#so he just loiters in whatever room hopper is in staring at him

[hgrve]

hopper is trying to be a good dad to billy but it's an adventure

[bombshellbois]

Mommy Issues

@harringroveweekoflove

Harringrove Week of Love Day 4: School Dance

Rating: T

Words: 1633

Summary: Steve and Billy have a philosophical discussion that they're both way too sober to have.

“Are you a Mama Bird or a Mama Bear?”

The question comes way too early in the dance when the kids are only just barely beginning to cross party lines and venture into the neutral ground that is the dance floor. Steve has only had one cup of punch and he barely spiked it because he’s trying to make the flask in his jacket pocket last. So he still feels way too sober for this brand of bullshit. 

“Hargrove,” he sighs. “We’re the only people between the ages of 16 and 40 at this dance.” He doesn’t have a follow up for that. He could end it with ‘Could you not be a dick?’ but he’s honestly not sure that’s in the cards when it’s Billy. Sure, he’s trying to be ‘better’ in some vague and unidentified way, and he is here with Steve acting as emergency chaperones for the school dance since there’s a shortage of people willing to be out after dark in this town these days. He just still doesn’t do the ‘nice’ thing. Ever. So Steve just kind of leaves the sentiment hanging and hopes Billy takes something away from it. 

“Please. You’re a 40-year-old woman at heart,” Billy scoffs, pulling a cigarette from the packet in the breast pocket of his white dress shirt. Which looks annoyingly good on him. He even buttoned it all the way up. Steve isn’t sure if that’s because of the formal setting or the scar on his chest, but the end result is the same. Billy Hargrove can absolutely pull off shirts with high collars and Steve has to live with that knowledge. “So. Are you a Mama Bird or a Mama Bear?”

“Dude, I don’t even know what that means,” Steve groans. “I’m not a mom at all.” Glorified babysitter who doesn’t actually get paid and spends more time fighting monsters than trying to monitor who’s watching a scrambled porn channel, sure. Mom? No way. 

“I saw that dish towel over your shoulder at Byers’ place. You’re a mom.” Billy looks at his cigarette like he’s really contemplating lighting it. 

“You can’t smoke in here.” Steve realizes a moment too late how that sounded, and Billy is already grinning widely. No taking that back now. 

“Yes, Mama Steve,” he says, tucking the cigarette behind his ear. 

Steve downs the rest of his punch. He’s kind of surprised that Billy remembers he was wearing a towel over his shoulder almost a year ago when he’d be hard-pressed to remember a single thing Billy was wearing that night, much less some accessory. But then again, he’s pretty sure he got a concussion that night too so… that probably has something to do with it. 

Halfway through the night, Mike and El have ventured out onto the dance floor. They’re probably a little too warm and snuggly for Hopper’s preferences but he’s been remanded to staying home and watching The Magnificent Seven again. Steve has no doubt he’s watching the clock to get a head start on beating the traffic on that 9 pm pickup time. 

Dustin and Will are huddled in the safety of the boys’ side of the gymnasium, heads together like they’re forming some kind of strategy. Except they never actually make any attempt to move or anything. Steve isn’t even sure if Dustin has permission to dance at this thing. Long-distance relationships have too many nuances and kudos to Dustin for trying one right out the gate. He’s a brave kid. 

Max and Lewis are loitering by the punch bowl and every time Max makes a vague motion towards the dance floor, Lucas appears to look around and then decline. Steve pauses in his kid check to follow one of Lucas’s covert glances to where Billy is staring the kid down from across the room. Well, that’s probably something he’s gonna have to deal with because who else is going to? 

Steve comes back to stand beside Billy, pulling the flask from his pocket and offering it up. “So… what does that stuff mean?” he asks, because he has to make conversation about something, and what do he and Billy even have to talk about that’s not horrifying? 

Billy reluctantly pulls his eyes away from where he’s glaring at Lucas. “What?”

“Bears and birds. What was that about?”

Billy takes the flask, shakes it experimentally, and pours a large amount into his cup of punch. Steve’s hopes of even getting a mild buzz to offset the pain of this whole affair drain into Billy’s cup with too much of his stash. “Christ, Harrington, didn’t you even pass the animal chapter in biology?”

This is going great. “Pretend I slept through most of it.”

Billy rolls his eyes and takes a sip from his punch. Then he empties the flask into it entirely before handing it back to Steve. “You some kind of superhero or something?”

“Sorry?” Steve tucks the empty flask back away, making a mental note to never try and share with Billy again. 

“No parents, no sleeping, chasing monsters with a fucking bat…”

“I’ve got parents.”

Billy takes a longer sip from his punch and sighs out through his nose. “You’ve got landlords. That’s what you’ve got.”

Steve takes a breath. Counts to five. Reminds himself that dealt with a Russian interrogator for longer than he’s dealt with Billy so far, and if that didn’t kill him then neither will this. And he only has to deal with him for another 90 minutes. 

“What’s the difference between a Mama Bird and a Mama Bear?” he asks again. 

Billy looks him up and down, and for a second, Steve thinks he’s going to refuse. Make some snide comment and put them right back at the place they’ve been stuck for weeks and months now, with Billy hovering around the edges of Steve’s life while trying to re-integrate himself with Max. Seems like if anything, he’s at least realized that Max is something good in his life and that he’s a little short on good things so he should probably hold onto that. 

“It’s like… a mama bear is gonna protect her kid, right? Baby bears are all cute and hikers think they can just go pet it because it’s friendly and then the mom shows up and rips them apart,” Billy says. Steve is sure he notices that Max grabs Lucas’s hand and drags him onto the dance floor, but he doesn’t comment on it, and that’s some growth right there. 

“That’s horrifying,” Steve says in a conversational tone that implies he understands and Billy should continue. 

“Where the mama bird straight up shoves her kids out of the nest so they’ll learn to fly.”

“That’s… also horrifying,” Steve says, in a new tone that implies that… that’s horrifying. “Mama birds are assholes.”

“You gotta show the kids the door sometime, or they’ll sit in the nest forever and eventually starve when winter comes,” Billy says, like that somehow makes it less terrible. Send a kid plummeting towards the ground to teach them to leave home? Nest. Whatever. 

“Well, I wanna be the bear then.” 

Billy looks him over, a look on his face that Steve can’t for the life of him decipher. “Yeah. You are a Mama Bear, aren’t you? You chase all the monsters away.”

Steve shrugs. “I mean, I’m not gonna leave that up to Dustin. Have you ever seen him swing anything? That kid is a goalie at best.” And not a great goalie either. Passable, but he’s definitely not someone you trust with hitting anything. 

“What happens when the monsters come and Mama Steve left for college?” Billy presses. 

“I’m not going anywhere.” Steve has a stack of college rejection letters that speak to that, but Billy doesn’t need to know that. But he’s also stopped applying because one, he’s not smart enough to get in. Obviously. And two, seriously, none of these kids can get any power behind a swing. Someone with a decent batting average has to be around. “You talk like you’d rather throw a kid off a ledge and hope for the best.”

“Yeah, because that’s how you find out if they’re gonna make it,” Billy says, taking another swig from his punch. 

Steve doesn’t think that’s remotely true. Billy is no bird, even if he’d like to be. He did a lot of damage overstepping every boundary ever while he was trying to keep an eye on Max, and maybe he’s scared of doing it again. Maybe. They don’t exactly talk about stuff like fear and emotions. Or much of anything unless they’re really bored and forced to make conversation because they’re stuck around a bunch of kids. Conversations like this feel like poking the surface of a lake with a stick and trying to guess where the deep parts are.

Steve kind of wants to ask if Billy was once the baby bird in this weird National Geographic metaphor they have going. He doesn’t because he thinks he knows the answer and he also thinks that Billy will probably take a swing at him if he pokes. They’re not there yet, and Steve hasn’t figured out if they’re heading there or not. 

“Well I know they’re gonna make it,” Steve says, taking Billy's cup of punch and draining it because he really needs at least a bare-bones burn down the back of his throat to finish this conversation. “Because I’m gonna be here.”

Billy eyes him, but he doesn’t argue. Eventually, he just scoffs and rolls his eyes. “Fine. Whatever. But I’m kicking all of these brats out of Hawkins when they go to college. We’re not staying in this hick monster town forever.” 

Now that is a level of Mama Bird that Steve can work with. “Deal.”

[platypanthewriter]

Rollerskates

For the Harringrove April prompt month!  What if someone else encountered the mindflayer...I don’t know what this is, have some silly horror I guess

Hawkins was the worst.  Billy knew this--he’d known from the time they drove through the two-street town, he’d guessed when his dad praised the damn place and its down home American values--but he’d never guessed some sludgemonster would try to drag him into the ironworks, and he’d definitely never guessed whatever the fuck it was, it would send spies.

He glowered over from his lifeguard station at the row of rats outside the chainlink fence of the pool.  They were brave, knowing, somehow, that he couldn’t take his eyes off the pool for more than a few seconds to hose them down.  Billy glared back at them every few seconds--these huge rats, lined up like bowling pins, staring.  He’d started carrying a notebook to jot things down, not because he thought a goddamned soul would believe him, but to check that at least if he was hallucinating, it was consistent.

A kid hollered, splashing, and he yanked his gaze back to the pool.  

Sometimes they switched, he was fairly sure, watching them with binoculars.  There was a light grey one that hadn’t been there before, and a really fat one he was sure he’d have remembered.  He counted them, and made a note.  They were spying on him in shifts, because it was goddamn Hawkins, and the rats--and the steelworks, apparently--were possessed.

He was vaguely tempted to go back, or ask around town if the old factory was haunted, but every time he thought about it, he broke out in a cold sweat.

Every time he left the pool--every time he went anywhere--he could hear the soft squeaks of the mice, and the dragging sound of their piper.  She looked younger than Max, with overalls and rattling dark braids, but she swooped around on her rollerskates, playing her recorder, and the rats obeyed her.

Billy’d tried chasing her, once, but he could hardly catch up to rollerskates, and she skated backwards away, staring him in the eye.  He chased her two blocks, then rolled after her in his car, as she looped through driveways and through garages, an endless maze of shortcuts where he couldn’t follow, and he finally realized she was leading him back to the Steelworks.  He spun the wheel, leaving skid marks on the road as he sped back home, and laid awake, with his pillow over his head, listening to the rats in the walls.

After a week of the dragging sound of rollerskates in the street outside at night, the sounds of the off-key recorder warbling over the fence at the pool, and the gnawing rats in the walls, he tried cornering Max.  She just squinted at him, blinking slowly with huge dark circles under her eyes, and suggested blearily that he stop leaving food in his room.

“They’re not normal rats,” he hissed at her, and she stopped, glared at him, and then shook her head and walked off.  

 It wasn’t just Billy, either.  The front page of the Sunday paper--read in Neil Hargrove’s voice, because he wasn’t letting anybody else read it, even though he was taking forever settling himself--was about a guy running around Main Street with a shotgun, screaming about rats and rollerskates.  He’d finally tried to shoot the cops trying to get him to drop the gun, and been hit by a car, and when it revealed he was already under investigation for burning crosses in a local family’s yard, even Neil hissed.  His autopsy revealed his toes and fingers had been gnawed on by rats.

“What a nice town,” Max said dryly.  

There was an interview on TV with a guy’s wife--she’d called the police because her husband had stormed out in the middle of the night, screaming about rats.  She had bruises all up the left side of her face, and something deep in Billy shivered as he wondered about the darkness around her wrists, whether her husband had left bruises there too.  She flinched away from the reporter every time he moved, and he lowered his voice, grimacing.  

“We’d been fighting,” she whispered, and Susan put her hands over her mouth, glancing at Billy.  “We kept hearing rollerskates,” said the woman on he news, crying.  “I-I hope he didn’t hurt that little girl.”

Neil Hargrove stared out the window for hours that night, between glaring at Billy, and putting out poison for the rats.  

 Billy went to get in his car that night, and there were rats, rats on his seats and dashboard, and he yelled, slammed the door, and walked out to where there were people, stalking as fast as he could down the street.  He realized he was walking away from home, but he didn’t want to stop, so he just headed wherever he saw a group of people.  He elbowed his way into a crowd of people loitering around the drug store, and came face to face with Steve Harrington and his loud, curly-haired shadow.  

They stared at him, their mouths sucked in on soda straws, but Billy was on his last nerve.  “You fucking grew up here,” he hissed, stepping closer, “--right?  What the fuck, Harrington.  What the shit is with these goddamn rats?!  Why do they want me to go to the Steelworks--who the goddamn is the shitbird on roller skates—”

Harrington just blinked his big stupid cow eyes and frowned, but his sidekick said “Wait, what?  The Steelworks?”

“The fucking Steelworks,” Billy repeated, his eyes flicking between them as they exchanged an obvious glance.  

“That makes sense,” the kid said, digging out a map, and Billy growled.

“What fucking makes sense,” he asked, through his teeth, as Harrington leaned in to see the map, slurping his soda.  

“Lot of sightings around there,” the kid said, glaring up at Billy.  

“Sightings of what,” Billy hissed, and Harrington shot him a glower.

They didn’t really answer, but they let him follow them to a payphone, and Harrington called the sheriff.

“You can’t call the police on rats,” Billy bit out, feeling like a moron, kind of, for not trying it himself.  

“Shut your face,” Harrington told him, and then proceeded to ask for the sheriff himself, and Billy couldn’t help himself, craning over Steve’s shoulder.  

“My car’s full of rats, my walls’re full of rats, I never stop hearing the roller skates—” he yelled at the phone, and Harrington elbowed him off.

“Maybe you shouldn’t’ve been such a shithead to Lucas Sinclair,” the kid said, sounding pleased.

“Fuck you,” Billy spat back, pretending his voice hadn’t cracked.  “Who the fuck even is Lucas Sinclair?!”

“Sir,” Harrington said.  “Uh, Hopper.  Billy Hargrove thinks it’s out at the Steelworks.  Yeah.  Oh, um.”  He turned to frown at Billy.  “Are you sure you don’t need--we can help, we’ve—” he sighed.  “...I guess we can keep an eye on him.”

“I mean, do we need to?” the kid asked.  “The rats can have him, far as I’m—”

“We’ll make sure nothing happens to him,” Harrington gritted out.  “As long as he lets us.”

Billy snarled at him, but he let them bundle him into Harrington’s car, and curled up on Harrington’s couch, while Harrington himself stalked around his house shooting the occasional glare in Billy’s direction.  

“...was Lucas Sinclair the kid...that night,” Billy asked hoarsely.  “Max’s friend.”

“Yeah,” Harrington said, sarcastically.  “Nice how it only goes after the shittiest people, right?”

“Fuck,” Billy whispered, swallowing.  “Fuck.”

 After a while, Harrington sank down on the couch next to him, and Billy flinched, then tried to pretend he hadn’t, growling.  “They’ll take care of it tonight,” Steve told him, sighing.  “With flamethrowers.”

“Holy shit,” Billy said, staring at him.  

 It was true--Billy woke up the next morning on Harrington’s couch, thanked him awkwardly, and went home to find his father had left during the night, chasing a girl on roller skates.  

He didn’t return.

But, as Harrington had said, there were no more rats.  Billy still saw the girl, occasionally, her glare pointed, but she didn’t come near.  He considered trying to apologize to Lucas Sinclair, and finally asked Max, reluctantly, whether she thought the kid would even want to hear it.

“What,” she said, flatly.

“Maybe I should just stay away,” Billy muttered, as they maneuvered around each other, doing the dishes.  Billy couldn’t quite get over the thought that everybody had acted like the three people taken hadn’t deserved to live, and the rats had not been outside Billy’s house for his father.  Neil had deserved better, Billy couldn’t help thinking--he’d been right about Billy, after all--but on the other hand, he’d definitely charged out trying to murder a little girl on roller skates with his bare hands, so Billy felt a little bit vindicated, after all the things he’d muttered about his dad.

When he saw the little girl again, he yelled out, “D’you think your brother would want me to say sorry?!”, and she skated to a stop, turning to glare at him.

“Would you mean it?” she hollered back, her hands cupped, and Billy nodded.

“I’ll tell him,” she shouted back, and skated off.  

Max started bringing Lucas around, after that, and Billy always got them whatever takeout they wanted, and stayed the hell away.  Lucas nodded to him, after a while, and Billy’s spine loosened.

 Billy nodded to Harrington, too, when he saw him, and after a while, Harrington started nodding back, until Billy let the uneasy squirm in his guts every time they met eyes guilt him into saying, “Sorry.”

“What,” said Harrington, looking weirded out.  The mall was barely open, and he glanced around, like he might need backup.

“Sorry for that night,” Billy said.  “And--and for...helping me.  Sorry I ended up your problem.”

Harrington just stared back at him.  He laughed, though, when he found Billy in his driveway, grimly cleaning rat shit out of every surface of his Camaro.  

 The little girl just made him buy her ice cream, which he was fine with--she’d hop in his car, and they’d drive over to buy ice cream from Steve Harrington.

“I wasn’t possessed, god,” she groaned.  “I was doing God’s work.”

“It promised you ice cream, didn’t it,” Steve asked, raising his eyebrows, and she sighed.

“I was possessed by capitalism,” she sighed dramatically.

After Steve got off work, he climbed in Billy’s car, and they’d drive out to the quarry and talk.  Billy watched him the way he had at first--stupid Steve Harrington, with his stupid hair, and his stupid fucking smile--until he’d realize Harrington was talking again, and Billy was missing it, again.

“The hell d’you keep staring at,” Steve asked, laughing, and Billy groaned, rubbing his face, but Harrington didn’t seem pissed, so Billy just kept running up whenever he saw him, and Harrington started putting an arm aorund his shoulders.  The like, sixteenth time Billy almost forgot himself and kissed him, watching Steve’s lips from inches away, Steve smiled, a little crookedly, and pulled him back as he stepped away.  They stared at each other, and then Billy scrambled away, swearing and kicking at rocks.

Billy had his first gay kiss in the ice cream shop, with the scary little rollerskater wolf-whistling, and Harrington’s chocolate-sticky fingers in his hair.  It tasted like waffle cones.

The other Harringrove April prompts I’ve done