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theautisticbarbie · 11 months

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A Bird of Praise

Act I

Chapter I: The White Swan

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Word count: 1967 (I swear that I didn’t make that up but it’s definitely a sign considering that’s Tara’s birth year)

This is it! “A Bird of Praise” is live! I finished all of Act I not too long ago and I’m currently working on Act II while I publish Act I. This is the story of Tara Newman, my Stranger Things OC! This story runs concurrently with the show, so act I will coincide with season 1, act II with season 2 and so on and so forth. I added an intro video to this, which I will be doing for each chapter. I left this one creditless for now, but I might change my mind later! (UPDATE: I caved and put the creditless one in a separate post) The ones for the following chapters will have credits for the face-claims of the characters in the chapter (which you can find in the Ultimate masterlist) so look forward to that!

Just a heads up that there is EVENTUAL smut in Act II onward, so keep that in mind! That being said, this story’s plot definitely has meat, so it’s not PWP by a mile. I’ll be making a masterlist when I get home from Philly and get back on my computer so be on the lookout for that!

Chapter Summary: Tara goes to pick Will up and take him home, but things go awry when he’s already gone by the time she gets there.

Okay! Y’all have waited long enough! Without further ado, here it is!

6 November 1983 Rutherford, Illinois

Ulysses S. Grant Memorial Elementary School was having its annual Sister Act showcase. 8 year old Tabitha “Tabby” Castellanos didn’t have any sisters but decided to perform with her 16 year old cousin, Tara Newman, instead. They decided upon performing “A Baby Swan and her Mother” which was just a modified version of the Four Baby Swans.

After the showcase, Tabby was reunited with her parents. Alice and Emmanuel “Manny” Castellanos showered their 8 year old with praises.

“Good job, sweetie!” Alice remarked.

“You did good, too, mija!” Manny remarked, patting Tara on the shoulder before his moment with his niece was interrupted by the buzz of his police radio.

“I told you to turn that off during the showcase,” his wife reminded him flatly.

“I did. And the showcase is over.”

“And you’re supposed to be off duty, Tío,” Tara chimed in matter of factly.

“Don’t you have a 3 hour drive back to Indiana to get started on?” Manny remarked.

“I do,” Tara knelt down to her cousin’s level. “This was definitely fun! We should do this again sometime!”

Tabby gave Tara a hug before she made her way back to her vehicle. It was a 1980 Chevy Impala that was painted bubblegum pink and decorated with glitter, unicorns and flowers. Because literally what other car would you expect to be driven by Tara Selena Newman?

Tara made it across the Illinois border back to Indiana before she started to feel queasy. She shrugged it off as car sickness. Under any other circumstance, she might have slowed down, but she was on a time crunch. She had to pick Will up from the Wheeler house once their DnD session wrapped up and take him back to his place.

Will had protested this, insisting that he was old enough to return home on his own, but Tara argued that keeping his mother sane was the most mature thing to do.

Unfortunately for them both, once Tara made it back to Hawkins city limits, her nausea had become accompanied by a pounding and stabbing chest pain and they were both unbearable. Tara HAD to pull over. Good thing she did as she barely had the wherewithal to open her car door before she puked all over the side of the road.

Tara decided to examine her pulse and according to her read, she had gone tachycardic. She ultimately decided to rest a bit until her heart rate and intermittent vomiting calmed down. At least until a cop car pulled up behind her. Oh great. That was the last thing she needed. She peered closer at the vehicle to see if she could gauge whether it was a state trooper or municipal police.

An office exited the vehicle with a flashlight in hand and decided to shine it directly at her face, causing her to instinctively shield her eyes.

“Are you all right, ma’am?” the officer asked.

“I’m fine,” Tara said, shielding her eyes.

“Have you been drinking this evening?”

“No, officer. I wasn’t feeling well so I pulled over. You see, I have a heart condition.”

“Do you need me to call you an ambulance?”

“That’s not necessary. I just need to rest for a bit.”

“What’s wrong with your heart?”

“I have this disorder called POTS.”

The officer raised a brow. “You have pot on your person?”

“No, officer. POTS. It stands for Postural Orthostatic Tachycardic Syndrome. Sometimes it causes migraines and I end up like this, but I’ll be fine after a few minutes.”

The officer looked at Tara as though she just sprouted a separate head. “Well, then. I won’t keep you. Feel better.”

The cop got in his car and drove off.

After a few minutes, Tara felt marginally better and decided to have a chug of water and get back on the road.

Thankfully, she made it to the Wheeler house in one piece.

After knocking on the door, she waited patiently until the household matriarch, Karen Wheeler answered the door.

“Hey, Mrs. Wheeler,” Tara greeted.

“Hi there! What’s the matter, honey? You look as pale as a ghost!”

“I’m okay. Just got carsick on the road is all. Is Will ready to go?”

Karen cast a look of confusion. “Pardon?”

“Is the campaign still going on or am I good to take him home?”

“Oh, honey, he already went home. He never said that you were supposed to come get him.”

“Oh, I see,” Tara said, a combination of dejection and worry painting her face.

“He’ll be fine. You should go home and get some rest.”

“Will do,” Tara sighed. “Take care, Mrs. Wheeler.”

Tara wishes she could say that she slept well, but the truth is that her dreams that night took an interesting turn. They started out with nothing particularly out of the ordinary, by the standards of dreams, at least. Tara dreamt that she was Odette, the main protagonist of her favourite ballet, Swan Lake. It was a role she dreamed of playing since she first started dancing, so having dreams as her was a pretty frequent occurrence. As Odette, Tara pranced around the forest without a care in the world, for this was the moment before Rothbart cast his spell, turning her into a beautiful white swan. Right on cue, Rothbart showed, in his Adonis-like princely disguise. Tara feigned innocence and confusion, knowing full well exactly where this was going, and allowed him to lead her in dance.

Of course, the handsome visage was pure deception, as once Rothbart had Odette right where he wanted her, he revealed his true self. Normally, Rothbart assumed the appearance of an owl, but in Tara’s more recent dreams, his appearance was far more grotesque. He looked like a demon and had no skin. It took some getting used to, but after a few dreams of the same exact transformation sequence, she acclimated to the more morbid iteration of the warlock.

This time, though, things ended very differently. After Rothbart revealed his true form, a scream rung out in the distance.

Tara could recognise that blood curdling cry anywhere.

“Will?!”

“Help!”

Tara immediately ran in pursuit of the cries, abandoning her fantasies.

To her horror, she saw Will being dragged away into the hollow of a tree by some sort of eldritch looking vine. She immediately jumped into the hollow after him, when things took a turn for the horrifying.

Rothbart had cast his magic spell, turning Tara into a swan. But this wasn’t Swan Lake. Not even close. This place was dark, eerie and horrifying, but somehow eerily familiar. Tara couldn’t quite place it. But she couldn’t pursue Will, either. It was as if some unseen force was keeping her in place, forcing her to finish out the introductory sequence of Swan Lake.

As the pale golden rays of the morning sun wafted over Tara’s face, her eyes fluttered open. She looked over at her musical jewellery box, which had been playing the theme from Swan Lake on repeat. Inside was a pretty little revolving ballerina. She gently closed the box and rubbed the sleep from her eyes before making her way downstairs for breakfast.

Tara looked over at the oven to see a blinking “12:00” where the clock should be. “Did mom already head to work this morning?”

“Yup,” Daniel confirmed. “The power‘s out, by the way,” he said handing her a McDonald’s bag, setting his motorcycle helmet on the table.

“Oh wow! Thanks!” Tara beamed as he handed her a coffee.

When the twins started high school, Eleanor Newman quit her hotel concierge job and pursued work as a flight attendant. Because of the nature of her job, she was almost never home, often gone for days at a time and only back to sleep in her own bed.

“I had the strangest dream last night—“

“Let me guess,” her brother started, already unamused. “You were the pretty princess Odette and Rothbart cast his spell turning you into a swan.”

“Odette is a queen,” Tara corrected, matter-of-factly. “And this time was different.”

“Yeah, I know. Rothbart looked scarier than usual. You’ve been having the same exact dream every night since you got home from the hospital.”

“This time Will was there.”

That caught Daniel off guard.

“Why was Will there? What does he have to do with your dumbass princess fantasies?”

“At least my fantasies don’t involve trying to have sex with Chrissy Cunningham!” Tara retorted before getting up to reach for the phone.

“What are you doing?” her brother asked, raising a brow.

“Calling to make sure Will is okay—“

“You realise that their school starts way earlier and that he’s probably already AT school, right?”

“Then I’ll just ask Jonathan—“

“Or you could just not bother them with your dramatic bullshit this early in the morning, how about that?”

Tara was definitely not in the mood to argue with her brother, so she decided to go get dressed and wait for the school bus. This was the last year she had to take it. Next year she could get a parking pass and drive to school.

Daniel had already bypassed this by bumming rides to school from a friend. Tara had no idea who this person was or what they looked like. Just that the drive a pretty sizeable green van and so she could surmise that other kids were probably in it as well. Tara looked out of her window while getting dressed just in time to see Daniel climb into the van and watch it drive away.

She finished getting dressed, went outside, locking the door behind him and waited for the bus to pull up.

Once it arrived, Tara boarded the bus and immediately looked for the only two passengers on it that gave her any level of solace.

“Hi, Barb! Hi, Nancy!” Tara said, sitting next to the pair.

“Hi, Tara!” Barb greeted enthusiastically. Nancy just sat in silence, greeting Tara with a stare of indifference. “How was your morning?” Tara asked, mainly addressing Nancy.

“Fine,” she said, uninterested in the conversation.

“What about yours?” Barb asked to sustain the conversation.

“I think I got off on an odd foot. I had the most bizarre dream last night and haven’t felt quite right this morning at all.”

“Was it the same dream that you’ve been having every night for the past 2 years, by any chance?” Nancy asked, annoyed.

“This time was different!” Tara insisted.

“How so?” Barb asked, genuinely intrigued. “Was it the Bolshoi’s version? Or maybe the Kirov?”

“No!” Tara shook her head. “It’s exactly the same as usual, except for one thing!”

Nancy looked completely uninterested.

“Will was there.”

That got Nancy’s attention and she quirked a brow.

“Jonathan‘s little brother? Why was he there?”

“Well, I was supposed to pick him up after DnD and give him a ride home, but by the time I got there, he already left. I’ve had this sinking feeling about the whole thing ever since.”

“He’s fine, Tara. He’s 12. He’s old enough to find his own way back home,” Nancy dismissed.

But this awful feeling Tara had continued its way into ballet practise. This year, instead of The Nutcracker, they were doing The Snow Queen for their winter production. Throughout the entirety of the warm-up, Tara’s stomach was doing flips. When she finally got a moment to rest, she was drenched in sweat. Alana Alvarez, a classmate who was also her co-worker at her part time job, sat beside her.

“Chica, we just warmed up and already you’re sweating?”

“I’ve been having a hard time today.”

Their conversation was interrupted when Ms. McIntyre cleared her throat.

“Ladies, why are we talking?”

Tara took a deep breath and sighed, but she wasn’t going to let this go.

#stranger things #tara newman #daniel newman #stranger things oc #hawkinsona #hawkins #hawkins High ballet team #hawkins middle school #hawkins high #stranger things fanfic #stranger things season 1 #stranger things 1 #nancy wheeler #barb holland #Youtube

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theautisticbarbie · 11 months

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A Brewing of Sinister Shennanigans

Word count: 3,929

Yeah it’s a doozy I know, but it’s worth it. I promise.

Anyway, middleschool!Eddie is a little shit and takes Halloween pranks way too fucking far and it ends up hurting Tara way worse than he intended and he ends up in a shit ton of trouble.

Content warnings: hinting at medical trauma, medical procedures (spinal tap and blood draw), implied medical racism, Eddie is a 13 year old little shit, mentions of fearmomgering, original characters

Let me know if I missed anything!

Tara Newman, the prissy snob who would cry “Teacher teacher!” if she saw kissing in the halls. 10 years old and already she’s become the biggest tattle tale in Hawkins. Maybe in all of Indiana. And Eddie was often the victim of her snitching. And he was sick of it. Sick of the praise she got. The little trinket rewards that were given to her for being so “vigilant” and whatnot. The one time that Tara was selected as hall monitor (a selection that is made entirely at random but still Tara believed her merits influenced it) Eddie’s life was a living hell. He had a habit of ditching class quite frequently. The upside of that was he got a workout in everytime Tara accosted him demanding to see his hall pass. But now, it was payback time and was gonna knock her down a few pegs. The high and mighty Tara Newman would be a crying, sobbing mess when he was through with her.

Tara had made her Halloween plans. She told her mother that she wanted to be Cinderella. Her mother looked at various blue dresses at Goodwill before Tara stopped her, adamantly insisting that Cinderella’s dress wasn’t blue. She had already plucked a white flower girl dress about her size.

“Grandmother and I are going to change this one,” Tara declared.

“Did you ask her?” asked Eleanor, raising an eyebrow.

There was a pause hanging in the air. “Grandmother!” Tara called, running to her.

Kathryn Fox-Newman insisted on coming along every year when it was time for Tara to get her Halloween costume. The bold Englishwoman simply insisted that she never gets to spend enough time with her grandchild. Never mind that Daniel was also just as much her grandchild. She never quite seized the opportunity to spend time with him as aggressively. And seeing as how Tara got more motherly affection from her than her own mother, she was always willing to spend time with her.

Tara presented the white dress to Kathryn, who examined it and compared it with a Betamax tape she was holding. “Ah yes! This will do perfectly!” she declared.

“See, mom?” Tara said, pointing to the Betamax tape. “THIS is Cinderella!” she declared, matter-of-factly, pointing at an image of Lesley Ann Warren on the packaging. Her dress was very decidedly off-white and not blue, with gold detailing and an ermine collar.

This was the 1965 version of the fairytale, given to the world by Richard Rogers and Oscar Hammerstein II. It was the version that Tara watched with her grandmother every time she came to visit and it was her favourite version of the tale.

Daniel had picked out the various elements for his costume but insisted it was a surprise exactly who he was going to be. When the pair approached the register to get rung up, Tara proudly laid the dress on the counter as though it were a fish that she had caught. “I’m gonna be Cinderella for Halloween!” she declared proudly.

The teenager ringing her up couldn’t care less. “11.50.”

After their adventures at Goodwill, they went to the local craft store, where Kathryn and Tara purchased the notions to finish the dress.

Whilst they were having lunch at Denny’s, Kathryn was looking through the paper, tsking at the headline.

“West Nile Virus is on the rise again,” she declared with a sigh.

“What’s Wess Denial Virus?” Tara asked.

“West Nile Virus,” Eleanor corrected, matter-of-factly, “and it’s nothing you need to concern yourself over because your chances of catching it are not high enough to think about it.”

Time moved onwards and it was the weekend before Halloween when Kathryn decided to take the twins to see a movie at the drive in. They had gone to go see “The Wiz” with their favourite snacks in tow.

The running gag of taxi cabs going “off duty” and driving off flew completely over the two 10 year old heads.

Throughout the film, mosquitoes kept taking bites out of Tara. By the film’s end, she was covered in bug bites practically from head to toe.

The following next couple of days school were rough. It was, of course, a given that she was teased relentlessly for her unsightly appearance caused by the bug bites. Eddie, whom she expected to make the worst fuss and have the most heinous insults, was uncharacteristically quiet. The buzz-haired boy had strangely been leaving her alone that week. Little did she know it was because he had seen John Carpenter’s spooky thriller and was concocting something of sinister proportions. All he needed was the mask. He acquired that at Melvald’s by way of the five finger discount.

His initial plan was to hide in Tara’s locker, jump out and scare her that way. Unfortunately, the day before Halloween, Tara had to be sent home sick. So Eddie decided that if she wouldn’t come to his prank, he would bring the prank to her. He was gonna knock the tattletale down a few pegs come hell or high water.

If only he knew that Tara’s reason for being sent home wasn’t anything frivolous like a few sniffles. She had fallen seriously ill. She was vomiting, had flu like symptoms and was running a fever of 102 and had Tachycardic episodes. The final straw in which she was sent home was when she had a seizure during her spelling exam. Tara was sent to the nurses office, where the teacher delegated Nancy Wheeler to escort her to ensure that she got there in one piece.

“Stop clinging to me like that!” she complained. “You’ll trip me!”

As though Tara could help it. She was struggling to keep her balance.

“Maybe you wouldn’t be so sick if you didn’t eat so much junk food all the time,” the 10 year old added, annoyed.

Nancy practically dumped Tara off at the nurses office before returning to class.

When Eleanor arrived, she took one look at her daughter and determined that she needed to go to the hospital.

When they arrived at the emergency room, she checked in and sat down. “I’m thirsty,” Tara whined weakly.

“No, you’re not. Just wait for the doctor,” Eleanor said, rolling her eyes in annoyance.

When the doctor finally saw Tara, the first thing he noticed was all of the bug bites. “What happened here?” he asked.

“My mother took her and her brother to the drive in and a bunch of mosquitoes bit her.”

“Okay, well, after having examined your chart and knowing that these are mosquito bites, I think the best course of action is to be absolutely certain that we’re not dealing with West Nile Virus.”

What the doctor didn’t tell Tara was that doing that entailed a spinal tap and a blood draw.

During both, Tara was in absolute distress. No effort was made to comfort or console her. In fact, they only made it worse for her.

And the irony of it was that her spinal fluid was clear and showed no signs of infection. Her blood work, however, indicated that that she had yellow fever.

She was sent home on bedrest and all though her symptoms had greatly improved the next day, on Halloween, it seemed like trick or treating was out of the question.

At least until Kathryn showed up with her completed dress and told her that she had a surprise for her.

After helping her get into her costume and doing her hair and makeup, she gave Tara a pair of jelly shoes (meant to be her glass slippers) and the two went downstairs. There, her brother was dressed as Superman and his friends were dressed as different members of the justice league from the ‘60s comics. The Byers kids were there as well, with Jonathan as Batman and Will as Robin from the 1966 show.

“Hold on!” Kathryn said, rushing down the stairs to grab her video camera. “And go!” she said, pointing the lens at the staircase.

Tara descended the stairs as the camera followed. “Now the world will forever remember when Cinderella graced the citizens of Hawkins with her presence,” Kathryn declared proudly.

“And how is she expected to go trick-or-treating in her state? What happens if she gets tired, mom? Are you, a 63 year old woman, going to carry her?” Eleanor asked, raising a brow.

“Oh, poo. You were always the most serious of the bunch,” Kathryn said, dismissively waving her hand.

“Well, I’m the only one left alive, so there’s that part.”

Kathryn ignored Eleanor’s snide remark and ushered Tara outside, where she saw her neighbour, Mr. Callahan, with a child’s wheelchair that he had used his welding and prop building skills to fashion into a moving golden carriage. The same wheelchair his daughter used before sadly succumbing to leukaemia. Truthfully, he has happy to see it being given new life with Tara.

“A golden carriage!” The 10 year old declared, overjoyed.

“Hop on!” Mr. Callahan urged. Tara didn’t need to be told twice.

“Wow! I’m just like Cinderella!”

“You ARE going to the ball!” Kathryn declared.

“Mom,” Eleanor interjected. “The MOMENT she gets tired, you bring her straight back home.”

She then stringently turned to her children. “Don’t eat ANY candy until after I’ve checked it thoroughly once I get home from work!”

After about an hour, Tara was exhausted. She had filled her bucket to the brim and decided to call it a night.

Daniel and company decided, after pleading with Kathryn that they were old enough to do so, to stay out longer.

After wheeling Tara back home and tucking her in on the couch with her blanket and popping Cinderella into the Betamax, Kathryn decided to shoot the breeze with the neighbours whose children were still out and about.

“Very nice weather we’re having this time of year!” Barbara Runswick declared on the colour television screen. Before Jo Van Fleet could chime in with her disgust, telling her daughter to think of something more “personal” to tell the prince (which Tara could never quite figure out what that meant) the phone rang.

The 10 year old went over to pick up the line. “Newman residence!”

Silence.

“Hello?”

Click.

Tara held the phone quizzically as the dial tone buzzed before placing it back on the receiver with a shrug, assuming it was merely a wrong number situation.

“His highness is in tolerable good health!” Pat Caroll declared as Tara assumed her original spot on the sofa and resuming her snacking on the candy, disobeying her mother’s earlier wishes. Tara had a lot of things, but willpower to wait until her mother got home from her concierge shift at a hotel all the way in Indianapolis was a tall order.

“Something personal, you said?” Pat clarified on the screen as Tara adjusted her blanket and got in a comfortable position that was JUST right.

And then the phone rang again.

Tara rolled her eyes and groaned as she went to go answer it again.

“Newman residence,” she answered with a hint of agitation in her voice.

Again it was total silence.

“I think your phone is broken! Fix it before you call ba—“

Click.

Upon hearing the dial tone, Tara placed the phone on the receiver with an annoyed huff.

“Please, your highness. I would like to be your bride,” Tara heard Lesley Ann Warren plead on her television screen, unable to resume her position before the phone rang again.

“What??” Tara answered the phone, now highly irate.

Click.

Tara was now fed up and decided to dial *69 and find out what this was all about.

Once the line connected, the other phone in the house started to ring.

A confused Tara ended the call and decided to call the operator and find out what exactly that meant.

“Operator. How can I help you?”

“Hi… um… I have a question,” Tara started.

“How can I help you, sugar?”

“So I’ve been getting this call. But when I answer the phone, nobody is there and the line gets cut.”

Suddenly there was a small click in the line as though another phone was being picked up, but Tara continued.

“So I pressed *69 to see who it was and the other phone in my house rang.”

“Well, sweetheart, that means the call is coming from inside the house.”

Suddenly everything went black. The television was off, the lights were out and the phone was emitting a dial tone.

Tara was terrified of the dark. She frantically headed to her room in search of her flashlight.

Once she got it, she attempted to turn it on. After a few frantic clicks, she examined it and realised the batteries had been removed.

Tara’s breath caught in her throat when she realised she was not alone in the house. She heard slow and heavy footsteps. Frozen like a deer in headlights, the footsteps drew closer and closer. Eventually, Tara came to her senses enough to have the presence of mind to close and lock her door. After doing that, she fled to a corner on her bed, huddled by her stuffed animals for sanctuary.

The doorknob jiggled and the door pounded. After a moment, it subsided and Tara sighed, waiting anxiously for the power to return.

And then the lock disengaged.

Tara’s eyes locked on the doorknob, transfixed with fear as it turned. The door swung open and the very first thing she saw was the Michael Meyers mask. Instead of a navy jumpsuit, the figure was wearing an all black outfit, but that was hardly the first thing that registered in Tara’s mind. The figure raised a kitchen knife above his head. Tara cowered in fear as the blade glittered in the moonlight.

Tara had seen a glimpse of Michael Meyers in action at the drive-in when she went to the bathroom. On her way back, she saw him slash Annie Brackett’s throat on a giant screen while the vehicle containing her grandmother and brother were still out of sight. That was all she needed to know to understand the level of danger she was in.

As he advanced 2 or 3 paces towards the frightened 10 year old, she bolted out of her room with a blood curdling scream and made a beeline for the front door, crying out for her grandmother as she blindly ran down the street, hiccuping and sobbing.

Back at the house, Eddie, Gareth, Jeff and Daniel were loudly guffawing at the success of their prank. Daniel let them into the house and guided the team around where need be, Jeff manned the phone and made the heavy footsteps, Gareth switched off the breaker box, and of course Eddie had the honour of being Michael Meyers, with some help from Daniel who gave him a key to the room he and Tara share. Daniel then took the batteries that he removed from Tara’s flashlight and placed them on the desk while Gareth turned the power back on.

“Gentlemen, we got her!” Eddie proudly declared waving around his mask.

“All the detentions, ISS, demerits and Saturday school sessions we got because of her tattling were not in vain!” Gareth cheered.

Daniel sat on the bed he and Tara were forced to share by their mother and smirked wickedly. “Sucker!” he chortled.

Tara, meanwhile, had run aimlessly in a panicked frenzy and didn’t have the slightest idea where she was going.

Back at the house, Daniel and his cohorts were all laughter and guffaws until they heard lights and sirens outside.

When Daniel peered out of his window, he saw an ambulance and a fire truck.

Upon closer investigation, the paramedics appeared to be tending to his sister.

The four immediately rushed out of the house to see to what was going on.

Tara was on the gurney face as white as a sheet with an oxygen mask over her little face. Tara had run so much that in her fragile state of already having yellow fever, she collapsed.

Eddie took the fall for the entire prank to spare his friends from having the law on them. He was in serious trouble. The 13 year old was forced to spend the night in a Juvenile Detention Centre and make a VERY EMBARRASSING phone call to his uncle come morning. From there, he had 2 choices. Stay in juvi for the next 3 months or, since this was his first offence and he had no priors, return the stolen mask, apologise to everyone whom was victimised by his actions, and attend a reform programme for at-risk youth.

Wayne, who was definitely not pleased to come home after working all night to a phone call that his nephew had been arrested, told Eddie that if he wanted to continue living in his trailer, that he only had one choice. Not that he ever would have kicked him out of course.

Eddie took all of the tongue lashings and verbal beatings. Every word he just took it. He didn’t argue against a single thing his uncle said. Eventually, though, it became too much and he just couldn’t take it anymore and broke down crying.

Now, if Eddie were having this conversation with his dad and not his uncle, his dad would have simply yelled at him more.

But I think it occurred to Wayne that being a grown adult and cussing out a 13 year old boy was accomplishing absolutely nothing. Especially when it was clear that Eddie already felt bad enough about how things ended up. The man took a deep breath and decided to collect himself and approach the situation from a different perspective.

“I know,” Eddie hiccuped and sobbed. “I messed up so bad! They had to take Tara to the hospital! What if she’s dead? What if I killed her?”

Wayne let out a heavy sigh and put a hand on Eddie’s buzzed head. “I’m sure she’s fine. I mean, you didn’t mean to hurt her that badly, did you?”

“No!” Eddie sobbed.

“Well,” Wayne sighed, kneeling down to Eddie’s level. “Why don’t we start with returning the stuff you stole and while we do that, you can think about what you want to say to her.”

After returning the stolen mask to Melvald’s and apologising to the owner (who didn’t even notice it had gone missing and had likely had 10 times the shrinkage just in that week alone), Eddie began drafting his apology letter to Tara.

After about 3 hours of not hearing a peep out of his nephew, Wayne decided to poke his head into the boy’s room. “Eddie?”

Wayne saw the floor absolutely littered with crumpled papers. Out of curiosity, he picked one up and tried to read it.

He sadly didn’t succeed, as it was entirely illegible and had several words crossed out.

A few other papers he glanced at were all much of the same. He looked over at his nephew, who was very clearly frustrated.

“Son, it doesn’t have to be a Pulitzer Prize winner. She just needs to know that you’re sorry.”

“No, Uncle Wayne! If I say the wrong thing, it’ll mess up everything!”

“Maybe you should take a break and come back to it.”

“No! I have to do this!”

“Well…” Wayne started with a sigh, “I’ll be right outside if you need me.”

Wayne had nodded off on the couch when he was awoken by the sounds of Eddie’s footsteps.

“I finished,” he said meekly.

Wayne looked at the clock. It was past 1 am.

“Well, ain’t no point in going down there now at this hour. We’ll head down there in the morning before I go to work, but you gotta get up, understand?”

“Yes, sir.”

Tara was at home on bedrest when Wayne’s pickup truck pulled up. Between having the life scared out of her, having to be calmed down and assured that Michael Meyers wasn’t real and that it was only Eddie in a mask being his usual meanie self and being scolded by her mother for disobeying instructions regarding her Halloween candy, all while she was still recovering from yellow fever, Tara was exhausted.

Which is why when she saw Wayne and Eddie hop out of the vehicle, she immediately hid under her bedsheets.

The knock on the front door, though quite distant from her, made her stomach rumble. The lock disengaging, while exceptionally quiet from anyone else’s perspective, was deafeningly loud. The sound of the front door opening made her heart drop.

“Mr. Munson,” Eleanor greeted with a somewhat hostile inflection. “I presume your nephew is here to apologise to my daughter?”

“Yes, ma’am,” Eddie interjected.

“You know, she’s very upset about having to come out and speak to you after what you did,” Eleanor said, matter-of-factly.

“I understand, ma’am,” Eddie said apologetically, avoiding eye contact with the older woman.

“Can’t you see the boy is sorry? Why kick him while he’s down?” Wayne admonished.

“Let’s get this over with,” Eleanor said, rolling her eyes.

Eleanor trailed upstairs, leaving Eddie and Wayne to listen to the ensuing argument. Sadly, Daniel was nowhere to be found. The boy had Saturday school for leaving gummy spiders all over the cafeteria floor for the lunch lady to clean up.

“Tara, stop dragging this out and get your butt down there!” Eleanor boomed.

Eddie winced at the sound of the 10 year old crying. He decided to set the apology letter down on the coffee table and walked back out to the pickup truck.

Wayne followed him outside. “Boy, where do you think you’re going?”

“I think it would be better if we left,” Eddie said, defeated.

Wayne could tell his nephew was emotionally exhausted. Between what had already happened with his parents, the constant emotional turmoil that he endured in family court during his entire pre-adolescence and now this, it was very clear that Eddie was fed up with constantly being seen as a criminal when he was usually the victim.

“Can we please go home now?” he practically begged.

Wayne sighed and opened the car door. “All right. I guess the letter gets it across well enough.”

The two got in the truck and drove back to the trailer park, leaving Tara with the letter.

That aforementioned letter which she didn’t care to read and immediately stuck into her desk drawer never to see the light of day again.

Tara had decided 2 things that day.

One, she was never going to interact with Eddie ever again unless she absolutely had to and avoid him whenever possible. And two, she was NEVER going to trust him EVER again.

#stranger things #eddie munson #season 4 stranger things #hawkins #hawkins middle school #middle school Eddie Munson #halloween

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