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hitlikehammers · 3 months

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a Valentine's-flavoured cuddly-loose-lipped-secret-spilling-hopped-up-on-cold-medicine!Eddie

(and his ever-devoted boyfriend Steve who he's been crushing on since high school but that part's a secret was a secret)

for @thoroughlycollected: featuring the (actually kind of horrible) way schools would sell carnations for $1 or something for Valentine's Day to anonymously deliver to your crush

It turns out that Eddie under the influence comes in a variety of flavors.

High Eddie is languid, touchier than he’s normally prone to which is fucking saying something, and weirdly philosophical. He talks about alternate universes beyond the Upside Down as a meta-something concept. He theorizes how maybe he died in another dimension but some weird particle-subversion-something-something-whatever couldn’t survive re-sublimation in the Right-Side-Up and honestly when the big-brain bullshit skirts the edges of Eddie’s mortality Steve is here for all of none of that part, because Eddie’s heart was beating under Steve’s hands the whole goddamn time, sometimes maybe coaxed by Steve’s hands but from the moment Steve found him and Dustin to the moment he let go at the hospital he didn’t not feel Eddie’s heart beating, and he knew that not least because he would have come apart at the seams if that’s happened, he would have crumbled entirely for losing, or almost-losing, or thinking even close to losing the potential, the promise between them they’d barely skirted but that’d rooted heavy and at home in Steve’s chest already and fuck, fuck—

When Eddie philosophizes in general usually Steve just hangs on his every word, mesmerized by the beauty of him top of bottom, inside and out: somehow all Steve’s. But when his philosophizing leans toward that Steve’s own heartbeat does some weird shit that the weed can’t claim whole credit for and he grabs Eddie hard every time and kisses him until he’s dizzy with it, until they both are, until Eddie’s reduced just to blinking for at least five whole minutes and by that point High Eddie’s on to another topic altogether.

Which is for the best.

By comparison: Drunk Eddie is a lovelorn bastard, a little bit teary with it sometimes even, but always clingy and a touch extra possessive, sappier than he gets on even his most sappy days. One time he told Steve that no, he couldn’t let him go to take a piss because, and Steve remembers this word for word: there’s stardust in my body that’s in your body and that shit’s like magnets, Stevie, like magnets or whatever so my heart’s like pulled to your heart and if you go away without me ever you’ll rip my heart out—because like, a guy remembers that kind of declaration shouted into his ear over the music at a bar that’s safe enough that they’d get away with the excuse that Eddie was plastered, for the way he was hanging on Steve, but thank fuck the lighting was shitty enough that no one could see the flush on Steve’s cheeks, and thank fuck even more that no one could see his magnet-heart and how pounded something wild for the way Eddie draped over him and pressed full against his chest and nuzzled under his chin and made the kind of declarations that Steve had kinda been searching and hoping for all his life.

Drunk or not.

But then there’s another flavor, a specific one: and that’s medicated Eddie. And that Eddie, that cough-medicine-soaked-to-the-gills Eddie?

He’s an adorably giggly little fuck, is what he is.

“I’ll feel better by Saturday,” he lolls his head over to Steve’s shoulder where they sit beside one another, Eddie properly bundled in three blankets with a Sprite in hand. “Pinky-promise,” he slurs a little, but it might just be the stuffed-up nose doing the heavy lifting on garbling his words, and then fuck, of course the dipshit reaches up to seal the deal like the absolutely irresistible goofball he is, and always: snot-coated and all.

“Just rest up, babe,” Steve pulls him close with an arm around around his shoulder, dropping a firm kiss to his forehead: still warmer than Steve would like, in all honesty: “forget about Saturday,” and he means that with his whole chest, because fuck reservations and flowers and boxes of the chocolates Eddie likes best from the city—his boyfriend is sick, his boyfriend is hurting, and there is kinda not a single more important thing than that, than attending to that and making it hurt even the slightest bit less of he’s able, if it’s in his power.

“But we had,” Eddie sniffles heavily, loud and almost painful-sounding; “we had plans,” he whines, and turns toward Steve with overbright-eyes, far too watery:“our first,” he says it like it’s a heartbreak unto itself, bottom little quivering, and fuck.

Steve smiles though he hurts for Eddie right now so hard, want to take all the aching into himself it to spare this beautiful man for a fucking second, just he reaches and traces lilting patters around Eddie’s eyes, his browbone, his jaw, slow down to press soft at his lips:

“You not planning on having many more?” Steve asks soft, a little playful, a little leading: he likes to hear it, and often: that Eddie’s in this as deep and true and Steve is. For the long haul.

“All the more,” Eddie sing-songs sniffily, which is both pathetic and adorable, tugs at Steve’s heartstrings and the corners of his lips alike; “alllll of the more, Stevie-baby,” he draws out in promise, crosses his heart uncoordinated for feeling fuzzy with his cold and being fully cocooned in blankets and again: adorable and pathetic and perfect.

The man’s fucking perfect, even when he’s all stuffed-up and curled sick on the couch.

“Got you the best presents,” he adds on dreamily with a little chuckle, the high-pitched airy kind that float in the air between like bubbles; “so much better than all the other ones,” he adds kinda petulantly, pouts full around the words and maybe it’s the cough medicine, or the fuzziness Steve knows well comes with both the cold itself and the remedies to help alike; he brushes his lips against Eddie’s forehead just to be safe and Eddie giggles a little and leans full-bodied into Steve, unbalanced for the swaddling of most of his frame and that just makes him laugh all the more: he’s no more feverish than he had been, which was admittedly barely, just more than Steve liked, but: yeah.

Yeah, that’s…he kinda guesses it all could combine to have Eddie spewing kinda nonsense, and he probably should just smile and pull his boyfriend closer in his arms and cuddle him some more but he’s both curious and concerned, which turns out to be a potent mix, so:

“Other ones?”

“Mmm,” Eddie hums long and warm as he snuggles up to Steve a little closer, and Steve stretches an arm around him wholly, settles him flush to his chest: “but shh, don’t tell, okay?”

And Eddie sounds breathless, which piques Steve worry alongside the bright flush he finds on Eddie’s cheeks when he looks down: his eyes are fairly clear and…no, forehead’s still the same temperature, not clammy or anything, and Eddie’s just preening as he lazily tips his face up to receive more kisses, mostly unaware that Steve’s attentions serve any other purpose than loving on him.

And , well, no: they really don’t, it’s just the love’s multi-layered here, just now. It’s love, and it’s devotion, and it’s dedication to Eddie’s general wellbeing all wrapped into one. So: yeah.

“Swear,” Steve decides to play along, hoping for clues as to just how loopy Eddie’s ended up for one end of the sick-stick or the other; “what’s up, baby?” he draws circles over the harsh jut of Eddie’s clavicle, little massages that Eddie eats up with a dimpley grin as he sighs, back to the dreamy-tone again:

“Flowers.”

Steve buries a little smile into Eddie’s tangly tresses, because like…

“You got me flowers?”

No one’s ever really gotten Steve flowers.

“Noooo,” Eddie giggles and shakes his head under Steve’s chin as he buries closer into Steve’s chest, stretches Steve’s already mostly unbuttoned shirt out to damn well nuzzle the fuzz of curls beneath, and he makes this fucking…soft little half-whine that’s almost a purr, that vibrates straight through Steve’s ribs and his heart goddamn flutters, fucking hell—

“But that’s a great idea, can you remind Eddie tomorrow?” he pulls back with those fucking button eyes so big, as he talks about himself like he’s another person with such innocence then chuckles, burrowing against in Steve’s chest:

“I’d love to buy you good flowers, the nice kind, not the ones in a ten-gallon bucket sitting getting brown,” and his voice is all frown but…adorable, fuck, he’s such a fucking adorable drugged-up sicko, Steve can’t really handle this shit.

“And it was so sad,” he sniffles against Steve’s chest, and hell if Steve knows if it’s congestion or something like…mounting? Because he’s so sad? “The white ones, because they got brown so fast and, and,” and his words get caught up as his lungs rebel, as he sneezes, shakes from his core and Steve’s hands grab for him, tighten around him fiercely and Eddie gives into that protective instinct in Steve like clockwork, magnetic and automatic and Steve loves him so goddamn fucking much.

He presses his lips to Eddie’s temple as Eddie catches his breath and groans a little; kisses his over-warm skin just because.

“Carnations,” Eddie sniffles once he gets his bearings back enough; “are symbolssss,” he draws out long like a sloppy hiss; “of devohhh,” and he coughs a little, and pouts at being interrupted so he huffs heavier on the last syllable: “shun.”

De…devotion? Fucking…carnations?

Shit, Steve hasn’t seen a carnation, at least not knowingly; not since—

“And white ones mean pure,” Eddie rambles, all nasally but indignant anyhow, somehow; “so white carnations would be pure devotion,” and Eddie untucks himself from Steve’s chest for a second to look at him straight on with a little wobbly grin.

“You didn’t even notice, did you,” Eddie says, and there’s no sadness in it; but fuck, Steve…

Steve might fucking, like, start fucking crying.

Because he knows exactly what Eddie’s talking about, now.

“I noticed,” because it was the fucking carnations, the last time he thought about them: Hawkins High School, where they decided to hold up the horrible preteen tradition of anonymous flowers delivered for Valentine’s Day, so three people could be reminded they were the top of the fucking food chain with a pile of crushed flowers still dripping from their buckets of water, the little colored-paper tags soggy with the writing unreadable, while the rest of the school got to feel less-than when they got nothing, and Steve got more than his share even in the years after he toppled from on high in the social hierarchy, but they’d never mattered to him, they’d kinda made him feel uncomfortable. Except—and he could never explain it, but it was predictable, it happened every fucking year—in the collection of reds and pinks there was always one that stood out, all on it’s own.

A white one; Steve never even caught that they’d gone brown at the edges.

“Every year I noticed,” he exhales, and breathes Eddie in from the top of his head because, because—

Every year? Meant…meant every year. Freshman on up.

“My heart used to do this thing,” Steve murmurs against Eddie’s scalp, kinda; and yeah, it’s basically doing the same goddamn thing right now, a little trippy and dizzy and just…it’d scared him a little.

He recognizes now it’s how his chest feels when what he’s doing, where he is, who he’s with, who he holds inside tight close with him: it’s how his chest feels when what he’s doing is right.

“When I saw the white ones,” Steve whispers, and kisses against Eddie’s hair again, and again, because god; “only one person ever sent those.”

“Sometimes I’d have to run, like, hide in the gym showers so no one would know it was me,” Eddie matches his whisper, almost conspiratorial as he reaches out for Steve hand and Steve’s more than happy to meet him, to grasp tight, so tight; “hated gym, did you know that?”

“Oh, I had no idea,” Steve deadpans as he nuzzles Eddie’s hair, while Eddie goes back to nuzzles his chest, and Eddie’s breathing starts to even out and Steve thinks maybe he’s asleep, but then—

“Stevie?”

“Yeah, baby?” Steve wraps his arm around Eddie a little tighter.

“You’ll remind me about the flowers?” he asks, so goddamn soft; “wanna buy the best white carnations you’ve ever seen in your whole life.”

And Steve promises, yeah, of course—except: he kinda thinks maybe he already got the best ones years ago, again, and again.

He won’t discourage more of the very best, though, so long as Eddie’s the one next to him, handing them to him face to face, no hiding anywhere, just: them.

Pure devotion.

✨ ao3 link here

permanent tag list (comment to be added): @pearynice @hbyrde36 @slashify @finntheehumaneater @wxrmland @dreamwatch @perseus-notjackson

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#steddie #steve harrington #eddie munson #fluff #established relationship #established steddie #domestic fluff #valentine's day #sickfic #but like: eddie's a sniffly-cuddly-bundle-of-cough-medicine #and steve is a doting and caring and adoring boyfriend about it #secret time: eddie's been crushing on steve since high school #high school carnation sales #secret admirer #happy ending #or: happy-SAPPY ending #stranger things

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fatehbaz · 10 months

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Nothing in the past, moreover, gave any cause to suspect ginseng’s presence so far away. Or even closer by: since antiquity, for well over a millennium, the ginseng consumed in all of East Asia had come from just one area -- the northeast mountainous lands straddling Manchuria and Korea. No one had found it anywhere else. No one was even thinking, now, to look elsewhere. The [...] [French traveler] Joseph-Francois Lafitau didn’t know this. He had been [...] visiting Quebec on mission business in October of 1715 [...]. He began to search for ginseng. [...] [T]hen one day he spotted it [...]. Ginseng did indeed grow in North America. [...]

Prior to the nuclear disaster in the spring of 2011, few outside Japan could have placed Fukushima on a map of the world. In the geography of ginseng, however, it had long been a significant site. The Edo period domain of Aizu, which was located here, had been the first to try to grow the plant on Japanese soil, and over the course of the following centuries, Fukushima, together with Nagano prefecture, has accounted for the overwhelming majority of ginseng production in the country.

Aizu’s pioneering trials in cultivation began in 1716 – by coincidence, exactly the same year that Lafitau found the plant growing wild in the forests of Canada. [...]

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Since the 1670s the numbers of people [in Japan] clamoring for access to the drug had swelled enormously, and this demand had to be met entirely through imports. The attempt to cultivate ginseng in Aizu -- and soon after, many other domains -- was a response to a fiscal crisis.

Massive sums of silver were flowing out of the country to pay for ginseng and other drugs [...]. Arai Hakuseki, the chief policy maker [...], calculated that no less than 75% of the country’s gold, and 25% of its silver had drained out of Japan [to pay for imports] [...]. Expenditures for ginseng were particularly egregious [...]: in the half-century between 1670s through the mid-1720s that marked the height of ginseng fever in Japan, officially recorded yearly imports of Korean ginseng through Tsushima sometimes reached as much as four to five thousand kin (approx. 2.4–3 metric tons).

What was to be done? [...] The drain of bullion was unrelenting. [...] [T]he shogunate repeatedly debased its currency, minting coins that bore the same denomination, but contained progressively less silver. Whereas the large silver coin first issued in 1601 had been 80% pure, the version issued in 1695 was only 64% silver, and the 1703 mint just 50%. Naturally enough, ginseng dealers in Korea were indifferent to the quandaries of the Japanese rulers, and insisted on payment as before; they refused the debased coins. The Japanese response speaks volumes about the unique claims of the drug among national priorities: in 1710 (and again in 1736) a special silver coin of the original 80% purity was minted exclusively for use in the ginseng trade. [...]

[T]he project of cultivating ginseng and other medicines in Japan became central to the economic and social strategy of the eighth shogun Yoshimune after he assumed power in 1716. [...]

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China and Korea were naturally eager to retain their monopolies of this precious commodity, and strictly banned all export of live plants and seeds. They jealously guarded as well against theft of mature roots: contemporary Chinese histories, for example, record that the prisons of Shenjing (present day Shenyang) overflowed with ginseng poaching suspects. So many were caught, indeed, that the legal bureaucracy couldn’t keep up.

In 1724, the alarming numbers of suspected poachers who died in prison while awaiting trial led to the abandonment of the regular system of trials by judges dispatched from Beijing, and a shift to more expeditious reviews handled by local officials. [...]

Even in 1721. the secret orders that the shogunate sent the domain of Tsushima called for procuring merely three live plants [...]. Two other forays into Korea 1727 succeeded in presenting the shogun with another four and seven plants respectively. Meanwhile, in 1725 a Manchu merchant in Nagasaki named Yu Meiji [...] managed to smuggle in and present three live plants and a hundred seeds. [...]

Despite its modest volume, this botanical piracy eventually did the trick. By 1738, transplanted plants yielded enough seeds that the shogunate could share them with enterprising domains. [...] Ginseng eventually became so plentiful that in 1790 the government announced the complete liberalization of cultivation and sales: anyone was now free to grow or sell it.

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By the late eighteenth century, then, the geography of ginseng looked dramatically different from a century earlier.

This precious root, which had long been restricted to a small corner of the northeast Asian continent, had not only been found growing naturally and in abundance in distant North America, but had also been successfully transplanted and was now flourishing in the neighboring island of Japan. […]

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Colonial Americans, for their part, had developed their own new addiction: an unquenchable thirst for tea. […] This implacable need could have posed a serious problem. [...] [I]ts regular consumption was a costly habit.

Which is why the local discovery of ginseng was a true godsend.

When the Empress of China sailed to Canton in 1784 as the first ship to trade under the flag of the newly independent United States, it was this coveted root that furnished the overwhelming bulk of sales. Though other goods formed part of early Sino-American commerce – Chinese porcelain and silk, for example, and American pelts – the essential core of trade was the exchange of American ginseng for Chinese tea. [...]

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Yoshimune’s transplantation project had succeeded to the point that Japan actually became a ginseng exporter. As early as 1765, Zhao Xuemin’s Supplement to the compedium of material medica would note the recent popularity of Japanese ginseng in China. Unlike the “French” ginseng from Canada, which cooled the body, Zhao explained, the “Asian” ginseng (dongyang shen) from Japan, like the native [Korean/Chinese] variety, tended to warm. Local habitats still mattered in the reconfigured geography of ginseng. [...]

What is place? What is time? The history of ginseng in the long eighteenth century is the story of an ever-shifting alchemical web. [...] Thanks to the English craving for tea, ginseng, which two centuries earlier had threatened to bankrupt Japan, now figured to become a major source of national wealth [for Japan] .

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Text by: Shigehisa Kuriyama. “The Geography of Ginseng and the Strange Alchemy of Needs.” In: The Botany of Empire in the Long Eighteenth Century, edited by Yota Batsaki, Sarah Burke Cahalan, and Anatole Tchikine. 2017. [Bold emphasis and some paragraph breaks/contractions added by me.]

#all kinds of fun stuff smuggling piracy biogeography medicinal tea shogunates secret orders #the irony of emerging US empire beginning relationship with china based on export of american ginseng which europeans hadnt known existed #the irony of japan quickly transitioning from almost being bankrupted by ginseng to becoming a ginseng exporter #the importance of local habitats and smallscale biogeography despite the global scale of imperial trade #the french cartographer in 1711 in manchuria who had never been to canada but correctly predicted ginseng might grow there #abolition #ecology #imperial #colonial

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