#eddie was on that roof writing songs for her btw

[ashwhowrites]

I have a request, an angst one. It’s based by a song it’s called “the one that got away” by Katy Perry. YOU CAN MAKE IT FLUFFY OR ANGST FOR THE ENDING!!! Bcz I know people will ask for part two if you leave it angst.

Thank you so much! Love your writing btw, keep up the great work! Tag me once it’s published if you ever do it! @josephquinnlover0

Let's do it! I hope this is what you wanted. It does end happy !!

I am aware Eddie Munson would never sing this song, but he is today. I tweaked a little bit of the lyrics to fit his point of view. So the fic does not match exactly to the lyrics.

In modern times with social media and all that

Not proofread

~~~

Summer after high school when we first met

We make out in your Mustang to Radiohead

And on my 18th birthday, we got matching tattoos

Eddie wanted to leave Hawkins the second he graduated, he wanted a fresh start, a place where he could have a new reputation. He got a job at a bar, working to save up money so he can move out of the state. At that very bar, he met Y/N. A girl who soon became the girl of his dreams.

They were bartenders together, he'd play guitar on the slow nights, and she'd watch from the bar. She'd sing along as she helped customers.

Once their shift was done they'd race to her Mustang, climb in the backseat and make out for hours. But she also lay in his arms, playing with his fingertips as he ranted about wanting to leave Hawkins behind, but he couldn't imagine leaving her. Even with how much she worked, all her money went to keeping food on the table for her siblings. Her parents were barely around, they couldn't take care of themselves, let alone their children.

On his twenty-first birthday, they raced to the tattoo shop. Being together for over a year, and feeling more in love than ever. They wanted to be connected forever. So they got matching tattoos.

Now it was a painful reminder for Eddie every single day.

The perks of her parents never being around meant that once Eddie and Y/N got her siblings to bed, they could sneak out to the roof, a bottle of liquor in hand.

Used to steal your parents' liquor and climb to the roof

Talk about our future like we had a clue

Never planned that one day, I'd be losing you

She would lay in his arms, head against his shoulder. Together they would talk about their future, a future together. He talked about how one day he would propose at that shitty bar, promising to be hers forever in the same spot he met her. She talked about their wedding, her idea of her dress, and the color scheme.

Eddie never thought one day he'd never talk to her again.

In another life

I would be your girl

We keep all our promises

Be us against the world

When Eddie went to bed at night, he dreamed of another life. A life where they got their future together. She would be his girl and all the promises they made would stay true. It would be them against the world.

In another life

I would make you stay

So I don't have to say

You were the one that got away

The one that got away

In another life, he would have stayed, never taking that record deal. He would have turned back around when she begged him to stay.

He would be with her.

He wouldn't have to admit she was the one he let get away.

Eddie heard from Steve she got her tattoo removed, and it stung. Eddie traced the design, now even more bittersweet knowing the other half is now nonexistent.

Someone said you had your tattoo removed

Saw you downtown singing the blues

Its time to face the music

I'm no longer your muse

He saw a video of her singing at the bar. She used to sing in the kitchen as they danced. They wrote so many songs together, some songs he still sings to this day, to a crowd that doesn't know who the muse was. But he knew.

Listening to her sing brought back the memories, the songs she wrote about being in love with him. Now her songs don't relate to him at all, time to face it, he is no longer her muse.

Eddie made it big. He achieved his dream. He left Hawkins and moved out to Hollywood. Signed a record deal and is now drowned in money. But yet, none of that money could give him the chance to turn back time. He could buy anything in the world, but nothing would replace her, and he hated that he learned that too late.

All this money can't buy me a time machine, no

Can't replace you with a million rings, no

I should've told you what you meant to me, whoa

'Cause now I pay the price

He should have told her she meant more to him than any dream he had before her. He hated that it took him leaving her to realize she was his dream.

Now he has to pay the price.

Now Eddie returned to Hawkins, his tail between his legs as he arrived at the very bar. His guitar case was in his hand as he walked through the doors. His eyes caught the big sign that stated his name in bold letters.

In another life, I would make you stay

So I don't have to say you were the one that got away

The one that got away

"Eddie Munson returns, Live tonight at 8"

People were running up to him, asking for autographs, and expressing their excitement for his show. But his eyes stayed on the bar, looking to see if she would still be working there.

When he made it to the stage, the spotlight blinded him but he was able to see her through it. She hasn't changed in the two years he has been gone. Her hair was longer than before, but everything was the same. She looked just as beautiful as the day he left.

And she was looking back right at him. That same look of adoration and love in her eyes. A smile proud smile on her face as she clapped along with the crowd. He noticed her siblings sitting in the corner booth, huge smiles as they took him in.

He took a deep breath and strummed his guitar

"This is called, the one that got away"

~~~

Once Eddie finished his set, he walked to the bar. A nervous smile on his face as he walked up to her.

"Hey there rockstar," She smiled, walking around the bar to give him a hug. He could feel his body relax into her, wrapping his arms around her and keeping her close. Inhaling her scent as he kissed her head.

"Hi gorgeous, how are you?" He asked, pulling away to look at her closer. She smiled and stepped back, his body already missing her touch.

"I'm doing alright. The same old thing. Mom and Dad finally gave up, I saved up enough money to get my own apartment, and took the kids with me." She explained

"I'm glad you were able to move out. You deserved that. I see the little ones are not so little anymore." Eddie smiled, a little sad he missed out on watching them grow up. He spent every day with them for two years straight.

"Thanks. I see you are doing amazing! All over social media, magazines, and tv. I'm proud of you, Eddie." And he could tell she meant every word. He left her behind and yet here she was, supporting him every step of the way.

"Thank you, that means a lot. Things might look amazing but I've been struggling," Eddie admitted. He missed her and he wanted her back.

"Oh, do you need to talk? I'm about to go on break" She offered

~~~

Eddie paced behind the bar, cracking his knuckles as he waited for her.

"What's going on?" She asked politely

"I didn't come here to do the gig. I'm here for you. I miss you. Leaving you was the biggest mistake I have ever made." Eddie admitted. Reaching forward to cup her jaw.

She let herself melt into it

"I never blamed you, Eddie. Your dream was at your fingertips. I never should have asked you to stay, that wasn't fair. I mean I had no real life, I worked and took care of my siblings. Shit, I still do. Why would you want to stay? There was nothing here for you." She said, turning her head to kiss his palm.

"You're wrong. I thought it was my dream but I feel like I've been in a nightmare since I left. I had to leave to find out that you were my dream all along and you still are. I had a reason to stay, and she was across from me. And now she's the reason why I'm back. I still love you and I never tried to move on. I promised my heart was beating for you, and that's a promise I didn't break." Eddie admitted. Stepping closer, leaning his face closer to hers.

Her eyes were welling up with water.

"I still love you too. I never tried to move on either. I missed you every day and the idea of being someone else's just put salt in the wound. I missed you." She confessed, watching as he looked into her eyes, leaning down to ghost his lips over hers.

His eyes asked, and she replied by leaning up. Smashing her lips onto his. He moaned the second he tasted her again, wrapping his arms around her waist. His stomach did flips as she wrapped her arms around his neck, hands digging themselves into his hair.

"Thank you for coming back," she whispered against his lips as she pulled back. Small pecks to his lips between each word.

"I also came here to do something," Eddie admitted. A smirk on his face as he stepped back.

She looked at him confused, watching as he got down on his knee

"Munson..." she trailed off

"I came here to do something we always dreamed about," He started, she gasped as he went into his pocket, taking out a small ring. "I left once, and I've regretted it since. You are my dream, my life, and my future. I promised you I'd ask you to marry me at the bar we met, promise to be yours forever, so what do you say? Marry me?" Eddie asked, a smile on his face as she cried into her hands.

"Yes! Oh my gosh, Yes." She cried out, placing her left hand in front of him, allowing him to slip the ring on her finger. She admired the ring, it was gorgeous.

He got off his knee, standing straight as he cupped her face and leaned in, placing his lips on hers.

"Us against the world, right?" He whispered

"Forever" She whispered back, pecking his lips.

"I don't care if we stay in this shitty town, or move anywhere you want. As long as I have you, I'm happy to be anywhere." Eddie said

"Me too."

Tags!

@bmunson86 @mxcheese @ladymunson @michaelfuckinglangdon @z0mbie-blah @biittersweet @mirrorsstuff @slightlyvicked @micheledawn1975 @ago-godance @magnificantmermaid @tlclick73 @hargrovesswifee @cityofidek @manyfandomsfanvergent @silky-luxe @lokiofasgard616 @loving-and-dreaming @eddiemunsonsbitch69 @thegemaqua @ashlynnkennedy @strangerthingsstories5255 @harringt8ns @pleasinghellfire @whoscamila @josephquinnlover0

[theladycarpathia]

Hellcheer week day 3 - Meet Me at Midnight

Climbing out of the window isn’t as easy as she was led to believe. Neither is carefully inching her way down the trellis, hoping with every creak in the wind that it will hold her weight. Halfway down, she hears laughter echoing from one of the other rooms, someone still awake past curfew. She clings to the wall and prays that someone doesn’t choose this very moment to open the window for a cigarette.

She slips down the last few inches, neatly dropping to the ground. Campus is dead this time of night, a few lights still glowing in distant windows, the occasional bobbing torchlight of the night guard. She shouldn’t be out of bed, and sneaking off to investigate a murder is definitely frowned upon.

Especially when she’s a person of interest in that murder.

She slips away from her dorm room, sticking to the darkness provided by the girls’ building. Harrowdene rises above her, three stories and red brick, her home for the past three years. She knows which shower has the best pressure, the creak of the floorboards, how far out of the window to lean to get cell reception. First year she shared with Nancy Wheeler. Last year, it was Tina Watts, and this year she got Vickie Dawson. Vickie is in band, the LGBTQ club, and performed in last year’s production of Cinderella. She also hadn’t said too much when Chrissy had shimmied out of their window, along the ledge and down the large white trellis that goes from their floor all the way to the ground. She’d been in bed, feigning sleep but Chrissy had seen the glint of her eyes anyway.

Once she hits the rear entrance - the emergency fire door that gets propped open during the day and closed by Mrs Click every night - she makes a dash across the grass to the thick line of trees that surrounds Hawkins Academy. Mockett’s wood, the small forest that hides the school for the rest of the world.

Rumor goes that the original owner of the land - before it was a school - was a conspiracy nutjob and had it planted to keep anyone official out. Another rumor says that a girl was murdered by her teacher in a clearing after an affair gone wrong. This one is only half based in fact. Someone was definitely murdered here. 

It’s terrifying, walking through the forest after dark. Every crack, every rustle, the faint noises of a fox all make her jump and she wishes desperately that they’d agreed on another meeting place. She was here mere days ago, but in the setting sunlight rippling through the gold colors of the trees, it had felt almost magical. 

The bench in the woods is a relic from a time long gone by. Supposedly, once the school had a cluster of benches out in this clearing for students but they were nearly all removed over a decade ago. There’s just one left: the legs covered in moss, the wood faded and covered in scratched initials. More students have marked their names on it than even the bench can remember. 

He’s already there when she emerges from the line of trees, wrapped up in his denim jacket against the cold October bite. Her heart judders when she sees him there, tracing the wood with his long, elegant fingers. The silver of his rings glint in the light of her torch and he turns to look up, his face breaking into a smile when he sees her.

Stop, Chrissy tells her heart. We’re only solving a murder.

“Hey, you got out,” Eddie says, sounding impressed, as she slings her bag on the table and climbs onto the other side of the bench. “Not hard, right?” She narrows her eyes.

“How did you get out?” she asks, suspiciously. Apparently, the trellis trick is quite well known among the residents of her dorm, often used when sneaking out to go meet boys. Apparently the auditorium is a popular make-out spot…or it used to be. “The boys’ building doesn’t have a rose trellis.” He shrugs, looking unconcerned. But then again, he’s Eddie Munson, known dealer and outcast. Unlike Chrissy, this probably isn’t the first time he’s snuck out at night.

“The bathroom on the second floor opens out onto the roof of the administration building,” he explains, twirling the chunky ring on his index finger. It has twists of silver wound around a large amber stone. “Easy drop down and I just have to climb onto the bins to get back up. Unless some dick has locked the bathroom window before I get back but that hardly ever happens.”

“Okay,” Chrissy says slowly, and pulls out the black notebook from her shoulder bag. She barely had time to write all of her notes up after dinner but she’d needed to get them out of her head. Everything has been churning over in her mind for the last three days, ever since the body was found. She recognises how cliche it is to have a murder notebook and that true detectives probably keep everything in their heads but she just isn’t up for that. Everything makes more sense written down.

And she can’t keep a big whiteboard in her room so this will have to do.

“I put down everything that we have so far,” she says, opening it to the correct page and turning it around for Eddie to see. Eddie pulls out his phone and turns on the torch function, holding it up so that he can see her neat handwriting. She’s outlined everything as best she can: possible suspects and motives, a sketch of the auditorium, a timeline of the victim’s last day.

“This is good,” Eddie says finally, setting his phone down on the table beside them. “Really good. Is that timeline finished?”

“I think so?” Chrissy hedges, chewing her lip. People have been less than helpful with the details but she’s been able to get enough. “There’s half an hour just after class ends that I can’t account for. No one seems to have been with him then.” Eddie’s eyebrows shoot up so high that they nearly blend with the dark mass of hair on his head.

“Shouldn’t you know?” he asks, incredulously. “I mean…weren’t you guys dating?”

“No,” she says defensively, because she resents explaining her former relationship with Jason to someone who is essentially a stranger. Even though she’d…even so, she doesn’t want to explain it all to Eddie. She’d loved him as much as she’d hated him and then his body had been found three days ago, which made things much more complicated. 

“We broke up,” she says, folding her hands up into her lap so he can’t see her digging her fingernails into her palm. She’s drowning in grief and guilt and confusion, and she doesn’t know which to feel first. “The day before he died.” Eddie rests his chin on his palm, looking at her. 

“And that’s why the police wanted to talk to you?” he asks and she hesitates.

“No,” she says, eventually. It still feels like bile in the back of her throat, the cold look on Jason's face when she’d told him that it was over. How the news trickled through the dining hall the next day at breakfast that a body had been found in the auditorium. How the first feeling that flowed through her body was relief. “Because no one knew. I hadn’t told anyone and Jason didn’t either. I think he thought…”

It’s both too obvious for them to voice out loud. Jason had expected to get her back, and he’d probably never doubted that she would eventually do just that.

“Right,” Eddie drawls, his voice dripping in contempt. “Of course. What Lord Carver wants, he gets.” 

She swallows. She can’t speak ill of the dead, but she also won’t say it wasn’t true. Jason had…expectations. 

“Anyway,” Eddie says, seeing her discomfort. “It’s good shit. Couples of leads, a few suspects. People who aren’t us, which is the vital thing.”

She nods, because that’s the whole point of this little alliance. The drug dealer who’d had a very public fight with the victim only a few days prior to the murder. And the girlfriend who’d suddenly ended what everyone else thought was a picture perfect love story.  Police tended to suspect people who had motives like that.

“Were they horrible to you?” she asks, because she hadn’t been the only one pulled out of class for questioning. Everyone with a connection to Jason had been taken to the principal’s office at some point since it had happened. Chrissy, Patrick and Billy, and all the other guys from the basketball team, that freshman kid, Lucas, who found him…and Eddie. Even Steve, who’d never really been friends with Jason, had been pulled in. 

“Nah,” Eddie says, but there’s lines around his eyes that betray the lie. The police hadn’t even been very nice to her, and she has a reasonable alibi for most of the time frame of the murder. “It was fine. They can be dicks to me because I’m not a minor. They just asked about the fight.”

Chrissy knows better than to ask about the fight. There have been rumors flying around school, and there are even more now suggesting that Eddie had lost his temper and murdered Jason in a fit of rage.

People have too much time on their hands.

“What’s your alibi?” Chrissy asks, suddenly. They’re partners in this and she doesn’t know. But Eddie’s face turns guarded, a little defensive. 

“Why do you ask?” he says and she shakes her head.

“I don’t think you did it,” she assures him, because in a school full of doubters, she doesn’t want him to think she’s one of that number. “But what did you tell the police about where you were?”

“I was just…writing songs on the roof,” he says, rubbing the back of his neck. There’s a delicate flush to it, rising just above his Hellfire Club t-shirt. “Alone.”

“Do you do that a lot?” Chrissy pushes, and tucks her hands inside her jumper. It’s colder out here than she’d expected and she’d tried so hard to not disturb Vickie that she hadn’t stopped for anything like a hat or gloves. 

“Just when I have some good inspiration,” Eddie mutters vaguely. He’s avoiding her gaze, nervously strumming his fingers against the dry wood. She wonders if their meeting in this very spot nearly a week ago affected him as much as it affected her.

“Okay,” she says, deciding to let it go. She pulls the notebook back towards herself, squinting at the pages in the dim light. 

“I don’t know if we can get into the auditorium yet,” she considers, thinking of their next move. “The police are done but the staff still have it sealed off…what?” Because Eddie is grinning widely.

“I can get us in,” he says, in a low voice, jabbing a finger at the page, and her outlined sketch of the crime scene. “I have a key. The janitor is very forthcoming if you're willing to supply him with weed.”

“I’m really glad that your law-breaking helps us commit further law-breaking,” Chrissy says, flatly. But she sighs and stuffs the notebook back in her bag. What’s a little more rebellion?

“I guess it couldn’t hurt,” she admits and is startled when Eddie pulls himself out of his seat, sweeping her bag off of the table.

“What? We might as well go now,” he says, her bag dangling by the strap from one finger. “No one will be around and the guard patrols get less frequent after midnight. Less chance of being caught.”

“Sure,” she says in a daze and takes her bag from him, slinging it over her shoulder, easily falling into step with Eddie as they leave Mockett’s wood. She’s tired and it’s only a matter of hours before she has to roll out of bed and go to her classes like nothing has changed. Like her ex-boyfriend isn’t dead. Like she hasn’t snuck into a crime scene after dark. Like the idea of a killer hiding at school doesn’t terrify her.

Like the boy next to her isn’t the whole reason for breaking up with Jason in the first place.

“We probably shouldn’t hang out much together during school hours,” Eddie says awkwardly, as they head back towards Harrowdene and the shape of the drama building and auditorium beyond it. Maybe her dorm’s easy access to the murder site is what has the police thinking she makes an ideal suspect. Motive, access, relationship…all the dominoes in a line. 

The frank acknowledgement of it stings but she gets it. Any sign of a closeness with Eddie, another person of interest, might send those dominoes tumbling down. The police would probably love the idea of a murdering teenage Bonnie and Clyde.

“Oh hey,” Eddie says suddenly, noticing the goosebumps clinging to her skin. He unwinds the thick black scarf from around his neck, something chunky and handmade from wool. He deftly wraps it around her, looping it carefully around her hair. It’s soft, something well loved and she catches the faintest smell of his skin on the material, something woodsey and deep, like the inside of a guitar. 

“Thanks,” she murmurs and swallows heavily.

Oh yeah. She’s screwed.

@hellcheerweek