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Max doesn’t know how long she was out for, only that the lights are still flickering the same eerie blue that they had been as she watched Billy march down the hall, watched his hand fly out in front of him, and-
When she takes her hand from her cheek she sees red, her fingers bloodied. Her whole body throbs, aches like she has the flu, but she peels herself off of the cool linoleum with a grunt. El and Billy are gone.
Mike Wheeler is crumpled on the floor a few feet away. He looks pale, paler than he usually does. Max wonders for a strange second if he’d maybe want to go to the pool tomorrow so she can tease him about his pastiness and listen to him sputter on about how she’s being a total hypocrite, Max, seriously- but she shakes that thought out of her head. They might not even survive to see tomorrow.
Max kneels over him and begins to shake him awake.
“Mike wake up, Mike can you hear me, Mike get up, Mike-“ and then he’s looking up at her blearily, like he’s never seen her before in his life, like her first day of school all over again, his dark eyes suspicious and weary.
“Come on,” she says, grabbing his forearms and helping him to his feet. He has a cut on his cheek and a bruise on his forehead, which looks like it’s beginning to welt, “Are you okay?”
His fingers brush against Max’s own wound and she flinches, hissing.
“Jesus,” he says, “I’m fine. Are you okay?”
“I’m okay,” Max whispers, unconvincingly. It makes her cringe, how hard it is to lie when she’s just awoken from being knocked unconscious by her step brother in the back hallways of a mall.
Mike doesn’t call her a liar, though, just fixes her with his gaze and says, “I really thought I could kill him, after I saw him hit you.”
And it’s kind of funny, because Mike is maybe the least physically threatening of anyone in the Party, even Will, who Max has seen lift heavier things than he should be able to.
“Did he hit you, too?” Max asks.
“Yeah,” Mike touches his forehead and groans, “He pushed me into the pole.”
He motions at the metal pole sticking out from the wall and Max feels ill when she looks over and sees his blood on it, just lightly staining it. This, her whole relationship with Billy, the way he hurts people, is supposed to be her own cross to bear. It isn’t meant to be shared with anyone else. Not Steve, not Lucas, not El, and certainly not Mike, who is just about the last person she would ever open up to about what goes on in her house, when the doors are locked and no one can see her cry.
“I swear, when I find him, I’m gonna kick his ass,” Mike says, stumbling backwards a bit.
A year ago Max would have assumed he’s probably been concussed, and that he only means it because Billy’s hurt El, but Max knows now that Mike wants to fight for her, too. No matter how many arguments they’ve had, over things as huge as a telekinetic girlfriend to the inconsequential nature of Star Wars vs Star Trek, Mike is still standing here, in her corner, at the end of the world.
She wells up a bit, and then they are both surging towards one another at the same time, crushing each other up in a hug. The lights keep flickering above their heads.
“Come on, Zoomer,” Mike whispers as the untangle, “Let’s go find El.”
And they rush down the hallways, heads pounding, hands clasped.
Mike does indeed make it home by nine, as per his parents wishes. He’s kind of disappointed in himself for doing so, frustrated that not even the seemingly horrid influence of Eddie Munson could make him be outwardly disobedient. Sure, he went through a… phase… in eighth grade where was an absolute holy terror to everyone around him except for Will Byers, but to his credit, he’d though he was never going to see Eleven again. And now, a year later, it was threat of not seeing her over spring break that was keeping him from acting out again. She really did make him foolish, one way or another.
His father nodded at him in respect when he walked through the door at 8:58, cheeks flushed from riding home shotgun in Nancy’s car with the windows rolled down, participating in the occasional whoop and holler from townspeople celebrating the win. He hadn’t seen the game, too caught up in the terrifying hurricane that was Eddie Munson and Erica Sinclair in the same room, but the excitement thrumming through Hawkins was palpable, the kind of exuberant joy he’d never felt in his hometown before. As he rode home with his sister, both of them singing along to Fleetwood Mac on the drive, he felt for the first time in his life a reluctance to leave Hawkins. Which was, of course, insane. El and Will were waiting for him in sunny California, but Mike was hesitant to go to them when he felt for the first time in his life like a normal boy, in a normal town, on a normal Friday night.
His mom kissed his forehead, which she had to stand on her tippy toes to do, and sent him off to his room to sleep. She’d taken the liberty of packing for him, which made Mike feel dreadfully babied and pleasantly loved all at the same time.
Lying in his bed, Mike couldn’t shake the feeling of restlessness that had been surging through him all day. He wanted to get up and go find Lucas, who was likely out with the rest of the team, celebrating their victory. He wanted to steal him away, say, “I’m sorry we fought earlier, but I’m also so grateful that the biggest worry on my mind right now is something as dumb and trivial as being popular.”
He fought with Lucas more than anyone, like a brother. He’d had fights with Will before, but that was different, something more murky and containing depths Mike wasn’t ready to swim through yet. He never fought with Dustin over more than picking a movie to watch, the two of them eerily similar thinkers.
Mike wished, suddenly, that he could have been at the game, watching Lucas beat out the buzzer. Nancy had described it in crystal clear detail on the way home, voice shining with pride. Mike knew what it felt like, to be proud of Lucas like that. He thought of flickering lights, the yellow snap of the wrist rocket, the monster flying backwards into the chalkboard.
Lucas was too far away right now, and Mike decided that if there was anything he could do to make it up to him, it was let him have his night of glory with the rest of the Tigers.
Dustin was almost certainly talking to Suzie on the radio, recounting their epic feat against Vecna and speculating about what Eddie has up his sleeve for the next campaign.
There’s only one person in Hawkins who Mike knows is doing nothing, and when he sees the hall light shut off through the crack under his bedroom door, he’s out of bed.
He throws on sweats pants and a sweat shirt and grabs his backpack before climbing out of the window. He opens the garage door in silence and mounts his bike, pausing to check the contents of his backpack for a certain collection of items before peeling off into the night, still tinged with the excitement of a much needed win for Hawkins.
The only light coming from the trailer is from Max’s window.
Mike glances over at the Munson trailer, wondering if he should go say hi, but Eddie’s van is gone, and there is no sign of life inside.
He approaches Max’s window slowly, praying that she’s smart enough to close her curtain if she’s changing.
He breathes a sigh of relief when he sees her sitting on her bed in a t shirt, reading through an old Wonder Woman comic.
He knocks lightly and she jumps. She rolls her eyes when she sees him through the window but motions for him to go around to the front door.
“Hi,” she says when she opens it. She looks so much smaller than she used to, mostly because Mike has shot up over the first couple of semesters of high school, but she seems smaller in other ways, too.
“Hi,” he smiles big at her, praying that she’ll smile back, “Did you hear about the game?”
She nods, face still stoic, “I, um, listened to it. On the radio. What do you want?”
Mike rolls his eyes, “Let me in and I’ll show you.”
Mike knows deep down that he’s the only member of the Party Max has let into the trailer, and he knows that he’s the only one who she’d ever let see her mom passed out on the couch next to a full ash tray. He tactfully says nothing as he follows her to her room, just notes the tension in her shoulders mount as they walk by Mrs. Mayfield.
Her room is sparsely decorated, boxes still lining the walls even though she’s lived here for months. Her bed is hastily made, and Mike sits on it before she can invite him to.
“Did you go?” Max asks, flopping down next to him.
“No. Hellfire.”
“Ah.”
Max moved against the headboard and pats the space next to her. Mike follows, leaning into her pillows as they fall into a companionable silence.
He has absolutely no idea how, but sometime over the past ten months, Max has become his best friend in Hawkins. Lucas and Dustin and him are rock solid, trauma bonded, brothers for life. Steve is like a strange uncle and Robin an even stranger aunt. Erica is terrifying, and Eddie intimidatingly cool in a way Mike fears to bond with. Max is… she’s quieter now than she used to be, but still she thrums away, a constant. She’s prickly, she’s unpredictable, she’s melancholy, but she’s let him in, let him feel needed by her. She’s a cat in the body of a teenage girl, and Mike can understand that. Mike suspects a big part of their new closeness is because the stakes aren’t as high between them. He’s not like Lucas, who loves her so much it makes it hard for her to breathe sometimes. And he’s not like Dustin, who would drop everything if he saw her shed even one tear. Mike lets her be, accepts her sadness and shares it with her like it’s something as mundane as an ice cream sundae.
“Are you sure you don’t want to go?” Mike asks.
“I told you, dumbass. Can’t afford it,” Max huffs.
“My mom offered to pay for you,” Mike says, which is true. Karen likes Max a lot for reasons Mike isn’t privy to, but he doesn’t ever ask questions when she hands him a stack of Nancy’s hand-me-downs to take to her, and doesn’t mention that everything has the tags still on.
“I can’t go, Mike. My mom fell asleep with a lit cigarette in her hand two hours ago. I can’t leave her here,” Max picks at a loose thread on her quilt.
Mike doesn’t pry. He thinks maybe this is another reason she always lets him in. She can tell him things she can’t tell anyone else, because he knows she isn’t looking for any suggestions on how to fix it, she just wants to speak it out loud, let it be real, let it exist outside of her own mind. Mike tells her things, too. She’s the only one besides Dustin and El that know how close he came to dying that day at the quarry, how he almost ended his own life to save the one friend that was still by his side.
“I brought us something,” Mike says.
Max looks at him questioningly. He pulls a joint and a lighter he got from Eddie out of the empty mint box at the bottom of his backpack and revels in her laugh, which he hasn’t heard in weeks.
They smoke it on the steps of the trailer, taking turn puffing on it. She laughs again when he coughs, pushing against his shoulder with her own.
“There is no way Steve and Robin are dating, dude,” Mike hears himself saying, “They’re like… like cousins, or something. Besides, if they were, they would tell us. They would totally tell us!”
“I agree. The romantic chemistry just isn’t there,” Max says, “What time is your flight?”
“Uh, six. In the morning.”
“It’s like, midnight dude. You should go home. You can’t be jetlagged when you see El and Will.”
“El and Will,” Mike repeats, and his stomach flips over at the thought of seeing them tomorrow, though he doesn’t know why.
Max eyes him curiously, in a way that lets him know she can see right through him. Mike feels so raw under her gaze that it makes him want to push their foreheads together, to let her look without having to see her doing it. He does.
“Hello,” she says pleasantly.
“I didn’t like how you could see me,” Mike whispers.
“Hmm,” Max hums thoughtfully, like she knows what he means.
They’re quiet for a long time after that, foreheads pressed together, looking cross-eyed at each other. Mike feels like he’s in kindergarten again, completely unjudged by his peers. He could ask her any question, suggest any game at recess and she would say, “Okay.”
“Will you tell California hello for me?” Max asks.
“Of course.”
He leaves about an hour after that, head fuzzy. He hugged her before he left, but for some reason he’s worried it wasn’t for long enough. He knows he’ll be back in a week full of stories about his California adventures with Will and El, and he’ll be excited to tell her all of them.
But it occurs to him the next morning as he’s boarding his flight that she didn’t ask him to tell El and Will hello from her, just California. When he sees the state for the first time from the airplane window, he whispers, “Hello from Max.”
The dry California ground stretches on endlessly, giving no signs that it heard.
Mike feels El lean into his side, feels Will’s fingertips brushing his own, feels it all like a dull throbbing. He can’t focus on any of it, not on El and Will, not on Lucas and Erica, and he feels guilty because he knows how much they need him right now, but-
The sheets on the bed are white. Her hospital gown is white. The casts on her arms and legs are white. And her skin… her skin is unnaturally white. The only color anywhere in the room is her bright red hair, spread around her pillow like a halo. Mike forces himself to look away.
He looks at Lucas. Lucas looks so tired, and so heartbroken, but his voice doesn’t waver when he recounts the Creel House. Behind him, where she thinks no one can see, Erica is gripping his hand. Mike thinks of Holly, and can’t imagine sharing this part of his life, the supernatural horror show part, with her. He thinks Lucas is braver than he is, to trust his sister with this.
They leave quickly, trying to avoid any spaces that could be crawling with government officials looking for El.
He stands on the hill a few hours later next to Will, looking in horror at the split open Earth, ablaze with red light, the same color as Max’s hair.
A few days later, he runs into Steve at the high school.
“Robin and Dustin and I have been plotting a way to sneak into the hospital to see Eddie,” he explains as they sort through cans of food.
“They still won’t let him have visitors?” Mike is itching to see Eddie, too, equally sad and excited that he’s in on this with them now.
“No. Only his uncle. Has Hopper said anything about Owen’s? Are they trying to find a way to clear Eddie’s name? You know, sweep it under the rug?”
“No,” Mike looks across the gym to where Will is sitting with Robin on the bleachers, throwing various first aid supplies into care packages, “I… I haven’t seen Hopper much. He’s been with El, trying to figure out how to close the rift.”
Will looks up, and when their eyes meet Mike smiles. He’s ridiculously proud of himself for not looking away, but he doesn’t know why.
“I have something for you, man,” Steve says, quiet. He reaches into his back pocket and pulls out a slightly crumpled envelope. It says his name in messy writing on the front.
“My birthday isn’t until April,” Mike says, but his stomach flips over and a lump rises in his throat. It’s not a birthday card.
Later, when he’s said good luck to Steve and Robin and Dustin, still hell-bent on breaking into Eddie’s hospital room, and good bye to Will, who bikes home with his own letter in his back pocket, Mike goes to his basement and reads.
It’s short, to the point, very Max. She calls him an idiot in the first sentence. She thanks him, too, for nothing in particular. His chest hurts as he reads, and he sobs when he gets to the end, where she’s scrawled “Zoomer” in hasty lettering.
When he hugged her goodbye, the night before he left, Chrissy Cunningham was dead in the Munson trailer, just a few yards away. Eddie was already on the lamb, and Max was already starting to have her first symptoms.
Mike knew, no matter if she woke up, no matter what she would say to him if she did, he would always be mad at himself for not pushing harder about having her come to California with him. If the distance could have saved her, if it could have kept her alive, she’d be here now, comforting El, reconciling with Lucas, helping plot a break-in to the Hawkins Memorial Hospital.
He visits Max most mornings that summer. Sometimes his mom comes with him. Karen’s been helping Mrs. Mayfield out a lot recently, helping cook and clean around the trailer when she goes to work. A couple of times Holly comes, too, and Mike lets her sit in his lap and listens while she reads aloud from Babysitter’s Club books, helping her with the big words. Holly is surprisingly at ease in the hospital room, watching intently when the nurses bustle about taking Max’s vitals and moving her limbs around. Lucas is asleep in the chair next to her bed some mornings, and Mike always sends him on his way with a promise to walkie him should anything change.
One morning he comes in and she’s out of her casts. He keeps good on his promise and radios Lucas, holds him when he sees her.
“I can’t decide if it’s worse,” he sobs.
Mike understands. When she had her casts on, it looked like she was healing from something real, something they could see. But now, when she’s just lying in the bed, still and pale, it looks impossible for her to overcome the invisible affliction in her silent mind.
“I know.” He presses Lucas tight to his chest, keeps him there through the body-racking sobs, and thinks to himself how much it feels like having a brother.
Things start changing in Mike’s life that have nothing to do with the Upside Down. He and El are broken up, and he rarely sees her. When he does, she’s exhausted. He holds her, like he held Lucas, and she cries tired tears into his shoulder.
When he’s not at the hospital visiting Max, he’s with Will. He feels the blossom of something there, something he’s still too scared to name. He feels it when they bike around town aimlessly in the evenings, stopping at Dairy Queen or the Arcade when it gets too hot out.
To cope, he reads and rereads Max’s letter. He memorizes every word. He imagines talking to her about Will when he goes to visit her, and he imagines her sarcastic responses.
“Dumbass,” she would say fondly, “Idiot.”
It would never be an insult, not really.
Eddie gets out of the hospital in mid July and hides out at the Harrington house. Mike goes to visit him, too. Eddie starts teaching him guitar without really asking Mike if he wants to learn. Many long summer days are spent with the Party at Steve’s house, pretending the world isn’t opening itself up to swallow them whole just miles away.
One night, after watching Top Gun in the Harrington’s living room, Mike sees his sister standing outside, by the pool. Quietly he goes to stand beside her. He takes her hand in his, squeezes twice. Nancy stares into the artificially blue water, and hums a song. He recognizes it after a moment.
I’ll stop the world and melt with you.
The sliding glass door opens and Will is there, watching the Wheeler siblings solemnly. Nancy smiles at them both, goes inside.
“Hi,” Will says.
Mike watches him peel his socks off and roll up his jeans. He sticks his feet into the water. Without really thinking about it, Mike follows suit.
“Is everyone still inside?” Mike asks.
“Just the older kids. Dustin went home, Lucas went to the hospital.”
Mike stares at the side of Will’s face until he turns to look.
“Dumbass,” says Max’s voice in his mind, “Idiot.”
He leans in and kisses Will, soft. Will laughs, quietly.
“Are you laughing at me?” Mike asks, even though he’s laughing, too.
“I’m just laughing,” Will says, and leans back in.
The rest of the summer passes slowly. A week before school starts, Mike is lying in his bed, watching Will scribble in a sketchbook, when he hears Dustin screeching over the walkie.
“Max-“ he yells through the static, voice cutting out at random, “Awake-“
Will grabs the walkie and starts yelling back, trying to pull his shirt over his head with his other hand.
They fly down the stairs and tell Karen, who tactfully ignores the fact that they are each wearing one of the other’s socks and piles them into the car. She drops them at the entrance of the hospital before peeling off to get Max’s mom from work.
They beat everyone but Lucas and El, who were there when she opened her eyes and have each been holding one of her hands since.
Mike is floored, he’s just absolutely floored, when he bursts through her door to see her sitting up in the bed. There is a flush in her cheeks and she’s- she’s smiling-
“Mike?” she asks. Her head tilts slightly, and Mike realizes that even though her eyes are open, she can’t see him.
El gives up her spot and Mike takes it, grabs her left hand. He can’t say anything, just holds on tight.
“I told California hi for you,” he manages eventually, and Max laughs, leaving him speechless again.
He keeps holding her hand until Mrs. Mayfield gets there, and then he’s forced out of the room by a nurse, who chitters about overcrowding the patients.
Before he leaves, he kisses her temple, and she laughs again.
“Come see me again tomorrow,” she says, and Mike promises that he will.
He chances one last look at her through the window of her door. She’s wrapped up in her mother’s arms, their matching red hair tangling together. Mike smiles. There’s so much he wants to tell her, to thank her for.
Will grabs his hand.
“Want to go wait outside for the rest of the Party?” he asks.
“Sure,” Mike squeezes Will’s hand and lets himself be lead down the hall, promising himself that he’ll come back tomorrow morning first thing to tell Max about California, about El, and about Will. He can hear what she’ll say about it all now.
“Dumbass,” she’ll say, “Idiot.”
Mike has never been more excited in his life to be insulted.