#obsessed w the idea of eddie and like

[eddiesghxst]

stalker!eddie been on my mind someone see my through w this pls

obsessed with the idea of eddie just being a complete loser weirdo freak. nobody liked him as a kid and it put him in a corner where he could either be sad and lonely or do something distracting with his time— he did the latter.

he’s got these little fixations, things that keep him busy and entertained and he likes the rush he gets when he feels the need to learn everything about something— that’s where his love for dnd comes in. he likes that there’s not a single part of the game you could ever fool him about because he knows it like the back of his hand— almost as if he created it himself. he’s the same way with music— sits and listens to songs on repeat until he has every single pluck of the strings memorized to spin at his fingertips.

it’s his special thing. his superpower. to study things until they become a part of him. and that’s normal.

people can have fixations on things like games and hobbies and whatnot— that’s a normal thing to do.

what’s not normal is when eddie starts to feel this way about you.

suddenly it’s no longer an inanimate object he’s obsessing over. it’s no longer just a silly fantasy game or a limited edition guitar or a handcrafted dagger; no. this is a person. a human being.

he knows it’s not normal. knows it’s bad and he should probably stop before he does something stupid, but when eddie gets an urge to discover, fuck, he can’t stop.

youre not perfect. you’re not some angel sent from god, no, none of that insane cultish bullshit. he’s not exactly sure what it is about you that scratches that obsessive itch in him but it does and that’s dangerous.

he doesn’t realize it’s a problem at first. just thinks it’s a silly crush, no big deal he’s had plenty of those before. because it’s normal to smile at every little thing your crush does. and it’s normal to just want to sit there and stare at your crush all day long. that shit is normal.

but then he doesnt even realize what he’s doing when he offers you a ride home after class. he honestly and genuinely thinks he’s just being a good person by driving you home because it was raining and anyone with a decent heart would do the same.

but then he ends up coming back later that night. and he watches you through your window from across the street. watches for hours as you do your nightly routine, not even once getting a feeling that you’re not alone. he doesn’t even realize what he’s doing is so fucking wrong until you turn your lights off for bed and he’s left feeling like an audience at the end of a show. calling out for more.

he gets a sick feeling, knows it’s so wrong, what he’s done. goes home and panics and swears to himself that he’ll never do that weird shit again because he respects you and you don’t deserve this— and fucks sake this isn’t him! he would never do this to anyone!

but then he’s back the next night. and the next night. and the next.

and eventually he buys a camera. and eventually he knows when you’re home and when you’re not home. and eventually he’s sliding in through your window while you’re gone and he’s going through your things.

and eventually— fuck, he’s in too deep.

[taintedcigs]

✦ POLAROIDS | perv!eddie x reader ✦

part II is HERE!

wc: 2k+

pairing: perv!eddie munson x (kinda perv)!reader

warnings: 18+ !!smut, smut smut!!, MINORS DNI!! absolutely no minors!! male m*sturbation, or*l (male receiving), PERV!EDDIE, praising!! panty-stealing perv!eddie. slight dubcon, this is kinda dark so if this kind of stuff bothers u DO NOT READ!! i am not responsible for the media you decide to consume!!! JUST OVERALL FILTH MINORS DNI!!!

summary: eddie knows it's wrong to go through your drawers and steal your panties, but he can't help it, especially when he has a great idea on what exactly to do with them.

authors note: okay I CAVED IM SORRY BUT i cannot stop thinking about perv!eddie, and more specifically i cannot stop thinking about perv!eddie who's obsessed with stealing your panties... this is proofread but i only read it once so pls ignore any mistakes !! enjoy this filth that im ashamed to post for being down this bad for EDDIE!! ALSO YES THOSE ARE TAYLOR SWIFT'S 1989 POLAROIDS I COULDN'T HELP MYSELF WHENEVER I THINK ABOUT POLAROIDS 1989 COMES INTO MY MIND YES I HAVE ISSUES AND IM OBSESSED W TAYLOR SWIFT YES I EXIST!!!

eddie is a pervert.

or at least he feels like a pervert.

he's not proud of it, but he literally can't help himself when you're always around him.

it started out innocent, he would catch a glimpse of you in the hallways, enjoying the way your pretty giggles were infectious, making him smile immediately.

but then it turned into something else, almost like an infatuation, he was so addicted to being around you that he couldn't help it.

from little things to seeing your skirt flip up, to watching your tits bounce up and down with every curb eddie hit "accidentally", to the way he enjoyed you sitting on his lap while the two of you watched a movie, your ass shifting against his cock that made him hard immediately, to the way you made his mind fuzzy when you licked your ice cream, giggling as you swiped your finger, extending your finger so that eddie could also taste it.

it was as if you were teasing him, and it was driving him crazy, everything you did, eddie was obsessed with.

it was fine up until the point he started coming over to your house. it was as if something had taken over him, the first time he saw your room is when he lost it. it was filled with all of the posters of the bands he liked, you had shown it off to him like it was nothing, telling him that you liked listening to whatever he liked.

eddie knew then and there that he needed you in his life. forever.

when you left the room he couldn't help but go through your things, a huge smile plastered on his face as he saw the picture of the two of you, tucked to the side of your mirror.

then he started going through your drawers, he knew it was wrong, and he knew you could catch him at any minute, but it gave him this rush that he couldn't help but be excited about.

his eyes almost rolled into the back of his head when he saw your lingerie, the pink lacy set you had was enough to give him a heart attack.

and he couldn't help but take one, just one he promised himself, he knew it was a lie, he knew he would come back for more, but he stuffed it into the back of his jean pockets, knowing that he would be jerking off to them while thinking of you.

and when stealing your panties became a regular thing eddie knew he was fucked. he would sneak into your room when you were not around, stealing those cute little pink lacy panties you had a thousand of that you always wore with your tight little skirts.

he would jerk off with them, imagining your tight cunt as he fucked the material, finishing off inside as he released his warm load in the soft material. imagining how good it would be to see you wearing them, your cunt covered in his jizz, the thought of that alone would make him go feral.

and soon he would get so comfortable stealing them, cleaning them, and returning them that he would notice how careless you were with them.

he had stolen from you countless times before, and not once had you noticed, you kept going lingerie shopping with him because of how you always lost your panties, it was a win-win situation for him.

this caused him get a bit more comfortable, and soon enough, he was now in your room when you told him you'd be taking a quick shower, he was hurrying to go through your drawers, and he smirked at the sight of the cute little heart-shaped panties, remembering these panties from the day you wore that tight little black dress, showing off your curves and ass every time you bent over to pick up something eddie 'accidentally' dropped.

as he gets on your bed to engulf himself in your scent fully, polaroids on your bedside catch his eye, he slowly reaches for them, and his eyes bulge at the countless pictures of you in a bikini, they were all taken by nancy when you, nancy and robin went to that girl's spring break, leaving him behind.

his sadness at the time of you leaving is washed all away when he sees those pictures. each picture sends more blood rushing to his already aching cock, he curses and groans as he quickly unbuckles his belt, his cock stirs and hardens in his boxers.

and he's quick to release this tension as his angry hard cock springs free out of his boxers, plopping against his stomach.

he stretches the panties against the girth of his cock, and then wraps the panties around his pink tip, pre-cum beading out of his slit, while his other hand is holding the polaroids, examining every part of it.

the polaroid is enough to put a clear image in his mind, the first picture is you smiling, your tits are bursting out of your bikini and the only thing he can picture is how good they would look when you were stuffed with his cock, begging and crying for more beneath him, the way your breasts would bounce with every thrust is enough to cause a low groan out of him.

he's slow to stroke himself with the soft material, a part of him wants you to catch him doing this, a part of him wants you to see how crazy he is for you, he wants to see your shocked face as he fucks your precious panties, and a part of him wants you to help him out, he doesn't want this to be over so soon.

he goes over to the next picture, this time you're laying down on your stomach, your whole frame is in the picture and your ass is sticking out from your thong-like bikini, you face the camera as your gaze is dark, so filled with lust that he groans again, tugging at his cock harder with your panties as he imagines spanking your ass, leaving handprints all over your cheeks.

his fantasies intensify now as he imagines your soft hands over his rough calloused ones, giggling as you stroke him and kiss his angry pink tip. 'mmm, you're s'big, eds.' he imagines you giggling.

he gets to the next polaroid, and the sight alone is enough to make him spill his load all over the picture.

you are looking up innocently as you stick your tongue out, he has no idea why nancy would have this sexy photoshoot with you but he's not complaining as he forcefully tugs your panties along with his cock, his pumps getting intense.

'what d'you want me to do, eds?' he imagines you batting your eyelashes at him as you are standing between his shaking thighs,

'd'you need me to suck you off?' he imagines you asking with your doe eyes.

'yes, doll, need your pretty little lips wrapped around my cock.' he pictures your pretty mouth wrapped around his cock, taking all of him.

'f-f-fuck, just like that, pretty girl.' he groans, praising the imaginary you.

'y'like that eds, y'like me sucking you off?' he winces at your words, his hand began to fist his cock harder, beads of sweat dripping on his forehead from the way he imagined you, he needed to cum.

's'big eds, it's s'fuckin' big, hmmm' you purr, even in his fantasy, eddie is needy.

'need you so bad, princess.' his voice is strained from his groans, he's fucking himself so hard against your panties that the material is straining him, giving him a mix of pleasure and pain.

he imagines holding your hair in a tight grip, pushing your head further as you gag around his cock, all teary-eyed as you look up at him, the image of your saliva mixing with your salty tears causing a strained moan out of him.

'y'gonna cum for me eds? paint my throat with your cum?' the way he imagines you with your doe-eyes and your filthy words is too much for him, his knuckles are white as they abuse his poor aching cock.

'yes baby, need to fill your throat with my cum.' he whimpers now, he feels pathetic, so pathetic, fucking your panties as he's ready to cum all over your polaroid pictures, just so he could show them to you, tell you how fucking pretty you look covered in his jizz.

he imagines you hollowing out your cheeks, as you take all of him with your pretty little lips, his huge cock hitting the back of your throat, causing you to gag around him, and your hands stroking whatever's left of him, massaging his balls, and eddie's eyes roll in the back of his head.

just then, he hears the shower noise turn off, and he knows he doesn't have much time left.

'need your cum, eds. need to taste you.' the imagination is more than enough to get him closer, his grip on your panties is so tight that he can feel his cock ache, he needs to release himself, and he needs to do it now.

'gonna cum, baby, s'good, princess, doing s'good.' his thighs tremble, as eddie's hand sped up now, he bucked his hips forward in a rough movement as the image of you beneath his thighs taking him all was etched into his mind.

'f-f-fuck, gonna fill that sweet mouth of yours.' he groans, and he tugs on his cock faster and faster, his thumb swiping over the tip messily as he releases his warm load into the hem of your panties, animalistic groans leaving his lips.

'take it all, baby, shit.' he murmurs as his cock twitches in your panties, his sticky load covering all the soft material.

the sound of the bathroom door opening causes panic out of him before he can even ride out his climax he places the polaroids on the bedside and then he places the panties next to your clean clothes, getting dressed as he attempts to look nonchalant, sitting on your bed.

'sorry i took so long.' you giggle as you enter, and eddie just hums, his mind still hazy from what happened and the blood is rushing to his cock again as you stand in front of him with a tiny towel wrapped around your body.

your legs are shining and the towel is so tight that he can see the curve of your ass, and your breasts are so pushed together that eddie wants to curse himself for being this perverted about you.

he straightens himself, trying to appear as normal as you walk over to him.

'can you turn around, i'm gonna change.' you murmur, heat rising to your cheeks.

he awkwardly nods as he places himself in front of the mirror, a smirk appearing on his face as he watches you putting on the panties that was covered with his warm cum.

he expects you to have a shocked face, turn around and accuse him, or he expects you to believe that you got so aroused that you immediately soaked your panties, and he thinks he could help you with that.

but what he doesn't expect is to hear you whimper, and his head shots up at the sound, 'mhmm' you almost groan and the blood is quick to rush to eddie's cock again, he's hard as a rock.

'it's not warm enough.' you hum, as eddie turns to face you, his brows knit together in confusion.

'w-what?' he stutters almost, you shrug.

'next time i'd prefer if you actually came in me.' you say nonchalantly, and eddie's jaw almost opens at your words.

his mind is about to explode, he's stuttering, he wants to apologize, but at the same time he wants to know how you knew, he's speechless.

'i- i'm sorry.' he stutters as he attempts to get closer to you, a smirk forming on your face.

'how did you know?' he asks in a timid voice, he can't help but admit how much this excites him.

'oh, eds, who do you think put those polaroids in there?'

final author's note: OKAY IM SORRY ITS A BIT CHEESY BUT PLSPLPLS PLEASEE LMK IF YOU WANT A PT.2, my asks are open! request away <3 ily all hope yall enjoyed this filth omg mwah xo, em <3

[loulovingho]

(I made this little headcanon then had to write a fic for it. Here's 2k words of the 118 being obsessed with Tommy ft. Bobby being a dad, of course. Enjoy here or on ao3!)

The Problem

Buck has a problem.

He knows it shouldn't be a problem. Knows he should be grateful. He's never had anything like this before. Never felt so secure in his life. Work is good, home is good, friends are good, family's good, and his boyfriend... well, he's really good.

Buck is in love, like really and truly in love, for the first time ever. Yes, he's said it before, and maybe he meant it, but not like this. He's never had this much stability, and care, and comfort, and security. Buck doesn't just love Tommy, he feels loved by Tommy. Since the moment the words I love you slipped out of Tommy's mouth, there has never been a doubt in his mind that Tommy means it. And he knows that Tommy feels the same way about him too.

But none of that is the problem.

The problem is he's not the only one who loves Tommy.

All of his coworkers love Tommy.

A lot.

Apparently he is a very popular guy with the 118. Buck always knew Tommy was a cool guy, even when he first tried and failed to discredit the claim, but he didn't realize that every single one of his coworkers would also think Tommy was the coolest guy to ever walk the planet.

Okay, maybe they didn't actually think that, but it was obvious that they liked him and they wanted to be around him.

All. The. Time.

At first it was cute. Buck was thrilled that everyone liked the person he was dating. He was overjoyed that they always had something positive to say about Tommy, that they had him included in group chats, and invited him to hangout with the team after a shift.

Then it became... a lot to manage.

Chimney and Tommy had a long history, so it was to be expected that they would hang out on occasion. They both loved to watch classic movies and, while Buck didn't mind one every once in a while, he wasn't a huge fan of black and white so he let them have their time with that. He just didn't expect Chimney to add the Old Classics Movie Network to his cable subscription so there was always another movie being recorded that they needed to watch and analyze.

Tommy and Eddie were already friends, and Buck and Eddie were best friends, so it was easy for the three of them to hang out. Buck could get into wrestling, he liked karaoke trivia, and he was a big fan of learning Muay Thai. But that's where Eddie had a problem.

“Every time you come to Muay Thai,” Eddie whined, “you and Tommy end up going one round, get all horned up, and leave early.”

“All horned up?” Buck repeated with a glare. “What are we, fifteen?”

“You're banned from Muay Thai,” he declared, holding up a finger to silence Buck's incoming protests, “at least once a week.”

Then there was Hen, who Buck thought would care the least of them all.

He was wrong.

She became convinced that she was the reason he and Tommy ever got together, not Chimney.

“Chimney may have been the one to contact Tommy, but it was me who planted the seed in his head,” she'd say, “so I was actually the one who connected you two.”

It turns out Tommy and Karen also had a lot of similar interests, so one double date turned into regular double dates. Often, Karen was texting or calling Tommy to set up the next double date before Buck even knew a thing about it.

Hen also enjoyed Tommy's dry humor. They could battle back and forth for hours in sarcasm wars, and often enjoyed hating on the same things.

Even Ravi wedged his way into Tommy's life. He actually wanted flying lessons for other purposes than staring at Tommy for hours at a time while he rambled on about what each button did.

And Tommy was so kind, so insanely, annoyingly, kind that he always made time for everybody. Buck had no idea how he did it, but he did. He even always had time for Buck too, Buck just wanted more of it.

He knew it was selfish. He knew Tommy deserved to have all the friends and found family in the world, which is why he'd never say anything to him about it.

But, he could talk to Bobby. Ask Bobby to talk to the rest of the team, because he'd tried and they wouldn't listen to him. Or, maybe Bobby could just schedule him off a day where everyone else worked? Give Buck and Tommy a day where distractions weren't possible, because all of the distractions were busy at the station. Surely he could do something.

He should've known better.

The second he tapped on Bobby's office door, Bobby excitedly waved him in.

“It came in the mail today,” he declared, as if Buck was supposed to know what that meant.

“Wh- What came in the mail?” Buck asked cautiously as he sat down.

“The murder mystery game Tommy and I talked about last time you guys came over. I had no clue he was so into puzzles and mysteries. I already talked to Tommy, and you two are coming over for dinner tonight.”

“We are?” Buck asked. This was a lot of information to be thrown his way so quickly.

“Yes. Well, he actually said he'd ask you about it and then confirm, but you already said you didn't have plans earlier, so...”

He should've known that question was a trap. Bobby had asked what everyone's plans were while they were on the way to a call earlier in the day. Buck had answered that he and Tommy didn't have any, which was risky, but his mind went blank in the moment. His actual plans involved a lot of nudity, mind blowing sex, and hopefully some whipped cream, but he was trying to not be so blatant about his sex life anymore.

But now Bobby was looking at him with wide, excited eyes, and he did remember Tommy talking about that game, and Bobby's food was always so good, so it wasn't like he could say no.

“Yeah, of course it's fine.”

Which led them to now, having just enough time to shower and change before driving over to Bobby and Athena's place.

“I know we haven't had as much us time lately,” Tommy said as they reached the door. Of course he did. Of course he noticed everything. “So we'll stay for dinner, and do this game, and we'll go by nine.”

Buck tried to play it cool. “No rush.”

“Evan,” Tommy replied knowingly, dropping a kiss on his temple, “we'll go by nine.”

Who was Buck to argue? “Yeah... Yeah, okay.”

Dinner went smoothly, as if there was another option. Tommy was always great at keeping up conversation, and he and Bobby knew tons of people to reminisce about and catch up on. Tommy had a long history with Athena as well, and a lot of mutual respect between the two, so the conversation never stalled.

It wasn't like Buck was ever left out either. Bobby and Athena were his family; more of his parents than his actual parents. Bobby cared for him, loved him, watched over him in ways his father never did. Athena was a dose of reality when he needed it. She was stern, expected the best from him, and didn't whitewash anything. He felt more comfortable in their home than he ever did in the house he grew up in.

And Tommy always had a hand on his leg, or his back, including him in the conversation or bragging on whatever he did at work that week. When Buck talked, Tommy looked at him like nothing else existed in the world. He listened, hung on to every word.

He made Buck feel special.

Which is why Buck wanted to take him home, rip off all of his clothes, and adore every inch of his body.

He couldn't do that yet though, because it was only seven-thirty and they still had to play the murder mystery game.

It started innocently enough. It was a fun game with pictures, paperwork, some evidence, and background on all the suspects. Buck figured they'd read through the material, follow along, and they'd be led to the murderer in no time.

Then Bobby rolled out the cork board and began pinning suspect photographs and pictures from the “crime scene”.

Things devolved from there.

Athena gave up before nine. “I solve murders all day long, I don't want to do it all night too.”

Buck still held out hope they'd leave on time.

Another mistake.

“Hon, it's getting late,” Buck said a little after nine, gently patting Tommy's back. They were sitting beside one another at the dining room table. Buck had been half paying attention, half going through a Wikipedia rabbit hole that started with active US serial killers and had somehow ended up on the origins of duct tape. “Maybe we should let them get some rest.”

“Buck, we haven't solved the murder yet,” Bobby replied, lifting both of his hands to show all the paperwork. “Cassie's ex-boyfriend is a prime suspect, but I have no physical evidence to prove he did it.”

“I think we should look more into the circus clown,” Tommy replied, handing Bobby yet another piece of fictional paperwork. “I learned a long time ago that you never trust a clown.”

“We already cleared the clown. He had an alibi.”

“Did he though? His best friend, the balloon artist, was his alibi. The clown could've paid him off.”

That's when Buck decided he'd be better off slipping away and joining Athena in the living room.

“Would you like some leftover pie?” Athena asked, eyebrow raised knowingly, as she lifted up her own slice.

Buck nodded. “I got it.”

He returned a moment later, pie in hand, extra whipped cream. He sat down on the couch, across from where Athena was curled up on the loveseat.

“There's not much on right now,” Athena said, staring at the TV, “but these home improvement shows always find a way to reel me in.”

“As long as it's not a murder mystery, I'll enjoy it.”

Athena let out a laugh. “They're in it deep, aren't they?”

“I'm not sure an actual murder would take them away from that game.”

Athena shook her head, peering into the dining room. “Our boys are something else, aren't they?”

Buck smiled. He couldn't help the butterflies in his stomach. The night may not be going as planned, but there was something so sweet, so domestic, about it all.

Everything felt... right.

“Yeah,” he replied, “they're something.”

Two more shows started and ended, and Tommy and Bobby could still be heard in the other room, arguing about whether it was the clown or the ex.

“You know, I looked up that game a while ago,” Athena whispered into the darkness of the living room, the only light from flashes on the TV, “and it wasn't the clown or the ex.”

Buck sighed sleepily. “I think we'll be spending the night tonight,” he mumbled, his eyes slowly closing where he laid on the couch.

“Already made up the guest bedroom,” Athena replied, taking another sip of her drink. “New toothbrushes in the bathroom too.”

It'd be another two hours before Tommy would come and gently wake up Buck and lead him to the guest bedroom. They'd brush their teeth, and change into some of Bobby's pajama pants before snuggling in bed.

And then, before the sun rose, Tommy would be popping up from a dead sleep to exclaim, “It was the candlemaker!” before running out of the room, and apparently right into Bobby who- from the sounds of their mumbled laughter and high fives- had the same epiphany.

Yeah, Buck had a problem. And he hoped he had it for the rest of his life.

[imagine--if]

A/N: I've missed writing for Eddie 🥹 hope you enjoy reading! And happy 2nd anniversary to The Batman movie!! Can't believe I fell in love with the film and its characters two solid years ago, and super hyped for the sequel 🖤 A Bruce Wayne/Battinson imagine will be coming soon, so stay tuned!!

Wordcount: 1.3k

Time period: Riddler Year One, Issue 6 (beginning of The Batman)

He hated it when you were gone this long.

It was okay if he knew where you were, if you were working or out with a couple of friends, someplace he could track you through your phone. Through windows. Through anything. As long as the sun was still out and he knew exactly where you were, could reach you whenever he wanted, he could keep his grip on his mentality, and at least half-focus on his plans and preparations.

But he couldn't do any of that right now. Which led to the inevitable.

Pacing his shabby little apartment that you somehow managed to make a little brighter, tidier, something close to home, closer than he'd ever got before. But now, it was cold and dark and empty, painfully quiet, apart from his uneven, staggering breaths that Edward tried in vain to swallow down.

'Breathe.'

It was a simple job. Too simple. Sneak into the Penguin's rooms at the Iceberg Lounge, plant the bug, slip out again, unnoticed. And you would either be very much unnoticed, blending in perfectly with. there's of the deceptively beautiful girls and boys who danced and flirted and drank at the bars and around round tables and tall, glossy silver poles stretching up into the high ceilings of the club. Or you would be pulled aside by some pervert that thought you were as pretty as Edward himself did, maybe by the Penguin, or that pig Falcone.

He shouldn't have set you. Too risky. Send a follower? No, too complicated; not enough of them yet, everything still growing and finalising, piecing together in a lovely puzzle crafted by his mind. You might well go unnoticed, but if he dared go himself, it would be a horror show.

This was a baadddd idea.

The smooth click and glide of the lock twisting and opening up the heavy front door made him flinch out of his thoughts, murky green eyes jumping to the short hallway with hope and fear in his gaze. The same hope a puppy gets when its owner comes back home, the same fear a madman harbours in a dizzying craze, living off the what-ifs and obsessions their mind feeds them in the darkness.

When he speaks, it's in a rush, words tripping over each other and his voice catching, stumbling forwards to grip onto your shoulders with his soft but firm, trembling grip.

"You were gone too long," Edward insists, his fingers digging into the fabric of your sweater, searching for your warmth and reassurance, his eyes trying to take in every part of your face at once. "Too long... and I was worrying, and I felt sick, and I- you can't do it again, please, please, because-"

"It's alright, Eddie," you cut him short gently in amusement and sympathy, your arms fitting snugly around his neck as you embrace him. You easily fill him shiver at the contact, starving, aching, as he hugs you back with enough force to make you breathless, digging his face in your neck needily with a soft whining sound.

It's almost funny, how desperate and childlike he can be, all big green eyes sparkling with joy and awe at how readily you give your affections to him, his skin bare of any sweet touch from another being in Gotham other than yours. But he doesn't want anyone else's now, anyway. The rest of Gotham can sink into its corruption, and his hope incarnate can dance above the waves.

He gazes up at you in a slight daze, speechless, and you smile at him the way you do, the way that makes him smile back in giddy wonder, his thoughts spinning around and around like a carousel, all bright, pure lights and ethereal tunes.

"I miss you," Edward mumbles, half to himself, his stare wandering to study your eyes, your nose, your lips. "Always."

"I missed you too," you reply earnestly, "but it was worth it. I did what you said."

He blinks at your words, his attention circling back as he looks up into your eyes in curiosity and a sweet, almost innocent light, one that doesn't at all match the moment.

"I bugged his office," you clarify, nodding, "in and out. No one saw my face, and if they did, they won't remember it."

Edward lets out a slow breath, his expression loosening from intrigue and thought to the depths bubbling to the surface, his eyes spiked with venom and his words hushed with a small smirk.

"Oh," he mumbles, before giggling slightly, blinking up at you in pride and unhinged malice. "I love you."

You beam at his words, your fingers stroking down the plump curve. of his cheek, an action that makes him shudder and his breath catch in his throat, his eyes round and adoring.

"I love you too, Ed."

"I- I'll give you everything," he promises, his words rolling into lovestruck rambles between repeating your name, "everything I have. Every... everything."

There's that strange but familiar feral hunger in his eyes, not violent, but full of untethered passion and obsession, of love and lust, of everything he's never experienced before. And now that he is, he wants it all, wants it now, to feel everything at once and lose himself in endless spirals of pleasure and ecstasy that rakes up his spine and makes his voice crack and break-

"I'll never," Edward continues in a whisper, tugging you deeper into his arms, walking back and down onto his couch and pulling you with him, "never let you go. Everything will happen as it should, and I'll be there to get you... again, and again, and again, and again, and-"

You let him keep rambling on, his cheek rubbing against yours and ducking into the hot curve of your neck like a cat, his damp lips skimming your skin mindlessly, hanging onto you with his surprisingly strong grip, even though there's nowhere else to go. Tonight, there's nothing but the Riddler, his arms trapping you inside all that he is.

Black and green screens of computers running code down their displays absently fills the night with an eerie but almost comforting glow, polaroid pictures of his targets, red ink scribbled harshly in question marks and accusations over the glossy print. For you, there's a separate case of shots, most taken with you knowing, across the room in his apartment, with Edward grinning and giggling when you glare at him weakly in amusement and protest at the constant flashes and printing of pictures and mugshots.

No escape. None at all. You're with him for life, because you let him in, and like a virus, he ran through everything that makes you, you, drinking it in and fantasizing up until this very moment. A moment where Edward forgot about the blood he shed and the streams up for his cult following, the big board pinned with pictures and news clippings and rage in the form of black and white. He just clung to you fiercely, inhaled you, to do it all again the next morning, still trembling with the warmth and tremors of raw desire and love.

I am there, but cannot be seen," he whispers in your ear, nuzzling impossibly closer to you, his fingers lacing with yours, "to have me costs you nothing. To be without me costs you everything. What am I?"

You've heard this one before. It was in one of the little notes he left you during your first few meetings with him, and every one of his riddles seemed to have something to do with you, with how he saw you, absolutely angelic with no flaws, no blemishes, gorgeously unharmed by the wicked world of Gotham.

"Hope?" you guess correctly, glancing up at him expectantly, and he giggles again, his fingers tracing over your lips boldly, caught up in the moment and his own wonderful world of puzzles and clues.

"Or," Edward smiles brightly at you, resting his forehead against yours... and answering with your name.

✧༺ 𝓉𝒶𝑔𝓁𝒾𝓈𝓉 ༻∞ (message me know if you want to be removed. ghost blogs/dead accs have been removed.)

@misadventures0fdes @junebugp @simestandswithtaylorswift-blog @carley-carley-carley @lostbunn @dragovegogrimborn @i-wished-upon-a-star-one-night @edwardspumpkinpie @murderbimbo00 @sweetums0kitty @beel-mcburger @cml-san @jervis-tetch-my-beloved @bimboanime @phoenixgurl030 @dangerouslittlefairy @yoyoanaria @yaeyuuki @vinxlsketches @beenz-beenz @ghoulsgraveyard @birds-have-teeth @repostingmyfavs @r3ptiliaaa @for3v3rda1sy @glitterycheesecakegladiator @moonwritesblog @lilyevans1 @httpsunflowersleep @hxney-lemcn @callsigncrash @bokksieu @skateb0red @philiasoul@felicityofbakerstreet @deadlights-darling @ireadandream @tinyryder @kpopgirlbtssvt @truecobblepot @jessicainhell

[mydearyanderes]

Yandere! Welcome Home Neighbors Headcanons | Part 1!

Headcanons of how all the neighbors in Welcome Home would act as Yanderes!

Characters: Barnaby, Eddie, Frank, and Howdy!

TW: Threats, suicidal ideation, stalking, workplace harassment 

Barnaby B. Beagle 

It would take a lot for him to become full on obsessed with you

He’d act less like a boyfriend and more like an overprotective father

Barnaby wants you by his side 24/7, no matter what

If you don’t? Well get ready for a lot of a lot of passive aggressive comments about how he “just wants to protective” and how you’re being stuck up

He shrugs off any legitimate concern you have for the relationship, instead just laughing off all of your kvetching, as he calls it

Don’t forget that Barnaby is 8 feet tall

He’d never hurt you, no he’d never dream of it!

However

I can see him not so subtly reminding you how much larger he is compared to you, how he could easily overpower you if he wanted

Hopefully this keeps you in line

As long as you’re on his good side, he’s a great guy! Always laughing and joking with you, doing everything in his power to make sure you are entertained and won’t leave him

Eddie Dear

Oh he’s just so smitten!

Definitely a love at first sight type of guy

Stumbles over all his words when talking to you, you just make him so nervous! 

He respects your personal space, after all he doesn’t want to make you uncomfortable! 

However he doesn’t really understand the concept of emotional space

Eddie will inject himself into any and every activity you get yourself in to

Talking to Frank? Eddie’s there! Relaxing under a tree? Eddie’s there! Sleeping in the privacy in your own home? Eddie’s there.

He’ll send you anonymous love letters, but it’s really obvious who sent them

Because when he gives the letter to you he says things that make it blatant that it was him 

“Oh this guy really seems to like you!” “I haven’t even opened the letter yet...” “O-oh uhm... uh... I went through your mail?”

Terrible at lying

Overall a pretty harmless yandere, just wants your love and attention, even through rather creepy means

Frank Frankly

His yandere tendencies will only show after you two have been dating for a while 

He’ll whisper things here and there, about how your friends can’t be trusted

Barnaby is annoying. Sally is arrogant. Wally is creepy. Poppy is uptight. Etc.

No one is good enough for your attention, for your love

Even Frank battles with the idea that he isn’t good enough for you

You’ll have to spend many late night assuring him that, yes, he is good enough and that, yes, you do really love him

If you ever try to leave, or do anything that doesn’t involve him, he’ll guilt trip you until you stayed

You’re right, Frank is worthless and unworthy of love, you should just go ahead and leave him

If you call his bluff, and you continue to have relationships with others besides him. Or worse, break up with him, he’ll go mad

At first it’s trying to use logic to get you to stay. Then he get’s angry, yelling and throwing things in your direction and threatening to hurt himself. Lastly he’ll collapse to the floor, crying and sobbing until you decide to stay with him again, even for just a bit longer

He’ll repeat this cycle for as long as needed

Howdy Pillar

It starts out as a small crush, then it snowballs into something much, much more sinister 

You know how Barnaby pays for his hotdogs with jokes?

Well for you, you’ll have to do increasingly more and more elaborate things

Howdy does this purely to enjoy your company, even if for just a few minutes longer

It may even get sexual, assuming you two are already in a relationship

He gives you, and only you, ridiculous discounts on items 

Things in the store that you wanted that weren’t in the store are suddenly there now

Even things that you don’t remember telling anyone else that you wanted

He may even hire you as his assistant in his store, so he can rest easy knowing he’s with you most of the day

Soon, it won’t be enough. Howdy wants you around him constantly now. You’re too perfect to only see for a few hours a day

He’ll coerce you into a relationship with him if you two aren’t dating

If you refuse? 

Well, you don’t want to know what Eddie will resort to if you do that

[ashwhowrites]

oooooh I have been saving up requests for a while for you. here's one for now, I don't want to bombard you

"I don't know what to say to that"

"then don't say anything"

eddie & reader in love but reader always tries to cut whatever tension w humor/cracking jokes bc she gets overwhelmed by how serious eddie gets when telling her all the things he loves about her & why he loves her. she (so obviously) loves him too she just doesn't know how to handle all that emotion bc she's never seen or felt love like this in her life. eddie wants to change that

you can make it gn if you're more comfortable writing it that way!!

-☀️

this is literally how my partner and I work. I am obsessed and go on rants about everything I love about them.

Small blurb of two people in love

Not proofread

Eddie Munson was a deep person, he put a lot of thought into his ideas, he took time to really understand the things around him, and his emotions showed on his face. He wore his heart on his sleeve. He was passionate about the things he loves, and the people he loves.

Of course, Eddie was hyper and chaotic, always laughing and joking around. But he could turn serious in seconds if he was fully focused on something, and Y/N loved that about her boyfriend. Except, when she was his focus point.

Y/N was not used to someone admiring her, Eddie treated her like she was royalty. He worshipped the ground she walked on and stared into her eyes whenever she spoke. Turned his body to face her during conversations, brown eyes locked on her, even if she wasn't talking to him.

He was so wrapped up in her, everything she did took his breath away and he wanted to soak in her warmth. He could lay in bed with her all day and would spend the rest of his life doing the same.

~~~

It was an early Sunday morning, Y/N was laying on Eddie's chest as he ranted about his dream. His soft fingertips softly ran up and down her arm. Halfway through his story, he got silent. Y/N looked at him confused, only to find him staring down at her with a smile.

"What?" she asked

"You have the prettiest lips you know that?" Eddie thought out loud. His head was all focused on his dream, but the sun outlined her lips and now his head was stuck on that.

"Oh shut up, continue your dream." She waved him off

"Like the perfect shape, gorgeous color, and so soft." He trailed on and on, his thumb resting on her bottom lip as she softly tugged it.

And this is what Y/N struggled with. His eyes and attention of just on her. She felt her body grow hot and nervously laughed.

"You just like what my lips can do," she teased, trying to lighten the mood.

"I love that too, but that's not my main reason. I love that your lips feel like a safe place. A kiss from you just calms my body and gives my brain a second to shut off and restart." Eddie smiled, his thumb brushing her lip softly.

Y/N struggled with words, so she settled with hiding herself in Eddie's neck.

~~~

Eddie loved to draw, it was something he felt like he was good at. And his girlfriend was his perfect muse.

"And done!" Eddie stated proudly, a huge smile on his face as he cleaned off his notepad.

Y/N looked up from her homework, a smile on her face, assuming Eddie finished his math homework.

"Want me to check your answers?" She offered

"Oh.....I am not done with math." Eddie said with a nervous smile.

"Munson, we have been in this booth for an hour and what have you been doing?" She questioned, trying to sit up to look over the table.

Eddie smirked as he turned over his notepad, a proud look in his eyes as Y/N took in the drawing.

"Is...are those my eyes?" She was taken aback by how beautiful the drawing was. A collection of eyes scattered across the page, but each pair was slightly different. The eyes showed different emotions, happy, sad, and one that stood out. The eyes were so soft, warm, and so much emotion.

"Yeah, baby. This one was when you found your favorite flower at that one shop."

"Do you have a favorite flower, Munson?" Y/N asked, skimming through the flower shop. Robin's birthday was coming and Y/N decided on flowers and dinner as a gift.

"Baby, I don't know anything about flowers, maybe the yellow ones?" Eddie shrugged, looking over all the different colors.

"Many can be yellow." She laughed, shaking her head as she reached up to grab Robin sunflowers.

"What's yours?" Eddie asked, throwing his arm over her shoulder.

"Pink roses!" She said excitedly, her eyes catching a row of pink roses.

"And this was when you found that baby turtle in the middle of the street with no mom."

"EDDIE STOP!" Y/N screamed, Eddie slammed on his brakes. Panicked eyes looking over at Y/N

"what's wrong?" He asked, watching as her eyes began to water and tears ran down her face.

"That turtle! They are all alone, we need to bring them home." She said, throwing off her seatbelt and running into the middle of the street.

"BABY! WATCH FOR CARS" Eddie screamed after her, shaking his head as she scooped up the turtle. She came back with her eyes still tearful but a smile on her face.

"What's the last one?" Y/N asked, she was amazed by all the different emotions but that last one intrigued her.

She watched as Eddie blushed, his pale cheeks turning pink and his ears turning red, easy to tell since his hair was in a low bun.

"Um, that one was after we had sex for the first time." Eddie coughed out, nervously chuckling as he went to close the notepad, but she was quick to snatch it.

Holding it closer to her face as she took in the details.

"What was I looking at this time?" She asked, tracing the shading around her eyes on the page.

"You were looking at me." He admitted with a smile. "It was the day you looked at me the way I felt for you. Your eyes tell me everything about you and that night they told me you loved me."

Eddie always had a way to make Y/N at a loss for words.

"I just, I don't know what to say. I wish I could show my love for you like how you can. You know the right words and the actions. " Y/N ranted out, handing him the notepad.

"You don't have to say anything, your eyes tell me and that's enough for me," Eddie said, leaning over to kiss her, she smiled and met him halfway across the table.

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

[lowkeyrobin]

could you write something for eddievr?? If not it’s totally ok, have a good day!!!

-♊️

yeah sure! I went with this prompt I found from someone I follow so hopefully this is good lol ; thanks for requesting! hope you enjoy 🫶 ; I'm ab to be so honest I have no idea what this is.... don't expect anything good cause I wrote it at peak sleep deprived mess I'm so sorry (I literallt dk what to do w this i???)

EDDIEVR ; why are you here?

summary ; Eddie drops by to try and back your mind out of leaving for work, you leave anyways, and have to go running back to him

warnings ; language, platonic

word count ; 869

masterlist

"Why are you here?" You ask bluntly, arms crossed as you stand in your doorway.

Eddie stands in front of you, a desperate look in his eyes, "To save you from a mistake, Y/n!"

You roll your eyes with a light sigh. "Eddie, I'm moving, and you can't change that! I don't know why you're so obsessed with trying to hold me down here. I'm going places with my life. You need to move on!"

He opens his mouth to speak, but you cut him off.

"For Christ's sake, you're married! Go home to Gabby, please. I'm leaving tomorrow." You step out of his way to showcase the bins and boxes lining your walls.

"It's not about that!" He exclaims. "You're making a mistake, it's gonna be good for a while, but it's gonna come crashing down"

"And you know this how?" You squint, raising an eyebrow. "What, are you a psychic or something?"

He sighs, "I just don't wanna lose you, okay?"

"Holy shit. You came all the way here for that?"

He's silent.

"Y/n, please. I have a bad feeling-"

"Nope, goodbye" You move out of the way to slam the door closed, not wanting to hear another word.

Truth is, you'd gotten in a fight, a random one at that, when you told him you were moving. He was lying about his fear to lose you or whatever he meant by that, you talked online with him and his friends 24/7, it wouldn't be any different if you were a few hundred miles away. You talked more online than in person already. Nothing would've really changed.

But, apparently to him, it would've meant the end of the world.

He was hiding something, you didn't know what. He didn't want you to leave, you didn't know whether to find it sweet or creepy at first.

You decide to call Gabby, considering that's his wife, and you didn't want him around your home anymore. Plus, you had to question her about this.

The first time you dial her number, you're sent to voicemail. Out of your persistence, you call again, to actually be met by her voice.

"Oh my God, hi Y/n! Sorry, I've been baking, had to wash my hands and I couldn't get to the phone" She awkwardly chuckles, "What's up? You alright?"

"Uh, yeah..." You shrug, "Uhm, what's up with Eddie. He's so persistent about trying to get me to not move, but he won't tell me why"

You hear her sigh on the other end of the phone.

"He's worried about the company you work for, they're known for shady things, he's worried that after you make this move, that they're gonna start the shady shit now that you're closer to home base" She explains, "He's embarrassed that he did research on it, I guess. He's been looking for any and every reason for you to stay"

You sigh and nod, remembering she can't see you as you look back down at your phone. "Thanks, Gabby"

"Yeah. Let me know if you need anything, okay?"

"Mhm"

You hang up after giving her a proper goodbye and then flop down on your couch. You look around at all the boxes stacked along your walls, looking like a maze around the place.

You still didn't understand why he was acting this way, as it was just... childish? Maybe it was his way of showing concern for a friend, but it just felt weird.

"Eddie, you're a confusing man"

You sigh as you reach for your TV remote, turning the television on to watch more of a show you've been hooked on.

Surprisingly, Gabby wasn't lying about the shady shit your company was up to. They left you without a job in the middle of a big city and rent due in a few days. Awesome.

You were already on the verge of being evicted because you missed rent last month. The only friends you had anywhere close were Eddie and Gabby.

You decide to give Gabby a ring, hoping to ask if you could crash with them for a while. The stress was eating you inside out and you couldn't handle it, why not flee while you could?

"Hey Gabby!-"

"Y/n?" Eddie asks through the other side of the line, having picked up the phone for his wife, "What's up?"

"I'm getting evicted and I don't know what to do"

"Hm... I think I told you about that, pal"

"Actually, you didn't! Because you made a million excuses not to tell me for some reason"

"Yeah, true. Sorry"

"Anyways, do you at least have room for my cat? I'm not giving them up, they're my cat. I just need somewhere safe for them to be right now"

"Yknow you can stay with us too, right? We have a spare bedroom"

"I don't have money to pay you rent-"

Gabby quickly grabs the phone from Eddie, "You're welcome to stay with us anytime, Y/n. Please, come. I'm bored here without you"

"Hey!" Eddie exclaims jokingly.

"Alright, I'll be there in... five minutes!" You joke, "Okay, bye, thank you, love you, need to go, bye!"

"What the fuck is happening right now"

[bizaar]

Endless Summer ✧

Part 1: Our Lips Are Sealed

Cruel Summer Masterlist

- Next

pairing: eddie munson x afab!reader

warnings: sexual content (18+ minors dni), virgin!reader, mentions of drug usage, swearing, bullying, self-deprecation, masturbation (f)

word count: 10k

a/n: so I may or may not have been writing a few chapters of a semi-raunchy little prequel to Cruel Summer, this is the same babysitter!reader at the beginning of her relationship w/ Eddie - reader is hopelessly obsessed in a totally uncool, sweaty palms sort of way and Carol Perkins is the meanest girl in school.

Carol Perkins has been talking endlessly about … something, for the better part of the ten minutes it’s been since you sat down with your lunch tray.    

You aren’t exactly sure what about, because you’re not listening. You’re just sitting there watching her lips flap.    

You might have felt bad about that even as recently as last week, but somehow you can’t seem to muster the feeling today.

Maybe it's because you didn't get any sleep last night and your brain feels like its made of television static.

Maybe it has to do with the recent events that have more or less completely soured your opinion of your so-called best friend.

Maybe it’s just that her conversations these days are not exactly the stuff of edge-of-your-seat intrigue.

You're not listening to what she's saying, but a decent part of you is fairly certain in the knowledge that whatever she is saying is bound to have something to do with her stupid boyfriend.    

Tommy Hagan has been Carol’s singular topic of regular conversation for going on two years now, and you have been bored to tears for just as long. 

Tommy said this, Tommy did that, oh my god Tommy is so funny, Tommy Tommy Tommy.   

Tommy is fine, you guess, if you like snot-nosed bullies who never matured past age twelve.

If you like a guy whose idea of trying to divert attention away from the fact that he’s more into Steve Harrington than he is his own girlfriend is by stirring up drama, and feigning some kind of bullshit interest in you.

If you like a guy who calls you Princess like it's a slur and gives you a hard shove in the back like it's a sign of affection.    

Yeah… Tommy is so not your type.  

Then again, you never would have thought he was Carol’s type, considering her interests have always swayed more Han Solo than anything else — (see: The Empire Strikes Back poster she secretly has taped to the inside of her closet door) — but you know she would go to her grave denying it if you dared to remind her of it.

She'd probably try to take you with her if you did, so you don't, especially not today when you've left more than half your faculties at home in bed.

All you can manage right now is keeping your mouth shut and moving watery canned green beans around your lunch tray with a plastic spork.

Meanwhile, Carol talks and talks and endlessly talks.

You’re on probation with Carol after last week’s debacle in the quad, anyway, so you are not invited to chime in, even if you were listening.

You’re supposed to just sit there and listen to whatever it is she has to say and nod along dutifully without interrupting.

That’s your whole job here, nothing more, nothing less.

That's fine, you don't currently have the brain capacity for anything else.

Still, a bigger part of you than you are willing to acknowledge has started desperately wishing that Tina Burton or Nicole would show up and implore her to shut the fuck up.

Once upon a time, you might have done so yourself, but you haven’t been brave enough to speak so directly to Carol since the eighth grade.     

One too many times getting your head bitten off has conditioned you to wire your jaw shut and tune it out, for self-preservation's sake, which is exactly why you’d just stood there and took every bit of vitriol Carol had to give you that morning last week, like the good dog you are.   

Apparently, someone said something about hearing Tommy talking big in homeroom about some other thing that happened over the weekend at a party you didn’t attend.

Logic would tell you that Carol knows you weren't at this party because she gave you such a heinous amount of shit over it when you told her you weren't going, but logic almost never comes into account when it comes to things like this.

Carol doesn't care about the facts, she only cares about the rumor.  

It was suggested that you’d tried to cop a feel or something. Worse than that was how it was suggested that Tommy was into it, and she went nuclear.    

Not at him, of course.

Never mind that Tommy was the one spreading the rumor in homeroom, all that mattered to Carol was who he was trying so desperately to incriminate.   

Literally anyone else, and it wouldn’t have been such a big deal. If somebody had said that it was Vicki Carmichael or Tammy Thompson or Tina, Carol wouldn’t give a shit.

She’d throw her weight around, make a show of girlie dominance, there would be a very public spat, and that would be that.

But no, it had to be you.   

Why oh why did it have to be you? You imagine she’s asking herself the same question, and you’re not sure if your ears are ever going to stop ringing after the way she’d shouted at you, in front of God and Tommy and practically everyone in school.     

He just stood there watching it happen with that smug little smirk you hate so much plastered across his stupid face.

Everyone just stood there, even you stood there, staring helplessly at your sneakers, waiting for it to end. You were an island unto your own shame... until you noticed a pair of dingy Reeboks appear beside your own.     

“Good God!” A voice as familiar as childhood rang out, loud enough to slice through the air and silence Carol mid-stream.

Like so many meerkats, the whole school shifted and turned toward the intrusion, and like a knight in leather and patchy denim, there stood Eddie Munson.

At first, you couldn't believe it was him, or that this was even really happening.

He was just standing there, like it was the most natural thing in the world to butt in like this. Like this wasn’t the first time something like this had ever happened in the history of cool kids and losers interacting at Hawkins High.

Exactly where you fall on that spectrum was yet to be determined, but what was perfectly understood was that Eddie Munson had come riding in to rescue you from the dynamic duo that is Tommy and Carol.

They were speechless — Eddie was not.  

“What on God’s green Earth is making that awful racket?” He said loudly – theatrically – and then he turned his blinding attention to you, “Sounds like someone’s skinning a cat out here,”

Then, he gave you a gentle nudge with his elbow, like you were old friends and it was some kind of an inside joke, as if you were supposed to have any idea what that meant.  

You stared back at him, wide-eyed and still too stunned to speak, and he winked at you.

You have no idea what you said following that, if you even said anything at all. You're pretty sure you blacked out.

You don’t even remember what Carol said. You know there was some kind of vicious back and forth that occurred between them before a staff member eventually arrived to break up the huddle and cart Eddie off, and you know that Carol was pissed that you didn’t defend her.

Most of all, you know you’re still paying for that imagined slight with a concentrated cold shoulder from most everyone you know a full week later, but you can hardly make yourself care about being so summarily iced out like that.    

Because Eddie Munson stood up for you.

You still can’t wrap your head around that. Nobody’s ever stood up for you like that before, nobody over the age of twelve, anyway.

But Eddie did, and you haven't been able to stop thinking about it since. You haven't been able to stop thinking about him.

You really can’t afford to be thinking about him right now, not while you're so sleep deprived and not while Carol is sitting right there. If she could read your mind she'd claw your eyes out.

Thankfully, she hasn't noticed the way your attention has begun to stray. She’s too busy talking, and it's starting to give you a headache.   

Deep down, somewhere in your subconscious, you know you ought to try and smooth things over, because for as nasty as she can be (all the time, every day) she’s still your best friend. Even though she regularly puts you on probation like this for imagined slights.

Even though your friendship has conditions and stipulations that only seem to apply to you.

Even though you have nothing in common anymore except for the fact that you’ve been best friends since you were eight years old.    

So, perhaps the better phrasing is you know you ought to try a little harder because you used to be best friends.    

Nostalgia is the ancient, flaking paste keeping the walls of your friendship standing, but the paper there has long since begun to peel to reveal the rot beneath.     

Carol is still going on about who said what and who is dating who and all the latest gossip, talking at you more than talking to you. Talking just to fill the air because there's nothing Carol hates more than an awkward silence, and any silence with you is awkward.

You’re doing your best to at least try to pretend to look interested – really, you are – but with your lack of sleep and your headache, and everything else happening in the room, there’s not much you can do to stop the way your gaze has begun to wander…    

Because Eddie Munson has entered your periphery, Eddie Munson is standing on his lunch table – Eddie Munson stood up for you.     

Good God, indeed.    

You couldn't have listened to what Carol was saying in that moment if you tried, not with Eddie standing there, larger than life and violently demanding your undivided attention.

Well, okay... not yours specifically, rather the attention of anyone who just so happens to be bored enough to tune in to his frenetic display … which is to say, you.   

You’re happy enough to let him have your attention, and you tell yourself it's because whatever he’s up to is bound to be vastly more enticing than anything Carol has to say.

No other reason, absolutely not.

You’re not sure you’d be able to resist giving it to him even if you didn’t feel that way, because if you were being honest, you would admit that you’ve been painfully aware of him from the moment you’d stepped into the lunchroom.    

Not because you’re minorly obsessed with him or anything as uncool as that. Certainly not because you’re harboring a bizarre gargantuan little crush on him, or that when you tune everything else out and let your brain switch tracks, it’s him your mind shifts to.   

No, nothing so embarrassing as that.     

He’s a rebel with entirely too much cause, standing tall on the flattop, talking big and proselytizing to his minions about something with all the fire and charisma of a bible belt preacher. You’re hopelessly lost on the context of his sermon, but you’re nothing if not convinced and entirely prepared to convert to the church of Eddie Munson.

Quietly, and so, so carefully, so as not to alert the predators lurking in your circle. Stranded in the lion's den as you are, you're stuck having to worship your false idol from afar, and you're almost content to keep doing so.

Still, your cautious reverence does nothing to ease the shock of chills that wracks your body as Eddie raises his voice.

You can feel it vibrating in the pit of your stomach and you know you must be gawping stupidly at him as the passion of whatever it is that’s got him going today takes him to the edge of euphoria.

It’s absolutely captivating to watch, and almost enough to break Carol’s concentration... almost.

This is not exactly new behavior for Eddie, so most people have learned to tune him out.     

Normally you would count yourself in among that group — you know, like a liar — if for nothing more than that good ol' self preservation.

Then again, you aren't normally dead on your feet after spending a night tossing and turning, restlessly caught in the throes of a decidedly raunchy REM cycle, the subject of which just so happens to be standing on a table across the room. 

He's the reason you didn't get any sleep last night, and despite your bone tiredness, you're suddenly wide awake.

So what if you had a sex dream about Eddie last night? So what if your skin is buzzing where you can still feel his hands pulling at you, the gentle fanning of his breath on the nape of your neck where it had felt so real...

“Sweet Girl,” he’d whispered on heady exhale in your dreams, voice thick and shot full of holes in the way you can only imagine he might sound in the throes of ecstasy.

Just the thought of it sends a bolt of heat lancing through your core and forces you to shift in your seat and, tragically, avert your gaze. 

It's just a little bit too much show for you with tell out of the question, and Eddie, or at least the version of him in your dreams, is driving you nuts.     

You are an island to your own fantasies, feeling your heart throbbing between your legs and trying to be as subtle as humanly possible about the way you’re pinching your thighs together for the faintest glimmer of relief.

You stop that right this instant you dirty slut. A snarling voice in your head warns you, and you immediately obey as cooler heads prevail.

The absolute last thing you need is to go to pieces at the lunch table in front of all your peers. In front of Eddie.

Carol would never let you live it down.

Someone shouts something at him from across the room, and you have to fight not to look for his response.

You're just a little too hot under the collar right now to watch Eddie give someone the finger, especially while you're sitting there wishing he would give it to you instead.

Jesus Christ you are so pathetic.

You force yourself to look at Carol and watch her lips move. You don't hear a word she says, but you're grateful for the distraction and the sudden pang of longing in your heart, if only for entirely selfish reasons.

You hate having to suffer in silence like this.

Once upon a time, you might have been free to share the specificities of your dream in bowed heads and hushed tones, but you are entirely certain that were you to try that now, to lean across the table and whisper conspiratorially:

“Oh my God, you’ll never guess who I had the filthiest dream about last night,” you’d be instantly crucified, socially speaking.    

Carol doesn’t care about the yearnings of your most secret self. Not anymore. Now she only cares about Tommy and who did what at Tina’s party and how embarrassing it was, and quietly sidling up to Steve Harrington.    

She doesn’t care about you, and your secrets are absolutely not safe with her, no matter what the pathetic lingering sense of nostalgia keeps telling you.

You would cut ties if you had a little more self-respect, but high school is hard enough with bad friends, you know for certain it would be next to impossible with no friends.

The concept of starting fresh and trying to make new ones halfway through your sophomore year is a Sisyphean Hurdle you have no idea how to even begin to tackle. So you grin and bear it, and swallow any biblical yearnings you happen to harbor for the town pariah for later.

Besides, if you told her, all she would do is ask you what it is you think you know about anything raunchy before dutifully reminding you that you’re a virgin.   

Actually, the technical term would be “still a virgin” and would be followed up with the demand to know “when you’re going to do something about it” — like somehow the untouched state of your being is so embarrassing.   

You suppose in the eternal tide pool of the high school diaspora, it’s just one more patently uncool thing about you hampering her.

Carol Perkins and her loser best friend who doesn’t put out, has never had a boyfriend, never even been kissed.    

You would remind her that it’s hard to put out when nobody knows you exist.

Who are you but her excessively boring shadow? You don't put out because half the time nobody even notices you're there. But that would feel too much like whining and would only become an agonizing exercise in her rattling off a list of names you’d so much rather eat glass than accompany anywhere socially.     

But you tell yourself it's not all bad, because if you're invisible, then at least you don't have to worry about how poor a job you're doing masking the way you're staring at Eddie.

You can't be embarrassed if nobody perceives you right? You're not so sure.

You don’t really know when your stupid little crush began.

He's always been there if you really think about it, a fixture in the background of the swirling miasma that is your social circle, suddenly much larger than it has ever been since High School has became your habitat.    

Hawkins is a small town, and Eddie’s lived here his whole life, same as you. He’s a year older, but that wouldn’t be enough distance to remove someone from your orbit under normal circumstances, let alone someone like him in a town like this.    

Some part of you has always been mildly obsessed with him from a purely academic standpoint — forbidden knowledge is perhaps the most tantalizing thing to a young mind, and the likes of Eddie Munson has always been completely off-limits to the likes of you.   

Eddie's father was always something closer to a Universal Movie Monster than a real person in your mind.

More like Dracula or the Wolfman than a human man with a substance abuse problem.

When you were growing up, the most you knew about it was that Al Munson was the local boogeyman, and was to be feared by school children and good Americans alike.

Eddie didn't even feature in that conversation until much later, not until the notorious Munson patriarch finally went to prison and everyone could breathe a weighted sigh of relief.

With the streets safe again, life went on, and the good people of Hawkins very quickly realized their mistake.

People start to get nervous when there are no local pariahs to blame all their problems on. Hawkins is cursed, after all, but with Al gone, that narrative quickly began to crumble.

Luckily, they had a Munson to spare, and as soon as he was old enough, everyone was happy to force the son into the void the father left in the cultural zeitgeist. 

Eddie became bad news over night, "just like his father", your parents still used to say and you were are strictly forbidden from socializing with him.

You remember a time when it wasn’t like that.

You remember when your parents spoke about Eddie with a heavy dose of sympathy, because back then it wasn't his fault his father was a monster.    

When you were little, it was “that poor kid,” but as you got older and he started getting into more and more trouble, it became “stay away from that boy – he’s no good,”

Still, there’s nothing so tempting as forbidden fruit – you’ve known that since you were old enough to recognize there was a difference between boys and girls. 

And he is nothing if not strictly forbidden to you.

Even now, sitting in the lunchroom so publicly yearning, you can still hear your father’s lecturing voice warning you that if you so much as spoke to Eddie Munson you’d get instantly hooked on drugs, knocked up, and end up living out of a cardboard box by the time you were twenty.    

Which is stupid, of course, because you’ve gone to school with Eddie since first grade and you’d seen him talk to plenty of people over the course of that time, none of whom had gone on to suffer such a dismal fate.              

Anyway, it's not like he's banging down the door for your attention. You’re fairly certain he doesn’t even know you exist.   

There wasn’t much danger in becoming corrupted by someone like Eddie Munson before Carol got popular and dragged you along with her, and that hasn’t changed just because you won a golden ticket to the cool kid’s table… by proxy — you're more of an unwanted plus-one than anything else.    

Not Charlie Bucket so much as Grandpa Joe.   

But of course, you’ve never personally subscribed to the generalization that Eddie is evil or something.    

He isn’t the boogeyman or Dracula or any of those things that go bump in the night, no matter how badly your raunchy little dreams wish he'd come bumping through your night.   

As far as you’re concerned, Eddie isn’t even all that mean or scary, and maybe that’s just because he’d treated you so sweetly last autumn at Tina Burton’s Not-Quite-Halloween party….    

Except you’re not supposed to be thinking about that, remember? Because last week's dressing down in the quad wasn't actually the first time Eddie came to your rescue.

That memory is not safe within Carol’s proximity, but it is the ambrosia that has been singularly sustaining you for the better part of a year now – a year next week on Halloween, but who’s counting?

It is a shining jewel that you keep tucked safely in the spot behind your lungs, and you just can’t help but pull the curtain back to take a peek at it.   

It was your first high school party.    

You’d never partaken in anything before that night, never even been offered, but suddenly and unceremoniously finding yourself shoved up against Eddie in a game of puff-puff-pass, you let yourself be pressured into playing.   

He must have realized you were nervous — maybe your fingers were trembling when he passed you the blunt, but suddenly, and for perhaps the first time in your life, he was speaking directly to you.    

“Have you ever done this before?” Eddie asked you quietly, a heavy dose of concern shadowing the wry quirk of his brow.   

It was startling, to realize the curse of your invisibility had so unceremoniously been lifted, leaving you suddenly exposed to the one person you were never meant to speak to.

You had to resist the urge to whip your head around and ask, “Who me?”

Yes, you.    

Eddie Munson was looking at you and asking you if you knew what you were doing.    

Like something out of one of those anti-drug campaigns, you suddenly felt the unbearable pressure to perform in a situation you’d been preparing for your whole life: if Eddie Munson offers you drugs at a party, just say no kids.    

Only you could not help but notice how genuinely concerned he looked, how soft and approachable and incredibly fucking normal.

Not nearly as scary or dangerous as McGruff the Crime Dog had led you to believe. In fact, he was entirely too enticing, and you were suddenly desperate to make a good impression.   

You opened your mouth in the fanatical hope of saying something cool and casual — yeah, of course. You’ve done all kinds of shit — and were naturally horrified to hear the truth squeak out.    

“No.”    

Eddie’s brows crept toward one another forming a deep crease of concern between them, and in a bright burst of suddenly onset clairvoyance, you could read his mind - yeah, that’s what I thought, he seemed to say.   

You watched as he stole a quick glance over his shoulder, before leaning in, invading your space almost conspiratorially as the moist pink tip of his tongue darted out to wet his lips before he spoke.

Your heart was beating so aggressively in your chest that you were convinced he must have been able to hear it.    

“You don’t have to breathe it in if you don’t want to.” He said, “Just puff it and pass — you’ll be fine.”    

You still remember the way his lips brushed the shell of your ear when he whispered to you, how the fanning of his breath made you shiver with the tantalizing suggestion of nicotine and spearmint secrets.    

But it was the last little bit that really did you in.    

Not the overwhelming pressure of your peers insisting that just one hit won’t kill you, but the kind assurance from the person who provided the contraband that you didn’t have to partake if you didn’t want to.

It was the suggestion of having a choice in your fate that ultimately lured you out of your field and into the underworld — sickly sweet pomegranate promises, dripping from his tongue to yours.   

You’ll be fine.

Just like your father and McGruff the Crime Dog and all those insufferable after-school specials had promised, Eddie Munson turned his gaze upon you, and you were instantly hooked.    

He passed you the blunt, and you tried not to get too caught up on the way his fingers brushed yours when you took it.

You curled your lips inward as you brought it to your mouth, and you puff puff puffed, doing your best to hold your throat closed against any swirling wisps of smoke that might slip through and poison you.

You hoped it would give the subtle impression that you knew what you were doing in order to escape the humiliation of inexperience before you handed the joint off to the next person.

It still burned in a funny sort of way, but nothing really happened.

You didn’t slip down the rabbit hole, you didn’t burst into flames, and perhaps most importantly no one seemed to notice the wool being pulled over their eyes as you dared to steal another cautious glance at Eddie.    

His lips twitched in the faintest hint of a satisfied smile, and you bloomed under the approval of someone whose attention you never realized you so desperately craved.

You couldn’t believe you’d pulled it off, and you were so pleased to have evidently made Eddie proud that is physically hurt to watch him turn away from you and take the shining warmth of his attention away, leaving you shrouded in darkness.

Tragically, invisible again, just like that.    

If only you could have been so lucky.

Trust Carol to catch you faking when you — a virgin in so many aspects — continued to remain clear eyed and level headed after three rounds of puffing and passing.    

“You’re supposed to inhale, Dummy!” She shrieked, causing everyone in the circle to laugh at your blatant inexperience.   

Everyone but Eddie, you would have noticed had you been able to look, but shame-faced as you were, you kept your gaze fixed firmly to the floor.

When your next turn came around, you inhaled deeply and felt your lungs ignite.

You coughed, of course, and choked on the musky smoke as it filled your lungs and seared them medium rare.

It only took a handful of minutes before you quickly faded into oblivion, backed by the soundtrack of everyone laughing at you again.    

The rest of that night remains a mystery to you to this day.    

You don’t remember what happened after the game or how much longer the party lasted or even how you got home, but there are some things that stand out clear as day.

Somewhere, hidden back in the furthest reaches of your subconscious, you swear you can still feel the press of his body as Eddie held you caged in the crook of his arm, with your head resting on his collarbone and tucked neatly beneath his chin.

You don’t know how, but you swear you know what his lips feel like, brushing the highest point of your cheekbone, and the long line of his nose pressed flat against your temple with his breath gently fanning the side of your face.

You’re sure you can feel the deep rumble of his voice filling you with warmth, a low timber in his chest calling you Sweet Girl as he smoothes your hair back.  

You don’t know how you know all that, only that you do.

You feel it with every fiber of your being in a way that is so goddamn real it can’t just be an effect of your stupid little crush and unchecked libido. 

How else could your dreams be so inexorably vivid?

In a moment of weakness, Eddie promised you everything was going to be okay, and you believe him to this day.        

That night at Tina’s party, academic fascination bloomed into something new, fueled entirely by teenage hormones and the need to be seen.    

Like a door that, once opened, cannot be shut again, you are always thinking about Eddie, one way or another.

Attention is the high you crave like nothing else, and you desperately want Eddie’s attention, his undivided, unfiltered, unwavering attention, fixed solely on you.

Selfishly, you want him to be as obsessed with you as you are with him, and it makes you feel like at any moment you’re going to implode in on yourself like a dying star.    

Your parents would be appalled.   

Carol would be appalled.

But Carol hasn’t noticed, because she’s still talking, and you’re still not listening, because Eddie is still going. And going. And going.   

Eddie Eddie Eddie.

Eddie is suddenly so much closer than he was a moment before.

At some point, when you weren’t looking, while you were too busy thinking about him to notice the direction his tirade had taken him, he picked his was across the lunch tables and crossed the room.

Your stomach does a cartoon flip-flop, and you hold a wheezy breath in your lungs when he vaults down from the end of his table, furthest from his seat and closest to yours.

Suddenly he's right fucking there, and you forget how to breathe.

Your eyes meet briefly as he straightens up, and you immediately avert your gaze — self preservation, remember? — feeling your face flush hot enough that you’re half surprised it doesn’t melt right off of your skull as you shift your focus back over to Carol.    

Carol... what's Carol talking about again? Oh, that's right. Tommy Hagan. Tommy Tommy Tommy.

Tommy is so goddamn boring, but in this instant, with Eddie Munson lurking within enough proximity to feel the pull of his orbit, Tommy is the most interesting person in the world.

You desperately want to know everything about Tommy and Tina and who said what about you and how embarrassing it was.   

Because you’ve changed your mind. You don't want Eddie's attention. Eddie’s attention is blinding, like looking into the sun.

It makes you feel exposed, like he’s a spotlight shining straight through to your innermost self — your secret self.

The one that thinks about him in the wee hours of the morning when sleep eludes you and deft fingers creep their way down your body, edging toward the wanting apex of your spread thighs and slipping past creamy slick barriers to pull soft, lilting breaths and his name — his blessed, cursed name — from your parted lips until you’re going hot and cold clamping your jaw shut to stop the sordid cries of your orgasm from escaping your lips…   

Jesus Christ –    

No, actually, you’re much more comfortable remaining a wallflower and letting someone else get wrapped up in that undivided, unwavering, fixed-solely-on-you attention.

Better to stand aside and make room for somebody built to withstand that kind of heat from someone like Eddie. Someone edgy and cool, who gives the middle finger to the world and dresses the part — not some midwestern babysitter from a town no one has ever heard of.    

Yeah... but he’s from that town that no one has ever heard of, too, you think watching Carol’s lips move and hearing nothing but your own heartbeat.

You gaze wanders without your permission, and before you know it, you're looking at him again – your insides seize and cramp, because this time, he’s looking too.    

Your heart spasms in your chest and scrambles up into your throat, punching an airy breath out of you and flattening your lungs.   

Fuck.    

There’s that blinding light, that feeling of indecent exposure — it’s not the sun, it's a solar eclipse burning your retinas out of your skull, and somehow you can’t bring yourself to look away.    

You’re painfully aware of how you’re staring again, though this time it is because he has your eyes and he absolutely refuses to let go.    

Somehow it doesn’t feel even the slightest bit aggressive, more like an understanding – he sees you.   

He sees you.   

You’re blushing, you know you’ve got to be bright crimson — beet red even — you can feel it.

You're sweating.

Sweet Girl — hands pulling, lips brushing, wandering fingers, gasping, gasping —Sweet Girl Sweet Girl Sweet—  

“Hello? Ground control to Major Tom.”    

Carol snaps her perfectly manicured fingers in your face, breaking the spell and bringing the quiet din of the lunchroom rushing back in on you.    

It feels like getting swamped at the beach, swept off of your feet by the tide, and rolled in the undercurrent. You crack your head on the reef and your brains come tumbling out as you're washed away into oblivion.

You have to remind yourself to breathe.   

“Are you even listening to me?” She snipes, scrunching her nose in aggravation and flattening her bubble gum pink lips into a thin, ugly line.     

You blink stupidly at her as she comes back into focus, but you don’t answer, because you very clearly hadn't and your mind is not working well enough to drudge up an excuse.    

It feels foolish to try and lie about it because Carol loves to remind you that she always knows when you’re lying, and yet the truth is entirely too dangerous.

Your secrets are not safe with her, and your biggest secret is still standing right there.

You can see him in your peripheral vision, poking and prodding you and just begging to be noticed.     

And you can't stop yourself from looking. Of course you can't, who can resist the sun?

When you do, Eddie rewards you with a brief, goofy smile. All crooked lips twisted up to one side, the faintest suggestion of teeth poking out.

It's a startling contrast to the vitriolic injustice of whatever it was that had previously gripped him in such a chokehold, and it’s contagious, that smile.

You can suddenly feel the corners of your mouth twitching in response, threatening to expose you and just daring you to try to resist.    

It makes your insides go tight and squirmy, and you have to clench your teeth to keep anything remotely similar to a straight face.    

The change in your demeanor is unfortunately not lost on Carol.      

She narrows her eyes at you, and you are powerless to stop your own from darting back and forth.

Carol - Eddie - Carol - Eddie - Carol... Eddie always wins.

You feel your heart seize and begin to palpitate as she begins to twist to see what could possibly be so important to hold your rapt attention, and you have to grip the edges of your seat to stop yourself from reaching out across the table.

You could scream stop! and make a scene, but that would only make you look even crazier than you are sure you already do.

There's nothing you can do to stop the collision, and all you can do is brace yourself for the sky to come crashing down on your head.

Unstoppable force? Meet immovable object.

Round two. Fight.        

Carol physically recoils when she sees Eddie. Dramatically so - like he'd been waiting there to douse her in a bucket of ice water.

It takes her a moment to recover, but when she does, she has nothing but spitting, poisonous vitriol for him, much to your unbearable dismay.    

“Take a picture, Freak, it’ll last longer.” She snaps.    

Something indiscernible crosses Eddie’s features as his gaze flicks over to her from you, then back again.

You watch his brows marry in the middle as he pulls a face that is tinged ever so slightly with something that looks a little too much like hurt than you're comfortable with.

The flash of vulnerability makes your stomach go tight, and you’re suddenly possessed with a violent and desperate need to make him understand that you are not with her, despite how stridently untrue that is.

You are Carol's friend, after all, even if lately you've started to feel like little more than an out-of-trend accessory.     

With her, is all that you are.      

The hurt look is gone before it has time to settle, and Eddie wrinkles his nose in disgust.   

For a long moment, they stand staring poisonous daggers at each other and daring the other to be the first to die.

She hates him and he hates her right back — cool kids and losers. Circle of life.

All you can do is desperately hope beyond hope that you’re not lumped into that circle by association. Golden ticket by proxy.   

“Seriously, what the fuck are you looking at?” Carol snaps, and strangely, Eddie's features relax.   

“Nothing,” he says, rolling his shoulders, “Just wondering how Bulimia Barbie got out of her box.”    

Your insides clench and had she been facing you, you’re certain you would have seen Carol turn white as a sheet.   

Eddie turns to make the stilted victory lap back to his seat at the head of his table, electing to take the floor this time rather than the tabletop.

You watch him go, because at this point, you're Pavloved — if Eddie is moving, you're watching — and when he gets to his seat, he gives you one last parting glance.

This time, you muster your courage and hold his gaze, pulling a face that you hope looks at least halfway as apologetic as it feels. 

That went exactly the way it was meant to, according to the strict social hierarchy of Hawkins High, and you feel terrible about it.

Not nearly as bad as you ought to feel for Carol, however.     

There are a lot of ways to get under her skin — she’s never been exactly easygoing, but even you think bringing up the eating disorder she’s been less-than-privately struggling with since the eighth grade is a low blow.

She’d been devastated when word of it got out, and you didn’t have the heart to tell her it was Tommy who’d let that information slip, because they'd only just started dating when that rumor was making the rounds.

Tommy's mean, Carol's mean too, but despite the words still hanging in the air between you, you don't believe that Eddie is mean, not truly.

Carol makes a harsh sound of indignation in the back of her throat.    

“Asshole!” She shouts unevenly, then, “—can you believe that guy?”   

You don't answer, you're still too busy trying very hard to muster those latent psychic abilities you're still waiting on to tell Eddie you're sorry.

Carol hisses your name and you snap to attention.

"— what the hell are you looking at?"   

“Nothing.” You say quickly, doing your best to curl in on yourself so she can't reach across the table to bite your head off.  

Only Carol has not believed a word that has come out of your mouth since the summer between eighth and ninth grade. She twists in her seat again just in time to see Eddie looking away, much to your patent dismay,

“…Oh, gross!” she scoffs, whipping back around to face you, “What, are you swapping eyes with the Freak?”    

The adrenaline of being caught bursts in your midsection like a firework and sends lightning rocketing down to the tips of your fingers.

"No," You lie.

"Liar," she says.

You turn your attention back to moving the bits of your lunch tray back and forth, but you have completely lost your appetite, especially as she admonishes you with a disappointed utterance of your name.

Your cheeks burn with shame.    

“I was just being friendly.” You stress, pressing the plastic tines of your spork into the bottom of the tray until they bend and snap off.   

“With Eddie Munson? Ugh — gag me!”      

The unchecked disdain in her tone doesn’t sit right with you, because it’s not like she’s ever even said two words to Eddie that weren’t hurled as insults, and you can’t help yourself clicking your tongue.    

“...he’s not that bad,” you say, immediately regretting the statement as the mean nickname comes roaring back to slap you upside the head.

Bulemia Barbie snorts out an undainty sound of disgust, you have to bite your tongue to stop yourself from apologizing.   

“He’s a freak.” She snarls — so you keep saying, you think — “He worships the Devil or whatever — everybody knows that.”    

Horrifically, there is nothing you can do to stifle the bitter snort of laughter that comes bubbling up out of you.

It is a harsh, sardonic snot of a sound that escapes before you can reign it in.      

A brief flash of hatred colors her features, and you can’t help but feel that the curtain has been pulled back and you’re suddenly looking at her true self.    

"Everybody knows that." She repeats, slowly, forcefully, giving you a hard, cold look as if daring you to disagree.

Evidently, you dare, which is a shock to you.   

“How do you know?” you say, narrowing your eyes and wrinkling your nose in a quiet defiance. 

She opens her mouth to respond, but nothing comes out, because she doesn't know. That's just what everybody says, but as far as you're concerned, no one has any actual proof that Eddie Munson worships the Devil.

Your stance gives you the upper hand in this verbal joust, and your reluctance to concede is like throwing gas on a fire.    

Suddenly, Carol is all but shouting at you as her eyes go bright and her skin flushes a blotchy crimson.      

“Oh please, like you know any better, Little Miss Babysitter!”   

She hurls it at you like a slur and you flinch as the violent intention strikes you.   

You don’t know precisely when Carol became so mean, only that it happened sometime between the transition from seventh to eighth grade, right around the time she’d gotten her first training bra and started to notice how boys were noticing her — right around the time Tommy showed up.

Since that day, everything between the two of you has been a competition that she is determined to win, despite how clearly uninterested you are in participating.

You don't want to fight, and yet you feel the strangest sense of righteous indignation rising in you because she doesn’t know Eddie. She's never even tried to get to know him, and here she is condemning him right alongside everyone else just because it’s what’s currently on trend.

You want to ask her how that’s fair, how she would feel if the shoe were on the other foot, and suddenly she became bad news overnight.

You don't, because you don't want to get your head bitten off as much as you don't want to parrot the condescending tone of your mother asking you if you’d jump off of a cliff the same as everyone.

Mostly though, you don't ask because she's right.

You don’t know Eddie any better than she does, not with all your wishing and hoping and fantasizing, and certainly not after the way he’d looked at you at Tina’s party – Sweet Girl…  

“Yeah okay, whatever,” You mumble, because there’s no point in arguing with Carol when she gets like this.   

Your submission doesn’t apparently sit any better with Carol than your challenge did. Her face twists into a displeased scowl as she snatches up the can of coke that is the entirety of her lunch and begins to raise it to her bubblegum pink lips before thinking better of it and setting it back down with a harsh sigh.    

You don’t know what’s got her so flustered, or what you did to embarrass her so badly. All you did was smile at Eddie, it’s not like you invited him to come and sit at the table with you.    

“Why do you care anyway?” She demands then, clearly not done fighting.        

“I don’t,” You say flatly, sitting up a little straighter.    

“Then how come you’re defending him?”    

You cross your arms.    

“I’m not.”    

“You are though.” She insists, like she’s caught the scent of something she can weild against you, and is trying her best to sniff it out. “You’ve got that stupid look on your face like you’re about to get all self-righteous about something. What’s the deal? Do you like him or something?”   

Your heart seizes and suddenly you can feel color bleeding into your cheeks as your armor creaks under the stress of her accusation.

How could she possibly know that?   

Because she’s your best friend, she knows everything about you…   

“No…” you say, though even you are not convinced by the quavering tone of your voice.   

Carol stares at you, briefly uncomprehending before it dawns on her, and suddenly her eyes are blazing with malicious delight.   

Shit.   

“Oh, nasty!” She shouts, then gasps, mouth falling open in scandal, “You do! You totally do!”   

“I don’t – I mean, I don’t even know him.” You stammer, kicking yourself for how your resolve has begun to waver.     

“Doesn’t mean you’re not into him! Oh, that’s so gross!” Carol sneers, she is loving this all too much, “Oh, my God, look at you – you’re blushing!”   

Your hands fly up reflexively to bracket your face, and you hate yourself for the heat you can feel billowing off you, betraying you.

Carol squeals with malevolent glee and you know you must be sweating again for the way she is looking at you, eyes bright, teeth bared, wet, and shining in a hungry grin like a predator getting ready to make a meal out of you.   

“O-okay, that’s enough.” You say unevenly, trying and failing to be firm as you are suddenly unable to keep your voice from shaking as you speak.   

She doesn’t hear you – that or she just plain ignores you because she is getting too much of a rise out of your misery.    

“What are you, like, in love with him?”    

“Carol – stop.”   

“You are! Holy shit, you totally are!” She cackles, “You want to marry him and have a hundred of his freak babies!”    

She is practically screaming and you are this close to panicking about it, glancing anxiously across the room to the table where Eddie is sitting with his arms crossed over his chest, talking and laughing with his friends about something.

You have to force yourself to believe that they aren’t laughing at you because there’s no way they could possibly be clued into your conversation with Carol … who has started play-acting that she is you, moaning loud and wantonly as you are fucked by what you can only imagine is supposed to be Eddie.

It's shockingly apropos in the worst possible way, almost as if somehow she’d found the time to steal away and read the mad scribblings you’d left smeared across the pages of your diary that morning.   

“Oh, God–!” She moans, hands flying up to tangle in her hair and igniting a burst of cold anxiety in the pit of your stomach like a Roman candle, “Oh, Eddie! Don’t stop! Right there – Yes! YES! YES!”     

You could die. You could literally die.    

People have started to look over at you, stare at you, and all of that would almost be fine if it weren’t for the fact that you are currently imploding like that dying star.   

You can’t be certain if its a result of your friend’s whorish display or just the screaming sensation of someone staring at him (because if you weren't watching him like a hawk before, you certainly are now) but Eddie’s attention snaps back over to your table in an instantly, to you, and you nearly pass out.   

You’re on your feet with a loud squeak of chair legs on linoleum – much louder than anything Carol had just kicked up. If people weren’t staring before, they’re certainly staring now, watching you frantically attempt to gather your things and make a break for it before your brain can catch up with you.   

Carol has started to come down by now, and she's leaning back casually in her chair, watching you panic.

"Seriously?" She snickers, like she didn't just publicly humiliate you, again, "You're leaving?"   

“I gotta go,” you say quickly.    

“Oh, come on, I was just kidding.” Carol sighs, “Don't be so sensitive. Where are you going?”    

You can hardly hear her over the blood rushing in your ears. Your heart is hammering so violently against your ribcage that you can barely catch your breath to try and stammer out an excuse.   

“I just remembered,” You begin, your voice hitches and threatens to break, “I have this… thing I have to do for class. Totally forgot. I gotta go work on it.”   

You shove the last of your belongings haphazardly into your backpack and slide your lunch tray into the nearest trashcan – the entire tray hits the bottom of the bin with a loud thump that has the lunch lady shouting indignantly at you from the other side of the room.   

You don’t linger to rectify your mistake or apologize or do anything of the sort, because your frantic attempts to escape the lunchroom have drawn only more attention.   

One cursory glance reveals to you that, devastatingly, Eddie’s entire lunch table has turned to watch you go.

You nearly go stumbling to the ground as you trip over your feet in your frantic attempt to get as far from there as you possibly can, as fast as you can.

“Liar!” Carol shouts after you, “Where are you really going?”   

“I’ll see you later!”    

You twist at the waist and wave when she calls your name again, and, because you're Pavloved, you can’t help look to see Eddie leaning back dangerously in his chair, craning his neck to watch you go in a way that makes your heart seize against your ribs.

His eyes go wide when he sees you looking, and he lurches forward to right himself again, briefly losing his balance and just about toppling out of the chair as he does.  

He saw everything, which means he probably heard everything which means you should probably just go find a corner to curl up and die in.

Like, right now.      

You turn and pick up your pace and blow through the double doors before anyone can get the bright idea to follow you.   

You move through the halls without really knowing where you intend to go, but before you realize it, you’re in the gymnasium, stalking across the empty floor to tuck yourself back beneath the bleachers.   

It’s not the most covert hiding spot, and you're almost surprised to find it empty considering how many people tend toward coming down here to hide and make out.

The braver, hornier couples around campus have even been known to engage in the odd session of heavy petting or dry humping back here where they can get their rocks off more or less removed from prying eyes.

More, being the keyword there. It feels like someone is being busted for that kind of under the bleachers indecency every other week.

You’ve got no such plans to follow suit, despite the ruined state of your panties, as you scramble to slip out of sight with a gentle squeak of Chucks on clear coat.  

Your heart is pounding as you pull your knees up to your chest, face absolutely burning over the way Carol’s stupid play acting has left you slick and throbbing with the memory of your stupid, stupid dream.

You bite the inside of your cheek until it hurts and violently will yourself to get a grip, because what are you going to do about it? Nothing, you're gonna wallow in shame and that will be that.   

You pull your bag into your lap and begin rifling through its haphazard contents, desperately searching for some kind of a distraction – something to take your mind off of the lingering sensation of full lips and calloused fingertips and hot fanning breath – Jesus motherfucking Christ! Get a hold of yourself.    

You need your book. You need to lose yourself in thick text, hard science fiction, and worlds and histories and glossaries of outlandish names… only your book is not here. 

Your well-loved, annotated copy of Dune, whose cover is hanging on by a thread with how many times it has been bent backward as you pour over the familiar text. Whose pages are creased and dog-eared and littered with notes and doodles and all the little lines and themes you never want to forget.   

It’s not here. Even after you dig and dig and dig, even after you dump your bag on the gymnasium floor and spread all your things out in a neat fan in front of you.

Your book is still missing.   

You hardly get the time to stress about it much further than the singular thought before the school bell rings with a shrill, metallic clanging cry. It startles your brain back into an approximation of working action and sends you scrambling to shove all your things back into your bag.   

You’re almost relieved.

Without your book, you’d just been sitting there biding your time until Carol eventually sniffed you out and you would have to brace yourself for round two, but your schedules are thankfully far removed from one another.

She’s got Mrs. O’Donnell for fifth period, whose classroom lies mercifully on the other side of the school from your fifth-period chemistry class, and the ringing of the end of lunch bell is a Godsend, solidifying your escape and requisite safety from another bout of humiliation.   

Your lab partner is a freshman, Gareth Emerson, who just so happens to be a newer addition to Eddie’s roving gang of minions.

Somehow, that is much less terrifying than you’d half expected it to be when you first noticed him in the lunchroom, sitting tucked neatly into the chair at Eddie’s side and hanging on his every word.   

It had just been nice to know that you’re not the only one so affected by his gravitational pull  

Still, you’d often wondered how Gareth was lucky enough to win such a coveted spot so early on in his tenure, considering Eddie Munson tends to be a particularly terrifying entity to the newest additions to the Hawkins High student body.

As you’d gotten to know him, you stopped wondering about that.   

Gareth’s a sweetheart. He’s nice, funny, and reminds you a lot of your neighbor, Dustin, if he were a little older and just a little bit cooler, that is.

It’s no wonder he’s so quickly found himself at a place of honor at Eddie’s side, how could anyone resist him?  

You wish you could hang out with Gareth instead of Carol.

You wish you could sit comfortably at lunch and talk about the things that actually held your interest. That you could make afterschool and weekend plans without a hint of dread, and be safe in the knowledge that a trip to the movies or to the arcade was simply that. No ulterior motives or hidden agendas, no fear of being humiliated or abused for the amusement of the people who were supposed to be your friends.

You wish you could be real friends with Gareth, but Gareth hangs out with Eddie, and the thought of joining them at their lunch table is enough to send your heart into palpitations, so you just have to settle with the friendship you have, limited to the confines of the classroom.  

“Hey,” Gareth says, frowning quizzically at you as you unpack your things and hop up onto the metal stool beside him, “What happened to you at lunch? You looked like you were about to pop.”  

Your insides clench with shame and for a very brief moment, you're afraid you're about to empty them all over the tabletop.  

“You saw that, huh?” You mumble, swallowing hard.

“Everybody saw that.” He scoffs, pulling a face.   

Everybody. The word clangs around your ribs and you have to blink back the image of Eddie leaning so far back in his chair, watching you run from the lunchroom.

Literally run. Like some kind of scared little kid fleeing the monster that lives under their bed.   

Great.  

“What does she think you did this time? Sell her firstborn child for concert tickets or something?”  

You sigh, slumping forward to prop your head up on your elbow and level Gareth with an unimpressed look.  

“Nothing – I don’t want to talk about it.”  

He takes the hint and offers you his hands in a show of surrender before turning back to the blackboard, where Mr. Kapz has stepped up and begun scribbling formulas with a hard squeak of chalk.   

You watch without really seeing, trying to keep your mind from drifting too far with all your classmates sitting around you.

There is a cold lump in the pit of your stomach as a hundred different things whisk around your mind, all fighting tooth and nail for the limited real estate left in your brain with so much of Eddie stuffed up in there.

It’s always like that though, and it leaves you feeling particularly pathetic, thinking about yourself, sitting beneath the bleachers on your own, like the loser you are, hiding from your friends, wishing things were different, wishing you could be the person they wanted you to be, wishing you could be free of them.  

You suck greedily on a sharp intake of air and shake your head to dislodge that line of thinking before it can take root and pivot to a much more pressing matter, for the sake of your own self-preservation.         

“Hey, weird question,” You start, tilting your head down toward your shoulder and speaking in a loud whisper, “But have you seen my book?”   

Gareth’s brows are pulled tight over his eyes when you glance at him, and you are quick to elaborate,   

“Dune." You clarify, "It’s all beat up and annotated…?”    

“Yeah, no— I mean, sure I’ve seen it—” 

"Recently?" You posit, hoping he understands that you've lost it and not just trying to small talk about the sorry state of a mass-market paperback.

"Yeah."

You hardly let him finish.

“Really? That’s great! Where?” 

“...Eddie’s got it.”   

It hits you like a fist to the gut, punching your lungs flat and forcing the air out. Your heart thumps a heavy beat like it always does when someone mentions Eddie and you feel your tongue go fat in your mouth.     

“Ed-Eddie Munson?” You splutter, voice an embarrassing octave higher than normal, and barely manage to get the sound out over the way your throat is closing up.    

You can feel your cheeks heating just from the sordid act of speaking his name aloud.    

If Gareth takes any sort of hint from your bizarre reaction, he doesn’t let on.  

“Yeah.” He says again.   

You blink back at him, waiting for him to elaborate and feeling your chest go tight when he doesn’t.  

“…Why does he have my book?”   

“He said you left it in the parking lot after you dumped your stuff last week—”    

Oh, for the love of God…  

In the wake of everything else that happened that day, you’d almost completely forgotten about that… 

You’d been running late for school, having spectacularly slept through your alarm and been so rudely awakened by the thunderous hammering of two little fists, doing their best to bang down your bedroom door – Dustin, shouting at you to get your ass up out of bed.  

You’d forgotten you were supposed to be carpooling that morning, and you're sure you must have broken some kind of a land speed record with how you burnt rubber to get the both of you to school on time.

Gas pedal to the floor, music cranked up to eleven, you made the distance in five minutes flat.   

After, you’d been too caught up in your sudden prospective future as a Formula One driver to notice how you were headed for disaster. Jogging across the parking lot and trying to stuff your Walkman into your backpack, you weren't prepared for the wall of denim, patches, and studs to come stumbling haphazardly out of the open door of a semi-shitty beat-up panel van and directly into your path.   

You barely had time to look up, let alone pivot to try and avoid the sudden six-foot obstacle before you, so naturally you collided.

You managed to keep your feet and even catch your Walkman with an incredible feat of feline grace, but it came at the expense of your bookbag, which went tumbling topsy turvy and upchucked its contents all over the pavement at your feet.   

Fantastic.  

They stepped into your path, whoever they were. They crashed into you, but still you stammered out an apology, because how could they have been expected to look out for you when you’re running around under a cloak of invisibility?

Then, you dropped to your knees in an attempt to catch your pens and pencils before they could roll away. You fully expected to be ignored, to watch whoever it was that had just knocked your shit into the dirt skip off to class like you didn’t even exist, but when you looked up, there was Eddie Munson, crouched on the asphalt right alongside you with his head bowed toward yours, stacking your books and muttering his own apology.   

It just about damn near knocked the wind out of you, suddenly finding yourself so close to him again after spending so long quietly yearning for his proximity.

Once you got your lungs working and inflated again, you couldn’t help but breathe deep, trying to get a sense of him and refresh the waning memory you still clung to. He smelled just the way you remembered, like camels and spearmint gum standing out over the notes of whatever cheap cologne he’d obviously dusted himself in and Old Spice.

It made your mouth water, and then go completely dry when he looked up at you, turning that honey-warm gaze on you and bathing you in his spotlight. 

You weren’t invisible anymore, you were blushing, and you’d missed whatever it was he’d said to you – fuck. 

You weren’t listening, you were staring into his eyes, at the faint dusting of freckles across the bridge of his nose, at the plush spread of his lips, and the pink tip of his tongue darting out to swipe a slick sheen of moisture across them.   

Somewhere, distantly, you could hear your Walkman still playing, Ann Wilson imploring you to get a little more lost in him than is rightly wise…  

Oh, he’s a magic man, Mama…  

And he was waiting for you to answer him.

Fuck. What the fuck did he just say?      

“My fault…" Eddie mumbled thickly, "Didn’t see you there,”

Oh, thank God for that.   

“Oh – God, are you kidding?  It happens all the time.” You scoffed, dismissing the notion with a flippant wave.

It was almost a cool, collected thing to say, but then you just kept talking,

“Like. Way more than you would think,”

And talking.

“It’s actually kind of ridiculous how often people bump into me like that–”

And talking,

“Honestly, at this point, I feel like I should start wearing a bell.”   

Shut up shut up shut up already! You screamed, but before you could well and truly condemn yourself for being such a goddamn awkward weirdo, Eddie’s face twisted up in amusement and he laughed out loud.

A little too loud for something that wasn’t even halfway to being a joke – he was obviously high, the whites of his eyes were tinged an angry swollen pink, hooded and nearly closed as he peered over at you with his face split up in that crooked smile of his, but it was still so wildly endearing you couldn’t help but giggle yourself.  

You can’t believe you’d nearly forgotten that, that wonderful almost perfect moment of brushing fingers and traded looks and semi-meaningful silences.

If you really think about it, it makes perfect sense that he has your book. You haven’t seen your it since that day, haven’t even thought about it. It had been all but washed away under the bell-clanging effect of what happened later that morning between classes, with Carol jumping down your throat and Eddie riding in to pull you out of her line of fire.   

Good God!  He shouts in your memory, and you can’t help but agree with him.    

“Didn’t he give it back to you?” Gareth asks, brows marrying over his eyes.  

You give your lab partner an incredulous look because never mind how this new information is ever so subtly breaking your brain, but why on Earth would you be asking after your copy of Dune if Eddie had already given it back to you?  

Why would you even be talking about this?

The lack of logic there seems to dawn on Gareth just a tad too late to save face.   

“Guess not, never mind,” he hums, twisting back in his seat to face the blackboard.   

You sit, staring at nothing in particular as you try and fail to wrap your head around the concept of Eddie Munson carrying around your book.   

There’s something incredibly personal about an annotated book, and you can’t decide if you ought to be embarrassed about that, hoping that he didn’t stop to take the time to read any of the inane things you’d written there.

Suddenly you’re wracking your brain to try and remember if you’d gone and scribbled anything too incriminating in the margins, whether you’d absently scribbled out a dopey “Mrs. – Munson” alongside all your annotations about doomed heroes.

You imagine it written out in loopy script, replete with doodles of hearts and clouds and all the stupid cupid bullshit that is typically kept strictly within the pages of your diary. 

You’re suddenly burning with hot, whorish shame as you think back to the pages you’d frantically scribbled on in the aftermath of the wet dream you’d woken from that morning. Your fingers were trembling as you fought to get it down on paper before the vivid images and sensations slipped from your grasp and left you with nothing more than faint memories of calloused hands and full lips, burning your skin with the suggestion of phantom touches.    

Yeah, you’re going to have to go back and revisit that when you get home this afternoon, thank God you’re not babysitting tonight.   

You realize after a moment that in staring off into space, trying simultaneously to banish the feeling and relieve it, that you’ve actually been sitting, staring at Gareth, watching him wrestle with something like he’s trying to decide whether or not to let more information slip.   

Truly, you’re not sure how much more truth you can stomach here in fifth period chemistry, sitting perched on your metal stool and trying oh-so-subtly to shift over to the edge and give yourself a little relief from the way that your heart is throbbing in your panties again. 

Your guts seize like you’ve been caught red handed when Gareth twists back around to face you and ducks his head conspiratorially.   

For lack of anything better to do, you mirror his movements and hope beyond hope that, if you’re blushing, he doesn’t notice.     

“Okay, so…” he begins softly, “You didn’t hear it from me, but... he likes you,”   

You do your best not to react as your heart leaps into your throat – you don’t dare to hope to know who he means.    

“Who does?” You ask, playing dumb for the sake of your poor, nervous heart, because what if you’re wrong?  

You’re probably wrong.  

“Eddie does.” 

Then again, maybe not… oh, shit.

Gareth continues. 

“Like… a lot.” 

OH SHIT.  

Oh shit oh fuck oh sHIT be cool be cool be fucking cool!    

It takes every fiber of your limited willpower not to react, because honestly, you could scream. This is what it feels like to have your wildest dreams come true.

Eddie Munson likes you, Gareth said, like a lot, he said. 

Maybe it’s just the wrecked state you’ve been existing in from the moment you snapped into consciousness that morning, but suddenly you’re desperate, giddy, feeling the hard push of the urge to run and go find Eddie.

Find him and seize him by the shoulders and shake him and scream and shout and cheer and... and and and... and do what?

Confess your feelings?

Make some sort of grand declaration then drag him off somewhere to hop on his dick?

That’s what your ovaries are currently imploring you to do. Finally do something about that goddamn virginity of yours so Carol will climb down out of your ass.

But that’s ridiculous, right? And not at all practical, fantasizing about running off and trying to consummate what, as far as you can tell, is only a rumor before it can slip from your grasp.  

Where would you even go?  

Under the bleachers, where the braver, hornier couples go to rub up against each other and get their rocks off. 

No, no that’s stupid… and yet? 

You’ve heard the talk about Eddie, how he’s supposed to be easy or something — some part of you is pretty sure he’d be game to take you out to the back of his van if you went over and asked him nicely... just ask him nicely to lift your skirt and help you out with that pesky little virginal problem of yours, Christ, how embarrassing. 

He’d probably laugh in your face if you did. How do you know for sure that he even really likes you? What makes you think that there’s even the slightest chance that your stupid crush on him could ever be reciprocated?

You’re not a real person, remember? You don’t put out because you don’t exist.   

No, Eddie doesn’t like you, you decide in an instant, how could he? He doesn’t even know you.  

Gareth is wrong, and worse still, he’s teasing you – he has to be. It is, after all, the opening line to the oldest joke in the Hawkins High popular kid book: so, Eddie Munson wants to take you to prom…what do you do?   

It makes your chest hurt, and you have to pull your lips into a tight line to keep them from wobbling.    

Ha-ha, real funny joke, tease the loser virgin for the big stupid crush she has on the local Freak.   

“That’s mean, Gareth.” You say quietly.   

“What is?”   

You shake your head because you almost can’t bear to say it.   

“Teasing like that. That’s not nice...”   

He gives you a horrified look, like you’ve suddenly got bugs crawling out of your ears.   

“What? No, Dude, it’s not like that at all!” Gareth stresses, “I promise I’m being so serious right now. Eddie likes you. He really likes you.”     

It feels risky, but you can’t help yourself. Gareth’s a sweetheart, why would he lie to you?  

“…Really?” You ask, ever so slightly embarrassed at how small and hopeful your voice suddenly sounds and trying so, so hard to play it cool.    

“Yes… and it’s super goddamn annoying — no offense,”   

You shake your head, because in the absence of the ability to form rational thought you rely on deep-seeded pleasantries.   

“Oh, no, of course.” You say, “None taken … I think.”   

You suddenly can’t make your brain work, it just sits there like a fat grey lumpy pile of worms in your skull. Part of you is suddenly so sure that you can smell the smoke wafting up off of it as it overheats in your attempt to jumpstart it again.  

Eddie likes you. This is all really happening.  

It takes you a moment too long to realize that Gareth is still talking, and a moment even longer to clue yourself back in to what he’s saying.

“— he’s been going around in circles trying to work up the courage to talk to you, but he’s chicken shit, so he won’t do it unless he has some bullshit excuse to make it all casual — giving you your book back was supposed to be his excuse, but that was clearly a bust,”

And then, “Also, he basically threatened to kill me if I said anything so just do me a favor and be cool, alright? Pretend I didn’t say anything.”   

“…So why tell me?” you ask, almost startled by the sound of your own voice and how far away it sounds.

You’re having an out-of-body experience, that’s what this has got to be, sitting there, floating, watching yourself have this conversation with Gareth.   

Eddie Munson has your book, Eddie Munson stood up for you, Eddie Munson likes you...  

“Because he freaked when he found out we were lab partners and he’s being a huge creep pressing me for information about you, like he expects me to spy on you or something... Anyway, I figured with how fucking weird he always acts around you that you probably already knew.”   

You shake your head and hope to God the movement doesn’t cause your eyeballs to fall out of your sockets. You can’t remember if you’ve blinked over the course of the last five minutes.   

“I didn’t.” You squeak.    

His eyes go wide and you watch the color drain from his face.   

“Oh. Shit,” He says, “— well, like I said, you didn’t hear it from me.”    

You didn’t hear it from anybody. As far as you’re concerned, this conversation isn’t actually happening. Any moment now you’re going to snap out of whatever fugue state you’ve obviously just slipped into, and you’re going to find that this is all a dream – only your thigh is going raw from where you’ve been subtly pinching yourself. 

Still, you still don’t completely believe Gareth isn’t teasing you – this feels like dangerous ground and suddenly your guts are churning because you don’t know what to do with this information.

You don’t know how to make yourself understand that the one person who has always been wholly off-limits to you could suddenly be within your grasp.   

Possibility makes you ravenous and you have to fight to resist the urge to seize Gareth by the front of his torn flannel shirt and shake him, demanding more more more, that he tell you everything there is to know about Eddie and everything he’s ever said about you among the safety of friends.    

With a sharp pang, you realize that you’re suddenly violently jealous about the confidence he has to freely speak about the objects of his affections – evidently, you.  

The thought has warmth bleeding through your abdomen and filling up your chest cavity. You’re floating again, and you’re suddenly so, wickedly pleased.    

Carol would shit her pants if she found out.    

The rest of class comes and goes without incident, and you don’t hear a word of the lesson. 

You’re far too busy fantasizing about all your wildest dreams coming true, planning your future with Eddie, picturing your wedding and your first home together, growing old together, and all the road trips and holidays and milestones you’ll hit in between.

By the last twenty minutes of the lesson, you’re even toying with naming your children.   

You’re disgusting and pathetic and so far gone for him in such a stupid, irresponsible way. Only there’s one tiny little obstacle standing in the way of all of that.

Gareth says he’s not brave enough to talk to you, not without good reason, which is so painfully endearing, but a real problem because that makes two of you – you can barely even look at Eddie, let alone fathom trying to strike up a conversation. 

So, therein lies the problem. How on Earth are you supposed to marry him and have a hundred of his babies, as Carol had so eloquently put it, if neither of you can manage to buck up the courage to have a normal conversation?   

The bell is ringing before you can decide how to become a human being again, you’re still more cloud than girl when you catch Gareth as he begins packing up.   

“Listen, tell Eddie…” You start, feeling suddenly too shy to have his name in your mouth – it feels heavy on your tongue, forbidden, and you chicken out, “Tell him… that I don’t bite. If he wants to talk to me … then he should just come talk to me, right?”   

Gareth rolls his eyes,   

“I told him that, like, a hundred times… but I’ll tell him again. I’ll say you said so this time.”   

The promise pleases you immensely, only there is one glaring issue with that plan. He was never meant to tell you how Eddie supposedly feels about you. You’re not supposed to know he likes you.  

You bite your lip and feel your brows creep toward one another, forming a deep crease of worry between them.  

“Is that gonna get you in trouble?” You ask.  

Gareth opens his mouth to speak, then snaps it shut again as the words fail to come, like he too had very conveniently forgotten that the information he’d just passed to you was decidedly not for you.   

He hums thoughtfully, brows furrowed, and face pulled tight into a mask of displeased concentration.  

What to do, what to do.   

Finally, after a moment that feels like eternity, one you spend fidgeting with your fingers twisting them to the point of pain, holding a breath in your lungs almost like you’re afraid if you breathe he’ll take it all back.

Gareth shrugs.   

“...well, I don’t see why he needs to know that I’m the one who told you… people talk.”    

Truer words have never been spoken.   

A hundred years and a short lifetime ago, you and Carol spent an evening trading secrets and the deepest desires of your heart, and you jumped up and down on her springy mattress, screaming along to the Go-Go's and promising one another that, just like the song said, your lips were sealed.

You can’t help but wonder if she ever really meant it, if she would have laughed and recoiled and teased you mercilessly if you trusted her with your secret feelings about Eddie Munson. Only you had made the same decision and elected not to tell her even back then, even when your secrets were still safe with her.   

Can you hear them? They talk about us, telling lies, well, that’s no surprise.   

People talk, Gareth said.   

“They certainly do.”  You hum, shouldering your bag and following him out the door. 

[johannestevans]

the thing about homophobic violence in stephen king's work is that like. he really has a good understanding of what drives a lot of homophobic violence, in that it's a desire for power and domination, and is often motivated by insecurity

esp bc like. i think he's quite good at understanding that like, out of 5 guys in a group doing a hate crime, most of them are bigoted and are either angry or want to show their power, but 1 of them might be doing it to mask his desire for their victim

idk like. i'm p sure king has talked about how the homoerotic vibes of richie and eddie aren't necessarily intentional in the original book, but obvs diff adaptations and responses over time has influenced how he feels about that reading of the text

and particularly in the storm of the century like. the detail specifically that it's the gay dude's hair that triggers the main homophobic dude's attraction to him, and therefore his desire to instigate violence against him?

and idk i'm watching apt pupil now, which is obviously adapted by bryan singer, and i think it's interesting as a jewish guy for him to focus on the themes of sexual violence, gratification through power, and internalised homophobia

esp as someone who like. is himself a violent sexual predator and has particularly sexually exploited children for so long, it makes sense that he'd identify with and focus on the idea of like. the fraught sexual dynamics between them

the fact that both denker's character and todd's are both gratified by and attracted to violence, but the fact that todd himself like. seeks out power over this man, and rather than in the short story like. his lack of attraction to his gf isn't bc she's jewish or bc he's violent

but is instead implied to be by the narrative and by her own dialogue that like. he's not actually attracted to women at all, and his fixation on denker's crimes and on nazism in general are a way to obfuscate his desire for men

and denker himself is obvs like. cognizant of that - w the gay dude he invites into his home who reads him as gay, but also just thinking of the physical intimacy between the two, the way he leans over and reaches past todd, small touches, etc

and esp the fact that the end of this film is about like. todd attempting to deny everything he's done and start over with a "clean slate", and particularly accusing french of grooming him, paralleling denker's turning of the tables on him earlier

noteworthy particularly that like. french as a jewish guidance counsellor, the way that ppl do associate jewish traits & emasculated jewish men w perpetration of sexual violence, and that todd turning the exploitation on him is gonna be influenced by his own nazi ideology

that doesn't need to be explicitly laid out for it to be true, that his desire for power & his confidence in stating things that aren't true and knowing he'll be believed - knowing it doesn't matter if he ISN'T, bc the damage to his reputation will be real - being just.

straight out of the fascist playbook, the nazi focus on controlling narratives and the flow of information, damaging reputation, etc

and the fixation on appearance of success over anything else being attached to the secreted violence

it's a strange watch today just knowing that like. bryan singer now lives in israel bc the state of israel has established itself as a safe haven for a lot of sexual predators, and knowing that he's sexually exploited so many young boys

and while i don't think he's talked about it, like. one would assume his sexual exploitation and his shamelessness in it are at least in part bc of ways he was exploited as a boy himself, and how that influences his ideas of like. this sort of power exploitation narrative

idk. fucked up! much to think about!

apt pupil adapted by singer is ultimately a narrative about like, a teenage boy's burgeoning obsessive kink and sexual domination over an older man, and obvs that makes sense as like. singer's own fantasy

but also the fact that like. singer obvs has a more sophisticated understanding of the implicit sexuality of a lot of this forced and coercive intimacy and violence - and also the fact that like. a young man like todd being So Successful is like

in part going to be attached to his focus on and obsession with nazi ideology, esp in the 1990s, SO LONG AS he keeps it subversive and doesn't say the quiet part out loud, as evidenced by rich family and how they're just cool w denker potentially being a nazi

like the grandfather asks, is obviously suspicious, but then is basically cool with it

and tbh the fact that like. his parents are basically cool with him going along and being groomed by this old man so long as it's not Obvious why and doesn't damage their reputation

bc the Nazism and white supremacist ideology embedded in WASP society is all about like. Appearances and deniability - child sexual abuse and antisemitism are both perfectly acceptable so long as no one KNOWS that's what you're involved in

[apocalypse-shuffle]

BEING IN A RELATIONSHIP W/ EDDIE BROCK & VENOM (616 | generalized canon)

—

random Headcanons

SFW, minor canon action

pic source: Venom: Lethal Protector (2022) comic

part two

Your worst arguments happen because of them being so quick to engage in fights with Spider-Man if they so much as catch a glimpse of the web-slinger. (this was more of a problem earlier in the relationship)

Eddie is very much a man of action, and is allergic to inactivity, so oftentimes he has no idea about the newest pop culture phenomena. If you want him to engage in that media with you you’ll have to be the one bridging the gap.

You can however coerce him into watching a show/movie with you if you ply him with cuddles. He’ll 100% be paying you more attention than the screen though.

Alternatively though, the symbiote loves watching the silly little pictures on the screen and will usually request to watch movies with you if not already preoccupied.

One: because he likes being around you (you’re gonna get real used to the feel of the alien, trust me) and Two: because the dialog helps him improve upon his people skills for talking to civilians.

(Eddie’s natural gruff straightforwardness is only so helpful - ie:not helpful at all - for them when trying to save or soothe spooked people as Venom.)

Eddie’s eyes are a very intense blue-steele and the first time you met you told him he had “doll eyes”. However, he was so baffled he laughed so you count that as a win and mention the natural uncanniness of them every once in a while to tease him. You love his eyes though, really.

They love to kiss (and bite) at the junction between your neck and shoulders. I have a longstanding headcanon about marks and shit but I’m not gonna go into that rn.

Get comfortable with the distinct knowledge that you technically come second for both of them. It’s just that there’s a difference between being romantically involved (you and them) and being codependent and in love(Eddie and the symbiote).

On another note they do call you Precious (and if we take the name out of the context of how some of us were bullied with it it’s actually beautiful so…just let it happen). Eddie let alone Venom is clueless to the connotation. Plus Eddie’s got a really obsessive personality so I think that coupled with Venom’s own baggage coming into play makes the nickname very fitting.

They always reach for your hand in public, especially when around others to show that you're theirs cause they’re possessive like that.

They don’t need to sleep per say, as long as they have the right nutrients, so honestly sometimes they don't even go to sleep whenever joining you in bed. They'll just lay beside you smiling to themselves and watch you sleep.

They end up telling you they love you purely by accident after you had gotten hurt by falling debris when Spider-Man and Rhino were fighting. (They say it mid rant).

The only good thing to come out of the whole situation is Venom getting to carry you.

The symbiote, not possessing the concept of human shame, will say the most inappropriate things to you in public without a fuck to give. Eddie, shamelessly, also quietly does this to you because most human conventions mean nothing to him anymore.

They think you're adorable when flustered, and like it even better when on occasion you join in.

They’re constantly fretting over the possibility that Carnage might come and kill you for shits and giggles or that somehow Peter will manage to take the last pure thing in their life away from them.

Being away from them? Ha, ya right. They’ve always got you physically close or monitored by a part of the symbiote (I’m mixing up symbiote abilities so if it bothers you a lot then just say the part that stays with you is the clone of venom). You're really never without a part of them but you don't quite mind it. They’ll also resort to stalking with zero hesitation.

They take great pleasure in making their "mate" feel worshiped so you’ll have a lot of fun with that. Just make sure you accept and are vocal about your appreciation for their antics if you don’t want them to stop. Reciprocation doesn’t hurt either.

you(little spoon) eddie(big spoon)

The symbiote definitely appreciates being held more than Eddie with his intimacy issues and the ingrained notions of how men “should” act.

NOTES: Hope you enjoyed!!

If this looks familiar know it’s because it’s from an old blog I ran (just rewritten a bit), but otherwise it doesn’t really matter. I also noticed that I have a lesser amount of Marvel imagines than I do DC so this is definitely me trying to rectify that. Also, trust me, I know the Lord of the rings connotation I’m just not addressing it.

btw: This is a side blog so while comments are welcome I won’t respond.

[sibylsleaves]

Buck not realizing that not everyone is as obsessed with Eddie as he is is my favorite thing. Esp bc it kind of feels the ppl around him are actually a bit obsessed w Eddie in a way, just not to the degree he is. Like Maddie just accepts that he’s Buck’s favorite person ever and even Tommy seems to understand Buck’s ride or die for Eddie and thinks Eddie’s great too, so really it’s just normal people he doesn’t work with who could potentially go “yeah that’s unusual.” Bc the 118 have grown used to it over the years and don’t really examine it or think much of it anymore. As much fun as the idea of them all sitting around and being Buddie shippers is, I think it’s even funnier if that’s not even seriously on their radar, they just accept that the two of them are a bit weird about each other and don’t even register it anymore

like the thing is that Buck's experience IS actually borne out by reality......

they are ENABLING him. he is being ENABLED. Bobby was enabling him when he called Eddie eight-pack. Hen was enabling him when she said THAT is a beautiful man. and I like girls. They are ENABLERS!!!!!!

and yeah you're right. Hen saying two cut lines. Chim saying Buck's got the harder job tonight. they all just accept this.

I do think Maddie is the only one with an inkling. But even then, she didn't have an inkling until AFTER Buck realized he was bi and came out to her. Before that she was sitting in the same frog pot as the rest of them.

[lovejosephquinn]

Authors Note: Part 4, I'm sorry about all your broken hearts and frustration at Joe, hopefully your opinions might change soon? Thank you so much for all the love I've had for this series! I'm absolutely obsessed with it and so glad I had that burst of inspiration on a random Tuesday morning 😘

OH AND THERE WILL BE A PART 5, WHICH WILL BE THE FINAL PART!!

Summary: You're marrying a man for an easy life, yet you're so in love with your best friend it hurts. What would happen if everything changed drastically between the two of you before you were due to be wed?

Under 18's DNI. Warnings: Angst, smut, friends to lovers? Word Count: 2.7k

Taglist: @kayleeelena97 @eddiemunson-mylove @itsfreakingbats @joeschains @choke-me-eddie @creoleguurl @almightywdm @xlilithb @shawnamae87 @mythicalea @aysheashea @chickennug90 @figmentofquinn @sidthedollface2 @tlclick73 @chrissy-mj-stan @evansgal

Part 1 ✨ Part 2 ✨ Part 3 ✨ Part 4 ✨ Part 5

You ran a few laps of the club, looking in every possible knuck and cranny in attempt to find Joe. It had only been 5 minutes since he'd escaped your grasp, but it felt like a lifetime of torment and it's true; it really was when you thought about it, purely from the ultimate punishment of being so in love with your best friend for the majority of your time of knowing one another. He had to know, he will know and you were determined and in of more a sane mind to go fourth and let him know. Surely if you'd of told him from the beginning, as soon as he followed you into the toilets about your feelings back, things would have gone differently, who were you kidding, you knew they would of.

After at least 10 minutes, you bumped into one of your friends that you'd left alone, she caught you in a hurry, grabbing you by the arms wondering what on earth it was you were in such a rush to move along for.

"I saw Joe, I need to find him." You yelled over the music, the beat pulsating through your body from the thumps of the melodies.

"Where is he now?" She looked unnerved herself.

"That's the thing, I've no idea."

"Have you been crying honey?"

"That doesn't matter, I just need to find him. Will you cover for me? Say I've gone home. I'm sorry to cut my own hen night short but I need to talk to him, it's urgent."

"Go ahead, I got your back." She shot you a smile, a brief hug was exchanged and you exited out of the club.

You tried calling him, his phone was off. Of course it was, at a time like this why in the world would his phone be on? Thoughts coursed through your head like the speed of light, vile thoughts that he'd done something to himself over the hurt or that he'd never speak to you again after this, you desperately needed to get everything out in the open, if it was to end after this, at least you'd know you had your answer and as hard as it may have sounded, you could try your best to get over him.

Whilst your brain got the better of you, you sped walk into the back of a guy walking in front of you.

"I'm sorry." You gasped.

He turned around, to your luck, wasn't a stranger at all, Joe's best friend Wesley turned around in a sudden state of shock, staring at you like a rabbit in headlights.

"Wes! Oh my god, have you seen Joe? I need to talk to him."

"Best you don't, he's in a state. You look like you're in a state. What's going on with you two? Aren't you-" he stared at your get up, the bride to be sash crinkled up nicely from when you were wrapped around Joe being attacked by his lips, a welcoming flashback indeed.

"On my hen night, yes. Speaking to him is more important right now, where is he?" Wes could tell you had a sense of urgency about you and deep down he looked like he knew something, as his eyes looked down to his feet you could tell he was contemplating on the situation, but it was the simplest of answers that you were being prolonged from knowing.

"Do you want to marry this person?" Ugh. That old chestnut.

"Is that important?" You sighed.

"If it's going to hurt my best mate then yes it's important." Why did he have to do this now.

"I can't promise a thing, just tell me where he is for fucks sake."

"He went to another girls house..."

Your heart smashed into pieces.

"I'm sorry, I must of not been listening, did you just say what I thought you said?" Your eyes welled up and you tried your best to ignore it, how could you be mad at him for that? For wanting the attention he so rightly deserved. Maybe it wasn't like that or maybe you were just delusional.

"I know he's going home, you can go wait for him there if you really need to talk to him."

"But that could be hours." You didn't really need to think about it, you'd wait forever if it meant telling Joe what you really felt.

"I'll wait with you if you like."

You pondered on his offer, you knew full well either Joe had told him the whole ordeal or that he'd put two and two together, he wasn't stupid, clearly he knew what was really going on.

"Ok." You took a silent stroll over to Joe's house, sitting on the porch and waited on him. You felt like you'd been sat for hours on end, making small talk with Wes about god knows what whilst you anticipated his return, your mind was elsewhere, trying to figure out exactly what you were going to say and how you were going to approach it; all guns blazing was not an option.

All of half an hour later or a lifetime as you would've described it, a taxi cab pulled up outside the house, the passenger door opened and out came Joe, thanking the driver and slamming it shut, on a mission to get back into his house and shut himself away clearly. He looked upset and you couldn't blame him, but he'd clearly used his booty call for a quick get away from all this bullshit.

Your eyes caught each other at the exact same moment, they flickered straight to Wes after who briefly nodded at him, his lips pressed into a straight line, feet slowing down and coming to a brief stop about a metre away from where you were perched.

"Why are you here?" His eyes kept on Wes, but you knew exactly who he was referring to.

"Waiting for you mate, she said she needed to talk to you and I waited with her." Wes stood up, patting you on the shoulder, a silent way of wishing you luck and walked over to Joe, giving him a slender hug before disappearing off into the night.

Joe's eyes fell back to the floor, he walked up onto the porch, unlocking the front door and holding it open, looking down to where your bum was still firmly placed on the step, his eyes fiery with the torment of you in his very presence.

"You coming in then?" He said calmly.

You nodded, your body engulphed with goose bumps from the chilly spring night, but you were boiling in respect of the anxiety which was coursing through your veins at this very moment. Standing up, you followed him in, closing the door behind you, standing like you were a told off child, your hands firmly intertwined together, knees weak from just the sight of the man you loved in front of you, leant against the wall, staring at you with intent.

"Wes told me you were with a girl."

Joe's eyes became wide, lips parted a little and he huffed a sigh, loud enough for you to feel his breath travel over to where you were stood. Waiting on an answer, you could see him watching you with eagle eyes, it really looked like he was considering lying to you, but you trusted him enough to respond right.

"What's it got to do with you?" He spoke in a harsh tone.

"It's got everything to do with what I'm about to say." You snapped back, not about to take the shit that came with it.

"Which means?"

"Did you fuck her?"

There was the sound of silence again, your heart palpitated with suspense, did you break out and run or do you wait?

Joe scoffed loudly, turning away and walking in the kitchen. You stay put for the minute, staring into thin air but eventually hear the sink running, walking on forward you find him leaning on the countertop, elbow secured and hand to his forehead, sipping on the glass of water that he poured himself.

"Are you going to answer my question or is this the part where I fuck off?"

"What if I say I did?"

"Then there's no need to talk." You scoffed back, a humiliating reaction to the one he gave you just a couple of minutes ago back in the hall way.

Joe turned back to you, sipping the water, making it apparent when you heard the slurp from the glass. You rush over and take the glass out of his hand, his movement delayed when he pulls away at the feel of nothing.

"Did. You. Fuck. Her." You say through gritted teeth.

"What. If. I. Did." You don't know why you did it, but your body took control of your entire mind and the water was thrown straight in the direction of Joe's face.

His hands clawed over his face in disgust, yet a slight sadness apparent to the aftermath of what you just did. It looked as though tears were streaming down his face but you weren't sure if they were just water droplets or tears of disgust in his own self.

He shook his head, showing the upmost remorse he possibly could.

"No. I didn't fuck her." Your mouth made a silent o shape as you placed the glass back to the countertop in fear of dropping it on the floor, keeping your firm grip around it just in case things escalated further.

"You didn't fuck her?" He just answered your question, your head is screaming why the fuck did you just say that out loud.

Joe rolled his eyes which immediately had your blood boiling once again. "Well I went to but, I couldn't."

"Well you could've but-" You were interrupted suddenly by his next response.

"But what? She's not you."

"And he's not you." You whispered sheepishly.

Joe took a step forward to you, not watching where he was placing his hand but full of intent where he was going, his fingers briefly touched the other half of the glass you weren't holding, the tips brushing against your knuckles but instead of grasping your hand straight away he moves the glass from your reach, your peripheral vision catches the sights of his hand coming over to turn yours over, holding onto it as tightly as he can.

"Say that again." Joe screeched in an even lower tone.

You closed the space between you, your bodies almost becoming one. Reaching up onto your tip toes, you take a seductive tone. "He's... Not... You."

In the blink of an eye, your lips collided together, the place where your hands once sat were now feeling the material of each others clothing. Joe pushed you back against the wall, holding you in place so you couldn't move, it was the most alluring yet dangerous act you'd committed together yet.

Joe stepped back taking a hungry look at you, with one lick of his lips and giving you the come to bed eyes, your eyes followed the pattern of his hands that lead to your dress, with the strength and frustration that followed, he tore it from the chest down.

"You're so fucking beautiful princess."

"Say it again."

The dress falls down to your feet quicker than you could've anticipated, his mouth quivering in a smirk at your mimicking, leaning toward your ear, the only word he utters back is princess.

Your neck was suddenly mauled by his mouth, little nibbles here and there and his muscle working your skin, tasting the scent that he'd longed to taste since that one night when you were teenagers. Yet although you'd done all this before, given yourselves to each other it felt like the first all in the same breath.

You were lifted up by surprise, a tiny whimper leapt out of you, a similar position to when you were held up in the bathroom in the club, you unbuttoned his shirt in almost slow motion whilst he carried you up the stairs, the top half of his clothing discarded on the top step, just like you were now that you'd found yourself being almost thrown down a top his bed.

Joe kissed each part of your body like it was a drug to him, making sure he left no skin left untouched. A starved animal that craved every single part of you. Pulling you back up, he unclasped your bra, sweeping it over his shoulder, attacking your chest, sucking on each nipple in turn. Your hands spread around his curls, clutching them in your grip.

"Joe. I need you. Joey please."

"Let me have this moment just a little bit longer princess, I need you, but I need this time to appreciate your body."

"What if I beg?"

"I'm listening." The most flirtatious voice you'd ever heard.

"Trust me. We'll have all the time in the world, please just give me what I want."

"And what do you want?" He sighed, palming his hand over his trousers, a borderline pornographic groan escaping his lips.

"Fuck me."

"Your wish is my command." It truly didn't take him much convincing, it was obvious from the erection that was straining to get out.

You got into position, spreading your legs, laid on your back at the edge of the bed, bracing yourself when you saw his cock spring free, tiny spouts of pre-cum dotted all over the tip. He pushed slowly inside of you, stretching your walls finally, a breath of relief came from the both of you in unison as he started to move.

"Oh fuck." The profanity had never sounded more beautiful as you squirmed underneath him in pure ecstasy, your cunt clenching around him.

"Harder." You cried out, his hips rutting into yours, balls slapping, the smell of sex filling the room.

"You're mine." Joe leaned down biting onto your lip but you couldn't even get the response you wanted to out of your mouth.

"You're all mine." Hovering above you his fist gripped at your throat, not enough to hurt you but enough to get the message across.

The knot in your stomach came at full force, an orgasm near on the brink.

"You're so god damn tight princess, holy shit, you gonna cum for me yeah, give you what he never could?"

Something about what he just said made your back arch and his thrusts become erratic, your slick covered his length, dripping out and coating his balls with the contents he'd helped you create.

"Fuck I'm gonna cum." The gasp that burst from his vocal chords was erotic, a feeling that you couldn't recreate twice. He almost gave way and crushed you, his hands now squeezing into the sheets beside your head. Breathless, begging for oxygen, he pulled out and fell to your side, unable to find the words that were left unspoken.

The deed was done.

"It's over." You whispered.

Joe tilted his head toward you.

"What?"

"With him. I'm going to end it."

"Wait you're serious?" Forgetting the mess you'd made, the conversation had turned full force, his arm came over your stomach in an attempt to comfort you, but you needed to confess, you needed to get the truth out once and for all.

"How can I be with someone I don't love and don't want to be with, when there's always been someone else." Your breath hitched at the words coming out loud, becoming reality.

Joe gulped his own saliva back. "Of course."

"It's you, it's always been you."

"Then it's us princess, I can't bear the thought of a world without you."

"Promise me we can get through this." Joe reached for your hand, placing it to his heart.

"I promise." That was all you needed to hear.

[inthedayswhenlandswerefew]

North To The Future [Chapter 6: Self Esteem]

The year is 1999. You are just beginning your veterinary practice in Juneau, Alaska. Aegon is a mysterious, troubled newcomer to town. You kind of hate him. You are also kind of obsessed with him. Falling for him might legitimately ruin your life…but can you help it? Oh, and there’s a serial killer on the loose known only as the Ice Fisher.

Chapter warnings: Language, alcoholism, addiction, murder, discussions of sex, mild violence, ominous foreshadowing.

Word count: 5.5k.

Link to chapter list (and all my writing): HERE.

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For the past two decades, there has been someone living just above your family’s heads—someone as real as any of you, someone with ideas and dreams and idiosyncratic jokes—waiting to be freed from that dusty and unspoken-of cardboard box. Yet in a sense, he was with you all along: a whisper in the walls, a ghost who only roams once everyone else is asleep, a shadow that nudges open doors and leaves cold pockets of air to be stumbled unsuspectingly into. Your mom makes chocolate chip cookies with the same recipe he taught her twenty-five years ago. You’ve always liked Queen’s A Night At The Opera because he used to dance with you around the living room while the album played; it was also the first cassette tape you bought when you started driving. He carved the little wooden bears on the shelf in the study, the umbrella stand by the front door, the salad servers your mom only uses on special occasions. You learn all of this and more as you read the journals of the man who gave you twenty-three chromosomes, pieces of your eyes, skin, hair, voice, blood, fingerprints.

Jesse doesn’t feel anything like a parent—your dad is your dad and always will be, nothing can change that—but he does feel like a friend, someone you’ve known for so long you can no longer unravel where their memories end and yours begin. You can picture things exactly as he describes them. You laugh at his sharp, sardonic humor. And you can feel, in some impossible and yet unmistakable way, mourning when he recedes for a while like low tide. He will make routine notes for weeks, months, and then disappear for just as long. There are gaps that swallow up summers, winters, Thanksgivings, Christmases, New Year’s Eves; there are black holes that your mom’s faith must have drowned in. Sometimes his entries are mere reminders: Deb’s birthday next week, car needs new transmission, agreed to anniversary trip to Anchorage, dinner w/ Dale on Thursday. He did not scrawl these on the kitchen calendar where they could be seen by his family or his friends. He did not want anyone to know how little he could trust himself to remember.

You have no one to share these revelations with. Your parents could not bear it. Your friends would not understand. You can’t even fathom trying to explain the journals to Trent, what they are, what they mean. Bewilderingly, the only person you can imagine sharing them with is Aegon. But you don’t talk to him anymore. You can’t talk to him anymore.

A fourth body is found, this time in Moose Lake: Brandon Knight, thirty-one, a hydrologist, married with a toddler and another baby on the way. The Juneau Police Department is increasingly desperate for tips. They reveal that footprints left in the vicinity of the crime scenes indicate that the killer might wear size 12 L.L.Bean boots, although it’s difficult to know for sure since park rangers, hikers, hunters, and ice fishers of the non-homicidal variety frequent the lakes as well. It hardly matters. Practically half the men in Juneau wear size 12 L.L.Bean boots.

November dissolves into December, the snow falls, the nights grow long and treacherous like fangs.

~~~~~~~~~~

“Babe, babe, can we get Godzilla?” Trent pleads. You’re standing in the middle of the Action aisle at Juneau’s sole Blockbuster. “Babe, can we please get Godzilla?!”

“Okay,” you concede, but with a condition. “Can we get The Mummy too?”

“Ohhhhh.” Trent grins suggestively. His arms snake around your waist. “Two movies, one night, huh? You don’t want to get rid of me.”

“Maybe I just really like The Mummy.” You’re half-joking, but that means you’re half-serious too. In truth, you aren’t sure exactly how you feel about Trent. Sometimes you think he’s sweet and supportive and refreshingly uncomplicated (that’s a polite way of saying not very bright), sometimes he annoys you with his boisterousness and his immaturity, sometimes he’s useful to have around when heavy objects need to be lifted, sometimes he’s just there. On balance, he is a relatively pleasant distraction. Trent has an apartment on the other side of town—a much nicer apartment than Aegon’s, though you try not to compare them, what a catastrophic error that would be—but you usually invite him to your parents’ house instead. They like Trent, they’ve known him your whole life…and you like the idea of your parents always being just a few rooms away, of having an eternal and effortless excuse to send Trent home when you decide he’s overstayed his welcome.

“Yes,” Trent agrees enthusiastically. “Godzilla and The Mummy.” He grabs the Godzilla VHS in the plain blue-and-white Blockbuster box from behind the display case: green, scaley, mindlessly reptilian, a large nuclear-blast red eye. You peek behind The Mummy’s display case. There’s nothing there. All the copies have been taken.

“No!” you groan in defeat.

“They’re all gone?” Trent checks the surrounding movies in case someone restocked The Mummy in the incorrect spot. “Damn, sorry babe. Guess your taste in movies is just too good. Someone else had the same idea.”

In the next aisle over, there is a shrill and familiar sound. It’s Kimmie giggling. You round the corner to find her and Aegon wrestling over a VHS box. It’s playful, it’s adorable, it’s honestly pretty nauseating.

“Oh, hi!” Kimmie cries when she spots you, grinning. She tries to yank the VHS out of Aegon’s grasp but fails. He’s wearing a green flannel shirt, light-wash Levi’s, his gifted parka, and black Converses (far from a size 12, you note). He has also frozen completely. He’s gawking at you and Trent, dismayed and speechless. You’re an unwelcome intrusion. You’re a nightmare he can’t wake up from.

“Hey, guys!” Trent says obliviously. “Sup?”

Kimmie points to the VHS. “I’m trying to convince Aegon to put that back and get Titanic instead.”

“You poor bastard,” Trent tells Aegon, smiling. “What is it?”

Now Aegon is determined not to look at you. He stares down at his Converses instead, kicking at the dull blue carpet, running his free hand through his messy white-blond hair. “The Mummy.”

“No way! That’s what we were searching for!” Trent turns to you. “You should fight him for it, babe. Arm wrestle or thumb war or something. Trial by combat. Pokémon card battle.”

“Rock paper scissors,” Kimmie suggests. “Or, better yet, you can just have it.”

“Do you want The Mummy?” Aegon asks you, holding up the VHS. Your eyes lock; it’s the first time you’ve spoken directly since Thanksgiving, the first time you’ve really seen each other. And it’s the most unnerving feeling, because he’s a stranger and yet so familiar: the deep oceanic blue of his irises, the pale slopes of his cheekbones, the way his hair is forever falling into his face. You think of how few times you ever got to touch him. You think of how Kimmie can touch him always, anywhere.

“No.”

“Seriously,” Aegon says. “You can have it.”

“Trent wants to watch Godzilla anyway,” you say, much more dismally than you intend to, and then quickly add: “I’m okay with that, it has Matthew Broderick, he’s a stud.”

“Just take the movie,” Aegon snaps, offering it, his outstretched arm bridging the gap between you.

Your voice turns sharp, cutting. “I couldn’t possibly deprive you of your ideal date night.”

“No, really, I can get Office Space instead. I love that movie.”

“I don’t want your pity VHS!” you explode.

“Well then I don’t want your pity parka!” He rips it off and throws it on the floor. You glare at each other across a laden silence, surrounded by Romance movies that you wouldn’t mind tossing into an open flame. Trent and Kimmie are dumbfounded. A Blockbuster employee peeps tentatively into the aisle and then scurries away.

“Aww,” Trent says sorrowfully, breaking the quiet like glass, like ice. “Are you guys not friends anymore? Are you actually fighting?”

“No,” you and Aegon say almost simultaneously. You grudgingly accept The Mummy. He puts the parka back on. You pretend everything is fine, badly, like a soon-to-be-divorced couple does in front of their children. Then Aegon grabs a copy of Titanic off the shelf and slings an arm around Kimmie; and if any part of her was suspicious, it evaporates into a rose-gold haze of triumph and infatuation. They mosey away together towards the Comedy aisle, presumably to locate Office Space.

Trent chuckles and, ever horse-like, flips his hair out of his eyes. “You two are definitely fighting.”

“No, we’re not.”

“Look, I get it. Aegon’s a mess. But he’s a very talented mess, so you’ll have to learn to tolerate him. You can’t run him out of Juneau. He’s Boat #27’s frontman. How would I replace him?”

“Resurrect Kurt Cobain,” you murmur bitterly.

“Huh?”

“Never mind.” And then you ask with curiosity that you wish you didn’t have: “When’s your band’s next performance?”

Trent beams, proud like a good father. “This Thursday.”

“And what’s the song selection?”

“Can’t tell you.”

“Seriously?”

“Seriously.”

“You are not loyal,” you say, climbing onto your tiptoes to link your hands around the back of his neck. Strands of his hair—mane?—catch between your fingers. You smile up at him, feeling very very little. Vanishingly little. Excruciatingly little. The irony of you calling him disloyal hits you with alarming force. “Why can’t you tell me?”

“Because I genuinely forgot the name of it. I’m learning the drum part before the lyrics. It’s something by The Offspring, I remember that. Aegon picked it, he usually picks the songs.”

“The Offspring…” Punk rock, angry, unpolished, chaotic. Yeah, that sounds like Aegon. “Interesting. I can’t wait.”

Trent plants a kiss on your forehead. When he touches you, you are never struck by his gentleness, his carefulness, any illusions of ethereal liberation. He’s just flesh. He’s just weight. “I can’t wait to get back to your house and watch Godzilla.”

You check out your movies at the front counter, adding a bag of popcorn and a box of Buncha Crunch. Through the Blockbuster’s windows, you watch Kimmie and Aegon walk out to her custom-painted pink Land Cruiser: illuminated by murky streetlights, cold wind in their hair, their fingers intertwined.

And an hour later, when you’re sitting on your bed in pajamas watching Godzilla and Trent tries out resting his palm on your thigh for the first time…you let him.

~~~~~~~~~~

“He’s a freak,” Kimmie says, blushing behind her Miller Lite. She’s watching Aegon as the band finishes setting up; she’s a little spellbound, a little shocked…and Kimmie is not easily shocked. “A total freak. Like every position imaginable.”

“Okay, thanks for sharing,” Heather replies, glancing anxiously at you. “Anyway—”

“Like, it’s unreal. Very enlightening. I did not know my legs could bend that way.”

“Kimmie, please,” you beg, flinching away from her. You ply yourself with apple-flavored Bacardi Breezers like antivenom. Dale has officially switched over the soundtrack from Shania Twain to holiday music. Wham!’s Last Christmas booms from the speakers.

“Boundaries, Kimmie,” Heather says. Joyce—who tragically miscalculated the number of pages left in her latest fantasy novel and has therefore resorted to purchasing a newspaper from the vending machine just outside Ursa Minor—shakes her head with disapproval but no surprise.

“I always tell you guys about my boyfriends!” Kimmie whines. “Always, always, going all the way back to kindergarten when I kissed that kid Jason under the monkey bars! And then Ms. Butler told my mom that if she didn’t get me under control I was going to end up pregnant by eighth grade. Yet here I am, proudly not impregnated.”

“And we’re all very relieved about that,” Joyce quips from behind her newspaper.

Kimmie appears to be sincerely distressed. “You’re the people I vent to, you’re the people I want to share things with!”

Heather raises her eyebrows, exasperated. “Yes, well, you don’t need to share everything.”

“He’s exactly what I needed,” Kimmie says, undaunted, gazing at Aegon again. “Nothing serious, nothing complicated, lots of orgasms. And now that my mind is more clear, I can figure out things with Brad. I think I might miss him. I’ve heard he’s super jealous, maybe I’ll call him in a few weeks. You know, once the Aegon situation runs its course.”

Because Kimmie’s life is just one long line of men waiting to get their turn to take her to dinners, movies, scenic hiking trails, Blockbusters, bedrooms. That’s what it’s always like for main characters, right? You don’t want a long line of men. You only want one. The wrong one. “Cool,” you mutter, little more than a whisper. You wonder if in the litany of details that Kimmie feels compelled to share she will mention the track marks on Aegon’s arms. Maybe he told her not to talk about them; maybe she didn’t notice them at all. They’re not really something that would fit into her worldview. They’re serious. They’re lethal.

Kimmie continues: “And thank God we’re compatible sexually because otherwise, he’s honestly kind of depressing. All he wants to do is drink and watch the X-Files. It’s soooo boring.”

“Wow,” Heather contributes tonelessly.

The band is almost ready. Like a gazelle, Kimmie skitters off to the bar to buy another Miller Lite. She’s wearing an extremely cute pink satin dress and matching heels. You can’t hate her. She’s myopic and frivolous and oftentimes frustrating, but she’s also one of your best friends. She has been for as long as you can remember. It’s hard to cut something like that out of you; it’s like excavating a vertebrae or a rib.

“You okay?” Heather asks sympathetically.

“I’m going to jump off a roof.”

“No, you aren’t.”

“Yes I am. I’m going to climb those steps and go up to the patio and jump off right now.”

“This bar is a single-story building. I think you’d live.”

Lyrics from The Distance come back like daylight, recurrent and inevitable: She’s hoping in time that her memories will fade. “Maybe I can hit my head hard enough to give myself amnesia.”

Heather pivots. “How are things with Trent?”

“It’s fine. Trent’s fine. Nothing more, nothing less.”

“You don’t feel the compulsion to regale me with completely disturbing and unnecessary details of your sex life? Not that I’m complaining. I really don’t want to know about my brother’s mattress skills. Or lack of mattress skills. I’m not sure which would be worse, honestly. Is he hung like a horse? He looks like he would be. Wait, don’t answer that. I don’t want to know.”

You drain your third Bacardi Breezer. “I can truthfully say that I have nothing to report.”

“You haven’t…?”

“Nope. Not even close.” You look over at Trent, who is warming up at his drumkit and banging blissfully on the toms. He waves, drumstick in hand. You raise your empty glass bottle in reply. Aegon notices this, narrows his deep blue eyes, glowers at you. He has certainly embraced the punk rock aesthetic: white T-shirt, black leather jacket and pants, combat boots, his hair gelled back off his forehead. He has a safety pin pierced through the lobe of his right ear. It does not look professionally done. “He never even tried anything with me,” you tell Heather. She knows you’re not talking about Trent anymore. “We kissed once. Literally once. And it wasn’t even a hot sloppy kiss, it was like…like…I don’t know how to describe it. Quiet. Calm. He never asked for more than that from me. And now he’s spending five nights a week twisting Kimmie into a goddamn Auntie Anne’s pretzel.”

“That doesn’t mean he never wanted you,” Heather says softly.

“Really? Because it definitely feels like he never wanted me. Not in the same way, at least.” Not as badly. Not as hungrily. Not enough to let me fix him.

Bar patrons are gathering around the band: Kimmie, Gary, Matt, more of Trent’s meatheaded friends, a sprinkling of University of Alaska students, dreary middle-aged locals. That will be me someday, you think. Sitting in this same place with these same people watching the same meaningless events transpire day after day after day until I’m six feet underground. Dale is observing the band from the bar, washing pint glasses.

“We should go up there too,” Joyce says, displaying an iota of interest that is bafflingly out of character. She folds up her newspaper and stuffs it inside her sensible messenger bag. You and Heather accompany her and join the audience; when Rob spies Joyce, he stops plucking his bass and smiles. She smiles back, rather shy and secretive.

“Fascinating,” Heather says, and Joyce elbows her in the side. “Ow!”

Aegon takes one last swig of his rum and Coke and then taps the mic. “Test, test.” He sways drunkenly. His eyes scan the room, sharpening when they pass over you. He’s more jagged and angular with his hair slicked back; he looks ready for a fight. Kimmie squeals and claps. There are more applause from the crowd. You and Heather cheer for Trent. Aegon roll his eyes, so quickly most people would miss it. “Hi, I’m Aegon, and we are Boat #27. Tonight we’ll be performing one of my favorite songs. It’s called Self Esteem, a synonym for self-respect or dignity, which are things that certain people present this evening could use more of.”

“Oh, burn!” Trent says. He plays a ba dum tss on his drumkit, eliciting laughter. He is entirely unaware that Aegon is looking at you. No one else seems aware of it aside from Heather and Joyce.

“Fight, fight, fight!” Matt shouts. More tipsy laughter, more clinking glasses. Kimmie whoops and jumps up and down in her pink heels. When the band starts playing, she whips out a lighter from her purse and waves it around in the air. Rob is more animated than usual; he’s enjoying the feisty bassline. You try to keep your eyes on Trent—who is flipping his hair around more or less constantly, ready to run the Kentucky Derby—but they wander back to Aegon. He’s strumming his jade green electric guitar frenetically. He’s more than just channeling the requisite angst and aggression of punk rock. He’s pissed, he’s furious.

Aegon half-sings, half-screams the post-chorus, glaring right at you: “When she’s saying, oh, that she wants only me, then I wonder why she sleeps with my friends!”

“Oh, he’s dead,” Heather growls.

“When she’s saying, oh, that I’m like a disease, then I wonder how much more I can spend…”

You flee to the bar to get another apple-flavored Bacardi Breezer. They don’t even taste that great; you wish you didn’t crave them. “You okay, kid?” Dale asks, peering down at you from beneath bushy eyebrows. He sets another glass bottle on the counter and pops off the lid.

“I’m fantastic.”

“Not impressed with the talent of our local rock band?”

“Not impressed with one of them in particular.”

Dale chuckles, content to stay out of the drama, and ambles away to restock the pint glasses. You gather up courage like roses pulled from a garden thick with thorns. When Boat #27 has finished their song and accepted high-fives and back slaps from the audience, you go to confront Aegon. He sees you and whirls towards the front door, plotting his escape. Heather is standing there with her arms crossed, face fearsome. Aegon bolts up the staircase that leads to the rooftop patio. You follow after him, rage and hot blood pounding in your ears. You sprint out onto the snow-covered roof and slam the door behind you. Aegon leans unsteadily over the side of the building, contemplates jumping, thinks better of it.

“What’s wrong with you?!” you shout at him, your words turning to fog in the air. It’s freezing outside, and neither of you have your parkas. The sky is dark, clouded, starless. The full moon is a blur of dim silver light.

“Nothing, I’m amazing, I’m having the best two weeks of my life, obviously.”

“Why would you do that?” you demand. You’re trembling all over, and not just from the cold.

He shrugs, infuriatingly flippant. He shoves his hands into the pockets of his leather jacket. “Do what?”

“The song, Aegon, why would you harass me with that song?! You know, the one about me being such a slut despite the fact that you’re literally sleeping with my friend—”

“Who says the song was my idea?”

“Oh, shut up! I know you picked it. Trent told me you almost always pick the songs.”

He sighs dramatically, cynically. “Well, if Trent told you…”

“Why are you suddenly so obsessed with Trent?!”

“I’m not obsessed, I’m just understandably a little confused because you were so adamant that you didn’t like him romantically and that he wasn’t your type���”

“He’s not!”

“—And then the second I’m out of the picture you’re, like, all over him, all the time, and you’re here together, and you’re inviting him to your house, and you’re showing him off to your parents who from what I’ve heard freaking adore him, and you’re having these cute little movie date nights, and he’s calling you babe, and, oh by the way, I hope you enjoyed fucking while watching The Mummy, that was my congratulations gift to you both, you’re welcome, thanks for ruining that movie for me forever.”

“I haven’t fucked Trent!” you yell at Aegon.

“What?” He blinks a few times, letting it sink in. “Really?”

“Really.”

“Wait, wait, wait.” He looks like he’s trying to do math in his head; he looks like he’s realizing that he made a grave miscalculation. “You and Trent…you’re not…like…you’re not serious?”

“Nowhere close to it.”

“…Why?”

“Because I don’t like him enough.” And then you add, because you feel like you should: “Yet.”

“Oh.” Aegon is stunned; but more than that, you think, he is pleased.

“But I guess you like Kimmie plenty.”

“Oh,” he says again, less pleased this time. He stares down at his combat boots and stomps on icy clumps of snow, avoiding your eyes. His mouth twists into an odd, introspective frown. “Yeah, Kimmie’s fine. She’s fun. She’s…she’s more similar to my usual type.”

“Wonderful,” you pitch at him. “Great. I’m super happy for you.”

“Well you don’t have to be a bitch—”

“And guess what? Even if I was sleeping with Trent, that’s not something you get to have an opinion about. Because you spend your entire life crawling from one random girl’s bed to the next, so you’re not exactly Mother fucking Teresa and I’m using every shred of my self-control to not hold that against you. I think the absolute least you can do in return is refrain from trying to publicly humiliate me.”

He nods, chewing his lower lip. He waits a while before he replies, collecting his thoughts, slowing his breathing. “You’re right. I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have done that, you didn’t deserve it, I’m sorry.”

“I sort of accept your apology.”

The wind roars, clawing cruelly through your hair. It even tears a few strands of Aegon’s loose. He looks at you, all over, starting with your boots. When he gets to your face, he turns away. “It’s a compliment, you know.”

“How is you screaming at me and calling me a slut a compliment?”

“Forget it.”

“You still owe me $300 for fixing your dog.”

“Okay! I’ll sell a kidney!” He storms by you and disappears back inside Ursa Minor.

Downstairs, Heather is pacing the floor and eagerly waiting for you to return. Back at the booth, Joyce is deep in conversation with Rob. Trent is sitting at the bar and chatting with Dale about his bygone days in the Forest Service. And for a second, it feels like you’re seeing double, that Dale is just Trent in twenty or thirty years: brawny, rugged, straightforward, with his glory days long behind him and no thoughts for the world outside Juneau. There’s a jolting feeling, like hitting the brakes so hard the line of the seatbelt leaves a bruise. I’m trapped here. I really, really am.

“Oh, hallelujah,” Heather says. “I was about to come up there. I was worried the Greek boy had strangled you and was dragging your lifeless body into the wilderness.”

You shake your head, distracted. “He wouldn’t hurt me.”

“Maybe not physically.”

You shouldn’t have reminded him about the money; now you regret that. It was low, it was motivated by spite. You don’t really care about the money. You don’t want to deprive Aegon or Sunfyre of anything. “I think I need a change of scenery.”

“Want to walk over to Taco Bell?”

“I was thinking more broadly, but that will work for now. Should I invite Trent?”

“I mean, yeah, obviously,” Heather says. “He’s sort of your boyfriend. Right?”

Right? You suppose he is. You fetch Trent from the bar. Heather collects Joyce and Rob from the booth. Then Kimmie trots over to the amassing expedition, her heels clicking on the hardwood floor, her crimped hair beginning to fall flat, a fresh Miller Lite in hand.

“Want to go to Taco Bell with us?” you ask her. “I know it’s not your favorite, but I figured it would be rude not to invite you. You could probably bring your beer. I don’t think the employees get paid enough to try to stop you.”

“Ugh. Yeah, I guess I’ll go if everyone else is.” She spins around and shouts to Aegon, who is guzzling down another rum and Coke: “Hey, babe, want to go to Taco Bell?”

“Um,” Aegon begins. You glare at him. Joyce glares at him. Heather really glares at him.

“Yeah, totally, come with us!” Rob says, shattering the awkward lull.

“Bro, you have to come to Taco Bell!” Trent agrees from where he stands behind you. And then he squeezes your shoulders; be nice, he means. His hands are so large, so powerful. He clamps down on your flesh more roughly than he aims to, maybe even hard enough to bruise. You have to smother a reflex to step away from him. A shudder rocks down your spine.

Where did THAT come from?

Aegon sees this. It’s only an instant, but it seems to stretch on forever: he studies you, something moving under the blue of his eyes, wreckage beneath waves, shadows behind frosted glass. “I’ll go.”

“Yay!” Kimmie trills, joyful and tipsy, hobbling over to wrap him in a blundering hug.

The seven of you bundle up in your parkas, hats, and mittens and venture over to Taco Bell. You give Trent your order and then go with Joyce and Kimmie to shove some of the tables together and furnish them with plentiful napkins, plastic forks, straws, and packs of hot sauce.

You can hear Trent up at the counter: “Hi, can I get six steak tacos, a Nachos Supreme, a Gordita…uh…oh yeah, two large Mountain Dews, and…uhhhh…I think that’s it.”

“You want Cinnamon Twists,” Aegon tells him quietly.

“Oh yeah! Thanks, bro. I totally forgot. And two orders of Cinnamon Twists.” He pulls his wallet out of his back pocket to pay. Aegon starts ordering next. Heather is still glaring at him.

It takes all three Taco Bell employees to bring the trays of food out to the rearranged tables. You’re sitting next to Trent, of course, with Heather on your right. Aegon and Kimmie are directly across from you; Kimmie has indeed smuggled her Miller Lite into the Taco Bell. Rob is merrily eating his way through a small mountain of 7-Layer Burritos. Joyce has laid her newspaper flat on the table and is reading the Entertainment section while taking occasional, dainty nibbles of a Fiesta Taco Salad.

“Why don’t you guys have a fourth band member?” Heather says as she bites into a quesadilla. “Who am I supposed to enjoy a sizzling, doomed romance with?”

“Gary is single,” Kimmie offers.

“I can’t fuck Gary. He looks like Paul Giamatti.”

“Babe, babe!” Trent complains to you. “Stop hogging all the nacho cheese!”

“Sorry,” you say. You abandon the nachos and focus on your Cinnamon Twists instead. Aegon sighs moodily, looking around the Taco Bell dining room for something to occupy himself with. The last time the two of you were here, you were reading each other’s palms; he was telling you that you wanted him so badly it was eating you alive. It still is, you realize with horror. Oh my god, when will this end? How does this end?

Livin’ La Vida Loca comes on the Taco Bell speakers. “Hey, it’s Ricky Martin!” Trent announces cheerfully. “Just like your posters, babe.” He points to you. “She has, no lie, probably eight different Ricky Martin posters on her bedroom wall. It’s an addiction.”

Rob grins. “Yeah, that’s probably who she’s really thinking about every time you come over.”

Trent laughs, polishing off the Nachos Supreme. Kimmie tells everyone about how you used to cover your high school notebooks with celebrity photos cut out of magazines: Prince, Tom Cruise, Jon Bon Jovi, Cyndi Lauper, George Michael, Madonna, Sigourney Weaver, Princess Diana. More laughter, pure-intentioned yet unwittingly cruel. Aegon is the only one who doesn’t join in.

“It wasn’t about them,” you object. “It was about something, anything, beyond Alaska. It was about having some connection the outside world.”

“And look where you ended up,” Kimmie says with a bubbly, tipsy smile. “Back where you belong, with all your best friends. And we’ll do everything together. We’ll be at each other’s weddings, our babies will grow up together, one day we’ll be those old people at Ursa Minor yapping about the good old days.”

Trent beams and rests an arm across the back of your chair. Aegon sighs again. Joyce buries her face behind her newspaper. The front-page article is about how Microsoft has just hit a market capitalization of over $600 billion and is therefore the most valuable company in human history.

“Hey,” Aegon says suddenly, reaching across the table. “Can I have that?”

Joyce is confused. “What, the newspaper?”

“Just the front page. Yeah, that one. Thanks.” He takes it and loudly crumbles it into a ball. “Anyone got a lighter?”

“Um…” Kimmie roots around in her purse and produces one. She flicks it to life, the pink glitter on her fingernails sparkling. Aegon holds the paper ball over the flame to ignite it. Once it catches, he sets it on the table and watches it burn.

A Taco Bell employee, maybe seventeen years old, tentatively approaches. “Sir, you can’t start fires in here.”

Aegon picks up his large Mountain Dew and—making unflinching eye contact with the employee—dumps the entire cup onto the charred remnants of the newspaper page, extinguishing the blaze.

“Thanks,” the employee mumbles before retreating back behind the counter.

Everyone gapes at Aegon, mystified…everyone except Trent. He’s busy unwrapping his six tacos. He takes a bite of one and then lobs it away. “Goddammit, these are chicken, not steak! Didn’t I say steak?!” He brings his fist down on the corner of the table. The whole edge snaps off, a section of laminate about six by three inches. You don’t realize that you’ve yelped out loud until your six companions whirl to look at you.

The person you look at, strangely enough, is Aegon. There is no anger on his face, no annoyance; you could almost forget that Thanksgiving ever happened. You’re the only two people in the room, in the world. It’s an infinite second in which you understand each other perfectly. The expression on his face is not just shock, not just revulsion…it’s fear. And then he swallows it: whatever he’s thinking, whatever he’s feeling. With effort, he pulls his eyes—wide and darting, rattling with panic—down to the damaged table. He covers his mouth with both hands.

“Oh shit.” Trent chuckles nervously. “I’m sorry, guys.”

“Jesus Christ, you’re the Hulk,” Rob jokes, his voice shaky.

“We’re definitely going to get banned from Taco Bell,” Heather moans, rubbing her temples; and only then does everyone truly laugh.

Once you’ve all finished eating—and Trent has given his most profound apology to the three wretched employees of the Taco Bell, grim like Victorian orphans—you walk back to Ursa Minor’s parking lot together. Trent has one arm tight around you. Aegon keeps glancing at you like he wants to say something; you can see him out of the corner of your eye. You are careful not to look at him again. You don’t want Trent to notice. You don’t want him to catch on to what has already happened, what you undeniably want more of.

“Watch out for the ice,” Heather warns everyone, a true mom friend.

“I’m going to break my neck,” Kimmie says, wobbling in her pink heels, clutching Aegon’s forearm. “I’ll just try to step in Trent’s footprints. I’ll follow them all the way to the bar. They’re big enough.”

Trent grins at her, then announces smugly: “Size 12.”

[voydhund]

A few little Stranger Things headcannons :)

All kinds of things ranging from Miwi, Byler, (Semi-platonic) Steddie and (platonic) Elmax :) (Mostly Byler)

-That pretty girl in class that liked Will saw him doodling Mike and thought it was her.

-Will survived in the Upside Down purely out of spite and ‘if I die people (Mike) will be sad’

-Mike keeps every single drawing Will gives him. -Mike’s favorite song is ‘Should I Stay Or Should I Go’ because of Will. -When they were younger, Mike would bring Will little things like flowers, rocks, or bracelets he found, and he'd always keep them. -Will pays close attention to the kinds of things Mike likes, expecially songs. Every year on his birthday, Will makes him a little mixtape with his favorite songs on it. -Eddie mindlessly flirts with Steve, but when he flirts back he instantly gets all flustered and starts stumbling over his words. -Eleven and Max would randomly go to the mall and judge people's outfits when they got bored.

-Eleven struggles with words that sound the same but have different meanings. EX: 'Their' 'There' & 'They're,' 'Your' & 'You're' or 'we're' 'were' & 'where' -Eleven moves things around when she's bored just to fuck with people. Moving that one table just a few centimeters to the left without telling anyone, making random paintings crooked, etc. -Will has a weird obsession with bugs and plants, but he can't keep plants alive and it's too hard for him to catch bugs. -When they were younger, Mike and Will would spend most of their day (and night) hanging out in Castle Byers reading comics, talking about things they'd done recently, drama, etc. Sometimes they'd catch a bunch of fireflies in a jar and set it in there, and Will would just kinda stare at it like 'wow shiny light goes brrr' -Max lets Eleven brush/mess with their hair while they talked about drama or whatever. -Vecna couldn't... Vecna Argyle or Jonathan even if they wanted to. They're always a little too high and he can't deal with it. -Will is really good with guns for WHATEVER reason and Mike is infact not good with any weapon and the idea of Will with a gun makes him unreasonably flustered. -Eleven does not get the concept of boys liking boys/girls liking girls being 'weird.' (W: 'I like boys' E: 'So??? I like boys too???') -Robin and Will know immediately upon meeting eachother. ('I know what you are') -Sometimes the kids would go over to Steve's when they needed a 'break' from home/just to hang out and he'd just turn on a movie and go to sleep/hang out with Eddie like an actual babysitter -Dustin sees Steve (and Eddie) as a father figure(s) and Lucas (most of the original party) as a brother(s) -Will loves the rain. Watching the rain, being outside when it rains, just rain. Mike does not love the rain. Mike is like an angry cat when it comes to rain. Together they are the perfect balance.

[wayfayrr]

More ideas to share

I feel like that dink wouldn't 100% part to sage to the point he isn't himself anymore but rather they are affected by each other in way similar to Eddie and venom, them both needing each other as they share a common enemy altho to degrees as the chain isn't on sight with sage then with dink but they both hate the chain and them wanting reader to themselves I would think they would have a similar relationship to venom and Eddie with the hole dink needing a host and sage was at the right time and place as other links would physically would fit to being dink's host like sage since their all links but unlike sage they have a personal problems with each other that would be too much work fo dink plus if dink did become just part of sage and not one being anymore he wouldn't be able to spy on reader without reader noticing. Tho the two can read each other's thoughts and see their memories. I pitch this: dink always had dark thoughts over reader ever since reader played the loz games infact he always was watching them aware that there was a screen between him and them, he heard their voice and saw their face. He was watching them every minute they were on that device they used, studying them taking notes and getting every info he get his hands on, in the games where link fought against his shadow he would always stare at them when he get the chance at first it was his curiosity to learn more on how to take down these links and I guess this person who was with link at all times but as the relationship between reader and the links grew and reader playing more loz games it became much more darker than it was before till he got enough info on what reader's actions and seeing how their not really that much of a threat when link isn't in the equation and knowing how the links would help anyone who needed help and how they are close to reader, he picked them kidnapping them from their world to his and so placing them near the chain as a way toy with them as they getting much more obsessed over reader did he too and when the day finally came he took reader and sage at girst he wanted to kill reader but their was something in his heart that just didn't want too, so instead he took them both back to the real world. What I'm basically saying self aware yandere dink. So the possibility sage gets fangs please. I got this from a dream, just dink watching reader when they play the loz games and each time they play those games and he pops up he gets much more self aware and the desire to know every single thing about reader by watching and hacking into their device and like how that horror game( AMANDA adventure I think that's what it's name is) he gets out of the screen when reader finishes Tolk he just snatches them and takes them to the era where the chain is in like he is behind them when their playing the Tolk game while reader and everyone else is unaware.

AIDVNDFNVFVOIN I LOVE SELF AWARE AUS!!!! SELF AWARE DINK BBY!!!! ✨✨✨ HE'S HEARD EVERYTHING. Sorry got a little off track with that, but really they are my favourite things 💖 and I could go off about the chain being like that.

Sage and Dink as Eddie and Venom is something I can fully get behind, although I still love the idea that Dink is slowly losing anything that isn't Sage, due to losing his magic even though at some point they don't separate anymore - yes they lose the ability to spy on reader but it wouldn't happen for at least a few months at least. Sage was the best host due to the reasons you've mentioned and as Rauru proves his body handles foreign magic the best, so rather than rejecting and keeping dink more separate he just kinda??? like with an organ transplant if you can see what I'm getting at. Also sage with fangs 👀 I'm politely looking.

NOW ONTO MY FAVOURITE PART OF YOUR ASK!! If they share memories??? Sage gets Dink's memories of reader playing the games. he'll learn the other's secrets. BUT HE'LL ALSO KNOW WHAT READER WAS SAYING AS HIS GAME WAS PLAYED!! SO HE'LL LEARN IF READER WAS SIMPING FOR HIM, OR HOW THEY APOLOGISED EVERY TIME HE TOOK DAMAGE OR ABOUT THE FROSTBITE SET. AND THAT'S ONLY BASIC STUFF IF SAGE HEARD EVERYTHING THEN READER HAS TO DEAL WITH THAT. with dink hating reader at first and slowly becoming more obsessed, gradually falling for them more with each game they played finally becoming love when he gets to know what it's like to be link in BotW and TotK because reader is so gentle??? and his eyes track the camera and originally reader writes it off until they learn that isn't normal and is more like a creepypasta or a broken savefile (sidenote @imprisioned-in-the-hole and I have talked about the links being self aware! mostly sky due to the fact that his eyes track the camera somewhat in sksw!!) And if that was the reason that he stole the reader??? because they were so so close to the chain, that they knew everything?? and now they're there and they can hold them, the real question is was the chain aware of that when they met reader in Hyrule for the first time, I know you said they weren't but if they WERE?? chaos.

[chez-cinnamon]

Helloo!! I'm not sure how many asks are too much, but I'm just so curious about your AU! I remember you stating that water and such could injure the puppets, but are there certain things that could KILL them?? Can they even be killed? (You're a very talented individual btw, wonderful ideas and art!)

(Avfdknvdkjb thank youuu ;0; I'm fine with all the asks, the more the merrier, I'm obsessed w this au jvfhbjdf)

Yeah, water can range from moderately dangerous to very dangerous - because of how ink mixes with water, the pain comes from dilation since they need a high concentration of ink to keep their form and stay alive. Over time they become a bit more immune to water, but too much can cause them to lose form, or if they're stuck in water, they'll dilate enough that it will kill them. Barnaby, Poppy, Howdy and Eddie have a higher concentration of ink compared to Wally, Sally, Julie and Frank, so they can resist water a bit easier.

Other than that, they can't really be killed by other means, except fire, since they can burn like film.