eating in the underworld
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She catches sight of Hop first, of course. He’s who she’s looking for after all; or, perhaps more accurately, she will think later, he’s the only one she thinks she’s supposed to be looking for in this moment. The way Robin Buckley had talked about what had happened beneath Starcourt that night — well, it had all just seemed so final, she’d thought, and truly she’s never been so happy to be wrong in her life.
Meanwhile, in the Soviet Union, Joyce finds not one ghost but two.
Series
- Part 1 of eating in the underworld
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like coarse-cut salt on the tongue — by greatunironic
Fandoms: Stranger Things (TV 2016)
30 Mar 2023
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He instructs her on how to take the car out of park, get it in first, then second as they build up speed, and takes her down the main drag in town. She goes a solid fifteen under the speed limit but he doesn’t say anything. He doesn’t say a lot, as they go, just makes a correction here or there, a word or hum of encouragement too. He tells her to relax, once, and she breathes in deep and pretends to be someone else for a minute. It’s easy; she’s wearing a boy’s polo and Byers clocks that too, she thinks, the way his eyes flickered to the collar of it when he saw her on her stoop. She knows he knows. But he doesn’t mention it, so neither does she.
In the aftermath of Starcourt, Robin goes on.
Series
- Part 2 of eating in the underworld
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It’s outlandish. It’s implausible. It’s beyond the scope of man, beyond the imagination of children. He wants to shake his head, wants to dismiss it the same way they would laugh at the end of each campfire story, the same way folks would turn their noses up at the talk from the old miners who see things in the coal dust and dark and heat, because everyone sees something in the mine. That’s just the nature of the shadow.
Deciding to find his own answers, Wayne picks the wrong (or perhaps very right) moment to return to his trailer.
Series
- Part 3 of eating in the underworld
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He’s upright, at least. Leaned up against something, head tipped back and sort of sitting, with his hands bound, and he almost wants to laugh, on account of how much it reminds him of that first November, handcuffed in the bowels of Hawkins National Lab and that white haired son of a bitch framed in the doorway. Jim squeezes his eyes shut, shakes his head a bit, and opens them again, looking straight ahead then, and would you look at that, he thinks. This is the worst day.
Across from him, Steve Harrington sits flanked by two Soviet soldiers, beefy mother fuckers too, and he looks exactly as terrible as when they went beneath Starcourt and Jim only had time to think, Kid, what the fuck, I’m putting your ass in a bubble after this, so not that much time has passed, he thinks, he hopes. He’s handcuffed too, hands in his lap, and he smirks at Jim, all teenaged boy bravado that he can see through in a heartbeat.
“Hey, Chief,” says Harrington.
Hopper, Steve, and the art of survival.
Series
- Part 4 of eating in the underworld
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so this is what the volume knob's for by greatunironic
Fandoms: Stranger Things (TV 2016)
12 Aug 2023
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So he phones his shit in too if they’re not going to care. He spends a lot of time tracing the words carved into his desk absently, or staring out the windows now. He tries to get a seat closer to them, the windows, when he can, which is most classes except his English one. Mrs Woodcliff assigns seats alphabetically, and probably always has, far as Dustin can tell — there’s an SH WAS HERE!! carved into his desk in that class. He puts his notebook over that one, sits on his hands to stop reaching.
One afternoon, in December, Dustin and Erica work on their character sheets.
Series
- Part 5 of eating in the underworld
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He had dropped like a sack of potatoes, the sudden shock of the loud noise and the red hot pain taking him out at the fucking knees. Carver had stood over him, leveled and cocked his gun, and Eddie wasn’t going to give this holier than thou fuckhead the satisfaction of closing his eyes or flinching or doing anything but looking him dead in the eye as he murdered him when Max clocked him with a tire iron from parts unknown and a whole lot of teenage girl rage.
A few days after the world doesn't end (just yet), Eddie wakes up.
Series
- Part 6 of eating in the underworld
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zen, and the art of three point throws by greatunironic
Fandoms: Stranger Things (TV 2016)
16 Sep 2023
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Steve was never someone they used to pay much attention to before. Mike bitched about him endlessly when he was dating Nancy (though he’d been the one to breathlessly relate the tale of Steve and the Nail Bat and the Demogorgon to them, so). They’d viewed him with the benign disinterest Lucas thinks most kids would view their friend’s big sister’s jock boyfriend, mostly, but then Lucas had been in that junkyard with him and Dustin and Max and the demodogs and then he’d been with them at the Byers, with Billy, and Steve had put himself between Lucas and Billy without a second’s hesitation. Then he’d protected them again in the tunnels, and Lucas had maybe thought, Wow.
Lucas, at the basketball court on two Saturday afternoons, four months apart.
Series
- Part 7 of eating in the underworld
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So when Hop asks, when Murray asks, when Owens asks, when the doctors ask, when the specialist asks, he says: fall of ‘84, Billy Hargrove, in the Byers’ living room, with the dinner plate. He says: that’s when the static started in both ears, worse in the left than the right, but both weren’t great. He says: some mornings I woke up and it was like I heard everything like I was under water, but it would get better as the day wore on. He says: yeah, sometimes I got headaches too, and that made the static more. He says: after Starcourt, but just before, it did get worse, yeah. He says: I’d been practicing lip reading for a while, because I think some part of me always knew. He says: it was just gone, after that: no static, nothing blurry, just silence with the occasional whine when Hop got that whistle right.
Steve Harrington, and life after death.
Series
- Part 8 of eating in the underworld
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A letter, from one (almost) dead kid to another.
Series
- Part 9 of eating in the underworld