ElMax/Henclair OneShots (Elmax Manly)

storm's eye ambassador319

El can't sleep.

The room is staticky and soft. It isn't like nighttime at Hopper's, when she curls close to the wall and lets Mike's radio voice or the drone of the TV nudge her into sleep. This is a different kind of static. Like if she reached over and poked the back of Max's shoulder, her finger would buzz. 

She tucks her fingers safely back into fists. She shouldn't wake Max. There is streetlight in the window and it's picking out little random bits of Max's hair, the creases in her sleep shirt where El can see her breathing. Last week Joyce brought El a packet of glow-in-the-dark stars, and they didn't really glow, only barely, a search party of distant flashlights on her ceiling. Max looks like that. 

Slowly, El turns onto her back and stares into the dark instead. Her throat is scratchy. Her hair scratches at the back of her neck. Maybe she should get up and brush it. A magazine at the mall said your hair should always be properly taken care of, or you'll feel very "unkempt". El feels unkempt. She feels disheveled and haphazard and altogether out of place. Her neck is itchy.

And she can't stop thinking about Billy. His voice runs horrible circles around her head like a merry-go-round. I did not quite catch your name. 

She isn't scared of him. She isn't. The scary thing about Billy is that Billy is weird, and wrong; he's not him. He must be it. 

Thunder. Max makes a noise in her sleep. El rears up on her elbows, then her hands. Outside the blinds the world is wet amber and blue, and streaks of it slip into the room, quivering like lost little kids. An echo of rain gurgles in the gutters of the house. El hopes the storm picks up again; her movements are deafening as she tugs off the blankets and edges out the door. 

She means to go to the bathroom. Just to flick on the lights and look in the mirror, at something blindingly bright and solid, before she goes back to Max’s room to try again at sleeping. But the quiet stretch of the hallway calls to her. With only a few furtive glances back she lays a hand on the Mayfields’ front door and eases it open. 

The porch is blissfully cold. El tilts up her face to breathe in the night air. It’s strange, but a part of her always believes she belongs here, in the cold and in the dark. 

This is peaceful. Like the void; except she can make out shapes and shadows. Streetlight. A glimmer of wet grass. Stormclouds, lurking overhead of the houses. There isn't anyplace to sit, so El sinks down against the weatherboards of the house, lets herself study the patterns of moonlight scattered like piles of wet leaves over Max's street. The eye of the storm— the real storm, not any Upside-Down Mind-Flayer whirlwind— blankets her in quiet. El thinks she could fall asleep here. Right here. Let Max find her in the morning.

The door creaks. She jolts; a brief, awful thought: Billy?

"El?" 

It's Max. Lowering her hands, El swallows, and looks up. "Hi."

The lines of Max's face are scrawled and messy. She's squinting like she's still mostly asleep. "Hi. What's wrong with my room?"

"Nothing," El says. 

"It's super cold out here."

"Yes."

There's a soft scuffling noise; Max is kicking, kind of, at the doorframe. El sees her sway on her feet. "Come inside?"