Chapter Text
“Maxine,” Neil says, and it’s the voice that makes Max flinch, the one that suggests he’s trying to keep things light and bright because he’s seriously pissed off. He’s hovering in the doorway, one hand half-raised for a knock; Max looks over the edge of her comic to stare. “Have you seen your brother?”
Max thinks back with sweet satisfaction to him sinking to the floor with her needle in his neck. “Nope,” she lies, flicking over a page. She has more interesting things to concern herself with; Wonder Woman’s fighting a dinosaur.
“Okay.” Neil lets out a little breath, like he’s at least trying to control his temper. “He went out looking for you. He never came back.”
“He’s probably wasted somewhere. Maybe he crashed his car,” she adds, with clear cheeriness.
“No,” he says slowly. “That’s the thing. His car’s here.” Max shrugs, not least for the look of irritation it flashes on Neil’s face. Playing with fire, she thinks, and then she thinks about the baseball bat full of nails and thinks she’ll probably be okay. “You know,” he continues, “You shouldn’t go out without telling us how to find you. Something could happen.”
Max rolls her eyes. “I told you. I was with some kids from my class. We had an assignment.”
Neil’s lips thin. “Warn us next time, alright? And leave a number we can reach you on.” He pauses, taking hold of the doorframe as he turns. “Which kids?” he asks.
“Will Byers,” Max answers, bored. “Uh, Dustin. Dustin Henderson.”
“Byers?” Neil frowns. “Isn’t he the little queer that hangs around with the – ”
Max feels her stomach lurch. “Did you want something else, Neil?” she interrupts, fully lowering the comic to glare.
Neil stares at her in silence for a while. “Your mother is out of town for a few days,” he says, almost offhand. There’s something in the way he says it, some underlying strangeness that makes the hair stand up on the back of her neck.
“Where?”
Neil’s annoyance visibly grows. He’s not used to questions. “Visiting cousins in Delaware,” he says.
“We don’t have cousins in Delaware,” Max replies slowly.
“Take it up with her when she gets back,” he answers smoothly. “And you should think twice before talking back to me in future, little lady,” he adds as he shuts the door.
Max pulls a face at the now-closed door. It’s possible, she decides with a gloomy look out the window, that they do have cousins in Delaware. Mom’s family lived in New Jersey while she was at school, she remembers. But for her to take off like that, leave her here with Neil –
She’s probably just being paranoid, Max decides, falling back fully onto her bed. It’s not like she’s had a normal week.
The phone’s ringing in the hall when Max gets back from school; it’s the thing that tells her that it’s still only her and Neil in the house. He never answers it, and it never rings more than twice. “Little son of a bitch,” Neil mutters, slamming it down as she comes in. “Playing hooky. I’m gonna kick his fucking ass.” He throws her a sharp look as she shuts the door. “Where have you been?”
Max bites back a retort. “I came straight home.”
“A likely story,” he sneers. “Playing house with the little faggot, I bet. You a dyke, Maxine?”
For a moment, her heart jumps into her throat and she hasn’t got a goddamn clue what to say. Then, almost absently, she thinks of Billy. Of what he’d do. “No, sir,” she says.
He snorts. “Go do your homework.”
Max slouches off to her room, sitting down on her bed and clutching her board to her chest. That same sense of wrongness is creeping up her spine again. Billy’s not – he’s not stupid. She’s seen a hundred times the way he rides the line to avoid pissing his dad off as much as he can. He’ll be fully aware that playing truant is going to get him the beating of his life. And her mom wouldn’t just up and go without –
Max moves her desk chair under the door handle; she isn’t allowed a lock. She sits back down on her bed, hugs her knees to her chest. With just her and Neil in the wind-rattled house, she suddenly feels more than a little afraid.
Billy has no idea where he is. He remembers the smell of wet leaves, slick underfoot, walking and walking and walking. He remembers the sensation of falling, further and faster and faster again. A pulsing, awful orange-yellow light, the vicious jagged slashes of blue-and-green lightning bolts, and then – darkness. But not, crucially, emptiness.
He doesn’t know what the fuck it means, but Billy feels watched.
Wherever he is, they’re in the middle of a hell of a storm. He walks, one struggling step after another, through a forest that seems to stretch for miles, that squelches awfully underfoot. There’s no moonlight, no stars to navigate by; he just dragged himself off the rain-soaked ground, picked a direction and walked.
Slowly, slowly, the woods clear away and buildings swim into view. The storm’s knocked the power out; he can’t see for shit, can’t hear anything over the squealing wind. Billy thinks he can make out the squat black shapes of buildings, houses, but there’s no cars, no people.
Billy trips. He’s been too busy squinting into the distance and trying to make something out to remember to pick up his damn feet. The surface he crashes into feels like tarmac, and he hisses at the impact, more out of annoyance at his clumsiness than any actual pain. He spins to see what threw him, and makes out – he isn’t sure what it is. It’s as thick as his leg, colored dark, lying right across the road.
The thing moves. Billy swears under his breath, scrabbles to his feet, starts to run along the tarmac – but it’s somehow there in front of him, twining round his ankle and throwing him to the ground again. He kicks at it, desperate, and remembers then the sensation – dragging, not falling, along dank, slimy ground. Whatever this thing’s attached to, it brought him here.
There’s a screech, this bone-juddering howl that sounds like it’s been wrought up from hell itself, and the thing around his leg skitters away into the darkness. He catches sight of something in the flashes of light, more of a shape than anything else, big and black and legged, crouching up above him. He’s never been so fucking terrified. Then he stands up, turns around, and sees the thing that made the sound, and has to instantly reconsider. It stands like a man, but there’s no face, no face, and its arms, long and sinewy and rippling, end in claws –
A big pillar of smoke slams down next to him hard enough for the ground to shake, and Billy realizes they’re fighting over him. He turns back round and runs, harder than he has in his fucking life, away from the cacophony of screams and roars behind him. He thinks he recognizes the nearest building – he isn’t sure – he doesn’t think either of the things saw him come this way –
“I need El’s help,” Max says under her breath. They’re sat huddled in a corner in recess, trying in vain to keep warm against the bitter November wind. Will’s still off sick; there’s rumors going round that he’s dead again. That he’s at home asleep in a coffin. They’ve given up arguing with them.
Mike, predictably, immediately rankles. “She’s not some toy – ”
“My mom’s missing,” she interrupts with a glare. “Neil won’t tell me where she is and I don’t – I don’t trust him. I think she might be in trouble.”
Lucas makes a face. “Billy’s dad?”
“Yikes,” Dustin murmurs. “Yeah, I don’t trust him for shit.”
“El can find people, right?” Max continues. “I just thought – I don’t know. She can at least tell me my mom’s okay.”
“We should ask her,” Lucas agrees. “It’s her decision, Mike.”
“Fine,” he says tightly. “We can ask her. But you can’t get pissed if she says no.”
“Her name is Susan,” Lucas says. Mike, scowling slightly and arms crossed, is staring down at the photograph with extreme scrutiny.
“Susan?” El repeats, frowning. “Who is Susan?”
“My – my mom,” Max explains, nervous. El still scares the shit out of her, as much as she wants them to be friends. “She’s gone away – or Neil said she did, but she wouldn’t without talking to me, and I’m – I’m scared something really bad has happened to her.”
El nods. Her face is solemn. “I’ll help.”
“El – ” Mike interjects.
“I said yes,” she says again, fixing Mike with a hard stare. “Pass,” she adds, and Dustin fishes out the scarf she’s gesturing for while Lucas fetches the radio.
When she lowers the scarf from her eyes and wipes away the blood, her face is white. “Gone,” she says, voice a little shaky, and Max’s stomach drops.
“Gone, like – dead gone?” Lucas asks, and El shakes her head. She holds out her hand and flips it over.
It’s Lucas’ turn to go pale. “Oh, shit,” Dustin says.
Billy can’t see, can’t see a fucking thing, the world trapped down to a tiny little foot-wide box around him, thick with panic and adrenaline. He runs until his legs give out, until his veins are pumping acid, and then he hides like a child, curled up against trees, buildings, walls, any big, black shape he can find.
It’s like hide-and-seek, he thinks. Except that’s not true; that’s not exactly what it reminds him of, lazy summer days spent ducking in and out of rooms on tiptoes, his mom standing on their sun-washed porch counting loudly behind her hands. Really, it makes him think back to –
– where are you, you son of a bitch, his father says in the echoing, empty space inside his head –
Billy jams the crux of his hands into his eyes hard enough to see stars, shaking with rage and adrenaline and fear. That thing, that mass of writhing shadows with legs, it feels like it’s – like it’s laughing at him from somewhere. He knows it isn’t behind him because he’s sat with his back against the wall, but something fucks up all the hair on the back of his neck nonetheless. The very air feels rancid against his skin.
Billy opens his eyes. Everything around him is perfectly quiet and still; there’s only the crackle-snap of thunder, throwing that ersatz, awful light across the ground.
The building opposite him is some kind of house, fancy and big. He doesn’t recognize it. Billy takes a deep, jagged breath, and throws himself towards it, heart in his throat. Billy flings himself up the stairs, three at a time, slams himself against a wall underneath a window and hides. He closes his eyes and breathes, breathes, breathes.
Ninety-seven, ninety-eight, ninety-nine –
A face jumps out at him from the darkness. A human face, tight, white, and terrified. “Billy?” it hisses, still not quite fully in view, and after a moment he realizes who it belongs to.
“Susan?”
Hopper’s eyes slide over each of them, considered and slow. He’s got his feet slung up on his desk; Max privately thinks it’s a dirty habit. But it’s his desk, she supposes. She’s just glad to get away from the secretary who kept trying to buy Girl Scout cookies off of her.
“Is this about Billy?” Hopper asks.
“Billy? Fuck no,” Dustin says immediately. Mike elbows him on instinct for the language.
Max frowns. “What happened with Billy?”
“He’s not been at school all week,” Hopper says, sounding bored. “Principal’s been up my ass to find him and teach him a lesson, and his dad’s been up the Principal’s ass for telling me.” They all exchange a look. “What?” he asks, exasperated.
“My mom’s missing too,” Max says quietly. “El says she’s – ”
“Gone,” Dustin interjects. Hopper’s expression instantly turns grave.
Lucas holds out his hand and turns it over. “No, like, Upside Down gone.”
Hopper stares between them. “But she closed the gate,” he says.
“The Demogorgon could open and close gates all the time,” Mike points out quietly. “Maybe – maybe there’ll always be a way, now.”
“Maybe they went through before she closed it,” Lucas suggests.
Neither is a comforting thought. “We’re not gonna leave her there, are we?” Max hears herself ask in a small voice.
Hopper looks right at her, and his face is solemn and kind. “No, kid,” Hopper answers gently. “No, we ain’t.”
“It’s gotta be scared of something,” Billy mutters, dragging his hand through his hair. “It’s got a body, right? That means it can be hurt.” Fear, food, fucking – that’s what drives things. He’s really hoping he and Susan fall under food.
“We haven’t got any weapons,” Susan whispers back. “There’s nothing here.” He knows what she means; it’s like they’re a shadow of a place, rather than the place itself. Shadows, Billy thinks, and then goes still. Susan freezes too, looking terrified, until she realizes he’s patting himself down, hoping desperately to find –
“Fucking yes,” he breathes, pulling out his lighter. “I bet the fuckers aren’t too fond of this.”
“Then what?” Susan asks, her voice shaky but hard. “Billy, what do you think we’ll even – ?”
“Stay alive until it gets light,” Billy mutters. “Then maybe we can get our bearings, try and find a phone. There are power lines outside, they must hook up to something.” They’re going to need water pretty soon too, he thinks. Food they can cope without, but their odds of surviving without water are much, much worse.
They wait, and wait, and wait. It never gets light.
“Tell us how it happened,” Hopper says gently. “The first time.”
The look on El’s face makes her seem years older than she is. “It was an accident,” she says tiredly. “Papa just wanted me to talk.”
“To who?” Hopper asks. “To the Demogorgon?”
She nods. “I touched it. Then...” she shrugs, looks away.
“Maybe it wasn’t just you,” Max says quietly, breaking the silence. “That – that thing, the Demothingy, it was the one that could open portals, right? Maybe it, like, borrowed some of your energy or something. It’s not like you were trying to make a way through.”
“It was me,” El answers. Her voice is hard; but she looks a little unsure.
“So is that how you got back from the Upside Down?” Max asks. “You opened it up again?”
El shakes her head. “There was a hole. In the school. Then it closed.”
Max frowns. “But that was after you killed the – the – ”
“ – Demogorgon,” Dustin says helpfully.
“The Demogorgon,” Max finishes, trying not to look vaguely embarrassed at the word. “So what made the hole?”
“Maybe the Mindflayer did it,” Mike suggests.
“Or maybe there’s more than one Demogorgon,” Lucas adds.
“There were eggs,” Hopper concedes with a look of faint disgust. “In the Upside Down. I saw – I saw eggs.”
Dustin beams. “Maybe a whole ecosystem,” he says breathlessly.
Lucas rolls his eyes. “Please don’t be so excited about that,” he says flatly, and Dustin tries and fails to give him a dead arm.
“So you could do it again,” Hopper asks El, cutting across the scuffle. “If you had to.”
El nods once. Max hasn’t seen that look on her face before, that mixture of fear and nerve. It’s kind of awe-inspiring. “Yes.”
“Alright,” Hopper says, after a pause. “Alright, kid. I’ll go talk to Joyce.”
“This is the dumbest shit I’ve ever heard,” Steve says, aghast. “You want to tear a hole in space and time to save Billy?”
Hopper ignores him. “I don’t know what the right thing to do is here,” Hopper says, looking right at Joyce. “I wouldn’t lose much sleep over the boy, but Susan Hargrove – ”
“He’s just a kid,” Jonathan interrupts quietly. “Billy. He’s the same age as Nancy.”
They all turn to stare at her; she flushes. “He beat the shit out of Steve,” she says, almost defensively. Jonathan coughs pointedly, shifts, looks embarrassed; Nancy’s eyes narrow. “He went at Lucas like he was going to kill him – ”
“Please stop talking,” Hopper says tiredly. “I’m not here to write up a goddamn guestlist, I’m here to ask if you think it’s a good idea at all.”
Joyce hasn’t said a word. “If it goes wrong – ” she begins.
“I know,” Hopper interrupts, his voice soft. “But what if it was Nancy’s mom.” He pauses. “What if it was you.”
Steve thinks about his mom, trapped in that icy hell and stalked by monsters. About Barb, rotting away in another dimension while her parents sit and hope. “Does she think she can do it?” Steve asks quietly. “The girl. El. Can she shut it again after?”
“Yeah,” Hopper says. He’s resolute. “She can do it.”
“We can’t stay here,” Susan says. Her voice is rough and cracked from thirst.
Billy nods. “Get some sleep. We’ll try for one of the cars.” Fuck, he can’t stop shivering. They’re pressed up against one another, desperate for heat. “Maybe it’s just a Hawkins thing,” he adds. He wonders who he’s trying to convince.
“We can’t leave,” Susan whispers. Her cheeks are wet. “We need to find Maxine.”
Billy feels her words like a punch. He can see Max’s face in his mind, so fucking alive, full of fury and towering over him. He wishes with every inch of his being that she’s okay. “I don’t think we can,” he murmurs, and hates himself for the noise Susan makes, this choked-out little sob.
He’s right, though. They both know it. There’s nothing on the street outside except monsters and smoke.
For a moment Billy doesn’t know what’s woken him. Susan beside him is lying quiet and still, her breathing slow and even save for the rasping catch from the cold. Then he hears it again: that low rumble, like oncoming thunder. It’s almost a feeling, more than a sound –
– Billy remembers cowering in a ball in the attic, feeling the thud-thud-thud of his father’s boots on the stairs, his snarling voice screeching where you at, boy –
It’s found them. It’s here. He jostles Susan awake with a jab to her side and hisses, under his breath, “Run.”
Susan runs. Billy swings around to check the window, one hand wrapped around the metal bar he ripped out of the bathroom fittings, trembling with fear. The rhythm of his heart feels like his father’s footsteps, thundering inevitably faster, inescapable. The shadow-monster towers above the building, and there are no eyes, nothing to watch with, but Billy feels fucking seen, eviscerated, like the skin is peeling right off his bones.
Outside, Susan screams. Billy snaps his attention away, sprints down the stairs after her and finds one of those things stalking towards her, the ones made of flesh and blood, its nothing-face peeled open like a grotesque flower. He throws himself between them, lights the wad of cloth at the end of the pole and swings it towards the creature. “Stay the fuck back!” he yells, voice shaking with fear and fury. “Stay the fuck away from her!”
The creature gobbles out a roar, and Billy feels a rush of terror-nausea at the sound, twisted and revolting. It hangs back, clearly cautious of the fire, and Billy can’t look round, can’t check whether or not Susan’s got away; then that pillar of shadow slams back down in front of him, and Billy can’t see anything at all.
There are flashes. Horrible twisting wrenches of agony in his body and his mind. The taste of smoke in his mouth, cloying and awful, twining down his throat and bleeding through into every muscle and vein. Billy remembers screaming, begging for it to end. He remembers a girl, remembers thinking it was Max, remembers pointing at where he last saw Susan, shrieking get her out, get her out –
He’s in a hospital bed. The light in his face is fucking bright. The rickety pinging of the ECG is playing hell with the headache building up like jagged glass behind his eyes. “Easy, kid,” a voice says, jumping in out of nowhere when Billy tries to sit up; it’s a soft voice. A kind voice. “You took a hell of a knock.”
“What the fuck?” Billy mutters, or tries to; he doesn’t think much of it actually gets out. He sees the glint of a police badge, the soft tan color of the uniform.
“You got lost in the woods,” the man adds, sat next to his bed. The badge on his chest reads Hopper. “Hit your head.”
His head does fucking hurt. Billy wants to reach up and touch it, but his arms feel like lead; he wonders if he hurt them in the fall. He remembers – thinks he remembers, he slipped, something caught at his leg –
Panic hits him like a freight train; Billy hurtles upright in the bed. “Susan – ”
“Your stepmother’s fine,” Hopper answers, voice gentle, hand steady on Billy’s chest to push him back down. “Doctors say you’ll have some headaches, residual nausea. To come back in if you start having problems with your vision or if the pain don’t stop in a while.” Hopper’s watching him carefully, so sharply it makes him want to squirm. “Your dad’s here to take you home,” he adds, and Billy’s stomach drops. Shit, he thinks. Now he’s fucking for it.
Neil waits in silence for him to get dressed. He fumbles every movement, can feel every twitch of his father’s lips like a slap, the tightness of his brow, tension racking up at Billy’s incompetence no matter how swiftly he tries to move. Neil is gracious and apologetic to the doctors and the nurses, prolific in his goodbyes and well-wishes, and then slams Billy’s head into the dashboard the minute they get in the car.
Billy’s vision blacks out. His ears ring like sirens. He doesn’t think he passes out; but he doesn’t remember driving away from the hospital, and when he next looks out the window it’s all blue skies and fields. “Do you have any fucking idea how much this is going to cost?” his father spits, and Billy flinches at the sound of it. “They should’ve left you out there to rot.”
“Yes, sir,” Billy murmurs, watching the world race by as his vision sparks and blurs. “Sorry, sir.”
It’s always a dangerous game, approaching Neil. Max remembers one weekend back when they first moved through to Hawkins, back when even Billy’s breathing seemed to do nothing but piss Neil off. He’d thrown Billy around the room for stomping around, then thrown him around the room for sneaking up on him. That was back when Max thought that Neil’s outbursts were driven by reason.
It’s a Saturday. Her mom’s out buying clothes or groceries or some other dumb excuse to avoid Max’s constant vigil, checking on her every two minutes like she might get hauled off again at any moment; so it’s just her and Neil, sat sucking on one of his disgusting cigars in his favourite armchair. He told her mom he didn’t smoke when they met.
Dustin hits her up on the walkie and says they’re all heading to The Palace to destroy her highscore on Pengo. Dustin doesn’t even fucking like Pengo. She checks the house three times for Billy, but there’s no sign of him; so she tries to find some neutral middle ground and walks calmly over to her stepfather instead.
Neil turns a page of his magazine. “Don’t hover, Maxine. It’s irritating.”
“Sorry,” she says instantly. It makes her feel spineless, and that twists a sourness in her stomach she’s already too familiar with. “I was hoping – could you drive me to the arcade?”
Neil doesn’t even look at her. “Get Billy to take you.”
Max pauses. More dangerous than approaching him is talking back. “He’s not here,” she says tentatively.
“His car’s out front,” he answers with finality, tapping off the ash.
Max frowns. She glances at the window, sees he isn’t wrong; but Billy definitely isn’t here. She checks around again, remembers the porch, stands there stumped when it’s also empty. She stays out there for a moment, glaring out into the gloom; they’ve had the first real snow of winter, and the ground around their little house is covered in a foot of it. It’s kind of pretty, she thinks. Shitty for skateboarding, though.
Eventually she sees it; there’s a dent in the snow, leading off back towards the woods. Too well-established to be a fox. He must’ve gone for a walk or something. Max finds her thickest coat, pulls on her boots and follows the trail into the dark.
She finds Billy in a lake about a half-mile down the track. He’s naked in the water, the surface kissing the small of his back. She can’t see any shoes. Where he hasn’t broken through, the ice skimming the top is inches thick. Billy stands there in the freezing water and watches her with a calm neutrality that’s completely unnerving. “You okay, Max?” he asks, like she’s the one acting strange.
She hesitates. “I wanted – I wanted to go to the arcade,” she says.
Billy nods. “Sure,” he answers, flicking back his hair. “I’ll be right up.”
“There’s something wrong with Billy,” Max says, voice tight with worry as she crashes into the side of Pengo.
The machine rocks alarmingly on its axis; Lucas cries out in protest, loses his grip on the joystick, and Dustin pounces, scooting in to grab the controls. “Yeah,” Dustin replies, totally focused on the stupid pixellated penguin in front of him. “He’s a dickhead.”
Max rolls her eyes “No, like. Wrong wrong,” she insists. “He’s acting all weird.”
“Shit! Stupid fucking sno-bees,” Dustin shouts, slapping the dashboard. He relents to Mike shoving him aside with a scowl.
“The doctors said he was fine,” Mike says, lower lip between his teeth, eyes flicking around the screen.
“Grownups get like that sometimes,” Dustin says knowledgeably. “Like when Nancy got all pissy with us last month when we ate all the caramac bars even though she said she didn’t want one.”
“Yeah,” Lucas says, rolling his eyes, “That’s because she was on her – hey!”
“Dude, gross, that’s my sister!” Mike interrupts, thumping his arm, and promptly spirals into penguin doom. “Shit, look what you made me do.”
“There’s nothing disgusting about the menstrual cycle,” Dustin solemnly says, and Max, praying silently for strength, checks out of the resulting hysteria and wanders off out front for the relative quiet.
The air is ice-cold against her skin, drizzled with a thin, miserable rain that can’t be bothered to turn to snow. She squints up at it dismissively; then she catches sight of Steve, leant up against the wall beside the door and halfway through a pack of cigarettes. She watches carefully as he finishes one, throws it down into the snow, and lights another. “What are you doing here?” Max asks, shuffling closer for the cover.
Steve throws her a look. “What do you think? I’m on chauffeur duty for those chucklefucks,” he says, thumbing back at the door, and the two of them look back through the glass at the scuffling bunch of boys now clamoring for control of Dig Dug.
“It’s Saturday,” Max says.
Steve mouth twists up unhappily. “Yeah,” he says, dragging on the cigarette. “I know.”
“So don’t you have something better to do?”
Steve snorts. “You’d think,” he mutters. He glances over at her. “Is your mom doing okay?”
Max shrugs one shoulder listlessly. She won’t talk about it; or not to her, anyway. But she’s been hanging out with Joyce Byers a lot, and that gives Max hope. “How’s your face?”
Steve smiles. It’s a kind smile, Max thinks, though somehow sad. “It’ll heal,” he answers, over-casual. He nods towards his car, parked out front. “You wanna ride home or something?”
Max shakes her head. “No, I should probably go back in.” She has a few highscores to re-establish. “Thanks, though.”
They’re huddled round the payphone out front, Lucas and Dustin bickering about the best way to share body heat, when Mike brings Steve over. He looks despairingly between the two of them like he’s trying to decide whether to bother interjecting, and then asks Max if everything’s okay instead. “She can’t get through to Billy,” Mike explains. “And we’re out of change.”
Steve sighs, reaches into his jeans and drops a few coins into Max’s hands. She picks up the phone, dials for the seventh time; it rings, and rings, and rings. “He’s not answering,” Max says, hanging up again.
“Look, it’s freezing out here and I’m fresh out of quarters,” Steve says tiredly, and gestures back at his car. “Just let me drop you. It’s cool, honestly,” he insists when she begins to protest. “You’re basically on my way home anyway.”
She must look worried; Dustin smiles at her encouragingly. “He’s probably just playing his stupid music too loud,” Lucas says.
She’s the last one in the car, just her and Steve cruising down Cherry Lane, him humming along to some cheery pop nonsense on the radio and drumming out the rhythm on the steering wheel. “Right here,” Max says, pointing at the house, and Steve obediently tucks the car in behind Billy’s obnoxious blue Camaro.
The front door is hanging open. Only Billy’s car sits in the driveway, and every single light in the house is out. “Okay,” Steve says slowly. “That’s fucking weird.” They share a look; he kills the engine. “I’ll get the bat,” he says.
They edge into the house together, steady and slow. The hall light flicks on no problem, but the place inside is trashed, shit thrown haphazard all over the floor, a fist-shaped hole beside the mirror in the hallway. She traces the edges of it with her fingertips; Neil is going to lose his goddamn mind, she thinks. “Billy?” Max hazards; silence.
“The TV’s still here,” Steve says from the living room, sticking his head back round the doorframe. “There’s a bunch of money on the table too. I don’t think you were robbed.”
Max walks inside and looks around. It’s thick with broken glass and the sour tang of spilt liquor. She sees the empty cabinet beside the bookcase and her stomach drops; Neil’s gun is missing, the one he keeps for rats, he says, in the cellar, even though none of them ever sees any goddamn rats. Outside, Max sees that dent in the snow again, and understanding dawns on her in a horrible, electric wave. “Steve,” Max says, opening the back door, “Call Hopper,” and steps outside before he can reply.
He can’t have gotten far, she thinks. She might already be too late. Max pushes that unhelpful thought aside and walks into the woods with the baseball bat.
He’s standing with his back to her, out by the lake. Head back, face tilted up to the dying sun. “Billy,” she says, quietly. “Don’t.”
Billy turns. His eyes are bright and red, and Neil’s gun is hanging loose in his palm. There’s an empty bottle of whiskey by his feet, upturned in the snow. Max walks towards him, perfectly calm; she’s pleased to find she’s no longer afraid of him. If she feels anything at all, it’s pity. “Stop it, Billy,” she continues, voice cool. “You don’t get to do that.”
Black lines ripple and pulse beneath his skin, and Max stops dead in her tracks. “He’s in me,” Billy says. The gun in his hand shakes. Max’s stomach lurches with an awful, bone-deep fear. “He needs me.” He sounds fucking terrified. “He needs me alive.”
Max tries not to panic. “Billy,” she says, forcing her tone more gentle, taking another step. She’s almost close enough to grab his arm.
“He wants me to hurt her,” Billy says hoarsely. He looks like a child when he cries, she thinks. “You. But I won’t.” He shakes his head like his ears are buzzing with flies. “I won’t.”
“I know,” Max says; it’s at least a half truth. She holds out her hand. “It’s okay, Billy.” She risks another step. “Give it to me.”
Slowly, horribly, Billy’s eyes empty out. There’s nothing human looking back at her when she meets his gaze, and Max’s blood runs ice-cold. He looks up, over Max’s shoulder.
“Evening, officer,” Billy says.
Everything around Max seems to move both very fast and very slow. Billy’s hand begins to rise; Hopper’s arm finds her from nowhere, throwing her sideways into the snow; and Steve slams into Billy from behind, sends him careening madly forwards to the ground. “Stay down, kid,” Hopper says, and Billy thrashes and snarls, a torn, inhuman sound, bucks up under Steve and tries to lunge for Neil’s gun; Hopper ducks and grabs it, walks out of his reach. “Shit, kid, stay down.”
“Billy?” Max calls, pushing Hopper aside to kneel down next to him. Steve watches her carefully, sat across Billy’s ass with a hand around Billy’s wrists, wrenched round to the small of his back. She pushes Billy’s hair back, peers down at his blank face. “Billy,” she tries again. “It’s okay. We can fix it. We can fix it.”
“Fix what?” Hopper asks slowly, and Billy’s smile turns feral as his skin pulses black.
“Oh, shit,” Steve says.
It’s been three long hours since they crashed through the doors at Hawkins Lab, Billy slung over Hopper’s shoulder like a sack of flour. They’d had to knock him out to get him there, gagged and tied in a way that made Max queasy. He’s strapped to a bed in a room where the lights strobe out and the door’s been ripped off the wall; at least there aren’t any bloodstains, she thinks. The hallway stank like a hospital, which is to say that it smelt like chemicals and death.
“You doing okay?” her mom asks gently, and the sound makes Max jump. She nods, fidgets a little in the uncomfortable chair. They’re either side of the bed, like they’re holding vigil. Or keeping watch. Steve’s sat across the room on the floor, his back to the wall, eyes on his knees. He looks exhausted, somehow small. She wonders whether he’s having trouble sleeping too.
Hopper appears in the doorway. “They’re gonna try and get Owens on the phone,” he says, looking down towards the bed. “He still out?”
Susan nods. “He’s freezing.” She’s holding Billy’s hand; the visual is undeniably strange. Max doesn’t think they’ve even touched before. “I shouldn’t have sent him out looking for Max,” Susan adds, voice fraught. “This is all my – ”
“Don’t be stupid,” Hopper interrupts gently. “This kind of thing isn’t anyone’s fault. Besides, he’s gonna be fine.” Her mom looks unconvinced; Hopper sounds unconvinced. “Should I ring his dad?”
“No,” Susan says, at the exact same time that Max does. “No,” Susan continues. “It’s. It’s better if I stay with him instead.”
“Okay,” Hopper says, taken aback. He glances over at Steve, sat motionless on the floor across the room. The bruises Billy gave him are still stark against his skin. Max can’t help but wonder what he makes of them. “Steve, can you take Max home?”
Steve jerks, looks slowly between the two of them. “Uh, sure – ”
“ – Mom – ” Max interjects, more worried about her than Billy –
Susan smiles at her. “It’s okay,” she reassures her. “You don’t have to stay.”
“Trust me, it’s probably better if you don’t,” Hopper adds in a murmur, and the silence that follows is nothing but ominous.
The roads are quiet as they wind back through the woods, the snow slurrying up under the wheels. Steve switches on the radio, lets the chatter fill up the space, flinches a little every time the signal drops out. They’re just about to turn down Cherry Lane when Max suddenly says, “Don’t.”
Steve pauses at the junction, turn signal going click, click, click. “I’m not taking you back.”
She shakes her head. “I just – I don’t want to. Take me to – to Will’s?”
Steve looks at her for a long, steady moment. “Okay,” he says, pulling away. “But you’re calling your mom to let her know.”
Steve keeps the baseball bat by his bedroom door. He probably shouldn’t; but it comforts him, and he’s not thinking hard enough about it to let it worry him. It’s times like this he’s grateful for it, edging alone through the empty house, squinting down through the mist at the driveway to see who the fuck is hammering on the front door at five on a Sunday. It’s some comfort, he thinks, that demogorgons probably don’t bother to knock.
He sees the police car first, stark against the blackness of the tarmac, and his stomach flips in fear. He hasn’t spoken to his mom in – god, like, three days? Maybe four? He curls his fingers round the wooden handle of the bat, tries to find some scrap of courage as he walks down the stairs and opens up the door.
“Hi,” Hopper says, like this is wholly normal. Like Steve’s the weird one for answering the door while holding a baseball bat.
“Hi,” Steve says back, slowly. “Is everything – ?”
Hopper jerks his thumb back towards his car, and it’s only then that Steve sees Billy, hunched up in the back seat. “I need to ask a favor,” Hopper says, heavy and apologetic. “I didn’t know where else to take him. Mrs Hargrove – she doesn’t think it’s safe for him to go home.”
Steve looks over Hopper’s shoulder, back towards the car. “Is he – ?”
“He’s fine,” Hopper says. “It’s done. And this is – it’s only temporary, I swear.”
Steve hesitates, then nods once. “There’s plenty room,” he says. “My parents won’t be back til next month.”
Hopper’s face floods with relief. “Thanks, kid. I owe you one.”
Billy says fucking nothing when Hopper leads him inside, thanks Hopper in a quiet voice when he says goodbye and then stands there in silence, hands in the pockets of his stupid ugly jeans, glancing around the lobby in a way that makes Steve’s hackles rise.
“We have a guestroom,” Steve says; Billy just looks at him, steady and calm. Steve leads him up the stairs and down the hall, points out the linen closet and the en suite, says in an offhand voice to help himself to whatever he wants. His parents’ bedroom is right across the hall, doesn’t have a lock on it, and that makes Steve twitchy. Steve digs out an old t-shirt and sweatpants from the closet and drops them on the bed. “I’m gonna crash out for a few hours,” Steve says, leaning up in the doorway as Billy paces round the room. He looks caged.
“Need to go home,” Billy says. His voice is surprisingly hoarse. “Pick up some stuff.”
Steve nods. “I’ll run you over.” They stand there in silence for a moment, Steve hanging in the doorway, Billy staring off into the distance, fingers loose by his side. His knuckles are swollen and red; Steve clenches his jaw. “Don’t fucking steal anything,” he adds, and shuts the door.