brutal ━ mike wheeler

five. memories long forgotten

FIVE━━━━
MEMORIES LONG FORGOTTEN

stranger things;
season 3    ep 4

AFTER THE WEIRD NIGHT that the four teenagers had, they all agreed to have a sleepover at Max's house. Adrian was lying on the large empty space in front of Max's bed, a pile of pillows and two blankets making the floor less hard for him. Max held up two comic books as El crawled into the bed. "Which one?" The choices were Wonder Woman or Green Lantern, personally, Adrian preferred Wonder Woman, as he believed the plot and story were better. "I don't know," El spoke, seemingly paranoid.

Adrian sat up from where he lay and laid his arms on his knees, leaning up against Max's bed frame. "Hey, there's nothing to worry about anymore, okay?" Max reassured El as she laid the comic books in front of her. On the other side of the room, Frankie pressed her lips into a thin line. She wasn't sure how much of that she believed, but he wanted to believe that whatever had happened wasn't a bad thing, so she agreed with Max. Although, she was just trying to convince herself more than El. "Yeah, I'm sure everything is okay." El turned to look at the blonde as soon as she had heard her soft voice, eyes lingering for a moment.

In the time it took for El to smile before looking back at Max, Adrian and the redhead shared a knowing look. "It doesn't make sense, though," El stated, her eyebrows knitted together as she thought back to a few hours before. "What doesn't make sense?" Max asked. "Heather. The blood. The ice." The brunette answered. Max thought for a moment. "Heather had a fever, so she took a cold bath, but she's better now." While that did seem like a plausible explanation, Adrian still wanted to know where the blood had come from.

"That has to be it. I don't know where that blood came from, but. . . we saw her. We both saw her. She's totally fine." Although Adrian was unsure about the whole thing, he convinced himself that he had been overthinking it and he relaxed back into his makeshift bed. "What about Billy?" El quizzed the redhead in front of her. Max, not knowing how to respond to that, raised her eyebrows. "What about him?"

"He seemed wrong." El elaborated, leaning forward just a bit more. Adrian yanked one of the blankets he was using over his entire body, simply staring at the black in front of his eyes as he thought. "Wrong is kind of like his default. But it's nice to know he's not a murderer, because that would've totally sucked." Max chuckled, trying to lighten the mood. It worked a bit, but the three—no, four—all four of them didn't seem completely convinced.

She looked towards the two comic books that Max had selected and pointed towards the Wonder Woman one. "Who. . . is that?" Max looked at the girl in disbelief before she realized just who she was living with. "See, this is why you can't just hang out with your dad all the time. This is Wonder Woman AKA Princess Diana. She's from Paradise Island, which is, like, this hidden island where there are only women Amazon warriors." Adrian felt his body relax at every word that Max said as she read along with the comic. To be completely honest, Adrian still wasn't doing too well with the whole sleep thing, but when Max had started reading, it was almost like it was a bedtime story.

Adrian hadn't ever had someone read him a bedtime story, not once. So maybe, since for some reason it still hit close to home, that's why he was able to fall asleep not even thirty minutes later, snuggled in a pile of pillows, laying on one blanket while covered up with the other.

Adrian peeled his eyes open when he heard the phone on Max's dresser ringing. He sat up, glaring at it as Max got up, eyes droopy and annoyed. She brought the phone to her ear. "I'm sleeping. Go away." She went to go put the phone back down but brought it back to her ear when she had heard something that Adrian guessed caught her attention. "What are you talking about?" She spoke into the phone. "What?" She retracted the phone from her ear when she realized that whoever she was talking to had hung up on her. "What's going on?" Adrian asked, his voice raspy.