Chapter Text
When Billy wakes up, it’s a slow, fumbling process. It feels like trying to climb his way out of a hole, the edges crumbling and slicked with rain water.
He’s in and out for hours, the dull pain throughout his body always chasing him back under.
But he doesn’t go back to that room, and he doesn’t go back into the dark.
Instead, he dreams. About watching his body move without his input, about a monster bigger than his house, about red hair and freckled cheeks and the burning need to protect someone.
Truth be told, he had barely been cognizant when he and El had broken the mindflayer’s control over him. It had felt more like walking through a waking nightmare than a real event that had actually happened to him. He hadn’t been afraid, but only because he’d been too out of it to muster the emotion.
When he finally wakes up for real, fear is the very first thing to come to him.
He can hear the heart monitor beeping faster and faster to the rhythm of his fear, can feel the flighty adrenaline coursing through him, but his body is beyond sluggish. Even the panic can’t make him sit up and look around the way he wants to. The heaviness settled into his flesh is suffocating, only adding to the horrible fear that maybe the monster isn’t gone after all.
He makes a noise, just the ghost of a whimper, and suddenly there’s a hand on his cheek.
“Billy?” Max’s voice greets him, “Are you-- hey, it’s okay, you’re alright.”
Never in his life would he have thought the sound of his little step-sister’s voice would be such a relief to hear. But it is, it’s familiar and clear enough that he can tell himself she’s really there. He clings to it like a lifeline.
“Max?” His voice sounds terrible, shredded and dry as a reaped field, “Max…”
One of her hands grips his, and when he gets his eyes open enough to look at her, there’s tears in her eyes. For him. She’s crying for him.
She cried over him that night too, he thought. It had been so dark, so hard to see despite all the bright lights and fireworks, but he’s sure he’d seen her crying. He hadn’t thought anyone would be sad to see him die, least of all Max.
Her hand on his face reminds him that whatever he’d believed about her was wrong.
“I’m right here, not going anywhere.” She reaches up to wipe away some of her tears, and her sleeve slides down.
Billy’s blood runs cold.
There, right around her wrist, healing but not gone yet, are the same bruises that have decorated his own skin for years now.
“Max--” His heart monitor starts spiking again as genuine dread replaces the formless lingering fear, “You-- he’s been--”
The words wont come easily, he’s never really talked about what Neil is like behind closed doors and his throat is sore and scratchy but this is important. He hadn’t spent years acting as the matador to Neil’s raging bull for him to turn on her anyway.
Max’s attention flickers to her wrist and then back to Billy’s fearful eyes. She tugs up her sleeve and sighs.
“Yeah.” She says softly, her voice tired in a way that Billy understands and immediately hates, “Started when he got the first medical bill. He wanted to--” She swallows hard and grits her teeth, “He wanted to take you off life support. I told him what a dick move that would be after you saved me, and he… didn’t like me talking back.”
Billy’s mouth had already been dry, but now he can’t seem to stop convulsively swallowing. Trying to make the information go down without choking him. He’d always hoped that when one day something took him out, Max would already be grown enough to be out of there. Or at least that Neil’s preferential treatment of her would continue without him there to buffer.
“You sh…ould have l…et him.” He whispers.
Max’s expression does a 180 from resigned hurt to fury in seconds.
“You think I should have let him kill you?” She hisses, “After everything he’s done to you, everything he’s done to us you think it would really have been better to--”
She shakes her head and breathes out a long sigh that demonstrates more emotional maturity than Billy has felt for a single second of his entire life.
“No.” She shakes her head, “No, that’s fucking dumb Billy. You deserve better.”
He wants to argue that he doesn’t, that he’s not worth her getting hurt over. That he was secretly pretty sure Neil would be what killed him one day anyway, before any other kind of monsters joined the list of things he had to worry about.
But she looks so tired, and he knows he’s too tired to keep fighting right now. He doesn’t accept it, but he doesn’t argue either.
“Whe…re’s you…r fri…end?”
Some of the tension in her shoulders eases when he doesn’t press the issue, like she’d been preparing to fight him tooth and nail on the matter, which is only adding to the bizarre unreality of the situation. But seemingly the topic of El puts her in a much better frame of mind.
“She’s at home. It’s like two in the morning right now.” She glances over to the clock on the wall, squinting as she tries to make out the numbers, “Two thirty, whatever.”
Billy would ask what the hell she was doing here at such a ridiculous time, but he’s sure he knows the answer now.
“She’s…go…od.” He rasps, really wishing for a cup of water even though he’s not sure that he could actually manage to drink it, “Yo…u li…ke her?”
Max surprises him by blushing all the way across her cheeks. She’s never been the most open with her feelings, even before the heaviness that sits on her shoulders now had settled in, but apparently El is immune to that rule.
Interesting.
“Yeah, she’s a great friend.” The way she says ‘friend’, the little snag it hits on the way out of her mouth, is the same way Billy has talked about several of his own ‘friends’ in the past when asked, “She’s really cool, and funny even though sometimes her jokes don’t really make sense. And badass as hell.”
She smiles a little, tucking a strand of her hair behind her ear.
God, he wishes he could just hate this kid. It would be simpler, it would cause him so much less pain. He tried projecting all of his anger onto her, but it had just made him feel like even more of a piece of shit. He knows it’s not her fault, he does, and the more he talks to her the more he sees similarities between them. Caring for her went beyond obligation the moment he decided to throw himself between her and that monster.
But this isn’t the time or the place for talking about that, especially when he can hardly talk and staying awake feels like an Olympic sport, but at some point he’ll bring it up. After all, she’d given him a second chance, twice over now, which was more than literally anyone else had ever done for him. She deserved for him to be an actual brother to her this time around.
Now, if only he knew how the fuck to do that.