#tommy hagan is a bully but hes also a coward

[redrosydiaz]

im gonna be real — this author did Not get tommy h right. not at all. she made him out to be like the ring leader, the Big Bad Bully that starts shit AND finishes it, but like. that's not?? who he is??? he's a follower, not a leader. he followed steve, trailed after him like a lost puppy, and when steve decided being king wasn't his thing, tommy didn't step up to fill in his shoes — he moved on to billy. he became billy's shadow and did what billy said. also, as far as i remember (and i could be wrong, its been a hot sec since ive rewatched), tommy never got physical with anyone like that; he never threw a punch. so the way this writer is characterizing him, as this bloodthirsty, violently angry guy who beats up on freshmen and keeps beating up on them long after they've been seriously injured,,,, thats,,,, not it. that's not tommy.

[vthx]

Posting is complete!

Steve Harrington--the man who would be king--fell from the gentry's grace at the inaugural jock party of Eddie's senior year after Carol Perkins and Melissa Cargill caught him sucking off Tommy Hagan in the senior Harringtons' suite. The Saturday soiree went from giving head to getting heads rolling as the coup d'etat kicked off. The moral majority had found Harrington on his knees, and they intended to keep him there. There was no forgiveness from his former friends; there was no atonement allowed for willingly performing such an evil act. He was expelled post-haste from the sanctimonious sanctum of Hawkins' high school high society.

Despite his aggressive disinterest in the gossip of the glib and glamorous, even Eddie hadn't escaped hearing about it, if only because by Monday morning, everyone had heard about it. His entire homeroom was astir with speculation, a whole shitshow of Sherlocks playing social forensics on every person Harrington had even passed in the halls. Heidi Holloway even went so far as to speak to Eddie in public, wanting to know if Harrington had ever, you know, offered something other than money when he came to buy… She gave him a meaningful look that was mostly malicious curiosity. Eddie scoffed.

"Harrington? He never bought his own shit. He had people for that, honey." Holloway wrinkled her nose at the endearment. "I've never said a word to the guy. You sure you didn't catch wind of anything when you had your tongue down his throat last year?"

She scowled at the reminder that Eddie and half the school had seen her go upstairs with him at one of those insipid sports celebrations, turning back to more fertile muckraking with a hissed, "Whatever, loser. Like you'd know anything anyway."

They had spoken once, early in Harrington's freshman year when he'd tried to score coke off Eddie on the preposterous supposition that passing a little pot onto his friends made Eddie some kind of narcotics savant. Eddie had told the baby-faced brat to buzz off, inadvertently sabotaging his future side gig when Harrington convinced his crew that Eddie had tried to sell him baking soda.

Harrington was a liar and a coward, the kind of bully who'd shit talk people with his friends but balked at violence.

If no one else remembered their fleeting feud, Eddie wasn't stupid enough to remind them: anyone who spent any amount of time with Harrington would be under the gimlet gauntlet of a bored, small town investigation. There was going to be some serious Big Brother bullshit going on until this all blew over.

Eddie was happy to hide in shadows in the back of the room, feet kicked up, quietly obnoxious as he sketched a dragon eating his fellow homeroom cellmates on the edge of his campaign notes. Normally he'd have Scott, one of his two fellow Hellfire seniors, to shoot the shit with, but Scott was hovering at the fringes of the gossip fest, gleefully lapping up the reputational riches to rags riot. Eddie was left with his own thoughts, head bent over the notebook, face hidden behind his hair.

Fuck, wasn't this just the quintessential Munson luck? Any modicum of good was followed by a landslide of bad.

Eddie finally had other people he knew were gay in this hellhole of a town, and it had to be Tommy Hagan and Steve fucking Harrington. Those two being outed meant that Eddie still had no one to commiserate with but now also had to dodge the whole school playing I Spy for sexual deviants. Even if they hadn't been at the focal point of the frenzy, they were the kind of scumbags that made Eddie ashamed to be one of them.

Hagan had pinky-promised that his precious heterosexuality was intact, and he would send anyone who brought that into question to the slaughter in his stead, even his dearest and best friend. No sane gay man would stand within scapegoat-sight of him.

Harrington's only virtue was that Hagan had beaten him to the draw. If not for Harrington's unfortunate absence and more unfortunate position at Hagan's feet, they would both be pointing fingers at former friends. There was no honor--no loyalty--in the hypocrites who had made plenty of kids' lives hell for the accusation of being queer when all along they'd been among them.

Maybe--maybe--Hagan had been too out of it to know who he was with or what was going on, but Eddie wasn't giving Harrington a scrap of doubt. He didn't care how much Harrington had insisted he was drunk; no amount of booze had ever made Eddie willing to lick clit. The truth is out; the lies are old, asshole. If Harrington was sober enough to argue when he got caught--if he was sober enough to walk out of there--Eddie figured he was sober enough to know what he was doing, even if he'd been sloppy enough to get caught. Now there'd be hell to pay for every closet case in the school.

Continue

Story Title: Sing If You're Glad To Be Gay

Fandom: Stranger Things

Summary: 

August, 1983:

Months before Will Byers disappears, Steve Harrington is outed, bullied, and shunned. Eddie would be overjoyed to find another gay kid in Hawkins if it wasn't THAT gay kid.

Warnings:

canon-typical violence, canon-typical behavior, period-typical homophobia, relationship between 17- and 18-year-old, explicit sex, under negotiated kink / sex, dubious consent, bullying, internalized homophobia, negative self talk, suicidal ideation, recreational drug use, underage drinking / drunk driving, implied / referenced child abuse, 

Characters:

Steve Harrington Eddie Munson Jeff (Stranger Things) Gareth (Stranger Things) Robin Buckley Jonathan Byers Nancy Wheeler Barb Holland Chrissy Cunningham Patrick (Stranger Things)

Pairings: Steve Harrington / Eddie Munson

When I Started:*

October 2022 I fell hard into the Stranger Things fandom. This story originally started as “What needs to change for Steve to win his fight against Billy in Season 2?” and pretty rapidly went off the rails into something wildly alternate universe. I loved the premise, and it really gave me a chance to dig in to how relationships between characters would change if the events leading up to S01 did.

How I Lost My Shit:*

I’m a very non-linear writer, so there were scattered scenes and snippets of conversation and rushed notes on where everything should end up. I was slowly stitching it together into something more coherent, but I got distracted writing other stories.

How I Finished My Shit:*

A friend in the Stranger Things Writers Guild discord server mentioned that the WIP BigBang was happening and she was participating. Signing up gave me a strong incentive to finish without being punitive about failure. The artist I was paired with did such a stellar job that I was absolutely driven to finish.

A submission for WIPBB!