#redacted wheeler

[jinxjinn]

does this make sense??

[kidovna]

dreamt of this the other day

[alisaint]

this is only funny if you subscribe to the idea that mike's monologue doomed hawkins, but—

[campbyler]

working on ch10 and listening to the ch10 playlist and getting upset over every song as if i’m not the one who literally put them on here

[livsmessydoodles]

thinking about this scene today

this scene alone convinces me that byler is endgame bc you cannot make will actively say that hes not gonna fall in love and then write a whole plotline abt him being in love with mike.... just for it to not be reciprocated???

will is the only party member who's completely unexperienced with romantic relationships, which of course has to do with the fact that he's gay in the 80's, but this is a TV show. all of this is fictional so they can take whatever route they want with these characters, and making will continue to stay alone and suffer through unrequited love would be awful storytelling, especially when people claim that will moving on from his feelings would bring character development and growth.

wills feelings for mike arent there just to "show his growth". weve seen this kid go through hell and back yet even with everything kicking him down he stays strong and kind. hes the most selfless character in the show and always puts others needs before his own. in s4, they put a lot of emphasis in these character traits of his, and they're always picturing his love for mike as something selfless and pure.

now if his feelings are not reciprocated, how does this teach will a lesson that leads to character growth?? he already doesn't expect anything. life has shown him time and time again that he always gets the short end of the stick, why would he think this is any different?? making him have feelings for his best friend just to get rejected would just be a nail in the coffin, reaffirming to him that no matter what hes not worthy of ever getting what he wishes. this isnt character growth at all.

but if his feelings ARE requited, that gives us a twist to the story we havent seen. we would get to see actual growth for will, him learning to give himself value and realize that he DOES deserve happiness!! instead of leading into the expected spiral of bad things keeping up the consistency with everything else that has happened to will so far, finally giving him one good thing leads to us seeing a shift in his whole nature, and wed see him dealing with things he hasnt dealt with before!!! GROWTH!!!

besides why would they make such an intricate complicated storyline.... just to lead to a rejection we all saw coming? the GA expects him to get rejected. his feelings not being reciprocated would not be any surprise. but twisting those expectations in a way to shock the GA AND give wills character the happiness he so deserves after being through so much..... now THAT would be world shattering and a satisfying ending to both the viewers and will himself!!

this scene establishes a clear subversion trope, making us aware of how will believes he's never finding love, just for the show to later on subvert expectations and reward will with the love he deserves and never thought hed get🫶

[jonathanbyersphd]

No you don't GET it she's in a red jacket and he's in a black jacket with a flannel underneath and she's in a red jacket and he's in a black jacket with a flannel underneath.

[novakiart]

xf au - what happens when robin's belief that steve is still out there is irrevocably challenged?

i'm only posting bits of this au to tumblr for now - the full thing is on my twitter!

[bylertruther]

mike forming a connection with el and then losing her in a horrific way all to save his life with her last words to him literally being goodbye mike is like . A Very Important Character Feature for him. esp when u add in the fact tht her battery had been steadily depleting and she'd pushed thru n used that last bit to save them. and he watched!! literally called out for her right after!! and then radioed her every single day for almost a year!! and felt like he was going crazy!! and took charge of helping will both bc he loves him and that's his friend and it's a continuation of his care from s1 yes, but also bc there's no el to help them n understand!! it's up to them now!! and then overcompensated the next season bc he didn't want a repeat of tht situation to happen again!! n then he regresses in s4 n can't move on from tht first week bc he's scared AND feels like he isn't enough!! like. i'm a byler, but i have eyes. and i feel like acting like that all isn't a plot point tht spans multiple seasons is kinda wild. this is like saying tht water is wet i know but "el is important to mike and his character" and "byIer is #real" / "mike is his own character" are not incompatible statements lol.

[wayward-sherlock]

chapter six…it’s a little meta…

[caninecowboy]

im so normal about this btw

[dufrau]

I foresee a very Doomsday Prepper Nancy Wheeler fic in my immediate future. Like. It’s right there. See the vision.

[lighthouseas]

concept: all of the foreshadowing of mike running away actually applies to s5, and he runs away in the first episode for **reasons** before the timeskip. and the problem is -- no one can go after him, because the military closes all borders on hawkins until the "earthquake" (they know it isn't an earthquake and don't want it to spread) is under control.

essentially: no one goes in, no one comes out.

then we have a timeskip; and, to put it bluntly, everything is absolute shit without mike there. will is suffering with severe depression and guilt that he let mike go (though he's never stopped believing that mike is going to come back). the remaining wheelers are so dysfunctional that they barely talk to one another anymore. the party has grown apart. everyone is doing their best to fend for themselves in the apocalypse, waiting for the day when vecna returns so they can defeat him.

vecna officially returns at the end of the first episode that has the timeskip.

however-- in that same episode-- mike returns too.

the heart of the party is back.

[wheelercore]

I need nana wheeler to drop so i can post the virginiated parallels essay ive been writing in my head nonstop for 2 months

[pacinglikeghosts]

a love that came and left with this train

ronance | one last stop au | 15/15 chapters

In the end, it took Robin exactly three days to make herself at home in the apartment. It felt like she always belonged there, really, as she slotted herself into their routines with absolute ease. In the mornings, long after Nancy, Eddie, and Jonathan had woken up and gotten out of bed, Steve and Robin would drag themselves from the comfort of their warm beds and join the group, hair in similar states of disarray. The laundry became somewhat of a communal experience as Robin spent more and more time in the apartment, with Robin’s wardrobe (which, admittedly, was a small section of Nancy’s closet and a single drawer. It wasn’t like the move was planned) slowly morphing into a combination of Steve and Jonathan’s. And Robin would be lying if she said she didn’t notice the way Nancy’s eyes lingered on her as she got dressed, or lounged around the apartment in nothing but her socks, a pair of Steve’s jeans, and one of Jonathan’s sweaters.

as always, layout credits to bunivys!

read the latest chapter!

OR...

start from the beginning!

[the-teddy-bear-butch]

It’s been a hot minute and several songs have been added, so I’m reposting the SSMH official playlist 👀

[powderblueblood]

YES, NURSE RATCHED - a hellfire & ice retelling of chapter eight's most pivotal moment, from eddie's pov

a special treat for my love @deadlynightshade-and-hyacinth eddie munson x f!reader, reader is nicknamed lacy, reader's last name is also mentioned, this is lore-filled and handsy so if that's not your thing keep it truckin, minors dni i do not like you go away warning for strong language, smut inthe form of public fingeringgggg, drug usage, extremely bad parenting (al munson klaxon), evoking the feeling of a comedown, billy hargrove gets his shit rocked, excuse all typos it's redacted o'clock and i'm a little buzzed word count: 2.6k

The first thing you should know about the following occurrences is that they are preluded by a whole lot of next thing Eddie knows. Things snapping his attention to the left, to the right, knocking him over the head, rearing up on him with little to no warning.

Number one? His dad showing up at Reefer Rick’s, eyes bloodshot and sleep deprived and frantic, putting on a pantomime of being so psyched to see his boy! Rick snapping to attention and falling into his role of affable associate of Munson Senior immediately, despite the apology he’d tried to press against Eddie right when Al crunched the gravel of his driveway. What followed was a bender that Eddie couldn’t help but give into. Al has that effect on people, even him, even Eddie in his angry, angsty resoluteness that he should know better. 

You try knowing better when you're all bewitched, bothered and bewildered and shit.

Cue cut lines and records blaring until daylight broke over Lover's Lake– then Eddie, rising at noon but barely landed from his previous (ill-advised and bad-parentally-supervised) high, got it in his head that he ought to show up for school. At least for a little bit. 

Because they’d tossed your last name around a little last night, Al and Rick. Doevski this, Doevski that, in weird, vague terms that Eddie didn’t all the way understand. And the more weed he smoked and the more Jim Beam that got passed around, the less he remembered.

Which, dumb, right?

You’d tell him that was dumb.

You’d tell him he should have stayed sharp, listened up, gathered information.

He passed out on Rick’s sagging couch, mind searing with nothing but thoughts of you nagging him for intel.

Eddie woke up cotton-mouthed with your name on his lips. 

He needed to see you.

To catch one of your avoidant, barely-there glances as you flit through the hallway or maybe even spy you smoking a cigarette on the outdoor bleachers, reading in silence with Ronnie or Wheeler.

He’d think of what to say to you in the moment; probably spurned on by the sneer you’d give him– which he’d totally have earned, for having the nerve to ignore you for so long. 

Forgive me, he'd say, hands held aloft in Christlike composure, I just couldn't look you in the eye knowing you were getting willingly boinked by some Ivy League sweater monkey.

And then you'd have to admit your little bullshit college boyfriend wasn't Ivy League, and he'd prod you with that for a while, and things would eventually ebb back to whatever shade of normal you two were pretending to be. So? Okay!

But.

Next thing Eddie knows, he’s peeling into the parking lot and the first thing that he sees, bada bing, is you. All however many feet of you, steel true and planted on the hood of Billy Hargrove’s fucking Camaro, wielding a baseball bat like a sword.  

Eddie’s heart stops for the full entirety of a what fresh hell is this filter-focused second before he skids the van to a halt and launches himself from it. 

He advances this helluva scene just in time to hear you holler out, right in front of God and everyone,

“One thing you can say for Eddie Munson, is at least the motherfucker can get hard!” 

Eddie’s tread stutters and he wonders if this is what people mean when they use the expression taken out at the knees. Can he get a fucking encore, please? 

But then there’s the issue of the rabies-ridden Hargrove, the kid who’s snorted so much of Eddie’s dubiously cut supply that it’s no wonder that word has gotten around that he can’t keep his johnson rigid. There’s a thread dangling somewhere that makes Eddie wonder how familiar you are with that concept but. Alas. Digression. 

Hargrove calls you a cunt, and Eddie’s vision is replaced with a swathe of red. 

How ‘bout you try playing it cool, hearing someone talk to your girl like that, after a night of fun family drug-taking? 

Wait. His what? Hold on--

Next thing Eddie knows, he’s side-swiping Hargrove like a dirty bumper car, yak yaks something kind of funny (he hopes) and does not turn to look at you standing backlit like a holy fucking statue. Because he knows you’ll look beautiful up there, white hot with rage, holding a weapon poised for minor automotive destruction. He can’t handle beauty, not right now. Because of that thing from before with his knees. 

“...now her snooty ass is spreading it for half of Hawkins! Desperate! Stringin’ you along like the dumb piece of shortbus shit you a–”

It’s impossible to say whose hair trigger that tugged first, yours or Eddie’s. That’s like chicken vs egg. That’s like Han vs Greedo. That’s like, irrelevant. 

That baseball bat clatters to the pavement, a hearty overture to Eddie’s surge of empowerment, of rage, of insisting that she isn’t, I’m not, she isn’t, I’m not, nobody talks about her like that–

Next thing Eddie knows, he’s sitting beside you. Outside the principal’s office. Hand split open and aching, nose backed up and a little bleeding, coming down like the fucking Hindenberg. Reckoning with the fact that he wouldn’t need to be a little morning-after zipped on coke to throw a punch for you, if it came down to it. If it came down to it, he would have tried caving in Billy Hargrove’s other eye socket. He would have made him look like the Elephant Man if you needed him to. 

He liked that Eraserhead movie you made him watch. 

“He needs an ice pack…”

The soft mumble from you makes Eddie take this breath that makes his chest feel like it might concave. You, you. Reckless, unbuttoned, unlaced, off-kilter you, that still had time to snap at him after he’d tried to freeze you out, that still had eyes that asked him did it hurt? 

Eddie eavesdrops on as much of your grilling with Higgins and the hot guidance counsellor as his damaged eardrums will allow. Temporary insanity. Disgusting prank. He wonders what that’s about… and again, didn’t even think to question what brought you onto the hood of Hargrove’s car. He just saw you. He just acted.

He just keeps doing that. 

And then he hears. College. Application deadlines are within touching distance. 

“I can turn this around.”

Of course. Eddie hadn’t even thought about that, because he’s him. And it was something you were probably worrying yourself sick over, because you’re you– you wanted out of here. To get up, go, be someone great.

“New York, ideally,” you’d said to him once, tightrope walking across the broken bleachers outside; you’d been waiting around for him to give you a ride home, but he had a deal to make first. You were weirdly patient, weirdly pensive that day. “Someplace I can go and burrow in and absorb everything and grow out of a crack in the sidewalk, new.” 

Eddie’d held your hand, helping you step over a gap in the bench, “Not taking Manhattan by storm? Hurricane Lacy?” 

You–and he remembered this–had held onto his hand for a few more minutes, a cigarette dwindling in the other. Your fingers were cold; they clutched at his a little tighter when you spoke again. 

“No. Not Manhattan, not midtown, not big business. I have precipitated a change in my weathervane.”

“What does that mean?”

“Means that someone taught me the difference between being important and being significant.” 

Back in the room. Eddie drawls out some stupid crack to Higgins, who he’s still supplying with enough benzos to take out Jonestown a second time, which is the only reason he hasn’t been booted out of Hawkins High for absolute and final good. And then you’re alone again, the two of you. Together. 

“Wanna get out of here?”

Next thing Eddie knows, he’s spending the last of his energy like it’s burning a hole in his pocket, horsing around on the nurse’s saddle stool while you rifle through her office. You are all edgy and commanding because you have no idea how to say sorry you got wailed on by Hargrove for me.

Good. He likes you better like this, at least for right now. Likes to watch you attempt to pirouette on the razor’s edge of your relationship to one another, mostly because your attempt is more graceful and easier to watch than his is. And he likes to watch you. Watch you do anything, really. 

Watch you snap at him to get on the bed. Fuck. 

Watch you tear and dab at his busted knuckles. Fuckfuck. 

Watch you talk about Cat People and press his hand to his chest and tell him he’s injured and wrong and watch you watch searing, singing alcohol on his split lip dry up. Eddie watches your eyes brighten and darken with curious affection, like those twinkle lights that fade in and out, steady as breathing. His breathing is anything but steady. His knees have come apart, letting you stand between them.

You dab and he lets this broken sound loose from him, because the proximity of your body to his feels like a fresh fucking spring breeze and god, god, the way you’re touching him with such gentle, measured movements, like you’ve choreographed every one–

You’re so exact. You’re so organized. He wants to unexact you.

Eddie uses his good hand, not that either of them are really any good, and presses as much of you into him as he can. The flush of your front, the flush of your mouth, he even has to stop those shorn denim-sheathed legs of his from wrapping around your hips. Eddie’s grip, it travels, hitching tweed up the curve of your ass. 

You don’t push him away like he figured you might, you don’t indignantly demand what is going on?! You don’t. You weave your hand up the line of his thigh, to the hard edge of his crotch where he is straining, a rigidity that’s been building since you went all Nurse Ratched on him. 

A rigidity that’s hard to keep down around you, badum-tsssss. 

Fuck.

Eddie almost knocks the word loose with a low groan that’s pressed into the supple flesh of your cheek, your lovely blushing fucking cheek, a cheek he goes to kiss or bite or something but misses by a hair because you’re straining your neck back. To look at him. Not soberly, he hopes. 

Someone down there is wishing him death by dick.

Not the wettest, wildest, filthiest dreams that he’s had about you (and categorically, there have been many) could have prepared Eddie Munson from the earth-shattering consequences of this tiny gesture. Your tongue, perfect and pink, darts to his lip, stinging and sore and comes away with the tiniest drop of ruby-red blood sitting on its tip. 

And you suck his bottom lip between yours, eyes fluttering closed.

Eddie’s cock jumps as his heart does, not a second out of time, as you clamber up, into his lap– so completely un-Lacylike, so totally… unexact. How, in all the vastness of Heaven and earth and Middle Earth and Hell and the Bookstore and the closet and his bedroom and the van could he be so fucking stupid?

“Just friends, right?” Eddie is deaf to how pained it comes out sounding.

His good hand travels. He finds your thighs, the softness there giving way to easy indents for his fingers and he knows, he knows that this is where his hands should be–unless, higher could be good? Higher, high up past those offending, incriminating lace top stockings that drilled through Eddie’s mind like an ice pick, giving him whatever the opposite of a lobotomy is. Haunting him with a fervour, begging him to snap them, but there’s no fucking time for that, god it hurts but there’s no fucking time for that because you. Two. Are. In. The fucking. Nurse’s. Office. 

But the world has ceased turning. 

Eddie’s mouth opens in a silent attempt at a moan as his fingers push past to the beating, radiating core of you that the throbbing, radiating core of him longs for. 

You’re so wet, and soft and lush and it rings through is head like a fucking hallelujah, you’re wet, you’re wet for him.

More than anything, he needs your encouragement–he needs to know that you want him to keep going. That you want him, that you want him, that–

You nod, frantic and undone, and Eddie kisses you for it just before he realizes he has no idea what he’s doing. But nothing in his body tells him to zoom out–in fact, the only thing he wants is more in. More you, more of you wrapped around him. He moves his hands with a clumsiness usually uncharacteristic of him, fucking guitar guy, fucking painting miniatures and shit guy. But it works, according to you and the way you keen against him with your beautiful, spit-shining lips parted and pulling against his. 

These little noises, chirps and swallowed moans of yours– it’s like music. He wants to choke on them.

Eddie’s voice kind of cracks open again, letting a little air and a touch of begging out. He strains, pained, cock aching against the hitch of denim. “Does he do this? Does anyone do this for you, Lacy?”

Because you’re lonely, and Eddie knows that, with his fingers stroking you deep. You’re lonely, or would be, were it not for him. And it feels like now, in the heady swirl of these few moments that are stretched into an infinity, that he’s using it against you, but he’s not. He should be the one doing this for you, he should be the one making you feel this way, making you tremble even as he clumsily thumbs at your clit, because he thinks knows you and he thinks you want it unmeasured and unshackled and washing over you in a wave of sheer blind devotion and that’s why his tongue is all over your neck. 

That’s why his knuckles are split. 

That’s why there’s no malice in Eddie’s voice when he croaks, “Just friends? Lacy?” as you rock and spasm, hands clutching him around the shoulder and whimpers barely deadened against his lips. He can feel the texture of your pinched brow against his own. 

He wants to clutch you as close as he possibly can, but he’s got one good arm and it’s between your legs.

Between your legs. Jesus fucking Christ. 

Sobriety hits like a tidal wave as your breath returns to its normal rhythm; Eddie’s doesn’t quite have the same rebound. He’s still huffing a little, out of exertion or out of nerves, as he slips his hand out from under you, brushing what was off on his jeans. A small patch of his own bodily fluid collected there too, making sure he’s wearing the both of you like Hester Prynne’s scarlet letter as he walks around for the rest of the day. 

Eddie, throat starting to tighten up, pulls you in for one kiss, to give you one last taste of where he’d been split open for you. Melodrama dances around it; shades of we shouldn’t have, but we did, but we can’t, but now I have to fucking live with the fact I cracked open this Pandora’s box and I’m sorry. 

Or something to that effect. 

And you see right through him, because you always do. Hair in a muss, lips flushed, adjusting your skirt, re-exacting yourself, you clean up any evidence that this had ever happened. At least, on a surface level. 

Eddie dares to look at you once more, and you dare to look back at him. And thank god he’s sitting down, because that look shoots him right through the fucking aorta. You, wide-eyed and small-looking, pupils darting and unsure, are asking him why. Pleading with him, why. Why do this. Why now. Why at all, ever, why did you have to. Even though you know. 

“I–”

“No, I know. I know. I certainly know.”

Because you’re Lacy. You know everything. 

Eddie does think about going after you for a second, after your curt nod and dash through the door but he knows that it’s a zero-sum game. He has nothing good to say. It’s not even you that’s rendered him speechless– funny thing, you usually do the opposite. You always give him something to say. He just has nothing good to say. Nothing worthy of you. 

So he sits there, on the examination table, waiting for the mythical Nurse Lydia to tend to his wounds. 

First he’ll will himself soft, then he’ll will himself sane. 

Famous last words.