#I am fucking yearning

[i-hate-gravel]

the link/zelda tag on ao3 can only keep a bad ass bitch going for so long

[rosieshipper]

THIS ME RAPIDLY PRESSING A BUTTON THAT SAYS YES!!!!

For this man? Anything🥺🥺🥺

Weird question but

Would you kiss your F/O on the belly?

[justdavina]

Whole lot of gurl!

[vinestaff]

rain or shine i'm by your side so why won't you look my way

[rosicheeks]

07:46 and imagining you nuzzling up to me to wake me up, straddling my body so I can feel how wet and needy you currently are while you purr in my ear that you want to ride me 😇

IM COMING

[nyxofdemons]

THE WAY THAT THEY INVENTED ROMANCE WITH THIS SONG???? HELLO?????

[myosotisa]

every day i look for him - and every day i meet the same fate

[pedrospatch]

so how we doing out there

[novelconcepts]

The more the show progresses, the more I want to see the 90s cast infiltrating the modern timeline. We've gotten hints of it with Shauna and her younger self, her Jackie hauntings. We've gotten a little more with adult Lottie seeing teenage Nat (and Laura Lee), and with Natalie getting teenage Lottie in her final moments. I want more. I want the teen cast to be absolutely invasive on pivotal adult moments, infecting their adult counterparts when least expected. I want Taissa's argument with Van to dissolve into their teenage selves, their bond endless and timeless and inescapable. I want Misty absolutely wrecked by young Natalie lurking around corners, watching from mirrors. I want to see these women unable to navigate adulthood without the specters of their teenage selves cropping up absolutely everywhere, more and more as they let the memories in, as they stop being able to repress the trauma. They didn't grow up. They never could. You are always doomed to regress around your high school teammates. You are haunted by the phantom elements of your misspent youth. It is a comfort, and it is a gift, and it is a trial, and it is a curse. I would love to see that reflected with greater intensity, until the lines blur, until the timelines have no choice but to intersect. They haven't escaped themselves at all. They didn't grow up. They just got older.

[bakudekublogblog]

i'm sorry i dont think we're talking enough about the bkdk music video. they wrote a whole song full of yearning lyrics and holding hands and longing to be at each other's sides and miscommunicating but still wanting to be together, and then they put child actors in bkdk colors and hand them playing super heroes and holding hands. like bkdks were just given that. an official bkdk song and music video. hello????

[capn-twitchery]

wow what a polite young man i sure hope his arctic expedition goes well for him & his big giant coat

[i-hate-gravel]

the yearning buries its hands in my ribs and tells me its grip around my heart is an embrace

[mothwingwritings]

WOW!!! I LOVED "The Innocent Act Of Dredging Up The Past", IT WAS VERY GOOD!

I wonder how Y/N reacted when she found out she was pregnant and how Fox allowed herself to keep the baby because he doesn't seem like someone who likes sharing attention.

Thank you so much darling!!! I am so glad you asked me this because I have been thinking about Ren as a father nonstop since that request. My brain has been full of many thoughts and opinions and I am happy to have an outlet for sharing lol. That being said, forgive my blathering. ^^;

(18+ and warnings for noncon, pregancy/baby birthing talk, incredibly unhealthy relationships, abuse, and being kidnapped/held against your will.)

Being impregnated by Ren would be absolutely dreadful for you, causing you to spiral into a pit of fear and despair the moment you miss a period or begin to feel queasy in the morning. With the signs starting to show, your brain comes to the instant conclusion that you are with child-his child, and it frightens you like nothing else before. At first you try and convince yourself nothing is wrong, that you are probably just late due to stress, and your upset stomach can be any number of things, it doesn’t necessarily mean you are pregnant. Any of your symptoms can be explained away by something else, so in an effort to try and maintain your sanity your brain churns out explanation after explanation, no matter how nonsensical they may be, in hopes of calming your rampant nerves by coming to some other resolution. A stream of constant lies and false reassurances play on repeat in your brain, forcing the thought that you may actually be a mother to the farthest reaches of your mind.

But the longer you wait and the more you dwell on it, the more you are faced with the inevitable. He never wears protection, you haven’t had access to birth control, and despite your warnings of it being a delicate time of month for you, his base instincts always won out in the end. There was nothing else this could be.

Faced with the reality of the situation, you were now tasked with the burden of sharing the news with Ren. You didn’t want to tell him, terrified of what his response would be, worried that he would somehow blame this all on you and hurt you because of it, quite possibly worse than he ever has before. But an even more horrifying concern than that is if the news actually pleases him. What if he wants to keep the baby? What if you were forced to carry this pregnancy to term while trapped in this grim environment, left to raise another human that shares half their dna with a man who has done nothing but cause you irrevocable damage?

No matter what the outcome, none of them are favorable.

But you didn’t have a choice, and you knew it was better to break it to Ren sooner rather than later, lest this whole nightmare become irreversible. In the event he saw things your way, you wanted this thing out of your body as soon as possible (though you loathed to consider what strings Ren would pull to achieve this, and what backwater procedure would be done to do so).

At first Ren brushes it off, not truly believing your concern. He’s had sex with you countless times without protection and just now you get pregnant? Seems suspicious, so he concludes you’re either overreacting or trying to get a rise out of him, potentially both, and that in and of itself riles him up. Are you telling him this as some kind of ploy? Are you using a false pregnancy as a means to get him to ease up on you a bit or as an attempt at escape? After all you had gone through together, after all the love he has lavished upon you by sharing his home, his life, his heart, with you… Would you really tell a lie like this?

He struggles with that possibility. Despite his inclination to feel otherwise, he has a hard time believing you would use a pregnancy scare for your own selfish benefit. You have always been a good girl, his good girl, and deep inside he knows this is not something that is within your nature to do, even if he does have some major doubts.

So, though he doesn’t truly believe your claims, he buys the pregnancy test more as a means to shut you up and prove a point than because he actually believes you. Needless to say, he ends up biting his tongue over that one.

When hit with the truth, his emotions are mixed. On one hand, he wants nothing to do with children or child rearing. He didn’t have to do much of a self-assessment to recognize he would be a shit father, and he never particularly wanted to be a father to begin with. His own upbringing wasn’t the best, he himself never really having a father figure that was worth a damn to guide him or show him any love or support. He had no parenting manual to go off of, and was sure that a culmination of having no positive family experience and maturing into the warped individual he had become led to no other conclusion than NOT being cut out for fatherhood in the slightest.

More than that however, the thought of sharing you, even with a life he helped create, really REALLY pissed him off. Thinking of all the nights you would be spending tending to the baby when you could instead be wrapped up in his arms, or all the attention and affection you will be giving some inept kid that could instead be going towards him, truly gets under his skin. He doesn’t WANT to share you. You’re HIS. And while a baby isn’t going to change that, he doesn’t want the needless competition to begin with.

But on the other hand, having a baby does have its appeal. It would be nice to bring a life into this world that loves him from the get-go, completely relying on him while being totally oblivious to all that has happened in the past. That sort of pure, blind love is hard to come by in this world, and the fact that he could obtain it so easily from a life he created with you, a human that has your blood running through its veins, is EXTREMELY appealing. And on top of that, you are sure to love the child whether its conception was wanted/planned or not. If you loved a child that was half his for the remainder of your life, would that not bind you to him for just as long? Though he didn’t doubt your loyalty (or his ability to keep you tied to him with no hope of escape), it would be a nice assurance to have in the rare event things did not end up going his way.

Once that thought enters his head, it’s over. No further thinking or future planning is required-he is going to be a father, and YOU are the beautiful mama! Congratulations! (Does he get off to you being pregnant? Did this pregnancy make Ren Hana realize he has a breeding kink??? Sources say yes and that’s your problem to deal with now. :))

♡

Holding his newborn for the first time, he has never been so nervous. Tears flood his eyes as he watches the small bundle squirming in his arms, his heart aching as they stare up at him with wide, pure, inquisitive eyes. He was no stranger to ending lives, but creating them? This was something entirely new, as exhilarating as it was scary. His smile grew as he stared at her small face, pleased that she looked so much like you. He could only hope that her personality would mirror yours as well.

♡

As time passes and the baby grows, you find out quick that Ren has a very ‘hands off’ way of parenting, which is to say he relies on you to do most of the work. And honestly, he feels that is fair. He’s the breadwinner who works hard to provide for you and the newborn, which leaves all other parental duties in your capable hands. You are left to be the child’s main caregiver, their guiding force to lead them through life, their teacher, confidante, and friend. It’s a daunting task, all residing solely on your shoulders.

Ren won’t readily admit it, but he much prefers it that way. All the abuse that he has suffered through from an early age, every heinous act of violence that has been carried out by his own hands (your wounds, included), all of it has turned him into something unrecognizable, something grotesque. Even if he wanted to have more of a presence in his child’s life, he knows he doesn’t deserve it. If he had too much sway in the kids development there’s a good chance they will grow up to be like him in some way or another, which would be a waste of all the love and hard work that you had put into raising them into being an upstanding person. Ren had made peace with who he had become, but that didn’t mean he wanted to keep a cycle that someone like Strade had begun going either.

So, the baby more or less becomes your soul responsibility, and god is that a burden for you. It’s bad enough that you have such little support from Ren to begin with, but the fact that this is YOUR first time being a parent as well makes it all so much worse. You have no idea what the hell you are doing, and with Ren making sure to keep you as isolated as possible you had no one else to turn to for help, either. It was just you and this brand new life with no one else to rely on, if you fucked up in even the smallest way it could be devastating to the baby. If your daughter got truly hurt, sick, or worse in your care, you didn’t know how you would live with the repercussions, let alone handle Ren’s reaction.

If your life with Ren hadn’t already made you a strung out, nervous, irritable wreck, being a mother certainly would. As she continues to grow, Ren refuses to discipline the child at all, not wanting in any way to appear like a ‘bad guy’ to your daughter. Given the circumstances, part of you is thankful for that (you honestly don’t know what you would do if he turned his ire towards her), but it also just makes things more difficult with you. You are already beyond stressed about trying to raise a child in this type of environment, having no united front and constantly butting heads makes raising her that much harder, especially when any kind of rule you attempt to establish can so easily be overridden by her father who has no remorse over the frustration this causes, nor care as to how his flippancy may affect your child’s development in the long run.

It’s also not lost on you that being the sole disciplinarian also paints you in a less than favorable manner in your child’s eyes, something you are sure Ren has thought about as well. Being the ‘strict’ parent means your child will be more likely to hide things from you, or seek out her father instead of you for support, approval, and advice. Given whom Ren was as a person, this thought didn’t sit particularly well with you.

All you can really hope and pray for is that somehow despite the lack of social interaction and outside influence she will grow up to be a decent human. Even maturing under the delusion that her father is a noble man, even if in some instances you have to make yourself the villain, as long as it helps her out in  the long run you’ll do everything you can to insure your daughter lives the best life she possibly can, whether her father helps you or not.

I think the REAL problems will begin when the child gets older. When she truly comes into herself and forms her own opinions, develops her own personality, and starts to forge her own way of life… It’s gonna be messy. :/ Your child’s autonomy is definitely going to be a point of contention for Ren in the future, and he won’t be so pleased if/when she catches on to his true nature and begins to rebel or straight up reject him. God forbid she tries and join forces with you or attempt to become your savior. It’s going to take a lot of cunning on her end to make it out unscathed.

Also, I kind of touched on it previously, but Ren would be incredibly horny the whole pregnancy. Not that he isn’t already incessantly slavering over you, something about seeing you round and full just makes him snap. Which is scary in its own right, Ren isn’t the most gentle of lovers to begin with and has a tendency to lose himself more often than naught, hurting you in the process. It’s a constant struggle to satiate him while protecting yourself and the unborn baby, best of luck to you! :D

(And he’ll definitely breastfeed from you. He’s gotta make sure you are producing enough for the baby, ya know? :))

[justdavina]

SOOOOOO Yummie!!! She's a amazing transgender girl!

[witchof10klakes]

I wanna be able to be vulnerable around her. I want to be able to let her see my weaknesses and know that she still loves all of me INCLUDING them, not in spite of them. And I wanna do the same for her. I want to lift her up when she's down, and I want us to be a helping had for the other when one of us is hit where we're weakest

[flowercrowngods]

felt like letting mike and steve work through some shit again

cw: descriptions and imagery of them being lost and self-sacrificing, left alone with trauma they have no means to work through, could read as suicidal tendencies or intrusive thoughts

🤍 also on ao3

“What do you want?” Mike asks when Steve sits down beside him, gravel crunching, their feet dangling over the dark and endless abyss that is the quarry at night.

Steve doesn’t answer right away, doesn’t really know what to say now that he’s here, now that he found him. He looks so small, now more than ever, and it reminds Steve so painfully that he’s still just a child. He was always just a child, and children shouldn’t—

It feels like they got their rights at a childhood revoked years ago, and then they were just… supposed to be okay with it. It was expected, it was implied when nobody came to talk to them after.

When all they got was one NDA after another. When none of the professionally trained adults took one look at the children that they were, and asked, Are you okay? What do you need to be okay? I will talk to you once a week and make sure you learn how to be okay again.

Steve feels like a big brother to most of the kids now, sure, but he’s not their shrink, and he sucks when it comes to actually talking about shit. He can be there to drive them anywhere, can provide an evening of distractions and as much of a sanctuary as a house as haunted as his can be.

With everything else, though, he’s helplessly lost. So he says nothing, weighs his words to make sure they come out right — especially for Mike, who’s always just waiting for him to say something wrong and throw it back in his face with the sunny disposition of a feral, rabid cat.

“Hey,” Mike says then, irritated again; but his voice is hoarse, too. Tired. No heat behind it after that stupid fight with Dustin and Lucas earlier tonight that made him snap and leave Steve’s house in a frenzy. “I said, What do you want?”

Steve shrugs, looking ahead into the darkness that feels endless and alluring and deeply terrifying.

I miss my friend! My best friend, Mike!

“Making sure you’re okay.”

You’ve changed, you know that? You’re not the guy who would jump off a cliff for me anymore, I don’t think I even know you anymore!

Dustin’s voice echoes in Steve’s mind as it undoubtedly does in Mike’s, too, and he can only imagine how much that hurts, especially if he’s shivering like that even though the night is warm for early September.

“I’m okay,” Mike says, sounding endlessly annoyed about the fact. Steve almost huffs out a humourless laugh. Yeah, right.

“Sure you are,” Steve says, keeping his tone carefully neutral.

He shrugs off his jacket and drapes it over Mike’s shoulders without a comment, half-expecting him to just throw it into the darkness below. But Mike doesn’t move, is eerily still beside him, pretending not to notice that Steve’s watching him.

“But you know it’s, like,” he starts again and trails off, looking for the right words because this is unfamiliar terrain and the ground beneath his feet is quite literally nonexistent. “It’s fine if you’re not, right? It’s actually really fucking normal to be more than a little fucked up after everything, all that crazy shit. Or just… in general.”

You were twelve, he wants to say. You were twelve and you jumped off from here. You were twelve and you were going to die. And not because of those monsters, not yet. Just because… you were twelve.

Mike doesn’t say anything, but the gravel crunches once more as he reaches for a handful of stones to throw them into the darkness one by one, the void beneath them so enormous that they don’t even hear the noise of impact.

You jumped.

The longer Mike remains silent, the more Steve wants to scream, wants to grab him by the shoulders and shake him, wants to make him see and understand that Steve knows about the scars a decision like that leaves, especially when you live to deal with the consequences.

He gets seizures to deal with the consequences. His ear is fucky, his eye is twitchy, his head is aching constantly, he gets migraines that knock him out for a day or two, all because he wanted to protect his friends. All because he did protect his friends. It worked. They’re safe.

But they’re also unaware of… of everything. Of the horrible stillness as clarity dawns and all signs point to the one way that always seems to work. The one easy way out, and still the hardest of them all when the plan goes wrong and he makes it out alive. When It’s gotta be me is the only thing to say, but later turns into an angry It never should have been me because the world looks different when it’s smeared with your blood.

And it’s always the lost boys who make decisions like that. Steve wonders, some nights in cold sweat, what happens if he makes these decisions without immediate danger. What happens if he just… decides to jump. Decides to run. To give the world more of his blood. Without saving anyone.

It’s not like he wants to — but he’s terrified that it’s just who he is. Who he’s turned into, terrified that his friends will forever expect him to.

And he’s even more terrified knowing that Mike jumped before he learned about monsters. Before he learned about fighting and surviving.

You were a kid, he wants to say again, but his throat is closing up on him.

“I don’t think that’s okay actually,” Mike says after a while, tearing Steve away from his fears. They’re still both looking ahead rather than at each other, but it’s fine. They’re still here. “Like, people say it is, but it feels so empty when they do, you know? Like, sure, yeah, I’m not fucking okay, but what the hell do we do about that now? Oh, right, I know! Let’s throw it in my face that I’m not good enough for you anymore now that there’s no monsters to kill anymore. Now that I’m just Mike, who’s not even enough to be that anymore, sure. Right. Yeah. Let’s pretend it’s all fine, Steve, let’s pretend it’s okay to hurt all the fucking time!”

Mike is shaking now, violent tremors running through his body, and Steve’s first instinct is to reach out and pull him close, to keep him from that edge and take him to his car; turn on the heating and talk there. But Mike seems to need the darkness, seems to need to be faced with endless depth to give voice to his thoughts.

“What Dustin said was messed up. He shouldn’t have said that.”

Mike shrugs, throwing more pebbles into the darkness, though his motions have lost their vigour. “He’s right, though.”

Steve sighs, though not unkindly. “No, he’s not. Hey, listen to me.” He waits until Mike turns to meet his eyes, and he leans forward. “It’s not okay. It’s not right what he said. You don’t deserve to have that shit thrown in your face just because Dustin is a tactless little douche bag.”

Taking a bullet for someone is not the baseline for friendship, he wants to say, and it occurs to him once again how fucked up their perception and idea of friendship must be, now that they’ve all bonded over the most horrific shit and actual grief they never learned how to work through.

It’s not even Dustin’s fault, not really. They’re all just collateral damage to something Bigger, and all they have is each other, leaving them in a vicious cycle that is so, so fucked up.

“Why’d you jump?” he asks eventually, quiet in case the darkness tries to listen in. “Back then, why did you jump?” And do you wish El had let you? Do you sometimes wish that? When your room is quiet and it’s only you living with all those silent, terrible decisions?

Mike shrugs again, but there’s not much fight left in him, Steve can see that, can feel it in the air between them.

“Will was gone,” he says like it explains everything— and it sort of does. Steve has seen the way these boys look at each other when the other’s not looking, he has seen the hurt and the anger and the gentleness stored there, the words unspoken and the fear that, despite interdimensional monsters, kinda goes unmatched.

Because they have each other. They only have each other. And if someone’s suddenly different than what they thought they knew, if someone’s suddenly different, then… Everything might just fall apart.

And Steve wants to grab him again; wants to pull him close and say, I’m the same. We have the same scars. We have the same!

Slowly, carefully, he does lean over now, weaving an arm around Mike’s shoulders and pulling him into his side.

“I get that.”

Mike swallows heavily and exhales shakily. “I don’t think you do.”

“No. I think I really, really do. But it’s okay, Mike. You won’t be alone with this, okay. I’m on your side, you little shit.”

A pause, a beat, a moment’s respite. Then, “Why?”

“Because,” his heart is racing, his mouth trembling around forming the words for the first time, but he knows it’s the right thing to do. Knows it’s important.

Knows it might just save a life.

“Because I fell harder for Eddie Munson than I ever thought possible, and once i found out what was happening, I kind of wanted to jump off a cliff, too. But I didn’t, because I had someone with the same fears as me, and instead of stupid shit we just… Cried together sometimes. Screamed into our pillows. Laughed with and at each other, calling ourselves hopeless, and— I don’t know. It’s really fucking scary, and that doesn’t go away just because you have someone to talk to. But it‘s… better. It’s so much better.”

He huffs, swallowing around the lump in his throat, smiling into the darkness.

“So I’ve got you, okay? Whatever it is, whatever makes you feel like it’s not fucking okay, I’ve got you. You come to me, yeah? Lucas does, Dustin does, even Max does. This is your official, standing invitation and whatever, okay, dickhead?”

Mike shoves at him lightly, still not parting from the rather awkward side-hug they’ve got going on, and Steve is glad for it.

“Okay, okay, geez,” the little shithead says, rolling his eyes which Steve can see even in the dark, and it feels like the edge has moved away from them, like they have solid ground beneath their feet again.

Steve doesn’t say anything more after that, just waiting for Mike to stir to lead him back to the car, load in his bike and take him wherever he feels like spending the night.

But Mike doesn’t move for another long while, and it makes Steve feel like something big has just happened between them. Like they finally have found the common ground that Steve’s been suspecting they had for months now, even years.

Eventually, as they make their way to the car and Mike goes to grab his bike, he speaks up again, but more subdued now.

“Hey, Steve?”

“Hmm?”

“Does… Does Eddie know?”

“About what?” My tendencies to take a leap off the edge?

“You. Being…”

“Oh!” A smile as he unlocks his car and opens the back door to squeeze Mike’s old bike in there with minimal smears of dirt. “I’d hope so, we’ve been dating for months.”

“You’re dating?! You? Eddie’s dating you?”

“Yeah, listen, do you want me to just leave you here or would you rather be thrown out in the middle of nowhere?”

Mike grumbles something unintelligible as he climbs into the front seat, waiting for Steve to start the engine before he speaks up again.

“It’s just, you’re so… How did you even do that?”

Steve laughs at that, disbelieving and all, because, “Trust me, I have no idea. Must have been the ol’ Harrington charm and all that.”

Mike rolls his eyes and crosses his arms in front of his chest, sinking lower in the seats to pout. “You’re so lame.”

“Sorry, I couldn’t hear you over how much I have a boyfriend and you don’t.”

If his heart skips a beat because it still feels like a forbidden truth saying the word out loud despite the playful banter, then he’s ignoring that in favour of revving the engine.

“Asshole.”

“Dickhead.”

“Grow up,” Mike says, but Steve can see the smile he’s not even trying to hide, and he mirrors it with his own as he turns on the radio catching the final tunes of Springsteen’s Dancing in the Dark.

They’re not okay, none of them. But the car is warm, the cliff’s edge is behind them, and they’re not listening to the same ten songs anymore.

They’re getting better, step by tiny step.