callunawrites

[callunawrites]

Chapter 3 is up!

.

Eddie wakes up already in a bad mood. He’s got a raging headache that’s pulsing directly above his left eyeball and someone next door is singing Madonna loud enough to wake the dead. He groans, rolling over and burying his head under a wayward pillow in a desperate bid to muffle the absolute monster next door. Instead, the blender kicks on and somehow — somehow — the singing manages to get even louder.

Fuck, he’s not going to be able to go back to sleep, is he? And it’s— yep, right on schedule, six am on the dot.

He stays like that through the first, second, and third verses of Like a Virgin, gnashing his teeth under the blankets until they ache. When the blender cuts off, he thinks that he might get lucky enough to get a reprieve, but instead, the playlist shifts to Whitney Houston and he completely gives up on going back to sleep.

Eddie feels like he’s moving through molasses as he stumbles his way into the kitchen, making immediately for the bottle of Advil sitting on the counter and downing two with water straight from the tap. He presses his aching forehead to the cool metal faucet, willing his skull to stop throbbing in time to the beat of I Wanna Dance With Somebody.

It doesn’t work.

He reaches for the tub of shitty grocery brand coffee and rustles up a clean spoon to scoop out the grounds, only—

Scraaaaape.

Eddie frowns, peering down into the tub in disbelief. 

It’s empty.

Completely and utterly empty, with only the barest remnants of grounds clinging to the sides of the container. 

Eddie shuts his eyes.

As if mocking him, he hears Steve’s voice, as if from afar, asking so very sweetly, “Dontcha wanna dance?”

“No, I don’t want to fucking dance,” Eddie mutters, flinging the spoon back into the sink. It backfires when the clatter of metal on metal causes another spike of pain to shoot through his head.

[callunawrites]

Chapter 2 is up!

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There was a time in Steve Harrington’s life where he thought he had it all. He didn’t have to dream about getting a place of his own because his parents were never home anyway. Why should Steve have to pay for some cramped ramshackle apartment when he had a perfectly suitable house with a perfectly suitable pool and perfectly suitable furniture there for the taking?

If pressed, he may have told you that when he did get a place, it would be modern. Trendy. Something that only a kid with a sizable trust fund could get straight out of high school. A high rise with shiny appliances and a thousand dollar espresso maker with a closet full of Armani. Beer and wine for his friends. Maybe, if he was very lucky, he’d be able to spring for a personal chef the way they had when Steve was little – back when his parents were home more often than two days out of the month.

Only – time passed. Dreams changed. 

Steve fell out with his friends. Learned a little humility. Got his heart pulverized by Nancy Wheeler in Tina’s bathroom. Graduated high school by the skin of his teeth and started a very boring, very demeaning job slinging ice cream at the local mall and made friends with the meanest, funniest, dorkiest lesbian in town. 

And then, things kept changing.

His dad cut him off. Not like he’d cut Steve off in high school whenever he egged someone’s house or TPed the vice principal's lawn, but truly cut him off. Turns out, there are revocable and irrevocable trust funds. It doesn’t take a lot of guesses to figure out which one his dad had set up for him.

Fine though — Steve would roll with the punches.

He got another job, and then another, and another.

His dreams of that first apartment, the penthouse with the personal chef and the espresso maker grew smaller and smaller, until finally, the dream was just getting out. Out of his parent’s house, out from under his dad’s thumb, out from under the constant pressure to be the type of person that Steve would never be.

When Robin told him that she was moving to Indianapolis for college, he’d jumped at the chance to go with her.

“It won’t be perfect,” she’d warned him over milkshakes one day, chewing her lower lip to ribbons as she flipped through her welcome packet. “I’ll have to stay in student housing for the first year. You’ll have to manage the apartment on your own.”

“It’ll be fine,” Steve had told her, easily waving off her concerns as he popped another fry into his mouth. “I can handle a year. No problem.”

He cannot, in fact, handle a year. 

[callunawrites]

an elitist’s guide to superior music | explicit | 37k

Author: @callunavulgari

Artist: @firefly-party

Beta Reader: @mollymawkwrites

[Link to fic] | [Link to art]

Pairings: Steve Harrington/Eddie Munson, Background Robin Buckley/Chrissy Cunningham

Characters: Eddie Munson, Steve Harrington, Chrissy Cunningham, Robin Buckley, Dustin Henderson, Heather Holloway, Gareth, Jeff, Freak, Mike Wheeler, Maxine Mayfield, Will Byers, Joyce Byers, Wayne Munson

Tags: Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, Alternate Universe - No Upside Down, Meet-Cute, Meet-Ugly, Neighbors, Slow Burn, Misunderstandings, Mutual Pining, Accidental Voyeurism, Explicit Sexual Content, References to Depression, Mental Health Issues, References to ABBA

Trigger Warnings: Accidental Voyeurism, Mildly Dubious Consent (due to accidental voyeurism)

↳ Keep reading below for a sneak peek!

Eddie has always dreamed of getting his own place. Parties every night, wailing guitars, maybe a babe or two. More importantly, he's dreamed of a place for his boys to crash after a late night gig or a rowdy night of D&D. But when he gets his own apartment at long last, he finds reality to be a far lonelier experience than what he'd expected. Enter Steve, the neighbor in 6B who Eddie shares a very thin wall with. His neighbor who, for better or for worse, sings at the top of his lungs whenever he’s in a good mood and dances around his kitchen every morning before 6am.

At first, the endless parade of pop hits annoy him, but after a time, it begins to chase away some of that loneliness. The fact that it devolves into a petty back and forth war on who has a better taste in music is neither here nor there. Now, if only Eddie could manage to actually meet the guy...

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A modern day meet-cute featuring two shitty apartments, one hideous cat, misunderstandings, mutual pining, some truly inaccurate hopes and dreams about first time apartment living, at least some accidental voyeurism, and a whole lot of ABBA.

[callunawrites]

Eddie finds Stevie in the boy’s bathroom. It’s a Monday, which means that he’s still half asleep and reeling from Mr. Donaldson’s delightful first period lecture on The Catcher and the fucking Rye when he stumbles through the doors to the bathroom tucked around the back corner near the band room. Not the good bathroom by the language hall, no— the good bathroom was the one that the cool kids used. The one that Eddie frequents is the one with the ancient wonky toilet that no one ever actually uses because there’s a fifty-fifty chance of the singular working toilet in the room either flushing like normal or of it deciding to fuck you completely and flooding halfway down the hallway.

It’s been Eddie’s designated smoking spot since Rick let him in on the secret halfway through his sophomore year at good ole Hawkins High. Ninety-five percent of the time the room’s an absolute ghost town and if someone does show up it’s usually a fellow stoner looking for somewhere quiet to self-medicate before they’re subjected to the mind numbing horrors of Jeb fucking Houser’s government class a few doors down.

Which is why Eddie’s surprised to swing the doors open on a random Monday in late April and find the room already occupied— not by any of the usual suspects, but by Stevie goddamn Harrington, the queen bee of Hawkins High herself.

For a long moment, Eddie just stares at her like a deer in headlights, his fingers going lax around the cigarette that he’d already shaken loose from the pack. He doesn’t even notice it tumbling to the ground.

She’s sitting on the floor. 

That’s what he keeps getting stuck on. 

She’s just sitting there with her knees splayed out against the grimy tile, her body crumpled back against the far wall like a puppet with its strings cut. Her hair is still big, her nails still perfect, but there had been sniffles when he walked in, loud and ominous in the quiet until she’d clocked him standing there, her head snapping towards him.

Looking at her now… yeah, those are tears. Her dark eyes are big and round and wet, her lashes clumped hopelessly together with even more unshed tears. There are faint tracks down her cheeks where her mascara has run, black smears that skate past her chin.

For a long moment, they both just stare at each other in horrified silence. And then Eddie shifts awkwardly and breaks the stare down, belatedly stooping to scoop up his cigarette.

“Sorry,” he says, gesturing at the cigarette by way of explanation. He jerks the zippo from his pocket and jiggles it in her direction. “I just, uh—” He hesitates, not sure what to say. Should he offer to leave? Leave her to the dubious privacy of the shittiest bathroom in the school and give her back some modicum of her dignity? He thinks that’s probably his best option, to just turn around and get the heck out of dodge, but at the last second, he changes his mind, holding the cigarette out in question. “—you mind?”

Stevie blinks at him, the wet drag of her lashes terribly distracting. He watches them kiss her cheeks as if in slow motion and thinks for a moment, appallingly, of whether they’d feel whisper-soft against the palm of his hand if he touched them, a ghost of a touch like a butterfly’s wings.

Eddie watches in real time as she tries to compose herself, sniffing hard and wiping under her eyes as her spine goes straighter, her knees tucking back together all prim and proper. She bites her lip and for a moment he thinks that she’s going to argue with him, tell him to get out and go find another place to smoke.

Instead, she gives him a slightly watery smile and thrusts a hand out expectantly. “Only if you’ve got one to spare.”

[callunawrites]

It’s three am and Eddie has been trying to get back to sleep for well over an hour. There’s a nervous energy under his skin and he’s jittery, the remnants of the nightmare that had woken him still clinging to the backs of his eyelids like cobwebs. 

The clock on the nightstand ticks over to 3:18 AM, and he sighs, reaching for Steve’s thigh.

“Hey,” Eddie whispers, trying to keep his voice quiet. “Are you awake?”

Steve murmurs something in response, a barely intelligible little gurgle, more asleep than awake after all. Eddie winces as Steve rolls towards him, groping until he gets a hand spread out across Eddie’s belly. He hums out a noise — something that isn’t quite words, just the sleepy equivalent of a question mark.

Eddie huffs out a sigh. “Sorry, I didn’t mean to wake you.”

“Hey, hey, no,” Steve murmurs, voice slightly slurred from sleep as he edges closer, until his entire body is tucked into Eddie’s side. “Awake now, what’s wrong?”

Eddie grits his teeth. 

“Nothing,” he insists. “Really, it’s nothing.”

Eddie watches through the darkness as Steve cracks one eye open to peer up at him, frowning adorably. His hand, still on Eddie’s belly, begins to move, patting around Eddie’s person like he thinks that he’s got to look for war wounds. It’s only when his hand drops low enough, barely skating the tops of Eddie’s briefs, that Eddie makes a quiet noise and reaches for Steve’s wrist, stopping its descent in its tracks.

Because Eddie? 

Eddie’s hard. 

He’s been hard, or mostly hard anyway, since he woke from his nightmare over an hour ago, adrenaline still surging through his veins, the only thing left of the dream a lingering sense of unease, the vaguest memory of teeth digging into his flesh. And the thing is, the nightmare was not that kind of dream. Sure, Eddie doesn’t remember most of it, but he knows that it wasn’t a sexy dream. 

Unfortunately, his dick didn’t seem to get that memo.

Even with the vice grip that he's got on Steve’s wrist, Steve still manages to squirm loose just enough that the very tip of his pinky grazes the head of Eddie’s cock through his briefs.

“Oh,” Steve says, going still. He stills sounds sleepy, but now he sounds something else too. Shocked. Curious. Intrigued. “Oh,” he says again, in an entirely different tone of voice. 

A moment passes, the room quiet save for their breathing. Then, Steve squirms closer.

“No,” Eddie says, fighting to keep hold of Steve’s wrist. He catches the other hand as Steve swings it into play. “Steve, no, you don’t have to—“

“Oh, I’m gonna,” Steve mutters, and wriggles just enough to free up his left hand. He makes a little aha noise, pleased as punch, and then his hand is curling warmly around Eddie’s dick.

[callunawrites]

The tattoos are Robin’s idea. She comes up with it in the parking lot behind the Family Video fifteen minutes after they’ve shut down the store while the car is still idling in the parking lot. They’ve been slowly splitting the three and a half bags of skittles that they’d pilfered and hidden behind the register earlier as a late and nightmarishly sugary dinner.

“We should get tattoos,” Robin murmurs thoughtfully into the quiet, not pausing to break her staring contest with the flickering sign hanging above the store as she steadily pops green skittles into her mouth. 

Steve blinks. 

At some point since Steve’s last looked at her, she’s sorted all of the skittles out into little colorful piles on his dashboard – yellow with yellow, green with green, orange with orange. As Steve watches, she takes yet another green from the dwindling pile and crunches it beneath her teeth.

Steve, who has just worked an open to close shift and cannot bear the thought of even driving them home much less doing something that isn’t falling completely and irrevocably into possibly eternal slumber, says, alarmed, “What?”

She elbows him, still not looking away from the sign. Her eyes have gone glassy, the far away look on her face somewhere between hypnotized and dissociative. 

“Not now, dingus. Tomorrow, maybe.” She frowns, brows drawing sharply together, nose wrinkling. “No, tomorrow’s the thing– y’know, with the– ugh, with that one girl. Maybe next weekend?”

Steve eyes her blearily. 

He does have a date with Veronica tomorrow, but he’s half tempted to cancel. Getting stabbed over and over with tiny needles sounds substantially better than sleep-walking through yet another mind-numbing date. He chews thoughtfully on his lower lip, watching the play of neon-tinted light against the tarmac. “But what would we even get?”

“Matching tattoos,” she says, shooting him a borderline scathing look out of the corner of her eye. A very firm, duh – keep up.

“No,” Steve says. “I mean, what would we get?”

Robin frowns again. Her face does a thing– wavering between enthusiasm, confusion, frustration, then circling all the way back again. She pops the last green skittle into her mouth and moves onto the orange pile. “Good question. Let me think about it.”

Steve takes the entire pile of red and scoops every last one of them into his mouth, ignoring her protests, and starts the car.

“Sure,” he tells her, still crunching as he waits for her to gather the skittles back into her sweaty palm before he shifts the car into gear. He turns out of the parking lot, vision ever so slightly blurry from the a+ combo of sugar and sleep deprivation, and turns in the direction of her place. “Lemme know when you’ve got an idea, I guess.”

[callunawrites]

Sequel to you let me complicate you 

There’s a point, somewhere in the middle of Dustin’s rambling explanation of actual real-life monsters, evil Russians, and psychic little girls, where Eddie starts to tune him out. Not entirely, of course, because he’s pretty sure that there’s going to be a quiz on this shit later, but just enough to let his brain settle into a kind of numbness instead of the full throttle fucking meltdown that’s been his general state of existence since Chrissy Cunningham’s still-warm corpse hit his floor.

It’s not that Eddie doesn’t want the details. He does. Of course he fucking does. Real-life monsters? Evil Russians taking over the dearly departed Starcourt Mall? A miniscule army of actual fucking psychic children? It’s what stories are made of. Unfortunately, the brain can only handle so much. So, Eddie zones out a little. He’s almost positive that someone will give him the cliff notes version later, once his brain is fully back online. 

As it is, he is cold, the boathouse is dark, and Steve Harrington, despite the dozens of other things going on that would be a much better topic for his brain to latch onto, is proving to be irritatingly distracting.

When Eddie had first heard Steve’s voice, he’d thought– well, he’s not really sure what he fucking thought. That King Steve had come to save him? Un-fucking-likely. That Steve teamed up with the cops and Jason Carver and the rest of town to come and hunt the freak? A little more likely, but something about it didn’t quite sit right. So, Eddie stayed under that tarp, heart rabbiting in his chest, and felt the oar slam into the hull of the boat beneath him, felt the reverberations rumble upwards and outwards, the sound of it harsh in his ear. 

Thump. 

Thump. 

By the time that the oar hit him, Eddie was ready for it. Bottle in his hands. 

He hadn’t expected how strange it would feel to have Steve in his hands again, wouldn’t have guessed for the life of him that even now, all these years later, with adrenaline coursing through his veins and fight or flight sunk deep into his very bones, that something would sit up inside of him and recognize the body beneath his. In truth, he was already hesitating before he ever even registered Dustin Henderson’s voice shouting for him to stop.

He held that bottle to Steve Harrington’s neck, felt Steve trembling under him, watched the sweat beading against his temple, his eyes wary, and felt it. A sense memory of another time that he’d had Steve trembling under him for a very different reason.

[callunawrites]

The air inside of the Harrington house is noticeably hazy, smoke hanging ominously over the heads of all of Hawkins' best and brightest. It reminds Eddie of the sort of smog that sweeps in and overtakes big cities on the hottest days of the summer, a pervasive storm cloud of ozone and nitrogen dioxide, poison for the masses. Eddie watches it for a little while, his glassy eyes tracking the movement of the cloud as it wafts its way through the room, how it snakes lovingly around sweaty bodies, the smell of it settling into hairspray-laden curls, onto skin, working its way into the fabric of a dozen dresses, a dozen more flannels.

This isn’t his first Harrington party, but it’s definitely the loudest he’s been to by far. He’s pretty sure that half the school is here — popular kids, band geeks, even a couple of the real weirdos are doing their best to blend in with the wallpaper, as if they think they’ll somehow suck up coolness via the great and completely natural osmosis of existing at a subpar rager in Hawkins fucking Indiana.

Eddie snorts, hesitating for a moment longer in the foyer before he pushes his way back into the sweaty masses. His own supply has dwindled down to almost nothing after the night's business, just a single hastily-rolled joint that he's tucked behind his ear for safekeeping. Ordinarily, this is when he’d be making his escape, taking his pocketfuls of cash out the front door before the cops come calling, but it’s a Saturday night and Eddie is finding himself oddly reluctant to leave.

He meanders for a bit, taking in the sights. It’s definitely the biggest party of the year — which makes sense, he thinks. All of the biggest and baddest parties happen near the end of the year, when everyone is going out of their mind from end of year exams, ready for the heat and freedom of summer. It’s got a heady energy to it, a mindlessness that's all too tempting after weeks and weeks of pressure and stress. Everyone is laughing or dancing or kissing or puking. There’s skin on display, girls in low cut shirts and short skirts, guys with their shirts unbuttoned past their collarbones.

Eddie ignores them and makes his way to the basement, half thinking that he’ll find a quiet spot to smoke his jay before heading out, but if anything, the basement is even worse. Someone’s mocked up a light system down here, all blues and reds and purples, a disorienting tilt-a-whirl of color as the bass of the shitty pop that they’ve got playing reverberates through the room.

Upstairs it is, then.

[callunawrites]

The sky is grey today. Martin supposes that he should be grateful that there’s any light at all. Nightmare geography being what it was, every time that he’s ventured to the surface for the last six months, the sky has either been the perfect pitch black of void stuff or the murky green that means the Eye is up to something.

But now, it’s the thin misty grey of a London morning, a relic from another life. He can even see the sun on the horizon, a rare sight these days. Martin can nearly imagine it—waking cozy and warm in his nice soft bed at his crappy old apartment, padding around in his socks for a bit before getting ready in the dim morning light. Maybe even stopping in for the good scones around the block before heading for the station. Walking through the front doors of the Archive, listening to the distant drone of Jon’s voice, making statement after statement, muttering to himself between tapes. Sasha and Tim bickering about something between the stacks, the way Sasha’s voice hitches a little when she says his name.

A good memory, no matter how far out of reach. Martin's eyes sting, and he has to scrub at them for a moment before he’s able to continue, setting one foot down after the other.

The Panopticon is strange in the daylight. It still doesn’t look like the Archive, not the Archive as it once was, but in the daylight, it seems almost normal—assuming, of course, that you can ignore the seemingly endless rows of cameras around every corner. They follow Martin as he makes his way inside, turning to watch him as he crosses through the hallways, up the staircases, lights all blinking red. It almost makes him want to wave. A few months ago, he may have.

He counted once—it takes him exactly twenty-eight minutes to make it to the top as long as Jon hasn’t made any changes to the general layout of the place. He’s done that a couple times now, changing the way up, making the inside of the place a veritable maze. Martin still doesn’t know why. If it’s his way of attempting to keep Martin out or if he just can’t help himself, if its Jon at all, or merely the Eye.

Today it takes Martin thirty-two minutes, because he’d stopped on the fourth floor to help a little girl who’d gotten stuck between two camera feeds, unable to move. She hadn’t thanked him once he’d gotten her free, just scurried off into the dark, breathing shallow, fear in her dark eyes.

“Hello Jon,” Martin tells the floating figure that used to be his boyfriend, crossing the room to take a seat in the chair a few feet to the left of Jon’s dangling feet.

[callunawrites]

There is a mirror in the furthest corner of Hyrule Palace that is guarded day and night. It’s a beautiful mirror, old and ornate with a frame that's heavy with real gold, a strange flowing script etched into the metal. No one in the palace guard seems to know how old it really is, nor why it is guarded.

The first night that Link is on rotation to guard it, he thinks nothing of it. It’s a quiet night, with little to do save stand there and yawn.

The next morning, he’s asked a lot of questions about the experience. If anything strange happened. If he heard anything. If he noticed any odd shadows or tricks of the light.

No, he signs, perplexed. All quiet.

The man breathes a sigh of relief, giving a quiet chuckle and slapping Link across the shoulder blades. His palm is heavy, sweaty even through Link’s tunic.

“Guess you got lucky,” he tells Link. “Not a lot of first timers get a quiet night their first time.”

Odd, Link thinks as he’s heading back to the barracks.

[callunawrites]

It’s too good to be true, Steve thinks, even as the town cracks apart. The town is burning, one of their own is dead, another just on the cusp, but at least Vecna is limping. At least there’s a lull in the action, a brief respite to catch their breaths.

The town is burning—dozens dead, dozens more missing—and Steve somehow considers it a relief.

That’s when he knows that things have gotten bad, that his entire outlook on life has been fundamentally changed. When you can look at the town you’ve spent your whole life in cracked in half and on fire and think, well now, that’s not too bad, is it? That’s fucked up. It is, without a doubt, entirely fucked.

Steve is entirely fucked. In the head, sure. He’s been half aware of the PTSD, but this? This knocks it right out of the fucking park.

He holds it in until he gets home, and then he laughs until he cries, hysterical, holding his side so his stitches don’t pop and he ends up holding his guts instead. He falls into an uneasy sleep, wondering how he’s this lucky—lucky that his house is still standing when so many others aren’t, lucky that he can live while Eddie's corpse is rotting down there, because they couldn’t even give him the decency of bringing his body back with them. Some friends they are, Steve thinks, and giggles again.

He spends the next week in a fugue state. Helping where he can help, going where he’s needed. He volunteers at the school, and when that isn’t enough, he starts helping what’s left of the fire department search through the rubble.

They don’t find many survivors. Most of those unlucky enough to be caught in the cracks are just gone, as if the upside down forcing itself up and into reality was enough to carve right through them. A great beast opening its gaping maw and swallowing them down.

Breathe, he tells himself, every night as he’s falling asleep. You owe at least that to those who can’t anymore.

[callunawrites]

When Ryan Bergara was younger, he had an imaginary friend named Shane.

Shane wasn’t like any of the other kid’s imaginary friends, though, because Shane was real. When the crybaby in Mrs. Tanner’s first grade class talked about his imaginary friends, he talked about stupid stuff—elephants with perfectly pink trunks and big purple ears who blew bubbles every time they talked, dogs bigger than their classroom with fur the color of fresh summer grass, unicorns that pooped rainbows and spoke with Jersey accents…You know, fake stuff. Things you might see on the Disney channel just after school let out.

But Shane wasn’t like that.

Shane was mostly human shaped, except the fact that he was so very tall—taller than any adult that Ryan knew—and he had long lanky arms that sometimes brushed the ground when he walked and a great big head that made Ryan think of pumpkins. He had warm brown eyes that crinkled when he laughed and a silly mustache that he’d twirl whenever he did voices for Ryan.

He was a good friend. He went on adventures with Ryan to catch tadpoles in the neighborhood pond, played pirate with him in Mrs. Williker’s backyard whenever she wasn’t home to catch him near her pool, even told him stories when he couldn’t sleep at night, long after Ryan’s family had gone to bed.

And then, when Ryan was in the third grade, one of the older kids caught him talking to Shane.

[callunawrites]

Nico di Angelo takes his last breath in broad daylight, the sun gleaming at him through the trees overhead. It feels like one last fuck you, not even allowing him the decency of dying in the dark.

He’s in a state park, and even now, he can hear the tourists traipsing along the trails nearby—the faint echo of their bickering, their laughter, will be his last lullaby. It’s rich, that’s all—to die in the light, so close to salvation. If even one of them had taken even a few steps off the trail, they might have found him.

But they won’t. And he won’t. Survive that is.

Nico sucks in a quick breath, hearing the wheeze of his dying lungs, the gurgle of fluid there. Each breath is a little agony, and he isn’t ashamed—he sobs a little. For himself, for his friends, for the sheer amount of pain he’s put his body through—all that, and it’s only gotten him here. Dying alone, like so many of his kind.

[callunawrites]

When he was younger, his mother had told him that he would be scared the first time. That his veins would thrum with terror, his heart rabbiting in his chest. He would be scared, she said, because this was new, but she wanted to make sure he knew that just because it was new and scary didn’t make it bad. That it was okay to be scared. To be nervous.

His mother hadn’t known then what Stiles would grow into. His spark had been smaller then, the town bigger. There had been more magic. More wolves. More potential. She’d assumed that Stiles would be involved, yes, of course he would be—son of the sheriff, son of the town witch—of course he would be chosen. What she hadn’t known was that by the time Stiles came of age, he’d be the star of the show. The pick of the lot.

The day of the first full moon of the harvest dawns cold, the chill of the wind cold and biting, even through two layers of clothing.

Stiles spends the day preparing. He washes in the morning, scrubbing until his skin flushes red, and then after, he uses a mixture of pig blood and graveyard soil to paint the sigils across his skin himself.

He passes the daylight hours with his family. With his father, with Scott and Melissa. At sundown, they eat stew, hearty and rich, the flavor of meat and spices clinging to his tongue, and then after, Stiles attempts meditation.

It doesn't work.

By the time the moon rises, Stiles is shivering, his veins thrumming, his heart pounding—but unlike what his mother had predicted, his pulse doesn’t beat with fear.

No, he thinks, with the crunch of the leaves beneath his bare feet, his breath fogging the air before him, what he feels isn’t fear.

It’s anticipation.

[callunawrites]

Steve Harrington spins Eddie Munson back to life on a Saturday. It’s just starting to drizzle, the prickle of icy droplets like needles against the back of his neck, and he’s crouched over an empty grave working magic that even his mother’s mother dared not touch.

“Bone of the father,” he whispers, breath coming out in puffs of wispy vapor, half frantic as he grinds a pair of knuckle bones to dust. He’d bought them off a back-alley witch three states over, the knuckle bones near-ancient and pricier than they would be worth in any city worth its salt, but honest. True. Steve can feel the blessing like a tingle against the pads of his fingertips.

“Tears of the mother,” he adds, upending a crystal vial over the dirt as the wind starts to pick up.

It won’t work, he thinks. It’ll be for nothing. He needs the body, needs the flesh and bone for a proper weaving.

Faith, he reminds himself, and takes a deep, quelling breath.

“Blood of the son,” he finishes with all the sanctity of a devout Catholic murmuring amen after the priest’s homily, and opens a vein directly onto the headstone.

He empties at least a pint of blood onto the dead leaves scattered across the grave—empty, his brain helpfully reminds him, it’s fucking empty—and sews himself back up afterwards.

[callunawrites]

The glass that Xiao Xingchen had given Xue Yang when she’d first arrived is sweating on the coffee table in front of her, condensation running down its sides to pool on the expensive mahogany below. It’s a good drink—bubbly and sweet with the tang of citrus and the slightest bite of mint—but sweeter still is the satisfaction of knowing that the ring of condensation that the glass will leave behind is going to linger long after Xue Yang leaves.

It’s going to drive Song Lan crazy.

In the kitchen, Xiao Xingchen is cutting Xue Yang a slice of olive oil cake, the top of her head just barely visible over the fruit bowl perched on the dividing counter between kitchen and living room. There’s a handful of peaches in the bowl, perfectly plump and blushing pink. Just looking at them makes Xue Yang’s mouth water. The whole room smells of those peaches, the aroma heady and syrupy sweet, golden sunshine slanting in through the windows turning the whole room into an oasis of sweet-smelling warmth.

Xue Yang doesn’t know why they bother with the pretense anymore. They always do this, waffling around the kitchen after she’s arrived like there’s some sort of legal obligation to feed and water her before they fuck her brains out. Xue Yang has sat on this couch and eaten her weight in confectionery treats, fruits, even once, memorably, an entire steak dinner. She hadn’t understood it at first, and to some extent, still doesn’t now, but she’s grown to appreciate their little ritual.

Xiao Xingchen emerges from the kitchen with a wedge of perfectly sliced cake, golden and lovely with thin slivers of almond and powdered sugar sprinkled across the top, picture perfect against the blue glaze of the plate beneath it. She hands it to Xue Yang with a smile, taking a seat on the couch exactly a cushion away from her, and folds her hands into her lap. She watches Xue Yang eat it, too, her dark eyes lingering on Xue Yang’s lips whenever she takes a bite. When they first started doing this, Xue Yang thought it was maybe one of her things, people and food and sex, but she quickly realized that Xiao Xingchen honestly just liked feeding people.

“When’s Zichen getting home?” Xue Yang asks when she’s done, setting the plate beside the sweating drink and tucking her legs beneath her.

Xiao Xingchen glances at her watch and shrugs, beginning to slowly settle now that Xue Yang’s eaten. She looks fantastic today, her hair pulled back into a messy bun, still damp from the shower she must have taken before Xue Yang’s arrival. She’s dressed for relaxation, a pair of sweatpants hanging low on her hips and one of Song Lan’s t-shirts slumping down her collarbones. The first time that Xue Yang had ever seen Xiao Xingchen, she’d been dressed for work, her hair pulled back into a severe knot at the nape of her neck, a sharply cut grey suit clinging to her narrow frame, stilettos clicking against the floor as she stepped up to the counter. Xue Yang, her hair tangled up into a snarled bun, espresso all down the front of her apron, had felt like she’d been punched in the throat. Now, sitting on her couch months later in the fading afternoon light, Xue Yang thinks that she looks even nicer like this—loose, comfortable, a little bit undone.

“Not long now,” Xiao Xingchen tells her, her smile going a little smug when a moment later they hear the rumble of the garage door opening.

[callunawrites]

Yennefer fucks Jaskier the third week that she is at Kaer Morhen. It isn’t planned. Yennefer does not wake up one cold winter morning with a sudden craving for bard cock. It just sort of happens. One minute they’re arguing about Jaskier’s latest horrible earworm, and the next, they’re staggering backwards into Jaskier’s room, cold stone pressed scratchy and uncomfortable against her back as Jaskier hitches her skirts up around her thighs and drops to his knees.

The worst part—the very worst part about the whole mess—is that he’s actually good at it. The fact that after all these years she has first hand knowledge that his “reputation” isn’t bullshit somehow manages to frustrate her more than the fact that he makes her come so hard she screams.

“We don’t tell Geralt?” Jaskier says into the quiet afterwards. His chest is heaving beneath her splayed palm, covered in a thin sheen of sweat.

Yennefer doesn’t take her hand off his chest, but she does give him a look. “You know that he’ll know.”

Jaskier groans loudly, raising a hand to his face. He grinds the heels of his palms against his eyelids, making despairing noises under his breath. “You’re right,” he moans, once he’s done being a dramatic bitch. “He’ll probably smell it on us or something.”

Yennefer wrinkles her nose. Yes, he probably would. “I was thinking more that he likely heard us, but yes. The smell. That, too.”

Geralt’s room is closer to Jaskier’s than it is to hers, separated by a mere two winding hallways. She should have probably thought of that before taking Jaskier back to his bed instead of her own. But then again, they’re in a keep full of witchers. Even if Geralt hadn’t heard anything, she’s sure one of the others did. It would likely be everywhere by breakfast.

“This probably shouldn’t happen again,” Jaskier says, glancing her way.

“Probably not,” she admits, frowning up at his ceiling. It was good, though. Better than good. Better than anyone since… well, probably since Geralt, which made it all the more vexing.

Jaskier makes a quiet noise of surprise when she rolls back on top of him. He spreads his thighs a bit for her, which is very nice. Very accommodating. She rewards him by ducking her head down to bite one of them.

“If it isn’t going to happen again,” she tells him, rolling her hips against his, “we best make the most of tonight, wouldn’t you say?”