Chapter Text
I climb back up from the bottom of the stairs
They're dancing on my grave but I'm not not in there
Oh where, oh where, could our little prince be?
You open your eyes and you look right at me
So did you miss me, boys and girls?
I crawled out of the underworld
And I'm alive!
I'm Alive - The Hives
A vicious, staccato squelching and ragged screaming tears through the Upside Down like something wet and visceral ripping down the center, over and over and over.
Vecna’s fiery corpse has just taken a runner out the highest window and a slick, churning dread fists in Steve’s aching guts as the crew stumbles down rotting stairs toward the porch. Even from inside the house, the slick, viscous slap of an object impacting something wet carries, and Steve’s skull is writhing with too many horrors to even fathom what the fuck is waiting for them around the corner.
Something out there is still screaming. Broken, torn-throat roars of someone in abject pain. They don’t sound like Vecna.
“What the fuck, what the fuck, the fuck,” Steve chants, his own windpipe burning from choking vines, but he’s got to talk, got to hear himself alive so he can brace himself for whatever half-dead shit they’re hurtling toward with weapons ready.
“Get that gun ready, girl,” Robin rasps out, her throat just as screwed up. The screams sound more like sobs now but the wet, sloppy chopping sounds carry on, and whatever the fuck is out there sounds like a new monster out of their collective nightmare.
Why can’t they just win shit for once?
“Always ready,” Nancy says with steel in her voice.
And then they bust through the rose-gilded front doors, faced with the riotous red sky roiling above their heads like contracting innards, and—
A man stands with his great, muscular back to them, all wide, shifting muscle and shuddering, sturdy frame as he raises an axe and brings it down onto the charred corpse of Vecna. One. Henry fucking Creel.
Both of Steve’s arms shoot out at either side, doing the Mom-block to both Robin and Nancy, halting them on the porch that shudders beneath their feet.
The stranger keeps chopping, each violent, jerky rise of the axe sending viscera and guts flying back toward the porch. Vecna’s body is turning to slop and the guy keeps going and he’s—he’s not really screaming anymore, but he is crying. Body wracking and shuddering with furious, unhinged sobs that echo across the desolate playground across the street.
Steve looks to Robin, then Nancy. Adrenaline still stinks like sweat and copper between them, none of them yet dropping into shakes or numbness when there’s a potential threat standing right before them.
So Steve does what he does best. He takes each step at a time, leaves behind his loved ones, and runs into potential danger without letting himself think over how this can end.
“Hey!” Steve bellows, using his best intimidation voice, which is basically just imitating Hopper. “Hey you!”
The figure is heaving with effort, each breath apparently laborious, those big shoulders sagging and rising like they’ve just run a marathon. Chopping an seven foot tall entity into ground meat is probably a lot to take on. From behind, their hair is matted and dark, the back of their neck glistening with dirt and sweat, and for a brief moment Steve frowns the oddly familiar stance of stocky legs and feet, before they loosen the hold on their axe and let it rest at their side, shaking fingers gripping the end like a cane.
Panting, the stranger slowly looks over their shoulder and sharp, poolside blue eyes pierce across the gloom to meet Steve’s.
With fresh, pale tear tracks cutting down the grime of his face, Billy Hargrove nods into the stunned silence. The Upside Down writhes in the backdrop, a bleeding, wounded animal, and Vecna lays at his feet, butchered to unrecognizable meat.
Billy smiles and it’s the most terrifying expression Steve has ever seen. Unhinged.
“Hangin’ in there, pretty boy?” Billy rasps, his voice wrecked from the screams and sobs they’ve only just heard. “Took care of that pest problem for ya.”
Steve has, apparently, forgotten entirely how to speak.
“Billy?” Nancy yells from the porch. “Steve, get back!”
Steve blinks out of the shock, his sore, slowing muscles struggling to get him stumbling back and holding up his own axe. His movement seems to spur on Billy—is that really Billy, can’t possibly be Billy—because he fully turns around. Puts his back to the burger meat of Vecna’s body and keeps a hand on the butt of the axe, his face losing that familiar smug air as quick as it had come.
“Hey,” Billy says quietly, sounding more like a boy than Steve has ever heard. This absolutely cannot be Billy. “I helped.”
Steve stops backing up, stops minding Nancy’s second scream to get back here, we don’t know what he is—
Above their heads, the sky is doing something dangerous and new, the clouds heaving like a rampant heartbeat, blood red seeping around the edges of the environment like it’s dripping or melting. And Billy is just standing there, something cracked in his expression, a light gone out behind the eyes despite how unnaturally blue they are in this hellhole.
“I helped,” Billy says, soft, plaintive. “Steve.”
“Billy?” Steve says finally, his jaw tight and sore from clenching his teeth against the possibility of an attack. He doesn’t know what this is. Doesn’t know what’s happening. Rarely knows what’s happening on a good day, let alone the end of days. “Is that really you?”
Billy cocks his head and the tears start to fall, silent and cleansing down his grimy face. His eyes are so pretty, so human in the unholy light.
“Yeah,” he croaks. “Don’t cream your pants.”
Steve’s stomach drops and a hoarse, shocked laugh punches out of him. He looks over his shoulder quickly, making urgent eyes at a baffled Robin and Nancy, then looks back to Billy.
He looks like shit. Isn’t wearing any of his old clothes, because how and why would he? This is the Upside Down. Everything here is stuck in the past. Billy’s got on olive army fatigue pants, tucked into calf-high black boots so heavily knotted that it looks like Billy doesn’t even bother taking them off. His tee is soaked gray with soil and slime and sweat, dark patches at his chest and pits. It’s clear he has shorn his hair off at some point, maybe just shaved it right off, because it’s all growing in at one length around his ears and brow, a curly mop like a little boy’s hair too.
All of him is spattered in black and burgundy Vecna blood. He looks like he’s committed a massacre.
Steve shakes his head, tries to align his thoughts.
“You’re dead,” Steve says, but he loosens the grip on his own axe. Still holds it with both hands but keeps his arms relaxed, his wary gaze checking the state of Billy over and over again.
“Yeah,” Billy says, his pale lips pulling in a small, desolate smile. “Don’t I know it.”
“Steve.” Nancy is at his side so suddenly that Steve physically startles. They’ve been still for too long and Steve can feel his body begin to sag. “We need to return to the trailer. Find Eddie and Dustin. Get back, ASAP. Vecna’s—he’s—”
“This Vecna?” Billy asks, his voice subdued as he half-turns to kick at some remnant of Vecna’s foot. There’s maybe four or five pieces of limbs and a fragment of a butchered skull to identify this charred creature as the one that fell out the attic window.
“What d’ you call him?” Steve asks, still keeping his distance. He feels Robin close at his back. It’s like the three of them are just waiting for this all to get worse. Because in Hawkins, everything always gets worse.
Billy is silent for a moment, staring at the evidence of his carnage. His profile is the same, and while his body also looks relatively the same, still buff, still stocky in the legs and long in the waist, his face is gaunt and haggard like those pictures of Steve’s grandpa returning from the war.
“I don’t call it anything,” Billy says, hollow in voice and expression. The earth is beginning to tremble beneath their feet, a sentient rumble like masses of undulating limbs. “No one names a shadow.”
“How did you know we’d be here?” Nancy snaps, her body tight against Steve’s. She feels like a steel beam beside Steve’s swaying, shocked frame.
“Eh.” Billy gestures with a loose hand and Steve realizes he’s wearing brown leather gloves with the fingers neatly snipped off. At least some things don’t change. “This place tells you things.”
“This place,” Nancy spits out, like she can’t even call it the Upside Down, “doesn’t tell us shit. We don’t belong here. We’re not connected to a monster.”
Billy freezes up at that, his entire body stilling, stiff as a board, his bright, wet gaze flitting between the three of them and lingering on Steve. When he speaks, it’s almost meek; not anyone Steve recognizes.
“I’m—I’m not. Me neither.”
“You’re not what?” Nancy demands, unflinching. In the distance there’s a chorus of abject demobat screams and Robin makes a rough, alarmed noise like, they gotta fucking go. “A part of this world? Not a monster? Because the last time we saw you—”
“The last time we saw him,” Steve says tightly, “he saved our asses, Nance. And he’s just done it again, big time.”
Billy’s remains still before them, but now the electric blue of those eyes are aimed directly at Steve, unblinking.
“Yeah,” Billy says, his words cracked and dry, brittle and breakable. “Saved your asses big time, Wheeler. You really gonna leave me for dead all over again?”
Nancy chokes, sputters, and stomps a step forward, her sawed off shotgun tucked ready at her hip.
“You can’t seriously be suggesting we take you with us. We don’t even know what you are!”
“Hey, assholes!” Robin hollers and promptly scares the fuck out of Steve, who has been drifting in and out of a growing, pervasive numbness. “The sky is like, bleeding right now? And last time I checked, the Upside Down doesn’t normally melt like bust-open, stanky road kill in summer! So how about we just not do this right now? Vecna’s dead, we all saved our asses, so let’s get this convoy rolling out of the warzone, okay?”
“Robin’s right,” Steve says before Nancy can bulldoze through. “We gotta get outta here and there’s no way in hell we’re leaving Billy behind. He’s—no one deserves to be left behind.”
“Aw, Harrington,” Billy drawls, and for a brief second, it’s like Billy isn’t coated in gore and tear stains and trauma when he flashes a grin at Steve and turns away. He seems to purposely step into the bloody mulch of Vecna’s pulpy corpse before heading down the slope of the lawn, toward their bikes. “You do care. Now let’s fuckin’ go.”
“Steve.” Nancy’s got her claws in Steve’s arm, unrelenting until he turns with big, imploring eyes.
“What,” Steve snaps, stressed out and ready to burst at the seams. “What, Nancy. We don’t have time—”
“If we bring Billy back, we could be bringing a piece of the Upside Down back with us,” Nancy hisses as the three of them rush down to the street in a close pack. “A piece of—of, I don’t know, Vecna . Some of the smoke from the Mind Flayer! We can’t know. How can we know, Steve? This is insane. If he really is who he says he is, how did he survive this long? Where? How has he avoided Vecna so long? Keep up!”
Keep up. Steve feels his teeth grinding into each other. What hasn’t he been keeping up with? Who has he been holding back on this mission? No one. When it comes to the Upside Down, Steve is finally doing something he’s good at, for fuck’s sake.
“And if he’s just Billy?” Steve asks, stopping and turning to her. Robin heaves a sigh at his back but sticks close.
In the middle of the road, Billy is lofting one leg over a lithe motorcycle, something petite and not chunky like the big ones that Steve sees in groups at the local biker bar.
He looks back to Nancy, who hasn’t replied.
“What if he’s just Billy?” Steve whispers again. The grass beneath their feet is beginning to churn. The screech of demobats have disappeared, the world dead of sound but for the earth and trees and pavement growling. “And you leave him here to die after everything he’s done?”
“Steve,” Nancy replies quietly, the fight gone out of her. “I don’t know. But I’m not willing to risk a chance on someone like him.”
They stare at each other. Something in this moment shifts the way Steve has been looking at Nancy since this shit started. Crack in the rose-colored glasses.
Steve is the first to turn away, his voice rising above the trembling trees and swirling clouds.
“Let’s move out!”
They get on their bikes and Billy just waits, expressionless. It’s unnerving if Steve thinks about it too long. Billy’s always had the most expressive face in school, for better or worse. Now he’s just looking at the sky, his jaw stiff, his full lips thinned out and stoic.
“You’re not gonna leave us in your dust?” Steve asks, daring a glance.
Billy’s already looking at him, bright sky eyes so wholly out of place in this blood and guts cesspool.
“Trailer park’s where you came from, yeah?” is all he says.
“There’s a gate in a trailer,” Steve confirms. “And our friends are there.”
“I know,” Billy says, looking away to the open road ahead. It’s cracking, splintering. The sky is molten.
“How?” Steve asks quietly, not wanting Nancy or Robin to hear.
Billy revs up his little motorcycle.
“Save it for the other side, pretty boy,” Billy says, and this time he delivers a grin sharp as his axe, cutting right through the apocalypse like a ray of sun. “Everyone loves a guy with a little mystery.”
Steve gawks as Billy bolts off and leads the way.
“Not like this!” Steve yells after him.
Billy doesn’t abandon them, though. He keeps a steady course, using his arm or hands or the movement of his head to alert them to disturbances in the asphalt and concrete. Steve rides his bike like the devil is on his heels and it may well be.
Vecna’s dead, he reminds himself, barely able to believe it. The entity who seemed to orchestrate this level of hell is gone and now the world seems to be folding in on itself, bleeding out and twitching in the throes of a violent death.
Steve doesn’t know how long this world will remain stable. Doesn’t know if El has charged her batteries or on their side or doing what she does from some far off place. Doesn’t know how Eddie and Dustin fared. Doesn’t know what’s waiting for them in Hawkins.
As usual, Steve doesn’t know a lot of things.
But he knows that everyone is alive. Even Billy Hargrove.
By the time Steve speeds up to the trailer with Nancy and Robin close behind, Billy is already there, and he’s standing over Eddie’s bleeding fucking body with Dustin screaming, scrambling away with a trashlid shield trembling out to fend off Billy’s still form.
Hundreds of demobats surround them, dead on the ground, some of them bubbling and writhing, the skin splitting open as their insides seem to boil over and eat away at its own flesh.
“GET THE HELL AWAY FROM ME,” Dustin screams, his voice huge and wet with tears even as he waves the shield like it’s going to do shit against Billy. “WHAT ARE YOU, HOLY SHIT—STEVE, STEVE, BILLY’S—”
“Alive!” Steve yells, sprinting to them and dropping to his knees. He doesn’t have time to explain Billy, can barely do it himself right now. A heaving, sickly wave of dread dawns over him as Steve gets in close to Eddie’s body, his hands shaking as they rake through the layers of his clothes, discovering bloody, gaping wound after wound. “Fuck,” he bites off, ignores the unshed emotion damp in his own voice. “Fuck, fuck, he’s—he’s not—”
Billy falls to his knees just as hard as Steve, but he places his ear over Eddie’s mouth, eyes shut, as his fingers travel to feel at his throat. Dustin screams, DON’T TOUCH HIM, and Robin yells, DUSTIN WAIT, and Steve just inhales a shuddering, devastated breath and looks on in mounting horror.
Eddie’s dead. Eddie died doing this. He barely knew them. Didn’t have any business in the Upside Down. Didn’t deserve recrimination or terror or the accusation of murder. But he threw himself into the trenches beside Steve, beside all of them, and he’d fucking died for it.
“He’s alive,” Billy says, not moving his ear from Eddie’s lips. He opens his eyes though, too blue, and meets Steve’s shocked stare. He’s fairly sure they have matching tear tracks through the dirt on their faces now. “But we gotta move. Where’s the gate.”
“Thought you knew,” Steve said as he rounded toward Eddie’s feet. “I’ll take this end, you get his shoulders. Careful.”
“I know and I don’t know,” Billy says, which is fucking cryptic and generally on point for the Billy that Steve once knew. “Where?”
“In the ceiling,” Robin rasps out. She’s crying, but ignoring it, big alligator tears. Everyone’s losing it and Eddie’s bleeding out and the world is melting and they’ve got to go. Robin puts an arm around Dustin’s shoulders and begins to urge him toward the trailer. “Come on, let’s go, let’s go. Dustin, go ahead of us. Go —go call an ambulance the second you get back! We’re right behind you.”
For once, Dustin doesn’t argue and Nancy gives them a quick, concerned look, her eyes dark and bone dry, before she turns and races toward the trailer in chase of Dustin.
“Easy now,” Billy croons, voice low and calming as the two of them walk in oddly compatible tandem toward the trailer. Robin gets ahead of them, opening doors and moving shit out of the way. Eddie is a dead weight, a corpse for all Steve can tell, but there may be time.
Steve does not leave people behind. The world has left him behind too many times for him to do the same.
They’re stuffed inside the trailer, laying Eddie gently on the mattress. Billy looks up.
“Well that’s fucked up,” he says.
“That’s fucked up?” Steve snaps. “Out of everything?”
“How’s the physics work on this thing?” Billy asks, blatantly ignoring him.
“How the hell should I know?” Steve says. “You climb up, you fall down, but up.”
“Yeah.” Billy nods, eyes to the mattress reflected above them. Nancy is rapid-firing words into the phone and Dustin is sitting on the floor beside the mattress, looking up at them and weeping. “Okay. There’s no good way to do this. We need chairs.”
“Chairs,” Robin says, and she’s already bringing them without asking questions. The tears are drying, her soft, freckled cheeks pale and drawn, but she’s got a look like she’s ready to go five rounds and Steve kind of loves her very much.
“What’re we gonna do with chairs?” Steve asks.
“HURRY!” Dustin screams. “HE’S DYING!”
“You—” Billy nods at Robin. “Be ready with those chairs. We’re gonna lift the whole mattress with Eddie on it. Gonna get under it, holding it up. Then you’re gonna put the chairs by us, we’re gonna step up on them, and that should bring him right up against the ceiling that we can just—”
Billy pauses and makes a face like he doesn’t know the words.
“Y’know. Jostle the mattress around ‘til he tips off and falls. . .up.”
Steve gapes.
“That’s an awful idea. What if he just rolls off the mattress and falls onto this floor?”
Billy makes a grand, sweeping gesture at Eddie’s near-lifeless body.
“Well, he’s certainly not gonna be worse off, Harrington.”
“Oh my god,” Steve says, hands on his hips as he briefly looks around the room. “I mean, yeah, I guess. Okay.”
They pull it off, which is a thing that Steve’s just as shocked about as he is that Vecna is dead and Billy was the one to finish him off. Robin climbs up and falls in next, then Steve, as Billy holds steady the sheet rope.
And then it’s just them on one side and Billy on the other. Dustin is fussing over Eddie and Nancy has bust out the door to stand in wait to flag the ambulance, and Robin’s got the walkie talkie, yelling updates in the background.
“Billy,” Steve hollers up to the ceiling. “Let’s go, man!”
Billy hesitates. Blatantly takes a step back from the rope, his gaze glassy and wet as he looks between the sheet and Steve’s impatient expression.
“I—” Billy shuts his mouth. Rubs his chapped lips together, licks them, looks away, then back up. “I don’t know if I—”
Robin bolts across the room, colliding with Steve.
“Max is hurt!” She’s clutching the walkie to her chest, eyes massive and horrified. “She’s—there’s an ambulance on the way but—it’s bad Steve. Erica says it’s bad.”
Billy comes hurtling into the world like a comet, landing too close beside Eddie’s prone, bloodied body, and then he’s already on his feet. Wrathful, imposing, larger than life as he looms in on Robin, his face coming in close.
“Max,” he says. “She’s hurt?”
Robin nods frantically, tears spilling over anew.
“Lucas, he was—I could hear him crying in the background. And Erica was—she said Max’s body is all—and she called nine-one-one, but it’s bad, it’s—”
“Where,” Billy hisses. Then, louder, booming. “WHERE IS MY SISTER.”
“BACK OFF, ZOMBIE FREAK,” Dustin hollers, butting in between them to face off. “I don’t know what hole you crawled out of—”
“The one from your nightmares,” Billy snaps, sneering and bumping up into Dustin’s space, all broad chest and sinister, crackling aura.
“Billy!” Steve bands an arm across Billy’s chest, holding him back. “Stop. Dustin, keep in contact with Erica. Don’t take her off the walkie until you can confirm help has arrived. Robin, you and Nancy are going to stay and wait on the ambulance, okay?”
“Yes,” Robin says, nodding as she hands off the walkie to Dustin.
“Thank you,” Steve says, trying to lower his voice, struggling for calm, for leadership when in reality they’re all just a bunch of aimless motherfuckers who aren’t equipped to battle monsters or destroy the underworld or stick their hands in so much death, death, death. “Billy, let’s go. Creel House, Max, now.”
“Already gone,” Billy says as he rushes out the door and lets it slam behind him.
Steve takes a second. Thirty seconds. Stares at Robin and breathes. In the background, he registers Erica’s voice, but she’s not crying, she’s recounting her story. The rocketship, Jason, a gun, hearing her brother cry, the inhuman angle of Max’s limbs.
Thirty seconds is all Steve will allow himself that night. Robin braces a hand on his shoulder.
“Go,” she urges, silent tears building up in her big eyes, and then Steve is gone.
He passes Nancy on the way out. She’s coiled tight, looks ready to snap as she leans against the trailer with thin arms folded across her chest, every molecule of attention placed on Billy Hargrove’s head as he paces the length of Steve’s car and back again, legs kicking up pale dust in the darkness.
“Doin’ your fuckin’ hair in there, Harrington?” Billy snaps as Steve quickly approaches with keys in hand. “Let’s fuckin’ go.”
Steve will be happy for the rest of his life if no one tells him where to go ever again after this night.
He doesn’t have to tell Billy to get in. They don’t even bother with seat belts, just peel out of the parking lot and book it across town. Each of them silent as the grave.