Little Ol' Me

When he'd first arrived on his doorstep, three foster families in and nearly silent, Wayne had been pretty focused on just keeping him alive. There wasn’t a lot of extra cash floating around most weeks, but what he had, he spent on random treats he assumed kids liked. Colourful packages of cookies, cereal boxes with insanely dressed cartoons on them, and pastries that somehow tasted decent from the toaster.

Eddie wouldn’t eat any of them.

Wayne was at a loss. He’d thought, at 40, that he was never gonna be a father. Hadn’t prepared his life for the care and feeding of another living being. He didn’t even have a cat. There were things that people…like him. Well, they just weren’t meant to have families of their own. It was fine. He’d filled his life differently. But it meant that when his idiot kid brother fucked up once again, and his son had started floating around the universe, well. It didn't matter that he wasn't really ready. Wayne was hardly going to let that stand.

And Eddie wasn’t weak. He was hilarious and caring, a little firecracker of a kid who knew what he liked and wasn’t afraid to tell you. Wayne was enamoured; every day with an eight-year-old was an adventure he’d never anticipated having.

But he could not get the kid to eat.

He’d pick at anything Wayne handed him, politely taking bites every now and again. He was obviously eating enough to stay alive, but there was no excitement about food. None of the kid staples seemed to work.

Finally, in desperation, he just sets Eddie loose in the grocery store and tells him to pick whatever he wants. He anticipates regretting this choice. But Eddie, who is never shy, comes back with a single produce bag of lumpy, small sweet potatoes.

“These are my favourites,” he says quietly, placing them in Wayne’s basket. “Orange taters. Don’t know how to make ‘em, though.”

“No problem, kid,” Wayne says, baffled. “I’ll show you. We can make them together. Want anything else?”

“Nah, you cook good. Just missed orange taters.”

This is how Wayne discovers that his sister-in-law had never cooked anything that wasn’t frozen or from a box. A tiny detail, but it explained so much about Eddie’s relationship with food.

“Orange taters it is,” Wayne said, grabbing a few more.

That night, Wayne sliced up the sweet potatoes, tossed them with a little oil and salt, and roasted them until the edges caramelized. Eddie’s eyes lit up when Wayne set the plate in front of him. The kid devoured them, asking for seconds before Wayne had even sat down with his own portion.

After that, sweet potatoes became a staple. Wayne learned every possible way to prepare them; mashed with a little cinnamon, cut into fries, baked whole with butter melting into their centers. Eddie would eat anything if sweet potatoes were involved. Wayne started sneaking other vegetables alongside them, watching as Eddie’s hollow cheeks filled. Watching as Eddie opened up, taught Wayne how to freely be exactly who you were. Watching as Eddie took over cooking, preparing more vegetables than Wayne had ever known were available, like a five-star chef, dragging home library books of new information.

Seventeen years later, he can’t help but remember that little boy in the grocery store as he watches Eddie nervously fly around the kitchen of their little townhouse. It’s home now; now that his son had come back to him, now that he knew life was even more complicated than he’d thought. It was nice. Big enough for a family of two.

“You know he already likes you, right?” he teases, grabbing a second mug of coffee as Eddie flourishes a towel.

“Unc. Please. Not now. This is the most important meal I have ever cooked.”

“Sure,” he snorts. “Cuz that kid ain’t gonna say yes if he doesn’t like the pot roast. He already lives here.”

“Wayne,” Eddie says seriously, freezing.

Wayne raises his hands. “Sweet potatoes are burning.”

He dips out of the kitchen before the tea towel hits him in the back. He knows that everything will be fine. He’s excited, actually, to have both his kids in the same place. Cuz Steve Harrington, who’d never had much of a family of his own either? Yeah.

I reblogged this.

Author’s Note:  Thanks for stopping by my Master List!  I hope you enjoy and as always, feel free to leave a note, comment or ask!  I posted my first story in September of 2019 and really love how this blog has grown!  Thank you all for the incredible support and love!!

My character list has grown from one single dark haired villianized rascal to several!  Apparently, I have a type!!

Warnings:  The following stories are all for adults, include smut and are tagged on their individual story pages.  Please use that as your guideline!

He felt the tears in his eyes and his vision getting blurry as he watched everyone hug Will. And Steve just stood there, frozen, unmoving. His eyes burned as he tried to hold back the tears, the sadness and anger. Why couldn't that be him right now? Why did his parents have to hate him? Shouldn't they love him unconditionally as well? He's their son for fucks sake. But no. They don't love him, and he's not sure they ever did.

Silently Steve slipped through the door and made his way down to the basement where he could cry in peace. He was gonna talk to Will later, tell him he's proud of him. But right now, he can't.

He sat down on the ground, tucking himself into the corner and making himself as small as possible, hugging his knees to his chest as he finally let the tears fall. And once he let them, the dam broke and there was nothing he could do to stop them. He quietly sobbed into his knees, his entire body shaking.

WC: 645 | Pre-Steddie | Post S5 V1, AU: Eddie Munson Lives

Steve knows there’s no point in this.

In pulling the various vinyls from their shelves when Rob’s on break. In queuing the songs with no explanation. In letting the loud music interrupt their regular mix of pop and oldies.

It’s a jarring disruption- one that no doubt upsets the majority of their listeners. Not only that, it probably draws more attention to the Squawk than it should. Specifically military attention, the very thing that Steve is desperate to avoid day-in and day-out during Robin’s morning update on the state of things in Hawkins.

Logically, then, there should be no reason for him to take the metal records off the shelves and give them the air time they wouldn’t otherwise have.

Hope, however, has a funny way of overcoming logic.

My work for @steddiebbang and @thesecynicaldoeeyes

I had a blast reading the fic and then drawing this illustration. Ash can really paint a colourful picture with words.

Go start spooky season with steddie ghost story

get a bit of hope, you get

a cute birb photo

And Every. Single. Poster was vandalised, it literally looks like some of the most beautiful art you have ever seen

Written for the September 2025 round of @steddiemicrofic Prompt: dream, 434 words Rated: T Tags: Nightmares; Dreams; Blood and gore (brief); Eddie Munson loves Steve Harrington; Eddie Munson needs a hug

Blood.

In his mouth, his nose, his lungs. He claws at his throat, but there’s blood on his hands and blood on his face and blood on the ground, and he can’t escape the shrieking vortex of wings and fangs and pain that tears him apart, he’s drowning in his own blood, and-

Air. 

Eddie lies, gasping and shaking. The moon paints a silver stripe over the wall with the wedding photos, like it always does just after midnight. 

“Eddie?” Steve pokes his head from the pillows. “Dreams again?” 

The data does not support the assumption that all burned out people can “recover.” And when we fully appreciate what burnout signals in the body, and where it comes from on a social, economic, and psychological level, it should become clear to us that there’s nothing beneficial in returning to an unsustainable status quo. 

The term “burned out” is sometimes used to simply mean “stressed” or “tired,” and many organizations benefit from framing the condition in such light terms. Short-term, casual burnout (like you might get after one particularly stressful work deadline, or following final exams) has a positive prognosis: within three months of enjoying a reduced workload and increased time for rest and leisure, 80% of mildly burned-out workers are able to make a full return to their jobs. 

But there’s a lot of unanswered questions lurking behind this happy statistic. For instance, how many workers in this economy actually have the ability to take three months off work to focus on burnout recovery? What happens if a mildly burnt-out person does not get that rest, and has to keep toiling away as more deadlines pile up? And what is the point of returning to work if the job is going to remain as grueling and uncontrollable as it was when it first burned the worker out? 

Burnout that is not treated swiftly can become far more severe. Clinical psychologist and burnout expert Arno van Dam writes that when left unattended (or forcibly pushed through), mild burnout can metastasize into clinical burnout, which the International Classification of Diseases defines as feelings of energy depletion, increased mental distance, and a reduced sense of personal agency. Clinically burned-out people are not only tired, they also feel detached from other people and no longer in control of their lives, in other words.

Unfortunately, clinical burnout has quite a dismal trajectory. Multiple studies by van Dam and others have found that clinical burnout sufferers may require a year or more of rest following treatment before they can feel better, and that some of burnout’s lingering effects don’t go away easily, if at all. 

In one study conducted by Anita Eskildsen, for example, burnout sufferers continued to show memory and processing speed declines one year after burnout. Their cognitive processing skills improved slightly since seeking treatment, but the experience of having been burnt out had still left them operating significantly below their non-burned-out peers or their prior self, with no signs of bouncing back. 

It took two years for subjects in one of van Dam’s studies to return to “normal” levels of involvement and competence at work. following an incident of clinical burnout. However, even after a multi-year recovery period they still performed worse than the non-burned-out control group on a cognitive task designed to test their planning and preparation abilities. Though they no longer qualified as clinically burned out, former burnout sufferers still reported greater exhaustion, fatigue, depression, and distress than controls.

In his review of the scientific literature, van Dam reports that anywhere from 25% to 50% of clinical burnout sufferers do not make a full recovery even four years after their illness. Studies generally find that burnout sufferers make most of their mental and physical health gains in the first year after treatment, but continue to underperform on neuropsychological tests for many years afterward, compared to control subjects who were never burned out. 

People who have experienced burnout report worse memories, slower reaction times, less attentiveness, lower motivation, greater exhaustion, reduced work capability, and more negative health symptoms, long after their period of overwork has stopped. It’s as if burnout sufferers have fallen off their previous life trajectory, and cannot ever climb fully back up. 

And that’s just among the people who receive some kind of treatment for their burnout and have the opportunity to rest. I found one study that followed burned-out teachers for seven years and reported over 14% of them remained highly burnt-out the entire time. These teachers continued feeling depersonalized, emotionally drained, ineffective, dizzy, sick to their stomachs, and desperate to leave their jobs for the better part of a decade. But they kept working in spite of it (or more likely, from a lack of other options), lowering their odds of ever healing all the while. 

Van Dam observes that clinical burnout patients tend to suffer from an excess of perseverance, rather than the opposite: “Patients with clinical burnout…report that they ignored stress symptoms for several years,” he writes. “Living a stressful life was a normal condition for them. Some were not even aware of the stressfulness of their lives, until they collapsed.”

Instead of seeking help for workplace problems or reducing their workload, as most people do, clinical burnout sufferers typically push themselves through unpleasant circumstances and avoid asking for help. They’re also less likely to give up when placed under frustrating circumstances, instead throttling the gas in hopes that their problems can be fixed with extra effort. They become hyperactive, unable to rest or enjoy holidays, their bodies wired to treat work as the solution to every problem. It is only after living at this unrelenting pace for years that they tumble into severe burnout. 

Among both masked Autistics and overworked employees, the people most likely to reach catastrophic, body-breaking levels of burnout are the people most primed to ignore their own physical boundaries for as long as possible. Clinical burnout sufferers work far past the point that virtually anyone else would ask for help, take a break, or stop caring about their work.

And when viewed from this perspective, we can see burnout as the saving grace of the compulsive workaholic — and the path to liberation for the masked disabled person who has nearly killed themselves trying to pass as a diligent worker bee. 

#i clinically burned out in high school#i lost the ability for adrenaline/stress to motivate me to do anything#i had to relearn how to do EVERYTHING#i do sort of have a stress response back now#but it definitely does not work as well as pre-burnout#not that i’m testing that. lol#but the few years after burnout were actually very peaceful. i simply could not be stressed out i was incapable of it#i’m forever greatful i hit this point in high school because otherwise i would have inevitably hit it in college#where it would have had way worse consequences

Under the Desk

Inspired by this fanart by @paradimeshifts7 Steve Harrington/Eddie Munson | Rating: T | Word count: 986 | Tags: High School AU, established relationship, classroom shenanigans, fluff, Steve POV

Steve was supposed to be paying attention. Really, he was. Mr. Callahan’s droning about quadratic equations was the kind of thing that usually made his brain shut down on its own, but he’d promised himself — again — that this semester he’d at least try. At least pretend he cared. College applications were still a sore spot, and his dad’s voice lingered in the back of his head like an unwelcome echo.

But then there was Eddie.

Of course there was Eddie.

One second, Steve was tapping his pencil against the corner of his notebook, half-tuned to the lecture, and the next there was movement beside him, a sly grin shot in his direction, and then Eddie just… dropped. Like gravity gave up on him.

Just my Type

Steve Harrington/Eddie Munson @steddiemicrofic

written for ‘Experiment’ | rated: teen | WC: 398 | tags: gay bar, flirting, Eddie’s handcuffs, pre-season 4

😉 😉 😉

There are certain places you expect to see certain people, and there are certain places you would never in a million years expect to see others. The Phoenix Club, hours away from Hawkins— full of queers and delightful degenerates — is that place, and Steve Harrington is the person Eddie never expected to see.