Chapter Text
If he concentrates enough, he can still feel the trembles beneath the layers of his skin, contracting to make room for the centipede-like creature that once crawled along the contours of his lean muscle. It’s nothing but a ghost now, he tells himself. An instinctual twitch embedded in his subconscious. Nothing but a memory of what it felt like to easily boil under the sun when he was under the creature’s control. Now, simple sunburns just feed into the paranoia.
Paranoia. It’s just paranoia, he reminds himself, it’ll correct itself somehow.
Somehow. Everything accounts to the adverb of ‘somehow’ now. Somehow he still has a job as a lifeguard, even though it isn’t as warm as it once was now that autumn is drawing near. Somehow he hasn’t been cuffed in the back of a police cruiser. Somehow he didn’t kill those kids, his sister. Somehow everyone, except him, can walk around the streets of Hawkins like none of this ever happened―like he wasn’t just feeding these people to that thing. And despite you having to help Steve Harrington and his strange group of friends, somehow, you have yet to show your lovely face since that night of Starcourt Mall.
Why would you? The reason this whole mess started was because Billy had been on his way to some secluded motel room to hook up with a middle-aged woman, knowing your shift at that hole-in-the-wall diner would be ending soon and you’d be sitting on the curb outside waiting for a ride.
Billy shifts his blind glare away from the chlorine pool water to survey the area.
Clouds consume the once vibrant skies, draping the area in a cool grey and adding to the stillness at hand. There are a couple kids with snorkels and flippers diving into the deep ends, a couple mothers lined up in their usual spot but none have yet to turn to him, and a young couple deep in conversation while the third wheel awkwardly dips his feet with a boombox stationed beside him. It’s relatively quiet, and Billy can hear the faint romantic tunes drifting from the cheap speakers.
His head sinks forward once more, eyes dripping to his tank top which hides the grotesque scars, as the song plucks at his heartstrings to inspire the somberness he’s tired of feeling.
He tries to remind himself that that too is just a memory now―bare skin between lavender-scented sheets as this fresh-faced band spun on your turntable like a drug. It’s been three months. Three whole fuckin’ months since he woke up from his two-week long coma at the hospital, and yet he still needs to convince himself that you, too, are just some ghost that continues to haunt him.
A couple sprinkles hit his calves as the few people begin to pack up, and he laughs.
Somehow he’s still alive, and he wonders why.