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#swimmer steve harrington
thisapplepielife · 5 months
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Written for the @steddieholidaydrabbles December challenge.
Go For Gold
Prompt Day 22: Sports AU | Word Count: 1000 | Rating: T | CW: None | Tags: Swimming AU, Olympic Trials, Racing, Rivalry, A Dash of Secret Relationship, Eddie & Gareth are BFFs
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Eddie steps up onto the block. Rolls his shoulders. His neck. Gareth is two lanes down, in six. Eddie can see him bouncing up and down. Can tell he's nervous. Gareth didn't make the Olympic team at twenty, now he's fighting for a spot at twenty-four.
If Steve's nervous in lane five, between Eddie and Gareth, you'd never know it. Steve's twenty-seven, and has been doing this since he was fifteen. Eddie's Olympic debut came at twenty, but he thinks he was immature, even then. 
Steve has his game face on, his no-nonsense, no-bullshit approach to the sport. You don't bother Steve Harrington once he steps on the deck. It's just not done. Hell, you don't talk to him in the ready room, either. Steve will have his headphones on, serious as shit, not talking to anyone. Not even listening. Zoned out. 
Eddie is the only exception to the rule, and it's a power he doesn't abuse often. He's not trying to break Steve's focus, it's unsportsmanlike. Instead, Eddie will roughhouse with the other guys. The ones that like that to get their blood pumping before a race. 
Eddie is just a little looser. A free spirit, looking for fun. 
Sure, he wants to win medals, but it's not that serious. 
Well, it is that serious, if he's honest. Because Eddie's never trained as hard as he has in the last four years. He wants it. Bad.
For once in their parallel careers, Eddie isn't sure that Steve wants it more than he does. Steve staying in bed, while Eddie drags himself to the pool at the ass-crack of dawn. Eddie isn't sure Steve has anything left to prove. He broke all the records four years ago. 
Their rivalry is stuff of legend. Full of stupid commentary, like: "Without Steve Harrington, Eddie Munson would be the best swimmer of his generation," as if it's that simple. Without chasing Steve, Eddie thinks he might not have pushed this hard. It's a stupid hypothetical. 
This is their third Olympic Trials as number one and two. And you have to stay one and two, if you want to make the Olympic Team. You need to touch the wall first or second, with a crowd of twelve-thousand breathing down your neck every time your head breaks through the water.
They always say first is first, and second is also first, when it comes to Trials. But that's not true. Not really.
Steve Harrington definitely doesn't think so. 
Steve's not at the top of his game. He's hurting. He's getting older. They both are. Eddie's a year older, but hasn't pushed himself quite as hard. Hard, sure. But not to the extent that Steve has, year-over-year. 
Swimming's still fun for Eddie, but he's not sure that's true for Steve. Eddie thinks this might be Steve's last year, his last Olympics, and that hurts to think about. Eddie isn't ready to be done, he's still having fun, but doing it without Steve in the lane next to him seems sad.
When the buzzer sounds, they're launching into the pool, swimming the butterfly, the first leg of the 400 I.M. 
Eddie pulls ahead, but knows it won't last through the butterfly leg. Steve'll catch him, pass him, sure as shit. 
And that's how it goes. 
At the halfway mark, Eddie pops up fifty meters into the backstroke, and glances to his left and Gareth is out ahead of not only him, but Steve, too. The little shit is a helluva backstroker, these days. Steve's a half body length behind the both of them, and that's disconcerting. 
Eddie wants to beat him, absolutely, but he doesn't want Steve to fail, either. It's hard, when two people you love are also competing for a slot you want.
Switching to the breaststroke, Eddie catches Gareth quickly, and by the first turn has pulled ahead of both of them. By almost a body length, heading into the freestyle. Eddie needs that lead if he's gonna stay ahead of Steve to the end.
And he can see Steve closing the gap, but Eddie doesn't think Steve's got enough room to catch him.
And he doesn't. 
They go one-two, and for the first time at an Olympic Trials, Steve's number two.
Eddie hangs onto the lane rope and smiles, chest heaving. Steve swims towards him, also breathing hard, pulling him into a hug. Eddie hugs back, clinging to him.
"You got me," Steve says in his ear, and Eddie laughs. He's well aware they're being filmed, broadcast on live television, so he just claps Steve on the shoulder, laughs, and pulls away. Gareth is swimming under the rope, to get to Eddie, too.
"You did good, kid. You were ahead of us both!" Eddie shouts over the noise, and Gareth smiles. Eddie knew the odds weren't in Gareth's favor here, but Eddie will be right there, cheering him on in his other events. Hoping Gareth still snags a spot.
After their cooldowns, and the rest of the races for the night, they drag themselves back to the hotel. And like always, Steve's his roommate. It's been that way since the beginning. An unlikely duo, with a friendship that people like to write articles about, not totally understanding it.
Eddie dumps his bag on the floor, collapsing on his bed, groaning.
"I'm dead, bury me now," Eddie whines, smashing his face in the pillow.
Steve laughs, toeing off his shoes, and crawling in bed beside him. They have two beds, they always do, but unless it's the night before a competition, they usually squeeze into one. That's been interesting in some of the Olympic villages. Those beds are small.
Eddie rolls onto his side, and Steve slings his arm over him, pulling him closer.
"Okay, let's hear you gloat," Steve says, and Eddie laughs, leaning into Steve.
"This old man kicked your ass," Eddie says, grinning, and Steve shuts him up by pressing his lips to Eddie's, kissing him, hugging their bone-tired bodies together.
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Notes: Yeah, they are based loosely on Phelps and Lochte. Two very different versions of a pro-athlete, but somehow friends. Roommates at meets, always each other's card partner, etc. (And this race, in particular.)
Olympic Trials are the end all and be all in getting on the USA Olympic Swim Team. You don't get a spot unless you finish in the top 2 (and 3-6 in the freestyle where there will be a relay.) Unlike, say, figure skating, where it is entirely up to committees. Or gymnastics, where it's half-and-half.
If you want to write your own, or see more entries for this challenge, pop on over to @steddieholidaydrabbles and follow along with the fun!
If you want to see more of my entries into this month-long challenge, you can check them out in my Steddie Holiday Drabbles tag, right here!
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t-lostinworlds · 11 months
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MOODBOARDS ✘ STEVE HARRINGTON + SWIM ATHLETE
"Unless one of you three can top being a Hawkins High swim co-captain and a certified lifeguard for three years, then…" | Stranger Things S04E06 — The Dive
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findafight · 2 years
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I have been thinking of my Swimmer Steve au babyyyy...
Except. It isn't Will that gets stuck in the upsidedown. Its Dustin. His mom flips her shit and reports it that night, calling Karen and then Sue and then Joyce. No one's seen her boy.
Susan holds her hand as she looks through pictures for his missing poster. (they have been best friends since childhood and Lucas and Dustin have know each other since birth). She refuses to believe Dustin ran away or got lost in the woods because he knows better than that. Wouldn't have left Will by himself just to get lost in the woods!!
Joyce gets Jonathan to help put up posters at the highschool, and Robin and Steve see it and are like oh that's sad...but how are we, fifteen and sixteen year olds, supposed to help. And continue on with their regularly scheduled Tuesday plans.
Which is why Steve swims in his pool for probably the last time of the season, it's getting way too cold and he should have drained it before Halloween anyways, and pulls on sweats and a hoodie before tugging the pool cover, accidentally cutting his hand on the crank. (It's getting cold and his hands are drying out so his skin just caught and tore a little) and then he's gone.
Last post etc. Robin freaks and bikes to the police station to report Steve missing at lunch. His parents won't be home for another week and no one else besides his coach would even really care he's gone except maybe Nancy, who Steve is sorta dating after the teasing about Brazilian Gymnast made it clear that Buckley and Harrington weren't dating (yet, some say) but Nancy doesn't know his schedule well enough to know something's wrong soon enough.
And when asked how she knows he wouldn't skip town by a disinterested police officer OR Jonathan Byers I haven't decided which, (disregarding the fact his car was still in the driveway) a stressed and upset Robin says "because he would have taken me with him!" Because he would have. They'd talked about it, leaving Hawkins once they graduate and not looking back. Getting an apartment together and maybe working the same shitty retain job to make ends meet as she coaches him into gold medals.
If Steve were to run away, he would have taken her with him. But he didn't. Robin was still in Hawkins and Steve was gone. He didn't run away.
And then Dustin's "body" is found. Claudia knows it's not her boy. They didn't let her close to him but she saw, she saw, that the corpse on the table had front teeth, and her Dustin didn't. Susan Sinclair is beside her, nodding, and stands behind her as she tells Chief Hopper this. That it couldn't be her son because he had a condition, his teeth hadn't come in yet and he didn't have collar bones.
Meanwhile, Jonathan develops the pictures he took while going through the woods trying to help look for Dustin. He has one of Steve, standing bare footed in the pool gutter with his sweats rolled up, grimicing at his sliced hand, as something looms behind him. No Robin don't worry about the picture of shirtless and dripping Steve before that it's nothing a misshot don't mention it again
Dustin, who was pretty ambivalent about Hawkins' resident Olympic hopeful, clings to him in the upsidedown. He's glad he's bigger than Dustin and strong enough to be able to carry him if they need to run fast. Steve's gotten a bat out, already splattered with gore from whatever thing dragged them here, using shoes from the weird, nasty version of his house, and tells Dustin funny stories about his adventures with Robin as he keeps watch while Dustin tries to talk to his mom on the phone or to get the Christmas lights to blip in Morse code.
As Claudia and Sue discuss what's happening and how to get someone to believe them, the lights in the Henderson house keep flickering.
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navnae · 1 year
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Amateur swimmer Eddie who just needs to learn the basics of swimming and not immediately drown after stepping into the pool paired up with advanced swimmer Steve who says he can help Eddie practice. This leads to Steve holding Eddie up in the water by his waist whenever he gets the opportunity too and making Eddie a blushing mess in the process.
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munsonfamilyband · 1 year
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Hi, I just want to say that seeing people describe Eddie as scrawny just icks me out. Like, I don’t mind him being described as lanky, yknow? Because in reality he’s not small, he and Steve are the same height, and about the same build (if anything, Eddie’s vest is huge on Steve where it isnt on Eddie, and yeah he has a jacket under it but its a tight jacket) so seeing him described as scrawny just seems weird. Like, I won’t deny that I enjoy a good size difference, my favorite fake steddie dynamics are shorter but thicker Steve and taller but lankier Eddie, but making the nerdy one specifically scrawny or even twink-like when he so clearly isnt just feels weird to me.
I have nothing against people who disagree with this, but i don’t know it just seems kind of off. Plus, Eddie 1000% has strong arms, both because of canon evidence and because, as someone who has done work with sound in theater, that equipment is so fucking heavy, and Eddie is lugging amps and a drum set around EVERY WEEK for gigs, so he’s got strength there.
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inkluvs · 1 year
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❝ i’ve never seen someone lit from within, blurrin’ out my periphery ❞
swimmer! steve — requested by @katsu28
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catharusustulatus · 1 year
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It’s crazy that Steve really does have that whole ass badonkadonk. Like he’s got junk in the trunk. He’s the people’s princess but he’s also built like a Pixar mom, just a little bit. Hands on his hips, tiny waist, pout, bath and body works glitter mist in his hair, shelf in the pants. Robin bounces quarters off those things when she’s bored at work.
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familyvideostevie · 2 years
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emma, i know you're probably inundated with blurb (cause you're amazing writer) but please give us something about swim team steve!!! season 4 just made is a throw away comment but i need more!!
okay FIRST of all youre so kind thank you <3 the blurbs come from your wonderful minds i just help a little hehe
i have avoided thinking about swim team steve because its so much i know if they had put it in the show we'd all have lost the plot and only talked about it but now its time.
so we know that steve did basketball and swim but those are both winter sports (as far as i remember but i am no jock) so i think that steve started as a swimmer because he found it soothing and his mind could cool down and while he was still king steve when he was in the water he was just steve and he just swam and swam and obviously he was good at it and he was co-captain and so he was a good leader on the team and I'm sure he was good but mostly he was a team player and i think that maybe the team knew he was a good guy but he still had his asshole demeanor out of the pool and he was just so different on the deck and ugh. (although there's the part of swim season where all the boys bleach their hair then shave it for championships and steve was like fuck you guys I'm not doing that so no one made him) but then i think at some point his dad maybe was like play basketball instead and steve was like yes sir so he switched to basketball and that was fine but there was talking and yelling and it was more competitive and well. it wasn't as relaxing as swimming for him but he did his best (and then maybe he was a lifeguard during the summer and then the summer that billy was a lifeguard steve was like yeah no fucking thank you so he did not go back to that job).
but back to swim team steve lets pretend that steve swam the whole time and maybe senior year he invites his girl to a practice and he's recruited the whole team to help ask her to prom or something silly that swim team boys do where he gets them to spell out will you go to prom with me on their chests before diving in and swimming to the edge to ask her ugh she goes to all his meets and makes signs and cheers him on and he just always kind of smells like chlorine and she buys him speedos as a joke as gifts and ugh! jock steve is SO hot but SWIM steve is SO HOT!!!!!!
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thegoblinboy · 1 year
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oh for SURE “For your modesty” please! :D
Oh I got a little carried away 😅
Part from “for your modesty” for WIP Wednesday (: mine are currently up if anyone wants to send a ask in!
The doors behind the line of boys slams open. A loud laugh as someone’s voice bounces off the walls. Causing everyone to cringe, as they all assume that this was just some random kid coming in to laugh at them. If they all had placed bets that moment all of them would have bet for the same thing. Standing in the doorway stood Eddie Munson. A metal head loser who didn’t have any problems sneering at any form of jock in the hallways or hopping up on a lunch table and going into a loud tangent over conformity.
They all watch as the others nose scrunches up, the smell of chlorine hitting him. The way his face goes a light pink as he looks at the line of different shirtless guys with swimming trunks that barely hid anything. Steve, for a split second is distracted by his desire to jump into the deep end along with his other teammates. Curious as to how this guy was going to react, the obvious vein that was popping from his neck was a interesting sight. Though before anyone can say anything, the locker-room doors slam open.
“Munson! Strip and get in line! ASAP, or you will be failing gym this year!”
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thisapplepielife · 5 months
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Written for the @steddiemas challenge.
Permanent 99
Prompt Day 30: Smut Themed Sentence Starters | Word Count: 2811 | Rating: E | CW: Sexual Content, 18+ Only | Tags: Sports AU, Swimming AU, Modern Setting, Eddie & Gareth are BFFs, Olympic Swimmers, Heat Wave, Outdoor Fooling Around, Blowjob, Eddie POV
This follows my Sports AU drabble from @steddieholidaydrabbles where they were Olympic Swimmers, but can be read standalone.
This one is also available right here on AO3.
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we're hot and sticky as we can get, don't need to go swimming to be soakin' wet, you lean in and you bite my lip, it's hard to be cool in heat like this, sweat drop at the end of your nose, makes you lose your mind and lose your clothes Christian Kane, Permanent 99
Eddie rests his forearm over his eyes, attempting to block out the way too bright sun and wipe the sweat away from his forehead at the same time. 
The strips of cheap vinyl from the PVC lounger are sticking to his bare back and he can't seem to shift in any way to get comfortable with the feeling. Steve is worth millions, but he's dragged out some old as shit, tri-fold lounge chairs from last century. They had to have been stashed in his parents' pool house, left over from the eighties, faded from sun and years of disuse. If Eddie's going to be subjected to the summer sun, he's definitely gonna need a newer chair, because this is really not working for him. 
He's sticking to it in ways that feel really gross.
That has a lot to do with the fact that it's so humid it's almost insufferable. The glare off of the water isn't helping matters. It's blinding him, even through his sunglasses. They've spent a lifetime looking at pool water, so Eddie's not entirely sure why they're still doing it now, on their own time.
“It’s hot as shit,” Eddie finally announces, moving his arm just enough to catch a glimpse of Steve next to him.
Steve smiles, seemingly unconcerned by the unrelenting heat. 
He's tanned, and glistening in the sun, looking every bit of a Greek god. That bastard.
Eddie's actually seen Steve in Athens, at the fucking Olympiad itself, and he damn well didn't look anything like he does right now. Steve was only nineteen then, still just a kid chasing a dream. And, now he's a man. A gorgeous man.
Eddie is pretty sure he looks like an overheated, wet cat in comparison. A pitiful thing that probably just needs put down.
But Eddie grins, because retirement looks good on Steve Harrington. Damn good. Retired before thirty. That's quite the thing to wrap his head around. 
But that's not going to stop Eddie's complaining.
“From now on, summer months will be spent strictly indoors. It's too hot, and I’m too pale for this,” Eddie declares, as if that is the final decision on the subject matter.
It isn't. Not if his perpetually sun-kissed boyfriend has a say in the matter.
Steve just rolls his eyes, and doesn’t look away from his magazine, "You made the worst dressed list, again," Steve offers, flashing the glossy pages in his direction. "They put you on the fug list."
Well, Eddie doesn't give a flying fug what that rag thinks. He's gonna wear what he's gonna wear. 
"And let me guess, you're in the other column?" Eddie asks, but he already knows it. Ever since they went public with their relationship after retirement, they've been tabloid fodder. Everyone has been speculating on how long this has been going on (since Athens) and how long it will last (hopefully forever) and they've picked apart every last detail of their lives they can get their hands on. And their very different style choices have been a popular topic of conversation.
Steve retired, Eddie didn't. Until he did. And now, they're both out of the meat grinder, free at last to do whatever they want to with all this brand new free time. Eddie's had fun running swim clinics for kids, and Steve has been funneling his time and money into his charitable foundation.
The rest of the time, they spend lazing together, just like this. Finally getting to really build this relationship of theirs into something even deeper, and stronger, than ever before.
They can't leave swimming, not totally. It's in their blood. But it's nice to be away from the early practices and constant sacrifices you have to make to be an Olympian, not just once, but several Games in a row.
Their not-so-secret love went public at Eddie's last Games, when Steve showed up, but kept out of the announcer's booth, and refused to be interviewed. He wasn't there for his own promo. Everybody was pissy about it, wanting a piece of him, wanting the ratings boost his voice, his face, would bring in. But Steve was only there to see Eddie, Gareth and the rest of his friends on Team USA swim, that's it.
So, it didn't take long for rumors to reach a fever pitch, and instead of denying them. They just admitted they were together, and had been, for a very long time. And now, they were looking forward to retirement, together. 
And that was that. 
They've been holed up at Steve's house ever since, trying to keep away from prying eyes, to just be together. With no other commitments. No early practices. No strict diets.
They're just Eddie and Steve. No longer Harrington and Munson.
But, Eddie's getting a little stir crazy and a lot hot. He needs to be anywhere but beside a pool right now.
“I haven’t even set foot in the goddamn pool and I’m sweating through my trunks,” Eddie whines, just making sure his opinion on the subject has been heard by Steve, loud and clear.
“Shoulda rocked the banana hammock, bro,” Steve supplies with a shrug of his shoulders, laughing loudly, totally unbothered by Eddie’s constant bitching. 
Eddie smiles, "Don't call me bro, dude."
Steve giggles, and it's the best sound. So carefree. All that weight of expectation just…gone. It was amazing to see. Retired from professional swimming, Steve doesn’t sweat the small stuff, not anymore. And Eddie is one hundred percent down for that.
"Speedos aren’t exactly casual pool wear, regardless of what you might think, Harrington,” Eddie adds.
“Sure they are,” Steve answers, waving his hand over his lap.
Eddie looks over at Steve, and lowers his sunglasses down his nose. Steve's wearing a tiny, all-white Speedo that Eddie can't look away from. It was a purposeful choice, Eddie is well aware. 
Steve's baiting him. 
And the white makes it basically see through. It’s nearly obscene and Eddie knows damn good and well Steve wore it on purpose, knowing he’d either sweat through it, and make it see through, or end up in the pool…and make it see through. 
Eddie knows this game well and it sadly always, always works on him. He's an easy mark. Always has been when it comes to Steve Harrington.
Eddie pushes his glasses back up on his face.
“You're right, the Federation should have forgotten all about the tech suits and went back to those," Eddie says, licking his lips, wetting them. Two can play at this game.
There’s a sweat drop clinging to the end of Steve’s nose and Eddie reaches over to catch it with his thumb. Raking his eyes all over Steve.
"Is this seriously turning you on?" Steve asks, lifting an eyebrow. "I'm basically wearing an old work uniform."
Eddie just nods, looking at every inch of Steve's body. Still toned, but already going slightly softer in places. Not to mention all the body hair. Steve's hairy, when the fuck did that happen? After only knowing him as the shaved and waxed swimmer, this has been a fucking revelation of a magnitude Eddie can't even put into words. 
Steve's a man. No longer the kid he was when they met, a million years and a million miles away from here.
"You're staring," Steve says, teasing him, and Eddie just nods. He's definitely staring and he'll do it some more. 
Steve smiles and sets his magazine down and crawls over onto Eddie’s lounger, straddling Eddie’s thighs. It creaks and shifts under them, and Eddie holds his breath, and prepares for the little metal legs to collapse. It doesn't, miraculously, and Steve takes Eddie's stillness for an opportunity to lean in and bite at Eddie’s bottom lip before Eddie can, well, give him any more lip. Eddie groans a little at the feeling, hands settling on Steve’s hips. Steve deepens the kiss and runs his fingers through Eddie’s sweat-damp hair.
When they finally break apart, Steve is even slicker with sweat than he was before, but he just grins down at Eddie.
“Let’s go in,” Eddie urges, thumbs tracing lazy circles on Steve’s exposed hip bones. Running his thumb over Steve's Olympic rings tattoo that's just barely peeking over the top of the tiny Speedo. 
Steve took Eddie to get his own rings tattoo after his first Olympics, and Eddie took Gareth after his. It's a sacred tradition. 
Eddie presses his thumb into the slightly faded ink, then dips it lower, stroking until he feels coarse hair under his thumb. Then, he's sliding his other hand up and down Steve's hairy thigh. More hair. Hair for days.
In fact, Steve’s chest hair is damp and right in Eddie’s face. It’s driving him a little wild. Steve spent so many years shaved, that this has been a goddamn turn on. Eddie leans forward and buries his face in Steve's chest.
Steve just laughs, and pushes Eddie back down, nipping at Eddie’s neck playfully, “S’good out here.”
“Think of the air conditioning. And the big, big bed.”
“This is bed-like,” Steve insists, reaching over and hitting the lever sending the chaise flat. The unsteady metal legs wobble comically and Eddie laughs as Steve topples over on top of him ungracefully. It's a nice change of pace, since Eddie often feels like he's the ungraceful one nearly everywhere but in the water. Always one wrong move from a trip to the E.R., while Steve stands by, shaking his head. 
Eddie’s fairly certain this flimsy-ass chair can't hold their combined weight indefinitely, even without Steve trying to fuck him through it. But he still runs his fingers through Steve’s hair, pulling him closer, encouraging him. 
He'll ride this train into the ground, without question. 
Steve closes his eyes, and grinds down against him.
Eddie grips Steve’s hips, resting his fingers against Steve’s ass, cupping him through the Speedo. When he squeezes his fingers underneath the tight material, Steve opens his eyes to meet Eddie’s, and Eddie just raises an eyebrow, questioning.
“By all means,” Steve answers, lifting up enough for them to work together to get it shimmed off his ass.
It isn’t easy. Removing a wet Speedo never is, and Steve’s wallering him in the process. Eddie almost takes a knee to the nuts, but they finally get it peeled off Steve's hips and tossed onto the ground. 
Steve unties Eddie’s trunks and pulls the Velcro closure apart loudly. He snakes his hand inside and closes his fist around him, and Eddie can’t help but buck up into the tight grip. 
“Fuck, Steve,” Eddie pants, leaning back further, enjoying the feeling.
Steve smiles and leans forward, chasing him, licking a path of sweat off of Eddie’s chest. It makes Eddie shiver unexpectedly and he can’t stop himself from tangling his hand in Steve’s hair. Urging him lower. Steve takes the hint. He always does.
He pushes apart Eddie's trunks, getting himself better access, and Eddie lifts up, to let him tug them down a little further, but not all the way off. 
Eddie groans when Steve’s mouth makes contact with his dick.
He rests his hand on Steve's head, feeling every movement from above and below. Steve's a gold medal cocksucker, that's for goddamn sure. 
"That's good, sweetheart," Eddie says, and Steve hums in acknowledgement, head moving up and down, hand doing the rest of the work in tandem. 
Eddie slides his hand down to Steve's face, pressing his palm to his stubbly cheek, and Steve changes the angle, so the head of Eddie's dick now hits the inside of his cheek with every bob of his head, bumping against Eddie's palm.
Steve's teasing him, playing with him, but it's fucking hot. 
So hot, and it's all Eddie can take, honestly, and he arches his hips off the chair, coming. 
Steve pulls off, and makes eye contact as he swipes his tongue around his mouth, gathering up Eddie's come on his tongue, which he shows Eddie, before swallowing.
"You're gonna kill me," Eddie says, as he moves to wrap his hand around Steve's hard dick, but Steve holds up one finger, wagging it at him. 
And then he slides fully on top of Eddie, and ruts into his hip. Using Eddie to get himself off.
Jesus H. Christ. 
Retired Steve is his favorite version, so far. Even more than top of the podium Steve. Or secret locker room blowjob Steve.
This version? His to keep? This is the one. 
Steve's breathing heavy into Eddie's ear, hot puffs of air and soft moans that make Eddie wish he could get hard again right now. Eddie digs his fingers into Steve's slick back, just along for the ride. Getting to enjoy the sights and sounds of Steve working hard. Breath catching with exertion. 
It's so familiar, and yet, brand new.
Steve lets out a groan in Eddie's ear, and then comes inside Eddie's shorts, and that's a new feat, for sure. 
Steve clearly doesn't give a fuck if he glues himself to Eddie's pubic hair, as he lays down on Eddie fully. Naked, sated and happy. This is the kind of hot Eddie isn't going to complain about. 
He almost says so, when he feels the whoosh of air blow past his arm before there’s a splash in the pool. He freezes. He doesn’t dare open his eyes, even if he’s certain it’s only Gareth. Maybe Robin, if he's really unlucky.
Steve's house has a revolving door. You never know who's gonna show up, unannounced.
And Eddie can't help it, he flushes even further, cheeks red and hot, totally embarrassed. 
When Eddie finally cracks an eye open, he laughs when he sees Gareth standing in the pool, right at the edge. Arms folded, head resting on them. Staring right at Eddie. Gareth has no shame and doesn’t get embarrassed easily, if ever. 
Just like Steve, honestly.
How he's surrounded himself with these two, he's not exactly sure.
"Whatcha guys been doin'?" Gareth drawls out, like he can't see Steve's bare ass in his face and know exactly what they were doing. 
Gareth's caught them fucking in several countries at this point. This is nothing. It's not even in the top ten most compromising positions he's seen them in. But still. Eddie could do without it, for sure.
Gareth's dog, Bonzo, is prancing around poolside, barking and jumping, just as hyper as his owner.
Steve just shakes his head, leaning over and picking up his discarded Speedo and walks back towards the house, like it’s no big deal to be walking around the backyard, totally naked. It's nothing Gareth hasn't seen before, to be certain. They've all spent far too many years together, in far too many locker rooms. 
Still, Eddie lifts his hips, and gets his trunks back up and securely fastened. He’s not about to get caught naked if he can help it. Unlike Steve, he does have some shame, and doesn’t exactly desire his junk getting featured on TMZ.
Some days, Eddie thinks Steve's just daring them to run dick pics of him. Probably because he knows what he's packing, and nobody in their right mind is gonna give his dick bad press. 
Definitely not Eddie. No way.
Eddie is about to get up, when Bonzo seizes the opportunity for the freed up premium seating, and jumps up onto Eddie’s lap.
Eddie hears the chair give way before he feels it. Soon enough they’re both falling to the ground. It’s a short fall, but Eddie still scrapes his elbow on the concrete and Bonzo shoots him daggers as if this whole mess was Eddie's fault, as the dog darts away from the scene of the crime, and towards the house, trying to catch up with Steve.
Steve clearly saw it happen, and he’s doubled over laughing near the sliding glass doors, still naked, and Eddie really doesn’t find it all that funny. 
“Fuck you, asshole, that hurt!” Eddie yells across the yard as he awkwardly untangles himself from the wreckage. Steve just laughs harder, and as much as Eddie wants to, it’s hard for him to stay mad at Steve.
Eddie gets up and surveys the collapsed heap of vinyl and aluminum. It looks like it's a total loss, and that does make Eddie smile, fully thankful that the chair from hell finally met its overdue end.
He jogs to catch up with Steve, hoping to slide in the shower with him, where Steve will kiss his wounded pride all better, and maybe go for round two. 
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Notes: Song is Permanent 99 by Christian Kane. It's not on Spotify, or I'd just embed it. Gareth's dog is Bonzo, after John Bonham. Because I still like to think he's a drummer in this world, and that still plays with Eddie here, too. They just took their focus elsewhere.
This is the kind of chair I'm talking about, which they're still making apparently?! I had no idea.
If you want to write your own, or see more entries for this challenge, pop on over to @steddiemas and follow along!
If you want to see more of my entries from this challenge, they are in my tag right here!
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findafight · 2 years
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Physically restraining myself from writing an au in which Steve decides, in the summer of '82, that he wants to swim at the 1984 Olympics. He trains at the outdoor pool and his own, and when the school year rolls in he talks to the swim team coach about it. She decides he can probably make it even if he is a bit younger than other swimmers, but he'll have to work hard. Steve goes all in on this in some mix of misguided desire for his father's love (how could a father of an Olympian be disappointed!) and genuine love of the sport. (His events are 100/200 butterfly, 1500 free, and maybe 200 IM?)
Robin needs gym credits. Desperately. The gym teacher talks to the swim coach and agrees that in order to prevent young Robin from accidentally braining herself on the ground, she could be the timekeeper for that Harrington kid trying to first get into the Pan Am games and then the Olympics the next year.
So little baby grade 9 Robin gets paired with newly determined to prove himself as something outside of highschool grade 10 Steve. She immediately starts the "you rule/you suck" board for when he makes/doesn't the PanAm (and later Olympic as I'm preeeety sure they're adjusted yearly?) qualifying times for his events.
Anyways all this to say is that she comes out to him in May of '83 Because he planned on bringing her to Caracas for the games, and she actually really likes him, likes fooling around with him in Mrs. Click's classes and gossiping as they drive to or from practices, but she doesn't think she can pretend around him for very much longer...
Anyways it's fine and they are chaotic besties and Steve places fourth in 100fly, silver in 200, and bronze in 1500fr. Amazing. I'm so proud of my boy.
There's an after party with the younger athletes and Robin, fifteen and out to someone for the first time ever, somehow flirts her way into making out with a girl on the Brazilian gymnastics team who gets her number and she is relentlessly teased by Steve about when he hears they had a little phone date and the Brazilian Gymnast said she can't wait for LA. He talks about this loudly in the school hallway, only saying "Brazilian Gymnast" and when asked why not use his name Steve's like "plausible deniability".
Because of this Robin somehow gets elevated up the social ladder despite being in drama and marching band and arguably being Steve's sidekick. Like really. A student at your small ass school went to Venezuela over the summer, won a silver medal, and his best friend who he brought along made out with a world-class gymnast?? Rumour mill runs wild. Robin is suddenly seen as someone with game instead of someone who is part baby giraffe.
All this to say is that fall of '83 goes two ways:
1) Robin comes to school frazzled on Wednesday morning, completely missing band practice. She asks the swim team if they've seen Steve. They haven't.
Wednesday's are their off day. Robin has band and Steve crosstrains with basketball boys with weightlifting. She bikes to his house and he drives them both to school. That morning, she arrived on time, but Steve didn't answer the door. His car was in the drive and the living room light was on. Robin got her key out and walked through the house. Trying to convince herself she was catastrophizing. She got to the backyard and found the pool cover half on and panics for a half second that Steve fell in and got trapped and drowned by the heavy plastic, but she doesn't see him. Nothing.
She bikes to school. No one's seen him. His parents aren't meant to be back for another week.
At lunch she peddles her way to the police station and demands to file a missing person report.
Jonathan Byers' has a very disturbing picture to develop.
2) a few days after poor little Will Byers goes missing, Steve is driving Robin home after they practiced (Robin finally getting in the pool and doing laps of her own), when they drive by the Byers' house. The lights are flickering and flashing and something is clearly wrong. He slows down, looks over at Robin, and they both get out of the car.
When they ring on the door bell, calling in to see if they need help, what's wrong, they both get Nancy Wheeler pointing a gun in their face.
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t-lostinworlds · 6 months
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Competitively Stupid | Steve Harrington
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》 PAIRING: steve harrington x female!reader
》 TROPE/GENRE: rivals-ish (since childhood) to lovers, some angst; fluff
》 SUMMARY: It was stupid, jumping off a cliff just to prove that you were better than Steve fucking Harrington. But you were competitive. You were not losing to him. But you know what was stupider? For it to take a near-death situation for you both to confess what you truly feel for each other.
》 WARNINGS: canon divergent (everyone is alive & well & happy thanks), pet names (sweetheart, baby), shitty parents (on both sides), competitiveness on all accounts, r is basically a counterpart of steve during high school (cheerleading captain, queen of hawkins high, swim team captain, etc.), peer pressure-ish, some stupid decisions & stupider actions, very irresponsible cliff jumping (which doesn't end well), drowning, CPR, injuries, an emotional moment™, love confessions, and a happy, sappy ending.
》 WORD COUNT: 5.3k+
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A/N: hi! okay, well, it's been a while since i posted a steve fic so i'm kinda nervous ngl. also, not me making it a habit to include swimmer!steve in all my fics from here on out. this was meant to be short & sweet to dust off the cobwebs but lol. super random. i saw a video of someone cliff-jumping & boom, the idea was born. also, not me using the first aid training i learned in college.
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📍 BLOG NAVIGATION ✩ STEVE H. MASTERLIST ✩ MAIN MASTERLIST ✩
⊱ ─────.⋅♚ *。・゚.★. *。・゚✫*.
This was stupid.
Absolutely idiotic.
You genuinely have no idea why you were even doing this in the first place.
"There's no way you can do it."
Right.
That's why.
The taunting voice of Steve fucking Harrington was the reason why you were standing on the edge of a cliff, looking down at a thirty-foot drop into the dark ocean.
This was supposed to be a relaxing trip with your new found family.
"You know you don't have to listen to him, right?" Robin sighed, so completely over the fact that her two best friends who never got along no matter what she tried, somehow came to an agreement to not listen to her right now.
Not that you could blame her.
You and Steve had been rivals ever since you were kids.
It was what you had always known.
What with narcissistic parents who used their children as pawns to one up each other, you had been conditioned to see him as an enemy from the second you step foot into their home.
Your family was invited into the Harrington residence for dinner as a way of welcoming you to the neighborhood. You recently just moved in, so you didn't know anyone else yet. When you heard that the next-door neighbor had a son who was your age, you had been really excited to gain a new friend.
All that changed when your dad sat you down an hour before, prepping you about how the Harringtons were a respected family in the town, and that you needed to show them you weren't any less than them, if not show them you were better. He drilled it in your brain to be on your best behavior, to be the best and the perfect daughter.
It only got worse when you finally sat down at that dinner table.
The comparisons were endless.
"See, my daughter here is a wonderful gymnast, quite amazing for someone her age."
"How wonderful. Steven here has swimming lessons every weekend. His coach said he might end up in the Olympic team once he's of age."
"Splendid. How about his academics? I'm sure he can take inspiration from my daughter's exemplary grades."
"He's the top of his class. Maybe if they study together, your daughter would be able to catch up in time."
It was harsh, pitting two seven-year-olds against each other—impressionable kids who only wanted to make their mom and dad proud.
But neither your parents nor his truly gave a shit. All they cared about was becoming the best family in the street, if not the whole town.
The sad thing was, those dinners became a regular thing, held alternately between your house and his.
It always looked like a preparation for battle whenever your mom would pull out the finest china in her collection along with the cookbook she only ever used for special occasions.
It was in the guise of cordiality when it was, in fact, an excuse to show off, to make a competition out of everything, a moment to compare who did what best. Those dinners were like monthly scoreboards, tallying up the respective families' recent achievements—and that included yours and Steve's.
Nobody was surprised that the competitiveness stuck with you both.
And it only got worse during high school.
Whether that was something as mundane as winning the popularity contest when running different circles—even going as far as getting crowned the King and Queen of Hawkins High—down to academics and extracurriculars.
Captain of the basketball team. Captain of the cheerleading squad. Prom Queen. Prom King. MVP of the season. Brightest student of the year. Beer pong Queen. Kegstand King. Best summer camp counselor. Lifeguard of the month and it went on and on and on and on.
When he got co-captain for the men's swim team, you rubbed it in his face that you were the captain of the women's team. When you got second place at the science fair, he made sure to rub his first place medal right in your face. When you became president of the student council, you ordered him around to do extra work whenever the basketball team was required to help with community service.
It was a constant back and forth.
There was always a competition between you and Steve Harrington.
And sure, since you graduated, it became subdued. But it was still very much there. Vying on who was the coolest babysitter in your band of ragtags, even fighting to have the title of Robin Buckley's ultimate best friend.
This thing between you and Steve was deeply rooted. So there really wasn't much Robin could do apart from getting in between your frequent squabbles before you started actually killing each other.
In Robin's words, something drastic had to happen for you both to finally wake up and see that this rivalry between you both wasn't what it seemed to be on the surface.
You had no idea what she was even implying.
Now, on a little getaway on the nearest beach you could drive to, the competition started with a race on who could get there first. It wasn't even fair seeing that you weren't the one driving.
The group had split into two, some were in Eddie's van—along with everyone's belongings since he had ample space in the back—while the others were in Steve's Beemer. Since you and Steve couldn't be in the same room together without an argument ensuing, it was a unanimous decision to have you two separated. Nobody wanted to deal with that for hours on the road.
Not that you could blame them, either.
And sure, it was the kids who suggested the race, but with Steve's smug smirk and that arrogant wink he threw once you got into Eddie's passenger seat, you knew it was game on between you too.
Yet despite the metal head being a fast—albeit slightly reckless—driver, he somehow took his sweet goddamn time getting to your destination.
Only when your group arrived at the beach last, did he say something about Steve threatening him to be extra careful with driving because there's important cargo in his van—whatever the hell that meant.
You lost to Steve on that one, but you would argue it was rigged from the start.
The next was a supposed friendly bout on who could build the biggest sandcastle that didn't topple over after a few minutes.
It was boys versus girls with you and him being team leaders. The girls won, obviously and El never used her powers. It was fair and square since the other team mostly argued over everything they could think of and had no teamwork at all. You made sure to point that out to Steve as you watched their sandcastle crumble into ruins.
Another one was beach volleyball. Same leaders as before, but you get to pick the members of your teams this time. Steve made it his mission to pick the tallest of the bunch. Still, it wasn't the advantage he thought it was because it ended up being one point too close.
Your team would've won if Steve wasn't such a dramatic asshole.
It was truly an accident. When you spiked that ball, you were not aiming for his face. He simply thought it was a good idea to catch the ball with it. Besides, he was distracted, flirting with some random girl in a bikini who was passing by, right in the middle of the game.
How was it your fault that he wasn't paying attention?
He made sure to oversell his injury after that, curled up on the sand as the girl fussed over him. But you saw that smirk on his face. You would've hit him again—definitely not by accident this time—if you weren't busy arguing with Robin about the point deduction. She said it was only fair since you hit the ball when she hadn't blown her imaginary whistle yet.
You decided to let it go when Steve commented on you being a whiny sore loser.
Unfortunately, the competition was ending with who could make jumping off a cliff and into the ocean look the coolest—adults only, despite the groans of protest from the mischievous bunch.
Eddie offered to stay behind and watch the rascals. When teased, he simply said he didn't want to test Death today.
His comment didn't help your nerves.
Robin said she was only coming purely as a voice of reason. She'd been saying nonstop how it was a horribly stupid idea, that there really was no need to be doing this in the first place.
But Steve wasn't backing down, so you weren't going to either.
So once again, it was only you and him.
As it always had been.
He volunteered to go first, throwing in a comment about rushing back up the cliff's edge before you could take your turn because he wanted a front-row seat for when you'd chicken out.
It only made you want to do it more.
His dive was smooth, almost flawless, you admit. He even showed off with a little flip near the end. It didn't take long for him to swim back to the shore, either. His years of training as a swimmer were obviously paying off.
But you trained just as much if not more than he had.
The only difference was, adrenaline didn't fuel you as much as it did Steve. So instead of getting all powered up looking down at a cliff's edge like he was, you were terrified.
But who wouldn’t get scared looking down at harsh waves crashing against sharp and jagged rocks? There was no margin for error here because one wrong slip and you'd be dead.
Still, if Steve could do it, you could do it better.
You weren't about to lose to his stupid ass.
"I'm not listening to him," you argued back, taking in a shaky breath as you took a step.
"He's doing reverse psychology!" she squeaked. "So you doing it is still listening to him!"
"I'm fine, Robs, I can do it," you mumbled, a slight questioning lilt at the end of your sentence.
"Look, sweetheart, it's okay to admit defeat," Steve said, cocky voice with an even cockier smile as he crossed his toned arms against his bare chest. His hair was still damp, quick to climb back up so he could get his front-row seat as he promised.
But you weren't chickening out.
Never.
"I mean, it wouldn't be the first time you lost to me so, it shouldn't sting as much."
You ignored him.
Instead, you took another step, the tips of your toes now hanging over the edge.
You can do this. Wipe that smug smirk off his face. You got this.
"Listen, you don't have to do—"
"Shut it, Harrington," you growled.
With a deep breath, you closed your eyes, counting from three, two, one…
You jumped.
-:-:-:-:-:-:-
This was stupid.
Absolutely idiotic.
He shouldn't have pressured you like that.
The jump wasn't deadly, per se, but it also wasn't exactly deemed the safest, especially if you weren't an expert in any sort of way.
And he didn't want to say it out loud because if he did, he knew it would only push you to do it more just to prove him wrong.
But Steve could see how scared you were.
He was already dropping the act, voice laced with concern as he started telling you that he wasn't worth all of this, that he was stupid and that you were always going to be better than him.
But, obviously, you didn't listen.
You simply jumped.
You and your stupidly competitive ass.
"Damn it," he cursed under his breath, rushing to the edge of the cliff, tensely watching your falling figure disappear into the water with a splash.
"You two are complete idiots."
"Shut up," Steve gritted, never looking away from the water. Yet any annoyance was quickly overpowered by sheer worry as he scanned the deep blue for anything.
There was no sign of you.
"Like seriously! It's like I'm the only one with a brain cell here!"
"Come on, come on, come on," Steve mumbled, completely ignoring Robin when you still hadn't emerged to the surface. "Come on, Y/N, don't scare me like this."
"Uh, Steve?" Robin asked after a moment, carefully looking over the cliff before shooting him a worried glance. "You look anxious and you being anxious is making me nervous."
"She hasn't come up," he grumbled, glancing at his watch.
It was nearing a minute.
"Maybe you didn't see her?"
"I haven't taken my eyes off the water, Buckley," he gritted, too harsh and uncalled for since Robin didn't do anything wrong.
But he was panicking.
A minute and thirty seconds.
"Come on, sweetheart, you can do it. You're an amazing swimmer," he whispered encouragingly, hoping some sort of magic would let you hear him underwater all while saying it aloud for his own sanity.
Two minutes.
You could never hold your breath any longer than that.
Steve knew because he always won that competition.
And that was in a calm pool.
"Shit, shit, shit!" he cursed, gearing up to dive after you. "I don't think she's coming up!"
"Okay! Okay," Robin rushed, panicking. "Maybe she's already on the shore. We should go down now and see—"
Steve didn't listen.
He jumped right after you.
The biting cold was awakening.
Still, it was the absolute fear of losing you that was keeping him alert.
He ignored the sting of the salty ocean water in his eyes as he frantically searched for you, his heart beating hard and fast, struggling for oxygen all while fearing for your safety.
Steve didn't know which came first, relief or dread when finally found you, aimlessly floating and unconscious under the deep blue.
He swam to you as fast he could, securely hooking his arm under your shoulder and dragging you up to the surface.
Steve always knew that adrenaline can give you a random boost of strength when needed. He simply didn't expect that to be proven true when he was carrying your unresponsive body in his arms as he brought you to the shore.
He gently placed you on your back on the sand, cupping your face as he checked for any injuries.
You were so cold.
"Hey, hey, wake up," he begged, grabbing your shoulders to try and shake you awake.
Nothing.
"You didn't have to make the jump, you idiot. Why do you always want to prove me wrong," he scolded with no ounce of anger, only worry. He started tapping your cheek frantically. "Come on, wake up!"
Still no response.
"Dammit, Y/N, why'd you have to be so fucking stubborn," he scolded, his voice shaking in fear, his chest tightening as he pressed two fingers against your pulse point.
His own heart stopped when he couldn't feel yours.
And you weren't breathing.
Steve tried to keep himself calm. If he panicked now, he wouldn't be able to give you the aid that you direly need.
"Come on, Harrington. You know what to do. You trained for this," he mumbled to himself, getting into the proper position to give you CPR.
He gently cupped your forehead with his left hand, his other two fingers under your chin as he tilted your head up.
"You're going to be okay," he whispered, pinching your nose before slotting his lips against yours.
Breathing into your mouth, one, two, he watched your chest rise as it filled up with air, only for it to settle back down without coming back up again. He quickly kneeled straighter, locking his fingers together and placing the heel of his left hand in the middle of your chest, pushing down with enough pressure to try and get your heart to start again.
"One, two, three, four, come on, sweetheart, breathe for me," he mumbled, easily finding the right rhythm, his first aid training as a lifeguard coming back to him like it was second nature.
Still, he never wanted to use this skill in a real-life situation, much less use it on you.
It was the longest thirty counts in his life.
Check for a pulse. Check for breathing.
Still nothing.
"Goddammit, Y/N, come on!" he growled, blinking back the tears as he pressed his mouth against yours again.
Two rescue breaths.
Thirty chest compressions.
Steve repeated the cycle over and over. His eyes were stinging with unshed tears, his knees were burning as the rough sand dug deeper into his skin, and his arms were starting to get sore, tiredness slowly covering his aching muscles.
But he'd rather die first than give up on you now.
"Steve—"
"Call for help, Robin!" he ordered, not taking his eyes off you for even a second. When he didn't hear any movement, he yelled, "Don't just stand there! Go!"
He was going to apologize for being an asshole later. For now, he needed you to fucking breathe.
"Come on, come on, please," he begged, leaning back down to give you two more rescue breaths. "Breathe for me, baby, please."
Thirty chest compressions.
"Trying to prove me wrong when I've always been wrong, you idiot."
Five, six, seven—
"Sweetheart, come on," he choked back a sob. "Who's going to call me out when I'm being stupid, huh? You know Robin can't do it alone."
Twelve, thirteen, fourteen—
"And you're really going to leave me alone to watch our kids?"
Twenty, twenty-one, twenty-two—
"Y/N, baby, please, I can't live without you," he whimpered.
Twenty-seven, twenty-eight, twenty-nine, thir—
Steve felt his breath leave his lungs when you finally gasped for air.
He quickly turned you to your side, rubbing your back as you choked out all the ocean water that got into your system.
"There you go, you're okay," he whispered, whether to reassure you or himself, he didn't even know anymore. All he was focused on was making sure you were going to be okay.
"S-Stevie?" you coughed out the nickname that was only ever used by you.
It was the equivalent to his nickname for you—sweetheart.
Names that started out to annoy each other but the more often it was used as time passed, it only managed to grow into an endearment that held something warm underneath it. You both were quick to realize that the nicknames you had for each other weren't out of spite anymore.
Neither of you simply addressed it.
"Steady, sweetheart, I'm right here," he reassured, hurriedly getting into your line of sight to stop you from trying to turn around to face him. He gently cupped your cheek, offering you a soft smile when your gaze found him. "I'm not going anywhere."
You nodded as best as you could, your eyes clinging onto his brown ones only for them to screw shut when a shiver ran through your whole body.
"C-Cold," you stammered.
"I know, I know, come here," he said softly, guiding you to sit up before quickly settling behind you. He gently pulled you closer between his legs, his chest pressed against your back as he blanketed his body over yours, rubbing your arms to keep you as warm as possible.
You turned to face him slightly, burying your face into his neck only for you to wince at the slight movement. He quickly tried to steady you again, checking over you twice to look for any visible injury. But he couldn't find any.
"Tell me what hurts," he asked, pressing his lips against your cold forehead as he fully wrapped his arms around you.
"A-Ankle," you whimpered in pain, your grip on his waist tightening and God he hated that sound so much.
You must've rolled it when you jumped, and having landed on it when you reached the water, it definitely made it worse.
"It's okay, you're okay," he murmured, littering kisses against the side of your head to try and keep your mind off it. "Robin already called for help, they should be on their way, alright?"
You gave him a small nod, inching even closer to him, seeking as much warmth from him as possible. Your cold breath was tickling his skin but he didn’t care. Hell, you could be breathing fucking ice and he still wouldn’t give a shit.
As long as you were breathing.
"I need you to stay awake for me, okay?"
"I-I'll try," you whispered.
"First to fall asleep is the biggest loser," he mumbled, squeezing you slightly when he felt your eyes flutter close. "And you wouldn't want me to win this, babe, because I'll be a little shit about it."
"Not f-fair," you choked out a laugh.
"It's plenty fair," Steve chuckled tearfully, ignoring the sudden wetness on his cheeks. He hugged you tighter instead. "So stay awake or you'll lose to me. Again."
"Right there! They're right over there!"
Steve had never been so grateful to hear Robin's voice.
-:-:-:-:-:-:-
"So are you finally going to tell her?"
"Tell her what?" Steve questioned back, unable to take his eyes off of you, soundly sleeping in a hospital bed with your foot now wrapped in a cast.
The doctor had already checked everything and thankfully, there weren't any further injuries apart from your twisted ankle.
Now, all you needed was to rest and recover.
"That you've been in love with her this whole time."
Steve sighed, squeezing your hand before turning to look at his best friend.
"I'm not in love with her, Robs."
"Right," she scoffed, raising a knowing brow. "Because jumping off a cliff with zero hesitation so you could save her is totally normal behavior for someone you claim you hate."
"I never said I hated her," he argued, and it was true. He couldn't think of a single moment where he hated you.
"Yeah, well, you two definitely don't act like you like each other."
"Does she annoy and frustrate the shit out of me? Yes. But I never hated her," he admitted.
Steve didn't know what it was exactly, maybe it was his tiredness muddling his brain, maybe it was from everything that happened in the last couple of hours finally catching up to him, or maybe it was the overwhelming need to confess everything into the open before it was too late—and it almost had been. Either way, he found himself suddenly spewing out all the things that he always just kept to himself.
"She's also been the most constant person in my life, you know? Hell, we basically grew up together. I can't just not care about her," he continued, memories flooding his system before he could even stop it. "She's been so ingrained in my life, her and the cute dresses she wore at those stupid dinners our parents always dragged us to. Her and her stupid competitions whenever our babysitters would bring us to the park together. Her and that stupid dance she always did whenever she won at anything even if it was my expense—she always does this cute little wiggle whenever she won, and that never left her even as we got older," Steve chuckled at the thought.
"And fuck, don't even get me started with how similar our parents are. She's the only one who will always get me when it comes to that," he continued. "And yeah, we compete a lot, but there was no hatred between us. Maybe at the start but all that went away when we learned that whatever our parents were feeding us was bullshit—that they were bullshit.
"And fine, did I sometimes get so annoyed whenever she got a new boyfriend? Yeah. But only because she always had this bad habit of dating fucking assholes. I don't know where she got those dickheads from but every time I see a glimpse of her crying by her window at night I swear to fucking God I would've killed every single one of those assholes if she asked," he gritted, slumping down in his seat with a sigh.
"She deserves to be treated right, you know? She's already experiencing so much shit at home, she doesn't need any more of that anywhere else. Sure, she irritates me to no end but that doesn't mean she's not a sweet girl who always cried whenever some random pet commercial came on the TV during the holidays. Does her competitiveness drive me up the wall? Absolutely. But that doesn't mean I don't feel so fucking proud of her whenever she wins another medal or achieves another milestone. And yeah, I wonder about how she's doing, if she's taking care of herself, if she's getting enough sleep between her work and classes. But that's only because I worry, you know?
"And maybe I do think about her a lot but that doesn't mean I'm in love with…"
Steve blinked.
Well fuck.
"Wow," Robin marveled. "You're stupider than I thought."
"He hit his head as a kid, cut him some slack."
Steve paled at the sound of your voice, swiftly turning red at the thought that you probably heard all the things he said.
He turned to face you, groaning in annoyance when he saw the smug smile on your lips. "You've been awake this whole time?"
"I'll leave you two love birds alone," Robin sang, quickly slipping out of the hospital room and closing the door behind her.
"How much of that did you hear?" Steve asked, rubbing the back of his neck.
"Enough to say you're stupid," you hummed.
He rolled his eyes, leaning back in his seat with crossed arms. "I'm not the one who jumped off the cliff and almost died just to prove a fucking point."
"Yeah, well, I guess we're both stupid then," you snorted.
He shrugged. "I guess we are."
"Jesus, you don't have to act so tense. I mean, you've already given me a mouth-to-mouth, we've practically made out already," you scoffed playfully. "I honestly thought I'd die first before swapping spit with you yet here we are."
It was your attempt at alleviating the tension, to throw in a funny quip. But with everything still so fresh in his mind, Steve simply couldn't take it well.
"Don't fucking joke about that will you?" he snapped, rubbing a frustrated hand over his face.
The silence that followed only made the tension worse.
"I'm sorry," you whispered.
Steve immediately felt bad.
"No, no, no. You didn't do anything wrong, don't apologize," he sighed, meeting your eyes with an apologetic smile. "I'm sorry. I shouldn't have snapped. It's just—"
He stopped himself, chewing on his bottom as he looked everywhere but at you when he felt the tears well up again.
"Will you come here?"
Steve took a calming breath and did as you asked, moving his chair closer but didn't attempt anything else than that.
"Stevie," you called when he still wouldn't look at you.
Harshly wiping his eyes with the back of his hand, he lifted his head. You smiled at him sweetly, wiggling your fingers to get him to come even closer.
"You scared me back there," he croaked, taking your hand with a squeeze.
"I didn't mean to," you softly said, remorseful and apologetic even though you didn't have to be.
"I know," he murmured, pressing your warm palm against his cheek as he shot you a glare. "Just don't do that again."
"Promise," you giggled, stroking his cheek with your thumb.
Steve leaned closer into your touch. "How are you feeling?"
"Better, thanks to you," you hummed, brows furrowing in thought. "When Marcus got that black eye, you said it was because he was playing dirty on one of your games." You tilted your head knowingly. "That wasn't true, wasn't it?"
Steve shrugged. "He hurt you."
"It was a small bruise on the arm, Steve," you reasoned.
"He shouldn't be giving you a fucking bruise in the first place," he growled, the memory bringing back the same anger he felt when he first saw that bruise. The soft tapping of your finger against his cheek calmed him down. "Sorry."
"Did you lose on purpose to get him expelled?"
"What? No!" he scoffed, offended, rolling his eyes when you giggled. "I tried so fucking hard to win that fight, you know, for you."
"You've always been protective of me," you hummed, taking his hand and interlacing your fingers together.
"Don't think I didn't know it was you who dyed that poor girl's hair green that one year in middle school summer camp," he retaliated.
It was a sharp and piercing scream that woke up the whole camp that morning. Everyone rushed out of bed to see what was going on only to find a girl who once was blonde was now sporting bright green hair in the middle of the crowd, crying her eyes out.
Steve would've thought it was only some silly prank if he didn't know who the girl was. But he did. Because the day before he tried to ask her to be his girlfriend, only for her to turn him down in the most embarrassing and humiliating way possible.
It wasn't difficult for him to find out who the culprit was since he immediately noticed how you kept hiding your hands in your pockets for the next few days after the incident.
The counselors quickly found out that the little menace—whoever she was—decided to use permanent dye on the poor girl's hair instead of something washable.
Your green palms colored you oh so guilty.
"She called you pathetic and gross in front of everyone!" you argued, pouting. "You looked like you were about to cry and I hated it."
Steve's heart warmed at that, a smile on his face despite rolling his eyes. "I wasn't about to cry."
"Yeah well," you shrugged, eyes trained on your intertwined fingers, your thumb playing with his. "I'm the only one who's supposed to be mean to you."
"Hmm," he agreed, bringing the back of your hand to his lips. "I guess we've always been there for each other, huh?"
"I guess so," you giggled, cupping his cheek and tugging him closer.
He stood up from his seat, following your lead until he was pressing his forehead against yours.
"Thank you for saving my life, Steve," you whispered, eyes turning glossy as so many emotions covered your irises, the weight of what almost happened catching up with you.
"You don't have to thank me for that," he said sincerely, brushing the tip of his nose against yours. "I'd do it over and over again in a heartbeat."
You nodded, sniffling, "Still, thank you."
Steve wasn't able to argue some more when you all but kissed him.
The first time Steve felt your mouth on his was a horrible experience considering he was trying to keep you alive.
Now, everything was the complete opposite.
A kiss that was careful but sweet, a hint of nervousness and excitement all the same, completely unhurried yet burning with passion as his lips molded against yours.
But still, it felt like that first gasp of air—a finally.
"I'm in love with you, too, by the way," you murmured as you pulled away, your warm breath tickling his lips.
"Thanks for clarifying," he chuckled, eyes laced with adoration, unable to stop his smile from growing wider, warmer. "I couldn't figure that out from the kiss."
"I mean, you are kinda stupid," you teased.
"We're on that same boat, sweetheart," he chuckled. "I'm sure Robin would remind us about that every single day now."
"Unfortunately," you groaned playfully. "God, she gets annoying when she's right."
"Tell me about it," he hummed, brushing his lips against yours, moving away when you chased it.
You whined.
Steve didn't hesitate to dive back in.
✫*゚・゚。.★.*。・゚♛ *.
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wynnyfryd · 2 months
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Trailer park Steve AU part 61
part 1 | part 60 | ao3
cw: mentions of canonical minor character death
Chapter 14
It's twilight by the time they make their way to Rick's place — gnat clouds swarming, sun dipped low, Lover's Lake an inky smudge beyond the blur of passing pines. Steve’s not totally sure how they got here, this dusty service road that's more pothole than pavement; one minute he's bitching about doomed love and double VHS, the next he’s taking the scenic route to a drug den.
There were some important moments in between, he’s pretty sure.
He’s also pretty sure he blacked out somewhere around the moment the morning news reported that an-unidentified-Hawkins-student-who-very-well-could-be-Eddie-Munson was found dead in his fucking trailer.
Kinda difficult to resurface from that one.
Feels like his soul’s got swimmer’s ear.
Even hours later — after Dustin and Max burst into Family Video talking a mile a minute about how Eddie was alive and they needed to use the phones; after Ernie stupidly gave a reporter Steve’s name, swearing up and down on the TV that his neighbor Steve Harrington was an upstanding young man who would never do something like this; after they spent an agonizingly long afternoon lying low and taking backroads to avoid the cops because the cops probably suspect Steve of murder now, oh god—
“It’s this next right up ahead,” Max says from the back seat. There's a map spread over the bench between her and Dustin, and Steve blinks himself awake; gives her a nod in the rearview.
Beside her, Dustin’s munching on Twizzlers he stole from the store — window down, easy slouch, just way too chipper for the situation at hand. "So Steve," he says conversationally, "now that you're a fugitive, does that mean—?"
Steve cuts Robin a pleading look.
Robin reaches back and smacks the little twerp upside the head.
"Ow!" Dustin whines.
"Shut up, please," Robin smiles.
Max makes a sound like she's trying not to laugh and checks the map again. "Right here," she says, pointing. "After that weird tree stump."
They turn onto another road that could be generously described as paved, once, several decades ago, and eventually, the winding path lets out onto a slightly nicer street. Aging but cared for, Holland Road is a crowded row of little lake houses, trailers and shacks with manicured shrubs and chipped fence paint, weeds growing through the sidewalks beneath pristine American flags. Steve pulls into the driveway of #2121.
It looks abandoned. Dark inside and out, a truck parked on the curb that's likely been there for a while, its tires sagging in a mulch of old wet leaves. There’s an autumn wreath on the front door.
“You sure this is the place?” he asks as they climb out of the car.
Max sasses him for questioning her navigation skills, Dustin unsuccessfully tries to land a revenge slap on Robin — a move that earns him a retaliation wedgie and a wrestling match he was never gonna win — and Steve pops the trunk and feels a hundred years old. Feels every bit the exhausted dad trying to keep the family road trip together as he grabs his nail bat and slings his duffel over his shoulder.
"You planning to spend the night?" Dustin teases from Robin's armpit, still bent double where she's got him in a headlock.
"No, just-" he drops the bag at their feet with a grunt, “doesn’t hurt to be prepared.”
Dustin’s eyes bug out. “Is that a can of goddamn bear mace?”
“Keep your voice down!” Steve hisses.
“You keep your voice down!”
"Should I just go ahead and choke him out?" Robin offers.
Steve considers it for a second: knock 'em all out, stuff 'em back inside the car. Go do this shit quietly by himself.
He rolls his eyes and puts his hands on his hips.
"You're no fun," she pouts, but she lets Dustin go.
Dustin grabs flashlights and walkies out of the bag, passes them around the circle. They take a moment to steel themselves — huddled together in the dark, shoulders tense, the creepy house looming ahead. Sharp shadows stretch toward them. Croaking sounds creeping from the edges of the lake.
Robin puts her flashlight under her chin like she's about to tell a scary story. "Alright, kiddos," she says in a deep, ominous voice. "Let's go rescue Steve's ex."
Stunned silence in the sudden vacuum her words create. Steve lets out a tired sigh. Dustin’s jaw is on the curb.
“His WHAT?” Dustin shouts.
Oh, my god. “He’s not my ex."
Robin rolls her eyes and says ‘sure’ under her breath, and Max turns to Dustin, laughing. “You didn’t know they were a thing?”
“We’re not—” Steve tries again.
“What were you trying to get them back together for then?”
She seems genuinely curious. Dustin seems three seconds from spontaneous combustion. “What was I WHAT?!” he yelps, limbs everywhere. Reminds Steve of Eddie so bad it hurts.
“Okay,” Steve interrupts, clapping them both on the shoulder; drops his voice to a harsh whisper. “In case you two forgot, we’re here to rescue Eddie.”
“Who you’re dating.”
Dustin’s voice is small, disconnected, his gaze far away. Like he’s shellshocked.
“Jesus Christ.” Steve pinches the bridge of his nose. “I— Yes. No. It’s complicated.”
Max snorts at his answer, Dustin makes a series of faces like he's gonna need seven years to process, and Robin interrupts his crisis by waving her flashlight like a traffic guard, walking backward up the hill as she directs them toward the house.
“Why don’t we just go find him first?” she suggests, making a rainbow with her hands, flinging light through the grimy windows. “And then Stevie here can answer alllll your big gay questions.”
Steve glares at Robin. Dustin glares at him, narrowed eyes for a full ten seconds like 'yeah, you fucking better,' and then he takes off up the driveway hollering Eddie's name.
part 62
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lesservillain · 5 months
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alpha!steve harrington x omega!reader
cw: omegaverse dynamics, knotting, bonding/marking, breeding kink, unprotected piv, semi public, mutual pining
wc:~5.7k
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Music plays at a low hum from the small radio at your desk. The only station that comes in clear has been taken over by Christmas music since Thanksgiving break. Not even Wham!’’s Last Christmas was giving the same sense of relief after hearing it every day for almost a month now. 
Despite the winter wonderland outside, you still seek out the coolness of your water bottle against your skin, the chill helping to ease the flush that’s been making you sweat like it was mid July in Texas. You’d even cracked the window behind your desk in hopes that the fallen snow would help with your elevated body temperature. But you knew that all of your efforts were for nothing. That no matter how cold you made it, there was really only one thing that would actually be able to ease the discomfort that you felt spreading under your skin; the burden of being an omega in this world. 
Ever since you split with your ex this past spring you’ve been having to deal with your heats on your own. It's not impossible for an omega to go through heats without an alpha to ease the pain, but when you go cold turkey after years of having someone there to satisfy the overwhelming biological need to mate, it can take a huge toll on any omega. 
Science has made leaps and bounds over the last 20 years to improve suppressants for both alphas and omegas. They’re not perfect by any means, but they’re better than dealing with the intense urges that you feel when that time of the month comes. 
The current suppressants you're taking are…experimental. Mixed with a birth control that’s supposed to be able to stop even the swimmers of an alpha in rut from reaching an egg of an omega they’ve marked. They were suggested by your doctor as a preventative, since omegas after losing their long alpha tend to subconsciously scent to seek out a replacement. 
And they worked really well the first few months, not having a heat for nearly half a year. But the added stress of moving to a new town on your own and starting a new job where you were constantly playing catch up after inheriting a mess from the school’s previous nurse, your heat came back full swing within the first month of the school year. The dizziness, increased appetite, a dull ache in your lower back, and hot flashes put you out for three days before you could get a suppressant strong enough to make you functional again. 
Now you’re having your winter heat, which, so far, has been much tamer by comparison thanks to the increased dose of your medication. But the combination of your heat with the influx of students seeing you due to peak flu and strep season, your body has been practically screaming at you by the end of each day this week to go home and relax. 
The sudden overzealous opening of your office door takes your attention off your sweltering body. The all too familiar voice of Mr. Harrington calls out “Helloooo, nurse!” as he occupies the space in the doorway. 
Steve Harrington was one of the school’s sophomore history teachers, as well as the football and basketball coach and the leader of the Student Achievement program. All of the staff, and probably some of the students, swoon over him at any given moment, his presence never missed due to the air that surrounds him. Unfortunately you’re not immune to his charms either. In fact, the natural attraction between the two of you was palpable at times, regardless of how much you try to ignore it. 
Steve could feel it, too. And maybe it was the way his alpha brain was wired, but his flirty personality is jacked up to 10 whenever you’re around. It’s not on purpose, at least not in a conscious way. His amazing hair, the way his clothes hugged his toned body, and his almost unnaturally handsome face made him the poster child for the perfect alpha partner. 
Well, perfect except for the fact that he’s the clumsiest man you’ve ever met in your life, leaving your office at least once a week with a Strawberry Shortcake bandaid after giving himself a paper cut or an ice pack on his head when a ball hits him in the face. 
Despite his accident-prone nature, Steve is a highly desired, single alpha in his prime. And with you being the only unclaimed adult omega in the building, it’s put a huge target on your back for your jealous coworkers who think they have a shot with him. To remedy this, you’ve maintained a firm level of professionalism and platonic friendliness at all times with him, despite his flirty personality testing your willpower.
His intoxicating scent invades your senses sending  a wave of warmth to wash over you before you can even give him a quick glance. You pull at the collar of your blouse willing the air to cool down your shirt. “You feeling okay there, nurse? You look a little flushed. Or are you just that happy to see me?”
“Mr.Harrington,” you say flatly, following with teasing sarcasm as you continue looking over your paperwork, “I was starting to worry you weren’t going to see me this week. Thought you’d finally broken your streak of bad luck.” He lets out an airy chuckle that makes the sides of your lips threaten to curl.
“Oh, honey, you know I can’t stay away from you.” He means it. He would fake appendicitis if it gave him a greater chance to be doted on by you. To get closer to you. “I would have been in here sooner if I hadn’t been glued to my desk all week getting grades in before break,” he says, voicing his grievances that were the result of his own negligence. 
“I see,” you hum, continuing with the sarcastic tone. “I guess I won’t have to replenish my box of bandaids just yet.”
“Weelll,” he draws out, “All that sitting time must have built up my bad luck, because, uh, I think this one may need more than just a bandaid.”
When you finally lift your eyes from your desk, they almost bulge out of their sockets at the sight of him. Where you initially thought his arms were just crossed, you see his right hand is actually covering his left bicep, blood staining down the sleeve of his light and navy blue striped dress shirt. The lack of urgency in his tone had you thinking nothing was wrong, but of course Steve Harrington would find the time to flirt with you while he’s bleeding. 
Tossing your water bottle on the desk and jumping up from your seat, you practically fly across the room to assess the damage, pulling his hand away to find a tear in the sleeve and blood spread messily on his skin underneath.
“Oh my goodness, what happened?” You ask with concern, pulling him into the office by the hand and leading him to a cot, shutting the door behind you. 
“Mrs.Harmon asked if I could stay and help set up stuff around the auditorium for the choir performance tonight,” he explained as you pulled at the material of his sleeve, trying and failing and get a better look at the wound, “and I accidentally knocked a shelf off the wall while trying to get the decorations out. I moved fast enough that it didn’t crush me, but it did knick me a little.”
“A little! Mr.Harrington—” you start with a stern tone, preparing your normal lecture to him about being safe. 
“Steve,” he corrects with a smug grin, insisting that you call him by his first name since you’ve met. 
“Mr.Harrington,” you repeat like a warning, trying to remain professional when he’s so close to you. It’s hard when he’s staring at your face with those big hazel eyes as he watches your face scrunch in frustration while you fiddle with his shirt. A shirt that’s straining to stay together around his large bicep, leaving no give for you to get a better look at his wound. 
Losing your will to argue with him, your hands rest to your hips with a sigh. “Can you, just, slip your arm out of the sleeve, please?”
“Of course,” he says with faux seriousness as you can see his all too satisfied smile, rolling your eyes at him.
Turning on your heel, you walk a few feet to grab the things from the supply cabinet to treat his wound. Your back is turned to him as you fill your arms with gauze, tape, cotton balls, and anything else you may need for a cut that large.
 “You know, you’re probably the clumsiest alpha I’ve ever met,” you tease as you turn to face him again, “Sometimes I think you get hurt on purpose just to see m—“
The rest of your remark dies on your tongue as your mouth goes dry. Taking liberties with your request, you watch Mr.Harrington completely remove his shirt, dropping it on the cot behind him and facing you once more. The white under tank he���s wearing leaves little to the imagination as it hugs his broad chest tightly, thinning the material and making it almost see through. His skin still has the last lingering tint of the tan he was sporting on the first day of school, and different sized freckles and moles decorate his body like constellations in the sky. You’ve never seen so much of him all at once, head feeling fuzzy as you drink him in. 
“I think you might be drooling a bit there, Ms. Nurse,” he says pointing to the corner of his own mouth to further his teasing. But you can barely hear him, the words muffled as your ears start to ring and your vision tilts as if you’d been drinking. The boil you’d been dealing with all day felt like a slight shimmer as your fever suddenly spikes, your body on fire as the scent coming from his newly exposed skin has you reeling.
The supplies you’re holding dropped to the floor, freeing your hands to grasp at the counter behind you. Steve rushes to your side, wrapping an arm around you and easing you to the ground. He barely makes it without dropping to his knees himself, the smell of your pheromones hitting him like a brick. 
“H-hey, what do you need,” you hear him ask, but you can hardly register the words as his scent in close proximity only spurs your heat on more. Even with your clothes covering your skin, the touch of his hand on your waist and the one he’s rested on your knee make you crave more of him in a carnal way, the urgent need to close the gap between the two of you has your body shifting until you’re on your knees and crawling towards him. 
His hands hover in the air, slightly trembling as you lean into him. He falls back on his ass as you get closer until you’re practically laying on him, rubbing against him with your face like a cat. “I need you, Steve,” you purr. He takes a sharp breath in through gritted teeth as your hand drifts lower, lower, until your fingers land on the very prominent bulge straining against his deep blue slacks. “Shit,” his head snaps back at the contact, before dropping back down to look at you with hungry eyes.
“What happened to keeping it professional?” He tries to joke, unsure if this is all just a test from the universe to see how he would react to having his nightly fantasies come true. And while Steve may be resilient in many ways, he wasn’t sure if he could hold back with the way you’re looking up at him through your lashes as if he’d hung the moon and the stars. The scent of his musk permeates the room as he gives into your needs, his desires, letting the primal urges he’s been pushing down since the day he met you front in his mind. 
If you were in a different state of mind you probably would have laughed at his comment. But the intense ache that bloomed between your legs as all your senses start to leave your body has you whimpering against his chest. 
Strong arms scoop you up swiftly, tossing you down on the cot and pulling the privacy curtain behind him. In the split second he was away from you, you managed to grab his discarded shirt and pull it to your nose, inhaling his lingering scent. It was like a drug that you couldn’t get enough of, your thighs rubbing together and hips moving against air as your body seeks out any kind of relief for the ache. 
Suddenly, the shirt is torn from your grasp roughly. You cry out, hands reaching out aimlessly before they’re being grasped tightly around the wrists and pinned to the bed. The cot dips as a weight wedges its way between your legs, pressing against your core in a way that has you instantly bucking against it with reckless abandon, your clouded mind only thinking about satisfying the throb in your core. 
“God, look at the mess you’re making on my thigh already,” Steve says with a low growl, watching you use him in a pathetic attempt to relieve yourself. The grit in his voice hits every nerve in your body on its way from your ear drums to your cunt. 
“You smell so fucking sweet,” he groans as he brings your wrist to his nose and inhales, “Like vanilla or honey, o-or something better,” he stammers. He leans over you, hot tongue licking a thick stripe from your collar bone to behind your ear, lightly biting the lobe and pulling, goosebumps rising on your skin. His hair is just as soft as you imagined it would be as it tickles your cheek, a sharp contrast to the way his teeth bite at your neck, his tongue soothing over the skin. 
You press your cheek into him, whining his name right into his ear, practically begging him to put you out of your misery. He releases one of your hands to grab your face, lips pursing together, making you look him in the eyes. His pupils fully blown out and close enough that you can see your own fucked out reflection in them.
“Listen to me,” he says, swallowing, eyes flickering between your eyes and your lips. “I’ve been wanting to do this for five fucking months. Five long months of fucking my fist to the thought of getting you under me just like this, making you a mess and having you beg for me.” He takes a deep breath through his nose, nostrils flaring as the last bit of his resolve begins to waver. “So if we do this, you’re mine from now on, got it? No more of this back and forth, pretending you don’t want me as much as I want you bullshit. Once I start…I’m not going to be able to stop. Do you understand?”
There’s no hesitation with how quickly you try to nod your head against his grip. The heat coming off of your cheeks warms the tips of his fingers. “Nuh-uh,” he tuts, giving you a little shake, “Need to hear it. Tell me you want this.” 
“Want you, Steve. Need you. Need your cock, please, please please.”
 He curses under his breath before his lips crash into yours. The kiss is hot and heavy right off the bat as teeth clash and tongues dance together in desperation. Your free hand finds its way into his perfect hair, pulling slightly at the nape, eliciting a moan from him that you catch as it leaves his lips.
Steve pulls away from you with a wild look in his eyes. Both of his strong hands release their hold on you so that he could rip open the front of your blouse, sending buttons flying and hitting the floor with a clatter. His mouth is back on you, nipping and biting the skin while his hands pull your tits free from the cups of your bra. 
Mouth moving at lightning speed, he hungrily takes one of your nipples in his mouth, sucking and tonguing the bud while needing at your other breast with his hand. His eyes are glassy when they look up at you, half lidded and unfocused, drool dribbles down your breast from his mouth. 
Everything next happens so quickly you can barely register it. Steve pulls away from you completely, standing up fully to rip your pants down your legs. Once he throws them to the floor, he’s making quick movements to undo his own pants, his right thigh drenched from the slick that had soaked through while grinding against him. 
His cock is so hard that the pressure against the crotch of his pants has the zipper undoing itself once he frees the button. Wasting no time, he shucks down his slacks and boxers in one go, his large cock and heavy balls now on full display for you, the sight making your eyes widen in surprise—and maybe fear?
Alphas are known to be bigger than even a well endowed beta, and omegas are built to handle the size of an alpha’s better than a beta can, but the size of the Steve’s cock less than a foot from your face has you mesmerized at the sheer size of it. But while your mind may be in shock, your pussy has a mind of its own, slick dripping in anticipation for the stretch you’d be receiving. Even in his large hands it looked massive, bigger than any alpha you’d been with before. 
You sit up in the bed slightly, reaching out to take him in your hand, your fingers barely able to wrap around him as you stroke the angry red tip. He curses under his breath as you let your hand roll over the tip, feeling the veins against the skin of your palm with each stroke.
 A little bead of precum bubbles at the tip and something in your mind snaps. Your mouth is on him in an instant, any sense you may have had left is completely gone out the window when that salty taste hits your tongue. 
“Fuck, look at you,” he cooes, followed by a guttural moan at the sight of you trying to take as much of him in your mouth as you can. “Such a good girl. Trying your best to take me in that pretty little mouth of yours, huh?” His words egg you as you continue to suckle at his tip, lapping up any of his spend that leaks out as you keep pumping at his shaft.
You want to keep going, want to be good for him, but ache between your legs is becoming unbearable the longer you go on. Slick is slipping down your thighs, a puddling forming under you on the sheets as your body involuntarily preps itself to take Steve’s massive cock. You look up at him with teary eyes, lifting your ass in the air as a silent plea for him to take you like the bitch in heat that you are. 
And as much as he’s loving watching you pitifully mouth his cock, seeing you present yourself for him turns off the evolved parts of his brain, leaving him to run on primal instincts only. 
Grabbing you by the throat, he manhandles you onto your back and positions you so your ass on the edge of the cot. Your legs fall to the sides, opening as wide as you can get them, pussy on full display and ready to be taken. 
“Hoooooo, fuck,” Steve shudders, licking his lips at the sight of your dripping cunt, hole clenching around nothing, begging for him to fill it up. He runs his fingers through your folds to collect some of your arousal, barely brushing over your throbbing clit. He brings his fingers to his mouth, shoulders slumping in satisfaction.
“Damnit, of course you taste sweet, too. Can’t wait til I can get you in my mouth,” he says with a slight slur. 
You panic for a moment, unsure if you could wait any longer for him to finally be inside you. As if he can read you like a book, he lets out a soft chuckle, taking his cock in his hand and pumping it slowly. “Don’t you worry, baby girl, I’m not gonna keep you waiting any more. Next time, though…”
The sticky tip of his cock taps your clit, sending shock waves throughout your body with every touch. It’s too much and not enough all at once. His name falls from your lips, and he shushes you in return, lining himself up with your entrance.
The breach of his tip stretching you wide is like a shot of morphine in an IV drip, your body becoming numb and a live wire at the same time, replacing the pain with a fuzzy haze all over. 
Steve watches the way your face contorts with pleasure as hips rock back and forth slowly. His teeth bite down on his bottom lip, trying his hardest to hold back so you can get used to his size, but the vice grip you have on his cock has him quickly losing his resolve. Body falling over you, he brackets your head between his forearms as he finally folds. His breath fanning over your face has your eyes fluttering open. Met with the most divine visual of Steve’s pinched brow, scrunched up nose, and slack jaw fill your vision entirely. Your breath is punched from your lungs as he makes that final thrust, bottoming out inside of you with a shuddered whimper. 
“Oh, my god,” you breathe, wrapping your arms around his neck and pulling him in closer. He buries his head in the crook of your neck, rubbing his face against your skin, marking you with his scent. He begins to move, setting a pace that makes every thrust feel like heaven, the tightness of your walls amplifying every ridge and bump of his cock as it drags back and forth. “Fuck, Steve, you’re so big,” you whine, “Never felt so full be-fore!” The last syllable comes out as a gasp as he thrusts into you hard, spurred on by your words. 
His arms wrap around you tightly, laying all of his upper body weight against you to pin you in place so he can fuck into mercilessly. The feeling is mind melting, nonsense words mixed with repeating his name over and over fall from your mouth with each punch of his cock against your cervix. Each thrust hits that spot inside of you dead on, throttling you towards the edge quicker than your mind can handle in your current fucked out state. 
“Fuuuuck,” Steve’s voice is strained next to your ear, thrusts slowing as you “Don’t squeeze so tight, baby, I don’t wanna cum yet.” 
His words have the opposite effect on you as your whole body trembles beneath him, cumming so hard his cock your vision goes white. Your chest presses into his as your back arches off the mattress, the skin to skin friction against your hardened nipples stimulating you more as he fucks you through your high.
He lifts his head to watch you come undone with a wide eyed, feral look. He’s panting, too, with a string of saliva from his tongue to the skin of your shoulder where he had latched on, the skin red and already speckling with broken blood vessels. 
 “You’re so pretty when you cum on my cock like that,” he says with heavy breaths, “Wanna see you do it again, and again, and again,” he babbles, leaning in to trail kisses along your jaw, continuing to thrust into you harder and harder, in his own world now. You can only cling to him as he ruts into you, nails scratching down his back. “Gonna fuck you over and over and over until it takes. Big, round belly on full display for everyone to see. You gonna tell everyone Mr.Harrington got you pregnant when you can’t hide it anymore? What will all the other teachers think?” 
“Fuck, Steve, please.” 
“What is it, baby? Tell me what you want.”
“Want it, Steve. Want your knot.”
“Oh, is that right?”
Suddenly, he pulls away and out of you completely. It’s such a shock to the system you can help but cry out at the loss of him. But the vacancy doesn’t last long, his strong arms lifting and flipping you with ease until you’re face down into the mattress, ass being propped up on shaky legs so he can bottom out in you once more. 
This new angle changed everything. A wanton moan feels like it was being pushed out of you as it felt like his cock was in your lungs. One hand grabs a hold of your hip while the other pushes down on the back of your neck, effectively pinning you down so he can pick back up his brutal pace. There was no rhythm to his thrusts, driven purely on animalistic instincts as he chases his own pleasure, using you as a means to get him there.
“You want my knot, huh?” The question is rhetorical, said in the heat of the moment as he feels his peak nearing. “Want me to give you my knot and really knock you up? I’ll ruin you for any other alphas that think they have a chance. Cause you’re mine now, aren’t you, sweet girl? No other alpha’s gonnna fuck you like I can, right?” 
“No-no, Steve! Don’t want anyone else! Only want your knot! Please, please!” Your eyes lull as he fucks you stupid, mouth parted open as you drool onto the sheets. 
His weight shifts, trailing kisses down your back until he gets to that spot on the back of your neck. A chill runs down your spine as his teeth scrape against the skin over your scent gland. “Well, if that’s the case…Guess you wouldn’t mind if I held you to that, right?” 
The primal part of your brain is screaming for him to do it; mark you and make you his, permanently. The logical side fights for dominance, reminding you that you never wanted to be owned by an alpha, which is why you and your ex broke up in the first place. But the way he was making you feel right now had you second guessing all your morals. He hums over you, lips lingering against your skin as he speaks. 
Before you could answer, his hips were stilling inside you, the base of his cock swelling as he pumped you full with his spend. It would have been painful if it didn’t trigger the release of oxytocin in your body, making you cum with him. Your legs start to give out, but his hold on you tightens as his spend continues to spill into you., the  His body shakes above you, chest heaving as tries to catch his breath.
The two of you take a moment to come down from your highs. The air around you feels electric as the two of you become one, his knot settling within your walls snuggly, the steady stream of Steve’s cum filling you to the brim until you couldn’t possibly take anymore. He rests his head over your scent gland, rubbing his face against it out of comfort while you still emit that sweet, sweet smell. 
Everything feels right in the moment, until it’s interrupted by a knock and an intruding aroma. To you, it smells like smokey wood and cinnamon, but to Steve, it’s a threat. The smell of another alpha trying to get near his omega and claim her over him. You can feel his body tense up, breathing picking up in a panic, lips pressing against the skin as his mind races.
“Steve?” You say his name meekly. There’s a short pause between you, a split second before you feel it, his teeth clamping down on your skin. It’s like every nerve in your body lights up all at once. The sensation is powerful it makes you cum again, clamping down on Steve’s still hard cock buried inside of you. The moan he lets out against you is pornographic, teeth still clinging to your skin tightly as his saliva mixes with your body’s natural scent.
“Hey, everything okay in there?” The muffled voice calls from the other side of the door.
“Get the fuck out of here, Eddie!” Steve yells out to the janitor, another alpha that you’d seen in passing, pinching your skin as he does his best to keep his teeth on you. It’s quiet for a moment, and you think that Eddie left until you hear a loud, booming laugh, and a faint “About damn time!” as the new smell starts to dissipate. 
Steven feels your body jolt slightly beneath him and refocuses his attention on you. You do it again with an audible snort. At first he thinks you might be crying, guilt creeping in as he’s realized what he’s done to you. But as you get louder, it’s clear that you are actually laughing. 
“Was tho funneh?” He asks, drooling down onto your back.
“I don’t know,” you say through fits of giggles. “I think I’m losing my mind.”
“Thounds like et,” he says, laughing along with you.
“Sorry, I just…wasn’t expecting any of this.” Your body shifts under him, growing uncomfortable in the position you were in. Steve senses this, releasing your skin and licking your wounds so that, with careful maneuvering, he’s able to get both of you comfortably on your sides. He wraps his arms and legs around you, holding you close to his strong chest, eyeing his handiwork of his mark as you rest your head on his arm.
“There’s nothing for you to apologize for,” he says softly, kissing the back of your head. “If anyone should be apologizing, it should be me. I took things too far…But if I’m going to be honest with you, I don’t regret it.”
It could be the residual high from your heat, or the change in your brain chemistry from his mark, or just the fact that you’ve been pushing down how much you really wanted this with him from the moment your hands touched when you both went for the same bagel at the first staff meeting over the summer, but you couldn’t deny that you didn’t regret it either. 
For so long you’ve been in denial, trying to ignore that he was the reason your suppressants stopped working because you wanted him so badly that your body was rejecting them when he was around. Denying how happy you get when he brings you coffee in the morning, or how much you look forward to when he sits with you during his lunch period to talk about whatever shenanigans his multitude of friends get into, or how the whole reason you started this heat was because he let you sit in the passenger seat of his BMW while he jumped your car after work on Tuesday, the inside smelling so overwhelmingly like him that you had to jump out and rush straight to your car before you ended up jumping him in the middle of the parking lot. 
“Steve?” You request his attention just above a whisper, breaking the silence between you. He hums quizzically, resting his cheek against yours. “Did you really need to grade papers this week, or have you been avoiding me this week because you knew I was going through a heat?”
His cheek vibrates against yours as he chuckles from his throat. “You’re so smart, you know that, right?” He kisses your cheek before settling back with his head on the pillow, forehead resting against the back of your head. 
As the two of you lay there you ask him a million questions, picking his brain to its fullest extent with this new closeness the two of you share. Really, you just like the sound of his voice, but he does say a few things here and there that make you belly laugh.
“Don’t do that,” he laughs along with you, “We’re never going to come undone if you keep squeezing me like that!”
“I can’t help it,” you wipe a tear from your eye, trying your hardest to suppress your giggles. 
Thirty minutes pass and Steve’s knot finally goes down enough that he can pull out of you. It feels like a part of you is missing now that he’s no longer occupying you after so long. Hot, sticky cum pours from you like a storm drain onto the sheet below. With a sigh, you make a mental note to add new sheets on your list of things to replace, right under a new box of bandaids.
Oh, shit. Steve’s arm.
As he starts to gather the discarded clothes on the floor, you see that that blood has dried up and mostly rubbed off after everything. After the two of you redress, you wearing Steve’s button up after he made your blouse no longer wearable, not that you were complaining as the need to nest was starting to kick in, you cared for his wound. Just a cut left behind that would be okay with a little disinfecting and a few steristrips. 
“You forgot the most important part,” he says with a shake of his head as you place the last strip on his arm. You tilt your head at him in confusion, a smile forming on his face as he looks at you with a sparkle in his eyes. “Aren’t you gonna kiss it better?”
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wroteclassicaly · 1 year
Note
Kink hour got me thinking about Steddie's breeding kink, where they fight over who's gonna breed reader. But that's just me...
Ooooooh, shit! Why you gotta get me started? 😝 I’ve thought about this… like, so much.
Warnings: Language, NSFW, smut, breeding kink, vaginal fingering.
~*~
“I mean, c’mon… Seriously, Y/N. Whose hair would look better on him? Harrington’s or mine? S’ a pretty simple answer if you ask me.”
“She didn’t, dumbass.”
“Oooh, King Steve, you know I love it when you talk dirty to me.”
Your eyes roll into the back of your head, and not because of Eddie’s thick digits knuckle deep in your sopping wet cunt. You grip the headboard for leverage and close your legs around his wrist, an exasperated sigh escaping your swollen lips. “For one, we don’t know if the baby would be a boy. And two, his hair wouldn’t look like either of yours unless he used a plethora of women’s hair care products.”
Eddie snickers and you swat at his wrist, your nail getting caught underneath the chain bracelet. “I wasn’t just talking about him, smart mouth.”
It’s Steve who grins that half smile that makes you want to take him until your throat is raw and your neck is bruised from his squeezing. He likes to do that when he’s fucking your throat, balls slapping at your chin, tendons straining in your neck as you attempt to take him, spit all over the floor in an accumulated puddle. He removes Eddie’s finger and before you can protest (as if you would, really…), he’s easily gaining access in your hole. You watch him with a slack jaw as he adjusts his hard cock in the gray sweats he’s wearing. “Good girl, honey. You’re really wet tonight. You like thinkin’ about me filling you up with my baby?”
“Um… Excuse me, I was—“ Eddie’s interruption is cut off.
“Shit, man. Her pussy just sucked my finger in deeper. She does like that.”
Eddie is pouting, wiggling his way between your thighs, ringed hand clasping over your knee to spread you wider, his finger trailing along your slick covered thighs, parting your labia, before it pushes in beside Steve’s. You can’t do anything but moan wantonly, saliva smearing across your mouth, tongue flicking across to attempt to gather it. You arch your ass in their direction, palms both flat against you. You’re greedy this evening.
“You know what I think, Steve?” Eddie bats those pretty little lashes beneath a curtain of curls, Steve pushing them back to see his boyfriend’s flushed features.
“What’s that, hot rod?”
Eddie, as if he’s got this secret that’s capturing him into a fit of giggles, leans in towards Steve. “I think we should pump our girl so full of cum that it soaks the bed. And when she recovers, we go again, see who’s swimmers win first.”
You gasp and shiver, all of you groaning in raspy unison. You felt yourself grow slicker, their fingers getting smashed together in your sticky walls. Like a prize where everyone wins, and you get to be the competition board. They don’t have to ask if you approve, and you know you’re gonna be so sore tomorrow, but you can’t fucking wait.
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luveline · 1 year
Text
radio cure | steve harrington
an unhappy you meets steve harrington and his merry band of dorks. he shows you that some things are worth sticking around for.
5k words, fem!reader she/her used, tw mentioned/implied suicidal ideation please don’t read if that’s going to have a negative impact on you (no graphic imagery. but reader is passively suicidal and dealing with the other factors of that), robin steve + eddie chaotic trio, friends to lovers, multipart, swearing, friendly teasing, sarcasm, artist!steve, 90s au
.•° ✿ °•.
You're twenty two when you decide to kill yourself.
It's a warm day. The sun shines like a flower bud unfurling, a faint hint of golden yellow masked by cloud cover. You're savouring the brief moment of blessed cool as you walk around Lover's Lake, your ipod in one hand, headphones around your neck.
The flowing pants you're wearing help mitigate the heat around your legs, an itching, slick thing. Warmth feels like oil on your skin. You tip your head back and smell the grass, the lake water, the dry mud under your feet. You're thinking it's as nice a day as you're going to get this week, and you're forlorn, because it doesn't make one drop of difference.
You look up at the blue sky, squinting against the light, and you think it to yourself resolutely. This is going to be my last year. When your savings run out you're giving up.
It doesn't feel conclusive. It doesn't feel scary. It's just a decision.
You walk over dry grass until you reach the short pier on the leftmost side of the lake and sit down. You pull your headphones over your ears and bite your lip when the music isn't loud enough. The dock is rough. You're uncomfortable immediately. You want to go home, but you pull out your little craft sketchbook made of yellow paper and a pencil you've sharpened with a pen knife, staring out across the lake for something to strike you. A duck. A goose. Anything at all.
The thing is, you don't want to draw. You aren't some master, though you try, and you aren't a natural talent… You try sometimes. Nothing seems right. Most people have a style, charm, but you could draw a picture perfect copy of the day in front of you and still feel the lack; you have no idea what it is that makes other people's art beautiful, and that's the problem.
It doesn't matter. You put the sketchbook away. You have nobody to impress but yourself, and besides — you're not the first person in the world to feel uninspired. Thousands of people must feel it everyday, and they aren't throwing any pity parties. You peel off your cardigan, ball it up, and lay down with the fabric behind your head. You can hear the soft pant of a dog across the way, the happy chattering of a Frisbee game. Under the dock, little bodies thwack the planks, tiny green frogs that occasionally hop in the grass nearby.
You press your arm against your stomach and you fall asleep not long after that, your ipod playing music a few feet away.
Steve Harrington doesn't know why he stops to look at you. You're just a girl enjoying the summer sun, and he doesn't mean to be a creep. But you've left your stuff laying in small hills around you and your body's lax. You're asleep.
He kneels down next to you. Enough room to swing away if you try to stab him for perving. He isn't perving, he reasons. He wants to check if you're okay.
He tilts his ear toward you and holds his breath.
You're snoring.
Good, he thinks, crawling back to the far side of the dock, at least two feet between you. You're sleeping.
He sits down, knees up, hands between his thighs, and looks out across the lake. The sun shines high as the clouds shift to reveal it in full force, a burning yolk. It kisses every bit of green foliage it can find, dappled sunlight everywhere he looks. Steve is out today to draw whatever beauty he can find, and the light across the water riding the rippled waves of ducklings and brave human swimmers seems nice enough. He peers out of the corner of his eye at you, deems you still sleeping, and takes the pocket sized sketchbook out of his denim jeans.
His pencil is a stub folded between the pages. He lays down graphite in big sweeping lines, more focused on the impressions of shape than the specifics. It's hard to see a coloured world in black and white values. Steve isn't great — he's been drawing for two years now, and that feels like both a lifetime and a flicker. Every day he learns something new about making art, and every day he looks back and feels embarrassed at what he made before. The start of his sketchbooks make him cringe. This one is a mixture of pride and tepid reluctance.
Being bad at something is a stepping stone at getting better. Not every drawing he makes is good, but hopefully it's teaching his brain to be better. He doesn't know what he believes about art but he likes to draw, and he has gotten better.
The point isn't in being good, he'd told Robin. I just need something to do. Before I go crazy doing nothing. 
He draws the lake. He loves the way it comes into being. Ten minutes can turn grey splotches into trees, and bluegrass, and the heat rising off of the water. He draws a duck when it swims really close, though he has to abandon it when it swims away, leaving a half formed lovecraftian creature to haunt the page. He draws the dock, and his shoes, and your shoes, and your hand curled weakly next to your ipod. He draws your wrist, though he stops quickly.
He looks at your sleeping face.
Steve thinks you don't look like anyone he's ever seen before. He notes your lashes, your brows, and your nose. The sun emphasises the fine hairs across your cheek, and the texture beneath them.
He wants to draw your face, but he thinks drawing your hand and your shoes might have been too much without permission. He lets you sleep for a while, and then when he realises the heat is making him dizzy, he can't leave you there to bake.
He rips a sheet of paper out of his sketchbook and shoves the small book back into his pocket. The dock groans as he stands, and he casts a shadow over your face and upper torso.
"Hey," he says.
You flinch awake.
"Don't panic," he says, which is something a pervert might say, so he amends, "don't freak out, I'm just worried you're gonna cook your brains. I didn't want you to get sick."
You sit up. You look kinda cooked already, blinking and disoriented.
"You okay?"
You don't look up. "Yeah, I'm okay. Thank you for waking me up."
"Yeah, sure. Here."
He holds out the drawing of your hand. He doesn't think it's good, doesn't want you to see it, but he already did it. Giving it to you will ease his guilty conscience.
It's unlike Steve to bail, but he bails. Your fingers are barely brushing the paper when he's wiping his palms on his thighs and stepping away.
"Bye," he says, uncertain. "Try not to fall asleep again!"
It's not so weird. Sure, he'd made your fingers skinnier than they really are, and he made your shoelaces look like spaghetti, but they're good drawings.
You're trying to read a book in the corner of Benny's when he finds you a second time. He hovers, and you're not cool, you aren't, you're working with what you've got. Not many people skills.
“Hi,” he says.
"They were good drawings," you say, in lieu of your own hello, thumbing at the pages of your book all full of jumpy nerves.
"Thank you, I'm… new to it. My best friend, she's– she's actually nicer than she should be about them, I can't lie. I was going to say she thinks I should be banned from picking up a pencil, because I wanted to make you laugh, but. She's nice when it matters."
You can't keep looking down, it wouldn't be polite. You dog ear your paperback and let it lie against the tabletop, greasy to touch but you doubt it'll make a difference. The book is old and had cost you 50 cents at Mr. and Mrs. Wheeler's yard sale.
He's tall. Hair falls around his face and curls gently against his cheeks, a sandy brown. He's wearing a hat. He hadn't been wearing one the day he'd given you his drawings, but you can understand why he needs it. The sun is an inescapable force: sun stroke has half the town down for the count. The whole reason that you're in Benny's is because it's air-conditioned and shady.
"Do you want to come and eat with me and my friends?"
You say no automatically. "No, that's okay. I don't wanna," —you don't know what to say, so your voice hikes up awkwardly— "impose."
"You don't have to, but if you want to, you're not imposing." He twists at the waist and nods to a booth across the room, where a boy and girl sit. When they see you seeing them they look away. "Sorry, they're dorks. There's usually more of us, but Jon's in work and Nancy's in Emerson, so…" He seizes up.
You wonder why people are so afraid of being awkward. It terrifies you, to think one day you'll fuck up and be awkward and the other person will remember it and laugh, but looking at him now, you can't see why it matters. It actually makes you feel better, knowing he's worried too.
"I only brought enough for the milkshake," you say.
"I'll get you something."
"That's– no, that's okay."
He hesitates. "You'd be doing me a favour. I love them, really, but I can't stand it when they're together, they bully me."
It would probably be worse to reject his offer and sit here lonely while they laugh and talk. You'll worry they're talking about you.
"Okay," you mumble, picking up your book and your milkshake.
He grins at you and you follow him through the diner. It's not busy today, but there's still feet to fall over and backpack straps to tread on, so you watch the floor.
"My name is Steve, by the way."
You tell him your own name, which brings another quick smile to his face. He slows as he approaches the booth of his friends and beckons for you to slide into the empty side before following you in.
"Guys, this is– Eddie, what the fuck is that? We said no gross shit at the table."
"This, my friend," Eddie says, words rolling around his mouth grandly, "is a monster."
It's a little man made of coffee stirrers, sporks, and chewing gum seams. It's kind of gross, but it's cute. Grossly cute and cutely gross.
"We're about to eat."
"You're stepping on his artistic licence," says the girl, her voice distinctly pretty and a tiny bit hoarse.
"Disgusting," Steve says.
You shift on the leather chair underneath you and anxiety pulses in the bottom of your stomach. They're ignoring you, but not really. Both have lifted their eyes to look at you, and, in sync, they smile. The girl's smile is startling, lip gloss lips and white teeth. Eddie's is softer, less happy and more reassuring.
"I'm Eddie," Eddie says, though you'd figured it out. "That's Robin. Do you think my monster is gross in the gross way or gross in the sick way?"
"He's cute," you admit to thinking. "But the gum…"
"I didn't have any glue."
"Steve told us about his drawings. If he's holding you hostage right now, blink three times, okay?" Robin jokes.
Eddie and Robin lean their shoulders together and start a bit where they count your blinks. There's murmurings about shelters and how they can definitely throat punch Steve hard enough to make him mute. You're stunned at being the object of a joke and don't know how to react, feeling like you've been whacked and now there's cartoon birds flying around your head and they can all see them.
Steve grabs the menus out of the rack and slaps one down in front of everybody. "Alright, team. You know the drill. Last person to choose what they want has to buy drinks." He spares you a glance. "Except you. She's on me because hostages don't pay for themselves."
"I would make such a pretty hostage," Eddie says.
He is pretty, in fairness. Dark curls thick with baby hairs frizzed up in the summer heat frame a pale face. He has big brown eyes.
“And talented,” Robin adds, poking the gum man until he falls flat on his face. The head pops off and Eddie shrieks, not loudly but with a passionate upset about him that makes you laugh.
Steve leans over. “Please choose quickly so I don’t have to pay for Robin's lemonade addiction. No pressure.”
“I’ll just have what you have.”
“With a coke?”
“Sure.”
“Robin?” he asks.
“I want a cheeseburger with a lemonade and then, if you will, another lemonade.”
She dumps her menu in Eddie’s lap, who looks up from his decapitated figure with a look of defeat.
“Wh- hey, she cheated. She hurt my dude.”
“Rules are rules.”
Eddie sulks and accepts everybody’s money. He slinks up to the window like an annoyed cat. After he’s placed the order, he looks back to the table and flips the bird covertly.
“So, how old are you?” Robin asks.
“Twenty two.”
“How’s that?” she asks sympathetically.
“Robin.” Steve chides. “She’s twenty so she thinks she’s a baby.”
“I am a baby. This is my first year not being a teen, which means it’s my first year as an adult. I’m one.”
“We have this argument a lot,” Steve says, though not with any bravado. Simple explanation, his voice soft and warm. “When being an adult actually begins. It’s not the adult part that even matters, it’s the not having rules that fucks people up. Look at Eddie. He’s been out of school for a year and he’s been arrested three times.”
You frown, not because his getting arrested would bother you (depending on the charge), but because you’re surprised, and surprise is quick to appear as anger on your face. His shirt and rockstar rings, his nice smile, his gum man — you’d assumed he was a huge nerd. His arrests are a surprise.
“What for?” you ask, before you can remind yourself that invasive questions are rude.
“Once for indecent exposure– completely accidental. Once for trespassing, and the last time was because he chained himself to a tree outside of Tawny’s bar. They weren’t cutting the tree down,” Steve says. “He, and I quote, wanted to see what all the fuss was about.”
“Don’t give away my RAP sheet when I’m not here,” Eddie says, placing a tray of drinks on the table carefully. Three cokes and two lemonades.
“It’s not a RAP sheet if you don’t actually get in trouble. They let him off ‘cause they know his uncle. And also ‘cause it’s Hawkins.” Robin slides her slice of lemon between her teeth, shepherding her two lemonades as far away from everybody as she can, looking extremely hedgy. “I’s a bitch sheet.”
Eddie feigns for her second lemon slice and snickers when Robin defends it, elbowing him hard in the ribs.
“I paid for it!” he says through laughs.
Your hands start to shake. You hide them under the lip of the table but it’s no use. Soon your legs are shaking, your arms, all of you. They’re minute tremors, both invisible and impossible to ignore. You glue a smile to your face and try to calm down. You’re overwhelmed and you don’t know why — this isn’t a new feeling. You are not the first person to feel this feeling.
Then why does it feel like it?
Sometimes, everything gets so scary so quickly, and you sit there wondering why it isn’t scary for everybody else, and you wonder why they can’t see it on your face how scared you are, and they must see it? They must know you’re fucked.
You’re shot with thoughts. These people, you could be friends. All you have to do is make a good impression. But how should you go about that? How do you talk? What do you say?
“I draw too,” you say, hands clamped between your knees.
Steve’s eyebrows do this little dance. It’s adorable, and it makes you want to be his friend most of all.
“You do?”
“I do. I’m not good, I mean. I used to be better. I’m out of practice.”
“I draw,” Eddie says.
“Yeah?”
He nods. “Jonathan, too. God, you should see his shit. And he’s an even better photographer. But I draw shitty zine comics. And Robin does the typesetting for me.”
“Oh, wow,” you say genuinely.
“Nancy writes,” Robin says. “So we’re, like, a jerk circle of artists. She’s good, too.”
“She’s good,” Eddie imitates fondly. “I bet she is. Robin’s gonna be a great writer as well, once she gets all these private Nancy lessons.”
Steve puts a hand up and Eddie promptly shuts up. He takes a big, sheepish slurp of coke and you feel like you’ve said something wrong though you barely said anything at all, sipping at your own coke.
“What are you reading?” Robin asks.
You slide the book toward her so she can see for herself. “The Sea, The Sea,” you tell her. “It’s about, uh,” —you’ve only managed to read the first thirty pages, and that’s after reading the first ten five times straight— “this guy named Charles, he’s unique. He’s uh, annoying.”
“You know, Nancy used to have a book that looked just like that,” Steve says.
You laugh weakly. “It must be popular. I got it at a yard sale.”
“Can I open it?” Robin asks.
“Of course. It’s already pretty beat up, I don’t think there’s anything you could do—“
Robin opens the book with one hand, thumb and pinky fingertip pressed to either side, and tries to take a sip of her drink without looking, tipping her glass of lemonade straight into the pages of The Sea, The Sea. What doesn’t get soaked up by your book rushes down the length of the table and into her lap.
Steve reaches across the table to grab up the glass, but the damage is already done. Your lips part. Eddie gawps, throwing a hand over his slack-jawed face.
“I’m so sorry. I’m so sorry,” she says, looking at you with wide eyes. “I have the worst case of butterfingers ever, I’m sorry.”
It’s as if she can’t believe she did it. You fluster when you realise they’re all waiting for your reaction.
“It’s okay!” you say, as loud as you’ve ever spoken in public.
“You can be mad,” Steve assures you.
“No, it was an accident. I’m not mad, it cost fifty cents, and it was totally garbage anyway. I’m really not mad.”
Eddie stuffs napkins under the table and Robin shivers uncontrollably, dishing ice cubes from her lap and the seat. Steve, laughing now, says, “God dammit, Robs,” sounding like she might be the most golden person on the planet.
Steve works his hat over your hair the best that he can. “There. Now you won’t die from heat stroke.”
You bring both hands to the hat to encourage it down onto your head. “Steve,” you say, sounding unsure on how to continue.
“It’s on loan.”
You nod and look out over the lake, where Eddie stands at the edge of the dock. "It's getting way too fucking cold for this," he complains, in swim shorts and a shirt, gazing in distrust at the lake’s shimmering surface.
Lake is kind. It is technically a lake, but also technically a really, very pathetic lake that feeds from a pathetic tributary. If you stationed Steve on one side and you the other, he would strain to hear you talking. Likely infected with brain eating amoeba or tadpoles or leeches. Slimy things. It’s less disgusting than Lover’s Lake, a condom cesspit, so that’s a plus.
You aren’t looking any more eager about jumping in than you had been, thighs naked and kissed by the hem of an oversized, black t-shirt. It’s wrinkled. Steve kind of loves it.
"Just jump in, you big babies," Robin says.
She'd already jumped in, screamed at the cold, and now languishes in the chest height water in front of the small fishing dock with a smug smile on her face. "Not you," she says to you. Steve rolls his eyes.
You shake your head, hair slipping out of the hat. You sigh as you pull it off and readjust the sizing band.
"I guess I am being a baby,” you say to him quietly. “The sun’s been out all day, how cold can it be?” You’re not feeling confident. It seeps into your voice, to which Steve lends a placating smile.
"Really fucking cold."
"Eddie, shut up. Y/N, it's fine. You'll like it."
“I really don’t think she’ll like it.”
Steve doesn’t either, but he wants you to feel included, and less tense. Distract you from whatever it is that’s giving you such a big case of the frownies, and prove he and his friends aren’t just book-ruining hooligans.
Eddie finally jumps in over Robin’s head, disappearing into the not quite blue water with a cut-off curse. He appears again a few seconds later, black hair slicked to his face, neck and shoulders, wiping the water from his eyes as he splutters and giggles boyishly.
“Shit, Stevie,” he says. “Not that cold after all.”
“You don’t have to jump in, you can just ease off the dock, if that’s better,” Steve says.
“Frogspawn,” you murmur.
Steve does a bunch of flexing, throws in a jumping jack for good measure. “Alright,” he says, holding out his hand. “Let’s go.”
You shake your head gently.
Steve doesn’t wanna embarrass you further, or insist when you really don’t want to, so he nods and smiles and takes a running jump into the lake. Robin and Eddie both swear and dart away as his body collides with the surface of the water, and he sinks like a well-practised stone to near enough the lake bed, feet gracing slippery pond weed and things he’d rather not think about. The air shatters out of his lungs and the water, despite the summer sun, is cold. It feels amazing — he hadn’t realised how warm he was until the temperature abruptly shifted.
He rushes back up to the surface and shakes his hair out like a dog, water running down his face and shoulders in fast thick rivulets. He peels his eyes open and turns to find you still hesitating on the dock. Robin splashes at Steve in retaliation for his hair splatters and Eddie laughs evilly as he joins in.
“Come on!” he begs you. “I told you, they bully me! I need back up!”
You toss his hat on the dock. The jump you take into the lake is timid but enough to miss the frogspawn and not break your legs, a cold splash of water and you’re there. Luckily, your presence has Robin and Eddie both stopping in their cruel tracks, and you don’t have to save Steve after all.
Your happy laughter is stunning.
"It's so cold!" you squeal, water in your eyelashes.
Eddie takes one of your hands and together the four of your tread into deeper water.
"Now that all who can be present are present," he says, falling into his dungeon master drawl, "it's time we commence the The Tournament. Swimmers, take your stations."
Everyone falls into line. You don't know what you're falling into line for, raising your timid voice to ask, "What's the game?"
"The game is me and you dunk the ever-loving out of dumb and dumber," he says.
"Hey, what?" Robin asks. "How come you get her? She's a total wild card, she might win the game all by herself."
"Or she might really suck. We don't know, and so in the interest of fairness, I propose she swims with me." Eddie's wet sleeve sticks to your skin as he nudges you. "But you don't suck, do you?"
"Um…"
"Attagirl. On your marks, get set, go!"
You spend an hour like that. Steve and Co, they're stupid, but they aren't stupid stupid. The Tournament is a series of chasing and dunking (stupid but fun) wherein you get to throw yourself on the shoulders of the person you're chasing and submerge them (stupid again). You can't hold them down, though, they aren't trying to drown one another. Much.
The sun regretfully starts to set. If it's anything like the last few days, that means it's likely near 10PM, and they're all working tomorrow.
"Do you have work tomorrow?" Steve asks in concern, after he's heaved himself up onto one of the huge stones on the opposite side of the lake.
Cattails obscure you from view on your own stone. Across the lake, your possessions lay thankfully unscathed on the dock. Robin sits as close as she can to Steve on his rock, kicking water at Eddie every time he tries to approach.
"You fucking rat," he fumes, mouth full of lake water.
"I'm not really working right now,” you say.
"Do you need a job?" Eddie asks. "They're hiring— Harrington, restrain your creature! They're hiring at the Palace Arcade, aren't they?"
Steve nods voraciously. "Yeah! Hey, we can get you an interview no problem, they probably won't even ask you that many questions. I mean, Keith worked there."
"Don't be mean about Keith," Robin says, though she doesn't really like him. He thinks it's akin to defending your deadbeat older brother.
"I don't know, I think even a couple of questions might be too many," you worry.
"How come?"
You pull the fluff off of a cat tail, and it explodes in your hands. Steve yanks one down to do the same, watching the fibres float across the lake's disturbed surface with a cool breeze. Robin shivers beside him, sensitive to the cold in her wet clothes, the adrenaline of swimming and almost but not really dying wearing off.
"I'm bad at stuff like that."
"I don't think anyone's good at interviews at our age," Eddie says, nose wrinkled as cat tail floats toward him. "We're, like, babies."
"I always feel like I'm really old," you confess. You look down at your naked knees. "Like I wasted all the good years already."
"What, school?"
"And the four years since," you say.
Steve gets it, in a way. His high school years sucked, and he'd maybe thought he'd get out of Hawkins on a track or swim scholarship, basketball — anything. But he's here still, and at first that hadn't been what he wanted. Sure, he'd expected it, but in different ways.
Steve pushes back the cattails to see you clearly. "I didn't even get any real good years until just now," he says, as kindly as he can.
"I failed senior year twice," Eddie speaks up, "I kinda thought I was wasting my life too, but if I didn't, I wouldn't even know Robin, and she's, like, my best friend."
He throws his hands over his face before Steve can kick a huge wave of lake water into his eyes. "Get your own," Steve fumes. He's not really mad.
"Yeah, these are the good years," Robin says, "probably. I never had guys fighting over me in high school." She laughs and tucks her wet hair behind her ears, her freckled cheeks pale in the oranging light of the sunset.
You hold your hands out for Eddie and he finally climbs onto one of the rocks. From this side of the lake, you can watch the sun set behind the silhouettes of Hawkins town a half mile away. It dips slowly down, meandering almost, a pearl sinking through layers of raspberry pink and orange and, as Steve holds his breath, that sudden flash of electric green.
"I'm blind," Eddie mumbles, falling back into the rocks and grass.
"Shit, that was cool." Robin stands up and stretches. "I'm so cold I'm gonna die right here. Steve, do you still have a blanket in your car?"
Steve looks over at you again. You look shell-shocked, not quite awed. He doesn't know what emotion you're feeling, only that you're feeling it, eyes wide and set across the lake at the darkened sky, lights from the buildings like stars shimmering in your pupils.
He stands up and offers his hand to you. When you take it, he pulls you up without hesitation, not a flicker of doubt or an ounce of struggle.
"I'll get you that interview," he says, questioning, soft. If you want it. 
Your fingers linger in his palm.
"Yeah, okay. Thank you."
"Come on!" Robin says, taking your other hand and tugging without apology, barefoot over the asphalt path surrounding the lake. "Before the gnats come out."
"We might see fireflies if we stick around," Eddie says.
They bicker. Steve lets go of your hand and you and Robin walk just ahead, your head bobbing between his two arguing friends like you're watching a quickfire tennis match.
You turn to the side and hide a smile. Steve sees it, and he figures it's a start.
"Munson," he hollers, "how about you stay and watch the fireflies and you tell us all about it? Me and the girls aren't gonna freeze out here so you can get back in touch with nature."
It's a bad joke, but it works. "Fuck you, Harrington. The ladies wanna see the lightning bugs, don't you?"
"I can't remember the last time I saw them," you say.
"Then we have to stay," Eddie says smugly.
You all crowd the back of Steve's car, the heaters on but not doing a lot, the blanket stretched over Robin's shoulders. She tucks it behind your back, and you all look out to the night and scout for bugs.
"There," you whisper, pointing.
Green dots of light rise from the dry grass like tiny lanterns, a handful at a time.
"Jonathan's gonna be sad he missed this," Robin murmurs.
You try to count them all. Four voices whispering bets into the night air, though the real number isn't possible to calculate. "Winner gets a new paperback on Robin," Eddie jokes, swiftly quietened by a barrage of elbows to his side.
They let you win.
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