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scoops-stevie-archive · 2 years

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Misty Taste of Moonshine - ao3

Six months into their relationship, Steve realizes how different Eddie is when he's around certain people. He doesn't put on the theatrical facade he wears when he's at school or hanging out with the party, all loud and brash and in your face as the name Eddie Munson has come to be known.

He's been to enough Corroded Coffin practices to see the way Eddie interacts with the band. Little inside jokes and a casual affection that should make him jealous, but in those moments, he sees himself and Robin and feels nothing but warmth. That even after everything, Eddie can still have this with the handful of people that know him better than anyone.

Even so, they don't know the Eddie that resides at the Munson trailer. The real Eddie, not the one dimensional being that deals in the doorway under the dim porch light and in the shadows, the one that's on the receiving end of sneers and the word "devil" spat at his feet like his face isn't even worth the trouble of aiming for.

Steve learns that when Eddie was four, his mom died in a car accident on her way to pick him up from the babysitter's. His dad had never been around, so her brother Wayne was the only next of kin eligible to take him in.

"I don't really remember my mom," Eddie says one night after dinner. He and Steve are in Eddie's room. Wayne's already left for work so they've got the trailer to themselves until morning. They could use the time to fool around like the teenagers they aren't, but tonight, Steve just wants to hear Eddie talk. There's an acoustic guitar he keeps in the closet, a gift from his grandpa before he and Wayne moved to Indiana. He strums it quietly as they sit on the bed. "I remember she used to sing to me a lot, though. Lots'a Loretta Lynn and Johnny Cash." He's got a soft smile on his face as he plucks the strings absentmindedly.

"My first real memory is of me sittin' on my great grandma's knee in her kitchen. She had this rocking chair in the corner by the window that looked out over half the holler." He turns his smile to Steve. "I'm takin' you there one day, Stevie. You gotta see it."

They don't know the real Eddie. Steve considers himself lucky that Eddie trusts him and feels comfortable around him to let every single carefully constructed wall come crumbling down when they're alone in the safety of the trailer.

They don't know that the voice they hear everyday isn't his real one. The one he grew up speaking with. When it's just them, Eddie's outside voice fades into one with a soft twang and it makes Steve's insides melt like butter in the screaming hot cast iron skillet that's seasoned and so well loved by both Munsons. Steve can cook, don't get him wrong (with his parents gone for weeks at a time it was either he learn how to use the stove or starve) but compared to Wayne and Eddie, his food is on par with a ten year old who just learned how to boil water.

Eddie always appreciates Steve cooking for them. He stands behind him at the stove with his arms gently wrapped around his waist and his chin on his shoulder, gently swaying back and forth. In the beginning, Steve would get embarrassed with Wayne in the room and brush his boyfriend off, but now it's almost second nature to lean back into his hold and accept the kiss on the nape of his neck and the quiet "smells good, baby" in his ear, the man who has come to be more of a dad to him than his own father watching with fondness behind his beer can.

Steve has always known that Hawkins wasn't home to Eddie, not really. He knew that, to him, home was deep in Carter County, Kentucky where lived with his uncle and grandparents. And his great grandparents and various aunts and uncles and cousins. Unlike Steve, Eddie never grew up with a shortage of love. There was always plenty to go around, even if they didn't have much money. Then Wayne got laid off from the coal mine when Eddie was thirteen and they moved up here to Indiana where he got on at the Sattler quarry. From what Eddie's told him, though, most of his family moved out of the holler and into the southern regions of Ohio. Only a few cousins stayed behind to keep their grandparents' cabin in the family.

To this day Steve still kicks himself for not fully noticing Eddie sooner. For not befriending him before Tommy H. and Carol dug their toxic claws into him and turned him into the douche bag he's still revered as. He remembers the new kid being introduced at the beginning of seventh grade and how hard he tried to make friends. He remembers how he was shut down every single time with laughs and cruel comments. Kids outright making fun of his accent and his clothes until he no longer tried reaching out and hung back from everyone. He eventually met Jeff and Gareth, and Steve was so grateful to them for getting Eddie out of his shell again, but the damage was already done and it followed him every year since.

Sometimes Steve will ask Eddie to sing to him, and he'd settle further into the pillows on the other boy's bed (the trailer was more his home these days than his actual house) and listen with his heart almost bursting with emotion as Eddie played a tune on his acoustic. A Johnny Cash song that Steve vaguely recognizes, a song that Eddie says almost every Appalachian family has their own rendition of. Steve thinks it's also eerily fitting for everything that's happened in the past year.

And when he's finished, Steve will pull him into a kiss and vow to never take for granted this version of his boyfriend only he's allowed to know.

#steddie #eddie munson #steve harrington #eddie munson headcanons #gay eddie munson #eds #*drags you in by the collar* listen to me closely: eddie munson is a son of the appalachian mountains #idk about the rest of yall but our metalheads have LAYERS #most of us grew up listening to the oldie country bc its all our parents and grandparents listened to #the song eddie sings to him is aint no grave bc i feel like its a song that resonates with a lot of appalachians #and bc i think it fits the hawkins gang pretty well #taking eddie's vague af backstory and tearing it to shreds. he's my blorbo now bitch #i was gonna have eddie describe the holler he grew up in but #the mental image of it combined with welcome home son by radical face made me too emotional lmao #cj writes #appalachian eddie #cj talks

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greens-multiverse · 5 months

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[after - almost six months, holy fuck - here's part two of my end-of-anniversary-crystal songfic about abe and azure journeying to the bottom of reality/excuse for a lot of expository flashbacks about my season 2 myth arc headcanons. part one, which contains most of the setup, is here. our song being ficced is still the ai girl and the deep heart sea; tonight we're on the first full section, 'reincarnated girl rho.' this... turned out much longer than i expected]

so if you did go diving into the depths of the substructure-sea, what would you find just below the surface? easy: the physical world

you might think we live in the physical world, but that's not entirely true. human bodies exist in the world of atoms and forces, but human minds, like the minds of anything sentient enough to dream, belong to the lower layers of the noos. that's the term for the blanket of ideas and memories and stories we sophonts collectively lay over bare reality, the landscape of thought that gives everything meaning. up here, a piece of stone could be the last remaining artifact of a lost civilisation, or a source of energy that could power a city for generations, or the mark of the one true king. down there, it's just a collection of molecules

still, as stark as it might look with the haze of imagination removed, the topmost portion of the substructure is pretty similar to the world we know. the stars spin and the elements flow and people and animals act just the same, though if you didn't know how our home layers work you'd never guess why. and even if you do, it's hard to impose the framework of narrative over them for very long without the support of the noos. down there, nothing could be or means or implies anything; it just is

which isn't to say travelling through it would be exactly like going for a walk in our home layers - it might, if you were going for a walk across it, but if you're going down through it things get very strange very quickly! the philosophers also say that time is a direction, much like up or forward, and they're fairly close to right. going through the topmost layers of the substructure feels like plunging through entire timelines, events thousands of miles and dozens of years apart all flashing past your eyes at once. it's like experiencing dozens of scenes from the same story all at once, all without any context to tie them together or any subtext to give them meaning. but if it's a story you played a part in, you might be able to follow along, just about

it's pretty easy to find yourself reflecting on it

sunlight zone

Azure, the girl who returned

down here, I can see everything

as we drift downwards, time and distance fall away, and all that ever was blurs together, like disconnected clips of an absurdly long video. it's as if in the final death throes of this tiny shell of a world, the strings holding its timeline together have snapped, and the whole arc of its short history has tumbled into my hands. I feel like I could see anything, anywhere, if only I knew how to sort through the heap. I can even catch a glimpse of its ever-fewer potential futures

the back of my right hand shines a familiar colour I still cannot name. Abe's hand in mine crackles with haze, purple and white chasing each other around his crumbling skin. beneath it, I can just about see the beginning of a vast, eternal structure

the further we descend, the closer everything draws to us. it's becoming hard to distinguish discrete events, everything running into everything else. soon, I realise, the only moments I'll be able to perceive at all are this world's approaching end, and its distant beginning

but I don't need to look to see all the parts that truly matter. ever since IT came, I've remembered everything I've ever witnessed in perfect clarity

IT was far too unstructured to be called an 'entity' there was no one who understood what IT was or why IT had come into existence so they called it 'Missingno' or 'the glitchhaze' or 'OLDEN' some even called IT 'Altair' as if IT were a god

I did not witness ITs entire emergence, of course. the formation of the confluence called OLDEN began before my world was created, before his, perhaps even before the true reality all the worlds of the haze are mere shadows of. whatever ITs source, IT came to impinge on that reality, chewing it up, piece by piece, shredding order and logic and spacetime until only a formless haze of glitches remained. there was nothing anyone could do to stop IT. even the gods could just barely slow IT down

and yet, so I'm told, there was no malice in IT, not then. ITs bites at the edge of the universe were random, almost exploratory, as if IT didn't know what it was, or even what IT was. everything IT touched collapsed into haze, but that haze did not lash to corrupt everything it could reach or sink beneath the surface of reality to poison it from within. most often it disappated, and even when it lingered it reached out tentatively, inquisitively, even playfully. whether IT was curious or hungry or simply lacked enough of a mind to want anything at all, no one knew, but IT wasn't trying to destroy our universe in the beginning

but by the time IT came to my world, IT had changed. IT had learned how to hate

IT came to a world wracked by change and uncertainty and shredded it apart with a brilliant vicious light since no matter what all would someday return to the void why not cut short this farce of a universe and bring an end to ITs own suffering?

my world was nothing. a bubble within a bubble, a tiny simulation created as a last bastion from the corruption. but limited as I knew it was, insignificant as I knew it was, it was mine, and I fought hard to free it from those who would harm its people. I defeated each gym leader, I tore apart Team Rocket, I ascended the Indigo Plateau to claim the title of our world's first champion. ten settlements, twenty-five routes, a hundred and fifty-odd species of pokémon, and I stood above them all, the strongest trainer between the impassable mountains and the waters that trailed off into nothingness. I swore to protect them from whoever and whatever might seek to harm them

I was so young, then. so naïve. so arrogant. despite everything I had already learned, it never occured to me SOMETHING might come that I could not fight

IT came to my world at dawn. by the morning's end the ocean was a writhing mass of corrupted matter, advancing northwards in an unstoppable deluge. by mid-afternoon, the plains were choked with haze, towns and forests collapsing in on themselves faster anything could flee, faster than most could even notice. by nightfall, all that was left of my world was a mountaintop, and a temple, and me

I had begun the day determined to fight IT until the breath left my body, but by this point all I could do was sob. I had lost all my allies, all my pokémon, all my hopes as city after city fell and nothing we could think of so much as made IT flinch. they had relied on me to save what they could not, take revenge where they could not, and I had failed them all. despite everything I promised on the Vermillion dockside, I hadn't been able to protect anyone. all I had left was despair

I'm not sure why I had been allowed to escape. perhaps IT meant to save me for last

IT came slowly up the mountainside, chewing the horizon as if savouring each bite. I watched it from the empty doorway of the temple, unable to muster the energy to flee any further. for the first time, but not the last, I sat and waited for the end

then the space just in front of the doorway flickered, and Abe stepped through a crack in reality and out into the snow. we had known each other for some time now, he who designed my world, I who tracked him down and demanded to know why. I had seen him teleport across the world through his unknown doors many times before, but I was still somewhat surprised to see him alive. so quietly for a moment I didn't know if he heard it, I croaked out his name

he was just as shocked to see me here, I could tell by how quickly he spun around. his breath caught for a second, and he mouthed, "I'm sorry." then he turned to face the approaching chaos, and his shadow blossomed into an infinity of fractals

the beginning of the battle between the last of the fossil gods and IT was, I am told, like nothing ever seen by living eyes. unseen it remains, for I did not watch it. I moved further into the temple, behind enough walls it seemed unlikely I would be impaled by debris, and there I curled up and waited for the storm to pass. there was nothing I could do against IT I had not already tried a thousand times, and besides, what difference could a single powerless human make in a clash of the divine?

all around me, the earth, the walls, even the air shook. I could not even begin to interpret the sounds - the crackling, the tearing, the rattling - erupting from the temple's entrance, but soon enough I saw cracks drive through first the stonework and then the empty air. I knew my world was finally dying, and, despite my youth, despite my pride, despite my fear, I felt strangely relieved. a gash in spacetime snaked through the halls towards me, shedding glitches, leaking a brilliant, terrible light -

and from a direction I was not watching, something pierced the back of my right hand

I instinctively jerked my arm back towards me, but as soon as the impact sight came into view, I froze. there was no blood, no pain beyond the initial shock, not even a wound. there was only a sliver of dark orange stone barely larger than my fingernails burrowed into my skin, faintly humming. I had just enough time to take in the sight before the tear in the universe reached me and glitches overwhelmed everything

everything, that is, except me. the stone walls melted, the air collapsed, the world around me crumbled into a thick morass of swirling, chattering, ever-changing decay, but I remained just as I was. even when the haze lanced out at my body directly, the force I had seen rend through buildings and mountains and people alike in mere seconds slid off my skin like a passing rain. the space (if one were to call it that) around my head shifted rapidly between water and wood and viscera, but I could breathe more easily than I had in hours. through the flickering, crackling haze, for the first time I saw the back of my hand gleam

I did not know, then, that the miniscule stone shard tinting my skin an impossible colour was the last remaining fragment of an entity older than the gods. at the end of the battle I was sheltering in the temple from, IT aimed a dart of pure haze right at the core of the only fossil god still alive, the Dome. but for whatever reason such a being might do such a thing, the Old Amber leapt into its path. the impact made the packed-together rock at the heart of their being burst into a thousand infinitesimal pieces which flew off in all directions, shattering against the mountain or evaporating upon contact with the glitches. but somehow, through a series of coincidences and just-right circumstances, one shard slipped through it all and landed in me

was this planned by the Old Amber, or mere happenstance? I still don't know, and I doubt I ever will. but whether there was a purpose behind it or not, from that moment on the glitches could not touch me. a whole world could dissolve into haze around me, and I would keep my form, and my identity, and my memories. no matter how much time passed, no matter what happened, I remained myself

but all that I discovered later. then and there, curled up in that crumbling temple at the end of everything I'd ever known, I dazedly watched half a dozen tendrils of corruption pass through my body harmlessly before I realised I was not, in fact, dead. I reached out for one of the few remaining patches of wall and slowly got to my feet, and just when I'd found a stable footing my world finally snapped open and I tumbled head over heels into the glitchhaze. I fell for what seemed a thousand years through light and texture and shrieking, repetitive sound, and none of it so much as pulled my hair. the shock had faded from my mind enough I was beginning to wonder why

then my back slammed against solid ground. it knocked the breath out of my body, and when I inhaled I tasted air once again. the surface I was lying on was wet, spongy, and stable, at least as far as my arms could reach. when I pried my gummed-shut eyes open, the first thing I saw was a dazzlingly blue sky

it was a fairly typical early hazeworld fairly early on in its development. no tree was yet tall enough I could not step over it, the largest animals were barely bigger than mice, and the pokémon were still amorphous clouds of spirit, not coherent enough to create physical forms. even once it had fully matured, its sky never changed from that brilliant blue, and its dirt squished like jelly rather than crumbling. the worlds of the haze were only ever so real, and this one was even less so than mine had been

but in that moment, all that mattered was that it was

yet there was one whose existence ITs haze could never erase I was "Vega", lodestar inviolate, she who saw everything

that grassy clearing caught in an eternal morning was not alone in the glitchhaze for long. as some consequence of its battle with IT, the Dome created handfuls, then dozens, then hundreds of these tiny worldlets, little pockets of order billowing in the haze. each new hazeworld was just a touch more real than the last - a sky that dimmed and brightened again, soil that could be broken up to plant whatever fruit you pleased, water that cycled from stream to lake to cloud and back; a little larger, a little more self-sufficient. soon they were detailed enough humans could live there, and they built settlements, then cities, then regions. and then, slowly, step by stumbling step, they began to reach out across the haze to each other

I had long mastered the art of travelling through the haze by then. Abe, who had also survived that last battle, had to travel between worldlets through broken warps and bizarre glitchmancy tricks, his unknown doors writ large, but I could simply walk off the edge of one world and stroll through the glitches to the next one. not that it was ever that simple, of course; navigating the endlessly shifting landscape of the glitchhaze was more art than science and more luck than either, and I seldom arrived in the precise world I was aiming for even when I didn't spend months lost in the wilds of the haze. but it was never dangerous, not for me. out of everyone in existence, I alone travelled the haze without fear

the people of the hazeworlds grew used to Abe and I passing through their regions. we both got into the habit of telling them stories; he of the worlds that lay past their borders and the ways they could be reached, I of the worlds that once were and how they had been destroyed. we taught them what the haze was and that there were others like them beyond it, and they taught themselves how to send things through it; first information, then objects, then living beings. soon the haze was home to a great alliance of worlds, interconnected by hazeships and databeams and a dozen kinds of interworld teleportation, fighting back the glitches wherever they could, always searching for a way to defeat IT forever. Abe and I they revered as gods, the ones who had shown them the nature of reality and bestowed upon them the power to change it. with our teachings, they so fervently believed, they would restore the universe

Abe helped them whenever and however he could, but I seldom did. I could never muster the will to do much more than pass on my stories, never shake the feeling that no matter what anyone did, reality had merely been granted a stay of execution. why, I still cannot say; perhaps my mind was as trapped in that moment of despair as my body, and just as my hair never grew no matter how many decades passed me by, my heart never lifted out of that black pit. or, perhaps, I simply never managed to overcome my grief. all I could bring myself to do was sit on the outside of that glorious dream and half-heartedly hope it would be fulfilled

alas, it was not to be. no matter what they tried, no matter how they struggled, in the end there was nothing we mere humans could do against ITs hate. one after another, the worlds of the alliance were overcome and fell, and the links they'd forged between them became vectors for the very corruption they'd been made to fight against. over the course of its long defeat, the alliance grew desperate and cruel, but even that was not enough, and once it finally broke the surviving worlds of the haze were left completely without protection. once upon a time a world was not considered stable unless it was completely free of glitches, but now even the most substantial were strewn with impossibly stretched landmarks and holes in reality that opened into infinity. even Abe, as immortal as I was but for somewhat different reasons, began to mutate, his form and his memories slipping away a fraction more every time he crossed the haze, until all that was left of him was a barely sentient heap of glitches, marked out from the rest of the corruption only by the occasional flash of purple

but I? I remained. no matter how many worlds crumbled around me, no matter how long I spent lost in the haze, my self was preserved. even in that final barely coherent, violently unstable, utterly corrupted mockery of a world, where no division existed between human and pokémon and language had degraded into loud, garbled noise and time had broken in a way impossible to put into words, I had not changed one bit since the day my world died. in my customary seclusion, I watched the strands that held together this final world quietly fray, and I wondered whether, once all existence had been devoured by IT, I would finally be permitted to cease

isolated as I always was, she nonetheless tracked me down. a girl with blue hair and red scales and a wide, fanged smile, whose eyes were tinged the faintest purple and whose voice carried a muted echo of thousands more. like so many residents of the haze before her, she and her allies had sketched out a wild, one-in-a-million scheme to restore the lost worlds and bring the battle to IT. I didn't believe they could do it - there? then? at the end of everything? - but for the very last time I gave them my stories. I told them everything I knew, fully expecting that it could never make a difference

some time after that (in a manner of speaking) the last world abruptly shattered. the slow rot that had been eating away at it since before time had broken suddenly surged, and pillars of pure corruption burst out of its husk of a sky. as the ground beneath my feet dissolved into glitches for the very last time, the shard in the back of my right hand vibrated so fast it became painful. through the haze and the light, I thought I saw my left hand begin to melt -

and I sat in the Champion's Chamber of the Indigo Plateau, on the same plastic folding chair my world's Lance had taken to calling my throne, so many long years before. the stitching on the jacket I had left dangling on it the day my world had ended pressed into my back

it took me so many long seconds to comprehend where I was. it took me several more to realise I could still move. my heart hammering, my body shaking, half-convinced that if I moved too quickly this dream would burst like a bubble, wholly expecting Koga to burst in at any moment and announce that something was eating the sea, I got to my feet. I took a few dazed steps, and my shoe tapped against something on the floor

I looked down, and I saw pokéballs

what can I say about what happened next? my charizard wrapped my tail around its body and held me close as I cried. his scales rustled, solid and alive, radiating a warmth that drove my grief to the edges of my soul for the first time in an eternity of loneliness. with every pokéball I opened, every old ally I reunited with, every step I took in a world like so many others I had passed through but in its details unmistakably mine, it receded a little further. how it came to pass, I suspect not even the gods could say, but the people of the last world of the glitchhaze had brought back the first. they had brought me home

the story of that reborn world is not one I am equipped to tell. as much as I tried to keep a grasp on events, from the moment we discovered there was a new land beyond the once-impassable western mountains I played at best a peripheral partin the saga of ITs final defeat. but I was once more part of it; so longer a silent, sobbing witness to a fate I could not change, but an active participant in an impossible, glorious miracle. I fought where I could, and I laughed when I could, and though my sorrow never entirely went away it became easy put it aside for a few moments and bask in the beauty of this dream-made-reality

and yet, as wonderful as it was, it was not perfect. there was one person missing. I scoured the world in my search for him, both the tiny region we had grown up in and the new lands blossoming into existence all around it, fully convinced he had to be out there, restored along with everything else. but I never found more than a shadow. there was one time… but that was not him. I have been told over and over again that my best friend still lies at the bottom of the Cinnabar Strait, as dead as this world once was, and will soon be again

but that cannot be. he was a host of the Voices, and even when all of reality was on the verge of being devoured by glitches, they were as immune to the corruption as I. somewhere, somehow, he must still exist, if not in body then in spirit, if not within this universe then without it. and though logically he could be anywhere in the infinite nothingness outside reality, I know - somewhere, I think I always have - where he is. for so long I thought him unreachable, but no longer

wait for me, Evan. I'm coming to save you

and as for THAT which declared everything I had l ever loved and all we dreamed together no more than a useless charade what would I say to IT? … come on we've still a long road ahead

#twitch plays pokemon #mitzi fic #mitzi writing #azure #abe #old amber #and this remains not not about #olden #approaching four thousand words! i was not expecting the sections to get this long #i can't promise the next one will take less time to come out. it's almost certainly gonna be narrated by the voices #and they're always Fun to write #i decided azure talked like she'd swallowed a thesaurus very early on and had a lot of fun writing her #and i have decided who exposition guy is!#layer 2: the stream

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