#oc lockup | Explore Tumblr posts and blogs

powderblueblood · 9 months ago

Text

HELLFIRE & ICE — eddie munson x f!oc as enemies to star-crossed lovers

CHAPTER NINE — EDDIE the OBVIOUS and the LADY SPHINX

PREVIOUS | MASTERLIST | NEXT

summary: a tense dinner at rick lipton's place reveals some part of al munson's reason for returning to hawkins. your saturday morning detention is tense, and you and eddie both get more than you bargained for when you crash hellfire club to profile them for the school newspaper. content warnings: MINORS DNI AS ALWAYS warnings for smut, cunnilingus, dick-fondling, p in v, reference to drug usage, slight perv!eddie, silly teenagers having silly teenage fights that actually aren't so silly (kinda antagonistic ronance version!), reference to childhood physical abuse, al munson jumpscare, lacy's dad jumpscare, both lacy's real first name and surname is used in this chapter. no description of body type. just descriptions of a good time eye emoji eye emoji word count: 16.4k

Dear Lord,

Grant me the serenity to accept the shit I cannot change, the courage to change the shit I can, and the wisdom to seize a damn fine opportunity when I see one.

Amen.

When Al Munson cooks a spaghetti dinner, you know he means business.

Once a line cook with aspirations higher than diner fumes, always a line cook with aspirations higher than diner fumes.

He learned to cook on the grill, but perfected it in the joint. During one of his stints, a homecoming tour of the state of Kentucky, he fell in with this web of wiseguys who made him stagiaire in their makeshift kitchen, slicing ghostly slivers of garlic with a razorblade.

Al’s insisted on the method ever since. Even now, hunkered over in Rick Lipton’s kitchen, preparing a meal for which Eddie’s already lost his appetite.

Eddie had already given up on the whole there are a bunch of knives right there suggestion, knowing his father loves few things like he loves performing his whole Kiss the Cook bit. He plays it to the hilt, an exercise in tart, rich, floral smarm that beats out the complex flavoring of his tomato gravy by a country fucking mile. Down to that bullshit Serenity Prayer.

“Courage to change the shit you can? Man, you can barely change your underwear!” Rick heartily chuckles, heaping pasta onto his plate. The way the noodles slide against each other, thick and glistening like worms full of nefarious promise, makes Eddie want to ralph.

He hadn’t had much of an appetite for anything since he’d visited the nurse’s office.

He felt weird. Strung out. Guilty. And angry. Guilty like, what got into me, why’d I do that and angry like, why’d I leave you just standing there like that, and why’d you let me.

“C’mon, kid, you look famished,” Al pulls that anger-inducing Cheshire Cat face, placing a solely ornamental leaf of basil on top of the dish Rick passes. This fucking asshole. These fucking assholes. In cahoots together. “Wayne’s Hungry Man dinners ain’t hittin’ the way they used to, huh?”

Al’s smile doesn’t slice through the tension of the room nearly as clean as he wants it to. Eddie feels Wayne stiffen at his right elbow, sees Rick divert his eyes from across the table.

“Well, Dad,” Eddie says, forcibly stabbing and winding his fork through the spaghetti, “You know what coulda solved that?”

“What’s that, huh?”

“You staying out of lockup for longer than the duration of an MC5 song.”

Al doesn’t falter. Eddie bets he could open-palm slap him and that shiteater of a grin wouldn’t slide from his face.

“I’m here now, ain’t I?” his father clicks his tongue, digging right into his own dish, “You really gotta learn to live in the moment, kid.”

Eddie’s spaghetti-filled mouth starts to form around the indignant words, I’m not a kid! but Al beats him to the punch. Quite literally.

“Though, judgin’ by those scuffs on your knuckles, looks like you did somethin’ without thinkin’ it the whole way through first. Huh?” Al slurps his pasta noisily, and Eddie feels Wayne tense even more, if that’s possible. “Who’s the lucky guy?”

The sense memory of silver flashes colliding with Billy Hargrove’s face in the parking lot, the sense memory of you and your vicelike grip trying to pull him off before he killed him. The sense memory of bile blowing through his veins, stumbling upon those lowlifes talk to you like that. Rage blackout. Yadda yadda.

According to rumor, Hargrove was lucky that Eddie didn’t cave his entire cheek in. He still couldn’t totally see out of his right eye, the swelling was that gathered and insistent.

Eddie lets the question droop in the air, before eventually mumbling, “S’nothing. Just– shit at school.”

Wayne had been the first one to ask him, obviously, catching sight of his bandaged hand when he came upon Eddie staring a hole into–you guessed it–yet another Murder, She Wrote rerun, following your encounter on the examination table.

Eddie had given it the brush off so Wayne had given it the brush off. He was no stranger to his nephew bearing busted knuckles, even if it did make the old man’s blood chill every time he saw it. Those interactions always reeked of you poor kid, like Eddie was the perpetual victim. Got under Eddie’s skin a little.

But Al asks him like he knows something. And Rick won’t look at Eddie.

“This wouldn’t have anything to do with your lovely new neighbor, would it?” Other shoe, meet short, hard drop.

Eddie’s grip tightens around his fork, and in the back of his mind, he summons the spirit of the sharpest tongue he knows.

“Who?” He’s this close to prank calling people using his Lacy impression, that’s how good it’s gotten.

Al cradles his cheek against his palm. His eyes, the eyes that might as well have been scooped out and shoved into Eddie’s skull, they’re such iris perfect replicas, search his son for cracks in his composure. Al stabs, stabs, stabs aimlessly into his dinner.

“You’re a lot of things, Eddie Munson,” he says, “but you ain’t dumb.”

“Truly do not know what you’re yakkin’ about. Can I eat?”

“Come on, Eddie boy! You out there getting into scuffles over that little gold-plated piece’ah something?”

“Can I eat?”

“A little forbidden flame, maybe, two’ah you?”

“Can I eat?”

“Can’t say I blame ya. If I were… twenty years younger.... Or maybe she likes ‘em a little more mature. Think I got a shot?” Al’s teeth are starting to grit, spittle starting to fly. Frenzied in the way he’s trying to eek a reaction out of his kid. “Huh? Eddie?”

Al’s lecherous suggestion of you toed the line of too much for the Munson men, it seems. Eddie and Wayne’s voices overlap.

“Maybe we leave that girl out of this, Al–” “–can I eat, or what?”

SLAM! Al’s fist comes into direct contact with the hardwood of Rick’s dining room table, plates and cutlery and glasses clattering nervously. Rick jumps a little, groaning under his breath. Wayne drags a hand over his eyes.

“You can answer the goddamn question! Shit!”

Eddie, for his part, should probably feel a little scared, his dad raring up on him like that. Instead, he just lets his wound-up fork sag in a pile of spaghetti and leans back in his seat. The thing with Al Munson is this– his bark has always been way bigger than his bite. Especially when he’s as coked up as he is right now.

Ever since he’d roared into Rick’s driveway in that eyesore of a muscle car (alright, it was a little cool– but in, like, a lame Dukes of Hazzard kinda way), Al had been operating in sharp angles and backed-up nostrils.

Shit, Eddie would be shocked if there wasn’t residue on that razor blade he used to slice the garlic. That stupid, reckless, peacocking-as-a-father motherfucker.

He folds his arms, waiting for Al’s tone to pitch on down, for the tremor in his hand to act up, for him to say–

“Sorry. Sorry,” pressed through a line of grit teeth, “I just… Hmm.” It’s like Al is actively trying to plaster the mask of his charming grin back on his face but it keeps slipping out of his fingers. “She’s a real dime. Smart as hell too, huh? Shame about–”

“Al, what’re you gettin’ at with all this?” Wayne asks, and thank god he does. Eddie doesn’t know how much more dancing around the subject he can take, but he won’t be the one to bend first. “What did you bring us up here for? And don’t–” the eldest of all Munson holds a hand up, “--say you just wanted to get together. I don’t buy it. Eddie sure doesn’t buy it. And if Lipton here buys it, he’s a fool.”

Al shrinks, a snot-nosed kid under the magnifying glass his big brother holds to him. “Wayne–”

“You bring us up here to make us part of that goddamn stupid high school feud with that girl’s father? You really spin out that far?”

It’s not often that Wayne speaks up, but when he does, boy. Can that man dress a situation down.

Al falters. Wayne has that ability to knock him out at the knees, and Eddie makes a mental note to ask him how he does that.

“Listen. Alright. It’s not– alright,” Al clenches his hands in fists, a flex in and a flex out. A gesture Eddie notices, because he does it too. As if he’s trying to grasp the last threads of trust from them. “With that girl’s old man permanently benched so to speak, there’s an opportunity for another batter to step up. Okay? Jail sentences get doled out like Halloween candy–who knows that better than me, right?--but life goes on. There is… an opportunity here. Work still needs to get done. Work that I could’ve– that I can do.”

Eddie knows that his dad doesn’t realize he’s saying a lot of nothing, because Al’s always saying a lot of nothing. Vague promises with no real end to them. What catches him this time around is the glint in his eye, hidden behind the drug-induced one, and the glint of a gaudy ring on his finger. A green gem stamped in the middle, like a cat’s harvested eyeball. Huh.

“... let me make good on this, boys. For once. Let me take care of y’all.” Al huffs a faux-humble breath, glancing toward Rick for some kind of illustrative reassurance. “Y’know, seeing how it screwed up that little girl, seeing her big, upstanding daddy go to jail and all, I really–,” a swallow, for dramatic measure. Gunning for Best Actor here. “--felt it. Made me think, Eddie, of all the times when you were just a squirt… Made me wanna do right by you, is all.”

“How much of that doin’ right have you got up your nose, Dad?” Eddie sneers, putting two and two together. Of course this is what he’s back for; not to sell, couldn’t possibly be that simple in the convoluted world of Al Munson, but to supply. To get a suit fitted, pretend to be the big man. “Try before you buy isn’t exactly the most cost-effective policy.”

“Jesus, why, why have you got to make this so hard on me, kid?” Al is just about wringing his hands right now, scaling the apex of his desperation. “You have an in! You have the in!”

The in, of course, being Eddie’s connection to you, and by proxy, your dad. Al’s like a bloodhound that way, sniffing out the few good things that Eddie has going for him from miles off and tearing them right from his hands and acting like he’s doing Eddie a favor by making him his man on the inside.

“This whole town could be ours if you would just–”

That does it. Eddie leaps from the table, chair clattering to Rick’s warped wooden floor.

“I don’t want this whole town, are you fucking crazy?!” he yells, spittle flying, “And–and I certainly don’t want it if it’s anything to do with you!”

What the hell would make Al think that Eddie would hitch his wagon (which, granted, ain’t in too great a shape–he’s barely passing any classes, thanks to a pickup in business he guesses he can thank his dad for) to the living sunk cost fallacy that his father is? What the hell does Al Munson want with that kind of fantasy, one where he’s king bastard of the Hawkins cockwalk when he can’t even stick within county limits for more than a couple of weeks?

Well, Eddie actually has a pretty good idea, one that occurs to him like a lightning strike as Al struggles to keep his temper level. Let Eddie look like the tantrum-throwing brat.

Yeah. Exactly.

He’d wind Eddie into whatever scheme he was cooking up and ditch it, half-baked, leaving Eddie in a kitchen with all the smoke alarms going off. Elbow deep in an unsalvageable mess, because Al could never follow through on anything.

He’d have Eddie exploit your relationship for a couple of instances of, “That’s my boy.” Because Al still thought that trick worked; making him believe he’s loved, valuable, wringing every last drop of loyalty out of him because a boy needs his father… and a father needs his boy, y’know!

Fuck that.

“We should split.” It’s Wayne who says it, batting away the apologetic glance both the Munson men get from Rick– like he’s Al’s keeper or something, managing his moods. Like he isn’t raking in a cash cow from Al’s great Ray Doevski replacement theory.

“No, c’mon–” Al half-heartedly protests, like he could still save the evening but can’t really be bothered.

Wayne follows Eddie’s furious stalk out the door, tearing a cigarette from a soft pack as he hauls into the passenger side of the van.

Eddie, a tightening ball of rage, whacks the steering wheel with one good thump. He’d been stupid enough to entertain Al these past couple of days– out of confusion more than anything else. Waiting for the other shoe to drop, as it were.

“The in,” Eddie mockingly mumbles as the van roars to life and he peels out against scattering gravel.

Wayne has his cigarette pinched between his thumb and index and lets that settle for a beat or two.

“You wanna talk about it?”

Fists flexing around the wheel, Eddie knows very well he’s been caught red-handed. There’s no way Wayne had gone this long without suspecting anything, even after he’d specifically warned him. More of a suggestion, actually; Wayne knows that Eddie will do whatever he wants, regardless.

Unfortunately, he’s like his father that way.

“There’s nothing to talk about,” Eddie says, a shoulder shrug, a mirthless lilt in his tone. “She…”

Again, Wayne stays silent. Waiting for Eddie to tell on himself, like he always does.

“She doesn’t deserve to be in the middle of this,” Eddie arrives at, voice a little choked. “Whatever Dad’s planning on doing–”

“Neither do you,” Wayne reminds him. This is where Wayne and his stoicism pulls Eddie up short. Neither do you, and the only way you avoid the blowback is if you two avoid each other. But at that same time, Wayne always knows where Eddie’s heart is at. Knows that his heart is too big not to follow.

Even if Wayne hasn’t seen you two together, laughing ‘til you’re stupid like the kids that you are, can’t he see…

“Why can’t this be easy?” Eddie asks, his voice small. Echoes of a littler him, one that Wayne would pick up in the truck after school. Head hanging, backpack trailing, kicking pebbles and cursing the world.

Instead, through a sage swirl of smoke, Wayne’s hard stare seems to peel back some. He’s always known where Eddie’s heart is at. Eddie’s starting to think he wishes he knew less.

—

Jesus Christ, are you ever sick of learning your lesson. Of reflecting on what you’ve done.

It’s exhausting, and more to the point, pointless, and even more than that, boring.

Truth is, you’re beginning to second-guess your adoration of brilliant thinkers. Those motherfuckers knew too much, and in the past week, you’ve found yourself yearning for the days where you got by on knowing nothing but the good stuff! The juicy gossip, where the best parties were at, what lipstick could not stand up to what nail polish! When intellectualism was a bedtime story you’d read to yourself under the fucking covers and you didn’t have to decode the labyrinth of your own stupid feelings!

Sure, you felt like a husk most of the time, but you’d take that over this graceless stumbling shit!

You should be allowed to smash the windows out of Billy Hargrove’s car and no one should be able to say boo about it! God!

Instead, however, you’ve been caught up in an as-yet-unprecedented display of seething and sulking. People are still whispering about you, natch, glancing at your belly like you would’ve if that heinous spawnous prank was played on anyone else. At the very least, they still have the good sense to flinch when you match their stare.

Billy Hargrove’s two week suspension means you don’t have to worry about seeing his ugly face, but it also comes with the two week guarantee of not seeing Eddie.

And the probable delay of your Hellfire article. Which is paramount. Obviously.

Speaking of Eddie, there’s too much speaking of Eddie to do.

You keep replaying the sneak attack from Al Munson in your head, him sliding his aviators down his nose to get a look at you.

“What are you doing here?”

“Payin’ my respects. Your father, shit. Shame what happened to him. He was– well. I was gonna say he was a ‘good man’, but that sounds kinda funny, don’t it?”

It wasn’t about Eddie, except it was about Eddie, because every stupid thing is about Eddie.

Especially the fact that you’re sitting in your college-going beau’s chariot, about to slink into Saturday detention. If it weren’t for him…

“Lacy?” a voice calls from the driver’s seat. “You alright?”

You snap to, rearranging your face into something definitive and sharp and pleasing to the eye. Because you’re fine! You’d said as much when he snuck you into the basement of his parent’s house–why wasn’t he back in school yet–and said as much when he squirmed against you, asking you if you were okay in that weighted way that really meant can I put it in yet.

You’d gotten on all fours because it allowed you to roll your eyes when he was all, oh, woah! sliding it in from the back.

You’d reached around and teased your clit to attempt a climax. Trying to imitate that clumsy rhythm from the nurse’s office. It didn’t quite stick–paled in comparison, like a Simon and Garfunkel tribute act made up of people that didn’t secretly want to fuck each other.

And then he gave you a ride this morning. Bright-eyed and bushy-tailed and ready to bore yourself out of misbehavior– but you’d told him that you had newspaper business to attend to.

“I’m fine,” you brightly declare for the fourth and final time, reaching over to squeeze his shoulder. It was a weird gesture, but the shine had buffed off. He’s cute and all, but you two had gone to see Paris, Texas at the Hawk and he didn’t get it.

He didn’t get how much you clowned on him for not getting it afterwards either. You hadn’t been able to get it out of your head, the way he shrugged away from you at the diner as you ribbed him for his plodding misunderstanding of Harry Dean Stanton.

Coldly, you thought of the trade-off that you and Eddie had agreed on. Repo Man for Paris, Texas once it came out. You had to pretend you liked Repo Man a lot less than you actually did to swing that one, because Eddie wasn’t keen to lock in to some movie about a dude crying in the desert or whatever unless you angled in the fact that you owe me for making me sit through all that machismo.

“You love machismo. You wanted to nail that sweaty little punker, I saw you squeezin’ your knees together.”

“For Emilio Estevez? Please. I had my eye on the old guy. ‘Ordinary fuckin’ people, I hate ‘em’--that kind of shit really does it for me, Munson, you know that.”

“That why you’ve been entertaining the pleasure of my company for so long?”

“Down, dog.”

Anyway. Fuck.

“Listen, Lacy, I gotta tell you s–”

“Can’t right now! I’m already late and Fred is gonna have my head,” you chime, all saccharine, climbing out of the car. “Call me!” You pray that he doesn’t.

Slam. What an extraordinary waste of time.

As instructed, you make your way to the gym, which you think is a little weird. Detention usually denotes writing pointless, go-nowhere laments on how sorry you are for being such a bad kid, right? Think on your sins, yadda yadda yadda.

Typically enough, no one’s here on time. Everyone’s late. You’re perched on the bleachers like an asshole, sitting alone like an asshole. That’s the goddamn ticket, isn’t it? You’re alone in all of this. You always have been.

Like, for example. The Al Munson walk-on role into the surrealist tragi-comedy that is your fucking life. You can’t tell that to anybody. Not Eddie, naturally, not your mom, not Nancy because then you’d have to explain the continued and complicated Eddie of it all, not Ronnie because just because. And the ickiness of it hangs off your every move, and you can’t shake it, and no one can share it.

You’re beginning to wonder if that’s true of all the parts of you. The ickiness. It’s all a little heavy, isn’t it?

As if on cue, hearing ickiness called by name on the wind, Mr Kaminsky pushes open the gym’s double doors.

“Oh, what the fuck.”

“Had to see it for myself.” Your loathed History teacher says, full of glee.

“Sir, if this is some kind of elaborate courting ritual, I have to say, you’re not my type.”

“Careful up there, Doevski. There’s more detentions where this came from.”

“Freak accident. I can’t be caged.”

“Well, let me enjoy the exception to the rule!” Kaminsky claps, and you jerk at the echo.

You sigh so hard you almost unlatch something. “What elaborate torture have you got planned for me today? Want me to run laps or something? Because these shoes aren’t built for that.”

“Don’t get ahead of yourself, Lacy,” the teacher digs, “We’re still waiting on your comrades.”

“I’m late, I’m late, I know I’m late!” a familiar voice comes skidding right up behind Kaminsky, baseball hat askew, mud stains on the knees of her overalls. “Some goddamn lunatic tried to run me and my bike off the road–”

“Ronnie?”

“Hey, Lacy!” she calls brightly and breathlessly, slamming herself down on the bleachers beside you.

“Ron, what’re you–”

An unmistakable heel-click rounds its way into the gym, and in walks Nancy Wheeler with her face all pinched like a porcelain doll. She receives your big ol’ center-piece-missing jigsaw puzzle of a look with a knowingly arched eyebrow.

“You’re late, Wheeler,” Kaminsky tries, but Nancy’s already consulting her wristwatch.

“Detention starts at nine sharp, right?” she says, impenetrable as always. “It’s 8:58.”

“Then can I have my admission of lateness struck from the record, actually?” Ronnie asks and Kaminsky shoots her a withering one, consulting his clipboard.

“Alright, we got one more. Give it the goddamn two minutes, but then I’m bumping her to suspension. You wanna count it, Wheeler?” he scoffs. Wow, so he’s like a round the clock douchebag. To everybody.

At what you only can assume is 8:59, the mismatched gangle of Robin Buckley comes slinking over the waxed floor, looking half-awake and pissed off–more pissed off, you might argue, now that she registers her company. She perches on the furthest end of the bleachers, pointedly away from the loose gaggle of you, Ronnie and Nancy.

You shoot Ronnie a look like, what’s the sitch there? Thought you two were getting all bosomy.

Ronnie just shrugs.

“Alright!” Kaminsky claps the clipboard again, “So, this is a fun group. Bunch of smart girls who got caught doing idiot stuff. We’re gonna make you pay for that today. Sound good?”

The whole bad bunch of you just stare at him, slit-eyed.

Your collective punishment, as it turns out, comes in the form of scraping old, disgusting, errant gum and other mystery sticky bullshit from the bottom of the bleachers.

“Stupid is as stupid does,” Kaminsky sagely says, handing you each a tiny chisel from the art room, “And I understand that some of you are violent offenders,” that’s a pointed look at you and Ronnie, by the way, “but please. Don’t use this opportunity to take another girl’s eye out. Your community college acceptance is riding on it.”

Motherfucker. Everyone knows Ronnie Ecker is in the running for valedictorian.

He leaves the four of you to your own devices, promising to check up on you all in a solid forty-five.

“How many times you think he can beat off in forty-five minutes?” Ronnie immediately asks as the teacher disappears through the door.

“Depends. Is he doing it in the shameful privacy of his three-door rust bucket or the clandestine confines of the AV room?” you question.

Nancy makes a gagging sound but adds, “And is he using his imagination or Ms Kelley’s yearbook picture?”

Nasty Wheeler! That girl has truly endeared herself to you.

Robin, however, doesn’t weigh in at all. She just sort of glares and angles herself onto the nearest bleacher rung to start scraping the age-old mastication from the wood. Tension in the air.

“Buckley’s got the right idea,” you say, twirling the chisel in your fingers, “Sooner we get started, sooner we get the grossness over with…”

Ronnie sticks close by you, which is nice. You always like having her in proximity. Nancy, who’s nothing but work ethic in everything she does, starts furiously working on a corner a little ways away from you both– and Robin.

It doesn’t take long, maybe fifteen minutes of silent, resigned scraping, for you to get bored. And disgusted.

“At what point do we get to do the whole prison thing of what are you in for?” you say, sitting up and letting the blood rush back to your head.

“Well, yours goes without saying,” Ronnie chuckles, “going all batter on Hargrove’s car like that. Did you actually bust a window?”

“Just swung it around,” you say, driving your heel into the bench, “I may have inherited the felony misdemeanor gene, but I didn’t inherit getting caught. What about you?”

Ronnie flicks another gum wad off with her chisel, “Actually, you might wanna ask Wheeler about that.”

Your brow furrows. “Nance?” your voice rings down to the lower rungs, “Ronnie here says you were implicated in her detention-getting.”

“Yeah, um. Well, I heard about everything when you went–”

“--totally awesome psycho–”

“--in the parking lot and… I just. I wanted to clean up all that shit. From your locker. And then Nicole came by, smacking her stupid gum, and it kind of got ugly.”

Nicole. The irony of it, Nicole, gnashing out shittalk about you and Eddie in order to impress whatever unfortunate member of the wrestling squad she’d dug her press-ons into this week. Nicole, who’d already invaded Eddie’s territory, much to her apparent shame.

What a majorette of a bitch.

You would’ve given anything to be ringside for this, her versus Nancy.

“You toed up to Nicole Summers?” a little pause, your voice goes smaller, “For me?”

Nancy sits up, her perm clouding around her. She points her chisel Ecker-ward.

“Ronnie was the one who smacked all her books out of her hand.”

Ronnie pffts. “Like she hasn’t done that to me a million times. Eye for an eye.”

“Nicole wouldn’t even go near her on account of that one time she bit that one kid for catcalling her.”

“Oh, stop,” Ronnie’s gathering a blush, batting her hand all coquettish.

“Wait, that was real?” you say, eyes darting between them, “I thought that was just some freak rumor we came up with.”

Rabid Ecker was one of the less clever nicknames your group of crown ghouls had come up with, so it obviously didn’t stick too long.

“We?” Nancy scoffs, not mean.

“The royal ‘we’,” Robin Buckley drawls from her prostrate position on the bleachers. That sounds mean, the bite in her voice.

Your hackles can’t help but rise at that cold snap in her tone. Does she have a fucking problem, or something?

“And why are you here, Robin?” you call, hands knitting in your lap.

“I was with these bozos,” she says, a note-faithful mockery of your pointed voice, “For some godforsaken reason… and now I really wish I wasn’t.”

“Why’s that?” you press.

Nancy’s whole upper half tenses. “Robin–”

Robin’s chisel clatters on the bench, a toss made out of frustration. She looks to the three of you with pursed lips before letting loose.

“Steve found out,” Robin says, “About the pregnancy test thing. In like, the worst way he could possibly find out, which is so goddamn unfair, unfair in the first place because of Nancy not telling him–like, I get it, your choice or whatever but you guys have been together for, like, a really significant period of time and you know how he feels about you–”

You and Ronnie can’t even get a breath in before Nancy rises from her seat, fingernails digging into tiny little fists at her side. She’s all spit and fury, she’s on Robin.

“Oh yeah, the worst way he could find out, Robin, the worst way which is that you blabbed to him!” Nancy yells, ricocheting around the gym, “‘Oh, I couldn’t help it, he asked me what was wrong and it all just came out–’ Give me a break! I mean, are you really that co-dependent that no one can tell you anything in confidence without you running to tell Steve?”

Robin’s face seizes in a snarl. “Are you really that stupid that you forgot to use protection with your long term boyfriend?”

“What is your problem?” Nancy’s voice whistles through her teeth, sheer exasperation, “How is this any of your business?”

“Should we stop this?” Ronnie whispers, with no intention of moving.

You shake your head in tiny, tiny increments, gossip monger past getting the best of you. “I kinda wanna see where this goes.”

“He is my friend, Nancy! And you broke his heart, dumping him right after– after–!”

Both your and Ronnie’s mouths drop into an ‘o’. You’re kind of disappointed–a big Wheeler-Harrington bust up and you weren’t first on the call list?!

“Jesus, Robin!” Nancy spits, perm flying, stomping towards Robin, “Get a personality! Sublimating yourself onto Steve Harrington isn’t doing you any favors!”

“Why, Nancy? I thought you loved him.” What confusing wording.

“I–”

Okay, these two girls are walking right into shit you can’t take back territory. You and Ronnie rush the bleachers, breaking the negative space between them both.

“Ladies! Break it up!”

“You heard Kaminsky! We’re all holding chisels, this could get ugly fast!”

You look to Nancy and her eyes are glistening. Reddening with the heat of anger and frustration. Robin’s jaw has hardened into a tough clinch, arms bound around her chest. Ronnie, she just lingers awkwardly, not quite knowing where to look. Your hand goes out to Nancy’s elbow, and she jerks away from you at first.

“Let’s go. Come on.”

“We’re supposed to be chiseling,” Nancy seethes. Your eyes roll, no patience for this go-nowhere brat routine, and you lead her to the other end of the bleachers anyway. Saying something like, we’ll take one end, Ronnie and Robin take the other, we’ll get this shit cleared in no time.

Nancy starts working furiously, but that’s kind of not what you had in mind here.

“You broke up with Steve?” you ask, point blank. Like she’d ask you.

She keeps chiseling for a few heavy, angry seconds. “I wasn’t gonna tell him, you know. I wasn’t gonna tell him, and we were gonna be fine. He could have lived without knowing. And then–fucking Buckley– and he had all these questions.”

“Like what?”

“Like why didn’t I tell him. And why was I so put out by the idea. Like, why didn’t I want to have his hypothetical baby at age seventeen… stupid shit like that.”

“He’s sensitive.”

“He’s a moron.”

“Don’t say things you don’t mean,” as if you didn’t have irrefutable proof in her favor. But that was the old Steve Harrington, wasn’t it? He’s meant to be some soft-hearted do-gooder dream boy now, right?

“No, Lacy, he’s a moron,” Nancy hisses, spit flying again; you’ve never seen her like this. Blue eyes bold and frightening with conviction. “Why should I have to tell Steve about something like that if it’s just a big nothing? If I was never even actually pregnant or whatever? Why can’t I just have that to forget about myself? Why do I owe him part of every single goddamn decision I make about my life?”

This is a bigger conversation, isn’t it? What you’d once regarded as poor Nancy and her perfect boyfriend, boo-fucking-hoo is now poor Nancy and her perfect boyfriend, stifled by his redemption.

“At least if he was still an asshole, I wouldn’t feel bad about breaking up with him. After all this.”

“Now it’s just like you’ve kicked a puppy.”

“Exactly.”

“What total bullshit.”

Nancy shoots the tiniest smile up at you, a stiff little nod bobbing her neck forward.

There’s a long beat as your focus reframes around Nancy. All the two of you wanted were lives of your own. Existences not indebted to anybody, good or bad. Shit.

“I’m the sublimator, by the way. I know that,” Nancy whispers, great big eyeballs glittering at you, “It’s easy to… fold into someone like Steve when, y’know… you’re not exactly likeable on your own. I just. I wanted to hurt her. She doesn’t deserve it. But I wanted to.”

Her chisel gestures towards Robin, working alongside Ronnie in relative silence that Ronnie awkwardly tries to puncture.

You understand that. Wanting to hurt people after you feel like they’ve breached your trust. Even accidentally. And doing it. And the ugliness of the shame after, you’re familiar with that too.

You reach forward and brush a little lint off her collar. “Thanks for getting in trouble for me, by the way. With that stupid prank and everything.”

“What are you talking about?” she scoffs softly, “You covered for me. And you didn’t have to.”

“Hey,” you hold out your pinkie finger. It’s the least you can do. “Promise is a promise, right?”

—

The members of Hellfire Club gather in an awkward row, standing under the odd, warm glow of the drama room lights like a police lineup of suspects least likely to score a date to homecoming. Sorry, Ronnie.

“What do you think,” you say, swiveling your focus to Jonathan, who’s standing there twice as awkwardly with his camera slung around his neck, “Should we take ‘em outside, make ‘em do Abbey Road?”

In the middle of it all sits the man who can’t help but be of the hour, what with the throne and the glowering and the gravitational pull. Eddie, slumped into that wild set piece left over from god knows what drama club production of, like, Henry VI or Pirates of Penzance or whatever, is so beyond unhappy with what’s unfolding in front of him.

Good.

Ronnie clearly hadn’t even fluffed him into the idea. Which she offered to do, when you’d hitched a ride home on the back of her bike after the tension of Saturday detention dissipated. You’d firmly nixed the idea, the sneak attack being the whole point of this thing.

You’d also learned that a two week suspension was no way no how going to keep Eddie from sneaking in and running this Hellfire session, which meant your article wouldn’t be delayed after all.

So, nah. Good ol’ Ronnie, she just let you stalk in there with your notebook and your pen and your glasses and your Pentax-wielding Jonathan Byers, ready to entirely fuck up Eddie’s day, which gave him no opportunity to protest or call for embargo. Because if he did, it’d raise eyebrows of suspicion and everyone would be like, I thought you two were weird trailer park friends? Is something going on? Something emotionally incoherent and ambiguously erotic? Should we tell everyone? Should we call the Mayor?

“Capital idea,” Eddie says, not exactly to you, but to those in general attendance like he’s playing to the cheap seats, “Maybe I can mow them down in my van and save them from this torture.”

Your smile tightens and Eddie matches your expression, both your mouths straining against your skulls. Wisecracks will not save him. He should know that by now.

“Let’s get a couple of the maestro while I excavate the disciples’ brains,” come the instructions and a swift pat to Jonathan’s shoulder. He flashes you a bewildered kind of look.

“Wh– how do you… want him?”

Incredible phrasing. You glance at Eddie, but not really at him–not enough that he can register and sucker your gaze in. Bathed under the dramatic glow like he was born to sprawl all cock-kneed on a throne like that.

“Exsanguinated and hung on a meat hook, preferably,” you say to Jonathan, “But, I trust you. Do whatever.”

As you gather the rest of the Hellfire denizens at the end of the table to interview them talking head style, Jonathan Byers slinks towards Eddie.

Eddie shifts uncomfortably, less equipped to keep up that fuck you stormcloud persona when he’s at the other end of a focusing lens. Plus, Byers always kind of gave him the creeps. Not to be a dick, but. Here we are.

Byers, to Eddie’s complete and utter horror, clears his throat and attempts to scrounge up some semblance of conversation. But, of course, it’s Jonathan Byers so it’s not fucking small talk. Any other day of the week, Eddie could get behind the notion of eschewing such how about this weather we’ve been having type social norms but Byers decides to jump in with–

“So you guys are…” he trails, leading the witness. Snap goes his little aperture. That’s unfair. Means he caught Eddie’s immediate facial reaction which, hands up, he has never been good at hiding.

“Neighbors,” Eddie supplies in a rush, twisting on his throne again. “She can… hear me yelling about DnD from my trailer. S’why she’s here. To shut me up, I guess.”

Byers adjusts his stance, capturing Eddie from a lower angle– a little more badass looking, he hopes. Frame the fucking curls, for god’s sake.

“Gotcha journalism,” Byers quips. Byers quips.

Eddie’s mouth relaxes and he huffs out a little, “Exactly.”

Byers shifts yet again, clearly covering all wondrous angles with his dinky little thirty-five millimetre whatever the fuck.

It’s not that this whole sneak attack article for the Streak thing is getting under Eddie’s skin– Eddie didn’t even have a chance to acknowledge it getting under his skin. You just breezed in here and started sticking bamboo spikes under his fingernails, like the little warmongtrix you are.

And now you’re sitting at the end of the game table, ruby red end of your fountain pen pointing at Gareth, noting down everything he says without even the slightest hint of condescension. These dorks are looking at you in awe and fear, save for Ronnie who just looks smug, and you’re listening to them. Really listening to them. Your face fixed with that hard little glare that tells him you’re recording the minutiae of their answers.

Eddie digs the pad of his thumb into his lip. Why would you want to do this? Why aren’t you avoiding him at all human cost? What is your angle here?

“She’s cool, y’know.” Click, goes Byer’s camera again. “Lacy.”

Eddie’s voice comes out distant, his focus tugging away from you super, super slowly.

“I heard you blew it with her.”

Byers, caught off guard, lowers his lens. “She told you about that?”

Eddie shrugs, like it’s nothing. It’d be easier to pretend like the idea of you and Byers hanging out was nothing if Byers and Eddie weren’t both classified outsiders.

“Well, uh,” Byers fiddles with something on his camera, shrugging in turn, “It was weird, talking to Lacy back then. You know. She was kind of–”

“She’s different now.” Eddie answers too fast, springing to a defense that didn’t call for him. He sits up a little bit straighter, spine iron-rodding, and tries to recover.�� “I mean. She’s retired the whole icy Swatch rat bit. She’s not, like– pretending to be something.”

Jonathan gets this look on his face. One last click of the camera.

“I wouldn’t know. I blew it, remember?” But you didn’t, man.

Little does he know.

“Are we done?” Eddie says, launching himself from his chair and slapping palms on the table. His DM screen shakes. Byers steps back with a flared little danger zone! look tossed your way. “We’ve already lost–”

“--fifteen minutes of glorious game time?” you drawl, crossing a final ‘t’ in your notes. “Of course. My apologies. Tight schedule?”

Your eyebrow arches as you flash your eyes up at him. His jaw flares. You– you’re good. You’re vicious and you’re good.

“Theee tightest,” Eddie grits through the falsest of grins and jerks his head, waves flying and the rest of his little Hellfire sheepies following in motion to take their seats.

Ronnie takes her time, mumbling under her breath, “You sure this is a good idea?”

And she was right, with what she’d said before. You are using this as an excuse to get in his face–bolstered only by the fact that he had now gotten in your pants, and you weren’t letting him slink off that easy. Especially with the workplace cameo appearance from Al Munson that you had just been forced to live through.

You’d been looking over your shoulder ever since, expecting to see him leering at you over those sickening aviator sunglasses.

“Oh, I’m positive,” you assure her, turning to Jonathan. “I need, like, one or two shots of them playing then you can take off.”

“Waiwaiwaiwaiwaiwaiwait,” Eddie interrupts, an arm raising over his head to signal halt, “Okay, so first, you storm the castle with your little camera boy without my approval, now you think you’re going to stay for the game?” His ire is genuine. “It’s Hellfire Club, Lacy. Members only. We don’t need bleacher bunnies.”

“Oh, come on, Munson!” you lilt, situating yourself on an abandoned desk, away from the game table. “The people want to know how the Satanic sausage is made.”

“The people being?”

“Your critics and fans. What is this all for, if not to piss off Hawkins’ Presbyterian and garner a whole new legion of Hellfire acolytes, huh?”

“We don’t need any help from the press on that front.”

“Really?” You drag out your single-word answer, using the seconds to count the minimal amount of players in the room. Not even Ronnie could boast 100% attendance, with her marching band obligations clashing with Hellfire sessions. Eddie glares at you. Yeah, yeah.

“A–actually, Eddie… I think it’d be… pretty cool,” Gareth says, waver slowly fading out of his voice. “I mean, if we’re in the school paper, my Mom’ll be less suspicious that we’re like–”

“--doing k-bombs in the drama room…” you mutter, loud enough that only Jonathan can hear.

“--and stuff.”

Eddie exhales so hard his nostrils flare, his shoulders tense, he’s about to shit.

“And who else would like to stand shoulder-to-shoulder with Gareth the Treacherous here?” he snarls, looking pointedly around the table, “Jeff? Dougie? Cyrus? Ecker?”

The dorks erupt in yapping agreement, totally swinging for Gareth’s angle.

“Shut up!” Eddie barks, throwing himself back onto his throne. Ringed fingers pinch the bridge of his nose. “Fine. But this, in the business, is what they call a mutiny. Don’t come cryin’ to me when you’re all gettin’ swirlies with half of the Weekly Streak stuffed in your goddamn mouths.”

That’s creative. He really could have had a fruitful career as a bully if he wasn’t so gooey in the middle.

“Munson, I promise you can ride circles around me on a motorbike on live TV if this all goes to shit.”

You make a fluttering hand motion that reads proceed, which he, naturally, hates. He stares at you, like white light white heat searing through stares at you. And then his eyes shut. He takes a deep breath.

What follows is… exactly what you should have expected, actually.

Eddie Munson transports the present-and-correct party of adventurers back into the eye of their campaign. Their mission? Infiltrate a cult of royal knights that have been bewitched by a high priest who is forcing them to sacrifice the kingdom’s innocents in order to fuel his dastardly arcane magic. The plot is… involved. You’d done a light touch of research on how exactly the dragons and the dungeons all worked, so to speak, but it didn’t really seep into the membrane. It’s something you could only really engage with if you saw it in action– you’d have to rely on Eddie and company to fill in the blanks that the extensive lore left. Like, how exactly did these mythical dice come into play? How does a character sheet set you up for success, or failure? What the fuck is a skill check and why does it read so complicated?

And fill in they… kind of did.

Aside from the technical aspects, you find yourself suckered into the story. Quite literally, gripping your seat as Ronnie’s character–a highly capable bard, from what you understand–attempts to escape the hateful royal sect and find her way back to her party. They’d taken her hostage, and she’s managed to escape her chains but they’re ruthless, on her like dogs. Eddie illustrates every sweaty, panicky movement as they close in on her, and your fine, painted fingernails are dug into every word.

Eddie weaves these stories like gossamer– both in the sense of delicate intricacy and destructive nature of that big red monster thing from Looney Tunes. Each plot twist is created to elicit a sense of true foreboding, embellishing how effective his storytelling is. It forces each and every person at the table to face fear head on, dig deep and use what they were given in order to prevail, even if they’re shaking in their boots while doing it– shit, this is good, you should be writing this down.

Blindly, you sketch the word gossamer into your journal, not tearing your eyes away from the table. You barely notice the flash going off to your immediate right– Jonathan Byers’ lens pointed right at you.

“Uh–” you start, Jonathan reaching to grab his jacket from behind you as the game goes on.

“I’m headin’ out– gotta pick Will up from…” he trails off, but you fill in the blank. Nancy had mentioned that Mike was hosting his friends for a DnD session tonight too, and the party naturally included the most junior Byers. You nod, checking the time– Jesus, where had the last three hours gone?

“Tell Nancy I said hey, if you see her,” you say, “and thank you.”

Jonathan shrinks into himself, bashful. “Don’t worry about it.” A beat. “I still want that Echo & the Bunnymen, though.”

Your face peels into a grin that says don’t worry, I”m good for it! and you wave him off. The Hellfire party don’t even notice his leaving, except for Eddie who, being judge, jury and executioner, notices everything.

“...and on that sweltering note, germies and Eckermen, we must bid each other good eventide. Until next time.”

An operatic groan of disapproval goes up from the players, and you realize this must be a regular thing. Eddie always leaving them wanting more. Tease.

“I know, I know, if you had it your way, you’d be locked in here, pissing in buckets and the show would go on all night,” Eddie jeers, rising from his seat to start collecting his stuff, “but I wouldn’t inflict that on the janitorial staff. ‘kay? Scat. Outta my sight.”

With great indignation that swiftly turns into backslaps of appreciation, the Hellfire Club moves out of the drama room one by one. You stay put, and Eddie avoids your eyes completely.

Folding shit back into that madly overstuffed DM folder, he throws a strained-casual, “Need a ride?” to Ronnie, the last straggler.

She shakes her head, smile barely contained. “Uh-uh! Two wheeled my way here and I’ll two wheel my way back– you, uh, have fun though.”

“Bye, Ronnie,” you call after her, voice properly piercing through the air for the first time in hours. Eddie reacts like he’d completely forgotten you were there. Which, impossible. It’s also impossible for him to keep up the whole punk-ass overlord act when it’s just the two of you. As it is now.

Alone, together. Again.

There’s a charge between you, as if that even needs pointing out. Like the electric fences surrounding McCorkle’s farm.

You and the wagonful of your one-time buddies, Carol and Tommy and Tina et al, used to drive out there more than a little under the influence. Your favorite trespassing activity was reaching out for the electric fence, hooking your fingers around it to feel the darting shock permeating your skin.

“What the fuck are you doing? Can’t that, like, fry your brain?” Carol’d ask you, slugging back the last of her beer as Tommy and Steve Harrington attempted to tip a cow in the background somewhere.

“Try it, Care,” you’d giggled, half drunk and half coursing with adrenaline, half alive and half dead, “It feels weird. It feels good!”

You’d woken up the next morning in your plush bedroom in Loch Nora, two little blisters on your fingers, smarting from all that pleasure seeking. Did you regret it? Or did it just make you want to do it again?

Eddie still doesn’t look at you as he speaks from the opposite end of the table.

“Get everything you need?”

“No,” you answer, short. “Missing my key interview.”

Now he looks. Now he has the nerve to. And irises lock on irises, Eddie frozen in place. He knows he’s not getting out of this.

What’s more, you don’t think he really wants to.

“Pretty controversial subject matter,” he says, tone a whole shade softer than the commanding voice of God he’d used through the duration of the session. A little higher. Nervous. “What with the panic, and all.”

“Me and controversy are bedfellows,” your shoulder darts up, “I’m the big spoon.”

“Oh yeah?”

“Yeah,” you nod; your tone is as marble-solid as ever, eyes trained and undarting, “Like when I implied the Tigers were straddling a generation-defining line of bold faced failure. I got in a lot of trouble for that.”

The corners of Eddie’s mouth twitch a little. “Define ‘a lot of trouble’ by your standards.”

“They made me print a retraction!” You’re genuinely incensed by the memory, hitching forward in your seat, “I mean, how insane? ‘Bad for school spirit,’ they said. Like I’m some kind of pep exorcist.”

Eddie tongue folds in between his teeth and he turns his head a split second too late. You can see him biting back a snicker, or something, and point to Lacy and yadda yadda yadda—but you smile, and the tension feels like it’s waning. Thank god, because it is suffocating you. You take your in and up you get, moving to the seat closest to his right-hand side.

“Can we get started?” The fountain pen is uncapped, the notebook cracked, your legs crossing. Eddie sinks back into the throne, his face warming up under the yellow stage lights.

“Okay. Hit me with your best shot.” Fire away.

You’re quick with it. “Why this?”

“Really? That’s your first question?” Eddie looks bemused.

“It’s the least rudimentary of all the Ws,” you explain nice and plainly, plucking up fingers to illustrate your points, “People know who you are–against their will, mostly. People can glean what the game is–or will, once I put a fine point on the… everything that just happened there. What people don’t get is why. Why indulge yourself in this?”

His fingers knit together in his lap, nearly shy.

“Because it’s fun.”

“Nope, too vague.”

“Vague?”

You physically knock the notion with a waving hand, leaning closer over the table, errant miniatures and spare pencils still scattered there.

“Basketball is fun. Chess club is fun. Throwing rocks into a rusted can of SpaghettiOs is fun if you can make a case for it. Too vague. Didn’t come here for the everyman answer.”

“What did you come here for?” That’s loaded. The way he’s daring himself to look at you is loaded. How soft his voice turns is loaded.

“The Munson answer.” It hangs in the air like someone dropped off the gallows. “Dig for me.”

A long, metastasizing beat. Resistance is futile, as it is and ever will be with you. Eddie hitches his arms across his chest, hiding a smile in the heel of his palm. Flattery works with him. Even if you'd never call this flattery.

“Escape,” he eventually tells you.

“Go on,” you press.

“There is this… insatiability when it comes to fantasy. To stories like this, the kind with big, thriving worldscapes. Reading ‘em, even writing ‘em– it’s good, but it isn’t enough sometimes. Sometimes you want to wrap yourself up in the reality of elsewhere. Travel to a world where things are different.”

“But not idyllic.”

Eddie’s eyebrows pull together.

“No. If these campaigns were just… the bad guys are defeated by a mighty sword that you and you alone always happen to have on you, that’s not a campaign. That’s a circle jerk.”

“The idea is to be challenged. To fight for something.”

“Right. To adventure. Beat the odds.”

“And you can’t do that alone.”

“Well, you can. I think that’s called, like, writing a book.”

“Ohh-kay, Eddie…”

“No, no, no, I mean,” Eddie shakes his head, planting his elbows on the table top, “Where’s the fun in that? Where’s the thrill of the unknown? Of not knowing what the other characters are gonna do, or what sick twist the dastardly, brilliant DM is gonna pull out next?”

He’s on one now, so you don’t stop him. Eddie’s eye takes on that mercurial shine, the same one he had while he was cruise directing the campaign. You wonder when he got like this—got bit by the God complex bug. Here, he could dare people to defy him when he’d been the defiant one his whole life.

You think about a littler him, yearning for escape.

“It also doesn’t work if everyone wants to be a hero. Too many heroes spoil the stew, okay, so you need to find other, y’know, likeminded weirdos who fall into different alignments. Those alignments only work when they’re played off other characters. Your merry band of outlaws or pirates or underdogs or whoever. You work together, or you betray each other, or you come back together because of some mighty sworn oath and you see your mission through. It’s not about winning or losing, y’know? Whatever happens out there,” he gestures to beyond the barricade of the drama room doors, “doesn’t matter. Whether life’s beating the shit out of them or not, my little acolytes, as you call ‘em, sit at this table and they’re part of something bigger. Something thrilling. Magical. Alchemic. They’re part of–”

“--a team.” You think about a littler him, yearning for people to escape with.

Eddie flaps his ever-animated hands. “Not my phrasing. But.”

“That thread runs through it all,” you say, drawing a line down the center of your notes with the inactive end of your pen, “Teamwork. Belonging. Victory– an escape from the mundane to victory, especially when you can’t find it elsewhere.”

Eddie’s chin rests on the back of his hand as he squints at you. “Sounding a little sportsmanlike there, Lacy.”

“And?”

“Thought you weren’t pulling for the everyman answer.”

“A hook’s a hook’s a hook,” you quirk your eyebrows, “–and, when you put it that way—”

“When you put it that way.”

“—what really makes you any different from, say, the Tigers?”

“Besides the cult of personality surrounding all jocks–”

“As if you don’t court your own little cult of personality—“

“—we actually win our campaigns.”

You start to retort, then stop. Letting that sink in.

“Oh. Oh, that’s good,” you say, sketching it down.

“I foresee letters to the editor in your future,” Eddie says, and he’s smug about it. Anything to aggregate the status quo, no matter what the blowback might be.

No one in their right mind here behaves like him. He just… does whatever he wants.

You find yourself wanting to touch the fence.

And maybe it’s that you stare at him a beat or so too long, but Eddie shifts his gaze down to the wood grain, flexing his hand. Scabs still marring his knuckles and all.

“It wasn’t broken or anything, then?” you ask, gesturing to his hand.

Eddie looks back up with a drag. You can feel what’s coming.

“Oh no, it was shattered,” he tells you, eyes-wide earnest and lying through his teeth, “My bones just heal super fast. My mom, she ate a shit ton of canned spinach when I was in ute.”

“Right, the calcium—”

“Nah. Rare botulism side effect,” he shrugs like, whaddaya gonna do!

Dumbass.

“Rare Botulism Side Effect is a good album title.”

“I’ll tell the guys.”

Silence falls again, and if you reach around, there’s something close to normalcy in there. Among the spikes and confusion.

“Um,” Eddie’s face contorts into a tiny cringe, “I found out what the… what the prank was, by the way. I obviously wasn’t here to witness the whole masterpiece theater of it all but– but Ronnie told me.”

A tight and ugly feeling constricts your chest. You look away, nodding through a grimace. You’d opened your locker with the practiced caution of someone diffusing a bomb since that whole incident, which sucks as someone who derives real joy from slamming metal doors.

“Pretty creative bit, huh?” is all you offer.

“Almost too creative for Hargrove,” Eddie counters, uprighting a fallen miniature with one finger.

“Are you trying to say I was being hysteric, jumping on his car?” It sounds like you’re offended, but.

“No,” Eddie meets you right where you’re at with this sparkle framing his stare, “I’m saying it was probably a collaborative effort. You could go seek even more batshit revenge, if you wanted to.”

“And would you be there to stop me before I cut Carol Perkins’ breaks?”

You can see Eddie biting his tongue between his teeth oh-so-lightly… Saliva catching in the low light. It’s warm in here. Stuffy.

“Prob–”

“I miss you.”

You cut him off in such a harsh, unforgiving way that Eddie feels his words rammed back down his throat. He blinks a couple of times, tempted to shake his head to make sure he heard you right. But there you are, your sight line running clean through him. You couldn’t be talking to anybody else.

“You do?” His voice is so small that his lips barely move. His lips, teased by his tongue, wetting them.

“Don’t act brand new. Everything’s harder without you. You have to know that.”

He gets snagged on the angles in your voice. By without you, he can only imagine you mean since he started giving you the cold shoulder and you started hitching rides in that college dork’s Ford Cortina. And by everything, he can only imagine…

“Lace…”

This is hard. This is horrible. This is uncomfortable and risky and as exposed as you have ever been, but it’s necessary.

“I can’t stand the tension of not being around you,” you say, breath feeling harsher as it speeds past your molars, “And I can’t stand the tension when I’m with you either, with you and wanting to–... so what do I do, Eddie?”

You focus on him, adjusting as if you were looking through the viewfinder of Jonathan’s Pentax. Eddie’s face, bewildered and angelic, with his parted mouth and his honorific glow of the stage lights haloing the frizz in his hair. He looks like something you want to commit to memory, as if to say see?! How could you deny this?

You rise from your seat, ever the investigator, and bear over him with hands on the table. Cards on the table, too. A genuine question smarts in your mouth, too sour candy you have to spit out.

“What do I do, Eddie?”

Eddie inhales with a sharp touch as you stand up, inspecting, demanding. He goes to tell you I don’t know… in the meekest of tones but the arch in your eyebrows says don’t you goddamn dare. You terrify him, and you make him dig.

“Forget it. Forget about all of it,” he breathes, almost tasting your perfume, “We can reset. Blank slate. Pretend like we don’t know each other. Pretend like none of this ever happened. It’d be better. Safer. Easy. Right? We could totally do that. We’ve fooled everybody so far. Even ourselves, into thinking this was… we could...”

“Fuck you,” you say in a soft rush.

Eddie only realizes that you’re both smiling when you kiss him. It’s clumsy at first, teeth knocking and everything, your hands winding around his collar and your frigid fingertips finding his neck. The shock of your skin on his, the matchstick crack of your mouth on his propels Eddie onto his motherfucking feet. He leans over you, knocking you into the table as your tongue works its way deep into his mouth.

You give him an, “Mm,” and if feels like an ascent to heaven.

Sparkles in the static makes the stuffiness evaporate, makes the room come alive. Your legs part to invite him closer to you, your hands faster and more insistent than his are. You pull at the hem of his Hellfire shirt and yank your head back, a string of saliva married between your mouths.

Fingers are more bold than they were in the nurse’s office, weaving the leather out of Eddie’s belt buckle. A deep ridge etches between Eddie’s eyebrows and his hands are propped in a mid-air surrender. Your eyes, your everything fucking eyes, are weighted with want. And challenge. Because you always do have to get one up on him.

“Reset this.” You tug at his zipper. “Tell me to stop.”

“Lacy…” Eddie whispers, watching you pull at the waistband of his boxers with his mouth agape. He’d dreamt about this. Thought about this. His cock about jumps into your hand like you’re Snow White and it’s a goddamned hummingbird. Pen marks on your fingers. “Jesus, y–...”

Eddie’s arms angle up behind his head, like a strung-up marionette, fabric of his shirt ghosting against his nipples in the stretch. This only makes him angle his hips further into you, eyelids flickering and his blood breaking the speed limit on its descent. Fuck, and then you fucking touch him– fingertips along the length of him, featherlight and goading.

Eddie’s groan is broken, half-caught in his nose. You’re looking at him like he’s a bad puppy, like you’re teaching him a lesson in scolding masking adoration. You’re beautiful and he wants to tell you so, but it all comes out in a whimper. Your hand closes around his cock, thumb brushing rii-iii-iight along the ridge of his head.

“Tell me to stop,” you echo yourself, and you’re fascinated that it comes out sounding like you know what you’re doing. You don’t. You’ve never been thrust into a net of feeling like this, never had anyone look at you the way Eddie is now– like he’d throw himself on a bed of open flames for you, so long as you kept touching him. It’s drunkard-making. It’s a full headrush. The gradual glisten of his reddening head looks delicious to you.

“Tell me to s–”

Grip tightens around him and Eddie moans from right in his sternum, his arms dropping to cradle around your head. He can’t believe he’s doing this, he can’t believe he’s fucking doing this but–

“Stop,” he gasps, fingers winding in your hair. His entire spinal cord is begging him to buck into your hand, your mouth, your anything, but he steels himself. “Stopstopstop, Lacy. Fuck– fuck.”

Your eyes widen, cheek in his palm. “Really?” Said in the most painful, the most misread did I do something? lilted tone. Your hand doesn’t exactly go slack right away.

“Yeah. Yes,” Eddie murmurs, eyes screwing closed and opening again, the most manual effort ever put behind a blink. “I c–I didn’t do this right, the first time. This is stupid. This is so stupid.”

And so your hands go, and you feel the anchor of your heart slowly dropping… But Eddie drops his face right down to yours.

“You deserve… so much more than giving me a handy on school property,” he tells you, and feels almost coherent about it. “Hot as it is. Right out of my… nastiest dreams as it is.”

Oh. Oh. The corners of your mouth pick up as Eddie presses his forehead to yours, just about evening out his breathing.

“Had a premonition about this, didja?” The pressure of his face on yours, his breath on yours, his skin on yours. It’s nice.

“Came to me in a vision,” he grins, crooked. Slides his thumbs along your cheeks and kisses you, slowly and noisily. “I’m a prognosticator.” Tongue half in, half out your mouth. Your heartbeat sinks between your legs. In a good way. “Been known to prognosticate.”

“Five dollar vocab word,” you mumble into his mouth, can’t help but push your body against him like a cat begging for attention. Eddie’s lips latch to the space right below your ear, a place where his mouth makes you feel like cymbals are clashing in your stomach.

“Come home with me,” he says, the note of pleading in his voice making your legs go numb. His nose and his lips dragging against the side of your neck, begging you to focus on the details and not the bigger picture. “Please.” A swallow. A beat. A ragged whisper. “... I missed you. Too. Y’know?”

“I do…” you sigh into his curls, readjusting his boxers, “actually need a ride… so.”

—

The van ride back to Forest Hills is tight with a tension that makes you both laugh, your mouth still buzzing from the kiss Eddie’d laid on you right before he’d helped you into the passenger seat. Even after he’d insisted you not touch him from the drama room to the parking lot, insisted because, “This thing,” he’d gestured to his crotch, his hard-on painfully zipped into submission, “this thing is gonna get me hauled over by the cops!”

“Don’t laugh!” you scold, mouth straining around the gleaming smile you’re suppressing, body all giddy. Voice ringing clear and high even over the cranked radio. Sabbath, naturally, Vol. 4. Wheels of Confusion sounds like treacle to you, mixed in with his laugh.

“I’m no-oo-oht!” Eddie says, syllables punctuated with chuckles, “I just– I am expressly escorting you back to my place! To, like, have sex with me!” His hands beat against the wheel, teeth sunk into that pretty bottom lip, giddy-upping so hard he actually does swerve the van a little.

“Woah!” you yelp, “Eddie, the road! You should’ve let me drive, you’re feral!”

Eddie moon eyes at you, reaching over to pinch your chin. “Lace, please don’t get all sore about this, but I will never trust you behind the wheel of this van. She’s a delicate piece of machinery and you would drive her like it’s the demolition derby.”

Narrowed eyes and all, you kind of have to concede. You’ve never been the best behind the wheel, a road rageaholic, and if you were to add feeling as frisky as you do now on top of that sundae… you press Eddie’s DM binder into your lap a little harder. Down, girl. He doesn’t help, thumb stroking your chin and everything.

“This is suh-rreal.”

“Stop zooming out so hard or I’m not gonna have sex with you!” You’re kidding. You’re so completely kidding. If he doesn’t touch you someplace lower than your neck soon, you’re going to disintegrate.

But Eddie pauses. “Like, you don’t. Have to.” Panicky, freezy. Hastily pulling on his good guy hat. “You don’t– by the way. It’s whatever you want. Call timeout at any time. I know I’ve been kinda–”

“Eddie.”

“...you still want to though, right?”

The giggling dies down as you edge closer and closer to your respective trailers, darkness washed over them like a swathe of dark blue paint. The lights in both trailers are out. Nobody home. Wayne, something about the weekend, something about overtime. Your mom… who knew. She’d been moving around in shadows more so than usual lately.

Everything out there is dimmed, except you two. Eddie doesn’t waste a second once the motor shuts off and the radio is silenced; he slams the driver door shut but the teensiest knot of hesitation tightens in your stomach before he reaches the passenger door.

And then he reaches the passenger door, gathering you out of it and pushing you up against the side of the van. Snapping you out of it instantaneously using the bare force of his mouth against yours.

“Eddie…” mumbled, your lips barely unstuck.

“Sorry. Shit, sorry. I just really like kissing you.”

Something pops in your chest; he’s… Jesus, he’s so sweet. Coal-eyed and excitable and lovely, kissing you with nothing left to spare.

“Hey. Redirect,” you shiver, his fingertips pressing into your waist. “Come to my place.”

Eddie casts a wide glance back toward your double-wide. The forbidden castle. “Your… y–are you sure?”

“Sure that my bedsheets are cleaner than yours, yes.”

He murmurs, “Bedsheets,” with a darkened gaze and a grunt. Bedsheets. You wanted him in your bedsheets. “Get your key. Get your key. Get your key before me and my dick have a shared brain hemorrhage.”

That new lock doesn’t stick at all, thank god.

Eddie, ordinarily, would nosily register all of his surroundings– he had an extremely barebones idea of your place, cast mostly in darkness like this, from that first night he’d driven you back from the fallout at Harrington’s. But he’s too busy nosily exploring your throat with his tongue, recording and archiving every breathy sound you make as you tug him toward your bedroom.

Cardboard boxes still trip you up a couple times. Did you ever unpack, or what?

You break from his heady kiss, vision doubling, taking in a lungful of air as you push Eddie through the door. Spine flattens against it as it shuts, the noise drawing a little bit of sobriety into the room. You reach to hit the floor lamp on and your bedroom is illuminated in a soft, orange glow, a scarf thrown over the bulb to diffuse light. A half-effort to make you forget where you were sometimes. It works; the edges of everything softens, which is such a contrast to the definitive presence that he is.

Eddie’s chest is heaving. He attempts to get his bearings but he can barely get his eyes off of you, squirming ever-so-slightly, ever-so-sexily against the door. Like you’d captured him.

Lips swollen, watching you watch him from the door, he turns a little shy and turns to look at the ephemera around him instead.

He’s standing in your bedroom.

You’re far more cluttered than he expected you to be.

He expected pressed sheets and a pristine dressing table, like a prison cell designed by a set dresser from Dynasty.

Well, that’s wrong, actually. He expected that of the Lacy people thought you were.

On the walls are a couple of tear-outs from the Rolling Stones he’d helped you liberate from your porch in Loch Nora, a mission you’d bought him breakfast for but didn’t have to. But mostly, every surface in the room is covered in piles. Piles of books, records, tapes, pens, jewelry, nail polish. And the clothes. They hung from everywhere, bursting out of your tiny closet space like bodies trying to escape.

It’s confused in here; feels like someone who has unearthed parts of herself that she hasn’t been able to organize yet. Eddie wants to comb through it like a collector at a rarities market, he thinks, running a finger along the spine of a porcelain cat that sits on your dresser.

“Place is filthy, cheerleader.”

“You’d know about mess, freak.”

The only really neat, clear space is, fortunate for tonight’s entertainment purposes, the bed.

As he’s sliding his jacket (jackets, plural) off, Eddie’s eye travels to the window.

“Did you fix your blinds?” he asks, pivoting back and forth on his heel.

“My blinds?” you parrot. The blinds that had been broken when you moved in. The ones that sure were shuttered now. You’d made a point to fix them with whatever was left out of your first paycheck from the Bookstore. “How’d you know about my blinds?”

He could’ve lied, if he caught himself quicker. If he didn’t straighten up his back like someone had snapped him to attention. “Uuh.”

It dawns on you like a flashlight in the eyeballs. “Were you… watching me, Munson?”

Not spying, mind. Not peeping. Watching. Eddie sinks down to sit on the edge of your bed, because whether or not he’s ever going to get to be here again kind of hangs in the balance right now.

“That. Dep…ends. What do you,” Please don’t kick him out. Please don’t kick him out. Look at the line of your fucking body as you round on him, staring him down like you want him for dinner. Christ, he hopes you want him for dinner.

Eddie swallows roughly, tone bumpy, face a dime store Halloween mask of nonchalance. Paper thin. “What do you think about that?”

Fact is, he’d subsisted on a couple of very guilty glimpses of you. Catching sight of the lines of your bare back and taught shoulders would keep him in jerk-off material for a week, just thinking about kneading out your knots and undoing your bra clasp with his teeth.

Eddie felt positively Victorian about it. Maybe you’d flash an ankle at him next and he’d be institutionalized for hysterics.

You look at him with the same pinpoint as you did earlier. Like you’re studying him. And then you edge closer, closer, nudging his knees apart. Echoes of the nurse’s office.

But this isn’t the goddamn nurse’s office. You’re not straining to adapt to the element of surprise. You know that the breath Eddie takes, shuddering and wondrous as you tilt his chin up to look at you, is a sound you want on repeat for as long as you can bear to hear sounds.

“They’ve blinded men for that, y’know? Before.”

Eddie can’t answer. Just let out a huh! as your fingers trace his jaw, thumb brushes his lip. His hands squeeze the curve of your ass, fingers beg into your thighs as he watches you, dumbstruck. His tongue unconsciously presses to the tip of your thumb and he hears your breath hitch.

A sustained shock travels up your neck.

“I mean, was it worth it?”

“Was it w… Lacy.” Eddie’s hands have breached the hem of your skirt and with a groan, his face burrows into the silken fabric of your shirt, like he’s trying to nudge it off with his nose or his mouth. Fingers are working mindlessly to loosen some article of clothing from your body and it makes you feel buzzy and trancelike. “Don’t ask stupid questions. I might have fuckin’ carpal tunnel because of you.”

Jesus. He makes you feel so…

Desired. Needed. You’ve never felt that way before, and you don’t quite know how to navigate it. So your buttons start coming undone with the work of one hand, the other shoving Eddie by the shoulder to lean back on your bed.

Eddie, here, among all your things. Disparate in your shabby little dollhouse, looking at you like you just swallowed the sun.

Your shirt comes off, and Eddie, in a game of match point, tugs his off too. Pause comes over the both of you. You’d seen him shirtless before; shower-bare in his trailer when the first security breach happened, a crack in the containment whatever you were pretending your relationship to each other was–affable enemies, irritated acquaintances. He’d looked at you like an animal cornered, tendons tense under his tattooed skin and you’d wanted to drag a finger or two down the center of his chest.

You didn’t, though. You’d sniped, asked where the cigarettes were.

This is all one big case of making up for lost time.

You’ve been looking at him so long, bra strap slipping off your shoulder, that Eddie leans forward. As if to come get you.

Remember me? I’m real. You can touch me. Touch me, please.

His warm arms pull you to him, pull you onto the bed, pull you against his lips. It’s gentler there; not as furtive. It says, hi, I’m here. Your arms, tugging him closer as he eases you beneath him say, good, I’ve been waiting. Eddie brushes his nose against yours, you laid down with your hair fanned out on the plush comforter.

Both your pulses must have stuttered at the same time.

His smile is serene but you can feel his forearms trembling. “I feel like I’m gonna have a heart attack.”

“Don’t,” you tell him, very quietly while his hand nervously tries to find the zipper on your skirt, “I just got you back.”

Your hips lift to help him and you’re wiggling the thing off and you’re wiggling your tights off and he’s thrashing his jeans off only to land back between your parted legs with bouncing recoil from the mattress. Laughter biting in one another’s mouths. The nerves are teeming off him in waves and it makes you want to kiss him all over.

The feeling housed in your body is different; not jittery, but struck somehow. This doesn’t feel like the way it usually feels, the way it does when you disappear into spare rooms at parties or the shadow of Skull Rock or hitch your leg up against the center console of someone’s shitty car. It doesn’t feel rote, like you’re doing it to stack up experience points– that is a Dungeons and Dragons term you found particularly interesting. How many bad tongue kisses had you accepted just to feel like you’re progressing, instead of waiting for someone who wants to taste you like Eddie does?

Your bodies caged together, you feel the eager, hard, tragically clothed line of him rub against your center. Eddie manages to free your bra clasp on the first try, which you almost goadingly applaud him for–but he cuts you short with a bewitched stare, his lovely, hot mouth laving over your nipple as he slips the fabric away. It tears the first real moan from you, your back arching into his kneading fingers as his tongue curves over your tightening bud.

Eddie can’t believe what he’s hearing. He can barely see straight, but he’s trying to commit every second of this to a glorious Technicolor memory, sound and image capturing working overtime. The sound that comes from your beautiful, balmy mouth sounds fresh out the packet–like you’d never made it for anyone before. The look of suppressed surprise on your face confirms as much and Eddie feels like he might explode.

He, too, has no idea what he’s doing but he can’t help his hips from jerking into you as he plays on. Playing with your nipples, remembering that making them glisten with his spit will make you whimper, and so will kissing the center of your sternum. He’s watching wide-eyed and fascinated as your brow furrows and your legs tighten around him. He’s a wonderful student, when he wants to be.

Eddie is throbbing, and there’s too much cotton and lace between you.

There’s also this other thing, and it comes out of him like word upchuck as you try to tease his boxers down around his hips using only your feet.

“I oughta tell you,” Eddie whispers, voice all raspy, all boyish with his hair tickling your collarbone, “I’m, uh. I’m not good at this.”

“At what?” He’s got one hand roaming over your chest, the other making indents in the meat of your thigh. It feels like he’s holding your breath right in his hands.

A new shade of pink rises high in Eddie’s already straining cheeks. He really doesn’t want to have to use his words to spell it out. “Thiii-iiss.”

Oh. A rivulet of cold realization runs through you. Nicole. Cass. Girls daring themselves to get near to him. Experience points. The great freak experiment project.

“This isn’t that.” Your hands hold his chin, perhaps a little roughly, to make sure he’s listening. And Eddie is, breath baited. You press your forehead to his like he pressed his forehead to yours. “It’s not.”

He’s really about to ask you, what is it, then? but that feels like something you can work out later. Eddie lets you tug at his lips and you let him tug at your panties, arching up so you can wiggle them down your legs. His eyes cast to the downy hair at your mound, and it’d usually occur to you to apologize for your unshaven legs, as if it mattered.

But the way he regards you doesn’t call for that; it calls for you to open up for him. Spread.

A rough pad of a finger runs along your slit, feeling the generous drip that’s gathered, and Eddie moans as your breath hitches into an animalistic, “hahh!”-- he’s edging down your body to bury his face there. He wants to feel you, smell you, taste you. You tense at the sudden contact of his palms pressing your thighs open, his nose against your clit and he feels it. A jolt of worry passes through him. Did you not want that? “Sorry–”

“Don’t– no, Eddie, don’t stop,” you strain, laugh a little, “You just… surprised me. Keep– keep surprising me. Please.”

Shockwaves break through you as he gingerly offers his tongue. And more, and more, until he’s lapping at you with a vigor and no real direction. You dig against him, made speechless by the building ache in your core.

In your fantasies, you hadn’t anticipated him being so giving–so eager to please and explore. Like all things, this moment projected itself in your head with the hard edges of some imagined cockiness, Eddie telling you to spread your legs and you, nymphlike and fluid and still somehow holding all the indiscriminate ‘power’, doing so.

But this? This is soft and messy and spitty and real. Eddie is drooling and babbling into your pussy with the uncalculated effect of someone who has improvised his whole life and it’s tearing you at the seams. A satisfying little rip, every keen movement he makes.

You know when you’re close to climax, that familiar feeling of your cunt suckling at nothing, but it doesn’t feel as jagged as the first time he brought you there. Urgently, you tug at his hair, claw at his shoulders, begging for his attention.

“Eddie,” you gasp and his hands flex around your thighs at the sound of his name in your mouth. It’s yours, he wants to tell you, rutting heedlessly into the mattress from his position between your legs, keep it! Please! “Eddie, Eddie– come here, come to me.”

Your velveteen voice summons him, his face glistening from the exploration of you. Embarrassment threatens to ping at you, but it flames into want, seeing how wet and obscene he looks. That’s all from you?

Eddie does as he’s told, heart pounding– and the sensation of fabric dragging against the raw tip of his cock nearly makes him pass out.

“Fuck! Fuck, you–” he stammers as your hand pulls his heavy length free, balls tightening under your firm touch, “N-not fuck you, obvi-ously, but–hunh–okay, kinda fuck you…”

Eddie’s lips fold against yours as he attempts, with shuddering arms, to brace himself over you. He whines at your dexterity, swiping his head against your entrance. The wetness from him, the wetness from you– the sheer impact of sensation slices clean through him. It’s not a tactic, you’re not teasing; you’re angling to get him inside you. You need to get him inside you, your entire body is begging for it.

“Baby, please, please, I’m not gonna last–”

“Who said you had to?” you ask, voice a drop of dark syrup. Just for him. “Who said you had to?”

The earnestness in your eyes gives Eddie pause– for all of a pulsating second.

“I want you… inside. Don’t you want to feel me?” you ask with real conviction, thumb swiping over his moistened head in a way that makes his vision go galactic.

Eddie yanks your hand away, kissing roughly it, nailing it beside your head as he tries to ease into you.

“Want? It’s all I want–fuck, it’s all I fucking think about, Lacy–huhh–”

His first attempt results in a gasp of pain– the sting, the stretch, it’s a little much a little fast. The sharpness has you wincing and has Eddie searching your face with an arrested kind of guilt.

“Y–shit, baby, are you–”

“I’m okay,” you recover, hand steadying on his flushed cheek. “Just–slower. Ease it in. You’re– you’re pretty remarkable, Eddie.”

“Remarkable?” he mumbles against your cheek, focused and slowly lining his head against your entrance. “Really?”

“Prodigiou—ss, uhh–fuck!” Whispered swears come streaming from you as he sinks right into the velvety constraints of your cunt.

Your eyes roll right back, mouth tipping open and the grip of you arresting around him makes him cry out into your chest.

Eddie’s cock is long and heavy and thick, constricted to the point where you can nearly feel every ridge of him. It hurts, the stretch of him aches, but it’s delicious–pinned and sweetly painful.

“Prodigious–is a five dollar–fuckin’--vocab word–” he strains, lifting his hips ever so slightly– you’re clutched onto him so tight that you move with him. Eddie open-mouth groans against your neck. “Lacy, Jesus, you’re so tight–you feel so good–how the fuck do you feel so good? Who invented you?!”

There’s a tinge of a giggle in your moaning, which doesn’t let up. Eddie’s voice rings out like a church bell, making one slow stroke inside you, then another. Then another, then another, picking up speed, groans chorusing into the hollow of your neck around the lewd sound of his flesh slapping against yours. The sound alone brings you close to cumming. “Oh, pleasepleaseplease, fuck, Lace, I’m g– fuck, I’m–”

The way Eddie’s hands are carving permanent marks into your hips, the way his movements are halting, you get the idea that… “You holding out on me?” you ask him, short of breath around your panting but demanding still, “Don’t you dare–don’t you dare.”

“Lacy, uhh– please, ’mgonnafucking–”

“Cum for me? Are you?”

Your fingers tug at his curls so you can look at him as his face tenses. Eddie’s hair is flattened across his head, face glimmering with exertion. You drag your lips against his forehead, the salty flavor of sweat breaking across your tastebuds.

“For you, for you, shit, only for you–only for you, only fucking ever–fuck–”

His dark eyes have been blown out since he pulled you to the mattress, eyelids flickering over his irises as he pistons into you with speed that hurts but you love it.

You barely hear yourself beginning a prayer of dirty little succors, but there it is, easing him through his orgasm as he shudders a load between your legs. “You feel like nothing on this fucking earth, you know that, you’re so good for me...” The tension breaks with one final rasping cry, his expression dissolving into a softness as he exhales a lungful, neck stretching to lean into your touch.

A couple of half-cracked dry sobs escape him.

Looking up at you, cradled against your shoulder, Eddie’s cursing himself for every second he’s wasted not doing this with you.

And you, looking down, are stroking his damp curls from his forehead and cursing yourself. You’re going to burn the world down for this boy.

“Lacy. You–”

And then, y’know, the fucking front door of the trailer clicks.

Little too much deja vu for your liking these days!

Immediately, you seize upwards, jolting a confused Eddie with you– which breaks your heart, in a way, seeing him darty-eyed and shocked out of his bliss so fast.

“Fuck. Fuck. Fuckfuckfuck.” These are not like your prior ‘fucks’, he can register through the haze of his post-nut state. These are bad fucks. So he responds in turn, “Fuck?”

“My mom!” You hiss, naked and scrambling. Panic crests on you like a wave, a wave that should have been an orgasm mind fucking you, and your fingernails tear at the comforter beneath you.

“Under, under, gogogo!”

Because if there’s one thing your mother, in all her former-center-of-attention glory, loves to do? It’s enter a room uninvited.

Case in fucking point–

“Lacy?” A perfunctory knuckle rap from the other side of the door, just as you manage to hide Eddie by shoving him behind you and tenting the comforter around you both. You’re praying to anything with a little more gusto than God that it works. And then, enter your mother and her cloud of Shalimar.

Soon as she opens the door, you can tell something is terribly off.

She’s smiling, face as serene as the Virgin Mary. Usually she’s got a sharpened dagger of a glare, just for you. Two of you haven’t been spending much quality time lately, see.

“Lacy! What–” your mom’s brow knits, but it’s a look of amusement. Which freaks you out. She’s looking at your just-fucked-by-Eddie-Munson hair, isn’t she? The mascara that’s surely streaking down your face? Does she know? Can she sense he’s in this very room? “--what are you doing?”

“Napping. Crying. What does it look like?” you snap, hiking the comforter up a little further and begging that she doesn’t notice Eddie’s incriminating clothes strewn across the floor.

Eddie, for his part, is not breathing. He’s crouched behind your bare ass, a position he’s in no rush to get out of, arms caged around your thighs like a petrified child. This is almost funny–or would be, if he wasn’t scared shitless of everything your mom would definitely do to him if she discovered him buck ass naked in your bed.

Dreamily, Eddie reminds himself that he’s buck ass naked, in your bed. He smiles into one of your cheeks and considers how biteable it is.

“Well. Wrap it up,” your mom says, tone still light, and you twinge at the irony. At least you’re on the pill. “I have a surprise.”

Slam. Door shuts. Your lamp wobbles with the force of it and Eddie emerges from behind you, like a freshly-fucked groundhog.

“She sounds happy,” he mumbles, arms sliding up around your waist.

You want to kiss the mirth out his mouth but you have to shove him back behind you first– cue your mom, doubling back through the door. Jesus!

“What was that?”

“Nothing!” you say, shortly and breathily because Eddie nips at your fucking ass cheek back there. “Just–you sound happy, mom!”

She shakes her head at you, a smile curving her tulip colored lips, like a mom from a detergent commercial. Y’know, were it not for the whole Italian widow getup she’s alway sporting.

“Get on with it already.”

You count to a full five before you even let out a breath, snapping your attention back to reality and the fact that Eddie Munson is very naked in your very bed.

“You gotta get out of here,” you tell him, and you want to kill yourself about it.

The both of you balance on your knees. Eddie tugs you into him with shining, begging eyes. Standing almost at full attention again, already.

“Jesus, that thing’s impressive.”

Eddie’s fingers wind around the hair at the nape of your neck. Despite the brief jolt of fear from your little interruption just now, he’s all romance–totally suckered, rose-colored glasses, the whole bit. Thoughts not exactly creating a straight line just yet, but he doesn’t care. He’s had his hands all over you for the better part of an evening now, and he doesn’t want to let up just yet. It might kill him. It might kill him.

There’s no unringing this bell between the two of you, and he knows that.

And you knew it first, because you know everything first.

“You sure?” he hums into your sweet lips, “You absolutely positive? Because I could be real, real quiet…”

Eddie’s also thrilled by the fact that he seems to know instinctively what to do to turn you on.

“What if I don’t want you to be real, real quiet?”

You kiss him back, sighing and sliding a single finger down the length of his cock.

“Lace…” he whimpers to you, his commandant fantasy of being dominant in the bedroom officially, officially escorted out back and shot. He wants to please you too badly. Be the jester in your court that makes you cackle and makes you cum.

“Lacy!” a shrill yell comes from the hall. Your eyes snap open, Eddie’s dancing with amusement and yours heaving with alarm.

“Fuck, okay, go! Window!”

Another scramble, you tossing jeans and socks and the rest of Eddie’s uniform at him while you clean yourself off, try to pull a robe around yourself. A stray thought occurs to you as you watch him trip over himself, ripping the hole in his jeans a little further–you hate what he wears, but you love it on him. And off him. And…

You yank up those blinds and unlatch the window with a faint smile. Nothing about you two makes any conceivable sense–

Eddie starts out the window, shirt barely pulled down his torso and his shoes in his hands, then turns to hook you to him by the elbow. Smiling with the full blush of his mouth, he kisses you. Firm and knowing and whole.

–except that. That makes sense.

The pad of his finger clears a lock of rumpled hair from your forehead.

“To be continued?” Eddie searches your face, with those crazy dark brimming universes of eyes.

Your heart is leaping in your ribcage. You nod sharply, gleaming back at him.

“I’m comin’ back for you, Lacy Doevksi,” he tells you with all the brazen confidence he can muster. “And I am gonna go down on you until I drown. On pain of death, I swear it.”

“Go!” you command, and regret it as soon as he drops out of your bedroom window. Eddie starts a cant toward his trailer across the way.

“Faster!” you hiss, just as an excuse to watch him.

He pivots mid-jog, hair swinging wildly, his hand grabbing at his crotch.

“You try runnin’ with a hard on! Witch!”

It’s far, far, far too quiet once he’s escaped through the front door of his trailer.

It's not fair, you think. You should be basking in some kind of afterglow, sharing a stupid cliché cigarette, you feel like you should be... celebrating this.

You shouldn't have to keep running away from each other.

The warmth the two of you had created, through mere physical friction or just how much you… you like each other, rapidly dissipated into a chill as you advance through your bedroom door, to deal with the other thing.

Surprise, you thought, What kind of goddamn surprise could mother o'mine have for me? Did she boost a bank? Did she win the Indiana Sweepstakes? I don’t want to know about any g–

“Lorelei.”

The universe has a way of shoving you back in place when you get ahead of yourself.

You don’t just stop in your tracks, you’re repelled a half-step backwards. The centrifugal force urging you away, telling you there’s an immediate threat in the heart of your home.

No one uses that name anymore. Not even him. Not since you were fourteen.

“Daddy.”

Your father sits at the shabby dinette that you and your mother don’t even share meals at, sits there in the suit he was sentenced in. A rich navy pinstripe, chosen because gray would have been too flashy and black would admit defeat. “Of course!” your mother had said, marveling at his ingenuity. But the pantomime of his defense was wearing real thin on you; whispering at school had started growing louder and louder and you were finding more and more chips in the porcelain of your father’s worldly facade.

“Why not compromise. Wear charcoal,” you’d said, leaning against the kitchen counter in Loch Nora, drinking orange juice from your parents’ wedding crystal as the movers taped up your boxes, “You can plead guilty and still look smug about it.”

Your father had smacked the flute from your hand and it shattered in forty thousand pieces on the ground. You didn’t move, didn’t breathe, because you knew if you did, you’d be next.

Navy it was. And navy it is. He sits at that dinette like he’s expecting white jacket service. You swear even more gray has started glimmering through his hair. Flashy.

“Should I ask how you’re here?” you say, stiff and scared. Your mother, standing at your father’s shoulder, tuts and sighs. Can’t you just enjoy this? she silently bemoans.

“Good behavior,” Ray smiles, “Can’t say the same for you. Can I, Lorelei?”

“Principal Higgins called,” your mom chimes in, “Or rather, that odious little secretary called. You think you could get a Saturday detention and they just wouldn’t tell us?”

“That’s why he’s here?” You laugh a little, inwardly. “With all due respect, Daddy, that’s a terrible reason to break out of prison.”

To your surprise, your father chuckles too. Makes your blood run cold, obviously.

“Y’know, I really didn’t anticipate this for my homecoming, I gotta tell you,” he says, shifting in his seat and plucking a cigarillo from his jacket pocket. “I mean, honestly. I thought, a nice bottle of Beaujolais–”

“We’re fresh out,” you gesture to your cringing mother.

“--a dinner at, Christ, Enzo’s, since that’s where our budget is at now,” his lighter flicks and ignites the end, “But no. I have to sit here and cross-examine my daughter about… fraternizing with the lowest of criminal elements.”

The lack of self awareness here is off the fucking charts. It makes your blood pressure spike.

“Take a seat, Lacy,” your father so gallantly gestures to the vinyl backed kitchen chair in front of him, “and tell me all about Eddie Munson.”

Chair drags aggressively against the linoleum. You sit, and swear that the next time you’re caught off guard by anyone’s father, it’d better be God himself.

This bit is getting old.

author's notes: so i'm not fucking around when i say i need to hear everyone's thoughts on what just happened immediately. i really do think that happenings-wise, this was my favourite chapter to write thus far. felt cathartic, from the al munson to the hellfire article of it all. anyway. onto the good stuff - like i feel like everyone who reads this series will have clocked this but of course i lifted the garlic slicing right out of goodfellas. i just think it's a perfect al munson attribute to have - al munson kicking out the jams instead of picking up his kid i know that's right - our dukes of hazzard ref is a tribute to my own personal al munson fancast - not that paris, texas but this paris, texas. (and you know when lacy eventually gets eddie to watch it he CRIES. they both cry) - i should probably put the repo man trailer in here as well - speaking of another fancast! the manager of forest hills trailer park is, of course, to me, in my heart, carl rodd. - the best song off of abbey road by the beatles, fight with the wall - SHOULD WE CALL THE MAYOR - lacy promising eddie that he can ride circles around her on a motor bike is a reference to hunter s thompson being ambushed on canadian television by one of the hells angels he wrote about in his book. dude rolls onto set on his hog. it's crazy. - eddie is kinda gossamer coded - cow tipping? at mccorkle's? anybody? our love is god - god wheels of confusion is kinda horny sounding huh i think that this might be the shortest references recap so far in the series?? one of them anyway. probably because i wrote 4k words of FILTH. anyway, thank you all so much for continuing to read this fucking thing. we're almost at the end of this part of the story which is wild to me. now let me get on your ass and remind you that REBLOGGING FICS IS ESSENTIAL TO YOUR FIC WRITERS HEALTH. SO ARE COMMENTS AND SO ARE ASKS so send those pls :) love you hellcats. be well, cats

#published by powder #hellfire & ice #in progress #e. munson by powder #eddie munson x reader #eddie munson x f!reader #eddie munson x you #eddie munson x oc #stranger things fic #eddie munson fic

199 notes · View notes

ryomaandgundhamkin · 2 months ago

Text

HELLO! EVERYONE!! ASKS ARE OPEN (READ FOR INFO)

(@peachyfnaf @theinfamousdoctorf @theinfamousmaybelle @moonlit-dreamers @bloodmoon-da-idiot @the-weirdest-and-silliestfriend @deyisacherry @leafmilky @maikoevans0785 @lilith0908 @starlight811 @iza-h4t3s-b1g0ts @wonders-sunlight @upsidedownapple @sillygoofycyn @da-queenguin @skibibadadobop @onikecrescent @lunar-solarsystem @purplepanda0909 @gremlininthedark @charliecuculi @norana0615 @foxboidrew @endereverett @tsamsheadcanons @sunnyboi3 @dyooranges @bunnnnix @randomfoxsworld @randomized-sims23 @lovescatscats @mmrcr8tivity @achickennamedcheese @tvboxi @ballygaming1205 @grimmofthequeenn @solarisdabest69 @starsmothercannon @alex-issad @lednet-sorrow @that-one-unknown-artist @luckyyyduckyyy @sunshineeenigggggt @pollux-starsz @sassycandypoetry @wolfes-alt

IM SO SO SO SO SO SO SO SO SORRY FOR THAT HVHCHDJ 😭)

LOCKUP AU IS WIP- if any of you want to check it out it will be here:

@cannibaleclipseau

ASKS ARE OPEN ON MY SECOND BLOG, CANNIBALECLIPSEAU!! THEY ALWAYS WILL BE OPEN HERE IF YOU WANT TO ASK ANYTHING TO MY OCS. PLEASE DONT SPAM MY INBOX.

ASKS FOR THE AU ARE ALLOWED ON MY SECOND BLOG! THE AU IS STILL WIP ⚠️

THANK YOU AND IM SO SO SORRY!!!

I’m sorry about school and everything that makes me busy😭💔… thanks for the understanding

#important #asks open #send asks #send asks to my second blog #second blog #au info #ryo yapping #LOCKUP AU #CANNIBAL ECLIPSE AU

35 notes · View notes

braveclementine · 4 months ago

Text

Berlin

Warnings: 18+readersonly, somewhat sexual flirting

Copyright: I do not own any Marvel characters or locations. However, I do own my OC Elizabeth Lightwood. I do not condone any copying of this.

Elizabeth had made a show of breaking her handcuffs and had pretty much fought all of them until they had allowed her to ride in the car with Bucky. They had put him in some sort of container that pissed her off, but you didn't see it as you were put into a different car with Steve, Sam, and T'Challa- who was the cat man.

"So you like cats?" Sam asked next to you, T'Challa and Steve being in the middle.

"Sam." Steve sighed.

"What? Dude shows up dressed like a cat, you don't wanna know more?" Sam hissed.

"Your suit. . . it's vibranium?" Steve asked.

He looked at Steve and for a moment you thought he wasn't even going to answer but then he said, "The Black Panther has been the protector of Wakanda for generations. A mantle, passed from warrior to warrior. And now, because your friend murdered my father, I also wear the mantle of a King."

"He didn't." You said softly. "I have been looking. . . we have been looking for Bucky for years. My friend, she comes from a planet called Asgard who has a man there by the name of Heimdall who can see the future. She brought me to Bucharest and we found him. We have been with him for a week. I do not know who blew up the UN or why Bucky was blamed, but he hasn't left the apartment."

No one else spoke, but you hoped they had listened.

🎃 ::::: 🧡 ━━━━━━━━━━━━━━ 🧡 ::::: 🎃

As you got out of the car, you saw the box they had put Bucky in. It was a huge container and your heart immediately went out to him. Elizabeth looked furious, standing by the box, a hand on the glass. They were trying to get her to move away from him, move to where you, Steve, Sam, and T'Challa were, but she wasn't budging.

Afraid that she was going to pull a Loki and stab someone, you called for her. She softened and looked at Bucky. She pressed her hand completely to the glass, said something to him, and then joined you.

"What's going to happen to him?" Steve and Elizabeth asked at the same time.

"Same thing that ought to happen to you. Psychological evaluation and extradition."

"This is Everett Ross, Deputy Task Force Commander."

"What about a lawyer?" Steve asked.

"Lawyer. That's funny."

"As a citizen of the United States and under the fifth amendment, he has every right to a lawyer." Elizabeth said, crossing her arms over her chest. "You might think he's guilty but because of the process, he's innocent until proven guilty. You're in the Government, you should know that."

"Funny, coming from someone whose soulmate is also a murderer." Ross said, sneering. "See their weapons are placed in lockup."

"You might not want to touch my weapons." Elizabeth smirked, "Some magic might. . . well let's not spoil the fun, shall we?"

"We'll write you a receipt."

"I better not look out the window and see anybody flying around in that." Sam threatened.

"You'll be provided with an office instead of a cell." Everett continued as they walked through the Berlin campus. "Now, do me a favour, stay in it?"

"I don't intend on going anywhere." T'Challa said.

"For the record," Natasha who apparently came out of nowhere said, joining Steve on his other side, "This is what making things worse looks like."

"He's alive." Steve said.

"He's innocent." Elizabeth said.

"No. Romania was not Accords-sanctioned." You heard Tony's voice up ahead and wondered if things could get worse. Or possibly better. "Colonel Rhodes is supervising cleanup."

"Try not to break anything while we fix this." Nat said over her shoulder.

"Consequences? You bet there will be consequences." Tony said into the phone, staring straight at you as he stood up and started to make his way towards the rest of you. "Obviously you can quote me on that, because I just said it. Anything else? Thank you, sir." He hung up.

"Consequences?" Steve asked.

"Secretary Ross wants the four of you prosecuted." Tony said. "Had to give him something."

"I'm not getting that shield back, am I?" Steve asked.

"Technically, it's the Government's property." Nat said. "Wings too."

"That's cold." Sam muttered.

"Technically, it never was." Elizabeth muttered and then paused, "On the shield anyway. Howard was never Government and the Government never gave Steve the shield but ya know, make up the rules as you go along so no one else can play. Fuck everyone here."

"Okay." Steve said, turning on you, "What the hell happened to 'I would never go look for your soulmate without you Steve'?"

"You were in London for Peggy. Someone had to go." You muttered.

"I wanted to make sure he was mentally sound before you went." Elizabeth sighed. "Give him someone that wasn't biased. You're biased Steve and I needed open minds."

"Tony seems colder than usual." Sam sighed.

"Er- I may have. . ." You looked over at Elizabeth and she rolled her eyes. "Damn, you really told him over the phone?"

"Look, in my defense I didn't want to wait." You protested.

"What?" Sam and Steve asked together.

You sighed, "Bucky. . . no, the Winter Soldier killed Tony's parents."

T'Challa snorted.

Elizabeth turned on the black panther and fired up immediately. "First off, I'll have you know that Bucky wasn't even there to kill your father, which I'm sorry for your loss. And for a second thing, I would love to see you try and fight mind manipulation when someone is forcing you to do something. Oh, that's right, you can't. Even Gods can be taken over so don't act all high and mighty like you could do better if they stuck you in a mind wiping machine and turned you into a monster."

She stormed up onto the platform.

"So. . ." Sam said awkwardly. "I'm guessing her and Barnes got along wonderfully?"

"Yeah." You said. "They. . ." You laughed a little. "they connected so easily, it was amazing. She's been helping bring his memories back slowly. He's been remembering his mom, his sister, teachers, you Steve, Peggy, some of the other members on his battalion. . . stuff like that. Doing memory games with him, introducing him to people he doesn't know and quizzing him on them. He's improved so much. . ."

"Hey, you wanna see something cool." Tony said. "I pulled something from dad's archives." Tony said, holding something up between his fingers. "Felt timely." Steve sat down in a chair. Since Tony seemed to be only talking to Steve, you and Sam stayed silent. "FDR signed the Lend-Lease bill with these in 1941. Provided support the allies when they need it the most."

Great Tony, fantastic. You thought. Show him something nearly as old as him, telling him that FDR used them to help Steve's side win the war. Perfect.

"Some would say it brought our country closer to war." Steve said.

"See? If not for these, you wouldn't be here. I'm trying to. . . what do you call it? That's an olive branch. Is that what you call it?"

"I'd call it blackmail or bribery, one of the two." Elizabeth called over her shoulder, staring at the TV screen that had Bucky on it.

The two of them muttered a bit and Tony stood up, "You know Dad was a pain in the ass, but he and mom made it work."

"You know, I'm glad Howard got married. I only knew him when he was young and single." Steve said.

"Oh, really. You two knew each other?" Tony asked sarcastically. "He never mentioned that. Maybe only a thousand times. God, I hated you."

"I don't mean to make things difficult." Steve sighed.

"I know, because you're a very polite person unlike cheetah cub over there," Tony jerked his finger at Elizabeth. T'Challa looked at her and she bared her teeth like fangs at Tony and hissed. You and Sam tried not to laugh.

"If I see a situation pointed south, I can't ignore it. Sometimes I wish I could."

"No you don't." Tony muttered.

Steve smiled. "No, I don't."

"Which is a good thing." Elizabeth said, "Means someone on the team has a moral compass."

"Hey, you know I took you in." Tony shouted back at her.

"Sometimes. . ."

"Sometimes I want to punch you in your perfect teeth." Tony sighed. "But I don't wanna see you gone. We need you, Cap. So far, nothing's happened that can't be undone, if you sign. We can make the last twenty-four hours legit. Barnes gets transferred to an American psych-Centre instead of a Wakandan prison."

You watched, shocked as Steve picked up one of the fountain pens. He stood up, twirling it in his hands. "I'm not saying it's impossible, but there would have to be safeguards."

"Sure. Once we put out the PR fire, those documents can be amended. I'd file a motion to have you and Wanda reinstated"

"Wanda? What about Wanda?" Steve asked. Sam and T'Challa had wandered off, perhaps bored of the conversation. Elizabeth had turned from the cameras though, staring at Steve like she didn't know who he was.

"She's fine. She's confined to the compound, currently. Vision is keeping her company."

"Oh, God, Tony. Every time I think you see things the right way- "

"It's one hundred acres with a lap pool!" Tony raised his voice to interrupt. "It's got a screening room. There's worse ways to protect people."

"Protection?" Steve asked. "Is that how you see this? This is protection? It's internment, Tony."

"She's not a U.S. Citizen!"

"Oh, come on, Tony."

Actually, Tony had a point. She wasn't a U.S. citizen, there were worst things that could've happened to her on that front.

"And they don't grant visas to weapons of mass destruction!"

"She's a kid!"

"Give me a break!" Tony shouted. "I'm doing what has to be done. To stave off something worse."

Steve nodded, "You keep telling yourself that." Steve held up the pen and placed it back with the other, "Hate to break up the set." And he walked out.

You sighed, walking up and sitting down next to Tony. "I'm sorry. This isn't. . . it's not your fault."

Tony reached out and you took his hand. He looked at you. "Barnes really is innocent?"

"Elizabeth never left his side." You whispered. "Especially after she found out he sleeps better when someone he trusts is next to him. He never left."

Tony nodded, "Elizabeth will have to stay on Earth a little longer as a key witness."

You nodded and then asked, "Where's Everleigh?"

"Fury and Hill are watching her. She's safe, you don't have to worry." Tony sighed.

It was silent and then you said, "Elizabeth's pregnant again. Triplets this time."

"Damn Loki has some good sp-"

"Stop." You slapped his shoulder playfully. "I don't need to hear about Loki like that."

Tony smiled a little and you sighed. "Tony. . .if I could have told you that terrible news face to face, I would have. But I didn't. . . I didn't want to bring Bucky back and-"

"I know." Tony said and he sighed. "I. . . I'm having a hard time wrapping my head around it, trying to understand. He killed my parents. . . but he didn't. It's just. . . I can't hurt anyone."

"Sometimes, we can't." You whispered. "Sometimes, we just have to know that we did what we could."

Tony leaned forward and kissed your forehead. "I love you."

"I love you too." You smiled.

"Who is that?" Elizabeth asked suddenly.

You and Tony broke apart and looked to see she was jabbing her thumb at a man who had joined the room Bucky was in.

"That's Barnes therapist." Tony explained.

"Hello Mr. Branes. I've been sent by the United Nations to evaluate you. Do you mind if I sit?"

Bucky didn't answer and the man pulled out the chair and sat down at the table. Elizabeth started to pace restlessly while you stood with Nat and Tony.

"Your first name is James?"

He didn't answer.

"I'm not here to judge you. I just want to ask you a few questions. Do you know where you are, James?"

He didn't answer.

"I can't help you if you don't talk to me, James."

"He hates being called James!" Elizabeth snapped at the screen. Steve looked at her in surprise.

"My name is Bucky." Bucky said and you smiled, biting your lower lip with your teeth. Good old Elizabeth.

"Why would the task force release this photo to begin with?" You heard Steve ask behind you and you saw Elizabeth tilt her head and knew she was listening too.

It was strange. Why had they released the photo? That didn't seem like something they should want to do at all, because then it would make said person hide even more.

"Get the word out, involve as many eyes as we can?" Sharon offered.

"Right. It's a good way to flush a guy out of hiding, especially if he didn't do the crime." Steve muttered. "Set off a bomb, get your picture taken, Get seven billion people looking for the Winter Soldier."

"You're saying someone framed him to find him?" Sharon asked.

"Steve, we looked for the guy for two years. Sam said. "and found nothing."

"We didn't bomb the UN. That turns a lot of heads."

"Yeah, but that doesn't guarantee that whoever framed him would get him. It guarantees that we would."

Your blood ran cold.

"Yeah." Steve muttered.

Elizabeth didn't even hesitate, slipping through the shadows, and running from the room. You continued to watch the screen now.

"Tell me Bucky, you've seen a great deal, haven't you?"

"I don't wanna talk about it."

"You fear that if you open your mouth, the horrors might never stop. Don't worry. We only have to talk about one."

Suddenly, the power went out.

"Sub level five. East wing." Sharon rattled off quickly. You, Sam, and Steve raced out of there.

🎃 ::::: 🧡 ━━━━━━━━━━━━━━ 🧡 ::::: 🎃

Elizabeth couldn't get the door open and she was panicking. She had tried unjamming it with anything she could find near the door, but it was locked. She breathed in deeply, trying not to cry. She could hear Bucky begging on the other side of the door for the man to stop while he used Bucky's trigger words.

"BUCKY!" She screamed. Maybe if she could be loud enough, maybe if she could cover up the words, maybe he wouldn't hear them. Maybe he wouldn't be triggered. "BUCKY!"

Bucky suddenly screamed on the other side of the door.

Magic.

She slammed the door open with turquoise whisps and looked around. The man was standing on the other side of the box. She ran for him as he spoke another word and went to tackle him.

She knocked him to the ground as Bucky slammed the entire door open and then punched him across the face. He froze, looking only for Bucky, and Elizabeth got to her feet quickly.

"Soldat?" He whispered.

Bucky said a single line in Russian and Elizabeth's heart fell out of her chest.

"Mission Report. December 16, 1991." Then Zemo looked over at Elizabeth, "Mission report and then snap her neck."

🎃 ::::: 🧡 ━━━━━━━━━━━━━━ 🧡 ::::: 🎃

Steve came storming into the room, grabbing the man off the floor, slamming him against the wall. "Who are you? What do you want?"

"To see an empire fall."

Sam entered the room too and Steve heard grunting. You turned to see Bucky there, fighting Sam. Elizabeth was unconscious, slung over Bucky's shoulder as Bucky grabbed Sam's chin and flung him at the cage they'd kept him in. Steve ducked as Bucky threw his fist at him.

It was surprising, the agility and skill that Bucky could still fight with Elizabeth on his shoulder. But Steve didn't really have time to be impressed as Bucky's fist whirred up and then shoved him down an elevator shaft.

Steve quickly used the elevator line to start getting himself out of the elevator shaft, tossing his jacket off and leaving it there.

🎃 ::::: 🧡 ━━━━━━━━━━━━━━ 🧡 ::::: 🎃

You ran through the building, looking over the balcony to see Bucky fighting everyone, an unconscious Elizabeth on his shoulder.

You didn't have time to wonder over the perplexity of it all. You had no idea what you could do. He was in soldier mode, which meant that he didn't know you.

But he knew Elizabeth well enough to. . . what was he even doing with her? Had he been the one to knock her unconscious? But if so, why was he carrying her? Was he trying to escape with her? But Elizabeth would have been more than willing to fight by his side. So. . .

You watched as Tony hit him with a sound wave, then a light wave. The two of them fought until Bucky tried shooting him, Tony's own metal hand blocking the bullet. Tony pulled the gun casing off and then Bucky kicked him into a chair. Said chair skidded through the other tables and such with Tony in it.

"Bucky!" You shouted down at him.

Sharon and Natasha started to fight him and he dropped Elizabeth. You hopped over the balcony as Bucky slammed Nat into a table. T'Challa kicked him in the shoulder.

You tapped Elizabeth's cheek but she was out cold.

Bucky managed to kick T'Challa away, then shoved you into T'Challa so that the two of you got tangled with each other. When T'Challa got off of of you, you saw Bucky with Elizabeth in his arms, already up the staircase.

"What the hell does he want with her?" You groaned, staggering to your feet and cracking your back.

T'Challa pulled some really crazy cat moves and then they tumbled down some stairs. And then, Bucky and Elizabeth were gone.

🎃 ::::: 🧡 ━━━━━━━━━━━━━━ 🧡 ::::: 🎃

You had met up with Sam and the two of you had met up with Steve who had dragged Bucky and Elizabeth out of a crashed helicopter that happened to end up in the water. You all went to a warehouse.

You texted Tony so he knew you were okay and said it would take some time for you to get to him. Then you tossed your phone.

It took some time to bring Elizabeth around. She explained that Zemo had ordered him to snap her neck, but he resisted somehow and only knocked her out.

"Hey Cap!" Sam yelled. You and Steve joined Sam and Elizabeth in the room Bucky was in. They had winched his metal arm in a machine, much to Elizabeth's displeasure.

"Steve." Bucky croaked. "Elizabeth."

"Which Bucky am I talking to?" Steve asked while Elizabeth hesitantly knelt by his side.

"Your mom's name was Sarah." He chuckled, "You used to wear newspapers in your shoes."

"Can't read that in a museum." Steve said, a faint smile on his lips.

"Just like that, we're supposed to be cool?" Sam asked.

"What did I do?" Bucky asked.

"Enough." Steve said.

"Oh, God, I knew this would happen." Bucky groaned. "Everything HYDRA put inside me is still there. All he had to do was say the goddamn words."

Suddenly, there was a brilliant flash of rainbow light and you all looked over in surprise.

"Loki!" Elizabeth jumped to her feet, going over and embracing the black haired man. You all just stared in shock.

"Hello pet." Loki purred, kissing the top of her head.

"Loki." Steve greeted him with confusion.

"I'm not staying." Loki wrinkled his nose. "I just came to give you these."

He handed Elizabeth a small container. She kissed him on the lips and he smiled. "Just stay safe pet, okay? You've got three little kittens inside of you that you need to take care of."

Steve and Bucky raised an eyebrow before exchanging a meaningful look, and Sam gaged, "I'm going to be sick."

You couldn't wait to tell Tony.

Loki glared at Steve. "You better protect her Rogers or I'll cut off your head and do it like the Romans. Or whatever the saying is."

Elizabeth giggled again, kissing Loki passionately again.

"Heimdall get me off this accursed planet." Loki shouted at the sky and then he was gone again.

"That was interesting." Sam muttered.

Steve looked back at Bucky. "Who was he? The man that used the words."

"I don't know."

"People are dead. The bombing, the setup, the doctor did all that just to get ten minutes with you." Steve said.

"He asked for a missions report." Elizabeth said, paying attention to the box Loki had given her, the green-blue whisps going into it. "For December. . . was it 16 of 1991?"

"He wanted to know about Siberia." Bucky sighed. "Where I was kept. He wanted to know exactly where."

"Why would he need to know that?" Steve demanded.

"Because I'm not the only Winter Soldier."

"Dun dun dun!" Elizabeth muttered.

Steve glared at her but Bucky smiled a little.

"Who were they?" Steve asked.

"You're no fun." Elizabeth muttered.

"Their most elite death squad. More kills than anyone in HYDRA history. And that was before the serum."

"They all turn out like you?" Sam asked.

"Worse."

"The doctor, could he control them?"

"Enough."

"Said he wanted to see an empire fall." Steve sighed.

"With these guys, he could do it." Bucky said. "They speak thirty languages, can hide in plain sight, infiltrate, assassinate, destabilize. They can take a whole country down in one night, you'd never see them coming."

"This would have been a lot better a week ago." Sam muttered.

"If we call Tony-"

"He won't believe us."

"Even if he did-"

"Who knows if the Accords would let us help." Sam finished.

"We're on our own." Steve sighed.

Sam shrugged, "Maybe not. I know a guy."

5 notes · View notes

callsignbaphomet · 1 year ago

Text

Part 1, Part 2

Didn't mention this before but I'll gladly make edits to fit in other OCs within the story/info. ESPECIALLY FOR UTHORIM! In fact, Uthorim gets mvp special treatment above all else tho.

Reminder, this has all sorts of TWs.

Boston:

After walking for who knows how long Jelani made his way into a building and barricaded himself in it. He spent days crying and sleeping whenever he could as the nightmares that had started after he was assaulted continued to get worse which meant he still wasn't sleeping much. The guilt was strangling him, he blamed himself for his brother's death. He spent days sitting up against the wall, not moving and crying, occasionally screaming at the top of his lungs. Eventually the guilt got so bad he grabbed one of the guns and put the barrel in his mouth but before he could pull the trigger he heard a loud whimper as Dagny pawed at his legs. He dropped the gun and held Dagny in a tight hug, she needed him and he couldn't just abandon her like that so after a few days he and Dagny emerged from the building and made their way into the thick of the Commonwealth.

The first few months he moved from one abandoned place to another. Eventually he came across the Wicked Shipping Fleet Lockup facility and cleared the ferals that had infested the place. He cleaned up the place, fortified it and called it home for a while. It wasn't until later he noticed that a merchant would come by the area, specifically up to the farm that was nearby. He had all the caps he and Loke saved up as well as most of the funds their parents left for them so occasionally he went over to the merchant to stock up on things. It just so happened that on one of those occasions a trio of raiders had followed the merchant and when she stopped at the farm they struck. Jelani had been making his way to the farm as he learned the schedule but when he got there the three raiders had held up the merchant, the farmer and his family. Short on patience and no real desire to deal with the mess, Jelani snuck up on the raiders and shot 2 of them in the back while Dagny took down the third one. The farmers and the merchant were thankful but all he wanted was to buy what he needed and left without saying a word.

A few days later the farmer went to the facility where Jelani was staying at and thanked him again for saving his and his family's lives. Jelani was dismissive but the farmer straight up asked him if he was a merc. Jela said he used to be but now he just wanted to be left alone. The farmer kept trying to make conversation with him but at one point Jelani just completely shut down and went quiet. Eventually the farmer got the message and left but not before leaving a few caps as thanks for the help.

The next time the merchant came back around she asked Jelani about his abilities with a gun. He knew what the next question would be so he shut her down but she kept insisting. Given what happened last time she was looking for reliable mercenaries to act as guards for her and her caravan. He was gonna turn her down but he thought that sitting alone in some shipping facility wouldn't help what he was going through so he relented but said that if she wanted him to tag along then Dagny had to go too. She agreed as long as she wouldn't bite her or her brahmin.

So for several months Jelani and Dagny were that merchant's own personal bodyguards. To say it wasn't as active as he thought it would be was an understatement. The most they dealt with were bloatflies and the occasional asshole trying to act tough. A teenager doesn't exactly instill much fear into adults but the hardware that specific teenager carried and his abilities with it did.

18-years-old:

Almost a year later Jelani and Dagny were still with the merchant. Eventually she changed her route which led her through Bunker Hill. One night he went to the bar to get shitfaced and blackout drunk just so the guilt brought on by his brother's death wouldn't hurt as much and to sleep. Due to constant disturbing nightmares Jelani barely slept and getting drunk was the only way he could get a full night's sleep. To say that's pretty bad for someone with trauma and one kidney is an understatement but at this point he just didn't care. As he drank he overheard a guard say they were gonna shut Bunker Hill until further notice due to some raiders threatening to start some shit. Jelani was not having any of it but the gates had been locked and no one could leave or enter until the issue was resolved.

Feeling like absolute shit due to the guilt of Loke's death alongside his other trauma Jelani was once again feeling extra suicidal. So he grabbed his mother's sniper (which he named Gungnir), Dagny, a couple of molotovs, and snuck out of Bunker Hill to deal with the raider problem.

The idea was to commit suicide by gunfire but those raiders were mostly drunk, high, disorganized and could barely stand on their own two feet. Those unlucky enough to not die by Jelani's bullets were mauled to death by Dagny and when the two ringleaders of that pack of raiders finally showed up Jelani and Dagny made short work of them. By sunrise Jelani was standing at the gates of Bunker Hill with two decapitated heads in his hands. Kessler and the rest of the population just stared as he dropped the heads at the gates and once they were opened he simply said, "There. Now keep the fucking gates open, assholes."

Impressed and a bit unsettled, Kessler stopped Jelani and asked to talk to him. She admitted they were all having problems with raiders in the area. The settlers were paying the raiders off but they kept getting greedier and greedier and were now threatening to kill them all if they didn't increase the caps. Kessler and Stockton offered a ridiculous amount of caps for every one of the raider leaders he killed. Kessler mentioned that once the leaders were dead the rest would scatter. Admittedly Jelani felt something when he went to hunt down those raiders, something he hadn't felt in a long time. He was reminded of New Vegas and going out on jobs with Loke. He also admitted that he felt he was getting rusty by simply escorting a merchant and only dealing with critters. He agreed but first spoke to the merchant about his plans. She understood but he told her that if she needed him all she needed was to ask.

The hits were done cleanly and effortlessly. Some just had him simply sit on the roof of a building and snipe them. He got creative with others, he'd infiltrate the gang by dressing up as them, sneak towards the leaders and quietly deal with them. Other times he'd simply crash into their hideout and have a good ol' fashioned shootout. After it was done the rest of the raiders cleared out of the area just like Kessler predicted. Jelani and Dagny were paid very well and the bar owner gave him a deep discount on drinks whenever he wanted to stop by. Word got around and soon plenty of jobs were falling on Jelani's lap, mostly hits and assassinations, but jobs nonetheless.

Now that he wasn't traveling around he figured he'd find a spot to crawl into though he did have that shipping facility but it was too close to the farmer and his family. He preferred to stay as far from other people as possible. He decided to look for somewhere else that was solitary enough but easy enough to find in case someone needed him for another hit, it wasn't like there were telephones anymore. A few miles south of Diamond City there was an old, abandoned military bunker that was mostly intact but filthy enough to make his allergies spike up (this is actually a mod I really liked when I played FO4 on Xbox. However I haven't found this mod on Nexus). Between jobs he'd spend his time cleaning and fixing the place, he also took to cleaning and restoring weapons. Except for pipe weapons, he thought those were an abomination and needed to be scrapped for parts. All of this was to keep himself as busy as he could so he wouldn't think about the guilt or the racing thoughts that constantly hounded him. Jelani was still very much suicidal, depressed, his drinking turned into a bit of a problem but when things got really bad he'd indulge in Med-X just to numb himself enough not to listen to his own suicidal thoughts. Sometimes, it was so bad that he took to hurting himself. Mostly he'd resort to cutting his arms. Sometimes he would put cigarettes out on his inner thighs and wrists. The relief was momentary and each time he self-inflicted wounds on himself the relief lasted less and less so the wounds got deeper, bigger and more frequent. At one point the pain was so bad he shot himself in his right calf and then dug the bullet out himself. Somehow the pain he felt inside was worse than digging out a bullet himself.

At some point he agreed to a contract to kill a gunner and wanting to take up the challenge Jelani agreed. It wasn't the epic fight he was expecting, this gunner was a coward who ran as far south as he could. He tracked him down to Poseidon Energy and as soon as he saw Jelani coming he figured he was there for him so he took off and ran into the FMS Northern Star for shelter not knowing it was occupied. The ghouls there made short work of him but Jelani had to bring back evidence that he was dead so he tried his best to sneak up to the body but was found. A gunfight ensued and in order to get the upper hand Jelani yelled, "Flankere dem!" Which was a command directed at Dagny.

Here's the thing about Dagny. Jelani trained her not in English but in Norwegian so that no one could understand what he was saying. All her commands were taught in Norwegian. So if you tell her to sit she won't understand much less obey that command. But if you say sitte she'll sit.

The ghouls obviously heard him and one of them, a ghoul named Varg, asked Jelani if he spoke their language. Everyone stopped shooting and Jelani answered back in Norwegian. Varg approached him and in broken English said he was curious as to how he knew the language. Jelani explained that his father's side of the family knew the language and had been teaching it to their children and their children's children and eventually his father taught it to his older brother and his brother taught him. He was fluent in it, could read it and write it but he didn't know what it was called. Varg told him it was Norsk (Norwegian) and that his ancestors were more than likely from Norway, by the accent Varg was sure they were from northern Norway just like he was. When Varg asked what his last name was, a great, big and goofy smile formed on his face. Long story short Jela made a new friend who he kept in contact with as it was nice to have someone to talk to in Norwegian again. He managed to get evidence off the body and got paid. Occasionally he'd stop by the Northern Star with supplies and to just chat for a while.

Several weeks later Jelani was on his way back home from another job and on his way he was ambushed by some raiders. To be more specific raiders that once belonged to the group that were harassing Bunker Hill. It wasn't planned out, they just saw him walking nearby, recognized him and acting on impulse they surprised him. This time they were very sober so one of them grabbed a sack and threw it over Dagny, tied the sack and tossed her in the water. Jelani freaked out and tried to get to her but one of the raiders hit him hard enough on the back of his head that he was disoriented enough to fall to the ground. As the ringing in his ears subsided he could make out some yelling and shooting and when he came to a group of weirdly dressed raiders had gunned down the ones that had attacked him. Thinking he'd have to fight off these other raiders he went for his gun but one of them, a skinny, pale guy with long champagne blonde hair walked up to him with Dagny in his arms and said in a very heavy southern accent, "Hey, this yours?"

Dagny was soaking wet but she was fine. Jelani tightly hugged her and with an almost quivering voice he thanked the raider for saving her. The rest of the raiders petted Dagny and played with her a little and one of them gave her a small purple plush toy which she gladly took.

Now, these raiders weren't running around the Commonwealth helping people, they were after THOSE specific raiders and now that they were done they headed back to where they came from. However, the raider that brought Dagny to Jelani turned around after telling the rest he'd catch up later and walked back to Jelani. He noticed he was bleeding pretty badly from the back of his head and after examining it he said he needed stitches. Jelani just waved him off but the raider said he had friends nearby that could help him. He helped Jelani to his feet and helped him to Kingsport Lighthouse. He introduced himself as Angelus Malakhov.

Angelus "Hellhound" Malakhov:

Born somewhere in the southern parts of the wasteland Angelus, back then known as Irina, was the only child of a woman who lived with her mother on a farm. His mom had met a caravan guard and 9 months after a very drunken night Angelus was born. The woman did her best even though HER mother was not happy about the pregnancy and how it happened. She barely even acknowledged her grandson. Still he and his mom were happy and that's all that mattered. Eventually both moved out and had very little contact with his grandma.

When he was 6-years-old he told his mom he felt like he was a boy and his mom was supportive of his decision. He didn't wanna go by Irina anymore and his mom suggested the name Angelus cuz she read it somewhere and thought it was pretty. He took to it and was known as that since.

At 14 years of age his mom got sick and she wasn't getting any better. She was afraid it would get worse and having no one else to turn to she and Angelus moved back in with her mother. She was not supportive like his mom and called him by his previous name and tried to get him to act like a girl.

At 15 his mother died and his grandmother became crueler and blamed him for his mother's death. Not wanting to take care of what she deemed a "weird and broken girl" she sold him to an old merc that sometimes stopped in the nearby settlement.

*** In the original version it was Angelus's dad that sold him to his grandmother. It was sort of like "I'll sell this to you in exchange for leaving me and my wife alone. Do whatever you want to him but leave us alone."

The old merc actually turned out to be a decent person who recognized that Angelus wouldn't be safe there so he took him off her hands. He taught him how to shoot, steal, pickpocket, pick any lock and taught him how to fight. He respected his new identity and even helped him on that end. He knew of a doctor whose partner was a pretty good surgeon. After he recovered the two of them lived a simple but happy life.

When he was 18 the old merc went out on a job and never came back. After half a year passed Angelus figured he was dead so he packed up his things and left. Before leaving the state he was curious and stopped by his grandma's farm and found the place in disrepair. He went in and found her rotting corpse at the end of the stairs. He thought he'd feel something but all he did was chuckle and then proceeded to steal anything and everything that wasn't bolted down. He sold everything and made himself plenty of caps.

He traveled North and joined a raider gang. He quickly became one of the top earners as well as a reputation for being very fucking easy. He stayed until he was 19.

At 19 he joined another raider gang, this time he decided it would be fun to be part of the prostitutes the raider gang was known for peddling. On top of selling himself he was good at stealing from customers which grabbed the attention of the gang's leader. He took him off the work line and kept him in the hideout to take care of his needs and that of other gang leaders he deemed were worthy enough to share his spoils with.

At 21 he grew tired of the routine of being one of the gang leader's boy toys and being passed around. Don't get it twisted the man has a super high sex drive and he enjoys putting it to good use but he also loved the killing, the stealing and the fighting. So he made his way further North and joined a raider gang known as The Mad Ones. Now this gang he loved! He was free to join in on raids whenever he wanted, he could also sell himself to earn caps for himself and the gang and had no problems tending to his gang's needs. The gang was swimming in caps, alcohol and chems. It was a dream come true...until several rival gangs joined forces and basically wiped out the majority of The Mad Ones. Angelus along with a handful of others survived but he looked to one of his clients who was a member of The Pack to see if he could get in. His client vouched for him and he's been in that gang since.

Now at 25 he is comfy and having a blast in a gang that was similar to The Mad Ones pretty much doing the same things he was doing before. It wasn't as intense but it was fun. He even found the animal motif quirky. So much so that he joined in on the trend of reshaping and sharpening his teeth to look like fangs and wore sharp, metallic "rings" on the tip of his fingers to resemble claws. This earned him the nickname of Hellhound. That and his propensity to bite people in fights.

He also had the freedom to come and go as he pleased, mostly to do hits for the gang and Nuka World as a whole. During one of these hits he noticed a small group of women being attacked by a yao guai. To this day he has no fucking idea what compelled him to do so but he jumped in to help the women. The rescue didn't go as smoothly as he hoped and ended up being almost clawed to death by the creature but he did manage to kill it. Among the women were Ginger and her wife Abigail who were the leaders of the Kingsport Lighthouse settlement. They quickly brought Angelus back with them and tended to his wounds. After this an unlikely but strong friendship was formed between them. Angelus visited them whenever he could and would help out in anything they needed help with. That's where he took Jelani.

Back to Jelani:

At the lighthouse Angelus asked the girls for some help which they gladly offered. It took about 8 stitches and they offered both Jelani and Angelus to stay for dinner and overnight to keep an eye on Jelani but he refused and left after thanking them. Hey, Jelani's severely depressed, suicidal, bitter, and dead inside but he ain't rude.

Time goes by and Jelani keeps his regular visits with Varg who has chosen to get out there more and explore the Commonwealth to learn of the people and get a better grasp of the English language which Jelani gladly helped him with. Varg had a natural talent and a devious charm about him. He could talk his way into and out of anything as well as get info out of anyone and he gladly shared his knowledge with Jelani. The two of them kinda partnered up and with time they trusted each other.

Varg also put Jelani in contact with other clients who were more than happy to pay him to get rid of certain elements which broadened his reach to the South, Southwest and Southeast ends of the Commonwealth.

One of these clients turned out to be a high ranking gunner who contacted Jelani through Varg. He had an officer under him who went rogue and joined the Minutemen. Now, this high ranking gunner had put in a good word for this guy and vouched for him so if word got out he'd be in deep shit so he was filed as KIA. He knew where he was so he paid Jelani to kill him and paid extra to keep all the info he got from the job to himself. He even said he'd pay even more for the death of the Minuteman that turned him. He agreed.

This ex-gunner was located in Sunshine Tidings Co-op so it wasn't too far. On his way Dagny was trying to get his attention. He isn't one to ignore her as the last time he did it ended badly for him. He told her to lead and they soon started to hear sounds of someone struggling. In the distance Jelani and Dagny found what looked like three settlers attacking someone. One had a knife drawn and pointed at a man while another settler held the man and pulled on his hair hard enough to tilt his head back and exposed his throat. The other had a baseball bat at the ready. Upon closer inspection Jelani realized it was Angelus who was being attacked. He wasted no time and ordered Dagny to sneak as he silently crept closer to get a better shot. Jelani dropped the man with the knife with a single shot to the side of the head and Dagny went for the throat of the man holding the bat. When the third settler loosened his grip on Angelus he broke loose and snapped the settler's neck. He saw Dagny and quickly recognized the little snake coyote dog thing and saw Jelani emerging from the tall grass. Jela checked in on him but aside from a few bruises to the face he was okay. Jelani asked if he could drop him off somewhere but Angelus asked if he could go with him for a bit.

Jelani usually prefers to be by himself but he agreed to let Angelus go with him and Dagny. He let him know he was on his way to finish a contract and Angelus volunteered to help out as thanks for helping him. Jela gave him some of the details specifically who the targets were but not why they were targeted. The hits were surprisingly done quietly and they managed to bring back evidence of both kills back to the gunner who hired him. As promised the payout was huge. Since it was so late Jelani offered to let Angelus sleep at his place and split the payment in half since Angelus helped to kill the second target.

Once at the bunker both got cleaned up, ate and stayed up drinking and chatting away till late at night. Now, Angelus is a lot of things and one of them is not knowing how to properly express himself unless it's through sex (if it's with men, remember he's gay). He did thank Jelani for helping him but he had something else in mind. He leaned over to Jelani and started to kiss him. Jela on the other hand was caught off guard. He's surprised and quite frankly nervous but he kisses him back though he's already on high alert. He definitely took a liking to the raider and was attracted to 'im but you know, trauma struck him hard and his immediate response to physical touch was nervousness. Jelani tried his best to fight through the nervousness that was building up as Angelus leaned closer but when Angelus put his hands on Jela's hips he immediately started to cry and begged Angelus to stop. Angelus stopped immediately and saw Jelani was crying, frozen in place, breathing hard and gripping the couch so hard he was shaking. Angelus backed away and asked if Jelani was okay but he couldn't even talk. So he got up and got him some water and apologized for making him uncomfortable but all Jela could muster was a shaky, "I can't..."

Angelus didn't really understand what was wrong with Jelani but he remained by his side and tried to comfort him as best as he could. Eventually Jelani stopped crying and fell asleep next to Angelus who went to get a blanket and a pillow to make sure Jela was comfortable.

When Jelani woke up he found Angelus asleep at the other end of the couch. To say he felt 1,000% embarrassed about his reaction the night before was an understatement but as he usually did he tried to ignore it and moved on. He made breakfast for both of them and when Angelus woke up he checked in with Jela but Jela said, "Just forget it happened." Which highly confused Angelus but he didn't bring it up again. They shared a mostly quiet breakfast and then the raider left.

That night was kind of a big setback for Jela. For days the nightmares were intense and the intrusive flashbacks were pretty graphic. Med-x or drinking himself to sleep were the only things that somewhat prevented them and even then the effects of the alcohol just exacerbated his ideations of suicide.

#OC au: fallout #Oracle Corp au #au Jelani tag #au Angelus tag #au Dagny tag #au oc things

8 notes · View notes