Chapter Text
Stu’s drunk again. Drunker than he meant to be. The bottle sits on the counter somewhere above him, but he’s on the floor now--knees up, spine slouched against the cabinets, kitchen light buzzing overhead like it’s thinking about giving out.
Thirty years without Billy and the air still feels too big.
His shirt’s half-open, the fabric bunched under his arms. His fingers drift to the faint white lines Billy left on him, old half-moons and ridges, souvenirs of love or violence or whatever they were pretending it was back then. He touches one, presses until the skin blanches, just enough to feel something spark behind his ribs. He toys with the point of a knife--not cutting, just lightly pressing, dragging the cool metal across healed skin, testing the idea of pain without letting it stick.
He breathes. Something inside him echoes back wrong.
When he glances at the oven door, he freezes. The reflection behind him is wrong--tall, dark, hooded. A Ghostface stands in the warped metal shine.
Stu jolts hard enough that his head bumps the cabinet. “What the--?”
Static swims through the air, a glitch in an old TV, then--
“Hey.”
The voice sharpens.
“Hey. Stop that, dickhead.”
Stu’s throat closes. The knife slips from his hand and clatters on the tile, spinning once before settling.
The reflection lifts its hands, pulls the Ghostface mask free.
Billy.
Young Billy. Sharp-jawed, bright-eyed, beautiful Billy. Ten seconds before a kill and ten hours before a kiss. Billy as he was, not as he ended.
Stu whispers, “What the fuck,” but it’s barely breath.
Billy tilts his head, unimpressed. “You’re wasting time.”
He says it like they’re teenagers again, like the last thirty years never scraped Stu raw.
He crouches in the reflection, elbows on his knees. “Enough of the emo martyr crap. We’ve got work to do.” A lopsided smirk. “Remember work?”
Stu’s eyes burn. The voice is so clear it might as well be vibrating in his bones. Billy talks like he used to talk only to Stu--too fast, too smart, too sure of them: about how the world turned into a bad parody of their mythology, how what used to be sacred became a punchline. How everything kept moving even though they didn’t.
“Unfinished business,” Billy says softly.
The reflection flickers--
Then he’s gone.
But Stu feels him.
Warm breath ghosts over his ear. His eyes flutter shut without permission. There’s a smell--not real, can’t be real--gasoline and smoke, that heady chemical sweetness of something catching fire far away.
Billy’s voice lowers, intimate, conspiratorial, the way he used to lean in close when he wanted Stu to follow him anywhere. “You remember how we used to be.”
A palm presses to Stu’s chest. Not real, not possible, but it’s there--weight, warmth, grounding him, winding him up at the same time.
“Everything rots,” Billy whispers. “So burn what’s rotten.”
Stu’s breath stutters. His head tips back against the cabinet. The flickering light hums. Reality wavers.
He opens his eyes slowly, terrified the hallucination will dissolve if he moves too fast.
Billy is kneeling in front of him.
Smiling. Excited. Hungry. Beautiful in that terrible way he always was. Dark eyes bright with an old fever.
Stu wants to kiss him so badly it aches. Instead he chokes out, “I miss you. I’m sorry.”
Billy doesn’t look angry. If anything, he looks delighted--like Stu finally said the right line in a script only Billy understood.
Billy’s hand settles over Stu’s, curling his fingers around the knife again--not toward himself, repositioning it, shaping the posture, reminding him of who he used to be before grief turned him inward.
“Prove it,” Billy murmurs.
A ghost’s dare. A metaphor with teeth.
And for the first time in thirty years, Stu feels something catch fire in his chest--bright, dangerous, patently Billy and Stu.