#queer metalhead | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

unclewaynemunson · 1 year

Text

“I already did”

It was 2014 when Wayne heard the news.

He was sitting in his favorite chair, the sun warming his face through the window while he stared out over the lake, when Eddie came bursting through the door in his usual whirlwind of chaotic energy.

'Where's Scott?' He had something almost frantic in his face; Steve came walking up behind him, placing a calming hand on his shoulder in an attempt to stop him from practically vibrating out of his own skin.

'Hi, uncle Wayne.'

At least one of them had proper manners.

'Takin' a walk,' Wayne said in reply to Eddie's question. 'You alright there, boy?'

'You haven't heard it yet?'

'Heard what?'

'Jesus Christ, you don't know it yet!'

Eddie dramatically flopped down on the couch, grabbing Steve's wrist to pull him with him.

'What's this about? Good news or bad?'

'Great!' said Steve, at the same moment Eddie groaned 'Baaaad.'

Wayne raised an unimpressed eyebrow at the both of them.

'Well... Drumroll, Steve,' Eddie ordered, waiting for Steve to repeatedly slap his hands on his legs. 'As of today, the state of Indiana has bestowed upon same-sex couples the unimaginable honor to express their love for each other in matrimony.' The sarcasm was oozing from his voice.

'Pretty cool, right?' Steve added, flashing Wayne an excited smile.

Eddie rolled his eyes so forcefully it looked painful.

'No, it's not “pretty cool!”' he exclaimed before Wayne could say anything. 'What, after centuries of oppression and violence they get to decide that we're now worthy of joining their fucked-up social constructs and we should be clapping our hands ready to conform to their gross ideas of what love is about? We should be grateful that they finally let us play by their rules?'

'It's not about playing by the rules, it's about – about...' Steve rapidly snapped his fingers a couple times, and Eddie, despite his passionate dramatics, patiently waited for him to find the word he was looking for.

'It's about recognition!' Steve finally exclaimed in a somewhat triumphant tone. 'We get to be a family!'

Eddie scoffed. 'We already are a family. Have been for almost thirty years. We got each other, we got the girls; we don't need any ridiculous bureaucratic documents to prove that.'

'That's not – it's a celebration of love!'

'It's a preposterous and backwards tool of the heteronormative patriarchy to submit the people to their institutions and chain women to their men and keep the masses quiet!'

'Lotta big words you got there, did you rehearse this?' Wayne chimed in.

Steve chortled, which earned him a poke in his ribs from Eddie.

'So are you and Scott gonna...?' Steve let the end of his question hover silently in the air.

'I dunno,' Wayne said. It wasn't something he had ever given much thought to – not because he didn't care, but because he had never expected to live in a world where it was a possibility in the first place. Hell, he still vividly remembered the sodomy laws being abolished. He had never exactly been an optimist. But here they were.

Eddie kept on ranting for almost a whole hour, while Steve kept looking at him with that fondly amused expression on his face, as if he could never get enough of Eddie's dramatic complaining.

'You don't mind that he's bein' so, um... stubborn?' Wayne cautiously asked him when Eddie left the room to go to the toilet.

Steve chuckled. 'If I did, I wouldn't have kept up with him for this long,' he jokingly answered.

'But you want to. Get married.'

The fine lines around Steve's eyes deepened. 'Yeah, I want to,' he admitted. 'And I'm pretty sure that all his aversion against it will fly right out of the window as soon as I get down on one knee for him.'

He got this cocky, confident smile on his face; Wayne loved those moments, when despite the gray hair and the wrinkles, something of the young boys Eddie and Steve used to be shone through in them.

XXX

Wayne didn't stop thinking about it after the boys left. He could still barely believe that this was a decision he could make. Who would've thought, after decades of self-loathing and suppressing his feelings, that he could now get married to the man he loved?

He grew more certain of it by the minute. The answer was already everywhere around him, after all: in his eager expectation of Scott's return, in the framed photographs on the wall, the cheesy Mr & Mr mugs on their coffee table, the two pairs of reading glasses that were lying side-by-side on a newspaper next to those mugs...

He wouldn't buy a ring or drop down on one knee – he was nearing eighty, he probably couldn't drop down on one knee and get back up again even if he wanted to. But he didn't want to do it by the rules anyway. He wanted this to be theirs.

And he saw everything he needed to know in Scott's eyes before either of them even opened their mouth.

'Did you hear the news?' Scott asked, that beautiful glow of being outside and active that he always had after he came back from his walks clinging around him. Sometimes Wayne would join him, but Scott could still walk faster and longer – the price Wayne had to pay for smoking like a chimney for nearly seventy years – so he didn't mind letting him go alone and having a pot of coffee ready when he'd come back, enjoying the sound of his voice while he told Wayne about the ever-changing nature or the birds he had spotted along his way.

Wayne merely hummed in response to his question, while Scott settled in next to him on the couch.

They had shared this life together for almost thirty years: in sickness and in health, for better and for worse, for richer and for poorer – they'd already done it all. And yet...

He took his time to look into Scott's eyes, to search his face. His gaze wandered over the fine maze of lines that had kept expanding over the years they had spent together, the gray stubble where once a thick mustache had been, that one big age spot right below his left eye, the scar on his chin from that time one of the twins had viciously attacked him for having the audacity to make her eat her veggies.

He could see the question in Scott's eyes before either of them even spoke.

'Should we..?'

'Yes,' said Scott, smiling. Eager. And that was that.

XXX

There was no elaborate party, no fancy reception, nothing like that. Eddie took Wayne shopping for a new flannel and a slightly nicer pair of jeans for the occasion. Scott jokingly wore a tie with little rainbows on it over a button-down in a light shade of pink. It was simple: just them, Eddie, Steve and the girls at the town hall. Their signatures side by side on a piece of paper; it almost seemed too profane. They were back outside before they knew it. But Scott's smile still managed to light Wayne from inside like the very first time he had seen it.

Everybody else was already gathered back at the house. The house they got together, the house that had been theirs for more than twenty years, the house they had made into their home with or without that piece of paper that told them they could. Hopper and Joyce, Robin and Nancy, all the kids who lived close enough to make the trip; they were all there, sharing food and laughter in the garden near the lake while the sun set behind the trees.

After the world was wrapped in darkness and it was just the two of them again, Wayne grabbed Scott's hand to guide him back inside. He lingered on the porch, looking up at the stars shining down on them. He felt Scott shiver beside him, cold now that the sun had disappeared, and pulled him closer. His husband.

He knew that the two of them were finite, of course, unlike the stars in the sky above them. He knew that the biggest part of their lives was behind them, that they would leave this planet sooner rather than later. He had honestly never expected to make it this far. But he had. He had made it, all the way from being officially fundamentally wrong, through years and years of deep-rooted, stubborn self-hatred, to here. 2014. The year in which he got married to the man he had allowed himself to love. The best thing, after Eddie, that ever happened to him. The person who had colored his every day, who had made it easy to get up in the morning and to go to sleep feeling content.

He tore his gaze away from the sky to look at Scott.

'What are you thinking about?' Scott quietly asked him, watching him with that attentive gaze that wouldn't ever let a single detail escape him.

Wayne took his time to think about how to phrase it.

'How it's possible that everything changed and nothing changed at the same time, today,' he eventually answered.

Scott squeezed his hand, brought it up to his lips to press a kiss against it.

'Who would've thought, huh?' he said. 'That something so simple and silly as saying “I do” can change your whole life?'

'It didn't change my life,' Wayne answered with certainty. 'I already did.'

Scott chuckled. 'I already did, too.'

And somehow, this moment, just the two of them sharing these words on their porch wrapped in darkness, was infinitely more meaningful than anything that happened in the town hall.

#oh the complicated relationships of older queers with being able to get married #i know this isn't a popular opinion but eddie the non-conformist queer metalhead would 100% HATE the idea of marriage #no you can't change my mind #(steve can change his tho)#don't mind me rambling about stranger things #clarkson my beloved #wayne munson #scott clarke #steddie #steve harrington #eddie munson #stranger things #fruity ficlet

747 notes · View notes