Chapter Text
“This is a bad idea,” Max says, not for the first time. “This is, like, seriously one of the worst ideas you’ve ever had, and that’s saying something—”
“Max,” Billy says irritably, raising a hand to knock on the door, “shut up.”
She rolls her eyes, tucking a strand of red hair behind her ear, and shuts up.
It’s not as though she’s wrong. Even now, standing on the doorstep of the small-but-pretty apartment on the edge of the Gaslamp Quarter in San Diego, Billy is filled with misgivings. Sure, the place is a mere trolley ride away from his workplace, close to Balboa and near all his favorite restaurants and cafes, not to mention within walking distance of Max’s place. It’s in a nice part of town too, which is more than he can say for some of the other apartments he’s seen, and from the outside it looks clean and well-kept.
Yeah, there are a lot of advantages to living here, if he decides to take the room. There’s just one major drawback.
Billy bites his lip, and knocks hard on the door. He’s not backing down now. He needs this.
There’s silence for a moment, then the sound of rapidly approaching footsteps - and then the door opens. Billy steels himself, rolling his shoulders back and shoving his hands into his pockets.
The woman on the other side of the door doesn’t look particularly friendly. She’s small, slight, with dark curly hair, a pale, rather angular face and big blue eyes that are currently narrowed in Billy’s direction. She’s wearing a gray sweater and jeans, and her arms are folded across her thin chest. “Hello,” she says guardedly.
“Hi,” Billy says, nonplussed. He wasn’t expecting a woman. “Uh - I’m Billy, I’m here about… am I in the right place? I’m here about the room.”
“Yes,” the woman says in a clipped voice. Her eyes travel briefly across Billy’s body, and then jump over to Max. Her jaw tightens. “I’m Nancy. Steve’s girlfriend.” She pauses, and then says somewhat reluctantly: “Come in.”
They come in. Billy glances around as Nancy leads them through a bright little kitchen to the lounge area beyond the dining table, gesturing towards the couch for them to sit down. The couch itself is a dull grayish-brown color, and Billy is already thinking how much his lime-green throw pillows would liven it up.
Jesus. He can’t let himself get excited about the place. Like Max said, it’s a terrible idea - but he can’t help himself. The last place he went to see had black mold on the ceiling and a distinct aroma of cat piss.
“If you want to do this, I’d be your contact,” Nancy says crisply, after Billy and Max have sat down. There’s no other seating in this part of the room, so she hovers a little uncomfortably over them. “There’s no need for you and Steve to communicate. That’s the arrangement we’ve decided on.”
“I didn’t realize you lived here,” Billy says.
She flushes. “I don’t,” she says. There’s an awkward pause before she rallies. “Steve will be staying with me on weekends, so the apartment is yours then, as well as in the evenings from six until eight thirty in the morning each day. Does that work with your schedule?”
Billy thinks fleetingly of his last job, the one where he’d been lucky if he left the building by ten at night. But he can’t think about that, can’t let himself go there. At his current place of work, he’s out by five-thirty every day.
“Yeah,” he tells Nancy. “That works for me.”
“Good,” she says. “Steve works nights, so you won’t see him.”
Billy blinks at her. “I won’t see him at all?” It’s not that he particularly cares about befriending the person he’s potentially planning on sharing space with - but it seems odd not to meet him even once.
Nancy’s jaw is set. “No,” she says, and Billy is suddenly certain that this is her edict, not Steve’s. She lifts her chin. “Do you want to see the bedroom?”
The bedroom is barely big enough for a double bed and a dresser - which might cause some problems, given how many clothes Billy owns - but it’s flooded with light coming in from the glass doors leading out to a tiny balcony, and when Billy steps onto it he’s met with a warm late autumn breeze and an attractive view of the street outside leading down to the waterfront.
When he comes back inside, he can see by Max’s resigned expression that she knows he’s decided to take it.
They leave after a quick look in the bathroom, which is small but surprisingly clean for a dude who lives alone. Billy, aware that he’s unusually fastidious in his habits, is suitably impressed.
Nancy gives him her number at the door. “You can text me if you decide to take it,” she says. “You’ll probably want some time to think it through—”
“No, that’s okay,” Billy interrupts. “I’ll take it.”
There’s a moment when she seems to be deciding whether or not to be pleased about this. At last she nods. “Okay,” she says. “I’ll tell Steve.” Her eyes wander over to Max again, and she goes on delicately: “You know it’s just - Steve doesn’t want to share with a couple. He’s only expecting one person.”
Billy’s face twists automatically at the implication; Max says icily: “I’m his attorney.”
That earns her an elbow to the ribs. “She’s my little sister,” he says to Nancy, barely holding back his eye roll. “She’s just here to check out the place with me. I’m—” he swallows, suddenly no longer laughing “—well, it’s just me.”
“I see,” Nancy says. For some reason, the news that Max is not in fact Billy’s cohabiting girlfriend doesn’t seem to have reassured her; her eyes remain stony cold. She says: “Shall we start with a six-month trial run?”
“Sure,” Billy says, and then they’re leaving, Nancy closing the door behind them as they step out onto the shaded walkway that leads to the stairs.
Max throws him a sideways glance. It’s full of judgment, though whether for Billy or for Nancy he can’t tell. She says: “So.”
“So,” he replies.
They head down the stairs. “Well, on the plus side, if he turns out to be a serial killer then I might get a client out of it,” Max says cheerfully.
“Pretty sure that would be a conflict of interest, defending the guy who murdered your brother,” Billy comments. “But hey, you know, anything to help, right?”
“He literally could be a serial killer,” she persists. “You don’t know anything about him. And apparently you’re moving in with him without even meeting him, which, no offense, is the dumbest fucking thing I’ve ever heard in my life. You’re just going to go off the word of that stone-cold bitch in there? You think she’s a ringing endorsement for Mr Anonymous or something?”
Billy sighs as they turn down a neighboring street, heading for the nearest trolley station. “Max,” he says in a placatory tone, “it’s going to be fine.”
Max touches his arm. “Stay with us,” she says. “Just, like - until you find something better. You don’t have to leave.”
“My legs will fall off if I have to spend many more nights curled up on that couch,” Billy says.
“It’s not my fault you’re so tall,” she replies tartly. “If you were a foot shorter you’d fit.” She shakes her head. “We can get a camping cot or something.”
They’ve reached the station, blessedly close to the apartment. “Max, there’s not going to be anything better,” Billy says gently, leaning against the shelter. “I can’t afford anything better. That place is a godsend after some of the places I’ve seen.”
“I’ll lend you some money,” Max says at once. “I’m a criminal lawyer, Billy, I make enough to give you some—”
“Max,” Billy says sharply, “no.” He takes a breath, his chest suddenly too tight. You’re selfish, he thinks. Remembers. You’re fucking useless. You can’t do anything on your own. “You have… you have to let me do this for myself.”
There’s a long, long pause. Max’s eyes are narrowed as she looks at him, clearly mulling over what he just said. This, he knows, is what makes her a good lawyer - this thoughtfulness, coupled with the laser-sharp brain whirring away in the background. She sees things much, much more clearly than Billy ever will.
It’s amazing, really, that they’re standing here together. They’re not actually brother and sister, although they’ve referred to each other that way for so long that Billy has almost forgotten that it isn’t true. For six years in the far-off distance of their childhood Max’s mom was married to Billy’s dad, and for five and a half of those years Max and Billy absolutely loathed each other. It wasn’t until the day Neil Hargrove turned on his wife for the first time - after years of Billy being his only victim - and Billy earned himself two broken ribs and a black eye defending her, that the relationship between him and Max thawed.
Susan didn’t last long after that, but although she took Max with her when she left, they stayed in touch. Now, as adults, there’s no one in the world Billy trusts more.
“There’s something you’re not telling me, isn’t there?” she says, with her unerring nose for the truth.
“Yeah,” Billy says. He knew this would come up sooner or later. He sighs, digging in his pocket for his phone. He’s read the message so many times by now that he could probably recite it off by heart, but he’ll let Max read it for herself. “Neil texted me,” he admits.
“Jesus fucking Christ, Billy!” Max says, taking the phone. She bends her red head, studying the message.
Billy, she’ll be reading. The scene you caused last weekend was absolutely unacceptable - I was appalled by your behavior, especially given the fact that you’ve spent the last year living rent-free in my home. Don’t think that just because you’ve moved out I don’t expect you to pay what you owe. I expected better from you.
When Max looks up again, her eyes are round and shocked.
Billy shifts restlessly, folding his arms. His eyes are prickling; the message has already brought him to tears several times since he received it yesterday evening. “I can’t borrow any more money,” he says. “I already owe him a shitload—”
“That’s bullshit,” Max snaps. Her face has gone red, the way it always does when she’s angry. “You don’t owe him anything! He’s your dad, he never said he was going to charge you rent.”
“Oh, come on,” Billy says irritably. “I lived there for, like, eighteen months, and I never paid him a red cent.” He doesn’t even want to think about how much money he owes his dad, given the absolutely pitiful state of his bank account right now. “He - fuck, Max, I don’t like it either, but he has a point.”
She narrows her eyes at him again. She’ll never be able to be objective about Neil, not after he hurt her mom, and Billy understands that. He doesn’t expect her to forgive him. She says slowly, “What’s this scene he’s talking about?”
Billy flushes. He’d made… well, an absolute ass of himself, really. It was three weeks since he’d been fired, the longest time ever, and Billy had been starting to worry that his dad really meant it this time, that he really was out of a job. His job, his baby, the only career he’d ever had. And then he’d found it.
“I was drunk,” he tells Max. “I had too much to drink, and then I saw this… this W-2.” He takes an unsteady breath. “He hired someone else.”
“Asshole,” Max mutters darkly.
Billy’s shoulders hunch involuntarily. It had been like a physical blow, reading that form. Theodore Reece, the new guy was called. The business - it had always just been him and Neil. They’d never discussed bringing in anyone else. But now it looked like Neil had changed his mind.
“I guess before then I didn’t… I didn’t think it was real,” he says in a brittle voice. “I thought, you know, I thought we’d figure things out.”
Max snorts bitterly. “Right,” she says. “Because that’s what you did the last eight times he fired you.”
Billy tips his head back, as if by doing so he can force the tears back into his skull. The truth is… well, yeah. Neil has fired him before, when they’ve had disagreements. Sometimes it’s because they can’t agree on a business decision, and his dad wants to remind him which one of them is actually in charge. Sometimes it’s because Billy has done something stupid, and Neil starts thinking they shouldn’t be in business together in the first place. Sometimes living together starts to rub them both up the wrong way, and it spills over into the workplace.
But their business works. When things are going smoothly, they’re like a fucking dream team, all of their individual strengths complementing each other perfectly, and until now, they’ve always managed to get past the hiccups. Billy will apologize, and his dad will tear up the paperwork letting him go.
Until now. Because Neil has never, ever hired anyone else before.
“I shouldn’t have… I had a fucking meltdown,” he tells Max without looking at her. It’s embarrassing to admit. He’d been way too drunk, which his dad hates at the best of times, and he’d worked himself up into an absolute state. By the time Neil came home, he’d been a crying, screaming wreck.
His dad was rightfully disgusted. Billy flushes in hot shame at the thought of it.
“He fired you,” Max exclaims. “He kicked you out. What did he expect you to do?”
It’s clearly a rhetorical question, but Billy answers it anyway. “Take it like a man,” he says. “Act like a fucking adult.”
Because that’s the problem, isn’t it? He’s still stuck in his teenage years, can’t seem to sort out his life without his dad stepping in to help. It’s pathetic. He’s pathetic. He can’t hold down a job on his own, can’t even afford an apartment without having to share a bed with a literal stranger. He doesn’t know how to be an adult.
It makes total sense that Neil is sick of it. Billy is sick of it.
“Billy,” Max says, laying her hand on his arm. She sounds upset. “Billy, that’s not - you are an adult. You don’t have anything to prove.”
“Yeah, I do,” Billy says.
She dashes her head angrily away from him. “He’s the asshole, not you!”
Billy swallows. He can’t - he can’t hear that right now, even though he knows she’s saying it because she loves him. She hates Neil and she loves Billy, so of course she’s not able to see how complicated the situation is, all the shades of gray under the surface. Yeah, Neil did wrong in the past - but he’s done everything he can to make up for it in the present, and it doesn’t mean he’s wrong now.
He says, voice wobbly: “Max, I’m… I’m out, right? What more do you want from me?”
Max sighs. “I just want you to be happy, Billy,” she says.
“Yeah, well, I’m trying,” he says. “I left. I have a new job. Now I have a new place. Just let me work this out, okay?”
“Okay,” she says. The trolley is pulling up at the station, and they start towards it together. Billy exhales, relieved. He doesn’t want to fight with his sister on top of everything else. “Okay, but you have to promise you won’t fall into the roommate trap.” She flashes him a smile. “Don’t let him murder you, and—”
He raises his eyebrows. “And?”
Max’s eyes are glittering as she grins at him. “Don’t sleep with him,” she says.
“As if,” Billy says with a snort, as they get onto the tram. “Trust me, Max, that is the last thing I’ll be doing. After all—” he flashes his Pronto card against the scanner “—if Little Miss Uptight back there gets her way, I won’t be meeting him at all.”
*
Nancy calls while Steve is at work, which means, predictably, that he misses her call. He’s in with El when he feels his cellphone buzzing in his pocket, doing his routine checks while she gives him her usual sass. He would never take a call when he was in with a patient.
“Is that your girlfriend?” El asks, clearly hearing the phone vibrating from her position in bed.
Steve glances down at her in the middle of changing out her IV. “The thing about not picking up the phone,” he tells her, “is that I don’t know who it is.”
She giggles. “I bet it’s your girlfriend,” she says. “You should pick up. It’s not nice to let your girlfriend go to voicemail.”
“True,” Steve says, pretending to think about it. “If I picked up, I wouldn’t have to deal with you.”
El’s answering smile is wide as she holds out her arm for him to take her blood pressure. “I know I’m your favorite,” she says complacently.
Steve shudders theatrically. “Are you kidding? I don’t even like you!” He’s rewarded by another little giggle. El is starting to look sleepy, eyelids fluttering closed as her shorn head slumps back against the pillows. Steve removes the cuff from her arm and takes her wrist, flipping his watch up from his chest to count her pulse.
There’s a lump in his throat. She’s so young.
Sometimes it catches him off-guard, this job. He loves it, can’t imagine ever doing anything else, but it can be emotional. No one who works here is immune. They see so many patients coming through the doors, and at least half of them don’t leave again alive. Some nurses can’t take it, have to quit for a general ward which might be more frantic but which faces less death than palliative care.
Not Steve. He likes the difference he can make here, likes the slower pace, the way he can really get to know his patients. And they don’t always die - sometimes they get better. At the moment, El’s prognosis is about fifty-fifty.
“Goodnight, El,” he says quietly to her. She murmurs in her sleep as he leaves the room.
Robin is in the staffroom, flipping idly through a magazine and drinking coffee. She looks up as he comes in. “El?” she guesses.
“Yeah,” Steve says. El is right - she is his favorite. She’s one of the youngest patients he’s ever treated, just twelve years old, and yet she’s so composed, so easy to talk to, so funny. She should be living a very different life than the one she’s been forced into.
“Dr Alexei was asking for you,” Robin says after a beat. She grins at him. “I think he has another scarf for you.”
Steve groans. “Okay, look, they’re lovely scarves, but I already have, like, fifteen!” he says. “I don’t even wear scarves. What am I supposed to do with fifteen scarves? Why doesn’t he give them to anyone else?”
“Because no one else was dumb enough to say yes the first time,” Robin says promptly. Steve flips her off, sitting down heavily on the couch beside her. She hesitates, and then says in a different voice: “How’s Eddie?”
Steve tips his head back so that it thunks heavily against the wall. “The same,” he says. He exhales deeply, suddenly feeling bone-weary. “Tired,” he says. “On the edge of giving up. Losing weight.”
“I thought you said he’d started working out,” Robin says.
“Yeah,” Steve says with a humorless laugh. “He’s jacked, but he’s thin. Thinner. He looks fucking awful. They made him cut his hair.”
Robin closes her magazine, shuffling a little closer to him to knock her knee into his. “It’ll grow back,” she says reassuringly. She lets out a muffled laugh. “I can’t really picture Eddie Munson jacked.”
Steve laughs too, although it’s not really funny. Figures it would take going to prison for Eddie to become anything other than a skinny nerd - but it’s still so wrong. Not what he’s supposed to look like, not who he’s supposed to be. He needs to get out of there. Being inside is fucking destroying him.
“I called Sal three times last week, trying to get an update on the appeal,” Steve says. “I don’t think he’s even filed the goddamn paperwork.”
Robin winces, squeezing his wrist. “I’m sorry,” she says. She bites her lip. “It’ll - it’ll get there, right?”
Steve shrugs. “It’s not a priority for him,” he says tiredly. “I’m only paying him half-fees. I can barely afford that as it is. We talked about finding another lawyer, but, you know… At least Sal knows the case. And no one else would take it for this money.”
“You’ve got this whole flatshare thing, though, right?” Robin asks. He can hear how hard she’s trying to be optimistic. He knows she wants to help, wants to be there for him, and a flash of gratitude goes through him. It could be worse. It could be like Nancy, with The Argument—
He stops the thought in its tracks. They’ve agreed to leave The Argument where it is.
“Uh, yeah,” he says, trying to focus on Robin’s question. “Nancy was supposed to meet the guy this afternoon - that’s probably why she was calling, actually.” Guiltily, he digs his phone out of his pocket. Sure enough, he has a missed call from Nancy. “Shit. I should probably call her back.”
“Yeah, probably,” Robin says cautiously. Ever since The Argument, he’s had the impression she doesn’t really know what to make of Nancy. She’s the only person he’s told about it, because if he told Dustin… well, it would not be pretty. Robin is the only friend he has who won’t be judgmental. After all, she doesn’t really know Eddie.
Steve sighs again. He hates the idea of having to share his space with someone else, not to mention share his bed. But he needs the extra money to pay Sal, and he couldn’t think of any other ways of reliably increasing his income. Not since he promised Nancy not to take weekend shifts.
He presses the call button and holds the phone to his ear.
“Hey,” Nancy says.
“Hey,” Steve replies evenly. He pauses. “How did it go?”
Nancy sighs irritably. “Yeah, I’m fine, thanks for asking,” she says testily.
“Sorry,” Steve says. “Sorry. How’s your day been?”
She thaws a little at the genuine contrition in his tone. “He seems… normal,” she says. “Not a crackhead or a serial killer, or whatever. He wants to take it.”
A little pulse of hope throbs in Steve’s chest. “Really?”
“Yeah,” Nancy says. She hesitates. “Steve, I know you… you laughed me off when I said it before, but I want this to go through me. There’s no reason you and him need to meet. I have his number. I can be the main contact.”
Steve sighs, glancing minutely at Robin, who makes a show of flipping through her magazine without looking at him. “Nance—”
“It’s not that I don’t trust you,” she says. “I just think - it seems cleaner, doesn’t it?” She pauses. “I just didn’t think the first person you’d be sharing a bed with would be, you know… not me.”
“We’re not - I mean, it’s not like that,” Steve says. “We’re only sharing a bed at different times.”
Another brief silence. “I know,” Nancy says at last. “Don’t act like I’m being unreasonable, Steve. I think most women would find it weird. Especially when—” She breaks off.
“Especially when their boyfriend is bisexual?” Steve asks in a harder voice. Robin glances at him and then swiftly away.
“I didn’t mean it like that,” Nancy says, and Steve decides to let it go, because they’ve had this fight. Not as badly as The Argument, but - he doesn’t want to do it again.
He tips his head back again, closing his eyes. “Yeah,” he says. “Yeah, I mean - you can be the main contact, or whatever. I don’t care.” He hesitates. “You know I don’t want to share a bed with anyone except you, right?”
Nancy sounds marginally happier when she replies, “Well, good. Me neither.” Then she says, “You know, when I was telling him about the hours - it occurred to me that you don’t have anywhere to go over the weekend, when he has the place.”
“Well, I figured I’d—” Steve cuts himself off. He’d figured he would spend his weekends staying at her place, but maybe that’s presumptuous. Scratch that, it’s definitely presumptuous - but something in Nancy’s tone makes him go on: “I figured we’d spend them together.”
“Quite the assumption,” Nancy says, but she sounds pleased.
He allows himself a smile. “Sorry,” he says. “I should’ve asked. Is that okay?”
“Of course it’s okay,” she says at once. “I… You know I just want to spend time with you. I love you, Steve.”
Only the slightest fraction of a hesitation before he replies. “I love you too,” he says.