and here’s to the friends that never stop dying

ao3 • writing tag • time travel au tag (stories & snippets) steddie drabbles & microfics ☕️ ko-fi vibes only. mostly steddie, sometimes clarkson.

🌷 WIPs & multi-chaptered stories

➤ i’ll try. i’ll try. (but i couldn’t be better) WIP M | 74k | 12/? | time travel au, angst, steve whump Sent back to 1983, Steve tries to save his friends from everything that's coming and takes on the battle against the Upside Down alone with El by his side.

➤ nice to meet you, where you been? T | 12k | 3/3 | tattoo shop au, pure fluff, trans eddie Chrissy sends Eddie to check out a tattoo shop. Little does he know it belongs to Steve Harrington, or that they’ll both be falling for each other at lightning

➤ untitled knight!Steve / bard!Eddie WIP T | 10k | 2/? | tumblr: part 1 | part 2 | ... regency au (freeform), enemies to lovers Eddie is a bard of great renown who returns to Hawkins ready and willing to spite the people who cast him out all his life. He is in search of his muse: the knight Dustin has been writing to him about who has inspired his greatest ballads and poems. Dustin’s Sir Steve is nowhere to be found, but Lord Harrington seems to hold a grudge against Eddie and he wants to find out why.

➤ see the stars shining through the cracks of my broken heart | steddie week fic T | 14.7k | 3/3 | tumblr: part 1 | part 2 | part 3 | part 4 | part 5 | part 6 | part 7 in which Eddie and Chrissy get engaged and Steve is heartbroken. yearning ensues. a story about love requited and unrequited, breaking and healing, and hope (steddie & buckingham)

➤ shattered on the cliff’s edge, trapped by the tides WIP M | 5.8k | 2/7 | tumblr: part 1 | part 2 | ... A steddie ghost story. Steve Harrington, disgraced and disowned by his father for moral insanity, has been haunted by eerie dreams of a mysterious lighthouse ever since he was a little boy. His lighthouse quickly turns from recurring night terror to gruesome reality when his superior delegates him to fix the broken light and be the new keeper. But he soon finds out that it is he who is being kept.

➤ tales of blue | who did this to you? WIP M | 13k | 3/4 | tumblr: part 1 | part 2 | part 3 | Eddie POV, pre-s4, injured Steve, hurt/comfort One summer's day in 1985, Eddie finds a very injured Steve in the boathouse, and even though he doesn't want the kind of trouble that this might bring, he can't just leave him there. So, scared though he is, he takes Steve to the one person he trusts to always make everything better.

➤ untitled kas!eddie / steve WIP M | 5.3k | 1/? | tumblr: part 1 | post-canon, hurt/comfort, enemies steddie The extent of his brain injuries and the intensity of his migraines is something Steve has been keeping secret from everyone. When he goes to Kas to let him feed, however, the sudden blood loss gives him a migraine. Kas decides to take care of him.

one shots & ficlets under the cut (ao3) -> ao3 link in the tumblr fic post

we, the measure of tragedy

–✨–

Grief will come with a certain sensation, a feeling that life is happening just a few feet away, just out of reach. It’s like floating but not in the sense that everything is light and easy. Floating, untethered, where everyone else has their feet on solid ground. Floating just out of reach from them so they’ll look at him without comprehension, only a certain sense of pity. Sympathy, sometimes. Compassion, rarely. 

Daniel has known this feeling most of his life. Emptiness where hands used to hold his, absence where fingers used to comb through his hair and dig up sand, dirt, and affection. He knows this. He can name them all, all these thoughts, all these emotions — can name them in languages that are long gone and some that never were. 

He can breathe through them, too. Smile them away. Push them aside and allow them to be an undercurrent as his fingers brush paper and stone and history. Turn them into artefacts no one is likely to unbury. 

–✨–

He’s hooked up to an IV because Janet said something about severe dehydration, among other things, and maybe if he asks nicely he can get something for the pain and the nausea. Although he doesn’t know how much of that is from being dragged and pushed and pulled around by a relentless Unas and how much of that is grief and shock and disbelief and the phantom of memories, just a few days old, knocking on his bones and the inside of his skin, reminding him of where these people used to be, just a few feet away from him at all times for three weeks. 

And now they’re a few feet below him. In the morgue, waiting for a decent burial, a decent ceremony, the same one everybody gets. Not a winter wedding with friends and family wearing dresses and suits, the most wonderful day of one’s life, no. A summer funeral, classified, with grim faces and dress-blues worn by no one who really, truly matters. 

That kind of feeling will make any man ask for things that might numb the pain. Janet only smiles at him sadly, her hand coming up to his hair, brushing dirt and sand out of it and making him feel seven again. He doesn’t tell her that he needs the pain killers even more now. He doesn’t let her see the tears rolling from his unseeing eyes either as he lies on his side, back turned toward her, knees pulled almost to his chest. 

–✨–

The morgue is a liminal space. One that practically invites people to linger without purpose. A place between life and death, where one meets the other with reverence that doesn’t really exist outside. Daniel wonders which one he is, what his role might be down here in the dark. […]

The motion activated lights have kindly shut off and it feels right to be here. He could have died on 888. He would have died on 888. In every other universe, he would have died in that cave. So he’ll just sit here a while and be the next best thing. 

like dude when will i learn that writing visceral emotions sometimes elicits those emotions!! that’s the whole point. and that when i feel them, it’s the exact opposite of bad writing actually.