bury me anywhere (but hawkins, indiana) | harringrove

chapter one: the nightmare

JUNE 30TH, 1985

BILLY | NOW

Billy Hargrove clings to the arms of the lifeguard station, white-knuckling the crackled plastic as he tries to pretend he's not boiling alive.

Around him, kids and moms and more fucking kids clatter by, flipflops slapping the wet concrete. He can't bring himself to even give them a dirty look when they run past, let alone put the proper fear of God and Billy in them.

All he can think about is the night before. Burning tire rubber, skidding off the side of the road, the phone booth... the warehouse.

Last night was a nightmare, but Billy can't get it out of his skull. It had to have been a nightmare. Hallucination. A bad trip he didn't even know he'd been on.

Most of those could explain the broken windshield, and the horror.

Nothing explains the burning under his skin. Or the blunt, all consuming vision of just a few hours ago: slamming Karen Wheeler into that goddamn supply shelf until she stopped with the talking. Until she stopped with pretty much anything at all. Then he'd bring her to—

Billy swallows down glass. Tries to focus on that wet flap-slap-slap of feet going by. The surface of the pool glitters in blocky, blinding streaks. Everything is glaring, beating sun, burning inside and out, and—

He frowns at his stinging arm, twisting to look.

Exhales in a punch as he sees the gory red burned into it. There's a pulse of black, something seething underneath. All of the sudden, his nostrils are filled with the scent of singing flesh, and real or not it churns his stomach all the way up into his throat. He's burning up, it's burning through his skin and clawing its way out– he's clawing out and he'll burn Billy out to stay alive— Christ, he needs to calm down. Cool down. He's fucking dying, the sweat's pouring off him—

Billy drags himself down the chair rungs. Miles underneath him, the cement below the guard station wavers in and out. His slides squeak on the plastic rungs, ringing in his ears.

He blinks and he's in the pool showers.

The handles are all cranked. He's melting against the cold concrete as the lukewarm water drowns him upright, cradles him, soothes the burn from his core. It's such a relief he could fucking cry. (And if maybe he does, the cooling spray washes away the evidence.)

Footsteps jerk him to awareness, stiffening, and there's that skip of time again, that blink. The most fractional flicker, a carefully disguised loop in the film.

All he sees are familiar Adidas, white striping over matchy sailor-blue. They're slowly gathering water, dripping over, soaking in.

He follows them up slowly. Blue shorts, darkening under the spray, familiar ones he definitely hasn't been staring at all month. Billy blinks through the water streaming down his face, and Steve Harrington is looking down at him in the Hawkins Community Pool showers.

Billy stares, because if he's dead, Steve shouldn't be in his hell. (Though an eternity of never being good enough for Steve fucking Harrington? ... That'd fucking suck. So, maybe.)

Part of him is sure he's already in some weird hell, anyway.

That was the most rational explanation for the nightmare visions. Maybe he punched his last card behind the wheel last night, that flash of something strange crashing into his windshield, burned into his retinas as the last thing he'd ever see. And maybe it served him fucking right.

He'd only pushed for the meetup with Karen that fast to make sure he had solid plans for last night, far outside of Hawkins. Anything to stop himself from driving all the way out to that shitty quarry under the stars and seeing if Steve remembered to show up.

Karen was the safer, saner option. Steve would think so too, if he knew. Right?

Of course, now he was fucking dead and having hell visions, so who knew at this point. God, his head. The throbbing of his skull, the fever the sunlight beats into him, the time he's losing track of, the insane— the insane things he keeps hearing. Seeing flashes of.

The places he keeps waking up in.

Like here.

The showers whisper cool around them. It's a muted, damp hum. The glaring clamor of the pool outside has faded out entirely.

Steve glides closer, right at the edge of the stall.

Something isn't right with him, Billy can tell right away. Steve's eyes are dead flat. Darker than even that rare, midnight pitch they got after too much liquor and just enough strictly platonic friendly groping, darker than Billy's ever seen them. It's a different kind of dark, and Billy feels a terrible sameness in it.

Steve's mouth opens.

"Take me to him, Billy."

Billy's back hits the wall, ass on the wet shower floor. He doesn't know when he sat down — does he? He scours his brain, but comes up blank.

"It's okay. Take me to him," Steve says, preternaturally calm.

And the thing is, Billy knows with biting siren clarity who Steve means. His boiling insides go ice shearing cold.

"Steve-" He manages thinly—

— and abruptly that cold flat Steve isn't standing over him at all. Steve's solid, real, on his knees in front of him, completely dry stupid sailor shorts leaching water at the thighs in dark splotches. The stall isn't really big enough for both of them. His styled hair is gathering a fine mist of water, and he's saying something, and his face is anything but flat—

"Billy! Billy, hey, are you with me? You look like death- Jesus, what's wrong with your arm? You're bleeding—"

And Billy may be right there but Billy's gone all the same, buried a hundred miles deep as he screams nonsensically at the mottled black-blue sky of his waking nightmare. Red lightning splits Billy's world apart and–

Aboveground, he smiles. The shower curtain rattles in his ears as he snaps it shut behind Steve. It's fast, what he does, and violent, but the worst part is Steve doesn't see any of it coming.