✓ Her Mixtape, Stranger Things

xlii. my tears ricochet

"Okay. Fine. I understand but seriously, Rue—"

"Do you even miss me?" Rue asks helplessly, like a child almost. Desperate. Hoping that maybe, maybe she wasn't the only one who missed her with every bone in her body. Rue prayed to every star in the night sky that Max missed her as much as she had.

The facade of anger had disappeared, slipping between her fingers as water would. No matter how badly Rue wanted to stay angry, stay rageful, stay rash, stay careless, she couldn't. Max had a key of her own, and she brought down everything Rue had worked to build, stripping her bare and revealing Rue's true colours. Her miserable, sensitive colours.

Rue felt thirteen all over again.

"Because I missed you. It's pathetic, I know. And I try to forget about you, maybe even hate you, but I can't. I could never hate you. And it just hurts even more knowing why I can't hate you... because I..." Say it. Say it. Say it. "I missed you. I miss you, Max."

Max stays silent on the other side of the call, and with every second that passes, Rue feels her heart crawl into her throat, becoming harder to breathe. All she could think was that all those summer days had been nothing but a fragment of her imagination.

She doesn't miss me. She doesn't miss me.

"Can we please not do this over the phone?" Max finally spoke, "Just... try to get the flight, okay? Call me or Dustin once you get it. Come home, we can fight here, if you want. I'll ask Steve or Nancy to pick you up—"

Rue never let her finish. She slammed the phone back into its place, ending the call as she did so. Her lips trembled, and she slid down the wall until she was on the floor. Muffled sobs escape her lips as she embraces her knees and curls herself into a ball.

Max didn't even miss her.

As if the last three months of healing never happened, Rue felt a heavy ache in her chest. The relapse of heartbreak began, and she held her hands to her chest, fearing that her heart might spill out.

"Rue?" a soft, gentle voice called. Rue brought her head up from between her knees and found Joyce kneeling before her. The look on her face was one of motherly worry, "Sweetie, what's wrong?"

Rue suddenly felt very aware of whatever scene she had caused, and embarrassment seemed to have replaced her heartache once she realized she had woken Joyce up. Rue wiped her eyes and let Joyce help her stand.

As Rue reached her full height, in the corner of her eye she spotted El peeking her head out her door, which was usually open three inches. She had a brush jammed in her nest of hair, which had grown out so much in the previous year, and she looked out her bedroom with the same wide, curious eyes she had when Rue first met her. Joyce must have noticed Eleven as well and led Rue to the bathroom. "Why don't we- why don't you shower, alright? A nice warm shower that will help you calm down."

　　There's a room where the light won't find you.
　　Holding hands while the walls come tumbling down.
　　When they do, I'll be right behind you.

When Rue was thirteen years old, she had lost her mother and father in the short span of six months. Emilia Davis died as a result of injuries sustained in a car accident, while Bob Newby was mauled by alternate-dimensional dogs. They had both taken their last breaths before her eyes, one death, more gruesome than the last.

Joyce Byers had always been there at Rue's lowest. She was there when Bob was killed, and Rue returned the favour when Hopper died, too. Joyce had turned into the mother Rue had lost, filling the empty shoes perfectly.