Note
Habe you ever had a "did we even play the same game?" moment with someone?
My favorite game ever used to be Metal Gear Solid 4, it’s still up there in my top favorites, and this time at a party I met a guy that said he didn’t like MGS4 because he felt like it ruined Snake as a character and that it misrepresented him. I asked if he could elaborate and his response was that they took this Rambo dude, this super manly war hero and emasculated him into a weak old man.
I need you to understand that Solid Snake was without exaggeration fundamental in my growth as a person: I am from a latino country, grew up in what’s widely considered the wrong side of the tracks in the middle of nowhere, being macho, manly, tough was incredibly important to me, because that’s how it was in there, and Snake (plus “The Knight In Rusty Armor” by Robert Fisher) basically made me question all of what I’d grown up thinking up until then, because Snake isn’t a badass because grrr manly beef jerky I kill and swear, he is this incredibly solemn guy who hates what he can do, but is the only one that can do it, and if he doesn’t do it, then nuclear war happens, or worse. There’s a whole angle of expectation as a narrative arc in regards to Snake: Meryl expected a glorious, boisterous war hero, Otacon expected a grizzled, badass action hero, Liquid expected Himself But Better In Every Way, Ocelot expected a tool and nothing else, Naomi expected a callous and cold killer… And they were all wrong, he is, ultimately, an exhausted man that cannot stop no matter how much he wants to stop, because if he does, the world might likely go up in literal flames.
So to hear this self-proclaimed superfan of Snake say this just made me skip anger and go all the way to pity. In-universe, those in the know of Snake worship him as an actual God of War, and it’s a common thing that gets addressed in-universe: The whole point of MGS2 is that Raiden could never have won if he tried to be Snake, because you don’t want to be Snake. Snake hates being Snake. Snake isn’t manly because he beat a tank on foot one on one, Snake is admirable because he does the right thing, even if he’s breaking down molecule by molecule as he goes and he wants nothing more than to fuck off and raise dogs in the arctic, but keeps on going anyways because he can do something about it. The most important message he imparts on Raiden and Meryl is Don’t Be Me; Create A World Where Snake Doesn’t Need To Exist.
I felt pity because if you feel like MGS4 misrepresented Snake, then you really and explicitly are exactly the kind of fodder PMC nobody that feeds the proxy wars in MGS4. I think only by skipping every cutscene you can come out thinking that way. The only thing super about him was ficial.
540 notes
·
View notes
Text
📼 ; ONCE BITTEN, TWICE SHY | 1/2
summary: by the summer of 1987, eddie munson has mastered the art of dying and coming back to life again. but worse than that: he can't seem to stop running into the pretty lifeguard from hawkins community pool. the grumpy ol' vampire slowly learns to love sunshine in the afterlife. (23k)
pairing: vampire!eddie munson / ditzy!sunshine!reader
contents: fem!reader, strangers to friends to lovers, fluff, hurt/comfort, extreme canon divergence (most of the events of st3 and st4 still happen but starcourt is still standing, some people aren't dead, etc.) (i'm just here to have fun, honestly) cw for mentions of grief and ptsd, mentions of blood
( best listened with headphones, full fic playlist here )
꒷꒦꒷꒷꒦ (㇏(•̀ᵥᵥ•́)ノ) ꒦꒷꒦꒷꒷
she lives in the place in the side of our lives
where nothing is ever put straight . . .
꒷꒦꒷꒷꒦ (㇏(•̀ᵥᵥ•́)ノ) ꒦꒷꒦꒷꒷
Being a vampire sucks.
No pun intended.
Eddie Munson’s too tired for puns. He’s too tired for most things, really.
That’s what they don’t tell you about being a vampire — it’s not nearly as cool as The Lost Boys make it seem. He isn’t any stronger now than he was the night he died. He isn’t any faster, either. And if he’s capable of shape-shifting into a bat, he hasn’t tried because the thought of becoming the thing that killed him feels like more of a purgatory than what he’s been doomed to already.
He didn’t even get a cool cape out of it, which is more of a bite than anything, honestly.
No pun intended.
All Eddie’s got to show for his death are the patches of marred skin on his stomach to prove it. And a couple of pointy teeth — which, so far, have only tasted his own flesh because he’s bitten his lip with them more times than he can count. And, yeah, maybe he’s got a heightened sense or two, but that’s it. It’s not nearly as cool as it sounds, either. Enhanced hearing and sense of smell are just code for being constantly overstimulated.
Eddie misses being alive. He misses not knowing what blood tastes like. He misses forgetting to eat all day and accidentally having ice cream for a first meal — which he’d then scarf down like a man starved until it inevitably made him sick, so that he could then complain about how sick he felt.
He misses the consequences of humanhood because now he’s half-corpse, half-god — a dizzying mixture for a boy who used to just be somebody’s kid.
And what does Eddie do to cope with it all? He gets his weekly mint-chip cone at Scoops Ahoy.
Steve passes the ice cream over the counter with a kinder smile than Eddie’s used to. His skin is freckled and golden against the dark navy of his uniform. So full of life. The child’s sailor outfit hasn’t stopped being funny, but Eddie scowls at him ‘cause he’s jealous. He’s never been anything but pale, even before death, but he can’t exactly catch a tan now, can he?
“You look good,” Steve Harrington observes, distant but meaningful.
The wild-haired boy ahead of him doesn’t seem nearly as poorly as he did a day or so ago, when he looked somehow more like death than the day he actually died. He’s got his usual color back now. A telltale sign of a recent feeding.
Eddie flashes the boy a dubious, brown-eyed glance. “Are you flirting with me?” he jokes with his ringed fingers curled around the waffle cone, too monotoned to sound as playful as he means.
Steve’s face screws. “No.”
“Damn.”
“See! That’s what I’m talking about!” the brunette proclaims proudly, waving an accusatory finger in the other boy’s direction. “Eddie from yesterday wouldn’t have made that joke. Eddie from yesterday wouldn’t have said anything, actually.”
“Well, Eddie From Yesterday, hadn’t eaten in two weeks,” the boy deadpans. (He isn’t talking about food, either). “And Eddie From Yesterday was so exhausted and filled with an inhuman rage that death was funnier than making stupid jokes.”
Steve tries not to cower at his faux-seriousness. “Touché,” he nods.
Eddie hands the boy the last bill in his wallet. Steve makes out his change and, like a total idiot, dumps a dime onto his palm. The silver hits his skin like a drop of acid rain or molten lava. Eddie winces at the burn, hissing through his teeth as he jerks his singed hand back.
“Why are you giving me dimes, man?!” he shouts over the sound of clattering coins.
“Shit!” Steve grimaces. “Sorry, dude— I forgot.”
“Oh, you forgot?” Eddie bites in a mocking tone.
“Yeah! Sorry if I can’t remember everything about—” Steve pauses his rant to peer around the shop with cautious eyes. He quietens. “—Vampires, alright? Sue me.”
Eddie watches the boy scramble to gather scattered coins –– coth hat askew on his head, scarlet tie in his way. The sight alone makes him laugh. A sharp exhale through his nose, but a laugh nonetheless. “You know what? How ‘bout just keep the change?”
“You keep the damn change,” Steve grumbles under his breath.
“Nice one.”
“Shut up.”
Eddie takes a big bite from his fresh scoop. He lets the sharp peppermint and deep chocolate concoction melt in his mouth. The strange combination was always the best distraction from the coppery tang of blood lingering on his tongue.
Distracts because the metallic taste never quite leaves him, no matter how often he washes his mouth out. The taste of death always persists. Not in a poetic way, though. It’s more like a mouthful of old pennies.
Only problem is, he can’t really taste it now — the tart mint-chip or the pint of blood he’d choked down yesterday afternoon. The sensuous scent of hibiscus lilts along an otherwise still breeze, sudden and very overwhelming. It’s powdery and floral, rich and fruity. A fragrance sweet enough to make him ill, and it’s accompanied by the rhythmic flip-flop, flip-flop of rubber sandals.
Eddie glances mindlessly over his shoulder, then nearly breaks his neck at the force of his double-take. The candied scent, he finds, belongs undoubtedly to the pretty face behind him.
You saunter into the ice cream shop like a rolling summer cloud — with a walk that’s as soft and delicate as you look. There’s something thaumaturgical in the honeyed atmosphere that follows you in, still unceremoniously punctuated by the flip-flop, flip-flop sound of your shoes against the linoleum.
You are, unsurprisingly, as pretty as the raspberry, marshmallow, lily-of-the-valley scent radiating from your sunkissed skin. There is much of it on display now, and what little is covered is hardly left to the imagination.
Straight from a shift at Hawkins Community Pool, your mandated uniform clings perfectly to your torso — a pretty, scarlet one-piece that scoops deeply at the chest. Stamped on the center is a pool floatie and two surfboards that make a more summery skull-and-crossbones shape. ‘Lifeguard’ is written just beneath it, right over the swell of your breasts.
You wear a pleated skirt on your lower half to match. The bouncy fabric rests scandalously, and perhaps unintentionally, low on your hips. A faint sliver of your skin is showcased in a way that drives him hopelessly wild. And you’ve paired it all with a pair of too-big sunglasses on your head and a cherry sucker in your mouth.
Effortless. A total cakewalk of perfection.
Eddie Munson and Steve Harrington have never known much about either.
The latter is still trying to dump change into the tip jar when he goes to greet you. Your eyes link, the words get stuck in his throat, and the coins scatter to the laminate all over again. Steve tries to catch them at first before realizing how utterly uncool he must look. He makes a bigger fool of himself by just letting them fall.
“Hey. Hi. Wel—Welcome to Scoops Ahoy,” the brunette clears his throat. He props his hands along the countertop and feels a rogue penny stick to his clammy palm. “You’re not lost, are you?”
Steve forces a lopsided smile at his sorry excuse for a joke. Eddie rolls his eyes. You blink at him and pluck the cherry sucker from your mouth — which has left your lips softly swollen and tinted a rosier shade.
“This is where pretty boys in tiny sailor outfits sell ice cream, right?”
Your deadpan expression makes it difficult to gauge whether or not you’re joking. Steve’s face glows red at the sort-of compliment. He nods rapidly until the words catch up to him. “Yeah— Yeah, it— It is, actually.”
You smile at him, tightlipped and warm. It fills the windowless shop with glittering sunbeams. “Then can I have a scoop of rainbow sherbet, please?”
Steve raps his knuckles against the counter and nods again. “Yep. Coming right up.”
Eddie takes another hearty bite of his ice cream while you linger at his side — a couple of feet away but feeling much closer than that. As the minty chocolate melts slow on his tongue, all he can taste is the fruity-floral scent of you.
It makes his head go all swimmy because he knows your blood must taste the same. Like velvet. Or an expensive red wine people spend half a fortune on. He can hear the soft wooshing of your heart, too. Soft and unhurried. Gentle like an ebbing and flowing tide.
He shouldn’t be thinking this way, he knows. He fed yesterday; he should be feeling halfway normal by now. But your scent is dizzying still, and much stronger than Eddie figures it should be. If he’d met you a day or more ago, when the need for a feeding was quite literally eating him alive, he’s not sure he would’ve been able to contain himself.
He doesn’t think he would’ve hurt you, per se — because he hasn’t actually hurt anyone yet. Not in this stage of his afterlife, anyway. But it would’ve taken all the waning strength left in him to stop himself from doing something unthinkable. And that thought alone is somehow more terrifying than death.
Neither, however, is as scary as your gaze meeting his.
Your eyes lock, and only then does Eddie realize how long he’s been staring. His blood runs cold. Cold-er. An eon blinks as he tries to recover from his hopeless leering. (He’s just as useless as Steve The Hair Harrington, turns out).
“Hi…” he murmurs through a mouthful of mint-chip once he realizes he’s got nothing else to say. How’s a freak like him meant to talk to someone like you? A walking fairytale of ethereal chaos?
You move the cherry sucker to the pocket of your cheek with your tongue. Through it, you mumble, “Yeah. I guess I am.”
Eddie laughs before he means to. His pink lips curl into a smile, and the inside of the delicate skin scrapes the fangs threatening to poke through his gums. They fit just perfectly over his canines, typically veiled by his gums until it’s time to feed. Or until he’s faced with a pretty girl who smells like Heaven and looks just the same, apparently.
He hides his grin behind his fist and scoffs a breathy laugh.
Your face twists in a delicate look of confusion. “Why’s that funny?” you question once you’ve plucked the piece of candy from your mouth.
His smile ebbs instantly. “Oh. It’s… It’s not— It’s not funny, actually,” he stammers, chocolate eyes wide and round like a pair of buttons.
Your frown deepens. “So you don’t think I’m funny?”
“No, it’s— it’s not that I don’t think you’re funny, I just— I think that—” Eddie stumbles over himself trying to get the words out. He inhales deeply through his nose and swallows hard. “I’m a little confused, honestly…”
There’s a brief moment of silence that passes like minutes.
There’s something distinctly wild in your unwavering stare. It possesses a sort of magnetism that makes it impossible to look away from — though Eddie desperately, desperately wishes he could. But because he can’t take his eyes off you or the fire swimming laps in your irises, he catches a flicker in your gaze. A flame. A spark.
A smile quirks at the very corner of your mouth before a brighter beam blooms there. A sunshine sort of giggle sputters past your lips. “Oh, gosh— You should see your face right now,” you manage through a fit of laughter, swatting his shoulder with your free hand (a little harder than he thinks you mean to.) “I’m just kidding! Seriously. You can laugh now. It’s okay.”
Eddie doesn’t find it all that funny anymore, but your gaze is pretty and expectant, so he forces out a faint laugh just to appease you. He gapes in confusion the second you look away.
You’re a strange thing. Pretty, yes. But still very, very strange.
When Steve passes you a rainbow scoop on a waffle cone, you fish a crumbled bill from the chest of your swimsuit. The boy takes it with a trembling hand — like touching the cash is touching you in some way — and struggles to recall basic arithmetic when he makes out your change.
Eddie watches you savor one last taste of your diminishing sucker, lips curled around the lolly before popping audibly off of it. “Is there a trashcan—” you ask and glance around the shop.
“There’s one back here,” Steve offers mindlessly. “I can chuck it.”
Your hands brush when he takes the paper stick between careful fingers. Silky sunkissed skin sweeping against silky sunkissed skin.
Eddie’s almost jealous. He wishes he could touch you in such an innocent, accidental way — or anyone, really. But his blood stopped circulating about a year or so ago, and he’s had a glacial disposition about him ever since. Sometimes, when he’s just freshly fed, he feels sort of warm. Sort of normal. But that only lasts about an hour or so before his skin goes wintry and grey again.
“Thanks,” you lilt with a kind grin, sandals squeaking as you step back from the counter. You arch a brow, and the sweet smile turns suddenly mischievous. “And don’t worry about the change. I’d hate for you to make a bigger mess.”
You tilt your head and take a kitten lick of your scoop, fighting back a giggle when the sailor boy gapes at you. You spin around and flip-flop, flip-flop out of the ice cream shop — back to whatever fairytale you came from.
The scent of ripe fruit and freshly-cut flowers leaves with you, along with the lavender haze Eddie had been swimming in since he saw you. Drowning in, more like.
Steve laughs at your sort-of joke until the mist passes. Only then does he seem to notice the coins still scattered across the countertop and the half-eaten sucker in his hand. His fluffy brows pinch together in a very evident confusion — like he’s just woken up from a dream.
“…What the hell was that?” he muses after a few long moments.
Eddie shrugs and takes another bite of his half-gone scoop, tasting it for the very first time now that you’re gone. “No idea,” he answers through the mouthful.
꒷꒦꒷꒷꒦ (㇏(•̀ᵥᵥ•́)ノ) ꒦꒷꒦꒷꒷
once you get it, you never wanna quit (no, no)
after you've had it, you're in an awful fix. . .
꒷꒦꒷꒷꒦ (㇏(•̀ᵥᵥ•́)ノ) ꒦꒷꒦꒷꒷
Eddie finds you again several minutes later. Not between the pages of a fantasy book, but on a lone bench by the bus stop.
You finish your rainbow sherbet in silence, people-watching behind a big pair of Sharon Tate-style sunglasses. The sight of you alone makes him trip over his feet, like you’ve got your own gravitational pull that makes him stumble on thin air just to be closer to you.
“Oh—” The huff spills accidentally from his mouth when his sneakers scuff the pavement.
It garners your attention accordingly as you turn slowly towards him. You lift your sunglasses to your head again, just to squint at the vividity of the golden hour. You flash the boy an ice-cream-stained smile, tight-lipped and warmer than the setting sun — like he’s one of your old friends who deserves to be looked at so kindly. (He’s neither.)
“Hello!” you greet brightly as you lift the waffle cone to your mouth. You take another bite and add through the mouthful. “Again.”
“You’re still here?” Eddie squints, ‘cause he’s not sure what else to say.
“I’m on lunch—” you answer, slightly slurred through the melting ice cream on your tongue. A milky drop of pink and orange falls to the side of your thumb, and you lick it away mid-sentence. “—Late shift.”
Eddie hums with a slow nod, squinting one eye to block the sun.
His pale skin buzzes, even under his leather jacket and dark thrifted tee. It isn’t because he’s hot, though. He hasn’t broken a sweat — not even swaddled in the ninety-degree evening — because he lost the ability to somewhere between getting eaten alive and rising from the dead.
The sunlight just makes him feel a bit weaker than usual. Hungrier, too. And he hates being hungry because it makes him feel viciously ravenous. Like a total barbarian. Cruel and angry and inhuman. So he tries to stay out of the sun when he can.
He knows he should start plotting his way out now, but talking to you is like getting caught in a spider’s web. He gets all tangled in his words, netted in his want to impress you. He ends up superglued in a trap he isn’t totally sure he wants to get out of.
“Must be a slow day then, huh?” Eddie jokes dryly.
Your face twists. “Hm?” you wonder wordlessly as your tongue darts to the corner of your mouth.
“I just meant that— You’re a lifeguard and everything, right? And you— You’re dry, so… There must not have been a ton of lives to save today,” the boy explains, gesturing wildly with ringed hands. He laughs at himself and sticks the trembling limbs into his jacket pockets. “That’s… That’s what I meant.”
You don’t seem to notice his sudden floundering, or the way he can hardly make out an intelligible sentence when you’re looking directly at him. He can’t tell if you’re just kind enough to ignore it or if you’re just totally aloof. He hopes for the latter.
“It’s a lot less swimming than you’d expect, honestly,” you confess as you analyze the melting cone in your hand. You twist your wrist with your face pinched in concentration — like deciding whether to bite into the pink, green, or orange bit is that intense. “It’s just a lot of, like, blowing whistles... And walking around…”
You choose the raspberry pink side in the end, crunching as you bite into the waffle cone.
Eddie nods in response — not because he’s really heard you, but because he feels like he sort of understands you in some way now. You were sweet raspberry in the flesh. The color pink incarnate. Gold and glittering, like the sunset was fashioned in your likeness.
But then you smile up at him, with crispy wafer crumbs clinging to the raspberry-lime-orange concoction on your mouth, and the moment feels a lot less poetic than that.
“Sometimes I just wanna be like, ‘Jeez— Can’t one of you fuckers at least try to drown or something? God,” you mock in an accent that’s hardly your own, giggling at yourself halfway through.
You flash Eddie another expectant smile. Grinning with all your teeth as you wait for him to laugh with you.
It takes him a second too long to force another chuckle — still trying to gauge how serious you are — but you don’t seem to mind. “Right. Well, uh… Here’s hoping, right?” Eddie quips with a crooked smile, lifting his right hand to flash his crossed fingers.
You giggle louder at that. Laughing with him, and not at him, for the first time since he started making a fool of himself in front of you.
His chest swells like he’s still got a functioning heart hiding there. It’s sparkling and warm, full of pride, almost like he’s alive again. Truly alive. He realizes, then, that he never wants to stop making you laugh.
When your giggling ceases, you hum a contented sigh and take another sloppy bite of your ice cream cone.
Eddie watches you — unblinking, like a total freak — and tries to figure out if he made you up in his head.
You were like a fairy-tale princess come to life. An enchanted form of imagination, slightly childlike and effortlessly romantic in a way. You were the kind of girl who held butterflies on the tip of her finger, who reached out to touch the stars at night, who shared her secrets with the moon when no one else would listen.
You’re the kind of thing that only exists in dreams. You have no real sense of reality, accordingly, which Eddie thinks only proves his point.
With sunshine glittering in the strands of your hair, your eyes flit back to his. Eddie averts his gaze suddenly (and very obviously) from yours, but if you’re perturbed by his leering, you don’t show it.
Instead, you look at him the same way you’ve been looking at him this whole time — like you’ve got a world of magic secrets hidden in your eyes. Like you want him to come searching for every single one of them.
“Did you— Did you walk here, or…?” the boy trails off, eyes falling to your rubber sandals.
He hopes you hadn’t. It’s far too hot, and the pool is quite a few blocks from here. From what little he’s learned about you, though, he figures you’re probably crazy enough not to care.
“Bus,” you answer plainly, pausing mid-bite.
Eddie blinks. “The buses stopped running a half hour ago… You know that, right?”
You freeze. Melted ice cream pools at the edges of your mouth. A very loud answer, even in its silence.
There’s a very audible crunch-ing sound as you chew through the too-big bite. You bring your palm to your chin to catch rogue crumbs and blink up at Eddie with wide eyes.
“…What?” you wonder pitifully in response. Though, with your mouth still full, it sounds more like a deep, muffled, and utterly pathetic, “Wah—?”
“They stop running here at six-thirty.”
You swallow, face screwed.“Why?”
Eddie shrugs. “Beats me.”
You turn away — staring far off at the parking lot but looking at nothing, really. Eddie feels like he can finally breathe now, without your eyes strangling him.
He watches you go deep in thought and wishes he could see what the inside of your mind looks like. He imagines it’s full of confetti. Wild, glittering thoughts and a handful of sparkling confetti.
“Well…” you huff after a few moments, a deep and whimsical sigh. You look down at the melting cone in your fist and try to find a silver lining in the swirls of pastel colors. “‘Least the ice cream’s good.”
“Are you gonna walk?” Eddie wonders aloud as his chest pinches with misplaced worry. He crosses his leather-clad arms over himself in a feeble attempt to soothe the ache there — to smother his palpable empathy, which makes him feel like your burden is his to carry.
He doesn’t have to. Carry it, that is. It’s not like you’re not asking him to. But he can’t ignore the overwhelming urge to help you — this strange, elven princess who needs rescue by a lowly bard way out of his element. It’s an instinct that borders on primal.
“Do I have a choice?” you respond rhetorically. Eddie shrugs and you shrug back, unfazed. “I can walk. The sunset’s pretty… And there’s a dog park on the way there, so… That’ll be fun, I guess.”
Eddie’s dark eyes flit to the sky, where the sun’s slow descent paints the wispy clouds in vivid colors of blush and honey. He understands the simple beauty of it but rarely ever gives it a passing glance.
He spends most of his sunsets inside, hiding from the pretty golden hour behind closed curtains. He cowers under his blankets like a child (‘cause his tiny square window is west-facing, painfully so) and tries to tell himself that he’s not as hungry as he feels.
That he’s not hungry at all.
That he’s still normal.
Eddie looks back to you a moment later, features twisted with uncertainty. “I’m pretty sure the park’s gated after sunset…”
You don’t ask him how he knows that, and he’s grateful. He figures you must assume that he’s got a dog of his own, which is a lie he’s happy to stick to.
It’s better than admitting that Jim Hopper nearly caught him dealing a couple years back and had to make a quick escape through the park — where he then had to hop a locked fence he didn’t know was there. It wouldn’t have been so embarrassing if he hadn’t rolled directly into dog shit when he fell to the ground. That’s a secret he’ll take to the grave.
If the Chief takes mercy on him, anyway.
“Well… The sunset’s still pretty,” you conclude with another sigh, because at least that can’t be taken from you.
Eddie watches you take another bite and makes a very pointed decision not to tell you that that’ll be gone soon, too. By the time you walk back to work, the sky will be a muddy mixture of orange and lilac and navy. Hardly a thing worth looking at.
He lets you revel in your little nothings anyway.
“I should— I should probably go. I have a… thing to get to, so…” he trails off, chuckling at his own hopelessness. His worn sneakers scuff the pavement when he steps back from you. He scratches at the small curls twisted at the nape of his neck and tries to find the words to say goodbye. “Uh— Have a good rest of your shift, I guess. Hope it’s more… eventful.”
You smile at his stammering and his poor excuse for a joke.
“Thanks,” you nod. “Have fun with your… thing.”
Eddie nods once. His smile wavers only slightly when he turns away. His cheeks puff as he exhales a deep breath — which he hadn’t realized he’d been holding until now.
He stops short at the edge of the sidewalk. Doesn’t even make it off the fucking curb before his guilty conscience catches up with him. It stops him like a force field and weighs heavy on his chest with a similar strength.
He turns quickly again, curls whipping around his face. “Do you… Do you want a ride?” he blurts with a squint in his deep chocolate eyes.
The offer is hardly from the kindness of his unbeating heart. He just wants to make himself feel better, if he’s honest. He wants you to decline, actually — so then he’d be alone, and his conscience would still be clear.
Your eyes widen softly at his offer. You shift on the hard bench. It squeaks quietly under your weight.
“Well, I— I wouldn’t— I wouldn’t wanna intrude,” you tell him, stumbling over your words for the first time in front of him.
Something about it, how shy you’ve suddenly gone, makes you feel a bit more human compared to the glittering creature Eddie made of you in his head.
The boy shrugs. “You wouldn’t be.”
“No?”
“No. It’s just… on the way…” Eddie insists, sighing to himself, because Hawkins Pool most definitely is out of his way. “So, you know… It’s no problem.”
There is a beat of fleeting silence, filled only by a whispering summer breeze and muddled conversation from distant mall-goers. Eddie’s eyes dart over your features, twisted softly with a faraway look of worry.
The anticipation has his heart in his throat. He isn’t sure now what answer he wants to hear. Both might equally break his heart. A double-edged sword.
Your chest deflates with a dramatic sigh of relief. A lazy smile tugs at the corners of your mouth. “Okay. Good. ‘Cause I didn’t wanna be, like, too eager, you know? But that would be… super duper nice.”
“Good thing I’m a super duper nice person then, huh?” Eddie jokes with a tightlipped smile, which ebbs into a scowl the moment he turns away from you.
He becomes a storm cloud of annoyance as he stalks across the parking lot. Less so because of you and more so because of his deep-rooted sensitivity, where everyone else’s emotions demand to be felt by him and him alone.
It’s a very strange thing, indeed: to be dead and yet still carry the crushing empathy of a person with a bleeding heart.
꒷꒦꒷꒷꒦ (㇏(•̀ᵥᵥ•́)ノ) ꒦꒷꒦꒷꒷
real to real is living rarity, people stop and stare at me
we just walk on by, we just keep on dreaming . . .
꒷꒦꒷꒷꒦ (㇏(•̀ᵥᵥ•́)ノ) ꒦꒷꒦꒷꒷
Eddie doesn’t look back to make sure you’re following him. He knows you are. He can tell by your lingering strawberry-vanilla scent, and your rhythmic footsteps in rubber sandals that trail just behind him. The incessant flip-flop, flip-flop, flip-flop quickens as you rush to keep up with his longer strides, trying hopelessly to finish your ice cream and talk at the same time.
“Adam— my manager— he’s such a hardass. Like, if I was late today, he definitely would’ve fired me,” you ramble and crunch hard into your cone. “Well… maybe not fire me… ‘Cause we’re kinda short-staffed right now— But he definitely would’ve given me a lecture! Like, dude, just because your dad owns the joint, doesn’t mean you have any actual authority over me, you know?”
You giggle loudly at yourself. Eddie just nods in response, barely listening, and not bothering to glance back at you.
You continue anyway, through a mouthful, no less. “Except, he kinda does have some authority, I guess. Since, you know, he’s the one who signs my checks and everything, but… You know what I mean.”
The boy ahead of you stops suddenly in place. Your sandals scuff the pavement to keep from running into the back of him. He turns to face you, brunette curls flouncing, and your heart skips at the proximity. He’s much too pretty for anything else.
You can smell the cologne spritzed on his neck from here. A high-pitched and very boyish cedarwood that makes him somehow more endearing. There’s something floral in it, too — perhaps from the conditioner making his hair all shiny. And the subtle powdery scent, you figure, comes from his old Back Sabbath tee. An evident hand-me-down of some sort.
You can see more of him like this without having to ogle like a creep. His brown eyes are so dark they’re almost black, but you can see flecks of gold in them, too. His pronounced nose is dotted with pores and faint freckles you think you could count if he let you. There are a couple of spots on his jaw, too — some still red, others already scared over — that make his scowling face more youthful.
He’s got a couple of dark circles under his eyes, which you think means he doesn’t get as much sleep as he should. He’s got a pair of perpetual smile lines beside his mouth, too, which must mean he laughs a lot (even if he isn’t now). And he’s got a subtle furrow between his bushy brows ‘cause he’s totally the quiet, observant type.
You’d like to think you’re taking a closer look at him than anyone else in Hawkins ever has. Where they see a freak with crazy hair and a dangerous attitude, you see an old soul with young eyes and a wild mind.
“Is this you?” you wonder aloud, with ice cream clinging to the corners of your mouth.
Eddie lifts his hand and taps the key fob twice. The rusted tin can behind him unlocks with a hearty ca-chunk. He fakes a tight-lipped smile, “Yep.”
You rush around the hood then, hurrying for the passenger seat and struggling to finish the rest of your ice cream. Eddie eyes you expectantly as he lifts himself onto the chipped pleather of the driver’s side. His deadpan face twists with amusement as you inhale the remaining bits of your ice cream.
Your eyes go wide when you catch him staring, cheeks jutted like a chipmunk’s. You wipe your mouth with the back of your hand, then swipe your palms together. “Sorry— Sorry, I didn’t—” you swallow hard and try not to choke. “I didn’t wanna get ice cream all over your van.”
A laugh sputters from Eddie’s mouth, a more boyish sound than you thought he was capable of, and he hurries to cover his mouth with his fist. He can feel the sharp stinging of his fangs as they stab slowly through his gums, more prominent now that you’re so close to him — smelling as sweet as you look.
“Well, this isn’t exactly a sports car,” he scoffs. “I don’t think you have to worry about that.”
You swallow down the rest and hop in beside him. The faux leather of the passenger seat has grown distressed with time, sticking to your sunkissed thighs where your skirt doesn’t reach and poking you in places. The smell of his cologne stains the interior, along with a more subtle, skunkier scent.
You have to tug extra hard on the seatbelt — once, twice, and then a third time — before it gives.
Eddie sticks the key into the ignition and twists. A heavy metal guitar solo blares suddenly through the speakers, rattling the old van and making both of you lurch with a momentary panic.
“Shit!” the boy curses as he reaches for the blasting radio. He turns down the volume with pale, lanky fingers, wide eyes flitting from the console to the pavement as he peels out of the Starcourt lot. “Shit… Sorry.”
You shrug a bare shoulder. “It’s okay. I listen to my music loud, too. I’m pretty sure I’ve blown out the headphones to at least two Walkmans by now.”
“Yeah?” Eddie hums with a lazy smile. “What kinda stuff stuff do you listen to?”
You purse your lips to the side and avert your gaze as you ponder the question. “Van Halen, definitely… Dio and Def Leppard occasionally— oh, and don’t even get me started on Ozzy Osbourne.”
Eddie feels like his heart’s in his throat. It settles there and makes it hard to breathe while his anxious hands fidget on the steering wheel.
You can’t be this pretty and like all the music he likes. It’s just not fair. It’s like the universe is trying to kill him. (Even though it kinda already did that once.)
“Are you joking?” he wonders aloud, laughing with furrowed brows. His chocolate eyes dart from you, to the winding road before him, and back again. The soft smile on your lips blossoms into a more mischievous thing, and he nods slowly to himself. “You’re… You’re joking, right?”
“I might’ve been looking at your cassettes, yeah.”
Eddie’s gaze flits downward to where he keeps his tapes stacked in a cubby beneath the console. His chest aches with a distant embarrassment. “Right…” he huffs.
“Real answer?” you offer with a twinkle in your eye, spinning in the seat to face him more. You tuck your feet beneath you and count each name on your fingers. “Cyndi Lauper, Madonna, ABBA, and Blondie. That’s my top four— Not in that order, though! I love them all equally.”
“That makes… a lot more sense.”
“Do you have any of their tapes we could listen to?”
Eddie scoffs a faint laugh until he realizes you’re being serious. His tightlipped smile ebbs as he answers, “I can’t say that I do. No.”
“That’s too bad,” you huff and slouch further in the passenger seat. You gaze out the window with a faraway look in your eyes and start rambling before you mean to.
“I’ll let you bum one of mine, if you want. You can borrow my copy of Arrival, that’s one of my favorites! My most favorites. Or Super Trouper, maybe. I love that one, too...” You deflate with a heavy sigh. “Shit. I can’t decide— Which one do you prefer?”
Eddie stammers for an answer. He feels like you’re barely speaking his language.
“Screw it. I’ll just make you a mixtape,” you decide firmly. “It’s impossible to pick just one.”
Eddie nods wordlessly to himself, unconvinced that he’ll ever actually see you again — like this, anyway. With you making a home in the passenger seat of his van, which has never known a pretty girl like you before now.
“You could always swing by the pool if you want,” you offer with a hopeful grin. “Adam lets me man the radio sometimes.”
“Does he?” Eddie hums indifferently.
“When I wear my bikini, yeah.”
His face screws at the thought of someone taking advantage of you in that way, with you perhaps too gullible to understand. “Well, Adam sounds like a dickwad,” he grumbles and shifts his grip on the steering wheel.
“A massive dickwad,” you giggle like it’s your first time ever using the phrase. “One time, I played my Billy Joel tape, and he called it pedestrian. Pedestrian! Not only is that, like, totally sacrilegious or whatever, but it’s also extremely pretentious. Just call it lame or something, you sound arrogant.”
When your rambling ceases, you can hear Eddie laughing. Really laughing. Not just that weird breathy sound he keeps making. It spills from his mouth like sunshine, though he tries to stifle it with a fist pressed to his mouth. And even though you don’t remember saying anything particularly funny, you laugh alongside him.
“Why do you cover your smile when you laugh?”
“Why do I do what?”
“You always put your hand over your mouth when you smile,” you observe with a curious squint. “Did you know that?”
Eddie’s tongue darts over his protruding fangs, which peek in faint slivers from his pink gums now. You would only see them if you checked his mouth like a dog, but he gets self-conscious about it, anyway.
“No. I didn’t. Must be an old habit, I guess,” he stammers, lying through his teeth as he turns into the parking lot of Hawkins Community Pool.
The crowd there has seemingly ebbed with the setting sun, which he’s grateful for. He stays on the far edges of the property still, lest he draw any unwanted attention. ‘Cause the only thing more recognizable than his wild hair is the tin can he rides around in.
His ringed hands curl around the gear stick. The van jerks softly when he puts it in park. Eddie clears his throat. “We’re, uh— We’re here.”
You get distracted easily, and he’s grateful for that, too. You drop the conversation entirely as you reach for the seatbelt. The buckle clicks when you unfasten it. “Thanks for the ride, Eddie,” you chirp with a pretty smile.
His head snaps in your direction with enough force to give him whiplash. His mouth opens and closes like a fish as he gapes at you. He struggles to find the words to say. He thinks he’d rather face a hundred demobats (again) than have this conversation.
“You…” he swallows hard, adam’s apple bobbing. “You know my name?”
You shrug, oblivious to his otherwise very palpable fear. “‘Course I do.”
His heart would stop if he weren’t already dead. He thinks the force of his current shock could jolt it into beating all over again. Though, he figures he has no right to be so surprised. He is Eddie Munson, after all — the town freak who didn’t murder Chrissy Cunningham but left her to die instead.
No one knows that she’d been long in the dying before Eddie ran like a coward. No one knows that there was nothing he could do to stop the dark wizard from killing her. No one knows that he died trying to avenge her death despite all that. And no one ever will — save for the handful of teenagers who saved Hawkins alongside him.
Eddie knew, from the moment he rose from the dead and made it out of that godforsaken hellscape, that he would never be seen as the hero. He didn’t want to be. He just wanted to be a kid.
But here he is now. A half-dead and hated thing. A creature not worth loving.
And here you are, smiling at him like you intend to love him back to life.
“So… So you know what happened with… With the…” He talks with his hands and struggles to make the words out. He always has. He always will.
You nod before he has to. “Yeah. I think I just… I figured that wasn’t something you wanted to talk about with strangers—”
“I don’t wanna talk about it,” he insists.
“Then me not bringing it up was a good thing, right?”
“I mean, yeah, but—”
“Well, I’m hearing a lot of talking for someone who doesn’t want to talk about it,” you mock, not totally unkind, just a little bit strange.
Eddie almost laughs at that. “I’m just— I’m confused.”
“About what?”
Now, he really lets himself laugh because the answer’s rather obvious.
“Because most people are scared of me!” Eddie blurts with a cynical chuckle, gesturing wildly with his pale, ringed hands. “Everyone thinks I’m some— psycho-killing murderous freak.”
“Well, I don’t,” you insist, all pretty in your way, as you shift on the worn pleather seat beside him. “That’s gotta count for something, right?”
You unlatch the glove box ahead of you and help yourself to its contents. The junk inside clatters together while you search very obviously through it, rambling mindlessly to yourself as you do so.
“You like mint-chip ice cream cones smothered in sprinkles. And your initials are sewn onto the waistband of your jeans— like you’re gonna lose them or something. And… there’s a Blondie tape hiding in here.” You giggle to yourself and flash him the cassette.
Eddie blinks at you like an owl. “That’s not mine.”
“Secret girlfriend?” you tease with a scrunched nose.
“Secret tape,” he confesses before plucking it suddenly from your fingertips.
There’s a whole story behind it that he’d tell you if he could. About how he couldn’t leave the house for some weeks after he came back to life and how his friends brought him things to pass the time. Robin Buckley had an elaborate assortment of board games that bordered on concerning, and Dustin Henderson had brought an entire library to his trailer.
The rest of them put together a selection of tapes for him to listen to. He can’t be sure now if Nancy Wheeler really gave up her prized Blondie cassette or if Mike Wheeler did it without her knowing.
You struggle to bite back your laughter as you sort through the center console next.
“See! That doesn’t exactly read psycho-killing murderous freak to me, Eds. Honestly, it kinda reads as someone who’s never hurt anyone in their whole life, who probably wants everyone else to stop hurting them—” You cut yourself off with a gasp. “Ah! Here it is.”
You dig a rogue ink pen from the depths of the console. A bright smile tugs at the edges of your lips. Eddie’s still struggling to breathe when you reach for him. “Can I have your hand?”
“Why?” he wonders with pinched brows.
“You’ll see,” you lilt mischievously and take his ringed hand in your smaller one.
He worries, briefly, that you might comment on how cold he is for the middle of summer. But if you notice it at all, you don’t mention it as you scribble your number onto the back of his hand.
Eddie grimaces when the tip presses hard into his pale skin. “Ow…”
“See? You’re just a big baby,” you joke, giggling quietly to yourself. You click the pen with your thumb as you part from him. “There. Now you have my number.”
Eddie flashes you a dubious glance, unsure of what he ever needed your number for.
You answer his silent question like it’s obvious. “So I can give you the mixtape.”
“Right,” he hums with a slow nod.
“Well, I’m gonna go clock back in before I get a total earful from Adam,” you sigh and reach for the metal door handle. “Thanks for the ride, Eddie.”
“Don’t mention it,” he shrugs nonchalantly as you slide out of the van. The back of your pleated skirt rises softly in the process, flashing a glimpse of your ass. He swallows hard and stammers. “Just— Just, like, be safe, or whatever.”
“Or whatever,” you mock with a lighthearted chuckle.
“Well, this is a crazy world we live in, haven’t you heard?” Eddie jokes to cover up his blunder. He tilts his wild head to his shoulder as a pink smile forms crooked on his mouth. “I hear psycho-killing murderous freaks are roaming the streets these days.”
He expects you to laugh, but you grow strangely serious instead, furrowing your brows as you mumble to yourself. “Crazy World... That’s a good song, actually. I should put that on the mixtape—”
You forget to say a proper goodbye as you close the door behind you. The rusted metal hinges screech before slamming shut. You walk off towards the pool house without another word, flip-flopping the entire way to the front gate. Eddie watches you go with his features twisted in a subtle mixture of shock and awe.
Steve Harrington was right. What the hell was that?
꒷꒦꒷꒷꒦ (㇏(•̀ᵥᵥ•́)ノ) ꒦꒷꒦꒷꒷
oh, how could i ever refuse?
i feel like i win when i lose . . .
꒷꒦꒷꒷꒦ (㇏(•̀ᵥᵥ•́)ノ) ꒦꒷꒦꒷꒷
Three days pass before Eddie sees you again. Not that he’s counting, anyway. He debates, however, calling you on the second one — but by then, your number had long disappeared from his hand. He decided, then, to count his losses and pretend he wasn’t as boyishly heartbroken as he felt.
Missing you was a double-edged sword. He never wanted to see you again, but he mourned for you always. He prayed he’d never run into you like before but searched for you in all the faces he met. It was agony.
When he drops Dustin off at Scoops Ahoy after a long afternoon of campaigning, Eddie tells himself it’s not with intent to run into you there. He tells himself it wouldn’t be the worst thing, but not to get his hopes too high. That he’d only make a fool of himself. That it’d be better if he didn’t see you at all.
He’s left grieving anyway when he doesn’t immediately spot your face in the dwindling crowd of the ice cream shop.
“If it isn’t the man of the hour,” Robin lilts from where she sits at one of the tables, obviously on her break and eating from a bowl of the rainbow gummy bears they use as toppings.
“You dweebs talking about me?” Eddie scoffs as he shoves Dustin light-heartedly ahead of him.
As soon as he crosses the threshold of the small shop, you come very suddenly into view. You sit ahead of Robin, in your usual uniform, and with your usual rainbow sherbet cone. You steal a few rogue gummy bears from her cup and dip them into your ice cream, which has started to melt with your distraction.
He stills in place, struck with a bolt of blue. Your pretty, summer scent hits him full force, then — slaps him in the face and demands to be noticed. You flash him a small smile, and he has to remind himself to breathe.
“Not at all,” Robin answers with a knowing smirk.
Steve scoffs from where he wipes down the counter, tendons flexing in his golden arm. “Only for ten straight minutes.”
“We were talking about how I gave you my number. And how you never called,” you explain to the poleaxed boy, tilting your chin to your shoulder to peer at him from beneath your lashes. A mischievous smirk hints at the corners of your lips. “A girl could start to wonder, you know?” you tease, only partially playful.
Eddie stammers for an explanation. He feels like his heart’s in his throat, like it’s closing on him, and like he can’t really breathe.
He blinks rapidly as his head starts to swim. He zeroes in on your heartbeat, though he knows he shouldn’t. It’s a soft and rhythmic whoosh, whoosh, whooshing — like that of an excitable baby deer. His hands ball into fists until his dull nails leave crescent shapes in his palms.
Dustin gapes at the sight of you. “You’re real?” the strange, curly-haired boy blurts.
“Me?” you ask with pinched brows, motioning to yourself with the ice cream cone.
“Dustin!” Eddie scolds, nudging him pointedly on the shoulder.
The boy cowers. “Sorry. It’s just… I thought you were, like, an imaginary person Eddie made up or something,” he admits, squinting his hazel eyes and crossing his arms over his chest. You flash him a dubious look until he elaborates obliviously. “‘Cause Gareth was making fun of him for not having any friends outside of Hellfire and stuff—”
“Hey,” Eddie snaps to get the rambling boy’s attention, tapping the brim of his Thinking Cap. “Shut up.”
“What’s Hellfire?” you wonder aloud.
“Book club,” Eddie lies.
You grin with furrowed brows. “You talk about me at book club?”
“I mentioned you. Once. ‘Cause Gareth asked— And I didn’t call because the pen smudged,” Eddie answers all at once, swallowing hard when he feels bile building in his throat. He can’t get your heartbeat out of his ears. Or your scent out of his nose. It’s suffocating, all of it. “Does that clear everything up, or…?”
Steve hisses through his teeth. Robin scoffs. You blink at him with wide eyes, hardly expecting him to be so short with you. “Uh-huh,” you nod with a forced smile.
Eddie would apologize for it if he didn’t feel so sick. But now he teeters on the knife’s edge of nausea, unsure if he’s going to faint or vomit or both. So he fakes his own smile and inches towards the exit. “Great. I’m gonna— I think I’m gonna go—”
“And leave us with babysitting duty?” Steve scoffs. “How nice of you.”
Dustin frowns and flashes the makeshift sailor his middle finger.
Eddie fumbles to come up with an excuse. “I just remembered, uh— Wayne wanted me to record Cheers tonight, and I totally forgot. The ol’ geezer’ll kill me if he misses an episode, so… I gotta run.”
He ducks out without another word, grimacing at himself because he’s usually a much better liar than that. The others can surely see right through him. They know that he’s unwell — that he’s just hungry and impossibly overstimulated.
But you don’t. You don’t know him at all, and maybe that’s exactly why you rush out of Scoops behind him.
Eddie shoves the glass exit of Starcourt Mall with trembling hands. The summer breeze rushes over him immediately, billowing through his hair and clothes. He takes his first good breath and the swimmy feeling of nausea starts to fade.
The hunger remains even still. The ravenous thoughts remain, too — of your heart between his teeth, beating on his tongue, and your blood tasting of sweet red wine.
When he starts to scare himself, his mind tells him that he’d never hurt you. That he hasn’t yet, and that he never will. But still, the thoughts are there, and they hardly ever leave.
Your fresh berry scent covers him like a shroud as he rushes to his casket (his van, really, but the symbolism fits.) You struggle to keep up with his longer strides, pleated skirt flouncing as you hurry behind him — a kicked puppy who doesn’t know when to stay back.
“I don’t mean to annoy you, you know?” you call after him.
Eddie stills and spins sharply around to face you. You stumble back on rubber sandals to keep from running into him, trying not to cower when he towers suddenly over you.
“What?” he asks with his features swirled in confusion and distant suffering.
Your wide eyes dart over his pallid features, more sallow than you remember. You forget everything you were going to say as concern drips from your pretty features. “Do you feel okay?”
“I feel— fine,” he stammers, less than convincingly.
“Okay…” you nod, unconvinced, then repeat yourself. “I don’t mean to annoy you, by the way.”
Eddie shrugs. “What makes you think you annoy me?”
“I dunno,” you answers, sheepish in a way he hasn’t seen you before. You shift your weight on your scarlet sandals and talk wildly with your hands, looking everywhere but at him. “I kinda talked your face off a few days ago, and then I made that stupid joke about you not calling, and I just… I realized you don’t know me all that well. And that I can be kind of a lot sometimes. Or, you know, a lot of the time. But it’s not like I mean to be, you know? I don’t mean to be a burden or to—”
“You’re not a burden,” Eddie blurts.
Your breath catches as you blink at him with wild, glassy eyes. He gets the feeling no one’s ever said that to you before and tries to ignore the stinging in his chest.
“No?” you echo in a mousy voice.
“Not even a little bit,” he answers instantly.
You inhale a shaky breath that leaves through your mouth in a sigh of relief. “So you’re not upset with me?”
“No,” Eddie scoffs. “You haven’t done anything to upset me. So far, anyway.”
You nod to yourself at the reassurance. “Okay. Good. I just— I thought you ran off in such a hurry ‘cause you didn’t wanna be around me or something.”
You chuckle to yourself, feeling silly about it now.
Eddie shifts awkwardly ahead of you ‘cause you’re not too far off.
“Do you… Do you want a ride?” he offers despite himself — despite his overwhelming feelings for you and despite the fact the buses are still running for another fifteen minutes.
He chucks his thumb over his shoulder and flashes you a sheepish look. Because he isn’t sure of what to say now, or if he wants to leave you at all.
You duck your chin and scrunch your nose, too pretty for your own good. “If it’s not too much trouble?” you lilt.
Eddie only grins. “Who says I don’t like a little bit of trouble?”
꒷꒦꒷꒷꒦ (㇏(•̀ᵥᵥ•́)ノ) ꒦꒷꒦꒷꒷
under those white street lamps,
there is a little chance they may see . . .
꒷꒦꒷꒷꒦ (㇏(•̀ᵥᵥ•́)ノ) ꒦꒷꒦꒷꒷
He survives the golden hour, but just barely. Eddie hides from the setting sun underneath the covers, writhing on the thin mattress as he waits for the ravenous feeling of insatiable hunger to pass. It never does.
Instead, he feels the absence of you most ardently. He withers away as he grieves for you, like a wilting flower craving sunlight. But he’s nothing but a pale, gray, and exhausted thing now — an unloveable creature aching for a feeding.
“Wayne…” Eddie grumbles tiredly, half muffled into his pillow. When he receives no response from his uncle, he musters the strength to shout. “Wayne!”
Footsteps trudge down the hall, bulky work shoes heavy on thin carpet. His bedroom door creaks slowly open, and his uncle stands beneath the frame of it — wearing the thick navy coveralls that has his name sewn in cursive on the chest. His weathered hands work at the buttons below the collar.
“What is it, Ed?” Wayne wonders in a gravelly drawl.
Eddie takes in a rattling breath, peeking one eye open to look at his uncle. His vision’s too swimmy for anything else. “Can you call Hopper?” he slurs like a sick child.
Wayne’s graying brows furrow in worry. He squints at his nephew across the bedroom, languishing beneath his covers and growing more waxen by the second. He’s typically only this miserable when he hasn’t fed in weeks.
“You hungry again? It’s only been a couple days.”
“I know,” the boy grumbles, squirming on the mattress like he can’t get comfortable. “I just don’t feel good...”
Wayne can see that much from here, so he doesn’t put up any more of a fight about it. He fastens the cuffs of his sleeves with wise and suddenly anxious hands. “I’ll give him a call before I head to work… You gonna be alright without me?”
Eddie nods against the pillow, curls frizzing around his head. He responds in jumbled slurs, “Mhm. ‘M alright. ‘M just… real tired…”
“I’ll call Hopper,” Wayne repeats, firmer this time, before shutting the door behind him.
Eddie spends the next half hour rotting away in the lonely trailer.
Jim doesn’t bother to knock when he arrives, but it’s not like he needs to. He makes enough deliveries of the riboflavin kind to Forest Hills that he deserves his own key.
Besides, Eddie could smell him when he pulled into the driveway — the pint of blood he carried with him, more so. It’s a deep, rich, and powdery scent. Nowhere near as sweet as you. But then again, he doesn’t think anything could be.
“What’s the special this time, Chief?” Eddie jokes with a small huff as Hopper helps prop him against the headboard.
The mustached man is still clad in his khaki work uniform, gold badge glinting in the lamplight. His hardened face remains in its usual deadpan frown, though his bushy brows furrow in a subtle confusion. “Do you really wanna know?”
Eddie thinks for a moment, then sighs. “No…”
Jim opens the brown paper bag sitting on the nightstand. He pulls out a plain styrofoam cup topped with a lid typically used for coffee. The thing looks innocent enough, save for a few drops of crimson staining the white of it, likely from an overfill.
There was a time when Eddie could do it himself. Where he could puncture the blood bag Hopper delivered and pour it into one of the mugs he and Wayne have been collecting for years.
He stopped being strong enough for that a while ago, though. The sight of blood makes him queasy now, which is ironic for very obvious reasons.
The chief does most of it for him now, though Eddie thinks Hopper likes it best that way.
“Here you go, kid,” Jim says as he passes the boy his cup of liquid scarlet. He holds the lid of it in his other hand, face screwed at the coopery smell engulfing the small bedroom. “Try not to think about it too much, alright?”
Eddie takes the cup in a trembling fist and squeezes his eyes shut so he can’t see its contents. He forces himself to down it in one go — equal parts because it’s easiest that way and because he doesn’t want to be too much of a baby in front of the chief.
The blood tastes like a strawberry milkshake as he swallows it down, but that’s always the easiest part. It’s the after that’s so ruthless. After the overwhelming bout of starvation passes. After he’s half normal again. That’s when the blood starts to taste like blood — all metallic, like a bunch of old pennies. That’s when he feels like a monster.
Eddie groans when the cup is fully drained. He passes it back to Hopper with his eyes still shut. The man takes it with one hand and pats him on the shoulder with the other. “Good job, kid,” he mumbles, dropping the empty cup back into the bag.
The boy relaxes against the pillows with a shuddering breath.
Jim waits until then to interrogate him.
“What happened between now and four days ago?” he asks with his arms crossed over his chest, towering over the boy’s bedside. “This is the first time you’ve needed to feed more than once a week. Hell, it took Wayne and me almost a year to convince you to feed more than once a month.”
Eddie shrugs lazily, lips jutted and eyes lidded. “Nothing happened.”
“I need to know, kid. So I can keep you safe.”
And so I can keep everyone else safe, too, but he doesn’t say that part.
“It’s just— This girl,” Eddie confesses, then grumbles with a sigh. “I don’t know, alright. It doesn’t even matter.”
Hopper squints. “What girl?”
“No one,” Eddie insists, then cowers under the man’s glacial stare. “Fine. Some-one. She just— makes me go all weird or whatever. I don’t know.”
Jim hums, nodding softly to himself and trying not to be too amused at the thought of Munson having a crush. He scratches at the coarse hair underneath his chin. “And is… staying away from this girl an option, or…?”
Eddie ponders the question for a moment, then exhales a chest-deflating sigh. Just like he did when questioning the origins of the blood in his cup. You were a lot of the same in that way — a thing he needed to survive but wasn’t strong enough to face.
“No… I don’t think it is…”
꒷꒦꒷꒷꒦ (㇏(•̀ᵥᵥ•́)ノ) ꒦꒷꒦꒷꒷
Hawkins Community Pool is strangely liminal after dark. The property itself is illuminated by only a few amber streetlamps, with most of its light coming from within — from inside the wooden pool house and beneath the sparkling cerulean water.
Eddie parks his van on the darkened edges of the parking lot and tries to find the courage to leave it. The crowd is minimal now, having lessened significantly since he dropped you off some hours ago.
There are only a few stragglers left, most of them teenagers soaking in the last few minutes before closing. He’s grateful for that much. The fewer eyes on him, the better.
If he wasn’t being ogled at with gazes hardened with disgust or softened with pity, people weren’t looking at him at all. Their attempts to keep from staring were perhaps more blatant than they realized.
Maybe they didn’t want to be rude, or maybe they wanted to pretend he wasn’t there at all. It made Eddie hyper-aware of himself either way, which is why he often preferred to stay hidden.
He idles by the chain-link fence, swaddled in the humid summer air that smells overwhelmingly of chlorine and dewy grass. It takes several agonizing moments to catch your attention.
You dance softly in place and mouth the lyrics to a song Eddie can only make out vaguely from here, while the girl beside you stands perfectly and unenthusiastically still.
You freeze when you catch Eddie’s gaze. Confused at first, then surprised. It takes a matter of seconds for both emotions to mix together and leave you a bumbling ball of excitement.
The boy raises a ringed hand in a curt wave, which you reciprocate with a much more enthusiastic one. You turn to your co-worker and mouth something Eddie can’t hear before rushing to the parking lot to meet him. The flip-flopping of your rubber sandals grows as you make your way to him, along with the rustling of the windbreaker you wear over your bikini.
It’s a modest scarlet two-piece, with a high waist and a halter neckline — but much more of your skin is on display than Eddie’s used to. (If there was any time he needed to be grateful for a recent feeding, it was now.)
“Hi…” you greet, panting heavily as you stand before him.
“Hiya,” Eddie grins cheekily.
“I… I didn’t know you were coming.”
“I didn’t either, honestly.”
“Did you, uh— Did you and Wayne get to watch Cheers?”
It takes Eddie a moment or more to recall his earlier lie. He nods rapidly in response, perhaps too quickly to be truthful, but you don’t seem to notice. “Uh, no. Not yet. He’ll watch it when he gets back from the graveyard shift.”
“Okay. Cool,” you beam, eyes sparkling as they dart over his features — which have seemed to gain a bit of their life back. He’s still pale, but his eyes are less sunken in than they were. The dark chocolate of his irises swim with a melted honey color. “You look a lot better, by the way. Than you did when I left, I mean. I was scared you were getting sick.”
“Nah, I just… Needed a breather, I guess,” Eddie admits with a breathy chuckle. “I was with Hellfire all day, and… Babysitting’s a tough gig, turns out.”
You laugh alongside him, noticeably less forced. “No, I get it. I basically spend all day babysitting, so…”
“Right. I shouldn’t be complaining.” Eddie scratches awkwardly at the back of his neck and grimaces when his rings get caught in his hair. It takes a very noticeable moment for him to gain the courage to ask the question on the tip of his tongue. “Can, uh— Can I see your hand real quick?”
Your brows pinch. “Why?”
“You’ll see,” he lilts with the same mischievous smile you used on him some days ago now.
He holds a ringed hand expectantly out for you. Your gaze glimmers with intrigue as you put your fingers in his paler, colder ones. You watch him dig in his jacket pockets for a moment before pulling out the same ink pen you’d rescued from the depths of junk in his center console. He clicks it with his thumb, and you jerk your hand out of his.
“Wait!” you blurt.
Eddie flinches, feeling like he’s done something wrong, like he must’ve hurt you in some way.
Your features screw in a pinched look of concentration as you stick your hands in the pockets of your windbreaker. “I’m pretty sure I have a marker in here somewhere— Ah! Here it is!” You’re smiling all over again when you pass him the black Sharpie. “So it won’t wash off before I get to call you.”
“Right,” Eddie hums with a slow nod, taking the marker from you. He bites back a smile when he catches you shoving a pack of sparkly stickers back into your pockets. “What are those?”
“Stickers,” you answer, then grimace when you realize that much was obvious. You rush to elaborate. “For the younger kids that have older siblings. They usually get dragged here, and nine times outta ten, they haven’t learned how to swim yet, so… I try to make ‘em feel better with sparkly things.”
The grin Eddie tries to hide blooms very suddenly across the expanse of his pink lips. His chest swirls with a warmer feeling because you’re sort of his sparkly thing, in a way. A bright and glittering thing that makes him feel whole without trying.
You offer him your hand again, shier now. He wraps it in his larger one with fingertips that border on glacial. You fight back a shiver while Eddie uncaps the marker with his teeth. He mumbles through it while he scribbles his number on your wrist.
“Don’t let this scrub off before you get to call me like other idiots do, alright?” he jokes, flashing you a sparkling stare beneath his lashes.
“I’ll call you the second I get home,” you promise with a firm nod. “I’ll write it down, too, so I won’t forget.”
Eddie caps the marker with a lopsided grin sitting lazily on his mouth. “And it’s only for emergencies, alright? Like, if you need a ride or… A spare Blondie cassette that I may or may not have in my glove box.”
You nod again, this time with a giddy and very poorly hidden smile. “Emergenicies,” you parrot, so he knows you really heard him.
(You call him the second you’re back from your shift, though Eddie expected nothing less from you. The emergency in question? You missed him too much.)
꒷꒦꒷꒷꒦ (㇏(•̀ᵥᵥ•́)ノ) ꒦꒷꒦꒷꒷
this is stranger than i thought,
six different ways inside my heart . . .
꒷꒦꒷꒷꒦ (㇏(•̀ᵥᵥ•́)ノ) ꒦꒷꒦꒷꒷
You decide to visit him that weekend, unannounced and unexpected — which is basically how you entered his life in the first place.
You’re a smiling thing on his doorstep. A rival to the early morning sun beaming in rays behind you. Eddie squints one eye and grimaces at the brightness of each.
“Morning!” you chirp like a songbird.
“What are you doing here? How’d you even find me?” Eddie grumbles tiredly, rubbing his sleep-swollen eye with his fist. He wears his slumber all over — in the wild curls, and in the wrinkled shirt that used to be Wayne’s, and in the baggy plaid pants sitting low on his waist.
The complete and utter opposite of you: an angel kissed with the summer season.
The sun sparkles in your hair. The warm breeze billows in your clothes. The scent of something sweet clings to your skin — of fresh cherries, vanilla cake, and swathes of dewy grass. Each is tantamount to your bone-crushing beauty, which borders on whimsical and intimidating now.
It’s weird seeing you out of your uniform. A strange, but welcomed sight. You’ve traded the mandated bathing suit for a flouncier dress. The thin cotton fabric clings to your torso and drapes over your thighs like summer rain. It’s a scarlet number, gingham-patterned, with two white bows for sleeves.
Eddie’s tired eyes rake over your pretty form despite himself. He gapes when he finds the raging scrapes you wear on both knees, a bright crimson color to match your strawberry aura. “Jesus Chr— Are you okay?!”
You follow his gaze, bending softly at the waist to peer down at your legs. You press the skirt of your dress down with your palms, and your chest pinches at the sight of your raw knees.
Your eyes flit from the fresh scratches to the concerned boy ahead of you. “Which question do you want me to answer first?” you wonder with wide, sheepish eyes.
Eddie repeats, firmer now, “Are you okay?”
“I’m totally fine,” you shrug with a beaming smile before rambling an explanation, talking absentmindedly with your hands. “I decided to buy a bike after I got my paycheck, but I don’t really know how to ride it yet, so I’m trying to teach myself, and I… kinda accidentally swerved into a ditch on the way here.”
Eddie’s chest flares with a primal feeling. He can’t stand the thought of you hurt — can’t stand the thought of you hurt and him not being there to help you. “Okay…” he wavers with his face still screwed.
“I wasn’t stalking you, by the way! Scout’s honor!” you blurt, holding up four fingers instead of three. “I just knew you lived at Forest Hill’s, and, I mean, the van is a dead giveaway, Eds.”
“Fair enough,” he huffs.
“Besides, I really wanted to bring you something, and I couldn’t wait until I saw you at Scoops because the anticipation was driving me crazy—” You lose yourself in thought and slide past him in the doorway without thinking.
Eddie just blinks and shuts the door behind you. “And… What is it… Exactly?” he wonders cautiously, only partially fearful of the answer.
It takes you a moment too long to answer him, as you get lost in the sights around you. The trailer was bigger than it appeared on the outside, not messy by any means, but very lived in.
There’s a folded cot in the corner beside the recliner and a small square TV across from it playing morning cartoons. Vintage baseball caps line one wall, and a collection of mugs line the other. Everything feels like a self-portrait of the Munson family.
“The mixtape I promised,” you answer finally, spinning around to face him again. You pull a plastic cassette from the pocket of your dress and gesture with it in a nervous hand. “I was starin’ at this thing all night, and I couldn’t stop thinking about you— about giving it to you, I mean.” You correct yourself with a nervous laugh and rush to move on. “I’ve always been super bad with gifts— I can’t keep ‘em a secret to save my life. I’m good for, maybe, five seconds, and then I’m just like, gosh, I can’t wait anymore, you know?”
You realize you’re rambling and trail slowly off. You swallow hard, muster a wavering smile, and motion for Eddie to take the cassette. You watch as he studies it with a careful hand — pale and lanky and devoid of his silver rings.
“You made this for me?” he mumbles after a few moments.
“Well, I told you I would.”
“Yeah, but… You made this? For me?” he repeats, with a different inflection. ‘Cause he doesn’t know who else to put it. Doesn’t know how to tell you he doesn’t feel half deserving of anything you could give him.
You giggle in response. “You said you didn’t own anything ABBA. Or Madonna. Or Cyndi Lauper— so obviously, I had to make you an entire compilation of their discography. I’m not an asshole,” you laugh. “And I put a few of my favorite songs on there, too…. And songs that made me think of you and stuff…”
Eddie smiles before he means to. It’s a strange thing, he finds, to be thought of in such an innocent way — to be looked for in the places where he couldn’t physically be. He ducks his chin and peers at you with glimmering eyes. “Yeah? Like what?” he humors.
You don’t miss a beat. “He’s so shy!”
Eddie flinches at your singing — the volume of it, more so. Your voice rings across the quiet trailer, and a laugh sputters past his lips. “Yeah. Alright.”
“That sweet little boy who caught my eye!” you continue and reach out for him, digging your fingers into the junction of his neck and shoulder. His skin is milky white, smooth, cold to the touch.
“Okay!” he chuckles and swats you away with a playful hand. “I get it!”
“It’s the Pointer Sisters,” you grin.
“I’ll take your word for it.”
His chocolate eyes dart back and forth between both of yours, momentarily lost in the way you’re looking at him — with your eyes all squishy around the edges. He’s not used to being looked at so softly. Or being noticed at all.
He swallows hard and averts his gaze. Your scrapped knees enter his vision again, weeping a bright scarlet that threatens to drip down your shins. He ignores any instinct of hunger.
“You’re bleeding pretty bad, by the way.”
You only feel the ache when you’re reminded of it. Your stomach gets all swirly at the sight of your bruised knees, rubbed raw and stained with the grass that partially cushioned your fall.
“Gosh…” you mumble to yourself, clutching the skirt of your dress in your fists. You flash Eddie a sheepish look and a wavering smile. “Any chance I could bum a bandaid?”
꒷꒦꒷꒷꒦ (㇏(•̀ᵥᵥ•́)ノ) ꒦꒷꒦꒷꒷
The bathroom is a tight fight, but you make it work.
You sit on the counter, per Eddie’s instruction, while he retrieves the first aid kit collecting dust in the medicine cabinet. He sits on the edge of the bathtub across from you, way out of his element (in more ways than one), as he cleans your cuts with trembling hands.
His throat is tight with nausea. His head swims with it, too. White stars speckle his vision that he tries hard to blink away. The sight of your blood, diluted and pink on the white tissue, makes him weak.
He isn’t sure if it’s instinct or desire that makes him want to swallow you whole, but the primal urge to consume you is there — in the figurative sense, of course; to bury his teeth in your neck and have a piece of you forever.
Being between your legs in such close confines is ample enough distraction, though.
You push the skirt of your pretty gingham dress up the expanse of your thighs to give him space to work. You sit with them slightly spread, too — enough to reveal a sliver of your underwear, he thinks. Eddie isn’t sure if it’s intentional or not, so he fights the boyish urge to catch a glimpse of the most private part of you.
“Jesus…” he huffs and chucks the napkin into the bin. With the blood and the grass stains now wiped away, he can see the scratches more clearly. Your delicate skin is abraded and raging with it. Like you fell and kept on falling. “Did you get mauled by a bear or something?”
“In the knees?” you quip.
“Looks like it.”
“I just wanted to match my dress,” you shrug. “That’s all.”
Eddie opens an alcohol swab with his teeth, then meets your pretty smile with a scowl. “You’re hurt. It’s not funny,” he deadpans after spitting the package from between his teeth.
“It is a little bit, though,” you argue just to argue, scrunching the bridge of your nose. He presses the damp wipe to your knee, and you flinch at the sudden stinging feeling. “Ow!”
He smiles at your pouting. “Maybe a little,” he concurs.
“That was mean!”
“You told me to distract you, so I distracted you. Sue me,” the boy shrugs, feigning innocence, as he reaches to toss the swab in the trashcan beside the counter.
The sight of wadded tissue, all stained with your ruby-colored blood, makes his breath catch in his throat. The ground starts to sway beneath his feet. His eyes go lidded and heavy. His mouth waters with need.
Eddie shakes his wild head in a feeble attempt to remove the ravenous thoughts from his brain, but all it does is make him dizzier.
He blinks wildly as he reaches for a bandaid in the opened container beside him. It slips from his clammy, tremoring hands. He fumbles to grab it again and slaps it to the counter beside you.
“You okay?” he hears you ask, sitting right in front of him but sounding much further than that.
He sits up again and clears his throat, gaze dim and glassy. “Yeah. Yeah, just— Just give me a second…” He breathes hard through his mouth. Eyes squeezed shut. Knuckles going white around the edges of the ceramic tub.
You watch with a wide, inquisitive stare as you smooth the bandages over your knees yourself. Your concerned gaze flits from the pallid boy ahead of you, to the plasters on your skin, and back to him again.
“If blood makes you queasy, you coulda just said,” you joke, trying to make him smile, ‘cause you hate seeing him so ill. “You didn’t have to torture yourself just to help me.”
“Blood doesn’t make me queasy,” Eddie tells you, though he’s still slurring his words.
“Then why do you look like you’re about to hurl?”
His glazed-over eyes are slow to open. “That’s just my face,” he deadpans.
“No. You have a pretty face, Eddie,” you insist as your giggling swells like sunshine in the tiny bathroom. “It’s just all scrunched together, like you’re gonna be sick or something— like this.”
You swirl your features in a manufactured look of drama and pain. Brows furrowed, nose scrunched, mouth snarled. Eddie chuckles before he can help it. The sick feeling still lingers, though not as obvious now.
“You are bizarre. Did you know that?”
“I did, actually,” you giggle.
Your entwining laughter fills the bathroom’s close quarters. The glittering noise echoes through the small trailer and finds Wayne at the doorstep. He toes off his work boots and pauses at the sound of giggling — one familiar and lower in pitch, the other foreign and sparkling.
His socked feet pad down the length of the carpeted ground until he finds the door between Eddie’s bedroom and the kitchen’s edge, already ajar. It creaks loudly under the man’s calloused palm when he pushes it slowly open.
His tired eyes widen at the sight before him — a pretty girl on the sink with a pair of scrapped knees, and Eddie sitting on the tub ahead of her with bloodied tissue in the bin beside him.
Wayne’s heart falls to ass like a steep drop on a rollercoaster.
You smile brightly at the strange man. “Hello!” you greet with an enthusiastic wave.
He blinks slowly at you for a moment, then nods politely. “Hi there,” Wayne says in a deep and gritty drawl before turning to his nephew. “What’s goin’ on here?”
“Nothing,” Eddie blurts, all wide-eyed and fidgeting. He struggles to be casual as he swipes his clammy hands over his thighs. “We were just, you know, hanging out…”
“Everythin’ alright?”
Eddie nods quickly, then stops when it makes him queasy. “Yeah,” he answers, clearing his throat. “Yeah, she just— fell on her bike on the way over, and—”
He flinches when you gasp.
“Wait! You’re Wayne!” you shout with a sudden recollection.
The man tries not to recoil at the volume of your voice — much too loud for so early in the day, like a chirping bird outside his window. He forces a tightlipped smile and nods again. “I am,” he tells you.
You smile so wide your eyes squint at the edges. “You have Eddie’s nose!”
Wayne laughs, a single scoffed breath. “What can I say? Big noses run in the family.”
“Well, I happen to like ‘em that way,” you insist with a casual shrug, kicking your feet back and forth from where you’re perched on the counter. Your heels meet the cabinet in several rhythmic thunk, thunk, thunks.
When you look down at your bandaged knees, Wayne and Eddie share a look without you.
The older man raises his greying brows. This girl is bizarre, Eddie can hear him saying.
He nods wordlessly at his uncle’s silent observation, as though to say: I know she is, and I happen to like her that way.
꒷꒦꒷꒷꒦ (㇏(•̀ᵥᵥ•́)ノ) ꒦꒷꒦꒷꒷
i guess you’re just what i needed,
i needed someone to bleed . . .
꒷꒦꒷꒷꒦ (㇏(•̀ᵥᵥ•́)ノ) ꒦꒷꒦꒷꒷
The plastic case of the cassette you made him clatters on the dashboard of his van, filling a silence that would otherwise be occupied by you.
Eddie’s passenger seat, cracked and worn with age, feels strikingly empty without you in it. Which is strange, ‘cause your presence used to frighten him once. It does, still, he thinks — but now he mourns the haunt like an old, empty house.
He drives his rattling tin can across town to Hawkins Community Pool, with a cup of rainbow sherbet rattling in the holder at his side, like an offering for a ghost he no longer wants to exorcise from the home behind his ribcage.
“It’s gonna melt before you get it to her,” Robin remarked with a smirk as she scooped ice cream with an expert hand. “You know that, right?”
Eddie bowed his head and tried to hide behind his curls. “Not if I run real fast,” he joked sheepishly.
The pastel sherbet softens quickly in the summer heat. (Not even the van’s middling A.C., pointed right in its direction, could keep it sufficiently cool.) The muted hues of pink, green, and orange begin to swirl together as the milky concoction undulates in his ringed fist. He hopes you don’t mind and prays you see past his feeble attempt to be kind.
“Well, well, well…” Billy Hargrove lilts with a pretty pink smirk at the sight of Eddie Munson’s familiar face. He lifts his sunglasses to the top of his mulleted curls and rests his magazine on his lap. “The dead has risen…”
The poor boy sticks out without trying, despite his desperate attempts to stay hidden — all but swimming in his leather jacket, baggy jeans, and wild hair. He’s a pale, death-touched thing floating in a sea of golden life.
But, unlike the contemptuous leers from the other patrons, (some who are still certain Eddie killed Chrissy, and others who have always seemed to look at him that way), Billy Hargrove only smiles. A fake, sardonic grin that shows none of his teeth and shines mostly in his eyes.
His squinted ocean gaze glimmers like he knows all of Eddie’s secrets — which is only half-true. Billy knows what the end of the world did to him, because it almost killed him too, once upon a time.
So, no. He doesn’t know all of Eddie’s secrets.
Just the biggest one, maybe.
Despite being largely immune to the summer heat, Eddie still feels the burn of embarrassment stinging his chest. Clawing behind his ribcage like a thousand ravaging demobats. The hot-cold aching of wishing he were dead ebbs when you turn to look at him over your shoulder — when your wide eyes of sparkling hope lock with his darker, dead-er ones.
There’s an undeniable spark of delight in your irises, though Eddie doesn’t know what for. No one’s been this happy to see him in a year. No one’s been this happy to see him ever.
Something about it makes his stomach hurt. Or maybe it’s just the way you and Hargrove are sitting behind the front counter together, like a couple of old friends, with glowing sunkissed skin hugged tight in scarlet bathing suits.
In that split second, Eddie feels like he’s in high school again — a loser, not yet dead, pining for the pretty girl way out of his league and praying the basketball jock doesn’t shove him into the bleachers.
If you notice the momentary fear in his eyes, you don’t show it.
And if you care that he’s a loser, you don’t show that, either.
“Eddie! Hi!” you greet, giggling as you push yourself off the countertop. Your pleated skirt swishes around your thighs as you rush to him. Your matching sandals pad rhythmically along the stone floor. The flip-flop, flip-fop sound echoes through the shaded breezeway.
Eddie doesn’t know how wide he’s smiling when you’re finally standing ahead of him, but he can feel it burning in the apples of his cheeks.
“You haven’t been around for lunch,” he says in place of a greeting, fidgeting with the cup of melting ice cream in his fist. “I was scared that you keeled over or somethin’.”
“You were worried about me?” you wonder aloud, voice a few octaves higher than he’s used to. You purse your smile to the side of your mouth and scrunch your nose. “Aww…” you croon and dig two fingers into the junction of his neck.
Your touch is soft and warm and less than gentle.
Eddie cringes, effectively set aflame by the electricity of you. He shrinks back with a wavering smile and finds himself grateful that he’s too dead to blush these days — or else you’d see how hopeless he is.
You ramble an explanation while his skin buzzes.
“I’m a little slow on my bike, turns out, and I couldn’t make it back here in time,” you tell him, which rests his anxieties a little.
Eddie’s been worried about you ever since he patched you up in his bathroom. Everyone’s been worried about you, in truth, ‘cause it’s a well-known fact that you’re a total klutz.
“And after being late for the third time, Adam got kinda mad at me…” you continue, shifting on your feet. “He got really mad at me, actually. I wore his favorite bikini, and he still threatened to fire me. I was, like, oh shit, I’m actually in trouble—”
You giggle to yourself, but Eddie feels like there’s a knife between his ribcage. A sharp, burning, and pulsing urge to get you away from all of these assholes. To get you out of this town. God knows it doesn’t deserve you.
He swallows hard and tries to joke. “Must’ve been real bad then, huh?”
You exhale a dramatic sigh. “Yeah, so… I’m kinda trying to get back on his good side and everything. It’s easier to just stay here. I would’ve called, but I— I didn’t think you cared that much.”
“I care!” Eddie scoffs, pale face swirled with offense.
“You’re the one that said emergencies only!” you mock through another pretty giggle.
“Abandoning me for a week is an emergency.”
You light up like a goddamn Christmas tree at that.
“See! I knew you were worried about me!”
Eddie scoffs again and looks away. He focuses on the crowd bustling outside the breezeway because it’s easier than meeting your eyes. Until one of them catches his gaze and flashes him a leery look, anyway. Then he feels like he might puke.
“Not at all,” he answers in a playful deadpan, clearing his throat when his voice shakes. “That’s definitely not why I decided to bring you a… half-melted cup of rainbow sherbet.”
His chocolate eyes avert to the plastic container in his fist, swirling the milky pastels again for good measure. When he looks at you again, it’s through his lashes and with his head bowed sheepishly.
You smile with your lips curled under your teeth — obviously giddy and trying hopelessly to hide it.
“I thought it was for me, but I didn’t wanna assume,” you admit quietly, cheek squished into your shoulder.
“It’s basically a milkshake now,” Eddie mumbles and extends his arm. His voice shakes as much as his hand does. “Sorry…”
You beam at the pinched look of worry on his face. “I like milkshakes, too, silly,” you giggle and take the cup of melted ice cream from him.
Your fingers are gentle and strikingly warm as they brush his colder, paler ones. Warm like dragonfire, or an old house bathed in candlelight, or a freshly sharpened blade through the heart.
Eddie bleeds out on the pebbled concrete as you turn away.
You rush back to the counter you leapt from, balancing the container in one palm as you bend over the top of it. A satiny summer breeze rolls through the shaded shack and billows through the pleats of your skirt, lifting the thin fabric to reveal the thong of your one-piece — a sliver of soft scarlet running between your thighs.
Eddie’s undead heart lurches into his throat. He turns his gaze to the ceiling until the wind passes.
Billy looks up from his magazine to smile at you with his teeth. “This your boyfriend, sweet thing?” he asks as you pluck your straw from the styrofoam cup you were just drinking from.
The nickname floats on the humid air and strangles Eddie accordingly. Your mouth curls around the end of the bendy straw before you give him a proper answer. You blow hard to dispel the remnants of room-temperature water before sticking the plastic into the milky concoction in your fist.
“Yes,” you answer plainly, then take a long sip of the softened ice cream. You shrug with the raspberry-orange taste on your tongue. “He’s a boy. And he’s my friend,” you lilt. “Jealous?”
Billy laughs. Loud.
“Of Munson?”
You nod quietly, straw caged between your teeth.
He laughs louder and slouches in his swivel chair. The golden muscles of his toned chest flex as he flashes you a quieter smile — one that might say he knows a lot more than you do if you cared enough to read the signals.
“I can’t say that I am, no,” Billy hums, faux sympathetically.
“Well, maybe if you were a little nicer, he’d be bringing you food, too,” you tell him, very matter-of-fact about the whole thing, as you spin on the heel of your rubber flip-flop and saunter away.
Eddie grimaces when you’re ahead of him again. “Please tell me this isn’t the only thing you’ve had today.”
Your face screws as you take another sip. “No,” you answer with a firm shake of your head, though the word comes out garbled from the fruity concoction in your mouth. You swallow it down and confess, “I had half a Poptart for breakfast, so…”
“That’s… not breakfast,” the boy monotones, then motions his wild head to the cup cradled in your right hand. “And this isn’t lunch.”
“Well, I told you I don’t have time to get lunch,” you argue like a child, soft and sheepish, head bowed to avoid his unwavering stare. You stab at the softened ice cream with the plastic straw, leaving holes in the pastel swirls, as you mutter to yourself, “And I can’t make it for myself, either. I’m not adult enough for that yet.”
Eddie feels it again. The sting of empathy in his chest. The primitive need to help you that makes it hard to breathe most days.
He shrugs his leather-clad shoulders and crosses his arms over his chest, tucking his trembling hands under his armpits.
“Well— Maybe— Maybe I can, you know, bring you something?” Eddie offers, stumbling over himself the entire way through. He shifts on his feet and swallows through the frog in his throat. “Like, when I have the time, or whatever.”
He doesn’t tell you that he always has the time. (‘Cause he only works nights at The Hideout now, and spends the rest of the day’s many hours rotting in bed.)
Your face pinches into a girlish pout. Something soft, but sterner than he thinks he’s ever seen you before. “I can’t ask you to do that.”
“You’re not asking. I’m offering,” Eddie argues. “And I’m not doing it outta the kindness of my own heart, either— It’d just make me feel better to know you’re not totally withering away whenever I’m not here.”
You try hard to keep your scowl. But then your chest starts to glitter like a thousand sparklers in July, and you’re beaming before you can stop it. Eddie watches the pretty smile curl slowly on your lips despite your futile attempt to hide it.
“What’s that look for?” he cautions.
“Nothin’,” you shrug, smiling with the straw between your teeth. “I just like you.”
Eddie forgets to breathe and dies all over again, right at your feet.
꒷꒦꒷꒷꒦ (㇏(•̀ᵥᵥ•́)ノ) ꒦꒷꒦꒷꒷
only boys who save their pennies
make my rainy day!
꒷꒦꒷꒷꒦ (㇏(•̀ᵥᵥ•́)ノ) ꒦꒷꒦꒷꒷
Most Tuesdays, some Wednesdays, and every Friday — (the mornings after his late night shifts at The Hideout) — Eddie Munson buys you lunch.
He stands at the counter of Benny’s Burgers and pays with the rogue quarters and crumpled bills he finds in random pockets of his jacket. The bearded man looks on in slow-blinking bemusement while the boy counts out the $4.89 your sandwich costs.
Benny ends up throwing in free fries for the effort.
It takes Eddie an embarrassing amount of time to realize you were sneaking money into his pockets every time he visited you, even though he told you not to pay him back. Even though you swore you wouldn’t. (He’ll never believe another one of your stupid Scout’s Honor promises again).
Saturday comes, and Eddie’s cleaned out ’til his next shift on Monday.
He thinks he’s handling it pretty well — the very palpable lack of you — but the contrary is written all over his face.
He’s sprawled out on the sunken-in couch in the living room with the headphones of his Walkman around his neck. Madonna plays muffledly (and far too happily) as he stares up at the ceiling, trying to make constellations of your face from the cracks and water stains.
Dustin watches his best friend grieve from the other side of the coffee table and sighs. “It’s the sandwiches, right? You guys hate the sandwiches?” he wonders aloud, but to no one in particular. “God, I knew I put too much jelly in them—”
“The sandwiches are amazing, Dusty-Bun,” Robin insists from Wayne’s recliner, with a mouthful of PB&J jutting out her freckled cheek. Her chipping maroon nails are stained with crumbs as they flash an ‘ok’ symbol in his direction.
With grape jelly on the corner of his mouth, Steve mumbles from the floor in front of her, “Doesn’t explain why Eddie’s still sulking over there, though.”
“Exactly!” Dustin huffs, flailing his arms.
Eddie rolls his eyes. He exhales a heavy breath that makes his chest deflate, then turns to face the eyes staring back at him. “I’m not sulking,” he grumbles like a rain cloud.
“Yeah. It’s the pouting that’s so convincing,” Max scoffs from Dustin’s other side, blinking at him from behind her glasses as she fakes a tight-lipped grin.
Eddie just squints at her. She’s not nearly as menacing as she used to be. Not when her ocean eyes are bugged out from such thick lenses, anyway. Now he finds her sort of adorable, in a subtly intimidating way — like a kitten holding a pocketknife.
“I’m not pouting, either,” the wild-haired boy retorts, features scrunched in a soft pout.
Lucas wipes his mouth with the back of his hand. “He just misses Barbie,” the boy croons playfully.
Eddie blinks at him with a flat face. “Barbie?” he echoes.
“Yeah,” he shrugs, voice high. “Barbie.”
“Am I supposed to know who that is, or…?”
“Oh, you know who she is,” Lucas nods with a boyish chuckle. “Very well.”
He keeps on laughing about it until Max elbows him hard in the shoulder. Steve misses the silent cue as he tears off a piece of bread crust, snickering to himself at the inside joke.
He pops it into his mouth and meets Eddie’s gaze, emotionless and expectant. His eyes widen as he stammers for a response.
“The girl— Your girl— She was at Jazzercise the other day,” Steve explains, then swallows hard. “She was with that pretty lifeguard, too. What’s her name again?”
He looks instinctively up at Robin for an answer. Eddie beats her to the punch.
“Billy Hargrove?” he monotones.
“Ha-ha.”
“Heather Holloway,” Robin tells him.
“Heather!” Steve exclaims, snapping his fingers. “I’m pretty sure I dated her freshman year, actually… Or was that Heather Hart?”
The boy loses focus quickly as he goes deep in thought. Fluffy brows pinched, honey eyes squinted. A heavy silence lulls over the crowded living room, and Madonna’s muffled voice grows louder. ‘Cause we are living in a material world, and I am a material girl!—
Before Eddie has time to be embarrassed, Steve shrugs at himself.
“Doesn’t matter. Anyway. She was at Jazzercise with Heather just, like, dripping in pink. Pink leg warmers, pink leotard, pink tights…” Steve trails off again, stare glazing over like he's imagining you all over again. “It was crazy…”
Eddie’s face swirls in disgust. Not at the thought of you, of course, but at the notion that your beauty is perceptible to others. That he isn’t the only one who can see you, admire you. He is not the only one you’ve threatened to kill with your piercing stare, and the thought alone makes his stomach twist.
“You’re such a boy,” Eddie scoffs.
Robin leans forward, freckled face solemn and serious. She rests her elbows on her denim-clad knees and slowly shakes her head. “No… It was crazy,” she echoes more earnestly.
It sounds different coming from her. It means something different coming from her, too. Eddie’s brows raise and disappear beneath his curly bangs. “Oh, yeah?” he hums with bated breath.
“Yeah,” Robin answers with a disbelieving sigh.
“Hence, the nickname,” Lucas nods, seemingly missing the meaning ‘cause the only other girl he’s cared to notice besides Pheobe Cates is the redhead sitting beside him.
The girl with magnifying glasses over her eyes and legs that don’t work as well as they used to. Despite the circumstances (involving dark wizards and a certain death), Max hasn’t changed at all. And neither has the way Lucas’ teenage boy heart beats for her.
Eddie scoffs a tired laugh. He turns back to the ceiling and throws an elbow over his eyes. “I’m gonna tell her you guys call her that behind her back, by the way.”
“It’s a compliment!” Dustin defends, a few octaves higher than normal.
“Or you could tell her to her face,” Max offers with an absentminded shrug, folding her napkin into a weird shape in her lap — only ‘cause she’s fidgeting, of course, not because Dr. Owens said it would help ease the stiffness in her fingers. (Being dead might’ve taught her some things, but listening to figures of authority is not one of them.)
“She’s working today. Billy said so.”
Eddie peeks at her, flat-faced. “Did he?”
“Yeah. Means you can go visit your girlfriend instead of bitching and moaning about how much you miss her all weekend.”
“She’s not my girlfriend, Mayfield.”
“That’s beside the point.”
“No. That is entirely the point,” Eddie argues, laughing more sincerely now. “Other than the fact that the sun will literally kill me.”
Max’s light eyes narrow into thin slits behind her clunky glasses. She says the hard thing out loud, without blinking. that the rest of them are already thinking, anyway.
“You’re already dead, Munson.”
꒷꒦꒷꒷꒦ (㇏(•̀ᵥᵥ•́)ノ) ꒦꒷꒦꒷꒷
hey, you, with the pretty face,
welcome to the human race!
꒷꒦꒷꒷꒦ (㇏(•̀ᵥᵥ•́)ノ) ꒦꒷꒦꒷꒷
No wonder the streets seemed so apocalyptically empty, Eddie thinks to himself as he walks through the front gates of Hawkins Community Pool. Because every goddamn person in town has chosen to spend their Saturday here.
Benny from the diner sits by the kiddie pool next to the entrance, watching his daughter wade in the shallow water. He looks like a different person without his grease-stained apron on. His swim trunks are bright red and slightly too short for him, his Hawaiian shirt is unbuttoned to reveal his beer belly, and his face is burnt everywhere but under his sunglasses.
Jason, Andy, and all the rest of their goons hog the picnic tables while pretty girls sit on the tops of them — wearing their expensive bikinis and basking in the sun like it’s shining just for them. The boys laugh and shove at one another, trying to pretend like they’re far too cool for it all.
Familiar faces fill the blue water, but it’s hard to make them out in the crowd. Everyone’s swimming and splashing and stuffed within the chain-linked fence like cattle. They all go blurry, like a bunch of indistinct shapes before a backdrop of bright colors. Like a Claud Monet painting, if he ever cared enough to paint uninspiring Midwestern towns.
It’s far too packed to feel self-conscious ‘cause this is the kind of horde you drown in. But that just means it’s catastrophically overstimulating. For Eddie, most of all, who’s sorely out of place in his leather jacket and baggy jeans and dirty sneakers.
The boy cranes his neck to search for you, dark eyes flitting wildly over the crowd — once, twice, and then a third time.
You’re nowhere to be found, and he knows this because your face is far too pretty and not easily missed. Your sweet hibiscus scent is equally absent, drowned out by the overwhelming smell of chlorine, sunblock, and sweat.
If you were around, he’d know it.
“She’s not even here!” Eddie huffs, lifting his arms only to drop them dramatically at his sides. Any arguments about his pouting are surely moot now. Even he can feel the petulant scowl pinching his features.
Max, equally confused, stands at his side and pushes her glasses up her nose. “Billy said she was working today. I heard him on the phone. He definitely said it,” she observes, mostly to herself, ‘cause she can’t stomach being wrong. “Well… He said he was opening with the two prettiest girls in town, so I figured one was probably Heather and the other was—”
“Barbie?” Eddie finishes flatly.
“Yeah.”
“Well, she’s obviously not here, so… Let’s just go back home and do— literally anything else.”
Eddie spins on the heel of his worn sneaker with the intention of going back the way he came. His van is parked crooked, anyhow. Steve complained as much when he parked his shiny new BMW right beside him. He figures he should probably get back before someone slashes his tires. Again.
He nearly runs into someone the second he turns around. Someone standing far too close for comfort, in a bright red bathing suit and matching skirt, with too big sunglasses on the top of her head.
“Who’s not working today?!” the person shouts loudly in his face, with the evident intent to scare him.
Eddie stumbles back into Steve, who promptly shoves him forward again. It takes him approximately that long to realize it’s you.
You guffaw when the rest of them jump in fright — a loud and heavenly sound that refuses to be drowned out by the droning of a million different conversations.
“I totally got you guys!” you exclaim, giggling so hard your head tilts back.
Eddie laughs with you, mostly in shock, as he clutches his chest where his heart isn’t beating.
“Admit it! I got you a little?” you say, pinching your thumb and forefinger and squinting through the sliver of space between them.
“Yeah,” the boy huffs a forced laugh. “Yeah, a— a little bit.”
Visibly delighted by his words, you beam brighter than the golden hour sun.
“I knew it!” you grin before your eyes flit over his shoulder, to the group of friends gaping wordlessly behind him. You scrunch your nose sympathetically. “Sorry… You guys were just collateral.”
“You know I have a bad heart,” Steve complains for the sake of complaining, clutching his chest over his short-sleeved button-up. He flashes you a stern look and gripes, “That shit’ll kill me.”
Your eyes narrow in a challenging squint. “You’re twenty-one years old, Steve.”
“Yeah,” he scoffs. “And being around you ages me five years.”
“Well, then, I guess we’re gonna have a very long, very happy life together. Aren’t we, Stevie?” you retort with a sickly sweet smile that Steve meets with a scruffy-faced scowl.
Eddie watches the brunette boy roll his eyes like he wasn’t getting half-hard at the thought of you at Jazzercise an hour ago. It makes him only partly jealous.
He could never dream of being so casual around you. ‘Cause when your eyes find his again, it feels like his stomach’s doing backflips. It’s like he blinks, and he forgets how to speak.
“So!” you chirp. “Family trip?”
Eddie opens his mouth and doesn’t realize until that moment that every word in the English language has left his brain. Robin shoves him hard in the back to put his head back on straight. The words fly from his mouth like a pull-string doll.
“I didn’t wanna bother you, but these idiots forced me into it.”
“Good. You need to get out of the house from time to time, Eds— You’re getting so pale,” you ramble and reach suddenly for his face. Eddie freezes when you take his chin by your thumb and forefinger. The warmth of your velvety touch sets his skin aflame; more so when you look directly into his wide-eyed gape and say, “There’s nothin’ wrong with needing a little sunshine, Eddie Spaghetti.”
“Weird,” Max muses with a sarcastic lilt. “That is exactly what we’ve been trying to tell him, too.”
Eddie shoots her a glare — the best he can, anyway, with your hand still cradling his jaw. He can only see the redhead from the corner of his eye, but the smug smirk on her freckled face doesn’t go missed.
Your fingers slip from his face, and Eddie feels like he can breathe again. He feels strangely empty, still, without you touching him — like he’s starving, or like he’s never been touched before now. Sometimes, it feels like both are true.
He wonders if that’s just the price he has to pay. If being near you means feeling like he’s dying and coming to life all at once. There’s a nagging voice in the back of his head that tells him he’ll pay it, with your pretty fingers strangling his neck and all.
“You’re MADMAX, right?” you wonder aloud to the girl with auburn plaits draping her freckled shoulders.
She’s mostly a stranger to you now, but you think she must mean a great deal to the rest of them. They talk a whole lot about the redhead with chunky glasses who acts like she’s way too cool for it all but defends her Dig Dug high score like her life depends on it.
The girl nods and crosses her pale arms across her chest, flashing you a suspicious, tightlipped smile. “Yeah. Which means you must be Barbie?”
“Barbie?” you echo.
Eddie chimes in then. “That’s what these freaks call you when you’re not around,” he says, nodding his wild head to the group of aforementioned freaks behind him.
Your face twists as you bring your hand to the center of your chest. “That is the nicest thing anyone’s ever called me before,” you respond, strangely sincere.
Lucas smiles from over Max’s shoulder, nodding like he’s proud. “You’re welcome,” he tells you.
Dustin stands just beside him with a conspicuous paper bag under his arm. You squint past Eddie and over to the curly-haired boy. “What’s that?” you blurt.
It takes him a second too long to answer. “Oh. Uh. A sandwich—” he stammers vaguely, extending his arm towards you. You take the sack from him without thinking twice and rifle blindly through its contents.
“PB&J?” you guess with an inquisitive arch to your brow. Dustin nods, looking pleased by your assumption. Your arm stills suddenly within the crinkling brown sack, and your eyes narrow into thin slits. “With the crust cut off?”
“Uh… no.”
“Good. That’s obviously the best part of the whole sandwich,” you respond, almost to yourself, as you pluck the snack from the bag.
You unwrap it from its plastic seal and take a hefty bite in one fell swoop. Your eyes flutter shut like it’s something gourmet, and not just something Dustin slapped together on his kitchen step stool at home.
“Thank you for this,” you mumble through the wad of food in your cheek. “You’re officially my new best friend, Dusty-Bun.”
“Rude,” Eddie scoffs.
You swallow hard and fight back a smile, like you were hoping for that exact response. “And who said you were my best friend in the first place, hm?” you argue playfully, waving the half-eaten peanut butter jelly sandwich in his face. “That is very presumptuous of you, Eddie Spaghetti.”
Your pleated skirt flutters at your hips when you spin on the heel of your plastic sandal. You flip flop, flip flop out of the shaded shack and towards the sunshine and unadulterated chaos. The rest of them follow behind you — save for Dustin, who migrates to Eddie’s side with a far-off gaze.
“Sure she’s not your girlfriend?” the kid wonders, never once taking his eyes off the back of you.
Eddie looks down at him with a flat face. “I’m sure,” he monotones.
Dustin grins wide, likely forgetting that other people can see it, too. “Good,” he hums to himself.
“Don’t get any ideas, Henderson,” the older boy blurts before he means to, then tries not to cower under the expectant glance he gets. “You’re obviously way out of her league.”
꒷꒦꒷꒷꒦ (㇏(•̀ᵥᵥ•́)ノ) ꒦꒷꒦꒷꒷
The group fits in pretty well despite being the self-proclaimed outcasts of Hawkins, Indiana.
Steve most of all, but that usually goes without saying. He looks like small-town royalty in his brand-name polo and too-expensive navy swim shorts. He’s lost his touch since high school, though, as he tries and fails to flirt with Carol Perkins’ sister.
“So, Amber— What’d you say you were studying again?” you hear him ask as he lingers awkwardly by the longue chairs.
“My name is Autumn,” she corrects in a drawl that’d give a valley girl a run for her money.
Steve, oblivious to his blunder, only smiles. “Oh, cool. That’s, like, definitely in my top four favorite seasons—”
Robin, in a strange turn of events, is much more casual in her flirting than her co-worker-slash-best-friend. She spotted Vicki the second she walked in, sitting with a few girls from yearbook and rubbing sunscreen onto her supple skin.
She pretended she didn’t, though, which only made it that much more obvious that she had. Vicki waved at her once, then again to invite her over, and Robin was far too awkward to decline.
Now, she sits gracelessly with a bunch of half-strangers and her biggest crush, looking only slightly out of place in her frayed shorts and Steve’s baggy tee. She nods politely in conversation and thanks the universe for making it so damn hot today. At least now she can blame her burning freckled face on the golden setting sun.
Dustin and Lucas, meanwhile, stuff their faces with ice cream sandwiches in a feeble attempt to consume them before they melt. The softened vanilla leaves messes on their fingers and faces, making them look somehow more boyish than their respective Spiderman and Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle swim trunks.
Max sits off to the side of them in her own chair, partly overstimulated, and trying to let the piercing sunbeams ground her again.
Eddie Munson, however, in his attempt to blend in, only draws more attention to himself.
He sits beside your post, shaded beneath a wide umbrella, in the same attire you’d see him in on any other day. The baggy jeans, and the thick leather jacket, and the Corroded Coffin merch. He’s dripping in black and silver but hasn’t yet broken a sweat. You don’t know how, though. ‘Cause you’re hot just looking at him.
You pluck your plastic whistle from your mouth to ask, “Are you sure you’re not burning up over there?”
Eddie laughs before he means to because the answer’s obvious to him.
The last time he felt an ounce of heat was when he was bleeding out on the dirt floor of an alternate universe — when crimson blood ran warm over the mangled skin of his chest and ribs. He’s been colder than ice ever since. And he keeps forgetting you don’t know about any of that.
“Yeah. I’m sure,” he answers, angling his head to face yours.
There’s a white cast on his grey face from sunscreen deliberately not rubbed in. It feels like a shield in some way. Not in the warm-blooded human kind of way, of course, but in the vampiric curse kind. The kind that would otherwise make him debilitatingly weak sitting outside like this. Now, he feels somewhat normal.
The golden hour sun sits like a halo behind your head. He squints one eye to see you better. “If you wanna see me shirtless, you can just say that,” he jokes. “Instead of beating around the bush and everything—”
“I wanna see you shirtless,” you blurt in a strange monotone that makes it hard to tell if you’re joking or not.
The boy falters. Tries not to choke on his own spit. There isn’t a world where he can flirt with you where you don’t immediately snatch the upper hand. It’s like you’re immune to that sort of diffidence. Eddie wishes he was, too.
“Wow,” he scoffs after the few long moments it takes him to recover. “Way to be blunt, sweetheart.”
“You told me to say it!”
You give him a lazy shrug and a lazier smile as you swap the bright red lifeguard buoy to your other arm. Eddie shifts uncomfortably in his seat, as though physically affected by the way you look at him, and the plastic pool chair makes a weird squeaking noise beneath him.
“Yeah, well, most people tend to be more subtle about it.”
“I’ve never been subtle about anything in my life.”
You turn back around to scan the busy pool, and Eddie feels like he can breathe again. A laugh rattles through his tight chest as he quips, “I’m starting to realize that about you, actually—”
“God. Stop flirting,” Max groans from your other side, who has otherwise been so silent that Eddie was starting to forget she was there. She doesn’t turn to look at either of you from where she lazes on the lounge chair. “Sitting with Steve would be more bearable than this.”
“Yeah, Eddie. Stop flirting with me,” you grouse, obviously playful, and without missing a single beat. You glare at the boy over your mostly bare shoulder and try hard not to smile. (He can’t see it in your eyes, anyway, though.) “I’m trying to talk to my new friend MADMAX. Gosh—”
You spin on the heel of your plastic red sandal, and your matching skirt twirls with you. Eddie can’t take his eyes off the back of you. He forgets how to blink when the fabric swishes to give him a brief glimpse of your ass.
He’s always hated the sun, but he loves the way it kisses your skin — leaving you glistening and mouthwateringly supple.
His fangs threaten to make an appearance when a warm breeze carries your cotton candy cloud scent to him. His gums start to burn with the sharp ache.
“—Hi, MADMAX,” you singsong to the scowling girl, grinning with your cheek pressed to your shoulder.
“You can just call me Max,” she deadpans. “You know that, right?”
“But MADMAX is so much cooler. And it suits you way better.”
“Does it?” MADMAX wonders with an unenthusiastic hum.
“Yeah. Maxine is a name for an old woman. Or, like, one of those ridiculously expensive French poodles,” you ramble and turn back to the pool again, head bobbing as you scan the crowd. “But MADMAX? Now, that is a name for a badass with really cool hair and a sick pair of reading glasses.”
There’s a beat of silence, filled only by the sound of splashing water and the buzzing of a thousand distant conversations, as Max tries to bite back a laugh. It sputters past her anxiety-bitten lips before she can stop it — a strangely airy giggle from such an intimidating girl.
She shakes her head, still, to pretend she’s above the childish giddiness.
Your face screws in feigned offense. “Don’t laugh!” you scold.
Which, of course, only makes her laugh harder.
Eddie lifts his head, finally taking his eyes off you to gape at the redhead across the aisle, who hasn’t laughed like this since the world ended.
It must be something strange you alone bring out of them, he realizes. Something special in you that the end of the world didn’t steal like it did everyone else.
“These guys bothering you, newbie?” you hear your manager call to you, only partially drowned out by the surrounding laughter and shouting from the bustling crowd.
His voice is annoyingly distinct. It’s deep and articulate in a way that makes him seem smart. You don’t know if he really is, but you do know that he’s really a raging asshole.
Adam stands before you, gold and glittering under the setting sun like God’s first creation himself. He’s got veins up and down the length of his muscular arms, and a bulging chest that he waxes every two weeks like clockwork. He’s Steve The Hair Harrington pretty without an ounce of the charm.
“Huh?” you call back, brows raised and eyes wide, just to make him repeat himself.
“I asked if these guys were bothering you,” Adam repeats, flicking his cleft chin back to get the blonde curls out of his eyes. “You look distracted.”
“What guys?” you wonder with an innocent furrow to your brows.
The man’s emerald eyes flit instinctively over your shoulder at Eddie, who everyone has been trying and failing not to stare at this whole time.
You wonder if Eddie notices it, too — if he’s gotten immune to the constant leering or if he’s bone-crushingly aware of it all. Either way, no one deserves to be ogled at like that. Like some kinda zoo animal.
Everyone always walks on eggshells around him, refusing to look him in the eye out of fear he might bite. But you know he doesn’t have the teeth for it.
Despite that, you look at Eddie over your shoulder like he’s a stranger. His eyes are wide and swimming with apprehension as the chocolates of them dart between you and the man made out of chiseled marble.
Adam knows that you know him. You know he knows it, too. Which makes lying to him all the more fun.
“I’ve never seen this man before in my life,” you shrug.
Adam squints and crosses his too-big arms over his chest. “Doesn’t change the fact that he’s loitering. Along with the rest of these kids—” He looks around him with a visible disgust.
Max pretends he isn’t there. Dustin and Lucas, meanwhile, forget to be casual as they cower under his stare with their ice-cream-stained faces.
“It’s a public pool, Adam. Everyone's loitering. Duh.”
You turn away and stick your whistle back in your mouth. You chew absentmindedly at the plastic and scan the pool for any reason to use it.
Adam’s neck twitches. An angry sort of tic he didn’t know he had until he met you. “You’re still on the clock, newbie. If I see you gettin’ distracted again, I’ll—”
You blow the whistle. Loud. And for far longer than you probably need to.
The high-pitched chirping rings in Adam’s ears from the close proximity. He flinches away accordingly.
“No running, please!” you shout sweetly to the pudgy middle school-aged boy on the other side of the pool. (His babysitter always brings him here so she can sunbathe, and he’s always roughhousing in the deep end. Billy’s developed a personal vendetta with him over the summer.)
The suddenly quiet pool returns to its deafening chaos a second later.
You flash Adam a cheeky smile. “You were saying?”
“I was saying that I’ll take it out of your paycheck,” the man bites, angled jaw clenched tight. “You’re already on thin ice. Understand?”
Your lip juts in a feigned pout. You nod slowly, eyes wide like a puppy he’s just kicked.
“One more strike, and you’re cleaning toilets, newbie.”
“Ah, I knew that’s what this was all about…” you lilt seductively, lips curling into a mischievous smirk. “You just want to see me bending over—”
You lean closer toward him until your spearmint breath fans across his chiseled jaw. Your bottom juts out in Eddie’s direction, until he can see the very bottom of your ass from beneath your pleated skirt. It makes him as flustered as Adam the Asshole, who stalks off on long legs quickly after, sufficiently embarrassed.
You laugh at the back of him until he disappears into the crowd again. The bubbly sound ceases the moment he’s out of earshot, and your smile ebbs into a girlish pout. “Dickwad,” you mumble under your breath.
You recover from it all rather quickly while Eddie struggles to remind himself to breathe. His mind reels as he, for the first time ever, grapples with the very real possibility that he might actually be in love with you. Or that you’re not real at all, and that this is just Vecna’s doing — long gone but still putting visions in his head somehow.
He doesn’t know which is worse.
꒷꒦꒷꒷꒦ (㇏(•̀ᵥᵥ•́)ノ) ꒦꒷꒦꒷꒷
oh, what a strange magic!
oh, it’s a strange magic!
꒷꒦꒷꒷꒦ (㇏(•̀ᵥᵥ•́)ノ) ꒦꒷꒦꒷꒷
The golden-orange sky turns a milky pink and lavender. Eddie’s friends, sunburnt and sufficiently pruned, don’t leave until the first star blinks faintly in the sky. The rest of the crowd goes with them, bustling bodies spilling out in a swarm.
It takes the rest of the gang several long moments to realize Eddie isn’t behind them. (You told him you forgot your sunglasses, and he offered to get them for you, ‘cause he’s nice like that and everything.)
(He doesn’t know the sunglasses are currently hiding in the pocket of your windbreaker.)
“What, where’s Eddie?” Dustin wonders aloud to the rest of the group, head flitting wildly in search of the misplaced metalhead.
“He went to the bathroom, I think,” you blurt the first lie you can think of. “He was talking about a nervous tummy or something. I don’t know.”
Steve scoffs like he senses a non-truth. “So, he’s leaving me with babysitting duty again?” he quips with a cynical, lopsided smile. “How predictable.”
“You say that like we’re the spawn of Satan or something,” Lucas jokes.
“You aren’t?” the oldest boy deadpans.
Dustin flips him off with a chubby finger and a flat face.
They bid their leave tangled in mindless arguments and lanky limbs. You watch them leave with the understanding that Steve’s 733i will be a tighter fit than it should be, crammed with a bunch of rowdy teenage boys. You feel sorry for Max and Robin most of all.
Steve’s car peels out of the parking lot one moment, and Eddie returns the next.
“I couldn’t find your sunglasses anywhere,” he confesses sheepishly, face twisted like a puppy’s as he scratches awkwardly at the back of his neck. “I don’t know. I think some asshole might’ve stolen ‘em—”
“Oh, no, it’s okay,” you shrug with a tightlipped smile. “I found them in the, uh— In the lost-and-found bin.”
“Oh. Okay. Cool,” Eddie stammers, nodding slowly, just before a smile tugs at his lips. You watch from beneath your lashes as the subtle realization curls on his face. “You had ‘em the entire time, didn’t you?” the boy wonders in a low voice that makes your stomach do whirl.
“Yes,” you squeak in a mousy voice, then ramble before you can stop it. “But only ‘cause I wanted everyone else to leave! You know, so we can have a real date and everything…”
“As opposed to the fake ones we’ve been having?” he jokes with pinched brows.
“Exactly,” you nod, strikingly sincere. ‘Cause the constant carpooling and melted rainbow sherbet dropoffs had to have meant something.
“As tempting as that sounds, sweet thing,” he humors, scrunching the bridge of his nose. “I do think I might be actually coming down with sunstroke.”
You turn your head wordlessly to the entryway of the shack. There’s only a sliver of the night sky visible from here, but it’s navy blue and sparkling with so many little stars. You look back to Eddie with a dubious glint in your eye. “The sunset twenty minutes ago, Eds.”
“Yeah, but… I’m still sick.”
He removes his hand from the pocket of his leather jacket and balls it into a fist over his mouth. He coughs once, trying hard to make it believable ‘cause he hasn’t been truly sick since the winter of ’84.
That’s perhaps the only cool thing about being a vampire — he’s basically got Superman’s immune system now.
“Well, I actually learned how to treat sunstroke while I was in training,” you lilt with an air of mischief in your voice as you take a daring step closer. The scent of sunscreen and cheap musky cologne clings to his skin. Something about the combination of the two is maddening.
You’re filled suddenly with the primal urge to bite into him like an apple. But you refrain, lest you scare him off.
Eddie’s caught in a similar dilemma, but with perhaps realer consequences than that. Your natural marshmallow-passionfruit scent suffocates him like a pillow to the face. His fangs threaten to force their way through his gums as his head starts to swim.
He ignores every vampiric instinct swirling in his mind and focuses, instead, on the pretty smile curling at your lips.
“Bet ya didn’t know that, did ya?”
Eddie swallows hard and shakes his head. “No, I— I don’t think you ever told me that,” he stammers, then clears his throat when the words get stuck there. He puts both hands back in his jacket pocket, balling them into fists until his nails bite into his palms.
“First, you gotta take off your clothes—”
“You’ve been trying to get in my pants all day,” the boy laughs. “You realize that, right?”
“—And then you gotta cool off in a very luxurious community pool.”
Eddie gets what you’re playing at, then. His smile ebbs almost instantly. “No,” he dismisses with a stern shake of his head. His deep chestnut curls, frizzed with the late-summer humidity, sway around his jaw. “No. No way.”
“Oh, c’mon! Please,” you whine. “The pool closes in, like, half an hour— Then it’ll just be us! We can swim together!”
“I don’t know how,” Eddie whines back, head tossed and face screwed. “Seriously. I grew up in a trailer park. No one ever taught me how to swim, alright? I’ll drown.”
Something about that seems to please you, as your pout curls slowly into another smile. You meet the boy’s wet brown eyes with a gaze that glitters something wicked.
Eddie can see your head spinning with a thousand bad ideas from here. His heart would race at the thought of getting into trouble with you if it was beating still.
You’ll bring him back to life yet.
“Don’t worry, Eds,” you shrug with a sure grin. “I’d give you mouth-to-mouth in a heartbeat.”
꒷꒦꒷꒷꒦ (㇏(•̀ᵥᵥ•́)ノ) ꒦꒷꒦꒷꒷
The pool glows a vibrant sapphire color. It makes the surrounding amber streetlamps seem dull in comparison. The water is as blue and crystalline as an early summer sky. Eddie figures you must be the sun, swimming in the center of it all.
You wait patiently in the shallow end — out of both your windbreaker and pleated skirt for the first time in front of him — and swipe your hands over the water, letting it drip like liquid diamonds from your fingers. You hum quietly to the slow song playing on the boombox across the way, which now houses the mixtape you made that Eddie seems to take with him everywhere.
The boy shifts uncomfortably at the head of the pool, feeling awkward in the pair of swim trunks you found for him in the break room.
You’ve never seen so much of him before. His paper-white legs are a lot longer than you expected, ‘cause his baggy jeans hardly do him any favors. And his arms are a lot muscular, too — likely from moving band equipment and bussing tables.
He’s already so pretty to begin with. You don’t know what he’s got to be such a Nervous Nelly about.
Eddie knows he’s making it harder for himself. It’d be a lot less awkward for the both of you if he just took his shirt off and jumped in the water. But he’s paralyzed by the misplaced panic that strikes that lightning in his chest. And by you, ogling at him like he’s a pretty thing that deserves to be ogled at.
“Stop staring,” he calls to you, pretending to be playful but meaning every bit of it. “It’s makin’ me nervous.”
“Would it make you feel better if I closed my eyes?”
“Much.”
You put your hands over your eyes, to make him feel better and all. Though, you can’t help but peek between the slivers of your fingers as he strips himself of his Corroded Coffin tee.
His torso is as long and lean as you imagined, with sprinkles of hair on his chest and the pudge of his tummy that trails into his borrowed trunks. You try very hard not to stare too long at the gray scars embedded in his pale skin.
Everything seems to come easier to him when you’re not looking at him. He slides the black fabric off his pale, pale torso, tosses it to his feet, and hurries to hide in the water in one fell swoop.
The chlorine makes his nose burn, but the water feels like satin on his skin. It’s soft and warm and smooth against the cold, sharp edges of him.
“You can open your eyes now,” Eddie scoffs when he notices your hands still over your eyes. He can see you blinking at him through the slits in your fingers. “I know you’re peeking.”
“I was not!” you gasp, mouth agape with a playful offense.
“Well, you weren’t exactly being discreet about it, sweet thing.”
“These are very nefarious accusations you’re making, Eddie Munson…” you scold with arched brows and wide eyes. The water ripples faintly around you as you stalk towards him like a predator to prey, eyes narrowed in a challenging squint. “Are you prepared to back them up?”
The boy cowers slightly under your unwavering stare. “I don’t like the way you’re looking at me right now—”
And he was right not to. ‘Cause you’re lunging suddenly towards him in a flash.
The water splashes violently around you as you wrap both arms around his neck and sweep him off his feet. Literally. You kick his legs out from underneath him, then catch him before he can fall completely backward. Both his downfall and his savior, ironically.
“Ha!” you shout in his face, the tip of your nose brushing his.
“Jesus!” Eddie gasps in response, still heart lurching in his chest.
“I asked if you were prepared!” you defend like you’re innocent, like you aren’t still cradling him in your arms — the only thing keeping him from going under.
“Not for this!” he yells back.
Only then is he able to take a good breath in. He can smell the velvety scent of your blood from the achingly close proximity. He can feel your heart beating in his own chest from where you’re pressed so intently against him. It makes him instantly dizzy.
He fights back the primal urges that would otherwise drive him mad.
“Jeez…” he huffs, fangs burning. “You’re a lifeguard— You’re supposed to stop people from drowning.”
“Yeah, but no one ever needs saving,” you whine. “It’s so boring.”
His chocolate button eyes flit back and forth between both of yours. “You tryin’ to save me, sweet thing?” he jokes.
You squint. “Is it working?”
“Yeah, actually… If you let me up now, at least.”
He’s grateful when you do, though he mourns the lack of you when you step back a few paces.
His damp hair sticks to his skin when he rises to full height. He shakes his head like a dog, and you giggle when a few rogue droplets fly your way.
“You have freckles on your shoulder,” you observe distantly, eyes darting across the faint amber spots on his pale skin as you try to make constellations out of them. “I didn’t know that ’til now.”
Eddie’s lips jut downward as he peers at his arm from the corner of his eye. “Not really,” he shrugs.
“You do!” you insist. “There’s not many, though. I could probably count ‘em if I wanted.”
“Maybe on our second date.”
“I didn’t know you had a tattoo here, either—” You poke him in the chest, a little harder than you probably mean to.
Eddie winces and rubs his palm over the fading black widow under his collarbone. “Well, you don’t know everything about me,” he quips. “I like it that way. It keeps you on your toes.”
Your face pinches into a girlish pout. “Only ‘cause you never tell me anything.”
“I tell you loads of things,” Eddie laughs.
Your frown deepens. “You never told me about the picture of Ozzy Osbourne you keep in your wallet.”
“…How do you know about that?”
“Dustin told me.”
“Of course he did,” Eddie huffs. “Remind me not to tell that little shit anything ever again.”
“You never told me about how you got those scars, either,” you blurt, eyes trained on his milky white torso. Beneath the clear, rippling water, you can see the parts of his supple stomach that are marred and turning pink.
You don’t realize what you’ve said until your gaze flits back to his startled one. Your eyes widen as you ramble quickly, “You don’t have to! I’m not trying to… I’m just— I’m just saying. ‘Cause, you know, Steve has the same ones… On his ribs…”
“I’m not even gonna ask how you know that,” Eddie jokes with a (mostly) feigned jealousy.
“Billy does, too. He’s got the same lookin’ scars on his chest,” you continue. “And then I started thinking, you know? I thought, since you all know each other and everything, maybe something happened to you guys. Like, in the earthquakes or something.”
Eddie swallows hard and debates on spilling his guts.
He swallows his secrets down like bile, in the end.
“Yeah. You’re— You’re not too far off, actually,” he answers with a breathy, bitter laugh. He scratches at the back of neck, if only to busy his anxious hands, and flits his gaze to the velvety night sky.
The blinking white stars there ground him when the world starts to swim — reminds him that he’s on Earth, in Hawkins, and not in the hellscape he died in.
That was his final thought as he took his last breath that spring. How strangely fitting it was that there were no stars in the Upside Down.
“We, uh… We kinda went through hell and back, but, uh… ‘Least lived to tell the tale, right?” Eddie scoffs at himself, then remembers Chrissy — how young and full of life she was one moment, and how her wide blue eyes were sucked out of her skull the next. He recoils then, feeling like he’s said the wrong thing. “Wait. That was— That was insensitive. I didn’t mean it like that.”
“What are you talkin’ about? You’re right,” you assure him with a quiet, emotionless laugh. “You guys survived. You got lucky. We all did.”
Eddie peeks at you beneath his lashes, through the wild curls sticking to his face. “Where were you?” he murmurs. “When… When everything happened?”
“Crying into my milkshake at Benny’s Burgers,” you answer without missing a beat. The memory’s far too vivid for anything else.
A laugh sputters from Eddie’s throat. He’s sure you must be joking. You blink at him like an owl, and he goes solemn all over again. “Oh. You’re… You’re serious?” he mumbles.
“Yeah, I was… feeling sorry for myself over something stupid, and then the ground started shaking outta nowhere— like the universe was trying to say, ‘Hey, this could be soooo much worse, dude,’” you ramble quietly to yourself, skimming your fingers over the water’s surface. “…But then I found out people actually got hurt and everything, so I was like, ‘Oh, maybe I shouldn’t make this about my stupid broken heart, actually.’”
Eddie’s tight chest deflates with a wavering exhale. He didn’t know you back then, but something about knowing you were okay makes him feel better. ‘Cause, yeah, he died and all, but he couldn’t stomach the thought of Vecna taunting you.
“I’m glad you’re okay,” the boy confesses in a honeyed whisper.
A soft smile quirks at the edges of your lips. “I’m glad you’re okay, too, Eddie Spaghetti.”
Your hand reaches out for him. Almost instinctively. Like he’s a whole universe with his own gravitational pull.
Your palm settles soft and warm on the outside of his torso. Your thumb grazes the marred skin over his ribs, and Eddie tenses at the foreign feeling. You jerk back instantly.
“Oh. Shit. Sorry,” you stammer, face twisted apologetically. “I didn’t— I should’ve asked first.”
“No. It’s— It’s okay. Seriously,” Eddie assures with a rapid nod. There’s a faraway look in his chocolate eyes, almost like he’s daydreaming. He feels like he is, anyway. ‘Cause he’s never let anyone this close before.
“I just… I wasn’t expecting it. That’s all.”
Do it again, he says in so many words. Please, I think I might need it.
You reach for him again, more hesitant this time. Your hand settles over his scars again, and you breathe hard through your nose.
Your stomach twists with a phantom sort of ache, like you can feel every ounce of the pain he surely experienced back then. Thinking about how hurt he must’ve been makes you hurt, too.
Eddie can see it written all over your face. How much you ache for him.
He can’t stand it.
He cups your cheeks between trembling, unsure hands. His touch is softly calloused and colder than ice. He tilts your jaw gently upward, urging you to meet his gaze once more. Your eyes are wet and glittering when they lock with his heavily lidded ones. Your mouth parts to say something, anything. But your brain doesn’t work fast enough.
‘Cause Eddie's kissing you before you can blink.
He tastes distinctly of nicotine and boyhood. Of midnight, full moons, and neon lights. You can feel every groove in his bottom lip from where he picks at it with his teeth. Every sensation is new to you, like cool sparkles of excitement in the pit of your tummy, but it’s strikingly familiar all the same. Nostalgia for something you’re experiencing for the first time warms the center of your chest.
You breathe hard through your nose. The gust of air tickles Eddie’s cupid’s bow as he parts from you, lips smacking apart in protest.
Your eyes, still yet to blink, remain wide and glazed over. “Whoa…” you sigh to yourself.
Eddie’s unsure of how to gauge your reaction. His face swirls with horror.
“What?” he mumbles, still cradling your face between worried hands. He can’t tell if your cheeks are heating or if he’s just colder than usual. Perhaps both are equally true.
“Nothing,” you answer quickly, still slightly faraway. “I just… I got a weird sense of deja vu just now…”
The boy forces a quiet laugh. “Who else have you done this with?” he quips.
“No one!” you blurt. “…But I think I might’ve dreamt about this once.”
“Really?”
“Definitely.”
“Was it better than you expected? Or should I just see myself out now—”
You lean forward to chase his mouth. The cerulean water ripples faintly around you. Your lidded gaze never wavers from his rosy lips, which you’re realizing now are all but begging to be kissed. You don’t know how you never noticed it before.
Eddie’s smiling too wide to respond appropriately.
“Why are you laughing?” you frown.
“I’m not!” he responds through breathy chuckles.
“You are—”
Eddie leans forward in a flash, pressing another chaste kiss to your pout.
You’re all smiles again the second he pulls away, bursting at the seams with a sort of giddiness that could give the sun a run for its money.
He knows, somewhere deep down, that he shouldn’t make you this happy. He doesn’t even deserve the chance. But here you are anyway, smiling so wide at him that your eyes are starting to crinkle at the edges — showing him that there’s still sunshine in the dark, reminding him what it means to be living.
“Does this mean we get to do this forever?” you wonder in a mousy voice.
“What?” he chuckles. “Kiss?”
You nod wordlessly, blinking up at the boy with wide, wet eyes.
Eddie nods quickly back.
“Then yeah…” he wavers, chest aching and gums burning.
He loves you so much he’s gone hungry for it. For you.
He longs to devour you, in every way imaginable, and you want to devour him just the same. He can tell in the way you stare at him when you think he isn’t looking — in the way you stare at him even when he is looking — and in every one of your movements that urges him closer, closer, closer.
Your gaze is debilitatingly intense. Your attitude is mind-bendingly strange. You’re ruining his life, and Eddie can’t believe there was ever a time he wasn’t kissing you.
“Yeah,” he repeats, firmer now. “As long as you want.”
if you made it this far: i love you. so sorry for making you read something so long. i'd kiss you on the forehead if i could. also pls consider reblogging! this took me so so long to write, and it really helps a lot! thank u, love u (▰˘◡˘▰)
#published by bug#eddie munson x reader#eddie munson x y/n#eddie munson x you#eddie munson smut#stranger things x reader#eddie munson#stranger things#stranger things imagine#stranger things fic#stranger things fanfiction#stranger things fanfic#eddie munson imagine#eddie munson angst#eddie munson fluff#eddie munson fic#eddie munson fanfiction#eddie munson fanfic#eddie munson fics#st oneshots#eddie spaghetti oneshot
280 notes
·
View notes
Text
When Billy was a Newbie
I like to think some of these scenarios happened when Billy was first starting out as a hero.
Villain: *monologging*
Marvel: *doesn’t even let them finish and socks the shit out of them and takes them to the police department*
This happens a good twenty times until one villain has enough.
Villain: *monologging*
Marvel: *about to attack while they’re talking*
Villain: “OKAY WAIT WAIT WAIT, STOP RIGHT THERE YOU BASTARD.”
Marvel: *stops, confused*
Villain: “I know you’re new to this whole thing, but you do realize you’re supposed to let us monologue and tell you our evil plan, right?! You’re not supposed to cut us off!”
Marvel: “I’m not?”
Villain: “No!”
Marvel: “Oh. I’m sorry about that, Mx. Supervillain. I’ll let you and the other ones talk next time.”
Villain: “Wait, really?”
After this, he actually does end up letting them talk and all that.
I also think something like this would happen when he was getting used to fighting crime.
Marvel: *throws one of the big blue mail boxes at some low level, human, emphasis on human, crooks* “Oh… my bad, guys! I was a little too harsh.”
Crooks: *severely injured* “What do you mean ‘your bad’?!?????? That was a little more than harsh!”
Then, there’s the fact I think he wouldn’t care about where he’s saving people. By that I mean, Billy has a lot of free time because he doesn’t go to school. Because of this, you’ll casually see Captain Marvel in flipping Milwaukee helping some people who got into a car crash, then in Orlando helping out with a fire, then in San Jose helping someone who lost their dog. Point is, if there’s someone to help out, he’ll help. Through this, he met Superman actually. Funnily enough, it was while holding up a building.
Marvel: *holding up a building*
Supes: *flies down* “You’re Captain Marvel, right?”
Marvel: “Huh? Uh yeah?” *looks over Superman, seeing his suit and thinking he’s another hero (Billy doesn’t know most heroes because this was when the time bubble recently popped)
Supes: “You need a hand with that?”
Marvel: “Yes, please.”
Supes and Marvel: *work together to move the building to somewhere safe so it won’t hurt anyone*
Marvel: “Thanks.”
Supes: “No problem.”
*awkward silence*
Supes: “If I can ask, what brought you to Metropolis?”
Marvel: “I’m here to fight crime…?” *says like it’s super obvious*
Supes: “Wha? Don’t you have your own city?”
Marvel: “I mean, I guess. Fawcett isn’t really my city though. I just protect it.”
Supes: *blanking and trying to come up with something to say* “Captain, you can’t just go around in other hero’s cities and fight crime for them. It’s a breach of territory.”
Marvel: “It is?”
Supes: “Yes, it is. Honestly, I’m just happy you didn’t do this in Gotham. Batman would’ve been furious.”
Marvel: “Oh. Okay then… so just stick to cities that don’t have heroes?”
Supes: “Well, I guess but don’t you normally-”
Marvel: *beaming smile* “I appreciate the advice, Mr. Superman.”
Supes: “Your…welcome? Wait, what do you mean ‘stick to the cities that don’t have heroes’?”
Marvel: “Oh, well, when crimes slow and nothing’s going on in Fawcett, I kind of just fly around everywhere looking for stuff to do. Just the other day I helped these two old, farmer people, husband and wife, lift their tractor out of some mud.”
Supes: *a little astounded he has that much time on his hands* “Really? Where was that?”
Marvel: “Kansas. I think the town they lived in was Smallville or something?”
Supes: *nearly shits himself* “Ah… I see.”
Then there was the time he met a random Green Lantern. He had no idea what the Lantern Corp were, but any information Solomon gave him made them sound cool though. But you want to know the worst part of this interaction? The Lantern was trying to give Marvel a ring.
Random GL (RGL): *talking about how he wanted to give Billy the ring and yadayadayada*
Marvel: *not even listening due to the Gods talking a whole lot*
Mercury: “BILLY STEAL THE RING!”
Marvel: *saying this out loud* “What? What ring?”
RGL: *confused, says something Billy isn’t paying attention to*
Mercury: “THE RING ON HIS FINGER. KEEP UP WITH THE PROGRAM.”
Marvel: *still talking out loud* “Oh okay okay… how do I do that?”
Solomon: “You are supposed to use your will.”
Marvel: “Huh? Solomon there’s no way that’ll wor…” *trails off as he wills the ring off the lantern’s finger* “I take back what I said.”
RGL: *starts to fall*
Marvel: “Holy moly!” *rushes down to catch him*
RGL: “Earthling what the hell is wrong with you?! Why would you do that??!?”
Marvel: “I’m sorry! The voices has told me to.” *gives them back their ring*
RGL: *flies off grumbling how he’s a psychopath*
Then there was when Marvel joined the Justice League. When he got the communicator, he put it in his pocket dimension and promptly forgot about it.
Marvel: “The Justice League hasn’t contacted me. I wonder if I’ve done something wrong…”
Meanwhile…
Batman: “This is like the third meeting he’s missed, Clark.”
Supes: “I know, I know! I’m sorry! He didn’t seem like the type to skip out on meetings. He talked like he had a bunch of free time.”
WW: “You should go talk to him. You are the one who invited him.”
Supes: *sighs* “I will.”
Back in Fawcett…
Marvel: *helping a cat down from a tree*
Supes: *flies down when he sees him* “Captain! Can we talk?”
Marvel: *hands cat back to its owner* “Mr. Superman. Of course! I’ve actually had something I’ve been meaning to talk about with you too.”
Supes: “Right, well I guess I’ll cut straight to the point. Is there a reason you haven’t shown up to the last meetings?”
Marvel: *stares at him with the most confused face* “Meetings?”
Supes: *confused at Billy’s confusion* “Yes? You get notified on your comm about them.”
Marvel: “Comm… Comm?” *thinking face before recognition flits across his face* “Wait, this thing?” *reaches hand into pocket dimension and pulls out his JL comm*
Supes: *slightly horrified when he saw his arm disappear for a moment* “Yeah. That.”
Marvel: *taps comm and sees over 45 unread notifications* “Oh.”
Supes: *wondering how in the world Marvel never checked his comm* “Oh indeed.”
#billy batson#dc captain marvel#shazam#captain marvel dc#fawcett comics#fawcett#fawcett city#superman#clark kent
289 notes
·
View notes
Text
Curiosity Killed The Cat Gets You Laid?
Synopsis: It's Halloween night, and you're wandering through the woods you were always warned to stay far away from, searching for vampires. They say curiosity killed the cat, but no one mentioned it could also get you laid.
Pairing: vampire!Jeonghan x afab!reader x vampire!Wonwoo
Genre: suggestive, one shot, vampire! au, supernatural! au
Rating: suggestive/mature
Word count: 1.9k
Warnings: blood, injuries, vampires, dry humping, lemme me know if I missed anything!
Note: Happy Halloween! This is my first attempt at a vampire fic so please be nice.
Thank you so much to Indi @wongyuseokie for the amazing banner! She ate for real.
Click here to join my taglist!
Reblogs are appreciated ♡
.ᐟMinors/blank/no age indicator blogs will be blocked.ᐟ
October 31st, Halloween, the one day you look forward to all year. In this small, sleepy town where nothing ever happens, Halloween is the rare time when everything feels alive. It's ironic, really, that a holiday meant to honour the dead and the supernatural is the only time the town truly comes to life.
Although plenty of celebrations and parties are happening around town, your mind is elsewhere: vampires. Rumours about the woods on the edge of town have been swirling for years. Some say it's home to secret gold mines; others claim there's a hidden graveyard for those who have sinned way beyond redemption, and many point to the string of murders that have occurred there. But what really grabs your attention is the rumour that vampires live there.
You've been told time and time again never to step foot into the woods, but hey, you can't stop curiosity now, can you? And that's why here you are on Halloween night, making your way through the woods you've been told to stay far away from. You chose tonight for this journey because Halloween is when vampires are supposedly most active—at least, that's what the internet said. You're really hoping it wasn't wrong.
The crunch of leaves and the distant hooting of owls greet you as you step into the woods. A chill runs down your spine as you take in your surroundings—the darkness wrapping around the trees gives the forest an eerie, foreboding feel. The shadows twist into strange shapes, making you glance over your shoulder and double-check your surroundings more often than usual.
You mentally curse yourself for not bringing a proper flashlight; your phone flashlight does the bare minimum to light the surroundings. After several minutes of walking, you stop in your tracks. You could swear you've passed this same tree four times already—or is it a different one? Damn, you might be lost.
'This might've been a stupid idea,' you think.
In too deep to back out now, you proceed to go further into the woods, a very bad idea, but your stubbornness overpowers your voice of reason a lot of the time. A sudden howl piercing through the sky stops you in your tracks. Wolves? No, that can't be. You must’ve misheard—it was probably just the wind, you tell yourself. But then, another howl echoes through the woods. Okay, wolves. Definitely wolves.
Quickening your pace, you decide to retrace your steps, hoping that will eventually lead you back to society. As you try to find your way out of the woods, you hear footsteps, multiple footsteps, heading toward you. Not wanting to risk a run-in with wolves, you take off running.
Unfortunately for you, you were never much of an athlete, so you end up tripping over a rock and falling, cutting your palm on the jagged ground. Cursing out loud, you pick yourself up and observe the cut; it was fairly deep, and blood continuously started to pour out of it, staining your hand. You frown and squeeze your hand, hoping to stop the blood from flowing.
Okay, now you definitely need to get out of the woods. If the wolves don’t get you, the inevitable infection from your wound will (though you’re being a bit dramatic). Frowning, you continue to head to where you think you came from.
Stumbling aimlessly through the eerie forest, you suddenly come upon a massive mansion. It looks like something straight out of the Victorian era, with towering spires, gothic architecture, and plenty of decay to match. Your small flashlight barely does it justice, making it hard to fully appreciate the mansion's haunting beauty.
Could this be it…? Remembering the whole reason you ventured into the woods, you head inside the mansion. You're determined to encounter at least one vampire tonight.
The heavy wooden doors groan as you push them open. You take a deep breath as you absorb the sight of the eerie mansion. Inside is a stark contrast to the exterior; it feels much more cohesive, with relatively recent furniture and a sense that the place isn’t falling apart.
The air stilled. It became quiet, too quiet. The only sound you can hear is the beating of your own heartbeat ringing in your ears. Gulping, you shakily make your way towards what you assume is the fireplace. It was dark, perfectly in line with the gothic theme that enveloped the entire building.
Above you hung a large portrait of two men, hauntingly beautiful, with pale, almost white skin and dark maroon eyes that seemed to pierce through you. Their jet-black hair framed their faces perfectly. They wore white blouses that you assume are from the Victorian era, adorned with very expensive jewellery. One man was slightly shorter than the other, but his looks would put any model to shame; his longer hair framed his face beautifully, making you think, "a fallen angel". The taller man had shorter hair and more sharper features, yet he appeared just as ethereal. His mesmerising eyes seemed to draw you in, almost as if they were sucking your soul. Another striking feature was their lips, a deep red, almost as rich as their eyes.
"Damn, if these guys are the vampires, then I wouldn't mind getting my blood sucked by them," you muse out loud.
"Oh really now?" A voice purred next to your ear. You whip your head around to see who it is, only to be greeted with nothing.
"W-Who was that?!" You shout, cursing under your breath as your voice comes out shakier than you'd like.
"I’m sure you already know who, bunny," a voice whispers from behind. You spin around, but there's only darkness.
"I-I know how to fight!" You yell, trying to sound confident.
"Ooh, a fighter. I like that," a deeper voice purrs, this time right next to you.
Suddenly, your phone is snatched from your hand, plunging you into complete darkness. Panicking, you throw punches into the air, hoping to hit something—anything—but you freeze when a hand catches your fist.
"She really is a fighter, Wonwoo," the first voice chuckles; even his laughter seems to have a surreal feel to it. You hear another low chuckle from behind, which you assume is Wonwoo.
Wonwoo then wraps his arms around your waist, plunges his nose into the crook of your neck, and takes a long whiff.
"You smell absolutely divine, doll," he moans; you can't help but shiver at his actions.
Suddenly, the room flickers to life with candlelight, making the already creepy mansion even more eerie. You can now see the man standing before you, and you gasp; it's the same man from the portrait, the one with the longer hair.
He gently uncurls your injured fist, running his tongue slowly along the wound, and lets out a moan. Your breath catches at the sight, and you can't help but shiver at his actions.
"She likes that, Jeonghan," chuckles Wonwoo. You blush at Wonwoo's words, embarrassed cause it's true.
"You want this just as bad, don't you, bunny?" Jeonghan purrs before licking another stripe up your palm, causing you to let out a soft whimper.
"Don't even try and deny it, doll; we can hear your heartbeat," whispers Wonwoo before licking the shell of your ear.
You gulp, your mouth dry as sandpaper, and your heartbeat thunders in your ears. Sure, you came into the woods hoping to encounter vampires, but now that they're standing right before you, you're unsure what to do. They're so alluring, their very presence making your head spin.
Wonwoo leans down, gently nipping at the skin of your neck, making your heart lurch. You can feel him smirk against your skin.
"It has been a while since we had a blood servant," he mumbles against your skin. Jeonghan hums, a small smirk painting his face.
"What do you say, bunny? Want to become our blood servant?" Jeonghan purrs.
You open and close your mouth like a fish out of water, completely at a loss for words. Yes? No? If you say yes, are you doomed to serve them until death? If you say no, will they kill you on the spot? Your mind races, spinning with uncertainty. Maybe coming out here wasn't such a good idea after all.
"Looks like our little bunny is unsure," snickers Jeonghan.
"How about we give you a taste, then?" Wonwoo whispers before sinking his teeth into your neck.
You gasp and freeze, paralysed by the sudden sharp prick. You brace yourself for intense pain, but instead, you're flooded with overwhelming pleasure. It feels as though every nerve in your body is igniting, sending wave after wave of pleasure through you. Your arousal soaks your panties, and you can already feel it sticking to your skin. You've never experienced anything like this before—nothing even close. You close your eyes, savouring the sensation as your head spins. It feels like you're floating.
"I can smell your arousal from here, bunny. Does it feel good?" Smirks Jeonghan, you can only whimper in response.
"Barely drunk from you, and you're already dripping," Wonwoo chuckles against your neck.
He spins you around to face him, and you instinctively lick your lips as you take him in. Deep maroon eyes with a piercing gaze, skin so pale it's almost white, making his blood-stained lips stand out even more. He looks at you with a smirk.
He cups your cheeks and presses his lips to yours, letting you taste your own blood—metallic and tangy. You melt into the kiss, already addicted to the way his lips feel against yours. Desperate for more, you press up against Wonwoo and start grinding against him. You can feel Wonwoo smirk into the kiss; Jeonghan chuckles at your actions.
"If you become our blood servant, I can guarantee you pleasure beyond what you've ever felt, bunny," hums Jeonghan.
Pulling away from the kiss, you turn toward Jeonghan; your mind clouded with thoughts of them and nothing else. Any sense of reason is long gone. Without a second thought, you agree—you'd say yes to anything at this point.
"Good choice, bunny," smirks Jeonghan before effortlessly carrying you. You gasp and wrap your arms and legs around him.
He sinks his teeth into your neck and starts drinking your blood. You let out a moan at the euphoric feeling washing over your body. Maybe it's because you're already lightheaded from the first time, but this feels ten times more intense. It's as if you've died and gone to heaven, but what's happening is far from heavenly.
Your whole body trembles, and you feel like you have just had an orgasm. You whine out Jeonghan's name as you feel him squeeze your ass. He detaches his lips from your neck and runs his tongue over the bite mark; you shiver at his actions.
Panting, you glance down at the vampire. His pupils are blown wide, lips stained with blood, and a smirk curling on his face. You catch a glimpse of his sharp canines as he watches you.
"We're lucky to have caught such a pretty blood servant," smirks Wonwoo, causing Jeonghan to chuckle.
"Let's take care of the aching between your thighs," hums Jeonghan. "I bet you want to be filled up with our cocks, right bunny?"
"I bet she can take both of us at once," chuckles Wonwoo, causing you to clench around nothing.
"Let's find out, shall we?" Jeonghan smirks before heading toward what you assume is their bedroom.
And that's how, on Halloween night, you became a blood servant—bound to serve the two vampires for the rest of your life.
Taglist: @tinyelfperson @gyuguys @stay-tiny-things @tomodachiii @unlikelysublimekryptonite @miyx-amour @iamawkwardandshy @codeinebelle @brownbunnyb @do-you-remember-summer-127 @jennwonwoo
If your username is striked through it means I couldn't tag you! Make sure to turn off the visibility settings so that I can tag you!
#kvanity#thediamondlifenetwork#k-labels#svthub#jeonghan smut#jeonghan x y/n#jeonghan x you#jeonghan x reader#jeonghan imagines#jeonghan fanfic#wonwoo smut#wonwoo x y/n#wonwoo x you#wonwoo x reader#wonwoo imagines#wonwoo fanfic#svt smut#svt x y/n#svt x reader#svt x you#svt imagines#svt fanfic#seventeen smut#seventeen x y/n#seventeen x you#seventeen x reader#seventeen imagines#seventeen fanfic#yoon jeonghan x reader#yoon jeonghan imagines
171 notes
·
View notes
Text
off the grid — II
✰ max verstappen x !driver reader ✰
summary: you strived for nothing but perfection. nothing less was expected from you. being a female formula one driver made it even harder for you to make mistakes. you figured that dating max, your biggest rival yet, wasn't a mistake...right...?
genre: kinda slow-burn? mostly angst, eventual fluff at the end.
wc: 5k
a/n: hello everyone! sorry for the slight delay in posting this part, i was super busy yesterday and couldn't proofread this part. please do let me know if there are any spelling / grammar errors in this part. all of the other parts of this fic will go in the masterlist <3 thank u so much for reading
“nothing happened in the way i wanted, every corner of this house is haunted.” - gracie abrams, ‘i miss you, i’m sorry’
——— ₊ ⊹ BAHRAIN GRAND PRIX
"kelly, stop it. we're in public— what are you doing?" max was exhausted with his relationship with his girlfriend. she always made his personal life quite tiring with all of her demands. she harshly pushed him away, not wanting to hear anything else from her boyfriend.
max always tried his best in his relationship with kelly, always listening to her demands, always trying to make him happy, always trying to appease whatever demon that was inside of kelly for the day. but it seemed like his actions were not enough for her.
"no max, i'm done. if you don't want to put a ring on my finger, then it's over," kelly had tears in her eyes before she turned her back on max.
with those last words, she stormed off.
and max didn't bother to chase after her anymore because he, too, was done with their relationship. it was his last straw.
he didn't really understand how it started but kelly started becoming obsessed with the idea of marriage. he had told her in the middle of their relationship that he wasn’t looking for someone to marry. personally he didn’t really want to get married, it came with too much legal issues that he wasn’t looking forward to in case their relationship fell apart.
"what if we got married max?" kelly rubbed her dainty fingers over max's knuckles, max stiffens up at the question before looking at her with a sigh, his look was all that she needed for her to roll her eyes and look away, snatching her hand that was lovingly holding his own.
max didn't understand where this was coming from, he had explained his boundaries very early in the relationship, that he, himself, didn't really understand the concept of marriage or want it.
"love, we talked about this. i don't want to get married, i like things how they are," max touched her forearm, but she moved away from him, a bit too harshly for his liking.
the comfortable atmosphere built around their shared apartment had shattered, and all there was left was the fragments of that comfortable space.
"what if p grows up and she asks, 'mommy, why do you not have a ring around your finger?' then what max?" kelly snapped, standing up with her back faced towards him, not wanting to be near his proximity. max looked away from her, anywhere but her.
"p will understand as long as you explain it to her, why are you so worried about that? she doesn't understand other than the games you install on her ipad and coloring. i seriously don't understand where this is coming from," max tried to stand up and touch her shoulder but she turned around roughly and glared at him.
"it does matter if she understands, what were you thinking?" kelly raised her voice, now getting angrier by the second, "i'm going to be forty soon and still no ring on my finger max, time's ticking and i'm going to have what i want or it's over."
he had caught wind about people on social media bullying her, how they called her a groomer when she approached him when he was young and he didn’t know how to feel about it.
they all called the relationship "inappropriate" and kelly preying on a young driver, but he didn't think it was at the time. now, he was starting to realize that maybe it was.
maybe she wanted things from him a man her age at the time couldn't give her.
max's mind was clouded when he got in that car at australia, it was hard for him of course. he had a long relationship with kelly but he knew when to stop when he felt tired.
the dnf made it harder on max, fucking engine failure. there were rumors going around, as per usual, on why max decided to dnf that day. a lot of people had assumed it was because of his breakup with kelly but that wasn't the reason but it sure as shit added onto his sour mood.
the season went past and he tried his hardest, scoring points, getting poles, wins. he felt hollow though, he still couldn't get over the break up which was uncharacteristic of him.
max scolded himself sometimes, for loving too much. for giving the people who didn't deserve the love he gave. but sometimes he knew that he was a bit rough around the edges, his personality was a lot and he knew not a lot of people were willing to put up with it.
that included you.
he felt horrible for causing you that much heartbreak but he didn't know how to properly show remorse to you, it was his fault and he knew it. both accidents were his fault now that he looked back and actually thought about what actually happened.
then the incident with you and him, sleeping on him just to find some semblance of comfort.
and for once in his life, he was scared.
not scared that you might hate him even more for trying to comfort you, but more so of the fact that how comfortable he felt when he was comforting you.
but after months of heartbreak, that was the first time he didn't think about kelly.
your rookie year ended on a positive note at least, ferrari had managed to overcome all odds and win the constructor's cup with charles becoming the driver's champion.
on the off-season, as soon as he got home. he entered his apartment he shared with kelly, with her sitting there as if she was waiting for him.
"i'm taking the apartment, you have a lot of money. get yourself a new one."
the words coming out of her mouth were cold, and as if that wasn't enough, she had already packed his things into boxes, thankfully they were labelled and not just strewn about without care.
the first night he had settled into his apartment, he was in his feels. he felt upset, rightfully so. he just got kicked out of his own apartment that he paid for, taken by his, now, ex-girlfriend to live in.
and just his luck, the convenience store down the street (which he thought was going to be open around the clock) was closed.
'why the fuck do these things happen to me when i'm already feeling shitty?' he thought to himself before begrudgingly trudging up the street back to his apartment, letting his feelings out in the elevator, when the elevator doors opened, he was caught off guard by a pretty ferrari driver.
max greeted her with as much warmth as he could muster up, "oh, hi y/n."
"what are you doing in my apartment complex?" were the first things out her lips.
SECOND YEAR ⋆˚𝜗𝜚˚⋆
you and max never really talked about whatever the fuck happened in that ferrari motorhome that night and you didn't want to. your mental health was already fucked as it is and you didn't want to make it worse for the second season, if you were even getting a seat in the next season.
thankfully, ferrari saw the potential in you and resigned with you for a multi-year contract, up until 2027. surprisingly, you had offers from different teams but refused to meet up with them as you were already signed to the iconic red team.
it was finally the winter break and everyone was off races until next year, it felt good. not having to attend multiple parties every month and socialize with people that you really didn't give a fuck about but needed their networking in order to boost your career.
being a female in motorsports was hard, you had never shared your hardships with anyone. knowing that they probably didn't have the same difficulties as you getting through the ranks.
you remembered the taunts, the teasing looks from the boys you were competing against in the karting days but those looks and the taunts gave you enough to propel you to the spot you had now.
"oh look, it's the girly girl driving today. must be an easy race for you ey?" one of the friends of the boy that you were competing today taunted you near enough so you could hear.
it hurt. hearing those words hurt.
you were 14.
and was just discovering the world of misogyny that the motorsports world was filled with.
the competing driver just laughed and shrugged him off.
your dad had looked at you softly before bending down to look you in the eye, he had heard all of the taunts, seen all of the looks and knew how down you felt in your career, but he always encouraged you to push forward.
"you got this champ, ignore them. you are miles a better driver than he is, go wipe the floor with his ass."
and that you did.
you continued to wipe the floor with his ass that race, the smug look on your face was priceless as you saw him look at you angrily and storm off to cry to his daddy about how a girl just beat him in a race.
the plan was stay at home in monaco until someone dragged you out, but a late night snack sounded nice.
begrudgingly listening to your grumbling stomach, you decided to get up and head to the convenience store down the street of the lavish apartment complex you lived at in monaco.
it felt refreshing just to be out and about in monaco without a care in the world what strategies and what upgrades ferrari would bring the next weekend. it wasn't the hardest job in the world but you told yourself that you deserved this long-needed break.
you exited your apartment and locked it, making sure to bring all you needed, your phone and apartment keys and access keycard. your eyes travelled to the door in front of you with lots of folded but used boxes in front of them.
you wondered if someone had moved in but pushed it to the back of your mind as you heard your stomach grumble again.
okay maybe ramen doesn't sound too bad right now...
you walked over to the elevator and pressed the button, but before you could, the doors opened and you were surprised to see who you were faced with.
"oh, hi y/n," max breathed out, his eyes were puffy and face was red as if he was just finished crying, you were genuinely concerned as he exited out of the elevator, the words stuck in your throat. you didn't know what to say, so you blurted something out.
"what are you doing at my apartment complex?" it sounded stupid, and you quickly reprimanded yourself for it inside.
max locked eyes with you before letting out a laugh, despite the despair that was lingering in his eyes, "you do know that multiple people can live in an apartment, right? that's what they're supposed to do."
you internally smacked yourself on the head before letting out a small laugh as well, the elevator doors closed as it dinged to another floor. you looked away from max, trying to press the button for the elevator to come back but it was useless.
"were you heading out?" max asked as you didn't answer his last question, getting distracted from the elevator going to another floor. you finally looked back at him and nodded.
"sorry for the stupid question, i just didn't expect you to live here. on the same floor as me, no less," you spoke gently, as if not wanting to stir any unwanted drama off the grid in the off season, "but yeah, i was quite hungry so i wanted to go to the convenience store down the street to get a bite."
"it's not open 24 hours, i just left to go see myself," max shot you a small smile, "i mean, if you don't mind, i have some instant noodles if you want any?"
you wanted to decline, just go back to your apartment, sleep the hunger off but your idiotic self blurted out another stupid response.
"sure."
you were settled into his apartment and on his sofa, turns out it was the one right across from you. he just moved in. you also didn't know that max was a cat dad. having two cats lovingly named sassy and jimmy, named based from clubs located in monaco. you wanted to laugh at the stupidity of the names.
max was in his kitchen cooking up the instant noodles that he promised earlier. his cat, sassy— or was it jimmy? it was hard to tell them apart, they looked the same— was curled up in your lap, purring to its heart's content.
you pet the cat gently, liking the way she— or he?— purred. they sounded a little bit like an f1 car which made you giggle a little.
the sound of two bowls being set down in front of you on the coffee table broke you out of your little trance with the kitty, you looked up to see max's soft smile, sitting on the floor across from you.
"which one is this?" you ask as you point to the cat snoozing on your lap, max looked up from his bowl of instant noodles, before responding.
"that one is sassy," max spoke, grabbing a pair of chopsticks that he left on the table as he set the bowls down earlier, "come eat."
you nod as you sit on the floor, still across from him to take the chopsticks as well and start to dig into the instant noodles. it wasn't the best thing in the world but your stomach thanked you for it.
you both ate in a comfortable silence before jimmy approached you and started playing with the drawstrings of your hoodie, pawing at it and making you smile, "hi there, you like my hoodie?" you giggled as you pet the cat gently pawing and biting on the strings.
"excuse him, he's quite the playful one," max said in between bites of his noodles, you paid it no mind. the cute little bugger already stole your heart.
you continued eating in silence with him before thinking back to how you found him in the elevator, puffy eyed and red faced, you wanted to ask but was scared that it might come off as intrusive.
"if you don't mind me asking, are you okay?" you asked, going against your gut, assuming that he would probably do the same for you if he had found you in the elevator crying, "you looked like you had been crying earlier, is everything okay?"
max, who had his eyes locked onto you when you first asked the question now looked away to another part of the apartment, he took a pause before answering your question.
"i moved into this apartment because i broke up with my girlfriend and... it's just hard," max breathed out, as if the answer was tight in his chest, "we were in a relationship for four years, it's hard to let go of something like that, you know?"
you nod before finishing up your noodles, not really knowing what else to say. max also didn't add on top of what he said earlier.
it was only when you were getting up and go and excuse yourself back into his apartment when he said something, "thank you for the instant noodles max, i think it's time for me to head back to my apartment though."
"i- uh— do you want to watch a movie–? with me? or i mean if you're tired you can head back... i just need a little human company tonight if that's fine with you," max stuttered over his sentences and you couldn't help but find it cute for a moment.
you scolded yourself for a second before making another stupid decision for the night.
"okay."
testing the car felt great, no big problems whatsoever. lap times were more than satisfactory and it was time for bed. you were tired. being an introvert meant that there was limited social battery for people and it meant that it was time for bed.
"what are your thoughts on the car?" charles came up to you after you got out of yours, taking off your helmet and balaclava, you shot him a small smile.
"it feels better than last year, i think it's fine. i just have a small issue with the brakes, but so far it's alright. we'll just have to see in the first race," you spoke to him and he agreed with you about the brakes. they were kind of slow to respond to the touch, you had to tell your mechanics about that.
you off season had spent mostly with your friends and family. the occasional dinner at either your apartment or max's but that was it. you haven't contacted the other drivers, and they didn't either.
you had speculated that maybe it was because you were a woman and they were scared of women— that was a joke.
this round of testing was done in barcelona, catalunya wasn't one of your favorite tracks but you managed. you were excited to try out the car in abu dhabi though, one of your best tracks. scoring good lap times even when you were a rookie.
as you retired the car for the night, you took off your racing gear, gloves, suit and all. you wore a simple sweater and some shorts to get back to the hotel, but what you didn't expect was max to come up to you and talk.
"hey," he waved you over as you were about to leave the track, he was seen in some red bull gear.
of course he was.
"hey max," you waved at him, you didn't know whether to feel comfortable in his presence or awkward, considering you did spend a bit of time with him in the off season.
"how was your car? i saw you flying with charles earlier," max chuckled, you shrugged with a smile on your lips, the car did feel great. he wasn't lying when he said you were flying with charles.
"yeah, great speed and control for this year," you told him, fiddling with the strap of your bag, "how was your car? you got your problems from last year fixed?" you asked him, you had heard him complain about his "wagon" a few times when you guys were spending time with eachother in his apartment.
"unfortunately no, i told them that we're still having the same problems as last year. i guess it's better but it's still not 100%," max had told you before gesturing to the exit, "you wanna walk with me to the hotel?"
you nod and just listening to him talk the entire time you guys were walking to the hotel. you didn't feel like talking and he was the yapper in the dynamic so you let him talk your ear off, you didn't mind though.
"—and imagine! sassy was there, behind the door. staring at me like i did something wrong but she was the one that locked themselves inside of the room. i had a punch a hole in the door to get them. it was ridiculous," max shook his head as you guys entered the hotel lobby.
you just laughed and made your way to the elevators, thinking back to that time when you had found him in your apartment building, puffy eyed. i guess that was the start of the healing in your relationship, no longer angry at him but still feeling a little bitter about your could've been maiden win.
"your cats are adorable, i would forgive them," you had spoken softly to max while pressing the button in order to go to the floor you needed, max rolled his eyes.
"they're lucky i love them," max had scoffed sarcastically, "well, what about you? you don't really talk much about your personal life..."
"there's not much to talk about," you shrug and shove your hands in you pockets, your family dynamic was complicated. people who knew you on a deep personal level knew that and you didn't know whether you were ready to spill that particular can of worms to max just yet.
"my family life is not great, but i have friends to help. that's all i can say for now," you glance at max who had his eyes on you, but he nodded. he knew a thing or two about an unstable relationship with family.
"which floor are you staying at?" you ask him as the elevator dinged, trying to change the subject but not being subtle about it, signaling that it was at the current floor you guys were at, ready to pick you guys up and deliver you to whatever floor you desired.
"the twelfth, you?" max had asked as he stepped into the elevator as soon as its doors opened, you followed suit.
"i am too, i guess the drivers are all put in the same floor for ease," you shrug but max shook his head, objecting your statement.
"usually, it's the teams that decide which floors to put the drivers. it's based off of room availability. coincidentally, we just stay at the same floor," max had corrected you, you didn't say anything back to that. social battery more than dead.
you had thought it would be funny if you guys were placed right across from eachother just like at home. the elevator ride was filled in comfortable silence, you appreciated that it never felt awkward being silent for a period of time with max.
as the elevator dinged once again, you and max exited.
"well, i'm off to bed, goodnight max," you wave him off as he went right and you went left, "i hope you rest well, we have a flight to catch tomorrow."
you had walked away and he had too, but you heard something that made you turn around.
"you wanna fly with me?" max had almost blurted out, now you fully turned to look at him, you guys were quite far from eachother.
"what..?"
"i have a private jet, do you want to fly with me?"
"max, what the hell? why do you have a private jet?"
"just answer the question."
"i'll double check with my manager and give you an answer later," you shook your head, him having a private jet was definitely not something out of his character, but you didn't know. he never brought it up on the late nights you would spend with him.
"alright, goodnight y/n," max had a small smile toying on his lips, he was waving before you rolled your eyes playfully and waved back, turning back around to rest up.
he's insane.
there you were the next day, on a flight straight to abu dhabi sat with max verstappen. no one had asked for a ride with him, so it was just the two of you on the plane with flight crew.
you didn't know whether to thank the gods or to curse them out for ferrari not having booked a flight for you yet last night.
you were chatting with him, about and anything except for your cars or the race upcoming in abu dhabi. you didn't want to think about that right now, you had told him at the start that you were feeling anxious about it and he respected your wishes and didn't talk about it.
as you landed in abu dhabi, ferrari staff were awaiting your arrival. max was hot in pursuit behind you, you figured it would've been nice to talk and say thank you for the flight but one of the ferrari staff present, your pr manager jessica had come up to you to interrupt your train of thought.
"so, y/n. we have some media coverage to do today, you have a few things to say and address," jessica had explained but you looked up at her confused, what did she mean by 'address'?
max was right behind you and gave you a teasing look that said, 'being bombarded with work already?'
you wanted to roll your eyes and laugh.
when did your relationship get that casual?
"can i at least thank max for the flight before you throw me into media duties?" you rubbed your temples as jessica handed you over an ipad filled with things you needed to answer and address.
jessica lets you go with her hands up held in the air, like she was a guilty criminal.
you turn and look at max who was now next to you, "thank you for the flight max, it was nice chatting with you," you told him before he gave you a small smile.
"no problem, call me if you need another flight. i need a new jet buddy anyway, last one told me to fuck off and stole my apartment," he waved you off before walking away, you really wanted to laugh now. he was so silly.
you finally looked over to the ipad before gasping.
address relationship rumors with max verstappen.
what the fuck was happening?
you were on the press conference line up for today, and of course pr responses rolled off your tongue as if you gave a fuck.
you just wanted to drive, why were press conferences so necessary for you to drive?
"last question for l/n before we end the press conference," one of the journalists spoke up as you nodded, mic up on your mouth, ready to give whatever bullshit they wanted to hear, "what is your current status with max verstappen?"
you wanted to vomit.
"sorry, what do you mean by that? can you clarify?"
"rumors are spreading around that you were spotted boarding his private jet, do you have a comment?"
"well, all i can say is that if i was a man, this news wouldn't be happening. i'm just friends with verstappen, nothing more, nothing less. please refrain from asking me ridiculous questions like these, i just want to drive," you had shot back, thinking that the question was ridiculous, all because you were on the same flight as him?
the press conference wrapped him and charles nudged you, a teasing look on his face.
"'i just wanna drive', ey?" charles laughed and you smiled at his teasing look, knowing that it was all in good fun, "nice job at shooting down the journalists. they have no boundaries sometimes."
"thank you, just because i'm a woman," you joked back and charles laughed, "let's make this testing worth it because i want to beat his ass now."
the abu dhabi grand prix weekend was in full swing, the paddock being filled with people here to watch the race or staff from respective teams trying to wrangle their drivers or trying to fetch important people crucial for the race.
fireproofs were on and a ferrari cap was sat atop of your head, waiting for the go ahead of the engineers for you to sit in your car and finally drive.
quali day today, and you were starving for a fight.
"you look so serious, amour," a soft voice spoke up as you tore your gaze away from your car, looking up at the owner of the voice. it was alexandra, charles' girlfriend.
"oh hey, alex," you laughed, stood up and greeted her, "how are you doing? i haven't been seeing you around the paddock," alex hugged you and smiled at you, she was always nice to you, much like her boyfriend.
"yeah, i've been busy with dealing with things at home, how are you? you seem quite eager for today's quali," alex had asked as you laughed, apologizing for your seriousness today.
"i was quite angry at the journalist the other day for bringing up me and verstappen's relationship status. i just want to take pole today. don't mess with an angry woman, right?"
alex would only laugh at your statement, knowing full well that you were right.
"AND WITH THAT L/N MAKES A STATEMENT TO ALL THE PEOPLE WHO HAVE DOUBTED HER IN HER ROOKIE YEAR, SHE TAKES POLEEEEEEEEEEEEE!"
"let's fucking go anthony!" you screamed into the radio as he informs you that you start first place in tomorrow's race.
"you deserve this, you worked so hard to get up to this point. i'm very proud of you kid," anthony spoke to you through the radio before you pulled into the pits, your side of the garage was awaiting you with full smiles on their faces.
and this is why i race.
you exit the car and you're immediately swarmed with hugs and cheers.
"l/n takes pole, l/n takes pole, l/n takes pole!" were the cheers of your engineers as they lifted you on their shoulders and screamed, the screams in the crowd mixed with the adrenaline of the pole made you smile the widest.
"I TAKE POLE THIS WEEKEND, LET'S FUCKING GO!" you yell on the top of your lungs, your engineers were so happy. everyone was happy.
you were rewriting the history of motorsport by force, whether they liked it or not.
you were one of the first few women to enter f1 and the first woman to take pole ever.
this was your break. this was what you deserved– no, this was what you worked hard for. all those years of people doubting you, telling you that you had no place in the sport, that you didn't know how to drive, that you didn't deserve to drive all because you were a woman. to prove all of your doubters wrong. to tell the world that, hey. i'm here, i'm here to prove every single person wrong.
and as if a weight was lifted off your chest, tears freeflowed onto your cheeks.
i fucking took pole today and i'm gonna win again, and again, and again.
you exhale deeply, it was refreshing to not see any cars in front of you for the first time ever. starting front row, on pole no less was exhilarating.
you weren't going to let this go to waste. you were going to take this opportunity by the balls and turn into your first win.
you felt it in your bones.
"AND FOR THE FIRST TIME THIS SEASON, IT'S LIGHTS OUT AND AWAY WE GO!"
————————————————————
hi there, an anon had recently informed me that y/n being the first female driver in formula history is actually not accurate in real life, so i edited the parts for off the grid from this point backwards to fix any mistakes in my writing. so sorry for not doing my due diligence and actually researching the history of women being in this sport. looking forward to do better in the future.
- aria 🤍
#leclarifies fics#max verstappen x reader#max verstappen x yn#max verstappen x you#max verstappen fic#max verstappen fanfic#max verstappen#max verstappen angst#max verstappen fluff#f1 fic#f1 fanfic#f1 x reader#max x reader#verstappen x reader
183 notes
·
View notes
Note
hi bb 🥹
could you do like a deep comfort with Billie? where reader is feeling really anxious and we’re just sitting in the bed and she just helps talk out our troubles and thoughts and just holds us and is physically intimate with us (fluffy) to help us calm down <3
New Chapter
Billie Eilish x female reader !
A/n: I saw this tiktok and ugh I just needed to write something like it. Hope you enjoy nonnie ! (Ok so embarrassing update. Sad update LMAO but I forgot Ms billie can't get us pregnant -i just didn't think the idea through- so I'm making it a bit creative and I'm praying you enjoy, just try not to think of it as legitimate and focus on the comfort okur :D) - also sorry if it's short 😔 - also kinda went way off your request :( I hope you like this tho nonnie
Summary: you're always an anxious mess, so once you find out this news you have a complete breakdown.
Warnings: angstyish, comfort, suggestive mentions ??? Anxiety attack, I think that's it !
Masterlist
Uh oh. Was all you thought this morning when you felt ill. You had so much work to get done you did not need to get a cold or the flu ontop of that. Then it hit you on what it could be. Surely not though.
Rewind to a few weeks ago. You and Billie had just had a date night and you wanted to try something new, per her suggestion. Slightly drunk you both decide to use the ejaculating dildo. But last time which wasn't that long ago, you were trying for a baby. You had been finding anonymous donors for a while and she finally found one. You ended up forgetting about it, so you thought nothing could happen because I mean, it was old. Surely nothing could attach to anything right?
Wrong. This feeling was getting worse as the morning went on. Billie was over at Finneas' working on some music related things. So she wasn't there. You had bought pregnancy tests like a month ago when you and Billie came up with the random idea. You were ready then, kind of. Now? Fuck no. Your job had been getting worse and you were honestly thinking of quitting. But you couldn't do that. Even if Billie insisted that it'd be ok, she could pay for the both of you she says. But you said she shouldn't ever have to do that.
Working was your everything even if this job was the putz, you've always loved working. You procrastinate looking at this stupid test. The whole baby thing was merely a thought you guys weren't 100% on it. Atleast you weren't. A human growing inside you, that's so much to think about. Children are a huge responsibility. Your head soon feels light, trying to calm your nerves. "Don't be stupid, this is just nothing. Turn it over." You try and convince yourself. Your hand trembles as you do, fully expecting 'not pregnant'
Wrong again. Your eyes widen tremendously. "Fuck, no no-" You accidentally drop it starting to freak out. Your chest feeling extra heavy. And just in time to freak out more, the front door opens. "Hey baby! I'm back." Baby.. Baby. Ones growing inside you. Your mind races. Shit, fuck. Your freakout continues. Your breathing becoming labored. Trying to calm down as your heart rate picks up. Pointless. "Y/n?" You try desperately to think of something, how on earth do you even explain this to her. 'Oh hey, yeah I'm pregnant.' Not to mention how scared you were.
You didn't want this not now, and you honestly weren't sure if you ever would. That's probably just the anxiety talking, but all you could think about was how scary this all was. Scared wasn't even the right word for how you were feeling. And the pain in your heart was telling you that. She comes into the bathroom looking at you with worry. "What's going on-?" Then she saw your teary eyes, panic flooding her. "Hey, hey. What's up?" She grabs your face gently. "Talk to me, please." But she stops herself realizing you were about to have a panic attack.
"Ok, look at me, I'm right here." Her hands grab yours going to put it on her heart like she always does, but you retract them. Shoving them in your hair. "I cant do this." You say breathing heavy. Still stuck on what you had just read on that stupid stick. It's all you could think about right now. "Do what babe?" That worried her more. What on earth were you talking about. "This can't be real- I have to be dreaming." You then say clutching your beating heart, shaking your head in disbelief. She grabs your face again, never harsh. "What. Is going on." Her thumb swipes your tear stained cheeks.
In attempt to calm you, and it worked for a moment. How do you even tell her. "I-.." You began but tear up again. You couldn't find the words at first, buy you try so hard. "I'm pregnant." You decide to just blur out, ripping of the bandaid, the stuck. Sticky. Bandaid. She gives you a confused look. "Babe-" She doesn't believe you, you wish you didn't believe you. "You do realize-" But you turn around before she could finish, grabbing the test and putting it in her hands. She widens her eyes, seeing it. Even more confused than she was before. Then her brain clicks. "The dildo.." you hear her mumble.
You're pacing, but she grabs you. "Hey, it's ok. I promise this will be all o-" "No. I can't do this, I don't think I ever could. This is so scary and." You stop feeling your chest heave. "Baby." She then says. "Yeah, ones growing in me. A human, I can't do that." She grabs you again, spotting how another attack was coming on, her hands grabbing yours and instinctively putting them on her heart. One of your coping mechanisms. "Look at me, we can do this I promise." You sob. "It was old how'd it even-" She brings you into her. Wrapping her arms around you. "I don't know my love... I don't know." But that's all you needed to stay calm, her warmth was incredibly comforting. Her voice calming every nerve inside you.
Just like it always did. You wrap your arms tightly around her. Burying your head into her chest. Lettung the initial shock die down. Heart going back to normal after awhile. Her hand gently caresses your hair, kissing the crown of it. "I'm here, which will be the main thing and we will get through this together no matter what." Her soothing touches and voice was all you needed. That's what helped in the end. You kinda wished you had done it when she was home, knowing that if she had been, you could've potentially avoided a anxiety attack. Still holding you close as you did so, letting you know that all of this would be ok. "What if I suck, what if it hurts-"
But she stops you, really not wanting you to think about this right now. "Hey, don't worry about that right now ok?" She pulls you back getting you to look at her. "I know you're scared. Fuck, I am too. But we got this." Her finger moves a loose strand out of your face, holding it once again. "You're good with kids, so good with kids. I'm just worried that I won't be good with it." Her head shakes. "You'll be amazing. You've got so much love in you, I know once it's here you'll be the best. Mother. Mark my words." You smile at her brightly. Everything she was saying soothing every worry. You were so glad to have someone like that in your life.
"I love you." She then says, making you cry out of happiness this time.
"I love you more. I'm so glad out of anyone in this world, you're the one I'm doing it with."
"And that's never changing."
Lil note, since I felt like I didn't get your request like you wanted and it's kinda bugging me (a lil mad at myself) I'll do a little blurb of a small idea that I got !
#billie eilish#billie elish icons#billie ellish lyrics#billie#billie eilish x reader#billie eilish fanfiction#billie elish moodboard#billie eilish x you#billie eilish fluff#billie eilish angst#billie eilish comfort#billie eilish x y/n
164 notes
·
View notes
Text
never yours to have
brothers bsf!jude bellingham x fem!reader
summary: he was never yours but it didn't stop you from wishing he was
a/n: i am RUSTY so please show this some love thanks 😌 i'm also not really an angsty writer so this is not my normal style
navigation masterlist
𖡼.𖤣𖥧𖡼.𖤣𖥧
10 years you'd known jude. he was 11 and you were 10. he was best friends with your brother. you'd been close for as long as you could remember. all his moves to different countries you'd been there. all his hard times you'd been there and him vice versa. there was never any sort of label between you as you got older. your brother had always told jude you were out of bounds and told you jude was out of bounds and that was that.
you'd be lying to yourself if you said you didn't find him attractive, of course you did. but you were certain of two things: he was your brothers best friend and he had one hell of a reputation for being a fuckboy. you couldn't really blame him for that second part, but you always told yourself it was something to be weary of. you'd never be reduced to a number, and your brother would no doubt kill you and jude if something happened anyway.
little did you know your feelings were being reciprocated ten times stronger. everytime he was near you his heart skipped a beat. it was wrong. maybe that's why he wanted you so badly, because he knew he could never have you. you were his best friends sister, strictly off limits. but he couldn't help it. your smile, your laugh, your eyes, your voice, everything about you was perfection. to jude, you were the most beautiful person inside and out. and oh how he wished you could be his person.
your brother had decided that it was necessary to have a huge house party for his birthday, and you'd been forced to go. you weren't exactly happy to be, much preferring a quiet evening but the prospect of seeing jude after him being away for so long made you alot more excited than you wanted to admit. you couldn't help but keep glancing over to the door, waiting for jude to arrive. but when he finally did you wished he hadn't. he brought a girl? not just any girl either, quite frankly she was the most beautiful girl you'd ever seen and there she was hanging off his arm. she was perfect and she had jude. bitch.
it was immature, it was petty and it was stupid. nothing had ever happened between you and jude, you had always been strictly friends so you weren't really sure why you felt the way you did. why did this have to be the time you realised your feelings? but you were still angry, still hurt. it was irrational and you knew it, so your solution was to get drunk and avoid jude like the plague. but you couldn't run forever
"where have you been hiding?" he appeared behind you.
"shit jude. why would you sneak up on me like that?" your drink had gone all down your top. perfect.
"m sorry. come here" he grabbed a towel and attempted to dry you, something which any other time would be completely fine with you. but this time it felt wrong. you snatched it out his hand, admittedly alot more aggressively than you intended. "what's with you? can't take the drink?" he was drunk, and his arrogance was no longer attractive, it was infuriating to you. "shut up jude. i just don't think your girlfriend would appreciate watching you feeling me up" you spat and turned on your heel.
but he followed you. "what the fuck does that mean?"
"just leave me alone jude"
"no what's with you? you've been avoiding me since you've i got here and now you're making digs"
"no i'm not"
"are you jealous?"
"i'm sorry?" was he serious?
"are you jealous?"
"i heard you the first time jude. no i am not. why would you even think that?"
"don't know, but it would explain why you're acting so stupid"
you had nothing to say to that. ultimately he was right. you should be happy for him. why weren't you?
he paused, then talked slower and calmer than before.
"you know there's nothing going on between us right? we're just friends. she knows someone else here so we just decided to go together"
"then why was she all over you?" you mumbled, matching his low tone
"dunno. she'd had a few pre drinks so she was just tipsy"
you stared at him again.
"i like you y/n. not in a friend way. in a i can't think straight around you way. and your brother will probably kill me but i can't keep this in anymore. i don't want you to think i'm with anyone else because you're the only one i want"
"jude don't fuck me about" you were barely whispering, too afraid for this to all be some sort of joke.
"i wouldn't dream of it. i mean every word y/n. i think i'm inlove with you"
you'd unconsciously stepped alot closer to him, gazing up with glassy eyes. your brain screamed that he was drunk, that he was a player, that he was your brothers best friend but your heart said otherwise. you liked him too and you were gonna give it your best shot.
it was like he'd read your mind. one hand slipped to the back of your neck, pulling your lips to his while another fell to your waist. he was angelic. so gentle, so careful. he kissed you like you were fine china. a prized jewel that needed all the respect in the world. you melted into him. it was perfection, something you'd been dreaming of for years. the kiss meant absolutely everything to you. everything.
you could've kissed him forever if your brother hadn't come outside to find you both. "what're you both doing out here? it's cold come inside"
jude grinned at you in a way that had your heart bursting. "come on"
it wasn't long before he'd disappeared. and he'd been gone a while. you thought nothing of his absence until you noticed she was missing. you made your way upstairs looking for him when you heard someone else call out his name. another girl.
no, surely it wasn't.
the shout had come from the bathroom. you walked slowly, shaking hand turning the handle. you knew then and there what had happened. you knew you should've walked away. but you didn't. some twisted part of you wanted to check, and if it was what you thought it was, you wanted him to know you knew. you wanted him to know he'd hurt you. so you opened the door and you were met with a sight that made you feel physically sick. she hadn't seen you, clearly lost in her own please and her hair being held in jude's hand probably didn't help her ability to look in the mirror and see you. but he did. he met your eyes in the reflection. regret clouded his face instantly and he stopped. her head raised at his halted movements, clearly confused and you muttered a quick sorry before slamming the door.
you couldn't breathe. you needed to get out, get away from him and his lies. you ran back out to the garden that he'd confessed his feelings for you and kissed you in not even 20 minutes ago. you stood in the same spot and you let your tears fall.
why were you so upset? he was never yours to have
#it has been a min wow#writing this gave me a fat headache#jude bellingham#jude bellingham x reader#jude bellingham imagine#jude bellingham fanfic#footballer x reader#footballer x y/n#football imagine#footballer imagine
149 notes
·
View notes
Note
“You know me better than anyone. You always have.” for the prompts if it sparks!
(buddie) (788 words) i still have so many of these prompts left lmao, hope you like this one!
“I’m fine,” Buck says, and to his genuine surprise, he really means it.
Eddie raises an eyebrow. Rude, but fair. “You’re fine,” he echoes, flat and disbelieving.
Buck shrugs. “Yeah, man, I don’t know what to tell you.”
Eddie blinks a few times. “Is this what denial looks like? I think this might be what denial looks like.”
“Denial is a river in Egypt,” Buck replies cheerfully.
Eddie snorts. “I don’t think that’s how that saying goes.”
“Maybe not,” Buck allows. “Still fine, though.”
“Uh-huh,” Eddie says.
“I am!” Buck protests. “I’ll prove it. Ask me what happened.”
Eddie heaves a sigh and stands. “I’m getting a beer. Do you want a beer?”
“I mean, yeah, but not if it's a pity beer,” Buck calls after him.
“Wouldn’t dream of it,” Eddie tosses over his shoulder.
He comes back with a bottle of Buck’s favorite sour, which is ridiculous because the only place that sells it is a full thirty minutes farther than the closest grocery store. It’s absolutely a pity beer.
“Eddie!” Buck exclaims.
He feigns innocence. “I already had it!”
Buck narrows his eyes and takes the bottle from Eddie. “I’m choosing to believe you, but only because I really don’t want one of your godawful IPAs.”
Eddie rolls his eyes and settles back on the couch beside him. “If that’s what it takes,” he says.
“You’re supposed to be nice to me,” Buck says accusingly.
“I am nice to you,” Eddie says. He leans his head against the back of the couch and rolls it lazily to the side to look at Buck directly. “I’ll be nicer if you can find an adjective other that ‘fine’ to describe your current state of being.”
Buck blows a soft breath out through his nose. “I’m good, Eds, I promise.”
“I just—you were more broken up about Natalia,” Eddie says softly. “Why are you so okay with this?”
And that—that is the sixty-four thousand dollar question, isn’t it? Because Buck is fine. He’s not emotionless, but nothing he’s feeling is particularly painful or consuming. Being with Tommy was good and fun and nice, but breaking up with him didn’t feel like some terrible ending. It felt like finishing a chapter in a book that you can’t put down and staying up late because you just can’t wait to start the next one. He’s never really felt like that before.
“Honestly? I don’t know. I just am. You know me better than anyone. You always have. Why don’t you tell me?”
Eddie huffs a soft laugh. “Contrary to the beliefs of our friends and coworkers, I can’t actually read your mind, Buck.”
“I don’t know,” Buck teases, “I think you probably could if you tried.”
“Sure,” Eddie says. “Think of a number between one and ten.”
Eleven, Buck thinks, just to be an asshole. He grins at Eddie, who stares at him in mock concentration.
Eddie narrows his eyes. “Stop cheating,” he says.
Buck bursts out laughing. “See? Knew you were a little bit psychic.”
“More like fluent in Buck,” Eddie snarks back.
He feels soft and loose, and it hits him that this is what he’d never quite had with Tommy. They were never as in sync as he is with Eddie. He’s never felt so comfortable, so known as he does when he’s here. It’s an impossibly high bar to hold a partner to, but—
Buck’s jaw drops.
Eddie’s expression shifts to vaguely concerned confusion. “What?”
“Nothing,” Buck says quickly.
Eddie fixes him with an unimpressed look.
“I just, uh—” Buck stalls, frantically searching for words that haven’t quite coalesced yet in his mind. “Um. I think I—”
Eddie sits up a little straighter. “Buck,” he says, soft and worried. “It’s just me.”
It’s just Eddie. Eddie who knows him. Eddie who sees him. Eddie who makes fun of him and trusts him and treasures the little pieces of him he’s handed over throughout the years. It’s just Eddie.
It’s Eddie, and all at once Buck is realizing that it’s never going to be anyone else.
“I, uh—” Buck tries again. “I have to—I forgot to feed my neighbor’s cat,” he lies, standing so quickly that he bumps the coffee table and nearly knocks over Eddie’s mostly full beer.
Eddie’s brow creases. “Okay,” he says quietly, and Buck doesn’t think for a second he believes him.
“I’m just gonna—I’ll see you tomorrow?” Buck asks desperately.
“Course,” Eddie says.
“Thanks for the—bye!” Buck squeaks.
He hightails it out the door and throws himself behind the wheel of his Jeep. Of course he isn’t upset about Tommy. How could he be?
He’s been in love with Eddie the whole fucking time.
#thank you for the prompt anon i hope you liked it!#911#911 abc#buddie#buddiefic#buddie fic#fic#abbie writes#abbie answers#anon
185 notes
·
View notes
Text
hey guess who’s absolutely losing it over the stan twins again (spoiler alert its me)
so i was innocently scrolling tiktok when i was introduced to this DIABOLICAL au idea: firstly, what if ford really had shot stan with his crossbow when stan first showed up at the shack? and secondly, what if ford tried to bring him back to life frankenstein-style? (full credit to tiktok user @44boora for this idea, go check their account for some gut-wrenching art) (also… full post below the cut this got long)
but like i was thinking about this, ford bringing stan back to life specifically, and how dependent the concept is on this specific time in his life. i just feel like any other time and under any other circumstance, ford would have been able to, eventually, accept stan’s death. we see it at the end of weirdmageddon, where ford is ready to accept that the stan they all know and love is gone now that his memory has been erased. he tells mabel as much, and only realizes there’s hope for him when mabel is determined enough to push back against ford’s logic. ford believes very intensely in his own perception of the world. he believes in science. theoretically, he believes death is death, and there’s nothing he can do to change that.
but then, think of ford after he’s been betrayed by bill. this ford is at his absolute lowest. he can’t trust his own perception of the world anymore. he’s seen the truth of what their relationship was and the horrors he was so close to unleashing on their universe. he is desperate to right his wrongs. he’s losing sleep, his body is abused every time he closes his eyes, and the end of the world as he knows it is iminent if he doesn’t succeed in making the portal as secure and unusable as possible without dismantling it entirely. the only person he believes he can trust after everything that’s happened is stan. so he contacts him for help, and in his time waiting for him to arrive, cannot stop thinking of the worst-case scenario: that bill could still be coming for him. so when he opens the door to stan, his high-strung, paranoid brain doesn’t see stan, and he shoots.
he shoots his own brother with a crossbow and kills him.
ford is not usually one to blatantly ignore a scientific fact. again, death is death, and there’s nothing he can do about that. and yet, in a state of such intense grief, when his entire world is already close to crumbling around him and he’s holding his dead brother in his arms, there’s nothing else he can feasibly do but deny. so he does.
he lives in denial of a lot of things. that stan’s death is final, obviously, but also his reasonings for attempting to do the impossible and revive him. ford likes to believe he operates purely on logic, so he tells himself he’s doing this because he has to. without stan, he can’t prevent bill from entering their universe. he’s still the only person ford can trust, so reviving him is another step in his ultimate goal of stopping bill and saving the world. it doesn’t matter that its never been done before, ford will do it anyway. and he believes that he can, because as much as he thinks he’s moved on from his hubris, he’s still acting off the assumption that he’s special. he’s so far ahead of everybody else, so naturally, if anybody could accomplish the impossible and bring stan back from the dead, its ford.
and so he denies that the real reason he’s trying to save stan is not a logical one. he denies that he’s running entirely on emotions. it would be foolish to try something so risky and impossible and time-consuming if he were only doing it because of his crushing guilt and decade-long yearning, so he tells himself there’s so much more to it than that. he can’t just be doing this because he loves him, right? he’s not that shallow. he’s not that desperate.
and yet, he is. because as much as ford wants to deny it, he can’t live without stan. he can’t live with the knowledge that he was responsible for stan’s death. if he didn’t succeed, his grief would surely kill him.
#this concept is consuming my every waking thought#there’s just something so… cathartic? about their roles being reversed and ford saving stan#i feel like so many people downplay just how much ford loves him#the amount of times ford mentioned stan in his journal? UGH.#and that’s just journal 3!!! and only the things he wrote down!!#imagine how often he must have thought of him… he holds stan and his childhood so dear its devastating#there’s no question in my mind that ford would pull a victor fucking frankenstein just to see his brother again#i’m so devastated about this#ripping my hair out#gravity falls#stanford pines#ford pines#stanford#stanley pines#stan pines#ford and stan#stangst#stanford pines analysis#analysis#gravity falls au#frankenstein au
155 notes
·
View notes
Text
I might be the only person out there that wants it but god, I want poolverine where the relationship between Wade and Logan in is comfortably undefined. Where they don't have to have big love confession. No big jealousy.
They live together, they fight together, they fuck, and care about each other. And sometimes caring about each other is doing things to each other that woould horrify people who are not them. Also Logan sometimes fucks off for weeks at the time and it's FINE. After first 24 hours Wade gets hit with big ADHD "out of sight, out of mind" and doesn't pine.
And Logan always comes back, because he does love having place to call home and Wade is excited each time, because his favourite person is there, and they pick up as if nothing happened. There is no panic, they have goddamned eternity.
I want the drama to come in form of external horrors and problems. I want the two of them slot together like two really messed up pieces of the same puzzle and give each other safe space to be their own horrible selves without breaking each other hearts in the process.
Space guys. Give Wolverine long leash, so you don't smother him.
175 notes
·
View notes
Text
Zoro drunkenly (or while tipsy) confesses his love to Sanji one night but, in the same breath, tells him it’s okay—he knows Sanji is straight and is fine with them remaining "only" crewmates, he just had to get these feelings out of his system. And Sanji is overwhelmed because ???? Where is this even coming from? Why is the mosshead suddenly saying these things? This isn’t how their relationship is supposed to work. They don’t do the whole talking thing, especially not about serious topics?? When they have emotions to work through they fight each other, maybe throw in an insult or two. But this? This is unfamiliar territory for Sanji, so he’s really not sure how to react, much less respond.
So he doesn’t; he just stares at Zoro, his mouth opening and closing. Zoro takes that as his sign, gets up from the stairs he’d been sitting on, and leaves for the sleeping quarters. It is quite late, after all.
The next morning while preparing breakfast Sanji is oh so tense. He’s still mostly confused because there’s just no way the green-haired brute could harbor any such feelings toward another human being—least of all him—could he? And what if this does change things? Zoro said it wouldn’t, but who's to say?
And Zoro acts like nothing ever happened, he's just the same old moss ball that drinks too much Sake and takes way too many naps during the day and Sanji is so confused and he's getting angry now, because how can he act so nonchalant while the cook is over here losing his god damn mind over this? Does Zoro maybe not remember confessing? Had he been that drunk?
And obviously Zoro DOES remember, and he's NOT calm at all. He's freaking out internally every time he and Sanji are in the same room, but he'd rather lose his remaining eye than have anyone notice. So he does his best to play it cool. And yeah, maybe he takes a nap or two more than usual, and maybe he spends even more time working out in the crow's nest than is strictly necessary, but that is nobody’s business but his own, isn’t it?
Bla bla bla cue Sanji questioning the universe and his existence, freaking out over his sexuality, sloooowly coming to terms with it and then freaking out again about telling Zoro and what it means for the crew dynamic etc etc.
Also Robin being somewhere in the background of the story, smiling to herself, sipping on her tea, because of course she knows something is up, and she has a pretty good idea of what it is about, even if she doesn’t know the whole story, because she knows pretty much everything that’s going on on the sunny, cause she’s the responsible older sister™️.
————————————————————-
I have never attempted to write anything before, not even a rough draft like this, but Zosan has been living in my head rent free for the past few months now, and once the idea for a possible plot popped up in my mind I absolutely needed to note it down. Oh well, I hope I am not embarrassing myself too much by posting this.
Anyways, this is the most I can offer due to a lack of actual literary skills, but I still hope you enjoyed!
The obligatory English isn’t my first language speech: please excuse any spelling and grammar mistakes, I tried my best, I swear!
#might delete later#idk#is this embarrassing?#I sure hope not#one piece#zosan#sanzo#sanji#zoro#roronoa zoro#vinsmoke sanji#black leg sanji#op#fanfic#fanfiction#rough draft#fanfic idea#monkey d. luffy#monkey d luffy#luffy#straw hat pirates#nico robin
121 notes
·
View notes
Text
Fic Idea
Post 8x05
Bobby's acting strangely—not overtly, but just enough that everyone is side-eyeing each other. Buck decides to hang back after his shift one morning and catches Bobby still in his office. He asks him what's up, and Bobby admits that even though Gerrard is gone, that doesn't mean the budget cuts also went away. The good news is that with union pushback, instead of firing someone, they've agreed to rotating month-long furloughs, effective Nov 1st.
Buck immediately volunteers for A shift. He'll do Nov and Dec. Bobby says he can't let Buck sacrifice that much of his paycheck. Buck tells him he's got enough stocked away for a couple of months and that he wants to do this. It might even be good for him.
The first month is really good. Tommy works 48/96, so they get four full days off together and it's amazing. They had a mini vacation in Palm Springs where they went stargazing, hung out by the pool, and spent a day in Joshua Tree.
Buck gets in a lot of reading and knocks down his sizable tbr. He fills in as a sitter for Jee-Yun and enjoys the hell out of spending time with his niece (never mind her deep disappoint on the days Tommy isn't there too). He also gives himself a full day of doing nothing but scrolling his phone. He jumps from one Wikipedia article to another and explores exceedingly niche substacks.
And he still gets 118 time. At least once a week he goes in and cooks a filling lunch for them. He does it at the 217 too, where they sing his praises. He even spent two days being a firefighter when Chim came down with a cold. All in all his month off was pretty amazing, and he figures December would be a piece of cake. He's so sure that he tells Bobby he'll take January too.
Except it stops being a piece of cake. Two days in and he's already restless. It doesn't help when Tommy, Chim, and Eddie show up and tell him how they worked together for a rooftop rescue at Nakatomi Tower. Buck doesn't know the building and asks where it's located. The guys are dumbfounded. "Like, Die Hard, man," Eddie tells him. "Come out to the coast, we'll get together, have a few laughs?" Tommy says hopefully. "Die Hard...Yippee-ki-yay, motherfucker?" Chimney prods. "Oh, yeah," Buck says, having it all click together.
After that his aimlessness really takes hold. He keeps himself busy by feeding the 217 breakfast, lunch, and dinner on the days Tommy works. On his second day, one of Tommy's crew tells him, "You know, you should start taking orders. Make some money since they won't let you fight fires.
Buck's surprised at how fast the idea takes hold. He spends all four of his days with Tommy talking about it. He feels like he's vibrating out of his skin, and he falls just a little more in love with Tommy when he tells Buck that his idea is not only good, but that he knows a guy who can help make it happen.
Buck next goes to his team and explains his idea. He's going to open a sandwich service. Nearby fire stations will send in orders the day before, the sandwiches will be made the next morning, and delivered throughout the afternoon. Tommy has a friend who will rent out commercial kitchen space to him, and the employees will be fellow furloughed firefighters. They wouldn't be making the same pay, but they would be making something instead of draining out their savings like Buck. Eddie's all in, but Hen and Chim are a little more hesitant. Whether they come around or not, that's okay. Buck plans on starting small and thinks he can do it with three or four people, and he has multiple firehouses to pull from. But he knows his biggest hurdle is coming up with the start-up cash.
He toys with the idea of asking his parents for a loan. They were willing to fork over money for Chim and Maddie's down payment, and they swear up and down they want to make amends, so if Buck needs to use guilt to get a cut, he will. Before he can work up the nerve to ask, Tommy hands him a card and calls it an early Christmas present. Inside is a check for 10k. Buck's floored and misty eyed. He asks how and why and are you sure? Tommy pulls him in and tells Buck that he's sure. That he believes in Buck and wants to do whatever he can to help him succeed. Including making sandwiches.
And that's it. That's all I've got. Purged from the system.
#tevan#bucktommy#kinley#buck x tommy#tommy kinard#evan buckley#bucktommy ficlet#ficlet#tevan ficlet#something dumb i needed to get out of my head#fanfic idea
78 notes
·
View notes
Text
Possessed | Daryl Dixon x Fem!Reader
A/N: Thank you, @darylssunshine and @lazyneonrabbitt for some of the dialogue on this. Happy Halloween, everyone! Loosely inspired by @angelwings-crossbowstrings’s “Trick Or Treat” fic.
(GIF by @dixonscarol)
Daryl Dixon was a brave man. There was almost nothing in the world, old or current, that could terrify the man you loved more than life itself. He did not scare easy at all, and you were beginning to think that perhaps the man just did not have a fearful bone in his body.
Well, that was before you had suggested a horror movie marathon to celebrate Halloween, and you quickly realised that Daryl could indeed be a jumpy mess.
“Babe,” you began through fits of laughter, “it’s just a movie.”
Daryl grumbled and crossed his arms over his chest as he shifted his attention back to the movie that was playing on the television—a luxury that living in the Commonwealth provided you. “Quit yer laughin’, woman. Ain’t nothin’ funny ‘bout this.” He could feel the warmth spreading across his cheeks, and he prayed to whatever higher entity was listening that you could not notice it. “Can we jus’ finish the goddamn movie, please?”
You simply shook your head, clasping a hand over your mouth to stifle your giggles. “Sorry,” you apologised, your words muffled by your hand. “Yeah, we can. Think you can handle it?”
Daryl scoffed and leaned back against the couch, attempting to appear nonchalant. “‘Course I can. Ain’t no fuckin’ wimp.”
Despite his words, the moment the two of you quieted down and turned your attention back to the movie on the screen—Annabelle—another jumpscare happened. It startled Daryl so bad that he instinctively grabbed onto you, his arms wrapping around your shoulders as he shifted closer to you. If he moved any more, he would be clambering onto your lap, and you found it rather endearing.
Choosing not to say anything, and biting your lip to prevent another laugh from escaping your chest, you wrapped your arm around his shoulders, softly trailing your fingers over his arm. However, you barely began offering him comfort when he jumped again, and this time, you could not help the laugh that escaped you.
Daryl grumbled and removed himself from your embrace. He grabbed the remote and paused the movie, before turning back to you. “S’not funny.”
“It is!” you laughed, your hands clutching at your chest as you doubled over. “It’s just… you’re like the toughest person I know! Am I really supposed to believe that a horror film is enough to have you cowering into my lap?”
“I ain’t cowerin’,” Daryl countered with a scoff, but he knew that his words seriously contradicted what you had seen just a few moments prior. “I jus’ dun’ like dolls, s’all, and that bitch s’a haunted one.”
“Wait, seriously?” you asked incredulously. “You don’t like dolls? How come you never told me?”
Daryl shook his head. “‘Cause s’silly,” he mumbled. “I dun’ like them movies ‘bout haunted dolls.”
“Not even Chucky?”
“Nah. Bastard scares the hell outta me.”
“Hun, you could literally dropkick Chucky across the room if he came running after you,” you told him with a light laugh, your eyes sparkling as you looked at your husband.
“He ain’t even s’posed to be runnin’!” Daryl replied exasperatedly. “He’s goddamn plastic!”
“Well, dead people aren’t supposed to be able to run either, and you kill those every day without hesitation.”
The archer let out a small sigh and shook his head. “Yer one to talk. What ‘bout those lil’ spiders ya scream at when ya even so much as see ‘em?”
It was your turn to scoff. “It has eight legs and, like, fifty thousand eyes! That’s not natural.”
“Oh, and a possessed doll is?” Daryl countered, and you knew he had a good point.
“Touché, Dixon,” you conceded with a small smile. You took the remote from his hand and got up, moving towards the small stack of different movies. “How about we watch something else? How does ‘Halloween’ sound?”
Daryl visibly relaxed at that, and a small smile tugged at the corners of his lips. “Sounds amazin’.” When you popped the movie in and flopped down next to him on the couch, Daryl wrapped his arms around you and pressed a kiss to the top of your head. “Have I ever told ya how much I love ya?”
“You don’t have to. I know you do.” You leaned up and pressed a soft kiss to his lips, before pulling away and smiling at him. “Happy Halloween, Dar. I hope Annabelle doesn’t haunt your dreams tonight.”
Daryl groaned, but he smiled nonetheless. “Yer on thin ice, woman.”
“I love you too, Dar.”
Prompt: You’re like the toughest person I know! Am I really supposed to believe that a horror film is enough to have you cowering into my lap?
Taglist: @holdmytesseract @thevegandarkelf (comment/DM to be added or removed.)
#krys writes .ೃ࿐#halloween#daryl dixon#daryl dixon x reader#the walking dead#twd daryl#daryl x reader#daryl dixon fanfiction#daryl dixon x female reader#daryl dixon imagine#daryl dixon the walking dead#daryl#the walking dead daryl#daryl fanfiction#daryl x reader fluff#daryl x you#daryl x female reader#daryl x y/n#daryl dixon fan fiction#daryl dixon fanfic#daryl dixon x you#daryl dixon x y/n
74 notes
·
View notes
Text
do we think we can make a silent hill x mha crossover work? is that a thing The Vibes would permit? Us, leaving the city during a golden afternoon after a shitty day at work—driving into the night trying to get to a small town in the mountains. Maybe we stop for petrol, a bottled drink. A snack pack of gummy worms we throw onto the passenger seat next to us. Are we tired? Does it matter? We keep driving and driving until the world narrows down to the curve ahead in our headlights. Maybe we’re just outside of the town’s limits when it happens: the kid appearing in the middle of the road.
Do you scream? Do you even remember? Does it matter? Whatever noise you make, you manage to jerk the wheel, a sharp twist that sounds like a bone snapping, somehow, as the pale concrete of the pylons alongside the road are illuminated by your lights like headstones as you spin straight into them.
And when you wake up? When you blink, laid over your wheel and your horn blaring, screaming into the now white blanket of a foggy day—do you even remember the kid? How slight he was? Does it matter?
Maybe it doesn’t matter to you, right now, sitting up. Nothing aches, you’re not uncomfortable, you’re not even thirsty—you’re just there, still in your car, the horn now silent. Why is it daylight? Where did all this fog come? Did no one really drive past in all the however many hours you were out? Does it matter? Pray to God but row to shore—it’s a Russian proverb, supposedly, but you’d heard it on a TV show once, or maybe read it in a book. You can sit there in your car that smells like fog and pineneedles or you can get out and get yourself help. You get out, stumble; and then you follow the curve of the road down into the valley.
You almost feel relief when you see the tiled rooftops. Civilisation. Driving in the dark always felt like driving between worlds, suspended in time, only you and your music, low, the twin lights of other cars, other ghosts going past. But now you’re broken free of it, running down that road, now, your footsteps sharp and echoing against the rockface of the cliff above you—following you down into the ground levels out and leaves you standing there, at the edges of a rice paddy, your relief curling back into the bitter weight of fear when you realise it’s still so quiet. Where is everyone?
You make your way past a couple of small cars, parked up. One of them has a smashed window; you skitter around the edges, something thick in your throat.
“Hello?” You call out, when you make it to a small cluster of homes, the residential street small and tidy.
There’s a scuff of shoes—like they’re kicking off from a wall, or in gravel—and then you startle as just a few houses in front of you, a small boy jumps from behind a wall and bolts—leaving you to call out, “HEY! WAIT—”
He disappears around the corner before you can even reach him and when you turn you scream—coming face to face with a man in the green and gold of a Pro Hero suit, his hands up, catching hold of you as you scream again, twisting.
“Whoa!” He says. “I’m sorry! I’m sorry! I heard you call out and—I’m sorry, this must be so weird. Are you okay? Are you okay?”
His hands squeeze your arms tighter, reassurance or warning you can’t tell but you—you try to pull back, as much as you can, your eyes flitting over his face as he does the same with you, brow furrowed, big green eyes worried under a riot of dark, green curls.
His lips part, and he swallows. “Are you okay?” He asks for a third time, a whisper. “You’re the first person I’ve seen here since—since I got separated from the others. Please. Are you okay?”
Your heart is thumping hard but you’re no longer trying to fight against him and instead of answering you shake your head—you don’t know. You don’t know. But does it matter?
Wide, firm hands squeeze your arms once more—and then release you, letting you stand, the Pro Hero’s face (and he must be a Pro Hero, you think with a frown, although suddenly you can’t remember ever having seen him) grave.
“Everything will be okay,” he says, firmly. “I’m here. We’ll stick together, find the others, and get out of here.”
From his belt, there’s the click and fuzzy roll of static, coming from a small radio. You swallow, and nod.
(His words sound familiar to you—why do they sound so familiar? Maybe it’s just the script all Pro Heroes say. But it nags at you. It’s nagging at you. Why? Why does it matter?)
65 notes
·
View notes
Text
。*゚+*.✧"Into the looking glass."。*゚+*.✧
Part I Part II
Post format: Multipart series
Pairing: Yandere!DoL x Fem!Isekai!Reader
Word count: 5k
Synopsis: You gain the chance to wake up in the world of one of your favorite games. Unfortunately, the 'favorite game' happens to be one about rape, violence, and stalking. Not only that, but the game seems to be rigged against you. All you want is to find a way home and put this all behind you, but is that even possible...?
Warnings: Sexual Assault, Attempted Non/Con, Stalking, Violence, Age Gaps, Teacher/Student,
Color indicator: Excellent Good Decent Okay Poor Bad Terrible
Another dull morning, you think to yourself, rolling over to turn off your alarm. You pick up your cellphone and blearily swipe your screen as you clamber out of bed. It’s embarrassing to admit, but you really didn’t notice anything was wrong until you stood up and looked in the mirror. You blink, poking at you face and staring where your reflection should be, but isn’t. You wave your hand in front of the mirror. Nothing.
You look around, only to realize that your surroundings are different, too. The room you’re in is plain, cramped, and completely devoid of character. It’s almost liminal, in a way. Eerie in its emptiness.
You need to get out of here.
You nervously reach for the door and twist the handle. The doornob moves with you, but the door remains fixed in place. Your phone buzzes, and you fish it out of your pocket, quickly turning it on. You’ve gotten a text, but the number is blank.
You have not chosen an avatar yet. Please choose one from the mirror before leaving your room.
Well, that woke you right up. Is someone watching you? You swerve your head around, checking the ceilings and corners for cameras. You try the door again. You go in circles, turning the whole room upside down. You try the door. Nothing. You check your phone. The same message appears as soon as you open it. You swipe it away out of habit, but it refuses to budge. Freaky. The time hasn’t changed since you woke up, either, though you’re sure you’ve been at it for more than fifteen minutes by now.
You decide to take a peek at the mirror again. You try to remove it from the wall to look behind, but your vision goes white the second you make contact with its’ surface. Your vision clears, and in front of you is a grey figure of ambiguous gender. It looks almost made of clay. Your phone buzzes.
Player avatar selection.
Select a sex. Sex cannot be changed after starting the game.
1.) Male 2.) Female 3.) Hermaphrodite
Well, you’ve either fallen asleep or been drugged. Not knowing what else to do, you choose female, watching in horror and fascination as the figure morphs to accommodate your choice.
>Next
Other customization options soon come up. You give the figure your ideal height, weight, and features. You change her skin tone, hair color, texture, and eye color. You watch as she slowly comes to life as your ideal. The person you’ve always wanted to be.
Your phone buzzes just as you finish touching her up.
Set Name
You’re about to name her when the text fills itself in with your name instead.
Welcome, [First]! 1. Start Game!
You grimace, and hit play.
—————————
When you come to, it’s 07:00 again, and you’re still in that room. You glance at the mirror, only to see your avatar glancing back. You wave your arm in front of it, and she mimics your movements perfectly. You make a lewd gesture, and she does, too. Creepy. Is this really a dream? You’re startled out of your thoughts as your phone buzzes once again.
If you want to avoid trouble, dress modestly and stick to safe, well-lit areas. Nights are particularly dangerous. Dressing lewd will attract attention, both good and bad.
Welcome to the alpha of Degrees of Lewdity!
1. Next
The new school year starts tomorrow at 09:00. The bus service is the easiest way to get around town. Don’t forget your uniform and backpack!
Your face pales as you read the text. There’s no way. You hit next, reminding yourself that you’re only in a dream, and that no one can harm you in a dream. Your phone opens to its home screen, where you see various apps, some of which are labled.
-Characteristics -Social -Traits -Journal -Stats -Feats
You open characteristics and take a look. At the very top is a color chart indicator. description of your body’s appearance and condition, underneath are familiar stats.
Purity: 7/7 You are angelic. Physique: 3/6 Your body is average. Willpower: 1/6 You are fainthearted. Awareness: 3/7 You have a normal understanding of sexuality. Promiscuity: 0/6 You are chaste and pure. Exhibitionism: 0/6 You are coy. Deviancy: 0/6 You are squeamish.
Everything seems to be in line with the stats for the beginning of a playthrough. Everything except one.
Beauty: 7/6 Your beauty is beyond measure.
That’s…not good, if the blaring red is anything to go off of, anyway.
You scroll down. Your skills are all ranked as F, which is actually better than the “None” stat they usually start as. That’s weird, but you aren’t complaining. Your sex skills, however…are all at C. That’s super weird! You aren’t sure what to make of it, so you choose to ignore it instead.
Your overall school performance is terrible, with F’s all around the board. In real life, this would mean you’d picked the athlete trait, but your physique is baseline, and your athletic stat is also at F, so it can’t be that. It must just be inconsistencies from being asleep, you reason. That’s why your stats are all over the place.
Your status is normal, aside from your allure. Which is maxed out at “You look like you need to be ravaged.” You shudder.
You check traits. You have two.
Alien - You aren’t from around here! RPG like elements have been incorporated into your reality for a smoother experience. Virgin - Your purity recovers faster. Your virginity might be worth something.
You open your journal.
It is the 4th of September, 2022.
-It has been 0 days since the game started. -The game started in autumn. -It is autumn. -School term starts on Monday the 5th of September.
Current quests:
You turn your phone off and look around. Everything seems normal, too normal. You read somewhere once that it’s impossible (or perhaps just very difficult) to read clearly while in a dream. Could you have been drugged? Or did you take something and then forget about it?
Visit Bailey in his office by 20:00 tonight to recover your ID documents and gain your independence.
Failure to complete quest will result in the day restarting
You pinch yourself. Ow.
Well, that’s not solid proof. People have reported cases of feeling pain in dreams before it’s just kind of really rare is all. Or, or! Maybe you’re not dreaming. Maybe you’re dying. Maybe you got into an accident somewhere, and now you’re in a coma. People hallucinate during comas, don’t they?
You pinch yourself, again.
It’s not real.
…You might as well see what this quest is about.
You leave your bedroom, and walk to Bailey’s office. You don’t question how you know the way there. You knock on the door and enter.
“I know why you’re here,” he says. “You want me to release you from my protection, so you’ll be an independent citizen. I could do that. But there’s a problem. You’ve been living under my roof without giving anything in return. You owe me. Until you pay me back, I’m not letting you go.” He picks up an envelope and flips through it. Dozens of identification documents are stored within it. One of them is yours. “£100 should do. To start with. I don’t care how you get it. Knock on doors and ask for work. Rent yourself as a footstool. Steal it, even. Just have it a week from now. Or I’ll find a way to extract value from you.”
You nod and leave his office, returning to your room.
Your phone buzzes as soon as you close the door.
Quest completed. New quest added to journal. View Now?
Y/N
You hit yes.
Time-Sensitive:
Bailey wants £100 on Sunday. Find a job and free yourself from his clutches.
That’s great and all, but maybe you shouldn’t leave the orphanage today…or ever. Not until you wake up. You decide to just download some social media apps and scroll for the rest of the day instead. You scroll until midday, when you’re stopped by your stomach growling. Can you get hungry inside a dream…? You feel uneasy as you climb off the bed. Your neck hurts from the uncomfortable position you had been in, but that’s the least of your worries right now.
You leave your bedroom and enter the main hall. A trim girl happens to be passing by your door, so you stop her and ask about when lunch is. She looks at you strangely.
“Whenever you want…? Just go somewhere and get it. I don’t know.”
“I meant here, can we get food here?”
“Sure, if you’re underage. We have to provide for ourselves once we reach eighteen, though. You know that. Everyone knows that.” She leaves in a hurry. You go back to your room to watch “Gootube” videos. It’s not as pornographic as it sounds.
You stay on your phone for the rest of the day. It never seems to run out of charge. Finally, you turn it off and climb under the covers. You don’t bother to wear pajamas. You sleep soundly, and wake up at 07:00 on Sunday, September 4th.
Wait, what?
You look at your journal again.
Journal
It is the 4th of September, 2022.
-It has been 0 days since the game started. -The game started in autumn. -It is autumn. -School term starts on Monday the 5th of September.
Current quests:
Visit Bailey in his office by 20:00 tonight to recover your ID documents and gain your independence. Failure to complete quest will result in the day restarting
But you didn’t fail your quest! You completed it and…
It’s because you didn’t get a job yesterday, isn’t it?
You sigh and climb out of bed. Off to visit Bailey again.
“I know why you’re here,” he says. God, you wish you could skip dialogue in real life. Or in dreams, you guess. Bailey wraps up his speech and you leave, this time heading outside the orphanage to look for work right after.
As expected, you bump into someone almost immediately. A voluptuous woman grabs you. “You’re the cutest thing I’ve seen all week!” She says, lunging for your clothes. You step back, but she catches you, lifting your sundress’s skirt and revealing your lace panties. You try to grab her hand and pull it away, but she’s stronger than you. She pushes you to the ground, and you land painfully on the sidewalk. You let out an involuntary yelp as your elbows scrape on the pavement. Is she really going to try and molest you out in public like this? It would appear so, as she’s currently straddling your legs with her knees, keeping them apart. You come to your senses when you feel a hand on your groin, and scream out for help.
A taut man comes to your rescue, chasing off the woman and helping you to your feet. He treats your wounds and gives you a pepper spray charge. You thank him and go on your way.
The dog pound is probably the best place to start with, you think to yourself while looking at the map on your phone. So you hop on a bus and wait for your stop, but not before a thin man sits next to you and rests his hand on your thigh. You shuffle away from him, and he follows you. You stand up, and he does, too. No one else is paying attention. You quickly walk to the most crowded area of the bus and sit next to a plush woman. She doesn’t look happy, but doesn’t say anything, either. The thin man watches you from his seat. You reach your destination, and he moves to follow you when you stand. Luckily, a tall man stops him, giving you a thumbs up as he blocks the thin man’s view of you. You give him a grateful nod and step off.
Your shift at the dogpound goes on without incident. Thugh the employees tried to get handsy more than a few times, they never took it further when you moved away. You even took your lunch break at the nearby cafe! You’re surprised by how much character the place had visually, considering it comes from a text-based game.
By the time the dog pound closes, it’s nighttime. You pale at the realization. It’s nighttime, and you’re in Degrees of Lewdity. Should you risk taking the bus? Or should you risk the streets?
If you’re on a bus, you’re there for less time, but it’s an enclosed space. If you’re outside, there’s more places to run and hide. But hiding goes both ways.
You elect to go through the streets, sticking to the places that are the most open and well-lit. You get home without incident, though you swear you saw something in the alleys.
You collapse into bed and sleep for ten hours.
—————————
It’s 07:03 when you wake up. You have school today, so you look through your wardrobe for your uniform. You find it, but…why is it so skimpy? Sheer tights, short plaid skirt, tight shirt, platform mary janes and loose socks. You put it on, but the shirt is so tight it won’t button all the way, leaving a sizable amount of your cleavage and lace bra visible.
Speaking of which, aren’t you only supposed to start with plain underwear? Why is all of yours lace? And why does it clasp at the front? You spend twenty minutes looking for a jacket, different shirt, or other way to cover yourself, but find nothing. Bailey bangs on the doors around the orphanage to wake the orphans up. You sigh and put your clothes back into your wardrobe before leaving.
You bump into Robin on your way out. Literally. He nearly runs you over.
“Hey!” He says running towards you. He doesn’t slow down in time and plows right into you. You help him up. “Thanks,” he says, looking a bit bashful. “I didn’t see you yesterday. Remember, you can visit me in my room anytime you want. I have something to show you. I’m so excited!” He runs off, and you realize you’ve forgotten your backpack, so you head back in and find it. It takes you another ten minutes to realize you’d put it behind the door. By the time you’re ready, it’s already half an hour past seven. You decide to see if Robin is still in his room.
You knock, and hear some crashing. Before you can ask if something’s wrong, Robin opens the door and hugs you. “Look,” he says, pulling you inside. Your eyes immediately land on the shiny new game console in the corner of the room. “I’ve been saving up,” he says. “What are you waiting for?” He pats the bed beside him and you hop on. You watch him play for a few minutes, and the two of you walk to school together.
Though it’s literally your first time meeting him, you feel safer around Robin. Though you know he can’t fight to protect you, having someone by your side does a lot to ease the mind. Plus, he’s one of the only decent people in the game. You’re glad, but at the same time, you’re uneasy. You wonder if he notices you’re not his childhood friend. That you look like her, sound like her, but you aren’t her. You wonder if he’d hate you, should he find out.
“Is something wrong, [First]?” You snap to attention.
“Huh? Oh, uh, no. I’m okay,” you say. “I was just kind of busy yesterday, came home exhausted but couldn’t sleep, you know how it is.” You wave your hand dismissively at him as you pass the school gates. “Where are you heading? I’d like to go with you, if that’s alright. Since I didn’t see you yesterday, and all.” Really, you just don’t want to be alone here. But there’s no need to say that.
Robin smiles, and the two of you hang out in the rear courtyard. It’s nice, but you can feel him glancing at you when he thinks you’re not looking. It makes you uncomfortable. Has he caught on? You excuse yourself and head to the library. Maybe you should acquaint yourself with the other non-crazy person on campus. At least you won’t have to lie about your identity to Sydney.
You walk over to the counter near the back of the library. A tall boy with a strawberry blonde ponytail and glasses is stamping books behind it. You smile as you approach him. “Good morning…” He says, yawning. “First time at the rental counter? You can rent out one book at a ti-” Sydney yawns.. “Time. You can also buy school-approved clothes here. Headmaster Leighton’s marked the prices way up, though. Students with a good record get special discounts.” He seems excited, though you can’t place why.
“Books can be rented out for two weeks at a time. You can renew your rental at any time…” He looks down. You look down. Sydney has stamped his hand. You smile.”...Let’s call that a demonstration of what happens if you return a late or damaged book. My name’s Sydney, by the way! Pleased to meet you.”
“I’m [First],” you respond. You and Sydney spend some time chatting. You notice that he’s oddly red.
“Are you feeling okay?” You ask, raising a hand to his forehead. “You’re burning up! Let’s get you to the infirmary!”
“W-what? No, I’m okay…”
“No, you’re not,” you say, pulling him up by the forearm. You drag him to the infirmary, and he has to bend down to allow it. No one pays you much mind, though you’re sure you look a little silly, holding onto the forearm of someone much taller than you. You reach the nurse, who informs you that Sydney is perfectly healthy, though tells him to take a rest on one of the beds upon seeing the bags under his eyes.
“See?” He says, smiling. “I didn’t realize you were such a worrier.” You flush, embarrassed. Is pure Sydney supposed to tease people? His face softens. “Thanks…for worrying about me, though” he says, then checks the time. “You should probably get to class.” Right, you’d nearly forgotten you were at school. You thank Sydney for reminding you and leave as he waves you off.
You go to your science lesson. Despite your grade being at F, the lesson is actually pretty easy to follow, some of this you remember from your own highschool lessons. The bell rings and you leave the classroom, only to get shoved into a locker immediately. A boy with blonde hair covering one eye looms over you. You recognize him immediately.
“Don’t get in my way again,” Whitney says, pressing his knee against your crotch. “Or I’ll put you in your place.” He releases you, but you know that won’t be the end of it. You hurry to math class, hoping Whitney will skip today. You’re tense for the first twenty minutes of class, but slowly begin to relax upon realizing Whitney probably isn’t going to show up. Nearly half an hour into class, the teacher River steps out for a moment. And with the kind of timing you’d only see in movies, Whitney waltzes in, his jacket thrown over his shoulder. You try to look away, but it’s too late. Whitney makes eye contact with you and grins. He walks over to the mousy girl sitting next to you.
“Move,” he says. She does. You turn away from him, but he grabs your hair, forcing you to look at him.
This is unfair, you think to yourself. Whitney isn’t supposed to sit next to you unless you’re dating. Why now?
“Watcha lookin at, slut?”
This sucks. You want to go home. When is this dream supposed to end?
Whitney tugs at your hair even harder. “I asked you a question, slut.”
How did you even get here in the first place? Did you really die? Were you in a coma? Whitney yanks your hair back so hard your body goes with it, creating an awful screeching sound as your chair lurches back. River walks in just in time to see you fall on your back. Whitney is sent out. He turns to make a penetration sign with his hands at you as he leaves.
Math ends, and you head to English. There’s a crowd of students blocking your path. You peer over shoulders and heads to see the source of the commotion, and see a dark haired student on the ground, with two bullies standing over him. Your first instinct is Kylar, but you must be wrong. Kylar’s event shouldn’t happen until a week from now.
You could try to help, but that would probably get you assaulted. Even if you didn’t, your fellow students would think less of you, leading you to getting picked on later, and potentially assaulted more and–
Fuck it, you can’t ignore this. You’re already shoving past students and blocking the bullies’ view of the student. “Leave him alone,” you say. “I won’t stand for this.” One of the bullies, a thin girl, shoves you down.
“Sit, then!” She says, the audience laughs. You pick yourself up and ram into the thin girl and her friend. You knock her off-balance and she falls to the floor, screaming as soon as she lands. “You stupid bitch! You broke my tailbone!” The audience is laughing at her, now. Her friend is helping her up. “I’ll get you for this! Mark my fucking words!” You shiver. Hopefully no one notices. You turn to check on the boy they were harassing, only to nearly bump heads with him. You jump back, and the boy smiles apologetically. There’s something else in his expression, but before you can figure out what it was, you make eye contact with him, and the whole world goes dark.
Tousled black hair, short stature, sickly pale skin and the greenest eyes you’ve ever seen. It’s Kylar. It has to be. “T-thanks,” he says. “I-I’m Kylar.” Your face drops, but you aren’t sure if he saw it before running off. The tips of his ears are red, you notice. You step towards the crowd, which is already dispersing. The remaining onlookers make way for you, though you feel a hand grope your butt as you leave. You turn, but no one’s there.
You head into English class, already exhausted. Kylar watches you from the back. You ignore him. The plump boy sitting behind you sniffs your hair during the entirety of the lesson, so it’s hard to focus. You look down at your notes. It’s an unintelligible mess. Is this what it means to have a grade F in English, you wonder?
Finally, it’s lunch time. You head to the cafeteria, passing by the headmaster on your way there. You swear you saw him checking you out. You shudder and speed up. Upon reaching the canteen, you are presented with three options.
Robin is talking with some students at his table, they seem to be arguing.
Sydney is sitting alone, several piles of books surrounding him.
Kylar is also alone, stabbing at his food with more violence than seems neccesary.
Despite your self preservation instincts, you walk towards Robin to see what the commotion is. The lean boy is accusing Robin of ‘looking at him with disrespect’. Arguing with him would be pointless. So you do the next best thing and smile as you spit in his face.
As expected, he doesn’t take it well, and pounces on you immediately. He tears open your shirt, leaving you only marginally more exposed than you already were. You scream loudly, and Leighton rushes in. You suppress a smirk.
“What’s the meaning of this?!” He shouts, pushing past students to find you exposed on the ground, the lean boy holding you down. He scrambles off of you, and you fix your uniform. The lean boy tries to explain, but Leighton cuts him off and sends him out. Robin helps you up.
“Are you okay?! Why did you do that?”
Kylar watches from across the canteen. +Jealousy
“I saw Leighton on the way over here. I figured if we caused a scene, he’d be the one to get in trouble for it.”
“Don’t do something like that again! That was really dangerous!” You nod, though you don’t really mean it.
The rest of lunch passes without incident and you go to History with Robin. The two of you chat about his game before class starts. You learn some interesting things about the history of the town. Nothing happens during history, and you leave feeling refreshed. You navigate the halls to your swimming lesson and change. You keep your eyes down, but swear you feel the stares of your classmates. You think you hear a camera go off, but when you turn, no one’s looking at you.
A taut boy follows you around the pool, and doesn’t stop trailing until the lesson is over. He keeps his distance, but it still makes you feel uneasy. The bell rings, and you don’t see him again.
“...Nevermind,” you say. “Maybe they won’t notice us.” You and Robin try to blend in with the crowd, but a hand on your shoulder quickly yanks you into the open.
You meet up with Robin in the courtyard, but hesitate walking home when you see Whitney hanging out by the gate.
“Can we go out through the back?”
“The back? Why?” You nod your head towards Whitney and his friends, and Robin makes an ‘O’ with his mouth. “I don’t mind, but how will we get out?” You’re about to answer when a realization hits you. Right. You haven’t unlocked the tunnel outside yet, which means you can’t leave unless you climb the fence.
“Hold it, slut.” Shit. “You didn’t pay the toll.”
“Flash us your tits.” There’s a crowd circling around you. You notice people pulling out their phones.
You grit your teeth. “What’s the toll?” Whatever, you have twenty quid to spare.
“[First]...”
“It’s fine, Robin.” You give him a strained smile as you unbutton your blouse. “Happy?” You ask, turning back to Whitney.
“Not quite,” he says, grabbing the front of your bra and unclasping the hook. Your breasts flop out. “There. That wasn’t so bad, now, was it?” You turn and quickly fix your bra, wishing it clasped at the back instead of the front like a normal bra. You and Robin speed away, then find a secluded ally to fix your shirt.
Excellent Good Decent Okay Poor Bad Terrible
Finally home, you decide to check out some of the apps you didn’t bother with yesterday.
Social
Primary relationships:
Robin The Orphan Robin wants to be your best friend. Love: 100% Confidence: 0% Trauma: 0% Lust: 40%
You smile. It’s little different than the starting relationship in the actual game, but you’re slowly getting used to the inconsistencies. You’re about to look at the next box when your eyes are drawn back up to the pink text. Wait a minute, doesn’t that mean bad? You check the color chart to make sure.
But, why? Why is that bad? Isn’t it good? Or, is it because his confidence is low? Maybe the key word here is “wants”. Still, wouldn’t that count more as poor than bad? Whatever, no need to nitpick. You’ll check back in on it later. You move on.
…You almost move on. Why is his love so high? And his lust, too?! It’s gotta be a glitch, right? Right?
Right. You restart your phone and boot it back up. Nothing’s changed. You put that aside for now.
Whitney The Bully Whitney wants to own you. Love: 50% Dominance: 50% Lust: 100%
Another different one. Also bad. Terrible, even. You aren’t even sure what to make of it. You just met him, and his lust is already maxed out. His love is also surprisingly high, though only half as much as Robin’s is. You make a mental note to sit in view of the teacher during math going forward.
Kylar The Loner Kylar is obsessed with you. Love: 100% Jealousy: 55% Lust: 90%
Another case of inexplicably high stats right off the bat, though you aren’t surprised with Kylar. You move on.
Sydney The Faithful ? Sydney is conflicted. Love: 77% Purity: 44% Lust: 66%
Okay, you’re pretty sure those are all just angel numbers. Or, supposed to be angel numbers. It’s kind of hard to do that with only two numbers. Though 666 is actually more of a demonic number, it still fits the theme. Aside from the strange percentages, you’re also concerned by the question mark next to ‘faithful’, not to mention the fact that his purity is already so low he’s conflicted. You haven’t even flirted with him yet!
You glance at the other named NPC’s. They’re all unremarkable, full of “has no strong opinion of you” aside from two.
Bailey The Caretaker Bailey doesn’t want you to leave. Love: 25% Lust: 99%
Leighton The Headmaster You’re Leighton’s favorite. Love: 10% Lust: 85%
Your stomach lurches. Gross. You are absolutely repressing that shit.
You check your reputation next.
-The police aren’t concerned with you, and have no evidence linking you to any crime. -The atmosphere in the orphanage is calm. -You are considered a normal student by teachers. -Your fellow students desire you.
You grimace at the last one. You make a mental note to buy a more concealing uniform.
Finally, you have your fame. This one should be normal, right? You’ve only just gotten here.
Sex: Unknown Prostitution: Unknown Rape: Obscure. Beastiality: Unknown Exhibitionism: Unknown Pregnancy: Unknown Combat: Obscure Kindness: Obscure Business: Unknown Socialite: Unknown Overall: Famous
What?! Famous?! How does that— Ugh, forget it. You keep reading.
The townsfolk call you Darling. Those in the criminal underworld call you Darling.
…?
What…what does that mean?
—————————
<Prev Here Next>
A/N: Not proofread. I made this in one sitting lol
#yandere#degrees of lewdity#yandere x reader#dol#yandere dol#whitney the bully#dol whitney#robin the orphan#dol robin#sydney the faithful#sydney the fallen#dol sydney#kylar the loner#dol kylar#dol pc#bailey the caretaker#leighton the headmaster#male yandere#yandere x you#male yandere x reader#male yandere x you#male yandere x y/n
118 notes
·
View notes
Text
learned that illness kinks are a thing and i can’t stop thinking about ford having one
stan gets sick one day — nothing too severe, just the flu or something — and ford enters full-on mother hen mode. ever since weirdmageddon, he’s been feeling extra protective (ans extra guilty) over stan, and that includes protecting him against illness!
but when ford takes stan’s temperature using a thermometer, he feels… strange. he brushes it off as him just pining over his brother again — the action does feel a bit intimate — and moving on.
but, as the day goes on, ford quickly realizes that this isn’t just his standard incestuous feelings. stan being so vulnerable, ford being able to take care of him, him and his flushed, sweaty face, ford hearing stan pant and even sometimes moan/whimper from sickness… stan’s sick and ford, the pervert that he is, thinks that it’s hot.
ford’s got EXTREMELY conflicted feelings about this. he’s genuinely concerned for stan, he does want him to get better despite his… primal urges, but he can’t help but find stan being sick really hot. and he feels so guilty about it, because, wow, stan’s SUFFERING, and he thinks it’s HOT????
even after stan gets better, ford gets real… excited whenever stan exhibits any symptoms of sickness, even if he’s not actually sick. stan does that old man cough and ford replays the sound in his head when he masturbates that night. around march, stan starts sneezing and sniffling his nose — damn pollen — and ford almost passes out on the spot.
stan doesn’t connect the dots — he’s typically a bit too preoccupied to notice, and, when he does, he just goes “huh, that’s weird”, because “my brother has incestuous feelings for me and also has a kink for me being sick” is a bit of a weird conclusion to jump to — until the first time it happens after they’ve gotten together. stan bursts into laughter — not in a mean way, but like, oh my GOD, it was SO obvious, and he DIDN’T NOTICE, and also stan’s heard of his fair share of kinks but illness was never one of them — and pokes fun at him for the rest of the day. “ohhh, sixerrr, i think i’m coming down with somethiiiiing… *obviously fake coughs*”
the next time stan gets sick, he jokes about it, saying “bet you’re getting off on this, huh?”, only for ford to reply with a “…yes.” and, oh boy, now that he knows what ford’s thinking, stan’s finding himself getting worked up.
they end up fucking, ford and stan love it, but then ford ends up getting sick — but he certainly doesn’t regret it.
tl;dr
^ford
96 notes
·
View notes