#such as billy and max having a strained relationship with jane in the background as the real 'sister figure' | Explore Tumblr posts and blogs

tenta-cute · 2 years ago

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Dumb Little Harringrove Thing 4/∞

Hell hath no fury like a Billy Hargrove creatively constipated. Or, well, maybe not fury—not anymore—but definitely some firm annoyance.

The abandoned poem lies scattered over the pages of his notebook, reviewed so many times it’s a miracle his favorite pen still has any ink left. Old habits keep prompting him to find something to drink—some mediocre rum or maybe a shitty beer for old times’ sake—but it’s been years since he had last enjoyed a drink without someone nearby to keep him company.

Some habits are not worth returning to.

He makes tea instead.

Bathed in the warmth of the setting California sun, his little nest looks like something out of a fairy tale; warm and cozy, soft in the way that Billy would’ve never associated with himself, and yet here he is. The smell of orange and cinnamon swirls in the air.

He burrows deeper into his cardigan, chasing warmth provided by high-quality cashmere. It’s a bit silly to be wearing such a thing in Cali, where winters are sunny and mild, but he always feels a bit cold these days. When he was a kid, he used to run hot in more ways than one, shirt unbuttoned all the way to the navel even in fucking December in Indiana, but then the Shadow happened and here Billy is, not even thirty and already down a spleen and one kidney, with busted circulation and nerve damage that sometimes keeps him up at night. Wrapped in bulky sweaters. Doing yoga instead of lifting weights. Drinking cinnamon tea instead of alcohol.

...It’s not that bad. Better than the alternative in which he’s rotting in a tiny wooden box, that’s for sure.

Now armed with a cup of hot tea, Billy looks at the coffee table, where his work remains temporarily abandoned.

When he had first started to write it was as a form of self-therapy—half-assedly picked from the list suggested by Owens, chosen purely by virtue of being less girly than, say, knitting or scrapbooking—but somehow it turned out that Billy Hargrove has a knack for something other than fist fighting and being a disappointment. Words that he would never say out loud turned out to be easy to put on paper, flat and disconnected from the emotions they bring, thus significantly less threatening.

Billy filled the first notebook before he re-learned how to walk.

Fast forward ten years and he now gives people business cards with the word Writer right under his name.

Sometimes he still has to sit down and ponder how the fuck it happened. William Hargrove, former playboy and general menace, current writer with two moderately successful tomes of poetry to his name and a small but dedicated fan base that does shit like write him letters about how touched they were by his words and how much they related to his struggles, what the fuck. (He tries not to cry when he reads stories from people who are just like him.)

Billy sits down, drinks some tea, and picks up his notebook. He winces immediately.

He always feels guilty when writing about Max.

They don’t hate each other anymore, but their relationship is still strained and built on old hurt that new understanding never quite scrubbed clean. There was a time when everyone expected them to start over, rebuild themselves from scratch in the context of a real brother and a real sister, and they tried. They tried for years, until they realized that the best they can do is polite amity and decided to leave it at that.

Sometimes Billy wonders if its because in his heart he had enough space for only one sister, and the gap was filled almost immediately by Jane. Sometimes he wonders if he hurt Max by allowing someone else—a stranger—to take the place that was prepared for her.

Maybe he should write about Jane instead.

Billy drinks his tea and re-reads the poem for the hundredth time, as if he doesn’t know every single line by heart by now. The more he reads, the more he feels words slipping out of control, as if his thoughts are drifting away. Leading him somewhere else, somewhere he doesn’t care to go right now.

“Fuck that,” Billy announces to the empty room and drops the notebook back on the coffee table. He’s been trying to avoid the elephant in the room for hours now, but there’s no point in pretending he can write anything while in this kind of shitty mindset.

He doesn’t deal well with loneliness, is the thing.

Billy brings the empty cup to the kitchen, washes it, dries it off with a towel, and puts it back on the shelf—an old routine, one too useful to bother uprooting from his brain. Neil is quietly rotting in his shitty little house back in Hawkins, destined to die alone in the small-town prison he tried to condemn his son to. Billy can pick and choose which rules he wants to obey now. He can keep the useful ones and ditch everything else.

The little post-it note he’s looking for is stuck to the fridge with the horrible plastic magnet shaped like a slice of radioactively yellow pizza—a small piece of Argyle’s brilliant idea of a housewarming gift, that is a pack full of weed and pizza-themed memorabilia.

Billy consults the note a couple times as he dials the unfamiliar number. Counts the beeps. Waits.

“Hello?”

Billy sighs. His shoulders relax at the sound of familiar—albeit unpleasantly tinny—voice in the receiver. “Hey. It’s me.”

“Hey, you,” says Steve, and it’s like all the miles and miles stretching out between them are suddenly gone.

Steve sounds tired—the kind of tired that even enthusiasm can’t quite mask. It’s late in New York. He should go to sleep soon.

But Billy is a selfish bastard.

“How’s work?”

Steve groans.

“Somehow both very shitty and very rewarding? The team is awful—getting them to do anything is like, a major achievement. No idea where the hell my dad found that project manager. Fucker is worse than Keith from Family Video.” Steve laughs tiredly. Billy basks in the warmth.

“Yeah?” he asks, almost breathlessly. “Tell me about him.”

It’s not that he’s particularly invested in Steve’s job. Steve’s job is fucking boring, some paper-pushing, meeting-organizing, numbers-watching thing that Mr. Harrington had eagerly pulled out of his Burberry-clad ass. Steve doesn’t really hate it—at least not the way he expected to hate it back when he was a teenager and the prospect of working for his dad was just a looming threat—but it’s still a brain-dead office job without much potential for personal growth.

Such is life. You don’t always get what you want. You don’t always get what you deserve.

At least it pays well—more than it should, really, not that Billy is complaining.

Steve talks about some guy named Cliff who sounds like a complete prick, one of those older guys who are too close to retirement to give a fuck, too comfortable in their belief they are irreplaceable, too confident in their outdated ways to listen to some kid young enough to still have all his hair. Billy closes his eyes, tries to tune out the tinny static. Pretends that Steve is right next to him, leaning against the wall with a cup of his gross yerba that smells and tastes like wet cigarettes.

“But I’ve somehow managed to whip them into shape,” Steve is saying, a little more lively now. A little satisfied. “Maybe this branch won’t collapse the second I skip town.”

“When are you coming back?”

Yeah, yeah, Billy is clingy and pathetic. Sue him.

“On Thursday,” Steve says firmly, and from the unyielding tone of his voice Billy can kinda tell that he must’ve waged at least one office war for this. “Abigail wants me to stay till the end of the week and fly home Saturday morning, but fuck that. I’m not a miracle worker.”

Their conversation briefly strays towards Abigail, who apparently still believes that Steve is one of those ambitious and bloodthirsty young sharks instead of a glorified office worker he actually is, and as such keeps trying to help him bump up his position in a rat race he is not at all interested in participating in.

Abigail is a bit dense.

“Okay, enough about my shitty job,” Steve says. “How’s the poem going?”

Billy scrunches up his nose. Ugh.

“It’s not going.”

“Ah.”

“Yeah.”

“That bad, huh?”

“Yeeeeah,” Billy drawls, toying with the coiled phone cord. “I think I might have to… Dunno, either scrap it or sit on it for a couple days. When it comes to Max there’s something I can’t get out of my system.” He yanks at the cord a couple times, watching it stretch and bounce back, stretch and bounce back. “It’s like I’m constantly chasing after closure I’m never gonna get—don’t tell me to just talk to her.”

He can hear Steve’s mouth shut with a click on the other end of the line.

Yes, Billy should talk to Max. Yes, Billy knows that. No, Billy is not going to talk to Max. Even the usual hour-long catch up sessions they do whenever a holiday demands a customary phone call end up sapping all the strength from his body, and they rarely go beyond the safety of small talk. Maybe it would be different if they could talk face to face, but Max and Lucas live in fucking Canada where there’s even more snow than in Indiana, so there’s no way in hell Billy is ever going there. Cold temperatures make him—nah. If he could, he would move to fucking Africa. Either way, he can’t ask Max to leave her perfect little life abroad just to come all the way to California so they can talk.

It’s fine. They’re fine the way they are. No point rocking the boat.

“Billy? Baaaaabe?”

Billy coughs. “Yeah,” he mutters, “Yeah, sorry, just… You know. Max.”

“I know,” Steve says. “Anyway. What else are you up to?”

“Not much. This morning I spent three hours on the phone talking Jane through an oil change.”

“How did that go?”

“She’s getting the hang of it,” Billy says, and tries not to sound as overwhelmingly fond as he feels. “Would’ve probably went faster if we didn’t spend at least one of those three hours talking about fashion.”

He waits for Steve’s affronted squawk and is not disappointed.

“Why is she talking to you about fashion? You used to have an honest to God mullet!”

Billy grins at the absolute indignation in Steve’s voice. “Yeah, and you fucking loved it, asshole,” he drawls.

“Yeah, no. It was like a rat’s nest. Gross,” Steve argues, as if he’s not completely obsessed with Billy’s curls, no matter their shape or style.

“She’s a rebel, baby. Of course she’s gonna talk to the guy who wears a leather jacket and knows the importance of waterproof eyeliner,” Billy purrs into the phone. “If she talked to you… Man, you’d probably try to put her in pastels.”

“I don’t think this is as strong an argument as you think it is,” Steve says slowly after a brief moment of nearly audible cog-turning. “I put you in pastels and you look stunning.”

Billy idly picks at the sleeve of his cardigan.

It’s yellowish beige. Like sand on the beach.

“Fuck off and go to sleep, Harrington,” he mutters, lips curling faintly at the sound of Steve’s victorious laughter. “I’m serious. It’s late. Go to sleep.”

“Jesus, I really should, huh? I have a conference in the morning, because, you know, Abigail fucking hates me. I’ll call you tomorrow.”

“Sure. In the evening, okay?” Billy glances at the coffee table, where the abandoned notebook somehow manages to look outright accusatory. “I gotta drop by Brianna’s office. Get a fresh perspective and shit.”

He’s pretty sure that Brianna is just gonna tell him what everyone else is telling him—that he needs to talk to Max—but Steve won’t be back home for two more days and Billy’s already had enough loneliness to last him an extra lifetime or two. So he’s gonna talk to Brianna and maybe even offer to write some blurbs for her, even if Billy really fucking hates writing blurbs. They make him feel like a used car salesman.

“Alright—“Whatever Steve wanted to say next drowns in a massive yawn.

“Bed time,” Billy says pointedly.

“Yeah, yeah. G’night, babe.”

They’re too old to play the you hang up, no, you hang up game, so Billy just grins and makes an exaggerated kissing noise, a saucy mwah that makes Steve cackle.

The line goes dead.

The apartment is still empty, but. Warmer.

#harringrove #billy hargrove #steve harrington #ficlet #these used to be called 'dumb little harringrove drabbles' but is it really a drabble if it's 2k words long?#soft billy #i wanted to write something in which their future is not completely perfect #but its perfect enough for them #drawing from some of my long-standing headcanons #such as billy and max having a strained relationship with jane in the background as the real 'sister figure'#or billy using writing/poetry to help with the trauma and it eventually turning into an actual profession

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