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It starts in the lobby of the Squawk.
Kali is napping in the basement. Or, at least, doing a fairly wonderful job of pretending to nap.
Eleven is curled onto the couch beside the radio booth, Max parked beside her. They both look exhausted.
“What did Kali say to you?” Max asks casually.
El lifts her head, eyes suddenly wide and alert.
“What?”
Max shrugs. Hopper mentioned to Joyce that Kali said something to you that made you act weird. I don’t know,” she says, sighing. “I’ve been gone awhile, but… you’re different.”
“It’s nothing,” El says, fidgeting with the blue braided hair tie on her wrist.
“Is it nothing, or did she say nothing?”
The questions hangs in the air, floating like dust on the last rays of sunlight filtering past the blinds.
El reaches out, hovering over Max’s wrist.
“You won’t tell?”
Max furrows her brows, confused. “What? No.”
El frowns, glances to the floor, considering. She comes to a decision quickly, eyes flickering to the basement door. Vicky is in the kitchen. Nothing will happen.
“Let me show you.”
In El’s mind, Max stares down into the inky darkness. The cool water laps at her feet.
“What are we—?”
Max lurches the floor falls out below her, snippets of memories flashing before her eyes like a cut up film reel:
A big yellow van driving into Hawkins, dark smoke choking the sky, red rifts colliding in downtown, people gathered in the gym, cleaning Hop’s cabin, hours and hours of training to be faster and stronger, Mike, Will, Dustin, Lucas, Steve, Robin, herself. Still falling, blinded by the images in front of her. Mrs. Wheeler on the floor, bleeding. The lab in the Upside Down.
She floats gently through a glass building with high chain-link fence and guard towers. Horrible cages with creatures of the Hive Mind, experimented on and tortured by Dr. Kay. Hopper’s suicide vest. And finally— Kali, in a freezing room, blood bags hanging at her side.
She feels her stomach drop again and finds herself in the church on the edge of town, still in the Upside Down. Kali stands before her, and Max realizes El is sharing her memories directly with her. An illusion of rooms and rooms, connected like railroad cars by a curtained opening, each holding a pregnant woman faded into view. Kali runs through them. A woman begs her to let her die.
And then the memory hesitates. Slows, almost freezing, glitching out.
She watches Kali craft an illusion of Eleven in that cold room, dozens of tubes and medical devices connected to her, almost lifeless. Max hits the surface of cold water in El’s mind, back to the inky darkness, heart beating wildly.
“Sorry,” she whispers. Max opens her eyes and finds El already looking at her, the room blue and shadowy and scarier than when she left. “You weren’t supposed to see the last bit.”
Max stares at El, hard.
Then she kicks the wheelchair weakly, irritating her further, struggling as best she can to get out of the damn chair and hug her best friend. El’s face morphs into surprise, then concern, grasping her hand.
“It will be okay. We have a plan,” she says reassuringly. “It ends with me.”
It isn’t reassuring. Not in the slightest, not to Max.
Because Max does not care if Dr. Kay or any other scientist wants to restart that program, but she’ll be damned if she loses one of the only people in the world she loves with her whole heart.
“No, El, listen, they- you can’t let them dictate your life! It’s your life, you deserve to live it! You can’t—” Max keeps hitting the chair, refusing to let it defeat her. Just one more thing Vecna has taken. One more thing she won’t let him have.
El holds her shoulders, trying to gently coax her to calm down. “Max, I have to—”
“No, you don’t.”
“They’ll make more—”
“They won’t! We’ll make sure they don’t. I swear, we’ll figure something out, you can’t—!”
“It’s my life, Max,” she says, so heartbreakingly quiet that Max feels her breath stall in her lungs to keep from screaming. “You taught me to be my own person. This is my only… it’s my choice.”
El won’t look at her. She’s staring at the floor. Max would kill to see her smile even half as big as she did two years ago, reading Wonder Woman comics and wandering the mall together. Sleepovers on weekends before she moved and when Max went back to school. Letters dotted with stars and smiley faces.
Love, El
Max closes her eyes and lets the tears fall down. Give her a break, she hasn’t had a chance to cry in a year and a half. And she’s pissed off. Really, terribly angry right now.
“El, please listen to me,” she says, voice catching on her name. She kneels in front of Max, undivided attention given, hands clasped together.
“We can make a plan. Okay? You come back from the Upside Down and hide. The military will be waiting, we know they will. Just have Kali turn you invisible, right? Like she will in Henry’s mind? And you can sneak back to the cabin through the tunnels,” Max is pleading, she knows it. It’s a half-assed plan that hinges on Kali’s cooperation and survival. El shakes her head. Max reaches up to hold her cheek, locking eyes. She waited so long in that stupid cave to see her beautiful eyes and curly hair. Today will not be the last day she gets with her.
“We’ll come get you. And you won’t have to hide anymore. We can go anywhere, somewhere far away like Iceland or those tiny islands in Scotland. Or New York City or Toronto,” Max swallows down a pitiful noise. “I just got you back.”
El’s face crumples. She slumps over, her head in Max’s lap. She squeezes her hand, shoulders shaking slightly.
“Just promise me you’ll try,” Max whispers. “Promise me.”
Eleven lifts her head, teary-eyed and red-faced.
Max brushes a strand of hair away from her face. “I can’t lose anyone else. No heroic sacrifices, okay? You have nothing to atone for, El.”
She nods, wiping her eyes.
“No, out loud.”
El smiles, small and still sad. She rolls her eyes.
“Bossy.”
Max flicks her forehead lightly. “I won’t let you go if you don’t say it.”
“I promise.”
Max wants to believe it. She does, actually. But she isn’t sure El does.
The moment she’s ripped out of Henry’s mind, she panics. There are soldiers in the Squawk, guns drawn, and she barely registers them as her mind flicks the worst possible scenarios. They arrive at MAC-Z. They lay down tire spikes.
The truck and a humvee come barreling through the gate, crashing as soldiers jump out of the caravan to surround them. Max searches frantically as they herd people off the truck. Her heart wrenches as they slam Lucas into the side of the truck, gun to his back. That’s all she can do — sit and watch and swallow down screams. Everything is still for a moment. Everyone is complying. The soldiers are on edge, looking for…
“El!”
Max follows Dustin’s gaze. Eleven stands in the portal, wind whipping around her, debris flying behind her. Mike elbows a soldier in the face trying to claw his way toward her. Lucas is crying, yelling as loud as he can over the sound of a world imploding a hundred feet away.
Max scans the crowd. Hopper is on the ground, looking for all the world like he might die when she disappears. Joyce clutches Will.
It’s devastating.
Her heart leaps to her throat.
It will all be over soon.
And she’ll never—
Something flashes in her periphery. A trick of the light, or… the Radio Shack door shuts just as she turns her head. Not five seconds later, she blinks and El is in front of her, bruised, limping on one leg, a maroon line bleeding down her left arm. Max collides into her, holding her as tight as she can. It almost feels real.
“How are you here? Why are you—?”
“I promised I would try,” she says. “I have to leave.”
Max shakes her head. “Not like this, not—”
“Kali was weak. We don’t have much time,” she says. “I didn’t know if it would work.”
Max blinks hard, ridding her eyes of tears to see El as clearly as possible. El is in pain. Max checks her over, patting her arms and sides. El holds her hands still, ducking to meet her eyes.
“Kali is dead. I told her I didn’t want to die. I told her that I promised,” she says, rushing through words. “Time and space together. That’s what Dustin said. I pulled it to us.”
“…What?”
El shakes her head. “No time. I needed to say goodbye.”
“No, no… I don’t understand. I’ll find you, once everything calms down. You can send…”
Max trails off, realizing what she means.
She decided to live.
Just… far away from Max.
It feels like her ribs are collapsing. She leans into El, wrapping around her as tightly as possible.
“I’m scared,” El breathes. “I don’t want to leave you.”
“You have your whole life to find good things,” Max says, trembling. “And you’ll find them.”
El buries her face in Max’s neck, sobbing.
“How do you know?”
“Because I didn’t think I would find them either. But I found them. In Lucas. With the party. In you. But you have to leave. You have to survive this first.”
El nods, tears flowing freely and dropping into the pool of darkness below, disrupting the calm waters like their footsteps.
“Tell everyone I said thank you. For teaching me how to be a friend.”
El pulls away just enough to see her face. Her hands hold Max’s face, disbelieving.
“Thank you. For being my friend.”
Max’s eyes dart over El, trying to memorize everything she can. The small freckles on her cheekbones. The deep brown of her eyes. The shape of her lips as she smiles, tears falling onto her lips.
She makes a split-second decision, closing her eye and crashing her lips to El’s, kissing her hard then softly as she tastes salt on her tongue.
“I love you,” she whispers, fighting to keep her composure. “I love you, El.”
“I love you, too, Max.”
Max can feel Eleven slipping away, the sensation of her touch growing lighter. The warmth of her hug dissipates. The brightness of the image of her, always so colorful and so pretty, begins to fade like an old photograph.
Max peppers kisses all over her face, holding her hands. Calloused from training in the last year. Strong. Small and warm in hers. Maybe for the last time.
“Go,” Max says, crushing her in one last hug. “Go. Go, now!”
When she wakes up, the scene has hardly changed. Eleven still stands at the entrance to the gate.
Max exhales shakily.
What if she was lying?
What if Eleven will die, and Max loses her forever?
She squints.
Through the haze of the Upside Down, the smoke in the air, she can just barely see Eleven.
But there’s no blood on her arm.
It ends with her.
She’s free.