Chapter Twenty-Two ♰ 
A New Hope

  "So she didn't care? Like—at all?"

  "Oh I'm sorry? Did you want your ex-girlfriend to be mad at me?"

  Steve's neck nearly cracked from how fast he turned it to look at Sydney, his eyes wide with horror as a challenging stoicism subtly rose one of her brows.

  "What?" he coughed out, turning between to road ahead and the girl in his passenger seat, panicked. "No! That's not―that's not what I said!"

  Sydney's aloofness broke into a smile. "I'm messing with you."

  He deflated with a sigh of relief, then shot her a glare. "You gotta stop doing that. I nearly drove us off the road!"

  He was right. The leather seat under her now had a nail-tear after his tyres screeched from his foot slamming brutally on the brake. But Sydney just rolled her eyes like she hadn't just nearly caused a crash, and smiled out of the window at the thicket of pine trees lining the road. Ever since her 'confrontation' with Nancy, she had felt more at ease than she had in months. The last little haunt―the lingering sting―was Toby's hostility that morning. But Sydney kept telling herself it'd heal eventually. Toby never stayed mad at her.

  She was letting herself enjoy the little victories―such as Nancy burying the hatchet before blood could even be drawn, and the cold war between her and Steve being mitigated. She'd make up with Toby. They always did.

  "But yeah..." said Sydney absently, "she said she wasn't mad at me. Which is...outrageously good of her. I probably would've been crying and slamming her head into a brick wall."

  Steve nodded, a bit alarmed. "Comforting."

  She smiled again, and reached over the console to pinch his cheek. "I'm messing with you again. You should probably start catching on."

  Before she could fully take her hand away, Steve was sweetly brushing his lips across her knuckles. Sydney softened, keeping her arm outstretched as he kissed her fingertips too, not tearing his eyes off the road once. She felt a visceral tug at her heart; he was so pretty to look at. So ineffably pretty. When she let out a raw little sound from her throat at his ministrations, he looked up at her and flashed an innocent smile. Like he wasn't aware of the power he had over her. Like he had no clue at all.

  "So, uhh..." Sydney emptied her throat with a hearty cough and yanked her hand back. Steve had this shit-eating grin and Sydney let him have it, just stared shamefully out the window with a tight chest. "What's the plan?"

  "Your place, right?" checked Steve, brows pinching. When Sydney said nothing―still thinking about the loving kisses tingling across her knuckles―he looked at her, worried. "Right?"

  "Oh! Right! Yes, right."

  Steve frowned. "Have you changed your mind? Hey, if you still don't want me to meet your dad, I―"

  "Do you want to meet my dad?" asked Sydney sharply. 

  "I mean... Yeah," said Steve, giving a shrug. Eyebrows furrowing, Sydney sunk a little in her seat with a nod. And it was a sucker punch to Steve's gut. "But you don't."

  Sydney's head shook fervently. "No, it's not that." 

  "Hey, no, I fucked up so-"

  "Yeah, that's the problem."

  Steve tasted bile.

  "I just mean," Sydney added swiftly, trying to do damage control, "Dad knows how upset everything got me. I don't want him to think I'm weak or anything for forgiving you so easily."

  Steve would hardly call a year of yearning and painstaking love letters and a torrid affair "easy," but he doesn't say that. He's had enough of her being mad at him. Steve wanted Sydney to want him to meet her dad. It was a weird thing to long for but he had seen, slowly, over the past year, Sydney and her father form a bond that Steve envied. He heard the way Matt spoke about Sydney to other people―like she's his whole world. And Steve vividly remembered what Sydney was like after Matt got wounded in the upside down; catatonic until he was discharged from the hospital, and when he was, she was always at his side―even at the cutting of his cast. Matt was probably the single most important person in Sydney's life. Steve wanted to know him, and he wanted Sydney to be proud when she introduced him to her dad. He also wanted Matt to like him. He wanted Matt to like Steve for Sydney. 

  As if she could read his mind (and sometimes, Steve swore she could) Sydney reached out and put her hand on the nape of his neck. "Hey," she said, "I want you to meet my dad, okay?"

  Steve gulped. Hard. "Yeah?"

  Sydney smiled. It made his insides feel funny. "Yeah."

  "Okay..." He relaxed. "Okay, good. Because I want to meet him, too."

  All that enthusiasm went right out the window when Steve parked outside of Sydney and Matt's home and he realised the light on in the kitchen, a tangerine glow coming through the chiffon curtains, and Matt's truck on the drive. His stomach was suddenly in knots, and he started waging a war in his own head―what would be worse: another passive aggressive confrontation with Mother Dearest, or Matt McConnell kicking Steve out (but not before telling him what a waste of space he was for hurting his daughter.) 

  "Stevie," Sydney sung mockingly. "We're here. Are you okay?"

  "Am I―yeah, I'm...I'm good. Great. Let's―" He undid his belt. He felt like he was sweating. Shit, was he sweating? Did it gross Sydney out? "Let's do this."

  Sydney's mouth curled in amusement. "You're meeting my dad, we're not shipping off to 'Nam."

  Feels like it, Steve thought grimly.

  "Yeah, I know."

  "So, c'mon," she said, unbuckling her own belt and picking up her bag from its spot on the floor. "Let's go to war." 

  She was kidding, but Steve really felt like a soldier on his way to war as they made, hand-in-hand, the short distance from his BMW to the front door of the cabin. There was no knuckles against oak or even the jangling of keys for Steve to prepare himself, because Matt had obviously left the door unlocked for when Sydney came home, and she opened it with no hint of hesitation. The prettiest thing he's ever seen, Sydney looked over her shoulder briefly to grin at him, and walked right into her home, slipping between his fingers as he stalled on the doorstep.

  "Get yourself together, Steve," he mumbled under his breath.

  Bracing himself, Steve stepped inside and shut the door behind him.

  Steve had been here before, but now his senses were tuned right up to max and everything felt more. A year ago, his thoughts were entirely on Sydney―it diluted everything else around him. Like the peeling wallpaper, all of the mysterious stains on the carpet, and the furniture that definitely came with the house because all the vintage patterns and frills didn't seem like something Matt would choose. It was homely. And even though Steve knew just by glancing around that Sydney hadn't decorated an inch of this place herself, it was so perceptibly Sydney anyway. 

  With a hole in his heart, Steve thought back to what he said to her last year. Less emptiness to fill in a smaller house. It was probably one of the truest things he ever said. Suddenly, he's a little kid feeling like an insect under a microscope in his own house―the ceilings are unfathomably high and the walls feel simultaneously too far apart, and too claustrophobic, and even though there was more rooms than three people needed, there wasn't love in a single one. The Harrington household was so hollow and dark―another fossil of the American Dream in Loch Nora. But Matt and Sydney's cabin at the edge of Lover's Lake, surrounded by drug dealers, tax evaders and single mothers just getting by, was home.

  The hole in his hearts stitched itself back up again when Sydney popped her head round the corner of the kitchen door and smiled brightly at him. "You coming, pervert?"

  "Pervert?" Matt's voice yelled from the kitchen before Steve could reply. He startled, and his eyes widen as Sydney's roll up to the ceiling. "He's a pervert, too?"

  "Dad," Sydney seethed warningly, before disappearing back behind the door.

  Palms definitely sweating now, Steve slowly made his way down the hall and into the kitchen, and he nearly got knocked right onto a fall when a mass of fur and drooling saliva came bounding right at him. Steve cried out in surprise at the hard feeling of paws colliding with his abdomen, and was instantly willed to his knees at the excited panting and barking of a huge, friendly German Shepherd. 

  "Hey, buddy," Steve cooed, ruffling the dog's unruly, dark coat. "Hey."

  "Bastard takes my dog too," Matt mumbled bitterly.

  Steve's on his feet again in an instant. Soldier. And, before he can stop himself, he's lunging across the kitchen with his hand outstretched and a belly full of nerves.

  "Hi, Mr McConnell, it's nice meeting you... again."

  Matt's brows pinch together as he stared between Steve's hand and Sydney stood behind him, giving him a pleading expression. Try, she begs, please try with him like you tried with me.

  "Yeah, somehow the interdimensional monster and missing kid made it less awkward last time," said Matt dryly. 

  He wasn't the best at subtext. 

  Steve laughed uncomfortably and pocketed the sweating, ignored hand in the back of his jeans. "Yeah."

  "Ziggy, I've gotta go back to the station," Matt tells Sydney, eyes completely sweeping over Steve and softening at his daughter. As he talked, he swiped up his keys from the counter and left a wad of crumpled cash in their place on the granite. "Told Hop I'd take the night shift to help with Merrill's pumpkin patch―he's pretty upset about it."

  After he pecked a chaste kiss to her forehead and went for the door, Sydney noticed a brown, paper file-folder tucked into his trousers, poking out slightly from under his jacket. 

  "You're taking the night shift because of... pumpkins?" Sydney asked warily. 

  Matt paused in the doorway. "Uhh...yes. It's a pretty big deal. Merrill's and Eugene McCorkle's patches are all rotten. Could be something big."

  Sydney and Steve exchanged a look―lie.

  "Well, I hope you solve it," said Sydney rigidly.

  Matt's smile was thin, and a bit neurotic. "Thanks, kiddo. Umm... I left some cash for pizza, knock yourself out." He then narrowed his eyes meanly at Steve, "not up." 

  As Sydney exclaims in protest, horrified, Steve started choking on air and fervent promises of "not at all, sir," and "I would never," and he's now most definitely sweating (he felt the beads of it dampening his collarbone and nape of his neck.) 

  Matt ignored both and left. 

  It wasn't until they heard his tyres rolling over the gravel driveway that both of them recovered from Matt's ill-placed joke, and Sydney finally turned to him. Her cheeks were slightly pink from embarrassment, and her ears felt hot, but seeing Steve in such a state admittedly made her feel better. Something about a twitchy and nervous and downright pathetic Steve was somehow even better than arrogant, charming Steve. 

  Don't get her wrong, she loved Steve's hoarse voice in the morning back at the lakehouse when he murmured illicit things to her as he kissed the shell of her ear and grazed his knuckles against her bare thigh. She loved the giddy feeling she'd get in her belly every time he teased her and even the horrible ache he made her feel when he upset her. (And there was no better anger than the rage he gave her―none more justifiable and divinely feminine and volatile and beautiful.) But the high she got from being reminded that he was just as weak for her as she was for him was incomparable. Suddenly, she understood people like Nadine Munson. When you get a taste of a drug, of a high, you don't want to let go. Sydney never wanted to let go of Steve Harrington again.

   "So," she exhaled. "You wanna watch Star Wars?"

✸

  Alright, it's imperative to say that Matt McConnell didn't make a habit out of lying to his beloved daughter.

  In fact, Matt's had this lethal problem where he told Sydney things he shouldn't tell her at all―such as crude anecdotes from his teen years, and government confidential secrets, like Eleven, and her still being alive. 

  Matt never lied to Sydney. It just wasn't what they did. Ever since everything with Will, and the Upside Down, and both of them keeping things from each other, they had this silent pact that they would never do that again. They can't protect each other as effectively as they can if they're both on the same page―and that's why they kept so many secrets a week ago: to keep each other safe. It had all been in vain though―they both ended up intertwined in the same mess, the invisible string getting all knotted and unravelling to where they are now. Matt with a broken bone in his leg he may never fully heal and both of them burdened by a lifetime of interdimensional trauma. 

  So, Matt knew Sydney could handle her own. She's fought a monster from another realm, swallowed the pill of a girl with telekinetic powers―hell, even befriended her. But there was one thing that Matt needed to protect Sydney against and had vowed to do so till the day he died: 

  Mother.

  A faceless, lifeless, haunting omen. A grave. A mass of rot that still tenants inside of Sydney. A totem. And an unsold case.

  That's what brought Matt here: back to the gunmetal grey hell of Hawkins Laboratory. Or, more specifically, Anya's office: a sterile little room, with generic paintings hung up on the wall and a porcelain dish of mints on her desk. 

  "So, I'm sure you have a lot of questions, Matthew."

  Even in an informal meeting, Anya spoke clinically, and with the fluidity of running water. 

  "It's Matt," he corrected, placing Christine's documents on the lab on Anya's glass table. "And yeah, I can think of a few."

  Anya flashed that placating smile again and gestured for him to go on. 

  "As you probably know, last year in January, my―" the words catch in Matt's throat. My what? "My daughter's mother," he decided on, "died in a car crash."

  Anya wet her lips. "Yes, I watch the news, Mr McConnell."

  Matt shifted in his chair, sceptical. "I was looking through her stuff a few months back with our daughter and I find these files." 

  He nodded his head at them and at his indication, Anya picked them up, reluctance evident in her eyes as her fingers curl around the brown paper and open it. She digested it all quickly―the stories from the text subjects of Project MKUltra, and Peter Ballard, the orderly's, testimony―and got to the torn page at the end with pursed lips. 

  "Do you mistrust me that much you ripped out a page?" she mused wryly. 

  "I didn't do it," remarked Matt. 

  Anya looked curious. "Your daughter?"

  Matt shook his head. "Sydney wouldn't. She couldn't care less about any of this. She wants to put it―her mom―behind her."

  "Hmm," Anya considered. "And you?"

  He blanched. "What about me?"

  "Do you still care for this woman?" drawled Anya. "Do you still love her, is that why you're here? To avenge a woman you love and left and lost―"

  "It's none of your business why I'm here!" Matt exclaimed, chagrined.

  Politely, Anya closed the document and folded her hands over it upon the table. "Actually, Matthew, it is my business. You're in my workplace, in my office, asking me questions―so, I'll ask again: do you still love Christine Sommers?"

  A ghost made itself home in Matt's ribs.

  "Yes," he muttered.

  Anya seemed contented at that. "Do you still love her, or are you guilty that you abandoned her and your child, and she died?"

  "Listen, if you're just going to―"

  "The last entry in this file is dated the day before the crash," Anya observed, interjecting him smoothly. Matt faltered, not expecting that. Anya raised a brow, "Am I wrong, Mr McConnell?"

  "No...no, that's right."

  "It could just be a coincidence," she pointed out with a shrug.

  "See, no, no―" Matt rebutted, straightening up and wagging a finger 'no,' "It isn't. I know it isn't. And since finding these, I realised―Chris was a good driver. She would've never crashed."

  Anya looked amused. "A pretty baseless defence. Your honour, this wasn't an accident, she could drive really well," she imitated. At Matt's deadpan glare, she sighed and touched her fingertips to the file. "Matthew, the roads were icy―it had snowed all week, and frozen over... No matter how good of a driver Christine Sommers may have been, if wheels go out of control over an icy road, accidents happen." 

  "Okay, well, where was she going then?" demanded Matt, frantic. "It was past midnight, and it was dark and icy, like you say―and back home, she had just about everything she needed to take down this lab! Where was she going?"

  "Do you want me to dig her up and ask her?"

  "I want the truth!" he yelled back.

  Anya leaned back in her chair and considered this, him. Matt McConnell―former dysfunctional alcoholic, deadbeat dad and flaky sheriff's deputy turned... functional alcoholic, proud father and, well, still a pretty flaky sheriff's deputy. In her training, Anya was taught to dissect people, but Matt was hard to dissect―a bloated, decomposed corpse rather than a fresh one. The silver instruments didn't quite sever the skin and Anya couldn't draw blood. 

  "The truth is that Christine Sommers got very close to shutting down this institution because of Project MKUltra, and she died an admittedly very... suspicious death a day after her final entry," said Anya, blunt and precise. 

  A knife. Matt flinched. She finally drew blood. 

  "And," she continued, "the last entry was torn out by someone who you, and your daughter, does not know...

  Is that truth enough for you, Matthew?"

  Matt sat back, baffled. "Y-Yeah, I think about summarises it."

  Anya nodded. "Good. Now. Do you want to hear the real kick?" (The deepest cut.)

  "There's more?" he asked miserably.

  "I've memorised every last staff member who has ever worked in this facility―you know, upkeep of pensions, and other admin nonsense―but this testimony of the orderly..." trailed off Anya, jabbing a finger against the document. 

  "What? What about it?"

  "Mr McConnell, Peter Ballard does not exist."

  "He doesn't...exist?"

  Anya wet her lips and placed her joined hands in her lap professionally. "Peter Ballard doesn't work in this facility, Matthew. He isn't recorded in the system as of ever having been." She watched silently as a myriad of emotions took form across Matt's face and continued, "So, either Christine fabricated a testimony―"

  "Absolutely not," Matt shut down adamantly. "Chris was a good lawyer. The best."

  "A good driver... a good lawyer... Christine Sommers really was a jack of all trades," said Anya wryly.

  Matt felt like he was running a mile a minute. His heart was ahead of his head and he couldn't think. Peter Ballard didn't exist. The key testimony to whatever case Chris had been building was―what? Made up? Matt McConnell always had trouble processing hard to swallow pills―the death of his youth, the fact that he helped create something as perfect as Sydney, men on the moon―but coming around to the possibility that Christine Sommers was anything short of immaculate in every little way... that was the real tribulation. He had fashioned this idolised image in his head of an unattainable and flawless woman, cut from a priceless cloth, moulded by egoist hands. Chris was something he never deserved because she knew everything and had everything and that's how it should've always been.

  It was a contrary thing to believe, but that Matt thought for a while that maybe Chris could even cheat death, and when she got in that car crash, and Matt sunk into the first stage of grief―crippling denial―he convinced himself this was all a charade. She was twisting the knife in, he told himself. She wanted him to hurt, and blame himself. So he did. Ravenously. He tore himself up every day thinking of how much he wasted and fucked up by leaving her, leaving Sydney. Meanwhile, some childish part of him waited for Chris to come back from the dead and claw her belligerent, vengeful self out the grave―brushing soil off her shoulders, scoffing in God's face―and coming back for Daughter.

  Chris was never someone he thought could die from something as fickle as the brakes of her car failing her. At the age of 33, no less. She should've had longer. She should've done more.

  He could picture it so vividly now. Matt sits at home alone, with a beer that's gone stale in his hands, and the television on in front of him. Sydney isn't there, so the house has no light or warmth, it's just Matt, and static, and anguish. The TV in front of him shows Hawkins Laboratory being evacuated, and shut down. Chris shaking hands with the mayor but there's something else in her eyes―this wasn't enough. Bringing the lab to its knees and avenging all those women and their children―that was not enough. Chris wants everything and she will get everything Matt sits at home, alone, believing she can do it. He watches as she embraces Sydney loosely―handling Daughter like she's a bomb, and Chris doesn't want to dirty her brand new pencil skirt or chiffon blouse. She lets her go and Matt wallows in his misery, wishing he didn't.

  It's a tangible memory of something that didn't exist and never will.

  "...Matthew?"

  Anya's voice came from an echo chamber.

  "...Matthew, are you ok?"

  Matt pinched the bridge of nose, willing away the ringing in his ears, and the migraine thumping against his skull.

  "Yeah, I'm―I'm good."

  He breathed in deeply, and a sterile smell of ammonia and mercury filled his nose. He inhaled again, and this time it's Chris―his youth, his girl, everything he lost. She tasted too much like mint from chewing on gum to hide the taste of weed and too much coffee from her parents, and he had his hands on her waist, fisting the material of her expensive clothes like he was afraid she'd leave him, and she's all vanilla perfume, mango hair products, and all things good. She's his, then she isn't, and he's all alone.

  "Chris wouldn't make up a testimony, ok?" Matt insisted profusely. Anya didn't look convinced so he proceeded, "She wouldn't. She's―was probably just protecting someone's identity with a...a..."

  Unimpressed, Anya drawled, "Pseudonym?"

  "Yes!" he exclaimed. "A pseudonym. Maybe Peter Ballard is a pseudonym. Witness protection, right?"

  "Hmm," Anya reflected. "But what about the names of the women? Terry Ives... Meera Prasad... Bonnie Munson. Why not protect them?"

  Matt wavered. "I... I don't know! To give them a voice―tell their story. It was about the women. Helping them, giving them the justice they―wait. Did you say Bonnie Munson?"

  "Yes," said Anya slowly, perplexed. "Did you not―"

  Brain feeling swollen and waterlogged, Matt snatched the case file back and aggressively flicked through the pages. There was a log of every single subject of Project MKUltra that Chris managed, or rather tried, to question―Terry Ives, Meera Prasad... even Meera's daughter, Kali, and the few dregs spared about her time in the lab. Matt thought he had dissected every last word and testimony in the document: how did he miss someone so close to home?

  His finger jabbed at a page when he spotted a piece of paper torn right from a notebook and glued on top of a scrap newspaper article. The paper covered half of the article's headline, but Matt remembered reading this exact issue of the Hawkins Post when it was published in 1967. It was Bonnie Munson's obituary. Town princess turned town pariah after she traded the nuclear life for one of trailer parkers and a husband with cocaine debris dusting his nose, and a thousand needle-puncture wounds along the pale, bony canvases of his arms. And the paper on top of it was a messy spider-diagram written in the familiar scrawl of Chris's handwriting.

  He recognised it well because it hadn't changed since high school. The careless, frantic slanting of her 'T's and the forgotten dots over her 'I's and the ink smudged across the page, because Christine Sommers always wrote like she was running out of time. (Which, now, Matt saw that she was.)

  It was a patchwork of vomited words―'Bonnie,' circled and underlined, and connected to two other names, her children's: 'Eddie' and 'Nadine.' All three went back to the word in capitals at the top, written so angrily it indented the paper, and the charcoal of the pencil smeared as a shadow underneath it: "MKULTRA." At the bottom, surrounded by a border of violent question marks, was the town-epithet of Bonnie's husband, "Clyde," connected to another branch―Pennhurst Mental Hospital. And finally, branching off from both Clyde and Pennhurst, was the last name scribbled onto the diagram:

  "Victor Creel?" Matt wondered aloud. Anya straightened up, curious. "The psycho who killed his whole family?" He looked up at Anya's own perturbed expression, frowning, "what does he have to do with this?"

  Anya looked just as lost as him. "I...I don't know."

  "And Bonnie?" said Matt, waning. His fingers got limp and he dropped the document back onto the glass table.

  "You knew this woman?" prodded Anya.

  Matt felt cut open and raw. "She was Chris's best friend back at school."

  Anya hummed again. "Interesting. Maybe that's why―"

  Aggravated static suddenly started to come from Matt's walkie-talkie in his back pocket. He swallowed thickly, and rose an apologetic hand at Anya before using it to take out the walkie and press his thumb down on the moni button.

  "Hop?" he asked, a little breathless. "That you?"

  "I'm gonna need you to come down to the lab. Now," panted Hopper over the crackling reception. Matt stared at Anya, and she just rose her fair brows wryly. "I think I know what's been rotting the pumpkin patches."

  Matt looked around Anya's office and held down the button again.

  "Well, funny story there, Hop...I'm already here."

✸

  Matt didn't get back home until late.

  He went out with Hopper and a team of the lab's scientists to Merrill's pumpkin patches after Hopper accused Dr Owens of allowing whatever they were experimenting on to fester beyond the facility. Matt would've been quite content in calling it a day―his brand new trainers from Sydney ruined by rotten pumpkin carcasses, and his brain hurt after all of the many revelations scuttling around in it like centipedes―but when Powell called Hopper to inform him about a woman witnessing a strange girl using her mind to manipulate her kid's swing, Hopper practically begged Matt to come back to his cabin with him to 'sort Eleven out.'

  Matt didn't know when he went from deadbeat dad to a kind of inspiration figure that Hopper needed to model his fatherhood skills after so he could properly reprimand the little, complicated girl he took under his wing. He did know, however, that he ended up being absolutely no help at all, and spent the miserable drive home in the dark grimacing about the argument between El and Hopper he had witnessed like a pathetic fly on the wall. Hop furiously revoked Eleven's television privileges, and when El tried using her powers to root the television in place, Hop severed the fuse and reinforced his punishment by saying that Matt was going to let Eleven see Sydney ever again. El had screamed that she hated them both and threw what Matt could only describe as a psychic tantrum in her bedroom―every last one of the cabin's windows smashing into smithereens.

  Matt stood, helpless, his arms wounded and bleeding, a little cut on his temple too, and said something meagre like, "Daughters, right?"

  Hopper kicked him out, forlorn and furious, and here Matt was, returning home at 11:52 after quite possibly one of the worst days of his life, not knowing that, with only eight minutes left, it could still get worse.

  When he got into the hall of their cabin and saw the television light trickling from the living room, Matt mistakenly thought Sydney had stayed up for him, and was maybe watching Only Fools and Horses, after kicking Steve out and ordering a pizza in for her to share with Matt when he got home. His heart swelled at the thought, and his smile grew as he imagined Steve spluttering over his words as she frogmarched into the door and left him outside in the cold, dumbfounded.

  "Ziggy?" he called out. He was met with muffled words coming from the TV and no response from his daughter. "Sydney, I'm home. Sorry I'm back late, kiddo, it's been a―"

  Blanching in the doorway, Matt dropped Chris's case file comically when he saw what was in front of him. It was the complete opposite of the little reverie he had cooked up in his mind―optimism too fickle of an ingredient. The television was halfway through playing Sydney's prized Return of the Jedi VHS, not only Only Fools & Horses at all. He had expected to find Sydney where he had found her many times before―half-asleep on his armchair, curled up in a blanket, drowsy but still fighting to stay awake for them to squeeze in at least one episode before bed. But she wasn't. And Steve Harrington was still in his fucking house.

  Cuddled up so tightly their ribs may as well have been fused together by sewn viscera and threaded veins, Steve fucking Harrington was wrapped around Matt's daughter on the couch, her head tucked into the nape of his neck, and his resting on top of hers. He had an arm draped over her shoulder, and she had one of hers hugging his abdomen. He could hear Steve snoring softly with one of his nostrils pressed right against Sydney's hair, and she was faintly talking in her sleep―murmuring nonsense like she always did after drifting off in the middle of a movie.

  Matt's hands were balling at his sides and he had every mind to wake them both up with his petulant yelling―just about to slide into the effortless role of a protective father scorning the very same boy who had spent the past year putting Sydney through the ringer and breaking her already bruised heart (the very same Matt should cradle and protect.) He had a throat full of insults and belligerence and he was about to fill the walls with them when―

  The pizza box in front of them was empty. Apart from a few crusts, sure, but―empty.

  Sydney had ate it all.

  His heart broke in the most terrifying, beautiful way―the cracking of Father's most vital and wounded organ, after suffering so much torment in one day.

  Somewhere across town, the bell tower struck midnight, and his bad day was over, and Matt bent down to scoop up Chris's file, and tiptoed to his room, desperate not to wake either Daughter or the boy beside her up.

  He went to bed and dreamed of Christine.

  (They used to do the very same thing.)