Chapter Text
The first time Billy wakes up is in a generically clean, generically plain hospital room, harsh fluorescent lights overhead, and the overpowering scent of sterility, with the general noise of a bustling hospital on the other side of the door. There's something to his left making a very annoying, very persistent beeping noise, and it is not helping the pounding headache that's settled in somewhere deep in his skull. There are tubes and wires and monitors running off of him in every direction. Blood and fluids and who knows what else. Probably something for the pain because he's certainly not feeling anything right now aside from a bone deep sort of exhaustion, limbs heavy, mouth dry.
But, he realizes, he's alone.
Why is he alone?
Not that he wants just anyone there with him. Doesn't give a shit where his dad is, where the cops are, he's sure they have questions, sure there's a damn media circus outside (how could there not be? A cop, a journalist, and a bunch of teenagers all brutally slain – he's sure they're having a field day). No, just…
"Stu?" he chokes out, his voice rough and ragged.
Why isn't Stu here? There's another bed on the other side of the room, but no trace it's been occupied. Where is Stu? How long has it been? A glance at the clock on the wall tells him only a couple of hours have passed since they were brought in. Is he still in surgery? Is he in another room? Is… No, he doesn't want to even think about the other possibility.
The rhythmic beep-beep-beep of the monitor speeds up, which seems to draw the attention of a nurse.
"Where's Stu?" he demands of her, trying his hardest to sit up and get out of this damn bed so he can go find the other boy himself.
"You need to calm down, honey," the woman says, pushing him back down, "you're on some pretty serious medications and if you keep this up, you're liable to really hurt yourself. You need to rest."
But he doesn't listen. He manages to get mostly upright, but that comes at a cost. His head swims, his vision blurs out of focus, there's a sharp ripping pain in his side, but he doesn't care. The shrill beeping of the monitor gets even faster, until it matches the frantic beat of his racing heart. "I need... where's Stu? Is he okay?"
The nurse is calling out to a colleague, who comes rushing in amidst orders to sedate him before he does any more damage. The newcomer pins him down while the first nurse starts rifling through the contents of a locked drawer and comes up with a syringe of something that's surely meant to knock him out again.
But he doesn't want that. He can't let that happen, not when he doesn't know where Stu is, if he's okay. He has to know. "No, don't-" he fights, but the guy holding him down now is doing a pretty decent job of it, and all his squirming is doing is setting off more alarms and drawing more and more people into the room.
But that's about when everything goes dark again.
The second time Billy wakes up, he's too exhausted to fight.
Which means he's trapped.
Stuck in his own head and floating between the crystal clear memories of the party and the much hazier recollections that came after. He remembers every single detail of killing Tatum and Dewey and Sidney and her father. Remembers standing in the kitchen with Stu with startling clarity, remembers the stabbings and then entirely too much blood entirely too quickly, remembers Stu's desperate "I love you," and his own equally desperate pleadings of "You die, I die," and "You and me." It starts getting fuzzy around the time that the cops finally show up, bursting through the door, into the house, into the room, clearing the place, finding all the bodies as they go. He's almost glad that the memories of the medics dragging him away from Stu (who had, by then, been alarmingly unresponsive), aren't quite so vivid. There are scattered bits and pieces of his own ambulance ride, and he dimly recalls being poked and prodded in the emergency room of Woodsboro General before the drugs they gave him kicked in and knocked him out for real.
Plus there's the ominous layer of nightmares – the what if's and could be's that he doesn't have the means to disprove. Imagines Stu bleeding out before he could even get here, imagines Stu flatlining in surgery, or making it through and just… not waking up. Imagines they fucked up the plan enough to somehow get caught, imagines them dragging him away from Stu's bedside in handcuffs, never seeing him again. As if he needs that additional kind of torture on top of the not knowing.
He hears someone talking nearby, the garbled words filtering into his mind. Curious, he finally finds the strength to open his eyes, to move. When he does, though, he rather wishes he hadn't bothered.
"Dad," he manages to croak out, looking from his father, seated at his bedside, to the man lurking in the doorway, "Sheriff Burke."
"Son," he says, moving quickly to pour Billy a cup of water from the plastic pitcher on the little bedside table, which Billy begrudgingly accepts, taking careful swigs – the cool water feels fantastic on his raw throat. "You're awake. How are you feeling? The doctors said you ripped your stitches out earlier."
And, well, that certainly explains a lot. "I'm fine," he says, though he is anything but.
Still, maybe this isn't so bad. One of them will probably know something about Stu, or can at the very least find out for him. Before he can ask, though, the Sheriff crosses the room, stands at the foot of his bed. He looks tired – no doubt he's been dealing with the crime scene, the media, the families, an office full of irate cops angry they lost one of their own (even if they hadn't seemed to like Dewey all that much). "You sure are a lucky kid," he remarks.
Billy manages something that's almost a laugh at the absurdity of that. "Not feeling super lucky at the moment, actually."
"At least you're feeling something," the Sheriff counters. "That's a lot more than can be said for the others. And now that you're awake, I can finally get some answers about this whole mess. Mind if I ask you some questions about what went down? Your father can stay, if you want."
Alarm flares in his chest at those words – the others… what about Stu? "I'm not answering any of your questions until you tell me if Stu's okay," Billy demands.
"Just him?" The Sheriff questions, clearly suspicious. "Not your girlfriend?"
"I already know the answer to that one, Sheriff," he says, trying his best to slip into the character he needs to play for this – helpless victim, devastated boyfriend, all around innocent party. "I saw her bleed to death after her dad stabbed her in the heart – there's no surviving that. But Stu was still alive when you got to the house."
"His heart stopped in the ambulance on the way here. They got him back, but it's been pretty touch and go. He's still in surgery to try to stop the bleeding, looks like the knife got his liver pretty good," he begrudgingly explains. "His parents are flying home tonight."
Billy feels… cold.
He did this. He fucked up. If Stu dies, it's on him and no one else.
The heart monitor picks up again, but he fights down the rising panic.
"What do you wanna know?" Billy asks, hoping they can get this over with as quickly as possible. The sooner this is done the sooner Sheriff Burke will leave, the sooner he can convince his dad to fuck off. Then Billy can freak out about Stu with some modicum of privacy.
"Start from the beginning," the Sheriff says, "Just tell me what happened."
So he does. He tells the tale just like they rehearsed, shifted just a little bit here and there to fit the narrative of what actually happened. It was getting late and the party started fizzling out. He, Randy, Stu, and Sidney had been watching a movie in the living room when the masked killer attacked them. He'd gotten Randy before any of them knew what was happening. The rest of them bolted, made it into the kitchen. Billy had tried to stop him, keep him away from the others and he'd been stabbed in the gut in the process. Stu had interrupted the killer before he could finish the job and Billy had been shoved aside, had hit his head on the cabinet when he'd fallen. Stu'd put up a decent fight but ended up down, too. And then he'd gone after Sidney. Neil Prescott made the reveal and killed his own daughter. Killed himself. It had all happened so fast, Billy tells him, they couldn't do anything to stop it.
He doesn't mention the other bodies. He shouldn't know about Tatum or Dewey or Gale Weathers and her cameraman. Doesn't mention the car out in the woods.
And Sheriff Burke listens, takes notes, asks follow up questions where needed and offers useless platitudes in all the right places. "I'm sure we'll have more questions for you as the investigation continues," he says, before he takes his leave. "Thanks for your help."
Billy heaves a (slightly painful) sigh of relief. One down, one to go.
There's an awkward beat of silence. Most things are awkward with his dad. "You don't have to stay," he offers, knowing that while most decent parents would probably disagree with the mere idea of leaving their only child alone in the hospital mere hours after an attempted murder, his father will have no such issues with the idea.
As expected, he jumps at the chance, already getting to his feet. "If you're sure," he says, and "You need anything, just give me a call."
And then Billy's alone again.
Trapped in his own head until the drugs drop him back into a dreamless sleep.
The third time Billy wakes up, it is late in the afternoon and he finds Stu sleeping soundly in the other bed, hooked up to just as many tubes and wires and monitors. He feels a weight lift off his chest at the sight and the only thing that stops him from climbing out of bed and rushing over to the other boy is a pointed look from the nurse (the one who'd been there for his initial freak-out) that's busy checking Stu's vitals.
"Is he doing okay?" he asks. figures that's a safe enough question to not get himself sedated again.
"Given the way he came in, he's doing much better than expected," she tells him. "He finished talking with Sheriff Burke a little while ago; it seemed to take a lot out of him. He's been asleep since then, but he should probably be waking up again soon."
Billy's relieved to hear that. Hell, he's relieved just to have Stu close enough to prove to himself he's still alive, the slow, steady beep of the heart monitor is a comfort now.
She crosses the room to check his vitals, too, and when she's completed the task, she disconnects him from several of the monitors. "Don't go ripping your stitches out," she warns him. "I can't guarantee the doctor will be quite so willing to put them back for you again."
"Understood," he assures her, taking that for the tacit permission it was surely meant to be.
So, once she's gone, he slowly eases his way out of bed, carefully maneuvering with the few attachments that remain. He manages to stagger across the room without setting off any alarms or injuring himself any further. He claims the chair at Stu's bedside and settles in – he does not intend to move anytime soon.
When he wakes again sometime in the middle of the night, he's slumped forward over the edge of Stu's bed, holding tight to Stu's hand under the cover of his own body. He jolts upright – which, ow – when he feels Stu's hand shift in his grip and looks up to find the other boy awake, smiling down at him with his stupid dopey grin on his stupid dopey face.
"Hey," Stu mumbles at him, his voice deep and sleep rough – Billy's woken up to that sound dozens of times, revels in it now when he'd feared never hearing it again. "Told you I wasn't going anywhere, didn't I?"
He breathes a huge sigh of relief and after a brief look at the closed door separating them from the rest of the hospital, he risks leaning in to steal the quickest of kisses. Stu is not dead, not dying, not ghostly pale and clammy and unconscious – but alive and awake and talking. "Yeah, but you got about as close as you could possibly get," he counters. He feels all of the built up adrenaline and worry and fear of the last twenty four hours leave his body all at once. He feels floored again, exhausted like he had been when he'd first woken up here. "Fuck, Stu..."
"I know," he says. Then, something almost like a laugh, "Let's not do that again. This sucks."
"You can say that again," Billy agrees. He's not even talking about his own injuries, just what almost losing Stu had done to him.
"I'm sorry."
The words catch Billy off guard. Mostly because Stu's the one saying them. He can't imagine what Stu thinks he has to apologize for in all of this. "For what?"
"I…"
"Bleeding?" Billy guesses, "Pretty sure that one's on me, buddy."
"For saying… What I did," Stu answers. "I meant it," he says, before Billy can take that the wrong way. "Only… I didn't mean to tell you, but I couldn't not tell you, then, you know? I know you don't care about me like that. So we can just… pretend I didn't say it? Chalk it up to the blood loss?""
"You don't know shit," Billy counters, surprised at himself for how viscerally he means that. He doesn't know why Stu thinks 'I love you,' is so off limits after everything else they've done together. Sure, Billy didn't say it back, has never said it, doesn't know if he can say it even now, but that doesn't mean he doesn't care about Stu. It's not like 'you're mine,' is somehow less subtle. It's not like trusting Stu with his plans, with his motives, with his life is any less of a connection. It's not like he takes it lightly, Stu's unwavering loyalty – the kind of thing his parents could never manage. No, Stu is his in way no one else could ever understand, just as much as he is Stu's. Always. The two of them, together. Equals, partners in everything. "What makes you think I'd want to forget it?" he wonders, his voice low and quiet as he leans in close. "You think I did all this with you so I could drop you as soon as it was done? You're mine, alright?"
And Stu seems to get it, then, just what he really means. "Yours," he agrees, and Billy has to resist the urge to kiss that stupid grin off his face again. He can't wait until they're out of here.
And he wants to talk more, to ask how the interview with Sheriff Burke went, to ask about his injuries, but he doesn't. He's exhausted, Stu's exhausted – they should both be resting. "We should sleep," Billy tries.
"Don't know if I can right now, babe," Stu says, and Billy isn't surprised. Stu gets like that, sometimes, too keyed up and manic to settle down. Usually, there are relatively simple ways to solve that problem, but those methods won't work, not here, not now. Still, he has an idea.
Admittedly, there hasn't been a lot of talk about what happens after, after the party, after the murders, after they got away with it. There are no other plans – no other murders to carry out (at least not right now – Billy's father is always a compelling option, but that will have to wait). But there has been one thing floating around in his head for months now. He'd never wanted to stay in Woodsboro, so, "Run away with me," he offers.
"What?"
"Once we graduate," he clarifies, they'll be done with their senior year in only a little more than half a year, "let's get the hell out of this place, go somewhere where no one knows us. You and me."
"You and me," Stu answers without hesitation.
It's something else to talk about later, but for now, the mere idea of it seems to have settled Stu enough that Billy can tell when he starts to relax. "Sleep," Billy urges him again, "I'm not going anywhere," he promises, leaning over the edge of the bed again, Stu's hand still trapped under him. He holds tight and doesn't let go.