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Lucas can’t remember the last time the quiet has stayed that way in his head.
As a kid, he never needed it to. Never wanted it to. Life was just more interesting when there was always something to be thinking about.
Whether it was a strategy he was mulling over for one of Mike’s campaigns, or a particular science lesson from Mr. Clarke that captured his imagination, or even a comeback for a bully that he’d think of just a little too late on his bike ride home from school. Always something to try to add a little excitement to his simple small town life.
But his life isn’t simple anymore. It hasn’t been for years.
Now there are things he doesn’t want to think about. Things that crawl around the darkest recesses of his brain, that are always searching for an opportunity to make an appearance.
Images of all the waking nightmares he’s come face to face with. Faces of all the people he’ll never see again. Reminders of all the wrong choices he made in the moments where it mattered most.
Silence is now an adversary. An invitation for his train of thought to inevitably take a turn for the worse, and send him spiraling into an abyss that takes all his effort to climb back out of.
Lucas was never one to be weighed down by the things he and his friends went through, not compared to some of the others. Even during the worst period of his life, when Max was in a coma, and they had no idea where Vecna was or even how to kill him, Lucas was able to keep his focus for the most part on what he could do about it.
On the hardest days, when he’d feel his hope in Max slipping, or growing doubt in the idea that Hawkins would ever be the way it once was, he would plan. Help Nancy map out their next crawl mission, or work with Dustin on the tech in the WSQK van.
He stayed sane by never staying in one headspace for too long.
Every moment since the battle ended though, and the fighting was officially done, Lucas has struggled to stay afloat. To be present the same way he was when everything was still on the line.
Where he was once alert, he’s now on edge. Where he was once always ready for a fight, he’s now expecting one around every corner.
Where he was stuck waiting for a miracle by Max’s side, he now finds himself constantly checking to be sure it still exists.
Silence isn’t something Lucas can run from anymore, and it’s no longer something he enjoys.
Even when it’s just him and Max in the silence, like now.
They’re lounging on his bed, curled up with their limbs tangled and her head on his heart. There’s nothing in the air but their soft, slow exhales and the faint sound of his dad watching the Bulls game downstairs.
This moment is peaceful. Quiet. It should stay that way.
But as Lucas looks out his window, the setting sun makes him think about time.
At first it’s benign. He reminds himself to keep an eye on the clock, so they don’t miss their movie in an hour. He wonders idly how long it will be, and if they should go out for food before or after. Or if the movie theater popcorn and some candy could hold them over long enough to just heat up some leftovers when they get back home.
Mundane problems. Solvable problems.
It doesn’t take long though, because it never does anymore, for the concept of time to start bothering Lucas.
And because Max is half-asleep in his arms, it latches itself to her.
He wonders how much more time she has today before her muscles start to ache, and how much longer it will be before that isn’t something that’s constantly on both of their minds, even if they pretend it isn’t.
Six months of recovery, and Lucas can still see how heavily everything that happened still weighs on her.
How she always seems a little tired. How her movements aren’t as frenetic and carefree as they should be. How he catches her staring off at nothing sometimes. How the light is still returning to her eyes, not yet quite as bright as when he first noticed the fire-like spark in them that he fell in love with.
It’s reminiscent of the first few weeks after Will was found, when it took him awhile to truly start acting more like himself again. Like their souls need time to find their way back to their bodies.
Lucas can’t help but feel his chest deflate whenever he thinks about the unfairness of it all. All these months that it’s taking Max to find her old self, and it’s all because of one night, a few split second decisions, and a crucial failure to do what he’d promised. To protect her.
If he really thinks about it, this all started the moment he decided to tell her the truth about the upside down in that cramped back office of the arcade.
“Okay, that’s like the fourth time you’ve sighed like that in the last ten minutes.” Max says suddenly.
It’s not an outright accusation, but Lucas still feels caught. He’s glad she can’t see his face, because he tries to play it off with a laugh, pulling her in even tighter against his now slightly faster heartbeat.
He knows Max won’t let it go though, and he’s immediately proven right.
She pushes herself off of his chest, sitting up to look down at him. Her arms tremble slightly with effort as she does so, and it sends a spike of guilt through Lucas’s chest. She’d been comfortable, and he ruined it.
The same way her life in Hawkins had been safe, before he dragged her into danger by letting her into his.
Max’s eyes narrow. She studies him for a moment, her gaze playful, like she’s trying to use x-ray vision to see his thoughts. Lucas manages a genuine smile back, created by his affection for her antics.
But after a moment she sees something in his expression, something Lucas can never find in the mirror but she somehow always catches, that makes her turn serious. Her face softens.
“What is it?” she asks, in a way that he knows means what is it this time?
There’s no more holding back between them. An unspoken agreement they made the moment she woke up on that table in the hospital basement.
It’s not always as simple as it sounds.
Lucas had to remind Max in the first couple months of her physical therapy that she didn’t need to hide the frustration at her progress that was clearly weighing on her. That he was right there with her.
There are still some days, when her body reminds her that it isn’t where she wants it to be, that she’ll break down when they’re alone. Lucas holds her in his arms every time, whispering gentle reminders about how far she’s come.
Other days, it’s the memories that get to them. Her knowing what it feels like to die, him knowing what it feels like to have someone die in his arms.
The nights are often the worst though, when Max has nightmares of Vecna pulling the life from her, or being back in the cave she describes as her prison, or any other number of the near endless horrors she experienced that could’ve easily meant the end had things gone just slightly differently.
Lucas has his own nightmares. Of her body breaking in front of him, or of demogorgons slicing his chest open, or demodogs seconds away from ripping both of them to shreds in a laundry room.
It depends on the night whether he vividly relives staring down the barrel of Jason’s gun and begging Max to stay with him, or if it’s an abstract creation of his own making that takes far too long to realize didn’t actually happen when he wakes up.
Either way, he can’t ever seem to shake the terror until morning, when he picks Max up at her place and he can finally quell the fear with a long, tight embrace.
It’s easier on the nights she stays over in their guest room that’s usually only reserved for his uncle’s visits. When her mom is working late, and he gets to be her “nurse”, as she calls it. Really it’s just a precaution, in case of a bad fall or some other accident that could happen when she’s alone. Otherwise she’d still be in the hospital.
Lucas always feels more at ease when she’s close. When he can have his eyes on her. He’s never admitted that, but he has a feeling she knows.
When she’s only one room away, he breathes easier. When he can slip under the covers next to her after a bad nightmare, or vice versa, he actually falls asleep again. So long as they’re up before his parents in the morning.
Erica caught him once, tiptoeing back to his room at five a.m., still half asleep, but she just rolled her eyes continued towards the bathroom. As much as she gives him grief—especially about his love life—she’s had enough of her own brushes with death to be able to at least understand it.
Hell, she was the one to coax him into letting go of Max’s body when the paramedics arrived to take her to the hospital.
Another guilt he still struggles with. She was too young for that. For all of it.
Lucas is pulled back into the present by the pressure of Max’s hand in sliding into his. He focuses again on her still questioning face. Her piercing eyes that never let go of their hold until she’s gotten what she wants.
He sits up against his headboard, and reaches forward to brush her hair back. It’s got more wild volume to it now that she’s cut it shorter. He likes it, it reminds him of when they first met, when she let it be messy and tangled more often, as opposed to always tied back or in braids.
His hair is also closer to how it looked in middle school, after having finally buzzed off his high top fade that he’d given up on maintaining long before that. His priorities had been elsewhere, like his comatose girlfriend and the apocalypse, to be fair. Max made a comment when she first saw his new look about “being able to recognize her dork again”.
Lucas’s hand lingers on her cheek after he’s tucked her locks behind her ear. Max’s face turns a shade pink in response, and her lips pull up just a fraction at the corners, despite her concern for him. He thinks she’s never looked so perfect.
He doesn’t want to ruin the moment. He doesn’t want yet another instance of their past getting in the way of their present.
But if he doesn’t tell her the truth, he’s a hypocrite, because that’s all he’s ever asked of her.
“I’m just thinking about how you lost so much time…how we lost so much time, and I couldn’t stop it.” he confesses quietly. The words are bitter in his mouth, a hard truth to swallow.
He’s quit saying he “let her” die, because she punches him in the arm for it now that she has the strength. He doesn’t see how saying he couldn’t stop it is any different, but Max insists it is.
Her mouth twitches into a frown. There’s a unmistakeable sadness that overtakes her, and an uncertainty of what to say. Lucas can see the wheels spinning in her head and coming up with nothing.
It’s because she knows he’s right.
Not about his failure to save her (they’ve already had that disagreement more than once), but about the time they’ve lost.
Suddenly, the burden of that truth is now weighing on both of them.
Lucas lets his hand drop into his lap, and his eyes follow it down.
He wishes he hadn’t said anything. Why would he put that on Max? After everything she’s gone through, all the healing she’s been working so hard on, why would he give her a reminder there are some things that can’t ever be regained. That nearly two years of her life were stolen from her, lost to isolation and being hunted by Vecna like prey.
It makes Lucas sick whenever she talks about it. Picturing her alone in that cave, thinking she’d never get out.
Worst of all is the pain in her eyes when she describes it. A pain that he can’t stop.
“Fuck that.” Max mutters under her breath.
“Yeah.” Lucas huffs dully, remembering the phrase his mom always quotes about how ‘misery loves company’.
“No,” Max turns and grabs his face in her hands, pulling his chin up to look at her. She no longer looks sad, but defiant. Angry, even. There’s a hint of that old spark in her eyes that makes his heart skip a beat.
“Fuck that.” she says again, more intensely this time, and Lucas realizes she doesn’t mean it pityingly, but as a middle finger to the concept itself.
“Lucas, I did lose time—a lot of it. There are so many days I wonder what things would be like if none of this had ever happened. If that psycho hadn’t picked me, if I hadn’t isolated myself from everyone so much after that summer, if I hadn’t pushed you away…” her voice trembles slightly.
Lucas instinctually reaches out at the sound, wrapping his arms around her waist. He wants to pull her into an embrace, but Max plants a firm hand on his chest, right over the scar that he flinches at whenever anyone else but her touches, keeping him in place until she’s finished.
“But that’s what put me in that situation in the first place, spending all of my time stuck in the past, regretting everything.” Max’s eyes roam over his face, in search of a sign that he’s getting what she’s saying.
“I don’t want to regret anymore, and I don’t want you to either, okay?”
Her tone is stern, daring him to try to argue with her.
Max has always been that way ever since he first met her. Resolute, stubborn. It drives Lucas crazy sometimes, especially when she decides to shut herself away, but he also loves it about her.
It’s probably what helped her survive so many moments she otherwise wouldn’t have.
“But Max,” he starts tentatively, still unable to let go of the voice in the back of his mind, telling him that she deserved better. That they both deserved better. “Doesn’t it bother you? How…unfair it all is?”
Lucas feels like a child, whining about fairness when he knows it’s not owed to anyone. He’s learned that the hard way.
But most teenagers don’t have to watch their girlfriend die, or fight off monsters from another dimension, or watch helplessly as their friend sacrifices herself to keep the rest of the blissfully ignorant world safe.
So yeah, he feels a little jilted by it all.
“Lucas, nothing in my life has been fair.” Max lets out a humorless laugh. Unshed tears try to fight their way out as she grabs his hand, holding it against herself. Like she’s trying to keep him close, despite the fact that he’s not going anywhere.
Even now, Lucas can tell some days that she doesn’t trust that he’s real. That he never left her. He feels the same way about her, just…differently. In his own way.
Her eyes flit down to their interlocking fingers, then back up at his face. The blue of her irises are like ice, freezing the moment. It makes everything else slow down.
“Nothing except for you.” she says softly. “So don’t second guess any of it. We’re here now, that’s what matters.”
Over his shoulder, the last of the sunlight peeking above the trees paints her face in golden light, and Lucas suddenly remembers what he wouldn’t have given to see her like this last year, awake and staring back at him, full of life.
This isn’t the first time he’s had this revelation, but it hits him like a truck whenever he does.
“I love you.” he breathes.
Max has heard it probably over a hundred times from him at this point, and he’s not sure any amount will ever be enough. It feels like every time he says it, he has a new reason to mean it.
His dad once told Lucas when he was younger that when he found the right girl, he’d want to yell it from the rooftops so the whole world could hear, and that’s how he’d know she was the one.
Lucas wishes there was a way to make the whole universe hear him, in this dimension and every other.
He settles for just Max hearing it, and the look on her face every time she does, like she’s never expecting it.
She leans forward and kisses him, taking a moment to steadily sink deeper into it, like they have all the time in the world, because they do. Lucas can taste a hint of the salt from the pretzels she was snacking on earlier, and—as always—her strawberry chapstick.
He doesn’t think he’ll ever get enough of this either.
When their lips part, Max presses her forehead against his, letting the intimate moment linger between them just a little longer.
“I love you.” she echos, barely audible. When she says it, it’s just for him, and nobody else.
Lucas tilts his chin up for another kiss, but Max pushes on his chest, sending him back down onto the mattress instead. She lays on top of him again, returning to their previous napping arrangment.
“Finish that thought later. I’m still tired right now.” she says.
“Okay,” he agrees with a smile, wrapping his arms around her like before. “but there’s not much time for sleeping left before we have to leave.”
Max grins against his chest, her unmistakable sarcasm lacing her tone as she replies “Oh yeah, god forbid we miss Rambo three.”
Lucas laughs. It’s hard to find a worthwhile movie to see in theaters every single week, admittedly.
“Well, we haven’t missed a Friday movie date since you’ve been out of the hospital, we can’t break that streak now.”
“Alright, just let me have a few more minutes.” she mumbles, nuzzling her head up into the crook of his neck.
Lucas sighs, this time out of a feeling of contentedness. His mind is more settled now, back in the present. Maybe one day, the quiet will be just this. There won’t be anything but Max and him, and the peace they fought so hard for.
Until then, he holds her close, and lets the warmth in his chest remind him that even brighter days are ahead.