#wowweee

Everything is quiet. The silence is permeating, seeping into everything. Soaking through the darkness. And it is cold, so, so cold.

It feels like she’s floating through nothing. Her body feels the weight of the crushing void and yet nothing at all. Does she have a body? She can't remember anymore. Much less remember her name.

Is she someone? Was she ever someone? 

When she first arrived here she was frightened. The fear felt like the only thing real here and she clung to it. Until that eventually ebbed away into nothingness. Being consumed by the void. 

That was at the beginning. Although she doesn’t know much time has passed since she arrived here. Time no longer has meaning and now she just feels nothing. Maybe she belongs here.

Preposterously could she equate this place- feeling? to peace. Being that she must be dead. How else to explain this? 

But… is she dead? Being dead would mean that she was someone and she doesn’t feel like she’s ever existed.

-

A voice ripples through the void, waking her from whatever she’s doing. How can she sleep if could be dead? 

It’s muffled as if it’s underwater. It’s impossible to make out what it’s saying but she thinks the voice is saying the same thing over and over. It’s far away and if she could get to it she would but she can’t move without a body. 

Ultimately the voice drips off. She doesn’t know if she’s supposed to miss it or not.

-

The next time the voice comes it’s different. It’s urgent and desperate. It hits her like a tidal wave.

As if she was resting on the shore and a wave came in, dragging her under. Has she ever been to the beach? Why does this feel familiar? It’s still not possible to make out what the voice is saying as she gets trapped under the wave of it. 

For the first time, she realizes she does have a body and she trashes against the current. It’s useless. It’s drowning her but she smiles. This isn’t nothingness. 

This time she mourns the voice after it leaves.

-

She would say that the voice doesn’t visit for a while but truly she doesn’t know. It feels like a long time. What a funny thing! To delude herself into thinking she can feel the passage of time.

The realization that she has a body gives her a sort of refuge in the meantime. Ten fingers and ten toes. Red hair that she can’t stop herself from touching. The simple act of doing this brings a burst of laughter bubbling up from her core but she can’t hear it. Any joy gets snuffed out in the blackness.

There are flashes now. Flashes of a life she thinks is hers but she can’t be sure.

It’s all disjointed and out of place. Broken into bits and pieces. If she focuses on one too hard it melts away and she can’t get her mind to retrieve it. There’s a smell of a perfume. There’s a noise of indistinct hard words, always with the smell of leather and cigarette smoke. The good and the bad ones blend, not quite indistinguishable. 

Her favorite flash has to be a good one, she just knows it. It’s a sense of warmness and it feels foreign in the frost around her. The feeling is always paired with a streak of tender honey eyes.

-

The voice returns and this time she runs toward it. By the account of the fact that the voice has given her back her name. Max.

“It’s Max, not Maxine. No one calls me that.”

The voice is one of a another girl and she anguishedly calls out for her, “Max! Are you here?! Max?!” 

Yes! Yes, she’s here! Her name is Max and she is here! Dear God, she is here!

She scours the void looking for the girl calling out for her but it’s like the voice is coming from every direction. She can’t make heads or tails of where it’s coming from. 

“Max! Please! I need you to answer me! Max!” The girl’s voice is fading.

No! No! No! Don’t leave! Not yet! Max screams out to the girl but nothing comes out. Oh her chest is tight and she can feel herself breaking. Please don’t let the voice leave her yet.

But the void is not kind and Max collapses in on herself when the deafening silence returns. 

-

The flashes keep coming to her. More distinct now. 

There’s her mother and shades of California. There’s Dustin flashing off his new teeth. Mike and his pouty face. There’s Lucas…and his tenderness. His warm, infectious kindness. He never gave up on her. Not even after she tried to run him off after Billy died.

Billy who- no, don’t think of that. Don’t think of him here. This cold place gives the flashes of him power. 

But the girl who calls out for her, she's not sure who she is. There are a few flashes of a girl with honey eyes and she thinks that it has to be her but how could she know? What’s her name? Why does she come here? Does she do so to find her or is she here to torment her? 

No, this girl is kind. She remembers that much. She’s special. 

Snowball dance, empty dance floor, and glitter banners, “Touch her again and I’ll kill you again.”, piggyback from a pizza freezer, number one.

None of it makes sense. It hounds her to scream into the void. What happened to her?! Why is she here?! What did she ever do to deserve this?! She aches to hear the sound of her screams, the depths still keep her silenced. 

-

“Max?! Are you there?!”

The girl’s voice booms through the void and this time Max takes off running. 

It still circles her, coming from all directions but this time, oh this time it’s slightly louder from one way. She follows it eagerly, pulling at it like a string. 

“Max! Please!” 

She’s here! She’s here! She’s here!

The voice grows louder and louder and starts to single out into one line, coming from one direction. Right in front of her. The voice is so tangible she can almost taste it. 

It’s quiet then, too quiet, and right as she's starting to fear it’s too late when she sees her.

The girl kneels on a slate of blackness, face in her hands. She’s dressed in a black hoodie and jogging pants. Both of them are too big for her. Her hair must’ve been shaved but it’s grown. Wisps of hair growing out of her skull twist and turn, ready to curl but not long enough to do so. 

She doesn’t fully remember this girl but she misses her. Who is she?

There’s no way to know if the girl looks up from her hands because she senses Max’s presence but she’d like to think so. But when they make eye contact, her red-rimmed eyes look through her. 

“Max? …Are you there?” 

Yes! She’s here! She tries to tell her but she still can’t fucking speak! 

The girl stands, looking around, “Max if you’re here please tell me!”

This poor girl looks worn. Her face is aged from grief and her eyes are lifeless. This isn’t how she remembers her. No, she could swear she recalls her filled tickling curiosity about the world around her and the way her eyes would light up in amusement over the simplest things. The girl she remembers was a girl who was not sure who she was but was eager to see who she could be. She’s special. 

The girl calls out to her again, “Max please answer me,” how can a girl so young look so defeated?

Max doesn’t stop trying to call out for her, she’s standing right in front of her but the girl doesn’t see her. Eventually, she walks through Max.

El. Eleven. The party’s madge. The chief police’s adopted daughter. Max’s friend. Max’s first true girl friend. 

El spins on her heel to face her, warily looking at her, “...Max?” El holds out her hand and hesitantly Max lets her fingers phase through it. 

The smile El gives her is worth it, eyes gleaming with tears, happy tears, and her bottom lip trembles, “Max, I knew you were here.”

-

El visits her. As much as she can. Apparently, wherever is not here has been keeping her busy. 

They sit together in the darkness. Max ghosts her hand over El’s to let her know she’s here. She likes it when El tells her what’s happening in the not here. 

An outside world that has sunshine and that warmth Max misses so much. In the void, she only gets glimpses of warmth and they always have something to do with El. 

It’s hard to think about how she had a life outside of the void. The icy darkness feels like it’s all she’s ever known. It’s a part of her now. There’s no going back.

There’s no way for her to tell El this and she desperately wishes she could. She feels like El would understand. 

El tells her about Hop being back. About how Dustin has been struggling lately but El had made sure someone was there for him. Will and Johnathan have been great to her and accepted her into their little family. Curiously she doesn’t talk about Mike. Which is…strange. Mike was important to El but she can’t remember why. Which makes it odd that El hasn’t mentioned him. 

Her favorite is when El talks about Lucas. His sister, Erica, has been there for him and is making sure he’s taking care of himself. El tends to be vague where Lucas is concerned besides that. Max is grateful. She knows Lucas is not okay and it’s her fault. 

There was a fallout in the not here, something that has destroyed Hawkins. God, she hadn’t heard that name in a while. That same something that is the reason why Max is here.

On that too El remains vague. Just mainly reassures Max that everyone is safe. That’s okay, Max doesn’t want to remember what put her here. Who put her here.

-

Time goes on. El’s hair grows, curling around her face. Max thinks it’s adorable.

There are more voices. These are different from El’s when she first appeared. These are outside the void, from the not here. She doesn’t recognize them but El tells her they belong to Lucas, sometimes Dustin, and rarely, Mike and Will. Even though she can’t make out what they’re saying, it feels good to hear them.

There’s been some other…developments too. 

Max gets pains. In one of her arms and both of her legs. It feels like her bones are splintering. Twisting and cracking. She would shriek in angony if she could.

When they hit her in waves, it makes her wish for the time she felt nothing. When the void absorbed everything. She knows what El is not telling her, it’s that something is wrong with her physical body. Someone has broken her. 

Someone who’s been calling out to her. Someone who wants to finish what he started. 

She won’t allow herself to remember him. Her whole life she’s had to force herself to be strong. The only grace of the void is she doesn’t have to do that here. Because the truth is she’s terrified.  

The flashes of her life feel like they are racing towards a finish line and the closer they get to it, the darker and more distorted they are. She doesn’t want to make out the details of the shady figures and she doesn’t know what the clang of a grandfather clock that she hears every so often entails. Maybe it’s selfish that she’s too scared to want to know. 

But here, in the void, she has the freedom to be scared. That fear allows her to have ignorance, something that she was never allowed to have in the not here. She can remember always having to be strong, she didn’t have a choice in the matter. She remembers being so, so, tired because of it. 

If she had the option…she doesn’t know if she’d want to get back. He can get to her out there. The void is endless and certain, there’s a sense of safety allowed in that. Even if he can leave traces of himself here, she believes that he can’t get to here. She doesn't care if it's cowardly, she's had to be brave her whole life!

When she’s sitting next to El though, she knows El is bidding time till she can get Max out of here. And...she's okay with that. She can be brave for El. Because sometimes it doesn’t feel enough to just see El. She wants to see her out of the void, to hold her hand, feel her being real. Smell her perfume that she started wearing because Nancy wears it. 

She wants El to see her. Max is growing tired of this one-way communication. El may feel her presence and yes El is capable of carrying on a one-sided conversation but it’s not the same. She misses her and she knows El misses her as well. Why come to the void so often if not?

-

The next time El returns it’s different. She’s urgent. “Max! Are you here?!”

Instantly Max goes to her, putting a hand on her shoulder so that she knows she’s here. El is crying. Oh, how she longs to do the simple act of asking her what’s wrong or just to hug her. 

El settles a little when she feels Max’s hand phase through her but not much. She pushes one of her curls behind her ears and straightens her shoulders, looking Max right in the eye. Not that El knows she’s doing that. Even so, she feels how powerful El is as it seems she’s staring into her soul.

She reaches for Max, her hand hovering in her hand, how El knows it’s there she doesn’t know, but it grounds her body. “Max, I need you to wake up now.” 

Wake up?  What? It almost makes her mad that El thinks that leaving the void is as simple as waking up. 

“Max, I need you to try,” El beseeches. 

Max wants to scream that it’s impossible to leave the void, that she’s worried if she tries to leave she’ll end up deeper in it. Be without a body again. And even if she does leave, he’s out there waiting for her. 

But then El chokes on her next words, “The doctors have told your mom it’s time, they say that your…brain dead,” she says that term as if it’s foreign to her, the way you say a new word when you’ve just learned it, “They’re going to kill you because they think that you are gone, but I know you are not, so, please! Wake up, Max! I need you to wake up!” 

And just like that, Max falls. 

-

She’s spiraling. Or at least she thinks she is, all she sees is black. Her hands, oh fuck, she can’t see her hands! Her body, it’s gone! She’s nobody! She can’t feel anything, it’s just like how it was when she got here in the beginning!

Maybe she’s actually dead this time. She kinda hopes she is. 

There’s no way to head to because there’s nowhere to be. What did El say? Brain dead? Doctors were going to kill her? Did she mean they were going to pull the plug? Because there’s only one man who wants her dead. Is that what they did? Maybe this, this space, is just the purgatory before she finally dies. Maybe she can finally get some rest.

She never got to say goodbye! This rips its way through her subconscious. She never got to say goodbye! Not to her mom, not to Lucas who has always been there for her! Not to El…she never got to say goodbye to El. 

Oh, anger blooms all around her, he took everything from her! She never got to say goodbye!

“Max! Wake up!”

Wait, what is that?

“No, she’s in there! You can’t do this! She’s here!”

That’s El. That’s El! She’s with her now!

“Listen to her! If she says there then believe her! Get away from Max!”

That…that’s another voice. Lucas. They’re here with her! 

“I’m coming!” She doesn’t know why she yells that out, but she can hear herself. For the first time in God knows how long she heard her voice! “Guys! I’m coming!’

There are other noises, whirring that sound like it’s coming from machines and she follows it. It grows louder and louder and at some point, Max is running. Her body is back! She dashes through the nothing, the weight of spite propelling her forward.

“El!” she screams out, “I’m here!” She rips her way out of the void. Running and running until…she feels it.

-

She can’t see but it’s different. Everything is covered in white film, movements are detectable but she can’t make out anything.

But her body, she can feel it again. She can feel the pillow behind her head and how scratchy the blanket is on her. At least from her waist up she can feel, it feels like the lower half of her body is still submerged in the void. It feels weird to breathe. It makes her choke.

Someone is sitting on the bed with her, cool to the touch, fingertips push her hair out of her face and a voice coos at her. It’s El. It’s really fucking El. She can touch her, Max is no longer a ghost. She can feel the tears leaking out of her eyes. 

“Don’t cry Max,” El soothes, but her own voice is thick, “I told them you were here, I told them you’d come back. Because you said you wouldn’t leave! Friends don’t lie, you wouldn't have lied to me.”

Max tries to reach out to her with one arm but something keeps it in place. She struggles for a moment before El places a hand on that arm, silently telling her to settle. Max is relieved when she realizes her other arm is free. 

She reaches out to touch El, she wants to feel her be real too, and El grabs her outstretched hand and places it against her cheek. She can feel that they’re wet and knows she was right, El is crying too. 

Her voice in the here is rough and it’s more of a sob but she doesn’t care. 

“I’m here El.”    

A/N: Thank you for reading! Comments fuel my soul!