Work Text:
Max prefers to think about things rather minimally, she would say. Shit happens. Keep moving.
She would watch as her mother and her father had a conversation that would quickly morph into an argument. Multiple arguments that would usually end in doors slamming, constant shouting, and after what felt like an eternity, an eventual divorce. It could be worse, she reasons. She would stay with her mom but still be able to visit her dad. Maybe they would be happier apart than when they were living together.
Max felt the gradual shift in her life as her mom found someone new (albeit even if it wasn’t a mere two months after her divorce). Suddenly, her family dynamic had supposedly changed for the better, although the happy rhetoric her mom envisioned was anything but. Her bias aside, Max believed Neil Hargrove was a sorry excuse for a husband and even more of a shit father. He and his son, Billy, waltzed into their lives and masqueraded a picture-perfect facade that quickly faded the more her mother began to force the merging of their two families. Billy quickly came to terms with the fact that his new normal included a new stepmother and a nuisance of a stepsister. He damn near made sure that he projected his misery with this new normal onto Max every chance he got. Billy’s only happiness in his life hung by a tenuous thread in the form of his friends he had in California. Max could practically hear the snip! of that thread as soon as Neil announced they were moving their so-called “family” to Hawkins, Indiana.
Billy’s face had been redder than the wine glass precariously held in Susan’s hand during the conversation at dinner. The ringing in her ears drowned out almost the entirety of what was said, but Max remembers the pure hatred aimed at her and her mother when he screamed, “This is my life you’re ruining. Go to hell.”
(She chooses not to think of the way Neil slammed Billy into the wall after that. Not to think of how her startled eyes had nowhere else to look since her mother’s gaze seemed glued to her drink. Not to dwell on the way her hands were beginning to shake underneath the table. Shit happens. Keep moving.)
Almost a year later at Starcourt, Max abruptly finds herself drowning in her thoughts. The replays of Billy screaming reverberate through her very being as she studies his limp form on the mall floor. She cradles his cheek, his face, tears streaming down her cheeks as she combs her trembling fingers through his matted hair. She doesn’t register the stinging on her face from where he had slapped her just moments prior.
Max barely acknowledges El as she gently pulls her away from his body and instead opts to bury her head into her shoulder. El isn’t well-versed in the art of comfort quite yet (although she tries her best), but Max dully notes her gratitude as she continues to cry in her arms. Mike hovers, not quite reacting, but not leaving either. He rakes his hand through his hair and winces whenever El shoots him a panicked look.
Nothing could have prepared the two of them for Max’s reaction when the ambulances and police officers arrived. Their hordes began to appraise the amount of damage done and retrieve the kids who were caught in the crossfire. Max’s shocked cries only began to amplify as they began to drag Billy’s body away from the mall. She scrambles to crawl away from El and desperately latches onto him (his body is so, so cold) while the officers do their best to pry her fingers away from their grip on his torso. Lucas is suddenly there and Max barely notices the way his hands flail during his failed attempts to calm her down.
(She refuses to move from where she is kneeled in his pool of blood. Did Billy really care for her, even if they weren’t siblings by blood? Could she have prevented this?)
-
Mike tries (and fails) to come with terms with the fact that El and Will have been whisked away from Hawkins by a very adamant Joyce. To California, a place he has only heard about through vivid depictions of a dreamy-eyed Max as she recounts stories of her adventures with her dad. He remembers the bright look in her eyes as she would tell the Party her grand plan to move back to California to be with him after their high school graduation.
He hasn’t seen her eyes light up in a long time.
Mike wonders how she’s doing, but he never knows who to ask anymore. Max herself will barely look at him or anyone else when she does go to school, and ditching class has become a more frequent pastime for her over the past couple of months. Dustin is never able to elicit a response from her that is more than a simple, “Fine, thanks”, or “Sorry, I’m busy.” Lucas still tries, but she seems to be harsher to him more than to anyone. Probably because he is so damn insistent. Even if Max doesn’t want him to, Lucas still cares about her, but there isn’t anything he can do that will cause her to slip up. She still remains rooted in her resolve.
The only information Mike pieces together comes from incoherent whispers shared between Steve and Robin when he visits the video store on a chilly November afternoon. At first, the only information he finds out is that Max had visited the store only a few days before to pick up a rental for Neil (the apparent man responsible for raising his asswipe of a son, Billy). Mike moves through the aisles absentmindedly when he sees the worry lines crease Steve’s forehead out of the corner of his eye.
“You can’t be serious, Robin.”
“Do you think I’m lying?” Mike can make out the incredulity in Robin’s voice.
Steve lets out a deep breath before answering. “She’s just a kid.” Another exhale. “Are you sure it wasn’t just, like, Tylenol or something?”
“Yes, Steve. When I went in there to clean the bathroom, she had three pills in one hand and her mom’s prescription medication in the other.”
Mike didn’t hear as the movie he held in his hand clattered to the floor.
That same night, Mike can’t sleep. The walls are paper thin in their house, and he tosses and turns until he can hear Nancy’s sleepy mumble telling him to “Shut the hell up!”
(Holly is sound asleep in the other room. Nancy and Mike liked to joke that Holly was a deep sleeper just like their dad. Mike wishes he could sleep that good.)
Mike sits up in his bed and stretches, trying to get rid of the sore ache in his limbs. He looks around his dark room before sighing and turning on his bedside lamp. The alarm clock reads 2:04 A.M.
“Shit, shit, shit, shit, shit!”
He sits on his bed and huffs. Tries to lay back down, and huffs again. His resolve quickly dissipates as he puts on warmer clothes and some shoes. Mike continues to grumble and look around his room as if there is someone in there who is watching him act like a fucking idiot.
Mike opens his window to feel the cold night air seep into his bedroom. As he sticks his head out the window to look at the grass below, he raises his eyebrows quizzically as he analyzes just how far down the ground is. He offhandedly curses and finds himself wishing he worked out as much as Lucas.
Counting down from three, Mike opts to launch himself rather clumsily from his window and lands with a gruff “Harumph!” as he feels his breath knocked out from him. It takes him longer than he would like to shake himself off from the jump and dust the grass off his pants before standing up. He jogs (halfway limps) from the front yard over to the garage to retrieve his bike. He pedals away from the garage, all the while still grumbling, wondering if his last-minute plan is even a remotely good idea as he makes his way towards Max’s house.
(He misses the way Nancy’s bedroom light turns on as his bike turns off their driveway. Steve really hopes he doesn’t know the reason Nancy is calling him this early in the morning.)
-
Steve doesn’t really mind being the babysitter as much as he lets on. Hell, those are his kids.
Babysitters are for making sure everything is alright. They are there to make the kids laugh, to make them smile, to care for them and know all their favorite things and just be there for them. They handle the cold, the flu, falling off a bike, failing a test, even going through probably eight breakups in the span of one summer (Lucas always could find a way to bounce back relatively fast).
Steve wishes there was a babysitter’s manual for dealing with kids who had a habit of getting shit on by the Upside Down. Keeping all six of them alive is hard, but keeping them happy sure seems to be a hell of a lot harder these days. Ice cream and Dig Dug just don’t seem to do the trick like they used to.
He grapples with the story Robin tells him earlier that day for hours until he hears his phone ring in the middle of the night. A half-awake Nancy informs Steve of Mike’s half-assed attempt to sneak out of their house and questions if her brother told him anything that would clue her in to his whereabouts.
“I’ve just been really on edge, Steve, since everything that’s happened over the summer.” Steve detects the underlying stress underneath Nancy’s otherwise groggy voice over the phone. He quickly rushes to assure her he would pick her up soon, and then proceeds to leave his house. Unlike Nancy and Mike, he has no parents to sneak around to maneuver his way to his car. He tries not to let that bother him as much as it probably should.
Mike’s bike is the first thing Nancy and Steve see in the front yard when they arrive at Max’s house. Steve’s attempts to remain rational come to an abrupt halt as he witnesses an angry man slam the front door and trudge to the beat-up car at the front of the driveway. He feels Nancy flinch beside him as the man (who Steve can only assume to be Neil) slams the bottle of beer he is holding to the pavement below. The glass splinters into multiple fragmented pieces below. Neil angrily slams the door of his car before speeding away.
“Mike couldn’t have arrived much earlier than we did.” Nancy is already shutting the door to Steve’s car as she hurries across the street to the house. Steve finds himself scrambling to reach her side.
Nancy opens the door to the house only to stop short in confusion as Steve bumps into her from behind. The television in the front living room booms loudly during what must have been a football game (Mike later recalls that whoever they must have played, the Miami Dolphins won). Both coffee tables on either side of the couch in the middle of the room had been flipped. Ripped comics litter the floor with traces of Wonder Woman and Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles just barely being visible. Steve can feel the bile rising in his throat.
Nancy jolts herself back to reality as she moves through the wreckage with Steve’s reassuring hand on her shoulder from behind. “Mike? Max? Are either of you there?”
Steve promptly finds the plug tethering the television’s connection and disconnects it from the wall. Once the roaring of the game vanishes, he finally hears the strangled cry of Mike Wheeler.
“In here! Hurry!”
The fifteen seconds it takes Steve and Nancy to maneuver from the front living room towards the sound of Mike’s voice feels like its take hours instead of seconds. Aside from Mike’s shouting, Steve can now make out a second noise akin to whimpering. Nancy and Steve sprint down the dimly lit hallway and plunge into the room where Mike’s pleas are coming from.
(Steve’s stomach does a sickening jolt. He’s going to be sick, he is sure he is going to vomit, he knows without a doubt that he’s not equipped to handle this. Always the goddamn babysitter. They really should have hired someone who knew what they were doing.)
“..eve?” He feels himself moving again, Nancy’s horrified intake of breath worlds away as he kneels eye-level to an incoherent Max Mayfield. Steve urges himself to a get a grip without getting choked up, but he can only blankly stare at the disheveled state Max is in. A bruise is beginning to rapidly form on her left cheek, turning a shade of purple that will surely morph into a sickening hue of black before the night is over. Her left eye is swollen shut, and although her right eye is open, it is glazed and unseeing.
Steve can’t allow his eyes to linger on the blood drying in her hair. He can’t let his resolve falter as he glimpses a yellowing bruise on the side of her rib where her hoodie is pulled up slightly. His attention is drawn to where her left hand lay slack beside her, numbly reaching for an orange bottle with her mother’s name inscripted on the label.
His hands are then on Max’s face, gently holding her head up while Mike is hugging Nancy behind him. Steve tries to be careful with her cheek so she won’t be in any more pain than she already is.
“Can you hear me, Max? Max?”
He watches her attempt to laugh, which is followed by a cough that shakes her pale frame. He sees the way her teeth are stained red. “..Mike stopped by.”
Mike probably would have snorted if Max wasn’t delirious.
“He did. He came to check on you.” Steve begins to feel tremors in his hands. He barely observes the way Nancy lunges for the phone on the nightstand by the door.
Max looks like she wants to say more, but then lurches forward. Her whole body turns a sickening shade of gray, and then she is convulsing before Steve can say another word. Steve is almost thrown back from the sheer intensity of her spasms, but he hangs on and desperately checks her pulse. Her heart sounds unstable, sometimes thrumming and sometimes faltering. Mike appears from behind Nancy to support Max’s legs and carefully lay her onto her side. Steve winces whenever he hears Max choke in pain from the jerking.
“They’re here, Steve! I’m opening the door!”
Nancy frantically gestures to the paramedics who arrive onto the scene and quickly make their way to where Max now lay panting. Her choking turns into wheezing, as if her lungs are clawing for breath that is no longer there. The paramedics load her into the gurney and whisk her into the ambulance as they fire off questions to Nancy. She hops into the vehicle and motions for Steve to carry Mike with him to the hospital.
Steve is the babysitter. He never really considered himself that maternal when it came to his kids.
But as he consoles a distraught Mike who has taken to hyperventilating in the passenger seat of his car, Steve has never felt more protective in his life. He finds himself drumming his fingers on the steering wheel as he stews over anything he could have done just hours ago that would have kept this from happening.
(Steve should have intervened as soon as Robin told him what she saw. He should have talked to Max when he noticed the way she would cave in on herself as she would leave the video store to go home. He should have noted the disdain in Nancy’s voice when she described the state Karen Wheeler always found Susan Hargrove in after yet another trip to the nightclubs in Indianapolis. He should have really paid attention to the unbridled rage in Neil’s eyes as he dragged his stepdaughter away from Starcourt that summer.)
Steve finds himself longing for Joyce Byers, for El and Will, for Hopper especially. Hopper would know how to handle this. Steve certainly did not.
He is sure of one thing: Max wouldn’t running away from her support system any longer.
Mike, the other shitheads, Nancy and himself included, would be there to get her through this.
He is damn sure of this. He has to be.