#eddie’s attention span is godawful

[livwritesstuff]

Just in connection to my reply to one of your posts with little baby Moe (Okay she wasn't a baby but you get it.)

I really, really need some scenes with the girls (all of them or one by one) where they tell Steve (and Eddie too) how amazing he is as a dad. Not as teeny tiny children but rather as teenagers or even as young adults. Just genuine love between them, no ulterior motives.

Because I feel like Steve NEEDS that too. Every now and then. I know parents always have moments where they feel like they've fucked up or that their children don't really like them. And I feel like Steve could spiral about these things on a bad day. Eddie telling him that the girls love him to pieces doesn't help a lot on these days, I believe (You can correct me since it's definitely your universe and your Steve and Eddie).

So I'm just asking, very VERY politely :))), what you think those moments could look like and what the girls would say or why Steve even feels like he failed them. (Okay that's a LOT I'm asking of you, I'm sorry.) Just see where the flow takes you, if it does.

Thank you thank you thank you 🥰🥰🥰🥰

HAZEL

Steve was home alone with the kids because Eddie was away for a few days of work meetings in New York. The second day of Eddie’s absence, Steve was hit with a killer migraine – his first really bad one in a while – so he set the girls up with a movie (a long one) to give himself a couple hours to try sleeping it off.

A while later, he woke up to an alarm blaring – weird, he’d thought in the moment because he probably wouldn’t have set a loud alarm for a migraine nap (seems a little counter-intuitive), but everything about his brain was foggy so who's to say.

Then, outside the door, he heard this exchange between his two oldest daughters.

Moe: Papa can turn it off.

Robbie: But we’ll get in trouble.

Robbie: It’s on fire.

Half-convinced he was dreaming, he got up and followed the girls into the kitchen where, yep, the microwave was on fire. All Steve really remembers is unplugging it and leaving it to the elements outside.

Turns out Moe had wanted to make mac and cheese (which she knew how to do – they’d actually been about to graduate her to toaster privileges until this incident) and it had been a fluke timer-based accident.

Eddie had thought coming home to a melted microwave in their driveway was hilarious, but Steve was seriously rattled about it because it was the first time he'd felt like something had happened because of a failing on his part. He shouldn't have let himself succumb to the migraine, he should have pushed through it to be there for the girls, but he’d let himself slip and then they set the goddamn microwave on fire.

The same day he got back from his trip, Eddie went out and bought a new microwave (even though it’s one of those purchases Steve would normally handle because he doesn’t trust Eddie for a second to not buy the dumbest appliances he can find), and he took all three girls with him so Steve could have a bit of time alone. When they all returned an hour or two later, the sheer volume and amount of excitement they brought with them pretty much confirmed for Steve that whatever microwave Eddie bought had way more bells and whistles than any person on Earth could possibly need.

Steve didn’t go downstairs to greet them and not too long later, the door to his and Eddie’s room opened, and then three-year-old Hazel was climbing into bed and snuggling up close to him.

“There’s a new microwave,” she told him in her matter-of-fact way she reported on everything that happened in her world.

“I know,” he replied, running a hand through her tangled blonde curls (unlike Robbie, Hazel’s tolerance for “hair time”, as they call it, is pretty much rock-bottom – her hair is more frizz than curls these days and Steve is figuring out how to cope).

“Daddy wants to turn the old one into a diagram,” she continued.

Steve furrowed his eyebrows.

“A diagram?” he repeated.

“He wants to put all the melted spoons in and make them look cool and put it on a shelf.”

Oh – also, no fucking chance. Not in Steve’s kitchen.

“I think he said diorama, Haze.”

Hazel nodded.

Then she said, “You were like a firefighter.”

Steve refrains from pointing out that he shouldn’t have needed to be like a firefighter in the first place (because that would be putting his own issues onto his children and he doesn’t want to do that), even though he knows it’s true. He should have been there.

“You’re the best dad ever,” Hazel continued.

“Yeah?”

“Uh-huh,” she nods, and she’s just as matter-of-fact now as she was before, and she’s sitting on his chest in a way that has her little knees digging into his ribs, which should hurt but instead feels like a tether to the real world he can grasp onto and pull himself out of his head.

 “You think we should go check out this microwave?” he asks, starting to sit up.

Hazel nods.

“Alright, let’s go.”

MOE

When Moe was 21 – a junior in college in New York City – she and her best friend since kindergarten, Gray, started dating (finally, in Steve’s opinion, because he’d seen that coming for ages).

Steve and Eddie have known Gray for as long as Moe has, and they’ve watched Gray grow up nearly as much as their three daughters – as a kindergartener with freckles and dark brown pigtails, as a middle-schooler tearfully coming out as non-binary knowing they’d have to hide it from their family, as a high school senior, still with all those freckles, eager for the fresh start that college would bring.

It was nice to be for Gray (and for a handful of their daughters’ other friends over the years) something that Eddie and Steve had needed when they were their age – a place where they could be themselves without any consequences, a place where they didn’t have to hide, because sometimes, as was the case for Gray for many years, you have to hide. It’s nice to have a safe haven where you don’t.

During Moe and Gray’s senior year of college, the pair made plans to come home for their final spring break. When that first week of March finally rolled around, Moe called from the train to tell them that Gray was finally pulling the trigger – finally coming out to their parents, finally telling them about their relationship with Moe.

“Are they sure,” Steve had asked – not because he doubted Gray but because he hadn’t been too much older when he’d taken that leap for himself and he’d felt the subsequent loss of his parents like mourning a death.

“Positive,” he’d heard Gray reply.

Three hours after their train dropped Moe and Gray off at the Wellesley Farms station, Steve and Eddie heard the back door open. A moment later, Moe trailed in with something heavy in her eyes.

“How’d it…” Eddie started to ask from where he and Steve sat on the couch, but he stopped when Moe shook her head.

“Not over yet,” she told them, “Gray made me leave. It’s a fucking trainwreck.”

And even though he knew that was always going to be the outcome, Steve’s heart still sank.

“Damn,” Eddie commented while Steve shook his head, “They’ll always have a home with us, but…”

“Yeah,” Moe nodded, “Still sucks.” 

Steve recognizes something of his own experience in that – he feels so damn grateful that Jim and Joyce had slid into that parent role for him, especially after he’d become estranged from his actual parents in his mid-twenties. Still, they weren’t his parents, and Steve would’ve never not wanted his parents to pull through like they should have.

Moe sat down on the couch between her dads.

“Why did Gray make you leave?” Steve asked (even though he had a sneaking suspicion why).

“Uh…” Moe paused, pushing her blonde bangs back, “Well, I wouldn’t say I was yelling, exactly, but…I dunno. If you ask Gray they might tell you I was yelling.”

Yep, that seems about right.

“I just,” Moe continued, “I know Gray was prepared for this – for their parents, like, rejecting all of this – and I know they’ve always totally sucked so this was obviously how this was gonna go, but I think I had a hard time seeing it because I’d never really had to consider what it would be like for that to happen.”

Moe shook her head, her bangs falling right back into her eyes, and Steve had to resist the urge to ask if she wanted his help trimming them like he’d done when she was little.

“I just mean – it never made a difference to you who me and Haze and Robbie were or what we did. You just, like, love us regardless…and always, y’know? I never had to imagine anything happening to make that stop, and I never had to consider that it might not be like that for everyone.”

She paused again, this time for a while, her eyes trained on the carpet as she fiddled with cuffs on her jeans. 

And then Moe looked Steve dead in the eye.

“You’re the best dads,” she said, “and I’m really, really lucky.”

ROBBIE

There were eight hours between Steve and Eddie finding out their fifteen-year-old daughter had been in a car crash during a school trip to Disney World and when they finally made it down to the hospital in Orlando she’d been taken to. There were another agonizing two before Robbie woke up.

When she did, her eyes groggily blinked open, and she looked blankly around the hospital room for a moment, and then she saw them.

Then her pale face crumples and suddenly she’s crying.

And that had Steve’s heart plummeting even faster than the phone call from hell he’d gotten eight hours earlier, because Robbie doesn’t cry.

He can’t remember the last time he’d seen her cry – not since she was a baby, anyway. She’d cried constantly as a baby, but the second she had a firm enough grasp on the English language it had ceased entirely, replaced by an endless stream of words – demands and trains of thought and exclamations and everything in between.

Eddie had joked that she’d only ever been crying out of frustration over not being able to tell them what she needed, and as soon as she could tell them, she had no use for it anymore, so seeing Robbie sobbing – the kind of crying where no sound could come out, where she was barely breathing, where her tears were soaking her cheeks and staining the collar of the hospital gown someone had changed her into – it practically had Steve crying himself.

After a few minutes of we’re here and you’re okay and what do you need, Robbie had tearfully admitted, “I need a hug,” and then she’d broken down again.

She wasn’t exactly in any position to get up, obviously, so Steve had taken off his shoes (because even through tears she’d still side-eyed his sneakers) and slid onto the hospital bed so he could pull Robbie into his arms just like he used to do when bad dreams woke her up in the middle of the night.

Later, when Eddie was just outside the hospital room talking to the nurse and the chaperone for the trip about the accident and how the school was planning on moving forward in the aftermath, Robbie finally spoke.

“Papa,” she said, her face pressed into his shoulder.

“Mm-hmm.”

“I’m sorry.”

Steve looked down at his daughter.

“Robbie, you don’t need to–”

“Not for this. For…just, like, in general. You–”

She paused, and Steve let her.

“I just mean…” she continued, “I haven’t been, like, good lately, and I’m sorry.”

Steve didn’t know what to say.

She’s not exactly wrong – it’s true that Robbie had been a total piece of work lately, especially since she started high school, especially since she got bumped up to the senior-level band class because she’s that good at the violin (which he and Eddie had been thrilled about initially until they realized it meant she was making friends with high school seniors) – but Steve didn’t exactly know how best to explain to her that up until this, up until she’d nearly died because of it and no matter how much Steve didn’t like it, it was normal.

It was normal for teenagers to do dumb shit, to hurt themselves, to hurt others, to drive their parents goddamn insane with worry. It wasn’t normal for them to nearly end up dead because of it, and this time it wasn’t really even her fault.

It sort of reminded him of Nancy in a way, of how Nancy had never been the same again after what happened to Barb, how Nancy had never let herself be a dumb teenager, never let herself relax, even though picking a boy over a friend was normal. Sneaking out and drinking during a badly-supervised school trip was normal. Sure, there were supposed to be consequences but there shouldn’t be a goddamn death toll.

“I know, Bean,” he finally said, something about the situation pulling out a nickname for her that he hadn’t used in a long time (because when she was born, Moe had turned Robin into Robbean and the rest was history).

“You’re really good to me,” Robbie whispered, “You and dad are so good to me, and I’m not always good back, and I’m sorry.”

“I don’t need you to be sorry,” Steve told her because, for right now at least, it was true, “Just…just stick around long enough to work with us, okay?”

Robbie nodded.

“Okay.”