#like literally floating on the wind like a cartoon character who got a whiff of a tasty pie or something

[stevieharringtonwifeguy]

i fuckn love pov outsider fics and i especially love fics where it's like years later and tommys grown up and become less of an ass, and i just read one where he had a metalhead robin analogue, and now im imagining him running into eddie at a concert years later and being like oh shit!!! i know that guy. man i should probably apologise im like 80% sure i called him slurs at some point. and he starts to walk over but before he gets there eddie's joined by a super hot girl who looks incredibly out of place in her pink sweater and short denim skirt, but she slots herself into eddie's arms like she belongs there and greets him with a kiss on the cheek. and now tommys like man i called him all those slurs and they weren't even accurate (is it better or worse if they were?? he's gotta stop that train of thought)

but then the girl turns her head slightly and tommy can see more of her face, and she's super pretty with nice skin and big brown doe eyes and a nice spattering of moles across her face and down her neck and... wait a minute. and he squints. tilts his head a bit. and he swears if you ignore the tits and the long hair and the makeup.... he'd swear that was steve harrington. she looks just like him, but a girl, and tommy knows steve doesn't have a sister (tommy'd joked about that a lot before everything, how he'd wished steve had had a sister with his looks, and yeah in hindsight he doesn't know how he never clocked his crush on the guy until college)

and he stares at them for most of the concert before he finally says fuck it and approaches them. what follows is possibly the most awkward and tense high school reunion in history, which is definitely saying something. but once eddie and his girlfriend realise he isn't going to start shit (and once tommy awkwardly asked straight up if she was, in fact, his childhood best friend in drag or something ("which it's cool if you are!! i went to college in cali so i like. know about shit." "oh well as long as you know about shit-""stevie be nice you're giving the man an awkwardness-induced heart attack")) it actually is... kinda nice.

he'd missed steve- stevie now, apparently- after he'd gotten his head out of his ass enough to remember how it was when they were kids, when stevie was just this sweet kid he felt he needed to look after. and it's probably not going to get back to that, even now. she has eddie to pick her up when she falls now, hold her hand when she cries about skinned knees. but he thinks they could maybe still be friendly. put each other on their christmas card list and catch up once a year. she says she'd like that, when he mentions it, and eddie seems to relax a bit as she does so. like he'd been on alert before, taking care of stevie like tommy used to back in first grade. it hurts a little bit that he's something stevie needs to be protected from, but he's man enough to know he deserves it, he was a real dick to her back in high school

but now they can sort of laugh about it, laugh about what it'd be like if junior-year-them could see them now- tommy, a gay man, stevie, a bi woman (and dating eddie munson too, for shame), both genuinely enjoying themselves at a metal concert- and that's something at least.