A/N: This is an omitted bit from ST:tSL that I still wanted to share. I hope you enjoy.
Friday November 4th, 1983
Friday, just about midnight the air was crisp and cool, as one would expect on a late night in November. The sky was clear and cloudless, the stars twinkling like crystals in swaths of dark satin.
Clouds of her breath circled around Mads head as she followed close behind Eddie, who followed Tris up the hill. She promised a view, and a secluded spot to smoke. A guest at the motel had called the front desk, complaining of a smell coming from her room.
Thankfully, it was Jake who took the complaint and could care less about them smoking weed. He just advised them to find a new place to smoke until the guest checked out. It was annoying, but Tris said she knew just the spot.
Mads was skeptical, though. Tris was… cool she guessed. She dressed like a punk and was friendlier than she appeared, but Mads – who was unused to people wanting to be her friend – did not know how she really felt about Tris.
When they reached the top of the hill, Mads instantly saw why Tris brought them here. Junk and old vehicles littered the landscape, lending an abandoned air to the place. It was a place people didn't come, at least not often.
"My sister and I used to come up here and play 'Mad Max' before she got 'too old' for it," Tris explained, gazing up at the sky as they walked, her amber eyes nearly black in the darkness. If they could see in the dark, Mads would have noticed a flush to her cheeks.
"That's cute, Buckley," Eddie teased, pulling out the weed and rolling papers. "Did you make potions out of mud and sticks and perform dark rituals too?"
"As a matter of fact," Tris shot back while yanking open the door to a rotting old bus. "We did. And put that stuff up, we're not there yet."
The inside of the bus was no better than its exterior. The rust that coated the outside like a second skin permeated the interior as though it were bleeding. The windows… Mads didn't want to know what was coating the windows, but it made them near impossible to see through.
"I think we're gonna need tetanus shots after this," Eddie murmured to Mads, earning himself a poke to the ribs.
They watched as she pulled a loose bench underneath the escape hatch on the ceiling of the bus, then climbed onto it – hauling her backpack through the hatch – and out onto the roof. It was obvious that she'd done this before, at least a few times.
"You going up there, or what?" Eddie asked, jostling Mads with his elbow.
Sticking her tongue out at him, she clambered onto the seat and jumped, her fingers catching on the lip of the opening. Athletic she was not, but it was easy enough to pull herself up and out into the cool night air once again. Even now, Tris knew not to try and help her.
Once again, Mads was met with the twinkling crystal laden fabric that was Hawkins' night sky. It was so different from the downpour in which she escaped this place. So unlike the urgent, terror filled night she ran bleeding in that downpour from the person who swore he loved her most.
It was so beautiful.
"Pretty, isn't it?" Tris asked next to her while Eddie struggled to pull himself up.
Mads could only nod, any words she could have spoken suck in her throat.
"I think this spot has the best view of the sky in town, except maybe the hill behind the fairground or Lover's Lake," she continued, face full of wonderment at the tapestry that was the night sky.
"Been there a lot, Buckley?" Eddie joked breathlessly, finally having pulled himself onto the roof.
"Wouldn't you like to know," she quipped, tossing her shaggy hair.
"Duh, that's why I asked."
"A lady never tells."
"So you haven't then."
"I'll bite you, Munson. Don't tempt me."
Mads ignored them, staring up into the atmosphere as though in a trance – their bickering becoming background noise. She only came back into herself when Eddie pried her hand away from the rusty roof, placing a joint into her fingers.
Once they had all smoked a fair amount – and Tris shared some rather squashed pound cake she had in her backpack – they began to recline against the rusted metal of the bus, watching as stars twinkled above them. As they became shapes and stories, waiting to be shared. Burning spheres of heat and gas, winking out in glorious displays of death and destruction, sending the evidence of their fate lightyears away. Hoping, just hoping for their existence to be recognized, their stories told.
The cold, vast expanses of space had to be so lonely, even for magnificent celestial bodies such as these. Mads could see herself in those glorious, dead things – reaching out for connection one last time with the hope at least one person would reach back and grasp her fingers, no matter how much pain it would cause her in the end.
She wondered if that was how 001 felt.
It didn't do to dwell on that, though. So she didn't.
"My mom used to hate it when we'd come out here," Tris said, breaking through her thoughts once again. "We'd be so fuckin' filthy… She didn't care that we'd had the time of our lives playing around. She wanted us clean and presentable. Especially me."
"So what happened?" Eddie asked, breathing out a long drag, voice catching slightly on a cough.
"Wow, really?" Tris rolled her eyes, but smiled. "Opening up here and you're roasting me. Anyway, she made me dye my hair and do shit like wear training bras at five years old cause she wanted me to be the perfect little pageant girl. I fucking hated it."
"You as a pageant girl?" Mads smirked. "I can see it."
"Oh, you mean with the rebellious opposite spectrum look I've gone with?" Tris laughed. "I've always been a tomboy, and I've never liked the 'girlier' things my mom shoved down my throat. Except maybe makeup. I like makeup."
"So the metalhead curse infected you too?" Eddie grinned.
"It infects all us outcasts at some point." Tris said sagely, exhaling a cloud of smoke.
"That it does," Mads agreed.
"You're not exactly a metalhead though, Mads," Eddie teased.
"I like all sorts of music, so what if I don't listen to Dio exclusively?" She sniffed.
He merely grinned and poked at her with the toe of his sneaker.
She was so glad he still wanted to be her friend. That her abilities hadn't scared him off like she thought they would. Eddie, with his wild hair and effervescent love for all things strange, was the perfect anchor for her. For all those whose hearts need homes. He wasn't a monolith, but a beacon.
Brighter than any of those dead giants in the sky.
What would have happened had Mads stayed with 001? Would he still be her shining star, or would he have destroyed her like all the others? Had she stayed… there would have been happiness for a time, surely. But that kind of happiness couldn't last for long. It never did.
This, though, sitting on the roof of a rusty old bus and looking at the stars with two kids who felt equally as strange as she did… This kind of happiness filled her up from the inside out, even with 001 haunting her every thought and action.
The joint was nearly gone now. Mads took one last inhale, holding it as she passed the joint to Eddie who did the same. Then Tris. All exhaling moments after the other, filling the sky with the smoke from their dying dope cigarette, slightly obscuring the stars.
Soon enough their cold light shone down upon them again, Mads' lay back against the roof of the vehicle, an arm cushioning her head. Her fingers reached toward the sky, offering the dying lights the chance to grasp her by the hand the way she so dearly wished someone, anyone to do.
A movement in her periphery caught her eye. Tris and Eddie had mimicked her, lifting the fingers of their right hands towards the stars, soft smiles playing around the edges of their lips.
Oh.
Oh.
She wasn't so alone, like 001. She wasn't. These two – these freaks who refused to conform, to be anything but themselves – they were with her. Tris may not know everything about her… And she may never know, but she was still here. With her, as though there was no place else she'd rather be. And Eddie, the freakiest of them all in the eyes of Hawkins, was never too far from her side.
Even under these stars Mads was not alone, she was never alone anymore. 001 had convinced her that she had nothing but him and herself to rely on, but that wasn't true. Here, under the inkiness of the night sky, Mads lay with the freaks and ghouls. Her present and past. Not alone anymore.
A/N: This was an omitted idea I had set between chapters 6 and 7 of ST:tSL that I couldn't find a way to work into the story between the two chapters without it feeling long winded to me. Its only like 1,000+ words, but I felt it was important to the characters to share it.
Chapter title is taken from A lyric from Smashing Pumpkins song "1979" released in 1995 on the studio album "Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness".
Thanks for the Follows, favorites, and reviews! I appreciate each one! (Please don't forget to leave a review if you liked the story so far!)
This is the "mixtape" I created for this fic. It's not entirely period accurate, but I feel like these songs fit the theme of the show and characters.
playlist/2w0Fg6UPmVvj5L3EIMRYfw?si=d8e38810c96f4875
