#there's a rougher demo cut where you can hear me start to tear up at the end

[enigma-absolute]

Despite having never seen the Muppet Movie in full, Gonzo's solo has been chewing through my brain so I figured - why not?

Backing Instrumental Link (starts at 1:10)

[goalieprotectionsquad]

so i’ve watched like three straight days of maine cabin masters and my idiot ass is thinking of the harringtons having a cute little cabin on a lake in maine where they went every summer as a family before his dad started making bank and didn’t have the time anymore.

it’s been seventeen years since steve’s been up there. he doesn’t live at home anymore. he has a job that doesn’t really make him happy, but doesn’t really make him miserable, either. he has plenty of savings from the government coverup but doesn’t have anywhere to go with it. nothing to spend it on. the kids get older. they leave for college. he’s in his mid-twenties and complacent and isn’t all that motivated to change anything.

he gets dinner with his parents when they’re in town in the spring. his mom is talking about a lodge they stayed in when they visited basque country over christmas and he suddenly remembers the cabin. he waits until his mom is done relaying unimportant details like the color of the drape tassels to ask his dad if they still have the cabin in maine, and it’s evident on his face that he’d forgotten about it, too. he looks sort of wistful for a moment but it passes quickly. yeah, they still own it. no, nobody’s been up there in a while. steve doesn’t really think before he’s saying, “can I take a trip up there?”

his parents stare at him for a second like they’re surprised he’s actually interested in doing something, which. not unfair. his dad can’t remember where he put the keys but gives steve the address and tells him to find a locksmith who can get him inside. (steve plans on elbowing through a window or something to save on time and the hassle).

he subleases his apartment and leaves. everyone he likes is either away at school or just. away. moving on with their lives. he doesn’t have anyone to say goodbye to beyond telling his boss he’s quitting.

it takes a while to get up there, but he does, eventually. the cabin is hard to find and it looks so bad on the outside that steve has to triple check the address on the adjacent cabins to make sure it’s the right place. he thinks it’s maybe not just him who hasn’t been here in almost twenty years.

he stays in a hotel and gets up early to meet the contractor. she looks like she’s holding in a laugh when she introduces herself as kali. “look,” she says. “I’m going to be straight with you. this place is literally falling apart.”

steve doesn’t know what to say so he says, “yeah.”

“we can do a walkthrough,” she continues, “but I guarantee that this is going to make your budget look like pocket change.”

steve doesn’t really want to say it’s his dad’s money, so he shrugs and says, “let’s do it,” and watches her pick the lock.

the foundation is rotted out. the floor is rotted out. the porch is rotted out. she points at things and says any variety of that has to go or we’d start by taking that out or when was the last time you were up here again? they need to hire a plumber and a landscaper and an electrician and probably an exterminator, too, and kali doesn’t say anything when she watches him write a check for half the amount she quotes. she gives him a calculating look with kohl-rimmed eyes and says, “all right. we’ll be here tomorrow morning.”

steve shows up at seven because he doesn’t have anything better to do and there’s already a truck parked outside. a tall guy with a beanie shoved low over his forehead is tearing the porch off the front of the house and steve goes over to him and tries not to get hit with any falling debris.

“hi,” he says and has to stand there a minute before the guy looks at him. “I’m steve. is kali around?”

she’s inside the cabin and is leaning over the sink when steve walks in. she yells no. no. no. out the open window to her right as the water continues to run and then yes that’s it we got it as it cuts off abruptly. she looks unsurprised when she turns around and sees him standing in the doorway.

“hi,” he says again. “I’m here to help.”

“you’re paying us to do this for you, you know,” she says, but something in her face makes steve feel like she gets it.

a guy with his hair pulled into a tight bun at the nape of his neck hoists himself through the front door from where the porch used to be. “hey,” he says, all silk, when he sees steve.

“billy, this is steve harrington. the homeowner.” she stresses the word enough that steve literally cannot not notice the emphasis. billy rolls his eyes and shakes steve’s hand. it’s rough with calluses and steve would be stupid not to think about what that would feel like on his skin.

“billy hargrove,” he says. “head carpenter.”

“steve’s here to help with demo,” kali says. 

“well,” billy says. he gives steve one of the most obvious once-overs he’s ever seen. “welcome aboard. you’re gonna help me knock down these interior walls, pretty boy. heads up, though. you might break a nail.”

billy shows him how to use a stud finder and how to cut into the walls to make sure there aren’t any loose wires running through it and then he fucking kicks the wall in and gives steve a wild grin as the drywall dust settles into his blond hair.

steve comes back every day to see billy. he doesn’t even bother lying to himself. billy is funny and sharp and always seems to have a comeback for anything anyone ever says. he shows steve how to build things. stands at his shoulder and watches him use the staple gun on the trim. brings him lunch when he goes out to get food for the rest of the crew.

he tells steve that his mom sent him to live with a friend who had moved from san diego to bangor a few years before. his parents split and she didn’t want him living with his dad. he says susan is a little ditzy but she means well, and she didn’t give up on him during his rougher years in high school even though he isn’t even her kid. he calls her daughter my sister and gets a pinched expression on his face when he talks about how she’s been going through her teenage angst since she was eight and how they’re still figuring out how to not always be at each other’s throats.

it takes a month for them to take out the rotted lumber and to fix the foundation and floor and porch and roof. billy shows steve the crumbly mess in the insulation that means he has an ant infestation. steve helps make the framing for the bathroom and bedroom walls and helps lay the stones for the walkway down to the lake. he spends all day at the work site, then he goes back to the hotel, has dinner, crashes. rinse and repeat. he spends the days the crew isn’t working exploring sort of idly and missing the smell of sawdust. 

when kali declares the place habitable, he buys a mattress and drops it onto the floor of the master bedroom, which is still missing its walls. he checks out of the hotel and buys some groceries and spends his evenings down at the lake, his own private little waterfront. he tries reading but the only salvageable book in the cabin is walden and he can’t make it past the first page.

he hears axel and mick talking about a meteor shower one night. once the crew is gone and the sky is turning purple-navy, he goes down to the lake and lays back to look at the stars. they’re brighter out here, brighter than hawkins, somehow, and the sky feels endless.

he turns to look over his shoulder when he hears footsteps crunching through the undergrowth in his direction. “just me,” billy calls through the dark. he drops down heavily next to steve and passes over a beer and a hamburger wrapped in greasy foil. casual, like they do this all the time. his hair is down and curly and he’s wearing a red shirt unbuttoned to his navel, where it’s tucked into his jeans. he’s wearing cologne, too, and billy smiles when he sees it get steve’s attention.

they talk and they sit in comfortable silence and then they talk again. billy seems to be getting closer and closer until their shoulders and thighs are pressed together and their elbows are knocking. when billy turns to look at him, their noses almost brush, and steve knows billy doesn’t miss the way his eyes drop to his mouth.

“have you swam in the lake yet?” he asks instead and gives steve a wicked smile when he shakes his head, and then he’s up and stripping down and is in the water, wet hair slicked back over his head, before steve’s brain has even puttered beyond looking at billy’s mouth. “come on it, pretty boy! water’s fine.”

he unabashedly watches steve undress and reaches for him immediately once he’s in the water. no preamble. just. puts a hand on his hip. when steve doesn’t move back, he slips an arm around steve’s waist, and then the other. their knees bump under the water and billy noses at steve’s cheek. kisses him on the chin and the corner of his mouth before he kisses his bottom lip. they kiss and kiss, the water not even up to their collarbones, and steve has never been so aware of the night noises around them. cicadas in the trees. a loon some ways away. something shrieks in the distance and it startles steve enough that he stumbles in billy’s grip, and billy tightens his hold and tilts his chin closer again and whispers, “it’s just a fisher cat,” into the crease of his lips.

they start heading back to the cabin before billy makes them double back for the food wrappers and beer bottles and steve grabs their clothes so he has something to do with his hands. he’s never run naked through the trees before but there’s something freeing about it. for some reason, the trees out here don’t look as threatening as the ones in hawkins. maybe they’re older, wiser. maybe they’ve seen more and know how to protect him and billy from whatever else is out there.

steve clears away the painting tarp over the bed and barely has it on the ground before billy is crowding against him, skin dry but hair dripping at the ends over his freckled shoulders. they lose track of time in a cabin they rebuilt together.

billy’s hand on his chest is what wakes him up. the sun is filtering in through the windows and billy is trying to press a mug of coffee into his hands. steve doesn’t own mugs or coffee or a coffee maker out here. steve sits up and leans against the wall, right where they’ve sketched out the custom headboard billy’s going to help him carve, and lets the blanket pool around him in a way that has billy’s gaze dropping, the apples of his cheeks going a little pink. he looks good in the morning sun, in the little bits of dust floating through the air. 

“where’d you find the coffee maker?” steve asks. “and the change of clothes?”

billy gives him a big shark smile but sounds a little sheepish when he says, “I was hedging my bets on needing morning provisions.”

steve makes them eggs and bacon and toast and they sit out on the new front porch to eat and wait for the rest of the team to show up. billy keeps leaning in to kiss his ear, the hinge of his jaw, the side of his neck. just pecks. they still set steve on fire.

billy stays that night, and the next, and the next, and the next. they go swimming for real, eventually, and play cards, and fall asleep outside in the grass with their fingers twisted together. out in the open as much as in their own little world.

kali knows something is going on between them, even if steve doesn’t know if billy told her or she figured it out herself. when it’s just the three of them in a room, billy likes to pitch his voice down, low enough to be husky, but loud enough to be overheard, and gives steve directions more gutturally than usual. pull out a little, he’ll say, all breathless, when they’re fitting the doorframes. now push it back in. harder. mm, yeah, steve. right there. steve doesn’t know if it’s meant to be embarrassing or not but he laughs himself red in the face anyway.

they finish the cabin over the next six weeks. if steve hadn’t been there every day for almost three months, he might have thought he’d gotten the address wrong. it looks like a house, first of all. the outside is a soft brown to blend into the trees. there’s a little living room with a couch and a little table with two artfully mismatched chairs in the kitchen. there’s a huge window in the master bedroom overlooking the lake. steve has never really felt drawn to the water as a non-great-lakes-midwestern kid, but every time he looks out over the lake, he wonders if he even wants to go back to hawkins.

it feels weird giving kali the second half of the payment, knowing he won’t see her again. he hugs her and she pats him awkwardly on the elbows until he lets go. one by one, the rest of the team leaves, and it’s not until steve’s standing alone in the fading sunlight that he realizes that billy’s gone, too.

it’s the first time billy’s just left without saying anything about where he was going and when he was coming back. that deep, dark part of steve says they were just fooling around during the job, but he drinks a beer and talks himself out of panicking. he makes himself a sandwich. lays in the bed. showers. doesn’t really know what to do with himself now that the job is done and billy is gone.

he’s laying on the couch and staring up at the ceiling when the sound of a key scraping in the lock has him on his feet on instinct to do -- something, he didn’t really think that far ahead -- but then the door wedges open and billy’s head appears around it.

“sorry,” he says when he sees steve still gaping. “didn’t mean to scare you. we just -- kali forgot to give you back your spare.”

steve watches him reach out and hang the key ring around the hook next to the door. it overlaps steve’s set.

“oh,” steve says. “thanks.”

billy gives him a little smile and looks like he’s going to leave, but then they’re both saying wait in the same moment and billy’s smile reappears around the door, wide but shy.

“stay,” steve says.

billy slides the rest of the way past the door. he has a small duffle thrown over the shoulder steve couldn’t see behind the door and he’s holding a bottle of cheap grocery store champagne.

“I was hoping you’d say that,” billy says. now that steve’s shown his hand, it’s  like billy’s found his footing again. he drops his bag and goes over to the cabinet to pull out two mugs, sets them on the counter. he wraps an arm around steve where’s he’s drifted over without really meaning to. billy kisses the corner of his mouth and presses the bottle into his hands. the foil is already peeled off the cork. “I heard you’re celebrating a housewarming. you wanna do the honors?”