chapter twenty three ♰ Mothers

  The next morning, Matt woke up to breakfast already on the table, and Steve Harrington twirling his daughter under his arm as What's Love Got to Do with it by Tina Turner blared from the radio.

   Matt stopped in the doorway, bewildered, and regretting his decision of not waking Steve up last night and kicking him out of his house. He stood in the rue of his choice, staring glumly at the three plates already set at the table, piled with scrambled eggs that looked perfect, and slices of toast that were done just right. One of the plates was even partnered by a mug of coffee that was brewed precisely to Matt's liking, infused with cinnamon and enough sugar that Matt could smell it from the edge of this little domestic world that Steve had fashioned out of charm and a surprising skill for cooking—and an unhealthy dose of confidence about Matt's coffee habits that he wanted to crush between his fingertips like a bug, splattering the guts all over his pretty, perfect hair.

   Even his dog was sat obediently at Steve's feet, panting heartily and drooling all over his socks—onyx eyes dazzled in adoration by the guest as he danced with Sydney.

   "I see you stayed the night, Steve."

   Steve caught Sydney mid-twirl and balked at Matt's cross face. "Mr McConnell!" he exclaimed, jumping back from Sydney. "I didn't realise—"

   "You made breakfast," said Matt. Blunt. Mean.

   "Dad—"

   "No, no, Syd, that's fine," Matt said childishly, "not like it's our thing or anything. I bet his eggs aren't even that good anyway—" to test, Matt violently filled a spoon full of eggs and shovelled into his mouth, and was about to imitate a begrudged sound of disgust when he was hit by surprise: they were really good. Matt forcefully swallowed down the mouthful, looked back up to Sydney's glare, Steve's terror, and faked a gag, "Bleurgh."

   "I'm sorry, Sir—" Steve started to say, horrified.

   "Steve, he's just—"

   Matt interjected them both, "Out, bucko," he said, jabbing a thumb to the door.

   "Ser-seriously?" the kid stammered.

   "Ye-yeah," Matt mocked, "out!"

   Sydney glared at him furiously. "Dad, leave him alone!"

   "Why is he here, Sydney?" Matt yelled, indignant now. "After everything he did to you, why is he here—in our home?"

   "Dad, please," she hissed.

   "No, just..." Matt pinched his nose. "Steve, leave. Please." 

   Steve, mortified, went to go, but Sydney protested, "Steve, don't!"

   "Steve, go."

   "Steve—"

   Steve stomped his foot, crying out, "I don't know what to do!"

   Sydney stared between the helpless boy and her infuriated father, and her shoulders slumped in defeat, turning around to fully face Steve with her lips pouted in dismay. 

  "I'm sorry, Steve..."

   He didn't seem sorry. He looked warily between the angry man in the doorway, and the daughter that he adored, and shook his head. 

  "No, no, that's fine," he insisted (he meant it—Matt McConnell scared him shitless.) "I'll—see you at school?"

   "If you're lucky," grumbled Matt.

   Sydney glared at him over her shoulder and turned back to Steve. She hesitated, before grabbing two fistfuls of his sweater and yanking him down to her height, smashing her lips against his. It was mostly to piss her dad off—but the small sound of amazement he let out against her had Sydney melting into it. She almost forgot her dad was in the room, scoffing incredulously and glaring up at the ceiling with rage hot in his belly. Steve relaxed into it too—kissing her so nervously that it was the most gentle he had ever kissed her, and she smiled against him, fingers slowly letting go of the jumper for her palms to fall flush against his warm chest, his heart literally in her hands. 

   "Okay, you've proved your point, Sydney," Matt barked. 

   Gulping, Sydney jumped back, and left Steve standing there, feeling detached from his body. He blinked, amazed, not quite knowing what to do. Then he saw Matt narrow his eyes and take a step closer, and Steve was leaping into action.

   "I'm going, I'm going!" he cried in surrender, dashing for the door (not without patting Bucky briefly).

   Sydney and Matt were stuck in some kind of Father/Daughter stare-down until the screeching sound of Steve's tyres had her finally exclaiming, "What the hell, Dad?"

   "I don't like him," he replied simply.

   "You don't have to," snapped Sydney. "He's not your boyfriend."

   Matt's could've fainted. "And he's yours?"

   Sydney blushed. "Not yet, no."

   "But he will be?" Matt demanded.

   "Dad—"

   "I don't like him, Sydney!" he reinforced, hastily picking up the mug of coffee and pouring it down the sink. He looked at it mournfully, and heard Sydney scoff behind him. "I don't! I know boys like that, Syd, and they're not good for you."

   "Oh, you know boys like him?" Sydney mocked. "What an original, and totally not ridiculous, thing to say, Dad!"

   "I know because I was just like him!" Matt stunned her with. She had never seen her father so anger—Talk about someone so maliciously. Even Ronald Reagan. Even himself. "He's a jumped-up, Mr-Popular guy who will peak in high school, and falls in love too easily and pities his own heartache without realising how he makes girls feel. And one day, he'll knock you up, and think he can handle it. He'll tell you that he'll get a job working for his dad because his grades aren't good enough for college, and he'll make you feel bad for him having to skip out on a sports scholarship, and he'll amount to fucking nothing! He'll leave you, and your kid, and he'll be a lonely, sorry son of a bitch until—"

   He caught himself.

   He nearly said it.

   Until you die like your mom.

   Matt stumbled back until his back hit the granite countertop behind him and he startled, snapping out of his rant. He saw it so realistically—a sight he never wanted to see: Sydney dead. Bones twisted like a contortionist, and face all cut by glass. 

   He smacked the image out of his head and clutched his chest, willing down the bile in his throat. When he calmed down and finally met his daughter's eyes again, they were welling with tears and sweeping over him in a devastated panic. 

   "I'm not mom," she told him softly.

   "I know," he said, hoarse.

   Sydney watched his throat bob in anguish. "I'm not."

   "And that's a good thing," Matt choked out. Sydney flinched, stepping back. "No, I mean—" Matt scrubbed his eyes with the heels of his hands, "Sydney, I think your mom was murdered."

   "This again," Sydney laughed humourlessly. "Just let it go, Dad." Let her go. Let her be dead. "I have."

   "Sydney, you aren't listening ... I think—no, I'm pretty damn sure the lab had your mom killed," said Matt, approaching her when Sydney shook her head, covering her ears like a child being told something they didn't want to hear. (She was still a kid. She was just a kid). Matt's hands tenderly curled around her wrists, trying to pry them off her ears, "Kiddo, I know it's not something you wanna talk about, but—"

   Sydney's arms dropped to her side, defeated.

  "I told you to leave it alone," she mumbled. "I didn't want you to keep looking into any of this. Are you doing this because you think you owe her?"

   Matt's eyes widened. "Sydney, no. But don't you think she deserves more than a cover-up? Like Benny, and Barbara? Suicide, running away ... A car crash. They can't keep getting away with killing people and lying about it!"

   "My dead mom isn't a case for you to solve," Sydney seethed.

   "I loved your mom, Ziggy," said Matt. Her face screwed up painfully. "I did, and I do, and she haunts me."

   Sydney wanted to tear his head off his shoulders and make him understand what Christine's haunting really felt like. All of the numbers. Pounds, calories, days since she buried her mom. 

  Ticking, ticking, ticking.

   "But it's not just her anymore," he insisted. Sydney returned to him, dazed. "It's everything the lab ever did. That experiment—it ruined lives, Sydney. It killed people. A woman I knew well—your mom's old best friend—was a test subject for Project MKUltra, and she died right after having her second kid."

   "Who?"

   "Bonnie Munson."

   Sydney's blood went cold. Munson. Nadine. With a jolt, Sydney was transported to Nadine's bedroom—a kitsch, earthy nirvana that smelt like weed, and reminded Sydney of a funny feeling in her belly, and the weightlessness of a high. Nadine and Sydney in the summertime, listening to Eddie's cassettes, sharing a blunt. She's back there again. Nadine's leaning over Sydney to do a line off her nightstand, and Sydney's knuckles are tracing the bird silhouette tattoo on her thigh. She sat back on her heels to bore her dilated eyes into Sydney's and she's telling all about the mom she never knew, and how she had a taste for cocaine too. 

  Like mother, like daughter, she said, stealing the blunt from Sydney's swollen lips and melting back against the peeling wall behind her.

   "Nadine's mom," Sydney muttered.

   "Probably, I don't—Wait, you know her?"

   Know her. Did anyone know Nadine Munson? She was a smoke-blurred enigma and Sydney wished she knew her. In retrospect, maybe she had a little crush on Nadine. Maybe she hungered to unfurl the mystery that was Eddie Munson's less erratic, but no less debauched, younger sister—a blur of smudged eyeliner, fishnet tights, and an ugly reputation that she wore just as proudly as her leather jacket that was falling apart: the pockets rattling with loose pills and dusty with cocaine debris. She was the most interesting and raw person that Sydney knew. She was the kind of girl that should be travelling round the country with some big band, and making out with every single one of the members after a big gig. Her heart was an organ of fire and Sydney remembered the closest thing to vulnerability she ever got from Nadine:

   I'm not an addict, or anything ... My mom, fuck, she was an addict. Died of an overdose 6 months after I was born, left me and Eddie with our batshit crazy dad ... But hey, dead moms makes for hell of a character building, right, Loch Nora?

   Sydney felt dizzy. "Yeah ... Yeah, I know Nadine." 

  Nadine kept her mom's wedding ring on a chain round her neck, and tasted like cherry chapstick with an aftertaste of weed.

  "Actually, Dad," Don't do it, "can I borrow Mom's case file on the lab for a bit?"

   Matt's eyebrows raised in surprise. "Really?"

  "Yeah," said Sydney, blinking, "if that's okay."

  "Well, erm—Sure, Zig. If that's what you want."

  Sydney wasn't really sure if she remembered him leaving the room. She was barely conscious for him returning to it, either. But when he did, Matt looked disconcerted, and a little reluctant about handing over the files in his hand.

  "Why now?"

  "Huh?"

  "This whole time," said Matt, frowning, "you wanted to let your mom rest. You were against me looking into it—Hell, just a few minutes ago—"

  "It's like you said, right?" Sydney forced a smile onto her face, shaken herself. "The lab can't keep getting away with this. I'd like to know about it, before we stop them."

   Matt scoffed. "We. We're doing nothing. Idiot."

   "Not until we've figured shit out, no."

   "No," said Matt sternly, "not at all, Sydney. I mean it." But by now, Matt figured out that Sydney wasn't listening to him at all. She was reading the file. "Sydney, seriously—"

   "I'll see you later, Dad."

   "Sydney—"

   She was already at the door. "School, remember!"

✹

   Sydney didn't go to school.

   Nadine's a refreshing sight. Her fishnets had seen better days, but the black miniskirt that kissed her upper thigh looked so suspiciously new that Sydney could only assume that she had stolen it. There was also a thick layer of clingfilm on her wrist—covering her most recent tattoo. Her hair was ringing wet, and dripping down her back. A droplet of it was collected in the hollow basin of her collarbone, and she answered the door to Sydney with a towel thrown over her shoulder, and a cigarette hanging from her mouth.

   "Oh," she said absently, "it's you."

   Sydney, wet from the rain, shivered. "It's me."

   Nadine glanced over Sydney's shoulder; at her Jeep, at the very distinct lack of Steve. "Just you."

   "Just me."

   "Hm."

   "Can I come in?"

   "I guess."

   Nadine barely moved out of the way to let Sydney in. It left Sydney a little breathless when she actually moved into the trailer, and it wasn't just because of the rancid smell of Eddie's socks on the floor.

  "Had to break it to you, Loch Nora, but we're all fresh out of, well—" Nadine's took a deep drag, "everything."

   "That's not why I'm here," said Sydney, nervous.

   Nadine, moving to the couch, stared at her weirdly. "Oh?"

   "Yeah, I erm, well—" Sydney laughed nervously, readjusting her grip on the damp file in her hands, "it's a bit hard to explain, actually."

   "Right. Do I need to roll something for this?"

   Sydney frowned. "I thought you were out."

   "I lied."

   "Then why—"

   "Because you're making me shit myself a bit, Sommers." Nadine stubbed out her cigarette in a seashell ashtray. "Your fidgeting is pissing me off too. Sit the fuck down."

   "Right. Okay."

   Sydney fell into a bean bag next to a cabinet full of Eddie's cassettes. A puff of dust exhaled from it, and a chunk of stuffing slithered from a torn seam.

   "So?" Nadine demanded. "What the fuck is up with you?"

   "It's difficult to explain, like I said."

   "Well, I haven't got all day, Sid Vicious."

   Sydney nodded. "Yeah, I know that—"

  "So."

   "Nadine, there's no easy way to say this so I'm just gonna come out and say it—"

   "Erm." Nadine suddenly looks very uncomfortable. "Okay..."

   "I know how your mom died."

   Nadine's face fell. "Oh."

   "Oh?" Sydney stared. "Oh. That's all you say. Oh."

   "Just... That's not what I was expecting. S'all."

   "Well, yeah."

   "I mean," Nadine says, shaking her head, "everyone knows how she died. She OD'ed."

   Sydney shook her head too, more violently than Nadine had done. She leaned forward, her knees almost touching the other girl's, nails pressing into the fragile paper of the document.

   "No, Nads—well, yeah, she did. But not because of why you think."

   "Sydney. You're making literally no sense."

   Grimacing, Sydney realised quite prematurely that she had no idea how to proceed with this conversation. Why was she here? What had she expected Nadine to do with this revelation of hers—of her mother's; their mothers? Sydney knew her mother. Christine exists in the marrow of her and probably always will. Bonnie Munson, to her rosy welt of a daughter, was a faceless, silent ghost. Even here, in Nadine's home, there's no trace of her. Did Sydney really have any business being here, with this document, unburying family trauma that probably could've done being left very well alone?

   "I'm sorry," she muttered, going to stand, "I shouldn't have come. This was stupid—"

   "Uh, no, you're not gonna leave after that. Sit." Nadine's eyes, an earthy, hickory colour, and worryingly dilated, narrowed in on Sydney as she uneasily sat back down. "What the fuck do you mean by not because of why you think? My mom was a junkie. There's not much else to it. Hell, I don't even think she quit using when she was pregnant with me, nor Eddie—"

   "That wasn't her fault," blurted Sydney.

   Nadine face drops. "What?"

   "It wasn't that she didn't care, Nadine. Your mom, she—they did that to her. They killed her. Inadvertently."

   "In-ad—what?"

   "Doesn't matter. Point is," Sydney rasps, white-knuckling the file now, "when your mom was pregnant with Eddie, the government paid her a lot of money to be a test subject in some mad fucking experiment—"

   "Are you stoned right now?" Nadine asked sharply.

   "No!" she protested, shrill. "No, I'm not stoned, Nads."

   "You sound laced. My mom, part of a government experiment—"

   "It's the truth," said Sydney adamantly. "One of the institutions in charge of the project was Hawkins Lab. They pumped these pregnant women full of psychedelics and experimented on them. All kinds of things—abuse, sleep deprivation, they starved them—"

   A certain madness gleamed in Nadine's blown pupils. "You sound like my dad, Sydney. You sound fucking crazy."

   "Your dad knew all about it, then! Hell, look, my mom put him down in here as a witness—"

   "Is that what this is all about, Sommers?" seethed Nadine, voice steely and brittle as Sydney's fingers went to slip through the pages of the file. She stilled, meeting at Nadine's remorseless stare. "Is this you spiralling about your mom? Because, if so, I know I fix you up now and then to help you sleep, but this—this is a whole new level of enabling crazy. And I want nothing to do with it."

   Sydney blinked against the unrelenting, cruel face of the accusation, and felt very raw all of a sudden. "That's not what this is."

   "Well, I know it's not the truth. You sound like a crazy person."

   "I am not—"

   "Dating Harrington has really screwed you up, Vicious."

   "Just." Sydney sighed, shaking her head deplorably. This was useless. "Read this," she says, handing out the file. "It's all there. Everything."

   "I can't read," Nadine said drolly.

   Sydney glared at her. 

   "Fine. But only because I think you're losing your mind and I feel bad."

   Silence unravels between them, and Sydney grew restless in it. Apart from the fleeting glimmers of madness and nostalgia she got from her dad on visits to Pennhurst, Nadine didn't really know much about her hallowed mother. Now, she exists in her lap—dried ink in Chris Sommers' handwriting, an intergenerational script of lineage that was kept locked away in a mental asylum, or the unkempt grave at Roane Hill Cemetery with the weeds between the cracks and her mother's disturbed bones.

   Nadine knew very young that nothing ever ends poetically, or with a nice neat bow. Coffins are varnished oak or mahogany, and they are covered in earth, and worms, and gravel. All that blood in her mother was never once beautiful; it was just red. Never once was she righteous or gullible enough to believe that just because her biology is tarnished with drugs did she think it was her preordained destiny to meet her mother's same fate. Nadine knew that the generational cycle could be severed with enough gall—she simply didn't have it. Eddie, he did. Nadine's weaned on poison, fatherly madness, and motherly grief. She didn't listen when Uncle Wayne told her that it was fine to sell, but not to abuse. She's covered in thousands of little wounds, punctures almost. Sydney Sommers, a thornbush who bristled from the overattention of her own dead mother, had needles and spines to fit perfectly into them. Now, she's handing her this.

   "I don't understand," she mumbled.

   "I know it's a lot take in, Nad, but—"

   "I don't understand why you're giving me this," said Nadine sharply, tossing the document aside onto a pile of Eddie's vinyls. "My mom's been dead seventeen years, Sommers. Why the fuck would you come to my home and give me this? She's gone. We buried her. How fucking dare—"

   Sydney frantically shook her head, alarmed. "Nadine, that's not what's—I didn't mean for—"

   "Fucking hell, Sommers. I know you've been all over the place lately, with Harrington, with your own ma, but this—bringing this to me—I didn't know you had in you."

   "Had in me?" repeats Sydney in disbelief.

   "To be so selfish!" Nadine screamed. "Hell, you give me this, and expect me to what, exactly? Join you in some two-woman crusade against the government? Oh, hello Mr. Judge, yes, I would like to testify against the C.I.A. for doping my darling, dead mother on acid in the '50s—I don't think it was very kind of the government to do!" Laughing hysterically, Nadine throws herself up and out of the futon and buried her flustered face into her hands. "Oh my fuck, Sommers. You're more twisted than I ever gave you credit for."

   Sydney honestly couldn't believe what she was listening to. She hadn't expected a collected reaction from Nadine, but she certainly hadn't this—to be blamed. She felt like she was receiving a punishment for misdoings that were not her own, and shame smears itself in red, hot blotches up the nape of her neck and columns of her swollen throat. She shouldn't have bit the curiosity bullet in the first point, she realised hollowly. She was right all along, and Matt should've listened to her when she told him from the very beginning that this wasn't a good idea.

   The dead should remain dead. Christine, Bonnie—mothers, as they were, corpses they shall stay. Sydney knew what the lab was capable of. She sees it every time she looked into Eleven's hickory, broken eyes—the modern Prometheus: a love in her the likes of which the others could scarcely imagine and rage the likes of which they could not believe. An entire world exists because of them, and it lingers even now in Will. To bring Nadine into this was wrong of her. She was right. Her friend was right. Bonnie Munson's been dead for almost two decades.

   But didn't she deserve justice?

   "Nadine, I..." Sydney stammers over her own guilt as it fills in her mouth, choking on flowers, "I didn't think—"

   "Yeah," Nadine scoffs humourlessly, "you didn't. What am I gonna tell my brother? Hell, does this mean our dad's not even crazy? He's there, in Pennhurst, rotting away because he tried telling everyone about that—" she pointed contemptuously at the document. "Now you're telling me that he was right, all along?"

    Sydney grimaced. "My mom, she tried getting him out. This would've proved that he was sane—"

    "Yeah, and they fucking killed her for it, Sommers. I don't want to get killed."

    "I don't want to get you killed either. I didn't tell you this to get you involved in all of this—"

    "Wait," said Nadine markedly, lifting a hand, "has this got anything to do with what happened to the Byers kid last year?"

    Sydney cringed. "Well, erm—"

    "Judas Priest, Sydney. What the hell have you got yourself into?"

    "It's a long story, I don't want to have to burden you with all of it, Nadine. I seriously never meant to, like, freak you out, or endanger you, I just—" Sydney let out a shaky sigh, "I thought you deserved to know. I figured you'd do the same for me."

    Nadine's teeth toy with her split lip, blood spilling onto her tongue. It's an obsessive taste of hers. The metal swells in her mouth in a ouroboros punishment of replay—the skin-sloughing transmigration of all her grief and longing. She dangles on a leash that Sydney didn't even know she held, and she couldn't stay mad at her. Because she would do the same for her. Every time.

    "Well," she starts, falling back onto the futon. Her hand reached out for a tobacco tin and her rolling papers. "I think this calls for a smoke, don't you?"

    Sydney blinks at her in surprise, watching as Nadine started to pluck the stems out of her bud. "Are you—you don't want me to leave?"

    "You said it's a long story, yeah?"

    "Well, erm—yeah."

    "So, Kaminsky's chem lesson can wait. Start talking, Sommers."

AUTHOR'S NOTE.

yearly IKTE update. this is sooo underwhelming after almost 12+ months of radio silence, but it's important filler and sets up for the reason of season 2 (can u believe i'm 10 chapters into act 2 and we've barely entered canon yet.......erm, my bad. it's all stevesydney's fault for going on a slutty lakehouse holiday). hope this didn't disappoint too much, im gonna try be a bit more consistent with updates - spooky season is upon us, which means im gonna be rewatching "stranger things" for the cosy autumn 80s vibes. and i swear, the plot starts to pick up from here on and out, lol. 

shameless self-promo, despite not updating ikte, ive since published a regulus black fic, and a hotd fic. both also contain protagonists very similar to sydney - in that they have complicated relationships with their mother's, and are both involved in infidelity. apparently my girls all have something in common. i'd love if u could go check them out!

please drop your feedback/what u thought. hope you're all alright. 

DANI.