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piss-pumpkin · 14 days

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Bad dreams (Percy x reader)

Child of Hypnos reader, ~4.5k words, set ambiguously after pjo, the request was enemies to lovers so I sincerely apologize. Masterlist

Capture the flag. It was a game of epic highs and lows, winner and losers, all to decide who wore the crown. Until next week, that is. And nobody took it more seriously than Annabeth, determined to win and keep her indestructible reputation as the best strategist around. She was in the war room, taking this very seriously, and discussing with her right hand man before the team.

Percy groaned, dramatically dropping his head on the table, half pushing off the map. “Annabeth, why?” He complained, hand waving in the air to communicate the distain that she couldn’t see in his face.

Annabeth sighed, taking her head in her hands. “I know you don’t like them,” she started calmly, crossing the floor to Percy to pat his back gently. “But the Hypnos cabin is an asset, between all of them, we can have half the enemy team asleep,” she said, ever pragmatic.

Percy was not a fan of her reasoning, as sound as it was. Unfortunately for him, the head counsellor of the Hypnos cabin was you. And You and Percy? He didn’t even want to think about. No idea why you decided not to like him upon meeting, even less of an idea how it’s escalated as far as it has. “Wise girl, have mercy,” he whined, standing up straight again. “Putting me in a room with them is a sure fire way to lose.”

Annabeth pursed her lips. “That might be true,” she started, circling the table, eyes the pieces she set dramatically to represent each of her forces. One or two Hypnos campers per squad to weaken the enemy. “But they’re essential to the plan, just… you’ll be in different areas, if all goes well.”

Percy grumbled. Things never went well.

As the battle drew closer, the allied cabins assembled to hear the more polished version of Annebeths plan. And of course, that meant you at the table, front and centre, your forces being an essential part of the strategy. Great. You always listened to Annabeth, even though she was always sticking up for him. And she managed to get you on the same team, even when you knew that guy you hated would be there.

You nodded along with the details, assigning siblings you thought best for each task. You seemed a lot nicer with them.

You conferred with your cabin, and offered another plan to Annabeth. Percy wasn’t completing focused, because when you were done, he had no idea what you’d said. Annabeth seemed to be a fan though. She nodded along, and adjusted the prices on her map while you have people notes and alternate delegations.

An order to each cabin head. All except him. He glanced around at each counsellor telling their cabin mates what they should do, and he cringed. You’d instructed everyone else. “Uh,” he started looking to you because Annabeth was busy talking to the Apollo counsellor. “Does my job change at all?”

You pursed your lips, smiling just slightly. “No, I guess I didn’t have anything for you,” you said slyly. “But isn’t jumping in without thinking kind of your whole thing? Just roll with that, yeah?”

Percy’s face flattened as he sighed. He needed somebody else, “Annabeth?” He asked.

She turned to him, and thought for a moment. “They might have a point,” she said curiously, much to his detest. Percy grumbled as she continued. “Using you as a wild card might be beneficial, especially because you can take large groups of them at once.”

Great. No job, and more work, somehow. And you were smiling, a bit too satisfied with yourself and his annoyance. Why was it always like this?

…

There was one time when Percy was sparring with Clarisse, and they got a little too heated, and it ended up with Clarisse on Pegasus cleanup duty, and Percy teaching sword classes for a week. Definitely the lighter punishment, considering he liked the job. Chiron always went a little easy on him. But there were layers to this punishment. Primarily: you.

When Percy was approaching, he saw you, and sighed. You were there first, already talking to the younger campers, wide smile on your face and holding a weapon. Ugh. Of course he had the misfortune of fucking up the same time as you. Okay. This week was actually going to be terrible.

“Hey, sorry I’m late,” he said, jogging up to you and the campers. You’d just finished some sort of introduction, it was the perfect time to slide in. The youngest kid looked maybe ten, and had a dagger in her hand. She was little small for the real swords. The kids were looking up at him, faces blank or curious, and you were side eyeing him, brow raised, completely unimpressed. Yeah, he should probably do something interesting.

“Yeah, you sure were,” you laughed sarcastically, sounding just nice enough for the kids not to pick up on your distain.

Percy grimaced. Great start. With a deep breath, he did his best to recover, running his hands through his hair nervously. “Well, I’m here now, so,” he said, looking at the younger campers. Grinning, and ignoring your cold stare, he uncapped Riptide, and a few kids gasped. “How about we get to the fun stuff?”

He spared you a glance, catching you roll your eyes at him. This was not going to be a good week. Quite possibly the worst punishment Chiron could’ve given him.

It’s hard to teach as a team when you can’t get along for a second. And all the kids noticed, and did their best to egg you on. Percy was fighting for his life harder than he had on several quests, until the very last minutes of the time slot. Thank the gods it was only like, an hour. Even if it was one of the longest hours of his life.

And he wasn’t even spared when it was over.

“Of course we fucked up on the same week” you sighed, picking up a carelessly discarded sword. “Let me guess, something boring…” you started, walking idly toward the weapons rack with a handful of blades. “Like what, blowing up the bathroom again? Or sneaking out of camp for a quest?”

Hmm. Low blow. Though not completely unwarranted. “No, much cooler than that,” Percy sighed, rolling his eyes as he kicked up some dust from the arena floor. “Beating up Clarisse.”

You scoffed, “somehow I doubt that.”

And you weren’t exactly wrong. It was more of a mutual beating up, in a sort of frenemy way, Percy was the first to admit. But not to you. “Hey, you should see her,” he chided. “There’s cold hard proof.”

You bumped his shoulder on the way out of the arena, sighing. “Maybe I will, I could get some tips on kicking your ass,” you said, raising your brow.

By the time he thought of a good-ish response, you were too far away to hear, and he was kicking himself for letting you get the last word. He glanced around the empty arena dumbly. It looked like you finished the cleanup while he just stood there, another point you had on him now. The punishment may not have been a competition, but you seemed to be winning thus far. Shit.

And it only gets worse from there.

He managed to come early the second day, a full fifteen minutes to get warmed up, and think about what could be good to teach the newbies. And he had the arena all to himself to slash dummies in the exact way he’d instruct them to do later.

“Clarisse told me Chiron intervening is all that saved you from getting sent to the infirmary,” you said.

Percy jumped, Riptide nearly falling out of his hand. When the fuck did you get here? He hadn’t heard you at all. Sneaky bitch. He turned to face you when he recovered from his shock, “yeah, well, she couldn’t admit she lost a fight if there was a gun to her head.”

You didn’t look sold. You raised your brow, “could you?”

He pursed his lips. He wanted to say something like, yes, duh! But quickly realized it might be a lie. To most people he could, but admitting defeat to you felt much worse. Like it would confirm all your doubts or apprehensions about him, or whatever your grudge was. He decided a little lie wouldn’t be the worst thing in the world. “I could,” he said casually, slashing a combat dummies head.

He didn’t see your face as you hummed lowly with disapproval. Probably for the better.

Or so he thought, because as you were walking towards the dummy beside his, he started to feel drowsy. His slashes got slower as his arms felt heavier, like they were weighing him down. He looked at you, and immediately wanted to lie down and pass out. Ugh. Your subtle smirk told him you knew exactly what you were doing. And it only escalated when the kids started to arrive.

You started the lesson off assertively. While he was struggling to blink with his heavy eyelids. “If you have any cool demigod abilities, you should totally use them literally whenever you can,” you said, pointing your weapon enthusiastically at the campers.

Percy couldn’t help but watch in slight awe as you engrossed them all. You narrowed in on a son of Apollo, your blade staring him down as you told him he should get comfortable using healing abilities in a fight. You seemed to have a suggestion for everyone; the daughter of Hectate should use the mist, a Demeter kid should try and use vines, your Hypnos brother should use… sleep powers. Percy knew about those all too well.

Percy had to admit he was jealous of the way they seemed excited about your ideas. Did they really like you more than him? It wasn’t that he felt bad not being liked, he was plenty used to that in all the schools he went to. It was more that it was you. The way you showed a nicer side to seemingly everyone but him. His body still felt like it was made of lead.

You had some blind spots though. Not everyone had powers, Percy guessed, watching a couple Athena kids rolling their eyes or looking at the ground. “I hate to interject,” Percy started, stealing your and the kids attention again. “But this is weapons training, there are other classes for using abilities.” Plus, maybe you’d stop using yours if they got back on focus.

”Hey, I’m teaching them how to fight better, isn’t that the goal?” You shot back. You seemed to catch the way his eyes were lingering on the kids without abilities. “Even if you don’t have any specific powers,” you said, turning back to the campers, “if we start using them, you’ll learn how to counter them, and kick our asses better.”

Percy sighed. You seemed pretty stuck on this. He tiredly uncapped Riptide, and pointed at it. “Weapons class, Y/n. Let’s focus on using weapons,” he said.

You shifted your lips around, maybe chewing on them, and then seemed to have a thought. Unfortunately. You smiled at the kids, “yeah, well, Percy doesn’t always use his abilities to the fullest when he fights,” you said. “Maybe don’t take his lead too much.”

Ugh. “Well, it’s not always as easy as some people make it look,” he said, gesturing at you. “Not everyone has powers, and some people get drained easily by theirs. For me, I can’t always rely on there being water around me.”

You crossed your arms, raising your brow, and actually looked at him this time. “You know what people are made of, right?”

The kids were listening intently, some snickering and smirking to themselves. A couple seemed annoyed that the training was paused just so the teachers could bitch at each other. Percy sighed, “yeah, no, I don’t want to do that. I think that was an episode of Avatar: the last airbender.”

You rolled your eyes, scoffing. “Well you might win more fights if you did,” you said snidely. Your eyes lowered a moment as you lowered your voice with a bitter tone, “I hate the idea of you going easy on me.”

Before Percy could respond with a retort of his own, you’d dropped the mean act and completely focused on the kids, upbeat and happy. You clapped your hands together, and shot them a wide smile, “how about a demonstration, guys?”

Aw shit. The kids lit up, nodding along as you continued. “How about me and Percy have a little match, and we see who wins, yeah?” You said, grinning at him. Ugh. It wasn’t a secret that people said he was the best swordsman at camp, but you were a head counsellor too. And even if he could stab you, he probably shouldn’t in front of the kids anyway.

He had started to tune you out, but got snapped back to reality when he heard his name. “Percy, are you down?” You asked with faux sweetness. Ugh. Percy sucked a breath in through his teeth, and sighed. “Uh-Sure,” he said cautiously.

You grinned, and the kids stepped back and whispered to each other. Yeah, they definitely picked up on your rivalry. They waited restlessly, probably excited to see the climax of your mutual dislike. Like the fight was inevitable. He uncapped Riptide with a sigh, and raised the blade as you shooed the kids to step further back. He took a fighting stance, raising his blade at the ready. Just great. Your aura of tiredness or whatever was affecting him seemed to get worse. Yeah, he might be fucked without water.

You smirked, twirling a weapon of your own between your fingers and glancing at your audience happily, chest puffed out in self satisfaction. “Do you want to count us down?” you asked the kids, grinning.

They nodded along, three, and Percy sighed, eying the water bottle he had off to the side. If he could get it then maybe... whatever. Maybe if he beat you, you’d lay off. Two. Or, if you won, you could get ten times worse. One. There was no good outcome. And it’s not like either of you could maim each other with the kids watching.

Ugh. Still weighed down by an impossible spell of drowsiness, Percy started to lunge forward, sword ready to slash in an arc above his head. But then he looked at you. And you looked at him. And you were shooting him a finger gun, and Percy was out cold, without enough time to grumble or complain about it. Well shit.

Like most times he slept, he was dreaming. Nightmares, specifically. At least he felt no godly presence, or anything sinister. Today, it was Annabeth and Grover dead on the floor, with Kronos in Luke’s body glaring at him from the sidelines. And then it was just Luke, looking at him sadly, approaching him, and then asking why he let his sister die. Percy didn’t have an answer.

Nightmare Luke wasn’t a fan of that. Suddenly he was turning back into Kronos and raising Backbiter, and Percy was completely unable to move, paralyzed by fear, sadness, and bitter anger. Great. Just great.

But Luke didn’t swing. He stopped, eyes cloudy and blank, and the bodies faded away. Was his subconscious being nice today? Luke stepped back, and his sword has vanished, and the scene was fading fast.

Percy was awake. He grumbled, not wanting to open his eyes. His head was in the dirt, body completely weighed down by his own exhaustion. The arena floor wasn’t the worst place he could’ve fallen, at least. He grumbled, sat up, and rubbed his eyes until they opened.

You were still there, Percy’s eyes flew open, shaking any lingering tiredness. He scooted back just slightly. You were sitting beside him, head rested in hands and lips pursed. “Uhh,” he stuttered, scooting back further. “You’re uh, still hanging out here?” A quick glance showed the kids were gone, and the lesson had been over for a while.

”You have some of the worst nightmares I’ve seen, dude,” you said simply, shifting your head from hands to hand. “I’m… sorry, I didn’t- I didn’t mean to snoop.”

Percys brow furrowed. What? You looked apprehensive, but your words didn’t seem malicious in the slightest. He stopped scooting back, but he held his arm up defensively between you, unsure why. You didn’t have a weapon. “It’s… fine. Was it you that… ended it?” He asked tentatively.

You nodded. “It didn’t seem fun,” you said quietly. You looked away, hiding your face in a palm, “Sorry for putting you in there, I guess,” you said. “I’ll try to avoid sleeping you, if you want.”

Percy looked at you quizzically, jaw hung slightly open, more than confused. You were being nice. That’s crazy. He wasn’t sure how to act. Every word he said was laced with hesitation and the slightest bit of a stutter. “Thanks, I guess,” he mumbled, scratching the back of his neck. “Appreciate it.”

You nodded, and a slightly sealed silence fell over the woods as you refused to look at him. But you didn’t stand up to leave yet either.

“Hey, Y/n, can I ask,” he started, sitting up straighter and crossing his legs. “Usually you hate me…” he said, almost wincing. “Do you… not, today?”

That got your attention, and your eyes were burning through him. Your brow furrowed, and softened, your mouth opened and then closed, you looked away, then back at him, and then sighed. “I don’t hate you, Percy,” you admitted, sounding abjectly defeated.

That got an involuntary “huh?” Out of him. You totally hated him. That was just a fact.

You sighed, and shook your head, turning back away from him. You tone was far lighter this time, “no, I don’t hate you, I just- I don’t know,” you said.

”Then why-“ Percy started dumbly, but quickly trailed off, unsure how to make his question less rude. There didn’t seem to be an obvious answer. “Why are you like this,” he asked, cringing at his own callousness.

You snickered, looking at him with a slight and awkward smile. You shrugged, and looked back at the woods. Percy didn’t speak, he barely breathed, waiting for any sort of a signal from you. Somehow, it worked. You sighed , and stretched your legs in front of you and said, “I don’t know.” You paused, probably thinking. “It just comes naturally, I guess.”

Percy hummed.

“That came out mean, didn’t it,” you laughed softly.

“Like most things you say,” he laughed, but quickly trailed off. “Sorry.”

You smiled hesitantly, looking over at him with softer eyes than he usually sees on you. “No, that was deserved,” you said.

Percy smiled, and then raised his brow, surprising himself. That didn’t happen when he talked to you, this was fresh territory. Before he could respond, you were standing, and for the first time, offering him a hand up. And for the first time, he took it.

You pulled him to his feet, but didn’t look at him, curtly turning your head away as he stood in front of you. Percy couldn’t help but snicker under his breath. You seemed intent on staring at a tree.

”Hey,” Percy started, brushing his hair out of his face. “Do you wanna go get on the same page about what we’re teaching them tomorrow so we don’t have a repeat of today?” He asked. He got a little scared when you finally looked at him, but you didn’t seem angry. And if anybody knew your angry face it was him. “We’ll probably be better teachers if we actually work together on it.”

You hesitated, raising your brow. “Uh, really?” You stuttered, crossing your arms and shrinking into yourself.

Percy sighed. He was doing this, he’d committed now. For better or worse. “Yeah,” he nodded, with a friendly smile. “Why not? Let’s go get lunch or something.”

Percy wasn’t sure how well his olive branch was working. Your lips were pursed and arms still crossed, but.. the ever so familiar scowl you often showed him was absent from your lips. That could be good. You looked at the ground, then back to him, “yeah, okay.”

And here he was braced for rejection and an insult. Small victories. Percy grinned, nodding his head in the general direction of the dining pavilion, “then let’s go.”

You nodded, and walked quietly beside him as he started for the path. Okay, a little awkward silence was nothing, that was still a win. Miles better than where he was this morning. Or even like, an hour ago. So Percy was inclined to try and bridge the gap. “The kids are gonna be really surprised when we actually work together, tomorrow,” he laughed. Careful words, when, not if.

He caught in his peripheral the tug of your lips upward into the slightest of smiles. “They’ll never see it coming,” you said. Maybe like a joke. Wow, was this actually working? You let out a small laugh, “neither did I.”

Percy but the inside of his cheek to suppress a smile. That made two of you, because this was the last thing Percy expected too. “Yeah,” he started. “Not bad though.”

For the first time in a good minute, you met his eyes, and his attention was drawn. You didn’t normally look at him like that. It was a… nice change pace. You sighed, “No, not the worst.” You swished your cheeks around a moment as you paused, but didn’t say more. And Percy would be lying to himself if he tried thinking he wasn’t a little disappointed. It almost looked like you were gonna say something nice. Well, maybe not the worst was nice enough. For you, at least.

”Percy, I’m really sorry about those nightmares,” you said finally, looking at the ground.

Ah. That. Percy didn’t tell all that many people about his shit dreams. It was kind of a given that most people at camp got them, in some capacity at least. But he did his best to project a lighthearted image, especially when he was with the younger campers. “Oh,” he said dumbly.

“If you want, I can help with those,” you offered quietly.

Now that caught Percy’s attention. He raised his brow, “You can do that?” And he didn’t ask his other question: you would do that? Like, for him?

You looked up at him, then back to the ground as the two of you approached the dining pavilion. “Yeah, Hypnos stuff,” you mumbled. “I do it for some other people too.”

Oh gods, you felt bad for him. That was a weird thought. “Oh- you don’t have to do that,” he started, suddenly far more embarrassed. So that’s why you were being nice. Suddenly it didn’t feel as good as before.

You looked up at him with wider eyes now, and bit the inside of your cheek. “Well, if you ever change your mind.”

Something about your pity didn’t sit right with him, even if was glad you didn’t look like you wanted to bite his head off. This look, the feeling sorry for him face, was somehow worse. “I won’t,” he snapped, sounding meaner than he meant. Or maybe he did mean it, in his bitterness he couldn’t tell. “You don’t need to pretend to like me now that you feel bad.”

You brow furrowed, and that pity look was gone in an instant. “Hey asshole, I was just offering to help,” you spat. Now this was more familiar. You crossed your arms at your chest as you walked. “Thought about being nice for once.”

”Yeah, for once,” he said, rolling his eyes. “Because now you feel bad.”

”Oh shut up,” you said, shaking your head with a glare. You stopped just short of the pavilion. “You aren’t special because you get nightmares, idiot, half the camp does,” you said, stepping closer to him. He was inclined to back away. “I’ve seen worse.”

Percy took another step back. There was a few stray campers sitting in the pavilion watching curiously, now.

“But sure, go ahead,” you said, hands animating with your words. He flinched a moment as you halfway gripped the air. “Keep having your shit dreams, I don’t care.”

“Then why did you offer,” he spat back.

You looked at him like he was an idiot, shaking your head. “Because nightmares suck, nobody deserves that shit,” you said, like it was obvious. “Not even a stuck up asshole who thinks he’s better then everyone.”

What? Percy stood dumbly for a moment while your sharp glare subsided into a duller scowl. Did he really come off like that? “I’m not-“ he started, but quickly gave up. As much as he wanted to insult you back, half the things you said were genuinely pretty nice. You were right, nobody deserved that.

You scoffed, “sure you’re not,” you said bitterly.

The two do you stood silently for a moment. And a few moments more. The couple of campers watching awkwardly tried to go back to eating. The lunch plans the two of you made seemed so far in the past now. Same with the idea of getting in the same page.

Percy spoke first. “I don’t- I don’t think like that,” he said lamely.

”No, you’re just the hero of Olympus, who goes on all the quests, who the gods tried to give immortality too,” you said. But the malice was gone. “You’re the reason I even have a cabin here,” you said quietly.

Percy winced. How do you explain to somebody that going on all those quests… wasn’t always great. It stopped being amazing when more lives were at risk, the stakes got higher, people died. A lot of the time all the glory kind of sucked. “Well it’s… not all it’s cracked up to be,” Percy managed. “I mean, you saw the aftermath.”

”Yeah,” you said, looking at the ground. “That’s why I thought.. you might not be how I thought.” You looked up, expression made of stone. “But at least you’re… I don’t know,” you trailed off, “I think I’d still rather be somebody, even if it sucks.”

Percy half heartedly laughed through his nose, “Usually I feel the opposite, it would’ve been easier to be a kid of some minor god.”

”Grass is always greener, I guess,” you sighed.

“You are somebody, though,” Percy said, realizing he should probably address that. The idea that you were insecure seemed so alien. The way you insulted him always seemed so confident. “You don’t need a ton of quests or fights to prove that.”

You rolled your eyes, a weak smile was forming on your lips, “well, that’s easy for you to say. I’m only here, and claimed, and in a cabin because you made the gods pay their child support.”

Percy smiled softly, gesturing his head to the tables at the pavilion. He started to walk as he spoke, “that’s the gods, that’s their problem,” he said, grabbing a plate to fill with the magic food with you behind him. “You’re more then the gods approval.”

He had to look back to see if you were still there, the way you went quiet. You grabbed a plate, and followed him to a table, all with that stone faced look. Not pity or malice, this time. When you sat down beside him, you finally cracked. “Thanks,” you managed, staring ruefully at your food.

“It’s true,” Percy said.

You looked up at him, a slight smile on your lips this time. “Thanks,” you said, more confidently.

“Are you still up for helping me with the nightmares?”

This request haunted me for like over a month cuz I couldn’t get anything out of it for a while. I wasn’t gonna post here but I ended up happier with it then I thought tho. Can you tell I never write enemies to lovers? I usually hate that trope lmao. Anyway part 2 coming maybe.

#x reader #my writing #percy jackson x you #percy jackson fanfiction #percy jackson #percy jackson x reader #percy jackson x y/n #pjo x reader #pjo

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calentvre · 2 months

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that one person in the replies of the black sails vs ofmd poll arguing against black sails being "an actual queer show" is being deliberately obtuse and a troll but i can't sleep so. sure. i'll say why dismissing black sails like that is intellectually dishonest

defining how black sails is a "queer show" or how queerness is written into its core is i think explained best by the other things that black sails is about. queerness is but one among the show's most important themes, that all overlap and intersect each other

on the societal level: hierarchies of power and influence - hinging on wealth, status, gender, reputation, et cetera. transatlantic empires - colonization, slavery.

on the personal level: identity, image - the performances we put on for others, safety, independence, dependence on other people. the narrative of a life. how human life resists narrative payoff. becoming, then bearing the burden of what you've become.

in general: stories - the power they and the act of telling both hold. the truth and its importance; its irrelevance. reasons. consequences. inevitability.

black sails is about all these things and it connects the threads between them with precision, narrative grace and emotional payoff. it is a tragedy about disenfranchised characters that are navigating their wants and needs in the face of various expectations, crafted with historical plausibility in mind.

if it's somehow still unclear how queerness ties into the show's themes... it is insulting and frankly absurd to denigrate the queerness of the show with arguments dismissing flint's struggle just because there wasn't on-screen sex between men. flint not being straight is only the backbone of the plot! and reducing wlw relationships that span the entirety of the show's four seasons into "male gaze fodder" or whatever is an incredibly disingenuous take that not only glosses over how multifaceted and integral their characters are but also reveals the bad faith nature of these arguments. the first season featured a lot of sex and violence, sure, to lure in a mainstream (GoT era) audience, but the mere existence of a wlw relationship alone? what about anne and max building their trust and love, balancing against duty and image caters to the straight man, exactly?

yeah, black sails does not really play for representation points - instead, it has real things to say: about fighting against a rigid society that would rather get rid of you. about choosing either idealism or pragmatism in the face of oppressive forces. about escaping your identity or holding onto it and the violence and freedom concealed in each choice.

#black sails #text #discoursing as a little treat to myself<3

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cannedpickledpeaches · 4 months

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Sad Poems but I Choose to Interpret Them as Happy

Jade Leech x Reader

“I will love you if I never see you again, and I will love you if I see you every Tuesday. I will love you as the starfish loves a coral reef and as kudzu loves trees, even if the oceans turn to sawdust and the trees fall in the forest without anyone around to hear them . . . . I will love you as the iceberg loves the ship, and the passengers love the lifeboat, and the lifeboat loves the teeth of the sperm whale, and the sperm whale loves the flavor of naval uniforms. I will love you as a drawer loves a secret compartment, and as a secret compartment loves a secret, and as a secret loves to make a person gasp . . . I will love you until all such compartments are discovered and opened, and all the secrets have gone gasping into the world.” -Excerpt from The Beatrice Letters, Lemony Snicket

Jade is not as fickle as his brother, but he too is guilty of interests that come and go like the wind. There are some that stay, like hiking, foraging, and photography; but there are far more that he drops as soon as he’s figured them out. More often than not, his love is not long-lasting.

He has long accepted that any romantic relationship he finds himself in would have a very slim chance of being normal. Healthy. No, his love will likely destroy his partner, whether it is because of obsession or of fleeting interest. He thinks it wouldn’t be so bad to experience it. It would be interesting, a deviation from his norm.

You’re his target, but only because you made such a fascinating proposition. When you’re bored of me, tell me immediately, and we can break up with no hard feelings. Were you such a pragmatic person? He hadn’t noticed before. It spurs him on to know more, to learn everything about you. And once he does, once every single secret you could possibly hide is laid bare before him, he’ll lose interest like he always does and drop you like a bad habit.

So he does. Your favourite food. Colour. Season. The basic things, until they get more specific. The way you do your hair in the mornings. The recipes you favour and the ratio of their ingredients. Your reactions to his occasional unhinged comment. The shows that you laugh or cry at. The ones you think are mediocre. He files them all away in his memory, picking you apart like you’re a subject to study. That’s what he tells himself, anyway. Mild interest. Once he finds out everything, he’ll grow bored and leave.

Days turn to months turn to a year. Has so much time really passed? The secrets you hold have dwindled in number. He knows you inside out, top to bottom, soul to body. There’s only one thing left that he doesn’t know.

You often tease him, asking why he won’t bring you to the Coral Sea. He always gives some shoddy excuse or the other. He isn’t so sure, himself. There’s no real reason to stall. The ice floes have retreated. His parents would be delighted. He would finally know how you’d act in his hometown, in the dark, deep sea that is so different from your home, and with that, he would finally drop you. There will be nothing new.

Unfortunately, I find myself quite busy recently. Perhaps next month. When next month comes around, he pushes it another thirty days. Then another. He was never one to procrastinate, so why now? This is far from efficient. Was he such a cowardly person? He hadn’t known before. He needs to get it done so that he will no longer have a reason to keep you by his side—

Ah. That is the issue, isn’t it?

He doesn’t know how long he’d been in love. All he knows is that he can’t get bored anymore, even if the smile you give him is the same, even if your laughter that warms his chest is unchanging, even if he brings you home. All he knows is that as much as he thought his love would be destructive, he treasures your comfort and happiness too much to think about hurting you anymore. The deadline no longer lies where your last secret is. Forever, until the seas dry up, until he breaths his last gasp—he will love you forever.

#twst fanfic #twst #twst jade #jade leech #twisted wonderland #jade leech x reader #twst x reader #I like dissecting the characterization of yandere jade #but soft Jade is great too #twst x yuu #disney twst

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harmonictechnicality · 1 year

Text

Eddie’s Memory Log: Day 72

part 1 here | part 2 here | part 3 here | part 4 here | part 5 here (ao3 link here)

Of course Steve is being realistic about this, he has no other choice. That’s not true - he has infinite choices, which is the shitty yet amazing part about being a human with freewill.

But he’s thoroughly convinced himself that he only has one choice: be cynically realistic. Pragmatic. Steve actually picked up a goddamn dictionary to figure out his feelings, and that’s the closest word he could find.

He’s gotta be pragmatic about Eddie’s memories. If he’s not, he’ll fucking dissolve into broken shards of hopefulness like last time. It'll all burst out like he’s pissed off, which is so unfair.

But if he remains neutral, he won’t get hurt. Right?

However, the kissing and the touching and the sweet words are all way too good for Steve to be a complete cynic. Because god, he wants all of that with Eddie. Exclusively with Eddie. He wants to know how Eddie’s heart monitor will sound if he kisses that caved-in spot between his neck and his ear. He wants to know if it’ll speed up or skip tones if he squeezes Eddie’s thighs. His waist. His cheeks.

Shit, Steve can’t stay pragmatic if he’s thinking about exploring Eddie like a lickable atlas.

He clenches his fists into his steering, holds onto the forgotten days. How miserable those days felt. How they’ll feel even worse if he’s too optimistic.

Practical. Steve can do practical.

Eddie looks better than Steve remembers (which was fourteen fucking hours ago). Still. He’s pinker in his cheeks, in his nose too. His hair is combed out at the roots, still fuzzy and wild everywhere else. Almost like he gave up because the tangles were so bad.

He’s wearing one of the faded green hospital gowns today, the color of toothpaste. Steve likes it when he wears this one instead of the off-white ones. Those remind him of outdated nightgowns, the ones that porcelain china dolls wear.

Faded green is better. More life. Less death.

“Are you glued to the door or something?” Eddie says a few seconds after Steve turns the door shut. Still just standing there.

“No.” Steve doesn’t move.

Eddie’s brows lower, forehead creasing. “Gum stuck on your shoe?”

“No.”

“Wait, don't tell me - there’s a force field in this room, and only you can see it.” Eddie points directly at Steve, wagging his finger at him. Steve inspects all of his fingers on that hand, searching.

No ring.

Steve’s ring isn’t there. Not on that hand, at least.

Eddie snaps twice. “Very Jean Grey of you, Stevie.”

Steve exhales, rearranges the hair on his forehead. He’s tapping over his jeans, thinking up a better way to go about this. Quickly decides there is no Better Way. All Ways suck.

“Munson...”

“Harrington…”

He still needs to see Eddie’s other hand, to look closer. Peer over the stupid bed covers and know for sure. “Just… give me a second.”

“You’re freaking me out, man.”

“That hurts coming from you.”

“As it should.” They both go quiet after that.

It’s definitely Steve’s turn to take the conversational baton, but he can’t. He’s too focused on getting a good view of Eddie’s hand without moving too close. If he gets too close, Steve knows he’ll be tempted to push him into the bed, connect his mouth to Eddie’s and not stop until his lip muscles lose all mobility.

Steve gets on his tippy toes, slanting his torso sideways to get a better view.

“What the hell are you looking at?” Eddie tosses up both of his hands. Steve lasers in on every goddamn finger.

“Nothing.” Steve says. The ring isn’t there. “It’s nothing.”

Eddie isn’t wearing his class ring. That’s all there is to it. No reason to get analytical or quiz Eddie on his foggy memories. Steve has his answer in plain sight.

Eddie doesn’t remember.

This is why Steve needed to remain pragmatic, that stupid word he looked up in the event that something like this might happen. He’s still disappointed, still actively working to keep up his decent posture and pleasant disposition.

Fortunately, the cynicism helped. His foundation isn’t fractured. His heart isn’t skydiving without a parachute.

Steve is as okay as he can be knowing that Eddie Munson forgot about kissing him.

His legs are no longer cement blocks. He’s able to move away from the door just a bit. Moving around actually helps with the disappointment, he’s not really sure why. Maybe it’s because his neurons or whatever have multiple tasks to perform, not just all obsessing over the same fucked up feeling.

Who knows, at least Steve is taking steps. Metaphorical and literal ones.

“Hey.” Eddie says.

“What?”

Eddie tilts his head to the side, his eyes raking over Steve’s whole body. “You should lock the door.”

“Why?”

Eddie shrugs. Steve catches a quick smirk before Eddie covers his mouth with his ringless hand.

“Why, Eddie?”

Eddie shrugs again, and has the fucking gall to laugh this time. He pulls out the guitar pick necklace that’s sitting underneath his hospital gown. Except the guitar pick is not the only charm hanging from the chain.

The ring.

Steve’s class ring has been added to it.

His legs are locked once again. Deadbolted to the floor. Magnetized. Frozen. Whatever comic book bullshit Eddie mentioned earlier.

He can’t move.

“If I remember correctly, you told me to wear it.” Eddie’s voice turns lemony-sweet. Almost biting. “You didn’t specify it needed to be on my hand.”

“You’re…” Steve is suddenly short of breath, seeing Eddie’s thumb glide over the metal of his ring.“You’re such an ass.” Christ, he doesn’t believe how gone he sounds when he says it. Even amongst Eddie pulling this trickster douchery nonsense, he’s still fucking weak for him.

“The door.” Eddie punches out each syllable. “Lock it.”

Steve fumbles, stupidly fumbles with the damn lock, takes centuries to get the shit to click properly. He can hear Eddie snickering, which sets him the fuck off. Steve’s suddenly next to the bed, resting one knee on the edge. Gets his hands wrapped up nicely in Eddie’s hair.

Steve can feel Eddie mouthing baby into the kiss, makes him press into it more. All he wants is to feel that one word heating up his lips, pulsing sound-waves against his mouth. Steve lets his hand travel down to Eddie’s chain, pulls once, causes Eddie’s mouth to fall open. Steve does it again to see if it’s a reflex or permission to kiss deeper, fuller.

Eddie hums, closes his mouth over Steve’s bottom lip, lets the vibrations rumble there. He grips around Steve’s hand, the one holding the necklace, and he squeezes them together.

“You remember?” Steve’s words come out choppy. Split up between breaths and Eddie’s mouth over his own.

Eddie nods, can feel his eyelashes tickling Steve’s cheek. “All I could think about.”

“Me too.” Steve gives the necklace a tiny yank. Eddie’s hand jolts to Steve’s waist, more delicious reflexes that Steve wishes he could chew on.

Steve leans away from the kiss, dipping down to the necklace instead. At first, he just places his teeth on the chain, let’s his tongue feel the small grooves.

But something possesses him to get weird. Let loose. So Steve sucks on both charms at once, makes too much sound, spit dribbling at the corners of his mouth. He’s fully testing the limits on Eddie’s accessory-based reflexes and it’s working so damn well.

Eddie gets a handful of Steve’s thigh, gives him a firm lift. It’s practically impossible to balance over the bed when Eddie does that maneuver. Steve starts toppling over, smushing Eddie’s face, not sexy at all.

“Cut it out.” Steve whispers, trying to get back up. Trying harder not to laugh.

Eddie groans. “Just get on top of me already.”

“You’re injured.”

“And you’re still not in my lap.”

They transition back to kissing, Eddie’s tongue flits around Steve’s gums. Steve can feel the flicks in his fucking core, deep in the middle, all warm flashes that make his muscles tense up. Like the nerves are connected, like Eddie could alert his whole body to gleam under his touch.

If it weren’t for this horrid hospital layout, Steve would have Eddie all over him. Tangle them up in unholy ways. Pray mercilessly that no one ever finds a key to unlock the door. Goddamnit, this public respect thing is getting old.

“Can’t touch you how I want like this.” Eddie nestles into Steve’s neck, sucks on his skin till Steve’s head falls back. Steve already can tell that it’ll leave a mark from how sensitive it feels, raw and tingly.

It only takes one more dig into his thigh for Steve to give up his Respectful Guy charade. Crawls into the bed, throws one leg over Eddie’s side, sinks down into the spot. Christ, he can feel how warm Eddie is from here, and it’s jostling up his mind. Steve can finally comprehend why every girl he’s ever hooked up with insists on making out like this. It’s a fucking recipe for sin.

“Shit, this is…” Steve claws his hands over Eddie’s chest, over the gown. Hopes he doesn’t undo any wires or bandages.

Eddie grins. “Different view?”

“Yeah.”

“You like?”

Steve gets lower, cages his arms around either side of Eddie. “Like the guy I’m looking down at.”

“Good answer.”

Kissing like this beats every other position that Steve’s horned-up mind can think of. It’s all muted moans and wet lips. Eddie’s still in his sweatpants from yesterday, thank every star in the sky for that. Steve can already feel how turned on he is, has to keep resisting the urge to hook his finger into Eddie’s waistband. Mess around with the fabric until Eddie whines.

“Steve.”

Just like that.

Eddie keeps targeting the bruise he made. Nurses at the skin like he could make new colors if he sucks hard enough. Maybe teeth-marks, maybe speckled blues. Fuck, Steve wants both. More.

“Feels so fucking good.” It does, it really does. Steve can’t think about how dumb and slutty hickies are when it feels this good.

Eddie kisses over it, washes the sting away. “Like making you feel good.”

Eddie is starting to smell less like hospital disinfectant and more like Steve. Like Steve’s bedroom and Steve’s shower gel. Like Steve’s laundry detergent and Steve’s car freshener. God, Steve wants to roll his hips just a little harder, tongue him a little deeper. Get his hands on every inch of Eddie until they smell unrecognizable from one another.

“Can I?” Eddie tugs on the hem of Steve’s sweater, eyes fully blown, lips naturally pouting from all the kissing. This is how he should always look, make a goddamn monument out of this adorably fucked-up expression.

“I’ve got it.” Steve straightens back up, peeling his sweater over his head, undershirt going with it. His hair is already tousled and ruined from Eddie combing through it so aggressively, he doesn’t even mind all the static making it worse.

Eddie’s devilish smile drops to a regular smile, then disappears altogether. His hooded eyes are now wide, unblinking. His hands go straight to Steve’s stomach, fingers splayed out completely.

“Holy fuck, Steve.”

It takes longer for it to register than it should. Steve has royally screwed up. Majorly. Eddie starts skimming over all of Steve’s scars, the ones shaped exactly like his.

Those distinct ones that Eddie doesn’t remember receiving. Believes whatever bullshit story the doctors told him when he woke up.

This is bad.

This is terribly bad.

Eddie’s hands fall, returning back to his side. His voice sounds flimsy. Small. “They’re just like mine.”

“Yeah.” Steve agrees. Cause what the fuck else would he do? “They are.”

“I wasn’t in a car crash… was I?”

A car crash? Real original, very creative for a group of people that spent a decade of their life training their brain muscles to be the size of the Titanic. Bravo, geniuses.

Steve just shakes his head. Doesn’t let his bitterness show too much, upset Eddie further.

“Fucking knew it.” Eddie deflates back into his pillows, slamming his fist over the side railing. The sound makes Steve’s shoulders jump, decides now would be a good time to un-straddle himself from Eddie. Sit in a chair like a non-horny person might do.

“So whatever happened to me… it happened to you too?”

Steve can’t get the words out just yet, still giving Eddie non-verbal answers. Head nods, shoulder-shrugs, depressing looks away from his intense stares.

The room is way too quiet. Steve’s silence is stifling. Even the empty spaces feel crowded.

“Shit.” Eddie must feel it too. The mysterious claustrophobia brought on by full disclosure. “What… what happenedto us?”

Steve forces the words to come out this time. “You’ll never believe me.”

“Well you’re in luck. Cause even if I do believe you, I might not even remember.”

“That’s not funny.”

“Didn’t say it was.”

Steve hates this. Hates that he caused this by being careless. Hates that it’s his fault and he can’t blame it on anyone else.

“Fine.” He shakes off the hatred because it’s stupid and it’s getting them nowhere. Just dead-end roads and abandoned streets. Steve gets somber instead. “The door stays locked.”

“Is it that bad?” Eddie asks, straightening himself up in the bed.

“It’s that bad.”

“Jesus christ.”

Yeah. Any explicit response is fitting for what Steve is about to attempt.

“Exactly.”

Steve is doing a shit job at explaining all this interdimensional monster fuckery. Having Dustin here as backup would’ve been handy, especially since he gets all the DnD references that seem to further confuse Eddie.

Like… Eddie is taking all the references way too literally to how he uses them in his complicated board game - they have to pause every time a new term comes up. Has to elaborate that ‘no, it isn’t the same as those scarily intricate drawings in your guidebook. It’s just whatever the twerps came up with on that day.’

Honestly, Steve expects the subject matter to be the difficult part, not the skewed fantasy terminology. All the making out has shuffled Steve’s brain, made him forget how strange Eddie is.

He kinda likes it though. Hell, he’s fawning over the strangeness.

It’s been almost two hours, Steve can’t believe he’s gone over everything in such a short duration. Definitely missed some details, but whatever. Eddie gets the gist, that’s what matters.

“So…” Steve says.

“So…” Eddie copies.

“Thoughts?”

“I have them.”

Steve rolls his eyes, crosses his arms. “Do you think I’m bullshitting you on any of this?”

“If you were Mike Wheeler, maybe.” Eddie jokes. He jokes all the damn time, but Steve is fairly certain that this is one of those self-defense jokes. The side of his humor he wears as a shield. “I swear to god, that kid thinks up the craziest fucking scenarios. Almost scared to hand over the reins of Hellfire to a twisted mind like that.”

He takes a minute, snorts at his own commentary, then unwinds. Settling down.

“But you…” Eddie says, pointing at Steve, staring hard. “Well, I don’t exactly think Steve Harrington, Lord of Frenching, would be able to conjure up such reveries with your particular flavor of imagination.”

“That sounds like an insult.”

“Maybe.” Eddie says. “But if you were somehow both a total hottie and a total nerd, I’d be thoroughly wrecked.”

Steve perks up, twirls a finger into Eddie’s hair. “I’d like to see that.”

Eddie shoves him away, definitely giggling. “This is precisely what I mean! Trying to seduce me right after telling me there’s another world directly beneath our feet. You’re just…”

“Ridiculous?”

“Exceptional.”

How can Steve feel this flattered after explaining the most traumatic timeline of events? He’s blushing, the kind of blush that girls would sit in front of their mirrors to apply perfectly, apply evenly - Steve is doing that kind of blushing, just naturally. And yeah, he might have that effect on Eddie, but Eddie has the same effect on him.

They let the far-fetched truth resonate for a while. The silence is back gathering the space between them, but it’s less suffocating this time. It feels valid.

Eddie shifts his weight in the bed, looks at a scar on the inside of his arm. “So, I was almost a bat feast, huh?”

Steve touches the scar in response. Hopes Eddie understands the confirmation.

Eddie sighs. “Did anyone else… did we lose anyone?”

“Verdict is still out on that one.”

“Missing?”

“Coma.”

“Oh.” Eddie looks away. “Fuck, I’m sorry.”

“Yeah.” Steve is sorry too. Should’ve been him.

“Someone I know?”

“She was your neighbor, so probably.”

Eddie looks down at his lap, eyebrows knitted together. His go-to frustration face.

Right.

Eddie doesn’t remember where he lives.

“Her and Sinclair used to date.” Steve tells him. “He’s with her right now, actually.”

“She’s here?”

Steve sings an ‘mhmm’ through closed lips.

Thinking about Max never gets easier. She basically sacrificed herself and Steve just let her do it. He let a fucking child convince him that they had no other choice. Of course they had other choices.

Infinite choices. The shitty yet amazing part about being a human with freewill.

It should’ve been him. That should’ve been the choice.

“Can we go visit with her?” Eddie interrupts Steve’s intrusive thoughts, probably for the best. “Would that be weird?”

Steve studies Eddie’s expression for a minute. It’s uneasy, distressed. Just plain sad. All of that is more than understandable. This is heavy shit.

“Not weird.” Steve gets up. “Think it’d be pretty nice actually.”

Eddie waits outside Max’s door while Steve heads in first. Just checking to make sure Lucas is cool with them covering his shift for a little while.

Steve gives a few taps over the door before peaking in. “Just me, Sinclair.”

“Good to see you, man.” Lucas looks up from his book. He’s been reading Max the whole The Dark Tower series to her since July. She has an undying love for Stephen King, they’re all pretty optimistic she can hear powerful words - and all of his are.

“Heya, Mayfield.” Steve lays a hand on her shoulder, rubs his thumb back and forth. “All the other losers at the skate park are gonna be so jealous of you. You’ll have the sickest scars there, no competition.”

“Steve.”

“What? She agrees.”

They all refuse to whisper around her or talk about her in the past tense. Like she’s not even there. Like she’s already gone.

She’s not. She’s in there somewhere, Steve just knows it. If Eddie can come back, so can she. Max is a goddamn powerhouse.

“How’s Eddie doing?”

“He’s… you know.” Steve instinctively rubs the purplish-gray bruise on neck, face prickling up. “He’s good.”

The best, actually.

“Glad to hear it.”

“He’s here, by the way.” Steve sneaks that in there. “Wanted to visit with our girl, if that’s cool.”

Lucas does a double take. “Wait - he remembers?”

Surprise, surprise. Steve opens his big, fat (pretty) mouth for a second time today. “No, no… I told him.” Way to go, dumbass.

“Steve!”

“Hey! He saw my scars.” Steve matches volume. “I had no choice!”

“How exactly did he see your scars?”

Damn damn damn. “That’s…not… never mind.” Steve is stumbling, the words are all scrunched together, total nonsense in his throat. “It’s sort of irrelevant now. He knows. And he’s here, so…”

Lucas sighs, gives Steve a good ol’ fashioned Eye Roll, and looks over towards Max. “Guess I should take a lunch break anyways. I’ll be back in a half hour.”

Steve nods, pulls a chair right up next to Max. She’s in better condition than she was after her last surgery. Less gaunt. Sure, there’s no major changes, but still. None of them are giving up on her. She’d kicked their asses in whatever afterlife that may exist.

Lucas drops a kiss into Max’s hair, whispers something in her ear. Steve does his best not to eavesdrop, doesn’t seem like it’s any of his business. Lucas gives Steve a pat on the back and sighs again. The two of them are in this place the most, Steve completely relates to how draining the atmosphere can be. Exasperation is so warranted.

“Send Eddie in on your way out.” Steve says.

“Will do.”

Lucas and Eddie chat outside for a while, so Steve takes the opportunity to catch up with Max, keeps his hand on her forearm the whole time. He tells her about Eddie, how he likes him. Really likes him. Knows she wouldn’t give a shit about something like that, about liking guys. She’d probably make fun of him for making a lame ass mixtape though. So he tells her about that too - lets her imagine how nauseating he can get when he crushes this hard on someone.

He tells her that everyone misses her, Mike included, even if he’d never say it out loud.

“He’s always buying new stickers for your casts.” Steve says it like it’s the juiciest gossip. “Tries to convince us that Lucas asked him to. The kid’s a shitty liar though, but you already know that.”

Her heart monitor is nothing like Eddie’s. It’s a dull pattern, never changing. There’s no ballad or pop song fragments. No song at all.

Steve tries not to dwell on how much that hurts, leaves splinters in his chest.

The door squeaks and Eddie slides in. He seems kind of nervous, anxious maybe. But he meets Steve’s reassuring gaze and lets go. Smiles. All the splinters in Steve’s chest turn into petals. He loves how happy he can make Eddie, just by looking at him. That feels genuine and rare. Veryrare.

Steve signals his head towards Max, needs Eddie to greet her properly. Present tense, no whispers.

Eddie looks back at Max, takes two steps forward. “Um…”

“Something wrong?”

“Remember when I told you I have crazy, vivid dreams?”

“Yeah?”

“Well…” Eddie scratches the top of his head. Looks at Steve in disbelief. “She’s in almost all of them.”

Shit. “Are you serious?”

“Little Miss Charlie McGee.” Eddie sings, arms waving toward her. “In the flesh.”

Steve’s voice goes flat. “That’s not her name.”

“Be cool, babe. She gets the reference.”

Eddie quickly picks up on their Max Etiquette. He approaches her like they’re old friends, shows off his visible battle scars, makes her feel included. Steve is captivated by Eddie’s ease, his summery energy he develops with her.

“So you two talk?”

Eddie waves him off. “I talk. She just…”

“Right.” Steve assumes the answers. Finally wraps his head around what Eddie is telling him, that he dreams about Max, often. “Still - this is huge. Like… this is a big fucking deal!”

“Mellow your vibes, please.”

“Says the most un-mellow person I know.”

Eddie shushes him, gives his full attention to Max. “We gotta get you out here, McGee. If I had known you weren’t just my little dream angel, I would’ve busted you out of this joint months ago.”

He’s so fucking great with her, so normal about all of this. Within a few hours, Steve has turned Eddie’s perspective on life inside-out, yet he’s still so attentive. Totally adopting Steve’s patience and gladly offering to Max, the person who needs it most right now.

Steve steals a quick kiss onto Eddie’s cheek, sort of misses and pecks his chin instead.

Eddie bites his lip, scolds Steve halfheartedly. “No kissing in front of Little Red.”

Max would definitely deck him for calling her little.

Steve kisses Eddie’s cheek again, doesn’t miss this time. “Just… really like you.”

“Like you too, Stevie. Could bake you into a pie, save you for dessert.”

“Barf.”

“Uh huh - get used to it.” Eddie hugs Steve from behind, sways them back and forth like a cheesy prom dance. “It’s gonna get so much worse. Red is probably so sick of me yapping her ear off about you.”

Steve twists his neck around to look at Eddie. “So… she knows?”

Eddie nods, scratches the back of his neck. “I don’t ever shut up about you.”

“Could’ve ended the sentence with I don’t ever shut up, and it would still be accurate.”

“Feisty.”

Steve looks towards Max. He smiles, thinks about how she’d tell them they’re both total dipshits before doing a kickass flip on her skateboard. “She brings out the best in me.”

They fill Lucas in on the fact that Eddie dreams about Max almost every night. Of course, Lucas wants as many details as Eddie’s mangled mind can give him.

The dreams are simple: a dark room, almost pitch black. Max is sitting cross-legged in the center, staring directly at Eddie. She doesn’t say anything, doesn’t stand up either. But if Eddie talks, she’ll non-verbally respond in some type of way.

For instance, Eddie says he told her his top five favorite movies of all time. She stared at him blankly until he got to number four: Firestarter. She smiled. He says it was brief, but it was the first time he discovered that she was listening to him. Understanding him.

“Hence the name -“

“Charlie McGee.” Lucas chuckles, getting the reference. Steve doesn’t - pretty sure he was necking Sydney Sawyer for the whole duration of that film.

They’re all sitting in the stairwell outside of Max’s room. No point in discussing this in there, upsetting her with their schemes and impractical theories. No one has concrete answers, not even the doctors. Why should three losers be an exception to this?

Pointless as it may be, they continue to brainstorm.

“Any new Kate Bush albums?” Steve asks.

Lucas shuffles back and forth. “We have the stereo playing all the time in there. I think that would’ve woken her up months ago if it were that easy.”

There’s another long pause. A few sighs ripple out, echo.

“Eddie?” Lucas says.

“Yeah?”

“Remember that character you came up with in your last campaign?” Lucas’ energy changes, fills the corridor they’re standing in.

Eddie’s mouth opens, then shuts.

Steve has to tackle back the urge to remind Lucas that Eddie struggles with recent memories like that. He’s an expert on All Things Eddie, but that’s not exactly something he should flaunt right now. Steve knows how to read the room for christ’s sake.

Lucas faces Eddie, seems determined. “Come on, man. It was so badass.”

“I don’t doubt it.”

“The oracle’s assistant…” Lucas nudges eagerly. “Ring any bells?”

Eddie sheepishly looks away, looks at Steve for support maybe. He should know better, Steve isn’t going to be helpful with nerd shit. But Steve elbows Eddie’s side, gives him a weak smile. Just a subtle bit of encouragement.

They both glance over to Lucas who is deep in the thought, mumbling to himself.

“They relinquish all their autonomy while the sun hangs in the sky…” Lucas recites. Steve thinks he’s imitating Eddie’s narrator voice. It’s not too bad, actually. “But when darkness falls and their eyes grow heavy with sleep…”

“The lowly assistant governs the slumber of their ruler.” Eddie finishes the phrase with a wolfish grin. “Sinclair, you’re a certified genius!”

“You came up with it.” Lucas pats Eddie's shoulder, grinning just as wide. “Do you think it’ll work?”

“It’s worth a shot.”

“Do you even know how to -”

“Not really.” Eddie squints, contemplating. “But how hard can it be?”

“Dunno. Never tried it.”

Steve finally cuts into their little exchange. “Would either of you care to translate your dweeb-ology to me?”

Both Lucas and Eddie stop murmuring to each other and gawk at Steve. They’re not laughing at him, not yet at least. More so, they’re staring as if they somehow forgot Steve was even there. Like their board game bullshit sucked them onto their own nerdy planet, far from Earth.

Eddie places a hand on Steve’s cheek, still wearing that performance smile he gets when his fantasy lingo takes hold of him. Steve is fully aware that it doesn’t look sexy, the way Eddie does it, but his breath still gets caught in his chest at the contact.

“My dear, sweet Stevie.” Eddie sings, sounds sinister. He playfully smacks Steve’s cheek a few times before removing his hand. “Have you ever of a lucid dream?”

Steve scrunches his nose. “Sounds gross.”

Eddie: Nope - your mind is just filthy.

Steve: Least my mind works…

Eddie: For a harlot, sure.

Steve: A what?

Eddie: Nothing.

They’re about to continue their bickering when Lucas clears his throat. Gives each of them a disturbed expression. “You two sound like my parents.”

Steve and Eddie both gag at the implication, denying any resemblance to fucking grownups. No way. They may not be in high school anymore, but they’re definitely not adults. They’re both trapped in that state of maturity limbo, where age is merely a suggestion, not a law. Sort of like Steve with speed limit signs.

“Whatever.” Lucas heads for the door. “I’ll go keep Max company while you fill Steve in on the plan.”

“You got it, Sinclair.” Eddie gives Lucas a stern salute as he leaves the stairwell.

As soon as the door shuts, Steve's hands are all over Eddie. Pulling the drawstring of sweatpants closer to him, curling his fingers at the back of his neck. He can hear Eddie make a surprised noise, but doesn’t dwell on it. Just presses him into the wall, kisses him hard. Steve tries to kiss quietly, minimal lip smacking, but Eddie heaves into his mouth and Steve loses all of his control.

“Distracted?”

Steve mumbles something like, ‘so hot,’ but his lips can only do so many tasks at once. Right now, he’s way too preoccupied with running his tongue over the ridges of Eddie’s teeth, tempting him to bare down.

Eddie gives into the temptation too easily, grazes his front teeth over Steve’s tongue, Steve’s bottom lip, Steve’s jaw. Goddamnit, the dull pricks of teeth turn Steve’s insides into custard. So fucking decadent and absolute mush.

“Was it my Dungeon Master voice?” Eddie sneers, pulling down the collar on Steve’s shirt to lick over the bruise he placed there earlier today. “Did that get you all horned up for me?”

“Do you ever stop talking?” Which is a backwards way of saying yes. One thousand percent yes. Fucking christ, who knew Eddie’s gravelly narrator voice would be borderline audio porn for Steve?

Eddie swirls over the bruise again, then leans back into a slobbery open-mouthed kiss, real messy and wet. His hands slip into Steve’s jean back pockets, cupping his ass, makes his knees lock.

“Wish you weren’t in such a bulky material, darling boy.” Eddie uses that voice. His nails dig into the scratchy fabric, so many dirty noises bouncing off the walls. Eddie isn’t even asking Steve to take off his clothes, but he doesn’t have to. The voice, the desires, it’s all there. All heavy and whirling in Steve’s mind.

“Oh okay fuck,” Steve’s words all sound whimpery now, almost depraved. He sinks into one more kiss. Makes it last, makes it sting. Finds the willpower to create a non-ass-cupping distance between them.

Eddie wipes his mouth with the back in his hand and smirks. He tilts his head up at Steve’s hair, which Steve already knows is proabably fucked up. He’s always teetering on a stylized sex hair look, so it’s gotta be wet dream worthy right now. Steve smooths out the sides, minimal effort to look presentable, and Eddie just spectates. Enjoys the show that is Rattled Steve Harrington.

“You’ve got a freaky side.” Eddie says, way too vile.

Steve keeps flattening out strands on his head, ignoring the heat settling into his cheeks. Ignoring Eddie’s comment too. “Just tell me about the gross dream thing.”

“Fine.” Eddie plops down on the top step of the stairs. “Take a seat, fellow freak.”

Turns out, it’s not gross at all. It’s actually kind of cool. Really cool.

From Steve’s understanding (and Eddie’s elaborate explanation), lucid dreams are kind of like directed dreams. Like the individual who’s experiencing them can actually decide their own actions. Change outcomes and shit. If Steve had known that was an actual ability, he would’ve done things a lot differently in that dream he had about getting snowed in at the Playboy Mansion.

Okay… maybe Steve is the one that’s making it gross.

“So, you’re gonna lucid dream tonight?”

“I’m gonna try. Try being the keyword because I don’t think it’ll be that easy.”

“Sam will be back on Monday.” Steve reminds him. “We could see if she knows anything about it.”

Eddie clicks his teeth, nodding along. “That’s not a bad idea, Harrington. That woman is a wealth of knowledge.”

“If she runs for president, I’m endorsing the shit out of her.”

“Oh, absolutely.”

They head back to Eddie’s room, writing down anything that seems helpful or significant to their plan. Steve leaves a bit early to beat traffic. It’s not ideal, he’d rather stay the night.

Leaving Eddie is tough, gets tougher every time. Steve makes him put the ring back in the drawer, just in case he forgets. Can’t take any chances.

“How could I ever?” Eddie circles his thumb around Steve’s palm. Traces small shapes into his skin.

Steve shrugs. “Just to be safe.”

“Okay.”

“But… don’t.” The word forget stays unsaid. It already holds too much power amongst them. No reason to give it more fuel, more gravity.

Eddie brings Steve’s palm up to his lips, kisses away all the invisible patterns he put there. “I won’t.”

It’s not a promise, they know better than to promise things that are radio static. Fuzzy and unclear. Mental fog. Even so, Steve lets those two words fuse his broken expectations back together.

Just until morning.

That’s all he needs.

Day 73:

The phone is ringing. It’s four in the fucking morning and the phone is ringing.

Steve decides after the third time that he’s not answering - out of spite.

But then it rings two more times and he cracks. Swears every curse word he knows walking over to the phone, invents some new ones too. His eyes still refuse to open, he’s blindly picking it up off the hook.

“Who is it?” He whisper-yells. That’s the only volume his voice has at four in the fucking morning.

There’s an obnoxious kissy sound coming through on the speaker.

“Damnit, Munson.”

“Don’t be rude, you love it when I tease.”

“I don’t love anything at four in the morning except the inside of my eyelids.”

“Ouchie.” He can tell Eddie is pouting into the speaker. Can practically hear his lips pushing out, being a real dick about it.

Steve yawns. “Is this important? Did the dream thing work”

“Wouldn’t know. Can’t sleep.”

“And how am I supposed to help?” Steve gets to be a dick too if he has to form coherent thoughts at four in the fucking morning.

“Bedtime story? Lullaby? Dirty limerick?” Eddie suggests, sounds totally wired. “I’m not picky.”

Ugh. Steve is such a pushover in general. But for Eddie Munson? He’s a lovesick fool. “I can stay on the phone and you can listen to me snore. Final offer.”

“Sure, I’ll take it.” He hears Eddie clapping. “But at least tell me what you’re wearing.”

“You’re joking.”

“Most of the time, yes. I am.” Eddie says. He waits for an answer that he does not receive because fuck, why would Steve talk dirty right now? Eddie fake-coughs into the speaker, puts on the most pathetic voice. “Just give a dying man some x-rated visuals and I’ll shut up.”

“Good god, you’re not dying.”

Now Eddie is fake-crying because of course he is. Such a drama queen. As soon as they get his memory back, Steve is getting him a goddamn talent agent. Let him win a few awards for his untimely performances.

“Red pajamas bottoms.” Steve gives in. Classic pushover style.

“No shirt?”

“No.”

“Fuck.”

Steve laughs, can’t help it. “Thought you said you’d be quiet now.”

“It was an involuntary fuck, I promise.”

“Whatever you say, babe.”

He falls asleep hearing Eddie hum the last track on his mixtape that he made for him. The one that’s always at the top of his stack.

There’s no visual torture from Eddie today. The necklace is in plain sight, Steve’s class ring sitting directly over top of Eddie's guitar pick. No need to make assumptions or compose his cauldron of feelings.

Nope. Eddie remembers. Eddie likes him and didn’t forget. Steve could toss the binder of progress into the dumpster, let it live out the rest of its days in a goddamn landfill for all he cares.

He’s not gonna do that though because he’s nowhere near Eddie Munson on the Dramatics Scale.

They spend the early part of the afternoon working through questions that Eddie can try to ask Max in his dream. It keeps them busy while they wait for Sam to arrive on her shift. Steve picked up quite a few packets of gum at the gas station - both to sweeten their request and replenish her supply.

Eddie is pretty exhausted from not sleeping much during the night. Anytime Steve fiddles with the mismatched necklace charms, Eddie answers him with languid, plush kisses. The slowest, most mindless kind - the type of kisses that makes Steve feel as if they’ve been kissing each other for years, not days.

“You’re scrumptious.” Eddie praises, his tone is all tipsy from the affection.

“You’re heavily medicated.”

They’re pretty disgusting today, probably from all the happiness that breeds gross shit. Steve is whirling strands of Eddie’s hair, watching it stay curled. Eddie is tickling Steve in inappropriate areas. A fuckton of tongue-kissing.

So gross.

“Stay tonight?” Eddie says randomly.

Steve uncurls Eddie’s hair from his finger, thinking over the request. “What if I mess up the lucid dream process?”

“Sweetheart, you are a mess repellant. You dust away all the bad shit and make things shiny and clear.”

“Can’t clean your messy memories though.” Steve points out.

Eddie purses his lips. “Yeah well, that’s asking for a miracle.”

“I guess so.”

“I know so.”

“You and Max deserve miracle-level results though.”

“See what I mean?” Eddie peppers kisses into Steve’s hair. “Scrumptious.”

Unlike Steve, Sam is a miracle worker. Anytime there’s a lull in her shift, she sits with the two of them, discussing the mechanics of lucid dreaming. Tells them how she did sleep studies during her last two semesters of college.

“Lucky for you, some of the medications you’re on, calm your mind to begin with.” Sam explains. “That helps with your long term memories, but it also eases your mind in general - sleep included.”

“Like a muscle relaxer for his brain?” Steve chimes in.

“Essentially.” Sam says. “This should make the lucid dream process fairly easy for you. Your mind is already open to new perceptions.”

“I do sometimes feel like I’m steering the actions in these dreams.” Eddie agrees. “It sort of feels second nature to me.”

That checks out. Steve grabs the binder, shows Sam a few notes he took on the first day:

‘It doesn’t take long, sleep seems more natural to Eddie right now than being awake.’

She scans over the words a few more times before speaking again. “You’d be surprised. A lot of head trauma patients that take a cocktail of treatments say the same exact thing. They describe it as the dream world being easier to navigate than the waking world. Less pressure to meet societal standards.”

Sam gives a few more tips while she goes through Eddie’s nighttime medication routine. Most of them have to do with Eddie checking in with his surroundings, noticing differences or passage of time, things like that. They could potentially wake him up during his REM cycle, but she sort of doubts that they’ll need to do that. Her assurance seems to rub off on Eddie. Steve is fucking grateful for that.

“Should I leave?” Steve gets up, noticing the time. Visiting hours are about to end. “I mean… Will I be a distraction?”

Sam doesn’t look up from her chart, just motions towards Eddie. “Does Steve bring you comfort or stress?”

“Comfort.” Eddie answers fast, noticeably red. “Definitely comfort.”

She clicks her pen, looks up at Steve, and smiles. “Then he can stay.”

Eddie spends over an hour constructing a solid argument as to why Steve should sleep in the hospital bed with him. He even includes a thesis statement and a variety of credible sources (if one considers Nightmare on Elm Street to be a credible source).

“What if a doctor walks in and sees two dudes cuddling like teddy bears? What the hell do we say?”

“We tell them it’s for science. Duh.” Eddie folds the blanket back, pats the spot next to him. “Besides, they’re fucking surgeons, Stevie. I’m sure they’ve seen weirder shit.”

“Valid point.”

After an excessive amount of maneuvering and soft-pretzeling their limbs together, Steve is in Eddie’s hospital bed, under the covers. He places a few chaste kisses onto the back of Eddie’s neck before sinking into the cushion of their shared-pillow.

“Hey, Steve.”

“Yeah?”

“Did you ever think this would happen?”

“Did I ever think I would be spooning a guy with a memory-deficient brain and plotting a way to wake up a girl who survived an unsurvivable death?” Steve squeezes the two of them together. Lets the rhetoric of his question oscillate along with the shitty fan in the corner of the room. He can feel Eddie laughing against his chest and it makes him squeeze harder. “Yes. This is exactly where I thought my life would take me. Thank you for asking.”

“Smartassery and pillowtalk.” Eddie smacks Steve’s hand that’s wrapped around his stomach. “I’m a lucky guy.”

Steve thinks he’s the lucky one. He’s earned the trust of someone that has every reason to resent the whole world. He has a second chance to get to know someone that shouldn’t even be alive. Steve is the luckiest idiot in this dimension and every fuckstorm alternate dimension that may exist out there.

The beeps on Eddie’s heart monitor are slowing down. Steve knows what that means, it’s his second most fluent language these days. Eddie is drifting off, almost asleep.

“Bout gone?” Steve keeps his voice hushed, barely audible.

Eddie hums a grumply, ‘mhmm’ and moves Steve’s hand over his heart. No need to listen to the monitor now.

This is it. This is their chance to make a difference, reverse the injustice. Be heroes.

“Go find our girl, Munson.”

“You got it, babe.”

Day 74:

This is the best night of sleep Steve has had since… well, since that reality-shattering night back in 1983. Nancy Wheeler cocking a gun at a goddamn creature and spitting in the face of cowardice. Sleep hasn’t been the same since then.

So to sleep throughout the whole night, not jolting awake, not once. That’s an outright win for Steve fucking Harrington.

Eddie sleeps longer, more soundly too. That’s nothing new, he always sleeps like this - since day one of the memory log that Steve started keeping, but stopped needing. Stopped relying on it.

His brain has made extra space, exclusive storage, just for Eddie. It’s weird to reflect on, but that’s a common thing Steve has done when he falls for someone. He automatically creates a penthouse for all of their quirks and isms to reside comfortably in. Live luxuriously inside his fucked-up head.

It’s around eight in the morning by the time Eddie starts stirring, scooting in closer to Steve’s touch. Fucking hell, it makes he feel wanted. Important.

Eddie slowly flips around to face Steve, twisting himself up in all his tubes. Doesn’t matter. Steve is certain that Eddie knows by now that he will untangle him without making it weird - no arm scribbles necessary. They’re beyond that.

“Morning, demonic tinker bell.”

“I remember that.” Eddie is still groggy. “I remember you.”

It’ll never get old hearing him say that. “Would’ve been so fucking awkward if you didn’t.”

Steve’s lips are all chapped from sleeping with his mouth open, but he kisses Eddie anyways. Honestly, Eddie doesn’t seem to care. Might be too sleepy to notice.

He’s lost a lot of weight, being on a hospital diet and throwing up all the damn time. Even so, Eddie looks doughy and sweet in the morning. Steve wants to squish his drowsy little face, smush his nose, honk it like a car horn.

They kiss a little longer before the anticipation becomes too much. Steve has to know what happened in Eddie’s dream. “So… any luck?”

“Are you a gambling man?” Eddie asks through a yawn. “Cause if so, then yeah.”

“Holy shit, really?” Steve starts shaking Eddie’s shoulder. “Did she tell you what might help wake her up?”

“She didn’t speak, but she was holding something this time.”

“Holding what?”

“Think it was Corduroy.”

“The material?”

“The bear. You know, the children’s book?”

No, Steve doesn’t know that children’s book. While most of the kid's parents were reading Little Golden Books, Steve’s nanny was reading him excerpts from her murder-mystery novels. Although, his dad did occasionally hand Steve the comics out of the morning newspaper. Whenever he was around, that is.

“I asked if the bear was hers and if she still has it.” Eddie pokes Steve’s cheek. “And she nodded yes to both. That’s a start, right?”

“Definitely a start. It’s gotta be.” Steve sits up in the bed, stretches and cracks every fucking bone in his back. “I’ll go grab us some coffee and fill Lucas in once he gets here.”

Eddie gives him a thumbs-up, reaches onto the desk for his walkman. Steve’s walkman.

Nah. Who is he kidding? He’d put a goddamn bow on it. He’d let Eddie keep it forever.

It’s Eddie’s walkman now.

Lucas heads to Eddie’s room once he arrives. They drink their coffees while Eddie fills him in on the dream updates. It’s nice to see Lucas all perked-up again, he’s been pretty dejected for several months now. Even if they’re just clinging to scraps of hope, it’s better than grasping at maybes and question marks. That’s all they’ve been doing up until now.

“I’ve seen it.” Lucas says. “Green overalls? Ripped arm that’s missing all of its stuffing?”

Eddie hums into his coffee cup. “Looks like she sewed it back together with yellow threads?”

“That’s the one.” Lucas confirms. “It’s in her bedroom - she keeps it in a box of stuff from her grandma.”

He fills Steve and Eddie in about her grandma, how she took Max in during the worst part of her parent’s separation. Whenever the fights were unbearable, she’d take Max to the park for some fresh air. Lucas says he’s pretty sure that she bought Max her first skateboard. The bear must be a gift from her too, must be pretty meaningful.

“Do you think you can get it?” Steve wonders, looking towards Lucas.

“For sure, I’ll drop by tonight after I leave.”

“Wait.” Eddie interrupts their order of business, wildly waving his hand. “When is McGee’s birthday?”

“November 6th.” Lucas answers.

Steve checks the weekly calendar on the wall, the one used to track Eddie’s medical schedule. “That’s three days from today.”

“Do it then.” Eddie demands.

“Why?” Steve and Lucas say it at the same time.

“The song.” Eddie begins to hum the tune of happy birthday, conducting himself along with his index finger. “It was very quiet, but I heard it during the whole entire dream.”

Lucas has a skeptical look on his face. “So, you think we should… wait?”

“It’s a gut feeling.”

Lucas huffs, seems apprehensive about this idea. He’s been incredibly patient, more patient than Steve on his best days. But even the most tolerant individuals have boiling points. This might be his.

So Steve tries to intervene, uses his coach voice for good measure. “If Eddie says wait, then we wait.”

And that’s exactly what they do.

They wait.

Day 76:

It’s the day before Max’s birthday. Steve hasn’t really left the hospital since Monday, too busy checking in on her and keeping Eddie stress-free, just in case he needs to lucid dream again. They’re doing that Inseparable Thing - that obnoxious clingy shit that lovesick people do. Is that what Steve’s experiencing? Lovesickness? Ugh, he needs to ask Sam if she can write a prescription for him - get the gooey feelings under control or whatever.

Lucas arrives with a box, probably the one he mentioned to them a couple days ago. Carefully, he pulls out a raggedy teddy bear.

“That’s the one!” Eddie almost chokes on his potato soup from the excitement. “That’s the bear from the dream!”

“It’s… falling apart.” Steve makes an unpleasant face.

“It’s well loved.” Lucas corrects him. “Clearly, this means a lot to Max.”

Steve gets up, starts pacing the room with a pestering thought. “Remember what El told us? About happy memories being stronger than the hateful ones?”

“George Lucas would eat that shit up.” Eddie replies.The name sounds familiar, but Steve doesn’t catch on. “I mean, come on. That’s very Dark Side versus The Force.”

Lucas high-fives Eddie. “Dude, you’re so right.”

“This is a Star Wars thing, right?”

They both look at Steve like he just murdered their silly little nerd vibes.

“I’m gonna pretend like he just didn’t refer to Star Wars as a thing.” Eddie shudders. Lucas joins him the theatrics.

Steve rolls his eyes, recalls Eddie’s reaction to his dice collection. “Let me guess: it’s not a thing, Star Wars is phenomenon.”

“Pretty boy catches on fast.” Eddie winks, gives Steve a dark look that makes him think they’re gonna be up to some fairly vulgar stuff later.

“Steve might be onto something…” Lucas admits. Honestly, why is it so hard for people to admit that Steve has good ideas sometimes? “Maybe what she used against Vecna the first time wasn’t her happiest memory.”

Steve studies the bear, examines its matted fur and the questionable stains on its overalls. Max must’ve had this for a long time, considering all the wear and tear. “Maybe this is connected to her happiest memory.”

Lucas nods. “She probably repressed a lot of her childhood, there was too much crazy bullshit going on with her family splitting up.”

Eddie sighs, they both look up at his thoughtful expression. Deep, comtemplative eyes. “I bet some of her good memories may have been shoved aside with all of the bad memories she tries to avoid.”

Of course Eddie can relate to memories getting shoved aside, hidden away whether he likes it or not. There’s pieces to this scenario that each one of them can link to their own past. It’s not surprising, but then again, not much surprises Steve anymore.

He learned early on with all of this monster fuckery that the phrase common ground, gained its notoriety for a reason. It’s much more common than anyone thinks. Finding it, even amongst a group of clashing personalities, is easy.

Common.

Lucas hides in Eddie’s room in order to stay past visiting hours. They plan on taking the back stairs to sneak into Max’s room just before midnight. Eddie suggests that just Steve and Lucas go - he doesn’t want anyone getting suspicious if he’s not in his bed.

Steve offers to stay with him, but Eddie is insistent. Stubborn. “You’ve gotta help Sinclair. Make sure he doesn’t royally fuck things up.”

They both know that’s bullshit. Out of the two of them, Steve is the fucker-upper. “What if you need help?”

“I’ve got Sam.” Eddie reminds him, places a quick kiss over Steve’s wrist. “And besides, I’ll just be sleeping. Nighttime meds usually knock me out cold.”

“Usually.”

“I’ll be fine, sweetheart.” Eddie speaks in the kindest register Steve has ever heard from him. It’s really nice. “I’ll be here when you get back.”

There’s an unwanted fear taking over Steve’s mind right now. A selfish fear.

“Remember me. Okay, Eddie?”

Eddie’s kind register doesn’t waver. “Okay, Steve.”

It’s almost midnight. Steve places the stuffed bear in the crook of Max’s right arm. Lucas slings her arm over it, keeping it secure. Eddie told them that’s the arm she holds it with in his dreams. Might as well be as accurate as possible with this.

They keep the conversation light while they wait for the clock to strike twelve. Little topics like how uncharacteristically warm it is for November and how no one has been able to conquer her Dig Dug high score at the arcade. Things like that.

“It’s almost showtime, Mayfield.” Steve leans in two minutes before midnight.

Lucas laughs, stroking her shoulder. “Still annoying that you’re older than me.”

“Oh, it shows.” Steve teases. “She’s more mature than both of us combined.”

“And she never lets us forget that either.”

“Never.”

Day 77:

The clock alerts them that it’s midnight. Both of them are holding their breath, staring hard down at Max. Watching. Waiting. Wishing for change.

A few minutes go by, but nothing happens. No difference whatsoever.

“Maybe it’ll take awhile.” Lucas says. Hope trembling in his voice.

Steve gives a half-smile. “Yeah. That could be it.”

An hour goes by.

And then another one.

By three, Steve stands up. Mainly to keep himself from falling asleep, but also, to give his nerves something to do.

“Witching hour.” Lucas states blankly. As if Steve is just supposed to know what the hell that is. Steve peers over and sees that Lucas isn’t talking to him. He’s talking to Max. “You love witching hour.”

“Is that right?”

Lucas nods. “She says it’s that time of night where her mind is most clear. Which I always found equally bizarre and cute.”

Steve chuckles, sits back down. “Why is that?”

“Witching hour is said to be the hour where ghosts and demons are most likely to… materialize.”

“Materialize?”

“Show themselves.”

The phone next to Max’s desk starts ringing as soon as those words leave Lucas’ mouth. Both of them jump in their seats, Steve’s pretty sure he mumbles something explicit and incoherent.

He picks it up so that Lucas doesn’t have to let go of Max’s hand. “Hello?”

“Just me.”

Steve sighs at the familiar voice. “Speaking of demons…”

Lucas whispers, ‘is it Eddie?’ And Steve nods, laughing a bit at the impeccable timing.

“Can’t keep your mind off me, huh?”

“Something like that.” Steve replies. “Is everything okay?”

“I saw something.” Eddie whispers. “Well, I heard something. She’s not up yet… is she?”

“Not yet, no.”

“You know the happy birthday tune I’ve been hearing?”

“Yeah?”

“It was louder tonight, more distinct.” Eddie states. “So I walked closer to Max, and it got even louder.”

“What does that mean?”

“I don’t know, man but I think… I think the song is inside the bear.”

Steve looks at the toy, tries to connect the dots. Not doing such a swell job. “You mean like a voice box or something?”

“Something like that, yeah.” Eddie yawns, the medicines must have really done him in tonight. “Just test out the theory and give me a call back, yeah?”

“Yeah, okay.”

“Good luck.”

“Sweet dreams.”

And the line clicks dead.

“What did he say?” Lucas jumps up, adrenaline must be kicking back in.

Steve heads toward Max’s bedside. “He thinks that song is coming from inside the bear. Does it have a button or anything?”

They carefully inspect the bear, without moving it from Max’s hold. Neither one of them notice anything resembling a button or a pull-string. Steve takes a step back, while Lucas continues to search.

Before they left tonight, the position she needed to be in seemed weirdly important to Eddie. He made a big fuss about it, rambled for quite a long time:

‘It’s wrapped under her right arm, every damn time. Other things change, like her clothes or her hairstyle, but never her position. Always hugging that damn bear like it’s her long lost twin.’

“Hey, Sinclair. I might know what you can try.”

“I’m listening.”

Steve hopes this doesn’t come across stupid but… “I think you need to hug Max.” Okay. It sounds a little stupid, for sure. He tries to elaborate. “Well… hug Max and the bear. Eddie said she's always hugging it - that must be what’s making the song play.”

Steve bends down, pushes the green overalls to the side, just to check.

“No fucking way.” Lucas gasps, looking over Steve’s shoulder.

There it is. Right in the middle of the bear’s body, lays a red heart sticker. There’s words printed on it, but most of the lettering has faded away. Steve squints and thinks it might have said something like ‘press here.’ No way to know for sure though.

“Go ahead, Sinclair.” Steve motions for Lucas to take his place. “Hug the birthday girl.”

Lucas gulps, slowly switching spots with Steve. He glances back one more time, maybe for reassurance, which Steve gladly gives to him. Just a few pats on the back. Three times for three in the morning. The witching hour.

Max loves the witching hour.

He leans over, almost kneeling, and wraps Max into a gentle embrace. “Happy Birthday, Mad Max.” Lucas squeezes her lightly at first, then tighter. Nothing too tight, nothing that would undo all of her intricate wiring. But enough to make the song start playing.

The birthday melody is almost inaudible. The speaker inside the toy sounds extremely eroded, overused. Steve isn’t the biggest music expert, but even he can tell that it’s out of tune. All the notes are distorted and boxy.

It’s playing though. It’s working that much.

Lucas doesn’t let go of Max the whole time. He keeps squeezing her and the bear. Steve stays incredibly still, not on purpose, just out of anticipation. Caution, too.

The last note plays out for a long time, much longer than it needs to. Steve almost wonders if it got jammed, but it eventually clicks off. Letting the room go silent. Just their heavy breathing, the air conditioning, and Max’s heart monitor.

Her heart monitor…

“Oh my god.” Steve hears it almost instantly. The change in pattern. A new tempo of beeps. Faster or maybe slowly or maybe it’s switching between the two, he’s not quite sure. But it’s definitely something…

Something new.

Almost a key change. Almost a song.

“Steve…” Lucas lifts up, keeping one hand over Max’s arm. “Something’s happening.”

The pattern changes again. It’s picking up the pace, becoming more lively.

Steve and Lucas both shift their focus to her face, her eyes. They’re still closed, but they’re moving now. They see all the rapid movements underneath her eyelids, causing her eyelashes to twitch, to flicker.

She’s still in there. She’s still in there and she’s responding.

“Get a nurse.” Lucas says urgently, never letting his focus leave Max’s face.

Steve rushes into the hallway, grabs the first nurse he can find. He’s not even sure if he forms a full sentence to her, just a jumbled mess of exclamations. But it must be enough to get his point across because she jumps into action. Pages the medical team on staff and makes a mad dash to Max’s bedside.

Within ten minutes, her room is swarmed with nurses and doctors. Her eyes begin to crack open, muscles working harder than they have in months. The monitor is getting stronger, steadier. Might be the best tonal-based arrangement Steve has ever heard in life.

There’s a brief lull while the doctors add a few notes to her chart. Steve takes the opportunity to pull Lucas aside, tells him he’s going to fill Eddie in on the good news. Lucas is all smiles, waving Steve off. Steve is all smiles too as he jogs up the stairs.

Max is waking up, there’s no reason for any other expression to occupy his face at this time. Smiling is the only appearance that seems suitable for this sort of occasion.

That’s the philosophy circling Steve’s mind when he gets to Eddie’s room, and it immediately vanishes at the sight of Eddie sobbing in his bed.

“Oh my god, what’s wrong?” Steve hops onto the creaky edge, pulling his sweater sleeve over his hand to rub away all the tears and snot. It’s fucking gross, but Steve can’t process anything besides comfort right now. Gross shit is secondary to sadness.

But… Eddie’s not sad. He’s laughing. He’s still sobbing, but he’s laughing too. What the hell? Steve is fucking baffled.

Eddie grabs Steve’s drippy sleeves and waves his arms wildly before placing Steve’s hands over his tear-stained cheeks.

“It all came back,” Eddie chokes out, smiling through his sniffles. “All of it. Every last pesky memory.” He moves Steve’s hands from his cheeks to his temples. “It’s all right here, Steve. I remember it all.”

Oh. Oh fuck.

Steve keeps his hands there, bringing Eddie’s face forward to kiss him madly. His lips are extra wet, everything tastes a bit salty from all the teardrops. They’re kissing with the damn door still open, but fuck anyone who dares Steve to remove his lips from Eddie ‘Unabridged Edition’Munson.

They’re laughing and kissing and mopping up tears with mouths and tongues and Steve’s sleeve yet again.

Steve brings their foreheads together, feels more powerful now that they’re on the same page, memory-wise. He’s fucking elated, can hear it every damn word he utters. “When? How? When? When?”

Eddie sniffs again, kisses the corner of Steve’s mouth. “A few minutes into the devil’s hour.”

“Is that different from the witching hour?”

“No, Stevie, they’re the same thing.” Eddie’s forehead wrinkles, his face is blotchy from all the crying. “Color me impressed that you know what the witching hour is.”

Steve gets up to shut the door, lock it, anything to avoid the explanation on how he just learned what the witching hour is - thanks to Max’s obsession with it. “Wait… shortly after you called me?”

“Not long after that, yeah.” Eddie finally blows his nose into an actual tissue this time. “I would’ve called, but I’ve been a blubbery mess ever since. It’s just…”

“Overwhelming?”

“Very. A fucking monsoon of emotions.”

Steve dries the last few tears off of Eddie’s face. “Do you think Max waking up helped unlock the rest of your memories?”

He recalls Eddie’s birdcage tattoo, rephrasing the question. “Like maybe, you were both trapped somewhere else? Somewhere less -”

“Less normal? Supernatural, maybe?”

Steve has flashbacks of red lightning bolts and floating ash particles everywhere. “Yeah. That.”

“Feels like it, yeah.” Eddie nods slowly, still processing probably. “Almost like we needed each other to shut down the whole system. Break free.”

“Escape.” Steve touches Eddie’s side, right where the tattoo is located.

“Exactly.” Eddie grins. “We escaped.”

“Fucking wow.”

“Couldn’t have said it better myself, Steve Harrington.”

Steve crosses his legs on the bed, fully facing Eddie. They stare at each other for a moment, before Eddie tackles Steve with a hug. He wraps his arms around Eddie’s waist, laughing at the abruptness. Not complaining though. Steve would never complain about receiving an Eddie Tackle Hug.

However, an unwanted fear, similar to the one he had last night, enters the forefront of his mind.

Eddie remembers everything now, even the bad shit. He probably remembers Steve being the ultimate shithead in high school. He also probably remembers Steve having a massive crush on Nancy Wheeler just a few months ago.

Steve slips out of the hug, shrinking into his stupid fears. “Does this change anything?”

“Like what?”

“About…” Steve gestures over himself. Tries to play it off like it’s no big deal, but it is. Masking that is impossible.

“About you?” Eddie scoffs, taking Steve’s hand. He deliberately rubs his thumb over Steve’s left index finger, where Steve used to wear his class ring - the same one that’s sitting over Eddie’s chest, next to his guitar pick.

“My naive little Stevie boy. You think that I, a mere mortal who used to wait around Starcourt Mall for hours to catch a glimpse of your impeccable backside, would just be over you like that? Please. Be serious.”

“Okay.” Steve un-shrinks himself, gets stuck in Eddie’s shimmery eyes because he can. “Just checking.”

“Well if you’re just checking, let me help you get a more thorough analysis.” Eddie is the one in Steve’s lap this time, tongue going straight down Steve’s throat. It’s fucking predatory, the way Eddie’s kissing him. Way too dirty right away.

Minutes earlier, Eddie was bawling his eyes out and now he’s actively trying to tongue-fuck Steve in a goddamn hospital. Patients are probably coughing up blood two doors down, but here they are - panting and getting hard just from licking into each other’s mouths. It’s sick and demented, but so is all the bullshit they’ve put up with this year.

An eye for an eye, or whatever those bearded proverbs say.

Steve keeps his hands gripped over Eddie’s hips, twisting at the material of his sweatpants. He knows that he’s being noisy now. Every time Eddie grinds the slightest bit over his thigh, he’s moaning, chanting Eddie’s name like a slutty hymn. If they don’t slow this the fuck down, Steve’s sweater won’t be the only damp article of clothing amongst them.

“Driving me crazy here, Munson.” Steve grits his teeth, stays as quiet as possible which somehow makes the pleasure hit harder when Eddie nibbles on his ear.

“Like you this way.” Eddie snarls, blows into Steve’s ear this time.

Steve does a full-body shiver, wants to fucking ride off of that motion, but no way. Not here. Not in the godforsaken medical inferno. Absolutely not.

He releases his grip on Eddie’s sweatpants, cracking his knuckles. “Can we like… not let the first time we fuck be in a head trauma ward?”

“You mean to tell me you don’t find the smell of formaldehyde to be a turn-on?”

“Quite the opposite actually.”

Eddie tries to bribe Steve with massages so that he can stay in his lap. He promises to be on his best behavior, but Steve isn’t a complete moron. Eddie’s Best Behavior, is still naughty, still vulgar as all fuck.

He makes a big scene out of it, collapsing onto his pillows, complaining how cold he is to no longer be in the arms of a ‘real man.’

Such a weirdo. Steve loves it.

“Do you want this back?” Eddie flips Steve’s ring over the chain around his neck.

Steve shrugs, shaking his head. “You should keep it.”

Eddie continues to fiddle with the chain. His shoulders drop, settling into their natural position. “But you don’t need the visual indicator anymore. I’m not gonna forget.”

They can say that word now. Forget. It no longer holds the same power over them.

“I know you won’t.” Steve stops Eddie’s fidgety fingers from clanking the ring against the chain anymore. He keeps their hands pressed together, resting on top of their two charms.

“I want you to wear it to remember instead.”

One month later…

Unlike the weirdly warm November, Hawkins is having a freakishly cold December. Steve dresses in layers to begin, but the extra-puffy jackets and hair-flattening beanies are concealing some of his best assets.

This wouldn’t be such a mega bummer, except it’s Eddie’s first day out of the hospital. So Steve is losing his shit that this is how Eddie is going to see him for the first time in months. Out in the wild. On a fucking date.

A real date, not a hospital-adaptation of a date. A real one. One that Eddie insisted on planning out entirely, start to finish. Refusing to tell Steve a goddamn detail about it.

They’re meeting in the Hawkins High School parking lot, right after sunset. Eddie is celebrating his homecoming with Wayne during the day, before his shift at the plant. Steve keeps the heat on when he parks, mainly because he’s expecting Eddie to be fashionably late. The guy’s never been known for his punctuality, neither has Steve though.

Steve listens to three and a half songs on the radio by the times Eddie’s van screeches into the parking lot, braking way too fucking close to Steve’s car. Several months in a hospital bed has made his already dismal driving skills even worse. He turns down the radio and watches Eddie slip out of his van.

It’s dazzling, seeing Eddie outside, back in his preferred attire. Steve feels dazzled. One time, Steve spotted Ralph Macchio on the sidewalks of Indianapolis, was totally starstruck by him.

Eddie Munson has the same effect, only much much better. Cause Steve gets to kiss Eddie and mark up his neck like he’s a fucking coloring book.

Eddie thumps his row of silvery rings on the window, breaking Steve’s dazzle-induced trance. Steve smiles, rolls the window down halfway.

“Cold much?” Eddie grimaces at Steve’s heavy coat. Immediately knocks off his stupid beanie.

“It’s the middle of winter.”

“Guess I’ll need to warm you up then.” Eddie unzips a small portion of Steve’s jacket. “Get you out of these ridiculous clothes.” He sticks his cold fucking hand into Steve’s shirt, against his bare chest.

“Jesus!” It’s so cold that Steve’s teeth start chattering at the contact. “See - I think you’re just using the weather as an excuse to get me naked.”

“I’m always looking for a reason to get you naked.”

Steve rolls the window down the rest of the way. “Well the joke’s on you then, babe. You don’t need a reason.”

“No?”

“Nope. I’m a sure thing.” Steve kisses him, gets his hand on his leather jacket, decides right away that he likes this material way more than the gauzy cotton on those hospital gowns.

Eddie playfully chomps at the tip of Steve’ nose, a weird little habit he’s formed over the last month. It never fails to make Steve snort with laughter. “That sounds a lot like something a hometown slut would say.”

“The one and only.”

As soon as Eddie gets in the car, he’s begging to drive it to the secret date location. Steve would rather gnaw off his non-dominant hand than let Eddie Munson drive his precious baby around town. He’s crazy about the guy but not that crazy.

“Just give me the directions and I’ll drive us there.”

“No fun.” Eddie stomps the floorboard.

Steve clicks his fingernails over the buckle on Eddie’s belt. “I think I’m very fun.”

“Fucking drive, you tease.” Eddie groans, reluctantly moves Steve’s hand back to the steering wheel.

It doesn’t take long for Steve to figure out where Eddie is taking them, Steve catches on after the second left turn.

“The library?” Steve questions at the stoplight. “It’s past six, there’s no fucking way the library will be open.” Besides, why the fuck would he want to go on a study date with a guy painted in leather?

Eddie doesn’t respond, just keeps navigating and humming along to whatever Billy Idol song is playing on the radio.

Steve parks in the corner of the library lot, just in case this is all a ploy to get them somewhere dark and alone. Eddie might just want secluded car sex, and Steve would not complain at all if that’s the big surprise.

Clearly that’s not the surprise, because Eddie skips to the front doors, messing around with the lock.

Steve hurries after him. “You wanna get us arrested on our first real date? That’s your idea of romance?”

“I’ve been in white-walled prison for the last seven months.” Eddie takes the bobby pin that’s in between his wicked grin, jiggles it into the lock a few times, gets it open with ease. “Let me earn my troublemaker title back, okay?”

He spits the bobby pin onto the ground and swings open the door. Steve doesn’t know why his thigh muscles clench at the aggressive spitting action, but fuck, it happens. Definitely not an innocent reflex, that’s for damn sure.

Once inside, Eddie takes Steve’s hand, guides him through a maze of bookshelves. If Steve had been a brighter pupil in school, he may know where they are headed, what section they will end up at. But he skimmed through most classes, only gave his full attention to the subjects that piqued his interest (which weren't many, especially not ones of practical use).

“Here.” Eddie motions down to an aisle with empty shelves. There’s three books stacked together at the end of the corridor, along with a few candles. There’s probably some unspoken law amongst librarians that candles should never cross the threshold of library, although Steve doubts Eddie gives a fuck about library laws - or any legal system for that matter.

It’s dark and warm, streams of smoke coming off the illegal candlelight. Steve takes a few steps closer to examine the books under the dim flames. Reads each title on the bindings.

“You didn’t.” Steve peers over at Eddie.

“I sure did.”

They’re Eddie’s literary references, the ones used to describe his varying moods in the hospital. Taming of the Shrew, Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, andBeowulf.

“What the hell did you do with all the other books?”

Eddie shrugs, slides his hands into his front pockets. “They’re safe.”

Fucking suspicious. “That’s not reassuring at all.”

“It's not?” Eddie invades Steve’s space. “This isn't reassuring?”

Eddie kisses Steve’s neck, pulls him in by the waist. Steve peels off his stupid puffy jacket so goddamn fast. He naturally lets his arms drape over Eddie’s shoulders, allows himself to get dizzy in his heated touch, soft lips. His hands meet at the base of Eddie’s neck, clawing all up his scalp. Steve can feel Eddie’s muscles tighten, exhaling into the kisses across Steve’s collarbone.

“So, what am I today?” Eddie whispers.

“Hmm?” Steve’s listening abilities are hazy from the wandering touches. Not comprehending thoughts so well anymore. Not like this.

“Kathy?” Eddie pecks Steve’s left cheek. “Hyde?” Then his right. “Grendel?” Then the bridge of Steve’s nose, before biting it like he always does now.

Steve feels seduced - at least, he thinks this is what seduction feels like. Usually he’s the one doing the whole Mrs. Robinson routine, he’s not used to being Dustin Hoffman in the seduction scenario.

He trudges through the dreamlike fog that Eddie has constructed in his mind, finds a way to reclaim sobriety in this moment.

“Which one is it?”

“How about…” Steve takes a deep breath. Kisses Eddie on the lips and pulls away. “How about boyfriend?”

Eddie’s nails dig into Steve’s back, clutching way too hard.

“Would that title work?” Steve asks, only a small inkling of doubt seeping into his confidence.

Eddie stops digging, his forehead un-wrinkles, his gaze becomes gentle. He takes Steve’s hands into his own, just dangling between them and finally smiles.

“Boyfriend works.” Eddie answers - the smile turns into a dopey grin. “As long as you’re cool with sharing titles.”

Steve looks at Eddie’s chain necklace and nods. “Sure. We can share.”

They stay like this for a while, Steve only notices the passage of time from the dripping wax over the candles. The flame is getting weaker, the room is getting darker. They stay the same. They stay grounded. Steve’s not in any rush to move or stop spewing mushy nonsense back and forth with Eddie, but he’s aware. He’s aware that the rest of the world is keeping a schedule, while they quietly riot against Time altogether.

Eddie is the one that eventually breaks the frozen moment. “We haven’t seen my favorite section of the library yet.”

“Oh really?” Steve’s voice is rich and buttery from the pure swooning he’s been doing all evening. “Are you planning to burn that section down with your pyromaniac tendencies as well?”

“You’ll just have to see for yourself.” Eddie blows out the candles and starts dragging Steve away once again.

They jog up two flights of stairs, race to the fire exit, and wind up at a sketchy looking ladder. Eddie doesn’t hesitate, starts climbing, skipping every other wrung.

“What the living hell, Munson?” Steve doesn’t even know why he’s whisper-screaming, but he is.

Eddie bangs his fist at the top, cracking open the square-ish door on the ceiling. He looks back down at Steve with a crazed expression. “Don’t tell me you’re scared of heights.”

“No, just…” Confused. Steve’s often in a state of confusion though, so what’s fucking new? “Out of the way. Coming up.”

Eddie hoists himself up and disappears. Steve lets out a string of swears, still whisper-screaming as he climbs. When he gets to the top of the roof, he sees Eddie sitting directly in the center. He’s looking up at the stars, seems happy. Seems alive. Free.

There’s a grocery bag beside him, rustling in the night breeze. Steve smooths out his jeans and joins Eddie on the ground. Or roof. Roof-ground. Whatever the fuck people call it.

Steve is about to snoop through the bag, when Eddie grabs something from behind his back, cradles it against his chest. “This is my favorite book. Right here.”

Steve squints his eyes, but it’s hard to see the binding in the dark. “The Hobbit?”

“No.” Eddie leans in for a quick kiss. “But it’s so fucking sexy that you’d guess that.”

He holds the book flat out in both palms, offering it to Steve, who realizes it’s not a book at all. It’s a binder.

Eddie’s Memory Log binder.

“Did you…” Steve takes the binder, trembles from his sudden nerves. “Did you read this?”

“Every page.”

Fuck. Steve is fully embarrassed now. Yes, Eddie has seen him writing shit down in this for months, but parts of it are personal. Some pages are less about the notes, and more about how Eddie made Steve feel. It’s like someone just told Steve they published his goddamn diary (which he does not have a diary, fucking gross).

“I actually added some notes.” Eddie flips the cover open. “You should take a look.”

On the first page, next to this bullet:

Eddie doesn’t remember he has a sense of humor.

Eddie has scribbled in tiny lettering:

Not true - you’re just not as funny as you think you are, Steve Harrington.

Next to this note of Day 5:

Eddie remembers Grease? (Of all the movies Steve thought this guy would reference… Grease? Is it the leather? Hm.)

Eddie had added:

First of all, I will poison your stupid grape sodas if you ever tell anybody I like Grease. And second… of course, it’s the leather. And Frenchie is comedy GOLD, obviously.

On Steve’s corner-note on Day 38 that says:

Eddie notices Steve’s ass…

Eddie has edited to say:

Eddie notices touched Steve’s ass…(as of Day 72. Put in the history books, folks. Teach the kiddies about this in schools across America).

There’s so many random notes, Eddie manages to fit them on the busiest of progress days. Steve flips further along before Eddie stops him, picks out a specific page.

Day 66.

The day where Steve stapled Eddie’s card to the page.

The day where Steve wrote this:

Robin was right. Definitely think I’m falling for him.

Eddie has added his note underneath, in dark red ink:

That’s good. Because he’s definitely falling for you too.

Steve looks up, almost gets a head rush from moving so fast. Eddie seems nervous too. For once in his life, he seems to be reconsidering his boldness.

“Are my rewrites okay?” Eddie snags the binder back, sets it to the side so he can scoot in closer.

“Hell yeah.” Steve closes the gap, leans in for another kiss.

“Good. Because now I have bad news.”

“What?”

“I lied. I didn’t get back from the hospital today.”

Steve’s stomach drops. “You didn’t?”

“I got back yesterday.”

“Why would you lie about that?”

“So I could get this done and surprise you.” Eddie lifts his leather jacket and undershirt to reveal his side, his rib cage. He still has some bandages from the hospital in certain areas. However, Eddie has clear wrapping in one spot. Steve bends forward to examine the markings.

It’s a tattoo. A bird tattoo, the bird on the opposite side of the broken cage, escaping its enclosure. Free like Eddie. It’s the same one he planned on getting after graduation. But… he didn’t graduate. Not necessarily.

“Felt like I still deserved to get it, ya know?” Eddie says, shaking a bit from the cold. “After all, I did escape death… and that damn hospital room. It still works.”

Steve nods, fights the urge to touch it because he knows it’s probably still sore. “What kind of bird is it?”

“A canary.”

Steve studies the tattoo even closer, a sideways smirk creeps up on his face. “Is it… yellow?”

“Yeah, yeah.” Eddie quickly lowers his shirt and jacket back down. “But the least vomit-inducing yellow they had available.”

“Did you get this bird for me?”

“Absolutely not.” Eddie says, very defensive. “I’m not a trashy white girl who drunkenly gets a tattoo at her bachelorette party.”

“Got it.”

Eddie pauses, hesitates. “You may have helped inspire the color choice though.”

“I see.” Steve is so fucking glad that it’s dark outside because he knows he’s flushed. Can feel the blood spreading all over his face.

“Do you like it?”

“I love it.” Steve is able to say it this time. Means it. “I love you.”

“I love you too.” Eddie grabs Steve’s hand, kisses the spot where his class ring used to reside. “Would be a complete idiot not to fall in love with you, Steve Harrington.”

Saying it isn’t terrifying. Hearing it isn’t alarming his flight senses. All the usual declaration jitters have departed. Packed up and left town.

Maybe it’s because there’s a clarity over their relationship that Steve has never had before. A clarity that is only obtained by coming face-to-face with Death so many times. Eddie is alive, Max is awake. Why would three little words scare Steve when he almost lost them both?

And besides, Eddie isn’t going to forget that he’s in love with Steve. That Steve loves him back. That’s no longer something they have to worry about either. Yeah, the world may be an apocalyptic fuckshow, but Eddie’s memory is sublime. Never forgets a goddamn thing anymore.

Looks like Steve’s wish came true in that regard. He really is un-fucking-forgettable.

“What’s in the bag?” Steve takes a peak, can’t see shit in the dark though.

“Our dinner.”

“You made me dinner?” Steve isn’t sure how he’ll politely decline Eddie’s food. He may have fought monsters with homemade weapons, but he’s certainly not brave enough to eat something prepared by a dude that considers Vienna sausages to be gourmet.

“I bought dinner.”

Thank god.

“What’s on the menu?”

“For me? Lo mein. For you…” Eddie pulls out two separate containers and winks. “Kung Pao Chicken.”

Steve smiles, positively beams at his boyfriend. He takes the container and plastic silverware, digs right in. He takes a big bite, watches Eddie’s goofy, lovestruck expression while he chews.

“What do you think?” Eddie seems eager for his approval.

Steve doesn’t keep him waiting. He swallows his bite and answers Eddie the same way he did many months ago. “Excellent choice.”

“The food?”

“The food, the date, the guy.” Steve reaches out to hold Eddie’s hand, knotting their fingers together. Once a gesture of helpless support. Now meaning exactly what Steve says out loud:

“Everything.”

It means absolutely everything.

💌 The End 💌

#steddie fic #steve harrington #eddie munson #memory log #can't believe this is the final one woweeeee #and it's like... very long (I'm trying so hard not to apologize for that)#thank you thank you thank you for reading along #writing this story was pure joy and chaos combined #and if there's errors - it's because it's 4 in the morning (and I am rapidly losing my marbles)

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marie-mcd · 2 months

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Apart from the drunken bookshop scenes in Good Omens S1E1 being very entertaining, these well-loved scenes continue to fascinate me, because I'm seeing someone be persuaded to change their mind without being on exactly the same page.

My observations: they have common ground; Aziraphale isn't too far gone to be reasoned with; Crowley succeeds by meeting him where he is, and by reflecting Aziraphale's own logic back to him.

In conflict resolution IRL, identifying common ground can be a hurdle, but this is easy for them here, and also amusing that their common ground is the whole earth; they love it and deep down don't want it to be "tested to destruction". But Crowley's attempts to persuade him by pointing out all the things Aziraphale would lose personally isn't enough to sway him to help stop Armageddon.

I've observed IRL that someone too far gone to be reasoned with in a given moment tends to be someone so caught up in a strong emotion that their brain seems to completely block the ability to consider someone else's thoughts and feelings outside their own (and/or they'll seek out someone whose opinion confirms their own). I see that Aziraphale is disturbed by the idea of animals suffering when the world ends - which probably extends to humans, given how he cared about Adam and Eve, and that art and theatre comes from humans. He has deep, well-founded fear about disobeying his superiors, but he hasn't lost access to his empathy for others. He's nearly there: "I don't like it any more than you do, but I told you, I can't [disobey]. I'm an angel". "I can't interfere with the Divine Plan."

The really interesting part is when Crowley takes Aziraphale's ideas about disobedience and about the Divine Plan, and manages to get him to see them in a different way: the two seemingly contradictory ideas can actually be consolidated. Since the Plan is ineffable - Aziraphale's own idea reflected back - "You can't be certain that thwarting me isn't part of the Divine Plan too". Aziraphale doesn't have to completely reconsider his belief system, or change the status quo, or consider uncomfortable ideas related to his identity as an angel, to be persuaded: Crowley meets him where he is, and so he only has to stretch his comfort zone a little bit, rather than take a big leap. Additionally, Crowley prompts Aziraphale to think for himself rather than spell out his idea for influencing the antichrist: "It'd be too bad if someone made sure I failed..." Which I also like to see.

(Also, how great is it that Aziraphale uses this same tactic at the airfield base later?!)

As I write these sorts of posts, I worry that I'm just pointing out really obvious stuff; but I'll go ahead and post this anyway because it's an interesting exercise for me to ponder and pinpoint why exactly I like certain things.

And I love me some pragmatic, productive conflict-resolution and problem-solving in real life; scenes like these get me thinking along those lines.

#good omens #good omens meta #neil gaiman #terry pratchett #gnu terry pratchett #ineffable spouses #ineffable husbands #azicrow #aziraphale x crowley #crowley x aziraphale #crowley #aziraphale #crowley appreciation #p

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galedekkarios · 2 months

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yk. something i find interesting about gale is that he very much is good-aligned, but like. sometimes... in certain situations... his rejection of evil acts isn't so much "this is bad for moral reasons and that's why we shouldn't do it," like some other companions will argue, including those that are neutral or even evil, but more so "the cost is too great and so we shouldn't do that."

which is just so fascinating. bc he does accept and support some not great things if he thinks that the ends will justify the means. but if the means are too much then he'll turn away from it. like. he's an emotional guy, a good guy, but he's so pragmatic. he'll get dirty if he thinks it'll help more than it hurts. he'll get dirty if he thinks something good can come out of it. he's just... so interesting.

#like. i need to chew on this man he's GOOD but he's also kinda 🤨🤨🤨 and it makes me Insane.#✏️

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bruciemilf · 1 year

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Imagine that one scene from that animated series justice league where Batman reveals everyone's secret identity(like a badass) then takes off his cowl and they're all in shocked confusion. I mean that's baby girl Bruce Wayne, sunshine of Gotham as The Dark Knight. Then they all get really protective of him. They might've feared him before but now they know he's just baby. It doesn't matter that he can beat them all, he's baby... Idk I find the idea cute

Okay, so I love that scene dearly, but my heart screams for something more personal? If that makes sense? I'll take inspiration from one of my favorite Spider-Man identity revels.

Let's imagine this; The city, Gotham or Metropolis or just an unlucky piece of land that had a really bad day. Hal saw the building collapse first, coming down on them like an avalanche of death.

Hal isn't very good at brain work; He's not like Flash, who can map out an entire route in his mind in a blink, calculating escape routes, and distances, and lengths, and how fast he can run without injuring anyone.

He's not strategic like Wonder Woman, or pragmatic like Batman, or sensible like Superman. He's not the brainpower; But he's pretty damn good at acting like he's okay.

And withstanding that building because Superman got Injured, well.

He can do so with sweat raining down his temple and pain screaming in his system and a smile on his lips, "This is a really good arm work out, guys,"

" Hang in there, Lantern,"

He hears that you're doing great, Hal just well under his hero moniker from Barry. It's a good power up, if nothing else.

Wonder Woman rubs his shoulders before attending to the injured, helping them dig a way out before the oxygen dries out.

Another thing he's not good at is comforting people; He's lost to crying kids. Especially crying kids whose parents are paste under rubble and hubris.

His back is arching, his fire's going out. All he knows is that those little sniffles and whimpers in the hissing silence hurts worse.

The only person he can think would be worse than him at it is Batman; Stone masked, more shadow than person, a labyrinth of a man.

But Hal isn't paid to think for a reason, because Batman kneels by that kid, and places a fatherly hold on his shoulders, just like Hal's father used to do when he bruised his knees climbing trees.

He doesn't say anything, because there's nothing to say. Words aren't medicine, after all. He's just waiting, it seems like, until the kid speaks first, " My daddy's dead."

"...Yes. I'm sorry."

"But, -- but you were here. You're the justice league! No one dies when you're around! You're supposed to save everybody! So why-- why not him?!"

The weight gets heavier.

" Your father asked us to take care of you first. He protected you."

" You should've left me, then! What am I going to do now? I'm just, -- I'm just...A human."

" So am I."

" No, you're Batman. That's, -- That's not the same. You don't understand. "

Hal's vision is blurry and pained, bordering dangerously close to the deep dark void of unconsciousness, -- but he can't, he can't, God damn it Hal, be useful for once in your entire life, -- but he makes out a shadow moving.

He makes out the shape of Bruce's cowl, an armor, a secret, a mystery with no epilogue. Then he sees pale. Two dots of blue, sparkling from dark grey smudge.

When his vision sharpens, so does the tired face of Bruce Wayne.

"...Oh, holy shit."

" I do, " his voice changes, too, thought that may be just Hal's pumping eardrums playing tricks on him. He goes from grainy and rough to rain soft and porcelain. " I do know. Our pain isn't the same. But the way we can get through it, is. Together."

The kid falls in his arms. For just a moment, it seems like death won when the ring powers out.

"Shazam!"

" Hey guys," Shazam's pretty wheezy for a tank made of beef and godly hands, " Sorry for the hold up. Got stuck in traffic."

They make it out. They use the picture of Wonder Woman carrying him out on her back, and Green Arrow shoves it in his face at the first opportunity.

He doesn't expect them to stick around in the hospital. But he does need to know, " Okay, so, hopefully that wasn't a near death fever dream. But are you Bruce Wayne?"

He asks Batman, and Bruce answers, a tone of shyness not unlikely a new kid introducing himself to the class, " ...Yes. and you're Hal Jordan."

"...Was it the biceps that gave it away?"

He doesn't smile, but Hal doesn't expect him to.

" Well, I mean...I'm in for the long run with you guys," Barry offers them a dorky smile before taking off his mask, too. " My name is Barry Allen. And I'm the fastest man alive...Also a bit of a science nut. I need to see your gadgets, by the way. Your Kevlar durability is just amazing, I mean the way you somehow altered the material,--"

" Oh," Apparently, Batman can blush. It's pretty addictive.

One by one, they follow, all easy smiles, all trust.

" My name is Diana. Princess of Themyscaria. I enjoy ice cream and swords."

" My name is Oliver Queen, and if you want to make a gay joke, don't bother. I said them all and I'm getter at it. And you!" He points directly at Bruce with an arrow, " You're in so much trouble for not telling me about this!"

" You didn't tell me either."

" What kind of detective can't explain the white, blonde, rich, good looking guy apart from Green Arrow? Come on."

Hal has a suspicion Bruce already knew, but said nothing out of courtesy.

" Hal Jordan. I almost broke my spine for you, so, you're welcome for That."

Superman strokes the back of his neck and hunches his shoulders, " I'm, uh, Clark Kent. I'm a journalist for the Daily Planet. I, uh...Make a mean apple pie. Which I could really go for right now."

" Hey, you punched Lex Luthor in the face! Good on you, man."

Diana chuckles, " You'll have to make your famous apple pie for us some time."

" Sure. I like eating with friends."

Hal and Oliver are definetly discussing that blush on Bruce later.

They all turn to Shazam, who's been listening, quiet for once, before he blows a laugh, "Uh, yeah, pass. You guys are nice and all, but I'm more than fine with this. Just me. Good old Shazam."

Crack.

" Is that...Is that a fucking 10 year old?!"

" I'm eleven!"

" What the FUCK,--"

" Don't curse in front of the 9 year old!"

" Again, I am eleven!"

" Who let the 8 year old in!?"

" Wow. Adults really don't listen, huh."

Bruce quite literally shakes on one place, " Are, um, are your parents deceased by chance?" He sounds hopeful about it, too.

" So. A handsome pilot. The fastest dork alive. A badass princess. A good guy who punches hard. A bow and arrow. A weirdo. And a 5 year old. We're quite the group, huh?"

" Again. I'm 11."

" Until you don't bring me some pizza and a bear, you're nothing."

#bruce wayne #dc #battinson #justice league #the justice league #basically they're what the team found family the marvel fans pretend the avengers are #clark kent #diana prince #hal jordan #barry allen #shazam #the flash #billy batson #text #writing #ny writing #that one spiderman scene with andrew garfield lives in my head rent free #text post #asks

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aestariiwilderness · 18 days

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Bad Batch -- Actually Probably Not Spoilers?

But Just In Case:

Like, for plot reasons, I see why they couldn't do it. But my biggest (and possibly the funniest) peeve I have with Bad Batch is this: Canonically, Tech is some kind of master hacker. Can forge chain codes after learning about them five seconds ago. Hacks battle droids -- presumably, you know, SECURED in some way -- on the regular. Masked a ship's signature or whatever. Calculates percentages of plans' successes on the fly while hanging upside down from a screechy flying reptile. Has zero fear (except when Omega is driving the Marauder or someone is doing the Wikipedia entry who isn't him) ("it's not affecting life support. We're fine"; riot racing; everything he's ever done). The moral heart of the Batch pre-Omega ("the systematic termination of the Jedi was a big one for me"; "I understand. I do not agree with you"; "of course we are a family"; "we have not always seen eye to eye with Crosshair but he is our brother and we do not leave our own behind"; but has no issue being pragmatic when it's called for (see: Cid, riot racing again, missions for Rex, interruptions thereof, etc.). Seriously. Wack job of a man. Crazy. Strict moral code arranged almost solely around his family that absolutely nobody sees coming and that, specifically, does NOT preclude massive destruction, property damage, and lethal measures. Ridiculous man. Homeschooled. Genetic Mandalorian. COMPETENT. (Usually.) Bona fide, literal, genetically-engineered test tube genius who is also biologically nine years old. Has no concept whatsoever of overkill. Point being -- he is EXACTLY the kind of person I would expect, once it sunk in that: 1. They are no longer Kaminoan/Republic property 2. They are, in fact, on the run with fam + new baby and - cranky but nonetheless beloved sniper bro who picked a terrible time to be stupid And 3. that "money" is now a thing they must Account For.... Give him two days to study finances, economy, and the various mafia; send him on a weekend trip to Nal Hutta to observe gangs, and hey presto -- the Hutts? overthrown in a year. Black Sun? Under new management. Pykes? A thing of the past. The Senate? Convening emergency sessions to discuss Where All the Money Has Gone. Palpatine's Secret Slush Fund #43? Drained. Hemlock's Science Budget? Currently funding the clone rebellion. ISB 401ks? Being used to pay someone to "retrieve" (read: kidnap) Crosshair from Rampart. Cad Bane's baby-stealing revenue? Currently outfitting the Marauder with gold plating. My point: WHY ISN'T TECH HACKING STAR WARS ATMs Story would have been over six episodes in. Tech would have foreclosed on the Palace; the Death Star would have fallen prey to insurance fraud; Omega would have grown up with more gowns than Padme. The Banking Clan bows to their new and, uh, eccentric overlords. Wrecker has thirteen new Z-6 cannons. Echo has thirteen natborn employees and is thoroughly enjoying himself. Hunter took an actual shower (still didn't get a new bandana). The Empire is turning over the empty coffers and shaking them out, wondering if they have rats. Mas Amedda is standing on street corners with an upturned hat. Crosshair is happily occupied with suing the Kaminoans for emotional damages. The end

#tbb spoilers #just in case #tbb tech #tbb #tbb crosshair #tbb hunter #tbb omega #funny #star wars #the bad batch #bad batch season 3 #the bad batch season 2 #the bad batch season 1 #tbb echo #clone force 99 #tbb wrecker #alternate universe #how it should have gone honestly

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txttletale · 4 months

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Regarding https://www.tumblr.com/txttletale/738341757552672768/big-fan-not-even-particularly-involvd-i-just

Hard disagree. Until science demonstrates that people into (say) BDSM really are disproportionately more likely to become predators, someone's kinks will remain precisely as irrelevant to it as their pesto preferences, which is the exact reason that comparison works well and is not a fallacy.

It's just that "could this person's pesto taste mean they're a PREDATOR?" is transparently bullshit in a way "could this person's kink tastes mean they're a PREDATOR?" isn't. The only reason the latter equally absurd premise gets entertained is that 1) both things are related to sex, which doesn't really say much when so many things are, 2) because it aligns with people's collective biases and objectively incorrect assumptions about how abuse works and why it's perpetrated. Like that's it, that's the reason. It's very comforting to think that being a predator comes with obvious red flags like the kink preferences they announce and that's a big reason people think that. It's broadly comparable to the (extremely widespread until only a few decades ago, at least in the West) stance that sexual assault is motivated by how the victim dressed rather than a constellation of victim vulnerability and perpetrator being someone who'd take advantage of that. It's scary to think that you can't actually protect yourself by not wearing short skirts, so people will pretend like hell like that's all there is to it, even if it means they get burned and left without support when this paper-thin shield doesn't work. Same "reasoning" with the relationship between kink and predatory behaviour.

It's all pesto, in the end, and pushing back against the supposed link by framing it as absurd is the correct approach here IMO.

sure, the comparison works well in terms of being objectively correct -- they even acknowledge this in their example. i agree with basically everything you're saying here and the reason i agreed with anon instead of rejecting them (as i have every other 'oh you gotta be soooo careful about people talking about kink in case they're a PrEdAtOr' anon i've gotten) is that they are expressly making an exclusively pragmatic argument -- that from the purely rhetorical perspective, reblogging a post about how kinks don't make someone a sexual predatory -- which is of course correct -- from someone who turns out to be predatory for other reasons looks bad.

like, i think anon also agrees on all that stuff you said with you (or at least, that was my interpretation of that ask) -- they were just pointing out how extra diligence about who you platform making that argument is needed not because that argument is suspicious but because it is more rhetorically/politically disastrous for someone making that argument to be exposed for the argument than it is with something totally unrelated.

#ask #futureevilscientist

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daresplaining · 4 months

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hi! long time admirer of your blog! is there any particular reason why matt (specifically) pretends he's dead when something goes fucked up in his life? is it as a result of trauma or a past experience 'cause i have yet to figure it out myself. thanks in advance! hope you're having a wonderful day!

Hi, and thank you!

That's a really interesting question. To my memory, Matt has never psychoanalyzed himself on-panel about this, so I suppose it's up to us.

The short answer is that each faked death tends to be tied to the specific circumstances that surround it, as well as Matt's state of mind at the time, but there are noticeable patterns. (I'll do a quick run-through of The Deaths of Matt Murdock, but here's a more comprehensive (though not quite up-to-date) overview for anyone unfamiliar.)

His earliest faked deaths were more about pragmatism than anything, and had to do with protecting-- or simplifying-- his secret identity. His very first, of course, was "killing" Mike, which he presented as just being a matter of convenience. The Mike identity, while fun, had outlived its purpose and was starting to cause Matt trouble in his relationships with Karen and Foggy, in addition to just being a tiring logistical nightmare. (Also, Mike was cooler than Matt and that just wouldn't do.) There wasn't much forethought to his decision, he just encountered a situation in which Daredevil (Mike) would be in danger and suddenly thought, "Hey, what if he died?"

Matt (thinking): I just thought of something! ...The nuttiest idea I've ever had! But, if I can pull it off...it'll end my triple-identity bit...forever!" Daredevil vol. 1 #41 by Stan Lee, Gene Colan, John Tartaglione, and Sam Rosen

Matt's second faked death came about when supervillain Starr Saxon discovered his secret identity. This threat to his double life brought out feelings of resentment that Matt had been harboring toward his civilian identity since issue 1. In these early years, in an effort to hide his powers and superheroics, Matt turned his mild-mannered alter ego into an exaggerated caricature of a blind person, played at being helpless, prevented himself from acting on his feelings toward Karen Page, and dialed down his personality. He believed that this was necessary, but he also hated it and found it stifling. Added to this was his overall bitterness toward the ableism he had experienced since his accident, and the sense that the world around him viewed him as helpless (Matt mentions in an issue shortly afterward that his least favorite sentiment is pity). Thus, at this point, he saw the Matt Murdock identity as a prison, and the Daredevil identity as liberation, and so he grasped at the idea of faking his (Matt Murdock's) death not just as a way to counter Starr Saxon's threats, but also as an opportunity to finally rid himself of an identity that he actively disliked.

Matt: "My problem isn't Daredevil--and never was! It was always Matt--the blind lawyer--the hapless, helpless invalid! He's been my plague...since the day I first donned a costume! Then, let Matt Murdock no longer exist!!" Daredevil vol. 1 #53 by Stan Lee, Roy Thomas, Gene Colin, George Klein, and Artie Simek

Fortunately, Matt largely got over this resentment after he stopped putting his different identities into such rigid boxes. He does occasionally give up one or the other of his identities from time to time, but we don't see him actively killing an identity out of hatred again. Which is...certainly a positive sign in regards to Matt's overall mental health.

Instead, in the decades since the Starr Saxon incident, Matt's faked deaths have tended to revolve around two vital needs: the need to escape from something horrible in his life, and the need to protect his loved ones. Sometimes it's more of one, sometimes it's more of the other. In the Nocenti/JRJR run, Matt screws up real bad by cheating on Karen Page (at this point still recovering from her drug addiction and very fragile) with Mary Walker. Matt gets nearly killed by Typhoid Mary, wakes up in the hospital and learns that Karen has discovered his treachery. He finds himself at a crossroads, hating himself for the betrayal, hating the violence in his life and the seeming futility of everything he does, and feeling unable to cope, he abandons his civilian identity, vanishes from the lives of the people who know him, holds a symbolic "funeral" for Matt Murdock, and runs off upstate.

In the Chichester/McDaniel run, Matt ends up with a convenient body double in the wake of a major secret identity scare and decides that it would be best to fake his death in order to protect his loved ones. The only person who knows he's still alive is Maggie, his mother, because Matt goes to her for name suggestions for his new civilian alter ego (she ends up suggesting "Jack").

Maggie: "Oh, Matt, thank god you're alive!" Matt: "No 'Matt', Maggie. Not anymore. That's become a dangerous name for anyone too near to me." Daredevil vol. 1 #325 by D.G. Chichester, Scott McDaniel, and Christie Scheele

After becoming a full-on supervillain in Shadowland, Matt again decides that it's "for the best" if his loved ones think he's dead, and he vanishes off to New Mexico. In this case, the only people he allows to know the truth are Elektra and Ben Urich. Then there's Matt's memorable, utterly bonkers deal with the Kingpin in the second volume of the Waid/Samnee run after his, Foggy's, and Kirsten's lives have been ravaged by one supervillain attack after another:

Matt: "My offer is this: You guarantee the safety of my people, and the identity bell gets unrung. Think of it as a perverse twist on witness protection. Everyone--Foggy, Kirsten, everyone--will be told I'm dead. Meanwhile, you'll give me a new name and identity known only to you. You'll get back the secret you paid for. You'll oversee the plastic surgery so that only you recognize the face. Hell, even I won't see it. Hell, graft the mask to my skin. I won't care." Fisk: "But you'll still be Daredevil." Matt: "That way, you'll always know where I am. How to use me even when I don't think I'm being used. And how to, at any time, take anyone or anything away from me that you don't want me to have." Daredevil vol. 4 #16 by Mark Waid, Chris Samnee, Matthew Wilson, and Joe Caramagna

And then, of course, we have our most recent example, in which Matt coped with the chaos of his recent life and the violent death of his brother by using Mike's corpse as a body double and fleeing the city to go fight ninjas with Elektra.

What's interesting about these faked deaths is the gap between the reasoning that Matt offers himself versus the actual reality of what he is doing. Each time, Matt is convinced that his loved ones will be better off, safer, even happier if they think he is dead. And of course, this is not based on nothing. Matt has suffered tremendous loss, and has brought great pain into the lives of the people in his orbit. He lost his father. He accidentally got Elektra's father killed, and then later had Elektra herself die in his arms. He contributed to the circumstances that led to Heather's suicide. One of his villains killed Glori. Another killed Karen Page, and nearly killed his mother. Yet another put Milla in a psychiatric hospital, possibly permanently. His brother just literally died in his place. Foggy's life has been in danger more times than I can list. Matt's story has a towering body count, and he carries that grief with him at all times--particularly in circumstances when his life is in shambles, when enemies are closing in, and when those around him are in the crosshairs or have just survived being there. Of course Matt would think that everyone would be "better off" without him around. In the purest, most practical sense, he's probably not wrong. And so, when he lets his loved ones think he is dead and tells himself it's for their own good, I do think he genuinely believes it.

But of course, that also isn't entirely true or realistic. Sending the people who care about him into mourning again and again is not protecting them. And when you really look closely, it's obvious that Matt's most frequent reason for faking his death is the same reason he clings so strongly to the Daredevil identity despite the pain it has caused him: escape. When Matt feels stressed, under pressure, unable to think, or powerless, he can always put on that suit and hop out the window. And when Matt's world is falling apart and he cannot cope at all and doesn't know what else to do, he abandons his life. He escapes into a different identity. He leaves. In his head it's for the people he loves, but it's clearly also for himself. And as frustrating as this coping mechanism can be as a long-term Daredevil reader, I also love it for how incredibly human it is.

With all of this said, though, I think the funniest answer is that Matt inherited some kind of when-in-doubt-fake-your-death gene from his mom.

#Long post #briefcasejuice #Daredevil #Matt Murdock #Asks #Commentary #Adventures in Continuity #ID in alt text #I adore this question. Thank you for sending it!

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animentality · 4 months

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I saw a post in the Gortash tag once, can’t remember who the op was and I could never find it again but it stuck in my head SO much, but basically it was a headcanon that Gortash, after growing up in hell, has a very disassociated view of the world and doesn’t see other people as Real People. As in, (part of) the reason he can be so immutably pragmatic and effortlessly callous when it comes to his abuses of others is that he straight up does not see the people around him as people, just dehumanised objects. And that that this is why doesn’t feel the need to justify his crimes, because to him he hasn’t done anything of any real consequence on an individual level. Like sure, he’s making “people” suffer, but their individual suffering is utterly meaningless in the grand scheme of things because they are utterly meaningless in the grand scheme of things. People are just cogs and gears for his machines. Tools. Currency. Chess pieces. Playthings. Ladder rungs. Whereas Gortash himself IS a Real Person, and so if he’s been made to suffer that is Wrong. And he would not even see this as hypocrisy. (Imo this would also explain why he has his “you to the exclusion of all others” approach to Durge, because Durge is the only other Real Person to him, and therefore they can be his equal where others can’t.)

I could never stop thinking about this headcanon not because I’m the kind of person who needs to rationalise an explanation for why a favourite character committed soulless atrocities (i.e. whatever else may or may not have influenced him, Gortash committed soulless atrocities first and foremost because he is an evil compassionless terrible power-hungry person). But I liked it because of the parallels of Bane consuming souls with no regard for their previous personhood, and Gortash metaphorically “consuming souls”/using people with no regard for their personhood either. (It also just makes a lot of sense that Gortash would view people as a devil would, and you can almost draw a line between the way Raphael toys with and torments people and the way Gortash does, I guess he learned from the best 😬)

This is an excellent analysis of Gortash as a character. Right on all accounts, especially given the way he was raised by Raphael and later worshipped Bane.

Of course people are just commodities. And it goes back to the Ketheric Thorm line, how people are copper pieces to be traded by the gods.

Dehumanization is one of the best themes of Baldur's Gate, which they did fairly well, given how all the companions have elements of dehumanization and the corruption/abuse of power in their stories.

Gortash in particular, though, had it real bad. He was literally enslaved by a devil as a CHILD, and of course it's going to ruin how he sees humans.

How many humans has he seen give up their souls, when he was never given that choice?

He would think of them as fools, who want to be controlled.

And hence, a little fascist psychopath is born.

#enver gortash #baldurs gate #bg3

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sunandflame · 6 months

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Shards of Glass, Chapter 8

Summary: Kyojuro Rengoku, History Teacher on the Kimetsu Academy, is constantly having strange dreams about a Slayer who looks exactly like him. He thinks nothing of it until he recognizes a very specific person from these dreams and feels a very unique connection to her.

Pairing: History Teacher Kyojuro x Teacher Fem!Reader

Trope: Reincarnation / Sequel to Flame and Water (can be stand-alone)

Word Count: 1745

Warning: domestic issues (not abuse)

Pinterest Board of Shards of Glass

Crossposted on AO3

Masterlist of Shards of Glass

This was bad. This was really really bad. She tried her best to suppress the tears, but they continued to stream down her cheeks even after she managed to barricade herself in the toilet stall. Why now? Why here? She tried to think of several explanations, but there were none. She didn't know why she reacted so extremely to it. It was her who rejected him. Her, who saw his heart break into tiny pieces at her words. And yet she felt her throat tightening, her own heart breaking just like his as if there was an invisible connection between them both.

The argument with Kenji didn't make things any better as it only added more stress to her. She didn't want to go home because she knew there would just be a new argument. A new reason to fight. She felt terribly alone and needed to talk to someone about it.

She calmed down eventually, washed away her tears at the sink to look somewhat decent again and decided that she had to find Giyuu.

She found him immediately. Luckily he was alone in the sports hall and was cleaning up the equipment from class. He immediately felt her presence and turned to face her. His eyes widened when he saw her and concern was written in his otherwise expressionless gaze. There were no remnants left of her tears and yet he was able to sense that there was something wrong with her. They weren't best friends and cousins for nothing. As soon as he asked the question, “What happened?”, her tears started anew and she threw herself into his arms.

Confused and overwhelmed by this outburst of her emotions, he was at first taken aback until he gently put his arms around her and let her cry on his chest. He didn't say a word though it wasn't necessary. Giyuu's calm manner, which always reminded her of still water, calmed her immensely and when her tears dried up, she took a step back to look at him again.

“I messed up and I don’t know what to do.”

“Care to elaborate on that?”

In short words she told him everything that had happened so far. “And he just confessed to me and it made everything more complicated.”

“How so? Did you not reject him? You have a boyfriend that you love, right?” Giyuu's pragmatic question stopped her in her tracks.

Did she love Kenji? The fact that she hesitated at this question was actually very self-explanatory.

She remained silent and saw Giyuu sigh. “Then let me ask you another way: Do you love Rengoku?”

Another awkward silence that gave them the answer he wanted. She couldn't deny it and yet she couldn't confirm it. She belonged to Kenji but- “You know how long Kenji and I have been together. I don't want to throw away all these years just because of-" She interrupted herself, not daring to say it. “You’ve known Kenji for as long as I have! We were all in one class together back then. Do you even like him?”

“I don’t hate him.” Giyuu’s answer was short.

“But you don’t like him?”

“He doesn’t fit with you.” He saw her surprised face at his words. He pinched the bridge of his nose and sighed. “Listen, Y/N, I can’t tell you what to do. You have to decide this on your own. The only thing I can say is that you love Rengoku more than you loved Kenji in all these years.”

~ ~ ~

She layed in bed, her gaze turned briefly to Kenji, who had his back turned to her. They had finally managed to talk to each other without it ending in an argument, but the situation didn't feel good either. Giyuu's words were circling in her mind. You love Rengoku more than you loved Kenji in all these years. Was that true? There was an undeniable and unique connection between the two of them. Something unexplainable. She hadn't forgotten the feeling she had when they first met. The constant feeling of deja vu had not subsided. She had only successfully pushed it aside.

Her hand reached for the metal of the Water Lily pendant on her collarbone and she sighed deeply. She should try to sleep. Tomorrow was also a day. That was her last thought before she spiraled into a dream that she thought she had long forgotten.

There were actually several dreams and impressions that bombarded her. So many feelings overwhelmed her. Fear, happiness, desire and sadness. Infinite sadness at the end. She woke up with a slight startle and immediately looked around. 4:34 a.m. Kenji was still asleep, but Shimizu, her black cat, had noticed her restlessness and had jumped onto her lap, purring, brushing her fluffy face against her own to show her affection. She gently stroked her back and scratched her head, trying to sort through the many impressions that created a chaos that echoed in her head. She tried to sort them out.

"You probably saw my father in me. He was the former Flame Hashira."

"We can train together if you want! You can be my Tsuguko!"

"Hating yourself only gets you so far, be proud that you survived."

“But you don't need to be afraid of him as long as I'm with you."

"You are not alone in this. I won't allow that, so share your pain with me."

“Y/N! I love you and I would be happy if you could become my girlfriend!”

"If you keep it up like that you'll surpass me, my water lily! Or should I call you now my little flame?

"You are as beautiful and pure as this water lily..."

"Yes, we will always stay together..."

"When wounds are healed by love, the scars are beautiful."

"I will see you in heaven, my love."

She hadn't even noticed the tears running down her cheeks as she pulled Shimizu close, letting them fall silently into her fur. She finally knew how she recognized Kyojuro, but all the remaining impressions from her dream gave her a headache and she needed a quiet minute to think about them.

Still, the realization hit her hard. Did she understand that correctly? Kyojuro and her knew each other from a past life? Or was her brain playing games? But how would someone then explain the connection? Or what happened when they first touched in the car the other day, after the drinking party. The vision of him gently kissing her knuckles just to pull her into a passionate kiss. That wasn't wishful thinking back then, no.

‘You are as beautiful and pure as this water lily…’ Was that the reason why she bought that necklace back then? Not because of that sweet memory she had as a child with Giyuu but because of that? Was that the reason why Kyojuro was so fixated on it too? He must have known it! The universe had known, but she had remained clueless until now. The headache got worse and she looked out the window that announced the sunrise. She'd better get ready for work.

~ ~ ~

School life was weird, but it was like that every Friday. She didn't avoid Kyojuro, but they didn't meet either. Her feelings were renewed in chaos and she didn't know what to do next. During her break she decided to take a walk to clear her head, but she kept wondering what she should do next. She considered the situation from every angle but couldn't come to a conclusion that wouldn't rip the heart out of a particular party.

She stopped briefly and looked at the cloudless sky. "What would you do?" She asked it out loud. A question she didn’t ask herself but to her past self. She seemed to have known everything better and was able to make difficult decisions. She sighed, she hadn't been really waiting for an answer in the first place? She was about to turn around when a sudden gust of wind blew through her hair and a heart-shaped leaf landed on her face. Puzzled, she took the leaf off her face and looked at it and knew what she had to do.

~ ~ ~

Never in her life did she expect to end up in such a situation. In a situation where she was wandering around homeless and watching the sun go down. Well, she had to blame herself for it, but it had all happened so quickly.

She wanted to have a rational conversation with Kenji - she was also able to, to a certain extent, until she brought the topic up. The topic that involved that things no longer worked between them. The terrible accusations and things she had to listen to. The accusations that she’d cheated on him and many more. She would never do such things and if he would not be so filled with anger and jealousy he would realize it. It quickly turned into a loud argument that got so bad that she simply grabbed her jacket and left their shared apartment.

It hadn't felt like home in a while and it still hurt. She walked aimlessly for a long time to clear her head until she came to a park bench and sat down. Now the tears flowed and her vision blurred until she felt something soft against her leg. She was startled and quickly wiped away her tears only to see that Shimizu had followed her this far and was meowing at her worriedly.

“Shimizu, you loyal soul…” Renewed tears flowed as she picked her up and pressed her face into her warm, soft fur. It felt so good to know that she wasn't alone. Y/N didn’t realize how the time passed by when it suddenly started to rain.

Shimizu’s desperate meowing worried her. Without a second thought she took off her coat and placed it over her to protect her from the rain. She took the cat in her arms and started running in a random direction.

The streets soon became familiar and there was only one person who happened to live nearby.

Drenched from the rain she stood at the threshold and pressed the buzzer. Kyojuro opened the door with a smile that dropped quickly into a surprised face. He probably did not expect her here, at this hour. “Hi…” She breathed while she stared back at him. “Could you take in two strays who got caught up in the rain?”

A/N: Hello my sweethearts... This story will take a little break and won't be updated weekly anymore. I was able to queue them as I had the chapters prepared beforehand but you know how irl things can turn your muse low. That doesn't mean I won't continue or finish this series! It will just be slower in the future. I hope you all can forgive me than I left you hanging with this cliffhanger.

I know I said I won't do a tagging list, but that was because this story had a regular schedule. So if you want to be tagged into the next chapter, than let me please know in the replies down below.

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sineala · 7 months

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Superheroes and ethics

I realized that I wrote this last month on Patreon and forgot to post it here. I got asked to write meta about superhero ethics with regard to Steve and Tony. I ended up writing mostly about how Captain America's Plot Armor interacts with his principles.

I have been asked to talk about ethics and philosophy with respect to Steve and Tony. Unfortunately, the only philosophy-adjacent disciplines that I know well enough to speak about with any confidence are formal semantics and pragmatics, which isn't really all that useful in daily life unless you'd really like to learn about the differences between entailment, presupposition, and implicature, and also the Gricean maxims of conversation, which are great if you want to completely ruin conversations by violating them as many times as you possibly can.

So I'm not a philosopher, sorry.

But! I can talk more informally about Steve and Tony and ethics.

And I know there's been a lot of meta -- and actual books -- written about their differing views. I have a book here, A Philosopher Reads Marvel Comics' Civil War: Exploring the Moral Judgment of Captain America, Iron Man, and Spider-Man, by Mark White, which I have not read yet but it sounds like this is probably the book you want to read if you want an actual philosophical analysis of this stuff. Judging by the reviews, the author decides to associate Tony with utilitarianism and Steve with deontology. That is probably fun. I am in no way qualified to talk about it. On an informal level, the thing I find fascinating about them is that, when it comes down to it, Steve and Tony are really not all that different.

I have been thinking about this for a while, because the last time I left anonymous asks open on Tumblr, the final ask I got before I decided that this wasn't a good idea was someone who wanted to pick a fight with me by asserting that Steve/Tony was a bad pairing because "they don't think alike, have different morals, different interests, and different emotional issues that the other is not capable of helping out with." This is one of the reasons why I don't have anon asks on anymore. But I thought it was honestly an interesting thing to think about.

So I have been pondering this on and off for a while, and I realized that the thing that really bugged me about it was that their general thesis was that Steve and Tony were bad for each other because they have nothing in common. See, I don't think that's true. I think they have a whole lot in common. But I am also willing to acknowledge that canon likes to put them in situations where they're at odds with each other and it seems fairly easy to come up with circumstances that will cause them to want to beat the stuffing out of each other. But, crucially, this doesn't mean they have nothing in common.

(I also think they actually have a lot of similar interests and are actually very capable of helping each other with their emotional issues, which canon demonstrates multiple times. But that'd be a different essay.)

For me, one of the reasons why Steve/Tony are so compelling as a pairing is because they are so similar. Let's call it, like, 95% similar. They are remarkably like-minded when it comes to their values and how they view the world. It's just that then they can fight, bitterly, over the remaining 5% of differences.

They work well together most of the time and it's just the bits where they almost work together that are so agonizing and provide so much material for fandom. Because it's not like they don't understand where the other one is coming from, what they want, or why they want it. They do. They just don't understand how the other person can come up with a different path to the answer given their shared goal and shared values. Steve doesn't understand how Tony is willing to do something that Steve thinks is wrong, and Tony thinks, I don't know, that Steve's ideals are too naive for the real world. Tony thinks Steve's plans are unrealistic and Steve thinks Tony's plans are unacceptable.

There's also an additional complication, which is that Steve as a character has a lot of plot armor that Tony doesn't. Steve decides what he thinks is moral and what he thinks is immoral, and he simply does not do the immoral thing. And the thing is that the narrative helps Steve out with this. It's fine if he's idealistic! It's even okay if his ideals are naive! He almost never has to go against them. I am saying this as a big fan of Steve. The story really helps him out.

For example, Steve thinks that killing is wrong, so he doesn't kill anyone, generally speaking. (Depending on the retcon you believe in, he may have in fact killed zero people in World War II, which is kind of ridiculous.) But in situations where the best of the options involves killing someone, someone pretty much always ends up dead. It's just that someone else does the dirty work. Steve surrounds himself with a lot of spies and assassins (Bucky, Sharon, Natasha) and those people kill the people who need killing.

In Civil War, Steve believes Registration is wrong, and he never has to change his mind. He probably still believes it's wrong. Instead of going on trial, he dies; he never has to face the consequences of any of his actions. The narrative shields him from that. When he comes back to life, Registration is gone and he gets a pardon from the president. It's all taken care of. He causes a lot of damage, and he doesn't even have to say he's sorry for trying to bash Tony's face in, in public, with witnesses, after having destroyed what looks like several city blocks.

So Steve never compromises his principles, because he has the luxury afforded to him by the plot so that he almost never has to be in a situation where he'd have to decide whether he should compromise his principles, say, for the sake of the greater good. He doesn't have to make that choice, because Marvel's not interested in writing stories where Steve has to make that choice. So it just… doesn't come up. He almost never has to put his ethics to an actual test. If you hand Steve the trolley problem, he'd just say, well, I'd save everyone. That's not an actual option in the trolley problem. But he's pretty much always going to be in a plot where he gets to do the right thing and save everyone.

Tony, though? Tony has to do terrible things for the sake of the greater good all the time. He doesn't get to opt out of the decisions. Even on a personal level, he has to do terrible things to himself. He has to decide probably at least half a dozen times whether he should wear the armor even if wearing the armor is hurting him -- say, when he decides to take on the LMD in the arc where he gets his first artificial heart, or in Armor Wars II, or in that storyline in the middle of Busiek's run after he gets beaten up by the Mandarin. And he always decides to wear the armor no matter what the personal cost is to his body. He ends up in a lot of fights where he has to take pretty bad damage to save the world -- and while Steve would also make that decision, Steve's going to heal up and be fine, like in his recent run where Bucky shoots him in the shoulder. He has a healing factor and he's fine in a couple weeks. Tony breaks his back in order to save civilians and then gets addicted to morphine and ruins his life for a good long while. That kind of stuff, with lasting physical consequences, just doesn't happen to Steve. Let's not talk about Streets of Poison.

It's pretty obvious when you look at their biggest fights (say, Civil War and the incursions) that Tony believes that the ends justify the means, and Steve doesn't. However, Steve doesn't exactly have usable alternate suggestions. The plot armor helps him out there. Steve espouses extremely noble ideas, life and liberty and all that… that are not actually workable plans.

And because of how the narrative treats him, he doesn't really need to have workable plans, either. It's not like he actually uses them. Because he's just going to be fine. (Except in the incursions, but everyone came back to life afterward so it's all fine.)

Steve doesn't like the SHRA. Okay. Fine. He believes it's an unjust law. His plan is apparently to just… keep fighting Tony and anyone else who tries to take him into custody for not registering. What's his endgame? Does he have one? His plan appears to be "be on the run from the government forever." As far as I can remember, he would prefer the situation to go back to the way it was but he does not, to my knowledge, ever propose a way of achieving that. He's not out there saying the law itself should be found unconstitutional or anything.

Similarly, with the incursions, after the Gauntlet breaks, the Illuminati have no solution for an incursion that isn't building bombs and destroying the other Earth in the incursion. Either they act to destroy the other Earth, or through inaction, both Earths are destroyed. Big ol' trolley problem. Steve refuses to play. Steve says he can't countenance that. Excellent moral stance. It's very him. He says, "I believe we'll find a way to stop it." He doesn't have any ideas besides "not the thing Tony is doing," which appears to also be his stance about the SHRA. If they'd let Steve stay in the Illuminati… what would he have done? I suppose the possibility exists that if he managed to flip one of the scientists to his side he'd get them to think up an alternate answer. He could have suggested that everyone evacuate Earth. But he doesn't actually have an idea, personally for what to do. Other than "nobody should die."

(That isn't even what happens, in the end. Of course, by the end, Steve is trying to hunt Tony down and kill him, so you could argue that he's not really behaving much like himself there, and neither is Tony.)

Anyway. When you think about it, what Steve wants and what Tony wants, in both scenarios, is pretty much the same thing. They have the same values and the same goals; it's just that the paths they're willing to take are different. But when it comes down to it, they both actually want the exact same thing. Like they do most of the time. They both want to save the world. Except now they're fighting about how to get what they want. The fights are about the details. At least in 616.

We can contrast 616 Civil War with MCU Civil War. I have actually only watched CACW once, so this is going to be fun and possibly inaccurate. The 616 SHRA and the MCU Accords are, very broadly speaking, about the same general topic: government oversight of superheroes. In the MCU, after the disaster in Lagos, the UN decides that they can't just have the Avengers running around wherever they want, exploding things and getting people killed. Tony agrees with the need for UN oversight. Steve does not; he feels that the Avengers should be able to go wherever they need to go without getting caught up in red tape. Here in the MCU, Steve and Tony not only disagree on what the right thing to do is, they disagree on what the right outcome should be, and the reasons for that. Steve wants things the way they were. Tony would be okay with some amount of oversight. They both have different visions of the way the Avengers would look and operate, because they value different things; Steve wants autonomy and Tony wants accountability. The fight isn't just about the details. The fight is about everything.

This isn't the case in 616 Civil War. No one is fighting for (or against) "I, a superhero, should be able to go wherever I want for superhero reasons." UN oversight is one of those things that all the Avengers, including Steve, have agreed about for years; there are panels of Steve asking to get UN clearance before the Avengers zip off to Russia to save Tony. What happens in 616 is that an inexperienced superhero team gets into a fight they can't control, destroying a school in Stamford, CT, with massive casualties. The SHRA is a US bill saying that all American superhumans (which is probably thousands of people) should register with the government, receive training if they want to be heroes, and provide the government with their real names.

Both Steve and Tony are opposed to this, before Stamford. Then, when Stamford happens, Tony realizes the SHRA is happening no matter what and decides to support it. Even with the SHRA in effect, both Steve and Tony think there should be superhuman oversight; Steve just thinks it should be the teams training people up, the same way as they've always done. They don't even disagree about that; Tony also thinks they should be in charge of oversight, but he means himself (and Steve if Steve would ever join him). The people training superheroes would in fact still be them, both of them, no matter which side wins the war. Neither of them trust the government to handle Registration well. Steve's answer is to object to the very idea of Registration and to stay away from the government, and Tony's answer is to get in there and keep the superhero database in his own head so that Gyrich won't get the list of names and start sending Sentinels after everyone.

So they both massively distrust the government's presumed right and/or ability to safely do this, and want to protect superheroes from government oversight as much as possible. That's basically the same stance. Steve just thinks no one should get anywhere near the government, and Tony thinks if he gets in there he can make it less bad. He can be the guy doing the oversight. People who don't register might get arrested but at least they won't be killed by Sentinels, because he can stop that from happening. Steve isn't willing to imprison his friends at all, probably because he doesn't believe Tony when Tony says the only other option is death (i.e., they can't go back to the way things were -- although of course that's eventually what ends up happening, albeit long after Civil War is over). He probably thinks there's a secret third option, because for him there usually is. But what they basically want is the same thing. Tony's just willing to go a little farther than Steve is to get there.

Sure, Tony's plans aren't perfect. But he does have them. Sometimes they're really lousy, because sometimes there is no good solution. I acknowledge that he does a lot of things in Civil War that are actually pretty rotten. I am saying this as a fan of Tony. He does some bad things. He starts a war with Atlantis. He manipulates Peter Parker into unmasking, which has terrible consequences. He builds a prison. He imprisons a lot of his friends. But none of these things involve the government massacring superhumans. The one really, really bad future he's afraid of doesn't happen. (And we know, thanks to that one What If issue, that that's exactly what would happen if he weren't running Registration.) Other bad things happen, yes. But not that, which is the worst.

Steve doesn't want anything bad to happen. Steve just wants the good solutions, with no moral or ethical compromise on his part. and he usually gets them eventually by narrative fiat. Sometimes he has to die first -- which is, of course, what happens in Civil War -- but, eh, whatever, it's comics. That's not really a major drawback for superheroes. And eventually he gets what he wants, because comics return to the status quo. Everything goes back to the way it was.

It's the same thing with the incursions. Neither Steve nor Tony want their Earth to be destroyed, obviously, but Tony is willing to build bombs to destroy the other Earths in case they can't find any other solution. Steve says he thinks there will be another way. And neither of them want to use the bombs! Tony doesn't want to use them at all! The Illuminati don't actually find themselves in a situation where they have to decide whether to bomb a populated Earth until the Great Society incursion, and Tony refuses to be the one to do it. After Namor does it, Tony is distraught and says he thought they'd find another way -- which is the exact same thing Steve said to him except nobody kicked Tony off the Illuminati for saying it. They both have the same attitude. They want the same outcome. They don't want to use the bombs. It's just that Tony's willing to build them. They're pretty much on the same side here about everything (including the desire to not bomb other planets) except the lengths to which Tony is willing to go to have a backup plan. Just like Civil War.

I suppose I would say that, overall, comparing Steve and Tony's relative ethics seems hard to do in a way that is fair to both of them because Steve is so often given the ability to stick to his beliefs in a way that Tony isn't. "What does Steve do when he actually can't do the right thing" is one of those questions that doesn't seem to get explored all that much, except possibly at the end of Hickman's Avengers run, in which everything was going to hell anyway, and it wasn't like he got to be in Secret Wars to try to fix it. He does also tend to quit being Captain America when he doesn't like the government, although I think in that case that's more that doing the right thing at that time is Not Being Captain America.

(Secret Avengers is also a pretty good look at a Steve who has to do bad things and really, really doesn't like the things he's doing. He doesn't handle compromising his own values all that well. I think that would be a whole other essay.)

But anyway, yeah -- I think 616 Steve and Tony are on the same side when they fight, more than you might think they are given how many panels we have of them dramatically punching each other. Tony believes that the ends justify the means, and essentially, a lot of their fights are because Steve disagrees with Tony's means -- but he is very often 100% on board with Tony's actual motives, which I think is a fact that often gets lost when we start talking about their conflicts, because at that point we… want to talk about their conflicts. But I think they really do agree with each other a lot, which is what makes their conflicts so interesting and painful.

#posts i actually wrote

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