no Upside Down after season 3 or maybe ever or maybe it comes after all this has happened who knows AU where one day Chrissy is sat with Jason and the other popular kids in the cafeteria as always, twirling her food around her plate but not eating it as always, listening but not really joining in the chatter as always and Eddie has just finished his bi weekly tirade from the lunch table and the jocks and some of the cheerleaders and especially Jason are all saying rude, mean and homophobic things about him and the other ‘freaks’ and Chrissy snaps
she tells them they’re being awful, she’s only spoken to Eddie once or twice and he’s been nothing but nice to her and she’s watched him scoop up freshman that were struggling finding friends year after year and yeah maybe he’s a bit intense but a lot of people are, he just likes different things to them, so she stands up, grabs her lunch tray and speeds over to Eddie’s table, aware of all the eyes now on her
(if Steve Harrington can work up the nerve to commit social suicide and come out of it with seemingly a tight knit group of friends, even if some of them seem to be children, why can’t she do the same?)
she taps Eddie on the shoulder and meekly asks if she can sit with them all and the freshman that had joined him that year all silently shuffle down to make room for her, she recognises Lucas from the basketball team and smiles at him and he gives her a sweet smile back
Eddie stares at her for a moment longer like he can’t believe that Chrissy Cunningham is sat at his lunch table then jumps into action, introducing her to everybody and telling her this isn’t the first time their paths have crossed, for once she eats everything on her lunch tray and doesn’t feel bad about it
later in her maths class Robin Buckley leans over to whisper to her that what she did at lunch today was really cool and Chrissy blushes for some reason but smiles and takes the compliment and they whisper for a while until the teacher tells them both to be quiet
Nancy Wheeler also smiles at her across the corridor as they all shuffle out of school and it catches Chrissy off guard because Nancy doesn’t usually go out of her way to be that nice to anybody, she’s not mean but she sticks to her circle, which just happens to be very small
she avoids Jason like the plague for the rest of the day and the next morning and at lunch she immediately makes a beeline for Eddie’s table again, who welcomes her with open arms, this goes on for about a week and then on Friday Dustin Henderson tells her they’ll be hanging out at the arcade the next day if she wants to come and she’d turned down an invitation to join a Hellfire so she says okay just so he’d smile
(she actually has a really good time and later in the afternoon when Eddie’s band members have ditched and the kids rush across the road ‘to visit Steve’, as in Steve Harrington?, Eddie offers to share a joint and Chrissy goes for it and soon she’s telling Eddie about how she wants to dump Jason and how she’d been avoiding cheer practice because she was afraid the other girls were going to be mean to her now and how does Eddie not care? Chrissy wants to not care!)
anyway Eddie ends up collecting another sheep and a bestie at that, Chrissy helps him pass his class, she dumps Jason, her and Eddie get pulled into the Party and co (for Upside Down things or just regular stuff who cares) and Steve would definitely help Chrissy with the whole being fallen teen royalty thing too and just let Chrissy be happy with her friends and maybe her gf Robin pls
