Eddie has a serious problem.
A quagmire, perhaps, and it’s a real catch-22 of a situation too.
The problem really stems from how his and Steve’s third baby Hazel was born a few weeks earlier.
The baby isn’t the problem, obviously.
It’s just…it is a truth universally acknowledged or whatever that men holding tiny little babies is hot as all hell even as a baseline. Factor in that the man in question is Steve Harrington, and then factor in that Hazel is their third baby so any nervousness has been completely eclipsed by an easy kind of confidence, and what you end up with is a level of hotness that really shouldn’t be allowed.
Also – Eddie forgot to mention, ever since Steve hit forty, he’s had the smallest hint of grey growing right at his temples and that isn’t helping things at all.
Eddie could eat him, honestly.
He really can’t believe the audacity of this guy for…just existing, really. Eddie can admit that all Steve is really guilty of is holding his infant daughter, but dear god what a crime that is.
Like, right now Steve is holding the baby against his chest with just one arm (and, seriously, the one arm thing is goddamn killing him, because it flexes his bicep in just the right way and Eddie would bite a chunk out of it if he could), the other midway through chucking a throw pillow at their oldest daughter for being a total monster about…well, Eddie would probably know what particular flavor of hell Moe is raising at the moment if he could take his eyes off of Steve for even a second.
But he can’t, so here they are.
Eddie also might be drifting off a little bit, and therein lies the catch-22 of it all –
It’s true that Steve is by far the hottest he’s ever been, but Eddie’s so tired that he couldn’t do anything about it even if he wanted to.
Actually – he’ll rephrase.
If he wasn’t so fucking tired, he’d be doing something about it.
Immediately.
And, like, he has no fucking shame at all about this. Decorum and discretion, maybe, but shame? None whatsoever.
Why should he?
It’s clearly the universe’s way of repaying him for all the shit it put him through as a teenager. Why the hell else would he not only be married to Steve, but also watching him fulfill his lifelong wish of becoming a dad three times over and aging like the finest of fine wines while he’s doing it. Eddie’s never even been a wine kind of guy, but when it’s Steve…obviously all bets are off.
Except, he's not being repaid in full, because there's the downside of having a newborn again – newborn babies don’t sleep. Well – she sleeps, but not when it’s convenient for Eddie and certainly not at the same time as his and Steve’s other two daughters. Plus, she’s proving herself to prefer contact naps over anything else, which Steve obviously loves, and…yeah, there’s a good few reasons why that shit doesn’t help Eddie’s situation at all.
Regardless, he hasn’t managed to sleep more than four straight hours at any point over the last three weeks, so any time he does have a child-free second to spare, that’s what he’s doing.
Steve notices him looking, because of course he does.
“What?” he asks, his voice low and quiet and a little tired and so so sexy.
“Oh, the things I’m doing to you in my head, Stevie-boy,” Eddie replies, (even though he knows he’ll be crashing the second his head hits the pillow – whenever the hell that ends up being).
“Yeah, yeah,” Steve says even as he shifts Hazel so she’s cradled in the curve of his arm (because he’s a goddamn bastard and he knows exactly what he’s doing), “Put your money where your mouth is, babe.”
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I Saw the TV Glow is such a uniquely, devastatingly queer story. Two queer kids trapped in suburbia. Both of them sensing something isn’t quite right with their lives. Both of them knowing that wrongness could kill them. One of them getting out, trying on new names, new places, new ways of being. Trying to claw her way to fully understanding herself, trying to grasp the true reality of her existence. Succeeding. Going back to help the other, to try so desperately to rescue an old friend, to show the path forward. Being called crazy. Because, to someone who hasn’t gotten out, even trying seems crazy. Feels crazy. Looks, on the surface, like dying.
And to have that other queer kid be so terrified of the internal revolution that is accepting himself that he inadvertently stays buried. Stays in a situation that will suffocate him. Choke the life out of him. Choke the joy out of him. Have him so terrified of possibly being crazy that he, instead, lives with a repression so extreme, it quite literally is killing him. And still, still, he apologizes for it. Apologizes over and over and over, to people who don’t see him. Who never have. Who never will. Because it’s better than being crazy. Because it’s safer than digging his way out. Killing the image everyone sees to rise again as something free and true and authentic. My god. My god, this movie. It shattered me.
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Ok consider:
A new hero emerges and the Justice League watches him for a while who make sure he’s not a threat. They see this giant clumsy man who moves like he’s not used to his body, smiles goofily every time he saves someone, and is clearly inexperienced with his powers and they’re all just like. Ah. This is a child.
Except they don’t think he’s a ten year old or however old Billy is at the time, no no. Clearly this hero came into existence shortly before his first appearance, just a few months ago. They don’t know how or why but It’s not the weirdest thing they’ve seen so it’s pretty easy to believe.
But they can’t just leave this toddler with the powers of a god to stumble around and potentially hurt someone by accident, nor go down the wrong path and become a villain. So of course they decide to ‘subtly’ guide him without alerting him to the fact they’re onto him.
They introduce themselves but instead of inviting him to the league they pop by every once in a while to ‘subtly’ teach him about responsibility and power, but also about love and humanity. They try to teach him to enjoy life and that he doesn’t have to act like an adult around them, instead encouraging him to enjoy his childhood even if it’s not an ordinary one.
(Too bad the Justice League suck at subtlety.)
Billy is certain they somehow found out he’s a kid before they even met him, probably because of Batman’s freaky know-it-all powers, but he isn’t very worried as they seem nice and don’t treat him like he’s dumb or fragile. They respect him as a hero despite his age so he lets himself act like a kid around them after a while.
When he gets comfortable enough to detransform Billy thinks that’s his identity reveal. The league thinks that he magicked himself a body that’s more of a representation of his true self and fits his developmental age better, possibly as a way to blend in with humans and experience what it’s like to be a normal child. Good for him!
Basically Billy gets a bunch of super powered parents and the Justice League get a newborn man that they think they’re raising from scratch lol
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It’s uncharacteristically warm outside for late-winter in Hawkins, Indiana.
It’s 2004, and the whole entire Party is back in Hawkins to celebrate Jim and Joyce’s fifteenth wedding anniversary (it’s actually closer to their sixteenth by now, but they’ve all well and truly entered that phase of adulthood where planning things is next to impossible), and it’s the first time they’ve all been in one room since…honestly, Steve doesn’t even know when. Since Lucas’s wedding in ‘99, maybe.
Everyone is inside unwinding after dinner. Steve can hear them from where he’s sitting outside on the front deck gently rocking the porch swing Hop had installed years ago with one foot, a now-empty bottle resting on the unfinished pine floor by the other.
The front door of Jim and Joyce’s house quietly opens and Steve looks over as El steps onto the porch, closing the door behind her as soft as she’d opened it.
She pauses, her eyes turning wary as they slide off of him and onto the baby girl drifting asleep in his arms (his and Eddie’s littlest baby, Robbie – the older baby, Moe, who’s nearly three so not really a baby anymore, is inside still probably being doted on by all her aunts and uncles).
Even in her early thirties there are so many ways El is still just like the little kid Steve met back in 1984. At the same time though, she’s completely changed.
“Doin’ okay, Ellie?” he asks gently.
She nods.
“It’s getting loud,” El tells him, “Someone put on Jeopardy.”
Yeah, that’ll do it these days – older and wiser they may all be, but any kind of trivia is still a vice for pretty much the entire Party.
“Well, you’re welcome to join us out here for as long as you like,” Steve replies.
He knows El is a little apprehensive around babies still, same as she is with cats and puppies – really anything small and vulnerable that might have been used against her many years ago, so he half-expects her to go back inside.
But she comes over and sits down next to him on the porch swing anyway and for a while, both of them are quiet.
Robbie exhales a satisfied snuffling noise that tells Steve she’s well and truly asleep.
Out of the corner of his eye, he sees El’s hand twitch, like she was going to raise it but then stopped herself.
“Can I?” she asks tentatively.
“‘Course,” Steve tells her, and he watches as El runs the tips of her fingers over the wisps of soft hair on Robbie’s head.
“How old is she now?”
“Three months,” he replies, “Four in a week or so.”
“And she’s…she’s doing…good?” she asks, and there’s something so El in her tone, the same tone she always uses when she’s tip-toeing her way through something that, to her, is foreign territory.
“Mm-hm. She’s good.”
El nods.
“Your daughters are lucky,” she says, her brown eyes trained wistfully on Robbie even as she pulls her hand away.
Steve thinks he knows what she’s getting at, but before he can ask, she keeps going.
“She’s gonna live her whole life never having to wonder if she’s loved or if she matters,” El says, “She won’t have to wonder because it’s always true. That’s special. I love Hop, and everything I have that is good is because of him, but…I still wish I could have had what you and Eddie are giving her too.”
And Steve knows exactly what she means because he feels the same way, because he thinks about it all the time, every time he thinks about his daughters and the way they are his entire world like he should have been to his own parents and yet never was, every time he thinks about himself and his father and his father’s father and knows it ends with him.
He’s not sure how to put any of that into words.
It’s El though, and he’s never really had to put those kinds of things into words with El, so he decides to just nod and settle back into the porch swing with his friend at his side and his daughter asleep in his arms and the faint noise of the people he loves most carried over them on the breeze of a warm winter evening.
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