#steve is now 20

[hitlikehammers]

there is a tree as old as me

rating: teen tags: future fic, outside POV, trespassing, established relationship, engaged steddie💍 ✨for @kallisto-k at my BIRTHDAY MONTH PROMPT FEST for the prompt: To Build A Home—The Cinematic Orchestra: 'and now, it's time to leave and turn to dust // out in the garden where we planted the seeds // there is a tree as old as me

She catches the trespassers by chance, really.

She’s awake early even for her routine, age doing nothing for the capacity to sleep in on a good day but her hip’s been a trial, and she needs buy a new mattress but Richard’s insistent he can’t bear to sleep on a stone slab, Patricia, good god—she wants to get one of those Select Comforts that splits their settings between two sides as a compromise; he argues those are for lesser mortals, which she’s long learned has evolved in recent years to mean not just that he thinks he’s above something in general, but more now that he thinks he’s better than technological advances.

And Patricia Harrington has standards, certainly, but she can also recognize when

She’s also old enough to remember when ‘new’ was an opportunity to throw her Black Card and gloat a little in the rush of the novelty, the momentary shine until the next new thing appeared to repeat the cycle.

She might be feeling her years, but she doesn’t understand when her husband got so damn old.

At least he’s still savvy enough to the time that they’ve got an airtight security system for the house itself, given the trespassers—more likely would-be-burglars, given the evaluation they’d just paid taxes on for the property—that she spies out the window, hears where she cracked the window in the kitchen to light a cigarette as she brews an early coffee.

Maybe Richard will agree to motion sensors for the yard, if she tells him about these…miscreants.

They’re moving carefully, like they don’t want to be seen, or more likely caught—suspicious, obviously—but they’re also moving like the know where they’re headed, as if they’re familiar with the space they’re traversing even in the pitch dark: even more suspect, really, and she wonders if they’ve cased the home, adds full-property camera surveillance to her list of proposals for reevaluating their security.

“I can’t believe you convinced me to—“ she barely catches the hiss from one of the criminals from across the yard, but it doesn’t last.

It doesn’t last because the second party drags the first close and: the lighting’s horrible, the moon’s crescent at best, but there’s really only one thing to be doing when two bodies press close, and then break apart with a pop she makes out on the breeze and, well. She was young, once.

“Believe it, baby,” the second trespasser rumbles low, and, oh, good god: “we gotta hit all the landmarks.”

They’re men. They’re both of them men and they were just—

“Landmarks?” the first one hisses sharper, this time, and Patricia…she doesn’t care nearly as much as Richard does about what people do in their bedrooms that she personally doesn’t agree with.

But this isn’t anyone’s own bedroom. This is her lawn.

“Of our story,” the second one, he—he—has got such curly hair she likely would have assume it was a very tall women, if it weren’t for the voice; “all our highlights.”

“What, exactly, was—“ the first man, he sounds a little exasperated as he whispers, but…fond. Fond like Patricia hasn’t heard in…well.

A very, very long time, at least.

“Here,” the curly haired fiend traipsing her property stops at a redbud tree Richard had always despised, said it looked tacky, common. Patricia canceled every removal service he’d had whichever secretary he instructed to send.

The second man turns, moves slow toward the tree before reaching, placing a hand on the trunk almost carefully, reverently. There’s something…familiar about him. The shape of his face, the way the the coif of his hair catches in shadow—

“My nanny used to tell me this tree was planted the year I was born, that it grew up with me,” and oh, oh, that’s, he’s—“so that I’d have to eat my vegetables and stuff, if I wanted to see it grow.”

He sounds so nostalgic, so soft at the edges; Patricia doesn’t know if she’s ever heard her son sound like that.

Because that’s who it is; why he seemed familiar even at a distance.

Even if she hasn’t seen or heard from Steven in nearly twenty years.

“And look at you both,” the other man, with the curly hair, he’s holding Steven by his arms, and the motion, the body language is…tender even before she hears the words filter over:

“Big and strong,” the man says, and then he’s cupping Steven’s cheek and Steven leans in so quick, like he trusts deeply, here: “fuckin’ beautiful.”

She can’t see it, not in the dark, but something tells her Steven’s smiling for the words. It makes her feel…uncomfortable.

Because it’s not as if they hadn’t seen it; she doesn’t know where Steven’s moved, where he ended up when he moved out while they were gone, left his key and a simple, terse little note about the furnace needing looked at—she only knows he’s nowhere near here, anymore, and she suspects there are some, like the former police chief and his wife, who know where he went but she never asks. She’s too proud for that.

But the point is: Steven doesn’t live in Hawkins anymore, and likely lives nowhere near Hawkins. But when The Post ran the engagement announcement it had only been implied, she’d never have been able to place is, but: when and S. Harrington and E. Munson announced their happy news in print, in a town that didn’t house people by those initials, even if it still housed residents by those family names?

Well. Patricia had suspicions. And she remembers the Munson boy largely because his hair was an unmistakable mess.

Apparently some things didn’t change.

“This,” the Munson boy, because that’s who it is, that’s who’s still cradling her son so close and so gently: “this was the first place I knew you wanted me.”

Steven’s head, she sees, still tilts just so when he’s baffled.

“What?”

“I knew you loved me like I love you, I knew that way before but you,” and the Munson boy, he pulls his hand across his face like the night isn’t doing the hiding for him. Preposterous, really.

“The urchins were inside, we were going to grab more pop to bring in and you pushed me up against this very tree,” and the boy—man, they’re men, they’ve long been men and Patricia doesn’t want to pry up the implications of how she saw no part of the becoming part of that process with her own eyes—but the man’s voice is so warm, so…smitten.

It should be nauseating. Another thing she doesn’t want to pry at is why it…isn’t. At least not quite.

“Couldn’t wait, you said, couldn’t keep you hands off me,” and he’s turning Steven, walking him back against the tree as he speaks the words, like he’s reenacting something nigh-sacred.

“And I knew that I was out of my mind with wanting you like that, on top of loving you more than fucking life baby, but,” and Munson, she can see the way he breathes in his deep for the heave in the line of his back, and she can see the way he…brushes the line of his nose back and forth against Steven’s.

Who still has her father’s nose.

“You were hard as soon as you pinned me,” and Patricia frowns at the glass, when she hears that; and she barely hears is, in fairness, it’s pitched low even as they think they’re alone which is the least they can do but they are not alone and Patrician does not need to be subjected to—

“And it was like a light switch, or a lightning bolt,” the Munson boy—they’re boys they are still boys—but the Munson boy whispers it, and sounds like he’s wondering at it;

“He loves me,” he breathes, the line of his back breathing so deep again; “and he fucking wants me.”

And no, Patricia does not need to hear that at all, but.

There is a part of her, buried somewhere, who…does miss the idea of wanting. Of being wanted. In the abstract.

“You’re absurd,” Steven snorts and oh; oh, she remembers that tone, that testy little snark that always riled Richard enough that he’d largely stomped it out of the boy but oh: Patricia did love when Steven failed to rein it in.

Because it always reminded her that Steven was her son.

She doesn’t intend to start rubbing at her chest, but it…it feels kind of tight, there, just now.

It aches, there. Just now.

“I love you,” and Steven’s voice, she’s never heard him speak with that much feeling, and it’s difficult not to…to react to even just overhearing, to eavesdropping, though in fairness: it is, again, her property.

“And I want you,” Steven leans in, and kisses at Munson’s cheek with such affection, a devotion that’s obvious, near-blinding even in the dark; “just as much now as then,” and then Steven, Steven—

He laughs.

He laughs and it’s such a light and carefree sound and it’s so foreign to Patricia’s ears that it almost makes her anxious, or something of the like.

“But then so much more, baby,” and the warmth in those words: those are foreign too.

Those feel strange to hear, not least in Steven’s voice which…

She thinks she may not have recognized, if the first thing she hear were these words, in this tone.

She’s not wholly sure how to sit with that suspicion.

“Ten days,” the Munson boy’s hands go to Steven’s hips and he rocks them back and forth a bounce in the motion, a levity.

“Ten days,” and Steven…no.

No: she would not have recognized that voice.

She would not have known her son.

“You’re gonna be my husband,” the Munson boy whispers, Patricia only hears because she’s trying to, now, she…she wants to even if it hurts unexpectedly, the tightness under her hand in her chest a pain, now, a small little stab when this man cups her son’s cheeks, cradles him so careful and so…so loving, undeniable even like this, and says what she suspected from that notice in the paper.

Steven is getting married. Steven is getting married and he is proud enough to flaunt it in a town who could never prove it, where he no longer has tied; to a a partner who is proud enough to do the same just as brazen, and she doesn’t know if she’s proud or put-off, but she does know here, now—

Steven is in love. And he is loved deeply in kind. And the person who loves him sounds in awe at the idea of pledging forever not as a contract, but maybe more as a privilege.

She wasn’t paying attention for a strand of seconds as she acknowledged this, and decided ultimately to stop trying to do anything deeper than just that.

But she sees them pull apart; they’d been kissing the entire time she’d been thinking it through.

She isn’t even interested in acknowledging the…niggling little feeling of that kind of prolonged affection, let alone the way they reach for each other, steady each other in the coming apart, as if they have no desire to wholly come apart.

The idea of trusting another pair of hands like it looks as if they do, in the dim of these early hours, is…another foreign thing.

“Okay, okay,” the Munson boy laughs, no, giggles; “let’s get out of here before the owners notice.”

And he turns, would meet her eyes if he could see her; she knows he can’t, knows she’s standing just beyond the capacity to be caught and how absurd, caught inside her own house.

But then he’s turned away again; the house, and whatever it holds, far less compelling than the man at his side.

“Wayne’s place?” Steven’s asking and the Munson boy grabs his hand, lifts it to his mouth.

“Yeah,” the Munson boy says so low, so soft and sweet; “we can hit some more landmarks before that bagel joint he likes opens, we can take him breakfast.”

“More landmarks?” Steven sounds baffled, but so very fond and his partner doesn’t let go of his hand once, reels him in to peck his cheek.

“Of course, sweetheart,” the Munson boy nearly…purrs, how ridiculous; “so many. Because we’ve got one hell of a story.”

But ridiculous or no: the moon shifts out from the clouds as they make to scamper off the lawn and Patricia sees her son’s face for the first time in decades, now, and oh.

Oh: she’s never seen him smile like that. Not…not once.

She turns away, because the sting in her chest burns behind her eyes, a little; because the joy on Steven’s face is…

It feels private; like something she’s not meant to see.

She goes to pour herself the coffee she’d largely forgotten, and, well.

She’s still going to talk to Richard about security, but maybe…

Maybe not just now.

permanent tag list (comment to be added/removed): @pearynice @hbyrde36 @slashify @finntheehumaneater @wxrmland @dreamwatch @perseus-notjackson @estrellami-1 @bookworm0690 

[ehh-is-the-name]

I make good spending decisions.

For real though, mephone-3gs' shop got me hooked up after ii16 <3

I wanted to get the Cobs one as a magnet for my dorm fridge but I was NOT paying another $7 in shipping just to get it. Might make use of an old fridge magnet or something, I know people be having yard sales up the ying-yang, so I'm crossing my fingers. I love having a sticker taped to my fridge but a magnet would just be better for my soul.

[sergeifyodorov]

whatever happened to the sanctity of Making Your Own Post

[smoshers-comment]

▶ Apple Vision Pro SUCKS (Sketches)

[elliotts-personal-property]

This one goes out to the Steve girlies🫵, who have to deal with my Joe Hoe™️ shenanigans on the daily💗

[ima-ghost-art]

What if Steve and Eddie got trapped in the upside down during the final battle of 87?

El cant find them and can no longer open a gate for everyone to try find them, so everyone has to believe they're dead. The party feels lost without them.

Of course, Dustin Robin Max Lucas and Erica are all devastated, all refusing to believe that the two were dead, sure that there must be a way to get them back. But, weeks turn to months and months turn to years and there is still no sign of Steve and Eddie being found.

After a while the group is forced to just start moving on with their lives, each moving away but all staying in contact.

Slowly they start forming their own familys, Lucas and Max (now living in California near Jonathan and Argyle) welcome thier first daughter 'Stephanie Erica Sinclair' April 29th 1992, she was a happy accident and was named after her parents favourite siblings.

The same year, Argyle and Eden have a little girl named Evie, the two splitting custody after Eden moved out of Utah to California near Argyle.

Next was Nancy and Jonathan two years later, the pair having a set of twins 'James Edmund and Katie Barbara' August 10th 1994. Jon takes full custody when they turn 3, living with Argyle back in Cali, letting Nancy follow her dream of becoming a journalist in Chicago, while he worked his dream job at a photography studio stationed on the coast. The two both knew they weren't going to last, however they dont stop loving eachother. (Nancy still helps out with the twins when shes in the area as well as weekly phone calls, making sure they know she loves them even if shes not often around)

In 96, 'Issac Lucas Sinclair' who was the same age as a little girl called 'Morgan' later adopted by El who Dr Owen's believes nay have powers similar to hers and Henry's.

Robin and Vickie, who now live in Michigan, adopt a son in 2000 a trans boy named Tyler, a year older than Stephanie.

At this point it's 2007, having been 20 years since the final battle, 20 years since the party lost Steve and Eddie, 20 whole years. The only people who still lived in Hawkins was Dustin and Suzie Henderson, the two of them both choosing not to have kids, living together in one of the newer houses built along the edge of Hawkins where they had easy access to their jobs working in a lab just outside of Indianapolis. The two secretly working on a way to potentially find their missing friends.

Dustin becomes the fun uncle to his friends kids, Hosting a new version of Hellfire for them with Will being his co DM!

Wayne Munson also continued to live in Hawkins after he helped during the final battle, after losing his nephew he moved in with Claudia living with her.

The wheelers and Sinclair's still both live there too, Holly Wheeler after graduating, now being a teacher at Hawkins high.

The Hopper-Byers move out towards Illinois, Mike and Will both living together in an apartment together in Indianapolis, and El lives with Max and Lucas with their children together in California.

(lest not also forget Garath and Jeff, who also helped in the final battle, the two along with the other members of Corroded Coffin started making it big during the early 90s, and successfully did 2 world tours, they always dedicate each performance to Eddie, as he was the man who started the band and would have loved to see where they ended up now!!)

The party end up coming back to Hawkins in July, to celebrate the 20th anniversary of the end of the Upside Down.

...That is until Stephanie Sinclair goes missing while cycling back to the Hendersons after an evening at the arcade with the other party members kids. Everyone else was staying at the wheelers or the old Byers home, but hers were staying with her Uncle Dustin like they always did. Issac and Morgan hadnt joined them so she was biking on her own.

They found her abandoned bike along the edge of Mirkwood the next day... Stephanie Sinclair had completely disappeared

It didnt take long for missing animal reports to start cropping up either, same with another missing person, one of Holly's students...

When Stephanie is finally saved a week later she wasnt found alone. Her and the missing student, were accompanied by two familiar young adults.

Steve and Eddie, both looking like they had barely aged at all since getting trapped in the upside down.

[pizzaqueen]

No context dialogue snippet from a pre-Steddie Steve&Robin ficlet I’ve been meaning to write for months:

“Uh, Steve?”

“Yeah.”

“I think your uncle is gay.”

“Yeah, I figured that out.”

“Just now?”

“Yep, just now.”

[stopthecarrrr]

Verse: Dead By Daylight

[[if you are interested in a Dead By Daylight verse interaction or for our survivors to be affiliated in any way, please give this a like. The DBD brainrot has been strong lately so I figured why not see who wants to do this? XD

getting the kiddo to bed so I will hopefully get some more things accomplished but hey even if I don’t, I’ll still throw out some small banter.]]

[bittwitchy]

cw anti st*ggy and st*cky joke:

its funny how much i hate st*ggy considering i also dont like st*cky romantically

[prodigal-upsiders]

she said i think i’m going to boston

or: Nancy, and Eddie, and new starts

Nancy Wheeler starts at Emerson College in the fall of 1986, and she is being so normal all the time. With Vecna actually dead, with the Upside Down actually finished this time, she tells herself that it’s finally time for her to move forward, no longer let it all tie her down. She tries so hard, but she’s always adrift, surrounded by her peers who just don’t get her even though they’re in the same classes, fired up about similar things, she’s just... not connecting with anyone the way she hoped. But she keeps trying to push herself forward into her life as she used to envision it, still stays every night in her dorm room even though she wakes up every hour with her entire body tensed, her muscles aching from clenching so tight so she doesn’t wake her roommate, and she’s exhausted, unable to get back to sleep because she can’t keep her guns under her bed here, so she sits with her back to the wall and watches the sunrise creep through the window, and she puts her makeup on and pretends, pretends, pretends until she can step off the campus and find the two people in this state who understand what she’s been through.

To her surprise, it’s Wayne Munson—who wouldn’t stay in Hawkins after what they did to his kid, who took his payout for his silence and the loss of his home and now has a small place outside the city, a little under an hour away because he wasn’t going to smother but he also wasn’t letting Eddie out of his sight for a while yet—who tells her what she needs to hear. Tells her that she can’t force feeling safe, or at least safe enough, but she can find it and she can sit herself down there, whatever that looks like, for as long as she needs to, and anybody who thinks less of her for that is never going to understand where she’s coming from, anyway. And she’s not even really surprised when she finds herself leaning on Eddie more after that—in Hawkins, in the hospital and during his recovery, he needed her and everyone else a lot, and he's not shy about it, and having him be vulnerable first lets her let her own guard down. And his apartment over the music shop is louder than her dorm room, removed from all her studies and fellow students, but it’s also a place where she can reach out and touch a weapon if she needs to, just to tell herself it’s there; and it’s where she can reach out and grab onto Eddie, too, and it’s not until she lets herself have that that she realizes how much she needed to be able to know he’s safe. She can go back to sleep, there. The rest of her family might still be in Hawkins, not always available to call and pretty far away to visit, but she can ground herself with knowing that Eddie’s safe, and that makes it easier to remember that the rest of them are, too.

And she finally starts relaxing and accepting that she can lean on people too, and Eddie is someone she can just be a weird trauma survivor around, just as much as she can relax and be a young adult and geek out about her interests around him too. They’re both huge nerds, and some of their interests overlap, and when they don’t it’s exciting and fun to pace around while she explains her thing, or watch Eddie as he jumps around and gesticulates wildly while he tells her about his.

On New Year's Day, 1987, Nancy pierces Eddie’s ears in their bathroom and in return he dyes her hair pink and helps her make a battle jacket. She fills it with not just music patches but also finds political and literary pins—defiantly adds pop patches, but keeps a Corroded Coffin pin that Robin made despite them no longer playing together, and a few metal pins that Eddie is very proud of. (She never gets really into any one particular artist, but Eddie makes her mixtapes of the songs she really likes, the ones with lyrics that make them fables and ghost stories swept up in sound.) It’s not about the scene, for her, but there is a lot of comfort and confidence she finds in donning the armor. She had a different kind of armor in Hawkins, but she wants something new now, something that marks her out as different from who she was. The sturdy denim weight across her shoulders and the bright shocks of pink in the corner of her eye feels like defense and offense both, as she adds protest pins to her collection and wears them out along with her pastel skirts and cute low-heeled boots. She’s a far cry from the hometown girl she used to be, but she’s also still the woman who grew from those roots, changed as she was by the darkness underneath. It’s 1987 and Nancy Wheeler goes to college, and she goes home to a loud little apartment on a busy street, and she feels safe enough to walk forward.

[devondespresso]

unexpected side effect of being a jock writing fanfic is that im spending far too much time looking into and explaining rope climbing for it to be in 7 lines of my fic

[findafight]

Robin and Steve's Epic Platonic Soulmate Mixtape Chapter 8 is here!

Preview:

In the morning, Steve made breakfast as Robin loaded the VCR with the first cassette of whatever season of MASH Steve had handed to her. She got the captions on and stopped the tape, letting the blue screen fill his overly large living room with a neon glow.

Steve hummed in the kitchen, making popeye eggs and tea. She leaned her head back on the couch and wrapped the blanket around her body, cocooning herself in the warmth. The quiet of the morning was nice. Easy. She could see the two of them living together, in some apartment far away from Hawkins and government conspiracies, just existing and growing up. It’d be nice, they’d have a room for the Party to share if they visited, and Robin could maybe get a girlfriend to come over and Steve would smile and wiggle his eyebrows suggestively at them like a doofus.

Robin could imagine Steve getting some shitty retail job with her, or maybe he’d finally get a gig teaching little munchkins how to play piano. It would suit him, working with kids. Not Robin, no, children were frightening creatures with sticky hands and loud voices and very soft heads that she was frightened of breaking. But Steve was always softer than anyone gave him credit for, corralling all the members of the Party even in the month and a half they’d been absorbed into their group into some semblance of order and he’d be a good teacher

Finish on AO3 or start from Chapter 1

[strangedisciple]

Isn’t it like super late in British time 🤨/silly

Having to take Steve’s job while he’s on leave </3

yeahhhhhhh it is- its like. 20 to 1 lmao-

either way i think im gonna go 2 bed now :]

[formosusiniquis]

okay but what if I did a vandal rewatch and wrote about them having to deal with the approach of their 30s??

[poisonouspastels]

actually im kind of thinking abt how all the main players in the AU are probably way more mentally Not Great than it may appear at first

[jonathanbyersphd]

No, because if they wrote Steve more interesting he could've been the Nothing New character but NOOOOOO