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petit-etoile · 7 months

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in the moonlight (my darling, do not fear)

pairing: astarion/tav wordcount: 4184 content warnings: mentions of injuries, no in-depth descriptions, minor spoilers for astarion's act ii romance other tags: canon-typical violence, canon complaint, hurt/comfort, whump, developing relationship, love confessions, gender neutral tav, elf!tav archiveofourown: here. sentence prompt: "you're like a sickness, a disease, and the only way for me to be cured of you is to let you completely consume me until my body has no fight left." — from here. summary: defeating the orthon is no small task. the hardest part is what comes after.

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‘No!’ he shouts, and it’s so loud it echoes on the edges of your mind. ‘You can’t die.’

I’m not dying, you think but the words never leave your lips. In the depths of your consciousness, you can faintly remember the battle with the Orthon. Karlach had killed the displacer beast, hadn’t she? Shadowheart had blinded the Merregon… You remember violent flashes of light and the shaking of the Gauntlet. Trying to remember takes too much energy, and thinking about opening your eyes makes your stomach roll.

‘Get up, damn you!’ Astarion snaps harshly.

He paws at your desperately, shifting rock and ruin, and when he presses his hands to your side, stars flutter behind your eyelids so violently all you can do is moan. It’s your turn to shove at him. You push at his hands and feel your fingers glide against his skin. But I’m too tired, you want to say. I just want to sleep, to dream. Eventually, you give up your fight and relax into the darkness. Maybe when you awaken, the illithid parasite will be gone and you will be cured. You can only hope that it comes true.

Astarion has other plans for you. He curses your name so sweet it could be a perfectly mulled wine and leans forward. His ear tickles your lips, and whatever he hears come from it is enough to make him heave out a relieved sob. His hands are on your face again. His fingers are sticky, and they smell like powder. He jostles you so violently that you groan against your will, but it doesn’t seem to matter much to him.

Astarion rests his head against your chest right where your broken collarbone has begun to throb. You struggle to open your eyes and stare at the roof above you, but you don’t see the familiar ceiling of Shar’s Temple. The celestial glowing swirls have been blocked from sight by ugly granite floors. If you really put your mind to it, you can recognize Karlach’s desperate cries on the other side.

‘What happened?’ you whisper.

‘You were supposed to jump down!’ Astarion snarls. ‘Gods, why didn’t you jump down!’

The panic in his voice is enough to make you try harder to retrace your memories. You had plunged your blade into Yurgir’s chest but couldn’t manage to pull it out. It hadn’t killed him. Yurgir had laughed at you, had laughed at your friends — He had never hated anyone more at that moment.

It had taken the blade you kept on your hip to finally kill Yurgir. He had dropped bombs, you recall. It comes back to you easily now. Astarion had been right behind you and was going to follow you down, but you were so wounded he insisted on helping you jump away from the bombs before they exploded. But you hated heights, you hated the feeling of falling.

‘Scared,’ you admit.

‘Ha! Scared!’ Astarion repeats, tone pitching up in his hysteria. ‘Karlach was going to catch you!’

‘I couldn’t,’ you say. ‘I was scared. I couldn’t jump, I couldn’t do it. I’m sorry, Astarion.’

A shaky sob escapes his lips. ‘Don’t be sorry, my love,’ he whispers. ‘Don’t close your eyes again.’

A shudder of exhaustion runs throughout your body. You want to ask questions. You can feel them on the tip of your tongue, but moving your jaw is more work than you’re currently cut out for. Without craning your neck, you try to assess the damage.

The displacer beast’s claws had torn your sleeve. You remember how its teeth snapped shut close to your face, and how now matter how hard you tried to push it away, its thick neck kept you from escaping. Shadowheart had distracted it with a clone. Desperation had pushed you to follow Karlach up the steps so that you could fight the Orthon. For Raphael’s contract. For Astarion.

You do as you were commanded. You stare at the shaking, makeshift rooftop and blink dust from your eyes as it filters down like mocking snow. Astarion’s head feels particularly heavy at this moment. With a sudden, horrified realization, you fully come to terms with the situation you’ve found yourself in.

You are lying in a puddle of your own blood and too broken to move. Half of the floor you were standing on has fallen beneath you and blocked you from your allies, and the only one at your side is Astarion. It must be like death itself to sit there surrounded by blood while injured. He could heal himself if he drank. You raise your good hand and place it against his white-silver curls.

‘I know I usually offer first,’ you say sheepishly. ‘But if you need a drink — ’

‘Have you lost your gods-damned mind?’ Astarion hisses.

Before you can say anything else, he sits up and leans over you. You are easily distracted by his beautiful, marble-like complexion which is marred by the dirt and dust and blood. He’s beautiful.

Astarion’s cerise eyes are frantic. ‘I do not mean to alarm you, but you are dying.’

Like the ceiling’s fate above them, the reality of the situation comes crashing miserably down on top of you. Shadowheart’s spells cannot penetrate the wall that has come between you. You realize it now. You press your hand against the hole in your side delicately and laugh a little, staring at your fingers coated with blood. You close your eyes, but Astarion’s distressed whine has you search frantically for his face.

‘I’m sorry,’ you whisper, horrified. ‘I’m sorry. I’m — Do not hate me.’

‘Please,’ Astarion begs. ‘Just stay awake. Stay with me. Karlach is trying to get through; All you have to do is stay awake, please.’

You search his face for some hint of comfort, but it’s hard to see through the dark spots knotting in your vision. You do your best to push away the panic, to force the tears back into your eyes. You don’t want to die, not yet. Raphael still has to translate the runes on Astarion’s back. Shadowheart wants to finish the gauntlet. You want to save Karlach’s heart, to absolve Wyll’s pact, to save Gale. Selfishly, you want to kiss Astarion again without any of that which comes after. You want to savor the weight of his mouth against yours.

‘I’m sorry,’ you tell him again. You swallow harshly. ‘This must be like torture for you.’

Astarion chuckles hoarsely. ‘While you are very tantalizing, this is…nothing compared to two hundred years.’

You smile faintly. Two hundred years of carrion, and now you are laid out in front of him as delicious and forbidden as the feast Raphael offered you once. He ducks out of your view to lay his head on your chest. Though he tries to hide it, you can feel the little shudders of his sobs.

I’m sorry, you think to the ceiling. The weight of Astarion’s head against your shoulder is agonizing to your broken collarbone, but whatever he is doing, he is doing it with such reverence it reminds you of the religious devout and their steadfast adherence to their god.

He burrows his face into your chest, careful to stay small over you, to be mindful of your condition. He tries to balance his breathing so that it’s quieter and less disruptive, but no matter how hard he tries, he cannot quell the frightened way his shoulders jump. You close your eyes for a moment just to memorize the sight of it.

‘No,’ he says suddenly, sitting up. ‘You promised. You cannot die, I forbid it. You said you would protect me, and you cannot do that if you are — Speak to me, damn you!’

‘’m awake,’ you say tiredly. ‘I’m not going anywhere.’

‘You cannot,’ Astarion insists.

‘Next time,’ you say, ‘I will jump.’

Astarion shakes his head, and little drops of his tears rain down on your skin. ‘It isn’t the smell of you that makes it hard,’ he confesses brokenly. ‘It isn’t even about the damned Infernal runes. It’s you, everything about you. What is left for a disease like me when someone like you goes away?’

‘You will lead them,’ you tell him.

Astarion’s nose wrinkles at the idea. ‘I am not particularly interested in being the face of a revolution,’ he says. ‘No matter how beautiful I am. I am still a sickness, a beast. You are the only one good enough to lead us.’

‘You are like a sickness, then. A horrible disease,’ you say, mindful of the way his eyes narrow. ‘The only way for me to be cured of you — to be the cure for you, is to let you consume me until my body has no fight left, Astarion.’

‘How dare you,’ he says with a coquettish shrug.

You can hear Karlach slowly working through the rest of the rubble now. You hate to feel too hopeful, but you can almost hear the sound of the shattered floor breaking free. They were coming to save you, to save him.

‘That was rather poetic, you know,’ Astarion tells you. He watches your face intently as if afraid he’ll miss out on something exceptional. ‘You’ve never been one to use such gorgeous words.’

‘I wanted to,’ you say softly. ‘For you, my love.’

Astarion’s eyes widen as those words fall seamlessly from your lips. You aren’t sure if he meant to say them earlier. After all, he’s only ever been fond of calling you darling or a delectable little treat, treating you recklessly with careful honeyed words. As if getting any closer to you might coax him into accidental oblivion where your name might leave his lips thus solidifying you as something to be treated with care. A pomegranate seed between his teeth.

The shock doesn’t stay for long. Your eyelashes flutter though you fight against it. The decaying darkness around your vision has almost reached the center. You cry faintly and press a hand against your side, horrified that your blood is still pouring from you even if it is slower now. Perhaps you are running out of blood. You want to tell Astarion to drink it all up before it’s mixed with the sulfur and ash, but words are hard to form. Your heart skips a beat.

Don’t let me go to waste, you beg helplessly, reaching out to his mind when yours is all but gone. A heart-wrenching sob erupts from his chest. When you next awake, there is relatively less action than what was happening before. There are no violent tremors of a floor threatening to collapse. The sound of frantic shoving is absent. There’s only a dim hum in your ears, and the sound of a hushed fire burning well into the evening. You slowly open your eyes and blink away your sleepiness.

Shadowheart’s healing spell still hovers over you, but she’s not in your tent so she must be concentrating somewhere else. Your collarbone still smarts and you can definitely feel every single bruise you’ve ever received in your life, but you feel stronger, fuller. You reach a hand as if to inspect the wound at your side again and find the skin there is closed now.

‘You’re awake,’ Astarion says softly. ‘Thank the gods.’

You sit up quickly and feel the world turn sideways for it. Lightning dances along the back of your eyes as you try to steady yourself, and Astarion reaches out to ground you as you sway back and forth. You wonder just how long he’s been sitting there in your tent waiting for you. Your head throbs faintly once you manage to open your eyes.

‘Thank the gods,’ you echo breathlessly. ‘You brought me back?’

Astarion grimaces as though embarrassed. ‘I wasn’t the one who carried you back to camp, no,’ he says almost petulantly. ‘You’ll have to thank Karlach for that. But I have sat here since then, I must admit.’

‘Everyone — ’

‘Everyone else is fine,’ Astarion interrupts. ‘Halsin aided Shadowheart in your healing. Gale procured herbs, Wyll kept vigil at camp while you slumbered. It was all very twee. You’ll be sad you missed it.’

Astarion raises his chin much like a cat who desires petting. He would never admit it, but you can see it on his face. He’s relieved. If he were anyone else, he might weep for joy at seeing you awake again. It isn’t who he is, so you settle for knowing that he has not left your side since you escaped the Gauntlet.

You sit up further and wave your hand through Shadowheart’s healing spell. It doesn’t disperse as much as you wish, but you ignore it, crawling across your lumpy bedroll so you can wrap your arms slowly around Astarion’s neck. He freezes beneath your touch and begins sputtering, but then you feel his arms wrap around your waist. He burrows his face in the side of your neck.

‘I’m sorry for scaring you,’ you mumble against his ear.

You hear him swallow. ‘I’m not apologizing for yelling at you, if that’s what you want.’

‘I would never ask you to,’ you insist.

Before, you thought it would be a small hug. Something to show your thanks to him. You loosen your arms around him so that he can pull away, but if anything, Astarion drags you closer to him. He hides his face in the spot beneath your ear and inhales deeply, memorizing your healthy scent intently.

The hug lasts longer than you thought it would. It’s almost as healing as the magic, too. You hold Astarion as close to you as he will allow, rubbing circles and tracing his curls at the nape of his neck as if to promise that you will never leave again. You decide to sniff him tentatively as well, and beneath the dirt and ash from the collapse, he still smells like Astarion.

You startle a little when you feel his hand tuck beneath your shirt, his fingers reaching to touch a hint of your bare skin. Someone was kind enough to drag the heavier armor from you, but you still have your bloodied shirt on. Astarion’s cool touch is welcome against your aching spine.

‘I thought,’ he says slowly, ‘that you had sentenced me to a lifetime of loneliness again when you were felled earlier. At first, I was so angry that I thought I might hate you for your mistake. I wanted to kill you myself once the dust had settled.’

‘Astarion — ’ you start to say, hopeless apologies on your tongue.

‘You will let me finish,’ Astarion says harshly, though he nuzzles you. ‘Elves reincarnate, but how long does it take? How many years would I be forced to wait before I caught the scent of you on the wind?’

You’re freed from his grasp, but you aren’t allowed to escape far. You both kneel in your tent, one of his hands on the back of your head, the other at the side of your waist where your skin had been ripped open before. Astarion allows you to see him for who he truly is. His eyes are soft, weak when he stares deep into your eyes like he’s afraid he’ll forget you.

‘You have made this sinner a worshiper, though it’s no gods I am on my knees for,’ Astarion says to you. ‘The only hymn I care to rehearse is your heartbeat. The only prayer is your name. I begged the gods for years that they would save me, but you are the only divine who has answered my call.’

Your breath catches in your throat.

Astarion presses his hip into yours. ‘I wanted to wait to tell you,’ he says with a miserable shake of his head. ‘To think more.’

‘You still can — ’

‘I cannot,’ he admits. ‘When I close my eyes, all I see is your body beneath mine with your life’s blood spilling from you. You begged me to devour you.’

‘I wanted you to be strong,’ you admit. ‘Before, you told me you were only allowed to dine on creatures who couldn’t think. Who knows how long your strength would have lasted…’

His eyes seem to contain infinite sadness. You try to be intent with your words, but you’re distracted by the way he releases his head to palm your chest, pushing his fingers so forcefully skin it’s as though he’s determined to dig through your flesh to grip your heart in his hand. You’d allow him if he asked.

‘You are so self-sacrificing it’s insulting,’ Astarion snorts. ‘Do you think I would have continued in this realm without you? Never have I felt so selfishly about someone before.’

Carefully, almost as if he’s never done it before, Astarion leans forward and presses his lips against yours gently. All you can think about is his overwhelming devotion even as you respond to the kiss, melting against the touch. You hadn’t realized how much you missed this.

And you do miss it. You hate being in the Shadow-Cursed Lands more than you hate the lift in the mountains. Everything is dark and dreary and dead, and your companions are prone to being even more distant and distressed than they were before. You feel as though you are of little hope.

But Astarion kisses you now like a man who is breathing air for the first time. His mouth is hungry and insistent, and his hands cling to your skin more than he’s ever clung to you before. It causes you to blush. It’s unlike him to show such desperation. He’s willing, open, honest — yet this kiss is so different from the ones you experienced before. It’s almost chaste. He kisses you like a knight would kiss his charge.

‘But I want this,’ he whispers, breath ragged against your cheek. ‘I want you.’

‘Astarion,’ you murmur. That's all you can say.

He presses his nose against your jaw. ‘Whatever my intentions were before, to the hells with them,’ he says harshly. ‘I want us to be something real, something true if you’ll have me. It’s what you deserve.’

‘I do,’ you confess, almost embarrassed. ‘You must’ve known how silly I felt pestering you. You were the first person I sought out when I returned to camp.’

‘You did have a rather obvious air of desperation about you,’ Astarion says with a small laugh.

‘But I wanted you to come to me of your own accord,’ you continue. You touch the edge of his collar. ‘I lacked confidence. I did not want to force you into something knowing your history.’

He kisses you again. This time, it is a little less chaste. Astarion is determined to devour you, mind, body, and soul. His hands wander as though they’ve never felt your body before, and there’s something anguished about the way he returns to cradling the back of your neck. Your mouth is nothing but a scripture he is determined to practice.

You feel drunk with exhaustion. Having been settled between death and undeath for so long has left you feeling as though there is nothing in your sinew, and Astarion is making matters worse. Your head is filled with nothing but him and his unpredictable mercy. You cling to his shirt and struggle.

What have you done to deserve such boundless devotion? You have listened to, and pleaded with, every emotion he has given you. You’ve taken and given and created anew. Now Astarion becomes. Everything you have given him evolves to become this. When he is finally finished memorizing your mouth, he pulls away and confronts you with barely concealed hunger.

‘Say it,’ he begs desperately. ‘Say you want me too.’

‘I want you,’ you say. ‘Gods, you must know this. There’s nothing I want more.’

‘I wanted to manipulate you,’ he says, horrified. He hides in the crook of your jaw. ‘I wanted to use you as a shield, someone to stand behind.’

‘I am not a very big shield,’ you say.

He doesn’t laugh. ‘I was going to do what I had done before,’ he says. ‘Use your emotions for me as a weapon, but — I never want to see you near another weapon for as long as we live. Do you understand?’

You press a kiss to his hair. ‘Shall I stand behind you now?’

Astarion does laugh at that. He faces you fully now, hands cupping your cheeks. ‘You may as well be regulated to nothing but camp duty. You find a place for us to rest, you sew our clothes up when they come back with holes in them. I’d say you could make dinner, but…’

You brush a lock of his silver hair away from his eyes and run your thumbs against the swelling. He’s just as exhausted as you are even if he has yet to admit it. The building’s collapse has left him equally as tired. You encourage him to lay down with you, and he does, curling at your side with his head on your chest.

‘Will you be our fearsome party leader?’ you ask. You close your eyes and try to imagine it.

‘Oh yes,’ he swears solemnly for your sake. ‘I will hold the map and point us in the correct direction. Hopefully my leadership will lead us away from Shadow-Cursed things and back to the streets of Baldur’s Gate. I am so ferocious that whoever controls these parasites will give up upon seeing my muscles.’

You try to imagine your life without the tadpole. It seems relatively empty without Shadowheart and Lae’zel’s bickering, and you would miss the way Halsin and Gale are prone to rambling on about whatever is holding their interest at the time. You’d miss Karlach and her boundless enthusiasm for dancing. You’d miss Wyll, too. You’d miss the way he always watches your back.

Would you have met them in Baldur’s Gate? Would Astarion have picked up your scent and chased you down an alleyway intent on drinking your blood? He would be as he was before, angry and cruel and distant. For a moment, you’re almost grateful that the mindflayers had kidnapped you that morning. The circumstances surrounding it were dire, and you hated the gross wiggling the worm was prone to doing when it wanted you to be authoritative, but you would miss them.

‘I don’t regret it, you know,’ you say suddenly.

‘You do not regret what, exactly?’ Astarion asks. ‘Getting blown up and nearly dying? You should.’

You snort despite your best attempts not to. You press your palms against your eyes and try to keep from laughing too hard. For what it’s worth, Astarion does let out a small chuckle. You can hear his frown.

‘Aye,’ you relent. ‘I suppose I do regret nearly dying and. I don’t regret what came before it. If Raphael asked me to strike down all of the gods so that he would translate your back, I would do it without asking a question. You deserve to know.’

‘I cannot overstate how…appreciative I am of that,’ Astarion says finally. ‘But, just so you know, I would do the same for you without question. I have most of the time. I trust at least a third of your decisions.’

‘All of the decisions I make,’ you begin.

But Astarion interrupts, ‘I am sure you make them with everyone’s best interest in mind. Sometimes it works out. Sometimes you end up blown to bits.’

‘I do not regret letting you feed from me,’ you say, pretending he never opened his mouth. ‘I do not regret the silly way I fell into your honeyed words. I do not regret killing the Orthon. I do not regret you.’

‘We’ve barely just begun.’

You swallow. ‘And I will see it through until the end of time,’ you say. You’re fully aware that it’s too soon to make sweeping grand declarations of love, but you can’t stop yourself from saying. ‘You will never be alone again.’

You take Astarion’s silence in stride. You want him to know that he isn’t the only one capable of saying disgustingly romantic things. In the wake of your unconsciousness, you feel a rush of things you haven’t felt in quite some time. Life felt dreary in the mountains and worse in the Underdark. You hate when your world feels as though it’s crushing you. Now, even in the dark, it’s as if the sun shines on your face.

‘I love you,’ you say.

‘Say it again.’

‘I love you,’ you repeat, this time with more meaning. You try to roll onto your side, but your shoulder fusses too much. ‘I want you, and I want this. Forever.’

‘Forever,’ Astarion repeats, a sense of wonder entering his voice as he toys with the taste of it on his tongue. Once again, he sits above you, his head pressed against your chest, shaking as he listens to the sound of your heartbeat beneath your skin. ‘I like the sound of that.’ You smile at the sound of a purr in his voice, and allow yourself to imagine what forever means.

#astarion #astarion ancunin #astarion bg3 #astarion x tav #astarion x reader #astarion x you #astarion x oc #from ，carcosa .#my fic

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shywhumpauthor · 2 months

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You Can’t do This

Cw: kidnapping, restraints, torture, mentioned mouth/eye whump (doesn’t actually happen), non-con touching, knives, threat of asphyxiation/choking

“Wait- wait,” Villain sputtered, the words tripping over their tongue, snagging in the back of their throat. “You can’t- Hero, this is illegal- you can’t do this!”

They twisted their wrists against the restraints that bound them to the chair, flexing their fingers to try to relieve a fraction of the pressure. The movement only pushed the cables deeper into their skin, dragging a hiss from their clenched teeth.

A warm hand wrapped around their neck from behind, turning their exhale into a wheeze as their head was shoved against the back of the chair.

“Since when have you cared much about what’s legal?” Hero responded, amusement adding a drawl to their words. They circled the chair, grip on Villain’s neck adjusting so their palm lay against the villain’s wind pipe, fingers digging into the sensitive skin on the side of their neck. Just enough pressure to fear, for Villain to feel the threat of their airway being crushed, but not enough to cut off their breathing. Not yet.

“He-Hero, this isn’t funny, stop.” Villain grit out, shrinking as far back as the chair would allow. Hero only pressed closer, moving in so their legs were on either side of Villain’s, their ankles bound to the chair legs.

“Was it funny when the roles were reversed? All those nights I spent tied up in your basement, bleeding and cold? Was it funny then?” Hero hissed, their other hand raising to Villain’s face with the speed of a strike. Barely in time, Villain braced themself, only for a warm hand to press against their jaw, fingers brushing over the curve of their cheekbone. The touch was stark against the chill in the air, a misplaced comfort—artificial. Hero’s stroked their thumb below Villain’s eye gently, before coming to a pause with both hands cradling either side of Villain’s face. “Was it?”

“No, no Hero, it wasn’t,” Villain’s voice wavered now, threatening to crack. “You can’t do this, you’re s’posed to be the good guy-”

Hero stepped back suddenly, tearing their hands away from Villain’s face like their skin had turned toxic. Villain tried to ignore the ache that swelled in their chest as the cold air drowned any remnants of the warm touch in moments.

“I guess I am, aren’t I? The ‘good guy’?” Hero repeated, turning their back to Villain. They stepped to the side of the poorly lit room, to something that resembled an old workbench, their body blocking Villain from seeing what they were doing. “I wonder what the press will say about your sudden absence. They’ll publish anything I tell them to, you know? I could feed them some story about you fleeing the city, the country even, and your name would be forgotten in a week.”

Hero turned around, bracing their palms against the workbench and leaning back.

“Everyone always believes the good guy, don’t they?” Hero shook their head. “No one cares about another pesky street criminal, do they? All they care about is Supervillain, the papers would move on from you the next day and you’d be forgotten. You wouldn’t even get one of those ten year follow-ups.”

“Hero, let me go. You can’t do this. You can’t,” Villain twisted their arms against their restraints in one last pitiful attempt to free themself, accomplishing nothing but to make Hero chuckle.

Hero pushed themself forwards, striding closer. It was only then Villain noticed something in their hand, slender and orange—a box cutter, they realized quickly, as the hero closed the distance between them in three steps.

“Tell me exactly what I can and can’t do, Villain? What can’t I do to you?” Their hand twisted in Villain’s hair, shoving their head back against the chair while the other flipped out the blade on the box cutter.

The words died in Villain’s throat. Their lips parted, eyes tracking the blade as Hero lifted it up to their face.

“I can do anything I want to you.” Hero’s eyes stared directly into Villain’s as they placed the blade against their skin, just below their eye. “You should be glad, your eyes look so pretty when you’re scared. Otherwise I would’ve plucked them out by now,” Hero began to move the blade to the side, putting just enough pressure to split a thin line of red below Villain’s eye.

Villain didn’t dare breathe as Hero paused, gritting their teeth against the sting as they felt the blade puncture a bit deeper. A drop of blood rolled down their cheek like a tear.

“I thought about this moment every night in your basement,” Hero muttered, pushing the edge harder into Villain’s flesh as they followed the track of the blood, drawing a half suppressed yelp from Villain as the pain suddenly intensified. “Planning out exactly what I would do to you, how I’d pay you back for everything you’ve done to me.”

Hero accented the last word with a sudden sharp twist, finishing the line to Villain’s jaw before pulling their hand back. Tears burning in the corners of Villain’s eyes, welling faster than Villain could suppress them.

“Ple- please, Hero, you can’t,” Villain’s voice trembled, any thoughts of maintaining their dignity gone with their fear.

Hero’s palm cracked against their bleeding cheek, catching them off guard. Pain like fire burned from the cut, their head snapping to the side with the force of the blow.

“This will be your only warning,” Hero began, their empty hand grabbing Villain by the chin and tugging them back to look at them. “I do not have the same reservations about your voice as I do your eyes. Another word from you, I’ll cut out your tongue and shove it down your throat and it’ll be the only food you get for a month, got it?”

#whump #whumpblr #whump community #whump writing #its me coal #coal wrote something #whumpee #whumper #whump prompt #whump prompts #hero whumper #villain whumpee

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powderblueblood · 5 months

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HELLFIRE & ICE — eddie munson x f!oc as enemies to star-crossed lovers

CHAPTER SIX — IN MY ORBIT

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summary: it's escape from new york, if by new york you mean eddie munson's trailer. he knows you need to stay away from him, you know he needs to stay away from you, but honey... who else is gonna tell him there's an 'e' in roane county? content warnings: MINORS DNI obviously, my god. we've got your usual here-- mentions of masturbation, both male and female, white hot motherfucking yearning of the sexual and emotional kind, a surprise nancy wheeler, little women references, sticking it to the teacher we don't need no education style, eddie munson says acab word count: 12.2k

Dear hooker from the Christmas card in Minneapolis, can you shut the fuck up? I need to think!

Dear Bilbdoolpoolp, you nutty sea bitch goddess, do me a solid and send me a diversion– tear the roof off this trailer– I need to think!

Dear Lacy, quit looking at me like I just bit the head off your Virginia Woolf doll. I want to suck face with you so bad, like really goddamn bad, and you seem like you want to do it to me as well, what with your whole, like, big doe eyes and all that shit, but I need.

To think.

It’s not what Eddie wants to clamp over your mouth, but it’s what you’re getting. His hand, his whole ringed hand, which takes up the better part of your face so all he can see is your eyes flashing from possibly turned on (jury’s still out) to confused to plain angry.

“Mmmphmph!” you squeal against his hand, and he pulls his most panicked, most pleading expression out of the bag.

“Lacy! Lacy. Lay-cee,” he hisses, teeth grit and spittle flying,”Do me a favor, do me a favor for once in your life and be. Cool. Be cool.”

His fingers slide from your mouth and your jaw is set all hard. “Who the fuck do you think you’re talking to?!”

Right. Ice princess. Totally. Totally. “When I said be cool, I meant be quiet!”

“Ed.” That gruff rumble is coming from right outside his door. Eddie holds an index finger to his lips, and motions, like a goddamn kindergarten teacher, for you to do the same. Because that’s all you seem to understand. And you roll your eyes, but you do it anyway. And he– fuck, you’re cute.

“Yee-aah?” he calls back, tone about as even as the Appalachian mountains.

“Can I–”

“No!” Eddie barks, seeing that door handle twist a fraction of an inch. What would Wayne do, if he caught you in here? Would his brain explode all over the trailer? Would that be the end of the last truly good Munson family member? I mean, probably not, but he’d be all disappointed in Eddie and that would be worse. So much worse. “I’m not… Decent.”

You, still with your finger planted in the indent of your cupid’s bow, do a bad job of suppressing a snort. “Who are you, Rita Hayworth?” you hiss, and Eddie raises his hand to seal your stupid lips up again. Stupid. Lippy. Stupid lips. You bat it away, motioning like, okay, I’ll be cool!

Who the fuck is Rita Hayworth, anyway?!

“Well. Get decent,” Wayne says, a single knuckle rapping on the door–that means get movin’, “Need to talk to you.”

And far be it from Eddie to keep the man he’s effectively betraying by stowing you away in his bedroom waiting. Up like a shot, he lifts the needle from the skipping record, pausing by the door before he heads out to meet his fate.

He can tell by the look on your face that he’s blown this. Whatever it is– was. He had a perfect precipice of a moment, and he’d totally shot himself in the foot. But Eddie would sooner see you alive and unkissed than dead of pneumonia in the freezing rain, ‘kay? Call him a hero, whatever.

“Just–”

“--shut the fuck up,” you whisper, hands drawn up in surrender. Realizing that there’s nothing funny about this situation. “I got it.”

The door whumps closed behind him, shaking the entire trailer in its wake, and you wait all of three seconds before racing to it and pressing your ear up against the paint-chipped wood.

What’s going on out there? Is it about me?

How could it be about you? Unless Munson’s uncle had some kind of sixth sense, some breach in his cerebrum that alerted him once you crossed the threshold of his precious trailer. Come to think of it, you don’t remember seeing a second bedroom in this thing.

You’d be lying if that didn’t elicit a little pang of pride– my trailer’s better than your trailer, you jealous? Doesn’t answer the question of where the Munson uncle sleeps, but at least you and your mother had a two-bedder.

To your flaring frustration, the Munson men have opted to use an indecipherable muttering gravelly man octave with which to discuss this pressing business. That could or could not be about you. Insanely inconsiderate that this is the one time that Eddie Munson isn’t the loudest voice in the room, a ball of fury and sound and action knocking over everything in its wake. When it was the one time you actually wanted to hear what he had to say.

You also regret to inform yourself that that wasn’t all you wanted from him, up until about forty-five seconds ago.

The white-hot embarrassment of being caught ready to throw a leg over him–the white hot embarrassment of being caught holding onto his wrist in the record store, of him catching you falling out of his van–descends over you in a wave that almost takes you out at the knees.

But you’d wanted it– you did, in one suspended moment that you couldn’t pawn off on being high or drunk or wildly angry, sobbing soaked out in the rain. You had looked at Eddie Munson, in his dark, bottomless eyes and took in his slope of a Grecian nose and his dumb, effusive mouth with the pink lips and the pretty teeth and you had wanted it. Him. Him and the nebulous it that he would inevitably end up doing to you.

He wanted you back. You thought.

When Eddie slips back into his bedroom, you’re peeking through his blinds. Your trailer remains in total darkness, that criminal slip of a key obviously still jammed in the lock. You look over your shoulder at him and his brow is set in such a weird and distant crease that you think– shit. Maybe I hallucinated all that. Maybe that was all me.

“What are you doing?” he asks, voice flat and near silent. What happened out there?

“My mom,” you start, “She…”

Never came home, is where you were going with it, but you don’t get to finish. “Okay,” he says, all absent. He flicks off the bedroom lamp as he passes it, this unconscious motion that leaves you both stranded in a blue-tinged darkness.

In the moments it takes your eyes to adjust, he’s sitting next to you on the bed.

“I’m gonna sleep on the floor,” he tells you. His irises are shiny and hard and serious.

Oh. The kind of tension you want to poke at.

“Don’t be stu–”

“I’m not bein’ stupid, Lacy.”

You blink. Your faces are close. In the dark, the fractals of him would be easier to not remember in the daylight. You could pick out the parts you wanted–his cheekbone, his jutting jawline, the sloping corner of his mouth–and not puzzle them together in the morning. You could separate it. It could be fine. A non-event.

“It’s cold,” you press, your voice low and solid, “and you don’t have another comforter.”

“How do you know that.”

Lucky guess. “I just do.” Just let me have this without having to ask for it.

I am a little afraid, I don’t know of what, and you’re the last solid thing I can grab onto.

Or lay next to.

“What side of the bed do you sleep on?”

“All of it.” God, he’s so obstinate.

“Pick a favorite.”

His mouth–his mouth–scrunches up the way a shitting cat’s might. You puncture the silence with a visible shiver. This staredown is horrible.

“Fuck. Fine.” Point to Lacy. Eddie, arms out, gestures to the side of the bed furthest from the door. “Get comfy.”

In a scramble, you dig yourself under the comforter, pulling it all the way up to your chin. But now the shivering has started, and there’s no sign of stopping it– real, muscle seizing, teeth-chattering shivering.

Eddie mumbles something like Jesus Christ, or God help me or some other plea for mercy, and slides in beside you, pitching himself at the very edge of the mattress. Arms folded over his chest.

“You gotta quit shaking!” he hisses.

“I am fuh-reezing!” you seethe back.

You kick your knees up into your arms, facing away from him and curling yourself in the tightest of balls and really, really working hard on calming down your wracking because, honestly? Little embarrassing.

The mattress crreeaaaks. A shift in weight.

“Are you really that cold?”

You put that shaking to good use and nod in the affirmative. “Ice princess, right?”

Like you were putting this on for show. God, he’s such an asshole.

The way he gulps is borderline cartoonish. “Okay.” A shaky breath. “But we have to not make this weird.”

The mattress shifts again and you feel his weight edge closer to you. You relax a little from the fetal position, head craning to peer over your shoulder. He was– hovering, as much as one could hover when lying in a horizontal position.

“Munson, are you trying to cu–”

“Stop it. Stop making it weird. I’ll throw your ass out that window and it’s a cold snap and you’re already cold blooded so you’ll, like, double fucking freeze to death.”

But he wouldn’t. Of that you were fairly confident.

Eddie’s hand edges toward your waist, positioning his front side ever closer to your back, which feels… not horrible at all, until–

“No. Nope. That’s not gonna work.”

You have to bite back a smile. Boys. Boys and their stupid, simple penises.

He flops back against the mattress, head angled to the ceiling. Awkwardly, he jigs an arm up, like some puppeteer’s yanking his string. His hand hits you square in the back of the head.

“Ow–”

“Shut up. Get under here.”

Slowly, and almost shyly, you rotate your shivering body a cool one-eighty degrees and find him concentrating resolutely on the ceiling. You glance up. There’s black mold on that ceiling. You wish you had noticed that before, but when up shit creek, et cetera. Inching and inching, you settle in next to him, head nestling into his armpit.

His arm gingerly curves around you.

You bring your hands up to your mouth, fingers curled in fists like a little kid.

Your leg brushes against his, accidentally, racking up the leg of his flannel pants. You can feel the hair against your bare calf– strong, ticklish.

And you can hear his heart.

Jackrabbity. Thu-thump-thu-thump-thu-thump.

So’s yours.

He is so warm.

“Hey,” he whispers, tone a little softer this go around, “Can I ask you something?”

You do a tiny swallow and hope it’s not obvious. “I guess.”

“... Does it stink down there?”

Eddie Munson smells like cigarette and soap and that warm smell from the dryer. You inhale and hope it’s not obvious.

“Yes. You’re ripe. It’s disgusting.”

“Good. ‘night, Lacy.”

“Goodnight, Eddie.”

–

Eddie wakes up with a painful inhale and two of his rings tangled in your hair.

Shit! Fucking shit! See, he was supposed to stay awake, stay alert, make sure Wayne didn’t like, suddenly develop a tendency to sleepwalk and stumble into his room while you were all… curled up next to him. With your freezing little ice blocks for feet. And your lashes fanned out across your cheeks. And your tiny little kitten snores, you goddamn bitch.

But for as freaked out as he was–and is, girl in his actual human bed and everything–Eddie started nodding off here and there. And suddenly, here and there became the morning sun beaming directly into his stinking retinas from a crack in the blinds.

He is now hyper-aware of your hand curled beneath his sternum and your boobs pressing against his side.

The following procedure needs to be handled delicately, like a bomb.

Because the other thing, among all the other other things, is Woody fuckin’ Woodpecker has come calling this morning too.

Now, blue sky situation, ideal world, you’d just be able to scoot that hand a little lower and help him out with such an issue. But since he blew any shot of you wanting that along with any semblance of dignity he held in your eyes last night, that is a no-go.

He needs a Bible level miracle to will himself soft and untangle his rings from your hair without you waking up. And he also needs to wake you up and smuggle you the ever-loving fuck out of his trailer.

Careful, careful, careful– he starts picking strands out from around the silver, wondering how the hell he let himself just… tousle his hand around in your hair without, I’unno, getting turned into a pile of dust.

Then you make this noise– this little mewl, like mmnnrgh?, and Eddie’s entire body skips a beat. He needs to commit it to memory, record it to the ongoing multi-track mixtape he’s unconsciously been creating in his mind. Lacy’s Greatest Hits, featuring dick-in-fist chart toppers such as Who Died and Made You My Parole Officer?, Sorry, I Don’t Teach Remedial, and an eight hour loop of you saying his name. Eddie. Eddie. Eddie.

He wants to pull you on top of him, rings-in-hair and all, and kiss all the broken little mmnnrgh?s out of you ‘til you don’t have the breath to make any more. ‘til all you’ve got is his name on your tongue, your Siberian cold hands under his shirt.

And if he keeps thinking thoughts like this, he’s gonna kill himself!

This is not helping. You are not helping.

With some absolutely saint-worthy maneuvering on his part, Eddie gets his fingers free of your hair, but it’s not the gentle tug that wakes you up–

It’s a certain eardrum-perforating WHOOP-WHOOP.

Eddie Munson never thought he’d see the day where he was thanking whoever down there that’s lookin’ out for him for the sound of a cop car. Instant boner killer.

But also–

“Issat-thefuckin’-cops?” you slur at an almost normal volume, rising from underneath Eddie’s arm.

He shushes you, all harsh and wiry and you’ve just woken up, bleary-eyed and not yet able to comprehend your surroundings. Which, boy howdy. He darts to the window like an animal alarmed, peering out through the blinds.

“Oh, you gotta be fuckin’ kidding me.”

“What’s happening?” you whisper-ask, slapping consciousness into yourself with a palm to either cheek.

“Lacy, on a scale from one to ten,” Eddie seethes, scanning his view from the window, “How likely is your mom to report you as a missing person in under 24 hours?”

Your stomach drops with an acidic, awful clunk. Going out and making a fool of us. Your mom, caring only when she absolutely has to.

“Eleven.”

Eddie turns his big, siren-eyed stare on you.

“Then we gotta get you outta here. Like. Yesterday.”

You, now, you’re at a total loss. A total loss that’s made your blood turn bad under your skin, a total loss that has made you want to strangle your own mother, but a total loss where it actually matters. “I can’t believe she’d–!”

“Don’t matter, sweetheart! Does noooot matter– this the first time you ever got the cops called on you or something?”

You blink, remembering red and blue lights outside of your house in Loch Nora. But that wasn’t for you. Technically. Figures why you suddenly feel morning-sick nauseous, though.

“Well, mazel tov,” Eddie says, misreading the memory and starting toward his door.

You scramble for him, tugging at him by the bottom of his t-shirt. “Where are you going?!”

“Running interference. We need a distraction,” he tells you, like it’s the most obvious thing in the world. Okay, sorry for not being an accomplished criminal.

“Interference. Yeah. You’re good at that.”

He hits you with a sneer. “Not my first rodeo. You post up by that window and watch– when the coast is clear, I’ll give you a signal.”

“And then what?”

“And then– and then what?!” Eddie gasps, totally incredulous that you’d even try to ask– to seek his guidance, or whatever, “And then you’re on your own, kid! I’m already about to throw a match into the powder keg of your stupid hot mom, I’m not gonna stick around to watch her blow up!”

A quiver escapes your pinched lips, one that nearly says don’t go.

You’ve been taking care of yourself for a long time. That’s not the problem. The problem is tasting what it’s like when somebody helps you and realizing you haven’t had your fill. That, and your mother’s wrath which is your father’s wrath if you blow your cover and word gets back that you were hanging out in Al Munson’s boy’s trailer.

Nuclear fallout. Worse than Eddie’s room.

Eddie notices that you’ve been quiet a half-beat too long– and not just because you are both pressed for time, he puts his hands on your shoulders. Reassuringly, hurriedly. He shakes you, pump-pump, snap out of it.

You’re still gripping the hem of his t-shirt.

“Hey.” His voice is quieter. “This is gonna be fine.”

“Before you go out there, I– I need to ask you something.” It’s all compulsion. Why are you helping me? Why are you being nice to me? I don’t deserve you being nice to me.

Do you regret not kissing me last night? Do you regret not doing it right now? What am I supposed to do if I regret it too?

“Lacy?”

“Did you fuck Cass Finnigan in the ass?” Oh, yeah, there it fucking is.

Complete bafflement. Eddie seems to completely short circuit, powering back to life with a groan. “Wh– how did you know that?”

You huff, because it’s all you can do.

“I’m the goddamn Oracle of Delphi.” Finally, your vice grip of his shirt loosens. “Well. Go get ‘em, tiger.”

Okay, insulting.

Eddie stalks out of the room, head reeling on several different strata levels. By someone’s infernal grace, Wayne has already left for the day–it’s 7AM; way to get a headfirst start on inconveniencing the boys in blue, Lacy’s mom–so Eddie has ample space to flail his arms around wildly, frustratedly, cursing himself out before grabbing his uncle’s insulated parka from the coat rack and heading out the front door.

“Officers,” he says, half-wishing the zip on the jacket would choke him out so he wouldn’t have to put himself in the line of fire like this, and for what. “What’s uuuup?”

“Perfect.” That clipped yap comes from behind a cloud of smoke, teeming out of your mother huffing back a Dunhill. “There’s the little curr himself. Ask him where my daughter is, why don’t you.”

Well, now Eddie sees where you get it from.

“Shouldn’t you be on your way to school, son?” one of the officers (Callahan, if Eddie’s last speeding-ticket-receiving memory serves) drawls, clearly not all too concerned with the happenings here. But, considering to your mom, who can resist a Blanche DuBois type in a crisis, right? Definitely runs in the family.

Eddie lets his tongue loll out in an exaggerated hack-cough. “Sick day.”

“Then you oughta be inside, right?” Cops, man. Our nation’s greatest thinkers.

“I would be,” he says, taking on the haughty tone of– well, of your mother, “was it not for that obnoxious weew-weew of yours rousing me from my sick bed.” He even clutches at the lapels of the coat, shivering for effect. That one’s for you, baby.

“And y’know what, while we’re on the subject of noise…” You weren’t wrong when you said that he’s good at running interference– because he’s good at being a nuisance. “I’ve been meaning to put a call into you guys. You guys, police guys.” Eddie moves to stand in the negative space between your trailers, however many feet it is.

“See how much distance it is from here–” he points to his trailer where, if you’re not totally fucking this up, you’re watching from the slits in the blinds of his bedroom, “--to here?” Other arm goes up. He’s standing there like Christ the freakin’ Redeemer, and the cops’ attention is pulled right to him because he’s got priors and he might do something weird and they’re idiots. Your mom is all about Eddie too, forgetting to be concerned and distraught for half a moment.

Munsons have that effect on people.

“... yeah?” Callahan says, prompting a wild-eyed Eddie to go on.

“I should not be there,” again, a nod to his own trailer, “and be able to hear Englebert Humperdinck from in here.” He waves a wild arm toward your trailer, edging a couple steps closer to it. Big ol’ brown eyes here locks his gaze on your momma. “Lady, that’s crazy. What are you doing playing ballads that loud?!”

Lacy Sr goldfishes back at him, mouth bobbing, presumably-last-night’s lipstick bleeding. Still so very hot.

“I mean, look, I get it, you’re writing a letter to daddy in jail–and that sucks, and if you need company, you know where to find me–but can’t you do it a little quieter?” Eddie says, a wholly believable impression of a flabbergasted man. The cops almost seem to buy it.

“I am not in there playing records–” “Right, you’re too busy letting your daughter go missing under your nose. Listen, ma’am, this might not be Loch Nora, but around here, we got respect for our neighbors!” Oh, he is a honey-glazed Christmas ham.

A honey-glazed Christmas ham that is advancing towards your trailer door and dragging the attention of the attending adults with him, indicating you with a subtle two-finger salute that you better get out of his.

You snap the blinds back into place. Motherfucking go time. Until you realize that you have no shoes to speak of, just your book bag and whatever’s left of your steely reserve. You’d tossed your sneakers into that bag with your sodden cheerleader get-up– where the hell was that now?

You shove on the sizes-too-big work boots by the door and make it happen.

Eddie’s out there just pantomiming like his life depends on it and you take the steps in front of his trailer two at a time, as silently as is humanly possible– and fuck, it’s cold out here, but the cold helps! The cold makes you faster, more decisive, more agile simply down to the fact that you need to get out of the fucking cold. Adrenaline is sparking off at the base of your throat, making you a little dizzy but a lot determined.

You catch Eddie’s eye as you sneak, sneak, sneak around the back of your trailer. He gives you a not entirely subtle thumbs up and yells, “Yes! Yes, I think it’s an issue pressing enough for the law, I am a goddamned high school senior! I can’t study if the dulcet tones of Paul Anka are breaking my focus every five minutes!”

“Thought it was Englebert Humperdinck?”

“She’s got a catalog of records on her like you wouldn’t believe!”

Then it’s just hands on the outside of the trailer, feeling around for like, a trap door, some loose paneling, anything.

“Oh, so we couldn’t have sprung for a model with a freaking back door?!” But a window is kind of like a back door, you realize, and you’re a goddamn cheerleader. You’ve got a core of steel.

A lot of elbow grease is required to slide open the window of your tiny living room, but by god do you crank that thing. Army rolling onto the couch and into a bunch of boxes of breakables–living mausoleum, great to see you again–you freeze. That’s a lot of clattering.

“Did you hear that?” Your mother’s voice.

“I’m shocked you can hear anything at the volume you’re playing those Rat Pack records, duchess.” Eddie. You choke out a silent laugh as you dash to your bedroom.’

Alright. Alright. I gotta make it look like I was up to something… First word that comes to mind? Slutty. Because that’ll make the police no longer give a shit what you were doing (she brought it on herself) and effectively redirect your mother’s rage.

Hands tear off the borrowed boxers and Stooges shirt and grab the first thing in your mess of half-unpacked clothes. A form-fitting jersey dress in dark blue, which you throw on without thinking of underwear. A calf-length pea coat on top of that. The nearest pair of loafers to go with. You’re not formulating this outfit, okay, but one cursory look in the mirror and it sure does scream walk of shame.

But at least it doesn’t scream walk of shame from trailer across the way.

Then, your front door creaks. “No, I know I heard something in here…”

Fuck! Fucking fucker! As delicately as humanly possible–so, not very–you ease yourself out of your own bedroom window, book bag in tow.

I’ve gotta make this look believable.

You land on the ground with a soft thump, mere feet from your front door. There, Eddie is holding up the rear of the party walking into your trailer. You, not a goddamned second to lose, break into a soft jog and do a fucking make-believe loop around Eddie’s place, heart hammering in your ears.

You, a professional in willing your own reality, call out a super convincing, “Mom?” as you approach your trailer from the opposite side.

As if you just got here.

“Lacy?!” she squawks, darting right back out from whence she came. She barrels past Eddie, the two Hawkins police officers following close behind.

“What is… going on?” you ask. Lying– you come by it natural.

“Where the hell have you been?!” your mom shrieks, and she would slap the shit out of you if she could. You see that much in her fiery eyes. “You know, I came home this morning to a key broken off in the lock of our door and you were nowhere to be found! Nowhere!”

You cannot help yourself, unable to stomach her self-righteous display of motherly concern. “So where the hell have you been ‘til this morning, Mom?”

Her mouth hardens into a line. Comin’ real close to getting backhanded in front of the cops.

“I came back after cheerleading last night,” you explain, eyes going all earnest and wide as you include the cops in your little spin– paying special attention to Callahan, because he’s not not a little cute, okay? “It was raining like crazy, and I was trying to unlock the door and–you know how that lock sticks, Mom–my key just broke off! In the door! I was like, gee, what do I do? And you weren’t home, Mom. And I had no idea how I could reach you. Mom.” The second she gets you alone, she’s going to strangle you. Worth it, for the look on her face. “So I went to a friend’s.”

Callahan seems to drink in your disheveled appearance. “A friend’s, huh?”

“Just a friend’s, Officer,” you simper, batting your eyelashes, trying to steam up the little piggy’s horn-rimmed glasses. “Promise.”

In the near background, Eddie Munson silently gags. You have to force the corners of your mouth down to keep from smiling.

“I’m so sorry to have wasted your time, gentlemen.” Your mom’s chipped manicure tightens around your bicep. “Get inside that house. Now.”

“Hardly a house. Doesn’t even have a goddamn back door.”

The cops give a good ol’ salute and get to getting, their quota for community service just about totalled for the day. Passing by Eddie on your way to the front door, your mom rolls her eyes. “Typical.”

Over your shoulder, you throw him a twisty little grimace. A mouthed thank you. Seriously.

“You ladies keep that racket down, now,” he calls and watches your mom muscle you past the doorway.

Slam goes the door, the trailer seeming to shudder with it. And then it’s quiet. Still. Eddie sighs out a big, cold lungful, his eyes trained on your front door. Without the immediate distraction of you, the memory of last night’s hushed and furrowed conversation with Wayne gathers over him like a stormcloud, heavy with thunder, pregnant with rain.

Your dad called.

Al Munson never calls. He just shows up. He never calls, unless he’s trying to take the temperature of a place. A place that’s recently been occupied by a family he had a significant part in completely blowing up– yours.

Eddie has… no idea what he’s supposed to do about that.

Because Eddie Munson deals in absolutes.

And he, unfortunately, evidently, obviously, absolutely cannot stay away from you now.

–

So following the events of that fateful Friday, you had no good goddamn idea how to behave. You spend the weekend without a single sighting of Eddie Munson, much to your confusing chagrin, and you really did try your very best to behave normally about this.

But for the first time in a long time, you were completely alone.

No chittering friends to distract you. No stilted lunches with your mother. No conversations into rusted handsets through shatterproof glass.

You drifted around town, retreading haunts that really should have elicited some kind of feeling in you. They used to, y’know, when you escaped the neon of Starcourt (before it burned down) for the mothball-scented stacks of the bookstore.

Which, fittingly enough, was just called The Bookstore. Way to establish a town-wide monopoly.

Toeing around the shelves, chipped nails clutching a Simone de Beauvoir book you’d already read but lost and didn’t exactly intend to buy, you willed yourself to give into the curse of familiarity. To woo yourself with recognizable surroundings. To pretend like your whole worldview wasn’t skewed by a Stooges t-shirt still lying under your pillow.

The boots, you’d left in an inconspicuous position by the front door.

The rest of it, though…

Consciously, you’re reaching into the shelves of the philosophy section, reorganizing the whole thing because they’ve completely blended the Eastern and Western flavors (and even have a little theology thrown in there, for Chrissake). Unconsciously, you’re thinking about how you’ve been wearing that Stooges shirt in some respect since Thursday. How Friday night found it rucked up around your breasts as you squirmed under the covers, two fingers in radial motion in your panties, muffling gasps into your shoulder. Thinking about him gripping you by the shoulders, leaning into you in the half-light, his hair fanned out on his pillow as his arm sloped around you. How Saturday found you with such white-hot shame that you couldn’t even think about him grinning at you without cringing. How Sunday, today, in the bookstore, finds you wearing it under your bottle green sweater.

You’ve lost your mind. Your entire mind. The Woman Destroyed, indeed.

So, maybe it’s better that you’re spending the weekend solo. But of course, the moment that thought occurs and you yank a copy of Fear and Trembling off the shelf, you’re looking down the barrel of something just awful.

Red-rimmed eyes, bucketing tears and sniffling, there’s goddamn Nancy Wheeler. Full on weeping, in your bookstore. What’s worse is, there’s no passing this off– there’s no pretending you never saw it, like you normally would, because she makes direct eye contact with you.

“Ohgh–!” is the noise she makes, a kind of snotted-up exclamation, a congested gasp of surprise at your own dissociative gaze intruding on her private moment.

God, you’re so tempted to just slam the Kierkegaard book back in place and high tail it out of the place.

But you don’t.

From your confessional box-esque view, you can see that weeping Wheeler is clutching a copy of Little Women.

“Don’t worry,” you murmur, the bookstore always making you take on a library-hush tone of voice “They don’t all die of scarlet fever.”

It catches Nancy off-guard; she lets loose a little heh-heh, despite her crumpled expression. “I know,” she says, voice all uneven from her tearfulness, “I’ve read it a million times.”

“Which part got you this go around?” you ask. “The book burning? Meg and that pitiful violet silk debacle? Jo’s sham marriage?”

“Jo doesn’t end up in a sham marriage,” Nancy spikes, wiping under her eyes with a delicate knuckle. You wish to god this girl would turn ugly just once. It’s sickening.

But you were right on this one, and you knew it. “Does so. She spends her whole life refuting the idea of getting all shacked up like Meg, only to settle down with a man, what, twice her age?”

“She loves him.”

“Does she? I mean, she loved Laurie too, in a way.”

“You think she should have ended up with Laurie.” Nancy says this to you in a way that’s almost condescending. A tear drips off the tip of her perfect nose. Fucking joke.

“Don’t be so goddamned simplistic, Wheeler,” you sigh, rounding the sagging bookcase so you can meet her in her aisle. Because you’re right, and you’d like to be face-to-face when you tell her so. “Jo shouldn’t have ended up with anybody.”

Her brow crinkles. “That’s way too sad.”

“Really?” you scoff. You’d have expected Nancy Wheeler to cop to a narrative undertone a little better than that. “All Jo wants is freedom– to live as she pleases and write as she pleases. It’s totally diminutive to just marry her off in the end. Jo deserves to be alone. Make her life completely her own. She doesn’t need Friedrich, or Laurie. She’s enough– she’s Jo March, for Jesus’ sake.”

A seed in this triggers something in Nancy and lets out a big old yelping sob– one that makes Ivana, the take-no-shit owner of The Bookstore, lean over the counter and glower at them. Library hush, remember? You take a couple of steps forward, shielding Nancy from view.

“Okay, what did I do? What’s going on here?” you ask– you kind of hiss, actually.

“I’m sor– no, it’s nothing, it’s stupid!” she blubbers. “Just… God, they all get to be a lot sometimes, don’t they?”

And immediately, you know exactly what she’s talking about. Your friends. Your friends loved to shit on Nancy Wheeler, both to her face and behind her back– though it was more of the latter on this on-again phase of her and Steve’s rocky romance. Steve had shared some not-stern-enough (as far as you’re concerned) words with you guys, basically asking you to lay off Nance. Yes, she’s a nerd. Yes, she kind of thinks she’s better than you guys. Yes, she kind of can’t hang. But she’s Steve’s girl, and that’s what matters.

To her credit, she’s made an effort with you all this time, despite all the ribbing. Despite your pointed coldness toward her.

She doesn’t see kindness as a weakness. You do.

It occurs to you that you’re wrong.

“Tell me about it, sister,” you mutter, hugging de Beauvoir and Kierkegaard to your chest.

“I’m sorry,” she sniffs, meeting your achingly dry eyes with her big, sparkling wet ones. You hate a pretty crier. She looks like a fucking woodland creature. “For how they all treated you, I’m sorry. I should have said something.”

Ah, because you were victim to some not-so-sly digs too. Nancy was probably relieved the heat was off her for once.

“I believe that,” you say, and you do. She’s got no real good reason to lie to you, especially being that you’ve been such a pill the entire time you’ve known her. “But what did we expect, y’know. Lie down with dogs and all that shit.”

“Right,” she nods. Peers at the books in your hands. “That’s pretty… heavy stuff.”

“What, this?” you flash her the Kierkegaard, “Wait, shit, this isn’t Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas!”

Nancy laughs as high and clear as a bell, and you feel kind of… good about it. Proud of yourself. The sound dies between you, a touch of awkwardness coloring the moment.

“Listen. Nancy.” Your tone takes on a seriousness; this is advice you usually save for yourself, but… you don’t know. You’re feeling charitable. Inspired by recent events, maybe. “All of these people are bottoming out in the middle, okay? You don’t need to worry about them. Their relevance in your life is… fleeting, at best.”

“Is that how you feel?”

“Yes,” you tell her, and mean it, “Always have.”

“Didn’t always seem that way,” she says, a tilt to her head. Her bloodshot eyes are studying you. “You seemed pretty wrapped up in them, from what I saw.”

“I’m a chameleon, girl. I adapt to survive.”

“Is that how you feel about… all of them?” There’s weight behind that question. “Bottoming out in the middle?”

She means Steve. You can tell she’s also afraid that she thinks the same thing. Sweet, devastatingly handsome, unambitious Steve. Lionhearted, driven, stratospheric Nancy. She’s going places. He’s going to his shift at Family Video.

“You’re not ready to hear my thoughts on that,” you say, reaching for the book in her hand. Out comes your fountain pen and you’re scribbling in the inside cover. “But you should call me, when you are.”

“Okay, but— you know this means I have to buy this now,” Nancy chuckles.

Amateur.

“Not necessarily,” you say, taking a step closer and slyly slipping the book into the open tote she’s carrying. You pat the wide-eyed Wheeler on the shoulder.

“Sometimes the five finger discount chooses you.”

–

Monday morning finds Eddie Munson not just on time, but early for first period. He’s here before you are, sinking further and further into his seat as he anticipates your arrival. Of all the freakish things he’s done in his whole entire life, this behavior is the freakiest.

But he couldn’t help it. It was a weekend of strategically watching through the blinds so he could avoid you if you left the trailer, and sometimes catching you watching him back. Though, your blinds still aren’t fixed, so it’s not like there was some vice-versa catching going on. What? Shut up. It’s been a confusing forty-eight hours.

He’s slept so poorly that he’s actually hallucinated you in that cursed Stooges t-shirt a couple of times, pacing past your bedroom window.

These visions have led him to have quite the cramp in his dominant hand.

Which is not great, because he’s probably going to have to re-take this pop quiz that Kaminsky is apparently handing back today.

And a cherry on top of this weirdo shit cake is Ronnie Ecker is sitting diagonally across from him at the top of the classroom, looking all concerned and stuff.

He hasn’t told her anything. Not about you and your impromptu sleepover at the trailer, not about his dad’s looming and uncertain return, nothing.

He’d gone over to her place on Saturday to work out some kinks in some Hellfire stuff, but he’d spent most of the time standing in the middle of the living room, zoning out at the TV as an episode of Murder, She Wrote rolled on.

“Dude, what’s the fucking matter with you?”

“Wh– nothing! Angela Lansbury, man, she’s really. Uh. Magnetic.”

But as much as Ronnie had pressed, and she had pressed because she’s a presser, no juice was coming out of this little orange! No siree fuck. Eddie had done such a good and painful job of saying nothing that Ronnie had completely sold herself on the theory that the black mold in his bedroom had finally entered his brain.

Which, I mean, eventually it will, right.

Point is, Eddie is now shitting himself because he knows that the second you walk through that classroom door, it’s gonna be written all over his face. Maybe not in such excruciating detail as I helped her out of the rain and she put her head on my chest and she smoked a cigarette so pretty I almost died and we listened to my–our?!–favorite Tom Waits record and we almost kissed but I did technically sleep with her if you want to be super nit-picky about it, but. Ronnie’ll know something.

And Eddie has an idea how Ronnie will react– and it matters to him how Ronnie will react. Always has, always will. And she is going to beat him to death with her Trapper Keeper, probably, screaming bloody murder about what a moron he is for letting this happen.

But also, she might not. Because she’s always kind of admired you from a distance, too. She would kind of be all shy whenever she came out of a Biology class that you two shared. It was super weird, because Ronnie doesn’t do the crush thing.

Is this just the deadly nightshade effect you have on people, or what?

Fuckshit. Shitfuck. As if he willed your arrival into existence, there you are. Breezing through the door in some belted velvet getup, with your shiny little shoes. They’ve got ribbons attached, winding around your ankles like you’re a ballerina or some bullshit, a terrible, sultry ballerina with daggers for eyeballs that are aiming right at Eddie.

He diverts his interest to his textbook for the first time in his academic career.

And he prays, prays, that you still don’t want to acknowledge him in public– that you’ll just sit down in front of him and ignore him.

Somebody down there likes him.

You take your seat, leaning back further than you need to and flicking your hair all over his desk. It’s almost like every other Monday, but this time it feels pointed.

“Well,” Mr Kaminsky sighs, following you in the door and looking as bedraggled as ever. “You should all be ashamed of yourselves.”

He clicks open his briefcase, clearly imagining the silence in the classroom to be worth much more than it is. “Some of the worst quiz answers I’ve seen on record.”

Your hair smells familiar, Eddie thinks. Like a mixture of your rich, smoky floral perfume and his shampoo.

“That’s what you get for pulling a shittily written paragraph-answer pop quiz on a half-taught section, dumbass,” Eddie hears you mutter.

Kaminsky calls your name. “Something you wanna share with us?”

Eddie watches your shoulders stiffen. “We’re not even halfway through the section, Mr. K. How are we supposed to answer questions on something we haven’t been taught?”

“Hilarious, coming from you,” Kaminsky says, stabbing a finger in your direction, “because you’re one of the only aces.”

“Just because I passed doesn’t mean I agree with the way I was taught,” you level, and Eddie can see by the way your shoulder blades shift that you’re folding your arms. “I read ahead, anyway.”

“Great. You can continue that independent learning streak,” Kaminsky smirks, “in detention.”

“Oh, that is bullshit!”

Christ, Eddie wants to kiss you between those tense little shoulderblades. All the way down your spine.

“Yeah? Be my guest–Lacy? They call you Lacy, right?–and take two. Now, if there’s no more objections to my teaching methods? No?”

Thunk. A stack of papers lands on Ronnie Ecker’s desk. “As the only other person who scored a hundred and hasn’t given me any lip, go ahead and pass those back, Miss Ecker.”

Ronnie, god love her, does as she’s told. But not before doing a little rifling through the stack and scribbling something on one of the tests. The papers sail back through the classroom in a whirlwind of white, take one, pass it along.

You’ve got Eddie’s, and you hold it over your shoulder without so much as turning to look at him. Which is what he wanted, what he needs, sure, but what he actually wants is for you to accidentally graze his hand so he has an excuse to hold it and maybe eat it.

He snatches the test back, all nerves. Unsurprisingly, a big fat D for duuuuhhhh plants itself in red like an ugly lipstick kiss at the top of the page. Eh, at least it wasn’t an F. You take the victories where you can get ‘em these d–

All of a sudden, you’re snapping back around, grabbing Eddie’s paper back from his desk.

“Hey–!” he hisses, almost knocked unconscious by another bloom of your perfume. “What’re you doing!”

You, again, do not even deign to look back. You just stretch a single index finger back in his general direction– a Lacy-coded sign to fuck off, I’m busy. You hunch over the paper for the remainder of class, seemingly checking and re-checking and going at it with your precious fountain pen.

He spends the next forty minutes in a cold sweat, mind racing, until the bell finally rings.

Then it’s a dash, with Eddie trying to grab you and you heading straight for Kaminsky and the both of you just slamming into his desk.

What in the everloving fuck could she be doing now?

“This is a C grade,” you state, plain and simple. Kaminsky just flops his khaki-wearing ass into his chair.

“What are you talking about?”

“Eddie’s test. You mis-graded him.” Wait, this is– is she helping me? “You docked him points here, here and here when the answers were perfectly fine.”

“I think I know how to grade a test, Lacy. I’ve been doing this, for a job mind you, since before you were even a twinkle in your convict father’s eye.” Woah, Kaminsky. Straight for the jugular.

But then Eddie notices you seize in the tiniest of flinches and decides he kind of wants to punch out this teacher. “Look, hold up, we don’t–”

“Fine. Compare it with mine.” You smack your test paper, with its circled red A, on the desk next to Eddie’s. He squints, and he recognizes it, because he’d recognize Ronnie Ecker’s handwriting anywhere– up top of your sheet, scribbled, HARD AGREE– TOTAL BULLSHIT. “They’re basically the same answers. I mean, same content, same major point– the sentence structure leaves a little to be desired, but he’s got the right idea.”

Snared.

“Wait, really?” Eddie’s eyebrows raise. Okay, even he didn’t know that. He barely remembers even taking this test. He can’t be sure he didn’t cheat, but he’s not about to mention that now…

You look at him, right at him, for the first time today. And shrug, with your one little shoulder, like you love to do when you’re too cool to speak.

“And you give a shit… why?” Kaminsky says, asking the question we’re all pondering.

“Peer tutoring,” you tell him, enunciating those words like you’ve taken elocution lessons. You could’ve. You’re, apparently, full of surprises. “I’m rehabilitating my image.”

Kaminsky is going red, red, and redder under that collar.

“Which is why I won’t be able to make it to detention. Either of ‘em.”

“Now, you listen to me, you little hoity-toity madam–” the older man says, shooting out of his chair to lean almost nose-to-nose with you. Eddie reaches a hand out, to either pull you back or slap this dude, but you sense it coming. Push it away. Ow.

“Mr Kaminsky,” you say, all mock gasp, “What is Ms Kelley gonna say when I tell her that you’re getting in the way of me enriching my fellow students’ academic experience? Is that really the kind of environment we want to foster here at Hawkins High?”

You hit the teacher with a sneer of a pout, boxing him right down to size. And Kaminsky actually retreats, like physically backs off.

“Fine. Fine.” The teacher grabs a red marker from the cup on his desk, harshly scribbling on the ‘D’ on Eddie’s test and marking up the whole paper with a massive fuck-you ‘C’. “Best of luck with that rehabilitation, Lacy. If this is the company you’re keeping, you’re gonna need it.”

“Neato threat, real original!” you chirp, and it’s all venom in those vowels as you gather the tests back, “Knew you’d see the light, Mr K.”

Eddie, of course, follows your hard little steps out of the room like a loyal mutt. But not before he turns and aims a whaddaya gonna do! flavored shrug at Kaminsky. “Go Tigers?”

“What?” In the hallway, he struggles to keep up with you in a sea of jostling students. “And how?” Dodging a backpack. “And–” Marry me? Tripping a freshman. “Gareth! Watch where you’re going, man!”

“Kaminsky wants to play hide the klobása with Kelley.”

“The what?”

“Czech sausage. He’s Czech– Christ. He wants to bang her.”

“Oh.” Get in line, my man. He watches you twist your combination lock with a grace that’s frankly unnecessary. He’s fidgeting where he stands. So much for avoiding you, but he was doomed from the start in that regard. “That was– woah, back there. Like, I think you might have just single handedly raised my GPA.”

“Good. So we’re square. Indy County Tech Center, here you come.” You deposit your books, grab some more, and flick his newly-graded test at him so that he has to catch it in midair. Then, a slam! of your locker door and you’re gone, making tracks down the hallway in your little ballerina shoes.

“Lacy– Lacy, wait up.” Eddie finally falls in step with you, following wherever you’re going. “I’m feeling some hostility here.”

“Wow, point to Munson. How perceptive,” you snit, not meeting his eyes.

“Are you mad at me?”

“How could I be mad at you? I don’t even know you.”

“Lacy, don’t be a bi–”

That makes you stop dead, stabbing a finger in the air near his chest.

“Do not fucking call me a bitch.” You mean it. God, but you mean it, and he can see it; you’re about to boil over, just about holding it together. Your big eyes flutter at him and he feels like he doesn’t have kneecaps. You suck in a jagged breath, hard expression faltering. “I feel like an idiot. If you really wanna know. I thought–...”

“You thought what?” he asks, and he kind of knows, but he also thinks that might be blowing shit way out of proportion. You look down, tugging a piece of lint from your sleeve. Eddie verbally nudges at you, because if he touches you, he might a) crumble or b) be on the receiving end of some blunt-force trauma. That binder you’re holding is huge. “Lacy. You thought what?”

“I just–... You ignored me all weekend,” you say in this little mouse voice he was not expecting to come from you. Except, he had heard it before. I’m cold.

But so what? She’s– she’s always cold.

“And? You’ve ignored me, like, my whole life.”

“I know that, but…” This is difficult for you to choke out. Bodies pass into classrooms behind you and soon enough, you two are alone in the hallway. Again. But there’s no sniping, no snarling, no cur-like behavior with your teeth exposed. “I didn’t hate being in your trailer.” Oh my god. Oh my god. “Hanging… out with you, I didn’t–” Holy shit. Eddie does not know where to look, what to feel, what to think, what to do. And he shows it as much, kind of just gap-mouthed staring at you, willing himself to say something smooth– or at least nice. But when you glance back up at him, finally, it’s a look of defeat.

“Look, whatever. Congrats on your C. We’re even. So you can forget it.” And you move around him, ducking through the door of AP French.

Not you can forget it, like in your dreams, Munson, but you can forget it like it was right there and you blew it, buddy.

The classroom door clicks closed and Eddie bends at the midriff, feeling like he’s been stabbed.

–

You felt like you were trying to digest a rock until the final bell rang– though, c’mon, you didn’t know what you could have possibly expected. Eddie Munson is Eddie Munson, and you’re you. And you’d thought it yourself, it was an instance of temporary insanity. Dawn broke, the harsh light of day illuminating all the reasons why you two being anything less than contentious semi-strangers was a logical impossibility.

So what if you wanted to kiss him. You’ve wanted to kiss a lot of people and haven't done it. It hadn’t killed you.

However, it hadn’t gnawed at you like this either.

Nancy Wheeler called, by the way, which means she stole that book off the back of your advice–that, or paid for it once you left the store, a flurry of charming apologies fluttering around her head like Snow White’s attendant birds. Typical. But she’d called, and you two had had an awkward forty five second conversation where she asked you if you’d mind awfully if you looked over her latest piece for the Streak.

Something about spotlighting female business owners in Hawkins.

“Coffee’s on me!” she’d said brightly, so super-duper keen. You all-of-a-sudden hated to put a damper on her, so you said sure.

“But I’ll be uncompromising. I want you to know that.”

“Of course. That’s why I asked you.”

It occurred to you then that Nancy Wheeler, in her way, might actually look up to you.

How fucking weird.

And sure enough, there she was, waiting for you in the parking lot once you gathered all your stuff from your locker. She leans against her car, wearing a corduroy skirt and a sweater that you don’t even really hate, and throws you a casual wave. The thing about Nancy and her consistent commitment to kindness toward you was she wasn’t even asinine about it– she never chased you around the playground, begging you to put on her friendship bracelet. If she did, you could actually hate her. Hate her for being cloying and desperate. You could call her all the shitty words for saccharine in the book and feel justified.

But that is, regrettably, not the case.

You almost say something like, Thank god your car is out of the shop, I’m sick to death of walking in these shoes, before you remember you made up that thing about Nancy’s car being in the shop. In order to skip class with Eddie Munson.

And just as you’re crossing the lot to her wood-paneled station wagon (family car, you’re guessing?), that very same Eddie Munson skids directly into your path. Like, gasping for breath.

“You di–huhh, you didn’t hear me calling you?” he says, straining against his lung capacity.

“Jesus!” you jump, “No!”

You really didn’t. You must have rage-tuned him out.

“Oh, right. Oh, fuck, you walk so fast. Gimme a second here,” Eddie wheezes, hands on his knees. “You– you want a ride home?”

You look over his shoulder to a very perplexed looking Nancy Wheeler and find yourself fighting a smile. Motioning for her to wait a sec, you turn back to Eddie. “I’m good. I got a thing with Wheeler.”

“Wheeler the priss?”

“And Lacy the bitch,” you remind him of that epithet he’d pinned on you like a corsage.

He clocks it and grins. Eddie’s grin lands like a dollop of cream in your otherwise shitty coffee. You do not like this about him. At least, not right now.

“The dynamic duo.”

“Yeah, we’re gonna go solve crimes,” you roll your eyes, kind of over the whole bit already, “You’re making us late. What do you want, Munson?”

Eddie holds up a ringed finger, uno momento por favor, and digs around in his pockets. Candy and gum wrappers and an old, crushed cigarette soft pack all fall out during his cavity search until finally, he produces a crumpled piece of bright yellow paper and thrusts it toward you.

“It’s no Harrington kegger, but you are cordially invited.”

It’s a flyer. Corroded Coffin, Live at– Oh. Oh. It’s been painstakingly hand-doodled and photocopied, the pencil marks where mistakes have been erased still visible on the print.

This is his band.

You, in only the way you can, study it with a quirked brow– a look of dismissal, one might even say. Your eyes slowly raise to meet Eddie’s, who looks as if he’s about to start hopping from foot to foot, there’s so much nervous energy thrumming under his leather jacket.

Fwump. You palm the flyer into his chest. You nearly feel the physical sensation of his heart sinking.

Then, you pluck your fountain pen from thin air, uncapping it with your teeth.

“There’s an ‘e’ in Roane County, dumbass.”

With the delicate nib, you scratch the letter onto the misspelled place name, using his chest as an upright writing desk. You can actually feel his breathing becoming all uneven. His grin rounds out its corners and becomes a smile, and you can tell the difference between those two expressions now, apparently.

“Does that mean you’ll come?”

“That means I know where it is,” you say, capping your pen and leaving him clutching the flyer to his chest.

“Friday! Ten PM!” Eddie yells after you, hand cupped around his mouth. “Roane County Quarry! With an ‘e’!”

Nancy meets you with a look of total bemusement as you finally tug open the passenger door of your car. She watches Eddie watch you, almost tripping over his Reeboks as he walks backwards toward his beat up van. And you read every inch of the look she’s giving you.

“He is my neighbor, Wheeler.”

“Yeah! He seems like a… super nice neighbor. Really friendly.”

“So not ready to talk about that yet,” you mutter, beating back a blush that’s threatening to color your cheeks.

Nancy giggles– bubbly like phosphate, friendly-teasing, not pointed, not mean. Weird feeling. She turns her keys in the ignition. “But when you are, will you call me?”

–

You’d swear Corroded Coffin were about to be on the cover of Circus, the way Eddie has been… well, Eddie-ing out at rehearsal all week. He’s thrown not one, but two temper tantrums about the boys not sounding tight enough (“We need this clown car tight, you clowns!”) and has received not one, not two, but three perfectly aimed drumsticks to the head, courtesy of Ronnie Ecker.

The third one was just target practice, but he earned the other two.

“What has crawled up your ass, dude?” Jeff, a sophomore that can admittedly out play every single one of them in bass and every other instrument, demands.

“I bet I know what crawled up his ass,” Ronnie glowers from behind her snares, “Or should I say who.”

Now, Ronnie hadn’t witnessed Eddie giving you that flyer, or your copyediting work on it, but she had that preternatural thing where she could feel it when Eddie was out and about doing some dumb stupid dumbass bullshit. Like those dogs that can detect earthquakes. She’s full time on the beat detecting earthquakes.

“Cool it, Jessica Fletcher.” Maybe Angela Lansbury really did do a number on him. “I quite simply want us to sound good, for once. Not Hideout good– good-good. The Quarry is a big deal! Like, a literal big cavernous deal. You want a dry run for the Garden? This is our shot, maestros.”

“Are you seriously comparing Roane County Quarry to Madison Square Garden?” Cyrus, their second guitarist and first-rate vocalist, says with narrowed eyes. “Something did crawl up your ass.”

“And die,” Ronnie agrees.

“And now the death stench is in your brain,” Cyrus adds.

“And the stench has turned toxic.”

“And the toxicity is killing off your brain cells one by one by one.”

“And we’re gonna get on stage at the Quarry, and your head is gonna explode–”

“Just like Scanners,” Cyrus and Ronnie finish in such an eerie unison that it actually raises goosebumps on Eddie’s arms.

“Fuck, are they serious?” sweet, gentle, naive Jeff asks, brown eyes flared in alarm. Something about being a child prodigy in one arena makes you so desperately gullible in everything else.

“No!” Eddie barks. “We just– we’ve gotta be good.”

Because what would Lacy say about what Robert Christgau would say about us?

Something cutting like a scythe, brilliant like a diamond.

But for your part, you don’t know much about metal.

I mean, you’ve got a vague familiarity with the genre– you’ve got a subscription to Rolling Stone and Creem (RIP), for god’s sake. The roots were far more accessible to you as a whole; ‘Smoke on the Water’ by Deep Purple has the kind of intro you can paint your nails to, for example, and ‘Immigrant Song’ by Led Zeppelin feels like hotwiring Billy Hargrove’s car and driving it over a cliff (in a good way).

The absolute thrash of it all, though? Your one musical blindspot. And you weren’t quite sure how keen you were to lift the veil on it

Regardless, you decided you were going. You were going to show up at Roane County Quarry, ‘e’ included, and dip your toe into the kind of lawfully insouciant scene you’d always fantasized about, ever since you read your first Kerouac.

Granted, the metalhead-and-allied contingent of Hawkins weren’t exactly the Beat poetry set, but you doubted they’d be boring. You imagined a lot of leather incorporated into the outfits. At least one of them would have a switchblade. Maybe there’d be a Hells Angel there.

The only way to know is to go.

Something Eddie possibly failed to consider, being that he has molten lava in place of a bloodstream, is that it is positively arctic on this fateful Friday night. So sub-polar is the goddamned weather that you have to dig out your warmest coat.

Your warmest coat isn’t exactly the desired attire for a thrash rock show happening in a quarry.

“What the hell is she wearing?” come the murmurs as you slip your way through the modest (but gathering?) crowd, all finding heat around fires set in trashcans and mouthfuls sunk from bottles in brown paper bags. Girls with hair so gelled and spiked and backcombed that it looks sharp and flammable give you dirty looks, and the looks their boyfriends give you are even dirtier– and not even in that way! Misogyny in rock and roll, alive and fucking well!

You spot Eddie Munson in the near distance and bend down, grab a pebble, and pelt it at his denim-and-leather clad back. He spins, alarmed, on alert, and does a bad job of dimming how he lights up like a goddamn Christmas tree when he sees who’s launching projectiles at him. You. He’s all lit up, looking at you.

You glance away. Like, yes. The miracle has arrived. Calm down.

Then his face falls a teensy bit.

“What–”

“If you ask me what I’m wearing, I’m going to scream,” you say, crossing your fuzzy arms over your fuzzy chest. “And we’re in a quarry. Sound carries.”

Eddie reaches out, hand all gnarled like Dracula or something, and pets you on the arm of your coat.

“Guys, get over here.”

“No–” you start, but all of a sudden, all four members of Corroded Coffin are taking turns stroking the arm of your fur coat. “Stop that. It bites.”

“Eddie, can you confirm or deny that it bites?” Ronnie Ecker says in a tone you’ve never heard Ronnie Ecker use before– knowing, biting, a little nasty. You’re not sure whether or not to be offended by that, but… you like this look on her.

Or maybe you just like when anyone gives Eddie Munson shit.

“He’s never had the privilege,” you say and shoot Ronnie a sly look. Just to test the waters. She blushes. Point to Lacy.

“Alright, let me go ahead and nip this in the bud before it begins,” Eddie cuts in, manually removing Ronnie’s petting hand from your upper arm. He flourishes a hand out in front of you, a half-bow, a consummate dork. “We’re almost on. May I escort you to your seat, m’lady?”

“Jesus Christ,” you mutter, committed to the contrarian bit for the time being, but let him lead you all the same. “They reserve seating in this ditch?”

“Not for everybody!”

“Why am I getting special treatment?” You don’t know what answer you’re expecting to that question.

“Lacy,” Eddie levels, stopping dead at his van and looking you dead in your face, “you wore a mink coat to a metal show. You’re not a VIP, you’re a liability.”

“What, dead animals aren’t hardcore enough for you people anymore?” you drawl as he props open the passenger door of the van. You take his hand, as you’ve taken his hand a handful of times now, in a way where it’s almost ordinary. But then, halfway in and halfway out of the van, you pause.

“Oh, no. This just won’t do.”

“Whaddaya mean?” Eddie mumbles.

“Well, I’m not gonna be able to see shit from here.”

“Where do you–”

“I’m getting on the roof, asshole.”

You slam the door on him, rolling down the passenger window. All hands and swinging limbs, careful not to snag your tights on the peeling paintwork, you clamber out the window and up onto the roof of his van. Settling your ass down, crossing your legs over his windshield, you flash him one of those winning smiles. He smiles back.

There’s a buzzing in your stomach. It’s not from the flask of whiskey you’ve been sipping from, but you’re willing to lie.

“Cheerleader,” he teases.

“Break a leg, Munson,” you say, cheersing that aforementioned flask to him. “Snap it clean off for me.”

There’s not a whole lot of pre-show faffing about (you didn’t time your entrance to hang around) before Corroded Coffin takes the stage. And god, the sound is horrendous. You can barely hear the banter up top (winning, you’re sure) from the band’s frontman– which, to your shock and awe, is not Eddie. It’s a fellow senior named Cyrus Painter (great name, by the way), who you vaguely recognize from Math and from the Hellfire table you crashed that one time. He doesn’t seem to hold much of a stage presence beyond glowering and muttering darkly into a microphone that’s barely picking up his voice, but all importance of that seems to go right out the window as soon as they hit the opening chords of their first song. You think it might be called ‘Whiplash’.

And it’s good.

It’s almost perverse, how technically accomplished it is– like, high school bands should not be this technically accomplished, but then you twig that Ronnie is in band. Like, the marching band. And so is that other kid on the bass, the one who they featured in the Streak for winning a bunch of teen virtuoso awards. Cyrus carries the song with the beautiful grace of a wrecking ball, but–and you might be biased–the one that’s putting the texture on this whole operation is the lead guitarist.

Eddie’s not in band. Eddie’s not technically perfect. But it’s Eddie that’s throwing shots of gasoline down the hatch of this fire-breathing dragon. This would be way too neat of an outfit if it wasn’t for him, fingers flying so fast over his fretboard that he barely touches it, scuzzing up the surrounds of the thrash metal with an almost bluesy warmth.

Warmth. Of course it’s warmth. Of course it’s searing fingers and sweat you can almost see teeming from underneath his bandana, even in the sub-zero temperatures. It’s Eddie, throwing his whole self into this.

A shot of pure admiration followed by a twinge of envy.

You wonder how he does that.

The song concludes, barely leaving time for whoops and applause before they launch into another. They’re laser-focused, locked in like Chrissy Cunningham in that goddamn basket toss, and you kind of get it. It’s not for you, but you kind of get it. This is sword swinging fucking music, slay the monster fucking music.

Dungeons and Dragons fucking music.

It’s all build, all fantasy, all story, all rage and rush and ravenousness. And before you know it, it’s all over, and you’re applauding– applauding more reservedly than you feel you want to.

“I’m comin’ up there!” There is Eddie, who’s apparently made a beeline from the milkcrate stage to his van, under the pretense of loading equipment. Which he’s managed to do in what seems like thirty seconds flat.

A gas lamp of eagerness and pure energy, he’s blazing bright and clumsily hoisting his way onto the roof to sit with you– he doesn’t have your muscular strength, so he has to kind of swing a leg and roll his way up there, almost knocking you over.

“Woah!” you giggle as he collides with you, reaching for your flask with a gimme that. He hoists himself up next to you, tugging off his bandana and running a hand through the flattened waves to give them a little oomph again. But Eddie right now, he’s all oomph.

“So,” he nudges you, eyes gleaming, “Don’t leave me in suspense, Lester Bangs. Whatdja think?”

You screw your lips up, sigh hard through your nose. “I don’t know how to tell you this, Munson…”

“Hmm?”

“...but it didn’t suck.”

“Really?” Eddie’s eyes gleam, like you just scored him that ‘C’ grade all over again.

“Re–ally,” you nod, pulling the flask from him, “I mean, Ronnie? She’s fucking John Bonham.”

“I keep telling her that.”

“And that kid on the bass–?”

“Jeff.”

“Jeeeeff. Him and Cyrus, right? Dead set on a Pulitzer.”

“I’ll take your word for it.”

You let the trepidation hang between you for a beat or two, letting Eddie’s eyes search your face with a big fat uuummm? Hello? as you take an achingly long pull of that whiskey.

“Am I forgetting somebody?” you murmur.

“Oh, fuck you!” he barks through a laugh. You’re both shoulder to shoulder, his breath blowing warmth onto your cheek because of how far his voice projects. “C’mon, Lacy. I can take it.”

“Can you?”

“Don’t tease me, ice princess.”

“‘Don’t freeze me’, you mean.”

“Dammit.”

“Gotta be quick on that trigger.”

“I know.”

“Like you are on that fretboard,” you finally hand it to him. “I mean, shit, Munson.”

“Really?” he says again; he is beaming, glowing from the inside out. He’s radioactive, this kid. You cannot, cannot, cannot stop looking at him. “Really shit, Munson?”

“Really shit Munson!” you exclaim, a little louder than intended–blame the whiskey. “Where’d you learn to play like that?”

“Who, me?” Eddie shrugs, stretching his arms over his head. “I’m a self-made man, baby.” You think, for a second that he might try and pull that corny movie theater move where the boy stretches only to drape his arm over the girl’s shoulder– and you’re half-relieved, half-disappointed when he doesn’t.

“Incredible,” you say, when you could’ve said bullshit.

That makes him… almost shy. He glances away from you for the first time since he’s sat up here. “Yeah, well. Gotta while away the hours somehow.”

“Can I ask you something?” It flies out of your mouth before you have a chance to stop it.

“If it’s about what I was doing out at that crossroads with my guitar, then no.”

“Can we be friends?” It’s nearly medical, the way you ask him. Like you’re verifying symptoms. And he’s taken aback– maybe it’s how straightforward you are about it, or maybe it’s the weird, tender lilt to your tone. Eddie blinks.

“... do you mean right here right now friends or actually acknowledge each other in the hallway friends.”

“I mean full time at your lunch table friends,” you say. Suddenly, your throat is very dry. “You can even carry my books if you want to.”

Eddie’s eyes narrow, and his voice seems to narrow with them. “I don’t know. Sitting with us sorta requires that you join Hellfire…”

“Friends need boundaries, Eddie.”

“Price of admission, babydoll.” The way he rolls his head over his shoulder is… shut up.

You pause, honestly kind of mulling it over.

Eddie hitches himself a little upright, a lightning flash of concern dashing across his face. “I”m fucking with you. Yes, we can be friends…” he breathes out a laugh, washing you over with that studying look again, ”What a weird way to ask.”

“But weird good, no?” you say, and you say it all bright and searching– like you’re looking for his approval.

Eddie, with his hand braced against the roof of the van, directly behind your back, leans in so that his chin is resting on your mink-covered shoulder. He looks up at you, revved up on post-show adrenaline and a little of your whiskey. It is now, you realize, a little hard to breathe. Eddie Munson smells like cigarettes and soap and garbage can fire and sweat and rock and roll.

“Weird like you’re a weirdo, Lacy,” he hums, “And I aaalways knew it.”

Bangbangbang! The sound of Ronnie Ecker’s balled up fist on the side of the van makes you both nearly jump out of your skin, two skeletons too close for comfort.

“Guys, I hate to break up–whatever the hell, but I’ve still got a curfew!” she yells. “And my Granny’s got a gun!”

You and Eddie, you and your friend Eddie, look at each other and burst into nose-first laughter, snorting away. Giddy, giggly, stupid. And the funniest part is, you really think you’ve killed it.

By saying let’s be buddies!, you think you’ve put a stake right into the pitter-pattering heart of the nebulous other feelings you find yourself feeling when you look in Eddie’s eyes, at his lashes, at his hands, at his neck.

For a clever girl, you are so, so stupid.

author's notes: here we here we here we fucking go! i'll admit i'm a little delirious writing this because it's REDACTED past REDACTED but i needed to get this up and outta me. and also because y'all deserve it, being so supportive and nice to me AGAIN. i can't get over youse. dyou wanna get married - bildoolpoolp, a real goddess from dnd! her areas of control are darkness, insanity and revenge to which i say: lacy that u? - virginia woolf doll came to me in a dream and then i found this article about a virginia woolf doll. all i want for christmas? virginia woolf doll. stones in pockets not included - rita hayworth, always decent - got me feeling like miss tayla the way i'm burying meaning in eddie's dialogue! - the oracle of delphi, one of our baddest bitches on record - calling lacy's mom a blanche dubois type was admittedly shady of me but... if the shoe fits. - i'm zeroing in on officer callahan based almost solely on how much joy i get from watching him in search party, a show about terrible awful millennials that takes a turn you'd never see coming! THIS IS A FORMAL REQUEST FOR YOU TO WATCH SEARCH PARTY - in case you wanted a visual for the stooges t-shirt eddie gave lacy - LITTLE WOMEN ALIGNMENTS AS I SEE THEM: nancy is a stone cold jo march with a touch of beth around the ears, lacy is amy sun amy moon jo rising, EDDIE IS AN AMY, steve is a meg sun amy moon - also jo march is a lesbian and if you really want to talk about it, trans. i'm not citing a source for this i don't need to - jessica fletcher you beautiful bitch - y'all remember ms kelley, the hot guidance counsellor? right???? - nancy the priss and lacy the bitch-- make us solve crimes! - the missing 'e' in the corroded coffin flyer is a real fucking thing from that hawkins memories box you can buy. i love that boy and he can't spell and i want it framed. - circus, a rock magazine that was neck and neck in notoriety with rolling stone. here's ozzy on the cover in a tutu! - scanners is a perfect film from 1981 by my baby daddy david cronenberg! (cw for head explosion in the trailer) - listened to smoke on the water or immigrant song lately? no? well, we were all raised by school of rock so fix that - alright so the corroded coffin lineup of it all. i've long held the belief that eddie is in fact not the vocalist but is, on charisma alone, the de facto frontman (think russell hammond in almost famous). cyrus is named for the mountain goats song the best ever death metal band in denton which makes me cry if i think about the freaks in corroded coffin being the best ever death metal band out of hawkins! when you punish a person for dreaming his dream, don't expect him to thank or forgive you! they will both outpace and outlive you! - lester bangs! i did another almost famous/real life reference :( which is also a deep cut lacy reference that may or may not be explained - john bonham died! thaaaaaat's all for this round, folks. thanks again for sticking with me, likes and reblogs and comments are always so appreciated and who knows if i'll write even more next time! COZ I SURE FUCKING DON'T!!!! okay love u hellcats x

#published by powder #hellfire & ice #in progress #e. munson by powder #eddie munson x reader #eddie munson x you #eddie munson fic #stranger things fic #eddie munson smut #do not come for me if this is not fully proofread okay..... even saints are fallible bitch....

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not-a-space-alien · 1 year

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I know none of you sickos (affectionate) out here writing about angst and whump are over age 25 because none of you EVER mention how much it hurts your knees to kneel down. Bestie if your blorbo is in his 30's, he's going to be wailing and gnashing his teeth after five minutes kneeling on a concrete floor, and not because it's hurting his pride

#whump

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kikiiswashere · 1 year

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Waltzing for Three

Summary: You're impossibly pregnant and uncomfortable. Luckily, Silco and Jinx are there to help you out.

Warnings: None/SFW

WC: 2.7K

SilcoxAFAB!Reader, established relationship, found family fluff

Notes: I have no idea where this came from, but this little drabble wouldn't leave my brain. So, please enjoy some domestic, soft Silco

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It seemed entirely improbable that a human should ever fit into the tiny cloth you held up between your hands. The onesie was freshly laundered, the fabric impossibly soft under your fingers. You smiled, flipping it, and placing it against your swollen belly like a sticker. The pull of your lips broadened, revealing your teeth in a bright grin as your womb’s occupant gently patted their small feet or fists against their future wardrobe. Peeling the onesie away, you folded it and set it on the growing pile that had been started on the coffee table.

Nesting, they called it. A deep, primal urge to ready one’s space for a new baby. You hadn’t completely written off the people and books that had mentioned this phenomenon, but you were very surprised at the insistence and intensity of the inclination as you breached your third trimester. Especially since the pregnancy wasn’t planned, and since you and Silco were cautiously excited and anxious about the little one’s arrival. You figured your nervousness may sway nature’s tendencies; alas, she had a stronger pull than you realized.

A groan rattled through your teeth as you reached for the next article of baby clothing. Despite the happy anticipation with which you waited; your body was becoming increasingly uncomfortable. The first trimester was marked with nausea and tender, growing breasts; the second, digestive woes seceded and your bump bloomed proudly before you. You had felt beautiful and divine (and Silco had told you as much). Now, in your third, the glow of pregnancy was wearing off. You couldn’t breathe. You had to pee all the time. Your once confident and saucy gait had been reduced to a gimping waddle – like a fat whump. It hurt to exist; you and the baby fighting for space in your stretched out body.

Silco looked up from his desk at the displeased sound.

His scratching pen paused and he asked, “Are you alright, lovely?”

Internally, you felt your eyes cross. While you appreciated his doting behavior, part of you was sick and tired of being treated like a fragile, delicate thing. As your due date neared, every single utterance you made had Silco checking in. When you cleared your throat in your morning shower, he’d pop his head into the bathroom. When your inhale hitched up as you attempted to take a deeper breath, he looked at you expectantly. Once, you had stifled a wayward burp and he had shot up from his desk, looking at you with wide, waiting eyes.

“I’m eight and a half months pregnant, Silco,” you sighed, folding the onesie you had just plucked from the laundry basket. “I’m tired and it hurts to move. It hurts to be still. My hips and lower back are killing me.”

“Shall I pour a tub for you?”

Sitting back on the red tufted couch, you smiled appreciatively at your partner before lifting your gaze to the large window behind him. While the Undercity was always darker than the surface, you could tell by the light glowing behind its many panes that it was only early evening. If you took your nightly tub now, it wouldn’t be long before you fell asleep. Which would mean the baby would kick you awake in the predawn hours.

“No. Thank you, though. I don’t want to get ready for bed quite yet.”

An understanding hum rolled through the back of his throat. He put his pen down and pushed his chair away from his desk, making to stand. Setting the carefully folded onesie on top of the others, you reached into the basket, pulling out one that made you smile with soft fondness. It was black, with bright scribbles of blue and pink dancing in jagged designs across the fabric. It was an utter relief to you both that Jinx was just as excited about the baby. Given her traumatic past with siblings, you and Silco were initially nervous about sharing the news with her.

However, per usual, she surprised you with her reaction. When you had told her (being very mindful to repeat the fact that you and Silco would not love or cherish her any less), she tittered with excitement and fidgeted more than usual in Silco’s lap as she gazed at you with awe, her big, blue eyes tracking between your face and your (then, still unassuming) belly. Her small hands twitched and flexed, and she bit her lower lip.

“You can touch them,” you had chuckled. “But you won’t feel anything right now. Not yet.”

In a flash, Jinx’s hands were on your abdomen, inspecting.

“Gentle, Jinx,” Silco reminded.

She heeded his instruction, but her attention was fully on your stomach. Her small but dexterous hands padding over you in wonder.

“I’m the big sister,” she whispered, and both you and Silco shared a look over her head. She leaned in closer, lightly pressing her cheek to you. She wrapped her skinny arms around you and said, “I’ll never leave you. Okay? You can count on me.”

Your throat tightened and your eyes welled at her promise. Cursing your raging hormones, you pulled the girl into your chest for a tight hug. Once she was settled, you reach over her and pulled Silco into the embrace with a tug on his tie.

The soft, fuzzy sound of music flowing through Silco’s gramophone pulled you from your memory. Your head swiveled around to see him lift his hand away from the needle. He pivoted the sound horn just so before turning and walking over to you. Reaching out, he gestured for the onesie in your hands. You gave a quizzical look, but handed the garment over. Deftly folding it, he placed it on the pile and then held both hands out to you. Your eyes rolled and a playful scoff tsk’d behind your teeth. Nevertheless, you gripped his offered hands, and using your combined strength, hauled your massive, front-heavy form to its swollen feet.

You groaned as Silco steadied you, your skeleton adjusting and succumbing to the pull of gravity.

“I don’t know how good of a waltz partner I’ll be right now,” you sighed, waddling to the center of the office.

“Never fear, my lovely. I won’t hold it against you.”

Silco slid in behind you, nestling his front to your back. He wrapped his arms around you, but lower than usual. Before you could question it, his hands cupped the underside of your belly . . . and then hoisted up.

Janna’s sweet tits . . . the relief!!

It was immediate and euphoric. Your jaw dropped, head lulling back onto Silco’s shoulder. You were simultaneously melting and floating. The weight of your huge stomach being lifted off the aching and stretched cradle of your hip bones was heavenly. A long, loud, rattling groan tore through your mouth.

Silco chuckled. “Is that so?”

Weakly nodding against him, you matter-of-factly said, “If it wasn’t such a chore to get down and back up again, I get on my knees and blow you right now.”

A deeper laugh rumbled through his chest and he kissed your temple.

“Perhaps I can get a raincheck, then?”

A gooey smile, stupid with reprieve, spread across your face. You turned to look up towards your partner, and he was quick to kiss you. His lips were warm and firm against yours, just like his hands on your belly. Your and Silco’s lips molded seamlessly against one another; top and bottom lips taking turns puzzling against their neighbors. It was lovely, intimate, easeful, and unassuming. Giving him one last, lingering kiss on his scarred lip, your head lulled into the crook of his shoulder and neck. Silco readjusted his hold on your belly, and you both kept swaying to the music softly warbling through the office.

After a few minutes, the babe within you wriggled into a new position, punching, or kicking, across Silco’s wide hands. You felt his hold tighten and his chest swell. The fact that he was so quietly excited made your knees wobbly with adoration.

“They’re a good dancer,” you whispered. “Just like their dad.”

Silco huffed a small laugh and you were thrilled to see the color rise in his cheek out of the corner of your eye.

Before he could administer a witty retort, there were a series of thumps and mutterings above your heads. Then soft, shuffling scratches and mumbled thoughts traveled further through the ceiling. Both of your heads followed the noise, bodies gently turning in time with the sway of your feet, until you were both facing Silco’s desk.

From the rafters, you heard a small voice take a deep breath and whisper, “Okay . . . Three, two . . . one!”

Jinx leapt from her platform and tumbled onto Silco’s desk. Even though this was not a new behavior for the girl, what was new was the way your heart leapt in your throat, and the way you winced at her clumsy landing. A few times, you had read how a parents’ brain (especially the parent that carried the child) changed; how things that never used to bother or scare them suddenly mattered when it came to the safety of their little one.

You had expected it, but you were not looking forward to the ‘worrying’ part of parenthood – especially in a place like Zaun. Especially in the positions you and Silco held. Especially since Jinx did not seem to have any sense of self-preservation.

She dusted her knees off and leapt up. “I finished it!” She proclaimed, flourishing a large piece of white parchment with scribbles all over it.

“Oh? Let’s see then,” you said, awkwardly leading you and Silco toward the desk, making sure he still held up the weight of your bump.

Jinx flopped onto her seat on the desk’s top, kicking her gangly legs over the edge. Adjusting the paper in her hands, she thrust it forward proudly for inspection. Your heart swelled at the sight of it, and it was a weight you were glad to hold within your bosom.

For the past week, Jinx had been designing the baby’s room. What color it would be; where the furniture would go; what art she was going to put on the wall; where the toys would live; where she was going to keep a sleeping bag and pillow in case she and the baby decided to have a slumber party.

Excitedly, loudly, and quickly, Jinx began to take both you and Silco through each detail she had laid out. You listened attentively, still weaving to the music.

“And this is where his toys will be stored . . . over here is his dresser . . . this is his changing table. I’m still trying to figure out how to create a super-sealed-smelly bin in case his diapers are extra stinky . . . “

As beautiful and sweet as it was, your heart couldn’t help but tap a little nervously as Jinx went on about ‘his this’ and ‘he that’. You weren’t sure what the sex of the baby would be – and you, annoyingly, felt like you never got a good, motherly sense of it. Somedays you were certain it was a boy; then a few days later, it felt like it could be a girl; then you wouldn’t be sure at all. Regardless, you both had tried over the last several months to temper Jinx’s insistence that she would be having a brother. But she wouldn’t hear it.

“I don’t want another sister!” she would cry, stomping her feet.

Of course, you and Silco would be happy with either, or whoever the baby turned out to be. But you were quietly hoping that Jinx would get the brother she was expecting.

As she continued explaining the sorting system of the dresser, a knock came at the office door. All three of you paused, Jinx’s face falling into an aggravated expression at being interrupted. Silco guided you both to turn toward the door.

“Come in.”

At this time of day, it could be only one person; and, indeed, Sevika let herself into the office. She froze at the sight before her. It wasn’t new per say – this domestic scene – but it clearly wasn’t one she was getting used to. She huffed and closed the door behind her.

“We have an issue,” she said, stepping forward.

Again, you felt the pads of Silco’s fingers press more firmly against your bump. Whether he was conscious of the way his arms stiffened to pull you closer, you weren’t sure. It made your heart melt regardless.

“An issue that you cannot sort on your own?” he asked. You could hear by his tone that he was sneering at her. As your due date grew nearer, Silco had made an effort to delegate as many tasks as he could so he could be close.

“I wouldn’t be here otherwise,” Sevika replied, barely keeping her temper in check. “Marcus is on his way. About that Councilor’s kid OD-ing on Shimmer.”

A gruff sigh passed through Silco’s lips. He rolled his eyes and said, “Very well. Go get the VIP booth in the mezzanine ready. I’ll be there shortly.”

Since you had become pregnant, Silco no longer took meetings in his office. It didn’t quite make sense, since it was not a secret that you two were expecting. But it seemed to bring him some modicum of peace, so you hadn’t questioned it.

“Good night, Sevika,” you called as she turned to leave.

She nodded and half-heartedly waved a hand in your direction before leaving and closing the door. Silco let out a gentler, more forlorn sigh once she was gone.

“I’m sorry, my lovelies,” he said, addressing you, Jinx, and the baby, you realized, as his hands gently caressed your bump. “Duty calls, unfortunately.”

“No!” Jinx cried. “I wasn’t done showing you his room!”

She brandished the blue print at him, her blue eyes going big and watery.

“I know, child,” he cooed, leaning his head toward her. “I would love to see and hear the rest if I am finished before your bedtime. If not tonight, tomorrow over breakfast. Agreeable?”

Jinx’s shoulders and lower lip slumped forward, but she nodded.

“I’m sorry, sweetheart,” Silco whispered against your temple before planting a kiss there. Your daughter was already laying on the guilt pretty thick, so you restrained your reaction and merely nodded in understanding.

“Ready?” he asked, indicating his hold on you.

Something between a whine and groan pealed out of your throat at the thought of being saddled with the weight of your giant belly again. You began to nod, but Jinx jumped off the desk with renewed excitement.

“Let me! Let me! I can do it!”

She jockeyed in next to Silco, awkwardly wrapping her arms around you.

Your partner’s soft chuckle vibrated through your chest, and he said, “Come stand over here, Jinx . . .”

You stood dutifully still as Silco patiently guided Jinx into the correct stance, placing her arms and hands appropriately and instructing her to widen her feet to accommodate her shorter height.

“Ready? I’m going to let go. Don’t drop them.”

“I won’t! I won’t! I can do it!”

You felt Silco’s hands and arms recede, transferring the weight of you and the babe to Jinx. A small laugh escaped you as you felt the small girl behind you squeak and brace herself. To her credit, she did manage to keep your womb off your hips.

“Oh my gosh! Why is he so heavy?” Jinx exclaimed.

“You’re doing wonderfully, Jinx,” Silco applauded as he rounded you both.

He brought a hand up to your face and held it against your cheek, looking you in the eye earnestly.

“I am sorry.”

You leaned into his hand and shrugged, as you and Jinx began to sway to the music again.

“You can make it up to me later,” you said coquettishly.

That sliver of a smile that was reserved only for you (and now Jinx. And soon, baby) cut across Silco’s lips. He leaned forward and kissed you.

“Good luck,” you said as he broke away. “Give Marcus my best.”

Silco rolled his eyes, ocean and fire flicking up to the ceiling. He reluctantly took his hand from your cheek and strode for the office door.

“Give him hell!” Jinx grunted from behind you.

You laughed, patting her hands with yours. Silco did not respond, but you saw his shoulders quake with amusement as the door closed behind him.

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Notes: Thank you for reading! If you enjoyed this, please comment and reblog!

#silco #silco fanfic #silco x reader #silco x f!reader #silco x afab!reader #silco x pregnant reader #soft!silco #found family #silco fluff #jinx #sevika #domestic fluff

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steviewashere · 20 days

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In it For the Long Haul (And Then Some)

Rating: Teen and Up CW: Minor Internalized Ableism Tags: Post Canon, Post Season Four, Canon Divergence, Angst and Hurt/Comfort, Hospitals, Hospitalization, Medical Conditions, Steve Harrington Has Head Trauma (Brief Mention), Amputee Steve Harrington, Amputee Eddie Munson, Disabled Steve Harrington, Disabled Eddie Munson, Whump, Implied/Referenced Depression, Steve Harrington is a Sweetheart, Eddie Munson is a Sweetheart, Steve's Injuries Actually Have an Effect On Him, Eddie Munson Calls Steve Harrington Pet Names, Medical Accuracies (Surprising, I Know), Tattoos, Implied/Referenced Sex, Getting Together

Guys, oh my god, my Apple keyboard has prosthetic emojis?! That's so cool.

🦾🦿—————🦾🦿 He thought it’d be another concussion that would put him out this time. It’s practically the stamp of approval left on his body by the Upside Down. Should be bright green and sticky on his forehead and in big bold letters for everybody to read. But it isn’t a concussion. And he’s not sure what to do with himself.

Maybe they should’ve taken him to the hospital to get medical treatment after the bat bites. It wasn’t just on his back and arms and stomach. The marks were on his legs, too. Even though he had tried to kick the demobats off, they still sunk their teeth in when they had the chance, albeit briefly. Considering, too, he also walked through that hellhole without shoes on. He should’ve seen a doctor. First thing, he should’ve seen a doctor. But he didn’t. And he had the infection to show for it. Except, his body hadn’t healed the way it was supposed to. His immune system didn’t cooperate. It didn’t keep up.

The infection spread through the muscle of his left foot. And when it didn’t go away fast enough, it worked its way through his toes, shot up his ankle, and into his calf. Right below the knee.

His pinkie and ring toes went first. They—and he wishes he could spare the gruesome details—turned purple and swollen and numb. That’s when he knew things would be different. As soon as those parts were gone, he had begun to turn his face away from the window of hope. Instead, he looked out at the deep ocean waves of regret and grief, and imagined himself as a sinking ship. Filling with water. Plummeting to the bottom. Rotting.

Robin and the kids would all come around. Flood into his room. Talk to him while he was delirious from anesthesia first, then morphine next. Spoke to him when he hissed through phantom pains. Looked away when he had to be wheeled into the all too spacious hospital bathroom. “Tug the red chord if you get stuck,” he recalls a nurse saying. “Don’t put pressure on this foot, it’s still draining,” another had said. And by the time he could stay out of the wheelchair, he forgot what it was like to pee without the reminders, what it was like to go to the bathroom and be able to stand on his own.

Because of his luck, though, he lost the whole foot next. The infection had worked its way into his tibia. Didn’t fall asleep willingly after he was taken off of medication. Just sat in his cramped hospital bed, staring down at the stump of where part of him once was, and wept. Hands curled over his thighs, nails digging into his flesh, lips tight against his teeth, unblinking and weeping softly into the silence of his room. The first night without morphine and without the foot, he sat in the dark. In the black ink of his room. Choking on himself. Uncaring towards his limp and greasy hair dangling in front of his eyes. And he didn’t sleep. Didn’t want to. Couldn’t take the glare off his absent foot.

He stopped flexing the other foot, stopped running it against his left leg when he did try to sleep, stopped wanting to use it all together.

It wasn’t until the calf was removed completely, leaving him with half a leg and just his knee, did he stop talking. He just sat in the bustling white noise silence of his room. Wide eyes that were dry and red and bloodshot staring down at the thin cloth blanket draped over himself. An even thinner hospital gown stuck to his sallow skin. Stomach rumbling with hunger, but he couldn’t eat in the presence of himself. He just sat and thought of blankness, of absence, and of loss.

He’s been in the hospital nearly a month—endless surgeries and endless bouts of infections—when Eddie finally visits. Steve barely glances at him. Notices his silhouette and odd gait and the hiding of his right arm, but nothing more. Goes back to his lap with a raw emptiness, gaping and pulsing the more and more he sits in this room. Still recovering. Not even at the point of physical therapy yet. Still trying to heal his, how he views it, now useless body.

Eddie sits down in the chair to his left. Grunting with the exertion. He releases a measured, deep breath. “I heard from Robin that you were up here,” he states conversationally. “Thought I’d come up and see you now that I’m not stuck in my own room.”

Steve doesn’t say anything. Just traces his thumbs over the hem of his blanket. He thought he’d be angrier at the mention of Eddie being discharged. Filled to the brim with bitter jealousy. But all that tinges in his chest is a beastly want. An ache. The sizzle of something dwindling out.

“Haven’t had the chance to thank you, Steve,” Eddie murmurs. “I thought I’d die down there. Figured it was the best option, y’know, considering my circumstances? But then you and Dustin did the whole tourniquet thing and risked your lives and welcomed me in like a friend. So, my mind’s been changed. Hate this town and how it hates me, but I’m glad to still be here with some of the best people I’ve met,” he says sincerely. “But—I, uh—I wanted to come keep you company, as a friend. Show you something, too.”

At that, Steve raises his eyes slightly. Enough to catch on where Eddie’s knees are pressed firmly against the side of his bed. Angled oddly to stretch out and wiggle his right arm in sight of Steve’s vision. That’s when his eyes catch on the limp sleeve of the flannel he’s wearing. How it just flattens to the bed, red and black, lifeless.

The sleeve rolls up to reveal the stump of Eddie’s arm. His hand, wrist, and half of his forearm completely gone.

“We match,” Eddie says. And it should be grim. It should be a devastating statement to make. But something in Steve starts to warm. A desperation sort of growth, one that comes from the want and need to be seen. Eddie continues, “And—Look, I know it’s not ideal. It really isn’t. If anything, this is like majorly fucked up for the both of us. But…We’ll figure it out, you know? Get prosthetics. Cut up our clothes to accommodate our limbs, or well, lack of. But you aren’t alone; that’s my point.”

Hesitantly, Steve raises his head. Finally looking at Eddie in his entirety. The palm sized scar on his cheek, pink and shiny and stark against his face. The ring around his neck and the other red raw scars that creep into the collar of his t-shirt. And his hair. It’s gone. Shaved down. Replaced by a bit of fuzz and one long scar that goes from the widow’s peak of his hairline, to where it tapers at his neck. Steve doesn't remember Eddie getting injured there, but it must've been from when he fell through the portal—limp and loose.

He realizes, looking down at himself, that there are swirls of scars from the back of his own arms, deep white lines on his knuckles, the ring around his neck surely present, and that doesn’t even include the ones that ache on his back. He looks back to Eddie.

Eddie reaches out a slow hand, cupping his cheek, wiping at something. That’s when Steve realizes that he’s crying. “Hey, oh, I’m sorry,” he murmurs, “I’m sorry, Stevie. I didn’t think that—“

“You get it?” Steve squeak-rasps. His throat throbs. It's dry and brittle and painful all the way through him; down to his stomach, into his sweaty palms, at the base of his stump. Phantom stings that make him twitch. But his voice...It's nothing like him. It's haunting to hear himself. And for a moment, he wishes he didn't speak. Eddie, however, startles and softens all at once. Eyes glistening at Steve, worried and concerned and cautious, but also enamored and welcoming and empathetic.

Nodding, Eddie says, “Yeah, sweetheart, I do. I’m still getting used to it, too.” He pushes up into Steve’s messy hair, swiping it away from his forehead. Doesn’t even grimace at how gross it surely feels on his fingers. “You don’t have to sit alone about this. ‘Cause I’m right here with you. And…” His eyes grow immeasurably softer. “…I may not have both hands, but I’ve got both arms to hold you," he breathes.

It’s easy to lean into Eddie’s hand. To close his eyes and let himself feel this. Sobbing quietly, muffled behind his lips. Shoulders shaking with it. He blubbers, “I hate this, Eddie. I hate this, I hate this, I—“ And cuts himself off with a loud, unashamed, explosive sob.

“I know, sweetheart,” Eddie is saying as he wraps himself around Steve. Tucks himself in close, to where Steve is able to set his head on his shoulder. He sits on the edge of the bed so that he doesn’t overcrowd. And just holds on tight. “You feel how you need to feel, Steve. Get it out, it’s okay.”

Steve groans harshly in the back of his throat. Gasping in short breaths, chest rattling with the effort. He slams his forehead into Eddie’s chest, over and over. Muffling into the fabric of his shirt, “Nobody else gets it. They don’t understand. They don’t…All of them.” Eddie doesn’t speak. Afraid that Steve will stop if he does. “They think I’ll just bounce back, but everything is different now, Eds,” he cries, “Everything.”

And he finds that he does mean that. He knows he's too quiet. Knows he's behaving too serious for his bones. Too mature for his lungs. He's hollow to his core, and bleeding between his teeth. There's something deeply fractured in him now, even if he were to ever show a sliver of who he was before.

He allows himself to cry for a few minutes more before slumping with exhaustion, but he doesn’t close his eyes. Doesn’t let sleep pull him under. Just shakes and shivers and twitches in Eddie’s warm hold. Until, Eddie pulls back. Arms set firmly on Steve’s shoulders. Eyes wandering his face, his hair. “You look so tired, sweetheart,” he murmurs, “When’s the last time you’ve slept?” Steve shrugs in lieu of a response. Eddie's eyebrows twitch down, a frown wanting to form, but he worms it away. Offering with a well-crafted small smile, “How about you sleep and I keep watch for you?”

He shakes his head. “They’ll take more of me if I close my eyes. They keep doing it,” Steve mutters. His voice is weak and slightly petulant.

“What do you mean, Stevie?” And Eddie's face drops again. Frowning through the floor.

“They come in here and tell me the infection spread. Tell me about how it goes bone deep. Or how my limbs are turning purple. Or how something doesn’t look good,” Steve rambles on, “Then, they have to take me back for surgery. And I have to let them because I get it, I do, because my body isn’t healing right. And it's not something I'll just make up for at home, so I let them. I let them and then...I wake back up and more of my leg is gone. I can’t let them take more from me. I can’t lose more of myself. I can’t, Eddie, I can’t—I can’t—I can’t—“

Softly, Eddie shushes him. Rubbing his remaining hand up and down Steve’s arm in long stripes, carefully avoiding his still agitated scars. “Shhh, baby, you’re okay. It’s scary, I know. But they said that you’re doing better. Treatment is working, Steve. You won’t lose anything else, okay?” His eyes are wide and imploring. Deep brown, enriching, swallowing Steve whole. “You won’t. This is it. They just need you to rest. I’ll be right here while you do so; I won’t let them do anything to you that you wouldn’t want. But you need sleep. You’re wasting away on me.” His hands push firmer on Steve's shoulders. Imploring again, searching and hoping for Steve to understand. He reiterates, “You’re wasting away.”

“I’m not,” Steve weakly argues.

“You are,” Eddie whispers, “You look like you haven’t slept in days, Stevie. And the doctors already told me how you’ve been refusing to eat. That’s not good. You gotta rest and get healthy, to a place they need you to be, so that you can go home.” Steve doesn't like that idea. Back to his big, almost always empty house. Eddie must read that, somewhere, on his face. He gently splays his hand over Steve’s chest, shoving at it with light force. Promising low, "Home can be with Robin or Nancy or me, Stevie. But you have to get better first. You have to. Just lay down and talk to me, sweetheart."

Hesitantly, Steve lays down with Eddie’s push. Head lolled on the pillow so that his face is pointed towards where Eddie sits. He stretches out his hand and weakly grips to Eddie’s fingers. “I’m scared,” he finally confesses. The words falling heavy from the tip of his tongue.

And though Eddie knows, Steve can see it in his eyes, he asks anyway, “What’s got you spooked?”

Steve blinks groggily. Wrung out from the tears. From the sobbing. The speaking. From existing the way he has been. “Of not being myself,” he answers, muttering. “I can’t drive now. I can’t work out the way I used to. Can’t even stand to use the bathroom. I’m not losing more of my limbs, but it’s like I’m gone.”

Eddie’s thumb pushes firmly into the back of Steve’s hand. And he looks straight on at Steve’s tired, tired, tired eyes. “I ain’t letting you go,” he swears. “We’ll find what works. We’ll find you again, I promise. Especially now that we have all the time in the world.”

“It’s going to take so long, though. You don’t want to be stuck with me during that.”

Simply, Eddie shrugs. “So, what? I’ll be figuring out myself again, too. And from what I’ve heard, you’re the kind of guy to take no shit. If anything, you’re going to be the one stuck with me.” His voice grows lower and lower as Steve’s eyes dip to a near close. “Go ahead and sleep, Steve. It’s okay.”

With a long, grieving sigh, Steve closes his eyes completely. Mumbles, “You’re a good guy, Eddie.” Voice slow and sticky. “I’m glad you’re my friend.”

As Steve’s grumbling snores fill the room, Eddie stands to lightly open the curtains. Soft sunlight pooling through the room. It makes Steve glow in yellows, his hair shiny and his skin glistening. He’s worse for wear, that much is evident to Eddie. But he can work with that. He’ll accommodate all that Steve is willing to give. And he’ll keep an eye and an ear out, too. Even if that’s all he’s allowed to offer.

He sits back in his original chair. Stretching himself so that he can lean over Steve's bed. And swipes the stray hair away from his eyes. “I’m glad you’re my friend, too, sweetheart,” Eddie murmurs into the white noise of the room. He stays until visiting hours are over.

And comes back every day until Steve gets to go home.

——— Their prosthetics don’t match perfectly to their skin (the prosthetic’s skin being a shade darker than what they’d usually have), but they make do with them. And they find a way to joke about it. To mingle with the still raw ache of what they’ve lost.

Steve ends up painting the nails of Eddie’s prosthetic hand to match his real fingernails, black and shiny. Eddie aids with changing out Steve’s sneakers so that they match his polos and sweaters. And they find it especially funny, when they get together and hook up for the first time, to be laying in a pile of limbs quite literally on Eddie’s bed—but to look off at his side table, their arm and leg are cradling each other. Just as they do. Holding one another on the worst days, through the phantom pains and the afternoons where they sob. It comes easily, being with one another.

It takes time, like all things do. Like watching paint dry on some days. Or waiting for water to boil on others. Prone to lash out, sure. Prone to stay stock still in bed with far away eyes. But they’re in it. They live it. And as time pushes, days grow to be normal. To be expected.

“We should draw tattoos on our limbs,” Eddie suggests one day.

“I can’t draw, Eds. But what do you have in mind?”

In it for the long haul, with a drawing of a hand, is put on Steve’s prosthetic calf.

And then some, with a leg wearing a Nike sneaker, goes on Eddie’s wrist.

“Can’t believe my first tattoo literally cost an arm and a leg,” Steve mutters later, admiring the work Eddie’s done. And all they can do afterwards is laugh until their stomachs hurt, air is impossible to catch, and their cheeks are wet with tears.

🦾🦿—————🦾🦿 When my mom was alive and, obviously, still used her prosthetic leg, she'd threaten to beat up my bullies by taking her leg off and whacking them with it. Also, her leg had a piece of see-through plastic on it where she could have something customized in it, it said "Kicking ass and taking names."

#stranger things #steddie #steve harrington #eddie munson #disabled steve harrington #disabled eddie munson #amputee steve harrington #amputee eddie munson

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arealphrooblem · 6 months

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A Lost Cause Part 2

Synopsis: The trusted keeper of all the Heroes' secrets, Civilian's existence is kept a tightly guarded secret itself. So how did the villain find her? And how will she withstand the attempts of his scientist to break her open and discover those secrets himself?

CW: nonconsensual drugging, medical whump, medical experimentation, needles/IV insertion, mentions wounds from torture, torture recovery, captivity

The anticipation of what might happen each time he walked into the room was almost worse than actual torture. His words ran on a loop in her head as she dozed in and out of deep sleep.

I am dying to create the tools that will break you open.

But each time he visited, he did nothing but check vitals, change bandages, survey her progress, feed her. Slowly she worked her way up from broth to solid food, from sleeping most of the day to sleeping at night, from needing a catheter to walking to the bathroom herself once the bottoms of her feet were healed (and that was not a fun day, no sir).

The scientist refused to answer her questions outright unless she offered up answers of her own. Each day they ended in a stalemate, which he seemed to find amusing.

He refused even his name. Eventually she just started calling him the doctor, because he treated her like one. Despite her captivity, despite the ominous warning Vanderbilt gave her in the interrogation room, despite her overwhelming vulnerability, he treated her with polite and patient professionalism.

She tried to give him the same courtesy. Whatever his future plans were, he had given her the space and time to heal back to full strength. She would make sure he regretted that. But first she had to look cooperative and weak.

A few days after shedding both the catheter and the bandages on her feet and thighs, the doctor strolled in not with his usual stethoscope, but with a clipboard and a pen.

Her gut did not like that.

“Your recovery is chugging along quite spectacularly,” he said, clicking the pen. “Which means we are almost ready to start the clinical trials. Of course, before I give you anything, I will need you to answer a few questions about your medical and family history.”

“Clinical trials for what?” she asked, feeling like she swallowed a stone.

“For my experiments, of course,” he said, as if it were obvious. “Why did you think I’ve been helping you recover? Pity? The goodness of my heart?”

“What experiments?” she demanded.

“Oh I have several in mind for you. But first, a few questions.”

“Sure, of course,” she said, deeply scathing. “Let’s make it easier for you to torture me. I’ll jump right on that.”

“You should, if you want greater chances of survival. I need to know your allergies, cancer risks, medications you’ve been on, previous surgeries, or else I could accidentally kill you. You’re a very special experiment. I’d rather not lose you so soon to such a preventable cause.”

It made her blood run cold, the casual way he voiced her probable death, as if he equated it with the disappointment of prematurely expired raspberries. An inconvenience, but there’s always more.

The worst part was that he had a point. What would be the purpose of her team rescuing her in a blaze of glory if she had died of anaphylactic shock?

So through gritted teeth, she answered all of his medically relevant questions. He wrote each down dutifully on his clipboard.

“And your name?” he asked finally.

She pursed her lips into a thin line and glared at him. He nodded.

“Not today, then. No worries. That will be the first thing you give me with the success of my first experiment.”

A knot formed in her stomach. “What’s the first experiment?” she couldn’t help but ask.

He smiled enigmatically. “You’ll find out when the time comes.”

She waited a few minutes after the door shut before she tip-toed to the window. The only thing she could see outside was a sheer cliff and water for miles. Probably the ocean, but she couldn’t open the window to tell. It was nailed shut.

Wherever she was, it looked far from civilization. Maybe that was why, after what had to be at least a month if not more, that her team hadn’t found her yet. They were city people. Superheros rarely had to venture into the rural countryside, let alone a place this remote.

Such reassurances did not cure the unease in the back of her mind that something didn’t add up.

Now that she had recovered, fatigue did not weigh her down so much and boredom began to creep in it’s place. The doctor offered her a handful of novels, mostly pulp scifi and dystopian literature. She read them and re-read them so often she could quote passages from each one. When the doctor finally appeared in her room with a small, rolling table of syringes and an IV needle, the jolt of adrenaline was almost euphoric in the face of the mind numbing monotony of her days.

“You seem eager for our first experiment,” the doctor said with a bemused quirk of his lips.

“Ecstatic,” she deadpanned, ignoring the jolt in her heart. “I can’t wait for you to kill me with whatever ungodly chemical is in that.”

He chuckled, pushing the cart next to her bed. “You’re right in that God has nothing to do with what I create. But it is not my goal to kill you — the opposite in fact. I try to limit risks as much as possible. There is only one you, after all.”

“Is that supposed to be reassuring?”

“Is it not?” It was almost comical how he blinked at her in innocent confusion.

She just glared at him in return, which he cheerfully ignored as he slipped the latex gloves on with a snap. He even hummed a little as he pulled open the packaging for the IV needle and the alcohol wipe.

Meanwhile her gut churned and frothed in horrible anticipation. She had gone through literal torture but this scared her more. When knives or brands or electric cattle prods came out, at least she knew what they did. No one knew what would happen as a result of this experiment, not even him. At least the goal of torture was to keep you alive as long as possible. These experiments could kill her. These could be her last living moments.

Fear tainted her every breath but just as she did in the face of her torturers, she refused to let it show on her face. Instead she stared resolutely out the window, at the glint of the water in the sunlight.

“Deep breath,” he murmured just before she felt the sharp pain of the IV needle.

Her gaze darted to him, drawn like a magnet to the sight of him tapping the air bubbles from the syringe. Nausea roiled inside her. She fought hard against the urge to rip the IV out before he could inject the serum. Instead, she could only watch in horrified resignation as it flowed through the IV drip.

“And now we wait,” he said, flashing her that polite smile, as if they were sitting in a doctor’s office.

He removed his dark tinted glasses and sat down at the love seat.

“We wait?” she cried. “Wait for what?”

The anticipation of the IV alone nearly drove her mad and now this?

He shrugged. “Ideally your mind should relax into an altered state where you forget you’re not supposed to keep your secrets and you tell me whatever information I desire. However, that didn’t work well back with Vanderbilt and I’m not expecting much success this time. I just want to see how you react to these sorts of chemicals.”

“So you’re just fucking around with my brain?”

“In a manner of speaking, I suppose.” He crossed his legs and tapped his thumbs on his knees, the picture of nonchalance. She never wanted to hit him so much.

“What if it does nothing? What if you failed?”

“Failure is just important data I didn’t have before. I’m not afraid of failure.”

You should be she thought bitterly.

But of course it wasn’t his life on the line.

When the effects hit her, it wasn’t nothing. All the muscles in her body locked up and spasmed. She could do nothing but writhe in the bed and scream. It felt worse than all her other torture combined.

By the time she finally blacked out, she couldn’t scream anymore.

#hero x villain #villain x civilian #whump #whump writing #medical whump #my writing #a lost cause #this is pretty dark for me

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whumpalicious08 · 4 months

Text

More Public Humiliation Whump (READ WARNINGS ⚠️)

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Aka my magnum opus, in my humble opinion.

⚠️Cw⚠️ / Smoking, Drinking, Gun violence, graphic gore, minor character death, non consensual touching (over clothes), manipulation/manipulative language, religious (catholic) imagery & references, internalised shame, public humiliation, possessive behaviour

2nd person Whumpee has they/them pronouns. Brief, vague mention of area between legs, no explicit reference to any biological organs.

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Living Weapon Whumpee / Mafia Whumper.

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You find it difficult to breathe inside the pub. Smoke congeals with the air and stains the insides of your lungs.

The stench of blood is so strong it makes your mouth taste metallic.

Whumper is speaking and everything else feels quiet.

"...Kid comes waltzin' into your house, starts touchin' on your property. Can't hardly blame nobody for gettin' a little unkind."

There's a man on the floor in front of him. He's a couple years younger than you- twenty. He's studying geology, a topic that lit up his eyes endearingly. He's on his gap year.

You'd tried to warn him off you, gentle but insistent. Whumper likes you seen and not heard.

But the charming bastard had leaned in, eyes painfully kind, and he'd told you how pretty he thought your smile was. It'd been so long since anybody'd told you that.

The kid had brushed his knuckles over your wrist, coyly hiding his concern at your reaction. His compassion had distracted you.

You hadn't seen Whumper approach.

He'd dragged the kid away from the bar, away from you, and into a more open area. God, you'd forgotten to even ask his name.

You hadn't seen Whumper approach.

You don't see him now, either. You turn your face away and stare down at your drink. But the tourist's throat keeps flapping wet gurgling noises and you can't turn away your ears.

Another shot cracks through the air. Another terrible banshee cry. You count up from one silently to distract yourself.

It doesn't work, but you pretend that it does, and that's enough sometimes.

It was enough before, when Whumper had jovially condescended to the tourist and amicably levelled his shotgun at his knee.

(You'd missed the money shot. You always strive to when you can, innate coward that you are.)

Whumper loves that gun. He's always telling you that it's;

"a gorgeous weapon second only to one".

He'd won it from the Sheriff, during a poker game he'd hosted last month. The policemen in attendance tonight eye it with just as much desire as they do Whumper; the perfect power fantasy.

"Please."

The kid's warped voice rings too loudly in your head. You falter at 37 and can't start over.

Whumper does something to him that makes him hack up air like a cat, unable to scream any longer.

"Shut up and listen real fuckin' close. Whumpee is mine. Mine to touch, mine to use."

You feel the tips of your ears burn in violent shame. Your teeth feel wobbly with how hard you're clenching them.

Whumper's silent for a beat. You don't need to be facing him to know he's looking at you. "Sometimes, they're so damn good at bein' owned I get to thinkin' they like it." His tone turns jeeringly wistful, and indignation curls your hands into fists.

People's eyes and unspoken words become embedded in your skin like shrapnel. Pieces of you, of them, sting when you think you've found reprieve.

"All I'm doin' to you is some kindly teachin'. Got to set an example, you understand."

"Did- I didn't-"

You think he may be trying to say he didn't know, but it'd be futile anyway. Whumper wants an execution. The tourist begins to catch up and abandons his words for sobs.

Whumper hums in sympathy, the sound vulgar in its sincerity. "Whumpee. C'mere."

There's white hot needle points dancing over your body as you stand. The shrapnel sinks deeper as more attention shifts to you.

You find it harder and harder to avoid looking at Whumper's barbarity. The tourist's humanity entices your own; you grow unable to pretend either don't exist.

You reach Whumper's side and look down.

The bullet had shattered the kid's kneecap fully. There's a gorge where it should be; exposing jelly-like tissue the colour of pus and flesh and viscera. Dark shades of dried blood makes it look like somebody'd rubbed dirt into the gore - you can imagine Whumper doing that, tearing at the edges of the exit wound with gritty black fingernails.

His elbow is gone too, chips of shattered bone and viscous chunks of torn muscle the only remnants of it left.

You notice that the tourist's lips are moving once more, and gratefully take the opportunity to look away from the depravity. You can't hear what he's saying. Just the feverish, incoherent ramblings of a man from whom Death will have to beg for mercy.

Whumper's voice pounds against the inside of your skull like tinnitus, trying desperately to drown out the injustice he's caused.

"Kill him. Bastard's all used up." Whumper's cigarette wobbles as he snaps the order. His perverted sense of mercy makes you squeamish.

You've met people who mark their kills. Some do it to boast. Some do it to self-flagellate.

You've never had to carve anything into your bedpost. Every one of your victims live on, feeding, parasitic within you.

But this ... this boy, convulsing and begging in a pool of his own fluid; his death will be a tumour, destruction for destruction's sake.

You're suddenly not sure that you can handle another ghost.

"No."

Whumper's eyes cut into you. You used to believe he had the Devil in them. Now you don't believe there are any Gods or Demons here at all.

"Say that again?"

He's offering you an out he knows you won't take.

You lower your head, but peer up at him through your lashes, a veiled mockery of the submission he expects. He's pushed you just far enough tonight. The several shots of sickening, unidentifiable liquids coalescing in your stomach makes you too brave.

"No, Sir."

Whumper likes you brave. He'll fill your glass and enjoy the consequences.

His hand closes around your arm, fingernails ripping skin, and he roughly handles you into position. You try to jerk away, but the weight of his shotgun reminds you of his conviction.

The tourist is crying again. You can't remember if he'd ever stopped.

Whumper's chest is firm against your back. His leg parts yours sightly and he angles your body with intent, displaying you to the rest of the pub. He rests the long barrel of his gun on your hip, slowly guiding it lower. "I ain't askin', angel."

The pub's only sparsely populated today, and some people are only watching out the corners of their eyes.

But it may as well be packed to you.

Whumper lingers behind your knee purposefully; making you think he might actually do it, before he moves on again.

You feel your heartbeat everywhere; in your throat, under your fingertips, at your temples.

You feel terror everywhere, too. You think it's circulating the room, a plague of quiet fear. Endemic to the bar and your body.

The gun stops at your inner thigh.

Whumper brushes his lips against your ear. Radiant heat from his cigarette warms your clammy neck. "You'll do as you're fucking told."

He gyrates the barrel ever so slightly, a brutish imitation of a caress. Your breath hitches. I own you.

The muzzle's pointing down, safety on. He doesn't need a lethal weapon to remind you how to behave. I own you.

If you hesitate any further, it's only for a second.

Your defiance is brittle and impulsive. Your deference is always enduring.

The bitter pill Whumper feeds you settles on your tongue and makes you think maybe you do like being owned.

"I'm sorry."

The gun's driven sharply upwards, stabbing too hard even through clothing. Your ignoble cry seems to carry. He holds you in place and it hurts.

"Louder."

"I'm sorry-"

He slips his fingers down your back pocket and pulls out your revolver. He presses it into your hand and steps behind, painful pressure lifting off your back and from between your legs.

"Show me, then."

Eyes are boring into you. Whumper's, the patrons'. You hear somebody sniffling across the pub. You have the feeling there are more.

Under different circumstances you'd sneer at the pity, but the room's just seen Whumper what, assault you? Debauch you?

You're pretty damn pitiable right about now.

The tourist's lips are still fluttering. You lower yourself down on one knee to hear him better.

"...forgive thy... holy father ... mercy on me."

You glance at his neck in case you've missed anything. No cross.

You place your hand over his darting eyes, and your gun over his forehead. His mouth stops moving, and then he does too.

For one bleak moment you hope, much for the tourist's benefit and quite contrarily to your own, that there is a next life. You hope that Whumper will burn in infernal fire; searing with a fury rivalled only by the flames awaiting you.

There's more friction generated by the bullet than you'd like. Smoke from the barrel rises up, up.

Whumper's derisive words feel distant, but his fingertips gently carding through your hair seem to scald. "Wasn't so hard, was it?"

You breathe in and choke.

---

#whump #emotional whump #whump writing #whumpee #pet whump #whump community #whump prompt #whump fic #whump scenario #verbal humiliation #defiant whumpee #whum

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chaotic-orphan · 10 months

Text

June of doom, day nineteen:

That’s going to be one hell of a scar : cage // pliers // scrape

CW: team Whump, leader whump, threats, carving/ cutting ( explicit), blood (explicit), intimate whumper, scary whumper, evil whumper, creepy whumper, defiant whumpees, multiple whumpees, knife mentioned, torture (explicit and graphic), mention of past injury, fear of darkness?, Self sacrifice

Very long and very late I am sorry, enjoy

*~*~*~*~*

“Leader? Leader!” Medic whispered through the darkness, rousing Leader from their light nap. “Leader?”

“I’m here, Medic,” said Leader, voice reassuring. Leader was sitting with their back against the wall, no, not wall. Leader turned with a groan, their muscles still heavy with sleep and their last fight with Supervillain. Leader’s hand found cool metal bars and that woke them up immediately.

Their last battle with Supervillain… Leader remembers their team sweeping in just in time, just as Supervillain’s fist came down on their temple and darkness swallowed them.

Fuck.

“Supervillain has us?” Leader asked quietly.

“He used you as leverage. Told us to surrender or he’d kill you. I’m sorry Leader.”

“No,” said Leader with a grunt, sitting back against the bars. No wonder they were aching all over. “No don’t be sorry. I would have done the same thing. Where are you?”

Leader squinted against the darkness trying to locate Medic, or anything for that matter. They could barely see their nose in front of their face.

“I’m— I think I’m in a cage,” said Medic. Their voice came from the right. Leader lifted their arm through the bars trying to feel for another cage but felt nothing. They took a sharp breath as the reaching movement aggravated a stabbing pain in their ribs. “Leader?”

“I’m okay,” said Leader through grit teeth. Fuck, Supervillain had gotten a few good hits on Leader. Their upper lip was sticking to their nose from no doubt a trail of blood. “Are you okay?”

“Yeah… we’re all good. Supervillain just took us he didn’t touch us, we were just worried about you…”

“We? Supervillain took all of you?”

A blinding light flashed on and Leader shielded their eyes in the crook of their elbow and heard a couple of familiar moans from the sudden brightness.

“I thought I heard voices,” came the rumbling voice of Supervillain. There was a smile in his voice that set Leader’s nerves on edge. Leader lowered their arm, blinking quickly trying to adjust to the sudden burst of light. Their eyes settled, taking in the room they were in.

Leader was right. They were in a cage. Solid steel bars lined every edge except the bottom which was just a thick metal edge. Leader could fit comfortably sitting down but there was no way Leader could even think about standing in the cage unless they were on their haunches or kneeling. Even then they’d have to bend their torso, there was probably room for Leader’s head again above them and that was it.

Bastard, forcing them to sit like dogs in cages. Leader’s hand clenched into a fist at their side, glaring up at Supervillain as best they could.

Supervillain stood in his stupid grey three piece suit perfectly tailored to his muscular frame. He wore a charcoal grey overcoat and a black scarf over it and had his cane in both his hands, holding it horizontal as his cruel grey eyes focused on Leader in their cage. Face as expressionless as always, impassive, neutral… every part he could control except his grey eyes. His haunting grey eyes that showed exactly what emotion he was feeling. The only part of him that gave Supervillain away.

“Hey let us out of here you psycho!” Youngest yelled, kicking at the bars of their cage. Leader’s eyes went to them. They were the furthest from them on the left. There was a cage between them — where Rogue sat, glaring at Supervillain — then Youngest’s cage after.

Supervillain turned their head to Youngest’s cage and Leader’s heart dropped. “Sprightly little thing aren’t you?”

“How ‘bout you let me out of this cage and I’ll show you how sprightly I can be, hmm?!”

“Youngest,” Medic said, warning in their voice, to shut up or else. Supervillain walked over to Youngest’s cage and crouched down, putting their cane through the bars. Youngest scrambled back, but there wasn’t anywhere to flee to and their back hit the bars with a gentle thud. Leader watched as Supervillain’s cane rested easy on Youngest’s throat.

Youngest swallowed, the cane bobbing with the motion and put a hand up to grab it, but Supervillain batted it away and struck Youngest’s cheek with the cane. Youngest’s cheek whipped to the side with the impact.

“Supervillain!” Leader yelled now at the front bars of the cage, while Medic cried “Get away from them!”

Supervillain didn’t do either. Instead they kept their gaze on Youngest and lowered the cane to Youngest’s throat again, digging into it: “How ‘bout I chain you up and muzzle you for your insolence, hmm? Will that put manners on you?”

“Supervillain,” said Leader, voice hard. “Leave them alone. If you want to hurt somebody, hurt me!”

Supervillain turned their head and their piercing grey eyes found Leader’s. “Hush, Leader. It’s rude to interrupt someone. You’ll get your turn.”

Supervillain turned back to Youngest, and Leader and teammates could only watch helplessly from their stupid tiny cages. Leader’s heart was pounding out of their chest through their ears, as Supervillain used the Cane to force Youngest to look at them. An angry red welt was growing on Youngest’s cheek and they stared at Supervillain with a mixture of fear and hatred.

Supervillain tilted their head. Then asked with their horrible, matter of fact way: “Would you like to be immobilised completely and gagged, Youngest?”

Youngest shook their head side to side. “Use your words,” said Supervillain and Youngest swallowed, then spat out a contemptuous no.

“No what?” Supervillain asked, and Youngest’s entire face scrunched up in disgust. Leader saw their hands ball into fists at their sides. Leader also saw the tremble in their hands before they made them into fists. The fear coursing through their veins masked with their anger.

Supervillain pressed the cane into Youngest’s throat and their hand shot up again but stopped at Supervillain’s soft: “ah-ah-ah. No what, Youngest?”

Humiliation burned red on Youngest’s face as they said: “no, sir.”

Supervillain retracted the cane and stood in one swift movement. “Good. You can learn.”

Supervillain then turned to Leader with his grinning grey eyes. “They have a lot of potential, Leader. You should be proud.”

“Let them go, Supervillain,” Leader said.

“Why would I let them go? I have you all right where I want you. Except for you of course, Leader,” said Supervillain, walking towards Leader’s cage. Leader moved so they were sitting on their arse in the cage, legs stretched out in front of them and back against the bars, craning their neck to keep Supervillain in view. Supervillain stood directly over Leader’s cage looking down at them with a subtle hint of a smirk tugging at the edge of his lips.

Supervillain’s voice dipped, his rumbling deepening as he practically purred: “You I want on display. As a warning and a trophy as to what happens to those who oppose me.”

“In your dreams,” Leader snarled and Supervillain laughed, putting their hands on the top of Leader’s cage. Leader fought the urge to grab Supervillain’s hand and yank them down on the cage just to wipe that smirk off his stupid face.

“Sometimes Leader, if you work hard enough, your dreams can come true. Especially now that I got your little gang here too. You’d do just anything to protect them, wouldn’t you?” Leader’s heart sank at his words, their mouth going dry. That’s why they were here. Because of Leader. Because of Leader’s weakness to them.

“If you touch them—“

“I promise I won’t lay a finger on them,” Supervillain said, “as long as you do as I say.”

“No, Leader!” Rogue hissed from the cage to Leader’s left. “No you can’t let him—“

“You’re not sacrificing yourself for us,” said Medic, tone final. “We’ll get out! We’ll find a way, Leader. We always find a way. He just wants you we’ll be fine!”

“Yeah Leader, I just want you. You gonna make your team suffer in your place?” Supervillain asked with their hideous smiling rumble. Leader stuttered out a breath through their nose, even though it felt like they couldn’t breathe. Supervillain was asking something so impossible of them… and Leader didn’t want to just go along with it as horrible as that sounded.

They didn’t want to be the Leader and sacrifice themselves to Supervillain’s sadistic machinations, but if they didn’t… if they didn’t Supervillain would subject his team to them instead. Their team. Their family.

Leader swallowed hard, eyes focused on Supervillain’s cruel grey ones and nodded, just once. Supervillain’s lips spread into a proper smile now, and they got to undoing the lock on top of Leader’s cage. To the protests from Leader’s team.

“No! Leader no! Supervillain! Hurt me instead, hurt me please!” Medic demanded, pleaded, while Rogue just started kicking at the hinges on their cage and yelled in frustration when they got nowhere. Youngest was dead silent as Supervillain lifted the door of the cage and grabbed Leader under the shoulder and helped them out of the cage.

“Easy. Easy, there you go,” Supervillain praised, letting Leader sit back against the cage, sucking in a sharp breath. Supervillain moved his hand down to Leader’s ribs and Leader shot a hand out, stopping him, breathing heavy and cutting into Supervillain with a glare. Supervillain’s expression remained neutral, yet his eyes were a playful chiding. “I gave you that injury, Leader. Do you really think you can deny me seeing it? Do you really want to risk your teammates getting matching bruises?”

Leader’s glare softened to one of furious shame, as they let go of Supervillain’s hand and allowed him to lift Leader’s shirt up to Leader’s ribs. The cold smile on Supervillain’s face looked wrong. Strange. His hand on Leader’s ribs was surprisingly warm, as he pressed his palm against it and Leader sucked in a breath, clenching their jaw.

“Does that hurt?” Supervillain asked with his rolling rumble like falling stone.

“No. I’m just peachy— ow!” Leader cried as Supervillain dug their fingers into Leader’s ribs. Leader jerked to the side but Supervillain held them firm until Leader was gasping for breath, protesting: “Okay! Okay! It hurts!”

Supervillain removed his hand and dropped Leader’s shirt. “Good,” he said and stepped back. Leader looked at him, then Rogue was shouting in warning as Supervillain’s cane cracked against Leader’s bruised ribs. Leader crumbled to their knees, mouth open in a silent scream as they fell, then gasped again on the ground. They were on one hand and their knees, their other hand cradling their ribs protectively.

“Leader! Leader!” Medic was crying, but Leader just sucked in a sharp breath and raised their head to Supervillain again. Eyes narrowing.

Supervillain let out a loud sigh. “Still so insolent,” he said slowly, and cracked the cane against Leader’s jaw. Leader cried out, struggling to get their balance but it didn’t matter. Supervillain kicked at Leader’s injured ribs again and Leader went down, hitting off the stone floor and curling up protectively around themselves.

Leader opened their eyes to see Rogue reaching out for them between the bars, but they weren’t able to reach Leader. Leader saw a flash of grey fabric before a polished shoe slammed down on Rogue’s hand, driving the heel into it.

“No,” Leader gasped out with a pathetic wheeze. “No…” they said again, getting to their knees and grabbing at Supervillain’s foot. “Me… only… me…”

“Hear that Roguey? Only Leader, so stop trying to help or I’ll just hurt Leader more, yeah?” Supervillain said, lifting their foot from Rogue’s hand and grabbing Leader by the hair. Leader groaned as Supervillain yanked them up to their knees. “Get up, Leader. To your feet, come on now. I have a lesson to teach you all.”

Leader cried out as Supervillain yanked them up by the hair further and got to their shaky feet, holding onto Supervillain for balance. “Good. Very good. Now give me your hands.”

Cold fear washed through Leader’s veins at the command. Not their hands, they wanted to say. Anything but their hands. A punch to their ribs and Leader almost doubled over, but Supervillain used the pain as a diversion and cuffed Leader’s hands together in front of them. The cold metal snapped closed over Leader’s wrists, tightened to the point that Leader wondered if they would cut off their blood flow.

A strong hand under Leader’s chin directed their head up to look into those vindictive grey eyes. “Can you stand on your own?”

“Maybe if my ribs weren’t aching right now,” Leader grumbled, channeling all their pain, all their hatred into their glare they shot into the fathomless steel grey sea. Supervillain let Leader go, but Leader was ready this time. Both feet planted on the ground, knees bent, hands kept low in front of them.

The side of Supervillain’s lips quipped at Leader, as if they were impressed, but Leader could also very well be drunk on pain right now so they weren’t sure if what their eyes showed them were real.

Supervillain took off his black scarf first, then his overcoat and hung them on a hook that was nailed into the door. Next came the suit jacket and he stopped there, hanging that up too. He uncuffed the cuff links from his dress shirt and began rolling up his sleeves.

“Thought you were going to treat us to a striptease,” said Leader, forcing their usual devil-may-care smile onto their face. Supervillain flashed a smile too and then Leader’s head was thrown back, fresh blood dripping down their nose as Supervillain grabbed their hair to bring them up again.

“See, Leader, it’s not your fault per se, but with you being the Captain of your little team, your cute lil quips have spread like a wildfire throughout your ranks. Which means not only do I want to torture you to the point where you can’t even think about any witty comments, but I also want to wring it out of your teammates too.”

Leader’s hands shot up at the mention of their teammates and Supervillain smiled a handsome smile, as if he was happy to have touched a nerve.

“So you think I’m witty?” was all Leader said and Medic let out a tired: “shut up leader.”

“See?” Supervillain said, hand tightening in Leader’s hair. “Even they know when to stop.”

Leader just grinned exposing their bloody teeth. They had gone full feral, anything to piss Supervillain off. Anything to keep him off of their teammates. Just bait him. Bait him. Bait all his anger. All his frustration. Don’t even let him think about touching their team.

“Are you going to put me in my place or is you talking the torture?” Leader asked, tired. Supervillain could still that spark of defiance in Leader’s face and he let his mask of indifference shutter down over his own face.

Supervillain turned Leader and began dragging them towards the darkness behind the cages. Leader dragged their feet, their boots scraping along the ground as they were pulled against their will into the deep dark. Fear clasped their heart in a vice as they went stumbling after Supervillain’s long strides.

Lights flickered on around them and Leader could feel all the blood drain from their face. It looked like a fucked up medical room, with tools and utensils on the walls perfectly hung and cabinets full of god knows what.

And in the middle of the room was a metal table. Leader started struggling more now and Supervillain grinned as he felt the pull become more desperate. Supervillain turned to face Leader and revelled in the panic winding through their features. Supervillain yanked Leader forward and shoved them back onto the table. Leader fought them, trying to push Supervillain away but even on a good day they knew they wouldn’t be able to.

Supervillain wrestled Leader down, yanking their cuffed wrists above their head and hooking them to the end of the table. Leader yanked them down with all their might but they wouldn’t come loose. Supervillain watched Leader struggle until they stopped, lazy grey eyes going to Leader’s, raising his eyebrows, he asked: “no witty remarks?”

“Do your worst,” is what Leader said and Supervillain grinned.

“Oh I intend to,” said Supervillain stepping away from the table and walking over to one of the walls, grabbing a pliers from it and walking back over. Leader felt adrenaline pump through their veins a little too late if you asked Leader, but they tugged on the cuffs all the same just for something to do. Somewhere to put their fear.

Supervillain left the pliers on the metal table then walked back to the cages. The panic seized Leader’s throat as they leaned up, straining against the ache in their ribs, against the strain on their arms and cried out: “Supervillain! Don’t touch them! Just me, remember?!”

The clang of the handcuffs off the metal table was ricocheting through Leader’s ears like a storm of bullets from their struggling but they didn’t care. They saw Supervillain bend and pick up something from the floor and turn to walk back to Leader.

Leader calmed down a bit after seeing it was Supervillain’a cane. “Don’t worry Leader. I only have eyes for you. This just requires a more personal touch,” said Supervillain with his rolling voice, a hint of humour rounding his words. When Supervillain stopped beside the metal table Leader was chained to, he clicked a button on the handle and the hidden blade shinked out of the end of the cane.

The dagger had been a nasty surprise when Leader first felt it slice across his cheek. Supervillain had kept it a secret until Leader finally had the advantage over him in a fight, and then that shink changed the entire pace of the fight. That just seemed to be the general theme of Supervillain and Leader’s relationship.

Supervillain always seemed to have the upper hand.

Supervillain twisted the bottom of the cane and it came loose, the black metal of the cane becoming the hilt of the blade at the bottom. Leader tugged at the handcuffs again. They felt too exposed. Too readily waiting like a lamb for slaughter, they needed to do something.

“Nerves getting the better of you?” Supervillain asked, voice quiet as he placed the cane on a table to the side. “I can always drag Medic over here instead if you prefer.”

“You wouldn’t live to see tomorrow if you did,” Leader hissed and Supervillain smiled down at them.

“Just making sure. Now, to business,” said Supervillain. They grabbed Leader’s shirt and cut it loose with the blade. The cool metal scraped against Leader’s abdomen and chest causing a shiver to run down their spine. Supervillain turned back to face the cages and said louder so everyone could hear: “is everyone paying attention? Good. This is what happens you just don’t know when to stop and piss me off. Pay attention Youngest.”

The harsh tug of metal and Supervillain smiled to himself, turning back to Leader. All helpless and angry below him. Supervillain nearly sighed and stopped his work to just bask in how long it took him to finally get Leader here. Right where he wanted them, to finally hear them scream and not be able to fight back whatsoever.

Not with their hands.

Not with their words.

He wanted them broken, and hollow, to be moulded into something more after Supervillain was finished with them. The potential just sat idle under their skin and Supervillain would be the man to bring it out into the sunlight. That untapped nugget of something extraordinary.

Supervillain walked around the other side of the table, dagger in hand, then hummed, walking to the other side again. Mouth screwing up in concentration. Then, mind made up he sighed and climbed onto the table, straddling Leader’s waist with a knee on either side.

“At least buy me dinner fir— uhst,” Leader gasped as Supervillain pressed their ribs with his fingers.

“I need you to hold still for me now Leader, and tell me when it hurts.”

Supervillain wished he could have photographed the beautiful confusion on Leader’s face before he leaned over them, pinning their shoulder to table and started carving the first initial of Supervillain’s name just below Leader’s right shoulder.

Leader screamed as Supervillain dragged the blade through skin as if it was as easy as paper, thrashing in their restraints and screaming. Trying to loosen the handcuffs from the hook or jab a knee into Supervillain’s side, crotch, leg — anything. Anything to stop the pain that burned through Leader’s shoulder.

“Hold still. Almost there,” said Supervillain and placed a steadying hand on Leader’s bruised ribs to keep them down. Leader opened their mouth in a silent scream, trying to alleviate the pressure by sucking in their stomach and pushing it out. Twisting, writhing, turning— nothing could make them feel better.

Supervillain leaned back and smiled down at Leader. Leader was just happy they had finally stopped, but it didn’t stop the stinging pain from the deep cuts that were still bubbling warm blood down Leader’s torso and onto the table. To Leader’s horror, Supervillain reached back and picked up the pliers they had left on the edge of the table.

Supervillain brought them down to Leader’s fresh cuts and Leader shook their head, tears streaming down their face. “Supervillain— don’t- don’t!”

“Sssh,” Supervillain cooed, pressing a bloody finger to Leader’s lips. “Relax. I just need to make sure it’ll last.”

That sentence did anything but reassure Leader and before Leader could tell Supervillain that they would rate him poorly on yelp, the pliers was in his skin. The metal bites opening Leader’s flesh, ripping them further apart. Leader screamed from their gut, like a banshee, except worse because they knew merciful death wasn’t coming after the torture. It was just more torture.

Leader was in and out of consciousness by the time Supervillain was done, blinking hazily up at the monster above them. “Good. Done. You did so good. That’s—“ supervillain said with a laugh. “That’s gonna leave one hell of a scar, Leader. You’ll die with that one.”

“Go fuck yourself,” Leader croaked, voice hoarse from screaming. Supervillain tutted them.

“Leader. Leader. Leader. Where’s your usual banter, hmm? No funny input? I didn’t expect you to break so soon.”

Leader couldn’t even tug at their restraints in protest anymore. Their body was exhausted from healing and the adrenaline leaving their system. Supervillain lifted the bloody pliers so Leader could see it and sighed.

“You know the pliers was fun, but I think a clamp would be much more effective at ensuring scarring, wouldn’t you Medic?”

Leader barely heard Medic’s desperate reply. “Please… Supervillain. Please, let me look at them. I can heal them, make sure—“

“Enough. I don’t want them healed. I want them suffering. Although I do enjoy this whole family trauma thing, it does spice up the torture a bit.”

Supervillain was off Leader them and Leader nearly passed out with relief. Until their eyes followed Supervillain to the wall again and they pulled out a medical clamp, and the breath was taken from them.

Supervillain wasn’t done with Leader… they weren’t finished yet.

Sure enough Supervillain climbed back on top of Leader in the same position as before with their blood slicked knife in hand and a clamp in the other.

“You… you’re… I thought—“

“You thought we were done?” Supervillain asked and then laughed. A humourless, evil sound. “No. No. That was just the initial of my first name, Leader. How else will people know I tamed you if I don’t write my last name too?”

Distantly Leader could hear Rogue and Youngest shouting, protesting, calling Supervillain ever name under the sun and screaming. Pleading.

It all melded together in the static in Leader’s brain.

“In all honesty, Leader, you should be thanking whatever God is looking down at you that I don’t have a double barrel last name or we’d run out of body parts.”

Supervillain leaned over and pinned Leader’s left shoulder before getting to carving again. Leader screamed and cried and screamed some more and eventually, mercifully, they passed out on the table.

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