Okay so there's all the headcanons and AUs about Chrissy lives and helps the party clear Eddie's name but what if they failed. She's alive but he gets arrested anyway.
There's zero proof that he did anything (because he didn't) but in a small town in the middle of nowhere, confirmation bias has gotten the best of them. Eddie's lawyers are doing their best but there's only so much they can do against Jason's family and Fred's family and Patrick's family and all of their lawyers, not to mention the fact that the entire town has turned against him except for Hellfire, the Party, his uncle, and Chrissy.
The trial's a shit show, the judge is an asshole, the prosecution are assholes, the population of Hawkins are fucking assholes. And he loses. Of course he does, because there was never any other way this could have gone. Not when the real suspect is an interdimensional mind demon thing. Not when the entire town has been itching for an excuse to see him locked up. It's like blinders on a racehorse; they had him in their sights, finally, and he has no way out.
Chrissy had spent enough time in Hawkins' "high society" to know that these people fear and abhor that which they do not understand. They couldn't understand him, she could see that now. She watched them tear through his room, his car, his family, his history, his entire life, only to come up empty but still point at him and say "he did it" anyway.
It makes her furious. She wants to tear the limbs off of everyone in that courtroom, but she can't. So she does the next best thing.
She goes to law school.
She'd never really had the best grades, but now she has something to work for. It takes some time, but she never stops advocating, never stops fighting. Nancy's a big help, too. She's a journalist, she's got contacts in the industry that are helping to get the word out.
She writes him letters the whole time, too. By the time she graduates, damn near at the top of her class, she's realized that while she started this thing because of that deep-rooted sense of injustice that came out of watching the boy who saved her life get torn to shreds on the stand, it's turned into something else. Now she's fighting for him because she loves him (and maybe she had all along).
Eventually they get enough support from enough people, from enough big names (fucking Metallica, for one -- she couldn't tell them exactly how Eddie used their music to save her life, only that he did) that he's granted a new trial. This time, he doesn't get a shitty state-appointed attorney. He gets Chrissy fucking Cunningham, and she's not going down without a fight. (She feels it's the least she can do. She loves him, she owes him, she still feels like it's her fault, in a way.)
It's a long and gruelling process, appeals and analysis and arguments. She calls a probably record-setting number of character witnesses, brings the Party in to provide an alibi. (They all remember that week down to the last detail, even after all these years. Scars might fade but those memories don't.)
She's determined to beat this thing. She can tell that it's almost beaten Eddie, she knows that if they lose again he's going to give up, and she's not going to let that happen.
Finally they make it to trial and it's nowhere near as cinematic or dramatic as she had been imagining it for the last few years. It's the same agonizing slowness as the first time around, only this time there's hope. A glimmer of hope, a flash of hope, a blinding fucking beam of hope.
The place is packed this time, too, but it's mostly people there in support. Eddie nearly falls out of his chair when he sees James Hetfield sitting there. For him.
Chrissy finally gets to tear apart everyone that had been in that courtroom, only she gets to do it the way she's always done it best: with her words. She's got the odds stacked against Hawkins. They had no investigation, no evidence, just a hunch. They couldn't figure it out, couldn't explain it, so they called it a cult killing and found somebody weird!
The jury is appalled, thankfully. How could anyone possibly get convicted on such little evidence? The verdict is a unanimous not guilty, and then...it's all over.
Well, it's not over.
Eddie's released, he's reunited with his Hellfire, the Party, his uncle. Chrissy.
He loves her, too. Always has. How could he not, after all she'd done for him? He tells her he wants to marry her as soon as she'll let him and she says that he could've asked any time in the last however many years and she would have said yes in a heartbeat.
But first, she leads him away from the chaos for a moment of quiet. He thanks her and she shakes her head. She'd done it all for him the same way he'd stood on top of his trailer with his guitar.
And she tells him that. She'd been telling him for years, even if he couldn't hear it. She'd said it when she graduated high school, graduated college, passed her LSATS. She'd said it when she passed the bar and walked at her law school graduation and right before she walked into the courtroom. She says it again now, just so he knows she means it, because he'd meant it and he means everything to her.
every html learning website is like “um oh btw if you do it like THIS? youre a fucking loser what the fuck are you doing? youre such a failure. you should quit coding forever and also blow up your computer”
