#I kinda wished the glasses were even more ''mid century dad glasses'' but I had to pick from the frames the optician brought

[undead-potatoes]

Damn bro, the graphics on these new glasses are insane

[platypanthewriter]

The Devil Looks After His Own Ch.3

Chapter One | Two

Little Steve Harrington is so lonely he tries summoning a demon with a ritual advertised on TV–but luckily, it doesn’t work, and a buff, non-human nanny hired by his mom shows up minutes later.  Years later, they’re best friends, and Steve still doesn’t know the truth.   For @magniloquent-raven​!

“Y’know, I did take payment,” Billy said, as he snapped and Steve’s cereal was just marshmallows, and Steve shook his head. Billy snapped again, and there was some cereal in there again. “You were trying to give that Camaro set away to some demon, and when I showed up, I took it.”

Steve paused, frowning at his bowl, because he liked the LEGO 1969 Chevrolet Camaro Z/28.

“Unless you want it back,” Billy said, cocking his head to catch Steve’s eye, and Steve shook his head hard.

“No, no, I don’t,” he said quickly. “D’you...really really like LEGOs?”

“Uhhh,” Billy made a face. “I like making things with you, because you really like ‘em. But it’s not about what I want, it’s something important to you. And that set was your favorite, right?”

“...it was new,” Steve mumbled, kicking his feet. “But it’s not…”

“Not what?” Billy asked, cautiously, and Steve bit his lips together, wondering what to say.

“D’you want all my LEGOs,” he finally asked. “Y-you can have all of them. D’you—”

“Hey, hey, kiddo,” Billy laughed, as Steve swallowed hard. “Hey, it’s okay, my man, what’s wrong?”

“It’s not enough,” Steve said, squeezing his spoon so hard it dug into his hand, and blinking hard to clear his eyes.

“...brat,” Billy said, fondly. “All I’ve done is make you cereal a couple times. You’ve still got some credit, really.”

“You’re my best friend,” Steve squeaked out, not crying, but kinda sounding like it anyway. He tried not to sniffle. “Y-you’re my best friend, you—you’re worth more than LEGOs.”

“Shit, c’mere, kidlet,” Billy said, coming around to hug him. “Nothing here to cry about, you little weirdo, what—”

“Are you on sale,” Steve demanded, pulling Billy closer. “How come you’re cheap—”

“Oh my god,” Billy snickered, because he wasn’t taking anything seriously.

“Is this like the Woohoo! stickered meat at Safeway,” Steve asked, shaking him. “Are—are you old?! Billy are you gonna die—”

“No!” Billy cackled. “No, no, I’m—I’m fine—”

“Are you gonna get slimy like the old mushrooms we bought?!” Steve whined, crying for real, and Billy started laughing too hard to talk. “You’re not even listening,” Steve mumbled as Billy squeezed him tightly, stroking his hair.

“Lucifer falling,” Billy mumbled, kissing Steve’s head. “I’m okay, alright? I’m—I’m not past my expiration date.”

“When is it,” Steve asked anxiously, and Billy started snickering again, wiping his eyes.

“It’s not for a few thousand years,” Billy promised, and Steve mouthed it, wide-eyed.

“...oh,” said Steve, trying to figure out the math on the huge number. Even his dad, he was pretty sure, wasn’t more than a hundred. “...how old is my dad?” he asked, thinking, and Billy frowned thoughtfully.

“Younger than me,” he said, with certainty. “Maybe just a few hundred years old?”

“Oh,” Steve said, doubtfully, and then he squinted over at the card on the fridge. It said ‘Over the Hill: Congrats on the big 4-0!’ and Steve frowned at it. “...his birthday card says he was forty,” he said, and Billy stilled.

“...forty what?” he asked.

“...yeeeears?” Steve guessed, less certain in the face of Billy’s disbelief. “I...I think when my mom’s grandma died, she was seventy-eight. Years,” he added, for Billy. It had seemed like an impossibly large number at the time.

“...years,” Billy breathed, wide-eyed. “Not—not centuries, just years.” His grip tightened on Steve, and he finally looked upset. “You—you’re going to die in years.”

“...unless I get sick,” Steve told him honestly, and then wished he hadn’t, because Billy made a choking noise in his throat, and hugged him tighter. “Um, it’s—it’s a lot of years,” he muttered, into Billy’s shoulder, and Billy shook his head, sniffling.

“No, it’s not,” he breathed. “Fuck. Shit. I—damn it, kid.”

“It’s okay,” Steve told him, grimacing, and patting Billy’s shoulder. “Don’t cry. You—you can, um, you can get a...dog. You can play with my LEGOs.”

“That’s the most depressing picture, damn,” Billy muttered, wiping his eyes. “You sure you don’t want immortality instead of marshmallows, kiddo?”

“I-immune?” Steve muttered, frowning, and Billy messed up his hair. Steve yelled and batted at him, giggling.

“You wanna live forever with me, short stuff?” Billy asked, ducking away from Steve swinging a rolled-up magazine at him in revenge. Steve paused mid-swing, frowning suspiciously at him, and Billy laughed. “You wanna just be a kid and play with LEGOs forever?”

“...I wanna grow up,” Steve said, with certainty, after some thought. “And play with LEGOs.”

“...yeah, I figured,” Billy said, smiling a little.

“I want a credit card,” Steve told him, and Billy snorted a laugh. “...what happens to you when I die? Do you get to go home?” Steve asked, and Billy made a face. “...where is home?” Steve asked, more cautiously.

“Nowhere I wanna go,” Billy told him, messing his hair up again.

He looked kind of lonely all afternoon, Steve thought. There wasn’t much Steve could do about death, really, so finally he just hit Billy with a water balloon.

They took a long time to decide on a house for Billy. Finally Steve took all his kits out, and stared at them, while Billy fidgeted next to him on the bed.

“What if we put them all together,” Steve whispered, feeling like it was something forbidden. “I put them all together by myself already. We—we could make you a—a castle with a space shuttle on top, and a Millenium Falcon, and—and dungeons.”

“Those might come in handy,” Billy said, nodding, and Steve giggled. “I need a garage for my Camaro, too.”

“It’s a 1969 Chevrolet Camaro Z/28,” Steve told him, feeling like Nancy when she corrected people about dinosaur feathers.

Billy shrank down to the size of his hand and helped, running around the table and kicking through piles of loose LEGO to find pieces, and they added some things to support the weight of stuff hanging off the sides. Steve had been grinning so hard his cheeks were sore, his feet numb from sitting on them all evening, when his mom poked her head in, and Billy leapt through a LEGO window to hide.

“...what a mess,” she said, wrinkling her nose. “It’s gonna take you hours to sort these back into bags.”

“I’m making a tower,” Steve told her, since that was mostly what it looked like. “I’ll put all the extra parts away, though.”

“Eugh,” she said, and shut the door without remembering to say goodnight.

“How’d they get you as a kid?” Billy asked, from inside the haunted mansion, and Steve sighed.

“Probably I was on sale,” he muttered. “Dad will buy anything if there’s a coupon for it,” and Billy started laughing so hard he had to grab the fancy goblet stuck to the table, for support. Steve grinned, watching him standing next to the dangling skeleton. “You wanna try the elevator?” he asked. “It actually moves.”

“It actually falls, more like,” Billy said, making a face. His voice was kind of reedy. “No way.”

“...can you get...hurt, this size?” Steve asked, suddenly horrified, and Billy shrugged, leaning out to look at the elevator.

“My bones are tiny,” he said. “I could stay sturdy, but I’d weigh a lot, y’know, I’d probably break your LEGO set.”

“Oh,” Steve said softly, jerking his hands back from the set. “Do—do you need help getting down?”

“I’m fine, probably,” Billy said, and then promptly fell out as he tried to edge around the table, and Steve yelped and caught him in both hands. He weighed almost nothing, like a bird.

“Be careful,” Steve hissed at him.

“I can heal myself, probably,” Billy panted, wide-eyed, and Steve found another drawback of minifigure-sized Billy, when he tried to hug him, and had to just gingerly brush his cheek against Billy’s whole body.

“It doesn’t matter if you heal,” Steve hissed. “It still would hurt, right?!”

“...yeah, but if I fix it, I’m okay again,” Billy said, laughing, and Steve lifted him up so Billy was only a couple inches from his nose, and Steve could see his expression. Billy grabbed his thumb.

“...if I fall down the stairs and break my arms and my legs and my head open,” Steve said, remembering Billy’s panicked yell when Steve had slipped on the cement stairs outside, in the rain, and clonked his head on the rod-iron railing, “—is it fine if you fix it?”

“Holy crap, kid, don’t even say that,” Billy breathed.

“So it’s not okay if you fall down the LEGO stairs either,” Steve hissed, and Billy blinked at him, then laughed a little, and Steve could swear his face went a little red.

“I’m not human, short stuff. It’s different.”

“It’s not,” Steve said stubbornly. Billy waved to the Death Star, and Steve held his hand next to one of the conference room chairs, then grimaced. “Don’t fall again,” he told his tiny best friend. “I’m gonna put railings in,” he decided, rooting through the pile of discarded LEGO. “You can’t just fix yourself—”

“I do,” Billy said, laughing, and Steve stopped.

“...Billy,” he said softly, “—when?”

“...just...sometimes,” Billy said, climbing up on the table and kicking the Darth Vader minifigure in the head so it flew and knocked into the Palpatine minifig, which distracted Steve for a second, because it was the coolest thing he’d ever seen.

He covered his eyes. “Billy.”

Billy groaned. “You know. Like the time I didn’t know not to put cold glass under the hot water, and it blew up in my hand. Or that time in the parking lot when you didn’t look, and that car almost crushed you against the cement divider, and I pushed you out of the way.”

Steve remembered that one—he’d been kinda mad about it, because Billy’d shoved him to the ground, and he’d skinned his knees—but he remembered he hadn’t said so, because Billy was pale and shaken, and made Steve promise about 900 things about car safety. “...you...fixed...the car hit you?!” he breathed, his hands twitching as he longed to hug Billy, but couldn’t grab him when he was so small. “You—the—”

“I fixed it,” Billy waved his hands, laughing. “It wasn’t expensive—”

“You—could you have—moved yourself, or stopped the car,” Steve whispered, sitting on his hands.

“I might have had to alter the driver’s memories if I teleported, though, and moving the car is expensive, too, how many LEGO sets you wanna burn through to keep me, Stevie—”

“...Billy,” Steve said blankly. His eyes stung.

“Don’t wanna wear out my welcome,” Billy said, laughing.

“These are all yours now,” Steve said, waving at the stacked sets, ceiling-high. “The-they’re all. Yours. If—if you need more we can—we can do. Something. Don’t get hurt. Even if you can fix it.”

“...you don’t need to give me all that,” Billy said, frowning down.

“I love LEGO but you’re more important,” Steve told him, gritting his teeth, because Billy should have known that, and if he didn’t, maybe Steve had screwed something up. “You’re super important, Billy.”

“...okay,” Billy said, sounding confused.

“Save the—the magic for nobody getting hurt,” Steve told him, crossing his arms. “Obviously. What—what are you doing, anyway, are you stupid?! Don’t get hurt, Billy. That’s an order.”

“Oooo, an order, big man,” Billy said, laughing.

“An order, and you have to listen to this one,” Steve growled.

“You told me I can decide what to do after I listen,” Billy said, because he was a dick, and Steve told him so.

“You’re being an asshole,” he whispered, so his parents didn’t hear.

“I’ll try not to get hurt,” Billy told him, tossing Palpatine out on the rug, “—but no promises. Keep that guy out there, he reminds me of my dad.”

“He can go in the dungeon,” Steve suggested. “You promise? You’ll try.”

“Yeah, yeah. Put Darth Vader down there too, he sucks.” They put Doc Ock and Harley Quinn in there too, and Jafar, a clown Billy thought looked suspicious, and a lady in a horned helmet Steve was pretty sure wasn’t on the side of the heroes.

“No innocent until proven guilty here, I guess,” Billy said, sitting on the edge of the pirate ship on the mansion’s roof, and kicking his legs. “Maybe she was born a minotaur, you ever think of that?”

Steve giggled, and put the horned lady out with the topiaries. “We can see how she behaves,” he said. “But she’s not the minotaur—”

“Put Dumbledore in the dungeon too,” Billy pointed a flag he’d wrested off the pirate ship. “He is not responsible about the safety of his school.”

“And this mafia guy,” Steve said, and Billy gasped.

“Profiling! You just assume he’s mafia?!”

“He has a gun and a chainsaw,” Steve snickered harder, but sat him up in the conference room.

“Elsa should go in the dungeon too, from Frozen,” Billy said thoughtfully, and Steve fell over laughing, because Billy had yelled for an hour after that movie. “She froze a whole damn country,” Billy pointed out. “Sure, she warmed it up eventually, but how many people froze in the meantime?!”

“Let it go,” Steve gasped, wiping his eyes.

“What about the dead babies, Stevie? Should I let them go?” Billy asked, his hands on his hips. He looked hilarious with one foot on the LEGO rigging of the pirate ship, flag in hand. “You got any blue frozen children we can put with her?”

“Oh my god,” Steve cackled, rolling onto his back. His stomach hurt.

As the school year went on, Steve made more friends. Billy looked kind of lost the first time Steve got invited away for a slumber party, but Steve couldn’t help thinking about how magical beings required a price, and wondering when he wouldn’t be able to afford Billy being his friend anymore.

He’d gotten more esoteric in his reading, since Billy wouldn’t answer certain questions, and he’d found Grateful Dead stories at the library, all about travelers finding a corpse and burying it, only to be helped by its spirit for years, like Cinderella and her dead mom giving her dresses. In his reading, those sounded the most like Billy, since he wasn’t exactly a genie. Steve racked his brain trying to remember a bird he might have buried, or roadkill he’d pushed out of the road, but Billy didn’t like talking about who he’d been before Steve, so he was reluctant to ask.

The thought that Billy might be dead, might just...run out one day and vanish, used up when he’d repaid his debt to Steve, was so lonely Steve clung to him for nearly a week, sitting in his lap as they watched TV at night, and not paying enough attention to anything Billy said. He was so bad at acting normal about it that Billy tried to take him to the doctor, and Steve had to get ahold of himself, and start planning for when Billy was gone.

He started by making friends. He complimented Barb on her tidy desk when they did coloring, and Tommy on his new boots, and Nancy on her treasure hunt clues at recess. He passed his fruit snacks around, and pretty soon other kids shared too.

Billy got quieter. After a few days, Steve drug him around the side of the gym again and hugged him, squeezing him as tight as he could, until he hugged back so hard his fingers dug in against Steve’s shoulder blades.

“I’m not bored of you,” Steve told him, sliding his fingers into Billy’s hair, and brushing his thumb over Billy’s earring. “You’re my favorite too.”

Billy sighed into his shoulder, burying his face in Steve’s neck, and Steve held onto him. “...you ever want me to leave, tell me, and I’ll go,” Billy said softly, and Steve shook his head frantically, hugging him tighter, clumsily, so Billy’s shirt hitched up under his arm, and Billy’s skull thudded against Steve’s jaw.

“I don’t want you to leave ever,” Steve whispered, so fervently his voice shook, and Billy sighed, relaxing in his arms. “...how...how long can you stay,” he whispered, sniffling back tears, and Billy twitched.

“What d’you—I can stay, Stevie,” he said softly, but Steve shook his head, pulling his hand back to wipe his eyes.

“Genies run out,” he hissed, crying harder. “Ghosts fade. What are you, Billy, how can—how can I—”

“Oh, shit,” Billy muttered, grabbing his face, and Steve laughed, sniffling. “No, no, I’m—I’m not leaving, I swear.”

“I-if I don’t ask for things?” Steve offered, and Billy bit his lips.

“You can ask for things,” he muttered. “I—I’ll just tell you how much it would be. You can give me more LEGOs.”

“Okay,” Steve told him, used to the weight in his stomach that was worry about Billy. He squeezed tighter.

That night, he couldn’t sleep, and Billy finally called over from his matchbox bed in the space shuttle. “You okay, kid?”

Steve stared at the ceiling, blinking back tears, and trying not to sniffle.

“...are you dead?” he asked, finally, in a scratchy voice that hurt his throat. “Billy?”

Billy ran down like six staircases through the sets to stand on Steve’s bedside table, and Steve put his arm out for Billy to scoot down. “What,” he said, climbing up to stand on Steve’s chest, and Steve tried not to move too much as he pushed his pillow more under his head, so Billy wouldn’t fall.

“Are you dead,” he asked. “Is—is that why you can...do things? And—and why you’re so old?”

“No, I’m not dead, what the—heck, kid,” Billy sighed, sitting cross legged on Steve’s chest like a little Disney fairy. He was cute, and Steve sighed, trying not to smile when Billy looked upset.

“...you’re not a fairy or a genie, exactly,” Steve said, wiping his nose. A tear slid down around his cheek, and dripped warm onto his neck. “Cinderella’s dead mom granted wishes.”

“...I thought that was a fairy,” Billy said, frowning distractedly, and Steve shook his head.

“I read a book in the library that said she was actually a nice ghost. Disney changed it.”

“Huh,” Billy said, raising his eyebrows, then shook his head. “Anyway, no, I’m not dead.”

“Good,” Steve said, swallowing hard, and Billy got up, nervously, and walked up to pat uncertainly at Steve’s chin. “I love it when you forget you can change size,” Steve giggled wetly. “Turn kid-sized.”

Billy did, his weight squishing Steve’s chest until he scrambled off, but Steve grabbed him, and hugged him close.

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