#beloved mutuals please avert your eyes & think no less of me etc etc

[girderednerve]

i thought too hard about stranger things, alas

okay so you know how everybody loves that one song by the mountain goats, "the best ever death metal band in denton"? if you do not know this, the story of the song is that there are 2 friends who want to be in a death metal band—they are committed to this goal—but the adults in their lives do not understand or respect this aspiration, and so one of them is sent against his will to a locked treatment facility, and the other one writes him letters. "when you punish a person for dreaming his dream, don't expect him to thank or forgive you; the best ever death metal band out of denton will in time both outpace and outlive you! hail satan!" the song goes. i love it very much.

anyway with that important background established, here's what i think should happen: eddie's metal aesthetic & general troublemaking result in being sent to an adolescent psych hospital. this is comprehensively awful; wayne either was not involved or was heavily pressured into it without understanding the situation. while there, eddie is assigned to share a room with steve, who was forcibly committed by his parents because of his 'psychosis' after the events of s1. of course, steve was not delusional or hallucinating and was instead telling the truth about the demogorgon & the upside down. now that he's in here, though, he's having a really rough time; he & all the other psych ward residents are trying to avoid chemical & physical restraint, he's worried for the kids outside, he's despairing, and he's traumatized. both eddie & steve are relying on contact from the outside and each other to survive—eddie gets letters from his band mates, sincere & innocuous; steve has some sort of nerdy comms set-up with dustin.

i am not committed to realism in this story, so what's going to happen is that they both are going to break out to rejoin the party & deal with, i don't know, let's say the mindflayer; instead of the show's lazy appropriation of 80s action + horror tropes without any effort to comment on them from s2 onward, this story is about solidarity in the face of institutions that want to crush you & prevent you from telling the truth. eddie still has to play guitar in the underworld, though. metal as fuck

it is important to me that at the end of this story, where a group of young people manage to come together & expose conspiracy & escape the violence of the psychiatric hospital (&, for that matter, the nuclear family), that eddie & steve end up together and that steve still has auditory hallucinations or similar & it's fine. also, just for fun, i think they both come out as trans or genderfucky. i love 2 have fun. also in this AU hopper does not get starved (horrible) and stops being a cop (obvious reasons).

anyway as you can see i am not a plot guy but it's a concept, right?