astrobei

[astrobei]

bro, does this party have perfectly ripe summer heirloom tomatoes or do we need to pregame?

[astrobei]

Moke and his little mokelings

(Five Mokes in a room bitching)

[astrobei]

for @stonathanweek's first round of stonathan sunday prompts!! based on the following: "I thought that was our arrangement now. I get to kiss you and you get to shut me up."

“I thought that this was our arrangement now,” Steve mumbles into Jonathan’s skin, breath hot, words slurred and strung together by the trail of open-mouthed kisses he’s leaving along Jonathan’s jaw. “I get to kiss you,” he continues, and then there’s teeth where Jonathan’s neck meets his shoulder and a hiss coming from his own mouth— “and you get to shut me up.”

That had certainly been the arrangement — not that they’ve ever come to a verbal agreement on it, and that was kind of the point in the first place. The thing is, when the one person who ties you together doesn’t want to talk to either of you, and the only thing you have to talk about is her, not talking at all is usually the best option. If it had been up to Jonathan, back when this all started, not talking would have meant not interacting at all, and of all the things he was losing sleep over, not having to interact with Steve Harrington wouldn’t make the short list, or the long list, or any list at all, really. 

(It hadn’t been up to Jonathan, which didn’t come as a surprise, because nothing Jonathan actually wants is ever up to Jonathan.)

There had been a series of arrangements prior to their current arrangement, and none of them involved Steve until they did. After returning back to a considerably more apocalyptic Hawkins than he’d left it, there hadn’t been any choice other than to stay, and staying meant several things — first, finding a place to stay, their old house long-since sold. After that had been sorted — with Will posted up with Mike in his bedroom, Holly and Nancy sharing so that his mom could take Holly’s room, and Jonathan taking up residence in the basement — everything else seemed to implode, like the universe felt it had to make up for the fact that something in Jonathan’s life fell into place with relative ease. Being in close quarters with Nancy meant the truth about Emerson had nowhere to hide, and despite the fact that it didn’t look like either of them were going to college any time soon, if at all, she’d been mad enough and hurt enough to end it between them. Jonathan didn’t think she’d understand, because she never does, when it comes to things like this, but it still hurt; he also didn’t think it was possible to never see someone you shared a living space with, but Nancy manages fine enough to make it look easy. 

It’d be nice to have someone to talk to about it — or anything — but Argyle had fled back to California the moment the sky had started bleeding red, and Jonathan doesn’t blame him for it. His mom is focused on El and Hopper and Will, always Will, never Jonathan, and he doesn’t blame her for that, either. And Will, who Jonathan knows would listen — who would probably love to listen, who would somehow be able to say exactly what Jonathan needs to hear — has enough going on without Jonathan adding the weight of his own trivial problems for his baby brother to bear. Jonathan doesn’t know how to blame Will for anything, so he doesn’t. 

He does blame Steve. Because Steve is there — always has been, lingering in the edge of his peripheral, and no matter how hard he’s tried, Jonathan has never been able to block him out. He blames Steve, because Steve knows what it’s like to be iced out by Nancy; he blames Steve, because he knows the truth about what’s happening in Hawkins, all of it, without Jonathan having to explain; he blames Steve, because Steve had been the one to find Jonathan sitting on the hood of his car in the high school parking lot as he was burning through the last of the weed Argyle had left behind, and it was Steve who had plucked the joint right out of Jonathan’s fingers and taken a hit, and it was Steve who’d asked him about Nancy and Steve who’d said shit that Jonathan didn’t want to hear and Steve who’d only shut up when Jonathan made him, when kissing Steve to get him to quit seemed like a better idea than decking him. 

It still hadn’t been a good idea, and Jonathan fully expected Steve to deck him instead — but Steve had kissed him back, open-mouthed and filthy and a little mean, and that had been the start of it. He doesn’t think they ever finished that joint, and he knows for a fact they’ve barely spoken a word to each other since then. Come to think of it, he’s pretty sure this is the most Steve has spoken to him in the past two months outside of propositioning him, which is weird, because Jonathan has never spent so much time with someone without really speaking to them before, and he spends a lot of time with Steve. And that, really, is the other thing — it’s really hard to spend so much of your time with someone and not end up caring about them, even if that someone is Steve. 

Because, yes, Steve is there, and he knows, understands what’s going on without Jonathan having to explain, which is why hooking up with him is easy: they don’t have to talk or explain. They already know. 

But Jonathan— well, Jonathan wants to talk to Steve. Jonathan wants to talk and be heard, wants to be heard and be listened to even more, and he thinks Steve might be good at both of those things. After all, he’s silently shown up for Jonathan in other ways — he stares back, a challenge, when Nancy’s eyes are on them any time they have to share the same space; he stays close when they’re on patrol together, like he’s trying to become Jonathan’s shadow; and sometimes, he’ll randomly swing by the Wheeler’s house to pick Jonathan up and just drive him around, no words or funny business, startlingly and uncannily always seeming to know exactly when Jonathan feels like the walls are closing in on him. In terms of physicality, the vibe has shifted entirely, so much so that Jonathan doesn’t even begin to know what to do with it. He doesn’t know when Steve stopped kissing him like he had something to prove, can’t pinpoint when everything they do together started to go soft around the edges, but it’s where they’re at. Even now, with Steve biting kisses into his neck — it’s not a mean thing, meant to hurt, the way it had been when this first started. It’s softer, more controlled, a clear effort being made to make sure it’s good, something Jonathan likes. 

He’s not sure why, but it kind of makes him want to cry. 

“I know,” he finally says, a little breathy. Steve’s hands slip under his shirt, settling on his hips, thumbs tracing circles into his skin, like he’s detected that Jonathan is coming to a conclusion in his head and is trying to give him more evidence to support it. “I just,” he starts, and then stops, because he’s not looking at Steve, but he’s right there — he’s right there, and they don’t talk, and Jonathan is worried that if he tries to, he’ll lose Steve altogether, and Jonathan doesn’t know how much more loss he can handle. 

And then he remembers it’s already the end of the world, and he could die tomorrow, and he doesn’t want to go as quietly as he has lived. 

“Maybe I want a different arrangement,” he manages, addressing the car ceiling. The bravery he felt to ask the question in the first place — do you want to talk, or some variation of it — has since evaporated, gone to become one with the cycled cabin air. His fingers tighten their hold in Steve’s hair, holding him in place when he tries to pull back. “Maybe I want to kiss you without shutting you up.”

There is an excruciating moment where the words hang between them, where Jonathan’s awareness has honed in on the sound of his own heartbeat in his ears and Steve’s breath on his neck and Steve’s hands on his hips.

“Okay,” Steve says, and he doesn’t sound mad or weirded out, and the breath Jonathan didn’t realize he was holding breaks free from his lungs, his shoulders relaxing with it. “Okay,” he repeats, and when he tries to pull back this time, Jonathan lets him, fingers slipping from Steve’s hair. It’s dark, most of the interior lights in the front seat rather than the back, but he can still make out Steve’s face, the earnest way he’s looking at Jonathan. “I can— we can talk, too. Is that what you want?”

Jonathan can’t remember the last time someone has asked him what he wanted. “Yeah,” he says, and to his horror, his voice cracks, right in the middle. He clears his throat and tries again. “Yeah, I—yeah.” Another beat, an uncertain silence, and then: “Is that—okay?”

“Of course that’s okay,” Steve answers instantly. He looks properly upset, like the fact that Jonathan even asked is an affront to him. “Jonathan, I thought you didn’t” —he cuts himself off, looking down to Jonathan’s lips, and then the position they’re in, sprawled all over each other in the backseat, and then meets Jonathan’s eyes again, the rest of his sentence unspoken, but understood— “I didn’t know.”

“I didn’t say,” Jonathan says. 

“No, you didn’t,” Steve agrees. He leans forward, kissing him again — uncharacteristically soft, shy, even, before he pulls away completely. He stays close by, though, settles into the seat next to Jonathan, facing him, without being on top of him the way he was. One of his hands returns to his own lap, while the other settles on Jonathan’s knee, a comforting, steady weight through the denim of his jeans. “Alright,” Steve continues, suddenly alert. “What do you want to talk about?”

What Jonathan had thought to be the hard part — asking Steve to talk in the first place — seems easy in the face of Steve’s question now. There’s so much he wants to talk about that he doesn’t know where to begin — about how he’s scared, every single day; how he buried his brother once before, and doesn’t want to do it again. About how his mom keeps throwing herself into danger without any regard of how anyone feels about it, and Jonathan feels a lot about it. He wants to tell Steve that every time they’re patrolling together, he’s started to worry about Steve, too — about how losing Steve is shaping into just as scary of a thought as losing Will or El or his mom, and how badly that scares him. He thinks all of this might be too intense for their first real conversation, and he thinks about how nothing they’ve done in the past two months fits into any definition of normal or conventional, and he thinks that that’s not a bad thing. 

“I don’t know,” he says instead of any of that, because self-preservation is a useful skill for when you’re trying to survive an apocalypse and for when you’re trying not to scare someone away. “I didn’t get that far.”

Steve laughs, languid and easy, his head rolling to the side. “Just—start easy,” he suggests, nudging Jonathan’s leg with his own. “Tell me about something you like.”

“Something I like,” Jonathan echoes. 

“Something you like,” Steve says again, accompanied by a curt nod, sending a fluttering feeling throughout Jonathan’s chest. He thinks that if they make it through this, come out of the end of the world on the other side alive and well, he’d very much like to visit New York, take the camera he knows had the wrong name on the gift tag, and bring Steve, too. “Like— music,” Steve prompts, when Jonathan still hasn’t responded. “I know you like music.”

Jonathan shakes his head with a laugh. “We’ll be here all night if I start talking about music,” he says. 

“Our former arrangement meant that we were going to be here all night anyway,” Steve replies with a wink. Jonthan likes that word – former. “Go ahead — I’m all ears.”

And Jonathan does. 

[astrobei]

person next to me on the plane is sick which i can be normal about <- affirmations

[astrobei]

prompt for @stonathanweek’s first stonathan sunday: “who protects you, though?”

“Dude,” Steve says. “This can’t be good for you.”

Jonathan peels his eyes open to register two separate things, at more or less the same time. One: Steve Harrington, standing over him with his arms crossed, hip popped, and one of his muddied white sneakers tapping disapprovingly on the ground in near-perfect time to the ticking of Jonathan’s wristwatch. Two: the fact that Jonathan has had to peel his eyes open at all, which can only mean one thing.

He fell asleep.

His stomach drops.

Not good, he thinks, because falling asleep means his reflexes are sluggish now, which means it takes him a few extra seconds to process what Steve is even saying. And this means that Steve has had enough time to notice that Jonathan has woken up, and manages to frown even more, getting in an additional “Dude,” before Jonathan manages to frown, blink, and rub his eyes. Not good, because sluggish reflexes defeat the point. Not good, because—

He reaches an arm out, skimming over the hay-covered ground, frantic, frantic, until his fingers close around his gun and he sighs in relief. Secondary sensations to take note of: the twinge in his neck as he rolls it out, the ache settling in between the knobs of his spine, inelastic tension coiling taut in his shoulders, and Steve’s laser-focused stare burning a hole right through Jonathan’s head.

“What?” he insists, trying to play it off, but it comes out hoarse, sleep-rough, and Steve was here before Jonathan opened his eyes at all, so it’s probably not even worth trying. Still, there’s a look in Steve’s eyes that Jonathan doesn’t love, soft in all the wrong ways, that immediately has his hackles raising. When Steve doesn’t say anything — just lets that weird look in his eyes get even more goopy around the edges — Jonathan sits up straighter against the barn door, frowns, and repeats himself. “What?”

He expects Steve to— well, he doesn’t really know what, actually. Steve’s been surprising him these last few months, which always makes him think about the thing Nancy had said when they’d gotten back to Hawkins — about how Steve changed, in the week he and Nancy had spent fighting monsters together in Jonathan’s absence. Enough for her to go on the defensive when Jonathan asked about him, anyway.

Jonathan doesn’t know about all that. He’s known men like Steve before Steve, and he’ll know men like Steve after him. But where he would have expected the Steve of two years ago to scoff, maybe, to roll his eyes and make some offhand comment about how like shit Jonathan looks right now, the Steve of today does none of those things.

Today-Steve holds his hands out, and gestures for the gun. “Give me that.”

“What?” Instinctively, Jonathan clutches it closer to his body. “No. Why?”

“Because,” Steve says, and then he’s kneeling to the floor, dirt and hay and God-knows-what caking up along his kneecaps, another streak of mud along the sides of those white tennis shoes. Jonathan braces himself for it — you look like shit, you’re gonna take someone out with that thing — but Steve just says, “It’s three in the morning. What the hell are you doing?”

“Keeping watch,” Jonathan says, blinking even more forcefully, as if this will clear away the rest of the disorientation lingering there, in the minute creases of his eyelids, the insides of his mouth, the cracks between his molars. It doesn’t do much to help; he finishes blinking and his eyes are on their way to closing again, stinging against the chill of the night breeze.

“Yeah, no shit,” Steve says, both louder than Jonathan expects him to, and — well, more blatantly than Jonathan expects him to. It startles him just enough to make him look over sideways, at where Steve’s silhouette is illuminated by the porch light they installed by the barn door. He’s not sure what he expects to find there, but it isn’t this: Steve’s eyes simultaneously wide with concern and brows furrowed in what seems like confusion. Jonathan opens his mouth to say something, maybe to defend himself, or say hey, man, what the fuck? when Steve seems to realize how it came off and winces before correcting course. “I mean,” he says, quieter now. “I know, you keep— I see you come out here every night, and you don’t come back in until everyone else is starting to wake up again.”

The hey, man, what the fuck? that had been forming on Jonathan’s mouth makes another attempt to make itself heard, but it’s late, he’s tired, there’s a comfortable breeze blowing through the clearing, and in the end, it comes out without any bite. “What?”

It’s Steve’s turn to blink now, long and slow, like he’s realizing that Jonathan’s not doing a very good job at processing what he’s saying. “Go to sleep,” Steve says slowly, over-enunciating now, like a little bit of sleep deprivation automatically means Jonathan’s fucking stupid now. “Seriously,” Steve says, intonation picking up again, falling back into a normal pitch and speed. “How long has it been since you got a good night’s rest?”

“Not that long,” Jonathan says, but it’s probably undercut somewhat by the yawn that sneaks out around it.

Steve makes a disapproving noise, low in his throat, like he didn’t even really mean to, and Jonathan feels himself exhale in response, exasperated and exhausted, two counts turning into three, into six, seven, eight.

He wants to tell Steve that it’s not his first rodeo. That he’s used to this, a routine that comes to him almost easier than breathing: sitting awake in the dark, heart racing and ears straight for the first indication of a noise of distress. Waiting for the sharp creaking of floorboards, a jolt in the bedsprings, a sudden pause in the snores that had previously been floating their way down the hall. The quiet tap of knuckles against his door, a pair of small hands shaking him awake. The thing about the weed, later, is that it helped him fall asleep, but it didn’t help him stay that way. Left him lurching awake at two, three in the morning, heart pounding and sweating through the sheets, waking up again a few hours later feeling like he hadn’t slept at all.

He knows Will doesn’t sleep much these days. He knows Will sleeps even worse when they’ve had a close call, when the threat of something creeping up on them in the night is marginally more real than it normally feels. Steve pulls his knees up towards his chest, like he has no intention of leaving anytime soon, and Jonathan grips the pistol harder in his hand. “It’s fine,” he says. “I have to— someone has to—”

Watch them, he thinks. Protect them. Jonathan’s learned to sleep light, tread light, dream light. Guard up and bearing down.

“Okay?” Steve says, like Jonathan is simultaneously stating the obvious and also missing the obvious, something bright and glaring, right in his face. He puts a hand out again, and Jonathan hesitates; Steve glances down at the gun, raises his eyebrows again, waggles his fingers, and just for a second, Jonathan gets it — the thing Nancy had seen in him, that change. Something vulnerable and open in his expression, the early morning hour, the hair that’s falling into his face instead of standing coiffed up around it. Jonathan hesitates, and Steve says, “Jonathan, I— you think I don’t know you come out here every day?”

Jonathan opens his mouth. Lets it close. No, he hadn’t known that. “It’s not,” he tries again, and then just, “no one else is keeping watch in there.”

It might be the exhaustion, or maybe the idea of Will or Mike or Robin or Nancy sitting up in their sleeping bags, awake, waiting for something to crawl out from the shadows and reach its long claws until the door, but his voice cracks there, wobbling on the precipice of the last syllable in a way that’s nothing short of mortifying.

“I know,” Steve says, too soft and quiet for the easy target Jonathan is making of himself, and then there’s a hand wrapping around his pistol, pulling it gently out of Jonathan’s grasp. “But, like— shit, dude— what about you? Who protects you?”

An unwelcome, panicked laugh bursts out of him, too sudden and too loud for the early morning silence, but Jonathan can’t help it. He’s seen Steve in action, the way Will’s friends follow him around like ducklings in a row. Him and Robin, bodies angled towards each other, tittering away in the corner. Years ago, the idea of Steve protecting anyone would have made Jonathan throw his head back in laughter. Now, his limbs feel heavy, and there’s something open and warm in Steve’s eyes, wide and brown and dark in the dim lighting of the barn’s lanterns, and Jonathan’s fingers are brushing the palm of Steve’s hand as he passes the gun over. He thinks about that stupid baseball bat, the nails he and Nancy had hammered into it, the sound of the wood splintering around the rusty metal, and blurts out, “Do you even know how to use that thing?”

Steve’s eyebrows shoot up, like he’s surprised, like he wasn’t expecting Jonathan to take this so lightheartedly. “Do you?” he replies.

Jonathan shrugs. “Enough,” he says.

Steve’s lips tilt upwards. “Enough,” he echoes in response. He turns the gun over, holds it up. Squints into the distance and pretends to shoot.

Jonathan’s eyelids are drooping again, but he glances along the firm line of Steve’s hands, thumb and index finger lined up along the trigger, and is reminded of it again: Steve’s changed. How his hands used to be so fidgety, rapping against their front door, twirling that stupid bat back and forth. How they’re steady now. Jonathan heard about Max, heard Lucas and Dustin tell Mike and Will about that day at the cemetery, Steve’s arms around her after she fell twenty feet out of the sky.

Steve lowers the gun, bumps Jonathan’s shoulders with his. “We can stay out here,” he says. Wary, like he thinks Jonathan’s going to put up a fight, even after laying his weapon down. “If that helps.”

It does help. “Okay,” Jonathan says.

“Okay,” Steve parrots.

Sleep still doesn’t come easy. Jonathan has a sneaking suspicion that it never will, for him. But for the first time in months, Jonathan tips his head back against the splintered walls of the barn, weather-worn and chipped red paint, and lets himself try to get there.

[astrobei]

hooaoaaaagagahhahhhhhhhh. <- words of a mf who finally finished writing something

[astrobei]

grown men will throw fits about how they face sooo much rejection and women would never get it meanwhile me and the girls who were even just like average or a lil ugly at like 12 years old were being treated like we were subhuman by peers and adults alike

[astrobei]

just gonna keep saying will's death would be lazy writing like i get the fear but it's the same reason they can't kill hopper. it's too repetitive.

they've also had a hundred opportunities to kill will off and have it be more narratively cohesive and higher stakes. the entire point of the series and the instigating event is saving will's life, that's the whole point. almost every decision that happens in season one is dedicated to saving will's life. he is the reason the show exists, and if they kill him now, the message is "love means nothing, sometimes you should just let people die."

season one he has a fakeout death. season two he self-sacrifices himself by telling them to close the gate and kill him with it, but they refuse.

season three he is directly connected to the mind flayer.

season four he's involved in an active shooting. aka an event where the purpose is all of them to be killed. and he doesn't get killed. a grown man gets killed instead.

will's death just would not make sense or why bother keeping him alive this long. the closing message of this show cannot, and i repeat, cannot be that they should have let an innocent little boy die in the upside down for the greater good and he was never actually "worth" saving because the world is better off without him in it.

this isn't life is strang(er things) it cannot end like that

[astrobei]

Stranger Things 2.06 - The Spy

[astrobei]

STONATHAN SUNDAY

We are kicking off our Summer of Stonathan with our first Stonathan Sunday! We're going to be doing this every second Sunday until Stonathan Week (16-22 August).

Quick reminder: This exercise is to keep things fun and breezy, a little way to challenge yourselves picking one (or as many as you want) of these prompts and writing a short ficlet with it, 300-500 words. This is not something you should stress over or spend a lot of time on, it's just to get the creative juices flowing as we count down to Stonathan Week.

As always, remember to tag us (either by mentioning us or by tagging just #stonathanweek2025 or #stonathansunday) so we can see your post and give it a reblog!

Prompts:

“What? No witty remark? Nothing clever to say?”

“Who protects you, though?”

“I hope I’m imagining those meows coming out of the box in your hands”

“I’m so glad to see you!”

“This can’t happen again.”

“Don’t tempt me.”

“You’re late. As usual.”

"Can you look at me, please?”

“Stay? Please?”

“I don’t deserve you.”

“I thought that was our arrangement now. I get to kiss you and you get to shut me up.”

[astrobei]

[astrobei]

I can't access the whole article but um. The US just bombed Iran

[astrobei]

first time line dancing wish me luck everyoneeee

[astrobei]

haven, rolling over and laying on my back: my suni😊 hashtag mysuni 🧍🏽‍♀️

me and suni, laying on blanket in park

suni, into the silence: my sock😊 hashtag mysock🧦

[astrobei]

evan buckley + ADHD

[astrobei]

drinking an espresso martini but also haven is here YAY

[astrobei]

is he acting out of character or did you get too attached to a headcanon