season 5 rewrite in joint canon with @baldursgte .
At first, there was nothing. Just a black numbness, a vacuum of nothing that had swallowed her whole. Max thought she was dead until she opened her eyes (and still lowkey does for most of her time here). She woke up in the rainbow room. She instinctively tried to wake up one of the children, only to find them dead. She tried to run in a sheer panic, but every time she found a new door it led her right back to the rainbow room. After a while she realized she wasn’t in immediate danger — she wasn’t being chased, and in fact Vecna probably thought he succeeded in killing her. if she was careful, she had time to be smart about this.
she collected herself and began to explore more intentionally. she isn’t sure how long she wandered through henry’s memories — days, weeks, months, years, decades. it all blended together & none of it really mattered. at first she could only access parts of the memory that were henry’s directly. she could only things he saw, only go places he went. but as she spent more time exploring his memories, and learning how to navigate the labyrinth, she found she was able to expand them and reach places that henry had no direct memory of.
it’s about six months into her coma when she arrives to the Camazotz that we know, coming face-to-face with henry. she tries to go back the way she came, but he’s blocking her path so she runs into the unknown. the whole thing with the cave happens, etc, she sets up camp. the first time she slips back into a memory, she’s got a specific goal in mind: a blanket. it gets cold in the desert at night, and apparently being non-corporeal doesn’t protect you from freezing your ass off.
when she returns successful, henry is waiting for her, but the pursuit ends at the same place it did previously. it takes a few months for her to truly believe that he will not follow her into the cave, but once she accepts it then she starts to venture out more regularly. she searches the desert, finding the trap door but she is not able to open it on her own. she tries EVERYTHING, prying it open, setting it on fire, putting a ton of weight on it to try to break it. it never budges. she’s hit a dead end.
after a year in her coma, max gets comfortable with where she’s at. she starts to antagonize henry intentionally — disrupting him at private moments, heckling and insulting him, flipping him off through the windows of his own home. she never fails to enrage him. there is always a chase, and he is never quite fast enough to keep her from disappearing into the rocks.
the longer she spends in her coma, the more reckless she becomes. the less she cares about getting caught. she starts to outright break into the creel house whenever henry is gone. at first, it was to explore and pilfer items here and there. eventually it became destructive — henry would return home to a wrecked first floor, with broken dishes, shattered records, and linens in the fireplace. it’s petty, but she’s angry and she is not going to make anything easy on henry if she can be a pain in his viney ass instead.
her anger turns to hope when mike fucking wheeler of all people suddenly appears in her cave. it’s probably the first time in her life she’s been outwardly happy to see him, and she fills him in on all she’s learned about henry and this world, using metaphors from a wrinkle in time. together, they manage to pry open the trap door and escape… or so they thought. max wakes in jane’s arms, her whole body aching and stiff and painful. she’s confused and terrified and there’s demodogs everywhere, but the party makes out out the other side – just barely.
when the groups reconvene, max is horrified to find out that mike didn’t actually make it out. she insists they have to go find him right away, starting with the library in the upside down – the place his exit portal from camazotz had shown. it takes a while for the entire party to realize that mike isn’t being kept in the upside down, but rather an entire new dimension that they call the far realm. between will and jane’s powers, they are able to break into this alternate dimension and rescue mike. little did they know that this was all part of a grander plan: vecna wasn’t the villain they had thought, but rather a lieutenant for an even bigger bad: the mind flayer. and it had just claimed it’s ideal vessel in will byers.
the party works together to get mike as close as possible to will, hoping he’ll be able to get through to him again like he did in the past. it works and he is freed, barely, but now the mind flayer is loose and angry. it takes every single person the party had, especially jane and will, but they managed to defeat the mind flayer, though it’s not without losses suffered. joyce and hopper both gave their lives protecting the kids. nancy, steve and jonathan were all severely injured, but survived. the kids who fought were mostly fine, albeit traumatized.
after that, the world slowly went back to normal – or as normal as it could be.
