Text
Clean
Joel makes a mess on you, then keeps you in the bathtub until the water goes cold. (3k)
Tags - dark!joel, one shot, smut, fingering, come shot, manspreading, masturbation, overstimulation, forced orgasms, dubconnnnnn, daddy kink, innocence kink, inexperienced reader, biiiig girthy yet unspecified age gap, weird feelings and some good ol' fashioned shame, hitting, Joel is fatherly in a hot and disgusting way, calls himself 'your old man', gratuitous use of the nickname 'kiddo'. Say the affirmation with me: The ickier it is, the harder I nut.#bushnation, MORE DEPECHE MODE REFERENCES. TRY AND STOP ME. Like car sex, I write bathtub sex uniquely in that I’m not bound by bullshit ass physics or logic so yes, both people fit in the tub and everything is fine. Reader is bathed by Joel, her hair is washed and finger-combed by him too, but length and texture are not described. This was a decroded fic for me to make i can't lie Fic help - @endlessthxxghts, thank you for always seeing my disgusting visions and giving me your eyeballs A/N - thank you for all the birthday wishes, dear friends in my phone! I celebrated with you all last year when I was writing Mall Rats and it’s special that a lot of you are still with me today, but some I have new friends too ❤️ I love you. Having readers like you in my corner all this time has been beyond special and so rewarding and I hope you know I mean it when I say that I love you.
You’re washing the dishes tonight, your least favorite of the chores Joel makes you do. You prefer doing laundry or plucking the weeds with him, because he lets you collect flowers and put them in vases. He even taught you how to press them between heavy books, and how to frame them nicely.
Joel calls your name from upstairs. You quickly wash and dry your hands, then scurry up the steps. His door is closed almost all of the way, just a small sliver of light peeks from his room into the dark hallway. “Joel?”
“In here, sweetheart. Need ya for somethin’.”
You push open the door the rest of the way, and Joel’s naked and sitting upright on the edge of his bed, cock in hand with his bare thighs spread wide. He’s grunting as he squeezes the base, the tip all flushed and swollen. “C’mere. Switch me spots.”
You don’t yet obey his order. You’ve seen Joel’s cock before, seen him masturbate before, too. Despite that, it still makes you feel nervous to see him and be with him like this. It gives you that icky feeling in your gut and makes you breathe funny.
“C’mon. You know it ain’t gonna bite ya, kiddo.” Joel stands up and pats the spot on the bed. “Sit,” he says, his tone sharper than before. “Need somethin’ pretty to come on.”
Joel doesn’t like repeating himself. You won’t make him ask a third time.
You sit on the bed, the covers warmed and slightly damp by Joel’s body heat don’t comfort you. He stands in front of you, rock-hard cock bouncing in his loose grip. “Why don’t you give me a hand this time,” he says, reaching for your wrist. He pulls it up to waist level, then wraps your palm around his member, closing your fingers tightly. “Ohhh, fuck,” Joel groans from deep in his chest. Loudly, he breathes in and out through his nose as he twists your hand up and down his shaft. “Jus’ like this. That’s a good girl.”
This is, however, the first time you’ve ever felt his cock. All of your firsts with Joel have never gone the way you thought they would. The first time he saw you naked, touched you, or that you saw him - it was all surreal and rather abrupt. Joel tells you things like this are always a little new and funny at first.
His cock feels heavy in your palm. You think about the things you like about it - the warmth, all of his veins and ridges, how smooth and soft the head is. But it’s a little sticky, too, which is unexpected to you.
“Alright, alright. S’enough,” Joel says, pulling your hand away. “Lift up your shirt.”
You lift your shirt, pushing it up your torso until it’s bunched just beneath your breasts. “Nuh-uh. Like this,” Joel murmurs, pushing the garment up above your chest, exposing yourself entirely to him. He rubs his thumb in circles over both of your nipples so that they pebble under his touch, then gropes and squeezes your flesh. “Lie back,” Joel says, pushing you down on the bed. “Attagirl.”
You watch as Joel pumps his cock above you, the end of his fist slapping against his softened belly repeatedly. He breathes heavily, and his dark eyes are wild like an animal as his gaze is fixed on your naked form. Joel breathes quicker as he approaches his release, grunting a slew of swears he doesn’t allow you to say. “Fuck, goddamn. Oh, goddamn,” he hisses as ropes of his hot come spurt onto your body. He covers you like a canvas; his favorite painting, and for his eyes only.
Joel collects a bit of his spend up with his first two fingers. “Give it a taste,” he says. “Want you to try it.”
You open your mouth, and Joel pushes his calloused digits inside, painting your tongue with his come. “Suck,” he says, and you do. You furrow your brows at the salty, bitter flavor, how it tastes dissimilar from its scent. “Don’t like it?”
You shake your head. “I don’t think so.”
Joel chuckles, cupping your jaw and rubbing his thumb along your cheekbone. “S’okay. Y’don’t have to.” Joel yawns then, patting your cheek gently with his weathered hand. “C’mon, kiddo. Bath time. Daddy made a mess a’ ya, didn’t he?”
Joel walks you to the bathroom with him, holding your hand the whole time. He puts the little rubber stopper in the drain of the bathtub, then turns the water on. “Warmer, pl-”
“Don’t need a reminder, sweetheart. Know you like it hot. Daddy won’t let you freeze.”
“And bubbles.”
“I know, baby girl. I won’t forget your bubbles.”
As the bathtub fills, Joel opens the oak cabinet under the sink and pulls out the old bottle of bubble bath, the one he’s been refilling just for you. He pours a capful under the water, bubbles immediately building. It smells mostly of nothing, but a bit of that original bubblegum scent remains. Your image reflected in the mirror begins to blur as steam fills the bathroom, and when the tub is full, Joel shuts off the water. He helps you undress and then gets in the tub first, carefully lowering himself until he’s sat with his back against the wall. “Jesus, s’hot. Gonna turn us both into soup,” Joel laughs. You smile shyly.
He spreads his legs, then outstretches his arm to you. “C’mon. Hop in.” You take Joel’s hand, squeezing it while wobbling a little on your one foot as you step into the bath. “I gotcha, kiddo,” he says.
The water is warm on your feet, nearly burning you but you enjoy the tingle. Joel helps you down, lowering you until you’re submerged in the water, your back against his warm chest, his thick package pressing against your ass.
Joel fills an old, plastic measuring cup with the soapy bath water and brings a hand to your chin, tilting your head back so he can rinse your hair. The hot water feels soothing on your scalp, and Joel repeats the action until your hair is soaked all the way through and dripping down your back.
You giggle at the noise the bottle of shampoo makes when Joel squirts a bit into his hand. He lathers it between his palms, then scrubs your scalp. “Eyes closed, kiddo. Don’t wanna hurt ya,” he whispers.
Your eyes flutter shut as Joel works the soap into your hair, scrubbing your scalp all over. He alternates between scratching you gently with his dull nails, to massaging you with the tips of his fingers. He uses his thumbs to rub the base of your skull in circles, the other four fingers of each hand drawing lines up and down and all over. Once Joel’s built a thick lather, he uses the same plastic cup to rinse out the shampoo.
He conditions your hair next, working the cream into the strands. He uses his fingers to loosely detangle, “Ow, daddy,” you complain as he tugs on a knot.
“I know, I know. M’sorry, baby girl.” Joel presses a kiss to your forehead. “Was an’ accident. M’tryin’ to be gentle.” He rinses out the conditioner next, “Grab me that bar of soap, will ya?” he asks.
“Mhm.” You lean forward and reach for the orangish, rectangular bar of soap in front of you on the shower niche, then grab it and hold it over your shoulder.
Joel takes the soap, “Thank ya kindly, darlin’.” He dips it in the soapy bathwater before lathering it between his palms that are already beginning to prune. Gently, he pushes you forward to scrub your back and your neck, then pulls you right back into himself. “Gimme an arm,” he says, a slight rasp in his voice. You raise your arm for him and he washes you with the lather, “An’ the other,” Joel adds, now washing your other arm, massaging you with his strong hands. “Here-” Joel taps your shoulder with the soap. “Your daddy’s gettin’ old,” he grumbles. “Can’t bend like he used to. Wash your legs f’me, sweetheart.”
“Okay,” you murmur, taking the soap back from him. You lather the soap just like Joel did, then wash your legs one at a time, bending them at the knees. When done, Joel reaches over you to take the soap back. He pulls you back against his soft middle and puts his soapy hands on your torso, sliding them up and down your skin, washing off his now dried spend. He groans quietly as he washes your breasts, kneading the flesh there and circling your nipples with his slippery fingers. You feel his cock twitch against you.
Joel washes down, down your stomach. “Spread ‘em,” he says, and you part your legs wider. Your stomach jumps when his hands rub past your pubic hair and he washes your folds, that soft, private place between your thighs. You whimper when his thumb catches your clit.
“That feel nice, kiddo?”
Your breath hitches in your throat as you search for an answer.
���I-”
“You can tell your old man. I know it does,” Joel coos, rubbing his thumb left and right over your clit. You lean your head back and turn your head to the side, burying yourself in his bicep as you whine. “You don’t take much at all, do ya, sweetheart?”
Joel’s made you come before. It’s one of the first things he did when he brought you home, actually. But you amaze him every time, how quickly and easily you fall apart on his fingertips. He thinks about tasting you for the first time, how sweet you’ll be on his tongue. Or his cock, down your throat or between your thighs and splitting you in two. God, you’ve so much to learn, and Joel gets to walk you through it all. His favorite innocence.
Joel adjusts you both so that you’re sitting more upright and he can reach around you with both hands. “Rest on me,” he says, pressing the side of your head against his so that his scruff is tickling you, but not scratching you. It’s too long for that.
Joel peers over your shoulder to watch what he’s doing, and to watch how you react. Your soft tummy rising and falling with big breaths, thighs twitching. Joel circles your clit with his middle and ring fingers, patiently working you up. “How’s that feelin’?” he asks, “Can you tell daddy?”
“Mm,” you hum, “Yeah…”
Joel chuckles, dragging the tip of his aquiline nose along the side of your face. “Use your words, baby girl,” he instructs. “Good girls use their words, hm?”
“Feels g- feels good,” you whimper, voice breaking as Joel works you. He rubs your clit faster now, and you’re rocking against his palm, splashing the water a little.
Joel brings his other hand to your core and lines two fingers up with your entrance, slowly pushing in while he massages your clit. You wince in pain, squeezing his bicep as he pushes them in further.
Joel hums in sympathy. Being in the bath means you’re not a slick, slippery mess like usual. “Know it hurts, kiddo, but you gotta get used to it.” Joel’s fingers are all the way inside you now, and he pulls them back out. “You’ll get used to it,” he drawls, now pumping those fingers in and out of you, slowly. “You’re bein’ so brave for me, baby girl.”
The ache of Joel’s fingers stretching you out dissipates eventually, and he changes the action - instead of drawing his fingers in and out of your cunt, he curls them repeatedly inside of you - Joel knows you love when he does this to you.
You moan freely, relishing in the pleasure. Joel’s right, he’s always right. You’re used to him now, and he feels so good. Swirling his fingers around your clit, stroking that sweet spot inside you with the other hand - it takes no more than five minutes until your breathing turns ragged and you feel that hot, sticky feeling in your gut, the one that feels both bad and good all at the same time.
“Ask for it,” Joel mumbles, reminding you of your manners as he senses how close you are. “Be polite.”
“Please,” you say, “Can I come?”
“‘Course you can, sweetheart. Of course.”
The orgasm washes over you quickly. You come with a symphony of breathy moans, saccharine in nature. Joel’s never heard anything like it, and he’s grateful he has enough of his hearing left to be able to.
With his weathered, wrinkled fingers, Joel fucks you through your climax until the last of it courses through you. You come down, but Joel doesn’t stop touching you.
Maybe he thinks it’s not yet over. Joel keeps doing those same tight circles on your clit, and you start to squirm. “Joel–” you wrap your hands around his forearm and attempt to move him, but his strength is far too great for your efforts to mean anything at all.
“Sit still. You’re givin’ me another one.”
Joel keeps your back pinned tightly against his hairy chest, your legs spread wide with his hand in between them, patiently swirling his middle and ring fingers around your swollen and over-sensitive clit. Your hips are starting to ache and the sensation of Joel pleasuring you has turned uncomfortable, downright painful.
“I wanna be done, Joel. I can’t do another one,” you whimper, voice shaking as tears well up in your eyes. There’s nowhere to run, and you know you just have to take it. “I can’t.”
“Yes, you can,” he whispers soothingly, his ministrations on your pussy unfaltering. Joel’s holding you back. You’re not supposed to tell him no. “Know you can.”
His words serve more to frustrate you than encourage you. “I. Can’t,” you huff as you try to pull away from him and close your legs shut in the now lukewarm and soapy water, but Joel keeps you in position in his vice grip.
“Knock it off,” he growls. Joel has to hide his amusement. You’re quick to anger, just like he is. Just like your daddy. “Jus’ relax.”
You’re close, and whether you realize it or not, Joel does. Your twitching legs, the way you’re breathing. Release is right around the corner if you’d just calm yourself down. Poor thing. You always did struggle with regulating yourself.
“Get - I told you-“ you interrupt yourself to groan, “You’re not listening to me, daddy. I said I c-can’t fucking—” you don’t finish the sentence and instead seethe in frustration, jerking and splashing bath water onto the floor. “F-”
Joel slaps your cheek, hard. “Easy,” he scolds, “I didn’t raise you to speak to me like that.” Joel his nose against the side of your head and bites your ear, the way a dog does with a pup. A warning. “An’ I don’t have to listen to you. You listen to me,” he adds. “Adjust the fuckin’ attitude and try it again before you piss me off.”
Your voice cracks as you whimper Joel’s name, a sob then escaping your chest. Your cheek stings and tingles, like you never stopped feeling the impact of Joel’s hand meeting your skin.
“Don’t start cryin’, just breathe. Breathe. Go slow,” Joel instructs, pleased when you inhale steadily. On your exhale, Joel whispers, “You need me to talk you through it?”
You nod against him, sniffling. “Then I’ll talk you through it. Focus on my voice, focus right here, kiddo,” he tells you. “Relax, just a minute. Calm yourself.”
You rest against Joel, and he pauses his ministrations on your clit. “I can’t do it again, Joel,” you plead. “I don’t think I can.”
“I know what you think. It don’t matter, ‘cause it ain’t up to you, sweetheart. We’re tryin’ it again.”
Joel restarts, circling and massaging your clit with that same pressure from before. And just like before, it’s uncomfortable. It hurts, and you don’t like it.
“Lean into it, sweetheart. Let it ride.”
Frustrated, you shake your head. “Daddy–”
“You need to let it happen. Got all night, sweetheart. Water’s gettin’ cold.”
“Joel.” Your voice cracks.
Joel ignores you. He pumps his fingers, focusing specifically on your g-spot as he knows how sensitive you are there. Your protests begin to quiet, replaced by soft noises of pleasure. “There it is,” Joel purrs. “Make those pretty noises for me. You’re doin’ good.”
Pleasure begins to build, just like Joel said it would. It almost makes you mad, mad that he’s right. Always right. Mad that Joel knows your body like the back of his hand, better than you do. The stubborn part of you wants to stave off release, but a bigger part of you doesn’t wanna fight Joel on this. You don’t like to fight with him anyway. You always lose. So, you allow yourself to bask in the pleasure Joel knew you’d feel.
“You gonna come one more time? You gonna come on daddy’s fingers?”
“Yeah,” you nod. Your eyes squeeze shut as the feeling builds, almost exponentially. Your gasps and moans halt and there it is - Joel’s pulled another orgasm from your body. More powerful than before, the feeling washes over you like the tide, waves of warmth and electricity flowing over your body with each movement of Joel’s fingers. “Yeah, attagirl,” he breathes. “Manners, sweetheart. What do you say?”
“Thank you,” you whisper, out of breath.
Joel rinses you with the water as you come down from your second orgasm of the evening. He taps you twice on the hip, “Up,” he says, and you stand up on shaky legs.
Joel reaches for an old, floral-patterned towel and dries himself off first, then wraps it around his waist, thick belly bulging over the edge of the fabric. He grabs another towel for you next, drying your legs and arms one at a time before wrapping the towel snugly around your shoulders.
“You finish those dishes?” Joel asks, pulling the drain stopper out of the tub.
“Not all of them,” you answer. “I’m sorry.”
“Nah, don’t you worry ‘bout it. I’ll do the rest, hm?”
You wear a small smile, “Okay.”
“An’ I was thinkin’ that I could make us popcorn, like you like. Put on a movie. One of those girly ones I picked out for you, huh?”
Your smile grows. “Yeah,” you answer.
Joel smiles too. “Good. Let’s get you dressed, then.”
thank you for reading! please consider engaging by reblogging, hopping in my inbox, and/or commenting. your words go so far in keeping me motivated to write ♡
More dark!joel
#joel miller x reader#Joel miller smut#joel miller x reader smut#joel miller/reader#joel miller x you#joel miller one shot#joel miller fic#joel miller tlou#Joel miller#joel the last of us#dark!joel miller x reader#dark!joel miller#dark!joel#pedro pascal characters
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I feel like poly!marauders would have s very funny debate around group halloween costumes. Lots of Sirius being dramatic and James pouting. Only for reader to do a couples costume with Barty.
Love your writing!
hahaha aweee poor boys
poly!marauders x fem!reader who isn't matching with them on Halloween [576 words]
CW: ....none I don't think? the boys' theatrics? a prank? pouting?
“For the last time, Sirius, no.” Remus groaned, earning him a disbelieving scoff from Sirius and a whine from James.
“But why, Moons? It’s perfect.”
“It’s not perfect, it’s ridiculous.”
“It’s whimsical.” James interjected.
“It’s embarrassing.”
“Halloween costumes are supposed to be a little embarrassing!” Sirius argued, earning him a head tilt from James.
“Well, now, I don’t think they’re supposed to be embarrassing. Maybe…funny? Quirky?”
“I don’t care what they’re supposed to be, we are not dressing up as the big bad wolf and the three little pigs.” Remus declared with an air of finality, causing Sirius to deflate rather spectacularly.
“Well what do you suggest we dress up as, then?” He muttered just as you entered their dorm.
“Uh oh. Why’s Sirius got his pouting face on?” You commented as you pulled off your school robes. Sirius turned his pout towards you and gave you his best puppy dog eyes.
“Moons is being s’mean to me.”
You made a sympathetic cooing sound that had Remus rolling his eyes before you took Sirius’ face between your hands and kissed his pouting lips.
As you pulled your lips away but not your face, you whispered to your grumpy boyfriend. “Was he being mean to you, or did he just say no?”
Sirius balked at you as Remus let out an inelegant snort and James’ laughter bounced off the stone walls of their shared dorm.
“You know what? Fine, screw all of you. I’m going to wear whatever the hell I want and you all will just have to figure out your own costumes.” Sirius huffed as he pretended to turn away from you, only for him to fold the second you started to walk away and pull you into his lap.
“Wait, wait. You guys haven’t figured out your costumes yet?” You asked in disbelief, clearly wondering how the three of them could put so much thought and planning into their pranks and mischief, yet completely fumble Halloween.
“Well…no?” Remus asked as James blurted “what do you mean you guys?”
“Guys, I’ve had my costume planned for weeks!”
“Weeks?” Remus parotted.
“Weeks.” You insisted.
“But…” James started helplessly. “I…I thought we were going to match?”
You looked somewhat sympathetic for him, but grimaced at your admission. “Someone else asked first, bubs.”
“You’re matching someone else?!” Sirius shrieked as he all but threw you off his lap so he could look at you.
“Oh for Merlin- yes.”
“Who?” The three boys chorused with varying levels of theatrics.
And the next night, one could find three pouting marauders sitting dejectedly in the Gryffindor common room dressed as the three blind mice under the suggestion of their girlfriend. Their girlfriend, who was currently wearing matching costumes with Barty Crouch Junior - a pirate and his Treasure.
Remus might’ve found it in him to be a little more miffed about it if you hadn’t looked so sodding good in gold and bedazzled all to hell.
“Note to self,” James muttered defeatedly, “spend less time planning the Halloween prank and more time on the Halloween costume next year.”
The end of his sentence was punctuated by screaming when the multiple 12 foot skeletons lining the room started walking on their own accord.
It was way less funny than they had imagined it would be when Barty threw “his booty” over his shoulder and took off out of the portrait hole.
“Duly noted.” Sirius sighed as he took another swig of his drink.
#ask elle#marauders era#marauders au#marauders fanfiction#reader insert#self insert#sirius black#remus lupin#james potter#poly!marauders#poly!marauders x reader#poly!marauders x you#poly!marauders fluff#poly!marauders imagine#sirius black x reader#sirius black x you#remus lupin x reader#remus lupin x you#james potter x reader#james potter x you#the marauders#marauders x reader#poly marauders x reader#poly marauders x you#marauders#ellecdc fics#best friend barty crouch jr#best friend!barty
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Mind, body, and soul || Rafe Cameron x fem!reader
gif by @mad3lyncline
Summary: in a rare moment of vulnerability, Rafe voices his need for you and you only.
Warnings: angst galore 😍😍
Word count: 2,371
A/n: guys this acc had me giggling, smiling, and kicking my feet bc I love it when Rafe is so lovestruck by reader and being vulnerable to her and her only.
MASTERLIST
divider by @h-aewo
As you reverse park your car, the bass-heavy thrum of trap music vibrates so intensely you can feel it reverberating even from your car. Sarah, lounging in the passenger seat with a tipsy grin, shakes her head. “I can already tell I’m going to be horribly hungover tomorrow.” You chuckle, flicking her a sympathetic look as your finger hovers over the button to raise the convertible roof.
“Me too,” you agree with a laugh. But just as you press it, a blinding light floods the car, making both of you instinctively shield your eyes. “What the hell?” you mutter, squinting as you try to make out the source of the glare. Across the parking lot, a truck idles with its high beams aimed right at you. You narrow your eyes, recognising it immediately.
“Is that your brother’s truck?” you ask Sarah, already knowing the answer. She groans. “It is.” With an exaggerated sigh, you roll your eyes and flip him off, watching as he laugh. “Yeah, real funny, dickhead!” you call out, your voice carrying over the pulsing music just as the roof finishes closing.
Shaking your head with an amused grin, you hop out of the car, the cool night air washing over you as you look back to see Rafe, still sitting behind the wheel with that signature smug grin, clearly pleased with his little stunt. “Of course my brother’s here,” Sarah mutters under her breath as she steps out and shuts her door, the headlights casting long shadows across the driveway as you hit the lock button.
You laugh, nudging her with your shoulder. “It’s a party loaded with booze, drugs, and girls—where else would he be? Rafe wouldn’t stray too far from that scene,” you say, a knowing smirk playing at your lips. As you round the car, you throw a pointed glance his way, catching his eye for a brief, charged moment.
His grin widens, like he’s daring you to say something, but you roll your eyes, dismissing him as you turn back toward the house. The heavy beat from inside grows louder with each step, the thumping bass promising a long, wild night ahead. Behind you, you can still feel Rafe’s gaze, lingering with a mix of mischief and something unspoken.
~
“Finally, you’re here,” his voice murmurs close to your ear just as his arm slips around your waist, pulling you into him. The familiar warmth of his body and the scent of his cologne makes you melt, and you can’t help but grin as you look up at him. “Miss me that much?” you tease, rising onto your tiptoes to press a quick kiss to his lips, savouring the brief contact.
“Get a room, please,” Sarah mutters, rolling her eyes as she heads off, leaving you both laughing softly. You’re still smiling into the kiss when his hand slides to grip your waist, then dips lower to give your ass a playful squeeze. Biting back a laugh, you take his hand in yours and lead him inside, weaving through the crowd toward the kitchen, where bottles line the counters and red cups litter the island.
Just as you reach for a drink, you hear Rafe’s voice behind you, casual yet somehow authoritative. “Hey, man,” he calls out, extending a hand. You turn in time to see Topper clasp his hand, pulling him in for a quick bro hug, their easy familiarity apparent. Rafe glances over Topper’s shoulder and gives you a subtle wink, a smirk dancing on his lips. You take a slow, steady sip of your drink, trying to ignore the flutter that Rafe’s wink stirs up.
He gives you a curt nod, voice cool as he says your name—“Y/n”—playing it off casually, fully aware that Topper’s watching. Then, as if on cue, Topper drapes his arm over your shoulder, pulling you close. You lean into his touch, holding Rafe’s gaze with a challenging glint as you cock an eyebrow at him, feeling the tension sparking in the space between you. Rafe just smiles, but you can tell by the tightness at the corners of his mouth that he’s bothered, the calm facade masking what you know to be a prick of jealousy.
Leaning in, you press close to Topper, your lips brushing his ear as you murmur, “I’m gonna go find Sarah. I’ll be back.” You punctuate the words with a soft kiss to his jaw, aware of Rafe’s intense gaze on you, reading every movement. With one last glance over your shoulder, you slip away, feeling the weight of Rafe’s stare as you blend into the crowd, a mix of satisfaction and anticipation simmering in your chest.
~
“Took you long enough,” Rafe’s voice comes out in a lazy drawl, each word dripping with barely concealed impatience as you shut the door softly behind you. His eyes are locked on you, tracking your every step as you make your way across the room, his posture relaxed, yet there’s a simmering intensity beneath it.
“Yeah, well, I was having my fun,” you say with a playful pout, savoring the way his gaze darkens slightly, jaw tightening as he registers your words. You take your time, letting each step toward him linger, the tension between you building with each inch of distance closed. Rafe’s expression flickers with something unreadable as you stop a couple of feet from him.
“What do you want, Rafe?” you ask, voice soft but steady, holding his gaze with a hint of challenge. His eyes drag slowly over you, a touch possessive. “I don’t get why you’re still with him,” he says, his voice carrying a quiet edge. The statement hangs in the air, daring you to defend it. “Topper?” You shrug casually, though you can see the slight twitch in Rafe’s jaw as you say his name.
“Well, he’s my boyfriend. And…” You pause, watching his reaction, leaning into the charged silence before continuing, “I love him.” Your voice is confident, but you’re aware of how close you are now, of the heat radiating from his body as you step between his legs, close enough to feel the subtle tension in him. Rafe’s pupils dilate, his breathing shallow as he lifts his gaze back to yours, dark and intense.
Slowly, his hand reaches out, resting on the back of your thigh, fingers tightening as he guides you a step closer, his touch firm, sending a shiver through you. The distance between you vanishes, and you bring your hands up to his face, cradling it gently as you tilt his head back, forcing him to look up at you. His usual confidence is flickering, replaced by something raw, vulnerable.
“You don’t mean that,” he whispers, his voice barely audible, laced with a desperate edge. His eyes search yours, seeking the truth, his unspoken desire crackling in the air between you, daring you to deny it. His words hang between you, heavy with something you’re not ready to name, his eyes searching yours with a mix of longing and frustration that makes your heart race.
ou hesitate, fingers brushing over his jaw, feeling the tension in him as he waits for you to say something, anything, that confirms what he so desperately wants to believe. A soft laugh escapes your lips, and you arch an eyebrow at him, letting the weight of his expectation settle for a beat before saying, “I don’t get why you’re acting like this just because I let you go down on me at that party.”
Your voice is teasing, the words edged with a playfulness that you know will only stoke his frustration further. Rafe’s eyes narrow, his jaw tightening as he processes your response. He lets out a short, mirthless laugh, his grip on your thigh tightening just enough for you to feel the heat of his frustration. “You think this is a joke?” he murmurs, voice low, but there’s a vulnerable edge beneath the words.
You let your hands fall from his face, crossing your arms as you look down at him, still standing between his legs. “What am I supposed to think, Rafe? You’re acting like one night means forever.” You raise an eyebrow, challenging him, but the way he’s looking at you—intense, possessive, almost pleading—makes your own resolve waver. Rafe’s gaze sharpens, his frustration giving way to something deeper, more vulnerable.
“You think I just go down on anyone?” he mutters, his voice barely concealing the hurt simmering beneath his irritation. His hand tightens on your thigh, pulling you that much closer as he speaks. “I wouldn’t do that if you didn’t mean something to me, if this didn’t mean something.” You feel his words settle over you, heavier than you expected. His eyes are locked on yours, unflinching, his expression raw and open in a way that catches you off guard.
He’s never looked at you like this, not with this intensity, this strange mix of frustration and honesty that threatens to crack your own defenses. Rafe’s hand slides up to rest on your hip, his thumb brushing against your skin in a way that sends a shiver through you. “That night, it wasn’t just a game for me,” he says softly, voice rough with the weight of the confession. “Don’t pretend it was for you, either.”
You want to say something, anything that will take the edge off the tension thickening between you, but as you look into his eyes, you realize there’s nothing you can say to downplay what happened. The unspoken connection between you is real, and the way he’s holding you now feels dangerously close to a promise. “He’s your best friend, Rafe,” you whisper, your voice softening as you move a strand of his hair away from his forehead.
The gesture feels intimate, yet the weight of your words hangs heavy in the air, a reminder of the precarious line you’re both walking. Rafe shifts slightly, moving his head aside, the warmth of your touch lingering as your finger hovers just above his skin, caught between wanting to reach out and the realization of the boundary you’re skirting. After a moment’s pause, you let your hand fall back down beside you, the distance between you feeling impossibly charged.
“Yeah, and I don’t care about him,” he replies, his voice low but steady, an edge of defiance creeping in. “What matters is how I feel about you.” There’s a moment where his expression flickers—vulnerability giving way to defensiveness. Your heart races at his admission, the honesty in his tone sending a thrill through you. “So you think that just because we had one moment, I should throw everything away?” you challenge, your voice firm, yet tinged with uncertainty.
Rafe’s expression hardens, but there’s a flicker of vulnerability beneath the surface. “You make it sound like I should care about Topper,” he says, the annoyance creeping into his voice. “I don’t. All I care about is you.” The weight of his words hangs in the air, thick with tension. You take a breath, feeling the gravity of what he’s saying. “But it’s not that simple, Rafe. You can’t just ignore everything else.”
“Why not?” he replies, leaning in closer, his voice dropping to a whisper, filled with intensity. “Why can’t I want you? Why can’t I want more than what we’ve settled for?” Your pulse quickens, caught between his gaze and the truth of your own feelings. Rafe’s intensity is captivating, and as he searches your eyes for answers, you realise that the boundaries you thought you had are blurring, the desire between you too strong to deny.
“Because you can’t have me,” you whisper, your voice barely audible, but the words land with a finality that makes his jaw tense. Your hands lift to cradle his face, fingertips brushing against his skin as if trying to commit every line and angle to memory. Your gaze flickers to his lips, the urge to close the distance almost overpowering.
Rafe’s eyes darken, his breath hitching as he studies your face, searching for any trace of doubt. “Says who?” he murmurs, leaning into your touch, his hands coming up to rest gently over yours. He’s holding you there, grounding himself in this moment as though refusing to let it slip away. You swallow, feeling the intensity radiate off him. “Says the part of me that knows you don’t always get what you want.”
The words feel heavy, but there’s a tremor in your voice that betrays your resolve. Even as you speak, your thumb unconsciously traces the curve of his cheek, lingering with a tenderness that contradicts the distance you’re trying to impose. Rafe’s gaze drops to your mouth, a flicker of longing crossing his face. “That’s where you’re wrong,” he whispers, his voice rough and unsteady, his eyes meeting yours with a determination that makes your heart race.
“I can’t help wanting you. Mind, body, and soul,” he murmurs, the words heavy with an intensity that sends a shiver down your spine. His voice is low, almost reverent, and as he leans in, his lips hover just inches from yours. His breath fans over your skin, warm and inviting, the space between you crackling with electricity.
His hands slide down, settling possessively on your waist, fingers pressing into you as though anchoring himself in this moment. He pulls you in closer, his gaze locked on yours with a raw vulnerability that you’ve rarely seen. “And I think you want this too,” he breathes, his voice barely above a whisper, eyes searching your face for any hint of hesitation.
You feel your resolve wavering, the intensity in his words and the weight of his touch making it impossible to ignore the desire building between you. There’s a pause, a beat of silence where the world outside fades away, leaving only the two of you, caught in this fragile, electric moment. You feel the pull, the undeniable truth in his words.
Your fingers tighten slightly against his skin, and you lean in just enough to brush your lips over his, tentative, testing, but unable to hold back. It’s a whisper of a kiss, a surrender, and as his grip on you tightens, you know there’s no turning back.
#rafe cameron#rafe cameron x reader#outer banks#fanfiction#rafe cameron x you#obx fanfiction#rafe cameron fanfiction#rafe cameron x fem!reader#rafe cameron x female reader#rafe cameron x kook!reader#rafe cameron x y/n#rafe cameron x oc#rafe cameron au#rafe cameron angst#drew starkey#drew starkey x reader#drew starkey x y/n#outerbanks x reader#outer banks x y/n#outer banks x you#outer banks x reader#drew starkey x you#drew starkey fic#drew starkey fanfiction#drew starkey imagine#rafe cameron imagine#rafe cameron outer banks#outerbanks rafe#drew starkey x female reader#rafe outer banks
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📼 ; ONCE BITTEN, TWICE SHY | 1/2
summary: by the summer of 1987, eddie munson has mastered the art of dying and coming back to life again. but worse than that: he can't seem to stop running into the pretty lifeguard from hawkins community pool. the grumpy ol' vampire slowly learns to love sunshine in the afterlife. (23k)
pairing: vampire!eddie munson / ditzy!sunshine!reader
contents: fem!reader, strangers to friends to lovers, fluff, hurt/comfort, extreme canon divergence (most of the events of st3 and st4 still happen but starcourt is still standing, some people aren't dead, etc.) (i'm just here to have fun, honestly) cw for mentions of grief and ptsd, mentions of blood
( best listened with headphones, full fic playlist here )
꒷꒦꒷꒷꒦ (㇏(•̀ᵥᵥ•́)ノ) ꒦꒷꒦꒷꒷
she lives in the place in the side of our lives
where nothing is ever put straight . . .
꒷꒦꒷꒷꒦ (㇏(•̀ᵥᵥ•́)ノ) ꒦꒷꒦꒷꒷
Being a vampire sucks.
No pun intended.
Eddie Munson’s too tired for puns. He’s too tired for most things, really.
That’s what they don’t tell you about being a vampire — it’s not nearly as cool as The Lost Boys make it seem. He isn’t any stronger now than he was the night he died. He isn’t any faster, either. And if he’s capable of shape-shifting into a bat, he hasn’t tried because the thought of becoming the thing that killed him feels like more of a purgatory than what he’s been doomed to already.
He didn’t even get a cool cape out of it, which is more of a bite than anything, honestly.
No pun intended.
All Eddie’s got to show for his death are the patches of marred skin on his stomach to prove it. And a couple of pointy teeth — which, so far, have only tasted his own flesh because he’s bitten his lip with them more times than he can count. And, yeah, maybe he’s got a heightened sense or two, but that’s it. It’s not nearly as cool as it sounds, either. Enhanced hearing and sense of smell are just code for being constantly overstimulated.
Eddie misses being alive. He misses not knowing what blood tastes like. He misses forgetting to eat all day and accidentally having ice cream for a first meal — which he’d then scarf down like a man starved until it inevitably made him sick, so that he could then complain about how sick he felt.
He misses the consequences of humanhood because now he’s half-corpse, half-god — a dizzying mixture for a boy who used to just be somebody’s kid.
And what does Eddie do to cope with it all? He gets his weekly mint-chip cone at Scoops Ahoy.
Steve passes the ice cream over the counter with a kinder smile than Eddie’s used to. His skin is freckled and golden against the dark navy of his uniform. So full of life. The child’s sailor outfit hasn’t stopped being funny, but Eddie scowls at him ‘cause he’s jealous. He’s never been anything but pale, even before death, but he can’t exactly catch a tan now, can he?
“You look good,” Steve Harrington observes, distant but meaningful.
The wild-haired boy ahead of him doesn’t seem nearly as poorly as he did a day or so ago, when he looked somehow more like death than the day he actually died. He’s got his usual color back now. A telltale sign of a recent feeding.
Eddie flashes the boy a dubious, brown-eyed glance. “Are you flirting with me?” he jokes with his ringed fingers curled around the waffle cone, too monotoned to sound as playful as he means.
Steve’s face screws. “No.”
“Damn.”
“See! That’s what I’m talking about!” the brunette proclaims proudly, waving an accusatory finger in the other boy’s direction. “Eddie from yesterday wouldn’t have made that joke. Eddie from yesterday wouldn’t have said anything, actually.”
“Well, Eddie From Yesterday, hadn’t eaten in two weeks,” the boy deadpans. (He isn’t talking about food, either). “And Eddie From Yesterday was so exhausted and filled with an inhuman rage that death was funnier than making stupid jokes.”
Steve tries not to cower at his faux-seriousness. “Touché,” he nods.
Eddie hands the boy the last bill in his wallet. Steve makes out his change and, like a total idiot, dumps a dime onto his palm. The silver hits his skin like a drop of acid rain or molten lava. Eddie winces at the burn, hissing through his teeth as he jerks his singed hand back.
“Why are you giving me dimes, man?!” he shouts over the sound of clattering coins.
“Shit!” Steve grimaces. “Sorry, dude— I forgot.”
“Oh, you forgot?” Eddie bites in a mocking tone.
“Yeah! Sorry if I can’t remember everything about—” Steve pauses his rant to peer around the shop with cautious eyes. He quietens. “—Vampires, alright? Sue me.”
Eddie watches the boy scramble to gather scattered coins –– coth hat askew on his head, scarlet tie in his way. The sight alone makes him laugh. A sharp exhale through his nose, but a laugh nonetheless. “You know what? How ‘bout just keep the change?”
“You keep the damn change,” Steve grumbles under his breath.
“Nice one.”
“Shut up.”
Eddie takes a big bite from his fresh scoop. He lets the sharp peppermint and deep chocolate concoction melt in his mouth. The strange combination was always the best distraction from the coppery tang of blood lingering on his tongue.
Distracts because the metallic taste never quite leaves him, no matter how often he washes his mouth out. The taste of death always persists. Not in a poetic way, though. It’s more like a mouthful of old pennies.
Only problem is, he can’t really taste it now — the tart mint-chip or the pint of blood he’d choked down yesterday afternoon. The sensuous scent of hibiscus lilts along an otherwise still breeze, sudden and very overwhelming. It’s powdery and floral, rich and fruity. A fragrance sweet enough to make him ill, and it’s accompanied by the rhythmic flip-flop, flip-flop of rubber sandals.
Eddie glances mindlessly over his shoulder, then nearly breaks his neck at the force of his double-take. The candied scent, he finds, belongs undoubtedly to the pretty face behind him.
You saunter into the ice cream shop like a rolling summer cloud — with a walk that’s as soft and delicate as you look. There’s something thaumaturgical in the honeyed atmosphere that follows you in, still unceremoniously punctuated by the flip-flop, flip-flop sound of your shoes against the linoleum.
You are, unsurprisingly, as pretty as the raspberry, marshmallow, lily-of-the-valley scent radiating from your sunkissed skin. There is much of it on display now, and what little is covered is hardly left to the imagination.
Straight from a shift at Hawkins Community Pool, your mandated uniform clings perfectly to your torso — a pretty, scarlet one-piece that scoops deeply at the chest. Stamped on the center is a pool floatie and two surfboards that make a more summery skull-and-crossbones shape. ‘Lifeguard’ is written just beneath it, right over the swell of your breasts.
You wear a pleated skirt on your lower half to match. The bouncy fabric rests scandalously, and perhaps unintentionally, low on your hips. A faint sliver of your skin is showcased in a way that drives him hopelessly wild. And you’ve paired it all with a pair of too-big sunglasses on your head and a cherry sucker in your mouth.
Effortless. A total cakewalk of perfection.
Eddie Munson and Steve Harrington have never known much about either.
The latter is still trying to dump change into the tip jar when he goes to greet you. Your eyes link, the words get stuck in his throat, and the coins scatter to the laminate all over again. Steve tries to catch them at first before realizing how utterly uncool he must look. He makes a bigger fool of himself by just letting them fall.
“Hey. Hi. Wel—Welcome to Scoops Ahoy,” the brunette clears his throat. He props his hands along the countertop and feels a rogue penny stick to his clammy palm. “You’re not lost, are you?”
Steve forces a lopsided smile at his sorry excuse for a joke. Eddie rolls his eyes. You blink at him and pluck the cherry sucker from your mouth — which has left your lips softly swollen and tinted a rosier shade.
“This is where pretty boys in tiny sailor outfits sell ice cream, right?”
Your deadpan expression makes it difficult to gauge whether or not you’re joking. Steve’s face glows red at the sort-of compliment. He nods rapidly until the words catch up to him. “Yeah— Yeah, it— It is, actually.”
You smile at him, tightlipped and warm. It fills the windowless shop with glittering sunbeams. “Then can I have a scoop of rainbow sherbet, please?”
Steve raps his knuckles against the counter and nods again. “Yep. Coming right up.”
Eddie takes another hearty bite of his ice cream while you linger at his side — a couple of feet away but feeling much closer than that. As the minty chocolate melts slow on his tongue, all he can taste is the fruity-floral scent of you.
It makes his head go all swimmy because he knows your blood must taste the same. Like velvet. Or an expensive red wine people spend half a fortune on. He can hear the soft wooshing of your heart, too. Soft and unhurried. Gentle like an ebbing and flowing tide.
He shouldn’t be thinking this way, he knows. He fed yesterday; he should be feeling halfway normal by now. But your scent is dizzying still, and much stronger than Eddie figures it should be. If he’d met you a day or more ago, when the need for a feeding was quite literally eating him alive, he’s not sure he would’ve been able to contain himself.
He doesn’t think he would’ve hurt you, per se — because he hasn’t actually hurt anyone yet. Not in this stage of his afterlife, anyway. But it would’ve taken all the waning strength left in him to stop himself from doing something unthinkable. And that thought alone is somehow more terrifying than death.
Neither, however, is as scary as your gaze meeting his.
Your eyes lock, and only then does Eddie realize how long he’s been staring. His blood runs cold. Cold-er. An eon blinks as he tries to recover from his hopeless leering. (He’s just as useless as Steve The Hair Harrington, turns out).
“Hi…” he murmurs through a mouthful of mint-chip once he realizes he’s got nothing else to say. How’s a freak like him meant to talk to someone like you? A walking fairytale of ethereal chaos?
You move the cherry sucker to the pocket of your cheek with your tongue. Through it, you mumble, “Yeah. I guess I am.”
Eddie laughs before he means to. His pink lips curl into a smile, and the inside of the delicate skin scrapes the fangs threatening to poke through his gums. They fit just perfectly over his canines, typically veiled by his gums until it’s time to feed. Or until he’s faced with a pretty girl who smells like Heaven and looks just the same, apparently.
He hides his grin behind his fist and scoffs a breathy laugh.
Your face twists in a delicate look of confusion. “Why’s that funny?” you question once you’ve plucked the piece of candy from your mouth.
His smile ebbs instantly. “Oh. It’s… It’s not— It’s not funny, actually,” he stammers, chocolate eyes wide and round like a pair of buttons.
Your frown deepens. “So you don’t think I’m funny?”
“No, it’s— it’s not that I don’t think you’re funny, I just— I think that—” Eddie stumbles over himself trying to get the words out. He inhales deeply through his nose and swallows hard. “I’m a little confused, honestly…”
There’s a brief moment of silence that passes like minutes.
There’s something distinctly wild in your unwavering stare. It possesses a sort of magnetism that makes it impossible to look away from — though Eddie desperately, desperately wishes he could. But because he can’t take his eyes off you or the fire swimming laps in your irises, he catches a flicker in your gaze. A flame. A spark.
A smile quirks at the very corner of your mouth before a brighter beam blooms there. A sunshine sort of giggle sputters past your lips. “Oh, gosh— You should see your face right now,” you manage through a fit of laughter, swatting his shoulder with your free hand (a little harder than he thinks you mean to.) “I’m just kidding! Seriously. You can laugh now. It’s okay.”
Eddie doesn’t find it all that funny anymore, but your gaze is pretty and expectant, so he forces out a faint laugh just to appease you. He gapes in confusion the second you look away.
You’re a strange thing. Pretty, yes. But still very, very strange.
When Steve passes you a rainbow scoop on a waffle cone, you fish a crumbled bill from the chest of your swimsuit. The boy takes it with a trembling hand — like touching the cash is touching you in some way — and struggles to recall basic arithmetic when he makes out your change.
Eddie watches you savor one last taste of your diminishing sucker, lips curled around the lolly before popping audibly off of it. “Is there a trashcan—” you ask and glance around the shop.
“There’s one back here,” Steve offers mindlessly. “I can chuck it.”
Your hands brush when he takes the paper stick between careful fingers. Silky sunkissed skin sweeping against silky sunkissed skin.
Eddie’s almost jealous. He wishes he could touch you in such an innocent, accidental way — or anyone, really. But his blood stopped circulating about a year or so ago, and he’s had a glacial disposition about him ever since. Sometimes, when he’s just freshly fed, he feels sort of warm. Sort of normal. But that only lasts about an hour or so before his skin goes wintry and grey again.
“Thanks,” you lilt with a kind grin, sandals squeaking as you step back from the counter. You arch a brow, and the sweet smile turns suddenly mischievous. “And don’t worry about the change. I’d hate for you to make a bigger mess.”
You tilt your head and take a kitten lick of your scoop, fighting back a giggle when the sailor boy gapes at you. You spin around and flip-flop, flip-flop out of the ice cream shop — back to whatever fairytale you came from.
The scent of ripe fruit and freshly-cut flowers leaves with you, along with the lavender haze Eddie had been swimming in since he saw you. Drowning in, more like.
Steve laughs at your sort-of joke until the mist passes. Only then does he seem to notice the coins still scattered across the countertop and the half-eaten sucker in his hand. His fluffy brows pinch together in a very evident confusion — like he’s just woken up from a dream.
“…What the hell was that?” he muses after a few long moments.
Eddie shrugs and takes another bite of his half-gone scoop, tasting it for the very first time now that you’re gone. “No idea,” he answers through the mouthful.
꒷꒦꒷꒷꒦ (㇏(•̀ᵥᵥ•́)ノ) ꒦꒷꒦꒷꒷
once you get it, you never wanna quit (no, no)
after you've had it, you're in an awful fix. . .
꒷꒦꒷꒷꒦ (㇏(•̀ᵥᵥ•́)ノ) ꒦꒷꒦꒷꒷
Eddie finds you again several minutes later. Not between the pages of a fantasy book, but on a lone bench by the bus stop.
You finish your rainbow sherbet in silence, people-watching behind a big pair of Sharon Tate-style sunglasses. The sight of you alone makes him trip over his feet, like you’ve got your own gravitational pull that makes him stumble on thin air just to be closer to you.
“Oh—” The huff spills accidentally from his mouth when his sneakers scuff the pavement.
It garners your attention accordingly as you turn slowly towards him. You lift your sunglasses to your head again, just to squint at the vividity of the golden hour. You flash the boy an ice-cream-stained smile, tight-lipped and warmer than the setting sun — like he’s one of your old friends who deserves to be looked at so kindly. (He’s neither.)
“Hello!” you greet brightly as you lift the waffle cone to your mouth. You take another bite and add through the mouthful. “Again.”
“You’re still here?” Eddie squints, ‘cause he’s not sure what else to say.
“I’m on lunch—” you answer, slightly slurred through the melting ice cream on your tongue. A milky drop of pink and orange falls to the side of your thumb, and you lick it away mid-sentence. “—Late shift.”
Eddie hums with a slow nod, squinting one eye to block the sun.
His pale skin buzzes, even under his leather jacket and dark thrifted tee. It isn’t because he’s hot, though. He hasn’t broken a sweat — not even swaddled in the ninety-degree evening — because he lost the ability to somewhere between getting eaten alive and rising from the dead.
The sunlight just makes him feel a bit weaker than usual. Hungrier, too. And he hates being hungry because it makes him feel viciously ravenous. Like a total barbarian. Cruel and angry and inhuman. So he tries to stay out of the sun when he can.
He knows he should start plotting his way out now, but talking to you is like getting caught in a spider’s web. He gets all tangled in his words, netted in his want to impress you. He ends up superglued in a trap he isn’t totally sure he wants to get out of.
“Must be a slow day then, huh?” Eddie jokes dryly.
Your face twists. “Hm?” you wonder wordlessly as your tongue darts to the corner of your mouth.
“I just meant that— You’re a lifeguard and everything, right? And you— You’re dry, so… There must not have been a ton of lives to save today,” the boy explains, gesturing wildly with ringed hands. He laughs at himself and sticks the trembling limbs into his jacket pockets. “That’s… That’s what I meant.”
You don’t seem to notice his sudden floundering, or the way he can hardly make out an intelligible sentence when you’re looking directly at him. He can’t tell if you’re just kind enough to ignore it or if you’re just totally aloof. He hopes for the latter.
“It’s a lot less swimming than you’d expect, honestly,” you confess as you analyze the melting cone in your hand. You twist your wrist with your face pinched in concentration — like deciding whether to bite into the pink, green, or orange bit is that intense. “It’s just a lot of, like, blowing whistles... And walking around…”
You choose the raspberry pink side in the end, crunching as you bite into the waffle cone.
Eddie nods in response — not because he’s really heard you, but because he feels like he sort of understands you in some way now. You were sweet raspberry in the flesh. The color pink incarnate. Gold and glittering, like the sunset was fashioned in your likeness.
But then you smile up at him, with crispy wafer crumbs clinging to the raspberry-lime-orange concoction on your mouth, and the moment feels a lot less poetic than that.
“Sometimes I just wanna be like, ‘Jeez— Can’t one of you fuckers at least try to drown or something? God,” you mock in an accent that’s hardly your own, giggling at yourself halfway through.
You flash Eddie another expectant smile. Grinning with all your teeth as you wait for him to laugh with you.
It takes him a second too long to force another chuckle — still trying to gauge how serious you are — but you don’t seem to mind. “Right. Well, uh… Here’s hoping, right?” Eddie quips with a crooked smile, lifting his right hand to flash his crossed fingers.
You giggle louder at that. Laughing with him, and not at him, for the first time since he started making a fool of himself in front of you.
His chest swells like he’s still got a functioning heart hiding there. It’s sparkling and warm, full of pride, almost like he’s alive again. Truly alive. He realizes, then, that he never wants to stop making you laugh.
When your giggling ceases, you hum a contented sigh and take another sloppy bite of your ice cream cone.
Eddie watches you — unblinking, like a total freak — and tries to figure out if he made you up in his head.
You were like a fairy-tale princess come to life. An enchanted form of imagination, slightly childlike and effortlessly romantic in a way. You were the kind of girl who held butterflies on the tip of her finger, who reached out to touch the stars at night, who shared her secrets with the moon when no one else would listen.
You’re the kind of thing that only exists in dreams. You have no real sense of reality, accordingly, which Eddie thinks only proves his point.
With sunshine glittering in the strands of your hair, your eyes flit back to his. Eddie averts his gaze suddenly (and very obviously) from yours, but if you’re perturbed by his leering, you don’t show it.
Instead, you look at him the same way you’ve been looking at him this whole time — like you’ve got a world of magic secrets hidden in your eyes. Like you want him to come searching for every single one of them.
“Did you— Did you walk here, or…?” the boy trails off, eyes falling to your rubber sandals.
He hopes you hadn’t. It’s far too hot, and the pool is quite a few blocks from here. From what little he’s learned about you, though, he figures you’re probably crazy enough not to care.
“Bus,” you answer plainly, pausing mid-bite.
Eddie blinks. “The buses stopped running a half hour ago… You know that, right?”
You freeze. Melted ice cream pools at the edges of your mouth. A very loud answer, even in its silence.
There’s a very audible crunch-ing sound as you chew through the too-big bite. You bring your palm to your chin to catch rogue crumbs and blink up at Eddie with wide eyes.
“…What?” you wonder pitifully in response. Though, with your mouth still full, it sounds more like a deep, muffled, and utterly pathetic, “Wah—?”
“They stop running here at six-thirty.”
You swallow, face screwed.“Why?”
Eddie shrugs. “Beats me.”
You turn away — staring far off at the parking lot but looking at nothing, really. Eddie feels like he can finally breathe now, without your eyes strangling him.
He watches you go deep in thought and wishes he could see what the inside of your mind looks like. He imagines it’s full of confetti. Wild, glittering thoughts and a handful of sparkling confetti.
“Well…” you huff after a few moments, a deep and whimsical sigh. You look down at the melting cone in your fist and try to find a silver lining in the swirls of pastel colors. “‘Least the ice cream’s good.”
“Are you gonna walk?” Eddie wonders aloud as his chest pinches with misplaced worry. He crosses his leather-clad arms over himself in a feeble attempt to soothe the ache there — to smother his palpable empathy, which makes him feel like your burden is his to carry.
He doesn’t have to. Carry it, that is. It’s not like you’re not asking him to. But he can’t ignore the overwhelming urge to help you — this strange, elven princess who needs rescue by a lowly bard way out of his element. It’s an instinct that borders on primal.
“Do I have a choice?” you respond rhetorically. Eddie shrugs and you shrug back, unfazed. “I can walk. The sunset’s pretty… And there’s a dog park on the way there, so… That’ll be fun, I guess.”
Eddie’s dark eyes flit to the sky, where the sun’s slow descent paints the wispy clouds in vivid colors of blush and honey. He understands the simple beauty of it but rarely ever gives it a passing glance.
He spends most of his sunsets inside, hiding from the pretty golden hour behind closed curtains. He cowers under his blankets like a child (‘cause his tiny square window is west-facing, painfully so) and tries to tell himself that he’s not as hungry as he feels.
That he’s not hungry at all.
That he’s still normal.
Eddie looks back to you a moment later, features twisted with uncertainty. “I’m pretty sure the park’s gated after sunset…”
You don’t ask him how he knows that, and he’s grateful. He figures you must assume that he’s got a dog of his own, which is a lie he’s happy to stick to.
It’s better than admitting that Jim Hopper nearly caught him dealing a couple years back and had to make a quick escape through the park — where he then had to hop a locked fence he didn’t know was there. It wouldn’t have been so embarrassing if he hadn’t rolled directly into dog shit when he fell to the ground. That’s a secret he’ll take to the grave.
If the Chief takes mercy on him, anyway.
“Well… The sunset’s still pretty,” you conclude with another sigh, because at least that can’t be taken from you.
Eddie watches you take another bite and makes a very pointed decision not to tell you that that’ll be gone soon, too. By the time you walk back to work, the sky will be a muddy mixture of orange and lilac and navy. Hardly a thing worth looking at.
He lets you revel in your little nothings anyway.
“I should— I should probably go. I have a… thing to get to, so…” he trails off, chuckling at his own hopelessness. His worn sneakers scuff the pavement when he steps back from you. He scratches at the small curls twisted at the nape of his neck and tries to find the words to say goodbye. “Uh— Have a good rest of your shift, I guess. Hope it’s more… eventful.”
You smile at his stammering and his poor excuse for a joke.
“Thanks,” you nod. “Have fun with your… thing.”
Eddie nods once. His smile wavers only slightly when he turns away. His cheeks puff as he exhales a deep breath — which he hadn’t realized he’d been holding until now.
He stops short at the edge of the sidewalk. Doesn’t even make it off the fucking curb before his guilty conscience catches up with him. It stops him like a force field and weighs heavy on his chest with a similar strength.
He turns quickly again, curls whipping around his face. “Do you… Do you want a ride?” he blurts with a squint in his deep chocolate eyes.
The offer is hardly from the kindness of his unbeating heart. He just wants to make himself feel better, if he’s honest. He wants you to decline, actually — so then he’d be alone, and his conscience would still be clear.
Your eyes widen softly at his offer. You shift on the hard bench. It squeaks quietly under your weight.
“Well, I— I wouldn’t— I wouldn’t wanna intrude,” you tell him, stumbling over your words for the first time in front of him.
Something about it, how shy you’ve suddenly gone, makes you feel a bit more human compared to the glittering creature Eddie made of you in his head.
The boy shrugs. “You wouldn’t be.”
“No?”
“No. It’s just… on the way…” Eddie insists, sighing to himself, because Hawkins Pool most definitely is out of his way. “So, you know… It’s no problem.”
There is a beat of fleeting silence, filled only by a whispering summer breeze and muddled conversation from distant mall-goers. Eddie’s eyes dart over your features, twisted softly with a faraway look of worry.
The anticipation has his heart in his throat. He isn’t sure now what answer he wants to hear. Both might equally break his heart. A double-edged sword.
Your chest deflates with a dramatic sigh of relief. A lazy smile tugs at the corners of your mouth. “Okay. Good. ‘Cause I didn’t wanna be, like, too eager, you know? But that would be… super duper nice.”
“Good thing I’m a super duper nice person then, huh?” Eddie jokes with a tightlipped smile, which ebbs into a scowl the moment he turns away from you.
He becomes a storm cloud of annoyance as he stalks across the parking lot. Less so because of you and more so because of his deep-rooted sensitivity, where everyone else’s emotions demand to be felt by him and him alone.
It’s a very strange thing, indeed: to be dead and yet still carry the crushing empathy of a person with a bleeding heart.
꒷꒦꒷꒷꒦ (㇏(•̀ᵥᵥ•́)ノ) ꒦꒷꒦꒷꒷
real to real is living rarity, people stop and stare at me
we just walk on by, we just keep on dreaming . . .
꒷꒦꒷꒷꒦ (㇏(•̀ᵥᵥ•́)ノ) ꒦꒷꒦꒷꒷
Eddie doesn’t look back to make sure you’re following him. He knows you are. He can tell by your lingering strawberry-vanilla scent, and your rhythmic footsteps in rubber sandals that trail just behind him. The incessant flip-flop, flip-flop, flip-flop quickens as you rush to keep up with his longer strides, trying hopelessly to finish your ice cream and talk at the same time.
“Adam— my manager— he’s such a hardass. Like, if I was late today, he definitely would’ve fired me,” you ramble and crunch hard into your cone. “Well… maybe not fire me… ‘Cause we’re kinda short-staffed right now— But he definitely would’ve given me a lecture! Like, dude, just because your dad owns the joint, doesn’t mean you have any actual authority over me, you know?”
You giggle loudly at yourself. Eddie just nods in response, barely listening, and not bothering to glance back at you.
You continue anyway, through a mouthful, no less. “Except, he kinda does have some authority, I guess. Since, you know, he’s the one who signs my checks and everything, but… You know what I mean.”
The boy ahead of you stops suddenly in place. Your sandals scuff the pavement to keep from running into the back of him. He turns to face you, brunette curls flouncing, and your heart skips at the proximity. He’s much too pretty for anything else.
You can smell the cologne spritzed on his neck from here. A high-pitched and very boyish cedarwood that makes him somehow more endearing. There’s something floral in it, too — perhaps from the conditioner making his hair all shiny. And the subtle powdery scent, you figure, comes from his old Back Sabbath tee. An evident hand-me-down of some sort.
You can see more of him like this without having to ogle like a creep. His brown eyes are so dark they’re almost black, but you can see flecks of gold in them, too. His pronounced nose is dotted with pores and faint freckles you think you could count if he let you. There are a couple of spots on his jaw, too — some still red, others already scared over — that make his scowling face more youthful.
He’s got a couple of dark circles under his eyes, which you think means he doesn’t get as much sleep as he should. He’s got a pair of perpetual smile lines beside his mouth, too, which must mean he laughs a lot (even if he isn’t now). And he’s got a subtle furrow between his bushy brows ‘cause he’s totally the quiet, observant type.
You’d like to think you’re taking a closer look at him than anyone else in Hawkins ever has. Where they see a freak with crazy hair and a dangerous attitude, you see an old soul with young eyes and a wild mind.
“Is this you?” you wonder aloud, with ice cream clinging to the corners of your mouth.
Eddie lifts his hand and taps the key fob twice. The rusted tin can behind him unlocks with a hearty ca-chunk. He fakes a tight-lipped smile, “Yep.”
You rush around the hood then, hurrying for the passenger seat and struggling to finish the rest of your ice cream. Eddie eyes you expectantly as he lifts himself onto the chipped pleather of the driver’s side. His deadpan face twists with amusement as you inhale the remaining bits of your ice cream.
Your eyes go wide when you catch him staring, cheeks jutted like a chipmunk’s. You wipe your mouth with the back of your hand, then swipe your palms together. “Sorry— Sorry, I didn’t—” you swallow hard and try not to choke. “I didn’t wanna get ice cream all over your van.”
A laugh sputters from Eddie’s mouth, a more boyish sound than you thought he was capable of, and he hurries to cover his mouth with his fist. He can feel the sharp stinging of his fangs as they stab slowly through his gums, more prominent now that you’re so close to him — smelling as sweet as you look.
“Well, this isn’t exactly a sports car,” he scoffs. “I don’t think you have to worry about that.”
You swallow down the rest and hop in beside him. The faux leather of the passenger seat has grown distressed with time, sticking to your sunkissed thighs where your skirt doesn’t reach and poking you in places. The smell of his cologne stains the interior, along with a more subtle, skunkier scent.
You have to tug extra hard on the seatbelt — once, twice, and then a third time — before it gives.
Eddie sticks the key into the ignition and twists. A heavy metal guitar solo blares suddenly through the speakers, rattling the old van and making both of you lurch with a momentary panic.
“Shit!” the boy curses as he reaches for the blasting radio. He turns down the volume with pale, lanky fingers, wide eyes flitting from the console to the pavement as he peels out of the Starcourt lot. “Shit… Sorry.”
You shrug a bare shoulder. “It’s okay. I listen to my music loud, too. I’m pretty sure I’ve blown out the headphones to at least two Walkmans by now.”
“Yeah?” Eddie hums with a lazy smile. “What kinda stuff stuff do you listen to?”
You purse your lips to the side and avert your gaze as you ponder the question. “Van Halen, definitely… Dio and Def Leppard occasionally— oh, and don’t even get me started on Ozzy Osbourne.”
Eddie feels like his heart’s in his throat. It settles there and makes it hard to breathe while his anxious hands fidget on the steering wheel.
You can’t be this pretty and like all the music he likes. It’s just not fair. It’s like the universe is trying to kill him. (Even though it kinda already did that once.)
“Are you joking?” he wonders aloud, laughing with furrowed brows. His chocolate eyes dart from you, to the winding road before him, and back again. The soft smile on your lips blossoms into a more mischievous thing, and he nods slowly to himself. “You’re… You’re joking, right?”
“I might’ve been looking at your cassettes, yeah.”
Eddie’s gaze flits downward to where he keeps his tapes stacked in a cubby beneath the console. His chest aches with a distant embarrassment. “Right…” he huffs.
“Real answer?” you offer with a twinkle in your eye, spinning in the seat to face him more. You tuck your feet beneath you and count each name on your fingers. “Cyndi Lauper, Madonna, ABBA, and Blondie. That’s my top four— Not in that order, though! I love them all equally.”
“That makes… a lot more sense.”
“Do you have any of their tapes we could listen to?”
Eddie scoffs a faint laugh until he realizes you’re being serious. His tightlipped smile ebbs as he answers, “I can’t say that I do. No.”
“That’s too bad,” you huff and slouch further in the passenger seat. You gaze out the window with a faraway look in your eyes and start rambling before you mean to.
“I’ll let you bum one of mine, if you want. You can borrow my copy of Arrival, that’s one of my favorites! My most favorites. Or Super Trouper, maybe. I love that one, too...” You deflate with a heavy sigh. “Shit. I can’t decide— Which one do you prefer?”
Eddie stammers for an answer. He feels like you’re barely speaking his language.
“Screw it. I’ll just make you a mixtape,” you decide firmly. “It’s impossible to pick just one.”
Eddie nods wordlessly to himself, unconvinced that he’ll ever actually see you again — like this, anyway. With you making a home in the passenger seat of his van, which has never known a pretty girl like you before now.
“You could always swing by the pool if you want,” you offer with a hopeful grin. “Adam lets me man the radio sometimes.”
“Does he?” Eddie hums indifferently.
“When I wear my bikini, yeah.”
His face screws at the thought of someone taking advantage of you in that way, with you perhaps too gullible to understand. “Well, Adam sounds like a dickwad,” he grumbles and shifts his grip on the steering wheel.
“A massive dickwad,” you giggle like it’s your first time ever using the phrase. “One time, I played my Billy Joel tape, and he called it pedestrian. Pedestrian! Not only is that, like, totally sacrilegious or whatever, but it’s also extremely pretentious. Just call it lame or something, you sound arrogant.”
When your rambling ceases, you can hear Eddie laughing. Really laughing. Not just that weird breathy sound he keeps making. It spills from his mouth like sunshine, though he tries to stifle it with a fist pressed to his mouth. And even though you don’t remember saying anything particularly funny, you laugh alongside him.
“Why do you cover your smile when you laugh?”
“Why do I do what?”
“You always put your hand over your mouth when you smile,” you observe with a curious squint. “Did you know that?”
Eddie’s tongue darts over his protruding fangs, which peek in faint slivers from his pink gums now. You would only see them if you checked his mouth like a dog, but he gets self-conscious about it, anyway.
“No. I didn’t. Must be an old habit, I guess,” he stammers, lying through his teeth as he turns into the parking lot of Hawkins Community Pool.
The crowd there has seemingly ebbed with the setting sun, which he’s grateful for. He stays on the far edges of the property still, lest he draw any unwanted attention. ‘Cause the only thing more recognizable than his wild hair is the tin can he rides around in.
His ringed hands curl around the gear stick. The van jerks softly when he puts it in park. Eddie clears his throat. “We’re, uh— We’re here.”
You get distracted easily, and he’s grateful for that, too. You drop the conversation entirely as you reach for the seatbelt. The buckle clicks when you unfasten it. “Thanks for the ride, Eddie,” you chirp with a pretty smile.
His head snaps in your direction with enough force to give him whiplash. His mouth opens and closes like a fish as he gapes at you. He struggles to find the words to say. He thinks he’d rather face a hundred demobats (again) than have this conversation.
“You…” he swallows hard, adam’s apple bobbing. “You know my name?”
You shrug, oblivious to his otherwise very palpable fear. “‘Course I do.”
His heart would stop if he weren’t already dead. He thinks the force of his current shock could jolt it into beating all over again. Though, he figures he has no right to be so surprised. He is Eddie Munson, after all — the town freak who didn’t murder Chrissy Cunningham but left her to die instead.
No one knows that she’d been long in the dying before Eddie ran like a coward. No one knows that there was nothing he could do to stop the dark wizard from killing her. No one knows that he died trying to avenge her death despite all that. And no one ever will — save for the handful of teenagers who saved Hawkins alongside him.
Eddie knew, from the moment he rose from the dead and made it out of that godforsaken hellscape, that he would never be seen as the hero. He didn’t want to be. He just wanted to be a kid.
But here he is now. A half-dead and hated thing. A creature not worth loving.
And here you are, smiling at him like you intend to love him back to life.
“So… So you know what happened with… With the…” He talks with his hands and struggles to make the words out. He always has. He always will.
You nod before he has to. “Yeah. I think I just… I figured that wasn’t something you wanted to talk about with strangers—”
“I don’t wanna talk about it,” he insists.
“Then me not bringing it up was a good thing, right?”
“I mean, yeah, but—”
“Well, I’m hearing a lot of talking for someone who doesn’t want to talk about it,” you mock, not totally unkind, just a little bit strange.
Eddie almost laughs at that. “I’m just— I’m confused.”
“About what?”
Now, he really lets himself laugh because the answer’s rather obvious.
“Because most people are scared of me!” Eddie blurts with a cynical chuckle, gesturing wildly with his pale, ringed hands. “Everyone thinks I’m some— psycho-killing murderous freak.”
“Well, I don’t,” you insist, all pretty in your way, as you shift on the worn pleather seat beside him. “That’s gotta count for something, right?”
You unlatch the glove box ahead of you and help yourself to its contents. The junk inside clatters together while you search very obviously through it, rambling mindlessly to yourself as you do so.
“You like mint-chip ice cream cones smothered in sprinkles. And your initials are sewn onto the waistband of your jeans— like you’re gonna lose them or something. And… there’s a Blondie tape hiding in here.” You giggle to yourself and flash him the cassette.
Eddie blinks at you like an owl. “That’s not mine.”
“Secret girlfriend?” you tease with a scrunched nose.
“Secret tape,” he confesses before plucking it suddenly from your fingertips.
There’s a whole story behind it that he’d tell you if he could. About how he couldn’t leave the house for some weeks after he came back to life and how his friends brought him things to pass the time. Robin Buckley had an elaborate assortment of board games that bordered on concerning, and Dustin Henderson had brought an entire library to his trailer.
The rest of them put together a selection of tapes for him to listen to. He can’t be sure now if Nancy Wheeler really gave up her prized Blondie cassette or if Mike Wheeler did it without her knowing.
You struggle to bite back your laughter as you sort through the center console next.
“See! That doesn’t exactly read psycho-killing murderous freak to me, Eds. Honestly, it kinda reads as someone who’s never hurt anyone in their whole life, who probably wants everyone else to stop hurting them—” You cut yourself off with a gasp. “Ah! Here it is.”
You dig a rogue ink pen from the depths of the console. A bright smile tugs at the edges of your lips. Eddie’s still struggling to breathe when you reach for him. “Can I have your hand?”
“Why?” he wonders with pinched brows.
“You’ll see,” you lilt mischievously and take his ringed hand in your smaller one.
He worries, briefly, that you might comment on how cold he is for the middle of summer. But if you notice it at all, you don’t mention it as you scribble your number onto the back of his hand.
Eddie grimaces when the tip presses hard into his pale skin. “Ow…”
“See? You’re just a big baby,” you joke, giggling quietly to yourself. You click the pen with your thumb as you part from him. “There. Now you have my number.”
Eddie flashes you a dubious glance, unsure of what he ever needed your number for.
You answer his silent question like it’s obvious. “So I can give you the mixtape.”
“Right,” he hums with a slow nod.
“Well, I’m gonna go clock back in before I get a total earful from Adam,” you sigh and reach for the metal door handle. “Thanks for the ride, Eddie.”
“Don’t mention it,” he shrugs nonchalantly as you slide out of the van. The back of your pleated skirt rises softly in the process, flashing a glimpse of your ass. He swallows hard and stammers. “Just— Just, like, be safe, or whatever.”
“Or whatever,” you mock with a lighthearted chuckle.
“Well, this is a crazy world we live in, haven’t you heard?” Eddie jokes to cover up his blunder. He tilts his wild head to his shoulder as a pink smile forms crooked on his mouth. “I hear psycho-killing murderous freaks are roaming the streets these days.”
He expects you to laugh, but you grow strangely serious instead, furrowing your brows as you mumble to yourself. “Crazy World... That’s a good song, actually. I should put that on the mixtape—”
You forget to say a proper goodbye as you close the door behind you. The rusted metal hinges screech before slamming shut. You walk off towards the pool house without another word, flip-flopping the entire way to the front gate. Eddie watches you go with his features twisted in a subtle mixture of shock and awe.
Steve Harrington was right. What the hell was that?
꒷꒦꒷꒷꒦ (㇏(•̀ᵥᵥ•́)ノ) ꒦꒷꒦꒷꒷
oh, how could i ever refuse?
i feel like i win when i lose . . .
꒷꒦꒷꒷꒦ (㇏(•̀ᵥᵥ•́)ノ) ꒦꒷꒦꒷꒷
Three days pass before Eddie sees you again. Not that he’s counting, anyway. He debates, however, calling you on the second one — but by then, your number had long disappeared from his hand. He decided, then, to count his losses and pretend he wasn’t as boyishly heartbroken as he felt.
Missing you was a double-edged sword. He never wanted to see you again, but he mourned for you always. He prayed he’d never run into you like before but searched for you in all the faces he met. It was agony.
When he drops Dustin off at Scoops Ahoy after a long afternoon of campaigning, Eddie tells himself it’s not with intent to run into you there. He tells himself it wouldn’t be the worst thing, but not to get his hopes too high. That he’d only make a fool of himself. That it’d be better if he didn’t see you at all.
He’s left grieving anyway when he doesn’t immediately spot your face in the dwindling crowd of the ice cream shop.
“If it isn’t the man of the hour,” Robin lilts from where she sits at one of the tables, obviously on her break and eating from a bowl of the rainbow gummy bears they use as toppings.
“You dweebs talking about me?” Eddie scoffs as he shoves Dustin light-heartedly ahead of him.
As soon as he crosses the threshold of the small shop, you come very suddenly into view. You sit ahead of Robin, in your usual uniform, and with your usual rainbow sherbet cone. You steal a few rogue gummy bears from her cup and dip them into your ice cream, which has started to melt with your distraction.
He stills in place, struck with a bolt of blue. Your pretty, summer scent hits him full force, then — slaps him in the face and demands to be noticed. You flash him a small smile, and he has to remind himself to breathe.
“Not at all,” Robin answers with a knowing smirk.
Steve scoffs from where he wipes down the counter, tendons flexing in his golden arm. “Only for ten straight minutes.”
“We were talking about how I gave you my number. And how you never called,” you explain to the poleaxed boy, tilting your chin to your shoulder to peer at him from beneath your lashes. A mischievous smirk hints at the corners of your lips. “A girl could start to wonder, you know?” you tease, only partially playful.
Eddie stammers for an explanation. He feels like his heart’s in his throat, like it’s closing on him, and like he can’t really breathe.
He blinks rapidly as his head starts to swim. He zeroes in on your heartbeat, though he knows he shouldn’t. It’s a soft and rhythmic whoosh, whoosh, whooshing — like that of an excitable baby deer. His hands ball into fists until his dull nails leave crescent shapes in his palms.
Dustin gapes at the sight of you. “You’re real?” the strange, curly-haired boy blurts.
“Me?” you ask with pinched brows, motioning to yourself with the ice cream cone.
“Dustin!” Eddie scolds, nudging him pointedly on the shoulder.
The boy cowers. “Sorry. It’s just… I thought you were, like, an imaginary person Eddie made up or something,” he admits, squinting his hazel eyes and crossing his arms over his chest. You flash him a dubious look until he elaborates obliviously. “‘Cause Gareth was making fun of him for not having any friends outside of Hellfire and stuff—”
“Hey,” Eddie snaps to get the rambling boy’s attention, tapping the brim of his Thinking Cap. “Shut up.”
“What’s Hellfire?” you wonder aloud.
“Book club,” Eddie lies.
You grin with furrowed brows. “You talk about me at book club?”
“I mentioned you. Once. ‘Cause Gareth asked— And I didn’t call because the pen smudged,” Eddie answers all at once, swallowing hard when he feels bile building in his throat. He can’t get your heartbeat out of his ears. Or your scent out of his nose. It’s suffocating, all of it. “Does that clear everything up, or…?”
Steve hisses through his teeth. Robin scoffs. You blink at him with wide eyes, hardly expecting him to be so short with you. “Uh-huh,” you nod with a forced smile.
Eddie would apologize for it if he didn’t feel so sick. But now he teeters on the knife’s edge of nausea, unsure if he’s going to faint or vomit or both. So he fakes his own smile and inches towards the exit. “Great. I’m gonna— I think I’m gonna go—”
“And leave us with babysitting duty?” Steve scoffs. “How nice of you.”
Dustin frowns and flashes the makeshift sailor his middle finger.
Eddie fumbles to come up with an excuse. “I just remembered, uh— Wayne wanted me to record Cheers tonight, and I totally forgot. The ol’ geezer’ll kill me if he misses an episode, so… I gotta run.”
He ducks out without another word, grimacing at himself because he’s usually a much better liar than that. The others can surely see right through him. They know that he’s unwell — that he’s just hungry and impossibly overstimulated.
But you don’t. You don’t know him at all, and maybe that’s exactly why you rush out of Scoops behind him.
Eddie shoves the glass exit of Starcourt Mall with trembling hands. The summer breeze rushes over him immediately, billowing through his hair and clothes. He takes his first good breath and the swimmy feeling of nausea starts to fade.
The hunger remains even still. The ravenous thoughts remain, too — of your heart between his teeth, beating on his tongue, and your blood tasting of sweet red wine.
When he starts to scare himself, his mind tells him that he’d never hurt you. That he hasn’t yet, and that he never will. But still, the thoughts are there, and they hardly ever leave.
Your fresh berry scent covers him like a shroud as he rushes to his casket (his van, really, but the symbolism fits.) You struggle to keep up with his longer strides, pleated skirt flouncing as you hurry behind him — a kicked puppy who doesn’t know when to stay back.
“I don’t mean to annoy you, you know?” you call after him.
Eddie stills and spins sharply around to face you. You stumble back on rubber sandals to keep from running into him, trying not to cower when he towers suddenly over you.
“What?” he asks with his features swirled in confusion and distant suffering.
Your wide eyes dart over his pallid features, more sallow than you remember. You forget everything you were going to say as concern drips from your pretty features. “Do you feel okay?”
“I feel— fine,” he stammers, less than convincingly.
“Okay…” you nod, unconvinced, then repeat yourself. “I don’t mean to annoy you, by the way.”
Eddie shrugs. “What makes you think you annoy me?”
“I dunno,” you answers, sheepish in a way he hasn’t seen you before. You shift your weight on your scarlet sandals and talk wildly with your hands, looking everywhere but at him. “I kinda talked your face off a few days ago, and then I made that stupid joke about you not calling, and I just… I realized you don’t know me all that well. And that I can be kind of a lot sometimes. Or, you know, a lot of the time. But it’s not like I mean to be, you know? I don’t mean to be a burden or to—”
“You’re not a burden,” Eddie blurts.
Your breath catches as you blink at him with wild, glassy eyes. He gets the feeling no one’s ever said that to you before and tries to ignore the stinging in his chest.
“No?” you echo in a mousy voice.
“Not even a little bit,” he answers instantly.
You inhale a shaky breath that leaves through your mouth in a sigh of relief. “So you’re not upset with me?”
“No,” Eddie scoffs. “You haven’t done anything to upset me. So far, anyway.”
You nod to yourself at the reassurance. “Okay. Good. I just— I thought you ran off in such a hurry ‘cause you didn’t wanna be around me or something.”
You chuckle to yourself, feeling silly about it now.
Eddie shifts awkwardly ahead of you ‘cause you’re not too far off.
“Do you… Do you want a ride?” he offers despite himself — despite his overwhelming feelings for you and despite the fact the buses are still running for another fifteen minutes.
He chucks his thumb over his shoulder and flashes you a sheepish look. Because he isn’t sure of what to say now, or if he wants to leave you at all.
You duck your chin and scrunch your nose, too pretty for your own good. “If it’s not too much trouble?” you lilt.
Eddie only grins. “Who says I don’t like a little bit of trouble?”
꒷꒦꒷꒷꒦ (㇏(•̀ᵥᵥ•́)ノ) ꒦꒷꒦꒷꒷
under those white street lamps,
there is a little chance they may see . . .
꒷꒦꒷꒷꒦ (㇏(•̀ᵥᵥ•́)ノ) ꒦꒷꒦꒷꒷
He survives the golden hour, but just barely. Eddie hides from the setting sun underneath the covers, writhing on the thin mattress as he waits for the ravenous feeling of insatiable hunger to pass. It never does.
Instead, he feels the absence of you most ardently. He withers away as he grieves for you, like a wilting flower craving sunlight. But he’s nothing but a pale, gray, and exhausted thing now — an unloveable creature aching for a feeding.
“Wayne…” Eddie grumbles tiredly, half muffled into his pillow. When he receives no response from his uncle, he musters the strength to shout. “Wayne!”
Footsteps trudge down the hall, bulky work shoes heavy on thin carpet. His bedroom door creaks slowly open, and his uncle stands beneath the frame of it — wearing the thick navy coveralls that has his name sewn in cursive on the chest. His weathered hands work at the buttons below the collar.
“What is it, Ed?” Wayne wonders in a gravelly drawl.
Eddie takes in a rattling breath, peeking one eye open to look at his uncle. His vision’s too swimmy for anything else. “Can you call Hopper?” he slurs like a sick child.
Wayne’s graying brows furrow in worry. He squints at his nephew across the bedroom, languishing beneath his covers and growing more waxen by the second. He’s typically only this miserable when he hasn’t fed in weeks.
“You hungry again? It’s only been a couple days.”
“I know,” the boy grumbles, squirming on the mattress like he can’t get comfortable. “I just don’t feel good...”
Wayne can see that much from here, so he doesn’t put up any more of a fight about it. He fastens the cuffs of his sleeves with wise and suddenly anxious hands. “I’ll give him a call before I head to work… You gonna be alright without me?”
Eddie nods against the pillow, curls frizzing around his head. He responds in jumbled slurs, “Mhm. ‘M alright. ‘M just… real tired…”
“I’ll call Hopper,” Wayne repeats, firmer this time, before shutting the door behind him.
Eddie spends the next half hour rotting away in the lonely trailer.
Jim doesn’t bother to knock when he arrives, but it’s not like he needs to. He makes enough deliveries of the riboflavin kind to Forest Hills that he deserves his own key.
Besides, Eddie could smell him when he pulled into the driveway — the pint of blood he carried with him, more so. It’s a deep, rich, and powdery scent. Nowhere near as sweet as you. But then again, he doesn’t think anything could be.
“What’s the special this time, Chief?” Eddie jokes with a small huff as Hopper helps prop him against the headboard.
The mustached man is still clad in his khaki work uniform, gold badge glinting in the lamplight. His hardened face remains in its usual deadpan frown, though his bushy brows furrow in a subtle confusion. “Do you really wanna know?”
Eddie thinks for a moment, then sighs. “No…”
Jim opens the brown paper bag sitting on the nightstand. He pulls out a plain styrofoam cup topped with a lid typically used for coffee. The thing looks innocent enough, save for a few drops of crimson staining the white of it, likely from an overfill.
There was a time when Eddie could do it himself. Where he could puncture the blood bag Hopper delivered and pour it into one of the mugs he and Wayne have been collecting for years.
He stopped being strong enough for that a while ago, though. The sight of blood makes him queasy now, which is ironic for very obvious reasons.
The chief does most of it for him now, though Eddie thinks Hopper likes it best that way.
“Here you go, kid,” Jim says as he passes the boy his cup of liquid scarlet. He holds the lid of it in his other hand, face screwed at the coopery smell engulfing the small bedroom. “Try not to think about it too much, alright?”
Eddie takes the cup in a trembling fist and squeezes his eyes shut so he can’t see its contents. He forces himself to down it in one go — equal parts because it’s easiest that way and because he doesn’t want to be too much of a baby in front of the chief.
The blood tastes like a strawberry milkshake as he swallows it down, but that’s always the easiest part. It’s the after that’s so ruthless. After the overwhelming bout of starvation passes. After he’s half normal again. That’s when the blood starts to taste like blood — all metallic, like a bunch of old pennies. That’s when he feels like a monster.
Eddie groans when the cup is fully drained. He passes it back to Hopper with his eyes still shut. The man takes it with one hand and pats him on the shoulder with the other. “Good job, kid,” he mumbles, dropping the empty cup back into the bag.
The boy relaxes against the pillows with a shuddering breath.
Jim waits until then to interrogate him.
“What happened between now and four days ago?” he asks with his arms crossed over his chest, towering over the boy’s bedside. “This is the first time you’ve needed to feed more than once a week. Hell, it took Wayne and me almost a year to convince you to feed more than once a month.”
Eddie shrugs lazily, lips jutted and eyes lidded. “Nothing happened.”
“I need to know, kid. So I can keep you safe.”
And so I can keep everyone else safe, too, but he doesn’t say that part.
“It’s just— This girl,” Eddie confesses, then grumbles with a sigh. “I don’t know, alright. It doesn’t even matter.”
Hopper squints. “What girl?”
“No one,” Eddie insists, then cowers under the man’s glacial stare. “Fine. Some-one. She just— makes me go all weird or whatever. I don’t know.”
Jim hums, nodding softly to himself and trying not to be too amused at the thought of Munson having a crush. He scratches at the coarse hair underneath his chin. “And is… staying away from this girl an option, or…?”
Eddie ponders the question for a moment, then exhales a chest-deflating sigh. Just like he did when questioning the origins of the blood in his cup. You were a lot of the same in that way — a thing he needed to survive but wasn’t strong enough to face.
“No… I don’t think it is…”
꒷꒦꒷꒷꒦ (㇏(•̀ᵥᵥ•́)ノ) ꒦꒷꒦꒷꒷
Hawkins Community Pool is strangely liminal after dark. The property itself is illuminated by only a few amber streetlamps, with most of its light coming from within — from inside the wooden pool house and beneath the sparkling cerulean water.
Eddie parks his van on the darkened edges of the parking lot and tries to find the courage to leave it. The crowd is minimal now, having lessened significantly since he dropped you off some hours ago.
There are only a few stragglers left, most of them teenagers soaking in the last few minutes before closing. He’s grateful for that much. The fewer eyes on him, the better.
If he wasn’t being ogled at with gazes hardened with disgust or softened with pity, people weren’t looking at him at all. Their attempts to keep from staring were perhaps more blatant than they realized.
Maybe they didn’t want to be rude, or maybe they wanted to pretend he wasn’t there at all. It made Eddie hyper-aware of himself either way, which is why he often preferred to stay hidden.
He idles by the chain-link fence, swaddled in the humid summer air that smells overwhelmingly of chlorine and dewy grass. It takes several agonizing moments to catch your attention.
You dance softly in place and mouth the lyrics to a song Eddie can only make out vaguely from here, while the girl beside you stands perfectly and unenthusiastically still.
You freeze when you catch Eddie’s gaze. Confused at first, then surprised. It takes a matter of seconds for both emotions to mix together and leave you a bumbling ball of excitement.
The boy raises a ringed hand in a curt wave, which you reciprocate with a much more enthusiastic one. You turn to your co-worker and mouth something Eddie can’t hear before rushing to the parking lot to meet him. The flip-flopping of your rubber sandals grows as you make your way to him, along with the rustling of the windbreaker you wear over your bikini.
It’s a modest scarlet two-piece, with a high waist and a halter neckline — but much more of your skin is on display than Eddie’s used to. (If there was any time he needed to be grateful for a recent feeding, it was now.)
“Hi…” you greet, panting heavily as you stand before him.
“Hiya,” Eddie grins cheekily.
“I… I didn’t know you were coming.”
“I didn’t either, honestly.”
“Did you, uh— Did you and Wayne get to watch Cheers?”
It takes Eddie a moment or more to recall his earlier lie. He nods rapidly in response, perhaps too quickly to be truthful, but you don’t seem to notice. “Uh, no. Not yet. He’ll watch it when he gets back from the graveyard shift.”
“Okay. Cool,” you beam, eyes sparkling as they dart over his features — which have seemed to gain a bit of their life back. He’s still pale, but his eyes are less sunken in than they were. The dark chocolate of his irises swim with a melted honey color. “You look a lot better, by the way. Than you did when I left, I mean. I was scared you were getting sick.”
“Nah, I just… Needed a breather, I guess,” Eddie admits with a breathy chuckle. “I was with Hellfire all day, and… Babysitting’s a tough gig, turns out.”
You laugh alongside him, noticeably less forced. “No, I get it. I basically spend all day babysitting, so…”
“Right. I shouldn’t be complaining.” Eddie scratches awkwardly at the back of his neck and grimaces when his rings get caught in his hair. It takes a very noticeable moment for him to gain the courage to ask the question on the tip of his tongue. “Can, uh— Can I see your hand real quick?”
Your brows pinch. “Why?”
“You’ll see,” he lilts with the same mischievous smile you used on him some days ago now.
He holds a ringed hand expectantly out for you. Your gaze glimmers with intrigue as you put your fingers in his paler, colder ones. You watch him dig in his jacket pockets for a moment before pulling out the same ink pen you’d rescued from the depths of junk in his center console. He clicks it with his thumb, and you jerk your hand out of his.
“Wait!” you blurt.
Eddie flinches, feeling like he’s done something wrong, like he must’ve hurt you in some way.
Your features screw in a pinched look of concentration as you stick your hands in the pockets of your windbreaker. “I’m pretty sure I have a marker in here somewhere— Ah! Here it is!” You’re smiling all over again when you pass him the black Sharpie. “So it won’t wash off before I get to call you.”
“Right,” Eddie hums with a slow nod, taking the marker from you. He bites back a smile when he catches you shoving a pack of sparkly stickers back into your pockets. “What are those?”
“Stickers,” you answer, then grimace when you realize that much was obvious. You rush to elaborate. “For the younger kids that have older siblings. They usually get dragged here, and nine times outta ten, they haven’t learned how to swim yet, so… I try to make ‘em feel better with sparkly things.”
The grin Eddie tries to hide blooms very suddenly across the expanse of his pink lips. His chest swirls with a warmer feeling because you’re sort of his sparkly thing, in a way. A bright and glittering thing that makes him feel whole without trying.
You offer him your hand again, shier now. He wraps it in his larger one with fingertips that border on glacial. You fight back a shiver while Eddie uncaps the marker with his teeth. He mumbles through it while he scribbles his number on your wrist.
“Don’t let this scrub off before you get to call me like other idiots do, alright?” he jokes, flashing you a sparkling stare beneath his lashes.
“I’ll call you the second I get home,” you promise with a firm nod. “I’ll write it down, too, so I won’t forget.”
Eddie caps the marker with a lopsided grin sitting lazily on his mouth. “And it’s only for emergencies, alright? Like, if you need a ride or… A spare Blondie cassette that I may or may not have in my glove box.”
You nod again, this time with a giddy and very poorly hidden smile. “Emergenicies,” you parrot, so he knows you really heard him.
(You call him the second you’re back from your shift, though Eddie expected nothing less from you. The emergency in question? You missed him too much.)
꒷꒦꒷꒷꒦ (㇏(•̀ᵥᵥ•́)ノ) ꒦꒷꒦꒷꒷
this is stranger than i thought,
six different ways inside my heart . . .
꒷꒦꒷꒷꒦ (㇏(•̀ᵥᵥ•́)ノ) ꒦꒷꒦꒷꒷
You decide to visit him that weekend, unannounced and unexpected — which is basically how you entered his life in the first place.
You’re a smiling thing on his doorstep. A rival to the early morning sun beaming in rays behind you. Eddie squints one eye and grimaces at the brightness of each.
“Morning!” you chirp like a songbird.
“What are you doing here? How’d you even find me?” Eddie grumbles tiredly, rubbing his sleep-swollen eye with his fist. He wears his slumber all over — in the wild curls, and in the wrinkled shirt that used to be Wayne’s, and in the baggy plaid pants sitting low on his waist.
The complete and utter opposite of you: an angel kissed with the summer season.
The sun sparkles in your hair. The warm breeze billows in your clothes. The scent of something sweet clings to your skin — of fresh cherries, vanilla cake, and swathes of dewy grass. Each is tantamount to your bone-crushing beauty, which borders on whimsical and intimidating now.
It’s weird seeing you out of your uniform. A strange, but welcomed sight. You’ve traded the mandated bathing suit for a flouncier dress. The thin cotton fabric clings to your torso and drapes over your thighs like summer rain. It’s a scarlet number, gingham-patterned, with two white bows for sleeves.
Eddie’s tired eyes rake over your pretty form despite himself. He gapes when he finds the raging scrapes you wear on both knees, a bright crimson color to match your strawberry aura. “Jesus Chr— Are you okay?!”
You follow his gaze, bending softly at the waist to peer down at your legs. You press the skirt of your dress down with your palms, and your chest pinches at the sight of your raw knees.
Your eyes flit from the fresh scratches to the concerned boy ahead of you. “Which question do you want me to answer first?” you wonder with wide, sheepish eyes.
Eddie repeats, firmer now, “Are you okay?”
“I’m totally fine,” you shrug with a beaming smile before rambling an explanation, talking absentmindedly with your hands. “I decided to buy a bike after I got my paycheck, but I don’t really know how to ride it yet, so I’m trying to teach myself, and I… kinda accidentally swerved into a ditch on the way here.”
Eddie’s chest flares with a primal feeling. He can’t stand the thought of you hurt — can’t stand the thought of you hurt and him not being there to help you. “Okay…” he wavers with his face still screwed.
“I wasn’t stalking you, by the way! Scout’s honor!” you blurt, holding up four fingers instead of three. “I just knew you lived at Forest Hill’s, and, I mean, the van is a dead giveaway, Eds.”
“Fair enough,” he huffs.
“Besides, I really wanted to bring you something, and I couldn’t wait until I saw you at Scoops because the anticipation was driving me crazy—” You lose yourself in thought and slide past him in the doorway without thinking.
Eddie just blinks and shuts the door behind you. “And… What is it… Exactly?” he wonders cautiously, only partially fearful of the answer.
It takes you a moment too long to answer him, as you get lost in the sights around you. The trailer was bigger than it appeared on the outside, not messy by any means, but very lived in.
There’s a folded cot in the corner beside the recliner and a small square TV across from it playing morning cartoons. Vintage baseball caps line one wall, and a collection of mugs line the other. Everything feels like a self-portrait of the Munson family.
“The mixtape I promised,” you answer finally, spinning around to face him again. You pull a plastic cassette from the pocket of your dress and gesture with it in a nervous hand. “I was starin’ at this thing all night, and I couldn’t stop thinking about you— about giving it to you, I mean.” You correct yourself with a nervous laugh and rush to move on. “I’ve always been super bad with gifts— I can’t keep ‘em a secret to save my life. I’m good for, maybe, five seconds, and then I’m just like, gosh, I can’t wait anymore, you know?”
You realize you’re rambling and trail slowly off. You swallow hard, muster a wavering smile, and motion for Eddie to take the cassette. You watch as he studies it with a careful hand — pale and lanky and devoid of his silver rings.
“You made this for me?” he mumbles after a few moments.
“Well, I told you I would.”
“Yeah, but… You made this? For me?” he repeats, with a different inflection. ‘Cause he doesn’t know who else to put it. Doesn’t know how to tell you he doesn’t feel half deserving of anything you could give him.
You giggle in response. “You said you didn’t own anything ABBA. Or Madonna. Or Cyndi Lauper— so obviously, I had to make you an entire compilation of their discography. I’m not an asshole,” you laugh. “And I put a few of my favorite songs on there, too…. And songs that made me think of you and stuff…”
Eddie smiles before he means to. It’s a strange thing, he finds, to be thought of in such an innocent way — to be looked for in the places where he couldn’t physically be. He ducks his chin and peers at you with glimmering eyes. “Yeah? Like what?” he humors.
You don’t miss a beat. “He’s so shy!”
Eddie flinches at your singing — the volume of it, more so. Your voice rings across the quiet trailer, and a laugh sputters past his lips. “Yeah. Alright.”
“That sweet little boy who caught my eye!” you continue and reach out for him, digging your fingers into the junction of his neck and shoulder. His skin is milky white, smooth, cold to the touch.
“Okay!” he chuckles and swats you away with a playful hand. “I get it!”
“It’s the Pointer Sisters,” you grin.
“I’ll take your word for it.”
His chocolate eyes dart back and forth between both of yours, momentarily lost in the way you’re looking at him — with your eyes all squishy around the edges. He’s not used to being looked at so softly. Or being noticed at all.
He swallows hard and averts his gaze. Your scrapped knees enter his vision again, weeping a bright scarlet that threatens to drip down your shins. He ignores any instinct of hunger.
“You’re bleeding pretty bad, by the way.”
You only feel the ache when you’re reminded of it. Your stomach gets all swirly at the sight of your bruised knees, rubbed raw and stained with the grass that partially cushioned your fall.
“Gosh…” you mumble to yourself, clutching the skirt of your dress in your fists. You flash Eddie a sheepish look and a wavering smile. “Any chance I could bum a bandaid?”
꒷꒦꒷꒷꒦ (㇏(•̀ᵥᵥ•́)ノ) ꒦꒷꒦꒷꒷
The bathroom is a tight fight, but you make it work.
You sit on the counter, per Eddie’s instruction, while he retrieves the first aid kit collecting dust in the medicine cabinet. He sits on the edge of the bathtub across from you, way out of his element (in more ways than one), as he cleans your cuts with trembling hands.
His throat is tight with nausea. His head swims with it, too. White stars speckle his vision that he tries hard to blink away. The sight of your blood, diluted and pink on the white tissue, makes him weak.
He isn’t sure if it’s instinct or desire that makes him want to swallow you whole, but the primal urge to consume you is there — in the figurative sense, of course; to bury his teeth in your neck and have a piece of you forever.
Being between your legs in such close confines is ample enough distraction, though.
You push the skirt of your pretty gingham dress up the expanse of your thighs to give him space to work. You sit with them slightly spread, too — enough to reveal a sliver of your underwear, he thinks. Eddie isn’t sure if it’s intentional or not, so he fights the boyish urge to catch a glimpse of the most private part of you.
“Jesus…” he huffs and chucks the napkin into the bin. With the blood and the grass stains now wiped away, he can see the scratches more clearly. Your delicate skin is abraded and raging with it. Like you fell and kept on falling. “Did you get mauled by a bear or something?”
“In the knees?” you quip.
“Looks like it.”
“I just wanted to match my dress,” you shrug. “That’s all.”
Eddie opens an alcohol swab with his teeth, then meets your pretty smile with a scowl. “You’re hurt. It’s not funny,” he deadpans after spitting the package from between his teeth.
“It is a little bit, though,” you argue just to argue, scrunching the bridge of your nose. He presses the damp wipe to your knee, and you flinch at the sudden stinging feeling. “Ow!”
He smiles at your pouting. “Maybe a little,” he concurs.
“That was mean!”
“You told me to distract you, so I distracted you. Sue me,” the boy shrugs, feigning innocence, as he reaches to toss the swab in the trashcan beside the counter.
The sight of wadded tissue, all stained with your ruby-colored blood, makes his breath catch in his throat. The ground starts to sway beneath his feet. His eyes go lidded and heavy. His mouth waters with need.
Eddie shakes his wild head in a feeble attempt to remove the ravenous thoughts from his brain, but all it does is make him dizzier.
He blinks wildly as he reaches for a bandaid in the opened container beside him. It slips from his clammy, tremoring hands. He fumbles to grab it again and slaps it to the counter beside you.
“You okay?” he hears you ask, sitting right in front of him but sounding much further than that.
He sits up again and clears his throat, gaze dim and glassy. “Yeah. Yeah, just— Just give me a second…” He breathes hard through his mouth. Eyes squeezed shut. Knuckles going white around the edges of the ceramic tub.
You watch with a wide, inquisitive stare as you smooth the bandages over your knees yourself. Your concerned gaze flits from the pallid boy ahead of you, to the plasters on your skin, and back to him again.
“If blood makes you queasy, you coulda just said,” you joke, trying to make him smile, ‘cause you hate seeing him so ill. “You didn’t have to torture yourself just to help me.”
“Blood doesn’t make me queasy,” Eddie tells you, though he’s still slurring his words.
“Then why do you look like you’re about to hurl?”
His glazed-over eyes are slow to open. “That’s just my face,” he deadpans.
“No. You have a pretty face, Eddie,” you insist as your giggling swells like sunshine in the tiny bathroom. “It’s just all scrunched together, like you’re gonna be sick or something— like this.”
You swirl your features in a manufactured look of drama and pain. Brows furrowed, nose scrunched, mouth snarled. Eddie chuckles before he can help it. The sick feeling still lingers, though not as obvious now.
“You are bizarre. Did you know that?”
“I did, actually,” you giggle.
Your entwining laughter fills the bathroom’s close quarters. The glittering noise echoes through the small trailer and finds Wayne at the doorstep. He toes off his work boots and pauses at the sound of giggling — one familiar and lower in pitch, the other foreign and sparkling.
His socked feet pad down the length of the carpeted ground until he finds the door between Eddie’s bedroom and the kitchen’s edge, already ajar. It creaks loudly under the man’s calloused palm when he pushes it slowly open.
His tired eyes widen at the sight before him — a pretty girl on the sink with a pair of scrapped knees, and Eddie sitting on the tub ahead of her with bloodied tissue in the bin beside him.
Wayne’s heart falls to ass like a steep drop on a rollercoaster.
You smile brightly at the strange man. “Hello!” you greet with an enthusiastic wave.
He blinks slowly at you for a moment, then nods politely. “Hi there,” Wayne says in a deep and gritty drawl before turning to his nephew. “What’s goin’ on here?”
“Nothing,” Eddie blurts, all wide-eyed and fidgeting. He struggles to be casual as he swipes his clammy hands over his thighs. “We were just, you know, hanging out…”
“Everythin’ alright?”
Eddie nods quickly, then stops when it makes him queasy. “Yeah,” he answers, clearing his throat. “Yeah, she just— fell on her bike on the way over, and—”
He flinches when you gasp.
“Wait! You’re Wayne!” you shout with a sudden recollection.
The man tries not to recoil at the volume of your voice — much too loud for so early in the day, like a chirping bird outside his window. He forces a tightlipped smile and nods again. “I am,” he tells you.
You smile so wide your eyes squint at the edges. “You have Eddie’s nose!”
Wayne laughs, a single scoffed breath. “What can I say? Big noses run in the family.”
“Well, I happen to like ‘em that way,” you insist with a casual shrug, kicking your feet back and forth from where you’re perched on the counter. Your heels meet the cabinet in several rhythmic thunk, thunk, thunks.
When you look down at your bandaged knees, Wayne and Eddie share a look without you.
The older man raises his greying brows. This girl is bizarre, Eddie can hear him saying.
He nods wordlessly at his uncle’s silent observation, as though to say: I know she is, and I happen to like her that way.
꒷꒦꒷꒷꒦ (㇏(•̀ᵥᵥ•́)ノ) ꒦꒷꒦꒷꒷
i guess you’re just what i needed,
i needed someone to bleed . . .
꒷꒦꒷꒷꒦ (㇏(•̀ᵥᵥ•́)ノ) ꒦꒷꒦꒷꒷
The plastic case of the cassette you made him clatters on the dashboard of his van, filling a silence that would otherwise be occupied by you.
Eddie’s passenger seat, cracked and worn with age, feels strikingly empty without you in it. Which is strange, ‘cause your presence used to frighten him once. It does, still, he thinks — but now he mourns the haunt like an old, empty house.
He drives his rattling tin can across town to Hawkins Community Pool, with a cup of rainbow sherbet rattling in the holder at his side, like an offering for a ghost he no longer wants to exorcise from the home behind his ribcage.
“It’s gonna melt before you get it to her,” Robin remarked with a smirk as she scooped ice cream with an expert hand. “You know that, right?”
Eddie bowed his head and tried to hide behind his curls. “Not if I run real fast,” he joked sheepishly.
The pastel sherbet softens quickly in the summer heat. (Not even the van’s middling A.C., pointed right in its direction, could keep it sufficiently cool.) The muted hues of pink, green, and orange begin to swirl together as the milky concoction undulates in his ringed fist. He hopes you don’t mind and prays you see past his feeble attempt to be kind.
“Well, well, well…” Billy Hargrove lilts with a pretty pink smirk at the sight of Eddie Munson’s familiar face. He lifts his sunglasses to the top of his mulleted curls and rests his magazine on his lap. “The dead has risen…”
The poor boy sticks out without trying, despite his desperate attempts to stay hidden — all but swimming in his leather jacket, baggy jeans, and wild hair. He’s a pale, death-touched thing floating in a sea of golden life.
But, unlike the contemptuous leers from the other patrons, (some who are still certain Eddie killed Chrissy, and others who have always seemed to look at him that way), Billy Hargrove only smiles. A fake, sardonic grin that shows none of his teeth and shines mostly in his eyes.
His squinted ocean gaze glimmers like he knows all of Eddie’s secrets — which is only half-true. Billy knows what the end of the world did to him, because it almost killed him too, once upon a time.
So, no. He doesn’t know all of Eddie’s secrets.
Just the biggest one, maybe.
Despite being largely immune to the summer heat, Eddie still feels the burn of embarrassment stinging his chest. Clawing behind his ribcage like a thousand ravaging demobats. The hot-cold aching of wishing he were dead ebbs when you turn to look at him over your shoulder — when your wide eyes of sparkling hope lock with his darker, dead-er ones.
There’s an undeniable spark of delight in your irises, though Eddie doesn’t know what for. No one’s been this happy to see him in a year. No one’s been this happy to see him ever.
Something about it makes his stomach hurt. Or maybe it’s just the way you and Hargrove are sitting behind the front counter together, like a couple of old friends, with glowing sunkissed skin hugged tight in scarlet bathing suits.
In that split second, Eddie feels like he’s in high school again — a loser, not yet dead, pining for the pretty girl way out of his league and praying the basketball jock doesn’t shove him into the bleachers.
If you notice the momentary fear in his eyes, you don’t show it.
And if you care that he’s a loser, you don’t show that, either.
“Eddie! Hi!” you greet, giggling as you push yourself off the countertop. Your pleated skirt swishes around your thighs as you rush to him. Your matching sandals pad rhythmically along the stone floor. The flip-flop, flip-fop sound echoes through the shaded breezeway.
Eddie doesn’t know how wide he’s smiling when you’re finally standing ahead of him, but he can feel it burning in the apples of his cheeks.
“You haven’t been around for lunch,” he says in place of a greeting, fidgeting with the cup of melting ice cream in his fist. “I was scared that you keeled over or somethin’.”
“You were worried about me?” you wonder aloud, voice a few octaves higher than he’s used to. You purse your smile to the side of your mouth and scrunch your nose. “Aww…” you croon and dig two fingers into the junction of his neck.
Your touch is soft and warm and less than gentle.
Eddie cringes, effectively set aflame by the electricity of you. He shrinks back with a wavering smile and finds himself grateful that he’s too dead to blush these days — or else you’d see how hopeless he is.
You ramble an explanation while his skin buzzes.
“I’m a little slow on my bike, turns out, and I couldn’t make it back here in time,” you tell him, which rests his anxieties a little.
Eddie’s been worried about you ever since he patched you up in his bathroom. Everyone’s been worried about you, in truth, ‘cause it’s a well-known fact that you’re a total klutz.
“And after being late for the third time, Adam got kinda mad at me…” you continue, shifting on your feet. “He got really mad at me, actually. I wore his favorite bikini, and he still threatened to fire me. I was, like, oh shit, I’m actually in trouble—”
You giggle to yourself, but Eddie feels like there’s a knife between his ribcage. A sharp, burning, and pulsing urge to get you away from all of these assholes. To get you out of this town. God knows it doesn’t deserve you.
He swallows hard and tries to joke. “Must’ve been real bad then, huh?”
You exhale a dramatic sigh. “Yeah, so… I’m kinda trying to get back on his good side and everything. It’s easier to just stay here. I would’ve called, but I— I didn’t think you cared that much.”
“I care!” Eddie scoffs, pale face swirled with offense.
“You’re the one that said emergencies only!” you mock through another pretty giggle.
“Abandoning me for a week is an emergency.”
You light up like a goddamn Christmas tree at that.
“See! I knew you were worried about me!”
Eddie scoffs again and looks away. He focuses on the crowd bustling outside the breezeway because it’s easier than meeting your eyes. Until one of them catches his gaze and flashes him a leery look, anyway. Then he feels like he might puke.
“Not at all,” he answers in a playful deadpan, clearing his throat when his voice shakes. “That’s definitely not why I decided to bring you a… half-melted cup of rainbow sherbet.”
His chocolate eyes avert to the plastic container in his fist, swirling the milky pastels again for good measure. When he looks at you again, it’s through his lashes and with his head bowed sheepishly.
You smile with your lips curled under your teeth — obviously giddy and trying hopelessly to hide it.
“I thought it was for me, but I didn’t wanna assume,” you admit quietly, cheek squished into your shoulder.
“It’s basically a milkshake now,” Eddie mumbles and extends his arm. His voice shakes as much as his hand does. “Sorry…”
You beam at the pinched look of worry on his face. “I like milkshakes, too, silly,” you giggle and take the cup of melted ice cream from him.
Your fingers are gentle and strikingly warm as they brush his colder, paler ones. Warm like dragonfire, or an old house bathed in candlelight, or a freshly sharpened blade through the heart.
Eddie bleeds out on the pebbled concrete as you turn away.
You rush back to the counter you leapt from, balancing the container in one palm as you bend over the top of it. A satiny summer breeze rolls through the shaded shack and billows through the pleats of your skirt, lifting the thin fabric to reveal the thong of your one-piece — a sliver of soft scarlet running between your thighs.
Eddie’s undead heart lurches into his throat. He turns his gaze to the ceiling until the wind passes.
Billy looks up from his magazine to smile at you with his teeth. “This your boyfriend, sweet thing?” he asks as you pluck your straw from the styrofoam cup you were just drinking from.
The nickname floats on the humid air and strangles Eddie accordingly. Your mouth curls around the end of the bendy straw before you give him a proper answer. You blow hard to dispel the remnants of room-temperature water before sticking the plastic into the milky concoction in your fist.
“Yes,” you answer plainly, then take a long sip of the softened ice cream. You shrug with the raspberry-orange taste on your tongue. “He’s a boy. And he’s my friend,” you lilt. “Jealous?”
Billy laughs. Loud.
“Of Munson?”
You nod quietly, straw caged between your teeth.
He laughs louder and slouches in his swivel chair. The golden muscles of his toned chest flex as he flashes you a quieter smile — one that might say he knows a lot more than you do if you cared enough to read the signals.
“I can’t say that I am, no,” Billy hums, faux sympathetically.
“Well, maybe if you were a little nicer, he’d be bringing you food, too,” you tell him, very matter-of-fact about the whole thing, as you spin on the heel of your rubber flip-flop and saunter away.
Eddie grimaces when you’re ahead of him again. “Please tell me this isn’t the only thing you’ve had today.”
Your face screws as you take another sip. “No,” you answer with a firm shake of your head, though the word comes out garbled from the fruity concoction in your mouth. You swallow it down and confess, “I had half a Poptart for breakfast, so…”
“That’s… not breakfast,” the boy monotones, then motions his wild head to the cup cradled in your right hand. “And this isn’t lunch.”
“Well, I told you I don’t have time to get lunch,” you argue like a child, soft and sheepish, head bowed to avoid his unwavering stare. You stab at the softened ice cream with the plastic straw, leaving holes in the pastel swirls, as you mutter to yourself, “And I can’t make it for myself, either. I’m not adult enough for that yet.”
Eddie feels it again. The sting of empathy in his chest. The primitive need to help you that makes it hard to breathe most days.
He shrugs his leather-clad shoulders and crosses his arms over his chest, tucking his trembling hands under his armpits.
“Well— Maybe— Maybe I can, you know, bring you something?” Eddie offers, stumbling over himself the entire way through. He shifts on his feet and swallows through the frog in his throat. “Like, when I have the time, or whatever.”
He doesn’t tell you that he always has the time. (‘Cause he only works nights at The Hideout now, and spends the rest of the day’s many hours rotting in bed.)
Your face pinches into a girlish pout. Something soft, but sterner than he thinks he’s ever seen you before. “I can’t ask you to do that.”
“You’re not asking. I’m offering,” Eddie argues. “And I’m not doing it outta the kindness of my own heart, either— It’d just make me feel better to know you’re not totally withering away whenever I’m not here.”
You try hard to keep your scowl. But then your chest starts to glitter like a thousand sparklers in July, and you’re beaming before you can stop it. Eddie watches the pretty smile curl slowly on your lips despite your futile attempt to hide it.
“What’s that look for?” he cautions.
“Nothin’,” you shrug, smiling with the straw between your teeth. “I just like you.”
Eddie forgets to breathe and dies all over again, right at your feet.
꒷꒦꒷꒷꒦ (㇏(•̀ᵥᵥ•́)ノ) ꒦꒷꒦꒷꒷
only boys who save their pennies
make my rainy day!
꒷꒦꒷꒷꒦ (㇏(•̀ᵥᵥ•́)ノ) ꒦꒷꒦꒷꒷
Most Tuesdays, some Wednesdays, and every Friday — (the mornings after his late night shifts at The Hideout) — Eddie Munson buys you lunch.
He stands at the counter of Benny’s Burgers and pays with the rogue quarters and crumpled bills he finds in random pockets of his jacket. The bearded man looks on in slow-blinking bemusement while the boy counts out the $4.89 your sandwich costs.
Benny ends up throwing in free fries for the effort.
It takes Eddie an embarrassing amount of time to realize you were sneaking money into his pockets every time he visited you, even though he told you not to pay him back. Even though you swore you wouldn’t. (He’ll never believe another one of your stupid Scout’s Honor promises again).
Saturday comes, and Eddie’s cleaned out ’til his next shift on Monday.
He thinks he’s handling it pretty well — the very palpable lack of you — but the contrary is written all over his face.
He’s sprawled out on the sunken-in couch in the living room with the headphones of his Walkman around his neck. Madonna plays muffledly (and far too happily) as he stares up at the ceiling, trying to make constellations of your face from the cracks and water stains.
Dustin watches his best friend grieve from the other side of the coffee table and sighs. “It’s the sandwiches, right? You guys hate the sandwiches?” he wonders aloud, but to no one in particular. “God, I knew I put too much jelly in them—”
“The sandwiches are amazing, Dusty-Bun,” Robin insists from Wayne’s recliner, with a mouthful of PB&J jutting out her freckled cheek. Her chipping maroon nails are stained with crumbs as they flash an ‘ok’ symbol in his direction.
With grape jelly on the corner of his mouth, Steve mumbles from the floor in front of her, “Doesn’t explain why Eddie’s still sulking over there, though.”
“Exactly!” Dustin huffs, flailing his arms.
Eddie rolls his eyes. He exhales a heavy breath that makes his chest deflate, then turns to face the eyes staring back at him. “I’m not sulking,” he grumbles like a rain cloud.
“Yeah. It’s the pouting that’s so convincing,” Max scoffs from Dustin’s other side, blinking at him from behind her glasses as she fakes a tight-lipped grin.
Eddie just squints at her. She’s not nearly as menacing as she used to be. Not when her ocean eyes are bugged out from such thick lenses, anyway. Now he finds her sort of adorable, in a subtly intimidating way — like a kitten holding a pocketknife.
“I’m not pouting, either,” the wild-haired boy retorts, features scrunched in a soft pout.
Lucas wipes his mouth with the back of his hand. “He just misses Barbie,” the boy croons playfully.
Eddie blinks at him with a flat face. “Barbie?” he echoes.
“Yeah,” he shrugs, voice high. “Barbie.”
“Am I supposed to know who that is, or…?”
“Oh, you know who she is,” Lucas nods with a boyish chuckle. “Very well.”
He keeps on laughing about it until Max elbows him hard in the shoulder. Steve misses the silent cue as he tears off a piece of bread crust, snickering to himself at the inside joke.
He pops it into his mouth and meets Eddie’s gaze, emotionless and expectant. His eyes widen as he stammers for a response.
“The girl— Your girl— She was at Jazzercise the other day,” Steve explains, then swallows hard. “She was with that pretty lifeguard, too. What’s her name again?”
He looks instinctively up at Robin for an answer. Eddie beats her to the punch.
“Billy Hargrove?” he monotones.
“Ha-ha.”
“Heather Holloway,” Robin tells him.
“Heather!” Steve exclaims, snapping his fingers. “I’m pretty sure I dated her freshman year, actually… Or was that Heather Hart?”
The boy loses focus quickly as he goes deep in thought. Fluffy brows pinched, honey eyes squinted. A heavy silence lulls over the crowded living room, and Madonna’s muffled voice grows louder. ‘Cause we are living in a material world, and I am a material girl!—
Before Eddie has time to be embarrassed, Steve shrugs at himself.
“Doesn’t matter. Anyway. She was at Jazzercise with Heather just, like, dripping in pink. Pink leg warmers, pink leotard, pink tights…” Steve trails off again, stare glazing over like he's imagining you all over again. “It was crazy…”
Eddie’s face swirls in disgust. Not at the thought of you, of course, but at the notion that your beauty is perceptible to others. That he isn’t the only one who can see you, admire you. He is not the only one you’ve threatened to kill with your piercing stare, and the thought alone makes his stomach twist.
“You’re such a boy,” Eddie scoffs.
Robin leans forward, freckled face solemn and serious. She rests her elbows on her denim-clad knees and slowly shakes her head. “No… It was crazy,” she echoes more earnestly.
It sounds different coming from her. It means something different coming from her, too. Eddie’s brows raise and disappear beneath his curly bangs. “Oh, yeah?” he hums with bated breath.
“Yeah,” Robin answers with a disbelieving sigh.
“Hence, the nickname,” Lucas nods, seemingly missing the meaning ‘cause the only other girl he’s cared to notice besides Pheobe Cates is the redhead sitting beside him.
The girl with magnifying glasses over her eyes and legs that don’t work as well as they used to. Despite the circumstances (involving dark wizards and a certain death), Max hasn’t changed at all. And neither has the way Lucas’ teenage boy heart beats for her.
Eddie scoffs a tired laugh. He turns back to the ceiling and throws an elbow over his eyes. “I’m gonna tell her you guys call her that behind her back, by the way.”
“It’s a compliment!” Dustin defends, a few octaves higher than normal.
“Or you could tell her to her face,” Max offers with an absentminded shrug, folding her napkin into a weird shape in her lap — only ‘cause she’s fidgeting, of course, not because Dr. Owens said it would help ease the stiffness in her fingers. (Being dead might’ve taught her some things, but listening to figures of authority is not one of them.)
“She’s working today. Billy said so.”
Eddie peeks at her, flat-faced. “Did he?”
“Yeah. Means you can go visit your girlfriend instead of bitching and moaning about how much you miss her all weekend.”
“She’s not my girlfriend, Mayfield.”
“That’s beside the point.”
“No. That is entirely the point,” Eddie argues, laughing more sincerely now. “Other than the fact that the sun will literally kill me.”
Max’s light eyes narrow into thin slits behind her clunky glasses. She says the hard thing out loud, without blinking. that the rest of them are already thinking, anyway.
“You’re already dead, Munson.”
꒷꒦꒷꒷꒦ (㇏(•̀ᵥᵥ•́)ノ) ꒦꒷꒦꒷꒷
hey, you, with the pretty face,
welcome to the human race!
꒷꒦꒷꒷꒦ (㇏(•̀ᵥᵥ•́)ノ) ꒦꒷꒦꒷꒷
No wonder the streets seemed so apocalyptically empty, Eddie thinks to himself as he walks through the front gates of Hawkins Community Pool. Because every goddamn person in town has chosen to spend their Saturday here.
Benny from the diner sits by the kiddie pool next to the entrance, watching his daughter wade in the shallow water. He looks like a different person without his grease-stained apron on. His swim trunks are bright red and slightly too short for him, his Hawaiian shirt is unbuttoned to reveal his beer belly, and his face is burnt everywhere but under his sunglasses.
Jason, Andy, and all the rest of their goons hog the picnic tables while pretty girls sit on the tops of them — wearing their expensive bikinis and basking in the sun like it’s shining just for them. The boys laugh and shove at one another, trying to pretend like they’re far too cool for it all.
Familiar faces fill the blue water, but it’s hard to make them out in the crowd. Everyone’s swimming and splashing and stuffed within the chain-linked fence like cattle. They all go blurry, like a bunch of indistinct shapes before a backdrop of bright colors. Like a Claud Monet painting, if he ever cared enough to paint uninspiring Midwestern towns.
It’s far too packed to feel self-conscious ‘cause this is the kind of horde you drown in. But that just means it’s catastrophically overstimulating. For Eddie, most of all, who’s sorely out of place in his leather jacket and baggy jeans and dirty sneakers.
The boy cranes his neck to search for you, dark eyes flitting wildly over the crowd — once, twice, and then a third time.
You’re nowhere to be found, and he knows this because your face is far too pretty and not easily missed. Your sweet hibiscus scent is equally absent, drowned out by the overwhelming smell of chlorine, sunblock, and sweat.
If you were around, he’d know it.
“She’s not even here!” Eddie huffs, lifting his arms only to drop them dramatically at his sides. Any arguments about his pouting are surely moot now. Even he can feel the petulant scowl pinching his features.
Max, equally confused, stands at his side and pushes her glasses up her nose. “Billy said she was working today. I heard him on the phone. He definitely said it,” she observes, mostly to herself, ‘cause she can’t stomach being wrong. “Well… He said he was opening with the two prettiest girls in town, so I figured one was probably Heather and the other was—”
“Barbie?” Eddie finishes flatly.
“Yeah.”
“Well, she’s obviously not here, so… Let’s just go back home and do— literally anything else.”
Eddie spins on the heel of his worn sneaker with the intention of going back the way he came. His van is parked crooked, anyhow. Steve complained as much when he parked his shiny new BMW right beside him. He figures he should probably get back before someone slashes his tires. Again.
He nearly runs into someone the second he turns around. Someone standing far too close for comfort, in a bright red bathing suit and matching skirt, with too big sunglasses on the top of her head.
“Who’s not working today?!” the person shouts loudly in his face, with the evident intent to scare him.
Eddie stumbles back into Steve, who promptly shoves him forward again. It takes him approximately that long to realize it’s you.
You guffaw when the rest of them jump in fright — a loud and heavenly sound that refuses to be drowned out by the droning of a million different conversations.
“I totally got you guys!” you exclaim, giggling so hard your head tilts back.
Eddie laughs with you, mostly in shock, as he clutches his chest where his heart isn’t beating.
“Admit it! I got you a little?” you say, pinching your thumb and forefinger and squinting through the sliver of space between them.
“Yeah,” the boy huffs a forced laugh. “Yeah, a— a little bit.”
Visibly delighted by his words, you beam brighter than the golden hour sun.
“I knew it!” you grin before your eyes flit over his shoulder, to the group of friends gaping wordlessly behind him. You scrunch your nose sympathetically. “Sorry… You guys were just collateral.”
“You know I have a bad heart,” Steve complains for the sake of complaining, clutching his chest over his short-sleeved button-up. He flashes you a stern look and gripes, “That shit’ll kill me.”
Your eyes narrow in a challenging squint. “You’re twenty-one years old, Steve.”
“Yeah,” he scoffs. “And being around you ages me five years.”
“Well, then, I guess we’re gonna have a very long, very happy life together. Aren’t we, Stevie?” you retort with a sickly sweet smile that Steve meets with a scruffy-faced scowl.
Eddie watches the brunette boy roll his eyes like he wasn’t getting half-hard at the thought of you at Jazzercise an hour ago. It makes him only partly jealous.
He could never dream of being so casual around you. ‘Cause when your eyes find his again, it feels like his stomach’s doing backflips. It’s like he blinks, and he forgets how to speak.
“So!” you chirp. “Family trip?”
Eddie opens his mouth and doesn’t realize until that moment that every word in the English language has left his brain. Robin shoves him hard in the back to put his head back on straight. The words fly from his mouth like a pull-string doll.
“I didn’t wanna bother you, but these idiots forced me into it.”
“Good. You need to get out of the house from time to time, Eds— You’re getting so pale,” you ramble and reach suddenly for his face. Eddie freezes when you take his chin by your thumb and forefinger. The warmth of your velvety touch sets his skin aflame; more so when you look directly into his wide-eyed gape and say, “There’s nothin’ wrong with needing a little sunshine, Eddie Spaghetti.”
“Weird,” Max muses with a sarcastic lilt. “That is exactly what we’ve been trying to tell him, too.”
Eddie shoots her a glare — the best he can, anyway, with your hand still cradling his jaw. He can only see the redhead from the corner of his eye, but the smug smirk on her freckled face doesn’t go missed.
Your fingers slip from his face, and Eddie feels like he can breathe again. He feels strangely empty, still, without you touching him — like he’s starving, or like he’s never been touched before now. Sometimes, it feels like both are true.
He wonders if that’s just the price he has to pay. If being near you means feeling like he’s dying and coming to life all at once. There’s a nagging voice in the back of his head that tells him he’ll pay it, with your pretty fingers strangling his neck and all.
“You’re MADMAX, right?” you wonder aloud to the girl with auburn plaits draping her freckled shoulders.
She’s mostly a stranger to you now, but you think she must mean a great deal to the rest of them. They talk a whole lot about the redhead with chunky glasses who acts like she’s way too cool for it all but defends her Dig Dug high score like her life depends on it.
The girl nods and crosses her pale arms across her chest, flashing you a suspicious, tightlipped smile. “Yeah. Which means you must be Barbie?”
“Barbie?” you echo.
Eddie chimes in then. “That’s what these freaks call you when you’re not around,” he says, nodding his wild head to the group of aforementioned freaks behind him.
Your face twists as you bring your hand to the center of your chest. “That is the nicest thing anyone’s ever called me before,” you respond, strangely sincere.
Lucas smiles from over Max’s shoulder, nodding like he’s proud. “You’re welcome,” he tells you.
Dustin stands just beside him with a conspicuous paper bag under his arm. You squint past Eddie and over to the curly-haired boy. “What’s that?” you blurt.
It takes him a second too long to answer. “Oh. Uh. A sandwich—” he stammers vaguely, extending his arm towards you. You take the sack from him without thinking twice and rifle blindly through its contents.
“PB&J?” you guess with an inquisitive arch to your brow. Dustin nods, looking pleased by your assumption. Your arm stills suddenly within the crinkling brown sack, and your eyes narrow into thin slits. “With the crust cut off?”
“Uh… no.”
“Good. That’s obviously the best part of the whole sandwich,” you respond, almost to yourself, as you pluck the snack from the bag.
You unwrap it from its plastic seal and take a hefty bite in one fell swoop. Your eyes flutter shut like it’s something gourmet, and not just something Dustin slapped together on his kitchen step stool at home.
“Thank you for this,” you mumble through the wad of food in your cheek. “You’re officially my new best friend, Dusty-Bun.”
“Rude,” Eddie scoffs.
You swallow hard and fight back a smile, like you were hoping for that exact response. “And who said you were my best friend in the first place, hm?” you argue playfully, waving the half-eaten peanut butter jelly sandwich in his face. “That is very presumptuous of you, Eddie Spaghetti.”
Your pleated skirt flutters at your hips when you spin on the heel of your plastic sandal. You flip flop, flip flop out of the shaded shack and towards the sunshine and unadulterated chaos. The rest of them follow behind you — save for Dustin, who migrates to Eddie’s side with a far-off gaze.
“Sure she’s not your girlfriend?” the kid wonders, never once taking his eyes off the back of you.
Eddie looks down at him with a flat face. “I’m sure,” he monotones.
Dustin grins wide, likely forgetting that other people can see it, too. “Good,” he hums to himself.
“Don’t get any ideas, Henderson,” the older boy blurts before he means to, then tries not to cower under the expectant glance he gets. “You’re obviously way out of her league.”
꒷꒦꒷꒷꒦ (㇏(•̀ᵥᵥ•́)ノ) ꒦꒷꒦꒷꒷
The group fits in pretty well despite being the self-proclaimed outcasts of Hawkins, Indiana.
Steve most of all, but that usually goes without saying. He looks like small-town royalty in his brand-name polo and too-expensive navy swim shorts. He’s lost his touch since high school, though, as he tries and fails to flirt with Carol Perkins’ sister.
“So, Amber— What’d you say you were studying again?” you hear him ask as he lingers awkwardly by the longue chairs.
“My name is Autumn,” she corrects in a drawl that’d give a valley girl a run for her money.
Steve, oblivious to his blunder, only smiles. “Oh, cool. That’s, like, definitely in my top four favorite seasons—”
Robin, in a strange turn of events, is much more casual in her flirting than her co-worker-slash-best-friend. She spotted Vicki the second she walked in, sitting with a few girls from yearbook and rubbing sunscreen onto her supple skin.
She pretended she didn’t, though, which only made it that much more obvious that she had. Vicki waved at her once, then again to invite her over, and Robin was far too awkward to decline.
Now, she sits gracelessly with a bunch of half-strangers and her biggest crush, looking only slightly out of place in her frayed shorts and Steve’s baggy tee. She nods politely in conversation and thanks the universe for making it so damn hot today. At least now she can blame her burning freckled face on the golden setting sun.
Dustin and Lucas, meanwhile, stuff their faces with ice cream sandwiches in a feeble attempt to consume them before they melt. The softened vanilla leaves messes on their fingers and faces, making them look somehow more boyish than their respective Spiderman and Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle swim trunks.
Max sits off to the side of them in her own chair, partly overstimulated, and trying to let the piercing sunbeams ground her again.
Eddie Munson, however, in his attempt to blend in, only draws more attention to himself.
He sits beside your post, shaded beneath a wide umbrella, in the same attire you’d see him in on any other day. The baggy jeans, and the thick leather jacket, and the Corroded Coffin merch. He’s dripping in black and silver but hasn’t yet broken a sweat. You don’t know how, though. ‘Cause you’re hot just looking at him.
You pluck your plastic whistle from your mouth to ask, “Are you sure you’re not burning up over there?”
Eddie laughs before he means to because the answer’s obvious to him.
The last time he felt an ounce of heat was when he was bleeding out on the dirt floor of an alternate universe — when crimson blood ran warm over the mangled skin of his chest and ribs. He’s been colder than ice ever since. And he keeps forgetting you don’t know about any of that.
“Yeah. I’m sure,” he answers, angling his head to face yours.
There’s a white cast on his grey face from sunscreen deliberately not rubbed in. It feels like a shield in some way. Not in the warm-blooded human kind of way, of course, but in the vampiric curse kind. The kind that would otherwise make him debilitatingly weak sitting outside like this. Now, he feels somewhat normal.
The golden hour sun sits like a halo behind your head. He squints one eye to see you better. “If you wanna see me shirtless, you can just say that,” he jokes. “Instead of beating around the bush and everything—”
“I wanna see you shirtless,” you blurt in a strange monotone that makes it hard to tell if you’re joking or not.
The boy falters. Tries not to choke on his own spit. There isn’t a world where he can flirt with you where you don’t immediately snatch the upper hand. It’s like you’re immune to that sort of diffidence. Eddie wishes he was, too.
“Wow,” he scoffs after the few long moments it takes him to recover. “Way to be blunt, sweetheart.”
“You told me to say it!”
You give him a lazy shrug and a lazier smile as you swap the bright red lifeguard buoy to your other arm. Eddie shifts uncomfortably in his seat, as though physically affected by the way you look at him, and the plastic pool chair makes a weird squeaking noise beneath him.
“Yeah, well, most people tend to be more subtle about it.”
“I’ve never been subtle about anything in my life.”
You turn back around to scan the busy pool, and Eddie feels like he can breathe again. A laugh rattles through his tight chest as he quips, “I’m starting to realize that about you, actually—”
“God. Stop flirting,” Max groans from your other side, who has otherwise been so silent that Eddie was starting to forget she was there. She doesn’t turn to look at either of you from where she lazes on the lounge chair. “Sitting with Steve would be more bearable than this.”
“Yeah, Eddie. Stop flirting with me,” you grouse, obviously playful, and without missing a single beat. You glare at the boy over your mostly bare shoulder and try hard not to smile. (He can’t see it in your eyes, anyway, though.) “I’m trying to talk to my new friend MADMAX. Gosh—”
You spin on the heel of your plastic red sandal, and your matching skirt twirls with you. Eddie can’t take his eyes off the back of you. He forgets how to blink when the fabric swishes to give him a brief glimpse of your ass.
He’s always hated the sun, but he loves the way it kisses your skin — leaving you glistening and mouthwateringly supple.
His fangs threaten to make an appearance when a warm breeze carries your cotton candy cloud scent to him. His gums start to burn with the sharp ache.
“—Hi, MADMAX,” you singsong to the scowling girl, grinning with your cheek pressed to your shoulder.
“You can just call me Max,” she deadpans. “You know that, right?”
“But MADMAX is so much cooler. And it suits you way better.”
“Does it?” MADMAX wonders with an unenthusiastic hum.
“Yeah. Maxine is a name for an old woman. Or, like, one of those ridiculously expensive French poodles,” you ramble and turn back to the pool again, head bobbing as you scan the crowd. “But MADMAX? Now, that is a name for a badass with really cool hair and a sick pair of reading glasses.”
There’s a beat of silence, filled only by the sound of splashing water and the buzzing of a thousand distant conversations, as Max tries to bite back a laugh. It sputters past her anxiety-bitten lips before she can stop it — a strangely airy giggle from such an intimidating girl.
She shakes her head, still, to pretend she’s above the childish giddiness.
Your face screws in feigned offense. “Don’t laugh!” you scold.
Which, of course, only makes her laugh harder.
Eddie lifts his head, finally taking his eyes off you to gape at the redhead across the aisle, who hasn’t laughed like this since the world ended.
It must be something strange you alone bring out of them, he realizes. Something special in you that the end of the world didn’t steal like it did everyone else.
“These guys bothering you, newbie?” you hear your manager call to you, only partially drowned out by the surrounding laughter and shouting from the bustling crowd.
His voice is annoyingly distinct. It’s deep and articulate in a way that makes him seem smart. You don’t know if he really is, but you do know that he’s really a raging asshole.
Adam stands before you, gold and glittering under the setting sun like God’s first creation himself. He’s got veins up and down the length of his muscular arms, and a bulging chest that he waxes every two weeks like clockwork. He’s Steve The Hair Harrington pretty without an ounce of the charm.
“Huh?” you call back, brows raised and eyes wide, just to make him repeat himself.
“I asked if these guys were bothering you,” Adam repeats, flicking his cleft chin back to get the blonde curls out of his eyes. “You look distracted.”
“What guys?” you wonder with an innocent furrow to your brows.
The man’s emerald eyes flit instinctively over your shoulder at Eddie, who everyone has been trying and failing not to stare at this whole time.
You wonder if Eddie notices it, too — if he’s gotten immune to the constant leering or if he’s bone-crushingly aware of it all. Either way, no one deserves to be ogled at like that. Like some kinda zoo animal.
Everyone always walks on eggshells around him, refusing to look him in the eye out of fear he might bite. But you know he doesn’t have the teeth for it.
Despite that, you look at Eddie over your shoulder like he’s a stranger. His eyes are wide and swimming with apprehension as the chocolates of them dart between you and the man made out of chiseled marble.
Adam knows that you know him. You know he knows it, too. Which makes lying to him all the more fun.
“I’ve never seen this man before in my life,” you shrug.
Adam squints and crosses his too-big arms over his chest. “Doesn’t change the fact that he’s loitering. Along with the rest of these kids—” He looks around him with a visible disgust.
Max pretends he isn’t there. Dustin and Lucas, meanwhile, forget to be casual as they cower under his stare with their ice-cream-stained faces.
“It’s a public pool, Adam. Everyone's loitering. Duh.”
You turn away and stick your whistle back in your mouth. You chew absentmindedly at the plastic and scan the pool for any reason to use it.
Adam’s neck twitches. An angry sort of tic he didn’t know he had until he met you. “You’re still on the clock, newbie. If I see you gettin’ distracted again, I’ll—”
You blow the whistle. Loud. And for far longer than you probably need to.
The high-pitched chirping rings in Adam’s ears from the close proximity. He flinches away accordingly.
“No running, please!” you shout sweetly to the pudgy middle school-aged boy on the other side of the pool. (His babysitter always brings him here so she can sunbathe, and he’s always roughhousing in the deep end. Billy’s developed a personal vendetta with him over the summer.)
The suddenly quiet pool returns to its deafening chaos a second later.
You flash Adam a cheeky smile. “You were saying?”
“I was saying that I’ll take it out of your paycheck,” the man bites, angled jaw clenched tight. “You’re already on thin ice. Understand?”
Your lip juts in a feigned pout. You nod slowly, eyes wide like a puppy he’s just kicked.
“One more strike, and you’re cleaning toilets, newbie.”
“Ah, I knew that’s what this was all about…” you lilt seductively, lips curling into a mischievous smirk. “You just want to see me bending over—”
You lean closer toward him until your spearmint breath fans across his chiseled jaw. Your bottom juts out in Eddie’s direction, until he can see the very bottom of your ass from beneath your pleated skirt. It makes him as flustered as Adam the Asshole, who stalks off on long legs quickly after, sufficiently embarrassed.
You laugh at the back of him until he disappears into the crowd again. The bubbly sound ceases the moment he’s out of earshot, and your smile ebbs into a girlish pout. “Dickwad,” you mumble under your breath.
You recover from it all rather quickly while Eddie struggles to remind himself to breathe. His mind reels as he, for the first time ever, grapples with the very real possibility that he might actually be in love with you. Or that you’re not real at all, and that this is just Vecna’s doing — long gone but still putting visions in his head somehow.
He doesn’t know which is worse.
꒷꒦꒷꒷꒦ (㇏(•̀ᵥᵥ•́)ノ) ꒦꒷꒦꒷꒷
oh, what a strange magic!
oh, it’s a strange magic!
꒷꒦꒷꒷꒦ (㇏(•̀ᵥᵥ•́)ノ) ꒦꒷꒦꒷꒷
The golden-orange sky turns a milky pink and lavender. Eddie’s friends, sunburnt and sufficiently pruned, don’t leave until the first star blinks faintly in the sky. The rest of the crowd goes with them, bustling bodies spilling out in a swarm.
It takes the rest of the gang several long moments to realize Eddie isn’t behind them. (You told him you forgot your sunglasses, and he offered to get them for you, ‘cause he’s nice like that and everything.)
(He doesn’t know the sunglasses are currently hiding in the pocket of your windbreaker.)
“What, where’s Eddie?” Dustin wonders aloud to the rest of the group, head flitting wildly in search of the misplaced metalhead.
“He went to the bathroom, I think,” you blurt the first lie you can think of. “He was talking about a nervous tummy or something. I don’t know.”
Steve scoffs like he senses a non-truth. “So, he’s leaving me with babysitting duty again?” he quips with a cynical, lopsided smile. “How predictable.”
“You say that like we’re the spawn of Satan or something,” Lucas jokes.
“You aren’t?” the oldest boy deadpans.
Dustin flips him off with a chubby finger and a flat face.
They bid their leave tangled in mindless arguments and lanky limbs. You watch them leave with the understanding that Steve’s 733i will be a tighter fit than it should be, crammed with a bunch of rowdy teenage boys. You feel sorry for Max and Robin most of all.
Steve’s car peels out of the parking lot one moment, and Eddie returns the next.
“I couldn’t find your sunglasses anywhere,” he confesses sheepishly, face twisted like a puppy’s as he scratches awkwardly at the back of his neck. “I don’t know. I think some asshole might’ve stolen ‘em—”
“Oh, no, it’s okay,” you shrug with a tightlipped smile. “I found them in the, uh— In the lost-and-found bin.”
“Oh. Okay. Cool,” Eddie stammers, nodding slowly, just before a smile tugs at his lips. You watch from beneath your lashes as the subtle realization curls on his face. “You had ‘em the entire time, didn’t you?” the boy wonders in a low voice that makes your stomach do whirl.
“Yes,” you squeak in a mousy voice, then ramble before you can stop it. “But only ‘cause I wanted everyone else to leave! You know, so we can have a real date and everything…”
“As opposed to the fake ones we’ve been having?” he jokes with pinched brows.
“Exactly,” you nod, strikingly sincere. ‘Cause the constant carpooling and melted rainbow sherbet dropoffs had to have meant something.
“As tempting as that sounds, sweet thing,” he humors, scrunching the bridge of his nose. “I do think I might be actually coming down with sunstroke.”
You turn your head wordlessly to the entryway of the shack. There’s only a sliver of the night sky visible from here, but it’s navy blue and sparkling with so many little stars. You look back to Eddie with a dubious glint in your eye. “The sunset twenty minutes ago, Eds.”
“Yeah, but… I’m still sick.”
He removes his hand from the pocket of his leather jacket and balls it into a fist over his mouth. He coughs once, trying hard to make it believable ‘cause he hasn’t been truly sick since the winter of ’84.
That’s perhaps the only cool thing about being a vampire — he’s basically got Superman’s immune system now.
“Well, I actually learned how to treat sunstroke while I was in training,” you lilt with an air of mischief in your voice as you take a daring step closer. The scent of sunscreen and cheap musky cologne clings to his skin. Something about the combination of the two is maddening.
You’re filled suddenly with the primal urge to bite into him like an apple. But you refrain, lest you scare him off.
Eddie’s caught in a similar dilemma, but with perhaps realer consequences than that. Your natural marshmallow-passionfruit scent suffocates him like a pillow to the face. His fangs threaten to force their way through his gums as his head starts to swim.
He ignores every vampiric instinct swirling in his mind and focuses, instead, on the pretty smile curling at your lips.
“Bet ya didn’t know that, did ya?”
Eddie swallows hard and shakes his head. “No, I— I don’t think you ever told me that,” he stammers, then clears his throat when the words get stuck there. He puts both hands back in his jacket pocket, balling them into fists until his nails bite into his palms.
“First, you gotta take off your clothes—”
“You’ve been trying to get in my pants all day,” the boy laughs. “You realize that, right?”
“—And then you gotta cool off in a very luxurious community pool.”
Eddie gets what you’re playing at, then. His smile ebbs almost instantly. “No,” he dismisses with a stern shake of his head. His deep chestnut curls, frizzed with the late-summer humidity, sway around his jaw. “No. No way.”
“Oh, c’mon! Please,” you whine. “The pool closes in, like, half an hour— Then it’ll just be us! We can swim together!”
“I don’t know how,” Eddie whines back, head tossed and face screwed. “Seriously. I grew up in a trailer park. No one ever taught me how to swim, alright? I’ll drown.”
Something about that seems to please you, as your pout curls slowly into another smile. You meet the boy’s wet brown eyes with a gaze that glitters something wicked.
Eddie can see your head spinning with a thousand bad ideas from here. His heart would race at the thought of getting into trouble with you if it was beating still.
You’ll bring him back to life yet.
“Don’t worry, Eds,” you shrug with a sure grin. “I’d give you mouth-to-mouth in a heartbeat.”
꒷꒦꒷꒷꒦ (㇏(•̀ᵥᵥ•́)ノ) ꒦꒷꒦꒷꒷
The pool glows a vibrant sapphire color. It makes the surrounding amber streetlamps seem dull in comparison. The water is as blue and crystalline as an early summer sky. Eddie figures you must be the sun, swimming in the center of it all.
You wait patiently in the shallow end — out of both your windbreaker and pleated skirt for the first time in front of him — and swipe your hands over the water, letting it drip like liquid diamonds from your fingers. You hum quietly to the slow song playing on the boombox across the way, which now houses the mixtape you made that Eddie seems to take with him everywhere.
The boy shifts uncomfortably at the head of the pool, feeling awkward in the pair of swim trunks you found for him in the break room.
You’ve never seen so much of him before. His paper-white legs are a lot longer than you expected, ‘cause his baggy jeans hardly do him any favors. And his arms are a lot muscular, too — likely from moving band equipment and bussing tables.
He’s already so pretty to begin with. You don’t know what he’s got to be such a Nervous Nelly about.
Eddie knows he’s making it harder for himself. It’d be a lot less awkward for the both of you if he just took his shirt off and jumped in the water. But he’s paralyzed by the misplaced panic that strikes that lightning in his chest. And by you, ogling at him like he’s a pretty thing that deserves to be ogled at.
“Stop staring,” he calls to you, pretending to be playful but meaning every bit of it. “It’s makin’ me nervous.”
“Would it make you feel better if I closed my eyes?”
“Much.”
You put your hands over your eyes, to make him feel better and all. Though, you can’t help but peek between the slivers of your fingers as he strips himself of his Corroded Coffin tee.
His torso is as long and lean as you imagined, with sprinkles of hair on his chest and the pudge of his tummy that trails into his borrowed trunks. You try very hard not to stare too long at the gray scars embedded in his pale skin.
Everything seems to come easier to him when you’re not looking at him. He slides the black fabric off his pale, pale torso, tosses it to his feet, and hurries to hide in the water in one fell swoop.
The chlorine makes his nose burn, but the water feels like satin on his skin. It’s soft and warm and smooth against the cold, sharp edges of him.
“You can open your eyes now,” Eddie scoffs when he notices your hands still over your eyes. He can see you blinking at him through the slits in your fingers. “I know you’re peeking.”
“I was not!” you gasp, mouth agape with a playful offense.
“Well, you weren’t exactly being discreet about it, sweet thing.”
“These are very nefarious accusations you’re making, Eddie Munson…” you scold with arched brows and wide eyes. The water ripples faintly around you as you stalk towards him like a predator to prey, eyes narrowed in a challenging squint. “Are you prepared to back them up?”
The boy cowers slightly under your unwavering stare. “I don’t like the way you’re looking at me right now—”
And he was right not to. ‘Cause you’re lunging suddenly towards him in a flash.
The water splashes violently around you as you wrap both arms around his neck and sweep him off his feet. Literally. You kick his legs out from underneath him, then catch him before he can fall completely backward. Both his downfall and his savior, ironically.
“Ha!” you shout in his face, the tip of your nose brushing his.
“Jesus!” Eddie gasps in response, still heart lurching in his chest.
“I asked if you were prepared!” you defend like you’re innocent, like you aren’t still cradling him in your arms — the only thing keeping him from going under.
“Not for this!” he yells back.
Only then is he able to take a good breath in. He can smell the velvety scent of your blood from the achingly close proximity. He can feel your heart beating in his own chest from where you’re pressed so intently against him. It makes him instantly dizzy.
He fights back the primal urges that would otherwise drive him mad.
“Jeez…” he huffs, fangs burning. “You’re a lifeguard— You’re supposed to stop people from drowning.”
“Yeah, but no one ever needs saving,” you whine. “It’s so boring.”
His chocolate button eyes flit back and forth between both of yours. “You tryin’ to save me, sweet thing?” he jokes.
You squint. “Is it working?”
“Yeah, actually… If you let me up now, at least.”
He’s grateful when you do, though he mourns the lack of you when you step back a few paces.
His damp hair sticks to his skin when he rises to full height. He shakes his head like a dog, and you giggle when a few rogue droplets fly your way.
“You have freckles on your shoulder,” you observe distantly, eyes darting across the faint amber spots on his pale skin as you try to make constellations out of them. “I didn’t know that ’til now.”
Eddie’s lips jut downward as he peers at his arm from the corner of his eye. “Not really,” he shrugs.
“You do!” you insist. “There’s not many, though. I could probably count ‘em if I wanted.”
“Maybe on our second date.”
“I didn’t know you had a tattoo here, either—” You poke him in the chest, a little harder than you probably mean to.
Eddie winces and rubs his palm over the fading black widow under his collarbone. “Well, you don’t know everything about me,” he quips. “I like it that way. It keeps you on your toes.”
Your face pinches into a girlish pout. “Only ‘cause you never tell me anything.”
“I tell you loads of things,” Eddie laughs.
Your frown deepens. “You never told me about the picture of Ozzy Osbourne you keep in your wallet.”
“…How do you know about that?”
“Dustin told me.”
“Of course he did,” Eddie huffs. “Remind me not to tell that little shit anything ever again.”
“You never told me about how you got those scars, either,” you blurt, eyes trained on his milky white torso. Beneath the clear, rippling water, you can see the parts of his supple stomach that are marred and turning pink.
You don’t realize what you’ve said until your gaze flits back to his startled one. Your eyes widen as you ramble quickly, “You don’t have to! I’m not trying to… I’m just— I’m just saying. ‘Cause, you know, Steve has the same ones… On his ribs…”
“I’m not even gonna ask how you know that,” Eddie jokes with a (mostly) feigned jealousy.
“Billy does, too. He’s got the same lookin’ scars on his chest,” you continue. “And then I started thinking, you know? I thought, since you all know each other and everything, maybe something happened to you guys. Like, in the earthquakes or something.”
Eddie swallows hard and debates on spilling his guts.
He swallows his secrets down like bile, in the end.
“Yeah. You’re— You’re not too far off, actually,” he answers with a breathy, bitter laugh. He scratches at the back of neck, if only to busy his anxious hands, and flits his gaze to the velvety night sky.
The blinking white stars there ground him when the world starts to swim — reminds him that he’s on Earth, in Hawkins, and not in the hellscape he died in.
That was his final thought as he took his last breath that spring. How strangely fitting it was that there were no stars in the Upside Down.
“We, uh… We kinda went through hell and back, but, uh… ‘Least lived to tell the tale, right?” Eddie scoffs at himself, then remembers Chrissy — how young and full of life she was one moment, and how her wide blue eyes were sucked out of her skull the next. He recoils then, feeling like he’s said the wrong thing. “Wait. That was— That was insensitive. I didn’t mean it like that.”
“What are you talkin’ about? You’re right,” you assure him with a quiet, emotionless laugh. “You guys survived. You got lucky. We all did.”
Eddie peeks at you beneath his lashes, through the wild curls sticking to his face. “Where were you?” he murmurs. “When… When everything happened?”
“Crying into my milkshake at Benny’s Burgers,” you answer without missing a beat. The memory’s far too vivid for anything else.
A laugh sputters from Eddie’s throat. He’s sure you must be joking. You blink at him like an owl, and he goes solemn all over again. “Oh. You’re… You’re serious?” he mumbles.
“Yeah, I was… feeling sorry for myself over something stupid, and then the ground started shaking outta nowhere— like the universe was trying to say, ‘Hey, this could be soooo much worse, dude,’” you ramble quietly to yourself, skimming your fingers over the water’s surface. “…But then I found out people actually got hurt and everything, so I was like, ‘Oh, maybe I shouldn’t make this about my stupid broken heart, actually.’”
Eddie’s tight chest deflates with a wavering exhale. He didn’t know you back then, but something about knowing you were okay makes him feel better. ‘Cause, yeah, he died and all, but he couldn’t stomach the thought of Vecna taunting you.
“I’m glad you’re okay,” the boy confesses in a honeyed whisper.
A soft smile quirks at the edges of your lips. “I’m glad you’re okay, too, Eddie Spaghetti.”
Your hand reaches out for him. Almost instinctively. Like he’s a whole universe with his own gravitational pull.
Your palm settles soft and warm on the outside of his torso. Your thumb grazes the marred skin over his ribs, and Eddie tenses at the foreign feeling. You jerk back instantly.
“Oh. Shit. Sorry,” you stammer, face twisted apologetically. “I didn’t— I should’ve asked first.”
“No. It’s— It’s okay. Seriously,” Eddie assures with a rapid nod. There’s a faraway look in his chocolate eyes, almost like he’s daydreaming. He feels like he is, anyway. ‘Cause he’s never let anyone this close before.
“I just… I wasn’t expecting it. That’s all.”
Do it again, he says in so many words. Please, I think I might need it.
You reach for him again, more hesitant this time. Your hand settles over his scars again, and you breathe hard through your nose.
Your stomach twists with a phantom sort of ache, like you can feel every ounce of the pain he surely experienced back then. Thinking about how hurt he must’ve been makes you hurt, too.
Eddie can see it written all over your face. How much you ache for him.
He can’t stand it.
He cups your cheeks between trembling, unsure hands. His touch is softly calloused and colder than ice. He tilts your jaw gently upward, urging you to meet his gaze once more. Your eyes are wet and glittering when they lock with his heavily lidded ones. Your mouth parts to say something, anything. But your brain doesn’t work fast enough.
‘Cause Eddie's kissing you before you can blink.
He tastes distinctly of nicotine and boyhood. Of midnight, full moons, and neon lights. You can feel every groove in his bottom lip from where he picks at it with his teeth. Every sensation is new to you, like cool sparkles of excitement in the pit of your tummy, but it’s strikingly familiar all the same. Nostalgia for something you’re experiencing for the first time warms the center of your chest.
You breathe hard through your nose. The gust of air tickles Eddie’s cupid’s bow as he parts from you, lips smacking apart in protest.
Your eyes, still yet to blink, remain wide and glazed over. “Whoa…” you sigh to yourself.
Eddie’s unsure of how to gauge your reaction. His face swirls with horror.
“What?” he mumbles, still cradling your face between worried hands. He can’t tell if your cheeks are heating or if he’s just colder than usual. Perhaps both are equally true.
“Nothing,” you answer quickly, still slightly faraway. “I just… I got a weird sense of deja vu just now…”
The boy forces a quiet laugh. “Who else have you done this with?” he quips.
“No one!” you blurt. “…But I think I might’ve dreamt about this once.”
“Really?”
“Definitely.”
“Was it better than you expected? Or should I just see myself out now—”
You lean forward to chase his mouth. The cerulean water ripples faintly around you. Your lidded gaze never wavers from his rosy lips, which you’re realizing now are all but begging to be kissed. You don’t know how you never noticed it before.
Eddie’s smiling too wide to respond appropriately.
“Why are you laughing?” you frown.
“I’m not!” he responds through breathy chuckles.
“You are—”
Eddie leans forward in a flash, pressing another chaste kiss to your pout.
You’re all smiles again the second he pulls away, bursting at the seams with a sort of giddiness that could give the sun a run for its money.
He knows, somewhere deep down, that he shouldn’t make you this happy. He doesn’t even deserve the chance. But here you are anyway, smiling so wide at him that your eyes are starting to crinkle at the edges — showing him that there’s still sunshine in the dark, reminding him what it means to be living.
“Does this mean we get to do this forever?” you wonder in a mousy voice.
“What?” he chuckles. “Kiss?”
You nod wordlessly, blinking up at the boy with wide, wet eyes.
Eddie nods quickly back.
“Then yeah…” he wavers, chest aching and gums burning.
He loves you so much he’s gone hungry for it. For you.
He longs to devour you, in every way imaginable, and you want to devour him just the same. He can tell in the way you stare at him when you think he isn’t looking — in the way you stare at him even when he is looking — and in every one of your movements that urges him closer, closer, closer.
Your gaze is debilitatingly intense. Your attitude is mind-bendingly strange. You’re ruining his life, and Eddie can’t believe there was ever a time he wasn’t kissing you.
“Yeah,” he repeats, firmer now. “As long as you want.”
if you made it this far: i love you. so sorry for making you read something so long. i'd kiss you on the forehead if i could. also pls consider reblogging! this took me so so long to write, and it really helps a lot! thank u, love u (▰˘◡˘▰)
#published by bug#eddie munson x reader#eddie munson x y/n#eddie munson x you#eddie munson smut#stranger things x reader#eddie munson#stranger things#stranger things imagine#stranger things fic#stranger things fanfiction#stranger things fanfic#eddie munson imagine#eddie munson angst#eddie munson fluff#eddie munson fic#eddie munson fanfiction#eddie munson fanfic#eddie munson fics#st oneshots#eddie spaghetti oneshot
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all eyes on you, all eyes on us
joe burrow x fem!reader
summary: it’s halloween night, time to dress up with your best friend and get your party on. all is well until you see your ex at the party, the emotions rush back in… but he fits you like a missing puzzle piece. you keep letting him back in, he’s doing a number on you.
warnings: MDNI i’m sooo serious i love to block. semi-public sex, groping, hickeys, scratching, pinv, dirty talk.
word count: 3.3k.
note: this fic is based off the song So It Goes… by T. Swift! requested by my sweet friend @starsinthesky5! i also wanted to add a halloween element to it.. i hope you guys like it! (something funny in the tags hehe) (i do not own any pics used!!)
you could feel the bass of the music bumping through the floor, radiating through your feet and up your legs as your best friend pulled you deeper into the club.
she took your hand in hers, leading you through the sea of sweaty bodies to an open area in the room, somewhere the two of you could dance and let loose.
“you need this!” she assured you while you got ready. her claims were that recently you’ve been too uptight, you’ve been shouldering too much. and it’s halloween, so you need to have fun.
you agreed to come to the party, and even in matching costumes. she looked incredible in a dress identical to yours, but hers was white with gold fringe hanging from a slit in the leg. she wore a halo, gold jewelry, and red lips to match.
your dress was black with silver fringe, and rather than necklaces or bracelets you decided on two silver cuffs that sat tightly on your biceps. you painted glitter highlights on your cheekbones, and a dark maroon stain on your lips. you clipped two black horns into your hair at the top of your head. classic angel and devil costumes… but you didn’t care. you both felt good.
she finally stopped walking, dropping your hand as she stood in a vacant spot near the back of the club. there was a smoky haze that settled across the room, illuminated by the neon lights that were strung along the ceiling and the walls. you couldn’t quite make out the song that was on, but the beat was nice and you swayed your body along with it. you weren’t sure if you’d know anyone else here, but you were hoping to meet someone, even if just for a night of fun.
your friend was right. you needed to let loose. have fun. get laid.
“i’m gonna go get us a shot!” she yelled over the music, reaching over to squeeze your shoulder. your eyes followed her as she walked to one side of the bar, which wasn’t that far from you. she leaned over to speak to the bartender and then gestured back to you, presumably telling him why she wanted two shots. you locked eyes with him and - whoa. he was hot.
he smirked at you, eyes raking over your body, before looking back at your friend. his salt and pepper hair and stubble told you he was older - nearing his forties if you had to guess. he turned to grab a bottle of vodka off the shelf behind him and you ogled his form as you watched the muscles in his back and arms ripple. when he turned around, he looked back at you again. he poured the shots and your friend grabbed them, walking back over to you with her mouth wide open.
she handed yours to you and you both downed them, discarding the cups on a small table nearby. “the bartender is a total dilf!” she laughed, grabbing on to your shoulders. “totally!” you agreed, looking up to check him out again. “he was totally feeling you, babe!” she smiled. you weren’t focused on anything she said.
the bartender was now making a drink for a tall man, dressed in an all black suit. you couldn’t see the front of him, but you didn’t need to. you knew it was your ex. you could tell by his posture, the utter confidence in which he carried himself. joey fucking burrow.
flashback to your break-up
“you’re so difficult to deal with, you know that?” joe spoke, the way he sat made him look defensive. you held back tears as he threw complaints your way.
“we’re in public, joe. you’re not a fucking walk in the park!” you finally speak up, tilting your head at him to show him you wouldn’t back down. the chatter and soft music that floated through the restaurant weren’t doing enough to hide that the two of you were arguing. “this relationship hasn’t been working for a while, but it’s not just on me. you’re a diva sometimes. you make things difficult.”
he let out a snarky laugh, tipping his head back. his hand flexed on the glass he was holding, threatening to crunch it right then before he loosened his grip. you weren’t even sure what had started this fight, but you’d been at odds with each other recently, so it could have been anything. but when joe brought up working it out, you told him you weren’t sure you wanted to, which led you here. a fancy dinner in a quaint restaurant where everyone could see you falling apart.
“maybe you’re right. maybe it isn’t worth trying to work out. lets throw the last six months down the drain.” he said, his tone smarmy. he widened his eyes at you as he spoke, placing the ball in your court. the waiter came over to ask you how everything was, but he didn’t get a single word out as he took the two of you in, your anger and emotions sitting on the table rather than your meals.
“i’m sorry i just.. i don’t think this is working. i think our personalities clash too much.”
to be honest, you felt caged in. you felt like a hostage to your feelings, but you weren’t sure exactly why. sometimes joe’s barriers were difficult to break through, and you had an idea that was something that was breaking you down.
joe never had the intention of making you feel that way. he didn’t want to push you away, but he wasn’t the best at displaying his emotions. his temper was getting shorter and shorter. he had the tendency to take things out on you, and he hated it. but, if you wanted out, he couldn’t stop you.
neither of you said a word for the rest of your meal, the tension was palpable from across the table. he paid for dinner, although you offered, and you climbed into his car quickly so he could take you home.
he pulled into your drive, parking the car before leaning over the console to look at you. you felt stifled, the air in the car was thick with anger, sadness, regret. you grabbed the door handle and popped it open, but before you could get away joe grabbed your hand, turning you back to face him. you leaned into the car, waiting for his spiel.
“i’m sorry for making you feel upset. i’m sorry i couldn’t have been more for you.” tears spilled down your cheeks finally, all your emotions were rolling down your face leaving salty stains in your makeup.
he continued. “i really am sorry, i love you.” he said, looking down at the wheel.
“so it goes…” you respond, pulling your hand away and walking inside.
end of flashback
joe must’ve felt your eyes burning holes into the back of his head, because he turned around and smirked at you, catching you staring at him.
he took his drink from the bartender and walked away, back toward his group of friends. you tried to push him out of your mind and let loose anyway. you danced with your friend through five or six songs, and the thought of joe being at the party almost became a distant memory.
after a little while you were feeling hot, a sticky sheen of sweat coated your whole body. “i’m gonna gef some water!” you told your friend. you made your way to the bar, slightly excited to talk to the extremely hot bartender.
you sat down on one of the stools and waited for him to get finished making someone else’s cocktail so he could attend to you. he shook their drink in the mixer, poured it, then finally looked your way. a goofy lopsided smile spread over his lips as he walked closer.
“what can i getcha?” he drawls, leaning over the bar on his elbows. his face is now inches from your own, but you don’t mind it. he looks even better up close. “just some water, please. i’m just a little hot.”
he turns and grabs a bottle of water from a mini-fridge behind him, placing it on the bar in front of you. you unscrew the cap and take a long sip, accidentally letting a drop fall from the corner of your mouth and slide down your neck. you know he sees it, but he doesn’t mention it. after you finish drinking, you place the bottle down, twisting the cap back on.
the bartender starts speaking to you again. “i really like your costume, by the way. i saw you when you came in and… woah. you’re gorgeous. i’m j-” he begins to tell you his name, but he’s cut off.
“she doesn’t care what your name is, buddy. she’s my girl.” joe snaps. he must have seen you flirting with the man behind the bar and made his way over. “i’m not your girl, joey.”
he places a hand on your arm, running his fingers along the silver cuff. “‘can we go talk for a moment?” he asks you, tone sounding oddly soft. the bartender looks back and forth between you. “i can have him thrown out.” he says, completely seriously. “it’s okay,” you tell him, reaching across to pat his shoulder. “i’ll go talk and be right back.”
you hop off the barstool, ready to walk away with joe, but then you remember your friend. your eyes scan the room to find her and you aren’t shocked to see her making out with one of joe’s friends. “she’ll be fine.” joe says, taking your hand and leading you through the crowd. he stops in the middle of the dance floor, pulling you close against him as you allow him to take the lead, moving along with the music.
“very fitting costume.” he smirks, looking you up and down. “what are you supposed to be?” you ask.
he reaches his hand in his pocket, pulling something out. he holds up a white masquerade style mask. “a magician.”
he lifts it up to his face, putting it on with the strap going around his head. he’s smirking. curse the phantom of the opera for making you think this costume style was hot. his hands find your hips, pulling your body closer to his. it’s like you can feel every set of eyes in the room on you. joe feels you tense up and watches you as you scan the room.
“i promise all eyes aren’t on us, babe.” he whispers. “but i think they are.” you reply. “what did you even want to talk to me about?” you ask, pushing at his chest to create some distance between you.
“i miss you.”
you scoff out a laugh. he misses you? he knows this’ll never work. joe cradles your face in his hands. “you know we don’t work, joey.” you argue, once again trying to pull away from him. “we don’t,” he agrees, small smile playing at his lips, “but the sex does.”
you can’t disagree with him on that front. “why try to find some random stranger to sleep with when i’m here, when i know your body and what you like?” he challenges, leaning down so his lips are ghosting over yours. he’s right.
you don’t give it any more consideration. you don’t allow yourself time to back out. you smash your lips into his with fervor, your arms wrapping around his neck. he kisses you back with just as much intensity before pulling away, grabbing your hand and leading you through the club again.
“where are you taking me?” you ask him breathlessly. “one of the private rooms.”
he pulls you through a beaded curtain that hangs on a doorway, roughly pushing you up against a wall. “i’m not fucking you on one of those beds or couches or whatever they are. that’s so unsanitary.” you protest.
“i know that. that’s why were gonna do it against the wall.” he smirks.
“anyone could walk in here and find us!” you say, worried about being caught. “let loose, that’s what makes it fun, baby.”
his lips find your neck, biting and sucking at the skin. “jump.” he murmurs. you hop up and wrap your legs around his waist. you reach up and pull his mask off, tossing it somewhere across the room. your fingers tangle in his dirty blonde curls.
his grip is firm as he holds you against the wall. you tug on his hair, bringing his lips back up to yours. he slips his tongue into your mouth, sliding it against yours. you can feel him straining against his dress pants as his hips roll upward into yours.
“joey, fuck me.” you breathe, your voice hoarse. he chuckles at you. “still so eager for it, huh?” he teases.
he uses one of his arms to press you into the wall, sliding his other hand up your dress and tugging at your panties. when he realizes this angle won’t work, he drops you back down til your feet are on the floor and helps you step out of the lacy black thong. he shoves it in his back pocket before standing up, telling you to jump again. his hand bunches up your dress, exposing your bare core to him.
he kisses you again, one of his hands working to undo his belt and pants. you glance down slightly, watching as he pulls his thick cock from his pants. your arms remain around his neck, your forehead pressed to his shoulder. he brings his hand up to his mouth, spitting on it before reaching down to run his fingers through your folds, not that you really needed it.
from seeing him in the costume, the thrill of potentially getting caught, and knowing that he knows just how to get you there, you’re soaked. he takes his cock in his hands, sliding it through your folds before finally pushing into you, inch by inch. you gasp at the size, even though you know from plenty of experience exactly what he feels like.
the air in the room is thick as he begins thrusting into you. the sheer force of his hips slamming into yours is holding you against the wall, but you still help him remove his jacket anyway, and you pop the buttons on his shirt as he bites and sucks at your neck again. you’re satisfied when you can finally get your hands in enough to rake your nails along his back. if he plans on marking your neck, you’re going to tear his back up with your freshly manicured nails.
“fuck, you feel so good. so tight.” he says, tongue soothing over a mark he left on your neck. “i’m so full, joey.” you reply, finally pulling him up to look into your eyes again. he reaches up and places a hand on your neck, applying the lightest pressure. “ah, your favorite necklace.” he teases. you place your hand on top of his, pushing on his fingers so he’ll squeeze harder. he does, but only briefly, all the while his hips are still pistoning into yours. when he removes his hand, his fingers find your clit, rubbing tight circles into it. you can tell he’s close, and he’s trying to get you there too.
he presses gentle kisses into your lips as he speaks to you. “come on baby, i know you’ve got one for me. let me have it.” he coaxes.
it doesn’t take long before you’re unraveling, cumming hard all over his cock as warmth spreads from your horns to your toes. you’re squeezing joe, sucking him in and he cums soon after, filling up your cunt with his cum.
you press your sweaty foreheads together for a moment, the slight intimacy of the moment making both of you reminisce. you don’t let it last long, you can’t. because you know this doesn’t work.
“joe… can i.. have my panties back?” you ask, trying to make your voice sound playful so you don’t completely ruin the moment. he pulls out of you and lets you down. you squeeze your legs together, hoping that none of his seed will run down your thighs.
“sure.” he says, fishing them out of his pocket. “not sure what they’re gonna do for you, though.”
he’s right, but you need to slip something on, to create at least the tiniest barrier. joe awkwardly scratches at the back of his head before fixing himself, and then buttoning his pants. he fixes his shirt, slides his jacket on, and makes himself look as neat as he can.
“um.. thanks joe. that was nice.” you slip out, voice cracking. saying goodbye would be awkward for you both. joe doesn’t respond verbally, instead he just leans in and kisses your forehead before walking away. you unfortunately have to walk out after him, looking for your friend. she’s still kissing joe’s friend, but you think you’ll have to interrupt to tell her you’re just going to head home.
joe turns to look at you. “i’ll have tee tell her you left, just make sure you text her when you get home.”
“tee?” you ask, looking puzzled. “my teammate tee? that’s who she’s kissing.” you nod knowingly. you turn away from him then, heading for the exit, walking as slow as you can so that no evidence of what you’ve just done with him leaks out of you. when you’re almost to the door, you feel a hand on your shoulder.
you turn around and you’re face to face with the bartender. he looks you over, smirking. he can tell by your appearance that barely any talking was done, but he doesn’t care. he shoots his shot anyway. he hands you a slip of paper with his number on it, winking at you before sauntering back off to the bar. you glance around the crowded club again, your eyes landing on joe. he’s already dancing with another girl. you’re not jealous you tell yourself. he’s not yours, nor are you his. you tear your eyes away and walk out.
you make it outside, hailing a taxi and telling the driver your address. it doesn’t take long to get back to your building. you pull out your phone and keys, which you’re surprised you didn’t lose after the events of the evening, and head up the elevator to your floor.
you unlock the door, stepping inside and kicking your heels off before locking it again behind you. you tiptoe to the bathroom, turning on the shower and letting it heat up. you look back at your phone, two new text notifications showing on your screen. you open them one by one.
bestie: girl!!! let me know when you make it home! i’ll probably be going home with this cutie i met!
you respond to her quickly.
you: home! have fun 😋
the second text is from joe, go figure.
joeyyy b: so it goes, huh?
you don’t respond to his message, you just heart react to it. you really aren’t in the headspace to talk to him right now, because if you respond you’ll end up inviting him over, and you can’t have that. he’s not good for you, you aren’t good for him. you’ve let the pieces fall naturally into place. it’s over between you, even if you both still have the slightest residual feelings left.
before you step into the shower to wash the day away, you click new message at the top of your screen. you type the bartenders number in and… are you really gonna do this? fuck it.
you: hey, it’s y/n. the devil from the bar. 😈
when you see typing bubbles pop up almost immediately you squeal, locking your phone and slamming it on the bathroom counter before undressing and stepping into the hot, steamy shower.
taglist: @slimshiesty @starsinthesky5 @kykysinlovewithafairytale @burrowdarling @bengals-barnesbabe @joeyb1989 @loveyatopluto @toterry @unhingedfangirl @superheroprincess22
#and if you ask me if the bartender is based off patriots former wide receiver julian edelman i’m gonna say maybe but the answer is yes#joe burrow#cincinnati bengals#nfl#joe burrow x reader#joe burrow fanfic#joe burrow fan fic#joe burrow fanfiction#joe burrow imagine#joe burrow smut#joeburrow#joey burrow#joey b#joe burrow fluff#joe burrow blurb#joe burrow bengals#joe burrow fics#joe burrow x reader fanfic#joe burrow x reader smut#joe burrow x y/n#joe burrow x you
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Reader speaks sometimes in their native language when they are frustrated/excited/in the middle of a rant switch languages. And it intrigues Aventurine, who secretly starts to learn the language too, just to listen in secret.
One day, maybe during a light argument between them, reader drops a cuss word that does translate to "f*** you" and aventurine takes this moment to reply, while grinning from ear to ear "oh? Youre offering for once?"
Stunned silence.
Reader starts freaking out in their native language while aven just stands there with that shit eating grin.
Established relationship. No, they never done the deed, but he wanted to catch reader by surprise, and he did. He so proud of himself.
“You think you’re clever, but just remember: I’m one step ahead”
Summary: You and Aventurine are sharing a relaxed afternoon, and a playful argument about his so-called "inspirational mess" turns into teasing banter. When your frustration leads you to mutter in your native language, Aventurine—who’s secretly been learning it—seizes the chance to tease you in return. Caught between embarrassment and laughter, you realize he’s been one step ahead, and Aventurine is all too proud of himself for the surprise.
Tags: Aventurine x Reader, Established Relationship, Fluff, Playful Banter, Lighthearted Argument, Language Barrier, Teasing, Humor.
Waring: Slight Swearing.
A/N: THIS IS SUCH A FUNNY REQ!! I LOVE IT HONESTLY!! 🤭 (As someone's who's native language is not English, this is very funny and cute at the same time🥹🤧like imagine your s/o learning your language just so you can communicate freely or learn what you have been saying 🤭🫶💖🥹)
You’re both lounging around his suite on a lazy afternoon, a stack of paperwork untouched as the conversation somehow spirals into an easy back-and-forth about each other’s quirks. It’s all lighthearted and playful, but it doesn’t take long before you’re teasing him for his incredibly deliberate way of never quite cleaning up his cards and dice, always keeping them just a bit scattered, “for inspiration,” he claims.
“Inspiration, huh?” you say, raising an eyebrow. “Well, maybe my inspiration would be higher if I didn’t trip over your cards every time I’m here.”
Aventurine raises his hands in mock surrender. “I’m telling you, darling, you can’t rush art! It’s all about atmosphere.”
“Atmosphere?” you scoff, switching to your native tongue as you get more animated. “More like a mess that you just want me to overlook!”
He smirks, feigning offense. “My ‘mess’ is a masterpiece—unlike someone’s habit of muttering incomprehensibly every time they don’t get their way.” he teases, with that knowing look in his eyes. He’s clearly waiting for you to switch languages again.
You roll your eyes, slipping into your native tongue almost instinctively. “Maybe if you weren’t so infuriatingly full of yourself, I wouldn’t have to mutter at all.”
Aventurine chuckles, his grin only widening. “Full of myself?” he repeats, pushing back just enough to keep the mood light. “Look who’s talking—every time you walk into this room, you practically take over.”
“Take over? Oh, please,” you huff, slipping deeper into your language as you mutter, “if anything, I’m saving this place from turning into a pigsty.”
He raises an eyebrow, clearly waiting for the right moment, and finally, you let slip a particularly choice phrase—a cuss word that, in your language, translates a little too directly to “fuck you.”
He seizes the opportunity, his face lighting up with a triumphant grin. “Oh? You’re offering for once?”
The world goes still. You blink at him in shock, the realization dawning as your mind scrambles. He understood you—completely. Your cheeks flush, and before you can help it, you’re sputtering in your native language, tripping over words and trying to make sense of how he even learned it.
Aventurine just stands there, that infuriatingly smug grin plastered across his face, arms crossed in satisfaction. “Surprised?” he drawls, clearly reveling in your stunned reaction. “Turns out you’re not the only one with hidden talents.”
You start freaking out, half-laughing, half-ranting in your language, swearing at him all over again. He just chuckles, standing back and drinking it all in, proud as ever for catching you off guard.
“Oh, please,” he says with a chuckle, “keep going—I’m starting to enjoy these rants.”
You cover your face, torn between embarrassment and laughter, and finally shake your head. “One day, I’m going to get you back for this.”
He leans closer, his voice low and challenging. “I’ll be waiting, darling.”
#hsr#honkai star rail#x reader#honkai star rail x reader#hsr x reader#hsr aventurine#aventurine x reader#aventurine x you#hsr aventurine x reader#established rp#established relationship#playful banter#fluff#lighthearted argument#language barrier#teasing#humor#slight swearing
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guess who just spent 15 minutes of their lifetime transcribing a 4 minute clip of pearl rambling about life series on stream (29/10/2024)
anyway i can’t upload the video (too long) here’s the transcript anyway (also long)
Pearl: Um, alrighty. By the way, I wanna— I’m, I’m curious, I wanna know, okay, it— when it came to… Secret Life, why did people think I— I betrayed Gem completely? Wouldn’t me teaming with Gem have betrayed Scar? I wanna know where all this, like, super [word that i can’t place for the life of me. solar???] “Pearl betrayed Gem” came from. (laughs)
I understand, I killed her at the end. And we teamed up for a moment. But Scar was on our side and not trying to kill my allies. That was my team from the beginning. Gem, was always trying to kill ‘em. So how… how is that not a betrayal in any… like it kinda has to be quote unquote betrayal, but technically Scar was allied with me more? (laughs)
“Scar was distinctly not on anyone’s side” Did anyone watch my finale? ‘Cause, he was teamed up with us. Gem was trying to kill us in that last episode. So, logically, I would fight with the person who’s not trying to kill my team. [Freudian slip]
So I just wanna know, how did I do the betraying in that instance? (laughs) “From her POV it was a betrayal” Ahh, it’s a belief system, huh? (laughs) But it’s funny. I like it. I was just curious what, uh, put the nail in the coffin for that belief. ‘Cause I’ve seen it come up a little bit lately, and apparently I’m the one that betrayed.
(laughs) I dunno about that one. Curious. Curious, curious, curious. (laughs) Technically, whichever way I’ve gone, I would’ve went— it would’ve been betraying somebody, right? If I’d turned around and killed Scar, I would’ve betrayed him, because he was allied with us at the end. And then killing Gem obviously, same. But, when it came to that, I actually let Scar— I think I hit her once. Otherwise it was Scar. I did one whack, and then I stood back and let him kind of rock and roll. And uh, make it— make it between those two. So it was an interesting finale, that one.
But, something that people have mentioned actually, is that, uhh, another thing was, with, uh, Cleo and Scott in Real Life.
All this talk of Pearlo betraying people, are we not gonna realise that people have betrayed me in the life series? With a split decision? I’m just sayin’. They ain’t innocent. (laughs) Just sayin’, I think— I think 5am Pearl had every right to do what I did. Throw in um, what is it, the fuel on the fire for this one?
Character arcs. It’s cool to see how people analyse them, so I’ve been seeing a little bit of that. Especially with the new, uh, “I don’t love you” line that I got last session. Love you Gem. Always will. Even when you say no. (laughs) Even if you don’t, I’ll still be there. It’s fine. (laughs)
“Do it for the plot, Pearl” Basically.
(clip ends)
#she’s so right for the SL thing people pretending scar won alone just because he said “how’d the guy with no friends win”#ever heard of an unreliable narrator guys. guys pearl was right there. guys#so funny when she realises it’s just what gem thinks and goes like ahh okay that makes sense but /why/#also so funny when she says i only hit her once. HELP. girl listen to yourself rn#cleo and scott. man. the way she switches between third and first person and seems to be talking about both DL and RL is very on-brand#also only a hardcore gempearl fan who stalked every tag after wl ep 2 could’ve jumped as hard as i did#when she pointed out the “i don’t love you” line. oh she definitely saw that one fanart#and then obviously the bit about gem. the dichotomy between this and whatever the subnautica clip was#please i’m gonna lose it they remind me of DL zombiewood
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Rating HSR characters in relationships
Title is self-explanatory <3
Characters: Boothill, Dr Ratio, Blade, Aventurine (separately)
⊱ ─── ⋅ʚ♡ɞ⋅ ─── ⊰
CW: cursing, mostly fluff and some crack
CW Aventurine's part: toxic dynamics, emotional neglect, jealousy, Aventurine in general
Lmk if there's any warnings I should add!
Had to restrain myself on Dr. Ratio I have soo bad brain worms about him rn he’s all I think about
。゚•┈꒰ა ♡ ໒꒱┈• 。゚
Boothill
10/10
DO NOT. AT ME. I PROMISE I’VE THOUGHT THIS THROUGH. I know most people who read that will be like “what the fuck Boothill would NOT be a perfect partner” and that’s where you’re right ! No, he would be an awful partner !
For MOST people.
But see, he wouldn’t be just ANYONE’S partner.
If you’re dating him, it means you’re exactly his type and he’s exactly yours. You wouldn’t date a guy like him if he wasn’t exactly what you wanted. He lays out all his cards on the table right away. Your relationship won’t have the chance to even begin if you’re not head over heels immediately bro 😭😭😭
With most characters I can imagine them in a relationship with a lot of different kinds of people. Like for example yeah I can imagine Aventurine both dating someone more reserved and sweet or someone bold and loud. Or someone like Argenti Lord knows that man could love ANYONE (or anyTHING tbh), but with Boothill there’s just a very narrow range of personalities I can imagine him with. Hence the rating cause he’d only be in one kind of relationship.
You guys are a POWER COUPLE I tell you. It’s SICKENING how much you love each other and how well you fit together. Two peas in a pod. I’m gonna throw up.
You both love the exact same things, you both HATE the exact same things, and you are both equally deranged and insane
The IPC hates to see you coming 💀🙏
You’re constantly in a friendly competition to outdo each other. Who has the higher bounty ? (Usually him) Who can drink most alcohol before blacking out ? (You, surprisingly) Who can kiss the other the most times during this high-speed chase ? (You always tie on this)
He swallows a bullet. You say “I’ll do you one better!” and swallow a knife. You are a human and so he needs to take you to the hospital so you don’t fucking die
(You both think it’s funny afterwards so it’s okay)
Even when you guys “argue” it’s never really that serious. Honestly you both think it’s kind of hot…… you argue in a devious, sexy way……. *smirks mischievously*
Sorry I cannot take him seriously
You match his freak <3
Nobody fucking likes you together. Separately ? Sure people like you. But the moment the two of you are in the same room it’s like you merge into one singular, horrible, annoying entity and NOBODY wants to be around to see it 😭😭😭🙏🙏🙏 neither of you have gotten a lecture about how inappropriate pda can be and also the two of you speak total nonsense it’s incomprehensible to everyone else
Considering putting Boothill on my “do not request” list, not because I don’t like him but because even I don’t understand how the two of you would fit together I can’t write it y’all are that weird
Boothill is for the freaks and he is PERFECT FOR THEM !!!
。゚•┈꒰ა ♡ ໒꒱┈• 。゚
Dr. Ratio
9/10
Okay I’ll be honest I’m not very caught up on Dr Ratio (I briefly hated him I only recently started liking him again HELP) so forgive me if there is some mischaracterisation in this I’m working on it my view on him isn’t complete yet 🙏🙏
Though Ratio is very ruled by logic, that doesn’t mean he doesn’t have emotions. Furthermore, he views these emotions as important. Logic is not inherently opposed to emotions, and in fact, ignoring them would be illogical.
That is to say, yes, he’s an intellectual man. But he also has a high emotional intelligence 😇😇
Like not in the way of knowing how to cope with them. I don’t think he feels many strong emotions regularly (except for annoyance lol), so I think he in fact gets kind of overwhelmed by them around you and never knows how to regulate them properly HELP
But what I meant to say is that, in a relationship, he considers your thoughts and feelings a lot and makes an effort to prioritise them. He does not want for you to be unhappy.
He values you very highly. He takes all your opinions into consideration and treats them with respect.
He loves you a lot it’s actually ridiculous. He frequently gets annoyed at himself for how much he finds himself downright SIMPERING over you.
And like yes Ratio can be very harsh in the way he speaks but I think that 1, his care for people (including the “fools” and “idiots” he seems to scorn so often) shows and it shows even more apparently for people he cares about, and 2 I think he realises it would be inappropriate to be as rude as he usually is to you. You two are in a relationship, you are not some stranger. He cannot go around criticising you constantly, that would not be a healthy dynamic. Meaning he softens his vocabulary for you.
His care for you is very blatantly obvious. In the beginning I think he’s a bit embarrassed to show you affection. He hasn’t ever dated anyone, much less been in a relationship, with anyone before you (I honestly don’t even think he’s had his first kiss 😭😭), so I think his inexperience plays a part in it. But he still shows you as obviously as he can that he loves you, and he doesn’t shy away from vulnerability in private moments.
Bro has researched how to be a good partner trust 🤞
He communicates very clearly with you as often as possible. He hates misunderstandings, and tries to avoid them whenever possible. The two of you are almost always on the same page.
Whenever you argue, he still does not want you to leave the argument feeling unloved. Type to sigh, let his eyes soften and say “I believe it would be best if we both had some time to cool down”, then squeeze your shoulder as he passes you out of the room. Kisses you goodnight before you go to sleep. It’s often easier to talk it out the next day.
The only things bumping him down from a 10/10 for me is the fact that he doesn’t have that much time to spare for time with only you (his schedule is very packed), and the fact that he cannot cope with his OWN emotions 😭 Great with yours because he can logistically figure out how to handle them, terrible with his own because they’re affecting his own mind and he isn’t used to it
。゚•┈꒰ა ♡ ໒꒱┈• 。゚
Blade
7/10
Surprisingly high rating for a guy like him but I swear I’ve thought about this ok don’t leave 😔😔😔
I think it takes…. A lot. Like a lot a lot. To break through Blade’s tough outer shell
He hates letting people in so much it’s actually crazy
The closest person he has before he meets you is probably Kafka, and that’s not really by his own choice he would shut her out too if he could 😭😭
(Not to say he isn’t like, calm and polite to people. He’s pretty reserved and just, like, quiet ig usually, he only really gets weird and aggressive when the Mara flares up or he needs to be for a mission. I just mean he isn’t gonna be open and available for basically anyone lol)
It’s mainly difficult to GET INTO a relationship with Blade, but if you do manage it, it turns out a lot sweeter than you’d expect
He’s just a deeply tired man. He is not malicious, he is not unnecessarily cruel. He is worn out and sick of living, of never getting the rest he so desperately craves. He finds some sort of respite in you, and so he treasures you.
He trusts your judgement. He stands by you, no matter what. He’s loyal to a fault once you have him. The worst that could ever happen to him now is losing you. Even when he thinks you’re about to do something stupid (and he always tells you when he thinks it’s stupid), he’ll come with you. Better he’s there to take the hit for you than letting you go alone.
Even with the smaller things, he shows it even more obviously. He cooks you dinner and lunch every day, so you don’t have to. He lets you decorate his apartment, and he never adjusts the things you place in it, even when it clashes horribly with his own style. He lets you drag him along anywhere, whether it be a concert or a park, without complaint.
The main downsides with Blade are that he never, ever, verbally tells you that he loves you. Maybe once during your entire relationship he’ll say it, and probably when you’re on your deathbed, but he usually won’t. Even if you try to pry it out of him.
He can be really mean in the way he says things sometimes, like telling you straight up your ideas are dumb, but it’s always softened by the way he agrees to do whatever you want anyways.
Another frustrating thing is how he cares very little for his own wellbeing. It’s a regular occurrence for him to come home with guts spilling out of his abdomen, and it’s really uncomfortable to see even if you know he can’t die. He can still feel pain, even if he’s learnt to cope with it well. It’s scary to see him so hurt so often.
But you wouldn’t get into a relationship with him if you didn’t already know all this, hence why I rank him so high. He’s a lot better than you expected when you met him, which means you’re effectively in a better relationship than you’d have hoped 😭😭
。゚•┈꒰ა ♡ ໒꒱┈• 。゚
Aventurine
4/10 💀💀
I love him so much (my content is mostly Aventurine centric) but holy fuck man,,,
I have never and will never sugarcoat it Aventurine is TOXIC. Like GENUINELY. I wouldn’t say abusive but he can be really cruel. He gets lost in his own head and takes it out on you in ways he doesn’t really mean to. Aventurine is not a good person.
He’s fucked up in all sorts of ways and it’s no surprise it could easily destroy any relationship
Trust issues ? Jealousy issues ? Commitment issues ? Attachment issues ? Insecurity issues ? Mommy, daddy AND sister issues ? Every kind of possible issue you can probably imagine ? Yes on all fronts, bro’s the full issue package 💀
It would take a very special kind of person to endure in a relationship with him (I would not be able to do it if he was real I’ll be so honest)😭
When things are good, they’re really good. He can be so fun and playful and sweet and he loves to spoil you and everything that belongs to him belongs to you. He loves you more than the air he breathes and he’d do anything to make you happy
The issue is, most of the time, things are not in fact good.
I keep mentioning it but his relationships are always such a push and pull. A game of hot and cold. One second he clings to you and begs you to never leave him, and the next he won’t respond to your calls or messages.
Even worse, sometimes he’ll be outright mean in order to push you away, insinuating you’re “holding him down” and that you’re “wasting his time”. You’ll find yourself questioning if he actually does love you, because what sort of person does this to someone they love?
(It keeps him up at night when he treats you badly. He hates doing it, but he needs you to hate him as much as he hates himself.)
Usually he’s a really smart guy. Even when he does stupid things (things like making a purposeless high-risk gamble, playing Russian roulette), he’s fully aware of what he’s doing. (He does it because he kind of hopes he’ll actually die this time.) But with you, he loses all his composure and can’t really think straight.
He feels safe with you, and that scares him. He’s a danger to your safety, and it’s better to push you away, make you hate him, than it is to let himself be happy with you. His life is beyond saving, so all he can do to you if you stay is drag you into his mess. He can’t fix himself, not even for your sake.
He lies to you, he neglects you (sometimes for weeks at a time), he builds up new walls between you constantly, but at the same time he gets insecure and jealous when you hang out with others. Only when you threaten to leave him does he finally start getting his act together, because he realises that now that he’s had you, he couldn’t bear to live without you (even if he knows that’s very selfish of him).
He gets better with time, but I really, really doubt he’ll ever be fully healed. It doesn’t help that his job wouldn’t really allow it, and he can’t leave the IPC through any other means than death.
I originally ranked him as a 3/10 (diabolically low rating I know 💀💀) but I bumped him up one because he will get better. If you stick around long enough, he’d probably make it to a 7/10, but since that would take like over 4 years of being in a relationship with him I felt it would be unfair to rank him much higher 😭😭 At the start he really fucking sucks dude I’m so sorry my condolences
。゚•┈꒰ა ♡ ໒꒱┈• 。゚
My inbox is open, feel free to send in asks or requests, I'd love to ramble about things <3
#[boothill]#[dr ratio]#[blade]#[aventurine]#boothill x reader#dr ratio x reader#blade x reader#aventurine x reader#veritas x reader#veritas ratio x reader#aventurine honkai star rail#aventurine hsr#aventurine star rail#hsr aventurine#reader x aventurine#reader x boothill#reader x dr ratio#reader x blade#blade hsr#hsr blade#hsr x reader#honkai star rail x reader#dr ratio#veritas ratio#boothill#hsr boothill#honkai star rail#hsr#hsr x you#reader insert
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getting emotional over the fact that mr reca really would guide you, just as a good director is supposed to, but would still retain the authority to make executive decisions if he felt your choices were not beneficial to your film (life) or your growth as an actor (person)
#mr reca x you#mr reca x reader#i love him i love him i love him so fucking much#i’m going to cry like actually i am so goddamn emotional over him right now it’s not even FUNNY#i’ve been having a MELTDOWN over this man all fucking day#so anyway#i have so many fucking thoughts about him but i’m trying to post them in a timely manner instead of just spamming#oh my GOD i love him#the point here is that daddy is still The Boss at the end of the day#he’ll allow you to make your own silly little decisions and learn from your silly little mistakes and cheer you on throughout it all because#he loves you SO much but at the end of the day he has the final say#his word is LAW as we have heard <3#inky.reca
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Just thinking of being enemies with benefits with Theo-
Oh my god, yes. Enemies with benefits with Theo makes me droooooool. The way he would taunt you. Mess with you. Just to fuck your brains out later. I had this idea of reader working at the three broomsticks….👀
TW: 18+, MDNI, SMUT, CHARS 18+, Uni AU, enemy!theo, dom!theo, rough sex, choking, slight brat taming, dom&sub, semi-public fuck, degrading, dirty talk, edging, PIV
“Funny…you think your actions don’t have consequences, hm?” Theodore growled through his rough thrusts. One hand wrapped around your throat while the other held you up against the wooden wall. Gasps, whimpers, hissing. That’s all that could free from your now swollen lips.
It wasn’t unlike Theo to come visit while you worked at the pub, but given the track record between you two, you never expected him to be balls deep inside of you in one of the rooms above the three broomsticks…but here you were.
“Such a fucking little brat-fuck…telling your friend to serve me instead of you, huh?”
He husked right along the apple of your cheek, his strong hand tightening around your neck while he pounded into you. You see…Theodore wasn’t too thrilled when he showed up to the pub only for you to have your coworker switch tables with you.
You weren’t friends. Dating. Lovers. No. You were enemies who….occasionally liked to have some ‘fun’ together. As confusing as it was you couldn’t deny the attraction you had for Theo. God, you hated him. Loathed him. But when he fucked your brains out it’s as if that all slipped away.
“I-I….I just thought-“
Theo cut you off, his darkened eyes shooting up to yours as he thrusted into you even harder. His jaw clenched while his gaze flickered between your own.
“Thought what? Huh? Didn’t want to serve me but wanted to be fucked by me? Is that what I’m hearing?”
Fuck. His domineering and assertive tone was driving you mad. It would only fuel your arousal more so. Your dainty hand went over his own as you nodded your head to him.
“Yes! Fuck- I'm sorry! P-please…”
Whimpering out as you tried oh so hard to bite back your moans, Theo couldn’t help but smugly smirk. Knowing what you wanted, but of course, he'd tease you about it beforehand. “Hm? The brats begging?…. Please what, ragazza?”
He asked in a taunting tone, his pumps seemingly only going faster. You were on the brink of climax. But you knew Theo and he surely wouldn’t let you finish until you begged him to.
“Cum…please-fuck please let me cum, baby”
You whined, squirming under his touch. Practically feeling your legs start to shake already. You couldn’t hold back much longer at this point. And Theo? Fuck he loved bringing you to this electric state. Knowing he had that control….that power over you.
“Beg for it, brat. Fucking. Beg. For. It.” Theodore grunted through each hard thrust, his teeth gritted together while his hand moved up from your throat, squeezing your cheeks together.
“P-please, gods- please let me cum, baby…fucking, please! I-I’m begging- please!” You cried out, feeling tears prick your eyes as you fought back the intense orgasm that wanted to hit. Your juices already starting to leak from your aching cunt.
Theo’s cock was throbbing between your clenched walls, giving you a slight head nod of approval before cursing in Italian under his breath.
“I suppose you’re deserving to cum now….finish for me, Cara.”
His voice came out in a hushed groan, the sound of his balls slapping against your skin heard all around. You didn’t even hesitate, finally being able to breathe, you let your pleasurable climax hit. The wetness from your pussy flowed freely down his cock. But he wasn’t done with you, not in the least.
Just a small little blurb for now but I can’t wait write more for this👀👀👀
Divider pinned in my master list 🌙
Requests and asks open my smut sluts 💋
#theodore nott#theo nott#theo nott smut#theo nott x reader#theodore nott smut#theo nott x you#slytherin#slytherin boys#theodore nott x reader#theo nott x fem!reader#enemy!theo#theodore nott x fem!reader#theodore nott requests#theodore nott fic#theodore nott x y/n#theodore nott x you#theodore nott imagine#theo nott drabble#theo nott fanfiction#theo nott imagine#theonott#theonott smut#slytherin fandom#slytherin smut#Slytherin boys smut#harry potter fandom#mommynotts asks#Theo smut
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Simon having a cracked phone screen is so fucking funny to me for some reason lmao
Y'know, that's the thing with me. I’m on board with whatever version of Simon people go with
Want him to be a smug bastard? Count me in. Awkward and inexperienced? Love it. A soft-hearted bloke with terrible communication skills? Absolutely.
But there's one thing I won't budge on: Simon's phone is the most neglected object on the planet. It’s practically begging for mercy, but Simon refuses to let it die because what else should he need it for? It still rings for calls, and it pings when he gets a text. Brilliant.
#theo replies#asks#simon ghost riley#simon riley x reader#simon ghost riley x reader#cod#call of duty
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For the yandere! Justice League x assistant reader, how would they react if they had Deadpool as a friend? Like he randomly shows up. They would try to keep the reader as far away from him as possible, but it's Deadpool. Lol. How would Yandere Justice League feel if the reader liked Deadpool because he's funny and makes the reader laugh even if in a tense situation, randomly just talking about nonsense and/or making funny jabs at some of Justice League members? Not only that, but he would just annoy them for his and the reader's amusement. I can also imagine Wonder Woman or Superman trying to kill/critically injure him but finding out he has a super healing ability. LOL. I can imagine the scene where Deadpool punches Colossus, but his hand breaks, then he tries again while saying, "Cock shot!" but his other hand breaks. Instead, he does it to Superman and says, "Oh, your poor Lois Lane!" I feel like that would make the reader laugh out loud.
I finally saw the Deadpool & Wolverine movie, and I loved it! So now I want to see more content about Deadpool. I forget how funny he can be. I would like you to add a Deadpool & Wolverine, but I don't know if you have seen the movie yet. But I recommend you go and watch the movie.
A Day in Life: Best Friends Forever
Synopsis: A day in your life where a visit from your friend ends up in Deadpool losing his thumbs and re-attaching them back.
Pairing: Yandere!Justice League X Gn!Assistant!Reader; Platonic!Deadpool
Tw: 18+; No spoilers from the movie; Some violence; Light gore descriptions (not really); Some sexual comments (it's Deadpool); English is my 2nd language.
Word count: 830
Requested? Yes.
Extra notes: I loved this request, saw the movie on like the same week it came out, sorry this took so long</3
General masterlist | A Day in Life - Series masterlist
— So that's what happens when I’m not around, huh?! — Hal Jordan snarked, faking amusement by the sight in front of him, but being very much not amused.
How? Was the question going through everyone's minds, as they watched their dear assistant (Y/N), in the middle of Hall of Justice, chatting away with a very infamous criminal known all around the hero-villain underground, who every single soul despised, and yet, there you were, choking your laughter and in tears with Deadpool, acting as if you've been friends all your life.
Diana was the first one to approach, followed by the rest of the Justice League.
— (Y/N), is this man bothering you? — She squared up and stared directly on Deadpool’s blank white lenses. That grounded you and helped you come back from the stories your friend was telling you.
— B-Bothering me? — Your laughter slowly died down, and you wiped your tears. — No, we’re just talking. — You shrugged and sniffled, so happy that a genuine smiled was fixed on your face, hypnotizing all the heroes for a moment.
— Wonder Woman! — Deadpool gave little fangirl jumps. Diana swallowed a groan. — It’s amazing to see you again! I’m even wearing my fanciest anal plug and thinking about you, all in your honor. — Diana couldn't control the disgusted and astounded expression on her face, while Wade saluted her. You bite your lips to not giggle.
— Don't be silly, Pool. Not everyone understands your humor. — You lightly slapped his shoulder and he sighed.
— I know! That's why I'm so introverted and depressed! — He shook his head. — That's why Disney sold me to DC, they couldn't handle my deep and complex character. Let's hope James Gunn knows what he's doing now. — Everyone, including you, furrowed their eyebrows, but no one decided to question what the hell he was talking about, since the mercenary was known for being insane. — And just after my third movie with Wolvie came out! Unbelievable. — He threw his hands in the air and shook his head while looking at an empty space as if there was someone there. He did that sometimes.
— You seem… Close. W-When did that happen, (N/N)? — Flash looked between you and Deadpool, biting his lower lip, slightly anxious. You blinked.
— Oh, well. Like, a few months ago? He sent his curriculum because he wanted to be part of the Justice League. There were no records of him in the system so I Interviewed him. Obviously he didn't pass, but we became good friends! — You shrugged with an easy smile.
— That's… Great, (N/N). — You narrowed your eyes on Hal Jordan.
— Hey… — Deadpool's mask gave the slightest hint that he was furrowing his eyebrows, and he pointed at Green Lantern. — (Y/N) told me about you. I don't like you. — He took his guns out of the holsters and pointed at the brunette. You gasped and stepped back, slightly regretting having told Wade about that. — STEP BACK WORST RYAN REYNOLDS SUPERHERO MOVIE OR I’M GONNA BLOW YOUR BRAINS OUT IN 4K R-RATED! — Hal raised his arms. He was already on thin ice with you, and beating your bestie would probably be a bad idea to start over.
Batman grunted for someone to cover your eyes and threw two batarangs that disarmed Deadpool before he could react. Deadpool gasped and looked at the ground wide eyed. His thumbs had been chumped off in the ordeal (Batman was jealous and also knew he would just regenerate).
— WHAT? WHAT’S HAPPENING? — You blindly yelled, since Superman had zoomed to just behind you and was covering your eyes.
— HE CASTRATED ME! — Deadpool cried, reaching back for his swords, but since he didn't have thumbs anymore, he couldn't even hold them, making him just cry more from frustration. — THE DADDY ISSUES JUST GET WORSE! AND JUST BECAUSE I WAS READY TO BE ADOPTED BY YOU! — Batman furrowed his eyebrows at the mention of him having more than just one kid.
— Guys, we should all just calm down. — Flash tried to play the pacifist, standing in the middle of the chaos with his hands up, but Wade’s cries were covering his voice.
— WHAT'S HAPPENING? — You tried to tug Superman’s hands off, but he didn't let up, and started trying to sooth you.
Deadpool got to his knees and pathetically tried to push one of his thumbs into place, trying to accelerate his healing process, and after 30 seconds of chaos, he perked up when the thumb got attached again. He did the same to the other one.
— The sight is gross, (Y/N). You do not want to see it… — Wonder Woman mumbled, eyes fixed on the scene, feeling a mix of grossed out and impressed.
— Gross? This is natural. Like the birth of a little naked newborn baby. You wanna know what's real gross? My roommate Blind Al’s stink! She might as well be dead at this point… Uh, oh… — Wade slowly got up. — (Y/N)... Call me an Uber. I need to check on someone.
Like, comment and reblog 🥰
#dc comics#yandere dc#yandere bruce wayne x reader#cw yandere#masterlist#yandere diana prince x reader#yandere barry allen x reader#yandere hal jordan x reader#wade wilson x reader#platonic wade wilson x reader#deapool#platonic deadpool#bruce wayne x reader#yandere clark kent x reader#clark kent x reader#diana prince x reader#barry allen x reader#hal jordan x reader#marvel dc crossover#marvel x dc#tw yandere#tw violence#yandere justice league x reader#justice league x reader#justice league#justice league x deadpool#deadpool x justice league#deadpool x reader#yandere justice league x assistant reader#justice league x assistant reader
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NSFW ALPHABET - hanta sero
ft. hanta sero x afab reader
warnings: afab reader but no pronouns used, dacryphillia, dumbification, overstimulation, i think that’s it?
notes: idk if anyone still does nsfw alphabets anymore but i think they’re fun!! this is for me and the one person that asked for this (ily) not proofread!
aftercare: what he’s like after sex
whether you’re dating or not, hanta will always clean you off with a warm, damp towel or get a shower/bath going for you. he’ll bring pajamas to the bathroom for you and have a water bottle and a snack waiting if you seemed particularly wiped out. bf hanta also loves to cuddle afterwards (prefers to be big spoon) and will kiss your neck and shoulder while he whispers how much he loves you in your ear :3
body part: his fav on both of you
on himself, i think he likes his arms and shoulders. he has a sleeper build (you can fight me on this) and will subtly flex when he sees you staring at him lmao. on you, he likes your hips - he just thinks they’re nice to look at and grab, and is definitely staring if you wear something that accentuates them. in public, he’ll usually have a hand resting there (you can’t tell me he’s not at least a little possessive) but he also love love loves to pull you towards him by your hips when he’s fucking you or eating you out
cum: anything to do with cum
i’ve said this before but hanta is just such a freak. he loves to cum inside but if he has to pull out he wants to cum on your ass, tits, stomach, face, back, you name it. he just thinks you look so pretty covered in his cum! he has several pictures of you on your knees in front of him, smiling sweetly with your face and chest painted white. oh and if he finishes in your mouth and you swallow it he’s immediately hard again.
dirty secret: a dirty secret of his
before you started dating, you were hanging out with a few others from your class in the common room when you started play fighting with mina. you leaned over him from your spot on the couch to push her, laughing as you rested a hand on his thigh to support yourself. he was hard in an instant and had to excuse himself to jerk off in the bathroom so you wouldn’t see! he has no idea why that got him so worked up to this day and refuses to tell you out of embarrassment :\
experience: how experienced is he?
i think he’s probably the most experienced out of the 1a boys, which is not to say that he’s sleeping around or anything, but he’s had a few partners before you and definitely knows what he’s doing! he understands that every body is different and he’s a fast learner as well, so even your first time together will feel natural! he’s also soooo good at eating pussy guys i cannot express this enough, he is a munch through and through
favorite position: self explanatory
probably cowgirl y’all i’m gonna be so fr. he loves this for three reasons: one being that he can see your face, two being that he can both let you control the pace and take over when you get tired (or simply when he wants to), and three being that he can get deeeeeep. he knows all the right spots to hit and will tease you about it when you can’t do it yourself, but he’ll decide to help and buck his hips up into you all the same. when you get tired and he feels your thighs start to shake he’ll pull you down to lay against his chest so he can fuck you right <3
goofy: is he funny in the moment?
he’s a funny guy!! and sex is funny sometimes!! if something awkward happens he’d much rather joke about it and get to hear your pretty laugh than pretend it didn’t happen. he prides himself on being able to make you laugh. for the most part he’s pretty into it, but that doesn’t mean he won’t make a joke if the situation calls for it!
hair: anything to do with grooming
i don’t think he shaves but he’d trim it if you asked him to or if he thought it was just getting too out of hand. he prefers you not to shave either (hanta is a bush fan idc. traverses the jungle without fear) but he also wouldn’t mind if you did, he’s completely obsessed with you and your body so he thinks you look gorgeous either way. he also doesn’t care if you shave your legs, armpits, etc, and he thinks it’s weird when other men are grossed out by body hair. like… why would he gaf
intimacy: the romantic aspect
if hanta sero is in love he is LOUD about it!! he absolutely worships you and the ground you walk on. yeah he fucks but he is also more than capable of making love. this usually happens on special occasions like anniversaries, birthdays, after a particularly nice date, etc. sometimes he gets kind of emotional, especially during sleepy morning sex, and he’ll tell you all the things he absolutely adores about you while he fucks you oh so slow. he also thinks hickies are romantic and if you give him one he’s wearing it with pride.
jack off: anything to do with it
he has a pretty high sex drive so if you’re particularly busy and don’t get to see each other much for a couple days, he’ll look back on old photos of you or the two of you together and jerk off. he’s absolutely gonna make it your problem though, it could literally be the middle of the day and you’ll get a text like “just busted to a pic of us from last week 😞 miss you baby” and??? he’s so unserious with the way he talks about it but now you’ve gotta carve out some time in your schedule to give him what he deserves
kink: a kink of his
he lovvvesssss when he fucks you so good that you start crying. he’ll shush you sweetly and wipe your tears away with his thumb all while keeping up the same pace and maybe even going harder. totally freaked out the first time it happened because he thought he did something wrong but has had a thing for making you cry since then. he’s a tiny tiny bit sadistic in this sense, he just loves knowing that he has that power over you ^^
location: his favorite place to do it
he’s not picky and, like i said, he’s obsessed with you, so he’ll pretty much fuck you wherever. he doesn’t really like having sex in a place where it’d be super easy to get caught but he’s fine with car sex. his overall favorite is definitely his or your bedroom, it’s the most comfortable and he doesn’t have to worry about rushing or keeping an eye out for other people!
motivation: what gets him going
i think he’s super big on physical touch, meaning he absolutely loves to cuddle. he loves being big spoon and nine times out of ten it doesn’t take him very long to get hard when you’re pressed up against him. this extends into everything though! rubbing his back? hard. kissing? hard. hugging you from behind? hard. he’s bricked up at everything you do tbh.
no: something he wouldn’t do
i often see people talking about him using his quirk in bed but i really don’t think he would! it’s super sticky and annoying and he doesn’t want to irritate your skin by trying to get it off. this absolutely does not mean he won’t restrain you if you want him to, he’s just not using his tape for it
oral: preference giving/receiving
i keep saying HE IS A MUNCH! AN EATER! he loves eating you out. he’s lowkey into dumbification and wants to make you cum on his tongue at least once before he fucks you, but prefers for it to be two or three times. he just loves how you get all fucked out before he’s even inside you. now, he’s only a man, so he’ll never ever stop you if you wanna suck him off, but he absolutely prefers giving over receiving
pace: fast, slow, stamina, etc
he’s somehow figured out the perfect pace at which to fuck you and has absolutely no problem keeping it up. he naturally speeds up when he’s getting close but even then it’s just soooooo good and ugh i’m in love with him. he’s slower when you’re both in more of a romantic mood and it allows him to focus on which spots and angles make you gasp and moan. he’s got hella stamina too (more below)
quickies: his opinion on them, how often, etc
he doesn’t mind a quickie! he knows what works to get both of you off so he’s more than capable of making it happen. since he likes to eat you out beforehand he definitely prefers to take his time instead, so they don’t happen too often. you’re much more likely to get all hot and bothered only for him to tell you to wait until later (much to your dismay)
risk: is he game to experiment? does he take risks?
hanta is a firm believer in trying anything once. he has a few hard no’s but otherwise he’s game for pretty much anything, especially if you bring it up. he thinks you’re much more likely to keep your sex life fun and interesting when you’re open to trying new things. it’s not a big deal to him when things go wrong and he makes sure you know that it’s perfectly fine! he always tells you he’s willing to try again if it’s something you’re particularly interested in, and genuinely means it
stamina: how many rounds can he go? how long does he last?
like i said i think his stamina is great! he can easily go two rounds with no issue whatsoever but a third will take him a bit longer to get ready for. he lasts pretty long (give or take 15-20 mins) and doesn’t usually require much downtime at all
toys: does he own toys? does he use them?
i don’t think he owns any toys personally, but he has no problem using them together. he thinks people who see sex toys as competition are lame and particularly loves using a vibe on you when you haven’t had much time together. he’ll be seated as deep as he can be inside you and stay perfectly still there while he holds a vibrator to your clit and makes you cum around him a few times. he already knew he was into overstim but the way you clamp down on him when he’s using the vibe is something he’ll never get enough of!! he also secretly wants you to use it on him but won’t bring it up unless you show interest in it.
unfair: how much does he like to tease?
hanta is suchhhhh an asshole sometimes. he thinks it’s the cutest thing ever when you get all worked up from his teasing and is actually in love with the way you beg for him. he’ll tease you in public by whispering in your ear or texting you the things he wants to do when you’re alone. he’s got a filthy mouth and never fails to make you blush at the things he says. he’s also the type to rub his tip against your clit and press against your entrance because he thinks how frustrated you get is funny <\3
volume: how loud is he?
he doesn’t moan very much, it’s mostly heavy breathing and an occasional groan when you feel particularly good. he prefers to hear the pretty sounds you make instead. he’s a big talker though! the only time he really shuts up is when he’s eating you out and even then he’s telling you how pretty you look when he replaces his tongue with his fingers. sometimes he’ll let a few breathy moans slip out when he’s about to cum but otherwise he isn’t loud at all
wild card: random headcanon
for some reason i think he takes the best nudes. like lighting, angle, content, he’s super good at making it look good. sometimes when he misses you really bad he’ll sit in his desk chair in front of a mirror in his room and record himself jerking off, his shirt riding up his stomach and his head thrown back and he just looks gorgeous. you seriously have no idea where he learned how to do all that.
x-ray: what’s going on under those clothes?
oh man. not very thick but he’s on the longer side, probably around seven inches fully erect and he knows what to do with it. he’s cut and it’s soooo pretty, his tip isn’t necessarily any pinker than the rest of him but it can be when he’s been hard for a long time. super super slight curve upwards. he has a really prominent vein that runs along the underside and it’s super sensitive, he hisses every time you drag your tongue along it and he has to pull you away from him so he doesn’t cum fast. also he’s a leaker sorry u can literally look at him and he’s got pre everywhere bruh
yearning: how high is his sex drive?
high. this boy always wants to be fucking you. actually loses his mind a little bit if you go more than a week without at least letting him eat you out. he’s turned on by basically everything you do, and even if you’re not doing anything, he’s turned on from just looking at you. he’s more likely to be up for a quickie when you’re both super busy because he hates being apart from you for so long!
zzz: how fast does he fall asleep afterwards?
he never falls asleep before you, even if he’s exhausted! he has to make sure you’re comfortable and all cleaned up before he can peacefully go to sleep. there was one time he fell asleep right after sex because he was just having the longest day ever and he still hasn’t forgiven himself for that, even though you insist it’s okay. he’s the sweetest and just wants you to be happy and comfy, i mean, you just let him fuck you, it’s the least he could do!!
#hanta sero mha#hanta sero smut#hanta sero x reader#sero x reader#sero x you#mha hanta sero#mha sero#mha x reader smut#mha smut#mha x reader#mha#mha fanfiction#bnha smut#bnha x you#bnha x reader#bnha hanta#bnha sero#hanta sero#sero hanta x reader#sero hanta#nsft alphabet#x reader#x reader smut
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New Chapter
Anya x Reader
Can be read as platonic because we all want the best for her
SUM: Anya gets an abortion so you and the rest of the crew wait for her. You were the first one, however, to see her after surgery. Also because fuck you, abortion rights
Warnings: Abortion, sexual assault, jimmy, medical situations, abortion rights, domestic happy family
“How long is it gonna take?” Daisuke asked, as he was worried but also excited. Excited for Anya to feel better. Worried for well….Not like he’s had the best reactions to medical situations. Example A being Curly in the wheelchair next to him.
Curly was doing so much better now that he was actually on the planet again. The doctors were still jaw dropped that Anya was able to keep him alive with so little. Was not only a testimony to how she refused for him to die, but him refusing to leave his crew behind as well. It’s still a long journey ahead, but he was in clean bandages and clothes at least. Was even able to talk again. Sorta. Rather raspy but he will get there.
Jeez where to start on how you all got here to begin with.
“She’s going to be fine. Abortion is way less invasive than you think. It really depends on how far along, but luckily she isn’t too far for it to be to extreme. Not sure what type she went for, but whatever she chose she chooses. Just grateful we were able to return home before she reached to far along.” You would admit, as you would check up on Curly’s IV bag for him. Taking over Anya’s roll until she could return.
“Ya know….My wife had an abortion.” Swansea said, and it made all of you look over to him in pure surprise.
“What’s the funny look for? Ya think I’m a freak that would refuse my wife that? She needed it! The kid just….It ain’t my place, but the kid just wasn’t gonna survive. Either she carried it to term and die with em, or she just skips the heart ache. Not like it was her fault. We got two healthy girls at the end of the day. We got em because she got rid of that fucked up one.” He explained, as Daisuke seemed wide eyed in respect.
Explains why he snapped more clearly.
Anya had explained to Swansea what had happened, and before you pre Daisuke knew it Jimmy’s head was sliced off and rolling across the kitchen floor. Poor Suke threw up all over you from the sight, and shock. Then threw up again when he learned why he did such a thing. Lots of puking and crying. Fitting.
“Glad that damn company is dead. Whose wise idea was it to have a single woman surrounded by men. No offense you two-“ Curly would wheeze, before you would help him take his medication. Sure is easier to take pills when you actually give him water and take it slow. No choking or crying.
“Thats a can of worms I don’t want us to talk about.” Swansea would scoff. As a father to two girls he had a lot of things to say. Daisuke would be willing to listen, sure, but honestly you all had enough emotional fatigue to last multiple life times.
Thank god Curly was so high up on the food chain at the company. They knew they would get into more hot water if their, once, top captain suddenly vanished. Wouldn’t make their bankruptcy any smoother. For once they did the right thing and sent Simeon to save them.
Funny. A capitalist corporate organization took responsibility for their actions. For the right reasons? No. But they still took it. Strange. Isn’t it?
“Is she done yet?” Daisuke would whine, as you laughed at his childish nature. As if waiting on a sister to get out of the dentists office. You found it rather endearing honestly. That despite it all he was still having a heart full of love and excitement.
“Go play on your toy.” Swansea would grumble, as Suke whined. Regardless he would pull out his game boy. A nice excuse to play video games with out any guilt on wasting his time. Enjoying life shouldn’t be a burden.
“Need anything, Curly?” You would ask him, since you planned on going to the bathroom. Yeah Swansea and Daisuke could handle him, but you still wanted to be polite. Maybe you could grab him something from the vending machines. Maybe a soda. Some sugar in his system would do him good. Anya said that sugary bubble water of some kind, like sprite, can help quite a lot with indigestion.
“I should be fine. Thank you for asking though. Sorry you have to…” He would admit, as he looked himself over. His missing limbs now properly covered up with fabric to keep them clean, and allow him some kind of independence. The fabric on the stumps were padded. With enough practice and effort he would certainly be able to roll himself around.
Then again this was a world of space travel. He was going to get cyborged eventually, but you need to be healed first before such an intense operation. Can’t rush something like this.
“Hey. I do it because I can. Not because I have to. You are our captain. Let me be a good solider.” You teased him, and even in his broken face you could see a smile.
Swansea have you a head nod to indicate he would ‘take care of the boys’ and you were off to use the restroom.
Once done with that you would grab a soda from the vending machine for Curly, a bag of candy for Daisuke, and some pretzels for Swansea. As you were making your way back a nurse would motion you over.
“Miss Anya was asking for you. She has finished her operation, and wanted you to see her.”
You were surprised at that. You expected Curly to be her first guest. Did something go wrong? Oh you couldn’t help but freak out.
You followed after the nurse quickly, and all you were shown was Anya resting in her hospital bed. Tired, but relieved. Mostly. You saw that familiar stress in her eyes. That same stress she had when asking you if she made the right choice in asking Jimmy for help with medicating Curly.
That worry of if I did the right thing.
The nurse would leave you to alone, and you would quickly set the snacks aside. Now you were sitting next to her, in a chair, and holding her hand. Ready to be the shoulder she needed.
“Hey there Doc. How you doing?” You asked her, as you carefully stroked the back of her hand. Made sure to be mindful of all the tubes and wires.
“Well….It went far smoother than I expected. It was just so quick. They didn’t even need to put me under. The IV is more so for the issues I already had because of being stranded on the ship for so long. It was just so quick. So painless. Was just like pulling a thorn out of an arm. It was….Simple.” She would try and explain to you. Needing to make sure to stop herself before using doctor jargon.
“Too easy?” You puzzled.
“Yes. It was just….I expected pain. Pain and anxiety and horror. Suppose even a nurse can come to learn a thing or two…..”
She was hiding something, and you had an educated guess on what.
“You expected Jimmy to break down the door. Weren’t you?”
There was silence, but it told you everything.
“Scoot over. Move it sister-“ You were now crawling into the medical bed with her, moving the wires around, and soon snuggled into her side. Hugging her close, and especially with your arm over her stomach.
“You did the right thing. It’s your body at the end of it all. You took responsibility of taking care of yourself. You wouldn’t have been able to live a proper life. You went to med school. You don’t need me to tell you the horrors of pregnancy and birth. That alone is terrifying. But also you simply not wanting to be pregnant is enough. Ain’t no Jimmy’s gonna storm in and say otherwise.” You huffed, as she smiled. Her head leaning into yours.
“Yeah….No more Jimmy’s. Pretty sure Swansea will make sure of that.” She did her best to joke, and you were proud of her for it. This whole ordeal was hell. Hell none of you will ever truly walk away from. But that’s ok. You all had each other to lean on.
“I think I’m ready for everyone now.” Anya would whisper, as you gave her hand a squeeze. You were so proud of her. This was all such a nightmare, but she’s taking it in stride.
“Hell yeah.” You agreed, before climbing out of the bed. You made sure to grab the snacks, and exited the hospital room.
“Come on guys-! Anya is waiting on you-!” You shameless shouted outside of the room. She couldn’t help her face palm. Daisuke sure was an influence on you.
“I wanna push Curly!”
“Like hell you are-!”
They would bicker away, before Curly said ‘fuck it’ and did his best to roll himself over. He sure was a stubborn one. Made it half way before you figured that was enough work out for one person.
“Pretty far! Getting better at it-!” You encouraged, as the two men realized how far Curly rolled off on before finally following you two into Anya’s room.
“HAPPY NO BIRTH-DAY!” Daisuke would cheer, as Anya shook her head at such a joke.
“God dammit kid-“ Swansea side, before he came over to Anya. Giving her head a kiss. Just comforting her much like a father would.
“How many of us need to be in medical beds?” Curly would give a raspy snort, as Anya reached her hand out. He would lean his head over, and she would give it a stroke. As if all his hair never burned off. A means of holding his hand, in a way, compared to just grasping a limb.
She didn’t need children.
She had all of you.
What else could a woman want?
Since you were willing to read through this story to the end, and get a nice in depth look on the importance of such why not donate to some organizations? : D
Planned Parenthood
Nation Network For Abortion Funds
National Abortion Federation
The Bridge Alliance
The Satanic Temple
ActBlue
No worry on donating. Spreading awareness and signing petitions still help! The more people learn and understand the better! Could also like reblog with other organizations or petitions!
Abortion is healthcare!
#mouth washing#mouthwashing#mouthwashing x reader#mouthwashing anya#mouthwashing daisuke#mouthwashing swansea#mouthwashing curly#Captain curly#anya x reader#mouthwashing fandom#mouthwashing fanfic#abortion#abortion rights#women’s rights#abortion is healthcare#abortion access#abortion care#abortion is a human right#abortion is essential#abortion is a right#health care#no uterus no opinion#pro choice#anti pro life#let women have rights#let people live#block me if you want#facts are facts#so eat a egg#fuck jimmy
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Hi Jade, for a Halloween ask could I request tasm! Peter or James trying to persuade their s/o to dress up in a couples costume? Tyyyyy
When James comes home that evening, it’s with the attitude of a man entrenched in love. Like, you’ve suddenly become a more enticing woman, his honeymooning, doting, squeezy sort of affection timesed by a thousand. He takes your face in the middle of the living room and holds you like he’s worried you might walk away.
“Alright,” you whisper. “What do you want?”
James holds you imploringly. “Oh, please, I just want one favour.”
“You never want just one favour, James.” Still, you draw a heart over his face with your eyes and resign yourself to saying yes to whatever whim it is he’s going to ask of you.
James smiles. He’s never not smiling, genuinely, but he reserves a softer super-happiness for you, and blesses you with it whenever he feels you’ve done something inconceivably kind. It’s the first sign of peril.
He has a plethora of ideas and none you like. The first being M&M’s. Then, I’ll be Jack and you’ll be Sally. No, I suppose I’m not skinny enough. He offers Gomez and Morticia; salt and pepper; a vampire and their unwitting victim, wherein he’s the victim, of course.
“I feel like all of these require too much body paint,” you say.
“What about…” He brings your hand to his lips. “Sailor Moon and Tuxedo Black?”
“Darling,” you say, lovingly disapproving, “absolutely not.”
“But what will we be, otherwise? I’m running out of options.”
You’re on the sofa now. James lays across you, a little big for it but too sweet to push away as he opens your hand, talking against your palm.
“You haven’t suggested beans on toast.”
“Would you–” He stops as you laugh. “Tease.”
“I have the perfect one. We’ll be Sirius and his unavoidable penchant for mischief.”
“So, Sirius and Remus.”
And while that would be funny, you have a far better idea in mind. You lean over him and turn his face by the line of his jaw, murmuring in his ear. “We’ll be lovebirds,” you decide, knowing the cheesier the costume the better, that a handmade headband and onesie will make his entire year. “How’s that? You can dress me up in feathers. And when everyone asks–”
“It’s brilliant. God, it’s inspired, it’s magnificent,” he says, but it’s all so soft you’re not truly listening, letting him pull you down for a kiss. “We’ll be the talk of the town.”
Sirius will piss himself laughing, but James will be happy. “Glad that’s sorted.”
#james potter#james potter x reader#james potter x fem!reader#james potter x y/n#james potter x you#james potter fic#james potter fluff#james potter blurb#james potter drabble#james potter imagine#james potter fanfic#james potter fanfiction#james potter scenario#james potter oneshot#the marauders#marauders era#marauders
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Mild Venom: The Last Dance spoilers
One thing I think would’ve made TLD better even if it had the same plot and ended the same way is more reciprocal affection.
I think the biggest problem of the movie symbrock-wise is that all affectionate/romantic scenes are mostly from Venom. Eddie seems to just be tolerating Venom most of the time. They’re suppose to be ride or die at this point. They’re suppose to be best friends he said it himself! I think if more scenes showed Eddie’s love or at least fondness for Venom, then more fans would be happier with the movie.
To be clear tho, I didn’t hate the movie but I do think it’s a step down from how their relationship was previously. Obviously I wasn’t expecting it to be so explicit with loving pet names and sloppy make outs but more implied in the way the previous movies did it.
Some examples I came up with for Eddie loving venom moments (actual spoilers):
Eddie complaining to the bartender that his fun vacation time with his “friend” was interrupted when they got punted into Marvel universe instead of talking about thanos and meta humans and how annoying aliens are. I want to believe they had fun in Mexico!!
Eddie smiling (and being grateful!!!) when Venom made him a cocktail. Also he shouldn’t have a headache venom can heal him.
When Venom says “You always take me to the best places” Eddie replies with “anything for you, bud” (but make it sound like babe)
More bonding over stuff they’d do in New York. Eddie can talk about food and Venom asks if there are bad guys there and Eddie says They can be the lethal protector there
More scenes in the Casino!!! It was so short :((
They should’ve tried to cheat at cards at least to show they also have a mind bond. It could’ve been cool or funny!!
A woman trying to hit on Eddie but he gets awkward and rejects her cause “I’m here with someone”
Mrs Chen could mention Ann and Dan are married and Eddie is happy for them but implied he’s sad cause he can’t marry venom
While separated in the Area 51 lab, Eddie is significantly distressed about it and talks about feeling hollow inside or like with a missing limb
Eddie should’ve been given the option to sacrifice Venom save himself and the world. But he CHOOSES NOT TO he says “but I need him” like the trailer suggested!!!
Have Eddie explain to the scientist women what being with venom is like and how he makes him feel (like the end of the first movie). Not only is this sweet but will allow the scientists to be more sympathetic towards symbrock and explains their willingness to help them and also to bond with the other symbiotes later in the movie
Have Venom apologize for hardships he put Eddie through and have Eddie assure him he’d do it all again if given the choice
Have Eddie shed a tear (at least 1!!!) when he wakes up without venom for the last time
The rest of these are more significant changes to the movie but still in keeping with the general plot:
Venom should’ve kept the codex a secret for a while and just told Eddie the xenophage was just revenge for the symbiotes imprisoning knull or something
Eddie can tell venom is acting strange and suspects he is hiding something (like in the comics re: their pregnancy)
The codex truth is revealed after the dance with Mrs Chen when they get attacked by a xenophage but before they get separated and taken to Area 51 leading to the sacrifice venom convo
When they reunite, venom admits he kept it a secret cause he was afraid Eddie would leave him but Eddie reassures him it’s them til the end
The rest of the movie plays out the same. But I think these choices would’ve really solidified their bond. It would’ve been more painful at the end but more satisfying!!! If you wanna make angsty tragedy then go all the way don’t half ass it
They’ll also have more scenes for their RomCom/Valentine’s Edit
#here’s my venom rambling#I kept thinking what was missing and how it could be fixed#symbrock#venom#eddie brock#venom the last dance#venom spoilers#venom the last dance spoilers#veddie
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