#maybe somewhere near the end of s4 even

[miniimoose]

truely why did they make lemongrab like this

dont get me wrong I LIKE IT but fuck man... why

[hitlikehammers]

Steddie Post S4: If All That's Left of Steve in the Final Battle is Ashes—

...are they REALLY JUST ashes? 🔥 

The final battle—like the last part of the very final battle—ends with shattering, and with dust.

It starts, the first bad dream and the first bloody nose and the first Code Red on the radios: well, that’s three months into something, for the first time in Eddie’s sorry-ass-but-honestly-actually-since-almost-not-having-any-life-at-all-any-more-and-miraculously-making-it-through-a-night-then-a-week-then-a-month-then-rehab-then-chronic-pain-then-more-friends-than-he’d-ever-had-before-and-frankly-in-the-beginning-more-than-he-could-count-plus-three-new-mother-figures-and-two-maybe-three-extra-maybe-father-figures-plus-one-friend-of-Dorothy-who’s-the-platonic-soulmate-of-maybe-the-love-of-Eddie’s-not-actually-still-sorry-ass-life: he’s about three months into something wild and reeling in his chest, brushing hands and lingering looks and flushed cheeks and little secret smiles ducked in toward shoulders or behind stray curls, or falling asleep pressed arm-to-arm only to wake up in one lap or another, and the whole of it’s shameless and intentional and giddy somewhere low in Eddie’s belly because it’s not uncertain, it’s honestly just fucking bashful, it’s shy and it’s the both of them wordlessly leaning into it, careful but sure, and almost all the more buoyant for it.

It’s three months in, and when they step up to that last battle—that final turn, do-or-die—maybe Steve pulls him behind a truck Eddie doesn’t even know the owner of, where it came from or why it’s there; but maybe Steve pulls him behind and draws him close without a word and kisses him relentless, drags his teeth and draws a little blood for the force and leaves them both raw, and panting, and desperate: it couldn’t really go any other way, like this—here.

Now.

“Live through this,” Steve had breathed against his angry red lips, hard enough that it stung; “so we can pick up where we left off.”

“I will if you will,” Eddie had shot back, defiant; still begging.

And Steve had kissed him again, and Eddie’d watched as Steve walked away with the lightest smear of Eddie’s blood on his lower lip as he’d spoken:

“I’ll hold you to it.”

And they’d parted, to do their fucking jobs, to play their fucking roles. They’re come back together, ready to take the final boss down as a unit, and Eddie remembers that he’d felt hopeful, he’d felt so fucking relieved because this was it. They were gonna nail it, all for one, and—

So it might be near the end, actually—they may have almost done it, finished the job and killed every last bit of this hellscape, every beast big and small, crushed what’s left of the husk of Vecna orchestrating it all: it might happen near the end. Or maybe just shy of the beginning. Somewhere in the middle.

All Eddie knows is that it happens. There’s light, and people floating in the air and then more light, dragged back down by the same lightning-spark power, and it’s back and it’s forth and when it hits anyone, Supergirl pulls them back to the ground and fights back harder, her face blood red dripping to her neck, her teeth bared all wrath and fury, and then—

Then there’s something that shoots different, hits Steve and he doesn’t float. It looks different, so it probably is different, and he doesn’t float when it hits him.

And so: Eddie holds to the bargain.

But Steve.

Steve…Steve Harrington, with the bitchiest glare and the brightest smile and the goofiest laugh and the biggest fucking heart, the bravest of all of them and the best part of Eddie’s whole soul—

Steve gets hit, and disappears from the world in nothing but a cloud of dust.

No one tries to shush Eddie, when he screams, when he wails and sobs; drops to his knees and fucking howls.

No one tries to stop him when he crawls to the space that held his whole heart, and now lies empty, save a dusting of something almost shiny, coarse to the touch but fine to the naked eye, hard to distinguish from the dirt on sight alone—is that him? Is that his Sweetheart, all that’s left of him—

Eddie thinks maybe they try to stop him halfway through the way he starts frantically sweeping, scooping up the ash and filling every pocket he has with as much as he can. He vaguely feels a hand on his shoulder, maybe the sound of his name, but it’s all white noise because Eddie’s picking up the pieces of his heart, here, Eddie’s trying like hell to hold on to something of the man he loves and anyone who doesn’t like it, or thinks he’s crazy, or wants to rush him, ask him to leave any little pouch in any layer of his clothes unfilled, less than overflowing with all that remains?

Fuck them. Fuck them all. Because Eddie kept his side of the deal.

Live through this.

I will if you will.

And now he has to live with the way his Stevie…didn’t.

——

The rest of the Party sticks together after it’s done. Dustin is inconsolable, Erica and Max scowl in each other’s direction but not really…at each other. Mike’s having a weird…frenzy response, denying Steve’s dead at all and demanding Lucas help him get El to look for him, he has to be somewhere, he has be saveable like Max, like Eddie. Robin’s fucking catatonic—the real adults take most of the burden, trying to figure out who to call, because Steve’s their only casualty, the beating heart at the center of all this and it’s gone, no wonder they’re breaking—

The Party stays together. Eddie falls back on what he knows.

He runs.

Specifically: he runs home, carefully though, he can’t jostle his pockets, and he knows exactly where he’s looking when he gets to his room, crawls to the farthest corner of his closet in this still-weird-to-be-so-big bedroom after the trailer: and he finds it.

His mom’s old little hope chest.

There are a million little fake velvet pouches inside, a couple pieces of actual jewelry kept in an empty film canister, and then a smaller jewelry box type thing meant for a dresser or something: Eddie doesn’t think he can fill the hope chest.

But the rest…

He starts with the jewelry box, since it’s already empty, carefully cups his palms to fill it with the precious dust until the lid doesn’t close.

Then he sorts the pouches, puts aside the ones that don’t pull tight enough shut for his liking. The rest…those will be temporary. He’ll find a better home for the ashes soon, but for now they’re safe, and all that’s left is…

The film canister is special.

It’s stupid and plastic and like every other fucking black-and grey tube thingy that smells like vinegar on the inside of you hold it up too close. But this one—

He’s always gotten a little teary-eyed to think that this was the one his mother kept.

Because he’d poked a hole through the rough little peak in the top of the lid with a fork, took a piece of thread from the junk drawer and made himself a necklace to match the one she had and she’d smiled at him so bright, poked another hole next to his, and threaded his string-chain through the back of the lid so it’d close up tight, to keep all your most secret prized possessions, my sugarbean and he had. For years.

Now it held what was left of her jewels, mostly cheap stuff with sentimental worth he couldn’t calculate—but now he has to take the faulty pouches and give the jewelry a new home.

Now he’s never had something more prized and precious to keep.

He finds fishing line in Wayne’s stuff, stronger than the thread worn and aged over a decade and a half, swaps it out with the string. Covers the inside with electrical tape to make sure nothing can sneak out of the holes, even so.

And then he fills it. Last of the ashes, and it all only just fits but the lid pops on perfect.

Then he pulls it over his head, and lies down on his bed.

And fucking sobs when the canister falls to settle right over his heart.

——

Some of the kids try to coax him out, argue grief is better shared or whatever, but Eddie’s deaf to the knocking, the way they try to yell at his window—not even cracked open, he won’t risk a rogue bird or a stray breeze disturbing all he has left of his, his—

The kids go away, eventually.

Wayne finds out through the grapevine what’s happened—he comes into Eddie’s room and holds him even if Eddie doesn’t want it, doesn’t ask. He’s grateful, though, even if he doesn’t say it, and Wayne sheds more than one tear; he’d been warming quick to Steve, called him son.

That wasn’t something Wayne did lightly. Not that anything Wayne did was done lightly.

However many days pass, Eddie doesn’t keep track. He wakes and runs to the little box on his dresser, just to make sure it’s safe, clutching the film tube around his neck while he does, weighing it desperately until he can be sure the bulk of the ashes are undisturbed. The rest of his time is spent lying in his bed and rolling the little canister across his fingers, taking off all his rings so he can just…touch it. Be close to whatever lifeless pieces of Steve—and likewise, then: pieces of Eddie—remain anywhere at all. He passes the hours like that, largely. Sometimes he thinks he’s hungry, like his stomach aches in that pang kind of way, but thinking of eating in a world where Steve doesn’t breathe makes him sick every time, so he doesn’t follow through. Wayne pesters him to at least drink something, so he sometimes shuffles to the bathroom, or the kitchen, drinks from the sink because glasses are for people who make plans for the future, who intend to drink things over the course of a lifetime, a life maybe with a purpose, a purpose that—

Eddie throws himself back into bed again, every time. Presses his film-canister-talisman tight to his sternum until the hurt of the pressure blurs with bigger hurts, and ultimately blurs into black.

Until one day, he opens his eyes. And after he’s done with the subtle disappointment that he had to, that morning came at all; when he gets up and checks the box?

The lid’s flipped off.

And there’s a tiny pile of dusty ash, glittering next to it, when there’s no light in the room to even catch it.

Eddie’s heart drops, then seizes in his chest.

What the fuck. What the fuck.

No one comes in but Wayne, and he just pokes his head in. Nothing can get in, either, unless…but they closed all the gates, there is no Upside Down anymore—

Eddie’s hands are shaking as he tries to brush the little pile into his hands, pulse tripping when the thinks of what it is, inside his hands, and he carefully lets it sift back into the jewelry box, tries to judge if any’s been lost, closes the top when he starts breathing too heavy, when his anxiety threatens to make the situation worse as he tries to bend down and see the furniture at surface level, find any precious speck of—

Not a speck. Not a…mote.

The escaped ashes were on top of something, though. Something Eddie’s never seen before. About the size of a notecard but, kinda like…ancient, weathered; that yellowed look you can never fake just right, traced alone with…some kind of calligraphy out of fucking Camelot or some shit, metallic gold in script:

I cannot let you burn me up, nor can I resist you. No mere human can stand in a fire and not be consumed.  

The…fuck?

Eddie tries to squint, because the text is weirdly positioned; it does look like something’s worn off, and some of what’s actually there is brighter, bolder than the rest, and then there’s a whole other style, almost backward, like a mirror-image of handwriting, and Eddie lifts the card up to the mirror instinctively, only to see…

There’s writing on the other side.

Eddie’s breath catches when he recognizes the handwriting. Small, and more words than should be able to fit but…it fits. It’s dried blood in color, and Eddie’s not convinced it’s just a color for how it’s a little raised and flaky, but it doesn’t come off when Eddie touches it, traces it because the cramped little letters, tall and short all mixed and mismatched, so familiar, so tight in Eddie’s chest—

It’s…Eddie…

Eddie’s eyes skim the first few lines in Steve’s handwriting, and he cannot fucking breathe—

Hey, wow, that’s some crazy shit there on the other side of this piece of paper, my gran says it’s a warning even if I don’t personally get it, but I’m pretty sure it’s enchanted? The paper, I mean. The warning’s probably about being too close to…this, without being prepared. But that’s, whatever. Point is, I don’t think I can make new enchanted paper, so here’s the deal: First, thanks for grabbing the ashes? I didn’t actually expect anyone to do that. I hope it was intentional, like that you weren’t sweeping or the ash got stuck in your shoes or something, because intentional will make the rest of this way easier (hopefully, or like, maybe), and if you’re a part of the bigger Hawkins fuckery it’ll be way easier to believe at the least so, fingers crossed I guess but: I’m kind of a phoenix? Firebird? Thing? It’s a bloodline “curse” but especially since the, umm, incidents with the Lab I’ve been thinking maybe it’s actually kinda cool? Like insurance. But the extra fucked up thing is that someone has to grab the ashes without being, like, told to. Free will or some bullshit. And apparently we’re not a very spontaneously likable bunch of dungeons-and-dipshit-type creatures, because not many of us even get to re-birth ourselves. Because of the ash…thing. But you! You did that! And now I can do the rebirth thing! Which I hope is okay. There are a lot of, like, bond-type things that go along with the person who ‘cares selflessly to gather ash unbidden’—I think that’s what makes someone more than a ‘mere human’ consumed by the Fire and they won’t get burned, they’ll be…well, if they wanted. Bond-stuff. Not important. I’m not gonna hold you to any of that shit, like, nothing you don’t want to happen will happen because of this, I 100% promise. Except maybe I’ll do some over the top gestures of gratitude—and on the off chance you already know me, at all? Over-the-top is kinda how I do most feelings, so. Should not be a surprise. Only thing I will ask, and if it’s too much no worries, the whole resurrection shebang was a gamble from the get-go but, if you can just keep this pile of ashes safe for a little bit? It takes longer to heal based on how old you are when you, y’know. Kick it. So…yeah. I never learned how to come back as a baby because that sounded weird. Quicker, but weird. I only learned the slower way so I can just…come back how I left, like no time passed. But if you can keep the ashes safe until then that’d be totally cool. Anyway, thanks, whoever you are. Kinda owe you my life, here. I’ll show you the appreciation you deserve when I’m, you know. Not-ashes. Once I have opposable thumbs again and stuff. But really. Thank you. See you soon, hopefully (if that’s cool, I mean, I can get out of your hair ASAP too if you’d rather, just say so soon as I pop up)— ~SH

Eddie…falls to the floor at some point, nearly ripping the note, no: no, actually, he should have decimated it, macerated it the with the way his hands clench and his tears have fallen and made not a single mark: enchanted paper.

Ashes that…maybe are Steve?

That maybe mean Steve could come…will come back?

Eddie really can’t breathe, now, and when the black swallows everything, he’s still on the fucking floor.

——

When next he comes-to, Eddie splashes water on his face after he checks on the jewelry box, reads the letter again, clutches the ash-filled pendant in his hand as he drinks, considers eating—no.

No, not yet. His stomach’s still unsteady. His chest is swollen, pressed with something like hope for the impossible because what the fuck, first and foremost, but then, then…

There was a horrorscape under his feet for years before it came for him personally, before he almost died at its hands once, and then again by proxy when, when it took his…

His maybe-love-of-his-life-and-also-possibly-something-like-a-phoenix-who-might-be-coming-back-to-Eddie-which-would-mean-Eddie-could-keep-breathing-and-his-heart-would-be-returned-to-his-chest-by-the-hands-of-the-man-he-loves-because-he-thinks-it-died-with-Steve-but-if-Steve-isn’t-dead—

He basically almost died again when…maybe his Steve—who Eddie fully acknowledges at this point he’s absolutely fucking gone on with his whole heart and soul, because there’s no other real explanation for his total and complete shutdown as a human for the sake of Steve’s loss—when his Stevie died, but maybe didn’t.

But then now, now maybe…

Maybe the impossible could be something that saved them, saved him, instead of something that only sought to ruin.

Eddie doesn’t think he can believe he’s that lucky.

But it’s easier to entertain the possibility, than to continue just…knowing Steve died before Eddie could acknowledge with his everything that he—certified cynic and self-deceiving dumbass Edward Elliot Munson—was ass-over-ankles in love; and more than that: before he could tell Steve as much, because of anyone Eddie’s ever met, Steve Harrington deserves to know how impossible it is not to; how ineffably much he is loved.

“Hey,” Eddie ultimately finds himself curled up back in his bed again, clutching his film canister to his chest, tight enough to leave an impression on his skin.

He wants it to. Right over the way his heart slams against his ribs. He wants a bruise. He wants a scar. He wants inviolable proof.

“Umm, so I don’t know if this is real,” Eddie’s eyes flicker to the jewelry box of ashes, the strange potentially-enchanted note on his dresser; “or if it is, how this works?”

This apparently being talking to the cobbled together film-pendant around his neck, he…he’s so fucked, isn’t he, this is insane—

But it’s not like that’s ever stopped him before.

And before never had love in the mix. So.

“If you can hear me,” Eddie runs his thumb around the circumference of the cap, over and over; “I pretty fucking sure I’m in love with you,” and it’s maybe fucked up, how it feels as nervewracking to say it to a plastic canister of ashes as he imagines it’d feel looking into those stupidly-wide amber eyes, but yep: said plastic ash-pendant’d be fucking bouncing with his heartbeat if he wasn’t holding it so tight to the furious drumming of his pulse.

“I know it’s fast? But,” and Eddie swallows, shakes his head for reasons that are maybe about dispelling the idea that anything’s too fast or too much in the life they’ve led, one where more might be possible, where a future might still exist beyond all possibilities, all hope except for the fragile frail thing in Eddie’s chest written in blood red, in Steve’s hand on Eddie’s fucking bones:

“I don’t think losing someone hurts like this if your heart’s not in it all the way,” and that’s, that is…

That’s the crux of it, isn’t it. His heart is the heart of it.

“Sorry, about that, if you,” Eddie swallows, sour around the idea that maybe, even if the impossible’s possible, this part, where he feels like this, is just…maybe not too far but in the wrong direction.

But he wants to believe. He wants to think Steve saw something pointing in this direction when he told him to survive, so they could have, so they could finish, so they—them, together—could…

“Yeah.”

Eddie’s voice is hoarse enough to hurt, now, so he lifts his little film canister to his lips and presses them hard, sure: it’s weirdly warm against his mouth, held too close to his chest for too long.

Not long enough. Not close enough.

“Be careful about taking care of yourself, about, coming back and,” Eddie grips his pendant of ashes back tight to the center of his sternum;

“I’ll watch over it, watch over you,” he promises; “long as you need.”

And he breathes, holding the canister close before he brings it back to his mouth again and whispers to it like it matters, or…just in case it matters:

“Come back to me,” his words come out in a shudder, all trembling; “I’m just a mere human, maybe less than,” and that’s true, that is so fucking true but:

“But you already consume me,” Eddie speaks it honest, and kisses the rim of the cap— if there’s any chance of getting in, it’s there:

“So burn me up, as much as you need to,” and Eddie means it, he fucking means it with everything he is; “just,” and his voice cracks, and he shoves the canister back tight to his shaking heart when the first tear falls on it, covers it with both hands and cups it safe and damn-near painful as he whispers to whatever might listen:

“If any of this is real,” he barely fucking breathes: “please come back.”

He loses the battle for consciousness to his tears, but awake or asleep: he doesn’t once let go of the pendant pressed to his heart.

——

Eddie’s warm. Like, fell asleep in the sunlight, swaddled in a blanket, embraced and held and wrapped up in pure comfort warm.

“You’re more than a mere human,” a voice exhales right behind his ear: also warm, also comfort, also fucking impossible and he turns, frantic and even more so when he feels the lack of his film canister against his chest, and he tries to scramble for it but he’s…he’s held the whole time in strong arms that he knows, same as he knew that voice, same as it’s clear that he’s warm because he’s wrapped up in a body, tangled from the legs up with, with—

“How,” Eddie barely speaks, more mouths as that chest lifts, those lungs fill, that mouth curls warm and sweet and his Steve is watching him, those eyes so alive and then those strong hands are reaching for him, cupping Eddie’s cheeks and marveling like Eddie’s the wonder, here, like Steve isn’t lying in his arms like a full-on fucking miracle.

“You offered burning, and pledged your heart unasked,” Steve says it in this…this way that is exactly that simple, and exponentially more profound.

“That is some lore shit,” Eddie breathes out almost on instinct because…that’s some lore shit.

And Steve—Steve, his Stevie, wrapped around him and moving and breathing and being and definitely one-hundred-percent naked but that is totally irrelevant right this moment because Steve—

Steve laughs at him, soft and fond and god, god but Eddie thought he’d lost it. He was so sure, and his heart was so broken but now Steve’s heart is strong against his skin and Eddie can, he can…

Eddie can fucking breathe.

“I don’t think anyone expects our kind to be…cared about, like that,” Steve shrugs a little, and Eddie wants to protest because Steve Harrington isn’t only cared about, he is adored, and fuck anyone who says different, who so much as thinks otherwise—he wants to push the point, but Steve’s eyes are so intent, so saturated with feeling.

And fuck, but Eddie missed those eyes.

“Speeds the whole re-personing thing up, apparently,” Steve’s smile is a little wider before he shakes his head with a cute little toss of that hair.

“Old magic things,” he dismisses; “for later,” and then he draws Eddie back down close to his chest and snuggles him in so, so close.

“Tired,” Steve sighs a little into Eddie’s mess of curls; “and you need taking care of.”

And it’s…out of everything, the protective certainty in those last words are maybe the most unshakable proof that settles in Eddie’s chest and reminds the still-reluctant, still-too-scared parts of Eddie’s heart to commit and start back to beating because: only Steve Harrington is protective…quite like this.

“You’re really here?” Eddie whispers, wondering and hesitant all at the same time.

“Thanks to you,” Steve kisses Eddie soft, sure: taste strangely of smoke and cinnamon but underneath—all Steve.

His Steve.

He folds into Steve’s chest and just, fucking, clings.

“So fast,” Eddie mouths against Steve’s skin, because the heartbeat under his lips is almost indecipherable, one beat to the next. “And you’re so warm, are you,” Eddie props his chin up and looks up at Steve, anxious and flooding with worry before he sees Steve’s smile, still sweet and steady.

“Bird,” Steve drums his fingers against Eddie’s forearm, lightning quick; “fire bird, so,” and the heat makes sense then, too, as Steve wraps him up again tighter and sighs, satisfied as he envelopes Eddie’s frame.

“Also extra energy, I think,” Eddie listens to Steve’s words around his heartbeat through his chest; “like, I couldn’t make it past your kitchen but, I don’t know how I know it, but I know I can give some of it to you while it’s settling.”

Magic. Steve. Can share his phoenix magic. To take care of Eddie. Immediately after coming back from the fucking grave.

On brand, Eddie guesses. Jesus fuck.

“I am pretty damn positive I’m in love you with you, too, by the way,” Steve shakes Eddie back to his body, to the moment, to the soft sure way he breathes those words and kisses Eddie’s temple like Eddie’s pulse doesn’t trip around the sentence, the sentiment.

“Also thank you, for,” Steve adds, and drops another kiss while Eddie reels, floats in the moment of hearing the words, of knowing for sure, of feeling it: “for loving me, somehow, enough to,” and Eddie can imagine where that’s headed, the way Steve says somehow like an unthinkable thing.

And there will be none of that, so he stops it and kisses hard, wet, open-mouthed at the center of Steve’s chest, over his bird-flutter heartbeat.

“It broke me,” Eddie breathes there, cracked open and still raw; “I already mostly figured but,” and his voice breaks, and Steve pulls him closer, so warm, and the bird-heart-flutter feels more like full broad wings, majestic, almost embracing and ensuring Eddie of all things is safe, and kept.

And warm.

Fuck if Eddie doesn’t fall into the feeling, full body; whole heart and soul.

“If there was any question whether I already loved you with everything, the way I fell apart,” and Eddie just moans a little because there aren’t…he doesn’t have words for it at all, he—

“Let me put you back together?” Steve murmurs low in a way that’s so soft and gentle but trembles the marrow inside Eddie’s bones.

Timeless. Endless.

Eddie kisses Steve’s chest again and hopes Steve knows that means yes, and please, and forever.

Unequivocally.

“Could we maybe talk about that, um, bond stuff, that the letter…” Eddie eventually speaks muffled into the hair on Steve’s pecs, after soaking in the heat and pulse and realness of him.

“I meant it,” Steve murmurs straight into Eddie’s skin; “I’m not holding you to—”

“I want you to.”

Eddie did not for a second think or feel otherwise, from the moment he saw the words, before he even started to believe at all: his mind was filled with possibilities by those words. His chest was…

“You…” Steve nudges Eddie’s head up from his chest and studies his face, reads something in his eyes before his breath catches, this time; before his bird-pulse skips, something light and giddy against Eddie’s weight and Steve huffs, disbelieving but…maybe happy for it.

Maybe…maybe overjoyed, even.

“Yeah,” Steve breathes, and leans to kiss Eddie full on the lips again, consuming: familiar for it.

“Yeah we can talk about that. But later.”

And then he settles Eddie back against him and wraps him in his bare skin, the still-radiant warmth.

“Now you sleep, and when you wake up, I feed you, you shower, you put on new clothes,” Eddie wrinkles his nose, doesn’t even know how many days it’s been since he cared for those things; abandons any shame for it when Steve feels him recoil and presses him closer, chuckles once and nuzzles his hair;

“Then I feed you again, and then,” Steve kisses his head once, and then twice, and then three times and Eddie feels it tingle through his goddamn veins like a vow, filled up with promise when Steve whispers, so alive:

“Then, we can talk.”

For @klausinamarink, who requested '"I cannot let you burn me up, nor can I resist you. No mere human can stand in a fire and not be consumed.”' at my HOBBIT-STYLE BIRTHDAY MONTH PROMPT FEST and also for @steddie-week for the Day Seven prompt 'Free Space'

✨permanent tag list: OPEN (lmk if you want to be added/removed): @pearynice @hbyrde36 @slashify @finntheehumaneater @wxrmland @dreamwatch @perseus-notjackson @estrellami-1 @bookworm0690 @nerdyglassescheeseychick @swimmingbirdrunningrock @goodolefashionedloverboi @sanctumdemunson @theheadlessphilosopher @lawrencebshoggoth @mensch-anthropos-human @micheledawn1975 @lumoschildextra @dotdot-wierdlife @imhereforthelolzdontyellatme @grtwdsmwhr @eddie-munson-addict

divider credits here

ao3 link here ✨

[sleepy-steve]

why are you never real?

@steddieangstyaugust 02/08 // ghosts

wc: 6.1k // rating: E // cw: suicidal ideation, sexual content // tags: angst with an ambiguous ending, ghost eddie munson, dream haunting, dream sex, mild suicidal ideation, nightmares, post-s4 but vecna died, inspired by sleep token’s the apparition

divider credits @steddiecameraroll-graphics

well, i believe // somewhere in the past

something was between // you and i, my dear

“You’re gonna wake up soon.”

Steve sighs, the motion feeling exaggerated, as most things did here. “Already?”

Eddie cocks his head and smiles sadly at him. “You know how it is, time works—”

“Time works differently here, yeah.” Steve cuts him off gently, having heard the words many times before. “Still… I wish I could stay here.” The with you is unspoken, but in his dreams, Eddie always seemed to be able to read his mind.

“Don’t say things like that, Steve.” Eddie’s tone is soft, but concerned. “It’s too easy to get stuck here, and they—the kids, Robin, Nancy, Jonathan—they need you.”

Steve scoffs, looking back out over the trailer park. It’s night this time. It wasn’t always. But at least they were in the Rightside Up. Sometimes they were in the Upside Down. Eddie said it depended on Steve, his moods, how his day had gone, how much pain he was in from his residual injuries, physical or otherwise. “They don’t need me. Maybe for someone to get his ass handed to him to buy time for more important things.”

Eddie grips his shoulder, a strange sensation still, no matter how many times Steve’s felt it. “Don’t undersell yourself that way. You’re way more important than that. They need someone who’s gonna look out for the reckless ones. How many times would Henderson or Mayfield have thrown themselves into danger if you hadn’t’ve stopped them? How many of them have you saved by looking out, making sure they didn’t do anything stupid?”

Steve looks back at him with a pained expression, head tilted slightly. “I didn’t save you.” His voice is soft.

“That’s not fair, Steve,” Eddie’s sympathetic gaze goes right to Steve’s soul. “You couldn’t have known… I needed to—Henderson… I couldn’t let him get hurt.”

“I know,” Steve sighs, the many times they’d had this argument echoing in his head. “I just… You deserved to make it out. As much as any of us did.”

Eddie’s hand moves from his shoulder to his hand, grasping tightly. If Steve thought about it for too long, the feeling would change, would start to become unnatural. “C’mon, big boy, time’s almost up,” Eddie teases, the humour falling a little flat.

Steve looks from where Eddie’s hand is placed over his, back up to his soft gaze. And as most of these meetings ended, they look at each other like they want to say more. Each of them with unspoken words barely held back, communicating something with near imperceptible shifts in expressions, eyebrows slightly raising and pulling together, tiny shy smiles. “I’ll see you soon?” Steve asks, the same way he always does.

“Of course, as long as you want me to be here, I will be,” Eddie answers, the same way he always does.

Everything shifts, warps, fades. Then Steve is awake, and Eddie is gone.

Steve knew. He knew he was getting too attached. Was starting to just wait for the days to end so he could enter his dreams and see Eddie again. Starting to pull away from his real life and crave the night, crave the warm feeling he got there. Like there was nothing else to look forward to aside from sleeping and dreaming. He knew the others were starting to catch on, to notice Steve’s detachment. He could only blame his ongoing migraines so many times before they’d start to get concerned and demand he see a doctor. But he couldn’t help it. It was like an addiction.

The first few times Eddie appeared in his dreams, those few months ago, Steve wasn’t even aware of what—or who, rather—he was seeing. It was more like a feeling. A level of awareness deep in his subconscious mind that let him know something—someone—was there. Seeing him. With him. It wasn’t until weeks later when he was hit with an exceptionally vivid dream, something he only experienced with night terrors after his experiences with the Upside Down, that he realised who it was.

To have a vivid dream that was calm was its own exceptional experience. Weirdly, he found himself in the trailer park. He was walking around alone at night, the area quiet aside from wind rustling and insects chirping. Steve walked aimlessly for what felt like close to an hour, until he heard a very quiet humming that made him stop and look around. He eventually looked up and saw a figure sitting atop a familiar trailer, swinging their legs and looking up at the stars. The humming got louder as Steve approached. The figure turned their head, and Steve saw a big smile he knew, crinkling the corners of eyes that he last saw as glassy and lifeless.

“Eddie?”

Steve woke up with a gasp, the sight of his own bedroom jarring after waking so abruptly. He rubbed his eyes with trembling hands and shook his head. Despite the fogginess of his mind, he remembered flashes of the recent dreams he’d had, all those weird-feeling ones, and it hit him. Steve didn’t know how exactly, but he was sure that all those weird-feeling dreams he’d had were also about Eddie. They all felt the same, somehow. The same… energy, or something.

Steve dreamed of Eddie again the next night. In that one, Steve was standing below the Munson trailer, already looking up at Eddie, who was still on the roof. Steve called for him, less shocked than the previous night. Eddie smiled down at him, the same as before. Though he only got to say, “Hey, Harrington,” softly, kindly, gently, before Steve startled awake again.

It took two more nights of the same—each wake up just as jarring, hands shaking for long minutes afterward—before something changed. The first difference was that it was daytime, the sun shining down over the trailer park. The second was that, instead of the roof, Eddie was sitting on the small porch of the trailer. Once Steve appeared, Eddie patted the step beside him, inviting Steve to sit.

“Good day today?” Eddie asks, lighting a cigarette.

Steve thinks for a moment, struggling to connect his dream mind to his conscious memory. He did have a good day. Both he and Robin had the day off work, so they took the kids to the movies. “Uh, yeah? How’d you know?”

Eddie waves vaguely at the sky. “Sun’s up,” he says around a puff of smoke. “I’m here instead of up there.” He points to the porch, then the roof of the trailer. “You didn’t wake up the second I opened my mouth.”

Holding out the cigarette, Eddie lets the smoke exhale from his nose like a dragon. Steve accepts it, taking a drag. “Yeah, wonder why that keeps happening…”

“It’s your dream, man,” Eddie shrugs.

Steve only hums, taking several moments to think about it. “I guess there’s no use asking why you’re here then?”

“You wound me, Harrington!” Eddie slaps a hand over his heart. “Am I such an unwelcome presence in your dreams?”

Steve laughs and looks to the ground, tapping the ash off the cigarette. “Of course not, man. I… I’m happy to see you. Even if you’re not, y’know, real… Are you?” He looks back with unease.

“Ah…” Eddie smiles in an odd way. “I guess that depends on your definition of real.” He throws up finger-quotes.

Handing the cigarette back, Steve gives him a quizzical look. “What’s that supposed to mean?”

Eddie takes the cigarette, inhales the smoke, and lets it out slowly. “You believe in ghosts, Harrington?”

The world shifts as Steve takes in the question, vision warping, colours blending together, physicality feeling both weightless but somehow very heavy.

“Woah, man, hey, stay with me, Harrington.” Eddie places a hand on his shoulder, but it feels wrong. Both too tight and too distant, like it’s not his arm at all but also like it’s inside his arm. Steve meets Eddie’s worried stare and tries to focus. The world settles around them. Eddie’s hand feels less foreign on him.

“You’re a ghost?” Steve finally asks.

“Ta-da…” Eddie does a weak imitation of jazz hands, cigarette between his teeth.

“And you’re, what? Haunting my dreams?”

“Aw, c’mon, man, don’t make it sound like that,” Eddie laughs. “But yeah, I guess something like that. It was more just to, y’know. See. What would happen.”

Steve thinks back on all the weird-feeling dreams. “It’s been, uh, couple of weeks? Right?”

Eddie is defensive, but there’s humour behind it. “Hey. I only popped in a couple of times, but then you started calling for me. And who am I to ignore the call of King Steve?”

Steve frowns and plucks the cigarette from Eddie’s fingers, pointedly ignoring the nickname. “Calling for you?”

“Yeah, I guess once you realised it was me and tried to see me again. It’s kinda like, I dunno. A sense? Or something. I can just feel it when it happens. And I know to come here.” Eddie gestures vaguely, hands moving with his words.

Steve exhales, smoke shooting low out of his mouth. “Sorry, man. Didn’t know I was doing that.” It sounds silly now that he’s said it, but he didn’t really know what else to say. What do you say to the ghost of your kinda-friend who is being called to your dream world?

“Nah, it’s cool,” Eddie brushes it off, taking the cigarette back again. “It’s not like I don’t have a choice. Like you summon me and I get dragged from wherever I am into your dream, nothing so dramatic. But, y’know, not much else to do. Ghost life isn’t exactly the most exciting existence.”

Steve looks at Eddie, who’s looking ahead, seemingly seeing something other than the trailer park. “Where are you when you’re not here?”

Eddie drops the cigarette butt into the grass below them and squashes it with his boot. “Other places.”

He doesn’t elaborate and Steve doesn’t ask. The silence stretches between them for several long moments before Eddie breaks it. “You’re taking this surprisingly well.”

Steve hums thoughtfully. “We’ve seen weirder shit. Besides, I’m not even sure I’m convinced this isn’t something my whacked out brain cooked up for me.”

Eddie looks like he wants to say something, but laughs softly instead. “I guess I’ll have to find a way to prove it to you.”

Steve mulls over what he’s learned, and remembers what Eddie said when he arrived in this dream. “Are you around when I’m awake?”

Eddie grins at him. “Sometimes.”

Another vague answer, but Steve can’t stop the matching grin that grows on his face.

“Alright,” Eddie says suddenly, looking out to the middle distance, then up at the sky. “Time’s almost up, you’re waking up soon.”

“Wait, what? Really?” Steve was sure it had barely been an hour.

“Time works differently here,” Eddie says. “Sometimes it’ll feel like five minutes, other times, five hours. Just depends.”

Steve feels his brows pull together. “On what?”

Eddie gives him a half smile. “On you, mostly.”

“Are you gonna always give me super vague non-answers?” Steve asks. There’s no heat behind it.

Eddie grins again. “Maybe.”

Steve scoffs and then shoves him softly with his shoulder. Another question creeps to the front of his mind. Overhead, the sky grows grey. “Are you… am I gonna see you again?”

Eddie gives him a curious look and then shrugs. “Sure. As long as you want me to be here, I will be.”

“Okay, okay, cool,” Steve sighs, the surprising bloom of panic settling back down. “I guess, uh. I guess I’ll see you soon?”

“Sure thing, Harrington,” Eddie says with a light laugh. It’s the last thing Steve hears before he wakes up.

Steve jolts awake, but doesn’t sit up immediately. The memory of his dream fresh, not fading quickly the way they usually would, and with it, a lot of confusion. Was that real? How would he ever know if it was and not just some delusion? His hands shake for twenty minutes before settling down. The questions and confusion plague him all day until the next dream.

When Steve arrives, it’s night again. But he’s on top of the trailer, standing a few steps behind Eddie, who is back to sitting over the edge. Greeting him with his usual grin, Eddie pats the spot beside him, same as the night before. Steve sits and joins him, looking up at the stars.

“Wasn’t sure if you’d want me back,” Eddie jokes.

Steve huffs a laugh. “Well, I have some questions.”

“Oh?” Eddie turns fully to face him, crossing his legs. “Do share.”

Steve turns too, pulling one knee up to lean his elbow on, other leg still dangling. “Have you worked out how to prove that you’re actually a ghost?”

Eddie hums, looking off to the side, out at the trailer park. “Sadly, I’m stuck on that one. I could tell you stuff I saw around you today, but that doesn’t really prove anything.”

Steve nods. “So I just… have to believe you? Take you at your word?”

“I mean. You don’t have to believe it, you could tell yourself it’s all in your head and banish me from ever returning to your dream world. If you wanted to.” Eddie shrugs, but continues pointedly looking away from him.

“I wouldn’t—I don’t want to do that,” Steve sighs. “I guess I just don’t want to have my hopes up. That you’re still around in some way.”

Still facing away, Eddie side-eyes him with a small smile. “Can’t imagine anyone being happy about getting haunted.” There’s something beneath the joke. Something soft.

“I guess… it’s nice? To think that you’re there. Here.” Steve coughs a little, struggling with the sincerity that seems to be pouring out of him. No filter in his dreams, apparently. “And in my dreams,” Steve continues. “Because I’m… inviting you?”

“I only answer the call as I hear it,” Eddie says, closing his eyes and holding a hand out to the side, palm up. Steve snorts, and they both laugh. There’s a brightness in Eddie’s eyes. 

The dream doesn’t last long. They spend some time looking at the stars before Eddie notes that Steve will be waking up soon.

“How do you know that?”

Eddie shrugs. “Dunno, just do. Same as you calling me. Just a feeling.”

Steve has no choice but to accept that answer. “So… I guess I’ll see you soon?”

“Sure thing, as long as you want me to be here, I will be.”

Eddie’s smile fades and warps before disappearing completely. Steve is awake and alone again, unsure of what to make of his most recent dream. It was nice to think that Eddie’s ghost was around, that he wasn’t completely gone, but how much could he rely on that? Sure, they had seen plenty of weird stuff, but Steve never believed in ghosts before this. If he wasn’t real, was Steve going crazy, having vivid conversations with the image of a—what? Friend? Steve wasn’t even sure what to call their relationship. This distinction held him up for longer than thinking about whether or not he even believed in Ghost-Eddie’s existence. Both thoughts hung over his head all day like his own personal dark clouds. He found himself wondering if Eddie was around during his shift at work, his car rides, picking up Robin or the kids. It was ever-present, and that thought alone started to make him believe that maybe Eddie really was there. Like his presence was forcing Steve to think about him.

Eddie visits his dreams every night. Days and nights at the trailer park, sitting on the roof or the porch, sharing cigarettes, talking about their lives, their pasts. Eddie claims to see a lot of what the group gets up to, and is always keen to share with Steve his thoughts on conversations, fights, misadventures he sees. (“It’s so good being able to tell someone what I thought!” Eddie says, grasping both of Steve’s shoulders. He feels heat growing in his cheeks at the sight of Eddie’s delighted eyes, but assures himself that it’s nothing.) Steve still finds himself questioning the reality of it all, but he starts looking forward to his dreams more and more each evening.

Then he has a nightmare.

The night terrors weren’t anything new, not since eighty-three. Though it had been a while. The knowledge that Vecna was defeated certainly helped, but there was something else. Steve tried to convince himself it was not the comfort of knowing Eddie was waiting for him. Of knowing that he was never truly alone in his dreams. No, it was definitely not that.

When he arrives at the dream-trailer park, Steve almost jumps back, almost trips over a familiar vine. The sky is a haunting blue-grey, red lightning striking in the distance. The trailer is covered in vines, exactly the same as it was that night. Fog covers the ground all around him.

“Woah, Steve, what happened?” Eddie’s voice comes from his right, causing him to flinch instinctively. “You okay?”

Steve swallows, heart pounding. “Yeah… Yeah, I just…” He took a breath. “Migraine.”

Eddie nods in understanding, looking around them. Steve had told Eddie about the migraines that struck him regularly since his run-in with Billy Hargrove, then doubled after his beatings below the Starcourt Mall. He’d suffered through one today, falling asleep with it pounding behind his eyes and feeling like his skull was splitting in two, cold cloth over his forehead doing little to ease his pain.

Eddie looks back to Steve, concern in his eyes. “You feeling okay now?”

Steve turns his shaking hand in a so-so motion. Thankfully, he wasn’t feeling the physical pain here, but it was clearly showing itself in other ways. Between the visuals of a place he hoped to never see again, the way his heart pounds in his chest, the way he couldn’t seem to take a full breath, he knew he was in a night terror—or at least, something like one. He didn’t know how that changed with Eddie being there. “Been better. You?”

“Fine, aside from seeing the place, y’know…” Eddie waves in the general vicinity, grimace settling over his face. “Like this.”

“Yeah…” Steve exhales, running a hand through his hair. “Sorry about that.”

Placing a hand on his shoulder, Eddie gives him a look, one that Steve was starting to become all too familiar with, huge brown eyes filled with sympathy. “It’s not your fault, Steve. You don’t—”

A low growl stops Eddie’s words, both of them turning sharply towards the sound. The sound of a creature creeping in the grass alongside the growl awakens something in Steve’s memory. “Shit.”

“What?” Eddie’s expression is slowly turning to panic. “What is it?”

“Quick.” Steve turns to the trailer. “On the roof. Go—now!”

He grabs Eddie by the elbow as he rushes to the railing. Steve sets his knee up for support, pulling Eddie forward to go up first. Eddie pulls himself up with surprising dexterity, quickly turning to offer his hand down to Steve. The growling gets louder. Steve grips Eddie’s forearm, using his foot to push off the railing and pulls himself up to the roof. They only get to look at each other in relief for a brief moment before the sound of something heavy hitting metal startles both of them into looking down.

“What the hell is that?!” The panic comes clear in Eddie’s voice.

“You remember when I told you about the demo-dogs in the junkyard?” Steve says, voice unsteady. “Nineteen eighty-four?”

The dog below them opens its face, hissing horribly, drool dripping from its many teeth.

“Jesus, yeah, okay.” Eddie rubs a hand down his face, seemingly unable to look away from it.

Another two demo-dogs join the first, all hissing and jumping at the side of the trailer, sending tremors through the structure. The rattling and sounds of flesh hitting metal send a chill down Steve’s spine. “You think they can hurt us?”

Eddie scratches the back of his neck. “I mean. This is a dream, and I’m, y’know, already dead, so technically no.” He peers over the side of the trailer, legs wide to keep him steady. “But uh, it’ll hurt until you wake up, I’m sure.”

Steve joins Eddie in looking over the side, mirroring his stance. From the fog, another group of demo-dogs joins the others, seemingly larger than the first ones. One of the big ones looks up at them—and how was it looking at them with no eyes?—opens its many-flapped face, and screeches.

Before he can register it, or stop it, Steve grabs Eddie’s hand, instinctively pulling them closer together. He’s unsure if he’s trying to protect Eddie or himself, he just knows he wants him near. Taking a small step, Steve ensures Eddie is behind him, further away from the creatures.

“They can’t get us. Up here.” Eddie’s reassuring tone changes quickly. “Right? They can’t like, fly, or something?”

“Shouldn’t be able to,” Steve says, more steady than he feels. His heart is still slamming in his chest, his breathing is still short, and his hand is still in Eddie’s. Somehow the last fact is the one sticking to the front of his mind.

One of the creatures rears up before taking a leap. Steve grips Eddie’s hand tighter. It reaches high, but not high enough, missing any possibility of getting to the roof by half a foot. He feels Eddie tug on his hand, pulling him slightly back. Finally dragging his eyes away from the creatures, Steve turns to see Eddie pulling him down to sit.

“Maybe if they can’t see us, they’ll piss off,” Eddie says, leaving their hands joined.

Steve follows him, sitting close. “Yeah…” Steve lets out a shaky breath. “Maybe.”

Loosening his fingers slightly, Steve tries not to watch, tries not to see if Eddie immediately takes his hand back after being released from Steve’s tight grip. He doesn’t. He just squeezes gently, reassuring. They sit cross-legged across from each other, while Steve tries to control his breathing.

“You saved the kids from those things?” Eddie asks, fear still lingering in his eyes.

Steve laughs shakily. “Yeah… yeah, like, five of them? Seven, maybe? Had Dustin, Lucas, and Max in the bus. Just whacked the dogs with the bat.”

“Ah, the fabled nail-bat,” Eddie says with grandeur. “Devastated I never got to see it. Pretty metal, Harrington.”

Steve can tell Eddie’s trying to make him feel better, distract him from his own mind, and Steve is willingly lulled into it, a small smile creeping onto his face. Their hands are still clasped together, Eddie now tracing little circles with his thumb on Steve’s skin. It’s all so comforting. So comforting but so temporary. So unreachable. The thought makes his smile drop slightly.

“Hey, you okay?” Ever-observant, Eddie notices the shift.

Steve tries to bring the smile back up, but he’s sure his eyes betray him. “I just… worry, y’know? That you’re not real. That it’s all in my screwed up head. I…” Steve sighs, looking down at their hands, voice growing small. “I want you to be real.”

“Steve…” Eddie’s voice is thick. His other hand reaches out, hesitates, then his fingers are softly around Steve’s jaw, gently guiding his gaze back up. “I know I can’t prove it, but I’m real. As real as a dead guy can be.” They both laugh softly. “I promise. I see you.”

Heart pounding rapidly, Steve tries to blink away the tears pooling in his eyes. “What if I go to sleep one day and you’re not here?” The question comes out quickly, out of Steve’s control. Like he can’t hold anything back.

Eddie pulls his hand out of Steve’s, who mourns the loss for only a moment, before Eddie brings it to the other side of his face, the cool metal of his rings softly pressing into Steve’s skin. “I promise,” Eddie says, voice serious. “I will always be here if you want me to be. Okay?”

“Okay,” Steve whispers, nodding between Eddie’s hands, before they trail back down to Steve’s.

The dream doesn’t last much longer, and Eddie prompts him to go quickly—“It’s a lot easier to get stuck in a nightmare.”—despite Steve’s quiet protests. Eddie brings his knuckles up to Steve’s face again, softly grazing his cheek with another promise to be there the next night, before he fades away and Steve wakes up.

Steve doesn’t have another nightmare for a long time after that. Weeks blend together in a mess of dream memories, Steve finding himself eager to get to sleep each night. He doesn’t tell anyone what he’s experiencing. It’s not that he doesn’t think anyone will believe him, but he doesn’t know how he’d explain why Eddie comes to him every single night. What possible reason could he give for that?

It’s a few weeks later, when they’re laying side by side on the roof of the trailer, Eddie’s hand softly tracing little shapes on Steve’s arm, when Steve finally asks a question he’d been thinking about for far too long.

“That day, back when you were hot-wiring the RV…” Steve starts slowly. Eddie hums for him to continue. “Were you… flirting? With me?”

Eddie doesn’t pull his hand away, but does keep his eyes firmly on the sky. “I—well, yeah. I was.” It’s hard to tell in the low light, but Steve swears Eddie’s cheeks are a little pink. “I just thought—y’know, we’d already seen so much shit. Thought it might, I dunno, make you laugh? But yeah. I was.” The silence stretches for a long moment. “Did you—is that—um, were you…?”

Eddie lets the question trail off into nothing. Steve takes his hand firmly in his, watches as Eddie looks at him and looks away just as quickly. Steve joins him in looking up at the stars. “It took me by surprise, for sure. But I, uh. It was—I hoped. That you were.” His cheeks feel hot, and he can feel Eddie’s eyes on him, analysing him. Steve doesn’t look back, scared to have said too much.

Neither of them say anything, but Eddie squeezes his hand. They stay that way until Steve wakes up, as always with a promise that Eddie will return the next night.

It’s another week, when they’re sitting side by side on the trailer’s roof, before Eddie struggles to ask a question that has seemingly been on his mind for days, hands more jittery than usual as he lets his fingers trail over Steve’s skin.

“Do you think… if I hadn’t—if we’d been able… that maybe,” Eddie clears his throat. “Maybe we could have…?”

Steve doesn’t need to hear the words to know what he means. “I think… yeah. There was something. Between us. I could, I dunno. I could feel it.”

He can’t explain it, the thing that Steve felt. Some electricity, some pull that dragged him into Eddie’s orbit starting the second Steve’s back was shoved into the wall of the boathouse and a shard of glass was pressed up against his neck. He found himself constantly in Eddie’s space, and was sure that Eddie felt it too. The lack of needing to distance themselves from each other. It was present, and the more Steve thought about it, inevitable. If they’d had more time, been able to explore it… 

“Okay,” Eddie exhales heavily. “Yeah. Me too.”

They lock eyes, and Steve sees barely concealed grief, longing, in Eddie’s. The almost imperceptible widening, irises shining, the slight pull of his mouth, all says more than anything either of them could put into words. Eddie breaks the moment, letting his head rest on Steve’s shoulder, hand clasped tightly around his.

It’s one of the longest nights Steve’s had in his trailer park dreams.

It gets much worse after that. Steve constantly pulls away from his real life, like it’s just time to fill until he can get back to his dreams. He often says how much he wishes he could stay. He doesn’t say why, but Eddie knows. Despite how gentle his tone is, Eddie reminds him to think of his real life, to not let himself get stuck in his dreams. But Steve sees the resolve slipping, the way Eddie doesn’t even seem to be able to convince himself when he tells Steve how important it is to stay present, with the people that love him.

Steve opens his eyes to his dream to see night, as it often is, though the sky is clouded. No sign of the stars he and Eddie usually spent the nights looking at. He knows why the clouds are there, his earlier argument with Robin echoing in his mind. Eddie is where he usually is, sitting with his legs dangling off the roof of the trailer.

“Hey,” Eddie calls softly. “You okay?”

Steve shrugs before moving to the railing to pull himself up to join him. The silence settles between them, Eddie waiting patiently for him to start talking. Steve doesn’t say anything, instead looks at his own shoes beside Eddie’s.

“C’mon…” Eddie brings his face close to Steve’s, leaning down with a small smile. “Tell me what happened.”

Sighing softly, Steve doesn’t bother to ask how Eddie knows something happened. He always knew. “Just had a fight with Robin. It was stupid. I’ll apologise to her tomorrow.”

“Why was it stupid?”

“She just…” Steve runs his hand through his hair. “She knows I’m hiding something from her. Said I’ve been distant. And I got mad about her asking. The whole thing is my fault.”

Eddie is quiet for several moments, studying him. “That doesn’t sound stupid to me.”

Steve sags a little at the words. “Yeah… but if I had just told her… maybe not all of it, but enough. I dunno. We probably wouldn’t have fought.”

“Steve…” Eddie’s voice is so soft, Steve knows he doesn’t want to hear what he’s about to say next. “You can’t… you can’t keep doing this. I’ve told you before, it’s too easy to get stuck here—”

“Well maybe that’s what I want!” Steve snaps, cutting him off and immediately regretting it.

Eddie pushes himself a few inches back, away from Steve, expression unreadable. He pulls his knees up to his chest. “If I think…” His words are slow and measured, “that you are at risk of getting stuck here… I’ll—” Eddie pauses, seems unsure for a moment. “I will have to stop coming back.”

Ice floods Steve’s veins. “What? What do you mean?”

“I don’t want you getting stuck here. You need to live your real life, you can’t just keep waiting to come back here. It’s not healthy.” Eddie hugs his knees. “I don’t want to stop coming. But I will if I have to.”

“Eddie… no…” Steve reaches out but stops when Eddie shakes his head.

“You can’t keep doing this. It’s not your fault that I didn’t make it,” Eddie says, referring to their conversation from the previous night.

Steve feels a wave of guilt wash through him. “We could’ve saved you. I could have saved you.”

“I made my choice that night, you can’t keep blaming yourself for it.” Eddie pulls his legs tighter. “But it’s not just that… is it?”

Steve curls in on himself. “I… I can’t help it. Knowing that we could have had… It’s like this—thing that won’t leave me. It’s all I think about. You are all I think about.”

Over his knees, Eddie gives him a devastated stare, eyes swimming with it. He looks at Steve like he has so many things to say, but doesn’t say any of them. Holding it all back. Holding himself back.

Steve feels the lump growing in his throat. “Please… please don’t leave me, Eddie.”

Whatever resolve Eddie had crumbles, and he shifts close to Steve, taking his hands. “I won’t, Steve. I’ll always be there. But this… it isn’t good for you. If I need to hide from you, for a little while…” 

“Please don’t…” Steve whispers, looking up at him with wet eyes. Their noses are almost touching. “Please…”

“Steve…” Eddie sighs, pained. His brows pull together.

Steve pulls his hands from Eddie’s, placing them on either side of Eddie’s face. He watches the conflicted look fly across Eddie’s eyes before he leans forward slightly. Their lips brush so softly, Steve shudders a breath at the feeling and Eddie groans, eyes closing as his frown intensifies. Steve freezes for only a moment, before surging forward. Eddie is grabbing him tightly, one hand pressing at his back, the other pulling on his shirt. All of their fear and longing felt through the movement of their lips. It’s fierce and heavy and desperate. Eddie’s tongue is in his mouth and he tastes like cigarettes and the salt from Steve’s tears. Letting his hands soften, one cups Eddie’s jaw, the stubble rough against his skin. The other trails down his neck, then to grip at his hair, fingers tangling in the curls.

Steve’s heart races, and everything starts to warp. Eddie is not close enough and he’s so close they’re almost one. Their lips are too soft and too firm against each other. It feels intense and it feels like he’s chasing it. It’s all consuming and it doesn’t feel like enough. He tries not to think about it. Tries to just sink into the feeling.

Unsure how or when it happened, Steve is on his back with Eddie above him. Their hands are everywhere, mapping each other, clinging desperately to one another. Steve pulls Eddie closer so their bodies are flush, feeling the weight of the man he knows in his heart is dead but feels so real and alive on him now. Feels the expansion of breath in Eddie’s chest, the thrum of his pulse in his neck, the pull of his teeth on Steve’s lip. He hears the soft moans from Eddie’s throat, the rustling of their clothes as they move against each other.

Their movements become frantic as hands move to waistbands and zippers come undone. Everything blurs. Their hands are together, wrapped around each other, running up and down their lengths as one. Steve’s lips trail down Eddie’s throat, breath catching as he feels the pulse there again. Every sensation arguing, screaming, that he’s real and alive. Eddie ducks, bringing his lips back to Steve’s, face angled to deepen the kiss until they're both panting into each other's mouths.

Steve tries to look but only sees snatches of detail. Eddie’s eyes, hooded and glazed as their hands move quicker. The redness creeping up his neck. The creases between his brows deepening as his moans grow louder against Steve’s lips. He can’t tell whose groans belong to who as their breath combines between their lips, their hands moving together. Pleasure coils low in his abdomen, his breath hitching as he holds tight to Eddie with his free hand. He moans and cries, lips dragging against each other as he comes, Eddie close behind him. Their hands slow and their breathing softens. Eddie’s weight is on him almost entirely. Everything else feels fuzzy.

They lay there, arms wrapped tight around each other, for what could be hours. Time has never been clear to Steve here. They hold each other as though fearful that one might be snatched away from the other at any minute. Between gentle kisses, Steve looks to see tear tracks running down Eddie’s cheeks—no doubt mirroring his own. His focus starts to return, the warped feeling fading, returning to the clarity of his familiar dream world. Steve remembers what they had been talking about before.

“I won’t,” Eddie says, eyes locked on his. “I won’t leave. I promise.”

Steve has no choice but to believe him, nodding before kissing him again. It might have been one of the longest dreams Steve’s had, but it’s entirely too soon before Eddie warns him that he’ll wake up soon. Steve pulls him tighter, his desire to stay stronger than ever. Eddie is the one who finally pulls away, sitting up beside him.

“Promise me you’ll fix things with Robin?” Eddie tries to ask it casually, but it’s clear he’s avoiding what he really wants to say.

“Yeah,” Steve sits up with a half smile. “I promise.”

Eddie reaches out, letting his hand trail down Steve’s cheek, stopping at his jaw. He leans in for a slow, soft kiss. Everything he wants to say is in his gaze—gentle, longing, pleading.

“I’ll see you soon?” Steve asks, the way he always does, and yet not at all like that. There’s so much more behind it. His voice wavers, afraid that the answer will be different.

“Of course,” Eddie answers, voice breaking. As the dream starts to warp and fade, Eddie’s wide wet eyes blurring before him, Steve hears the promise more earnestly than ever. “As long as you want me to be here, I will be.”

[ep2nd]

@remy-a

Today's topic- the change in animation in LMK

I know like the majority of the Fandom has probably been sent to the ER after season 5 animation (or the emotion couldn't tell) but I think someone said that the animation slightly changed from like the Pilot to s 1-3, somewhere there, so like 3 different animation at this point, maybe??

Alright here's my thoughts

AGGAGAGAGGGGHHHHHHHH

Okay for real this time-

When I first watched LMK, I fell IN LOVE with the fluid motions, the active movement, the anime-style Influence, the exaggeration, the most random fun moments, pop ups, yse of environment, angles, camera movement, facial and body expression and other stuff I don't know the name of

Now as someone who's never watched Anime, please don't kill me, I don't exactly know what that looks like, but try going anywhere on the internet without tripping down the stairs and falling into the basement of ANIME

Also, I'm used to more rigid, beautiful backrounds, great lighting, or basic show animation. Such as Trollhunters, Amphibia, The Owl House, Big City Greens, Ninjago, How to Train your Dragon, Carmen Sandiego and others

So as you can see, this was new to me, and I fricken loved it

Now I can tell there definitely has been change from the Pilot to season 4, more refined, less sloppy

So, when season 5-

Oh dear, I love you Wild Brain, I really do, Ninjago and Carmen Sandiego WERE BEAUTIFUL

BUT AHHHHHH

I will say this, this is a new artstyle, they need practice, and I'm sure it'll improve, but this is not that time it's time to CRITISIZE GET THE RED PEN (maybe I am an English Teacher)

Remember what I said about what I love about LMK animation? Okay now throw it out the window into the Fire of FRICK THIS

Now I will say, they used some angles pretty well, such as using the environment to show emotion/tension, like when it would Pam out and something was blocking the two characters, from Wukong to Macaque to the poll in the Pagado and then a mountain between MK and Wukong near the end- look for its cool- someone pointed it out here on Tumblr can't remember name sorry

2nd, the expressions look really typical, like I miss the shot eyebrow from Wukong, or the the pathetic puppy eyes of MK, or the :3 for Mei, or the furious faces of Pigsy, the sparkly pure joy of Sandy, the chaotic gremlinness of MO, the evil Edit maker smiles of Macaque (I've seen your tiktoks) ALL THE LITTLE EXTRA THAT MADE THE EXPRESSIONS AND HUMOR/TENSION/EMOTION BETTER

3rd, the movements. Seen especially in the second episode when they escape. It's just, so basic running, like compare them running to MK's run in s2 running from the LBD and then when he ran in s4 away from the Ink scroll. Just so much more fear and dread. Also talking bout LBD, her voice actor? Phenomenal as always? Her movements and how they animate her? She seems more like a red headed doll with button eyes than the horror of something like FNAF(haven't played FNAF so can't really compare) what I'm saying is she seemed less huanting, a weary, fear-instilling, and bone-chilling(shut up let me pun) presence this time around, which really makes the scene less dramatic, but the camera angles, voice acting, and some animation still make it somewhat good.

Okay, this post is getting long and I can rant all day, and that's not even with me rewatching the show to pick it apart, someone probably already has good for them I'll look for it👍

In conclusion, comes of more dull, simple, rough, and rushed. S5 story, which has some problems, really hit deep in the last few episodes, mostly MK and Wukong, and if the studio beforehand continued animating, then I think it would have been a masterpiece, really sad to see the wasted potential

I know it's a new studio, but I wish they took more time to practice and learn, and maybe do it on a season that wasn't like the big reveal and end (I'd say a more happy season but let's be honest the Trauma train ain't stopping for a LONG TIME)

so, I guess I'll give it a 4/10, points for using the backround to storytell, still got some great angles, some funny bits here and there (the soldiers where a joy), action scenes were somewhat good, not a lot can't judge more, and pity points because I know they're still learning

[katyawriteswhump]

the power of love, part 13 (steddie, stobin, steve whump fic)

Alternate ending S4: Steve has a habit of surviving near death experiences then getting sick for no reason. And Eddie and those fatal bat bites? After an impossible feat of mouth-to-mouth resuscitation from Steve, he’s mysteriously fixed. So, Eddie’s back to being banished, this time with Steve and Robin in tow. Eddie’s healing, but Steve isn’t… and life gets even more confusing, when Eddie develops feelings for Steve, which aren’t entirely unrequited.

Part 1 Part 2 Part 3 Part 4 Part 5 Part 6 Part 7 Part 8 Part 9 Part 10 Part 11 Part 12 Part 14

(also on AO3 here and as part of my steve whump fic series)

Steve POV

When Steve’s finished slumping forward and retching, he’s so through with everything.

“You did good with the lightning, kid.” Hopper scrapes Steve’s hair from his face. He’s still got an arm about him, pretty much all that’s stopping Steve collapsing onto the dirt. “Let’s hope we don’t need it again, huh?”

Steve sniffs, takes the kleenex Hopper offers and dabs his lips. As his super-fast breaths finally slow, his brain kicks off: 

I got superpowers! Henderson’s gonna flip! Shame about the glitches, what with the blacking out and puking my guts out. The sound of a rushing river distracts him. He’s been hearing it, on and off, for hours. 

He kneels a little more upright. Hopper gives him some space, passes him some water. “How far exactly have you travelled from Hawkins since the accident at Lover’s Lake?”

The accident? Oh yeah. I died. Twice. 

Steve hasn’t told anyone about his second joyride into the afterlife in the Soviet base. Somehow, being an idiot as a kid is way easier to share. A damp breeze rattles through the trees, slapping him back to the present.

“Steve?” prompts Hopper. 

“I… uh, I played basketball all over the state.” Even after drinking, his voice is a croaky mess. “Swim meets, too. Been a few times to Indianapolis. I was okay.”

Hopper scratches his stubbly jaw, looking almost as bushed as Steve feels. “How okay?”

“To be honest, I was kicked off the starting squad after a couple of the more distant games. Crappy performances, and I got humiliatingly sick on the bus.” It all makes sense now. “I survived.”

“Fine. You’re a tough guy. You’re gonna have to tough your way through this journey. I can’t leave you behind.”

“Eleven survived in the woods for—”

“At that stage, she didn’t have half the US army on her back.” He pats Steve, powerful enough to rock him. “She’d gotten experience with her powers, too.”

Steve can’t fathom if he’s feeling slightly patronised or dead relieved. All he really wants is to lie somewhere quiet and sleep for a year. Instead, he must drag himself to his feet—or, in the event, he lets Hopper do the dragging. He can’t help asking, though: 

“Chief, can you hear running water? Like, loud.”

And getting louder. Niagara loud, in fact.

“No. Why? Can you?”

“Oh… um, maybe not.”

Okay. It’s totally in my head. Why aren’t I panicking harder?

When they reach the Humvee, Robin and Eddie are no longer at each other’s throats. On the contrary, they’re huddled in some deep and meaningful chat. As one, they slam Steve with stricken bunny-rabbit stares, which make him want to laugh so goddamn loud.

During the torturous drive, he sleeps, and his mind drifts back to the Soviet base. He’s caught in that furious red tide, which roars through his aching head. It’s echoed by a caressing whisper: You’ll know when it’s time to go home.

“Yeah, I got it. Shut the fuck up.”

“Rude! Wasn’t saying anything.”

“Huh?” He lifts his cheek from Robin’s shoulder. Her worried, tear-stained eyes overshadow the amusement ruffling her lips. Jesus, I’m breaking my friends! “Dreaming. Sorry.”

He gingerly rolls his shoulders. The side in the sling twinges miserably, and yet… Now he knows he’s gotta ditch the whole bunch of them, the fug of sickness is clearing. He feels better. Much better, in fact.

He keeps the news tight. 

If he plays poorly, they won’t expect him to sneak away, right? Though, the plan pitches him another problem—when he does escape, how can he stop Robin and Eddie coming after him? Eddie, particularly, would be in beyond deep shit if he got taken.

Inevitably, the Humvee gets stuck again. When Hopper asks Steve to take the wheel, Steve grabs up a green army notebook he’d spotted in the footwell, a stubby pencil also. He scribbles fast, between revving the engine.

“Eddie, I love you. Please don’t follow me. Steve x”

I love you. 

Wtf? 

When he’d blundered down that path with Nance, he’d been licking the scars two-and-a-half years’ later. With Robin, of course, things turned out different.

Then Eddie Munson happened. 

To be fair, knowing Eddie as he did now, he doesn’t actually believe Eddie would vomit on the note. Maybe only cackle a while. Either way, Steve would no way in hell obey a love letter, telling him not to follow, from anybody he cared about.

Given recent form, he doesn’t think Eddie would either.

He scrunches the note into his pocket then scribbles furiously at ‘take two’: 

“Eddie, DON’T FOLLOW ME. You make me sick. Steve.”

Jesus, that’s hopeless. You make me sick? He doesn’t mean that, apart from… It’s sorta true. Steve detests it, however, longs to try again. He’s out of time.

He stuffs the second note into Eddie’s pack, as Hopper opens the door. “We’re gonna have to walk from here. Think you can make it?”

“Dunno,” says Steve. For purely tactical reasons. Likewise, he doesn’t volunteer to carry many supplies.

As they trudge their way through the trees, his chances to run aren’t happening. Everybody’s way quieter than usual—edgy, like during that drive in the RV before they faced down Vecna. When he tries subtly falling behind, they all jump to help him. Even worse, they reach the liaison spot way sooner than he expects. Thankfully, for Steve, the car isn’t there.

“Where the hell are they?” Hopper gets out a compass to check they’re in the right spot.

“Because compasses are so accurate near Hawkins,” gripes Steve, his pulse thudding madly. It really is now or never, and why the hell hasn’t he got a better plan?

“We’re far enough out that the gates shouldn’t make a difference, right?” Eddie says.

How do we know? How do we know that Vecna hasn’t swallowed Hawkins whole, while we’re running away pissing ourselves yellow?

Steve bites this back. It’s not like he wants them coming with him. He sits down on the verge, presses his face to his bent knees. Soon as he dares, he gets up again.

“Where you going?” asks Robin, clambering up also.

“I need to pee,” says Steve. Eddie’s on his feet too. Steve can’t look him in the eye, and the words nearly choke him. “I don’t need a babysitter. Shoo!”

He walks back into the forest, upping his pace as soon as the trees obscure him. It’s gonna be a long trek, he’s hardly got any supplies, and he’s got a weird sense that, no, he isn’t gonna get through this time. He follows the sound of the water, because it seems obvious that he should.  

And he feels more torn apart than ever. 

The tug back to Hawkins is overwhelming, but the tug back toward Robin and Eddie? It’s like somebody has wound a thread around his heart, attached it to the pair of them. As he strides farther away, the thread snares tight, like that rope around his wrist did.

He’s annoyed—if not exactly surprised—to hear somebody thrashing through the forest behind him. Robin yells, “Steve! Steeeeeve!” 

He finally locates a small stream, which seems to be the source of the supernaturally loud torrent. He skids down the bank, landing in about three inches of water, and crouches low. 

Go by, Robin. Dammit, turn back.

She tumbles into the stream a yard off, landing on her ass with a loud splash and a louder squeak.

“Uuuuugh!” She takes the hand he offers, and they scramble to their feet together. “Steve, what the hell are you doing?”

“What the hell are you doing?”

She flicks pond scum from her legs and grimaces spectacularly. “Stopping you being an IDIOT! And since when were you not sick? God, I was so worried! Were you faking?”

“You know I wasn’t. I got… fixed.”

“Fixed? Like, HOW?”

He urgently presses a finger to his lips. “Sssssh! Keep your voice down! Look, I don’t know exactly, and I can’t go back. Hopper will make me get in that car.”

“He can’t force you.” Her glare is louder than her voice was.

“Whatever. He and El need to go. You and Eddie need to go.”

“You heard what Hopper said. They’ll torture you for information—they could kill you.”

“Been there, done that, Robin.”

“This isn't funny.”

“You think I don’t know that?” Steve sighs hard, belatedly noticing the stream has breached his sneakers. “All I do know is that I feel more myself already, turning around.” Following the water. “Also, Hop’s right—El can’t defeat Vecna with the military gunning for her. I don’t know exactly what I can do yet, but I have to try, whatever it is. So, please, Robin. Go back. Tell the others you couldn’t find me.”

“Eddie won’t leave without—”

“Which is why I gotta move! Take care, all right?”

He wants to hug her so bad. Instead, he sloshes away.

“Ugh, slow down!”

“Seriously?” He turns about suddenly. She nearly smashes into him and takes the opportunity to get right in his face.

“I am so mad with you! You made me run after you, my butt is drenched, and now you’re making me walk along a horrible ditch, all the way back to Hawkins?”

“It’s the quickest route.” He doesn’t know how he knows, only that he does. He turns around, wades onwards. The damp never bothered me anyway…

“Then why don’t we follow the bank, Steve?”

She has a point. “Oh. Okay.” They clamber up the sides, start following the stream from above. It’s as slippery as the riverbed and overgrown with treacherously tangly weeds.

“Eeeeeew! When this is over,” says Robin, “I am never, ever venturing into the totally-not-great outdoors again.” 

“You don’t have to do any of this, Robin.”

Her latest scowl is more jokey—and fond—than he figures he deserves. “Shut up, Dingus. You know I do.”

Part 14

tags: @estrellami-1 @kal-ology @finntheehumaneater (thank you, thank you, thank you!) If anybody else would like to be tagged on this fic or any of my writing, please let me know :) Reblogs, comments and likes also very much appreciated :) Thank you for reading so far :)

(also part of my steve whump fic series on AO3)

Part 1 Part 2 Part 3 Part 4 Part 5 Part 6 Part 7 Part 8 Part 9 Part 10 Part 11 Part 12 Part 14

[topaz-mutiny]

Folks seem to be interested in my random and extremely sporadic word vomit (and my tempo is unlikely to change - it may be I even just go silent for a couple months) so I’d thought I’d gather some of my guessworks for the upcoming Season 3 of Vox Machina.

Having seen the campaign already and knowing what points they need to hit gives me some ideas on what might happen.

The first thing to note is that what will happen likely depends pretty strongly on if the Chroma Conclave arc extends into Season 4 or not. If CC ends in Season 3, thats one dragon dead every 4 episodes. Which doesn’t sound bad until you account for everything that happens in between - 3 more people need vestiges, potential plane-hopping, downtime scenes, romance scenes, villain scenes, character progression scenes (like the Twins finding out it was Thordak that killed their mom). Is a lot. But it could be done - a lot would probably need to get cut or condensed.

So, with that in mind, here’s what I think is going to get cut and changed if the Conclave ends in S3:

Kynan Leore is cut entirely. Vax already has plenty of storypoints on his plate, adding in Syndrome isn’t too necessary especially since Ripley can just hire anybody she wants. There’s also not been any buildup to it, and while it could happen entirely in S3, that would be time better served to the other members of Vox.

Hotis is cut entirely. Again, Vax has already had a lot happen and while Hotis’ conclusion didn’t happen until after the Conclave, what we’ve seen of Hotis seemed to just purely be an easter egg for fans of the actual-play. So this also would mean Vox Machina Does Not Go To Hell. Percy may make a deal with a devil somewhere else.

City of Brass might be cut. We’ve just seen two major moments of Scanlan (jumping from a height with Mythcarver in order to save his friends and getting a devastating hit (from Hotis’ attempted assassination), and Awakening Mythcarver by standing his ground and not running away (killing blow on a devil in the City of Brass)) so the only really important thing left there is the Plate of the Dawnmartyr, which could be moved. I can see the City of Brass staying but being greatly changed, especially if the Conclave extends into S4.

Keyleth’s Earth Aramente will be shown. This is something that happened pre-stream and during a timeskip, so no one but Matt and Marisha really have had details on this before. But the show has indicated that Keyleth still needs to go to Terra for her Aramente, so it seems like it will be shown here and she will gain her Keyteor Earth Elemental form here. Possibly could also be combined with getting the Spire of Conflux, depending on what happens with Vorugal.

Vorugal is a big heaping question mark. I have doubts they will ever show Draconia (and the ravine tree was used as their entry to Vasselheim), and a straight assault on Whitestone seems unlikely (what with the magic barrier and Raishan’s alleged help), so it’s really up in the air as to where they’ll be taking his fight (beyond being near a forest for that Anything Can Happen In the Woods scene post-battle, if it maintains its place in the timeline (it might move, honestly, as it seems too quick to have All Them Ripley Scenes in the first 3-4 episodes and then kill Vorugal since he’s definitely the second dragon that will be taken down)). Possibly the dragon fight I’m most interested in since it’s such an unknown.

Ripley might have more vestiges. For the sake of condensing things, Ripley could not only start stealing Cabal’s Ruin and Whisper, but the Plate of the Dawnmartyr as well and maybe even the Spire of Conflux. She seems WAY more involved in the show than in the streams and we’ve gotten to see her perspective fairly frequently. Having more than 1 or 2 vestiges (some part of me thinks Whisper might be cut since Show Vax is fast enough that teleporting on a knife hit seems redundant, plus it would work better having 1 vestige per character) on hand would also make her and her crew an even more interesting and dangerous Mirror Match for the party. It will also help lead the show party into discovering she’s involved, discovering she’s making guns, and letting Percy feel like shit for multiple episodes.

I do expect the Thordak and Raishan fights to go pretty much like they did on stream (barring the deaths, which all but one will be removed). Speaking of deaths...

While I really, really, REALLY want it to happen, it is still possible Percy’s Glintshore death will be replaced with something equally dire, like Orthax kidnapping his soul or something and torturing him a little, and after Orthax is gone his soul is separated from his body and is contemplating going with the Matron of Ravens until Someone calls his soul back to his body.

Unlike by brother, I still think Scanlan’s FIX HIM death is still going to happen. They’ve really been focusing on giving Scanlan a five-star treatment during the show (which, not gonna lie, I’m a little annoyed at), and that death and his team’s prank cements his decision to leave Vox Machina. It would also be a great point to allow Pike to perform her first resurrection rite, based off of how she saw Kashaw perform one, and set up for how Vax’s upcoming death is a death Pike cannot fix.

And then they might do something to set up the Whispered One / return of That Bitch arc, but I’m not sure what it could be. A villain scene, perhaps.

So, that’s it for my thoughts on the major plot beats.

[besidesitstoowarm]

series 2 retrospective

this season felt like it lasted FOREVER. i think a lot of that was down to how much more slowly i got through the episodes (this season had a lot of baggage for me that i think i've now shed, so i was kind of dreading all of them) but the other part is the lack of real stand-out phenomenal episodes, i think. i don't count the finale, bc finales always have a ton going on and iirc they're all somewhere between great and mindblowingly excellent. i guess my fave this season would've been "the impossible planet" with maybe "new earth" as a second? "school reunion" gets huge nostalgia points for me, which is quite the feat bc i haven't even seen the era it's nostalgic for. this has the weakest of moffat's rtd-era eps and i don't think any of the episodes just slam my ass into next week in the same way as like, "dalek" or "utopia"

but my memory had been very unkind to this season and i am brave enough, and sexy and genius enough, to admit my wrongness. it's honestly really powerful of me. anyway i do think this season carried on and expanded upon some of the themes of last season, namely sympathizing w mickey, the doctor's savior complex, and the near-suicidal devotion that rose has to traveling with the doctor. all three were handled well, including the doctor taking his protective shit too far; nine would tell rose to sit the hell down and stay put, but ten was willing to BANISH HER TO AN ALTERNATE UNIVERSE just bc HE decided she would be better off there. he will learn nothing from this, and make the same type of decision for donna

idk if this makes sense, but ten is the "main character" in the way that nine wasn't in s1? nine kept himself deliberately closed off, he did not want his pain and his feelings to be centered in the way that loud, boisterous ten edges his way into every conversation. nine went places and saw things and saved the day, sure, but was also willing to leave or sit this one out or stay out of things, which makes sense as a recent genocide survivor/perpetrator. he doesn't want to be the center of attention, he just shows up and crazy goes down around him (and his companions do whatever). that feels a little closer to early classic who, to me. the show lives and dies by the quality of its companions. ten (who is heavily influenced by rose) wants to be The Hero. he wants to Save The Day

i am sticking by my theory that ten was crafted and molded by the mingled energy of rose and the tardis as bad wolf, and so he's like. well he's basically what donna becomes at the end of s4, this time lord human hybrid thing. i maintain this bc it makes sense both plot-wise and thematically and it's romantic in a cannibalistic way which appeals to me (two different ways to be "inside" someone). so in that sense, ten isn't just a response to having been nine (having "survived" being nine) but he's also absorbed rose's outsized opinions of him. he was born from her love and devotion for him, and his regeneration took place under her care, under her belief that "the doctor is special and important and nothing is allowed to happen to him" and wow it gave him an ego! it also gave him a pathologic need to Save The Day. i can't wait to see what happens to him when he is with any other companion

and so we say goodbye to rose. she was the perfect companion to restart the show with, very likeable, very bubbly, very curious. she was opinionated and saucy and empathetic, and she had fantastic chemistry with both doctors, which is hard to pull off for such different actors. i don't really have a lot to say that i didn't already say in my various individual episode write-ups, but i will miss rose, and i look forward to her various returns

[strawberrysodaslut]

Innocence - Eddie Munson

Part 1 // Phantasms

❛ ━━━━━━━━･❪ ❁ ❫･━━━━━━━━━ ❜

❛ ━━━━━━━━･❪ ❁ ❫･━━━━━━━━━ ❜

Previous Chapter

Series Masterlist

next chapter

❛ ━━━━━━━━･❪ ❁ ❫･━━━━━━━━━ ❜

word count: 2.5k

summary: after being convinced to talk to the school guidance counsellor about her nightmares, Julie seeks comfort in the woods, meeting a surprisingly friendly Eddie Munson

warnings: this is not an x reader it is an oc post s3, pre s4, descriptions of pain, death, blood, spoilers for the episode 1 of season 4 (Eddie existing + mentions of the first scene), Julie is adopted, mentions of trauma, flashbacks, mentions of drugs, mentions of bullying

a/n: this first part starts off kind of slow, but i wanted to make sure to build the world Julie lives in opposed to jumping straight into meeting Eddie, but I promise they’ll have more interaction in the second part

join taglist

❛ ━━━━━━━━･❪ ❁ ❫･━━━━━━━━━ ❜

Pain, all I felt was pain. White, hot burns run through my body, screaming to flow out of me. My bones fight against each other, desperate to rip from the shackles of my joints.

I can hear myself screaming, but I can't feel it, I can't even think, my consciousness slowly rips from me. Life slipping away.

And then I feel nothing.

As my thoughts fade back, I'm near certain I'm dead, just for a moment. That I've died and woken up somewhere new until I hear the voice of the man I've known your whole life.

"What did you do? What did you do?"

-

It was the same dream, every time.

I sometimes wonder if I made it all up, if the screams, the pain, was all a figment of my imagination. But when I wake up, the mark on my wrist ensures I know the truth of my past. It was real, too real.

But that's not my life, not anymore.

They were as desperate as I was to put that chapter of my life behind me. But my mother isn't an idiot, she knows that whatever happened to me haunts me to this day, and I can tell it breaks her heart.

They were as desperate as I was to put that chapter of my life behind me. But my mother isn't an idiot, she knows that whatever happened to me haunts me to this day, and I can tell it breaks her heart.

They were as desperate as I was to put that chapter of my life behind me. But my mother isn't an idiot, she knows that whatever happened to me haunts me to this day, and I can tell it breaks her heart.

I nod, and she continues her questioning, "Is it still the same one every time?" She asks, receiving another nod in return. She puts on a half-earned smile, "Ms Kelly called, she wants to see you today, said she'll drop by at fourth period. Maybe you could talk to her about your dream?"

Here we go again, "Mom, you know I can't-"

She cuts me off, "I know, you can't tell her because if she believes you she puts herself at risk, and if she doesn't you'll end up at a psych ward." She rolls her eyes, "But why can't you tell her about your dreams, without telling her the content of your dreams. You do that with us, why can’t you with her?"

I open my mouth, ready for the onslaught of answers that have been burnt into me for years, but when I think about it, there really isn't a reason.

Huh

"Okay, I'll try talking to her, but I'm not promising its gonna help"

My mom nods, proud of winning this battle, "I'm not promising either, but it might."

And with that- plus a few pieces of toast, I head off to school, ready to hide that part of me away. Putting on Julie, the fun, popular, cheerleader. The one no one has ever seen frown.

The first person I see is Chrissy, the kindest human being I have ever met. I still remember the first time I met Chrissy, my parents put me in a Gymnastics class, hoping it would help me learn better social skills, it would have been a huge fail if Chrissy wasn't in the class.

She was so kind, so welcoming compared to everyone else's coldness. She didn't mind that I struggled with my social cues, in fact, she found it fun to teach me, showing me the coolest songs, the hottest celebrities, and taking me to the movies. To this day she doesn't why exactly I was so behind on your social skills, too kind to ever ask.

"Jules!" She yells, running over to me as I lock my bike to the rack. "I had the craziest dream last night."

... wanna bet?

Of course, I can't say that, "Really? What was it about?" I ask, walking with her into the school.

She goes on to explain the dream and in her defence, it's pretty wild. An alien came into her room, invited her to a party and tried to sell her weed, but when she agreed the alien turned her over to the police, who were a bunch of mutant pandas in madonna costumes.

"Honestly, the most unrealistic part about that is you agreeing to buy weed," I say, wandering to your locker.

She laughs, rolling her eyes, "Hey, I totally could. Just yesterday I chewed gum in Mr Stevenson's class,"

I nod, "Never mind, you're a complete rebel," I kid, causing her to lightly punch you on the arm.

Then suddenly, I feel the air shift, like all the light in the world had just faded. I knew exactly what this presence was... Jason freaking Carver.

When Chrissy first told me she was dating him, I didn't know what to say. Chrissy was all that was good in this miserable town, and dicks like Jason were what made the town so miserable, what could she see in him.

That's when I learnt about the wonderful world of two-faced liars, with Chrissy, he acted so kindly, like a true gentleman, but when she wasn't around he was shoving kids into lockers, calling them every word in the book, normally opting for one starting with f, but that wasn't uncommon in Hawkins.

"Hey baby," He says, walking behind Chrissy and kissing her cheek, he looks up at me and his smile drops "Julie." He says, lightly nodding his head at me.

The thing is, I hadn't put much effort into hiding my disdain for Jason- mainly because I didn't want to, but also because I couldn't help it. He was awful, and he knew it.

Still, I nod at him, not giving him any words, but acknowledging that he's there, before opening my locker, fetching my books. He whispers something to Chrissy before leaving the two of us alone.

"Could you try to treat him like a person?" Chrissy says, giggling. As much as she wanted me to like Jason, she clearly enjoyed seeing me hate someone.

I smile at her, "No," I say, closing my locker, "See you at lunch, yeah?" I ask, watching her nod before walking to my first class of the day.

-

School was the same as usual, boring, tiring, just waiting for the bell to ring for class to be over. That is, until fourth period. I had gotten so lost in the long list of work I had to do, that I'd completely forgotten about my session with Ms Kelley, but she didn't.

"Hi Mary, would you mind if I borrowed Julie for the rest of the period?" Ms Kelley asks, the teacher nods her head, and I grab my stuff walking with her to her office.

When she sits down, she smiles at me, waiting for me to say something. I don't really know what to say, so I wait for her to talk.

She gives in, pulling out some papers, "I just wanted to check in, see if you were okay?" She asks, "You've been written up for sleeping in class five times this month, is something going on? Are you having trouble sleeping?"

Damn she really had to get right in it, didn't she?

She's right, so I nod, watching as she analyses me. "Okay, so what's been going on? Is it trouble getting to sleep? Trouble with staying asleep? Maybe nightmares?"

I stop her, "Yeah, nightmares."

She nods, "Do you mind if I write some things down? I promise, no one gets to see the stuff I write but me and you." She says, pulling out a notepad and a pen.

"Uh- okay," I say, fiddling with the hem of my dress as the anxiety overtakes my body. 'Don't say too much' I tell myself, 'You'll get her hurt if you do.'

"So," Ms Kelley starts, "These dreams, are they fictional?" She asks.

I shake my head, cautious of how I choose my words. "They're... flashbacks, sort of."

She furrows her brows, writing what I say down, "Why sort of?"

I let go of a heavy breath I didn't even know I had, "Because- its uh- dark. Like I can't see anything, I can just feel..." I trail off, but Ms Kelley is quick to catch me.

"What do you feel?" She asks.

"Pain."

She nods, once again writing in her notebook. "So in this flashback, someone is hurting you?" She asks.

I slowly nod, opening up becoming scarily easy after how secretive I had to be.

"Is this person still in your life?" She asks, "Because, if someone is hurting you, there are people who can help."

"No," I say, "Uh- whoever it was, they're definitely not in my life anymore."

Her brows once again furrow, her soft writing becoming scribbles, "So you don't know who hurt you? How can you know they're not in your life?"

"Because they can't be." I say, nearly clapping my palm to my mouth, "Uh- it was before I was adopted."

Her face relaxes, nodding in understanding., "I see. You know, Julie, it would be much easier to unpack this dream if you tell me what was in it."

I shake my head, "No, I- I cant." I say, peering at her notebook, 'not when you're writing it all in there'

She seems to notice where my anxiety is coming from, because she takes the notebook and puts it back in her drawer, "How about this, no writing, no report, we can just talk and I lock it all up right here." She says, tapping her temple.

Maybe there's a way to tell her without telling her the exact details.

"Uh, I was at a sort of- playgroup. I was playing with one of the toys, uh- and there's yelling, from outside of the room."

you know those weren't people yelling Julie, they were screaming, they were dying.

"The sounds got closer, until the door opened. I was scared, so I hid. But when felt safe enough, I looked around and- some of the kids were hurt."

They were all dead Julie, you know that, you saw what their bones turned into.

Flashes flood my mind as I try to explain, every detail I ignore coming back to hit me, scream at leaving them behind. The bodies, the blood, the smell, the sound of them screaming, begging for help, the feeling when I knew whatever it was found me, and the pain that came right after.

It's too much, it's all too much, I need it to stop. Everything needs to-

The bell rings.

Thank god.

"I have to go," I said, walking straight out the door, ignoring Ms Kelley's protests. I rush out of the school and into the woods, the only place where I’ve ever feel truly safe in this stupid town.

I make it to the clearing, picking a table and lying straight down on it, sobs tearing through my body one after the other, the sight of those kids, dead on the floor, stuck in my head. Tears roll down my face as I try to calm myself down, but the attempt is futile, I'm too worked up.

I was close to telling her everything, too close. I can't let that happen again.

Eventually, the tears slow down, breathing becomes easier. Everything slowly coming back to normal. I take out my compact, ready to face the mess I'd just made of my face, and wow, I look like a fucking clown. There are tear marks down my face, mascara pooled at my under eyes, my eyes and skin are red and puffy.

There's rustling behind me, someone's coming. "Hello?" I say, turning around just in time to see Eddie Munson walking into the clearing, along with his stupid lunchbox.

I didn't really know Eddie- I'd heard of him, of course. Even though he was arguably the furthest thing from popular, everyone had heard of him. Whether it was from people calling him a freak, or his very loud rants in the cafeteria, or even his infamous dealings, people knew who he was.

He was in most of my classes, but I've never spoken a word to him. I can't imagine he'd be complaining about that though, the people I'm associated with are less than nice to him. I don't hate him, but from what I've heard, he's not someone you wanna hang around.

He looks at me, "Oh, is this area taken? I thought your friends were-" He trails off, looking in the direction of the cafeteria.

I shake my head, "No, you're good, it's just me." The way his body relaxes is honestly upsetting, is he actually scared of them? He never acts like he does. "Just needed some time alone, y'know. I can go though, it's fine.”

Eddies brows furrow, lightly waving his arms around, "Oh, no. God, no. You can stay, that's fine." He lingers on the last word, eyes dragging across my face, inspecting the state I'm in. "Are- are you okay?"

Shit, it really is that obvious, isn't it?

"Yeah, no I'm fine." I say, hoping he believes my lies, "Uh, something got in my eye."

He nods, but it's clear on his face he doesn't believe me. "I know I'm like, the school freak." He says, doing a little dance, "But I'm also the school drug dealer, and a surprising amount of people unload their baggage on me. So if you need someone to talk to, you can always talk to me... yeah?"

I didn't even notice I was tearing up until I felt the tears roll down my cheek, slightly choking on my breath as I nod. "Yeah, that sounds really nice."

Eddie, walks up to where I'm sitting, "So..." He says, joining me on the bench, sitting just beside me, "Do you wanna talk about it?"

I shake my head, I can't tell him what's wrong with me right now- right? Maybe a little bit? "Uh- Really it isn't much. It's just, I was adopted," I say, watching him nod along in understanding. "And the... um- the place I was at beforehand, it just wasn't a good place."

Eddie nods, pressing his lips together as he tries to piece together what you mean, "Yeah, the foster system is fucked." He says.

I chuckle, "So fucked." I say, ignoring the fact that he knows nothing about what I actually mean, just pretending he does.

The sound of the bell ringing in the distance breaks the conversation, we both look at each other, lightly chuckling before I get up. He quickly follows, stretching his back enough that I can see the trail of hair where his shirt rides up. I bite back the way my breath hitches, looking away from him.

"Well, if you ever need another therapy session - or even just drugs," He says, shrugging before walking backwards, "You know where to find me!" He says, walking into the trees, out of my sight.

Yeah, I know where to find him.

[panicatthediaz]

40 (almost kiss) + 54 (secret relationship)? 🥰

Being in bed at 12:00 am will not stop me, I guess. Bonus Getting Together, I guess. Spent 3 or so hours at this. Ops.

Post S4. This is a disgusting amount of fluff. Unbeta'd (but self proof-read) as I wrote this from 12 am to 3:30 am.

On AO3

Years In The Making

Not that he believed it, but he was sure most people around him would say it was meant to be; something fated somewhere to happen somehow. Eddie didn't really believe that.

What he did believe was that they may have been too afraid (or maybe too repressed, in his case) to see what was going on, what had been growing for a long while. Years, maybe?

But getting shot (again) had given him a good shake, and he could say he'd been almost disappointed to see Ana by his bedside. No fault of her own, of course not, but...

He was pretty sure of what he wanted at that moment.

Breaking things off with her hadn't been that difficult, or painful, a couple of weeks after his return home. Ana's disappointment was clear, but she seemed to know as well as he did that they weren't going anywhere as a couple. With a promise to stay in touch, she walked out of his home one last time.

Now all he had to do was talk to Buck.

-

Buck had been cagey for the first few days when Eddie had asked him about Taylor. It took about a week and a couple of beers for him to blurt out, "She kissed me then ran out." He fidgeted for a couple of minutes. "Then she came back and we talked through it."

Eddie's heart sank, but he still put on a smile for the sake of his friend (if that was all that he would be for Buck, he'd make do). "And?"

"And we are at very different stages when it comes to romance." Buck shrugged, but the tiny frown was right there between his brows. "She became a good friend, but damn, we wouldn't have lasted as a couple."

Buck finished his beer and turned to Eddie, though not looking beyond the water bottle he was holding in his one good hand.

"She, uh... She isn't quite who I want." Buck cleared his throat, abruptly standing up and walking away from the dining table to place his empty bottle in the recyclable bin. "How is Ana, by the way?"

Eddie accepted the deflection well enough, watching as Buck stood by the doorway with his arms crossed, a stance that tried to project calm. Eddie doubted he was anywhere near it; he never enjoyed talking about failed relationships (including those that never took off).

"We broke up last week," he replied easily, standing up to refill his bottle in the kitchen. "Don't worry," he added, seeing the wide-eyed surprise (and dare he say, hope?) in Buck's expression. "It was pretty amicable and even. We both saw we weren't going to get anywhere and decided to split."

"Okay," Buck whispered, following him into the kitchen. "You okay?"

Eddie nodded, smiling. "Yeah, I'm fine." Though he had to ask... "Who is it?" Buck's confused, scrunched-up expression was pretty damn cute, making him look a little bit more like the Golden Retriever pup Hen and Chimney often compared him to. "You said Taylor isn't who you want, so who is it?"

"Eddie," he said on a groan, though he simply leaned against the counter instead of answering.

"See," Eddie spoke with a new bout of confidence (maybe just as ill-placed as the excitement he was starting to feel), standing against the sink across from Buck. "I'm kind of hoping for a specific answer here."

Buck didn't reply. Eddie had barely even noticed a shift in Buck's expression before he moved into his space, pressing a hard kiss against his lips, a huge contrast to how softly his hands cradled his head and how careful he was to not press against the sling and his injured shoulder.

Eddie wasn't sure if the bottle ended up on the sink or on the floor by their feet. What mattered was that he managed to get his hand on Buck's neck, drawing him even closer.

(Not that Buck let either of them press too close, and god, he loved him.

And he was distantly aware that he should be at least a little freaked out over the thought after one kiss - their first kiss - but, well... Years in the making and all that.)

-

One kiss became two, became many, and Eddie could see the same feelings reflected in Buck's blue eyes. Belonging, a finally and a home.

There was no need to go beyond kissing and cuddling, both of them content to sit even closer together, hands intertwined whenever they could.

It was... Soft in a way Eddie hadn't had in so long, intimate in ways he thought he wouldn't experience.

-

And they weren't subtle, weren't actively trying to keep anything a secret. Eddie was still off work, doing his PT as he should and Buck had been staying at his house (their home, he couldn't help but think every time) since Eddie got out of the hospital anyway.

But two months passed and the only two people aware of the change in their relationship were Christopher and Carla because they found them cuddled up on the couch, Eddie knocked out by painkillers and then too out of it to deny anything when his son questioned him about it.

(Christopher had simply nodded with a mumbled "Good" and left it at that. They still had no idea what that was about.)

The sling had come off a few days ago, though he still couldn't do that much, and it was driving Eddie up a wall. Buck was at the station, and he didn't want to think about the conniption he'd have if he drove there.

He knocked on Christopher's bedroom door, opening it slowly to see his son smiling at him from where he sat with his book.

"Hey, buddy." It was impossible not to smile back, feeling the all-encompassing warmth at the fact that he was still here, could see his son growing up for a while longer. "What do you say we pay a visit to the station?"

The frown he got for that was so much like Shannon's that he didn't know what to do with the pang in his chest. There was no guilt, not then, over the fact he missed her. He just did, she should be able to see how much their kid was growing, how much like her he could be sometimes. And maybe she was, if the afterlife turned out to be a thing after all.

"You are not supposed to drive."

And that tone was way too much like Buck's, just this morning, for Eddie to hold back his laughter.

"I was thinking we could take an Uber." He shrugged with his left shoulder. He might have been desperate to get out of the house, but he wasn't stupid; he didn't want pain and he didn't want to end up lectured by the entire team once he got there. "What do you say?"

Christopher considered it for a moment, then placed his bookmark and got up. "Let's go!"

-

"You better not have come in your car, Eddie!"

He rolled his eyes at the very much expected exclamation as Christopher giggled beside him.

"Don't worry, Buck," the kid said, walking ahead as Buck came downstairs. "I didn't let him drive."

"Thank God for you, kid," Buck said, kneeling on one knee to give Chris a hug. "Your dad is stubborn, he probably would have driven here if it weren't for you."

"Hey!" There was no real annoyance in his protest, but Eddie still said, "I get enough sass from my kid, don't you start, too."

Buck, in such a show of maturity, stuck out his tongue at him before turning to Christopher once again.

"Come on, buddy, let's go see the fun people."

Chris' laughter echoed in the station, and Eddie let the light atmosphere carry him upstairs to the loft where he was greeted by the rest of the team with hugs, and some friendly pats on (thankfully) his uninjured shoulder.

Chimney and Hen immediately walked with Christopher to the pinball machine, and Bobby had given him a plate of leftover breakfast to carry wherever he ended up sitting.

He chose the couch, where Buck had already made himself comfortable again and was currently watching the trio at the machine. They could hear Hen encouraging Chris to beat Chim's high score.

"Hey you," Buck greeted softly, an arm going around his shoulders as Eddie adjusted himself.

"Hey yourself." Buck glanced at the other side of the loft, then pressed a quick peck to his lips. Apparently, everyone was sufficiently distracted. "How are you?"

"So far so good." He took one of the biscuits from Eddie's plate, quickly popping it into his mouth as if Eddie hadn't sat here to share them. "I'd ask how your day is going, but it's obvious you're bored out of your mind."

Eddie groaned, letting his head fall back against Buck's arm. He was beyond bored, at this point, and no amount of movies or video games had helped. Buck's chuckle beside him was another pretty good incentive to get out of the house.

He turned his head to face him, his own expression undoubtedly soft as he took in the man that had been by his side for so long and for so many things already.

Buck's expression softened even more, somehow, his smile bright as the sun and even warmer. He leaned closer and-

And what sounded like a very undignified squeak interrupted their almost-kiss, causing Eddie to huff in mild annoyance and turn around.

Chimney stood by the dining table, gaping at them. Bobby was still in the kitchen and turned to look at them at the sound of Chimney's squeak.

"What's wrong, Chim?" Hen asked, frowning all the way from the pinball machine (where Christopher continued to play).

"They..." He gestured between the two of them. "Since when are you two together?!" He ignored Hen's own surprised exclamation. "They were about to kiss!"

"Yeah," Eddie confirmed, nonchalantly making himself comfortable in Buck's arms in the new position so he could look at the rest of their team. "And you had to ruin the mood."

Buck hid his face in his hair, and Eddie could hear the quiet snickering. They really thought the others would have caught up after two months of visiting Eddie at least once every few days.

"What about Ana?"

"We broke up two months ago, man."

"And Taylor?"

"Dude, we never started dating in the first place." The exasperation was clear in Buck's voice. "She's really just a friend."

Chimney nodded, satisfied for the time being. They had no doubt that there would be more questions later.

"When did this even happen?" Hen asked this time, walking over with Christopher.

"Two months ago," Chris answered before either of them could, smiling a little too innocently. "A week or something after Dad broke up with Miss Flores."

Eddie had no idea Christopher knew that level of details, but he had definitely been out of it when he told him. Maybe he said more than he remembered.

"Well," Bobby finally spoke up, walking over to their little family unit on the couch, now that Christopher was tucked on Eddie's other side. "I'm happy for you two." Eddie could feel whatever tension had been on Buck's body (not that there was much in the first place) drain out of him at Bobby's words. "And we can deal with HR and paperwork once you're back at the station," he added, directed at Eddie. Bobby's smile was genuinely warm, putting him even further at ease.

Years in the making. Maybe it was obvious to everyone else, but Eddie wouldn't change a thing about the road they took to get here. It had been hard and full of hurt, but what they had was solid and them and it was definitely worth it all.

Including the cheering, clapping, and whistles of everyone else when Buck pressed a kiss to his lips right there and then simply because he could.

[mlchaelwheeler]

what are your current thoughts about how they'll handle max? do you think she'll die? that she'll remain blind? wheelchair bound?

Ohh ok so I think that Max is obviously not dead. That would be poor writing after making her struggle with depression/suicidal ideation and then escaping Vecna only to get killed in the end. We know that when Vecna "kills" someone, he traps their mind. I think Max is somewhere trapped in Vecna's mindscape (her mind is technically trapped, but in the show they'd show her physically trapped I think, maybe in her nightmares, but hopefully not because that's so depressing). I'm guessing that they'd have to save her before truly defeating Vecna, because if they kill him, his mindscape would disappear and Max's mind would truly be lost forever, making her actually braindead.

I think that her near-death will have consequences though. Even though El will get her back from the mindscape before Vecna is defeated, she's not going to be completely back to normal--she's blind and all her limbs were snapped. I honestly think she'd stay blind simply because Vecna is constantly tied to eye symbolism. It seems like his lasting effect on her would be taking her sight. I'd hope that she would regain some use of her limbs, just because she's so tied to skateboarding--it was one of her happiest memories in S4! Taking away her ability to skateboard seems so cruel. Of course, Max would never be back to how she used to be, but she could regain some function. It would also be great to have a disabled character on the show!

[bibliocratic]

tread softly

S4 Canon Divergence + Mythological Creatures AU Mermaid!Sasha, Pheonix!Tim, Selkie!Martin

cws apply - see tags

Peter Lukas has always prided himself on the timing of his entrances.

He is not there, then he is. The ward slips colder, down into single digits. Martin gives a jerking shoulder-hunch motion when he notices his unexpected arrival, coupled with an intake of breath. No noise this time, no jumping, no explications of suddenness or surprise. Martin Blackwood takes well to both shock and silence with a delightful sufferance, and Peter is indulgently proud.

The lad is, as expected, by the Archivist’s bedside. Crone-backed, ringed with an satisfying corona of misery.  It’s after visiting hours, but Martin likely hasn’t even realised that the gaze of the ward staff and orderlies has simply grazed past him when he came up, when he took his traditional post, when they do their rounds. Martin has not wanted to be noticed, so he won’t be.

Peter idly watches the machinery and tubes threaded though the Archivist like mechanical embroidery. This one seems eminently more worse for wear than Gertrude ever was. Stronger, though. Peter watches Elias’ chosen as he lies still and sedate for all he stalks the landscape of dreamers, and wonders if he might see the Eye’s favoured come to fruition in a way Gertrude never did.

All the more reason to talk to Martin, it appears.

“What do you want?” Martin says. Dulled, thick-throated. He’s wiping his face free from damp with his baggy jacket sleeves, glowering at Peter with a delayed annoyance, as if he’s interrupted some no doubt tender petition for waking. The antiseptic stench of the hospital worsens the tension in his bones.

He is perfect for their God. Peter’s so pleased the Archivist wasn’t so careless to have lost this assistant like he nearly lost both of the others. Elias told him that the Corruption had already sought to burrow into the debris of this lost soul, that Martin has taken the mantle of archivist well, while Beholding’s chosen was indisposed. And it is true that Martin’s gaze is more assessing than he would like. But Peter knows that Forsaken has long laced Martin’s lining with mist and dew-damp cold, filled his stomach with fog far longer than those petty chancers have tried to have him in their maw. That his God’s touch has been settling like thronging, subdued snow in place of Martin’s sealskin.

“I wanted to see if you’d thought about my offer,” Peter replies genially. Pushing his hands in his pockets, ignoring Martin’s radiating desire to be left alone.

Martin has. Peter doesn’t need Elias’ pretty little parlour tricks to know that Martin has likely thought about little else.

“I’ve been a bit busy.”

“Oh right!” Peter says after a moment’s pause. It visibly annoys Martin that it didn’t come to mind faster. “That spot of bother with the Flesh. All sorted now, I’m sure!”

“Why didn’t you do something to stop them?”

Peter crinkles his face in a deliberate confusion. Casting out his line.

“Why, what should I have done?”

Martin takes the bait with ease.

“It’s your job, isn’t it?” His voice pitches with accusation. His hands ball into fists, and he moves to standing, the chair complaining as it’s pushed back. “It’s your responsibility! You’re in charge now Elias is gone.”

“Thanks to you,” Peter replies smoothly. “And your companions seemed to do a good enough job. A few bruises here and there, a few near misses. Nothing they won’t heal from.”

Peter slides closer. Just a step. It makes his skin sing discordant at the proximity, but Martin stiffens, an anxious intake of air despite himself, and Peter knows he’s paying attention.

“I could ask you the same question,” he says.

“What do you mean?”

“Why didn’t you do something to stop them?” Peter doesn’t sound judgemental. He doesn’t have to, Martin will paint on layers of meaning without overdoing this particular nuance of his game. “It was very impressive, watching you all. They all held their own very well. Except you. You could argue I suppose, that it’s not the same. That you’re not like the mer or the firebird or the sphinx, no added little genetic extras, and you don’t get any boost from any old helpful Power like that police officer, or the angry one touched by the Slaughter. You’re just Martin. And that’s… that’s the problem, isn’t it? Just Martin. Nothing to offer in the fight, no way to protect them. Holding them back. They could have been hurt, and you wouldn’t have been able to do, well, anything at all.”

“I…” Martin says, and Peter takes another step.

“The Extinction is a pressing threat. There isn’t time for me to wait while you finish your grave-side widow routine. I need you to help me, and it would be only fair, in return, for me to help you.”

“Oh, what, you can fix me then?” Martin snaps.

“Not at all,” Peter says. Smiling, because he is so funny, with his rage sputtering in a fog that seeks to tamp it flameless, stumbling headlong and blinded into the conversational pitfalls Peter’s dug behind him. “No, no, I’m afraid you’re broken, Martin. I speak from experience when I say you’ll never grow your skin back.”

Martin freezes. He looks Peter up and down like he’s expecting to see something different, the scales fallen from his eyes, but this is the only skin Peter has worn for so long now, and he endures the slightly prickling gaze of Martin’s Eye-touched observation.

“You… You were – ?”

“A long time ago. Before the Lonely granted me a better shroud to cloak myself in. It is not a selfish God, Martin. It offers gifts, or payment, if you prefer that way of understanding it, to those who work in aid of its ends. Benefits that could protect your friends, should something as unfortunate as the Flesh’s assault occur again.”

“And what about Jon?”

“He’ll wake up. Or he won’t.” Peter replies cheerily. “Either way, you can’t do anything for any of them like this.”

Martin gives him a scowl. Peter lets it pass over him. He knows, before Martin even opens his mouth, that he’s won.

Sasha avoids the sea.

She does not know why. Its pull is no lesser through her absence. She has dreams of sinking and never coming up for air, and she does not know if it is serenity in the ceaseless drop or despairing surrender. She marks the high days and festivals of her people alone and unremarked upon, speaks to her landward kin infrequently and vaguely. She needs to be here, she tells herself harshly. She can’t go off when there’s so much to do, when she’s in the process of losing so much. One of her family cold and vanishing, one breathing through a machine, and one… he died, died properly, and although he came back purged of something poisonous, the shrapnel scarring of collapsed masonry on his skin and the reddest, warmest wings sprung from his back, this does not settle her terrors.

She cannot leave. Not when she could lose sight of her splintering shoal so easily. Not when she’s unsure the temptation to dive down and out, deeper, further away, wouldn’t ensnare her to cowardice.

She finds the first scales in the shower. It’s a myth that any water will have the skin of her legs go slick, then bumpy, fusing into one muscled tail with her scales folding outwards. She can have showers and baths without impact. It’s the sea, that is the essential component. The same for most deepwater kin. Not the sea, maybe, or exactly, but what it represents in the change. It’s something about floating out into endless space clad only in human skin and human lungs and trusting not to drown. The letting go of one form with the tide and permitting the waves to bring forth another.

Her scales are dimmed, like they’ve smudged. Their colour diminished.

It’s not a molt. Her people don’t. Tim does, normally annually. Before they travelled to Yarmouth, he’d been dropping feathers around the office almost continually with stress. Nesting, and growing in new and painful sections of wing, snapping with a yo-yoing temper.

Tim notices. Maybe because he’s the only one left. Basira is holed up somewhere of course, as is Melanie, but it’s not the same. They weren’t here before, they don’t have the context for how much their group is diminished, falling to pieces slowly like her own skin is.

They’ll be visiting Jon later. She hasn’t seen Martin in weeks.

Tim approaches slowly. Looks at the flakes of blue in her hand. Understand flowers gently in his eyes, and he reaches out and touches her arm, and she forgot the world could manifest in ways other than hurtful.

“You OK there, Sash?” Tim asks.

“I don’t know,” she replies. “I don’t… I just…  When did it all go so wrong?”

“I dunno,” Tim repeats, and he doesn’t move away and she doesn’t want him to. “God, I – I don’t know, Sash.”

Jon’s clothes are dirt-clotted, ripped up by the grind of rock, and holding him tarnishes Tim’s feathers grey, smudges the pattern on his t-shirt into obscurity. His teeth are chattering, goosebumps bobbling up his arms and making the dark hairs up his arms stand on end. Tim suspects it’s more shock than cold.

Sasha brought him a glass of water, holding her palm under it because Jon’s long-fingered grip is so shaky it’s sloshing the water up the sides.

“Told you the rib was a shit idea, huh?” Tim says. Played as a joke and deliberately shorn of any accusation. He breathes in-and-out and Jon follows the rise and fall, and it benefits both of them. Tim’s getting better at control. He’s had to. His anger grows in like pinfeathers but so does his grief these days, a full plumage of emotions he is learning to deal with.

Jon coughs up something that could be agreement, but is mostly dirt and grave soil over Tim’s shirt.

You should have waited for us, Tim thinks but does not say because there would be too much teeth in it, and Jon’s skin is already whittling down to skeletal. We asked you not to go, we wanted a better plan, why didn’t you wait.

You could have died, down there in the dark, and we wouldn’t have even had a body to mourn, he does not say.

We love you, you idiot. We love you and even that wasn’t enough to stop you leaving, he does not say.

We’re already losing Martin, he does not say.

A room full of looping, chattering, overlapping tape recorders. Neither Tim nor Sasha stacked them, and Jon would not have thought to.

It should be a reassurance, that Martin’s been here.

God, Tim hopes he knows what he’s doing.

Sasha rubs at Jon’s back, helps him sip another small trickle. Tim’s wings, voluminous and unwieldy, knock over recorders in a clattering collapse as he scoops them around to shield them both. Against the balmy heat Tim’s throwing out, Jon’s shivers gradually subside.

“Daisy?” Jon murmurs. His teeth are grimy with soil.

“She’s with Basira,” Tim replies.

Sasha’s picked up the rib that’s dropped out of Jon’s clenched palm. Wiping the grime off it and staring at it without clear expression.

“Why, Jon?” she asks.

“I wanted to help,” Jon says. His words small, like he’s embarrassed that he even thought of it. “Even if it was one person. I wanted to be able to do something good for a change.”

“You could have died,” Tim says.

Jon’s horrible flat chuckle scrapes over his lips.

“I’m not sure I can anymore.”

“Yeah…” Tim replies subdued. He glances at the red daggers of his feathers and thinks he understands that.

“I wonder what it would take,” Jon says idly, slurring with exhaustion, and Tim grips him closer and hopes he never finds out.

Martin doesn’t react when Sasha sits down near him. The breeze, a vicious snagging chill tussles his hair, some wisps twisting into nothingness like smoke from an extinguished candle. She is still getting used to this Martin, or perhaps the Martin he never let others see. The toned-down stillness of him, the undisturbed waters of his expression. His skin not quite solid, the patches that have returned pale, sickly-pallored in the softening dim of moonlight. The rest of him is a coalition of fog, a hazy motion to his image like he’s wave-rocked, smoked out.

Long minutes pass. Sasha sits down cross-legged. The waves ripple up the stones that make up the strip of beach surrounding the loch, and they’re hard and uncomfortable under her.

“I can’t swim, you know,” Martin says finally. The sea is louder than he is, and he can make himself so quiet these days.

“No?”

Sasha keeps her tone light, inquisitive without intensity. Martin shakes his head, and his image lags, skipping disjointed, like his connection is poor.

More silence. Sasha doesn’t know what she should say, where Martin’s thoughts are at. She scratches behind the base of her gills, rubs at the dorsal fins sitting mostly flat under her sleep shirt.

“I didn’t live too far from the sea,” Martin continues. Looking at the wavering mirage of his hands without comment. She doesn’t even know if he recognises her presence. “We had Liverpool about an hour away. Even Blackpool, I guess. My primary school had a swimming club, where they’d pack them off to the big leisure centre on a coach afterschool. Kids’d get these little medals for managing like five metres, or ten, fifteen. But there was a small fee, and Mum said…” He snorts out a dismissive breath and his face twists, and neither of these actions suit him. “Doesn’t matter. I never went, and I never learnt, and that was that.”

“You could always come swimming with me?” Sasha proposes slowly. Lost in the swell of this conversation, why Martin’s talking about the sea, what this has to do with anything. She wishes he’d look at her.

Martin doesn’t answer immediately. He might not have even heard her.

“I told Peter, and he said that made it even better. That it was a such a – ” he says the word with a sneer, the words sharp-toothed in his mouth “ – gift, that I’d never even had the opportunity to know what I would miss, not even a memory to embellish or to sour. That there was so much that could root in absence. He said I should be grateful.”

“Peter Lukas said a lot of shit,” Sasha says.

She shuffles closer to him. Puts her hand on his knee.

“Whatever he told you was bollocks, you know that right?”

Martin blinks. After a moment, his hand joins over hers. His image grows denser, less likely to be stolen by the midnight air.

His eyes, fixed out on a horizon point in the slick dark of the loch, are still distant.

“I just wish I understood why she did it,” Martin murmurs.

“Who?”

“I did some research. After Elias… after I found out. I couldn’t have been the only person, and it’s rare enough but there are – help groups… you know, therapists that specialise in that kind of stuff. But I didn’t… I couldn’t face going to one. I thought that… knowing what was so wrong with me would make it easier, but it didn’t. All my life, I…. I was stupid enough to think it might be something I could fix. If – if I changed myself enough, if I said the right things, loved the right people, then I might… that someone could fix me. But it can't be fixed. That’s what all the leaflets said. That it was best to think of it like a permanent injury. Like having a stroke, or some sort of brain damage or something like that. Something irreparable.”

“Martin, sweetheart…” Sasha starts. She doesn’t understand. The flotsam of Martin’s speech grows erratic and he’s started shivering, and it’s no wonder, dressed in a t-shirt, pyjama trousers and some thick socks.

“Do you know much about selkies, Sash?” Martin powers on. Chattering teeth and goosebumps and it’s like he’s drawing something out of himself, some infection long done its damage. “Not many of them left, and they don’t usually venture landward like some of the other deepwater species. They mate for life apparently. Staunchly social communities, and some of them can’t… can’t cope, if they lose their group, or their partner. They take off their pelt, and just swim off to drown. A-and those help groups and therapists, those people who had theirs stolen, or destroyed… they’re, god, they’re all terminal. They last six months, maximum. Because it kills them, losing it. They waste away and they die. And here’s me…” Martin’s face twists again, and it’s bitter and angry and despairing all at once, “and I just get to keep going.”

“Selkies…?” Sasha says. “Why are you….”

She trails off in a gradually dawning horror.

“Martin?”

“She burnt it,” Martin says, his tone stringing higher now, distress sweeping in like a squall to break up the unnatural apathy in his voice. “I don’t think she knew what it would… I mean, I don’t know, maybe she did, maybe she wanted me gone just like dad, I don’t know, and I’ll never know because I can’t ask her why. I didn’t even… it was so long ago. I was sick and then I got worse and it was awful and I didn’t understand why I was so ill, why everything hurt just so much… and after, when I was better, Mum said it was appendicitis. I believed her. Course I did, why wouldn’t I. I didn’t know… not until Elias, and I’ll never know what I’ve lost, or why it didn’t kill me, maybe it was because I was so young, or because it’s only from one side of the family, I don’t –  I don’t know! I’ll never know! It’s a whole part of me that she just… she just took a-a-and…”

Martin’s back bows like whalebone. He takes long shuddering breaths like his words are keelhauling across his lungs.

Sasha’s never heard of a selkie with only half their soul. She can’t imagine, what it would do to someone.

She moves in front of Martin and he moves forward against her like a wave crash. He’s taller and heavier than her, and the impact pushes her back momentarily before her arms catch him.

“Breathe, sweetheart,” she says, “You can do it, breathe.” She holds him so surely, and she always will. And he starts crying then, the first time since Jon was in hospital, and he won’t or can’t stop shivering, and it is horrible to hear every emotion inside him claw itself back from the brink.

She keeps telling him to breathe, and he keeps following that instruction through sniffling and sobbing and broken-voiced confusion,  and she counts it as a small victory nonetheless.

Jon’s mouth cannot scream.

Tim’s in the next room, the kitchen, drying plates and bowls and cutlery, within shouting distance, and he’d be here in a moment – he’d help if only Jon could speak a word other than his unbidden, unwanted recitation.

Jon’s mouth doles out its terrible missive, and he doesn’t not feel like a person as Elias rolls out the triumphant red carpet of his plotting and scheming, the self-satisfied weave of his grand finale. And no, he’s not a person, not for a long time now;  he’s a catalogue, a testimony, an archive, and he would never have chosen this.

His hands scrabble at his throat, and his eyes are blurred with tears, his vision obscured, but it does not seem to matter, for his skin ripples and sloshes like an inkwell and a hundred eyes swell and pop and inflate again like bubbles against his skin.

Someone else screams. And the multitude of Jon’s eyes are newborn, fractal-imaged, gummed up with a feast of far-reaching horror all witnessed by him, overseen and devoured in his sight, and it is hard to translate what his original set of open, weeping eyes see. There is motion. Commotion. There are apologies being spoken in his ears, fervent, petitionary, but he is hearing the rising insistent thrum of the summoning and it is as sickening as it is beautiful. Someone is holding a hand hard over his mouth, the grip painful and punishing but even then the words burble out through the cracks. Another hand clamps over his eyes, and he shrieks and thrashes as his words gather to a crescendo.

A hand tears the paper from his grip. There is an acrid whoosh of smoke. Jon drops like the rigging of a ship being torn down. The hands at his mouth and eyes lower quickly to loop around his waist, catch him and hold him up.

Jon sees Tim, wide-eyed and shimmering with terror even as his skin burns gold and his feathers shine and there are only sooty flakes left of Jonah’s statement, scattering down from his palms.

He thinks it’s Martin behind him. Jon folds further, all his weight pitching forward and Martin’s forced to come down with him as he retches the leftover words in his mouth; king of a ruined world, he vomits up with bile and ink, and it splashes with a disgusting slop over the living room floor.

Sasha’s partially webbed hands are holding back his hair as he hacks and gags, his lips stained black, his stomach heaving as he chokes on everything that comes up, his stomach roiling with an overwhelming nausea.  Conduit of fear, he brings up, dribbling from his lips like paper pulp.

After a long while, it’s over. Sasha carries him to the bathroom, and helps him clean up, although Jon has little memory of it.

He wakes, feeling like a shipwreck, and Tim is there. Sat nearby, his head in his hands. His fingertips stained with ink and soot. He can hear Martin and Sasha talking in low tones nearby.

They're still here. Even now, he’s surprised that they haven’t left him.

And Jon has no words remaining, so his body betrays him with airless, silent tears, at all he could have wrought upon this world, at all the suffering he could have brought to their door to still be granted forgiveness for.

It is not the end. It is an interlude, a reprieve. In some ways a kindness, and in others, waiting is its own cruelty.

They’ve bought blankets to the beach in order to cushion the hardness of the stones rounded by tide and time. It’s the first time they’ve gotten Jon to come outside for more than a few minutes.  The scratches up the column of his throat healing. His voice still damaged, scratchy and scraped from misuse.

They’ll have to be moving on soon. To make plans for whatever future they need to avoid.

She sits up, and stretches out from where she’s been lying against Tim’s thigh. Glances at Jon, barely four metres away on a separate towel. Grey-haired and tired-eyed. Martin’s holding his hand, the left one crinkled by burns, as they talk about something treasured for its meaningless. Despite everything, Jon’s face practises relearning its smiles, even as he touches tentative at the marks around his neck, the bruising at the edges of his mouth.

The tension has not faded from Tim’s shoulders. His plumage sharp and strange even now. Her own scales patchy and bare, whole sections that have not grown back.

She considers her battered but striving shoal, and wants to show them that their past is not all there will ever be. That there will be an after-this, whatever that looks like. She wishes they spoke her tongue, so she could gift them names, new names, for the things they have become, this things that they have survived, and all that has survived them.

“Martin!” she shouts over, a sudden inspiration seizing her. “Want to come in the water with me?”

Martin’s expression barrels through at least three iterations before it hovers between wary and uncomfortable.

“I – er… I might just be better off here, actually.”

“No pressure,” she tells him, and she means it, for all she remembers that he has never had the chance to know the sea as she has, to feel his whole weight held up by the water. “But I am a pretty spectacular swimming teacher. I promise I won’t let go.”

Martin, to his credit, thinks about it. Gnaws on his lip, stares away from her and at his knees. Next to her, she can feel Tim bite back an enthusiastic declaration of encouragement for fear of spooking him.

Martin stands gingerly, and she is so proud of him.

“I haven’t got a costume,” he says.

“Your boxers will be fine.”

“We want something pretty to look at, show us those legs, Martin!” Tim says. He times the tone playful, the perfect balance of joking and complementing, and it works, with Martin’s blushing and ‘shut it Tim’ distracting him from the enormity of his decision as he neatly folds up his jeans, and takes off his shoes and socks. Sasha peels off her long skirt, rolls down her tights. She dislikes shoes on principle, and rarely wears them.

The rocks dig into the soles of Martin’s feet as they waddle down to the shore, slow going and interspersed with wincing.

She takes his hand as they stop, stand a foot from the border between land and sea.

“We’ll just go a little way out,” she promises. “The water’s fairly calm but for your first time…”

“I don’t think I can do this,” Martin whispers. He hesitates, and she waits for his decision.  And then, he creeps forward, and she follows. He swears vehement as the water hits his toes, and he almost balks to feel the frigid temperature, but he pushes forward, his swearing getting more and more creative the further he walks out against the tide.

From the headland, someone cheers, likely Tim.

“Don’t look at them,” Sasha says. “Come on, this is all you, ok?”

Her legs unfuse into her tail, and she shivers out a feeling like cramp, luxuriating in the sensation against her skin.

Martin tentatively wades out. He’s tall, but there’s a point where he stops, knowing to move forward means his feet won’t touch the ground.

“A little further, yeah?” Sasha encourages, and he nods jerkily, a frantic up-and-down, his expression petrified. “You can do this. Don’t look at the water. Look at me.”

Keeping her eyes fixed on his, she pulls him slowly into deeper waters. His fingers are pressing rounded marks into her forearms. His leg gestures are sloppy, thrashing, and at one point he dips below the surface with the disturbance he’s making, and he splutters as he resurfaces, surging up, eyes bulging in a betrayed panic. She continues to reassure him and doesn’t let go as they stop and simply float, the shoreline easily in sight.

“How does it feel?” she asks.

“Wet,” he grumbles. Clearly concentrating, he treads, kicking out in a motion that gradually finds rhythm.

For a long while, it is them and the sea. The waves rub up against the bare patches in her scales, but the reminder is not painful.

Martin’s breathing calms. His terror recedes, and he looks down at the obscured water under them.

“Can we go out a bit further?”

She’s not doing as much pulling now. She shows him how to use his arms to push himself through water, and stopping and starting, correcting his gestures and posture and breathing as they go, they drift further out before stopping again, hanging suspended above the depths.

Martin smiles at his own unexpected success. He lets out a long, satisfied sound like something’s loosened in him for the first time.

His eyes, completely black, reflect the dour and overcast midday sun.

“Martin, your eyes.”

“What’s wrong with them?” Martin says, but no – he doesn’t say, he barks, and then gasps, and then barks again, stunned, unsettled. He doesn’t look upset. He’s bitten his lip with his too-sharp teeth that now line his gums, and he touches the sharp pain it has caused with incredulity, his still human fingers marking out the sensation of the new.

“What’s happening?” he asks and Sasha grins, and says “I don’t know, Martin, I don’t know” and he’s splashing, a seal without skin, something entirely himself, shivering minutely in the cold shock even as his smile shows off his pointed teeth. He barks again, the sound almost jolted out of him as he figures out how it works, and she trills in delight, and it sets him off grinning and kicking. And for the moment, for this moment, the Lonely is banished entirely landbound, and there is only them treading water, surrounded by the endless sea and trusting they will not drown.

They have to go back to land eventually. The waves around them start to wash choppy, the sky colours grey with the surety of rain. They swim back, and sometimes Sasha lets go, bobbing near his elbow as he swims slowly but steadily on his own.

Martin’s teeth flatten when they crawl onto the shore, panting and burbling out the dregs of their laughter. Tim and Jon have come over to greet them, Jon holding the towels and garments like an overladen clothes tree. Tim chucks Sasha a towel to fold around herself into a makeshift skirt before her tail bisects back into legs.

“Tim, Tim, Tim!” Sasha says excitedly, waving her hands and gesticulating.  “Did you see, did you see?”

“See what…?” Tim starts, but he glances at Martin, whose eyes are slow to fade from black to blue, and Tim might not realise what exactly has happened, but he senses the tenor of the mood because he’s barrelling in, knocking into Martin, wrapping him in a hug and nearly smothering him with his wings. Once released, Jon approaches slowly, putting his burdens down. Martin glances up at him, almost anxious now that the initial buzz is wearing down, but Jon goes softly to his knees, and his smile spreads across his face like paint in water.

The grey of the sky feels far off as they allow themselves the momentarily uncomplicated gift of being happy.

[urdearestmom]

I'll Walk With You

hello everyone shocked to see me posting yet again???????

i said after i posted that oneshot rehashing 3x06 that i was going to one day write something where mike and max have an actual conversation.... and here it is!! for your reading pleasure :)

i think i did them and their dynamic justice with this and i'm super proud of how it turned out. we're unlikely to ever get something like this in the show but i'm hoping s4 at least gives us them being actual friends so that i can infer that something like this happened between seasons lol

Max’s house is silent as the grave. She isn’t surprised, it’s been like this nearly all the time since the summer. Her stepfather will drink himself back to sleep on the couch, and her mother will say nothing. Max won’t say anything either. The day has barely begun and it’s already shit.

Most of the time she escapes the horrible atmosphere inside her house by going to school, but it’s Spring Break now and she has nowhere to be. She’ll be stuck with her thoughts all day if she doesn’t find something else to do, so after nearly two hours of trying in vain to entertain herself, she decides to head out and see if Lucas is free. She knows Dustin already left town with his mom the night before, and she’s not willing to have Mike third wheel her and Lucas, so she hopes he’s down to go do something with her. He’s good at distracting her from the inescapable cycle of guilt and anger she feels constantly nowadays.

Except when she gets to his house, his parents are in the garage putting things into the trunk of the family car. She stops at the sight. Erica is nowhere to be seen but Lucas is standing in the front doorway and sees Max coming right away. He meets her in the street.

“Max, hey,” he says. “What’s up?”

Max gestures to his house. “I came to see if you wanted to hang out, but it looks like you guys are going somewhere.”

Lucas frowns. “I thought I told you, we’re going to visit my cousins in Chicago for a few days.”

Lord, a few days? Lucas must see it on her face because he scrambles to assure her it’s not for the whole week.

“I’ll be back Wednesday,” he promises.

“Today’s Sunday,” she protests. She knows there’s literally nothing to be done about it, but it still sucks. What’s she going to do all week?

“I swear I told you,” Lucas repeats.

“Yeah. Yeah,” Max answers. “You probably did. I’m sorry, just… forgot.”

He frowns again. Max has been forgetting a lot of things lately. She’s not sure why, it just feels like everything in her life is too much and her brain can’t handle it the way it should. Freshman year has not been the greatest so far.

“You okay?” He asks her, reaching for her hands, and his concern makes her heart squeeze painfully in her chest. He’s probably the only person who actually cares about her well-being, seeing as her mom clearly doesn’t.

Max nods. “Yeah. I just didn’t want to be at home, but I guess I’ll find something else to do. Bye, Lucas,” she says, squeezing his fingers gratefully before turning away to bike off back down the street.

“Hey!” He calls. She turns back. He motions to the big house next door, equally familiar to her. “Mike’s still home, maybe you can ask him?”

Max crosses her arms. “Like he would want to hang out with me,” she scoffs.

Lucas sighs. “Look, I know he can be a bit of an ass sometimes-”

“That’s putting it lightly.”

“-But he’s not a bad person, Max, you know that. He’s dealing with a lot right now,” Lucas finishes.

Max rolls her eyes. “Yeah, well, he’s not the only one,” she says bitingly. She has never gotten along with the third boy in their group and at this point she isn’t sure she ever will. She’s also not really in the mood to look at his stupid face today, considering it’ll more than likely start an argument and she doesn’t have the energy for that.

“I know,” Lucas says. “I know. But you’re both my best friends and I think you guys are more alike than you think. If you just gave each other another chance, you’d get along.”

Max doesn’t reply. She doesn’t really know what to say because she knows Lucas is only trying to help her with what he thinks is the current best solution, but she doesn’t want to agree with him either.

“Just think about it,” he continues. “He’s the only one not going anywhere so if you really need to see someone…”

She gets what Lucas is implying, but really? “He’d probably laugh in my face if I showed up at the door. I’d rather stay home.”

At that, Lucas raises his arms in surrender. “I’m just saying he wouldn’t turn you away. We don’t lie to each other, alright?”

Max shrugs in response. “Whatever. I’ll figure something out.”

Lucas steps forward quickly to hug her. Pulling back, he keeps his hands on her arms. “I wrote my cousins’ phone number on the back of your math worksheet yesterday if you need it.”

She gives him a tiny nod and he returns it with a small smile, dropping his arms back to his sides.

“I’ll see you first thing Thursday morning,” he adds.

“Thursday,” she repeats, putting one foot back on her bike pedal. “Got it.” What’s she supposed to do until Thursday?

The answer, as it happens, is absolutely nothing. For the rest of Sunday afternoon, Max rides around town with no destination. She stops in a park for a while, sitting down and pulling up blades of grass and sprinkling them around her. A man walking his dog gives her a weird look and she flips the bird at his back. That action feels oddly satisfying, even if he didn’t see it. In the evening she makes her way back to her house, and everyone pretends like she didn’t just spend the entire day gone.

Monday dawns looking and feeling exactly the same, except Max decides to get a start on some homework. This way when Lucas comes back she’ll be free to hang out with him without the thought of her assignments hanging over her head. Her mom leaves to go to work and all it does is make Max hyper aware of Neil’s movements across the house. He’s supposed to go to work too, but Max isn’t sure he will. In fact, she sort of suspects he’s either quit or been fired. He’s missed too many days.

When she’s tired of writing and the lines of her character analysis of Mercutio are starting to blur into the equations on her algebra worksheet, she goes into the kitchen to find something to eat. Neil’s gone, so she makes herself a ham and cheese sandwich and stands by the sink to eat it. She feels exhausted, and it’s barely afternoon.

Hours later, she wakes up from a nap to the sun near setting and the noises of her mom puttering around the kitchen making dinner. The first thing her gaze lands on is the clunky walkie-talkie sitting on her desk, and her thoughts spring to the boys. Specifically, what Lucas said to her the day before.

Maybe it has more merit than she first gave it. It’s true that she doesn’t get along with Mike at all, but she might be willing to try again at some point, if only to appease Lucas. She had wanted to when they all first met. She liked the other boys just fine, but she could tell from the get-go that Mike was their ringleader and his opinion could sway the others. If she wanted to truly feel like a part of the group, they all had to be on board. Even after that, things weren’t so terrible between them; at least until summer and all the drama with El and then everything else that happened. Now, Max’s headspace is too occupied by other problems to care much about trying to repair her somewhat-friendship with him, and Mike has become more and more reclusive by the day. She even thinks she saw him smoking once, down at the far end of the field, which, although she isn’t an expert, she feels is extremely uncharacteristic.

Everything’s just weird now. There’s too many empty holes in all their lives.

Dinner is mostly quiet; nobody in this house ever says anything that has any true meaning anyway. Maybe it’s better this way. Neil ends up on the couch joined by his bottle of whiskey and Max’s mom shoos her away after she’s cleared the table, so Max retreats back to her room. The silence is almost deafening, and she wishes that dumb walkie-talkie on her desk would crackle. What she wouldn’t give for someone to say real words to her.

She considers calling Lucas, but she doesn’t want to bother him with her problems when he’s supposed to be having fun with his cousins. She also doesn’t want Neil to ask who she’s calling. In the end, she ends up tidying her room, gathering up all her comic books and folding the clothes she has on the floor before placing them on her chair. The walkie seems like it’s calling out to her as she glances at it every five seconds, and then finally lets her frustration out on it by snatching it up and launching it at her bed. She doesn’t want to break it, but she did want to throw it. Why does she keep looking at it? It’s not like anyone’s going to call her on it. The only people who might are both out of town.

Her emotions war inside of her. On the one hand, she knows what she wants, what she needs. She needs to talk to someone freely so it has to be someone who relates to what she’s seen, because being stuck virtually alone inside her house for the next few days until Lucas gets back is going to drive her insane. Unfortunately the only person she can think of is someone she isn’t on good terms with, which makes her angry for even having the thought. Is she really desperate enough to potentially embarrass herself?

Damn Lucas for putting the idea in her head. She’s sure she never would’ve considered it on her own. Damn Lucas and his stupid advice, damn Dustin for ever speaking to her that day and getting her involved in all their mess, and damn Mike for hating her from day one.

Damn her for going to talk to him anyway. She sneaks out her window, just as she has done to meet Lucas so many times, except it’s after nine and it’s dark out. She brings the walkie with her.

On the way, she wonders why she’s even doing this. She supposes it would make it easier for Lucas and Dustin when they all hang out together (which is getting rarer every week) if she and Mike aren’t constantly at each other’s throats about something or other. She also remembers something El said to her on the phone a while ago that she had forgotten about until this very moment. El had heard enough complaints from both of them about each other and was just wishing they would stop fighting. Max had scoffed at it and been about to launch into another rant about just how much of a jerk Mike was when El had said she didn’t care if they weren’t friends, she just wanted them to stop being so mad all the time.

Max kind of agrees with her. Being angry all the time is exhausting, and there are way worse things in her life to be angry about than Mike Wheeler and his dumb attitude. If she can make peace with him, maybe she won’t feel so out of place around her own friends. And maybe, if they can get over everything that’s happened between them, it’ll give her hope that the rest of her life might look up one day, too.

It’s only when she gets to his house that she realizes she doesn’t know what she wants to say. Maybe it doesn’t have to be a whole conversation, maybe just seeing each other for five minutes will give her enough stability to stay in her house until Lucas returns and she can talk to him instead. She just needs to be around someone who knows the things she’s been through since she moved here, someone who looks at her and knows why she is the way she is. Her mom can never know and will never understand, and Neil is too scary to ever think about approaching him with anything at all.

She drops her bike in the grass by the back of the house, making her way to the basement door where she knows the boys like to be. He’s probably in there still. Her stomach is roiling with nerves, scared that he’ll open the door and glare at her like he usually does, but she remembers there’s another way he looks at her sometimes. There are moments at school, when she passes the gym or sees the basketball team, where Max gets overwhelmed at the memories of her dead stepbrother. It’s almost like she can smell him, the way he used to get up in her face when he yelled at her and the way he looked when he died apologizing to her. It’s moments like that when Dustin and Lucas will be distracted with some petty disagreement that she looks to Mike and his gaze contains solidarity instead of hostility; reassurement that he knows what it feels like to be reminded at every turn of someone you cared about who is gone. He was there, too, and saw Billy sacrifice himself at the last moment just as she did. It’s not an image either of them can forget.

It’s this that gives her the courage to rap her knuckles on the glass pane of the basement door and wait for an answer. When she waits ten seconds and nothing happens, she frowns and knocks again. He wouldn’t know it’s her, why would he ignore it?

She pushes her face up to the door again and tries to see inside, her breath fogging against the glass, and then realizes all the lights in the basement are off.

“Shit,” she says quietly. She doesn’t want to show up at the front door at this time of night. His mom will probably answer and Max doesn’t want to explain herself. She wanders around to the front of the house anyway, looking at which lights are on. There’s one on the ground floor that flickers and seems like it might be a TV, and there’s one on in a room on the second floor. That room has pink wallpaper, though, so Max decides to assume it’s not the one she’s looking for. The middle upstairs window is dark, and the one on the left has the blinds pulled halfway down, but she spots a familiar figure walking past it in the half second her eyes jump to it. Bingo.

She takes a breath to steel herself before bringing the walkie-talkie out of her jacket pocket and pressing down on the button. “Mike, do you copy? It’s Max. Over.”

The walkie crackles with static for a few seconds, and then clears up as an answer comes through. “Yeah, I copy. What do you want? Over.”

“Can you come outside?”

It crackles again in the silence, and Max thinks that maybe this was insane and she should just go home. Then, “You’re outside?”

The blinds lift all the way up and Max sees Mike’s expression change from confused to surprised, like he didn’t actually believe she was there. In a second, he has the window pulled up too and his head sticking out of it.

“What are you doing here?” He asks, his tone of voice anxious, and Max realizes he probably thinks something horrible has happened. In his head, there’s likely no other reason she of all people would show up at his house at close to ten at night.

“Nothing happened, if that’s what you’re thinking,” she says, glancing away from him above her and noticing she’s standing in front of the front door. This is not a good place to be. “I just- didn’t want to be alone.”

She looks back up to find him staring at her like she’s grown another head. “So you came to me?”

Max huffs and crosses her arms. “Well, there’s no one else to go to!”

“Keep your voice down!” He hisses. “Do you want my mom to hear you?”

She glares. She’s starting to think that this was a bad idea after all.

After a few seconds of mutinous eye contact, Mike puts a hand to his forehead exasperatedly. “Give me a minute, I’ll meet you at the basement door.” He shuts the window and pulls the blinds down without another word, so Max heeds the order and circles back around to where she left her bike. A few moments later, he comes out the door shrugging on a jacket over what looks like-

“Are those Star Wars pyjamas?” She asks, her mouth twisting into a teasing little smile. What does El see in this guy? As far as she knows, Lucas isn’t this completely nerdy.

He gives her a flat look. “Why do you have to have a problem with everything that I do?”

She frowns. “It was just a question. Relax, jeez.”

In response, Mike puts his hands in his pockets and looks at her. “So what do you want to do?”

Max balks for a second, awkwardness taking over her. This is so weird. She’s never willingly chosen to spend any of her time alone with Mike, and now she doesn’t know what to do.

“Um… just- walk around, maybe?”

He shrugs at her answer and starts walking toward the line of trees behind the house, where there’s a little path that leads off to the next street. Max follows quietly, a little moonlight shining down on them, and she thinks that the silence between them doesn’t feel as explosive as it usually does.

Somewhere along the way, after they’ve crossed another street and gone down a path between two houses, Mike takes something shiny out of his pocket and starts playing with it, and Max sees that it’s a lighter.

“What’s that for?” She asks.

“Lighting things up,” he says.

“You smoke?”

“Only sometimes.”

“So what’s it for the other times?”

He looks at her and his eyebrows furrow for a quick second, seemingly surprised that she inferred something about him correctly.

Mike shrugs again. “Sometimes I go out to the woods and set dead leaves on fire one at a time just to watch them burn. It’s weird how something that was alive once can just disintegrate right in front of you.”

Max isn’t sure what to say to that, but she offers something anyway. “Sometimes I steal my stepdad’s Bowie knife. Use it to stab trees,” she says casually. “Sometimes I even carve that I hate him into them.”

She’s never told Lucas that. Something in her knows that he wouldn’t relate, that his way of dealing with his anger is much calmer and reserved, but Mike’s admission of low-level violence makes her feel less crazy for her own. Maybe Lucas was right in saying they’re more alike than they think they are.

They come out of the trees behind the houses, and the path continues down a hill to a small playground area. There's a swing set that Max sits down on, the cold rubber biting through the fabric of her jeans and making her shiver. The chains creak when Mike sits in the one next to her. He’s digging through his pockets for something.

Max is almost surprised when he pulls out a box of cigarettes and plucks one from the pack, lighting it, but given what he’d just told her two minutes ago it’s not that shocking. He takes a pull from it and then blows the smoke out into the air slowly.

“You want some?” He asks, turning to her.

She remembers the choking sensation she’d felt that time Billy had offered her a drag from his cigarette, and then her mom’s reaction to it.

“Yeah, why not.” Maybe if she still smells like smoke tomorrow, her mom will care enough to ask where she’s been.

Mike hands it to her and the tips of his fingers are warm. “You’ve smoked before?”

“Once,” Max says.

He nods and watches her, and she tries not to let the hot, ashy air she breathes in make her choke. She holds it for a few seconds and then blows it out, and it makes her feel less nervous than she was before about this whole situation.

The pair of them sit there in the darkness for a few minutes, sharing the cigarette in silence, before Max thinks to ask a question she never got a real answer for.

“Why do you hate me so much?”

Mike doesn’t look at her, sucking in another breath of smoke. “I don’t hate you.”

“You sure act like you do.”

“Oh, and you don’t?” He says sarcastically, still not looking at her. “If I hated you why would I be here right now?”

“Well, if I hated you, why would I have come talk to you?” She retorts, trying to restrain the irritation she knows is probably written all over her. If she doesn’t rein herself in, she knows this is going to go south quicker than she wants it to.

He laughs dryly. “You said it yourself. You only came because there’s no one else.”

Max bites back the anger that’s trying to rise. He does have a point there, but she’s not going to tell him that. He’s also not answering her question.

“Fine. Maybe you don’t hate me.”

“I don’t.”

“What’s your problem with me then?”

He hands her the end of the cigarette to finish and grabs onto the chains of the swing, dragging the toes of his Converse through the grass.

“You’re always starting shit with me for no reason and it makes me so tired,” he says. “Like, we’d be friends just fine if we didn’t argue every other day.”

“And whose fault is that…” Max murmurs under her breath, dropping the cigarette stub to the ground and putting it out with her foot.

Mike turns to her sharply. “Uh, yours? You made El break up with me! How am I supposed to forget that?”

“I already told you I didn’t make her!” Max says loudly. Why is he still on this? As far as Max is aware, they’re basically back together anyway so it’s not like it made a difference. “And how am I supposed to forget how shit you made me feel the first week I was here?”

He looks away again. “I was pretty rude, I’ll give you that.”

She scoffs. “That’s underrating it. You were a total asshole.”

He pushes himself forward a little bit and then lets himself swing back. “I guess I never really apologized for that. I do regret it.”

Max stays silent and waits for him to continue. He’s slumped over in the swing, looking smaller and sadder than she’s ever seen him look, and her heart twinges. She recognizes the defeat present in the way his shoulders are hunched, the complete and utter exhaustion at the state of their lives painted on his face. It’s what she sees every day when she looks in the mirror.

“It wasn’t that I didn’t like you, or something,” he tells her. “I was jealous that Lucas and Dustin seemed like they were moving on when I was so…”

“Messed up?” She offers.

Mike shrugs. “Yeah. And part of it was out of concern for you, too.”

Max furrows her brows in confusion. That’s new. “Concern?” She asks, shaking her head slowly. Her hair swings around her face like a curtain, blocking her vision, but she wants to look at Mike and see how he explains this. She tucks it away behind her ear.

“Yeah,” he says again. “I could see how fucked up Will was, and I knew how fucked up I was. And Dustin and Lucas are good at pretending stuff doesn’t affect them but I know it did. It does.”

“And?”

“And I didn’t want someone new getting mixed up in our shit, okay?” He bursts out, meeting her curious gaze once again. “I didn’t want someone else to have to experience the stuff we did. I thought if I made it obvious that I didn’t want you there, you would leave. You know now, but when Lucas told you we couldn’t tell you stuff for your own safety it was the truth.”

Max thinks about that. She supposes it makes sense. She has noticed that Mike tends to be the guy that worries about everyone else’s safety, and always wants to get to the bottom of the problem before anyone gets hurt. Lucas is the same and it’s something she admires about him, but it’s overtly obvious in Mike when he’s always the one stressing about coming up with plans. Lucas is a little more go-with-what-the-adults-say.

“I’m sorry that I hurt you,” Mike finally says, and his expression is earnest. He’s a bad liar anyway, so Max knows that he means it. Speaking of his lies… she has something to apologize for too.

“I’m sorry too,” she says. “For judging your relationship too fast.”

He makes a weird noise when he registers what she said, almost like a laugh but kind of mad, too. “Yeah, and for making my girlfriend dump me.”

Max reaches out towards him and smacks his arm, a spike of irritation fuelling her. “Mike, how many goddamn times do I have to tell you I didn’t make her?”

“Well, what the hell did you say to her to make her do that?!” He exclaims.

The peace of the previous moment is gone and Max crosses her arms over her chest defensively. “From what she told me, it sounded like you were just lying straight to her face so you didn’t have to see her. All I did was tell her that if you did it again, she should dump your ass. You did it to yourself.”

Mike throws his arms up. “Hopper made me lie! He told me if I didn’t, he wouldn’t let me see her anymore. You seriously think I wouldn’t want to spend time with her? After everything we went through?”

She thinks for a second about the way he’d looked when El had walked back into their lives; the way he had seemed to drop all the negativity he’d been carrying around the second she came through that door. Max remembers thinking she’d never been so sure about someone’s presence in her life.

He’s still on a roll. “What, is that why you’ve dumped Lucas, like, seven times? You just break up with him the second he does something you don’t like without even letting him explain himself?”

Bringing that up is a sore point. Max feels incredibly guilty for the way she’s treated Lucas in the past, and she’s trying to be better. She’d told him once that she knew she could be a jerk like her stepbrother sometimes, that she was angry just like he was, but that she didn’t want to be like him. And then she turned around and behaved exactly like him, manipulating Lucas’ reactions and dumping him over and over because she knew he would come back. It made her feel like she was in control, the dominant one, the complete opposite of what she saw in her mother and what she felt in her house every day.

But she had come to a point where she realized that one day, Lucas would get fed up with her. There would come a day when he wouldn’t stand for it anymore and he’d leave her permanently, and Max didn’t think she could live with that. From then on, she had decided to try harder with him and make things better, to talk about her feelings more. It’s always going to be difficult for her, but Lucas is worth it.

“Don’t say that like you know anything about why I did that,” she says sharply, gripping so tightly onto the chain of the swing that the cold metal feels like ice in her hand.

Mike glares back at her, indignant. “Oh, that’s rich! Like you knew anything about me when you said that shit to El!”

Max stands up suddenly. “I’m tired of the lies, Mike! Do you know what it’s like to live in a house where your mom will watch your brother get beat up and leave the room so she can pretend it didn’t happen? Where she doesn’t care where you go or how you feel or what’s going on with you because if she doesn’t ask, she doesn’t have to lie to herself that it’s okay? Where we all just don’t talk about anything and pretend it’s all fine when it isn’t?”

She’s breathing hard and he’s staring up at her with wide eyes, accustomed to her outbursts by now but not like this. Max sits back down on the swing, hard.

“I broke up with Lucas a lot because it made me feel like I had control,” she admits. “I needed to feel like I was in charge of the situation. I get enough of being treated second-class at home, and I don’t want to be like my mom, ever.”

She looks back at Mike on the other swing and he doesn’t look mad at her anymore, only like he’s processing what he’s just heard. It lets her own anger drain out of her.

“When El told me what you said, it reminded me of my mom,” Max continues. “She seemed so confused on why you would do that and to me it looked like you were just using her when you wanted her and dropping her when you didn’t. My mom kind of… disappears into whoever she’s dating and just goes along with whatever they do, and it looked like that for me,” she finishes.

“I get it,” he says, and Max raises her eyebrows. “I mean, I don’t get it personally, my parents aren’t like that. I just meant I get where you’re coming from. It makes sense why you would think that way.”

“I didn’t want the same thing that happens to my mom to happen to El,” Max adds. “She is her own person, and she of all people deserves the chance to be that.”

At last, they find common ground. “I agree,” Mike replies. “She’s been through enough in her life. And I’m happy you and her are friends now,” he adds. “Seriously. It was kind of weird to imagine her having girl problems or something and talking to my sister about it. I’m glad she has you.”

“I’m glad she has you,” Max says, and Mike looks shocked to hear her say it. “I might not get why, but I know you make her happy somehow. Even if you do wear Star Wars pyjamas.”

“Hey!” He says, offended. “You recognizing it means you’ve seen it too. And I know for a fact you read comics, so you’re just as much of a nerd as me.”

Max shrugs, giving him the point. “At least I can beat you at arcade games.”

“Is that a challenge?” He asks, swinging closer as if to intimidate her.

Max laughs, and it’s a real laugh for the first time in what feels like forever. “You’re on.”

“Tomorrow,” Mike suggests. “Twelve o’clock. I’ll meet you there.”

“Bring painkillers,” she warns him. “You’re gonna need them after I’m done kicking your ass at every. Single. Game.”

“You won’t beat me at Galaga,” he says proudly.

“Wanna bet?”

They stand up and shake hands, and his feels pleasantly warm. It’s a nice change from the frozen chain she was holding onto.

“Loser gets us fries,” Mike adds, and Max agrees to it. As if of one mind, they both turn back up the path they came from.

They’re back across the two streets they crossed and almost all the way back to Mike’s house when Max speaks again.

“So are we good?” She asks. She feels good about having aired out all the conflict she had with him, and he’s had this dumb smile on his face the whole time they’ve been walking back, which she’s choosing to take as a good sign.

“Yeah,” he says, looking at his feet. “We’re good.” He smiles wider.

It brings a small smile to Max’s own face. Having friends feels nice. “Why are you smiling like that?”

He coughs a little, scratching his head. “Just thinking about how happy El will be when she finds out we’re not enemies anymore.”

Max rolls her eyes good-naturedly. “You are so whipped.”

He shrugs as if to say, what can you do?

“I think Lucas and Dustin will benefit from having us not trying to kill each other every five seconds, too,” she says.

“Definitely.”

“Although I’ll probably still be annoyed by half the things you say.”

Mike makes a face like he’s not surprised to hear that. “Don’t worry about it. You’re still annoying, I just like you now. No more actual fighting.”

“Good,” she replies, feeling happier than she has in days as they arrive back in his backyard. She can faintly see her bike lying in the grass.

Mike has the door to the basement halfway open by the time she’s sitting on her bike ready to ride away, and at the last second lays a hand on her arm.

“Hey, anytime you need somewhere to go… I’m usually home,” he says, looking at her directly. It’s a simple thing to say, but she knows what he means by it. He’s telling her that he understands that sometimes her house is not a home, and that she’s always welcome in his if she needs it.

“Thanks,” she responds, and for once she is truly thankful for Mike Wheeler’s existence.

“Well, good night,” he answers, and awkwardly salutes her out of nowhere.

Max squints at him confusedly for a second. “I’ll... see you tomorrow,” she says haltingly.

He looks kind of embarrassed and shuts the door quickly, and Max rides off back to her house. That was random.

However, she is looking forward to tomorrow. She has a feeling Mike’s going to be the type of friend she’s constantly competing with, ribbing back and forth to see who can be worse just like they usually do, but this time knowing they’re both forgiven for their mistakes. It’s different from her other friendships for sure, but she thinks it’ll be good. Lucas is going to be pleased.

Maybe the wait until Thursday won’t be so bad after all.

[pedroalonso]

maybe not entirely within the spinoff concept, but i think i saw somewhere someone? lol talking about potential spinoff-like shows, something english language and us/maybe uk setting, like for a more english language audience (aka us audience lol). maybe he wouldn't even need to be involved in that, besides some producer credit or something so as far as he's concerned the show is over with s5. i think it was maybe an article about how incredibly globally popular lcdp got in s3/s4 - they noted it was watched globally but not as much in us and uk. so like a spinoff only as far as same heist concept and a built in audience to an extent.

oh!! so it kinda has the same vibe as the korean version of lcdp that they’re planning to release. well, idk if i’d be interested in that kind of reboot especially because the original is already so near and dear to my heart, but i’ll probably end up watching to compare how the different versions compare to lcdp.

[thesaunatest]

MY HUGE THEORY ON EL’S PLOTLINE IN S4

before you guys even start, YES I know that 99.9% of what I say is going to be wrong but this is literally just for fun.

its march 1986, middle of the school year and el HATES school

when we left her she was barely literate and had just started getting accostomed to speaking full sentences, NOWHERE NEAR a 9th grade level, so shes struggling in her classes to say the least

on top of that, she barely knows how to socialize with other people, so shes evidently getting picked on

with joyce and jonathan both working to keep the family afloat, will and el get left alone alot

but outside of the party, they socially have nothing in common

in fact, will is adapting to the new town a whole lot better than el. he fit right in with all the creative kids he met in class, but el didnt mesh with that crowd

anyway, our girl is sturggling

the only time she really has fun is when she visits hawkins, or when someone from the party visits them

which leads us to spring break

mike obviously comes to visit, and el doesnt want them to waste a single second so she begs mike and will to come explore the town with her

at this point joyce is already in her detective mode, hatching a rescue plan for hopper so she doesnt notice theyre gone

and jonathan is battling the heartbreak of nancy ghosting him when she was supposed to come visit

so the trio goes off on an adventure without anyone noticing.......... or so they think

because brenner is back, and he knows el is with the byers, but he cant go and snatch her because he doesnt have the resources all the way in california

in fact, he doesnt have the resources at all. his numbers experiment is seen as a catastrophic failure that lead to the deaths of hundreds of lab employees

the only way for him to redeem himself in the community, and gain his funding back is to present his peers with proof that the project can work, so he needs to get one of his numbers back

el is the only one he can track down, but he doesnt think he can do it himself. if she saw him, she could just kill him with her powers, he assumes because he doesnt know she lost them

so who does he employ to get el back to hawkins? lonnie byers

its almost too easy. it doesnt take much to bribe lonnie, and hey, its not like its his kid. so lonnie accepts the bribe, and goes all the way out to california to find el

he shows up at the byers house..... only to find it completely deserted. so he waits

and the trio finds him there after their day out (why are you here? what do you want? where are mom and jonathan?)

and lonnie, being as crafty as he is, comes up with a good excuse on the fly (hes craftier than i am because i genuinely have no idea what he would say)

anyway, he gets them in his car and on their way back to hawkins

jonathan shows up after theyve already left, and is too stoned tired to think anything of the empty house

and joyce is already halfway to russia

will knows his father. he knows that his father doesnt give a shit about him, the family, or anything about hawkins. he knows that his father wouldnt get involved in anything unless he had something to gain. so hes wraking his brain

maybe.... lonnie pulls over to take a suspicious phone call? maybe will figures out an inconsistency in his story? either way, the gang is onto lonnie and figures that they gotta get away from him and get back to joyce and jonathan

they tuck and roll out of the car. idk. all that matters is that they get out of there

as theyre rolling out of the car, el bonks her head a little and has a quick flashback to her time in the lab

since her intuition is always spot on, she takes this as a cue the breener is back and lonnie is working for him

she tells the boys it isnt safe to go back to california or hawkins, so they come up w an alternative plan, somewhere neither brenner nor lonnie would think to look for them

and while theyre on the road, they stop at a diner to eat (dont ask me where they got the money) and we get will leaving an emotional voicemail home, probably sobbing to jonathan about how much he means to will, which gives el an idea

because who has the resources to help her, as well as a desire for vengeance on brenner? kali

el uses her superb hitchiking skills to get them to chicago

maybe she just has some hints of her powers left, but it isnt too hard for el to find kali

she explains everything thats happened, and lets kali know that if she want revenge, the opportunity is hers

unfortunately, lonnie was hot on their trail, and called for reinforcements

theyre ambushed by the few employees brenner has working for him. initially, everyone is hiding, assisted by kali’s powers

but el knows they arent leaving empty handed, and would rather get taken away then have kali’s freedom taken from her

so el reveals herself, followed by mike because he wont leave her, followed by will because he wont leave mike

all three get taken away, back to hawkins lab, but now kali is even more motivated to bring down the lab once and for all

so kali and her gang get to hawkins, almost simultaniously with jonathan, who has been looking for his family in a frenzy since the morning he woke up to find eveyone gone, without even a note or a phone call, as well as argyle, who came along for the ride

the video store is being used as home base this season, so thats the first place they go, where they find steve, shortstaffed and not knowing whats going on because the whole team ditched him

they catch him up to speed on how EVERYONES GONE and steve catches them up to speed on how EVERYONE IS GETTING MURDERED

meanwhile, brenner has three predicaments

1) no matter what he does to el, what kind of torture he inflicts, she isnt using her powers because she doesnt have them. she tells him this several times. he refuses to believe it

2) lonnie byers is demanding his payment, which he didnt recieve because the deal was that he bring el to them, and he couldnt even do that

3) he has to find a way to dispose of mike and will, who he had no intention of bringing into the lab but theyre here and they know everything

and this is the moment where mike screws up by letting them know that people know theyre in the lab and people know about all the experiments and any second now, someones gonna come banging that door down to save us. nancy, jonathan, steve, robin max, lucas, dustin, kali-

and the second mike says her name he knows he screwed up

brenner decides in that moment that all he can do is round up everyone involved and get rid of them. conveniently, the string of murders occurring will serve as a good cover for what happened to them

and this is the part where joyce, murray, and hopper get back to hawkins

this is also the part where nancy and robin and the gang get back to hawkins

so nancy and robin immediately go to the video store armed with all the new information they learned from victor creel

..... and are met with jonathan, argyle, kali, and steve in pandemonium

they close the store for the day, and get ready to storm the lab

they realize that they need something from the school, so they head there to pick it up

and soon after arriving, theyre met with the all to familiar hawkins lab vans

they make a hasty escape, taking out some of the goons but they need to find a way to get the rest off their trail

they head for the woods, hoping to hide out in the cabin

meanwhile, the russia crew has taken the mostly demolished cabin as their haven to recover from whatever injuries they sustained

theyre all running through the woods, but they realize the people from the lab are closing in on them

and then nancy and jonathan pass a very familiar tree

they use whatever weapon they have on them to break through the bark, and head into the upside down

the lab people keep going into the woods, eventually finding hopper’s cabin

epic showdown between the russia crew and the lab people, joyce, murray and hopper win, they realize the lab is back, immediately head there realizing theyre gonna have to rescue someone

nancy and robin use the info they learned from victor creel to keep the gang alive in the upside down, max, argyle and eddie are freaking out because omg we’re in another dimention, we get some big reveal about the truth about the upside down and the gang makes their way out and head to the lab

and while this is all happening,we get some super emotional monologue between brenner and el (ala-the last 10 minutes of the truman show) and brenner realizes that el isnt going to be the naieve superweapn she used to be, and decides the best thing he can do with el is give her the standard punishment, time in the closet

and being in the closet triggers all sorts of flashbacks and emotions (mbb’s opportunity to show off her acting chops for an emmy)

joyce and hopper bust into the lab like they did in season 1, but this time they dont get caught

they decide to split up to cover more ground, and hopper finds el in the closet

and around the same time joyce finds mike and will and gets them out of there

here comes the REAL emotional performance

hopper sees her, we get a teary eyed “el!” “dad!”, and then hopper gets pulled away from el by lab workers

exactly the same way terry did

we’re watching this happen from el’s perspective, with a heart-wrenching “noooooooooo” from el, accompanied by cuts to every time el has had to be separated from someone she cares about (terry, the s1 ending, billy dying, her leaving kali in s2, saying goodbye to everyone on moving day, her being separated from mike and will when they got to the lab) accompanied by some terribly sad 80s song, then back to the present moment, she reaches her hand out and boom, the guards go flying. her powers are back

except she doesnt have control of them the way she did before, and now shes bringing the whole building down

her and hopper race to the the first floor, and meet joyce and the boys, they get out of the building at the very last second, and the whole thing collapses.

eventually they find the other group, the whole team is now together, they go and take down the big bad from the upside down, joyce almost KILLS lonnie

nancy and robin drop a huge bombshell that has to do with hawkins/the upside down, specifically pertaining to el, which they pieced together after talking to victor creel

we get a massive cliffhanger, season 5 starts like 10 minutes after the ending of season 4

[ridiasfangirlings]

AU where Saru was homeschooled so he and Yata never met in middle school. This makes it so Yata goes through/graduates high school. Somewhere along the way Yata manages to somehow get a girl pregnant & now is a very young single father. So Sarumi meet for the first time (as members of Homra and S4 respectively) at their canon ages and Fushimi is really thirsty for Yata, but he has no idea what do with his feelings, especially since Saru doesn't know if he can deal with a kid w/ all his issues.

Okay I've done a lot of out there AUs where everyone's a dragon or a god or emotionally healthy, but...an AU where Yata isn't a virgin? Way too weird, man :P How they would become friends while being in separate clans in this AU would be interesting, like somehow even being enemies they become closer. So say Fushimi is home-schooled, though considering his parents it's probably less 'home-schooled' and more 'Kisa throws some books at him to read on his own while Niki stops by occasionally to bug him.' Fushimi grows up all miserable and alone under Niki's thumb until one day while in high school he meets Munakata and is drafted into Scepter 4. Yata meanwhile maybe ends up falling in with some troublesome people, like he's rejected by everyone at school and pretty much becomes a delinquent in self defense. In high school he befriends some other delinquent guys who like to smoke and drink and do drugs, Yata gets super drunk one day and ends up actually doing it with an equally drunk girl. She gets pregnant and has a kid and maybe dies shortly afterward of like a drug overdose or something, Yata goes to get revenge on the dealers who sold the drugs to her and that's how he ends up meeting Homra and joining them, newly determined to become a hero like Mikoto-san and to raise his kid right.

Homra probably helps Yata out a lot with the babysitting, like if Yata has to go out on Homra business he can leave the kid at the bar without worry (I bet Anna gets along really well with the kid and loves to babysit). In his position as Homra's vanguard Yata runs into Fushimi quite often and of course their relationship is adversarial at first, though without any of the bitterness of canon. At some point while Yata still sees Fushimi as an annoying Blue he also finds himself looking forward to running into Fushimi a bit, like they have similar power levels and he gives Yata a challenge which Yata enjoys. One day they end up chasing after the same Strain and end up in a perilous situation together, like the Strain has poison powers and Fushimi takes a hit for Yata, moving without even thinking, and he ends up getting poisoned. Rather than leaving him like Fushimi expects Yata refuses to leave his side, taking care of him and hiding him until Scepter 4 shows up to finish off the Strain. Fushimi figures Yata was just doing this out of obligation, like Yata would probably end up in trouble if he left Fushimi alone and then Scepter 4 found out, but even after Fushimi's taken back to headquarters and given some medicine and told to rest Yata actually sneaks into Scepter 4 to check on him out of concern. Fushimi can't believe that Yata actually cares about him and Yata finds himself thinking that maybe they don't need to be enemies, like Fushimi did save him after all and yeah he's a jerk but he seems like a pretty cool guy.

After this they basically become friends and maybe Fushimi is just a bit smitten and unsure what to do about it, he's never had these kinds of feelings before plus Yata's in another clan and clearly all enamored of his King. Yata at some point invites Fushimi to the bar and that's when Fushimi meets Yata's kid, he immediately tries to be all cool and emotionless as he asks about Yata's girlfriend and Yata says she wasn't really his girlfriend and she's gone now anyway, he's a single dad. This complicates things for Fushimi though, because while part of him is so relieved that Yata's not taken already (though this is probably a shock to his system, like wait Misaki isn't a virgin) there's the whole worry that one, does Yata even like guys, and two, if they were to hook up how would Fushimi handle a kid. The kid is probably totally attached to Fushimi almost immediately too, clinging to his leg and wanting to play with him and Yata feels strangely excited that his kid likes Fushimi so much while Fushimi's just having an internal freakout because what if he breaks Yata's kid. He assumes that there's no way he and Yata could be together then, like if Yata knew how screwed up Fushimi is he'd never want his kid to be near Fushimi at all (and maybe that leads to something of a 'betrayal' in this AU, Fushimi pulling away and declaring Yata his enemy because it's easier than dealing with the idea that he could never be the one Misaki loves).

[chidoroki]

Head empty, pre-TPN season 2 thoughts only.

Normally I don’t even bother with hiding spoilers but since the new season is so close I’ll put everything below a cut (if tumblr cooperates) because I do want anime-onlys to enjoy the season with as little knowledge to what madness is about to happen as possible. This is just a bunch of notes that filled my head over the past couple days.. weeks? A long time.. and if I didn’t write them all down somewhere I wouldn’t stop thinking about them.. so if you understand this whole mess, then kudos to you.

So, here’s your post-season 1/ch37+ spoiler warning.

Demon language:

With Mujika and Sonju making their grand first appearances, I hope actually implement the demon language this time?

The only word spoken in the language in season 1 was the demon god’s name, which was just changed to “Him” (sub) or “The One” (dub), so ignoring it there was fine.

Granted, our demon friends don’t say much in their language during the upcoming arc, aside from this moment in ch48, but I can see the anime passing it off as a mere whisper between the two of them just so they don’t have to worry about it.

I don’t recall any of the GP poachers using the language though.. right? Pretty sure they don’t..

Anyways, all I’m saying is that they better figure something out by the Ayshe shows up way later in future seasons.

Episode count? 24?

Short answer: I don’t think so? Did once, but stuff happened. Anyways..

Season 1 ended in March 2019, which is also when we learned we were getting a second season and once we found later on that S2 was originally going to air in October 2020, I immediately thought we were getting about 24 eps.

I thought with all that time between seasons, 24 eps would be reasonable and that S2 would end at ch101. S1 managed to adapt 37 chapters, so 64 chapters in a season twice as long sound decent enough, right?

By the time we reach ch101, it would give us the demon forest, shelter B06-32, Goldy Pond and the short trip to Cuvitidala. (all of which would make this long wait for s2 sooo worth it btw.)

By this point we learn a bunch about the outside world, Norman being alive, what happened to Phil, and the demon bastard himself.

I bring up ch101 as a stopping point because it’s the last chapter before the two year time skip and.. I honestly can’t see them doing a time skip mid-season?

I mean, they could if they wanted to, I guess? Having everyone age up suddenly between episodes via a montage, a quick summary or even flashbacks of what we missed.. but maybe at the start of a season? Not in the middle.

Right now we know anime original scenes are going to be included into season 2 so I’m kinda hoping that once we do eventually reach the time skip we learn more about the search Emma’s group went on for T7W/golden water/temples.

I counted. If S2 does indeed get this many episodes, ep23 (or 22, if there’s a break in between somewhere or whatever) will land on my birthday and you can bet I’ll be beyond happy

HOWEVER! all the hope I once had about a 24ep season vanished due to the clusterfuck that was 2020. Thanks to the worldwide pandemic, many anime were put on hold and pushed back several months, with TPN airing this month rather than the original October date.

It was a bummer hearing about the delay at first but I never complained about it. I much rather have the studios prioritize their employee’s health over production.

Even if S2 did reach ch101, or even Goldy Pond, they would need to find a ton of new voice actors, and with how the world is working now.. eh, I have some doubts.

Cloverworks also has two other series airing this month aside from TPN so needless to say they’ll be a bit busy, especially if employees are still working from home, social distancing, or however they’re managing to produce these anime.

So, episode count.. 12?

The main reason I have a hard time grasping the idea of another 12ep season at all is because.. I don’t know where it’ll be a decent place for it to stop?

S1 ending at ch37 with the kids escaping? Perfect. You can’t question that decision. But now? When a whole bunch of craziness is about happen? How do you choose another perfect moment to end a season with?

No matter how many anime original scenes they have planned for the demon forest, I believe we’ll at least reach B06-32, which will get us to ch52.

Could they go farther? Sure. Perhaps ending at ch59-60? It would leave us off with Emma & Ray leaving the comfort of the shelter to follow Yuugo into yet another demon infested forest, much like how S1 left off, as the escapees left their once safe, comfortable life into the unknown world.

Or end at ch64? After Emma gets snatched by the poachers? It could work. It would certainly leave everyone wanting more, especially us manga readers because goddamn the GP arc would be SO close!

Perhaps ch74 after seeing Norman alive? Just so it’s not a big darn secret anymore to those who are going into this season blind? (how do people manage to stay anime only? i’m not trying to make anyone feel bad.. i’m just impressed? i caught up to the manga right after s1 because i didn’t have the self control to wait!)

Ending on that chapter would be so bittersweet to me.. because you know what appears in ch75 and it’s literally one of the only things I care about.

S2 preview trailers already teased some of the demon forest scenes I’m most excited about, so the only things left that will truly excite me are Yuugo and that darn outfit. (seriously, whenever we do get to see emma in her gp outfit for the first time, someone better scream at me so i can die from happiness.)

Okay, and all the GP kids too.. especially their trio!

Could they fit the Goldy Pond arc into a 12 episode season along with every other event that came before it? I.. seriously hope not? 

Compared to s1, which was very dialogue heavy, GP is about as action packed as we’re gonna get in the near future, and those scenes are going to fly by once they get put into motion.

Quick example (because it was recent and i can’t think of something else atm): the Overhaul arc from My Hero Academia. Off the top my head it was about 40 total ch? That arc took up half of the show’s S4, which was a total 25 eps.

So with the GP ending at ch96, it’ll give us about 20-30 chapters (depending on where you personally see the start of this arc I guess? once yuugo leads the duo through the forest, when emma gets snatched or when the battle actually starts)

If GP were to happen in s2 where there’s 12 episodes.. literally everything would be so fast paced and I don’t want them to rush anything or leave stuff out?

Other options?

It’s very wishful thinking and I would be getting my hopes up for nothing, because I know it won’t happen, but I could possibly see them fitting GP arc if S2 was made up of 18eps?

6 eps for the demon forest, 6 for Goldy pPond, the remaining 6 to accommodate B06-32, Cuvitidala and any other anime original scenes as they wish.

Although fitting about 64 chapters into 12-18 episodes sounds a bit much.. but not really? I seriously have no idea at this point how much story we’re going to cover this season.

Could I perhaps place all my hopes towards a second cour later this year? Like for the summer.. or would I be expecting too much?

This all could’ve been avoided if they just tell us! Seriously, I’ve been thinking about episode count since last year.. and now you have to deal with this mindless chatter of mine.

I’d honestly be okay with another 12ep season though. We waited this long that I’ll just be excited to see all the children again.

Anime-only scenes:

Those 3 days the children spent learning from our demon friends? Yes please! Did you know Emma not only learned how to use a bow and arrow but a freakin’ harpoon as well? Like.. hello?? I must see this!

Perhaps they’ll even adopt some of the extra pages from some of the chapters, like they did in S1 with the flashback of Norman being sick in ep10.

I know this will be such a high hope, but I remember in ch177 how Emma claims that after they escaped, they all remembered how kind Isabella really was, so if they decide to adapt the extras from ch41-42 & ch45, I’ll cry.

And these pages? Cloverworks, please..

I’m literally begging here..

Especially these two! Even though I still doubt we’ll reach Goldy Pond if we get 12eps.. but in the future! Please!

Other random nonsense:

I may or may not get emotional upon seeing Isabella at the very start when she goes to confront Grandma Sarah. If her hair is kept down as it was at the end of S1 then I’ll give the anime staff my sincere thanks.

We only heard 15 seconds of “Identity” and yet it has been living in my head rent free ever since that trailer dropped. I need to hear the full song sooo damn badly, y’all have no idea.

Here’s hoping they don’t cut out the inner monologues again. At this moment I don’t remember any specific ones from the demon forest I want to see but I’m sure they’re present.

I’m ready to die at every cute Chris moment they give us.. and this entire scene where the kids scold Ray. 

Literally every scene with Emma & Ray. They’re my top 2 favorites from this series okay? Of course I’m going to fangirl over them. (they already showed the hug in one of the trailers and i damn near cried)

If we see him, (which i’m sure we will, but i still have tiny some doubts) I hope they give Yuugo a fantastic voice actor.

Also, his nicknames for everyone!! Literally everything about that man I’m hyped for.

Again, very doubtful we’ll get GP in a 12ep season, but whenever that arc decides to grace us with its presence, “63194” better play on full blast when ch92-93 gets animated.

Speaking of music, while I’m completely excited to hear the new OST that Obata has in store for us (thank god he’s doing this season again btw!), I hope we hear some of those unused tracks from the first season, specifically “Their Own Thoughts.”

Every time Emma mentions their future, their goals or how her family will always be together, I’ll cry. (thanks demon god and your stupid reward)

Yes I’ll be doing those reaction posts (if you follow me i’m sure you’ve seen them by now) after every new episode as I do with other series I watch.. once I survive the usual long day at work, avoiding anything TPN related so I can watch in peace and quiet when I finally get home.. damn it, im already so anxious, help.