Chapter Text
“on the blue path, tamer of lost stars, i will go on my way until the universe fits in my heart”
“curve,” federico garcia lorca
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She opened her eyes and found herself floating in a sea of clouds.
A panic seized her by the throat. Above her, the room—the world—had no ceiling. All she saw was a boundless span of soft white light. Her fingers flew to her eyes, expecting to find tracks of dried, flaking blood, only to realize she could see her hands. Shaky, and pale, and through a haze of mist, but they were her hands.
Slowly, Max lifted her neck just enough to assess the rest of her body. She was wearing the outfit she had entered Creel House in, only it had lost all traces of grime or sweat, as if it came straight off the laundry line. Clipped to her hip, her walkman had crossed over, too. She pressed play, heard the little plastic click, but nothing played.
Her fingers rubbed the worn hem of her corduroy jacket, a vintage hand-me-down from her mom, and it dawned on her how nothing hurt. In the attic, in Lucas’s arms, her body had numbed and she had felt her life swimming away with no way of catching it by the tail and reeling it back. Here, her heart pounded insistently against her chest, the rhythmic downbeat of the oldest song she knew.
Tears pricked at the corners of her eyes as she sat up. Around her hung a thin, watery mist. It wasn’t hot like steam or cool like a fog rolling off a tumbling ocean. It simply existed, everywhere, untouchable and unfelt.
She opened her mouth, but stopped short of screaming, suddenly scared she didn’t have a voice to scream with. The same mystic force that spirited her pain away could have made off with her voice as payment. She never listened well enough when the boys started talking fantastical, only tuned in on a need to know to save the world basis, and maybe now was when it came back to bite her.
Mike would have a name for this place, and Dustin would know its rules, and Lucas would draft a plan of action, while Will looked out for signs of danger and El prepared to fight whatever lay waiting for them in the mist. They were so good and she needed them too much, and that was why she hid from them for so long. If they saw the ugliness in her heart, they’d realize she’d only ever poison them.
Instead of screaming, she stood. The mist hid any sign of the ground, yet there was something solid for her to steady herself on and that was a start. A shit one, but a start. What would Dustin do, she thought, and the answer was spiral for a good ten minutes of time she might not have. What would Lucas do was the better question, or what would El.
A sound called through the mist. It was far-off and rang hollow, as if shouted into an empty chamber.
“Hello?” she called back, surprising herself. Her voice came out badly worn.
The mist echoed the question back to her. The first sound had gone, maybe never was.
Now that her ears had opened, she recognized another sound, a persistent one—the rush of a river, coming from somewhere to her left. Will would say to head towards running water, as rivers meant resources and civilization. Though she didn’t feel particularly hungry or thirsty, and had a disturbing inkling she wouldn’t be anytime soon, Max liked the sound of civilization or just about anything that wasn’t a neverending cloud.
She walked, a few feet or a few miles only the mist knew, but the river roared louder and louder until it sounded like she had submerged herself in it. The mist hadn’t cleared, but it seemed to have risen in a canopy above her head. When she glanced up, she glimpsed silvery shadows slithering through the fog, whispering but not whispering, their indistinct voices joining with the river in harmony.
And when she glanced back down, she saw she wasn’t alone.
At the edge of something—not water exactly but a glassy pool, unmoving despite the sound of a current—a silhouette stood with its back to Max. It was unmoving, too, but it looked startlingly human right down to the shadow of hair curling around its shoulders.
Another trick, it had to be. The river noise had been meant to lure her here, so whatever monster this was could finish her off for good. She had no weapon to fight with but her fists and her only other option was running back in the direction she came. What were the chances the mist would simply send her in a circle, always bringing her right back to the pool and the shadow until she grew too exhausted to go on. With her lifetime of luck, Max would bet against herself.
“Hey!” she shouted. The echo was stronger here, sending her voice back hard and resolute. She balled her fists as the figure turned its head. “I don’t know what this is or what you are, but—”
“Mayfield?”
The shadow stepped forward, then again, and though Max retreated backwards, her fear had been replaced with something small and fluttery flapping around her heart. She knew that voice, had heard it cursing out a van when it wouldn’t start, and mocking jocks in the cafeteria, and agreeing to hunt down a gate to another dimension even as a town mob had formed demanding his head.
But hope was a dangerous thing, as fragile as a butterfly and as easy to crush in a fist, so Max didn’t release hers even as she tentatively answered, “Eddie?”
As if his name were the spell to lift a final veil from her eyes, Max saw it was Eddie, looking almost exactly as he had the last time she saw him. Like her, his outfit hadn’t changed—the days-old Hellfire shirt and torn black jeans, the leather jacket with an army vest shrugged over it, and his skull bandana now wound in his hands like a cat’s cradle. And, same as her, he didn’t have a scratch on him.
“Did you die?” she asked, tearing off that band-aid and taking a layer of skin with it. Eddie winced and Max mimicked him, releasing her fists just to wrap her arms around herself in a lonely, tight hold.
“I—” A complicated sequence of emotions flashed across Eddie’s face, as slippery and undefined as the shadows above their heads. “I don’t know. Did you…did you die?”
She tried to remember anything after landing in Lucas’s arms, her world reduced to a black sky without stars, and came up against a wall. Shaking her head, Max echoed Eddie’s answer: “I don’t know.”
“Well,” Eddie said with a gunshot clap. “This should be fun.”
“You might not even be real,” Max reasoned, still not trusting this land of emptiness. Who would?
“Ouch, Red.” Eddie rubbed at his chest, miming a bruised heart. “Why do I have to be a figment of your imagination? Why can’t you be a figment of mine?”
Without meaning to, Eddie just made the best argument for why they were here together, as two very real and very undead people, however impossible that might seem. If this place wanted to torture her with a spectre of anyone, it would have chosen Billy. If it wanted to gain her trust, it would have chosen El. And if it wanted to comfort her, guide her gently to some further beyond, Lucas would be standing in front of her, holding out his hand palm up as Eddie did now.
“Pinch me, if you want,” Eddie offered. “I don’t know about you, but I was never able to touch my imaginary friends.”
Though still hesitant, Max crossed the remaining distance between them and pinched his inner wrist. “Huh,” he said, running two fingers over the skin where she had done it. “So, nothing really hurts here. Except, like, the massive emotional wounds.”
So close now, she noticed how Eddie’s arms twitched at his sides. Maybe he wanted to hug her, as some way of cementing neither of them were alone anymore, but that only reminded her of how she barely knew Eddie. They weren’t friends, not by choice. They had been neighbors, and that hadn’t been by their choice either. Not five days ago, there had even been a part of her that believed him capable of murder.
“We’re dead,” Max declared, because they could argue a hundred different explanations for why the two of them wound up here, but only one would ever make sense. They were the ones who didn’t make it, the very ones their friends had put their lives on the line to save.
Max shouldered past Eddie and approached the mirrored water, sat cross-legged on its murky shore. A frightening sense of calm flooded her as she stared across the pool, imagining a ship with white sails like the outstretched wings of a bird sailing to meet her. Her dad once promised if he ever bought a sailboat, he’d name it for her, his best girl. She wondered if he bought the boat, but forgot to call and tell her so. Were promises considered kept even if the person promised never knew of it?
“What is this then?” Eddie asked. As he sat beside her, he eyed the water warily.
“Limbo, maybe,” she guessed. It had been nine months since her mom dressed her up and dragged her to church. That last time, they were all in black. “Or we’re at that river, the one from mythology…”
“Styx,” Eddie supplied. His fingers danced along his shins, probably craving a cigarette. “Like the shitty band.”
The walkman tucked against her hip felt as heavy and useless as a pound of stones. Her desire to hear music again came on so strong that she was tempted to ask Eddie to sing for her. Silence fell over them instead, filled only by the coursing of water that somehow appeared tranquil and still.
“Is there anything we can do?” Eddie cast a sideways glance her way, his eyes drowning in something approaching resignation. “Or are we still in the brainstorming phase?”
He had a hint of humor in his voice, but what did they have to laugh about? It already seemed like a century had gone by since she spoke those words to Eddie in the boathouse. All their brainstorming, all their tramping through the woods, all their dimension crossing and plan making, and it amounted to nothing. Eddie had wanted to clear his name and fate had flipped him off. Max had wanted to live and fate denied her, too.
All at once, she wished her walkman actually were a fist full of stones she could use to shatter the surface of the water. She heard a rapidly churning river in her ears, so why didn’t she see white water and a blistering current? She didn’t want to sit serenely on the shore, waiting for her ship to come sailing in, just as she never wanted to sit on the curb outside a San Diego bus station waiting two hours for her dad to remember it was his weekend.
The universe never cared about what she wanted, though, because if it did, her dad never would have skipped out in the first place. Then her mom never would have married Neil Hargrove and she never would have known Billy or moved to the middle of nowhere cornfields of Hellgate, Indiana.
Hell, she’d settle for no dad, and Billy, and Hawkins, if she could have no Upside Down and no death. Her friends happy and her blissfully unaware of any otherworldly dangers.
“Uh hey, Red?” Max almost forgot Eddie was sitting beside her, but she turned her head to see him twisted around, gaze locked somewhere behind him. “Was that there before?”
Max followed his eyes and her heart leap-frogged into her throat. Amidst the shapeless fog, a door had appeared, hardly a few yards from where they sat. The door looked strangely familiar, though it was as nondescript as they came—medium-height, rectangular, slathered with a bucket of white paint. It stood solitary, unconnected to any walls, and Max sensed if they tried walking around it, they’d find nothing but the mist.
That left an obvious question: what if they went through it?
She looked to Eddie, finding him already staring back at her, an eyebrow piqued. “I’ll go if you go,” he said as he rose to his feet. “What exactly do we have to lose, right?”
There was always more to lose and Max felt a prickle of annoyance Eddie of all people wouldn’t know that. She should probably harbor a greater apprehension towards passing through a magical mystery door, but what she feared more was what she’d do if she stayed at the edge of the water for any longer.
They walked to the door side by side, but neither of them reached for the knob. Maybe Eddie was considering the possibility they had plenty further to fall. The door stayed put, indifferent, but Max had a flashing vision of the door disappearing just as she grasped the handle.
But the knob, solid and warm metal, gave easily underneath her hand. The door swung open.
Darkness met them and Max bit back a groan. Of course, why would it give them a glimpse of what they’d be getting themselves into?
“Do you want me to go first?” Eddie rocked forward on the balls of his feet, a humming electric pulse of energy radiating off him. At Max’s hesitation, he amended, “Or same time?”
The doorway was too narrow for two people to walk through at once, but Max nodded anyway. She suddenly couldn’t bear the idea of getting stuck here alone. As soon as she felt Eddie’s shoulder knock uncomfortably against hers, she stepped into the dark.
—"Max!"