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uyuartik · 2 months

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bad idea, right? (obi wan kenobi x f!reader) part iii

tags: angst, fluff, arguments, period typical misogyny (of course not from obi wan), just overall wealthy pricks being little shits, the trope of THERE WAS ONLY ONE BED, but not really, do you believe in second chances (i don't) (💀), little smut compared to the rest because originally there was no smut in this (but i HAD TO use that idea), REPOST because i fucked up in the first place

a/n: welcome back for the finale!

well, i can't think of anything to say except this has been a blast for me, and i'm so happy that there are those who enjoys this madness as much as i do. hope you like the ending too. thank you all!

likes and reblogs are very much appreciated, and i can’t wait to hear your opinions! i am also crossposting on ao3, feel free to interact there as well.

part one | part two | part three

enjoy!!!

word count: 8.3K

chapter three: fuck it it's fine!

You don’t board that ship. A slight sickness you excuse, then spend your days sulking at home, still covered by the expanse of your lies. It is not totally untrue, though. You did really wake up with a swollen throat, and that put the integrity of your health during the journey at risk, thus with great grief, canceled the plans. Nobody knew that you’d not even mention the symptom on any other day, just requesting some honey tea and hardly noticing it disappear in the morrow. And it exactly worked out as predicted, more so, without leaving its discomfort for remorse. But after that, the hours stretched out each day, like you were living in a different plane where you were not welcomed. Perhaps you actually weren’t, for if you followed your fate, you’d be eating different foods, and walking foreign corridors. In an attempt to run away from that feeling, you try to socialize just a little, attending even the most dull tea parties. Also, your preference of company has to be specialized now, and that proves difficult sometimes.

So, that’s exactly why you indeed sulk at home, even though all your efforts.

But not tonight.

Then again, perhaps you should've.

His presence has nothing to do with it, to be perfectly clear. On the contrary, he makes it a little endurable. The forced small talk and empty eyes you once feared dearly are not the case, even after your last encounter. Of course, there's a little awkwardness, an uncertainty about where the line of intimacy now stands, shadows of anger and disappointment still darkening the atmosphere, but the overall sensation comes down to longing. You both lost a great friendship, cast it aside in a blink, but your souls don't accept this new arrangement that quickly, trying to fall into the familiar rhythm once more each time you feel your walls break. You don't allow it, neither does he. Yet, it is about the only thing that turns this night into a not complete waste of time. Even a pleasant one, you'd dare say.

If it weren't for literally everything else except this.

The hushed little uninformed jokes start during the dinner. It is the lord of the house that says them, to his close circle, barely hanging onto etiquette he had glimpses of. As minutes tick and glasses of wine roll, that glimpse is gone, and even in your seat at the end of the table, you hear him clearly. The pressed lips and masked mimics pretending not to be aware of it soon become apparent on every face, excluding you and Lord Kenobi. You glower the first time another of the guests feels confident enough to make his dirty contribution to the subject. Typical, you try to stay calm, tapping your fingers on the table. The world is filled with the likes of him, and the last thing they deserve is your attention. The reflex doesn’t go unnoticed by him, and he sends a sympathetic smile, showing that you’re not alone and accepting this invitation was a most regretful choice. He uses a few retorts to close the deal, let the dinner continue in different matters- or in silence, that would be fantastic indeed, but his smart wit and slight intimidation work only for a couple of minutes. Now it’s your turn to reflect that sad smile, and you do.

The sadness doesn’t come from the circumstances around you all, though. Your heart feels heavy, for not trying better ways to handle that morning. That guilt will haunt you, drag you into the gloomy pit you’ve been in, and maybe, you should stay there for some time, a penance for your mistakes.

After dinner, when the ladies and gentlemen huddle around different interests, you get a chance to cool off. The soft peals of laughter and giggles fill the room, a much more pleasant sound than the roar of men. You get to entertain others with your stories of other cities you’ve been to, and they tell their interesting incidents, and make fun of their husbands, people who deserve, as their commotion spills out of the walls. The topic of their conversation, marriage, diffuses out into your circle in such a way, that once again, you’re restraining yourself, trying to listen to the problems one of the ladies is complaining of, and not to hear the crude comments going on on the other side. You’re stopped from rushing out of your armchair simply out of respect you have for the woman speaking when you pick up your name passing in their remarks. Plus, Kenobi’s words, you don’t flatter me by offending the lady, reach every ear in the room, sharper than a knife. Your cheeks burn with anger, then with gratitude, and at last, out of embarrassment, because how are you going to explain he’s just doing an honorable thing, that it’s his character to defy ill minds when he sees one, and this has little to do with his “pursuit” of you? Your breaths are shallow and quick as you focus on the discourse, and dodge every attempt to pull the subject towards your relations.

Though, the snake doesn’t give up on eating, even his own tail, it seems.

In less than half an hour, a joke about abduction is whispered, and you surge from your armchair, the screeching sound echoing. You murmur what resembles to be an excuse (you’re still deciding whether they are worthy of one), and send one glaring gaze at the group, enough to make one flinch, and walk out.

Out of the entire house.

Lucky for you, this is a night in which you carpooled with another guest, meaning you only have your own feet to carry you away in this pouring rain.

But of course, that’s not enough to deter you.

You take big steps, enforced by your fury. Thus, the house leaves your sight in no time, but not their audacity, still ringing in your ears. Implications about your freedom. Complaints of wive-hood. Humor about how perfectly reasonable is to get rich, by kidnapping a young woman… (Honestly, after all that, you don’t have mercy for them of the panic they might experience when they realize their guest is not refreshing in another room, and have left the estate altogether. Alas, that guest is you.) You string curses at them, the only form of thinking you have in regard, and feel the bulk of emotions resonate with every stomp, even spilling out of your tear ducts. Your dampening body, and the length of the road don’t make it any easier, feeding your frustration. Your only anchor is your self worth, the reason you began this path in the first place, and you desperately hope it will turn the tide in a while.

Though now, the picture you paint with those foul words and wet clothes isn’t exactly the brightest.

It is still among these moods, that Obi Wan catches up to you. You’re not exactly surprised to see him, his carriage closing the twenty minute distance you put between yourself and that damned house with a speed that you think can’t be that good for the horses in the long run. They stop abruptly at your side, and you have all those insults readied if it turns out to be that fucked up man or polite declines if it is indeed Obi Wan.

But, you can’t speak them. The world feels like it freezes, the raindrops slowing down, and carrying away your burdens as they fall to the soil. The small door opens, and Obi Wan rushes out of it, with an expression that is so honest and raw. His fright vanishes at the sight of you, that scared gaze dissolving, eyebrows relaxing… You can actually see his lips move, Thank God. He is totally undisturbed by the downpour, already making his strands stick to his forehead. His hands find yours, and pull you close, almost like an embrace. You look into his eyes, how focused they are on you, as if they could burn you from the inside with their intensity. You have an undeniable urge to kiss him right now, and that has nothing to do with lust, but your wish to undo the last couple of weeks, uphold that strong connection once the two you had. Of course, you don’t, you can’t, thus, you let him lead you inside, and continue towards whatever destination.

Funny, how you feel much calmer doing the thing you thought you wouldn’t. Moreso, you have no woes about it either.

The silence is deafening, but nobody dares to open their mouth, the greatness of the storm of emotions you both are having too heavy on your tongues. He puts his less soggy jacket around your shoulders, you welcome it with a nod. That’s the moment you realize the redness on his knuckles. It’s not hard to guess the scene, and that has your head turned to the floor, processing the entire night. It is also at this moment that you become aware of your fresh tears, still sliding over your cheeks. Even if he notices them, he doesn’t do a thing about it, an indifference you’re grateful for. He just looks out of the window, and contemplates, same as you.

===

The tub filled with hot water doesn’t make you any wetter, but it helps with the temperature. You’re sorry that you exhausted the owners of the inn you had to stay in, (for it was getting impossible to travel in that rain) with this request, but a voice tells you that Obi Wan wouldn’t have it any other way. You’re unbelievably silent as he sorts it all out, staying in your bubble, unintentionally playing the part of the damsel in distress. You listen to his list of requests, for the horses, for three rooms (the best reserved for the lady, he insists), a tub to be prepared for you, and some tea-

“No need.” Your voice is weak, but it is clear. He would’ve protested this answer, but it is the first time you’ve talked after leaving the house, how ironic, and the realization sets deep in both of you. After that, you feel the words pile up on your tongue, but in a blink, you find yourself in a room. Alone.

“So sorry, I thought they gave me this room.” He stands at the door, holding it half open, face turned in the opposite direction.

“Obi Wan.” His gaze hesitantly finds your way again. God, he’s about to kill you with that blues… “Can we talk for a second?”

You name yourself a hypocrite for asking that, in this state, but you can’t breathe with all that untold things if you spend another second without explaining yourself to him, and apologize for all the trouble you’ve caused. And, isn’t this already proof of the trust you have for him, how vulnerable you can be in his presence?

And, there’s nothing he’s not seen before, after all.

He gingerly closes the door, locking it in a swift motion, and makes his way to you. You pull yourself together, and reach for his hand for him to help you out.

“No, stay. Your fingers are still cold.”

You can’t hide the small smile forming on your face as you settle back, careful to keep most of your body underwater. He, ever noble, keeps his eyes straight on your face, which somehow doesn’t help. There’s something about his rolled-up sleeves, the matching three-piece suit down to two for the damp jacket sits behind the chair in your back against the fireplace. His hair is drying up in all defiant shapes, and you have to stop imagining that morning he woke up next to you.

“I just wanted to say thank you. For everything. I- I never intended to cause this big of a mess, and make someone clean up after me. Certainly, not you, of all people. You shouldn’t have tired yourself this much, and I’m sorry for it.”

“You can’t expect me to do nothing.” The sentence begs for a dear to be added in the end, and he has to fight his throat to silence himself. Instead, there’s a kind tug at the corners of his lips.

“You’re right.” You nod. “But the truth is, I wasn’t thinking clearly. I needed to get out, I just couldn’t sit there pretend I didn’t hear all those nasty comments.”

His fist clenches at the reminder, and you once again spot the bruises settling in on his knuckles, filling with the desire to mention them, but you inevitably decide not to. “That asshole-“

”He was obnoxious since the first hour, and loud, but that doesn't scare me, for thus he has proven himself to be just a foul mouthed man. But, that title started not to cover the extent of it- it was too much and I couldn’t take it anymore. You may say it was obvious from the start, but I tried my best to not evolve this into a thing I would regret afterward. And I succeeded.”

“So you don't even regret ever setting foot in that house?”

A tinge of disgust seizes your face, but only for a moment. Even with all those words echoing in your ear, you don't have hatred in your heart, or any remorse. You're not so quite sure about its reason, nor do you wish to be, avoiding all analysis. Like you don't know the basics already. But the sudden change in your expression tells everything. “I don’t think I can ever regret it. At least, not in its entirety.” You say, hugging your knees and lowering your head. Hot steam no longer hits your skin, you realize in your attempts of distraction.

There's a second of silence in the room, despite the thunderstorm raging outside. You are as cold as in the beginning because of it, and you almost contemplate how good of an idea this conversation was, especially under these circumstances.

“I’d say the same.” Obi Wan speaks, and that's when goosebumps rise on your skin. Your eyes meet his, then flutter away quickly, overwhelmed. Does he mean-

Why is him meaning that any different than yours, huh? Why is it any worse when he says it?

“You should get out of there.” He reaches for a towel, and you shyly stand up, turning your back and pressing your arms around yourself. Nothing he hasn't seen before, right? As the coarse fabric is draped around your shoulders, you can’t help but feel afire, the imprint of his hand around your shoulders for a second lingering way more than it should, creating a tingling sensation.

“Thank you.”

“Well, I must return to my room now.” He folds his hands together, like trying to preserve where they’ve touched, and his eyes still stay respectfully up, causing your heart to lose its rhythm. There has never been a scenario that involved nakedness without… sexual intentions, and clearly, it’s not even crossing your minds right now. Your awareness of it takes up all the space in your mind, tosses every other idea out, and leaves you at the mercy of your soul.

“Obi Wan.” Fuck, the way you call his name, it is bound to weaken him every time. “Can you-” Oh, haven't you demanded enough from him? “I- I would like it if you stayed.”

His mouth hangs open for a second, with a subtle sharp inhale. His fingers tighten around each other, then relax all together, hanging free by his side. “Of course.” For all the words that come to his lips, it’s a most simple answer.

Not that you have any complaints.

You’re filled with another kind of thrill, being this open with your wishes, but having no clue whether they’ll take the night, having no clue where you want the night to go, or how to act in this very moment, half covered. You just know that you prefer him, being in the same chamber as you. You’d prefer to listen to his idle talk or slow breaths, than the silence of the room. You’d prefer him to snore in your bed than to picture him in his own, lying awake. (Because let’s face it, it’d take a while for him to surrender to sleep, if left to his own devices.)

He takes a step towards the armchair, unbuttoning his vest and you come back to your senses, stepping out of the tub in the opposite direction, towards the nightgown the innkeeper gracefully lent to you. It’s slightly large for your body, definitely not tailored for someone close to your size, but if Obi Wan ever heard you commenting on the fact, he’d wholeheartedly claim you still looked like an angel. Since you don’t, he doesn’t too, but it’s obvious in the way he takes in your form, a battle of excess fabric against your movements. He has to bury a groan when your sleeve falls down your shoulder, a simple accident. He knows that shouldn’t have been seen by him, or you didn’t do it on purpose, that tonight is not meant for those activities, and it shouldn’t get him so bothered up, but it fucking does. Does it also make him want to slap himself? Yes.

Walking near the fireplace, you wring the excess water from your hair and run your fingers through the strands before rubbing that towel aggressively, for the fact that it is already soggy enough, and is not gonna do much. You despise sleeping with wet hair, it is an invitation for you to get sick, not to mention that you’ll be sharing the bed, leaving frustrating streaks of wetness on the sheets for them.

“Hey, hey, let me help you.” Is he a little bit scared? The answer is another yes. But he’s not gonna stand there and watch you fight with your hair. He takes the fabric, locating the most usable spots, and slowly massages your strands with them. Objectively, it’s not a lot different in terms of overall results, but it does more than that anyway. Despite the forbidden intimacy, despite the question of “How is he so good at it?”, you’re lulled by the constant movements, the tension in your muscles easing off. He keeps you by the fire longer than you would’ve stayed, and that achievement belongs solely to him. Frankly, he too is not sure how long the two of you could stand like that, or put an end to it. All that matters is that your hair is pleasantly damp, less bothersome, and he did that.

To be honest, with each minute he is in your presence; the task of holding onto his manners, respecting his broken heart, and following your lead is getting harder to manage.

“Thank you.” You murmur, eyelids barely held open, and he feels like a juggler, suddenly losing his sense of balance, and dropping one of his props.

“You’re welcome.” Perhaps he was the one to thank, for the pleasure. That’s the second prop, falling down.

Still, it’s obvious how that sentence misses a darling thrown out after it.

You climb the bed, and he follows suit. You both favor the edges of the mattress, and there’s a ridiculous distance between both of your bodies, but you’re both too timid to use it, even at the risk of tumbling down.

Only after the urge to find a better position kicks in that you move, and end up just a little closer, face turned to his side.

He’s already turned to you, eyes closed but definitely not trying to sleep, or relax if nothing. He opens them of course, after you rustled the sheets that hard.

“What if I get sick tomorrow?” Admittedly, that’s a silly question, but the scenario occupies your mind. All the elemental factors are present, and you only have a formal dress on your back. Also, the fact that it would be all your fault, yet you are the one to complain? You hate yourself for saying it out loud.

“Then we would stay ‘til you got better.” His point-of-fact words, softened with his bedtime voice, must be annoying. Must be. It is not. It is the raw truth, straight from his core. You won’t disrespect it, (again). “I would take care of you.”

(Doesn’t he, always?)

A shiver runs down your spine.

(He’d name this place heaven, if it allowed you two to stay together a little longer.)

“Obi Wan.” Whispering, trying your best to break that ugly silence, not to crush under the weight of his words, but more importantly to let him know your truths, the alignment of your soul. “I- I never told you how much I appreciated you. Now just today, but especially today.”

He’s trying so hard not to sound rude, or leave you unanswered, but none of them are good enough. Thankfully, you are not expecting one. Your fingers ghost over his knuckles, afraid to hurt him. he’s not even sure you’re doing that, ‘til you hunch over, and press a small kiss over them.

That’s all the acknowledgment he needs, ever. It wasn’t becoming of a gentleman, obviously, but the situation didn’t require gentleman-cy, too. He has no recollection of how his fist ended up in that man’s eye, except for the exact second it happened, feeling his shirt slide from his other hand as the impact sizzled through his bones, and sent the man to the floor. He found himself in the middle of saying God knows what- he still doesn’t have a single clue, and thinks about the possibility of how they’ll resonate, ‘til it reaches his ears once again.

Though, he has no fear regarding that, or the altercation before it. Nor regret.

“I am honored that our names are spoken together, a testament of our likeness.”

The third prop.

It falls, most obviously, but he doesn’t show it. Not under these circumstances. No matter how you try to avoid the subject of love, or a future, he’s burning for it, burning for you. In that moment, it is settled that it’ll always be that way, forever. You’re absolutely crushing his heart, and maybe even crush yours in the process (for which reasons, he’s never sure), regardless of your intentions pointing otherwise, because he knows you’re pushing through your struggles to speak up, select the appropriate expressions, to honor your past. He’s touched by your effort, as well as your words, oh, your words… This is the only compliment he’ll ever accept, and it’s not even meant to be a compliment. Your voice is already etched into his brain, and there will not go a single day he’s not reminiscing about it.

Thus, with such strong emotions, his every muscle twitched with the desire to pull you closer, wrap his arm around your waist, card his fingers through your cool hair as your lips meet. He wants to kiss you slowly, savor your taste and caress your tongue with his, for the sole purpose of being close to you. You, throwing one leg over him… You, falling asleep in his arms as he gets to bathe in your enchanting scent… The feeling of your warm breath against his neck as you take refuge in there… He’s surprised he doesn’t have to chain himself not to act on any of these images.

(Oh, it very much feels like he has done that anyway)

Yet, it is probably the worst night to do so. It has all been too much, and all this on top of that is a recipe for disaster. A disaster he’s been struck with nonetheless, though, perhaps he can spare you from.

When it comes to you, he has always put his heart before his mind, (but never disregarding the latter part. It is the essential element to keep both of you safe, to never compromise your social statuses, to create the optimum atmosphere for your relationship to flourish (by your own unusual standards)). For the first time, he’s not following that code. Even he can’t imagine the consequences if he doesn’t.

You’re glad that nothing has changed. No response from him, no action. His relaxed expression tells you enough; the calmness of his eyes, his slow breaths and the slight curve of his lips… To be honest, you’re relieved to see your words reach their destination but also set with the urge to prove them. To press down your mouth on his, from which you hope for an answer; to hold his hand without causing any discomfort, or simply hug him for a second, eliminating all space between your bodies like your souls.

Alas, the role of the hypocrite is a part you no longer wish to play, and you’re perfectly willing to hurt yourself by not succumbing to your wishes, and refrain him from further confusion.

“Good night, Obi Wan.” You say, fingers grazing over his for the last time, and curl yourself into a ball.

“Good night, my dearest.”

===

The morning is unlike the previous example.

You wake up to him getting up, so there’s no way for you to know if your bodies drifted closer during the night, but considering the position of your arm, extended way beyond the middle, it is quite possible to assume some physical contact was present.

Considering you two are not facing each other, thus acknowledgment of the situation is not a matter, your embarrassment is half of what it should be.

Though, your cheeks burn brighter each second you can’t peel your eyes off of him, filling up the rest of that cup. Watching him walk around, the movement of each chiseled muscle on his back as he puts his shirt and trousers on quickly highlights another impropriety. He is perfection, even in that drowsy state of the human condition, there’s harmony to his every motion, the slow steps he takes, the way the fabric glides against his skin, the subtle fine arrangements of his fingers to make sure it looks decent, even how he breathes causes him to blend into the room, but also bedazzle it in his grace, make him stand out like a crown jewel, a masterpiece of arts that name the place.

You can only stop your ogling once he leans in and stirs the flames, which were already going strong since they were last fed before you went to sleep- wait, that doesn’t seem possible, did he actually sever his sleep to tend to it?

Is there any other explanation you need?

Your heart may flutter out of your chest after this realization, so you skirt out of the blankets. Of course, the sound draws his attention, and you’re caught, forced to react.

Yet, the unstoppable smile forming on his lips inspires a similar response on yours so easily, so naturally that you don’t feel obligated at all. On the quite contrary, that simple mimic banishes any pretense, showering you with reassurance and bravery, the motivation to act on your own true terms, not society’s or the ones you pressured onto yourself.

“Good morning.” The simultaneous greeting pulls a giggle from both of you, and it is all so small, yet so much. You sway away from his direction, casually reaching for your clothes, hoping he doesn’t notice the tremor of your legs when you shed the nightwear and put the chemise on. Because you know, he’s watching you. Divine justice, perhaps.

“Be careful, Obi Wan, I might start to think you enjoy watching me get dressed too much.” The snarky comment, fighting its way out of your mouth further softens the atmosphere, and it is like the first days of spring after a harsh winter, soothing your souls with relief.

“Guilty as charged.”

You shake your head, consumed by his usual forward banter. A scene taken straight out of your past. You shimmy into your dress instead of coming up with a cleverer response.

“You don’t sound sick.” He says, indicating that he’s been paying attention.

Biting your lip, you turn away. “Actually…”

“Is there something wrong?” He ends up right beside you in a blink, as if the world changed by your unfinished sentence.

Your heart picks up a different rhythm, hands raised in position to tie your ribbon but frozen. “It’s nothing, my throat just feels-”

“Do you want me to call a doctor?”

That was the exact reason why you started with it’s nothing. Alas… “No, it’s probably just my overthinking and coming up with strange sensations.” And if not, it depends on how well you spend tonight, so there’s not much room for intervention. Definitely not in medical terms.

“Pity.” His comment makes you scoff. After that, you can’t reward him with your concerns, can you? It is funny, ugh.

“Let me help.”

Your heart can’t get any rest as the tension simply changes garbs, his fingers trailing over yours and leading a 180° turn, leaving a blazing line along your skin, to tie the ends of your ribbon together. Your arms tentatively fall to your sides, not sure what to do with their freedom. His breaths lick your neck while he attentively, slowly smooths his creation, and you’d probably freak out if you weren’t so focused on the sheer range of his skills.

(Also the mystery of how he comes to acquire it, but it’s only the deep, dark parts of your mind speaking. Moreover, you do not pride yourself in a position to be jealous. You absolutely are, on that tiny level, and no, you’ll never admit it.)

Though, you’re not gonna comment on that, not when your heart threatens to fly out of its cage. The sacredness of the action brings back the echoes of your concerns, not a single one strong enough to overtake you, but the cacophony of them loud enough to occupy the entirety of your capacity.

All that talk of past times… Coupled with a little hesitancy, and how the tables turn…

“T- thank you.”

“My pleasure.” Like he just didn’t flip the dynamic, he carries on with his outfit, tying his cravat. His beautiful hands work expertly, effortlessly, and the result is perfect, even without a mirror, eyes on you the entire time.

“Is it looking fine?”

“Yes.” You meekly answer. It is decent, like he always is. Somehow witnessing that feels as sensual as the previous scene, pulling you further down the whirlpool.

Embarrassed enough already, you busy yourself with your hair, accepting the mess that it is, and decide on a simple bun, as much as possible. The practiced moves bring you some sense of calmness and control, even if the result isn’t perfect. The silence helps too, along with his occupancy of tidying up the room.

“Do you want to have some breakfast?” He asks. God, how does he still sound that cheery?

“No, thank you.” You don’t want to keep your father worrying any longer, and it’s not like you’re going to faint. The memory of your last food in the most unpleasant company is still strong enough to expel any thought of hunger.

That answer may be the clearest thought you’ve ever had this morning, yet it is the one that whispers doubt into his heart. You are silent, turned away from him, and far too engrossed in whatever unnecessary thing you’re doing. Because now, he fears that if the two of you leave this room, this building, all your lives in it will be a part of the history, never to be repeated or worse, mentioned again, lost in the torn pages. The joke about residing here for however long- seems awfully bitter, perfectly demonstrating he’d rather hold on to the possibility than put an end to this.

How could that be love?

Perhaps you were right, accusing him of madness.

That’s the only reason he walks out of the room to prepare the carriages, instead of cocooning the both of you in.

===

“Father!” You wrap your arms around him, who’s standing by the main entrance to your estate, waiting anxiously. He does the same, unaffected by the eyes that watch, the staff, and a mere acquaintance, Lord Kenobi.

Now Obi Wan knows who you got your bravery from.

He stands quietly, hands folded in front of him, not sure what to do but damn sure not to leave. He had plenty of time to think about his madness on the road, and decided it was not anything pathological- it was pure love and desperation for you. Isn’t that the nature of most of your meet-ups? Consoling each other in the positively dreadful situations, and utilizing everything to spend a second more together?

He hears you reassuring him of your well-being, and summarize the thing in pretty understated phrases. Even that makes him stutter over his words in a fit of rage. Obi Wan agrees. You distract him by speaking of the help you’ve gotten from a valiant friend, and that’s how he enters the conversation.

“Good morning, Sir.”

How he keeps it all cool, sharing and shaping his anger, silencing any doubt that may arise in him is a surprise, though he’s called a great negotiator for a reason, right? His work in various cases in court has earned him the title. He’s not overtly a fan of flaunting it. Though, it helps him a great deal in this instance.

At least, enough to have a pleasant exchange in these unpleasant circumstances, and secure permission to talk to you again.

Alone.

It is weird enough as it is already, you and him spending the night at some inn, him casually chatting with your father like his clothes haven’t benefitted from the merits of ironing, not to mention his hair being on the wild side after a slight treatment of rain, and now he is requesting your attention? Not only yours, but your father’s too in extent?

His plans have never been so crystal clear.

“No.” You declare your objection so clearly, in one word as the door closes behind him, giving you the privacy of the room. “No, no, no, no.”

“I haven’t even opened my mouth!” He objects, though it is more of a principal thing, than an actual defense. He knows you’ve worked it all out already. God, could he expect anything less from you? Your watery eyes and trembling hands break his heart into a million pieces, reactions so strong even before he has a chance to utter their cause. He caresses his beard, reevaluating if he should continue-

He can’t live with the consequences if he dares not. He can’t live with what-ifs, or not knowing the reason why you are so repulsed by the idea or would you still feel the same, if he told you about his love for you. Of course, that would require some magic, considering the magnitude and intricacy of it. How is he supposed to put the purest feelings he’s ever had to mere words, the origin of the butterflies caged up in his chest, the wires of his brain getting tangled up whenever you’re not around, and the constant intoxication from the strongest liquor he’s ever consumed? He’d rather die than sober up, and a part of him already recognizes that it’s not a possibility. It is his poison and antidote. There’s not a moment that passes without either of them.

And surely, he has no complaints about it. Never will. It is a brave choice, but what’s braver is this moment.

“No.” You repeat, hands clasped together to stop them from shaking. Your voice is low albeit steady, as much as it can be.

Because you do not lift your eyes to meet him. “You can’t propose to me, because I can’t refuse it. But I will. Then the whole country will wonder what is so wrong with you, and me, and they will talk about it all the time, for years to come. The whispers will be the first thing that you hear in every room you enter, and you’ll see the mischievous glint in the eyes of every person you meet, them scrutinizing whether those rumors are true. Our reputations will be tarnished forever, and we will hate each other for it.” And you can’t stand that.

You don’t sound like this is the first time you’re putting these words together. In all your distressed state, you sound awfully logical in your own way, so focused on one improbable, insane possibility (damn those reputations, he can never hate you), but devising every little detail.

“Why?” He basically hollers, running a hand through his hair. Why does that potential is the one you envision? “Why can’t you marry me?”

One can only dream that someone outside isn’t listening.

“Because- I don’t know!” You take a desperate step closer, showing him your honesty. You truly can’t quite name your aversions, and isn’t that already enough of a reason to stay away, spare the person you’re facing? “I don’t know how to be a wife! And I am scared. All my life I alienated myself from the idea of a marriage, I methodically dismissed every chance claiming it wasn’t the time, all the way ‘til I would say it was too late. I was content with that idea. Because I love- loved my life the way it is; I get more than I need from my father, and that is to remain unchanged when my brother takes over, and I am free as a bird, unbound by society’s expectations, traveling wherever, wherever and trying new things. I was, I am so happy about it that anything that may alter it I shun from immediately. And now I find myself in a place I never imagined, and I am scared. I don’t know what happens now. I don’t know what to expect. I don’t know what that future looks like for us.”

He moves towards you, his head tilted sideways in understanding, arms reaching for yours. Finally, finally hearing your justifications, the basis of your attitude, fills him with pride and compassion, and most importantly, gives him an opportunity to help you solve those problems, together. But, you hush him, squeezing his wrists in gentle guidance, with tears streaking across your cheeks. “I just know that I love you. I love you so much that my heart will always feel like a weight in my chest when I’m not with you, like a ship sinking, but never reaching the bottom. And I will continue to love you even if you stop loving me back, but I would rather lose you on my terms than by the burdens a marriage brings.”

“Why do you so believe that a mere contract would change my feelings? Do you think my affections for you are that fragile?”

You frantically shake your head, causing the drops to fall faster. “No, I’m not saying that-“

“Then what?” He snaps, though not because he’s angry. He wants to learn every single reason that’s keeping you away.

“You don’t know what that will do to us.”

“No, I don’t! And I don’t care! It will never change my feelings.” This, he can shout freely. This is the simplest truth for all his remaining days on this earth.

You don’t know that, you want to object. “Obi Wan…” Is the response that comes out of your mouth. “I am not a good bride.”

“No.”There’s acceptance in his tone, a punch to your guts. “You’re the love of life, my companion, my everything.” When he pulls you even closer, and cups your cheeks, you let him. “Haven’t we been through all the struggles a couple could share already? Haven’t I seen all of you, and let you see all of me? Haven’t you claimed my entire soul, and occupied my every single thought? You made me break my rules, and painted a picture I never thought was suited for me- and I came to like that picture very much. In fact, it’s all I ever want my future to look like, with you in it. You, exactly in the way you already are, with all your unsusceptibility to the norms and striking habits. I know that can be scary. I am afraid too. But, anything worth doing starts like this, I know it. And we’ll be the biggest idiots in the world if we let our fear rule us.”

You can’t help but laugh a little, the joyful sound making his breath hitch. It is reflected on his face too, and it is something you’ll hold on to, alongside the tears that begin to form on his eyes. Fortunately, they sit there, despite him kneeling in front of you, his fingers never leaving the bend of your arm, only to follow the route they create, and hold onto both of your hands. “Please, marry me.”

You’re convinced, but your tongue is still tied, so you nod. Your entire upper body shakes with the gesture in seconds, making you look like an overexcited child, on the verge of losing their balance with the restlessness of their legs. You barely feel him kissing your knuckles before he stands up and embraces you, stabilizing both of you in both physical and emotional terms. Let’s be real, if he kissed you instead as he desperately wished to, you’d fall on the floor (and continue there- ‘til somebody discovered the two of you in very indecent terms). His chuckles quickly become your favorite song, you feel blessed as they delight your ears, and make your chest vibrate like his. He revels in the newfound proximity, despite the fact that you’ve been much, much closer in the past. This is new. This is raw love, uncombined with other emotions, strengthened by the absolute truth that you two are meant for each other, and with the promise of you’ll do something about it. He holds you ‘til your sense of balance is restored, for he now has urgent matters he has to attend to. He’ll get to hold you forever soon, and that revelation doesn’t change the herculean feat of letting you go now. He can’t help but wipe the streaks of wetness on your face, though it forms again. He solely doesn’t repeat himself because of the widest grin on your lips. You press yourself to his palm, eyelids closing for a moment, then place a small peck on it.

“I- I’m now gonna go and talk to your father, get the papers right- and find a-” oh, that’s not “a”, he is going to require many others even if he keeps everything minimal, “I’ll be back in three, fuck, four hours, okay?”

“What? No!” You exclaim, almost giving him a heart attack.

“What’s wrong?” His fingers tighten, a slight tremble taking over them. You have to smile to get him to relax once again, and raise your eyebrows wittily, as if he is a fool for not imagining it already, reminding him of your nature.

“I’m only doing this once. I want everything to be right.”

He squints his eyes, grasping your chin. There’s a few seconds of silence, the time it takes for his nerves to settle. When it does, you’re struck by the intensity of his blue irises, the condensed calm before the storm. “So you want to stay as my fiance ‘til the next season starts, in eight months, succumbing to waiting as we get no freedom to ourselves, always in the center stage, enjoying the last of our bachelor states, the lonely nights and beds bigger than you can ever occupy.”

His other hand, wandering across your waist tells you exactly what he implies. While you actually weren’t planning on such a thing, it causes a surge of rush to overtake you, burning you from the inside. Pursing your lips as you free your face from his grip, with a contradicting shaky breath, you say. “I was always fond of winter weddings…”

To this, he laughs, echoing in the room, and you join him.

One can only hope whoever outside listens to this too, this moment of pure joy preserved in one more mind.

===

“I couldn’t be happier to be married to you.” Obi Wan whispers, but the sentence is loud and clear to you, etched into where he takes nest in the crook of your neck, hot breaths burning your skin.

“We’re still not- ngh“ Yes, this is supposed to be the rehearsal, the night before the main event. You two should be at the reception downstairs, among your many relatives and friends and other members of the society, all gathered for tomorrow morning, when these words of yours will be invalid.

Of course, you are further making a hypocrite of yourself by the way you hold onto him, legs wrapped around his waist, arms locked around his shoulders as he burrows his cock into you. It was impossible to wait any further, as you were separated by the whole ordeal of preparations and the watchful eyes. The moment you found a clearing, you two slipped away, cue to now, where your back on the wall as he supports you against it. You didn’t even get one meter away from the door, you could basically reach the knob with a simple extension of your elbow, but in the end, who cares? Who cares when he fills you so deliciously, scratching the itch that has been building for some time, peppering you with all the love in his heart?

Still, your sentence is cut abruptly as he drives his hips faster, rougher- very much an act of pedantry, advising not to get lost in the details. It works, the correction dies on your tongue, though a quite loud moan takes its place. His hand flies to cover your mouth, and your eyes pop open, meeting his. The pressure of his palm against your face almost forces another sound out of you. Fuck, you adore those blue storms, even when they are focused elsewhere, turned to the door as if it can see past behind it, scanning for intruders. You do actually whimper when the danger dissolves, the vibrations running among his bones, and he keeps up his pace, hitting that sweet spot over and over again.

However, it is getting harder in terms of balance as he now has one hand to stabilize you, and despite your best efforts, it is quite hard not to slide off of the smooth fabric of his clothes. Remorsefully, you push on his shoulders, and he understands, pulling his cock out of you and burying his mouth on your skin. He stifles a sob in there, the frustration getting the best of him.

“Oh, you definitely had too much wine.” Look at who’s talking, you with those wobbly legs and bitten lips…

“No, I just had too little of you.”

Your heart flaps its wings out of your chest, as it does after his every cheesy compliment. You still cannot figure out how he makes you blush harder with those words, even as he ravages you in the meantime.

You reach for a kiss, it is always a good idea. He hums contently at the touch, grateful at the most basic form of contact. Obi Wan rocks against you unintentionally, and that’s how the unsatiated desire wages war, with desperate groans and roaming hands.

Then, his fingers tighten around your waist, and you find yourself supported against the vanity with your open palms, depositing most of your weight there (thank God, because you couldn’t trust your feet much longer). He pulls your hips back to his. Your back arches in a way that is most complementary to his chest, and fuck, it is a vision.

It literally is.

Fluttering your eyes open for only a second (that was your intention at least), you’re struck down with the image of the two of you in the mirror, faces contorted in the prettiest way that is possible in this dirty position, heavy lids and open mouths, fingertips whitened by the strong grasp you have on each other, the matching colors of your outfits…

Yes, even with that detail, you’re still on his side, agreeing you’d be idiots if you weren’t doing this.

Deciding to take the sight from its direct source, you turn your head to the side a little, looking at the adonis of a man you’ll soon call your husband, with his neatly trimmed beard and prominent cheekbones and long eyelashes you are slightly jealous of and so much more…

He meets your gaze, breathless with similar thoughts, that little tug on the corner of his mouth telling you all you need to know, but then he nudges your face to its previous state by a small clasp of your chin, and you’re watching him through the reflection, leaning forward when he starts to fumble with your skirt once again.

The moan that leaves you is totally incapable of being unobscured as he enters you anew. The change in the angle along with the visual stimulation has you teetering on the edge quite easily, like him, but he denies it, maintaining slow movements and choking out any noise that dares to leave him.

Of course, all is impeded when the door is knocked-

“Occupied!”

Your voices are synchronized, high and tight. The clock stops for a moment for your bodies, as if the stationary status makes it any less scandalous, and both of you fixated on the doorknob.

It never turns. Never.

Still, the dilated pupils remain a little longer, joined over the mirror, with big puffs of breath and shaking hands.

“Do you think they-“ There’s not an exact word that you can find to explain what has just occurred, but the sentiment is clear.

“Probably.” And the answer too is just as clear.

Well, the only thing lost is the trivial achievement of never being discovered before the wedding.

A wedding which is hours away.

So, you push back, wiggling your hips. His unrestricted sound is all you need to regain your spirits back, and you do it once more. Just like that, the wheels are turning.

“You realize there’s a bed behind us, right?” He asks as he slowly thrusts into you.

“Yes, but I like the view better here.”

#star wars imagine #star wars fanfiction #obi wan kenobi imagine #obi wan imagine #obi wan kenobi x reader #obi wan x reader #obi-wan kenobi x reader #obi-wan x reader #obi wan kenobi smut #obi wan kenobi fluff #obi wan kenobi angst

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mp3chan · 1 year

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1:47am [F]

plz reblog if you enjoy it!

pairing: bangchan x (chubby) gn!reader

word count: 844

tw: insecurities, very mild angst (like a sprinkle), mentions of nayeon (not tw but i don’t want anyone to think i hate her i don’t she’s literally one of my twice biases), chan makes one lewd comment

sum: y/n suddenly feels very insecure and chris immediately steps into action! channie to the rescue!

an: im trying to figure out if I prefer referring to bangchan as chan or chris so rn I will flip flop between the two (this is also very self indulgent)

you stared at the photo of chris and nayeon on his phone. he said he had been helping her with her solo album and popped into to her album shoot just to say hi.

“doesn’t she look really pretty?” chris commented, he was always complimenting the girl idols, mostly to their faces, knowing how much they struggled with diets and body image due to the nature of the industry.

you understood his support of nayeon and knew they were just friends, you even overheard her calling him her brother. but something about calling her pretty for the umpteenth time today just bothered you.

“yeah she looks great.” you finally managed to get out, trying not to let it show how much that hurt. you pulled your knees up to your chest and rested your chin on them.

sometimes you didn’t understand what chris saw in you, couldn’t see the so called ‘beauty’ he did. you didn’t voice how often you really had these thoughts and just put on a brave face to not stress him out. he had enough on his plate, he didn’t need to deal with your insecurities as well.

you must have been spaced out and in your own head for awhile because when you looked back up, chris was in front of you, his phone tossed aside on his bed and leaning in close to you.

you quietly gasped not expecting him to be so close and blinked in confusion as to just what he was doing.

“what’s going on in that pretty little head of yours hm?” chris asked you, a small smile appearing on his face, he was just so handsome. you didn’t understand.

“why do you like me?” you blurted, the filter slipping away for a moment. “out of all the idols and beautiful models and people you could have had, you chose me.” you added, not able to look him in the eyes by now. “i don’t understand, never have.”

chris was stunned to say the least, he knew you had your insecure moments but you always seemed confident in your body and just overall.

“what are you talking about?” was the only response chris could formulate in that moment, letting his mind properly think after saying that. “do you think you’re not enough for me?” he asked you, lifting your chin gently so you were forced to look at him.

“i know i’m not enough, channie.” you sighed, pulling your head away so you could avoid his gaze again. only for him to pull your gaze back to him.

“explain.” was the only word he said, it sounded stern, almost angry.

“i mean someone like nayeon just seems like a better fit for you. i can’t even fit in your hoodies and she’d drown in them, she’s in the same industry you are and she gets the struggle and she’s just so perfect and i’m just….me.” you sniffled, closing your eyes so you could keep avoiding his gaze, you never wanted chris to know the severity of your insecurities.

“but that’s the exact reason i’m so in love with you.” chris chuckled, not realizing he just told you he’s in love with you for the first time.

you gasped and your eyes snapped open to stare at him. “you love me?” you asked him, still not fully believing him.

chris went bright red when he realized he said that and took a deep breath. “of course i love you.” he caressed your chubby cheek gently. “nayeon is a good person but she’s not you. she could never be you.” he explained and it just confused you even more.

“you’re almost always here when i get home to make sure i get something to eat and vent about my day. you’re so understanding and patient about my career and not a lot of people would be. you have the cutest cheeks that are just perfect to pinch, the best boopable nose, lips that I could kiss until i die.” chris started rambling, watching your cheeks get redder the more he spoke. “the best arms to be wrapped up in a hug in. the softest tummy to rest my head against when i’m tired. the plumpest thighs that I would easily let suffocate me as i eat you out.”

you gasped and smacked his shoulder at the lewd comment. “chris!”

“my name sounds perfect coming out of your mouth. your mind and humor is just amazing. you’re so thoughtful and helpful. i’ve never been happier, y/n.” chris whispered to you, your lips millimeters from touching.

“i love you.” you whispered, feeling a tear of happiness slid down your cheek.

chris smiled, gently wiping that tear away, and gently pecked your lips. “i’ve always loved you, it’s always been you, my love.” he rested his forehead against yours. “and it will always be you.”

you smiled, the negative thoughts fully melting away for good. you knew you’d have your moments in the future, but never like this.

not if chris had anything to do with it.

#mp3chanwrites #bangchan imagines #chan imagines #skz fluff #stray kids fluff #bangchan fluff #chan fluff #skz imagines #stray kids imagines #kpop fluff #kpop imagines #bangchan x y/n #bangchan x reader #chan x y/n #skz x reader

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bizaar · 1 year

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Cruel Summer - Part 9

First - Previous - Next

pairings: Eddie Munson x fem!reader

summary: After breaking up, you and Eddie do your best to soldier on with your lives, but you slowly begin to discover that there is a stronger line of connection keeping you together than just history…

word count: 11k

warnings: swearing, descriptions of Chrissy's death, fluff, slight angst, awkward situations/second-hand embarrassment (lmao but honestly some people need it)

A.N.: Part 9 is here baybee! Now that the honeymoon phase is passed we're gonna get some questions answered whether we like it or not -- also? don't ask me why like half of the taglist is refusing to work, I hate technology :|

You hadn’t planned on falling asleep, but the overall stress of the day added to a lack of any kind of proper sleep the night before had lulled you into a false sense of security and sleep’s gravitational pull.

You were out before you’d even realized you were dozing — the press of a hand gently shaking your shoulder jolts you into waking.

It’s dark now, and for half a terrifying moment, you have no idea where you are, pushing up and glancing around the room with your head on a bleary-eyed swivel. There is only the faintest light shining in from elsewhere, casting strange shadows, illuminating the unfamiliar room and all its furnishings in an uneven amber glow.

There is a figure kneeling on the dingy carpet in front of you, but you don’t have time to be scared before his familiar features come into focus and everything comes rushing back to you – the shag rug, the dark green walls, the outdated seventies furniture – Rick’s place on Lover’s Lake.

That’s where you’d found Eddie.

You feel your heart thump in your chest at the realization and use it to anchor yourself to the moment, to him, kneeling in front of you.

You breathe a marked sigh of relief and sink back into the dingy couch cushions as Eddie reaches up to tuck a stray lock of hair back from where it has fallen into your face.

“Hey, sleepyhead,” he says softly.

You reciprocate the greeting, mumbling it as you crush a fist into your eye to wipe the sleep from it.

Somewhere in the very far back of your mind, you’re reeling with how exceedingly gross it is to know that you’d been sleeping on Rick’s couch.

You don’t want to know what kind of disgusting secrets are lurking beneath the cushions where you’re currently sitting, but you’re not even really thinking about it — you’re too busy looking at Eddie, all dark eyes, long lashes, and messy curls that you can’t help but instinctively reach out to smooth down.

His eyes are puffy and red-rimmed, and his clothes are dirty and pulled out of shape, but he looks happy, incandescently so, with the same big lazy smile spread across his face that always warms your insides.

He’s a wreck, and he’s the most beautiful thing you’ve ever seen, though most importantly, you can’t believe he’s actually here.

Part of you had been so certain you’d imagined the whole thing – finding him here, wrapping yourself up in his arms, kissing him breathless – how many times have you dreamt some version of this exact scenario over the past eight months? How badly had you wished it would be as easy as that, to simply stumble upon him like he’d just been sitting around all this time, waiting for you to find him?

Of course, you have to remind yourself that it actually hadn’t been “that easy”, not in the slightest, and you have to subtly pinch yourself just to make sure you aren’t still dreaming.

The location does nothing to help because honestly, Rick’s place? Of all the places in Hawkins — in the world, really, it makes perfect sense he’d be here, considering it’s the last place you would ever think to look, and you feel rather stupid about that.

“What time is it?” you rasp.

“Quarter to seven.”

His answer leaves you a little more than dumbfounded.

So much for your grab-and-go mission.

“Jesus.” You yawn, body trembling as you stretch your limbs to the furthest point of their reach.

“Yeah, you were dead to the world there for a minute, Sweetheart.” Eddie hums.

You can feel yourself pulling a face, one that Eddie mirrors, pushing his lower lip out in a gentle, pouting mockery of you.

“Hungry?” He asks, patting your knee as he stand, “I made dinner.”

You watch him retreating back to the light in the other room, and quickly come to realize that it is the kitchen.

There is a little table and several mismatched chairs sitting together just past the doorway, illuminated by a bare, incandescent bulb hanging from the ceiling and casting harsh shadows.

You can’t imagine what could possibly constitute “dinner” under these circumstances, but the pervasive growling of your stomach betrays your wariness of anything prepared in the meth lab that is Rick’s kitchen, so you push up on stiff legs and follow Eddie across the worn shag carpet to the other room, hugging yourself tightly as you go.

“Is it a good idea to have that light on?” You ask warily, suddenly recalling hearing something about Rick’s most recent arrest, “What if somebody sees?”

“Don’t worry, we’ll be careful.” Eddie calls from the other room, you stop short as he pokes his head out to give you a wry look, “Unless you’d rather sit around in the dark?”

He’s gone again in an instant, leaving you chewing your lower lip.

You really wouldn't, considering Rick’s house is creepy enough in broad daylight, but you don’t have to tell Eddie that.

Your sneakers make soft sounds on the stained linoleum as you cross the threshold from carpet to kitchen, where you find Eddie standing at the stove, stirring something sticky in a dented silver pot.

For half a moment, it’s all you can do but stare at the broad form of his back, the stark familiarity of him, standing there cooking as casually as if the stove were his own.

You can hardly wrap your head around it, suddenly being here in the same room like nothing ever changed. Strange as it is, it fills you with a calming sense of contentment that is almost enough to make you forget the time you’ve spent without him — then he twists at the waist to look back at you over his shoulder, licking his lips where he’d just tasted whatever it is he’s cooking, and he smiles that same old lopsided grin.

It hits you like a bolt to the chest.

He’s here… he’s really here.

You move before your mind can catch up, and whatever it was Eddie was starting to say is cut off with a harsh grunt as your body collides firmly with his. You snake your arms around him and hug him back tightly into your chest and breathe a contented sigh, pressing your cheek into the space between his shoulder blades.

You feel his hand come up to rest over yours instantaneously, and for a moment you both just stand there, holding one another, swaying ever so slightly to your own circadian rhythms.

“You okay?” Eddie asks softly after you breathe out another one of those long sighs.

You would tell him you’re fine, happy even, incandescently so, but there is an inexplicable lump of emotion forming in your throat, rendering you momentarily speechless.

When you don’t answer right away, he tries to turn to look at you. You press tighter against him because suddenly you’re just about ready to cry.

“I missed you so much,” your voice is tight and thankfully muffled against layers of denim and leather, but you can feel the gentle rumble of his own contented sigh rolling through Eddie’s body and into yours.

“Yeah — yeah, I missed you too, Baby… God, you have no idea...”

You’d expect the reciprocation of the notion to fill you with a happy emotion, like some kind of wonderful relief, but for some reason, it fills you instead with memories of the previous summer’s grief, and it makes the knot in your throat swell painfully.

All that pain and misery and he’s just been sitting around missing you too? It doesn’t make you feel any kind of happy emotion, in fact, it makes you feel terrible.

A heavy silence fills the room, bringing with it a tangible weight. He feels it as sure as you do.

“Hey, come on — what’s the matter?” Eddie asks, and you can’t help but get stuck on the harsh breath you’d been trying to steady yourself with.

“Nothing,” you lie, propping your chin up on his shoulder, “…it’s just — what happened to us, Eds? Why’d you shut me out like that?”

You feel him tense ever so slightly beneath your touch, and very quickly he turns his attention back to the stovetop.

“Nothing happened…” he mumbles.

“Then why’d we break up?” You press, jerking him back and jostling him like you intend to try and shake it out of him.

He sighs, slow and shaky like he’s been anticipating you asking him that question — dreading it.

“I don’t know…” Eddie shakes his head, causing his shaggy curls to dance across his shoulders and tickle your nose where you’re leaning on him, “It was just a lot of change really fast and I couldn’t get out of my head over it. I guess I freaked out.”

Your mind rejects the answer and you bristle against the growing tension you can feel bleeding into the room — suddenly and infuriatingly, you can’t get Steve’s maddeningly condescending tone out of your head.

Oh, you freaked out? Is that what we’re calling it?

“Nothing changed.” You huff.

“You graduated,” Eddie insists, turning his head to look at you – you glower at him over his shoulder but he continues before you can object, “I didn’t … and suddenly everything was so different, I got scared that things were never gonna be like they were … just you ‘n me, you know?”.

“No, I don’t know…” you press, “I don’t know what you’re talking about, Eddie, what was different?”

“You were.” He says flatly, like he hates to admit it.

It hits you like a slap to the face and you can’t help but recoil from it ever so slightly.

“Me?” You choke.

“I know you didn’t mean anything by it, but it was like all of the sudden I wasn’t important to you, and … fuck, I don’t know… it hurt my feelings.”

The feeling is mutual, and suddenly you feel a heady defiance rising up to replace the knot in your throat.

“That’s stupid.” You mutter sullenly, petulantly even, because how could Eddie ever be anything but important to you? He should know that, but the sentiment strikes a chord in him.

“Is it?” He bites, “The way you kept blowing me off to hang out with your old friends…what was I supposed to think?”

He says it like it’s a dirty word, and you can’t even manage to get your feelings hurt over it, because, despite the venom in his tone (which you don’t appreciate) he’s right — you knew he wasn’t graduating, and you knew he was upset about it, even if he never said so.

You suppose if you really wanted to be obtuse, you could make the argument that he never brought it up because Eddie has always been a chronically bad communicator of his feelings, so how could you have possibly known anything was wrong?

But then again, you always know when something is wrong, and you chose not to ask him about it in favor of wrapping yourself up in the preparations for your own graduation – not out of some malicious selfishness so much as careless oversight – and the subject went entirely ignored as a result.

You would tell him that you’d only been hanging out with your old friends because he was acting so weirdly distant and ignoring you, but you can’t muster the fight.

In an instant, all the defiance goes out of you, replaced this time by a sickly sense of understanding.

All this time you’d been stuck feeling sorry for yourself over how Eddie had pulled away from you, shut you out, you realize much too late that from his perspective it must have seemed like you’d done it first.

It makes your chest hurt to think how self-centered you’d been – maybe your initial instinct about the breakup had been right, maybe it was all your fault.

Eddie clears his throat then and makes a soft, defeated sound that shoots you full of holes.

“I dunno… I guess I figured you were finally getting sick of me or something…” He sniffs.

“What do you mean finally? …Eddie—”

He is quick to continue before you can finish, giving a lopsided shrug that he uses to mask the way he wipes his cheek on his shoulder.

“No big deal,” He says unevenly, clearly struggling to mask the tremble in his voice. “Bound to happen eventually.”

Oh, Eddie… your poor sweet boy…

You hug him a little tighter.

“No, it’s not,” you insist, “… I’m so sorry I made you feel that way.”

He hums out his answer, a gentle laugh that has his smile faltering ever so slightly.

You press a kiss to his neck and nuzzle him there. Eddie leans into your touch and chuckles.

“…I wish you would have said something.” You sigh.

“Yeah, well, you know me, I’m stupid.”

Then you grit your teeth and poke him hard in the ribs.

“No, you’re not,” you growl.

Eddie flinches against the jab and laughs out loud, and you don’t even manage to feel bad about it because as much as you know he hates to be tickled, he knows how much you hate it when he self-deprecates like that.

“Take it back, Munson.”

“Okay, okay, I take it back — go sit down, will you? The food’s gonna get cold.”

You don’t immediately release him though, as the thought of staying like this and holding him a little longer is suddenly much more appealing than food.

When you linger too long, Eddie says your name firmly, in a way that you suppose is meant to be a warning, if not without a good dose of humor.

You heave a moody sigh and relent, releasing him and retreating to the little dining table – though not so little as the one back at the trailer. You sink into one of the rickety folding chairs, tucking your hands between your thighs, and pulling your shoulders up to your ears as you watch Eddie put the finishing touches on your meal with a dramatic flourish that sends salt scattering to every corner of the kitchen.

“What did you make?” You ask.

You hadn’t been able to see into the pot over the slope of his shoulder and now curiosity gnawing at you. He turns and triumphantly reveals the slimy contents of the pot and you feel your stomach clench.

Spaghetti-o’s.

You don’t know why you expected anything different considering Eddie’s culinary skills are expressly limited to: microwaving leftovers, boiling water for top ramen, and throwing a can of condensed bullshit into a pot.

Still, you wrinkle your nose and make a harsh sound of disgust in the back of your throat.

“Oh, don’t give me that. Beggars can’t be choosers,” He chides you, “You wanna eat or not?”

You eye him warily, biting your cheek and hating yourself for even considering it.

Sure, Eddie’s going to eat it too, but he is like a raccoon. He’s lived so long off of processed foods and junk that his stomach lining has since turned to steel, so he can eat most anything and not bat an eye. Your stomach, however, is not so strong, and it is cramping with memories of a particularly intense bout of Spaghetti-o-induced food poisoning – still, you haven’t eaten all day…

Eddie tips the pot and shakes it at you in a way you imagine is meant to be tantalizing, and in spite of your better judgment, you nod sullenly.

He rewards you for it by filling your plate with a wet smack of sticky o’s, sauce, and freeze-dried meatballs.

Fantastic.

Eddie falls into the seat across from you and sets the pot down onto the woven trivet sitting on the placemat in front of him – you’re surprised that Rick has even got amenities like trivets floating around in his kitchen, or placemats for that matter.

You watch as Eddie immediately tucks in with the wooden serving spoon which, you can’t help but note, is almost too large for his mouth, stuffing his face like it’s his last meal.

Your attention does not go unnoticed.

“What?” He barely manages to get the word out through the mouth full of processed pasta he’s got, his face smeared in a Glaswegian smile of sticky red sauce.

“You’re not even gonna use a plate?”

Eddie levels you with a blank stare as he chews, like he’s really got to think it over. Then, after a moment of contemplation, he swallows, wipes his mouth on the back of his hand, and extends it to you across the table.

“Hi, I’m Eddie, nice to meet you.”

You smack his hand away and roll your eyes — eight short months, and somehow you’ve forgotten just who it is you’re talking to? You’re a fool.

Eddie breathes an airy laugh through his nose and you can’t help but try and suppress your own smile at the bizarreness of the situation you’ve found yourself in, eating Spaghetti-o’s in Rick Lipton’s kitchen like you haven’t got a care in the world.

Once again, you are struck with how it’s like nothing has changed, sitting across from Eddie and sharing a meal like this. It’s familiar in the most comforting way, despite the circumstances.

If you closed your eyes, you could almost imagine you were back at the trailer, sitting together at the littler-than-this-one dining table after a long day, unable to decide if you were more disgusted or amused by the painfully audible smacking and slurping of Eddie’s eating habits.

He finishes the pot in record time, then furrows his brow and gestures to your untouched plate.

“You’re not gonna eat?” He asks, tongue darting out to lick the excess sauce from where it is smeared across his face.

You shake your head, deciding in an instant that you can stand to sustain your hunger a little longer.

“You can have it.”

“You sure?” though he doesn’t wait for you to answer before he drags the dish back towards himself.

You give him a pointed look, to which he shrugs and sets himself to the task of inhaling his second helping.

You avert your gaze and turn a wandering eye on the dingy little room, taking in Rick’s knickknacks, what few of them he has.

It’s sparse and messy and makes you miss the comfort of the trailer’s clutter, all of Wayne’s mugs and hats and keepsakes… the treasured Garfield mug that you had won the highest honor of being allowed to use, much to Eddie’s complete and total outrage (he is not allowed to do much more than look at that mug because of his tendency towards dropping anything and everything that passes through his hands.)

You wonder with a quiet despair how much of the clutter is still there and how much will be impounded as evidence.

Then suddenly, much to your despair, you can’t stop picturing the trailer the last way you’d seen it, cordoned off with police tape, harboring the ruined, twisted body of Chrissy.

You feel your stomach heave and have to resist the urge to press the heels of your palms into your eyes until you see stars like you’re half afraid they’re going to fall out of your head – like Chrissy’s had.

You can’t stop your brain from going around and around in a desperate attempt to fill in the blank as to what could have possibly happened to her.

You know you’re never going to be able to stop yourself from thinking about it, and it’s going to drive you insane. As much as you hate to bring it up, you have to know what happened to Chrissy…

You watch Eddie carefully, fully entrenched in the task of filling his stomach and blissfully unaware of how you are about to ruin his evening.

“Eds…” You start slowly, chewing nervously at your thumbnail, “Can I ask you a question?”

He hums absently in response but doesn’t look up, still too busy shoveling Spaghetti-o’s into his mouth, one spoonful after another.

You hesitate, and the prolonged silence is enough to finally make Eddie glance up at you through the thrush of his dark lashes. He’s licking his lips again, looking so painfully boyish as you watch the shadow of anxiety creep in to shroud his features.

You bite the inside of your cheek and watch him watching you, fruitlessly wracking your brain for the most diplomatic way to ask.

Only there is no easy way to ask about something like this, so you just ask.

“...What happened to Chrissy?”

He flinches and instantly breathes out a harsh, shaky breath, almost as if you’d socked him in the stomach with the question.

Eddie drops the spoon into the dish with a muffled clang and pushes back in his chair like he’s suddenly lost his appetite, and for a very long moment, he is a sphinx, completely and utterly unreadable.

It makes your insides squirm with unease as you watch him fidget. The tip of his pink tongue darts out to sweep across his lips as he averts his gaze, he twists the clunky silver ring on his middle finger and clears his throat.

It’s nearer to half a minute before he finally answers, though only after being prompted a second time.

“Eddie…?”

“She didn’t – it wasn’t – I don’t know,” Eddie quickly shakes his head and starts picking at a flakey piece of laminate, curling up from the tabletop. “I don’t know what happened to her.”

You feel something sink inside of you to be so summarily dismissed.

“Okay…” You say carefully, suddenly afraid you’ll say the wrong thing and cause him to shut down completely – you hate to do it, but you have to know, “Well… can I ask what she was doing at your place?”

His head snaps to attention and you watch color bleed into his cheeks in a hot flush, almost like you’ve just accused him of something untoward – or maybe more like you’ve just caught him – you banish the thought before it can finish forming.

He sits gawking at you, wide-eyed like he cannot possibly imagine how you could know that Chrissy had died in the middle of his living room. You try to smile, almost apologetically, but you only manage to press your mouth into a tight horizontal slit.

“It’s the first place I went looking for you…” You explain, offering him a lopsided shrug, “I…Christ – I saw her, Eds.”

“You saw her?”

You nod, chewing your lower lip and hating how it feels like an admission of guilt, like you’d been intruding on something that you were not meant to see – which is to say a literal crime scene – but you hate even more the way it forces Eddie to move to defend himself.

“I didn’t do that to her.” He says immediately.

You barely let him finish before you’re leaning across the table and shaking your head, desperate to assure him that you don’t assume that for a second

“I know,” You say immediately, “Believe me, I know … but –” He’s watching you warily now, like he doesn’t trust you and it makes your insides twist in on themselves, you have to take a deep, steadying breath before you can continue. “… Eds, I just need to know what happened. I need you to help me understand.”

Eddie hesitates a moment before scrubbing at his face with his hand. He slumps back in his seat and swears harshly under his breath, then lingers in a long silence like he’s trying to decide what to say.

You, in turn, sit and wait with what you tell yourself is an infinite well of patience and not a bundle of nerves perched on the literal edge of your seat.

“She just…” He starts before stopping again. “Nothing happened, okay? Between me and ... and Chrissy?” He insists, leveling you with an edgy look and turning his hands over on the tabletop like he means to show you he’s got nothing to hide. “I need you to understand that before we go any further..."

You feel your heart begin to palpitate. It wasn’t what you’d meant in asking him what had happened, but it doesn’t shock you any less.

"Okay..." You say slowly, unevenly, suddenly unable to stop hearing Gareth's words about whatever Eddie did with Chrissy...

It seems to put him at ease, at least a little bit, and you're not entirely sure what that means.

"She only came over to buy..." He says firmly, "I swear."

You can't help but choke a little on that tidbit of information.

“Chrissy?”

Eddie nods.

It takes all your willpower to suppress the hard scoff of bitter laughter bubbling up in your throat because you can hardly imagine soft-spoken, sweet, angelic Chrissy so much as speaking to Eddie without bursting into flames or something, let alone soliciting drugs from him.

“Chrissy Cunningham wanted to buy drugs... from you?” Your tone is much harsher than you’d intended, but there is nothing you can do to suppress the biting edge of cold jealousy creeping in on you.

It’s stupid to be jealous of a dead girl, you remind yourself, but you can’t help it.

Eddie nods again, slower this time, and you can’t decide how you are supposed to react to this information, considering the recessed part of your brain that has been subtly attempting to drive you crazy wondering what they were doing together last night.

He’s not even technically your boyfriend anymore… so why does it feel like he just told you he’d cheated on you?

You don’t know how you feel, so you tell yourself you’re relieved, because at least now you know she wasn’t there to fuck him, which, in the grand scheme of things, would have somehow been more believable than the concept of Chrissy soliciting drugs from Eddie.

Still, you can feel your face flushing bright and hot with stress as your mind turns the argument over and over, asking yourself did he? All the while simultaneously assuring yourself that he didn’t—wouldn’t. Would he?

You grit your teeth against the conflicting voices as a louder thought shoulders its way to the front of your mind – one tiny little detail screaming at you to tell you it doesn’t make sense.

“… So… why couldn’t you just sell to her out of the back of your van like you do with everybody else? Why’d she have to come over?”

Eddie fidgets with his fingers and shrugs, and you feel your stomach tighten as you realize he’s actively avoiding looking at you.

“She wanted pills because she said she couldn’t sleep – nightmares or something, I don’t know.”

You’re suddenly — unhelpfully — reminded of a conversation you’d had with a particularly snotty ex-friend one afternoon at lunch in your tenth-grade year, back when the extent of your interactions with Eddie was strictly limited to stealing shy glances at one another across the lunch room.

“Oh gross, are you swapping eyes with the Freak?” She’d scoffed when she twisted around to see who it was holding your rapt attention.

You’d quickly muttered an excuse about just being friendly and fixed your gaze on your lunch, blushing under the heat of your friend’s calculated gaze — and then she’d leaned forward and whispered conspiratorially to you.

“You know I heard he’ll trade weed for head,” and you’d nearly choked when she continued. “I’ll bet if you let him fuck you in the back of his van he’ll give us some blow,”

You’d gone on to learn that Eddie did not, in fact, sell cocaine — just weed and pills, he’d assured you — and you never asked him whether the rumors were true about trading his stock for sexual favors. In the grand scheme of things you didn’t care if they were, but now you can’t stop thinking about what Jeff had told you about the last he’d seen of Eddie — headed out to his van with Chrissy…

You can’t get out of your head over it.

“…So you brought her home?”

His eyes widen in alarm as you can only assume he has finally come to realize how this all sounds.

“No — it wasn’t like that, I swear — Sweetheart, come on, you know I don’t carry pills around – you know that.”

You do know that. Very well in fact — still, you have to bite the inside of your lip to keep from asking the terrible question your psyche keeps poking you with: did you fuck her? Or perhaps rather, were you planning to fuck her?

Stop it stop it stop it stop–

“…So she came over, but I couldn’t find my stash – the place is always a fuckin mess, I mean… you know how it is –”

You wish he would stop telling you what you know and cut to the chase. You make yourself nod because Eddie is giving you this strange, sidelong look that you can’t decipher, and you want him to know you’re listening, despite the way your brain is busy tearing itself in half.

“...And I wasn’t even gone a minute, but when I came back she was just standing there, like – like she was hypnotized or possessed or something.”

You can feel a cold dread creeping in on your chest, like icy fingers closing around your heart as your dream comes rushing back to you.

“And I was shaking her, trying to get her to come back, but she wouldn’t wake up… she just wouldn’t wake up… and then the lights started going on and off. Flickering like… like it was a goddamn horror movie or something… and then she –”

Eddie’s voice hitches and goes tight as you watch the color drain from his face and his eyes glaze over like he’s reliving the moment — you’re doing your best to keep yourself from reliving it too – the ubiquitous cracking of bones snapping up out of place, eyes being wrenched back into their sockets.

You fail to suppress a shudder, but thankfully Eddie is too far off in his own head to notice.

His hands are shaking where they’re still turned up against the cracked and stained tabletop, his rings clinking ever so softly against each other.

Absently, you reach across the table to steady them, if only as a force of habit.

In spite of your fears and what your mind is telling you he did or didn’t do, you remind yourself that whatever happened was traumatic enough to send him running for his life, and whatever happened, he deserves the chance to explain himself.

This is about Chrissy and how she ended up like that, not whether she slept with your boyfriend — ex-boyfriend— before it happened.

“One minute she was fine and then she wasn’t moving and I tried to get her to come back but – I swear to God, you’re gonna think I’m crazy – she started fucking floating…”

It makes you feel sick, and you still can’t pinpoint exactly why – maybe because some irrational part of your brain had been holding out on a hope that it had only been a terrible dream, that maybe you were experiencing a weird but brief bout of insanity that was bound to pass, that none of this was real.

“…Floating,” you hum, your frustration with the situation causing you to inadvertently sound skeptical of the whole thing.

You watch in horror as Eddie’s face contorts with disappointment.

“...Oh, Christ… you don’t believe me, do you?”

You try to suppress the spike of anxiety it sends lancing through your midsection – shit, fuck – because this was exactly what you had been worried about.

“Hey, no, that's not what I –” You start, attempting to try and backpedal, but Eddie is already shaking his head, like he cannot believe what he’s hearing, like somehow you’ve betrayed him.

“Jesus – you think I’m making this up?” He asks, his voice lilting with despair. “Why would I lie about something like this?”

“You wouldn’t.”

“What, you think I cheated on you and now I’m lying to cover my own ass?” Saying it out loud only serves to convince him that it’s exactly what you think, “Are you fucking kidding me?”

All the jealousy and paranoia goes out of you as your heart beats erratically with the need to fix this before it goes too far.

“Eddie, please, just listen–” You press, but he cuts you off.

“No, stop it— don’t do that —I know how crazy this sounds, okay? I get it, but that’s what happened and nobody is going to fucking believe me because it’s so goddamn crazy!” He cries, fisting his hands in his hair and hanging his head.

You could kick yourself for how spectacularly you’d fucked this up, but you’re afraid to say anything to try and smooth it over for fear of only making it worse, so you sit and hold your breath and wait for Eddie to react first.

You listen to him breathe, a harsh in and out punctuated by flushed, simmering emotion threatening to boil over.

It’s a long time before Eddie comes down again enough to come out from where he is hiding behind his hands. His face is flushed and he sniffles, wiping the back of his hand across his nose before he makes himself take a deep, steadying breath.

“Why are we even talking about this?” He huffs. “Seriously, what have I ever done to make you think I could cheat on you?”

You fidget anxiously in your seat, trying to decide how to explain yourself, and decide in the last moment to shift the blame a little – it’s not untrue, after all.

You give an uneven shrug.

“Jeff told me he saw you getting in the van with Chrissy and I guess I let myself go a little crazy over it …”

He makes a harsh sound and rolls his eyes.

“Fucking, Jeff — you know he was probably just trying to make you jealous, right?”

“Yeah… guess it worked…” You mutter, trying and failing to hum out a humorless laugh. “It was stupid… sorry.”

Eddie just shakes his head. His voice is thick and he barely manages to keep it from trembling as he speaks.

“Baby, I promise, I’m telling you the truth,” He insists, “Chrissy came over to buy pills. That’s it. Okay? I didn’t kiss her, I didn’t fuck her — she didn’t even sit down, Man. Nothing. Happened.”

Only something did happen last night, and Eddie knows that as well as you do. He rolls his eyes and moves like he’s going to cover his face again before stopping himself, “Jesus — nothing except…” He trails off.

He can’t say it, but he doesn’t have to. Nothing happened except that she died.

You set your jaw and try again to smile, deciding in an instant that it’s enough and that you can set aside any jealousy or suspicion or any of those other ugly feelings – you can be angry about it after this is all over if you still need to, but for now, you’re on Team Eddie, no matter what.

“Okay,” You say simply, “I believe you.”

Eddie gives you a flat look and tucks his arms that much tighter over his chest. You watch his jaw flex as he considers it.

“What, so it’s just that easy?” he scoffs.

You shrug.

“It can be.”

He shakes his head and sucks his teeth like he doesn’t believe that for a moment and averts his eyes again, electing to turn away and stare off at a point in space rather than look at you.

You don’t know how any of this became your fault — except that you’re a goddamn moron continuing your string of making the worst decisions possible — but if blaming you is what makes Eddie feel better, you’ll shoulder it.

You sit together then in a tense silence as you try to wrap your head around this whole thing.

It doesn’t make any sense, hypnotic trances and floating up off of the ground, but then again how could something like that happen to a person? More importantly, it’s just like Eddie said, why would he lie about something like that?

He wouldn’t.

Eddie’s a lot of things, but he’s not a liar. You know that for certain, which means this is real, whatever the fuck this is, and you’re both in way over your heads.

At least you can share in that dilemma together, that is if he’ll still have you after this titanic fuck up.

Under the table, you push forward to nudge his shin with the toe of your sneaker, offering an apologetic smile when his inky gaze slides over to you.

“...So, she started floating,” You prompt, “What happened next?”

Eddie heaves a sigh and uncrosses his arms, almost like he’s forgiven you for your perceived lapse of faith. Almost.

“She started floating…” he gives you a pointed look, like he’s daring you to question it a second time, “...and then —”

He trails off, and for half a second he clenches his jaw as his eyes are wet and shining with tears again, but he swallows the emotion and lets his lids slide shut as he grits his teeth and forces the words out.

“And then that was it." He says, "Then she was gone…”

You know he’d spared you the gruesome details, which your psyche is more than happy to deliver to your inner eye.

You believe him — not so much that part about Chrissy wanting ketamine— but you have this terrible sinking feeling that it’s not going to be enough, and no one else is going to, no matter what you do.

Even if somehow you miraculously come up with bulletproof evidence, a literal smoking gun, you know it’s still just going to be Eddie’s fault because he’s a Munson and that means the town will have already decided his guilt— that’s why you need to go, get as far away as fast as possible.

“Okay… obviously that’s a lot to take in, but thank you for being honest… it was really brave of you.”

He snorts bitterly.

“Not that it’s gonna do any good – I mean, even without my name dragging me down, who in their right mind is gonna believe any of that?”

The complete and utter defeat in his voice is heartbreaking, and you’re suddenly so desperate to snap Eddie out of this pathetic version of himself, this exposed nerve of a person.

You purse your lips and shake your head.

“I wish you would stop feeling so damn sorry for yourself,” You mutter, glancing up to see if Eddie takes the bait of your tough love.

He does, sitting up to blink incredulously at you – you just shrug.

“It’s like I said, we’re gonna figure this out.”

“How?” He sniffs.

“I don’t know,” you say honestly, “But we will.”

After a very long moment, nods in a way that makes you think he doesn’t expressly believe that, but there’s nothing he can do about it.

“…Okay…okay…” he says, almost like he’s trying to convince himself.

It takes another one of those long, shaky breaths to steady himself enough before Eddie sits up and viciously scrubs his hands over his face.

He sniffs and clears his throat, and offers you a weak smile, and you feel your insides warm a little.

“So what now?” he asks.

“Now… we get you as far away from here as fast as we can… don’t ask me how, I haven’t figured it out yet.”

“Well, whatever we do it’s gonna have to be in your car because the van’s gone.” He huffs, gesturing vaguely, “Crashed it in a ditch out near the quarry.”

“You– you crashed?”

“Yeah, it’s totaled. I don’t really wanna talk about it.” He mumbles.

You know you shouldn’t laugh, but you can’t stop yourself from snorting undaintily, and you have to clap your hand over your mouth to keep your cool.

“Eddie…” You press.

He gives you an incredulous look, brows furrowing over his eyes as he stares back at you because you’re laughing at him. He just told you he crashed his van in a ditch and you’re literally shaking with the effort to keep yourself from laughing – it’s a losing battle.

“It’s not funny,” He presses, despite the way you can see him fighting the upturn of his lips.

It only spurs you on and you grin at him.

“It’s a little funny.”

“Jesus Christ, you’re such a brat,” He huffs, still fighting to keep himself from smiling as you sit there fully entrenched in a fit of giggles, “I’m fine by the way, thanks for asking.”

“I’m sorry, I don’t know why I’m laughing…” you gasp, breathless from the way your stomach muscles have begun to cramp, “It’s just … God – it’s been a really long day.”

“Really? That's a bummer because my day’s been great.” Eddie says sarcastically, propping his chin up on his fist and drawing aimless circles into the cracked and flaky linoleum. “I mean, clearly you know how fucked my day has been – but anyway, I’m sick of talking about me. How was your day, Dear?”

He folds his hands neatly in front of him when he says it and smirks at you.

You roll your eyes.

“Well, I almost got arrested this morning – it’s a long story, I was looking for you.” you huff when Eddie’s eyebrows jump up to disappear beneath his curly fringe.

Then you remember your little Toyota sitting abandoned in Benny’s parking lot.

“Oh, shit, and my goddamn car died.”

“Shit indeed. That leaves us pretty much stranded.”

You heave an aggravated groan and wrestle with a strange hope that nobody decides to tow it, despite how useless it is to waste any energy on that kind of thinking, because once you get out you’re never coming back – now you just have to get there.

“Hey, come on, Sweetheart, take a dose of your own medicine, we’re gonna figure it out, remember?” Eddie teases, gently kicking the toe of your shoe beneath the table. “So, what’s plan B?”

Good question. You chew the inside of your mouth and wrack your brain for solutions.

“Well…” You start, “Wayne gave me some money—”

It’s enough to snap Eddie out of whatever is left of his pity party and he perks up to the closest thing you’ve seen to his normal self yet.

“You saw Wayne?” he asks, voice lilting up with surprise.

You nod.

“Yeah, this morning,”

Eddie narrows his eyes at you.

“Before or after you almost got arrested?”

You can feel yourself pulling a face again as the memory of how foolish you’d been to go barging into a crime scene like that returns to you in full force.

“After,” you mumble sheepishly, “He kind of, sort of bailed me out.”

“Yeah, that sounds about right.” Eddie hums, deflating a little as he begins to fidget with his rings again – you suppress the urge to reach across and take his hand to make him stop – one of these days he’s gonna break his finger, twisting it like that. “… is he pissed at me?”

You feel your brows come together over your eyes, and you realize a moment too late that you’re more or less glaring at Eddie, but you can’t really help it.

You can’t imagine why he would even ask you that, how could he ever imagine that Wayne would walk in on what he’d found waiting for him at the trailer that morning and immediately jump to anger?

Fear, sure, for the scene he’d stumbled upon, for the lack of ability to find Eddie afterward and all the hideous possibilities his absence implied, of course, but anger?

You realize with a start that it’s probably how Eddie’s father would have reacted, had he been in Wayne’s shoes.

You don’t know much about the man, there’s a reason Eddie won’t talk about his childhood after all, but you know he is a son of a bitch, wherever he is, and you have to swallow the misplaced anger that realization stirs in you.

“No, Eddie, Wayne’s not pissed at you. He’s the one who sent me to come find you.” you press, and when he continues staring back at you like a freshly kicked puppy, you dig your hands into your pockets and fish out the crumpled bills.

“Look,” you say, laying them flat on the table between you, “He gave me this and told me to get you out of town… he made me promise I wouldn’t leave you… not that I would anyway … even if you are a jerk.”

In spite of everything, it pulls a short burst of laughter out of Eddie, which leaves the faintest hint of a genuine smile spread across his face.

It’s so good to see him smiling again.

“Aw, man,” he breathes, chuckling softly to himself, “So, I guess you kind of like me, huh?”

You scrunch your nose and feign disinterest as your insides go warm and fuzzy when Eddie looks at you in shades of the same way he’d stolen those shy glances at you from across the lunch room all those years ago.

You love him so much you can’t stand it, so you shrug.

“You’re alright, I guess.”

Eddie hums thoughtfully, still fidgeting with his fingers.

“That must’ve been weird.” He begins, “Seeing Wayne?”

The question strikes you as odd, and you answer honestly without really thinking.

“Not really,” you say, “I see him all the time.”

Of course, it’s only then that you remember that there is no possible way Eddie could know that, and you feel a strange sense of alarm jump up into your throat when he pulls a face, like you’d let slip a secret you’d sworn never to reveal — only you’re the one who had made Wayne promise not to bring Eddie up in any way shape or form including but not limited to not telling him about your weekly visits.

He doesn’t get the chance to ask you about it before there is a sudden and violent banging at the front door.

It sends the pair of you leaping out of your skin.

Eddie hits the floor as the doorknob begins to rattle, and you jump up out of your seat with enough force to send the chair clattering backward to the ground.

You jump up, much too late, and pull the chair for the overhead light, instantly plunging the both of you into darkness. It draws the attention of the newcomers instantly.

You hear Eddie say your name frantically from somewhere in the dark and you feel your heart leap up into your throat.

“Go hide!” You hiss but you can’t see well enough to tell whether or not he obeys.

Suddenly, the knocking and rattling are punctuated by voices, most specifically a high drawn-out shouting.

“HELLOOOOO – REEFER RICK! ARE YOU THERE–?”

It takes you a long, terrifying moment to recognize the voice, but when you do you are flooded with relief.

It’s only Dustin – thank God for that – and he’s not alone.

“Dude… what the hell, don’t just shout that.” Steve hisses. “Have a little discretion, will you?”

You heave a sigh, clapping your hand to your forehead as you rock back on your heels. The tips of your fingers and toes sting with adrenaline as you rush to the door and whip it open, flooding the room with what little light there is from their flashlights and startling the group of familiar faces just outside.

You’d all but forgotten they were coming, but just like that you suddenly have a Plan B.

+++

Dustin knows he should be happy considering how miraculously everything fell together.

They found you, and you found Eddie, just like he knew you would.

He knows he should be pleased, but that feeling is hampered by the very small part of him that had begun to hope beyond hope that they would not find the two of you together, that maybe they wouldn’t find Eddie at all and he’d never have to think about the two of you making out in a photo booth in the Starcourt mall ever again.

And he's unfortunately been thinking about that all day. It's really kind of ruining things for him.

But now here you all are, together, just like he’s wanted all year, and Dustin feels like he’s going to crack a tooth for how tightly he’s clenching his jaw.

You’d whipped the door open and damn near given everyone heart attacks in doing so, hurried them all inside to the weird, dated house that stank of weed and burnt spaghetti, and then promptly realized as you switched the kitchen light back on that Eddie was nowhere to be found.

It set Steve off immediately, much to Dustin’s chagrin. He’d really hoped you two had moved past the bickering, but he was quickly coming to understand that it was probably a fool’s hope.

“Seriously?” Steve snapped, watching you turn in fruitless circles around the house, looking for Eddie, “You had one job here and you lost him?”

“Eddie? Okay, game’s over, you can come out now!” You called, doing a very poor job at hiding the rising anxiety in your voice by calling out in a lilting, sing-song way, “Olly olly oxen free!”

“Steve, come on.” Robin chided quietly, as you slipped into the other room, “Give her a break,”

“You come on, don’t you think it’s just a little bit ridiculous?” Steve huffed, running a hand through his perfectly coiffed hair, “What kind of babysitter loses the goddamn kid?”

You took the opportunity to come back into the room then, if only to defend your reputation.

“He’s not a kid, okay? He’s a grown-ass person. And I didn’t lose him, thank you very much, I told him to hide when you morons came banging down the door like you were trying to wake the dead.”

“First of all, that moron you’re talking about is all Henderson—”

Dustin did not appreciate the sentiment, but he didn’t have time to stand around complaining about it, so he cut Steve off before he could get really catty about the whole thing.

“Did you guys set up a designated hiding spot or something?” He asked.

You shook your head, resting your hands on your hips and frowning and you gestured to the room.

“No, but this isn’t a big house. There are only a handful of places he could be.”

That’s what they’d said about Hawkins proper, and it had still taken them hours to stumble upon this lead, but Dustin wasn’t about to start naysaying his own operation, so the party split up and went looking for Eddie — you, Max, and Robin stuck to the house while Steve and Dustin slipped out into the boathouse and promptly found Eddie hiding under a tarp.

Steve nearly lost his head for it.

Dustin froze and stood helpless as Eddie jumped up and slammed Steve against the wall with more force than he would have guessed the metalhead could muster, and thankfully the commotion brought everyone running.

And then you’d all but tackled Eddie to the ground to pull him off of Steve, which Dustin couldn’t deny was kind of amazing, despite the very tense few moments it took to talk Eddie down after.

The next few minutes were an exercise in patience.

They needed to know Eddie’s side of the story, clearly, so they waited as he explained what happened as best he could.

Dustin did his best to remain impartial, because regardless of whatever he was currently feeling, Eddie deserved the chance to explain himself. Still, it was very distracting, watching you watch Eddie — looking at him like he was the only person in the goddamn room, and Dustin couldn’t help but get a little bent out of shape over it.

If anything, it was rude, ignoring everyone else in favor of one person? Certainly very uncharacteristic of you, who always went out of your way to make sure everyone felt included.

This was much more like that weird dopey version of you that existed under the spell of your stupid boyfriend – Dustin had to quickly remind himself to merge the two images, because there was said stupid boyfriend, sitting on the floor of the boathouse, looking like a kicked puppy. Eddie freakin Munson.

God, he hates this so much.

And then it was his turn to explain things, which Dustin quite possible hated more than any of it because suddenly he was having to lay it all out there, everything he never told you about the double life he’d been keeping from you over the past few years, about Eleven and the Upsidedown.

You didn’t take it well, because how does anyone take the news that there is another world just beneath your feet full of monsters who periodically violently claw their way up into yours? That everything you think you know about what has happened in your town over the past few years is a conspiracy to keep that world hidden?

No, you don't take it well at all, particularly when it leads to a bizarrely frank discussion about what they thought could be behind this — some kind of spell caster, Dustin and Eddie collectively decide, Vecna.

You make a harsh sound of disbelief, snapping everyone’s attention to where you stand with your arms crossed and your brows furrowed.

“I’m sorry, Vecna?” you say, “Like in your stupid D&D game?”

It hits Dustin like a fist to the gut and suddenly he feels too winded to defend himself, despite the way he tries.

You never thought D&D was stupid before, but he supposes it’s never been anything but a game until now.

“It’s not stupid—” He insists.

“It’s also not real, Dustin,” You snap, “Something seriously fucked up is happening here and we need to figure out how to deal with it before something arguably worse happens.”

God, you’re mean today.

It’s Steve’s turn to make a snide noise then.

“Worse than what happened to Chrissy?” He huffs.

Eddie flinches and you bristle, immediately reeling on him.

“Steve— do not fucking start. I swear to God, you’re only making things worse.”

And just like that you’re back to fighting, the same way you had been in Family Video.

It’s exhausting putting the two of you together, honestly, Dustin doesn’t know how he ever thought you could be friends.

“How the hell am I making things worse?” Steve chokes, “Your boyfriend’s the one who came at me with a bottle.”

Dustin feels his insides heave and go tight at the mention of it, though not as violently as they do as you proceed to perhaps the worst thing anyone can possibly say at a moment like this.

“He’s not–” you bite the sentence off in an instant, like you only just realized what it is you’re about to say, and more importantly, who you’re about to say it in front of.

Of course, everyone knows what it is you were about to say.

Strangely, it makes Dustin’s heart seize, because for as jealous he is, he is suddenly very aware of the way Eddie’s head snaps to attention. His brows come together over his eyes in that same hurt look that always makes Dustin feel like he needs to protect him.

The room grows eerily silent, and you clamp your mouth shut, eyes wide and cheeks burning as you stand stock still.

“Not what?” Steve prods, and Dustin could wring his neck for it.

For all his good qualities, the worst thing about Steve is how he just can’t leave things where they lie.

“Hello?" he says, making a show of waving his hand in front of your face, "Who’s not what?”

Dustin knows you might have slugged him had you not been so caught up in your dreadful misstep.

“Nothing, nevermind,” you say, shaking your head dismissively.

“No, go ahead and say it,” Eddie says then, a little quieter but with no less bite than Steve had – he’s standing behind you, ever so slightly removed from the rest of the group and looking a little too rough around the edges for Dustin’s liking.

You blanch and whip around to face him, shifting your weight from foot to foot as he stares you down, and Dustin resists the urge to put himself between you.

He honestly doesn’t think he could move if his life depended on it,

“She’s talking about me,” Eddie informs the group, as if everyone didn't already know, then addresses Steve, “– that’s what you said, right? That I came at you? So it’s me…”

Finally, Eddie turns his gaze back to you and it’s the worst thing Dustin has ever seen, watching someone who knows they’re about to have their heart broken prepare for the worst. It’s like watching a car wreck, terrible and ugly and frightening but you can’t look away.

Suddenly he doesn’t know who is the bad guy here, who he needs to step in to defend.

“Eddie, it’s not–” you start, your voice is small and clipped, and you barely manage to squeak the sound out.

He shakes his head slowly, like he doesn’t want to hear whatever excuse you might be drumming up.

“I’m not what?” Eddie prompts you again.

“...You’re… you’re not – fuck – you’re not my … my boyfriend.” You stammer, glancing nervously around the room, down to your toes, and then sheepishly back up at Eddie, “You’re not my boyfriend, Eds…”

Then tension is unbearable, like you finally saying it had sucked all the air out of the room. Even Steve seems to be feeling particularly shitty about this whole exchange.

Dustin exchanges a tense look with Robin, who looks like she's trying with all her might to shrink into her jacket and disappear.

Somewhere further into the room he hears Max mutter something to the tune of “Yikes”, and he can’t disagree with her.

For a long moment, nobody says anything, and the silence is a yawning chasm ringing in Dustin’s ears.

Eddie breathes out hard and rocks back a step, almost as if you'd reached out and stabbed him.

He grits his teeth and pulls a face like he’s trying to smile, and nods.

“...Yeah,” he says, “That’s what I thought you were gonna say,”

“Eddie—”

“I don’t want to hear it.” He snaps in a way that makes Dustin bristle.

You recoil ever so slightly, and he watches a strange, hurt look flash across your face as Eddie turns and stalks to the other side of the room.

You follow and Dustin’s insides go tight – how did that go so wrong so fast?

He moves like he means to follow you but Robin grabs him by his sleeve and quietly ushers him and the rest of the group back toward the house.

He follows, but he can’t stop looking back over his shoulder, trying to catch one last glimpse of you and Eddie standing huddled in the back of the boat house before the door closes behind him.

After it's shut, everyone proceeds to stand in a stunned silence, all seeming to share the sentiment that what they just witnessed was painful enough to make them all feel like they’d just been broken up with. Dustin feels like he could vomit.

“Well, that was excruciating,” Steve mutters.

Max scoffs from where she’s sunk down onto the couch.

“Only because you didn’t have to listen to them break up the first time,” she says flatly. “By the way, what just happened in there? Totally your fault.”

Steve recoils sharply like she’d socked him in the face and opens his mouth to protest – nothing comes out. He looks to Robin for assistance, but she shuts him down in an instant with a slow shake of her head.

“Take the credit for that one, Stevie.” She says, “You’ve graduated to wrecking other people’s love lives as well as your own.”

The sentiment seems to hit him hard, as suddenly Steve is sinking down into a particularly ratty-looking armchair and staring off at nothing in particular with the faintest hint of distress masking his features.

“Jesus Christ, I’m a menace,” he says, a little more than stunned by the information that has suddenly come to light.

Dustin stands watching the door, wondering whether he ought to intrude, play mediator.

That’s what you do when your friends are fighting, right? Mediate, make them come to some sort of agreement, and shake on it? Only it’s not Mike and Lucas fighting in there, and Dustin is suddenly way in over his head.

Part of his rational mind is telling him that it’s none of his business, he ought to just let the pair of you work out whatever is going on between you, but the rest of him is too muddled with the conundrum of everything he has learned today.

Eddie broke your heart last summer, so that makes him the enemy, but Dustin is pretty sure he just stood there and watched you break his right back, which is good in terms of the mission to avenge you, but terrible considering Eddie is the object of his current mission – to find him and protect him at all costs, and he just stood there and let you trample him into oblivion.

Some avenger he is.

It’s a goddamn mess and Dustin is damn near ready to tear himself apart over it. He knows it’s not his business, but curiosity gets the better of him and before he knows what he’s doing, he’s got his ear pressed to the door.

He thinks he can hear you saying something, and he certainly hears Eddie raise his voice. Everyone hears it, in fact, and it brings their attention to where Dustin is pressed against the solid core.

“Dustin – what are you doing?” Steve calls, sounding suddenly very dejected.

Dustin dismisses him with a wave, but Steve’s admonishment of him is very quickly backed up by Robin.

“Leave them alone.” she insists.

Dustin shushes them harshly, he can’t make out what you’re saying, but you’re clearly arguing.

“I’m just trying to make sure they don’t need me to step in!” He hisses, missing the sound of approaching footsteps.

The door whips open and Dustin staggers forward, very nearly falling flat on his face at your feet.

You sidestep him without so much as a second glance and storm through the house to disappear down the long hall off of the living room.

Dustin watches as you go, helpless to do anything but stand there as his insides twist themselves into knots, and then Eddie appears in the doorway, stumbling over his own feet in his attempt to follow and looking exceedingly chagrined as he calls your name.

Somewhere further into the house, a door slams, rattling the walls and the clutter tacked to them.

Dustin feels a strange and bitter sense of schadenfreude wash over him as he watches Eddie flinch against the sound and slump back.

He swears harshly under his breath and pushes his hair out of his eyes.

“Good job.” Dustin says flatly and prides himself in the way he withstands the dirty look Eddie gives him. “Are we ready to make a plan now? Or do you two want to fight some more.”

Behind him, Dustin hears the dull rumble of a chorus of disappointed sounds from the rest of the group, but they all get up and file back into the boat house to give you a little space while they discuss the next course of action.

The strange hostility that jumps up in Dustin’s midsection is a bizarre contradiction to the strong pull of friendship he feels toward Eddie, but every time he starts to come back down, he thinks back to the polaroid photo strip he’s still got crumpled in his pocket, and the fire revs up again.

Over the course of the next twenty minutes, plans are set in motion. Eddie is safe, for the moment — even if he is a stupid jerk — which means Dustin can relax a little.

Now if only he could stop his mind from spinning around in circles wondering just what the hell Eddie must have said to you to make you storm off like that.

Dustin can’t help but notice the way Eddie keeps glancing at the door every few seconds, like a helpless puppy just waiting for you to come back.

He has to resist the urge to tell him to give it up because you’re not coming back – he really hopes you’ll wise up this time and not come back — but at the same time he is gripped with the urge to sidle up to him, assure him things are gonna work themselves out.

The conflicting notions are going to drive him crazy.

Dustin snaps his fingers for Eddie’s attention.

“Hey, you wanna do us the courtesy of paying attention while we’re trying to save your life?” he snaps.

Eddie blinks stupidly at him, brows furrowed like he can’t believe his audacity, but Dustin doesn’t wait around to hear what he has to say about it.

It’s well past midnight by the time the plan is finalized, and you still haven’t emerged from the room you’d shut yourself into.

It had been decided that they’ll go back into town and run their own reconnaissance mission, Eddie will stay put with a walkie-talkie, and everyone will remain in regular contact until they can get a handle on whatever the hell is going on. Now Dustin just has to figure out where you stand with all of that.

He finds you in the back bedroom, sitting on the floor at the foot of the bed with your legs crossed. It reminds him of the way you used to sit on the floor in his bedroom playing Atari – Dustin wishes you were back there, in happier times before you had to worry about things like stupid boyfriends and monsters and interdimensional spell-casters.

“Hey,” he calls from the doorway, startling you to attention.

You sit up a little and offer him a meager smile, though he can tell you’ve been crying what he imagines were angry tears. Your cheeks are streaked with them.

“Hey yourself.” You sniff, quickly brushing any lingering wetness from your face and wiping your nose across the back of your hand.

Dustin wonders briefly if you’d let him hug you – he contemplates joining you on the floor, but he can hear Steve in the other room rallying the troops.

“We’re headed out, in case you wanna hitch a ride.” Dustin says, jerking his thumb over his shoulder.

You sit silently for a moment, staring through him rather than at him, then sniff and dismiss the notion with a flippant wave.

“Nah, I’ll stay.” You say.

It makes his stomach clench. He’d so hoped you would come with them, even if he knows it's better that someone stays to keep tabs on Eddie.

Why does it have to be you? A tiny, nagging voice is crying out from somewhere inside him, though he knows the answer well enough. He’s got photographic proof crumpled up in his pocket.

“Really? Even after…?” Dustin trails off, unsure of how to really describe what he’d just witnessed as anything but a lover’s quarrel, which he is violently opposed to.

You wrinkle your nose and shrug, smiling for what he thinks must be his benefit. It doesn’t reach your eyes.

“Yeah…” You mutter, “Somebody’s gotta stay and babysit him. Figure it ought to be me.”

Dustin can hear Steve calling his name from the front room – wheels up, let’s go – and he hesitates, before venturing to take a step toward you.

You watch him carefully as he does.

“You don’t have to, you know.” Dustin assures you, “I’m sure he’ll be fine.”

You force out a quiet chuckle, and the corners of your mouth twitch as your smile begins to fail.

“Of course he will, I’m gonna make sure of it.” You say.

Steve is honking the horn now, and shouting Dustin’s name, which is completely counterintuitive to everything they just went over about keeping a low profile.

Christ, he could strangle him.

“You better go,” you say, gesturing through him toward the car, “Daddy’s callin’.”

It’s not you saying it though, just like all those other times you said something that was wholly uncharacteristic of you, and entirely your boyfriend.

Eddie, Dustin reminds himself. It’s Eddie.

Just a little too mean for no good reason at all. Somehow it’s a little less jarring to hear, now.

He’d always wondered how someone could rub off of another person like that, how you could pick up their little phrases, begin to talk like them, but he supposes Eddie is Eddie – his favorite person in the world besides you, of course, he doesn’t know how you could know him and not have him rub off on you, just a little.

Dustin takes the walkie-talkie from where it is strapped across his shoulders and hands it to you. You take it and turn the clunky device over in your hands, still smiling that hollow smile as you fidget with the dials.

“We’ll be back tomorrow, but in the meantime—”

You don’t let him finish.

“Yessir, call you if we need anything.” You say, making a show of saluting. “Channel two, right?”

“R-right.” he says.

That’s the frequency he and the party always used before Will moved away, and Dustin is more than a little touched that you would remember.

Of course, then he can hear you chiding him gently, because how could you ever forget? You were a party member, weren’t you?

“DUSTIN!” Steve shouts from the front yard, “WE ARE LEAVING WITH OR WITHOUT YOU.”

And then he hears Eddie calling from the front room.

“Henderson, will you get the fuck out of here before he blows a gasket? Jesus Christ!”

Dustin looks back to see you staring out toward the front room again, frowning, and he feels a sudden desperation pulling at him.

The party doesn’t split up – you should be going with them.

“… You’re sure you don’t wanna come with?” He asks sheepishly, suddenly feeling like that same eight-year-old kid who was so desperate to impress you the first time you babysat.

You roll your eyes and push up to your feet, taking him by the shoulder and leading him to the door.

“Bye Dustin.” You say and shut the door firmly behind him.

Dustin lingers a moment, breathes a deep, steadying breath, then jogs down the hall into the living room.

Eddie is sitting slumped on the couch fidgeting with his fingers – he glances up at Dustin when he feels him staring.

“I gave her the walkie.”

“Cool.” Eddie says flatly, and then when Dustin continues to stare at him, “What?”

“...Be nice to her, okay?”

Eddie levels him with a dour look and Dustin half expects him to make some kind of snide comment, but he thinks better of it and breathes out a heavy sigh.

“Okay,” He mutters, sounding more or less defeated.

Dustin turns to leave, then stops short.

“Are you guys gonna be okay–?”

He doesn’t let him finish.

“Bye Dustin,” Eddie says, in a strangely perfect mimicry of you that sets Dustin’s teeth on edge.

It's one thing to hear Eddie speaking through you, but you speaking through Eddie?

Christ, that's just weird...

And then the roar of the engine indicating that Steve is actually trying to leave him behind lights a fire under Dustin's ass.

He whips around and bolts out the door to catch Steve's Mercedes just as it's pulling out of the driveway.

Dustin slides into the back beside Max and barely manages to get his door closed before Steve hits the gas again, ignoring the way he chides him for making everybody wait, and doing his best to suppress just how goddamn stressed he is that things are about to take a turn for the worse.

taglist: @harrys-tittie , @r-a-d-i-0-n-0-w-h-e-r-e , @itsrainingbisexualfrogs , @thicksexxualtensionaltension , @ganseysgff , @scoopsr0bininn , @pbs-theundeadmaggot , @audhd-dragonautagonaut , @clilxlxx , @alexandriaemily200 , @averagestudent03 , @but-vanessa , @cosmictime45 , @timelordfreya , @forever-war , @munsonzzgf , @chervbs , @irisabrams , @mopeymopeymouse

#cruel summer #cruel summer fic #eddie munson x reader #eddie munson imagine #eddie munson x you #eddie munson #eddie munson fanfic #stranger things fic #stranger things #this chapter actually had one more part but it pushed it to almost 16k so i figured i'd split it up and get you part 10 that much faster

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pix3lplays · 3 months

Note

Epsilon (Pluto) dating hcs pleaseeeeee

Whoa an actual Epsilon request? Yay, okay!! Let’s do it, thanks so much!

Notes/Cw: Assuming reader is a human in this version and I’m just kinda…making stuff up about how dating a robot would work in the Pluto universe, so just bear with me haha.

ALSO some angst!

Sharing a bed

SPOILERS FOR PLUTO…mainly episode 7, but also the overall plot of the show

Also if anyone at all has any other Epsilon requests for me I am ALL ears-

Also also! Kinda nervous because I don’t think I’ve seen any Epsilon x reader’s on tumblr? So yeah haha…

-Epsilon dating headcanons-

Epsilon, one of the seven strongest robots in the world…and…your dear boyfriend.

Anyone would think your love story is grand and fascinating…I mean…a human dating a robot? Especially one as powerful as Epsilon? Sounds like something that’d be on the news. Maybe it was.

Human/robot relationships weren’t…unheard of, but not exactly smiled upon in a world still hesitant to accept robots as members of society.

Your love story isn’t some incredible, fascinating tale of romance and drama…the truth of the matter is you were just one of the caretakers at his orphanage…you were so kind, so gentle with the children…and of course you always treated him with respect and admiration that he thought he didn’t deserve.

But how could you not show him respect and admiration? You really did admire him. Not only did he refuse to fight in the war, he even dedicated himself to taking care of the orphans from that horrible war…

He can tell that you really care for the children, just as much as he does. Both of your lives are quite literally dedicated to those kids.

The two of you just naturally grow closer.

It’s strange really. He’s always been just…Epsilon to you. And now suddenly you’re noticing little things about him. His gentle hands…the way his hair blows in the wind…those special moments when he smiles, and his expression is so soft and warm and for some reason your heart flutters when you see him.

One night after you’ve finished putting the children to bed, you run into Epsilon. He was waiting for you.

“May we speak for a moment, y/n?” he asks.

“Of course…” you say. Your little crush on Epsilon was starting to make your life…difficult. You couldn’t even look into his eyes at this point.

No matter how elegant his speech, he can’t hide the fact that he’s feeling a little awkward in this moment.

“I know that up until this moment our relationship has been strictly professional, and if you want it to stay that way then you should tell me now, and I will respect your wishes…”

Your silence speaks volumes, especially with the way you finally manage to look into his eyes with curiosity at his words.

He does his best to explain it. He’s known you for a long time now, and he’s always appreciated how kind and gentle you are…especially with the children.

“I would do anything for the children…” you say quietly.

“As would I…y/n…and…”

You wait with bated breath.

“I would do anything for you, too.”

“Epsilon…”

“I know that in this society, a relationship between us would be generally frowned upon, even if not prohibited by law…I don’t want to subject you to persecution because you chose to-”

“I don’t care about any of that. I want to be with you…” you interrupt him.

Yeah anyone would know such a thing was considered ‘wrong’ overall, even with the anti-discrimination laws in place. It would be seen as ‘unnatural’ and quite simply there were bound to be people who would question if you even consented to be in a relationship with him, or if he was just using his position and power to force you.

And so it begins. He’s insistent about your reputation though. He wants to keep the relationship a secret until the right time. The children don’t know, the other caretakers don’t know…the two of you are good at keeping everyone unaware of your romantic involvement with each other.

It’s amazing really, even though he does his best to treat you normally when you’re around others, you can just feel how much he cares about you.

Your first kiss wasn’t grand or romantic. You were the only two left awake, and you were sharing a quiet moment of calm after the chaos that inevitably comes from watching over children all day.

The two of you are standing by the window.

He can’t stop looking over at you while you gaze out into the darkness of outside.

Epsilon was a gentleman. He asks you.

“May I…kiss you?” he takes your hand and he is so gentle with you, touching you like you were made of glass.

You nod, look at him expectantly, waiting for your kiss. His free hand finds your cheek, and he leans in to kiss you. First he kisses the corner of your mouth, as if to let you adjust to the feeling of his lips on you. He’s cold. You shouldn’t be surprised, all of Epsilon was cold, from his hands to his cheeks to all the rest of his body, and you SAVORED the sensation of touching his cold body. And a moment later his lips meet yours, and you trace your hands up his chest and wrap them snugly around his shoulders. He’s so gentle with you. As gentle as he could possibly be…he holds you as long as he can, before you finally pull away when you both hear one of the children stirring.

-General dating headcanons-

It’s a requirement that you like children if you want to be with Epsilon. He really just…couldn’t be with someone who had a dislike of children, it just wouldn’t work.

Surprisingly a traditional lover, despite being a robot. He’ll refuse to share a bed with you until you’re actually married to each other.

Despite your best efforts, your relationship eventually gets the attention of the media. Even if human/robot relationships aren’t THAT uncommon, given you’re dating one of the most powerful robots in the world, with a unique public reputation, expect lots of attention from reporters who are just dying to write a story on all the intricacies of your relationship with Epsilon. Not that there’s much to tell to be honest. Yes you LOVE Epsilon and he loves you but the two of you really do refrain from being romantic with each other most of the time.

The two of you tend to prioritize the children over each other…taking care of all those kids is a full time job…

Of course he wishes he had more time for you, but neither of you would be happy if he chose you over the children.

That doesn’t mean he NEVER has time for you though. When you do get time together he takes you on dates. Traditional dates like nice dinners and romantic strolls…basically the date is ideal if he gets to relax and catch up with you on how you’ve been doing and feeling lately.

Epsilon is really interesting because he does understand how comforting physical affection can be. You see it in the way he gently hugs his children. Even if the sensation is lost on him, the importance of the gesture isn’t. Of course once he’s comfortable enough with you too he’ll give you sweet hugs and hold your hand and occasionally let himself kiss you.

The only times when you really find Epsilon breaking your heart is when he tries to sit you down for the, “if anything ever happens to me-” conversation. You don’t want to hear it, don’t want to think about something that awful. But it was hard to avoid when the murders started taking place, and he was a Clear target. All he wants is for you to promise to take care of the children without him, and of COURSE you will but…you don’t Want to do it without him.

He’s definitely not the most experienced when it comes to Any sort of relationship, whether that’s friendship, or romantic. In fact you’re the first person he’s ever had this deep a connection to. He genuinely never imagined himself falling in love…but now here he was.

-So I KNOW you just asked for dating hcs….but have a few marriage hcs as a treat~

Epsilon who catches you by complete surprise when he gets down on one knee, clutching a ring.

You really had thought he’d Never want to get married, if only solely to protect your reputation. You really believed that if you wanted to marry him, you’d be the one to propose…and you doubted that he’d even say yes.

You were satisfied just dating him.

But here he was, proposing to you.

Of course you say yes…it’s Epsilon asking you. His proposal is so sweet and genuine, and he reminds you that you should not feel pressured into marrying him if you aren’t ready, but really…you’ve been dreaming about this moment. You just never thought it would come.

Epsilon…wants to marry you.

You try to keep the ceremony secret…the two of you really don’t want the media getting involved in your relationship. Again.

But APPARENTLY they did because on the news the next day are videos and pictures of the wedding…ah well…at least they didn’t ruin your wedding day. It was The happiest day of your life so…how could you really mind that So many people were seeing your smiling face right now?

Epsilon was quite horrified to see that your wedding was so blatantly made into news like that, accompanied by various ‘experts’ arguing the ethics of a human marrying a robot…It caused QUITE the debate, bad enough that he quickly shuts off the television, just in case it was disturbing you. You do wonder what he intended to do about it, but whatever it was he backed off when you insisted you didn’t want to make a big deal over it.

How can it really bother you at this point? You’re finally married to Epsilon. Let the media talk about it. You didn’t care.

Even after marriage it takes Epsilon a while before he first shares a bed with you.

Despite how well you know Epsilon, you’re really not sure why…but you can only respect his decision.

But the first night you Actually spend with Epsilon?? He was pretty shy. You’re surprised you’re actually able to coax him into bed that night.

Initially he just sorta keeps to his side of the bed, it’s up to you to snuggle up next to him if you want to cuddle.

So you do. You wrap an arm around him, and snuggle up against his arm.

He’s stiff and awkward at first, not used to being so physically affectionate with you.

Eventually…he’ll wrap an arm around you in turn, gently, softly, like he’s worried he’ll hurt you…as if he hasn’t already mastered being gentle with humans.

A little strange sleeping next to a being that doesn’t…breathe, but once you get used to it??

Most comfortable sleep of your LIFE. And you get to sleep like that Every night now? Amazing.

(Also I’m having a silly thought of you needing a glass of water in the middle of the night, and dragging your husband out of bed because he GLOWS!! Very convenient for you so you don’t stub your toe, and you don’t need to hurt your eyes by turning on all the lights in the house. A common Epsilon Win not gonna lie.)

-Ok ANGST and Spoiler alert!! Sorry I cannot HELP it-

But just IMAGINE-

You haven’t even been married that long.

And suddenly your husband is cruelly taken from you.

All that was recovered was his hands, you didn’t even have a body to bury properly…Often times the deceased’s memory chip would be given to the surviving spouse but…not even that could be found.

There was NOTHING left of him.

Of course, you weren’t completely alone. There were the other caretakers, and the children, so even if all of you were grieving the loss of your beloved Epsilon, at least you weren’t grieving alone…

But how do you explain this to the children? That the one constant in their chaotic lives was ripped away violently from them, and wouldn’t be back, ever again.

It’s hard. Hard to explain, hard for the children to understand, and watching them break down in tears at the thought of never seeing Epsilon again…it was difficult.

Of course you do what you can for them, but it’s hard to deny that Epsilon was the favorite among the children.

You have to be strong. For yourself. For your children. But of course the media won’t leave you alone, as someone widowed by an infamous serial killer…maybe eventually you just…break on camera. What did they really want from you? To see you like this? Of course you were heartbroken by Epsilon’s death what more did they expect from you?

And of course there were the anti-robot organizations who celebrated the murder of your husband, celebrated that you were free from that robot…it was…frustrating.

And even the people who weren’t necessarily anti-robot had problems with him, given that he was a pacifist during the war.

An unfortunate amount of people felt neutral or even happy about Epsilon’s death.

Yeah, it’s painful. Eventually you’re able to chase away the media, and live as a recluse with the children, but really, none of you are ever the same after his passing.

Author’s note: right, I guess that covers my thoughts for now…sorry that took so long, but thank you so much for the Epsilon request!

#pluto epsilon x reader #Pluto #Epsilon x reader #Epsilon #Pluto Epsilon

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kiaracarrera · 1 year

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OBX Season 3 Ramblings and Thoughts: Part One:

So can we all collectively agree that Big John was kind of the worst and there was way too much screen time for him and not enough screen time of all the Pouges together? - I did love that the name ‘Big John’ actually fit though and not just in a sense of ‘big = dad’ because the height on Charles Halford alone was enough to make it seem like John B was actually a child and not a grown man playing a child.

I love this show with all my heart and soul but what makes it truely magic to me is the friendships and the togetherness and the found family elements. The lack of that this season really affected my personal viewing pleasure in a negative way.

As much as I loved seeing all the duo pairings this season I am so so annoyed that Kiara, Cleo, JJ and in particular Pope weren’t part of that finale El Dorado cave treasure hunt. I don’t even wanna talk about it because it makes me so annoyed. (I will totally talk about it with anyone that wants too though hahaha)

The emotional journey I went on with John B and Topper as individuals boy oh boy.

John B was my fave in season 1 and my least fave in season 2 and this season I both adored him and he irritated the absolute shit out me, overall I think as the leading character it’s hard not to root for John B but I think his storyline will be greatly improved having Big John out of the picture in Season 4.

Topper whyyyy. I actually fully stanned Topper for like 90% of this season and I have no shame in admitting it. He was ALWAYS down to help Sarah and in turn the Pouges and while some people may find his apprehension to break the law and get himself in near life or death situations frustrating, I personally found it relatable? I’d argue that the Pouges were worse to Topper than Topper was to the Pouges for most of this particular season and the way he was adamant he wasn’t going to get into a fight with John B at Mike and Anna’s anniversary party was hot idc what anyone has to say. Of course we can’t have nice things though so Topper had to fuck things up and burn shit to the ground - literally. Of all Topper’s questionably poor choices this one’s gotta be the one he can’t come back from. I think Austin North is superb as Topper but truthfully I would have payed good money to axe a quarter of the scenes he and Sarah shared and given them to Jiara instead.

Jiara season baby!! LOVED LOVED LOVED the build up of their story this season, it was expected but brilliant none the less. All the almost moments, the back and forth, the ‘I’m just a loser and you’ve got your whole future ahead of you’ angst of it all 😩. Then there’s the “Like I love you dude” - it wasn’t big or grand or showy but it was Kiara and it PERFECTION even if JJ’s reaction wasn’t what I personally would have wanted to see. THE KISSSSS. No words, other than I would have like JJ to be the one to say I love you first here but anyway let it be known that I’ve rewatched that scene too many times and ‘Hanging on the Telephone’ has been on repeat all day, thanks Soundcloud. Admittedly though the aftermath of the kiss was disappointing, with over an hour left of OBX we literally were given CRUMBS of them in that finale episode which was disappointing to say the least. I also have suspicions on where Jiara might be in season 4 with that time jump at the end of the season and the uh lack of interaction or affection between them but that’s a discussion for another day.

Speaking of the time jump - did it really need to be 18 months? Like 3 months great! 6 months fine, even like 8-9 months and I would have been like yeah okay 🤷🏽‍♀️ but 18 months!? A whole year and a half!? So much can happen in that time and that’s so much we’ve missed. Most notably the starting points of Jiara and Cleope!? What do you mean we don’t get to see where their relationship went after those monumental first kisses. I get a time jump because the actors are also aging up but 18 months just felt like too much. I’m interested to see what happens in season 4 at least.

In other shipper news Cleope - loved them. So sweet and Cleo is an absolute queen. Easily one of my favourite characters this season and I really enjoyed the journey her and Pope took and in particular Cleo’s relationship with The Hayward’s as a whole. What a beautiful addition to this show.

Did somebody say toxic? Oh wait it’s just John B and Sarah. I’m sorry, I know this is such a popular ship but I just absolutely cannot with them anymore. I have been so neutral on them over the past two seasons but between Sarah’s cheating and John B’s serious anger issues, at this point I surely can’t be the only one who thinks they both (John B in particular) need time to heal on their own before they come back together (and I mean like at least three quarters of a season broken up not just three episodes). I don’t know, obviously it’s been 18 months and they own a surf shop now and they’re both free of their bad dads so maybe things will be different in season 4 but I have VERY low exceptions.

Sarah’s understandably coping a bit of flack this season but I fall more neutral on my opinion on her this season. In season one she was my least favourite and in season two it was the opposite, this season my opinion on her falls somewhere in the middle. I did love that we got to see more of her friendships with the other Pouges outside of John B though! Another reason why I think it would be beneficial for her character to not be tied to John B’s permanently going forward. Sarah and Kiara’s friendship is always a highlight for me.

Putting this all the way down here at the bottom where people might not see because I’m low key ashamed… but RAFE 🤤 I’m sorrrry he’s just so freaking fine. Well at least until he opens his mouth or you know, moves 😅. I’ve seen a bit of a Rafe/Kiara rise with the new season releasing and look, I’m not judging because their shared scenes this season showed some major chemistry but in the name of all things good and well I’m going to stay strong and say our good sis Kiara deserves way better than to ever be pulled into any storyline that involves Rafe Cameron as a love interest. A friend? Maybe, potentially, I mean for someone who swore he was going to be coming for Kiara he did approximately nothing to fulfil that - which is exactly what good enemies to friends stories are made of, but as a romantic interest I’m going to pass thanks. I’ll stick to nurturing the potential that Jiara has.

Lastly bye bye Ward Cameron. It was fun knowing you truely! What a brilliant villain.

If I didn’t totally bore you and you made it this far please let me know what your fave and least fave moments of this season were and/or who your fave and least fave characters have been!! Would love to chat to you guys about this show 🥰🥰🥰

#obx #outer banks #obx3 #jiara #Cleope #sarah cameron #john b routledge #jj maybank #kiara carrera #outer banks netflix #pope heyward #obxspoiler

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hollygl125 · 8 months

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On the adventure endgame, and why I support Sara leaving the lab:

From an inside-the-show perspective, I 110% support Sara’s decision to leave the lab to go off on an epic eco-adventure with Grissom, just as he once decided to leave the lab to go off on an epic eco-adventure with her. I would totally make that choice in her circumstances. From an outside-the-show perspective, I also support the narrative choice to have Sara and Grissom go off on an adventure together rather than stay together in Vegas.

While GSR-fic writing, I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about why I support this ending, so I’ve outlined some of the (terribly rambling) reasons below the cut.

I honestly—though, yes, I am somewhat embarrassed to admit it—love (the GSR of) “Immortality” (16): it’s its own little self-contained Sara Sidle and Gil Grissom love story of angst, yearning, wistful glances, and happy endings, and I have spent more time rewatching that last dock scene than I should willingly admit to anyone. (And JF and WP are so beautiful together—so beautiful!)

But this also highlights how bizarre the whole later-season GSR storyline was. These people were crazy for each other! They had no conception of personal space! They wanted nothing more than to stand on top of each other! They wanted nothing more than to breathe each other’s air!

Of course, as an episode of CSI, “Immortality” (16) is also pretty ridiculous. Whenever I get to the “you turned her heart” line I almost always have to pause the show for a minute just to digest the ridiculousness (or sometimes to do a little rant to myself or whoever’s near).

But (returning to the positive vibes here)…. According to Zuiker’s DVD commentary (if I’m remembering it correctly), the team had very little time or resources to put together the finale, plus all the sets had already been taken down. (Is that right?) Yet they gave us bomb tests and butterflies and bees and a boat (completely with a Moby Dick reference) and a happy ending to what was basically, in the end, the GSR story. Zuiker also (again according to my memory of his DVD commentary) insisted on filming a scene I consider crucial to the ending and on editing out a scene that would have distracted from it. So, overall, I’m very grateful.

Anyway, here’s why I like the adventure endgame:

*Speaking personally, for my own life, if I could use my background and skills to go off on an eco-adventure with the love of my life, I would 100% make that choice. I will admit that bias. (Maybe that’s the whole ballgame? I’m not sure.)

*If I were Sara Sidle, and I could use my background and skills to go off on an eco-adventure with the love of my life, I again would 100% make that choice. Making that choice is consistent with Sara’s characterization.

*Jorja Fox said long ago that she thought Sara would choose love over work: “Sara, by virtue of being a realist, is also very much a romantic. So I think if she really was in love with someone, and it came down to a choice between work and love, I think she’d go in the direction of love” (TV Guide, 2006). (I definitely think WP was being coy in his answer to the same question.)

*In this case at least, love > job. Specifically for Sara, as someone on Tumblr pointed out (I can’t find the reference right now), because of who she is, she is more likely to find another good, interesting, intellectually challenging job than she is to find another love, let alone another love of her life. Man she’s loved quite madly for seventeen years is a pretty irreplaceable role. It’s not like she’s choosing between some guy she met online a few weeks ago and a job for which she’s been working her whole life.

*Sara doesn’t have to choose between love and the job, though. Grissom clearly wants to talk to her throughout “Immortality” (16) but doesn’t think he deserves to ask to be in her life again. He would totally return to Vegas for her, but she wants to join him on the adventure.

(If he told her the only way for them to be together was for her to give up the job and follow him, that would be a completely different story, but that would also be totally inconsistent with his characterization and what “Immortality” (16) shows us.)

Moreover, once the two of them are back together, (1) he would not be good with either one of them getting anywhere near any bombs, and (2) they would be total partners in whatever adventure they undertook.

*Sara would want and enjoy an (eco-)adventure; she would not enjoy being lab director.

*Sara has proven herself, at a minimum, amenable to change. She has previously picked up and moved her life on basically a moment’s notice. Sara either picks up her whole life and leaves or threatens to do so on several occasions throughout the course of the show, so Sara either likes or is open to change (at least change she initiates—i.e., she is the agent of change, rather than change is imposed upon her).

*Sara is the most progressive of the CSIs. She had (extremely dysfunctional, yes) hippie parents and spent most of her first three decades near or in San Francisco. She cares about animals and wildlife, she’s a vegetarian, she likes vegetation, and she cares about the environment. (In 2007, as shown in “Living Doll” (07x24), she drives a 2006 Toyota Prius II; at the time, the Prius, a hybrid, was among the cleanest vehicles sold in the United States on the basis of smog-forming emissions.)

*Sara has previously wanted an adventure (e.g., the Sea Shepherd, the Galapagos) and has acted accordingly (going off on a marine research vessel then doing research in the Costa Rican rainforest).

*Sara’s happy (work) place is doing fun science and investigations with Grissom, not doing administrative work while Grissom does something else in Vegas (even though Sara working as a CSI while Grissom does something else in Vegas would have been far preferable to what happened in the later seasons). They like working together (and they’ve already wasted enough time they should have spent together).

*Sara would not enjoy being lab director, and I’m quite certain she knows it. She doesn’t exactly look thrilled to be completing her application for the position.

Although later seasons of CSI made Russell both lab director and night shift supervisor, that’s not realistic for the top crime lab in the U.S. outside Quantico. Lab director would be an administrative/managerial job. Season 5 is more realistic. As soon as Ecklie gets promoted to assistant lab director, he stops doing lab or field work (to the extent of refusing to cross the crime scene tape because then he would have to testify) and starts doing administrative and managerial tasks, as he explains at least a couple times throughout that season.

In “Nesting Dolls” (05x13), Sara tells Ecklie, “You couldn't hack it in the field, so you fail your way up”; similarly, in “Secrets & Flies” (06x06), in response to McKeen querying whether he might be interested in more responsibility or a promotion, Grissom says, “You know, Oscar Wilde once said, ‘Ambition is the last refuge of failure.’ I'm fine. Thanks.” Both Sara and Grissom like science and fieldwork and hate (and, honestly, probably have a fair bit of contempt for) the kind of work being lab director would entail.

I can’t see either Sara or Grissom wanting to rise above the position of shift supervisor. I can see Sara enjoying a promotion that would give her more responsibility and autonomy in her role as a criminalist (which is how I understood the season 4 promotion for which she and Nick apply) but not one that takes her away from that work. Hence it’s not all that surprising that in seasons 5-15 she never appears to try to rise up the ranks at all.

I also think Sara would have to contort and to suppress a lot of her personality, her instincts, and just generally herself for that kind of administrative/managerial role, and (though she could have succeeded if it were what she really wanted) it would ultimately have made her pretty miserable.

*Sara, if we’re being honest, does not at all have the experience necessary to be director of the top non-federal crime lab in the U.S. (I love Sara! But this is still true!) Sara is a great criminalist! Sara has no administrative or managerial experience! Probably even Nick becoming a lab director in San Diego with only a couple years as assistant shift supervisor (a role from which he was demoted) under his belt is unrealistic. But Sara, a known non-people person, with no relevant administrative or managerial experience, getting the job as director of the country’s top non-federal lab is beyond unrealistic.

Maybe going from CSI to lab director could make sense for someone who is clearly a gifted future administrator and manager (I honestly don’t know!), but that is not Sara. That is maybe the opposite of Sara. Sara is a shit-disturber. Sara is awkward. Sara’s brilliant manipulation of Nora Cross in CSIV, for example, is quite beyond what CSI Sara could pull off. (Sure, she can persuade Grissom, but that’s because he never doesn’t want to sleep with her, and even then it took her years.)

Ecklie would have other internal options (the other shifts’ supervisors and assistant supervisors), he could look at external candidates, and he could appoint an interim director if he needed more time. I’m not saying Sara could never become lab director (I think she could if she really wanted the position and seriously pursued it on a longer-term basis), but at the time of “Immortality” (16) she doesn’t have the necessary experience or even a demonstrated interest in that kind of role.

(Like, seriously, when Grissom says she deserves the promotion, that can only be because he sees little gold stars floating everywhere and hears symphonies playing every time he looks at her.)

*Sara being appointed lab director is so clearly an unrealistic contrivance for the sake of the finale plot that I can’t really care in the slightest that she gives up the job. First, of course, there’s the two points above (she wouldn’t want or be qualified for the position). Then there’s the timeline in “Immortality” (16).

Sara is completing her application at what I presume is the start of her shift (at the beginning of the finale). That’s the same shift when the bomb goes off in the casino. Russell gives her the case because she’s applying for the position. He suggests it will help her application, even though, again, her competency as a criminalist really says nothing about her readiness to take on a high-level administrative/managerial role.

Based on their clothes (mostly, Sara’s striped t-shirt), they work on the case all night, all day, and through to the next night. Then the next day (I presume it’s the next day based on Heather still wearing the same clothes from the day before), immediately after the case is solved, Sara gets the promotion. This also coincidentally happens to be Russell’s last day, from the look of things (him packing up his to-go box).

Russell has clearly given prior notice of his departure, but Sara submits her application only maybe 36 hours before he is leaving, and, within those same 36 hours (while a crazy bombing plot is going on in the city and making international news), Ecklie hires her.

Being lab director is clearly an important role. (In season 5, Ecklie gets a huge black-tie dinner with speeches just for being named assistant lab director). The hiring of a lab director would absolutely be a more significant endeavour than this.

So, Sara applying for the job at the beginning of the episode and getting it at the end provides a nice framing for the episode. Sara getting the promotion leads into a nice Sara/Grissom scene near the end. Sara getting the promotion adds more suspense to the ultimate will they/won’t they question. But, logistically speaking, it doesn’t work.

(As an aside, in terms of logistics, I think the story could have made more sense if they’d already chosen a new lab director and Ecklie was still just deciding who would step in as night-shift supervisor. Sara’s running of the case would then have some significance, she’d maybe actually want that job, and she would presumably be sufficiently qualified to get that job. They could still have found an excuse for the final photo-op—her having been the lead on the bombing case and then getting the promotion would make for a nice story. It would also be an even clearer parallel with whatever promotion Grissom got (I think—this show is so muddled in places) at the beginning of the series.)

*Finales are often a time of transition. Sara’s found family has largely moved on (or is moving on), and it makes sense for Sara to be doing the same. I love workplace found families (The West Wing, Sports Night, Parks and Recreation, Brooklyn Nine-Nine, Superstore, etc.), but finales often involve transitions (usually symbolizing personal growth) for the characters in those found families (The West Wing, Parks and Recreation, New Girl, Brooklyn Nine-Nine, Superstore, etc.). (Occasionally characters realize they shouldn’t be moving on—à la Russell Sam Malone in Cheers—but that’s less common).

Most of Sara’s crime lab found family has moved on or is moving on. Warrick died. Grissom left the lab. Wendy left. Catherine left (although she seems to be coming back). Brass retired. Nick left. Finlay died. Russell is leaving. To my mind, Greg and Morgan are moving on together (meaning Sara’s importance in Greg’s life will inevitably ultimately diminish), though they may be staying at the lab for the time-being. (Morgan is wearing a huge sparkly ring on her left ring finger in her final scene, in which she embraces Greg after they defuse the bombs in the parking garage. I’ve always taken this to mean they finally got together.) Nick has moved to California, and there’s probably a decent chance of Greg and Morgan ultimately moving back to California, since they are both from the L.A. area. (Unless we learn otherwise, I’m assuming that’s where they are now.) (Many thanks to the second season of CSI: Vegas for ruining my Greg/Morgan headcanons, but the above was true at the time.)

Sara has already left the lab once, and it makes sense for her to be doing the same again. Plus, in 2015, it’s not exactly hard to stay in touch with people long-distance, and Sara has practice. (Long-distance friendships are presumably a lot easier to maintain than a long-distance marriage, though I’ve never tried the latter.)

*For me, the two biggest ongoing narrative arcs (journeys) of the first nine seasons are Sara and Grissom’s romance and the (related) personal growth of Grissom, the show’s protagonist. Both those stories culminate with Grissom finding Sara in the rainforest, which gives us one of my favourite scenes of the entire series. It’s a great ending for both. (In my opinion, the whole show could have ended right then and there; its narrative arc was complete.) But Jorja Fox’s return, and TPTB’s handling of it, sort of threw a wrench in things, and then ultimately we got season 13, and I don’t think I need to say any more about that. To my mind, Sara and Grissom going off on an adventure together best restores the happily-ever-after ending they originally received—and deserved.

*Whatever she later claims, Sara in “Goodbye and Good Luck” (08x07) clearly intends a permanent departure from the lab, and in season 9 she wants an adventure (e.g., the Sea Shepherd, the Galapagos). She goes off on some sort of research vessel then goes to do research in the rainforest in Costa Rica. She wants an adventure (preferably with Grissom).

After he and Sara divorce, Grissom picks a path that coincides with what Sara had wanted (a Sea Shepherd-like organization) and names his boat after one of their favourite books. I don’t think he ever expects her to join him, yet he chooses a cause she would like. He subconsciously selects something that might best entice her to join him (if she had any clue he wanted her around). (Even when she’s not around, everything he does, he does for her, or with her in mind; he’s always thinking of her.)

*I don’t blame anyone but TPTB for the divorce. (Sometimes things are so out of character that I cannot blame the characters; I have to blame the TPTB.) But the precipitating event really is Sara’s return to Vegas. After that, as far as I am concerned, they are like boiling frogs (i.e., their marriage disintegrates so slowly that they don’t even notice until it’s too late, and then Grissom thinks he is doing the right thing by setting Sara free). So, to undo that mess, it makes sense that they would again leave Vegas and continue their intended adventure together.

*From a narrative standpoint, Sara leaving the lab to go after Grissom parallels Grissom leaving the lab to go after Sara. It’s balanced. It’s symmetrical.

Although Sara originally comes to Vegas for Grissom, those are different circumstances. That (Sara moving to Vegas post-“Cool Change” (01x02)) is guy she’s secretly kind of in love with offering her a great job opportunity and her accepting. That is not “you are the love of my life and I will give up everything I hold dear for you,” which is what “One to Go” (09x10) and “Immortality” (16) both are.

Additionally, in both “One to Go” (09x10) and “Immortality” (16), Grissom and Sara (respectively) each go after the other only after the other has tried to set them free, reinforcing the parallel.

Moreover, while Sara gives up a lot in leaving the lab for Grissom, Grissom would have had more difficulty reaching a point where he could give up everything in his well-structured life for Sara. Sara has proven herself more amenable to change. In contrast to the actual ending, having Grissom follow Sara away from Vegas (“One to Go,” 09x10) only to end up following her back to Vegas (“Immortality,” 16) would feel very one-sided.

*Finally, the symbolism of the adventure is good.

While deserts can be extremely biodiverse places with their own ecosystems and life (on which I am very much not an expert), in this story the desert is associated with death; it’s the setting of this particular show about death; it’s where Sara is taken to die; and, in the eighth season, Sara literally has to leave Las Vegas and the desert to say goodbye to her ghosts.

Sara has a lot of ghosts. Sara and Grissom have both spent their lives with death. Their fathers die when they are young, which strongly influences their upbringings. They graduate early, which means they begin their jobs early, with both starting out in the coroner’s office in their respective cities and then moving on to different crime labs. Both are obsessed with their jobs, jobs that revolve around death.

Before they meet each other, neither Sara nor Grissom is fully living; before they meet each other, neither is fully invested in the human experience. But they meet, and they fall in love, and ultimately they choose life. (They lift their heads up out of their microscopes, although Sara has always been more prepared to do this than Grissom.)

In “One to Go” (09x10), Sara and Grissom reunite in the tropical rainforest in Costa Rica, an incredibly green, lush, biodiverse place, and honestly I cannot think of a better metaphor for life; I couldn’t find any great stats, but one website I visited stated that the Costa Rican rainforest ranks first in the world in biodiversity per area unit. The rainforest is also the place Grissom wanted to visit before he died, as stated in “Way to Go” (06x24), where it is thus initially contrasted with death.

Then, in “Immortality” (16), they once again leave the desert, but this time for the ocean. Again, contrasted with the desert, for our purposes the ocean symbolizes life. They’ll be working on the conservation of marine life. They choose life. They choose the adventure. Together.

Sara and Grissom reunite in the coastal state where they first met (and where they were both born and raised); they have come full circle. They sail off into the sunset. The end (but not actually the end of the story I’m currently telling).

And, lucky for us, we then get an epilogue that shows us just how perfectly magical they are when they are finally allowed to become old(ish) and married together!

Those are my (very rough) thoughts; obviously your perspective may differ! 💛

#csi #gsr #otp: gsr #sara x grissom #grissom x sara #sara sidle #gil grissom #jorja fox #william petersen #💛: survivors in the night #my thoughts and feelings on the two lovely science nerds

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