Story Synopsis: Some weird low-key occult parties start popping up that Steve can’t in good conscience ignore and takes it upon himself to investigate. Billy gets caught up in the consequences of his meddling, and isn’t it funny? For all the strange things the Upside Down has thrown his way, it’s werewolves that Steve has trouble accepting exist.
Notes: uh hello. have some links to playlists i made on spotifyandyoutubefor all the chapter titles and lyric summaries i use on this story
—
“What kept you?” Steve asked as Billy slid into the passenger seat, dressed in his own clothes now but looking unhappy still. There was an anxiety-based agitation in his voice that he could not restrain, and he didn’t care if Billy picked up on it or not. He’d been made to wait, a target in the open, safe from the cold only as he sat struggling to contend with the building tension that grew with every twisted shadow he watched that bent and swayed with the wind.
Billy didn’t answer as he shut the door behind him, unable to put into words how he’d needed some time to mentally recover from the shock of running into Neil like he had. The memories of the way he’d used to sneak back home after parties- careless and drunk and making too much noise- had rattled him too much as he relived the repercussions of his own ineptitude. Neil didn’t often show much self-restraint on those nights, and Billy wasn’t quick to forget it. The only reason he’d been spared tonight was because of Max.
Shaken as he was, he’d run into Steve as he’d been making his way back to him, car in motion and already driving towards his home. The twenty minute timer had barely expired when they’d met about halfway, the low-beams of the car’s headlights cutting through the slight flurry of snow to find Billy walking down the length of the street, head kept low and hands tucked deep into the folds of his borrowed coat.
“I was held up,” was all Billy managed to say, and when he spoke, Steve could hear an exhaustion in his voice that went beyond the physical.
Billy was tired, clearly, but not just from the walk. Something had happened, but he didn’t want to talk about it. They sat still and silent for a moment as Steve decided on whether or not he wanted to press the issue. The idling hum of the motor and the soft sound of snowflakes landing on the windshield told him it was best not to, and so he sighed and directed his attention back to the road. Putting his car into gear, he began to drive, turning them around in the middle of the street to head off in the right direction.
He couldn’t pretend that he wasn’t hurt from Billy’s silence. Foolishly, Steve had begun to think that they’d been making significant headway in being able to rely on one another in this matter, and Billy’s sullen withdrawal stung. There was simply no way for him to know that Billy’s father had marked him by name.
Neil had somehow become familiar with Steve, and that meant that for Billy to be caught associating with him now was a liability that would end in punishment- severepunishment- if he wasn’t careful. Even though all Steve claimed he’d wanted to do was help, Neil had turned accepting that help into a serious risk that, at first, Billy hadn’t thought he’d wanted to take. All those nights of being beaten for simply returning home late would be compounded into one terrible reckoning if he got caught, and the thought of that had been overwhelming.
It still was.
So much had unwittingly been placed on the line in the span of a single confrontation.
—
They made it to the Henderson household without further incident, though Steve still felt jumpy and Billy was still moody and withdrawn. Parking alongside the curb in front of the house, they got out and quietly ferried their supplies to the cellar and stood at the top of its ruined entrance. They stared down into the dark, bloodied stairwell, shoulder to shoulder, both of them too apprehensive to make the first move.
Billy was reluctant to return to the place of his savagery, and Steve was afraid of whatever unknown things may have been lurking in the dark. Not that he believed there was anything down there, just that there couldbe, and he wasn’t willing to find out. Twenty minutes of sitting alone with his thoughts had made him overly wary of the possibility of hidden monsters waiting to ambush him.
It didn’t matter that they were there for a reason; for once, they both seemed to see eye to eye on something, and that something had them both far too reluctant to go back down there.
“We should get started,” Steve said, though he clearly was not making any effort to move.
“Sun won’t be up for another few hours,” Billy drawled, sounding almost lazy in an attempt to cover up any fear he may have been outwardly expressing. “It’s not a race, Harrington; we have plenty of time.”
Together they stared into the depths of the cellar, each of them too intimidated by what it may or may not have contained to want to return to it.
“This is stupid,” Steve remarked, trying to lighten the situation with a laugh that sounded more like a hysterical sigh. “You know there’s nothing down there.”
Billy scoffed and maintained his façade of indifference. “Alright, if you’re so sure, be my guest. Ladies first,” he said coolly.
Steve side-eyed him with a frown, but Billy’s eyes were locked on the narrowness of the cellar’s throat. Neither of them moved.
Taking a deep breath, Steve muttered a quick “Fuck it” and led the way into the darkness. He heard Billy hesitantly begin to follow behind him after he’d made it about halfway down the flight of stairs, and the sound of his steps bolstered Steve’s determination somewhat, but it did nothing to calm his squeamish nature: there were bits of Billy everywhere.
His stomach rolled unpleasantly as his eyes flicked around, trying not to linger on any one spot for too long. He did his best to avoid the more obvious bits of gore that decorated the staircase, but still managed to step on something soft and round that squishedunpleasantly beneath his shoe, sending a shiver up his spine. Part of him wanted to look, just to know what it was, but he managed to restrain himself. The nature of un-seeing something was a talent he hadn’t yet learned to master, and he was already close to gagging as it was. If it was affecting him this badly, he wondered how Billy must have been feeling at that moment.
Maneuvering around a pile of shredded clothing, Steve stepped into the cellar and reached out to grab for the hanging cord to turn the lightbulb. Billy lingered on the steps behind him, waiting for the light to come on.
It didn’t take long to find, but the first time his fingers brushed against the dangling string Steve couldn’t help but jerk back against the sensation. He cursed himself mentally before reaching back out to grasp it and pull, and finally there was light with which to see what remained.
Shed bits of skin and scores of dried, rust-brown blood were all over the floor and portions of the walls. Steve repressed his want to gag at the sight of it all, and was thankful that the cold had at least prevented the rot from progressing too far. Billy stood forlornly behind him, but with the light on he stepped into the room and knelt down to scoop up a clump of his hair. He stared down at the strands, sifting through them with his fingers. Wordlessly, Steve opened up one of the trash bags he’d brought along and held it out while Billy dropped the fine blonde hairs into it.
For some reason, Steve felt like apologizing, though he knew he had no reason to.
They split up and began to take action then, leaving the limp trash bag in the center of the room as they went about cleaning what they could by hand. Equipped with the only pair of gloves, it fell to Steve to pick up a majority of the gore while Billy milled around, trying to restore order to the mess he’d made out of the Henderson’s stored possessions.
Progress was slowed only when Steve realized he wouldn’t be able to get any water to properly try and mop up the stains. He’d gone back up the stairs, aware of Billy’s eyes on his back (as though he were afraid Steve were going to leave him alone down there, or worse yet, lock him back in), with the bucket and tried to fill it from the outdoor faucet, but found it frozen when he tried the tap.
“Shit.”
Sighing, he wondered what they could do to try and clean the blood now but couldn’t think of anything they could do that would work effectively. “Shit,” he hissed again as he was forced to give up.
He left the bucket at the top of the stairs before he made his way back down to rejoin Billy.
“So, turns out the spigot’s frozen. Should’ve guessed that it would be; I don’t know how we’re going to clean the rest of this shit out now,” he announced with a sigh.
Coming back into the dimly lit room, he found that Billy had halted in his efforts. He’d put many things back into place, but had stalled when it came to the shelf that had been used to block the entrance into the tunnel. He stood before the gaping hole utterly perplexed, his confusion palpable in the small, cold space. Steve felt his stomach drop; he’d neglected to think of how he was supposed to explain thataway.
At the sound of Steve’s voice, Billy turned around with eyes wide and asked, “Did I do that?”
There was almost a sense of childlike wonder in the tone of his voice, as though he both could not believe nor comprehend the depths of his own power when he was changed. His eyes- yellow-blue and beautiful- were widened in confusion as he looked to Steve for clarity.
“Uh.”
Taken aback by the genuine mystification Billy met him with, Steve faltered. It would be easier to let him believe that it hadbeen him, as neither one of them truly understood what monstrous things Billy was capable of when he was changed, but after days of trying to build up mutual confidence and trust between them, Steve knew he owed it to him to be more upfront than that.
It would mean indoctrinating him into the Upside Down; he only hoped that the government didn’t have ears down there in the dark with them to pin another security breach on his loose mouth. He thought not, but at the same time was hesitant to risk it.
“No, you didn’t,” he said tentatively after a moment, noting the way Billy’s brow furrowed, fearing he may have provoked his anger. He was so tired of dancing around it, but he’d found that being direct with Billy yielded better results. “It was already there before you got here.”
“The hell does that mean?” Billy asked slowly, and Steve could see in his gold-flecked eyes how suspicious he was.
“It’s how you got out.”
He returned to Billy’s side as he turned his attention into the black, dark depths of the tunnel. Memories of his folly from a few nights prior led him to wonder just how much of the story Billy was going to believe, if he were willing to listen at all. “I forgot it was here, honestly. My fault, I guess. Dustin and I had it hidden behind that shelf you knocked over and it just kind of derailed from there.”
Billy was silent and speculative as he took in this new information, searching Steve’s face for any falsity.
“You forgot about a giant fucking hole in the wall ?” he asked, sounding incredulous. He seemed more surprised now by that than the fact that it existed at all.
“Out of sight, out of mind, man,” Steve replied with a shrug that was more of an awkward jerk of his shoulder. “It’s not like this is myhouse. I know I shouldn’t have, but with everything going on, I did. I’m sorry.”
He could feel Billy’s eyes boring into him, but didn’t want to face him at that moment. Billy looked away with a scowl and continued to size up the giant breech in the wall. After a moment of quiet pondering, he stepped forward and walked into the hole. He placed a hand on the earthen wall for support as he cautiously began to venture inside. Steve stayed where he was, giving Billy the space to explore it on his own, but as Billy delved deeper and began to blend in with the darkness slowly surrounding him, he couldn’t keep himself from getting nervous. He took a step forward hesitantly, unwilling to lose Billy to the darkness a second time.
“What the fuck is this?” Billy called out after a moment’s heavy silence, sounding relatively close despite being totally consumed by shadow, his voice echoing slightly in the hollowed-out earth. “How far does the damn thing go?”
“Far,” Steve replied, minding the volume of his own voice so he didn’t accidentally wake Dustin or his mother sleeping up above them. “It… goes all over town, I think? At least as far out to the farms, like where the parties were.”
After a moment during which the only sounds that could be heard were of Billy’s boots trudging through the loose ground, he came back out from the darkness and once again stared openly at Steve.
“There is seriously something wrong with this town, you know that?” Billy said with an annoyed click of his tongue. He glanced around the room before stepping back into the dim light. “Explain to me why the hell there are a bunch of secret tunnels spread all throughout this goddamn place. Better yet, tell me what the hell kind of shit could have even madesomething like this.”
Steve wanted to, but didn’t know how private their conversation really was. Memories of how he and Nancy had been compromised rose to the forefront of his mind, and besides that, they were working against the clock; they had to be out of there before Dustin or his mother woke.
“This is going to sound like more bullshit, but believe me when I say that it’s not safe to talk about it here,” he said, sounding defeated. He wished he had a beer or a cigarette in hand to steady his nerves; after all he’d been through recently, he felt he more than deserved one. “I need to show you something anyway, or you’re not going to believe anything I have to say.”
“I’m a literal monster, Harrington, in case you’ve forgotten; whatever you thinkI wouldn’t believe-” Billy began to argue, but Steve promptly cut him off.
“Yeah, you are, but you’re not the first one Hawkins has ever seen,” he said as he began to gather up his supplies, rounding up the filled trash bags and tying them off to stave off some of the stink they emitted. His words seemed to have taken the wind out of Billy’s sails as he stood there looking even more confused than before.
Steve glanced around the basement at all the blood still left on the floor and walls and knew they would just have to leave it be. Let Dustin’s mother think what she would; at least they’d removed all the rest of Billy’s residue.
“Did you get all the stuff you needed?” Steve asked as he began to head towards the stairs, gesturing with his head for Billy to follow. “Your keys and whatever?”
He spied a shovel propped up along the wall and grabbed it before leaving.
“Yeah,” came Billy’s quiet, ponderous reply.
On the way up, Steve paused on the step where he’d inadvertently stepped on something, flattening it against the cement. He couldn’t stop himself from looking as he ascended, and realized sadly that what he’d crushed underfoot had been an eye.
—
The drive to the quarry was mostly silent. Whenever Billy tried to press him for more information, Steve quietly shut him down until he finally understood that he wasn’t going to learn anything more until they reached their destination.
The weak snowfall that had persisted into the early morning finally began to relent as they drove. With the way his arm was stinging, he drove one-handed to keep it in a relaxed position. He thought about his impending medical visit, and wondered if this time they might give him something to manage the pain.
As they got closer to the quarry, Steve eventually turned off the main road onto an unused, slush-filled gravel-based tributary road that led them through the woods. They were both on high alert as they traveled, bouncing along in the car. Neither of them were willing to get jumped by the red-eyed beast as they passed through, though they needn’t have worried; the drive was uneventful, and they rolled up to the forest’s edge where the lip of the quarry inhibited its growth.
Billy looked around, and seemed unimpressed with what he saw.
“Glad we decided to go sight-seeing,” he said, seething with sarcasm. “How utterly romantic of you.”
“Shut up, man,” Steve retorted tiredly. He cut the engine and stepped out to get the shovel he’d brought with them.
Billy had been to the quarry a few times before, but only from the main access point. This was a different, more rural side to it that, if not for the lack of a view, he found he actually rather liked for its privacy. If he didn’t have such an innate fear of the woods now, he might have even let himself believe that Steve had just brought him out here to neck.
He got out of the car and stood by the door as he waited for Steve to find what it was he wanted to show him. As it was though, he just seemed lost.
Steve looked around the area that was both familiar and unfamiliar to him at once. He remembered coming out here to bury the demo-dog that Dustin had foolishly tried to hide in the Byers’ fridge, but not the exact location. He shivered a little with the cold and glanced around for the landmark he was all but certain they’d made note of to mark the grave.
But what had it been? It’d been so long since they’d gotten rid of the corpse that, like the hole in the cellar wall, it had followed the rule of ‘out of sight, out of mind’ and he could no longer remember.
“Dammit,” Steve muttered to himself as he walked around, all but certain that they had buried it closer to the quarry’s edge than to the forest’s.
He tried pushing the shovel tip into the ground every so often, wondering if he’d be able to find a soft spot hidden beneath the snow, but the earth was frozen hard and wouldn’t relent. He was beginning to feel like this had all been a colossal waste of their time and energy when he saw it: the old tree stump that they’d used as a makeshift headstone, now half-buried in the snow.
“I found it!” he declared as he made his way over to the stump, taking care not to slip in the slurry. From behind, he heard Billy say, “Great. What is it, ‘cause all I’m seeing is a bunch of snow and shit and mud.”
“We buried it, I have to dig it up,” Steve said, too excited at having actually found the grave to note the despondent tone in Billy’s voice.
Gripping the shovel tightly, he cleared the snow away from where he planned to dig and then plunged the shovelhead directly into the dirt. He regretted this action immediately, as his arm lit up in agonizing pain. He let out a yelp and dropped the shovel to grip his injured bicep.
“Fuck,” he moaned once the initial wave of pain receded. He was left with a hot throbbing sensation that he imagined he could feel pulsing through the layers of clothes he wore. “Holy shit, that hurt.”
He was so focused on the abrupt pain in his arm that he didn’t hear that Billy had left his perch by the car to join him by the stump. Wordlessly, he bent down to pick up the discarded shovel, though not before shrugging out of the borrowed jacket he’d been wearing to drape it over Steve’s hunched over figure.
“What are you doing?” Steve asked as he felt the coat cover him.
“Digging for buried treasure, what else?” Billy replied snarkily. There was a look in his eye that was equal parts worry and concern, but his language did well to mask it. “Sit down and show me where the ‘x’ is before you lose your arm, Harrington.”
Surprised, Steve could only point out the general area he thought the corpse might still be. “It’ll be big, hard to miss,” he clarified as he swept the snow off the tree stump and sat atop it, cradling his arm. Billy nodded in acknowledgement and eyeballed the area before picking out a spot to begin digging.
With Billy at the helm, the shovel bit into the earth with ease, carving out a chunk of dirt that he casually threw over his shoulder. The muscles in his arms barely flexed as he fell into a rhythm, and it looked as though it cost him no great effort at all to sling the dirt around. Steve watched him dig in silent admiration until Billy caught him looking.
“Better start talking while resting on your pretty ass,” he said, pulling his lips up into a coy smile, obviously appreciating the way Steve was watching him so openly.
Clearing his throat and awkwardly turning away, Steve nodded and pretended he couldn’t feel his face turning red. “Uh, right. Yeah. Just uh, keep an open mind about it; it’s kind of a lot to take in.”
“I’ma lot to take in, if you know what I mean,” Billy said with a lecherous laugh.
“Humble,” Steve said with a roll of his eyes, but even still he couldn’t help but smile a little as Billy resumed digging. Instead of chastising him for being gross, he began to tell him about Hawkins’ sordid history with monsters.
As he didn’t know the truth of everything himself, he did his best at explaining what he knew, about how the government was somehow involved, and that they’d made contact with an alternate dimension but in doing so had opened a doorway they couldn’t close. He explained how the creatures kept coming through that doorway, and how Hopper was involved and why he felt they could trust him. Billy paused in his shoveling on the odd occasion to ask for clarity involving certain points that Steve himself wasn’t clear on, but he wasn’t angry or dismissive about anything, only curious.
He talked about his first encounter with the Demogorgon, and how terrified he’d been standing up against that monster. The longer he talked, the better he felt. It had been hard keeping these things to himself, and even though he’d had support in Nancy and the kids and others, it felt good getting to talk with someone who had an outside perspective. Not that Billy added much to the conversation besides the occasional grunt as he threw another load of dirt over his shoulder, but still.
It was nice.
“It started with Will, somehow,” he said as he began to explain just how the kids he was always hanging around were connected in all of this. No one had explained to him just how the kid had been the epicenter of it all, but he hadn’t bothered to ask, either. Everyone initially involved with Will’s disappearance were still a little touchy on the subject matter.
“The zombie kid?”
“Don’t call him that, man. He gets all weird about it, and if the other little brats hear you say it then they’ll start hassling you over it.” He paused, remembering the incident in which they had all promptly reprimanded him on the one (and only) occurrence he’d slipped up and said the nickname. “Him and the others though, they’re smart. Really smart; probably smarter than I am, honestly.”
“‘Probably’?” Billy chimed in, throwing him a grin that Steve met with a roll of his eyes.
“Shut up and keep digging, Hargrove.”
With a light laugh, Billy complied and Steve continued talking.
He spoke on how even after the Demogorgon had been beaten and Will rescued from the alternate dimension, the problems hadn’t ended. More strange things kept happening, centered around Will, and that’s when the tunnels were created. He touched on Dustin and Nougat and on a man called Bob whom he’d never actually gotten to meet, but whom he had heard had been braver than most. He explained how Maxine had gotten involved and expected anger from Billy then, but wasn’t met with anything other than silent contemplation.
Regardless of the surprising lack of biteback, there was still a noticeable drift in the tone of their conversation. Steve could feel it as plainly as he could feel the cold wind blowing: he had taken their conversation and driven it into precipitous territory, because the story was wrapping up, and they both knew what was coming next.
“The night you, uh, came to the Byers house… you never let me explain what was happening, or what we were doing. You’d already come in with your- your stupid, weird, pre-drawn conclusions.”
Like you always do.
Steve turned his attention up from where he’d been watching the hole being dug to look up at Billy, trying to gauge how he was reacting to the topic. He knew to expect pushback for it, but anything else he had hoped to discern was blocked from view as Billy had turned his back to him. For some reason, the fact that Billy wouldn’t face him bothered him.
Taking in a deep breath, Steve decided to continue and see how far he could push it before Billy’s temper ignited. “It was just bad timing, man. That’s all it ever is with me. At the Byers’ that night, with the first one; hell, even with you- it’s just bad timing.”
He had to catch himself when he tasted the hint of venom creeping out in his voice. He hadn’t wanted to start an argument, but the nature of the conversation brought out bitter feelings in him that he had yet to reconcile. He took a deep breath to re-ground himself before continuing, saying, “We were in the middle of something, trying to get Will back from the stupid thing possessing him, fighting off the dogs, and trying to figure out what the hell to do next when you just- showed up.”
A particularly deep shunking sound ensued as the shovel bit into the earth again, and then, with an awkward lurch, Billy suddenly stopped shoveling.
Steve felt his chest tighten as he finally landed on the primary point he’d been dancing around. That night at the Byers… was he supposed to have forgiven Billy for what he’d done by now, or even just gotten over it on his own? Billy had never done anything by means of an apology, and yet…
And yet there they were, having spent the better part of the last few days sharing each other’s company like old acquaintances. Sometimes they’d laugh, share a joke, and even tiptoe around the odd innuendo. But would they be that friendly with one another if they hadn’t bonded over the shared trauma of the Yule parties? And if not, where would they be now except still latched at each other’s throats? Nothing about this lined up right in Steve’s mind, but it didn’t feel as wrong as he wanted it to, either.
He opened his mouth to say more, to elaborate on his thoughts a little bit better, but was stopped by the quiet sound of Billy sniffling.
Steve bit back on his words, shocked at the thought of Billy crying. He gaped openly as Billy made that wretched sound again, unsure of how to react. This wasn’t the reaction he’d wanted (though, if he were being honest, he wasn’t sure what sort of reaction he was hoping for anyway), but a small part of him was touched that the events of that night weighed as heavily on Billy as it did on himself.
Regardless, he didn’t know what to say. Steve sat frozen on his perch, eyes wide and eyebrows drawn up towards the sky. He watched, speechless, as Billy took one large, shuddery inhalation of breath, and Steve realized then that he wasn’t crying; the sounds he’d mistaken for sniffling were actually of him sniffing.
Billy had latched onto a scent with his new, keener senses and was acting on them. Steve watched as his shoulders tensed briefly, hunching up tightly before he tossed the shovel aside and unexpectedly dropped to his knees, clearing more snow away from the area he’d been digging in with a frightening intensity. He grunted with the effort, dirtying his hands in the mud and the snow in a way that would most likely end with bloodied scrapes. In his reckless fervor, he was able to move more earth away with his bare hands than he could with the shovel.
“What is it, Hargrove?” Steve asked sharply as a spike of anxiety tore through him. Derailed from the determination he’d held onto in order to talk about their fight, he felt fear sidle in to take its place. “What is it? What’s going on?”
When Billy didn’t answer, he stood up and left the jacket he’d been holding in his seat to walk closer to the hole that he was digging. The urgency with which Billy was clawing at the ground was frightening; he was beginning to hurt himself, Steve had to get him to stop. He reached out and grabbed hold of his shoulder, trying to pull him away from the hole and whatever it was he was trying to unearth. He expected violent resistance, or to be thrown aside in a similar fashion to the night when he’d been tossed aside as though he were nothing, but to his amazement, Billy reacted to his touch and stopped.
Panting hard in a way that created great puffs of white air, Billy froze, staring down into the hole he’d created, his face blank and pale. His hands were raw and bloody, and Steve noted with some unease that his fingers were claw-tipped, but whether that had occurred before or after his sudden compulsion to dig was unknown to him. Swallowing hard, Steve stood hovering over Billy’s shoulder to look down and see what it was that Billy had been desperate to reveal.
But the only thing to see was what he’d already known was buried there: the rotting carcass of the demo-dog laid curled up on its side, partially obscured by the dirt Billy had been hurriedly trying to remove. Seeing it eased some of his apprehension, but as he flicked his gaze from the body to Billy, he found that he was now staring up at him with some terrible knowledge hidden behind his eyes.
Again, unease coiled itself in the pit of his stomach as he was unable to discern what the blank expression on Billy’s face meant.
“What is it?” he asked again, feeling his tongue stick to the roof of his mouth as he spoke, mouth suddenly gone dry. “What’s wrong?”
Billy’s eyes flicked away from Steve’s face and down to his hand, where the bandages covering the hidden wound wrapped his hand like a glove, and the sour feeling in his stomach intensified.
“It’s the same,” Billy said somberly, turning away from his hand to look back down at the husk of the demo-dog. “The smell. The bite on your hand- it- they smell the same.”
A feeling like he’d been suddenly doused in ice water washed over him. The sensation was numbing as he stumbled backwards, tripping over the stump as he fell away.
“Fuck,” he whispered quietly, the word materializing in the air as a calm breath of cool condensation. “Of course it is. Of fuckingcourse it is.”
All the dread and apprehension that had been building up in him in those terse few seconds as he waited for the revelation had sapped him of all his energy. When the back of his legs came into contact with the stump, he slumped down and sat on it in disbelief. He felt cold all over; even the frigid morning air couldn’t touch him the way Billy’s words had.
“You got a cigarette, man?” Steve asked, his voice hoarse. He didn’t want to think about what it meant that the bite and the dead demo-dog smelled the same. Not right now; not when he’d emotionally been on the cusp of something else and then been abruptly ripped back to his present problems.
Standing up from his kneeled position, Billy quietly reached into the front pocket of his shirt to pull out a dented pack of cigarettes. Wordlessly, he approached Steve, his footsteps crunching in the snow as he held one out to him before pulling one out for himself. He lit them both with the click of his flip-top lighter and then sat down on the opposite end of the stump, pressing his back gently against Steve’s.
Steve stiffened at the contact, but eventually leaned back into him, and they sat balanced on the stump together, back to back.
Billy’s warm weight was comforting as he began to calm down, taking long, ragged pulls from the cigarette. He stared out over the rim of the quarry, taking in their surroundings to note just how serene it was, despite the circumstances of them being there. The trees and rocks glistened with the fresh frost, and oh, how beautiful it would all be come sunrise when the light would make all those thousands of tiny facets shine.
Whatever the smell meant, what good did it do him to know? It was already there, a sickening part of himself that he’d tried to ignore every step of the way.
He could feel Billy move whenever the other boy shifted and breathed, taking his time in smoking his own cigarette down to the filter. Distantly, he could hear the sounds of a few early birds beginning to chitter in the woods close by. Such a strange time for peace, Steve thought.
“Harrington.”
Billy’s gruff voice caught him off-guard, but he was still too numb to properly react; otherwise, he may have jumped.
“Yeah?” he responded, and even he could hear how listless he had become.
There was a moment’s hesitation before Billy spoke again. “About that night,” he began to say, and that tightness that Steve had felt in his chest before began to resurface, squeezing him gently. “I didn’t need an explanation. Nothing you said could have stopped me. You were right. I had conclusions. Notions. Whatever; it didn’t matter. I was looking for a fight that night and I found it, but I didn’t mean- what I did- I didn’t mean for it to happen to you.”
Billy had begun to tense up he’d rambled on, each unsteady word he bit out constricting his muscles. Steve could feel it in his shoulders, in the way he kept fidgeting with the cigarette he held in his hands. Steve remained silent in the event that Billy wanted to continue talking, wondering what had made him want to touch back on the conversation they hadn’t concluded.
“I mean- fuck, it’s hard to talk about this shit. I’m not goodat this. You said you and those little shit-stains had stuff going on behind the scenes, yeah? Well, I did too.”
“This is the shittiest apology I’ve ever heard,” Steve muttered. He would have laughed, if not for how hyper-aware he was of the strong feeling of gravity pressing down all around him. After what they’d just discovered, he wondered if he’d ever have the energy to laugh again. Not for the first time did he feel old beyond his years.
“Shut up,” Billy hissed sharply, leaning away. As he moved, though, Steve moved with him and stretched back into the lean to maintain contact. Billy was warm and alive, and he needed that comfort. “It’s just, I fucking-” he tried to say again, and growled when he couldn’t finish his sentence. “It’s just that I mistook you for someone else, alright? I didn’t mean for it to be you,” he said in one sharp breath that seemed to deflate him as it was spoken.
Steve frowned and turned his head to let his cheek rest against the span of Billy’s back and tilted his face up towards his shoulder. “Mistook me- The fuck does that mean?” he asked morosely. Whatever Billy was trying to say wasn’t making sense. “Who the hell did you mistake me for?”
Billy was silent for a long time. What remained of the cigarette that was perched between his fingers slowly burnt down into ash, and he let it drop into the snow. Steve felt his heart thudding in his chest and tried to ignore it, wondering if Billy was going to answer at all when-
“Just then, you looked a lot like my dad, is all,” Billy said quietly, shifting uncomfortably in his seat with the admission. His voice, usually self-confident and full of a lazy sort of bravado, sounded almost timid, like he was afraid of being scolded. Steve recognized it as the soft sound of vulnerability.
The smoke from his cigarette drifted up and away from him, slow and indifferent to their plight. Steve heaved a heavy sigh and sat up, no longer pinning himself to Billy’s back.
“I’m not going to say it’s okay,” Steve began to say, flicking his cigarette butt aside as he finished it, “because it’s not- noneof this shit is- but, for what it’s worth, uh, thank you.”
Billy shrugged, feigning indifference to the fact that he’d just handed Steve a piece of himself that’d he alone had been carrying the weight of for a long, long time. He sniffed awkwardly and rubbed at his face before standing up, mildly horrified at what he’d done.
“I gotta be home before morning,” he said whilst clearing his throat. The situation had suddenly become awkward, and Billy was once again becoming avoidant with eye contact. “Was that-” he paused and gestured uselessly at the hole he’d dug- “all you wanted to show me?”
What if I said no, Steve thought to himself as he stared hard at the ground. What if I said there was more? What if I said I wanted to show you a piece of me, too? Would you run like you are now?
“Yeah,” Steve said instead. “Yeah, that was all.”
He watched as Billy took up the shovel and silently began to re-fill the hole, once again confining the demo-dog to its grave and burying their moment of shared intimacy with it. It was nice that they’d been able to talk more candidly with one another, but Steve knew they weren’t likely to speak of it again. There were still things he wanted to say, but Billy had closed himself off before he could.
Out of sight, out of mind, Steve reflected sadly as he waited, but even still, he was glad that Billy had been able to open up to him at all. It was a step forward, and that thought at least warmed him enough to push some of the cool numbness out.
Story Synopsis: Some weird low-key occult parties start popping up that Steve can’t in good conscience ignore and takes it upon himself to investigate. Billy gets caught up in the consequences of his meddling, and isn’t it funny? For all the strange things the Upside Down has thrown his way, it’s werewolves that Steve has trouble accepting exist.
Chapter Word Count: 7958
Pairings: Eventual Billy Hargrove/Steve Harrington
If Steve dreamt of anything as he’d slept, he couldn’t remember any of it by the time he woke up. His mind was blank and mercifully clear of any recent memory, and yet, he still found himself responding to a curious feeling of dread as he slowly blinked his eyes open to reluctantly face the darkness of his room. He spent a minute trying to reflect on what dream he could’ve had that would have left him feeling so… apprehensive upon waking, but no subconscious recollections came forward.
In spite of his inability to remember if he’d had a night terror or not, he groggily came to realize that he had curled up into a ball sometime in his sleep and was currently clenched up in an incredibly tense position, his entire body uncomfortably seized up as though it was in anticipation of being hit. He bid his muscles to relax, momentarily afraid that he was caught in the throes of sleep paralysis and wouldn’t be able to move at all, until he felt the strain gradually begin to leave, his muscles reluctantly letting go of the tension they’d been holding. Stretching out his sore legs, Steve sighed heavily and stuffed his face further into his pillow after a cursory glance around his room told him there was nothing for him to be afraid of.
Still, he thought, nuzzling his cheek into a fresh, cold patch of pillowcase, it was weird; given the nightmares he was used to waking up from (saturated in sweat, tangled in bedsheets, wheezing and on the cusp of screaming), it would have made sense for him to remember all the graphic details that left him feeling vulnerable. Too often he would wake in a fright and end up carrying the weight of his dreams around with him during the day, but this time there were no lingering memories to contend with. Regardless, there was still some dormant instinct within him that was demanding he react, though, in so far as he could tell, there wasn’t anything for him to react to.
The sensation was both puzzling and irritating, bothering him like an itch in the middle of his back that he could only barely reach with the white tips of his fingernails. Anxiety slowly welled up within his chest as he tried to make sense of his circumstances, but without any perceivable immediate threat, Steve didn’t know what his body expected him to do. He took a couple of deep, calming breaths to settle his nerves and closed his eyes, willing himself to simply fall back asleep so he could ignore whatever it was that was bothering him properly. Gradually over the span of several long seconds he began to calm down, languishing in the warm comforts of his bed when the sound that had originally woken him repeated itself: a distant, metallic sort of clanging, coming from down the stairs.
A cold chill washed over him as he snapped his eyes open, suddenly alert, the very last dredges of fatigue giving way to a sharp spike in adrenaline. There was nothing but still darkness in his room as he stared blindly forward, his unfounded apprehension finally finding something to latch onto and send his heart racing. The sound came again, louder, and he jerked upright in bed, staring towards his opened bedroom door. Had he left it open when he’d gone to sleep? He couldn’t remember, and was frightened by that fact.
Still dressed in his clothes from the evening before, Steve got out of bed as quietly as he could and crept towards the yawning darkness of the hallway. He paused by the doorframe to listen, but couldn’t hear anything specific over the pounding of his own heart as he strained his ears. Lamenting the fact that he’d left his bat in the trunk of his car, he slowly made his way to the head of the stairs and paused again to listen. This time, though, there was something to be heard.
The soft sound of someone walking around on the floorboards down in the kitchen immediately put his fears to rest as he remembered that Billy was still there, roaming through his home after spending the night on his couch. He must’ve gotten up sometime earlier and made some sort of commotion, which in turn woke Steve, and the suddenness of it had set him on edge in his sleep. Exhaling a deep, shaky sigh, Steve ran an uneasy hand through his unwashed hair and tried to force himself to laugh weakly at the situation.
He stayed at the top of the stairs just listening for a while, trying to discern what it was Billy was doing from the upstairs landing as he debated on whether or not he wanted to go back to bed. On the one hand, he could still feel that bone-deep exhaustion that had him collapsing into bed in the first place, but on the other, his heart hadn’t yet calmed down and the adrenaline surge from before seemed to have warded off any remaining sleepiness. He wouldn’t get rest if he laid back down now, but he’d be comfortable and warm.
Again the sound of something clanging reached his ears from below, only this time he was able to discern it as the sound of cookware being jostled around. It seemed so obvious now, given it was something he was used to hearing on a regular basis. He cooked so often for himself; how had he not recognized the sound? A mild wave of embarrassment came over him for not having been able to recognize the sound properly, but before he could give it much more thought, he felt his stomach clench and growl hungrily at the idea of food being prepared. After a moment’s hesitation, he flicked the hallway light on and descended down the stairs casually, lured in by the hopes that whatever Billy was making, he’d have enough to share.
He reached the first floor landing and rounded his way into the kitchen, where he saw a pot filled with water that had been set up on the stove to heat. There were a few pans that had been set to the side of the stove’s slowly warming eye from where Billy had set them aside in his search for the pot, but Billy wasn’t there to tend to them. Taking a quick look into the pot to see if Billy had started making anything yet, Steve drifted into the living room in search of him.
“What, the bologna pancakes weren’t good enough for you, Hargrove?” he asked in lieu of a greeting when he finally laid eyes on him standing by the couch. He’d thought to be cheeky, but the way Billy was standing- stock still, rigid, muscles tense with his back facing Steve- had that old familiar feeling of unease resurfacing within him.
If Billy heard him, he didn’t respond. His focus was trained entirely on the large, sliding glass doors that led out to the pool deck in the backyard. Unnerved and hesitant to do so, Steve turned to follow his gaze, afraid of what he might see, but couldn’t see anything outwardly suspicious that warranted such devout attention. It wasn’t until the motion-activated lights on the deck turned off that he realized that it’d been unusual for them to have been on to begin with.
Something big enough for the lights to have turned on had been out there recently, and Billy must’ve seen it.
That icy form of dread he’d felt earlier came filtering through his veins again as he stilled uneasily.
“Did you see something?” he asked, unwilling to raise his voice above that of a quiet murmur now that he understood they were at risk. His eyes flicked back to Billy, but he didn’t respond, his attention fixed wholly on the windowed doors like a dog on high alert. He looked as tense as Steve had felt when he’d woken up not too long ago, but there was some far-away look glossing over his eyes.
Steve didn’t know what he should be afraid of more in that instant: Billy’s lapse into silence, or the unknown thing lurking around outside. Was it possible, he wondered, for a werewolf to be affected by a moon that wasn’t quite full? What stopped a werewolf from going mad anytime he saw a moon at all?
There was entirely too much that he had yet to understand, but it would have to wait until Dustin got back to him on what he’d managed to learn. Hesitantly turning his attention away from Billy and back towards the dark panes of glass, Steve strained his eyes against the darkness and tried to perceive if any of the shadows out there had any sort of a determinate form. But all the darknesses of the night coalesced together, fusing into nothing but unrecognizable blocks of shadow that the nearly-full moon couldn’t touch. There were no red glinting eyes watching them from over the fence, no tall, grotesquely stretched forms hidden in the darker recesses of the back yard, but still something had come close.
Just as Steve began to feel as though it was safe enough to divert his attention back to trying to figure out what was going on with Billy, the lights outside abruptly flicked back on. Light suddenly flooded the back deck and seeped into the living room like stage lights being turned on after a show.
In the span of a few seconds that felt more like hours, a form at last made itself known. Emerging from the ominous veil of shadows crept a sizable raccoon, standing up on its rear legs as it slunk onto the back deck. It turned its nose up into the air and sniffed for a moment before turning to look in at the two of them through the glass in much the same way that they were staring out at it.
The tension in the air went slack in an instant as Steve released a shuddery breath he hadn’t realized he’d been holding.
“Jesus,” he exclaimed after a moment, forcing himself to laugh for a second time that night as the raccoon dropped to all fours and trundled out of sight. “I’m way too young to be on the verge of a heart attack like this; you could’ve said it was just a raccoon, man.”
“Didn’t see it before,” Billy muttered, blinking the far-away look out of his eyes slowly. He shot Steve a sidelong look of annoyance before rubbing the stiffness out of his arms. “I was in the kitchen and the lights just came on. The hell was I supposed to think?”
“Well my dad’ll be pleased to know they work, at least,” Steve said as the outdoor lights eventually turned off, dousing them in the natural gloom. “What’re you making in there, anyway?”
“Wouldn’t you like to know?” Billy said tersely, turning round and leaving Steve to stare out at his backyard.
“I mean, yeah? That’s kinda why I asked.”
Steve wanted to follow after him, but remained where he was, temporarily entranced by the night. Questions filled his mind as he wondered where the creature was, and if it was possible that Billy had ended up killing it after they’d been separated, but that would have to be something he’d have to ask directly, he supposed.
But what if he hadn’t? However terrible it made him feel to think about, he didn’t want to imagine it still prowling around out there. Unbidden, Billy’s words from what seemed like years ago repeated themselves in his mind:
‘ Wouldn’t it just end up following you home?’ If it was still out there, why hadn’t it come here yet?
Anxiety boiled up inside him again as he shook himself free from that line of thinking. Steve glanced out the glass doors once more (just to be sure, just to be safe) before following after him, mentally urging his nerves to settle down.
He walked in on Billy standing at the stovetop, minding the pot of heating water. Billy glanced over his shoulder at him and wrinkled his nose at him as he came in.
“What, my hand starting to smell again?” Steve asked as he leaned against the set of cabinets his mother had picked out when they’d remodeled their kitchen three years ago.
“Starting to, yeah,” Billy responded. “You been cleaning it?”
“Not really,” Steve answered truthfully, holding his hand up to inspect it. The motion made his arm sore, and he remembered that he’d have to go back to the hospital at some point to get his stitches fixed.
The back of his hand looked as normal to him as it ever did, though the butterfly bandages Billy had used to initially close up whatever wounds were there had begun to peel off.
“Not like it really bothers me, though,” Steve said, speaking up again when Billy didn’t respond to his previous comment. “Can’t clean what I can’t see.”
“I’m not your fucking caretaker,” Billy grunted, turning away from the stovetop to sneer at him. “How hard is it to just wash your damn hands every once in a while?”
“Your water’s boiling,” Steve commented dismissively as he pulled away from the cabinets to peek at whatever it was Billy was doing. To his surprise, he found that Billy had not only been rooting through his mother’s cutlery, but had been through the pantry as well.
Laid out near the pot of boiling water were a few packets of black tea, something that Steve never really indulged in but his mom kept around for when she was home. Steve raised his brow in surprise as Billy scooped up the tea bags and pulled the water off the eye.
Scowling and turning a little red in the face, Billy brushed him aside as he set the hot pot on a trivet and began to go through the upper cabinets, ignoring him altogether.
“Didn’t take you to be a tea drinker,” Steve remarked as he retrieved the mugs he knew Billy was searching for, stepping up close beside him to reach up and pull them out. He set them down in front of the pot as Billy snapped one of the cabinet panels shut and awkwardly stepped back and away from him.
“Couldn’t find any damn coffee,” he said, once again wrinkling his nose.
Steve left him then to take a seat at the dining room table they’d met with Hopper at as Billy finished preparing. It didn’t take long, and eventually he joined Steve in the room, still wearing a sour expression on his face as he set down two hot mugs with the tea already steeping.
It was a weird gesture, Steve thought as he pulled the cup he was offered closer to himself. With how curt Billy had been acting toward him lately, he really hadn’t thought he’d be kept in mind when it came to stuff like this.
The silence that came with the tea wasn’t awkward as it would have been in any other situation, at any other time. It was almost companionable, in a way. Sitting across from one another, Billy’s gaze sometimes flicked from the table top to the large dining room window, to Steve, and to his cup of tea, while Steve found his attention mostly just drifted.
They drank and relaxed as much as they could, given their circumstances, and even though Steve had managed to sleep, he felt as though he hadn’t. He was still incredibly tired, and judging from Billy’s haggard appearance, he hadn’t fared much better on the couch.
“So…” he began slowly, rubbing his thumb along the ceramic rim of his cup, “do you… remember anything? From when you were-? Last night?”
Part conversation starter, part genuine interest, Steve began to ask the questions he’d been sitting on since he’d woken up.
“No,” Billy said curtly, as though he’d anticipated that Steve had been building up the courage to ask him the entire time they’d been sat there. “I blacked out after- when my eyes came out-” He paused to shudder, unable to repress the shiver of disgust he felt as he recalled what had happened to him. “When I came to, the sun was up and I was freezing my balls off in a snowdrift somewhere in the woods.”
“Did you kill it?” Steve asked hopefully, but his hope was quickly dashed as Billy met his question with a shrug. “You don’t know? There wasn’t any… I don’t know, evidence or anything?”
“There was a lot of blood. Most of it was probably mine.” Billy took a deep drink of his tea and wiped the excess liquid off his upper lip. “Sticking around to search the area was the last goddamn thing on my mind since I was literally freezing my balls off. Never seen my dick look so fucking small,” he muttered as an afterthought.
Steve couldn’t help but laugh spontaneously at that, sympathizing for him even if Billy’s answer managed to dredge up more anxieties within him.
“You sure it’s not always like that?” he couldn’t help but retort, smiling a bit as Billy scoffed and rolled his eyes.
“Oh, sorry, didn’t realize you were such a size queen. Help yourself to it if that’s what you want, Harrington,” Billy said snidely, leaning back in his seat a bit to give him better access despite the length of table between them. “Come and see how big it is for yourself.”
“Whatever, fuck off. How’d you even manage to make it back? To the cellar, I mean. I waited up for you,” Steve said, then, realizing how that sounded, continued to say, “I mean, like, I didn’t know what to do. We should’ve made emergency plans or something.”
Again, Billy shrugged and sat upright, propping his elbows up onto the table. “I dunno. Followed the blood back mostly. That, and I could… smell you, I think.”
Steve looked up in surprise, but Billy wouldn’t meet his eye, as though admitting that he’d recognized his scent from out in the wilderness was somehow more embarrassing than talking about how the intense cold had made his dick shrink.
“What, you mean like my hand? You could smell that from all the way out there?”
“I don’t know,” Billy snapped, suddenly looking annoyed. His eyebrows furrowed together under the lip of the beanie he was still wearing, as though he were still trying to figure it out himself. “I could just smell something , and somehow I knew it was you, alright? None of this shit makes any sense to me, I don’t know how you expect me to explain any of it.”
“Oh,” Steve said quietly, dropping the subject in order to keep Billy from getting any angrier with him. Billy sighed deeply and went back to drinking his tea.
The silence that followed then was awkward, both of them doing their best to keep their eyes from landing on each other, and while Steve knew Billy had answered his questions to the best of his ability, there was still so much left unknown, like, where was it? If Billy could smell him and track him down as easily as he had, then why hadn’t ‘it’ done the same? He hoped the meeting with his kids would help to shed some light on the issues at hand, and if Dustin did as he’d requested, then maybe they could figure out more about what this meant for Billy, as well.
He was lost in those thoughts as he wondered about what the best way to bait Billy into attending the meeting was going to be, when Billy broke the silence.
“I need you to take me back,” he said as he finished off his cup of tea. He met Steve’s eyes sternly from across the table, the yellow-blue of them piercing in the dim light.
“Take you back?” Steve repeated dumbly, unsure of what he was referring to.
“To the basement.”
“To the- whoa, what, why?” Steve didn’t bother correcting him; he was too surprised that Billy would want to go back there at all, given everything that had happened.
“I left all my shit down there,” Billy explained, sounding drained despite having just finished his drink. “My keys, my clothes; my hair,” he added bitterly.
“Ah, shit,” Steve muttered before finishing off his own cup. He set the mug aside as he remembered the absolute mess they’d left the Hendersons cellar in. “We do have to clean it up. Fuck, man.”
Billy mutely seemed to agree with him. They’d left a plethora of evidence that something violent had taken place there, and Steve was pretty certain it counted as a biohazard in some regard, if the wild animals hadn’t already been in there to pick at the shed skin.
“What time is it?” he asked, sounding resigned. He ran a hand through his hair, felt the grease that had built up and wanted nothing more than to just take a shower in that moment.
“Three-ish.”
“In the morning? Jesus, I feel like I didn’t even get any sleep,” Steve moaned. He slumped down into his dining chair uncomfortably, wallowing in his state of tiredness before sitting back up, knowing that if he lingered there for too long he wouldn’t want to leave at all. “Alright I guess. Let me… get some stuff together before we go.”
Steve stood up, half-expecting Billy to follow suit. When he didn’t, Steve shot him a look as he was taking his mug back into the kitchen to rinse it in the sink. “You coming?” he asked, running the water a little bit to clean it out.
Billy was silent for a moment before saying, “I need you to drop me off somewhere first before we get to the basement.”
“Cellar,” Steve found himself mumbling as he turned the faucet off. “Drop you off somewhere, where?”
There was another pause of silence before Billy finally stood up, the chair legs squealing as they were dragged across the floor.
“My place,” Billy said as he set his own mug into the sink, and if Steve were a more perceptive person, he would have noticed the nervousness Billy exuded as he spoke. “I’m tired of wearing weird shit.”
“I thought we were going to the cellar to get your clothes?” Steve questioned as Billy moved away to wait for him in the living room.
“Don’t be a dumbass, Harrington,” Billy drawled as he made himself comfortable on the sofa, the shirt he was wearing riding up his midriff a bit as he stretched out. “I know girls think that shit’s cute when they pull that on me, but you’re smarter than that. You know whatever’s left down there is ruined.”
“Shit, you’re right, I didn’t think about it,” Steve admitted as he bustled around, gathering the supplies he thought they’d need to clear out Dustin’s cellar.
He grabbed a few large trash bags his mom kept under the sink, and his famous pair of yellow rubber gloves, a mop from the pantry, and dropped a bottle of dish soap into a small bucket. When he felt he was ready, he collected Billy last and offered him one of his coats from the foyer closet. He picked the biggest one Steve had, and together they left the warm sanctuary of the Harrington house and rushed out to his car to escape the gently falling snow.
It took a moment for the Mercedes’ heater to kick on, but when it did they were both grateful for it. Warm air gently blew over them as Steve pulled out the drive and began navigating his way towards Billy’s home, trying to recall the route from memory but relying on vocal instructions when he needed them or seemed ready to take a wrong turn.
Besides Billy occasionally speaking up to navigate, the drive was mostly silent. Steve had had the radio on, but when he realized he could only catch the signal of talk shows and gospel stations where people called in searching for long-distance salvation, he quickly turned it off.
The silence left him with his thoughts, and as he drove, the rhythm of the wind-shield wipers slowly batting back and forth against the slow, he could feel a weird sense of deja vu worming its way into his mind. It nagged at him as they rode, and the further he got from home the more the feeling advanced.
He found that he was gradually becoming more nervous as time went on. Driving through the slight flurry of snow reminded him of something, but he couldn’t quite pin what it was until he spared a glance at Billy to see if he was feeling the same way and immediately remembered the dream.
Billy’s profile, lined up against the snow-speckled black of the night. Angry red eyes keeping pace with the car, staying close enough that its panting breath fogged the window. The car door opening; Billy being taken.
His heart-rate spiked as his hands gripped the wheel tightly. Had the dream been a premonition? A warning? Of all the strange things to have happened to him as of late, developing a sixth sense wouldn’t have surprised him at all. He felt both trapped and exposed all at once and anxiously pressed his foot a little harder on the gas.
To Steve, it seemed as though Billy hadn’t noticed the sudden nosedive his psyche had taken. He looked bored and despondent, gazing out the passenger side window to read the street signs as they passed to let Steve know when to turn. Unbeknownst to him, Billy actually could tell that something was up, though he chose not to speak on it. He could tell whenever his pulse spiked, or his foot nudged the gas pedal a little harder, but didn’t want to promote the idea that he cared. If it didn’t affect him, he didn’t want to be involved. A selfish way of thinking, but one he’d adapted to in order to survive as long as he had.
“Stop here,” he said after they’d been driving for about ten minutes. Steve ignored him, white-knuckles gripping the wheel in a deadlock as he continued to drive. Frowning, Billy sat up in his seat and turned towards him, annoyed. “You deaf, Harrington? I said pull over .”
“Huh?” Steve said unfocused, his voice dull and eyes unwavering from the length of road ahead of them.
“Pull over!”
Steve blinked suddenly, as though he’d just then heard Billy’s request. He took his foot off the gas and let his car decelerate naturally until it rolled to a gradual stop in the snow, pulling up along the curb to throw it in park.
He gazed around the area in confusion, anxiously biting at his lower lip as he checked to make sure nothing insidious had followed them. The street didn’t look familiar to him, though, and he was quick to recognize that they weren’t pulled up to Billy’s house, or were even on his street at all.
“Where are we?” he asked in confusion, trying to deduce the nature of the stop.
Billy bluntly ignored him in favour of unbuckling his seatbelt and opening the door, the action of Billy leaving the car making Steve tense up subconsciously as the cold winter air whisked in.
“Wait, where are you going?” A little bit of his mental panic seeped out into his voice, and he hoped he didn’t sound as fearful as he felt. “I thought you said you needed to go home?”
“I am,” Billy said as he shut the door, burrowing down into the coat Steve had loaned him. “Just wait here. I’ll be back.”
“What? Why?” Afraid of the thought of Billy running around in the night and snow on his own, and being left alone in the night and snow, Steve hastily undid his seatbelt and scrambled for his door. “Are you going the rest of the way on foot? Dude, that’s so stupid; I really think we should stick together here. Get back in the car and let me drive you.”
“DON’T fucking follow me,” Billy snarled, quickly whipping around on Steve when he stumbled out of the car and stepped forward to draw him back, baring his new, fearsome teeth angrily. “Just wait here like a good little bitch until I come back. Can you do that, Harrington? Can you be a good little bitch for me?”
The sudden aggression he was displaying was jarring for a moment, but Steve was able to see through what he was trying to do; had been around Billy when he’d been on the milder side of pleasant company long enough now to understand that his aggressive display was only a tactic of self-preservation. He was deflecting, trying to get Steve to back off the only way he knew how because it had worked in the past.
But not this time.
“It’s not a question of whether or not I can follow your asinine orders, jackass! What if it comes around?” Steve questioned, nearly shouting as his anger and frustrations stoked him on, ignoring the way Billy was trying to deflect. “If it gets you while you’re out there on your own being a ‘tough guy’ or whatever the hell it is you’re trying to do here, I’d be none the wiser.”
“Well I handled it once on my own already, didn’t I?”
“That doesn’t count if you can’t even remember how you did it,” Steve said icily.
“Oh, you’re worried about me now?” Billy said through grit teeth, narrowing his eyes when Steve refused to back down.
“Of course I am!” Steve’s voice raised well above the threshold for a shout as he hollered his affirmation, his regard for caution being thrown aside as his frustrations reached a boiling point. His words seemed to stun Billy into silence, a look of pure surprise crossing over his features as he stood there gaping. “Why the hell wouldn’t I be worried about you?” Steve continued, lowering his voice once he realized he’d gotten the upper hand in the conversation. “This shit is scary , man. Stop trying to piss me off to the point where I can’t stand you and just let me help you , dammit.”
This was the second time in so many hours that he’d seen Billy look so vulnerable. The fabricated rage he’d used to turn Steve away from him only moments ago was gone, and in its place was something much softer, more unguarded. If Steve didn’t know any better, he might’ve said that it looked as though Billy might begin to cry. His eyes were wide and his mouth was opened in a slight expression of surprise before he caught himself and turned away.
“Just, look,” Billy said, awkwardly reaching for a strand of hair that was no longer there to twist his finger in. His hand floundered, unsure of what to do before he shoved it in his coat pocket and shivered. “I can’t- It’s- I just have to do it to this way. Don’t question it, alright? Just let me go, and if it shows up, drive off without me or whatever it is you have to do. Don’t think about me and just fuck out of here as fast as you can.”
“I just, I don’t understand,” Steve said, blinking the snow out of his eyes. He’d known Billy to be stubborn in the past, but this was just exasperating on an entirely different level. He was clearly hiding something, and seemed to have come close to confiding in him about something before getting scared out of it. They’d been so close to breaking ground in their proximity-based friendship, only for Billy to recoil so hard he’d nearly shut down entirely. “You berate me all the time for being a dumbass, but this is some real stupid shit you’re trying to pull here, Hargrove. I can drive you. Let me. Please.”
They stood there at odds with one another under the dim light of a streetlamp while the motor of Steve’s car rumbled quietly beside them. The winter’s chill began to seep into each of them, making them shift around uncomfortably as they each tried to retain any amount of their own body heat that they could.
“I know,” Billy said, eventually relenting. His voice almost cracked, and he had to clear his throat before he could continue, averting his eyes. “I know it’s fucking stupid, so be smarter than me for once and just wait here, alright?”
“How long?” Steve demanded, squaring his jaw to prevent his teeth from chattering as he rubbed his hands over his arms to generate warmth.
“Twenty minutes.”
“Tops?”
“Tops,” Billy promised.
It was Steve’s turn to sigh; he didn't’ understand why Billy was being so adamant about traveling the rest of the way to his own home on foot, in the snow, in the dark , but if he’d been so willing to throw hands over it, then he must have had a reason for it. Whether it was a good reason though was yet to be determined.
“Alright,” Steve said after a contemplative moment, letting the argument drop. “Twenty minutes. If you’re not back by then I’m going straight to your place, got it?”
Billy scrunched up his face as he considered the deal, and looked disagreeable at first, but eventually nodded stiffly. “Fine. Whatever makes you happy. I’ll be back.”
And then he was gone, turning around before Steve could get the last word in as he began jogging off in the direction that must have led towards his home. Left alone, Steve watched his form until it blended in with the dark and the snow before getting back into his car to smack the steering wheel with his frozen fist.
It had caught Billy by surprise. Steve’s blatant admissal of caring about him had thrown him for such a loop that he hadn’t known how to comprehend any of it. He couldn’t tell whether to be touched or hurt by his words and the intent behind them.
Either way, it had caused an unexpected lump into his throat that Billy had had to swallow down painfully. Steve claimed not to understand, but in Billy’s experience, nobody ever really ‘got it’ with him. They either knew and ignored it, or remained blissfully ignorant of the fact that Billy lived in constant fear of his father’s shadow, and he’d long grown tired of trying to find something strong enough to ward it away.
But Steve came close. He could acknowledge that. Steve was a lot braver than Billy would have ever given him proper credit for, and proved it over and over again with every new day that they were together. It was beginning to be troublesome, Billy thought; it was beginning to hurt.
These were the kinds of thoughts that circulated through Billy’s head as he stiffly jogged home, each step he took that brought him closer bringing out the worst of his worries as he wondered if Neil would be up at this hour. He hoped not, but had learnt a long time ago that it was better not to hope at all.
He paused to catch his breath once he reached his backyard, having to cut through his neighbors yard in order to avoid coming in the front. Once he’d gotten control over his breathing, he retrieved the spare key Susan kept under the mat specifically for him to use. The only kind thing for him she’d ever done.
Mentally saying a prayer and wishing he had the protective weight of the pendant his mother had given him around his neck, he slipped the key into the doorknob as quietly as he could and slowly turned the lock.
Stepping inside, the house was dark. A good sign that Neil had given up waiting for him to come home, but not a guarantee. Still, he couldn’t help but feel a little relieved as he gently shut the door behind him and made his way inside. He would never resort to tip-toeing around in his own home, but had learnt and practiced a way to distribute his weight evenly in a way that let him walk lightly around without disturbing the floorboards that were more prone to groaning.
He reached the hallway to his bedroom without issue, but was caught the instant he rounded his way into it.
Max looked startled as she almost collided into him, having woken up sometime earlier to use the bathroom. Billy looked just as surprised, giving her the advantage to speak before him.
“What the hell are you doing here?” she hissed quietly, alertly looking around to their parents’ bedroom. “Neil is pissed . I thought I told you to keep away!”
“I am,” he whispered tersely, trying to step around her and get to his room, but she stood her ground and wouldn’t let him pass.
“Sure doesn’t look like it,” Max muttered. She squared up to him- (a habit she’d gotten used to doing ever since she’d threatened his balls with a spiked bat)- and looked him over, a confused look creasing her features as she saw what he was wearing under Steve’s coat, which was something she must have recognized, because the next words out of her mouth were, “What were you doing at Steve’s house?”
He opened his mouth to begin to tell her that this wasn’t time nor the place to talk about it, when he felt him. He came looming out of the shadows behind him, creeping up on him like the creature had in a nightmare long past. The expression on Max’s face went wide in startled fear as her eyes drifted from Billy’s face to Neil, who stood directly behind him, having silently stalked him from the living room. Billy closed his eyes and licked his lips nervously, not daring yet to turn around and face him.
“Steve?” Neil asked, his voice even and disturbingly calm despite the apparent disgust he seemed to speak with. “Not Steve Harrington; surely my son would know better than to associate with that queer .”
Billy swallowed hard. In his mind he was screaming; at Max for revealing him, at his father for abusing him, and at Steve for having done this to him. He opened his mouth to speak, desperate to come up with some sort of lie or half-truth that would spare him, but ultimately couldn’t think of anything to say.
“Steph,” Max said, quickly intervening. She spoke with self-assurance, even in the presence of his father’s oppressive aura. Billy opened his eyes in surprise, looking down at her, but her gaze was fixed steadily on Neil. “I said Steph’s house, not Steve.”
A dreadful silence encapsulated them in the hallway as Billy and Max waited to see if the lie would take. It was hard to gauge with his back turned towards him (and Billy hoped, more than being caught, that his father wouldn’t demand he turn around to face him to reveal himself in Steve’s too-small clothing), but the pause was… hopeful.
“Steph,” Neil repeated, testing the name on his lips as though he were judging a fine wine. Was it good, or was it spoiled? “This is the first I’ve heard of any Steph.”
“Stephanie Baumgartner,” Max said, again perplexing Billy with her readiness to come to his defense. There was no hesitation in her voice or posture, reminding him of how Steve had stood against him earlier. “She was in my science class. I… called her earlier to compare exam answers and thought I heard Billy.”
Again, there was a long, drawn out pause as Neil compared the false facts Max had given him with what little he knew about Billy’s connection to Steve, and the assumptions he’d already made about it. In the back of Billy’s mind, he hoped Max was at least telling the truth about there being a Stephanie in her class. Knowing Neil meant knowing that he’d be going through Max’s yearbook later to crosscheck what she’d said.
“Is that what she said, Billy?” Neil asked, taking a step closer towards him. At his sides, Billy’s hands had begun to tremble as a dormant instinct began to awaken within him, triggering with his fight or flight reflex. “Did she say Steph or Steve , son?”
Billy licked his lips again, his eyes darting downwards to Max’s, who seemed to be pleading with him to go with it. But lying to his father like that had consequences; consequences that Max would now take part in because it was she who had started the lie to begin with. If he didn’t go along with it now, he’d be condemning her. He clenched his hands into fists to stop them from trembling, and felt something dreadfully familiar in his fingers as he did so.
They were going numb. The very tips of his fingers that grew into his fingernails were beginning to grow sore as he physically felt a reaction. Panicked by this and by how his father had rounded on him to tell the truth, Billy could only think to play along.
“Yes sir. I’m… dating her sister. Max heard me on the phone. I stayed over for dinner.”
A look of relief briefly flashed across Max’s face, too fast for it to be readily seen in the dark of the hallway. The tension held between them in the hallway was thicker than the fog in Inaba after it rained. Billy focused on taking deep, relaxing breaths as he tried to stave off whatever physical reaction his newfound lycanism was trying to act out on.
“Then explain to me why you’re sneaking into the house at 4 in the morning,” Neil demanded, the casual tone with which he’d been speaking earlier tossed aside in favor of a more stern and serious one.
Billy blanked, trying to think up of a reason good enough that would satisfy Neil. He looked to Max for guidance, but she couldn’t help him here.
“Car wouldn’t start,” he said lamely after a moment.
“Hm.” Neil grunted, and Billy could feel the hot air of his father’s breath hit his neck, making him shudder. “Then how’d you get home?”
“I got a ride.” Billy’s tongue felt thick in his mouth, like it’d grown in size and dried up, becoming useless.
“A ride,” Neil repeated, sounding pleased that Billy couldn’t come up with anything better. “I didn’t hear a car come up the drive. Didn’t see any headlights, either.”
Gotcha , Neil wordlessly said.
“I had her drop me off down the street. Didn’t want to wake anyone,” Billy said, trying hard to keep his voice steady and composed. The claws that his hands were trying to grow bit into the skin of his palms as he kept his fists clenched. “I was just trying to be considerate, sir.”
He could feel Neil sizing him up and waited for the moment when he would demand that Billy turn around and face him. He didn’t know what would happen, or how his innate instincts would react when and if he ultimately decided to do so.
“Funny,” Neil said. “I’ve never known you to be considerate .” He said the word hatefully, as though he were spitting out something rancid. “You wanna know what this sounds like to me, Billy?”
For every excuse he gave, Neil seemed to find a way to skirt around it in order to dig deeper into the lie to expose him.
Billy swallowed hard again. “What’s that, sir?”
“It sounds like an excuse, Billy. It sounds like a lie , and if I find out that you’ve corrupted my only daughter-”
“He’s telling the truth!” Max suddenly snapped, nearly shouting as she raised her voice over Neil’s. “Why can’t you just believe him? Why do you always have to think he’s lying when he isn’t?!”
It was the first time she’d ever spoken out against him, and the force with which she’d chosen her words had rendered Billy speechless. He stared down into the angry tempest that was her eyes, partly awe-struck and partly terrified. He knew Neil had never struck Max, not yet , but if anything were to spur him into it, this would have been it.
“Don’t,” Billy tried to whisper, but his warning was lost when Neil spoke over him.
“Go to bed Maxine,” he commanded roughly.
“Only if you let Billy go too,” she countered, crossing her arms defiantly.
Billy tried to convey the severity of her actions to her through his eyes, pleading with her to stop before she took things too far. She was in Neil’s good graces now, but that could all change very quickly. Heedless of Billy’s mute warning, she stood her ground and stared heatedly at her step-father who Billy could only imagine was staring back just as hard.
“We’ll settle this in the morning, Billy,” Neil said, sounding as though he were speaking through clenched teeth.
“Yes sir,” Billy replied automatically, too stunned to say anything otherwise. He felt the weight in the floor panels shift as Neil turned away, conceding for the time being. Max drew in a deep breath and held it until they were both alone again.
She turned a triumphant look up at him, but her victory was short-lived as Billy began to move past her, muttering, “Move, shitbird,” as he went.
“I just saved your ass,” Max whispered angrily after him. “A little thanks would be nice.”
“You didn’t ‘do’ anything, only delayed the inevitable,” Billy said quietly in retort as he went into his room, closing the door sharply (but not loudly) behind him, shutting her out before she could get anything else out. He heard her mumble something incoherent before she went into the bathroom, and from there into her room.
Billy breathed in a shaky sigh of relief as he flipped the lights on and stood there with his back pressed tightly against the door. He slid down the length of it and sat on the floor, examining his fingernails carefully. They had thickened and grown slightly, but otherwise seemed fine. He found slight traces of blood caked up underneath his nails and picked them clean before getting up to finding a suitable change of clothes.
The waiting was terrible. The minutes passed in agonizing slowness as Steve scanned uselessly through the radio to find something worth listening to in order to pass the time. As before though, nothing of worth came over the speakers, but listening to people calling in to the gospel station to complain or ask for help for their mundane problems was more interesting than nothing.
He kept the volume turned low and sat hunched over his steering wheel, nervously trying to pay attention to anything that seemed out of the ordinary. The engine’s constant idling helped to keep his mind at ease, giving him something offhand to focus on, but his mind kept drifting back to the nightmare he’d had the day before, and what the apparition of Billy had told him:
‘You can’t save me.’
‘I’ve been lied to before.’
Steve sighed, trying to understand what it all might have meant, or if it really had any relevance to his situation at all. It had only been a dream, after all. Regardless, he had no idea what to really make out of any of it.
He understood enough to not give up, though.
Checking the clock on the dashboard for the time, Steve sat and continued to wait, counting down the minutes, ready to jump to Billy’s aid should he need it.
Story Synopsis: Some weird low-key occult parties start popping up that Steve can’t in good conscience ignore and takes it upon himself to investigate. Billy gets caught up in the consequences of his meddling, and isn’t it funny? For all the strange things the Upside Down has thrown his way, it’s werewolvesthat Steve has trouble accepting exist.
Notes: SURPRISE!! its a SECRET DOUBLE UPDATE ‘secret double update? what does it MEAN?’ it means that, when i went back to re-read my story to make sure i was keeping on track for continuity purposes, i couldnt even get through the first chapter! it was just THAT BAD (imo), so i went back and re-wrote it entirely. it doesnt offer anything new in terms of plot, but boy howdy is it an upgrade to what it used to be. bless those of you who kept up with the story after reading that trainwreck
(this chapter update is dedicated to @pfandghoul bc they were my 100th follower here- THANKS BUDDYYYY)
OH ALSO- i got a commission done of billy in the TERRIBLE OUTFIT (but with hair, bc i cant commission an artist like demonfleet and not have him draw those beautiful curls). PEEP IT HERE
—–
“Who else knows?”
Hopper’s voice, though sluggish and weighted with exhaustion, still carried with it a tone of seriousness that had Steve feeling prematurely guilty about the way the rest of the conversation was going to play out. He knew what Hopper was really asking; knew he wanted to hear confirmation that the kids weren’t somehow involved in any of this, and even though they weren’t, not yet, Steve still found himself turning his eyes away from Hopper’s authoritative stare, focusing his attention instead on the spot on the table where he’d been picking at the veneer absentmindedly. And although he knew the question was primarily directed towards himself, he let Billy answer.
“No one,” Billy said self-assuredly, a hint of surliness edging out with his tone as he exhaled a hot breath of smoke and leaned forward to stub his cigarette out in the ashtray centered between the three of them. He sat back in his seat with a grunt and a creaking of wood and promptly lit another.
Gathered in the Harringtons’ dining room- (the room itself being, remarkably, an equal point of pride to both of his parents)- the three of them sat gathered around the antique wooden table that served as a centerpiece, perched around its aged surface in differing states of dishevelment. Their collective exhaustion was as palpable as the smoke trails that had been gathering and circling slowly above their heads for the past ten minutes, in which Billy had chain-smoked three cigarettes down to the filter before either Steve or Hopper had had the chance to finish their first.
Sitting across from him, Steve could feel Hopper’s eyes, sunken and dark and weary, boring into him as he waited for his response to confirm what Billy had said.
“No one else knows,” Steve affirmed after a moment’s hesitation, in which he took a hard drag of his cigarette and exhaled with a long, drawn out sigh. He could feel the pressure of what he was going to say next catching in his throat before he cleared it and amended, “Well, not… not yet, anyway.”
“Yet.”
The repeated word dropped from Hopper’s lips like a dead weight, falling upon the three of them like a bomb. It broke whatever uneasy peace they’d managed to find in those few minutes where they’d all just sat smoking in silence, each of them trying to recover from the ordeals they’d endured over the night before reconvening to tackle them again. In its place, a taut, malevolent tension began to take form, and in it Steve could feel the enmity brewing against him.
“Yet,” Hopper repeated again, and this time there was anger in his voice. Steve winced reflexively, slowly turning his eyes up from where they’d been focused on the tabletop to meet his anger directly. “And what does ‘yet’ entail exactly, huh, kid?”
Steve opened his mouth to answer, but couldn’t force the words he wanted to use to explain out. Under Hopper and Billy’s stares, all the reasoning he’d had stored up for why he needed to at least tell Dustin what was going on left him. He could feel the trust his only two allies had in him turning into something dark and misconstrued as he sat there struggling to form a sentence, but was helpless to combat it.
“It’s not what you think-” he started to say, but was interrupted when Billy interjected by slamming his fist down hard upon the table, rattling the ashtray in its place and silencing him instantly.
“Well what the fuck is it then, Harrington?” There was such strong mistrust in Billy’s eyes when he spoke- mistrust and vehement anger, such that Steve could practically feel the foundations they’d laid in their almost-friendship crumbling apart. “Selling me out to this pignot enough for you? You trying to go national with this shit or something? What the fuckdoes ‘not yet’ mean?!”
“Hey! You need to calm down,” Hopper snapped, directing his ire towards Billy, who’d begun to rise out of his seat with each word spoken in anger. “Sit down and give him a chance to explain, alright?”
But he didn’t.
“Fuck that, and fuck you,” Billy said roughly, leering across the table at both Hopper and Steve. His stomach let out a low growl that momentarily stalled him long enough for Steve to intervene before he could say anything more.
“What the fuck are you talking about, ‘go national’? Do you even hear yourself, Hargrove?” Steve spat back, exasperated, tired, and unable to keep himself from matching Billy’s aggression when it was being thrust at him. He narrowed his eyes and took another hard drag off his cigarette before continuing, saying, “Who the hell do you think would even believe me? You think I’m just going to stroll into the Hawkins Post and try to sell them a werewolfstory? ‘Oh uh, yeah, some douchebagI know turns into a big bad wolf during a full moon. You might wanna print that- warn the people! Billy Hargrove’s a more literal monster than we thought!’ I didn’t even believe in any of this crap at first, who do you think I could I possibly sell that to?”
The words came spilling out of Steve’s mouth before he could even think about what it was he was saying. He knew he’d fallen for another one of Billy’s taunts but couldn’t help himself; he refused to be painted as the villain in Billy’s fabricated scenario when he hadn’t even done anything yet, and certainly hadn’t been planning anything near as diabolical as selling Billy out to the country as some kind of freak sideshow act. Steve matched Billy’s glare evenly, half-aware of the way Hopper had groaned and run a hand down the length of his face. ‘You’ve really done it now, kid,’ his expression seemed to say.
Appearing taken aback, Billy seemed somewhat startled by the harsh words Steve had doled out to him. With a hand across his stomach, a small hint of vulnerability crossed over his features before he quickly reigned it back and pulled his lips back into a harsh snarl, his half-smoked cigarette dangling forgotten in the corner of his mouth to reveal at last what oral thing had been bothering him so much on the car ride over.
His teeth, Steve observed dumbly as he stared openly at the obstructions lining his mouth. Of course it was histeeth.
Thin, long, and all of them pointed, they looked more suited to what might be found in the muzzle of a large hound rather than in the mouth of a man. They were canine in nature, unnaturally fitted in his mouth where before his teeth had been straight and white and pristine, forming a smile so blindingly handsome it wasn’t always easy to look away.
“You’re right! You didn’t believe in any of this at first, but all it took was a little bit of proof to convince you though, right, Harrington?” Billy cooed smoothly after a moment, an eager look flashing in his yellow-blue eyes at the prospect of their argument turning into a physical fight in Steve’s parents’ dining room. “How much proof do you think it’d take to convince one shitty reporter in this hick town, huh? A mouth full of weird teeth? A broken arm that heals itself in, what, the span of two days? I mean, isn’t that what did it for you, Harrington? Witnessing this small little biological miracle of mine? Maybe thatwould do the trick. Could really blow the lid off of this one; might even be able to contribute something to your daddy’s legacy besides being a little piece of shit.”
“Enough!” Hopper’s voice burst from his throat, booming loudly in the condensed space. The suddenness of his outburst was enough to draw both Steve and Billy’s attention off of one another, though they were each reluctant to turn away. “You!” Hopper shouted, pointing one finger authoritatively at Steve, who sat and stared at him with a baffled look on his face, “Quit goading him on, goddammit. And you,” he continued, turning his command to Billy, “sit downand shut the hell up! He might be mouthing off, but you need to show this kid some damn respect for taking responsibility last night. He could’ve died going after you, do you understand that? He could have diedfor you.”
The weight of Hopper’s words had the exact impact he wanted them to. Steve turned away in embarrassment as a funny look crossed over Billy’s face. Confusion wormed its way through his anger, furrowing his brow and pulling his lips into a frown. It was a look Hopper had seen many times before when he’d been in the army, when soldiers who’d been at arms with one another were forced to let it go under the threat of punishment from their higher ups. It was a dark, begrudging sort of obedience fresh cadets endured when their commanding officers demanded they stand down when they weren’t quite ready to. With his momentum shaken, Billy’s look of anger slowly slipped into something a little more unreadable as he sank back down into his seat, muttering a quiet “Yes, sir” aloud as his stomach emitted another horrifically loud growl that everyone in the room ignored.
“Christ, I’m dealing with childrenhere,” Hopper mumbled, kneading his fingers against his temple. He took a moment to take a deep breath of collection and lit another cigarette, flicking his lighter fruitlessly a couple of times before a spark struck and he continued speaking.
“Nothing said here leaves this house,” he said sternly, making sure to make and hold eye contact with each of them to stress the importance of his words. “This,” he said, gesturing vaguely to Billy with his freshly lit cigarette, “doesn’t go ‘national’; it doesn’t even go local, you got that? Whoever your ‘not yet’ applied to doesn’t getto know, so you can put the idea that you’re going to tell anyone else about any of this right out the window, understand?”
He looked sharply to Steve then, insisting in so many words that the children be left out of whatever they decided to do moving forward. Steve bit the inside of his cheek and looked away stubbornly, nodding once as he crossed his arms across his chest. He was aware of how he must’ve looked- like a spoiled, pouting child- but he couldn’t help it. Of course he understood; it didn’t take a genius to understand whythis needed to be kept secret, but he still owed Dustin an explanation, and right now he figured he liked Dustin a hell of a lot more than he liked Hopper.
Hopper watched him with a scrutinizing eye, and, as though he could read Steve’s thoughts, said, “Let me hear you say it.”
“What?”
“Say you understand,” Hopper said quietly, ignoring for a moment the fact that Billy was sharing the space with them. He enunciated each word with gentle forcefulness, not issuing him orders now so much as silently begging for compliance. “The three of us can handle it. We don’t need for anyone else to get involved.”
The air in the room felt very still in that moment. The cigarette smoke that had been pooling above them like a pale cloud continued its slow and stagnant swirl, apathetic to the nature of their conversation. Staring at him, Steve once again felt guilty. After everything that the chief had done for him, he still couldn’t commit to the promise Hopper wanted him to make. He understood where his concerns were coming from, but Dustin was already involved, in a way. He sighed.
“Well, the thing is,” Steve began to say, nervously tapping his fingers against the table, “Dustin kind of already knows?” Hopper’s expression turned dark, as Steve had expected it to, but better he tell him now than for him to find out later. “I mean, I asked the kid to use his house! You were there; you dropped me off. I didn’t tell him for what, or WHO,” he said, shooting Billy a pointed look, “but he knowssomething’s up. It’s kind of obvious I was trying to use his cellar as a holding cell, and I promised I’d tell him about it once things settled down.”
Hopper exhaled a long and forlorn sigh, rubbing his face into his hands tiredly. “Could this get anymore convoluted?” he mumbled to himself before he looked up and locked his gaze onto Steve. “Fine. You promised to tell him about it, so you will.”
Confused, Steve shifted his attention from Hopper to Billy. “I will?”
“Yep.” Hopper blew out a long string of smoke. As he did so, the tension he’d held in the muscles of his face seemed to relax. “We’re going to double-down on your dog story. You’ll tell him you were dogsitting for one of your mom’s friends. Dog got loose, and you had to lure it back. Threw some meat down there to attract and trap it. I trust you to make up some details to fill in the gaps if he asks anything specific. You got that?”
Steve stared at him, knowing full well there wasn’t a snowball’s chance in hell that Dustin would ever believe that. And besides, Steve had already told him it was a red alert, but if this was what it took to get Hopper off his back, then, maybe it was fine.
“I understand,” he said, knowing he would, eventually, have to ask forgiveness for his future misdeeds.
“Good.”
Steve lit another cigarette and breathed it in deeply, hating how openly relieved Hopper sounded. He stole a glance towards where Billy was sitting with his own cigarette still hanging limply from his lips and felt that guilt compounded. He couldn’t say for certain what Billy must have thought of him at that point, but there was no way he’d have been able to keep helping him on his own, because Hopper was right: he had almost diedlast night. But with the worst of it over (he hoped), they could focus less on that and put their heads together to figure out what to do going forward.
Or, they could have, if Hopper’s hip radio hadn’t begun to crackle in that exact instance, releasing a string of police-coded jargon through the speaker. They all collectively jumped a little at the startling noise as the dispatcher (Florence’s voice, Steve recognized) requested Hopper’s aid in assisting his deputies with something he couldn’t decipher.
“Great,” Hopper mumbled to himself, stubbing out the cigarette he’d hardly been able to enjoy. If possible, he looked even more tired than when he’d walked in. “Yeah, I copy,” he said into the radio as he unlatched it from his belt. “I’ll be there soon; give me a few minutes to wrap it up here and I’ll meet them at the scene.”
He clipped the small receiver back onto his belt before coming to a stand, groaning in a way that was similar to Steve’s dad when he’d been sitting down for too long.
“You’re leaving?” Steve asked as he watched Hopper collect his hat and place it haphazardly on his head.
“Duty calls,” Hopper grunted noncommittally. He pulled on the coat he’d left on the back of his chair and zipped it up to the collar. “I had a few of my boys start investigating a lead for me. A small one, but if they’re calling me out there, it means they’ve found something, and hopefully it’ll help us settle all this a little more quickly.”
“But we haven’t made a plan for what to do the next time this happens,” Steve said concernedly. He felt exhausted beyond his years, but none of their major issues had been solved or even discussed yet. “We haven’t talked about what we’re supposed to do at all.”
“Next time?”
Steve turned from Hopper to Billy, who’d spoken softly and, despite having looked enraged only moments before, now appeared confused.
“Well, yeah,” Steve said, flicking the ash off the end of his cigarette into the ashtray, “this is like, a monthly thing for you now, right? Kind of like a girl when she gets her-”
“Don’t fucking say it,” Billy growled. Steve shrugged, unbothered.
“…but only for a day instead of like, for a week,” he finished, feeling a little bit of self-satisfaction at the way Billy cringed and groaned.
“God fucking dammit Harrington.”
“You were the one who showed me the movie though,” Steve said, shifting the subject easily to skirt around Billy’s annoyance. Hopper lingered by the dining room’s opening, hearing out the tail-end of Steve’s concerns. “It didn’t end for him after one month; he was like, doomed to keep turning every full moon forever or something, right? Isn’t that how werewolves work, and doesn’t that, y’know, kind of include younow?”
A dawning look of horror spread across Billy’s pale face as he made the connection. He blinked once, let the long trail off ash fall off his cigarette onto the table, and looked away, dazed, as though the thought of having to relive last night’s nightmare hadn’t occurred to him before.
“What do you mean, next time?” Hopper asked, parroting Billy’s earlier confusion. “You saying he’s liable to… turn again?”
Steve nodded somberly. “We can’t use Dustin’s house again; he escaped way too easily, but I guess we have a month to prepare, so it’s not critical right now or anything,” he explained, to which Hopper acknowledged him with a low hum. “But we still definitelyneed a plan for next time.”
“Leave it to me, kid; I might have something I can make work,” Hopper muttered. His eyes were unfocused as he turned and began to leave, already mentally trying to work out the specifics of whatever it was he had in mind. “Remember,” he called back once he’d reached the front door, his haggard voice echoing down the short hall, “nothing said here leaves this house.”
He didn’t wait for affirmation before departing. From the dining room they heard the soft click of the front door as it opened and shut, leaving Billy and Steve alone in the dining room. Turning in his seat to look out the front-facing windows, Steve watched Hopper get into his truck and start the engine, noting the way he let his head hang briefly for a moment before he perked up to back out of the driveway. And then he was gone.
A wave of exhaustion overcame as he sat there, eyeing the empty space where Hopper’s truck had been. He was hungry, tired, and wanted nothing more than to just be able to sleep forever, but as long as he was needed, that wasn’t likely to happen. His role as caretaker was ever-expanding, and now, it seemed to include Billy as well.
Hopper had managed to hold the peace between them (though barely) while he’d been there, and Steve couldn’t presume to know how things were going to go now that it was just him and Billy again. As he turned back in his seat and finished off the rest of his cigarette, he realized that whatever aggression Billy had been harboring towards him was gone.
“Next time,” Steve heard him mumble to himself. The dejected manner in which he spoke was so unlike himself that he was reminded of the way he’d been behaving the day before, as though he could no longer find his own self-worth. Billy took the cigarette that had been hanging off his lip and held it in his hand, staring at the dimly glowing cherry before looking up to catch Steve’s eye to say, “I don’t think I can go through that again.”
He said it with such vulnerable honesty that Steve found he didn’t know how to respond. His own self-worth took a hit as guilt and pity began to rise within him as he stared back at Billy, hating that he didn’t know what to say. It felt wrong to try and supply him with empty assurances when he had heard firsthand and seen the aftermath of how painfully debilitating the transformation had been. There was nothing he could say that could possibly begin to alleviate the horror that came with knowing it was going to come and afflict him again and again, month after month, for the rest of his life.
What sort of consolation could he possibly offer him?
“C’mon,” Steve eventually said, depositing the butt of his cigarette into the ashtray as he scooted his chair back to stand up. Billy watched him with an exhausted, yet vaguely sorrowful expression that Steve decidedly didn’t like. “I’ll show you the bathroom.”
Well, at least he could offer him a shower.
—–
Steve could hear the shower running by the time he came back up the hall with a fresh towel in hand, but Billy wasn’t yet locked inside the bathroom. He was leaning up against the wall beside the bathroom door, arms folded across his chest and eyes closed, dozing off while he waited for the water to warm up. As Steve approached, he noticed that, while Billy had taken off the bloody ruination of his old shirt, he still had Mrs. Henderson’s ugly bathrobe loosely tied around his waist.
Billy cocked one eye open when he heard him come close, and mutely traded the shirt for the towel when Steve offered it to him. Neither of them spoke as the exchange was made; a silence broken only by the sound of spraying water hitting the shower tile forming between them until Steve found it too unbearable to withstand.
“So,” he started to say, rubbing the back of his neck sheepishly, “about before… I, uh, really shouldn’t have, y’know, said what I did about you being a monster.”
From his position against the wall, Billy frowned.
“I was just caught up in the moment,” Steve continued apologetically. “And I know that doesn’t like, excuse my actions or whatever, but it was still a shitty thing to say.”
As he opened both of his eyes, Billy found that Steve was looking everywhere but directly at him, and in fact had taken to looking at his own reflection in a decorative vase while he’d been talking. It was awkward; he was starting to feel uncomfortable about the sincerity Steve was trying to convey.
“I don’t give a shit, it’s not like it bothered me,” Billy lied, speaking tersely. His stomach growled, and he placed a hand over it idly. “Trust me, I’ve been called worse things than that.”
Steve’s shoulders slumped a bit as he worried the back of his hair into a knot. “Still,” he said awkwardly, finally turning away from the dark reflection of the vase, now absentmindedly trying to pull his fingers free, “I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have said that.”
Clicking his tongue and rolling his eyes towards the ceiling, Billy huffed out a deep sigh and said, “Look, Harrington, if you’re willing to make me some pancakes and fry up some bologna we can call it even. Just, stop doing… whatever thisis and let me shower.”
Steve paused to think about it. “Sure, okay, I can do that. I think we’ve got some pancake mix somewhere.”
With that awkward bit of conversation out of the way, Billy eased up off of the wall he was perched upon and slid into the bathroom before Steve could make any sort of addendum and closed the door. He listened to the sounds of Steve’s retreating footsteps down the hall over the pouring water as he undid the tie around his hips and left the beanie on the sink counter, decidedly not looking in the mirror as he stepped into the strong, warm stream.
—–
Billy stayed in the shower for a long, long time.
Steve hadn’t really been expecting it to be a quick one, but still, as he stood over the stove making a tall stack of pancakes that would’ve been enough to satisfy the stomach of any starving man, he wondered just how long he needed. The water had to have been going cold by now.
The smell of the bologna frying in the pan had, at first, encouraged his appetite, but was now starting to turn his stomach. The smell of bologna alone had never been appealing to him, and to have to smell it as it cooked was nauseating. He cut off the stove, transferred the fried meat to a serving plate, and then sat at the kitchen table to wait.
He nibbled a little at a pancake, but couldn’t stomach the smell of the bologna well enough to finish it off. He waited at the table patiently, like a mother might when she was waiting for her kids to come down and eat and strained his ears to listen for when the water shut off upstairs.
It didn’t, though. He could hear it trickling down through the pipes in the walls, quietly draining away whatever it was Billy was trying to cleanse himself of.
Steve sighed miserably and folded his arms over the table, sliding the chair back far enough so he could rest his head over them like he used to in English. He closed his eyes (‘Just resting my eyes’, as his dad was prone to saying before he fell asleep on the couch), and soon found himself asleep.
—–
In a dream, it was snowing and he was driving, speeding along a narrow, unfamiliar road.
‘Faster’, he was thinking to himself as he depressed the accelerator harder. ‘I have to go faster.’
A deep, dark blackness enveloped him from all sides outside of the car. He couldn’t see through it or if anything was in it, even though he knew, intrinsically, that he had his high beams on and should have at least been able to see where he was going. The road before him manifested as a slick black line, wavering in and out of focus between his rapidly swishing windshield wipers and the oncoming flurry.
He was in a hurry, though he didn’t know why. Billy was fine. Sitting in the passenger seat beside him, he looked almost bored with Steve’s pedestrian effort to save him.
“I’m doing my best,” Steve said, unsure of why he was now crying. “I’m going as fast as I can- please, please just understand that.”
“You haven’t done enough,” Billy responded in a voice that both was and wasn’t his own. It hurt Steve’s ears to listen to as he whimpered involuntarily. “I’m already lost.”
Alarmed, Steve took his eyes off the road to look at Billy and found him looking back. His eyes were a dark, glowing red, and he sat with his hand perched on the door handle. In the window behind him, red eyes that mirrored his own were slowly emerging from the darkness, coming so close to the car that the glass was beginning to fog up from its panting breath. How it was able to keep pace with the car when Steve had the accelerator pressed against the floor was unknown and frightening to him.
“Don’t,” Steve begged as Billy’s fingers curled around the handle, getting ready to pull it open like an emergency exit, “I can still help you.”
“I’ve been lied to before,” Billy said solemnly, his two-toned voice warbling as he pulled on the handle and opened the door to give himself over to the creature that was waiting hungrily by the window.
—–
“The fuck is this?”
Steve opened his eyes abruptly and nearly fell out of his seat as he transitioned into a wakeful state. Startled, he sat up and rubbed at his eyes uncomprehendingly.
“They’re just pancakes, Hargrove, don’t be rude,” he said sleepily without fully realizing what it was Billy was talking about. “Misshapen, maybe, but still just pancakes.”
Freshly showered, Billy stood before him wearing the beanie taken from Dustin’s house and some of Steve’s own clothing. An old ‘Hawkins High Phys. Ed.’ shirt clung tightly to his torso, baring a little bit of midriff above the hem of some old sweats. In his hand he held Steve’s two-way radio Dustin had gifted him to include him as part of their party, and through that radio he could hear Max’s voice trying to make contact.
“Steve, come in, Steve! Are you there?”
“Why do you have a two-way radio to my little sister sitting by your bed?” Billy asked icily, unabashed anger seeping out of his very being.
“What the hell were you doing in my bedroom?” Steve countered, feeling his stomach drop when he came to understand the implications Billy was making. He stood up and made to swipe the radio from Billy’s hand. “It’s seriously not what you think.”
“Remind me, where have I heard that one before?” Billy pulled the radio easily out of Steve’s reach, glowering at him as they faced off. “This looks pretty fucking bad for you, Harrington; she’s not even fifteenyet, you sick fuck.”
“It’s not justfor your sister,” Steve said heatedly, then, realizing how that sounded, amended by saying, “Look, I know you know I take care of her friends- this, it’s just- it’s just a radio to communicate with them, alright? They’re weird nerds who don’t like to use phones like normal people. It’s not for anything as dirty as you’re imagining, so would you quit looking for reasons to hate me when I haven’t even done anything?”
Sighing, Steve ran a hand through his hair and reached out for the radio, silently asking for it to be handed over. Billy continued to hold it, staring at him with an indecipherable look on his face. They stood at odds with one another before Dustin’s voice came through the radio speaker.
“Steve! It’s Dustin, we have a situation- please advise. Come in, Steve! Over!”
Billy looked at the radio in his hand and then at Steve with a scowl. He looked bored as he finally relinquished it without further fuss, sitting down at the table opposite of Steve and pulling the plates of food towards him. He gave him a mean look as he began sandwiching the fried slices of bologna between a couple pancakes before biting into them.
Relieved and annoyed, Steve turned away to speak into the radio. “I’m here, I’m here, sorry, what’s up?”
“Oh my God, it’s about time!” Dustin huffed. “You said you’d radio me later and you never did! Over.”
“Some stuff came up,” Steve mumbled, sitting down at the table and rubbing at his eyes. “What’s wrong?”
“It’s Will,” Dustin explained. Steve frowned. “He says he saw something last night that might have to do with the Mind Flayer-”
“Whoa whoa whoa! Hold on a second,” Steve interrupted quickly, casting a furtive glance towards Billy who was now watching him suspiciously. “I’m uh, I’m not alone over here.”
There was silence on the radio after Steve let up on the talk button. Billy squinted at him and mouthed ‘it’s not what you think’ sardonically at him. Steve sighed and shrugged; there wasn’t an easy way to explain this.
“I swear Steve, if you’ve been ignoring us because you’re with aGIRL-”
“No!” Steve exclaimed in frustration. Why did it seem like everyone was against him today? “I’m not- I’m not with a girl; haven’t even beenwith a girl since-”
“Oh,Steve,” Billy chirped in an ugly, high falsetto, speaking loudly enough for the radio to catch and relay his voice clearly. “Quit playing with that toy and come back to play with me.”
Horrified at Billy’s poor impression of a girl, Steve turned to face him with a look of shock.
“What the hell is your damage Hargrove? You know they probably heard that,” he hissed as he let took his finger off the talk button. “Why do you constantly have to prove yourself as being the biggest thorn in my side? Can’t you hop off my dick for five fucking minutes?”
Billy snickered and laughed, clearly satisfied with himself. He shot him a wink when Steve turned up his middle finger at him and bit down on another one of his weird bologna/pancake amalgamations.
“Was that Billy?”
Max’s voice. Both Steve and Billy froze as she called them out, sharing a mutual look of horror at having been recognized.
“Steve? Why are you with Billy?”
“Uh.” Wide-eyed, he looked to Billy for help in answering, but was met with nothing but a look of shock. They both floundered for a moment, during which Billy took the chance to shove more food in his mouth as though to say he was currently preoccupied and couldn’t be assed to help explain. “It… wasn’t?” Steve finally answered lamely.
A strong silence permeated over the radio before it crackled and relayed Max’s voice as she said, “Steve, he’s made fun of me plenty of times that I’d know his ‘I’m a dumb girl’ voice from anywhere.”
Steve groaned and threw Billy a dirty look, to which he received a simple shrug in response. It wasn’t supposed to have been a secret, exactly, but his children knew the history between them just as well as he did and he’d eventually have to explain to them just how they’d come to be together sooner or later. “Alright, yeah, I’m with your brother. He’s at my place.”
“Step-brother,” Billy corrected gruffly, wiping away some crumbs from his mouth.
“Can he hear me right now?” Max asked.
“Uh,” Steve said. “Yeah, he can hear you,” he replied after Billy gave him the go-ahead.
“Don’t come home.”
At first, Steve thought she’d said it out of anger, or spite, or something. It was vague enough that it could have been construed that way (especially with how flatly she’d spoken), but the look on Billy’s face made it clear that it was less a threat and more a warning, of sorts. He stopped chewing his food, eyebrows coming together as he frowned deeply. That vaguely sorrowful look that had crept up around his eyes from before surfaced in his features again as he stared ahead of himself.
“Message received?” Steve asked quietly, unsure of how to process his change in demeanor, to which Billy gave a brief, curt nod. He shoved the plates of food away and sat back with a forlorn expression on his face. “Message received,” he repeated into the radio. “Could you uh, put Dustin back on? Who all’s over there with you guys?”
There was a moment of silence in which Steve pictured the radio changing hands. While he waited for a response, he pulled the dish with the pancakes on it closer towards himself and made a second attempt at eating one.
“The whole party’s here, Steve. We have a situation that requires your assistance, over.”
“Yeah, I remember,” he said through a mouthful of soft food. “Not to be like, dismissive about it, but is there any chance it can wait? I’m kind of… ‘booked’, for the rest of the day; we can have, like, a group meeting and discuss things in person tomorrow, if it’s not urgent.”
He was careful not to mention how he planned on sharing Billy’s situation with them if they agreed, given how angry he’d been about the prospect earlier. It didn’t look as though Billy was paying him much attention at that point, however, as he stood up somberly and walked out of the dining room without a word, no longer interested in eavesdropping on his conversation. Steve wanted to follow after him to make sure he didn’t go anywhere he wasn’t supposed to, but stayed still and finished off the pancake he’d been eating.
“He says it’s not dire; just wanted us to be aware that something might be fucky. You wanna meet up with us tomorrow afternoon at Mike’s house? Over.”
“Sure, that’s fine,” Steve replied. He waited a moment to see if Billy was going to return, and when he was certain he wasn’t going to, he dropped his voice to a whisper and said, “I need you to do me a small favour before then, Henderson.”
“Oh my God, Steve, seriously? Another one? Over.”
Ignoring the indignation with which Dustin spoke, Steve continued. “I need you to research werewolves for me, alright? Like, specifically if it can be cured. Can you do that for me?”
“Uh, I mean, sure? Why though? Does this have something to do with our campaign? Over.” The fact that Dustin was so suspicious caused a little grin to spread out across Steve’s face. In spite of everything, leave it to Dustin to find a way to route it all back to the game he’d gotten him involved with.
“I’ll let you know tomorrow,” Steve said, unable to keep a teasing lilt from affecting the tone of his words. “And uh, just so you know, I’ll probably be bringing Max’s brother along, so don’t freak out if he shows up. Over and out, nerd.”
“Oh,nowyou decide to start using-”
Steve switched the radio off abruptly before Dustin could finish his sentence and set it face down on the surface of the table. He sat still for a moment, feeling his earlier exhaustion swirling within him like a snowglobe before he stood up and wandered out into the living room. He found Billy lying splayed out on the couch, eyes closed and resting easily atop the cushions.
“Just make yourself at home, why don’t you,” Steve said dryly, to which Billy gave a noncommittal grunt. “Do you, uh, need a place to stay tonight?” he asked awkwardly when he understood that Billy wasn’t going to move from his position.
Opening his eyes, Billy stared straight up at the ceiling with a stern look on his face.
“I can stay with Tommy H. if it’s a problem,” he said after a minute.
“I don’t really care what you do,” Steve replied, placing a hand on his hip. “But he’d ask questions, you know. You don’t really… look like how you should.” Billy heaved out a long and depressive sigh, shutting his eyes again. “It’s fine, though- you can stay in the spare bedroom upstairs,” Steve offered.
“Couch is fine,” Billy mumbled.
“You’d be missing out, it’s got a Queen-size mattress up there.”
“Couch is fine,” Billy repeated tiredly.
Steve shrugged. “Suit yourself, I guess.” He studied Billy laid out flat across the couch and felt that familiar need to show him pity. He couldn’t help but wonder what Max’s warning applied to; wondered if Billy would tell him about it if he asked.
“You were right about what you said before.” Billy’s voice was soft with exhaustion, but even so, it managed to break into his thoughts. Steve gave him a look of incomprehension. “About my hair, you were right; it’s coming back.”
“Oh,” Steve said, refraining from tapping into his inherent desire to chirp ‘I told you so’ back at him. “That’s great, man. I knew it would.”
“Still paler than the underside of a witch’s tit though,” Billy muttered, holding up a hand to examine his new complexion morosely.
And, yeah, he was right: even though it seemed his hair was going to be restored to its former glory (given enough time), it didn’t look like the same could be said for his skin. He was still woefully pale, looking less like the golden god he’d been before and more like, as Billy had said, the pale underside of a witch’s tit. Steve eyed him contemplatively, trying to come up with a solution that didn’t involve him laying naked out in the snow to try and catch some sun.
“Do you remember Tammy Thomspon?” Steve asked eventually, to which Billy had to pause in order to connect the name with the person being referenced. Once he’d nodded, Steve continued. “She always had a tan year round; used to talk about how she’d go to like, tanning beds and stuff.”
“I am notgoing to a tanning salon, if that’s what you’re suggesting here Harrington,” Billy said decisively.
“No no! She usedto do tanning beds, but then she kept talking about how they were unhealthy and caused skin cancer and blah blah blah. Before the semester ended though, she said she started using some new thing; she was telling me about it in History before the final,” Steve elaborated, stepping further into the room to take a seat on the armrest of the couch. He snapped his fingers as he tried to remember what it was. “It was like, some spray on stuff? A spray-on tan, I think. You could try that? Wouldn’t even have to go anywhere to get it done, I think it’s sold retail.”
Billy appeared lost in thought as he contemplated the option. He flexed his pale fingers and heaved another heavy sigh. “Anything would probably be better than this.”
‘You don’t- I mean, it’s not… you don’t look thatbad,” Steve lied. Billy put his hand down and glared at him from the far end of the sofa. “Alright alright, so you look like the white end of a fingernail. We get some spray tan, rinse you in it, and presto, you’re back to being average, dark and handsome. I mean, if Tammy Thompson can do it, it shouldn’t be that hard, right?”
Billy snorted. “Handsome, huh? Probably not; she was as dumb as the rest of the cows here.”
“She wasn’t the brightest light in the shed,” Steve agreed, feeling the slightest bit embarrassed at having called Billy handsome. “But, cool; glad we got somethingsorted out today.
“I’ll be in my room if you need me for anything, and I know you already know where thatis,” he said as he came to a rise, casting a snide look at Billy before heading back towards the staircase.
Predictably, Billy clicked his tongue in annoyance. “You realize you only gave me a towel earlier, right? I wasn’t about to put that thingon again. I wasn’t snooping; just trying to find a fucking change of clothes when I heard Maxine yelling for you on your shitty bedside table radio,” he said in that easy, drawling nature of his. “What was I supposed to think?”
“Why don’t you try thinking a little less and just ask instead of jumping to conclusions?” Steve huffed. He hadn’t wanted this to turn into another argument, but it seemed as though the conversation was quickly heading that way. “Look, I don’t- I’m too tired to argue with you. I’m gonna catch a nap and then we can like… I don’t know. Get some bottles of spray tan and hose you down in the backyard or something.”
Billy grunted in affirmation, and Steve was content to leave it at that. He shot Billy one last look before he stepped out of the living room, and, leaving the food out on the table where he’d left it, went straight up to his room. Like the condition he’d left Dustin’s cellar in, he’d clean up the dining room later.
As he entered his room, Steve was afraid, for a moment, that he’d find evidence of Billy having gone snoopingthrough all of his belongings. It would’ve been just like him to try and find something else he could use to hold against him while Steve was unaware, but as he looked around the area carefully, it seemed as though his room appeared untouched. His closet was left open from where Billy had gone in to take the clothes he was currently wearing, but, true to his word, it didn’t look like he’d rifled any deeper into it then he’d needed to.
Relieved, Steve stepped forward until he was toe-to-hem with his bed and let himself fall face forward directly onto the mattress, exhaling a deep sigh once he collided with it. He laid there unmoving, breathing in the hot, trapped air between his face and his comforter before he rolled over and laid himself out spread-eagle to look up at the ceiling.
“Why does this have to be so much harder than it is?” he groaned, cupping his hands together to cover his face. The familiar question he’d wrestled with of ‘why me?’ that he’d been struggling to answer since any of this started began cycling through his mind. Of course, now that he had time to rest, his brain wouldn’t let him.
He just wanted to help, and already he’d almost lost the trust of the only two people he could rely on. Neither of them seemed to understand that it was too great a burden for one person to have to shoulder alone. It needed to be a team effort, but no one seemed willing to branch out and make it one. Once again, it was left to him to take the initiative.
“Why is it so hard for me to help anyone in this damn town?” he moaned.
Story Synopsis: Some weird low-key occult parties start popping up that Steve can’t in good conscience ignore and takes it upon himself to investigate. Billy gets caught up in the consequences of his meddling, and isn’t it funny? For all the strange things the Upside Down has thrown his way, it’s werewolvesthat Steve has trouble accepting exist.
Notes:i am very slow writer i am apolgesek it took so long for this part to come out
~idk how to do linebreaks since tumblr took them away beep boop~
Johnathan woke up slowly, tangled in his bedding and hardly able to open his eyes. He stared out into the dark corner of his room, trying to pinpoint what exactly had woken him up before turning his head slightly to glance at the digital display of his bedside clock. The bright red numbers glared at him, displaying an hour that was far too early for his liking. He sighed deeply to himself and tried to go back to sleep, closing his eyes and rolling over onto his side.
As he shrugged his blankets back up tightly around his shoulders, trying to find that comfortable sweet spot, he realized from the pressure on his bladder that he’d woken up because he had to piss. Johnathan groaned in frustration and lay there for one stubborn, uncomfortable moment before resigning himself to getting up.
His coordination suffered with how tired he was as he got up out of bed and stumbled out of his room, tripping over his shoes when he got to the hall. Rubbing his eyes as he passed by Will’s room, he didn’t notice that the door to his brother’s bedroom was open and continued towards the bathroom unawares.
He relieved himself without turning the bathroom light on, unwilling to chase away what remained of his sleepiness by turning it on. Once finished, he flushed and tucked himself back into his underwear hastily, scratching at his stomach as he shuffled back into the hall, more awake now than he’d have liked to have been. There was nothing more he wanted in that moment than to get back in bed and wrap himself into a warm cocoon, but as he approached Will’s bedroom it became impossible for him to miss the fact that his door was open, and that a cold wind was steadily blowing through it.
It was the cold that had Johnathan’s stomach curling uneasily as he hesitated by the open door, looking into Will’s room uncertainly.
The window along the back wall of his room was open wide, allowing the cold, hard-blowing wind to sweep in snow as it passed by. An empty howling noise accompanied the wind as it scraped along the sides of the house and flew in through the opening. Will was standing in front of it, his comforter wrapped around his shoulders tightly as he turned from where he’d been staring out the open window to look at his brother, a desperately frightened look in his eye that glimmered even in the dark.
“Will?” Johnathan asked hesitantly, crossing his arms across his chest to keep himself warm as he wandered closer towards the open window. His heart was pounding hard and fast, already afraid of what Will was going to say. “What’re you doing? Why is the window open?”
Will didn’t say anything at first. He turned sharply away from where Johnathan was carefully watching him, his breath coming in quick bursts that skirted the edges of hyperventilation as he tried to summon the courage he needed to speak.
“Nothing,” Will said after one long moment. He freed one of his arms from his blanket robe and closed the window abruptly, snapping it shut quickly before stepping back to his bedside, still bundled tightly in the warmth of his comforter. “I thought I heard something outside, is all.”
Johnathan looked towards the window as Will climbed back into bed, as though he’d be able to see what his brother had thought he’d seen. “Heard something like what?” Johnathan asked eventually, speaking slowly in an effort to be mindful, artfully dodging the questions he really wanted to ask: is it him? Is he back?
In bed, Will shrugged easily, but something about the way he held his blankets tightly around him made him look small and insecure; even his eyes still looked wary and afraid. “I dunno. It sounded like some dogs fighting, I think. They were coming close, but it’s quiet now and I couldn’t see anything when I looked.”
“Some dogs?” It wasn’t that he mistrusted Will, but Johnathan was well aware of his brother’s penchant for withholding information when he thought it might put his family at risk. “Are you sure that was all it was? You’d tell me if there was more to it, right?”
“Yeah,” Will said softly. His attention had been focused on his window, but he turned it towards Johnathan with a reassuring smile. “Yeah, of course I would; the noises just reminded me of Chester, is all. I miss him.”
A bitter smile graced Johnathan’s lips at the mention of their late dog.
“Yeah, me too,” he said after a quiet moment of reflection. “He was a good dog, but if you hear them out there again, let me know and I’ll take a look, alright?”
“Okay,” Will said, letting his gaze drift back to the window. Johnathan followed it uncertainly before remembering how tired he was and how cold his bed was getting without him in it.
“Goodnight, Will,” he said as he turned away, closing the bedroom door quietly behind him as he left.
“Night, Johnathan,” Will replied with a whisper.
\\
The ringing of the telephone mounted on the kitchen wall sounded more like an angry alarm clock than it did a phone as it rattled insistently in its cradle. The loud, abrupt noise it made carried strongly into the living room, blaring its alarm as loudly and determinedly as it could, unheeding of whomever might’ve been trying to sleep through it. And Steve did manage to sleep through it, exhausted as he was, paying it no attention as he sighed and ignored the ringing tones that began to seep into the dream he was having. The kitchen phone rung dutifully regardless, announcing the call as loudly as it could before it eventually tapered off unanswered, and a welcoming silence took hold for one strong minute before it began to ring again, and this time it was strong enough to wake Steve with a start.
His body jerked in surprise as he was unceremoniously brought into wakefulness, the shock of the phone’s persistent ringing causing him to draw in a deep breath of air as he lifted his head up from out of the deep, cushioned crevice of the sofa he’d fallen asleep on. The lingering remnants of his dream mixed with his waking memory, muddying it to the point where he couldn’t immediately recognize where he was as he rolled over onto his back and stared up at the ceiling. The thought that he was late for school and had somehow slept through his alarm worried itself into his mind as the phone continued to ring unanswered. If he got written up for showing up late to first period again, then his dad was gonna really have his ass for it this time.
Steve quickly moved into a sitting position and winced as the injury on his arm protested painfully against his sudden movements. He ignored the intense throbbing, unaware of how misplaced his concerns were, as, in a manner that could be likened to Alice’s white rabbit, he stood up and hurried into the kitchen on curiously sore feet, slipping in too-small borrowed socks across the linoleum tile and worried only about the time. The little creature’s mantra of ‘I’m late, I’m late, I’mlate’ circulated through his thoughts relentlessly as he stupidly went to answer the phone in a misguided attempt to turn off the alarm.
He slapped the receiver off the arms of its cradle, ending its terrible noisemaking mid-ring. Relieved, he stood staring at the curved piece of plastic as it dangled limply by its cord, swaying against the backdrop of unfamiliar wallpaper like the pendulum of some grandfather clock.
“Hello? Anyone home? Hel-loooo?”
A voice, tinny and hardly audible started speaking through the receiver. The voice registered as being somewhat familiar to him, perforating the sleepy haze clouding his mind as he tried to bring his thoughts into focus; God knew he’d never been a morning person. Hesitantly, Steve reached out to take hold of the phone receiver and put it to his ear, looking around himself doubtfully as he did so to orient himself, when, as he caught sight of the kitchen table he’d stayed up all night sitting at, it all came back to him rather suddenly.
He hadn’t stayed overnight in some stranger’s house, and he certainly wasn’t late for school: he was standing in the Henderson’s kitchen, wearing two pairs of Dustin’s socks he’d had to stretch out to fit over his feet, which had somehow, miraculously, not given themselves over to frostbite in the night. Bright, early morning sunshine was flooding in through the kitchen windows, reflecting too harshly over the freshly fallen snow outside for him to look out at for too long. He squinted and turned away from the glare, unsure of what to do now that he’d actually answered the call.
“Uh,” he said into the phone smartly as he continued to stare around himself, still mildly caught in the throes of sleepy bewilderment. A small part of his brain was still trying to convince him that he was late for school and he ought to be hurrying on. “Uh, Hen- Henderson household?”
“Thereyou are! Finally, geeze, Mike, did you plan on sleeping all day?”
Dustin’s voice, clear but confusing in its purpose, came in from the other end of the line.
“Whoa, bud, I think you have the wrong number; this is yourhouse, not Mike’s,” Steve replied after a moment, fixing the receiver between the crook of his neck and shoulder. He balanced it there precariously as he went to roll up the sleeve of his shirt tenderly, trying to get a good look at the wound that was painfully making itself remembered.
He had to cock his head at an awkward angle to get a good look at it. The long, not-yet-healed gash that had had its stitches popped was coated in dried, flakey blood, but didn’t look as bad as it felt in Steve’s opinion. There were a few busted stitches he could see that would have to be tended to, but they didn’t look like they were in need of urgent care, and although he’d promised Hopper he’d go to the hospital first thing after the night was over, he felt it could probably wait a while longer. He rolled his sleeve back down and took the receiver in hand.
“Haha, yeah, I know man,” Dustin’s voice continued, his cheery tone sounding fake despite his words. “Look, Mike, I just wanted to let you know that I’ll be back in time for DnD today after all-”
“Dustin, dude, are you even listening to me? I’m not Mike, you called your own house-” Steve said, sighing in frustration.
“Yeah, trust me, I know.”The tone of Dustin’s voice became sterner and more pointed amidst the voices Steve could hear casually conversing in the background. Sudden understanding dawned on Steve’s sleepy face when he realized Dustin wasn’t being an idiot, but was attempting to speak to him in code. “SO, yeah, don’t worry about trying to incorporate my character without me, I’ll be home by eleven.”
“Eleven?” Steve turned around in place, trying to find a clock to give him the current time, forgetting that he had a watch currently strapped to his wrist. He found one mounted on the far wall that marked the hour at being just a little past 9:45. “Shit,” he breathed out lowly to himself, turning back to the wall the phone was mounted on. He leaned up against it, trying to think of what to do and how to respond.
The cellar was a mess; from the poor, dimly lit glimpses he’d gotten of it the previous night he’d recognized it to be effectively trashed. The gore that had come from Billy’s transformation was splattered all over the walls and floor. With the knowledge that he could barely keep his own room clean, Steve knew that there was no way in hell he’d be able to clean it all out in an hour, on his own, while also trying to figure out where Billy had gone.
He brought the inside of his lip between his teeth and chewed on it lightly, tugging at a piece chapped skin that had cracked and was peeling up, his gaze wandering about the room and to the windows again as he tried to come up with a suitable plan of action. His eyes lingered on the snow outside, adjusting to the refracting light as he weighed out his options.
“So are we still on to play?” Dustin asked, his voice interrupting Steve’s concentration. “Should I call the rest of the party and let them know?”
“What?” Steve blinked and turned his focus away from the window, but as he turned away he noticed something he hadn’t before. Squinting, he turned to look back outside and frowned, trying to figure out what it was that had stood out to him. “Uh, no?”
“Why not? You said earlier this week that the next session was going to be an important one!”
“Oh my god, your code language is confusing the hell out of me, Henderson. Look, I know you can’t speak frankly wherever you are, but if you’re asking to get something done today I- I can’t yet,” Steve said, and sighed heavily again. He knew he owed Dustin an explanation- had promised him one, in fact- but he couldn’t find the words to do it currently. He was hurt, sore, tired, and still had so much left to do that he couldn’t allocate enough energy into trying to formulate the response he owed. “Listen, not today, man, but tomorrow, alright? ‘Call the party’ and assemble the rest of the nerds to set up a meeting for tomorrow or something.”
The silence on the other end of the line was welcoming. The voices that had been talking in the background were still hardly audible as Dustin took his time thinking over Steve’s request, granting him the time to focus on the snow.
It was fresh and thick and spread across the ground tantalizingly, practically begging for some kid to come along and roll a snowman out of it. But despite how serene it appeared, there was something off about it; something so subtle Steve couldn’t quite perceive what it was, but still he could tell that there was something there he was missing. He wiped away whatever sleep was left in his eyes and squinted harder, despite the way the sunshine that glimmered across the surface negatively impacted his vision.
“Okay, fine, but I’d like to remind whoever else may be listening that we are proudof our interests and refuse to wear the moniker of ‘nerd’ with shame,” Dustin said testily in response.
“Yeah, okay, whatever; that’s cool, man,” Steve mumbled. “I’m glad you’re proud of your little nerd interests.” He was starting to develop a headache as he stared, watching the way the natural lighting changed as the cloud coverage shifted and moved. The snow became less bright, and the shadows deepened as the clouds traveled slowly by, and suddenly Steve realized what it was that had stood out as peculiar to him.
It was disturbed. What should have been a fresh, even coating of snow was disturbed. He hadn’t been able to see it properly until the shadows had been emphasized, but there was a clear path there that he could see now that indicated something had come through the backyard, leading straight to the cellar opening. Any remnants of exhaustion that lingered still in Steve’s body was replaced with a sharp spike in adrenaline.
“Okay, okay cool yeah, look, I gotta go,” Steve said hurriedly, unsure of when exactly he’d tangled himself in the phone’s curly cord. “Just, radio me later, or something, uh, we’ll get this all sorted out, and listen seriously for a minute here: do not, I repeat, do notlet your mom go anywhere near your basement alright? It’s fucked up, but I’ll take care of it later; I gotta go now, we’ll debate the politics of what being a nerd does to your street cred later.”
“Wait, wait!” Dustin exclaimed, and Steve only obliged him because he had yet to unwind himself completely from the phone’s deceptively long cord. “At least give me a hint for the session; is it- is it a ‘code red’ kind of thing we’re going to be dealing with here? I wanna know what spells I ought to prepare, you owe me that much of a hint at least!”
Steve paused as he finally unwound himself completely, his arm already postured to hang up the phone. He looked out at the snow, where something had clearly come through while he’d been sleeping.
Was it a code red? He thought of Billy’s screams and of the smatterings of gore he hadn’t wanted to see that had caused them when he’d delved into the cellar last night; thought of how he’d wandered alone like an idiot into a tunnel where no one had known he’d gone and where no one could help him if he’d needed it, and wondered how much longer he could survive trying to handle this all on his own.
Was it a code red?
“Yeah,” he said quietly into the phone, closing his eyes against the horrific memories he’d forced himself to recall, hating that he was dragging his children into this with him, “yeah, man, I’d say it’s a code red.”
“Fuck,” he heard Dustin whisper, and smirked a little when he overheard his mom begin to call him away from the phone. “Alright, alright, I’m coming! This has been great Mike, but now Igotta go.”
“Right, yeah, so just radio me later. I’ll tell you more about the ‘session’ then,” Steve said, and hung up without waiting to hear Dustin’s confirmation.
Steve floundered for a moment after the phone clicked into place, flexing his toes against the tight, cottony double-binding that held them. He needed to go outside, but his sneakers were still soggy and unwearable, if the puddle they were laying in under the kitchen table was any indication.
When his feet had returned to a normal coloration after being soaked, he hadn’t thought about doing anything to his shoes to get them to dry properly. He’d scrounged awkwardly through Dustin’s dresser for something warm to cover his feet with after he’d drained the bath, and had spent the night trudging about in too-small socks and Mrs. Henderson’s bedroom slippers, worrying about Billy and Hopper in intermittent bursts; drying his shoes hadn’t even crossed his mind at all.
Pulling on the coat he’d left hanging on the back of one of the kitchen chairs, he hustled back into the living room to retrieve the slippers he’d borrowed. Much like Dustin’s socks, they were unfortunately too small to fully cover his feet and stopped just short of supporting his heel, but he was resolute in the fact that they would have to do. He shuffled over to the backdoor and unlocked the deadbolt with a heavy click to investigate the disturbance he’d spied from the kitchen.
He shivered against the cold and left the door open behind him as he awkwardly made his way closer to the trail, noticing with no small hint of relief that the tracks appeared to have been manmade and were recognizably human. Whatever comforts he took in that fact were unfortunately short lived when, as he finally came up close to the tracks, he noticed that there was blood mixed into the compacted snow where someone had come walking. It pooled primarily in the deep divot a heel leaves behind in a footprint, and it was no small amount.
Barefoot, Steve thought wearily. He was walking barefoot.
The bloody set of prints led straight to the doors of the cellar that had been left open wide, and there Steve hesitated, ignoring the fact that the slippers he was wearing were quickly growing cold and soggy.
He stopped by one of the open doors and stepped down onto the first step, taking care to not slip in the snow that had accumulated overnight. Steve squinted into the gloom, not blind to the fact that the tracks led in, but none had yet come back up. The morning sun was casting its light down the narrow cellar corridor brightly, but in the places where its illumination couldn’t reach, Steve thought he could barely make out the hint of a form submerged in the darkness. He took another cautious step down but stalled when he heard the sounds of something coughing hard, struggling to hack something up.
“Hargrove?” he called out unsurely, slowly descending further down the stairwell with one hand kept pressed to the cold, stone wall for support. “Hargrove, pleasesay that’s you down there.”
A low groan, sounding miserably familiar and rough amidst the sounds of heaving was all the confirmation he needed. He hastened in his descent, nearly slipping on a few frozen steps when the traction-less rubber soles of the slippers he was wearing failed to grip anything, throwing all the caution he’d thus far been exercising to the wind to reach the bottom as quickly as he could. His mind and heart were racing when he finally got to the bottom, and there he found Billy, naked and heaving and hunched over in the dark.
“Oh, shit,” Steve breathed out as he slowly drew nearer, his eyes roving over the pale expanse of Billy’s exposed back. His legs were awkwardly tucked up underneath him, revealing the raw and bloodied bottoms of his feet. Across his back and trailing around to the front of his torso were multiple pink, raised marks that looked like freshly healed scars, but even as Steve studied them he could see that some of them were still glistening and open. The gashes were long and vicious, holding Steve’s focus as Billy made another gross, wet retching noise. His body trembled as it heaved, prompting Steve into action.
“Fuck, are you alright?” he asked, but immediately chided himself for even asking; he could see quite clearly that he wasn’t alright at all.
He awkwardly bent to kneel down beside him, unsure of what he could really do for him as Billy clutched his stomach and shook. Steve hesitantly reached out to rub his back in comfort as Billy struggled and heaved again, choking on the vomit that was finally beginning to bubble up in the back of his throat. Steve looked away in disgust as it dribbled out of his mouth, but continued to rub his back dutifully in what he hoped was a soothing gesture.
His fingers bumped over the raised marks, subconsciously tracing them as he felt Billy’s skin, noting how amazingly smooth and soft it felt, strongly reminding him of the way Nancy’s skin got after she’d finished the exfoliating part of her beauty routine, leaving him to wonder if that wasn’t due in part to Billy’s skin being new.
The bile Billy was choking up was viscous in nature as he spit it out weakly. It was thick and red and clung to his lips before he began vomiting in earnest, his body curling forward as chunks of furred meat and splintered pieces of bone spewed from his mouth in a gruesome torrent, splashing messily on the floor before him. He coughed and spit raggedly, his body shivering all over as the muscles in his stomach clenched and drew loose repeatedly, tightening again and relaxing over and over in an attempt to finish purging everything he had in him. A seemingly endless amount of the unsavory mix of fur and bone spilled out of him, mixing with the red, bloodied juices that had coagulated onto the floor. Hearing Billy vomiting had Steve close to puking himself, an uncomfortable nausea settling in his gut as listened to the continued heaves until the delicate equilibrium of Billy’s stomach was restored.
“What the fuck is this?” Billy eventually asked hoarsely, unable to keep the full-body tremble he was experiencing from shaking his voice when he spoke. “What the hell did I eat?”
Steve shook his head uncertainly, chancing a glance at the mess on the floor before quickly looking away again.
“When I found you, I think… I think it was a deer,” Steve said, unsure if Billy would find that information to be comforting or not. Billy shuddered in response, shivering beneath Steve’s touch.
It was hard having to witness Billy in such a vulnerable state; he was so paleand hairless and weakened that, if Steve hadn’t known it wasBilly beneath his hand, then he might not have been able to recognize him at all.
The change, at some point, had robbed Billy’s skin of its remarkable tan, leaving his complexion woefully pale that bordered something almost ghostly. Steve recognized the theft as a tragedy, but it was made worse seeing that Billy had lost all of his hair as well- not even his eyebrows had survived the shedding, and the curly, golden-brown hair that would’ve looked trashy on anyone else was scattered tragically around the room in a display almost as gruesome as the remnants of his discarded, ruined flesh.
Billy groaned again, low and deep as he tried to straighten out, bumping Steve’s hand away. Long strands of saliva linked his lips to the muck on the floor, drawing Steve’s attention back to the thrown up remains of whatever raw thingmonster-Billy had feasted upon. He could feel the nausea rising in him again as the acidic smell of the vomit crept up his nostrils, and knew he had to move before he became as incapacitated as Billy, lest they both end up wasting the morning by wallowing in the cellar, incapable of taking care of each other.
He tore his gaze away from the fresh vomit and stood up, wiping his hands off on his jeans. He offered a hand down to help Billy up, but he didn’t take it. Billy remained where he was, dazedly staring down into the mess that had come out of his stomach, shivering violently, though whether it was because of the cold or from the ruin and subsequent rebuilding of his body, Steve wasn’t sure.
With nothing else to do, Steve stood by idly and watched as Billy spit whatever foul tasting saliva had gathered in his mouth onto the floor. When he realized he wasn’t doing anything except staring, Steve wondered if Dustin’s home could offer up anything for Billy to wear. The clothes he’d worn the night before lay in tatters at the bottom of the cellar stairs, his tight blue jeans ripped at the seams and the shirt he’d worn shredded into strips of fabric that not even all the kings horses nor all the kings men could hope to put together again.
“I’ll be right back,” Steve said, determined to at least try to find something for Billy to take cover in. It didn’t seem as though Billy was ready to try moving yet anyway.
Billy didn’t say anything as Steve turned away and left, walking up the stairs and into the morning light alone. He stared down into the muck of his sickness and tentatively reached up to feel his hairless head self-consciously, his hand shaking as he felt the smoothness of his scalp. A whimper escaped him as he attempted to restrict his grief, silently mourning the loss of one of his greatest points of pride.
\\
In the end, Steve ended up giving Billy his own shirt, awkwardly stripping it off in a way that didn’t aggravate his injury as he swapped it out for his coat. The long-sleeved tee fit tightly across Billy’s chest when he finally resigned to putting it on, defining his musculature well through the fabric in a way Steve’s body couldn’t. Steve tried to crack a joke about it being too small for him, but Billy didn’t appear to be much in the mood to joke as he stood still and wearily took the rest of clothes that were handed to him, only ever making an apparent noise of disgust when Steve handed him Dustin’s mother’s bathrobe.
“It’s all I could find that’d fit, probably,” Steve explained, hoping that Mrs. Henderson wouldn’t notice that the ugly pink thing he’d found hanging on her bathroom door had gone missing. Billy held it at arm’s length distastefully before begrudgingly wrapping it around himself, wearing it like a makeshift skirt as he tied it into place, pulling the soft pink belt that came with it into a tight knot on his hip.
There was nothing else Steve could offer him; Dustin was still only a kid whose clothes stood no chance at all of fitting Billy, and he didn’t feel comfortable rooting through Mrs. Henderson’s wardrobe to try and find anything better. It was ridiculous. Billy looked ridiculous, dressed in a bloodied shirt and pink skirt as he pulled his boots on over his healing feet, and under any other circumstances Steve would’ve made a point to laugh and make fun of the fact that he looked like a combat-ready Barbie, but as it was, Steve found that he was still having a hard time looking at him long enough to properly mock him.
He looked miserable and exhausted; ugly and humorous; the butt of a joke he’d spent his whole life avoiding by building his ego up until he’d become impervious to it all, but now his shell was cracked, and vulnerability seeped out of the fractures like a slow flood leaking out of a broken dam.
If Billy took notice of how strongly Steve was averting his gaze, he didn’t comment on it. In Steve’s mind, he thought Billy was probably thankful for it as he wordlessly put on the black knit beanie Steve had scavenged out of Dustin’s room to hide his bald head.
“You good?” Steve asked him quietly, watching as Billy adjusted the brim of the hat to cover as much as it could. Steve recognized the frailty Billy was trying to contain as it was quietly broadcast across the features of his face: it was in the way he kept blinking to prevent his eyes from watering up too much, and in the way his mouth twitched as he ran his tongue ran over his teeth repeatedly. It was in the way he couldn’t even manage to hold himself upright, his body hunched over and weighted in the shoulders with weariness and fatigue.
Billy didn’t answer, and Steve thought he could understand what his silence meant.
“Let’s get the fuck out of here,” he said after a moment, and let Billy lead the way out of the cellar and back into the house.
He appeared to have been recovering well enough, walking slowly but steadily with purpose until a severe wave of exhaustion struck him down almost as soon as they stepped through the door. He came close to collapsing after they stepped through the threshold and into the kitchen, but Steve was quick and intervened before he fell, taking hold of him as soon as he’d started to go down.
“Jesus fuck- Are you alright?” He asked in alarm, holding Billy awkwardly in his arms as he tried to regain his footing. He stumbled and nearly fell again as he jerked out of Steve’s grip and eventually let himself be guided to the couch.
“Peachy,” Billy muttered in delayed response, his vision blurring as he sat down. He sat still holding his head for a moment before leaning over onto his side, spreading out atop the cushions Steve had spent the night on and closing his eyes, desperate for rest.
“Wait, don’t- you can’t sleep here,” Steve said pleadingly, hyper-aware of what time it was and how long they had until Dustin and his mom came home. “Look, we have to be out of here before eleven; I have to make a quick call first and then we have to haul ass outta here, alright? Hargrove? Are you getting any of that?”
Billy didn’t reply, already fast asleep.
Steve groaned miserably, feeling the weighted responsibility of what it might be like to be a single parent trying to raise a belligerent, lazy teenage son. All the same, Steve left him alone; he’d been through a lot, and if he needed a little bit of rest to recover, then he could spare him the five minutes it would take to leave a message for Hopper.
He was rubbing his forehead as he made his way back into the kitchen, kicking off the wet slippers that were no longer of any real use to him. Steve grabbed the phone’s receiver from where it sat crookedly in its cradle and plugged in the number for the Hawkins police department, rehearsing what he planned to say in his head as he waited for the call to go through.
“Florence speaking for Hawkins P.D., is this an emergency?”
“Uh, hi, no, not an emergency; this is Steve Harrington, and I was just calling to leave a message for Hopper about-”
“About the dog he’s been out all night trying to chase down, yes,” she said, cutting him off curtly. “I recognize your name. Your mom’s show dog, is it?”
“Yeah, yeah, real prized. Expensive breed, and all that. She was just- just so worried about him,” Steve stammered, trying to fold himself naturally into the lie Hopper must have fabricated for the rest of the department to explain why it was so important that this dog be found. “But he came back about an hour ago, a little worse for wear but doing alright besides, so if you could just radio him or whatever that we found him-”
“What breed is it?”
“Uh, sorry, what?” Steve asked, eyes flitting to where Billy was effectively passed out on the couch. Mutt? Mongrel? Bully? What did Billy qualify as?
“I was just curious. It must be something really exotic if Jim decided to put himself on it instead of delegating it.”
“Oh, well, you know,” Steve said, mentally combing through the sparse list of dog breeds he knew, but nothing came up exotic enough to match the worth Florence had pinned on the imaginary dog. “It’s just- it’s just, uh, you know. A… a Dingo.”
There was a long moment of silence from Florence’s end that Steve used to mentally berate himself, slapping his palm to his forehead stupidly.
“ADingo,”Florence repeated dubiously. “Your mother’s prized show dog is an Australian Dingo?”
“Ah, yep, that’s right. We had him imported only a few months ago, actually. So if you could just pass that on to the chief for me, I’d be really grateful,” Steve explained quickly, hating himself for not being able to quickly think up something more believable than a wild dog he’d learned about through Nancy coincidentally for some kind of a school report.
“Hold on kid, before you go, Jim left me a message to relay to you in the event you found your mom’s ‘Dingo’ first.”
Steve hesitated, feeling the warm flush of embarrassment colouring his face as he considered hanging up and ending the call prematurely to avoid any further humiliating remarks. He prayed that he’d never have to meet Florence in person. “Oh. Uh, okay. What’d he say?”
“He wanted me to let you know that in the event you found it first, he’s going to want to drop in on you to see it and make sure it’s alright. Asked me to take down your address for him, if that’s okay by you.”
“Oh, yeah, sure, no problem,” Steve said, eyeing the ticking clock on the wall worriedly; it was already almost half-past ten. The day had just begun, and already he was beginning to feel the uncomfortable dregs of exhaustion flowing thickly through his veins.
Even so, he maintained politeness as he gave Florence his address and asked that his gratitude for all the hours Hopper had put in towards finding his ‘dog’ be forwarded to him via radio. He hung up quickly afterwards so she didn’t have the chance to make another smart remark about his mother’s alleged Dingo and sighed deeply, wishing he could just go back to sleep and let matters handle themselves. He gathered up his shoes and prepared to leave.
\\
It was tough getting Billy up after that; he was so bone-weary that Steve probably could’ve rolled him off the couch and dropped him onto the floor without waking him up. Seeing him like that reminded him of a time when he’d still been crowned ‘King of Hakwins’, when the only time he’d seen someone in a similar state of unconsciousness was when Tommy H. had gotten so shitfaced at one of his ragers that he’d passed out in the bathroom and wouldn’t wake up for anything. As his body blocked access to the toilet, other partygoers had resorted to messily pissing over him before Carol had begged him to roll Tommy’s prone form out of the way so he wouldn’t be humiliated any further, and even then he hadn’t woken up as he was effectively tucked up against the hard porcelain of the bathtub.
Looking down at Billy, Steve puzzled over how he was going to get him out of the house and into the car if he was truly as comatose as he feared he was. He could drag him out by the arms, probably, if he wasn’t worried about up keeping a respectable appearance; he knew some of Dustin’s neighbors, and wanted to keep in as good graces as he could manage with them, especially if it turned out they’d have need of the cellar again, but Billy was so dense that there might not be any other way.
Steve groaned loudly and looked around himself impatiently, wondering if there was some way he could rig together a possible sled or something to tow Billy out to the car with. Nothing in the living room jumped out to him as being particularly useful in that regard, though.
…What if he hit him? The thought came to him as he recalled some of the strategies his parents had employed on himself when he was younger. Sometimes, when he’d been hard to wake as a child, his dad would lightly (and sometimes not-so-lightly) slap at his face until he woke up. It was a startling technique, but maybe that was all Billy needed, and wouldn’t it be fair, anyway? For all the times he’d hit Steve, one wake-up slap wouldn’t be the worst he had coming to him. Steve raised his hand, aligned it with Billy’s prone form, and stared down at him morosely.
He twisted his arm back, mentally readying himself for the shitstorm that would erupt if hitting him did end up working, but paused when his attention was captured in the same subtle way it’d been when he’d noticed something odd about the snow earlier. Steve blinked, frowned, and then lowered his hand, mesmerized by what he saw.
There was a darkness that had been forming in the skin above Billy’s eyes while Steve had stood there pondering, slowly growing denser even as he continued to stare. He couldn’t quite figure out what it was at first, but realization struck him harder than he’d wanted to strike Billy when he understood with some dull amazement that he was watching Billy’s eyebrows slowly growing back in. It was very subtle, almost completely imperceptible, but the space above Billy’s eyes was slowly filling out- with the exception of one small slant that curiously remained blank. Without thinking, Steve reached out to run a finger along the small bare patch of skin, unaware that Billy had had a scar there until now. He wondered how he got it as he let his finger continue along the ridge of his brow, slipping from the smooth groove of the scar to feel the slight prickle of the short growing hairs as they naturally followed the curve along the shape of his eyebrow arch.
This isgood, Steve thought; it meant Billy’s hair would grow back, given enough time, and for some reason he found that thought comforting. He’d be able to look at him again without feeling guilty, like Billy was suffering for some grave mistake Steve had caused.
Without really realizing what he was doing, Steve’s gentle touch roamed away from his eyebrows, trailing down the length of Billy’s soft face, rubbing over his cheek bone and down to his chin, feeling the smooth expanse of skin in an unwitting caress. He held his touch there for a moment before suddenly becoming aware of what he was doing, jerking his hand away as Billy began to wake, his startlingly blue eyes blinking rapidly up at him in exhausted confusion.
“We gotta go,” Steve said, turning away in embarrassment and speaking far too gently. He cleared his throat awkwardly and repeated himself a little more insistently, a little more urgently. “Get up. We gotta go, Hargrove.”
\\
“Should I, like, drop you off somewhere?”
Upon leaving the Henderson’s house, Steve realized a little ways down the road that he didn’t actually know where he should be going. He’d only been to Billy’s house once, and didn’t know the way to it from Dustin’s, or if that was even where Billy wanted to go. With the immediate threat of being caught by Dustin’s mother averted, Steve had no preset destination in mind. Almost automatically, he began to navigate them in the direction of his own home with nowhere else to go.
“Likewhere,” Billy snarled, eyes closed and forehead pressed firmly against the cold windowpane.
His condition hadn’t improved since they’d left, and in some ways he actually looked worse. He was sweating hard, obviously riddled with nausea and trying not to bring attention to it. Every once in a while Billy’s stomach emitted a terrible growl that would in turn make Billy groan. It made Steve nervous, afraid that he was going to start throwing up again at any moment.
He’d become remarkably tight-lipped again, as it seemed that talking was causing Billy discomfort. Whenever he did speak, he’d reach up to tentatively press his fingers along the sides of his jaw, slowly making his way to the underside of his chin, wincing slightly as though he had a bad toothache. Occasionally he’d open his mouth and stretch it in an awkward grimace, reaching in once or twice to feel something that must’ve been bothering him, but would stop quickly whenever he caught Steve watching him. Part of Steve had hoped that whatever weird behaviors being a werewolf had on him would stop now that the full moon had come and gone, but it seemed he’d been mistaken. There was no shortage of mysteries when it came to Billy Hargrove.
“I don’t know, somewhere like your house?” Steve asked eventually, sighing heavily.
Billy mimicked his sigh as his stomach growled loudly again, rumbling insistently like a slow clap of thunder. It sounded uncomfortable. “Sure, Harrington, ‘cause my dad would just loveit if I rolled up with youlooking like this,” he bit out, leaning back in his seat and gesturing to the pink thing tied around his waist. The slit of the gown exposed much more of his leg than Steve would’ve liked, running up the length of his thigh to frame it between the hem that laid squashed between the car seat and his leg. “Fuck it, maybe you should; he might actually pay you for getting my hair cut.”
“It’ll grow back,” Steve said quickly, hearing the obvious melancholic tones of self-pity in his voice. Billy frowned and snorted, rubbing his jaw tenderly. “It will,” he insisted, taking his eyes off the road for a moment to send a look Billy’s way. “I mean, look: your eyebrows already have.”
Once again, Steve thought he was being encouraging, but Billy didn’t even check to see if Steve was being truthful. He opened his eyes and stared out at the passing scenery somberly, taking his hand away from his jaw and letting it fall flat in his lap.
“I want a shower,” he said eventually, wrinkling his nose as though he could smell himself. “Fuck, and some mouthwash.”
Having said this, Billy smacked his lips distastefully, drawing Steve’s attention to his mouth as he tried to cleanse his pallet of the acidic remnants of his sickness.
“You can use mine,” Steve offered, pulling his gaze away to re-focus on the road. “My shower. I have one.”
“Gee, do you really?” Billy drawled quietly, his innate nature to be sardonic unhindered by his nausea or whatever pains he was experiencing. “Guess you know where you can drop me off, then, Harrington.”
Steve clicked his tongue at the snide remark and rolled his eyes. “Smartass,” he muttered, to which Billy cracked a small grin.
“Smartest one I know.”
They didn’t talk anymore after that, despite the many questions Steve wanted to ask now that Billy was conscious and capable of speaking. Could he remember anything that had happened after he’d transformed and escaped? Where had he gone after he’d dragged the other one away? How far had they gone, and how had he known where to go when he’d turned back?
His questions sat on his tongue like an aftertaste that was too rich to swallow down, but he was too tired to ask them, and doubted if he currently had the mental fortitude to comprehend the answers if Billy chose to give him any. More so than trying to figure out what had happened over the course of the night, they needed to discuss what to do going forward now that they’d survived it. Back in the stifling comforts of Billy’s living room, Billy himself had said he’d remain unconvinced of anything until something concrete happened, and it had- so what did they do with that information? What did Billywant to do now that he knew, for certain, what he was? Who did they get involved to help them, and what sort of help could they expect, exactly? What could anyone do for them that they couldn’t do for themselves? Steve sighed heavily; he was far too young to be feeling this old.
They passed by Billy’s Camaro on the way to his house, parked on the side of the road two streets away even though Steve had toldhim it was fine to park in the driveway because his parents wouldn’t be home. But Billy had insisted, and had off-handedly thrown the conversation away from his weird parking habits to make fun of Steve’s shirt that he was now wearing.
“Is that cop following us?”
Stirred from his thoughts, Steve glanced into his rearview mirror to see what Billy was talking about. Lo and behold, trailing a few hundred feet behind them, Steve recognized the bulky shape of Hopper’s police truck trundling after them.
“Shit,” Steve muttered, running a hand through his hair; he hadn’t expected Hopper to come so soon. He was tired, goddammit; why couldn’t the universe just give him five minutes to catch his breath before it set up the next hurdle? “Uh, yeah, kind of.”
“’Kind of’,” Billy repeated, turning his attention away from the side view mirror to glance at Steve mistrustfully. “What does ‘kind of’ mean?”
Steve took a deep breath as he let the BMW coast up his driveway, putting it in park and letting his head rest against the steering wheel to give himself a chance to just breathe for a minute. “It means he caught us- me, whatever- in the woods last night, and now he knows; he knows about everythingand I think he wants to help,” Steve explained, turning his head to the side to gauge Billy’s reaction. For the most part he just sat there looking surprised, but Steve had expected him to look angry. “I think we needhis help.”
Billy frowned deeply and knit his eyebrows together. He looked like he had something he wanted to say, but his stomach let out another startlingly loud growl before he was able to say anything. He shut his eyes and groaned, slouching down into his seat as he gripped his stomach tightly.
“Whatis that, man?” Steve asked, addressing the concerning noises his gut was making as Hopper pulled up behind them. “Like, tell me honestly, are you hurt or about to shit yourself?”
“Shut the hell up Harrington, I’m fucking hungry,” Billy moaned, and under all the stresses that Steve had accumulated, he hadn’t expected that feeding Billy would be added to his pile of responsibilities. Steve’s brows rose up as he stared and began to laugh, unable to help himself as he heard the door to Hopper’s truck open and close.
He was laughing still in his seat when Hopper walked up to them, leaning down to look in at them through the window as Steve laughed loudly and uncontrollably, tears beginning to leak out of the corners of his eyes.
Steve wants more from a relationship than sex, but Billy doesn’t agree and tells him if he still wants to fuck around with him he has to respect that he doesn’t want anything more. No kisses, no cuddles— nothing.
And Steve does.
He respects the other’s wishes, but it still pains him every time after sex when he’d usually like to cuddle or even talk to the other that Billy just leaves with his heavy boots hitting the floor, making Steve feel like only a hole to be fucked once more.
But only if he knew that Billy did want more.
Did want to cuddle with Steve and kiss him before they’d both fall asleep and wake up together in the mornings to the birds singing outside.
Something nasty in your garden’s waiting Patiently, till it can have your heart Try to go but it won’t let you Don’t you know it’s out to get you running Keep on running They’re running after you babe -Land of make belive by Bucks Fizz
Seriously, only I would be inspired by the cheesiest song of the 80′s ever. A Stranger Things AU where Billy survives the Mind Flayer but is experimented on, and a part of the Upside Down stays with him and he comes back wrong. But he always finds Steve.
Would anyone read a Steve Harrington/Female!Billy Hargrove fic? Like, just a simple slow burn, enemies to friends to lovers, begrudgingly getting along, and co-parenting five little shits sort of thing.
Context : ( I’m recently gardening and my apple seeds were partially burned because of the sun which made me confused ^^“ )
So i had this Harringrove ficlet idea ;
Imagine Billy growing plants and being mad/confused when they are dying for unknown reason,
” Damn, plants are complex… :/ “
* Steve’s coming from behind to hug him, whispering *
” Well, you were pretty complex too you know ? But I’ve eventually found a way to make you bloom “
* Billy turns around, both having a soft expression on their faces. Steve’s putting his hands on Billy’s pink cheeks. They both end up giggling about the romantic atmosphere and eventually kiss each others softly *
