Steve: I Swing Both Ways.

Something about this makes me weirdly emotional

Drabble Challenge Day 6 - Comedy

hosted by @thedrabblecollective

Stranger Things - 100 words - Rated G

AO3 Link

Robin's shoes are a work of art, period

Converse

Robin watched Vickie leave Family Video, trying to calm her racing heart.

“Jesus, she’s like, totally into you.”

She jumped. Steve was watching her from the Sci-Fi section, a stack of movies in hand.

“You should ask her out.”

“Are you insane? I can’t tell Vickie I like girls, Steve.”

“You don’t have to.” He winked. “Just show her your boobies shoes.”

She blinked.

“Wrong shelf Dingus.”

“What?” He looked at his hands. “No? Alien is Sci-Fi?”

Not the movie, you.” Robin pushed him toward the other side of the store. “This is where clowns belong. In the comedy section.”

Description: [A video of a woman riding a galloping horse bareback while holding a large rainbow flag.]

Your Boyfriend is Hot, So Hot, Too Hot

Written for @steddiemicrofic

[ AO3 ]

June prompt: "Hot" | word count: 315 | rated: T |

Eddie has a hot, hot boyfriend.

That's great, right?

Except the AC is down, and they're melting.

Eddie watches as a droplet of sweat rolls down Steve’s glorious, wonderful tits. His chest hair is damp and gleams in the dim light.

Fuck.

His man is hot.

He lifts a heavy hand and gently strokes Steve’s chest, prompting a groan from his lovely boyfriend. 

“Stevie…”

Another groan.

Eddie takes his hand back and shuffles closer to him, admiring his lovely, shiny face. His parted lips call his own, and he can’t resist their siren call.

Steve opens an eye just in time to see his boyfriend push on his arms to get even closer to his mouth.

“Eddie…” he moans.

Their lips collide, moist, warm, parting to give way to their eager tongues. Eddie feels a sweltering heat growing inside him, something great, something terrible…

He flings himself far away from his boyfriend, sprawling his too-warm body against the barely cool tiles.

“Jesus H. Christ! I can’t, I can’t.” he whines.

Beside him, Steve makes a noise not unlike a dying cat. “Whyyyy.”

“Stevie, I adore you.” He rolls on the floor, trying to find a colder spot. “We’re gonna survive this. Believe me, no distance could ever destroy the undying love I have for you.”

“Please shut up, I’m melting,” is the only response he gets. Understandable.

“They’re going to fix the electricity, sweetheart. It’s been more than twenty-four hours. It can’t go on like this.”

Steve rolls over and mashes his face against the floor. “We can’t even fuck. I hate everything.”

The warmth is unescapable. Unless…

“You know what? I’m going into the pool.”

Steve raises his head, panicked. “Eddie, no, it’s not clean!”

Eddie sits up, reinvigorated. “I don’t give a shit. Lover's Lake has never been clean, and it hasn’t stopped anyone from swimming in it!”

“The pool is green, Eddie, green! The algae have taken over. They’re going to eat you.”

“Not if I eat them first.”

I have been thinking a lot about what a cancer diagnosis used to mean. How in the ‘80s and ‘90s, when someone was diagnosed, my parents would gently prepare me for their death. That chemo and radiation and surgery just bought time, and over the age of fifty people would sometimes just. Skip it. For cost reasons, and for quality of life reasons. My grandmother was diagnosed in her early seventies and went directly into hospice for just under a year — palliative care only. And often, after diagnosis people and their families would go away — they’d cash out retirement or sell the house and go live on a beach for six months. Or they’d pay a charlatan all their savings to buy hope. People would get diagnosed, get very sick, leave, and then we’d hear that they died.

And then, at some point, the people who left started coming back.

It was the children first. The March of Dimes and Saint Jude set up programs and my town would do spaghetti fundraisers and raffles and meal trains to support the family and send the child and one parent to a hospital in the city — and the children came home. Their hair grew back. They went back to school. We were all trained to think of them as the angelic lost and they were turning into asshole teens right in front of our eyes. What a miracle, what a gift, how lucky we are that the odds for several children are in our favor!

Adults started leaving for a specific program to treat their specific cancer at a specific hospital or a specific research group. They’d stay in that city for 6-12 months and then they’d come home. We fully expected that they were still dying — or they’d gotten one of the good cancers. What a gift this year is for them, we’d think. How lucky they are to be strong enough to ski and swim and run. And then they didn’t stop — two decades later they haven’t stopped. Not all of them, but most of them.

We bought those extra hours and months and years. We paid for time with our taxes. Scientists found ways for treatment to be less terrible, less poisonous, and a thousand times more effective.

And now, when a friend was diagnosed, the five year survival odds were 95%. My friend is alive, nearly five years later. Those kids who miraculously survived are alive. The adults who beat the odds are still alive. I grew up in a place small enough that you can see the losses. And now, the hospital in my tiny hometown can effectively treat many cancers. Most people don’t have to go away for treatment. They said we could never cure cancer, as it were, but we can cure a lot of cancers. We can diagnose a lot of cancers early enough to treat them with minor interventions. We can prevent a lot of cancers.

We could keep doing that. We could continue to fund research into other heartbreaks — into Long Covid and MCAS and psych meds with fewer side effects and dementia treatments. We could buy months and years, alleviate the suffering of our neighbors. That is what funding health research buys: time and ease.

Anyway, I’m preaching to the choir here. But it is a quiet miracle what’s happened in my lifetime.

Drabble Challenge Day 9 - Enjoy

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Stranger Things - 100 words - Steddie

AO3 link

Splash

The doctors had recommended exercising in water, and now Steve was there, swimming around in his pool, supervising Eddie. He didn’t want to leave him alone in the water, his heart heavy with the reminder of Barb’s demise.

It turned out the real menace was not the Upside-Down, but rather Eddie himself, who immediately decided to splash him.

Steve jumped back to escape, before retaliating, making the boy splutter and shake his head like a drenched dog.

Steve wasn’t sure it was what the doctors had in mind, but he hadn’t enjoyed playing in his pool like that in years.

You're about to close on your very own, suspiciously affordable and comfortable house. Just before you sign the contract, the realtor shows you the required legal disclosure: your new house is haunted by the type of presence you'll get from this spinner wheel.

Of course it is.

I was reading Marguerite Yourcenar's Le coup de grâce last night, both in French and in English because I enjoy pondering the choices made by translators—and the English translation was so bad. At one point the word "solitude" in the French original became "privacy" in English, in a sentence where the difference in meaning did matter, I think. At another point, the very simple word "les oublis" became "remembrance betrayed" which I feel gives extra precision in the translation which wasn't present in the original...?

There's also a passage in French in which the narrator wishes a woman would have had children, "who would have inherited her courage and her eyes", but decides that's a pointless regret because these decisions on how to populate the future are not ours to make ("ne nous appartiennent pas")—the English translation turns it into "Absurd, for who wants to people (...) the future?" That's different...!! And later on the narrator says that "all these misunderstandings" make him want to "steer clear of any conviction that isn't entirely personal". The English translation says "such misapprehensions were to cure me (...) of holding ready-made convictions." I'm sorry but, in this context you're saying a different thing. Again.

By this point I went looking for the name of the translator, in order to carry it in my soul in a pocket of indignation—and I found: "translated from the French by Grace Frick in collaboration with the author"! Grace Frick! Marguerite Yourcenar's life partner!

That was such a plot twist. Your wife? Your own wife wrote this inaccurate translation, with your blessing...? Well, I now have two theories: 1. After publishing this book, Yourcenar regretted some minor writing choices and asked Frick to modify some words and phrasings in her translation so they were closer to what she wanted to express. As a perfectionist who feels many regrets immediately after submitting a completed work I sympathise with this, but also that's cheating. You can't give English readers a text that's closer to what you wanted your book to be while French readers are left to wallow in the mud of your less precise first draft. I'm affronted by this possibility. 2. Grace Frick's translation was imperfect, and Yourcenar said nothing because she loved her and her imperfect linguistic choices. I also sympathise. I hope that's what happened actually—it feels less plausible than 1. but it makes me feel more at peace with this whole affair. I felt all my indignation melt away as soon as I decided to embrace this explanation.