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laundrybiscuits · 11 months ago

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Just cleaning up some of the snippets that have been lingering in my drafts, partly to take a wee break from posting massively self-indulgent experimental weirdness! This is from the matchmaking fic I was messing around with a little while ago.

So: the Vickie thing. Or, as Robin privately thinks of it, The Vickie Thing, capital letters and all.

Thinking about it makes her feel incredibly stupid and pathetic, so obviously she can’t think about anything else. It’s fine, though—it’ll be fine. Steve keeps telling her that it doesn’t really count, which feels good and bad at the same time.

She’s not even actually allowed to be mad about it, because Vickie was always totally honest with her and Robin lied all the time. Not big lies, obviously, just stuff like yeah of course I’d love to help you pick out an outfit for your date and of course it doesn’t mean anything and no it’s totally fine.

It’s just—a girl had wanted to sleep in her bed and hold her hand and gaze into her eyes late at night, trading meaningless secrets back and forth. A cute girl with a sweet smile and really cool taste in music, who was trying really hard to be vegetarian but kept sneaking bites of Panda Express orange chicken when she thought Robin wasn’t looking.

It had been so easy, when she was with Vickie, to just chase that effervescent feeling any way she could. Easy to say yes to whatever Vickie wanted, because Vickie was never pushy about anything; Vickie would only ever ask hesitantly, like she didn’t know what was allowed, and Robin just wanted to give Vickie everything in the world. Sometimes Robin had felt like she’d claw her own lungs out if Vickie would just say she wanted them.

Robin had spent a lot of time wondering if she was making it all up in her head. But Vickie had a way of looking at her, of smiling at her, that made the air between them feel heavy and copper-bright. Vickie had told her I don’t think I’ve ever had a—a friend like you before. Like, a girl friend.

And in Robin’s head, the space between girl and friend had been like an inhale; a vacuum. A space that wasn’t a space at all, until it turned out that it was.

———

After Robin helps Eden get the book down from the top shelf, she thinks that’s going to be the end of it. Just another day embarrassing herself in front of pretty girls; what’s new?

But Eden sticks around for some reason, wants to know if Robin’s read the book—Candide, by Voltaire—and when Robin blurts out that she’s read it in the original French like a pretentious asshole, Eden just rolls her eyes and says okay, genius, and shoves at Robin’s arm in a way that makes Robin think it’s not that big a disaster after all.

And before Robin knows what’s happening, they have plans to hang out the next day, because Eden’s apparently got nothing else to do and doesn’t want to hang around with her ex-boyfriend and the entire Hopper-Byers household. She just comes out and says it like it’s obvious. Maybe it is, but nobody Robin knows ever talks like that, no apologies or anything.

Eden’s so different from just about everyone in Hawkins. She’s real in a way Robin doesn’t know what to do with. She talks like she’s just passing through on her way to something big and bright.

“Like…New York?”

Eden shrugs, loose shirt collar slipping a little over one shoulder. Not all the way, just—it’s a really big shirt for her to be wearing. It looks like a grown man’s shirt, even though it’s got a tacky, faded skull with what looks like angel wings on the back and some tattered lettering that Robin can’t make out.

“Maybe,” says Eden. “New York sounds cool. I just gotta turn eighteen first. I was going to hitchhike to LA when I turned sixteen last year, but it—there’s, y’know, the kids.”

“You must really care about them,” says Robin. She’s always wanted siblings. It sounds nice, having a bunch of other kids around all the time, rolling their eyes at their parents together and sharing secrets. Like a built-in set of friends.

“Nah. I mean, I guess, kinda. Not really.” Eden glances down, picking at her cuticles. One starts to bleed, and she makes a face and jams her hands into her armpits. It’s probably going to stain her shirt.

“Where I’m from…” Eden tips her head back, rocking back on her heels a little. “Everyone’s just, I don’t know. Stuck. They can’t even look up from their stupid pointless freaking lives where they never go anywhere or do anything. They’re all going to get pregnant with a million babies, and those babies are going to have a million babies, and nothing will ever change. It’s a shithole. It’ll always be a shithole, forever and ever until the end of the universe.”

“Dark,” says Robin.

“Yep.” Eden smiles at her. The afternoon sun draws a bright, precise curve on her cheek. “Mistress of Darkness, that’s me. C’mon, Robin Buckley—let’s go see what else Hawkins has going on. I wanna taste the forbidden delights of a whole different shithole.”

———

Eddie sacrifices a notebook to the cause, because obviously Steve Harrington did not actually bring any supplies for this little planning session. Eddie would bet all his worldly possessions that Steve was the kind of guy who never even took out his pen in group projects.

“What do we know about Tammy Thompson?” he asks, gnawing on the end of his Bic.

“She wants to be a singer,” says Steve decisively.

Eddie writes CAN’T SING under her name and underlines it twice. Steve screws up his face like he’s trying not to laugh.

“She’s got, uh. Ambitions? She’s ambitious?” Steve tries, but Eddie can tell his heart’s not in it, so he ignores that and writes BLONDE instead.

“Is blonde important?”

Eddie shrugs. “If that’s Robin’s type, maybe.”

“I think she bleaches it. She was more, like, strawberry blonde in school. And hey, Vickie’s a redhead, so…”

Eddie crosses out BLONDE and writes EX-REDHEAD???

“Hey Harrington, next time you see her, maybe you should suggest she dye it back. Maybe Robin will be overcome with lust and the problem will solve itself.”

“Huh, you think?”

There’s a denim jacket crumpled at the end of the bed; Eddie picks it up and lobs it directly at Steve’s head. Devastatingly, Steve snatches it out of the air and shrugs it on like it’s no big thing, smirking.

“No, you fucking asshole,” groans Eddie. “I do not think Buckley is capable of making any kind of move. She’s like a skittish woodland creature. How come she never picked up any of, like…your whole deal?”

“My…deal?”

“Yeah, you know.” Eddie flops down on the bed with a gusty sigh. “Your Casanova thing. Bet you’ve never even thought twice about pulling out the charm at some poor unsuspecting set of tits.”

“Girls like my charm!” squawks Steve. “I was Prom King!”

“How far’s that get you with college girls lately?”

Steve scowls and prods at Eddie’s ribs with his big toe. “I’m just saying, I’ve got—moves.”

“Okay, okay, you’ve got moves.” Eddie sits up and grabs his hair, bunching it into two sloppy pigtails. He pitches his voice up an octave. “Ooh, look, Harrington, I’m Tammy Thompson and I never met a key change I couldn’t fuck up, how are you gonna put your famous moves on me?”

Steve’s rolling his eyes, but he shifts closer on the bed. “Hey, Tammy,” he says. “That’s a really cool, uh, shirt you’re wearing.”

“British Steel defined thrash and paved the way for Metallica,” says Eddie, still in Tammy’s voice. “You utter philistine.”

“Huh,” says Steve, smiling. He’s good; it looks real. “Sounds like it was, uh, pretty important. Maybe we could give it a listen sometime? You could tell me all about it.”

“Take me now, big boy,” Eddie warbles, throwing himself dramatically over Steve’s lap.

Steve laughs, but doesn’t shove Eddie off onto the floor like he’d been expecting. “No, for real, what’s the album about?”

“You better be careful, Steve Harrington,” says Eddie, sliding back into his real octave. “Charm like that, you’re gonna have me falling in love with you too.”

Eddie can feel Steve freeze up, eyes going wide. He sits up, putting a little space back between them, and busies himself picking some fluff out of his hair. “Come on, take a joke, man. Promise your virtue’s safe from me.”

Christ, he needs a smoke.

#absolutely nothing against Vickie Strangerthings but I needed Robin to have a disastrous situationship that mostly takes place in her head #in like 10 years Vickie will look back and go ohhhh that was a weirdly intense and maybe not 100% platonic friendship huh #I may reorder this in the posted version if & when that happens. but for now the Vickie backstory needed to be shoehorned in.#fic: somewhere sometime somehow

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laundrybiscuits · 11 months ago

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happy AO3 maintenance day! here's 2k of even-more-self-indulgent continuation

Eddie does know that he’s not actually a vampire like how Dracula is a vampire. He’s not an idiot, thanks. Also, vampires are just a metaphor for lust or alcoholism or class warfare or intimate partner violence, depending on what story you’re trying to tell. Eddie might be a metaphor but it’s a shit one, without any kind of organizing theme. His powers don’t make any fucking sense; they’re narratively inconvenient.

But if there’s one thing Eddie knows he’s good at, it’s spinning up a good story out of nothing at all. So, vampire it is.

He keeps saying that to the labcoats, because it’s fun to fuck with them. He hisses I vant to suck your bluhhhhhd even though he knows it just pisses them off.

It takes them a very long time to realize that small, regular doses of relatively fresh human blood would tamp down on the vomiting and uncontrollable bowels. Eddie’s cell had not been in great shape until they’d figured it out. There’s no dramatic children-of-the-night mystique left in shitting yourself on a concrete floor. Eddie likes to pretend it never happened, because it was before he crawled out from under that Greyhound terminal bench and could make his own choices again.

Everything before then, everything from that awful blank time Eddie can’t remember to the Greyhound terminal bench, was just a protracted birthing process. A years-long delivery, full of uncomfortable bodily fluids and a lot of screaming, and at the end he’s something almost but not quite like a person.

———

It’s a massive pain in the ass to get back to the super secret government laboratory in a hidden concrete bunker. Go figure.

“Isn’t there, like, another way we could do this?” says Eddie after three or four months. “One where I don’t have to get through a fucking obstacle course just to get within a mile of this place?”

“Well,” says the labcoat.

It’s technically a different labcoat, an older guy with sandy hair, but it’s better for the story if it’s the same one as before. She’s the unsmiling face of the lab.

Consistency is better; consistency means you don’t have to keep track of a bunch of different characters that nobody really cares about anyway. She’s not important except as a personification of the years between 1986–1994, even if she was technically still in grad school until 1989, one of two women in her cohort, and when she and the other women both got good jobs in the lab even though she’d been visibly pregnant when interviewing, they called each other up to shriek delightedly over the phone, and she’d never been a crier but tears had been streaming down her face because her grad school bills would be paid and she’d be able to have a real career and a family and she’d be working with the one person who’d ever really had her back, doing it all, the way her own mom said over and over she never could.

None of that’s important, because it’s not about Eddie, and also she’s not even actually in this conversation.

But let’s say it’s her anyway, the one from before, Chris-Lionel-Jacob’s mom. It makes things cleaner, thematically, if the lab is embodied in a person that Eddie can have feelings about, instead of being a complex institution with good people and bad people but mostly just people who are trying to do their jobs and don’t think what they do is wrong. A lot of them have student loans. A lot of them don’t actually know what they’re working on. That’s all just too complicated to fit into what is ultimately sort of a love story, believe it or not.

Eddie could decide to hate her, but he won’t. Partly because he never actually does see her again after he leaves the lab, and he’s already forgotten her face, but mostly because that’s not what protagonists do. Not in this story.

So, the labcoat adjusts her gold-framed glasses again and says, “Actually, if you’re open to relocation, we have more accessible clinics in Chicago, Boston, and Albany.”

“Nowhere on the West Coast, huh?” Eddie rolls his neck. “Always wanted to see L.A.”

“No,” says the labcoat. “We don’t want you going too far, just in case. Those clinics aren’t equipped to handle anything going wrong.”

Anything, of course, refers to Eddie. It is so incredibly obvious that it would be insulting to say it out loud.

———

The early days of his new life slip around like oil on plastic, resisting all his best attempts to get a hold of them but leaving him covered in sludgy filth anyway.

It makes sense. Sophomore albums are always a little sloppier than the first ones.

The bitch of the thing, of course, is how memories always get to feeling more real than whatever’s happening now. The first twenty or so years of Eddie’s life had proceeded in a dramatically tragic fashion; it’s easy enough to map out the arc. He’d had a Tough Childhood, capital T, capital C, which had resolved into a misleading kind of salvation when he moved in with Wayne; that’s the kind of second-act upswing that just serves to lull you into a false sense of closure before the hammer comes down. In this case, the hammer is of course watching a cheerleader die, being hunted for her murder, discovering that monsters are real, and dying in another dimension. Neat and tidy, really.

If there’s some kind of life lesson to be gained from his death, Eddie hopes Dustin learned it. Would be kind of nice if the little dork gazed into the middle distance every so often and remembered him. Eddie thinks about that sometimes, which is really just a way of thinking about himself. He imagines Dustin saying Eddie the Banished taught me everything I knew, he was such an influential mentor figure to me, I have carried his standard on through my new life as an inspiration and when I get a Nobel Prize I’ll gaze out over the crowd with a tear in my eye and say it was all thanks to Eddie, he mattered, he made a difference.

It doesn’t matter that Dustin doesn’t even sound like that. It doesn’t matter that they’d known each other for maybe six months total, and been something approaching real friends for less than a week, charitably speaking. That’s not the point. It might even be better that way

The Dustin in his head is a Peter Pan. Eternally young, with the kind of bullheaded confidence that only comes with youth. Eddie knows the kid hasn’t always had it easy; hell, that’s why he snagged him and his merry band for Hellfire.

It’s not, like, predatory, okay? It’s—it wasn’t like that.

He’d just seen a fragile hunger underneath the bravado and thought, not quite consciously: bet he’d be an easy sell.

Even further down, somewhere he didn’t let himself acknowledge until he was dying in Dustin Henderson’s arms: bet I could leave a mark. A legacy. A fresh start by proxy. Something to go right, in a kid who’s too young and malleable to know better.

So, maybe it was a little predatory after all. Maybe it was taking advantage; maybe Eddie’s been a monster this whole time.

———

There’s something Eddie knows and doesn’t know, and he thinks if he can get his head around it, maybe it would solve everything.

See, Eddie’s special. Unique, even. But also—he’s really, really not.

He won’t ever learn that about two thirds of people who survive to adulthood in the USA had Adverse Childhood Experiences, or at least he won’t ever remember if someone tells him, but the numbers don’t matter so much. He knows anyway. Most folks he grew up with went through some serious shit as kids, and some of it made Eddie’s deal look like a cakewalk. Even the ones who seemed to have their shit together: the nice thing about looking like every other gangly teenage metalhead plug is that people kinda stop registering your presence sometimes. He’s been tucked into a corner of a couch in the basement of someone he barely knows, invisibly nursing a shitty beer while some cheerleader casually mentions that her mom put another lock on the outside of her bedroom door, or some honor roll student talks about fending off a creepy uncle like it’s a funny story.

So—Eddie could spin his backstory in a tragic light, if he wanted to. The most wrongéd cherub this side of the Mississippi, criminal dad and neglectful mom, drugs and cars and a soliloquy about child abandonment.

Someday, at some point after Crossroads comes out in movie theaters but before American Idiot sweeps the MTV Music Awards, Eddie will tell Steve the truth: that he was the one who left his mom behind.

She hadn’t known what to do with him. She’d been young when she had him, just nineteen, and on Eddie’s nineteenth birthday he got so drunk he couldn’t even cry anymore. He’d sobbed in dry, rasping gulps that sounded more like some kind of seizure and left him lightheaded, because that was better than thinking about how his mom had done her best and she’d, she’d been so young.

She’d get so mad at him sometimes, which had felt like the biggest possible injustice in the world when Eddie was six and not great at listening or sitting still no matter how hard he tried, but nineteen-year-old Eddie could understand. He’d been an annoying kid. A tough one for a girl working two restaurant jobs and supporting a boyfriend with a rap sheet as well as a snotty hyperactive critter that never stopped making noise or needing things from her. It wasn’t any wonder that she got mad like she did. She’d always apologize afterwards, anyway.

It could’ve been a lot worse, but he’d screamed I hate you I hate you I hate you, I wanna go live with Wayne one too many times and she’d thrown her hands up and said well okay then.

———

He’s strange in the real world, but most folks leave him alone. He doesn’t think he looks that different from the people around him, not with his fresh Goodwill haul and hair finally growing out from the government cut, but he doesn’t move right.

It would be better if it were a shadowy-nightmare-beast thing: an uncanny stillness that unsettles everyone around him. Instead, Eddie hears himself talking too loud and too fast, getting up in people’s faces or flinching hard away from them because apparently you can forget how to be around people after a few years.

He doesn’t make a lot of friends in Boston. He winds up in P-Town most nights because it’s okay that he’s a little strange; they put up with him, more or less. He doesn’t understand why until some guy grabs his ass, and he thinks: why not. What’s anyone going to do to me now, anyway? What does it matter what anyone does now?

It doesn’t usually get too far, because he’s a little scared that he’ll lose control and bite someone, get their blood in his mouth. He doesn’t even know if he can get sick like real people, but it scares the hell out of him anyway. If he were even a little bit more normal, he might like getting held face down and fucked that way; but the one time he tries it, he can’t get hard and he wigs out, almost takes the guy’s hand off at the wrist. The guy calls him a freak and leaves, which is more than fair.

After that humiliation, he keeps it light. Casual. Just hand stuff, mostly, which isn’t really that gay when you think about it. He’s said that, too: told nervous-looking straight boys that it didn’t count, it’s okay, just relax, man. It’s not a big deal. It’s a lot like Hawkins, Indiana, after all.

This is the start to a wholly unasked-for sequel to wait for the season that I’ve been poking at for some time. It’s definitely even weirder than that already-kind-of-weird fic, so maybe give it a miss if you’re looking for the standard fare. Steve isn’t even mentioned in this snippet. I'll post something more normal soon, I promise.

From the living end of memory, the past seems inevitable.

You had to go through that terrible thing so that you could become the type of person who would survive that later, more terrible thing that most likely occurred in a thematically resonant way—and with a little determined creativity, the thematic resonances start popping up all over the place.

So then you arrive on the other side of the terrible thing, the second terrible thing, with your memories all worn smooth like rocks that have been jostling around in a pocket for years. They fit together now, no inconvenient angles or edges anymore. It’s all one continuous shape, the shape of how things happened, and you tell yourself that there was no other way for your story to go.

It was always going to happen this way.

It was always going to be the concrete; the buzzing overhead lights; the placid, thoughtful voice saying “Let’s see if we can get it to wear some clothes, why don’t we?”

Embarrassingly enough, that’s the first thing Eddie remembers from his new life. He’s seen clips of the grainy footage from the months before that, but when he tries to remember lurching around and sinking his teeth into some disgusting raw slab of meat, it’s like a black hole. His mind doesn’t even want to get near the edges. He feels irrationally like if he thinks too hard about it, his mind will decide that actually, sentience isn’t such a hot shit idea after all, and he’ll tip right back down and down and down.

———

Wayne’s old now, and it makes Eddie uncomfortable in a way he doesn’t really want to look at too hard.

Wayne had never been young, exactly; Eddie doesn’t remember a whole lot from back when he first went to stay with Wayne, just a lot of promises that it was temporary, promises that stopped coming after a while. But what he does remember looks a hell of a lot like Wayne when Eddie was nineteen or twenty: wrinkles, bald spot always hidden under some ballcap or other, grumbling I’m an old man but Eddie never truly believing it because somehow, over the years, he’d got to believing that Wayne would always be there. Fucking stupid! So so fucking stupid from Eddie, who on paper looks like someone who should know better.

Now Wayne’s actually old. Now he moves so slow, Eddie gets impatient just watching him through the lit-up window, doing the washing-up and puttering around the kitchen with stooped shoulders.

It’s easier on him if I don’t, thinks Eddie, but he already knows he’s lying as he thinks it. Or rather, he’s lying in a very specific way: it’s easier for Eddie if he pretends Wayne is dead, but probably not so much the other way around.

That makes him a pretty terrible person, he guesses, but then again—not exactly a person anymore. He doesn’t know how much that matters.

It would hurt him, thinks Eddie, tentatively, and that might actually be a little bit true. It’s just not as true as the other truth: that Eddie wants to keep Wayne locked in the box marked BEFORE because it’s too difficult to even think about explaining. That if Wayne’s back in his life, Eddie has to reckon with him as someone who will just continue to get older every single day until one day Wayne is as old as he will ever be.

It’s easier if he doesn’t. Doesn’t he deserve an easier life? Didn’t he go through purgatory? Hasn’t he paid and paid and paid? He should get whatever he wants, he should rip through the skin of the Earth to sink his teeth into the candy flesh, chew it up—

So yeah, he’s a monster in more ways than one.

———

There’s BEFORE and there’s AFTER, but really that’s just a narrative device. Really there are a lot of before-afters.

There was before-after Eddie woke up; that’s the big one, maybe. Then there’s before-after Eddie is Eddie again and could think in words like a human. Like a person. Then there’s before-after it becomes scorchingly, irreversibly clear that Eddie is neither human nor person.

And of course, there’s the before-after Eddie finds himself outside in government-issued sweatpants and a plain blue t-shirt, looking up at the gibbous moon for the first time in his new not-quite-life, and feels absolutely nothing about it.

It hits him later, kind of. He doesn’t even try to get somewhere safe (for whom?) to bunk that first night, just curls up in the nearest Greyhound terminal and felt sorry for himself, performatively. It seems like the thing to do. Woe is Eddie, friendless nightmare beast, freakier than anyone’d ever guessed he could be, and not in a fun way.

He hadn’t even—

Back before, like before he’d even died in the first place, he probably would’ve taken it harder. Hah. Harder.

But it hadn’t even occurred to him to reach into his own stringless scrubs and make baby Jesus cry, not for a long time. When it had, he’d felt oddly proud, as if that was proof that he's not some mindless beast at his core. That's probably not quite right, though. He thinks about it some more and decides it doesn't mean anything after all.

And then when dawn hits the Greyhound terminal, he belatedly realizes that shit, maybe he should’ve been thinking more about what vampires can and can’t do, traditionally, and he’s a little worried about burning to a crisp but it’s already too late, so he just rolls under the bench with the last of his consciousness and hopes like hell he looks too dangerous to mess with.

Somehow he’s okay; somehow the cops aren’t even called. This is by way of being an inference, given that once the sun is out for real, Eddie is for all intents and purposes no longer a participant in goings-on. But he wakes up in the orange light of the sunset and everything seems to be the way he left it, maybe a handful more Burger King wrappers and fresher eau de urine gathering in the corners. The slim roll of go-away-please cash is still in his white cotton briefs. He’s not in a drunk tank and nobody’s prodding him. Nobody’s even around. Cautiously, he wonders if it’s another freaky power they just never thought to check for.

He doesn’t feel much like testing it, and also it’s actually really fucking uncomfortable to be crammed underneath a bench like he is, so he crawls out and starts trying to pull together some kind of life.

———

“Eddie,” the labcoat says, while he’s still staring up at the night sky for the first time in almost a decade.

Yeah, that whole thing where he walked outside and looked up at the moon wasn’t actually that romantic. They didn’t exactly let him waltz out into the wide world with a bindle on his shoulder; they decontaminated him, made him sign a bunch of stuff, and had this labcoat in sensible shoes slip him a shifty fifty in exchange for promising to come back on a regular basis for “check-ups” that they both know aren’t for Eddie’s benefit. They pretend otherwise, because it’s nicer that way.

“What,” says Eddie. “I’m just saying, I dunno how the economy works nowadays, but I’m guessing fifty bucks isn’t gonna get me too far.”

The labcoat pushes gold-framed glasses up her nose. “You understand that we did not have to do this at all, right?” She doesn’t sound—she’s not being mean, or even condescending. She’s just telling him so he understands. “You do not legally exist.”

That’s all she says, but Eddie knows what she means. He also knows that this money’s coming with strings, and he wants to get the absolute most he can out of this while he still has something they want.

“Okay, but—”

The labcoat rolls her fucking eyes and reaches into her own fucking pleated slacks and pulls out her own fucking wallet, counting out two twenties and a ten gone soft around the corners. She probably gets paid real good. There’s a picture of a kid in the wallet, maybe five or six years old; it looks like a school photo with that weird cloudy blue-grey background. The kid looks happy. He’s grinning. His name is probably Chris or Lionel or Jacob. He’s probably in some kind of youth T-ball league where he mostly sits in the outfield and eats grass. He’ll probably get into a good college someday, maybe on a baseball scholarship after he gets really good at T-ball after all and hits the winning home run for his high school varsity team. It will be a whole different millennium and he will never, ever know that the Psych 101 class he’s skipping to dry-hump his English-major girlfriend was paid for by the three and a half years his mommy spent administering heavy-duty sedatives to Eddie so they could run all their little tests without Eddie getting bitey.

“Thanks,” says Eddie, because he’s got manners. He’s still got manners.

“We’ll see you in a month,” the labcoat says.

#it may help to note that I remembered I had Eddie call them 'labcoats' in WFTS and thought that'd be fun to keep going #so I went back and edited the last couple grafs on the first post #I think this will also probably take some editing because I'm not quite satisfied with the thematic rhythms but I need to move on for now #fic: maybe when the earth starts to melt #fic: wait for the season to come back to me

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laundrybiscuits · 1 year ago

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From the living end of memory, the past seems inevitable.

It was always going to happen this way.

It was always going to be the concrete; the buzzing overhead lights; the placid, thoughtful voice saying “Let’s see if we can get it to wear some clothes, why don’t we?”

———

Wayne’s old now, and it makes Eddie uncomfortable in a way he doesn’t really want to look at too hard.

Now Wayne’s actually old. Now he moves so slow, Eddie gets impatient just watching him through the lit-up window, doing the washing-up and puttering around the kitchen with stooped shoulders.

That makes him a pretty terrible person, he guesses, but then again—not exactly a person anymore. He doesn’t know how much that matters.

So yeah, he’s a monster in more ways than one.

———

There’s BEFORE and there’s AFTER, but really that’s just a narrative device. Really there are a lot of before-afters.

He hadn’t even—

Back before, like before he’d even died in the first place, he probably would’ve taken it harder. Hah. Harder.

———

“Eddie,” the labcoat says, while he’s still staring up at the night sky for the first time in almost a decade.

“What,” says Eddie. “I’m just saying, I dunno how the economy works nowadays, but I’m guessing fifty bucks isn’t gonna get me too far.”

“Okay, but—”

“Thanks,” says Eddie, because he’s got manners. He’s still got manners.

“We’ll see you in a month,” the labcoat says.

#okay so—I’ve been reading a lot of postmodern fiction lately #I’ve generally been a pomo enjoyer for many years despite the fact that it makes me a parody of myself #but that is why this is a wee bit more experimental. I do not expect people to like it!#this is pure self-indulgence #fic: maybe when the earth starts to melt #fic: wait for the season to come back to me

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laundrybiscuits · 1 year ago

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So I was playing around with an expanded version of this wlw vamp!Eddie snippet (tentatively titled heard you like magic) for Monsterfucker May because, well, 1) it’s pretty good incentive to write something I’d been thinking about anyway 2) I am procrastinating on a fuckton of work right now.

Anyway, I started jotting down some thoughts that wound up being practically a whole-ass essay, and the expanded fic definitely isn’t going to be posted before tomorrow, so…I thought I might as well post this. It’s not very exciting; it's about 1300 words of me ruminating on the worldbuilding/character decisions I’ve been making about adapting Steve’s gender.

The heard you like magic fic is really just me sort of iterating on the loose sketch of cisgirl!Steve I started noodling around with in feel how you fit around me. Obviously it’s not the same timeline at all; I hadn’t really thought through this AU very much, since it was spontaneously birthed from skimming the lyrics to “Red Wine Supernova” and getting inappropriately stuck on “her canine teeth in the side of my neck” but I’m using it to play with similar ideas.

I do think a very similar story to canon could have been created with cisgirl!Steve. (If female!Steve is trans, the timelines get a little complicated and there’s literally no way she could have socially transitioned and achieved an unquestioned popularity in the 80s. It could be a good and interesting story, but it would have fundamentally different beats.) Canon!Steve’s initial thematic/narrative function as the hot, popular boyfriend who embodies normality and social acceptance (at a cost) within the context of high-school-drama-turned-supernatural-horror could absolutely have worked with some of the genders shuffled; admittedly, it would likely have been received by audiences very differently. But from a purely thematic/structural perspective, yeah, I think the same story could have been told.

So the specific question I’m poking at here is: what does that Steve look like, if his largely unquestioned shifting relationship to masculinity becomes a largely unquestioned shifting relationship to femininity? Part of what makes him such an interesting character is how he navigates taking on a babysitter/caretaker role within the group, because that runs counter to his gendered expectations about who he is and what he’s good at. For a teenage girl, though, “babysitter/caretaker” is a pretty conventional role.

I’ve thought a lot about approaching this as “What would have to change to make female!Steve commercially viable?” Honestly, I do think the production machine would probably have killed her off as planned; she’d be too unlikeable. She’s hot and bitchy in a way that is simply unforgiveable in an 80s-inflected horror narrative.

But what if they didn’t, though? What’s the minimum amount of change needed to make Stephanie Harrington work in the story and world of Stranger Things?

If we’re cleaving as closely as possible to canon’s themes and structure, Nancy has to be male. Their relationship needs to represent convention and safety, because Nancy’s journey is partly about her inability to let things lie. For better and for worse, she’s not the kind of person who can pretend that everything’s okay when it’s not, and Steve exists to be the temptingly normative option.

Jonathan Byers is basically already Ally Sheedy in the Breakfast Club, so that’s straightforward enough: he’s a trope of the artsy “unsafe” alternative, the one Nancy’s parents wouldn’t approve of, but the one who understands and enables her rejection of easy answers. If we’re not concerning ourselves with marketing decisions, he could still be male and fit the same thematic role in M!Nancy’s arc, but that would change Steve’s journey pretty significantly.

I think it could still be a good story! There’s a lot of potential there. But if we want to keep Steve’s confrontation with Jonathan as a turning point for his character, it just works much better if Jonathan’s a conventional rival. The dynamics also play out pretty differently if M!Jonathan gets in a physical fight with F!Steve—it’s hard to imagine any version of Nancy being super chill about that. F!Steve is also slightly less likely to default to that kind of physical confrontation as socially acceptable/expected, although I could definitely see it similarly escalating to physical violence with F!Jonathan.

The Stobin dynamic more or less works with the genders exchanged. This is pre-Will and Grace; the concept of a “fag hag” existed but was not nearly as mainstream as it would become in a decade or two, so there wouldn't necessarily be a lot of expectations or models of what their relationship should look like. One minor shift: the public imagination had a much more specific concept of what gay men looked and acted like than it did for lesbians, so Steve would probably be a little more resistant and/or take a little longer to get it.

The Party can still keep their canon genders; I don’t think that would affect the older teens too much. It might shift the dynamic of Dustin seeing Steve as a role model, but I think that’s a sufficiently indirect/unstated part of their relationship that it could translate reasonably well. I do think Dustin might get a highly embarrassing and often-denied crush on female!Steve, but he absolutely would not admit it.

Max would probably be a little closer to F!Steve, since she’d have a bit less older-brother baggage, and less drawn to M!Nancy. Mike would hate F!Steve exactly the same amount, and neither Lucas nor Will seem to be that invested in canon!Steve anyway.

More generally, though, I don’t see F!Steve as taking refuge in “at least I’m a good babysitter,” because to some extent that would be expected. F!Steve probably didn’t babysit for spending money as a younger teen, but it wouldn’t be out of the question. I really cannot stress enough how much growing up in small-town midwest USA pre-Y2K was oriented towards training young girls for motherhood. They got explicit and implicit instructions that young boys simply did not.

I’m not completely convinced that F!Steve would be as inclined towards a big family as canon!Steve, either. For Steve, whose familial model is an almost wholly absent father, a big family is part of the fantasy of belonging. While I do tend to read him as having honest intentions about pulling his weight, he doesn’t have a very practical understanding of what childrearing is like, and anything he does above the bare minimum is going to be praised. F!Steve would be more keenly aware of the scrutiny she’d be under as a mother, as well as the sheer scale of labor involved. Also, she’d be much less likely to want to pop out six kiddos from her own uterus. The calculations are different.

I grew up in a very conservative area with girls whose primary worldly ambition was genuinely to become mothers. When we talked about “careers,” it was with the explicit understanding that it would be a side gig to help support their main role as a mother. Some of them do now literally have six children.

Steve does not strike me as that kind of person on a fundamental level. He has certain normative ideas about what family and relationships look like—his arc really is all about disrupting and complicating those ideas. In the context of F!Steve, though, I don’t think that thread of clinging to hegemonic norms would manifest in wanting a big family; it seems more likely to me that she’d have some vague ideas about two or three kids and a wealthy, attentive husband.

I also don’t necessarily see her being quite as keen to lean into a tank role. The “woman warrior” trope was gearing up for the cresting wave of girl-power third-wave feminism in the 90s, but it wasn’t quite there yet—certainly not for someone whose narrative category is “the conventional one.” I actually think that could be a good angle for F!Steve’s development; while canon!Steve has his established/normative role as the tank to counter the subversive dynamics of his role as caretaker, F!Steve could potentially flip those: it’s not weird or unexpected for her to babysit, although she might be surprised by how well she does with Dustin, but translating her athletic ability to combat could propel her towards accepting that she might not be 100% conventional after all.

Anyway, I really need to stop thinking about this and get back to the core of this story, which is “what if vampire!Eddie wildly underestimated how much of a monsterfucker Stevie is, and also what if they were both girls”

#virtually none of this will ever make its way into the text #it's just a fun little one-shot about a vampire who is also a girlfailure #and yet I insist on overcomplicating everything as usual!#also....yeah I haven't been around a whole lot #sorry! I'll probably start posting again around july when my most intense work stuff is wrapped up #I've also recently realized that I used to do a lot of writing on the tube/train...and now I drive everywhere. thanks USA.#stranger things meta

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laundrybiscuits · 1 year ago

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Don't know if that fourth chapter I mentioned in the tags will ever get finished, but here's a fairly self-contained 560-word snippet...nsfw, obviously, but not actually all that spicy. Additional content notes: mild inappropriateness from some random sex shop employee, not dwelled upon.

“Do you ever miss dick?” Eddie winces even as she’s saying it. “Wait, fuck. I didn’t mean—just, like. Would you ever…want to get fucked with a dick, if I got one, is what I’m saying.”

“Like a threesome?” Steph’s not completely opposed, if it’s something Eddie’d be into. But these days, she can’t really think of anything Eddie could suggest that she’d say no to.

“Uh,” says Eddie. “That’s not…what I had in mind. But we can circle back to that, maybe. I was actually talking about, you know…”

She gestures. It doesn’t look like any hand motion Steph’s ever seen before.

It’s been snowing in fits and starts all day. Eddie and Wayne have been finding and caulking every little seam for weeks now, so Eddie’s bedroom is warm enough for Steph to be hanging out in her underwear and an old Slayer t-shirt, letting Eddie play with her hair.

“A DILDO,” Eddie says, way too loud, then turns bright red and scrubs a hand over her face.

“Oh,” says Steph.

“I just think it’d be kinda hot,” says Eddie. “I mean, if you’re into it. You can—we don’t have to. And they’re expensive anyway, and I don’t even know where, um.”

“How expensive?”

“What?” says Eddie. “I don’t know. Expensive.”

“We could pick something out together.” Steph isn’t rolling that deep these days, but she figures she can swing $50, maybe. That’s like…three or four shifts? Something like that. Less than a week, for sure.

———

They’re not even that expensive, as it turns out. Eddie tries to sell her on a bulging silver-and-black monstrosity, but Steph settles on a sleek magenta model which seems like a more reasonable size.

“It doesn’t look…real,” says Eddie. “Is that—do you think you want something more, I don’t know. Fleshy?”

Steph shrugs. “I mean, you’re probably going to be looking at it more than me. Unless…”

It’s probably kind of dumb that she hasn’t thought about it before, but she’s sure thinking about it now: Eddie in her lap, bracing herself on Steph’s shoulders and panting wetly as Steph pushes the silicone in. Actually, that’s a pretty good thought, definitely worth revisiting: Eddie with all her shitty bad-girl tattoos and leather and chains, taking something bright pink because Steph’s the one giving it to her. Maybe she’d even whine for it, if Steph fucked her good enough.

Eddie smacks her on the arm. “Stop thinking whatever you’re thinking!” she hisses. “We’re in public!”

Steph rolls her eyes. “Sure, if you figure it’s worse than whatever the guy who’s been staring at us from the blow-up doll section’s been thinking about.”

“What? Where?”

“Don’t look, oh my god. He’ll—yeah, he’s coming over. See?”

The guy wanders over and leans on a shelf, close enough so they can see a plastic nametag that reads HELLO! MY NAME IS: DAN. “Can I help you ladies with anything?”

Eddie gives him a tight smile. “Just shopping for a bachelorette party.”

“Well,” he says, flicking his nametag. “I’m Dan, at your service. Gotta say, we don’t get a lot of customers who look like you in here. Just let me know if you have any questions, or if you’re looking for a…practical demonstration.”

“We’re fine,” says Eddie. “Thanks.”

“What, your friend can’t talk for herself?”

“I can talk,” says Steph. “We’re fine. Can we just get this one, please?”

Remember my WLW canon-era Steddie series from the 2023 Spotify Wrapped ask game? I've just added some connective tissue and put it up on AO3.

feel how you fit around me (5.2k, E)

Steph keeps showing up, and Eddie keeps letting her in. As epilogues go, it could be a lot worse.

#sorry about ending on a slightly tense note! the next scene is a smash cut to the car after Eddie lifts a vibe on the way out #which is mostly unwritten rn; I've been busy building out the flicker start ficlet but felt like posting this #and also felt like doing a bunch of research on the 80s sex toy industry that mostly did not get used at all #I just think the history of the dildo is cool as shit—both historical insertables and the rise of the modern market #though tbqh flesh-toned dildos really hit that uncanny valley for me even in a harness. which probably comes through.#love and respect to all those who prefer flesh tones! I have literally cast the contents of my nightstand as a water/steel pokemon team #I'M THE WORST #fic: feel how you fit around me

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laundrybiscuits · 1 year ago

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Remember my WLW canon-era Steddie series from the 2023 Spotify Wrapped ask game? I've just added some connective tissue and put it up on AO3.

feel how you fit around me (5.2k, E)

Steph keeps showing up, and Eddie keeps letting her in. As epilogues go, it could be a lot worse.

#I want to archive more of my ficlets but am constantly plagued by the desire to edit/expand #which is not commensurate with the amount of free time I have #like with this one I actually started writing another future chapter where they awkwardly visit a sex shop together #but I was like no!! I cannot!! if I let myself write just one more chapter then this will never get posted #fic: feel how you fit around me

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laundrybiscuits · 1 year ago

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I've recently been tagged in a few WIP/"last thing you've written" type games, and…to be completely candid, I haven't been writing any kind of fic lately because I've become a little bit obsessed with analyzing the Broadway revival of Merrily We Roll Along.

Not for any particular purpose, I just saw it at the Hudson a little while back and have a lot of feelings about it! In my tiny scraps of spare time, I've been working on an essay about Merrily and inevitability that will probably end up rotting in my google docs*, because that's how I approach writing as a hobby.

There's just so much there, holy shit. I'm focusing particularly on "Franklin Shepard, Inc." because Radcliffe's Charley brings a frenetic, desperate vulnerability to the performance that reads so, so differently from earlier productions. Throughout the show, I was consistently blown away by the heavy lifting Radcliffe, Mendez, and Groff do in shifting the core tension from "art vs commerce" (fine but basic, and difficult to keep modern) to "how people prioritize different types of relationships in their lives."

In an effort to make this slightly less wildly off-topic for this blog: this has gotten me thinking about the way that platonic relationships are treated in narratives, particularly but not exclusively in fandom.

"Found family" is and has always been a popular trope, but I do think its current incarnation trades a lot on the underlying fantasy of relationship permanence. When we recategorize friendships as familial relationships, we're making a claim—whether or not it's justified—about the indelibility of those relationships.

That's not inherently bad (or, god forbid, problematic). I think it's very very natural, especially for those who don't necessarily have a lot of experience with the way adult friendships change over time. Why wouldn't you want something as precious and unique and amazing as a good friendship to stay with you forever?

Certain people can feel like pillars of your world, and it's fucking terrifying to think about that being yanked out from under you—or even worse, to think about your lives slowly shifting like geologic plates until suddenly you realize it's been weeks, then months, then years since you last really talked.

CHARLEY: We're not that kind of close any more, the way we used to be. And a friendship's like a garden. You have to water it and tend it and care about it. And you know what? I want it back.

It's a peculiar, particular kind of grief when it happens, because even though it's a fairly common human experience, it doesn't get socially acknowledged in the same way as e.g. a romantic breakup.

So yeah, it makes a lot of sense that found family is a popular trope in all kinds of media, not just fandom.

However...at this point, I've developed a knee-jerk wariness to the phrase "found family," because I've found it often correlates with a really flat, simplistic depiction of human relationships. In extreme cases, it simply recontextualizes a relationship within the socially acknowledged/acceptable framework of a stereotypical family unit.

This does a disservice to familial and nonfamilial relationships alike. Every family is different, so why do so many found families in media look the same?

(I was monologuing about this to my very patient girlfriend, and she pointed out that this also sets up a success/failure binary condition in relationships, where permanence is the arbiter of success in both romantic and nonromantic contexts. She is of course both beautiful and correct!)

I have friends with whom I can sometimes share a glance and know exactly what they're thinking. I even have a running joke with one friend about the sheer number of times we've said the same thing in unison over the last 15 years. I still need to be intentional about building those relationships, extending empathy when we differ, and carving out time to reconnect. Truly intimate long-term relationships of any kind involve disagreements, conflicting priorities, and negotiating and renegotiating boundaries.

Being "basically the same person" or "sharing a braincell" actually sounds super fucking lonely to me, personally, and it handily elides the difficult, essential process of keeping people in your life.

FRANK: Old friends let you go your own way. CHARLEY: Help you find your own way. MARY: Let you off when you're wrong. F: If you're wrong. C: When you're wrong. M: Right or wrong, the point is, old friends shouldn't care if you're wrong. F: Should, but not for too long. C: What's too long?

That's a more complicated and much more mature narrative to tell than "friendship will save the day!" Because it's not that common and there's not a deep bank of references to draw from, it takes a lot of effort and skill to depict well, and I don't blame creators for not wanting to let it suck up all the air in the room. However, I think it's important to acknowledge that platonic relationships can also be flanderised and flattened.

In the context of fandom, which has always traded heavily in Romance genre conventions, I would really like to see more thoughtful explorations of complicated nonromantic relationships. I'm not even talking about genfic here! I've actually been thinking about Stobin specifically because that relationship (rightly & understandably) tends to show up in any Steve-centric fic, including the vast ocean of Steddie fics, so it makes the issue slightly more visible than I've seen in other fandoms.

I'm not saying I want to see them fight, or not be friends, or not love each other fiercely and near-obsessively in the way that lonely teenagers can. I'm just saying I want them to be distinct individuals who view the world in very different ways, and choose each other anyway. They already have a complicated past; I know from personal experience that it's possible as a lesbian to be best friends with a guy who once made a little speech about how into you he was, but that little layer of history never quite goes away.

I don't want frictionless relationships in my life. I want people who will challenge me and whom I can challenge, in the context of love and trust. I want people in my life whom I have to work to understand, because my life is richer when I do. And sometimes, I want narratives that will reflect the grief of friendships that are no longer part of my life, despite the best efforts of everyone involved.

In Merrily, Charley sings, "Friendship's something you don't really lose—" but Radcliffe's thready, pleading delivery makes it all too clear: Charley already knows he's lying. The audience just needs to catch up.

*Other essays in that particular graveyard: understanding the cast of Peanuts through the lens of anomie, humor and subversive linguistic nationalism in 00s Singaporean TV, how to fix Miss Saigon. WHY am I this way.

#side note: how fucking good was Radcliffe in that role? what a glow-up from HTSIBWRT #all the casting was brilliant but (Tony winner!) Mendez and (Tony nominated) Groff were less of a dark horse #anyway I think...I might start to get a little less rigid about letting myself dump nonfandom or fandom-adjacent posts here #we'll see if I have more time to post and/or write once this busy period at work dies down #recently is a relative term btw. I have been tagged more recently than the cambrian explosion. so that counts.#I appreciate the tags and it's very nice of y'all to think of me though!

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laundrybiscuits · 1 year ago

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I had zero plans to continue this but @shdwsilk came in with the extremely good takes sooo…

If you don’t know Inception this is probably incomprehensible. Soz.

“Shouldn’t you be talking to the mark?”

Steve visibly startles as Eddie slides onto the barstool next to him. Steve’s in a suit, because the mark is the most boring person alive and thinks a fancy cocktail party in a hotel is the stuff dreams are made of; Henderson was extremely specific about the number of dashing rogues Eddie was allowed to drop in for passionate speeches and/or dueling purposes.*

“Eddie?” says Steve.

“Mm, no, Johanna Berger.” Eddie tosses his head, letting ice-blonde hair cascade over his bare shoulders, and smirks up at Steve. “I am quite charmed to meet you, darling.”

Johanna is a young widow who may or may not have had something to do with her late husband’s untimely death, so she’s wearing a plunging black dress designed to show off some real bombshell curves. He’s pretty proud of her rack, honestly; it’s harder than you’d think to make sure everything looks realistic.

“Are you doing an accent?”

Eddie scowls. Johanna went to an international school, so her accent’s subtle to the untrained American ear, but he spent two solid hours last weekend reviewing Austrian vowels with his dialect coach.

“Are you not doing an accent?”

“Uh, no? Because I don’t need to? The mark’s from Connecticut.”

“Perhaps the both of you could use a little more exposure to…foreign affairs.” Johanna leans in coyly, trailing one red nail up Steve’s arm.

Steve lets out a snort that sounds completely unrehearsed. “Does that ever actually work for you, dude?”

Johanna tilts her head, gazing up at Steve. She’s not the type to get intimidated, but she is the type to be curious. She’ll take risks if it means getting a chance to pry someone open.

“You don’t spend much time with other forgers, do you?” she says.

Steve shrugs. “I don’t really do the whole, uh, dreamsharing community. I mean, I guess I’ve kinda been doing this a while, but like—not seriously, you know? It’s not really my thing. Wasn’t planning on any more jobs at all, but Henderson showed up, and you know what that kid’s like.”

Steve looks so openly fond just saying Henderson’s name that Johanna has the sudden urge to shield Steve’s face from the crowd somehow. The poor fool, she thinks in despair. He has yet to learn that a tenderness like that is to be protected.

Or—maybe Johanna would be contemptuous. Maybe she’d think: what a fool. Anyone could see how to break Steve Harrington’s heart.

“Yeah,” says Eddie. “I know what Henderson’s like. Biggest pain in my ass imaginable.”

The soft look on Steve’s face shifts into a real smile as he glances over. “Tell me about it,” he says. “Hey, you sound like you again.”

“What, no I don’t,” says Eddie.

“No, it’s good. It’s better than whats-her-name.”

Eddie looks down at himself, thoroughly-researched curves straining at the satiny bodice and a manicured hand still resting on Steve’s arm. “Maybe you just need to get to know Johanna,” he says. “She’s a hell of a dame.”

“Sure.” Steve winks. “Tell her to give me a ring sometime.”

“Oh my god, why are you hanging out with projections,” says Mike freaking Wheeler, popping up like a bad penny in a cater waiter outfit. “Steve, go talk to the mark! We’re running out of time!”

“Okay, okay, sheesh,” says Steve, pushing away from the bar.

“Jesus, Wheeler, we’re two levels down. We got plenty of time,” says Eddie, pointedly not watching Steve weaving through his crowd.

“Wait, is—are you—Eddie?” The kid is openly gawking at Johanna.

“Eyes up here, champ,” says Eddie. “This is Johanna Berger, and she’s here to make sure everything goes according to plan. Also, she’s here to look appropriately and publicly devastated at the tragic death of her husband, because the yacht club wives are getting gossipy.”

“Whoa,” says Wheeler. “That…wasn’t in the briefing.”

“Keep up, yeah? You’re in the dreamshare business, the briefing never covers everything.” Eddie puts a tray of champagne flutes in Wheeler’s hands and snags one for Johanna as Wheeler fumbles to keep from dropping the rest.

Johanna sips the champagne. It doesn’t taste like anything at all.

“Darling,” she says. “If you learn to let dreams surprise you, I think you will have a better life, yes?”

Across the room, Steve looks up from charming the mark. He smiles at Johanna, just a quick and completely unprofessional flash of teeth before turning his attention back to a Connecticut banker who probably wouldn’t have a hope in hell of catching Steve’s attention in the waking world.

Or maybe that’s Steve’s type. Maybe he’s got some smart, boring wife in a conservative pantsuit tucked away somewhere. Maybe she comes home every day like clockwork to a hot meal and freshly-bathed children and has absolutely no idea that her trophy husband inhabits dreamscapes in his spare time.

No, he is better than that, thinks Johanna. In my soul I know that he deserves better. I would take him away from such a woman in an instant.

Which is just—

Okay, so Steve Harrington might be a slightly bigger problem than Eddie’d thought.

*“Zero, Eddie! Zero rogues, zero secret Cinderellas, whatever that means, zero drama. Just assume the answer is always going to be zero with this guy!”

“Then what’s the goddamn point, Henderson?”

“Uh, maybe the nice fat paycheck coming our way?”

At this point, Eddie can either admit that he isn’t actually in it for the money (gross, not an option) or subside into a sulky silence. So: zero dashing rogues. It’s fine. He’s not bitter at all.

#okay yes I DID have fun with the fucky identity stuff but! I’m still not planning to write any more!#I mean it this time!#I cut out the dialogue coach's backstory though #the short version is that he thinks Eddie's a struggling LA actor named Gregory who gets the weirdest auditions in the world #Inception AU

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laundrybiscuits · 1 year ago

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Found myself reading some old Inception fic and felt the urge to poke at an AU idea—I know ST fandom skews a little young, so I genuinely don’t know how many people will even get this. If there are Inception primers out there, I haven’t bothered to find them, so…you’re on your own, kids.

“Absolutely not. I do my own forges.” Eddie sweeps the file off the table and directly into the trashcan; admittedly, it’s not the most mature thing he’s ever done, but Henderson’s getting on his last goddamned nerve.

The little twerp has the fucking audacity to roll his eyes and groan, like Eddie’s the one being unreasonable. “I know this guy, don’t be a dick. He can do it. Don’t you wanna focus on your super special architect stuff?”

“What you and every other dumbass dilettante drowser don’t seem to grasp is that my architecture is alive, and I breathe life into it via my meticulously crafted characters. I create richly textured worlds, Henderson, and I populate them myself. That’s why I’m the best in the fucking business: because I understand that the people and the setting are one and the same, and I can handle both.”

“Eddie.” Henderson crouches to grab the file out of the trash, and smacks it back down on the table. “I’m running this team, and I’m saying I don’t want anything like what happened in Munich to ever happen again. Okay?”

“Low blow, kid,” snaps Eddie. “Munich wasn’t on me.”

“I know, jeez. I just…” Henderson takes a second to tap the loose sheets in the file back into place, then stands there with his lips pressed together like he’s keeping something in. After a moment, he just says, “This isn’t going to be Munich. Because Steve’s going to be here.”

———

It’s not Munich. It’s not Munich at all. It is the furthest fucking thing from Munich possible.

Eddie’s never had a job go that smoothly—and it’s not down to Henderson’s obsessive prep, because it should’ve been a slippery one. The kind of job that twisted partway through into something frustratingly unexpected, forcing them to improvise and take whatever half-win they could squeeze out of the mark’s subconscious while dodging completely unexpected security.

Instead, it’s so incredibly not-Munich that the client gives them a fucking bonus, and when was the last time that happened? The bonus is generous enough that Eddie’s share can cover a whole new safehouse in Melbourne, which should have been great news, something to celebrate, except for the absolutely unholy amount of smugness now radiating from Henderson.

Eddie avoids the I-told-you-so conversation as long as he can, but he can’t run forever.

“I told you so,” says Henderson, flopping unceremoniously into the dark wooden chair next to Eddie.

“This is a library, dude. Keep your fuckin’ voice down,” says Eddie, without much hope. He’d heard Henderson was supposed to be meeting up with Sinclair in Lima this week; so much for that intel.

Henderson waves a dismissive hand, gesturing vaguely at the domed skylight high overhead. “It’s not like a library library. It’s basically a museum.”

“The goddamn State Library of Victoria is absolutely one hundred percent a library library, genius. See all the books? But also, do you think people go around yelling in museums?”

“Maybe they should! What we should be focusing on now, though, is that I was right about Steve, and I think it’s important for our working relationship that you acknowledge I was right.”

“I don’t have to acknowledge shit,” says Eddie, slumping down and ignoring the glares they’re starting to get from everyone in the atrium. “Anyone ever tell you you’re an egomaniac, kid? I don’t even get why you’re so hot on the guy, anyway. He’s like—the least imaginative forger I’ve ever met.”

It comes out a little harsher than he’d meant it. It’s just that forgers, as a people, tend to be easily swept into flights of fancy.

Eddie’s always sort of thought it was a requirement of the profession: when he’s inhabiting a character, part of his mind is always working to generate the little details that make them feel like a whole person. Their secret fears and even more secret hopes. How they deal with boredom or anger, what their gut reactions are. The small gaps between how they see themselves and how others see them. That’s where Eddie thrives, and he thinks that if he were less hooked on the magic of spinning up entire worlds for marks to wander through, he might forge full-time, just for the thrill of riding that uncertainty. It’s how he was taught, but clearly, Steve learned something different.

What Steve does isn’t really classical forging—not in the way Eddie thinks about it, usually. Steve just…walks into a situation, says some stuff, maybe gives the mark a smile all warm and private like a whispered secret. And then the mark folds. It’s maddening how easy Steve makes it look. Oh, he’ll pull on the right costumes and tweak his physicality a little, but it’s always still just Steve underneath.

Maybe that’s the trick. Eddie’s forges work because he crafts lavishly detailed lies; Steve’s forges work because there’s some kind of real, solid honesty at the core.

“I’m going to ignore the hurtful thing you just said because I know you hate to admit it when I’m right and you’re wrong,” Henderson informs him. “You really gotta work on that. More importantly, I’ve got a lead on a new job, and Steve already said yes.”

It’s not like Eddie needs the money. Henderson’s a nightmare to work with. And there’s the, y’know. The Steve Harrington of it all. Eddie has a million reasons to say no.

“Yeah, whatever,” he says instead. “When do we start?”

#not the start of a new thing! just a napkin scribble!#weirdly I think the most challenging part of writing this was shifting my core concept of the boys away from Just Some Guy #personally I'm not super drawn to rockstar or royalty AUs for them bc they're so intensely Just Some Guy to me #more specifically I find it fascinating how they deal with the absence of social validation in different ways #Inception AU

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