Regular People [Elmax]

Chapter 3 - Heart to Heart

After another half an hour of walking, they finally reached the top of the hill.

"Made it.", Dustin said triumphantly.

"Yeah, it only took five hours", Max groaned sarcastically.

"Why couldn't we just play DnD?", Will muttered to himself.

"I'm so thirsty", Lucas panted as he dropped the bag he was carrying onto the floor, pulled a canteen from his bag and started chugging the water. Max stared at him, an annoyed glare across her face. After a few more swigs, no water was left in the container.

"Did you seriously just drink the rest of our water?"

In a panic, Lucas spat the remaining water in his mouth back into the canteen and went to hand it to Max, a nervous smile plastered on his face. Even more fed up of him than before, Max turned her back on him and walked away. She couldn't deal with him right now. Thinking about Mike's possessiveness over Eleven had already irritated her enough, the last thing she needed was Lucas being Lucas.

Under the instructions of Dustin; Will, Max and Lucas started building Cerebro. While Max absentmindedly followed Dustin's instructions, her thoughts kept drifting back to Eleven. Not Mike and Eleven, just Eleven. Max suddenly found it weird that they never spoke, there was so much about El that was intriguing. Of course, the obvious thing would be her powers and how she grew up as a lab rat for the first twelve years of her life, but there was even more under that which Max wanted to know about. She didn't want to just know El's backstory, she wanted to know more about her as a person. After all, they were the only girls in a party dominated by boys, why hadn't they spoken? Then she remembered Mike. Of course, she and El had hardly spoken, Mike would always remove her from those situations before they got the chance. Max suddenly became infuriated by the thought of this. She decided that thinking about that wasn't a good idea when she was helping to build a really flimsy and fragile radio tower. She decided to chat to Will while they both worked on a similar part of the tower.

After an hour or so of building, they were done.

"Pretty impressive right?", Dustin said in a way that made everyone else think he'd somehow impressed himself too.

"Yeah", Max said quietly, still shaken up by her earlier thoughts.

"Now you ready to meet my love?"

"Okay, sure"

"Yeah", Will added.

Dustin sat on a jacket he placed over the grass and picked up the radio, "Suzie, this is Dustin. Do you copy? Over."

There was no response, just radio static.

"One sec, she's still there. Suzie this is Dustin. Do you copy? Over."

Again, no response. Max, Lucas and Will all looked at each other, shuffling impatiently.

"I'm sure she's there, it's just, you know, maybe she's, like, busy or, it's around dinner time"

There was a mini chorus of uncertain 'mhm's' and 'yeah's' from Lucas and Max.

Dustin continued to try and contact her, over and over again. Eventually, the moon was high in the sky and the other three decided to lie down on the grass in an attempt to get comfortable. Meanwhile, Dustin was pacing around nervously, getting even more frustrated with his inability to contact his girlfriend. This got on the nerves of an already irritated Max who had situated herself as far as possible from the rest of the boys, especially Lucas.

"Dustin, come on! She's not there!"

"She's there, all right? She'll pick up!"

"Maybe Cerebro doesn't work", said Will in an attempt to be helpful.