#tens of thousands of people it’s makes me sick to think about it.
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wouldvecouldveshouldve · 3 months ago
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the thing that terrifies me about this entire situation is… imagine if they didn’t find out. i just think about taylor, the band, the dancers, and all the fans we could’ve lost. and we could’ve just be on a livestream watching all that go down. it’s terrifying to even consider what could have potentially happened if authorities didn’t find out about the terrorists’ plans.
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succubi-tch · 1 year ago
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Jfc I cannot fucking do this
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suntoru · 2 years ago
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✧˖°. PRINCESS TREATMENT ONLY!
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summary: genshin men being huge simps and spoiling u every chance they get <3
feat. diluc ragnvindr, kaeya alberich, childe, kazuha kaedehara, scary mooch, xiao, thoma, ayatoe, al-haitham, kaveh
a/n: i swear i was working on the masterlist but the brainrot finally got to me hnghhhh
warnings: gn but feminine implications (ie. princess treatment, reader wears heels and makeup, passenger princess), simping for reader, maybe ooc? swearing, fluff, some are modern aus, maybe innuendos?
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─ ✰ DILUC is the gentleman we all deserve in our lives. if it’s raining outside, he’ll make sure to protect you from the wetness! he makes sure you’re fully bundled up in his coat, and that when he’s walking you home, the umbrella is fully covering you. oh, his shoulder’s getting wet? that’s fine, a little bit of water never hurt anyone. but if it happens to you? all hell breaks loose. what if you get sick from the rain? are you feeling alright? do you need medicine? a doctor? and if you’re in a modern au, he’ll definitely let you be the passenger princess 🥰 you can take naps, eat snacks, and pick all the songs! you don’t ever have to worry about giving him directions, you can just do whatever you want. he even installs led lights in his car so you can take asthetic pictures <3 if you’re tired, don’t worry about him, he’ll be fine alone, take your beauty sleep :) he drives you anywhere you want, no questions asked! you want to go to his mansion? you’ll be there in ten. grocery store? sure. nail salon? he’ll even accompany you to get your nails done just so you won’t be alone, pays for everything too!
─ ✰ KAEYA is absolutely whipped for you. to most people, he’s the town flirt, and a drunkard, but to you, he’s the most caring and softest person you’ve ever met, even if it’s hidden under layers of hurt. if you go out drinking with him, and come back drunk, he’ll carry you bridal style back home. pressing your body closer to his, he makes sure to prop your head so your neck won’t get sore. and if you wear makeup, he won’t put in the low effort to wipe your face with a makeup wipe, he’ll do your whole skincare routine for you! first, he uses makeup remover to take everything off, then, gently, he massages the cleanser into your skin and washes it off. he applies your creams and serums, making sure to be as tender as possible, even if you whine that all you want to do is go to sleep. he soothes you, whispering that all he needs is ten more minutes to brush your teeth and get you changed so you’ll feel clean in the morning. and for the hangover in the morning? he makes you special soup and showers you himself so you don’t even have to lift a finger.
─ ✰ CHILDE loves spoiling you whenever he gets the chance to. other people might think it’s just another sugar baby dynamic, but in truth, it’s far from it. it’s a selfless love, not just based on materialistic items. but even then, he’s willing to sacrifice his time and money for you. you’re his baby and his top priority always, no matter what. are you hungry? well, get ready, because he just booked a reservation at the highest star restaurant in town! you’re having a bad day? no problem, he’ll send one of the lower ranking fatui members to do the dirty work and he’s coming home early! he’ll bring home a large bouquet of flowers and a cute stuffie to match. you need new clothes? he’s driving you to all your favourite stores on his card <3 his wallet is practically bottomless, so don’t be afraid to spend what you want! a couple thousand mora is nothing to him if he can see your frowning pout turn into the pretty smile he loves so much. he even carries all your bags for you without asking! he can’t have his darling getting tired after all :(( just as long as after you give him a smooch on the lips and an hour of cuddles, the only payment he’ll accept (´∀`)♡
─ ✰ KAZUHA, even after years of being in a relationship, still finds ways to give you butterflies in your stomach. when you come back into your quiet home after a long night, too exhausted to take care of yourself, he leads you to a chair and sits you down. he ever so delicately unlaces your heels for you, taking his time doing so, but don’t worry! you won’t ever be bored. if the silence is too much, he’ll ask you how your day was, talk about his, and spill all the tea that happened on the crux. and if your feet are tender, he’ll massage them gently so they won’t be sore in the morning :(( he’s putting the utmost care and effort into whatever he’s doing for you, and that never fails to make your heart skip a beat. he still opens doors for you, dedicates hundreds, if not thousand of poems and haikus to you, and never fails to make you feel loved. he’d never forget an important date, even if you don’t mention it for months before! he always asks for your hand, and when you place it in his with a knowing smile, he gives you a fairytale-like kiss on the top, making sure to peck every little fingertip in the process.
─ ✰ SCARAMOUCHE never thought he’d bow down to anyone again in his lifetime. he’s trained every little bit of himself to be the most powerful, the strongest being he could so he’d never have to go through that humiliation. but yet here he is, tucking away his ego and pride, bending down on the ground for you. yes, he may grumble, telling you to hurry up, and that he doesn’t have all day, but the fact that he’s basically submitting to you speaks for itself. you taught him what love meant, healing, and promised that you’d never leave him, and for that, you have his eternal loyalty. as you climb on his back, he gently hooks your legs against his arms as he stabilizes both of you. the proximity of your face resting against his neck causes him to go up in flames, throwing his oversized hat on your head, telling you to hold on to it for him. but really he’s hoping the large structure obstructs his rosy cheeks. he does every little ‘embarrassing’ thing for you, from painting his nails barbie pink to being shrek for your matching halloween costumes. if his younger self were to look back at him, he simply wouldn’t believe it, but now, he wouldn’t even consider the possibility of even saying no to you.
─ ✰ XIAO never, ever, takes you adventuring with him, simply because he believes someone as precious as you shouldn’t risk getting hurt and scuffed up. so instead, he brings you little gifts that he sees while adventuring. a glaze lily, protective adepti charms, and almond tofu are all gifts that he’s brought to you before. he’s also much softer with you, never raising his voice and being cautious about his choice of words. if you ever get caught in a physical situation with him, automatically he moves to stand in front of you, one arm protectively circling your waist, pulling you closer to him. being xiao’s s/o, you also get special privileges. while he answers most who call his name, if you even utter his in a whisper, he’ll be there in a heartbeat, no matter if it’s an emergency or not. whether you called him to join your tea party, or if you are in the slightest bit of danger, he’ll be there. he also trusts you more than his logic, even if everyone else is against you. if you’re in a scuffle with other humans, he makes sure to hear both sides, but his heart already knows who’s right. whether there are 100 witnesses who all say you’re wrong, he’ll still believe you anyways.
─ ✰ THOMA is absolute malewife material, no questions asked. sometimes, if he’s not busy in the mornings, he’ll surprise you with breakfast in bed without a special occasion. he’ll peck your cheek and give you a soft ‘good morning’ as to not break the sleepy trance you’re in, carefully placing the tray onto the nearest nightstand. whenever he’s around, he does all your chores too, from washing the dishes, to dusting the house and sweeping the floors. you wom’t even have to lift a finger, he goes as far to make lunch too! since he’s not home by then, usually somewhere in the kamisato estate, he leaves handwritten sticky notes on each lunch box he gives you. he fills them with messages like, “the perfume you wore smells good today!” “your smile is blinding, my ray of sunshine” or “you’re gorgeous always, my lovely.” never once is a message repeated, he believes someone as special as you deserves to hear something unique each day. he even goes as far to make your food cute! he’s made panda shaped onigiri’s, cat-like dango’s… all because you asked him once, it’s become a tradition now.
─ ✰ AYATO never leaves you bored when he goes to one of his meetings. his maids set up a spa day, complete with a makeover and evening gown to go with it, but it’s just not the same without your husband :( thankfully, being the significant other of the head of the yashiro commission has its own perks. for instance, you can walk around like you own the place and join in on in his meetings, albeit later you might get punished by ayato for interrupting, but really, he doesn’t mind. seated on his lap, you play with his fingers and let out a quiet huff. why did you think this was a good idea again? what they’re talking about is so boring, you’re beginning to regret your desicion to join ayato, wishing to be soaking in the tub with a face mask again. thankfully, shortly after, he cuts the conference short, apologizing and telling them he has more pressing matters to attend to. you lead him straight home holding his hand, giddy that he’ll join another one of your salon days. he makes sure to pamper you, giving you a massage and washing your hair for you, praising you for being so patient, even if you were the reason the meeting ended early.
─ ✰ AL-HAITHAM, i headcanon, thinks he’s being subtle with putting up with your shenanigans, but he couldn’t be farther off. he might seem indifferent on the outside, but he cares much more than you might think. can’t sleep? just wake him up at 3am, he’ll wrap you in a blanket burrito and read to you until you fall asleep! just got your nails done? he’ll carry all of your books, what else would he need his giant man boobs muscles for? he revolves around you, as if you are the sun and he the earth. and god forbid if you’re ever mad at him, his whole life comes tumbling down. although if you can’t see it in his facial expression, all of his rationality goes flying out the window. he’s snappier than usual, getting annoyed at the littlest of inconveniences. even if you’re in the wrong, he’ll still apologize first, he just wants you to start talking to him again 😢 if you have conditions to making up, he follows them all to the tee. give you one kiss for every hour he’s made you upset? done. buy you the newest line of makeup or skincare? absolutely. cook dinner for the next two weeks? he already does that.
─ ✰ KAVEH is placed 1st on the list of simps. just pout your lips and whimper a “pretty please?”, he’s down bad. he lets you braid, curl, and play with his hair whenever you want, even if it was already styled in the beginning. he lets you steal all of his clothes, who cares if he’s worn the same thing five times in the past week? you look so adorable in his white shirt, he can’t complain. oh, and if you don’t like his style? he’ll let you pick out his clothes and style him yourself, he’ll stand there patiently for you like a mannequin <3 technically it’s not allowed, but he shows you all of his top secret projects and all the cool things he’s doing, you’re the only one allowed in his office! oh, what’s this? you want him to do your makeup? just give him a week, he’ll perfect cat eyeliner, lip liner and blending eyeshadow colors for you! after you’re done, he lets you do his makeup too, praising you for your talent. even if the blush is patchy, foundation cakey and lip gloss smudged, he still thanks you endlessly with unlimited cuddles and a new handbag matching his briefcase!
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jewishvitya · 4 months ago
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Sometimes the conversations about voting in the US feel like...
Person A: "I just watched this man fund the deaths of tens of thousands. I know some of their names, I watched their stories, I watched their tears and cried with them, I watched their deaths and felt sick with horror. I don't think I can stomach giving him the power to do more of that, even if the other person will do the same and more."
Person B: "yeah, and for me it's also very personal. My family members were killed in these attacks. I'm still struggling with the grief of it. And now I'm supposed to vote for the man that enabled their murders. I feel completely abandoned by the world. I'm being told there's no option to save my people, I should give up on them, and - while the genocide against us is ongoing- help the rest of you."
And instead of meeting this sentiment on the human level, instead of having compassion and understanding, the response is... calling people psyops, yelling at them that they're Trump supporters, minimizing Biden's part in this, or sometimes making charts and infographics.
Like, this?
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I'm not arguing against this. I don't know the details of every line, so I'm not saying this isn't correct. I wouldn't know, my understanding of the US political system is very incomplete, I'm not trying to argue facts.
But I see people feeling like they're standing in front of two options, being told "this one murdered many children and will continue if given the opportunity. The other one wants to do the same, and kill even more children. Now hand one of them the gun."
And they're being yelled down in response when they say this is too unimaginably horrible.
Even if I'm assuming that everyone doing this is also spending energy yelling at Biden's party to change course and do better, this is... hard. And really disturbing to me.
"Look, here's my chart that shows how your friend's family is dead anyway."
I told a friend that asked for my opinion, Israel is hoping for a Trump victory, the Israeli government feels that Trump would allow them even more freedom. I'm not telling anyone to choose inaction, because I do feel it's worth preventing, if this is what my government wants.
I just can't imagine seeing someone grieving the horror of so much death and suffering that the mind can't comprehend the scale of them, and telling them off for being "one issue voters."
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octuscle · 3 months ago
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With the help of Allah
Bosse had been on the road for three days. On the road on a trip around the world as a gift for his A-levels. In fact, he hadn't been given very much money. But his parents had generously allowed him to start his studies in a year's time. And until then, with a little help from his parents, he was allowed to do whatever he wanted. The original plan had been to fly to Istanbul and make his way from there to Cairo by bus, train or hitchhiking. The war in Israel had thwarted his plans and so he had flown directly to Cairo. And after a day at the pyramids, he was red as a sheet and he was sick of everything. To give his skin a rest, he spent a day at the big bazaar today. At least it was shady there. Even if it was unbearably hot. But the posts of the last few days had been very successful; initially only family, friends and maybe a few teachers had followed him, but the number of his followers was actually growing by a few dozen every day. Measured against the initial number of perhaps 200 followers, that was a huge success. And this success was to be further boosted today with a few reels from the Bazaar.
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The Bazaar was overwhelming. Confusing, full of people and smells. A babble of voices in which only a few snatches of words recognizable as English could be heard. Bosse loved the bazaar. But he hated the rubbing of his rucksack on his burnt shoulders. Suddenly he heard something. Rather unconsciously. Something irked him… It was… Swedish! Someone was speaking Swedish! "Unge herrn! Kom hit, snälla!" Bosse looked around. There was no one far and wide who was blonde and over six feet tall. He was in a crowd of short, black-haired people. And yet he heard it very clearly: "Unge herrn! Kom hit, snälla!" It was quiet… Much quieter than the Arab yelling of the other traders… But it came from one direction. Clearly… Bosse wasn't sure whether he wasn't beginning to hallucinate amidst the vapors of tens of thousands of people and the scent of spices from 1,001 nights. But the voice became louder and clearer "Unge herrn! Kom hit, snälla!" And then he was standing in front of the stall of a merchant who was one of the hairiest men Bosse had ever seen. Not many merchants showed their shoulders here in the Grand Bazaar. And to Bosse's taste, this man had better not have done so either… But now he stood before him with his hairy chest, hairy shoulders, hairy arms and huge, impressive beard. "Young sir, it's good that you're here. May I grant you relief from your pain?" Bosse looked at him as if bewitched. The man, who looked as Arabic as one could look, spoke to him in Swedish as if he had studied in Lund.
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"Young sir, you are not used to the sun. The sun is the Arab's friend. But the enemy of the men from the north. Buy one of my amulets, young sir! And your pain will be alleviated." The merchant took an amulet from a stand and placed it on Boss's shoulder. The feeling was wonderful. Coolness flowed through his skin. The pain of the backpack straps at least on one side of his battered body. "Young master, only 40 pounds. Not even ten crowns yet! And you will sleep the sleep of the righteous tonight. No pain. Young master, try it. And don't pay until tomorrow when it's worked. No risk, young sir!" Bosse didn't even think about paying tomorrow. Obviously this amulet was at least not harmful. He took a 50-pound note and gave it to the merchant. "Young sir. I'll gladly take the money. But allow me: this is the great bazaar of Cairo. You must haggle. This amulet would never have been worth more than 10 pounds." Laughing, he gave Bosse 30 pounds in change. Bosse hung the amulet around his neck, put the 30 pounds in his wallet and turned around to thank him. He almost collided with a giant of a man. He was in the coppersmith's alley. There was no one selling amulets for miles around. Bosse mumbled a "Maghfira" and set off in confusion. He walked deeper and deeper into the bazaar. No souvenirs or sweets interested him. He needed new shoes. Something more practical than his sandals. And if he wanted to visit the mosque later, he should get himself a prayer cap. The amulet on his chest felt great. And his skin changed from a glowing red to a rich olive color. He moved as confidently as a cat in the corridors of the labyrinth. This felt so familiar. He greeted a familiar face again and again. Every store he stopped in gave him a cup of tea. Rumors and gossip were exchanged. Besse overheard a lot on his way through the bazaar. And he knew that information had to be bought with other information. By the end of the day, Bessem was exhausted. The pedometer on his cell phone showed that he had walked almost 15 kilometers. But it had been worth it. He had done everything he had planned for his day off. He had fed his TikTok channel with all kinds of news. And all he had to do was survive tomorrow, Thursday, and then it was the weekend.
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Essam's day started early. His father was one of the biggest traders of copper in the big bazaar. And even though he was the crown prince, Essam was actually nothing more than an errand boy and porter. But Essam loves the job. He loved the bazaar. You met people all the time. Acquaintances and friends. But also strangers who gratefully let themselves be led out of the maze for a few pounds. Essam was well known in the relevant channels. Those who found him and let him "rescue" them were sometimes allowed to return the favor in kind. Essam was still a boy. But his cock was that of a stallion!
Pics by @ki-kink
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batmanisagatewaydrug · 3 months ago
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is it wrong to read smut of underage characters when i'm an adult? i've been reading fanfiction since i was nine or ten and smut since i was in my early teens. when i turned eighteen, i decided that i shouldn't read smut of underage characters anymore because i knew it was wrong, but then i kept doing it and have continued to even though i'm now twenty. i feel a lot of guilt around doing it. i never read anything with prepubescent characters but i've found that i am definitely drawn to fanfiction about relationships between adult characters and characters aged 13–14—something that makes me feel especially sick with myself because i was that age when i was groomed by an adult in my life. i think i am attracted to the idea of being that age again and actually going all the way with someone my groomer's age and it makes me sick. when i look at actual underage teenagers i feel no sort of attraction—on the contrary, the thought of sexualizing a real person that age actually really upsets and disturbs me. so why do i continue to get off on sexualized fantasies reminiscent of my own abuse? at the end of the day, i can't help but worry that makes me similar to my abuser.
hi anon,
I want to start with your final point, because this is hugely important: there is a hundred thousand million miles of difference between someone sexually abusing a real living human child with feelings, and someone reading about sexual situations happening to made up fictional characters who have no real feelings or trauma because they don't exist. the first one is a terrible violation of power to exploit and harm a vulnerable person, and the latter has literally no harmful consequences except for you, the reader, feeling weird and yucky about it.
let me be so clear about this up front: if this is something that feels like it's upsetting enough that it's causing you distress, you should stop reading this stuff. simple as that. if it ain't good for you and you know that, you need to take a step back for your own sake.
now, having said that: I really firmly believe that people don't need to justify why they like reading about things. but what you're describing - being drawn to stories that mirror your own abuse - is incredibly common. when survivors of sexual violence seek out ways of recreating their own negative experiences, whether it's via porn and erotica or playing those things out in negotiated kink scenes, it's very often a case of recreating their traumatic experiences with a built-in escape hatch. it's impossible to go back in time and undo the things that were done to you, but it is possible to reclaim a sense of agency by exploring what happened on the survivor's own terms, knowing that they can stop, say no, and walk away whenever they want, unlike when the abuse actually happened. in other cases, it can be thrilling to see a situation that caused so much hurt in real life play out as consensual and joyful in fiction.
again, please drop this if it's something that's causing you stress and discomfort! but also know that what you're doing is not harming anyone except, potentially, yourself, and you have nothing to feel guilty or ashamed of. please take care and make the best decision for you.
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beybaldes · 11 months ago
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*・゜゚・* high key just procrastinating my essay but…*・゜゚・*
sejanus plinth as your oblivious bestfriend
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- this man is minding his own business too hard, like, doesn’t even take the fact you might like him as more then a friend as an option because he figured if it was, something would’ve happened by now (he’s deathly afraid of rejection)
- literally so happy to spend his entire life doting on you even if it’s just as your best friend
- you will literally walk around the academy holding his hand and press kisses to his cheek or forehead everytime you have to part ways and this man still thinks you’re ‘just friends’
- literally so beyond shocked when Coryo asks if the two of you are together and hits him with ten thousand questions about why he thought that
‘what do you mean, Coryo? Why would you think we’re together?’ Sejanus’s whole face had paled and his sandwich was getting crushed in his hand. What had Coryo seen that he hadn’t? Surely if anyone was going to notice something about you, it would be him, not Coriolanus.
‘they kissed you goodbye, Sejanus.’ Coryo scoffed, eyes rolling at his friends frantic behaviour. ‘And they definitely don’t do that for anyone else.’ Sejanus wanted to ask if Coryo was sure, but he couldn’t get the words out without becoming a stuttering mess. He’d never thought about it that way befriend.
- spends months waiting for you to reach for his hand before he takes initiative and does it for himself the first time, and you totally freak but are super good at hiding it. Sejanus just takes this as he was right you were only being friendly.
- Coryo starts getting more and more sick of it, and finally decided to intervene by concocting a plan that would make even the shyest and sweetest of people (Sejanus) confess
“but I don’t get why.” you stressed, not really understanding coryo’s ‘plan’ that was supposedly going to push you and Sejanus together. it made enough sense but you weren’t sure it would actually help anything, not when you weren’t going to get anywhere when Sejanus only liked you as a friend. “if you want me to kiss you goodbye as well Coryo, you could’ve just asked.”
“it’s not about that, what I’m trying to say-“ Coriolanus didn’t have time to finish his works as he noticed Sejanus coming around the corner and into the corridor the two of you were stood in. “Kiss me, kiss me now, quick.”
more then anything, you wanted to be with Sejanus, and if Coriolanus truly thought this would make that happen, then you were willing to give it a try. Leaning up onto the tips of your toes, you pressed a long kiss to his cheek, making sure Sejanus had seen it before you pulled away. The second your lips left his cheek, he ducked his head and forced a blush to his face, hoping it would make Sejanus jealous enough that he would act on his feelings. However, Sejanus never said a thing, instead giving a pointed glare to Coriolanus and grabbing your hand tightly, pulling you away from the scene of the crime. As you turned to look back at Coryo in confusion, he simply gave you two thumbs up and a wicked grin.
- after Sejanus sees you press a kiss to Coriolanus’s cheek when you’d never done that for anyone else but him, some kind of switch inside of him had flipped
- low-key made him realise he’d never felt like this before and that he definitely saw you as more then just his friend (but had no clue how to go about telling you that)
- so he continued holding your hands and accepting your cheek kisses but now he felt more confident returning them.
“okay, I’ll see you later.” Sejanus had pressed a fleeting kiss to your cheek then turned and left the lunch table without another word, mainly in an effort to hide his flushed face but also incase your reaction was not what he’d predicted.
Coriolanus let out a loud laugh as he looked at the scene before him, your hand ghosting over where he’d just planted a kiss on you and a star struck look in your eyes. “Sejanus just kissed you.”
“Sejanus just kissed me.” You repeated in a far off, airy voice, a bright smile curling on your lips. “Sejanus just kissed me!”
- things only continued to escalate from there
- and since you were now certain he returned your feelings, you knew the only way you’d be able to make him understand was to be completely straight forward with it (because anything otherwise would just go over his head)
- it’s a gloomy, winter, Monday morning when it happens
you march through the doors of the academy, standing tall and proud with the confidence that what you’re about to do is going to give you the one thing you’d only ever dreamed about. it helps that your pretty sure things are going to work out in your favour too.
you walk straight past everyone from you classes, ignoring calls of you name from classmates in search of homework answers and a particularly belligerent Felix Ravenstill, who you’re pretty sure is trying to ask you to be his date for the winter formal. no one mattered right now except Sejanus. But then again, when had they ever? So, you aimed straight for him, not noticing the way Coriolanus seemed to try and ask you something as you approached the two, only taking in Sejanus who turned around to face you with a bright smile and a loving, “Good morning!”
“Good morning.” You replied closing all distance between you as you cradled his face between your hands and brought his lips to yours in a kiss. Sejanus takes a long moment before he begins to reciprocate the kiss, but when he does he drops his note books to the floor in favour of gripping onto your waist and kissing you back harder.
When you finally pull away from him, Sejanus looks totally frazzled - hair mused and lips red, face flushed and a smile so wide that his cheeks hold deeper dimples than usual. “What was that for?” Half the academy is currently staring at the two of you but this time Sejanus doesn’t have the mind to care. “I don’t get-“
“I like you, so, so much.” You tongue darted out across your lips for a fraction of a second but it was enough for Sejanus to find his gaze upon your lips once more. He could lean forward and kiss you once again but he wanted to listen to what you had to say - he figured he’d quite like it. “I want to be yours, if you’ll have me.”
Sejanus doesn’t know the word for it right then and there but it’s love that he feels for you, and that he will feel for you until his very dying breath. “Without a single doubt I am yours.” He answers, leaning in to try and kiss you again, though you pulled away as he moved in trying to meet his eyes. “I already have been for a long time.”
you let him kiss you when he leans in again.
- if Coriolanus had been annoyed by you and Sejanus dancing around eachother, he found himself even more annoyed now that you two were actually together
- somehow more handholding and kisses then before??? and you won’t leave each other alone???
- previously, if you had a class Sejanus didn’t, you’d leave him with a kiss goodbye in the canteen, but now that you were together, Sejanus would spring out of his seat the second he noticed you were grabbing your things, barely saying goodbye to Coryo as he took your hand and offered to walk you to your class
- Coryo was definitely jealous he was third wheeling so much harder then before (though jealous of who, he couldn’t decide) but was glad he didn’t have to deal with the two of you being in denial at least
An: hope you enjoyed!! If even a single person wants me to write Sejanus as your oblivious boyfriend I will <33
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cieloclercs · 1 year ago
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what would you say (if i told you i love you)? — charles leclerc
PART: 3? (read part 2 here)
summary. in which childhood best friends blur the lines between what they’ve always known, and something more
warnings. swearing, online hate, we’re getting to the angst now 🫣 arguments, charles is an idiot, arthur and joris being sick of his shit (but what else is new)
pairings. charles leclerc x arsty!reader
face claim. tara michelle
author’s note. again, i have no idea how much modern art sells for at auctions so don’t come at me if this seems unrealistic 🙏☹️ i also feel the need to clarify that y/n has 2 instagram accounts, one personal and one for art stuff ☺️
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liked by joris_trouche and 51,196 others
y/nsart auction update! 🎨
tide - sold for €12,460 erode - sold for €9,500 wave - sold for €20,890 glint - sold for €6,300
this is nothing short of a dream come true for me. the support i’ve seen both on social media and at the auction (once again, thank you to everyone who stopped by!) has been beyond anything i ever could have hoped for 🩵
if you’d told me when i was a little girl that one day people would pay for art i’ve created, i wouldn’t have believed you. i’m so so grateful to have been given this opportunity to do something that i love and to share it with the world 💗 i can’t wait to see what the future holds!
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username congratulations y/n! 💕💕
*y/nsart liked this comment
leclerc_pascale C'est tout à fait mérité. N'arrêtez jamais de peindre, ma fille, vous avez un don! / completely deserved. never stop painting, my girl, you have a gift!
y/nsart merci beaucoup 🥹 je promets de ne pas le faire x / i promise i won’t
arthur_leclerc congratulations petite sœur! / little sister
y/nsart merci arth ☺️
y/nsart also, ‘petite’? i’m literally older than you?
arthur_leclerc but you’re smaller 🙃
charles_leclerc toujours fière de toi, ma chérie ❤️ / forever proud of you, sweetheart
y/nsart 😐
charles_leclerc you’re still mad at me? ☹️
y/nsart if you wanted one of my paintings you could have just asked rather than wasting over €20,000. i would have let you have it for free
charles_leclerc i didn’t waste anything, y/n
username uh oh mom and dad are fighting 😳
username ironic how her highest selling painting was literally bought by her best friend 😭
username i guarantee you it would NOT have sold for that much if charles hadn’t been bidding
username i don’t want to be the one to say it but lately it kind of feels like y/n’s been using her friendship with charles as a way to promote her art…
username as much as i love y/n icl i think you might be right 🥲
username 🤢🤢🤢
username stop using charles’ fame to try and make yourself relevant! you’ll never be good enough for him babes 🥰
username the switch up on these comments from ‘fans’ is actually so embarrassing
username i know! it’s like as soon as y/n starts becoming successful everyone suddenly decides it’s not because of her own hard work but because of charles 🙄
username lmao how has she managed to make tens of thousands for that shit she calls art? i’m sensing a clout chaser 😂
username this REEKS of jealousy
username these comments make me sick. y/n has proved time and time again how talented and hard working she is. just because charles doesn’t know you exist doesn’t mean you get to hate on another girl who he ACTUALLY cares about. grow up.
*charles_leclerc and y/nsart liked this comment
username i feel so bad for y/n. no offence to charles but if he’d let the auction play out normally without bidding (although he does have a right to do so if he wants!) then she wouldn’t be getting all this hate right now 😔
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charles_leclerc back to work 🇳🇱
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username no y/n like? ☹️
username is y/n with you?
username guys check kym illman’s instagram! he said charles turned up to the paddock alone…
username i mean, y/n could be arriving later right?
username if y/n isn’t there it’ll be the first race she’s missed since singapore last year 😳
username y/n has a life besides charles! just because she’s not at one race doesn’t mean they’ve fallen out or anything ☺️
username but think about it…neither charles nor y/n have posted anything to do with each other since the auction a week ago normally they can barely go a day without posting each other 🥴
username can everyone just stop talking about y/n 🙄 all she ever did was distract him anyway
username forza charles! ❤️
username he’s not even smiling :((
username because he knows ferrari are shit, it’s probably nothing to do with y/n
username i didn’t even mention her? 😭
joris_trouche i think you’re missing someone mate
username JORIS??
username HE KNOWS SOMETHING!!
username JORIS PLEASE TELL US WHAT YOU KNOW
username i hate to be the bearer of bad news but y/n just posted. she’s not at the grand prix 🥲
yourusername
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replies:
arthur_leclerc oh shit arthur_leclerc what did he do joris_trouche just say the word and i’ll smack him for you 😁 ↳ yourusername please don’t do that 😭 yourfriend you don’t need him, mon amour ❤️ ↳ yourusername ☺️
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you:
did i do something wrong?
we haven’t spoken in a week
charlie 🤍:
no, y/n
you:
you won’t answer my calls
charlie 🤍:
i’ve been thinking about what you said
i don’t want you to have to deal with hate because of me
you:
so you think ignoring me is the answer?
charlie 🤍:
i’m not ignoring you, y/n, i’m trying to protect you
you:
what the fuck?
charles, i don’t care what people say about you
charlie 🤍:
but i do
isn’t it for the best? if we aren’t seen together for a while, you won’t get any of the hate
you:
you really don’t get it do you
if you think i want you to cut me off to ‘protect me’ then maybe you don’t know me as well as i thought you did
charlie 🤍:
don’t say that
i just want everyone to see you the way i do
you:
and i already told you, i don’t care what they think of me
i only care what you think
charlie 🤍:
why?
you:
i’m surprised you haven’t figured it out yet
charlie 🤍:
figured what out? [ seen at 4:11PM ]
y/n?
you:
i think it’s best if we don’t see each other for a while
bye charles
charlie 🤍:
what?! [ seen at 4:13PM ]
y/n come back [ delivered at 4:14PM ]
just tell me what you mean [ delivered at 4:20PM ]
please y/n [ delivered at 4:47PM ]
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scuderiaferrari A DNF in Zandvoort for Charles. Now time to refocus ready for Monza 🔜
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username what the actual fuck was going on with him today?
username i don’t know. i’ve never seen him so distracted 😕
username honestly a rookie mistake. if he’s going to be pulling shit like this then he doesn’t deserve his seat 🤷
username it’s just one mistake?? calm down 😭
username why do i feel like this has something to do with y/n…
username oh my god will you all shut up about y/n 🙄 they’re not even dating !!
username and? they’ve been best friends since they were 5 years old. if my childhood friendship broke down i’d be pretty fucking upset about it too
username we don’t actually know that they’ve fallen out tho…neither of them have said anything
username but isn’t it obvious? y/n not at the race, charles being distracted and sulky around the paddock? they’ve definitely argued about something
username charles i can’t keep defending you when you do this 💔💔💔
username how this guy has managed to keep his seat with all these mistakes i have no idea 😒
username hopefully y/n will be in monza to bring him some good luck🤞
➜ part 4
924 notes · View notes
bizaar · 3 months ago
Text
Cruel Summer Epilogue - Part One
Masterlist - Part One - Part Two
pairing: Eddie Munson x fem!reader
warnings: sexual content (18+) minors DNI (you guys they go the fuck off idk what to tell you, gird your loins), pregnancy, mentions of sickness and vomiting, traumatic flashbacks, angst, swearing (please let me know if I missed anything, there's a lot going on here)
word count: 23k (oof)
a/n: tumblr is really gonna make me split this thing up more than I already was going to — oh well, it doesn't matter because it's here! Forgive me for how I had to lay this out, and for everything that follows, because part two is going to be nothing but complete rabid bunnyfucking...
Melvald’s is slow today. 
Of course, that’s nothing out of the ordinary. Melvald’s is always slow. You don’t think there has ever been such a thing as a morning or afternoon rush within these cluttered walls, and you’re fine with that. 
You have to be, because it’s not like you have a lot of other options left in Hawkins. 
After everything went back to normal again — as normal as normal can be, considering the circumstances — you didn’t dare go back to ask for your job at Benny’s. You tell yourself it’s because you’ve got too much self-respect for that (and certainly not because you’re quite sure they’ll laugh you out of the building if you tried) so now you stock shelves at Melvald’s.
The hours are long and the pay is crap, but your commute is a quick ten-minute walk, and that’s more than you can ask for. Because you never got your car back after you went sailing out the front doors at Benny’s with the singular purpose of finding Eddie, getting out of town, and never coming back – a purpose you mostly succeeded in. 
Mostly.
You found Eddie, but you never managed to get around to getting out of town. You did eventually end up coming back, though only to discover that while you were away your trusty little Toyota Corolla had been towed.
Figures. 
Funny how you can’t just leave a vehicle sitting unclaimed in a private lot for over a month and expect there to be no consequences. 
By the time you got around to finding your car, you ended up having to sell the damn thing just to cover the impound fees, and you quickly learned that despite what all those sappy greeting cards like to say, you can put a price on your memories. Hundreds of hours of carpooling trips to and from school and the arcade and movies and innumerable Corroded Coffin gigs, all the jam sessions and make-out sessions and “you gotta hear this song” sessions that resulted in blown out speakers and deeply existential conversations and fights about nothing and everything. All the time and people, friends and lovers and emotions permeating it’s dingy cloth seats and hard plastic siding was whisked away in the blink of an eye. 
Your bittersweet adolescence, gone in exchange for a measly four thousand dollars. Somehow, you’re never going to forgive yourself for letting it go like that. 
And yet, for as sad as you were to part with and old friend, it wasn’t all bad, because even with most of that blood money sent off to the Roane County municipality, you still had a little left over. 
Enough to get the van towed out of the ditch and back into working order, at least. It wasn’t pretty, and it needed more work than any of you could really wrap your heads around just to bring it back to its previous semi-shitty condition, but it was alive and that was all that mattered. 
If selling your car meant that Eddie didn’t have to lose anything else, then you were happy to let it go.
Anyway, you like your walk to work. It’s short enough that it doesn’t give you time to think about anything that isn’t immediately in front of you. It doesn’t remind you of anything you might be mourning from back in the good old days, and it means, if need be, you can get home as fast as humanly possible.
Unlike at Benny’s, nobody at Melvald’s gives you shit if you have to go sailing out the front doors and across the parking lot to rescue Eddie from his demons.
That mile-and-back commute does not, however, keep you safe from the perils of being late for work. Not in the cold blue light of morning, when Eddie snakes his arms around you and holds you hostage, leaving sleepy, sloven kisses down the stretch of your neck and sending shivers up the length of your spine as he begs you for five more minutes, and five more minutes after that. 
You find that you have a hard time arguing with him on mornings like that when the only thing that can chase away the lingering sting of bad dreams and worse memories is to lay pressed together in a heap of tangled limbs, listening to the muted thump thump thumping of his beating heart and feeling the steady rise and fall of his chest as he breathes.
You’re spending a lot of mornings like that lately, laying in as late as you possibly can before slinking into work a cool twenty minutes late. And if anyone on Melvald’s barebones staff cares about that, you haven’t heard about it. Even if you did, the feeling would not be mutual.
Who gives a shit where you decide to spend your mornings? Mornings are for people who never came so close to losing everything, so what’s the harm in five more minutes? 
Plenty, it turns out, when you finally manage to extract yourself from that tangled mess of limbs and are hit with a wave of nausea like a speeding train the moment you sit up. You were late to work this morning, sure, though not because you couldn’t stop indulging Eddie in five more minutes, it was because you couldn’t stop your insides from turning into outsides and spent almost a full half hour with your head in the toilet.
You mostly don’t wanna talk about that. 
If you have to, you chalk it up to the bizarre sickness you can’t seem to shake. You just can’t stomach much of anything these days, except for herbal tea, and that is only consumed against your will, because herbal tea is gross, despite how it’s the only thing that abates your nausea. 
Well, you thought it did. 
Joyce Byers is on an extended smoke break, so you’re alone in the store when it hits you. 
One minute, you’re sitting behind the cash wrap, absently flipping through Cosmopolitan Magazine with a steadily cooling cup of stagnant bog water at your elbow, and then someone hits the ejector button. The next thing you know, you’re sprinting for the bathroom with a harsh squeak of Chucks on linoleum.
You barely make it to the stall in time to send your prayers to that eternal porcelain god.
Zero to sixty in half a second, just like this morning and every other morning this week. 
By the time you come slinking in again from the employee’s bathroom, wiping your mouth with the back of your hand, Joyce is still not back from her fifteen-going-on thirty minute break. There are no customers, no coworkers, just you and the lingering air of your spectacular Regan MacNeil impression – getting better and better every day – because it’s just another boring Thursday afternoon, and Melvald’s is always slow. 
Your insides cramp with the threat of sustained illness as you slide in behind the cash register, ready to resume the spell of your boredom, then, you find yourself face to face with a pharmaceutical ad you don’t remember seeing when you last flipped the page. 
You stare down at the image of a beautiful woman with her face stretched into a wide, open mouth smile, which is manic enough that you could easily mistake her for screaming rather than laughing. 
You begin to feel a cold, creeping dread raising the hair on your neck and arms as you read the copy. 
“Morning sickness? Not me!” 
Jesus Christ, you think with no small amount of disgust, Somebody got paid a million dollars to write this – and yet all it takes is those four measly little words.
They fall into place one right after the other, each with a hollow boom that sends shockwaves radiating out across the expanse of your body with goosebumps. A previously darkened part of your brain slowly begins switching on as the phrase is fed through its internal processor over and over until something starts to come into focus.
A question you haven’t yet asked yourself, and the answer you’ve been subconsciously dodging, like lightning in the storm of your sudden onset illness.
Morning sickness? Not me… surely not me…
Still, you immediately begin counting the weeks on your fingers and think yourself in circles, trying desperately to remember when you had your last period. Last week? Last month? You don’t remember. You’ve never been the type of person to keep regular track of something like that, though only because you never needed to. 
You were a virgin until you met Eddie and now you can’t seem to recall when you had your last period.
It takes you too long to remember, and when you do, you don’t believe it, so you count it out three times just to be certain and swallow hard against the sick feeling roiling in your esophagus.
January… February… March… March? No, that can’t be right… 
You rustle a piece of scratch paper from the register to draw it out so you can visualize it, and when the data still doesn’t change, you get up to go and find the calendar in the employee’s locker room just to be certain that it really is – June. 
According to your math, you haven’t had a period since March, and according to the calendar, that was two months ago. 
Holy Shit.
If you were thinking rationally, you might understand how two months could pass without a person noticing, especially when they’ve been living their life by the second. 
But you’re not thinking rationally, and if you were being honest, you haven’t been since last Spring. 
Time stopped for you in the other place, when Eddie’s heart stopped down on the wrong side of the world, and ever since you slipped back through, it hasn’t really started back up again in a way you can wrap your head around. You live your life by the days of the week, so how were you supposed to know something was amiss when your only basis of passing time is “it’s Thursday again,”? 
Something heavy settles in the pit of your stomach and you feel like you could be sick again as the facts begin to present themselves in neat little lines. 
You and Eddie are living together now. 
After everything that happened, when the dust finally settled on the Forest Hills trailer park, the folks from the Hawkins Lab came out from their fortress like feudal lords in lab coats. They took samples, corded things off with a mountain of red tape, performed test upon test upon test on the ruined contents of the trailer, and after all was said and done, it was deemed “uninhabitable”. 
Which meant the Munsons were out of house and home. Wayne, it turns out, could get temporary housing through the Plant, but only so long as he was actively working. Someone was going to have to be the steward of Eddie’s recovery once he got out of the hospital (and that was shaping up to be a full time job in and of itself) but if Wayne took any time off to take care of him, he was going to lose his bid for company housing. Without it, he would have to move the pair of them back into the extended stay rooms in the Motel 6 out on the interstate, which he could only afford to pay for if he was earning a steady paycheck – such are the perils of selling your soul to the company store. 
So, Eddie came to live with you in your icebox of a basement apartment, which seemed like the most practical, level headed idea until you were left alone and the reality of your sudden and total privacy settled in. It didn’t take long for the both of you to completely lose your minds in a haze of traumatic aftermath and unchecked hormones.
To you, it was the greatest idea anyone had ever had in the history of mankind – to your neighbors, Eddie moving in has been a catastrophic turn for the worse. 
Because at the end of the day you’re just a couple of horny kids, sharing four hundred square feet of space, most of which just so happens to be taken up by a queen sized bed. 
There have been noise complaints abound, but honestly, what did anyone expect to happen? 
And what did you expect to happen when all either of you seem to do outside of basic human function is fuck like bunny rabbits? 
You bury your face in your hands and choke on a horrified moan as you wrack your brain trying to think if, in fourteen months of domestic bliss, you ever once remembered to use protection..
The answer is a resounding no.
Who has time for condoms when you’re busy living your life to the fullest? What’s the saying? Wrap it before you tap it? Not me! You both almost died, remember? Live a little! 
At least that’s been the logic for fourteen fucking months. 
Jesus wept. 
In the silence of the store, in between the waning notes of royalty-free Muzak and the gentle murmur of outside traffic, you can hear the tick, tick, ticking of the overhead clock. Wretched time, quietly counting down the seconds as potential disaster comes hurtling toward you like an atomic bomb.
Your stomach is cramping again as you move out from behind the cash wrap and stagger over to aisle three on stiff legs–
Oh my God Oh my God Oh my God Oh my God 
– where you drop to balance on the balls of your feet and come face to face with the little white and purple boxes hanging there – pregnancy tests. 
You think back to the way you’d so casually racked them the day before and cannot believe it never once crossed your mind. 
Morning sickness. 
Except you aren’t just sick in the morning, are you? You’re sick all the time, any hour of the day… so it’s probably not that, right? You probably just contracted some weird parasite at the lake or from a bad burger and now it’s wreaking havoc in your guts, right? 
Right! a condescending voice tells you, It’s called a fetus. 
Your mind outright rejects the notion, but now that the idea is there, the hint of nagging possibility will not be dismissed. So you sit there, eyeing the vaguely feminine graphic design, promising quick results in big bold letters.
Ten minutes or less. 
You nibble your thumb and reach for the box before thinking better and stopping short.  
Do you really want to know? And what are the consequences if you decide you don’t? 
Maybe nothing. 
Maybe big ones. Big round baby-belly-shaped ones. 
You abuse your lower lip between your teeth and glance reflexively at your watch, which you discover is not there, but you’re too pressed to notice as you twist around to find the clock on the wall — half past one, and still no sign of Joyce. 
You turn back to the promise on the box burning itself into your retinas — ten minutes or less — and count the months again. 
The math doesn’t change. You’re definitely late, which means you are definitely— 
Shut up! Don’t say it, don’t jinx it! 
Then again maybe not…it’s a fifty-fifty chance, either you are or you aren’t. The answer lies in front of you, readily available in ten minutes or less. 
…So, what’s ten minutes? 
Joyce is still on a smoke break, so there is no one to cover for you, but what can possibly happen to an unmanned store in ten minutes? In Hawkins? On a Thursday?
Melvald’s is always slow — what are the odds you’re going to be hit with the first rush in the history of it’s time as a brick and mortar staple if you decide to pop back into the bathroom for a moment? 
Ten minutes more like.
You tell yourself it doesn’t mean anything as you snatch the box off the shelf and wobble back out of the aisle on stiff legs. 
Back to the employee’s restroom to take a pregnancy test – the reality of that information is profoundly disturbing. 
You’ve never taken a test before — never had to — but you distinctly remember instances back in High school where you’d been enlisted to stand guard outside of a bathroom stall while Carol Perkins and Tina Burton took “just in case” tests. 
You just want to sate a curiosity — just in case. What’s the harm in taking a test? 
It’s ten measly minutes. 
When Joyce finally comes back in, it’s been fourty-five minutes since she originally left, and you’re a vibrating ball of nervous energy. You sit, bouncing your knee erratically, fidgeting with the ring with the dark stone sitting snug on your finger – a promise, given, returned, and given again, pulling your t-shirt up and asking for five more minutes… just five more minutes – and she greets you with a tight-lipped smile.
You hardly wait for her to get through the door before you’re rounding the counter.
“I don’t feel well,” You say in a garbled rush, snatching your bag from where you’ve had it strategically stashed at your feet since you slunk back out from the restroom a second time, “D’you think it’ll be okay if I head out?”
She blinks back at you, and for a very brief moment, you’re terrified that for the first time since you started here, someone is finally going to give a shit about you leaving.
Thank God Melvald’s is always slow. 
“Oh. Sure, Honey. That’s–” Joyce begins, brows tweaked together in confusion as you rush past her.
You’re out the door and headed up the street before she can finish asking if you’re alright. 
You don’t think you could stand to answer that question right now, and she couldn’t help you even if you did. 
You need a quiet place to sit and think. You need to be swaddled in a blanket of cloying familiarity while you watch the rest of your world come crumbling down. You need… Eddie?  
No, a voice answers, startling you almost as much as what you’d learned in those previous ten minutes. You don’t need Eddie. Not right now, at least.
Right now, what you need is for it to be like it used to be. You need an adult, you need to go home, but you don't live there anymore, and your parents haven’t lived in Hawkins since the Summer of 1985. You can't even call them, because if you do, they’re just going to come down here and try to take you away again, like they did when you got out of the hospital.
You can’t have a repeat of that mess. You can’t leave Eddie, but you also can’t face him just yet. You need to be sure before you can go home, and before that, you need to get as far away from Melvald’s as you possibly can.
You briefly consider calling Wayne, just to try and get the closest thing you can to fatherly advice, but what is he going to do for you? What is anyone supposed to do for you right now besides tell you that you ought to have known better? 
You don’t need to be told what you already know. You need a second opinion, and you cannot get that sitting at home, socked in to four hundred square feet of domestic bliss with the ghost that haunts those walls.
But there is nowhere else you can go … not unless you want to make that long hike up Cornwallis and bang on the Henderson’s door like it’s the good old days and you’re there to babysit. 
You’re not about to submit yourself to the abject humiliation of Dustin (or, God forbid, Claudia Henderson) finding out, because you can’t just go closing yourself up in their hall bathroom for ten minutes (or less) with no explanation. You'd have to tell them what was wrong, why you couldn't use your own bathroom, and you're not ready for that kind of drama.
You can just picture the look Dustin would give you, admonishing you with a terse utterance of your name and a heaping helping of as much paternal disdain as a fifteen year old boy can manage. 
“Why weren’t you using protection?” He would demand, “— that’s the first thing they teach us in health class,” followed very quickly by a not so gentle reminder that “they hand out condoms at school like candy!” 
As if you didn’t know that. As if you (and everyone you knew) didn’t used to come home with those shiny little packages lining the inside of your bookbag like legal contraband. For the duration of your tenure at Hawkins High, you lived in the surety that you could open any drawer in your bedroom and be sure to find a condom there.
Not that you needed one. 
You were a virgin until you met Eddie, but none of that is any of Dustin’s business, and beyond the fact that you’re not in school anymore, you’re not going to go all the way up to his house just to take a pregnancy test.
You don’t need to, the soiled plastic applicator you’d hidden way down at the bottom of the wastebasket back in Melvald’s employee bathroom has already told you everything you need to know.
Suddenly, all you want to do is go home, crawl into bed and pull the covers over your head. You want to go back to the days of everyone telling you “you’re just a kid,” and you want to revel in the frustration of it.
More than anything, you want to smack yourself in the face for ever daring to suggest you were “grown up” enough for anything.
You’re just a kid. Eddie is just a kid. How could this have happened? Why on Earth didn't anybody stop you?
You just want to go home, but you can’t go home. Not yet, so you walk. One foot in front of the other, aimlessly without really seeing, and the next thing you know, you’re sitting at the warped, termite infested picnic bench in the woods behind Hawkins High, and you have no memory of getting there.
You know you should be more concerned about that.
Your shift is technically over at three, and you really should try to get home sometime around then (just so Eddie doesn't start to worry) but time was fake before you slipped back into the eternal dark of November ’83, and now you have no use for it at all, especially when you're so patently avoiding going home.
It seems like just yesterday you were sprinting out into the parking lot at Benny’s, ready to throw caution and everything you ever thought was important to the wind to go and save the jerk who’d so spectacularly broken your heart the previous summer – fifty-four Saturdays ago, your subconscious unhelpfully informs you.   
It’s a wonder you’d actually convinced yourself that anything of what followed that week could be the scariest thing you’d ever have to endure. Turns out, giant man eating bats and interdimensional wizards are nothing compared to realizing your period is two months late. 
You trace your thumb across the faded carvings in the tabletop and linger over your inscribed initials x E.M. – you did that, in the summer between your Sophomore and Junior year, in the first weeks of your official attachment to Eddie.
It felt like such an important gesture back then, but you had no idea what important looked like in those days.
You think back to those stupid kids who pledged to stand together against the world without knowing what that really meant, or just how viciously people could hate, and your heart throbs.
After everything that happened, Munson Mania in Hawkins has never been worse. 
The good people of Roane County had already done all the mental gymnastics to decide that Eddie killed Chrissy. It fit perfectly in their narrative about him, and it would be too much work to untangle the mess they made coming to that conclusion, no matter what the second coming of Jim Hopper said. Guilty or not, they whisper among themselves, point fingers, hurl insults, and shout accusations. 
Freak. Murderer. Psycho killer – qu’est-ce que c’est? – Barbed wire candy-grams for the town pariah, hurled like molotov cocktails, even in the light of the truth. The murky, inconclusive truth.
You had to learn how to adapt very quickly to the ramped-up prejudices of all these nice God-fearing people, because for a while there, Eddie couldn’t even walk down the street without fear of being reminded that everyone in this town thinks he’d be better off dead. The bolder of the good people of Hawkins have no shame about telling him so, either. 
Now, Eddie stays mostly out of sight of all your neighbors and you take care of everything that has to be done.
You go out, do all the shopping, work to pay the bills, keep your life support afloat and you bend yourself painfully out of shape to be his shield. You provide the bread and butter and all the love he could ever possibly need. You smother him in it, keep him well fed and swaddled in affection so that he never has to feel the cold touch of its absence. 
You're everything to him. Friend, lover, caretaker – you wish there was room for just a little bit of help in that, but Eddie doesn't have friends anymore.
He just has you.
Anyway, how are you supposed to explain to Adam and Jeff and Gareth that the Eddie lurking in the shadows of your basement apartment isn’t the Eddie they remember? What would they say if they knew he can’t make his fingers work well enough to play the guitar anymore, or that he can barely even look at his D&D books without breaking into a cold sweat? 
You know what they’d say – they’d want to know why. They’d want to know what the hell happened, because when they’d tried to visit Eddie in the hospital, they got one look at him before making a bullshit excuse about needing to leave, and he didn’t want to see them again after that. 
So now, when they call (and they so seldom call, these days) you tell them he's fine, and you hold them at bay, because it's your job to protect Eddie, no matter what. If that includes keeping all his friends in the dark, then so be it.  
If you can’t get around to explaining what happened to Eddie, and what is so terribly wrong with him, you can’t even imagine trying to break the news that you’re pregnant.
Christ, how are you supposed to tell people when you can barely conceptualize it yourself?
How are you supposed to tell Eddie?
He can barely hear that you’re going to be working late or picking up a shift, because it means he’s going to have to stretch his imagination to find ways to occupy his time without you. It means a change in his routine, and routine is all he has besides bad habits and nightmares.  
And now you’re just supposed to add a whole other person to that? One who can’t take care of themself or tell you what’s wrong or when they need something or when they’re on the brink of death or… or or or…? 
Your stomach is in knots again, because having a baby is suddenly starting to sound just like having a whole other Eddie to take care of, and you can hardly manage one of him. 
You have no idea how he is going to react to hearing that your tight little twosome is about to expand.
Eddie doesn’t have a lot of things that are strictly his, and when it comes to those things he is not exactly the sharing type. 
He’ll go blue in the face arguing he doesn’t get jealous, then turn around and have a conniption when you stay on the shore of Lovers Lake with Dustin and send him out in the boat with the others… dot dot dot - dash dash dash - dot dot dot…
You bite back the cloying scent of mildew suddenly filling your sinuses and dig shallow crescent moons into your palms until you feel your feet touch back down on Earth. Then, all the hideous questions you’ve been successfully holding at bay all afternoon come flooding in like the tide. 
What if Eddie doesn’t want this? What if this is one of those cataclysmic deal breakers and you lose him forever… again? 
And why does this all suddenly feel like your fault? 
In an instant, you’re once more brimming with that irrational anger, because if this is anyone’s fault, it’s his. He’s the one who always wants five more minutes, who pulls you back into bed and paws at your clothes and does all the little things he knows you can’t resist and takes and takes and takes. 
He’s the one who did all the work – what did Carol and Tina used to call it? The good ol’ pump and dump? 
How many mornings have ended with Eddie taking those five minutes more, then rolling over to go back to sleep while you run around trying to clean up the evidence and pull yourself back into shape?
He’s the master behind this little ritual, you’re just the vessel – and what is the vessel for if not to carry the seed?  
You need to walk, you need to think. You need to talk to Eddie.
You take the long way home, going past the haunts of your youth and all the places you don’t go anymore. All the places you’ll never go again — all the places that don’t exist like your childhood home, the Starcourt Mall, Benny’s Diner, and the cozy little double wide on the far end of town, and you think about how Hawkins is a ghost town that doesn’t know its dead. 
You walk, and you think about Eddie, like you always do.
You think about how bad those first few months were, about his nightmares and how he could barely stand to shut his eyes, let alone sleep because of the monsters waiting for him beyond the hypnotic pull of his circadian rhythms. You think about how in the beginning, sometimes he didn’t even have to close his eyes to become trapped down there in the dark again. 
You think about how hard you’ve worked to get him to where he is now, all the blood, sweat, and tears it has taken to curb the itch for all the bad habits that got infinitely worse in his attempt to soothe all the things that hurt. Everything you had to do to center your world around his needs, his worries, his recovery, to make him feel safe. It’s taken a long time, with a lot of set backs, and a lot of bad days, but you tell yourself that you’re happy to have them at all. 
Recovery is a road, not a destination, or at least that’s what Eddie’s physical therapists liked to say before he quit on them – if all you have to worry about is making sure the rent is paid and the pantry is stocked and the door is barred against the monsters out there, you’re fine with that. 
Nevermind your nightmares and all the little things you have to do to cope.
You’re only the one who had to sit there and lie to Eddie that everything was going to be okay while his lips turned blue and his eyes went dark. You’re the one who had to stand at a basin in the hospital and try to scrub his blood out of your clothes, your skin, your hair and lock your knees to stay upright while you did everything you could to try and keep your shit together.
You’re the one who had to sit at his bedside and tune yourself in to the new normal of monitored heartbeats and machines forcing compressed air into collapsed lungs, feeling so incredibly helpless to do anything but wonder how you ever told such a hideous lie. 
Everything is gonna be okay… you wish you could make yourself believe that. 
On your really bad days, that helpless feeling comes roaring back so powerfully you feel like you’re going to collapse in on yourself like a dying star. It's those days that you can’t pull yourself away from Eddie no matter what, where you need those five minutes just as badly as he does, because you’re the one who sat there and told him he was going to be okay and then watched him die.  
And then, when the feeling passes, you pull yourself up, straighten yourself out, and you go to work, because the only thing that matters is Eddie.  
He’s the only thing you can count on when the world gets too loud, the memories of that other place get too close, and you begin to feel yourself slipping away. He’s the only thing keeping you grounded, even if he doesn’t know it, and you’re suddenly so worried that introducing a third element to your duet will blur those lines again. 
You think about all your progress, how on your best days it almost feels like things are back to good, and you think about how all of that hard work is about to become extremely fucking secondary to the little parasite nestled in your womb – not a baby so much as a tapeworm.
The notion causes your insides to stir with anxiety.
How could you have been so careless?
And why would you or anyone expect anything else to happen when you’re just a couple of stupid kids playing house and sharing a studio apartment, which is getting smaller by the moment. 
Kids having kids. 
You should have known better. 
Because time isn’t real, the sun is starting to set by the time you finally make your way home, well past three o'clock.
Past Melvald’s and ten minutes down the street to the concrete stone steps and into the recessed well containing the red door, marked with a tarnished silver six. You can still see the faintest outline of the other two sixes someone recently graffitied on either side of the metal placard – just in case anyone happened to forget who lives here – and suddenly you think you can hear the distant tones of Iron Maiden playing somewhere beyond.  
Let him who hath understanding reckon the number of the beast, for it is a human number… 
It is not the first time you’ve had the misfortune of living in Apartment 666, and as you fumble with your keys and glare at the lingering shadow of permanent marker on paint, you are certain it won’t be the last. 
Funny how you never used to hate Hawkins before. 
Now, you’re painted red with the feeling as you plunge the key into the lock and twist it hard enough that someday you’re certain the blade is going to snap off (and then what are you going to do?) Today, however, is not that day. 
As you turn the key you hear the rotor shift over with a satisfying THUNK. You twist the handle, push the door, and nothing happens. 
You groan to stop yourself from screaming, because despite what you think, the door is not out to get you. 
You’re just having a very bad day. 
The humidity the humidity signaling the inevitable heatwaves of the Indiana summer causes your front door to swell and stick, and you have to give it a firm kick to force it open. You know this, despite how you may have forgotten under the weight of everything else currently on your mind. 
And yet, today, when the door sticks, it feels personal. 
You grit your teeth and shut your eyes against it as you put your foot in the door and give it one more solid push. It swings inward, taking you with it and sending you staggering across the threshold and into the apartment. 
The door swings shut behind you with a loud THUMP, and all goes quiet inside your head. 
Just like that, you’re home. 
A singular room made up of kitchen, dining, living, and bed area, all squeezed into four hundred square feet of what the landlord had originally referred to as “cozy living”, when it was just you and your broken heart.
Now, it’s a chaotic mish-mash of all your things and what you could salvage of Eddie’s before someone went and burned what was left of the Munson residence to a smoking husk. 
When you get in, he is sitting on the unmade bed wearing the same sweat-stained t-shirt and pair of ratty pants he’s been in for the last three days. His hair is greasy and hanging limply around his face, which is lined in the shadow of a patchy stubble. You try to think back to the last time you remember him showering, shaving, brushing his teeth, doing anything but laying in bed watching television.
You aren’t shocked when the memory fails to arrive. 
Don’t be unkind, that gentle voice comes again. You stamp it out before it can finish. It’s hard to be kind when all you have to cling to is the way things used to be. 
Eddie used to have hobbies and interests and friends. Now, he only watches television and reads the TV guide until he’s got it memorized and waits for you to get home so he can use you to chase his demons away.
Eddie’s depressed and you’re pregnant – it’s not much to go on, competition-wise, but the poison of your mood is inclined to suggest that you got the short end of the stick on that one, considering it’s his depression that got you that way.  
Nothing gives such an instant boost of dopamine like an orgasm, after all. 
The apartment is a mess. There are dirty clothes and dishes everywhere, mixed in with piles of the clean you have yet to put away. Socks and underwear hang draped off the backs of the two rickety dining chairs from where you’d washed them in the sink and lay them to dry six days ago. The bedsheets are pushed down and hanging off the mattress, exposing half a dozen Hostess wrappers sitting on the rumpled, stained top sheet. 
And there sits Eddie in the middle of it all with a hand down his pants and a lit cigarette pinched between his lips. 
Your blood flash freezes and boils. 
He’s supposed to be quitting. That same gentle – nagging – voice whines from the back of your mind. And he promised he wouldn’t smoke inside. 
You have to clench your teeth until your ears start ringing to shut that little voice up. 
“Hey!” Eddie yelps the moment you appear, leaping up and waving his arms around to try and disperse the smoke as he kicks the evidence of his afternoon indulgence off of the mattress and steps down with a hard thump – he’s limping ever so slightly as he crosses the room to you, “Hi! Shit… um… this isn’t what it looks like,”
Which is a bald faced lie – it is exactly what it looks like, and suddenly you can’t stop the mental tally of all the things you asked him to do today, and all the things that remain undone. 
It makes your skin itch, then as he gets closer, you see the holes in his socks – holes in his neck and ribs where he’d nearly been eaten alive – and you remember too late that you’d promised to pick him up a new pack of crew socks on your way home from work. You forgot. 
Part of you supposes that makes you even, and you stuff it down with everything else you’re not presently available to feel. 
You decide you don’t care. 
You don’t care that he’s smoking again even though he’s still not fully recovered from his collapsed lung, or that he gave up on physical therapy because it was too hard, or that he never does anything he says he’s going to and still always expects you to give him five more minutes.
And he probably still expects you to let him fuck you later on, even after all that. 
You don’t care you don’t care you don’t care. 
And after a moment, you’re surprised to find that you really don’t, (you do, you really fucking do) you’re just trying to see where the cigarette went when he less-than-subtly flicked it away.
The last thing you need to end your shitty day is to have the apartment burn down.  
Eddie mistakes your silence for anger, as he always does, and you watch him begin to fidget as he waits for you to speak. 
You don’t, because you don’t have anything to say, but also because he’s not wrong. You are angry.
You’re standing there, clenching your teeth and fists and doing everything in your power to swallow the urge to yell at him, or to nit pick all the things that are out of place in your apartment – no, not just yours anymore. He lives here, too – this is his home now.
“Where’ve you been?” Eddie asks when the tense silence becomes too much. “I was starting to get worried,” 
He reaches for you and you surprise yourself by letting him pull you into a tight hug that feels a tad too much like it’s meant to try and distract you from everything he evidently decided was less important than smoking cigarettes, eating Twinkies, and playing with himself. 
You’re mad as hell, and if you were paying any attention you would realize that the emotion is getting stronger by the moment, but you lean into him and snake your arms around Eddie’s midsection. You bury your face in his shirt and sigh against him as you chase the comfort of his embrace, waiting for the world to fall away and the cocoon of his safety to envelope you. 
Once upon a time, all you needed was a good Eddie hug to chase your worries away. Now, under his touch, all you can think is how he reeks of nicotine and smoke and days old deodorant and everything else that comes with unwashed boy.
But you have to remind yourself that you don’t care, because he says he was getting worried. 
“You were?” you ask, and your voice sounds odd against your ears. 
“Yeah,” he shifts back and holds you to the spot, like he needs to get a good look at you to make sure you’re still you and that nothing has changed in the few hours it’s been since you left that morning — he worries so much these days. “I went to get you from work when you didn’t come home,” He says. “But you weren’t there.” 
It sounds strangely accusatory, and you aren’t exactly sure what to do with that as a solid lump begins to form in the back of your throat. 
He rubs his hands up and down your arms in a soothing gesture, like he’s attempting to create friction in slow motion. It’s something he’s always done that has been comforting in the past, but right now it is only making a sore spot where he’s rubbing the skin raw. 
You look from his attempt at gentle, reverent contact to where he is carefully watching you, and feel your brows creep toward one another as that irrational anger begins to rise in the pit of your belly.
This is all his fault, and part of you seems to think he knows that, even if he doesn’t know. 
“Okay, I can see that you’re mad…” Eddie starts, doing his utmost to remain as diplomatic as possible so as not to set you off but also to accept no responsibility, “… are you mad?” 
You don’t answer. You don’t even look at him, instead you crane your neck trying to see around him to find that goddamn cigarette before it can catch and send everything up in smoke… literally. 
You feel Eddie’s fingers flex on your biceps.
“Don’t be mad. I was gonna get around to it, I swear, but then you didn’t come home from work and… and I was worried! I didn’t know where you were,” . 
Anger subsides — if only briefly — and you get almost all the way around to feeling guilty about that until you clock the cigarette butt smoldering on the yellowing linoleum in front of the kitchen sink, and then Eddie finishes his sentence. 
“...And I didn’t know if you were gonna be home for dinner,” 
He flinches when your head snaps around and you finally level him with a poisonous look. 
“So you smoked half a pack of camels and ate a box of Twinkies?” you scoff. 
You want to ask where he even got those, but then you remember. He went to Melvald’s looking for you, and when he didn’t find you there, he must have figured he deserved a treat for braving the big, scary world. 
He gets a treat and you get to watch your world crumble – you could spit fire. 
Eddie’s mouth falls open like he’s going to say something to defend himself, but then he just laughs. You can tell it’s out of nerves rather than humor, the way he always does when he’s caught red handed and doesn’t know what to say to get himself out of trouble. 
You would punch him if you weren’t half certain he would break into a thousand pieces if you did. Even then you’re not so sure you’d feel worse about breaking your boyfriend or having to vacuum him up off the floor after. 
“I was worried!” Eddie insists when you turn away and throw your keys into the dish with a thunderous crash.
“You said that already.”  You snap, storming across the tiny living space and stooping to pinch the half burned stock of cinders and throw it into the sink with a hiss. 
You almost wish that he would have just given you that kicked puppy look, then you could have at least felt bad about biting his head off. But no, he had to go and get irreverent on you. 
Hi honey, welcome home! I know I said I would clean up and do some house work and stop smoking so I don’t get lung cancer by the time I’m thirty and die, but you see, I can’t be fucked to care about anything but myself! But remember, it’s not my fault, I’m depressed!
You’d spent so much time worrying about what you were going to say to him, how you were going to break the news, but as you step out of your shoes and drop your bag onto it’s designated doorside hook, you decide that if he can’t be fucked than neither can you.
Those little pink lines say differently. 
You suddenly feel ready to burst. 
You cross to the bed, snatch up one of the pillows and press it to your face, then you scream as loud and long as you can. When you’re satisfied that your lungs are completely flattened, you lean forward and drop down onto the mattress with a muffled THUMP, and let the tide take you out. 
It’s just one more thing that douses you in a fresh layer of red. Because your first foray into real adulthood didn’t begin with moving in together, or engaging in excessive amounts of sex just because you could, or even the unexpected addition to your lives — it began with the waterbed Eddie had insisted upon. 
After he was discharged from the hospital, you learned very quickly that your mattress was too soft for his broken body, and the nice, “sensibly priced” one you’d gone out and tried to replace it with had ended up being too firm. 
After all that talk and research and careful consideration, all the work you put into trying to make him comfortable in his new home, in this new situation, and the mattress was too goddamn firm. 
Then came the waterbed, and Eddie’s first full night of sleep since leaving the hospital, and you didn’t dream of sending the damned thing back, no matter how badly you hated it. 
You still hate it as you lie there, coasting on the waves and stewing in all the ugly thoughts and feelings and emotions that you are meant to be safe from inside the vacuum chamber of your apartment. 
For a time, all you hear is the muffled sloshing of the trussed up waterballoon and the gentle murmuring of informercials playing on the half muted television. Then, you hear the slow thump of footsteps approaching and feel the mattress dip and slosh beside you. 
Your guts heave and for a brief, yet terrifying moment, the nausea returns. 
“...D’you wanna talk about it?” Eddie asks tentatively from somewhere not nearly close enough. 
“No.” You say, knowing well enough that this is not a conversation you can keep putting off. 
“Okay…” he says, sucks his teeth, then tries again, “D’you wanna hear about my day?”
“No.” You insist. 
“Great. So today, I got up at a reasonable hour and totally didn’t sleep in until two-thirty again. I did everything you asked me to and ate a healthy, full balanced meal and only watched, like, half an hour of tv – don’t worry, just PBS, Babe, only the really boring, educational shit. But I swear on my life, this whole place was spotless … and then out of no where – WHAM! You’ll never guess what happened.” 
He pauses for effect, and waits for you to play along, to rise to his prompting like you normally do, but he’s sorely mistaken if he thinks you’re in the mood for games. You wire your jaw shut and leave him waiting for you to answer. When you don’t, Eddie repeats himself,
“You’ll never guess what happened.” 
Finally, he prods you sharply under the armpit with two fingers, and you flinch, curling into yourself with the kind of high yelp that can only come from being tickled. 
“Ask me what happened.” he prompts when you uncover your face to glare at him. 
You tell yourself you won’t, but you’ve never been able to resist him, even when you’re mad. Especially when you’re mad, and especially with the way he’s leaning over and looking at you, all soft eyes and long lashes. Because in spite of the smoking and the lying and everything else, every part of you loves every part of him, even when you want to punch him in the face. 
“What happened.” You mutter reluctantly, not a question so much as a submission – Eddie smiles. 
It’s a half hearted thing that doesn’t reach his eyes, but you know what it’s meant to convey – Good Girl. Your heart skips a beat and you kick yourself for still being so stupid for him, even after all this time. You’re supposed to be mad at him. 
He shrugs. 
“Killer Klowns,” He says, and you roll your eyes.
“...you gotta be kidding.”
You turn away to bury your face back in the pillow, and Eddie keeps on talking and talking and talking, because that’s all he does anymore – try to talk himself out of trouble. Funny, the way he never seems to remember how that never works for him. 
“Baby? Baby – hand to God…” he says, pausing again. You just lie there and wait for him to finish, “...They were from Outer Space.”
And when his joking fails to garner any sort of joy, the sentiment goes out of him in an almost tangible wave. For a moment, there’s nothing but measured silence as the refrigerator kicks on and vibrates gently against his guitar, hidden from sight and collecting dust. 
In the interval of time between your release from the hospital and Eddie’s homecoming, you went looking for what could be saved in the wreckage of the Munson trailer. Thankfully, you knew where to look for what was most precious, like the family photos and heirlooms. You rescued what you could and replaced what you couldn’t, but there are some things that are too precious to ever replace.
Things like Eddie’s guitar.
When the world came tumbling down in those last few moments of whatever the hell happened at the end there, Sweetheart had taken brutal damage, and that was before someone burned the place down. She was barely clinging to life when you finally unearthed her from the rubble – all but one of her strings had snapped, the heat of the fire had caused her resin to bubble and warp, and without its protective layer, someone had been able to stomp her body nearly to oblivion. 
The violence of it broke your heart, and you’re not ashamed to admit you’d kneeled over her carcass and wept when you found her.
It made you physically sick to have to return her to Eddie in such a state, but there was only so much you could do without taking time and money you couldn’t spare to get her out to the Guitar Center in Indianapolis. 
She’d once been his prized possession, the focal point of his bedroom put on proud display, the only other woman in his life, now, she’s just some forgotten thing tucked into the space between the refrigerator and the wall, hidden from sight and collecting dust. 
Somehow that’s worse than any of it. 
Eddie told you it was because the apartment was so small and she fit so perfectly in that alcove, but you know it’s because after all that happened, he can’t stand to look at her. 
The refrigerator vibrates against her twisted body, and slowly, the room begins to fill with the muted buzz of a low E.
“I’m sorry, Sweetheart.” Eddie sighs, and it takes you a moment to realize he’s talking to you.
You feel the mattress dip as his hand comes down to rest at the side of your hip, caging you in beneath him, “I’m just trying to make you feel better… honest.” 
You heave a weighted sigh and roll over onto your back, throwing your arms over your eyes and baring down until you see spots and colors and stars. He settles down over you, and when you feel his weight come down to rest on your belly, your heart briefly palpitates. 
You have to stifle the urge to tell him to be careful, because he doesn’t know. How could he know? You haven’t told him. 
“I’m sorry,” He says again, and you can’t help yourself. 
“You’re always sorry when you get caught, but you always do it again.” You bite. 
You feel the corner of his mouth twitch against you and for a long time you both just lie there, wondering how the hell you got here. 
You like to think that under normal circumstances you might not stick around for so much bullshit, but unfortunately for you, your life never got back to normal after you put it on hold to go looking for the jerk last spring, and now you’re committed to him, warts and all. 
And the pair of you have always existed outside the bounds of “normal circumstances” anyway. 
It occurs to you now that this is exactly why you’d been so leery about coming straight home. You’d needed time to prepare before facing Eddie, to be certain before having to explain yourself, because it’s your job to protect him, but how are you supposed to protect him from himself, especially when he’s hell bent on following this path of self destruction to the end of the line?
But you’re still not certain, and you’re starting to think you really need to take another test…
“Where’d you go earlier?” Eddie mumbles dejectedly - you feel his voice rumble in the pit of your stomach and it sends the faintest stirrings of something you absolutely do not want to be feeling down through your central cortex – arousal. 
“Nowhere.” You say, distantly feeling your lips move and the vibration of your voice, but not hearing yourself speak. 
Before you realize what you’re doing, you shift your lower body, ever so subtly trying to move your hips up in search of a little friction.
Stop that, you silly bitch. You are not going to give him a pity fuck just because you feel bad about making him feel bad. 
You sigh. 
“I just needed to walk a little… stretch my legs… guess I lost track of time,” and then, “Sorry,” 
Eddie says something, and you are vaguely aware of responding – him asking if everything is okay and you dismissing the question, building up another layer of that lie and reassuring him that everything is fine…
At least, you think that’s what you said, you can’t be certain because his voice is still buzzing down through your belly and stirring that raunchy little pot, and you’re still fighting tooth and nail to stop your hips from squirming.  
You know if you don’t do something, you’re absolutely going to end up giving him a pity fuck, and that’s exactly how you ended up in the situation you’re in now. Because when Eddie calls, you come running, no matter what. 
I should tell him. 
You try to take another one of those deep, steadying breaths to banish the skittery tightness forming in your chest, and you choke on it.
Something begins to press in at the back of your eyes, welling up and crowding them in your sockets. Your vision blurs and before you realize what is about to happen, your lashes flood with hot, stinging tears.
You begin to cry. 
Goddammit. It really has just been a very shitty day. 
You uncover your eyes long enough to mask the motion of wiping away the wetness streaming across your cheeks by checking your watch, and you see that it is not there. A bright burst of panic sparks in your chest sending adrenaline shooting down to the tips of your fingers and toes before you remember how you’d removed it to wash your hands after being sick in the employee bathroom at Melvald’s. 
Before your life came grinding to a halt in ten minutes or less.
I should tell him. 
You imagine – you hope – your watch is still sitting there on the edge of the sink. And then you remember that it doesn’t matter if it is, because time stopped in November of 1983. 
Time isn’t real, it’s just another Thursday. 
You heave another one of those measured breaths – this one a little wetter and shakier than the last – and drop your arms to come down gently over Eddie’s shoulders. 
You sniffle and sigh, and he immediately twists over to look up at you. 
You look down and meet wide brown eyes – sad eyes – duller than they’ve been in months, red rimmed and ringed in dark circles like bruises. He’s so pale, his full lips are dry and cracked and raw from where you know he’s been biting at them. 
Eddie’s brows come together to form a deep crease of worry and suddenly your face is bracketed in his hands, brushing at the wetness you can’t manage to stem and apologizing endlessly for everything he’s ever done wrong. 
He doesn’t know what he did to hurt you, but he’s sorry for it. Sorry, sorry, always so incredibly sorry – how many times can someone say something before it loses all meaning? 
Sorry doesn’t mean shit coming from Eddie – yes it does, don’t be unkind.
He’s depressed, and you’re pregnant, and now you’re crying about it and he’s desperate to take the blame for it. 
To his credit, Eddie hauls himself up to meet you and pulls you into his arms, crushing you against him as you go to pieces. You can feel the uncertainty radiating off of him. 
He wants to know why you’re crying, so you should just get it over with and tell him, right? You can’t make the words come out, and now that you’ve started crying, you can’t stop. 
He deserves to know, but it’s your job to protect him, and so long as you keep this secret to yourself, he’s still safe from the harm it might cause. Everything is still okay, you just have to keep holding that door.   
It takes what feels like a very long time before you calm down, and even after you do, you just lay there facing each other, feeling Eddie’s eyes boring holes into your forehead. 
You have to tell him. 
“Are you mad?” Eddie asks before you can get the chance, reaching across to thumb away one last stray tear from the hollow beneath your eye – the lump in your throat threatens to swell again.
Tell him now.
You swallow hard and try not to choke on it.  
“Yes,” you say honestly, “But not at you … not really,” 
The corner of his mouth twitches again as he tries and fails to smile.
“Who do you need me to beat up?” Eddie asks in his best approximation of something he might have said once upon a time. It doesn’t hit quite the way it used to, and despite the shy smile that quirks up at the corner of your lips, you feel a sharp stab of grief for the person you lost on the other side of the world.
It's not a fair thought to have. He’s still here, part of him at least, and he’s fighting to get back to you with everything he’s got. 
You know he’s trying, and it immediately floods you with guilt. About biting his head off, about lying, about going missing long enough to leave him wondering what the hell could have happened to you. 
That was selfish of you, but you’re not going to apologize for it, because above everything else he said he was going to do, he promised to take better care of himself.
You suppose that makes you even. 
The silence that follows is unbearably weighted, like a sopping wet blanket – like the air in the other place – and you have to make yourself look at him to make sure you haven’t gone suddenly deaf, and to make sure he’s still there.
When you look, you’re not surprised to find that Eddie is looking too, like he’s had the same thought and it’s struck him with a bolt of blinding fear. You both do that a lot now, go checking to make sure the other is still there, even when you’re laying pressed against each other like this. 
He’s giving you that strange hard look you’ve come to know very well. It’s the same look he had on his face every time you caught him staring at you over the course of that long, terrible week last spring – the one he gives you when he knows something is wrong, but he is too afraid to ask on the off chance that he’s right about it. It’s the way his face looks all the time, now, ever since he got out of the hospital.  
Are we okay? He wants to ask, Do you still love me?
Because no matter how many times you tell him, it never seems to settle in. He always needs to hear it one more time. 
He always needs five more minutes. 
Just five minutes more more more more more –
Well, what about what you need? You’re the one watching your life fall apart, you’re the one who’s pregnant.
Then again, how do you know you haven’t been hallucinating the whole thing? You do have to tell him, but you really ought to take another test, just to be really, really sure before you share your findings with the class.  
A false positive isn’t unheard of. What’s the harm in a second opinion? You won’t know until you know.
Eddie follows when you sit up, and quickly takes your hands back from where you’ve begun scrubbing them furiously against your face, trying to rid yourself of the cloying miasma of salt drying tacky on your skin. 
“Don’t do that,” he tells you, and you don’t even bother asking him why. 
He does it because you would have done it to him. 
That’s how he operates now, relying heavily on what he knows you would do moment to moment, because he’s still that lost in the reeds. It’s the only way he knows how to take care of himself anymore: what would you do for him in any given situation?
The next thing you know, you’ve got your arms around his neck, squeezing him as tight as you dare, as tight as you think he needs to be held just to remember that he’s still here, and you wish like hell he would just pick up what you were putting down already. You wish he would know exactly what is going on with you without even asking, like he used to.
But you know he can’t, his mind is too clouded for the kind of clairvoyance lovers share anymore.
Eddie’s head thumps forward to rest atop your shoulder and strong arms – less strong than they used to be – squeeze you tight enough around the midsection to cause something in your back to pop. You don’t care. It’s grounding and it’s what you’ve needed all afternoon. 
You go chasing the feeling as you breathe in another two-count and exhale on three, twisting your head to bury your nose into the crook of his neck.
He stinks like days old sweat and your perfume. 
“I’m sorry I was mean,” you say into the filthy curtain of his hair, and you’re suddenly reminded of how you’d stood together like that in the dark of his bedroom a lifetime ago, counting down the moments you had to spare before you slipped back into the other place for the last time.
“S’okay,” Eddie slurs, and you feel the guilt of it throb painfully in your chest as you nuzzle against him, trying to slip beneath the surface and occupy the space beneath his skin. 
It’s the only way he’ll ever feel close enough without being inside of you – the gentle rumbling of your prior arousal begins to stir again, and you have to remind yourself that you’re not doing that.
“I love you,” 
He makes a soft sound and you feel his fingers flex against you, digging needily into your skin and pulling you up into his lap.
“Say that again,” he says, holding you against him.  
The fibers of his well worn t-shirt make the beginnings of a friction burn against your cheek as you shift to compensate for this new position – it’s hard to stay tucked against him now that you’re sitting above him, harder still not to sit right down and press the seam of your pussy against the bulge you can feel forming in his sweatpants. 
For the sake of your own self preservation – why? It’s not like he can get you more pregnant than you already are – you sit back on his thighs and bring your hands up to grace the curve of his throat. Eddie tilts his head back to follow and gaze up at you through his lashes. 
“Say it again,” he says, and days old stubble scratches the ridge of your knuckles as you stroke the side of his face.
“I love you,” you say thickly, for all the times you said it and he didn’t believe you, and all the times he needed to hear it and you kept it to yourself.
You listen as Eddie breathes out a shaky, charcoally sigh. His eyes slide shut and he lets his head drop forward to thump against your sternum. For half a blessed second, everything feels exactly like it should. Not like it used to, but as right as it possibly can be after everything that’s happened. 
It’s just you and Eddie. 
You and Eddie and the sea monkey growing inside of you.
Just like that, your brief moment of perfect peace begins to crack. You curl your arms around his neck in defiance of it and squeeze him a little tighter and do everything you can to hold it in place. 
He’ll be okay if you just hold him tight enough. Everything will be okay – nothing bad can happen when you’re together. 
Except for all the bad that happened at Rick’s Place and Lover’s Lake and on the other side of the world and… shut up shut up shUT UP!
Everything is going to be fine.  
You’ll tell Eddie your secret, and he’ll tell you that everything will be alright. You’ll figure it out, like you always do, and you’ll be happy to have whatever you end up with.   
You press your lips into the crown of his head, and he makes a soft sound beneath you. 
You tell yourself you ought t0 do it now. Don’t make a big deal out of it, but tell him and get it over with all the same so you don’t have to worry about it anymore. 
Eddie will help you – you don’t know how, but he will. He’s the only one who can help you, so just tell him. 
“Are you hungry?” You ask.
Coward.
He shakes his head and breathes a deeply melancholic sigh into your collar. Of course he isn’t, he’s full of sugar and coffee and nicotine, he’s not going to be hungry until next week. 
Still, you know he’s going to crash hard and be sick in the morning if you don’t make him eat something besides processed pound cake. He’s not hungry, but he’ll eat if you’re eating — the thought of food makes your insides clench and heave. 
“Are you?” He asks, shifting back so he can look at you again – in another life you watch him retreat to the stove at Rick Lipton’s place. 
“I made dinner,” that Eddie says, and you’re thrust into a memory of sitting with your heads bowed together over a flaking linoleum table, a sticky pot of Spaghetti-o’s and a hundred and one unsaid things between you — your stomach roils with nausea. 
“No, I’m good.” you tell this Eddie, your Eddie. 
That Eddie was your Eddie too, and sometimes you miss him so badly you can hardly breathe. 
You shift further back on his knees so you can look at him, really look at him, and tell him – you have to tell him – and you take his hands in yours. 
“Eddie, listen – there’s something we need to talk about…” You start, and feel him tense beneath you. 
You know what he’s thinking, more bad news. He’s about to lose something else, and you don’t have the heart to quell those fears just yet. If you get stuck trying to make it all better before it even begins, you’ll never get the words out.
You have to tell him. 
Deep breath in – the words sit on your tongue like burning coals, and yet you continue to fail to spit them out – just say it.
Two measly little words and it will be over. 
I’m pregnant.  
Say it, say it now … for the love of God, say anything.  
It’s only when you turn Eddie’s hands up to see his palms that you are saved from your sudden onset muteness as a spot of bright blood drying tacky in the creases of his hand makes itself known.
“Oh, my God!” You gasp, wondering how in the hell you didn’t see that before, “What happened?”  
“Nothing.” He mumbles, jerking his arm back to try and hide the wounded extremity. “It’s just a splinter.” 
You can feel your face pulling into a frown, even if you aren’t conscious of intentionally emoting, and you reach after him. 
“Let me see,” you say — Eddie says, because you’re out in the woods with two broken fingers that need setting and a black eye courtesy of Jason Carver, “Baby, let me see…” 
To his credit, Eddie doesn’t put up as much of a fight as you did back then, though only because you think after all this time he doesn’t have much fight left, and gives you his hand when you reach for it back in the here and now. 
Fingers in his, you turn his palm up again to scrutinize his shoddy work and feel your heart stutter.  
He’s dug a needlessly ugly crater into the calloused meat between his forefinger and thumb. Sticky, semi-coagulated blood is still oozing up in a ring around the faint shadow marring his flesh, and for half a second you’re afraid he’d gone and done something stupid like try to extract the foreign agent with a pair of scissors. 
When you look, you’re semi-relieved to see that it is only a pair of worn needle nose pliers balancing precariously on the bedside table. Still, you bite the pulpy mass you’ve spent the day chewing into the inside of your cheek until you taste blood to stop yourself from saying anything about it.
Eddie has always been such a boy, blundering through life and bashing his skull against problems because someone once told him to “use his head”. He always makes everything harder than it needs to be, and then wonders why he doesn’t feel any better by the end of it.
“I couldn’t find the tweezers,” he explains sheepishly.
You look up at him and gaze into those big sweet doe eyes — pretty eyes. Sad eyes. 
“They’re in the drawer —” You remind him, taking gentle hold of his face in one hand and squeezing, “—where they belong,” and then you push up to stand over him, “I’ll get them.”
You turn for the bathroom and don’t let go of his hand until the pull of distance demands it – his fingers slip from your grasp, and you blink back the beating of heavy wings and gnashing teeth, wrenching you out of his touch and into the dark of your mind’s eye.    
Across the room and into the little bathroom, you shut the door behind you. 
You click the lock. 
You don’t know why you do that, except maybe because you’ve been doing it all day, and you’re desperate for a moment to yourself in this four hundred square foot box of self pity. You tell yourself you only need a moment, but suddenly you can’t imagine that naïve girl who had been so ready to never have to bother with something like personal space and boundaries again.
What a foolish little thing she was.   
Young love doesn’t have the foresight for things like the shock of falling into the toilet at three o’clock in the morning because Eddie’s never lived with someone who doesn’t take a piss standing up and you’ve never had to navigate sharing a bathroom with someone who does. 
The learning curb has been steep. 
You drop the toilet seat with a loud clacking thump and you upend the grocery bag of prenatal contraband you’d smuggled out of Melvald’s. 
Part of you hopes Eddie didn’t see you grab your bag off the hook, but you suppose if he did, you’ll have to explain that behavior later, though at that point, you imagine he’ll have a lot more on his mind than wondering why you need to bring your purse with you to the bathroom. 
You drop your jeans, pee on the stick, and gnaw your fingers to the bone as you witness a little more of your life flash before your eyes with every passing second until you count out ten minutes … or less, as the packaging so boldly promised.
And when you receive your second opinion, you decide you could stand to get a third, so you lean over the bathroom sink, guzzle as much tap water as you can stomach and you do it all over again.
Colors and shapes and stars explode across your vision in a kaleidoscopic dance as you dig the heels of your palms into the jelly of your eye sockets and you wait … wait… wait to see what will happen next. 
There you sit, wringing your hands, bouncing your knees, and you wait ten minutes and ten minutes more until you get your results in thin pink lines and bright blue tabs and little green plus signs.
Positive results, which means… 
“Shit.” You hiss �� the plastic casing creaks and begins to tremble in your hands, “Fuck!”
A sharp rap on the door sends you leaping damn near out of your skin and the test goes clattering to the floor. 
The action is followed by a cautious utterance of your name, muffled by layers of wood vinyl and hollow core. 
Your heart lurches– along the bottom of the bathroom door, you can see the subtle shadow of idling movement. You forgot about Eddie, and you wonder with a start just how long he has been standing there, waiting for you. 
For ten minutes or less, you imagine. You have to swallow the urge to tell him to go away.
“Are you okay?” He asks, and you suddenly feel ready to burst into tears again – goddamn hormones.
You glance down at the strip of plastic casing and cardboard bullshit, at the two pink lines standing boldly against the soiled backdrop and grinning wickedly at you for all the smart decisions you didn’t make over the course of the last fourteen months of domestic bliss.
The answer rockets to the front of your mind.
No. You’re not okay. You’re pregnant.
You swallow hard to try and banish the cobwebs blooming in your throat, and when they thicken, you swallow again. 
Eddie is speaking before you can decide how to answer him. 
“… are you feeling sick again?” 
You just manage catch to catch the burst of bitter laughter before it can come bleating out of you, and you shake your head for no one in particular.
“Yeah – I mean no.” You say unevenly, “I’m okay, I’m just–” Pregnant. “–feeling a little bit off.” 
You know between the vagueness of the answer and the discovery of a locked door between you, Eddie’s mind is bound to be spinning out with worry. 
He worries so much about everything these days — just wait until he finds out about the baby, that’ll really give him something to worry about. 
You listen to him shifting his weight from one socked foot to the other on the carpet, to the soft thump that follows and has you picturing him resting his forehead on the door jamb. 
You brace your hands on your knees and push up to stare at your reflection, eyes heavy and ringed with exhaustion, about to get so much worse when you’ve got a tiny helpless creature screaming its lungs out at you in the inability to communicate.
You hear the tentative rasping of your name eke out from behind the door, and watch the handle jiggle in the mirror. 
All you want is to go to bed, sleep this weirdness off, and wake up tomorrow to find that everything has gone back to normal. 
Not the normal of this morning’s blissful ignorance, but the normal of days past. Of school days and homework and gossip and when the only thing you had to worry about not getting caught sneaking out of class just to steal five minutes behind the bleachers with Eddie.
The salad days.
You just want things the way they were — Eddie the way he used to be and you the way you used to be, sitting tucked away together in his bedroom at the old place, before anything went wrong and it was just you and your dreams for the future. 
More than anything, though, you wish you could buck up the courage to tell Eddie you’re pregnant so you can drop this suffering in silence bullshit. 
You carefully wrap everything back in that same plastic bag you never want to see again and stash it in the cabinet beneath the sink, tucked in behind all your forgotten bottles of shampoo and cleaning supplies, where no one will accidently find them. 
Then, you push up on creaky legs and address the elephant in the other room. You don’t unlock the door.  
“I’m gonna shower,” you watch your reflection say, it is a hollow, robotic sound, and Eddie doesn’t answer right away. You can hear him just outside the door.
Thinking. Worrying. 
Pouting more like. 
And you know he’s going to ask before he even says it. 
“…D’you want some company?”
Bingo.
Never has a sentence embodied a more desperate plea to be let in — he may as well have been scratching at the door and whining like a dog who’s been locked out. 
Let me in let me in let me in please let me in. 
You clench your teeth and blink back another wave of those pervasive tears pressing at the backs of your eyes as a strange, misplaced resentment wells suddenly in you.
It’s a startling feeling.
Not the same as the cheap, petty anger you’d felt before but a black and violent thing that does not belong to you. It has no business existing inside of you, and yet here it is, telling you that you can’t stand it. You can’t stand how much Eddie needs you all the time. You give him everything you have and he always needs more. 
Just five more minutes, please just give me five more minutes. Don’t leave me, just love me, let me in, let me in Please please please.
It’s not his fault. You tell the violent feeling. He’s depressed. He doesn’t have hobbies anymore…
He doesn’t have anything anymore — it bites back, he just has you. 
You shake your head in melancholic defiance of these conflicting feelings.
He needs me. You insist.
He’s using you up. It responds. He’s smothering you.
And you hate the feeling for being right. All he does is take and take and take, and you’re nothing if not a fool for giving him everything he needs and then some. You love Eddie more than anything, more than everything, but if he doesn’t stop taking, there’s not going to be anything left for you… for this— 
“—Baby?” Eddie calls faintly, startling you again. 
You have to take a moment longer than is probably necessary to calm yourself enough to decide whether or not you can stomach his “company” right now. 
“No,” you sigh, “I just wanna wash the day off.”
You imagine the pang of fear lancing through his chest as an invisible box is ticked off: the second sign of trouble.
Locked door. His alarm bells are ringing. Can’t get to you. You’re trapped trapped trapped. Let me in let me in let me in let me –
There is the scratching of the chewed edge of his thumbnail digging into the painted wood, peeling it — probably causing another splinter — and you have to bite your tongue to keep from telling him to stop doing that, because you’re not going to get your security deposit back. 
Who cares about security deposits or contraception or personal space, you both almost died, remember? Live a little!
You turn away from the stranger in the mirror and face the door, forcing yourself to sound chipper as you make empty promises about the future to the foreign shell of the person you have to remind yourself you love. 
“I’ll be out in a jiffy,” you call unevenly, “…just let me rinse off, okay?” 
There is a long moment of disappointed silence before Eddie finally responds. 
“...Mm’kay…” 
Fading footsteps thrum a gentle beat as you step out of your abused and crinkled jeans. Oddly, you feel like you’ve spent more time out of them today than in them, and that might almost be funny if it weren’t for the circumstances.
There is a moment of peace as you continue undressing, then the rapid thump thump thump of returning steps. A sharp knock summons another one of those long-suffering sighs whooshing up from the deepest recesses of your body.
“What do you need, Eds?” You ask a little too harshly, pinching your eyes toward the bridge of your nose with your forefinger and thumb. 
You tell yourself you’re not angry with him, you’re just tired and uncertain and scared of that uncertainty. 
“Tweezers.”
Oh. Right. 
They’re in the drawer, neatly tucked away and exactly where they belong. Just where you said they’d be. 
You crack the door as far as you dare and don’t look at your boyfriend when you take his palm in your hand, despite the holes you can feel him boring into the top of your head. 
Don’t shut me out — please – oh, God, please let me in! he begs you with only a few short breaths as you pluck the thick spur of plywood from his hand and douse it in rubbing alcohol for good measure. 
Eddie hisses and bends to kiss you on the cheek. You let him do it, then shut the door in his face. 
If he didn’t know there was something wrong before, he’s bound to be crawling out of his skin with it now. 
You don’t care, and you feel terrible about it as you lean over the tub to pull the pin and turn the water on. 
The shower head roars to life, and as it fills the room with noise and steam, you can barely hear yourself think – thank God.
You stand under the stream and let the water run hot on you until it goes cold, and even then you linger and accept the beating it gives you. 
Eyes shut, senses dulled, body pinging with goosebumps, you feel your muscles begin to loosen and relax. The outside world goes swirling down the drain, and you finally let your hand creep up to touch your belly. You splay your fingers over the expanse of skin and hold it there, feeling for something, anything, some sign of the life lurking there among your guts. When you don’t feel anything — why would you feel anything when the baby is not even a baby yet — you try your hand at rubbing the spot, back and forth, like you’ve seen people do to their fake pregnant bellies in the movies. 
The results are middling beneath pruning fingers and the shower head is pinging ice at you now, stabbing you in the scalp, so you decide with no small amount of disappointment that it’s time to get out. 
Just as you expected, Eddie is waiting for you when you flick off the bathroom light and re-emerge into the bedroom/living room/kitchen combo.
You’re almost surprised to find that the room has been more or less straightened. It’s not clean, by any stretch of the word, but trash, clothes, and all manner of discarded knick-knacks have been removed from the floor and stashed in other strategic places. The bedsheets have been tidied in the best approximation Eddie can manage for making a bed, though you can’t say it looks much different than it did before. He couldn’t do it right before he had his guts ripped out, and time and practice has had no effect on that inefficiency. 
He’s sitting there on the bed, trying to look casual with his long legs stretched out, ankles crossed, arms crossed, fingers crossed, and you give him a weak smile as you enter, holding your towel and heading for the chest of drawers on your side of the bed. You stop short when you notice the clothes he’s laid out for you: an oversized Houston Oilers t-shirt you’d thrifted for him before he came to stay and a soft pair of shorts – how unbearably sweet. 
“Feel better?” He asks hopefully, boyishly, as you step into the shorts. 
You nod, and you can’t even call it a lie, because getting the muck of the world out of your skin and hair has made enough of an impact to improve your headspace exponentially.
At least you don’t feel like you’re about to start screaming anymore – Jefferson Starship is happy enough to do that for you, howling to the elusive Jane, still playing that same old game she never can win. 
Eddie’s put on the mixtape you made him in the summer of ‘84, which you’re not certain he’s ever heard the end of – if only because he can’t make it through Dancing Queen without saying something snide about ABBA and disco as a whole – but he’s trying to make it better.
You tell yourself that, in spite of everything else, you have to give him credit for that as you slip the t-shirt over your head and walk your towel back to the bathroom. 
And if he’s trying, then you’re a fool for not trying too, so you do your best to put a happy look on your face when you reemerge and jerk your thumb over your shoulder.
“Okay, your turn.”
His mouth drops open, but you don’t let him protest. 
“Go on – git.” You say, affecting a thick southern drawl to try and lighten the mood. 
Eddie just frowns at you.
“If you wanted me to shower you shoulda let me join you,” He grouses. 
You stick him to the spot with a pointed look.
“If I’d let you join me, we wouldn’t be getting clean in there, and you know it.” You press, “I mean it, Eds. You smell like a garbage truck. When’s the last time you showered?” 
He snorts and does his best to make the jab to his ego look like feigned hurt feelings, but you can see the edges of his mask flickering. Not even near death had been enough to dampen that ego of his. 
It’s a bizarre thing to witness what is left of the Eddie from before fighting for real estate with what has grown into the Eddie here and now. If you could capture it in an image, you’d hang it on the wall and call it “the duality of man,”, but that wouldn’t help you to get Eddie into the shower any more than your attempt at gentle coaxing. 
You have to resist the urge to offer some sort of trade off, because there are scant few things that motivate Eddie these days that don’t end with you opening your legs for him. And you have to remind yourself, once more for the people in the back, that’s exactly how you wound up in your silly little predicament. 
Back when you were in high school and still strangers to one another, there had been a wildly circulated rumor that Eddie would trade weed for head … funny how that has circled back to reflect you and your recent penchant for sexual bargaining chips – if you take a twenty minute shower, I’ll go down on you when you get out.
You don’t wonder how your shitty old friends would react to learning about that development in your behavior, because you rarely ever think about Carol and Tina these days. 
You do wonder how you’re going to get Eddie to stop giving you that sulky look while holding your ground.  
He needs to shower (on his own), and you need a little more time to yourself. 
You hate to press the issue, because it makes you feel too much like his mother – and you cannot even begin to unpack the Oedipal concept of that dynamic – but you absolutely cannot spend another moment pressed against his side and breathing shallowly under a cloying musk of days old body odor. 
“I’m fine,” He insists, crossing his arms and still trying to pretend like he isn’t bothered by your indictment of his personal hygiene. 
“No, you’re not.” You say, “You have to take better care of yourself. I know you don’t think it’s gonna make any difference, but I promise you it will. You’ll feel better.” 
Eddie offers you one of those half hearted smiles, and quirks his brow.
“You always say that.” 
“Yeah, so what? I’m always right. Do it for me, okay?”
It takes him a minute more of contemplative pouting, but eventually he relents, because for as soft as you are for him, he’ll do anything for you, even if it means bruising his ego a little. 
He slaps his hands on the bed and pushes up in the fading glimmer of a gesture he might have made back in the old days – your heart throbs painfully in your chest as you watch him flicker in and out of frame – then makes a show of stretching his arms high over his head. 
You watch as he comes to immediately regret the motion when his bad side hitches and he quickly remembers his limited range of movement. 
Eddie pretends like it doesn’t hurt as he makes his way across the room.
“Okay,” he says softly, pausing to kiss you on the cheek as he passes, “But only ‘cause yer so damn purty,” 
The affectation of the southern drawl you’d used before sounds much better on Eddie, and you lean fondly in to the press of his lips, not even bothering to be annoyed when he takes a cheeky handful of your backside. 
You feel your insides burn with what the touch suggests, and for half a mindless second, you tell yourself that maybe you could stand to follow him in there. Just to help him wash, of course, get the spots he can’t reach… nothing else…
Then, your rationality comes snapping back into place when Eddie strikes you hard on the ass with an open palm. 
You yelp in alarm more than pain and jump. Even after every time he has done that before, you never expect him to do it, and your face is burning as you turn to watch him go, disgustingly pleased with himself and snickering.
“Wash your hair,” you call, knowing it will add at least another five minutes to his shower, and your coveted alone time. “And brush your teeth.” 
Eddie acknowledges you with a dismissive wave and something grumbled under his breath as he disappears into the bathroom, leaving the door cracked in a stark contrast to the way you’d shut him out when you slipped away into the next and only other room. 
Therein lies the ultimate problem of your living situation. You keep trying to build a barrier, brick by brick, because you need your space, but Eddie needs it too, so every brick you put up he takes right back down.  
You feel a muted pang of guilt over that which dissipates the moment you hear the shower hiss on. Then, and only then, do you breathe a sigh of relief you didn’t realize you were holding. 
Your time begins now. 
Because you absolutely cannot abide the state of the bed, even after Eddie’s futile attempts to pull it into shape, you spend the full duration of Jefferson Starship’s regression back into the days of Airplane attempting to wrestle the top sheet into position as Jane fades into White Rabbit. 
Then, as the first strummed notes of More than Words begins to play, you brave the tide and pull the blankets over your head, curling in on yourself protectively. In the dark, the wet sloshing of the mattress is so much worse, so much weirder, and you try not to think about how womblike your cocoon suddenly is. 
You didn’t want the waterbed. You wanted a normal mattress to try and live your normal lives, but Eddie already wasn’t sleeping because of his nightmares, and you couldn’t stand to see him in any further pain, not when it was because of something you could so easily remedy.
Sure, it was a real kick in the teeth to have to send five hundred dollars you couldn’t afford down the drain on a mattress, but thankfully the retailer would accept an exchange on a product of equal or lesser value (emphasis on lesser) and that’s how you’d gone and found Eddie in some back corner of the store, starfished and riding the surf of the floor model waterbed like a blissed out Goldilocks.
The stuff of your nightmares.  
“Babe, it’ll be so cool,” he’d told you when he was trying with everything in his power to convince you to say yes.
He’d spouted some bullshit statistic he’d skimmed in a pamphlet at physical therapy about the benefits of hydrotherapy, and you’d informed him that sleeping on a giant water balloon was not hydrotherapy. But you were just so glad he was getting excited about something, and because mattress shopping is an exercise in twentieth century torture, you took it home for a tentative trial. 
Fourteen months later, here you lay, trying to relax, trying to sink into a quiet, thoughtless meditation, but you can’t stop your mind from spinning.
Because you hate this fucking waterbed. 
You hate the way it lists back and forth when you climb into it, and when Eddie slinks in after you and startles you awake with the sudden lurch of blaring panic, like stepping off a curb in your dreams. 
You hate the leaks it springs, you hate the crinkling duct tape patches that poke you through the sheets when you roll over. 
You hate how it holds the cold in the winter and radiates heat in the summer. 
But you don’t hate how happy it made Eddie to see it delivered, or how you’d lay awake giggling together that first night. You love the childlike glee you’d shared that night, taking turns bouncing each other on the creaking tide and whispering back and forth like kids having a sleepover. 
Of course, that giddy episode of play was the only prelude to what was perhaps the worst night’s sleep you’d ever had, but you’re almost happy to ignore that.   
In a turn of events which you pretend not to be shocked by, Eddie’s shower lasts nearly twenty-five minutes. By the time he shuts off the water and re-emerges, scrubbed pink, clean shaven, and reeking of peppermint, you’ve let the gentle rocking of the bed lull you into a sleepy stupor. 
“How was it?” you ask, regardless of what you already know.
You don’t ask him how long he actually spent washing and how long he just stood there under the tap (you also don’t ask if he allotted any of that time to jerking off in the distant hope that he’ll be satisfied enough to leave you alone) because the subtle change in his posture is all the evidence you need to know you were right. 
Like always. 
He looks over at you and smiles that same goofy smile that made you fall in love with him back in high school, and his brows come down. 
“Cold.” He says, “You used up all the hot water,”
Oh, whoops. He levels you with a sidelong glance which you imagine is meant to make you feel guilty for not letting him share the hot water with you, but somehow you can’t manage to get around to feeling that way. 
He’s clean, that’s all you care about.  
You can’t help but stare as he drops his towel in a wet heap and stands comfortably naked, pulling open drawers and looking for a pair of boxers and a clean shirt – wonder of wonder, miracle of miracles…
“Sorry,” you hum, watching with rapt, unblinking attention.
Eddie turns at the sound of your apology, and it takes a moment too long for your gaze to snap up when he comes to face you. You smile innocently, but he’s already smirking at you. 
“Are you?” he asks, “...or are you just enjoying the show?”
You tilt your head down to press your shoulder to your ear. 
“Maybe,” 
He rolls his eyes and steps into the faded blue plaid boxer shorts.
“Maybe, she says – move over, will ya?” 
You hold the blankets up for him to slide beneath. Pulling the shirt over his head, he settles in beside you and you sit together in silence, listening to the distant sounds of your mixtape playing as you wait for the bed to stop sloshing. 
You know deep down he secretly hates it too, but he’s too proud to admit when he’s wrong, especially after campaigning so hard for it. You don’t care, you’re in this for the long game — you’re gonna make him say it before you do.
You curl your arm around his back and immediately go to work knotting your fingers in the tangles of his hair, tugging gently at the damp baby hairs curling at the nape of his neck and making a mental note to help him comb it out before you fall asleep. 
Eddie rests his head atop yours with a contented sigh and you feel the poke of his tongue in his cheek as he swipes it over his teeth. 
“So, are you ever gonna tell me about your shitty day?”
“Who said I had a shitty day?” You ask.  
He breathes an easy chuckle out through his nose and you hear it rattle all the way down in his lungs. 
“You and that attitude of yours,”
 Before you can say anything in defense of your self, the next track begins to play, bringing with it the iconic intro to Dancing Queen. And because Eddie cannot abide ABBA, he is on his feet in an instant. 
The prelude to a great disappointment begins to well in your chest, because unlike Eddie, you do in fact remember being young and sweet, only seventeen, and you cherish those days – the earliest days of your entanglement with the town pariah, before you’d finished dancing around each other. 
“Eddie don’t–” You whine, but he’s already thumping across the room to the stereo sitting precariously balanced in your rickety bookcase. 
When he reaches the unit, he makes the executive decision that you can neither dance nor jive, and you will not be having the time of your life. He begins agitatedly punching buttons, and the song cuts out.
The track skips, and the next thing you know, your blood is thrumming along to the beat of a crunchy baseline, and Steve Perry is crooning you make me weak, and wanna die… and you know exactly what is coming next. 
The main event. The lovin’, the touchin’, the squeezin’... your insides squirm with an unhelpful reminder of your deep dark secret, and you muster every shred of self control you have. 
You will not be having sex tonight, no matter how good Eddie looks naked, no matter what he does to try and sway you, and no matter how much Steve Perry insists he’s tearin’ you apart… 
You cross your arms and breathe out hard through your nose with wavering determination as Eddie turns back to you, once again disgustingly pleased with himself. 
“That’s better,” He says, crossing back to the bed in two long-legged strides and throwing himself down beside you.
The mattress jumps and rolls, and your muscles tense as you do everything you can to stay upright and sulking.
“Why do you hate fun?” you ask as Eddie crawls over top of you on his hands and knees.
“Hate fun?” he echoes, like he cannot believe you would accuse him of such a thing.
“You know I love that song.”
 “Yeah, but, Sweetheart, this is a great song! It’s the best song on the list,”
Never mind the fact that he skipped three tracks to get there. You set your teeth and try not to take offense to his criticism of your taste in music because you’ve long since agreed to disagree.  
“This is a sex song.” You correct, resisting the asking fingers he’s begun to drum along your tightly crossed arms.
When you fail to open up for him, Eddie rolls his head to the side and looks up at you through his lashes in that very specific way he knows drives you just a little bit crazy.  
“It’s your tape, Babygirl,” he says evenly, “I’m just a humble disc jockey.” 
You snort out your displeasure with the statement, but you can’t deny it. Because you had indeed hidden Lovin’ Touchin’ Squeezin’ among the tracks on your Summer Fling mixtape back in the summer of ‘84 in the raunchy little hope that it would inspire Eddie to do just that to you, and you know that he knows that as well as you do.
So, whose fault is it really when he slips his hands up under your shirt and starts kissing your neck?
You curse yourself for being so unbearably hot for him back in the day, and for the way that, after two long years, nothing has changed.
“Can I make a request?”
He hums out an easy laugh.
“Nope, sorry. We’re only playing mood music for the rest of the night.” Eddie says, and you tilt your head dutifully back when he nudges your jawline with his nose, “Unless you were gonna ask for Dio, ‘cause you always gotta remember to leave room for Ronnie–”
“If you try to put on Holy Diver again I’m leaving.”
He giggles then – actually giggles – and this time when he kisses you, you feel the press of his tongue on your throbbing pulse point.
You tell yourself this is as far as you’re going to go. You can stand to let him suck a bruise into your neck if that’s what it takes to make him happy but you’re not going to have sex, even if you’re suddenly squirming beneath him to alleviate the thrumming between your thighs.   
With everything you still have to talk about, you can’t afford to let Eddie distract you like that.
Of course, you already know what he’s going to say, the question he’ll ask you — what do you want to do? 
You don’t want him to ask you that. You want him to tell you what to do. You want him to have all the answers and put your mind at ease because you’ve been driving yourself crazy asking yourself that question all goddamn day.
What do you want to do? What are you going to do? How far are you willing to let this go? 
Are you prepared to go all the way with Eddie Munson? You’d asked yourself that once in a situation not so dissimilar to the one you currently find yourself in.
Of course, that time had been significant, because it had been the first time, and even now you remember that cold November afternoon so vividly. You should have been in school, but instead, you were parked outside a record store an hour outside of Hawkins, laying in the back of a van beneath the boy you so desperately loved and letting him send you to pieces with a kiss.
It wasn’t a chaste, pretty kiss like you see in the movies — at least no decent kind of movie — it was a heavy, dirty thing, with tongue and teeth and gasping breath. He held your hands pinned above your head, and you lay there rutting up against him in desperate search of something that only your animal brain could explain. 
The natural progression of things, the way of the world and of girls and boys since time immemorial.
You might have briefly entertained the thought of having his baby back then, in the murky heat of the moment. In hindsight, you’re fairly certain that was just latent Darwinism reminding you that you are a mammal and that your only true purpose on this Earth is to breed – so breed, Baby.
And then your rational human mind prevailed, and asked you that terrible question: are you ready for this?
You’d thought you’d been scared of what the question meant then, but the virginal fear of the thing lurking between a boy’s legs — between your legs back then, prodding you through Eddie’s jeans and asking for a respectful permission you could not help but deny — holds no candle to the uncertain, impending future, which you no longer bother planning for.
Pledging your undying love as a horny teen fresh out of a very close brush with death is one thing, but tethering yourself to something and someone indefinitely?
Are you ready to commit to that with Eddie Munson?
Are you prepared to love him and take care of him on good days and bad, no matter what? Through night terrors and fugue episodes and days and days and so many hard days of wishing he would just snap out of it and come back to his old self?
Are you prepared to have his baby? 
“Ground control to Major Tom.” Eddie calls distantly, and you feel a gentle tapping at the center of your forehead, “Can you hear me, Major Tom?”
He guides you gently from the mire of your existential thoughts and fears, and you blink back at him as he waits expectantly for an answer to whatever it was he’d just said.
“Hmm? Oh — sorry, Eds,” you say absently, reaching up to cup his cheek in your hand, “What were you saying?”
He glares at you, but the effect is ruined by the shy twitch of his lips, quirking at the corners despite his best efforts to play mad at you. He’s still on his hands and knees, a mere inch of distance between your noses as he glowers at you in mock offense — how dare you not be fully engaged in the first steps of this stunning foreplay.
Oh please, as if you don’t do this every goddamn night. 
“Only that I need you so bad right now,” he says, “But it’s not so easy getting that message to Mars. I guess NASA’s not really in the business of passing love notes.”
You scoff and roll your eyes, hooking a finger in the collar of his t-shirt. The lingering effects of the shower waft up in a puff of clean air when you release the fabric, and even through the haze of shampoo and toothpaste, you can smell the bitter undertone of all the cigarettes he smoked today.    
“You need me so bad every night.” You remind him. 
He grins and you feel his teeth when he tips forward.   
“Can’t help it.” Eddie says against your lips, attempting to resume the stilted progress of his foreplay by ducking his head to press a less than chaste kiss to the space beneath your ear — flicking tongue, scrape of teeth – his voice reverberates against the drum and you shiver, “It’s Kafkaesque.”
You snort and wonder as he snakes his hands up under your shirt and takes your breasts in hand if that was meant to impress you. 
“Pavlovian.”
“What’s that, Sweet Girl?” He asks, changing direction without missing a beat.
Eddie rocks back on the balls of his feet, and lifts your thighs over his, pulling you down the mattress a tick – your head thumps against the headboard. Ouch.   
He helps you sit up straight with an apologetic hand, boring holes into you with those big dark eyes – pretty eyes. 
Hungry eyes Eric Carmen might have told you, were you listening to the radio and not Journey’s endless waning call of “nah nah nah-nah nah,”.  
“You mean Pavlovian,” you tell him, bracing your hands on his shoulders when he hugs you by the waist and pulls you into his lap.  
“How do you know what I mean?” he asks as you settle into this new position. 
You drum your fingers along his collarbones and tilt your head, smiling coquettishly as you innocently prepare to bore him to death. 
“Because Pavlov trained dogs to drool at the sound of a bell by ringing one every time he fed them,” you say, “and Kafkaesque suggests that you’re trapped in an authoritarian situation that you can’t escape, so I don’t think that really applies … unless you’re trying to tell me something about our relationship.” 
Eddie hums out a low, performative moan, deep from the back of his throat. It’s not so performative a sound, however, that you can’t feel the hard length of something prodding into the crook of your thigh. 
“I love it when you talk dirty,” he says, baring his teeth at you in a wolfish grin that looks almost like something the old Eddie would have done. 
Eddie before the trauma and surgeries and blood transfusion on blood transfusion on blood transfusion. 
You roll your eyes and trail your fingers down down down his abdomen until you’ve reached the less-than-subtle tent in his threadbare boxers. He draws in a sharp intake of breath when you skim your fingers over the tip of his bulge before taking an immodest palmful of his dick. 
Once upon a time you would have wilted at the thought of doing something like that, but time and practice and the way Eddie’s eyes slide shut as he nods his encouragement has turned a gesture like that into something as casual as late night television. 
He rolls his hips forward and you already feel a bead of heady wetness blooming in the fabric of his boxers when you swipe a cheeky thumb over his tip.
His breath hitches, and Eddie has to clear his throat to keep his voice steady as you begin to work him in your fist. 
“Go on,” He says, and you’re nothing if not happy to oblige.   
“You … getting a hard-on …every night at bedtime… is Pavlovian…” You say, stroking him in a measured up and down. 
Big smile, front teeth poking out, cheeks indenting with an elusive dimple, Eddie shakes his head, pulling you forward to press bodily against him, and sandwiching your hand indecently between you. He doesn’t stop moving his hips. 
“You’re so smart,” he rasps, and you detect the faintest hint of a quaver in his voice when you make a ring with your index finger and thumb, encircling the broad flare of him through the fabric and squeezing.
His mouth falls open on a heavy breath, and you close it right back up with a finger on his chin. 
Still moving in short lazy thrusts, he sighs against you and kisses the line of your jaw, teasing your head back once more with a gentle nudge and exposing the taught columns of your throat to him.
“It’s so fucking sexy.”
You fail to suppress a snort and are almost shocked when it doesn’t immediately kill the mood.
“Is it really that sexy or are you just horny?”
“Who says it can’t be both?” Eddie says, “You’re smart and sexy… and I’m super fucking hot for you right now,”
And because he absolutely cannot help himself when he is reminded of even the faintest hint of a song, suddenly he’s singing under his breath.  
“—hot-blooded, check it and see—” Eddie’s Foreigner impression plays against the waning backdrop of Journey turning over to Pat Benatar, insisting We Belong from the competing stereo.
It’s entirely too much, and you burst into a fit of undainty laughter.
“Don’t laugh, this is important.” He says, grinning, “— I got a fever of a hundred and three,”
When you don’t stop, Eddie kisses you, and even under the seal of his lips, you can’t manage to stifle your giggling.
Of course, now you remember why it’s more fun to fool around and have sex every night than it is to be sensible adults who keep their hands to themselves. Because that’s how you get the old Eddie back – fun Eddie – the one who made you lose your mind and fall in love with him that first Tuesday night at the Hideout a hundred Tuesdays ago. 
Even then, you’d loved him so bad you could have screamed. And you did scream, you recall. You’d screamed yourself hoarse even as Corroded Coffin got booed off stage because you were their biggest fan – their words, not yours – even if their name was stupid and made you giggle behind their backs. 
So what if you only ever see that version of Eddie anymore when you’ve got his cock in your fist? As if to punctuate the thought, he stammers over the next lyric and gasps out a breathy moan when you give him three quick jerks.
He laughs.  
“Naughty,” 
You giggle along and part his lips with a cheeky swipe of your tongue, happily swallowing every little sound he makes under your touch and feeling your insides begin to quiver in turn.
You’ll keep jerking him off because it’s fun to watch him steadily go to pieces, but you’re not having sex tonight – so, why do you have to keep reminding yourself of that?
“Babe,” Eddie says, lips clicking wetly as you part, “It’s not funny, it’s a serious medical condition – you don’t have to read my mind, to know what’s on my mind – Man, those lyrics are stunning.”
“Sheer poetry.” You say, nodding and his eyes light up.
“Right? Guy’s an artist,”
You’re still giggling when you feel the scrape of Eddie’s teeth along the tender veins lining your neck, pinching just a little too sharply on your jugular.
It sends a bolt of adrenaline shooting down like sparks to sting the tips of your fingers and toes, and suddenly it’s not nearly as funny or sexy as it was a moment ago.
You gasp. Fight or flight kicks in — you freeze.
Your heart hammers in your chest, your hearing whites out, – your hands are trembling as you struggle to unwind the soiled bandage tied tight around your broken fingers. You press it to the ugly wound in Eddie’s throat, spurting blood as he tries and fails to breathe through it – he coughs and gasps against the pain it causes him and chokes on your name in a way that makes you never want to hear him say it again… help me, it pleads, don’t let me die, make it stop…
You breathe out harshly and shake your head against the intrusive image of blood turned nearly black in the dark of that place. Your hands come up to brace firmly against Eddie’s shoulders, fingers trembling as you dig them into the muscle there, and you shove him without really meaning to.
“Stop—” You gasp.
It’s okay, you’re okay, You tell yourself, the same way you tell Eddie every night he thrashes awake in a blinding terror, You’re here. You’re safe, you’re home — just breathe. 
“Sorry—” He says immediately, “Too much?”
But you can barely hear him over the roaring in your ears.  
You focus on what you can see — the walls of your shared bedroom/dining room/living room, all your collective things illuminated in the amber glow of the flickering table lamp sitting across the room.
And you focus on Eddie, drying curls backlit and flyaway, framing his face — his handsome face — not spattered in blood and twisted in agony, but freshly scrubbed and tweaked in alarm and a less than subtle hint of concern. 
You’re okay, but more importantly, he’s okay, he’s here with you, and nothing bad can happen when you’re together — but you’d been together while he lay there bleeding to death, hadn’t you? 
“Are you okay?” he asks, all traces of teasing gone from his tone. 
It’s amazing how quickly he can shut it off when the mood shifts. Your sweet boy. 
“I’m okay,”
“What happened?”
“Nothing,” you say, “I just — I didn’t expect you to do that.” 
It’s bizarre that the motion triggered you like that, especially since you’re not the one who had your throat cut down there.
Down there. 
“...do you wanna stop?”
You fight to suppress a shiver and the urge to immediately agree – yes, you should stop, especially since you have no intention of letting this go any further than heavy petting, but you don’t want to be a killjoy.
You shake your head to try and disperse any lingering memory of that night – that eternal night – and absently pet the side of your paramour’s face.
“No,” You say, “No, we don’t have to stop.” But you’re painfully aware of the lack of enthusiasm in your tone.
Eddie’s brows furrow over his eyes, and you can tell he doesn’t believe you, so you tilt forward to press a kiss to the corner of his mouth. 
“Let’s keep going,” you say.
You kiss him, attempting to rekindle what has already begun to die out, and when he doesn’t reciprocate, when you try to kiss him again and he leans back, you feel your insides seize with disappointment. 
“I’m fine, Eddie,” you say, and he pulls a face.
“Liar,”
“I am. I promise.” 
You watch disbelief shadow his face and the muscle in his jaw flex. You can tell he’s getting impatient, not for the starting and stopping, but because he knows you’re not telling him something.
Isn’t that the understatement of the century?
After a moment, Eddie drops his head and sighs your name dejectedly, you try not to flinch or hear it forced out on a burbling bloody timber begging you to make it stop. He slumps onto his hip beside you and he walks two cheeky fingers up the length of your thigh before resting a hand at the top and giving you a gentle squeeze.
“—we don’t have to do this.” He says, “We can just go to bed.” 
You wish that were true. 
You rock back into the pillows and force yourself to smile, feeling your cheeks pull as your insides go tight and twisty. 
Sure, you could just go to bed with a chaste kiss and a “see you in the morning,” and wake up in a few hours to find Eddie on his third cup of coffee, watching late-night television and chain smoking. Or, and far more likely, you can wake up to him thrashing and screaming beside you through the endless circadian reruns of his death and spend the rest of the night trying to calm him down.  
No actually, you can’t just go to bed. You have to do something to help him relax, so that he’s too tired to do anything but sleep through the night.
And the best way to do that, you have found, is to get him off. As it turns out you can only therapy fuck your boyfriend for so long – approximately fourteen months – before it starts to have consequences, like unplanned pregnancies and his being unable to sleep without you getting him off first.
Your hesitation to answer speaks volumes, and Eddie finally shakes his head.
“Let’s just go to bed,”
“No,” you press, pawing at the front of his shirt and hating how whiny you sound as you say it, “I want to keep going.” 
“Don’t just say that because you think it’s what I want to hear,” he says a little too harshly.
“I’m not.”
“You have to tell me if something’s wrong, Sweetheart. I’m not a mind reader, I can’t help you if you don’t talk to me.”
It’s startling to hear, like the clanging of a bell. He knows something is up, and while he may not know what it is, Eddie’s not nearly as stupid as he pretends to be, and you’re a bad liar.
So, quit beating around the bush and tell him already.   
You don’t know why, but you’re committed to denying it now, so you wire your jaw shut and shake your head. 
“I’m fine, you just startled me. I didn’t expect you to do that,”
Eddie gives you that hard look again, and you do your best not to wilt under it. 
“And…?” 
“…And I’m–” Pregnant. “– a little tired…” Pussy. “…and my head hurts.” Stupid. 
Oldest cliché in the book — not tonight honey, I have a headache.  
When he still doesn’t let up, you throw your hands up in a lopsided shrug and catch his face to bracket on the way down, as if that’s going to do anything to soften the blow of rejection you’re trying so desperately to avoid.
Suddenly, it feels a lot like you’re the one about to receive it, and you hate how desperate that makes you feel. What are you fighting so hard for? You’re not having sex tonight, remember?
“I found out I have to go in on Saturday to do inventory,” you fib, pulling your shoulders up and fully committing to the bullshit subterfuge, “That’s why I’ve been cranky… sorry, I should have just told you.”
And then, Eddie’s shoulders drop and he relaxes under the blissful satisfaction of the truth. It makes you feel grimy, 
“Ah-ha,” he says, “Melvald’s workin’ you to the bone, huh?”
You nod.
“One box of Kotex at a time.” More like one box of neatly packaged pregnancy tests — results in ten minutes or less! 
Eddie's features soften, and he dips his head to brush his lips across the slope of your shoulder. 
“My Baby’s just tired, huh?” He hums against you, “Poor Baby...” 
You suppress a flinch and silently wish he would stop saying things like that. 
“Yeah.” You say dejectedly, “Anyway, there you go. My shitty boring day. Stocking shelves, live in technicolor,” 
Eddie hums thoughtfully and you watch as he begins a steady descent down your body.  
“That’s hot. Think we could get it on pay-per-view?”
You push up on your elbows just as he slides down to come face-to-face with your midriff, and you clear your throat. 
“Where do you think you’re going?” You say, as he slips a cheeky finger beneath the band of your shorts. 
He pauses to give you a sly look.
“Down unda,” Eddie says, grinning and effecting a thick Australian accent. 
Oh no, absolutely not. Jerking him off is one thing, but if you let him go down on you, it’ll be a one-way ticket to Stupidtown, and you’ll absolutely end up letting him fuck you. 
You’re determined not to let that happen, so you pull your knees up and cross your ankles over his back, squeezing tightly. Eddie makes a put-out sound when you cage him in and he finds he can go no further. 
“You got a passport, Crocodile Dundee?” You deadpan, quirking an unimpressed brow.
“Jeez, can’t a guy worship at his altar in peace?” he says, trying to wriggle free and butter you up in the same breath, “The goddess? My inspiration?” 
You roll your eyes but you don’t let him go when he begins to squirm in earnest. 
It is an effort in futility. 
Back in the day, you spent many an afternoon sitting around the trailer watching professional wrestling, and those sessions typically ended with you in a headlock after boldly claiming you could beat Eddie in a fight. To his credit, he always at least let you try before flipping you ass over tea kettle and holding you pinned to the carpet until you said “uncle”. In those days, you never stood a chance, but that was then, and unlike Eddie, you actually bothered to go to your physical therapy sessions and still have full functional use of your body. 
You’re not trying to hurt him, so you aren’t putting nearly enough pressure on his ribs to really hold him, but he’s out of breath before you’ve even broken a sweat.
“Release me, Foul Temptress.” He demands, struggling against you and the vice you have on him. 
You cross your arms and make a show of leisurely checking your nails. 
“Say uncle.” You say innocently. 
“You’re evil,”  
“No, I’m winning.”
When he stops moving long enough to glare back at you, you push out your lower lip in a feigned pout. 
“Had enough yet?”
You watch the muscles in Eddie’s jaw flex as he contemplates all the biting retorts he could possibly hit you with before evidently decides against retaliation. 
He sighs and goes slack against you, forehead dropping to knock against your belly, and you once again have to resist the sudden and bizarre urge to tell him to be careful.
He doesn’t know, how could he know when you haven’t told him yet? 
Of course, it’s only lost in this brief but looming thought that you momentarily let your guard down, and Eddie finds his ace in the hole.
He presses his nose to the tender softness of your belly and makes a gentle, needy sound, and your thighs involuntarily tremble. 
You unhook your ankles and let your feet drop to the bed on either side of his hips with two solid thumps that sends you rocking back and forth on a sloshing tide.
You don’t know when he started to work your T-shirt up, but suddenly your flesh is exposed to him and those damn lips. 
He doesn’t kiss you, so much as part his lips and breathe out, a long, quivering breath that has your throat closing up and your knees edging open far enough to let him drop and lay with his stomach pressed flat to your pubic bone. 
“I just wanna be good to you,” he says, muffled against your stomach, searching hands skittering up up up over your thighs and into the open legs of your shorts to grace the supple curve of your hip. “Wish I had something nice to say … to make it all better…”
He brushes his lips over the spot just beneath your navel and you feel something flutter there. 
You can’t be sure if it’s just the phantom sensation of your secret crying out to be known, or the way you’ve noticed how he’s begun rocking his hips into the mattress. He still has a hard on, after all, and he knows how much you like to watch him get himself off like that. It causes your breath to hitch in your throat, but you manage catch Eddie’s hands before he can get your shorts off.
Under the looming threat of complete and total mental blackout, you muster your courage, and try once more to pick up where you left off. 
“I – I have something to tell you … actually,” you say tentatively, worrying your lower lip and trying not to get caught on the slow, purposeful canting of his hips.
It piques his interest enough to stir him from where he’s tucked himself between your legs and turn curious eyes up at you, blown dark with needy expectation. 
“Oh, yeah?” His voice is a deep and husky rasp that sends a bolt of want like lightning down to the thrumming apex of your thighs. “Something nice?”
You swallow hard and, despite your subtle hesitation, lift your hips off the mattress to assist him this time as he slides your shorts down and discards them over his shoulder. 
They land softly over top of the lamp, plunging you into a sudden and deeply muted semi-darkness – mood lighting, something inside you suggests and you have to force yourself to watch Eddie work to keep from rolling your eyes.
You’re not going to have sex with him… but that doesn’t mean you’re not just a little curious to see what he has in mind. 
You know exactly what he has in mind, Stupid.
You forgot to make him eat dinner so now he’s just going to have to make due.
“I don’t know if it’s necessarily nice, but it’s something.” You breathe, watching transfixed as he eases your knees open as far as they will go, exposing the thin, damp fabric of your panties to the air.
He hums, a gentle rumble in the hollow of his throat that sends goosebumps flash freezing across your arms and legs when it catches on the end. 
Distantly, you see his hips jump as he catches on a fold in the sheets, and you throb in wanting commiseration.   
“… good or bad?” He rasps, punching a breath out from your already flattening lungs as he skims the junction of at the crook of your thigh with the tip of his nose and moves lower … lower. 
“Oh… good.” You say, voice an embarrassing octave higher than normal, “It’s good… hhmmaybe. I...uh... I-I haven’t decided yet.”
Teeth in the elastic of your panties, a sharp tug pulls his lower lip down before it snaps back into place, and he groans.
You fail to suppress a shiver as Eddie eases your legs up over his shoulders, still working his hips against the mattress at an agonizing pace. Suddenly all you want is to be the bed, laying beneath him as he rocks steadily into you, using you to chase his release, just like he does most nights. 
It briefly occurs to you that if you’re having that thought, it means you’re steadily approaching the point of no return. If you had any sense at all, you’d pump the breaks while you still can, but then you can feel the smooth plane of his face nuzzling the flesh of your inner thigh. You feel the press of his lips, and your tongue goes fat and useless in your mouth. Under the gentle prelude to the way he begins to press slow, reverent kisses along the expanse of your scar, you forget how to breathe, let alone do something so pointless as speak. 
The scar is the only physical thing you carry from that day you slipped through to the other side of the world. It’s a jagged, ugly thing that extends from your knee to your bikini line because while the initial wound had been expansive, the surgeon who attended to you that night last spring knew fuck all about fuck all and somehow managed to make it worse. You’re lucky, because most of your trauma is invisible, but you shouldn’t be thinking about that right now, you should be thinking about something normal, something sexy as Eddie continues with those soft, open-mouthed kisses, leaving cooling wet crescents over the length of the raised puckered skin, higher, higher…
And what’s sexy about scars and surgeons and the lingering evidence of eighty-four stitches?
Nothing, absolutely nothing, but it doesn’t stop you from reaching down to hook your fingers in the fabric of his t-shirt. You tug and pinch and gather material until you’ve made a little progress, trying to undress him while he’s busy grinding his cock into the bed, but you’re having a hard time getting it done from this angle.
Thankfully, the reverence of your touch does not go unnoticed — Eddie ceases his ministrations to push up on his knees and help you. Flushed and sweating, he reaches back and takes a fist full of the fabric, pulling the shirt over his head and discarding it in one swift movement. 
And then, just like that, you can see all the punishment he took trying to save you, down there on the wrong side of the world. All his scars and the evidence of just how close you came to losing him. Your heart thumps solidly against your ribs – yours is ugly, but his are worse, and you don’t think you’ll ever get used to seeing what those nasty little fuckers did to him. You keep that strictly to yourself, however, because Eddie already hates the way he looks bad enough without the burden of your opinion. He doesn’t need to know how they make you feel. 
You reach for him, suddenly desperate to touch him, and he takes you by the hand. He holds you firmly in his smoldering, blackened gaze, and you watch as he presses your index and middle fingers together. Then, he slides the compressed digits into the dark wet heat of his mouth and sucks on them until you’re flushed so hot your face has started to burn.
On the surface of your brain, the feeling of his tongue slipping up between your fingers, edging them open and flicking at the soft nook of flesh at the valley of their connection is unbearably gross, but that message doesn’t seem to make it down to the places where it matters. Nobody tells your animal brain that it isn’t the sexiest thing you’ve ever seen in your life. Your fingers go sliding out with a sickly wet slurp, and you shiver.
“Save these for me,” he says, “For later,”
Later? What the fuck is that supposed to mean? What’s going to happen later? You find, as he slides down the length of your body, that you don’t actually care. 
What happens in an hour or ten minutes (or less) is none of your goddamn concern when Eddie is busy parting your legs in a mirror image of the way he’d just parted your fingers.
You find you don’t have the capacity to wonder any further than that when he slips back down to prop your legs over your shoulders and hook his fingers in the dampened gusset of your panties. You breathe out a long, wanton noise that something in the back of your mind tells you is whorish when you feel the first puff of air fanning your bare pussy.
That damning something in the back of your mind suggests you should be embarrassed about that, but you can’t manage to feel anything but heated as he eases your underwear down your legs and banishes them to some far corner of the apartment.
Eddie kisses the nook at the highest point of your thigh, directly to the right of where he’s begun to trace the faintest ghost of a touch over your entrance, and suddenly all you can hear is your own heart pounding in your ears. He applies a whisper of pressure and dips into you up to the first knuckle, and you lay there, barely able to take it, wringing the sheets in your fists, telling yourself that at any moment cooler heads will prevail and you’ll put a stop to this.
Stupidtown looms on the horizon, and he’s barely even touched you.
Then, on top of everything he’s doing to you, Eddie has the audacity to try and get you talking again.
“You were saying?… ‘something good, maybe’ … but…?” he says, stretching the word lyrically in a way you haven’t heard him do in a long, long time. 
You don’t get the chance to revel in that before the question is followed by the sharp pinch of flesh between teeth as he bites you, just beneath your scar. Hard enough to bruise, but not enough to break the skin. You yelp and jump against him, but he holds you firmly to the spot so you can’t escape, then he soothes the offended flesh with the wide flat press of his tongue before sucking it in past his lips – it burns, and you can’t stand how much you like it.
“Hey, g-go easy with that, will you?” You try to tell him, “Easy…” but then he uses two fingers to spread your pussy open wide, exposing you to the air.
You trail off into a long, high whine, which turns sharp and loud when he flicks the blunt edge of his nail over your painfully neglected clit. The bundle of nerves screams, and your hips buck up hard enough to break the seal of the bruise he’d been busy sucking into your thigh. 
When he presses his thumb flat to that howling little bitch, you blow right past the point of no return. 
“Oh, fuck! – Eddie!” you gasp, and when he smiles you can feel his teeth as he gives you one last gentle nip for good measure. 
“Ask me nicely,” He growls, and you lose your goddamn mind. 
Never mind all of your bullshit principles. Never mind tests or little pink lines and blue tabs and green plus signs – you need him to fuck you, and you need him to do it now.  
“Please,” you cry, “Please, please, please–”
“Good girl,”
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luvhughes43 · 1 year ago
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vicious | trevor zegras x reader
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luvhughes43 masterlist🌷
summary: media girl for the ducks, trev and her start hooking up + secret relationship but he tells people it’s not true & ruins her image in the process
lyrics: "oh, you're so vicious love me then pretend you didn't, crush my heart and wreck my image, why you gotta be so vicious?
word count: 1.5k
One year, ten thousand bad moments
But it was dressed up in heated emotion
And I tried to look for the best in the worst
But like, fuck me, that caused a commotion
you knew that what you and trevor were doing could end badly. but with every soft kiss, and tug, all your worries melted away. 
you had been working for the ducks as a photographer ever since your internship ended with them a few years back. therefore, you made sure not to let yours and trevor's relationship slip to your coworkers and trevor's teammates.you hadn’t bothered to read over your contract or work policies because who was going to know? it had never been serious with trevor. you’d meet up, hook up, and then that was that until the next time. 
you were secretly seeing him after practices. your camera long forgotten when trevor first asked you to meet at his place to “spice up my instagram”. it was all so easy. your routine was quickly set in stone after the first few meetups. when jamie went to the gym trevor was calling you up. when you were free of your photography duties you would sneak trevor into your office… it was reckless but worth it.
you knew now that you should've been more careful. not with how secretive you were being, because you had never been caught. but careful in the sense that trevor was a traitor. 
Oh, you're so vicious
Love me, then pretend you didn't
Crush my heart and wreck my image
Why you gotta be so vicious?
“i love you so much yn” Trevor mumbled into your skin as you laid tangled up in his bedsheets. you ran your hands through his hair, savouring the sweet moment.
“yeah so she thinks i’m in love with her or something,” Trevor laughs, his shoulders rising up and down like a comic book character. you would’ve smiled at the action if he wasn’t talking badly about you. “It’s kind of unprofessional if i’m being honest… i mean yns hot but…” he trails off chuckling. you couldn't gauge his teammates reactions to his statements. 
you felt your face burn up with embarrassment as Trevor continued his spiel about how you were apparently obsessed with him. as if he wasn’t the one always calling you up whenever he got too lonely. 
“have we slept together? no, of course not. she wants to though. i bet she’d beg me if i gave her the time of day”
“you should've seen how she was looking at me yesterday… it's crazy man! i'm surprised she hasn't gotten fired yet”
“do i mind that she’s obsessed? nah i mean the girls love me i’m used to it,” his eyes were crinkling from the wide smile plastered on his face, shoulders shaking with laughter as he and his friends joked at your expense. 
Said that it was me and you for life
Now you're kinda actin' like I died
word of what trevor had said about you had gotten around. lies that started with loud discussions with teammates turned into your coworkers overhearing, which turned into long HR reports. 
4 days after the first lie was uttered you were brought into your bosses office. she hadn’t cared about your side of things. his word was always going to be more trustworthy than yours. you were fired that day.
you had tried to seek trevor out as soon as you left your ex bosses office. your hands were shaking and your lip was quivering as you walked through random hallways. 
you heard his voice before you saw him. you couldn't exactly make out what he and whoever he was with was saying, but you knew he was laughing. 
rounding the corner you saw him. trevor was talking to one of the media girls. one of his hands was resting playfully on her arm while she giggled at whatever he had said. you felt sick. 
trevor met your eyes and his immediately widened. his hand fell from the girls arm and he brought it up to run through his hair. 
“trevor, I need to talk to you,” your voice was shaky but strong nonetheless. at your tone, the girl looked between you and trevor with clear apprehension in her eyes. 
trevor clearly picked up on this. “uhh, y/n im sure we can talk later yeah?” he said, sending a quick smile to the girl standing next to him. 
“i need to talk to you now,” you pushed ahead, knowing that if you stopped talking your composure would slip and you'd start sobbing in the hallway. 
trevor sighed, as if he had the right to be annoyed with you. he smiled apologetically at the girl again before he let you lead the way back to your office. 
You don't feel remorse, you don't feel the effects
'Cause you don't think you hurt me if you wish me the best
“look yn, i’m really sorry this happened but,” trevor started but you cut him off.
“oh you're sorry huh?” you spit out, hands shaking with anger. 
“i just want you to know that i wish you the best” he continued, clearly ignoring your anger.
“i was fired! trevor, I was fired because you decided it would be fun to ruin my reputation!” you burst out, voice rising as you let all of your frustration out. 
he rolled his eyes, “yeah i get that and i’ve said sorry. i don’t know what else you want me to do” trevor said, stuffing his hands in his pants pocket and leaning back against your office door. which you guess wasn’t really yours anymore.
you couldn’t believe what you were hearing. you closed your eyes for a minute to try and breathe through all the anger coursing through your veins, but trevors need to constantly be moving and making noise only aggravated you further. 
you sighed, opening your eyes again to see trevor tapping his foot impatiently against the carpeted floor. “‘i don't know what else you want me to do!’” you mimicked trevor in a high pitched voice. “i want you to tell my boss that you were wrong! That you lied! how could you do this to me? what am i supposed to do now?” you seethed, completely forgetting your strategies to calm yourself down. you had thought trevor was different when you two started hooking up. everyone seemed to have loved him, the media adored him, fans well… they’re divided but all in all… he seemed like the perfect guy on paper. but in reality, he was just vicious.
“okay calm down,” trevor says sternly, raising his hands up in surrender. “i didn't try to get you fired on purpose! it just happened” his defence was pathetic and you laughed humorlessly. 
“yeah well what are you going to do about it?” you questioned him, anger still present in your voice as you glared at him. 
“there's literally nothing i can do that's why i apologized” 
“there's a thousand things you can do! tell everyone you lied!” you were on the verge of yelling and so trevor gently shut the door. 
“if i tell everyone i was making things up, i dont have anyone's trust. you've gotta understand that my image is important here and-” trevor was talking but your ears were ringing. he wouldn't come clean because his image was important? what about yours? you were now unemployed, and your reputation would be forever ruined. it would be one thing if news had gotten out that you were seeing trevor. but now everyone thinks that you're obsessed with him. people were staring at you weirdly in the halls, whispering when you walked by. you couldn't stand the sight of him.
“get out.”
“y/n what?” trevor steps back, clearly not anticipating for you to be as angry as you were.
“i said get out. i don't need your worthless apologies and explanations of why you wont help me” your voice was raised and trevor raised his arms up in defence again. 
“im sorry like-” he starts but you once again cut him off.
“GET OUT!” you yell, walking over to your office door and yanking it open. a few of your coworkers were lingering outside and you could feel their heated gaze on you. you shoved trevor out of the room regardless, ignoring all the chatter outside as you slammed the door shut again. 
white hot tears blurred your vision as you sank down to the floor. You brought your knees up to your chest and wrapped your arms around them. you had never felt so defeated before. your dream job was gone, and any future you had in photography would be tainted by trevors false claims. 
Oh, you're so vicious
I loved you but I wish I didn't
If you're out there somewhere listenin'
Why you gotta be so vicious?
you sat and cried until you were sore, wanting nothing more than to erase trevor zegras from your life.
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onnahu · 4 months ago
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Batkids as AO3 users
Dick - I don't think he'd be a writer. He just don't give me the vibes, ya know? He would, however, read fics about people he knows. And himself. He's deep in superhero fandom, and at some moment he gets super invested in some rarepair and actually menages to set them up. I also think as a teenager he would stumble upon some E rated fic for someone he knows, then promise himself he'd never touch it again, and then a few years later he reads them a lot, is just super secretive and guilty about it. He does not, however, touch Batman E rated fics with a ten foot pole.
Tim - you'd think he'd write Hero RPF, huh? No. He's deep into Formula 1 RPF. He writes, he reads, he's just very active in fandom. Most of his works are some kind of Formula 1 murder mystery.
Jason - he is the one from Hero RPF. He doesn't read it, he just writes it. In various AU's, ranging from some inspired by his crazy adventures to those from classic literature. When he was still Robin, he wrote Pride and Prejudice Superbat fic, that became crazy popular. After ressurection he sweared he wouldn't touch it, but after checking it out once and realising how tragic his writing style was, he rewrites the whole thing. He reads fics from fandoms he does not know the original works of. He finds a fic he likes, and learns things from it. Then he spirals deep into fandom. Like many of Batfam fans I imagine. That's why he doesn't write, because he feels he can't without knowing the original, and he sure as hell ain't watching some kids show called Ben 10.
Babs - I think her beginnings were in something like Twilight of DCU. She would regret it forever. Currently she's involved in some shows she watches when on break from work and Oracle. I'm not really into TV series but maybe something like Bridgertons or The Boys or something like that. She writes only one-shots and is active on Tumblr. She has like a thousand bookmarks and she posts fic recs with the most wild analysis of writing style, plot consistency and just vibes. She stays away from any RPF's, but esoecially Superhero RPF. She's got it enough on day to day basis thank you very much.
Steph - that girl post Robin writes the most sick gore body horror fics change my mind. And she does it in fandom's you would least expected. She also writes Spoiler/Batgirl fics, that are really fluffy but also full of action and actually made the pairing wildly known.
Cass - she reads everything Steph writes for Spoiler/Batgirl. Steph does not know Cass knows she writes them. Cass is really charmed. She tried writing one, but it came out really dark and she didn't like how clumsy it was and gave up on trying to be an author. She reads heavy angst, crack, or Steph's Spoiler/Batgirl fics, nothing else. She's the person that leaves very short but very sweet comments on literally averything she likes.
Duke - that boy is in the same circles as both Tim and Dick. He actually finds out it's Tim that writes his favourite Formula 1 fics as Tim finds out it's Duke that leaves those super insightful comments on them that start's conversations with author and other readers. They have one talk about it and then forcefully forgets about it and continues as it was. He writes Batman and Robin and Robin Gang fics. He's really good at it, and that's how he found Duck Grayson. Not that any of them knows that's the other on the other side of the screen. And yes, he's Steph's beta reader, and she's his. They don't talk about it, it's just how it is.
Damian - he reads Batman and Robin fics but only about himself. He also draws fanart and makes comics about Batman and Robin (himself). Later he gets involved in Teen Titans fandom, then the Justice League one, and suddenly he's a wildly known fanartist in the whole Hero RPF community. And he did draw a fanart for Jason's fic ones. They both don't know it's the other. He also gives aby superhero an emotional support fictional pet. Dick think it's adorable. (He was the one that introduced Damian to fandom.)
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delimeful · 15 days ago
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Really? You don’t find passive aggressive comments, such as your tags, do be impolite?
And how, exactly, is an ask button (which YOU enabled) that is commonly known to be used for requesting stories on Tumblr from writing pages impolite? Are you new to writing Tumblr? What do you think a majority of writers on Tumblr use that ask button for?
I’ve been a follower for a while but I’m pretty dissapointed tbh.
Anonymous asked: I noticed a reply from @/gstash So let me address that as well. No, of course I don’t expect everything immediately and for free, and I initially requested this story over a year ago. I also spent over $50 being subscribed to Lime’s Patreon specifically for this story, but I had to stop due to low finances. I was just trying to check on when it may be up soon, but I felt the response was rather rude.
(the added slash is mine, i didn't want to inadvertently @ anyone else in this debacle lol)
this is gonna be my final word on the matter because im sick of getting home from work to asks like these. anything else is gonna be deleted. feel free to go ahead and use your actual blog to reply instead of anon if you still feel that strongly about it.
i dont think my tags weren't passive aggressive they were just plain statements. no, i don't think it's impolite to express a boundary irt people asking me for updates. your indignation about this reflects on you, not me.
to clarify, badgering me for updates (verbatim: "Could you please please please post chapter 7") isn't impolite, just irritating. it was the decision to send another ask chiding me for my response that was impolite. kind of a dick move, as most involved in the tumblr writing community know. i genuinely feel sorry for the writers you follow if you genuinely only see their ask boxes as an opportunity to pester them.
i'm disappointed too, anon. i hoped that maybe keeping calm and sincerely explaining myself would be enough to prompt you to respond with empathy in kind, but instead you doubled down.
it seems like there's been a misunderstanding in regards to my patreon; there is no tier that ensures a specific chapter of a fic is updated within a specific time frame. that would be a commission, which is explicitly listed as a reward for my $30 tier, because those take a lot more time + energy for me.
my $12 patreon tier offers early access to my writing, and the ability to request future chapters be moved up on my to-do list, through polls + priority continuation requests. i can't guarantee any specific chapter update in a month, and i'll explain why.
currently, i have over 50 total WIP fics being worked on. each month, i get around 25 chapter update requests. even assuming that each chapter is 2k, my usual minimum chapter length, i would have to write 50,000 words every single month. if i had the capability for that kind of regular output, i would be churning out books like stephen king instead of constantly struggling for my usual monthly 10-15k like a chump lol.
in essence, don't subscribe to my patreon for a specific story unless you know the next chapter for it is already up there. which it is, because i eventually got to your request. and it'll eventually be up on the blog for free. and during the months you spent subscribed to my patreon, you received at minimum tens of thousands of words of content.
finally, an earnest request: please stop acting like twelve dollars is an exorbitant fee when i'm literally making pennies per word written. like, i could have worked a single 8 hour shift at mcdonalds in texas for minimum wage instead and i would have ended up with $8 more than you paid me for four months of many hours of dedicated work.
(not even a joke: 7.25 x 8 = 58.)
in conclusion, i am a human person with feelings, just like every other writer on this site. please take a moment to remember that when sending asks in the future
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comfortcomes · 3 months ago
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i said i would make an actual post about this and my irls are sick of me talking about it on ig i’m sure but i do think it’s really really important that people know how much abortion funds are struggling rn on both the local and national levels. after the dobbs decision in 2022 there was a huge surge in donations to ab funds and a lot of them were able to expand their budgets as a result which was amazing. but that money is gone now, it is not being replenished on anywhere near the same level, and abortion access is MUCH more expensive than it was two years ago. these funds don’t just pay for abortion procedures (the cost of which has also gone up btw), they also provide direct support for flights, gas, hotels, because for people living in half the states in the US these are now crucial factors in their ability to access reproductive healthcare. the two biggest national funds (NAF and planned parenthood) have both capped their assistance for individual callers because of the demand, which in turn puts even more strain on local funds to close that gap. so basically if you’re trying to get an abortion as a US citizen today there’s no guarantee you’ll legally be able to in your state, the procedure will be more expensive and it’ll be harder to get an appointment than it was two years ago, and despite you paying what could easily be thousands of dollars to access essential healthcare, where you could have been fully funded by NAF in 2022, these orgs are now only able to pledge 30% of your total cost. funds in my state that have monthly budgets in the tens of thousands are having to close their helplines after two hours every week because of the insane amount of need. granted i live in a state that experiences unique demand as the first access point for many people living in southern states with abortion bans, but we’re not at all unique in the inability to keep up with the amount of people seeking help.
if you gave money to your local abortion fund when dobbs dropped, i guarantee no matter where it is that fund is now overwhelmed with far more demand and much less money than they had in 2022. and abortion funds are some of the only organizations you can donate to and be absolutely certain your money is going directly to people who need it—we’re a very small org but at the last budget meeting for my local fund we literally had less than $30 allocated for anything other than abortion support the entire fiscal year. two years ago people were giving “rage donations” in anger about the future injustices that would happen when abortion bans became widespread, but those things actually ARE happening NOW and there’s a really simple way you can make a small dent in a massive national crisis and it’s by becoming a recurring donor or volunteering for the abortion fund near you. as a country we’ve decided to just accept that women don’t have the right to full bodily autonomy in half of the US but you don’t actually have to accept it, you can stop numbing yourself to the grief you experienced about the end of roe v wade and contribute materially to slowly building that right back up again. and these are the places that are doing that: https://abortionfunds.org/find-a-fund/ and they really need your money
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committingwarcr1mes · 2 months ago
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mitski once said:
“i don't need the world to see that i've been the best i can be, but
i don't think i could stand to be where you don't see me”
and now i have to write this.
i really don’t get why people are so superficial about griffith, y’all like “nah, he always was evil vicious callous etc 🙄🙄🙄” and not even trying to look beneath, which is really discouraging because the eclipse arc made it very clear and showed everything in the most obvious way possible.
oh, remark: it’s only about berserk 1997.
so let’s start from afar. “griffith never cared of his people and friends, he easily betrayed them for batman costume 👻👻👻” like WTF?? he DID. he DID CARE. he sold himself to feed and equip his people, and it wasn’t like “he enjoyed f***ing that bearded guy ahshdjsa lmao 😂🤡🤡” (btw i don’t get this crap cause it seems like y’all are so obsessed with rape theme, but while feeling sorry for one victim you at the same time make fun of another. the hypocrisy of this fandom i can’t--). but return to what i’ve started. griffith always cared for his people; he never showed it and never admitted it even to himself, but he remembered everyone who died fighting for him, and i guess sometimes he really blamed himself for that — but again, never admitted it. those scenes weren’t given just for drama or something — these contradictions were always an important part of his character and determined his sight. failure would make victims meaningless. like people died for nothing.
another thing people don’t understand is that griffith never cared only about the power and the fact of becoming the king. people never strive to go on top just to go on top, all our actions are motivated by deeply personal reasons. so i think he really wanted people to follow him, believe in him, attach with his yearning. it always feels good when you see that people like you, need you, rely on you. that is what makes a leader a leader. of course you can say that it’s a selfish and vain wish, but aren’t all people selfish? you always set guts against griffith — so weren’t guts’ wishes and life stance selfish? i think it ridiculous to judge such things.
and now we get to the core — the need for love. love of thousands is pleasant, but in the end humans need something more than that. it’s lonely at the top, as they say. you still need someone to be close to, to trust and rely on. for griffith that “someone” was guts. “ wELL aCtUaLlY hE wAs NeVEr iN lOvE wiTH gUtS 🤓” oh STFU. you didn’t get the homosexual drama, but i did 🤭
and now i’m not going to speculate on was it healthy love or sElFiSh or tOxiC or pOsSeSiVe, i don’t care, you need to get that love can be twisted, sick, destructive, wrong, but it still LOVE. i agree that griffith did use guts for his own affairs, pulled in palace intrigues and etc, but it doesn’t change the fact that he had feelings for him that were able to confuse and mess him up.
“amongst the thousands of comrades... and the tens of thousands of enemies... there was only one man... you were the only one... who ever made me forget my dream” like WHY DO YOU THINK THIS NEEDED TO BE SAID??
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their relationships deserve a separate paragraph actually so i won’t drive too deep. all we need to understand is that guts became too important to griffith and it was literally the end to everything he worked for during all those years.
so, guts decides to leave, nothing now can stops him. griffith is messed up and disordered, he’s crushed and isn't really aware of what he's doing. and it is a very good subtext here — he feels rejected, so he goes to charlotte who’s obviously in love with him and has sex with her. it’s a reckless impulse, a moment of weakness, and it leads to the only mistake that cost EVERYTHING. and then griffith is tortured, mutilated and losing even the possibility to talk.
retreat: i find quite interesting how easily he lost that fighting with guts. you can say “well it’s just because guts is stronger blah blah blah etc 🙄🙄🙄”, but i think it was probably about griffith’s subliminal unwillingness to hold someone who’s already decided to give up on him. however…
what is going on in griffith’s head during all these horrible events? guts. guts guts guts. logic chain is simple: he got here because of guts, he lost everything because of guts, guts is the reason for everything he has to pass through now. i’m not blaming guts, but it’s just how griffith was thinking there — which is not surprising, like imagine yourself going through this kind of torture while remembering whom have you been and what you were striving for. all can imagine, but not all can understand.
“and yet… here, in this empty, hollow world… one thing is clear in my mind. him alone… like lightning splitting through the darkness… he appears in my mind so vividly. over and over again like the waves of a tsunami… hatred… friendship… jealousy… frustration… helplessness… affection… sorrow… they all come together into a giant vortex… they pin my fading consciousness down so that it doesn’t slip away. the one who caused this… my confinement in this darkness… will now… become the only chance at survival. when did it happen? this man, whose life was once in my hands… when did i fall into his powerful clutches? and now… in my mind i see him radiating so brightly it pierces in my eyes. guts!” IN BLACK AND WHITE
and this was the moment when love started to turn into hatred; when the pain of abandonment is so strong that it destroys the rest of the feelings. no one made griffith go to charlotte and do what he did, and yet he was so messed up with guts’ leaving that he went and did it. and now he isn’t even able to talk, to walk and to hold anything with his hands. no more fighting, no more winning. no more way to fulfill his dream. all because of guts. and still, affection is living. that moment when guts & co came to save griffith and guts holding him, griffith stretches his arm to touch… or to choke him? guess we’ll never now. however, some kind of hope flared up in him again. guts came back, and probably it will get better…
but oh, it won’t. only worse.
moving on scene when griffith lays in carriage and hears guts and casca conversation on the outside. it’s a VERY important moment that many people overlook, but it is exactly what led to the eclipse events as they are. so, guts is going to leave again and offers casca to join him, casca refuses because she needs to take care of griffith, and when she said that guts decides to stay. with HER. for HER. not for griffith. the story repeats itself, and griffith is still not that significant for him.
and look what happens here. griffith’s people saw his injuries and knew that he can’t lead them any longer. one part of them is going to follow casca now, the other one — guts. they all gave up on him. so did guts. the last one, whose affection griffith desired the most. what is for casca… it is a pretty complicated moment, but a part of the problem here is feel of betrayal. you can think as you wish but i’m considering casca as more like a sister, a fellow, a loyal companion and an assistant to griffith, than a love interest. like yeah, he had a dream where he lives with her taking care of him in small nice house, but… i think it is a question of a habit. we saw two women in griffith’s life: casca and charlotte. charlotte could be a key to power, but i don’t think that griffith wanted to even remember her after the torture. casca, on the other hand, was the one who was near him for quite a long time. she cared for him, supported him. so if griffith needed to give up and live normal life like simple men do, he would choose casca as a partner just because there is now other woman. but at this moment casca took guts away from him. another betrayal. and of course, it starts the jealous.
after overhearing guts and casca’s conversation griffith gathering his strength and drives horses to… somewhere. i don’t think he was fully aware of what he was doing, most likely it was just an another reckless impulse, but he gets into a river and decides to 💀 himself. it was a peak of his despair, but accidentally the red behelit returns to him — and the eclipse starts.
no need to retell, just want to make clear two things: 1) why did griffith betrayed his friends for batman costume 👻👻👻 2) and why he raped casca
moment №1.
besides obviously outlined in the series “he built his way on corpses and he must go on with no regret blah blah blah ☝☝☝” there is a much more important element of disappointment. like yeah, griffith is definitely disappointed about people and affections by this point. he’s not a leader for his people anymore; if they still feel something for him, it’s more like a pity for the cripple. and of course — guts. affection that cost everything, the reason why he appeared in such a position.
so now he has a choice: to sacrifice something that only ruins and ruins and finally get what he dreamt of the entire life, or to choose things that once already destroyed him and live the rest of the life as a cripple even unable to speak. noble are those who chose the second option, but i absolutely and with no doubts understand griffith’s choice here.
so yeah, now griffith chooses the power over everything indeed. he chooses himself and only. good for him <3
moment №2.
the rape. and the reason why that sacrifice was so bloody and brutal. yeah, all the people who appeared there with griffith went through hell right before their death. i don’t think all these sufferings and such nightmares were needed, like just blood & flesh & bone would be enough to give a body to femto, and still it was as it was. why?
it was said that femto will be born on the ruins of griffith’s dream. THE RUINS. so i think there was ruins of his personality either. during the last year griffith survived dreadful torments, the physical pain he suffered is unimaginable, and the trauma that leaves after such horrible events is immense. and it’s not a rare thing when people who survived violence now want to bring that pain to others — to make others suffer like they have suffered. femto is a product of griffith’s worst angles of personality, of darkest things that lived in him. so yes, everyone had to anguish and die the most dire way possible.
same thing is with casca. griffith NEVER wanted to rape her, like WHY WOULD HE EVEN DO, but he was angry and jealous because guts chose her over him. femto soaked it and just did the worst thing possible to avenge. and THE CORE: femto did it in front of the guts, so HE could watch. it was never about casca. only about guts.
idk what to write in conclusion. griffguts completely devastated me. love is an evil thing. never do such 💋
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isat-script-project · 25 days ago
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HAPPY 300!!!
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Welcome one welcome all. I want to announce: What the hell, yall!!
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You are reading that right. We have TWO HUNDRED THOUSAND total views on neocities, and over 300 followers on here!!
That just goes to show how much people love ISAT. I can't reiterate it enough, it has been an utter blast working with you all!
So, in honor of that, I redrew the website banner as.... us! The people behind this thing! And you may now notice... wait there's four?
(of course, if you've paid attention to the page updates, you'll have seen the names already!)
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i got very sappy under the cut. thank you.
From left to right, as our dear cast, we have -
@goldstargloww as Siffrin! I am, once again, infinitely grateful you just kinda manifested in my DMs and then spent an hour teaching me what github is over stream like i am an old man trying to install Linux. You are a lovely person, fun to talk to, passionate about what you do, and it's a continuous honor that this project remains among those things!!
Starring as Mirabelle.... is me! Your lovely mod, @felikatze, ye of many names (essay guy, divorce guy, wiki admin, etc etc~). It has been a lot of fun, a lot of despair, but always rewarding to work on this thing for.... nearly ten months now! Wow! I don't know if i've ever actually put consistent work into anything in my whole life for that long.
As Bonnie (instead of Isa, because that was their preference), we have @candycoatedrox ! I feel like you brought a fresh wind in when I was getting tired. You've shown a lot of initiative, you've picked up everything super quickly, and you're already helping make improvements to it!! You're extremely cool!! Seeing you makes me want to work harder as well!
And as Odile, we have @onenightbreak ! Wren, you have been here the shortest, but I am nonetheless overjoyed to have you on board!! Thank you for your preserverance in not being scared off by my overenthusiasm and nitpicky corrections. From my experience, I think you are kind, and cool, and your tumblr custom theme is sick as hell.
Here's to working together and actually finishing this thing!!! I hope everyone continues to have fun working on it, as I'm sure the dear viewers here have fun reading it and using it for all sorts of their own projects. (I saw a script project screenshot as the background of some fanart once. I've seen it used in poetry collages. I am so proud.)
Thank you all!!
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This is weird thing, but I really want to see Adam in glasses
The idea that Adam having to need to wear glasses but refusing to do so cus they make him look old, rather if he had bad eye sight while in heaven or got his eye site when falling to hell (sense I’m not sure you’d need glasses in heaven or not) is honestly beautiful to me
-🐊
Yes! Lol he would not be happy about needing glasses. In heaven I think everything would be fine, none is sick or needs for anything so why need glasses?
Adam grumbled as he looked in the mirror. These glasses made him look like an old fucking dork.
Since falling into Hell, his eyesight has gotten worse and it wasn't that big of a deal. That is until nearly fell down a fucking open man hole in the street. Lucifer had made him see an eye doctor and the devil practically had to drag the sinner there so he'd be seen by the doctor.
He needed glasses big time. His eyesight was shit. Adam wasn't surprised he was well over ten thousand years old.
Doesn't mean he liked it.
The only frames for glasses for men were either something out of the 50s or they make you look like a science professor. Adam had settled on the least stupid looking pair, thin square black frames.
He still hated them. Granted now he could see but he still tries not to wear them a lot. It took one comment from Angel to make him hate them even more.
He wasn't that old! ..... Not really? Lucifer was older than him, where then fuck were his old man spec's?
"You know, they don't look that bad." Adam jumped at the sound of Lucifer's voice. The king was leaning on the door frame of Adams bathroom giving the sinner a look he couldn't place.
"They make me look fucking old." Adam seethed as he ripped them off his face. He glared at the glasses.
Lucifer came closer towards Adam. "What's wrong with getting old? If you had some grey in that hair of yours I bet you'd be a silver fox." He winked.
Adam felt his face grow warm. "W-well yeah! Of course I would be, I'm fucking hot."
Lucifer took the glasses from Adam and placed them back on his face. "There is nothing wrong with getting old. Some people find older men sexy." He placed a kiss on Adams nose and walked away.
Okay, maybe Adam would give the glasses a fair try.
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