#eddie has a reality show | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

candied-cae · 10 months

Text

And Who Are We At The End Of The World? - Please, Be Gentle with My Breaks - III

Chapter 18/? - - - Read it on AO3

[1] [2] [3] [4] [5] [6] [7] [8] [9] [10] [11] [12] [13] [14] [15] [16] [17] [18] [19] [20]

Word Count: 10,480

Summary: There's a difference between being broken and having a few breaks. But a lot of these kids and been dealt a lot of blows, and not just from physical monsters of the Upside Down. There's still a lot of stuff hidden just under the surface that they haven't been able to show just yet.

TW: Depictions of PTSD - Triggering events and flashbacks

More ST Fics

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

Friday morning - the morning Family Video was set to re-open its doors and begin taking business again - had finally come.

It was a sunny morning. The kind that starts with birds chirping from the trees and the smell of coffee drifting from the kitchen. Robin and Steve had made plans to be at the store early, a few hours before opening, to eat breakfast together in the back office and take care of any possible final business that could come up. It was going to be a very good day. They'd decided that much.

Robin was still asleep and a little while away from starting that very good day when a noise that was less pleasant than birdsong rattled through her window.

It had been a week since the morning after the earthquake, and the construction crews had finally made their way to the suburbs near the Buckleys to take care of refortifying, structural concerns, and general repairs. One such house that required their attention, was the neighbor's from right behind them. The one that happened to be closest to the wall of Robin's room.

She was woken up when the racket started.

There was yelling, the workers shouting across distances and making their plans. Her neighbor's house had a lot of worry. She usually wouldn't mind the yelling that much. She could ignore it until Steve arrived to whisk her away. But she had been asleep and would've liked to stay that way. And all the noise outside made it impossible to fall back asleep. So she rolled out of bed and pulled her thin, red curtains closed, trying to block out just a little bit of the early morning sun.

It was about then that the foreman of the crew grunted with displeasure and came to a decision.

“Too much mess here. The whole foundation's got cracks in it, I don't like the way these wooden support beams are splinting, these warps in the flooring don't look good, and that roof damage is only going to get worse with bad weather. Call the homeowners. They can bitch about the facts all they want, but this house is going to be next with the demo team and need a complete reconstruction before anyone moves back in.”

Robin had already finished getting ready. She was washed up and dressed, and finally, the noise softened. Maybe they were done for the day. And she probably had another hour before Steve would be rolling around. So she dove back under her covers and tucked them in around her. Closing her eyes and drifting back off to sleep for just a little bit longer before she'd be taken away from her warm, comfy bed, and would be made to face the daunting trials of customer service.

Maybe forty minutes later, Robin was in that slippery state between sleep and awareness while the heavy machinery of a demolition team rolled down the street. All at once, those titans of force began to unmake the house right behind theirs. So close to where she peacefully slept. And the house did not go down easy.

Robin was startled awake in a red-tinted room, with the impossibly loud sound of destruction erupting from right behind her. The strength of it was rumbling the bed under her body, accompanied by the shriek of over-used and under-cared-for mechanical parts.

And all of it just sent her.

It felt like Thursday night. In the Upside Down. Where the red-tinted sky opened up above her, and the ground shook under her feet so hard she almost fell over. When the groans of an old house moved around her and filled up her ears. Until it all became echoes of screams instead.

Lucas's screams.

“Erica! Call for help!”

She felt it. She felt the fear again. Like it was all occurring to her for the first time.

Max was dead. Lucas was hurt. Eddie was going to die.

Her hands started shaking. She felt the sweat stick to the back of her neck, on her forehead under her bangs. Her arms and legs almost felt numb- or maybe they felt disconnected from her? They didn't feel right. Or useable.

She was frozen. And she tried to reason with herself. Thursday night was Thursday night. It was over a week ago. It all already happened, and she's supposed to be fine. She's in her room.

But as she looked around, none of it seemed familiar. It all looked foreign. Alien. It even started to look like the room was covered in vines, and dust, and cobwebs.

And she was alone. Steve and Nancy weren't there with her. By her side. Helping her run through the terror anyway.

She was alone.

A tear slipped down her cheek, and then one of the neighbor's walls went down. Everything shook even worse. And while she was petrified just a second ago, she was then thrown into urgency. She all but pushed herself out of the bed and backed up under the frame. In the little space between the floorboards and the box spring. She just tried to crawl further and further back, closing herself into something small and hidden.

Nothing bad should be able to find her under there.

She started crying harder.

Somewhere in it, her parents started asking questions. Asking if she wanted any breakfast before she left. Trying to make sure she was still up. Wondering why she wasn't answering. But none of it reached her. She just stared straight forward, trying desperately to cover her ears and make it stop. She just needed it all to stop. But all she felt was the tremble. And all she heard were the screams.

Her dad opened her door. He and her mom poured into her room and kneeled on the floor to find her down there under her bed. They tried talking to her. To figure out what was happening. None of them understood why it was happening.

Max was dead. Lucas was hurt. Erica was in danger. Eddie was going to die. Dustin was limping. Steve was bleeding.

Nothing was okay. And Robin was alone.

Steve's car rolled to a stop in front of the Buckleys. But Robin wasn't sitting, waiting for him on the stoop. She probably just woke up late and needed another minute, or two, to finish getting ready. They were going in early anyway.

Steve wasn't in any rush.

So he just sat in the driveway. Letting the radio play through “You're Much Too Soon” by Hall and Oats. But still, as the song ended and the host announced that The Cars would be playing next, Robin wasn't outside.

Which was starting to seem unusual. He'd never waited very long for her to run out. It's not like she was someone to go to a rager and be hungover the next morning. And there was no way she had something with Vickie that went so late she couldn't wake up. At least no way she wouldn't have mentioned it to him.

He wasn't sure what her deal was, but he still didn't really want to risk getting Mrs. Buckley's stink eye by knocking on the door. A person only makes that mistake once. So he shrugged to himself and honked his horn in two short bursts. To make sure she knew he was there. Not to sound passive-aggressive, but maybe she forgot what time they planned on leaving.

And in that dark space between what was happening and the memory playing over reality, Steve's car broke through.

Robin knew that beep.

From all the times she was already packed into his car after closing, and he was taking too long to lock the door to Family Video, so she'd lean over to the driver's seat and honk at him from his own car. From every time they'd gotten talked into running one or a couple of the kids somewhere, and they were taking their sweet time, so he'd honk at them. From any time someone peeled out past a stop sign in front of them, Steve would curse, ask how much they think his car is worth, and he'd honk at them because he couldn't expect an answer.

Robin knew the sound of Steve's Beemer.

Which meant Steve was there.

That was the only thing she could grasp and hold on to. Steve was there. Somewhere out of sight, but there. Steve was there, so she wasn't alone.

“Steve? STEVE?” she called for him. Past her parents that didn't fit the picture in front of her, she yelled for her best friend to fill in.

Just when Steve was really starting to wonder what was up, he saw Robin's father open the door.

“There's something wrong with her!” he shouted, looking more scared than grown-ups usually let him see.

And Steve didn't even think he'd ever run so fast for anything. Before he could even worry about what specifically could be wrong, before he could worry about the Buckleys not being his biggest fans, before he could worry about not technically having been invited inside their house - he was through the front door and following the sound of Robin's voice down the hallway to her room. Where her mother was crouched on the floor trying to reason with where Robin must've been under her bed.

He just shucked the jacket off his arms and scooted himself under there beside her.

“Hey. Hey, Rob. I'm here. It's me.”

She looked at him. And he made sense. As much as all of it didn't make sense, Steve being there with her while she felt terrified? That made sense.

Robin's fingers released a sweater that had been lost under her bed and instead grabbed onto the short sleeve of Steve's white shirt.

“Steve. Steve, it's- i- it's shaking. Everything is…”

“I know. I know, it is.” He nodded with her,” But, hey, I’m right here with you. Okay?”

There was barely enough room for the width of their bodies under there. But even so, Steve untucked his arm from beside him and pushed it into the space over Robin. He held her tight around her shoulders, her hand still twisted in the fabric of his shirt. She was probably going to stretch it out, but Steve wasn't even a little worried about it then.

“It's so loud…” she whispered, trying to cover up one ear without letting go of Steve.

“That's okay. That's okay, because…” Steve reached over to his discarded jacket. In the pocket was his walkman and one of his mixes he was keeping on him until he made the one specifically for Vecna. He slipped the headphones over her ears with a little difficulty, due to the angle and tight quarters. But after he got it on, he'd quickly sped through the first third of the tape, because ABBA's “Lay All Your Love On Me” should've been the fifth song on it.

He pulled her tighter against him while she listened to the music and spoke right into her hair,“ I’m right here. And I’m not going to let anything happen to you.”

She continued to cry.

Robin's parents just looked at the two in shock. They knew that they had gotten close, but they never imagined… Steve was the kid in town with a reputation for getting around. They always assumed there was something there, something he was chasing her for. They weren’t happy about it but figured - maybe just maybe - Steve Harrington got drawn into Robin’s refusal of his advances and it just made a game for him after they worked together at the mall.

But the way he was looking at her, it was love.

And not a romantic or lustful thing. It was just love in its purest form. Like they were two halves of the same person. Destined to link their arms together for the rest of their lives, despite whatever husband and wife they would get tied to down the road. It was something bigger than her parents understood.

But they were starting to.

Robin eventually stopped shaking so badly, and stopped crying so hard. Steve asked them if the construction crew could stop what they were doing. Even for just fifteen minutes. Just long enough to let Robin calm down some and get out from under the mattress and put some distance between them.

And the parents left them to each other. Somehow, they completely trusted that all Steve Harrington wanted to do was help their daughter feel better. When they told the crew that their kid was having something of a nervous breakdown, they were incredibly apologetic and immediately shut off all the equipment. Mrs. Buckley brought out some lemonade for them as a thank-you while they killed a little time.

“You doing better, Rob?” Steve asked when she looked like she was coming back to herself.

The room didn't look so scary anymore. Her mind wasn't covering her floor and walls in leathery tentacles. She couldn't hear kids screaming and crying in her ears. She knew Max was safe in the hospital, and Eddie was right next to her recovering. Lucas, Erica, Dustin, and Steve all made it out with bumps and bruises, but they were fine.

Robin pushed the headphones off of one of her ears and nodded to Steve, wiping off her face,” Yeah. Yeah.”

“Do you wanna get up?” he offered.

She thought about it. But her legs still felt like jello, and she still had an icky feeling making her hair stand up. It didn't look like the Upside Down anymore, but she was still scared it would again as soon as she made it to her feet.

“Not yet? It feels safer down here. Closed in, nothing can surprise me.”

“Okay. We’ll stay down here for a few minutes.”

Robin shook her head. She felt silly. “We’re going to be late to work,” she told him.

“Fuck work.” Steve remarked, and she laughed through a sniffle,” I’m the manager now. I say Family Video can re-open tomorrow.”

But then the worry hit her again,“ But, Steve, if I stay here all day and they start again, I-”

Steve just shrugged against her shoulder,“ We can go wherever. Wherever you want.”

And she relaxed again.

They got her up off the floor, splashed some water on her face, and got packed into the car after Robin hugged her parents. Told them she was going to be fine.

They blared music from his car and stopped back at his house first to grab snacks. She met the Antonovs while Steve stole a boombox and a handful of cassettes from his room. And then they made quick goodbyes and were off again. Steve figured a good place to go, to get away from everything, was that junkyard past the quarry.

They drove up the gravel road, around the big open water, into the break of the trees, and out through the clearing of abandoned cars and scrap.

“So, this is where Dustin took you, huh?”

She'd wondered what kind of place made for a demodog trap and makeshift fortress to hunker down in. Not enough to actually ask for a visit to a place that screamed serial killer central, but she'd wondered about it.

“Yeah. Except we came from the tracks and walked the whole way from town.” Steve told her.

Robin crinkled up her nose at the idea,“ If you're gonna bring me to the edge of the world, I'm not walking there. Only way you're getting me all the way out here is if I'm riding in style.” She leaned back in the seat, popped her feet up on the dash, and closed her eyes. Like she was trying to become the picture of luxury.

Steve just smiled softly and hummed,“ Of course, you are.”

The Beemer was parked and the two climbed out together. Robin's first instinct was to comment on the mess. The broken glass and the dented-up metal. Steve pretended it was all damage from the demodogs. She didn't know any better to push it. But they sat down in an open spot. Dug into the leftovers of Claudia's brownies while they just talked and looked out over the hill.

And then Robin brought the conversation back to something she considered to be of high importance.

“So, what's the plan with Nancy?”

Steve completely turned away from her, echoing her question like that'd make her drop it,“ What's the plan?”

And, as if she didn't even hear the annoyance in his tone, she agreed,“ Yeah. What's the plan? What sort of idea do we have on the docket?”

“Robin. Her boyfriend is sleeping on my couch right now.” Steve reminded her.

“Which is why I want to know the plan. Situation's gotten complicated.” Robin crossed her legs and popped a bit of brownie into her mouth.

But he declared,“ There is no plan.”

And she almost sounded disappointed. "Steve.”

“You guys keep trying to open that door - and maybe you could entertain the idea while Jonathan wasn't around - but it's different now.”

“You guys?” Robin pointed out,” Who else has been talking about you and Nancy?”

Steve muttered,“ Munson might've said something stupid…”

Her eyes widened,“ See! Multiple people-”

“Just the two-”

“Multiple people think there's something there! So why aren't you going for it? We got your confidence back, you're acting like the hot commodity you are again. Don't get why you're wasting time.”

He tried to redirect her,“ Why don't we focus on the Vickie front?”

She argued,“ The Vickie front is fine!”

“Oh? So what are the two of you then?” Steve pressed.

Robin got quiet before eventually saying,” I don't know.”

“That doesn't sound very fine.”

Which thankfully seemed to pull her away from Nancy Wheeler.

“How do I broach that topic then, Steve?” she asked.

“Well, you're gonna wanna get all dressed up, look real nice, lean in close, and then you're going to ask her where this thing is going.”

“And if she doesn't think 'this thing' is going where I want it to go? Then I've just outed myself and started the countdown until I become the town pariah.”

“You just gotta be covert enough it's safe, and direct enough you get a clear answer,” Steve advised. Which sounded like an impossible balance to strike.

And Robin was at least a little bit annoyed he'd even say such a thing. “Oh? Is that all?“

“That's all it takes!”

“Then…” Robin leaned over and got all in Steve's space before she put on a husky voice,“ Where do you think this Nancy thing is going?”

Steve cried out “Shut up!” and shoved her shoulder. They both fell into boisterous laughter while they lay out on the grass. Leaving behind the horrors of that morning and knowing full well that Family Video wasn't opening by 10 am as they planned.

Karen got a phone call that morning from Theresa. Robin's mother mentioned that they'd had a rough morning at their house, and asked if Karen had noticed Nancy going through anything after the earthquake. Seeming like she was reliving it at all, or stuff like night terrors? Karen truthfully told her that she hadn't seen any of that from Nancy, but what she kept to herself was that their kids didn't just face an earthquake. Karen knew they'd seen more than they needed to.

And with her soft heart, knowing that Robin got really shaken up and quickly left with Steve that morning to get away from the ruckus, Karen decided she'd pay the two of them a visit. Offer a little kindness and remind them that - even if they couldn't turn to their own parents for help - she was on their team now. Like what Nancy had said the night she found out what was going on.

So Karen baked a batch of fresh cookies in the oven. Her oldest daughter was pouring over her school work, the new and the old, and paying extra attention to her essays. Karen slid a plate on the dining room table to Nancy as they came out. Still warm and gooey, practically falling apart as Karen warned her to let them cool a minute so she didn't burn herself. And then she headed out the door. Packing herself and her Tupperware container away while she drove over to Steve's place. Where surely the two of them would have gone after Robin's fright.

The oddest thing was, as she came up to the front porch and knocked on the door, it wasn't either of them that answered. Nor was it Hopper or Joyce, or any of the kids. Instead, there was a man she'd never met before. A very attractive man, for the record, wearing a pretty skimpy pair of cut-off jeans that were halfway up his thighs and what probably used to be a tee shirt until the sleeves were snipped off to the shoulder and the bottom cropped until it almost showed skin.

Which was a little out of the usual considering Spring just started and nobody else in Hawkins would be dressing like that for weeks, if not months. Just wasn't warm enough for it yet. But there this mystery man was, looking like he was ready to host a Summer cookout and work on his poolside tan.

He pursed his lips under a crisp mustache and asked, with a strong, deep voice and accent,” Yes?”

“Uh, yes, I- uh- I’m Karen. Wheeler. Mike and Nancy’s mom.” she explained. Remembering herself after a moment and shifting the cookies onto one arm, reaching out with her other hand to shake his. Friendly, polite, and mannerly. Maybe a little more bashful than she should be.

He smiled kindly and shook it with a firm grip,” Dmitri. I am Mikhail’s father.”

“Oh, yes, I’d heard- that, um, that we had someone new coming into town.” she made the connection and thought to herself that she was being silly. Stuttering and sputtering for no reason.

“Ah, yes.” Dmitri nodded,” Once your government sends me some papers, I may move out of this boy’s home. Maybe then we will even be neighbors, yes?”

Karen smiled and agreed,” Yeah, maybe.”

It was quiet for only a moment before he wondered,“ Was there something…?”

“Oh! Yes! Sorry, um, I assumed Steve and Robin would be around. Wanted to drop off a snack for them.” she motioned to the container she held.

“That is very kind of you. They are out, but I can put it in the kitchen.” he offered.

She handed the sweets over with a simple “thank you,” but she didn't exactly want to run back home so quickly. And she thought it was only reasonable to try and get to know him. Being another adult on the end-of-the-world team and all.

“How- how are you and your son adjusting? To Hawkins? I'm sure it must be a big change.”

“It is fine,” he assured her. “Mikhail wishes he were in school. Also wishes he had his own room, but that will change in time. We are fine. Much better away from where we were. And I, myself, am most enjoying all the time free from work and the warm temperature.”

Dmitri remarked on it all with a smile. Pale, blue eyes shining under the midwest sun. Which must've been a stark difference compared to the snow-covered country he'd called home just days before. He really seemed happy to have completely turned his whole life around.

It wasn't like he had much of a choice. By the sound of it from Murray, Hop, and Joyce, he had to leave. There wasn't anything left for him or his son in the Soviet Union after he was imprisoned, escaped, and every person at his workplace - convicts and guards alike - was killed. He was a renegade, no matter what. So he had to pack up his kid and him, board a sketchy helicopter, and come with the people he'd become loose companions with. Chasing “hope of a better life” and “the American dream” as far as it'd take him.

It sounded terrifying for Karen to imagine putting her own family through. But here, the man stood. In the door of a teenage boy's home because it had a spare room to borrow. In a country he didn't know. Without a clue about what exactly was going to happen in the coming days, weeks, months, or years. If they made it that long.

And he smiled under the sunshine. Because he was away from work, and they had nice weather in Hawkins, Indiana. And that was enough to be happy about.

“Really?” she asked him.

“Oh, yes. Certainly. If I could spend the rest of my days like this, though in a home of my own, I would. Waking up early, making food, spending time with Mikhail and sending him off, enjoying this lovely weather… it is all I need.”

Karen had to laugh to herself. It sounded like the life of a housewife this man was wishing for. And she knew it wasn't all sunshine and rainbows. It wasn't as easy or as fulfilling as it seemed like it was when a person summed up in one clean sentence.

“Your son must be better behaved than mine.” she joked.

But Dmitri's eyebrow raised, and he leaned in closer to drop his voice,“ You think too highly of Mikhail. He is still a handful.” He sat back and mentioned,” Though, I suspect I am lucky to just have the one. You manage two.”

“Three, actually.” she corrected,” I have my youngest, Holly, too.”

“Three, then. Miss Wheeler, you are a mother of considerable strength, to do so on your own.”

“Oh, I’m not on my own. My husband, Ted, he-” Karen stumbled for a second. Not exactly sure how much she could speak to her husband's adequacy as a father. Not when it came to the softer parts of childcare. “Well, he supports us. Has a good job and brings home the bacon.”

“But you manage the home and children?” the man restated.

“Uh, yes, I guess, he mostly catches the bills, and I manage the house. And the kids. The day-to-day. If you want to look at it like that.”

“Then that makes you strong,” he argued.

Karen just averted her eyes and brushed her hair off her shoulder. “You’d be the first to think so.”

“Americans do not think their mothers are strong?”

“It’s-” She didn't get very far.

“They should. I believe you are very strong woman, Miss Karen Wheeler.” Dmitri said with full sincerity.

She couldn't help but notice he didn't correct to “Mrs.” even though she brought up her marriage. But it was nice to hear the rest of that sentence too. She was a strong woman. Seriously spoken, because it was no laughing matter.

Karen also couldn't help but ask a question she's wondered a few times by herself.

“Was it easy? To work and take care of your son on your own?”

It seemed a little rude to ask. She'd only known the man for a few minutes, and she only knew he was a widower or some kind of divorcee because it was sort of the elephant in the room. You don't think to grab the kid and not the mom if everything is going well. So he was in the parenting game on his own. And maybe sometimes Karen wondered if she could do something like that.

“Absolutely not.” he answered honestly,” My wife passed many years back. And my job it- it kept me away from home a lot. Only way we got through it was our sweet neighbor watching him when I could not. I only hope I may find way to tend to him more now.”

“You’d want to be a house-husband?” she asked, surprised.

“If I could? Absolutely. Just be a little… little trophy for the Missus to show off while I take care of the home and my boy.” he mused. “Sounds like a fine life to me.”

Karen only let out about half a laugh. “You’re a very interesting man, Dmitri.”

“What? You do not agree?”

“I can see the appeal, from the outside view. I’ve been in the housewife spot for a while now. It can be nice at times, but I definitely miss…” her eyes wandered,” the freedom.”

“I take it you have a passion then? One you put away to take care of your family?” Dmitri leaned against the door frame. His exposed bicep squished against woodgrain, though Karen tried not to notice, and he watched her carefully. Listening.

She admitted to him,“ Yeah, I did. Once upon a time. Many, many years ago.”

“Well, I hope you find it again, Miss Karen.” There it was with the “Miss” again- “Maybe your kids straighten up and give you time to chase it? Or your husband takes over some responsibilities of the house?”

“Oh, that’ll be the day.”

“You think Mr. Wheeler is not strong enough for the job?”

“He does his job.” Karen had to defend her husband. She began to count on her fingers,” Provides the roof over our heads, food on the table-”

But this Dmitri wasn't having it. With one hand, he gently closed his grip around hers. Only enough pressure to stop her, so he could say,“ If your husband leaves you so dissatisfied, then I do not believe he does his job very well.”

And Karen could feel the heat in her cheeks go hotter. He was close. And touching her hands. And serious but not afraid to laugh. And sweet in the way he talked about his kid. And attentive to her in a way no one has been since she and Ted first met.

It swelled something in her chest that scared her.

She smiled politely, and pulled her hands back,“ Sorry to have taken up so much of your time. I wasn't planning on more than a quick drop-off. But I’m happy to hear you’re both settling in. Feel free to help yourselves to the cookies as well.”

“Thank you,” he said, smoothly. No hint of dismay as she backed out. And then he added,” But it was no bother to speak with a beautiful woman on a nice day. Especially if she's brought over her own baking.”

In a moment of bravery, Karen agreed.

“It was no bother speaking to you either. I’ll see you again sometime.”

“Until then, Miss Karen. To your free time and the rise of house-husbandry.”

And Mr. Antonov stayed at the door while Karen returned to her car. He popped open the top and swiped himself a cookie in the wait. Watching as she opened the door and slid into the driver's seat. He only closed the front door of Steve's house once he'd seen the engine turn over fine. Making sure she'd have no problem getting home.

A length of care just beyond what was necessary.

It'd been a long, long time since Karen felt like anyone had extended that attention toward her.

Not that it mattered much. She was a married woman. A housewife. A stay-at-home mom. And Dmitri didn't convey much confidence that she was able to be anything else anymore. Not with three children to look out for. Even if Nancy was going to be off to college soon, Mike still had three years left. Hell- Holly was only six.

She needed to get back home.

Get back to what she knew how to do.

Time passed by in the junkyard. The sun rose up and eventually hung high in the sky overhead. Steve and Robin nearly emptied the last of Claudia's brownies. They were probably ready for some real food soon. And to get back to civilization.

But, for the moment, they just lay out on the ground next to each other.

Trying not to think about all the dirt getting into their hair and rubbing into the back of their clothes.

But Robin finally felt like herself again.

“Thank you,” she said to him. Her best friend. Who sat with her through the whole thing. Even though it snuck up on them out of nowhere, and they've never dealt with anything like it themselves.

“For?” he asked her.

She filled in,“ For being there for me.”

“Rob,” Steve rolled over onto his side to look at her,” I always will be. You know that.”

Robin nodded,“ I know. I just…” she started to explain,” didn’t realize it could get that bad. Nothing ever hit me like that after last summer. Nothing was ever similar enough to what happened that I just- I don’t know. But then I was just in my room, and I looked around, and it was just like Thursday night. Like some amalgamation of my bedroom and the Creel house, and the sounds were just- ”

Steve put his hand on hers where she'd started mindlessly ripping grass up by the roots.

“I know. But we’re fine. We’re fine.” he assured her.

“Yeah. We are.”

“So we’re feeling better now?”

“Yeah. We’re feeling better now.” Robin squeezed his hand.

“All the way better, or is there still something you need to be all the way there?”

She chuckled and smiled up at the bright blue sky. A big toothy smile. The kind her mother would've told her to reign in if they were taking family pictures. But the gentle fondness of Steve Harrington could be funny when he overdid it. Like a mother hen checking on his little chickadees over and over again.

And Steve might've been thinking about cruising by a drive-thru to finish off the comfort, but Robin had another solution in mind to settle any lingering anxiety.

“Well, if you’re offering… you know what my favorite thing ever is…”

And that was all the leading she had to do. Steve's eyes narrowed at her. But he didn't resist much.

“… Fine. Since you had a shitty morning.”

And then Steve went to his cassette player and dropped in “Robin’s Mix.” A tape he'd put together some time ago that always got the most runtime when its namesake was with him. It only took seconds for the sounds of ABBA's “Dancing Queen” to come out through the speakers. The first song on it. Robin stood, dusted herself off, and joined Steve by the hood of his Beemer where he'd propped the player. Fully set on turning the patch of seclusion into their own private dance floor.

And as the Swedish singers came in, Steve was quick to mime a microphone of his own. Directing every single word to his very best friend. Just like they had for her birthday.

“You are the dancing Queen, Young and sweet, Only seventeen! You can dance, You can jive, Having the time of your life, Ooooo~ See that girl, Watch that screen, Digging the Dancing Queen!”

They spun around each other. Robin shook out her hair, dropped her shoulders, and grooved side-to-side. Put her hands up in the air and swept them around in smooth motions. Steve was jumping around, posing, and kneeling to bask up at her. Like she was a real celebrity.

They probably put too much energy into it. If anyone serious was looking at them and compared their moves to the music at hand, they'd probably have said they didn't fit together. But to the two of them, it was how the song was meant to be danced to. It's what was right when everything came down to just Steve and Robin. No one else on the planet was invited.

And just being Steve and Robin was the easiest thing most days.

They made it all the way through the song before Robin nearly collapsed against him in giggles. He put away the phony mic, tossing it somewhere behind him to catch her before they both ended up on their asses. “One Way Or Another” began to fire up, but neither was listening too carefully.

“Thank you,” Robin said, almost out of breath.

“You already said that.” Steve pointed out.

“I know. But seriously,” she grabbed his hand and squeezed it like it was the most tangible lifeline she's ever had,” Thank you. For being my favorite person in the whole world.”

He squeezed her hand back, just as much love expressed in the simple act,” Thank you for being mine.”

Eventually, Robin stood back up on her own two feet. And they decided on that drive-thru meal to offset all the sugar and chocolate they'd had in lieu of a balanced breakfast. And interestingly enough, they also decided on going back to Family Video anyway.

They had no plans to open. More so just get out from under the sun before one of them (Robin) got sunburnt. Maybe even avoid the mosquitoes for the rest of the day. And Robin's Mix played through Steve's stereo the whole drive.

It might've only been Friday, and the nurses might've said they wanted to hold on to Eddie through Tuesday, but he was getting stir-crazy.

He hated, hated, hated just sitting there on that bed. He wasn't supposed to get up and move around too much, lest he desire to face Nurse Tracey's wrath. But it was torture. The tv was no adequate entertainment, and it killed him to know that everyone else had something to do. Some way they were healing or fixing things.

Just “getting better” wasn't a good enough assignment.

Not when there was so much at stake. Not when he was laying down right next to Max, who was stuck where he'd gotten out of. They told him it wasn't the same. But it should've been. They both died, and El brought them both back, and they both got to a hospital. But she wasn't awake.

And it pissed him off so much.

She played decoy, and so did he. And they both did their parts a little too well. But she didn’t get up after.

Wayne dropped in and ate breakfast with him on his way to work. Expressed his sorrow about Eddie's ring. Eddie's mom's ring. His fingertips drifted to his right ring finger where he'd always worn it. Not on the left, because that was the spot dedicated to his own engagement one day.

He missed it. The black gem, cut in too many facets that it caught the light too much. It didn't have the same mystique as domed, smooth onyx that seemed more like a void set in silver than a stone. He'd looked at some in pawn shops and understood the appeal.

But as much as his mom's ring didn't exactly fit the idea of what his aesthetic "should" be, it was better.

And it was gone.

He didn't cry when Wayne mentioned it. Didn't cry when Wayne said he was going to ask around, keep an eye out, and look wherever he could think to. Didn't ruin it for him by saying," I know I wore it into battle. I fucking kissed it before climbing up a twisted version of our trailer and starting my set. So if it's gone, it's gone in another dimension. And, honestly, it was probably eaten by a demobat, given how much they bit at me. So it had to be fucked up for good after sitting in dead monster stomach acid all this time."

No. Eddie just smiled at his uncle. Told him thanks for everything. Said he was going to make it up to him with a spaghetti night when they settled in a new place to call their home again. Wayne smiled and told him not to forget the garlic bread.

"You know that's the best part." he laughed.

Wayne's eyes caught on his watch, and it was time to go. He laid a hand on his boy's shoulder, kissed him on his forehead, and told him to just keep getting better. Try not to worry about anything in the meantime.

Eddie didn't promise him anything.

He finished his re-read of The Hobbit. Sniffled at the end like he always did. He looked over old notes and put together new ones for a campaign. The boys, including Josie and Erica, and even Will, all came by. It was nice.

It wasn't a very complex storyline he'd thought up, but for a one-shot, it would do. The gang of nine players packed around his bed was given the task of sneaking into a masquerade party held in a castle. The queen had received word that her daughter was in danger, but she didn't know who it was. It could've even been a member of their own royal guard. So she'd hired the band of adventurers to make sure the princess would be safe. The hard part was, she'd survived an insane labor of nine. Yup, nonuplets. So there were nine identical princesses to keep an eye on and protect while they tried to find the bad guy. And just as fate would have it, one of them died.

It was only thanks to Will's impeccable notetaking that they figured out it was not actually Daphne in the pale green dress, but Rowena who'd swapped their clothes and taken the place of her sister. A scheme worked up with an assassin she'd fallen in love with to steal the title of "eldest daughter" and have the first claim to the throne. She had been the youngest of nine, after all, she was far down the list before she'd see a crown.

But they solvest the mystery. Earned a good chunk of change from an incredibly distraught royal family who not only lost one child, but a second too. Everyone cheered for each other when they got the confession and defeated the enemies in combat. Tucked away the characters with mentions that it might be nice to dust them off and revisit the theme again another time. Make a regular habit of these Sherlock Holmes-like mysteries dipped in a little bit of fantasy flair and ass-kicking to close it all out.

It was fun. Mostly. But holding the session around his bed, where he felt like he was some weak little thing he didn't think he was… it hurt Eddie in a way he wasn't expecting. It itched against all the other feelings he was holding on to. And he didn't like it.

He was feeling cagey.

So, after they all said their goodbyes, he made a break for it.

Or, more exactly, he told Tracey he had to get out of there and begged for any way to make it happen. She was not happy. Looked at him down her hooked nose, through her thick glasses, from under crumbling mascara that rimmed her eyes. A scornful expression like she was trying to intimidate him into pulling up his covers and saying how much he actually liked it there.

But he stood his ground. And she admitted, him being a legal adult and all, that he could fill out an Against Medical Advice form - meaning he couldn't sue if he fucked himself up for leaving early - and he'd be free. So he asked her, very nicely, to fetch such a document for him. And she did. She still pestered him about calling or coming in the minute he felt bad. To watch himself for a high temperature, upset stomach, sweating or chills, bleeding, puss, or extra sensitivity around the injuries. So he swore up and down he would.

And he made it out.

His car was still at Wayne's hotel, wherever that was exactly, so Eddie just hopped the bus and made it downtown. He didn't have an exact plan, but he was not going to go home. That trailer was practically a fallout zone and wouldn't make for much of a shelter at that point. And he also didn't want to even figure out where Wayne was pitched up at. Because he was bound to go stir crazy there just the same as he had in the hospital.

He ended up on the idea to stop by a certain video store to annoy a certain pair of employees and whatever poor souls decided to shop there on the day Eddie Munson became a truly free man.

“What? Am I not pretty enough for you, Robin?” Steve asked.

His voice dripped with offense, like the discussion at hand was the cruelest thing anyone had ever said to him. They'd been making plans for Robin to ask Vickie on something more obviously a date. To help bridge that gap between girl friends and girlfriends. Robin had suggested something more like what she and Steve do anyway, getting together at someone's house when there are no parents home for a movie. But that also painted what they do as being inherently romantic and she gagged. Now, Steve was on some tirade about being a wonderful date and she should be so lucky.

He leaned against the shop counter and struggled to pop his hip out in a way that could even come close to feminine. But none of the shapes were there, and Robin could only look at him with pity. Not an admission of defeat.

“As much as I love you, Steve…” she tried to soften the blow,” You already know the key thing keeping us apart is my particular interest in…”

”Oh, right.” Steve's tone dropped, and he cupped his hands on his chest as if it was the first time the thought had occurred to him,” Boobies. I don’t have those for you.”

The comment caused Robin to crinkle her nose in a sharp cringe,” Stop calling them that!”

“Why?! It’s what they are! Not my fault you can’t handle the proper word for them!” he pushed.

“ANYWAY!” she tried to take control of the conversation,” I like them a lot, so stop pressing it. It's starting to get really sad.”

“Alright, alright, I'm hearing you, but what if I turned like this.” Steve turned around and arched his back as he shyly looked over his shoulder at Robin. Trying to pull off a more pin-up pose. Like, because she couldn't see his front, she could forget he was missing the pair features they both enjoyed so much. Like it made him girly enough at all.

Robin tried to hold back her snickers at his display. Steve closed his eyes and shook out his hair behind him for effect. He put on a pretend sultry voice before asking her,“ Does this do it for you?”

“What did I just walk in on?” Eddie froze in the open doorway.

As Steve's brain registered that the question didn't come from Robin, he snapped open his eyes and jumped out of the pose. Some kind of less-than-manly shriek flew up from his mouth, and all too quickly he practically tumbled over the countertop and crossed his arms over his chest to cover himself behind it. As if he was even topless in the first place. He wasn't, but he still felt pretty exposed.

“Can't you read the sign?!” Steve griped. A pointer finger shot out to where the “closed” side of the board was clearly facing out the door to any foot traffic on the sidewalk.

Robin was less focused on Steve's cause for concern and complaint. Instead, she joyfully exclaimed,“ Eddie! You’re out of the hospital!”

“Yup, doc declared me as less than ‘healthy as a horse’ but not likely to bleed out at any moment, so I've been released on good behavior for bedrest at my own home while the wounds, you know, do their thing and scar over.”

“If it’s bedrest, shouldn’t you be, ya know… in a bed? Resting?” Steve questioned him. Maybe a little pointedly, but hey, he was allowed to feel a little sour over Eddie walking in on his and Robin's nonsense. That stuff's supposed to be private.

“Didn’t really feel like hitching a ride across town for a quiet hotel room packed with Wayne's and I's stuff while he finishes the rest of his shift.” Eddie excused,” Plus I’d miss out on whatever the hell all this is. So I’ll ask again; what did I just walk in on?”

“Steve’s just really sad that he’s not pretty enough for me.” Robin mused teasingly. Figuring that context was innocuous enough for the present company.

“Oh, man. Tough break, Princess Harrington. My condolences.” Eddie said, putting one hand over his heart and the other on Steve's shoulder like he actually meant to console the man's wounded pride.

Steve swatted away the gesture immediately. And then he decided something new about Eddie being a member of the party.

”You two are insufferable!” he said with a pair of aggressive finger-pointing,” I don't like this duo! I don't need the two of you ganging up on me! It's unfair!”

“Wait till we get Dustin in on the action too. Three on Steve seems like fine odds.” Eddie added just to see the way it made Steve twist up his face. He even started getting a little red!

Through it all, Eddie and Robin found some kind of understanding between the two of them. An understanding of how fun it was to push all of Steve's buttons. And somehow, they still secured invites to his place for dinner. Maybe it was their wicked pair of sad eyes, maybe it was more of that “feeling way too bad for everyone” gene he's got, but Steve let them both pile into his car while he made his way home.

Eddie met their European guests, shook more hands, and made more small talk. And by the end of the meal, Steve would say he narrowly survived the onslaught of teasing. Steve ran Robin back to her place and stayed parked right outside until she buzzed him on the walkie and said she wasn't having a panic attack in her room again and he needed to clear out before someone accused him of stalking. Eddie and Steve laughed, and as the driver wondered where he was sending Eddie off, he admitted he didn't know.

Still hadn't even called his uncle to find out which spot across town he was camped up in.

And somehow… that conversation ended with another invitation to Steve's house. That time, one to spend the night. Eddie was eager to accept. A bustling house of kids and the most random assortment of adults sounded like the exact opposite of falling asleep to the sound of his heartbeat beeping on a machine next to him, and Max's a few feet away.

And thanks to an already stacked dance card - the Byers and Co. on the couch, Joyce and Hop sharing the master, Murray laid claim to the first guest room, the Antonovs in the other - there was really only one place with any spare room without tossing one the injured men to the floorboards.

And that was to partner up and share Steve's bed with him.

It started with Eddie trying to break the ice. Pointing out the grid pattern painted on Steve's walls and hung up on his curtains. Mentioning that it was nothing like how he imagined the King of Hawkins slept. It looked more like a cage than anything else.

Steve shrugged, agreed with the sentiment, and tried to focus on grabbing his own pajama options and getting the night over with. As awkward as it was shaping up to be. But drawing attention to his closet, drew attention to the desk and chair right in front of it. And the denim vest hanging on the back of that chair, which rightfully belonged to Steve's most recent guest.

“There it is!”

Steve turned around and followed Eddie's eyes to the battle vest he'd accidentally borrowed for too long.

“Oh, right! Sorry.” he picked it up from its perch. “Didn't mean to steal it. Just forgot it was there a little.”

“Wow. I let you dress yourself in my battle vest - watching out for your delicate purity so that it might not be besmirched - and you forget about such a deep moment we shared?” Eddie lamented the tragedy. Wondering to himself if it would be too much to try and force a tear.

“I didn't mean I forgot about it like that. Just- I was trying to figure out what to do with it, and I forgot to give it back.” Steve quickly handed it over,” Here.”

Eddie barely looked at the item before he asked,“ What to do with it? That sounds a little spooky. Did you have some kind of black magic spell in mind that you needed it for? You're not gonna steal a lock of my hair after I fall asleep, right?”

“No. Absolutely not. I, just, I was wearing it while I was all gross and sweaty and bleeding, so I figured the same rules as borrowing gym clothes applied, and I should wash it before I gave it back.” Steve tried to explain,” But you have so much stuff on it I didn't want to get ruined, and I wasn't sure how to go about it, and everything has been so insane all the time-”

“I get it. Worry not, Stevie.” Eddie tried to release him from whatever pressure he put on the idea. “Plus you don't really wash a battle vest. It's kinda supposed to go through hell and come out the other side with some authentic grime.”

“But another guy's blood and sweat? That's pretty extreme.” Steve commented. But his face said he leaned more towards 'nasty' than just 'hardcore.'

“You don't understand the culture. That's okay.”

“Alright. Well, then I guess my dilemma turned out for the best.” Steve ducked back into his closet.

Eddie more carefully examined his vest for all the wear and tear it saw. None of the patches or pins looked like they were in danger, but there were some new loose threads he could think about playing with. As he looked it over, he commented with a chuckle,“ Yeah, if you wanna uselessly panic about other stuff and wind up saving the day through inaction, there's the Vecna guy I don't know if you've heard about. I think those magic powers could really speed things along and get us all to summer break in one piece.”

Steve quickly turned out of the hanging garments and urged Eddie,“ Don't let Murray hear you strategize, or he'll barge in and spend an hour actually trying to make a plan out of it.”

He said it so seriously Eddie couldn't even get a response ready while Steve slinked out of the room to go across the hall. To change into the jammies and take care of his nightly routine in the comfort and privacy of his own bathroom. And before Eddie knew it, he was left alone in Steve Harrington's room. Sitting crisscross on the edge of his bed, a pile of denim in his lap, and far too much awareness of how fresh their friendship really was.

The rest of the house had gotten pretty quiet. They'd all turned in for an earlier evening after a long afternoon of work at Hop's cabin and some folks still adjusting their internal clocks to Hawkins time. A big, big house, packed with people, and yet there wasn't much noise.

Steve came back to his room just after a few minutes. He tossed his clothes from the day in a dirty laundry hamper and sat on the other side of the bed. Pushing down the covers before he swung his legs up under them. Eddie followed suit. Standing up to put his vest back on the desk chair for the time being, and climbed into the bed next to his roomie for the night.

And then Eddie and Steve were left to each other. In Steve's bed. Laying still as statues to get some well-deserved rest.

And it was nerve-racking. All of Eddie Munson's nerves were racked. He couldn't help thinking about how the whole situation was so far off the map for him a few weeks ago. On the 22nd of March, Eddie Munson held a broken glass to his neck, and everything's been so strangely on the up and up since. Minus the whole almost-dying part. They'd been forging a bond, a weird one, given such a distinctly separate history. But there they were. Having a sleepover in the famed King's bedroom.

And it wasn't any easier for Steve to deal with. It shouldn’t have been a big deal. It shouldn’t do or mean anything to him. Steve's done this sort of thing with Robin tons of times. Falling asleep next to someone you’re not attracted to should be easy and simple. But it wasn't.

Like, with Robin, they were both allowed to stretch their limbs out in all directions and hug the night away before they tried to kick one another off the bed. But, with Eddie, they were both practically on the edges of the mattress with their backs to each other so they wouldn't accidentally touch or even look at one another. And Steve wasn’t falling asleep. Instead, he felt like he couldn’t move without bothering Eddie.

What if his stitches were still super sore? What if he was lying about the vest and was actually bothered about the condition it was in? What if he was mad about his mom's ring?

And all of a sudden, Eddie started talking.

“You didn’t, by the way.”

Which didn't exactly make any sense as the first thing either of them had said in almost thirty minutes.

“What?”

“Stomp on me.” he clarified.

And it didn't immediately click. But after a second, Steve remembered what he said while Eddie was still in the coma. The part about “I was a bully,” and “I hope I didn't bully you,” but “I wouldn't really remember,” and “Tommy called it stomping on the ants” like that excused any of it. So that was the stomping Eddie was thinking about.

“Oh… so you…“

“Heard that bit?” Eddie finished for him. “Yeah. When our girlie woke me up in my head, some stuff outside started coming through. When there were a lot of you in the room, I couldn’t really follow any of it or understand what you were saying. But you stopped by on your own. Said that bit. It was easy to hear then.”

“Sorry. I honestly didn’t think you’d catch any of it.” Steve tucked his hands in closer to his face. More thankful than anything else that they couldn't see one another for this conversation.

And yet, Eddie joked,“ You planned to waste such a moving monologue on deaf ears? For shame, Harrington, for shame.”

“I just-” he tried again,” I’m sorry-“

But the other wouldn't hear it. “I just said you didn’t do it. Alright? Nothing to waste ‘sorry’ on.”

“But I must have, at some point.” Steve reasoned.

Unsure why his idea was to argue that, no, no, Eddie, actually he did mistreat you, you must be mistaken, think harder. But Eddie didn't waver. His voice was sure and even. And he simply affirmed the fact.

“You didn’t.”

“But-“

“I’ll admit, I convinced myself once or twice that you orchestrated all of it. Sent out your legions of jocks and goons to carry out your dastardly demands for you while keeping your hands clean. But, I know now that I was wrong about that idea.”

And with a pang of guilt that gnawed at his ribs, Steve spoke quietly,“ But I know I’ve said it.”

Freak. He called him The Freak. He knew he did. Hell, he said it just weeks ago when Dustin invited him to the game. He knew that.

But Eddie didn't dwell on it. Didn't deem it the important part.

“Not to me. Not once did you shove my face in it.”

“I’m still sorr-“ but Steve felt a smack on his shoulder. Carefully, he looked over to see that Eddie was laying face up, no longer with his back to Steve. The wall of air between them was gone, in one way or another. So Steve shifted over, joining him in laying back until he was looking up at his ceiling too.

“And do you always do that?” Eddie asked as he tried to get comfortable.

“Do what? Apologiz-”

“Talk through movies?” Eddie interrupted, steering the conversation way out into the left field,” I mean, I was unconscious, but I still heard your whole commentary on Grease. Very strong opinions you have on that one.”

“Okay, Sandy did nothing wrong and shouldn't have had to 'compromise' with Danny at the end just because he lied about their relationship to his guys for points. Had her story been about actually wanting to be less of a goody-two-shoes for her own reasons-”

Eddie stopped him before he really got going,“ That is what I'm talking about. Seriously, dude? And you had something specific to say every minute of it. Was practically watching it with you even with my eyes closed because you'd remind me what beat we were on without fail.”

He bumped into Steve's shoulder with his own. Small laughs bubbled up. And the whole situation didn't feel so awkward and stilted anymore.

“Yeah, I guess.” Steve agreed with a smile,” Rob and I are usually pretty chatty when we watch ‘em together. I think I picked it up from her.”

“Oh, yeah, you’re a real Chatty Cathy, Steve Harrington.”

“That such a bad thing?”

Eddie paused to think on it. But quickly decided otherwise. “Nah. I wouldn’t say so. Felt way less lonely with someone talking.”

Steve felt some pride settle back into himself,“ Then you’re welcome.”

“Oh, great,” he groaned,” Now I went and gave you a big head about it.”

“I think most people would tell you I already had one.” Steve pointed out.

“A big, stupid head.” Eddie took a finger and poked Steve right on the side of his forehead. But before Steve could really say anything else, he tugged the blanket up and rolled over in the bed. His back was up again, but it didn't feel so insurmountable. It was comfortable.

“Go to sleep,” he commanded. As if he wasn't the one that started their discussion in the first place.

Steve rolled onto his own side,” You go to sleep.”

A comeback fit for a first grader. My, how the mighty have fallen. But sometimes falling could be a good thing. Brings a person back down to Earth. Reminds them of all the other people that didn't climb too tall on their high horse.

And that kind of falling, the kind that Steve Harrington did, didn't make him shatter into broken pieces on the ground.

Some parts of a person need to break. Explicitly so they can put themselves back together. And maybe the breaks were always going to be there. But maybe he'd be the better for it. Maybe they all would.

#Totally didn't forget to post this for a while what are you talking about I've never-#Yeah #I did. Sorry Tumblr I need to get back into the habit of checking in on y'all over here. Working on it.#Anyway #I hope this chapter was everything a person could hope for a more?#I really wanted to develop the trauma they're all kind of going through - Robin has some PTSD - Eddie has some survivors guilt - etc #And more importantly than just the pain they are going through is the reality that none of them are alone #Even if they feel alone for a little while. Someone always shows up. And they don't have to sit in it by themselves anymore.#Also some Karen Wheeler X Dmitri Antanov because when I'm not making her sapphic that's my fave guy for her <3 #And I really really really love the scene in season 3 where Karen tells Nancy not to give up on what she wants from this life #And you can kind of see there's a little bit of longing as she says it to her. Pushing away maybe a little bit of regret what she didn't?#And I never see that stuff addressed - so I'm doing it #These characters are so complex goddamn #Also the lil D&D bit was heavily inspired by Drawfee's Drawtectives on YouTube and everyone should watch it #I dm-ed a similar session and it's so fun highly highly highly recommend #And I finally threw two character into an 'and there was only one bed' situation #After all my years of writing fanfiction I'm finally hitting first base #I have a lot of reasons on why I wrote that Steve didn't really bully Eddie in HS - I might make a whole discussion post about it #I know it's a pretty divisive headcanon - but after all the times I've poured over this show - this feels like the most accurate answer #Steve Harrington #Eddie Munson #Steddie #Steveddie #Steve x Eddie #Nancy Wheeler #Robin Buckney #Ronance #Robin x Nancy #The Fruity Four #Stranger Things

1 note · View note

webslinger-holland · 2 years

Text

Play Pretend | Eddie Munson

Summary: To escape the likes of Jason Carver, the reader has to play a little game of pretend with Eddie Munson himself.

Pairing: Eddie Munson x Fem!Reader

Warning: sexual tension, swearing, some kissing, fake relationship

Type: Oneshot

Word Count: 4,647 words

It had been one hell of a day and it was only lunchtime. During first period, Jason Carver had gone to extreme lengths to pass a note across the room to Y/n L/n. It read something along the lines of ‘meet me by the lockers after class.”

In response to reading the note, Y/n turned her head to look over her shoulder. She immediately spotted were the basketball jock was seated near the back of the class. He sent her a sly smile and a wink.

Turning back in her seat, Y/n groaned to herself in slight disgust. She crumpled up the piece of paper and discarded it to the side. He had been trying to shoot his shot since the start of senior year, but he couldn’t take the hint that she wasn’t interested.

During the short time between periods, Y/n was collecting her textbooks from her locker. She closed her locker door, jumping slightly upon seeing Jason standing on the other side.

He was trying to be cool. So Jason was leaning against the lockers with his arms crossed over his chest. He opened his mouth to say something, but she quickly cut him off.

“I don’t have time to talk. I’ve got class,” Y/n claimed. The bell rang to back up her excuse. She quickly scurried away from him, blending into the massive crowd of students in the hallway.

By the time lunch rolled around, Y/n was running through the hallways of the school. She was occasionally look over her shoulder to see if anyone was following her. She hurried past students in her path, apologizing to them as she ran into the lunchroom.

Desperately, Y/n’s eyes scanned the large crowd of students sitting at different tables in the cafeteria. Her eyes finally settled on one particular table on the far side of the room.

“Munson!” Y/n called out. She had cupped her hands around her mouth so it could be heard over the crowd.

While few people would have actually heard her over the commotion, Eddie surprisingly raised his head to look over the crowd. He heard his name once again. Finally, Eddie’s gaze landed on a familiar face.

“What?” Eddie mouthed from across the room.

Not wanting to draw any more attention to herself, Y/n decided that she shouldn’t yell across the room again. She glanced over her shoulder one more time. She then quickly made her way through the crowd of students in the cafeteria.

The Hellfire Club was confused by her mannerism. They all seemed to follow her figure as she made her way across the room. They ate their lunch slowly.

As Y/n approached the side of their table, Eddie scooted back in his chair to face her more. He held his hands up in defeat as if he was already trying to say he didn’t do anything.

Much to his surprise, Y/n waltzed right up to him. She placed her hand on his left shoulder and pushed him backwards so he was leaning against the back of his chair.

“Play along, Munson.” She demanded.

Without warning, Y/n lowered herself into his thigh and swung her legs to drape across his lap. She wrapped her one arm around the back of his neck. And the other hand came to rest on his chest.

“Wha—” Eddie was at a loss for words.

His hands were still held up in a defensive manner as if he was too afraid to lay his hands on her, which he absolutely was.

Now Y/n took her time to scan the room. She looked for the young boy that had been following her all day long. She knew he would show up at some point.

Finally, as if on cue, Jason Carver hurried into the entrance of the cafeteria. He took note of his surroundings, searching for one person in particular. By the look of it, it seemed like he hadn’t spotted her just yet. Perfect.

“As much as I love having you in my lap,” Eddie’s voice drew her back to reality momentarily. “What are we doing?” Eddie questioned.

At the given moment, Eddie tried to study her face and find out what this was all about. He followed her line of gaze in attempts to see who she was looking for.

Suddenly, Eddie felt her grasp his chin. She turned his head so that he was looking directly at her. She had this dark serious look in her eyes.

“Eyes on me,” Y/n whispered to him sternly.

“Yes ma’am,” Eddie nodded his head.

“Do you trust me?” Y/n questioned.

Normally, Eddie would come up with some snarky remark in retaliation just to mess with her. However, Eddie saw that she was no in a playing mood. She maintained this serious look. Her eyebrows rose as she waited for his answer.

“Y-Yeah. Of course I do,” Eddie said with a small nod of the head.

“Good,” Y/n said finally.

Out of nowhere, Y/n went to grab the lapels of his black leather jacket. She pulled him forward until his lips connected with hers.

For a brief second, Eddie’s eyes were wide open in total shock. He didn’t really know what to do or even what to think. He flailed his arms slightly at his sides as if he didn’t really know what to do with them.

With some hesitation, Eddie let himself go. His eyes fluttered shut. His body eventually began to relax in pure and total bliss. He grew more accustomed to the feeling of her soft lips against his own. He began to kiss her back.

“Did that just happened?” Dustin asked out loud. He looked at Mike who was sitting right next to him just to make sure he was seeing the same thing as him.

In response, Eddie kicked Dustin’s leg underneath the table as if to shut him up. He naturally cursed at the pain that shot through his leg. His face scrunched up while he rubbed his leg to comfort himself.

The two of them ended up losing themselves in the kiss. They didn’t seem to pay any attention to their surroundings, forgetting that they were kissing in a room full of other students. They were totally lost in each other.

Her hands snaked up the length of his chest to link around his neck. She played with his soft curls. She was able to smell the spicy from his cologne or body spray; she wasn’t sure what he used but it smelled nice.

At this point, Eddie was basically melting into her. He had never tasted something so sweet; it must have been her lipgloss. He laid his hands to rest on her hip and her thigh. His thumb rubbed small circles on her inner thigh. He tried to pull her as close as humanly possible, shifting her body more into his lap.

Just when things were starting to progress a little, by means of Eddie slipping his hand under her sweater to caress her soft skin, the sound of someone clearing their throat had filled their ears. The two of them pulled away from each other to direct their attention towards the sound.

Much to the surprise of almost everyone, Jason Carver stood on the far end of their table. His hands were placed in his hips which made him look like a father who was able to scold his rebellious teenage daughter. His face was beet red and his jaw was clenched tight.

“Oh! Jason!” Y/n was the first to speak up. “I didn’t see you there,” Y/n lied.

Looking between the two of them, Eddie secretly wondered if she had been trying to get away from the head of the basketball team. He had known for some time that the guy had been trying to ask her out for some time. It wouldn’t have surprised him if she was just trying to get away from him.

“Y/n,” Jason spoke sternly. “What are you doing with these…freaks?” He emphasized.

She ignored his question by rolling her eyes at him. She redirected the conversation by asking him a question.

“Can I help you with something, Carver?” Y/n wondered. She tilted her head to the side as if she was waiting for him to answer.

“Listen…” Jason began. When he turned his head, he realized that almost everyone in the cafeteria was looking their way. “I think I’ve made my intentions very clear,” Jason claimed.

“Is that so?” Y/n tried to egg him on.

“Yes! I’ve been asking you out since the beginning of the semester, but you keep playing hard to get.” Jason complained.

“Did you ever stop to realize that I might not be interested in you?” Y/n finally said.

“Come on, Y/n. Let’s be serious,” Jason scoffed. He started listing off some of his best qualities. “I am smart, I get good grades. I am the head of the basketball team. I’m—,” Jason was cut off.

“Narcissistic?” Y/n suggested.

“Egotistical?” Eddie added.

But Jason seemed to ignore both of their comments. He held his hands up in defeat so he could finally present his case.

“I just wanna know,” Jason said slowly. “Will you go out with me?”

“I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again,” Y/n said with a small shake of the head. “No,” she enunciated.

“Why not?” Jason almost whined.

“I could give you a million reasons,” Y/n rolled her eyes. She just then remembered her precious white lie. “Starting with: I am already in a committed relationship,” she announced.

For their sake, Eddie tried his hardest not to let his emotions show too clearly on his face. He would have most certainly rose his eyebrows in surprise if not for their current situation. This statement was a little shocking to hear because it wasn’t true.

However, Eddie found himself smiling at the statement. He just couldn’t wait to see the look on Jason’s face. Sure enough, the basketball boy was at a total loss for words. He must have been boiling with jealousy and anger. He eventually spoke up.

“With this freak?” He gestured to the man himself. “I don’t believe it,” Jason scoffed.

“I don’t know, man.” Mike interjected.

At this, Mike had turned his head to look between his friends. He remembered the whole ‘play along’ part and he decided to jump in to help them out.

“Did you see that kiss?” Mike said in a hinting manner. The others quickly caught on.

“Y-Yeah!” Dustin stumbled a bit. “Have you seen them?”

“They’re always all over each other,” Lucas chimed in.

“So in love,” Mike added. He was almost over selling it.

“Y-Yeah,” Eddie finally spoke up which caused everyone to look at him. “In fact, we’ll be celebrating our three month anniversary next week,” Eddie lied.

Just to piss off Jason even more, Eddie pulled the girl farther onto his lap. He leaned forward to that his face was hovering right next to the side of her face. He smirked evilly to himself. He went so far as to nip at her ear.

“What were we thinking, baby? A nice fancy dinner in town and then maybe we take things back to my place,” Eddie suggested.

“Eddie!” Y/n said almost surprised.

This was one of the first times that she had actually called him by his first name. She proceeded to slap his chest in a playful manner as if she were scolding him for saying such a thing. But he only smiled at her.

In that moment, Eddie pressed a small kiss on her lips. He was trying his hardest to convince everyone that they were in a relationship. And they were doing a pretty good job from how casual that second kiss looked.

They were putting up one hell of an act. While anyone could see that from their mannerism, they still played along where people couldn’t see. Such as under the table.

Eddie had his hand laying on the top of her black nylon covered thigh. His thumb rubbed small circles on the inside of her thigh, which was dangerously close to her heat. This caused her to blush profusely and forget for a second what she was thinking.

All the while, Y/n was mindlessly playing with the silver rings on his fingers. He felt a cold shiver rise up his spine upon feeling her caressing his long fingers so gently.

Both of them had grown somewhat distracted by each other’s actions. They just briefly glanced at one another through the corner of their eye. But then, Jason brought them back to reality.

“You’re sick, freak.”

“You’re one to talk,” Y/n mumbled under her breath.

“What did you just say to me?” Jason asked angrily.

This caused Eddie to tighten his hold on the girl in his lap. It could have been in a protective manner or as a warning to her to watch herself. She wasn’t sure.

All the sudden, Y/n rose to her feet in order to stand tall. She honestly didn’t care that everyone was now looking at her. She climbed onto the top of the table, which made a little ruckus.

She strode towards the every end of the table. Then she proceeded to squat down so that she was face to face with him. She narrowed her eyes at him.

“I said,” she said slowly. “You, Jason Carver, are a sick freak.”

The whole cafeteria erupted in ‘oohs’ as if saying they could feel the weight of her words and how much they burned.

Silently, Eddie stood to his own feet. He kept one hand on the table, taking a defensive stance. He was scared that she was getting too far ahead of herself and he wanted to be there for her in case something went down.

“You don’t think of anyone but yourself,” Y/n sneered. “You think you’re so high and mighty, better than everyone else here.”

Upon hearing this, Jason only crossed his arms over his chest and rolled his eyes at her comment. He saw that everyone was looking their way and listening to everything she said. It started making him nervous.

“You keep chasing after me because it pisses you off when you don’t get exactly what you want,” Y/n jabbed. “And the funny part is: you think you deserve everything the world has to offer,” Y/n chuckled.

Then Y/n raised her hand to show her fingers. She began listing off reasons why he thought he was deserving.

“Because you’re smart, because you’re the head of the basketball team, because of your status in society,” she carried on.

She leaned real close to him so that he could hear her final point. She knew she was playing with fire and speaking with venom in her voice.

“But let’s make something clear,” Y/n said. “You are nothing more than a pretentious little prick who’s got a stick so far up your own ass that you can’t take a fucking hint.”

He gritted his teeth and dug his fingers into the sleeves of his sports jacket. He was fuming at this point.

“So take the fucking hint, Carver. I’m not interested,” Y/n concluded.

Finally, Y/n rose to her feet and stood tall on the table. She looked down at him like he was lower than dirt. She spun around on the heels of her feet and walked back toward the other end of the table.

The Hellfire club members had stood up from their seats. They began to applaud her in the most dramatic way. They looked on her with such admiration in their eyes as if she was their savior.

At the end of the table, Eddie offered his hand to her like a gentlemen. She gladly took hold of it. He helped her climb off the table with the assistance of his hand.

As she began to walk away from the group, she looked over her shoulder and motioned for him to follow with the simple curl of her finger. He hurried to catch up with her, which caused him to almost stumble over his feet.

“Keep up, Munson.” She encouraged.

He trailed right behind her like a lost puppy, practically walking on the heels of her feet. He seemed mesmerized by her movements. He smiled to himself successfully.

Behind them, the other members of the club had joined them as they left the cafeteria. At one point, Y/n and Eddie had both turned around to flip the douchebag the bird. They waved their hands in the air, flipping him off in the process.

Even Dustin had turned around to flip him off. He was just mirroring Eddie who he admired so dearly and who had such an influence on him.

For the time being, Eddie and Y/n didn’t speak about the encounter in the cafeteria. They also didn’t talk about the whole ‘play pretend’ deal. It seemed like there was just this silent mutual agreement that, whenever Jason was around, they’d play pretend.

Less than a week later, Jason Carver was seeing walking around the hallways with his new girlfriend on his arm. Her name was Chrissy Cunningham. She was a pretty cheerleader.

It seemed like everyone in school knew that he was only dating her to get back at his old crush. The only person who didn’t seem to know that was Chrissy herself, which was honestly quite sad.

This was proven when Jason would be kissing Chrissy in the hallway with one eye peered open to check to see if Y/n was watching. She never was because she simply didn’t care.

It seemed like Jason was trying to tell absolutely everybody that he was so in love with Chrissy, but most people still believed he was still caught up on Y/n.

To prove himself, Jason would bring Chrissy flowers almost everyday. He’d write her love notes to put in his locker. He’s give her shoutouts at his basketball games. He was trying to go all out just so that Y/n knew about his new relationship status.

In contrast, whenever Jason was nearby, Eddie and Y/n would put on one hell of a show for him. Sometimes it consisted of Eddie putting his arm around her in the hallway. One time, Eddie had passed a note to Jason in class, asking if he’d be so kind as to hand it to Y/n. They both got a good laugh out of this, especially when the note only said “wanna smoke after school?”

There were times when Eddie and Y/n would be talking to each other before class. When Jason walked in, Y/n could see him in her peripheral vision. She would pop her lips into her mouth to contain her smile. Then she would widen her eyes a little at Eddie as if to tell him that he was here.

As if he read her mind, Eddie would lean down to capture her lips in his own. His body would be towering over her smaller figure sitting smartly at her desk.

Of course, Jason tried to play it off like it didn’t bother him. He’d simply roll his eyes and scoff at those two. He proceeded to head towards his own seat. He flopped down before casually glancing at them through the corner of his eye.

It had been a few months now. It was drawing closer to fall break. One day, Eddie was standing right beside Y/n locker. He was waiting for her to finish grabbing her school books so they could walk to their next class together. When Eddie looked up, he spotted Jason heading their way.

Although Jason hadn’t seen them yet, Eddie figured that he would soon. So despite the fact that they hadn’t physically spoken about their pact, Eddie decided to act on it since he was getting closer to them.

In that moment, Eddie went to grab onto her arms and made her turn to face him. He tried to look over her shoulder inconspicuously.

“Don’t look now. You-know-who is headed our way,” Eddie said to her without moving his lips.

He could feel her tense up in his grasp. He tried to assess the situation. He wanted to get back at him and he knew what would piss him off.

Without hesitation, Eddie lowered his hand to grasp her chin. He forced her to look up at him. He dipped his head down slightly.

“Just play along, baby girl.” He whispered.

In that exact moment, Jason had lifted his head just in time to see the two of them press their lips together in a kiss. He felt his fists clench at his sides and his face changed to the color of fire. He stormed off.

Meanwhile, Eddie had wrapped his arms around her waist. He pulled her as close as humanly possible. He was trying to enjoy and savor every single second spent kissing her.

There was a part of him that desperately wanted them to keep up with their ‘fake relationship.’ He would gladly keep pretending if it meant he got to be with her, even if it didn’t mean anything. He wanted her so badly.

He feared the day they would give up their game of pretend. He figured that it would only be a matter of time before they had to stop.

Now Eddie hated to admit just how hard he fell in love with her. In the beginning, he tried telling himself not to get too attached since it was only temporary and entirely fake.

But every time he saw her precious smile or he heard her pretty little laugh, he only found that he was falling deeper and deeper in love with her. He loved everything about her. He liked playing games with her, tricking everyone around them. He could list off a million things he loved and admired about her. He savored every moment spent with her.

So this time, when he kissed her, he kissed her with such desperation. It was as if he was trying to communicate how he felt towards her and how he never wanted to let her go. He silently prayed she could read his mind.

When Eddie finally pulled away, he could have sworn that he saw a twinkle in her eyes. She stared at him with her mouth slightly agape, catching her breath. He wondered if she was studying his face or searching for something.

“C—Can we talk? After school?” Y/n wondered.

Upon hearing those words, Eddie felt his heart drop in the confines of his chest. He thought the day had finally come. And the pain was nearly unbearable

“Y—Yeah. Of course,” Eddie struggled. But he nodded his head in confirmation.

The two of them agreed to meet by the picnic table in the woods. It was where Eddie did a lot of his deals. But it was a quiet, private, and secluded area where they could speak freely.

By the time Y/n had come to the picnic table, Eddie was already sitting there. He was fiddling with his hands nervously. He stared down at the old warped wood. He heard her approach him so he looked up at her.

For some unknown reason, Y/n couldn’t bring herself to sit down at the table. She instead opted for pacing back and forth. She tried to collect her words since she had rehearsed them in her head during the last couple periods of school.

The whole time, Eddie was watching her like a hawk. He had a feeling he knew what she was about to say. He had this horrible feeling in his gut and the pain in his chest had been hurting for some time. He wore a worried expression on his face.

“I—I can’t keep doing this,” Y/n began. She ran her fingers through her hair, pulling her hair in slight frustration.

“I understand,” Eddie confessed with a small sigh of defeat.

“I can’t keep playing pretend,” Y/n added. She had tears streaming in the corners of her eyes. She was so afraid to come out and say it. But she had to. “Not when I’ve fallen in love with you,” Y/n confessed.

Upon hearing this, Eddie snapped his head up so he could look at her and see if he heard her correctly. He cautiously rose to his feet. His mouth had parted slightly since he couldn’t find the right words.

Slowly, Eddie made his way around the side of the table until he was standing right in front of her. He saw how nervous and anxious she looked as if she feared his answer.

“You—” Eddie began.

“Yes,” Y/n cut him off.

“You’re in love with me?” Eddie wanted confirmation. He pointed to himself just to be clear.

“I am in love with you, Eddie Munson.” Y/n confessed softly. She sent him a small nervous smile. “I have been for some time,” she added.

“How long?” Eddie truthfully wanted to know.

“I liked you since before our whole scheme. But I started falling for you the more we hung out. I—I just didn’t know how to tell you,” Y/n said truthfully.

With shaky hands, Y/n was quick to wipe away the fears falling down her cheeks. She sniffled slightly. She fiddled with her hands to contain her anxiety. She couldn’t bare to look at him.

“If you don’t feel the same way, I completely understand. I just thought you had the right to know. And if I’ve ruined our dynamic and our friendship, then I am truly sorry—,” but she couldn’t finish her sentence.

Because Eddie Munson had cupped her face in his hands and silenced her with a kiss. Their mouths were moving together in a synchronized harmony. Their lips fit together like two perfect puzzle pieces and it was the most satisfying thing.

Their hearts were beating rapidly against their chests, threatening to break through the thin barrier. They could practically feel the blood and adrenaline pumping and coursing through their veins. They felt a rush of euphoric bliss envelop their beings, making their hearts sing with pure joy. Their hearts could barely contain the million different emotions surged through their bodies; desire, hunger, love, lust.

His lips were quite course, almost chapped. He kissed her with such dominance as if he were afraid she would slip through his fingers. On the other hand, her lips were so soft and gentle. She returned the kiss with the same amount of passion. She melted into his embrace.

In the end, the two of them beings needed oxygen to survive. They had quite reluctantly pulled away from each other. They carefully leaned forward to rest their heads together. The two panted heavily to regain their breath. They stared into each other’s eyes, feeling at a loss for words.

“I—I don’t understand,” Y/n said. She closed her eyes and furrowed her eyebrows in confusion.

“I love you too,” Eddie explained. “I thought that was obvious,” Eddie chuckled softly.

“You—you do?” She had tears in her eyes.

“Yes, baby girl.” He tucked a single strand of hair behind her ear. He then choked her cheek and caressed it with his thumb. “Ever since you kissed me in the cafeteria, I knew I was a goner,” Eddie said breathlessly.

They quickly found that they were at a loss for words. Neither of them knew what to say or what to do. They could feel the smiles growing at the corners of their lips. Then they began to laugh.

Suddenly, Eddie and Y/n found themselves going in for a tight embrace. They held each other so tightly like they were afraid they’d loose each other. They stood still.

“I don’t want to pretend you’re mine anymore,” Eddie whispered to her. “I want you to be mine, all mine.”

She smiled at this. And closed her eyes to savor his words. She went to kiss his cheek.

“You have me. All of me.”

THOUGHTS?

PART TWO HERE

#eddie munson #eddie munson fluff #eddie munson angst #eddie munson smut #eddie munson oneshot #eddie munson x reader #eddie munson imagine #eddie stranger things #eddie munson x you #joseph quinn #joseph quinn x reader

25K notes · View notes

livwritesstuff · 2 months

Text

“Papa has to put five dollars in the jar,” Hazel proudly announces the very moment she and Steve arrive home from her evening dance class.

“Jesus Christ,” Eddie groans his place at the stove where he’s cooking dinner, “What’d you do this time?”

The Jar is actually a repurposed animal crackers container – the big plastic kind shaped like a bear. Most people think it’s a swear jar which, honestly, Steve and Eddie are fine with because that’s probably better than the reality of the situation – that they (it’s mostly Steve, actually) need a system to keep in check the petty fights they get into with practically everyone they know.

“I just–” Steve starts, and then he rolls his eyes, “I don’t get why some people have kids if they clearly don’t want to be part of their kids’ lives.”

“Little pitchers,” Eddie reminds him – as in little pitchers have big ears, as in their children hear everything they say, whether they want them to or not.

Steve ignores him.

“So her class was about to wrap up – they had, like, five minutes left – and they all came out of the room looking all excited and they said they wanted to show us their recital dance so far because they’re almost done learning it.”

“Sure,” Eddie comments.

“And this one kid is, like, rushing to put her shoes and coat on over her little tutu thing because her mom’s waiting in the car outside, and she goes to get her, and then, like, five minutes later she comes back inside in tears because her mom didn’t want to come in.”

Eddie shakes his head, equally unimpressed.

“Anyways, they do their little routine and – Ed, they were so excited, and they tripped over each other the entire time and none of them know what they’re doing and it’s so fucking cute, man. I have no idea how anyone wouldn’t want to watch that.”

“Right,” Eddie said slowly, because he knows Steve well enough to start piecing together where The Jar might come into play.

“So when it was over,” Steve continues, “I walked the kid to her mom’s car and I told her that she missed a good show and that her daughter very obviously wanted her there.”

“Steve.”

“I really don’t think I did anything wrong,” Steve defended.

“Cough it up, big boy. Jar.”

#when the jar is full they have to donate it to their HOA so they're trying really hard to not add anything to it #liv’s steddie dads verse #steddie #steddie dads #steve harrington #eddie munson #judgy-steve my beloved

1K notes · View notes

eddiernunson · 5 months

Text

"Do You Want One?" | Eddie Munson x Fem!Reader | 18+

Summary: your cousin shows you around Hawkins High for your first day, and is surprised to say the least when her sweet cousin hooks onto Eddie Munson. Just seeing him brings a swoop to your stomach you've never quite felt before, and become desperate for more of him.

Warnings: late bloomer!reader, virgin!reader, mentions never having experienced lust of the sort or really understanding what it is, corruption!kink, little praise, taking of virginity, slight perv!eddie

Authors' note: I, myself didn't feel any sort of sexual attraction or lust until i was 15/16. I tried to write the reader innocent without being infantilized. Also, these photos are for aesthetics only, not much of the reader is described, except for height. Also, my editor pulled through, despite her busy schedule, thanks @forget-you-morelike-fuck-you! This is a birthday present to @bebe07011, always one of the first to read <3

Word Count: 9k

The subtle, yet annoying ring of your alarm yanks you out of your sleep, a sleep that took hours to settle into after anxious tossing and turning. A yawn overtakes your body as you sit up, looking around sleepily at the boxes that contain the contents of your room. You whine as the stars overflow your vision from the rubbing of your eye.

Your tongue clicks against the roof of your mouth, tasting the mint of your mouthwash when your mom pushes a bagel into your hand. Most of the kitchen is still in boxes, just a few appliances on the unnaturally bare counters. “Hey, Aunt Karen just called and said Nancy will be here any minute.” She offers, and a part of you feels for the bags under her eyes.

“Thanks.” You say, garbled with a piece of bagel in your mouth.

“Oh, and Mike is being a little testy, so he probably won’t move from the front seat for you.” She laughs, shaking her head.

You shrug, not caring. “I’ve been in the backseat for this long.”

Two honks out the front announce their arrival, and you ignore the anxious reminders she hurriedly spits out as you grab your backpack by the front door, already filled with school supplies from Texas. You shout an I love you to her as the Wheelers’ Station Wagon comes into your sight from the swung open door, finally out of her worried clutches that you’ve been in from the last week straight.

True to Aunt Karen’s word, Mike gave a defiant look when Nancy demanded he get out the front seat. Again, you didn’t care. “Sorry Mike has a ruler up his ass.” Nancy apologizes, her smirk reaching your own in the rearview.

You roll your eyes, a signal that it really doesn’t matter to you.

Hawkins, miniscule in comparison to that of your old home, Houston, passes by in the windows and you huff a sigh out at how much smaller your world has gotten. Your town, your school…you wish you could go back and give a reality check to the girl who patronized Nancy for it on the phone.

As promised, Nancy shows you to the front office and your first few classes. Being the new girl in the middle of a semester is absolute bullshit, but at least it wasn’t Forks, Washington levels of bullshit. That level of attention would’ve had you crawling under a bridge. Thank God only one teacher asked you to introduce yourself to the class. The rest of them couldn’t even be bothered.

Nancy sits alone at lunch, a notepad in her hand next to a near empty lunch tray. One thing you notice is that this school is much more categorized than yours was. It felt straight out of a high school dramedy, one you would criticize for being cliché.

Oh. Maybe it does some have truth to it.

“Hey loner.” You greet her, your butt hitting the hard plastic chair.

“I’m not a loner.” She huffs, hand moving absentmindedly as she writes. “My news team is getting this week’s paper done, we usually get it done during lunch.”

You roll your eyes, having noted the empty space on her tray. “You work too hard.”

“Nope. If you fail to plan, you plan to fail.” She answers, her signature side smirk on her face. Sometimes, only sometimes, Nancy doesn’t really have a serious bone in her body.

You gesture to the cafeteria, opening your fruit cup. “So, tell me about your very categorized cafeteria.”

She laughs, pausing in the middle of the sentence she’s writing. “So. There’s the jocks/cheerleaders, the nerds, the band nerds, drama nerds, science nerds—"

“Those are different from the regular nerds?” You ask, eyebrow quirked.

“Yes.” She deadpans. “Those are the kids without a clique,” she points, a bunch of kids not interacting, shyly nibbling at their lunches. “And finally, where my brother sits. Hellfire.”

It felt dramatic, but the table definitely earned their last but not least position. They stand out from the crowd, not seeming to care about fitting in like everyone else so desperately does. From the looks of it, individually, none of them would fit in the crowd. As a group, they stick out like a sore thumb. They don’t even care.

Nancy seems to be speaking, but she fades into the background. While you tricked yourself into believing you were observing the table, it occurs to you your eyes are fixated on the head of it, your heart beating out of your chest as you stare at him.

Him.

“Who’s he?” You interrupt Nancy, watching as his long frizzy hair curtain over his face. You didn’t even know someone in real life could be this good looking, you were sure it was reserved for celebrities in magazines.

Nancy switches her glance back and forth between your slack jaw and wide eyes and him. “That’s Eddie Munson.” She answers, her voice calculated. “The dork that I complained about Mike copying, remember?”

Your tongue reaches out to lick your lips, staring at him distractedly. A hot feeling in the swell of your gut overwhelms your senses. “You described a wet-rat loser.”

Nancy huffs in abrupt laughter. “That’s cause he is!”

“Him?” You ask, this hot feeling starting to radiate. You notice it’s especially hot in your crotch, a sort of…want you’ve never felt before. You’ve never craved for anyone this badly.

Nancy laughs in disbelief, surprised to say the least that her sweet cousin is openly drooling over Eddie The Freak Munson of all people. “I can put in a good word, if you want.” She teases, smirking at the way your eyes widen in panic.

“No, no, please don’t.” You insist, your eyes finally flickering back to her.

“Fine, you can drool from afar.” She muses. “Oh, lunch’ll be over in a handful of minutes. What’s your next class?”

“History.” You answer, viewing your crumpled schedule. God, not another boring lecture.

Nancy bites her lip, something she’s clearly not willing to share with the class. You don’t ask, still trying to catch your breath.

She walks you across the school to the classroom littered with historical figures and maps. She salutes you, telling you she’ll see you in AP Calculus right after this one. The look on her face never leaves it, she’s always got a secret right under the surface, but this one seemed more entertaining than the rest.

When you enter the classroom, the teacher tells you there’s assigned seats in this one and lucky for you, there’s one seat left. She directs you to the far-left corner, signalling to the one on the right. You shyly ignore the looks on your new classmates faces, all of them observing the face of the new kid who started so late in the year.

New faces are always hard to ignore, it’s just human nature to stare. Still, your stage fright is present in the forefront of your mind.

Your teacher starts the lecture by introducing you as a new kid, offering a wave to everyone that turns their head to look at you. Why can’t teachers just learn to be normal?

Your head is turned down, leaning on your elbow as she starts to explain a concept you’ve already learned last year. Are they sure they put you in a grade 12 class? At least this will be easier than most. Suddenly the heavy door opens, and your heart stutters as the man who’s taken over your every thought stumbles into the room ten minutes late.

“Mr. Munson! How nice of you to join us!” She greets, her scowl indicating that it’s anything but.

“You are so welcome, Miss. Greyson.” Eddie answers, his voice dripping in a tenor tone that sends a shiver down your spine. Not a lick of sarcasm comes from him, answering as if she was genuine.

She sighs, closing her eyes in exasperation. “Just go have a seat.”

Something in you suddenly realizes that the only available seat is right next to yours. A thrill takes over you, biting your lip excitedly as he struts as if he has all the time in the world.

After a brief stint on the projector, Miss. Greyson instructs the class to open their textbooks and answer questions on the following pages. “You may work in pairs.” She answers the many raised hands, and the room is filled by the harsh sound of desks groaning against the floor.

You get up from your desk, leaning into the teacher as she gathers the laminated sheets she had just used for the lesson. “I don’t have a textbook, yet.”

“Oh, I’m so sorry.” She replies, dropping her pile to shuffle off to her desk. “I completely forgot, in all the excitement.” She hands you the textbook that looks about fifteen years old, the spine cracked to oblivion. She leans in as you grab it, an apologetic look on her face. “I’m sorry about the placement of your desk, just ignore him. There was no one I hated in this classroom enough to place next to him.”

You resist the urge to raise an eyebrow, perplexed at her open disdain for him. It reminded you of the tone of voice Nancy had over the phone, wondering if the whole school was really this open about it. “I’ll live.” You answer, and she winks like you two share a secret.

Your textbook lands harshly on the desk, opening it to the page indicated in white chalk written on the blackboard. God, the reading is four pages, and the questions are a paragraph each. This much reading on the downfall of Mycenae? A jarring noise to your left surprises you, looking up to face his desk come closer and closer.

He leans over, a smile on his face that sends a thrill right through you. “So, how come I’ve never seen you around?”

He talks low, you spend the time hoping he doesn’t notice the goosebumps that trails over your skin. “Uh, I just started today.” You beg yourself to seem normal, to look him in the eyes like a decent conversationalist. You can’t bring yourself to, no matter how hard you try. Somehow you know when you finally look in those eyes of his, you’ll be too mesmerized to look away.

The printed words on the page make no sense, just a blur of boring text in black and white.

He leans back in his chair; you can feel his eyes planted on you. “Ah, makes sense. I would’ve remembered seeing your pretty face around.”

Oh my god he just called me pretty. Surely, he’s lying? Being in his line of sight and being considered good looking enough to him for him to even glance at was never in your wildest imagination, picturing him glazing right over you. Just a bug on the windshield. You gulp, pretending to be infatuated with the page in front of you instead of the man next to you.

“You shy?” He asks. In the corner of your eye, you see him leaning onto his elbow, his eyes staring a hole in your head.

Finally, you tear your glance off the textbook and onto him. God were you right about his eyes. How can a pair of brown eyes be so captivating? They’re a perfect chocolate brown, his mouth in a lopsided expression that sucks the air out of your lungs. “A little.” You admit, distracted by the sound of his fingers tapping rhythmically on the desk.

His limber fingers are dressed in chunky silver rings, the sight of his hands moving distractedly suddenly sends the heat you felt in your stomach earlier into a frenzy, the pull strong and overwhelming. “I can work with that.” A shy smile lands on your face, clenching your teeth as a method of resisting the urge to smile ear to ear. “Can I get a name?”

You tell him and hearing it from his lips is a vice and a half. “And you’re Eddie.” You say before he can introduce himself.

“So, my reputation precedes me.” He laughs, crossing his arms. “Or am I exactly like they said?”

You shrug. “Not exactly.”

His shoulders indicate a silent huff of laughter. “Care to expand on that?”

You shrug again. “You’re just…different.”

The look on his face indicates this answer isn’t good enough, but he doesn’t care to ask you to expand any further. As you work on your homework, finally settling your heartbeat and breathing rate, he writes in a notebook littered with graffiti. His left foot rests on the edge of his desk, the book resting on his thigh as he writes with the dull pencil.

He’s not doing any homework, but he’s at least letting you work on yours. The bell finally rings, dismissing you from your class and the room fills with chatter as everyone packs their bags. “You know where your next class is?”

You shake your head; having told Nancy you could work it out on your own. “Uh, no. It’s AP Calculus with Mr. Warner.”

“Mr. Warner.” He muses, his notebook in one hand and carrying a small metal tin. “Here, I’ll walk you.”

You pause, gulping as your bag rests on one shoulder. “You don’t have to do that.” You insist, suddenly realizing he’s about a whole head taller than you.

He smiles, his gaze making you feel…hot. “I didn’t ask, sweetheart.”

The way you gulp, your wide eyes darting back and forth between his, your teeth biting on your bottom lip nervously, Eddie was startled at the physical reaction and it was all going straight to his dick. The urge to shove his thumb between your pretty, plump lips is overwhelming, to say the least.

“Oh.” You answer, fingernails digging into the strap of your backpack. “Then lead the way.”

Eddie shakes his head, starting down the hallway to the other end of the school. As soon as he reaches the classroom, he turns around, leaning against the locker on his arm, neck hunching over you. Oh god, he’s gorgeous. “Will you let me take you out on a date, tonight?”

Every bone in your body wants to say yes, fingers just itching to reach out and touch his lithe hips. “My mom won’t let me go out on a Monday.”

So, that was not a No. “I would’ve asked for Friday, but I can’t wait that long.”

His admission drives you crazy, that heat ever present. Things like this just don’t happen. “Neither can I.” You admit, feeling scared of the rush that overwhelms you, yet scared of the idea of it never happening. You think quickly, biting your lip. “Think you can pick me up from my cousin’s house?”

He squints, crossing his arms as he leans against the locker. “Who’s your cousin?"

“Nancy Wheeler.”

His eyes bug out of the sockets, sighing in disbelief. “You’re cousins with Wheeler?” You nod, wondering if there’s any unspoken animosity between them. “I’ve dropped her kid brother off a few times, I know where she lives. You gonna tell your mom where you’re heading out for the night?”

You shake your head, sure he knows the answer, already.

Eddie huffs, hoping the crotch of his pants won’t give him away. “You ever snuck out before?”

“No.” You answer, looking up as the bell rings. “But I’m sure I can manage.”

You can’t place the expression on his face, somewhere between bewildered and amused.

For the record, it’s pure lust, having just met you and he’s already accidentally convincing you to sneak out for him. He wants you to, wondering if one day you’ll go so far to skip class to have fun with him under the bleachers.

His eyes leer down your body, watching as your skirt dances across your bare thighs while your feet can’t stay in place. He plays with his fingers absentmindedly, just barely resisting the urge to move them past the barrier and watch your face melt in pleasure.

“What time?” Eddie asks, eyes flickering up to your sweet face.

You think about it, knowing you’ll need time to grab at least a dress and get ready at the Wheelers’. “7:30.”

Eddie laughs, turning away from you and back down the hall to where you presumed his class was. “Pick you up at 7.”

“I-I said 7:30!”

“I’ll honk twice!” He answers, hand in his pocket like he didn’t just glue you into place.

The echo of his voice suddenly reminds you the halls are empty, only a few feet away from Mr. Warners classroom. You know more than anyone that AP Calculus students just aren’t late. Maybe he’ll give you grace on your first day.

You ignore the way every set of eyes switch to you, looking around the room for an empty seat. Luckily, Nance has saved one right next to you. “Hi, sorry. Couldn’t find it.”

“That’s alright, take this and have a seat right next to Miss.Wheeler, there.” He offers, gesturing to your cousin.

When the lecture ends and he assigns homework, she gets right to the point. “So, how was History?”

You sigh, rolling your eyes in exasperation. “You knew he’d be there.” You accuse, her grin affirming your assumption completely. “A warning would’ve been nice.”

“Not like you had to speak to him.” Nancy sighs, opening her textbook to the page indicated.

You stare at her pointedly, opening your book to a random page. “I sat next to him.”

Nancy instinctively knows something is up, seeing something was on your mind. “There’s something you’re not telling me.”

“You’ve barely given me a chance.” You comment sarcastically, looking over at her expectant face. “He…he asked me out.”

To say Nancy is surprised at this development would be simply, an understatement. “I’m sorry?”

You grin, finally letting that smile you’ve been hiding take over. “He’s picking me up at 7.”

“Like your mom will let you go out on a weekday.” She squints, knowing your mom’s tendencies to make you prioritize school over anything else.

“…which is why I need you to cover for me.” You hesitate, grinning shyly when she gives you a look of utter disbelief.

“Seriously?” You nod, pleading with her silently. “Fine. But you owe me big.”

You promise to make it up to her.

When the bell rings signifying the end of the day, your heart beats rapidly as the time for your date comes closer and closer. Nancy said she wouldn’t be able to help with your conundrum of the fact that you’ll need a dress and a way to get from your house to Nancy’s.

As you sit next to her while she writes a rough copy of an article wondering who you could possibly get to drive you. You might be shit out of luck. Like an angel, a freckled redhead appears out of nowhere. “Nance, is that the cousin?” She asks, sitting right across from you.

From the look on Nancy’s face, you’re unsure how close they actually are. “Yep.”

“Cool! I’m Robin, over-sharer, anxiety ridden, fast talker. Nice to meet ya.”

You take her extended hands, sort of hypnotized by her warm green eyes. “You too.”

“Hey, Steve busy?” Nancy asks, a million thoughts behind her head.

“Probably not.” Robin offers, getting up from the table. “Why?”

“Oh, she needs a ride.”

Robin eyes you, a smirk landing on her face. “I can convince him.” She side eyes, gesturing for you to follow.

You follow her around the school to the front where you face a handsome lanky dude sitting impatiently as he waits for his friend. When he turns the window down to ask who you are, you realize he’s not just handsome, he’s hot. God, you’ll have to reprimand Nancy for leaving that detail out. “What’s with the guest?”

“She’s Nance’s cousin. She needs a ride, would you mind?”

“What am I, a chauffeur?” Steve asks, face shifting into a deep scowl.

You stop Robin from responding, having an immediate comeback. “I had to listen to my cousin bitch about you for hours. Hours. I think I deserve a little compensation for my time, don’t you?”

Steve smirks, looking from under the hair falling into his face. “Whatever, get in.”

“Where you need a ride to?” He asks as you get into his backseat.

“My house.” You pause, hesitating to say the second location. “Then Nancy’s house.”

Steve squints suspiciously at you in his rear view. “Why two locations?”

“So my date can pick me up tonight.” You admit, glancing out the window shyly.

Robin turns in her seat, jaw dropping open. “Isn’t this your first day?”

You shrug, biting back a smile. “So?”

“Oh shit.” She glances to Steve and back to you. “Who? Do we know him?”

“Um, probably.”

“We know him.” Robin states.

“Turn here, third house on the left…” you tell him, getting out of his car as soon as it stops.

When you get inside your house, you explain to your mom you are way further behind on school than you thought you were and will need some time to get caught up. She asks how late you’ll be, and when you say midnight, she doesn’t even hesitate to let you go.

Thank god you don’t lie, because this should not be this easy. Your hands ruffle through the box of dresses by your bed, grabbing at a few you know look good on you. They’re stuffed into your backpack, cursing yourself for not unpacking your makeup earlier. Hopefully Nancy will be nice enough to lend you some. (You doubt it.)

You rush a love you out to your mom and back into Steve’s back seat, out of breath from running up and down the stairs so damn fast. God, the things you were doing for your goddamn date.

Nancy only lives down a few blocks from you, thus the easy carpool your moms figured out until you get your car. God, in Houston you could’ve just taken a METRORail, you didn’t need a damn car. You thank Steve profusely, thankful for his saving grace.

You would rather tell every member of Hawkins Senior class personally a fun fact about you than go out with Eddie in the same thing you wore to school. You’re shy, not pathetic.

“You don’t owe him anything if you tell us who asked you out.” She calls out of her open window, face full amusement. “C’mon!”

You wait as they pull forward, Steve shaking his head at his best friend’s shenanigans. “It’s Eddie Munson!” You shout, laughing as she shouts a what in utter disbelief.

You wave as they take off, thinking you and her could actually be great friends. She has the kind of spunk you look for in a friend, the same spunk you’ve witnessed in your cousin. A large part of you wonders why they’re not friends.

When your Aunt Karen wonders why she wasn’t alerted, you give the disclaimer you’re just there to catch up on the schoolwork. Your Uncle Ted insinuates Houston must be so far behind Hawkins, and you grit a smile in response, an indent on the tip of your tongue from your teeth. Most of your lessons from the school day you had learned last year, already earning top marks on those questions. The only class that was remotely hard was calculus.

It was borderline hilarious.

You run up the stairs, stomach in knots.

Nancy is nice enough to let you use her makeup, grinning up at you with amusement as you ruffle through the dresses you so hurriedly packed. She gives a definite yes to a dress you knew stands out but worry at the way it just brushes against your thigh, and the neckline dives deeper than what you’re used to.

When it cascades down your body, the look in her stark green eyes tells you everything you need to know. This was the dress. Nancy is kind enough to do your hair, talking quietly with you as she curls your hair.

The half hour leading up to 7 has you lying on her bed, freaking out. She does the homework you’re supposed to be doing, answering your questions vaguely. She tries to make you feel better, grinning cheekily as she never imagined her sweet cousin going on date with Hawkin’s resident metal head.

When two honks occur down the street, you sit up starkly at the sound, biting your lip as you glance to her. “Go. I’ll distract my parents.”

She does, asking them for faux advice in the living room as you sneak past them to the front door, closing it with the most care you could muster. When you don’t hear any commotions, that gives you the go ahead to run down the street to the large van that sticks out, headlights on as it sits idly.

You peer up at him through the passenger window, waving as he unlocks it for you. The lopsided smile on his face starts that heat up again, like he turns on burners all over your body at will. The door shuts behind you, and you smile up at him shyly when he turns down the music.

“You look…wow.” He compliments you, watching the way your eyes look up at him, that beautiful shine.

You assess his outfit, a leather jacket worn with a graphic t-shirt and jeans with rips at the knee. He looked casual, but damn fine regardless. Him losing his metal accessories and devil-may-care look probably would’ve disappointed you, anyway. “So do you.” You offer back, taking in the way he looks as he starts his van and pulls out.

“Thanks.” He winks, turning at a traffic intersection. “So, there are several places we can go, the movies, Hal’s Diner, Benny’s Burgers, bowling alley, the Drive In, up to you, sweetheart.” He insists, driving his van around the small town.

The only thing you want at the current moment is to be in close quarters with him, with the need to kiss him crazy, a need you’ve experienced far too much this quickly. There’s only one thing that allows that. “Drive in.” You decide, the prospect of those same close quarters sending a thrill down your spine.

Eddie signals left, the drive-in location the opposite way from where he’s been driving. “Sounds good, love.”

Eddie doesn’t ignore the way you subtly avoid eye contact from him, shyly looking at your near bare thighs. By the way, were you trying to get a rise out of him with this wonderfully slinky dress you’re wearing? The moment you crawled into his van he was overthrown by your sweet perfume and the way your dress smooths over your gorgeous curves. It’s too hard, impossibly hard, to resist leaning in for your sweet scent, to nuzzle his nose in your neck. The idea that you don’t want to leave the intimacy of the van any more than he does is enough to bring the urge to readjust the crotch of his jeans.

By the time he pulls up into the far corner of the lot, turning on his radio so it connects with the movie mid-beginning credit scene, you take in the sparce parking lot, only a few vehicles spread apart sporadically. Well, you wanted intimate. You wanted close, now you've got it. His freshly showered self with the mix of his cologne just adding fuel to the ever-increasing fire.

This fire suddenly sends the need to squeeze your legs together, not completely understanding the feeling, but there’s an inkling. An instinct that on some level you know what it is, but no one ever warned you it could be this intense.

The first act of the movie is shared by you and Eddie laughing at the same jokes together, grabbing candy from his hands when he offers it. You sip on a straw in a glass coke bottle, if only to calm the nerves combined with heat that has completely overshadowed any sense you seem to have. Eddie leans back comfortably in his fabric covered seat, a hand landing on your bare thigh.

Oh, that turned up the heat several notches. It starts to become clearer that this heat is what can now be more clearly defined as a want. A want for…more of his hands, further up, him, close to you. Closer.

As your thighs tense and clench under his touch, Eddie can’t hold back any more like he planned. His other hand is tucked under your chin, lifting your big eyes to look up at his. His thumb brushes against your bottom lip, your mouth parting as you look up at him with stars in your eyes. “Can I?”

Your eyebrows furrow, breath stuttering as you peer up at him. You nod your head, glancing at his shiny pink lips. Every inch of air is tugged from your lungs as he leans forward, lips open as he places them on yours.

Eddie had every intention of kissing you delicately, the way he knows you deserve to be kissed, gently and patiently. As soon as the whimper leaves your throat and vibrates into his mouth, he forgets his good intentions. The kiss turns dirty, fast, the pressure of his spread hand increasing in the best fucking way, making your body fold involuntarily towards him.

Just when you’re enjoying the feeling of his tongue against yours, mewling pathetically against his lips, Eddie starts to kiss down your throat. You sigh, leaning back as that heat finally gains a resolve. Oh, god you're horny. Is that what that is? No wonder teenage boys are such perverts.

The combination of teeth and tongue is everything you needed and more; every muscle feeling like jelly as his lips and hands work like magic over you. Eddie licks a strip up to your ear, a startled and blissful moan filling up the car. He skips right past the pleasantries, past any inclination that you were anything other than wild for eachother. “You ever touch yourself, sweetheart?”

Only God knows why, but the dirty sentence just makes you hungrier for him, more eager. However, the answer to that jarring question is an honest and stuttered, “No.”

Eddie separates from you, giving you a look, you can’t quite place. “Wait, really?” You confirm it, breathing heavily, gasping as his eyes visibly darken. “So, you’ve never cum before?”

The sentence makes your eyes widen, gulping at that gorgeous face of his. You think you know what he means, but you still need clarification.

“Orgasm, princess. Have you ever had an orgasm?” He asks, a hand placed on your cheek as he watches your reaction.

Oh. That’s what you thought. That’s an absolute and definitive, “No.”

His fingers increase their pressure, a reflex of from his reaction. God, you’re more innocent than he even knew. The idea of even teaching you what it means to get off sends a swoop through his gut, picturing you looking at him with those wide eyes as he corrupts you.

God, does he want to corrupt you. He wants to corrupt every inch of you, turn you into someone who begs him to skip class so you can guzzle on his cock. The way you stare up at him waiting for a response, eyes glazed over as you wait for him to continue kissing you, as if you don’t even remember you’re at a drive in to begin with.

His cock has never hurt so much from the blood pulsing through it, probably an angry red at this point.

“Can I give you one?” He asks, thumb starting to rub on your bottom lip again.

“An-an orgasm?” You stutter, voice squeaking through the question. He’s gorgeous, the way he stares down at you, those same chocolate brown eyes making that heat pool. Despite the fear, the arousal is greater. “Uh, sure.”

He smirks, watching your eyes dart back and forth nervously. “You’re sure?”

“Yes.” You confirm, pulling him for the kiss you so desperately crave. You weren’t sure how it happens, your hands having a damn mind of their own. Despite him pulling away, he slips back into the kiss easily, the hand on your thigh and hand on your face making you feel dizzy.

You’ve had kisses before, but you knew you were missing something in them. At last, you’ve found it, desperately clinging onto his kiss. God, he’s good at making you turn into mush, relaxing into his seats almost completely.

His hand inches up your thigh, waiting for you to protest. Your breath hitches as he gets closer and closer. “I'm gonna make you feel so good.” He promises, his hot breath turning you into a liquid. Finally, his hand lands on the cotton of your underwear, his strokes tugging mewls into his open mouth. “Shit, you’re soaked, baby. You even know how much you want me? Probably confusing, hmm?”

He puts pressure at the top, rubbing small circles and it feels like fire is set to your center, gasping as your concentration falls apart. His fingers feel good, in a way you didn’t think was possible. Words in your mind echo the thought of how damn good he feels, mouth attempting to tell him, but nothing comes out but wanton gasps.

Eddie watches you wither in his chair, legs opening for him. Sure, giving you an orgasm is a fierce turn on, but knowing you’ve never experienced any type of pleasure or want is sent straight to his cock. He remembers learning how good it felt to start rubbing his cock when it got hard, how often he started doing it when he realized it led to something.

All he wants to do is turn you into a pervert, one orgasm at a time.

That same warmth that’s made home in your gut starts to build, your thighs tensing up when it occurs to you what its building to. “Fuck.” You gasp, Eddie humming at the swear that leaves your lips. “Close, and I haven’t even really touched you, hmm?” He muses, lips starting to add a second sensation on your neck with his hot and wet tongue.

He pushes your underwear aside, fingers finally making direct contact with the wet slick of your folds. “Eddie.” You gasp. The skin on skin makes your head spin, clutching onto his leather jacket with desire. The pleasure jumps up thirty notches, that build reaching an all-time high. Nothing has ever felt better, never so fantastic. Again, now you understand why teenagers are such perverts.

“Let me see you cum, I can feel it coming, baby.” He whispers, licking his lips.

He slides a finger deep in you, the sudden intrusion alien but welcome. On the edge, you become even more completely desperate for him. How was his finger even better? How was that possible? The feat thrills you, happily and willingly giving into everything he gives you. “Damn. Baby. You look so fucking good, think you can cum for me?”

His fingers hook within you, and it pushes you over the edge you’ve been staring down, stars invading your vision, the heat you’ve felt everywhere, all at once. Your tight entrance pulses around his fingers, twitching, not aware of the loud, whiny moans that Eddie’s sure the concession stand less than twenty feet away can hear, but he’s proud of it, grinning maniacally at his hard work.

He guides you through it, thrusting his fingers as he watches you come apart under his touch. When you stop shaking, his hand rubs your pussy gently, admiring the slick that is now pooled down your thighs and even onto his chair. He smirks, catching your eye when they finally open to face him. “How’re you doing, love?”

You forget to be shy in your smile, grinning maniacally as you grab him, yanking him in for a hot, wet kiss. It’s even dirtier than before, attempting to show him how grateful you feel for his magical fingers. “That was…so…good.” You mumble, smiling wider when you can feel him do the same.

“Feels good, hmm?” He asks, his fingers still stroking you gently.

“Jesus.” You answer, thighs convulsing involuntarily.

Eddie chuckles, amused that it takes you cumming to cum out of your shell. “You’re pretty like this, you know?” You roll your eyes, and he can feel the dismissal of his compliment. “Can I eat you out, baby?” It shouldn’t be this embarrassing, but it is. You barely know any of this terminology, and he can feel you tense up below him, your once liquid limbs turning to steel. “You have no idea what that means, do you, baby?”

You shake your head, gulping in the embarrassment.

“That’s ok. Of course, I don’t mind helping you.” Eddie doesn’t mind. When he says that he’s under exaggerating, not showing an ounce of his true feelings. How much does it take for you to squirm under his dirty words? How much patience does he have before he begs you to let him shove his hardened cock down your throat. How long will it be until you’re riding him like a porn star? If he was even slightly sleezier, he’d bet on it with someone. “I’d make that pretty pussy feel even better with my tongue.”

Oh. That sounds miles better than anything your brain could’ve come up with. You bite your lip, staring up at him with pure want. “You’d do that?”

“If you’re willing to come into the back with me.” He muses, nodding his head to his elongated trunk. You turn your head, facing a fleece blanket placed on the floor of the van with a few pillows. Did he do this for you, or is it always this nice?

Eddie doesn’t think you can get any cuter, but when you nod excitedly, starting to crawl into the back before he can say anything, he’s proven dead wrong. He’s never been so happy to be wrong. As you crawl, he watches your ass, your underwear still pulled to the side as the shine on your folds is still visible in the light of the movie.

He smiles, crawling as soon as you land awkwardly on the floor of the van. You sit cross legged waiting for him, one spaghetti strap fallen off your shoulder as you bite your lip anxiously. It doesn’t help Eddie that the strap on your shoulder starts to reveal a breast, just peeking at the top of the nipple. He’s barely seen you, just at the tip of the iceberg of touching you, and he’s about to pop from the anticipation.

How are you doing this to him so easily?

Eddie leans in for a kiss, something as soft as he wanted to give you the moment he saw you sitting in the desk next to his, but his hormones got the worst of him. He kisses each bare shoulder, admiring the way you relax into it. His long fingers reach to the already fallen strap, fingers brushing as he tugs it down further, fully exposing the partially exposed tit. Your heart races, loud, too loud, in your temple and you wonder if he can hear it.

Eddie can’t, as heartbeats are usually inaudible to the naked ear. He can hear, however, the way those sweet breaths get louder, faster, and even more utterly pathetic for him. Eddie feels a goal take over his mind like a parasite, one he welcomes with a bed made. He plans to make you moan and whine louder so that everyone within ten miles can hear how good you feel, what a good whore you are—he’s getting ahead of himself.

Right now, he focuses on making you feel comfortable, helping you become at ease so you will never be self-conscious with him, never afraid of being too loud, or too eager. He can’t imagine ever thinking otherwise with you. He thought he knew the definition of impossible, but now he knows he had no clue.

Every sensible, distinguishable thought has left your brain, too focused on how good his tongue and teeth feel as he expertly works on your beaded nipple. His brain is going a million miles per hour, yours left behind in the middle of a desert. His hand guides the other strap down your shoulder, fully exposing your chest, the soft material falling so it sits wrapped around your hips.

Teeth scrape against the curve of your breast, as if his tongue is attempting to taste every inch, every centimetre of it. One hand smoothing the skin just below them. Wet kisses trail down your torso, tongue dipping into your navel, the sweet swell of your stomach, his dull nails digging into your soft flesh, the pain adding to the beauty of the mixed sensations.

Your pussy is raging in fire, shouting for the same attention he had been so generous at providing. He feels your thighs tensing, attempting to provide friction for yourself where you need it the most. “Does it hurt, baby?” He asks, mouth now at the base of your neck. “Does that sweet pussy hurt for it?” You nod, rubbing your thighs like a damn cricket. “Oh, I know, I’ll make it all feel better, don’t you worry.”

He admires your face, the way your eyes are closed with the muscles beautifully crumpled up.

“Lie down for me, and I’ll eat that fucking pretty pussy.” Without hesitation, you lay down, shifting your body so you can lie comfortably on the floor of the van.

When you do, his hands tug at the fabric around your waist, not pulling it off you, just clutching it like a vice. They slink under it, fingers tight on the waistband on your panties as he pulls them down your legs. As they leave your feet, pulling them around your heels, Eddie stares at the drenched middle, fingers playing with the thick slick that had gathered. Eddie seems to have a talent for stealing the air from your lungs, doing so as you watch him taste them. “Taste so fucking good, sweets.” He makes a show of placing them into his back pocket, shooting a wink when you give him a questioning look.

He adjusts himself onto his forearms, both hands landing on the top of your thighs as his head dives in between them. Your thigh muscles tense in his hold, begging him for mercy, any kind. “Eddie…please…I need…I need—”

He chuckles, bending over your wanton body. “I love how you say my name, but I’m gonna make you scream it.” He mutters, the scent of your arousal making his vision fizzle.

Finally, finally, his tongue touches you, relishing in the immediate whine that leaves your lips. He hums against you, enjoying the way your legs move restlessly. The first touches are so delicate, your heels digging in his (still) clothed back and grinding your hips to force more contact. “That’s a girl, take what you want from me.” He praises you, hand stroking your thigh gently.

The simple instruction drives your hips to grind more, Eddie’s tongue licking up your slick folds harder in response. At this point, fire isn’t a hot enough word to describe the heat in your pussy. Eddie starts to focus on your clit, his ears suddenly muffled by your thighs abruptly closing on his head. He starts a rhythm, switching back and forth, listening to how your sweet whines answer him.

Any thoughts occurring in your head are long gone, all out of your mouth before your brain even knows you’re thinking it. You wonder how you didn’t think of this, ‘how the first thing you thought when you saw Eddie not how good he would look between your legs’?

Answer: the best thing you’ve ever seen in your life. (Spoiler, there will be better things.)

Eddie is more than happy to play with you, to listen how you react to every touch he provides. So far, his favourite sound is when his tongue enters your sopping hole, fucking it gloriously. It was the first truly uninhibited sound he managed to pull from you. Every decision he made for you was purposeful, doing his damn best to send you over the edge again. He wonders how willing he is to put off his own pleasure for the sake of yours.

Honestly, to hear you come apart repeatedly is 1000% worth it to him, even if he has to rut against the floor of the van.

“Cl-close, Eddie.” You tell him, that sudden ending sneaking up on you. “So, so, so, so, good!”

Eddie takes your admission with pride, and as the stars invade your vision, your every limb tensing as you cum, he keeps going.

In your post orgasm haze, the over sensitivity of your pussy is overwhelming. However, his continuing and relentless mouth feels so good you relish in it, absolutely sure your legs will be sore from the constant convulsing. You whimper through a hushed and delayed swear, your hands weaving through his curls and tugging on his scalp.

His thumb meets your clit, rubbing feverishly and driving another orgasm out of you faster than you ever expected. His name is music to his ears as you shout it when the orgasm takes over you. “Fuck, Eddie, mouth feels…ah!”

His brown eyes open, nose nuzzling your clit as he stares at you through those darkened eyes. His tongue licks a long stripe, chin resting the mound of your pubic bone. “Think you can handle a few more?”

Your chest heaves, struggling to catch your breath as you lift your head up to face him. Your head feels like a weight, too heavy on your neck. Your mouth opens to answer him, but the weight of your head wins, landing back on the van.

Eddie works your clit again, watching your breasts move up and down as you struggle to catch your breath. “Maybe not that many more, hmm? Maybe just one?” …if he’s strong enough to hold back from giving you two.

Stopping at this point would give you a break you need, but at the same time you can’t bear to, Eddie’s tongue acting as a siren’s song. You’re hypnotized by him. “More, please. Please keep going.”

“I love hearing your voice beg for me. Your whimpers are the best thing I’ve ever heard in my life, sweets.”

Eddie dives in again, your choked whimpers telling any near neighbors that you simply don’t remember they exist. They’re not important enough to care about anymore.

As much as you are sensitive to every single touch, even over-stimulated, you welcome the next three orgasms he gives you. At the end of your third, or sixth, orgasm, Eddie rests his chin on your mound again, staring up at you as you recollect yourself. He’s patient, watching the light making its way back into your eyes.

Eddie nearly asks you a question, when your hand reaches out to grab him by his leather collar. He lets out a yelp of surprise, his fully clothed form an odd juxtaposition against your completely naked one. Well, save for the dress still on your waist. Your lips meet, tongues gliding against each other beautifully, and you taste yourself in his mouth. Even with your brain as foggy as it is, your body feeling as weak as it does, the number one thing you can focus on is getting those clothes off him.

Your hands fidget on the harsh leather collar, forcing it off his back. “Take it off,” you tell him, Eddie grinning cheekily in response. As soon as his jacket is off, you feel the graphic shirt start to come off with it. The reveal of his patched treasure trail, his bare skin against yours a marvel of sensations. You become impatient, attempting to hurry the process of taking his shirt off.

A symphony of laughter leaves his lips as his shirt finally is tossed off to the side, watching your eyes marvel at his tattoo littered chest. Your tits pressed against him pulls a groan from his lips, a sound that drives your legs to tug his tented jeans down against your bare pussy. If you thought his tongue felt good, it’s nothing compared to his hips against yours.

His voice is strained, dripping in husk. “Sh-shit, doll. I-I need you. Need to feel that virgin pussy wrapped around my cock. Need it so bad, please.”

Eddie begging like this being such a turn on is a surprise, to say the least. And from the pleasure he gave you, you’re willing him to do whatever he wants to you.

Whatever. He wants.

“Really? You want me?” You ask, whining as he ruts again.

“Desperately.”

Your hand moves down to the button of his jeans, undoing it with shaky hands and even shakier breathing. “You gonna take my virginity, Eddie?”

Somehow you knew this would make him crazy. You enjoyed it, enjoyed the crazy, adored his moan in approval. “I’m gonna take you, baby.” He grunts, starting to move his jeans down his ass, legs, taking his briefs with them.

He’s quick about it, tongue against your skin as he grabs the dress around your waist and slowly drags it down your legs, tongue dragging down along with it. Slyly, he holds a condom from his pants pockets between two fingers. “You ready?”

You bite your lip, making the bottom lip swell from the constant fidgeting. “I’m on birth control…” you admit, only on it to regulate a heavy flow.

He makes a show of tossing the condom over his shoulder, grinning at his crazy eyes. “Well, shit, darling.” He leans in, feeling the size of him as it brushes against your hip. He’s big, right? “Before I enter that pussy, I need you to do me a favour.”

“Hmm?” You ask, the only thing in your mind is how good his bulge felt when it rutted up against your heat. If that felt that good? Sex with Eddie…your mind goes dizzy from the need.

Eddie takes your hand resting by your head, wrapping it around his hardened length. The moan that leaves his lips is deep and rough. Your unsure fingers allow him to assist you, getting a hold of the rhythm. When you do, he lets you take over, face falling in your neck when your grip tightens. “Okay, I can’t take it any longer.” He whispers, gentle, goosebumps erupting in their wake. “Here, help me, will you?”

You don’t ask, only because you don’t have the chance to, when his hips help you brush the head of his cock against your wet entrance. You tease the two of you simultaneously, brushing it numerous times, both of you gasping in harmony. “Oh, you little tease.”

His hand replaces yours, whining as the head finally, finally brushes into your entrance. “Eddie.” You whisper, clinging onto him desperately. “S-so, so, so full.”

“Yeah?” He asks, both winded by the feel of you and by the blissed look on your face. Maybe if he kisses the middle of your eyebrow enough, he can settle every wrinkle you demonstrate from the pain beautifully mixed with pleasure. “Look at you, so drunk on it, did you ever think a cock could make you feel this good? Ever think how much you could want to be fucked so desperately?”

You shake your head, drunk on his words, drunk on his cock. “More, please.”

“Think you can take it?”

You whine impatiently, legs attempting to pull him in harder. “Eddie.”

He smiles as you fall into his trap, pushing in more than he knows he should. He can’t help it, the smile that takes over your face is the perfect reward. “I thought you were shy?”

You roll your eyes, knowing when someone is this close to you, has seen this much of you, there is barely any time to be shy. “Shut up.”

He listens, kissing you deeply as his hips start to move. Your hand weaves itself into his hair, whimpering into his ear as he hits, deeper, harder.

You can’t fully understand the sounds coming out of his mouth, the once coherent, cocky sentences turn into mumbled groans, and it’s refreshing to know he seems to want you as you did him, craved for you the same way. A string of words on repeat come from your mouth, just his name.

The only thing you seem to be able to think of is Eddie, Eddie, Eddie, EddieEddieEddieEddie…

“God, your tight pussy, I’m gonna cum soon…” At least, that’s what you think he says. “Gonna fill you up…” You tighten around him, enjoying the prospect of it. “Gonna see it dripping out of you.”

He doesn’t know how it’s possible you tighten around him more.

“God, you take me so well, it’s like you were made for me, made for my cock.”

Head? Empty. Cunt? Full.

Him? Perfect.

“Fill me up, please.”

“Listen to those dirty little words, gonna turn you into a filthy whore.” He whispers, whining together with you in bliss as his hips rut a final, harsh, jagged time.

Time seems to be endless, as he whispers in your ear, hands on his broad back when he settles, keeping his cock warm. Time is so endless; you don’t even notice the movie turning off and the subtle turnover of engines and wheels driving off past the van.

It takes a poor teenage employee to knock on the van doors, politely asking if you could leave because the drive-in is closed, and they need to lock the gate.

To say the way you avoid their eyes after hurriedly putting your dress back on turns Eddie on would be an understatement.

To say when you waltz with him hand in hand down the hallways the next day turns into a sideshow, would be an even bigger understatement.

You sit on his lap during lunch, curious to the reaction of the other boys sitting with him. When Eddie slips his hand under your skirt and plays with your clothed cunt, he knows he’s just starting to corrupt you as you attempt to seem normal.

He’s just getting started.

Regular taglist: @pinkcowracing @yourthebrokengirl @skrzydlak @thirddeadlysin @sammararaven @bebe07011 @prettylovley @josephquinnschesthair @forget-you-morelike-fuck-you @names-were-taken @oddussy420

Taglist requests: @trixyvixx @thirddeadlysin @rogerfxckingtaylor @bunnsandroses @angst-lasagna @whatwedontdointheshadows @tlclick73 @barbedwirebats @poofyloofy @skrzydlak @josephquinnsfreckles

Thanks for all the love!

#eddie munson #eddie munson fanfiction #eddie munson x reader #eddie munson x you #eddie munson x y/n #eddie munson fanfic #eddie munson smut #eddie munson x fem!reader #eddie munson x reader smut

1K notes · View notes

luveline · 2 years

Text

𝐥𝐨𝐯𝐞 𝐛𝐢𝐭𝐞𝐬 | 𝐞𝐝𝐝𝐢𝐞 𝐦𝐮𝐧𝐬𝐨𝐧

summary eddie munson is super weird. he holds your hand too tight, he has a fascination with your neck, and he can’t give a hickey to save his life. good thing you’re super weird, too. [20k]

warnings two losers falling in love!! vampire!eddie munson, ditzy!reader (kind of), fem!reader, smut mdni (p in v, unprotected sex, oral fem receiving, general heavy petting and kissing, praise), fluff, hurt/comfort, angst (eddie struggling with guilt and grief). canon divergent (the events of volume 2 take place but there’s a mostly happy ending i.e. everyone good lives and everyone bad dies) TW eddie doesn't have suicidal thoughts, but he does think about it briefly. not with intent or anything like that though. requested here for my halloween party <3

(㇏(•̀ᵥᵥ•́)ノ)

Eddie Munson never wanted to be a vampire, and he wants that on the record.

It's a ridiculous existence. It's embarrassing. It's nothing like all the movies and books promised him.

He's looking at you, Bram Stoker.

In Eddie's mind, Stoker’s nothing less than a liar and a sycophant.

"Who's dick were you bouncing on, Stoker?" he demands to know, kicking fallen leaf mulch under his feet angrily. "Need'ta fucking impress some vampire lover with your over-exaggerated, over-powered, ridiculous descriptions? Great. Hope it was worth it. Meanwhile I'm here, self-esteem half the size of a grain of rice because I can't scale a building with my bare hands."

Eddie would know. He's tried.

He's not genuinely angry with Bram Stoker, but he'd rather take his frustrations out on a guy who's been dead for a hundred years than take them out on the demobats, because he doesn't want to even think about the demobats. They're all dead too. Not before they'd had (see: devoured) their pound of flesh and changed his life for the worse, though.

He shakes his head to drive out the memory like water in his ears. It's easier to pretend none of that shit in the upside down ever happened. (Impossible to pretend. He begs himself to try anyway.)

He’s pissed because science fiction has promised him a lot of things and reality has delivered on none of them. No super strength, no impermeable skin. He is faster, but that's more a reflexive thing than anything else. And being faster doesn't make running fun. That’s impossible.

Sunlight breaks through the treeline and his skin crawls. Science fiction didn't get that right, either. The sun doesn't hurt. It's just really, really annoying.

He covers his eyes, winces at his itchy hand, pulls his sleeve over his fingers and covers his eyes again. "This blows," he says, and means it.

In Dracula, the sun nulls Dracula’s supernatural abilities. Eddie doesn’t have any abilities worth nulling, unless you count echolocation.

He doesn’t.

He walks another five minutes up the road toward Forest Hills when he realises you're behind him. His senses are enhanced now as a bat’s might be, hearing fine-tuned and dialled up every second of the day — which makes living in a trailer park where everyone thinks he's a murderer an acute misery — but he's as prone to distraction as anyone else. Especially when he gets stuck in a memory.

Eddie throws his gaze over his shoulder and finds you thirty or forty feet away, talking to yourself under your breath. He knows you more for your sounds than your appearance. To be able to put a face to your mindless babbling is a mystery solved. Of course you look like that. A skirt made of soft looking fabric bounces over two cute thighs, a pretty lacy corset type of thing that isn't too tight outfits your top half. You look more like a vampire than he does.

"Hi, Eddie," you call.

His eyes widen, a deer-in-the-headlights kind of surprise. If you notice how he's frozen you don't show it, continuing to push your bike toward him. The tick of the wheels grows louder as you get closer, two hands on the handlebars with wrists draped in bracelets, both silver and fabric.

Besides your jewellery, your arms are bare. You must be freezing.

"Hey," he says.

He doesn't know your name. He doesn't know how you know his, and he’s too awkward to ask.

Your sounds peak as you close the gap. The wet scrape of your dirty black canvas shoes over shining asphalt, the soft puff of your breath, the clinking sounds of whatever trinkets you have in your bag. If he focuses, he can make out the tiniest pinches of fabric. Your short sleeves rubbing against your arms, your bra straps stretching over your shoulders.

Eddie takes a deep breath and tries to diminish his senses.

"Where's your van?" you ask curiously.

"Piece of shit kicked it in the middle of town. Just my luck."

You pause at his side, looking him up and down obviously but without the judgement or irreverent disgust he's come to expect from near about everybody in Hawkins.

"That's not good," you say succinctly.

It's such a genuine response that Eddie can't find it in himself to be sarcastic.

"God awful," he agrees sullenly.

You nod and start to walk again. Eddie falls naturally into step beside you, matching your pace without thinking.

"You should get a bike."

He laughs. Coughs to cover it up. "Yeah?"

"They're way more reliable than a car, and it doesn't hurt the zone."

Eddie squints. "The o-zone?"

"Is there another one?"

You're still so serious that he spares you the ridicule he might dole out to anyone else. If Dustin had said something like that he would've ripped the kid a new one, but you're rather sweet in an odd way. You have a soft manner of talking — each word sounds like you've thought its pronunciation through meticulously beforehand.

He ignores your question and points at your bike, ring catching the sun. "Why aren't you riding it?"

"My chain slipped."

"So much for reliable."

That makes you smile. Eddie feels it like a punch, a flat palm slapped into his chest.

"You can't put the chain on yourself?"

A brisk breeze whips your hair, your earrings. The left kisses your cheek, a silver heart-shaped hoop with pink beads that click together. You lean into it, face tilted to one side as a perplexed smile plays on your sticky lips. "You can do that?"

"Sure, you pull it back around the gear. It's easy." He hesitates for a moment, and then feels guilty about hesitating. "I'll do it for you, if you want."

"The guy in no. 62 has been charging me ten dollars." You don't sound as angry as you should, in Eddie's opinion.

"I'll do it for nothing."

You beam at him. His chest feels like a bruise.

Pretty girls don't like Eddie. Not before Chrissy, not after. He's trying to work out your angle, what it is that you want.

Or maybe you don't know.

As soon as you find out who he is, you'll turn your pretty nose up at him and walk the other way. He shouldn't smile at you, he definitely shouldn't fix your bike.

He can't help it. He's so starved for positive attention that he follows you all the way through the park, westside to east.

He checks the driveway of his own home and smiles mildly when he spots Wayne's new car. It's new in the sense that it's different. It's actually way older than the one he'd had before, the one he'd pawned to pay for Eddie's — well, Eddie's everything. His check-ups, his court dates, his goddamn bail. In the same way that this trailer isn't the trailer, but an older, smaller one as far away from their first as possible.

Kid, if I had the money…

Wayne hadn't needed to finish. If he had the money, they'd leave. Leave Hawkins, leave Indiana. Settle down in some other mediocre Midwestern state with all the same creature comforts and none of the "You were acquitted but literally none of us believe you didn't kill someone," motif.

All they have now is debt, each other, and the Great Munson mug collection.

Eddie keeps his head down as they pass the old trailer. Nobody lives inside now. Only termites.

He can taste blood by the time they reach your home. Far from the metallicity of his human blood, Eddie's blood now harbours a bitter taste. Not quite like coffee but with that same overwhelming earthiness. He pulls his teeth from the bitten flesh of his bottom lip and quickly raises a hand to his teeth, alarmed.

No knife-like points. Normal teeth.

"Are you thirsty?" you ask him.

Eddie flinches and drops his hand. You've parked your bike against the wooden lifts of your porch and are halfway up the steps to your front door, hand clasped loosely on the railing.

His heart fucking pounds.

"I have grape juice?"

"Right," he says hurriedly, "right. Yeah, that would be awesome."

Duh, you meant juice.

You send him another endearing smile and pop up the last of your steps and into the front door. It's not locked. He doesn't follow, thinking you must live with somebody (who's gonna know exactly who he is and tell him to get lost).

He turns his attention to your bike instead. It's easy enough to fix. He rolls the bike so its handlebars are resting against your concrete driveway and covers the top bar of the metal body with his sneaker to stop it from toppling. He rolls up his sleeves and bares his arms, but pulls them back down immediately when he remembers the white-purple whorls of scar tissue lurking underneath.

"Fuck," he mutters. Everything is a reminder, all of the time. He can't escape what happened.

It's everywhere.

He's getting his fingers under the chain when you reappear. You've layered up, bracelets and naked arms hidden by a black hoodie.

The wind blows and your skirt shifts. From his position he can see a ladder hiding in your tights where your inner thighs are pressed together. He whips his gaze up like a high-school perv caught sneaking peeks in the girls locker room and notices the stitching on your chest for the first time.

"You like Dio?" he asks excitedly.

"Who?"

He wilts. "Uh, your hoodie. Dio."

"I got it for three dollars in the bargain bins," you supply helpfully, all pep as you climb down the stairs and offer him a glass cup adorned in dainty enamel flowers. "Is Dio good?"

He waves his hand at the glass apologetically. "Two seconds…" Lifting the chain with the second hand, Eddie tugs and then feeds until the links are lined up with the bumps on the big chainring. The skin on his fingertips get pinched and his eyebrows pull together in pain, but it's a mild irritant at worst and after a moment the chain is back in place.

He pulls his hand away and wipes dark grease down the front of his jacket. "I think I did it."

You're glowing, earrings like a metronome as you ask, "That fast? You're awesome."

He turns the pedal and your back wheel spins in time with his heart. You're awesome. When was the last time somebody who wasn't Wayne said anything like that?

Although Dustin had told him he thought Eddie was a much cooler, more fucked up version of the guy from Van Halen the other day.

You're just saying that 'cos we're both called Eddie, Eddie had said morosely.

Learn to take a compliment, dude.

When they aren't pity compliments, he might.

Eddie lifts your bike back onto the wheels to show you that it's working perfectly. You giggle your evident pleasure. "Oh, thank you, thank you!" you say, super sweet even as grape juice sloshes over the rims of your flowered glasses and drips down your fingers.

"Here, let me," he says, taking the glasses from your purple-stained hands.

You kiss your hands clean which is a thing, a lot to watch. Eddie admits to himself that he thinks you're really pretty, recognises that that is a bad thing to think considering the likely very short life span of your acquaintance. God knows you won't be saying anything as friendly when you find out who he is.

"You're so nice," you say. It feels like you're talking more to yourself than him. "Thank you. It's slipped off three times this month, and ten dollars is ten dollars. Wait, do you want ten dollars?"

"My services were administered charitably.”

Your smile grows. You accept your glass and take a small sip, eyes lit up as Eddie steers your bike one-handed to rest against the porch.

"Do you wanna come inside? I don't have any of the Dio, but I have Blondie."

He holds in a throwaway comment about real rock and roll, astounded that you’d ask him. "Your folks aren't home?"

"I'm twenty-two."

Eddie squints at you. "Seriously?"

"You didn't think so?"

He shrugs. It's not that you don't look twenty two. Or even that you don't act twenty two. But it's been a long time since he met somebody living alone in the park. Forest Hills is where poverty comes to settle.

"A boyfriend?"

"Just me and mister Porterson."

"That your grandpa?"

"That's my pet fish."

He smiles. It's his first real, authentic smile in days. He's genuinely elated by your offer and your attitude, but he doesn't know how to handle it, struck with a sudden nightmare of you, afterward, telling somebody you'd invited him in and he'd tried to hurt you. It isn't fair of him to assume you'd do anything like that. You've been nothing but sweet and sincere this whole time.

Eddie hasn't let his guard down in a long time.

You're giving him this wide-eyed, imploring look that promptly suffocates any fear.

And in a week, when she finds out who you are and feels betrayed, feels tricked? What then, Munson?

"You know what happened?" he asks.

"What happened?"

"Two years ago. Chrissy… Chrissy Cunningham?"

Don't say her fucking name.

Your expression clears as clarity blooms. You take a step. He needs a second to realise you've come forward rather than away, fingers twitching toward his hand.

"I know about it. I'm sorry that happened to you."

He stares.

This is a trick. Two years and he can count the amount of people who believe him on his two hands, and only because they'd all gone through it with him. Sometimes there are outliers, logical people who seem to realise Eddie couldn't have killed all those people, couldn't have been in all those different places without leaving any evidence behind. And sometimes there are people who agree he didn't kill Chrissy, but he's a coward for leaving her to die. (She’d already been dead.)

Eddie doesn't know what he thinks. Wayne sets the record straight every now and then with a clap on the shoulder. You did what every parent wants their kid to do. You lived. I can't ask for more than that.

"You don't believe it?"

"That you hurt her?" You hold his gaze, face practically impassive. "No, I don't believe it."

He pulls in a breath that fills every inch of his chest. "I could learn to like Blondie," he says.

—

You're standing in the driveway of Eddie's trailer with a heavy bag over your shoulder, face to face with a man who kind of looks like him but not really. You assume it's his uncle because who else could he be? If you hadn't seen him here you'd never guess.

"Eddie's mom must've had strong genes," you say. You bring your shoulder up toward your cheek thoughtfully. "He didn't get any of your face. Was she pretty? Eddie's really pretty."

"She was," he says, peering down his nose at you.

"I got sandwiches. Do you want one?"

"What kind?"

"I have ham and cheese, or ham and lettuce and tomato, or I have pumpernickel cookies. Is Eddie a vegetarian?"

"Why?"

"'Cause I only brought one cheese and cucumber, and I have dibs."

He climbs down the last couple of steps and is still taller but definitely less imposing, face covered in scratchy salt and pepper stubble and crows feet deeply embedded into the corners of his eyes. He looks like a man who has been tired for a very long time. You make a mental note to bring him some lavender for his pillow on your next visit.

"You're Eddie's new friend?"

You nod your head briskly. "Yes, sir. I'm Y/N."

He opens his box of camels like a pro, bottom pressed to his chest. He tucks a cigarette between his lips and pulls his lighter out. He doesn't light it.

"It's nice to meet you," he says eventually, voice warming.

You search through the mess of your skirt for the zipper on your bag and peel it open, pulling out your tupperware of cookies and cracking them open to release the fragrant smell of cinnamon and almonds. It's a heady scent, fitting for the holiday season approaching.

You offer Eddie’s uncle a cookie.

"Thought pumpernickel was bread," he says gruffly, taking one.

"It is, but there's this little town in France that makes these every year at Christmas and they call them pumpernickel biscuits," — he takes a bite and winces at the hard snap — "you're s'posed to dip them in hot chocolate."

"You don't say."

You nod happily and he moves aside to let you pass.

"Thanks, kid."

You turn back to him with your fingers curled around the door handle. "Of course! It's really nice to meet you, Mr. Munson, sir."

"Wayne is fine."

You laugh and repeat his name in a similarly rough voice, letting yourself in as Eddie had told you to do. You find him immediately in a man-made corner of the living room, pale and in his pyjamas. The trailer is open planned, a living room they’ve divided by propping a couch against the kitchen counter, a slim hallway leading to a cramped bathroom and the single bedroom. It's exactly like in your home.

You're somewhat surprised to see him in pyjamas. Eddie doesn't wear comfy looking clothes out of the house — you've only ever seen him in jeans and jackets like a real rockstar.

"Are you ready?" you ask.

You've invited him to come and search for bugs with you. Catching any kind of bug, whether beetle or butterfly or spider, is really scary, but you need to be able to catch them to draw them.

You'd expressed this to him over the phone and he'd said, "I can come and help. I have good reflexes."

He rubs his hands over his knees. There's a blanket pooled around his feet, a quilt he must sleep with, and the room is decorated with not a whole lot of stuff but enough to make you take a step back.

"Is this your room?" you ask, enchanted.

"Kind of." He pulls his hair from behind his ear, obscuring a pale cheek. "I don't think I can come with you today, I'm sorry. I meant to call you."

You toy with a dark thigh high sock as you ease out of your shoes, height drastically decreasing. "That's okay, we can stay here. I brought you a sandwich. I brought you two sandwiches," you correct.

He nods. Rather sadly, in your opinion. "Alright. Thanks."

You step over a tented paperback and hand off the cookies before sitting down beside him on the couch he's occupying. It's smaller than the one against the wall and round like a clam, lots of room for your legs to stretch out.

"I feel like a pearl," you say.

You and Eddie have been friends for a little while now. Long enough for you to realise he's either depressed or mentally unwell in some way. You hardly mind keeping him company on his bad days if he needs somebody, so drawing bugs will have to wait.

His hair is limp, not totally greasy but not super clean either. His face looks fresh enough, though the bags under his eyes make you frown.

You pull your purse into your lap, thighs covered by the thin layers of your midi skirt. "I have just the thing for you," you murmur.

"Yeah? Bring me another bracelet?"

You like that he sounds eager. Making his bracelet had been a challenge, lots of knotting and double knotting, three restarts and one small under the breath tantrum. It's not anything special, black and white hearts seven strands wide, but he'd been very appreciative.

"No, but I can make you another one if you want. I mastered the inverse chevron last night."

He hums. You pull a saran wrapped sandwich from the depths of your crowded bag, glad to see it's mostly intact. When you open it up you find that it's the ham and lettuce and tomato one, so you drop it into his lap haphazardly and move onto the next.

"Aha! Here," you pull a cucumber from your sandwich. "For you."

He takes it between two tentative fingers. "Thank you?"

"For your eyes."

"There's cheese on it."

"I'll still work," you assure him.

"M'not putting cheese on my eyes."

You laugh because he probably shouldn't put cheese on his eyes, cucumber adjacent or otherwise. "Okay, don't. I'll make you a hot towel."

He drops his hand on your arm as you go to stand. You like how he touches you, soft but not scared. "You just got here. Stay here." He pats you nicely. "Tell me about work last night."

You settle heavily into the seat beside him, your thigh to his thigh, your hip squished against his hip, doughy flesh separated by nothing more than a strappy tank top and a cotton long-sleeve t-shirt. His heat quickly becomes yours, a sinking transference of warmth.

"Well," you begin, cheek turning into the couch to face him. "It was mostly okay. I dropped another plate, but this time it didn't have a stack of waffles on it."

He smiles ruefully and sinks back as you had. Neither of you eat your sandwiches. "Progress. Taking it out of your pay?"

"Yes, definitely."

"Discrimination."

"That's what I said! I said, Sarah, I was born with butterfingers and you know that."

"She didn't budge?"

"Dishwashing all week next week. Whatever, though, 'cause it's Saturday."

He laughs and shakes his head, his gaze dropping to your neck. He does that sometimes. You can't blame him; you wear a varying assortment of necklaces because you think they're pretty, and you're glad he likes them too.

"See my new one?"

"What?"

"New necklace." You look down at your chest and pull the newest addition from between the cups of your bra. "It's real silver."

"It's nice."

"It's surprisingly heavy. Wanna feel?"

"That's okay," he says, slightly strained.

Right, you think. I'm talking a lot.

You press your lips together in a mild pout and look at him through appreciative eyes. He's a very pretty boy, all soft and pale and sweet dark curls.

"Do you want me to put your hair up?"

His lips part before he talks. "I don't know if you should."

"Sure I should. It's getting in your eyes, right?" You take his hand where it's laid unsuspectingly in his lap and slip the hair tie from around his wrist, his fingertips tickling the inside of your palm. "Sit forward, Eddie."

He takes a deep breath, holds it, and sits up. You twist and then realise you need some more height, pushing a leg under yourself to kneel next to his lap.

You weave our fingers softly into the hair at the front of his face and rake away in lieu of a brush. After it's mostly tamed you pull it all into one hand and wrap the tie at the base of his head. You hum to yourself as you go, pleased when his lovely curls behave.

"Voilà," you announce, moving back on your haunches.

He breathes out. "Thank you."

You reach for a curl you'd missed at the very front and encourage it behind his ear. He has subtle indents in his cheeks today like he's in need of a good meal, and his skin is colder than it should be when you flatten your palm.

"You need something to eat," you fret. Your fingertips stroke under his eye, your thumb his smile lines.

He moves away slowly.

You pull your hand back into your lap. "Maybe we can go out and get something, if you don't like the sandwich?"

"What?" he asks, pale lips taut as he simpers at you. "Are you kidding? This is about to fix everything that's wrong with me."

His enthusiasm emboldens you. "It so will! There's ham and cheese too, if you prefer that one."

"Get it! I'm gonna eat both of them." S

Eddie eats both of his sandwiches and you eat your own, the two of you with your heads dropped back against the couch as you watch TV. There's a guy you've never seen before running around the streets of Chicago city centre looking for people to be in his play. Eddie's seen it before. He repeats dialogue in time with the characters, performing each line. Impressive, what with how tired he looks.

"What did he just say?" you ask, mouth full of cucumber.

"He said he's gonna throw himself off a bridge," Eddie informs. "Poor guy. I know the feeling."

You swallow harshly.

"Seriously?"

Your sad tone surprises him.

"I- No, I'm kidding," he says, scratching the base of his throat, friendship bracelet his only adornment.

His nervous itching makes you even more worried.

"If you did wanna do that, you can talk to me-"

He baulks, tongue poking out past his lips as he licks the corner of his mouth. "Thanks, sweetheart," he says, pet name like a kiss. It sounds silly but it really feels like one, right in the centre of your chest. "But I'm fine. Promise. It was a bad joke."

"Okay," you say, letting your suspicion shine through. You hold his eyes.

You haven't known Eddie long. It feels like you met yesterday, though really it's been two or three weeks. You fit together in a way you hadn't expected and adore more than you can articulate, two funny puzzle pieces.

"Well, I just wanted you to know. I like being your friend, I don't want you to disappear."

He laughs and licks his lips, a rough, chesty sound. "I don't want you to disappear either."

Tires crunch outside, a shushing sound and then the sharp shriek of a jeep being put into park. Eddie perks up considerably, his shoulders straightening.

"Hey, Chief," Wayne calls.

Trailer walls. Basically made of cardboard.

"Hey, Wayne. Where's the kid?"

You can't hear what Wayne says after that, words stolen by the TV.

"Is that Chief Hopper?" you ask, trying to catch a glimpse of him through the mostly shuttered blinds.

"Yeah, he- He's friends with Wayne."

"Why's he wanna know where you are?"

"'Cause I got into so much trouble."

You bite your tongue. His tone is hard, not stern but almost, and you realise you've overstepped as you usually do. You want to apologise but you don't want to pick the wound, eager to gloss over and make him smile again.

"It's pretty cool, isn't it?" you ask him.

"What?"

You spread your legs wider to slide onto your thighs and make him the taller one again, legs bent in a 'W' shape. "Coming back from the dead! First Will Byers, then Hopper."

Something surfaces in his expression. An irony.

"The undead," you croon, aiming for a smile, a laugh.

He cracks. "The undead," he agrees, smiling in bemusement. His eyes are a funny shade of brown.

—

Eddie shoo’s you home early that night but tries to do it kindly. He feigns exhaustion, a facade that's difficult to uphold when his entire body is thrumming with want. If there's one thing Eddie hates about being a vampire (there are literally hundreds of things he hates, but this one's special) it's that he wants to hurt the people he likes a thousand times more than the people he doesn't.

He can't explain it. Your blood is more appealing than any lonesome stranger's. Your pulse is practically music to his ears when you sit beside him. He'd kill himself before he ever hurt you, though. Or that's what he likes to think. Whether he has that amount of control is debatable.

No. He would kill himself before he hurt you, or Wayne, or any of his friends.

Steve can see the way that he's feeling on his face.

Hopper's delivery set to one side, a tall glass with blood congealed in a sticky ring at the bottom, Eddie curls under his huge quilt and tries not to pass out. Blood sate feels the same as a thanksgiving food coma. It's awesome.

He hates how good it feels.

"Stop feeling guilty," Steve says.

"He doesn't look guilty to me," Dustin says beside him, taller than the last time Eddie had seen him but still miles off of Steve's tall stature. He's changed his hat again, this one a garish green. It's not a good look.

"He looks like he's napping," Robin says, delighted.

"Can you guys go home?" Eddie asks.

"Shithead."

"What Steve means to say," Robin corrects, grinning her huge, catching smile, "is that no, we aren't going home. We brought games."

"I don't wanna play games." He does. Eddie needs the distraction, because eventually the blood sate will fade and all that will remain will be self-revulsion and a cruel desire to do something awful.

"I do not care even slightly," Steve says, deadpan, as he sits right there next to Eddie where you'd been sitting before. Steve's nowhere near as soft and he doesn't smell as nice, but Eddie's honestly glad someone is willing to sit next to him at all.

"Ouch, what the fuck?"

Dustin looks up from where he's sat himself on the floor. Robin giggles in her seat on the coffee table.

"Munson, are you fucking shedding? I just got stabbed."

"They don't work like that. They retract."

Eddie feels at his broken gums with his tongue. There's a clean incision where his fangs come out and then snap back inside after a time. They're remarkably thin, fitting in front of his natural incisors neatly.

Steve grumbles, hips lifted and hand searching under his butt for whatever it is that jabbed him. He retrieves exactly what Eddie had been expecting but hadn't had the forethought to prepare a lie about with a shocked gasp.

"Is this an earring? You don't have your ears pierced."

He swallows, knowing it's a very guilty gesture, and meets Steve's eyes straight on.

Funny how Steve's hair speaks as much as his expression, bobbing as he nods his head to emphasise each word, "Munson, do you have a girlfriend?"

Silence.

"...Not really."

"Holy shit," Dustin says, sounding extremely pleased. "No way."

Robin tucks her short hair behind her ears, hands paused in disbelief at her neck. "Actually?"

"I have a friend," Eddie admits.

"Thank god," Steve says, dropping your heart earring onto Eddie's thigh. The silver feels extremely hot over his pyjamas, like it's been held in the centre of a blistering hearth.

"I really thought Steve was gonna have to take one for the team and give you a pity handie," Robin says agreeably, scratchy voice coloured by genuine awe.

Eddie groans, "Harrington, get this shit off of me. You know I can't touch that."

"I forgot," Steve lies. "Can you wait? My hands are busy."

—

He has Steve put your earring between two pieces of kitchen towel and holds onto it. He doesn't see you for a week, and he keeps your damn earring in his pocket that entire time worried it's gonna slip out and brand him at any second.

Finally, you call him. He pretends he wasn't waiting.

"Hello," you say, like you're announcing something.

"Hey. How are you?"

"Eddie, I need your help. Badly."

He flinches up where he'd been leaning casually, hard enough to make Wayne jump. Eddie smiles at him placatingly and mouths a poor sorry, turning away to pretend there's a semblance of privacy to be found in such close quarters.

"Are you okay?"

"I gotta find a rainbow leaf beetle. Do you have a torch?"

"...What?"

"They only come out at night, so I'm gonna go look but I don't have a torch that works."

He relaxes, the lilting cadence of your voice enough to make his whole night. You sound so pretty even through the phone. He suspects you could hold any pitch, deep or high, and you'd still sound nice.

It's all in the way you — he says this with love — perform the words. You speak like each word you're saying has equal importance, and it's calming.

Even when you say stuff that's nonsense to him.

Right now, you don't sound upset or even worried about not having a torch, simply curious to know if he has one. If he focuses hard (and he's been trying not to, as you deserve your privacy) he can hear you all the way across the park, shifting from foot to foot in your bedroom, carpet crushed under your heels.

The action makes him think this might be more urgent to you than you'd first admitted.

"I have a torch." He also has amazing night vision. Like, impeccable. "Can I come help?"

"You want to?"

"I'd love to. Are you going out tonight?" He leans back to glance out the window. "The rain is finally stopping."

"Yeah, tonight! Is that okay for you? We could go tomorrow if you can't."

You're willing to change your plans now that he's asked to go with you. It's a gesture as lovely as you are. Eddie doesn't think you'd ever think it of yourself; your kindness is so intrinsic you don't notice it, like the fine stitching of a leather bound book. Integral and widely unappreciated.

"That's perfect."

Wayne raises an eyebrow when Eddie relays the conversation. "You're going out in the middle of the night with this girl to… look for bugs."

Eddie crosses his arms over his chest. "I swear."

"Be honest with me, kid."

"I am!"

Wayne swirls his coke can around in his hand as he thinks, a reluctance evident in his scowl. Eddie knows he's way too old for a guardian's oversight like this but he lets Wayne have a say because Wayne loves him, and Eddie doesn't ever want to put his old man through the turmoil he went through when he ran away. If that means a curfew in his twenties, Eddie's okay with that.

"If you're going to have sex with this girl, I'd prefer you did it here. You have to treat women with respect."

Eddie shivers, full body. "Wayne," he groans, covering his face. He can feel his cheeks pink under his palms, that's how quickly his embarrassment rises.

"I know you're more responsible these days, and you're a grown up. If you want a girlfriend and you want to do adult things with her-"

"Jesus Christ."

"- then that's alright. You don't have to fool around outside."

He drags his hands down on his face, pained. "It's not like that. You met her, you know she's…"

"Strange?"

"Alternative."

"No, you're alternative. She's cooky."

"Don't," he says. He knows his uncle isn't actually being cruel, so he lets it lie and fights for his own cause. "We aren't messing around. She genuinely wants me to go find these bugs with her. And…" He hates himself. "She has her own place, you know? If we were going to-"

Wayne seems stricken by the same mortified embarrassment as Eddie, raising a calloused hand in surrender. "Spare me."

"Thank you," Eddie says, spinning on his heel to hide in the bathroom for a while. It's only when he's sitting on the closed toilet does he realise Wayne hadn't mentioned his more dangerous ailment. For a time, he'd been a normal (debatable) person having a normal (horrifying) conversation with his dad. Not a vampire. Not somebody who ruins everything he touches.

—

"It's so quiet," you whisper.

For you, Eddie thinks.

You're in the forest surrounding the aptly named Forest Hills trailer park, wielding your borrowed torch carefully into the dark. Eddie's following in your footsteps, trying not to smell everything that's on you today and failing.

You smell like a person as everybody does. Over that is your soap, a faint hint of milk and honey that sticks to your skin even after you've washed it away. Over that is your deodorant, 'unscented', and over that is your perfume, which he likes most. It's a mix of smells, some Eddie doesn't know and some he does. There's lavender, though that might be down to the bunch you'd brought for his uncle wrapped in newspaper, and there's something fruity he can't quite put his finger on, all of it wrapped up in a cloying pairing of vanilla and coconut.

"Eddie?"

"What?"

"Are you okay? You're almost as quiet as the trees."

If only you knew the trees aren't quiet.

"I'm alright," he says quickly, catching up to you where you stand a few feet ahead. "What are we looking for?"

Best change the subject. How to explain he'd been smelling the notes of your perfume?

"They rest on tree trunks. You have to be careful, any sudden sound or light will scare them away. But if you flash the torch on them, they shine like oil stains."

He loves when you talk. "Where'd they come from?"

"Place called Snowdon. They're so rare, they think there's only about a thousand alive there."

"Well, how did they get here?"

You laugh under your breath, so quiet he would've missed it if he wasn't enhanced. "I don't know. How do beetles get to different places?"

"They fly?"

A twig crunches under your shoe.

Eddie tips his head to the side, thinking. "If there's only a thousand, how-" He stops, your circle of torch light growing further and further away. "Are you sure that they live here?"

"No, but if they do we'll be the first to find them."

"So they've never found any out here? In- In the midwest?"

"Not yet. Where'd you go?"

He shakes his head in an affectionate disbelief. "Right behind you."

You search in silence for a while. Eddie wishes he could say he was mad, or even mildly annoyed, wishes he had even the slightest regard for his own time, but really he thinks any time with you is time well spent. Especially if it's helping you do something you want to do. Whether you find your rainbow leaf beetle or not, he feels better knowing he's out here with you to keep you safe and in company.

Conversation is sparing. He doesn't mind. Your footsteps fill the sound and he finds even that stupid detail charming, the crunch, the pick up. His own are silent, a rare advantage to his terrible affliction.

"Any other beetles you want me to keep an eye out for?" he whispers.

"I'm not sure…" You turn to face him, torch pointed at your shoes. Rubber toes touched together, you lean in until you're all he can smell. Perfume. Blood. "If you see any cool spiders, too."

"You have the mason jar?"

"You know I do."

More than you realise, he thinks. The glass clicks in your bag.

There's enough light reflected to see the most minute details of your face. Your nose, the circle of your irises but not their colour. He suspects Eddie from early '86 wouldn't have been able to see hide nor hair, and it wouldn't shock him if you were technically blind right now.

"Thanks for coming out with me. I was gonna ask you."

"Yeah?"

"Yeah, but I didn't want to come on too strong." He can sense your smile even though he can't see it. It's in the way your breathing deepens. "I know I can be a lot to deal with."

"Who told you that?"

"What?"

Eddie doubles down.. "Who told you that?" he sounds heartbroken.

He kind of is. Yeah, you're weird — Who cares? Who isn't? — but you're not a lot to deal with. He doesn't 'deal' with you.

"Everybody tells me that. All the time."

"Everybody's stupid." To say it so loudly, scathingly, is sweet. It's therapeutic. "They are. This whole town is stupid."

Your fingertips touch his thigh. He's willing you to turn the torch up and see his face, because he has a lot of feelings on display that he isn't brave enough to say out loud.

"You never make me feel stupid," you say softly.

"You're not."

You giggle breathily at his vehemence, fingertips pressing in with a touch more pressure before you pull away and shine the torch deep into the trees.

"This whole town is stupid," you mumble. "But not you."

He thinks of his friends who are definitely stupid, but he loves anyways. He's about to add them to the not-stupid (subjectively) list when he remembers Steve's discovery: your earring burning a hole in his pocket. He'd been carrying it for long enough now to forget all about it.

"Hey, I have something for you."

"You do?"

"Don't get too excited. It's not a gift."

He digs in his pocket for the tissue paper wrapping and hisses in shock as the silver plating of your hoop graces his index finger. You shine the torch at him. His eyes ache like he's been stabbed and he slams them closed, hand pulled to his chest.

How embarrassing.

"Eddie, what happened?" you question loudly.

He winces at the sudden overstimulation. Slowly, he blinks, and finds you staring at him in a worry that softens every feature, even your nose. He doesn't know the logistics.

"It's okay. Stabbed a paper cut on the back. Your earring's in my pocket, the heart?"

"The hoop? I thought I lost it." Your worry turns to confusion and then melds into joy. You step forward and fish in his jacket pocket for your earring.

"Steve found it."

"'The hair'?"

"Yeah, the hair."

You both laugh and yours heightens when you find the earring, pulling it out like a knife to be brandished. "Yes."

"I meant to tell you a dozen times that I had it."

"You're the best."

There's a crunch of wood somewhere to the left like something heavy falling over.

The forest sprawls in every direction and the trees tower, their presence looming as skyscrapers. The wind ruffles the topmost branches and their trunks groan with pressure. It's enough to freak Eddie out super sense or not, feeling suddenly like he couldn't protect you. He could hear the individual droplets of drool dripping from a lynx's bloody maw, and he can sense each twig underfoot before he takes his next step, but none of that is going to keep you safe in the face of real danger.

"Maybe we should head back," he says tentatively.

"Okay. Do you want to come over?"

His breath catches. "You want me to?"

"Yeah, we can watch movies, I have leftover pasta."

That sounds more like what he should've been thinking. "I don't wanna keep you up."

"What kind of pasta?" he asks.

The torch flickers. "With the tiny tomatoes. You'll like it, super creamy."

"How do you know?"

"You like Alfredo," you say astutely, hitting the torch into the palm of your hand. It flashes weakly, the shadow of the trees flickering and so dark they're violet.

"Try tightening the handle."

You turn the barrel of the torch and the light switches off completely. You try to undo what you've done to no success, the sound of plastic rubbing plastic almost as loud as your heartbeat. Your pulse falters and then grows to racing when the light fails to come back on.

"Eddie," you say, sounding unsure. It's a new sound on you. "I don't know where we are. How are we gonna get home?"

Your admission is like a dousing of ice water over his head. "You don't know what direction we came from?"

"No, do you?"

Eddie wouldn't know if he couldn't hear the sound of the electricity pylon buzzing somewhere to the right. But how can he explain that? "Uh, we were turned around."

You creep to his side and grab his arm with both hands. "Are you sure?"

"Hey," he says gently. "Hey, it's okay. I know where we are. We'll be fine."

"Are you sure?" you ask again.

"I'm positive."

You take a deep breath that doesn't erase your shakiness, a failed attempt at self-soothing. "I really don't know where we are."

"You're not afraid of the dark, are you?"

"Not really… I don't wanna get lost out here."

"You won't. I know how to get back. C'mon," he prompts, pulling his arm to encourage you forward.

You let go of him and navigate a few steps by yourself. He weaves through the trees, waiting for your heartbeat to slow.

It doesn't. He opens his mouth to reassure you again when you gasp, kicking your foot against a root and tripping. You barely fall, catching yourself on the trunk of a tree, and Eddie remembers himself. You can't see the trees. That's why you're worried. You can't see anything.

Then the smell of blood hits him like a freight train.

—

Your hand stings where you caught yourself, palm scraped down against harsh bark.

"Shit," you mumble.

You're panicking badly, and you're confused as to why Eddie isn't. Not only was it fucking stupid of you to come out here with only one torch, it was stupid of you to assume you'd remember what way was home. It was stupid of you to come here tonight for that stupid beetle, and stupid of you to drag Eddie along. You're an idiot, and now you're bleeding.

Your eyes sting with tears, pain like a popped seal. I'm so stupid.

"Hey," Eddie says, his tone silky soft, "you're okay. Let me help you up."

You hold your hands out.

"Eddie, this is weird." Hopefully he understands that weird means scary.

He takes your hands, fingers closing slowly over your bloody palm. His breath is loud as he pulls you up toward him like he's panicked but his grip stays kind, and you abandon the notion when he rubs over your knuckles with his thumb. "It's alright."

He doesn't sound the same.

"Eddie, we can't see."

"We'll go slowly, okay? I'll put my hand out and we'll walk around anything that gets in the way."

"Yeah," you say hurriedly, heart bump-bump-bumping against your ribcage.

He keeps one hand, the injured one, and starts to drag you slowly through the trees. His grip tightens as you go until it starts to ache, until it feels like it might bruise.

"Ouch, Eds. You're hurting me," you say, going for a lightly teasing tone and missing the mark.

Instantly, he eases off. "Sorry, sweetheart. You hold onto me, alright?"

You do as he'd asked, hand clinging to him as he leads. He doesn't squeeze you again, walking slowly as he'd promised, and the closer you get to the edge of the forest the clearer it becomes. Light pollution from the centre of town leaches through the trees like water trickling from an overflowing basin.

His second hand is in his pocket.

"Here," he says after you've traversed to the very edge of the forest. "There's the park. We're bona fide explorers."

He looks out toward the park and you look at the side of his face. Something isn't right. Something uncanny.

You drop your gaze from his face to your joined hands. They come apart, blood smeared in both your palms like two halves of a dripping heart.

—

There is something weird about Eddie. As a residential freak of Hawkins you think you're an authority in this, and you don't feel guilty for judging him. Your brain can't stop going over your night in the forest. For days you play the scenes back and for days you lose the details. You forget how the wind had tousled his hair, how he'd smelled, what he'd said.

You remember the way he'd squeezed your bloody hand. You remember the way he'd spoken, strained.

Not strained like he didn't want to comfort you, he had, but strained.

Restrained.

You're poking at the shallow cut half-healed now in your palm at work when a dude walks in, very tall, handsome, and gunning straight for you.

You straighten your badge and hide your bracelet heavy wrists behind your back, receding slightly as he approaches. He slows in front of you.

You have a light bulb moment.

"The hair," you say.

He scowls. "He told you that, huh. Typical."

"You're Steve?"

"That's me." Steve crosses his arms across his chest, his back to a booth, your back to the diner bar. "You're Eddie's new friend."

"What counts as new?" A month and a half doesn't feel so new to you.

"Trust me, you're new."

He has the strangest patch covering the outside of his left wrist, the same peculiar scarring that you can see on Eddie's waist when he reaches for a glass out of the kitchen cabinet. You don't ask because you're not a dick no matter how curious you find yourself, but it makes your heart skip. What is that? You'd assumed Eddie's was road rash. Now you're not so sure.

He tucks it under his arm.

You meet his suspicious gaze.

"You want coffee?"

"No."

You kick your foot, shoe sliding over the shiny waxed floor with a squeal. "Is Eddie okay?"

"Did you want to come to a party next Friday?"

"No," you say honestly. "Like a cult?"

"What?"

"Are you initiating me into your cult?"

He finally smiles, eyes creased with amusement. "I'm inviting you to our club."

"Club where you chew on each other?"

You look pointedly at Steve's wrist.

"No. Club where we play board games and drink jiffy pop. Come or don't, doesn't matter."

"If it doesn't matter, why are you asking me?"

It's a strangely intense conversation to have this early in the morning. Patrons chatter about work, coffee gets poured. The diner smells of syrup and sugar and bitter cold-press. You're both in work apparel, both refusing to move back. If this is some kind of shovel talk then that's fine, and if it's a test you're determined to pass, even if Eddie's been super weird lately.

"I'll come if you promise not to eat me," you say.

"It's really not that kind of club."

—

"I had the weirdest visit in the entire world today," you declare, stopping in front of Eddie's porch with a smile.

"Yeah?" he asks without looking up, guitar in his lap and pen scribbling over a lined notebook.

You wait for him to stop before you continue, leaning forward with both arms braced on the porch by his feet. "Steve Harrington came to see me, and he was super mean. You said he was nice."

He frowns at you. "I told you he was a dick."

"You like him when you tell me stories."

"How mean?" Eddie asks, patting the seat beside him.

You climb up onto the porch and plop down onto the couch, worn leather cold with the weather and damp in the seams.

You take a strand of his hair and curl it around your finger. "Not really super mean, but he was, like, acting like I killed a baby."

"He's like that."

You sigh and lean your cheek against the couch cushion, watching Eddie's stubble move as he tamps down a teasing smile. "He invited me to a party next weekr."

"It's not a party- Sweetheart, what are you doing?"

You tickle his cheek with the end of his hair. "Nothing."

"M'gonna sneeze."

You tickle him again, fine dark strands brushing over his pale cheek. He's a very ashen guy, you've found. Likely because he barely goes out in the sun and he doesn't eat enough. You draw circles around the apple of his cheek and grin softly at his growing smile, a sweet, silly thing.

"I'll tickle you back," he warns.

"Promise?"

He steals the curl back and tucks it behind his ear.

"You're not a cannibal, are you?"

Eddie chokes on air. You startle at his coughing and move to pat his back, palm slapping a steady rhythm into his shoulder. When he calms down you run your hand down the length of his arm, long sleeve t-shirt soft beneath your touch. You linger at his wrist and decide to hold it.

He drops his pen and your hand travels until he's caught your thumb. He kneads it in his fingers.

"I'm not a cannibal. Why would you think that?"

"I don't, but you and Steve are in your club, right?"

"Hellfire wasn't like that," he says heatedly.

"No, not- Not that one."

He doesn't say anything.

"You have… He has this scar, on his wrist. Like something bit him, or-" He turns to you and he looks formidable and upset and himself, not mad at you but raw emotion in his expression anyhow. It's gone as quick as it came.

"When all that… stuff happened," he begins quietly, "we got hurt. A couple of us."

You drop your head, ashamed at having pried. "I'm sorry, you don't have to tell me anything else."

"Don't be sorry…" He squeezes your hand and lets it go. "Don't worry about it."

"Okay."

"We usually call ourselves a party, these days. Not a club."

"Do you really play board games and drink jiffy pop?"

"Sometimes we get really crazy and order a pizza. You should come."

You realise as he says it how much his wanting you to go had mattered to you. Eddie's your friend, and you don't think that you're going to stay friends much longer.

"You think your friends will like me?" you ask, voice descending to a new kind of gentle.

He puts down his guitar and his notebook. His full attention is something you've come to really enjoy, not because of the hunger you often see flitting across his face — though that's neat —, but because of the inklings of adoration clinging to his smile when he looks at you. His blinking lashes. He smiles at you and just slows. A usually frenetic boy calmed.

"Maybe not Mike. Mike doesn't like anybody. Except for Will," he muses.

"What about you?"

"What about me?"

"Who do you like?"

"I like all of them." He juts his cheek toward his shoulder, conceding, " I think Dustin's my favourite. He's funny. He's funnier than I am, and he's the smartest kid I've ever met. And he knows it."

Your eyes focus on the pink outline of his upper lip as he speaks. It's a pleasure to be this close, and see him in this kind of crazy detail. When you go home tonight you might try to draw him. You'll probably forget.

It's the kind of smile that deserves to be immortalised.

"I really like your smile," you tell him, hoping it'll last a little longer.

It stretches. The pink outline turns white. "Shut up."

"I do. I've seen a thousand different smiles but I've never met someone who smiles like you do."

"How's that?" he asks, edging toward you, face a mirror in which you can see your own charmed expression.

"Like you," — you shake your head with your lips parted — "know a secret. Something you won't tell anybody."

His smile abruptly ends.

You've nothing if not a talent for saying the wrong thing.

"A good secret," you amend.

He picks up his acoustic and gives it an experimental strum. "Maybe one or two," he agrees.

Relief catches you. You nibble at the inside of your lip and watch his fingers work over the neck of his guitar, tipping your head so you can read the words he's markered over the body.

"This machine slays dragons," you murmur to yourself. "Yeah? How many?"

"Just the one."

"Save any princesses?"

"Not yet." He plucks at the strings, lost in thought, before turning to you with eyebrows raised. "Can you play?"

You exhale out of the corner of your mouth as he pushes the guitar into your lap, an arm coming around your shoulder, the other reaching to guide your curled forefinger to the strings. You turn to face him, watching him talk with a growing fondness.

"It's easy, I swear. We'll do Call Me. Blondie's basic, even a baby could play it."

He realises you aren't listening and raises his gaze, shiny brown irises stuck on your lips. This close, it would be worse if he didn't look at them.

You glance at his, an obvious thing, half a wish. If he only lifted his chin.

Your breath mingles.

"It's easy," he says again, a murmur of his usual volume as his gaze pulls back up to yours. "I'll show you."

You wonder if he can hear your heart pounding; it's deafening. You wait, and you wait, and you turn your eyes back to his guitar and clamp your fingers down against the struts so he can't see them shaking with adrenaline.

—

Eddie sits beside Steve and tries not to admit to himself that Steve Harrington is, horrifyingly, his best friend (along with the rest of the party, obviously). Steve is the closest in age and Eddie can't make excuses (though he tries and tries and tries), Steve understands how much Eddie doesn't ever want to talk about anything that's happened to them, so he talks about literally everything else instead.

"It was the weirdest pawn shop I've ever been in. They had, like, a wall of combi's playing the same video at the same time but all slightly delayed."

Eddie blinks.

Steve turns his head from the TV, having expected a response. "Did you say something?"

"No." Then, because he's not a dick. "Sorry, Harrington. Want me to sit on your other side?"

"What for?" Steve says. Not because he denies how he's hard of hearing, but because he denies having conversations with Eddie.

He does end up moving to Steve's other side with a pathetic excuse. "I can't see the TV."

Steve doesn't say a word until he's sat down again. "Sorry I was mean to your girlfriend."

"Yeah, what was that about?"

"I was cranky because it was early and I don't want her to damage the integrity of the party." He gives equal weight to both reasons.

Eddie snorts at him. "Since when do you care about the integrity of the party?" Steve barely acknowledges that they are a party. He thinks that's a very nerdy way to say friends.

"Since always, dipshit."

"And inviting her to join the party was the solution because…?"

Steve drinks the rest of his coke and pretends to really care about what's on TV. "If," he begins after a minute, refusing to look at Eddie, "something happens with her, and something happens to you, that damages the integrity of the party."

"Steve," Eddie says, jaw dropped down to his chest, "do you have a crush on me?"

"Oh my god," Steve mutters. "Oh my god," he says louder. "I can't stand you."

To prove his point, he gets up from the couch with a wrinkled nose, stops to tap his shoe gently against Max's where she's sitting in the armchair across from the coffee table, and disappears into his kitchen.

Steve Harrington cares about me enough to give Y/N the shovel talk.

He feels kind of great about it.

But he's not sure your the one who needs warning.

That night in the forest, Eddie had almost snapped. There are rules to follow if he wants to keep people safe, self-imposed, Hopper-imposed, and he's broken too many with you already, the most important being no close proximity when he's hungry. Eddie doesn't even realise he is hungry half the time. He'll be standing by you and he'll want to touch you, and suddenly it's like he's three weeks in to the month without sating.

He thinks about kissing you and suddenly he's thinking about biting you, and hurting you, and it's literally tearing him up from the inside out.

How can he want to do that to you?

"You look so depressed and pathetic," Dustin says out of the blue.

Eddie pouts and falls back into the couch, Steve's fancy throw falling onto his shoulder. "I used to like you," he says, taking in Dustin's outfit with a kind of parental approval. He's getting older and it shows, slightly more handsome than he had been — he's kept all his baby weight and it suits him, his full cheeks surrounded by the softest brown curls Eddie has ever seen. The outfit stays immature, a funny t-shirt and ill-fitting pants.

"Sad. You have a sad face," Dustin says.

"Go play with your nerd squad, please."

He doesn't listen, collapsing in Steve's still-warm seat like a cheap tent and crossing longer, thicker arms over his chest. He smiles at Eddie genuinely. "Where's your girlfriend?"

"No."

"Where's Y/N?"

Eddie tips his head so he can see past the coffee table and points to where you're almost hidden, sitting with Robin on the floor by Steve's sideboard. You have a basket of tapes in front of you, the two of you trying to choose what's going in the stereo. Eddie prays for anything but Blondie.

You will most likely choose Blondie.

"What does she like?" Dustin asks curiously.

"Everything, kind of. Why?"

"I wanna know what to say when I talk to her."

Eddie smiles at his friend's face, a soft, surprised thing. "I don't know if she knows anything about the radio but if you're happy about it she'll be happy too. She's a good listener."

Dustin picks at a piece of lint on his t-shirt bearing a white and black print of a dog wearing sunglasses. "So you talk to her?" he asks without looking up.

"I mean, yeah. What else do you do?"

"With a girl that likes you? Huh, let me think." Dustin laughs and ruins his own sarcasm, pointer finger laid against his chin in a show of thoughtfulness.

"It's not like that," Eddie says lightly.

"It could be."

"Could it? I mean… I don't even know if she'll stick around. And I feel bad 'cos I can't be honest with her."

"Why not?"

"Hopper said he would literally put me in the hole if I even thought about it." There's no need to expand. Dustin would know better than anyone what he's talking about.

He cringes at the thought, self hatred a hot poker down his throat. He must've said it to Dustin a hundred times when he finally came around from his coma (that wasn't a coma, but a death, and then a rebirth). I can't believe I put you through that. I can't believe I put you through that. I'm so sorry.

I'm just glad you're alive, Eddie.

And for a while, Eddie hadn't felt the same. The world he'd woken up to was hard. There had been lawyers and grief and guilt and becoming. He doesn't have the words to describe how it feels to become something new, something that needs to hurt people to live, something that will hurt people to live, whether Eddie wants to or not.

The loss of choice is suffocating.

Though moments like this with his friends– they don't make it 'worth it', they're just how it had to happen. There isn't a scenario where Eddie could give up. He can't leave Wayne, and he can't leave Dustin. He can live with the grief of what he is if it means other people don't have to live with grief of what he isn't.

"Eddie, are you okay?"

He's missed something. Dustin isn't the only one looking at him.

He curls a hand around his forearm subconsciously. "I'm fine. I think I'm gonna go to the bathroom, actually. Gotta piss real bad."

"Eddie-"

"I'm fine, Henderson." He puts on a good show, patting Dustin's arm. His heart, usually so slow these days, has enough life in it to ache.

He can't have been in the bathroom for five minutes when somebody knocks on the door aggressively. He's expecting Steve, pissed at his disappearance and likely preparing a speech on attention seeking behaviours and how they're hurting the youth of America, so he opens the door with a tired glare.

He finds you, beaming and pretty, dressed ridiculously nicely for his idiot friends.

"Hi," you say. He can hear something from Blondie's Parallel Lines playing from the living room, familiar because it's your favourite album. "Any room for me?"

Eddie moves back. You close the door behind you. The bathroom becomes a vacuum of your sounds and smells.

"They didn't have any Dio," you say with a smile.

"I honestly wouldn't expect any different."

"You could've brought some tapes, your mix from the van," you suggest. "I love that one."

"Which one?" he asks, and he can't help it, whenever he's with you his voice crops to a dulcet murmur. The urge to speak to you as you speak to him is unconquerable.

"One with the winking smile on the slipcase. I really like it."

"You can have it."

You lean against the sink. "I can?"

"Mm. Whatever you want." Especially when you look like this.

You smile at him, your 'thank you' smile, all sticky fondness and mischievousness. He has no idea what you're thinking.

"'S a small bathroom in a huge house," you marvel. Your voice echoes "Where does he shower?"

"There's an upstairs bathroom."

"Two bathrooms? That's-"

"Audacious?"

"I was gonna say overkill."

Your candidness has him shaking with laughter. He clutches at his sides, arms crossed and leaning forward. You visibly take in his appearance, eyes panning slowly over his clean hair. He'd taken care to look like somebody you might want to look at tonight.

"Why don't you sit down, Eds?" you ask, eyes creased with an unreadable emotion.

Eddie feels blindly for the toilet lid and pushes it down so he can do as you ask, wondering why you're asking.

"You look very handsome today."

He hugs himself. "As opposed to every other day, when I don't?"

You take a step forward, a second, hands playing with the hem of your shirt. Your outfit today is delightfully simple, a pressed black t-shirt long enough to cover the waistband of your pleated skirt. There's an expanse of thigh that makes his heart beat spin out, one longer than the other where your thigh-high is falling down.

He wants to pull it up.

"C'mere," he says.

You take that last step between his shoes and he reaches out, getting his fingertips under the elastic of your sock and tugging it upward over the soft fat of your leg. Your hands come up to his shoulders for balance, and you say, "No, you look handsome every day. Today you look very handsome. I made the distinction."

He covers your thigh with both hands, looking up into your face as you look down. "You look really pretty today," he says boldly, fingers spreading behind your knee.

"Thank you. Do you like my t-shirt?"

It's a screen print of Debbie Harry. Eddie tries not to roll his eyes. "I love it, but your dedication to Blondie is seriously worrying, sweetheart." He gives your leg a short squeeze and pulls the most giggly smile out of you yet.

"Like Madonna."

"No!" he bemoans.

You laugh and grow closer, arms on his shoulder, a hand threaded into his hair. "Cyndi Lauper?" you suggest.

He puts a hand on your waist as you move in for a hug. Your arms wrap around his neck and the tops of his shoulders, cheek crushed to the top of his head.

He'd ask if you were okay if he thought you weren't. You're not upset or seeking comfort. You're affectionate. You've been getting more and more touchy for weeks, as he has. Stolen touches, your almost-kiss on the porch last week.

"No, not Cyndi Lauper," he says, his hand skirting around your back to pull you in properly.

"R.E.M?"

"God, no. Where are you hearing all this junk?"

"The radio."

"Tuned into the wrong station."

You pet the back of his head. "Yeah," you say softly, "I think I was."

The hug is shorter than Eddie wants it to be. You make one of your happy sounds and pull away to get your hands on his face, stroking curls from his cheeks with a protective touch. "Handsome," you say, turning your hand to stroke his cheek with your knuckles. "Pretty. You have really big eyes, Eddie, so brown, and so…" You tilt your head to one side, face inching forward.

He turns his face to suit, to fit, breath held as you close the gap.

"So pretty," you murmur, and kiss him.

His hands are limp and then alive, one clutching your hip, one splaying against your chest. He can hear the thud of your heart clear as day — you're bumping with excitement as you kiss him. It's a delicate, tender thing, the party suddenly far away, the music drowned by the sounds of your breathing. You kiss as you talk, as you move, gentle but with bursts of ardency. Your lips are a blissful heat, the tip of your nose smushing into his as you part your lips over his.

He lifts his chin higher, his neck craned to receive you. He's savouring every movement. Each pause for breath that you take. The feeling of your inhales over his quick-bruising lips.

Your hands play in his hair so sweetly it makes his eyes burn with an embarrassing amount of emotion. He screws them closed and squeezes up your waist, steadying himself as you feel along his bottom lip with the tip of your tongue.

You don't get much further than that, seemingly pleased with your own brazeness or perhaps his touch, eyes glowing with mirth as you pull away.

"Sorry," you breathe, not sorry at all. "You just really looked like someone should be kissing you."

You're flushed. Eddie can practically see the heat emanating off of your cheeks. He can feel it.

He stands up, your pulse a ringing in his ears. The wet valves of your heart opening and closing.

"Eddie?" you ask quietly, lifting your head to meet his eyes as he walks you back into the door.

His gums sting. A click.

It's a compulsion.

His hands curl around your elbows, holding you in place. Your eyes are wide with confusion, your lightly swollen lips parted. He can see the tiniest slip of your pink tongue.

He holds your gaze as he leans in. Your eyelids flutter closed. You wrap your arms around him as he descends, totally trusting.

He's a meaner kiss than you are. He starts slow but swiftly loses a handle on it, kisses short but insistent, hot presses like little crescent moons against your barely open mouth.

His hands move up your arms, a near vice-like grip until he finds your sleeves. His fingers slip underneath, hands hungry for your warmth.

You make the worst sound anyone has ever made as he moves back, like something has been ripped from you. A gutted gasp, near silent.

He placates as he wades back in. Thumbs rubbing your arms, lips mouthing damp kisses down your face. The corner of your pout, the hill of your chin, the skin under your jaw. Your head tips back against the door with an audible thud. You exhale hard.

Eddie can't feel his hands.

Your pulse hammers under his lips. He kisses it once. He can't think. He can't breathe.

"You're always cold," you whisper, your hands drifting lazily under the fabric of his t-shirt. Your fingertips trail up his spine. "But your lips are warm."

He kisses your neck, his lips parting slowly, a hair's width a second as he sucks your skin into his mouth gently. It's barely a kiss. He does it a second time. A third. You start to laugh, a golden sound.

The point of his fangs touch your skin and you stop.

Eddie closes his mouth abruptly. His hand leaps to your neck and he feels your heart skip as he holds you still. "I'm sorry," he says, nose rubbing over the damp spot he's left behind, your teased skin.

Your heart hikes again.

"I'm sorry," he repeats. He pulls away, an agony.

"It's okay," you say. Your breathlessness says otherwise.

Eddie takes as many deep breaths as he can stand, wanting to clear his head and filling it with you instead. Your everything; your smell, your skin. Your limp hands against his back.

"I didn't hurt you, did I?" he asks when he gets a look at you, your unreadable expression. He takes care to keep his head angled down so you can't see the lower half of his face.

"I don't think you could."

You cup his cheek in your hand and he leans into it, his weight against yours.

"I wanted to tell you something," you confess.

"What-" He licks his lips, wincing when his fangs slide into his tongue and scrape grooves across his taste buds. "What was that?"

"I know you…" You pause, fingertips rubbing at his cheek.

Does she know? Eddie thinks, horrified. He hadn't realised how scary waiting could be. A thousand worries condensed into a handful of seconds. Does she know?

How could she not?

You press your palm to his cheek with more insistence. "I don't want you to think you have to hide anything from me. I know you have scars," you say, fingers sliding into the soft baby hair at the back of his neck. "You don't have to cover up. You don't have to cover any of it."

"I won't hurt you," he says, trying to convince himself.

"I know."

You stay a while longer. Eddie's friends pretend that you hadn't been alone in the bathroom for an inordinate amount of time together. You thank them all silently and less so, trying to talk to as many of them as you can.

There's Lucas, who's really, really nice, and his girlfriend Max, who's less so. She gives you an unimpressed look through her thick-lensed glasses, but you compliment her crutches and she comes around.

There's Mike, who actually isn't anywhere as bad as Eddie had described him. He's not frosty or standoffish, he's sweet and he asks questions. There's a girl with him that you don't catch the name of, and a boy on her other side.

There's Dustin, who you adore immediately, Robin, who you adore more, and then there's Steve.

Steve offers you a pretzel like you're more than familiar. He strolls right up to you with a bowl of them in hand and doesn't leave until you've eaten half of them.

There's a couple of people you don't manage to talk to at all, and you feel guilty about it all the way home.

"What if they think I'm rude?" you ask, tired eyes locking onto the stereo system. The time blinks analog in the dark, 12:59AM.

"They don't, don't worry about it. You have lots of time to get to know them, anyway."

You hum and turn to his face, indulgent because you know he can't look back. "You're not too tired to drive, are you?" He's spent. Yesterday had been one of his bad days.

"I'm fine."

"You say that all the time," you observe, dropping your cheek into the passenger seat's headrest.

"I'm fine all the time."

"Liar."

"Nuisance."

You huff a laugh through your nose. The strands of his friendship bracelet, the small beads at the ends, swing like pendulums in the gap between his arm and the steering wheel. You can see the rough skin of a scar creeping out from under his sleeve.

"Mike was really nice," you say.

"He has a bleeding heart."

That feels accurate. "He reminds me of you."

Eddie rolls his eyes. You feel for every detail, the strange tension between you like a gaussian filter over everything. He's gorgeous in a horrific way, heartbreakingly pale, eyes dark as pitch, hands restless. They squeeze alone the wheel, thick fingers curling tight until his knuckles are stark white. Running down the back of his hands are veins like rivers. They're more purple than green.

"Eddie," you say, playful, a tiny bit insecure.

"What?"

"Wanna stay the night?"

His hand moves forward on the wheel like he's revving a motorcycle, the tendon in his wrist rising to the surface. He clenches. "Not sure it's a good idea."

"Just to sleep. It's late."

"I don't know if I can sleep next to you."

You don't wanna say please. You don't want to ask Eddie to do anything he can't or doesn't wanna do.

He pulls up outside of your house with his mind already made up. He gets out of the car and you follow his lead. He locks it, shoves the keys in his pocket as you join him on the path up to your porch.

He's been in here enough times to know what it looks like, but for some reason you find yourself checking his face, worried about what it is he thinks of your things, all your mismatched trinkets, your stained glass lamps, your life as you let yourselves in. He ducks through the beeded curtain into your bedroom wary that they'll get tangled in his hair like they sometimes do.

"Do you wanna call Wayne?" you ask, gesturing to your telephone on the right hand side, nestled between a stack of books and a cup full of coloured pencils.

You pull your knee up to your chest and unlace your shoes one at a time. Eddie punches the number into the phone and holds the receiver to his shoulder to do as you're doing. It takes him less time to pop his sneakers off than for you to get out of yours. He's just taken the phone back into his hand when Wayne picks up.

"Wayne?" he asks softly. "Didn't wake you up, did I?"

You can't hear his response.

"I'm gonna stay with Y/N tonight. Yeah, we had a good time. Yeah…" His eyes drift to you as you peel out of your thigh highs.

"Yeah, I'm still here. What?" He meets your eyes and it feels accidental, because he throws his eyes to your bedsheets and turns his face to the wall. "No," he says firmly.

You scrape together something to wear for bed and some fresh underwear and leave for the bathroom, telling yourself that nothing is gonna happen so don't get your hopes up but not wanting to get caught out if it does. You freshen up, brushing your teeth and washing your face.

You stare at yourself in the mirror and wonder if you should've left your face-powder and your mascara on. Maybe even the skirt. You'd looked nice and pretty for the party. Now you look like yourself, still pretty but without those extra touches. Will he care? Does it matter?

You debate your pyjama pants considerably.

There's a lot happening.

Eddie is… Eddie is something else. He's different, you'd known that for a long time, and his kiss had confirmed it.

He's something out of a science fiction book.

Well, nobody's perfect.

Whatever he is, he'd kissed you. You'd kissed him and he'd responded, he'd come back for more, and now he's sitting in your bed when he could've gone home. You bring your hand to your neck and crane to one side, fingertips poking at your unbroken skin. His hickey's haven't even bruised.

You screw the pants up and drop them into your laundry basket. You take off every piece of jewellery on your person.

"Do you wanna use the bathroom?" you ask from behind the beaded curtain. "I left a new toothbrush for you on the sink."

"Yeah, desperately, I…" He takes you in as you emerge. Fresh-faced, bare-legged. As naked as you've ever been in front of him, physically and otherwise.

Eddie meets you where you're standing. He's ditched his jacket, and for the first time since you met him you can see the full length of his arms.

"You're not wearing your bracelets," he says, looking between your bodies. His hand twitches toward yours.

"You have tattoos," you say.

"They were better, before."

There's a misshapen mess of black splodges near the crook of his elbow broken up by scar tissue. One arm is less scarred than the other, an almost perfect flank of white skin.

"Is that a puppet? He's super spooky."

"Mh-hm."

You bring your hand to his tattoo and feel over the skin. It doesn't feel like it's there. Eddie holds your wrist and the two of you move together, your fingertips stroking up until you're wrapped around his bicep.

Eddie brings his free hand to your collar. His index finger straightens, encouraging your chin up so he can ease forward and kiss you. He's firm, eager, and your lips curl up into a smile underneath it. He turns his head to the right and you fall left, smile worsened when you feel his own start to form.

He nudges your nose. You take it for a telling off and laugh. "Sorry," you apologise, kissing his top lip.

"You're making this difficult," he chides.

Despite any sternness, Eddie loosens his grip on your wrists to slide his fingers between yours, pressing your joined hands to your chest. He leans back down and he's careful, almost methodical in the way he kisses. Chaste pecks, hot and precious as tiny stars.

You reach for his waist.

Eddie kisses you a final time and steps back. "I'll be back," he promises.

You lower your chin, flustered and perplexed by his sudden departure.

Walking around to the right side of the bed, you click on your bedside lamp — a beautiful glass and foiled contraption that throws dainty stripes of stars and hearts over everything close in the dark — before climbing in. You sniff one of your pillows experimentally, trying to remember when you last changed the bed. You decide they're acceptable even if they really smell like your hair oil and flip them around to be safe, plumping them up with your hands.

You've curled up on your side and almost succumb to your fatigue when Eddie returns, bringing with him the smell of spearmint and a fuzzy feeling in your stomach as he shuts off the light and sits on the opposite side of the bed, facing you. The hair around his face is damp with water, baby hair's limp.

"I'm sorry I don't have anything for you to wear, I-" Youre cut off by your own gasp as Eddie kisses you, his hand on your neck, his nose bridge sliding into your own. You hadn't been expecting it, and it's no less dizzying than any other kiss he's given you today.

"It's okay," he murmurs lowly, lips pressed to your lips, "have to wear you, is all."

You huff a laugh into his mouth. "I swear I'm always laughing when I'm with you," you muse as Eddie dedicates himself to your bottom lip. You cup the back of his head. "You're amazing."

Eddie groans and eases back. "I'm not good with words, sweetheart. To tell you how I feel about you."

You push one of your legs toward his knee. "...You can show me."

He shifts in the bed until he can lean over the entirety of your chest, hands cupping your face and lips poised hovering over your own, a millimetre of space between your mouth and his. "Okay," he says quietly.

He dips down. You can feel his bottom lip tremble, and then he's kissing you too hard to feel it anymore. You wrap loose arms around his back.

"Are you sure?" you whisper to him.

He rests his nose against your cheek, eyes closed, drawing the tiniest left to right. "I want you," he reassures.

"And you're okay?"

"Yeah, sweetheart. I'm okay. Do you want to?"

"Yeah. More than anything."

Another loving kiss against your cheek, Eddie moves down, down, down. "Tell me if I do something you don't like," he murmurs, top lip dragging and leaving a line of dampness to the base of your throat.

He adorns the canvas of your neck in half-moon contusions, big hands caressing your shoulders, your chest. You hold your breath as his fingers pass over your nipple, fighting to keep in any embarrassing sounds.

Eddie disagrees with his plan of action. You shiver as he brings his lips to a close and his bottom teeth scrape upward, as he pulls his head up and says, "C'mon, angel, breathe."

He follows his command with a manipulative touch, a circle over your nipple that makes you shudder. He kisses you and it feels like a thank you, pressure, a heat as his palm smooths over the bump of your tummy to your thighs. He squeezes the outside of one and for a while you can kiss him back, and then he pulls your thighs apart and you break away. Eddie follows, kisses you even when your reciprocation is weak.

He pushes your thigh flat to the bed.

You feel the heat of your excitement start to grow. Your stomach aches with the want to be touched.

"You're like a space heater, you're that warm," Eddie says, hand coasting down the inside of your thigh. He squeezes until fat melds under his fingers. "Are you scared?"

His whispering in your ear, his hand as close as it is to where you want it, it winds you up like a coil. You sigh as his thumb strokes the edge of your panties, sound coloured by an awful, devouring desire.

His face presses further into yours in reaction.

His touch is like the tide. He wades in, away. His thumb strokes inward over something soft and then his whole hand moves back to your thigh.

"Teasing," you utter.

"A little… Why, is there something you want me to do?"

His clueless whispering is infuriating and exciting at the same time. Your heart races and you can't discern if it's more lust or love.

"Touch me," you plead, pouting, knowing he's a pushover.

Anticipation stabs like a needle in your tummy as he slides his palm over your cunt completely. He rubs a careful, almost casual rhythm into your panties with the breadth of his fingers, lips kissing a lazy stripe up to your forehead, where he rests his face. You both watch his hand move past the valley of your rising chest.

"M'gonna pull these off, yeah?" He sits up, fingers pushing under the sides. "Lift your- yeah, thank you, sweetheart."

You buzz with his pet names, his soft voice, the feeling of your panties sliding up to your knees and his gentle exhale. You swear you can feel it fan over your slit. "Shit…" he moan, pulling at your spread cunt.

He looks like he's in pain, eyebrows pinched together and murmuring curses as he circles the wetness gathered at your entrance. You turn your head searchingly as he starts to ease his index finger inside your heat, a gentle probing.

One becomes two. He muffles your sighing with firm kisses, amorous praises, "That's it, baby, relax," as he works you open, fingers wet with slickness but not enough. He changes his position, pushing his middle and marriage finger inside and curving as his thumb slides up your slit looking for the bead of your clit.

Slow, slow circles. "There, huh?"

You shiver as he pushes in deeper, fingers as far as they can go. He spreads them wide, drops reassuring kisses all over your face when you keen. It's so new to have him kiss you at all, and to have him touching you — you're melting into nothing right there in his hold.

"I got you. Tell me if it hurts, okay?"

"Want you to- I want you to fuck me," you murmur, arms wrapping around him so you can hide your face in his neck.

"Fuck. Fuck, baby. Gonna fuck you just as soon as I can fit," he murmurs back, sinking three of his thick fingers into your snug cunt. He pulls wetness out with every thrust, a line of slick dribbling down onto the sheets underneath. He wipes it upward and pushes it back inside, his chest heaving. "Y'so tight, gotta take my time. Take our time." He rubs his nose against your head until he can kiss the highest point of your cheek. "Make sure you can take it."

"I can."

It doesn't bear repeating how quietly you're speaking, a mouthing inaudible under the wet, rhythmic thud of Eddie's pinky finger slapping your sticky cunt as he ups the pace of his finger-fucking.

"I don't think so," he coos, pulling his fingers from your cunt and making a show of spreading them wide. Your slick ribbons between them, almost invisible in the dark. "Ruin your sheets before any of that, maybe."

Eddie sits up and gets his hands under your armpits. You laugh as he tugs you up so your shoulders are on top of the pillows, but you don't have time to be confused. He quickly moves to kneel at your feet and pulls your leg over his shoulder, your back lifting unevenly from the sheets.

He starts with a sweet kiss pressed to the skin closest to his mouth, your lower thigh, and then works his way up, open mouthed, barely kisses at all until his hair whispers against your sensitive cunt and he's nipping at the stripe of skin between your thigh and the place where you most want his attention.

"Pretty," he says into your damp skin, lips shining. You reach down to stroke his hair behind his ears, worried he's gonna get it dirty.

He looks at you from between your thighs, his eyes dark in the dim light, their lashes long and soft where the outermost flutter into your skin. He's lovely.

He holds your gaze as he pulls back to your inner thigh. "Pretty everywhere," he says salaciously.

His lips part over your skin and you think he might bite you, a bruising hickey, but he pushes you down flat to the bed by your hips and kisses your clit, a simple kiss. Your fingers weave deeper into his hair. Your fingernails scratch lightly against his scalp, every tiny lick or kiss reflected in the minute tightening of your hands.

He goes slow, mouths down, kisses wetter and wetter as he reaches your entrance. "Poor girl," he murmurs, hands pulled down to further scandalise. He sinks two fingers inside and laughs into your cunt. You squirm.

"What happened? You're dripping on my fingers." Your thighs draw closed around his head as he curls his fingers against a soft spot.

"Eddie, can you-" You swallow. "Please. Please."

He pries your thighs open and rubs them soothingly, lapping at the heat of your cunt in face of your pleading. His tongue appears broad and flat up the centre of you until he's kissing on your clit, fingers pumping in rhythm. Your fingers work into his hair and he groans, the vibration enough to make you whimper under his mouth.

He laps at your clit messily and you tip your head back, breath coming in tight pants. You don't know what you say, only how you say it, desperate "please,"s and keening "Eddie,"s.

His thrusts grow in enthusiasm, fingers rubbing eagerly against something sweet. You pull your legs up and nudge his face to your cunt insistently, thigh shaking as you hold it up. Eddie doesn't need any more encouragement, his pretty pink lips suckling at your clit until you see stars. You make a pained little sound and try to move away from his kissing, startled at the intensity of your high.

Eddie lets your clit pop out of his mouth with a lewd, slick sound, his hands moving under your thighs and pulling you closer. "Good girl," he says, rubbing his wet face against the inside of your thigh. He inhales hard as you are, though he pauses to kiss your kneecap and pat your leg. "Good girl, sweetheart."

"I'm sorry," you say breathlessly, hands pulling his hair from his face. Pleasure rolls through you in hot waves.

"For what?"

"Tugging on your hair," you explain, shoulder pulled up to your cheek.

Eddie kisses your tummy lovingly and climbs on top of you to do the same just under your chin. "It’s okay, sweetheart, I like that shit. That was good, huh?" he asks, lips dropping down to yours all wet and warm.

He's not bragging, he's genuinely asking.

You nod into his kiss, your hands coming up to his sides. You swear your ears perk up as he unzips his jeans and eases them down, a hand disappearing into the mess of fabric. He moans quietly at the first touch.

You move his hair out of the way to watch. Eddie tugs at the length of his cock with a cruel hand, a short dribble of pearly precum sobbing down the tip and under his fingers. He spreads it as it goes, the slickness emphasising the ridges and veins of his cock. You can see it throb, if you look close enough.

He sits back and eases his jeans and boxers down enough to reveal a thatch of curls that brush his hand with every pump downward.

"You okay?" he asks, smirking.

You pull your shirt over your head and your chest warms at his adoring smile. "Will you take off yours?"

He doesn't hesitate like you worried he might. He sheds his t-shirt, pulling the fabric over the back of his head and dumping it off the side of the bed.

You take in his chest and it's abundance of ragged scarring still purpled with newness. He has a tattoo over his heart, a black whorl of legs and eyes. Fine dark hair crawls from the middle of his chest down his navel, joining with the thatch of coiled hair surrounding his aching cock. You shuffle forward and wait with two tentative hands held aloft until he says, "It's okay," before you touch him. You run your hands down the soft slopes of his waist.

"Does it hurt?"

"Not anymore."

"Can I kiss it?"

He snorts. "Prefer you kiss something else."

That really makes you laugh. You dot a kiss against his jaw and can't make yourself stop, dropping them all the way to the skin behind his ear. Your hand creeps lower as you go, held to the curve of his tummy. His skin is hot to touch the lower you go, and his stomach feels solid, a heaviness you know all too well.

"Can I touch you?" you whisper into his ear.

"Please."

You drop your forehead against his chest and he brings his hand up to cup the back of your head. His cock pulses as you wrap your hand around it, skin smooth and slick as you palm slowly up and down. You watch in awe as a bead of precum wells at the tip, Eddie's rough breathing loud overhead.

"Lie down, Y/N," he says, hand moving behind your naked shoulders.

"What way?"

"How do you want it, sweetheart? We'll do it whatever way you want."

You think about it. Whatever way you want. No matter how indulgent, you know he means it.

"Will you spoon me?"

He pushes you gently and follows behind, dragging your body into his front and angling your hips, cock hot and prodding your back. He gets his hand under your knee and pulls it up, splaying your cunt. You jump in surprise as he pushes his cock through your folds, tip rubbing against the still sensitive bead of your clit.

Eddie wraps his arms around you, hugging you from behind. "You wanna put it in for me, baby?"

You reach between your bodies and take his sticky cock into your hand, shifting until the head nudges against your hole. He sinks in inch by inch, arms tightening around your waist and grinding you down onto his cock until you're whimpering.

You grab at his arms with your hands and tether yourself to him as he starts to rock his hips, his thrusting tender and his face turned into your neck.

He presses his hand flat to your abdomen, an anchoring point as he moulds your weepy cunt around his length, each slovenly movement into your heat spreading you that little bit wider.

"Fuck," he says finally, sounding seconds from a black out. "Oh, fuck- You're tight. Gonna fuck you open slow, okay?"

You're pretty sure you'd let him do just about anything. You bring his hand to your mouth and kiss every white knuckle, every freckle you can see on the back, and when he bottoms out your cover your lips with his stolen hand to smother a tearful gasp.

Eddie's thrusts are spearing in their steady rhythm, a dirty slap ringing with every punching thrust forward. You curl in on yourself and hide your mouth in the sheets, wet pants smothered by fabric. Eddie's grip falls to your hip, where he pulls your body back and forces your cunt open even deeper.

His cock pushes into your sweet spot sudden and emphatic. You moan and he stills, rutting into that same space without pulling out until you're babbling his name, body knocked forward with every thrust.

Eddie turns your face toward him as much as he can without hurting your neck, your moans echoing in time with each thrust. "There you go," he says, "wanna hear how good it feels."

If he cares that you can't answer him he doesn't show it, arm coming up under you arm to grasp at your chest, your breaststroke soft and aching under his hand as he squeezes tenderly. His cock kisses at the sweet spot inside you intermittently; you're dizzy with it.

Eddie can't keep quiet either, his moans breathy, his breath hissing between his teeth when you clamp down around him. "Fuck," he begs, dragging his cock out of your heat, "fuck, Y/N."

He says your name like the syllables alone are appraising.

You can tell when it gets too much for him. He slows. His face drops into your shoulder, and he matches his pace to the wet kisses he leaves behind. Your wetness feels stickying, each of his thrusts snug.

His breath hitches, ragged pants accompanying every slow push of his hips. "Where's my girl?" he asks, eyes still closed as his hand abandons where it'd been squeezing the bump of your tummy to search further downward, fingers disappearing into your folds, short curls wet with slick. He can't find any purchase. You roll your hips, chase his touch and the pleasure that comes with it.

He groans into your shoulder. It sounds more pain than pleasure.

"Are you okay?" you ask, trying to turn in his arms. He holds you in place. "Eddie?"

"Yeah, fuck, I'm okay." He grinds up into your cunt. "Fuck, you're perfect."

"Will you kiss me?"

He does. It's nowhere near the bruising press you'd wanted. It's too careful.

"Listen," he murmurs, "I'm gonna get you on your front, okay? Gonna make you feel so good," he promises, waiting for you to nod before he pushes your shoulder away from him and climbs up behind you. You lay flat on your stomach and Eddie settles on your thighs, a heavy weight.

He pushes into your cunt with two fingers first, the new position allowing for a new pleasure. He pumps in and out and swaps his fingers for his cock quickly after, bearing the full weight of his body into your back as sinks to the hilt.

You both moan in time, hands fisted in the sheets.

He kisses your neck, lips parted, and his teeth feel so sharp that your heart sinks as it had in the bathroom.

"Eddie-" you start.

He pulls away, stops every movement.

"Eddie," you say again. What are you supposed to say? You both know what he is.

There's a lull where neither of you knows what to do filled by your too-fast breathing.

"I won't hurt you," he says, hands rubbing up the length of your back and then under. He holds a hand over your heart. He drops his lips to your back. "Do you want me to stop?"

He must feel your pulse calm under his touch, but he still asks again when you don't answer. "Do you want me to stop? It's okay if you do. You're okay, baby, I promise."

You steal a pillow from against the headboard and rise up on elbows. Your admission comes weak but completely honest. "Fuck me, Eddie, please... I want you. I want you-" Your murmuring's interrupted by a sharp breath as Eddie starts to move again, the head of his cock pushing into your cunt, a slick, perfect feeling.

He moans from the back of his throat as his cock pushes into you again and again, hips smacking the dough of your ass as his pace quickens. You hug your pillow tightly, tears popping up in the corners as he ruts deep.

"Being so good for me," he groans, clamped down on your hip with a vice-like grip. "Fuck, you feel so good. Fucking clinging to me every time I pull out, baby, Christ." His blasphemy is punctuated by a thrust that has you sliding up the bed, sheets wrinkling under your arms. You spread your thighs and wetness pools at your clit as his pelvis thrusts into you, driving pleasure so deeply it aches in your hips.

You moan pathetically and reach back to hold his hand, wiggling your fingers. He takes it in one and presses your arm against your lower back with the other, struggling to maintain a steady pace as he gets close to cumming. You're a babbling stream of sounds as he fucks in deep, swollen sweet spot tapped against mercilessly.

He throws himself back on his haunches, cock dragged out of your heat.

You pull your legs out from underneath him and curl onto your side to watch, eyes wide as white spurts of pearlescence jump out of the head of his reddened cock and drip down the bumps of his fingers. He leans back, his stomach and thighs tensed with every pump.

He groans through a smile, moan's coloured by a happy, relieved laughter. "F-uck," he drags, fisting his cock dry.

He meets your eyes as the last of it slides down onto his stomach.

You smile softly. "Fuck," you mumble.

Eddie wipes his hand in his jeans like a fucking hooligan and tucks his cock back into his boxers with a wince, and then he collapses on top of you. He's sort of nice about it, his arm over your shoulder and his face behind your ear.

"Fucking beautiful," he praises, dropping his head back on the bed so you're face to face. "You're so fucking pretty. So perfect." He kisses you. "You're perfect," he repeats, staring intently into your eyes.

You pull a hand from between your legs, smelling of sex. Eddie literally couldn't care less if he tried, and he lets you take his face into your hand without complaint.

He gets his arm under your arm and starts to rub your back. "You want me to take care of you again?" he asks, eyebrows raised gently. "Yeah?"

And you would let him, you would, but you need to see them for yourself.

You touch your index fingertip to his lip.

"Can I see?" you ask.

He loses his boisterous joy, tamps it down. He realises that he can't lie, that he hasn't been lying, and he nods. You tremble as you pull his lip up over his canine tooth, excited and scared.

A sharp, exceptionally white tooth pokes out of Eddie's gums. You're taken aback, though you'd known exactly what you'd find.

A fang.

Blood oozes at the gums.

"You're bleeding," you worry aloud, touching your finger to the dark beading at the base of his tooth.

Eddie's eyes rove over your face thoughtfully. He pulls your hand away from his lip and sets it on his neck instead. "They always do that. The gum heals, breaks when they wanna come out."

"How often do they come out?"

"A lot more since I met you. Whenever my adrenaline spikes, they seem to think it's… feeding time."

That is a dizzying thing to learn.

You're not sure how you feel, but you know one thing: he's Eddie. "It's too bad," you say, forcing a lightness that turns real more easily than you expect. "I really want to kiss you right now."

He strokes your cheek with his thumb. "I really wanna kiss you too. Maybe a small one?"

You find yourself leaning forward, unafraid.

He kisses you once, twice, three times, the two of you holding each other's faces and covered in mess. Slick and sweat and blood. The hearts and stars from your lamp spray over his hip and paint him with pinks, greens, oranges, a rainbow cutting over his trim waist. You rest your hand overtop, feel his keloid scars like hills under your fingers.

"My boyfriend's a vampire," you mutter, bemused at fate.

Eddie blinks at you. "I'm your boyfriend?"

"Yeah, I think so. Don't you?"

Eddie pulls you into his chest and doesn't let you go for a long, long time.

Your first time watching a blood sate is weird.

For one, Chief Hopper is firmly against it. He's got his kid with him, the boy from the party that Mike had been so heavily doting on, and if he didn't you might think he was a pretty scary guy.

"I think this is stupid," the chief says plainly. "I think this is stupid, I think you're stupid," — he points at Eddie where he's sitting sickly in the round couch — "and I think you're plain crazy, kid." He points at you last.

You beam at him. "People have said that about me."

His kid laughs.

"Will," Hopper says tiredly, "go sit in the car."

"Look, Chief, I know I messed up, okay, but she kind of stuck her hand in my mouth and I didn't really have a choice."

Wayne looks at you with new eyes. "You did?"

You nod at him faux-seriously.

"And what gave her the inkling that you might have had something in your mouth worth looking at?" Hopper says, which is hilarious. You laugh behind your hand.

He gives you a disapproving look that you completely ignore. If you'd taken notice of disapproval you would've stopped having this much fun years ago.

"Uh, well, she might have… felt them?" His pitch rises.

Hopper looks like he's about to blow a gasket when Will says, "What was he supposed to do? Never talk to anyone new ever again?"

"He did a lot more than just talk to me," you say. There'd been a fixed bike, phone calls, lots of sandwiches, bug hunts, an entire sketchbook full of drawings.

"I told you to wait in the car," Hopper says.

Will grins and raises his hands in surrender. "Bye," he mouths. You wave.

Hopper waits for the door to close before he continues. "I get it, when you're a teenager you think your hormones are the end of the world-"

"I'm almost twenty three."

Hopper pinches his hand closed. "But you do not understand the danger that you are creating here."

"Like a stake-ing," you whisper, very very quietly. Eddie's the only one who can hear you, and he laughs so hard he snorts.

"I'm glad you find this funny." Hopper's tone could not imply the opposite any more.

He hands Wayne a paper bag that audibly sloshes and stalks out, his anger a palpable cloud of steam rising off of his shoulders. Eddie seizes up beside you at the sound, lips parting as his fangs come through. You don't touch him because you value your blood inside your body, only slide away from him and smile. "You okay, handsome?"

"Kid, maybe the chief is right. We don't know how Eds is gonna act with you here," Wayne says.

You nod respectfully. You like Wayne, and he knows about all of this stuff more than you ever could.

"No," Eddie mumbles, putting his hand out for you across the couch.

You take it without thinking.

Wayne sighs. You can hear him grumbling as he disappears from view into the kitchen and puts a pot on the stove. There's the sound of a bag being punctured with a knife, a wet slosh. Eddie's grip on your hand tightens.

You're still fascinated that he even drinks blood in the first place. That's wickedly sickening. Wicked, because it's cool that he's a vampire, with his impressive hearing, senses and smell. But sickening, because if you had to drink a pint of blood every couple of weeks you'd throw up.

"I read about a new blood-sucker."

Eddie raises his heavy head. "Another bug?"

"No, a finch! A vampire finch. They're really pretty, Teddy. They're small and brown with long beaks and they drink blood because there's barely any water on their island." You give him a loving smile. "They aren't parasites. S'just how they had to change to survive."

He squeezes your hand, this time on purpose.

"Are you gonna come and have it in here, Eddie?" Wayne asks, one last shot at separating the two of you.

"I'm okay," he says loudly. His eyes trace your smile. "Really."

It can't be fun to have two people watch you drink a warm mug of blood, but Eddie finds it funny. He keeps laughing every time he brings the rim of the glass to his mouth.

"I can't do it if you're looking at me," he says.

Wayne rolls his eyes and looks away. You cover your face with both hands and part your fingers to spy on him through the gaps. He makes it look easy, draining the mug basically in one long pull, though his hunger turns violent as the cup empties. He chokes. Blood trickles down from one corner of his mouth.

You automatically want to reach over and wipe it away. Wayne grabs your arm before you can and gives you a fatherly look that says, I wouldn't do that if I were you.

"Shit," Eddie says, slamming his now empty mug down on the coffee table. It makes a grating sound like a ground mortar and pestle. He sits as far back on the couch cushions as he can, nausea clear on his face.

"Deep breath," Wayne says.

"Fuck, Wayne."

"You're aces. Deep breaths."

Your heart hurts watching Eddie like this. He covers his mouth with eyes closed tightly and breathes hard through his nose. Already there's colour coming back into his face, not a lot but anything is an improvement. He'd been practically grey.

When Eddie pulls his hand from his mouth blood has spread over his lips and jaw. Your eyes widen.

"I'll get the shower running," Wayne says, slapping his knees as he stands. He stops before the hallway. "Good job, Eddie."

The boy in question slouches into a ball on the sofa and nods into a cushion. You wait for the sound of Wayne pulling the shower cord that turns on the hot water before you stand up, head tipped to one side.

"You okay, handsome?".

"Tired."

"You want a hug from me?"

"Is anyone else offering?" He opens one eye to peek at you and grins at your distraught expression. "I'm joking, I'm kidding. C'mere, before I start bawling." You sit and then flop onto your side, pulling your legs up next to his. "Such a frowny face." His voice is adorably tired.

"Better than yours. You look like someone from Night of the Living Dead, baby."

Eddie's arm lies limp like a dead fish over your waist. "Lemme nibble on your brains," he says, words thick as dark honey, eyes closed. "Just a snack."

You're waiting for someone to pull the rug out from under your feet. No way your boyfriend, your cries at the end of every movie, brings you flowers because he felt like it, won't step on cracks in the sidewalk boyfriend just skulled a glass of O-negative like it was a milkshake.

You feel guilty as soon as you think about it. He's not confined to all his softest parts and he never will be. He's snarky and angry and loud. He plays guitar like a real rockstar and he doesn't take anyone's shit. He's a survivor. A glass of blood every now and then was never gonna stop him.

You keep wondering if you should let him suck your blood. It could be hot. It could also probably be the worst idea ever, a relationship faux pas up there with proposing after a month or saying I love you on the first date.

"What are you thinking about?" he asks.

You brush the hair out of his eyes with your ring finger. "Embarrassing relationship fumbles."

"Oh yeah? Like letting your girlfriend watch you drink human blood from a mug shaped like Woodstock?"

"Least it wasn't Snoopy."

"God forbid."

"Is it always like this?" You stroke your hand down his face and rub along his jaw with your thumb. "D'you always get sleepy?"

"Yeah." He turns his face so your hand covers his mouth.

You've stopped wearing silver jewellery, your wrists bare besides the endearingly awful friendship bracelet he's constructed for you. Not a friendship bracelet, he'd corrected. You're not kissing other friends, are you? Because that's really gonna put a downer on this whole thing.

You dip your forehead to his chin and the two of you lay there in silence. You can smell blood, a thick, metallic stick permeating every corner of the room. It's especially strong between the both of you.

"Do you wanna bite me right now?" you inquire without opening your eyes.

"Not really. Blood sate kicks in quickly. It's the worst for, like, the first ten seconds after. Now I wanna sleep, but Wayne's gonna make me shower."

"Maybe I can shower with you."

"I'm sure he'd jump for joy if you suggest it."

"Really?"

Eddie kisses your hand. "No," he says with a giddy laugh.

"I'll pretend I'm gonna sit on the toilet. Keep watch."

"How will you stop your hair from getting wet?"

"I'll lean out."

Eddie laughs even more than he had been, peeling laughter that warms you from the inside out as he kisses your hand again. "That'll definitely work."

Wayne clears his throat.

"Shower's hot. I'm going out. For an hour." Eddie perks up. His uncle looks him dead in the eye. "Don't make me regret this."

And while Wayne had been under the impression you and Eddie were gonna have some grown up fun together in the shower, what you really do is an innocent act of affection: you wash Eddie's hair.

"You have to lean your head back," you chide.

"I am."

"More than that."

"There's no room."

You're lucky you both fit. You're freezing standing behind Eddie, the only relief the warm water that trickles down from your hands to your elbows as you draw circles in his scalp, working the shampoo into a fine lather.

"How did you get blood here?" you ask, scratching rusty flakes from the hair behind his ear.

"I don't know. It gets everywhere. Like eyeshadow."

You push your chin over his shoulder. "You wear eyeshadow?"

"For shows."

"Really?"

"Is it hard to believe?"

You encourage his head under the water and rake your hands through his curls, encouraging the soapy water down to the ends with patient hands. "Lip gloss too? Hey, can I do your makeup?"

"Maybe tomorrow," he bargains. While the shower has helped to wake him up, lethargy remains thick and unshakeable as adamant.

You kiss the wet ridge of his shoulder blade, picturing his pretty face decked out in dark liners and sticky balm. "Thank you."

"I haven't worn any in a long time. Haven't played a show in a really long time."

You wring the water out of his hair and search in the steam for his conditioner. It's mostly empty. "You could put on a show for me. I never got to see you play," you say, shaking it really hard. A dollop collects in your hand and you work the dregs through the ends of his long hair.

"You want that?"

"I think you're the best guitar player in the world."

You're not joking. He's the best, and he plays guitar. And he's pretty good, semantics aside. You love sitting out on the porch with him and listening to him play old rock songs off the top of his head. You could watch his hands move over the strings for hours.

"If that's the case, I can definitely put on a show. Make-up, costume, stage dives. The whole nine yards. Anything for my girl."

You roll the ends of his hair between two coated palms and step back. "There. You have to let it soak in for a couple of minutes."

Eddie turns with a grin, angling his chest and hair forward, away from the stream.

"Whatever will we do?"

You wipe an escaped streak of blood off of his bottom lip and smile. "I have no idea."

You kiss. Eddie leans down and you move up, damp noses glancing off of each other. You're used to short kisses, never enough to make his heart race in case it prompts an unnecessary appearance of his fangs, so when Eddie encourages your lips apart to wade in deeper you pull back questioningly.

"Blood sate. I'm 'sated'. They won't come out."

Your jaw drops. "For real?"

He shakes his head with a pleased smile. "For real. Kiss me sick, sweetheart."

You throw your arm around his neck and drag his face to yours, kissing with an ardency that both surprises and amuses him. He laughs into your open mouth until suddenly he's not laughing at all, only breathing, pushing against you with the same urgent force and the same adoring smile.

"Does this mean you can give me a hickey?" you ask enthusiastically. Eddie has yet to give you a proper love bite.

He leans back under the show spray and pulls you in with him, laughing when you dissolve like rice paper in his arms, finally warm. There's never been a sweeter sound.

/\^._.^/\

thank you for reading! | my masterlist | my halloween party

if you enjoyed reading his, please consider reblogging. i promise it makes a huge difference

10K notes · View notes

steddiealltheway · 5 months

Text

Eddie’s eyes are brown.

At least, that’s what Steve would’ve said before staring into his eyes for…ten seconds? Thirty seconds? Five minutes? … he’s lost track of time.

But the time is certainly not wasted.

Steve’s not sure how he’s never noticed that brown eyes aren’t just brown. It’s a silly thought, and he knows that he should probably know this considering he also has brown eyes, but maybe he’s been too focused on his hair. And maybe he’s been a little too focused on Eddie’s lips…

He fights to glance down at them as Eddie stares back at him, his pupils blown wide, but every now and then when he leans a little to the side, the sunlight from the windows hits his eyes just right and his pupils contract, showing off all the color in his eyes. And Steve loves when this happens.

The brown turns into an almost amber color, deep brown highlighted by hints of warm red and orange. And at the bottom of his eyes, there’s small patches of gold standing out against the deep brown ring that circles the whole iris.

Steve thinks he could get lost in it all and stare for hours.

He leans in a little closer, trying to see more of that gold, and nearly groaning when Eddie shifts away from the light again, eyes becoming such a deep brown that Steve can easily see his reflection.

But he doesn’t want to see himself, he wants to see how that dark chocolate turns into that gold and red in the sunlight.

Then, something Steve didn’t fathom happens.

Eddie closes his eyes.

“Steve won!” Dustin shouts, as the other kids carry on loudly, and Steve is harshly startled back into reality.

A staring contest. That’s what this was supposed to be. A staring contest, not a Steve gets lost in his friend’s eyes for so long that he forgets to blink contest. Christ.

He glances sheepishly at Eddie and takes in all his features, the furrowed brow and the slight frown to his lips as Eddie tugs at a stand of hair.

As the kids file out of the room, moving onto whatever activity is going to keep them entertained next, Steve asks, “Are you that upset about losing?”

Eddie shakes his head and leans forward, staring into Steve’s eyes again. Steve fights not to look too deeply, afraid he’ll get lost in the depths forever if he gives himself the chance.

“I saw something I hadn’t seen before,” Eddie comments, looking back and forth between his two eyes.

“I did too,” Steve admits, allowing himself to stare a bit. He reaches out and pulls Eddie closer to him, getting both his eyes directly in the sunlight. “I see a whiskey my dad used to always keep on his desk, with hints of gold that reminds me of the jewelry my dad got for my mom, back when they still loved each other.”

His heart pounds at the memories, back to a time when things almost seemed normal. When he thought he would always be happy.

Steve shakes his head and glances away, unsure of how the colors he saw before could bring up the deep memories he spewed to Eddie. He changes the subject and asks, “What did you see in mine?”

He expects maybe an analysis of green and brown, or hazel as many girls tell him after staring at him for long enough to make him feel uncomfortable. He wonders why Eddie doesn’t make him feel that way.

A finger lifts Steve’s chin, turning his gaze back to Eddie whose stare sends chills down his spines. “I saw longing,” Eddie states and continues, “Was it for those things? Those memories?”

Steve finds himself shaking his head as his eyes glance down to Eddie’s lips which twitch as he swallows. “Was it longing?” Eddie asks, nervousness seeping into his tone.

Steve glances back at his eyes and nods. It’s not like he’s unaware of his deeper feelings for Eddie, but he didn’t expect to fall so hard in just a few moments as he stared into his eyes. And he definitely didn’t expect to have those emotions read so clearly in his own eyes.

Eddie’s hand slowly moves to cup Steve’s face as he says, “Steve, read my own eyes for a moment. Please see the-”

“Can you guys give us a ride to the arcade?!” Dustin yells from the other room.

Steve sees Eddie’s eyes flash with annoyance which is much different from the loving expression from before.

Loving.

Steve takes a deep breath and steps back as he hears multiple footsteps hurriedly making their way back to the kitchen.

“Did you hear us?” Mike asks, crossing his arms.

“Yeah, yeah,” Steve says, “Get to the car.”

He lingers back with Eddie as he watches all the kids run to his car, and when Steve gets to the door with Eddie behind him, he yells, “Give me a minute, I need to grab my wallet!”

He closes the door quickly and rushes into Eddie’s space, cupping his face, and asking, “Am I reading this wrong?”

“Not at all,” Eddie says, hope and deep longing shining in his eyes.

“Good,” Steve says, leaning forward and meeting Eddie in the middle as they hurriedly kiss, pouring in all the longing they’ve both experienced for months now but were too oblivious to see before.

(Robin laughs for minutes on end when she hears that a staring contest is what got them together when they’ve been having multiple for months without the label. Steve just rolls his eyes, but as soon as Eddie asks, “Want to have another staring contest?” He can’t resist.)

#steddie #eddie munson #steve harrington #stranger things #steddie ficlet

1K notes · View notes

ddejavvu · 6 months

Note

eddie brock is the og loser boyfriend and i can’t stop thinking about venom just like completely bullying him when he’s in a relationship like his partner is like this drop dead gorgeous person and eddie wears the same sweaty jacket all the time and eats frozen tater tots haha

"There are crumbs on your shirt." Venom observes, and when Eddie nods with a noncommittal grunt, he continues, "And it is not a shirt. It is a sweatshirt. A sweaty sweatshirt, Eddie. And you wore it yesterday."

"That I did," Eddie crams another handful of chips into his mouth, salted and straight from the bag. His attention remains solely on the television in front of him, and Venom's goopy form shakes its head.

"Y/N is coming over later." He reminds the human, watching with disdain as Eddie chokes slightly on his mouthful because of the way he's slouched in his seat. He swallows regardless, and when he speaks, his voice is gruff from the irritation in his throat.

"Yeah, she'll be here in a few minutes," Eddie nods, "Hey, do you think they fake this show? The drama, and all."

Venom has no interest in whether the trashy reality show that Eddie is so enraptured by is fake or not. He cares that you'll be here any minute now, and Eddie looks like a corpse that's been rotting for a few days.

When the doorbell rings, Eddie moves to get up. Crumbs begin raining onto the carpet and he groans as his lazy joints ache, so Venom shoves him back into place with a strong tentacle and uses another to stretch and open the door for you.

You're clearly expecting a person on the other side, but you're quick to recognize the tentacle you're met with instead. It wraps greedily around your waist and you place your hand over its sticky form, grinning as you're barely able to shut the door behind you before Venom yanks you over to the couch.

"Hi, baby," Eddie greets, tipping his head onto the back of the sofa to grin upside-down at you, "How are you?"

"Good," You lean down to kiss him upside down, and Venom is appalled that you're willing to put your lips on Eddie's crumb-coated ones.

"Sour cream and onion?" You guess, and you're rewarded with the near-empty bag of them that Eddie had been demolishing.

You settle happily onto the couch by Eddie's side with the chips in your hand, and when Venom begins to let go of you you hold his tentacle in place. The symbiote watches you silently for a moment, observing your behavior and thinking a whole host of unsavory thoughts about humans and their disgusting tendencies.

"I do not understand," Venom interrupts your gushy sentiments with Eddie about how terrible the acting is on so-called 'reality' shows, "Eddie is disgusting."

The man's nose wrinkles and you let out a scoff of a laugh.

"Thank you, Venom. That's very kind of you. Did you forget you're made of slime?"

"Slime does not sweat. And I do not have crumbs stuck all over me."

"Venom, being in a relationship with someone means that you need to be comfortable with them. We don't have to dress up all the time, Y/N knows what I look like in pajamas and I've seen her hair unbrushed in the morning."

Venom, too, recalls the rather impressive tangled mess of hair that you sport after a night of deep sleep.

"You do not mind that he smells?" Venom turns to you, his milky-white eyes blinking with a squelch.

"He's smelled worse," You give a half-shrug, only one of your shoulders moving as you squirm closer to Eddie beneath the blanket he's draped over you.

"You're both too good to me," Eddie grins, batting his lashes sarcastically, "Careful not to flatter me too much, don't want my head to get too big to fit in my helmet."

Venom regards Eddie for a moment, then thinks of the motorcycle helmet the man breathes into every day. It's repulsive.

"Your head is already abnormally large," Venom observes, settling into Eddie's shoulder opposite from you, "I will keep insulting you so that it does not get bigger. You are repulsive."

1K notes · View notes

bleedingoptimism · 20 days

Text

part one -> 📱💞🚙

part two -> 📱💞🚙

It only takes a week for Steve to show up at this door again. He knocks on the door late at night and he’s panting as if he’s run all the way there, “I had to see you” he says and it's overdramatic and kind of romantic, and Eddie barely resists the urge to jump in his arms and kiss him. Or check if there’s a filming crew and it’s raining because of how much this feels like a movie, but it’s a beautiful night outside.

“Come in,” he tells Steve, immediately turning and running around the living room, throwing away empty food containers and tidying up a bit.

Steve watches him amused, but stands by the door, hands in his pockets, “So…” he says, “Came home today to find Chrissy, Vicky, and Robin all sitting at my dining table with their heads buried in a phone”

Eddie looks up at that, because what the fuck? He looks at Steve confused and Steve nods, like he agrees with Eddie.

“The three of them lifted their head at the same time, it was kind of freaky honestly,” He keeps going and Eddie chuckles, curious as to where this is going, “They wanted me to see this,” Stevee finishes, lifting his phone up, the first episode of the van series playing, right at the part were Eddie first sees Steve and blushes while looking at him.

Back in reality Eddie is blushing again too, Steve saw the van series, he knows. Steve knows. “Steve…” he starts even though he has no idea what he’s gonna say.

But Steve doesn't let him try, doesn't let him think. He takes two long steps towards Eddie and kisses him, hard but short, pulls away holding Eddie’s face between his hands, and brings their forehead together,

“I didn't know,” he breathes.

Eddie shakes his head, “How could you not, I was so obvious I-”

Steve just kisses him again, once more short and sweet before pulling back, “You never said.”

Eddie wraps his hands over Steve's wrists, just holding them there, moving his thumb over Steve’s pulse slowly. He can feel how hard Steve’s heart is beating, can feel it match the rhythm of his own heart. And he wracks his brain, trying to remember if he ever did ask Steve out, or if he ever stated he liked him out loud.

He ends up laughing at the stupidity of it. Everyone knew Eddie loved Steve, except Steve, “I’m- I don't what to say. I'm sorry I-” he starts but Steve shuts him up with a kiss again, “It’s okay, I know now”

This time when they kiss, Eddie doesn't let Steve keep it short. He keeps him close, kissing him deeper, harder, longer, until he doesn't know where he begins and Steve stops.

The next day a new video gets uploaded. “Goooood morning!” Eddie says, even though it is clearly noon, from the passenger seat of his van, “Guess who is ready for their road trip!” he smiles and pulls the phone away from him, so both he and Steve are in frame. Steve is driving, eyes on the road but a huge smile on his face, Eddie’s hand is clearly visible on Steve’s thigh in the shot before Eddie moves the phone back to his face, “We’ll keep updating you guys, can’t tell you exactly where we are going cause we’d like a little privacy,” he says and wiggles his eyebrows, a soft gasp and a whispered and heated ‘Eddie!’ is heard in the background, “But we will upload videos from where we’ve been in a few weeks!” he films Steve once more, who looks at Eddie with a big sappy enamored smile on his face and then films the road for a few seconds, the world passing by the window. Finally, he twists the phone back to his face and says, “Oh! And don't worry about who’s going to drive… we’ll switch” and he winks and ends the video.

the end

☕🥐💕 coffee? by a roadhouse?

#stranger things #steddie #eddie munson #steve harrington #modern au #rv au #i wrote something #this was so fun guys i hope yall like the end #yall are so sweet i love it here

572 notes · View notes

gachagon · 2 months

Text

This is big spoilers for the commercials in the Awayfrompryingeyes website on the Welcome Home site.

I've been saying since DAY 1 that Eddie Dear was going to be one of the most important Neighbors to pay attention too, aside from Julie, Frank, and Sally. And this update just practically confirmed it, I had this long running suspicion about Eddie Dear, and it's that I think he was one of the first besides Wally to gain sentience in a way.

I know most people believe Wally was the one who "woke" up first essentially and was able to see the reality of what they were actually living in, but I think Eddie Dear was the first of Wally's friends to actually wake up. My reasoning for this is that Eddie's "backstory" on the neighborhood page is so vague and strange compared to the other neighbors. He's the ONLY one who doesn't remember where he came from, and we see routinely throughout these updates that he's kind of the odd man out a lot of the times.

And that's not totally unusual for a kids show, but there's something about Eddie that just points to him being a lot different from the other puppets. Like that he's also the only one who's able to actually tell what time it is, as he's the only neighbor with a real watch.

And he really REALLY wants to fit so badly into the world of Welcome Home that he sticks to his job as a mailman as much as he can. But even looking at his interactions with the others, you can tell he's not quite playing the role he's been set as perfectly.

I don't think Home (the house) had anything to do with Eddie waking up, I actually think it was a combination of Eddie just not being able to mesh well with the part he has to play and the other characters breaking his routine without asking him. The moment that really shakes him is when he can hear the Narrator say "And Eddie Dear was happy." and i think that's because he really doesn't know if he is happy or not. Home is still strange because its obviously the one thing that Eddie fixates on when he first gains sentience, but I don't think its what shook him out of just being a puppet only.

Eddie is also so obviously playing along with the idea of Homewarming and doesn't actually know much about it. But he's not letting the others know this, as when he's alone is when he tells himself to just "focus on the festivities" instead of the other confusing parts of Homewarming. When he's with Poppy decorating the tree (with turkey...? and gravy...?) He just makes it seem like what they're doing is a no brainer, and something everyone does during the holidays.

But when he starts spiraling at the party, all of the things he helped decorate look strange and confusing to him. He can't focus on anything, staring into the wallpaper makes it seem worse, and the fabric of his own reality is literally being ripped at the seams (there's just an excessive amount of video tearing which I equate to Eddie's sense of sanity at the moment and just how present he really is)

It's here that Eddie finally realizes just what they're doing, and what everything really truly looks like. Eddie even tries to focus solely on Frank's face to sort of ground him, but the goddamned credits for the episode itself is playing over Frank's face and obscuring his vision. The scene itself wants to move on but Eddie is still able to see what the audience normally wouldn't be able too, and that split from his reality to ours is what makes him freak out in the end.

#welcome home update #welcome home #happy homewarming #welcome home theory #eddie dear #welcome home spoilers

507 notes · View notes

andvys · 10 months

Text

Love of my life | E.M.

Warnings: hurt/comfort, slight angst, Eddie is a little mean for a second but he makes it up to reader right away, happy ending, grumpy!Eddie x sunshine!reader

Pairing: Eddie Munson x female reader

Summary: Eddie gives you the cold shoulder because he fears his feelings for you after you confront him and he realizes that he could lose you, he makes a confession. Based on this request, also combined it with this one.

Word count: 4.2k+

stranger things masterlist

Eddie had always been good at reading people, it always came easy to him to see right through someone else’s intentions. He knows when someone is trying to play with his feelings, he knows when someone pretends to be nice only to make fun of him later on, he knows when he gets asked out for a bet or just for the fun of it, he knows that the girls he sells weed to only play nice so they can get a discount– in reality, they hate him and think he is weird, he knows it, he knows everything.

It was always hard for him to trust people that tried coming into his life, knowing that they always wanted something from him.

Then, you came along.

Your family moved to Hawkins two years ago and you settled in pretty quickly. You joined the cheer squad, befriended the popular girls, went to every single party that you got invited to, hung out with King Steve and his then girlfriend Nancy Wheeler, you always wore fancy clothes, expensive boots and designer leather jackets, it was pretty clear that your parents had money.

But you weren’t– aren’t stuck up, rude and snotty like Jason Carver or his group of friends are. You don’t brag about the wealth your parents have, the house you live in, the car you drive or the clothes you wear. You don’t put others down, you don’t bully people, you don’t look down at the ones that have less than you do. No, you aren’t like the other rich kids in school, you are kind and sweet, you are helping, always cheerful and there to make everyone smile.

The popular girls are always feared, you aren’t.

He likes you but he struggles to show it, he struggles to let you in because despite knowing about the things he can clearly see, he struggles to read you, to see through you and your intentions.

He knows you aren��t like the others that came into his life to play with his feelings, to hurt him and take something from him, you aren’t like any of those hungry vampires that came just to suck the energy out of him. You are not like them. Yet, he struggles to give you a chance.

Despite being friends with girls from the cheer squad or guys like Steve Harrington, you always come back to him. Since your very first day in school, you have been trying to befriend Eddie. Why? He doesn’t know. As far as he knows, there isn’t much that you have in common.

Eddie lives in the trailer park, you live in a big house with a pool. Eddie drives an old van, you drive an expensive car, Eddie is hated, you are loved. Maybe it’s superficial of him to judge by these things. He doesn’t know much about you personally, he never even gave you a chance, he never gave himself the chance to get to know more about you. He was scared to do it. He was scared to let you in, to give you a part of him that no one ever gets, to be vulnerable and risk getting his heart broken, knowing that you would break his heart if he gave you the chance to.

He likes you, despite telling himself that he doesn’t. He likes the clothes you wear, he loves the leather jacket especially, he loves the cute dresses and the pretty skirts, the rings on your finger that remind him of the ones his mom would always wear, there is one on your middle finger, one with an emerald stone, it’s almost identical to the one he still has in his drawer, hidden in a little box that has her belongings. He loves the way your nails are always painted a new color every week. He loves your sweet perfume and the way it fills his senses when you walk past him, he loves the way you do your makeup and the way you always greet him with a smile even when he doesn’t give a proper one back.

But he hates the way his heart flutters when you sneak notes into his locker or into the pocket of his jacket during class– he keeps every single one of them, he hates the way his heart beats faster when your hand brushes his when he walks with you to your next class on a rare occasion, he hates the way butterflies fill his stomach when you wave at him from across the room despite sitting with the girls from the cheer squad, the ones that always glare at him and talk in hushed whispers when they pass by him in the hallways. He hates the way you keep trying to get to know more about him, he hates the way you get along with the guys from the Hellfire club, he hates the way Wayne asks about you after he only met you once when you brought over homework for Eddie after he missed a school day when he was sick. Eddie hates the way you always take over his mind, the way you are always there, even in his dreams, the way you sneaked your way into his heart.

You are everywhere. When he doesn’t see you in school, he runs into you at the record store, at the diner or even the hideout. One night when he was drunk on beer and high on weed, his filter was gone and he let his emotions out, he found the note you slipped into his locker, the one that had your number written on it with your nickname and a small heart, he called you– if he wasn’t so drunk, he would have heard how cheerful your voice had gotten when you realized that it was him. He invited you to watch him play and you agreed to come right away. Ever since then, you came every Tuesday to watch him play and cheer him on, his friends teased him for it, just like the Bartender who knew Eddie since he was seventeen. Eddie pretended to be annoyed but he secretly loved that you were there just for him.

He started warming up to you, the longer you stuck around, though he was still apprehensive and careful, still expecting you to reveal that your kindness towards him was only a part of a huge prank. Deep down he knew that it wasn’t the case, you have been there for longer than anyone else has, yet he was scared and continued to close himself off from you not realizing that he was hurting you.

You are always smiling, you are always cheerful and happy, sometimes it irritates him– not because he doesn’t like it but because it makes him feel guilty for being so grumpy when you are nothing but sweet to him.

The closer you both get, the more he becomes a part of your life. He finds out more about you and realizes that you have much more in common than he thought, he finds some cassettes of his favorite bands in your room, his favorite book on your bedside table, you both share a love for horror movies– especially Halloween. He finds out that you can play guitar and he swore, the moment he saw you play and heard your pretty voice, he fell in love.

But while you let him in closer, he still kept pushing you away and it was hurting you.

“Do you have any plans for spring break?”

Eddie shakes his head, leaning back in his seat, he places the empty milkshake glass on the table and looks around the diner before his eyes settle on you, “no, what about you?”

You shake your head, “not really,” you mumble.

Eddie doesn’t notice the sad look in your eyes, he is only focused on the smile on your face, the one he doesn’t realize is fake.

“Rich and popular girl has no plans for the summer?” He snorts.

You restrain yourself from rolling your eyes, you never minded his little jabs or snarky remarks but lately it’s been getting on your nerves. Why are you here? Why are you still sticking around when he clearly doesn’t want to spend time with you? He never wants you around, anyways. He only came to the diner because Gareth and Jeff canceled their plans with him and you were already here when he got here.

“I mean I’ve been asked on a date,” you shrug as you play with your straw, staring at the pink liquid in your glass, you don’t notice the way his face falls or the way he tenses up and swallows harshly.

“A-A date?” He asks.

You nod.

Eddie stares at your black nails, at your pretty makeup and your soft red lips that always look so kissable to him, your dress is new, he wonders if you put it on for someone or just for yourself.

“Who asked you out?” He asks, digging his nails into his palms.

“Mason,” you mumble as you finally look up at him, “you know, the guy from the school band?”

Eddie clenches his jaw, suddenly his chest tightens and an ugly feeling rushes through him. He doesn’t want you to go on a date with someone else, he doesn’t want to see you with someone else, you are meant to be here, with him.

“Yeah, I know him.” And he can’t even hate him, Mason is nice, not just to you but also to him and everyone else, his dad owns the record store downtown, the one Eddie always goes to, Mason works there after school and he always gives him discounts and even supports his band.

“S-So are you going?” Eddie asks, nervously.

As you look into Eddie’s eyes, you notice something that you haven’t seen there before. Possessiveness, jealousy and sadness. Maybe you should feel joyful to know that he hates the thought of you going on a date but it angers you and it makes you scoff in annoyance.

Eddie keeps giving you the cold shoulder, he keeps pushing you away, he keeps treating you with halfhearted kindness while you give him nothing but love and kindness.

“No.”

“Why not?”

“Because I don’t like him like that.” Because you like someone else.

The tension leaves his body right away and he sighs in relief, his face visibly relaxes and he chuckles, “thought I’d lose my favorite girl.”

On a different occasion, it would have made your heart flutter and your smile would be big but not today. Today, you are overwhelmed by your emotions, the realization that you have fallen in love with him, laid heavy on your heart because you know that he doesn’t feel the same and that it will only end badly for you.

“Right,” you scoff as you tear your gaze away from him and reach for your purse, taking out your small wallet, you pick out the $20 bill and place it on the table, “like you would care.”

Your sudden outburst and the snappy tone in your voice catches him off guard a little, you have never snapped at him before, you have never glared at him, you have never rolled your eyes at him, you have never walked away from him.

But now, he frowns in confusion and watches you rush out of the diner with your purse and jacket in your hand, not even sparing a single glance at him before you push the door open and walk out.

“What the hell,” Eddie mumbles, jumping to his feet and running after you without a moment of hesitation. He rushes out of the diner, running through the parking lot before you can get into your car. Just as you open the door, he reaches for your arm and pulls you back, shutting the door before he pushes you up against your car and steps right in front of you.

Your eyes widen a little when you realize just how close he is to you, you have never been this close.

“What’s gotten into you?”

You put your hands on his chest and try to push him away but he won’t budge, he grabs your wrists and holds them tightly but gently.

“Let me go!”

“No, tell me what’s your problem, why are you acting so rude? You’ve been doing it all night.”

“Oh, I’m rude?” You scoff as you keep trying to push him away, “you are the rude one!”

He chuckles at your words and shakes his head, “you are the one who just stormed out for no reason.”

You furrow your brows as you look up at him. His eyes are filled with curiosity and his lips are pulled into a smirk, he irritates you. You’ve had enough of this, of him giving you the cold shoulder, of him teasing you, knowing damn well that you have feelings for him.

“I mean in general, Eddie! You are always cold towards me, you always act annoyed when you’re with me even when you are the one coming to me!” You say angrily, tears well up in your eyes.

Eddie’s smirk begins to fade when he sees the tears in your eyes.

“Whenever I’m at the hideout, I’m there just for you and you don’t even seem to want me there, not even when you were the one who asked me to come in the first place!”

For the first time, Eddie watches tears roll down your cheeks, the look in your eyes is one of anger and sadness but also longing. You are longing for him. You are longing for him to apologize to you, to pull you into his arms and tell you that he will do better but he can’t, not when he messed up so bad, not when you are crying because of him already.

The angel on his shoulder tells him to apologize but the devil tells him to push you away the way he should’ve done a long time ago, for your sake or his? He doesn’t know.

“A-At first, I didn’t even care that you were being s-so cold but now it just hurts. I wanna be your friend but you make it so damn hard,” you whisper as you try to blink your tears away, “you know everything about me but I don’t know anything about you–”

“Is that what you want?” Eddie asks, “to know things about me?”

His brown eyes flash with anger, his voice is laced with bitterness. He lets go of your hands and takes a step back.

“So you can make fun of me, right? You wanna know things about my family, about my dad? About what he did to my mom?” He snaps, “that’s what you wanna know? So you can run back to your asshole friends and tell them all about the trailer trash gossip?”

Your bottom lip quivers and your shoulder slump, a look of disappointment crosses your features. You would never do this, you don’t even consider those people your friends and he knows it, yet he can’t stop himself from spewing all those ugly words to you.

“That’s why you kept running after me and that’s why you stuck around for so long, right?” Eddie asks, “tell me, was it a bet? Did they set you up to this?”

You shake your head, the wind picks up a little, blowing through your hair and messing up your bangs a little, you don’t bother pushing them away, you keep staring at him through your blurry vision.

That’s what he thinks of you?

You have given him nothing but kindness, you dropped some of the people you used to call friends, because you realized how badly they treated him, because he is more important to you than anyone else.

You stare at him in disbelief, his eyes that usually give you comfort despite the coldness he only ever gives you, make you shudder in pain, his lips are set in a frown, his skin looks pale beneath the moonlight and you hate yourself for thinking that he is still the most beautiful person you have ever laid your eyes on. You hate yourself for still longing for him and you hate yourself for loving him when he clearly hates you so much.

“Why would you think that?” You whisper shakily as you clutch your purse tighter.

He blinks, he shifts a little, taking in the sight of your tear stained face, the hurt in your eyes and the quivering lip, your voice sounding so heartbroken.

He was wrong but he knew that already, he doesn’t know why he is ruining things for himself, why he is hurting you so much.

He hesitates, his hands itching to reach out to you and pull you into his arms, to hold you and hug you for the first time but he can’t.

“You’re my friend, I dropped them all because I realized how awful they all were, especially to you! You’re important to me, Eddie. And I would do anything for you, anything! I-I knew you never wanted me around but I tried because I wanted you so badly, I really really wanted you and I kept running after you like some lovesick fool but it was for nothing,” you whisper, watching the way his eyes widen at your words, he stares at you in disbelief.

Lovesick? He wishes he could speak now but all he does is stare at you in shock.

Your one sided friendship is over, you don’t have to keep any of those secrets that you thought would ruin this thing between you anymore.

“I love you, Eddie,” you whisper, biting back the sob that rises up in your throat.

His lips part in surprise and his heart leaps to his throat as tears well up in his eyes just the way they did in yours. You are telling the truth, you have always been telling the truth.

He built walls around him to defend himself from all the pain that you could cause him if you broke his heart but right now as he stands here in front of you and he looks into your soft eyes, he realizes just how big of a fool he always was.

You would never break his heart. You love him. Why? He doesn’t know. You are this sweet angel that waltzed into his life and chose to give all her love to the guy that didn’t even know how to accept it.

He doesn’t deserve you, at least that’s what he thinks.

Your sniffles break him out of his trance, his heart breaks at the sight of you. He made you cry, he broke your heart. The girl that has done nothing but bring joy into his life is now crying because he messed it up.

You wipe your tears and turn away from him, you open the door and throw your purse and your jacket into the car.

“Goodbye, Eddie,” you whisper.

Panic fills his chest and his eyes widen as he looks at you. You are leaving. You are leaving him. His heart screams at him to do something, to pull you into him, to wrap his arms around you, to kiss you and apologize over and over again, to make it up to you.

His heart starts beating faster, his hands begin to shake.

He can’t let you go, he can’t let his stupid fears control him, he can’t keep listening to the lies, his anxiety keeps telling him about you, he can’t keep doing this to you.

“I love you too!”

It was loud and probably a little dramatic but he doesn’t care, he finally said it. A huge weight falls off his shoulders and suddenly he feels free.

You freeze, shock ripples through you and you stare into blank space for a moment.

Eddie takes a step forward, staring at the back of your head with a soft look in his eyes, he reaches for your arm and he slowly turns you around so he can see your face again. When your eyes finally lock, you notice the adoration in them, one that you have never seen before because he always hid it from you.

“I love you, y/n,” he whispers softly as he tugs you closer, he raises his hands towards your face and cups your cheek slowly, touching you the way he never did before– he should have done it a long time ago, “please don’t leave me,” he whispers with a hint of fear in his voice.

You stare at him wide eyed.

“I know you wouldn’t do any of those things,” he whispers as he strokes your cheek, “I-I was just, fuck, sweetheart, I’m scared.”

“Of what, Eddie?”

“Of this,” he whispers, pointing between the two of you, “y-you’re so perfect and amazing, you do all these things for me. You support the band that no one gives a fuck about, for fucks sake! A-And I’m just a–” he pauses, sighing, “I’m the town freak!”

“Yeah and I freaking love you!”

His heart flutters in his chest, warmth fills his body, a kind he has never felt before.

“Why?” He asks softly.

You grab his wrists and step closer to him so your chest is pressed against his, “you are perfect, Eddie. You are so talented in so many ways, you are so good to the people around you, you protect your friends, you are always there when someone needs you and you always made me feel safe, even when you kind of acted like a dick. You are better than any of these people living in this shitty town, you are better than those assholes you called my friends! Y-You are just perfect to me, Eddie,” you pause, raising your hand towards his face, you brush away the curls from his face, “and you’re not a freak, by the way.”

A tear rolls down his cheek and you quickly wipe it away, letting your hand rest on his cheek, “and you’re so beautiful, Eddie.”

His heart soars at your words. He leans into your touch and closes his eyes for a moment. He could have had this for so long already but his fears have led him to push you away, to hurt you, to make you believe that you aren’t anything special to him. Like he didn’t create D&D characters based on you, like he didn’t have a bunch of drawings of you at home, like he didn’t spend every second thinking about you.

Like he isn’t utterly in love with you.

“Please forgive me for pushing you away, for saying all these horrible things to you, sweetheart,” he whispers as he opens his eyes again, “I-I know that I’m really fucking bad at showing this but, I’m so crazy about you, y/n.”

You smile at his words, blushing and biting back the excited giggle as your eyes shine with happiness again.

How could he ever be scared of you? You will never hurt him, you will never break his heart, you will never leave him. You will always be the one to stay, like he will be the one to stay with you.

“I’m crazy about you too, Eddie,” you whisper as you wrap your arms around him and place your head on his chest, hugging him the way you always craved to. He sighs at the feeling, this might be the best feeling in the world, feeling you in his arms. He spent so many moments thinking about this, finally, he gets to do it. He wraps his arms around you and leans down to kiss the top of your head.

It’s only the first time that you are in his arms, yet it feels so natural. You can feel his heart racing, it matches the beat of your own heart.

“This is so much better,” you murmur.

“Better than what?” He asks, squeezing your arms.

“Better than you being grumpy.”

“I’m sorry, sunshine,” he says as he pulls back so he can look at you again, cupping your cheeks again, he gives you a soft smile, “let me make it up to you?”

“I’d like that,” you whisper.

His eyes light up, he looks down at your lips and tucks your hair behind your ears, “you’re too good to me.”

You stand on your tippy toes and wrap your arms around his neck, “it’s what you deserve, Eddie, you deserve to be loved,” you whisper and lean in to kiss his cheek. His breath hitches in his throat, the feeling of your lips on his skin might make his knees weak, “so please, let me love you.”

He lets all his walls crumble, he lets the love in, your love. He smiles sweetly and whispers a desperate, ‘please’.

You kiss his other cheek and place your hand on his neck, “I’ll love you forever if you let me.”

“Only if you let me love you,” he says with hope in his eyes.

“It’s all I ever wanted,” you smile.

“Me too,” he admits, finally.

“I’ll love you forever, you’re gonna get sick of me,” Eddie says, making you giggle.

“I could never get sick of you, Eddie.”

“Good,” he smiles before he finally kisses you for the first time ever, letting himself fall into your arms completely, knowing that he and his heart will always be safe with you.

#Eddie #eddie munson x reader #eddie munson x fem!reader #eddie munson x y/n #eddie munson x you #eddie munson x female reader #eddie munson angst #eddie munson fluff #eddie munson drabble #stranger things angst

2K notes · View notes