Émotion (Nobuhiko Obayashi, 1966)

chrissy on vigil by max’s bedside. 

switching between rubbing the blood back into max’s fingers, putting lotion on max’s hands, brushing max’s hair, and taking stock of her own still bruised limbs.

sitting by lucas while he’s reading to max and taking over when lucas has to leave or gets tired. 

asking lucas (and whoever else is willing) to tell stories about max so no one even gets close to forgetting what max was like alive and well. 

chrissy telling dustin she’s noticed his hat collection for a while and likes all of them. being fascinated by dustin’s fascination with radios. 

chrissy asking erica with genuine interest how she got into d&d, immediately getting more curious when she learns about figure painting and dice towers and homemade maps and dioramas. erica is no cliché and she has too many facets to ever be boring.

chrissy finding out nancy knows a thing or two about guns and with great trepidation asking if nancy will show her what she knows. saying she needs to read the school paper more. promising nancy she’s got the clear head and the clear eyes to see what’s happening in the world and call it out truthfully. admiring nancy’s dedication to not being just some girl. 

going to family video and getting into an almost heated discussion with robin over the ranking of brat pack movies before deciding st. elmo’s fire is superior. or maybe it’s the outsiders. is it the outsiders? probably. steve is making cartoon blinking noises.

chrissy being endlessly amused and in awe of robin, her solid sense of self. soon showing up to band concerts with a single pompom to wave in silence as a show of support.

something about will drawing chrissy in, even if he’s near silent, until she pulls him aside and asks what he’s feeling, if it’s anything like what she felt. getting to sit down together and explain all the leftover fear and dread to someone who might actually understand how heavy and how inevitable it feels. 

chrissy teaching max leg strengthening exercises.

driving to max’s house and either existing in post-vecna silence from the pain of living through it or doggedly pushing through and either cussing at their bodies’ weaknesses together or chrissy taking max’s hand and urging them both across the yard to the clothesline and back, then to the dog and back. and then to eddie’s house and back. 

chrissy asking eddie if there’s anything that can be done about his uncle’s trailer.

bringing wayne a new mug and flowers, desperately sorry he had to see her twisted the way she had been on his floor. 

every time she goes to see eddie bringing a hat or a mug for his uncle.

chrissy trying to ask what everyone’s favorite song is, but when it gets too hard to say and stings to remember, she asks about favorite albums. 

going to record stores and digging through bargain bins and whatever she can find that makes her think of the hawkins heroes. 

chrissy going to the picnic table clearing with a trash bag and determinedly cleaning up the tiny little space as if it will somehow cleanse it. 

chrissy being benched from cheer but still showing up to every game, now able to cheer for her squad even more than simply the players on the court. the girls become much less than just simple squad-mates and much more like friends.

chrissy telling mike and will she’s admired how close their friendship has been over the years. 

chrissy asking all four of the freshman boys how long they’ve liked d&d and what got them started. 

just once getting to have a conversation with argyle and hanging on every word that comes out of his mouth with a huge smile on her face, completely entranced and entertained. 

chrissy visiting fred and patrick’s graves to clean and decorate them. she didn’t know fred but from a distance and knew patrick on a friendly surface level, but she knows the horrors they experienced before they died. that’s enough. 

chrissy going to the hideout on tuesdays, not just to see eddie play, but to see corroded coffin. to hear the band members eddie is so proud of playing their hearts out. to actually learn their names and talk to them all and get to know them. she doesn’t scream or whoop or holler during their set but remembers particularly sharp riffs and rhythms to compliment later. asking about song names and lyrics and inspirations.

chrissy telling all of her female friends daily that they’re beautiful, slowly, eventually abandoning references to appearance altogether and telling them they’re amazing and smart or clever instead. what she might have liked to hear, unladen with subtext. 

the party having lunch picnics on the school lawn. 

creating summer game plans together and apart.

library dates.

desperately trying to reclaim any sense of normalcy within hawkins. 

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​ !

    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 .

hi friends! first of all, thank you for being here and interested in this little chrissy blog. second [spoilers], across the fandom the prevailing aus for chrissy seem to take place during the events of season 4. that is not the case for this portrayal’s main verse. chrissy remains dead for the entirety of the season, only reviving when robin/nancy/steve blast vecna. first killed, first revived.

as vecna emulates the lich of the same name from dnd lore and has noticeably displayed the bodies of chrissy, fred, and patrick in his mind space for max to stumble upon, which, coupled with the line “they’re not gone, eleven. they’re still with me,” provides some implication that the consciousnesses (or souls) of vecna’s victims still exist somewhere inside vecna or in a place of his choosing. this is only emphasized by his stealing of their eyes upon killing them, since “eyes are the windows to the soul”. especially powerful liches possess phylacteries, aka a protective central storage of power for their soul to draw upon when they need to regenerate. the three victims’ souls may very well have been stored in vecna’s “phylactery” mind space - his family’s deconstructed house - for that purpose. when vecna is attacked he is weakened to the point of potentially letting souls slip from his grasp. in a similar fashion that max can enter and exit, chrissy is released from the immediate bondage of vecna’s “phylactery” and able to slip through the cracks. although, unlike max, she isn’t released into the real world but the realm that vecna dwells in: the upside down. until she can find her way out, it’s there that she stays. in the real world, her buried body dissolves and her casket, when exhumed, is discovered to be empty.

long story short, all this can be found on my verses page and this drabble explaining how chrissy woke up. all this is to give chrissy her own unique story that both gives her a chance at agency, a solo story of survival, and manages to keep the timeline of s4 unchanged. thanks so much for reading!!!

"I wouldn't want to bother anyone," I say as the thing inside of me eats me alive.

Sweater weather. Happy September 1st

chrissy will eventually warm up a little to the aggressive sounds of metal although she never really becomes a fan fan. however, the moment eddie/cc plays her metallica’s “one”, she immediately latches on and never lets go. that is her metallica song.

hours into the unclear future, chrissy might catch herself realizing that infinite reasons could exist for pink cheeks and dreamy silences in a packed kitchen hot from crowded bodies guzzling light beer and gossip like air, but in the moment she was only capable of joyously giggling,  ❝ steve, you’re so pink! ❞  a small poke to his cheek came after, followed in quick succession by an exultant gasp and a poke to a nearby eddie’s cheek.  ❝ you both are! ❞

such a sight was inexplicably tickling with a plastic cup of punch or two in her system (never more than that, however  —  playing it safe has become more comforting than boring) that lent a glowing edge to even the harshest of lighting and noises. like all of them were sucked into the kind of classic 80’s film chrissy used to romanticize within an inch of its life. with her shoulder sunk into eddie’s side and halfway beaming at steve, an argument could be made. brat pack, eat your heart out. they didn’t have safe places like she did, to be drawn back to every night like twin homing beacons. they weren’t laughing like she could these days. 

a slow, loose dawning still managed to roll over the former cheerleader, cooling a little of her own halfway inebriation.  ❝ it’s been a while, right? since we had fun like this? ‘cuz it feels good. ❞  

a freak, a jock, & an ex-jock walk into a party....     ///      @firelightfables​ + @starsinshadows​