#van halen fic

[hawkinself]

Love in The Spotlight. Part Two.

Eddie Van Halen x Valerie Bertinelli

The sun was high as we pulled up to Eddie’s Pasadena home, the car packed with empty boxes ready to collect his life. The house sat on a quiet street, modest and unassuming, its charm wrapped in the hum of nostalgia. I could feel Eddie’s energy shift as we stepped out of the car—his usual confidence softened by a quiet reverence for this place where he’d grown up.

“You ready for this?” I asked, sliding my hand into his.

Eddie nodded, his grip tightening slightly. “Yeah, let’s do it.”

Inside, the smell of home-cooked food hit us immediately—warm, spicy, and inviting. His mom, Eugenia, appeared from the kitchen, wiping her hands on a towel. Her face lit up when she saw us.

“Valerie!” she said, her accent wrapping around my name like a melody. She pulled me into a warm hug, her petite frame radiating strength. “You’re too skinny. You need to eat.”

Eddie grinned. “She’s been telling me that my whole life.”

From the living room, his father, Jan, appeared with a pipe in hand and a gentle smile. “Ah, the actress,” he said, offering his hand. “Welcome, Valerie. We’ve heard so much about you.”

“All good things, I hope,” I replied, shaking his hand.

Jan chuckled. “Mostly.” His eyes twinkled with mischief as he motioned toward the dining table. “Come, sit. We’ll teach you some Dutch.”

Eddie groaned. “Dad, we’re here to pack, remember?”

“There’s always time for learning,” Jan said firmly. “And for food.”

Eugenia was already bustling back into the kitchen, her voice carrying over the clatter of pots and pans. “I’m making nasi goreng. You’ll love it.”

I shot Eddie a look, and he shrugged, his grin widening. “Told you,” he said. “They don’t take no for an answer.”

While the food simmered, I wandered through the house, letting my fingers trail along the walls, the edges of picture frames filled with black-and-white memories. Eddie followed behind, pointing out various landmarks of his childhood.

“This was my room,” he said, pushing open a door to reveal a small space filled with relics of a teenage guitarist. Old concert posters lined the walls, and in the corner, an amp sat next to a battered guitar case.

“You spent hours in here, didn’t you?” I asked, picturing a younger Eddie, hunched over his guitar, lost in the music.

“Days,” he admitted. “I’d lock myself in and play until my fingers bled.” He moved to the amp and knelt down, brushing his hand over it. “Learned every Clapton solo, every Hendrix riff, right here.”

But his smile faltered slightly, a shadow passing over his face. “It wasn’t always music, though,” he said quietly. “There were… other things.”

I knew what he meant—the stories he’d told me about starting young with cigarettes and beer, the habits that had followed him into adulthood. I reached out, touching his arm. “You made it through,” I said softly.

He nodded, his eyes meeting mine. “Yeah. And now, I’ve got you.”

By mid-November, the tour had wrapped up, and Eddie officially moved into my Los Feliz house. The place was already bustling with life. My brother Drew and his girlfriend Michelle lived in the guest house, which added a chaotic but comforting rhythm to our days.

Eddie set up his music equipment in the back bedroom, turning it into a makeshift studio. The space was soon filled with cables, amps, and guitars leaning against every available surface. I claimed the small room off the kitchen for my office, where scripts and notes piled up on the desk.

One night, as I was typing away, Eddie appeared in the doorway, holding a cup of coffee. He leaned against the frame, watching me.

“You’re really making this place feel like home,” he said, his voice soft.

I looked up, smiling. “We both are.”

He walked over, setting the coffee down beside me before leaning in to kiss my forehead. “Think I’ll ever get used to normal life?” he asked, half-joking.

I laughed. “Define normal.”

We found our routine in the little things: shared breakfasts in the sunlit kitchen, late-night jam sessions that spilled into the early hours, and lazy Sundays spent watching movies in the living room. It wasn’t perfect—nothing ever was—but it felt real, solid.

Of course, there were bumps along the way. One afternoon, I came home to find Drew and Eddie wrestling in the ivy outside.

“What is happening?” I yelled, hands on my hips.

Both of them stopped, panting and grinning like kids caught in the act.

“He started it,” Drew said, pointing at Eddie.

Eddie laughed, wiping dirt off his jeans. “He was asking for it.”

I shook my head, half-amused, half-exasperated. “You two are like overgrown teenagers.”

But beneath the surface, there were deeper challenges. Eddie was still grappling with the fallout of a paternity suit—a messy chapter from his past that had cast a shadow over our otherwise peaceful time. Though the case was dismissed, the emotional toll lingered.

“Sometimes I feel like I’m dragging all this baggage into our life,” Eddie admitted one night as we lay in bed.

I turned to him, my hand resting on his chest. “We all have baggage, Ed. What matters is that we’re in this together.”

He kissed the top of my head, his arms tightening around me. “I don’t know what I’d do without you,” he whispered.

Our home became a sanctuary, a place where love and chaos coexisted. There were loud dinners with family and friends, where Eugenia’s Indonesian dishes became a staple. Nights were filled with music, laughter, and sometimes the quiet hum of two people simply enjoying each other’s company.

One evening, as the sun set over Los Feliz, Eddie sat on the couch, strumming his guitar. I curled up beside him, a book in hand.

“This feels good,” he said suddenly, his voice low.

I looked up, meeting his gaze. “What does?”

“Being here. With you,” he said. “It’s not just a house—it’s home.”

And in that moment, I knew he was right. We were building something together, piece by piece, through the highs and lows, the laughter and tears. It wasn’t perfect, but it was ours.

[unkreativstermensch]

Picture this: Steve taking Mike to the 5150 Tour in May 1986 because no one else will go with him (Eddie's still in his slow recovering process and Karen only trusts Steve to bring Mike back in one piece anyway), watching the concert and realizing exactly three things:

1. Eddie stole...everything from Van Halen, his style, his hair, his instrument, his goddamn name, even.

2. Eddie Van Halen's kind of hot.

3. Eddie Munson is kind of hot.

[jaeedraszaerysz]

Bitter truth.

Note: idfk why I wrote this but it happened so...

Also I called the girl Aurora coz why not 🤷‍♀️🤷‍♀️

Set in 1984

Warnings: swearing, breakups, cheating, smoking, mentions of drugs and alcohol, threats of violence.

Summary: when Eddie cheats on Aurora and normality seems to turn on her like the wind, she finds herself back with old friends, and the long haired boy may just live to despise his decision.

Metalheads weren't exactly a common occurrence in Hawkins, and even then, only a select few were decent enough to even say hello to in passing.

That is how Aurora found herself dating the infamous, long-haired, doe-eyed "freak"; Eddie Munson. They had much in common, both guitar players, dead set on becoming kick-ass rock legends and changing the world, they both had amazing hair, and they both associated with a very, very dysfunctional group known as "the party".

Aurora had always been close with the boys, having babysat for Joyce Byers as a younger teen and developing friendships with both Nancy wheeler and Robin Buckley, along with Steve and Jonathan later on. She was kind, those who hated her only for her friends and her 'vibe', for her personality was nothing to complain about.

Her kindness even, somehow, led her to a friendship with Billy Hargrove, who drove her home or kept away creepy teenage boys in exchange for the very secret help with homework and patching him up after fights with his father.

She was much loved around Hawkins by those with decent hearts and always seemed to be smiling, radiating a warm energy into any room she entered.

It was surprising when she first started to date the Munson boy, however.

He didn't treat her like a princess, or even like his girlfriend alot of the time. He told her she tried too hard when she listened to heavier music than him, complained about her guitar skills despite them being practically perfect. He picked on her outfits and her hair and lots of things. Yet she stayed by him, and cared for him, taking what little affection she gained in return with a smile.

This is how she found herself approaching Eddie's trailer in the howling wind, in the pitch black on a Friday night. They had arranged to meet up to watch films and play guitar, but for a reason unknown to Aurora, Eddie had neglected to pick her up, so she made her own way.

She opened the door as she usually would and walked through into the trailer, it didn't look any different, but it sounded it. There were hushed whispers coming from the room down the hall and she smiled, expecting Eddie to be hunched over his guitar perfecting a song or two. She noticed the boys habit of talking to himself when he was involved in his music.

She walked quietly to the door and held the handle, pausing suddenly when she realised the door was open a crack. Eddie never left it open. Never. It was like an unspoken rule to the boy. His room was his and his only.

She pushed it inwards carefully and it glided away from her hand, revealing her boyfriends room and her boyfriend.

On top of a girl.

On top of Chrissy Cunningham.

He had his head buried in her neck and neither of them wore any clothes, the items already discarded on the hardwood floor amongst various other objects.

Aurora just stood there as Chrissy shrieked and Eddie turned around like he'd just been struck by lightning. She didn't move, just stood, her arms dropping by her side, swinging subtly like they weren't even a part of her anymore. Like she had become an inanimate object.

She opened her mouth slightly and looked away, nodding her head in the slightest way and turning around, dazed and broken. Her eyes were emotionless and she walked out and down the steps like her life had just been slapped out of her.

She could here the stumble of Eddie trying to get back into his jeans and out the door. He followed her but she continued to walk, even as the rain began to pelt down like the black clouds shared her pain.

Eddie shouted her name but she just wandered off into the darkness, down the road. The rain water soaked through her Black Sabbath shirt and dripped down her arms, past her few tattoos and collecting on her leather bracelets and rings.

Her teats began to fall, basically unnoticeable against the splashing water droplets hailing from the night above her and she dragged her feet. She had her friends but Eddie had been her person. Her reason. Her life. This dealing was foreign to her. Someone so set on ridding the world of people who cheated and lied and fought had caused her more pain than any Hawkins jock or dolled up mother could.

She continued to kick stones up from the side of the road as she went, her breathing becoming heavier by the second. What she wasn't expecting was to zone out and for a familiar blue camaro to pull up beside her.

Billy rolled down the window and pushed open the passenger door for the soaking girl.

"Get in." He spoke calmly, nothing more, nothing less.

She slid in, staring at her lap.

"I'm getting your car all wet." She whispered, trying not to let her crying become detectable.

"You know I don't give a fuck, Aurora. What the hell are you doing out here?" His voice raised but he wasn't angry with her in the slightest. He noticed her shaking hands and offered her a cigarette, which she took, nodding at him briefly before bringing it to her lips.

He raised his eyebrows and after a moment she whispered something.

"He's with her. I went in for our date night and he was with her." Billy's face changed instantly from concern to anger and he held the steering wheel tightly in his fist.

"What." His word was laced with venom and he turned to fully face her.

"I went into his room and he was naked, on top of that cheerleading bitch, Carvers girl." She rested her head back against the seat and a lone tear slipped down her freezing face.

"I'm gonna rip that stupid motherfucker's face off! Who the fu-"

"I don't wanna be in Hawkins anymore. I always talk about leaving but I just need to fucking go. Anywhere. Fuck Munson, fuck Chrissy, fuck Hawkins, Billy. I wanna go."

The boy paused. He brushed his hair back and looked out the window, he turned to watch Aurora blow smoke out the crack in the window and sighed.

"Let's fucking go."

"Wait, really?"

"Yeah." He replied quickly, laughing slightly. "There's nothing for us here. Let's go: just you and me. You're gonna be a huge fuckin rockstar and I've been wanting back to california since I got in that fucking car."

Aurora laughed in disbelief and threw her cigarette from the car.

"Right now?"

He made eye contact with her and smirked.

"Right fuckin now."

He drove the pair to Auroras house, where the girl climbed through her window and pulled out two small bags of clothes, some cash, and her guitar, she passed it to the mullet wearing boy and he quickly placed it in the back of the camaro. Aurora climbed back down and ran to the passenger side. The pair speeding off to their new destination. Cali-fuckin-fornia.

☆☆☆☆

Two days later the pair found themselves in a motel just outside Hollywood. They had kept to their words and hasn't stopped till they got there.

Aurora laid on the bed while Billy brushed his hair hastily in the tiny mirror in the bathroom.

"We never thought about where we're gonna live." The boy spoke suddenly, shattering the comfortable silence that lay between the pair.

"I've got a few friends here. Don't you fuckin worry about it."

☆☆☆☆

Six months later and no one in Hawkins had any idea where the ex-king of Hawkins high and the party's sweetheart had disappeared off to.

Some said he kidnapped her. Others they were having an affair and ran off. Others she was pregnant by the boy and the personal favorite of the basket ball team, Satan took them both down to hell.

The party sat in the byers home, bundled up on sofas and the floor and whatever else they could squish onto. Steve fiddled with the channels unconsciously as the kids bickered between themselves.

The Brunette flicked past MTV and suddenly Eddie was all on him screaming for him to turn it back on. It was some music festival interviews, featuring Eddie's personal favorites, Metallica.

His now girlfriend, Chrissy, sat next to him, silently staring down the children on the floor infront of her. Eddie seemed to try and replace Aurora with the girl and max, Robin, Nancy and will were not having it in the slightest, the rest of the party trying to adapt to it.

He shushed everyone almost violently as kirk hammet began to talk through the screen as an interviewer spoke to him about the show about to be played.

☆☆☆

There were tons of famous rockstars on the show; Guns n' Roses, Mötley Crüe, Pantera, Hanoi Rocks, Aerosmith, Bon Jovi, Van Halen, ZZ top, AC/DC, Ozzy Osbourne and Iron Maiden. It was Eddie's dream.

But during a random interview with various guys from different bands backstage, a very intoxicated Ozzy Osbourne stumbled into the room, his arm wrapped around a girl with bright white hair, adorned in black leather and studded jewelery, her other side held onto by an equally as hammered Eddie Van Halen. She was thrown a box of cigarettes by non other than Nikki Sixx and she lit one, placing it between her rouged lips before being dragged over to the camera. Her black sunglasses hid her eyes as the drunk British man began to speak into the camera.

It was all so cartoon like and Eddie laughed at the screen. Laughed until the rockstar moved back and revealed the girl without her glasses.

"And this," the loud Birmingham accent blared as the bot reached to turn the volume up. "Is Aurora Angel! Fucking mint girl right here this is, best woman guitarist I ever" He paused, forgetting himself, causing the girl to laugh and lean back on Van Halen's shoulder.

"Met?" She suggested. And the man's arms flew round her shoulder, shouting yes and stealing her cigarette before running off.

"Bloody hells, anyways." She laughed and turned to the woman now asking her questions.

"So, Aurora, we know you've been seen on the strip with a man quite a few times now, you seem close? Who is he?"

She bit her lip in thought and smiled suddenly when she realised what the lady was regarding. "Oh shit yeah, no. That's Billy. Best mate and number one fan. He's around here somewhere." She turned, her hair blowing slightly.

She was approached by the boy who still sported the same mullet, who was joined by non other than James Hetfield who engulfed the girl in a hug before joining in with the conversation.

☆☆☆

Eddie stood from his seat, shocked to his core. The kids began to freak out and max was shouting along with Steve.

No way, his girl. Ex-girl. Whom he had cheated on and replaced. Had become a famous rockstar, on hugging terms with his idol.

He felt his insides liquefy when he realised the bitter truth.

His rockstar potential was now 100% non-existent. Not when everyone in the industry was in love with the girl he broke and probably hated his guts for hurting her.

He was totally and utterly fucked.

You guys want a part 2? Let me know x

[sunsetcurveofficial]

i can’t stop thinking about the idea that steve becomes obsessed with eddie van halen after (their) eddie is gone because lbr the similarities are striking. and robin, dustin & nancy are watching as this goes on like 👀  and then one day eddie van halen cuts his hair and steve has a full-on breakdown when he sees the pictures in a magazine

[groupiewhoreee]

Hi hope you are well! Could you write something for eddie van halen? Anything really, i don't have a specific request lol

hi! i'm doing well, and hope you are too! omg, i've had so many drafts with eddie van halen i just haven't posted them. thank you for requesting this!

Sickening

Warnings: Throwing up, gross sick stuff, but its fluff so there isn't anything smutty! (minors can interact!)

Summary/Plot: You got food poisoning, and Eddie is worried about you.

-------------------------------------

you rushed to the bathroom, slamming the door behind you. you gagged, crawling to the toilet. you threw up, your stomach aching in agony. your abdomen hurt, the unexpected pain rushing over you. lightheadedness stuck to you. this sucked. you got up, quivering. sweat dripped down ur forehead. chills curled down your spine.

you heard footsteps coming to the door. it was eddie.

you locked the door chain. eddie pushed the door. "y/n, hunny, let me in please? i need my keys." he said sweetly. "i c-" you started gagging. "y/n, you okay?" he asked. "i-i'm fine-" you rushed to the toilet again, now barfing. "please let me in, whats wrong? are you sick?" eddie kept asking. you wiped ur face, now unlocking the door.

eddie walked in. quickly putting the palm of his hand to your head. "jesus-" he murmured. "your warmer than an oven." he said. "i think i have food poisoning.." you muttered. "baby, i told you not to trust alex in trying that new dish." he explained. "sorry.." you said. "don't apologize. just rest."

eddie took you to the bed, placing you down. he gave you some water, and medicine to soothe the pain. you took it, but it didn't do much.

"here, i'll stay with you. heres a trash can in case you barf." eddie smiled, giving you the trash can. he sat at the end of the bed. "alex can't be trusted sometimes. you know that. who knows? he probably got food poisoning too." he explained. "i know,, i shouldn't have tried it.." you said weakly. you tried getting up. "hey whoa, lay back down. whatcha need?" eddie asked. "i wanna see whats on tv." you told him. "okay." eddie got up, going to the tv and turning it on.

he switched thru channels until he landed on one you liked. eddie leaned and kissed ur head. you fell asleep after a while, eddie soon passed out later on.

alex van halen got sick too, and eddie stayed with you for the day.

[sourceofinfection]

My first Van Halen fic, "I Got the Tools, To Satisfy", was published today! The links are listed below for you to read. Kudos, comment, and enjoy!

And for those who still use Rockfic.

[cptkitten]

Van Halen - Hot For Teacher

[ashwhowrites]

Oooh, look who opened their requests! Fitting! Would you want to do an Fboy! Eddie with a reader that gives him both a taste of his own medicine but also a wake up call?

Awesome, so FboyEddie! I just have read so many fics where the reader sleeps with him and gets hurt when he says it's just sex and she ends up giving him a dose of his own medicine by sleeping with a bunch of other guys and I'm like ... why?! Why do you have to sleep with a bunch of other guys just to get back at him, I firmly think that just shrugging and going on your life would hurt WAY more. So of course reader gets hurt when Eddie says he doesn't 'do' relationships but is like "life is short, why cry over spilled (spoiled) milk". And maybe Billy Hargrove helps her, because even though she doesn't want to sleep with him he always likes to piss other guys off and he's just 'you won't risk hurting ME while you get back at that wannabe Van Halen". And when Eddie is pissed and is like "how can you be with Hargrove, he doesn't care about you, he just wants to get into your pants" and reader is like "oh, unlike you, you mean?" and that is an 'aha' moment to Eddie. Sweet and fluffy ending if possible

~~~

I hope this is what you wanted and you enjoy it! As always, thank you for requesting <3

A taste of medicine

Y/N and Eddie didn't cross paths too much. They had their own group of friends and hobbies. The only time they found themselves in the same place was at school or a party.

Y/N always had a thing for Eddie. She liked his mysterious and rebellious nature. She was attracted to him and she had no problem admitting that to him. He had the hots for her as well, the second she admitted she liked him he grabbed her hand and brought her to his van.

They were desperate, the kiss was hot, heavy, and messy. She clawed at his skin and his mouth attacked every inch of her. The windows fogged around them as Eddie pounded inside of her. Their moans bounced off the van and left no questions for the people outside.

The windows, noises, and the van rocking gave them the exact answer of what they were doing. But it wasn't uncommon for Eddie's van to be fogged up and rocking when he was at a party. It was almost a weekly occurrence. He liked to party and fuck. Everyone knew that about Eddie, especially the girls.

Anytime they wanted a sloppy, meaningless, and quick fuck, they'd go to him. He was damn good too, some girls came back more than once. But as always, he said it would never be more than sex.

"Look, I don't know where your head is, but I don't do relationships," Eddie said, pulling on his shirt.

"Oh," Y/N said she felt a small twig of hurt. The few times they've crossed paths, they got along and talked. Which he didn't do with girls. She was the only girl he talked to outside of sex. She thought she was different and maybe just a tad bit special. But she wasn't.

"Well, that's alright! Have a good night, Munson." She said, her voice chirpy and unbothered as she crawled out of his van.

Eddie didn't have a reaction when she slammed the doors shut.

~~~

The few times they passed each other, she gave him a small smile and kept on walking. She never came up to talk to him, not that she did before. But he guessed maybe she'd cling on to him the same way the rest of the girls did.

When they ran into each other at the next party, he was confused by her unbothered behavior. She talked to him the same way as before. She was friendly, smiling, and acting like nothing happened between them.

Even when a girl interrupted them, and was whispering in Eddie's ear, there was no sense of jealousy in Y/N's eyes.

The girl even went as far as to kiss Eddie in front of Y/N and all she did was smirk and walk off. A smirk that said, "Have a nice time."

Why wasn't she bothered?

~~~

Y/N left Eddie with his new girl of the night. The girl seemed to want Eddie's attention and Y/N didn't need to stand in the middle of that.

"I see you didn't fall for his spell." A voice said next to her. She looked over her shoulder to see Billy Hargrove behind her

"Life is short, nothing to dwell on." Y/N shrugged, she filled a red cup with a drink. Then she poured one for Billy and handed it to him.

"Do you know what might be fun?" Billy asked, his blue eyes snapping to Eddie and then back to her. She raised her eyebrows and turned her body to face him.

"Let's get back at him. It's time he realized not everyone is going to cry and beg for him back." Billy explained.

"One, I'm not sleeping with you just to get back at him. I don't sleep with random guys for any reason unless I want to have fun. And second, I'm not crying nor going to beg for him back. Involving you doesn't matter to me." She explained she wasn't a child. She wasn't going to get back at Eddie by sleeping around. She'd be doing exactly what he does. Plus she didn't think he'd care.

"Okay, fine. All fair points. We don't have to sleep together. Look, I need to make a girl jealous and you're hot. No feelings involved on either side, let me wine and dine you a few times. You get free food, might make wannabe Van Halen jealous, and you help me get the girl." Billy shrugged.

It didn't sound like a bad idea. She didn't care to make Eddie jealous. Billy was attractive and why say no to a few dates just to have fun? She liked dating and she liked getting spoiled. Billy wasn't expecting anything from it and neither was she.

"You got yourself a deal Hargrove."

~~~

Eddie found himself confused. He slept with Y/N, something he's been dying to do. And he craved her again. He waited and waited to see if she'd crawl back, like the other girls do. But she didn't. At the past few parties, she was always talking with Billy Hargrove and that didn't sit well with Eddie. He felt his insides burn when Billy had his arm wrapped around her shoulders.

How could she be so stupid? A guy like Billy Hargrove would never bother with a girl unless he was trying to get in her pants. Why would Y/N let herself be used like that?

And why did Eddie care so much?

For once, Eddie went after a girl. He ditched every girl that walked up to him that night. His fingers itching to run up under Y/N's dress. His mouth watered as he thought about her cunt on his tongue. He wanted her and he wanted her now.

He walked right up to her, she was standing alone for a second. Eddie took the chance.

"I've been thinking about you." He whispered in her ear, his arms wrapping around her as he stood behind her. He didn't waste a second, his hand slipping up her thigh. He could feel the goosebumps on her skin and the way she shuffled.

"Oh yeah? About what?" She edged on. If Eddie wanted just sex, she could do that.

"Your cunt clenching around my big cock. Your nails scratching down my chest as you ride me. Tits bouncing in my face as you swirl your hips. Riding me until you cum, using me until you're satisfied. Cum dripping out of you as you walk back into the party." His words went straight to her cunt. She took his hand and headed for his van.

~~~

Eddie panted as the sweat dripped down his forehead. His eyes half open as she crawled off his lap. Her skin glistened in sweat as she clipped back on her bra.

"Was that good?" He asked a hint of insecurity in his tone. She didn't ask him to fuck, he had to ask her. He had to make sure this time she felt him for hours, forcing her to think about him.

She looked at him a little confused and slightly laughed. "Yeah, it was good, Munson." She continued to get dressed and Eddie lay there naked.

He felt a little relief but also conflicted that she laughed.

"See you inside!" She said as she jumped out of the van. The doors slammed in his face yet again.

This time he wasn't going to let it go. He threw on his boxers and jeans. He didn't bother with his shirt, just throwing on his jacket. He marched back inside after her.

There she was, back with Billy like they didn't fuck each other's brains out in his van.

He walked up to them, yanking her away from Billy's grasp.

"Woah, Munson. Chill out. Don't hurt the pretty girl." Billy teased. He could practically see the steam coming out of Eddie's ears.

"Shut it." Eddie snapped, then he looked back at Y/N.

"What are you doing with him?" Eddie asked

"Um? Hanging out?" Y/N said she was confused. And she was confused as to why Eddie cared.

"Hanging out with Hargrove? Oh come on, he only wants to get in your pants! He doesn't care about you."

Y/N scoffed and shook her head. "Oh, unlike you, you mean? From what I can remember, after we hooked up you pretty much said sex was all it was"

He guess he never realized that. He was the one being stupid. He was the one who sounded like an idiot. He marched up planning to make her open her eyes, but her eyes were open.

Y/N rolled her eyes at his silence and marched off.

"Smooth, Munson." Billy teased, his hand slamming down on Eddie's shoulder. "I'll let you in on a little secret. She likes you way more than she thinks. You've got a chance, but the more you carry on with this fuck boy act, it gets smaller and smaller."

~~~

The hard part of always telling girls it was just sex, was not knowing a thing about them. Eddie had no idea where Y/N lived, worked, or a way to see her. He didn't have a number to call and he was embarrassed to ask around.

So he had to wait for Monday to arrive before he could apologize. He figured at least the extra time would give her time to calm down and give him time to figure out what he would say. But he still had no clue.

Eddie looked around every hallway he could, he even arrived at school early to find her. To his surprise, he found her. And not to his surprise she rolled her eyes when she saw him.

"Before you walk away!" He raced after her, his hand on her elbow.

"I want to apologize for my comment about Billy. I was the one who shut anything down and I have no right to speak on what you do. " Eddie started, his apology caused her to stay. Her head to the side as she nudged him on.

"I guess I never liked a girl enough to think past sex, and that's a dick move on my part. I was intrigued by you and I thought if we had sex, it would go away. And it didn't. I wanted you again and again. At first, I thought it was for sex. But the two times you shrugged me off, it hurt. And Billy helped me realize, if I was hurt, I can't imagine how hurt you could have felt. I don't want you to feel used. You are worth way more than that."

"Eddie, what are you trying to say?"

"I'm sorry and I want more than sex with you." Eddie said, plain and short. Right to his point.

"So now that it's you that wants it, you should just get it?" She asked

"No! I know that you have every right to never see me again. But I was hoping that the part that likes me or used to like me, might still be there and want to give me a second chance?" He asked, he never felt so nervous in front of a girl before. And he felt so seen and vulnerable.

"Look, I was fine with it being just sex, but I do like you. Yeah, it hurt a little bit that you wanted nothing more, but I wasn't surprised. And I wasn't going to crawl into a ball and cry about it. At the end of the day you are just a boy," she said, Eddie felt like this wasn't going in the direction he wanted. "But, maybe after a few dates, you'll be more than just a boy. " A small smile on her face.

"Okay now what are you saying?" Eddie asked.

"Cut off the girls, don't sleep with anyone else, take me on some dates, and after that, we'll see." She said, her head up high as she walked past him. Her shoulder brushed his.

She felt proud and she walked like she owned him, because in a way she did. No one ever had Eddie Munson on a leash but she was ready to drag him all around.

Tags!

@bmunson86 @mxcheese @ladymunson @michaelfuckinglangdon @z0mbie-blah @biittersweet @mirrorsstuff @somethingvicked @micheledawn1975 @ago-godance @magnificantmermaid @tlclick73 @hargrovesswifee @cityofidek @manyfandomsfanvergentreblogs @silky-luxe @lokiofasgard616 @loving-and-dreaming @eddiemunsonsbitch69 @thegemaqua @ashlynnkennedy @strangerthingsstories5255 @harringt8ns @pleasinghellfire @whoscamila @stusdollface93 @gretavankleep37

[lovebugism]

oh my god,,,, gurl!!!! THE CUSTOMER'S ALWAYS RIGHT fic is sooo good 😫 my heart literally breaks every time I read this story. Thank you for blessing us with this masterpiece <3

THE CUSTOMER'S ALWAYS RIGHT | square one

summary: eddie makes a confession that's been weighing heavy on his heart. you realize that your future with him is haunted by ghosts from your past. pairing: virgin!eddie munson / f!reader word count: 16.3k warnings: hopper, steve, and robin being the reader defense squad, hints at reader's previously poor mental health, mentions of abusive and toxic relationships, a banshees of inisherin quote, b*lly h*rgrove because he needs a warning. (pretend any typos don't exist pls and thank u!) a/n: guess who's back, back again? ✨✨ i'd apologize for disappearing for a month, but then there'd be apologies in all my notes, so just know that i'm sorry every time i disappear unexpectedly, okay? 🥲 thanks for being so patient! please enjoy this long-awaited installment of tcar ily <3

( PREVIOUSLY ) | ( SERIES MASTERLIST ) | ( NEXT )

Eddie’s got a 1986 Van Halen tape in his boombox and a baby pink heart stitched into the fabric of his shirt. He’s the least metal he’s ever been, but he couldn’t be happier.

You keep your promise to him to patch up his torn Hellfire tee. If anything, you use the absentminded assurance as your excuse to see him again. The night you shared before, all but baring your scarred souls underneath glittering stars and streams of pale moonlight, hadn’t satiated your hunger for him. Eddie left you craving in a way you weren’t used to before — a yearning to be close to him that went beyond the boundaries of physical intimacy.

It was a simple sort of longing. It was a homesickness. A sense of nostalgia for a love you’d never felt before.

You wish you could wear Eddie’s adoration for you like a blanket, wrap yourself in the hand-stitched quilt of many colors and bundle it tighter around your shoulders when the cold comes. You want his softness to hold you in a way you’ve never been able to hold yourself.

You feel swaddled in it, succumbed and cloaked and at peace in all his tenderness. You’ve never been so at ease, so blissfully comforted by the presence of another human being. And Eddie feels all of that, every ounce of warmth you feel, because it pours out of you like rays of sunshine and bathes him in shades of gold.

He didn’t think you could get any softer than you had been that night at Skull Rock, until you were nestled in his unmade bed the next morning. You curled your legs underneath you as you weaved the needle and thread through the tear in his t-shirt, eyes squinted and tongue poking out the side of your mouth in an astute concentration. 

All of the sudden, you were marshmallow fluff and honey on toast — made of all things sickly sweet that made his stomach feel suddenly full. 

You finish mending the rip in record time and beam when he wears the heart-shaped stitching with pride. The rest of the day thereafter was spent in the tiny confines of his one hundred square-inch bedroom. From there, the both of you came to the silent understanding that you didn't want to spend another day apart.

The weekend had given you a limited sort of freedom, allowed you to pretend that you lived in a world with no responsibilities or anything other than Eddie Eddie Eddie, but adulthood made you no such promises. He had a side job to do to keep himself afloat, and you had a cat that thought it was the end of the world anytime you were gone for longer than a night. Both of those things together meant that the eve of parting was ultimately inevitable.

Every second you spent away from Eddie felt like you were grieving.

You mourned for him in the darkness of your apartment and tried to pretend you weren’t half a person in the cat food aisle at Melvald’s.

You tried to lessen the unbearable distance with phone calls, though it didn’t come nearly as close as feeling his fingers thrumming imaginary beats on your thigh or his heartbeat thudding against your ear. 

But his voice filled the emptiness of your one-bedroom apartment and the Eddie Munson shaped hole he’d left just behind your ribcage, and that was good enough for you.

When you weren’t with him, you were roaming around your apartment like some kind of ghost, with the phone tucked between your ear and shoulder and the rotary clutched in your free hand. 

You cook yourself dinner with him ranting about his day in your ear. You hold the receiver closer to Bowie and force him to hear her purr when she’s being exceptionally cute. He falls asleep some hours later to the sound of your soft snores, and you wake up the next morning to the sounds of his.

It was pathetic, truly.

You’d be gagging at how sweet it was if it wasn’t happening to you.

But it was.

Every ounce of this sticky sweet goodness was yours, and it tasted just like honey on your tongue. 

It was the honeymoon stage times a thousand, all rose-colored and reflecting light — your own personal utopia. It brought with it a heavenly sort of refuge, a bubble of peace you never wanted to pierce.

Eddie basks in the serenity of it all when he finally has you with him again. You’re in his lap, on his lips, and all over him, but it still isn’t quite close enough. He doesn’t think he’ll be satisfied until you’ve successfully melted with him and your limbs have entwined with his like tree roots, destined to remain that way for the next couple of centuries or so.

And it’s weird because he could hardly handle living in such a tiny trailer with Wayne, let alone stomach more than a couple hours with the guys from Hellfire all in one place. But you? You entered his life all at once and now he can’t remember what it was like without you.

He doesn’t particularly want to, if he’s being real honest.

It’s why he’s always less enthused about letting you leave when you’ve both got responsibilities dragging you apart. He begs you to stay with him a few hours more, pleads for you to stick around while he makes a quick deal or an emergency pick-up when Dustin Henderson calls and says he needs a ride. 

And you promise you’ll wait on him there, because he makes it virtually impossible to say no to his rosy pouted lips and chocolate syrup puppy dog eyes.

That’s when you run into Wayne for the first time, when Eddie’s out and you’re making breakfast for when he comes back.

French toast and scrambled eggs sizzle on the stove and warm the kitchen with all its cinnamon confections. It makes the man’s face screw up in confusion when he steps inside the trailer because he’s never known Eddie to cook a day in his life. And then his eyes find you — a young, pretty girl all alone in his kitchen with his nephew’s van gone from the drive.

“…Who the hell are you?” he wonders gruffly and pops a cigarette between his lips, totally unbothered.

He’s got no reason to be intimidated by the stranger in his trailer. He’s more confused than anything else, and he’s got this contorted look on his face like he’s blaming the exhaustion from the graveyard shift for his vision of you.

“Oh— my god,” you mumble through the mouthful of whipped cream you’d squeezed into your mouth moments prior. You fight to swallow it all down. “Uh. Hi. I’m, um… I’m Eddie’s... girlfriend?”

It sounds like you’re lying. 

In some ways, it feels like you are. 

You’ve been spending more time in his trailer than in your own home, but it’s not like either of you has motioned to make anything official just yet.

He eyes you with a tired and heavy gaze, eyes as dark and as infinite as Eddie’s. The man gives you a once-over and then chuckles lowly to himself as he tosses his corduroy jacket onto the back of the recliner and his tin lunchbox to the coffee table.

You shift awkwardly on the other side of the room. “…What is it?”

“When Eddie said he was talkin’ to a pretty girl on the phone every night, I thought he was lyin’,” he admits through hearty chuckles. 

It makes you laugh too. 

There’s little talking after the fact, besides you offering him some of the breakfast on the stove and him joking that you should come around more often.

You recount the story to Eddie when he returns, utterly mortified about the whole thing. You’re even more embarrassed when the boy finds amusement in your horror and starts to chuckle to himself — not exactly at you, but not with you either.

He laughs louder when you swat at him for it. You clamber on top of him, mattress squeaking mattress under your weight, as you demand him to stop through giggles of your own.

Somewhere down the line, both of you stop caring. 

Neither of you is quite sure where the conversation stopped and ended, only that when you started kissing, you couldn’t stop. 

They weren’t innocent little pecks, but they weren’t sloppy and full of tongue either. You press your lips together with the intent of being as close as you can to the other, like you haven’t spent every second you could together.

Neither of you will be satisfied until you’ve swallowed each other whole.

And you, you’ve got this ache for him. A swirling of want that’s constantly rippling in your belly for this boy. He’s just not usually under you when it’s happening — and now that he is, the crackling embers have burst into white and blue flames behind your sternum.

Your lips click each time you part, a lewd noise you never want to stop hearing. The sound of it gives you goosebumps, like a good song you’ve just heard on the radio. You wonder if Eddie can feel them as his hands start to creep up beneath your shirt and find purchase along your waist. 

You open his mouth with your own and sneak your tongue inside just as you roll your hips over his lap.

It’s the most forthcoming either of you had been in your three-day stint of nonstop talking. Even when you were over at the trailer, totally alone and pressed underneath him, it was otherwise completely innocent. You just make out like a couple of teenagers until one of you wants to make a food run or offers to roll a joint. 

And you like that. You like that he doesn’t expect anything from you, but it does get a little agonizing when you’ve tried every attempt to give yourself to him and he just won’t take it.

Like usual, Eddie tenses when he feels you grinding on top of him — partly because he feels a tingle at the base of his spine when he gets instantly half-hard, but mostly because he knows there’s nothing he can do about it.

He keeps preaching to himself it’s not the right time, it’s not the right time, it’s not the right time — but he’s got no idea when it’ll ever be the right time, if it’ll ever be the right time, or if he’ll know it when it comes.

Because he’s had you to himself for days now — no Wayne, no responsibilities, no pressure — with his tongue rutting against yours and your hands fidgeting with the metal buttons of his jeans, and it still doesn’t feel good enough. Eddie doesn’t feel good enough.

He’s not sure if he ever will.

And it’s not you. God, it’s the farthest thing from you. As far as Eddie’s concerned, he’s never had more fun with anyone else. He’s never laughed harder with anyone else. He’s never felt as comfortable with anyone as he’s starting to feel around you. So he’s not entirely sure why he finds the rest of it so hard. 

Eddie wants you so bad that the ache of all his yearning is palpable. It’s like the weight of it is what’s keeping him from you — unstoppable force, immovable object, blah, blah, blah. 

Either way, it leaves him entirely unable to take things further with you, however much he wants to. There’s something in his way and it’s him. 

Your heartache is his own when he has to pull away from you.

“You okay?” you ask him with wide eyes and swollen lips, always so concerned for him.

“Yeah. Yeah, I’m good,” he’s quick to assure you. He’s still breathless when he fidgets beneath you, trying to prop himself up on his headboard without rubbing his half-hard cock against your thigh.

When he succeeds, he musters a smile that shakes at the edges. “It’s just… you know, not everything… It doesn’t have to be about sex, you know?”

He makes himself as soft as possible for you when he says this. He gets rid of all the usual teasing lilts that tend to lurk on his tongue as the words spill from his mouth. The last thing he wants to do is hurt your feelings or, in some roundabout way, make you think you’re the problem. 

He just wants you to know that that isn’t why he’s been wanting to spend so much time with you. There was never an ulterior motive with him other than all the adoration he holds in his hands and his mouth for you.

The strike of hurt that flashes across your face is obvious to only Eddie, who’s spent enough time mapping out your features to know what twitches are ones of discontent. The slight frown that dips between your brows when they scrunch together for half a second comes like a stroke of lightning. It’s a brief flash of purple in the sky that leaves so quickly that it makes you wonder if it was ever there at all.

You fidget on his lap, not resting as comfortably upon him as you had been just moments before. “Oh…” you murmur through soft, jutted-out lips. “Sorry. I, I didn’t—”

“No, it’s not— that’s not what I—” he tries to assure over your insecure stammers, but succeeds only in tripping over himself in return. He cuts himself off with a breathy laugh, shaking his head while his fingers fidget on your hips. “That’s just not what this is about for me, you know? I just… I wanna spend time with you.”

It’s easily the softest thing he’s ever said to you — to anybody, for the matter — and the marshmallow sweetness of it all wraps around you like wisps of pink cotton candy.

Your apprehensiveness twists into something lighter, a pair of twinkling eyes and a bashful smile.

“Oh,” you hum again, obviously more pleased than before. “That’s nice…”

“No one’s ever said that to you before, have they?” Eddie asks you.

He tries to muster a crooked smirk as the words leave his mouth, but he’s got a feeling he already knows the answer. Hearing you affirm his suspicions will do nothing more than make him angry at all the assholes that had you before him, at everyone who taught you that you were good for sex and hardly a thing else. 

It makes him wish that he’d gotten to know you sooner. Maybe then you’d understand that he’d be happy just holding you like this and never doing anything more.

You don’t answer him verbally, just shake your head with your lips pursed softly to the side. You look more innocent than anything he’s ever seen before, even with your lipstick smeared on your chin. 

He’s still not quite sure how someone could be so reckless with such a fragile thing — to watch you break and not spend the rest of time grieving to know that you’ll never be quite the same again. 

There’s a primal instinct that swims in him then, an urge to keep you in his arms and locked in the confines of his trailer forever and ever. He wants to keep the wolves of Hawkins, Indiana from ever getting a whiff of you again. It’d be more than they deserved, anyway.

“God, you have got to get better boyfriends, sweetheart,” Eddie tells you with a playful lilt in his voice despite the anger simmering in his belly.

“Isn’t that what you are?” you giggle.

His world stops.

“Huh?”

You tense at his tenseness. Only when he’s gaping at you does the weight of your words dawn on you. “…Huh?”

The awkward moment goes as quickly as it arrives, chased out by the fit of laughter the two of you are quickly thrown into. Your entwining chuckles rise like smoke in his tiny bedroom and then settle back over you like a fuzzy blanket.

“Are you asking me to be your boyfriend, babe?” Eddie teases.

“Of course not,” you scoff. “Babe.”

“Oh, right, of course not. That would be way too crazy considering we’ve spent, like, every day together and have made each other come… what is it now? Twice?”

“Three times for me,” you correct with you a smile. “You need to catch up, Eddie Spaghetti.”

“Another time?” he offers with a scrunched nose.

“Whenever you want.”

Eddie is grateful for your lack of urgency, even more so for the kiss you press to the tip of his nose. 

You peck him on the lips after — once, twice, and then a thiiird, drawn out time — before moving on to his chin and jaw and neck. Whatever part of him you can reach (which is just about everywhere, considering the vantage point you’ve got sitting on his lap), you sprinkle a kiss to it.

It’s an innocent sort of affection, the kind that makes him wonder how it ever came to be in the first place. What evolutionary measures led to this, to you pressing your lips to his skin to show how much you care about him? Eddie doesn’t really want to know the answer, he’s just grateful that it happened in the first place.

You’re so good at it, loving on him. You’re always so kind and so gentle in your way and it makes him feel guilty. There’s a lingering feeling of undeservedness that settles something heavy at the base of his stomach. How could he ever expect you to be so open with him when he hasn’t done the same for you?

A heavy sigh rattles in his deflating chest. 

“I gotta tell you something, sweetheart,” he cautions when your lips smack against the thrumming pulse below the left side of his jaw. “Something you’re not gonna like…”

A billion things run through your head all at once. When you part from him, he can see the rollercoaster of emotions each one of them puts you through.

Your first instinct is that he’s got some kind of partner he’s kept hidden from you until now. It wouldn’t be the first time you’ve gone steady with a guy who’s then told you about some other girlfriend he had — or, god forbid, a wife. 

But then you realize that you surely would’ve had some sort of inkling if that were the case. There’s no way Eddie would’ve been able to spend every second of his day with you — and then another several hours on the phone when you had to leave — without someone else coming along to burst your bubble. 

And so far, there haven’t been any angry wives, just the occasionally confused Uncle Wayne.

Then you start thinking he’s about to tell you he wants an open relationship. The you’re great, but I’m just not ready to settle down yet spiel that you’ve heard a thousand times before. Usually when people say that, they mean that they just don’t want to settle down with you.

You’ll become some douchebag’s fuck toy for a month or more until the girl next door comes around. He gets her knocked up in record time, his family forces him to marry her, and they begin their cushy lives together in the center of some cul-de-sac — really settle down, as it were.

You’re not sure if you could take that from Eddie. You could grin and bear if it you had to, take whatever attention he’s willing to give you because who cares if he’s giving it to someone else on the side? You’re just not sure how long you’d last like that.

And then you start to worry that he’s just going to break up with you entirely — it’s not you, it’s blah, I’ll always care about blah, please don’t tell anyone about how we blah-ed. That whole talk. 

All the rest of your worries stop mattering so much because you’ve only just called him your boyfriend. And here he goes, about to end it all before it can really even start. That’d be just your luck, you figure.

“Did I do something wrong?” you caution after a few moments of heavy silence.

Eddie’s bleeding heart wrenches at your words, at how sad they sound spilling from your mouth, and how you immediately think that it’s got something to do with you. 

He shakes his head feverishly in response. “No. No, it’s not you. You’re… you’re perfect.”

“Okay…” you concede quietly, voice trembling with a lingering disbelief.

“I just… I haven’t been totally honest with you, you know?” the boy admits before his glimmering chocolate eyes fly open and he corrects himself quickly. “And I haven’t lied to you or anything. Not— Not exactly. I just… I wanna be honest with you… As your boyfriend and all.”

You can tell by the sudden weight in his voice that he’s serious. But the fine coat of glowing rose that splotches Eddie’s cheeks after calling himself your boyfriend for the first time makes you melt. 

You smile to yourself and start to trace the heart you’d stitched into his t-shirt with your finger.

“Yeah. I mean, we are about to spend our two minutes anniversary together and everything.”

“Exactly,” the boy huffs out a laugh. It lacks its usual jest, though, because of the ice-cold anxiety that drenches him from head to toe and makes his hands and feet go numb.

His fingers tremble where the rest on your waist, trying and failing to find a comfortable position there because, right about now, Eddie feels the most awkward he’s ever felt.

“I just want you to know that I… I’ve never done this before,” he confesses quietly and with his eyes squeezed shut. He prays that he doesn’t have to be any less vague than that.

Your face twists in confusion — your brows furrow and your nose twitches and your head tilts to the side like a puppy. And then you’re laughing, a soft little thing of a giggle that normally makes his heart sing, though now he can only feel it breaking.

“What…?” he tries to scoff out his own chuckle. “Why are you laughing?”

“Because you’ve already told me that, dummy. That you’ve never felt this way before…” you answer, reciting his own words back to him. You haven’t yet forgotten how he’d looked at you as you said them, pale skin made silk under the moonlight while he sparkled beneath the beams of it and his love for you. 

“No, it’s… it’s more than that,” he corrects. “I’ve never even had a girlfriend before you. Or anything really.”

You still don’t seem to understand. You just look on at him with uncertainty. 

A quiet “okay?” tumbles from your mouth entwined with a nervous giggle, because you don’t understand what’s got him so somber. He’s never dated anyone, you’ve fucked half of Hawkins — these are just facts that went unsaid before now. 

And maybe it’s because you’ve never been with a virgin before, but the thought that Eddie might be one hasn’t seemed to cross your mind at all. 

It’s that exact thought that scares him. 

Because if it hasn’t already, maybe it’s because you’re avoiding it altogether. And why would he ever be the exception?

He opts to bite the bullet and hopes that his heart doesn’t get broken after.

“I’m a virgin. Okay? I’m a complete, total, proper adult virgin,” he blurts with a brazenness he’d previously lacked when it came to all this. “And I’m sorry I didn’t tell you before now, but I didn’t, because I liked you and I was scared. So if you wanna yell at me or if you wanna break up with me before our five-minute anniversary, I totally get it, but I should probably let you know that it’ll rip my little virgin heart to shreds, so…”

Eddie ends his nervous ramble with a trembling, lopsided smile that does little to ease the leaden tension he’s just manufactured in the four walls of his bedroom.

He can’t seem to gauge your reaction after the fact, which is strange because he always knows what you’re thinking. 

He knows when you’re laughing with him and not at him. You scrunch your nose and giggle when he tells you a funny joke, then tilt your head back and cackle when he trips over the punchline. 

He knows the exact moment when something’s started to bother you — when you get real quiet in your bubble of reserved stillness and your eyes start to glaze over. To anyone else, it might just look like a person who’s keeping to themselves. Eddie’s starting to learn that usually means trouble when it comes to you.

He knows the difference between your gentle sort of sadness and when you’re damn near inconsolable. When you cried at the end of Stand By Me, you smiled at him with a glassy tear-filled gaze, then rolled your eyes when he tried to comfort you. The tears only spilled over when you laughed because Eddie pretended you’d hurt him when you’d shoved him away. 

But when you’re really upset about something, you don’t show him at all — you fight to keep it all to yourself until you’ve squished the problem into a tiny enough ball that you can forget about all of it.

This is something different.

There’s too much crossing your mind all at once for him to get a good read of you.

You just gape at him, like you’re trying to figure out if he’s joking or not, and then fighting to understand what it means when you realize he’s being serious. 

And just when you’ve started to wrap your head around it all, when your brain remembers how to make words again and you realize you haven’t said anything in several agonizing seconds, a foreign voice sounds from down the hallway.

Not foreign in that it was unfamiliar exactly, just foreign in that you and Eddie had spent so much time alone that you were starting to forget that there was an entire world outside of yourselves. A great big world, filled with a great many people, some of whom were your friends who tended to get pretty worried about you.

“Edward Wayne— why the hell is the Chief in my driveway?” his uncle curses from the living room, sounding like he’s speaking through a cigarette in his mouth.

Eddie himself is immediately freaking the fuck out because he figures he must’ve gotten tipped off again. He tries to calculate the quickest way to get you off of him and to all of his cubby holes full of miscellaneous drugs so he can flush them down the toilet before Jim Hopper busts the door down.

And even though you’re not the drug dealer who’s had cops on their ass since they were fifteen in this equation, you look a whole lot more terrified than Eddie does.

Your eyes go wide and the whites of them swim with terror as you launch yourself off of his lap. You don’t spare another glance back at him, not even when you nearly trip over yourself when you shove your sneakers on your feet and shuffle out of the room. He’s forced to follow behind you like a confused puppy as you bound through the trailer at lightning speed. 

The haste of your movements startles even Wayne, who halts mid-puff of his cig when you’re in and out of the living room before he can blink. The opening squeak of the screen door and metal slamming against metal is the only thing that punctuates your exit.

“Would it kill you to answer your damn phone every once in a while?” the powerful timbre of Jim Hopper’s angry voice, of which only the man himself could pull off, is muffled until Eddie cautiously slinks onto the porch behind you. 

He finds the chief standing beside the Cruiser he’s parked sideways. The door of it is still flung open. A distant beeping sounds from the ignition. 

He’s still got on the pressed khakis of his uniform — complete with the golden badge pinned to his chest, darkened sunglasses on the bridge of his nose, and flat-brimmed hat on his head. Even with the majority of his face covered, it does little to hide the anger that radiates off of him like a hot stove eye.

You remain on the porch, shifting your weight on your feet at the top of the steps. “Okay, Hopper, just listen to me for a second—”

“Three days!” he shouts over you, not deterred by your composed nature. “I have been calling you… for three days! Seventy-two hours. No answer!”

Eddie decides to speak up from behind you despite his better judgment. “Yeah, uh, that was kinda my fault,” he confesses with an awkward laugh. “Wouldn’t let her hang up the phone—”

“I’ll deal with you in a second,” Jim interjects firmly and without thinking. He goes back to berating you with an admirable finesse. “Buckley wanted my head on a pike when I wouldn’t file a missing person’s report in the first twenty-four hours, but seventy-two? She was gonna kill me!”

Rather than argue with him, like every fiber of your being so desperately wants to, you make the difficult choice to concede with a heavy sigh. Because you don’t doubt that Robin was on his ass the second she realized you weren’t answering your phone or at your apartment when she and Steve dropped by.

She did tend to be on the overprotective side, after all, which obviously paired well with her melodramatic disposition.

“I’m sorry, okay? I’ve just been… busy.”

“Yeah, I’ve heard the one before,” the man answers bitterly.

“It’s different, Hopper!”

“I’ve heard the one before, too!”

Eddie can only assume that the both of you are communicating telepathically, what with the way your synchronized glares seem to say a thousand words (probably every curse imaginable, if he had to guess) without your mouths ever moving once. 

He stands on the outskirts of it all, feeling a bit stuck in the thorniness of such a tense silence, like any slight movement might cut him.

Jim moves slowly, akin to a creeping snake, as his hands raise to remove the glasses from his face. Their lack reveals the ice-cold glare that was previously hiding beneath them.

“Get in the car—” 

“—No,” you reject just as the direction leaves his mouth because you knew it was coming.

Jim inhales sharply and smacks his lips against his teeth, like a father whose child is most ardently testing his patience. He plants his work boot in the gravel and his hand on his hips. His steel gaze goes far off for a moment before flitting back to you again.

“…Get in the car or I put you in handcuffs.”

Your breath hitches at the threat. You squint over at him. “You wouldn’t.”

Jim smiles at you, but it’s more threatening than anything else. “We both know that I would.”

Eddie’s eyes flit between the both of you. He can tell that Hopper’s serious and that you’re trying to decide whether or not to call his bluff, with your arms crossed defensively over your chest and lips pursed in a tight line.

You ultimately decide not to. Because Hopper has, in fact, done that before. And even though the circumstances are very, very different, you wouldn’t put it past him to do it again. So you all but stomp your foot like a protesting child and spin on your heel to storm back inside the trailer.

Eddie’s nervous gaze flits between your disappearing form and the storm cloud of a police chief standing in his driveway. When their eyes lock, he realizes he should probably say something. He cocks his thumb over his shoulder and stammers, “I should— I should probably…”

He doesn’t finish his sentence. He catches the front door before it shuts and slithers through the crack of it to follow in behind you.

“Wait, was he— was he being serious about that?” Eddie wonders once you’re back in his bedroom.

It feels a lot less cozy than it did minutes before, less like the bubble of refuge that you thought nobody could pierce and more like a lonely space that feels entirely too empty. You pluck your things scattered around his room, and it starts to feel less and less like home with parts of you gone from it.

“I don’t know,” you answer within a sigh as you collect your cardigan from the back of his desk chair and shrug the thing back over your shoulders again.

“But it’s happened before?”

“Yeah. Once. When I was…” you confess quietly, then trail off. You get your bag from his nightstand and haphazardly shove your scrunchie, sunglasses, and chapstick into the bottom of it. “…When I was in a bad way— it doesn’t matter now.”

Eddie so desperately wants to pry.

He’d wanted to make a joke before, about the handcuffs — something less than tasteful about them and you and Hopper and some good ol’ freaky deaky that you'd scold him for after. But he decides not to now because you sound so strangely solemn about the whole thing, as though it was a story you buried deep with the intent of never bringing it up again.

“You don’t have to go with him if you don’t want to, you know that, right?”

“Of course, I do,” you scoff at his worries, not nearly as threatened by Jim as the rest of Hawkins. You move to stand in front of him in the center of his room and meet his furrowed brows with a soft grin. “He’s not gonna do anything, he’s just pissed. He’ll berate me on the drive back to my apartment and then it’ll be like nothing ever happened.”

That seems to please Eddie well enough, though he’s still a bit disheartened at your leaving.

“I guess we couldn’t keep spending time together like this, huh?” he teases lightly, like the realization of it doesn’t make his chest ache. “Sorta forgot about the rest of the world… whatever that is.”

“It was fun while it lasted,” you tell him with a shrug and a whimsical sigh.

“Wait for me, will ya?” he jokes, if only to make you laugh and to feel like he’s stuck in some sickly sweet ending of a romcom for a couple moments more. 

You roll your eyes at his dramatics but let him wrap you in his arms anyway. His hands find purchase on your elbows, thumbs rubbing soothingly along the outsides of them. “How about a kiss, then?” he offers when the urge to feel you because too great to bear. “For our ten-minute anniversary and all?”

“You never have to ask me, Eds,” you assure with a laugh. You rise to the tips of your toes and he meets you halfway. 

Home is in your mouth. It’s warm and cozy and safe there. It’s easily the most familiar place he’s ever known, with your bottom lip nestled between his own. He feels homesick when you part from him. 

“You’re not mad at me?” he wonders quietly, feeling a bit like a cowering child from where he stands in front ahead of you — eased only when you shake your head almost immediately in response.

“No. I couldn’t be even if I wanted to, I think.”

“Okay. That’s… That’s good.”

“We can talk about it later, if you want. After I get lurch off my ass.”

He tries not to smile too wide, but it’s hard not to beam every time he looks at you. “Yeah. Sure. I’ll… I’ll see you around, I guess?” he stumbles over himself, having forgotten how to say goodbye to you. 

It’s equally as hard for you too, it seems, because you nod at him and turn to leave and then realize once you’re halfway down the hallway that you might not survive if you don’t kiss him again. 

So you turn and rush back, catching Eddie with his back turned and spinning him around so you can peck him again. You feel his cheeks heat beneath your palm and his sigh against your cupid’s bow and his lips melt against your own.

You etch each tingling sensation into the edges of your mind in the hope that you won’t drive yourself completely insane when you inevitably start to miss him like crazy. 

You focus on that and on him when you find Hopper and his stupid proud dad smirk. It’s the only reason you don’t punch him in the jaw and tuck and roll out of the Cruiser when the silence becomes so slowly insufferable.

You’re starting to think Jim left the radio off on purpose. You’ve never known the guy not to drive around without the strumming of an old-school folk song to accompany him. You figure it must be some sort of intimidation tactic, to make you so uncomfortable that you break. You’re a lot closer to that than either of you realize.

You spare a glance over at the man next to you. He hasn’t looked at you once since you get in the car. He’s got one hand at three o’clock on the steering wheel and the other with its elbow propped up on the door as he scratches at the stubble on his jaw. 

He’s too at ease not to be bothered. This is obviously some kind of front he’s putting on to conceal his inner irritation.

You give on the lecture you’d been trying to prepare yourself for and exhale sharply through your nose. Your fingers fidget on your thighs as you kick your restless feet up on the console. 

“Get your feet off the dash,” Jim scolds without missing a beat. 

You huff and obey. “Okay, this is crazy— can’t you just yell at me already?”

He barely wastes a second.

“I cannot believe you right now!” he seethes through gritted teeth, stewing in a dad-like sort of anger.

“It was three days, Hopper!”

“You know what happened the last time no one heard from you for three days?” he shouts back. 

You tip your head back against the seat and groan. You should’ve known he was going to play that card. 

He waves an accusatory finger between the both of you. “You and me— we had a deal, remember? You let me check in on you. You agreed to that. You visit your little high school friends, and I see you at work, so I can make sure you’re not off somewhere killing yourself.”

Hopper becomes a casualty to the tense silence he created then, when you don’t retort with some comeback of your own and force him to feel every ounce of pressure from the leaden quiet. 

He sighs a great big, too loud sigh and shifts in his seat. His softening gaze flits between you and the road. “I didn’t… I didn’t mean it like that, okay? I just meant it, you know, figuratively. I wasn’t… trying to be mean.”

“When have you ever cared about being mean?” you monotone.

“I don’t,” he assures. “I’m just not trying to hurt your feelings, alright? Jeez…”

You try not to take too much pride in the man’s half-apology, though you’d be lying if you said it wasn’t a little bit rewarding.

Jim Hopper’s practically an iceberg. He only melts for his kid, Joyce Boyers, and you, apparently. 

It’s why he’s always so damn protective over you. He’s developed this sort of deep-rooted urge to keep you safe after watching you make every wrong decision a human being could possibly make. And when you mess up, because you do mess up, he feels like it’s partially his fault — that, if he’d done more, he could’ve kept you safer. 

It makes you feel like a burden most of the time, but you know it’s above yourself and mostly out of your control.

You’d known of each other for a while before you really met, because a troublemaker and police chief in such a small town are bound to. But somewhere down the line, he found you in a valley of mourning for someone that was still alive and you found him in a black hole of grief for someone who wasn’t. The empty and infinite voids within you both were stitched slowly together all over again. 

Jim Hopper was the dad you never had. You were the daughter he couldn’t.

And you thought something might change after he adopted El. You figured he might forget about you because it wasn’t like it was his job to watch after you or anything. Playing pretend always felt nice, but you knew it wasn’t real. 

It was to Jim, though, who’d developed a similar adoration for you as the one he had for Sara. He hasn’t been able to forget about you in the same way he hasn’t been able to forget about her. 

Every night, after he’s scrubbed the day off his body and washed it all down with a lukewarm beer, he lays on his pull-out bed in the small living room of his cabin and goes through a checklist in his head. 

He makes sure that he’s checked on El and reminds himself to wake up early to make her breakfast the next morning before he brings Joyce coffee at Melvald’s — Joyce. She always comes next on his list, always right after El, and then you. 

He forces himself to calm down when his blood pressure inevitably spikes at the thought of not having heard from you all day. He reminds himself that he saw you at work on his lunch break and that he’ll see you again tomorrow.

Jim hums to himself as he settles more comfortably into his springy cot, deciding that he’ll try a new wine he can’t pronounce when he sees you at Enzo’s the next day and that he’ll drink it while he rambles about Joyce or El’s new boyfriend.

He drifts to sleep with thoughts of Sara.

You’re as ingrained into his mind as every other person he’s grown to love.

He stopped worrying about never getting you out a long time ago. Like a tomato sauce stain on a dress shirt, he knows he’ll never get you out of his head. He knows even more so that he doesn’t want to — no matter how much you annoy him or how angry you make him when you don’t answer his calls.

“Sorry…” you murmur and swallow down whatever mundane argument you could’ve spewed then, at the result of his sudden warmth. You turn to gaze out the window and trace the edges of the puffy white clouds with your eyes. “I wasn’t thinking about that — the… deal, or whatever… Honestly, I was a little too busy being happier than I think I’ve ever been in my life, so…”

You don’t see the dramatic eye roll he gives you in response, but you can’t miss the hearty groan that spills from his mouth. 

“What?” you laugh in response. “Have you never been a kid in love before?”

It’s almost jarring how he goes from huffy to concerned in a fraction of a second. His head snaps over to you, jaw clenched and eyes suddenly stern and swimming with a lingering fear. 

“Love?” he repeats like he must’ve heard you wrong. “Love— That’s— That’s what this is?”

You shrug. “I don’t know… Maybe…”

His eyes flutter shut for a moment. “Please don’t tell me you’ve said that to each other yet. This guy was just a crush four days ago.”

“No, Hopper. We haven’t. I mean, he literally just told me he was a virgin, so I don’t think we’re even close to—”

“A virgin?” Jim echoes, voice high-pitched and giddy. He beams at you from beneath his bushy mustache and slaps you a little too hard on your arm when he laughs. “Shit, teacup. Are you runnin’ out of options over there or somethin’?”

You twist your body to hit him back harder with your right hand. “It’s not funny, Hopper,” you scold. “He’s nice.”

“You said that about Hargrove once—”

“This is different,” you monotone before the words have the chance to leave his mouth.

“Yeah? How do you know?”

The question stumps you for a moment because you don’t know — you can’t.

You’d never admit it out loud, but Hopper was right; you’re still not quite sure how you ever could’ve thought that Billy Hargrove was a good guy, but you did. You felt a similar feeling of elation with him as you do now with Eddie, an otherworldly sort of happiness that makes you feel like you’re the only person it’s ever happened to.

And here you are now, sometime later and reveling in the aftermath, still gluing pieces of your shattered heart together.

You treat love like a drug. You use and use and use until it stops being a fun thing and becomes a crutch you can’t live without. That’s always when it starts to hurt you, but you’re in too deep to stop craving it.

And you know it’s bound to happen all over again, but you have to believe Eddie’s different or else you might as well fall into the deep pit of despair you’ve been trying this whole time to crawl out of. 

He makes you happy, really really happy, and you’d rather gamble that he hurts you than give it all without even trying.

“I… don’t,” you conclude after a few moments.

Jim seems surprised by your admission, shooting you an incredulous look with his untamed brows raised to his hairline.

You meet his look with a wavering grin. “But he makes me really happy, Hop. Like… It feels like it should be illegal or something. He makes me feel so good my heart hurts. There’s like this—”

“Ugh,” the man grumbles in disgust, sullen all over again.

“I didn’t mean it like that, you weirdo,” you chide.

A grin twitches beneath his mustache in response. “I know you didn’t… ‘Cause Munson’s a virgin.”

“Oh my god!” you groan. “I didn’t even mean to tell you that, okay? Leave him alone— and a swear to god, Hopper, if you make fun of him—”

“Hey, there’s nothing wrong with it, alright? I mean, he’s got the expert around to show him the ropes— ow!” You cut off his stupid joke and accompanying sardonic grin with a fist to his shoulder.

Steve and Robin tend to be quite the formidable duo.

They’ve barely got a brain cell to rub together between them, but there’s still something strangely intimidating about them when they’re both angry. It feels a bit like they’re your I’m not mad, I’m just disappointed parents, and you’re the scolded child taking your lashings in the form of a lecture.

It’s what you feel like now, sitting across from them in your designated booth at Benny’s Burgers — the one by the window in the corner. It’s far enough away from the bustle of the entrance but close enough still to gossip about the assholes you used to know from high school when they walk through the door. 

“You scare the shit out of us when you go AWOL like that, you know?” Steve confesses, still soft even though you know there’s a more upset part of himself he keeps hidden for now.

His chocolate gaze flits between you and the pile of fries in the middle of the table that the three of you share. He finds the one covered in the most salt and pops it into his mouth.

“AWOL?” you echo with a distant laugh when you realize how much he sounds like Hopper. “It was three days.”

“Yeah, and you fell off the face of the earth,” Robin retorts, half-muffled through the hearty gulp of strawberry milkshake starting to melt in her mouth.

“You guys are acting like I went halfway across the country,” you scoff. “I was with Eddie. At his trailer.”

“Exactly!”

Steve’s face contorts mid-bite. “Wait, you were with him? The freak?”

It makes you roll your eyes. He’d been too busy hopelessly flirting with the waitress at the counter to hear the entire recounting of your absence to Robin, though it was more of you gushing about it than anything else.

“Yep,” you answer.

“You skipped out on movie night to be with… Eddie Munson?” he reiterates for himself, as though there was any correlation between watching the same three movies while gorging on greasy junk food with your best friends and falling more in love with a guy you were already head over heels for as he tried to explain away the unopened box of condoms collecting dust underneath his bed.

Both are equally fun in their own ways, but totally totally different.

“How did you survive without me, Steven?” you joke back in response.

“He didn’t,” Robin quips.

“So… what? You guys just went on some kinda bender? I don’t get it. Did you just fuck the entire time or something?”

“Well, contrary to popular belief, I can actually spend time with someone and not fuck them—”

“Okay, that’s not what I meant and you know it.”

“And to answer your question — no, we didn’t fuck,” you confess, then elaborate more slowly, a tad bit awkwardly. “Because he told me today that… he is a… virgin.”

Your words seem to settle over each of them differently. Robin stills with her lips wrapped around the candy-cane striped straw then furrows her brows, as though their meaning hits her a few seconds after the fact.

Steve, meanwhile, goes entirely agape in an amazed sort of shock. His eyes go wide, his brows fly up and hide beneath the bangs that hang down over his forehead, and his jaw falls open. And then he starts to smile, a subtle hint of a grin on the corners of his pink lips, like he finds it funny.

“I knew it,” he murmurs to himself.

“…Why are you smiling like that?”

His smirk widens. “That freak said he screwed Vicki Carmichael senior year. I knew he was lying.”

“And why do you look so proud of yourself, exactly?” Robin asks him.

“Because now I feel less bad about never fucking her,” the boy explains like it’s obvious. He set his elbows on the table and gestures wildly with his hands. “I always thought the freak one-upped me because she, like, never gave me the time of day after Hargrove came along, you know? But… It’s good to know that I’m still king.”

His delighted grin is met with confused looks from both you and Robin, who look upon him with twisted eyebrows and squinted eyes. 

“Are you not aware of how strange everything that comes out of your mouth is?” you ask him, only partly joking.

“At least that settles why he wouldn’t let you give him a blow job,” the brunette girl concludes with a shrug as she slouches against the booth. “Poor guy was probably shitting bricks about it.”

You realize then that it does make sense, why he’d always been so adamant about your pleasure and never his own. Why he always touched you like you were some fragile thing he might break, and like everything was new to him. Because it was new to him. All of it.

And even though it baffles you to no end how he went his entire life without someone wanting to jump his bones (because truth be told, you’re doing a terrible job at hiding your want to do just that), the fact still remains — Eddie Munson is a virgin. 

He’s a virgin with an acute infatuation for the local slut, both of you freaks in your own right. 

It just adds more intricacy to a puzzle that already feels so complicated.

“I’ve never been with a virgin before,” you admit quietly, mostly to yourself, as you train your gaze on the straw wrapper you curl around your finger. “It’s different… Scary.”

“Why?” Robin wonders aloud.

“I don’t know. I just— I don’t know what to do now.”

“Just do what you always do,” Steve tells you like it’s that simple. He folds his arms on the table and leans in closer to you. “Experience is good. Okay? Experience is key.”

“No, it’s not that. I think I’m just… I’m scared I’m gonna treat him the way, you know, that I was treated. And I don’t wanna… I don’t wanna do that to him.”

You’re not sure when the shift started, when you stopped being a person to people. You only know that you were something less than that. Somewhere between junior and senior year, you become a plaything that anyone could do anything they wanted to with, and you were too starved for physical affection to tell them otherwise. 

You liked the attention. You liked feeling loved, even if it was only for a minute and a half, and all you had to show for it was a pool of cooling come on your belly.

Eddie’s the fragile thing now that you were then. 

He was a delicate little thing that can break so easily, something you could split in half if you wanted to. 

You don’t. 

You want so desperately to be kind, but you’re scared you won’t know how to, because no one’s ever been kind to you.

Steve reaches across the table for you, taking a wild stab at an attempt for affection after several months of being scared to touch you — he did enough of that, he thought, and he’d hurt you. But he can see the lingering ache hiding in your glazed-over eyes and feels an overwhelming urge to quell your worry. 

Five warm fingers wrap around your wrist, not too tight or too strong, just enough to stop you from cutting circulation off to the tip of your pointer finger and to remind you that he’s still there.

“Trust me,” he tells you with a sudden soft swimming in his caramel-colored eyes and a smile playing on his lips. “You couldn’t do that to anybody. Not even if you wanted to.”  

Your heart nearly stops at his words, at the sheer kindness of them, and at the way he holds you in the soft way you’re used to only Eddie holding you. Your eyes go wide when they flit up to him and then start to sting with the weight of unshed tears. 

You’re quick to blink them away though, while you playfully shrug him off and joke — “stop being so nice before I get the wrong idea, Harrington” — because it’s easier than accepting his tenderness.

Robin takes one look at his fond gaze, all gooey and dripping with honey, and then at your rolling eyes and accompanying shy grin, and groans at the softness of it all. She slides out from the confines of the booth and grumbles something about getting a refill on her milkshake.

“Some fries too, while you’re up?” Steve offers with a hopeful grin.

He’s met with the girl’s signature scowl.

“Please,” you finish for him.

Robin grins. “Anything for you,” she croons, if only to make the boy pout, before skipping off to the counter.

She leans her elbows upon the red wooden laminate top and smiles that same sickly sweet smile for Benny by the grill — no doubt trying to get her refills for free. 

Even though the bearded man seems unimpressed with her presence, you know that he’ll give them to her free of charge. He’s always had a soft spot for her, one of the only people in town who could rival his wit.

The door dings open, a familiar and high-pitched chime that often becomes more frequent as the evening progresses. This time it lets in a foreign, bitter breeze when the door swings open and closed again.

You can feel the chill from a distance — it resembles the crispness of autumn despite being comfortably settled in the middle of March. It nearly takes your breath away, prickles your skin and makes you grimace back a shiver. 

When your eyes leave Steve, a difficult feat considering he’s doing an alarmingly good impression of a walrus by sticking fries in his upper lip, you find that it wasn’t abnormally cold air at all. It was a Peter Parker spider sense form of anxiety that had felt like a bucket of ice water had been poured over you.

Billy Hargrove used to turn heads when he walked into a room. 

Now he just sucks all the air out of it.

And it’s not like you haven’t seen him since the break up; for a while, the asshole was painted on the backs of your eyelids — he all but haunted your consciousness. You’ll see him around town on occasion, in his sunglasses and jean jacket and too-tight denim pants, while he struts around Main Street with his new girlfriend (otherwise known as, his flavors of the month).

You think this is the first time you’ve been in the same room as him since your split, though. It feels like it must be with the way your throat starts to tighten and you forget how to breathe. 

All at once, you’re scrambling for an exit. It’s like Billy’s a fire and his smoke is rapidly filling your lungs. Your legs start to tremble when your adrenaline spike. Your brain tells you to get out as quickly as you can before he burns you.

Steve notices the look of fear flood your features like a dark storm cloud. You were laughing just seconds before the door opened, equal parts with him and at him, but now you just looked terrified — like a child who’s just spotted a boogeyman in her closet.

He turns in the booth to find what haunted thing has just caught your eye and finds that it’s worse than any monster you could conjure up. It’s Billy fucking Hargrove, with his pretty hair and his pretty smile and his pretty girl under his arm.

His presence filled targeted, almost. Like he chose to come to this diner, on this day and at this time just to fuck with the group of you.

“Don’t even look at him,” Steve advises when he turns back to you. “Look at me, okay? He’s not even worth it. That asshole doesn’t deserve to ruin our day.”

And you try to listen to him. You try really, really hard to let him change that subject to the cold fries or Robin taking too long or a combination of the two, but you can’t focus on him. You’re already so overwhelmed at the sight of Billy that you can’t focus on anything else but him. 

You settle on the fact that you might just have to drag Steve and Robin out by their wrists because you can’t sit in this booth any longer, and you definitely aren’t hungry anymore.

And that’s when he spots you.

Your eyes lock and you freeze, immediately averting your gaze but catching the sudden sparkle in his own as he grins a sly, sadistic grin.

“No way,” you hear him say with a laugh under his breath. The sound of his voice makes you tense. You hadn’t realized how at peace you’d been all this time without having to hear it. Now it feels like so many little needles piercing your skin.

“Fancy seeing you guys here,” he greets after he’s made a b-line for your booth and dragged Vicki Carmichael along with him. He smiles with all of his pearly whites while he smacks pungent wintergreen gum between them. 

When he slides into the booth beside you, he does so without invitation, and forces Vicki to slink in next to Steve.

And like it wasn’t already awkward enough, you know Vicki — like, know her, know her. There was a drunken makeout at a Halloween party in ’82. Then a one night stand with her brother before he left for college in ’83. And then her Tom Selleck clone of a father at a sleepover for her eighteenth birthday in ’85. 

You’re not exactly proud of it, but you’ve gotten a rather hefty taste of her family tree, and the fact that both of you know it makes it that much more uncomfortable.

“We’re kinda busy here, Hargrove,” Steve tells him when he notices how comfortable he’s making himself in your booth.

“Ooh… Is this a little date?” Billy teases with a grin.

Steve’s face falls. “…No.”

“Oh, right,” he nods, though the sardonic lilt in his voice tells you that he already knew the answer. He crosses his arms on the tabletop and turns to look at you with eyes bluer than any ocean. They flicker up and down your form. Suddenly, you feel self-conscious in your baggy jean and tank top duo.

“You’ve been seeing that guy, haven’t you? What’s his name again? The, uh— the freak?”

“His name is Eddie,” Steve answers for you, defending him because you can’t find the words to.

“That’s it,” Billy snaps his fingers, then points. He nudges you with his shoulder. The familiar feel of his jean jacket against your skin makes you wince. “God, you must be runnin’ out of steam over there, huh? I mean… the freak? Seriously? You couldn’t do any better than that?”

The jokes were tolerable coming from Jim and Steve and Robin — they weren’t funny by any means, but you could stomach them because you knew they were jokes. But this? This was just to hurt you. And it works too easily because Billy knows exactly how to break you. He knows all the wires to cut and buttons to push because the puzzle of shattering your psyche is one he memorized long ago.

“He’s actually a really nice guy,” you manage through a tight throat, still staring at your fidgeting hands.

“Well, that’s good,” he hums like you need his approval. “It’s about time, right?”

You huff and choose to entertain him despite your better judgment. “What’s that supposed to mean?”

He only shrugs. “I don’t know... Just, you know, that found a guy willing to settle for you. That’s all.”

“Settle?” you repeat, trying to laugh despite how tiny your voice sounds.

“You know what I mean, c’mon,” the blonde boy chuckles. “Sluts are fun and all, but they’re not the kinda girls you wanna settle down with. Steve knows what I mean.”

“No, I don’t,” Steve monotones quickly and without thinking, gaze hardened and jaw clenched. “And you need to leave.”

“I”m hungry, Billy,” Vicki whines, feeling every ounce of the tension surrounding her — like syrup or quicksand. She slides her permed bangs from her eyes and tucks a rogue strawberry strand behind her ear in a nervous tick. “Can’t we just get something to eat?”

“Alright, alright. I know when I’m not wanted,” Billy chuckles.

You grumble bitterly under your breath. “Apparently not…”

“I’ll see you around, Harrington,” Billy singsongs with a grin that wreaks of insincerity while his girlfriend slides out from the booth. He turns to look at you and squints. “Don’t be a stranger, alright? Matter of fact, point Munson my way, and I’ll give him a few pointers.”

You’re uncowed by his offer and angered by his mention of Eddie. Your eyes are stern and unwavering as you meet his gaze for the first time since he sat down beside you. 

“I think you could learn a thing or two from him, actually,” you retort, words sounding sweeter than the venom lingering behind them.

Billy’s grin only widens, impressed by your arguing. “Ooh… I forgot about the mouth you had on you, sweetheart.”

The use of the nickname makes you cringe. It doesn’t sound nearly as fulfilling as it does when it comes from Eddie. Now, it just sounds artificial — degrading.

He leans in close to you like he’s about to tell you a secret and splays his arm along the back of the booth behind you. The nicotine on his breath makes you grimace; it’s intoxicating when it comes from Eddie, disgusting from the boy sitting next to you. 

His eyes are bluer so up close, darker than you remember them being, and you notice he’s trimmed his usual stubble to a patchy mustache. He looks like the grown-up version of the boy you used to know, visually more mature but still the same in his way.

“When he gets bored of you — because, let’s be serious, he will get bored of you — you know where to find me,” Billy murmurs to you, a cynical smirk on the edges of his lips. “I’ll make sure you stay nice and broken in for the next dozen guys that want a taste—”

Steve can’t hear a word from where he sits across the booth, but he’s fuming with fists clenched under the table anyway. He hates how close Billy is to you, more so how uncomfortable you look with the proximity and how his words make you flinch. 

“Alright, you need to leave,” he blurts. “Now.”

Before the blonde could respond with a quip of his own, Robin all but teleports to the head of the table. She’s standing in front of the four of you suddenly, carrying a basket of fries and a strawberry milkshake and wearing a frown on her face.

“You’re in my seat, dickwad,” she monotones, even though she hadn’t been sitting next to you before. She’s not the least bit threatened by the Californian douchebag.

Billy smiles up at her anyway. “I was wondering where the third musketeer was! Still a carpet muncher, Buckley?”

“Happily.”

“What do ya say me and you head up to Lover’s Lake later?” the boy offers despite his date shifting awkwardly a few feet away. It’s a joke, for reasons that are more than obvious, and that’s what makes it so unbearably unfunny. 

He slinks out from the booth. The lack of his warmth is strangely comforting and you’re able to breathe for the first time in five minutes. He stretches his back out when he stands to his full height in front of Robin, then shrugs with his hands splayed on his hips.

“Maybe you just need some good dick. I mean… we’re gonna die anyway, right?”

“I’d rather,” she quips with a rouge-tinted smile.

The way it makes him laugh is startling. He finds a strange humor in being rejected — in most things, really. You still haven’t forgotten the cackles that left his bloodied mouth when Steve delivered blow after blow to the boy’s face in the middle of his living room, like it was all a fun game to him.

That was, of course, before Billy got the upper hand and nearly killed Steve that night. He laughed about it that too, until Max knocked him out with a baseball bat.

He’s got the same grin on his face now as he did then when he turns to look at you. A pink and pretty smirk, just wide enough to reveal the dimple in his left cheek. It’s nothing short of taunting, like he’s mocking you without having to say anything at all.

“Don’t be a stranger, alright?” Billy repeats. He keeps smacking his gum between his teeth and winks at you before spinning on the heel of his boot. He guides Vicki with him to the counter with a hand on the back pocket of her jeans.

Even when Robin slides in next to you and effectively pierces the bubble of tension that had already started to shrink with Billy’s leaving, you still find it hard to breathe. You have to keep reminding yourself, forcing oxygen in and out with wobbling breaths through your nose, or else you just stop altogether.

The other two move on rather quickly, having no trouble finding their voices again after he’s gone. Their words are muffled, though, like they’re underwater.

“I forgot what an asshole he was,” Robin grumbles.

“Well, I didn’t,” Steve retorts, eyes scanning the basket of fries for the most strategic pick of the bunch. “I can still barely breathe through my nose.”

“That’s because you didn’t go to a doctor, dingus.”

“Because I didn’t need a doctor, Robin.”

“Yeah, because being concussed three times in two years is so healthy—”

Your eyes act like magnets as they stay locked on Billy’s form. He leans in closer to Vicki to tell her something, then pats her once on the ass before walking towards the exit again. The door dings when he swings it open. Through the window, you catch him pulling out a red and white pack of cigarettes — the same brand of Marlboro Reds he’s been smoking since he was in middle school.

“You okay?” you hear Steve say, but it sounds too far away for you to realize he’s talking to you.

Robin nudges you with her shoulder to jog you from your stupor. You blink hard once and then turn to her with wide eyes. “What?”

“You doing alright over there?” the girl wonders.

“Yeah,” your answer is too quick and too high-pitched to be true. “Fine.”

“Like, fine as in you’re actually fine, or fine as in, if I leave you alone for too long, I’m gonna find you living under a bridge like a troll?”

You roll your eyes at her. “Fine as in, if someone bums me a cigarette, I’ll be good as new.”

Steve huffs when you hold out the palm of your hand toward him. He’s the only one of you who smokes recreationally enough to carry a lighter and pack of cigs with him. You swear he only keeps it with him because the weight of them makes him feel cool. You’re grateful for them now, though, and for the escape they unexpectedly provide you.

His fingers are warm when they brush your hand. The metal zippo he drops in the center of it is far colder and carries a comforting sort of weight to it. He thumbs a cigarette from the pack for you, and you take it with a sardonic smile and a sickly sweet “thank you, Stevie.” 

Robin gets out of the booth to let you slide out of it.

The door chimes again, this time over your head when you open it. 

Fresh, spring air nearly knocks you on your ass when it hits you for the first time. You realize then, that you’d forgotten to tell yourself to breathe and now your vision’s all swimmy. The cool breeze tries its hardest to quell your swelling anger, but you’re still at a simmering boil. Fists clenched over the lighter and cig duo in your palm and your sneakers slapping angrily against the cracked pavement.

That’s what signals your arrival, the raging stomps that echo in the alleyway Billy takes his smoke break in. 

The boy takes a puff of his cigarette and smirks on the exhale at the sight of you. All he needs is one glance to see how angry he’s made you. It’s an innocent, childlike sort of rage that’s got you all scrunched face and red — a heartbroken girl on a war path.

“I knew you couldn’t resist me, sweetheart,” he taunts with his signature sarcastic smile. He holds his arms at his sides, like he’s waiting for some kind of embrace from you. “You used to be like that all the time — all over me, you know? Clingy.”

“You know what you used to be?” you ask him once you’ve planted yourself a few feet away from him, fists shaking at your sides in a nearly overwhelming mixture of rage and apprehension.

“What’s that?”

“Nice! You used to be nice! Or do you not remember that?” you wonder rhetorically. Your anger fades slowly, an ebbing tide, as a reminiscent sadness eclipses your fury — a flood of blue in all your red. 

The sharp frown between your brows crumbles and so does your clenched jaw as your harsh features crumple like a balled-up piece of paper. You look upon the man that broke your heart with all the shattered pieces of it.

“You used to let me sleep over at your place when I was too scared to sleep alone at mine, and you’d bring me food when I told you I hadn’t eaten all day, and you’d take me on drives when you knew I hadn’t left my apartment in days,” you ramble in a single breath, gesticulating wildly with your hands — waving them at him and at you and the still air between. They fall hopelessly to your sides. 

“You used to be so sweet, Billy…” you conclude with a wavering breath. Your chest trembles on the inhale as you straighten out your shoulders and lift your chin, trying your best not to look as defeated as you feel. “And you know what you are now?”

Billy grins that stupid grin at you, the one that almost looks kind. Almost. It’s still soft in all its insincerity, like a parent entertaining their kid that’s gone on some meaningless tangent.

“No, sweetheart,” he answers after a beat. “What am I?”

“Not nice.”

He scoffs out a laugh.

“You used to tell me, all the time, how scared you were about ending up like you’re dad—” he tenses at the mention of the man, of his own monster in his own closet. “—He’d beat you black and blue every night, and I’d bandage all your cuts and put makeup on you when you begged, so you could go out and pretend like everything was normal. And you know what? You’re just like him!”

Billy doesn’t cower when you walk closer to him. He’s got no reason to be afraid of you, but your words hit him in a place far deeper than a thousand bloodied fists.

“What he did to you, is exactly what you do to me… Or do you know see that?” you don’t wait for a sarcastic reply, mostly because you wouldn’t see the indicators of it through the tears that blur your vision. “You’re not punching me, but it feels like you are. You break me over and over and over and I have to pretend like everything’s just normal and that we—”

“Real mature of you. To bring out the dad-card,” he interjects, if only to stop your ramblings so that he might not have to hear the truth that comes with them.

“You used to he nice,” you repeat, you agonize, you deflate. “Or… Or did you never use to be?”

The shell of your mind answers for you, paints itself with all the memories you’ve been trying like hell to forget for the past six months. It’s easier to pretend the bad things aren’t real than unravel all the reasons why they were bad to begin with, you find.

The negative memories come together like renaissance paintings — dark and gloomy and blotted with too realistic tears and spatters of blood. The oil stains the backs of your eyelids, destined to remain there forever like paintings in museum that’ll stand the test of time if you nurse them well enough.

You hadn’t yet been able to forget the screams and the cracks of fists colliding with bone. They tend to keep you up at night, even when you squeeze your eyes shut and beg for your memory to be wiped away completely. 

Billy crouches over Steve’s chest and pummels wholehearted punches to the boy’s face, never tiring in their force, even well after the boy goes limp underneath him. You beg for him to stop while trying like hell to shield Max from the sight of it all. 

For a while, you’d blamed yourself for it — for Max being there in the first place and for Steve’s cuts and bruises. 

You’d taken the girl and sought refuge in the Harrington home after witnessing a rather heated fight between Billy and his father. There was a sudden urge within you to take her far away from it before it ended how it always did — in weeping cuts and salty tears and insincere apologies when the cops were called.

But you made it worse anyway. 

For Max, for Steve. 

And you apologized profusely for it after, cried to the boy in his bathroom while you nursed his cuts like you were the one who put them there. 

When he told you it wasn’t your fault, you didn’t believe him. Not until now. Not until you realized that Billy had always been angry — always raging with an ocean of fear and grief and violence.

When he fought with his sister, you thought it was normal, that that’s just what siblings did. But the way she cried to you after couldn’t have been normal. Neither could the unearthly fury that washed over Billy like a riptide when he found out you and Max had sought safety in Steve The Hair Harrington — angered that it was Steve and that he couldn’t be that for the both of you.

And then there was the fights. The yelling and screaming and crying fights that felt like the end of the world every single time. The kind of fights you shouldn’t be having when you’re eighteen. You thought that maybe there was some normalcy in the cheating and the secrecy and Billy’s accompanying assholery because that was all you’d ever known.

Or maybe because you had to tell yourself that was normal in relationships because you didn’t want your’s to end. Billy was the first guy to give a damn about you in ways that went beyond just sex. How were you supposed to just give that up?

But then there’s Eddie — Eddie The Freak Munson, who was really just sunshine wrapped up in leather jackets and wild hair and chunky rings and metal music. He makes you happy. The sort of happy that makes you suspicious because something bad has to counteract all the goodness he makes you feel. 

Maybe that’s what this was. 

Seeing Billy after having wrapped yourself in a blanket of Eddie’s warmth made you see somehow more clearly. He loves on you so much that it’s made a mockery of everything else. 

Whatever you had with Billy wasn’t normal, it was a goddamn shit show. He loved you when it was convenient and then had you believing it was the real thing, that you wouldn’t find it anywhere else, when you tried to leave him. 

It was a lie, all of it.

The realization makes you falter.

“Oh, god…” you sigh, voice fragile like cracking glass. “Maybe you never used to be…”

For the first time ever, you see Billy’s grin shake. The edges of it flitter, like he’s fighting to keep the corners quirked up. And his eyes have gone a lighter shade of blue, the way they always did when he blinked back angry tears as he talked about his father.

It isn’t rage glassing his eyes now. It’s something sadder, but still as real — something you never got from him in the two years you were together.

He tries, still, to cover it all up. He smacks his lips against his teeth, sympathetically. “Sorry it took you this long to figure that out.”

The laugh you exhale then is heavy with sadness. Your smile is far away and so is your gaze as you stumble back from him. You turn your head to the edge of the alley where mom’s with strollers and people in fancy suits bustle on the sidewalk and keep your eyes on the strangers that whiz by you’ll probably never see again. 

“This is… This is pointless,” you murmur. His lean form is blurry through the burning tears you blink away. “Every time I see you, it’s just more bullshit so let’s just— let’s just leave each other alone, okay?”

Billy takes a puff from his cigarette. When he sighs, white smoke billows from his plump, pink lips. “That’s a shame… I was just thinking that you were the most interesting you’d ever been.”

The ebbing tide that had just left you rushes back in a bubbling scarlet wave. His words don’t make you sad anymore, they just make you angry all over again because you know you don’t deserve them. And you’re not entirely sure why he’s chosen you to antagonize out of all the other girls who’d made the mistake of falling for him, but you’re too far past the point of not caring to ask.

“Bother me again and I tell Chief Hopper,” you threaten even though you don’t feel very threatening just now. “I know you’re not scared of me, but you’d be stupid to be scared of him.”

“Why’s that?” he wonders before sticking the half-gone stick between his lips again.

“Because he runs Hawkins. And he fucking hates you—” for what you did to me, you almost say. You swallow the words down like bile before they have the chance to spew out. “And… And be nice to Vicki. Okay? She’s too good for you. Don’t do to her what you did to me.”

Your plea for another is the last thing you say to Billy before you turn away from him. You wouldn’t be upset if it was the last thing you ever said to him. You’re grateful for the resounding silence that follows. It’s nothing but the sound of your receding footsteps and the soles of his shoes scrapping the concrete as he snuffs out his cigarette. 

There is no snarky remark or insincere plea — just two people who used to love each other that have no idea to exist together anymore. 

When you step outside the brick confines of the alleyway, you feel as though a fraying string that had always connected the both of you had been finally cut.

It allows you to take a deep breath in for the first time in months. A lungful of fresh air that cleanses you, body and mind.

And when you catch Steve and Robin idling at the corner and doing a terrible job of pretending like they hadn’t just been eavesdropping, you don’t get upset or angry with them — you don’t feel much of anything, really.

You just hand the boy his lighter and unused cigarette and let them comfort you on the drive back to your apartment.

A misery sandwich. That’s what Robin calls the three of you and the heaping pile you lay in. 

Your queen-sized bed is in no way meant to accomodate three moderately sized adults, but you make it work anyway, like you always do.

Steve lays on his back, legs crossed and hands tucked under his head. Robin is on her stomach on the other end of the mattress, arms wrapped around the pillow she smushes the side of her face into. You lay between the both of them — on the both of them. Sprawled out sideways, you’ve got your head on propped up on Steve’s ribcage and your legs thrown over Robin’s thighs. 

The awkward position is the most comfortable you’ve ever been.

“I can’t believe that asshole had the nerve to show up to the diner on our day,” the boy rants. “And then sit in our booth, I mean— who does he think he is?”

Robin’s response is mostly muffled by the pillow. “I thought he left, like, forever ago.” 

“Maybe he just couldn’t stay away. It’s Hawkins, shit attracts shit, right?” Steve answers with a shrug that jostles your head slightly. It doesn’t little to knock you from your stupor, though, where you’ve been stuck for the better part of the day. You pick at the skin around your nails with little regard for how red and raging it's gone.

He notices this and thumps you on your temple — hard enough for you to feel it, gentle enough that it doesn’t hurt you. 

You turn your chin to your shoulder to look over at him. He tilts his own head to stare down at you, honey-tinted gaze somehow stern and soft at the same time. “If he bothers you again, I’ll kill him.”

You’re instantly warmed by his protective disposition. You know that he cares about you, even though you like to joke that he doesn’t. Steve hurt you once, made a promise to himself to make it up to you, and then just never left you alone. 

You’re grateful for it. 

You’re not sure who’d be the butt of every joke if he wasn’t around.

“Good to know,” you answer, nodding against his side and trying to hide the smile he gives you. You fail. “You think if he breaks your nose again, it’ll pop back into place?”

His face falls. “You’re real sweet, you know that?”

You open your mouth to respond, something along the lines of “I’m always sweet. You of all people should know that, Stevie,” before a knock sounds at the front door. It comes in the several rhythmic raps that Eddie is known to give when he’s got a tune stuck in his head. 

Apparently now, it’s the chorus to “Why Can’t This Be Love?” The Van Halen song he said he couldn’t stand before you.

Robin huffs at the sound of the muffled taps. She frowns like a child. “Who the hell…?”

“It’s just Eddie,” you affirm through a half-hearted grunt as you rise from your comfy position.

That brightens the two of them up almost immediately. Her and Steve share a look you can’t place as they grin at one another. Then they turn back to you with identical mischievous twinkles in their eyes. “Your boyfriend is here,” the former of the two singsongs.

You roll your eyes, but make no move to correct her. 

When you stand from the bed and make the short journey towards the door, you hear the patter of their feet following close behind you. 

“Gonna go all the way tonight?” Steve teases and jabs you on the shoulder. “Do you want us to leave?”

“No, nothing is happening. And yes, I think you should leave,” you monotone playfully.

Robin rushes past you suddenly and grabs the brass door handle before you’re able. She swings it open without thinking twice about it. Her sudden appearance, coupled with the fact that it isn’t you, startles the man on the other side of the door.

Eddie’s umber eyes go wide, brows raising and disappearing beneath his fluffy bangs, as his head jerks back.

“Eddie Munson,” the girl full-names the stranger she’s never spoken a word to before now. She leans against the doorway and effectively blocks the boy’s view of you. Steve, who squeezes himself in beside her, doesn’t make it any easier. “Fancy seeing you here.”

“You too, Buckley…” he wavers, trying to peer past them for any sight of you.

“Perfect timing, Eds,�� you call out from behind them. “They were just about to leave.”

He’s relieved at the sound of your voice — even more so at your appearance when the two in front of you step off to the side to toe on their sneakers. 

You don’t look much different than when he saw you last. You’ve put on some makeup that’s started to smudge after the long day and changed your baggy sweatshirt for a more fitted tank top and boxers, but other than that you’re still the same. Still familiar and comforting in your way, a home away from home.

His smile is a tired one and it wobbles at the edges. “Oh, shit, am I— am I interrupting something?”

“No,” you’re quick to reassure him. “You’re saving me, actually.”

“Oh, give me a break,” Steve scoffs. “You love us.” 

The boy pulls you into a hug before he leaves, and it’s not the rarest thing in the world, but embraces like this do tend to be few and far between. He whispers  “use protection” in your ear and then a sharp “ow!” when you jab him in the ribs.

He and Robin smile kindly at Eddie when they walk by him and out the door, but waste barely a second before turning back around and grinning wildly at you. Steve flashes you a thumbs up while she mouths a cartoonish ‘good luck’ — like it’s the first time you and Eddie had ever been alone together. Like they were just on your ass about having been with him this whole time.

You usher Eddie and shut the door behind them. A quiet sort of peace settles on the apartment like a weighted blanket. The boy revels in every bit of its warmth.

Exhaustion drips from him like syrup. He’s sticky with it. His eyes have lost their usual twinkle, weighed down now with the burden of his fatigue. His face has lost most of its color, leaving a pale sheath of monotoned skin, and his hair is wilder than normal, with an unintentional sort of ruggedness to his curls.

It’s what being without you has done to him.

“You okay?” you ask him softly. It almost makes him want to cry.

“Yeah,” he answers anyway and idles in the spot where your kitchen meets your living room. “Just had a pretty shitty day. Wanted to spend time with you.”

“Me too… About the wanting to spend time with you part— and the shitty day part, too, I guess.”

Eddie smiles at your rambling, but purses it to the side to conceal it from you. “And since it is just about our…” he trails off and bends his elbow to check the watch on his wrist. “…Twelve hour anniversary, I picked us up some takeout.”

He sets the plastic bag on the counter. The red logo of Oriental Jade on the side of it makes your stomach roll with a distant hunger. You hadn’t realized how starved you were feeling after you abandoned your early dinner at Benny’s. It makes you more grateful for Eddie, who always seems to be on the same wavelength as you without even trying.

“Keep this up and we’ll be married before we hit hour twenty-four,” you joke as you rifle through the cartons — chow mein, sweet and sour chicken, dumplings, the works.

Eddie settles in next to you, propping his elbows on the countertop. “Well, I’m pretty sure the courthouse opens at nine, so… What were you thinking for the honeymoon? Hawaii? Bora Bora?”

“How about a cabin in the woods where no one can find us?”

“Hmm… Spooky. Sexy. I’m into it.”

You settle in the living room and eat on the couch while She Ra re-runs play on the television. You try to teach Eddie how to use chopsticks, though he can only work them with his non-dominant hand and all the wrong finger placements. You think it’s cute to watch him fumble with them, and you giggle about it until you’re scolding him for trying to feed Bowie some noodles. He laughs as you swat at him.

When all the containers are fully scrapped clean and tossed in the recycling bin, you migrate to the bedroom — which is perhaps too raunchy a phrase to use when the two of you only bury yourselves under the covers to talk shit.

Eddie drags out the chunky box fan you use when the air conditioner goes out in the summer — because it always goes out in the summer — and props it on the chest at the foot of your bed so the covers will billow around the both of you. “And it’s perfect because we can stay in the fort forever and not get hot,” he tells you, all giddy about it like he's a kid again.

“What if I get cold?” you retort.

Without missing a beat, he answers, “Well, lucky enough for you, I know several ways I can warm you up, sweetheart.”

He ditches his leather jacket and strips down to his boxers and settles in beside you underneath the blankets. The two of you lay shoulder to shoulder while you trace absentminded patterns on the palm of his hand and tell him about your day.

You make sure to leave out all the re-traumatizing-Billy-Hargrove bits, though. You focus mainly on the tense drive with Hopper and the small fight you’d had with Steve on the drive to the diner later that afternoon about the lyrics to Love My Way (both of you had been wrong).

Eddie tries his hardest to focus on your story and your fleeting touches, but he’s too far in his own head. You tell him all these things but he can’t stop thinking about himself — about whether or not you might’ve brought him up somewhere in between. 

He wouldn’t have blamed you, if you had. Steve and Robin are your closest friends and, for whatever reason, so is Chief Hopper, you’re bound to bring him up eventually. He was just hoping it would’ve been in a better capacity. Maybe about how kind he was or what a god he was in bed — not how he could only be one of those things because he’d never been anything in bed.

“It doesn’t make things weird between us, does it?” he wonders out of the blue.

You halt mid-sentence and turn to him with furrowed brows. “What?”

Eddie realizes then, that the first half of the conversation with you had only happened in his head. He prays that it’s too dark beneath the covers for you to see how red his cheeks get. “Just… What we talked about this morning. About me… you know…” He finds it hard to say the words. Or any of them at all.

“Why would it make things weird?”

“I don’t know. Because I wasn’t… totally honest with you, I guess? I feel a little bad about it, you know?”

“It’s okay,” you assure and turn on your side to be closer to him. Eddie stays on his back, more than happy to let you cuddle further into him. “I guess I do wish you’d said something before, though.”

His chest tightens. “I’m sorry. I just… I didn’t know how to—”

“I’m not saying it to make you feel bad!” you interject quickly when you catch the spiral of regret he was about to twist himself into. You curl tighter into his side, tossing a leg over his thigh and wrapping your hand around his bicep in an effort to melt with him. When he turns to face you, your noses nearly brush.

 “That’s not how I meant it. I just meant that, if I’d known before, I wouldn’t have… I would’ve taken things slower. I wouldn’t have been so, you know, so all over you.”

He hates how apologetic you sound. Like there was ever an ounce of him that would want to take back what happened that night at his trailer or a part of him that might hate how much you love on him.

“I liked it. I do like it.”

“Maybe we can just start over,” you offer. “Pretend like none of that ever happened.”

Eddie knows there’s no way in hell he’ll be able to forget about a single damn thing — not his cum stained jeans and how you looked so pretty washing them for him, not the feel of your tits in his mouth or you wrapped around his fingers, not how you made him blow his load all over his fist just by talking to him. 

He goes along with it anyway, though, just for you.

“Okay...” he nods slowly, then squints over at you. “You’re still my girlfriend, though, right?”

“Of course I am,” you giggle.

He grins proudly to himself. “Well then… Hope it’s not too early to have our first kiss then?”

It makes you roll your eyes because it’s such an Eddie Munson way of asking to kiss you. You told him earlier the day that he never had to ask you — in fact, you’d prefer it if he’d just kiss you out of the blue and take your breath away without you ever knowing it was coming. But there was something foreign and sweet in his little reassurances.

“Kiss me silly, Eddie Spaghetti,” you beam. He twists on his side to press tiny pecks to your smile.

It’s rather strange, you find, to kiss someone this way without the intention of it ever becoming something more. You kiss him just to kiss him — just to map the outline of his cupid’s bow and memorize the pattern of his tongue. Just to feel him, as much of him as your mouth will allow you to.

With one arm curled under his head and the other cradling your jaw, when his watch alarms — high-pitched beepbeepbeeps in quick succession — it’s sudden and close to your ear. 

Your lips click in protest when they part. His are pink and swollen and glossy with your spit. He smiles with them. “Happy twelve hour anniversary, sweetheart.”

“How long are you gonna make that stupid joke?” you laugh like your heart isn’t swelling so much you’re scared it might burst entirely.

“Uh, I was thinking… forever. Yeah. That sounds about right,” he concludes after a moment of feigned thought. He turns his watch off again and you swear you see him set for another twelve hours from now.

“Forever?” you echo.

“Uh-huh. Forever—” he presses his lips to yours once. “—And ever—” Twice. “—And ever.”

Eddie kisses you until you’re flat on your back and surrendering to each of his tiny little pecks. You twist your hands in his hair and let him love on you a little while more. You giggle when his mouth trails from your lips to your chin to your jaw to your neck. Please don’t get bored of me, you beg silently within your laughter.

I don’t think I could even if I wanted to, he answers with each kiss his sprinkles to your starved skin. How could I, when you’re the most exciting thing that’s ever happened to me?

[hawkinself]

The Night We Met

Eddie Van Halen x Valerie Bertinelli

Story is loosely based on real life events, I do not own the characters and rights, it’s just a simple take on this great love story with hopefully a happy ending. I haven’t found any fanfiction based on EVH and Valerie and I thought I’d give it a try. P.S. this story is in third person POV of Valerie (you), hope that’s not too confusing.

Chapter One: The First Note

1981

You weren’t supposed to be here, not really. A friend of a friend had slipped you a pass, telling you it’d be a night you wouldn’t forget. And now, here you were, clutching the laminated badge around your neck, feeling like an imposter in this gritty, electric world.

The backstage corridor was dimly lit, with roadies bustling past, their arms laden with cables and cases. You stepped aside, lingering near a stack of amps, your breath catching as you tried to steady your nerves. And then you saw him.

Eddie Van Halen.

He stood against the wall, his guitar still hanging low, its polished surface catching the faint light. His hair was damp with sweat, curling at the edges, and a smirk played on his lips as he exchanged a few words with a crew member. But then, as if sensing your presence, his gaze flicked up and locked onto yours.

Time seemed to slow.

His eyes, warm and mischievous, held you in place. He tilted his head slightly, studying you, and then that grin appeared—the one that had melted hearts across arenas but now felt like it was meant for you alone.

“Hey there,” he called out, his voice carrying effortlessly over the low hum of post-show chaos. “Didn’t know Hollywood stars snuck backstage.”

You blinked, momentarily thrown off. “Hollywood star?” you echoed, stepping closer. “I think you’ve got the wrong girl.”

He chuckled, the sound rich and unguarded. “Not from where I’m standing.”

The distance between you closed as you approached, the air charged with a strange, exhilarating tension. You weren’t sure if it was the lingering adrenaline from the concert or something else entirely. Either way, it made your skin tingle.

“Eddie,” he said, extending his hand, though it seemed unnecessary. Everyone knew who he was.

“Valerie,” you replied, slipping your hand into his. His grip was firm but easy, and his calloused fingers hinted at countless hours spent on the strings.

“So, Valerie, what’d you think of the show?” he asked, leaning casually against the wall, his guitar now hanging loosely at his side.

“It was incredible,” you said, meaning every word. “The energy out there—it’s like nothing I’ve ever seen.”

Eddie nodded, his eyes never leaving yours. “Yeah, the crowd was wild tonight. Feels good, y’know? Like we’re all just… connected for a while.”

You found yourself drawn in by the way he spoke, how his words seemed to carry a weight that belied the chaos of his world. He wasn’t just the rock god you’d seen on stage; there was something more, something deeper.

A few roadies passed by, nodding at Eddie but giving you curious glances. He didn’t seem to notice—or maybe he didn’t care. He leaned in slightly, lowering his voice as if the two of you were sharing a secret. “So, what’s a girl like you doing here, anyway? Got a thing for loud guitars?”

You laughed softly, shaking your head. “I guess you could say I’m curious. A friend thought I’d enjoy the scene.”

“And are you?” he asked, his grin widening.

“I think I am,” you admitted, surprised by how true it felt.

Eddie’s gaze softened, and for a moment, the world seemed to shrink to just the two of you. “Are you sticking around tonight?” he asked, his tone casual but with an undercurrent of something more—hope, maybe.

You hesitated, feeling the weight of the question. “I hadn’t planned on it,” you said, though the idea of leaving now felt almost unbearable.

“Well,” he said, pushing off the wall and slinging his guitar over his shoulder, “plans can change.”

The suggestion hung in the air, tantalizing and impossible to resist.

Before you could reply, a voice called out from down the hall. “Eddie, man, we’re heading out!”

Eddie glanced over his shoulder, then back at you. “I gotta go,” he said, regret flickering across his face. “But hey, if you’re up for it, we���re hitting a spot later. You should come.”

He pulled a crumpled napkin from his pocket and scribbled something on it, handing it to you with a crooked smile. “That’s where we’ll be. No pressure.”

You took the napkin, your fingers brushing his briefly. “Thanks,” you said, feeling a spark at the contact.

Eddie nodded, his grin returning. “See you around, Valerie.”

And with that, he was gone, disappearing down the hall in a swirl of leather and laughter. You stood there for a moment, the napkin in your hand, your heart racing. The world outside the Forum felt far away, and all you could think about was the man who’d just walked out of sight—the man who, without realizing it, had already begun to change your life.

That night marked the beginning of something wild, unpredictable, and utterly intoxicating. Eddie’s world was a whirlwind of music and mayhem, but it was also a world where you’d find love, heartbreak, and everything in between. And as you tucked the napkin into your pocket and stepped out into the night, you knew there was no turning back.

[iridescentprose]

your dangerously stupid little idiot - steve harrington x sinclair!reader insert

author's note: a long overdue steve fic that's been sitting in the drafts. i miss steve.

divider by: @bunnysrph

summary; you're in a secret relationship with steve - fluff; no warnings

The sound of laughter and the consistent thud of footsteps coming up the stairs made you groan. Although you'd much rather stick to your hermit agenda, you promised your parents you would keep the door to your room open, ensuring that your younger siblings and their friends didn't burn down the house without you knowing about it.

Hunched at your desk, you were busy with your nose in a book until a sudden incessant taping at your doorway got a little too annoying for comfort.

"Nice Van Halen poster."

"That's Bauhaus, idiot," you said, while your heart began to drum in your ears. You kept your back turned to him, eyes trained on the same sentence you had been reading ever since you heard Harrington's voice from downstairs. "What are you doing here, anyway? I don't remember Lucas inviting you over."

You heard him shuffle across your room —over to the poster with four Caucasian men clad in grey suits and dark sunglasses. You heard your bed creak, followed by an exaggerated sigh. You looked over your shoulder.

"Steve—"

"How come you don't have a picture of me on your wall?" He's lying in the center of your bed, legs hanging off the edge while his eyes are fixated on the Bauhaus poster above your headboard.

You sighed and shut your book before swiveling to face your boyfriend. "Because I'm not a psychopath...and last I checked, you can't carry a tune to save your life, Harrington." Abandoning your book, your walked over and grabbed his wrist, initiating a game of tug of war with a weak start.

Steve chuckled as he sat up, his body flopping forward like a limp noodle as he gave into your lack of strength. "Hey, hey. What's the rush? We're not going to get caught. Your parents aren't here."

"Yeah, but Erica and Lucas are. We'll be over before we've even started—"

You shook your head, a hot flash rising to your cheeks as the word 'dating' got stuck in your throat.

The word made you cringe. It made feel you like were in one of those lovesick romance movies whenever you said it. An unfamiliar queasiness rose in your stomach as Steve rose an eyebrow.

Crap.

You had been caught.

"What was that?" Steve stood up straight, towering over you, his features laced with an alert sense of curiosity. He had stepped forward now, nearly trapping you between him and the wall. You still had a hold on his wrist. "I didn't hear that last part, Sinclair. 'We'll be over before we've even started...?'"

You rolled your eyes. "Cut the crap, Harrington. You know what this is," you hissed under your breath, eyes darting to the open door that could expose your secret any minute.

"Yeah, but I don't think I've ever heard you say it out loud before," he said with an amused grin on his lips. A tendril of his hair loomed over the center of his forehead. You resisted the urge to brush it back into place. Now wasn't the right time for that.

Now wasn't the right time for whatever this was.

"If you don't get out of my room, you're not going to live to hear me say it."

With a small grunt, you pulled him by the wrist, guiding him to the threshold of your door. He's stumbling behind you, stifling a laugh and purposefully dragging his feet until they reach the creaky floorboards of the hallway. You then maneuver around him, taking your place in front of your door as you wait for your boyfriend to retreat back down the stairs.

But as smooth as a criminal, Steve turns around, arms braced against the doorway, feet locked into place. He has no intentions of moving until he gets what he wants.

"Harrington," you whisper, lowering your voice as you both were now in closer proximity to the stairs and Erica's room down the hall.

"Sinclair."

Seconds of silent staring pass before you sigh in defeat.

"You're an idiot, you know that?"

"But, I'm your idiot," Steve says, his face lingering close to yours. He's wearing a contagious smile that has somehow slid across the thin space between you and jumped on your face. "Now, are you going to repeat what you said earlier or am I going to have the privilege of properly introducing myself to my future in-laws?"

Crossing your arms, you lifted your chin and narrowed your eyes. He always found a way to have the upper hand, even if it made him look dangerously stupid. But as dangerously stupid as the thought of Steve introducing himself as your boyfriend to your parents and siblings was, you couldn't stop your lips from twitching upwards.

"I said," you started, your voice getting lower which each word, "If my brother or sister finds out that you're in my room, we'll be over before we've even started dating for a month."

You swallowed your embarrassment, your eyes falling to your shoes as the word tumbled out of your mouth. Steve had asked you officially to be his girlfriend only two weeks ago and you still couldn't admit out loud that you were dating him. Let alone in secret.

Having Lucas and Erica find out before your parents would be an never ending nightmare. Your parents had forbade you from dating until you had finished school. Thankfully, you only had a few more months and then —and only then—did you plan on making your relationship with Steve known to your parents.

"See?" Steve said, tilting your chin upwards. "Was that so hard?"

But before you could say 'yes' with gritted teeth, Steve had pecked your lips, leaving you speechless.

"I'll see at Family Video on Friday?" He whispered, already backing away from you as laughter came from the room right down the hall.

"Uh, yeah," you said, trying to keep your head straight. "Family Video. Friday," you confirmed long after he had vanished down the steps.

You leaned against your doorway, massaging your temples as you fought the smile on your lips.

"That boy is going to be the death of me," you mumbled to yourself before retreating back into your room and rereading the same sentence of your book all over again.

[mrprettywhenhecries]

✦ Name ✦ Winrey "Win" Jane Lewis

✦ Face claim ✦ Kailee Morgue

✦ Age ✦ 18 (in 1984)

✦ Birthdate ✦ 10/01/1967

✦ Zodiac Sign ✦ Libra

✦ Orientation ✦ Bisexual & Polyamourous

✦ Love interest(s) ✦ Billy Hargrove & Steve Harrington

[Read her story: I Don't Think You Notice • tumblr | ao3 ] Note: I'm going to be rewriting/changing parts of this fic soon, since just as I had started writing the third part the Steve thirst hit hard and I decided I wanted to change it from just a Billy/oc fic to Billy/oc/Steve fic. Look for the updated first chapter soon!

✦ Friends ✦ Tina, Carol, Vicky (ex friends), Heather Halloway, Max Mayfield, Robin Buckley, Dustin Henderson, Eddie Munson

✦ Occupation ✦ high school senior, works part time at Sam Goody when Starcourt opens, after the mall closes she gets a receptionist job at the mechanic shop Billy also works at.

✦ Physical Appearance ✦ 5’1", 110lbs, petite, grey eyes, bleached blonde hair in a short bob with bangs and darker roots, pierced lip (right side), small stick & poke tattooed star on left temple

✦ Likes ✦ horror films, sleeping in, mint chocolate chip ice cream & chocolate cake, muscle cars (especially her dad's 69' Chevelle COPO 427), swimming, loud music, collecting chintz, stargazing, big time wrestling/wwf

✦ Dislikes ✦ bugs, fake friends, small towns, being lied to, being underestimated, algebra, spiders/bugs, spicy food, pineapple on pizza, the anniversary of her mom's death

✦ Vices ✦ smoking, weed, whiskey, driving too fast, public/semi-public sex, partying, not wearing pants when home alone

✦ Personality ✦ loyal, determined, street smart, witty, flirtatious, stealthy, moody, aloof, quick to shut people out, stubborn, holds grudges, jealous

✦ Favorite Bands ✦ Blondie, Billy Idol, Pat Benatar, Heart, KISS, Tom Waits, Van Halen, Judas Priest, Fleetwood Mac, Black Sabbath, Bon Jovi

✦ Favorite Movie(s) ✦ Mad Max, Blade Runner, The Lost Boys, Halloween, Better Off Dead

✦ Backstory ✦ Originally from Chicago, Win lost her mother, Ellery, as a teenager, leaving her lost and embittered. Not long after her mother’s passing, unable to process his own grief, her father, David, threw himself into his work, spending long hours away from home and leaving Win unsupervised most of the time. In an attempt to ignore her predicament and fill the void inside her, Win similarly found things to distract herself, mostly vandalism and sex.

At the beginning of her senior year, Win's father was offered a job at Hawkins Lab and he accepted, relocating the two of them to the rural town, hoping the change of scenery would be good for her, and Win was quickly branded as the popular new girl. Though Win couldn't really stand the "friends" she made, she figured it was better than being a loner. Little did she know how much everything would change with the arrival of Billy Hargrove.

[ See her Full Bio Here! 💚✨] [ Alternate Outfits #1 ]

[roosterforme]

roosterforme's '80s Rocktober Playlist fic challenge

For those about to rock, we salute you!

Let's rock 'n' roll the Top Gun way! Choose an '80s rock song (or pop or country or rap...), and write a fic about one or more of our favorite Top Gun characters! Just make sure the songs are from Rooster's favorite decade, the 1980s!

Or create a banner or mood board! Go with an '80s vibe or a specific song to inspire you and run wild.

Banner credit to @mak-32. Rock on, Mak.

Rules for fics:

Please use the #top gun rocktober hashtag!!!

Once you have your song selected (first come, first served, no duplicates), please send me an ask letting me know which song and character(s) you want to write about. If your song is not listed below, just let me know what you want with your ask and I’ll add it (as long as it fits the decade). If your song has been claimed already, I'll let you know so you can choose another one.

You can use the song in the fic however you would like. Use it as the title, use some lyrics, have the song playing in the background, use it as inspiration, anything you want!

There is no real time limit, but please try to post in September or October.

Please make sure you tag me (or send me a message) when you post your story so I don’t miss it. I can’t wait to read and reblog!

Please reblog and share this with anyone who may want to participate. And reblogging fics is always a treat for writers!

If you’re under 18, do not submit or read smut.

Rules for banners and mood boards:

Please use the #top gun rocktober hashtag!!!

If you want to use a specific song, please send me an ask letting me know which song. If you want to participate with the '80s vibe and no specific song, just send me an ask and let me know you'll be submitting an image or images.

Please make sure you tag me (or send me a message) when you post so I don’t miss it. I can’t wait to reblog!

Please reblog and share this with anyone who may want to participate.

Songs and fics we are rocking out to:

1 @roosterforme What's Your Name by New Order (Bradley)

2 @beyondthesefourwalls Time After Time by Cyndi Lauper (Bradley)

3 @sylviebell Faithfully by Journey (Natasha)

4 @wkndwlff Love Walks In by Van Halen (Bob)

5 @desert-fern Jump by Van Halen (Bradley)

6 @yanna-banana Like a Prayer by Madonna (Jake)

7 @fanboyswhore9 Addicted to Love by Robert Palmer (Mickey)

8 @cherrycola27 Born to Be My Baby by Bon Jovi (Bradley)

9 @trickphotography2 Start Me Up by The Rolling Stones (Bradley)

10 @blue-aconite Every Little Thing She Does is Magic by The Police (Jake)

11 @roosterforme Do You Wanna Touch Me? by Joan Jett (Bradley)

12 @startrekfangirl2233 Wake Me Up Before You Go-Go by Wham! (Mickey)

13 @bradshawsbitch Hungry Eyes by Eric Carmen (Bradley)

14 @bellaireland1981 Can't Fight This Feeling by REO Speedwagon (Bradley)

15 @wkndwlff Lay Your Hands On Me by Bon Jovi (Bob)

16 @beyondthesefourwalls Jessie's Girl by Rick Springfield (Javy)

17 @thedroneranger Boys of Summer by Don Henley (Bradley)

18 @cottagecori Dancing With Myself by Generation X (Bob)

19 @sweetwhispersofchaos I Hate Myself For Loving You by Joan Jett (Natasha and Jake)

20 @sometimesanalice Straight Up by Paula Abdul (Bradley)

21 @lovinglyeternal Call Me by Blondie (Jake)

22 @roosterforme Adult Education by Hall & Oates (Jake)

23 @beyondthesefourwalls Your Love by Outfield (Bradley)

24 @mayhemmanaged You Shook Me All Night Long by AC/DC (Jake)

25 @topherwrites Love Shack by The B-52's (Bradley)

26 @ficsilike-reblogged Take On Me by A-ha (Bob)

27 @cottagecori Rock You Like a Hurricane by Scorpions (Bradley)

28 @jupitercomet Kissing a Fool by George Michael (Bradley)

29 @startrekfangirl2233 Don't You (Forget About Me) by Simple Minds (Jake and Bradley)

30 @topherwrites Just Like Heaven by The Cure (Jake)

31 @sweetwhispersofchaos As the World Falls Down by David Bowie (Natasha and Bob)

32 @inmyloveworld Open Arms by Journey (Bradley)

33 @thedroneranger Centerfold by J. Geils Band (Jake)

34 @gretagerwigsmuse Can't Hardly Wait by The Replacements (Bradley)

35 @bellaireland1981 Love is a Battlefield by Pat Benatar (Jake)

36 @blurredcolour Push It by Salt-N-Pepa (Jake and Bradley)

37 @blackwidownat2814 White Wedding by Billy Idol (Jake)

38 @keep-on-burnin The Look by Roxette (Bradley)

39 @cherrycola27 Secret Lovers by Atlantic Starr (Natasha and Javy)

40 @topherwrites Uptown Girl by Billy Joel (Bradley)

41 @jynxmirage If I Could Turn Back Time by Cher (Jake)

42 @notroosterbradshaw Edge of Seventeen by Stevie Nicks (Bradley)

43 @ficsilike-reblogged Hungry for Heaven by Dio (Beau)

44 @callsign-magnolia Who's Crying Now by Journey (Bradley)

45 @trickphotography2 Every Breath You Take by The Police (Bob)

46 @sarahsmi13s Pour Some Sugar on Me by Def Leppard (Jake)

47 @roosterforme Cover Girl by New Kids on the Block (Natasha)

48 @bobfloydsbabe Alone by Heart (Jake)

49 @ughthisisntright The Stroke by Billy Squier (Bradley)

50 @wkndwlff Special Secret Song Inside by The Red Hot Chili Peppers (Jake)

51 @sylviebell Thriller by Michael Jackson (Natasha and Javy)

52 @xoxabs88xox Why’d You Come in Here Lookin' Like That by Dolly Parton (Jake)

53 @paigewinchester67 I'm On Fire by Bruce Springsteen (Bradley and Jake)

54 @sarahsmi13s Fishin' In the Dark by Nitty Gritty Dirt Band (Bob)

55 @callsign-joyride Need You Tonight by INXS (Bradley)

56 @foreverrandomwritings Paradise City by Guns N' Roses (Beau)

57 @cherrycola27 Whoever's In New England by Reba McEntire (Bob)

58 @1234-angelika The Bluest Eyes in Texas by Restless Heart (Jake)

59 @decantedenchanted Right Here Waiting by Richard Marx (Mav)

60 @the-authoress-writes Black Velvet by Alannah Myles (Jake)

61 @withahappyrefrain Somebody to Love by Queen (Bradley)

62 @valhallaas Hold on Loosely by 38 Special (Javy)

63 @talktomegooseman The Chair by George Strait (Jake)

64 @foreverrandomwritings Master of Puppets by Metallica (Mickey and Bob)

65 @poetrieshouse Hungry Like the Wolf by Duran Duran (Mav)

66 @tongue-like-a-razor Poison by Alice Cooper (Jake)

67 @1234-angelika Real Love by Dolly Parton and Kenny Rogers (Bradley)

68 @the-authoress-writes The Flame by Cheap Trick (Ice)

69 @hangmanstigerlily Can't Fight This Feeling by REO Speedwagon (Jake)

70 @samsgoddess Hysteria by Def Leppard (Bradley)

71 @eternalsams Cherry Pie by Warrant (Jake)

72 @love-in-light Livin' on a Prayer by Bon Jovi (Bradley)

73 @thatdammchickennugget Summer of '69 by Bryan Adams (Bradley)

74 @whatislovevavy Everybody Wants to Rule the World by Tears for Fears (Jake)

Totally rad cover art:

@ryebecca She Drives Me Crazy by Fine Young Cannibals

@bettycooper Running Up That Hill (A Deal With God) by Kate Bush (Bradley)

@ryebecca The Power of Love by Huey Lewis and the News (Bob)

@mak-32 Get Outta My Dreams, Get Into My Car by Billy Ocean (Bradley)

@laracrofted I Love Rock 'n' Roll by Joan Jett (Bob)

@sebsxphia Come On Eileen by Dexys Midnight Runners (Bob)

Need some song inspiration? Check out these bangers:

Every Little Thing She Does Is Magic - The Police

Start Me Up - The Rolling Stones 

Livin’ On A Prayer - Bon Jovi 

Eye of the Tiger - Survivor

Shout - Tears for Fears

You Give Love A Bad Name - Bon Jovi 

Every Breath You Take - The Police 

The Final Countdown - Europe

Angel - Aerosmith

Edge of Seventeen - Stevie Nicks

Uptown Girl - Billy Joel

Call Me - Blondie

Take Me Home Tonight - Eddie Money 

Free Fallin’ - Tom Petty 

Hysteria - Def Leppard 

I Hate Myself for Loving You - Joan Jett & the Blackhearts 

Just like Heaven - The Cure 

I Won’t Back Down - Tom Petty 

Magic - The Cars

Love Is A Battlefield - Pat Benatar 

Addicted To Love - Robert Palmer

Love Shack - The B-52’s 

Without You - Motley Crue 

Material Girl - Madonna

Legs - ZZ Top

Paradise City - Guns N’ Roses 

Can’t Fight This Feeling - REO Speedwagon 

Cum on Feel the Noize - Quiet Riot 

[latibulater]

used up my 30 image per post limit on this liveblog of the buddy system:

kind of want the shirt with the gorilla on it

i love his little insignia laptop do you think thats a custom macbook case

"who was that, van halen?"

"no that was sean puffy combs, daddy" rusty literally giggling and calling brock daddy while they make little references at each other....seriously s3 they were so close to fucking. also jesus that reference given recent news O.o

THEATREEEEEE KIDSSSS

honestly need some fic of brock bonding with hank by teaching him martial arts

knowing dermott is rusty's son makes this scene so much funnier

insert knock-off-my-smug-grin-to-reveal-a-tinnier-smugger-grin meme. and looking at this pic he reaaaaaally looks like jonas. really want a dermott getting knocked to the past fic so badly

this really is a great brock episode. he gets so excited when he thinks of getting another kid to cold war dermott's face in

i really enjoy all the kiddy character designs, the artists always get more funky with shapes when the person is only for the background

the e-den was abandoned "forty years ago"..........

presented without comment

"You always wanted to be an adventurer. Not like answering trivia, is it, boy? Here's what we're going to do..."

the way he dives off the couch when he thinks brock is looking at them through the spy camera, and he gets so babyboy when brock says he thinks doc cries himself to sleep missing the monarchs

i love their little mo-ped

this episode was also like the one time triana seems to possibly Like-like Dean back, I wonder if that was a possible direction after this episode but just never made it into any final script so they ended up scrapping it and sending her to magic school

this mustve been really strange for Z, i wonder i maybe this was a small turning point for him

i dont think we ever get the boys interacting with more than one teenager after this ever again...... this was SO FUNNY. dermott calling brock "your dad's lover" and triana calling him a poser and a dork and "so Dave Matthews" to which Dermott primps his hair AGAIN. And Hank and Dean are so cute. the way in "tears of a sea cow" dean and hank clearly want to go to public school.....i get WHY in the cartoon itself that didn't happen, but why didn't it happen :(

a) magenta-haired Triana animation error jumpscare b) love that one kid in the corner who is enjoying the break-out fight

the troops being visibly scared of brock like seriously need more about henchmen mythos around Brock Samson. also Hatred yelling to Doc on the megaphone "he's murdering my boy - this is monkey business!" honestly very cute

were-brock....bloodied clawed hands brock...very extra hairy bloody sharp brock......

rusty's so exasperated at hatred misreading a.m. as p.m. his eyebrows disappeard

like brock and rusty have history but rusty and hatred have chemistry

love the rusting on the statue detail here

i love this end scene

"that's my dad, thanks for the zombie self defense lessons mr. samson!"

"you should've seen that kid's dna he was a ticking time-bomb of cancer. i cleared that up" like bio-engineer rusty.......please i need a gattaca reference episode

[lifeiskentastic]

Ken tastes Real World ice cream with gn!Reader

Gif by @chriswevans

A/N: It just occurred to me while I was eating my ice cream.)

Summary: Ken tastes Real World ice cream for the first time (and he really likes it);

Song: I know this fanfic is too short to even contain songs, but... I really need to recommend Ice Cream Man by Van Halen, i love it too much (why are all ice cream songs so raunchy, it's just ice cream, ppl😭😭)

Word count: 305 words;

Nice reading!

Ken gazed with genuine amazement at the tall cone filled with scoops of ice cream.

"You have to eat it, otherwise it will melt."

"So it will disappear?"

You nodded, seeing that Ken had absolutely no idea how something could melt, evaporate and just disappear without a trace. But this is not surprising, considering that until this moment he believed that all food was invisible.

It wasn't hard to see the grimace on Ken's face as he gingerly stuck his tongue out and touched the ice cream. However, as soon as the tip of his tongue touched the scoop of vanilla ice cream, his eyes widened, eyebrows furrowed, and he looked like he had made some new Nobel discovery.

"It's… It's so much better than at Barbieland."

Given that the ice cream in Barbieland was imaginary, even the most ordinary vanilla cone will seem like a delicacy. However, Ken was so mesmerized and started eating his dessert with such enthusiasm that you didn't dare say it out loud.

After a while, all that was left of the once large overflowing ice cream cone were traces of melted vanilla on Ken's cheeks and nose. You giggled softly as you reached up to Ken's soiled but satisfied face.

"Come here!"

You wiped the leftover ice cream from Ken's big smile, the tip of his nose, his cheeks and even his chin as his eyes gazed gently into yours.

"Looks like I'm going to need some more ice cream to learn how to eat it more neatly."

You smiled, knowing perfectly well that he only needed it to enjoy it even more. However, this was exactly the purpose of your mission to "Put Ken on Human Treats".

"As you wish."

And during that day, you were simply forced to try every possible (and impossible) flavor of ice cream.

***

P.S. How many times have I written "ice cream" in the entire fic?

[atimeofyourlife]

The culture wars in your heart and your mind

Title from Kill the DJ by Green Day

It's not the first time he's seen Eddie go off on a tangent about the superiority of his interests. Honestly, it's far from it. The amount of times it had happened while they were both in high school, plus a number of times since they'd become friends. It was getting old. Hell, if it wasn't for knowing he'd be ridiculed for his interests at every turn, Steve might have tried to move beyond friendship with Eddie.

"You know it's just in your head, right?" Steve said, cutting Eddie off mid-rant.

"What?" Eddie replied, looking irritated at being interrupted.

"This whole my interests are better than yours, my music is better than yours schtick. Most of us don't really care that much about sticking to one genre. Sure I listen to pop, and I like Madonna and Tears for Fears and stuff like that. But I listen to rock, I love Bruce Springsteen, Queen, Van Halen, Bon Jovi. I'll even listen to stuff like Dio. You're the only one here that thinks one genre is superior to others."

"Don't even try to compare them. Tears for Fears can't even reach the complexity of Dio. And even trying to count Springsteen as rock, it's offensive to the genre." Eddie started off again, only to be interrupted by Robin this time.

"Just because you don't like something doesn't make it offensive. You're not the keeper of music or anything."

"Yeah. And why does music have to have complexity to be good? Can't it just be good because it sounds good." Steve pointed out. "And you claiming that Tears for Fears don't have complexity? Hello, Mad World? The dreams in which I'm dying are the best I've ever had? How can you say that doesn't have complexity."

"It's the principle of it." Eddie huffed. "The masses will listen to mindless pop, ignoring music that could actually make a difference."

"Just admit that you're wrong, dude. This is a culture war all in your mind."

just a mini fic based off a song 🤷 I might do more of these when I can't think of anything else to write