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CHAPTER FOURTEEN ━━━ 'TIS THE DAMN SEASON
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One month later...
In Hawkins' barren cold, the snow glistened as it fell. The small town Sydney grew up in looked like it belonged in a child's snow-globe ━━ or on the picturesque front of a postcard. Visit Hawkins again soon! it'd say, promoting the American Dream fallacy of suburbia and nuclear families. As if not a month ago, it hadn't been ravaged by a predatory creature which killed Barb Holland, and very nearly Will Byers. As if there wasn't a lab on its border which experimented on children ━━ and one of those children hadn't sacrificed herself for her friends. All of that happened a month ago, yet everything seemed ... stagnant. Like everyone was holding in a breath of fumes. It didn't matter that Barb was gone, that Will was probably riddled with trauma, and almost everyone forgot about El ━━ maybe everyone was trying to move on. To bury it all. Get back to normal and do normal things ━━ like celebrating Christmas.
1983 was Sydney's first year ever spending holidays with Matt ━━ well, the first she'd remember. He had desperately wanted it to be just them, now he was discharged from hospital ━━ just Father and Daughter in their shabby, little cabin by Lover's Lake. He had every intention of taking a chainsaw to some shrub of a tree, mounting it up in the living room and swathing it in cheap fairylights. But he was still limping around on crutches, and taking pills for the migraines, and definitely wasn't in any condition of making them both Christmas dinner.
"We could just order pizza," he had joked ━━ at least, Sydney hoped it was a joke.
Sydney had brought it up absentmindedly to Joyce when dropping Will off at home after picking him up from Mike's house on one of the days where Jonathan had a late shift, and Joyce had been all too zealous in inviting Sydney and Matt around for the holidays ━━ and, not fancying slaving away over the stove tending to a turkey, fresh vegetables, and potatoes, Sydney enthusiastically accepted it. Matt had been begrudging, at first. But he got along with Joyce ━━ especially after the unusual bonding experience of surviving an alternate dimension together ━━ and, he didn't want to upset Sydney.
