#steve xbilly

[fizzigigsimmer]

It's spooky season and I need all the werewolf aus. All of the witchy teens. All of the vampire boyfriends.

If anyone has written a fic or know of a list, I will love you forever for a link.

[stackson-trash-blog]

The Happiest Place on Earth.

Rating: PG for mild gore.

Pairing: Harringrove. 

Summary:                                                                                  

{Call it psychic, like the kid in the film by Kubrick with a dad who reminds Billy of things he can't forget. There are no ghosts here, only the kinds of horrors which can steal someone away in the realest sense.}

A year ago, six months, a week into the past, a day, if someone had told Billy Hargrove he'd be trudging through the ruins of an old amusement park under the duress of moonlight at three am he'd have blown smoke into their watering eyes. Thrown his head back to that same moon, and told them to fuck right off.

Punched them square in their jaw, junior, senior, figure of so-called authority, it wouldn't have mattered. If they'd intimated that he'd be tearing his lungs to shreds calling out for the king of Hawkins. Meaning every single litany of his name, as panic, blind and hateful swamped every inch of him.

The terrain works against him, as if warning signs about unstable ground weren't enough. Abandoned attempts at a rollercoaster stand out in relief against what little light Hawkins gives off from such a distance. In daylight it just looks pathetic, overgrown and charmless, but it's disturbing just what the lack of illumination can do. Billy doesn't scare easy, after all the cartoonish monsters said to haunt places such as these can't stand up to the one living under his own roof. He's shivering because it's too fucking cold, and his leather jacket remains slung uselessly across the back of the drivers seat. Adrenaline's got nothing to do with it, fear has no home here. He tells himself these things like a record stuck on repeat, like someone who believes them.

Up ahead a concessions stand, paint peeling upon it's ugly mustard and red signs with their exorbitant prices lined up in rows rendered pointless by bankruptcy, it stands with the door ajar.

There.

Call it psychic, like the kid in the film by Kubrick with a dad who reminds Billy of things he can't forget. There are no ghosts here, only the kinds of horrors which can steal someone away in the realest sense.

Light seeps out from beneath a rotten frame, and Billy pushes past it without hesitation. He's ready, and yet not, for the sickly scent which hangs heavy in the air beyond. Obtuse particles, fade like ash between his fingers when he catches one drifting by, the mark of a place which genuinely warrants a warning sign. A barbed wire fence to keep stupid, reckless, desperate kids like him away. The far wall has been consumed, gelatinous tendrils dug deep into the corpse of an old bank of counters designed to display ice cream.

The happiest place on Earth awaits.

Beneath his hands the breech feels wet, and congeals disgustingly even where he wipes it away upon jeans already slathered with dew and grime. Beyond is truly as those little freaks described it. As much as they were willing to say now that they'd seen him almost get neutered by his own little sister. Steve had been far more forthcoming, air-headed, impulsive, eager to square off at any seconds' notice.

Steve.

It's been six weeks. Six weeks, four days, hours he doesn't dare to count. Six weeks in limbo. Six weeks where everyone else scrambled to find the King of Hawkins as if he were genuine royalty. Where Dustin hid a constant rawness around his eyes. Where Nancy joined Missus Wheeler in place of Steve's own damn parents, stapling his gormless face up onto telephone poles and message boards. Where everyone had a fucking opinion, and the need to share their idiotic theories. Where the smallest of things, the simplest of triggers reminded Billy of him.

Memories which he had no right to have made. Not with him.

The Upside Down renders his voice smaller than it should be. Swallows it whole, like it'd done with every trace of Steve save for a brief transmission. The same crackling entreaties not to follow. Not to mount some futile rescue attempt that had gone into production almost before contact had been lost. He still doesn't know why Nancy called him, why she knew he'd be livid if this remained an AV Club afterschool Special. Her and that creep with the camera as the only guest stars. But she did, and it was what had led him here.

Do right by him, by them. She seems like just that kind of girl. No wonder Steve had been slow to piece the parts of himself back together he needed to. Those last few fragments had been slotted back into place by Billy himself. And now it was all threatening to shatter again, crumble right out from underneath them both because Hawkins is merely a different kind of cess pit to the one he first though it to be.

//

"Gross. The grossest in the whole of Hawkins. Stop, stoppit, fuck, we're supposed to be studying."

"Perks of an open house, Harrington. Now put out, or get out."

"This is my bedroom, dipshit. You're gonna fail, drop out, and start working at KFC, and I'll come in and laugh at you wearing that dumb hat."

"Oh, is that fucking right?"

"......Find the roots of a polynomial, nature and points of intersection between two functions as well as--"

"Nice comeback, loser."

//   He wanders from one end of that godforsaken town to the other. The sure weight of a bat with nails hammered crudely into it is his only companion. By the second circuit the air beneath the bandana tied around the lower half of his face is thick with heat, and what little voice Billy had left is gone. A trashcan bears the brunt of frustrations only amplified by just how dense the silence is now. How completely it mocks him.

Upon main street he crouches, face pressed into his knees, tears hot against the denim beneath. He’s already an expert at keeping each and every one of them silent, even when there's no one to judge him.

Flakes of ash rain down, anointing Billy’s clothing and hair no matter how often he brushes them away with the backs of dirty hands. Two blocks down from the old post office, now held in the clutches of vines which pulse in a vile rhythm, one which makes his stomach churn for some reason, that's where his world decides to end. 

The road is decorated with burnt out vehicles, their crumpled facades stretching like wizened limbs to an uncaring sky. A few weak willed fires smoulder here and there, but this is a place where the foetid and the organic have seeped through its numerous cracks. In possession of a beating heart which pounds beneath his boots.  

At first it's just another trick. Another in a long line of putrid things which dare Billy to venture into the peripheries of his sight. To look for long enough to give himself nightmares if home is ever somewhere he makes it back to alive.

Then it coughs, he coughs, and the details begin to distinguish themselves from every other grey, wasted element of the Upside Down. He's running then, boots slamming down so hard upon the concrete that they feel as if they could create their own fractures. Bolting over obstacles that are now just as insignificant as the threat of the very same creatures which had almost laid waste to Hawkins. He doesn't so much as stop, but skid upon shins which find themselves torn to pieces. The bat clatters, rolling away to rest against a withered tire in this never ending jam of traffic.

".....took you long enough."

It feels redundant, and words surge up from his depths, hot like bile because Steve is smiling like he's not doused in his own blood. As if crimson isn't daubed over his chin in a wet slick. Like his chest doesn't rattle with every breath, and the rest of him isn't trembling so hard it's almost difficult to keep his shoulders still under clammy palms already staining themselves red.

".....the kids....they're not here are they?"

And it's so painfully like him to ask about those stupid children that Billy lets himself sob loudly enough for the whole of this distorted version of Hawkins to hear. He barely has a voice to call Steve a piece of shit, or to tell him that no, they're not here. He's the only one who's enough of a moron to come and save his dumb ass.

Above storm clouds have begun to gather, wreathing the sky with the threat of thunder. A sigh of relief vibrates in what's left of Steve's chest, and he turns his head to watch for the first spots of rain.

".....fuck, this is gonna ruin my hair."

The laugh they share hurts deeply. Twists around inside Billy's guts. Worse than the hardest punch, sharper than that time a jacked up douche in Cali tried to shank him for running his goddamn mouth. Pain like that could never compare.

Steve presses a solitary finger to his lips when he tries to explain. He's still smiling as the light leaves his eyes, and the skies finally open.

[stackson-trash-blog]

Anywhere but Hawkins.

Rating: PG for naughty words.

Summary:                                                                              

{He's still wearing those fucking Ray-bans; end of December, the cusp of the coldest snap of the year, and still Mister Daddy Cool can't quit. Embers crackle and shift across their unyielding black, and Billy wonders just how quickly they'd burn too.} 

Exhibit A; one Steve Harrington, currently ensconced in precisely seven layers of blankets in varying degrees of both condition and garishness. Not that the plaid of each of his numerous barriers against a non-existent chill in the air has anything upon the monstrosity gifted to him by Mrs. Wheeler.

For a woman with such exquisitely maintained hair, her taste in Christmas sweaters is bordering upon criminal. Matched only by a collection of novels whose lurid, muscle-bound covers would put an adult book store to shame.

Nonetheless, as with anything that represented an unbalancing of the natural order of things in Exhibit A's life, he accepted it with a practised smile, and the kind of thank you polite young men who'd have you daughter home by ten always provided. 

Not to mention, the mere sight of it seems to give Billy hives.

He'd already tried to toss the offending article out of the window of the Camaro on the drive down, and after stoking a rather impressive fire it'd been the first thing to make it's way suspiciously close to said flames before being rescued for it's integral part to play in Operation: Hissy Fit.

And so there he is, knees hunched up to Santa's workshop where it’s depicted in all it's poorly rendered woollen glory, nose tinged pink by an impending cold - one quite possibly caught whilst clambering around in a snow drift trying to relocate the offending article before Billy flipped him the bird, and decided to drive the rest of the way solo.  

Four, or is it five cans of shitty truck stop beer in, and there's a distinct ruddiness to Steve's cheeks. He's still wearing those fucking Ray-bans; end of December, the cusp of the coldest snap of the year, and still Mister Daddy Cool can't quit. Embers crackle and shift across their unyielding black, and Billy wonders just how quickly they'd burn too.

They're shoulder to side, crumpled up on a sofa made for one and a half people. A blanket lies listlessly over the rips in Billy's jeans. He doesn't need it, but ever one to fuss, and fret, and make a nuisance of himself, Steve insisted. Like it's fifty below, and they're being circled by penguins, or something. He's ridiculous, he *looks* ridiculous, but things are quiet and still save for the odd snap of dissolving kindling, and Steve's pitiful sniffles.

Lame as it sounds, lame as Steve had been since he first gunned the engine, and tore them out of dodge, the very thought of spending Christmas with his shoddy excuse for a family. Maybe drowning annual sorrows in booze, and smokes, and girls whose names don't even register. Yeah, it just doesn't cut it. Soft against the mound of blankets just about around where Steve's head is, Billy scoffs almost inaudibly. At himself, this whole stupid, wonderful piece of anywhere-but-Hawkins they've gotten themselves lost in.

"Merry Christmas, asshole."

Steve snorts, his head jerking upwards as the dregs of his latest can slosh onto the bare boards below.

"Same to you, dipshit."