Chapter Text
Stu drives until the road runs out and the trees grow dense and quiet around him. No headlights but his, no company but the wind and whatever’s left of Billy in the back of his skull. He parks, pops the trunk, gathers the little bundle of sticks he keeps ready for nights like this.
It’s pathetic, really. A handful of tinder, a single match. But when the flame catches, when the dry brush curls into ember, Stu feels something stir inside him. The small fire crackles, flickers, reflects in his glassy eyes.
Billy’s spectre crouches across from him, bathed in gold. The firelight dances in Billy’s pupils the same way it did when they were kids with too many secrets and too much gasoline. He looks so alive in the glow that Stu’s breath hitches in his throat.
“You see it, right?” Billy murmurs. “What it could be?”
Woodsboro swallowed whole.
A blaze with their names in it.
Stu laughs--sharp, shaky, incredulous. It starts in his chest and escapes before he can stop it. He covers his face with both hands, head tipping back toward the stars. The laugh breaks into something wetter, but he presses it down, lets it twist into a cracked grin instead.
Then Billy is on him.
Hands on Stu’s shoulders, pushing him back into the pine needles. The world tilts. Billy swings a leg over him, straddling Stu the way he used to when they were stupid teenage boys in over their heads. Stu goes pliant, breath catching as spectral fingers trace the line of his jaw.
Behind Billy, the fire swells, haloing him in wild light. It paints him in contradiction--devil, angel, monster, miracle. All of them. None of them. Just Billy.
The car radio jolts on from a few feet away, like the universe decided to add a soundtrack. Static first, then Thom Yorke’s voice bleeding through the night:
"I’m a creep…
I’m a weirdo…"
Billy leans in. Stu’s eyes flutter closed as their mouths graze--barely there, not quite a kiss, but enough to drag thirty years of longing to the surface. Billy rocks against him, a slow, intimate pressure, more memory than body.
“You’re still mine,” Billy whispers against Stu’s lips. “After all these years… only mine.”
Stu shudders, tears gathering in the corners of his eyes. The kind he doesn’t wipe away. “Yeah,” he breathes. “Yeah, I’m yours. Always.”
And in the dark, with the fire crackling and the radio humming and Billy moving against him like something half-dreamed, Stu lets the illusion take him. Lets it swallow him whole. In his mind--his lonely, broken mind--they come undone together, the way they used to do.
When the world steadies again, Stu is sprawled on the forest floor, chest heaving, eyes wet. The fire’s burned low. Billy is beside him, propped up on an elbow, smiling with that cruel, beautiful tenderness Stu remembers too well.
Billy closes Stu’s fingers around the matchbox, pressing it into his palm.
“It’s showtime, baby.”
Then he fades--dissolves like ash in wind.
Stu lies there a moment, staring at the sky. Then he laughs softly, breath trembling.
“Yeah,” he whispers, lips curling into that dazed, manic grin he hasn’t worn since he was eighteen. “Yeah, this is gonna be fun.”