Corroded Flowers Updates

neal.fun

Absurd Trolley Problems

Every problem is the trolley problem.

This is so fun try it

HOLDING OUT FOR A HERO?? OMG I’D DIE

I'm calling it now, the demobats are like the demodogs of their species line. They're NOT the final forms of that species line.

I'm thinking these bitches come out of these eggs in multiples, not just one, maybe up to ten hatch from one egg at a time, and those eggs are laid by something much much bigger.

I'm thinking Demodragons.

SO HERE IS THE WHOLE STORY (SO FAR).

I am on my knees begging you to reblog this post and to stop reblogging the original ones I sent out yesterday. This is the complete account with all the most recent info; the other one is just sending people on senselessly panicked avenues that no longer lead anywhere.

IN SHORT

Cliff Weitzman, CEO of Speechify and (aspiring?) voice actor, used AI to scrape thousands of popular, finished works off AO3 to list them on his own for-profit website and in his attached app. He did this without getting any kind of permission from the authors of said work or informing AO3. Obviously.

When fandom at large was made aware of his theft and started pushing back, Weitzman issued a non-apology on the original social media posts—using 

his dyslexia; 

his intent to implement a tip-system for the plagiarized authors; and 

a sudden willingness to take down the work of every author who saw my original social media posts and emailed him individually with a ‘valid’ claim,

as reasons we should allow him to continue monetizing fanwork for his own financial gain.

When we less-than-kindly refused, he took down his ‘apologies’ as well as his website (allegedly—it’s possible that our complaints to his web host, the deluge of emails he received or the unanticipated traffic brought it down, since there wasn’t any sort of official statement made about it), and when it came back up several hours later, all of the work formerly listed in the fan fiction category was no longer listed. 

THE TAKEAWAYS

1. Cliff Weitzman (aka Ofek Weitzman) is a scumbag with no qualms about taking fanwork without permission, feeding it to AI and monetizing it for his own financial gain; 

2. Fandom can really get things done when it wants to, and 

3. Our fanworks appear to be hidden, but they’re NOT DELETED from Weitzman’s servers, and independently published, original works are still listed without the authors' permission. We need to hold this man responsible for his theft, keep an eye on both his current and future endeavors, and take action immediately when he crosses the line again. 

The timeline, the details, the screenshots (behind the cut)

Sunday night, December 22nd 2024, I noticed an influx in visitors to my fic You & Me & Holiday Wine. When I searched the title online, hoping to find out where they came from, a new listing popped up (third one down, no less):

This listing is still up today, by the way, though now when you follow the link to word-stream, it just brings you to the main site. (Also, to be clear, this was not the cause for the influx of traffic to my fic; word-stream did not link back to the original work anywhere.)

I followed the link to word-stream, where to my horror Y&M&HW was listed in its entirety—though, beyond the first half of the first chapter, behind a paywall—along with a link promising to take me—through an app downloadable on the Apple Store—to an AI-narrated audiobook version. When I searched word-stream itself for my ao3 handle I found both of my multi-chapter fics were listed this way:

Because the tags on my fics (which included genres* and characters, but never the original IPs**) weren’t working, I put ‘Kara Danvers’ into the search bar and discovered that many more supercorp fics (Supergirl TV fandom, Kara Danvers/Lena Luthor pairing) were listed.

I went looking online for any mention of word-stream and AI plagiarism (the covers—as well as the ridiculously inflated number of reviews and ratings—made it immediately obvious that AI fuckery was involved), but found almost nothing: only one single Reddit post had been made, and it received (at that time) only a handful of upvotes and no advice. 

I decided to make a tumblr post to bring the supercorp fandom up to speed about the theft. I draw as well as write for fandom and I’ve only ever had to deal with art theft—which has a clear set of steps to take depending on where said art was reposted—and I was at a loss regarding where to start in this situation.

After my post went up I remembered Project Copy Knight, which is worth commending for the work they’ve done to get fic stolen from AO3 taken down from monetized AI 'audiobook’ YouTube accounts. I reached out to @echoekhi, asking if they’d heard of this site and whether they could advise me on how to get our works taken down.

While waiting for a reply I looked into Copy Knight’s methods and decided to contact OTW’s legal department:

And then I went to bed.

By morning, tumblr friends @makicarn and @fazedlight as well as a very helpful tumblr anon had seen my post and done some very productive sleuthing:

@echoekhi had also gotten back to me, advising me, as expected, to contact the OTW. So I decided to sit tight until I got a response from them.

That response came only an hour or so later: 

Which was 100% understandable, but still disappointing—I doubted a handful of individual takedown requests would accomplish much, and I wasn’t eager to share my given name and personal information with Cliff Weitzman himself, which is unavoidable if you want to file a DMCA.

I decided to take it to Reddit, hoping it would gain traction in the wider fanfic community, considering so many fandoms were affected. My Reddit posts (with the updates at the bottom as they were emerging) can be found here and here.

A helpful Reddit user posted a guide on how users could go about filing a DMCA against word-stream here (to wobbly-at-best results)

A different helpful Reddit user signed up to access insight into word-streams pricing. Comment is here.

Smells unbelievably scammy, right? In addition to those audacious prices—though in all fairness any amount of money would be audacious considering every work listed is accessible elsewhere for free—my dyscalculia is screaming silently at the sight of that completely unnecessary amount of intentionally obscured numbers.

Speaking of which! As soon as the post on r/AO3—and, as a result, my original tumblr post—began taking off properly, sometime around 1 pm, jumpscare! A notification that a tumblr account named @cliffweitzman had commented on my post, and I got a bit mad about the gist of his message :

Fortunately he caught plenty of flack in the comments from other users (truly you should check out the comment section, it is extremely gratifying and people are making tremendously good points), in response to which, of course, he first tried to both reiterate and renegotiate his point in a second, longer comment (which I didn’t screenshot in time so I’m sorry for the crappy notification email formatting):

which he then proceeded to also post to Reddit (this is another Reddit user’s screenshot, I didn’t see it at all, the notifications were moving too fast for me to follow by then)

... where he got a roughly equal amount of righteously furious replies. (Check downthread, they're still there, all the way at the bottom.)

After which Cliff went ahead & deleted his messages altogether. 

It’s not entirely clear whether his account was suspended by Reddit soon after or whether he deleted it himself, but considering his tumblr account is still intact, I assume it’s the former. He made a handful of sock puppet accounts to play around with for a while, both on Reddit and Tumblr, only one of which I have a screenshot of, but since they all say roughly the same thing, you’re not missing much:

And then word-stream started throwing a DNS error.

That lasted for a good number of hours, which was unfortunately right around the time that a lot of authors first heard about the situation and started asking me individually how to find out whether their work was stolen too. I do not have that information and I am unclear on the perimeters Weitzman set for his AI scraper, so this is all conjecture: it LOOKS like the fics that were lifted had three things in common:

They were completed works;

They had over several thousand kudos on AO3; and

They were written by authors who had actively posted or updated work over the past year.

If anyone knows more about these perimeters or has info that counters my observation, please let me know!

I finally thought to check/alert evil Twitter during this time, and found out that the news was doing the rounds there already. I made a quick thread summarizing everything that had happened just in case. You can find it here.

I went to Bluesky too, where fandom was doing all the heavy lifting for me already, so I just reskeeted, as you do, and carried on.

Sometime in the very early evening, word-stream went back up—but the fan fiction category was nowhere to be seen. Tentative joy and celebration!***

That’s when several users—the ones who had signed up for accounts to gain intel and had accessed their own fics that way—reported that their work could still be accessed through their history. Relevant Reddit post here.

Sooo—

We’re obviously not done. The fanwork that was stolen by Weitzman may be inaccessible through his website right now, but they aren’t actually gone. And the fact that Weitzman wasn’t willing to get rid of them altogether means he still has plans for them. 

This was my final edit on my Reddit post before turning off notifications, and it's pretty much where my head will be at for at least the foreseeable future:

Please feel free to add info in the comments, make your own posts, take whatever action you want to take to protect your work. I only beg you—seriously, I’m on my knees here—to not give up like I saw a handful of people express the urge to do. Keep sharing your creative work and remain vigilant and stay active to make sure we can continue to do so freely. Visit your favorite fics, and the ones you’ve kept in your ‘marked for later’ lists but never made time to read, and leave kudos, leave comments, support your fandom creatives, celebrate podficcers and support AO3. We created this place and it’s our responsibility to keep it alive and thriving for as long as we possibly can.

Also FUCK generative AI. It has NO place in fandom spaces.

THE 'SMALL' PRINT (some of it in all caps):

*Weitzman knew what he was doing and can NOT claim ignorance. One, it’s pretty basic kindergarten stuff that you don’t steal some other kid’s art project and present it as your own only to act surprised when they protest and then tell the victim that they should have told you sooner that they didn’t want their project stolen. And two, he was very careful never to list the IPs these fanworks were based on, so it’s clear he was at least familiar enough with the legalities to not get himself in hot water with corporate lawyers. Fucking over fans, though, he figured he could get away with that. 

**A note about the AI that Weitzman used to steal our work: it’s even greasier than it looks at first glance. It’s not just the method he used to lift works off AO3 and then regurgitate onto his own website and app. Looking beyond the untold horrors of his AI-generated cover ‘art’, in many cases these covers attempt to depict something from the fics in question that can’t be gleaned from their summaries alone. In addition, my fics (and I assume the others, as well) were listed with generated genres; tags that did not appear anywhere in or on my fic on AO3 and were sometimes scarily accurate and sometimes way off the mark. I remember You & Me & Holiday Wine had ‘found family’ (100% correct, but not tagged by me as such) and I believe The Shape of Soup was listed as, among others, ‘enemies to friends to lovers’ and ‘love triangle’ (both wildly inaccurate). Even worse, not all the fic listed (as authors on Reddit pointed out) came with their original summaries at all. Often the entire summary was AI-generated. All of these things make it very clear that it was an all-encompassing scrape—not only were our fics stolen, they were also fed word-for-word into the AI Weitzman used and then analyzed to suit Weitzman’s needs. This means our work was literally fed to this AI to basically do with whatever its other users want, including (one assumes) text generation. 

***Fan fiction appears to have been made (largely) inaccessible on word-stream at this time, but I’m hearing from several authors that their original, independently published work, which is listed at places like Kindle Unlimited, DOES still appear in word-stream’s search engine. This obviously hurts writers, especially independent ones, who depend on these works for income and, as a rule, don’t have a huge budget or a legal team with oceans of time to fight these battles for them. If you consider yourself an author in the broader sense, beyond merely existing online as a fandom author, beyond concerns that your own work is immediately at risk, DO NOT STOP MAKING NOISE ABOUT THIS.

Again, please, please PLEASE reblog this post instead of the one I sent originally. All the information is here, and it's driving me nuts to see the old ones are still passed around, sending people on wild goose chases.

Thank you all so much.

this is so me

The feminine or whatever urge to commit crime after reading “Art Heist, Baby”. But like, aesthetically.

If you have Spotify reblog this and tag what your number one song on your “on repeat” playlist is.

MY TWO FAVS

IT MUST BE EXHAUSTING ALWAYS ROOTING FOR THE ANTI-HERO

i adore this with my whole heart

Crashed the Wedding - Part 10

“Eddie I swear to all that is holy if you don’t stop fidgeting I’m going to stab you with one of these pins.” Nancy sniped as she fiddled with Eddie’s hair, the curls loosely tied into a messy mermaid braid decorated with silver crossing chains, hair rings, and gems. Even tied up as it were, Eddie had just let it grow down his back, only getting it dusted every few months to remove all the dead ends. He could have had anyone do his hair, anyone at all, could have flown in the best stylists in the world, but no. He’d asked Nancy to help him do his hair.

She’d told him the same thing, that he could get anyone to do it, but… he’d just smiled, told her they had similar hair, and that he trusted her to do it. She hadn’t let him down. She’d spent weeks researching braiding techniques because she knew he wanted it braided, spent ages working with one of those little mannequin heads with the hair to figure out how the gems, the chains and the little hair rings would fit into the style he wanted it to go in.

And only when she was confident that she could do it, did she attempt it on him. And that was two nights before at an impromptu hair rehearsal when she’d shown up with her bag of things to make sure what she’d done on the mannequin could be replicated with his hair.

It’d worked like a dream, she’d even managed to allow for a few messy curls to come loose from the braid, so they framed his face in effortless beauty that actually took a lot of effort. “I’m going to remember you said that at your wedding, see if you can sit still when you’re about to marry the love of your life. I feel like I’m being electrocuted but like… in a good way?”

“How can you be electrocuted in a good way?”

“Oh Nance, we gotta introduce you to the joys of electrostimulation, I’ll send you some links.”

“Please don’t, we had to get the scissors involved last time you sent me links to your kink stuff, honestly, Robin and ropes do not go well together.” There’d been knots, and not the fun kind, more the kitten trapped in a ball of yarn kind. “Almost dooone aaaand—” she slid one more bobby pin in place “finished!”

“Well… how do I look?” He turned in the chair to look at her, to look at her warm smile and emotional eyes. He’d already had his usual makeup team from his tours in to help him on that front, the crew invited as welcome guests but also helpy helpers in some parts. They’d covered his blemishes, however few he may have had, mattified his skin so the camera wouldn’t catch any oily spots lit up by the lights, and they’d gone the extra mile with his eyes. They’d been smoked with a dark shadow pallet, black blending into brown, into a warm honey gold the closer it got to his cornea his under eye lined with a soft brown, his lashes enhanced only a little by mascara to make sure it all blended together seamlessly.

He hadn’t needed anything on his lips, just a light swipe of a highlight over his cupids bow was always enough for his lips.

“You look beautiful, Eddie… Steve isn’t gonna know what hit him. Now let’s get you dressed and out there before Steve beats you down the aisle.” They’d already decided that Steve would be the one to walk down the aisle to him, followed by his Best Ma’am, Robin, and his groomsmaids an man, Max, Eleven, Erica, and Lucas. Preceded by their little flower girl Teresa Henderson, who’d sworn not to use her budding telekinesis to throw flowers everywhere.

Eleven would be watching that five-year-old like a hawk though.

She’d spent too long making sure that clearing looked as beautiful as it did to have her little demon child ruin it by whipping up a flower tornado. Too long lifting lanterns up to branches, too long artfully weaving string lights between the oranges, browns, and yellows of the leaves on the trees, letting some drape and some not. She’d spent too long ensuring all the benches they’d used as makeshift pews were arranged perfectly spaced to give everyone just enough leg room.

No flower tornado. Even if it would be extremely cool any other time.

The guests were beginning to arrive, walking down the long well-lit pathway from where they’d set up parking, Eddie had wanted a woodland fall wedding with elvish touches, and given Steve would bend to anything Eddie wanted if he bat his lashes cutely enough, the woodland fall wedding with nerdy elvish touches was happening.

It was extravagant, it would have cost a fortune to set up had Eleven not been there since the early afternoon setting it all up, it meant he got his way with his suit, a beautiful black tunic with faint dark grey brocade embellishments in the thick fabric, the cuffs held closed by silver cufflinks in the shape of D20’s, a high collar, open just enough to give his Adams apple room to breathe, hugging his neck.

The pants beneath it weren’t entirely visible but he’d gone for pants just tight enough around his ankles so he could wear his black calf-length harness boots over them, for ‘the look.’

It didn’t matter though, because nobody, not a single person would be looking at him when that music eventually started. A faint acoustic version of the march played by Jeff, Frank on base beside him adding depth to the gentle melody.

The little flower girl, her curls bouncing with each step as she carefully spread little yellow and white flower petals across the carpeted walkway, all the way down until she reached Nancy at the front who welcomed her and helped her to her own special seat at the front. And then, Eddie had to remind himself to breathe.

Steve.

He’d had no idea what Steve would look like on the day, they’d stuck to tradition, kept the outfits a secret and hadn’t seen each other for a whole twenty-four hours, even though that’d sucked. Now he wished he’d have gotten a heads up.

He looked like royalty, ethereal in his beauty, dressed in a similar style to Eddie, only his was white, a white tunic, golden in its embellishments, made even more beautiful by the cape pinned at his neck made of a thin gradient lace fabric that gently drifted across the floor, white and gold in its colour, embellished by golden glitter and starry patterns, in his hands a pretty arrangement of flowers in colours matching the petals little Teresa had decorated the walkway with.

He didn’t need makeup, he didn’t need anything but the clothes he was wearing, just looking at him was putting Eddie at risk of ruining his own makeup. He could feel the sting in his eyes, could see the watery distortion at the bottom of his vision, he breathed in sharply, the hand of their officiant, the grouchy old Chief himself, who’d gotten himself ordained purely to officiate that wedding, and Nancy and Robin’s whenever the hell they decide to tie that knot, on his shoulder, in a bid to ground him.

“Breathe kid.” Were his wise words, reminding Eddie that yes, air was required.

“It’s too hard, gonna asphyxiate.” Hopper only answered with a soft chuckle, and then Steve was there, their groomsmen and women at their sides, Robin, Max, Eleven, Erica, and Lucas at Steve’s, Dustin, Mike, Will, Nancy and Gareth at Eddie’s. Jeff and Frank lingering at the back to play them out at the end.

It all just sort of… tuned out after that, he couldn’t not focus entirely on Steve, on his smiling face, the happiness in his eyes, the warmth in his smile, the way the lights dangling in the treetops above made not just his outfit shimmer but his eyes too, he knew he should have been looking at Hopper as the man did his best to go through the standard opening words, to welcome their guests, to read out a little speech that Joyce had absolutely helped him to write that perfectly, leaving out all the monster bits, encapsulated just how much he cared for those two men, how he wished he could have been the one to walk Steve down that dumb aisle but he’d had to stay up front to do his actual job, something that had a tear slip from Steve’s eye and a soft laugh escape his lips.

He spoke of all the times he’d caught Eddie being a menace as a teenager, and how proud he was to see how much Eddie had grown up since then, even if it weren’t actually all that much, even a little bit was enough.

And then came the important part, the part Eddie had rehearsed so many times in the mirror he knew it better than one of his own songs.

“As you can probably imagine, our two grooms have chosen to write their own vows, so, without further ado as I know we’re all sick of hearin me speak… Eddie, i believe you wanted to go first.” Eddie took a deep breath. In, and out, before turning to Steve, the man mirroring him, his smile only widening as he witnessed that deep breathe.

“You got this, Bambi” he whispered with a cheeky wink, a direct crit hit to Eddie’s heart.

“Okay. Ehem… Wise men say that only fools rush into love.” Eddie began with a small grin that reached his eyes and made them sparkle in mischievous glee over his successful inclusion of song lyrics into his vows. Steve merely rolled his eyes in fond amusement, a smile seemingly permanently glued to his lips. “But I’m happy to report, that I’m no fool, although many would argue otherwise” a soft laugh erupted across the makeshift pews lining their little clearing, across the smiling faces of their friends, their families, their joy illuminated by the lanterns delicately dangling from the treetops overhead and the warm white string lights woven between branches between them. “I don’t think anyone can call nursing a love for half of the time I’ve lived as rushing it.”

Steve’s smile grew just a little wider, his hands gently squeezing around Eddie’s in a quiet show of support, as if he had ever needed support to talk.

“You came to me at my lowest, Steve, at my most frightened, and alone, you offered me warmth in your smile, safety in your words of comfort, and you supported me even though we’d definitely gotten off on the wrong foot.” Through sheer stupidity, assumptions of ones’ character, and jealousy over sharing their shared little brother. Not to mention the broken bottle to the throat. “Broken bottles, dorky little brothers, end of the world, you know.” Out of the corner of his eye he caught Joyce Byers gently waving her hand at Karen Wheeler as a simple ‘don’t worry about it’ gesture.

“I know” Steve quietly uttered with a gentle nod, his teary-eyed smile unwavering.

“You showed me what love is, Steve… you gave it so selflessly to anyone who needed it, welcomed them into your arms and kept them safe from harm even at the cost of your own safety. You’re like that single beam of warm sunlight through a break in the curtains on a cold winter morning.”

“And you’re the tiny little kitten that falls asleep in it.”

“Baby you get me so well.” He’d fallen asleep on top of Steve many a time and he always awoke warm, comforted, safe in a way that words simply could not explain.

“It’s a weird and wonderful gift.”

“Anyway, shh let me finish.” Steve’s smile widened a fraction as he nodded, lifting one hand up to his lips in a zip motion. “You adorable little shit. Ehem, as I was saying before I was so adorably interrupted. So, in light of how utterly perfect you are Steve Harrington, as there is no way on Earth, I will ever be able to pull off what you do so naturally for me every day, my vows to you will be to do my best every single gods-be-damned day, to be deserving of you. To never make you feel less than the most important person, the most important thing in my very crazy life. I vow to love you long after we become cranky old ghosts haunting our old stomping grounds because after everything we’ve seen, I flatly refuse to believe that I could stop loving you at death. I vow to never rearrange your hair stuff in the bathroom during my ‘rare as a unicorn’ cleaning sprees” at Steve’s fondly raised brow, Eddie tacked on a sheepish “again.” That earned another chuckle from their families. “I vow to give you all the applause, when you do something ridiculously badass so that you never feel underappreciated for the sheer awesome that is you in a crisis.”

“I am pretty badass, you are correct.” Robin, Steve’s Best Ma’am fondly rolled her eyes behind Steve.

“Shhh, I vow to pay attention to each and every one of your moles when I kiss them goodnight, even that one” Steve rolled his eyes, another soft laugh carrying through their audience “and finally, the most important one out of all of them… I vow to always leave the cap on the toothpaste instead of sending you on a treasure hunt for it every morning.” He’d somehow left it in the fridge at one point. Steve refused to let him live it down.

“Score” Steve quietly fist pumped.

“So, Steven Anthony Harrington, love of my life, I take you, to be my lawfully wedded husband, to have, and to hold, in sickness, and in health, for richer, and for poorer, for as long as we both shall live and beyond because fuck you, death, I’ve kicked your butt once and I’ll do it again.” He held his hand backwards toward Dustin, who deposited a subtle weight into his palm to be carefully slid into place on Steve’s finger. “To you I make this vow.” The ring a solid gold, oxidized at the surface to darken the metal, it had a raised texture made of gold dust randomly fused to the dark metal, creating starburst patterns across its surface as though the sun itself were trying to burst through the dark. “I love you, Steve… I love you so much.” His voice finally cracking at the end as he allowed the tears to gather where he’d been holding them back for as long as he could.

“I love you too, Eddie.” Steve whispered back, squeezing his hands once more, ignoring the single happy tear that fell from his own eyes, letting it fall.

“Steve?” Hopper’s gruff voice prompted Steve to begin his own.

“Right, one second.” He breathed inward through his nose sharply taking a hankie he’d wisely chosen to keep in his pocket out to dab it at his eyes, he could do this, he had his friends, his family, he had everyone he loved right there in that clearing, and he had Eddie, looking practically ethereal in the lights twinkling around him. He could do this, he’d spent weeks sitting with Nancy just trying to get the damn things to sound right, then an extra week rehearsing them so he wouldn’t have to pull out the papers they were written on. “I—uh…” He could do this, he could absolutely do this, he could—

“Baby, are they written on paper?” Eddie’s eyes were so soft, his words quiet enough so that only those at the front could hear him, Steve nodded “then read them from the paper, it’s okay.” Eddie gently lifted Steve’s hands to his lips and pressed a kiss atop his knuckles. Some things were hard when you’d suffered two too many concussions, Eddie never made him feel bad for not being able to do certain things sometimes, for needing days out of the spotlight, for needing moments to himself, for just… needing naps sometimes.

“I got you, Steve” Robin spoke in hushed tones as she offered the small number of pages to him, which he accepted gratefully. Now. Now he could do this.

“I wish I’d have gone first now, following that? Pfft, terrifying.” But then Eddie was the main lyric writer, lead vocals, and lead guitarist for Corroded Coffin, not to mention still the main DM for Hellfire so. He should have expected as much. Eddie gently squeezed the hand he still had hold of in an attempt to ease his nerves, it worked. “I’m not the best with words, so… forgive me.” The crows-feet at the corners of Eddie’s eyes only crinkled more as his smile widened, dimples on full display, nothing but love in that smile.

“For the longest time, I didn’t understand you, Eddie, when we were dumb teenagers still in school, you were this loud kid I could never wrap my head around, you played nerd games, and listened to music that made my head hurt even before the head trauma, you were an enigma that I didn’t try hard enough to figure out until you crashed into my life with a broken bottle to my throat that made me think things that didn’t belong in my brain in that particular moment.” He saw Hopper roll his eyes at their side, but Eddie was sniggering, so he ignored Hopper.

“We were pushed together through circumstance, and although that could have lead to us clashing, it could have led to resentment, you were just so easy to like. You never made me feel stupid for asking ill-timed silly questions” you have a car we don’t know about? Or, where’d you learn how to do that? As more than sufficient examples but god there’d been so many more since then. “You always so patiently just explained stuff to me without ever making me feel less than those around me, it was so easy to find myself drawn to you even if at the time, I didn’t really understand why.” He’d had a crush, a ridiculously ill-timed crush on a traumatised boy wrapped up in chaos, then after it was all finished, the crush had stayed, it’d stayed, it’d blossomed, he’d fallen deeper and deeper until resurfacing became impossible.

“You take the time to support me and lift me up in so many little ways and honestly, I don’t think you even really notice you do it. Like… you always remember where I put my glasses, even though you can never remember where you put your keys, you have like, this sixth sense for my migraines, like you know they’re coming before even I do—”

“You have this—”

“Don’t ruin the illusion, Bambi, just let me believe you’re magic.”

“Okay.”

“You make every space a home, Eddie, even that big empty house felt like home whenever you were in it, not because of anything you did, or anything you said, but because you, just you being your perfectly silly self, you are my home. You like to call me the sun, Eddie, but I’m nothing but the moon… I just reflect whatever warmth you give me. Without you I’m cold.” That mischievous little grin on Eddie’s face had softened, those beautiful brown Bambi eyes wide yet filled with warmth and emotion, shimmering with tears he’d previously shed and tears he seemed like he was about to shed.

“So, my vows to you are these… Eddie, I vow to support you, in every endeavour you take, be it music, be it writing, be it playing DnD until the early hours of the morning even when you know you have to be up at 6am to catch a flight. To never roll my eyes when you attempt to slip your nerdy references into our love life, I vow to never again ask you to play basketball with us, even if Lucas begs me to because I know you’ll selflessly say yes and suffer the entire time.”

There were pictures on the internet now. So many pictures. The Corroded Coffin fanbase found them all deeply amusing.

Lucas, now playing for some big-league team, had even signed one at his last signing event, almost choking with laughter when it turned up in front of him.

“I vow to continue, every day, to love you, and cherish you, and kiss both of those dimples at every available opportunity, awh yeah there they are~” Eddie ducked his head with an embarrassed little laugh, lifting one hand to his face to hide behind it, that didn’t last long though, because Steve curled his fingers around it and eased it away “nuh-uh, I wanna see that beautiful face when I do this.” Robin deposited into his waiting hand as she took the papers away, the ring that he’d specifically purchased out of his own left-over Harrington fund, the one he’d wisely kept in a separate bank account that the government had left alone when they’d seized his father’s assets.

He'd kept it from Eddie, hidden it away, because he wanted to see his face the first time he laid eyes on it. It was Mokume Gane in design, golds and silvers merged and shaped until the surface of the ring resembled an intricate wood grain effect, which on its own would have been beautiful, but it hadn’t been enough, it hadn’t been Eddie enough, so he’d had the words ‘One ring to seal our love, And forever to entwine us’ engraved around the outer ring in a beautiful elvish script, which Dustin had written down for him properly so the engraver could do it justice.

The expression of awe on his face when Steve slid it onto his waiting finger was more than worth the teasing he’d received from Dustin over how nerdy the whole thing was. “Steve…” Eddie breathed, eyes wide on the metal as they took in the beautifully curved writing, the intricate strokes, the pattern in the metal “you… you—”

“Yes, I did a nerdy thing for you, shh. I love you Eddie Munson, I will always love you, from now until forever, that is my vow to you.” And there were the tears, Eddie looking at him eyes shimmering and bright, beautifully reflecting all the lights around them more so than the twinkling little gems and trinkets tied into his hair.

“Ehem” Hopper cleared his throat “Eddie Munson, do you take this man—”

“I do.” Hopper didn’t chastise him for interrupting, even if he had interrupted the legal vows part.

“Steve Harrington, do you—”

“Without hesitation, I do.”

“Jesus Christ, well alright I suppose you’ve waited long enough, by the power vested in me, I now pronounce you finally married! Good luck boys, Steve, stick one on him would you so we can all get drunk.” Eddie didn’t resist in the slightest when Steve took his hand and pulled him in, he went willingly, pliant in Steve’s grip as the man twisted and dipped him, Eddie’s laughter almost musical in its beauty, his free hand lifting to cup Steve’s jaw as the man leaned in to close the distance between them, their families, their friends erupting in cheers as lips touched

“Much better than your first wedding, right?” Eddie cheekily murmured against Steve’s lips, barely parting from them they still brushed as he spoke

“Oh, be quiet.”

With a widening grin, Eddie whispered “Okay” right back, before Steve sealed their lips together once more in the second of many kisses, as Mr and Mr. Steve, and Eddie Munson.

~THE END~

"This is a Joe Alwyn album" "This is a Matty Healy album" shut up shut up SHUT UP!!!!!!!!!! Swifties are so annoying, this is a TAYLOR SWIFT ALBUM!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! WHY IS YOUR FIRST REACTION TO ASSIGN THINGS TO A MAN!!!!!!!!!!!! I HAVE HAD ENOUGH!!!!!

#24 on ur spotify wrapped describes how 2024 will go, how screwed r u

The fruity four are the most unlikely clique at Rose Hill.

The au/crossover I never knew I wanted til I saw those pastel uniforms