Hey!! 🙃.
Since you're taking prompts, I'd LOVE to hear 1millionk more about billy living in steve's treehouse while he's on the upside-down 🌟🌟🌟
He thought that he couldn’t get colder than he was in the heat of July 1985; when that thing was inside his very being, controlling his every move.
But he could. This place he’s in now, this reeking, nightmare parallel to Hawkins, makes him colder.
As if that Indiana small town needed to look more hellish, as if the Midwest needed to be even colder.
He came to on the floor of the mall, shivering and with a dull ache in his torso. When his eyes opened and he saw the walls of Starcourt all around him, he thought maybe he had lived through all of it; through a monsters’ arms tearing gaping holes in his chest, through eating chemicals, through being possessed.
Through Hawkins, Indiana. Through Neil. Through his mother leaving.
But Max’s face wasn’t hovering over him like it was when his eyes closed. He no longer heard her screams, heard everyone else’s murmurs.
The mall surrounding him was no longer fluorescent and bright, but grey and miserable, covered in vines that looked far too much like the monsters’ arms.
The holes in his chest were gone, but the black liquid that he thought might be his blood stained his clothing, his skin.
Maybe Billy Hargrove was alive, but he felt dead. Maybe Billy Hargrove was still Hawkins, but he felt like he was in Hell.
He walked. He’ll never know how long he walked for that first piece of time in this place, but he didn’t stop for miles. He walked out of the mall, past cornfields on badly paved narrow roads, past the steel mill, where he would’ve thrown up if his body was capable of doing that anymore, past main street.
There didn’t seem to be danger, the monster didn’t seem to live here. Vaguely he remembered fireworks, thinking that maybe all those kids managed to kill it. But it doesn’t matter. He’s still stuck down here.
He’s still so impossibly tired.
When he passed Cherry Lane and his fathers’ car in the driveway, Max’s skateboard on the lawn, he almost considered stopping, going inside and climbing into his bed that isn’t really his bed in this wrong version of Hawkins. It’s not like there would be any danger inside. Monsters don’t live down here.
But he couldn’t bring his feet to stop moving past it, carrying him far from a horror that’s a universe away.
Eventually, he hit woods; dense pine trees and a bed of fallen leaves, and shortly after, his feet finally came to a stop on their own, as if his body was possessed by something new now, something less insidious that took him somewhere safe.
Above him was a treehouse, nestled snugly into an oak tree. The ladder was covered in the same vines that covered this entire parallel world, but still Billy climbed. He’d never had a treehouse as a child, knew not to ask for one.
It was cozy inside. There were pillows and blankets, only a little damaged by weather and time. There was a walkman and a small collection of tapes, a shelf covered in incomplete board games and decks of cards.
And the walls were littered with photographs. When Billy looked closely, he soon made out a face he knew well, one that filled him with guilt and anger, but mostly a deep sense of yearning. Of sadness.
The young face of Steve Harrington peered out at him from the polaroids and it brought him to his knees, where he would have cried if his body was capable of doing that anymore.
And in that treehouse he’s been since. For weeks or months or maybe it’s been minutes. He’s not real, so how could time be? Maybe purgatory is sitting in the treehouse of the boy you were cruel to because you’d never be allowed to love him. Maybe that cruelty, towards Steve, but also towards Max, towards everyone, is what keeps him here now, some higher power deciding what layer of Hell to place him in.
Or maybe it’s the fact that he wanted to love Steve at all that will send him to Hell. He has a lot of sins to account for.
So he sits in the treehouse, huddled in the blankets and pillows that smell like death, but when he gets drowsy enough, smell like Steve. He plays endless games of solitaire.
He places the headphones of the walkman over his ears and is brave enough to try a tape. The collection is sweet, his chest stirring at the thought of a small Steve collecting Billy Joel tapes. He could be bitter about the fact that Harrington is rich enough to abandon an entire tape collection and walkman out here, but he can’t make himself feel much of anything towards him besides want.
His favorite tape to listen to in this nowhere of a place and time is a mix Steve made himself, one titled “For Margaret” with a small heart doodled in the handwriting of a kid with his first crush, maybe his first girlfriend.
Billy handles the deck of cards that Steve’s hands have touched countless times, he wraps himself in the blankets he’s convinced himself smell like Steve, and he listens to the tape of sappy love songs over and over and over again. He pretends the tape was made for him, left here for him so that he wouldn’t feel alone.
Sometimes he thinks he feels a grip at his hands, a tear drop falling on his shoulder, a voice whispering in his ear, ranting about a day at work, or begging him, desperately to wake up, to “come back to me.”
But he knows it's the delusions of a mind that is half, if not fully dead. He knows he’ll be here for eternity or maybe he isn’t here at all.
He knows that his existence is now measured in how many times he can play the same songs over before the battery runs out.
