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Unlike sweet little boy Byers, Billy has no mama who'll come down and scream at them and demand to know what was wrong with her son. Demand that they fix her boy, this instant.
Billy just has Max, Max who was frightened blues and sympathetic greens and the storm-lashed grays of guilt, like a little ocean beside the chair in his hospital bed. He was an adult, so they asked her no permission when they shoved the needles in or when they woke his heart up to make him keep walking around in this living nightmare. He would've told them not to bother - if his tongue still worked, he would tell them tomorrow.
His father always told Billy that he was born wrong, that he was a fuck-up, and he'd always been a fuck-up.
That was probably true. Billy didn't know why, but the things he wasn't supposed to do always made him feel the most alive. He never felt good unless he felt bad, so yes. Neil was correct, Billy supposed. Drive too fast, music too loud, drink too much. A boy's hand in his pants, the burning of the smoke in his lungs. Anything that felt dirty or wrong was good enough for him.
He hadn't known how dirty and wrong he could be, until they made him wake up again, hospital sterilization acid-strong in his mouth. He didn't do anything but puke almost a week after that. Until he could learn to taste past the rotten meat smell of deaths and lives and a hundred other things. There was something wrong, something happened to his brain when they brought him back again - Billy's brain worked just fine, but his tongue didn't, anymore. The rest of him...well. They told Neil that he suffered some brain damage from rescuing those little toe-rags in a fire down at the mall, because he and Susan would never believe the real story even if Max was willing to tell it to them.
Billy was born a monster, died a monster, and came back to life as a monster again.
He was trying to be a monster she could live with, this time.
It was just so hard, but he tried. He really wished she wouldn't bring him near her friends - he could smell the fear all over them, taste the sweat of it in delicious, black and reddish-tinged wafts. Like meat.
Red and bloody and cooked just right, mouth-watering and charred to perfection. All he had to do with rip them open and take a bite. He could. Something in him knows that it would be very easy.
She was okay though - she was always those soothing greens and blue, those stormy churning grays.
It reminded Billy of the ocean and there was nothing that gave him quite as much comfort.
With her brilliant hair, shining beneath his eyes even in the darkness, Max was like a lighthouse, a beacon inside the mists and fog of a perpetual hurricane. She never tasted like meat - like cinnamon, sometimes, raging and fiery. Or like mud, when she was really sad.
She left him alone, sometimes. He understood - she thought he didn't, and that was when the guilty gray was its stormiest, near-black streaks lashing through like lightning. She thought he was confused and frightened whenever she left, but Billy knew that she would always come back. She told him so herself, didn't she?
But sometimes, she had to leave and he understood. A girl had to have a life and he hoped that she would do it more often so that he didn't have to smell the delicious temptation of her little friends.
Billy didn't go out without her too often - never whenever he thought Max might catch him. After all, it would worry her something terrible. They both knew Neil and Susan would hardly notice if Billy just died in his room, so he didn't see the harm in getting a little fresh air to himself without Max's worried hovering. Blue and green, going in and out like the tide. She was his ocean.
The breeze coming off of the quarry was strong, such a high distance from the ground below it.
Now and then, Billy would kinda wonder if it would be so bad if he just let himself dive in. Probably wouldn't really hurt - at that height, he might even be dead before he hit the water. And nobody would miss him, not even Max.
Max would feel bad, of course she would. She was a nice person. But she would be free of having to feel like she should take care of him. Which was ridiculous - his brain didn't work the way it was supposed to but that was pretty different from suddenly needing to be cared for like a child. He wasn't, she was.
She shouldn't have to, he'd think, and then stare into the water. Blues and greens.