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theladycarpathia · 2 years ago

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@hellcheerweek

Chrissy Cunningham’s boyfriend had never said her words. Not once in three years.

She isn’t Jason’s soulmate either, his words still pale and gray under his basketball jacket. But that doesn’t seem to matter so much to him as the idea that he’s the one on her arm. She knows what it means - if he says her words, then there will be ultimate proof that she belongs to him. Branded onto her skin, for all the world to see.

The day her words had appeared when she was five years old was just another day for her mother to be disappointed in her. Another thing to complain about. The odd and brief sentence on Chrissy’s arm didn’t suggest a beautiful start to the kind of love story Laura wanted for her daughter. The only person who wanted her soulmate to be Jason more than Jason was her mother. Jason fits the bill: handsome, well off, going places. He’ll go to Princeton, like his father had, he’d make good money and they’d have attractive children. If Jason was her soulmate then her life would fall into place like perfectly fitting pieces of the puzzle.

Chrissy knows that if Jason hasn’t already said her words, he’s never going to.

Well, that’s not exactly true. You can know people for years before they say your words. Nancy Wheeler was in the same classes as Jonathan Byers all through middle school and high school. They were classmates and then friends while she dated Steve Harrington.

Then in their junior year, something happened. Nancy and Jonathan had matching black ink on their arms and, a short while later, Steve returned to school with yellowing bruises on his face and a right forearm that he wouldn’t show to anyone.

“They’re definitely black,�� Jason had said, disgruntled that, as always, King Steve had beaten him to something. He’d spotted Steve’s arm in the showers one day after practice, a quick glimpse before Steve had pulled on a hoodie and booked it. “But he won’t say what girl said them.”

“Maybe it’s Nancy,” Carol had suggested slyly, a stream of pale smoke drifting from her mouth. She and Tommy never quite recovered from Steve’s sudden rejection. Tommy, as usual, found someone new to worship, and Carol’s bite suggested that she wasn’t as over it as she thought. “Maybe she said both of their words and picked Byers instead.”

Chrissy isn’t so sure. The system isn’t perfect - there are people with permanently gray words, others who say the words of multiple people, and even the unlucky few who have no words. But she doesn’t think that’s it. The words have to mean something, you have to feel something. Nancy wouldn’t fall in love with someone so much that she said his words, just to say Steve’s a mere week after their break up. It doesn’t work that way.

Someone else said Steve’s words. And he is desperate to keep everyone from finding out who.

The rules of soulmates say that Jason could say her words in a month, a year, five years. It’s the rules of Chrissy that say otherwise.

She thinks that love isn’t meant to feel like this.

She thinks that sanity doesn’t feel like this. The hallucination in the bathroom is the last straw. She’s tired, so, so tired. Either the nightmares keep her awake or her mother’s delicate comments do. The smaller portions on her plate every night. The taste of bile in her throat. How Jason sometimes looks at her and doesn’t really see her. That the rest of her life looks like this.

She wants to make it stop. Even if for a little while. And she only knows one way to make that happen, so she makes the trip out to the woods behind the High school.

The crunch of leaves underfoot and the bite in the air suggest that spring is still a way off for Hawkins. She tucks her sweater around her and keeps going into the rolling fog, half unsure if she’s even doing the right thing. But she’s run out of options. She’s thought about telling her mom, Jason, just anyone, about how she feels and her throat closes up before the words ever have a chance to form on her lips.

This is desperation. Of the fear that she’s losing her mind. That she might hurt herself. That something is coming to hurt her. She grips her arm through her sleeve as though the pale words might somehow save her.

I don’t want to die without meeting you.

XXX

Eddie Munson might be the first person to ask if she’s okay in a very long while.

And even more than that, watching him voluntarily vault himself backwards over the bench and brush leaves out of his hair to make her laugh, she forgets. Just for a few minutes. But she forgets.

“You know,” Chrissy says, warmth blossoming inside her chest. “You’re not what I thought you’d be like.” Eddie tugs some of his dark hair across his face, his eyes bright and teasing.

“Mean and scary?” he suggests and her stomach dips, like she’s missed a step, like the event she’s waited her whole life for just happened without her permission or forewarning.

Her arm burns underneath her jacket, something that starts down near her elbow and shoots up towards her wrist, like a piece of paper catching fire and twisting itself into gray ash. She places her left hand over her sleeve, even though Eddie has no way of knowing. He can’t see that the three words she’s looked at nearly her entire life have just turned the same shade of black as his hair.

She can’t say anything else. She has to go, just in case the next words out of her mouth are the words on his arm, that he’s meant to be hers too. Because there’s no way she can do this to him. She wanted desperately to meet her soulmate before the end and now she has. But she can’t ask him to have to live through her losing her mind. One day soon, the feral mimic that hisses nasty words and scratches at her door might just break through. She doesn’t know what she’ll do if that happens: if her own madness will cause herself harm or if there really is a devil in Hawkins. Either way, that’s a torture she won’t put on him. Despite what Chrissy has learned, love isn’t meant to hurt.

She looks up, about to make an excuse, to call this whole thing off and leave when she spots his slack jaw, the way his eyes are wide in disbelief and her stomach curdles. It’s too late.

YOU KNOW, YOU’RE NOT WHAT I THOUGHT YOU’D BE LIKE is visible even from Chrissy’s seat, scrawled across Eddie’s arm in what she recognises as her own neat penmanship. It’s now as black as the bats that are inked near his elbow. She must have said his words before he’d had a chance to realize what was happening.

He looks up at her, waiting. He can’t quite bring himself to ask her the question that he wants to but it’s written all over his face anyway.

Shaking, Chrissy pulls her arm up from her lap and tugs the material back, baring her pale skin and the words MEAN AND SCARY? scrawled in a messy, jagged print. The kind of writing you might find creating lyrics or character stats scrawled in the back of an old notebook.

Eddie stares at it, jaw working furiously. He looks as confused as she does. She wonders if he’s maybe disappointed. But when he drops back into the seat opposite her and spreads his arm alongside her’s, just to see how the words look together, she catches a glimpse of a smile.

He’s happy that his soulmate is her.

“What do we do now?” Chrissy asks, and for once her future isn’t entirely filled with uncertainty and fear.

#hellcheer week #hellcheer #edissy #eddie munson x chrissy cunningham #eddie munson #chrissy cunningham #soulmate au #last day of hellcheer week!#where did it go?#I love a soulmate au #in my head a bond makes it easier to resist vecna #so this chrissy survives #i love theeeeem #prompt: soulmate #oops forgot to tag #background harringrove #Luna add to masterlist

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