public broadcast morticia, platinum record gomez
Steve Harrington/Eddie Munson wc: 3.9k | T | @stevieweek day 3: horror/princess; transfem!stevie; post-canon; getting back together AO3
Stevie shuts the prop book in her lap slowly, allowing the scene to transition out of the story animation and back to real life. For the seconds it is in frame, the red cloth-bound cover of the prop stands out in stark contrast against the gold and black of her skirt. The camera pans slowly back up to her face.
“That would be scary, wouldn’t it?” she asks her future viewing audience. “To wake up one morning and not recognize who you are.”
Wings beat, and a grey tentacle wraps around her shoulder. Robin clicks and coos, moving the demobat puppet in time with the noises. She's probably asking a real question, but Sevie hasn’t picked up much of the language she’s invented for her puppet.
It’s all scripted anyway.
“I agree, Demi. Not having an adult to go to makes it scarier. But wasn’t it brave to keep going even though he was scared?”
Robin chirps and squeaks again. Flapping the puppet’s wings with the special pull cord, she maneuvers the bat around the stage to make it look like Demi is flying.
“Of course, Demi, I’ll always be someone safe for you to go to. I love you.”
Her eyes sting as she says it. God, she cries so much more easily these days. Fucking hormones.
The puppet shivers and shakes in a full-bodied chirp. I love you too.
A howl sounds from just outside the room. Signaling the end of this segment and the start of the next one.
“Dart must hear someone at the door! Let’s see who’s come to visit.”
The pace is her favorite part of the show. Slow, easy. All done as much as possible in one smooth take. Stevie pushes herself up from the dark-patterned wingback chair, smoothing down her skirt, she walks from one room of the set to the other. The camera trails her, giving Robin a chance to move throughout the specially designed paths that keep her out of frame while she’s holding the Demi puppet.
Unlike Demi, Dart doesn’t that closely resemble his namesake. That was for the feds more than the children. Demi had some aesthetic changes to make her look more friendly, rounded body and visible eyes. Dart was changed fundamentally. Instead of the puckered fleshy face, Stevie can run a hand through sparse fur between two pointed ears. The animatronics Dustin helped their puppet master build let them move, giving the whole face more subtle movement than the other puppet is capable of. Good for the larger, German Shepherd-sized build. Even if the focus of the camera is usually on the face, the top jaw dog, wire-haired and angular, and beneath its pink nose, a split bottom jaw that opens in two wide, distinct joints. More cute than dangerous when a long forked tongue lolls out from it.
As Stevie’s thick rubber heels thunk against the floor of the set, Dart’s pit bull stump tail wags in its excitement at her approach. Back from college, Dustin is operating it today. He maneuvers the body so it faces her now that she’s come to get the door. The charmingly dumb look on its face gets her every time — a grin she has to school back to a more appropriately sized smirk.
From off stage, someone cues Dart’s reminding bark.
“Has our guest arrived, Dart?”
Dart can nod when Dustin operates it. Always more sure than the rest of them about the intelligence that lurked beneath those demo creatures. Still, someone once again makes the appropriate answering cue.
Robin is standing outside the set, positioning Demi in a window. She chirps and flaps, Stevie’s cue to begin introducing who is behind the door.
“Today’s scary job will have us confronting our glossophobia, that’s our fear of public performance. If your palms get sweaty when you answer a question at school or you think about throwing up when you have a piano recital, we picked this job to give you a special scare.”
Never a theater kid, Robin teases her at how quickly she’s picked this up. Her cues, like this one to open the door, are always hit. She knows exactly what her face is doing, the way her dark lips hint at a smile, and the way the dark of her makeup makes something dangerous and anticipatory flash in her eyes. She’s yet to have a guest not spook just a little when the door swings open. The danger that she used to be humming under her skin was obvious to them when the sound and light cues hit, making the stage flash and sound with lightning and thunder.
It’s one of the joys of the job.
The outside of the “house” is dark, a dual-purpose choice to hide the sound lot that pairs with how nice it looks in post to have the first glimpse of their guest be in that horror movie strobe.
“Welcome home,” she says as always to the blackness outside her door. Thunder booms first, then lightning streaks, and she’s looking at someone who shouldn’t be here. “Eddie Munson, front man of the band Corroded Coffin.”
She steps numbly out of the way, letting Eddie through her door.
Six years.
Dart rubs its head against her skirt, a move that would be accompanied by a whimper if it were able to make its own sound effects. As it is, she takes the comfort she can get from Dustin. Robin makes a trill; she's not a good enough actor to disguise the nerves in it.
It’s too much to deal with, so as with all things, she decides it’s better not to. There’s a procedure here, a routine. Stevie turns on her heel and starts walking to the set they’re supposed to be on. Eddie can fall into step behind her or, hell, maybe she’ll get lucky and he’ll run away. He’s always been good at that.
Stalking is what she’s doing; it might be what Eddie did too, to find his way over here. Hers means she’s moving too fast through the set for the pace they’re setting, the emotions she’s feeling moving her body like a rocket through the familiar frame of her pretend house. Eddie’s means he’s ruined her fragile peace.
It’s a real multifaceted word. Maybe they should use it for a show. Maybe they could get a zookeeper to bring a big cat on, too.
Eddie finds the guest’s seat at the table, sitting down across from her at the kitchen island, ruining the slight lift of her mood at the plans for a new episode with his continued presence.
He’s already got his hands in the spread on the table. Fingers smudged with the dyed red frosting, pinching a brownie carved into a coffin shape. It looks garish in the bright light of this set. The kitchen, the only set she refused to bow to the other aesthetics of the house. It unnerves instead in its rich, pastel, Stepford glory. Eddie looks just as out of place here -- even with the spiderweb detailing on the cabinets -- as he did in her kitchen in Hawkins.
“Good evening, Eddie,” she says what she’s supposed to say.
His mouth is full, his answer muffled in rich chocolate she baked herself before shooting.
“Why don’t you tell us about your band? I’m a big fan of your guitarist, Jeff Best.”
Jeff, the person who was supposed to be on the sound stage when she opened the door. The band member she had approved of, after being told by producers how enthusiastically the band had been supporting the show. How they wanted on, desperately.
She asks, “What’s the scariest part of your job?”
And asks, “Isn’t it frightening performing in front of thousands and thousands of people?”
And asks, “Are you ever afraid the stage will collapse?”
And asks, “Pyrotechnics are fires and fireworks that can be done inside, but aren’t you worried that something might go wrong?”
This segment has always been less of an interview and more of an exploration of worst-case scenarios. The things that frighten, the accidents that end up on the news, but rarely ever happen. A way to show the kids who tune in that the world can be scary, but it’s usually not. That fear of the coulds shouldn’t be the thing that keeps them from trying.
But she flings these worst cases at Eddie like knives, like saying they might manifest into coming true.
But each interview always ends the same way.
“What’s the scariest thing you’ve ever overcome?”
Eddie spins a chocolate eyeball around on the white china plate. It blurs with the movement until it’s just a white sphere moving around and around the border of fine, red blood splatter. Is he trying to figure out how to skirt his NDA? Is he inventing some stage diving accident or bar fight? Some story that will make him sound like the worldly rockstar the world knows him as?
Sure, he’s softened his aesthetic for this appearance. The only leather is his jacket. His wide-legged black pants, with the red and black brocade vest, straddle the line between professional and showman.
But he’s still Eddie, dungeon master drama queen to the last.
“The scariest thing I’ve ever done?” he repeats. Incorrectly to that point, done implies it’s scary because of his fuck up, overcome implies it’s the world. They’d workshopped the wording of that final question for days before her first interview.
Eddie continues, because if there’s one thing he’s going to do it’s continue whether she wants it or not. “The scariest thing I’ve ever done is go attempt to make amends with someone that I hurt very badly and hope that she’s good enough to forgive me.”
She’s supposed to ask a follow-up here, but she really doesn’t want to.
“Some of those were in the present tense, Mr. Munson.” She’s borrowing words from Robin now, stealing them from somewhere in her soulmate's brain because all Stevie knows is a blank rage that she hopes isn’t in her eyes.
That’s bad television.
“You’re right. The going has happened, the attempt is ongoing, and the fear is in both.”
A clock’s chime fills the room. Loud, sourceless, she’s taken to thinking of it like a school bell, and that’s better than remembering a grandfather clock and Max’s broken legs. Eddie flinches back, not that big a fan of the show apparently. Midnight ends every episode.
“Time sure flies, doesn’t it, Eddie?” A thump comes from behind them, a spot on the third wall out of the sight of the framing of their primary camera. Robin in position for her favorite job.
Stevie gives her her cue, “Gordon?” Robin, on her mark and her applebox, brings down the thick, fleshy, grey hand with the too-long fingers and the blackened nails onto Eddie’s shoulder. It’s weighted at the front, dislodges Eddie from his seat, and jostles him backward. “Introduce Eddie to the others? I know he’s just dying to stay for a while.”
Hand in place on Eddie’s shoulder, all Robin has to do is pull and he’s stumbling off stage like he’s on a vaudeville hook.
She blinks slowly, wills her blood pressure down. Her heart has been thumping in her ears since she laid eyes on Eddie, and even now that he’s technically off camera, she still can’t let go of her rage.
But there’s a show to finish, and she’s going to do her job. She can ignore Eddie’s big, brown eyes that somehow manage to haunt her even in the dark beyond the camera. She can turn down the camera, face it head-on.
She can. She does. “And don't forget: you're smarter than you think, braver than you feel, and you always have a friend right here. Until next time.”
She’s moving even before she can hear the director call, “Cut.”
“Whose fucking idea was this?”
“Not me,” Robin answers, gleeful at Stevie’s rage. She’s got Eddie still pinned in place with her long arm.
“Listen, Stevie, baby.”
“Nope,” Robin says, popping that P and giving Eddie a shake.
Not that anyone but Stevie would have heard that over the way she yells, “You don’t get to call me that.”
“Eddie, dude, not that it’s not good to see you, but I talked to Jeff,” Dustin comes out from the set with his hands already raised.
“And I saw that, Henderson, but don't fret, I wasn't offended. I figured you wouldn't mind if I remedied the situation myself.”
“Never let it be said you've ever learned a single lesson the easy way, Munson,” Robin says.
“Yes, and I'll be glad to catch up with you about that, Buckley. And with you, Henderson. But right now, I would love a moment with the talent. Stevie?”
It's on her tongue to say no again. To send him packing, the quest failed. Let him turn it into some ballad of spurned love and wretched harpies; she doesn't care.
But she doesn’t. She doesn’t. She says, “Five minutes.” And stalks off toward her dressing room.
He doesn't jingle anymore. That strikes her somewhere in the chest. The sound of his trailing behind her, the same melody as hers, told in a round: thick rubber heels on a concrete floor.
She sits down at her vanity and starts stripping off the thick paint of her on-camera makeup. As she slathers on cold cream, she can see Eddie find a seat on the coffee table. It throws her back to that last summer together, getting caught in her mother’s bathroom by a boy she liked in ways she didn’t know how to say yet.
The more things change.
“Listen, Stevie.” It’s funny how she can still tell when he’s started a sentence, not knowing how he plans to end it.
“You came all this way and you didn’t think about how you wanted to actually apologize? Did you get so lost in the drama of crashing my set that you didn’t think of what would happen when it was over?” She keeps her eyes on him in the mirror as she says it, moving through her routine like usual. With each condemnation, she takes her hand towel and wipes a little bit more of Stevie, Princess of the Dark, away until she’s bare-faced, annoyed, and just Stevie Henderson again.
“No,” he lies. “I mean, maybe. Look, Steph, for what it’s worth.”
She grabs her normal makeup, the lightweight stuff that doesn’t have to look good to the limited eye of the camera or sell a character that she’s only sometimes.
“It’s not worth a lot, Eddie. Let me try to save you some time. We finally gave in and gave the band the time of day, you leapt in ass first without a plan, because I’m Princess of the Dark, Princess Stevie, Lady Stevie of the Night, whatever the fucking branding has decided this week so I’ve got the image now. I’m not some baby freak borrowing wardrobe pieces from her socialite mom and her dyke best friend, I’m the right kind of metal that perpetual bachelor, frontman Eddie Munson can be seen with now. Does that about cover it?”
“No, no, Stevie, I swear.”
She can’t even slam down what’s in her hands. The stupid spongy applicator from her eyeshadow would get lost, and if she breaks another one of the eyeshadow colors, she’ll lose her mind. Setting it down gently does nothing to temper the absolute, white out emotion she’s feeling.
“You swear? You swear. The way you swore nothing would change. The way you swore you’d leave on tour and come back with nothing but stories and homesickness. That was the tour that you called me from Wichita to tell me you weren’t coming home, and you didn’t think it would work out if we tried to stay together. In case you forgot.”
“It’s not-”
“This was after you told me you didn’t want me to come when I offered. That it would be stupid of me to leave my -- easily abandoned -- job at the record store. But why would you want the idiot you’re about to leave playing merch girl as you wandered through the Midwest.”
“Are you finished?”
She’s got brown eyeshadow on one eye, her cheeks are pinked, and it’s not from blush. She’s pretty far from done. “That foot-in-mouth condition ended up being terminal, I guess.”
“Stevie.”
She can’t storm out if her eyes aren’t done. A half-done face is one thing, but it’s at least got to be even.
“Stevie, you’re getting mentioned in the same sentences as Elvira, R.L. Stine. You’re Sesame Street if the face was the Count and not Elmo. That’s you, that’s all you. It’s something you created from the ground up with nothing but your charm and vision, and yeah, stunning good looks and a little bit of black mailing the United States government.
“If you had come with us back then, you know what you’d be? My muse, sure. You’d be the merch girl that people whisper about, and wonder how many of the band members she’s sleeping with to get to play groupie. They’d find out things about you, and if you were lucky, they’d just make your life miserable.”
She can’t believe this. “Are you really trying to pull some ‘I left you to keep you safe,’ that is the biggest crock of shit I’ve ever heard in my life.”
Her face is done, she could leave. She’s given him more than the five minutes she promised.
But then Eddie’s standing. No, he’s collapsing, off the table to her feet. Hands clutched in her skirt, looking up at her from the floor. “You’re right, it wasn’t about you. It was about me being the same coward I‘ve always been. You know what I’m most afraid of, Steph? That one day you would wake up in our rank ass tour bus and you would resent me for trapping you and all of your potential.”
The vanity counter bites into the meat of her hands. “It took you six years to come here and say that.”
“Yeah, yeah, it did. And it was too long and it wasn't long enough. I would wait forever, Steph. It’s about who you are, not what you’ve become.”
“You’re contradicting yourself, Teddy.” He’s trapped her here, kneeling on her skirt the way he is. “Either you left so I could fill my full potential, which is pretty fucking bold to assume that everyone had that itch to leave Hawkins the way you did and that I wouldn’t have been just fine waiting tables or rewinding video tapes for the rest of my life. But it’s that or you love me no matter what, and it wouldn’t matter if I hung up the witch's broom.”
She’s feeling generous, and she likes how big and wide his cow eyes get when he’s desperate. It reminds her of different times. Eddie’s hand pulls hers off the vanity, and she lets him keep it. Let him pull it close to his chest. He’s probably imagining he’s some knight pledging some oath, and fuck even imaginging what he’s thinking endears her just a little bit more to him.
Letting him in was always going to be a mistake.
She’s never held a grudge as well as Robin.
“There isn’t anything you could do that would make me want you less.”
Still, in the last six years, she’s learned that even though she loves too hard and too long, sometimes it’s more important that she protect her heart. Like her head, it can’t take too many more beatings.
“You want a burger. You want a new record. You want a quick fuck with someone who knows what they’re doing. Wants are quick and fleeting, and sometimes they aren’t even that good. I can’t be a want, Eddie.”
He clutches her hand tighter. He drops his hold on her skirt so his other hand can grab her at the elbow instead. “Stevie, I need you. And if you send me packing, I’m still gonna need you. You’re it. You’re just- you’re it.”
“And if I didn’t follow you on tour, like some love-sick groupie? If I stayed here with the show, you couldn’t see me for weeks and months. You’d still need me?”
“Like air. I’ll call, I’ll write, I’ll come in and compose. I can be your first recurring guest or handle a puppet. Anything at your order.”
She can feel herself caving. Like a sink hole in her chest, the ground giving way to nothing but a yawning starvation. It’s been years, and she’s sunk all of her love and her care and the desperate need she has always had to be seen into this show. It was good, but there has always been so much of her to give.
So she spits back the worst thing he ever said to her.
“And I’m not just some stand-in for Chrissy Cunningham.”
She expects him to drop her arm. To scurry away like some frightened mouse now that the claws of the cat have dropped in front of it. To remember that before the tits and the smirky face she patterned off of Elvira, she was still always a mean girl.
The quiet collapse of Eddie’s face is less satisfying than the rage, the sadness in his eyes more like a kicked dog than an international rockstar.
“I shouldn’t have said that.” He says.
She could echo it, but hers needed to be said.
“If I thought you hated me, it was easier to leave. I could make you just one more thing I fucked up. I don’t see her when I look at you.”
She scoffs, and he pulls her closer.
“I don’t, Steph, I don’t. You’re not some damsel I couldn’t save. You’re the knight who rescued me. Let me make my oath, let me prove myself.”
“I want a new theme song. Something catchy, not metal. And you’re going to come on and do a special segment on the show about dealing with scary things, in terrible corpse makeup. Stop smiling, it’s not going to be fun.”
“I’m sure you’ll make it wretched.”
“I’m going to make you confront all the stupid shit you’re scared of and if you don’t act scared enough I’m going to bring in the rest of the band and tell them you’re the reason this is happening to them.”
“Gareth hates spiders, and Freak is scared of clowns.”
“And I want Jeff on the show. I had to cut out half of our interview questions about the things he’s had to face being black in the scene because you think you’re charming.”
He has the nerve to stand up, stepping on her skirt before he’s shoving his way into her space on the bench seat of her vanity. His hands are warm, fingers long and familiar as they curl around the curves she’s developed since they last saw each other.
“Whatever you want forever, Steph.” He whispers it into the side of her neck like he thinks he’s Gomez Addams, and she’s too weak to not be delighted.
“In that case, you can also explain all of this to Robin.”
“And when she kills me for wronging you?”
She grabs his chin between her fingers, lets her coffin-shaped nails dig into the stubbly skin until she can see the bite of pink crescent moons. “Don’t worry, I’ll bring you back. Everyone knows Miss Stevie is a witch.”
