Greenscrunchy - 𝐅𝐑𝐄𝐀𝐊 𝐋𝐈𝐊𝐄 𝐔𝐒

𝚍𝚊𝚏𝚏𝚘𝚍𝚒𝚕  +  𝚝𝚊𝚕𝚔𝚒𝚗𝚐  𝚠𝚒𝚝𝚑  𝚑𝚎𝚛  𝚑𝚊𝚗𝚍𝚜  .

wait a minute wait a minute wait a minuTE WAIT A——

thank you thank you thank you. to the sender, to @strangerthingspositivity for being a beacon of kindness and light, to my incredible writing partners for allowing me to work out my ideas and for making me smile on the daily. we’ve created stories that transcend the source material yet still appreciate it and value it while making it stronger and more effective. every day that i get on my dash, you all have been the call to action to become an even stronger writer and a more creative thinker, and i cannot show you enough appreciation for that.

Shoutout to @greenscrunchy for such an amazing take on Chrissy. I get such a great depth of her warmth and kindness as a person as well as such well thought out and detailed headcanons. It’s a delight to follow this blog as it is to write with this take on her character. Also, really love the blog’s aesthetics as well. Just chef’s kiss. A+. Much love.

send  ❛ ♡ ❜  to suddenly hug my muse  ! 

could be angst  ,   romantic   ,  plationic  ,  etc.

maythememebewithyou​:

White Christmas (1954 film) 

“My dear partner, when what’s left of you gets around to what’s left to be gotten, what’s left to be gotten won’t be worth getting, whatever it is you’ve got left.”

“Pushing, pushing…”

“What is this, the best two out of three?”

“We’re practically strangers.”

“When I figure out what that means I’ll come up with a crushing reply.”

“____, if you’re ever under a falling building, and somebody runs up and offers to pick you up and carry you to safety, don’t think, don’t pause, don’t hesitate for a moment, just spit in his eye.”

“That’s ridiculous, even if it made any sense at all.”

“I think it’s impossible, ridiculous, and insane! And I wish I’d thought of it first.”

“How do you do?”

“Don’t just stand there – how do I get off?”

“You ought to be horsewhipped. First you, and then you, and then you again.”

“Please, don’t quote me the price when I haven’t got the time.”

“Well, it’s not good, but it’s a reason.”

“Mutual, I’m sure.”

“Oh, that’s very funny. Ho, ho, ho.”

“I’m not the marrying kind. I’m not the engaging kind, either!”

“We ate, and then he ate. We slept, and then he slept.”

“Are things really that bad?”

“Troops ready for inspection, sir!”

“Oh, no. You wouldn’t do this to me…”

“I don’t know what you see in this long drink of charged water but honestly, after you get to know him, he’s almost endurable.”

“It’s probably just a small internal muscular hemorrhage, sir.”

“Well, you’re not exactly Superman, but you’re awfully available.”

“That’s right, ideal. That’s exactly the word we used, too: ideal. We looked at this big ski lodge and we said ‘Isn’t it ideal, absolutely ideal,’ didn’t we.”

“That’s not the way back to headquarters.”

“Wouldn’t do what?”

“Don’t you think we ought to…kiss or something?”

“Looks like it’s absolutely necessary.”

“I’ve got a feeling I’m not gonna like it…”

“Let’s just say we’re doing it for an old pal in the army.”

“Look who’s talking about guilt!”

“I want you to get married. I want you to have nine children. And if you only spend five minutes a day with each kid, that’s forty-five minutes, and I’d at least have time to go out and get a massage or something.”

“Let’s face it, ____, you’re a lonely, miserable man.”

“She’s always felt that she’s mother hen and I’m her little chick. She’ll never leave the roost until I’m taken care of.”

“____, you know that, and I know that, but ____ doesn’t know that. At least he won’t for about an hour and a half.”

“I just dropped by to thank you for saving my life.”

“I guess I’ve always been a silly school girl…you know the bit, the lady fair and the knight on the white horse.”

“Well, it was a life worth saving.”

“What’d you have for lunch today?”

“Well, break your arm, or your ankle, or your neck, but don’t break anything valuable, huh?”

“We’ve established that the lodge is ideal.”

“Well, then you’re happy for the wrong reasons, and that’s the same as being lonely and miserable, except it’s worse.”

“You know, in some ways, you’re far superior to my cocker spaniel.”

“Oh, my word, if I wasn’t such a mean old biddy, I’d break right down and cry.”

“Vermont should be beautiful this time of year: all that snow.”

“Let me tell you something, it’s kinda dangerous, putting those knights up on white horses. Likely to slip off, you know.”

“Well, I guess that’s the end of that.”

“It sounds very… Vermonty!”

“Why is everybody so concerned about my eating habits? Why don’t people just leave me alone?”

“I’ve got a feeling you’re gonna hate it.”

“How much is ‘wow’?”

“Last night, she couldn’t sleep. Today, she won’t eat… she’s in love.”

“Since you saved my life, you decided you have a right to run it.”

“It’s right between ‘ouch’ and ‘boing.’“

“Well, I like that! Without so much as a ‘kiss my foot’ or ‘have an apple!’”

“We like to take care of our friends.”

“I’m more of the ‘I don’t mind pushing my best friend into it but I’m scared stiff when I get anywhere to close to it myself’ kind.”

“Is that bad?”

“It’s always that she’s been kind of a mother hen.”

“We wanted the mother hen to leave the roost so that the little chick could… oh, I guess we laid an egg.”

thank you, cinnamoroll (that's a childhood dream right there) 🧡💛 and i'm so charmed to see the rest of the Strangers included in this. as it should be!

order up for @greenscrunchy!

𝔻𝔼𝔸ℝ 𝔼𝔻𝔻𝕀𝔼 𝕄𝕌ℕ𝕊𝕆ℕ,                               (hellmartyr​)

𝐀𝐋𝐀𝐌𝐄𝐃𝐀 𝐂𝐎𝐔𝐍𝐓𝐘 𝐀𝐖𝐎𝐊𝐄 𝐓𝐎 𝐀 𝐁𝐋𝐎𝐎𝐃-𝐒𝐎𝐀𝐊𝐄𝐃 𝐒𝐀𝐓𝐔𝐑𝐃𝐀𝐘. three bodies fished from the east end of the bay were breaking news on every local station. each of the gruesome trio were in varying stages of decomposition, alluding to an unspeakable verdict that the beautiful berkeley-oakland shoreline had been a dumping ground for some time. images of police boats, thick-bodied men in wetsuits, and figures cocooned in white shrouds looped the screen as a done-up broadcaster delivered a sobering report in vivacious fuchsia lipstick. kgo’s on-site reporter was interviewing the most hang ten looking dude. he wore a white crop top with pismo beach airbrushed across a muted neon sunset, homebrew cut-offs, and imported havaianas. teal clubmasters pinned back his fluffy blond fringe. the carefree nature of his taste failed to belay the anxiety clearly etched on his tanned face. one of his arms was wrapped protectively around the shoulders of a distraught brunette fastened close to his side.

      ❝ we got another night stalker on our hands, ❝ an unvarnished mix of mission brogue and inland drawl crumbled into the mic, ❝ who’s protecting the girls in this town, you know? like, were they students? sucks, man. it really does. say bye to your mom and dad, come out here to the california dream, pay all this tuition, then get butchered and dumped like your dreams meant nothing. who thinks they got the right to do this, you know? it’s scary. who’s gonna protect these girls? ❞

      the reporter’s response was robustly flaccid. she was there for the ratings game. she lived somewhere safe like albany or palo alto, seemingly out of a killer’s reach.

      ❝ it’s just awful, ❞ the woman beside the surfer boy whimpered as the mic was unceremoniously dropped into her face. fingers painted tulip pink cupped around her mouth to hide her grisly expression of heartbreak. her voice, so lost in the croak of sobbing, nearly drowned in the howl of onshore wind.

      leaned over a counter not too far from where the interview took place was eddie, fingers intertwined in a pensive barrier as tragedy once again surrounded him. the interviewer, the interviewees, the human wall that collected around them protectively, the police, the bay area denizens — they’d all believe this was done by a man. a man with his wires crossed. one who only formed a connection with someone when he watched the light fade from their eyes.

      chances are they were right. the capacity for great evil rested with mankind. and the atrocities didn’t stop at the boundaries of reality. spring of last year proved there was more to human wickedness than loose screws scattered on the floor. the unfathomable was real, organic, breeding and feeding off happily boring lives. its intentions ran deeper than cruelty, illness, or a maddening cocktail of two.

      that night in wayne’s trailer was a floodgate. the laws of nature were placebo and the truth was far more frightening than anything fantasy could conjure. vecna was real. angry red reminders across his abdomen and jaw evoked how much closer humanity was to hell than heaven. he was no leviathan in the sea or ancient being tethered to a shell, but a mortal man who wanted the world to burn the inside out. and if that was truth, what other unspeakable things hungered for warm bodies?

      low-bearing shadows skittering across the road, dark shapes beneath the waves, glittering eyes watching from the corner of an empty room.

      the lich’s curse, had it followed them to california? — the beating of a thousand cold, black wings, the hot red sting of teeth a thousand more — had they brought him here?

      a quiet shuffle behind the bedroom door broke eddie free of his nightmarish daydream. the joyous sound of tom getting pulverized by jerry replaced the macabre as he quickly flipped the channel.

      news to be shared when the day wasn’t so fresh and cherry bright.

baby, it’s halloween ! — @greenscrunchy / phoebe bridgers

      foreboding so heady moments before vanished without a trace as chrissy exited their room. how was it that she outshined the autumnal sun sneaking in from the balcony and sent eddie’s heart skimming across his ribs like a skipping stone. a bear-like yawn, a siren song, messy hair holier than a halo.

      his own expression lit up as eddie unwittingly straightened his posture. ❝ ah, there she is. my favorite ghoul emerges from her crypt. just in time for a morning bite. ❞ he emphasized the last word with an exaggerated gnash of teeth. a playfully extravagant gesture indicated the souvenir plate on the table, its offerings awaiting her inspection.

      a medley of blackberries and grapes lined the one edge of the plate. cradled in its crescent, a flapjack fashioned from bisquick and pumpkin purée, carved to reflect a jack-o-lantern. triangle eyes. a serrated grin. it even had a stem with a mint leaf jabbed in its shoulder to give it a flair of color and authenticity. it was very — not convincing. the image in his metal head was much clearer on paper than on bread.

      ❝ happy halloween, scream queen, hopefully breakfast is, uh, less trick and more treat. ❞ teased the smarmy hinge of his grin, ❝ no promises. ❞

Saturday, October 31, 1987

Halloween today.

I actually woke up slowly. That’s kind of a feat, I think, since the bed’s cold. And it must be a little later because the sun is in my eyes again, but I’m not sure I mind, even if I did leave the blinds open overnight. 

chrissy blinked through the last dozy fog of her half-asleep thoughts, unorganized mumbles eventually fading in favor of whatever daring breakfast preparations distant dings of silverware and thunks of bowls seemed to hint at. with remarkable ease, she found herself relaxing into the soundtrack of existence in the tiny, two room apartment. 

There’s so much noise coming from the kitchen. Eddie must be up and letting his mad scientist side take over. Him and the TV aren’t exactly working together but something about it sounds nice. Homey. I love that. 

chrissy sighed toward the ceiling, but it was a whoosh of happy effort against a fluttering of autumn sunbeams. light funneled through her tiny bedroom window, its makeshift curtain rod festooned with a gamely attempt at bloody handprints on ripped white undershirts masquerading as curtains. honestly, it was a little silly; from across the room the handprints looked more like balding chrysanthemums, their optimistic magenta shade not quite so sanguine up close or far away. no passersby taking more than a split second to look at the boo-on-a-budget would catch a lasting fright. which, as far as chrissy was concerned, was perfectly acceptable.

the hiss of something hot swapping surfaces and the surge of a breaking news jingle on their pocket-square sized television brought the threads of her wakefulness together. mental diary abandoned, bare feet hit the chilly floor in determined finality. days began with or without her, no matter what season, so it was best to break out ahead before it got the best of her. or before eddie munson got the best of the galley. 

eddie’s would-be culinary exploits were often more mis than adventure despite all the attentive enthusiasm befitting a michelin star chef. sure, he was giving their now shared kitchen a run for its money in terms of resilience (and their budget, watched over faithfully by herself, a run for its money in terms of cleaning product costs). yet the strawberry blonde couldn’t find much will to play stingy with her space when her effusive metalhead derived such joy from a task so mundane. 

yes, it was going to be a good day when the tricks befitting a halloween weekend were far more frightful than the thought of breakfast treats. that was to say, not at all. 

chrissy really hadn’t expected such a bold greeting to slip from her mouth on the tail end of a yawn. a year ago, she might not even have been capable. but away the pet name flew and her excitement with it, making a mad dash for the spark in eddie’s eyes. embarrassment folded under contentment at the vision of a cloud of frizzy brown hair leaning over the counter, snapping his jaws like a creature of the night. nothing had ever been sweeter. in the spirit of impulsivity chrissy pranced across their sliver of living room and past the counter to wind tight arms around his middle. ❝ g'morning. ❞  the air seemed to soften around them even further, melting all the essence of living down to the warmth she clung to. eddie’s shirt was soft when she pressed her forehead into it — soft and warm and smelling like pancakes. like home.

                        ❝ let’s see. ❞  hope rose with her spirits and she burrowed her way under his arm to peek at the masterpiece beyond. comfy as eddie was, his torso was in the way.

                         ❝ aww, he’s got big teeth! and a stem! i love him. thank you.... ❞  an arm snuck forward to snag three grapes, all of which chrissy popped into her mouth at once. she allowed herself the time it took to finish chewing slowly before letting the resident artist go with a squeeze in favor of admiring his presentation.  ❝ the pumpkin was a good idea, too - i can smell it. did you make yourself one or are you going to help me with this one? ❞

💭 + what she wants the most in life

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

oh man, this was diiiiificult for chrissy to nail down until midway through high school. laura cunningham had a laundry list of short term and semi long term goals that she wanted chrissy to meet, and as the good daughter chrissy adopted them as her own goals. they weren’t what she wanted, though. 

she first starts thinking about long term to life during junior year. it’s when everyone is clamoring their way through college apps and visiting campuses and collecting patches from universities they like and bragging over where they think they’ll get in. for everyone else, college is a vehicle to thinking about what they’re going to do for the rest of their lives. chrissy knows her vehicle to college will be cheer, but goodness knows she’d rather not do that for the rest of her life. no way she could! teaching cheer, though, that could be something. actually.......

surviving the upside down sends her into a state of mental disarray for weeks afterward as she tries to come to terms with what it means to be peeled from the edge and come away alive. but once the fog lifts, a lot more clarifies in its wake. first, she wants to live. actually live and be happy. she doesn’t want to be miserable. figuring out how to do that is step one. step two is how to earn a living while getting better and becoming happy at the same time. something that helps people. she keeps thinking back to cheer coaching, but more and more layers of that are peeled away and she finds herself thinking about teaching. social studies or history or even math. she’s always been good at math and wonders if there isn’t a way to get a job helping kids learn the most challenging yet the most logical of subjects. problem solving. helping people. helping kids.

chrissy realizes the core of everything while knee deep in college, taking a somewhat ill-advised “elective” psychology course: she wants to stay close to the most difficult ages in youth and keep an eye out for who needs a little extra attention or an offer of help. there’s no time to wonder who could have stopped her from becoming weak enough to fall prey to vecna, but regardless if vecna still lives or not, she’ll be watching. and she’ll be happy. that’s her promise to herself, her greatest desire: to get out of hawkins and find what makes her happy out there. she can’t help others if she can’t see beyond her own discontent. and she’s going to help someone if it’s the last thing she does, starting with herself. 

the air was cold, actually cold in hawkins for december. chrissy could be fooled into thinking that the place where she’d grown up was a place that made sense, where right side up really was the right side, and seasons were as black and white as they were supposed to be. but that illusion couldn’t be anything but fleeting. california fit more like a home for the past five months than hawkins ever had, even though it was fractionally warmer than what she was used to in winter, to the point that the beginning of december hadn’t felt real there until she’d arrived back in hawkins. where all the old, familiar places had shrunk into pitiful, sad imitations of what younger chrissy lived with so willingly.

there was one last place that still managed to make her feel welcome when all else fell through, one place that felt innately warm: the munson stoop. an emphatic middle finger to the blustery chill shooting shards of wracking frigidity through chrissy’s coat. eddie would be proud to know.

he was why she was there in the first place, rocking on her toes after knocking at the door. it had taken a minute to work up enough assurance that this wasn’t a mistake before her knuckles hit metal, but it happened. she knocked. and now she’d wait for the door to open and for just the right greeting to float down from her brain when it did. 

except when it did open, chrissy stalled. 

five long months of nothing but notes and letters and phone calls since summer ended, and there was eddie munson just a few inches away. in the flesh.

                      ❝ hi? ❞  what a way to sound the opposite of confident, but when chrissy meant so much, almost too much, by her announcement-free arrival, it was hard to know what to say first.  ❝ i hope that....   —  oh, forget it. merry christmas, eddie. i thought i’d try to surprise you. ❞

                       SURPRISE! merry christmas, @hellmartyr​ !

𝘿𝙀𝘼𝙍  𝙏𝘼𝙏𝙐𝙈  𝙍𝙄𝙇𝙀𝙔                          (deadbride​)

“so um. i saw you going to the woods after school, @greenscrunchy”   it’s out of the blue, smack dab in the middle of the first break they’ve gotten. the big game is tonight, so if there’s any time to cram in as much practice as possible, this is it.   “what’s up with that?”   there’s no judgement, but tatum does have to ask … what the hell. with the amount of people that have gone missing from their quiet town in the past three years, taking a shortcut through the forest seems like an awful idea.

she’s been practicing. starting from before the first bell rang when she slipped the hurried note into the slats of a forbidden locker until almost running from the woods like a bat out of hell. her thoughts wrote the script over and over throughout the rest of the afternoon so that when she opens her mouth the story comes out smooth. at least, she hopes it’s smooth enough that tatum, with with her watchful gaze sharper than a scalpel, will buy it.

chrissy hates lying, but it comes naturally. it’s how she can survive until summer. 

                    ❝ meditating. i’ve been trying it out before these last few games. ❞  her expression weaves together a concerted effort to keep her smile from wobbling or seeming fixed, but the many years’ previous practice for that too is a hail mary that's yet to fail her.  ❝ it’s supposed to help with focus and relaxation. ❞  chrissy shakes both pompoms she’s clenched in one hand with a grin.  ❝ doing the opposite of cheering before a game actually helps! and i need to stay focused for the girls, so.... ❞  all the narrowness of her shoulders might end up disguising none of the helplessness tucked into her shrug.   ❝ for the championship. are you excited?  ❞

reblog this to give the person you reblogged this from a gold star because they’ve been stellar today and they deserve it ⭐️