#contemporary harringrove my beloved

[intothedysphoria]

He was organising a collection of 90s dance records in a shop window when Steve saw him. He looked much happier. And, most alarmingly, he was alive.

Steve had watched Billy die. He’d had to go into therapy for twenty one years after watching Billy die. If Robin hadn’t taken a few steps back, Steve would have assumed he was hallucinating.

Billy looked up and their eyes met. It was at the point where there was grey in his beard and lines around his eyes but he still looked incredible.

Much better than he had when he’d been impaled straight through the chest, blood spraying everywhere.

It might have been a level of masochism but Steve found himself running straight into the shop and almost barrelling straight into Billy.

Robin, clearly alarmed, mumbled something about needing a drink and abandoned Steve in favour of rejoining Kali on the other side of the road.

Steve made a desperate grab for her but it was too late. She was gone and Steve was staring into the bright blue irises of his not quite dead ex (?) boyfriend.

Billy was appropriately sheepish during Steve’s highly emotional confrontation. He may have cried, a lot and Billy had to flip the sign at the door over to closed.

It was some shady government shit of course but a bit of Steve still wilted at the thought of not even being sent as much of a postcard. A photograph. Anything.

After a healthy amount of crying, the ridiculousness of the situation started to hit him. Billy was 57 and owned an independent record shop. They’d both survived aliens. What the fuck.

The proposition certainly wasn’t as smooth as it had been in 1985 but they weren’t teenage boys anymore. They were middle aged men and Steve appreciated the slightly awkward “want a coffee?”

Coffee was fantastic, with just enough milk and sugar. Steve stared down a massive poster of Hot Fuzz while Billy wrangled the cats and a large husky in the kitchen. There was a calm feeling to the house, everything being in the correct place, that Steve’s place lacked. At the very least, it was making Steve want to get a cat.

They ate spaghetti off Jason Voorhees plates and Billy gently rubbed his foot under the table. Steve had never tried picking things up after a thirty nine year gap and he stupidly decided to go all in.

Assuming that they would both have the same libido that they’d held at 18 was maybe unrealistic. When Billy walked back in to see Steve lying on the couch, doing his best to emulate times gone by, Billy went scarlet and mumbled that he didn’t have any condoms in the house.

So, Steve had definitely been too forward then.

They slept together literally instead, which felt intimate in a way Steve hadn’t prepared for. Nobody had stayed with him the entire night since Billy. Steve hadn’t let them. It never felt right.

It felt right now. They managed to hold each other all night through the nightmare and it finally let Steve hope.