears of his own, and he tries to blink them away so he can focus on her face (they both have tunnel vision, they can’t look anywhere else). Her song is still playing from the radio somewhere behind them, and Lucas is so fucking sick of it but he might never turn it off, not if it kept Max by his side and looking at him like that.
Kate Bush is his favorite fucking person in the world, second only to her.
But Max shakes her head and tells him through her tears that it was never about Kate Bush, not really.
“I just needed you.”
Lucas doesn’t have words for the scalding, aching something that twists its way through his insides and wedges its way to a stop within his heart. It’s a longing so deep that even thinking about verbalizing it to her is more than he can bear, and so he tries to tell her with everything but his voice. He reaches for her, supporting her head as he helps her sit up, all but dragging her into his lap as he pours all the things he can’t quite say yet into his embrace (he loves her, he loves her, he loves her).
“Mike, do you copy?”
At the resulting silence- the fifth time in a row- Lucas decides to give up for the moment. He stops his restless pacing and turns to check on Max. In the glow of the sunlight, she looks paler than pale, a ghost of the girl who rode circles around him on her skateboard. He hates thinking like that. She’s here and she’s breathing and she’s alive, but she is so clearly a shell of who she used to be. And that’s to be expected, but Lucas can’t help the part of himself that wants to coax his way inside her soul and lead her back out.
Everything is new and raw and jagged edges. Lucas knows if he makes a wrong move, the stitched-up scar between them will split open like the one that’s currently bleeding scarlet on his chest. He almost doesn’t mind that it’s there, a physical representation of his current state- his heart on the outside of his body, bleeding and bleeding and bleeding for her to just reach her hand out and take it back (it was always hers to take).
That’s how it used to be, at least. But though Max’s smile is fragile, her eyes are wide and trusting and sure. Lucas prays to God that he’s reading her right, because his stupid mouth could never stay shut when he was around her, and that deep-rooted longing was clawing its way back up his throat again. Any moment now, it would burst out-
“You were the first thing I thought of every day.”
Max’s eyes lock with his.
Maybe that wasn’t the worst thing he could have said, but did he have to embarrass himself already? He’d only had her back for hours and he’d been doing pretty well, if he said so himself. Would she think it was endearing, roll her eyes at him and call him stalker like she used to? Or would it scare her, the way he was suddenly throwing every thought that crossed his mind in her face and expecting her to take them?
“I mean-” Lucas’ face burns red. “Yeah, that’s exactly what I mean, actually. I never stopped waiting for you to come back.”
“I didn’t really have days, in Vecna’s mind,” Max tells him softly, her words coming out halting and careful. “Time was weird. I didn’t know for sure how much I’d lost until I woke up. But I’m pretty sure I thought about you every fucking second.”
Hope pours from Lucas’ eyes, his mouth, his heart. He knows he’s staring at her like she’s the whole fucking world but it doesn’t matter at all because she is.
“Are you gonna come hug me or what, Lucas?” Max tries to give her words some snark, but the tears underneath are winning out. “I can’t exactly come to you.”
He’s kneeling beside her wheelchair before he even knows he’s moving, pulling her into him so close that they might finally be one complete being, sitting there on the edge of the world. Her giggle is muffled into his chest, the side of her head pressed right into his heart. Her fingers grasp the hem of his sweatshirt, curling as tightly as she can manage. Lucas’ eyes are wet, again, but it will probably be weeks before he stops crying with the relief that is Max Mayfield returned home.
Behind Lucas is a gaping hole into a place of spores and vines and darkness. Above him is some new dimension called the Abyss, where legions of monsters including the worst one of all await. But in his arms is Max, awake and alive and smiling, and he’s pretty sure if the sky fell down now and wiped out everything but this moment, he’d be okay with it.