#newspaper pots | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

sp0o0kylights · 9 months

Text

Part Two / Part Three

Ao3

It's 8:45 am.

The Red Barn, which is neither red nor a barn, has been open since 7, catering to the early morning crowd with rounds of coffee and pancakes.

It was no Benny's, but given the size of Hawkins and the lack of alternatives?

No one was complaining.

They were all too happy someone had opened up another watering hole for the working class man (or lass, as Foreman Shelly will dutifully remind you) which meant the place was packed with both day and night shift regulars, passing each other in staggered waves.

It also meant Wayne was sharing the packed breakfast counter with a warehouse worker by the name of John Cheese on one side and Police Chief Jim Hopper on the other.

He doesn't mind it.

Wayne's a man on a budget thinner than his shoelace, but he's also a man who understands that small indulgences need to be made in life or you didn't truly live it.

This is how he convinces himself to get a coffee at the Barn after work everyday, reading the morning newspaper and chatting with the other regulars before he heads home.

Bonus, it gets him out of the rapid-fire franticness that is his nephew in the mornings.

(All the love in the world wouldn't change the fact that all that Eddie came with a lot of noise.

The kind of noise that was a tried and true recipe for a headache right after a long shift.)

As a trade off, Wayne went to bed early so he could wake up in time for dinner with Eddie.

It was a nice little system that worked for them.

A routine Wayne was reminiscing fondly on, when the pager on Chief Hopper started to chirp. With a sad moan, the man fished out a few crumbled bills and threw them on the counter, abandoning his coffee to trudge out to his truck.

This was not unusual.

Particularly recently, given they were but a scant few weeks past that whole mall ordeal. A fact all too easy to remember when one caught sight of the Chief’s still healing face.

What was unusual, was when he came storming through the doors a minute later, face now a furious shade of red with his hat clenched in his hand.

The energy in the room shifted, taking on something a little watchful as Hopper swept his gaze from side to side, like a dog on the hunt.

Judging by the way he stilled when he caught sight of Wayne, the latter assumed he found what he was looking for and could only pray it was the person behind him.

(He liked John, but Wayne had enough trouble this year and he wasn't looking for any more.)

"Munson." Hopper called, striding over and dashing all his hopes. There was a choked fury emitting off him, and given the way John audibly scooted his chair away, Wayne knew everyone had clocked it.

"Chief." Wayne greeted, inclining his head towards him.

Idly he wondered what the hell his nephew had done this time.

'So help me if he stole all the town's lawn flamingos and put them in that damn teachers yard again….'

Wayne didn't even get to finish his threat, the Chief was already next to him.

"Mind if I have a word outside?"

Dammit Eddie.

"Ah hell, what's he done now?" Wayne asked with a sigh, eyeing the coffee he had left morosely.

There was still almost half of it left and the pot had tasted fresh for once.

"What?" Hopper said, and then Wayne got to watch as the man ran through an entire chain of thoughts, each one punctuated by things like; "Oh," and "No. "

"This is something else." He finished, flushed and fidgeting, anger making him antsy.

Wayne stared up at him.

"Something else?" He repeated, not sure he heard.

"Yes, something else." Hopper snapped impatiently, before leaning forward, voice dropping low. "This doesn't involve your nephew, but we both know you owe me for how many times I've let that kid off, Wayne. That's a damn big favor I've been doing you and I'm calling it in."

If it were any other cop, it'd sound like a threat.

It was Hopper though. The same Hopper who Wayne had gone to school with.

They'd never been friends exactly, but they had been friendly and remained so. Even now, after Wayne had taken Eddie in, who’d gone on to be an undeniable pain in the local PD’s ass.

Hopper really did let the kid off easy.

Wayne really did owe him.

So he put down his coffee with a sigh, passed his newspaper over to John and stood up, motioning for Hopper to lead the way. Got into the Chief’s truck when he waved him in, and didn’t make a big fuss when Hopper tore out of the parking lot like hell was about to open up under them.

"Not a lot of the kids involved in the mall fire could be identified, but a few of them were." Hopper started, which felt nonsensical given the utter lack of context.

Wayne hummed to show he’d heard.

“Some of them got banged up more than others, and a lot of people wouldn’t be surprised if they didn’t make it.”

A pause, Hopper white knuckling the steering wheel as he swung the truck hard around a turn.

“For certain people, those kids dying is the preferred outcome.”

A mix of fear and warning swopped low in Wayne’s gut.

"Jim." Wayne said, dropping the use of a last name because if any situation called for it, it was this one. "What exactly are you saying here?"

The Chief chewed on his split lip.

"I know you're smart, Munson. I know you, and plenty of others are aware that something's happening, been happening in this town."

Which was a hell of an understatement if you asked Wayne. Plenty of the upper classes might be able to bury their heads when it came to the military parading about and the flow of “accidents” they brought in their wake, but then, they didn't see all the other signs of trouble.

The absolute oddity that was Starcourt’s construction.

How it had been built using primarily outside crews and anyone who'd taken a singular look at the site could tell you they were building it weird.

Weird as in it looked like it would have a multi-level basement, and not what a mall should have.

Then there were the constant electrical problems. The backups upon backups that failed. The late night delivery vans headed out to the Hawkins Lab.

The things in the woods that kept spooking all the deer and the weird markings they left behind that unnerved even the hardest of hunters.

This didn’t even touch the Russian military that more than one reputable person swore was hanging around.

The very same Wayne himself had seen, on more than one occasion.

(And you couldn’t deny it; those boys were military. Past or present, it didn’t matter. They moved like a threat, and Wayne treated them like one, staying well clear.)

"Yeah." Wayne admitted. "I also know better than to stick my nose in it."

"That makes you a smarter man than me.' Hop complained under his breath, but the anger was self directed.

"The point is, there are some government types crawling around, doing shit they shouldn't be doing, and more than a few of them are in the business of making people disappear.”

This was absolutely not where Wayne had thought this was going.

Hopper took a breath. Than another.

A third.

It was starting to make Wayne nervous, in a way he hadn’t felt since a social worker had brought Eddie to him for the last time and final time. It was the feeling that things were about to shift in a way that would change the course of his life.

"Steve Harrington is sitting in my office right now, beat to absolute shit.” Hopper admitted.

Wayne gave him the floor to talk, letting him go at his own pace without interruptions.

“He's there because some of those government types finally figured out his parents are never fucking home.”

Wayne sucked in a breath.

"We both know his parents, Wayne. Harassing them to come back and take care of their kid won't work, and frankly, I’m beginning to think all the phone lines are tapped anyway.” He winced here, like voicing such a thing pained him, and Wayne understood.

It sounded a little too out there, a little like he was buying into a conspiracy.

Except he wasn’t. Wayne knew he wasn’t.

Jim Hopper might have been an alcoholic, a man living in pain and unconcerned with his own life, but if there was one thing he was solid for, it was shit like this.

He didn’t jump to conclusions. Didn’t believe the first thing people told him. Even at his worst, he did the work to see what was really happening, and made his decisions from there.

(Even if that decision was to accept the occasional bribe, or drive an intoxicated 13 year old Eddie home instead of hauling his ass into the drunk tank.)

“Harrington won’t admit it, but he’s got a hell of a concussion if not a full blown brain injury and he’s not reacting as well as he should to Suites trying to run him off the road.” Hopper continued. Angrily, he added, “Damn kid didn’t even come to me until they tried to break into his house last night.”

His fingers squeezed the wheel so hard Wayne heard the leather creak in protest.

“I’d take him, but my cabin is being renovated from…” He trailed off, heaving a sigh.

“A storm, so me and my kid are bunked with the Byers right now and we’re full up.”

Hawkins hadn't had a storm like that in years, but Wayne wasn't going to call him out on the blatant lie.

“I need a place to stash him for the next few weeks, until I can work with some of the higher ups sniffing around, and get them to call off their attack dogs.”

“And you want to stuff him with me.” Wayne finished.

“I know you don’t have the room.” Hopper admitted easily, stopping his truck at a red light and locking eyes with the other man. “But I also know you’ll be the last place anyone would look for him.”

'Ain’t that the damn truth.'

“You’re really gonna go this far for a Harrington?” Wayne asked, instead of the million of other questions leaping to the forefront of his mind.

This one, he figured, was the most important.

“He’s not his dad.” Hopper said, as firm as Wayne had ever heard him. “He’s not either of his parents, and he saved my little girl.”

Wayne hadn’t even known Hopper had another little girl, but he also knew better than to ask where the guy had found one.

It wasn’t his business, just as nothing else Jim was involved in, was his business.

Except, apparently, Steve Harrington.

“I’m gonna need my own truck if I’m takin' Harrington home.” Wayne said easily, instead of bothering to ask anything else.

If Jim said the kid was different than his daddy, then he was--because when it came to things like that, Jim didn't lie.

No point in it.

“I know. Just needed to talk to you first, without anyone overhearing.” Jim said, before swinging the police truck around and heading back to the Barn.

“I’ll stay in contact with you, and I’ll make sure Harrington pays you for the pleasure of your hospitality. Just--” Here Jim cut himself off, looking like he was struggling an awful lot with the next thing he wanted to say.

Once again, Wayne waited him out.

“Don’t let Steve fool you. He’s good at fooling people, letting them think he’s okay. Too good at it, and between the two of us, I have a real good idea of the reason why.”

A memory came to Wayne unbidden, of Richard Harrington and Chet Hagan, beating some poor kid in the highschool bathroom bloody. The grins on their faces as the poor guy wailed for them to stop.

How they almost hadn’t.

“Alright.” Wayne agreed.

Hopper swung back into the Barn's parking lot, and Wayne moved right to his own beat to shit truck, ready to follow Jim back to the police station.

He wasn’t a praying man, not anymore, but Catholisim wasn’t a thing that let you go easy.

He found himself sending up a quick prayer, fingers flicking in a kind of miniature version of the sign of the cross.

Considering his own kid’s history with Harrington, and the sheer small space of the trailer?

Wayne had a feeling it was needed.

#this has like t wo more parts #pre steddie #wayne as a BAMF #wayne and Hopper both as psuedo parents to Steve #ya'll are gonna have to put up with my weird ass jumping all over the place warm ups sorry lol #Gary's fourth piece is coming no worries #and then this will either take its place or the other one I have will #you CANNOT look me in the eye and tell me all the blue color workers arent aware shits going down #like 100% local crews took one look at starcourt and went what the fuck #nevermind you know the local power plant lol #and with demo critters running around its not like they were tearing through brushes and shit #your local hunters are gonna know somethings up #anyway #beat to shit Steve Harrington #my beloved #hes gonna show up busted to shit with a major grade concussion and Eddie is gonna shit himself #steve harrington #steddie #I spelled collar color and im not changing it #outsider pov #wayne pov #I will write the first person who knows where I pulled John from a prompt of their choice #catholic wayne munson #jim hopper

3K notes · View notes

i-am-my-own-angel · 1 year

Text

Best line ever printed in the (now defunct) Texas City Sun

Indifferent to the whole situation is one of Mrs. Miles' cats.

#cats #indifferent #christmas #christmas tree #Texas City #newspaper #funny #1980s #80s #gone to pot

0 notes

mostlysignssomeportents · 17 days

Text

How to shatter the class solidarity of the ruling class

I'm touring my new, nationally bestselling novel The Bezzle! Catch me WEDNESDAY (Apr 11) at UCLA, then Chicago (Apr 17), Torino (Apr 21) Marin County (Apr 27), Winnipeg (May 2), Calgary (May 3), Vancouver (May 4), and beyond!

Audre Lorde counsels us that "The Master's Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master's House," while MLK said "the law cannot make a man love me, but it can restrain him from lynching me." Somewhere between replacing the system and using the system lies a pragmatic – if easily derailed – course.

Lorde is telling us that a rotten system can't be redeemed by using its own chosen reform mechanisms. King's telling us that unless we live, we can't fight – so anything within the system that makes it easier for your comrades to fight on can hasten the end of the system.

Take the problems of journalism. One old model of journalism funding involved wealthy newspaper families profiting handsomely by selling local appliance store owners the right to reach the townspeople who wanted to read sports-scores. These families expressed their patrician love of their town by peeling off some of those profits to pay reporters to sit through municipal council meetings or even travel overseas and get shot at.

In retrospect, this wasn't ever going to be a stable arrangement. It relied on both the inconstant generosity of newspaper barons and the absence of a superior way to show washing-machine ads to people who might want to buy washing machines. Neither of these were good long-term bets. Not only were newspaper barons easily distracted from their sense of patrician duty (especially when their own power was called into question), but there were lots of better ways to connect buyers and sellers lurking in potentia.

All of this was grossly exacerbated by tech monopolies. Tech barons aren't smarter or more evil than newspaper barons, but they have better tools, and so now they take 51 cents out of every ad dollar and 30 cents out of ever subscriber dollar and they refuse to deliver the news to users who explicitly requested it, unless the news company pays them a bribe to "boost" their posts:

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2023/04/saving-news-big-tech

The news is important, and people sign up to make, digest, and discuss the news for many non-economic reasons, which means that the news continues to struggle along, despite all the economic impediments and the vulture capitalists and tech monopolists who fight one another for which one will get to take the biggest bite out of the press. We've got outstanding nonprofit news outlets like Propublica, journalist-owned outlets like 404 Media, and crowdfunded reporters like Molly White (and winner-take-all outlets like the New York Times).

But as Hamilton Nolan points out, "that pot of money…is only large enough to produce a small fraction of the journalism that was being produced in past generations":

https://www.hamiltonnolan.com/p/what-will-replace-advertising-revenue

For Nolan, "public funding of journalism is the only way to fix this…If we accept that journalism is not just a business or a form of entertainment but a public good, then funding it with public money makes perfect sense":

https://www.hamiltonnolan.com/p/public-funding-of-journalism-is-the

Having grown up in Canada – under the CBC – and then lived for a quarter of my life in the UK – under the BBC – I am very enthusiastic about Nolan's solution. There are obvious problems with publicly funded journalism, like the politicization of news coverage:

https://www.theguardian.com/media/2023/jan/24/panel-approving-richard-sharp-as-bbc-chair-included-tory-party-donor

And the transformation of the funding into a cheap political football:

https://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/poilievre-defund-cbc-change-law-1.6810434

But the worst version of those problems is still better than the best version of the private-equity-funded model of news production.

But Nolan notes the emergence of a new form of hedge fund news, one that is awfully promising, and also terribly fraught: Hunterbrook Media, an investigative news outlet owned by short-sellers who pay journalists to research and publish damning reports on companies they hold a short position on:

https://hntrbrk.com/

For those of you who are blissfully distant from the machinations of the financial markets, "short selling" is a wager that a company's stock price will go down. A gambler who takes a short position on a company's stock can make a lot of money if the company stumbles or fails altogether (but if the company does well, the short can suffer literally unlimited losses).

Shorts have historically paid analysts to dig into companies and uncover the sins hidden on their balance-sheets, but as Matt Levine points out, journalists work for a fraction of the price of analysts and are at least as good at uncovering dirt as MBAs are:

https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2024-04-02/a-hedge-fund-that-s-also-a-newspaper

What's more, shorts who discover dirt on a company still need to convince journalists to publicize their findings and trigger the sell-off that makes their short position pay off. Shorts who own a muckraking journalistic operation can skip this step: they are the journalists.

There's a way in which this is sheer genius. Well-funded shorts who don't care about the news per se can still be motivated into funding freely available, high-quality investigative journalism about corporate malfeasance (notoriously, one of the least attractive forms of journalism for advertisers). They can pay journalists top dollar – even bid against each other for the most talented journalists – and supply them with all the tools they need to ply their trade. A short won't ever try the kind of bullshit the owners of Vice pulled, paying themselves millions while their journalists lose access to Lexisnexis or the PACER database:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/02/24/anti-posse/#when-you-absolutely-positively-dont-give-a-solitary-single-fuck

The shorts whose journalists are best equipped stand to make the most money. What's not to like?

Well, the issue here is whether the ruling class's sense of solidarity is stronger than its greed. The wealthy have historically oscillated between real solidarity (think of the ultrawealthy lobbying to support bipartisan votes for tax cuts and bailouts) and "war of all against all" (as when wealthy colonizers dragged their countries into WWI after the supply of countries to steal ran out).

After all, the reason companies engage in the scams that shorts reveal is that they are profitable. "Behind every great fortune is a great crime," and that's just great. You don't win the game when you get into heaven, you win it when you get into the Forbes Rich List.

Take monopolies: investors like the upside of backing an upstart company that gobbles up some staid industry's margins – Amazon vs publishing, say, or Uber vs taxis. But while there's a lot of upside in that move, there's also a lot of risk: most companies that set out to "disrupt" an industry sink, taking their investors' capital down with them.

Contrast that with monopolies: backing a company that merges with its rivals and buys every small company that might someday grow large is a sure thing. Shriven of "wasteful competition," a company can lower quality, raise prices, capture its regulators, screw its workers and suppliers and laugh all the way to Davos. A big enough company can ignore the complaints of those workers, customers and regulators. They're not just too big to fail. They're not just too big to jail. They're too big to care:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/04/04/teach-me-how-to-shruggie/#kagi

Would-be monopolists are stuck in a high-stakes Prisoner's Dilemma. If they cooperate, they can screw over everyone else and get unimaginably rich. But if one party defects, they can raid the monopolist's margins, short its stock, and snitch to its regulators.

It's true that there's a clear incentive for hedge-fund managers to fund investigative journalism into other hedge-fund managers' portfolio companies. But it would be even more profitable for both of those hedgies to join forces and collude to screw the rest of us over. So long as they mistrust each other, we might see some benefit from that adversarial relationship. But the point of the 0.1% is that there aren't very many of them. The Aspen Institute can rent a hall that will hold an appreciable fraction of that crowd. They buy their private jets and bespoke suits and powdered rhino horn from the same exclusive sellers. Their kids go to the same elite schools. They know each other, and they have every opportunity to get drunk together at a charity ball or a society wedding and cook up a plan to join forces.

This is the problem at the core of "mechanism design" grounded in "rational self-interest." If you try to create a system where people do the right thing because they're selfish assholes, you normalize being a selfish asshole. Eventually, the selfish assholes form a cozy little League of Selfish Assholes and turn on the rest of us.

Appeals to morality don't work on unethical people, but appeals to immorality crowds out ethics. Take the ancient split between "free software" (software that is designed to maximize the freedom of the people who use it) and "open source software" (identical to free software, but promoted as a better way to make robust code through transparency and peer review).

Over the years, open source – an appeal to your own selfish need for better code – triumphed over free software, and its appeal to the ethics of a world of "software freedom." But it turns out that while the difference between "open" and "free" was once mere semantics, it's fully possible to decouple the two. Today, we have lots of "open source": you can see the code that Google, Microsoft, Apple and Facebook uses, and even contribute your labor to it for free. But you can't actually decide how the software you write works, because it all takes a loop through Google, Microsoft, Apple or Facebook's servers, and only those trillion-dollar tech monopolists have the software freedom to determine how those servers work:

https://pluralistic.net/2020/05/04/which-side-are-you-on/#tivoization-and-beyond

That's ruling class solidarity. The Big Tech firms have hidden a myriad of sins beneath their bafflegab and balance-sheets. These (as yet) undiscovered scams constitute a "bezzle," which JK Galbraith defined as "the magic interval when a confidence trickster knows he has the money he has appropriated but the victim does not yet understand that he has lost it."

The purpose of Hunterbrook is to discover and destroy bezzles, hastening the moment of realization that the wealth we all feel in a world of seemingly orderly technology is really an illusion. Hunterbrook certainly has its pick of bezzles to choose from, because we are living in a Golden Age of the Bezzle.

Which is why I titled my new novel The Bezzle. It's a tale of high-tech finance scams, starring my two-fisted forensic accountant Marty Hench, and in this volume, Hench is called upon to unwind a predatory prison-tech scam that victimizes the most vulnerable people in America – our army of prisoners – and their families:

https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781250865878/thebezzle

The scheme I fictionalize in The Bezzle is very real. Prison-tech monopolists like Securus and Viapath bribe prison officials to abolish calls, in-person visits, mail and parcels, then they supply prisoners with "free" tablets where they pay hugely inflated rates to receive mail, speak to their families, and access ebooks, distance education and other electronic media:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/04/02/captive-customers/#guillotine-watch

But a group of activists have cornered these high-tech predators, run them to ground and driven them to the brink of extinction, and they've done it using "the master's tools" – with appeals to regulators and the finance sector itself.

Writing for The Appeal, Dana Floberg and Morgan Duckett describe the campaign they waged with Worth Rises to bankrupt the prison-tech sector:

https://theappeal.org/securus-bankruptcy-prison-telecom-industry/

Here's the headline figure: Securus is $1.8 billion in debt, and it has eight months to find a financier or it will go bust. What's more, all the creditors it might reasonably approach have rejected its overtures, and its bonds have been downrated to junk status. It's a dead duck.

Even better is how this happened. Securus's debt problems started with its acquisition, a leveraged buyout by Platinum Equity, who borrowed heavily against the firm and then looted it with bogus "management fees" that meant that the debt continued to grow, despite Securus's $700m in annual revenue from America's prisoners. Platinum was just the last in a long line of PE companies that loaded up Securus with debt and merged it with its competitors, who were also mortgaged to make profits for other private equity funds.

For years, Securus and Platinum were able to service their debt and roll it over when it came due. But after Worth Rises got NYC to pass a law making jail calls free, creditors started to back away from Securus. It's one thing for Securus to charge $18 for a local call from a prison when it's splitting the money with the city jail system. But when that $18 needs to be paid by the city, they're going to demand much lower prices. To make things worse for Securus, prison reformers got similar laws passed in San Francisco and in Connecticut.

Securus tried to outrun its problems by gobbling up one of its major rivals, Icsolutions, but Worth Rises and its coalition convinced regulators at the FCC to block the merger. Securus abandoned the deal:

https://worthrises.org/blogpost/securusmerger

Then, Worth Rises targeted Platinum Equity, going after the pension funds and other investors whose capital Platinum used to keep Securus going. The massive negative press campaign led to eight-figure disinvestments:

https://www.latimes.com/business/story/2019-09-05/la-fi-tom-gores-securus-prison-phone-mass-incarceration

Now, Securus's debt became "distressed," trading at $0.47 on the dollar. A brief, covid-fueled reprieve gave Securus a temporary lifeline, as prisoners' families were barred from in-person visits and had to pay Securus's rates to talk to their incarcerated loved ones. But after lockdown, Securus's troubles picked up right where they left off.

They targeted Platinum's founder, Tom Gores, who papered over his bloody fortune by styling himself as a philanthropist and sports-team owner. After a campaign by Worth Rises and Color of Change, Gores was kicked off the Los Angeles County Museum of Art board. When Gores tried to flip Securus to a SPAC – the same scam Trump pulled with Truth Social – the negative publicity about Securus's unsound morals and financials killed the deal:

https://twitter.com/WorthRises/status/1578034977828384769

Meanwhile, more states and cities are making prisoners' communications free, further worsening Securus's finances:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/02/14/minnesota-nice/#shitty-technology-adoption-curve

Congress passed the Martha Wright-Reed Just and Reasonable Communications Act, giving the FCC the power to regulate the price of federal prisoners' communications. Securus's debt prices tumbled further:

https://www.govtrack.us/congress/bills/117/s1541

Securus's debts were coming due: it owes $1.3b in 2024, and hundreds of millions more in 2025. Platinum has promised a $400m cash infusion, but that didn't sway S&P Global, a bond-rating agency that re-rated Securus's bonds as "CCC" (compare with "AAA"). Moody's concurred. Now, Securus is stuck selling junk-bonds:

https://www.govtrack.us/congress/bills/117/s1541

The company's creditors have given Securus an eight-month runway to find a new lender before they force it into bankruptcy. The company's debt is trading at $0.08 on the dollar.

Securus's major competitor is Viapath (prison tech is a duopoly). Viapath is also debt-burdened and desperate, thanks to a parallel campaign by Worth Rises, and has tried all of Securus's tricks, and failed:

https://pestakeholder.org/news/american-securities-fails-to-sell-prison-telecom-company-viapath/

Viapath's debts are due next year, and if Securus tanks, no one in their right mind will give Viapath a dime. They're the walking dead.

Worth Rise's brilliant guerrilla warfare against prison-tech and its private equity backers are a master class in using the master's tools to dismantle the master's house. The finance sector isn't a friend of justice or working people, but sometimes it can be used tactically against financialization itself. To paraphrase MLK, "finance can't make a corporation love you, but it can stop a corporation from destroying you."

Yes, the ruling class finds solidarity at the most unexpected moments, and yes, it's easy for appeals to greed to institutionalize greediness. But whether it's funding unbezzling journalism through short selling, or freeing prisons by brandishing their cooked balance-sheets in the faces of bond-rating agencies, there's a lot of good we can do on the way to dismantling the system.

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/04/08/money-talks/#bullshit-walks

Image: KMJ (modified) https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Boerse_01_KMJ.jpg

CC BY-SA 3.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/deed.en

769 notes · View notes

pinkrelish · 1 year

Text

𝐭𝐡𝐞 "𝐲𝐞𝐬" 𝐩𝐨𝐥𝐢𝐜𝐲.

singledad!mechanic!eddie x fem!reader

✶After a lifetime of questionable decisions, you moved from the big city to the sleepy town of Hawkins with your best friend, and took the first job you saw: answering phones for the most boring auto shop in the dullest place on Earth. It wasn't exactly the adventure you wanted it to be.. but attempting to win over the jaded mechanic who insisted on ignoring your existence proved entertaining.✶

NSFW — slow burn, eventual smut, strangers to lovers, flirting, mutual pining, angst, drug/alcohol mention/use, depictions of poverty, sort of grumpy x sunshine but eddie's just tired, reader and eddie are mid-late 20's

chapter: 1/20 [wc: 5.5k]

↳ part 01 / 02 / 03 / 04 / 05 / 06 / 07 / 08 / 09 / 10 / 11 / 12

AO3

Chapter 1: Surprise, Surprise

“Yes.” A simple answer which spawned as many awkward scenarios, as it did great ones. Your name was spray painted on the side of a bridge, you spent nights learning to tango on abandoned rooftops, the amount of tales you accrued of bad dates could fill a self-help book.

Whatever the question was, the answer was “yes.” Life was more exciting that way.

Well, your policy usually lended itself to exciting adventures, anyway.

Currently, you were sat behind a desk with your boss, Mr. Moore, who slouched on his black stool with his cheek propped on his fist, pointing a pencil at a customer’s pink invoice sheet in front of you, explaining who to call in the spiral-bound catalog for the parts to be shipped.

The tall counter top partially obscured the both of you from employees and customers alike, but as you soon realized, the number of employees was slightly above two, and the customers even less; and if any of them paid you any mind, you couldn’t tell from the disorienting mix of exhaust fumes, dirty oil, and grease wafting in from the glass door on the left.

Thus began the first day of your new job at David’s Auto Repair. Boring.

————

Your second and third days were hardly different. Arriving at the butt crack of dawn and beginning the routine that definitely wasn’t in the ad in the newspaper: clean the bathrooms (hey, at least they had two), start the coffee pot after scrubbing off years of neglect caked onto the inside, and organize the paperwork Mr. Moore left for you in his office.

Oh, and most importantly, after locking up your bike outside the front door, you made your way through the echoey workshop and poked your head out the back door to the parking lot–which, by all means, was a gravel alleyway with overgrown trees blocking your view beyond the sleek black car parked next to the dumpster.

“Morning!” you greeted the one employee who arrived early and stayed late. “Eddie, right?”

The man leaning against the gray brick wall didn’t bother acknowledging you. Didn’t lift his head from its dropped back position, nor open his eyes. Definitely didn’t take the cigarette out of his mouth to bestow you the gift of his chipper attitude, nor did he uncross his arms to offer you the bare minimum wave.

And much like the other days, you sat perched behind your desk and beamed up at him as he walked past you to the break room. And as usual, he slid his gaze to you. And like normal, he didn’t say anything.

But he did hold your eye contact for a fraction of a second longer, albeit, he looked a bit frightened when he did, as if he were suspicious of your smile.

You listened to the clunk of his heavy boots fade down the hallway, then return with him holding a mug of coffee.

This time, as he walked by, he remained vigilant, and your grin went ignored by his stupid big brown eyes surrounded by envious lashes.

Lucky you, the reception area was essentially a glass cage. Behind the black pleather seats for customers was the glowing blue sky, and beside you were floor to ceiling windows showcasing the artificially bright garage where the man in grease stained coveralls twisted gaudy rings off his fingers and placed them on a tray with his coffee, before picking up a dirty rag and popping open the hood of the car he worked on past closing last night.

“You’re welcome for the coffee,” you mumbled in a mocking tone, sneering at his red name patch–Eddie. “Jerk.”

————

Friday was different. You locked up your bike, chucked your backpack into your chair behind the desk, and made your way to the back of the garage for the routine, “Good morning.”

For some reason, you decided to reveal your whole self; more than your head stuck out the door, or rising above the countertop customers leaned on when trying to schmooze deals on parts–hell if you knew how to do that, anyway. You didn’t get paid enough to bargain.

You stepped onto the uneven gravel and surveyed the scenery, looking both ways down the alley to the major roads on either side leading to the heart of downtown Hawkins. Absolutely dismally silent. Void of life. Except for the small things you never noticed, like faraway birds, the hum of a distant motor, buzzing bugs before they disappeared for the cooler months. You felt the dew settling on your forearms, and swore you could smell impending rain on the cloudless day.

“Is it always this quiet?” you asked, face pinched in confusion as you took it all in. “I swear I can hear my own thoughts.”

Eddie may not have appreciated your joke, but he did surprise you.

He kept one of his arms crossed over his stomach, and took the cigarette from between his lips to flick the ashes. “You’re not from around here, are you?” he asked the dilapidated fence across from him.

Feeling cheeky, you schooled the thrill out of your voice from getting a response out of him, and said, “What gave it away?”

A drag on his cigarette was his wordless answer. Fair.

“I’m from New York.” The implied City followed without clarification. “Just moved here last week. My roommate’s from Hawkins, and she had to move back to help take care of her parents. They’re older and her dad has some health problems, and yeah, I couldn’t afford rent on my own, so you know, why not. Why not follow her to a town so small it’s impossible to find on a map.”

All your talking earned you a magnificent thing. Eddie finally opened his eyes, if only to pin you with a mild glare, and a skeptic pinch between his brows.

He said more to himself than you, “You must really like your roommate to come here.” The inflection at the end was both amusement and contempt, no doubt.

“We met in our first year of college and became best friends like that–!” You snapped. “Both theater kids going to school for acting, and we later made a comedy troupe with a few other people. When she asked if I wanted to move with her, I said ‘yes.’” Inclining your upper body towards him, you explained, “It’s sorta my thing. If anyone asks me anything, I say ‘yes.’ Obviously, I can veto shit that’s dangerous or crosses any boundaries, but it’s my policy to try everything. Life makes better stories that way.”

Your unique brand of wisdom furthered his obvious distaste for you.

Eddie inhaled his vice until the orange glow burned to the filter. Smoke fell from his mouth in a rush as if he were about to speak again, but he didn’t. He merely stared at you. And if he were having a staring contest, he won.

“Well, have a good day, then,” you said, spinning on the toe of your shoe.

You sat in your glass zoo for the day shuffling papers, making calls, and filling out forms. Most definitely not talking to the guy who appeared annoyed at your very existence.

Unfortunately for him, Hawkins was tiny and the pickings were slim.

Maybe it was his eyes, or the way the short layers of his choppy hair cut escaped his low bun to curl themselves in face-framing waves, or the fact he was twenty-years younger than the other two mechanics, but you took a liking to Eddie, much to his dismay. And due to your affinity for his annoyance, you noticed the subtle changes in his appearance sooner than you should.

————

Dark purple circles announced the lack of sleep under Eddie’s eyes before the bags could. Bloodshot and struggling to open past a sliver, he sucked down half his cigarette before the routine minutes of peace he carved into his strict schedule were interrupted by the newest knot in his muscles.

“Good morning!” you said.

“Morning,” he returned without thinking about it. Rookie mistake.

You stood closer this time, inching down the brick wall, approaching him as if he would startle like a wild animal to get a better look at the years wearing heavy on the fine lines etched into his face. Perhaps no longer ‘fine.’

“You good?”

He didn’t have the energy to put up his usual front. With his chin dipped to his chest, he kept his eyes closed, nearly drifting to sleep as he muttered, “Long night.”

“Ah.”

Your clumsy shuffling alerted him to your movement, and he reluctantly observed you standing a few feet in front of him, rocking on your heels. He filled his chest with an incredulous sigh before you even spoke.

“You seem like you could use some cheering up,” you beamed. “I could juggle for you! Should I do three or four?” Eddie’s jaw went slack, and the cigarette stuck to the wetness inside his chapped lips. You bent down to gather large rocks into your palms, opting for four when he didn’t answer.

You stood up and stepped back. Made a big show of tracing invisible arcs above your head with your gaze, readying your hands. Sucking in a breath. Building suspense while his expression slowly crept into one of tempered curiosity.

Tensing, you tossed all four rocks into the air, and made a genuine effort to catch them before they fell unceremoniously around you, bouncing off the gravel in your scramble.

Clasping your hands behind your back in feigned shyness, you announced, “I don’t know how to juggle.”

For a moment you thought he was going to continue to regard you as if you were a bug in his coffee.. Then his veneer cracked.

He snorted. The cute way, when someone’s trying to suppress it. A subtle shake in their shoulders, keeping their head down, and their smile hidden behind the heel of the palm.

Eddie hugged his arm tighter over his chest, and chastised himself, “Why’d I let that get me.”

And truly, when he flicked his gaze to you with the lopsided remnant of his grin, you were imprinted with the heat of his wonderment, and your body remembered that feeling. Sensing it later when you sat at your desk, tapping your pencil, rattling off a series of numbers and letters for engine parts, and you snuck a coy look over the phone at the exact moment Eddie turned around to ask Carl for a wrench instead of getting it himself from the tool box near the window.

And he felt your stare during lunch when you promised an irate customer their car would be ready by the end of business hours, and hung up the phone with the type of heavy-handedness one used when implying a ‘fuck you’ without stating it.

You pushed yourself from the desk and went to the fridge in front of the circular table in the break room, eyeing Eddie’s odd choice as you walked by. A bologna sandwich–fairly normal–but also a stained orange tupperware container with an array of dried out microwaved leftovers. A corner of spaghetti, pale instant mashed potatoes with three peas stuck on top, unidentifiable sludge that may have been beef stew at one point, and a handful of Kraft mac n cheese.

Pitiful amounts of food that most people would’ve thrown out.

Not that you should judge. Your lunch was the blandest rice-based meal your roommate’s mom made the night before. The woman had never heard of salt, much less other spices, but she was letting you live in their attic for free until you and Bobbie found a place to live.

Breaking your chain of thoughts, you smiled at Eddie on your way out.

He didn’t look up from his paperwork.

Wholly ignored.

————

Over the rest of the month, you learned there wasn’t a definitive pattern to which days of the week were hardest for Eddie, but it was clear when he was enduring the worst.

As the evenings grew cooler, you left the lobby door open, and in doing so, were wise to the bite in his words, the edge to his voice. The quick apologies to Carl when he let his frustration show. The fluidity of ‘fucks’ flying past his mouth, the way he wrung his nape while staring into the distance, and the lurking stress of bottled emotions causing his teeth to grind.

He approached you with concern spurned from the windows being painted black with night.

“You don’t have to stay behind, you know that, right?” Eddie got your attention in the doorway. You blinked at him, still seeing the words of the book you were reading swim past your vision. “I have a set of keys. I can lock up when I’m done.”

It was the most he’d said to you in two weeks. Three entire sentences composed of more words than he’d uttered if you added them all up since your juggling stunt.

“I don’t mind.”

A meager response which resulted in a standoff.

Eddie wasted no time bunching his shoulders at your defiance. He left streaky fingerprints on the door handle as he reached for his neck, and tucked his fingers under his collar to run his thumb along his chain necklace in a self-soothing gesture. A layer of grime coated his skin. His disheveled hair stuck to his sweaty, dirty neck. The front of his coveralls were blackened with grease, as was the white tank top he wore underneath, peeking above the unfastened top snap.

On the other hand, you overturned your palms and glanced around the barren room. “Is it really that much of a bother that I’m sitting in here being quiet?” you drawled.

“Yes.” Automatic irritation.

“It’s not like I have somewhere to be.”

“Don’t have a comedy routine to rehearse with your roommate?” he intoned in complete monotony.

“Ha-ha,” you replied, just as emotionless. You thought about correcting him in regards to you and Bobbie no longer doing stand up, but decided to grab your backpack and leave without putting up a fight. His concern about you staying late may not be genuine, but it was evident he wanted–or needed–you gone. You didn’t want to push his boundaries when he showed this level of discomfort, especially when the burden of fatigue wore beyond acceptable exhaustion, and he was ready to snap, no matter how hard he tried to quell it.

You surrendered, “Bye, Eddie.”

No reply.

In total darkness, you unchained your bike and hopped on, pedaling past the mailbox when you heard the thunderous slams of the service doors being lowered shut.

And you made it to the edge of the trees before coming to a screeching halt in the middle of the empty street, cracking your neck at the speed of which you whipped around to gawk.

Your heartbeat skipped, then timed itself with the extreme drum beat and opening wail of a guitar accompanied by high-pitched screamed lyrics.

The music may have been muffled, and the inside fluorescent lights struggled to penetrate the dense fog from the upper warehouse windows, but it was as if Eddie was subjecting the desolate parking lot to his own personal Judas Priest concert, hearing be damned.

You didn’t even know the dusty radio in the shop worked. But whatever helped him blow off steam, you supposed.

————

Today was a good day.

Eddie liked Fridays. Most people working weekdays did, but when he came inside early from his morning cigarette, and you hadn’t finished sweeping the shop, he made a point to idle around the orange car at the center, seeking your attention and offering an apology. Not a spoken apology, mind you. But it was rare he initiated eye contact, and when he did it with the purpose of showing deference in his softened features, you understood.

You forgave him with a gentle lift at the corner of your lips for an incident yesterday afternoon, wherein he grunted at you to leave him alone when you were telling him about one of the plays you and Bobbie acted in. Sometimes you required your own reminder of when you were being annoying, and gave him an apologetic smile for bothering him. He nodded. All was right with the world. All was forgiven and now he could get to work.

He wiped his hands down the sides of his coveralls, and leaned his upper half through the open car window to reach the latch for the hood.

The perfect opportunity to mess with him presented itself in all its glory. But first, you couldn’t resist taking a long.. long look at his backside, head tilted, mouth more than a little hung open.

“Huh?” He nearly banged his head on the roof, rounding on you with the sharpest glare in the Midwest.

Under the guise of perfect innocence, you kept brushing the broom over his work boots and toward the dust pan. “Sorry, sir, just doin’ my job. Gotta clean up the filth.”

“An actress and a comedian, huh?” he posed, allowing his smirk to foster as he gripped the edge of the door. “Gonna tell me you were a clown, next?”

“Actually..” You were interrupted by Carl coming in, followed by the near-retired Kevin who worked two days a week.

You greeted them loud and proud, overdoing it in the joy department at the ripe morning hour. Asking about Carl’s wife, and Kevin’s dog; really laying it on thick for the purpose of sending a message to the looming ghoul behind you: I’m annoying you on purpose now.

Still, as you entered the lobby, you caught sight of the sneaky grin on his face before he turned his back to you. A tight-lipped thing he was clearly trying to rid himself of while pulling his hair back into a low bun, and taking the time to tie up a bandana to keep everything out of his face, thus losing his security blanket from the world perceiving he wasn’t in a permanent bad mood.

And of course, Eddie kept up his act through lunch. Stomping through the lobby in that way people did when they were so very obviously trying to appear aloof, and coming across as anything but. Eyes staring straight ahead, but too wide and too aware to not be soliciting a reaction from their periphery. Chest out, muscles flexed. Posture the very opposite of casual, causing them to walk in a stilted manner like a robot.

And his charade continued when he came back from the break room, rounding the corner with softer steps. Slower. Hanging onto the precious milliseconds where your back was to him, and he could absorb your image freely without being noticed. Then, he lifted his chin and returned to his project, pretending you weren’t there.

Yep, so painfully obvious when he forgot reflections existed and you were surrounded by glass.

~~~

Fridays were the days he anticipated most. Work was grueling, and he had many things to finish before the break for the weekend, but he didn’t mind staying late. He preferred it.

Fridays meant he could rely on someone else handling the stressors at home, and he was free to earn his late hours at the garage, indulging in his loud music, and unwinding the constant state of tension lurking beneath the surface. It was the only way he knew how to cope. To stay sane.

Yeah, he loved Fridays. Until a surprise came running at him in her tiny pink shoes.

Eddie screwed his eyes shut and exhaled a long, hard breath through his nose.

“Sorry,” came Wayne’s earnest apology as his nephew wilted; shoulders sagging, head hung. Tapping the wrench he was holding on his thigh. Trying his best to keep it together. “Don’t mean to drop ‘er off on you, but work called me in, so I came here after picking her up.”

Turning away from the engine he was installing, Eddie assumed his authoritative voice, but it came out as a weary sigh. “Adrienne, you know the rules,” he warned lowly, “No running in the shop.” After a beat, he corrected himself. “I mean, no being in the shop at all!”

She giggled as she skipped away from him, sloppy pigtails bouncing with mirth, plastic glittery shoes slapping the concrete floor where a myriad of items she could trip on laid.

“Adrie!” He called out, but she was too busy opposing him to pay attention.

Lucky for her, a certain receptionist caught her by the shoulders before she crashed into a rogue tire.

“Whoa there, little Miss!”

You looked to Eddie for further instruction on what to do with the girl currently laughing up a storm at your feet, but he was frozen. A bit paler, and wringing the back of his neck. Unable to articulate any of the broken consonants on his tongue as he stared at you. You switched your gaze to the older man beside him, but he was equally confused as to why Eddie was having trouble speaking.

Addressing anyone who would like to volunteer an answer, you asked, “And who’s this?”

“This.. This i-is my daughter. She, I, Goddamnit–I’m sorry, can you take her inside? I swear she’ll be quiet. Right, Adrie?”

Seeing the pure desperation settle around his eyes, you assimilated into the role of babysitter, wanting to alleviate his anxiety despite the sudden surge of your own. You held your hand out for her to take, and she did so without a second thought, grasping onto you with her little fingers and standing up, being the one to lead you to your desk.

As the door closed behind you, you overheard the older man clear his throat under the strain of bad news. “The water heater is broken again, and I couldn’t– ..Before I had to leave.”

Their private conversation was sealed behind the glass. You didn’t care to eavesdrop. It was too heartbreaking watching Eddie frantically catch his fingers on his bandana before removing it so he could tangle his curls into his fist, tugging them over his face as he groaned in a fruitless effort to hide himself from the world.

But on the subject of his brunette waves..

His daughter had the same curl pattern. Almost the same cut, too. Clearly Eddie was the acting barber of the family. Something you’d find adorable if it wasn’t for the pang of rejection in your stomach.

Daughter. Family.

The words repeated themselves in your head as your eyes wandered to the black tray beside the tool cabinet. He wore several large rings. Lots of jewelry, in fact, but you couldn’t remember if any of them were a wedding band, and the embarrassment of developing a crush on a married man for weeks without taking two seconds to cross reference his left hand burned your cheeks hot.

“Hi,” his daughter said cutely, swaying from foot to foot while holding two of your fingers.

You crouched to her level. “Wanna draw while we wait?” She nodded, sucking on the tip of her thumb.

Steadying your spinny office chair while she climbed into it, you made sure she was comfortable before bringing out the black stool from Mr. Moore’s office, and sitting next to her. You opened your backpack, flipped to a clean sheet in your sketchpad, and presented it to her along with your colored pencils.

“Hmm, what should we draw?”

Adrie snatched the bubblegum pink color, and began her masterpiece. “Mrs. Teresa read us a book about a mouse.”

Thank God she said it was a mouse, because you didn’t want to be the one to guess what the two oblong circles on the page were.

Adorably, she filled you in on the parts of the story she remembered, and added a triangle of yellow cheese under the mouse, then waited for you to prompt another thing to draw. You followed the nocturnal theme and asked for an owl. She hesitated on what colors to choose, and you helped her pick out the shades of brown and tan.

“How old are you?” you asked while she inundated her bird with too many feathers.

“Four-and-a-half,” she said proudly. “How old are you?”

You raised your brows. “Certainly not four-and-a-half.”

At some point, your arm had wrapped itself around her. Maybe to help shift her closer to the desk. Maybe to collect her in a pseudo-hug when she completed her art. Maybe to let Eddie know everything was okay when he craned his neck to check on you while conversing with the man outside, and you put on your best face, grinning at the story his daughter reenacted about a cartoon she watched that morning at preschool.

“What next? What next?”

“Let’s see.. Can you draw me a bat?”

She was more sure of herself, grabbing the black pencil and outlining an entire colony of bats mid-flight with more attention to detail. “My daddy has bats.”

“He has bats?” you questioned, sweeping loose hair out of her face.

She pointed to her elbow.

Thinking on it for a moment, you perked up. “Oh! He has tattoos?” She recognized the word, nodding vigorously. “Interesting, interesting.”

She’d hardly begun to fill in their wings when Eddie opened the door, and held up the comically small backpack slung on his arm, signaling it was time to leave.

You helped her down from the chair, and she excused herself to the bathroom, which only contributed to the awkward silence when she disappeared down the hall and Eddie was forced to wait at your desk.

It didn’t have to be analyzed, nor stated. The reality.

He had an entire life outside of work.

Duh. Of course he did, but still. It was one he never shared with you. Not like you earned the privilege to know, or to be included in anything he didn’t want to divulge, but with how private he was, it came as a surprise.

Invoking the thousands of dollars you spent on acting classes, you moved on, and kept your tone light, “The butterfly backpack suits you. Not sure about the color, though. Bright pink clashes with your navy blue outfit.”

Tough crowd.

His sulky demeanor permeated in his dull gaze trained on his stained sleeves. “I’m sorry.”

“What for?”

“Dumping her on you like that. Normally my uncle has the day off work and can take care of her, but he’s gotta go in because someone called out sick, so, yeah..”

If it were at all appropriate, you would reach across the countertop to soothe him from picking at his torn cuticles. But it wasn’t appropriate. So you didn’t.

You locked your hands behind your head and leaned back in your chair. “Funnily enough, I worked a brief stint as a clown for children’s birthday parties, so I’m actually quite comfortable entertaining them.”

“I’m shocked,” he said, void of shock. Finding the strength to lift his eyes from the animals she drew on your sketchpad to the encouraging curve of your lips, he tried to match your grin, but it fell flat. “At least you can go home on time today.”

You sucked in a breath for a quick retort, but Adrie interrupted you in her tiny voice, “Daddy! I can’t reach the sink!” And maybe that was for the best before you humiliated yourself more.

Because, the truth of the matter was, you always had the ability to go home on time. It was only because Eddie stayed behind that you made excuses to sit at your desk past your scheduled hours, prattling off some nonsense about memorizing the catalog.

“C’mon,” he said to his daughter, supporting her on his hip. “Let’s get going.” His tone wasn’t unkind, but it wasn’t exactly patient, either. The creeping exhaustion he kept under wraps was breaking through. Stress fractures in the mask he wore around others. The sanity he gripped for dear life for the sake of Adrie.

He caught the empathetic pinch between your brows, and used the last of his energy to turn so his daughter could see you. “Say ‘bye,’ and ‘thank you’ for playing, Adrie.”

She waved with the same enthusiasm as a golden retriever wagging their tail. “Bye! Thank you!”

“Bye, Adrie,” you laughed. “Bye, Eddie.”

Like usual, he didn’t respond. Today that was okay.

————

Eddie was on the verge. He was trembling, failing to loosen a bolt on the water heater to investigate why it broke–again–when his hair was yanked–again–and his knuckles scraped a bent piece of metal–again.

He was kneeling on his kitchen floor, craving nothing more than a shower to wash away the work week until his skin burned, but he was not afforded the simple luxury.

No relaxation. Not for him. No one to call on when Wayne was gone. This was his life to fix. On his own.

After repairing cars all day, he was exhausted. Touched out. But Adrie needed something from him, something he couldn’t understand with his tired mind. All he wanted was a break. All he needed was a break from her using his coveralls to scale his body. All he sought was the energy to deal with her pulling his hair.

But he was not spared the fortune.

“Adrie, please,” he resorted to begging. And when she didn’t stop, he withdrew his arms from the closet, and pried her hands off his hair, peeling her away and setting her on the floor.

She made to grab him again, but he used his waning strength to squeeze her arms to her sides, giving her his full attention she fought for.

“Can I get you a snack? Or put something on the TV? Do you want a nap?” He listed off anything, shaking and desperate.

“I wanna play with Daddy.”

Guilt amplified the shame.

He was a shit dad. He knew. He did his best and it was never good enough.

“I know you do,” the words fluctuated in the wake of water stinging his eyes. “I know you do, but Daddy needs to fix this. I can make you a snack and you can eat it in the living room. How ‘bout that?” Under normal circumstances, that wasn’t allowed. She had a penchant for dropping sticky food on the carpet–which was just another thing he’d have to get around to cleaning–but he was willing to bend the rules for the promise of a shower.

Adrienne thought about his offer for a long while, and settled on his deal.

And yet, it was hours.. hours until he was able to sit down.

The water heater required more service than he initially thought, and his daughter wasn’t entertained by herself for very long. She came to him in intervals of minutes, climbing up his back and hanging from his neck. He stopped caring. He didn’t have it within him. He made sure she was safe, and that was it.

He fed her a dreadful dinner, and she was so happy for her overcooked noodles in pasta sauce. He saved the leftovers. Put them in the nearly-empty fridge and took out two beers for himself, cracking the tops before sinking into the couch.

Adrienne stood between his legs while he wrapped her in her favorite blanket, and placed her in his lap. The top half of his coveralls were tied by the sleeves around his waist. No matter how dirty he was, this was how they ended the night. Him staring blankly at the TV, and her cheek on his chest, ear pressed to his white tank top, listening to his heartbeat. Curling her fists into her tattered quilt in response to him nuzzling the top of her head, and resting there in a content hum. Closing his eyes. Turning off his brain. Tipping back swigs of beer until he felt better, and giving her kisses until she giggled and squirmed.

The kisses were as much for her as they were for him, giving and receiving the only affection in his life. Apologizing for earlier when he couldn’t stand to be touched.

Her hug was small, yet powerful. Clumsy, but what he needed. Another person to gather in his arms and have their weight fall asleep on his chest.

He collected Adrie, and gave her a few more doting kisses while carrying her to bed.

“Stay, Daddy.”

Sometimes he did, just to have a real bed to sleep in, but with how long it took to fix the water heater, there was only enough hot water to bathe her. He’d have to wait until the morning.

“Not tonight, Daddy’s still dirty from work.”

It hurt to walk away. It hurt more to sleep on the lumpy couch. Hurt worse when Wayne came home to crash on the roll out bed, and the sun funneled through the windows, and the day started all over again.

Hurt the most when Eddie thought about the surprised look on your face when you learned he had a daughter.

Hurt the least when he imagined a world in which you wouldn’t care, and still flirted with him come Monday morning, because fuck, it was the only thing he looked forward to after Adrie’s meltdowns on the way to school.

#eddie munson x reader #eddie munson #stranger things #eddie x reader #eddie munson smut #mechanic!eddie #eddie munson fanfic #stranger things fanfic #the yes policy

9K notes · View notes

apuckishwit · 1 year

Text

Making Room

Steve never gets into DnD.

Not even after Eddie convinces him to join a one-shot over one Christmas when the kids are all back from college and jobs and far-flung adventures. He's not a jerk about it or anything. He sits and makes a character with his boyfriend and he does his best with the role-playing and he only asks Dustin for help with the dice seven or eight times (and everyone had promised to give him an even dozen before they gave him shit about it, so it was fine). It's fine. He's not mad that he spent the time doing it with Eddie and the kids (some of them taller than him now, in spitting distance of college degrees and first apartments and jobs and spouses and lives, but they'll always be kids to him).

But afterwards he kisses Eddie and says it really and truly isn't for him, sorry babe.

And that's okay.

When he and Robin are scavenging through yet another thrift store for furniture and dishes and lamps for the apartment she and Nancy are getting in Indianapolis (he's so sad that her room in the little house he shares with Eddie is going back to being a guest room, but he's so damn happy that she and Nance have stopped dancing around each other...and they're only moving about half an hour away, he'll still see her all the time), and he spots an impractically long desk/table, onviously custom-built, with an absurd number of drawers and compartments built into it, he buys it immediately. He wrestles it into Eddie's van that they borrowed for the day, and smiles apologetically when Robin has to hold like three boxes on her lap. He gets it into their dining room while Eddie's at work, graciously gifting their own table to Robin and Nancy, and it's worth all the hassle (and the fact that one end of the table pokes about a foot into the living room space) when Eddie comes home to something big enough for even his most complicated campaign maps and with plenty of storage for all his dice and miniatures and source books.

And sturdy enough for Eddie's most...enthusiastic...thanks, they find out that night.

Steve never gets into DnD.

But every time Hellfire (whatever incarnation of Hellfire it is, be it the Hawkins crew or some of the guys from the little record shop Eddie works at in town, or some combination) meets up for a game, they get used to Eddie yelling, "Stevie! Evens or odds?" everytime a situation calls for a luck die. They learn that complimenting the snacks Steve sets out will sometimes get them advantage on a roll. They watch Eddie snag Steve's wrist as he passes in or out of the dining room and get him to roll a D20 for various and random reasons. Steve always obliges, before drifting back to the couch with a beer or a slice of pizza and whatever basketball or baseball game is on.

Steve never gets into DnD.

But sometimes Eddie spreads newspapers over the Campaign Table (TM) and sets pots of paint and rows of miniatures out, and he and Steve sit together for a few hours, Steve slapping on the basecoats with a single pot of white, gray, or black and Eddie going to town on the details while they chat about their day, playing footsie under the table or stealing kisses while they wait for something to dry.

"Babe! I need a name for the friendly barkeep who knows more than he seems!"

"Carl."

"He's a half-orc!"

"Those are the big green guys, right?"

"Yeah!"

"Hmmm. Big Carl."

"Perfect!"

Steve never gets into DnD. But he loves Eddie, and he loves how into DnD Eddie is. So he makes room in his life for this thing that Eddie loves.

***

Eddie never gets into sports.

Like, objectively he understands that some people enjoy running around getting all sweaty, trying to keep some kind of ball away from other people and make it go into some kind of receptacle. And he certainly appreciates the view of some of those people in tight little shorts.

Particularly Steve.

Like honestly? If it wouldn't get him labeled a total creep (and they weren't so careful about giving anyone a reason to question the assumption that they're just two young friends living together to save money until they find respectable women to marry)...he'd park his van out by the little middle school where Steve teaches gym and coaches basketball and baseball every day during his lunch break, just to watch his boyfriend run the mile with his students in those shorts that hug the muscles of his thighs just right.

But he doesn't like sports apart from the strictly prurient interest he has in watching Steve wear sports-appropriate clothes.

He tries. He wants to know just what it is that keeps Steve glued to the TV when his favorite teams are playing, wants to understand why Steve yells and groans and jumps up with wild cheers, spilling popcorn all over the living room floor. He just...doesn't get it. Steve tries to explain March Madness to him one year and it makes no more sense than when Wayne tried to when Eddie was a kid. Eventually he just shrugs, kisses Steve's nose, and goes back to petting through his boyfriend's hair with a, sorry, baby, it's not for me.

And that's okay.

He gets up early the week Steve is overseeing baseball tryouts, to make sure his boyfriend has a travel mug of coffee fixed just the way he likes it, and a good breakfast waiting for him when he gets out of the shower. Steve is unquestionably the cook in their relationship, but Young Eddie ate a lot of breakfast for dinner over the years and Adult Eddie makes damn good pancakes, omelettes, and French toast.

Eddie never gets into sports.

But he gets Lucas to break down exactly what kind of notes and stats Steve will be keeping track of and draws up a template "character sheet" for baseball players, spending an hour at the local library laboriously making copies with their cantankerous mimeograph machine.

He sure as shit never gets up at the crack of dawn to go running around the neighborhood the way Steve does...but on days when it starts raining or snowing halfway through Steve's run, he'll drag himself out of bed and throw some towels in the dryer, so they're nice and warm when Steve comes back inside.

Eddie never gets into sports.

But he takes every overtime shift he can for a month, so he can take Steve to Chicago for his twenty-fifth birthday to see the Bulls play. The seats aren't great or anything, and it's noisy as fuck, crowded as fuck, and he has no idea why his boyfriend is losing his mind every time that Jordan guy so much as touches the ball...but Steve's eyes are sparkling, the color is high in his cheeks, and when they get back to their hotel that night, they've barely closed the door before Steve is shoving him against it, devouring his mouth.

"Hey Eds, Ohio State or Georgia Tech?"

"For what?"

"I'm doing my brackets for the pool I've got with Hopper and Lucas!"

"Um, whoever's in red!"

"Ohio State it is, thanks babe!"

Eddie never gets into sports. But that's okay. He loves Steve, and he loves how happy Steve is when he's playing, or coaching, or running (God help him, he fell in love with someone who gets up at six am to run. Without anything chasing him.) So he makes room in his life for this thing that Steve loves.

Because certainly, love grows in shared passions and matching interests. But it also flourishes in the carefully tended space you make just for the things that make your person happy...even if it's just not for you.

#steddie #stranger things #stranger things fic #steve harrington #eddie munson #my wriitng #I dunno i was just feeling soft

3K notes · View notes

kitkatpancakestack · 2 months

Text

You think it's gonna be Eddie approaching Buck for sage dating advice but it actually ends up being Buck and Eddie spiraling together into parental insanity and then cue Christopher Dating Montage but Buck and Eddie are together in the background of all the scenes wearing nondescript baseball caps and hiding behind big potted plants and pretending to read a newspaper that's clearly upside down and just generally being overanxious dummies about the whole thing <3

#had anyone said this yet #911 spec #buddie #k spirals

470 notes · View notes

rustedhearts · 9 months

Text

Raise Hell (Nascar!Steve x fem!reader)

summary: nascar driver steve harrington is a hot mess. literally. but when he keeps coming into your diner, staggeringly drunk and adorable, you can’t help but grow fond of him.

uses she/her pronouns and female anatomy.

hot wheels masterlist main masterlist

tags: nascar!steve, reader is referred to as ‘bunny,’ just fluff and flirting.

author’s note: i don’t know much about the mechanics of nascar because i’m more of a formula one fan, so some of the racing terms/descriptions might seem a bit more f1. sorry!

raise hell, praise…harrington?

talladega, alabama, summer 1995

In Talladega, a girl’s got two things to be: a country beauty queen, or stuck at her high school job. Stupid or stuck. You were stuck—specifically, stuck balancing trays of sweet teas and cokes, and burning your palms on the underside of steaming hot burgers and flapjacks. Stuck in the same stupid powder blue uniform and frilly lace apron you’d been swearing since you were seventeen. Sometimes, you started to wonder if you were no longer stuck—just plain stupid.

But two years ago, Nascar saw a new face on the tracks: one Steve Harrington. Donned ‘Pretty Boy’ for his princely good looks and boyish charm, he burned rubber like nobody’s business, and Alabama’s been in an uproar ever since. You normally didn’t welcome midwestern men with such open and loving arms in a place like this, but as the folks say: he’s one of us, honey.

And one of you he became. He even had the slight slur of a southern twang to prove it, and you came to hear it firsthand when he sat at the end of your counter one night last October, bleary-eyed and pink-cheeked.

“What can I get you, Hot Wheels?” You hadn’t meant for the name to slip, but once it was out there, you couldn’t take it back.

Luckily, Steve just laughed. Slumped on his palm, draped over the counter full of old crumbs and sticky syrup, he pointed toward a laminated menu beside him.

“You guys sell fries?”

You gave him a basket of hot, golden french fries fresh out of the fryer, salted to perfection by yours truly. When Steve saw them sitting in front of him, practically overflowing in their red plastic, newspaper-lined confines, his eyes got huge. He devoured the basket in five minutes flat. You turned your back to clean the coffee pot, and when you went to check on him, offer a glass of water to rouse him from drunken stupor, he was gone.

Sitting in his empty, grease-splattered basket were two hundred dollar bills. It’s still the largest tip you’ve ever gotten on such a small bill to date (or…on any bill).

When Steve Harrington stopped by the diner, you went home with a thicker wallet, a swollen heart, and a burning blush on your face.

You always heard his arrival before you saw his face. The smooth, low grumble of his Ferrari engine. His headlights blared through the blinds on the diner windows, whipping with effortless expertise into the front spot near the door. The headlights cut off, and moments later the door chimed as his lean figure stumbled through.

Designer sneakers scuffing the floor, black leather racing jacket with endorsement patches ironed on neat gleaming beneath the white fluorescents of the diner. He smelled like gasoline and boozy cologne—or maybe that was just the booze. Steve's favorite bar was just up the road: a swanky wood-paneled joint with a mechanical bull, and girls just out of college in skimpy denim shorts and leather cowboy boots. He always left with pink-tinged cheeks and a sway in his step, and though you disapproved of getting behind the wheel under the influence, you didn't mind that he raced all the way here just to get to you.

Tonight, like every night, he strode straight toward the counter and took his seat on a squeaky metal stool at the end.

He patted the counter, shot a finger gun at you, and smiled a half-cocked grin. "Hey, pretty girl."

Cheeks blazing, you rolled your eyes as you collected the coffee pot—freshly brewed just for him—and his basket of sizzling, golden fries. You placed the fries in front of him and flipped over a porcelain mug, pouring a steady stream until it pooled around the rim. No room for cream or sugar: how Steve liked it best. He was already five fries in by the time you placed the coffee pot back.

"Hey, Hot Wheels. Catch anythin' good tonight?"

Elbows pressed against the counter, you leaned over the stack of sticky menus and extra ketchup bottles to flash him your sweetest smile. You always laid it on real thick for guys like him. None of 'em tipped like Steve did, and none of 'em were nearly as handsome. None of 'em made you laugh like Steve did. Jesus, how stupid was that?

"Nothin' worth bringin' home, Bun," Steve sighed, head falling to his palm as his fingers made quick work of delivering fries straight to his mouth.

"Better luck next time." You shrugged, though you knew what this game was.

"No," Steve mused, eyes narrowed with a twinkle of mockery, lips coated in shiny grease and flecks of salt. "No, I don't think so. Know who I'd love to take out, though?"

You pulled away from the counter, that familiar flutter in your chest. You reached for the damp rag previously soaked in lemon sanitizing spray, wiping at the crumbs behind the counter. Steve always came in right when you were closing up. The first time he stumbled in, you threatened to kick him out, but something about those stupid puppy dog eyes and that sly, halfway smile made you stop. You always agreed to close on weekends, just to stay back and clean up after the strays and Steve Harrington. The diner was quiet, only the buzz of old lights and the distant whoosh of cars on the road keeping you company until he appeared.

"Who?" you asked, eyes flicking his way as he munched on his fries. The newspaper in his basket crinkled with his eager snatching.

Steve lifted his head, movements slow and bleary, and in your periphery, you could see it follow your every motion. His jacket made his shoulders look broad and big. You could smell the cigarette remnants still on his hands when you moved in front of him again.

"Come on, Bun," he huffed, that poor, sweet attempt at an Alabama drawl clinging to every word. The way he said your given nickname made your heart squeeze.

"Come on, what?" You flashed him a smile, pursed lips and scrunched nose, and he shook his head amusedly at it. He thought you were so beautiful, even in this ridiculous 1950s getup, hair frazzled and face gleaming with heat.

"When are you gonna let me take you out, sweetheart?" he pouted, hand bumping his empty, grease-stained basket when he dropped it to the counter.

Though your insides were stirring and the back of your neck felt like someone was giving it a pinch, you spun on your heel and reached for the coffee pot again, feigning an air of cool ease. You never wanted a man to have the upper hand on you, no matter how pretty that man might be. Your daddy taught you better than that.

Pressing close to the counter, you held the pot midway in the air, hovering, and caught Steve's eye. His were all whiskey brown and muddy green, more hazel than anything. It was only at this moment that you heard the Willie Nelson song humming on the jukebox in the corner. His lips parted when your eyes narrowed, catlike and dreamily charming.

You inched closer, leaning in like you were fixing to whisper a secret. "When you come in sober, Mr. Harrington."

You topped off his untouched coffee, placed the pot back, and sashayed toward the tables to wipe them down (for the second time tonight). Behind you at the counter, Steve gnawed on his lip, head tipping to admire the backs of your thighs where they caught the plump flesh of your ass beneath your shorts. He scoffed to himself, snatching the mug thrumming with heat, slurping at the potent black liquid.

If sober was what you wanted, sober you would get.

♡ ♡

Nascar was always on channel two, and when your manager Rod was working, he insisted on playing it on the tiny television behind the counter. He paced between the office in the sticky kitchen and the space behind the counter, munching on peanuts and sipping a jumbo Pepsi from the morning.

"Rod, maybe you should have somethin' else to eat." You whooshed a platter of burgers and fries over his head as you rushed toward your table.

"Nah, I'm waitin' for that-that Harrin'ton kid to come on," he excused, motioning toward the tv with a salted peanut palm.

You bit back a grin, sliding the plates onto the table for your eager customers. Wiping your hands on your apron, you headed back to the counter and leaned on the other side.

"What, excited to watch his engine crap out again?” you teased, giggling at Rod’s offended expression before flouncing off toward the kitchen for your break.

“That kid might not be from here, but he’s one of us now, Bunny!” Rod called after you, accent thick and slurred loose.

You waved a hand, eyes rolling. “Why d’ you think I give him such a hard time, Rod?”

You heard his hoarse chuckle as you hopped up on the empty steel tabletop in the kitchen, snatching a soggy fry from a half-empty basket. The cooks all murmured about a table that sent back a burger (there’s always one), and asked you about your shift today. The occasional ‘how are the kids,’ and ‘your garden holding up well in this heat?’ ensued, but most of them knew that when you had a moment to yourself back here, you preferred it in silence.

Billy, a line cook a few years older than yourself, whizzed by with a greasy silver spatula and a plate of perfect, crispy grilled cheese. He slipped it onto your lap as he passed, eye dropping in a wink, before he returned to the grill. You grinned in thanks, picking up the warm, shiny sandwich.

You were halfway through the first triangular slice when a holler jolted you on the table. You dropped the slice, rushing to place the plate on the table and skitter into the dining room again. Head whipping around, you searched for some sort of disaster—a hurt child, a choking customer—and found Rod screaming at the television, red-faced and glistening with sweat.

Huffing, you collapsed against the counter. “Rod, what the hell?”

Rod didn’t tear his eyes away from the television as he smacked his hands together. “Aw, come on! His car’s crappin’ out, he’s gon’ have t’ leave the race.”

You shifted toward the television, preparing to scoff at the urgency of Rod’s statement when sparks skidded over the track on the screen. Even in their pixelated form, the sparks were bright and sharp as a firework on independence day. You watched the cherry red car bounce, jostling the driver inside—clear cause for a biting backache. The car veered left, then right, then toward the off track where Steve stopped it.

Rod cursed, slapping his knee and shaking his head.

“Got-damnit,” he shrilled, easing up from the stool. “When’re they gonna put ‘im in a car that actually drives?”

Rolling your eyes and attempting to ignore the ball of worry the size of Texas aching in your chest, you slid away from the counter and headed back toward the kitchen where your food waited.

“When are you gonna get t’ work, Rod?”

“Eh.”

♡ ♡

That night, you soaked the linoleum in lemon cleaner and scrubbed at the vinyl booths, lights dimmed to keep customer count low until you actually closed. Rod left a few hours ago, and only a handful of cooks lingered in the back, shooting the shit and sharing smokes. You liked having the dining room to yourself while you closed up, humming along the radio and watching the road through the windows. You fantasized about a life with enough money to never wipe a table again.

Given the day he had on the track, the last person you expected to see that night was Steve Harrington. So when the door chimed open and shoes squeaked across the freshly-cleaned tile, you whirled around with a customer-approved smile in preparation for a sweet but curt “we’re about to close.” However, the customer service facade dimmed at the sight of that familiar pretty face and those colorful ironed-on insignias.

“Hey, Bun.” He sounded breathless and beat.

"Hey," you squeaked, dumbfounded by the sight of him.

The outline of his helmet still sat on his face: aggravated red lines indented around his eyes, across his cheeks and nose. His hands, Ferrari-red and raw, trembled as they swept through his tousled hair. "Mind if I sit, Bun? Long day."

Which is how he ended up slumped in a clean booth, head of slick locks thumped against the glass. It felt odd to see him in an actual seat instead of his usual at the bar, but he needed the rest. You could only imagine the sort of strain a car going 200 miles an hour while jerking around had on someone.

You slipped into the kitchen, and with a meek and quiet plead, had the cooks make one last batch of fries fresh for Steve before they left. Just enough for the driver to get his strength back up and feel at home again. The fried pile of grease glistened and sizzled in their plastic confinement on the way out of the kitchen, a cold glass of Pepsi fizzing in your other hand.

You brought them to the man still drooped in the furthest booth, head tipping to find his eyes. "Steve?"

"Hmm?" Blearily, the racer sat upright and blinked at you.

Flashing him a fond smile, you pushed the basket of fries closer to him. "Food."

"Oh."

He munched on the crispy golden potatoes for a while in silence. The back door clinked with the absence of cooks. You thought about getting up to flip the sign over to 'sorry we're closed!' but you couldn't find it in yourself to leave the table. Eventually, you slid into the booth across from him and watched him eat. He sucked down the Pepsi through a striped straw like a toddler gulping apple juice.

"Why did you come here tonight? I mean...you're in no shape, Hot Wheels," you remarked, watching him rub his fingers free of salt.

Steve's eyes flickered toward you below his brows, chin tipped toward his food. He straightened up when he saw you watching, giving his shoulders a shrug. He smelled like scorched rubber, gasoline, and a bit of bourbon-whisky.

"Had a shit day," he muttered, eyes returning to his fries with urgency. "Knew seein’ you would cheer me up."

A flutter disrupted the rhythm thumping in your chest. You felt it in your throat, too, settling like indigestion. You swallowed harshly to clear it away, easing the wonderment in your face with a little grin. Steve went back to finishing the thin strips of fry remnants sitting at the bottom of his basket.

Stripped free of liquored charm and that 'pretty boy' suave, Steve Harrington actually seemed...sweet.

"Hey, Hot Wheels?"

Steve looked up, lips glassy with grease. "Yeah?"

"You can take me on that date now."

♡ ♡

1K notes · View notes

swirlingthings · 6 months

Text

so… i accidentally wrote an entire scene based off an idea i posted on here about a month ago. it brought itself into existence honestly, i’m still not sure how it happened. never written anything like this before. it’s called ‘alien thing’. see if you can work it out before aziraphale does. enjoy :)

And perhaps, after a while, the team at the Saddlescombe and Poynings Observer newspaper office would be alarmed to discover that the crossword they had devised for today’s edition had mysteriously been replaced by one that nobody recalled sending to the printing press, or indeed seeing before at all. And in a cottage not too far away, Aziraphale would settle down into the sofa with the paper like he always did at this time of the afternoon; his slice of cake (Victoria Sponge today - “you can’t go wrong with a classic like that”, he’d told Crowley in the supermarket), his mug of tea and an HB pencil ready for him on the side table. And Crowley, on the sofa next to him holding a small book which had been miracled into existence the moment Aziraphale had gotten up to fetch the newspaper, would be so intent on doing everything possible to not look in the angel’s direction that he’d stare too hard at the potted plant across the room and cause it to wilt.

“How odd.” Aziraphale says, ruffling the page slightly as if he were testing to see if moving it would somehow change the way it was printed.

“What?” Crowley says, calmly. He was incredibly calm when he said this, calmly.

“This crossword.” Aziraphale replies, brow furrowing. “I think… look, look at this.”

Aziraphale shuffles across to the middle of the sofa, holding his arm out in front of Crowley so that he could see the newspaper clearly.

“Look. Here.” Aziraphale points with his pencil. “5 Down, six letters: ‘Luminescent dust between star systems’. I think it’s NEBULA.”

“Sounds plausible.” says Crowley, his eyes not moving away from the paper.

“Well, that’s not all. NEBULA gives us the ‘B’ for 12 Across, eight letters: ‘Parisian fortress’, which must be BASTILLE.” The pencil moves down and waves around a clue, then shoots back up again. “And the ‘E’ from that gives us SERPENT for 10 Down! Isn’t that funny?” Aziraphale says brightly. He looks up and beams at Crowley, who is still staring directly at the paper.

“Why’s that funny?”

“Well…” says the angel, his smile turning peaceful. “I don’t know. It just made me think of you, I suppose. What with your being a serpent in Eden, and rescuing me from the Bastille. And the nebulas, from Before…” Aziraphale laughs softly and settles back on his side of the sofa. “I don’t know. I’m being silly. I just thought it was funny.” he says, running a hand through his hair and picking up his mug.

And perhaps the minutes would pass, and Aziraphale would think between sips of tea and scribbles of pencil that there really was something rather odd about this crossword, wasn’t there? 17 Down, eight letters: ‘Machine run by rotating vanes’. WINDMILL. That was the name of the theatre in Soho where he had performed his magic show. Crowley had almost shot him. They’d had wine afterwards, in the bookshop. 2 Across, seven letters: ‘Remarkable and unbelievable occurrence’. That had to be MIRACLE. 21 Across, five letters: ‘Japanese vinegared rice dish’. SUSHI. His favourite.

And Crowley would sit excruciatingly still, in absolute silence, and make no attempt to actually read the book he was holding open in his lap. He would be far too busy trying to look cool.

“Crowley…” Aziraphale looks up at him, after a while, another smile creeping across his face. “26 Across is INEFFABLE.”

“Oh? You stuck?” Crowley says, stretching out his legs and keeping his gaze fixed on a page of the book. Wait… was he holding it upside down?

“What?”

“Well, if it’s ineffable you can’t describe it in words, can you? So you don’t have the answer?” Crowley slithers down the sofa cushion and holds the book in front of his face. He’s a very busy demon with important things to be busy with. “Finding the word’s the whole point of a crossword. You must be stuck.”

“No, I mean the answer is INEFFABLE, Crowley.” Aziraphale’s smile spreads wider. “You know full well what I mean!” he said, nudging him sharply with his feet. Another “Oh?” emanates from somewhere behind the book, which Aziraphale grabs and puts to one side.

“What on Earth have you done?” he laughs, his eyes first on Crowley then returning to the paper. “14 Down: ‘A small settlement without a church’... HAMLET! Oh Crowley, the play!” he says, jotting it down with the pencil.

Crowley smiles too. “How are you doing on the letters?”

“Yes, it’s six letters, HAMLET.”

“No, I mean the letters in bold. In the boxes. For the final bit.”

Aziraphale looks back at the paper, and notices that around a few of the letters he had already pencilled in, the margins of the boxes were heavier than the rest.

“It’s a puzzle thing. What’s it called… an anagram.” Crowley continues, leaning over on one arm and turning to face him. “Look at the letters in bold and it makes something else.”

Aziraphale gasps excitedly, and starts to note down the emphasised letters in a patch of empty space towards the bottom of the page. The ‘A’ from BASTILLE, the ‘E’ from SERPENT, the ‘L’ from NEBULA…

“Crowley…” he says smugly, and proudly folds the paper to his chest to indicate he is finished with it. “Is it AZIRAPHALE?”

“Don’t just guess. Work it out.” Crowley says gently. Aziraphale’s pencil resumes its scratching against the paper. He wonders how he ever lived in his flat in Mayfair, void of this softness and this warmth and this angel. They’ve been in the cottage now for a good few years. It’s all the things he loved about Aziraphale’s bookshop, with the added bonus of never worrying if he’s overstayed his welcome. It’s theirs, together, completely. He’s forgotten he was ever holding a book, let alone supposed to be busy doing something else, like trying to look cool.

“Oh, no, there’s the N from WINDMILL.” Aziraphale mutters, leaning forward to write on the paper which is now resting neatly on his knees. “Unless… I was wrong about that one?”

“Don’t look at me, I’m saying nothing.”

“No, I’m not wrong. Hold on.”

Crowley sits up a bit more, putting his elbow on the back of the sofa cushion and leaning the side of his head against his hand. He listened to Aziraphale continuing on - “I’ve got ALIEN. Hmm, wait…” - while he curled up his legs underneath himself. His nerves had eased slightly (Aziraphale’s smile had that effect on him) but had not dissipated.

“INHALE? No, no, there’s two ‘I’s. Oh, I’m still missing some!” Aziraphale says. There was another comfortable pause while he scanned the remaining clues.

“Right. 6 Across must be… PEAR. I love pears. That one doesn’t get us any further with the anagram, though.” Aziraphale says, looking over at Crowley as if he were learning this for the first time and might be disappointed by the news. As if he hadn’t snuck downstairs in the middle of the night on three separate occasions last week to draft every detail in a notebook which promptly ceased to exist once he’d finalised his plan. He’d sent off the miracle at one in the morning.

“16 Across, ten letters: ‘Destruction of civilisation’. Well, that’s rather dramatic.” Aziraphale looks up, a tad disapprovingly. “APOCALYPSE? No, that doesn’t fit with HALO - the penultimate letter must... oh, ARMAGEDDON! Of course. Wonderful! That gives us a second ‘N’.” he says triumphantly.

“Aren’t you clever.” Crowley says, which earns him another sharp nudge in the thigh.

“And then we have the ‘G’ from GARDEN, which gives us… the ‘T’, from BENTLEY. Is it definitely not ALIEN, then? I’ve got ALIEN THING.”

“No, angel, it’s not ALIEN THING. Stop guessing. You’re still missing some, look at it carefully.”

There’s another patch of silence. Crowley shifts uncomfortably on the cushion, unfurling his legs and stretching them out over the edge of the sofa again. He scratches the back of his head and resumes staring at the now fully wilted plant opposite him. His nerves are back. Not long to go now. Aziraphale’s clever, really clever, and he does one of these things every aftern-

As if on cue, the angel suddenly sits bolt upright.

The silence hangs in the air. Questions like ‘Why did I think this was a good idea?’ and ‘How am I going to pretend this never happened?’ start to creep into Crowley’s brain. His face feels hot.

“Oh, Crowley…” Aziraphale says, with almost palpable softness. Crowley dares to glance over: Aziraphale’s holding the paper with both hands and looking down at it, eyes beginning to water.

“Crowley…” he says again, frantically scanning every inch of the paper. He wants to be sure he’s right before he says anything. Crowley knows he will be, and briefly considers whether he could get away with stopping time, but it’s too late for that now.

“It’s NIGHTINGALES.”

Aziraphale looks up at him.

“Is it?” Crowley says, in a tone which he hoped sounded like he actually was learning this for the first time.

“Oh Crowley!”

He suddenly finds himself pressed against various layers of linen and wool.

“You sweetheart!” Aziraphale squeals, as he pulls him up from the sofa cushion and into the hug.

Crowley’s growl is muffled slightly by Aziraphale’s shoulder. “I’m not sweet, I-” Whatever he tried to say next would surely be drowned out by Aziraphale’s laughter anyway, so he lets it go.

“You’re so clever.” Azirpahale says, settling himself directly beside Crowley and reaching for the paper, which he had flung to the floor when he’d moved. He looks over it again. “It must have taken forever, to work out all of that.”

“Nah. It was nothing, angel.”

Aziraphale smiles at the paper. “Well, I am thoroughly impressed. I…” He turns to look Crowley in the eyes. “I should have worked it out sooner than that. I didn’t… I didn’t realise that’s what you were trying to say. That that was the point of it, I mean.”

“Don’t worry. I knew you’d get them all.”

“That was very romantic of you, you know. To do all of that and have it be about us.”

“Shut up.”

“Well, it was.” Aziraphale smugly folds the paper in half. “I love you too.”

“Yeah, yeah, alright. Make my day.”

He gets a kiss on the cheek for that.

“Gosh, I expect the rest of my tea has gone a bit cold now.” Aziraphale says, without any trace of complaint. He wiggles back over to his side of the sofa and has a forkful of cake. “Well, that was exciting. I didn’t know they let people submit their own crosswords.”

There was a pause.

“Crowley.”

“It’ll be fine.”

“Oh Crowley no, that’s awful. You should have asked for their permission.”

“Don’t worry.” He smiles at Aziraphale. “They won’t notice.”

the end :))

#good omens #good omens 2 #aziraphale #crowley #aziracrow #ineffable husbands #good omens story #well… it’s a fic really isn’t it #good omens fic

746 notes · View notes