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The house is quiet for the first time in maybe seven hours.
Not just quiet, but silent; not even soft snores or the faint swish of water lapping at the lake shore penetrate the bubble surrounding Steve. He picks his way around the dropped cups, spilled liquor, and broken glass that litters the living room floor, draping the blanket from his bed over Jonathan, who’s passed out on the couch. It’s not like Steve’s using it.
Normally, Steve likes the hour after a party’s over, the silence and darkness and frozen state of the world. It takes a moment to adjust, to come down from the high of the party, but by that point it’s toeing the line of overstaying its welcome and he needs a break anyway. But it’s like he can’t come down from this one, hasn’t been able to in the hour and change since he kicked everyone but Nancy, Robin, and Jonathan out.
It’s like he hasn’t been able to come down all week.
They’d been skeptical when he brought up the idea of throwing a late summer rager, and fairly so. Nancy in particular hadn’t been thrilled, seeing as how Tina’s Halloween bash had gone, but Steve assured her this one wouldn’t be the same.
“Listen, I don’t give a shit about all of the popularity contests or reclaiming my title as ‘King Steve,’” he’d told her, which wasn’t quite true but was close enough that she didn’t call him out on it. “This is just an excuse to get blitzed out of my mind and wake up with a hangover rather than a panic attack for once.”
She conceded quickly enough after that.
And it worked great, while it was happening. But then it ended, Steve hustled everyone out the door not because his parents would kill him for throwing a party in their lake house but because he just didn’t want to deal with people that weren’t his people anymore, and then his people crashed within fifteen minutes. Steve spent an hour lying on his back, staring at the shadows the trees made on his ceiling and convincing himself he saw monsters in leaves and moonlight until he couldn’t stand it anymore.
It’s not that he can’t sleep, per se. He just can’t make himself want to.
The clock in the kitchen reads 3:17. Steve hits the brew button on the coffeemaker without checking to see if it actually has coffee in it. It whirs quietly as he retrieves a mug from the overhead cabinet, the first sound he’s heard in an hour beside the screaming in his head. The mug clinks when he sets it on the counter, and he’d be worried about waking Jonathan if he didn’t know for a fact that that boy is dead to the world.
A thin stream of coffee pours into the pot, and Steve fills his mug to the brim. He’s mostly sober by now, but he’s restless and anxious and has to go all the way or else he’ll start drinking again. And despite the brief release it provides, he doesn’t actually want to become an alcoholic. He wants to feel prepared for the things that go bump in the night. Yeah, the coffee will probably make him worse, but at least he’ll have his head back.
It burns the roof of his mouth when he takes his first sip. A part of him wants to chase the pain. The rest says it’s not worth it.
The house is too small, has been since he was a kid, and Steve steps carefully around the detritus left by trauma and teenage rebellion so he can slip out the door to stand on the back porch. The chilly air on his face is bracing, a reminder that fall is approaching even if it’s still ninety degrees and sunny during the day. He takes another sip of coffee, cooled by the breeze running fingers through his hair, and stares out over the water.
It’s still, unnervingly so, and Steve misses the height of the party, when the less sloppily drunk kids had decided to go skinny dipping off the dock.
The same dock, he realizes, that someone’s sitting on right now. Quick on the draw, Harrington, a voice chides in his head. It almost sounds like it could be someone he knows. But the three people he knows best are asleep in the house behind him, and he made everyone else leave.
He steps off the edge of the porch and starts walking barefoot down the path to the lake. Curiosity killed the cat, they say. He knows what’s out here, knows what he could find, but he’s not sure he cares anymore. Besides, as he draws closer, the silhouette settles into the figure of a man sitting cross-legged on the wooden slats. He shifts slightly and Steve catches the bright glow of a cigarette over his shoulder.
Demogorgons don’t smoke.
He isn’t disappointed, not even a little, not at all.
The moonlight is bright enough to illuminate Steve when he stops just behind the other person’s left shoulder, bright enough to illuminate the planes and angles of Billy Hargrove’s face as he takes another drag from his cigarette, gaze fixed straight ahead. He doesn’t have a shirt on and his hair is still damp from the lake, shining darkly in the white glow. Steve can’t decide if he looks more or less human like this.
“What are you still doing here?” It comes out rough, scratchy because he hasn’t spoken in the last hour and before that he was screaming with everyone else.
Billy blows smoke out into the night. “Don’t want to go home yet.” It’s barely louder than a whisper, but the sound carries. It’s just because they’re near water, Steve tells himself. It has nothing to do with the attention they’re drawing to themselves by breaking the silence. Normal kids don’t think like that.
Steve shrugs and sits down next to Billy. He feels the other boy’s eyes on him as he raises his mug to his lips, tasting the coffee but not swallowing any. After a moment, he offers it to Billy.
Maybe an eternity later, he accepts it, holding out his cigarette in return. Steve takes a drag, feels the nicotine sharpening the edges of his mind. Edges that could cut, he thinks. Edges that will cut, if he isn’t careful.
They can cut him. That’s fine. But he can’t let them cut anyone else.
“What are you still doing up?”
The question interrupts Steve’s private pity party, pulling him back to the lake, to the dock. “Don’t want to sleep,” he says. Billy nods briefly and hands the coffee back to Steve.
They stay like that for a few minutes, passing the mug of coffee and the single cigarette back and forth until both are drained and useless.
“You alright?” Steve asks. It’s too cold for Billy to be sitting out here in just a pair of jeans, but then again, it’s too cold for jeans and a t-shirt and that’s all Steve has.
“What is this, twenty questions?” Billy scoffs, then squints at Steve. “I should be asking you. You don’t look so hot, Harrington.”
Steve knows, sees the dark circles under his eyes every morning, feels himself shaking even though the temperature isn’t bothering him. He feels stretched thin, one phone call away from bursting apart at the seams. “Please,” he replies, trying for one of his patented King Steve grins, even though he knows it’ll fall flat. “Don’t pretend you don’t want this, Hargrove.”
Billy rolls his eyes, reaches toward his pocket like he’s going to pull out another cigarette but thinks better of it. Steve brings his knees up to his chest and wraps his arms around his legs, rests his cheek on them so he can look at Billy. The moonlight, the stark contrast between light and dark, should make him look harsher, but they do the opposite. He looks almost… well, soft isn’t a word Steve ever thought he’d associate with Billy Hargrove, but he looks like he could be.
“How was it, being the King of Hawkins High?” Steve’s not sure why he asks; he knows well enough, it can’t have changed that much. He still finds himself curious, though, listening intently for Billy’s answer.
“It’s a heavy crown,” Billy says, and even though Steve knows it’s true, knows he’s not lying, he can’t quite believe what he’s hearing. “Sometimes I think maybe you got it right, getting out while you could. Say a word and you’re dead,” he adds, but it sounds like an afterthought. Steve huffs a laugh through his nose anyway.
“Don’t worry, I won’t tell.” Steve’s fully awake now, fully aware, and he remembers why he’d wanted to get blackout drunk and forget all of his problems. There are worse things out there that want him dead than Billy Hargrove. He’s stared them in the face.
He wishes he could say that meant he wasn’t afraid of them anymore.
That’s what it is, he realizes, that’s what’s keeping him up at night, what has him walking the knife edge of paranoia. He feels helpless, hopeless. He feels hunted.
Steve says it before he even thinks it, before he even wants to think it. “I’m tired of being scared all the time. Thought maybe this would help, but I just feel worse.”
He coughs as a wave of cigarette smoke hits him in the face. Billy leans back, a satisfied grin creeping across his face as Steve glares at him. So he did light up again.
“We’re all fucked up, Harrington. You’re not special,” he says.
“I know, trust me.” Steve gives a dry, humorless chuckle, holds his fingers up without looking over. The cigarette lands in them anyway. He takes a long pull, holding the smoke in his lungs until it burns, until it hurts enough that he feels alive. “I’m like, the least special person alive,” he breathes on the exhale. “Ever feel like everyone else brings something to the table, something important, and you’ve got absolutely nothing?” He scoffs, keeps talking before Billy can answer. “What am I talking about, you’re Billy Hargrove. The King, the heartthrob, the basketball captain. You’re practically dripping value.”
“Hey,” Billy cuts in, sharp but somehow not threatening. “Don’t go around assuming you know what my life’s like. I did that to you last year, till you taught me not to.”
Steve makes a non committal sound in the back of his throat, lets Billy steal the cigarette back from his loose grip. He stares at the lake again, the perfect, black mirror of it. He hadn’t gone swimming with everyone else because he’d felt like it would swallow him whole and he’d never come back out. Now, he wonders if that would really be such a bad thing. If he just slipped under the water and let it take him away.
“Why’re you telling me all this, anyway?”
It takes Steve a moment to register the question, another to realize he doesn’t know. They were poking and prodding each other just a few hours ago, Tommy egging them both on. Steve was goaded into shotgunning four beers, Billy chugged vodka straight from the bottle. They narrowly avoided a two-on-two fistfight, Nancy quite literally dragging Tommy and Billy away while Robin held Steve and Jonathan back the only reason they didn’t actually come to blows. Steve doesn’t even remember what it was about, doesn’t have the energy to care. The point is that historically, they’re not exactly good together.
But it’s not like he’s got anyone else. There’s Nancy and Jonathan, of course, but he’s always felt like he’s on the periphery, not quite fully in their loop. And he has Robin now, but she’s been through less than he has and he wants to keep it that way. It’s not… he feels different from them too, like they’ve been able to process, to move on with their lives while Steve’s rooted in place, poised and waiting for a threat that’s already come and gone. And he’s sure they’re still not over it, no one is, but none of them have to go home to a big, empty house every night and think about how all they can really do is throw their body in front of danger, how they’re practically useless if they can’t get there in time. None of them stay up all night waiting for a message that they desperately hope won’t come until they start wishing it does, just to prove all the watching and fear and pain was worth it, just to be able to do something.
He shrugs. “Guess it’s easier, sometimes, to talk to someone who doesn’t care at all than the people who will care too much, y’know?”
Billy doesn’t respond right away, and when Steve turns to look at him, he finds Billy staring back. “What?”
“Nothin’,” he says, shaking his head. “Just, you seem like the kind of guy who always cares too much.”
In any other context, Steve is pretty sure he would take that as an insult. “Yeah,” he says, thinking about Nancy and Robin, sleeping in the same bed in the room next to his, about Jonathan, who’s going to cut his feet on glass in the morning because he refused to take the other bed, about Dustin and Lucas and Will and Mike and El and even Max. “I can’t really help it at this point.”
Billy shrugs, turning back to the lake and raising his cigarette to his lips. “Well, maybe that’s what you bring to the table. Not many people are capable of caring like that.” There’s a bitter edge to his voice, like they’re starting to tread on something personal. Steve doesn’t want to push him, but it isn’t easy to keep his mouth shut.
Billy blows smoke rings over the dock. Steve tracks their movement until they dissipate above the lake. As the last one floats by, he feels a gentle pressure under his chin and turns his head slightly to see Billy’s fingers in front of his face, holding the cigarette to his lips. It’s his thumb that’s under Steve’s chin, anchoring his hand to Steve’s head.
Steve imagines he can taste Billy’s lips on the paper as he takes a drag, staring Billy in the eyes. Even washed out in the moonlight, they’re so fucking blue. Billy’s touch lingers on Steve’s skin even after he’s broken the contact between them. Silence falls again, the kind of silence that presses on Steve, that makes him feel trapped. He digs his fingernails into his arms, but the pain isn’t as grounding as it used to be.
“I’m sorry,” Billy says suddenly. Steve’s startled by the words themselves, grateful for the sound of them. “For beating the shit outta you last fall. And for going after the kid.”
“You should be,” Steve says instead of something rational like “Thank you” or “I appreciate it,” because apparently he actually has a death wish. “But I—I realize what it must have looked like to you, how bad it was. I’m sorry too.” He only looks at Billy after he’s done speaking. Billy nods, looking pensive as he pulls from his cigarette again.
“Some shit went down that night,” he says. It’s not a question. Steve nods anyway. “That why you’re afraid?”
“I dunno.” He does know. Not that it matters; Billy seems to see through the lie.
“I know what it’s like,” he says slowly, looking out over the lake, “to be scared all the time. It sucks ass.”
Steve huffs in agreement, flopping back so he’s lying on the dock, legs stretched out in front of him. After a moment, he hears rustling beside him, feels the warmth of Billy’s arm line up with his as he follows Steve to the floor.
“I just want it to be over,” Steve whispers.
“Someday,” Billy replies, and it sounds like he’s trying to convince himself as much as Steve.
It all seems so surreal, this conversation, the kind of thing that could only happen at three in the morning, far away from anywhere they see each other during the day. And that’s the worst part; they’re fifty miles outside of Hawkins. The lake isn’t going to swallow him. There are no demodogs stalking the underbrush, waiting to catch him by surprise. Not even a whiff of a gate to be seen. Steve knows he’s being irrational about it all, there’s nothing out here to get him, but he’s still shaking, his heart’s still racing like it’s the last five minutes of a game.
Maybe he can’t get away from it.
“Don’t go home,” he says before he can overthink it. He feels Billy shift next to him, knows he’s being stared at, keeps his eyes fixed on the stars overhead.
“What?” There’s something in Billy’s voice that Steve can’t quite identify. He wants, desperately, to know what Billy’s thinking in this moment. If he were El, he could find out. The best he can do now is turn his own head, meeting Billy’s gaze. Their faces are inches apart.
“You said you didn’t want to go home,” Steve says, because once he starts digging, he can’t stop. “So don’t. Stay here tonight.”
Billy chuckles, but it’s strained, like he’s trying to hide something else. “I don’t think your nerdy little friends are gonna like that.”
“Who cares what they think?” Steve asks, and now he’s really caught Billy by surprise, because at literally any other time, he’d fight to the death for them. “There’s plenty of room.” A bald faced lie.
“Steve,” Billy says, and it’s serious now, intensely so. “Don’t do this. I don’t need protecting.”
Steve’s thrown for a moment, because he hadn’t thought Billy needed protection, hadn’t been trying to offer it. Something’s stirring at the back of his mind, Don’t go around assuming you know what my life’s like and I know what it’s like to be scared all the time and I don’t need protecting, but he’ll figure it out later. “Then protect me,” he says, and wants it even when Billy’s eyes widen in surprise. “Just. Stay.”
Steve’s not quite sure what happens after that. One moment Billy’s lying next to him, looking like he might be giving in to Steve’s obvious desperation, and the next he’s on top of Steve, arms bracketing his head and one leg slotted between Steve’s.
“Did you mean it?” he whispers. Steve feels the warm puff of breath hit his nose.
“Mean what?” He sounds absolutely wrecked to his own ears, and he should care that Billy can probably hear it but he doesn’t.
“When you said you wouldn’t tell,” Billy says, and it takes Steve a moment to remember that far back. “Did you mean it?”
“Yeah,” Steve breathes, and then Billy’s kissing him.
It’s like drowning and coming up for air at the same time, like a weight’s been lifted from his chest even as he’s being smothered. Billy’s a solid presence above him, the only solid thing he’s felt in the last year, and it takes Steve all of three seconds to run his hands up Billy’s sides and pull him down until he’s pressing Steve into the dock. Billy’s lips strike sparks against Steve’s, light a fire in the pit of his stomach where he’d been cold and empty. And he knew before, knew that he was hollow, but he didn’t realize how much of him was gone until now. He’s not sure what he can get away with, knows most people don’t like a tongue shoved all the way down their throat, but he needs this like he needs to eat, to breathe, to stop thinking. Needs to be as close to Billy as possible.
For the first time all day, all week, maybe since his life was quite literally ripped in two, Steve feels real.
Billy starts kissing along his jaw, down his neck, and Steve feels his nails scratching Billy’s back but he can’t stop his fingers curling in. “Don’t leave,” he pleads one last time, eyes screwed shut and hands clutching desperately at Billy’s shoulders. “I don’t want to be alone.”
He doesn’t realize he’s crying until Billy moves back up to his face, wipes at the tears falling from the corners of his eyes with the pads of his thumbs.
“I’m not going anywhere.”