Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

It’s late when he hears it - the sliding of his window in the dead of night. Again. Billy first heard that sound a month ago, a week later, four days after that, every other day for a while. And now every night. 

Whoever it is has gotten more brazen. He doesn’t know if it’s because whoever this is – whatever this is, he corrects silently behind closed eyes – genuinely thinks he’s asleep, or if it just knows how scared of it he is. Billy’s known it’s there since the first night, or since what he assumes to be the first night. Its presence presses like an awareness on the corner of his mind, keeping him conscious for the hours it lingers there, keeping him conscious until the window slides back shut again. He never checks to see who – what – it is, though; he doesn’t dare. He just lies there, eyes closed, as it keeps coming back again and again. 

Now, his room is dark on the other side of his eyelids and the gentle scraping of the crappy window jolts him from whatever sleep he’d managed. Every muscle tenses, fingers curling into his blanket to pull it tighter about himself. Even that small movement hurts – his body banged from basketball practice, the last of those fading wounds from the fourth of July, and where Neil shoved him about when the sun was still painting the sky in pinks and oranges – and Billy has to stifle a wince; not that that’s anything novel. He is a constellation of bruises, each mark flaring and dying like a series of sick, twisted stars.

The creature is in the corner of his room.

It makes no sound – Billy can’t even make out its breathing over the shuddering of his own breath and the way his pulse thunders in his own ears – and Billy’s eyes remain firmly shut, but he knows it’s there. He can feel it, the brush of its eyes as they sweep over him. It wracks a shudder from him that Billy can only hope will be put down to the chill from the open window, with the autumn air it lets in. 

The fact he doesn’t know what this thing wants is so much worse than the fact he doesn’t know what it is. Everything wants something , especially around Billy. The girls that fawn over him want sex, the guys that flock around him want status – it’s an easy system, when you know who wants what; it means you know where you stand, and you know what to do to keep yourself in good favour. It’s when you don’t know that everything gets fucked up. 

Billy doesn’t know what Neil wants from him, because nothing Billy has ever done has been good enough. He’s never figured it out and it just keeps hurting him, again and again.

Billy didn’t know what his mother wanted, either. He’d thought he did, but then she left and it was too late to know what to fix to make her come back. He didn’t know what would make him good enough and all it left him with was the dial-tone on the other end of the phone, all it left him with was the memory of her and a disconnected number to talk to and pretend someone on the other end still cared. But they didn’t, because Billy wasn’t good enough to be what she wanted and he didn’t know how to fix that.

So, yes, the not knowing what this thing wanted was the worst part. It could want anything, nothing, everything. It could decide nothing Billy could give was good enough and kill him for it, like the Mind Flayer had almost done – like the kids had almost done when they didn’t even try to save him, when they didn’t even think about it. 

It could decide nothing Billy could give was good enough and leave.

Billy was tired; waking up for about three hours every night and laying there in anxiety while something lurked in the corner of your room, and then having to wake up early to parent your step-sister, all while still recovering from nearly dying at the Mall, will do that to a person, it turns out. He was so tired, and he couldn’t afford that… but the idea of whatever this was finding him not good enough to stick around might just be his breaking point. A ludicrous idea, completely insane , but there it was. His goddamn sense of self-worth was hinging on this probably-supernatural stalker and he didn’t even know what it wanted.

So maybe that was another reason Billy didn’t look, why he didn’t speak about it or fight it or even lock his damn window: he didn’t want to break this cycle and scare it away. He didn’t want another thing to find him lacking and cast him aside.

It’s odd how time seems to move when whatever-it-is is here. It speeds by and yet seems to pass incredibly slow; like time is hurrying along his veins in time with the rapid beating of his heart, like time passes a second for each final reluctant shift in his position he finally gives in to. Racing, crawling. Gone too soon, lingering too long. 

In these moments Billy only needs worry about whatever this thing might be, might want, might do. In these moments the crushing realisation of how he needs to sleep soon lest Neil get mad at him for being exhausted the next day is never far away, no matter how much he wishes he could let himself just worry about one thing at a time. 

Between one moment and the next, after an eternity, there’s a slight rustling and Billy knows that sound. It’s always followed by the scraping of his window closing. It’s always followed by isolation.

Billy doesn’t realise he’s saying it until it’s out of his mouth:

“What do you want?” is whispered into the quiet of his room and the movement stops.

He doesn’t open his eyes; doesn’t have the courage to, as if, if he keeps them shut, he can just pretend he’d kept faking sleep. It heard him, though. He doesn’t look but he can feel it watching him again, can feel it hovering by the window. Maybe it thinks Billy was talking in his sleep.

He doesn’t know whether to repeat himself or cling to the comfort of its uncertainty, to cling to this silent familiarity he has with its presence and this strange cycle they’ve fallen into. It doesn’t matter, though. In the end, the window slides shut before he comes to a decision.

-

It’s two nights before the window slides open again. Two nights of waiting, of anxiety, of worrying that somehow Billy had broken whatever this is before he could even find out what this creature wants. Two nights of barely any sleep, and two days of walking around dead on his feet to follow.

So, when the window slides open and the creature slips inside, Billy doesn’t really have enough consciousness to worry about whether or not he should ask. He’s either gonna scare it off, which is probably for the better anyway, or it’ll come back again. Either way, Billy’s better off getting it over with now, since he’s already started this mess.

The mattress is firm beneath him when he rolls onto his back, eyes blinking through the darkness to stare up at the ceiling – not at the corner of the room and the creature he knows to lurk there, never at that corner. He can’t feel it, but he knows his journal is shoved under the weight of the mattress, buried somewhere beneath him. He wonders if this creature is a demon come to curse him for what he put to graphite and ink between those pages.

“What do you want?” he asks, gaze unwavering.

Silence.

It’s better than the creature just leaving, and yet worse. Suddenly Billy realises that it might not understand him at all, that there might not even be a reason for this. 

But if it can’t understand Billy then at least nothing he can say will scare it away, and nothing that he can say will incriminate him in the slightest. That’s the most freedom he’s had with anything in a long, long time.

The time passes in skips and Billy relaxes back into his pillow, eyes growing heavy. It’s odd how much his anxiety has eased knowing that the creature won’t just kill him the second it realises he’s awake. 

An hour later and the window slides shut again.

-

“What do you want?”

It’s the question Billy has taken to asking every night for the past week, whispering it like a secret to the blank surface of his ceiling. He never receives an answer, but he doesn’t stop asking. He’s not even sure he needs an answer anymore – the creature doesn’t seem to want anything – but it's a novelty to ask, to be allowed to ask without any repercussions. 

He’s expected to know how to make the girls swoon at school. He’s expected to know just what type of influence the guys wish to gain from him. He’s expected to know how to stop failing his father. He’s expected to know how to make Max listen. It wouldn’t bode well for him to ask them, but here he can.

The creature just waits in the corner like always; silent, passive and watchful. As the nights pass on in silence Billy holds himself less rigidly while he waits for the sound of the window sliding closed. Some mornings he even wakes up to sunlight without ever having heard it, unsure of when he ended up drifting off but knowing it must’ve been before it even left.

Falling into this new cycle is so easy, and it’s probably the only thing in Billy’s life that doesn’t hurt him. It doesn’t scare him at all anymore, even though it should. Maybe that’s the scariest thing of all.

He never looks to the corner

He passes through his days easily enough. Faking a wide smile, trying to keep Max in line enough that he won’t have to pay for it, and then going home. He helps Susan cook at his Neil’s insistence, shouldering the snide comments about that being a woman’s job through it, and then eats and heads to his room. He doesn’t find himself going out much anymore, doesn’t have the energy or the willpower – though he still goes out just enough to put up appearances.

Instead, most nights he just cranks up his music as loud as he can risk to without pissing Neil off too badly and fishes his journal out from beneath his mattress. The pages are cramped with notes and scribbles, margin overtaken by doodles. And then there are some spreads entirely overtaken by sketches.

Only he’ll ever see these, and it’s the most relieving thought Billy can manage. Whenever he can, he skims through the pages before tucking it safely back in its hiding spot and getting himself into bed. There he sleeps in wait until the window opens again and their little cycle starts over.

What do you want?

That’s why Billy is so startled when it finally comes:

“I want a lot of things.”

The voice is scratched and creaky, like the speaker hasn’t used it in a long while, and the sound of it makes Billy flinch. He’d gotten used to the silence and now it shatters, raining down around him. The constellation he thought he’d managed to pull together, a beautiful silent thing, seems to fade away and the stars are swallowed up by the endless expanse of darkness.

The window slides shut. Billy doesn’t manage to fall asleep.

-

Exhaustion isn’t a good look on him. Billy knows it isn’t, used to have it easily pointed out by the only real friend he was making in this god forsaken town. Heather’s gone now – another weight on his conscience, plaguing him whenever he sees that damn memorial for the lost students in the accident at Starcourt – but he hardly needs to be reminded of that fact.

Dark circles marr the skin beneath his eyes any time he catches a glimpse of his reflection and his whole complexion seems worn out. His skin has lost its Californian gleam and now he just looks tired and ill. Not that he isn’t, to be fair. While his strength has been slowly returning to him since he returned from the hospital a while back, he’s still in poor shape.

Refusing to quit the basketball team only ended in him being benched during games and lacking the strength to fight back against being shoved around in practice. What’s worse is that means people look up to him less; he knows what they want from him and he will get back their respect soon enough but it’s still frustrating. They pretend that they don’t begrudge him since he couldn’t have helped his accident, but they do. What’s the point of schmoozing up to the biggest guy at the school when he isn’t that anymore?

Maybe it didn’t really help his case that Billy spent weeks giving everyone the cold shoulder when he finally showed up after that damn summer, bruised and broken still. Tommy especially didn’t take well to that. The kid is a snivelling suck up with a burning need for attention that rivals Billy’s own – and, yes, Billy is aware of it – and Tommy did not enjoy being frozen out, even for a short while. It’s no wonder, really, that he was so bitchy at Harrington if this is what the guy’s like when Billy takes two fucking weeks to breathe.

They’re half at a decent point now, though Billy doesn’t really miss the annoyed glares that Tommy shoots him any time he’s not getting enough attention to make up for before. Or at least they are until Billy tells Tommy to go fuck himself if he needs attention that badly.

It’s probably not the wisest thing to say but Billy’s not slept for the past three nights straight, okay? He’s fucking exhausted and the little twerp won’t give him more than an inch of space for three seconds. Tommy’s been right up his ass all day, and that continues into basketball practice where the asshole keeps snickering at him as he fumbles his way through the whole thing. Does Tommy mean it particularly maliciously? Probably not, but Billy couldn’t be less in the mood for his attitude today. 

“Fuck you, Hargrove,” Tommy snarls, shoving into him. “You wanna go? Cause I don’t think you could fight a little girl right now.”

“I could kick your ass, Hagan,” he warns in a hiss.

The ache that had started up behind his eyes in class earlier is making a valiant return and Billy does not have the patience for this. If Tommy doesn’t back down and back off Billy will plant him on his sorry ass. 

“Oh, yeah?” Tommy says, turning until they’re practically pressed chest-to-chest.

“Yeah,” Billy spits, planting his hands on Tommy’s shoulders and sending him sprawling backwards. 

The look he gets sent in return is fuming.

By the time Billy gets home he has a split lip. He can taste the metallic tang of his blood where it’s sunk between his teeth and found a home in the corners of his mouth. Neil takes one look at him and sends him to his room until Susan needs him.

When he gets sent to bed it’s without dinner, a punishment for fighting and setting a bad example for Max. He has good enough sense not to laugh in his father’s face at that, despite the way he damn well knows Max has gotten herself in plenty of trouble without his influence. It doesn’t matter though, not to Neil or to him. Billy just writes as many nasty words as he can think of into the pages of his journal.

He can hardly spit them out like the blood he catches on the tongue that soothes the wound on his mouth. Instead they find refuge in scribbles on paper. Words about how much Billy would like to make his dad sorry for everything, about how shit he is and how despite everything he almost wishes he could just know what it would be like to be good enough. And when he feels ashamed of that weakness he snarls at the paper and pours in all the filth he knows would make Neil see red, about all the guys he’s subtly checked out in the changing room and the way he didn’t mind Tommy shoving him about entirely.

A grin steals across his face as he tucks the journal safely away in its hiding place. Neil would throw a fit if he had even read a sentence of the stuff in there, and it gives him an almost sick satisfaction to know it.

The grin fades when he crawls onto his mattress, pulling his covers over himself. It hasn’t been back since that night, yet. Not at all, and Billy can’t shake the feeling it’s waiting now that it has delivered its warning – or just that it left in general. No matter how late Billy lies awake, listening, he never hears that tell-tale sound, and his hours of utterly sleepless worry mean that he’s certain of its absence.

Eyes stare blankly at the ceiling, stinging and tired. More than anything, Billy just wishes he could fall asleep. It’s not a new wish – after years of laying with aching skin or a paranoid mind, he’s long since fallen into the habit of taking a good hour to fall asleep – but it is particularly present now, after nights of insomnia.

It’s when his body is almost finally giving into the lull of exhaustion and forcing him into unconsciousness that he hears it. That scraping of the window and the rustle of something sliding inside. Under that racing crash of panic-relief, he hardly feels the rush of cold air reach across the abyss of his room to grasp at his skin. 

“You’re back,” he observes after a long second of silence.

There’s that shifting of fabric and Billy’s heart plummets. It’s leaving. It’s leaving already, abandoning him here alone to worry over it again. 

Every muscle in Billy’s body tenses, fighting the heavy weight of exhaustion, as he strains to listen through the quiet. As he waits for another sound.

“What happened?” comes that broken voice again and Billy near sags in relief.

The voice is still in that corner, so it’s not leaving. It must’ve just shifted, though Billy has not known it to do that for as long as it’s been coming here. The only time it moves is when it comes and goes. So maybe it was planning to leave.

Billy can’t hope to guess what changed its mind if it was.

“What do you mean?” he asks, voice barely a whisper.

Neil, Susan and Max are all asleep – blissfully ignorant to whatever has been invading their crappy home in the dead of night, with only the sky itself as witness. Billy can’t afford to make much sound, can’t risk waking them, but he wants answers.

“There’s blood on you.”

Unconsciously, Billy’s tongue flicks out to sooth over the wound on his lip. The motion stings, startling a gentle hiss of air from him. 

Something about the feel of the creature’s eyes on him shifts. It shoots something like alarm down Billy’s spine and almost unbidden his gaze jumps towards it. He doesn’t look at it still, out of fear or habit he isn’t sure. What he does see, though, haunting his peripheral like a shadow, is the silhouette of a person – or at least that’s how it seems when Billy tears his eyes back to the ceiling above him. 

Part of him wants to look back but doesn’t dare. There is something dark and intense about the way it's staring at Billy, through the curtain of night drawn between them. It’s unnatural, definitely.

“I got into a fight.”

“At school?” 

A second’s hesitation and then he’s nodding.

The creature doesn’t speak again. It just keeps staring for long minutes that crawl on with Billy feeling more self conscious than he feels he should. He is all too aware of the bruises blooming across his skin, and the old wounds hidden beneath blankets that haven’t quite healed. Billy being in a state is nothing new, and it leads him to wonder if this thing has always cared about that.

“Why are you here?” 

It’s the closest he can ask to the burning question, the one that broke this all in the first place, but Billy’s sure the creature can hear it as sure as he can beneath his words.

What do you want?

Nothing breaks through the silence and Billy resigns himself to that fact. After all, the question he’s really wanting to know already got answered, be it in a vague, uninterpretable way. Instead of getting upset, he just sags surely back into his mattress. The thing seemed to have carried in its wake the return of Billy’s exhaustion, too.

His eyes grow heavy and the blinks between opening his eyes grow longer. The creature is back and the strange worries that had plagued him seem to fall away, blown as fall leaves off trees.

It’s not until Billy’s already being pulled away on the tide of sleep that the creature finally speaks again:

“To make it right.”

-

The creature doesn’t tend to say much. Nights continue as the previous, with Billy often speaking without receiving answers. It stays there, though. It keeps returning with the slide of a window open and closed behind it.

Billy walks through his days a little easier, now, a little less asleep. With that silent, staring company in the corner of his room, he’s found himself able to drift off again. Often that’s before the creature leaves again.

He still doesn’t know why it comes, and refuses to ask again, but it does, continuing on for the next couple months. It waits there as the nights grow longer and the days a little easier as they follow. Hardly speaking, always attentive. 

Sometimes he thinks he feels it in the days, peering at him. That sense of being watched drapes across him, not that he can tell if that’s true or not. The daylight seems to banish any awareness of where that feeling is coming from, and any furtive glances never reveal anything amiss. 

When he asks, the creature says nothing.

“You could at least shut the fucking window behind you,” Billy grumbles, half to himself, one night.

That gaze swipes over him again as he pulls the blankets tighter around himself, burying the cold tip of his nose into the fabric. It smells of hairspray and sweat, which clues Billy in on the fact he should probably change his bed linen. 

“Why?” the creature returns.

Its voice is less of a croak, recently. The words brush over him like the chill of the autumn-night breeze creeping in from the ajar window; it makes him shudder all over again. Something about the words being whispered to him, in a voice growing so clearly human, makes everything feel a little strange. It’s familiar, and it’s not…

Billy tries to assure himself that it’s just reminding him of sleepovers when he was younger – the ones before he’d failed to please his mother and she’d left him. Nights spent curled up on the floor of a friend’s room and giggling with giddy amazement at the fact he got to be carefree, even for a moment. It’s just the recollection of that which is haunting him. It’s just that which is making this tone, this voice, feel so familiar with each passing day as its words lose the rust of disuse. It’s just that. 

It has to be, the only other explanation is too impossible.

“Because, jackass,” he grunts, glaring at the wall ahead of him, though the creature will surely know it’s for them; “not everyone enjoys it being ten fucking degrees in their bedroom. You do realise it’s fall, right?”

There’s silence for a beat, as if they’re contemplating his words, and then the window is sliding closed.

Billy huffs out a sigh; he didn’t mean for it to leave, he just–

“Better?”

The voice actually startles him, though not nearly as much as the relief that washes over him. It almost makes him laugh, actually. Billy’s been trained like a damn Pavlov dog – the sound of the window closing makes him feel fucking lonely.

“The cold’s already gotten in,” he manages, rolling his eyes for good measure. “Next time close it straight away, yeah? It’s not like you ever make this a quick stop anyway.”

A pause. Always a pause, like it always really focuses on his words. Like it’s always listening and thinking carefully about what he’s said. That should probably make Billy wary, make him wonder if this thing is just manipulating him. But it doesn’t.

It really doesn’t.

“Do you want me to leave?”

Billy flops back over onto his back, ignoring the rising gooseflesh as his skin meets the chilled air, blanket now dislodged from where it was bundled around him all snug.

“Is that what I said?” he snarks. When the creature doesn’t say anything, even after a long moment, Billy panics. “Please stay,” he adds, so quietly. 

Shame burns in his chest, heating his face. He shouldn’t be weak like this, but it’s been so long since he felt like anyone was watching over him. It’s been a long time since anyone cared at all. Maybe he should add worrying about stockholm syndrome to his list of ‘things he’s not freaking about but should be’, though technically he hasn’t been kidnapped.

“Why do you want me to?” finally comes the reply, and Billy hesitates to answer.

It never asks him things like this, things that are heavy. Usually its sentences are clipped, short, like it doesn’t want Billy to truly know him. Not that that entirely works. The longer the days go by, the more Billy feels he recognises something about that voice. He shouldn’t, though, he can’t possibly.

“I don’t like feeling alone.”

“...You don’t even know who I am.”

Billy huffs a self-deprecating laugh.

“Yeah, and that’s the worst of it. I’m so fucking alone that I’m taking comfort in whoever or whatever the fuck you are crawling in my window to watch me sleep like a damn creep. It’s fucking hilarious, right?”

Silence.

“I didn’t know you felt like that.”

“Yeah? Well, no one does – did – that’s the fucking point of all-” he gestures vaguely, as if to represent the whole all-encompasing idea of his damn act “-this.”

Another pause.

“Do you always have to think so loud?” he snarks, hackles rising. It’s moments like this that he detests this thing’s silence, it’s thoughtfulness. Billy just spilled his second worst secret and it’s just… thinking, like this isn’t Billy’s equivalent of baring his soul.

It doesn’t rise to the bait, though. It just continues to think, and then says:

“I felt the same. Alone, overly responsible for everything and like people couldn’t be allowed to see how much I was carrying. I tried to get better about it but… I told the wrong person and she just brushed off all my problems.”

“She sounds like a bitch,” Billy smirks. “Sorry to belatedly tell you this, but women are bitches.”

He feels the thing bristle.

“Not all of them. My mom…”

Billy feels a stab of pain. 

“Moms don’t count for shit, either,” he hisses, green envy curling around his chest in a painful, crushing mockery of an embrace. “If they did, at least one of mine would’ve given a damn.”

For the first time, Billy hears it breathe. The breath it sucks in is sharp, gasping. It sounds painful, like Billy’s admission physically struck it.

“Billy…” it says.

And hearing his name on it’s lips is so shocking that Billy flinches, that Billy instinctively breaks the one fucking rule he’s held on to for all this time. His eyes dart to the corner, and this time it’s him that sucks in a sharp breath.

“Byers.”

Chapter Text

Jonathan Byers died.

Billy knows he did because he was there , because he saw it with his own goddamn eyes. And, sure, Billy was still half-possessed by the Mind Flayer in that moment, but it was still his hands doing all those atrocities. It was still his body guilty of hurting everyone. And it was still him watching behind his own eyes as that monster tore Byers apart.

It started with the fireworks. A cacophony of sound and light, blinding him and burning the Mind Flayer’s skin as if it was his own. An agony of supernatural design scorching along his nerves in sizzling bursts, mirroring those explosions of colour perverting the night sky with a pollution of pain and noise.

His ears were screaming. Head splitting open, skin flaying from his bones, lungs shrieking in agony as he breathed through it all. It left him there with no choice but to stand tall and strong as the torture of a hundred mangled bodies slammed down upon him, cobbled into a wall of pain to keep him from his own control. As one, they writhed in the gunpowder stench of man-made destruction, and in that moment he wanted to stop fighting – give up and let it all slip away. Still, he bore it in a body stolen from him, without even the power to scream through his suffering.

He convulsed within himself, calling for an end. It hurt. It hurt so much and suddenly he was nothing but that small boy again, leaning into his mother’s caress and wishing she could kiss away the pain. But she couldn’t. She wouldn’t because Billy’s mother had left him to suffer under the hand of a cruel man, alone and scared and hurt. Maybe he was meant to end like this.

There was a hand on his face, kind and understanding for the first time in years. And then Billy was pushing through. Standing. Dying. The limbs of the Mind Flayer pierced his sides like he was nothing at all, until all the strength fled from him and he truly was. And then, when that thing flung him aside to crack and collapse down the wall – a marionette cut from its strings – he almost felt relief.

Relief as the corners of his vision tinged black and everything grew blurry. The pain was immeasurable, eating away at and burning along every nerve in his body until he was merely a body of fire and sorrow as the embers of his consciousness died away.

And then there was Byers, taking the brunt of it all and saving his flickering flame from the wrath of the Mind Flayer’s cold. Saving the little girl that Billy was failing, the one that had reached past the monster controlling him and the monster of his own creation (who served no purpose but to drive away anyone who dared get too close to his heart). Saving that little girl who saw the boy he was, who offered him a fleeting moment of peace.

A sobbing Max would later tell him that Jonathan had run out of fireworks sooner than the others, that he had run down the escalator to try and get El – that sweet little girl – out of there. She would tell him that it wasn’t Billy’s fault for not holding out, but Billy could see it in her eyes -- in all their eyes -- that the kids didn’t quite believe that. They liked Jonathan, he’d been helping them where Billy had been hunting them, and would much rather have had him back.

Not that Billy could blame them. He, too, watched through the haze of his fleeting awareness as fire and destruction haloed Byers, as he ran forward like he didn’t fear that hulking form that had tossed Billy aside like nothing. Scrawny, weirdo Jonathan Byers facing down the Mind Flayer as it towered over them, pulling El behind his back like her safety was the only thing that mattered, the only thing that had crossed his mind at all.

Billy had heard so much about the Byers, and Jonathan in particular, since coming to Hawkins. Tommy hated that kid almost as much as he had hated Harrington for ditching him. Sure, Billy hadn’t really believed everything that came out of Tommy’s mouth, but he still had enough trust of how in-the-loop Tommy had been to know that Jonathan was nothing worth mentioning. The guy had beaten Harrington in one fight. That was it.

And yet there he was, facing down that thing that had left Billy so tortured and broken, facing down the thing that could give Billy’s dad some pointers should he ever want to step up his game of ruining Billy’s life. He stood so tall, silhouetted like some divine angel in the fading sparks. And then he broke.

The Mind Flayer pierced through Byers like it was inconsequential, like the boy’s strength and sacrifice hadn’t meant anything at all. In that moment Billy swore he could hear the tearing of flesh that should’ve been buried beneath the roaring of the creature, and screaming of the others, and the ringing in his own ears. What he was sure of was that he could feel the ripping of Byer’s skin beneath Billy’s own, that sensation clawing its way to his broken body through his fading connection to the Mind Flayer. 

Billy’s own wounds ached more fiercely with the echo of what was happening to Byers, as if the way his blood splattered in crimson streaks to meet with Billy’s own spilled blood created an unnamable tether between the two. Strike after strike lanced down the other with a stomach turning clarity for Billy. He could feel it like he was doing it, like he was experiencing it. Byer’s ribs snapping like twigs, the roll of hot blood over the Mind Flayer’s tortured flesh. The fleeting stutter of Byers’ chest. Still he kept fighting, until that final strike that pierced through Byers’ chest, splintering his sternum and striking through his heart as that sweet, iron taste of the other’s blood tried feebly to keep pumping along his veins.

Finally, he gave out, slumping in the Mind Flayer’s grasp, and then dropped as the creature shrieked and flailed. Whatever plan the kids had in action had evidently come to fruition as the monstrous form of the creature collapsed with a guttural scream and that final thread of connection between itself and Billy snapped. 

Meeting Byers’ eyes, though, told the truth all too plainly. They were too late to save him, he was already gone. His glass-eyed stare held blankly ahead. Unseeing.

Gone.

And then the world faded away entirely to the close of Max’s scream.

-

“You’re dead,” he tells the spectre standing before him. “You’re supposed to be dead; I watched you die.”

The spectre– Byers – Whatever-it-is nods at him, eyes unwavering in their intensity. There’s something about him, half-hidden by the shadows of night, that sends a shudder racing up Billy’s spine that has nothing to do with the chill of the hour. Something is inherently wrong here.

“I thought so,” Byers finally manages. “That I was dead. That you were dead.”

It’s so ridiculous that Billy almost wants to laugh. He smothers it down, staring incredulously at the form before him instead. Why on earth should a dead person have any thoughts on the matter? He shouldn’t have any thoughts at all, shouldn’t be able to.

“How aren’t you dead?”

“How aren’t you? ” Byers counters, glancing back up at him – though Billy couldn’t say when he’d looked away at all.

The words should be taunting, teasing, some cruel reminder that Billy has been swept away in a world he doesn’t understand. They’re not. There’s something raw and broken in the cracked voice of the other boy. It’s a desperation, and it makes Billy think he finally knows what his stalker wants from him.

“They got me to the hospital,” he says, feeling oddly numb. Maybe all this is just too much, maybe the only way for him to stay sane is to feel nothing at all. It’s still disconcerting to be so hollow in the face of such a thing, though. “But you were already dead. I know you were. Your eyes–”

He cuts himself off, eyes slamming closed as if that could protect him from resurfacing images. Bloodstained shirts. Vacant stares. His breath comes in sharp gasps as the almost-healed wounds in his sides throb with remembered pain.

“I’m not sure I wasn’t.”

When Billy forces his gaze back open, on Byers, the other guy is staring unseeingly at the floor. There’s something about him. Something wrong and all too suddenly Billy isn’t so sure he wasn't right before. Maybe Byers isn’t human after all.

Now that his eyes have adjusted to that shadow of the corner, Billy can see just how… off Byers looks. His skin is pale, the bags under his eyes deep, dark bruises. Byers couldn’t look much worse if he tried. Something about his complexion is so gaunt – he looks like he hasn’t eaten in weeks.

And Billy can make out the bloodstained tears, the ones that should reveal those fatal wounds, in his clothes. Beneath them all he sees is shadow, smooth skin, and flakes of dried blood.

“What the fuck happened to you, Byers?” he whispers.

The words don’t mean to come out so soft, but Billy can only imagine that whatever Jonathan has been through was bad; mind-breakingly, traumatisingly bad. An awful feeling shudders through him when Byers finally, hesitantly, meets his eye again.

In the darkness, his eyes are all-consuming. They shine a bright onyx through the shade of night, piercing through him and causing his breath to leave in a startled huff, drawing him in like a black hole. Captivating. 

Maybe self-conscious beneath his stare, maybe something else entirely, Byers shifts. It moves him into the faint light from the window, and those dark irises light up with a scarlet glow.

“What happened?” Billy chokes out. “At… At Starcourt?”

The lingering fear hesitates his tongue, with only Billy’s humiliation pushing him through the word. He’s hardly been able to utter the name of the damn place since the incident. That fact weighs the cruel crush of shame down on his shoulders. He shouldn’t be weak like that, not when everyone else is pushing through like normal, like this is all fine. But then Byers flinches at the mention of it and that weight shifts, if only slightly. At least he’s less alone.

“I don’t know,” the other confesses, voice barely a breath like this is a secret he wants to keep to himself. “I was sure I died, but then I woke up again after most of the Mall had burned down. I’d healed. Completely. And I freaked out; I didn’t know what to do, so I wandered around, panicking, and then…”

“And then?”

“I killed something.”

Billy’s blood runs cold, heart plummeting. 

“What?” he croaks, mouth suddenly dry.

“It was like I was overcome by something… by a bloodlust. And the next thing I know I’m waking up over the body of some cattle.”

“Christ, Byers. What the hell did that thing do to you?”

There’s a long moment of silence before Byers’ gaze flicks back to his own. 

“I don’t know.”

It’s strange to hear that familiar shuffle of Byers making his way back to the window and actually see the steps to accompany that. It feels almost surreal, like this couldn’t be right. The movements match up with the sounds but after so long of imagining what the sight might look like, it almost feels wrong – like someone has just played the sound over a disjointed video.

“Are you coming back?” he panics to ask.

Byers pauses, not looking at him. Billy wonders, for the first time, if Byers hasn’t dared look at him most of this time, too. A beat of silence and then a nod, before the other is slipping out the window and sliding it closed with that isolating scrape of glass coming between them. He doesn’t look up to meet Billy’s eye and then he’s disappearing into the night, leaving Billy feeling oddly bereft.

-

“Have you told anyone?” 

That’s the question Byers finally asks. It’s been nearly a week now, since Billy started looking to that presence in the corner rather than averting his eyes like some desperate game of since-I-can’t-see-monsters.  

There’s something fidgety about him as he asks, a nervousness buzzing under his skin so acute to Billy. Maybe he’s just learnt to pick up on little things like this, maybe it’s the shift from months of utter stillness that alerts him. There isn’t much movement from him still – just a twitch to his fingers, a shift of his weight – but Billy notices. And then there’s the fact that he won’t meet his eye. Instead he trains his gaze on the floor, like meeting Billy’s own gaze would be the worst thing he could imagine. Like looking at Billy would confirm every one of the guy’s worst fears, not that Billy’s able to understand why he would feel that way.

“No,” he answers, and it’s completely honest.

Now, after everything, he sees no point of playing with Byers. He doesn’t leave him in waiting, doesn’t mess with him with some fucked up game of suspense to impose his superiority over him like Billy might’ve done with someone else. There’s no point, not after Byers has already seen Billy at his lowest. He doesn’t think he can find a way to turn this around to his benefit, and honestly he doesn’t know if he wants to.

After all, he thinks he knows what Byers is after, now.

“Why do you even come here in the first place? Far as I know, everyone still thinks you’re dead.”

“I haven’t told anyone.”

“You what?” he asks, incredulous.

Because it just doesn’t make sense. There isn’t a chance of him making any sort of sense of that admission. Byers has been – what? – skulking around in Billy’s room at night, for months, without so much as seeing one other person to tell them he’s back? 

No one fucking gave a damn that Billy survived – except briefly Max who promptly went back to remembering just how much they hate each other – but if they did he’d have ran to them. The chance to be held and comforted, to have someone give a damn and try to help him through this heap of fucking trauma he’s got to deal with now, is something he hasn’t had for years and Byers is just throwing it away?

It almost makes him furious, the way he’s just discarding it like it means nothing. But mostly he’s just confused. Even if he was going to just leave his family in the dust, why creep on Billy?

“Why the hell haven’t you gone back to your family? Those kids – your brother – have been miserable. They want you back more than anything, even I can see that and I couldn’t give less of a damn about those kids more than just making sure my piece-of-work step sister doesn’t get herself killed and me in trouble.”

Byers has the good grace to look ashamed by that, to look pained.

“I just… I don’t want to hurt them.”

Billy snorts in derision.

“They’re already hurt. The way they look at me… they wish I was the one who died instead of you, and I can hardly blame them after everything I did–”

“That wasn’t you . That was the thing that tried to kill us.”

“Yeah, well, they don’t see it that way and it was still me who did it, even if I wasn’t in control. And that doesn’t change the fact that perfect little Maxine and her gaggle of pals think I should’ve kept fighting longer so that you wouldn’t have thrown yourself in and gotten yourself killed.” He looks Byers up and down. “Or, not-killed, I guess.”

He drops himself backwards on his bed, patience drained. 

“The hell would you hide from them for, Byers?”

“To protect them.”

Billy lifts his head to raise a doubtful brow at the other.

“Something’s wrong with me and I can’t hurt them. I won’t.”

“But you have no problem coming here ,” he points out, voice flat. “Am I just not worth this masochistic protection?”

“It’s not masochistic,” the other huffs. “And you are… but you let me leave. You wouldn’t drag me to the doctors, or- or make me stay here all day to keep an eye on me. If something changes in me and I need to get away to prevent myself from hurting you, you’ll let me. That’s why I still came back even though you know I’m here. If my mom, my brother , ever caught me–

“I… couldn’t risk going back. Ever.”

Billy nods, humming thoughtfully as he processes all the information. That made more sense, he supposed. If there was anyone Billy cared about he probably wouldn’t want to hurt them either. Hell, he’d spent so long, so much energy, fighting against his possession, fighting to hold back the Mindflayer; the idea of hurting even a stranger again was unthinkable, there was already too much blood on his hands to ever wash off.

But he’d still left one glaring detail up in the air, one fact left unanswered.

“Why the hell come here at all, though?”

Byers froze under the question.

“At first I was drawn to the hospital, where I found out you were still alive. I think… I think it was the smell of the blood there.”

“What are you, a fucking vampire?”

The silence after that spoke louder than words, told more truth than anything divined from stars or science. A meteor shower of secrets that blaze through the silence between them, demanding attention, blaring across Billy’s consciousness. 

“Well, fuck . What’s… what’s your plan to deal with that?”

“I don’t have one. Just to hide away when the bloodlust comes back, I guess.”

Billy huffs out something between a laugh and a sigh. A sound of resignation. This is his fucking life now, and he guesses he just has to deal with it and all the additional supernatural crap it throws into his shitstom of an existence.

By the time Billy is drifting into sleep, he’s forgotten that Byers only half-answered his question.

-

When Billy next gets into a fight, the reason is better than that he just hadn’t been sleeping and so he was irritable. It’s that righteous justification that has Billy grinning with pride, despite the iron tang between his teeth, at the other kid parked across from him in the nurse’s office. The kid scowls at him, holding a wet paper-towel to the darkening bruise on his cheekbone. And yet Billy couldn’t care less; he feels good about starting this fight.

The kid he cracked across the face is one of the assholes Tommy surrounds himself with. Tommy’s made loads of friends since his breakup with Steve – Billy’s the crown jewel of them, since he’s the one most likely to piss Steve off, but the guy’s made sure to accumulate a little crowd to stick it to the ex-keg king. This friend, though, did something really fucking stupid to tick Billy off. Really, the shit that came out of his mouth makes Billy want to walk over and hit him again just thinking about it. 

“Think that kid Byers is missing again?” Carol was joking, curled under Tommy’s arm at their lockers across the hall from Billy. “I’ve seen his little gaggle of kids running around all worried ‘oh, we should check on Will!’. It’s pathetic; they’re in highschool now.”

“Well, like brother like brother, right?” Tommy’s idiot friend snarked back, an awful, teasing smirk on his face. “Jonathan always was a weirdo queer; we shouldn’t be surprised if his brother’s the same. Good think he’s gone, really since–”

He hadn’t had a chance to finish that sentence. Billy’s fist had connected with the side of his face, slamming him with a metallic clang into the lockers beside them. The rest of the group gawked on as the kid seethed, reorienting himself. All eyes turned to them, people stopping in the halls to take a look at him like some sort of spectacle. The funny thing is, for that fleeting moment, Billy didn’t even care. For whatever reason, Jonathan’s been looking out for him and hearing that horse shit about him… it set Billy’s blood boiling. 

It had him seeing red, the words bringing a furious heat to his face and suddenly Billy wanted more than anything to teach the fucker a lesson. The kid got his wits back about him and launched himself at Billy quickly enough. It all ended in a brawl in the middle of the hallway and Billy couldn’t even care less. He merely shot Tommy a manic grin from where the other’s sent him to his arse on the floor, having stepped in to put a stop to it all.

Blood dripped from the friend’s nose and he spat it in an awful red glob to the ground.

“The fuck is wrong with you, Hargrove?”

“How ‘bout you lot try chatting that shit again and find out just how fucked up I am, Hagan?” he taunted back, sucking the blood from his teeth. 

Tommy went white, face livid.

“You gay for him?” he hissed, disdain dripping from every word like poison and Billy blanched.

“No, I’m just not too impressed about you saying shit about the guy who saved my life at Starcourt.”

It ended pretty quick after that, with teachers stepping in and shoving them apart. So now he’s sat with stinging knuckles and a cut lip on a crappy plastic chair as the nurse keeps a wary eye on them. 

He still doesn’t care. As far as Billy’s concerned, Jonathan Byers is a fucking hero and deserves more than one tired asshole defending him and his family. But, hey, at least Billy can offer those magre services.

A figure haloed by neon lights stands before a monster in his mind's eye, holding his ground between the creature and the rest of this god forsaken town.

Maybe, he concedes to himself when a fuming principal walks back in to tell Billy he’s suspended and his father’s here to collect him, getting into a very public fight with one dick wasn’t the wisest course of action. He’s fucked. He’s so incredibly fucked. He almost considers making a break for it, as if that’d make this any better even in the slightest.

“We expect better than this, Mister Hargrove.”

That’s great for them; Billy doesn’t suspect he’ll survive long enough to care. Neil’s going to kill him, knock him around ‘til he sees stars. A constellation of bruises once more.

The look on Neil’s face when he collects him from reception is a mask of utter calm, though Billy knows that isn’t the case. Driving back to their piece of shit home in Hawkins is silent, the kind of silence that Billy doesn’t dare breathe too loud over. And the longer it draws on the worse Billy feels about this whole thing, sitting stock straight like if he doesn’t move Neil will forget he’s even in the car with him.

What a nice leisurely drive he went on for the sake of it; his much detested son isn’t in the passenger seat, still bleeding out of his face and battered knuckles, at all. 

Billy almost finds it funny that, between himself and fucking vampire Byers, there’s more than one dead boy walking. Almost. A smirk graces his features at the twisted irony of it all for a moment before he meets his fathers cold eyes in the mirror and it falls away.

-

Jonathan is in his room when he enters, and Billy is beyond glad that he decided to spend his afternoon helping with all the housework. It had just been a way to keep busy, scared that Neil wouldn’t take well to him idling in his room and deciding that meant he hadn’t learnt his lesson about his behaviour. But seeing the other guy in his room floods him with this strange rush of panic and relief that even the throbbing pain along his back can’t register against. If he hadn’t waited until he’d seen that car pull away for their date night then Neil might’ve seen that there was a boy in his room.

After everything, that would only have been the final nail in the coffin. His death sentence would’ve been assured. Neil already thought him to be a--

...Well, finding a boy in his room would cement that. Billy’d been surviving off his masculinity alone up until now.

“You can’t be in here,” he hisses, shutting the door quickly behind him lest Max walk past and see his visitor. “My sister. My dad–”

“What did he do?” comes Byers’ hissed voice, and Billy flinches at that. 

The words are injected with a cold venomosity that poisons the air. If you’d asked Billy only a few months ago whether he’d have ever thought Byers could be intimidating, he’d have laughed in your face. Now, though? Now he wants to back away, back pressed against the door despite the marks his father left along there earlier for his stunt at the school. Those eyes flash as they stare at him, finally revealing a glimpse of the bloodthirsty beast beneath the highschool boy facade. 

“Punishment for getting suspended,” he dismisses, voice weaker than he’d like.

Billy just– he can’t face the brunt of anyone else’s wrath today. He’s tired and hurt and this wasn’t supposed to go down like this. Byers wasn’t supposed to mention it; no one is ever supposed to mention it. That’s the cycle Billy has fallen into, everyone ignores and dismisses it. It’s nothing. No one is supposed to admit to seeing this awful, dirtied part of him. No one is supposed to care about seeing the flayed mess of the boy he had been.

But Byers is supposed to be dead, so clearly life doesn’t really care for the correct, natural order to things.

“He hurt you?” 

At that, Billy just glares back defiantly. This is definitely not how it goes. He doesn’t talk about it. He never talks about it, no matter how many times Max tried to get him to open up when she first saw his dad raise a hand to him. 

He can’t talk about it. 

After a beat, Byers seems to understand that Billy isn’t going to say anything. He just nods sadly, eyes understanding in a way that makes Billy feel more naked and exposed than he ever has before. Needing to turn away from that, Billy busies himself with getting ready for bed.

It’s only when that all too familiar sound of the window scraping that Billy’s attention snaps back to Byers. He can’t bring himself to turn back, but his shoulders tense, forming a coiled line.

“Please,” he manages to grit out, “stay.”

Silence.

“I just… I don’t think I can sleep by myself right now.”

“...okay .”

The blankets whisper as he crawls into bed. The sound feels loud in the silence of the house; louder, even than the barely muffle chatter of Maxine on a late-night phone call with either her boyfriend or that girl she’s become friends with. It’s almost too much.

He can hear and feel everything, overwhelming and dragging him down towards that gaping maw of panic. His breath beats at the pillow before him, his back burns with each breath, the tag on his clothing claws at his skin.

And then Jonathan is sitting down before him, back to the bed. Legs crossed, staring away from Billy. From where he lies he can see the line of Jonathan’s shoulders – barely rising in the slightest; it occurs to Billy that he doesn’t know if Jonathan has to breathe at all – and the back of his head. There’s something restrained about his posture, and it should be intimidating but all it makes Billy feel is safe – like he’s being guarded for once.

A pause. Then a cool hand reaches over the edge of the mattress to take Billy’s own. It’s gentle. It’s so fucking gentle that it floors him. No one has touched Billy like this in so long – he can’t even remember the last time.

Tears roll hot and uninhibited down his cheeks. It’s silent. After everything, one would think Billy would have taught himself not to cry, but he hasn’t.

Jonathan doesn’t say anything.