𝙸'𝙼 𝙴𝚅𝙴𝚁𝚈𝚃𝙷𝙸𝙽𝙶 𝚃𝙷𝙴𝚈 𝚂𝙰𝚈.

hiya tigers! i'm in the midst of oozing my way back on here, so i'm beginning to post some stuff that has sat in my drafts for a while. one offs, threads with inactive or moved blogs, etc. if you get a random notif from me and you're wondering why, that's why! all excuses to write are good excuses and i'm using what i have LOL

chrissy had paced the boundary of the football field for twenty solid minutes before feeling any modicum less like crawling out of her skin and leaving it behind on the turf. it would take more than twenty minutes or a half hour or hour or the rest of the semester to make any sort of harmony with the disastrous state of affairs back at school, but that was ticking time chrissy did not have. 

                            we’re so sorry, chrissy. you must miss him so much. 

a surge of petulance rattled so fiercely in her gut that chrissy kicked at a clump of damp soil and grass hard enough to send it flying, nearly sending her sneaker with it. 

                            it must be so difficult. i always envied you two.

yes, shedding her skin sounded perfect. she would leave behind the deflated organ like a trash liner, right there at the edge of the football field. someone would find it and scream in terror that “chrissy cunningham’s dead again!” and run away or even faint dramatically on the spot. but there would be no body, only the ghoulish sausage casing polite company called flesh. chrissy could walk away from the smiles that wobbled and wavered, the lips that gloss never stuck to, the cracked and dehydrated nail beds she had to mask religiously with stinging nail polish. off she’d go, nothing but muscles and tendons and trailing blood like bread crumbs, a devil straight from a nightmare. her mother would open the door in horror and chrissy would demand an answer. what about now, mom? will i fit in the dress now?

                            just the perfect hawkins couple.

❝ your boyfriend was adamant that you wouldn’t have gone to someone like young mr. munson for help if you were afraid. ❞  

hhmph. jason was more wrong than he knew.

❝ it’s what he wanted people to think. ❞ a hard blink; her lashes felt light without mascara.   ❝ ....and where is jason now? ❞  there had been a strange lack of visits from him - or information about him, which was arguably preferable to a visit. chrissy didn’t want to watch while jason pointedly looked away from her bruised eyes and joints and wrist and knee braces. she could see it now, his bald discomfort with her appearance, not so doll-like anymore. not head cheerleader material, looking like that, her mother had already spewed to an attending nurse when she thought her daughter couldn’t hear.  

chief powell swallowed and glanced away. avoiding. chrissy froze.

❝ ch - chief powell? ❞  

❝ i’m sorry, ms. cunningham. ❞  his posture had noticeably shifted as if a load were suddenly dropped upon his shoulders.  ❝ we found your boyfriend beside a fault line. it’s likely that jason was killed during the earthquake. ❞  

❝ .....oh.... ❞

then he isn’t my boyfriend anymore, is he?

                            it seemed like jason really loved you.

                            don’t you think it’s weird hanging with the freak after your boyfriend died?

                            you’re friends with the hellfire weirdos? what the shit, chrissy, since when?

that was it. she couldn’t hold in the storm a moment longer. 

with an unusually savage cry, chrissy unloaded every iota of frustration on an unlucky blocking sled the football team had left out along the touchline. she felt the drag of an angry yelp as it flew out of her throat. again and again and again. the pull of muscle was refreshing and nauseating in turns. a kick for every stupid comment she’d heard since resuming classes. a pitiful grunt for every time she let the cheer squad, her friends, every oblivious classmate at hawkins high believe a lie about her. another, harder grit of her teeth for every time she didn’t do a thing to make anyone assume otherwise, too petrified to admit to herself just how miserable she truly was. 

now, chrissy cunninham was paying for her stepford bullshit and plastic smiles along chewing gum-stuccoed hallways. a perfect picture never meant to last. everything she was told to work for, gone.

four oil painted smiles flashed across her mind’s eye, each one more painfully frozen than the last. on the left, the girl in pink’s eyes started to bleed.

                          freak, freak, chrissy, you’re a freak! 

her shoe flew in one more perfect arc, a final blazing strike for good measure.  ❝ UGH!! ❞  

“looks like it’s absolutely necessary.”       /      @tempesttragedy​‘s veronica sawyer

sounds of exertion pivoted from growls to a terrified squeak. that whole performance had been witnessed. oh god, oh god.  chrissy waited, all tension and electricity, for the derision or the utter shock and horror, but none came. instead, all she saw upon turning was an almost.....blasé pair of eyes.

                  ❝ o-h......um. yeah. ❞  dainty wrist shaking with adrenaline, chrissy tried to dab at her forehead with any elegance she had left. halfway through the motion she gave up, a regretful grin taking the worry’s place.  ❝ kind of. it got built up....over a while.  ❞

just wanted to give a shoutout to @greenscrunchy! the mun is super nice and has made me feel so welcome in this fandom and they’re a pleasure to see on my dash! their chrissy is great and they deserve to know it! <3

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

    I’m dead. The deadest girl in Deadtown. It’s been a while now. I’m comfortable with the word. You wouldn’t believe how comfortable the dead can get. We don’t tiptoe. Dead. Dead. Dead. Flying Ace of the Corpse Corps. Stepping the light. Deathtastic. I don’t actually know what a doornail is, but we have a lot in common. Dying was the biggest thing that ever happened to me. I’m famous for it.

    And the thing about me is, I’m not coming back. Lots of people do, you know. Deadtown has pretty shitty border control. If you know somebody on the outside, somebody who knows a guy, a priest or a wizard or a screenwriter or a guy whose superpower shtick gets really dark sometimes or a scientist with a totally neat revivification ray who just can’t seem to get federal funding, you can go home again. But we go steady, Death and me. Nobody can tear us apart

    When the fires went out in Manhattan, they went out in her eyes, too.                              It’s nice to be famous for something, I guess.

             –  the  refrigerator  monologues .                                by  catherynne  valente .

there’s so much wrong with this place. everything, actually. 

as if the void dimension’s very existence wasn’t crime enough, chrissy stumbled down a hill covered in vines that appeared locked in a neverending battle with themselves, writhing and thrashing until too exhausted to continue. the ground crawled, the sky grumbled. unearthly animal voices chittered nearby every time chrissy so much as scuffed her sneakers too loudly. 

if her nerves weren’t completely shot by the time she escaped, they’d be numb enough to fool her into thinking they were useless. 

like the sky itself was ill, it regularly spat out streams of bloodstained lightning to wash the stale air in a rainbow of bruised indigo across sickly green, mocking her own bruised body - or complementing it. every sound echoed only to disappear moments afterward. even the echoes seemed doomed to die mere yards from their origin.

time burnt away meaninglessly the further chrissy walked on....and on.....and on until  —  yes, finally, main street snuck into view. hawkins always seemed so small from behind a set of wheels. just another pint-sized half awake middle american town that only stirred on weekends and holidays, where people still used the word “newfangled” and the church bell still told the time better than anyone’s watch. family businesses rarely closed because the family seldom moved. home was familiar. home was predictable, safe. 

chrissy had never been more sure of anything in her life when she stared down at the rotten facsimile of hawkins and reminded herself it was the farthest thing from safe. 

what she ought to have done was make a beeline for the police station. that would have been the wisest, smartest thing. but at the sight of the mayor’s office a few blocks away, a wall of exhaustion hit chrissy harder than a freight train. all that walking after an impromptu resurrection did nothing for her stamina and the thought of rest was enough to make her want to burst into tears. enough for her to creep up the office steps and gently pry open the door. inside was silent as a graveyard and twice as dark. dust motes floated in in the air, swirling into eddies while she tiptoed down the central hallway. going up the stairwell was tantamount to courting disaster - even keeping her back to it felt risky. then the smallest stroke of luck materialized in a plush (if musty) chaise lounge tucked away in an office. with some difficulty chrissy managed to drag it all the way back to the front doors and scoot it against the wall adjacent. this way, nothing could get in or out without her knowing. the best she could ask for at the moment. all that was left was to lay down, find an angle that didn’t exacerbate the shooting pain in her shoulder, and attempt to sleep. 

pain lingered no matter how she arranged her limbs, but sleep... sleep crept up on her without warning. the world fell into darkness so quickly that when chrissy awoke it was with a twitch of terror. she couldn’t remember toeing the familiar, milky line between consciousness and the void.

everything looked exactly the same as when she’d arrived. 

had hours passed? had days?

without any shift in light and no sound from the church bell or town center clock, chrissy might as well have been in the same place forever. such a thought blasted shivers into her every extremity. time to move along. this place gave her every species of the creeps ever invented. 

the next two blocks to the police station were small potatoes compared to her haunted trek from the creel house. her body still ached with every bend in her stride. rest had done nothing for her pain, only giving her sufficient energy to push through. well, that was something, wasn’t it? 

despite the flickering hope the notion of weapons provided, that light was dashed by the rattle of very secure locks on every door chrissy tried. she slammed her good shoulder into all of them; none did so much as tremble in their frames. the windows were barred even if she could find a rock to smash the glass. in the end, all she had were her frantic fists and shouts of panic that she knew, chrissy knew, were more foolhardy than anything else. any number of the nightmares lurking in shadows that she never spotted could hear her and come rushing out, discovering the easiest prey to ever wander in their vicinity. her yelps were careless and scratched like sandpaper over the tender meat of her throat, but she couldn’t seem to stop. she’d come all this way for nothing otherwise. this couldn’t be for nothing. she couldn’t let it stop here.

                               ❝  hello?? please, is somebody in there? i need help, please. hello?? ❞  if only faithful chief hopper was still alive, he’d have come running. maybe chief powell would, too. anyone, anyone.  ❝  it’s chrissy, chrissy cunningham. please, i don’t know what’s happening anymore. help, HELP!!!  ❞  

                             a note to @hellmartyr​ 

also, while we’re here, this tweet pointed out something veeeeeery very important about the past decade plus of science fiction, especially within star wars: that being present is not synonymous with representation. just the appearance of a character of color is not some box to be checked and moved on from. they are people and deserve full story-building effort and care. there SHOULD NOT BE ARGUMENTS ABOUT THIS. where the need for even more, even deeper societal change lies is that when representation is given, people behave like they are currently behaving about rings of power, house of the dragon, andor, book of boba fett, and the list goes on. since so many social media users are so fond of saying “grow up”, now is the time. it’s your turn.

i need everyone to know that this is how chrissy reacts to hearing live metal for the first time.

i’m the opposite of the grinch. i’m the binch. my heart is two sizes too BIG