There’s So Much Wrong With This Place. Everything, Actually. 

𝘿𝙀𝘼𝙍 𝙈𝙐𝙍𝙍𝘼𝙔 𝘽𝘼𝙐𝙈𝘼𝙉                           ( congregaticn ​)

@greenscrunchy​​ asked: ❝ i don’t even know how to describe it. i’ve never seen anything like it. ❞    ( murray! )

    - from stranger things s4 starters ( x ). 

    “ Of course, you haven’t seen anything like it. It’s–” He had to stop himself from saying something too aggressive like he normally would. The poor girl looked shaken up as it was. And she was a kid. And the last thing he wanted to deal with was a crying teenager. “It doesn’t want to be seen. More importantly, it’s not even supposed to be here. Crazy how that works, huh?” Still, he leaned forward with his hands folded together, obviously intent on listening to everything the blonde had to say. “Give me as much of a description as you can, yeah? Can’t really help if I got nothing to go off of except ‘ never seen anything like it. ’”

he’s helping. he’s helping. talking to her like she’s made of porcelain and would shatter at a moment’s notice if he said the wrong thing, which chrissy previously thought she’d learned to tolerate but apparently had not after, well....coming back from the dead. new chrissy had vastly different preferences, now. but murray is helping, she repeated, and swallowed down all thoughts of clinical insanity and tried to begin someplace concrete.

                    ❝ imagine the biggest spider you’ve ever seen. ❞  nope, still insane. all the indecision between giving a full confession and sounding less like she had a thousand screws rattling loose inside her head made for too much internal competition, too big for her skull. chrissy shook her head almost violently trying to wipe the distraction away.  ❝ a huge spider, but with a head that could almost be human? except it was just wrong enough not to be human. and it didn’t have eight legs. i think it was five....or six. ❞  just the foggiest recollection made her shiver with dread again and curl into herself.  ❝ i thought i might see vecna again...but not this. ❞

it wasn't your fault. you know that, right?             /             @vihilum​ (nancy)

the breath chrissy drew in was long and labored.

hawkins’ last three roller coaster years had proved wildly informative. power hungry corporations were allegedly endangering kids left and right, often enough to kill a few.  (chrissy still recalled the last time she saw barbara holland in the cafeteria. if memory served, chrissy had been a little jealous of the smile on barb’s face.)  there had been monsters at work from the beginning, biding their time below hawkins like spiders twitching, waiting patiently for a fly to clumsily flutter its way into their web.

but what chrissy cunningham had known for longer than the godforsaken upside down existed? it was her fault. it was always her fault. for eating the extra mouthful of protein, for not smiling hard enough, for not kicking high enough, for not willing herself weightless in the air to fly higher, born just unpretty enough to have to make up for that lack everywhere else. 

amazing, how one voice could sound like a thousand. and the few outliers that didn’t sound like the one rang so falsely at first.

                       ❝ are we so sure? ❞  i was weak enough to start the disaster. the gates. 

she pivoted to look at nancy. hard. it felt monstrous all of a sudden to bore her gaze into the fellow senior’s face. it felt.....like turning the splitting stare of her own mother onto someone innocent of any wrongdoing. all nancy wheeler, good, reasonable, strong, determined nancy wheeler who flouted every high school expectation to stick up her chin and say what i want matters more than what you think of me, had done was ask an absolving question. 

from experience, a queen bee’s glare could wither anyone from underclassmen to upperclassmen just as much as her smile could turn eyes to stars. that power came in handy now and again, unearned as it was. but in this moment....

she couldn’t do this. chrissy couldn’t do this to nancy. not even because she wanted honesty without cotton candy fluff and nonsense. to survive all this and to let her fears and worry mold her around constant suspicion? what a waste of time all but lost the night spring break began. she’d already spent enough of her life ruined and pretending.

                      ❝ i’m sorry i’m pushing you. there’s still.... ❞  the smile she tried to push forth flickered true for a moment, then plummeted to bittersweet. no vaseline teeth here. (deep down, something hinted that nancy's the type to say forced optimism is pointless. the impression unwound a hidden knot in the cheerleader’s chest.)  ❝ a lot to wrap my head around. have you ever been told something your whole life then all of a sudden the opposite is true? ❞  the words floated a few moments before chrissy huffed a chuckle at her toes, flicking her left pointer nail against the seam in her pants.  ❝ like maybe there’s no such thing as a parallel universe. and suddenly there is, right here under our feet. ❞

Send 🌿 to accidentally get caught under the mistletoe with my muse.

𝘿𝙀𝘼𝙍 𝙎𝙏𝙀𝙑𝙀 𝙃𝘼𝙍𝙍𝙄𝙉𝙂𝙏𝙊𝙉                      (starsinshadows​)

@greenscrunchy​ gets a starter cause I said so…

     The early December weather in Indiana should have made the idea of an outdoor party unacceptable, but with a bonfire going and enough alcohol, most of the teenagers present had only bothered with sweatshirts and body heat to supplement despite the snow on the ground outside of the fire’s heat. Steve had given up his coat to the “flavor of the week” – a pretty girl named Becky that he would actually probably date for a month or so, possibly through Christmas if she continued to not ask questions and stayed content to just be casual and have fun. She was currently laughing with some of her friends on the other side of the fire, beers in hand, and probably gossiping about their boyfriends or some poor kid that wasn’t popular and didn’t deserve the bullshit.      He leaned back on the lawn chair someone had brought out, looking sprawled and comfortable as he sipped at his beer like the King he was supposed to be, and he put on the smiles, shot back insults and sharp jokes as was required of him whenever the attention landed on him. Becky had come over fifteen minutes before to sit across his lap and make out, probably to show off to someone, but she’d gone back to her friends for the time being. He was her ride, so she’d make her way back to him before the end of the night, and she’d make sure she had a story to tell them all in the morning, he was sure.      He didn’t care. At least, that was what he told himself, and it was mostly true even if not in the way that he wanted it to be. He didn’t care about any of this, and it showed in brief, quiet moments when he stared at the fire and the exhaustion that he tried to keep hidden eased out at the edges of his being and the strange little streaks of gray that were appearing in his hair caught the firelight. Few people dared mention it, not willing to have Tommy H, Carol or half a dozen other people turn on them, but the kids had also noticed and Nancy had asked if he was sleeping at all. Only Robin knew and she’d passed on this particular gathering – not that he could blame her. He was ‘holding court’, so to speak, but he wasn’t interested in any of it and hadn’t been for awhile. Part of him wished he could just wander off into the woods and leave the circus behind, but that was the whole point of the charade to begin with; he had to hide the fact that he didn’t belong here anymore.

was chrissy cunningham a party person or not? 

staring hard into the dancing flames of the titular bonfire, chrissy clutched the neck of a wine cooler in both hands and asked the question for quite possibly the twentieth time since her upper school career had begun. and for the twentieth-or-other time, she still wasn’t sure. 

maybe it was a hawkins problem. were their parties lackluster thanks to the somewhat backwoods, down-home, small town (et cetera, et cetera) feel to hawkins? it wasn’t actually that small, all things considered, it just wasn’t a city. maybe that was the source of the issue and only cities had good parties. or was it just that she was inexperienced? chrissy scoffed at nothing and watched as the feathery plume of her frozen breath flew off to join the embers in the air. no, she’d been to enough “my parents are gone this weekend!” get-togethers and basketball game afterparties to use that excuse.

even more depressing was the thought that maybe parties were just like this everywhere and hawkins wasn’t an exception but the rule.

                       ❝ like what? ❞  a female voice seemed to slice through chrissy’s inner monologue. she glanced up sharply, but sighed once she put it all together: the interruption was just becky, having absconded from her dramatic perch on her throne - aka steve - exclaiming something to tammy and sue at chrissy’s elbow. a little spooky, but overall harmless. 

out of curiousity chrissy tipped her body backward so as to look past the girls. sure enough, there lounged king steve with his beer and his hair reigning over all of his subjects with a fuzzy smirk and the occasional cheers and nod for good measure. it could have been the inconstant light of the fire casting shadows where none usually sunk, but she could have sworn steve looked aloof in a way that didn’t quite match with his usually too cool for this school attitude. 

an absentminded tap of a nail against glass reminded the strawberry blonde of the drink she was still gripping. chrissy snorted lightly at nothing again, hoping neither becky or sue heard her. always the possibility of the wine cooler making everything just a little more maudlin to factor in, too. chrissy definitely considered herself a part-time lightweight, but a cooler and half should hardly be enough to make her buzzed unless her tolerance changed in the past month. 

except that she leaned back one more time, a little less steadily, and now steve looked hollow. haggard firelight washed across him courtesy of the still healthy blaze, but not even that seemed to break apart his dull mien. okay, something was up. without question.

one foot at a time chrissy did her best to scoot past the nearby knot of girls and amble in steve’s direction without being pulled back toward the fire. which is where she would like to be but for the fact that heaviness spread over steve’s brow was more interesting than discussing the macy’s christmas sale. becky did whine her name but only once, and chrissy assured her of a return at some point. by then she was halfway to steve’s lawn chair. only a few more steps and she’d come up beside the saggy excuse for a seat. mercifully some heat still reached into the fringes where steve was hiding.

without so much as a pause, chrissy plopped to her haunches and curled herself over her knees facing the fire but with squinted eyes pointed toward steve. this way she wouldn’t be planting her rump in a pile of snow and making the evening even less pleasant for herself.

                      ❝ what’s up? ❞  asked through her jacket sleeve, the popped p emerged a little less sharp but nothing could hide the sound of a grin that verged on loopy.  ❝ not enough beer or too much? you look kinda like the kingdom’s seen better days. ❞  

💭 + waiting

𝓗𝓮𝓪𝓭𝓬𝓪𝓷𝓸𝓷𝓼 — send 💭 + a topic to receive a headcanon about said topic.

chrissy’s good at it. she’d rather not be. or, more specifically, she is veeeeeeeeery good at biding her time. 

internalizing is nearly her full time profession at this point, so she can keep angst and impatience down like an utter champ, enough that the urge to think about what she’s waiting on all but disappears. distraction is key to this, also. no one is better at keeping busy or looking the furthest thing from lazy. (laura has a different rubric for this but that different rubric could apply to the rest of chrissy’s life already, so it’s rather a moot point.) filling her meantimes to the brim is never a problem. it’s the ache of waiting and wondering, sometimes for something completely unnamed and indefinable, that hurts the most. 

chrissy hadn’t known, but she’d lived her youth waiting, plodding along to achieve each goal her mother set for her. those were bite-sized accomplishments that helped ease the hunger to move on in her life. maybe from hawkins, even if it was only for four years. lasting all the way through high school was a long, long wait and her time needed to be filled so it would fly by. 

up until the nightmares began, chrissy thought the easiest way to survive was to steadily outlast every struggle that showed its grim little face, waiting until it passed. but the nightmares and visions came on too fast and too bloody to wait out. for those she had no plan and no solution, save for opening up to miss kelly. but not even miss kelly could help with every unsettled matter up to that point that still hadn’t dissolved with inattention and patience.

after that, she wasn’t too keen on letting life drift past her anymore. there was much still left to wait on, but even more still to do. things to do immediately, without having to twiddle her thumbs. the most important of which became kicking high school to the curb and setting herself up for a successful college experience far, faaaaar away. 

Émotion (Nobuhiko Obayashi, 1966)

𝘿𝙀𝘼𝙍 𝙉𝘼𝙉𝘾𝙔 𝙒𝙃𝙀𝙀𝙇𝙀𝙍                                  (vihilum​)

@greenscrunchy asked, “Was it always this way? Was i too dumb to notice?”

Evil has tendrils, evil has roots. Nancy’s never just out of reach, even when she’s grounded, even when her feet are planted firmly against soil. There’s no security granted that comes with stillness. Steadiness. Better to shift. She’s not a shark. She can’t stop swimming. She’s like the other fish in the sea. If she stops moving, she will die.

That’s how it feels. That’s how it’s felt. A mind unoccupied teeters on the edge of unraveling. She’s never catered to the luxury of relaxing and doing nothing. That has never appealed to her.

She thinks Chrissy needs it from her right now. A sure, unmoving hand, set on her shoulder. Stillness. She can’t always anticipate the storm. There’s no way of knowing if this is the calm ahead of a downpour. There is no way to tell what might be coming.

“I used to think I knew,” where it started, when it started, just how wide this crack had spread, she thought she understood everything about it, “but so many things,” Her record’s still playing low. She squeezes Chrissy lightly. “so many things move in secret.”

Things not meant for their eyes, to any prying gaze.

“Hidden, on purpose,” she shifts so that her arm is wrapped around the other’s shoulders, “I’d say noticing it was nothing but dumb luck.”

it’s discouraging to brace for the itching crawl of dread at prospective touch, like prey in a thicket anticipating danger. prey — or a sack of meat for trimming and displayed as a “prize winning catch”. either way, chills still tend to prickle over wary nerves she keeps primed at all times.

when people unexpectedly touch her arms, even friends, chrissy feels hooks sink into skin and frigid air blasting against the skin of her neck. goosebumps sprout, a thousand fearful eyes waiting for the other shoe to drop. for anything that requires an artful dodge and a smile wide enough to blind anyone that could even hypothesize what’s happening under the surface. that fearful, flayed core of chrissy is ugly; no one told her so, she just knows.

but, chrissy is reminding herself, teaching herself, she is safe here in the wheeler house. 

nancy’s room is low-lit, but there are no knives or hooks that she can see. none made for cleaving meat from bone at least. if there is cold, it’s drowned out by hums of music from nancy’s records and the sheer warmth of the colors strewn across the room. it’s cozy and appreciated. lived in. not that chrissy’s isn’t, but there’s a difference between girl’s bedroom and a doll’s. 

                        ❝ dumb luck, ❞  chrissy parrots. dumb luck for smart people. something about it makes the strawberry blonde grin and lean, really actually lean, into nancy’s gentle grip. 

it’s been so long. so long since she had real friends. the kind of friends that truly understood. who were honest without being cruel yet invited openness, offering their own in trade. 

one deep, steadying breath where she lets herself the believe the world has stopped turning, and a breath out. she turns toward nancy unsteadily reassured, but it’s a new beginning.

                       ❝ is it better to wish i’d known sooner? even if the truth was....so terrible. you were trying to figure all of this.....stuff out, about the upside down, all by yourself. you and your brother and jonathan and steve and mike’s friends, i mean. ❞  all of them so damn young when they had to fight a monster no one taught them to look for. and chrissy is afraid that even with enough quick thinking fit to lead a squad of cheerleaders and pull off reasonably good grades while keeping everyone politely at arm’s length, she would still have been too distracted by her own inner ache to see through it clearly.  ❝ things that move in secret are the deadliest. ❞ 

she doesn’t want to miss anything else. she can’t. not just for herself, but for everyone else.

City of the Living Dead (1980) dir. Lucio Fulci

“being kind takes zero effort” Lies.

Being kind takes enormous effort. Being kind means humbling yourself- it means saying no to your pride- it means forgiving someone instantly- it means putting someone convenience over your own for some time- it means acting as if the universe doesn’t revolve around you. Being kind is hard. Being kind is not butterflies and sickly sweet, half-witted compliments. It’s work. It’s serving others. It’s being silent when you don’t want to. It’s being honest. It’s being gentle. It’s being true even if the other person disagrees. Being kind is one of the hardest things a person can do and we need more of it.

well well well. some of the lotr fandom has shown their true colors. i'm both surprised and not surprised at the frankly outlandish amount of complaints that dwarves and elves and hobbits of color seem to have elicited. the rage is more outlandish when you discover the reasons for these complaints are 1) tolkien on occasion neglected to describe skin color which apparently renders everyone pale or 2) nostalgic attachment to the peter jackson films makes it unfathomable to picture the above listed races as anything other than pale/white.

here is all i’ll say about it: A WORLD WITH ONLY WHITE SKIN IS AN INCOMPLETE ONE. yes, even a fantasy world.