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Getting on track for the start of senior year takes summer school, a tutor, and nothing short of a miracle.
Summer school takes care of itself. Her tutor comes in the form of Jennifer Hayes, a bright, overachieving girl from debate team that Max quickly warms up to. Jennifer is no-nonsense and sets high expectations, two things Max appreciates in a world full of people that look at her wheelchair-ridden self and think disabled. She’s not sure the word has ever crossed Jennifer’s mind. In fact, the other girl pushes her so hard that Max finds herself spitting out her makeup work at a level her own teachers couldn’t even get out of her. Being that she rarely finds camaraderie with girls her age, Max takes a win where she can get one, and soon they’ve formed a new, but still welcome, friendship. Jennifer urges Max to join debate. “You’ll love it,” she says, smirking, “it’s basically arguing for an extracurricular and proving why you’re right.” Max readily accepts.
Nothing short of a miracle, it turns out, is a full-on Party scheme, complete with rotating study partners, flash cards, and the occasional all-nighter. Dustin takes the reins with gusto, delegating tasks like a king lording over his subjects. All the boys are geniuses in science, of course, which works perfectly since that’s Jennifer’s one weak spot. Max is already decent in English, but her math needs all the help it can get, so according to Dustin’s schedule (which, if you asked him, was law) there was always someone on call ready to step in at a moment’s notice. It takes every bit of Max’s determination and more patience than she possesses, but she makes it.
Not only is she heading into school that September with the same classes as the rest of her friends, but she’s doing it on her own two feet: She’s finally acing physical therapy with flying colors.
The Hawkins High marching band sounds like a herd of elephants getting run over, not that Max would ever tell Robin and Vickie. It’s not a great soundtrack for the already noisy gymnasium as she and Will sit in the bleachers waiting for Lucas’ first game of the season to begin. She’s not the happiest about it already, because of an idea she’d had and decided to carry out that she’s already regretting. Noticing her nerves, Will gives her a thumbs-up.
“You think he’ll like it?” Max feels fucking ridiculous and kind of wants to go home. It’s not that she doesn’t want to be at Lucas’ game- she really, genuinely does. She owes him every game for the rest of his life after freshman year. More than that, she wants him to see that she’s showing up for him, that she cares about what he cares about. He deserves that.
It’s just- she looks dumb as hell. She’s wearing his away jersey, since it’s a home game, and she’d be lying if she said she hadn’t checked out the block-lettered SINCLAIR across her back in the mirror no less than five times since putting it on. She had Jennifer help her with the rest. Her hair’s half up in two little bunches tied with green ribbons, matching green hearts painted on each of her cheekbones. But the worst and most embarrassing part is the sign.
Jennifer had insisted. “All the girlfriends make signs!” she’d said. “All the ones who aren’t cheerleaders, anyway. You want to show Lucas you’re showing up for him? You bring him one of these.”
So here she is holding a poster board covered in green and orange glitter, all her letters slightly crooked because she’d lost patience halfway through. go lucas! it says, plain and simple because she’d die before she put anything sappier on a piece of fucking cardboard for the whole crowded gym to see.
Will laughs, his face a mix of amusement and disbelief. “Like it? He’s gonna lose his fucking mind. His coach is never gonna let you come to a game again, Max, ‘cause he’s gonna be too busy looking up here instead of at the court.”
She laughs despite herself. “God, I can’t wait to see his stupid face.”
There’s a clamor towards the end of their row. Mike and Dustin, who had sent Will on ahead and stopped at concessions, have just arrived and are staring at Max like they’ve never seen her before. Neither are wearing a speck of the school colors. Mike drops his bag of popcorn. “Holy fucking shit.”
Max’s face burns, and this is hard enough already, can’t Mike sit somewhere else, like the other side of the gym, maybe, or the other side of the planet? “Not a word, Wheeler. Not a fucking word. I’m doing this for Lucas, but I’m at the end of my rope already and if you push it I will walk out.”
“Don’t push it,” Will begs. He tugs Mike into the row on one side of him, Dustin on the other, so Max and Mike are separated by the greatest possible number of people. “I need to see the look on his face when he comes in!”
Dustin, mercifully, keeps his mouth shut, but when he notices the hearts Jennifer painstakingly painted onto her cheeks, he can’t help but snicker.
“Not a fucking word.”
“Jesus, Max. I didn’t even say anything-”
Will shushes them both. “They’re coming out!”
The Tigers begin their single-file jog into the gym, each outfitted in their game day uniform and a megawatt smile. Max tips her sign up a little for maximum visibility and waits.
Lucas’ return to basketball wasn’t planned. The team had tentatively rebanded his sophomore year, but he hadn’t joined them. After seeing the true colors of Jason and his crew, he had wanted no part of anything they did. The team had only gotten crueler after the loss of their captain, stalking the halls like jaguars after their prey. When he told her all this later, Max understood wholeheartedly. She couldn’t imagine being Lucas and just going back like nothing had happened, standing there at practice faking smiles next to a jerk who’d threatened his little sister.
Last year, though, Chance, Andy, and the rest of their gang had been thrown off the squad for the stunt they’d pulled with Dustin right at the start of the season. His coach had reeled Lucas back in for some practices since they were now woefully shortchanged, and it had surprised him how much he’d missed it.
The remaining members of the team were decent guys. They were there for the love of the game, and he’d snapped back into place pretty easily. Max had had to threaten him to make him leave her side each day for practice, but it was worth it to see the relaxed, easy smile on his face when he came home. She loved seeing him do something just for himself.
Because Lucas had joined so late, he was second-string for his junior season, which was nothing new to him. He worked his ass off, just as he did with everything else in his life, and now here sat the Party proudly for his very first game of senior year, where he’d be a starter.
The audience roars as the team continues their trot into the gym, and Max unconsciously sits a little straighter as she sees Lucas among them. He’s step for step with the rest of them, which makes her smile. Back in freshman year, when she’d watched him come bounding in for their pep rally, he looked a bit like a baby foal still getting his legs under him, so clearly not in his element. Now? This was his team. His court.
Lucas glances into the stands just then, scanning until his gaze falls on them. He waves to Mike, Will, and Dustin, who all start whooping and wave back. Then he sees Max.
Lucas falters, taking in the little green hearts, the jersey, the sign. He stops dead in his tracks, his eyes comically wide. His teammate Brian, unprepared to stop, crashes into his back.
Max blows him a kiss. He just about falls over.
Beside her, Dustin cackles.
Max thrusts her sign into Will’s hands at the final buzzer and goes to wait for Lucas in the hall outside the locker room. According to him, the team typically relocates here to recap after each game. She’s not sure if she can just stand here, or if she should wait somewhere more appropriate, like back in the gym, or out in the parking lot. She had never come last year, the games weren’t necessarily wheelchair-accessible, what with the bleachers and the teams’ chairs lining the court. Max could have come and parked herself in the hall, maybe, but that felt stupid, so she resolved herself to the radio just like freshman year. Lucas never minded. He wasn’t playing all that much, at first, anyways, and he always came straight home afterwards to reenact his finest moments for her in his living room.
The door to the gym swings open, slamming against the wall and closing again. It’s Lucas, but without his teammates or coach. She’s a little confused, but he’s a welcome sight. He looks the other way at first, then spots her, reaching her in three quick strides. “Hey,” she says, smirking, tugging down the hem of his jersey over her jeans to bring his attention to it. “Good game out there. You don’t have your post game chat today, or-”
“Come here,” he says hurriedly, his voice a little wrecked as he takes her by the elbow and maneuvers her to the left. He bypasses his own locker room for the girls’ one next to it that she knows is empty and will remain so, throwing the door open with a flourish.
“Stalker much?” she teases as she takes a few steps inside, turning around and letting her eyes rake over just how good her boyfriend’s arms look up close in his jersey. “Pretty sure you’re not supposed to be in here.”
“I don’t care.” He tugs the door closed. If his voice is wrecked, his face is even more so. Seeing the looks he gave her from the floor was nothing compared to him standing here in front of her, looking like he was in agony.
Max tries very, very hard not to smile. “What’s wrong?”
“Please, for the love of God, never wear this to a game again,” he breathes out almost reverently. He’s looking at her like she’s too precious to touch, and she would be basking in it except that he’s way too far from her.
“Lucas, I swear, I didn’t fuck it up or anything-”
“It’s not that. It’s really, really not that.” He swallows and blinks hard, like he’s trying to shake the adoration from his eyes, but he’s doing a pretty shit job of it. She doesn’t mind at all. “Max. I cannot focus for the life of me when you’re sitting up there wearing my last name.”
Heat rushes to her face. “Oh.”
“Yeah. Oh.” Lucas takes a step towards her. “You definitely knew what you were doing. I couldn’t take my eyes off you. That’s what you were going for, wasn’t it?”
She grins and fidgets with the sleeve of the jersey. “Maybe.”
His eyes follow her movement, refocusing on the jersey. She’s having way too much fun with this. She might wear it everywhere, from now on. Few things are more fun than watching Lucas lose his mind over her. How far can she push this, she wonders?
Max turns around, pulls her hair to the side so he gets an unobstructed view of his name on the back. “How’s it look on me? Think I should keep it for awhile?”
His hands wrap around her waist, fire tracing a path up her ribcage. “So good. Keep it forever, I don’t give a fu-”
Max whirls around and kisses the rest of his sentence away.
Lucas’ hands leave her waist and are up in her hair immediately, his fingers running over the two little ponytails, the ribbons. She never does shit like that, never has the patience for much past a messy French braid or two, and honestly, Lucas does a better job with her hair now, for all the hours he spent fixing it at the hospital. But no matter how much satisfaction he gets from doing her hair, he loves messing it up.
Max’s arms are up around his neck, pulling herself closer. She hates admitting it, but the basketball player gig really works for her. She’d shoot herself before ever saying aloud that she’d had dreams about the way the muscles in his legs tensed as he bent for a jump shot, but well. It was true.
“You know what would look really, really good?” he says breathlessly, tearing himself away for three seconds too long. Max pulls him back in before letting him go with a begrudging, “what?”
“You,” he says between kisses, “in this jersey, and nothing else.”
She kicks her jeans to the floor in response.
He knows without her saying it that she’s never bringing her poster-board sign again. First of all, she could barely muster enough bravado to continue to stand there throughout the game with the thing. She was sure every eye in the gym was on her at some point, and not only was she losing all her street cred, but it didn’t even look good. If people were going to gawk at the stupid poster Max made for her stupid boyfriend, it better at least look like it came straight off a damn printer. Secondly-
El would’ve been all over Max’s be-a-better-girlfriend campaign. Every glitter-glued letter on the board practically screamed her name, and while it was Jennifer’s voice in her ear saying, “Lucas is going to die when he sees this!”, in her mind, it was El’s.
It goes home with him that night. He duct-tapes it to his wall and she wants to cry the first time she comes in his room and sees it hanging up. She hugs him really, really tight instead, and manages to keep it in.
The next game, she keeps the green ribbons, but she loses the signs, the makeup, and the jersey.
She thinks long and hard about the jersey. There’s pros and cons to that one. On the one hand, she loved driving him crazy, and thought about the tortured looks he’d sent her last time more than she’d like to admit. On the other hand, she didn’t want to throw him off and actually get him in trouble with his coach, and if there’s one thing Max knew she was always good for, it was distracting Lucas Sinclair.
She opts for the least sexy things she can find, instead- a pair of Steve’s old sweats and one of Dustin’s oversized summer camp shirts. She looks like she’s going to bed, not to her boyfriend’s game. Jennifer winces a little, but says nothing as she straightens the ribbon on the left side of Max’s head.
“Two school functions in one week,” Mike intones from her other side. “Is this a new record for you?”
She shrugs and slouches down once Jennifer’s done fixing her hair. “Honestly, yeah. Would’ve been fine not breaking it, but you know. Lucas.”
Mike smirks. “Oh yeah. The year of anything for you, Lucas. Like you even have to try to stay on his good side. Or are you trying more to get… under?”
Max whacks him on the back of the head, and Jennifer promptly switches seats with her.
She gets caught up in the game, though she’d rather not admit it. She finds it easier to scream his name when she’s not holding a stupid-ass cardboard sign, and she shakes the bleachers along with Mike with how hard they’re jumping up and down. The score bounces back and forth between the teams through to the final minute, making it exciting enough for even Dustin to be fully engaged.
When Lucas makes the game-winning shot, it’s oddly reminiscent of freshman year and the game none of them ever got to see. Lucas’ back is to her as he’s yelling with his teammates, getting swallowed up in a sea of muscular arms. But then he’s breaking loose of them, head swiveling towards the bleachers, looking for… her.
“Go!” Jennifer squeals, nudging her shoulder, and it’s Mike that steps in to shoulder-check crazed fans out of her way as she struggles down the steps. Stairs are still hard for her, especially with the amount of green-and-orange clad spectators weaving in and out of her path as they screech the name of their golden boy. Sin-clair, Sin-clair, Sin-clair!
Lucas scoops her up at the base of the bleachers in some move he definitely stole from an action hero. “Is it cheesy to say that shot was for you?” he says breathlessly, stars in his eyes and sweat dripping from his forehead. She’d usually banish him to the showers when he’s straight off the court like this, but the pure, unfiltered joy on his face is doing things to her that make her forget she’s standing in the middle of the gymnasium in front of two basketball teams and at least a hundred fans.
“Shut up,” she says, only half meaning it, and then she swallows any response he might have had with her lips.
He picks her fully up off her feet, both arms winding tight around her waist as he kisses her back with all his leftover adrenaline. They only resurface around five minutes later to Dustin’s unnecessarily loud “Shit, someone get them protection!”
Max and Lucas make the newspaper the next morning, like they’re any old high school couple. The star athlete and the girl he does it all for.
They’re coasting on a high. They sail through the fall and into the first bitter chill of winter, blissfully, disbelievingly happy. Lucas holds her hand in the hallways and walks her to every class. She wears his jersey on game days and he maybe kind of loses all ability to form thoughts and she maybe kind of pulls him into the janitor’s closet to take advantage of that. Lucas watches her and Jennifer’s debate practices with pride. They take Holly for milkshakes once a week. They help Erica get her Hellfire reboot under way. He lets her practice driving in his new (used) car and she takes great pleasure in tearing up Hawkins like she owns the place.
But just like all highs, it comes to an end. They teeter on a precipice, clinging to each others’ hands… and fall.
“Do you ever feel like we’re just… pretending?” she asks him one day, not realizing until she sees the hurt on his face just how wrong the words are coming out. “Like, this isn’t really us. The perfect high school couple. PDA in the hallways and after your games. Being this concept people talk about. It’s just like, this was Mike and El’s shit. They were the ones that were in your face, all the time, until everybody was sick of it. Do you think we’re just playing out how they should be?”
Lucas takes her shoulders. His hands are so gentle, more than she deserves with the amount of hurt that still coats his face. “Max. Do you think for a single second you would willingly be in a relationship with an imitation of Mike Wheeler?”
“Shut up,” she says, a snort slipping out against her will. “I’m being serious.”
“So am I,” Lucas says. “We’re still figuring shit out. Putting things together. We don’t know what we’re doing half the time, and it’s not exactly how we want it yet, but that doesn’t mean we’re pretending.”
“Lucas, I’m sorry,” she says, moving towards him, pushing her words out fast at the sound of the wounded edges of his voice. “That didn’t come out the way I wanted it to.”
“You can say you need us to be better,” he says weakly. “You can say that you need me to be better, but please don’t ever say that any of this is pretend.”
(She doesn’t need anything better than what she already has, and she hopes someday soon she’ll find the words to say so.)
Max is used to being the worse-off one in the relationship. After all, she’s the one who spent weeks in the hospital getting tests run after coming out of her not-coma. She’s the one who went through physical therapy, occupational therapy, brain scans, counseling. She’s the one with the fucked-up family, all but an orphan with both her parents MIA.
But Lucas is the one who’s been having anxiety attacks.
Max likes being able to do this one thing for him and comfort him during those moments. She feels like Lucas does a lot of the caring for and not so much the getting taken care of. She’d have to kill anyone who knew this about her, but she secretly loves the way Lucas devotes himself to her. It’s unlike anything she’s ever experienced before in her short life, and now that she’s able to, she doesn’t think she can ever get enough.
(“You’re not the one who needs to be better,” she says once, in a rare moment when she’s able to work up the courage, “it’s me,” and Lucas shakes his head and tells her that she is everything he needs already. She would think he was lying, if he wasn’t the world’s worst liar.)
They start at night. The Sinclairs have given Max their spare bedroom, telling the two of them they won’t be permitted to share until they turn eighteen, which they both agree is fair. As much as Max would love to stay with Lucas every night, she saves it for the nights when one of them is having a rough time. On those nights, his parents usually turn a blind eye.
For Max, “rough time” usually means nightmares, flashbacks. For Lucas, it’s waking up with the breath snatched from his lungs and the world tunneling around him, desperately grasping for purchase and finding nothing to hold onto.
Max tries her best to be something to hold onto. She squeezes his hands and rubs his back and uses the mantra he’d always said to her: “I’m here, I’m here, I’m here.” Lucas never knew what he dreamed of that caused him to have an attack. It was gone from his mind by the time he opened his eyes.
She always stayed after that, but she hated not knowing what to do, not feeling like enough to combat whatever was going on inside Lucas’ head. Of everyone in the world, he deserved inner demons the least. She’d crawl inside his mind and tear them to shreds with Steve’s baseball bat if she could. But El was gone (a little piece of her heart broke every time she thought of it) and with her, any hope of fighting Lucas’ problems from the inside.
They’ll just have to keep doing it the old-fashioned way.
Neither of them expect it to hit him in the middle of the court. It’s expanded a little from the dead of night, sure. He’s had to pull over driving a couple of times, leave class twice to lock himself in a bathroom stall. But five minutes into a game, after taking a shot his coach immediately hollers at him that it was the wrong choice, Max sees his shoulders tense up.
Mistake after mistake after mistake. He’s slipping out of the groove he usually carves out for himself, and beside her Will is wincing. If even Will can see it, it must be bad.
“And Sinclair is 0 for 5 on the quarter,” the announcer drones, and Lucas flees the gym.
She follows. She always will.
“I know you can do this,” she whispers as he paces the rows of lockers, breaths coming out in gasps. “You just have to push past what’s already happened. Start fresh. I know what you’re capable of.”
Lucas stops in front of her, hard-pressed to get the words out of his mouth. “I can’t- I can’t go back out there, Max.”
She’s never seen him like this about basketball. He takes mistakes pretty personally, but uses them as a springboard. No one would ever catch him making the same one two games in a row. He’d take his coach’s advice home and work on it for hours in his driveway until he was sure he’d perfected it, and Max would get kind of tired of watching him. But she loved the look of determination he’d get in his eyes, so she always brought her homework out to the yard while he practiced.
They end up tangled together on the locker room floor. Lucas lays on his back, his head turned to the side so his temple is pressed to the cold tile. Max is flattened against him, her knees on either side of his ribs, her arms wound around his back and trapped beneath him. He’s starting to breathe easier, but every other breath is still a sob. She wishes she could squeeze those ones away. She presses her head to his chest, her ear right up where his heartbeat lies, and listens as it evens itself back out.
“How can you ever say you’re not what I need?” he chokes out somewhere between his cries. “Look at what you do for me, Max. You show up. You do.”
“I love you,” she tells him, her fingers balled up in the back of his jersey, tugging him closer with her legs as she tries not to let her own tears fall. “I know I don’t tell you enough.”
“You do,” Lucas is quick to reassure her, eyes wide with guilt that she’s sick knowing he feels. It’s her own fault she retreats into her familiar shell sometimes and forgets that while Lucas wears his heart on his sleeve, her emotions aren’t as easily showcased. She can love him on the inside all she wants, but it means so much more for him to hear her say it.
“I love you,” she says again, the words rushed, her lips pressed to the side of his face. “I love you, I love you, I love you, Lucas, I’m sorry-“
“I know, baby,” he says back in a voice so soft she could wrap it around her to soothe herself to sleep. “You show me every day.”
One anxiety attack a week becomes two, becomes every time Lucas steps onto the court. Max starts coming to practices, not because she’s clingy, and not because she wants to drool over her boyfriend in his short shorts a couple extra days a week, but because she’s hyperaware that this is snowballing. She’s always been there to catch him when he falls, and she doesn’t ever want him to look into the stands, gasping for breath, and not find her there.
It takes all of five minutes today. One missed pass, one slight reprimand from his coach, and Lucas is already wild-eyed. His movements become jerky, uncontrolled. His dribble gets sloppy. Every time he gets the ball, it’s an automatic turnover.
Max can see the nerves mounting in his body, piling over the top of each other until eventually he spins to look at her with one pleading glance. That’s all it takes for her to melt and rush for the door.
She meets him in the locker room. He’s slumped on a bench at the back with his face in his hands, very obviously pissed off at himself. It’s hard for Lucas to break out of a slump when he starts messing up, because he starts to worry that he can’t make up for the first mistake, and what if that’s all people ever remember, and then he makes another one. And suddenly it’s too hard to stop it, and the momentum’s going the wrong way, and it’s kind of like a train wreck. They’ve talked his thoughts down this path over and over again, with Max doing her best to lead him back out, but while she could always pull the smile back onto his face, she could never keep him from following in his own footsteps the very next time he stepped on the court.
It was a vicious cycle. He was so afraid of messing up that all he did was mess up, and he made himself so nervous that he could hardly breathe. It wasn’t even fun anymore, the thrill was gone, and all that was left was some massive, entangled knot of stress and insecurity that he hadn’t even had until a few months ago.
“Isn’t this fucking stupid?” He pulls his head from his hands to look at her, and at that moment he really is just a teenage boy. He so rarely gets to be that anymore. They were older than their years at this point, and Max sometimes felt like she’d lived a dozen lives. “All the shit we’ve been through and this is what gets me. I kept it together when I was twelve fighting monsters but I can't play basketball at seventeen.”
Max wraps her arms around him, because what she knows how to do best is hold him together. After all this time, her most treasured skill is knowing every part of what makes Lucas Sinclair tick. How to annoy him, for sure. How to make him upset, though he was infuriatingly patient with her since her coma. But more importantly, how to make him happy. How to make him feel appreciated. How to make him feel so loved that he knew he was safe with her.
“Yes, you can,” she tells him, her ear pressed to his chest where his heartbeat rattles thunderously. She wills it to slow. “And you’re good at it. Really fucking good, Lucas. You know I’m only saying that because it’s true. I love watching you play. But I don’t know if you love it anymore. I’m not sure you’d get this anxious if you did.”
“I’m doing better like this.” Lucas’ voice is brittle, twigs snapped underfoot and discarded. “This is exactly what I wanted for myself in high school. So why can’t I just- fucking- take it-?”
She can tell his despair is hardening to anger, which she knows even better. She lived in the depths of that for years, herself. But Lucas isn’t a naturally angry person, and he wears it like a costume. She thinks if she lets it run its course for a few minutes, he’ll discard it.
He pulls from her arms and aims a kick at the wall. “Fuck!”
Max backs up a little and gives him breathing room to fume. She’s mellowed a bit, recently, but when she’s in his shoes, she doesn’t like people in her space. She wants to kick things, throw things, break things, and then settle down on her own accord.
Apparently, Lucas’ own accord is all of twenty more seconds. But then, he was always more gentle than her. He turns back around with a look of regret and looks at her like he’s not quite sure what he’s doing there.
“It’s not that you can’t do it,” Max says slowly, firmly, so he knows she’s being serious and not babying him. “Lucas, I know you could. It’s that you have to look at your life with it, and without it, and think about which is going to be better for you.”
He comes back to the circle of her arms with no hesitation, folding her into him like they’re two halves of a whole. “I have to quit. I know.”
Max presses a kiss to the inside of his arm, the only place her lips can reach with the way he’s got her squished into him. “It’ll be okay.”
“I just hate,” he says heavily, “that this was such a big deal to me. It’s not. We’ve gone through so much worse. You’ve gone through so much worse. No one gives a shit about if I keep throwing a ball in a hoop.”
She writhes her way out of his arms so she can squeeze his face between her palms. She does this, sometimes, to feel like the words she’s saying are getting implanted straight into his brain. What she’s about to say really needs to get there.
“You were the one who told me that every choice I make is a big deal to me, because it’s my choice for my life. It doesn’t matter what other people think about it, because fuck other people. This is something that’s going to make changes for your life, so it matters for you and it matters for me. Always.”
Lucas rests his forehead against hers. His eyes are back to his usually permanent mixture of mirth and adoration, so she feels like she’s done a decent job. He grins at her. “Fuck other people.”
He quits. People have things to say. It’s Hawkins, and ever since the earth beneath the metal band-aids got healed, their all-star basketball team became the most exciting thing about it again. But Max is not letting Lucas get swallowed up by whatever they’re running their mouths about. If she starts to see him wilt a little, like he just might be taking it to heart, she just tosses one of his jerseys on and watches his eyes go soft when he takes in his last name across her back.
Because fuck the school, they were not giving his uniforms back. They had much better uses for those.
Winter bleeds into spring. Basketball season’s all but forgotten. Lucas goes out for track. Max jokes that she’ll join him- she’s had plenty of practice. She puts green ribbons back in her hair and climbs a new set of bleachers twice a week to watch his meets.
Lucas still wakes up gasping for breath a lot about all the other things from their past that just won’t leave him alone. Sometimes he sees her with blood running down her face. Sometimes he sees her comatose in a hospital bed. Shit, sometimes it gets to her too. She wakes up with an ache in her chest because everything she dreams is real. Running through her portal while Holly stays behind. Vecna wearing Lucas’ face. Billy, speared through the chest by the Mind Flayer. El.
The only thing that keeps her sane is waking up to Lucas, Lucas, Lucas. She doesn’t know what one of them would do without the other.
But she knows they’ll never have to find out.