why is religious Christmas imagery all so joyful and pleasant? where is the inherent horror of the birth of Christ? A mother is handed her newborn child, wailing and innocent. Her hands come away sticky. Red. Simply by giving her son life she has already killed him. He is doomed from the beginning. Her love will not save him from suffering. Because the thing cradled in her arms is not a baby, it is a sacrifice: born amongst the other bleating animals whose blood will one day be spilled in the name of what demands it. the night is silent with anticipation. Mary, did you know? That your womb was also a grave?
Person on screen: needs a couple pats of butter, a splash of olive oil, simmered on low with a bay leaf and a cinnamon stick. What?! You never seen a boy who knows his way around the kitchen?
Yeah my mom always wanted a little girl but she got stuck with me instead. That wasn’t gonna stop her though so all my friends were opening up nerf guns and bmx bikes on their birthday, I was getting crockpots.
(scene changes to the person dressed in a nice black suit jacket, bright pink dress shirt, and black tie) Yeah laugh it up! Take a picture while you’re at it 'cause this is the last time you’ll ever see me in a suit! How do boys wear these things??
(scene changes to the person dressed in the same shirt and tie with no jacket and the shirt cuffs unbuttoned and rolled up, with purple nail polish on their nails) No, I don’t know how to fight. I was only ever taught how to deescalate situations with healthy communication and emotional validation.
i like a jason that genuinely was a textbook perfect child before he died, and he started going back to that goody-two-shoes way of life after reconciling with the bats. it’s just kinda in his nature; he likes the attention and the fact that bruce lets him get away with so much because ‘he’s such a good kid’, and he likes knowing he’s better than his siblings.
the rest of the batkids are absolutely disgusted by this dynamic, by the way. all the adults around them think jason is a fucking angel, and it drives them insane because the second bruce and alfred turn their backs, jason is a complete asshole of a brother. and there’s nothing they can do about it because in everybody elses eyes this man practically shits gold.
*at breakfast*
Jason: oh hey, Alfred, sit down; i’ll do the dishes. you just enjoy the food.
Alfred, smiling: why thank you, Master Jason. i believe i’ll take you up on that, the sunroom is lovely and sunny right now.
Jason: you just relax and enjoy it then :)
Jason, the second Alfred leaves to sit down with his food: *shoves Tim off his stool and steals his food* this is mine now, you go do the dishes.
Tim: ?!?!?!?!
~
*Damian and Jason at the league*
Ra’s, begrudgingly pleased: you have certainly surpassed my expectations, Todd. i have to say, my daughter made a good choice bringing you into our ranks.
Talia: you truly are worthy of being an Al Ghul heir.
Jason: :D
Damian, face flat: you know he didn’t even do the mission you assigned him, right? he hired a mercenary and went to Legoland.
Jason: *kicks him in the shin* HA! as if! man, little kids say the darnedest things… i thought i taught you better than that Damian!
Ra’s: yes… Damian, perhaps we should up your training until you learn not to spread lies in an attempt to tear your brother down. you could learn from him, you know.
Damian, loudly: i am going to kill myself.
~
Jason, walking through the manor: *accidentially knocks over an antique ceramic decoration, smashing it*
Jason:
Jason: *locks eyes with Dick from across the hall*
Dick: don’t-
Jason: BRUCE, DICK BROKE YOUR THING-
Dick: god DAMMIT JASON-
~
Bruce: *giving a mission brief on the batcomputer*
Jason: *shoots Tim with a slingshot*
Tim: *yelps*
Bruce, turning around: what’s happening?
Tim: Jason’s-!
Jason, slingshot hidden behind his back: oh, what? i what, Tim? because it seems like all i can fucking do is disappoint this family nowadays, i don’t even know why i fucking came home when none of you seem to like me being around,
Tim: YOU LITERALLY-
Bruce, snapping: ok that’s enough. Tim, don’t be rude to Jason, he hasn’t done anything wrong. if you can’t get a hold of yourself then you’ll just have to be benched for the night, understood?
Tim: ARE YOU- SERIOUSLY?!?!?
Bruce: yes. not another complaint. *turns back to the batcomputer*
Jason, grinning: *brings out his slingshot*
Tim, dead inside: i miss being an only child.
like, Jason’s a good brother, and he’ll have his siblings’ backs in anything. but he’s also the prodigal son that everybody mourned and it’s the biggest get out of jail free card in existence and he 100% abuses it at any and all opportunity.
Steve dolling himself up to go ask Eddie out. He’s like 85% sure Eddie feels the same way but he also pulls away just enough to cast a doubt. So he puts on his tightest polo shirt and the jeans that he KNOWS make people look at his ass. Puts on the lip smacker that he wouldn’t admit he wore during the Scoops era and a little bit of mascara. Spends a crazy amount of time on his hair.
All to hide that he’s scared that no matter how hot he looks Eddie might just not want him.
Ok but what if the day (almost date almost hang out with friend) where Steve want tl confess to Eddie, everything -like really everything- want so, so wrong. At the end, his hair are a mess, his make up was erased, maybe his clothe are dirty (for whatever reason, like he fall in dirt)
And he is tired, angry, disapointed and just want the day to be over.
Eddie tries to see the good part despite having a day as horrible as Steve and tries to cheer him up. So Steve explode and explain why he feels so bad, wanting things to be perfect.
And Eddie is so happy that Steve love him and confess immediatly without letting Steve spiralling
Steve talking about his “dry spell” and it ends with Eddie offering to help him out by blowing him. But then *every* time they do it Steve tries to return the favor and Eddie doesn’t know how to explain “dude I’m helping out my straight buddy with a couple blowjobs it’s a tale as old as time you DO NOT need to try and suck a dick to ‘reciprocate’”
steve talking this over with robin like “whyyyyyy won’t he let me touch him” and robin’s like “idk maybe he’s the dude equivalent of a stone butch?”
so then steve stops trying to touch eddie at all—won’t even play with his hair when he goes down on him, just sits there politely with his hands bunched in the comforter—out of some newly-educated respect for his queer identity, and eddie sees the shift and turns it into a huuuuuge internal drama. see? see!! i knew he never liked me. he’s just a straight guy taking advantage and he can’t even pretend to be into this anymore.
until one night steve gets so drunk and sad and clingy that he forgets to keep his distance. just pawing at eddie’s thighs from the floor, looking up at him with big wet puppy eyes like “please please please please i’m so good at it eddie PLEASE why won’t you let me 🥺🥺🥺”
Hey all! We are back! And it's a bit of time jump, but we are moving toward Eddie and Steve meeting up again.
Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3 | Part 4 | Part 5 | Part 6 | Part 7 |
~
The song persisted in his mind over the next couple of years. He had managed to get everything down but the lyrics. It was the words that eluded him for the longest time.
Then someone said the words.
“Holy shit!” Gareth said from his corner on of the tour bus. “They want us to be on the cover of ‘Metal Magazine’!”
“We’ve really made it now!” Brian cried. “First the Grammy last year, our records going platinum, and now this!”
Then it all clicked. It was time to write Steve his song. He immediately pulled out a pen and his notebook and started scribbling away. The words just flowed from his brain the paper.
“Uh oh,” Jeff said with a chuckle. “It’s seem you activated ‘creative beast mode’ in our songwriter, Bri-guy.”
Brian huffed and shook his head. “It was bound to be something. Remember last week when that squirrel stole his sandwich and went on that bender and came out with three songs and an idea for a concept album?”
Gareth grimaced. “Oof, yeah. Can’t wait to see the results of this one, though.”
The topic moved off Eddie’s furious writing, but he kept at until he was done. It just needed a title. He tapped his pen against his lips for a moment or two before he scribbled down something.
He nodded thoughtfully and then passed it off to Jeff who would be the one singing it.
Jeff pulled out his Delilah, a black Les Paul with a pearl splash guard and sat down with the song.
“Top of the world, gilded in green and gold,” Jeff sang, ‘who would have known your world was so cold...”
He frowned for a moment and then adjusted his fingering on the fret board, trying again. He got through the song about two and half times before he handed Eddie the guitar.
“I want you to sing it,” he said, cocking his head to the side. “You show me what you think it should sound like.”
Eddie furrowed his brow. “Come on, man. You know my singing is shit.”
“Not for this.”
He frowned and took the guitar from Jeff and began playing. “You sat in your executioner’s chair, and did the one thing no one dared, ooohh, lover you’re a truth teller...”
He went through the whole song and then looked up at Jeff, who had tears in his eyes. “What?”
Jeff pressed play on his mini-recorder he used for just this sort of thing and Eddie’s voice came through the speaker with startling clarity. With every note phone Eddie hit, real Eddie’s jaw dropped further until he was sure it was on the floor.
“That can’t be me...” he breathed.
“Oh no, it is,” Jeff confirmed. “And that’s why you’ve got to be the one who sings it. Because it’s your song.”
Eddie snorted and set the guitar down, flopping against the back of the sofa. “You’ve sung songs about me and my life before, dude. What makes this one so special?”
“Because it’s the first song about Steve.”
Eddie’s head snapped Jeff’s direction. “How did you know?”
Jeff let out a shuddering breath and sat forward. “Because I know you, Ed. Better than my own family most days and if there had been a song about Steve before now, I would have clocked it, but there hasn’t. Plus while you haven’t talked about it much, we do know it was Steve who came forward and said he trashed the drama room. And the line about destroying a legacy that was never theirs? That had to be about that incident.”
“You’re right,” Eddie said, running his fingers through his hair in frustration. “Fuck. I promised him that day that when we made it big I’d write a song about him.”
“And your strongest memory of him is when he gave up the life he could have had, for you,” Jeff reasoned. “Which fair enough. But this is bigger than you and him and telling the truth, because it feels like a love letter.”
He opened his mouth to protest but he knew anything that he said to the contrary would be a lie, so he closed it and just nodded.
“Which is why I’m guess you left out the pronouns,” Jeff concluded. “And I am absolutely comfortable with you telling people you’re gay or not. No skin off my teeth, dude. And if you coming out crashes us, then it was one hell of a run.”
Eddie turned a bright red. “I’m not ready to come out yet, which is one of the reasons for the pronoun obscurity, but not the only reason.”
“Oh?” he asked raising an eyebrow.
“It’s also to protect Steve,” Eddie replied with a grimace. “Maybe he has a job that if it came out what he did might force them to fire him. I don’t want to accidentally fuck up the guy’s life further than that shit already did and singing it to millions and millions of people would not just could, but absolutely would make his life a nightmare.”
“I’ll agree to that,” Jeff nodded sagely. “Let’s not make him desperate. He did a fucked up thing and paid the price as far as I’m concerned. Spreading that around now would be like dog-piling the guys and I’m with you, let’s not do that.”
Eddie scrubbed his face. “But what do you think, you think the label will go for it?”
Jeff sat back and rubbed his chin thoughtfully. “I think they would be pretty stupid if they didn’t. It’s straight up, solid gold, man.”
“Okay,” Eddie breathed. “You think it needs anything else. More drums, harder on the bass...”
“We’ll have to all play it together and see for sure,” Jeff conceded, “but it shouldn’t need too much tweaking to get it right.”
“Then let’s do this,” Eddie said cocking his head. “I’m going to sing a song on our album...”
Jeff burst out laughing. “Hell yeah you are. So let’s get this to Gare and Bri and see what they think, k?”
Eddie nodded.
What they thought was that it was about time Eddie finished the damn song and of course it was going on their next album. In fact they were going to build the entire album around the song because it was just that good.
~
Steve had moved away from campus dorms and straight into an apartment with Vince. They were in their final year of college, Robin having graduated the year before. She had a separate apartment was sharing with her girlfriend, Vickie. So they still hung out all the time.
Steve had really grown attached to Vince over the years. Not only were they in a lot of the same classes, they did a lot of the same extracurriculars as well.
And while Vince was more of a baseball guy, he would still watch swimming on ESPN with him every time.
Billy had remained a thorn in Steve’s side, but kept it to snide comments and sneering glances. Because the records spoke for themselves, Steve was by far the better swimmer. Which of course Billy chalked up to all the fancy private lessons.
Something that he refused to ever let go of. But whatever, Steve got his revenge by befriending his step-sister Max.
The dorm mother Claudia Henderson had a son about her age, Dustin and the two were on relatively friendly terms, (she was dating a good friend of his and so they were often in the same circles) so he had met her at the dorm when she came over to pick Lucas up from the dorm where he and Dustin were hanging out.
Actually Steve had befriended the entire gaggle of teenagers. Lucas, Dustin, Max, and Ellie. Steve had been quietly nudging Dustin to ask Ellie out, but he was being shy about it.
Vince’s family had come around the first Christmas he didn’t go home for, Steve and Charles inviting him out to stay with them over the holidays. They had shown the day after Christmas full of apologies and presents to make up for the fact that they had been awful.
They had patched things up and came to the agreement that he would stay at school for the breaks like Christmas and Spring Break, but would come home for the summer.
During their last Christmas break their senior year, Vince was whining.
“I’m not whining, Steve!” Vince protested. “I’m complaining. There’s a difference!”
“There is nothing wrong with my music taste!” Steve cried. “Just because I don’t go in for that screaming, guitar shrieking garbage, doesn’t mean it’s bad!”
Vince buried his head in his hands. “It’s not garbage, Steve!”
“It gives me literal migraines, dude,” Steve reminded him. “Like if you had metal music that didn’t involve screaming throughout the whole the thing, I might be more open to the genre. But until then, I will listen to my Duran Duran, Depeche Mode, and Tears for Fears.”
“That’s pop trash, man,” Vince informed him. “You call mine garbage but that is trash.”
“It’s not pop!” Steve defended, waving his arms around. “It’s alt rock and electronica, but it is not pop!”
Vince waved his hand dismissively. “It’s all the same if it’s not metal.”
“And you say I’m particular about music,” Steve said a with huff of laughter. “You’re a music snob, Vincent Harlow and it is an ugly look.”
Vince burst out laughing. “All right, maybe I am and I will convert you to metal even if I can’t convert you to my faith.”
“Vince, Lord love you and so do I,” he snarked, “but there is no way in your hell that I am giving up smoking and alcohol for replacement swears and stupid ass underwear.”
Vince pretended to be offended but it wasn’t serious. They both respected each other too much to try and convert the other to their way of life.
“Isn’t metal against your religion, anyway?” Steve huffed, throwing his pillow at his roommate. “All that Satanic stuff?”
“It’s my little rebellion,” Vince admitted, catching the pillow before it hit his face. “It’s like caffeinated drinks. Not technically against the Word of Wisdom, but modern times call for modern inspiration. But like Hades am I going to give up my Dr. Pepper up, same with my metal music.”
“Whatever you say, man,” Steve said shaking his head.
Vince threw the pillow back and it hit square in the face. “Where are your reflexes, dude? Like you didn’t even attempt to dodge that.”
“I’m so exhausted...” Steve whined and buried his head into the pillow to let out a little scream. He lifted his head back up and sighed. “I am six months away from a teaching degree and it feels closer to six years. My blood has been replaced by Cherry Coke and coffee, every bone in my body aches, and my dad is still telling me it’s not too late to change my major.”
“Your dad is like an old English Bulldog my gran gran had when I was twelve,” Vince said with a wince, “once he had his teeth on something, it took a lot to get that dumb thing to let go.”
Steve snorted. “I think I’d take that over the yappy thing my grandmother had. It was a peach toy poodle who was blind and deaf and only ever bit, yapped, or peed all over everything. I saw my dad kick it once for it trying to bit three year old me, best day ever.”
Vince laughed. “Regardless, you dad needs to back up and get off your back and let you live your life.”
“I know, right?” he huffed, rolling his eyes. “But he’s been supportive in other ways, so I mostly just let it slide...”
“But you’ve reached exhaustion levels and would like him to back off so you could get on with graduating?”
“Yes please,” Steve begged.
“I’ll tell you what,” Vince said cocking his head. “Take the weekend, make me a mix tape of all your favorite songs, and I’ll do the same and we’ll see if we can’t find a common ground in our music somewhere. No homework, no parents, no stress, just you, a record player and a half dozen recording cassette tapes.”
Steve thought about it for a moment. “My dad is going out with friends this weekend. Rhys and Ria are in town visiting their son and they were bringing a friend of theirs with them. So yeah, that sounds like a fun way to take over the house.”
“We can even have it be our Christmas presents to each other!” Vince enthused. “I mean in addition to what I’ve already got you, of course.”
Steve grinned back at his friend. “Of course.”
Just then the door swung open and Dustin yelled out, “Vince, Vince! Corroded Coffin is releasing a new album in March!!”
~
Where are Mike and Will? Being gay back in Hawkins. Also Steve's dad means well, but is stressing out about Steve's future.
I love when romanceable videogame charas have a friendship version of the romance scenes.... i love you can eat cookies with sera in the roof and they are "inquisition cookies" instead of "us cookies"... i love that you can spend the night with gale telling him he doesnt need to sacrifice himself and he is like "fuck you for bringing me friends and adventures now i dont want to die" thats the good stuff... i love that if you don't do the romance you get different convers that add a lot to how the character acts with a good friend, instead of just "oh well you didn't date them so no special bonding for you in friendship either"
Ooooh for the fic suggestions—max or will see some marks on Steve and worry that Eddie did something to him (they’re just kinky)
(could honestly be any of the kids I just went for the ones from abusive backgrounds for extra ouch)
I didn't mean for this to take a month, but here we are. 2364 words. (also on ao3)
(i wish you would write a fic where)
Will doesn’t know what to do. He likes Eddie well enough—despite how much Mike obviously likes him, and how much that makes his insides twist with jealousy, but that’s not Eddie’s fault.
Except he keeps catching glimpses of bruises on Steve’s wrists, or where his shirt rides up a little sometimes, or once on his face, beneath some amateurly applied concealer. That might be Eddie's fault.
He’s seen it before. On his mom, on his brother… hell, in the bathroom mirror a few times before Lonnie decided to take off. Would’ve been more if his entire childhood hadn’t been a master class in making himself small and easy to overlook. Eddie isn’t like him.
Will is just worried that Eddie might be a little too much like him. Brash and full of opinions and righteous conviction (like refusing to reschedule for Lucas), most of which gets a pass because Eddie likes the same nerd stuff as the Party but Will is good at pattern recognition. Same brands of cigarettes and beer, because they’re cheapest. Not that Eddie drinks around them—not much, just at backyard parties where the rest of the older crowd is drinking too, and even then nothing excessive. There were similarities but nothing truly alarming.
Not until Steve.
Will keeps telling himself that it doesn’t make something green and nasty rear up in his chest when Steve and Eddie sit them down one afternoon and explain that they’re together. He should be happy for them. He is happy for them! And happy that they’re paving the way for his own eventual introduction of his first boyfriend who he’s trying to come to terms with not being Mike. With it never being Mike. Even though Eddie can have a guy like Steve, in a place like Hawkins, when they’ve only really been friends for the moral equivalent of five minutes.
He’s totally not jealous. That has nothing to do with it.
Nothing at all to do with the fact that he makes sure that the first person he mentions the bruises to is Max, who also knows a thing or two about getting shoved around or grabbed too hard behind closed doors, and how likeable the perpetrator can continue to seem in the foreground. Or that the second person is Dustin, and that Dustin takes it and runs with it because he still feels guilty about Steve being tortured under Starcourt just because he’d intercepted that Russian code. Until the entire extended Party, Nancy and Jonathan included, are on board for an intervention. They didn’t get Robin, figuring she might be too close to see it clearly, but of course she’s there when they all go to talk to Steve.
Who isn’t cooperating at all.
“Are you guys fucking kidding me?” Steve snaps, both hands on his hips. At his side, Robin has her arms crossed with a judgmental frown, her eyes drilling into Will like he should know better. (He’s avoiding meeting that look.) “You think—Jesus Christ, I can’t even say it. I can’t believe any of you would actually think Eddie is like that. After the whole town tried to hunt him down with torches and pitchforks based on some bullshit murder accusations? He’s your fucking friend!”
“You’re our friend too, Steve,” Dustin argues, plaintive and visibly uneasy with how this is going so far. “And you’ve got—We’ve all seen the bruises. You can’t be mad at us for being worried, after all the shit you’ve been through.”
Something softens in Steve’s glare, but not by much. “Okay, so be concerned about me. Ask me if I have, I don’t know, low iron or something that makes me bruise easy. Which I don’t, but don’t… Don’t jump to my boyfriend abusing me, that’s messed up.”
Nancy steps forward to back Dustin up. “You do have a history of putting up with more than you probably should in a relationship,” she says.
“Don’t.” Steve brandishes a pointer finger at her, expression suddenly pinched. “If you want to talk about you and me, and maybe even actually apologize for some of that, just… do that. Don’t try to turn it on me like it’s some sort of trump card for why I should take this bullshit seriously.”
Will sees the word bullshit hit Nancy like a slap, and she steps back again, retreating to lean subtly back against Jonathan. He’s starting to feel antsy about how this is going.
“And the rest of you,” Steve continues, addressing the entire group. “I’m only going to say this once: Eddie doesn’t do anything to me that I don’t want him to do, and I don’t owe any of you an explanation for that. Maybe one on one, if you have questions and aren’t being judgmental assholes, but not in a group ambush like this. And you don’t want to find out what happens—what I, personally, will do if any of you go to Eddie about this shit, or if he ever catches wind of it. I’m not kidding. This goes in a goddamn vault.”
Frustrated, Will looks to Max. He knows that Billy used to grab her arm hard enough to leave marks, just like Lonnie. She was supposed to be the loudest voice in this! Instead, she looks uncharacteristically cowed. And sure, she’d also been the loudest proponent of maybe Eddie doesn’t even realize he’s going too far or maybe it’s not even Eddie, Steve still lives with his parents. After all, Max and Eddie are neighbors; she understands the stigma of living in Forest Hills better than anyone else here.
Maybe Hargrove Senior had never put hands on her mom, though. Maybe she doesn’t get that, how it can happen between people who say they love each other.
Something is rising in Will’s throat like bile, and he realizes too late that it’s words.
“Even if you think you asked for it, he still shouldn’t be hitting you!”
For the first time in all this, because Will has been hanging on the fringes of the crowd and not contributing much, Steve’s eyes land on him. It’s a heavy gaze, laced with both surprise and uncomfortably piercing scrutiny. Will isn’t really as close to Steve as his friends are—Dustin and Lucas especially, and even Mike has that long-running tension with him because the guy dated his older sister—and he’s not used to receiving the full brunt of his attention. Hadn’t realized how intense it is, or thought about how perceptive Steve can sometimes be.
And now everyone else is looking too. His skin is prickling unpleasantly all over under the microscope, sweat starting to gather at his hairline because he’s not made for the spotlight like this. It’s like—fuck, it’s like he’s something out of the Upside Down, like booger-sized Dart when they’d tried to shine a warm lamp directly at him in the AV closet. Like he’s always going to be the freak in the room trying to shrink out of the light.
And Jonathan is staring at him with recognition and guilt and something that makes Will want to cringe or maybe throw things. Because, fuck, Jonathan caught even more of Lonnie’s shit than he did! Jonathan is the reason Will first learned to start reading into bruises, the ones his big brother earned while standing in front of him like a human shield! Why is he looking at him like Will is in the wrong here?
“Okay,” Steve says, almost a sigh, even though it feels to Will like no one has spoken in approximately a million years. “Okay, just… It’s really not like that, Will. It’s… replacing bad memories with better ones. He only does what I specifically ask him to do and we talk it out before and after, and that’s all I’m gonna say here because you’re a kid and this is private, personal stuff. But also, please try to remember that he’s not… whoever you’re thinking of. He’s Eddie.”
Will crosses his arms tight across his chest and finds a point on the wall to stare at so he doesn’t have to look at anyone. He’s pretty sure Jonathan is still watching him. Feels like he’s burning up and going to be sick at the same time. Feels like Steve was being pointed, as if he’d actually dropped the words he’s not Lonnie in the room like a fucking atomic bomb—but that’s not what happened, and Will swallows down anything he might say about it because one more correction in front of everyone and he will actually implode.
He waits the rest of it out. Not that there’s much more to it—this rescue, or intervention, or mistake, whatever it is. Robin puts in her two cents, how “I know you’re all coming from a good place but trust me, that is absolutely not what’s happening here.” And fine, maybe he was wrong. But better to ask about the worst and find out it’s not than assume the best and be wrong about that, right?
When they all leave, Will is the first out the door. He hears footsteps catching up, and of course it’s Dustin because Dustin takes things and runs with them.
“Well that was awkward,” Dustin announces. “But at least it’s okay, right? Steve isn’t getting hurt, it’s all consensual… It’s unusual, but some people are into that. Ropes and handcuffs, real M&M stuff.”
“Pretty sure it’s not named after a candy,” Will relies flatly. His face still feels like it’s burning, and thinking about Steve and Eddie in the context of ropes and handcuffs… Well, it’s not helping. He’s aware he’s being kind of a dick, but he’s also aware that Dustin is only the first of many who are going to try and trap him in a conversation about this.
~
Surprisingly, everyone does end up leaving Will alone about it, even Jonathan. He’s too busy keeping his head down to really put too much thought into it until a few days later, when he realizes that maybe Steve had asked them all not to.
Because when he gets home from the arcade, the Beemer is the only car in the driveway and Steve is sitting on his front steps, clearly waiting for him.
“I brought some themed snacks,” Steve says as Will (reluctantly) approaches, and holds up two colorful bags of candy with the dorkiest grin the world has ever seen. “I got plain and peanut, wasn’t sure if you just like peanuts or both like me.”
It’s fucking M&Ms. Goddamn it Dustin.
“If I say I’m allergic to chocolate can we skip this whole thing?” he asks, knowing its rhetorical the second it comes out of his mouth. He already has his house keys out, stepping around Steve to open the front door—not that a deadbolt would stop military goons from breaking in like they had in California, but try telling his mom that.
Steve shrugs. “I’ve got gummy worms in the car. They might be a little melted together though.”
“… Chocolate is fine.”
~
An hour or so later, Steve lets himself out the front door. Will remains in his room, sitting cross-legged on the floor next to his bed, head leaned back, face still about ten degrees hotter than normal and green candy coating still on his fingers from the free peanut M&Ms.
As far as one-on-one talks went, it hadn’t been worse than the time his mom had given him the whole Birds and the Bees spiel. Steve was just the right mix of informative, funny, and surprisingly weird that made everything seem a little easier to swallow. And he’d done Will the courtesy of not talking about anything too much in terms of him and Eddie, because Will doesn’t really want to know about his friends-slash-babysitters’ sex lives—and, more importantly, not saying a word about Lonnie.
But he hadn’t beaten around the bush, either.
So now Will knows a lot more about S&M than he ever really expected to, including all the red flags that Steve says he knows to keep an eye out for. How the guy in charge, the one doling out… bruises and stuff, has the responsibility of safe wording out if he ever thinks something is off too. How the whole thing is about knowing and trusting your partner on both sides, and making sure both have a good time. How either of them can drop afterwards without aftercare, and what dropping means, and the ways they take care of each other to prevent it from happening.
It hadn’t occurred to Will that it could go both ways like that.
And the visual aid skin mag Steve had presented him with, along with a fucking receipt that showed it had only been purchased the day before to prove it was unused—Jesus Christ. But. Will flips through it now that Steve is gone and it’s not anything scary. Basically just light bondage stuff, and there’s this one picture he gets caught on where the guy tied up is being touched so… so reverently it makes something in him twist even as his throat felt suddenly tight.
Maybe Steve was onto something here, because Will kind of gets the fond look he’d had in his eye while pressing lightly on some of his own bruises during their talk.
Will is never going to admit to anyone, least of all Steve, but this is going beneath the loose floorboard under his bed. It’s not necessarily anything he’d actually want to try for himself in real life, but teenage beggars can’t be choosers when it comes to free gay porn in a small town.
Distantly, he hears the front door open and close again, and Jonathan’s voice calling, “Hey, Will? You good?”
Will sighs—Guess the reprieve is over. But he’s feeling a little better about the whole thing, ready to put the whole incident behind him and just hang out with his brother, so he gets up and heads to his bedroom door with a call of, “Yeah. Hey, you want to watch reruns or listen to the Clash or something?”
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