[A/N: This chapter describes a character experiencing an anxiety attack. If this type of content distresses you, I would suggest skipping the third section (i.e. after the second horizontal line divider.]

Max stands in front of the bathroom mirror, a hairclip in one hand and a thin braid of hair in the other. She listens to the whir of the ventilation fan and the sound of Hopper snoring on the other side of the door, alternating between deep reverberations that get stuck in his throat and the high-pitched whistling of air escaping through the parting between his lips. A thin layer of frost clings to the grass outside and although it is warm inside the trailer she can feel the chill in her bones.

She does not remember when it had all started; when she had first woken up to find herself still in darkness and with a restlessness in her chest that would compel her to her feet and force her stumble about with her hands stretched out in front of her face, feeling about in the gloom as if she were deep underwater until her vision would return to her. She cannot remember whether it was before or after she had seen Vecna disintegrated into smithereens or before or after she had seen that thing tear Billy apart or before or after she had heard her mother's name read out in the camp in the middle of the remnants of Hawkins by a military man who could as well have been marking attendance at the beginning of class. Trying to reconstruct her past now seems to her like grasping at sand and feeling it slip out of her grip between the gaps in her fingers until there is nothing left except for a few grains sticking to the sweat on her palms.

It wouldn't be so bad if it was at least consistent, Max thinks. Sometimes, like the morning when she had awoken to find herself resting against Eleven's chest, she would open her eyes and be met with rays of sunshine and the sound of cutlery clinking against plates in the kitchen and the low rumbling of laughter and the conversations of other people. She would dare to dream that it was all over, as if something she had done or the wingbeat of some butterfly in some faraway country had altered the course of her history and set her back on the path toward living the semblance of a normal life. And then she would open her eyes the next morning and there she would be again, fumbling about in the darkness.

"Shit," Max says.

She feels the hairclip slip out of her hand and land on the tiled floor. She kneels down and feels for it and when she finally finds it under the sink she holds it up, close to her face, turning it over and inspecting it. Even in the deep vermillion glow of early morning that stains the entire room she can see the pink and blue of the roses and the green of the leaves and their outlines traced in gold. She runs her finger along the border and feels the chip in the enamel that had been the result of the time she had tossed the hairclip at the desk in her room and missed and hit the wall instead. It's funny, she thinks, how there are these things you don't even care about until they become these enchanted objects that you can't live without. It is only when she has convinced herself that the hairclip is just as it had been when she had fished it out of the front pocket of her backpack that she lets herself breathe again.

It's going to be worth it. Promise. She can almost hear the words in her ears and they take her to a time when there had been the soft strains of Christmas carols playing in the living room and the smell of the Christmas tree in the hallway. She had sat before the mirror hanging above her white wooden dressing table and felt her mother's hands in her hair as she prodded and pulled. And you had rolled your eyes then and how you wish you could take it all back and go back to living in that place, living your average life where everything no matter how much you hated it was so predictable.

Max places the hairclip back in the pocket of her pajama pants and opens the door, tiptoeing back to the bed where she sees Eleven still asleep. When she climbs back into bed and pulls the blanket over her aching knees Eleven stirs and mumbles something and for a moment Max prepares to rouse her but soon she drifts off again. Max sits up and looks out of the window, the outline of the steeple of the church towering above the neat rows of steep-roofed houses of the town of Abilene stretching across the horizon. She watches the color slowly return to the shadows of the world as the sun crawls higher into the sky. It is as if the old, dying world of yesterday had withered away overnight and had been brought back to life by the light of the morning. In time, Max feels the tingle in her cheeks as the sun warms her skin and the glare in her eyes and the beating of her heart in her chest, and it is as if she too has been reborn.


"Hey," Lucas says, pushing open the door. He is immediately met with a wall of humid air that makes his shirt stick to his chest.

"Hey yourself, butthead," Erica says. She is lying in the bottom bunk with the blankets pulled up to her nose and when she sits up as Lucas enters he can see that she is still wearing the same sweatshirt she had on the day they had left Hawkins.

"You'd think you'd be nicer to the person who just walked half an hour to get you your flu pills."

"I meant it as a compliment."

Lucas tosses the plastic bottle in Erica's general direction, hearing it land beside her with a rattle. She takes it, unscrews the top and rips off the layer of foil she finds underneath. Lucas watches her tip out two pills into her palm before she tilts her head back and places them in her mouth, swallowing them without bothering to reach for the glass of water on the bedside table that he had left there last night.

"Thanks, nerd. I mean it," she says.

"You're welcome."

"Just the nerd part, I mean."

"You're a nerd too, you know."

They spend a few moments reliving the highlights of the campaign from two nights ago; Lucas regaling his sister with a tale of mysterious priests who had cornered them in a cave and the serious of bone-headed decisions that Mike had made that had placed them at the brink of defeat before the seemingly inevitable triumph of good over evil came in the form of Dustin rolling an eighteen. From time to time, Erica pulls out a tissue from the box sitting in her lap and blows her nose and when she does Lucas pauses to let her finish before continuing on.

"So, are you gonna be well enough to come back soon?" he says as his story draws to a close.

"Sounds like you guys need me, given you almost got wiped out by a bunch of bathrobe-wearing weirdos." Erica giggles but the exertion sends her into a coughing fit. "Maybe you should get out of here before you catch whatever I have," she croaks after finally catching her breath.

"Okay," Lucas says. "Yell if you need anything."

"Trust me, you'll know."

Lucas gets up to leave but as he approaches the door he stops, as if he feels something tapping on his shoulder, reminding him that there is more that he has to say. He stands, his hand resting on the doorknob, staring at the spots on the door where the paint has chipped away to reveal the bare plywood underneath.

"Uh, Lucas?" Erica says, waking him from his daze.

"Oh, yeah," Lucas says. He twists the knob but when he goes to push the door he is barely able to open it before he feels himself freeze again.

"Oh, God. It's not about Max again, is it?"

"What?"

"I've seen the way you look at her," Erica says. She scrunches up her face and imitates a kiss. "Oh, Max, I love you, please take me back –"

"Shut up," Lucas says. The words seem to erupt out of his chest and it is only after he has spoken that he realizes how loud his voice has become.

"What's wrong, Lukey?"

"You are so annoying."

"Hey, I'm not the one asking my twelve-going-on-thirteen-year-old sister for dating advice. Aren't you supposed to tell me about this stuff?"

"I just –"

"It's okay, Lukey, you can tell me," Erica says. She looks up at Lucas, watching him slowly turn his body around, trying to maintain contact with the doorknob as if it is the only thing keeping him from losing touch with reality entirely and erupting into a frenzy.

"I was just thinking about that story – with Lady Applejack and the prince," Lucas says.

"Yeah. What about it?"

"And you remember how – how we'd dropped that from the campaign, because you decided Lady Applejack –"

"Yeah, because I decided Lady Applejack doesn't need to be tied down to some stuck-up, hairy bastard while she's off being a badass assassin."

"Because he wasn't right for her."

Erica pauses and squints at Lucas. "Wait – you think Max is an assassin?"

"What?"

"You've lost me. What does this have to do with you and Max?"

"I never said anything about Max!"

Erica places her head back on the pillow and pulls the blankets back over herself. "Suit yourself," she says. "Not like I wanted to talk about your love life anyway."

"Fine," Lucas says. He pushes the door open and steps out and shuts the door behind him, giving it a firm shove as if to ensure that whatever is behind it has been locked securely inside. Stupid. So stupid, he thinks. She's right, who the hell asks their twelve-year-old sister for relationship advice?

The breeze coming through the open window is cool and Lucas feels a sensation like pins pricking his back as the sweat begins to evaporate. But what about the prince? he thinks. They hadn't given him a second thought, and neither should they have, of course – by the time they had returned to the town where he had been stationed he had found a new person to be his princess, his mouth filled with useless excuses about how he had thought Lady Applejack had been lost to the dark forces she had been sent out into the world to destroy and with equally useless promises that he had ended things and that there was only ever one princess in his life and that he would do anything to reunite with her, all the time knowing the truth, that their fates already been written long before they had even met and that they could never be anything more to each other than a bittersweet memory. Was it possible for the prince to be happy again, confined to being a background character to someone else's story, denied even the small mercy of being nothing at all by being forced to exist perpetually as an unremarkable detail in someone else's life? Would it be enough for him to watch from the sidelines as the pages of his life fill with the tales of others, knowing the entire time that he could only be consigned to an eternity of basking in the light of someone else's happiness?

Lucas steps out of the trailer and sees Mr and Mrs Wheeler. He is reading a newspaper and she is reading a book and they are sitting on opposite ends of a nearby bench, each with their elbow resting on one of the armrests. Without saying a word, Mr Wheeler tosses his newspaper to one side and stands up and begins to walk back to their trailer. Lucas shrinks back, afraid that Mrs Wheeler will look up and see him staring at her, but her eyes remain fixated on the pages in front of her and he hears the metallic thud of a trailer door being shut.


Outside the rain is so heavy that although the trailers are parked just over a thousand feet away the travelers from Hawkins are forced to find shelter in a nearby diner. Inside, they could just as well have been in Hawkins: it is like any other diner in any other small town in any other part of the United States. The sun-worn vinyl of the seats has grown sticky and there is a black-and-white photograph of Buddy Holly hanging on the wall. Advertisements for car repairs and farm equipment play on the radio sitting on the counter near the front door and drown out the hissing of food on the griddle and the low hum of conversations of the workers in the kitchen. At the counter, an old man wearing glasses with large round frames and with his long, graying hair tied back in a ponytail takes fries from his plate and places them one at a time in his mouth, turning his head occasionally to glance at the group of outsiders squeezed into two booths near the windows.

In the corner of the booth, Eleven sits and stares idly at the menu hanging above the serving hatch, trying to distract herself from the feeling in her stomach that had been growing and growing ever since they had stepped through the threshold of the door and she had heard the ringing of the small bell tied above the door frame with a piece of fraying string. Never too late in the day for breakfast, she thinks. Waffles for three dollars fifty. A club sandwich for four seventy-five. Coffee for seventy-five cents.

She looks away and watches the others chatting away, Steve saying something to Vickie and Robin giving him a shove and Steve laughing, and she watches the shape of their lips move as they speak but slowly the sound seems to fade out until all she can hear is the buzzing of static. She looks over at Max and wishes that she were sitting by her so that she could sit and count the freckles on her cheeks as she would tell her about her day and all of the exhausting conversations she had had or even if they could just sit in silence that would be alright too but all she can do is watch the back of her head bob up and down as she sits with her back turned to her in the other booth and curse the random order in which they had dried themselves off and walked through the door of the diner and filed into the nearest seats they could find.

She feels the blood rush to her cheeks, replacing the chill of the late fall afternoon with a warmth that seems to start at her feet and radiate through her body and that makes beads of sweat emerge on her back and mix and become indistinguishable from the drops of rainwater that stick to her and to her clothes. The world of the diner is a jumbled mess and although Eleven tries to find something else to focus her attention on the seats at the counter jut out at different angles and the coffee cups stacked near the serving hatch are all chipped and cracked in a myriad of different patterns and all around her is a random assortment (Hey El, Dustin says) of individual objects that bear no resemblance to one another and send her back and back and back again on an endless loop as she uselessly tries to put into practice the words that Hopper had repeated to her like a mantra, counting one, one, one, one as if the needle reading the record of her mind has slipped.

Her breaths become stuck in her windpipe and she has to choke them down and she feels the muscles squeeze in her chest as they force the air into her lungs and as they expand and fill she feels them burn and tries to call out for Max to come over and take her in her arms or to just turn her head so that she can count the freckles on her face or to do anything at all so that she is not all alone but she can only feel her lips dumbly opening (El, Dustin says) and shutting, opening and shutting, flapping about like she would want anything to do you with you anyway and the lamps that hang above the counter where the old man is sitting seem to blink on and off and for a moment Eleven thinks she sees the man flicker in and out of existence but no-one but her seems to notice, and you could have saved all of them and she can hear the whistle of the water in the coffee-maker grow louder as the water boils and she looks over and she cannot see Max anymore as if she has simply vanished and again they all continue to chatter on as if nothing has happened and she looks frantically around the diner but she cannot see her and now you are going to lose her too and she screams her name but no-one else can hear her and she feels her arms and legs quivering and it is as if she is flapping about like a fish pulled up out of the water with its mouth caught in a hook dying as it runs out of breath (Hey, El, Dustin says, What are you thinking of getting? I kind of want pancakes but I was thinking it might be a bit weird to have breakfast at like, six o'clock at night, he says) and she can feel her heartbeat stop and start, stop and start and it is as if it will stop forever if she does not focus all of her mental energy on forcing the blood to pump through her arteries and her veins, feeling her heart stutter like an engine failing to start –

"But I don't know if I'm in the mood for a burger, you know what I mean?" Dustin says.

– until it sputters to life and she can feel it begin to settle back into something resembling a regular rhythm and she looks up to see Dustin looking back at her, his eyes peering out from behind a mop of brown hair that she has watched grow longer and more out of control over the past few months and she feels the muscles loosen in her arms and legs and tentatively she opens and closes her hand, making a fist and feeling and looking at her fingers furl and unfurl –

"Hey, El." Dustin says. "I know it's scary, but we're safe here."

– and slowly the conversations around her fade back and she can see Steve still joking around with Robin and the sound of Vickie laughing and telling him that he is an idiot crackles through the static and she relaxes the muscles in her chest, waiting for a moment to see if her lungs will still inflate and feeling a sense of relief when she watches her own chest rise and fall as her breathing returns to her and the lights return to illuminating the diner with their hazy yellow glow and the whistling of the water in the coffee-maker stops as the waitress takes it and she can hear her footsteps and a gurgle as she walks over to the man and fills his mug and he raises his head and nods to thank her –

"Anyway, I was hoping you might want some waffles or something, so I don't like a total weirdo," Dustin says.

– and she sees Max wandering back from the bathroom and it is as if the whole world finally comes back into view and she sees the row of identical chairs at the counter and the stacks of identical coffee cups and the regular black and white stripes on Robin's shirt. She feels a cool draft rush into the room as another man walks in and takes his hat in his right hand and sits down at the counter and she realizes that there is no longer the sound of the rain outside and she can hear the muffled sound of tires on wet asphalt coming through the window.

"What?" Eleven says, startled by her own voice echoing in her head.

"What were you thinking of getting?" Dustin says. "They've got waffles here, and I know you're still kind of obsessed with them."

She feels Max turn her head to look at her and she looks up and forces her lips into a small smile. She sees Max smile back at her and crinkle her nose and roll her eyes while gesturing with her head towards Mike before he calls out to her and she is forced to turn back. And although Eleven is once again left with no choice but to stare at the back of her head and at the loose braid of red hair dangling over the back of the seat, it is as though she can see her anyway and the fact that she is there now seems to her to be enough.

"Waffles?" Eleven says.

"Yeah," Dustin says. "Or get whatever you want. You know, free country."

She feels Dustin place his hand on her arm and give it a little squeeze.

"Okay," Eleven says. "Waffles."

She slumps down in her seat and tucks her chin in and feels the pulse in her neck begin to slow. The energy in her limbs seems to dissipate until eventually she feels as if she can no longer move and as if at any moment she will close her eyes and be carried off to sleep.

"Thanks," she mutters, unsure if Dustin can even hear her.

"It's okay," he says. "They taught me a bunch of stuff after Eddie –"

He does not finish the sentence and Eleven looks up to him and nods as if to say that he does not need to, and so they let the thought sit between them for a moment before it dissipates and is carried away by another draft coming through the front door. A few minutes pass before the waitress hovers at their table taking orders, and when Eleven cannot manage to get the words out Dustin offers some phony excuse about her not feeling too well or not speaking English or something, and although she does not hear the words precisely through the ringing in her ears and the sound of her own breathing she understands them anyway.

That evening, Eleven lies awake in bed, marking the passage of time with the sound of Hopper snoring. Max is lying on her side, turned away from her, and although she cannot see her face she knows that she is awake too. She shifts slightly over in the bed until she is imperceptibly closer to Max and she feels Max wordlessly do the same. By the time they awake the next morning they are so close to each other that they are almost touching, the remaining distance bridged by the warmth radiating from their bodies, and for a just moment Eleven feels her past recede into the distance like an object in a rear-view mirror, the passage of time stopping and allowing her to bask in the glow of an endless present that envelops her, stretching on and on and on.