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Steve assures her that he’s done all the right things, followed all the right procedures. He’s calm, he looks…not relaxed because no one could possibly be relaxed in this situation, but he looks like someone who is collected and has control of the situation.
But Robin knows him, and she can see in his eyes that some piece of him has quietly died – maybe not forever, but this day has wounded him deeply.
So, she tells him he’s got this and when their lunchbreak is over, she goes back to the high school building and immediately goes to the main office. Impatiently, she dials and waits for someone to answer, anxiously hugging herself with one arm.
“This is the 11th Hour,” El answers in her best ‘customer service’ voice. “I’m Jane. How can I help you today?”
“I need you…” Robin sighs, closes her eyes, and puts a hand over her face. “Is Hargrove there with you?”
“Yeah, Robbie, hold on.”
There’s a clattering in the background before Billy’s gruff tone says “Buckley. What’s up?”
“You…you need to pick up Steve from work, today.”
“Car break down? Didn’t sound like it was in bad shape, last I heard,” Billy observes cautiously.
“No, Billy,” she says with quiet pain. “He’s-he might be there late. But he’s going to need you, when it’s finished.”
“Okay, Rob, you need to back up here. What’s going on?”
“Steve had to call CPS, Billy,” she whispers, “One of his kids came in with belt marks all over him, and while the school nurse was looking him over, Steve brought his older sister up and started asking her some questions, and he and the nurse realized very quickly that someone has been beating her around, too.”
Billy’s stomach drops. “But they’re-they’re five year olds,” he says numbly. “Little kindergarteners…”
“Yeah.” It’s amazing how much pain and anguish can be packed into a single word. “They are.”
He is, at this very moment, imagining anyone attempting to do that to his sweet little Lulu and the blind fury that left him for so long suddenly comes back with a fiery vengeance. “What kind of monster beats a five year old with a belt?!”
But the thing is…he-he knows. He was raised by that same kind of monster – Neil Hargrove absolutely beat Billy with a belt, more than once throughout his childhood. He has no idea how Robin is managing her side of this conversation so calmly.
“Their mom is an addict, and it seems she doesn’t pay a whole lot of attention to how her boyfriend treats her kids. Steve mentioned a couple of times throughout the year that he’d noticed both of them looking a little…unkempt, but Rosie is a single mom and times are hard, so he gave her the benefit of a doubt,” Robin says grimly. “Turns out, they were looking unkempt because the sister was the one trying to do the laundry and making sure they both got a bath and she wasn’t always so great at it. Not surprising, since she’s only nine.”
Swallowing past the sick feeling in his guts, Billy asks “Okay, so what do you need me to do?”
“I need you to be there when he lets himself freak out. He was acting super calm when I saw him because he has to finish class and wait with them until CPS can contact their aunt, but I’ve known him for a decade – the moment a child doesn’t need him, he’s gonna fucking lose it, Hargrove, and I know you’re the person he wants the most right now.”
Billy’s eyes go wide. “I’ll be there.”
“I know.”
Even with Robin's helpful warning, Billy doesn't really know what to expect when he walks down the Grade K hall. There are no children left in the classrooms here - school let out twenty minutes ago and these kids are too little for extracurricular activities.
He is expecting what he sees in Steve’s classroom least of all.
Steve and the other kindergarten teacher, Melanie Dohr, have rooms that mirror each other – boxy spaces slightly wider than they are long, with a doorway at one end that faces the children’s cubby stations, except that Melanie’s desk and chairs are to the left of the classroom door and Steve’s are to the right. At the very end of this room is a little sofa and an open space where they do story time and nap time and when he leans his head in to check on Steve, this is where he is sitting.
Squished right up against him on that sofa is a little girl with brown hair in two long braids. She’s a little girl, but she’s still too old to be someone Steve teaches. As Steve reads aloud, one arm around her, she listens intently as she leans into his side, a tissue clutched in her fist that she holds near her mouth as she silently cries. She’s heartbreaking and what’s worse – Billy actually recognizes her.
“Something that for lack of any other name might be called friendship existed and always had existed between Marilla Cuthbert and Mrs. Rachel, in spite of – or perhaps because of – their dissimilarity...”
This is Marcy Roberts, Martin’s big sister. He’s seen her many times, because Marcy walks her brother down to the kindergarten hall every morning before she goes back to Mrs. Webster in the third grade hall.
On their very first date, Billy had overheard Steve having a talk with Martin outside the classroom when he hit a classmate who called him names, and it reminded Billy so vividly of himself it was nearly painful. Of course Martin was the boy who’d taken a beating with a belt. He didn’t know why he hadn’t guessed it was Martin in the first place.
Silently, Billy makes his way into the room – he knows when Marcy spots him, because the third-grader immediately becomes tenser and tries to shrink into Steve’s side, her big blue eyes watching him wearily. Steve’s arm tightens around her, eyes briefly flicking upward before he serenely continues with his reading.
Old Billy would’ve been furious that Steve was deliberately choosing to ignore him – Old Billy was furious when Steve ignored him. New Billy slowly crept his way around to Steve’s desk while being watched by a little girl, settling back into the teacher’s chair and trying to look as innocent and nonthreatening as possible.
He wouldn’t consider himself a natural with kids, not like Steve was, and he’s definitely never had to interact with a child whose been treated…well, the way he’d been treated, he supposed. Lulu has never been afraid of him, but she also doesn’t really know any better. Uncle Billy is Uncle Billy, and he’s always been Uncle Billy in her eyes. And Justin is a worthless father, but he’s never actively tried to cause his daughter physical pain or mental anguish – though his complete disregard for her existence could hardly be called any better.
Steve is beloved by all of his students, of course, but for Marcy, he may literally be the only adult that she trusts. Marcy and Martin need him and that will hold his entire focus until they can be settled.
For a while, Billy wonders what happened to Martin, and then realizes that he probably had to stay in the nurse’s office. He knows from hard experience that sitting was likely painful and difficult at the moment if Martin got the belt. With any luck, the nurse has given him a light sedative, something to put him to sleep or even just make him a little more comfortable.
When Marcy’s focus is no longer dedicated to waiting for Billy to suddenly attack her, he takes the time to really look at her. Has she always been so small and thin? Is he only really noticing this now because he has some idea of what her home life is like? There’s a wrapping of gauze around her right forearm hinting that Marcy didn’t entirely escape the mercies laid upon Martin. Her hair – brown to her younger brother’s toe-headed blonde – is looking a bit unkempt and her clothes aren’t dirty but they are also certainly not new and Billy knows he wouldn’t have noticed any of this if Robin hadn’t already told him that their mother has been neglecting them.
But Steve had noticed.
Steve has been noticing, maybe the entire year, probably watching with helpless dismay as Marcy and Martin’s condition deteriorated right before his eyes as their home situation got more and more unhappy. Billy wonders what finally led him to the proof he needed to get CPS involved.
In hindsight, Billy now realizes that more than one of his own teachers had tried to get him to open up to them about the way Neil treated him at home, but he had been a scared and angry child and in early childhood, he hadn’t understood what they were asking for. And later on, he hadn’t trusted any adult enough to do that, until he’d become a sullen and violent teenager that everybody wanted to write off instead of an energetic and overeager child.
Marcy is still half hiding against Steve’s side, listening to him read – or maybe just letting the sound of his voice wash over her the way Billy is doing. Her hand is up near her face, fingers reflexively curling but she doesn’t actually put any of her fingers in her mouth. It’s not normal, is it, for a nine year old to still have the urge to suck her thumb?
He loses track of time, letting the murmur of Steve’s voice soothe him into something like a doze, though his eyes are still open, when there is suddenly a knock on the classroom doorframe. A slim blonde woman with a briefcase wearing a navy blue pantsuit stood in the hall, standing beside a brunette woman with her hair cut into a short bob. “Hello, you must be Marcy!” the blonde says, just a little too bright to be entirely natural. “I’m Mrs. Rhodes, but you can call me Vicki.”
“Uh…okay,” Marcy says nervously, still glued to Steve’s side.
Steve gives Vicki a very charming smile – though now that Billy knows him so well, he can see that it’s a bit insincere. “Can I talk to Marcy for a just a second? Nurse Downing’s office is just down the hall and to the right if you’d like to check in on Martin. He might still be asleep, though.”
“Alright!” Vicki said, though the brunette looked like thrilled about this, she followed her back down the hall to the nurse’s office.
As soon as the woman’s footsteps had dwindled down the hall, Steve gave Marcy the worn down copy of Anne of Green Gables. “Keep that with you,” he tells her quietly. “It has my address and phone number inside. I think your Aunt Rachel will take good care of you, but if someone hurts you again, if you don’t feel safe, or if you just want to talk to me, call me, okay? Even if it’s really late at night, even if it’s not a school day, even if it’s the middle of summer, alright, Marcy? Any time you want to talk to me, call me. Alright?”
“Okay.” Marcy repeats, louder this time but with a wobble in her chin. She clutches the book to her chest like a shield, fingers tightening on the spine now that she knew the truth of its importance.
She surged forward, embracing Steve desperately, which he returns before plucking up her faded purple bookbag. “Let’s go find Mrs. Rhodes and Aunt Rachel. We’ll see how Martin is doing.”
---
The hand off was just as hard as he knew it would be. Martin was emotional and weepy, throwing something like tantrum – or Steve would’ve called it a tantrum if he didn’t know how scared and confused and traumatized he was – but Rachel handled it pretty well and managed to calm him down. Marcy practically had a panic attack as they were leaving but Steve could almost see her reminding herself to be the responsible big sister.
Fuck.
Steve has to remind himself for the hundredth time that the state won’t let a single man with his history and his salary have one child, never mind two. No matter how much he loves them. No matter how torn up he is to watch them leave.
Rachel will do a good job, he tells himself firmly. Truthfully, Rachel couldn’t do much worse to them then her younger sister already had. Even after his gentle question of Marcy – something Vicki and Rachel will probably follow up on in more depth later – Steve isn’t exactly sure when Rosie checked out on her job as a mother. What little Marcy had admitted to, beyond the evidence directly on her and Martin’s bodies, left him believing that the real problem had been that Rosie was never checked in.
Rachel had looked unhappy with the development of this whole situation – unhappy, but not at all surprised. Steve thinks that maybe Rachel has long harbored some suspicions of her own.
Steve walks back to his classroom like a sleepwalker. He feels drained, like some kind of vampire has been sucking on his neck all afternoon.
Billy leaning against a corner of the hall, waiting for Steve to return. His eyes, so stark and vividly blue, remind him painfully of Martin and Marcy. Reminds him of a hospital bed, and a monster made of a mountain of corpses and carnage. Reminds him of the way Billy had looked against the starched white linens, and how for the longest time, that was the last image Steve ever had of him.
Deep in himself, he feels sick down to his soul. With time and practice, he’s gotten the hang of dealing with other people’s pain, but Steve has never quite gotten the knack of looking directly at his own. His voice crawls from his throat, falsely bright and without any warmth. “Picked a wild time to surprise me.”
“Wasn’t a surprise,” Billy grunted, watching him closely. The way he always seemed to be watching him. The way, Steve now realizes, the way Billy literally always had watched him. “Buckley asked me to take you back home.”
“I don’t know why,” Steve says, frowning at his desk as he idly tidies up before reaching to shut the lights off. “You don’t have to. I can drive, it’s not like I’m impaired or something.”
“Humor me,” Billy replies shortly, in a way that tells Steve he won’t be taking ‘no’ for an answer. Not that he ever really takes ‘no’ for an answer. Steve finds it both aggravating and charming, and he knows that combination is going to get him into some serious trouble one day.
Steve shrugs, though even that’s half-hearted. “Fine, I guess.”
Maybe Billy and Robin are right – he doesn’t really remember the drive back to his apartment and he’s sure that he opened the door at some point, but Steve finds himself in the kitchen, just…staring at the cabinets, and he can’t quite recall how he got here. Standing there, with no Billy in sight.
“Billy?!” His voice cracks, his voice going shrill with the same panic that’s making his palms sweat.
“What, what’s wrong?!” Billy shouts from the bedroom. His bedroom. Their bedroom? “Stevie?”
“I-nothing.” Relief suddenly makes his legs so weak that he nearly just collapses right down to the ugly linoleum floor. “Nothing!”
Come back. Come back and hold me and don’t leave me – not now and not ever. Tell you love me and tell me you’re okay. Tell me everything is gonna be okay.
Steve slid down the side of fridge and on to the floor, breathing deeply in and out.
Back when they first began living together, Robin had very quickly caught on to the fact that sometimes Steve was…not okay, so she made him get some time with an anxiety specialist – paid for by the US government, because part of the cause of this condition was a secret interdimensional hole under the town that occasionally produced violent alien entities that killed and ate people, which Steve and Robin were both not allowed to talk about with the outside world. They taught him breathing exercises, meditation techniques for moments like this one.
When he can get his legs beneath him again, Steve hauls himself off of the ground and searches around for the cast iron skillet. They have the ingredients for cornbread around here somewhere.
It will probably still taste like sawdust to him, but the activity will occupy his mind, at least for a little while.
He feels bad that he can’t pretend cheerfulness, even to Billy. Beyond the aching numbness that has penetrated into his very bones, Steve’s anxiety is shrieking at him, telling him that if he keeps acting this way, Billy will leave. A voice in his head that sounds like Robin warns him that his inability to give a shit about even that isn’t a good sign.
They eat dinner, and Steve tries to answer like a normal person would, but he can tell by the way Billy doesn’t quite meet his eyes that he’s not doing a good job. A much less helpful and comforting voice – one that sounds more like his mother or his father – tells him not to be so sensitive. To stop overreacting.
That other voice, his Robin/common sense/better angel voice, won’t shut up. Won’t leave him alone. Tell him. If you don’t tell him, you’re always gonna feel like shit about this. Tell him, dingus.
In the end, it’s Billy himself that breaks that final barrier on his silence.
---
Billy knows how to solve this – or at least he knew how Henry solved this when he found Billy wandering around fucking Silver Lake in the rain. But he doesn’t really want to put Steve in a bath of ice cold water and pour whiskey down his throat until he gags. Lost white boy. Hey, lost white boy! Why you walkin’ round lookin’ like somebody whipped yo dog? Huh?
He never did give him a real answer. What could he have possibly said?
Part of the problem is that if Billy didn’t know him so well, Steve would seem almost normal. But he seems a little extra vacant throughout dinner, while watching television, even while brushing his teeth. Like somebody replaced his boyfriend with a friggin’ Stepford Wife or something.
As gently as he can, Billy removes the remote from Steve’s nearly limp fingers. Steve barely blinks at him – though it would usually garner at least an indignant squawk from him. He tries to think of a way to say it diplomatically. Fails, because he’s Billy Hargrove and he has no diplomacy – and says: “Are you going to talk to me about this or do I have to torture it out of you?”
He’s entirely joking, but Billy flinches when Steve absently replies, “I doubt you’ll have any better luck than the Russians,” blinks, and then says: “What?”
Swallowing down his queasiness – Max has passionately defended Steve’s bravery at Starcourt before he ever even returned to Hawkins – he sweeps back the bangs hanging into his eyes. “Your kids,” he says, still clumsily attempting gentleness. “Do you want to talk about that? What happened?”
Steve smiles weakly, giving Billy a hug that held maybe a tenth of the strength he normally possesses. “No,” he whispers, face hidden away against Billy’s neck. “No, I really don’t want to talk about it.”
Billy swallows again, wondering why he feels so disappointed. He doesn’t really want to hear the grisly details – he’s probably got firsthand knowledge of most of it already – but at the same time, it feels like part of Steve doesn’t fully trust him. Though that idea should sound ridiculous, an insecure part of himself – mostly the part that still remembers his dad calling him a fuck-up all the time – wonder if Steve is actually as serious about them as Billy is.
Because Billy is like…insanely serious about them. A hundred times more serious than a heart attack, serious.
If a single pastor in Indiana woulda let him, Billy would put a ring on the long white second finger of Steve’s left hand tomorrow. That’s how serious he is. They’ve been together less than a month, but a part of him has belonged to Steve, with Steve, for more than ten years now.
Beyond even his own paranoia and insecurity though, is just…plain old worry.
He’s pretty much always known that Steve has a heart of gold, but it’s starting to look like maybe this day has hammered it to pieces. He watches Steve brush his teeth mechanically, unaccompanied by any of his usual chatter, moving like someone twice their age.
At bedtime, they usually trade off being the big spoon and little spoon, but this time, Billy stays facing Steve, gently strokes his cheek. A part of him feels a flair of love and hope when Steve leans into the touch. “Take it easy, heartbreaker,” he whispers, sweeping back Steve’s bangs again. “I’ve got your back tonight.”
The streetlights outside spread across their bed in a warm orange glow, allowing Billy to watch Steve blinking in a heartsick daze. Faintly, Billy hears him say “He was just crying. Just crying the whole morning, and I couldn’t understand why. By the time I took him to the nurse’s office, I-I think I already knew.”
Steve is the one crying now – crying and hangin’ on to Billy like he’ll disappear.
Billy’s just stunned, stunned and heartbroken by how utterly devastating this has been for Steve. He’s speechless, and the only thing he can do is hang on and be here for him. So he does.
---
The next morning is one in which Steve is allowed to sleep in, both because it’s Saturday and also because it seems that Billy has already gotten up to feed Angie for him. Normally she wakes him up whether his alarm goes off or not. He felt the mattress move just before dawn, but Billy is in bed with him now, wrapped around Steve’s back. He’s got a lowkey headache from all the crying – or trying not to cry – that he did yesterday, but he feels calmer about the world today. Marcy and Martin are safe, and Rachel will make sure they stay that way. Billy is here.
Relaxing back into the pillows, Steve finds Billy’s hand resting against his belly and laces their fingers together. He can tell that he’s already awake – his fingers squeeze back at his own too readily.
“I thought about you,” he admits quietly, tracing over Billy’s knuckles – rougher than his own, belonging to fingers shorter and thicker than his own. “The head nurse probably thought that I was going crazy. He was just…staring at me, on the bed. And I kept thinking about the last time I’d seen you before you left town.”
“What happened to me…it’s all in the past,” Billy says simply, and the ways his arms tighten around Steve’s body is comforting but the words don’t soothe him.
It’s all in the past.
But it wasn’t. Not for Steve.
“I use to wonder where you were,” he whispers, lifting Billy’s fingers to trace his lips over the scars on those knuckles. “No…not wonder. I use to worry. About you – where you were, what had happened to you.”
And now that the words had were finally coming out, Steve couldn’t hold anything back. “I’d worry myself sick, because the last two times I’d seen you-” He chokes, surprised anew that even with Billy right beside him, those images held just as much power over him as they had before. “-the last times I’d seen you, you were dying or you were-you looked so hurt and lost…”
“I’d wonder if you were even still alive – were you okay? I used to have these-these really vivid night terrors about that night in the mall…” He closes his eyes and swallows past the hard lump sitting in his throat. “Robin made me see a doctor, it got so bad – she didn’t know the specifics, but she did know that it wasn’t getting better.”
And for ten years, he hadn’t been able to say the name of his crush out loud, like there was a terrible curse placed on Steve. He laughs weakly. “I-I remember nearly fainting when El sad she’d seen you at Max’s wedding, and you looked well. You were happier. Calmer. It seemed so silly after that – though I still wondered what happened to you.”
“That’s not silly at all,” Billy murmurs, and he sounds thoughtful, squeezing Steve around the middle and warming him right through. “Was I okay? I wasn’t. Not for what felt like a long, long time.”
To Steve’s surprise, Billy hooks his chin over Steve’s shoulder and continues speaking. “After I tried going back to my mom’s – I was kinda homeless. I mean, I had the truck, but I’d just got out of the hospital and I could barely sleep for more than an hour or two at a time and every little noise made me wanna crawl outta my skin. I didn’t really notice much back then, but I’m sure anybody who walked down the street crossed to the opposite side when they saw me coming toward them.”
“This guy – this random black dude named Henry found me walking around Silver Lake, just wandering around by myself in the rain. I’m still surprised nobody called the cops on me. Anyway, Henry took me back to his apartment, poured whiskey in me until I gagged and threw a bucket of ice water over my head.” Billy chuckles slightly. “Miguel was so mad at him for that.”
“Miguel?” Steve repeats in a whisper, terrified that Billy will stop talking.
“Yeah, Henry’s boyfriend, Miguel. He was a nurse. I called them Harold and Maude just because it drove him crazy. They, um,” Billy took a deep breath in, held it, then exhaled hot air down Steve’s neck. He shivers and Billy cuddles closer, Steve’s heart thump, thump, thumping for him. “They were part of the group of volunteers who like…took care of people with AIDS. A lot of their families just kind of…abandoned them.”
Thrown them away, Steve thought, heart sinking. Just like Billy’s mother had (repeatedly) done to him.
Quietly, Billy says “For my first couple years, that’s what I was doing. Helping Henry and Miguel and the other volunteers. Looking back on it, they probably thought I’d lost someone to it. Most of us had, it seemed to be everywhere.”
He’s silent for so long that maybe Steve thinks that this is it, these tantalizing hints are all he will get of Billy’s past for right now, and Steve continues obviously stroking at his knuckles. He aches at the idea of Billy, still injured and hurting from the rejection of his mother, wandering through California all alone, until a good Samaritan was kind enough to take care of him.
Then Billy says, “Sometimes, I wished…I wished that I had it.”
And Steve can’t breathe, he can’t move, he can’t think. With six short words, Billy had wrecked his whole thinking brain. “You…that you had…”
“Yeah,” Billy says, very softly. “I didn’t want to die, I didn’t even want to be sick. But HIV was a concept Henry and Miguel would’ve known how to understand. I know that they saw the bandages, that first night, and the scars later on. I think I spent the first year there wishing that I were sick instead, just so that I would be able to tell someone what had happened to me.”
Steve can’t stand doing this without seeing Billy anymore and rolls to face him. “You shouldn’t have had to do that by yourself,” he says, nose trailing down Billy’s neck. “Nobody should have to do something like that by themselves.”
Willing his anxious stomach to settle, he adds “I hate that you went through that and that you were in such obvious pain that a literal stranger could see it. I hate that it took meeting two complete strangers for someone to finally care about when you were hurting. But more than anything, I hate that I wasn’t there for you when you needed someone.”
Billy’s freckles show in the morning sun, and the light makes his eyes bluer. He leans into the touch as Steve holds his cheeks in both palms. And what he says next makes Steve love him just that little bit more: “Maybe not. But I used to be a little boy, just like Martin Roberts. And you were there when he needed you, when Marcy needed you.” Softly, painfully gently, Billy kisses his mouth. “Because of you, Martin doesn’t have to grow up into me someday.”
Steve caresses down Billy’s cheeks with his thumbs, palms tickled by all the bristle. He whispers, “I don’t see growing into you as a bad thing, Billy.”
Billy huffs out a laugh, long eyelashes falling to his cheeks. Just the lightest of flushes touching the tips of his ears. “You were there, y’know.”
“Hm?” Steve murmurs dreamily, caught in the spell of those freckles and lashes.
“Every pair of big brown eyes were your eyes. Every lanky brunette with a sweet smile was you. I saw you everywhere I went. Trust me, even if you didn’t know it – you were there, heartbreaker.” His eyes devour Steve’s face, gaze lingering at the curve of his lips. “But more important than that, you're here with me right now."
When Steve cuddles closer, he rests his head right above the scars that mark the place where the Mindflayer pierced his chest. He has never been more owned, more possessed by anything than the feeling of his bare hand on Billy's chest. "Wild horses couldn't drag me off."