Chapter Twenty-Six ♰
Stay Soft, Get Eaten

  𝕺ne thing's for certain, Toby Stanfield had to stop saying, 'yes,' to those insufferable kids.

  This time around, he was pretty sure that he got hoodwinked or something. Dustin Henderson showed up on his doorstep, all toothy-grinned and that slight neurotic glint nursed in his eyes whenever he got one of his mad ideas, and told Toby as sententiously as a kid reading out a shopping-list that some kind of animalistic thing from the Upside Down had mauled his cat. Toby's first instinct—as it usually was with pretty much everything—was to ask about Sydney. But Dustin, rather indignantly, told Toby that he hadn't heard from anyone, that Toby was his only hope. It was the kind of massage that Toby needed to his wounded ego after Sydney ditched him at the Halloween party, so he snatched his Reebok's and the crowbar from under his bed, brusquely kissed his sick mother's forehead, and followed Dustin out of the wraparound porch.

  And if that had been it—just this testy kid asking Toby for help in something that he was desperately praying was not about the Upside Down at all (and that Dustin was maybe just a bit too bored nowadays, and had concocted some crazy story about some cardinal predator eating his cat)—Toby might've stomached it. But, as it always happened with these kids, it was worse.

  Dustin must've thought that rambling to swell that syrupy-thick silence between them would've been enough to distract Toby, because he prattled on about the torn-up viscera of Mews the cat, and how badly he missed El at times like this. And even if the memory of the sallow-skinned orphan from last year was enough to briefly soften Toby's heart, nothing could've prepared him for seeing Steve Harrington's car parked outside of his house. Citrus-varnished, burgundy gleam, and obnoxious. It must've took some kind of gall and restraint that Toby honestly didn't know he could muster to not take the crowbar in his knuckled-grip to the windshield of that Beemer and run back into his house, bolting all the locks.

  Toby spent the rest of the day—trudging sluggishly behind Steve and Dustin along the twin lines of an abandoned rail track, tossing along slabs of raw meat as bait as they went—swearing that this was his punishment for being so nasty to Sydney the day before. He should've heard her out. Should've listened. It wasn't Sydney he couldn't stomach, it was Steve. And Sydney's—God, she's everything; and he missed her in his bones. She existed even here, right now, in his marrow; in the dull ache as he tried miserably not to say something as Steve encouraged Dustin to play hard-to-get with the new girl he had a crush on. And this ouroboros of self-flagellation that Toby had pathetically fallen victim to—thinking about her perfume, the snorted-lilt of her laugh when her belly felt too sore, all those years of friendship sabotaged by this one guy and his ridiculous fucking hair...—it made him feel no less primal or full of teeth than the very thing they were hunting.

  "Oh, yeah," said Harrington, snatching off the unnecessary pair of Ray Bans he insisted on wearing. "Yeah, this will do. This will do just fine."

  Dustin had brought them to the junkyard—the very same that he and his friends were hiding out at when the lab sent helicopters and government-assassins after El last year. Toby didn't exactly have long to linger in the cyclical nature of it all, not when Steve was already strolling off deeper into the cemetery of rust-bitten cars and other weathered vehicles, emptying what was left of the fresh beef into a pile of pinkish carrion.

  "Good call, dude," Steve praised Dustin, smearing the sweat on his forehead against the sleeve of his jacket.

  Dustin beamed radiantly, glancing up at Toby all fever-bright, as if to say, 'did you hear that, man? He said good call!'

  Toby just ruthlessly flicked the bill of Dustin's baseball cap and started to empty his own bucket of raw meat onto the mound of bait.

  "I said medium-well!"

  The three of them turned. Just on the crest of the junkyard, clutching the shining handlebars of his beloved bike and flanked by some redheaded girl, Lucas Sinclair was waving at them enthusiastically. Toby wanted to go home.

  "Who's that?" Steve asked drolly.

  Toby's eyes stung from how hard they rolled at his slowness. They then considerably softened when they raked over to Dustin's sullen face as he stared yearningly at the girl with the wily, ginger hair as her shoulder brushed companionably with Lucas's in their frogmarch over. Toby knew that look well. He mastered that look. He lived in it. That unsightly forlornness of jealousy and longing and—

  "You're an idiot," Toby sneered at Steve.

  Steve blinked at him, startled. This was the first time Toby had spoken to him all day—well, since Halloween. "What? I'm—what did I even do?"

  "Lucas," gritted Dustin, almost seething when the others reached them, "we need to talk."

  Lucas glanced between Steve and Toby, thoroughly confused, and let his head slowly nod. "Yeah. I think so, too."

  "C'mon," Toby said to the redhead girl. "I'll show you what we're doing."

  Her left shoulder lifted laconically as she stalked after him towards the oxidised skeleton of a school bus. Admittedly, the red converse she had on—the very same pair that Sydney had—left a bad taste in his mouth as he started to absentmindedly mumble about how they should use the least rusted sheets of metal they could find to barricade any and all exists to the bus. She seemed astute enough to not touch anything that looked like it might make her contract tetanus and started to dutifully help him fortify the bus.

  "So," she said after a few minutes of working, "is this, like, your day job or something? Creeping around junkyards with buckets of offal?"

  Toby, elbow-deep in a haphazard pile of rusted sheet-metal, didn't spare her a glance. "Sure. Union's crap, but the pay's great.

  "Funny," she replied dryly. When he didn't bite, the girl toed miserably at a flattened car door before she wedged her foot entirely into a wheel-well. "This is so weird, dude. Like, Stalker—sorry, Lucas—he told me this crazy story. About this girl who could move things with her mind, and—" She narrowed her eyes at Toby's standoffish face, observing his features and frowning when he didn't even flinch. "Oh, c'mon! Not you, too?"

  Still, he said nothing. Instead, Toby picked up a bent license plate and started to work into a gauge in the side of the bus.

  "Oh my god, seriously?" she exclaimed. "What is this town? What's in the water here? Is it lead?"

  "Lead?"

  The girl shrugged happily, offering a crumpled bumper next. "I'm Max, by the way. Max Mayfield."

  "Cool. M'Toby."

  "Cool. How do you know Lucas?"

  "Erm." Toby went still, considering it. "My best friend, she, uh—she used to babysit him."

  A startled laugh of delight rasped from 'Max.' "Lucas needed a babysitter?"

  "Don't all kids?"

  "I mean, sure, but...—That's hilarious." She pretended to smear fake-tears from the corners of her eyes. "This best friend of yours. Is she still around?"

  Toby blinked. "Sort of."

  Max, painfully perceptive, nodded solemnly. "Boy trouble?"

  "I guess. She's got this...Steve Harrington problem."

  Max glanced over her shoulder at where Steve was reprimanding Lucas and Dustin for slacking, and she smiled ruefully. "Do the doctors say how long she's got left?"

  "I don't know," mused Toby wryly. "They think it might be terminal."

  "Well, I hope they find a cure." She made a face at the back of Steve's head, just as he shoved his sunglasses into his hair. "He looks like he's gonna audition for Terminator."

  Toby scoffed. "He wishes."

  "Did you say something, Stanfield?" chimed Steve, a petulant singling of his brow and a slight squint to his eyes that made Toby's mouth twitch (exacerbated more so when Max's shoulders started to tremble with small giggles).

  "Nope," said Toby, his grin lopsided, "nothing at all, Harrington."

  Steve didn't look satisfied, but he relented. Instead, he clasped his hands together and glanced approvingly at the fully-reinforced bus. "Well, nice going, team. I think this is a solid set-up we've got going on here—"

  "Is he, like, captain of some basketball team you're on or something?" Max asked dryly.

  "He's not my captain," Toby muttered to her absently, causing her to laugh again.

  "Hey, uh, Toby?" Steve's suddenly right next to them, almost squeamish as he rung his busying hands together over his careworn frame and grimaced dolorously at Toby's ensuing glare of distaste. "Can we, erm—" Steve blinked owlishly at the surrounding throng of his kids, who were all exchanging highly amused looks of pre-teen cheek and impishness, "you know, can we...talk?"

  Toby stared at him, farcical. "We are talking."

  "C'mon, man...You know what I mean," he said beseechingly, looking increasingly uncomfortable and pained. He cocked his head desperately to the side, gesturing for a clearing just far enough away out of earshot from the kids. "It'll only be a sec?"

  "Fine. Whatever."

  Toby patted Max's shoulder good-naturedly and mumbled something about, 'not gonna be long,' and tried not to let his grin get anymore shit-eating when she started whispering ingeniously with Dustin and Lucas. He followed after Steve just up the pregnant crest in the starched grass, rolling his eyes as the boy fretfully rolled the hilt of his spiked bat between the knots of his sweat-slicked fingers.

  Despite spending the better years of his life painstakingly making excuses for Sydney Sommers' most egregious mistakes, Toby seemed to fall short in his conscientious moments of trying to defend her attraction for Steve Harrington. After all, it was pretty much gospel around Hawkins that Steve genuinely thought that the survival of democracy was dependent upon the perfection condition of his hair. Toby once thought it was enough to know a person as well as you knew the insides of yourself—the very pinkish cartilaginous knots where the sinewy heart beats agonisingly behind. Clearly, it wasn't. He might one day open his pulmonary vein and let all of his longing bleed out in some macabre demonstration of just how much he loved his best friend. But all that brutish blood did not matter in the face of Steve Harrington's boyish charm.

  Nor did it matter that Toby Stanfield knew the architecture of Sydney Sommers how a sensitive child might remember the contents of their haunted, childhood home. The furniture of her grief, the nailed-photographs of her longings, the bookshelves of her deficiencies, the scarf he left on some armchair they shared years ago, in the off-chance she might call him to retrieve it. Not as long as Steve Harrington's fingers dug into her underjaw and he mouthed promises against the pulsing tremble in her throat.

  "—listen, uh, Toby..." Shit. When did Steve even start to talk? "I know we've kind of, like, gotten off on the wrong foot. Halloween, shit, that was...Shit. But, I just wanna say, there's no hard feelings, all right?"

  No hard feelings? No hard fucking feelings?

  Toby would punch the fucker in the jaw and swell his mouth with blood if he didn't think that Sydney would tenderly lick the rubies of it from his pouted lips.

  "I mean," Steve went on, laughing nervously, "Sid really cares about you, man. You're her best friend in the world."

  And God, if they didn't exact like a sucker-punch.

  Here he was, Steve Harrington in the sunkissed, mole-tendered flesh, trying to emulate the kind of sincerity and earnest that Toby had spent the majority of his life trying to convince himself that Steve couldn't possess (he had to have some sort of shortcoming, right?). But all Toby heard was years of hunger and yearning gutted of any chance at satiate by how casually Steve uttered the words, 'best friend.' Like, Toby was nothing more than a Tommy H. or Carol to Sydney. As though he wasn't her iron lung or absent limb. The kind of title that Toby used to wear as his proudest, most prettiest bruise, until the girl he loved started to fuck Steve Harrington—that boyishly, self-assured saint of undeserved second chances.

  "Yeah. Yeah, that's me, man. Sid's best friend." It leaves him brittle, pitchy, so un-Toby-like.

  "Look, Toby, I didn't mean..." Steve sighed, pinching the bridge of his nose and pressing his mottled knuckles to his jutted hip. "I hope I haven't..." The one silver-lining out of all this was the agonised expression on his face. At least that offered Toby a slither of satisfaction. "I just want to clear the air, all right?"

  Toby dipped his chin hollowly, slanting him a short, bared grin. "Air's clear. Crystal. Are we done?"

  Steve hesitated. He wasn't done. He didn't think this could ever be done. Not with Sydney between them, a picked-at scab of wounded pride and the coagulated blood of septic envy.

  "Sure," he said nevertheless, "yeah. Sure. We're done."

  Toby nodded, grateful. Max shouted his name again, elbowing Lucas conspiratorially in the ribs as if they were exchanging the funniest joke. He briefly stole a final glance at the rattled look Steve was trying to keep hidden behind his pursed lips and Ray Bans, and didn't even bother covering up his own scoff as he stalked back over to the kids. The sun setting warm and mirror-bright on the nape of his neck as he went, the grass parched and yellowed, Steve Harrington stood with the brutal reminder that someone had loved Sydney Sommers far longer than he had—far better.

  It delivered a nasty pang to his stomach as Steve stared remorsefully at Toby's squared shoulders and that aching rosary of his spine. It wasn't ask if any part of Steve expected them to be friends. He'd heard nastiness snarl from Toby's mouth that even the likes of rabid dogs couldn't replicate with starved bellies. But, he thought Sydney might be enough to soften the blows that Toby liked to exact against the soft parts of Steve that still flinched whenever someone didn't like him or said something unkind. The pitiful fact is, Steve Harrington couldn't stomach not being loved. It left a bad taste in his mouth. A bad child, an unlikeable child, a difficult-to-digest son. He lived on eggshells in his empty home, and his father made him breathe funny. At school, he was wanted. Envied. Yearned after.

  ...But now, with Sydney—he felt incongruent, like he was trying to assimilate into this fractured life that he simply did not fit into. One where Toby already carved out a place to burrow, a place to exist. He belonged with Sydney. Within her, maybe. In her ribs. Some self-pitying part of Steve couldn't help but feel like he just didn't deserve that, not like how Toby Stanfield did.

  God, his lungs hurt.

  The sky was smeared now with tangerine kissing the guts of raspberries. Toby was rolling his eyes affectionately as Dustin rambled on about Dart, the predator/prey, and Max was yanking at the sleeve of Toby's plaid over-shirt to try and get his attention about something. Meanwhile, Lucas was angling his bandana over his browbone to mimic Toby's demeanour. And Sydney's name—always Sydney, always his Nicks—hummed in Steve's blood like a haemorrhaging throb he couldn't quit.

  He didn't even know when he'd started to hold his breath.

  When he let it go, it came out ragged and in agony.

  "Fuck," he muttered quietly, rubbing his thumb over a sweat-slick brow. "Pull yourself together, Harrington."

  Night fell, and the inky-twilight found Toby perched bird-like in the eyrie of the bus's rooftop, the small of his spine cushioned by a deflated tyre. Elbow grazing his, Lucas was diligently keeping him company on 'lookout,' squinting through a pair of trusty binoculars through the fog that had settled slowly over the junkyard. Downstairs, Toby tried not to think too hard about whatever Steve and Dustin were talking about in hushed, conspiring voices as Max anxiously paced the length of the bus's aisle.

  "Hey, Toby?" said Lucas, tentative.

  "Yeah, kid?"

  "I was just wondering...where's Sydney?"

  He swallowed hard. "I...I actually don't know."

  Lucas nodded his head in solemn understanding. "She okay?"

  "I don't know that either, buddy." Toby was ashamed to say that his breath trembled the slightest bit.

  Lucas went very quiet. Unusually quiet for him. He adjusted his focus back to his binoculars, and grimaced through gritted teeth.

  "She'll be okay, though," he offered eventually. "She's tough."

  "Yeah. Yeah, she is," murmured Toby, soft and sullen.

  "I'm still her favourite, though." As if to comfort him, Lucas slanted Toby a shit-eating grin. All wry mischief and boyish cheek. "You know that, right?"

  Heartily, Toby laughed and leaned over to drolly tug Lucas's bandana over one eye, blindsiding him. "Yeah, yeah. Keep telling yourself that, you little shit."

  Just then, Max emerged from the fragile ladders, grinning crookedly at the two of them. "I'm not interrupting your bonding time, am I?"

  "Nope," said Toby, sparing Lucas a wink and a lighthearted shove, "he's all yours, Max."

  It was a bit clumsy, Max crawling over the mound of flattened tyres and Toby trying not to knee her in the gallbladder or something sore as he brushed past to make his way down the ladders. They managed it, Toby's hands definitely more calloused than they were this morning from all the rust-bitten metal that had been pressed into the sensitive skin of his palms. It's days like this when he thought about that scar he shared with Sydney, Nancy, and Jonathan—a healed wound by now; it didn't hurt, not ever. Still, it attested for a permeability to the four of them that felt more subjectively human than anything else (even blood, or skin, or marrow) could ever offer, knowing all that they know.

  His feet hit the weathered floor of the bus with a dull thud, startling Dustin, and forcing Steve to flip the Zippo lighter he was messing about with shut.

  "—as I was saying," said Dustin, cutting a glare across at Toby, "I don't care about her."

  Steve, lips twitching, winked. Toby's eyes rolled so hard he thought they might get lost somewhere in the depths of his skull.

  "Why are you winking, Steve? Stop," Dustin demanded, cross.

  "I'm just saying, man," he said innocently, "I know what the chicks dig. And it's cool guys. Guys who act like they don't care—"

  "And I said, I don't!"

  Toby worked at the ache in his jaw, thumbing over the tension in his mandible. "But, you do."

  "What?" seethed Dustin.

  "You do care. You care a lot, actually."

  Dustin's eye twitched vehemently. "I think that's what a professional might call projecting, Stanfield."

  "Sure. All right. You listen to Harrington." Toby stalked to the other end of the bus, snatching up his crowbar as if he might sever Steve's skull with it. "See how far hard-to-get will get you."

  Then, the Steve Harrington that Toby's always known—the one with a meanness about him, all split knuckles, the shattered pieces of Jonathan's beloved camera, Sydney's wasted bones—trickled out. A mumble, under-breath, cruel in a way only a boy could be, "Worked well enough for me..."

  "You asshole—"

  "I've got eyes!" cried Lucas from above.

  Dustin glanced between Toby's eyes of hate and the arrogant smirk Steve refused to let go of. "Can you two have your dick-swinging contest later? I think we've got more important things to be dealing with right now, don't you?"

  "Ten o'clock!" Lucas screeched. "Ten o'clock!"

  Toby, Dustin, and Steve all rushed to the nearest window, peering through the corroded gaps of a metal fence they nailed against it on the outside. The fog was dense and pale, almost water-ish at it swept in swathes along the ankle-high grass and old machinery. Just at the altar of the pinkish meat, a thing—just like Dustin described; hunchbacked at the spine, slick with viscera that looked black and almost like tar. It did not bite. It did not take a single scrap.

  "He's not taking the bait," whispered Steve, frantic, "why's he not taking the bait?"

  "Maybe's not hungry," Dustin offered lamely.

  Toby frowned, gut twisting grimly. "Maybe he's sick of cow."

  "Well, great. Do you happen to have pork, or chicken—something else to the extraterrestrial's liking, Stanfield?" Steve sneered.

  "No. But, I can do one better." Toby lifted his shoulder, straightening up to meet Steve's eye in almost a challenge. "Us."

  "Us." Steve's blown pupils seemed to soften out in realisation. Toby stared at him unflinchingly, and Steve chanced a look at his bat resting against the wall. He smiled mournfully. "Right. Us."

  "Guys?" said Dustin, confused. "Guys, what are you doing? Steve?"

  Steve and Toby lingered at the door—armed with boyish arrogance, a nailed bat, and a mechanic's crowbar.

  "Just..." Steve tossed his Zippo at Dustin, and he caught it haphazardly against his heaving chest, "get ready," he said ruefully, and turned to Toby. "You ready, Stanfield?"

  Toby's long fingers flexed around the angled hilt of the crowbar, the metal biting into this fresh calluses on the knots and slopes of his knuckles. A longing pulsed against the artery in his neck that spurred on whatever reckless bravery made him even suggest going out there to fight this thing.

  "Sure," he said lamely, "why not?"

  Their trainers hit the dirt in unison and the fog parted like the Red Sea at the holy feet of Moses. The creature was closer now; its sinewy limbs slick with otherworldly gore, its flower-like mouth twitching as thought it could smell the heat and syrupy-sweet yearning in their blood. It moved low and primal, its vine-like ligaments straining as the swollen curve of its spine cringed all grotesque beneath wet, matted flesh.

  It was almost the toddler version of whatever they fought last winter. Embryonic and nightmarish. An oily, black saliva dripped menacingly from the petals of its sawtooth mouth, hungry and inhuman.

  "Here, buddy-buddy..." whistled Steve as they treaded closer. "C'mon, little man...Dinnertime. Human tastes better than cat, I promise."

  "It's not a fucking dog, Harrington."

  Steve snapped his eyes at him, blown and belligerent. "Do you have any better ideas?"

  "Guys!" Lucas screamed from his perch atop of the bus. "Look out!"

  "A little busy here, Sinclair!" yelled Steve, barely glancing over his shoulder.

   "Three o'clock! Three o'clock!"

  "Three o'...—motherfuck—" Toby blanched, side-stepping until he and Steve were stood back-to-back, raising his crowbar as a second creature emerged from the tendrils of fog. This was one was crawling in a vulturine prowl, its maw unfurling in a caterwauling growl, padding over the cringing steel of a car's hood. "How many are there, exactly?"

  "The fuck if I know, Stanfield!"

  "Steve! Toby! Abort!" screeched Dustin his throat raw, prying open the school bus's door. "Abort!"

  The second doglike thing, the one advancing on Toby, pounced. Its shriek was like meat being cleaved from bone, and Toby launched away from it, swinging down the crowbar against its sinewy vertebrae. The squawk of pain was animalistic and blood-curdling. Toby staggered back, something black and viscous like molasses dripping from the iron bar as the monster rounded on him, wound oozing tar-like blood and its teeth bared in fury.   

  Somewhere behind him, Steve was swinging his bat down onto the other creature's throat and falling backwards onto the boot of a nearby car. Toby, panting, dug the heels of his trainers into the dirt and stared down his own monster. Then, in a sickening tandem with Dustin's frightened scream of his name, the thing charged.

  Toby didn't really think. Its jaw unfurled mid-leap, petals of jagged flesh twitching and glistening with brutish drool. A beat, and its paws were flush against Toby's breastbone, triplet-claws scratching at his sternum and prying an agony out of him that languaged itself into a short, profane yell. He swung again—more desperately this time. He thought of Sydney's bedroom as the crowbar caught the side of its jaw, the scratch of her turnable's needle over a Rumours vinyl as a wet crunch echoed through the junkyard's clearing. A single tooth—not quite a canine, not that normal—dislodged from its mouth, and spiralled into the night's mist. It howled in pain of its own, convulsing and madly snatching out to graze Toby's shoulder this time.

  Toby stumbled. The stings were hot and bright, and Steve was yelling something unintelligible as he cracked his bat down a final time—wood and nail and meaty flesh.

  "Toby, run!" the kids were yelling.

  And it's still Sydney.

  It's her perfume intermingling in the metal of this thing's ichor-blood. It's her smile in the face of something so unsightly and grotesque. It's Sydney and how she belonged to something better than this. He'd hand her pliers and let her extract his teeth. He wanted her back.

  "Stanfield, are you slow?" sneered Steve, suddenly there—here—snatching Toby's arm and dragging him along to the school bus. "Fucking move it!"

  The kids were barricading the door back up after them and Steve threw himself in front of them just as the injured, growling things came to bear at the sheets of metal, scratching at the rust.

  "Are they rabid or something?" Max demanded timorously.

  Toby, kicking himself back into it, yanked up a sheet of metal to reinforce the old door. The strain of lifting it exacted a tearing pain to the cuts slashed across his torso and made him hiss, swaying back until he slumped clumsily against Lucas.

  "Shit!" the kid swore, blanching. "Toby, he's shot!"

  "M'not shot—"

  "It can't get in," Dustin was panicking, yanking at his curls, "it can't get in. It can't—right, Toby?" Toby looked like he might puke. "Steve?"

  A body part tore right through the metal and the kids all screamed as they skidded further along the length of the bus. Steve swung his bat down onto the outstretched the limb but a second arm pulverised through the sheet, the very same that Toby had scathed.

  "—Is anyone there?" Dustin bellowed into his walkie. "Mike? Will? Sydney? God, anyone!"

  Another bang exploded from the roof above and Toby rushed over to them, raising his crowbar protectively and hardening his jaw against the feeling of his skin baring at the pull.

  "...We're at the old junkyard, and we are going to die!"

  Toby tried to calm them down, reprimanding, "We aren't going to die."

  Lucas suddenly tore the walkie from Dustin's grasp and shouted into it, "Toby's bleeding out and is experiencing delusions!"

  "Okay, that's just—"

  A blood-curdling scream ripped through Max's lungs then, and Toby tore around, seizing her shoulders and yanking her back from the ladders, where one of the creatures was stood at the top of, leering down. His nails bit into the scruff of her neck as Steve came to stand in front of them all, wagging his bat challengingly as he goaded it with some bullshit.

  "You want some?" he taunted. "Come get this! C'mon!"

  And, for one, singular moment, Toby feared it would—that it would sink its digitigrade fingers into the cartilaginous knots of Steve and split him down the middle. That all that brilliant blood would ooze out and splatter Dustin's new kicks. But, it hesitated. A confused, languishing twitch as it tilted its head to the side, as if craning towards a faraway sound. And, with an ensuing grunt of half-starved disappointment, it skulked itself away.

  The paw-like footfall crunched over busted metal until it fell unceremoniously onto sun-bleached grass and crept away with its kin into the mist-slick night.

  Finally, breaths. Sharp, stuttered ones. Soft pants and lung-rattles. Toby's grip slackened from the nape of Max's neck, where he was guiltily sure that he left a handprint on the sweat-dewed skin. Lucas, all ballooned pupils, blinked blearily up at Toby, as if asking if the danger was really gone. In the end, it was Steve who led the charge to the outside, nails of his bat carving burrows into the dirt as he dragged it along.

  "What happened?" demanded Lucas shakily.

  "I don't know," murmured Max, trembling behind him.

  Toby cradled his sweating palm against his bleeding cuts. "I don't trust it."

  "Maybe," suggested Dustin, halfhearted and hopeful, "Steve and Toby scared 'em off?"

  "No," said Steve, too-quick. He turned around, all hero-hair and charismatic, the bat balanced over his shoulder, and interjected adamantly, "No way—they're going somewhere."

♰

  Matt McConnell, as he oftentimes found himself these days, was having a really shitty day.

  He hadn't seen Sydney in over twenty-four hours—not since their argument in the morning-glow of their kitchen, that seemed so trivial now. He missed his daughter. It's laughable, really, the kind of things he misses when he's away from her. The way she taunts him by dangling slimy mushrooms between his appalled eyes when he drifted off during a movie night. That fond, half-frustrated lilt in her voice when he danced embarrassingly after a few beers as he cheffed them up something mediocre in the evenings. He even missed how loud she'd listen to music when she holed herself up miserably in her room when she was miserable on her period, snarling meanly at him if he dared to ask her to turn it down—the soft pillows he'd get lobbed at his head if he poked in it her door to check in.

  God, he missed his daughter. He'd rather be anywhere but here, in the lab, where everything reeked of disinfectant and the bad coffee-breath of all the careworn scientists with their hollowed eyes and misery-set frowns. He wanted to go home. Wanted to hug his kid, tell her that she's his daughter, and he's her father, that that's how it started and that's exactly how it's gonna end, and he's so sorry for all of the shit that came in the middle. He wanted to promise her that he'd let all of this bullshit with the lab and with Chris and all the ghosts go. That it would just be the two of them and their shitty home that's haunted in its own kind of way, but he hoped those ghosts treated her more kindly than the ones she left behind the white-picket fence of Loch Nora.

  But he couldn't go home. Not yet. Not with Will in this state, more skeleton than boy in a too-big hospital gown, some fly in a trap of spiderwebbing tubes and a beeping machine that Mike Wheeler kept glancing at with prayers in his doe-tender eyes. Hopper's long-since stalked off, frogmarching Dr. Owens to the Gate so they could exorcise whatever hive-mind had sunk its jaws into Will. It's just Matt in the corner of a sterilised hospital room in scrubs that stink of detergent and little death, an ache in his ribs as Joyce held vigil to her sickly son, and her boyfriend, Bob Newby, tried lightheartedly to cheer up Mike.

  "Hey," Bob said gently, nudging a chair toward him with his foot, "you need to sit, kiddo. You're swaying like a pine tree in a thunderstorm, ha."

  Mike shook his head, mumbling softly, "I'm fine."

  "He's right, Mike," Matt interjected, his smile weak. "You're thirteen. You shits are never fine. Sit."

  The kid blinked at him, a bit startled, but sat anyways. His eyes never left Will.

  Matt let out a quiet sigh of relief. Solemnly, it felt like his first win of the day.

  He needed a coffee. A cigarette. His daughter.

  Instead, he got Anya.

  The door eased open with a hiss, and Anya—that perfect head of shiny, honey-blonde hair of hers twisted into a chignon and fixed by a biro—slipped in, all willowy and pursed lips, a manila folder clutched so tight to her ribs Matt thought the papers might become a part of her. She didn't look as put together as she usually did, he noticed quickly. The tender skin of her under-eyes was smeared with purplish bruises from a lack of sleep, and the buttons of her lab-coat were subtly askew. Her gaze swept the room almost neurotically until they reached Matt with a brisk efficiency that did ultimately nothing to cover up her nerves. Briefly, her swollen eyes did rake back to Will, who was still sleep-soft and jaundiced, as if just to check that he was still breathing, but they didn't linger.

  Evidently, whatever was in that folder she was white-knuckling wasn't about Will. That realisation hit Matt like a sucker-punch.

  Christine.

  He stood up before she said anything.

  "Can we talk?" Anya's voice left her as raw as a frayed wire, trembling. She blinked dolefully at Joyce's forlorn expression, and added hastily, "Outside?"

  "Is this," Joyce stammered, afraid, "is this about Will?"

  "No, Mrs. Byers," she assured her warmly, but with a splinter. The smile she delivered was brittle. "This isn't about your son. Will's stable. This isn't about him, I promise. I just—I need to borrow Matthew. If that's all right?"

  Joyce glanced at Matt, almost amused. "Matthew..." The closest thing he had seen to a smile all day twitched at the corners of her mouth. "Of...Of course, Doctor. Yes. Matthew's all yours."

  A hollow dip of her chin and a faint smile, Anya ducked out of the room, though not without a severe look slanted at Matt.

  "I'll be back," he muttered absentmindedly to the room.

  "Okay," said Joyce delicately, a half-grin as she tenderly stroked a strand of hair from Will's forehead, "Matthew."

  "Shut up."

  He joined Anya outside to the hallway, limbs aching with a dull, tired pulse. The corridor felt colder than he remembered; too white, too clinical, as if the lab was holding a breath. Anya didn't linger for long outside the door of Will's room. She walked fast, folder still pressed to her sternum, the heels of her Mary Janes clicking professionally as she went. She didn't even spare a glance to make sure he was keeping up.

  They turned a narrow corner near the end of the patient wing, past a flickering exit sign. Anya stopped short in front of a supply closet, glanced around apprehensively at the tall corners of the walls, and pried it open.

  Matt, startled, mouthed pathetically at the air. "Erm, is this—are we...—"

  "Oh, get in, you idiot." She yanked him in before he could think and let the door click shut behind them. That antiseptic smell was even stronger here, and overhead, some kind of electrical whirring hummed in Matt's blood. Maybe the lightbulb, that left a dim slant of light over the smooth curve of Anya's jawbone as she stared at him and said, finally, "It's about Christine."

  "Yes," he said impatiently, "I didn't think you pulled me in here to, y'know..."

  Anya narrowed her eyes, unimpressed. "I'm being serious, Matthew."

  "So am I!"

  "Well," she said, swallowing, "it's more so Sydney, actually."

  "Sydney?" Matt went still. "Sydney, as in—my daughter. My daughter, Sydney?"

  Her eye twitched. "The city, actually. Yes, Matthew," she sighed, "your daughter." She outstretched the folder, shaking it. "It's all there. It took some digging, but...It's all there. An explanation for why Christine was looking into the lab, a motive for them killing her, the reason why your daughter broke her leg and had three sutures on her pterion in 1973..."

  "Woah, woah, woah." Matt shook his head jerkily, feeling like his brain might leek through his eardrums. "What are you talking about? Sydney broke her leg after falling off her bike. I was there—well, I wasn't there, but—" Rot swelled in his mouth at the guilt and the memory, "I remember it. I remember the phone call."

  "This says differently. This says that your daughter broke her leg after an experiment in a sensory deprivation tank went wrong," Anya corrected bluntly. Matt went to interrupt, overwhelmed, but she blowed on ruthlessly, "That she panicked. Thrashed around. Seized. She was six, and Christine was mortified, and that was the end of it for her—she took Sydney out of it. Took her back."

  Matt stared at her as if she was speaking in tongues. "No," he retorted lamely, flat, "that's not...You're crazy. What are you even...—That's not what happened. I remember. She fell off her bike."

  "You weren't there," said Anya tersely, "you said it yourself. The lab probably paid off the hospital. Medical jargon, some bullshit paperwork about an X-ray she didn't even have. That's the kind of thing they do." Something darkened in her sleep-hazy eyes. "As I'm sure you know, by now. With Barb. With Will, down the hall. Whatever, anyway," she muttered, interjecting her own bitter tirade. "This isn't about them. This is about Sydney. About this—" she jerked the folder again, which Matt still hadn't taken off of her, for fear that the paper might burn his skin. "Project Bellwether."

  "Bellwether."

  "Bellwether. The leading sheep of the flock—"

  "I know..." Matt faltered, pinching the bridge of his nose, "I know what a bellwether is, Anya."

  She lifted her shoulder, droll. "My bad?"

  "I just—what are you even saying right now? That my kid is like Eleven? That Sydney's...what? Got magic powers? Can move shit with her mind?"

  "Probably not," she said dully. "That's not what they were looking for with Bellwether. It was a control group. They were looking for signs of abnormality in kids that weren't a part of MKUltra, like Eleven was. Sydney happened be one of the kids in that group. From what I can gather," Anya continued, voice rasped with exhaustion, "Christine was struggling, after you left. Financially. Mentally, too, I don't doubt." Remorse twisted at his gut, and Matt's head hung shamefully. "But, I'm guessing she didn't think it was a big deal. A placebo group for a psychological study into child behaviour, maybe. I don't know. She signed Sydney up, dropped her off here, every Friday afternoon for six years. Until the accident. She got cold feet, took Sydney out of it. Got her away."

  Matt, flabbergasted, continued to profusely shake his head. "But, that doesn't make sense. They killed Benny Hammonds last year just for making Eleven a burger. Are you really gonna tell me they let Sydney go, just like that? Nah. This isn't my kid, Anya. This—Bellwether—whatever you think you've figured out—this isn't my daughter."

  "Matthew," she said wearily, pity-soft and almost compassionate as she touched at his elbow, "I thought the same. I did. But, I read more. Sydney, it...She was different from the other kids in Bellwether. Special. She was the only one out of the whole lot who showed any signs of, well, anything. It's all there, in the file. A bunch of medical jargon that probably wouldn't make any sense to you, but—she was special. For whatever reason, Sydney was special. And, someone here took a fascination to her. Some kind of, I don't know. An obsession? Someone that I told you, only a few days ago, didn't exist."

  "Peter Ballard," he murmured.

  Anya nodded tentatively.

  "What the fuck? What the shit—"

  "I know that this is a lot to take in, Matthew."

  "A lot to take in?" he demanded, pacing the claustrophobic length of the cupboard. "A lot to—you're telling me that my dead ex-girlfriend signed up our kid for some kind of fucked-up child experiment. That Chris lied to me about how our daughter broke her leg when she was six-fucking-years-old—"

  Anya's eyes flashed dangerously to the door, frightened. "Keep your voice down!" she seethed, going to toe with him. "I'm not supposed to have access to these files. These are highly classified. As in, above my jurisdiction classified. I'm putting my neck out just talking to you about this!"

  "Yeah? Well, I wish you fucking didn't!" exclaimed Matt. "I wish you didn't say a damn thing! Things are good, Anya! My kid, she—we're doing better. You think I wanted to know this?"

  "You came to me, remember?" sneered Anya, jabbing a finger harshly into his sternum. It sent a pang to his already sore heart. "All guilty and asking questions about the dead mother of your child. Don't be mad at me just because you didn't like what you heard. Don't blame me because Christine Sommers isn't the perfect martyr you thought she was!"

  Matt wanted to throttle her. "Don't," he said witheringly, "speak about Chris like that. She—I left her. Whatever she did after that, she did for Sydney. She must've thought this was would be good for her. She must've—"

  He rubbed a hand against the rough stubble that haunted his jawbone. How was this happening?

  Never did he think that this day would come, where he might have to defend his Chris for something like this. Chris, the first fruit, the first girl he loved—the last, maybe. Ill-fated and motherly in a way he envied. The woman who raised his child when he was too weak to stay. He'll pardon her for anything. There were weak moments when he cradled his self-made wounds and almost excused her for the cruelty she exacted unto their daughter. Punishments he translated, in his mind, into proxies that were meant for him. Inflicted on Sydney because Mother harming Daughter was the only language that Christine could still tongue through a mouth full of loneliness and too-expensive wine.

  It's his shame, not Christine's. That blood, it's his. Those sutures in their daughter, he put them there.

  The enormity of his mistakes was unsightly and enough to make him want to scratch his own flesh from his bones.

  "It's not on her," he mumbled.

  Anya softened. That touch returned. From his elbow, to his shoulder. Tender, long fingers, tracing the flexed line of his bicep.

  "I know you want to believe that," she said gingerly, as if she was dealing with a toddler that did not understand grief. "That Christine loved Sydney. That she didn't mean for this. And, maybe—I'm not a mother, Matthew. I won't pretend to understand. But, she still did it. She handed Sydney over, even if she got her back."

  Trembling, Matt tucked his chin into his chest. A quiet whimper wracked through him, and his shame had never felt so hungry.

  "She was desperate," he said eventually, sounding like he might cry. "She was alone. We were—she was so young, when we—when she had her."

  "And Sydney? She was a baby, Matt."

  Matt swore under his breath. His throat tightened and eyes stung, almost poisonously.

  "She wakes up screaming, sometimes," he mumbled, not really there, not really. He was home, again. Rushing into his daughter's room, where she was writhing in her sheets, drenched in sweat and thrashing—ribs empty, eyes bloodshot, the room almost liquid. "I figured it was from last year, with the...Whatever the fuck those kids call that thing. Demi, something. I don't know, shit. But, she gets these nightmares. Nosebleeds, too, sometimes. She's been through a lot," he whispered sadly. "Hell, she lost her mom, and had to identify her body. And, fuck, Chris, she—she didn't look good. There was just...Meat, where her face used to be. At her funeral, Sydney wanted to make a speech. Fuck, she was so adamant about it. She went mad at me when I suggested that it was too soon. But...I should've put my foot down more. I shouldn't have—she took one look at Christine's coffin and asked if we could get her out. In front of the whole town."

  Anya's eyes were wet, crestfallen. "Matthew, I didn't know..."

  "Yeah, well, I didn't know a lot of things. Clearly," he said bitterly. God, Matt McConnell hated himself. So badly. Maybe he deserved all of this bad days. Maybe he didn't deserve to go home. "I've been such a bad dad to her. The worst. Shittier than my own, and he—" Matt laughed humourlessly, smearing a thumb over his browbone, "he was pretty shitty, Anya."

  "You're not a bad dad," she snapped. "You aren't. You wouldn't have come to me if you didn't care about her."

  "Just because I care about her doesn't make me good."

  A silence bloated the room so jaggedly that it felt like a mouth full of teeth.

  Anya's hand slipped down the tensed length of his arm until her fingers found his. He flinched, first. A jerky, frightened motion that made both of their breaths hitch. But, Matt ached. He ached so badly. It's not just the enormity of his shame, but of his longing, too. His loneliness. He had his kid. Their dog. Shit, he had Hopper, and fawnlike El in that cabin, and Joyce, but—he longed for Chris, for touch, for boyhood.

  Almost like a tangerine-sun splitting through a litany of clouds, Anya's fingers tangled with his. Her palm, delicate, kissed flush against his own, sweat-slick and rough. That ribbon of ache seemed to unravel. Its bite loosened from where it pressed against his jugular.

  It let him be.

  Just for a breath, a touch—her thumb smoothing over the knots of his knuckles. And it really was like sunshine, like swallowing it. Like warmth in his belly for the first time in years that wasn't put there by his daughter's infectious smile or her contagious laughter or any of Sydney's sicknesses at all.

  "Matthew," Anya said quietly, "listen to me. You—"

  The first siren cut her off as brutally as a knife. A vicious alarm shattered the quiet and made his grip on her hand tighten.

  A smattering pulse of red-lights overhead swallowed them in a strobing blindness.

  "What the fuck?" Matt staggered to the door, tripping clumsily over a mop handle as he slipperily tried to grab the doorknob.

  Anya's hand snatched his wrist. "Wait!" Her expression was calculating and afraid. "I don't know what this is. It could be a breach. It sounds like a breach, and I don't know what the hell the protocol is for—"

  "Screw protocol!" exclaimed Matt, seizing her hand again. This time, there's no tenderness, or sunshine, or belly of warmth. There's only dread. And sweat. And a slight tremble as her fingers latch on his just as tightly. "We need to get to Will."

  Just as he flung open the door, a thick, visceral, sound reverberated from down narrow a vein of a corridor. Animalistic, and guttural, and starved.

  "Oh, for fuck's sake," he muttered. Lights flickered, the alarm blared distantly, and the alarmed footfall of scientists in lab coats smattered from somewhere further along the wing. "I thought this place was supposed to be secured? For a government lab, you lot sure let things in and out pretty easy!"

  "Oh, so this our fault?" demanded Anya, eyes blown.

  "Well. Not yours, maybe."

  "Just—move!"

  They broke off into a sprint. The strobing crimson of the emergency lights watered Matt's eyes as they kept their fingers intertwined. The wing had descended into chaos. Overturned equipment, gunfire, a predator's call.

  Matt tried not to empty his stomach at a smeared, bloody handprint on a plexiglass door as they burst through it. He ushered Anya round a corner first, a tender hand on the small of her back as her breaths left her in pants. She almost collided into two figures, a small, startled scream leaving her as Matt skidded after her, his own lungs heaving, and stopped abruptly short himself.

  "Jesus H. Christ!" he yelped, catching himself on the wall.

  There, framed in the pulsing, nightmarish red, were his daughter and Bonnie Munson's youngest kid.

  Sydney looked like she emerged from the bowels of hell, ghost-pale, eyes swollen with old-tears and new-fear. Dirt tattered the too-long trail of her flared jeans, and her dishevelled hair had fallen out of its ponytail, a bobble dangling loosely from the tangled ends of it. Nadine was braced next to her, holding a fireman's axe that one of them must've stole from some emergency panel.

  Matt's heart plunged to the basement of his belly. "Ziggy?"

  "Dad?" Sydney's voice was hoarse, frightened. She was shaking like a bathing animal in a clearing. "What are you doing here?"

  "What am I—what are you doing here?" he yelled, storming forward and grabbing his most dearest thing by the shoulders. He shook her, hard. Angrily. "You were supposed to be at home. Eating mushrooms on pizza. Safe. What the hell are you doing here?"

  Sydney shook her head, eyes teary. "It's a long story. But, Dad, we gotta do this later, man. We need to leave."

  "How did you two even get in here?" Anya ignored them all to demand. "The guards out front should've been told not to let anyone in, so how—"

  "A tunnel," said Nadine wryly, "to the basement. For a government lab, you guys should really up your security."

  Matt looked at Anya smugly. "Told you."

  A low, bone-chilling growl oozed through the walls.

  Sydney jerked toward it, before swaying into her dad's side. To feel him. Her old man. Matt. Her dad.

  His arm slung around her shoulders without thinking, lips pressing tightly to the faded scars on her forehead. "I'm getting you out of here, Sid. Now."

  "How about Will?" asked Anya, wheezing. "The others. We need to get them out, too. Hopper, your friend, he could be gone. If there's a breach, it would've came from the control room."

  "Will's here?" Sydney exclaimed. "Dad? What the hell's going on?"

  "Long story," he repeated her previous words lamely, offering her a remorseful grimace. "C'mon. Let's go. We'll find them, yeah?"

  They started moving further down the hallway, the harsh lights flickering faintly overhead. The low hum of the alarm travelled like a heartbeat within the living walls, broken only by the guttural growls of something that should not have lungs and did not bleed blood. The kind that made Matt's skin crawl and tighten the arm he kept desperately around his shaking daughter.

  Suddenly, just as Sydney's quivering hand reached out to gingerly open a door, the lights sputtered and cut out. Swallowing them all in pitch-black and dread.

  Matt blinked at the vague shape of his blanched daughter in his hold, then back at the hollow space where Anya's breath hitched and Nadine Munson swore a profanity that was enough to make even him wince.

  He bared his teeth bitterly. "This fucking place. Seriously, is this where my taxes are going?"

  The lights stayed dead, and the growling got closer, and Sydney... His daughter went suddenly very still.

  "Dad? I think my nose is bleeding."

AUTHOR'S NOTE.

omg we're so back babyyyyy. soz for that horrendously long chapter. and how lowk shit it is......and the ass cliffhanger......but whatever. it's out. you already know how much i hate action chapters. it differs too much from the dani tone of agony and despair (but i think parts of this chapter sufficed for that don't u???? lol. big up matt's shame and toby's massive fat crush for his bff)

anyways. i published a sister story to this fic, aka nadine's very own book! it's on my profile now, and it's called PUNISH HER. it's tagged as a robin buckley fic - which it is - but we all know that it's def gonna lean into the sydnadine dynamic that keeps me up at the night (if ur a sydsteve truther, don't worry - i haven't forgotten about them........they're reunited next chapter.......so, keep a look out1!!)

plz lemme know what you thought about this one. the ghost-reading lately is a little disheartening :( im sorry about the lack of updates for ages, and i totally get how a lot of readers may have just lost interest, or even deactivated from this shitshow of an app (fair). but for those of who are still here - i love u and thank u and plz keep up the feedback!!! it's so motivating and good for a writer to receive.

anyways lemme stop before this reaches 10k works lol. all my love, dani x