To Heal All Wounds

Look Who's Coming to Dinner

Shit.

How much of that conversation had Billy heard? Maybe, if he'd heard too much, Steve could say that he'd been talking about someone else. Someone Billy didn't know. That would work, right? If they hadn't used Billy's name specifically... had they? He cast his mind back as far as it would go, searching for Billy's name in the conversation at all but couldn't find it...

Maybe he was in the clear...

"Hey, Hargrove!" Steve's voice was too high and too loud and he had answered too quickly. "You're early today!"

"Smooth," Robin breathed in his ear as she passed behind him. She was leaving, Steve knew by the squeeze she gave his wrist, but before he could ask where she was going or why, Robin had already vanished, the soft swinging of the backroom door the only evidence that she had come or gone.

"I really know how to clear a room, don't I," Billy muttered, watching Robin's retreating form. His grin was toothy, and Steve could see that he was trying to find a space between Billy Before and Billy now, but his voice held was none of the malice of Billy before, and none of the playful mirth of Billy now. And Billy knew that he couldn't settle, Steve could tell by the little crease between his brows. Again, Steve was struck with the urge to smooth the wrinkle out with his fingers.

"She's not too fond of me," Billy observed more than asked, keeping his distance from the counter as he hovered somewhere between that and the door. He didn't have a stir stick in his mouth, Steve noticed. Was that why he was gnawing on the inside of his cheek? Because he had nothing else to work between his teeth?

"Yeah, well..." Steve chuckled, drying his hands on his apron as he glanced at the door through which Robin had vanished. "It's not personal, I promise."

"Yeah, it..." Billy sighed as he worked one of his hands through his hair and pulled roughly enough to jerk his own head to the side, "Yeah, it is."

"What? No, of course it's not. Robin is... she's..."

"I called her a dyke once," Billy interrupted, his hand still tangled in his own hair, his eyes glued to the floor. His voice had been so soft that, for a moment, Steve wondered if he'd heard correctly because certainly, he hadn't. No, no Billy had said something else. He'd said, literally, anything else.

I called her out of spite once.

I mauled her bike for fun.

I'll fall on your right, dunce.

I'm all for a hike, hun.

But none of it sounded right and he'd seen the way Billy's lips curled around the words as he spoke. 

I called her a dyke once.

Simple as that. Steve's jaw clacked shut and tried to work this new information into what he was slowly learning about the man who had given it to him. But it was like trying to fit a square peg into a round hole. No matter how Steve shifted and twisted and rotated what he had been told, it just didn't fit into the picture he was building of Billy in his mind. But it did slot perfectly into the memory he had of the other man from years ago, seamlessly fitting into place alongside a hundred other horrible things he knew about Billy Hargrove from before he died.

And he tried. Tried to remember that Billy when he was alive was different from Billy now that he was resurrected. And to his credit, Steve had been able to pull this man away from the one who beat him half to death at the Byers' house, setting them apart as different entities. He was even able to pull apart this Billy from the one who pinned Lucas, untangling what he was coming to understand of Neil from what he was coming to understand of Billy.