After everything goes to hell in Kamchatka, Hopper, armed with a flamethrower, tries to survive long enough to escape. As he makes his way through the monster-infested prison, he discovers an isolated wing he’s never seen before. The walls are streaked with blood; the lights are out. Somewhere in the hellish maze, a lone prisoner’s pounding on a door, roaring, “You Commie bastards! Let me the fuck out of here!”
Confused, Hopper stealths through the maze, following the endless chorus of bang bang bang! He turns a corner and finds a cell at the end of a long hallway - the source of all the noise. The door is reinforced, its small window shuttered from outside. The lone occupant howls in despair.
“Somebody! Please!” Bang bang bang!
Hopper creeps forward, his flamethrower casting a glow over the floor. When he steps on broken glass, the sound echoes sharply through the corridor. He freezes. The prisoner stops pounding on the door.
“Who’s there?” they ask lowly.
Their voice is familiar. Frowning, Hopper shifts to his other foot. The prisoner hears his change in posture and mistakes it for a retreat.
“No, please,” they cry, “don’t leave. Let me out. Please, just let me out. I can help you. I-I can kill them. Rip them in half from top to bottom. Because I’m strong, I’m fuckin’ strong. So let me out and I’ll help you. Please, I’ll help you! Just don’t leave me.”
Rip them in half?
Hopper’s frown deepens. Raising his flamethrower, he hurries to the window and yanks the shutter open. A young man looks out at him with the eyes of a wild animal. His skin is covered in grime, his hair hanging in matted tangles around his shoulders.
Hopper stares at him. His eyebrows fall in a bewildered scowl. “Billy Hargrove?”
The prisoner blinks at the sound of his name. He looks Hopper up and down, recognition dawning on his face.
summary;the story of summer and steve and how they navigate through life dealing with heartbreak and loss, all while fighting off inter-dimensional monsters, and trying to be normal adolescents.
warnings;this story contains explicit language, sexual content, violence, alcohol and triggering topics such as: anxiety, assault, nightmares, blood and death. please read at your own risk.
i began this series back in 2018 and have every intention of continuing on with it throughout the remainder of the show. these stories mean a lot to me and i hope you’ll enjoy them as much as i enjoyed writing them. lots of love, sav
summary;in which sixteen year old summer bradshaw finds herself fighting off a monster from another dimension all whilst mending her broken heart.
warnings;this story may contain explicit language, sexual content, violence, alcohol and triggering topics such as: anxiety, assault, nightmares, blood and death. please read at your own risk.
Summary: You’re finding it harder and harder to resist Steve.
A/N: Part two ya’ll! I’m pretty proud of how this turned out. I know it’s A LOT shorter than part one but I think I like it like this. I appreciate everyone’s feedback and support - I love hearing from you guys! :D Keep telling me what you guys like or don’t like, I love it.
Not my gif, credit to the owner
Monday morning rolled around and you were still all torn up.
Steve had really screwed everything up, and despite the fact he called to apologize, you were still angry. You were angry at him for not controlling his temper, you were angry at Tommy for being such a jackass, but mostly you were angry at yourself for letting your guard down. You knew better than to let Steve in, to fall for him. Yet here you were, having spent the entire weekend thinking about him, and you felt like someone had ripped your whole body in half.
You found Nancy and Jonathan before class, standing by their lockers. “Hey, Y/N,” Jonathan said. You handed him his coat, which you’d forgotten to give back Saturday night.
“You doing okay?” Nancy placed a hand on your shoulder, and you nodded. “I feel so awful about Saturday- all your hard work.”
They didn’t know about Steve and what almost happened in his car before the dance. “Yeah.” You said, pushing down any feelings you may have had about it. “But it’s fine. It’s over. No use crying over spilled milk.”
“You sound like my grandmother,” Jonathan teased, bumping you in an attempt to cheer you up. You smiled at your friends gratefully.
“Thanks for giving me a ride home, by the way,” you said, holding on to the straps of your backpack.
“Are you kidding? We wouldn’t abandon you at Homecoming from Hell. That’s what friends do, Y/N,” Nancy said, and the two of you smiled at each other.
“Plus, I doubt Steve could even drive. Did you see that black eye Tommy gave him?” Jonathan asked. Nancy smacked his shoulder. “What?” He asked in defense.
“It’s fine,” you said, shaking your head. “I don’t care. He was just a homecoming date, right?”
“The two of you seemed pretty close before everything hit the fan,” Nancy pointed out, debunking your thesis.
Your cheeks got red. You opened your mouth in protest, but you noticed Nancy and Jonathan weren’t looking at you anymore. You followed their gaze, turning around to look at the end of the hallway. There Steve was, walking in through the double doors and looking around. Looking for someone.
Looking for you.
His stupid, idiotic, handsome face was all torn up. He had a black eye, and his upper lip was all busted. A cut on the side of his face. He looked like someone had set him on fire, and you couldn’t help but feel bad for him. Your heart started racing again, like it always did when you saw him.
And then he saw you, across the crowded hallway, and you panicked. And just like Sunday morning, you ran. You darted in between Nancy and Jonathan, and pushed past all the people gossiping, feeling your eyes fill up to the brim with tears because you were so confused, so hurt and angry and fluttery and you hated it. You hated Steve for making you feel this way. You just ran and ran until you went outside, in the cold, not even caring that it was freezing and you didn’t have a coat. You finally stopped under the bleachers by the track to catch your breath.
Breathing heavily and feeling all the panic rise and fall in your chest, you sunk down into the gravel, shoving your backpack off your shoulders and burying your face in your hands. Hot tears fell down your cheeks, and you obsessively wiped them away, refusing. Not admitting they were there.
Why were you so emotional? Why did Steve make you feel so strongly? Why did you constantly feel like you were in an alternate dimension around him, and why did it scare you so much?
You didn’t know how long you’d been sitting there, but you snapped back to the present when you heard footsteps crunching in the gravel. You moved your hands from your face and saw Steve, standing with the sunlight right behind him, holding your coat in one hand and a bouquet of flowers in the other.
“Y/N? Are you okay?” He joined you on the ground, sitting next to you and placing your coat on your shoulders.
You wiped your face again. By this time your tears had stopped. You looked at him - god, Tommy had really done a number on him. It made you angry to think of someone hurting Steve’s face like that. Steve’s face was like a precious piece of art. To see it all torn up was… heart wrenching.
Instead of answering his question, you asked him one. “Does it hurt?” Your voice was small and soft and vulnerable. And you hated it but you were too tired to care.
Steve shrugged. “It did at first, but now not so much. Only stings when someone touches it. Killer headache, though. Like, absolutely killer.”
You tangled your hand in your hair, biting your lip for a second. You didn’t say anything.
Steve presented the bouquet of flowers to you. “These are for you.” Petunias and baby’s breath. “I’m really sorry, Y/N. About everything.”
You took the flowers, and looked at them for a few moments, contemplating your options. Your eyes flickered from the flowers to Steve, then back again. You were tired of all this inner conflict, arguing with yourself and giving yourself reasons not to give in. It was okay not to have self-control sometimes, right?
You took in a deep breath, and looked at Steve again. He was staring at you, waiting for you to do something- say anything. “I never asked you to defend me.” You said quietly, running your fingers over the petunia petals.
“I-I know,” Steve said, inching closer so your hips touched his. He was warm and his body was magnetic. “I know you didn’t. But I… I had to. Tommy was being such an asshole, and he pissed me off, and-“
“Why do you care what people say about me?” You cut him off, your voice still quiet. You didn’t sound angry, just confused. “I know we had that… that moment in the car, but you don’t know me. Your Nancy’s ex-boyfriend. You’re a popular senior on the basketball team with a big reputation and-“
“I like you, Y/N,” Steve cut you off, chuckling slightly. “Why does it have to be more complicated than that? I think you’re smart and beautiful and really cool, and maybe I don’t know you very well, but I know enough.”
You stopped, realizing your breathing was heavy again. “But Nancy…?”
“Nancy and I are fine. We’re friends. We had a relationship and it was an important part of my life, but it’s been two months and I don’t miss it. I’ve moved on, and so has she. Can’t you just give in a little? I know you feel something too.”
He was right, and you hated that he was able to read you so well.
You felt this big lump in your throat. You knew that if you tried to talk, you’d just burst into tears again. So instead you moved, shaking the gravel, and buried your head in Steve’s chest. His arm wrapped around your shoulders and you felt warm and safe, and all that panic faded away. “You’re right,” you said, speaking into his chest, your voice muffled like on a bad radio. “I do feel something.” You lifted your head slightly to look at him, and so he could hear you better. “I do, and it scares the shit out of me, Steve.”
“What are you so scared of?” He asked quietly, his other hand brushing your hair out of your eyes.
“I-I don’t know,” you mumbled. “Getting hurt, I guess. Screwing things up with Nancy. Falling for you and you turning out to be exactly like they said you were.”
“I’m not that guy anymore,” Steve said, looking into your eyes. “I’m different now, and for the better. We’ll take things slow, if that calms your nerves.” You nodded, and a small smile rose to his lips. “Yeah? So you want to…? You want to give this a shot?”
You nodded again, and the smile on his face grew twice in size. “I promise we’ll take it slow then, yeah?” he reassured you.
You bit your lip, sitting up so your head was parallel with his. “Maybe not too slow.” You whispered, leaning forward and finished what you started Saturday night. Your lips met his, soft and slow, and your arms wrapped around his torso. The two of you held each other and kissed for a few moments, breathing each other’s air and letting your hearts beat as one. Finally you pulled away, an inevitable and unstoppable grin on your face.
“Wow,” Steve said, breathless. You nodded.
“Yeah,” you agreed.
A/N: If anyone wants to draw that last scene I would LOVE to see it. I have no artistic ability but I want to see your interpretations. What are your favorite lines from this and part one? I love hearing stuff like that and fan art would be amazing! Also, if you want me to tag you in any future parts, inbox me! I will ONLY be tagging people who inbox me on it.
Summary: You’re in charge of homecoming but you don’t have a date.
A/N: OK, honestly I’m so proud of this you guys. It was like ten pages on a google docs. I hope you like it. I know a lot of people want a part 2 to twist of fate, and that will most likely happen pretty soon! But I want to do this as a series as well so we’ll see. Anyway, hope you all like it. I love the feedback, by the way, so tell me what you think!
Gif is not mine, belongs to the owner.
The sound of the phone ringing woke you up. Startled, you ran a hand through your hair and looked around before registering where you were. Home. In bed. Things were normal again, right?
Wrong. It was two a.m and the phone was ringing. Why did your parents agree to get you your own line? You quickly flicked on your bedside lamp and then picked up the receiver. “Hello?” You mumbled barely coherently, slowly sitting up in bed.
“Y/N?” It was Steve. You could tell by the way he pronounced your name. Just slightly different than everyone else did. Like it had more meaning coming from his mouth.
You let out a long yawn. “Yeah, Steve. It’s me. What’s going on? Why are you calling me at-“ you glanced over at the clock on your night stand. “Two thirteen in the morning?”
“I haven’t been able to sleep at all,” he said, and you could hear the tiredness in his voice, all groggy and deeper than usual. “Let me apologize. Let me make it up to you. I fucked up, okay-“
“Fucked up is putting it lightly,” you cut him off, your words sharp like daggers. “I don’t want to talk to you about it. Especially not now.”
Steve sighed on the other line. You could almost picture him running a hand through his hair. You hated that you knew him that well. “Go to sleep, Harrington,” You said, and didn’t wait for a response before hanging up the phone.
You tried to go back to sleep but your mind kept drifting back to a few days ago, when everything starting going to shit.
It had started on Monday.
You had been sitting at lunch with your two best friends, Jonathan and Nancy. You and Nancy had been really good friends since you moved to Hawkins back in November. When she started going out with Jonathan and you got to know him, the two of you started getting along really well - in a platonic way, of course. It was always the three of you, and though you knew Jonathan and Nancy liked have couple alone time, they also enjoyed hanging out with you. It was nice not being the third wheel even though you totally were the third wheel.
“So you’re telling me that you think Cyndi Lauper is better than Joy Division?” Jonathan asked, looking at you in disbelief, and, frankly, disgust.
“No, that’s not at all what I’m saying,” you said, sharing a glance with Nancy. “I’m saying that I think kids at the homecoming dance will like Cyndi Lauper better than Joy Division. I personally love Joy Division. But it’s an acquired taste, Jonathan. You have to admit that.”
You had all sorts of papers sprawled out on the table in front of you. You were in charge of planning the homecoming dance this year, and the set list was one of the most important aspects. You had to make sure to play stuff everyone would want to dance to. Otherwise they would just leave the dance. And while you loved Jonathan’s taste in music, it was not the same stuff everyone else liked.
“I thought you weren’t going to go,” Nancy pointed out. You nodded in agreement.
“Well I wasn’t. But I started to maybe consider it if Y/N was going to play Joy Division,” Jonathan defended himself.
“One song,” you said, scribbling something down on your list. “And you have to stay until the end.”
“Five songs,” Jonathan tried to negotiate.
“I have to play what everyone else wants to hear, Jonathan,” you rolled your eyes. “Two songs. Final offer.”
Jonathan just rolled his eyes and frustratedly stabbed a green bean through his fork. “Whatever,” he mumbled as he shoved the food in his mouth. Nancy hit him on the shoulder.
“Be nice,” she said, and he made a face at her. “And we’re going to the dance. Y/N is putting in a lot of hard work to make it fun. Plus, you look cute all dressed up.”
“God, you guys are adorable,” you said sarcastically. “Like really, my heart can’t take it anymore.”
Jonathan swallowed and shook his head. “Whatever, Y/N. You’re gonna be in an even mushier relationship someday, and you know what? I’m going to make fun of youwhen that happens.”
In response, you mimed shaking a magic eight ball, and turned it over to see the answer. “Hmm, outlook not so good, Byers.”
Nancy snickered.
“Why do I always feel like the two of gang up on me?” He asked even though all three of you knew the answer.
The subject of you not having a boyfriend was not addressed again until later that week, on Wednesday. You and Nancy were on your way to biology II, admiring the posters you spent all last night slaving over to advertise for homecoming.
“They really do look great,” Nancy said, smiling over at you.
You were proud. They did look great. People were paying attention to them. Your hard work was paying off. As you walked into bio, you passed a poster that said Do you have a date yet?
“Do you?” Asked Nancy as you set your books on the desk.
“Do I what?” You asked, not picking up on it.
“Do you have a date yet?” She quoted the sign, sliding down into the desk.
You shook your head. “No,“ you said casually, shrugging your shoulders. “I was just going to go by myself.”
Nancy looked at you like you were an idiot. “What?” You asked, furrowing your brows.
“Unacceptable!” She exclaimed, banging her hand on the desk for emphasis. It was then your turn to look at her like she was an idiot.
“It’s perfectly acceptable,” You retorted, opening your textbook to the chapter you were on. “Girls go to dances alone now, it’s fine.”
“No, I want you to have a date- hey, what about Steve?”
“Steve Harrington?” You said, nearly choking on your own saliva. “As in your ex-boyfriendSteve Harrington?”
Nancy scoffed. “We ended on good terms. We’re still friends.” She waved off the detail like it was nothing.
You didn’t feel the same way.
“I can’t do that. That’s too weird.” You hadn’t actually met Steve before- seeing as you moved to Hawkins just after he and Nancy broke up. You had seen him before, and knew abouthim, but never held a conversation. He was in the grade above you, and sporty and popular. He wasn’t in your circle and you certainly weren’t in his. Plus, he was your best friend’s ex - talk about weird. And he-
“I can see the gears turning in your head, Y/N,” Nancy interrupted your thoughts, and you snapped back into reality. “It’s not like you’re getting married to him. It’s just homecoming.”
“How do you even know he needs a date?” You asked, hoping that point would end the conversation.
“He told me he wasn’t going because he didn’t have one.” Nancy said, and when you looked at her weird, added. “We’re still friends. We talk every once in a while. What? Is that weird?”
“DoesJonathan know about this?” You asked, hoping to switch subjects. Nancy caught you in the act.
“Yes he does, and he’s fine with it. He and Steve are on relatively good terms, too, so stop trying the change the subject. You’re going to the dance. With Steve.”
And before you could protest any longer, the bell rang and class began.
You were hoping that Nancy would just forget that whole discussion never happened, but by the time lunch rolled around that same day, it was still the hot topic.
“So you’re going to the dance with Steve?” Jonathan asked, a teasing smile on his face.
“No, I never agreed to th-“
“Yeah, she is,” Nancy said, cutting you off. She looked at you sternly. “You’re not going to homecoming without a date, Y/N. That’s lame.”
“How do you even know he wants to go with me?” You asked, crunching down on a baby carrot in frustration.
“I guess I don’t,” Nancy said, biting her lip. She looked around the cafeteria. “But there he is now-“ she pointed, then shouted her next words, “Hey, Steve!”
The long-locked king of the basketball court whipped around, raising a brow in Nancy’s direction. He finally spotted Nancy waving him down, and sauntered over to the table, a cheeseburger from the lunch line in one hand. “Hey Nance, Byers.” He greeted each of your friends, then looked at you. “New girl.”
“This is Y/N,” Nancy said, nudging your foot under the table. “She started in like November, right?”
“Yep. November,” you said, nodding in agreement.
“Well, then I wish you a two-month late welcome to Hawkins,” Steve said, smiling at you in a friendly manner. You met his smile, but yours was awkward and forced, not charming and natural like his. He took a bite of his burger.
“Thanks,” You said, smiling. He was nice, but you didn’t want to go to homecoming with him. First of all you barely knew him, and secondly, no matter how many times Nancy insisted it was alright, it was still weird to you.
Nancy jumped in after a few moments of deafening, painful silence. “So anyway, Y/N needs a date to homecoming. You said you needed one too, right Steve?”
You gave Steve pleading eyes, as if you were begging him not to go along with this. You had accepted the fact that Nancy had weaseled her way into the situation and there was nothing you could do to stop it. But maybe there was something Steve could do.
Steve didn’t catch on to your hints. “Yeah, I do need one.” He looked from Nancy to you. “Did you want to go with me? Just as friends, of course.”
“Yeah, as friends,” Nancy added.
Jonathan, Nancy, and Steve all stared at you and you definitely felt the peer pressure. After a sharp inhale, you smiled unwillingly at Nancy. “Fine.” You looked back up at Steve, who was mid-burger right then. “Sure. Yes. I will go with you. As friends.”
So the plan was made. The homecoming game was Friday night, and the dance was Saturday night in the gym. While most girls in Hawkins would be spending Saturday getting their hair done, doing their nails, and last minute touch ups on their dresses, you would be helping decorate the gym and coordinating everyone else who was helping out. The dance started at seven, and you planned on being done decorating at five, which gave you a solid hour to get ready before dinner with Steve, Nancy, and Jonathan at six. Steve was going to pick you up and take you home. Talk about stressful.
While you were kind of irritated with Nancy, you also felt rather grateful towards her. She found you a date for homecoming, and she had been right. Girls who went alone were lame.
You spent all Saturday stressing out about streamers and balloons, and then sped home to get ready for the dance. The boys’ basketball team had won the game the night before, thanks to Steve, the team captain. You had gone to the game with Nancy (Jonathan had stayed home because he was a loser), and you remembered watching Steve running down the court. Once or twice, you could have sworn he looked right at you after making a basket. Why did your heart race when that happened?
Anyway, after decorating Saturday morning and afternoon, you went home and got ready, curling your hair as fast as you possibly could and rushing through your makeup routine. You had this gorgeous dark blue dress with black polka dots on the bottom hem and shoulder pads, you felt so cool with it on. So you wore that and some cute shoes. Seeing as it was January and freezing outside, you also slid on a coat.
Steve pulled up to your house at six on the dot, and rang the doorbell. You ran past your dad, who insisted on answering, and cut in front of him to open the door. “Hi,” You said, slightly out of breath. Steve looked really nice. Sport coat, dress pants. Your heart was racing again and you begged it to stop.
He opened the car door for you and brought you flowers, and was a total gentleman during dinner. It was so strange. From what you knew of Steve, he was a good guy, but Nancy must have been leaving out some kind of detail. Though she claimed she only broke up with him because she loved Jonathan more, you knew there had to be something wrong with him. So you were cautious and you looked for it. So far, nothing.
“So you were working on the decorations pretty much all day, huh?” Steve asked. You were in the car with him now, driving from the steakhouse to the school.
You nodded, fiddling with your wrist corsage. “Yeah, it was a miracle we got done before five. But it looks really good, I think. I’m excited to see it in full effect.”
“You like stuff like that? Planning events and organizing and decorating?” He asked, turning the radio down to a low hum so that the two of you could talk.
“Yeah,” you said, smiling at the thought. “Yeah, I do. I’m not a hundred percent sure yet, but I think I want to be a party planner or an event coordinator when I graduate. Could be fun.” You were both quiet for a beat. “What do you want to do?”
“After I graduate?”
“Yeah, you’re a senior, right? Do you have any ideas?”
Steve was silent. You looked up at him and saw he was shaking his head. “No, I really don’t. To tell you the truth, I’m kind of freaking out about it, too, because I… I have to figure something out, like, now, right?”
You could tell it was a touchy subject. “Well, it wouldn’t hurt,” You offered him a playful smile. “But you’ve still got some time.”
“We graduate in June.”
“Yeah, but you could take a year off. Do some travelling, self-discovery. Figure out who you are and what you want. No one is saying you have to know right away.”
“My dad is,” Steve said, turning into the school parking lot. “He wants me to have a plan, to know exactly what I want to do and where I want to go to college and where I want to live and who I want to marry and where I want my dead body buried. He’s nuts.”
You frowned slightly, and noticed that he was getting worked up over it. He put the car in park, and you placed your hand on his on the center console. Sparks shot through your veins, and you turned your head to look into his eyes. They were this deep, endless brown. Like a forest you could get lost in forever. You couldn’t help yourself. You wanted to get lost forever.
“Y/N…” Steve’s voice was low and unsure, and you could feel it. You felt the same way- unsure. But at the same time…
It felt so right.
“Steve…” Your voice paralleled his, and you felt his breath on your skin. Goosebumps. You leaned in slightly, knowing what was about to happen, and letting it.
His lips touched yours for half a second before there was a loud BANG on the windshield. Instinctively, you pulled away, looking through the glass to see Tommy H, supposedly one of Steve’s friends, laughing at the two of you’s startled expressions. Like, cackling. Ridiculously.
Your face turned bright red, and you all of a sudden felt really embarrassed and uncomfortable. So you took in a sharp breath, and opened the car door despite Steve’s protests. “Jesus Christ, Steve. If you’re gonna put the moves on a girl you should do it somewhere more private!” Tommy was shouting as you got out of the car. You felt red-hot humiliation light up your face, and turned on your heel to go inside.
“Tommy, why are you such an asshole?” You heard Steve say, but you didn’t turn back. You heard the car door shut and footsteps running towards you.
Steve had caught up with you. “Y/N, I’m sorry, okay? He’s just an idiot, and I-I didn’t mean for-”
“I know,” you stopped walking, turning to face him in the freezing cold. You’d left your coat in his car. “I know you didn’t mean to. It’s fine, okay? I’m just embarrassed, and I’m freezing, and I want to go inside, okay?” Your voice was shaky and on the verge of tears. You couldn’t believe Tommy had seen the two of you, and your almost moment. He was going to tell everyone about it, wasn’t he? God.
“Okay, yeah. Let’s go in.”
The gym looked amazing. You were so proud of all your hard work. The theme was Starry Night, so there were silver streamers and balloons all over the place. The art club had worked on a really pretty backdrop for the pictures, and it all just looked so good. Everyone seemed to already be dancing, and you could help but feel happy, despite all that drama in the parking lot, that people were having a good time.
“Wow, Y/N, this looks incredible,” You heard Steve say as you walked in. He placed a hand on the small of your back, and you let him.
“Thank you,” You felt the mood change, and you were grateful for it. Steve was really sweet, and you wanted to enjoy this night with him and your friends. This whole night was your baby- you’d organized and coordinated the whole thing and you really wanted people to enjoy it.
You spent the next hour or so dancing with him and Nancy, dragging Jonathan in as well. It was fun, and for once in your life you started to feel accepted, like you belonged there, on that technicolor dance floor with these people. Your friends. You were actually a part of this little group, and you liked it. For a moment, you even imagined what it would be like to be with Steve. It made you feel all warm and happy.
A slow song came on, and Steve asked you to dance. You nodded, and his hands found your hips. Your two bodies melted into one, swaying in time to the music. You were breathing the same air as him and you had no complaints. You closed your eyes and took it all in. Nothing could ruin this. Nothing at all.
“Looks like good ol’ King Steve found himself a new whore.”
Well, maybe that could.
You opened your eyes to see Tommy H and his girlfriend, Carol, pointing at the two of you and laughing. Your face got bright red and you took a step away from Steve, frowning.
“Hey, shut up, Tommy. Why can’t you just stay out of it?” Steve retorted, his face growing hard and stern.
“We just wanted to see you and the New Nancy,” Carol chimed in, and Tommy laughed. It was clear they were buzzed.
People were starting the stare, and you felt a lump start to grow in your throat.
“Just go away, before I have to do something we’ll both regret.” Steve threatened.
You jumped in, stretching an arm to block him from doing God knows what. “Steve, it’s fine-“
“No, it’s not fine,” Steve interrupted, looking down at you then back at Tommy. “He’s an asshole and he needs to learn his lesson.”
By this point everyone on the dance floor was staring, watching with anticipation.
“What are you gonna do ‘bout it, Harrington? You’re too big of a pussy to defend your new little slut.” Tommy taunted. “Hell, I-“
That was when Steve launched himself at Tommy, tackling him to the ground and throwing a hard punch. The crowd gasped, and all of a sudden kids started cheering “Fight! Fight!”
Tommy and Steve rolled around on the ground, each throwing punches and kicks and shouting at each other, and you stood there, heart racing. What were you supposed to do? You didn’t ask Steve to defend you- you weren’t his girlfriend.
They rolled around and eventually ran into the snack table, knocking the whole thing over. Punch and cake slices and chips flew everywhere, and some kids even cheered. The snack table collided with a cardboard pole holding up a bunch of streamers, and soon all your pretty stars began raining down, until your Starry Night turned into a meteor shower.
Two teachers eventually broke the fight up, and dragged both Steve and Tommy away to be lectured or punished or whatever.
“Oh, my god,” you muttered, watching all your hard work crumble around you. You were filled with absolute rage. Your eyes filled with red-hot tears, stinging as they ran down your face.
Nancy and Jonathan found you in all the chaos, and dragged you out of there before you screamed at someone. You were outside, walking with them towards Jonathan’s car, silently crying.
“Where’s your coat?” Nancy asked, an arm around you comfortingly.
“Steve’s car,” you managed to sniffle out, running a hand over your face. You were shivering, so Jonathan took his off and gave it to you. Thank god you had your friends, because you probably wouldn’t have been able to make it home.
Jonathan and Nancy drove you home and you sat in bed, still in your dress, staring at the wall and replaying all the events of the evening. You and Steve almost kissed. You and Steve dancing and holding hands, and he was so sweet until he ruined everything. You’d never asked him to defend you, never asked him for anything. He was trouble and you knew it the whole time. Why couldn’t you have just listened to your instincts? Because now here you were, sobbing and screaming into a pillow because you couldn’t decide if you were angry or heartbroken
It was six a.m. You had only slept a little. Forgiving Steve was on your mind, but you couldn’t decide if you wanted to forgive him or if you just wanted to go back to the car, and kiss him for real.
You threw on some tennis shoes, sweatpants and a hoodie, and snuck out the back door. You needed to do something- laying in bed crying about it wasn’t helping a damn thing. So you jogged down the street and when that didn’t help, you kept going. Your hair was still curled and your makeup all smudged - you looked like a melted clown - but you didn’t care. You just needed to think.
So you ran, and you kept running. Most people were in church or at an early breakfast or even still asleep, and you couldn’t bring yourself to care. You just kept running.
Finally, you stopped to catch your breath, in front of some random house. You took in the scenery for a moment, and realized you recognized the car in the driveway. Steve’s. And for a moment you thought maybe you were supposed to end up here.
But you shook the stupid thought away and you kept running.
Summary: After years of silence, you and your ex-best friend Steve start talking again.
A/N: Hey guys! This is my first Stranger Things fic, but I just had to write it, yanno? This will probably be a series if the first part gets a good reaction. Gosh Steve is so dreamy. Drop requests in my inbox if you have anyyy. I LOVE FEEDBACK, so gimme some!!!!
Also, gif belongs to owner.
You had been Steve Harrington’s across-the-street neighbor your entire life. You grew up riding bikes with him up and down the street, swimming in his pool on hot summer days, and sneaking out after bedtime to tell scary stories and catch fireflies. You were inseparable for the longest time- your parents and his even joked that you’d grow up and get married one day.
But Steve was a year older than you, so when he moved on to middle school while you were still in fifth grade, you grew apart. It wasn’t heartbreaking or anything- it happens. Kids grow apart. By the time you caught up with him in high school, his reputation as King Steve had been built. He was popular, dated all kinds of girls, captain of the basketball team, and had parties nearly every weekend his parents were out of town.
You weren’t like that. You hated big parties. You thought the concept of getting sloshed and screaming all night was idiotic (though you’d never done it before). You focused on your schoolwork, joined the school newspaper and yearbook staff. You and Steve didn’t run in the same circles hardly at all. Occasionally you’d chat in the hallway, but it was never anything important. You interviewed him once for an article regarding the basketball team. He stopped by with a casserole for your mom from his mom. Nothing crazy.
Last you’d heard, Nancy Wheeler had dumped him, after nearly a year of going out, for Jonathan Byers. But it didn’t make any difference to you. You had no feelings for Steve.
But then your car broke down.
“Radiator’s shot,” Said your father after hanging up the phone from his call with the mechanic. You stood in your living room, arms crossed in frustration. You had barely made it home from school today before your car sputtered out and died in the driveway. “Paul says he can’t get the parts for another two weeks.”
You frowned and let out a sigh. Your mom, who stood next to you, placed a hand on your shoulder. “It’s going to be fine, sweetie,” She said, then looked at your father. “So how is she going to get to school then, Rob?”
“I can’t take her,” Dad replied - you hated it when your parents talked to each other like you weren’t in the room - “I have to be at work at 7:00.”
The three of you stood there in silence for a moment, all thinking, until your mom spoke up. “Oh, I know! I’ll ask Joanne if Steve can take you!” She grabbed the phone and dialed before you could even say anything.
“Wait, Mom,” You said while she waited for Mrs. Harrington to answer. “Don’t- that’s embarrassing. Steve doesn’t want to drive me to school. He’s-”
Your mom put a hand up to silence you.
“Shh. It’s not like it’s a huge inconvenience, Y/N,” she said, “He lives across the street. You go to the same- Hi, Joanne!” Mom’s voice went up an octave when Mrs. Harrington answered.
Your cheeks turned red just listening to one end of the conversation. You and Steve hadn’t had a real conversation since you were eleven years old. He didn’t want to roll up to school and have you, literally the biggest dork in the world, get out of his car.
These dark thoughts proceeded as your mom continued her conversation, and after a minute or two, hung up the phone. You and Dad looked at her expectantly.
“She says Steve would be delighted to take you to school. See? I told you there was nothing to worry about.” She said.
“Delighted?” you repeated incredulously.
“Well, maybe I flourished a little,” She admitted, grinning like there was nothing wrong at all. “Anyway, he’ll be out front at 7:30 tomorrow. He has basketball practice after school until five, so you need to sit in the gym until he’s done so he can come get you.”
“What-”
“Y/N, he’s doing us a real favor by driving you back and forth. You can wait. It’ll give you some time to do your homework, read, whatever. You’ll be fine.”
Shit.
It was January. School had been back in session from winter break for about a week, but it was still freezing outside. You stood out at the edge of your driveway all bundled up- heavy coat, gloves, scarf, hat, etc, at 7:30, waiting for Steve to come get you. It was so cold you could see your breath when you exhaled.
Where was he?
Finally, a car pulled up to the curb, and the passenger’s window rolled down, revealing good old Steve Harrington with his hands on the wheel. He looked at you, all bundled up, and raised a brow. “You look… warm.”
You got in the car without a reply. You had no intention of making any conversation with Steve- he was just giving you a ride. There was no reason for awkward small talk- this was nothing but temporary, neighborly favor. After buckling up, Steve pulled off. The air was stiff between the two of you, and there was nothing you could really do about it, even if you wanted to. The plan was to power through the World’s Most Awkward Car Ride, then move on with your day. After thirty seconds of agonizing silence, Steve finally turned on the radio. Thank god, you thought, leaning your head against the back of the car seat. The music helped - gave you something else to focus on.
That first car ride was completely silent until you arrived to school. As soon as Steve put it in park, you grabbed your backpack off the floor and rushed to get out. “Hey, wait,” he said abruptly as you started to stand up. You looked at him, eyebrows raised. “Practice gets over at 5. Meet me back here then, yeah?” You nodded, then without another word, got up and went inside.
School was a blur. All you could think about was Steve. You convinced yourself it wasn’t for any other reason than you being traumatized after that awkward car ride. You convinced yourself it couldn’t be for anything else. You tried to focus on your assignments and note-takings and projects, but it was difficult. Your mind kept going back to Steve, and how awkward the ride home was going to be. You hated your car for breaking down.
After the final dismissal bell rang, you reported to the gym to sit and watch Steve’s practice. You made yourself as comfortable as possible on the hard wooden bleachers, opening your calculus book in your lap and starting your homework. A few minutes later, the team strolled out of the locker room, all shorts and shirtless, goofing off the way teenage boys do. The coach called their attention, and started off with drills. You would look up every once in awhile, but for the most part just focused on your schoolwork.
About a half an hour later, you had all your homework done, and nothing to occupy your time. In your rush this morning you’d forgotten to pack a book or your Walkman, so basically you were forced to watch their stupid practice. They were doing some sort of shooting exercise, passing the ball to each other and running up and down the court, taking shots and other basketball terms. It was all very boring, but it was all you had. You kept your eyes on Steve, finding it kind of endearing how into it he was.
“Hey, Harrington, looks like the president of your fan club decided to show up,” You heard one of the other boys shout during a water break. The boy pointed at you, and a handful of others laughed. Your face turned slightly red, and you looked down, trying to ignore them.
You heard Steve’s response. “Shut up. I’m giving her a ride home- don’t be a dick, Jacob.”
The practice ended, and you waited in the hallway outside the locker room. He walked out after a few minutes, his long locks slightly wet from either a shower or sweat- you couldn’t tell.
“Hey, Y/N,” He said, slinging his bag over his shoulders. You gave him a thin-lipped smile, and the two of you started the walk to his car.
“So what happened with us?” He asked after a few minutes of silence.
“What?” You asked, furrowing your brows. He opened the door for you, and you walked out into the brisk cold.
“You know, us,” He repeated, looking over at you. The wrinkles in his forehead were adamant and demanded an answer. “We used to be really close, Y/N.”
“Yeah, when we were, like, eight,” You said, shrugging. “Now we’re not. You went off and did your whole thing,” You made a gesture with your hand. “And I did mine. No one said we had to be best friends forever.” You offered him a small smile in condolences.
Instead of dropping it, Steve stopped in his tracks. “Wait,” he said, shaking his head slightly. “What ‘whole thing’?” He asked, mimicking the gesture you had made. Was he offended?
“I mean…” You trailed off. “I don’t know, your thing, you know? The whole popular, dating girls, going to parties thing. I don’t know.” You kept walking and Steve followed you.
“And that’s why we stopped being friends?” he asked.
“I guess so,” You said, shrugging again like it was no big deal. And it wasn’t, right? And why was Steve so adamant about finding out what happened? Why did he care so much?
The two of you trekked up the little hill to reach the parking lot, and Steve’s car sat there, waiting for the two of you to get in and end this little adventure. Steve didn’t say anything, and neither did you. Nor did either of you make any move to get in the car. You just stood there, by the passenger’s door, looking at him while he was looking at you.
“Well that sucks,” Steve said after a while. You looked at him, puzzled. “It does, it sucks,” He went on. “I wish you would have said something. I thought you were mad at me or something. I missed hanging out with you, Y/N. Now I feel like I don’t even know you anymore.”
“Yeah, well, we’re different people,” You said rather blatantly. Steve looked at you like he was slightly offended. “Well, we are,” you pointed out, getting in the car. He followed your movement. “You’re the jock with the history and I’m…” You trailed off, hands hovering over the seat belt.
“You’re what?” Steve prompted you to finish. He put the keys in the ignition.
“And I’m not like you, Steve.” You said, buckling in and refusing to look at him the rest of the way home.
The next morning Steve was at your house a half-hour early, and rang the doorbell about a thousand times until you answered it in your pajamas - a tank top with no bra and an old pair of your dad’s flannel pants. “What?” You demanded, arms crossed over your chest and bed head blowing from the freezing air creeping its way inside. You had literally just woken up five minutes ago, and ‘morning person’ was not on your list of attributes.
“Good morning, sunshine,” Steve grinned, his hair blowing in the freezing cold air. You step aside so he could walk in, mostly so you could shut the door. “I”m going to take you to breakfast. Go get dressed.”
“What?” You repeated, eyebrows furrowing so deep you almost struck oil. “No. I’m not going to breakfast with you.” You flat-out refused. Mornings were for coffee and contemplation, not going to breakfast with boys you barely knew anymore.
“Come on, pretty lady,” He teased, flipping a fly-away piece of your hair. You took a step back. How was he so cheerful? First of all, it was seven in the morning, and secondly, you had been kind of harsh to him the night before. He should be furious with you, or at least passive-aggressive. “Let me take you to breakfast. I’m not going to stop talking until you agree to it. Did you watch the basketball game on TV last night? Wow, those Los Angeles Lakers are pretty basket-tastic, huh? I just made up that word just now, it’s a combination of-”
“Fine!” You exclaimed, your eyes growing wide. He grinned again. “Give me five minutes. You’re such a child.”
He took a seat on a chair in the foyer, and you rolled your eyes before marching back upstairs to your room. Quickly you changed into a sweatshirt and jeans, put on a thin layer of makeup, and pull your hair into a ponytail.
You walked back downstairs to find Steve no longer sitting- instead, he was looking at the pictures on the wall in the living room. He was looking at one of you and your old dog, Trixy, before she died a few years ago. You were a freshmen in that picture, kneeling next to the dog in the backyard. Steve hadn’t noticed you standing in the doorway yet, so you took a moment to just study him. He was so different now. You thought he was cool, smooth King Steve. You’d thought for years that he was really intimidating, completely opposite from the boy you played house with growing up. But maybe now he was reverting back to that little boy. Maybe now he was coming down from his rebellious teenager phase and learning how to see good in things again. It was weird looking at him like this- he didn’t know you were there so it was like seeing an animal in its natural habitat.
You cleared your throat after a few moments, and he turned around, cheeks slightly flushed. “Ready?” He asked, taking his keys out of his pocket and twirling them around his finger. You nodded.
“I guess,” You muttered, following him out the door.
You thought he was going to take you to Benny’s (which reopened over Christmas - someone had bought it and it wasn’t nearly as good) or that one restaurant downtown. But then Steve started driving towards the Interstate, away from town. “Where are we going?” You asked, eyebrows furrowed.
Steve looked over at you for a moment before moving his eyes back to the road. “I’m taking you to breakfast,” He said, like there was nothing weird about the fact that they were leaving town.
“No, you’re abducting me,” You retorted, looking at him like he was a psychopath. “We can’t leave town to get breakfast, we’re going to miss school.”
“You don’t think I know that, Little Miss Honor Roll?” Steve glanced over at you again. Why did your heart race a little faster when that happened? “We’re not going to school, genius.”
“I didn’t agree to that,” You said, crossing your arms over your chest. “Turn the car around, Steve. I can’t skip.”
“Yes, you can,” He insisted, smiling at you for a second. “For once in your life, give in to a little peer pressure, yeah?”
You rolled your eyes. “What are you going to say when they call our parents?” You asked.
“They won’t,” He said. “I called the school twice - pretending be either of our fathers and said we were sick. They won’t be expecting us today- I like that sweatshirt, by the way. Your dad go to IU?”
“No, I want to though,” You said, glancing down at the Indiana University logo on your sweatshirt. You shook your head, realizing he was getting you off topic. “You pretended to be my dad on the phone?”
“Yeah, wasn’t hard.They should really be careful, someone’s going to abuse how easy it is to fool the receptionist one of these days.”
“You’re an idiot.”
He drove to Terre Haute, which was a bigger city about twenty minutes from Hawkins on the highway. You listened to the radio on the way there and didn’t talk much. It wasn’t nearly as awkward as it was yesterday. And you actually felt… comfortable. It was strange, but seemed kind of natural, actually. You and Steve. Hanging out like you used to. Well, not exactly like you used to, because you weren’t eleven anymore. But similar.
Steve picked this little diner near a truck stop area and you found a little table in the corner, sitting across from him and looking at him studiously. He was so weird. Did he hit his head?
“So, you’re not mad at me?” You asked after the waitress took your drink order. Steve looked up from his watch. “About last night?” You pressed. “I was kind of a bitch.”
“No,” He shook his head, his hair bouncing along. “You weren’t a bitch. You were honest. And it didn’t kind of hurt, but at the same time, it was refreshing. Not many people just give it to me straight, you know? Sometimes I feel like people are walking on eggshells around me so much and I just like it when people are just straightforward and honest.”
“Right,” you shook your head. He really was an idiot. You didn’t know how to talk to him. “So this isn’t just some plot to get me alone so you can murder me?”
“Nah,” Steve shrugged, flashing you a thin-lipped smile. “I just wanted to hang out with you. Yesterday made me realize how much I missed. How much I missed and how much I missed you.”
“Missed me?” You repeated, feeling your heart start to thud. “That’s dumb. You didn’t miss me. We were just kids then.”
“You were my best friend for like ten years, Y/N,” Steve said. “I missed you. Yeah. I did. Deal with it.”
The rest of breakfast was catching up. He told you how he got into basketball and asked you questions about the school newspaper and what you were interested in. He said what he was interested in and talked about his breakup with Nancy and how it never actually happened. She’d never even said anything to him about it, just started dating Jonathan like nothing even happened with Steve. You felt bad for him, but he seemed like he was alright now. He was laughing and making jokes and being a goofball. And you started to agree with him - you missed him. And that scared the shit out of you.
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.
Summary:After moving from New York to Hawkins, your life is changed by a handsome police chief, a mysterious girl and a realm that is beyond the boundaries of normality.
Warnings:some swearing
A/N:Sorry it’s been a while since the last update but thank you all for being patient and understanding! I hope you enjoy! ❤️ (plus- bless Steve )
You left the cabin obscenely early the next morning. You had fallen asleep on the chair in El’s room, it was surprisingly comfortable. You left a note for El and another for Jim, although Jim’s note was very short and to the point; ‘Gone back to my brother’s to get organised for work.’ You were still mad at him.
Reaching the house at around half seven in the morning, you headed in for a quick shower to wash off the sweat you had built up while walking back to town. Half an hour later, you were ready and downstairs pouring out a cup of coffee for yourself. You let out a long sigh and plopped yourself down on one of the stools by the kitchen island. “Hello?” You heard a groggy voice called out.
“Just me,” you took a large gulp of coffee and looked over to Steve “No offence but you look like shit.”
“So do you,” Steve dismally replied and placed down his half eaten bowl of dry cereal and his coffee. You reached across and felt the cup, it was cold.
“You want a fresh cup?”
“No,” he bluntly said and sat down across from you and downed what was left in the cup, grimacing when he tasted the bitter grounds at the bottom.
You raised a brow “What’s the matter?” He took a long time to reply, you could see his eyes getting glossy. He mumbled back 'nothing’under his breath. You intervened, you knew how he was feeling “You don’t have to talk about it ,but all I’m saying is eating dry cereal and drinking cold coffee isn’t going to help mend a broken heart.” Steve slowly looked up to you “Trust me, it isn’t a good coping mechanism. Neither is eating a pint of ice cream for that matter.”
Steve sighed and used his finger and thumb to rub away the tears welling in his eyes “She said it was all bullshit…Nancy, she-” he sniffled and wiped away a tear on his cheek with the back of his hand “Sorry,” he apologised.
“Steve, stop, never- and I mean it- never apologise for crying. C'mere,” you opened your arms and he happily accepted the hug “You don’t have to be so tough all the time, sweetie.” He pulled back and nodded tentatively “What time does your first class start?”
“Uhh ten thirty, why?”
“C'mon we’ll go to the diner before your first class starts, my treat! I don’t have classes until this afternoon.” You smiled and ruffled his hair “Go grab your things and we’ll get going.” He grinned and rushed up the stairs and grabbed his schoolbag and jacket. You grabbed your car keys and tossed them to Steve when he came down the stairs “You can even drive old blue out there today.”
“What?!” He ecstatically jumped on the spot “Yes! Thank you, Aunt Y/N!” You smiled and followed him out to the car. The radio was playing but you quickly turned the station when a certain song came on. Steve let out a small snort of laughter under his breath “What? You don’t like Billy Joel?”
“It’s not that I don’t like him, I love that song it’s just…” your words fizzled out and Steve raised a brow. “It’s a special song for Jim and I. We kinda had a fight last night. That’s why I came back so early.” Steve pulled up to the diner and you sent him a small forced smile “Lets eat, buddy!”
You let him get whatever he wanted, you always were a pushover with him. “Mom called last night before I went out. She said they’d be another week or so- Dad is trying to close a deal.”
“Well he’s stubborn enough to stay and get what he wants, regardless of how long it will take.” You took bite out of your waffles, Steve got pancakes with bacon and maple syrup- which he demolished. “So, you wanna talk or…?”
Steve looked up from his cup of coffee to you “You’re so worried about other people that you don’t take a minute for yourself. I should be asking you if you wanna talk.”
You shrugged a shoulder “Because I’m fine.” Steve didn’t look convinced “Really, I am.”
He hummed, unconvinced and continued finishing his breakfast. You mindlessly played with the last remaining crumbs on your plate with your fork. Steve could tell you were upset. He looked around and stood up, you assumed he was just heading to the bathroom but instead he went to the jukebox and picked a song.
Your ears picked up the recognisable tune of 'Old Time Rock and Roll’ and Steve slid back to the table, catching your attention. You raised a brow when he picked up his fork and began singing into it. You let out a loud laugh and the other diners glanced around and smirked at your nephew as he tried to reenact Tom Cruise’s infamous dance routine from Risky Business. He loved that movie. Steve held out his hand and you took it, standing up to dance along with him. The two of you danced around and sang along to the song. When the song finished the four other patrons, the waitress and the cook all clapped and whistled.
“Thank you,” you smiled and put a hand on his arm before extending your arms to give him a hug.
“Do we have to hug?” He asked like he was a kid asked to do a chore.
You tightly smiled and shook your head “Yeah, we do.” You wrapped your arms around him and he let out a loud groan. “I’m gonna hug you for even longer now,” you chuckled in his ear. You eventually pulled back “Come on, you’ve got class soon and I’ve got to get organised for my classes this afternoon.”
Steve drove to the school “You needing a ride home later?” He asked.
“Uhh…I don’t think so. I’ve got paperwork to do. I’ll either head back home or go to Jim’s” You both got out and he grabbed his things. “I’ll call you from a payphone or something and check in.” You knew how much Steve valued his independence, he wanted to prove to your brother that he could be responsible. Unbeknownst to Steve, you always kept Stuart and Deborah in the loop.
“Okay, I gotta go and get changed for gym class. See you later Aunt Y/N, and thanks for breakfast.”
“Anytime kid. Thanks for cheering me up.” you both went your separate ways. You had just made it to the door when you realised you left one of your bags in the trunk of the car so you jogged over to the gym hall and waited for Steve. “I need the keys, I’ll be two minutes! Tops!” Steve sighed and went back to the locker room again. “Sorry about this, coach.” You thinly smiled at the man with a whistle between his lips, it fell out when he smiled back.
“Ah,” he blew a raspberry and waved his hand while walking away to grab a basketball “These things happen.” Steve came back with the keys and you quickly grabbed your things out of the car before going back to the gym and handing your nephew the car keys back.
You heard a low whistle from behind you and you turned on your heel with a raised brow. “Well, well, well…no one told me the king knew a princess…” your face contorted.
“Excuse me?” You glared at the boy with messy hair.
“They call Steve the 'King’,” he clarified, using his fingers as quotation marks when he said the word king.
You rolled your eyes and glanced at Steve “Jesus, I’ve heard it all now…” You moved your bag up your shoulder and pat Steve’s arm “See you later.”
“Maybe you’ll see me later, Miss Harrington. You could teach me a lesson…” the boy blatantly flirted.
You forced a smile “Sorry to disappoint you but I’m way too old for you and already spoken for.”
His brows furrowed “Oh yeah? Well I’ll kick his ass into next week! Who is this asshole?”
“He’s the chief of police,” that put him in his place and the blood drained from his face while shock set it. You walked out the gym hall with a smirk on your face and headed to your classroom to set up for your class.
•••
“Okay, class dismissed. Remember homework is due tomorrow and I’ll need the permission slips for our class trip to the museum next week by the end of this week. Have a great night everyone!” You stood by the class door and smiled at each student. You noticed Dustin almost wrestling with his backpack. “You alright there?”
“Y-yeah!” He forced a smile and quickly walked out.
You raised a suspicious brow before saying bye to Will, who was trailing behind. You noticed him looking quite sheepish “Hey, Will. How are you?”
He nodded “Good, thanks Miss Harrington.” You thinly smiled and watched him and the rest of the group scurry off to the A.V room.
You returned to your desk and got on with some paperwork. A little while later, you heard a knock on the classroom door. Not bothering to look up from the papers you were marking, you called the person in “Can I help yo-” you cut yourself off when you glanced up and saw Jim standing there with a sorry look on his face “Oh…” you returned your eyes back to the papers you were working on “It’s you.”
You could hear his chunky boots approach your desk, his looming figure towering over you. He placed an apple in front of you and you stopped moving your pen for a moment to look at it before continuing with writing. “With me, the chief of police, eating my weight in doughnuts daily and now giving a teacher an apple you could call me a walking cliché, huh?” He tried to crack a joke but failed miserably.
“I could call you lots of things at this moment in time…” you mumbled and kept your eyes firmly on the work in front of you.
Jim sighed “Please don’t be like this…I’m sorry.”
You finally looked up to him, placing your pen down on the table a little harder than you intended, making him flinch at the sharp noise “It’s not me you should be sorry too!” You pinched the bridge of your nose “I can deal with a lot of things, Jim.” His gaze fell to his feet “But El,” his head snapped back up “She’s a young girl. She’s a teenager with hormones and emotions and so many feelings! She’s been through so much. You’ve got to understand that she doesn’t know any better. You’re trying to teach her and I know that, I know you’re doing your best but be patient with her. You know promises are the only thing she relies on and yesterday you said c-o-m-promise. Promise.Key word there, Jim.” You sighed and shook your head “The two of you have a lot to learn.”
Jim let out a huff “Why are you always right?”
“It’s a gift,” the corner of your lip tugged upwards “But seriously, apologise and I know for a fact El will apologise too.”
You stood up and and walked around to Jim, he wrapped his arms around your waist and you leaned up slightly to wrap your arms around the back of his neck and perch your chin on his shoulder “Thank you,” he pulled back slightly to take a good look at your face. Jim leaned forward and pressed his lips to yours once, then twice and then kissed you a little longer the third time. “Listen…I gotta do some stuff later so I might not be back for dinner,” he rubbed your arms “I guess you can bend my rules a little and let El have Eggos before dinner.”
“You trying to sweeten her up?” You raised a brow and he shrugged, biting on his lower lip and bobbing his head from side to side.
“Well….” he drawled out “Eggos could help my cause.”
You smirked and shook your head “Alright, alright…But I’m not the middleman here!” You stood back and pointed your finger at him.
“Course not,” he pressed a light kiss to your forehead “I’ll see you later.”
“Bye…” your eyes followed him out the door “Thanks for the apple…and the view…” you playfully added and Jim walked with a little spring in his step knowing you were checking him out.
“You’re welcome!”
You finished up your marking and headed home for the day. You wandered through the corridors that were leading you to the exit but stopped when you noticed a body whizz passed you at the end of a corridor. You swore it was Lucas. You turned the opposite direction of the exit and eventually made your way to the hall where you could hear voices.
What you saw shocked you.
She was never supposed to leave.
“El?” You quietly called out her name and you could see her freezing like a deer in headlights. She slowly turned around and had a very guilty expression on her face. You didn’t know what to do, you were so taken aback by seeing her outside. Jim would be furious. “Sweetie, we have to go,” you hastily made your way towards her “It’s dangerous.”
“Mike,” she pointed and you glanced up seeing him with Max who was on the floor. You were wondering why the group were still in the school floating around the halls.
“Come with me,” you took her hand and lead her to your classroom. “We can’t stay for long,” you shut over the door and headed to Mike’s desk. You only hoped that he had left what he had been writing. You noticed him scribbling something down during his free time- you assumed it was a note for El. You fished through his books and papers- and bubble gum wrappers. “Yes!” You took out the folded up note and sat down on Mike’s desk. “He wrote this for you…do you want me to read it to you?” El nodded, coming up and standing next to you, lacing her arm with yours. “'Dear, El. I miss you. It’s not the same and it’s super boring. Dustin and Lucas said that I’ll eventually accept not having you around but I don’t think I ever will. I think you’d like our friend Will, I’ve told him all about you. Miss Harrington said I should write to you. I hope I get to show you this letter someday. I miss you, from Mike.’”
You glanced down to the curly haired girl beside you and noticed her eyes becoming glossy. You sighed and wriggled your arm out from hers so you could give her a hug. “Thank you,” she groggily whispered and blinked away her tears.
“You’re welcome, sweetie.” You put back Mike’s note for El “We need to get back, it’s quite a walk but I’m sure you know that now,” you managed to laugh and El cracked a smile. “Let’s get going.”
You walked back to the cabin with El, mainly going through the woods so no one would see you. That meant the journey took longer than usual and by the time you reached the cabin it was dark. The lights were on and there was a small orange glow coming from the tip of a Camel cigarette.
“Oh shit…” you uttered under your breath.
Jim was back before he both of you and he didn’t look happy.
——————
Tags are open! Just let me know if you’d like to be tagged or not!
summary:Reader volunteers to keep Eddie company while the rest of the gang is away, despite their obvious tension and argumentative nature.
warnings:16+, swearing, suggestive dialogue, mentions of the devil
word count:2.1 k
a/n:This contains minor spoilers from season 4 because of the context of the characters’ situation. Also thank you for all the love on the last fic, I hope I do this one justice as well!
note:This can be read as a pt 2 to this fic, just because the characterization and dynamic between the characters is extremely similar. But, it can also be read as a stand alone (this was purposeful).
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The place is less than ideal, and that’s putting it nicely. The shack, if one can even call it that, is grimy, dirty, dingy, and every other synonym. There are cracks in the wood, possibly from termites eating away at it or the fact that it seems to have been built decades ago. Perhaps hastily as a necessity or a summer job that was haphazardly done.
Nonetheless, nothing about it screams home or safe or bearable.
I’m hesitant to sit down, I’ll probably manage to get splinters through the fabric of my clothes. The little fibres nudged deep into my skin like an annoying reminder.
The rest of the gang has just left, possibly to brainstorm some more, as they claimed to be doing, or pick up more food, or try to buy enough time to come up with some sort of comforting thing to say to Eddie in the least comforting situation possible.
“You’re not going with them?” Eddie asks, his voice almost meek, mixed with a sense of dread.
“Nope,” I say. “Why would I ever want to leave such a cozy place like this?”
I don’t know how to approach this situation, but if I were him, I’d want someone to treat me as normal as possible. I would want someone to be a distraction. I’ve been a good distraction in the past. I’ll make sure I play the part well.
I’m not very good at serious situations.
“Aren’t you afraid to be perusing with the town devil?” Eddie asks, his normal demeanour beginning to seep through, but there’s still a barrier.
It was like a witch hunt, and I don’t know if most of town believed he did it or if he would be the easiest person to blame. I didn’t though. People are not always what they seem to be.
“I don’t believe what they say. If anything, it’d be someone else. Not you.” I don’t say it to comfort him and I don’t say it to lie. I say it so he knows it’s true.
“What makes you say that?” He questions.
“If you know anything the obvious suspect is never the true culprit.”
I lean against the wall beside the window, far enough that if someone were to pass by, they wouldn’t be able to see me. Eddie is across from me, leaning his body on his outstretched arms resting on the table behind him. His chin is jutted slightly upwards, his hair falling behind his shoulders.
He raises an eyebrow at me.
“Come on, you’re like a walking poster child of what they should look like,” I say, exaggeratedly pointing at him. “That’s like a bank robber walking around with a shirt in huge red letters that say ‘I’m definitely not going to rob you.’”
He doesn’t look convinced.
“If anything, it would be someone you can’t suspect. Someone who’s sly and undetected. Under the radar.”
“I can be sly and undetected,” he argues, suddenly standing up straight. In the process, he knocks down a few empty cans onto the floor gracefully, causing a loud clanking sound to erupt.
He looks down at the cans now rolling near his feet and then back at me. “That was a poor example,” he mutters.
For a few moments, it’s silent. But it’s more of comfortable silence, something that says more than what words can. I don’t think it would be particularly helpful to fill the air with wishful thinking because I don’t know what’s going to happen, and neither does he. We’re both just caught in the crossroads of the most entirely fucking incomprehensible situation.
“So,” Eddie starts. He’s closer to me now, leaning against the right-hand side of the window. He tilts his head so he can look me in the eyes. “You willingly volunteered to stay?”
“Yeah,” I breathe out. “Surprised?”
“Why?” he asks. I don’t answer right away. “Is it because you love me and can’t live without me?” He teases.
I smile. “Something like that.”
I angle my body so I’m facing him better. My shoulder is pressed against the wall, it feels rough and cold. “I knew you were an interesting kind of person, but I didn’t think you’d be a fugitive.”
“It’s in my nature to keep people guessing,” he smirks.
“I’m learning that.”
There’s a crunch from outside the window, like twigs snapping. It can’t be from more than a few feet away. Eddie instinctively grabs my wrist, wrapping his fingers around the flesh, like it’s a natural reflex.
If I touched his wrist, would I be able to hear his heartbeat pulsating as fast as mine is right now?
A bunny appears in front of the window, its fur slightly matted with remnants of dirt. The answer to the sudden noise. I’m relieved and Eddie doesn’t let go. Not immediately anyway. And I let his hand rest there.
“Sorry,” he mumbles, before removing his hand. It feels naked now.
“Don’t be,” I say.
I gaze out the window. It feels like a photograph. There isn’t any movement, just a snapshot. No signs of life, besides our interference with the bunny. It’s almost calming, knowing that there’s nothing out there, not in this vicinity anyway. Like an escape from the chaos that lies ahead when I leave. Like an escape from the chaos picking at Eddie’s brain.
I’ve never known him to be silent. In our couple encounters, he’s never been silent. The rest of the world usually quiets for him.
“Do you want to go for a walk?” I ask him, suddenly slicing the silence between us.
Perhaps this can turn into the worst idea ever. Perhaps when they return to find us missing they’ll scold me and call me irresponsible. But I do it anyway, and I hope the universe doesn’t reprimand me for it.
He looks uncertain like he’s weighing his options out. Between the two of us, he has more at stake if we get caught. Eddie looks around the room, at its blandness. Like looking into his future hours, possibly days, trapped in here. How suffocating it will all be.
“Please,” he says.
••••
We’ve been walking for what has seemed like hours, but it’s still light outside, with no indication of how much time has really passed. There’s an incessant buzzing sound through the trees. Leaves crunch under the weight of my feet. My legs are tired, I feel like every inch of my skin has housed way too many insects for my liking, and I probably smell like the outdoors and sweat. I need a shower.
We pass the same tree for the third time. I know it’s the same one because it has the letter S etched into it. It’s all hard edges and jagged lines. Like they couldn’t get a good grip on whatever tool they used to carve the letter.
“Do you know where we’re going?” I whine.
“For the fourth time, yes,” Eddie says, annoyed. “I’ve been through these woods countless times, okay?”
“Doesn’t seem like it,” I mumble.
There’s a tree stump, the surface flat enough that it looks like Mother Nature’s chair. Weeds and other greenery entangle themselves near the bottom and into the ground. Not the most ideal resting place but I’ll take anything for a five-minute break from aimless walking.
I walk over, well more like my body slumps its way over, to the stump and I finally sit.
“Where are you going?” Eddie calls from behind me.
“We’re fucking lost Eddie, just let me sit down for a minute.”
“You’re the one who suggested this, remember?”
“Yeah, and I’m regretting every second of it,” I spit back.
He marches over to me, his eyes boring into mine like they’ve been recently ignited. “I didn’t ask you to come here, alright? You chose to stay with me, you chose to bring me on this walk, for what? You thought it was going to help me? Well, it didn’t. All you’ve done is complain.”
I want to explain to him that I don’t know how to make him feel better, that I don’t know how to navigate the situation. I know all the things I want to say, but I can’t piece them together. I can’t quantify everything I want to tell him in words that he’ll understand. Interpreting the messiness of thoughts inside my head.
My first language is in confrontation.
“Sorry for trying to be a nice fucking person.”
“Oh I’m sorry,” he holds his hands over his heart for exaggeration. “Did I not praise you enough for being on babysitting duty? My apologies.”
“Eat a dick.”
“You first.”
It’s juvenile really, but it’s hard to resist this belligerent nature between us. It’s all so thrilling.
It feels like everything around us has gone silent, only the sounds of us breathing heavily, like we were just in combat, our voices the weapons.
It’stense, the kind where you don’t know if the two main characters are going to kiss or kill each other.
I scowl at him. “That’s the best you can come up with?”
“I didn’t have ample time to prepare my comebacks, when I come up with a list, I’ll call you.” He walks closer now, edging closer to my left side. “Now move over.”
“What? No.”
“Why not?”
“Well for one, there’s no room for the two of us,” I say, motioning to just the slimmest of empty space beside me.
“I can make some arrangements for us to both fit,” he winks.
I narrow my eyes at him. “You’re insufferable.” But part of me looks up at him in anticipation, would I be particularly morally opposed to sitting on his lap? I mean I wouldn’t put up a fight if that’s what you’re thinking.
“Also, you just insulted me for sitting down and now you wanna join? Sit on the ground.”
He nudges me a little, like an annoying shove your obnoxious younger sibling gives you. In an effort to shift into the small space beside me, he manages to trip over his feet. He grabs my arm to keep me steady but, instead, thrusts me onto the ground with him.
He lands on his back with a loud huff, and I’m splayed over his abdomen. I reach for the dirt to steady me, but fragments of the earth just get lodged under my fingernails.
“You’re such a dick,” I mutter, looking him in the eyes.
“I think you’ve mentioned that to me already.”
“No, I said for you to eat a dick not that you were one.”
“Oh, okay, thanks for clarifying.”
His lips part slightly, and I notice how full they are, pink and soft and guarding the depths of his smile. I don’t know how long I’ve been staring, but if I’m thinking about it, it must be too long.
I wonder how it would feel to kiss him right now, without the rush of hormones from the last time. Last time it was like he was breathing air into my lungs, I felt like I needed it. Now, it would be more vulnerable. And I don’t know if I’m ready to cross that threshold, because what would it mean?
I follow his eyes with my own, in its own intricate dance around my face. My eyes, my mouth, the exposed skin of my collarbone from my shirt being stretched at the neckline.
All I’m thinking is DON’T LOOK AT ME LIKE THAT BECAUSE I MIGHT DO SOMETHING ABOUT IT!
“Eddie,” I whisper, like a secret. “I really did – do want to help you. I–”
Crunches follow up the trail, getting closer and closer. We both sit up, anticipating what’s to come. We don’t move, it’s like we’re frozen in the picture.
“Here they are!” Robin says. She’s followed by the others, who don’t look necessarily happy to see us.
“Why did you leave? Especially without your walkie-talkie. We thought something bad happened,” Dustin says, wiping sweat from his brow.
“Just wanted fresh air,” Eddie says. I nod.
They don’t look convinced.
“Were you guys hooking up in the woods?” Steve asks.
“What? No!” I yell, defensively.
“Then why does his hair look like that? And why is there dirt on your pants?” Steve asks.
“I fell.”
“Yeah, sure,” Robin says.
“I swear I fell!” I sound hysterical, and extremely defensive.
“Yeah, she fell, totally an embarrassing moment for her. Lots of sporadic limbs, screaming, the works.” I punch Eddie’s arm.
“Then why are you guys also lying on the floor?” Dustin asks.
“Tired,” I say.
“Yeah super tired,” Eddie agrees.
“I’m never leaving you two alone together again,” Dustin says, before turning around to leave.
“Promise!” I yell back to them.
The devil works hard, but Eddie Munson works harder, in every sense of the word.
♫ : rise, my fellow eddie fuckers. he’s been on my mind for days now, I’m in shambles.
I wrote this at 1am so if you see any typos no you don’t / j thank you to my wonderful fellow aqua queen daria @tiddieluvr for beta reading this ilysm
I just reblogged a bunch of prompts, and I’m itching to write! Please send me some Stranger Things requests! I have hyperfixated very much again and this is all I will be thinking about for the next 2-5 business months (or more)
The only stuff I won’t write is NSFW or abusive relationships, everything else I’m pretty chill with!
Feel free to be as vague or specific as you’d like with prompts, make your own or send me prompts from the list, or whatever else! Messages and asks are open!
warnings: no spoilers i don’t think, panic attack, ptsd from, well, hawkins, anxiety, mention of nightmares, monsters, and deaths. nothing you haven’t seen before if you watch the show. angst, comfort, fluff.
prompt: could you do a request for stranger things where the reader is hanging out with everyone (mike, el, max, dustin, will, and Lucas) and they end up having a panic attack and either they calm the reader or they call Steve to come and help calm the reader down.
— I changed it up a bit because i really wanted to write a soft steve thing for a change!!!!
Everybody else seems to move on so quickly, but not you. You feel like you can’t breathe most days. You can’t watch television anymore without seeing the monster in the white noise. You jump at everything: car horns, conversations, loud music. You sleep with the light on because you worry that even now it’s over, the demogorgons still wait in the darkness — where they’ve always been. It was easier before you knew.
Problem is that you work in a movie theatre. While you usually avoid having to work in the screening rooms, your co-worker has called in sick and you have no choice. Worse, Aliens is screening. The creatures remind you all too well of what you and your friends have faced over the last couple of years. What killed Barb and almost Will. Almost all of you. You’re trying to avoid the screen as you stand by the doors, making sure everything is running smoothly, but even when you close your eyes, you see that grotesque face printed on the inside of your eyelids, made more real by the vile noises of the creature in the movie. Your palms grow clammy and cold, your fingers trembling until you clasp them behind your back. When a character screams, you’re not in the theatre anymore. You’re back there, fighting monsters that shouldn’t exist.
Your stomach plummets and fills with sharp-edged nausea. Your lungs tighten until your breaths become shallow gasps. You turn away from the screen in an attempt to distract yourself, but there’s no escape from it now. It’s happening. As though you never left. You can’t stay. You run through the doors and into the light, dizzy and holding back sobs as you search for the bathroom. You’re too disoriented, the world turning beneath your feet — until you hear your name.
“Y/N?” Dustin is suddenly in front of you, brows knitted in concern beneath his cap and a box of popcorn in his hands. “Woah. Are you okay? You don’t look so good.”
“I…” You stutter on your own words, your knuckles turning white as you fist your uniform and try desperately to breathe again.
“Hang on.” Dustin is pushing you back. “I’m going to go and get Steve.”
“Steve?”
“He’s right over there.” Dustin points to the queue of people waiting for popcorn and snacks. Steve is at the front with a humongous tray of nachos and a tall cup of cola. “See?”
The sight gives you a little bit of relief — until Dustin mindlessly shouts across the foyer: “Steve! Over here, man!” And then everyone is looking at you, and if you’re not eaten by the monsters in your head first, you’re most certainly going to get caught and fired for leaving your post. But you can’t think about that, because you can still hear the faint rumblings of the movie slipping through the red double doors, and you still can’t breathe, and Dustin or even Steve can’t fix what was broken the night you discovered that monsters are real. That Hawkins sits on top of another world that wants to eat you all up.
Steve abandons his ten-dollar bill as well as his snacks on the counter when he sees you. He runs over to you both, concern etched into his features. You can’t even ask what he’s doing here. Usually, he tells you when he’s going to stop by — to have lunch with you or pick you up, but sometimes to watch a movie with Robin. Your relationship, friendships, was the one good thing to come out of all of this, and you’re terrified now that you might lose it when he sees just how broken you are. You’re usually so good at hiding it. At waiting until you’re alone at night to descend into the fear that never goes away. At smiling and nodding when he asks if you’re okay even though you’re having flashbacks and trying not to scream.
“Babe?” Steve asks again, tucking a sweaty strand of hair behind your ear. “What’s going on? What’s wrong?”
You choke on your own words, squeezing your eyes shut until tears pour down your cheeks. Steve looks at Dustin in question. Dustin shrugs. “She was like this when I found her.”
“Alright. Let’s just sit you down.” Gently, Steve guides you to the nearest bench beside a poster for Stand By Me. “Are you not feeling too good? Stomach flu or cramps or something?”
You shake your head. “I’m fine. I’m fine. I’m fine.” You say it to convince yourself as well as him, clamping down on your wobbling lower lip until it hurts.
“No, babe, you’re not. Talk to me.” He crouches in front of you, resting his hands on your thighs and running his fingers across the shape of your face. “Please talk to me. You’re scaring me.”
“I…” A sob breaks from you as you try to put it into words; can’t. “I don’t know.”
“Did something happen? Did someone do something to you? Is it that hotdog jerk again?”
Another shake of your head. The hotdog jerk is the arrogant, gross thirty-year-old who works on the hotdog stand and is trying to make his way around every female member of staff here, but you’ve already told him where to shove it and he usually leaves you alone. In fact, you wish it’s only that now. A human man you can deal with, even a slimy one like him.
This… This you’ll never be able to fix. It just feels so big sometimes. Like any moment, the Upside Down will open up again and swallow you.
“Then what’s got you this upset? C’mon, baby.” He’s whispering now, begging.
“I was… I was in the screening for Aliens and it just… it felt like it was happening again.”
Understanding dawned across his features, his forehead lining with sympathy and his eyes glimmering. “It’s not. You’re right here with me. You’re safe now.”
You squeeze your eyes shut again, trying to block it all out, but it’s still there, running through your head on a loop.
“Hey.” Steve tilts your head down, so soft it’s like he’s worried you might break. “Look at me. You’re in the movie theatre. You smell that?” He takes a deep breath and you frown in confusion. “Breathe in with me.” You do. “You smell it?”
“What?”
“Popcorn. Buttery, magical popcorn. And listen. Shitty music. There are no monsters here, Y/N. Just popcorn and shitty music and me. Focus on that for me.”
You do, breathing in and out again under his instruction. Slowly, the tension in your chest starts to ease. You keep looking at him, replacing the monster’s face with his soft brown eyes and stupid hair and pink lips. And the claws that were scratching you are just his fingers, feather-light and tender over your cheek, your chin, your neck, your hair. He wipes away your tears as you lean your head back against the wall, exhausted.
“Okay?“ he asks.
You give a weak nod, suddenly aware Dustin has watched the whole thing. He winces and hands you his soda. “I still get nightmares too.”
“You think you can give us a minute, Henderson?” Steve asks.
Dustin gives you another solemn smile before walking away, leaving you with Steve.
You can’t look at him. You’re embarrassed and exhausted and you’re not sure what would have happened if he hadn’t been here to pull you back.
“This happened before?”
You tip your head, tears still streaming steadily down your cheeks.
“Why didn’t you tell me?”
A shrug. Your voice cracks as you say, “Everyone else is just trying to move on from it. Forget. I feel… stuck. Weaker.”
“Are you kidding me?” he replies. “I feel like I’m just waiting for the next bad thing to happen. Always. It’s terrifying. It’s not something any of us can forget, and you’re not weak for being afraid. Jesus. I’d be worried if any of us were fine after what we’ve been through.”
“Yeah. I guess.” You attempt a mirthless laugh. It’s not that you think Steve is fine about it. It’s just that he holds it so much better than you. He can make jokes about it. He can carry on with his life. And while there are moments with him where everything feels okay again, where his love makes you genuinely, truly happy, it rarely lasts. There’s always something to push you back to this. To the terror. To the “what ifs” and the dread and the unanswered questions.
“You should have told me. I want you to talk to me about stuff like this. I don’t want you suffering all on your own,” he says.
You swallow another sob, unable to reply. Maybe you hadn’t known just how much you needed someone to be with you in moments like this. Just how much you needed him.
“You don’t have to be okay. Not with me. But you need to tell me what’s going on. You’re not alone in this. We went through it together. We’ll keep going through it together. Okay?” He laced his fingers through yours.
You soften, finally meeting his eye and squeezing his hand. The weight of it, the warmth, is more comfort than you could have asked for. “Okay. Thank you.”
“Of course.” He kisses your knuckles and moves to sit beside you, pressing his lips on your sweat-slick forehead and pulling you close. “That’s what I’m here for.”
You hold him for all it’s worth, steadying yourself in his grip. He’s your shield, keeping you safe just as you’re about to collapse, and you’ll never not be grateful for the way he loves you. “Go find your boss. Tell her you’re not feeling well. I’m gonna take you home.”
You don’t even have it in you to argue. You know there’s no way you could go back into that screening now, even if your wobbly knees would let you.
“Does that mean we’re not watching the movie?” Dustin complains.
“Sorry, kiddo. I gotta take care of my girl.”
Dustin feigns a gag, and a strained laugh bubbles from you. “It’s okay. We can rent something and watch it at home. No monsters, though.”
Steve smiles, peppering your nose with kisses. “No monsters.”
It’s all you need to hear.
“Also, are we going to talk about the fact that you’re willingly at the movies with Dustin on a Saturday?” you tease.
“Hey!” Dustin scoffs at the same time Steve deadpans, “No. Never. We’ll never talk about it.”
To make it easier for you guys new here, I’m making this with all the links to find whatever it is that you’re looking for in my blog!
Quick info about me:my name’s Jamile, I’m 19 (if you wanna know, my birthday’s July, 22nd), I’m Brazilian and I love writing although sometimes I delay delivering.
summary: growing up in the lab with Dr Brenner for a father wasn’t easy, but you had a friend that made things a bit tolerable.
It wasn’t easy being the daughter of Dr Martin Brenner, but you did your best to please him. He was a very systematic man, who wished to control everything and everyone as he saw fit, and you had no problem following orders, except that it was clear your father was setting you up for failure. He never made a secret that he did not like that you were born a female, not a male, and you guessed that was the reason behind all of his impossible requests he kept on making, always wanting more of your brain than it could ever learn.
That was the reason why you grew old in his lab in Hawkins— he expected you to follow him around like a loyal dog, and you were generally making notes on the things you saw in there.
It was no surprise to you when he asked for your presence to see something that had arrived at the lab. “A new subject,” he had called the boy, not as if dad was king and, the boy, his commoner, but as if the boy was a school subject, as it was what your father envisioned the boy to be to you.
“Come on in, daughter,” he said, getting up from where he was sitting. “This is number one.”
You walked in slowly, scared. You were barely ten, but smarter than most teens, but at that moment, you felt like a little dear, scared for his life. You stared at the boy sitting in front of where your father was and you were shocked to find a calm boy. You expected to see someone as scared as you, or even more, but no. Number 001, as your father called him, was serene, and he stared back at you like he could see your very soul.
“Number one, this is my daughter, [y/n] Brenner,” your father made the room so you could sit in the chair he once sat in. “Get familiar with her, as she is to be your future doctor, once she graduates.”
The boy stared back at your father. His head movement was weird as if he was used to having some hair to move when looking up, but there was no hair on top of his head, just his buzzcut.
“I’ll let you two get to know each other, as I’m sure my daughter can enlighten you about who I am,” was the last thing your father said before leaving and locking the door behind.
You gulped, forcing yourself to stop facing the door and look back at the boy.
He looked your age, maybe just a bit older.
“My name is not one,” he said, breaking the silence with a rasping voice.
“I’m sorry?”
He smiled, not showing his teeth. It was as if he found pleasure in seeing you confused.
“My name’s Henry.”
“Was,” you corrected him because that was expected. You knew that even though your father left, he could be watching you two, by the mirror windows or even the cameras. You learned long ago that they were everywhere in the lab. “You’re not Henry anymore.”
“I suppose you’re right.”
Then, the quietness came again. No one uttered a word. You were still nervous, gulping by the second, but the boy just laid back, watching. You didn’t like the silence, it made you overthink.
“You can call me just by [y/n], you know,” you said.
“Not a doctor then?”
“Oh, as much as my Papa likes to brag, I’ll only graduate high school next year. I still have a while before getting hold of my doctored degree.”
“Graduating high school?” that seemed to surprise him.
You couldn’t help but smile. It was a hard life, studying like crazy and not ever getting complimented, but you liked knowing you were a genius. “I am young as I look, but as my father’s daughter, I must be at the top of not just myclass, but everyone else’s.”
“Must be exhausting,” he replied, looking away.
He wasn’t expecting you to agree in a whisper. “It is.”
Both of you exchanged a knowing look. Maybe there was not much knowledge of each other, but there was of yourselves. You knew you weren’t gonna have an easy life, and he knew he was destined for one difficult as well. Doomed, was the word, but back then, you didn’t know. You just didn’t know.
~~
“Sorry I’m late, P,” you said, sitting down on the white floor.
Everything was white at that goddam lab, but you were used to it, or at least, it didn’t bother you as much as it did in the beginning.
Your friend Henry, or as you nicknamed him Peter, was the Number 001, and he was already in the room, sitting on the floor at the very same spot you two had found for each other. It was nice being able to just sit on the ground, and not care about getting dirty, as if there was any chance of that happening in the lab. It was simple and it put you two on the same level, which was true even if your papa wouldn’t agree.
Before getting your doctorate, you and Henry were not much of friends, although you supposed you were each other’s closest person in each life. Peter had access to the other kids, the other numbers, but they were just babies, while you spent your life alone, guided solely by Dr Brenner, your father. It was lonely for both of you, and once you had your degree in your hands, you decided to get closer to the boy who was always staring you around when you came down to the lab.
At first, your father did not approve of your specialization in psychology, but once he started filling the lab with children, he realized your diploma was very much in need, and he gave you a room, so you could listen and take notes on each of the kids’ complaints.
And even though number 001 was no longer a kid, he still had a scheduled hour with you, every Tuesday and Thursday.
When he walked in, for his first appointment ever, you were as nervous as he was shocked to see you. You had only turned eighteen, but he was about to be nineteen, and a lot had changed. Yeah, you saw each other grow up, but not as frequently as the hearts would hope, and a lot had changed.
You were one of them now, at least it was how he saw you that very first Tuesday. You were dressed in white, with your hair fixed in a tight ponytail. There were no more pink and yellow dresses. And he had changed too. He looked exhausted, with dark circles under his light blue eyes, and he was way taller than you.
You remembered him being cold, scared to talk. Of course, he did not lose his posture of serenity, as if he was always the most intelligent one in every room he walked in.
Neither of you remembered how or when it all changed, how you two came to agree with sitting on the floor and sharing your lunch (you always brought something tasty from the outside, something the kids would never have access to). Something had happened — maybe a look you shared or a word he spoke, neither of you could point at the thing, but both were very glad it had happened.
Peter looked forward to his appointments with you, for it was the only hour he had to be himself, to feel free. Yes, your room was as white as the rest of the place, but when it was just the two of you behind the closed door, suddenly, it felt coloured. It felt rainbowy.
“It’s okay. It’s not like I’m not used to being alone,” he said, jokingly, and you pushed him with your left hand while he laughed. “You shouldn’t…” he had to pause because he was laughing too hard “… push me like this, Dr; I’m sure your father won’t like it.”
“Papa?” you echoed. It was funny now that you were twenty to call him papa because that was the very nickname Dr Brenner was forcing the kids, the other numbers, to call him. Well, the word was not funny per se, as it was more weird than comic. “Papa can’t see in here,” you said, smiling, “so I just kill you and it won’t matter.”
Peter smiled again, that beautiful smile that always heated your heart. His hair was growing again, out of his buzzcut, as you noticed it happened way faster than with the other kids. It was so unfair, you thought, for he had the most beautiful golden hair. You were thankful the numbers had a schedule for haircuts, and Peter had to wait for the day with the others, instead of being taken to cut it earlier, because then it allowed you moments like that one, where you could see some locks fighting to grow.
You took advantage of his silence to inform some news.
“I’ve been talking to him, you know. I think… I think he will allow it, P. He’ll let you be a worker here, not just…”
“Don’t say patient,” he quickly interrupted you, knowing very well you hated to use ‘subject’ even though it was way better than ‘prisoner’, which he was.
You stared at him, focusing on every detail of his blue eyes.
You didn’t understand what happened to you two, why were you like this… How did you become friends? And is that the ideal word for the two of you?
Unlike most of the other numbers, Number One had a childhood outside the lab. He got to know some customs of American society, customs that used to reveal themselves without him realizing it. You liked those moments—when he referenced some ‘50s song, or even when he opened the door and let you out first. Most of the other kids couldn’t even form a sentence properly—and they were barely aware of some American habits and customs. It was like talking to little Tarzans, rescued from the forest.
“Sometimes… do you sometimes think about your life before?” you asked, genuinely curious.
“Stop analyzing me,” he said, pretending to be angry, but he knew very well that the question had been asked by [y/n] and not by Dr [y/n] Brenner. He was avoiding answering you, which probably meant that yes, he often thought about it. When he was Peter, though he was still Peter when he walked into your room. He’d never be Number One there — you would never allow it. “I think of my father.”
You gulped, nervously, just like you used to do when you were a kid.
There wasn’t much you knew about Peter’s life before he met your father, but you knew enough. He killed his parents, or at least he tried to kill his father, but only managed to end his mother and sister. You never knew his motives, for he never talked about it. All the info you had was given by your father, but he didn’t usually care for motives, only for results. So Dr Brenner theorized Peter killed his family because of something traumatic he must’ve been through, and that was enough.
For you, however, the question always remained.
“Your father… he was imprisoned, right?” you asked, trying to play it casually. You had done your research, but in any way did you want to scare him.
Peter looked back at you, your elbows almost touching.
“He was,” he said as if he wanted to say more but just couldn’t.
“Sometimes, I wish my father went to prison,” you let out your guilty truth. You knew what your father did to the kids, you weren’t dumb. But you spent so many years trying to please him, that it was hard to imagine yourself doing anything that could jeopardize your papa. Besides, his research was important, the kids maybe did not receive the best of treatments, for the love Dr Brenner offered was only when the children had reached important achievements but wasn’t that the love he offered you, his very blood daughter?
You watched Peter as he frowned, clearly feeling sorry for you. Although that was one of the rare comments you made about your father that could indicate a bad upbringing, it was only presumed that the boy used by the doctor would assume that the man was not a good father.
“One day,” he said, “we’ll get out of here, huh.”
“Yeah?”
“Oh, yeah. We’ll get your fancy diploma and my crazy abilities and make a world of our own.”
“I don’t know about a world,” you smiled, leaning your head on his shoulder. “I’m happy with just a house.”
He tilted his head towards yours and the two of you just stayed there, in silence, enjoying each other’s company. There was so much to be said… but there was never the right time. You hoped Peter understood that dreaming of leaving was just that: a dream. You couldn’t escape your papa, and he could even less, as he was not just his whole research base but also his favourite prisoner.
~~
Peter wanted to protect you.
He always wanted to protect you, ever since he met you, the little girl in pigtails, walking in all nervous and looking at him as if you were surprised and scared at the same time. He was not much older than you, but somehow he knew it was his job to be the protector.
He saw through your mind — even though he didn’t want to, it was inevitable with a power like his. He saw that you were just the perfect daughter even though your father was far from being the perfect papa you saw him as. He saw a mind as complex and smart as his and he was glad to find in you a twin soul.
Although he saw you grow old, he didn’t see you as often as he hoped, and there were weeks when he grew desperate, thinking Dr Brenner had done some evil against you, but then, all of the sudden, you were crossing the corridors following him around like a puppy, taller and prettier than the last time he saw you, and that was enough. It had to be.
However, three weeks before his nineteenth birthday, a guard came to his room, asking for him to accompany him for Number One had an appointment. Needless to say, Peter was very surprised when, opening the door, he found [y/n], dressed in white this time, just like the other doctors, but at the same time so different. She still had the same energy — a scared little genius. She looked pretty, more like a woman this time than the last, even though she was younger than him.
He was surprised, but he managed to pretend he was careless. What were you doing there, in a room all alone in the lab? He thought by now you’d be free of her father, but he was wrong. Or maybe you didn’t want to be free. Maybe you had become one of them officially.
So he kept his cold distance, scared you were gonna run more tests with him.
But it wasn’t what you did.
In your first appointment, you just sat there and told him about your trajectory, similar to your first conversation when he was eleven years old, except this time you had managed to accomplish all of those things your father had only planned.
He listened to it all because, why wouldn’t he? It was you after all. His weak spot. The one that would doom him.
Before he knew it, he was anxious, waiting for your next appointment, and, although again, he remained silent and just listened to you, he noticed that he likedit. He just liked being in your presence.
Something happened then, something shifted, and before he knew it, he was telling you everything, all about the tests and the powers; powers you could not comprehend, but that didn’t stop him from trying to explain and eventually show them to you.
Friends, he supposed. You two were friends. He had never thought of calling someone that before, but perhaps it was fit for the little relationship you two had formed.
And since he defined you as a friend, it was no surprise that one day, Dr Brenner, theDr Brenner, requested his presence in his office.
“Yes, Papa?” he hated to call the man that, he was bloody twenty-one years old, but if he called Brenner any other thing, he would be a dead man by the morning.
“I have been watching you closely, my boy,” he said, trying to put emotion in his words, but failing miserably. “And I think, as you’ve come of age, you should have a more important job here. Perhaps it’s time you help the other children, huh? Help them achieve their potential maximum, as I’ve done with you. You could be my left hand.”
Peter lowered his head, pretending to be honoured. There was no honour in serving Dr Brenner, but Peter knew it was better being a guard than being a subject. At least someone (the children) would stop looking at him like a child that grew too fast.
“That would be an honour, Papa. I mean, sir, as I suppose should be the one I should call you now,” Peter said, testing the waters. “It wouldn’t be right for the kids to see that Number One is in charge but they aren’t, right?”
Dr Brenner took a second to observe.
“Right. It’d be best if they didn’t know you are Number One. let them think he grew and left for the world. You shall be… I forgot; what was your name from before again, my boy?”
“Peter,” he replied, but soon realised he did it too quickly.
The doctor stared at number One, analysing, pensive towards his easiness of recalling his name. He wasn’t supposed to be remembering that time of freedom, before the lab.
Peter felt like that was his first test in the new position and he had just failed.
“Well, Peter, that shall be you calling from now on. Go to your room, yes? I’ll send someone to take your things to a new area of the building and explain your duties in the new position. But be clear that I’ll still expect you to continue training.”
“Sure. Thank you for the opportunity, sir.” And Peter left, not fast enough, but he did not stay to hear more — he just wanted to leave.
~~
“Who’s that?” he asked you, following the little girl that was accompanying your father as they passed down the hall.
“Eleven,” you said, as that was the number the little girl was designated and you had no idea what her real name was. “She’s been raised here, but isolated. Papa thinks she’s powerful.”
Peter crossed his arms, still following the girl with his eyes.
His hair was longer than the last time you saw him, and you liked it that way. Since he became a guard and helper, Dr Brenner cut him off from his appointments with you, so you were only able to see Peter if by chance you two crossed paths in the halls, like it was happening there.
It was unfortunate that you couldn’t see each other weekly, but you knew he would rather be a guard than be a ‘patient’, as you used to call and he used to hate it.
“Powerful how?”
“She had been through this whole way of birth… I don’t know how to explain it. She’s not a patient of mine,” you said.
“Why?” he questioned, genuinely interested.
“I don’t know. Papa says she’s too young. But I’ve talked to her, during some tests… She indeed seems very powerful. Talented.” You tilted your head, remembering the first time you saw Eleven.
“So she’s his new Number One,” Peter uncrossed his arms, only to smile at you, tossing his blond locks away from his eyes.
“You’re still number one,” unfortunately, you thought, a bit sad.
“Am I still the most talented and powerful person in the lab?”
“Oh,” you decided to provoke him. “I think Eleven wins.”
“How dare you!” he said, but he was laughing, and soon, so was you.
When you noticed the time on your watch, you decided to ask for a favour.
“Just… watch over her, huh? I feel like you’ll see her more than me, as it seems father won’t trust her over my surveillance. Eleven, she feels like she’ll need a friend.”
“You know you’re my only friend,” he said, and his expression was serious. He wasn’t lying.
“And you’re mine.”
He sighed. “I’ll watch over her.”
“Thank you,” you mouthed, soundless before leaving to go back to your job.
Peter watched as you left, reflecting on your plea. He saw in your mind that you cared for Eleven, more than you cared for the other kids. And if your request was for him to watch over the little girl, then he would be his bloody guardian if needed.
~~
“Happy birthday, doc.”
You stared up from your cupcake with a candle on top to see Peter, also known as Number One, in your room. There were rare times when he would come in, especially after he stopped being your patient, so you were surprised with his visit, but mostly, you were concerned because he saw your sad moment with the birthday cupcake.
“Thank you, P,” you said, shrugging and blowing the candle. “What are you doing here?”
“I came to say happy birthday. I know those things matter to you.”
You tilted your head while frowning before replying, jokingly, attempting to distract him from your real reasons. “It stopped mattering when I turned 25.”
“[y/n],” he smiled and walked in, closing the door behind, “you just turned 30. You’re not old.”
You were glad he decided not to mention your father — the real reason behind your sad birthdays. He never remembered, or he was always busy; you wish it didn’t matter, mainly as you grew older, but it still bothered you. Fortunately, you had Peter.
“I don’t think I’ve mentioned it before but I like when you call me Peter,” he said, changing subjects.
“I’d never call you 001.”
“I know, but… you could call me Henry. It’s better than the number,” he shrugged. “I like being Peter, the guy that works at the lab and not Henry the cursed son of a troubled man.”
You lowered your head, remaining in silence for you had not what to say after that.
“How’s Eleven?” you asked, because, as it seemed, you cared for the girl and it was a good way to change the subject. It was only natural to ask about her to the person who was spending at least ten hours per day with her.
Peter came closer to your chair, looking down at you with pity. It wasn’t as if Eleven was in danger (not more in danger than all of them) or as if she was a stupid child, but Peter didn’t like that you cared that much. It made him care too, and that was unforgivable.
“She’s okay. The other kids don’t like her, but she’s managing,” he said.
You sighed. “Well, I suppose it could be worse.”
“Sure. It’s not as if your father isn’t experimenting on her or something.”
You rolled your eyes.
“Don’t say it like that.”
“Like it isn’t the truth?” he replied, bothered that you didn’t like his sick joke.
“I know what my father does, ok? Do you think I like it?” you shouted, perhaps a bit too louder than needed. “Do you think I have any power against it?”
“No, but I do! I have power!” he yelled back. “Just say the word, [y/n], and we’ll burn this place to the ground.”
By place, you knew he meant your father. Your Papa.
And even though you had enough reasons to agree, you just couldn’t.
You sighed, giving up on the fight.
“I’m sorry,” Peter sighed too, and he placed one of his hands on your chin, forcing you to look back up, to look at him again. You allowed him, mostly because you were tired, but partly because it calmed you down to look at his beautiful blue eyes. “I didn’t come in here to fight. I wanted to give you a gift. For your birthday.”
You stared at him, confused. You could see his hands — there was no package in them.
But Peter’s gift… it didn’t need to be wrapt.
Growing up with parents that loved each other was kinda gross, at least it was what young Peter thought, seeing them touching lips all the time. He didn’t understand the reason behind it, why would they need to kiss at every chance they got?
Then, Peter came to the lab, he became Number One, his mother was dead, and he forgot all about it. He forgot the name of the feeling humans have, the one that curls up their stomachs and makes their hearts beat faster. He forgot it all until he didn’t. Until you showed up. And maybe his heart was racing, maybe he wanted to touch you.
Sometimes, brushing shoulders wasn’t enough.
So he remembered something, something lost in his past and probably unfamiliar to you too, as both had weird upbringings, but he thought it was just perfect. Peter knew he had to give it a try.
He raised his hand from your chin to your cheek and allowed the other to follow. Your eyes widened as you understood what was going on, but you did nothing to stop him. Hell, you had been waiting for that for decades.
You could leave the lab, you had access to movies. Even though there weren’t many kisses in your life — motherless childhood and all (besides the fact that you were always the nerd in school and life) — you desired to be kissed. You waited for that moment when you were fifteen, then at eighteen, then strong as ever when you were twenty (when Peter burst in celebrating being repositioned as a guard and not a simple number).
So you let him and you responded to the kiss. You touched him too, pulling him by his golden hair that you so much admired, and you let your lips open just enough that he could understand the signal. And Peter understood, as he too wanted more — wanted to feel you, taste you, and not just lips and tong, but hands, oh, wandering hands that travelled from your cheekbones to your curves, to pull you close.
If first you were sitting and he had to lean down to reach you, that was in the past minute, because he managed to change your positions with ease, placing you over his lap as he sat on your chair.
“I think…” you started but he kissed you, silencing you.
“Don’t think,” he replied. “If you think, I’ll think.”
“Peter…”
You could feel his smile on your lips.
“Let’s reshape the world, [y/n],” he whispered, kissing your neck, “join me.”
His hands tightened on your back when he noticed you froze. Damn it, he thought.
“We can free all the numbers and we can remake this place, this world, however, we see fit.”
“Why are you saying this to me?” you asked, confused. You thought it was about kissing, but maybe this primitive form of touch awoke something in him. It was two desires combined and you were scared Peter wasn’t gonna forget it.
There was no escaping your father, as much as you liked to dream about it.
You kissed him again. “Forget it, Peter.”
You pulled him closer by the collar of his white shirt.
“Focus on me.”
“It’s all I’ve been focused on, [y/n]. Couldn’t you see? How desperate I am to leave but I stay? Why do you believe I stay?” he kissed you back but this time you pulled away. “Don’t think, [y/n].”
You tried to find his eyes, his calming blue eyes that you loved to stare at. You would see sense there. You would see the real him there.
And you saw the real him there.
Blue. Ice cold blue eyes.
“Peter, let me go,” you said, expecting him to drop his hands from your leg and back.
But he didn’t.
“You just kissed me, Peter, why can’t you enjoy it?”
He shook his head. “How can I? Do you think your father will give us his blessing?”
You closed your eyes.
“And even if he does, do you think he’ll leave us be? Do you think he’ll let my children be?”
You gulped. “You’re overthinking, Peter,” you said, trying to remain calm.
“With whom do you think I’ve to learn it?” his voice was louder and it echoed in the room.
“Let me go,” you asked, but he ignored you, he just kept going with his monologue about the world and freedom. “Let me go, Number One.”
He instantly dropped you. One minute you were on his lap, the other you were on the floor. You got up, adjusting your skirt, trying to get to the door.
“Why did you call me that, Dr Brenner?”
You gulped.
“Why did you have to call me that, Dr Brenner?!”
You finally reached for the door. You had the handle in your fingers. He wasn’t holding you anymore. It was going to be ok.
“Say you’re sorry, please, [y/n],” Peter said, his blue eyes looking deep into yours.
“I’m sorry I called you by your number, ok? It won’t happen again.”
“That’s not the apology I wanted to hear.”
“Peter…”
“I think I loved you, did you know that?” he asked, getting closer, step by step, slowly.
You just knew you were doomed because the goddamn door didn’t open no matter how hard you pulled or pushed.
“Loved?”
“I think you loved me too.”
“I love you too,” you said, in an attempt to save your life, even though it was the truth.
“Tisk tisk,” he made the noise with his tongue. “Loved, dear. Loved.”
He didn’t even raise his hand before it all went dark.
