Hi all! This fanfic will be a series of Max-centric one-shots that cover a variety of points of view and set at different points in time, including (occasionally) speculation before season 2 and beyond season 4. I'll warn of significant spoilers.

This chapter will contain minimal spoilers for Season 4, episode 1, but not beyond that.


Chapter 1 – The Fading

Max

Summer 1985 through Winter 1986


Max couldn't pinpoint when exactly the change within her had really taken hold.

Billy's death had certainly been a catalyst, but it wasn't all. After he had died, she'd tried to be happy. She tried to move past his loss, past Hopper's death and its implications. She'd gone to the funerals, of course, but afterward she commiserated with her friends, together. She slept over at Joyce Byers' house to keep El company, dancing around to Madonna and Blondie and manicuring their nails and reading teen magazines and anything else she could think of to keep El distracted.

To keep herself distracted.

But there were still those hours in-between, the times when she was faced with the reality of what living in the house on Old Cherry Lane meant without Billy in it. Max found herself spending increasing amounts of time in Billy's room, sitting on the edge of the bed and staring at nothing in particular, surrounded by semidarkness and the stale odor of old cigarettes and musky cologne and feet and not realizing how many minutes, how many hours were slipping past.

Time started to pass in a way that didn't make sense anymore, and at first, it scared her.

Max doubled down on keeping busy. She went to the pool with the rest of the party and tried to ignore Billy's lingering presence there. She perfected her heel flip in the street in front of her house, cursing when she lost her balance, the words not quite covering the shouting from her mom and stepdad inside. She indulged her mother and halfheartedly spent a day shopping for clothes and visiting a salon, in preparation for high school, largely because she knew her mom needed a break from Neil. The screaming matches between them had become more intense and more frequent, often fueled by alcohol, and Max took to keeping her Walkman going at all times when she was in the house.

The first day of high school in September, she met Dustin, Lucas, and Mike outside of Hawkins High School and the four of them walked in together. Max knew that she looked the same as she had at the end of middle school: striped shirt, blue jeans, beat-up vans, copper hair in loose waves, and a confident smirk that felt all kinds of wrong for how she actually felt. So much of it felt wrong. El and Will weren't there, but why was Billy's ghost still lingering in the hall?

How could the world be forcing her to move forward when her step-brother was forever arrested in time?

Max managed to hide her increasing withdrawal in part by overcompensating with exuberant energy when she was with her friends. She didn't want El to worry about how she was handling Billy's death, under the circumstances. Eleven had her own losses to deal with. So Max helped the Byers family and El pack all of their belongings into a U-Haul bound for California. She belted out the words to the "Never-Ending Story" theme in sync with Lucas and they grinned conspiratorially at each other when Dustin snapped at the two of them.

All too soon, they were all standing in the driveway and saying goodbye. Max hugged Eleven tightly, a smile plastered on her face to keep from crying. El held her tightly, so tightly that Max could feel her friend's wet cheek against her neck. They smiled sadly at one another, promised to keep in touch, shared hopes of a visit. Before long, Max was wrapped around Lucas' arm and watching her best friend drive away.

Not long after that, the fights between her mom and Neil turned physical. She'd come home from school to find her mom's wrist bruised or her face slapped. She begged Susan to leave him, pleaded with her, tried to figure out a way to make things work financially without him. But her mother only turned toward Max, eyes lowered, and said nothing.

By November, Lucas had made the varsity basketball team and Dustin and Mike were fully invested in Hellfire. Max had always been strong-willed and independent, not one to pretend to be into something for the sake of secondary gain, but all of the clubs and teams at Hawkins seemed bland and uninteresting to her.

Her friends didn't notice at first that Max started staying home more. She was gambling that if she was in the house, Neil would think twice about hitting her mother. The fighting escalated instead. One night, Neil started throwing mugs and plates against the wall and a neighbor called the police. Nothing happened. Susan didn't want anything to happen.

Max began spending increasingly more time in Billy's room with her Walkman. She discovered Kate Bush's new album and immersed herself in the melodies and lyrics. Her mood alternated between grief and anger, but it was mostly anger. She seethed at Neil for hurting them, was livid at her mother for not standing up for herself, furious at Billy for not being there, pissed off at herself for not figuring out a way to save Billy at the mall that night.

One evening in the midst of a shouting match with his wife, Neil burst into Billy's room, drunk beyond anything Max had ever seen, and was enraged to find his stepdaughter sitting on his son's bed.

For the first time ever, Neil hit her.

After that, it wasn't long before he left for good and sold the house out from under them.

Max couldn't hide that from her friends, and the remaining members of the party packed a friend's home into boxes for the second time in as many months. When Susan unlocked the door of their new place at the Forest Hills Trailer Park, Max kept a stiff upper lip for her mom and her friends that crumbled the moment she shut the door of her new bedroom behind her.

She started slipping faster, withdrawing deeper into herself, feeling trapped within a world that kept trying to bury her in shit.

Hawkins High started assigning her to see the school counselor every Thursday. Dustin and Mike wouldn't acknowledge it, but Lucas seemed visibly relieved, which irritated Max a great deal. She felt her mood slipping, felt herself becoming less rational, inexplicable anger triggered by everything and nothing. Overall, she didn't notice that much was different, explaining it to herself as a reasonable response to the stressors and negative changes in her life. At least, she rationalized, she wasn't drowning herself in alcohol like her mom was.

The day after Christmas brought the arrival of El, Will, and Jonathan and for a few glorious days Max felt almost happy again. Having Eleven and Will made things feel almost normal. Almost like they were before, at the beginning of the summer.

Almost.

Lucas confronted her about her well-being, after their friends went back to California. Max thought he was being ridiculous, overreacting to what felt to her like a normal response to her best friend being back and then gone again. The changes in her were to be expected, she thought, catalyzed by the terrible events and losses in her life over the past few months. But Lucas insisted something was wrong with her, that she wasn't herself, that she wasn't well.

She was incensed. Just because Lucas didn't like the person she'd become didn't mean something was wrong with her.

She dumped him for the sixth and, she was sure, the final time.

Nothing was wrong with her. She was just different now. Her world was different. Everything seemed darker and paler than before, somehow. It wasn't like Billy and Neil had been all rainbows and sunshine, but the void they left behind cast her life into shadow.

Everything was dimmer, more hollow. There were times when she woke screaming from nightmares and half-expected her bedroom to be full of drifting particles, sinister vines, and dark creatures.

Max could keep her balance while grinding a rail on a 30-inch skateboard, so why was it starting to seem impossible to keep both of her feet grounded on a planet that was spinning in the same way that it always had?

The house on Old Cherry had been in Neil's name alone, of course, and the money he left Max and Susan with was laughably inadequate. After the first couple of months in the trailer park, they were struggling to make ends meet. Susan's drinking intensified.

Max kept going to the movies and the bowling alley and the arcade with Dustin and Mike, when they asked. She hung out with the boys, Robin, and Steve when Family Video got new movies in, sitting in Steve's parents' otherwise empty house with pizza and Coke. These were brief escapes that allowed her, even for just a few hours, to feel more like a normal teenager again, but they always ended with her back home feeling the weight of the world pressing in on her again.

At some point in late January, Max's grades started to slip as she increasingly withdrew into isolation and music. She kept skateboarding only because it was a mode of transportation.. She continued to relive her past traumas and recount her progressively shittier home life to the school counselor. Her insomnia worsened and inevitably, when she was able to sleep, her nightmares came more frequently.

She wasn't sure if she believed in a higher power, but she prayed anyway. She prayed that something would happen to her, something terrible, so that she wouldn't have to face another day. Maybe those thoughts should have frightened her, but the truth was that disappearing would be ok with her. Max could not see any other way out of the shitty circumstances of her life.

Each morning brought a sense of disappointment when she woke. Max dreaded going through the motions of another day that would end in more nightmares. But she kept going out of sheer habit.

Her friends, who had initially respected her need for space, stopped asking her how she was doing, if she was okay, because of her reaction to the questions. She didn't want pity. She didn't want to acknowledge there was a problem (although it was clear to everyone around her that there were several).

In early February, there was no food in the refrigerator and the phone bill hadn't been paid. Max was relieved that she'd been avoiding the cafeteria at lunch for the past couple of months, so none of her friends would notice when she didn't have anything to eat.

Susan took a second job. Max saw less and less of her, because when she wasn't at work she was escaping into alcohol.

Max escaped into music, becoming inseparable from her Walkman

She started finding excuses not to spend time with her friends. She stopped writing back to Eleven when El's most recent letter stated "Mike and Dustin say you aren't yourself anymore." Max didn't know how to answer that, because the statement was both true and false and above all filled her with an indignance that they were talking about her behind her back.

She had changed, whether they could accept that or not, and things couldn't go back to how they were even if she wanted them to.

Max continued to fade into the background of her own life.

She did not know any other way to exist anymore.


If you or someone you know is having thoughts of wanting to disappear or hoping for something catastrophic to happen to them, please seek help. This is what is known as "Passive suicidal thoughts," where depression sends a person so deep that they want to die, even if they've never contemplated actively harming or killing themselves. These feelings are just as serious as contemplating suicide, even if they aren't as immediately life-threatening.

Please dial 988 to reach the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline if you need to talk to someone.

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