#subtle dilf-steve bc I couldn't help myself

[livwritesstuff]

At forty-five years old, there’s one day out of the entire calendar year that Eddie dreads like none other.

It’s not his birthday, surprising as that is, and it’s not tax day either (though only because Steve, the angel that he is, elected to take charge of their insane finances ages ago so Eddie doesn't even think about it).

No, it's parent-teacher conference day at his children's school.

Eddie wants to have a strong word with whoever's idea it was to have every meeting take place in a single day. Maybe that shit works for the freaks with only one kid, but he and Steve have three hellraisers in the elementary school, so for them it usually goes like this:

Kid 1: Please help us figure out why she is inciting riots on the playground

Kid 2: Your child is taking up class time getting into complex moral debates with the teacher’s aid

Kid 3: She's a pleasure to have in class — that being said, does she ever talk?

– all within the span of 45 minutes.

Kind of whiplash-y, in Eddie's opinion.

Steve is totally in his element for that shit though. He’s good at distinguishing between when their kid is the problem (which is……..often) and when it’s a reflection of something bigger, and when that's the case, he gets to tap into the snarky, mean-girl side of him that doesn’t come out all that often anymore..

Steve, to Hazel's teacher: I don’t know what to tell you. Hazel makes all kinds of noise at home. We’ll talk to her, but maybe this also warrants a conversation about what’s going on in the classroom that’s making her feel like she can’t when she’s here.

It's sexy as all hell in Eddie’s opinion, or so he attempts to communicate to his husband the literal second they're out of the school when he tries to shove him bodily into the backseat of their car without extracting his hands from Steve’s back pockets.

Steve, managing to push Eddie off him for half a second: Dude – no fucking chance are we having car sex in the parking lot of our daughters’ elementary school. You’re crazy.

Eddie: *pauses to think about the layout of their town*

Eddie: Bet there’s no one in the lot for the cemetery.

Steve: No.

Steve: We can’t get cursed today. I’ve got shit to do.

Eddie: What about the hiking trails?

Steve:

Steve: Yeah, okay.

[livwritesstuff]

Something Eddie had learned during his and Steve’s past few years living in mid-western Massachusetts was that nobody parties harder than middle-aged suburbanites with their young children in the next room.

Sure, it’s a different kind of partying than what Eddie had participated in when he was younger, but still just as impressive, or so he's thinking as he stands in the crowded kitchen of a ridiculous McMansion decorated to the holiday nines, fancy IPA in hand (in a matte can and everything), four days before Christmas.

He's mingling.

Well, he’s kind of mingling. He’s had one eye on Steve, who is on the other side of the kitchen, pretty much the entire time, because Hazel, their youngest daughter, is sacked out and Steve is holding her in one arm as if she’s a newborn still and not a couple months past her first birthday like she really is (it’s providing Eddie with yet another reason he needs that kid to stop growing up, already, because he’ll never get tired of watching that man hold a baby).

Moe and Robbie are…honestly, Eddie doesn’t really know what all the kids get up to at these things. They are loud – and with an unending consistency that makes any silence deafening (and a telltale sign that some type of shit went down that they should probably check in on) – and occasionally one or two of them will barrel through the kitchen on some imaginary mission.

Eddie isn’t really even drinking. Steve is certainly doing enough for the both of them, and his way of getting himself into trouble with the other parents once he’s got a couple beers in him is entertaining enough for Eddie to not need alcohol to get through the night.

“Dude, fuckin’ Dan is making drinks,” Steve tells him early in the evening, “If he offers you a dirty Girl Scout, say no. He’s a father.”

“What the fuck is in that?”

“Vodka, creme de menthe, and chocolate whiskey.”

“Shit, that…actually sounds kind of good.”

“I know, but we’re declining in protest.”

Some time after that, Eddie ends up with Hazel. She’s awake and curiously mouthing at a peppermint cookie when Steve makes his way back to him.

“Lisa is mad at me I think,” he says as he sidles up behind Eddie, pressing himself against his back and wrapping an arm around his waist.

“Watch it, handsy,” Eddie warns him, “There’s children present. What did you do to Lisa?”

“All I said was that maybe the start of a recession isn’t the best time to buy a timeshare and suddenly I have a tone.”

“Well, what did you expect?”

Not even twenty five minutes later, Steve returns.

“Evan’s parents probably aren’t gonna invite us to their New Year’s party,” Steve tells him, with the tiniest slur to his voice that might have worried Eddie if he wasn’t also holding a very large bottle of water.

“Why?”

“I dunno, man. All I said was that the fourth Christmas tree might be compensating for something and it was like I said the Armageddon was coming.”

“Alright, I think it’s time for us to head out.”

[livwritesstuff]

I definitely think that former rich kid-Steve knows how to ski, and when he and Eddie move to New England in their late twenties, he gets into it again.

Eddie, on the other hand, is not a skier. Not by any stretch of the imagination. He let Steve drag him onto the mountain once, and that was way more than enough for him.

Years later, when they have kids that they're supposed to be enrolling in sports (to become "well-rounded human beings" or whatever), Steve signs them up for skiing "just to see how it goes", and much to Eddie's chagrin, they love it, so every weekend from November through February, the Harrington family can be found at their local mountain.

Eddie joins the trip to the mountain every weekend purely for child-wrangling purposes because, seriously, three kids five-and-under is no fucking joke. His favorite part of their ski days is the conversation Steve has to have with Moe, their half-feral menace of a five-year-old, before they hit the slopes.

"Okay, no running into anyone," Steve says as he adjusts Moe's bright pink ski helmet, "Last week you were bowling people over left, right, and center."

Eddie has to hold in a snort, because it's true. The second Moe got the hang of skiing she'd made it her mission to figure out just how fast she could barrel down the mountain. To hell with the other skiers.

"Can you make some big turns today, Moe?" Steve asks, and Eddie watches Moe give her dad some major side-eye.

"Maybe," she says, her tone suggesting she wouldn't be doing any such thing.

So Moe and Steve hit the big hill and Eddie drops three-year-old Robbie off at her lesson on the bunny slope and then he gets to spend the rest of the day in the warmth of the ski lodge with baby Hazel, watching out the window as Steve makes every attempt to prevent Moe from careening straight down the mountain.

"I swear – that girl doesn't feel fear," Steve says later when he finally manages to drag Moe into the lodge for lunch, "You see it, right? She's gonna kill someone if she keeps skiing like that."

"Hey this was all you, man," Eddie shakes his head, "At least we know we can't ever sign her up for hockey."

"Jesus Christ – imagine the bloodbath that would be."

[livwritesstuff]

only context needed -> it's 2001, steve and eddie are established foster parents, and they just had a newborn baby dropped off on their doorstep enjoy :)

Eddie appears behind Steve only a moment after an unnamed social worker passes off to him a newborn baby and disappears.

“Oh…shit,” he says, “That…yeah, that’s a baby. Was that…”

“Not our caseworker. Couldn’t make it, I guess.”

“Huh,” Ed replies, scratching the back of his neck, “Yeah, this never gets old. Well…she’s here, I guess...dibs on going shopping.”

“Fine by me,” Steve replies, adjusting the way he’s holding the tiny baby as he begins to make his way back down the hallway, “You can install the car seat while you’re at it.”

“Oh come on, Stevie.”

“I’ll text you a list.”

Eventually Ed does leave, and he begrudgingly takes the car seat with him (sucker, Steve thinks as he watches him go, because that thing is a bitch to install but he totally would have done it if Ed asked nice enough, but he’d do anything for Ed if he asked nice enough). The baby is asleep, and he’d like her to stay that way for as long as possible, so he unfolds the portable crib he’d dug out of the hall closet and then gets back to cooking dinner.

Steve is wrapping up the final steps of the paella recipe when the baby begins to cry. He hopes it’s not a hungry-cry or a diaper-cry, because he can’t exactly help her with any of those things until Ed gets back, but it turns out to be a woke up and didn’t know where she was -cry (or maybe it’s a was in the goddamn womb forty-eight hours ago and now doesn’t know what the fuck is going on -cry; Steve doesn’t blame her either way), because as soon as he’s got her cradled in his arms again, she calms down. He finishes cooking one-handed, and just as he’s plating up dinner, the door to their apartment opens.

Eddie walks into the kitchen, and Steve looks up just in time to watch his jaw slacken as his eyes fall on the way he’s holding the little baby.

“So how’d it go?” Steve asks nonchalantly.

“Jesus Christ, Steve.”

“What?”

“God, dad really is your final form.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?” Steve asks, though he can’t quite manage to quell the hint of a smirk on his lips before he turns back towards the stove.

“You know precisely what that means,” Ed replies tiredly.

“How did the shopping go?” Steve repeats, because Ed’s ability to productively shop by himself has been a bit of a toss-up ever since he started having a serious amount of disposable income.

Much to Steve’s immediate concern, Ed begins to bring bag after bag after bag in from the hallway.

“It went excellent, I’ll have you know. We’re gonna need a whole-ass shed for all the diapers, and she’s got clothes for the next hundred years.”

“That’s great,” he replies, replacing the baby in the crib, “She’ll be this size for the next forty-five minutes. Formula?”

“Done. Did you know that baby socks are so fuckin’ tiny, Steve?”

Steve looks at him for a long time.

“Is this your way of telling me you bought a lot of baby socks?”

Ed doesn’t immediately answer.

“Ed.”

“Yes — dinner ready? I’m starving.”

Steve rolls his eyes as he turns away — purely to hide the smile he can’t force down, because there’s something so goddamn cute about Ed getting excited about buying baby clothes (but for the sake of their bank account, he can’t let him know he feels that way).

“Dinner’s ready, go sit down.”

And because he can’t help it, he asks —

“So the dad thing does it for you?”“Steve, the dad thing did it for me when you were dad to our fifteen year old friends. Of course it’s gonna do it for me with a newborn fuckin’ baby. Jesus H. Christ.”

mildly edited excerpt from ch 1 of plant a seed (we'll watch it grow)

[livwritesstuff]

Eddie has a serious problem.

A quagmire, perhaps, and it’s a real catch-22 of a situation too.

The problem really stems from how his and Steve’s third baby Hazel was born a few weeks earlier. 

The baby isn’t the problem, obviously.

It’s just…it is a truth universally acknowledged or whatever that men holding tiny little babies is hot as all hell even as a baseline. Factor in that the man in question is Steve Harrington, and then factor in that Hazel is their third baby so any nervousness has been completely eclipsed by an easy kind of confidence, and what you end up with is a level of hotness that really shouldn’t be allowed.

Also – Eddie forgot to mention, ever since Steve hit forty, he’s had the smallest hint of grey growing right at his temples and that isn’t helping things at all.

Eddie could eat him, honestly.

He really can’t believe the audacity of this guy for…just existing, really. Eddie can admit that all Steve is really guilty of is holding his infant daughter, but dear god what a crime that is.

Like, right now Steve is holding the baby against his chest with just one arm (and, seriously, the one arm thing is goddamn killing him, because it flexes his bicep in just the right way and Eddie would bite a chunk out of it if he could), the other midway through chucking a throw pillow at their oldest daughter for being a total monster about…well, Eddie would probably know what particular flavor of hell Moe is raising at the moment if he could take his eyes off of Steve for even a second.

But he can’t, so here they are.

Eddie also might be drifting off a little bit, and therein lies the catch-22 of it all –

It’s true that Steve is by far the hottest he’s ever been, but Eddie’s so tired that he couldn’t do anything about it even if he wanted to.

Actually – he’ll rephrase.

If he wasn’t so fucking tired, he’d be doing something about it. 

Immediately.

And, like, he has no fucking shame at all about this. Decorum and discretion, maybe, but shame? None whatsoever. 

Why should he?

It’s clearly the universe’s way of repaying him for all the shit it put him through as a teenager. Why the hell else would he not only be married to Steve, but also watching him fulfill his lifelong wish of becoming a dad three times over and aging like the finest of fine wines while he’s doing it. Eddie’s never even been a wine kind of guy, but when it’s Steve…obviously all bets are off.

Except, he's not being repaid in full, because there's the downside of having a newborn again – newborn babies don’t sleep. Well – she sleeps, but not when it’s convenient for Eddie and certainly not at the same time as his and Steve’s other two daughters. Plus, she’s proving herself to prefer contact naps over anything else, which Steve obviously loves, and…yeah, there’s a good few reasons why that shit doesn’t help Eddie’s situation at all.

Regardless, he hasn’t managed to sleep more than four straight hours at any point over the last three weeks, so any time he does have a child-free second to spare, that’s what he’s doing.

Steve notices him looking, because of course he does.

“What?” he asks, his voice low and quiet and a little tired and so so sexy.

“Oh, the things I’m doing to you in my head, Stevie-boy,” Eddie replies, (even though he knows he’ll be crashing the second his head hits the pillow – whenever the hell that ends up being).

“Yeah, yeah,” Steve says even as he shifts Hazel so she’s cradled in the curve of his arm (because he’s a goddamn bastard and he knows exactly what he’s doing), “Put your money where your mouth is, babe.”

[livwritesstuff]

It’s uncharacteristically warm outside for late-winter in Hawkins, Indiana.

It’s 2004, and the whole entire Party is back in Hawkins to celebrate Jim and Joyce’s fifteenth wedding anniversary (it’s actually closer to their sixteenth by now, but they’ve all well and truly entered that phase of adulthood where planning things is next to impossible), and it’s the first time they’ve all been in one room since…honestly, Steve doesn’t even know when. Since Lucas’s wedding in ‘99, maybe.

Everyone is inside unwinding after dinner. Steve can hear them from where he’s sitting outside on the front deck gently rocking the porch swing Hop had installed years ago with one foot, a now-empty bottle resting on the unfinished pine floor by the other.

The front door of Jim and Joyce’s house quietly opens and Steve looks over as El steps onto the porch, closing the door behind her as soft as she’d opened it.

She pauses, her eyes turning wary as they slide off of him and onto the baby girl drifting asleep in his arms (his and Eddie’s littlest baby, Robbie – the older baby, Moe, who’s nearly three so not really a baby anymore, is inside still probably being doted on by all her aunts and uncles).

Even in her early thirties there are so many ways El is still just like the little kid Steve met back in 1984. At the same time though, she’s completely changed.

“Doin’ okay, Ellie?” he asks gently.

She nods.

“It’s getting loud,” El tells him, “Someone put on Jeopardy.” 

Yeah, that’ll do it these days – older and wiser they may all be, but any kind of trivia is still a vice for pretty much the entire Party.

“Well, you’re welcome to join us out here for as long as you like,” Steve replies.

He knows El is a little apprehensive around babies still, same as she is with cats and puppies – really anything small and vulnerable that might have been used against her many years ago, so he half-expects her to go back inside.

But she comes over and sits down next to him on the porch swing anyway and for a while, both of them are quiet.

Robbie exhales a satisfied snuffling noise that tells Steve she’s well and truly asleep.

Out of the corner of his eye, he sees El’s hand twitch, like she was going to raise it but then stopped herself.

“Can I?” she asks tentatively.

“‘Course,” Steve tells her, and he watches as El runs the tips of her fingers over the wisps of soft hair on Robbie’s head.

“How old is she now?”

“Three months,” he replies, “Four in a week or so.”

“And she’s…she’s doing…good?” she asks, and there’s something so El in her tone, the same tone she always uses when she’s tip-toeing her way through something that, to her, is foreign territory.

“Mm-hm. She’s good.”

El nods.

“Your daughters are lucky,” she says, her brown eyes trained wistfully on Robbie even as she pulls her hand away. 

Steve thinks he knows what she’s getting at, but before he can ask, she keeps going.

“She’s gonna live her whole life never having to wonder if she’s loved or if she matters,” El says, “She won’t have to wonder because it’s always true. That’s special. I love Hop, and everything I have that is good is because of him, but…I still wish I could have had what you and Eddie are giving her too.”

And Steve knows exactly what she means because he feels the same way, because he thinks about it all the time, every time he thinks about his daughters and the way they are his entire world like he should have been to his own parents and yet never was, every time he thinks about himself and his father and his father’s father and knows it ends with him.

He’s not sure how to put any of that into words.

It’s El though, and he’s never really had to put those kinds of things into words with El, so he decides to just nod and settle back into the porch swing with his friend at his side and his daughter asleep in his arms and the faint noise of the people he loves most carried over them on the breeze of a warm winter evening.

[livwritesstuff]

welp this post popped off overnight ty ty anyways let's talk about eddie's fav moment in fatherhood

Sometime between Steve and Eddie's move to Boston and Moe being born, Eddie's agent (he's a writer) relocates to New York City. For the most part, they're able to get shit done over the phone, but a few weeks before Moe's first birthday, a whole docket comes up that needs to be handled in person so Eddie has to go to New York, leaving Steve and Moe behind.

And he is miserable.

It's a short trip, only a few days, and the second he's no longer obligated to be there, Eddie's on his way home, wondering when he turned into the guy that just wants to be at home with his partner and kid while he flies up the I-90 (because he still kind of drives like a moron when Moe's not in the car - some things never change).

Eddie makes it home, and he's taking the stairs two at a time when he hears Steve say, "Who's that?" in that voice he only uses for Moe, and then he reaches the landing and rounds the corner, and there's Moe.

The second those beautiful brown eyes land on him, she's giving him a big beaming smile (what Eddie likes to call a “full ham”), kicking her little legs out and making those to-die-for baby noises.

Eddie isn't even aware of dropping his bag on the ground, just that he's scooping Moe into his arms.

"Hello, my sweet girl," he says, pressing a kiss to her chubby cheek.

That moment, the look on his daughter's face when she saw him for the first time in days lives in Eddie's brain as his #1 favorite moment raising Moe, because that undeniable expression of baby love is proof that he's doing something right.

Eventually, Moe squirms to be put down, and Eddie turns his attention to his partner.

"Hey," Steve says with a fond smile.

"Oh, right, you're here too," he manages to joke before Steve is tackling him onto the couch.

"You're not leaving again anytime soon, 'kay?" he says once he's got Eddie pinned down, "Thanks."

"Not planning on it, Stevie," Eddie replies, "Definitely not planning on it."

[livwritesstuff]

Have you talked about the girls’ first word yet? Would Steve and Eddie become competitive about it?

Oh they took it very serious, especially with Moe. They had a running bet and everything (the prize was bragging rights, because no amount of money is worth being their first baby’s first word).

Ultimately, Eddie won, which Steve thought was totally bogus because Eddie gets to be at home with her all day so obviously he was gonna be her first word. To make matters worse – she said it to Steve.

The three of them had been in the kitchen one morning, Moe clinging to Steve like she’d been doing lately when she’d pointed to where Eddie was standing at the stove making breakfast.

“Who’s that?” Steve had asked her “Is that…Dada?”

And Moe had looked right at Steve with her big brown eyes, gave him a cheeky smile, and said, “Dada!”

(Eddie waited for the initial excitement and pride to fade before gloating about it).

Robbie’s arrival brought about the bet again, but that time neither of them won because her first word was Moe.

Obviously, they realized afterwards, because Robbie was obsessed with her big sister, and it didn’t take long for her little chirps of Moe to turn into hi Moe and love Moe and where’s Moe?

It was so sweet that neither Steve nor Eddie were too bothered about losing the bet (and Moe does claim her well-earned bragging rights a good few years down the line).

Hazel turned out to be one of those kids who took her sweet time talking.

She could do animal sounds (foreshadowing, Eddie later called it), but not any actual words until she was a few months away from her second birthday.

Steve and Eddie had taken her on a drive around their town on the first really nice day of spring. They were driving past a local farm that let their cows and horses and goats roam around a fenced-in pasture when Hazel said, “I want to see the cows please, Papa.”

They’d been so perplexed that it wasn’t until after they stopped and said hello to the cows (because after that how could they not?) that they realized she’d said Papa.