scrubjayspeaks

Not Real Unless You're Here (11074 words) by freshbakedlady
Chapters: 7/31
Fandom: Stranger Things (TV 2016)
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Relationships: Steve Harrington/Eddie Munson
Characters: Steve Harrington, Eddie Munson, The Upside Down - Character, Robin Buckley
Additional Tags: Vampires, Ghosts, Eddie Munson in the Upside Down, Body Horror, Alternate Universe - Mutants, Trans Eddie Munson, Alternate Universe - Fantasy
Series: Part 2 of Whumptober
Summary:

A collection of short fic for the 2023 whumptober challenge.

It's that time of year again! And after falling briefly behind, I'm now caught up on the first week. So far, it is all Stranger Things, all the time. The brainrot is real, friends. I didn't plan it this way, but then, I don't plan this at all.

Much more focused on emotional whump this year, as compared to last. It's just, well, canon already beats the everloving shit out of Steve. Feels like that base is kind of covered. But I want to make that man so sad. Just the saddest poofy-haired puppy ever.

Day Twenty-Two: Toxic, MCU, Thor gets hurt on a mission. Bucky has a natural tendency to care for big, dumb blonds who pick fights above their weight class, whether he remembers that or not.

Day Twenty-Three: Forced to Kneel, MCU, Tony & Natasha, a witch's curse compels Tony to obey his teammates, only one of whom has any idea how to cope with that.

Day Twenty-Four: Blood Covered Hands, “I don’t want to do this anymore”, Leverage, eventual OT3, Eliot keeps getting hurt, and Alec is making plans about how he can keep that from happening anymore. It's all Eliot's idea--Alec is just the one taking notes.

Day Twenty-Five: Lost Voice, Duct Tape, Losers, Jensen is the team witch and gets his power locked away from him by a rival witch.

Day Twenty-Six: No One Left Behind, Separated, MCU, a mishap with a shrink ray leaves three Avengers at the mercy of the world's newest budding mad scientist.

Day Twenty-Seven: Stumbling, Magical Exhaustion, MCU, Bucky has always had magic. It's just never done him any good.

Day Twenty-Eight: Anger Born of Worry, Punching the Wall, MCU, Bruce doesn't think he's really on a team, and he definitely doesn't think he should be one of the people responding to an Avengers call to arms. He hadn't counted on how hard it would be to be the one waiting at home, though.

Another linkspam update for Whumptober! I'm especially pleased with Day Fourteen's story, which could easily convince me to write the rest of it. The Leverage werewolf AU, which has reappeared on Day Ten, has basically already succeeded on that count for itself.

Day Eight: Stomach Pain, Head Trauma, Venom, Fantasy AU of how Eddie and Venom get together, which is still basically that Eddie is a nosy idiot

Day Nine: Sleeping in Shifts, Caught in a Storm, The Losers, another Jensen/Cougar piece. Not so much a magic AU as canon taken half a step to the left, in which the Losers are a team dedicated to finding and securing magical artifacts before they can be misused.

Day Ten: Taser, Leverage, a continuation of Day Four's werewolf!Eliot AU. The secret was bound to get out eventually: Eliot gets captured by someone who knows he's a werewolf. Cue rescue mission.

Day Eleven: Sloppy Bandages, Self-Done First Aid, Avengers, Steve is used to dealing with his own injuries. Bruce shows him he has options these days.

Day Twelve: Cave In, Rusty Nail, Avengers, Teenage Horror AU. Natasha and Tony do their part to take out a nest of hydra creatures.

Day Thirteen: “Are you here to break me out?”, Avengers, Given what he went through at Loki's hands, Clint figures he's owed a favor from Asgard. Clint/Coulson.

Day Fourteen: Failed escape, MCU/Losers crossover, vampires, Jensen encountering the Winter Soldier and having some, shall we say, mixed emotions about the experience

Posted late last night for the second one, so here are the links to that and today's fill.

Day Two: Cornered, Caged, Tony houses feral werewolf Bucky, with varying success

Day Three: “Say goodbye.”, Impaled, Royal guard Clint and changeling Natasha hunt each other

I'm attempting to ignore the increasingly ominous noises coming from outside. My neighbors down the street appear to be gearing up for one of their massive parties, from which I will get to enjoy the dulcet tones of badly distorted music until late at night.

Someone down in the town either set off a single firework or a single gunshot--hard to say which, really.

And if these motherfuckers don't stop driving so fast up and down our (dead-end, unpaved, child-adjacent, country) road, I'm going to make good on my threat to design a retractable spike strip and blow someone's tires to kingdom come.

So anyway, fic recs! Because I've been plowing through fic lately.

I finished KouriArashi's Adult Wolf, which was part of a feast of Teen Wolf fic that I felt randomly compelled to devour. It's a very good time, with lots of suspense without any unnecessary stupidity, because hey, adults! (If it's not quite as relentlessly amazing as their Searching Ceremonies series, well, what is?)

Keeping with the theme of TW alternate universe/timeline fic, I really liked owlpostagain's Stilinski's Home for Wayward Wolves. Very charming. Lots of comforting platonic touching.

And then, because fic in general is a gateway drug, I fell down a rabbit hole of fic from thepartyresponsible. I decided to read along with their whumptober posts--hey, daily short snippets, very work break-friendly--and it went from there.

I think I had previously read Keep Us Fed, but I reread it because I so deeply love the other post-apocalyptic pieces coming out now.

And one thing I love about thepartyresponsible's fic is the number of casual crossovers. Marvel and DC characters freely mix, though I do love the moments when the tonal differences between those two canon universes are directly addressed. Nowhere is this clearer than in Give Thanks to Broken Bones, which I am currently halfway through. Watching Tony Stark run up against the sheer bonkers bleakness of Gotham is wild. Also, this one keeps making me laugh out loud and nearly come back late from said work breaks when I just need to see how that next scene ends.

So that's what I've been reading lately. Don't know why I suddenly have access to my reading brain or why it's only interested in altered universe fanworks, but whatever. I'll take it.

Oh, gods, I went outside to look, and the neighbors have brought in the bouncy castle. Again.

[NOT FINALIZED]

"Sam and I can man the kill box," Barton says, "but you gotta give us something to shoot at." Sam flashes him a look; they're both firing continuously at the Hydra agents and their black SUVs, the perimeter within the perimeter. Between shots, Barton shrugs. "You're not bored?"