Archive of Our Own ^beta

"What if the breath that kindled those grim fires,
Awaked, should blow them into sevenfold rage,
And plunge us in the flames; or from above
Should intermitted vengeance arm again
His red right hand to plague us".

--- Paradise Lost (Book II: Lines 170-174)

***

Just because they had somehow ended up fucking as the weather thawed into spring, it didn’t mean they liked each other.

The first time had been an accident. Not exactly an “oops, I fell on your dick” kind of moment, but close enough. Steve had hit first, fist to flesh, just to watch the way Billy’s head snapped back on impact. Billy had gone for the throat and Steve had gone for his belt. And before Steve could even really clock what was happening, Billy had just been on him, the heat of Billy’s body blazing and all-engulfing.

Steve had been angry, but it had felt good. Railing into Billy with his dick had felt just as satisfying as a fist—more so. It had made Steve dizzy, his vision tinted fuzzy and gray, and suddenly all Steve could focus on was watching the roped pull of Billy’s muscles twist as Billy just took all of Steve in, fervently grinding down on Steve’s dick like he was still looking for a fight.

It was always the same thing after that: They just kept colliding, some sick cycle of two polarized human magnets that were turned the wrong way but who kept trying to shove themselves together anyway. Like if they just pushed hard enough, they would finally connect.

They never did.

That still didn’t stop them from carrying out their special new flavor of aggression as the spring turned into June. Early summer boredom served as the brush fire, sparking into a few heated trysts that would always start with fists, then words, then teeth, then tongue. One minute Billy’s breath would be in his face, lips twisted up and sneering, looking for a fight. Steve would respond as he always did—by pushing—two dismissive fingers flicked against the breastbone of Billy’s open shirt.

That’s really all it took anymore: a quick shove and a gritted, “fuck off” and before Steve knew it Billy would be split hot and slick around him, grunting—panting—pushing back. Vitriol spewing from his fat lush lips every time Steve thrust, Billy bucking his hips back up to meet him all bared teeth and heat even as he moaned.

“Fuck, I hate you, Harrington.”

“God, I could fucking kill you,” Steve would always spit back in response, just before he’d come.

**

On the first night of July, the knock on the sliding glass door came as a rapping, something soft at first that quickly built into something sharp.

The clock in the foyer had always been loud—nothing but the most grandiose for the Harrington’s front hall—and Steve was already up, counting the clicks of it as it ominously ticked its way toward three am. It was way too late in the night for anyone to come knocking—a notion that immediately put Steve on edge, making him hesitate in opening it. But then again, monsters didn’t knock, so despite the hour the intention must be civil enough. Steve was awake anyway, always was at that time of night, pacing the kitchen and chugging down caffeine like that would accomplish anything greater than buzzing through his under-slept nerves until they twitched.

Steve didn’t bother to even try and predict the source of the late-night visit at his door. He knew better than to try and guess at who it was or why they chose to use the sliding door off the back of the house instead of the front like anybody else. At some point between finding Nancy with not only the resident teen creep but an even creepier inter-dimensional flower demon, and then getting kidnapped by a group of actual children in a stolen car, he’d learned not to even try. The world was just too unexpected.

And yet all the bizarre events over the course of the last year still hadn’t prepared Steve to slide back the glass to reveal Billy Hargrove on his back deck. The guy was dirty enough, covered in drying sweat and smudges of something black, that Steve could deduce that Billy had likely come from the forest, somehow following the back path up to the tree line of the yard and stumbling up onto the porch. That didn’t tell Steve why though. Nor did it tell Steve why Billy was shirtless. And shoeless. Standing there breathing heavy and unblinking in nothing but a pair of jeans.

Billy’s eyes were wide, he looked like he’d been tweaking. Steve had always thought Billy was a strictly alcohol kind of guy, but then again, all things considered, he didn’t actually really know Billy or how he partied. Still though. Billy looked rough, pulled tighter around the edges in a way Steve hadn’t seen him before. Not that he really looked at Billy all that often. Even in the moments that Steve had been inside him, it was too much like staring into the sun. Too bright. Too dangerous.

It was safer not to look.

“What do you want?” Steve asked, keeping his tone as derisive and dismissive as he could, since it was Billy, and those were the only tones that Billy seemed to be able to hear. The only ones he would ever acknowledge anyway.

Billy didn’t acknowledge Steve this time either though, so Steve resorted to hand gestures, propping himself against the doorframe as he snapped his fingers in Billy’s face. Just to piss him off a little. Call it a habit.

Only Billy still didn’t react. “What the fuck--,” Steve started and stopped. The only times Billy had ever sought Steve out by his own free will there had always been a reason, and that reason had remained rather singular. And yet, if Billy was here for that, they’d be halfway there by now. Billy wasn’t the kind of guy to just go slack-jawed and stare at the things he wanted. He just took them. So the fact that Billy was just standing there on the threshold where the sliding door bisected the dark back deck from the overly lit kitchen was, well, weird.

“Hargrove, man,” Steve tried, “you ok?”

Billy didn’t say anything, just kept looking at Steve with those wide, unblinking eyes. The blue of them flickered gray under the kitchen lights, the basin of skin beneath his lids smudged bruised and purple. Steve could tell that Billy hadn’t slept in a while. Steve knew that look. He knew that look well. That didn’t explain how pale Billy was though, his usually golden skin stark and white beneath the layer of grime.

“Come inside,” Steve urged, and just like that Billy did, his movement vaguely jarring, disjointed into something mechanical as he stepped over the threshold.

Billy was many things, but he wasn’t the compliant kind and Steve swallowed down his instinct for concern as his confusion morphed into a hint of alarm.

There was blood on his hands.

“Look man, you don’t look so good. Do you maybe need an ambulance or something?” Steve tried as he reached for the phone but stopped when Billy finally spoke, voice a raw mix of wet gravel that sounded distressingly like the discordant high notes of fear. It was unsettling, to hear Hargrove without mirth or menace; to hear him scared.

“I think—” Billy started, and despite the rasp, his voice didn’t slur with its usual late-night levels of intoxication. “I think I’ve killed people.”

Steve could swear his blood freezes at that, extremities prickling with the spreading cold. Billy was an asshole, a bully. But that didn’t mean Steve had ever expected to hear those words spill from Hargrove’s slackened mouth. Not now, not ever.

“Wait, what?” It’s not the best thing to say in this situation. Steve knows. But he doesn’t know what else to say either.

What was more surprising than the confession, maybe, was the tone that followed it. How Billy whispers his words like they were some sort of secret, as if said any louder and whatever was haunting his features would catch up to him, take him over.

“Please, Harrington,” Billy says next, taking a few more stumbling steps forward into the room, his usual coordination absent from the movement. “I swear, it’s not my fault. You gotta stop me. He’ll come back.”

And that was even stranger, clouded over the whole initial issue, actually. Steve doesn’t know who “he” is or what he’ll do. Can’t tell if Billy is the problem or the victim. If the blood stains on his hands were his own or someone else’s. Can’t tell if that even matters.

“Who?”

Billy was looking at him, but he must not really be listening, because Steve didn’t get an answer to that question either, just Billy, still looking at him with wild, haunted eyes that were still a bit too steady as he says, “I need you to kill me.”

Steve jerks backwards at that, surprised tension curling into his spine, making it go taught, rigid, his grasp over the situation still so very confused.

“That’s not funny.”

Billy shook his head emphatically and the curls around his face bounced with the motion, drawing Steve’s eyes to the leaves and glass in his hair, the sweat on his temples, the later caked into the cracks around his eyes like tears.

“I’m not joking,” Billy insisted. “You need to kill me. I-I can’t do it myself.”

Steve swallowed, his throat pricking with bile. Call it intuition, but deep down he knew Billy was actually serious. “What the fuck, man. I’m not killing you.”

“Why not?” The way Billy says it lacks confrontation, like it maybe really was supposed to be a simple question, even though it wasn’t at all, and Steve just stares at him, his blood quickly spiking with adrenaline in the anticipation of a fight.

“Why would I?” Steve retaliated, even though he shouldn’t have to ask questions like that ever.

Billy, apparently, disagreed, crumpling at Steve’s words like Steve had just told him something devastating. Like Steve was breaking some sort of horrible news to him instead of simply refusing an insane request to commit casual homicide.

The second hand on the kitchen clock ticked too loudly around them, just for a few thudding clicks as Billy slumped forward, his entire body sliding down the low cabinets of the center island as he landed knees-first on the tile, palms prostrate on the floor.

The motion is dramatic, wildly so, and it would be funny, or even satisfying, if it wasn’t causing Steve so much concern. The Billy Steve knew didn’t back down or bend. Granted, he didn’t know Billy well, but he knew him well enough for the sight to settle uneasily.

Adding to that was that Billy still sounded like himself, even if the pitch oscillated from something flat to fear.

“I can’t stop him. I tried and he won’t let me. He...makes me do things. Bad things.”

With a sick swoop in his gut, Steve realized that Billy also still sounded serious. “Who-who makes you do bad things?” Steve had heard the rumors from Max about Billy’s father: that he’s strict with Billy, controlling in a way that seemed excessive sometimes. But then again, both of Max’s parents had always been perfectly pleasant to Steve whenever he dropped Max off. Mr. Hargrove was always sure to ask him about the season, how Steve’s point average was these days, and always reminiscing about how he was his class’s prom king too, how it drove the ladies wild. Surely Neil Hargrove wasn’t some kind of secret serial murderer that had Billy out fetching him corpses. Even Max would have noticed something like that. And shit, Max.

“Who is hurt? Is Max alright?”

Billy shook his head, frantic and fast. “No. Not Max. I won’t let—It’s others. I don’t know them. But I can see their faces. I can see everything.” And Steve really wasn’t sure what to do about that information any more than he knew what to do about watching Billy, kneeling as he shivers and rocks his torso in a way much more frantic than soothing until he’s sobbing.

The whole tableau was too weird: to have Billy Hargrove, the Trash King of Hawkins, crying on the checkered tile of his kitchen floor.

Still unsure, Steve started to bend down to offer something that might hopefully be read as comfort but before he could follow through, Billy tipped suddenly forward, fingers curling into the fabric of Steve’s pant leg.

Billy’s voice still sounded too raw, like a wet wound, catching in his throat. “Please, please, please, I can feel him in me. He’s in me. Inside. Everywhere. Please, Harrington, please make it stop.”

And yeah, Steve has no idea what to do. No idea how to process Billy saying “please” let alone begging. Nor does he know how to make it stop—whatever ‘it’ is. And he’s definitely not about to kill someone. Even if that someone is Billy Hargrove—especially if that someone is Billy Hargrove.

But Billy was still mostly ignoring Steve anyway, single focused on whatever mission was in his mind. “You can do it. I know you can. ‘s why I came to you.”

Something clicked for Steve then, his own voice coming back to mock him, ‘I could fucking kill you’ whispered cruelly in the dark. Steve had certainly told Billy that enough times and something sick and cold sinks to the core of Steve’s stomach. Sure, he’s said it, but the very thought that Billy assumed Steve would really be capable of doing something like that—that Billy really thought Steve actually hated him that much, even when Billy was obviously in some kind of altered state, it still hurt.

“Well then you don’t know me as well as you think you do.” It’s all Steve can think to say in the moment other than something terribly esoteric and overly dramatic like, “Why would I kill the one thing that makes me feel alive in this nightmare of a town?”

Billy wasn’t really listening to him anyway. Still crumpled into his knees, Billy pressed further into Steve’s space, his forehead making contact with the flat bone of Steve’s shin to brace himself against as a shudder overtook him, spine twisting in an odd sort of convulsion.

Steve’s fingers itched to do something—to sooth or even fortify Billy’s body for him as it roiled, caught in an uncanny movement between undulation and a seizure. But Billy didn’t like to be touched outside of aggression and Steve’s hand hovered over the curls that Billy had pressed into his knees.

A stretched-out moment of silence passed before it breaks again on the rough timbre of Billy’s voice. “I shouldn’t have come here,” Billy said suddenly, whispers really, his voice oddly and alarmingly strained in a way it hadn’t been before as he springs upwards to reach for the door.

There was no way Steve was letting Billy leave like this, or at least, he intended not to. But Hargrove had always been a stubborn asshole and stronger than Steve in a way that allowed him to easily shake Steve’s hand off as he reaches for him.

Billy yanked at the sliding door until the glass rattles, his new focus hyper-fixated on getting out, and yet still he paused at the threshold, back turned and voice hushed, but still close enough that Steve can hear him when he says, “Goodbye, Steve.”

And that, out of everything else—the full list of bizarre and troubling things that Billy had done in the last ten minutes—was somehow the most troubling of them all. Everything in Steve locked up on impact, his central nervous system going numb.

Billy had never used his first name before.

Steve had never even been entirely convinced that Billy actually even knew what his first name was. But Billy had known it after all—he had said it. So soft, so final, that terror prickles through him, clogging up his throat.

Steve tripped after him, pushing the door further open. The summer air hanging heavy over the grass had started to fog, curling up from the lawn in wisps of white. “Hargrove-Billy. Fuck man, wait.”

But it’s futile. Billy had always been fast. A human kind of lightening, brightening up the sky even when Steve could never know how and when he was going to strike. And just like the burning flash he is, Steve could only catch a glimpse of him before Billy vanished easily into the dark line of the trees.

It was the last time Steve saw him until That Night.

**

That Night—That Night is a night that none of them want to remember, so of course none of them can forget.

The world hadn’t ended, which meant there had been nights that came after. Subsequent days turned into weeks, but it didn’t matter. Steve still sees everything vividly in full technicolor viewings that play out again and again across the screen of his inner eyelids. Before, sleep had already been evasive, but after That Night, Steve couldn’t even close his eyes.

It’s That Night plus four weeks later that Max calls at exactly 7:49 pm. Steve knows the time before the phone rings. He’s been counting every minute since three days before That Night—the night where Billy Hargrove had shown up spooked and altered and begging Steve to kill him. Time moves strangely.

“Steve?” Her voice is tight and fragile. Max has never been fragile, but everyone is now, the world around them pulled taught at the seams, threatening to burst, to spill every vile rotted thing at its core out onto the street.

“Yeah, Max. Everything ok?”

“Billy… He isn’t home from work yet.”

Work. Billy had died—nearly. Dead enough to declare it. His body melting into the linoleum of the Starcourt atrium. Six skin grafts, four blood transfusions, and a resurrection later and Billy had gone back to work.

Steve hadn’t seen Billy since his fourth night at the hospital, the night that Billy had woken up. But he’d seen enough to know that Billy’s body wasn’t in a position to save anybody—to guard any lives. But Billy had still gone back. It wasn’t like anyone was going to tell him ‘no’.

Steve certainly hadn’t told him no—he hadn’t told Billy anything. Steve didn’t know what to say to Billy at all anymore. He hasn’t been able to look at him directly. It’s cowardice is what it is. To avoid Billy so completely. But Steve still just couldn’t look at him. Not after seeing his body go down.

Steve has tried. Every morning since That Night, Steve has woken up swearing that that day will be the day he’ll finally go to the pool where Billy apparently still goes daily to haunt the water from the sidelines like a living ghost. Steve knows he needs to just do it. To see and confirm what the others have told him—that Billy was “different” now but breathing.

But every time Steve tries to get in the car, he remembers the crunch of glass on the ground. He remembers that he had seen the monster plunge itself into Billy’s bones. That he can still hear the sound of his ribcage splintering.

It’s the part of the movie in his mind that Steve relives the most. He can’t help it. He can’t forget that sound.

Still, where Steve has been too much of a coward to go and even look at Billy, Max has been trying to keep a keener eye out for him ever since the possession. It’s the guilt. They all know if they had been paying any attention at all they would have noticed something sooner. She thinks it’s her fault. That if she had paid more attention, she would have noticed that Billy was different. That he was never where he was supposed to be.

Max blames herself and Steve can only think of the night Billy had shown up on his porch. The look in his eyes when he had gotten on his knees and begged Steve to kill him.

Steve doesn’t have the courage to tell her the fault is his. But he does tell her that he’ll go check on Billy. It’s the least he can do. It’s the least any of them can do. He figures it’s finally time.

The drive to the pool takes longer than it should. The bends of the streets always seemed to take longer to travel in the nearing dark. Steve parks right out front, the lot so empty that he doesn’t even bother to pay attention to the lines. There was no one there. Or didn’t seem to be, but the gate was still unlocked, so Steve went in, heading further into the bowels of the structure past the door that reads, “Men.”

The way isn’t particularly easy to navigate. Dusk was settling in a way that made the locker room dim, tinted into a passively violent sort of purple. The kind that sat just past the under-saturation line and grated at the senses, confusing his vision like an optical trick, like the world should be just a bit brighter and clearer than it is under its glow.

The row of showers were tucked past the bend of the tiled hallway and Steve hears the shower before he sees any other signs of Billy. The sound of the rush of water hits like static in the echo of the room. In the presence of the spray, Steve couldn’t help but think of the showers at school. Their yellow walls a distant-seeming memory of a time when Billy had shined like the sun. But according to the others, Billy’s been pale since That Night, like the flayer had drained him of all his blood and the paramedics had forgotten to put it back.

Billy shouldn’t even be here. If El hadn’t been there That Night to have done the base work of pulling him back together before the paramedics came, he wouldn’t be at all. But either way he shouldn’t be right where he is now, certainly not walking and lingering around community spaces. Steve doesn’t know much about medicine, but he knows enough about surgery and bacteria and water to know the REC public pool showers are possibly the worst place for Billy to be.

At least that was one thing about Billy that was still consistent—the maintained tenacity to push headfirst into his own destruction. He had been beat down and gutted, but somehow Billy just kept ticking. Steve suspects that when you get pushed around and hit down enough, at some point standing back up just becomes a kind of automatic response.

Part of Steve knew that the boy who had stood back up this time had to be something different though. Someone that knew the feeling of being too full followed by being hollowed. His body hijacked only to be used, emptied, and left behind.

That was another reason that Steve had been too scared to seek Billy out since. Too much of a coward. Billy before was just so much personality: manic and wild. But now Steve really didn’t know what was left. And the part of him that didn’t already know was afraid to find out.

“Billy?” Steve called out before he could even round the corner to reach the row of shower stalls. Steve had learned through his own experience with the upside down that it was best not to sneak up on people.

No one answers, which was fairly disconcerting. But when Steve peers around the corner everything was where it was supposed to be: the room clean and orderly and ready for close. The only thing odd was that the second shower was still on, and when Steve came closer, he could see that Billy was just sitting inside it—clothed, seated, and facing outward towards the room from under the pelt of the shower spray with the curtain wide open.

Steve approached slowly, “Billy?”

Billy didn’t even blink; he just kept staring at nothing as far as Steve could tell, but the look in his eyes at least wasn’t what it had been that night in Steve’s kitchen. The wild struggle was gone, replaced with something that looked a little more absent than overtaken but still no less haunted.

Steve advanced cautiously, making sure Billy could see his every move—provided Billy ever bothered to look up his way. “Hey man, what are you doing?”

Billy doesn’t look at him. Instead, his eyes stayed fixed to the grout of the tile, knees pulled all the way up to his chest as he sat, swaying a bit under the water. The bend of his legs covered most of his torso, but Steve could still see the edges of his scars, the starburst explosion of twisted skin. They’re pale too.

Those scars are the last thing that Steve remembers. Steve knew exactly where the odd patterns had come from—why the paramedics had been so confused by the fresh breaks and remaining tears under the cross of already scarring tissue. He had been there and he had watched, with Max clutched and crying to his side, as El expended all the power she had left to pull his cells back together, too drained to do it flawlessly. She had succeeded where it mattered but there was still a mark, a large jagged mar of skin that remained as a chilling reminder that the monster had lain Billy’s heart bare.

El’s powers still hadn’t recovered. None of them had.

“Billy?” Steve tried again. Billy’s mouth moved around words Steve couldn’t hear over the sound of the water, so he moved closer, drawing up close enough to try and make them out. Only, as he drew in closer, Steve could tell that Billy wasn’t actually speaking, which Steve should have suspected. Max had been worried about that too, lately. How Billy didn’t talk anymore, even though the doctors at the hospital had assured them all there was no reason, physically, why he couldn’t.

Steve could guess though. It wasn’t all that hard to reason out. Billy had lost his autonomy for over a week to some dark inter-dimensional entity that made him “do things,” although Steve has yet to figure out what. The gang didn’t actually have a lot to go off of on that. They only have Will as precedent and the Mindflayer really hadn’t gotten around to using him much before they…saved him.

Billy’s case didn’t have that either. He had come to Steve for help, Steve painfully gets that now—had finally understood the second he saw Billy march into the mall, anything that he once was dissipated until a final moment, an apex battle of will before Billy plunged back into a very different kind of void. A void that left him caught in some internal storm all by himself that no one else could see apart from the constant damp panic in his eyes. The kind where he now did things like this, apparently. Huddled into cramped tiled corners to rock and stare at nothing.

In the end, Billy had to save himself and Steve still wasn’t sure if he had succeeded. Maybe the ghosts were still in there with him, hell maybe parts of the Mindflayer were too. El kept assuring them that it was gone, but Steve couldn’t know for sure if Billy won’t talk to him. Steve got why he wouldn’t be Billy’s first choice to talk to. Steve had already failed him horribly, irrevocably, once. Steve knows he’s the one that did this. That the mute shell Billy was now was more his fault than anyone else’s. Not the possession, but the aftermath. That Steve had been too caught up in looking at Billy in two-dimensions, as a shallow hot body that didn’t need to be anything but warm inside, that he hadn’t cared about anything else about the guy’s interior.

But Steve had spent enough of his childhood haunting the stairs of his house, peering through the banisters to spy on the parties his parents always threw on the first floor when he was supposed to be asleep on the second that he’s honed his skill for reading lips. And the added fact that Billy was apparently some kind of glitched record for the moment, set inaudibly on repeat, makes it pretty easy to deduce his mantra.

Can’t get clean.

Steve took another step closer, crouching down to Billy’s eye level, and Billy froze, the rocking motion of his torso seizing up under the spray as he threw himself back, pressing the curve of his spine tight back against the shower wall like he thought Steve was going to hurt him.

“Whoa. Hey. It’s ok, man,” Steve assured him. And yet, Steve could tell that it wasn’t. That Billy Hargrove shaking and cowering in the locker room of the rec center pool was a very far cry away from OK. And to know that Billy was scared of him— well that was just even stranger, sadder.

“I’m not going to hurt you,” Steve tried, and Billy nodded, response automatic even with his shoulders still hunched like he’d heard that lie before. It’s not a lie though. Steve has never hurt Billy before—not even during the most acute points of their aggression. The Billy Steve knew liked everything to seem like a fight; never wanted to come unless he’d bled for it, paid some sort of toll.

But Steve’s never crossed the line of violence when Billy didn’t ask for it and he wasn’t about to start now. He didn’t have a reason to. Billy—whatever this version of him was—wasn’t a threat. Whoever this guy was had no fight left in him at all. And from the sickening twist that’s been laying heavy in his chest since the mall, Steve kind of senses that whatever this Billy is was the part that was left. That Billy had offered up every last ounce of fight he had, gave it up to save a handful of strangers and had been left with this stitched together container, an exposed and open raw bruise of a soul.

If any part of The Billy Before remains, he must hate that the most. Billy had always kept himself walled off for his own reasons. And Steve can only imagine how the Billy he knows, or knew, would react to the idea of himself left so unfortified. In hindsight, Steve had maybe come closer to knowing who Billy was before the flayer than anyone else in Hawkins. Or at least had been in the position to do so even if Steve had never bothered to peer through the cracks during any of the times that he had Billy split open. And because of that Steve also knows he’s probably the last person Billy wants to see right now, if he was really seeing anything at all.

Steve should probably respect that, but he’d always been selfish, never been all that great at letting things go. So instead Steve sat right down in the shower beside Billy, letting the water gathering in the dips of the stall soak uncomfortably into the seat of his jeans. The pressure of the water poured down weaker than Steve was used to, the luxury head of his own home shower replaced by the cheap kind of showerhead that had been further caked over in the hard buildups of fluoride and lime.

The water was also cold, not enough to freeze but lukewarm enough to be uncomfortable. Steve had no idea how long Billy had been under the spray. He’s water-logged and soaking but that had likely happened in seconds, anything else was just a drawn-out form of excess.

Steve reached upwards behind him to turn the heat of the water back up. Billy didn’t consciously react to the heat but the micro shivers running through him began to abate and that was at least something.

“Billy,” Steve sighed, before he says as evenly and softly as he can, “Let me help you.” Steve doesn’t expect Billy to say “yes,” to such a hail Mary request. Not now. But Billy also doesn’t say ‘no’; he doesn’t say anything. But Steve can feel the skin of him as Billy’s shoulder slumps a bit into Steve’s side, a small press back of pressure as he leans slightly in against him.

It’s a start. Such a small, seemingly inconsequential thing. But it fills Steve with something like hope. The very sliver of an idea that something in Billy can still press back. Maybe even push.

Steve doesn’t know how to use that—has no idea what he’s doing or what Billy needs. But Billy’s curls feel softer when they are wet, and Billy looks so much more vulnerable when he’s keeping still.

Billy looks drained and tired, his body somehow solid and sturdy even when it seems like it’s on the brink of shattering, and that solidifies something in Steve, hardens within him a new kind of resolve. Steve hasn’t experienced the feeling of motivation in a while, the sense of purpose. But he experiences both now—determination—a determination to help Billy, whatever that means. To get him to speak; To help him be clean. To get him to fight again.

There’s something electric in the air still, Steve can sense it in the steam—a coil, a spark, the echo of the current that had always jolted through him whenever they collided. Steve feels it still. It’s a weak pulse, a small flutter of a thing. But it tingles where their shoulders touch and Steve just knows: Billy’s still in there somewhere. That spirit, that rebellion that is Billy Hargrove, it’s alive. Steve can feel it shimmer in his own pulse, a secondary weak but steady heartbeat. And Steve can’t explain it, but he knows: Billy, the one that he knew, at least in part, is still in there.

Steve repeats that small revelation over and over to himself in a mantra of his own as Billy continues to stare, finding small comfort in the way Billy hasn’t pulled away. That Billy has allowed, subconsciously or otherwise, for a sliver of his weight to lean against Steve’s side. That Billy has leaned on him at all.

Whatever has happened to Billy makes even the atmosphere heavy. Steve can tell that, even though he can’t see it, Billy has so much weight to bear. But Steve can handle taking some of his weight for him. And the longer he sits next to Billy, silent under the shower and steam, soaking in the returning warmth of Billy’s bicep pressed against his, Steve finds that he wants to take it on. That whatever fear had kept him back from finding out what Billy had become had been replaced by a renewed determination to coax out who and what remained.

****

Billy doesn’t know when it all began. Sometimes he thinks the darkness must have always been inside him, lying dormant, ready to rise. He can’t really remember a time of peace. A time without pain and anger. And he knows the fault of that is his, an infernal condition fueled by his twisted desires for all the things he shouldn’t want and that constant need to push. That need to make his presence known through sheer force of will and destruction: It swirls inside him, a bottomless vortex of entropy.

He always knew he’d end up crazy. Just like his mother. He just never expected all the weird shit that would come with it. The mutated aberrations that his fractured mind would conjure once his psyche had finally split. Monsters with smoke for eyes and limbs like tentacles, invading his body, choking his lungs until all his organs felt like they were fit to burst.

The first time it happened he was so hungry after, a raw hunger he hadn’t felt since childhood, in that interim after his mom had gone and before he had learned to feed himself. When Neil would come home at odd hours of the night, drunk and angry with no groceries in sight.

Grocery shopping was women’s work and Neil could eat at the bar and Billy had gone to sleep most nights so very hungry, pain in his guts, would walk to school early to sort through the trash, stay late to do it again.

He eats from the trash again once the hunger sets in in the alley. It should be nostalgic, familiar, like riding a bike—maybe. Billy doesn’t really know; he’d never actually learned how to ride, preferring the waves to the street. But Billy knows what he’s doing when it comes to dumpster diving. He knows what to look for so that his stomach won’t ache after.

Only he doesn’t reach for the familiar primary colored plastic wrap of stale Wonder bread, but for the bottle of Tide, the fancier stuff than his dollar store brand. And for a moment, when the blue melt of it first hits his throat it feels like a luxury, like a vintage wine from the Harrington estate.

It’s only when it comes back up, thick sky-blue bile—when Billy realizes the detergent really should have killed him but didn’t—his stomach still churning with hunger but not for food, that he realizes something is really, really wrong.

He’s late. Susan’s super has gone cold, left for him in Saran wrap on the table. It’s an unmistakably bad omen. But when Neil’s fist hits his jaw, Billy feels nothing. Not the usual flair of pain, not even the impact. Billy still knows that it landed, can hear the smack of taught skin slap across his jawbone.

Billy blinks, slow and sluggish, waiting for something physical to register. But his veins just feel like ice, nothing there to spark. There’s a voice in his head that wasn’t there before, smoky and thick, telling him all the things he already knows. How this is his life, all it’s ever been, a routine monotony of steady violence. How no one cares, not about a guy like Billy; how no one should.

But then the voice says something else too, dark promises Billy’s never thought of himself before. How it doesn’t have to be this way. That the voice could help him fight, help him win. All Billy needed to do was surrender and everything would go away. The hunger, the pain, the exhaustion. All he needs to do is let go.

It’s a tempting offer, too sweet to really be true. To pay off. But when Neil’s face twists into a deeper disappointed frown as he reaches for his belt, Billy figures fuck it, it’s not like he can show up at the pool tomorrow anyway, not after his father works him over.

Billy knows The Voice keeps Neil alive as collateral. Billy’s done things, terrible horrible things that have left people broken and screaming and gargling on smoke. But The Voice leaves his father alone, holding the man’s existence over Billy like a threat: “Do as I say or I’ll give you back to him.”

Billy still technically belongs to Neil. He still goes home every night where Neil still waits, hovering in the shadows. Only this time, Neil is just another monster. Billy can see and hear him, but he can’t feel him. And it’s the best kind of disassociation. Better than full bottles of Jose or Jack, because Billy doesn’t need to feel the aftermath either. He never wakes up sore or hung over, never has to feel the tender swollen flesh of a beating he was too drunk to remember.

Letting The Voice do whatever it wants with a body Billy can’t feel seems like a fair trade—the best trade. Besides, he no longer hurts but he still feels so tired. So very tired of the fight. Of the life he’s been given even in the odd lapse of this strange reprieve. Billy is tired. Billy resists but he also surrenders.

He vaguely recalls how his mother had been like this too. Numb to the world with voices in her head. Billy never thought it would feel like this, but he knows it must be the same. It’s in his blood.

He doesn’t do the things that his mother did. He doesn’t stay in the dark of his room, doesn’t laugh at odd hours and cry at the next. Her illness didn’t make her a monster. Billy is and his body remains in motion. Constant and steady.

In the beginning he sees everything, like looking through a window or a movie screen. Things are happening around him: heat, and shadows, loud crashes, and bright explosions but he doesn’t need to watch too closely. And yet, sometimes, without warning, he breaks through. When the shadow dissipates enough for Billy to see the sun, the blood on his hands.

It makes him feel things then: the panic at the sight of his palms soaked red, the gaping mouth parade of women bound at his feet. Billy’s never touched girls before. He’s never even wanted to. He doesn’t know what it means that he’s started to now. Doesn’t want to know what he does to them. Doesn’t like the way the ropes twist and burn into their thighs as they struggle. But he’s pretty sure he’s the one that brought them there. There are long strands of hair in the trunk of his car. They aren’t all the same color. It makes the world taste like bile. Billy usually blacks out before he can throw up, but he’s awoken one too many times with vomit on his shoes.

There’s something very wrong with him.

He’s dangerous. It’s like a shadow has overcome him. The Voice and The Shadow want things. They want Max. They want Steve. Billy won’t let it take them. He prays every night to whatever might be out there that he doesn’t wake up to find red hair tangled in the carpet, or Steve’s warm scent cold beneath the hood.

The Voice is the only thing that ever answers. The only thing Billy has ever found in the cold expanse of the universe that pays him any mind. Billy will give The Voice anything if it doesn’t take them. The Voice agrees to leave Max and Harrington alone, but it wants Billy to let The Shadow in completely. Billy doesn’t really have a reason not to. It’s better that way anyway—he prefers the times when he doesn’t have to feel.

Full surrender is easier than he ever knew it could be. The numbness spreads, the apathy and the plot unfolds. But Billy doesn’t need to know where it’s going or how it ends; it’s not his story.

But then, suddenly, in a shuddering blink, The Darkness goes away. The walls of the hospital are a blinding kind of white, harsh fluorescents boring down into his retinas that hurt his eyes after not seeing the light for so long. The Voice and The Shadow are gone. Billy doesn’t know when they’ll come back, but he knows that they will. There’s no reason for them not to.

Billy spends the first week after The Darkness fades in his room, crumpled into the closet, pressed against the back wall. It’s something he hasn’t done since he was a child. The closet felt bigger back then, easier to hide in—a dark, safe space until he learned the hard way that Neil could still find him there.

Just like Neil can find him there still.

He knows that there’s no place in his house that’s safe, so Billy paces the streets at night once his father comes home, even though he can no longer stand the dark. The nightly strolls set his heart into full blown panic, but he deserves the pain of it, the fear.

His whole chest feels like an open wound. It is an open wound, held together by string and medical staples. It hurts when he cries.

His wandering feels aimless, but he has no destination to make it right. He finds whatever shelter from the street that he can. If the evening sun is still up, he usually goes to the pool, or just stays there past his shift so that he doesn’t have to go home in the first place. It’s something to do with the water. How Billy can sneak in and stay in the warmth of it, keeping the shower running until all the heat is leached from the spray in a way he could never get away with at home. Water bills and signs of insanity being what they are.

The heat never lasts as long as Billy wants it to. The sauna sits as it always does, daunting and teasing in the corner. Its warmth calls to him. Billy can never get clean and he can never seem to get warm. Not warm enough like his body craves it to be. It feels like he was cold for so long, kept out of the sun. He just wants the heat to scald him clean.

The sauna beckons but he’s too afraid to go in it. Billy can’t fully remember why, but there are flashes: tears and spit and pain. He’s been in there before. There had been shards on the tile. He thinks the pieces might have been him. That he might have broken in there among the sweat and cedar wood.

Billy wants to go into the heat but he panics whenever he sees the door and he can’t. So he showers instead. Turns the temperature all the way up as high as it will set; it scalds his skin, turns the color of his flesh to something red and warm. He doesn’t feel it.

Near the start of September, someone falls at the pool, some adult that wasn’t even running. It’s not Billy’s fault for once. Troy had been on duty and it was all declared an issue with the worn material around the deep end of the water. That would be an entirely inconsequential statement usually. Before, at the beginning of the summer, when everything had still just been sunny and hot, it would have just meant a few days off work while the maintenance team came in to patch-up the concrete. Now, however, it means the pool is closed, otherwise occupied for a full week while workers crawl around its crevices to address all the upkeep in one swoop.

It means Billy can’t be alone there. He can’t be anywhere. He doesn’t have anywhere else to go.

Billy won’t go near his car and he won’t go into the woods. The days seem longer now that he’s present enough to remember them, all blurring together into some extended waking dream. Somehow, when the time had been fragmented, brief bursts of consciousness followed by black, those moments had been clearer—stuck out in his battered mind in stark relief.

He remembers Steve. Both from the time before, the fragments during, and the languid expanse after. Steve had shown up two days ago at the pool, the day before the community center had closed, his body crouching and sliding into the shower beside him, the casual soft glide of his skin against Billy’s arm something new but somehow familiar. Steve had felt warm. Thinking of his own house, the last one on the left, highlighted garishly with the porch light his father always left on to catch him coming home, makes Billy feel chilled straight through to the bone.

He goes to Steve’s.

Billy honestly doesn’t expect that Steve would ever let him inside his home, not like this. Billy is one hundred percent crazy and delusional but even then he still knows that he had only ever served a few select purposes in Steve’s life and none of them were to just stare and sleep. He’d offer up the things he’s good for, only he isn’t anymore. His body is a horror show of hollowed out holes. Inside and out. He’s got nothing left to offer.

But Steve’s place has a large yard with a fairly substantial deck. When Billy sneaks in around the back he can crawl up onto it and press himself against the deep brown siding of the house. There’s something soothing about its presence, the strong wood at his back, knowing its Steve’s and that Steve is inside of it.

The options of where to spend his nights are limited, and Billy is desperate, so he creeps into Steve’s backyard and onto his deck throughout the week to try and get whatever rest he can even though the moon is full enough to show the shadows of the trees.

It doesn’t last forever, or even very long. Time moves strangely for him now, still languid and muddled, but even still his nightly hiding spot against the side of Steve’s house lasts only for just over half of the week before Steve finds him, bat in one hand and a flashlight in the other.

The light stings Billy’s eyes when it shines into them and he hisses, flinching at how much the sound makes him seem feral, but he’s still more concerned with bracing himself for the impact of the bat. Billy used to play baseball when he was younger. Neil had insisted. Billy knows exactly what the crunch of a bat to his torso feels like.

It doesn’t come. There’s no aching thud of wood smashing into his skin, just the thick night air and the distant sound of cicadas.

“Billy?”

Steve always says his name like he’s surprised to see him. He really shouldn’t be. Billy is always around, always closer to Steve’s space than he should be, but Billy’s never been able to stay away. Billy’s also pretty sure that Steve can confirm it’s him without asking, but he nods anyway.

“Shit man. I almost pummeled you. What are you doing back here?”

There is no sane excuse that Billy can offer so he shrugs, his own silence loud in his ears.

The muscles of Steve’s face relax minutely in something like relief. Like he’s relieved that Billy has enough basic cognitive processing skills to respond to his name. That Harrington thinks of him now as something so simple should probably embarrass him, make Billy feel humiliated with how far his short reign in Hawkins has fallen.

It doesn’t. Billy can’t feel anything these days as subtle as humiliation. At least Steve’s pity makes Steve softer, stays the hand clutched to the bat from letting it collide. If Steve knew everything that Billy had seen, he would let his hand fall, crunch that bat right into Billy’s overworked skull. He should let it fall. Max always said that Steve liked to hunt monsters. Instead Steve says, “Come on. Come inside.”

The Harrington house is heated, even in the end of summer. Steve must like it warm too. He seems to understand somehow, Billy’s fear of the cold. The house also has wonderful showers, luxurious dark tiles and panes of glass that fill the room up with steam. Steve leads Billy to one and tells him he can use it and doesn’t say a thing about the length of time Billy takes to come back out. He’s waiting there after though, on the other side of the hall with a heaping pile of quilts, like he knows about the need to keep the heat trapped in.

The weather in Indiana in August still clings to the 90s. Muggy and heavy against the windows. But Steve still has a fire going in the fireplace when he leads Billy back downstairs into the den. Billy lets Steve move him, drag him to the couch and wrap his astounding stash of fleece and down around him. The warmth it brings is undeserved, but Billy takes it anyway, he’s too selfish to reject it. Especially the heat from Steve’s body as he settles in next to him, the burn of his skin rising above the rest.

“You can talk about it,” Steve says, almost hopefully, like he’s unsure if Billy is actually still physically capable of speech, “When you want to.”

Billy shakes his head, staying silent. He can’t talk about it. He doesn’t want to. He knows Steve must think this mute version of him is pathetic, something hollow and crazy. He isn’t wrong. But it’s still better than Steve knowing the full scope of just how much of a monster Billy really is. How deep the insanity truly runs. So he keeps his mouth shut and sleeps.

**

Steve had never expected that Billy would be the one to come to him. Not that Billy had, exactly. He hadn’t climbed through Steve’s bedroom window like he always had before in the spring, brazenly breaking into Steve’s home in order to wake him up to fuck in the dark. He hadn’t even knocked on the back glass door like he had that one time in early summer. No, Billy had simply come to the side of the house and sat, pressed into the sideboards. Steve wouldn’t have ever even known Billy was there if Steve’s life had been normal enough not to require patrol checks around the parameter.

But that wasn’t the world Steve lived in. It wasn’t the world Billy lived in either, which was another reason Billy really shouldn’t have been there, out in the open in the dark.

It’s easy enough to usher Billy inside. Almost too easy. Nothing with Billy had ever been easy, but he goes, pliant and pliable in a way that Billy has never been. He follows Steve blindly, like he’s just replicating all Steve’s steps. Part of Steve wants to scream, if only to see if Billy will echo it. The other part of himself is just too relived to see him, to have Billy alive, and safe, and trailing behind him through the hallways.

The days roll by. Billy sleeps a lot; Steve doesn’t sleep at all. Especially whenever Billy disappears, wandering back off to wherever he goes when he thinks he’s overstayed his welcome. Steve has tried to convince him there’s no such thing. That Billy is welcome there, in his space.

It seems an odd thing to say. After all the times before the height of the summer, when Billy would show up at Steve’s door during his lunch hour, hairspray and cigarettes, chlorine and sweat. The slick shine of his tanning oil stained Steve’s sheets but Billy had never lingered after, nor had Steve ever thought to ask him to. There had been no reason for either of them to stick around. They didn’t talk. They were never friends. They had simply been two enemies that couldn’t keep their hands off each other. A mutual addiction to the violence and the sweat.

Billy’s throat had been the warmest, tightest place Steve’s cock had ever known and Billy had always seemed thirsty, could suck cock like being crunched down on his knees behind an ally was a familiar second home.

And yet now it’s the quiet that has settled in the air between them that seems the strangest. At the time, Billy’s silence would have been a blessing. The Billy before talked a lot of shit, and there were more than a few times that Steve had directly informed him that if he wanted to hear what Billy’s mouth had to say, Steve wouldn’t have stuck his dick in it. That he preferred Billy speechless and choking on whatever means Steve had to keep him quiet.

It’s ironic now that Steve would give anything just to hear Billy speak. Even if it’s just Billy insulting him like he used to. Ragging him on. Maybe if Steve had let Billy talk more, or even had just listened at all to what he had to say, Billy would be talking to him now.

Steve feels guilty. Seeing Billy like this, something nags at Steve’s senses. It’s not right. Billy had a nice voice, when Steve thinks about it. Low, a little throaty, raw and overused. Steve wonders if he’ll ever get to hear it again. If he’s lost his chance to know anything about the pieces of Billy that are internal.

Then again, in some ways, Steve feels like he’s seen more facets of Billy in the last two weeks of silence and sleep than he ever knew before. Billy is haunted but he isn’t hollow, stuffed instead with so many subtle shifts of emotion that Steve for the first time in his life has started paying attention to the details.

Billy sleeps and Steve replays That Night. The fever dream of July fourth had left everything hazy, leaving only fragments to stand out in stark relief.

Steve hadn’t even been with Billy when he went down. He had seen it instead from the floor above. Fireworks and raining glass, the Russians in pursuit. Two men had followed him and Robin up from the basement, their clothing soaked in the scent of stale popcorn and malt. Steve had wished again in that moment for his bat, and yet, he hadn’t even needed it.

There had been a girl in his remedial math class junior year who liked to fuck on mescaline because it made her feel invincible. Like she could tear everything to pieces with just her fingers. Steve thinks of that when the first man reaches his orbit and Steve’s hands wrap around a throat and twist, the column of the guy’s neck crumpling like rubber vines. The lights in the Starcourt atrium spun and swirled and Steve had realized then that he could no longer tell the difference between men and monsters, had wondered for a moment in hindsight if he ever really could.

The Russian had hit the floor right as Billy’s body had splintered.

Suddenly Steve hadn’t cared at all about where the second man had gone, drawn instead to the railing, following the sound of Billy’s piecing scream. Steve had felt all kinds of emotions as Billy’s body hit the tile. An acute cocktail of agony that Steve didn’t know he could feel. Steve still can’t really comprehend why it took until that moment to realize that he cared.

Billy’s face looks softer when he sleeps. His cheekbones sharp and scarred but his lips round and full. It’s almost surreal now to think of those lips on his body, open mouthed and wet. Those lips have been a lot of places on him, most places. But not everywhere. Steve looks at Billy now, soft with sleep, and for the first time, wonders why they have never kissed.

**

Before she had left him, Billy’s mother used to read Billy folktales, each full of darkness and morals and takeaways about the evil that lurks in the world. Folklore throughout the world has all kinds of variations, but there’s one message that is almost universal: be careful what you invite inside your home; it will keep coming back. Billy didn’t believe in the fairy tales, because his mother never had. And yet, left on his own, Billy is that kind of demon apparently, the one that leeches on and stays, compelled to haunt instead of hunt.

Billy knows it’s only a matter of time before Steve excises him from his space. But every time he shows up at Steve’s door, Steve lets him in. Tells him the shower is free as he goes and starts a fire in the den, like a fire in an Indiana August is just something that’s done. Like Billy wandering through the Harrington’s always empty hallways like a ghost, refusing to speak, is all perfectly normal.

It’s not normal. Even Billy knows that. He remembers the times when his mother would go catatonic, not speaking to anyone for days on end. It freaked him out. This has got to be freaking Steve out now. Billy can see it in his eyes, the slight tension in his shoulders. But even though Billy can tell that Steve is desperate for him to just say something—anything—Billy also knows that Steve can’t possibly really want to hear what Billy has to say. It’s unfair to make Steve complicit in his crimes. An accomplice by proxy. So Billy keeps silent.

At least, Billy keeps his silence until the day he can’t anymore. It starts like a leak, small embodied confessions that spring into a flood.

After that first full night in the warmth of Steve Harrington’s house, Billy couldn’t even help it; he shows up at Steve’s repeatedly, opening and unraveling slowly until he’s suddenly rocking back and forth as he wordlessly confesses the things he did, holds the bent, curve of his palms up towards the soft glow of Steve’s overhead light that frames Steve’s hair like a halo. Steve’s an angel, stunning. And so Billy prostrates himself before him. He shakes and cries, pleads really, for absolution that can’t possibly ever come.

**

The next time Billy shows up he has a bruise on his cheek, right under the eye socket. His lip is spilt as are his palms. Steve takes him into the living room by the fire with the medical kit looking alarmed. “What happened?” He asks, but he already looks like he knows Billy won’t tell him. Billy never has, but also, Steve has never asked.

Billy understands why Neil went off like he did. He’d waited longer than Billy had ever anticipated after the hospital but seeing as how Billy won’t speak at home either, that couldn’t last forever. And although that probably worked to his advantage to stay off Neil’s radar for a bit, he understands how that would ruffle a guy like Neil overtime until he’s seething.

Billy’s not better yet, and that makes him weak. Billy’s crazy like his mother and that makes him shameful. An embarrassment. Billy has done terrible horrible things and that makes him sick. Billy has blood on his hands and that makes him dangerous. Only not to Neil. Never to Neil.

Steve cleans the wounds, tells Billy not to go back. The astringent over the cuts in his hands makes fresh blood pool up on his palms. Billy blinks slowly at them in horror. He has blood on his hands. He spends the night on Steve’s couch under a heapfull of blankets but leaves in the morning.

**

When Billy shows up offering up his palms, it reminds Steve of the Rec room shower all over again. Can’t get clean. He pulls him into the shower. Billy still won’t speak but he cries. Wrenching sobs he has to be feeling in his ribs. Steve’s own ribcage aches in empathy. He doesn’t know what to do. He touches Billy’s neck while he’s in the shower. Billy stutters a breath. The bones remind Steve of something, some ghost memory in his palm. It isn’t pleasant but it also isn’t Billy. Steve remembers, or rather he doesn’t, that there is something he should remember. About the feel of a spine in his hands.

They go to sleep wet. Steve dreams of the night at the mall. The slip of something under his fingers. The crunch. He wakes up in a cold sweat. He goes to find Billy sleeping and crawls in with him. Billy sleeps like he’s dead. The image is harrowing. Steve pushes in closer, wraps his limbs with Billy’s until they are all twisted up and all his pulse points can feel Billy’s heart beating. He matches their breaths. It helps. He sleeps. The next morning he wakes up and Billy is already awake. There’s no telling how long, but he hasn’t moved. Instead he’s holding Steve like he’s something precious. Steve feigns sleep just to stay wrapped up in him longer.

It’s an unspoken thing after that. Steve keeps slipping into the pile of Billy’s blankets and body on the couch until one night Billy comes to him first, slipping into Steve’s bed as Steve peels back the covers to offer him an in.

**

The days are creeping towards the first week of October before Billy finally truly speaks. He’d shown up at Steve’s door, just like usual, crossed over the threshold into the warmth of his space. He’s been dreaming more consistently throughout the nights, fragments of memories trickling back into the blank patches of his mind. None of them are good. His hands ache from the fists he keeps making in his sleep and he can’t stop looking at them as Steve pulls him inside enough to shut the door.

“There’s blood on them.” It’s the first thing Billy’s said in over two months. Weird first words to finally force their way out, but his life has been strange lately. His voice comes out too quiet, raspy with disuse, and Steve starts, clearly surprised by the sound of it, his expression a conflict of worry and hope.

“Are you bleeding?” Steve asks as he reaches for Billy’s hands, flipping them over to examine his palms before working his gaze up Billy’s arms, looking for a cut.

“My hands,” Billy clarifies even though he’s still staring right at them, unable to understand why Steve even has to ask. Surely anyone can see all the stains that have soaked in too deep to wash out. “There’s blood on them. So much blood on them.”

Steve’s face melts into something that looks a little too much like empathy, like he understands. There’s no way that’s true. There’s nothing that Billy has done that Steve should ever forgive.

Steve Kisses his knuckles, pulls Billy into the shower in his parents master bathroom, doesn’t even take the time to strip them down before he turns the water to hot and pulls them both under the spray. Billy’s curls slick and spill down his face. He’s still shaking, body heaving in disjointed sways, because he’s crying and Steve doesn’t know what to do, can only fold himself and wrap his own body around Billy’s and murmur sounds that mean nothing. Steve has no idea if it’s helping, but Billy responds ever so slightly, turning into Steve to grasp at his shoulders, fingers gripped tight, knuckles strained to white with the pressure as they dig into Steve’s skin, not as a threat but as an anchor, Billy clawing his way up from whatever waters have pulled him under, or trying to. And Steve needs Billy to do it; he’s not about to watch Billy drown on memories and air. And yet, he may not have a choice. Not if he can’t snap Billy out of it.

“Tell me about the blood,” Steve tries, because telling him he doesn’t see it isn’t helping.

“I can still feel it in me.” Billy looks haunted, vacant glaze of a memory in his eyes. “I close my eyes and it’s like I can feel it, all the places it touched me. It’s everywhere. I can’t get clean. I can’t ever get clean. “

Billy knows he sounds crazy, personifying his demons into monsters instead of madness. But it helps to disassociate to talk about it. There’s no one else it could belong to, but still, the sickness doesn’t always feel like his.

Sometimes Billy almost believes the monster was real. It’s a wishful kind of thinking, but it really did sometimes seem so tangible—something bigger than his mind. Its fingerprints linger. Billy can still smell the scent of it, the charred rubber soaked in something copper. A sharp scent. A stark contrast to the slithering softness of its form, the slick skin that glistened like tar, wormed it’s way like smoke through all the cracks in everything. How it moved like smoke only solid. It was so cold everywhere it touched, when it had worked its way into him, wriggling and writhing through all his seams.

There were moments when the delusions grew strong enough that Billy could have sworn The Thing was real and alive. Enough to have a heartbeat. It had pulsed beneath the membrane.
Slurping its way up his spine, it had wrapped around his neck until Billy had opened his mouth to scream.

That had been Billy’s seventh mistake. His worst mistake. He can still taste it on his tongue, coating his throat. Like iron. Like old blood. It had felt like decay sliding past his teeth. Jaw pressed so wide Billy couldn’t even bite.

The muck and the vile. Billy swears it’s still on his skin. He can’t get clean.

“Billy—” Steve starts, but there’s nothing for Steve to say.

“You should have killed me,” Billy confesses, “I can’t do it myself.”

“Do you want to?” Steve asks carefully, neutral.

He doesn’t. Not really. He’s never had the courage, the conviction to just give in. It had been too ingrained inside him to fight. Maybe the one good thing Neil had ever given him. Billy had lived with monsters all his life. He always knew that one day he’d become one, too. He had just hoped it wouldn’t be so soon.

“I-I just want it to stop. I can’t be the monster. I don’t want to be. I tried to fight it but I’m just... so tired.”

And then there’s the blood. So much blood.

“It wasn’t you.”

Sometimes Steve likes to pretend that the monster was real too. Billy has noticed that he humors Billy that way. Steve has been saying shit like that for weeks as Billy just stared into the fire, talking about Billy’s demons like they come from somewhere else. That they chose him.

“I know you think It chose me, but it chose *me*. You know why. Everyone knows why.” Because it was in his genes, an inheritance of insanity on his mother’s side. The only thing she had ever given him before leaving, her poisoned DNA.

“It chose Will last year.”

That part was new. Steve never talked about the kids that way—bringing them into the fucked up fantasy where Billy’s sick mind was simply some external disease that he could cure. “What?”

“Johnathan’s little brother. The small one, with the dark brown hair and the big eyes. The Mind flayer chose him too.”

That’s a word Steve hasn’t used before either. Not that Billy’s heard anyway. Although Billy doesn’t always listen to Steve’s words, just the warm tones of Steve’s voice were usually enough to help his heart rate settle, to make Billy believe that as long as he stayed in Steve Harrington’s orbit that no other voices, including The Voice would be able to reach him.

“Mind flayer?” The word should be silly, childish in its simplicity and yet the image it conjures is sharp, like raw meat thinly sliced at savage angles. It feels more viscous on his tongue than it should.

“Yeah. That’s not like an official scientific name or anything. But it’s what the kids call the thing that took you.”

Billy’s next breath hitches on an incredulous laugh, it mixes with the water to echo in a wretched wet way off the tiles. It’s one thing for Steve to weirdly pander to Billy’s delusions of monsters. It’s another to start pretending the kids would too. Billy knows he’s crazy. He doesn’t need Steve to rub it in.

“Yeah, OK.”

The look Steve shoots him is confusing. Like Steve is the one confused. “Yeah, The Mind Flayer. The Thing that took you.” Steve stops for a moment, considering, starting back up slowly. Like Billy was the one that’s slow. Which is fair, maybe. Billy’s not so sure these days. He has trouble with time, knowing how much has passed. If it’s all really accounted for. “What all did they tell you about The Upside-Down?”

Billy looked at him, equally as confused. “The what?”

“They didn’t tell you about the upside-down?”

“They who?”

“The kids, the government—anybody.”

“What? Why would the government talk to me?’

Steve looks at Billy, the horror in his eyes finally more in keeping with what Billy has been expecting to see there all along. “Fuck… Jesus. They really didn’t tell you anything? Billy, what do you think happened to you?”

“What are you talking about?” Billy asks. “Nothing happened to me. I’m crazy. I know you know that. But you don’t even know the real extent of it. My mom had an illness, too. She heard voices—had these delusions. All the time. They would tell her to do things, too. She would tell me about them sometimes, …before she left. I…I think I might be like her. But worse. Because I couldn’t stop myself from listening. And I saw things. So many horrible things. I can’t even tell all the time what’s real and what must be hallucinations. Like shadows. Monsters. And I’ve lost a lot of time. There’s gaps in my memories. Long stretches of black. But—I woke up once. With blood on my hands. And then it happened again. And kept happening. So much blood. I’ve hurt people, Steve. I think. I think I might have killed them."

Steve’s eyes stay on him, even as his voice takes on an oddly urgent tone, “Do you still see the shadows? Does the voice still speak to you?”

Out of all the things Billy just said, that was the part Steve chose to focus on? “Not for the past couple weeks. Since I got out of the hospital. But that doesn’t mean anything. They’ll come back. That kind of shit doesn’t just go away on its own. I’m crazy, Steve. I’m-I’m dangerous. I shouldn’t even be here. Putting you at risk.”

“You’re not.”

“Have you not been listening to me? I’m dangerous. I’ve killed people; I snap and could kill you.”

Billy, like saying it out loud makes him realizes just how true that possibilities is, scrambles to get up and go. Steve grabs his wrist, pulls him back down to the shower’s tiled floor.

“You’re not crazy. And you’re not a killer. There’s a darkness in this town,” Steve tries to explain, even though he knows he really can’t do it justice with words. “Your shadow, it isn’t yours. It comes from a place I’ve never been, but I’ve seen it.”

Billy just looks at him a little blankly. He tries another way.

“Where do you think you got that scar on your chest?”

Billy looks down where the fabric of his shirt sags, gaping with the stretch of the water.

“You can see it?” Billy asks like he’s honestly surprised. The scar is the kind of scientific enigma only his mind could conjure, patches of it healed and held together by twists unnatural to sinews and time.

Steve puts his palm to it, presses softly, firm enough for Billy to feel the weight of it.

“Yeah, man, I can.”

Billy grimaces, unsure if it’s that’s really better as he looks down at his body, at the stitched together splits of it spoking out from under Steve’s fingers.

“Do you remember where it came from?”

“I—no. I don’t know.”

“Ok, that’s ok,” Steve’s voice is soft, almost softer than the water. “There was a monster and a little girl. You saved her. What do you remember about the night at the mall?”

“The mall?”

“What’s the last thing you remember? Before the voices went away?”

“You.”

“Me?”

“I remember… I remember asking you to kill me. I remember being hot, in a really hot room. It smelled like cedar, and sweat, and smoke. And there was a window. I think Max was looking in. And I tried to talk to her. To warn her to run. Because I did bad things and I couldn’t stop them. And then there was glass and cold. I think I fell through a wall? And the woods were right there and I knew how to get to your house so I came and I asked you. And then black. Nothing.”

“That was a week before it happened,” Steve said, fingers curling into the scar tissue at the tips. “The night you came to me.”

Billy shrugs. Time doesn’t really mean anything anymore. Doesn’t really matter.

“Why’d you come to me?”

Billy looks at him, incredulous, because it should be obvious. “You know why.”

Steve chews on the inside of his cheek, thinking. “You said it was because you knew I could do it.”

Billy scoffs. “Couldn’t you?”

“No.”

“I wanted it to be you,” Billy tries to amend, “or rather, I didn’t want it to be anybody else. I didn’t want to give my father the satisfaction. Or anyone else really. I knew others could do it and it wouldn’t matter. I thought maybe, or more like hoped, that some part of you might care when you did it. That it’d matter.”

Steve nods, there’s a romance to that sentiment, or would be if it wasn’t so sad. “I do care. I couldn’t of done that though—not to you. Not even if there hadn’t been a way to save you. But you were right,” Steve admitted, voice growing tighter, “you were right when you said I could be a killer.”

“You didn’t kill Barb.” Billy had heard the rumors from Tommy and Carol. How Steve felt responsible for getting his dick wet as some chick he never knew got gutted on a forest floor. It was a loose association of guilt. Steve hadn’t dug his fingers into her flesh, felt how warm her insides could be until soaked in household cleaning products, fertilizer, and lye.

“Debatable,” Steve said anyway. But he’s dismissive about it. He isn’t thinking of her. Maybe hasn’t for some time. Too much has happened in the town for Steve to be able to remember Barb’s face like he used to. Now he only really sees it after it rains and the logs behind his house smell damp.

“There were these men at the mall. Russian military. One of them followed us up from the basement. He just appeared when we rounded the corner like he had come right out of the walls. I was upstairs when it all happened—when I saw you, fighting the flayer. I was distracted, watching you, and the guy got ahold of my wrist right when I saw you go down. I saw you go down and I just snapped. Because I just knew, you know? I knew that whatever had happened to you was because of them, this town, me. That if this town wasn’t what it was, if they hadn’t of fucked around with The Gate, if I had just really looked at you long enough to know to help you that night you came to my house.... I killed him,” Steve confessed. He hadn’t really thought of it that way until that very moment, the realization hitting him with an alarming clarity. At the time it had felt like defense—a necessity to survive. A primal response to a primitive moment in time. But someone had been alive under Steve once, someone who then suddenly wasn’t. And Steve had been too distracted by the grief of seeing pieces of Billy spilled out all over the mall floor to let anything else sink in. But that was still the truth of it. Steve had done it. And he couldn’t say for sure if there had been a point he could have stopped. A point where they would have been safe but the guy still breathing.

“The guy grabbed my arm and I swung, and I just kept swinging. Robin didn’t stop me. I don’t think she wanted to. I didn’t want her to either. Maybe I had a choice to stop, maybe I didn’t. But I did it and I’m not even sorry.”

He wasn’t sorry, he really wasn’t. Steve knew he’d do it all again if the situation remained the same. And yet, he also knew what that made him. If Billy felt this much guilt over something his body did without him, what did it say about Steve that his mind had killed with conviction? And it’s that part—his new-fond comfort with violence in the pursuit to deny further loss—the one cultivated in the slow growing fields of the vile earth that for seventeen years, Steve had called his home, that leaves his mouth tasting of ash. It’s the apathy in the aftermath that Steve feels guilty about. The part that makes Steve feel like maybe Billy should be looking at him as the monster. The part that makes Steve wonder if maybe this is how Billy feels all the time now too—the idea that he’s somehow not worthy of touch anymore. That he no longer has any right to be looked at kindly.

Steve’s uttered confession is the kind that Billy should leave at. Steve was the killer Billy had always thought him to be—had killed with purpose, on purpose. But Billy just looked at him, something unspoken in his eyes that wasn’t horror as he leaned forward under the spray of the shower and kissed him.

Billy’s mouth was on his. In all the months they had been colliding, that had never happened. It had seemed too personal somehow in a way that Billy’s lips on his cock somehow hadn’t been. It’s soft and it’s warm and Steve feels it in every cell of his blood.

Billy pulls back, just a sliver of space with droplets on his lips. “Fuck me.” The words were clear, the demand succinct, and Steve froze, unsure how to respond. But Billy didn’t seem to need him to. “Whatever it is you say was inside me. I can still feel what it’s like to have it in me. I feel it everywhere. I need to feel something else—anything else, ok? I need it.”

“I don’t think...” Steve began but Billy cut him off again.

“No.”

“No?”

“Yeah, No, you don’t get to think anything about it. If you're right then something that wasn’t me already got a say in what’s been inside me. I’ve already played that game. I get to choose now. Do it.”

Steve realizes his hands are still cradled around Billy’s skull from the kiss, and uses his thumb to brush the water off Billy’s lips. “What if *I* don’t want to?”

“Bullshit.”

Steve flinched at the accusation, conjured from a past life that Billy knew nothing about. Had just stumbled on independently. Because Steve really was bullshit, because Steve really did want him.

“You’re right,” Steve admits, as Billy stands to pull Steve up from the ground, because it was true. “I do. Want you. I always do. I think I always have.”

Steve ran his palm over Billy’s hip, the swell of his ass, thumb pointedly tracing the crevice where he split.

Billy pressed his face into the tiled wall, followed by his palms, fingers curling into the grout. Pushing his hips back defiantly, a demand disguised as an offering.

Steve would give him anything—almost anything. Steve couldn’t hurt him—at least couldn’t kill him—but that had never been a reasonable request. Steve would have killed the thing inside Billy though, if Steve had known, or rather had paid better attention to who Billy was to know what he was really asking: for Steve to help him.

Billy hadn’t asked for anything since. He was finally asking for something now, something that Steve could give.

“How do you want me to...”

“None of that soft shit—hard—but, umm, slow.”

Steve nodded, his hand finding the slope of Billy’s back, the dip of his spine. “Ok, we can do that. Whatever you want.”

Legs spread wider, braced against the wall. Steve bent his neck down, dropping a kiss to Billy’s shoulder. An intimacy that should be odd but wasn’t. Billy lets him do it.

Steve opens him up slowly, sinks in slower still. Realizes as the spark of their connection reignites that he's missed this like a piece of his soul. In the reality of linear time, it had only been a little over a handful of weeks since they'd last fucked, always so mean even when lazy with the early summer heat, the two months passing by since in a slow-motion blur. But so much had happened between. Their bodies altered with new scars.

Billy hadn’t had the time to rebuild his walls, muscles loose with fatigue and a need to be touched. Steve so desperate to give anything he could that he couldn’t hold back. It felt different that way—connected.

Steve pushes in deep. “How does it feel?” Steve asks, for the first time of all the times he’s been with Billy, he really wants to know.

“Warm.” He sounded so relieved.

“Ok.” Steve wrapped himself around him, trying to provide more heat. “Ok, I’ll keep you warm.”
It felt cheesy to say, too saccharine, but Billy melted under the weight of him, nodding like that was exactly what he needed to hear—to have.

Their fingers tangle on the tile, Billy’s whole chest pressed against the hard panes of the shower wall, Steve’s torso sealed against his spine. The heat of their skin scorched Steve’s senses, a wet slick friction. But he didn’t want Billy to feel trapped.

Hand cupping his chest, he pulls Billy up back against him. Billy's head tilts back to meet him, the curve of his neck arching over Steve's shoulder, finding more points of contact, everything taut and strained like nothing will ever be enough.

Still Steve kept the pace slow, even if that hadn’t been what Billy had requested he would have done it anyway; it felt right.

And the sounds it pulled out of Billy, quiet under the shower spray but there, heady ragged little sounds that Steve drank in.

Billy’s cock hadn’t changed, the familiar jut of it pulling his focus. Steve reached down to touch him, but Billy shook his head with a groaned out “No.”

“No?”

Billy’s curls shake against Steve’s chin. “Just like this. Just this.”

“Ok,” Steve agreed, moving his palms to the front of Billy’s thighs instead, pressing down, thumbs and forefingers curling down towards the sides, framing his groin without touching him further as he continued to drive in deep, “just this. whatever you want.”

Billy still quivered the same when he came, a full body shiver that started in his thighs. Steve felt the tremors first below his fingers before the rest of Billy’s body began to shake.

Before, Billy had always hated that about himself, and would do anything he could to distract Steve from seeing it, distracting Steve with a bite or a scratch, or a harsh exchange of words. Anything to get Steve more focused on the fight than the way Billy’s body broke under pleasure.

Billy has no fight in him now and it’s the one good thing to come from that—the way Billy lets Steve see him when it happens now: the spasm of his breathing, the flutter of his eyelids, the surrender of his form, all flickers of the soft violence Billy endures every time he lets himself feel something good.

Steve whimpers at the sight of it, comes himself to a choked-out sound that Steve thinks might have been Billy’s name, too wrapped up in the feel of letting Billy really see him in return.

The pleasure lingers as the exhaustion takes hold. Steve slides down the wall and brings Billy down with him. The floor of the shower seems familiar. Deja vu to the spot where Steve had first found Billy in the locker room at the community pool.

At least this time Billy speaks to him.

“There’s still blood on my hands.”

It’s a more direct statement than it usually is, calmer in some ways, a confession that Billy must still feel needs to be said. Steve can read the meaning in it. Sex isn’t an absolution for all his sins. That using Steve to chase away the taste that the flayer had left in Billy’s mouth, hadn’t begun to touch the blood debt that Billy had accumulated while the flayer had been inside him.

And the thing is, Steve understands that. Had always understood the weight of Billy’s guilt, the stains on his hands. What it was like to close his eyes and see red.

Steve thought of the Russian soldier and the feel of his skull as it gave beneath his hands. The traces of LSD and barbital had still been thrumming through his system, altering the clarity of his mind, but he had still had the ability to do it somewhere already in him. There had been no monster, no hive mind, controlling his hand, just drugs lowering his inhibitions, setting him free. Leaving Steve with the brutal knowledge once his sobriety returned what he was capable of. That seeing the kids in danger, El’s tearful exhaustion, Max’s pain, and Billy’s body broken and split open, had all been enough of a reason for Steve to kill. That he could take a life out of anger, grief, horror, defense, need.

Steve thought of the past two years, the city-wide conspiracy, how the guts of the town were rotting from the inside out.

How the spray of blood of monsters and hellhounds still scented the air from the gutters whenever it rained; how clusters of the dried muck of it still clung to the creases in his shoes.

He thought of Barb’s face, bloated and purple under an alien moonlight. How it had already started to drain into that new color while he was buried deep in Nancy Wheeler, Barb out there alone and bleeding on the ground.

He thought of El and the special kind of weariness she held in her bones, and the rare serious look on Dustin’s face when he had told Steve one night that first winter about how El had hurt the men that hurt her, right in front of them in the hallways of their school. That their bodies had crumpled like paper or tin cans. Dustin confessing that he had dreams about that sometimes, a scary back and forth cycle of el and faceless men sucking the life out of each other, how their bodies looked liked husks when drained of blood.

How in a single October evening back in the fall of ‘83, their whole collective misshapen little world had become a strange war zone. That when Steve had been setting fire to a living thing in the Byers living room, choking on the pungent stench of smoking flesh as it screamed, Will had been fading from existence in a parasitic hell dimension, the vision of jaws, teeth, and his mother in mourning the last things he thought he’d ever see. All while Dustin and his friends had seen El disintegrate, right there in front of them, not knowing they would see her again, only seeing in that moment their friend that they loved, the strongest of them all, bursting into ash.

How small horrors after that had become natural, mundane.

How Max had resolutely told him at the hospital, Billy three hours in and counting in the OR, about finding the blood around the house, soaked ragfulls of it in the sink that she had just thrown away without question. Because Billy bled all the time in their house, as long as she’d known him. It had become routine, the black eyes, the bruises, the blood. The only thing off about it was that he had gotten sloppy, leaving the towels on the bathroom counter instead of scrubbing the tiles down.

How that ignorance and apathy had left the bloodstains on her hands as well, not Billy’s blood after all but people’s—stranger’s. That maybe less of them would have died if she had said something. And that it was only then in the aftermath at the hospital, seeing Billy’s patched together skin on life support that she had fully realized how mortal Billy really was, too. Not the indestructible larger than life force she had known, but a boy who could not only bleed too much, but who felt it when he did. How the weight of his blood too was now on her hands. The years of silence.

But Max wasn’t alone in that guilt. Steve thought of the bruises on Billy’s body that had been there all year, every time he’d taken off his shirts: scrapes and abrasions and scars a kaleidoscope of trauma that Steve had never said anything about. Only ever observing how Neil Hargrove apparently preferred boots and belts and other tools of distance that kept his own hands clean.

How Billy never said anything about it and neither had Steve. How some of their more heated trysts in the early summer had torn his skin back open, made him bleed. How that blood was on Steve’s hands too with every passing day that he didn’t say anything. Didn’t once tell anyone about Billy’s home life or offer him any help. Because Steve had been too scared and selfish to say anything at all. Because he didn’t want Billy to go away. To close down what little slivers of himself he had opened and leave. Because Steve hadn’t wanted to be alone.

It wasn’t the first time Steve had put his own wants first. Steve thought again of Barb, the droplets of her life sprinkled across the grass and staining the concrete by the pool. A girl he barely knew drowned and dismembered in an alien land because Steve had been too selfish to care about anything but his dick. How that same selfish dick had drawn blood from Nancy too that night, slayed and torn right through the first fragile barrier of an innocence that she would never get back. That Steve knew Nancy could no longer look at him without seeing her, and what they had done together at Barb’s expense.

How Nancy had looked at him only months ago, on the night of July 4th when climbing into the car, eyes somehow decades older than they had been that first night Steve had looked into them the previous year, now haunted and drained as she had said, “The hospital. They’re all dead,” with viscera still warm and caked into her nail beds. The way Johnathan brushed off Steve’s concerned glance at the wounded wet stains on his t-shirt right after, soaked wine red in the moonlight with a quick shake of his head and the succinct explanation, “It isn’t mine.”

The whole town was bleeding; none of them were clean.

“There’s still blood on my hands,” Billy said. His skin still shivered. Naked and slumped to Steve’s side on the shower floor, leaning on Steve more than he ever had before. Steve liked the weight of it.

He reached back with his other hand to turn up the heat as he pulled Billy closer in.

“I know,” Steve assured him, because he did. He didn’t know how much it helped but Steve could only hope that it did somehow: for Billy to know he wasn’t alone. That Steve was right there with him, seeking some kind of secular absolution in a world of death and monsters. That Steve wouldn’t let Billy drown in the darkness because then he would drown too. They all would. The whole damn town, the heartland of Americana; another childhood lost.

Steve ran his thumb over Billy’s knuckles, slotted and twined with his own, rubbing at the stains that only Billy could see. There was blood on his hands, but there was blood in them too, his pulse steady and strong beating under his palms. He was alive. They were alive, and that had to count for something.

“I know,” Steve repeated—confessed. Any possibility of paradise long lost to war but still hoping something else could be found.

Steve pulled Billy’s hands closer in his, bringing them to his lips, his mouth pressing against his palms. They tasted clean, filtered water from the shower and the flavor of Billy’s skin. But that didn’t mean they were.

“There’s blood on mine, too.”