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theladycarpathia · 1 year

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@hellcheerweek

Chrissy Cunningham’s boyfriend had never said her words. Not once in three years.

She isn’t Jason’s soulmate either, his words still pale and gray under his basketball jacket. But that doesn’t seem to matter so much to him as the idea that he’s the one on her arm. She knows what it means - if he says her words, then there will be ultimate proof that she belongs to him. Branded onto her skin, for all the world to see.

The day her words had appeared when she was five years old was just another day for her mother to be disappointed in her. Another thing to complain about. The odd and brief sentence on Chrissy’s arm didn’t suggest a beautiful start to the kind of love story Laura wanted for her daughter. The only person who wanted her soulmate to be Jason more than Jason was her mother. Jason fits the bill: handsome, well off, going places. He’ll go to Princeton, like his father had, he’d make good money and they’d have attractive children. If Jason was her soulmate then her life would fall into place like perfectly fitting pieces of the puzzle.

Chrissy knows that if Jason hasn’t already said her words, he’s never going to.

Well, that’s not exactly true. You can know people for years before they say your words. Nancy Wheeler was in the same classes as Jonathan Byers all through middle school and high school. They were classmates and then friends while she dated Steve Harrington.

Then in their junior year, something happened. Nancy and Jonathan had matching black ink on their arms and, a short while later, Steve returned to school with yellowing bruises on his face and a right forearm that he wouldn’t show to anyone.

“They’re definitely black,” Jason had said, disgruntled that, as always, King Steve had beaten him to something. He’d spotted Steve’s arm in the showers one day after practice, a quick glimpse before Steve had pulled on a hoodie and booked it. “But he won’t say what girl said them.”

“Maybe it’s Nancy,” Carol had suggested slyly, a stream of pale smoke drifting from her mouth. She and Tommy never quite recovered from Steve’s sudden rejection. Tommy, as usual, found someone new to worship, and Carol’s bite suggested that she wasn’t as over it as she thought. “Maybe she said both of their words and picked Byers instead.”

Chrissy isn’t so sure. The system isn’t perfect - there are people with permanently gray words, others who say the words of multiple people, and even the unlucky few who have no words. But she doesn’t think that’s it. The words have to mean something, you have to feel something. Nancy wouldn’t fall in love with someone so much that she said his words, just to say Steve’s a mere week after their break up. It doesn’t work that way.

Someone else said Steve’s words. And he is desperate to keep everyone from finding out who.

The rules of soulmates say that Jason could say her words in a month, a year, five years. It’s the rules of Chrissy that say otherwise.

She thinks that love isn’t meant to feel like this.

She thinks that sanity doesn’t feel like this. The hallucination in the bathroom is the last straw. She’s tired, so, so tired. Either the nightmares keep her awake or her mother’s delicate comments do. The smaller portions on her plate every night. The taste of bile in her throat. How Jason sometimes looks at her and doesn’t really see her. That the rest of her life looks like this.

She wants to make it stop. Even if for a little while. And she only knows one way to make that happen, so she makes the trip out to the woods behind the High school.

The crunch of leaves underfoot and the bite in the air suggest that spring is still a way off for Hawkins. She tucks her sweater around her and keeps going into the rolling fog, half unsure if she’s even doing the right thing. But she’s run out of options. She’s thought about telling her mom, Jason, just anyone, about how she feels and her throat closes up before the words ever have a chance to form on her lips.

This is desperation. Of the fear that she’s losing her mind. That she might hurt herself. That something is coming to hurt her. She grips her arm through her sleeve as though the pale words might somehow save her.

I don’t want to die without meeting you.

XXX

Eddie Munson might be the first person to ask if she’s okay in a very long while.

And even more than that, watching him voluntarily vault himself backwards over the bench and brush leaves out of his hair to make her laugh, she forgets. Just for a few minutes. But she forgets.

“You know,” Chrissy says, warmth blossoming inside her chest. “You’re not what I thought you’d be like.” Eddie tugs some of his dark hair across his face, his eyes bright and teasing.

“Mean and scary?” he suggests and her stomach dips, like she’s missed a step, like the event she’s waited her whole life for just happened without her permission or forewarning.

Her arm burns underneath her jacket, something that starts down near her elbow and shoots up towards her wrist, like a piece of paper catching fire and twisting itself into gray ash. She places her left hand over her sleeve, even though Eddie has no way of knowing. He can’t see that the three words she’s looked at nearly her entire life have just turned the same shade of black as his hair.

She can’t say anything else. She has to go, just in case the next words out of her mouth are the words on his arm, that he’s meant to be hers too. Because there’s no way she can do this to him. She wanted desperately to meet her soulmate before the end and now she has. But she can’t ask him to have to live through her losing her mind. One day soon, the feral mimic that hisses nasty words and scratches at her door might just break through. She doesn’t know what she’ll do if that happens: if her own madness will cause herself harm or if there really is a devil in Hawkins. Either way, that’s a torture she won’t put on him. Despite what Chrissy has learned, love isn’t meant to hurt.

She looks up, about to make an excuse, to call this whole thing off and leave when she spots his slack jaw, the way his eyes are wide in disbelief and her stomach curdles. It’s too late.

YOU KNOW, YOU’RE NOT WHAT I THOUGHT YOU’D BE LIKE is visible even from Chrissy’s seat, scrawled across Eddie’s arm in what she recognises as her own neat penmanship. It’s now as black as the bats that are inked near his elbow. She must have said his words before he’d had a chance to realize what was happening.

He looks up at her, waiting. He can’t quite bring himself to ask her the question that he wants to but it’s written all over his face anyway.

Shaking, Chrissy pulls her arm up from her lap and tugs the material back, baring her pale skin and the words MEAN AND SCARY? scrawled in a messy, jagged print. The kind of writing you might find creating lyrics or character stats scrawled in the back of an old notebook.

Eddie stares at it, jaw working furiously. He looks as confused as she does. She wonders if he’s maybe disappointed. But when he drops back into the seat opposite her and spreads his arm alongside her’s, just to see how the words look together, she catches a glimpse of a smile.

He’s happy that his soulmate is her.

“What do we do now?” Chrissy asks, and for once her future isn’t entirely filled with uncertainty and fear.

#hellcheer week #hellcheer #edissy #eddie munson x chrissy cunningham #eddie munson #chrissy cunningham #soulmate au #last day of hellcheer week!#where did it go?#I love a soulmate au #in my head a bond makes it easier to resist vecna #so this chrissy survives #i love theeeeem #prompt: soulmate #oops forgot to tag #background harringrove #Luna add to masterlist

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theladycarpathia · 1 year

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Empty Places chapter 2- Cold Spots

Back to chapter 1

Creel House. Since its creation, this house has attracted bad luck, violence, and murder. A site of great evil? Or just a magnet for coincidences? We’re here to discover the truth, today on Mystery Spot!

“Did that sound cheesy?” Robin complains, twisting her head back to glare at the framed portrait of the Creels, as though they’re the ones responsible for their bad dialogue. “I think that sounded cheesy!” Billy raises an eyebrow and presses pause.

“It sounded cheesy,” he says bluntly. “You sound like an infomercial.” Robin sticks out her tongue and adjusts her beret. It slipped a little during her speech and now threatens to topple off onto the fraying carpet below.

“Fine,” she mutters. “I’ll think of something else. Even Steve’s intro sounded better than that.” Steve looks up from where he's fiddling with the ring light. He’s removed himself from this particular piece of theater as he has no design to stand near that horrible portrait or stare into Billy's eyes. Damnation all round.

“Hey,” he says, mildly offended. “You weren’t around when I was recording that!”

“It’s an educated guess, your intros are always cheesy,” Robin says and then sighs heavily. “Okay, maybe we should come back to this. You guys want to go have a look around? There’s two more floors above this, including an attic, and I think there’s a basement too.”

Steve makes a face. “I’m not going to the basement,” he says automatically, because he does not care about being seen as a jittery coward, so long as it means he doesn’t have to go to the basement. Basements are notoriously for murder rooms, and dark tunnels, and books covered in skin. No, thank you.

“I’ll take the basement,” Billy says, in a tone that implies that he knows exactly what Steve is doing. They once found a secret room in an old house that Billy had willingly gone into. He either doesn’t believe in squatters hiding in the walls or he’s very, very stupid. “You guys can head upstairs. Meet back in fifteen?”

Robin grabs her bag from the table, digging for her recorder. “Sounds good. Walkies on?”

“Yes,” Steve says, before Billy can scoff at the idea…again. “It’s an old house, Billy. You could fall through an old piece of floorboard and we might not find you until you’ve bled out. Turn on the damn walkie.” Billy digs out his walkie, clips it to his belt and makes an obvious show of switching it on.

“Happy?” he asks and Steve tries to not let it bother him. Billy’s just like this. Reckless, wild, immortal. Safety precautions are just a joke to him.

“Ecstatic,” Robin says, dryly. She tucks the recorder into her pocket, along with her walkie, and dumps her bag back down. “Don’t get dead. Let’s go, Harrington.”

Steve lingers just long enough to watch Billy wander out of the room first, heading for the basement door, before he trails after Robin. He can see by her face that he’s not subtle.

“Lech,” she hisses, tugging on his arm. The stairs are still pretty fucking incredible, a grand sweeping staircase of some rich, dark wood, carved into delicately sculpted banisters. Steve shrugs.

“He’s a dick but he’s got a great ass,” he says practically. And he would know. He’s the sucker who gets to see the curve of his best friend’s rear in boxers every time he sleeps over, after every basketball game as teenagers, that one time Billy jumped into the lake.

“I’d agree but my problem is that he has a dick,” Robin says, bounding up the stairs. Steve follows more carefully in her wake, mindful of how the wood creaks under her weight. “You’re on your own there.”

The second floor is pretty much the same as the first. Dusty, empty and abandoned and Steve has to resist the urge to sneeze. Robin drifts into the little girl’s room, looking at the faded pink teddies, the streaks of dust over the unicorn lamp. There’s a Barbie left on the floor, her blank plastic eyes staring judgmentally at their invasion.

“I just keep thinking that this is just all…really sad, you know?” she says, her voice echoing through to Steve in the hall. When Steve steps through the door, he finds her gently touching another family portrait with her fingertips. “You know? Like, they left everything. All their possessions and their memories. What on Earth scared them so badly that they did that?”

“I don’t know,” Steve says, but he feels it too. There’s something strange about this house, not just in the unnerving wrongness of it all, but the idea of a family just leaving and never coming back. No matter what Billy says, something had to have happened to make them leave everything in their lives behind. All they took was the kids, the dog and the car. Every family photo, every soccer trophy, every piece of artwork on the fridge. No one does that unless you’re absolutely desperate.

“If we found out why we’d be legends,” Robin continues, excitement coloring her voice. Steve tilts his head back to look at the glittery pink lampshade, faded after a decade in the sun. They probably would be - crime podcasters have helped make progress on cold cases before, and breaking the mystery of Creel House would definitely earn them some fame. Maybe enough to get him and Ro out of Family Video, which isn’t really where he thought he’d be rotting so soon after high school. Billy used to work at the local pool during the summer and recently - begrudgingly - got work at the local diner.

“Ro, if it was bad enough that they left one night without even taking their urn of Grandma’s ashes, I doubt that we really want to know,” Steve points out, and walks back out into the hallway. Robin follows, stopping only to look at the family portrait again.

“This little girl is all grown up by now,” she says and Steve looks at the remaining doors, more rooms and lives left behind.

“I hope so,” he says, because it sounds to him that Creel House always gets its blood.

XXX

The little boy’s room has a football deflating by the door. The parents’ bedroom has dust coating over the full length hanging mirror, a dress still lying discarded on the bed. There’s more mold on the shower curtain that they care to think about so they leave quickly.

“Didn’t you say there was an attic?” Steve asks, pivoting on his heels to see which door is left. There are two and after a shared shrug, they each step up to one.

“One?” Robin says, hand resting on the doorknob. Steve grins and does the same.

“Two,” he says, closing his hand around the metal.

“Three!” they say as one and push open their doors. Robin groans.

“Damn,” she says grumpily, dramatically leaning on the door frame. “I got the study.”

But Steve’s door has opened to a small, narrow staircase, a spider carefully making its web in the corner of the door. He reaches out for the pull light but a few quick yanks prove that it’s long burnt out.

“I’ll go up,” he says, digging in his bag for a torch. “Follow me when you’re done?” And then he puts his foot on the bottom stairs, ducks under the spider’s intricate work, and begins to climb.

The attic is…an attic. It’s so caked in dust that Steve has to cough once he takes his first deep breath. Like everywhere else, it’s filled with relics of another time, the remnants of a normal family life. Boxes labeled BABY CLOTHES, XMAS DECS, and CONCERT T-SHIRTS. There’s even a Christmas tree, still in its box in the corner, and Steve wonders if it’s the same one the kids were sitting under in the photo downstairs.

“Creepy,” he mutters, and that’s when the bell starts to chime.

He’s glad that no one is around to hear his squeak, as he whirls around to face the source of the noise. A large, polished grandfather clock sits at the very end of the attic, against one wall, the pendulum swinging back and forth with every chime. Swallowing his nerves, Steve inches closer. The time is all wrong, the hands set to the twelve and the two. He wonders if the clock thinks it’s early in the morning or early afternoon.

Wait. Two o’clock. Two chimes. So why won’t it stop chiming?

Steve freezes, suddenly unnerved. It’s fine. It’s a decades old clock. It’s definitely busted. It doesn’t know the right time so there’s probably no way that it’s going to chime the right amount of times either.

No. No, wait, that’s still all wrong. It’s been well over two decades - closer to three - since the Packards left their house. Steve doesn’t know much about physics and that shit but he knows enough that stuff needs power. Electric, batteries, some kind of fuel. And like a lot of clocks, this one would need to be wound. It wouldn’t keep going for nearly thirteen years. So who wound it?

Oh shit, he’s going to regret this.

He steps forward carefully, clutching his torch like a weapon, the beam cutting across the ceiling and occasionally illuminating the pale strings of another web. The clock continues to ring, the sound taking on an unnerving tone, each one growing more distorted as the bell chimes. Up close, Steve can see the thick crack across the glass face, the smears of dust on the curves of the wood. But just as he reaches out to touch it, the dark crack split from the eight all the way up to the two begins to squirm and Steve bites back a yelp as a small black spider emerges from the clock face.

“What the fuck?” Steve mutters, retrieving his hand and carefully turning the torchlight over the clock. The spider skitters over the glass, unaware of the intruder in its midst. Steve exhales, chastising himself for being startled. It’s a broken old clock and a tiny spider has taken up residence. It’s fine.

But then Steve sees the second spider.

And then the third.

And then the crack froths and hundreds of the little bastards emerge from the clock face, tumbling over each other in their race to get out, turning the clear glass a squirming inky black as they spread.

Steve bolts.

He promptly smacks into Robin on the way down and only her quick reflexes stop them both careening down the small staircase.

“What the fuck, Harrington?” Robin curses, pulling herself- and him - upright by tugging firmly on the hand-rail to right them both. Steve lets go of her shirt, the fabric now seriously crumpled from his damp fingers. She continues to look annoyed, until she sees the fear on his face.

“What is it?” she asks and pushes her way past him up the remaining stairs. Steve drops down on the closet step, heart hammering in his chest. He hasn’t felt like this since they found that odd bloodstain in the living room of that empty cottage. But even peeling up the carpet to see the massive dried rust underneath doesn’t quite feel like this.

“What?” she asks, looking baffled. She peers back down the steps towards him, her face unusually anxious. “Steve, what is it?”

Once the blood pounding in his ears fades, Steve can immediately hear what’s wrong. The chiming has stopped.

“What?” he says, in disbelief and pushes himself up so he can climb back up the steps. Aside from Robin, and her overwhelming aura of worry, the attic is exactly as it was.

Except for one thing.

“There was a clock here,” Steve says stupidly, pointing at the now unoccupied patch of wall. He turns to look at Robin. “A big grandfather clock and it was chiming, and it had spiders coming out of it. It was right here!”

Robin stares at the wall. The now empty patch of wall. The expression on her face flickers between worry and bemusement.

“Bud, I love you,” she says, tilting her head. “But did you inhale something really old that you weren’t meant to?”

“No!” Steve howls in frustration. “There was a clock, okay? A big one and it kept chiming. Even though the clock hands were pointing to two o’ clock, it just kept chiming a lot. And who even would wind up a clock that old, okay? It’s not like the ghosts of the Creel kids are coming back to keep the old vanishing grandfather clock wound up!”

“Steve,” Robin says gently, face now turning to one of pity. “I get that you’re…having some issues. Like this house is really fucking weird and the whole Billy thing gets really obvious every time that we do a video, but can you chill?”

Steve turns and storms back downstairs.

Fucking murder house.

XXX

Steve stomps down the attic stairs, not even bothering to close the door behind him. A small petty part of him suggests that slamming the door would feel really satisfying but he pushes it down.

He feels rattled and frustrated. Nothing about this day is going as planned and as he storms back down the main staircase he can’t help but think that maybe this is what they deserve. None of the other places they’ve explored have ever been like this, the remains of a family still waiting to be collected. It feels more like a violation than the old barns, the empty factory, the burnt out mill. Steve stops at the bottom of the staircase and drags a hand across his face.

It’s stupid. He’s letting this weird old house get to him.

Steve sighs and jams his torch back into his bag. They’ll need the lights soon, as the sun begins to set, but they’re good for now. Enough time to do a little scouting around for interesting spots, get some filming done. It’s been over a year since they started this and they have it down pat by now. Getting used to filming in the dark took some time in the beginning and they try not to do it too often for various reasons, but they decided today that filming some stuff as night fell would look really creepy.

Steve regrets that choice now.

He heads back to the dining room, intending on waiting with the rest of their gear. Let his friends finish the walkthrough by themselves. He’s going to find Robin’s emergency chocolate and eat it in front of the Creels’ weirdo portrait.

But the dining room isn’t empty. To his surprise, Billy is standing by the wall, staring up at the picture frame. He must have finished up early, the basement taking less time than upstairs.

“I didn’t think you liked that picture,” Steve says, dumping his bag onto the table. Robin's bag is already there, as she prefers stuffing her pockets full of the tools she might need rather than carrying a large backpack around. And anything else that doesn’t fit, she makes Steve carry.

“I don’t,” Billy says shortly. “It’s a lie.”

“Okay?” Steve asks, unsure. These days he never quite knows how to handle interactions between him and Billy. He hates it because Billy’s still his best friend, having been there for nearly all of his life. He doesn’t want to not know how to talk to Billy.

But it’s become more and more inevitable as Steve’s crush grew into something unmanageable and persistent. Talking to Billy leaves him open to saying something stupid without Robin as a buffer, to Billy flirting with him, Billy making a dumb comment about the cute guy he went on a date with last week.

“It is, though,” Billy says, gesturing up at the warm smiles of the Creels. “It’s all fake. People don’t pose for these family portraits because they’re really that happy. You have this huge fuck off painting in a room where they probably brought guests. It’s bullshit.”

“I suppose,” Steve says slowly, digging in the front pocket of Robin’s bag for a mini chocolate bar. He probably should know, as his own family have pictures just like that in their front room and they’re definitely only for show. He’s probably unable to see it in the same way that you can’t see the forest for the trees. Billy never had the kind of family that put on a front like that. No one gathered the Hargroves together for a cheesy group shot. “And they all died, in the end.”

“Hmm,” Billy murmurs and turns away from the portrait. His eyes move to the chocolate in Steve’s hand but he doesn’t comment on it.

“Did you find anything?” Billy asks curiously, the fading glow of the sunlight rippling off of his dirty blonde hair. Steve exhales, wondering in what universe it’s fair to make one man so fucking attractive.

“No,” he mutters mutinously, shoving the last of the chocolate bar into his mouth and stuffing the wrapper into his pocket. “Well, sort of. Upstairs is the same as down here. They left everything. But there was this freaky clock in the attic.”

“Okay,” Billy says, the single stud that he wears in his left ear glinting in the light as he fully turns to face Steve. “I’ll bite. Go ahead, Scooby Doo, what did you find?”

And sometimes Steve just wants to punch him in his stupidly gorgeous face.

“I saw this weird clock,” Steve says, because it really does sound stupid now. Hey, audience, subscribe now to see Steve freak out at a clock! There’s probably a totally rational explanation but he’s going to freak the hell out about it anyway! Hell, they’d probably lose viewers. They’ve never tried a stunt like that before. Steve didn’t even have his camera rolling.

Maybe Robin’s right. Maybe there’s like thirty year old drugs up in the attic that he breathed in.

“It was just chiming and shit,” Steve shrugs, wandering over to the freaky portrait of the Creels again. He has to admire the Packards for their bravery. If he’d just moved in and found this painting in his dining room, he’d have burned in a cleansing fire out in the backyard.

“And that’s freaky how?” Billy asks, sounding totally reasonable.

“It vanished when Robin came up to see it,” Steve says sheepishly. “I know it sounds bullshit but I swear-”

“Hey,” Billy says and gives that brilliant smile, the one that makes moms go weak at the knees and persuades gym buffs into his bed. Steve feels his own knees go a little weak under the full power of it.

“I know you believe in all this weird, spooky shit but you’re not crazy,” Billy continues, his eyes a brilliant, impossible blue at this range. “And this house is really fucked up. Even I agree with that.”

“You do?” Steve asks, a little dumbfounded, because not once has Billy ever been creeped out by anything. They visited the old Miller barn once, where old man Miller supposedly hung each of his daughters from the rafters, and upon seeing the tattered rope hanging from the beams Billy had scoffed and said that some idiot had probably hung it up to trick gullible assholes.

“Yeah,” Billy says simply. “I mean, you can feel it, can’t you? There’s something different about this one.”

“Yeah,” Steve says quietly. “There’s something different about this one.”

“Maybe there’s a reason for it,” Billy suggests. Steve snorts, taken aback.

“You’re kidding, right?” Steve says. “Should I get out a camera or will our ratings plummet? Billy Hargrove, born skeptic, admitting to the possibility of ghosts, ghouls and goblins?” Billy dramatically presses both hands to his chest, faking hurt.

“Ouch, Harrington,” Billy says, a teasing glitter in his eyes and something dips in Steve’s belly at that familiar challenge. High school basketball games had been hell. “That was right out of King Steve’s playbook.” Steve shrugs, turning his head away from Billy’ piercing gaze.

“Yeah, well…” he mutters. “Just didn’t expect it.” He leans against the solid wood of the dining table, and doesn’t really think about the inevitable dust and dirt clinging to his rear until too late.

“I’m just saying,” Billy protests. “At some point the teenage investigators stumble across the genuinely haunted house.”

“No, thanks,” Steve says, because he’s seen that movie. Which is kind of every horror movie. “I do actually prefer that we stay the kids with a dog Scooby gang rather than the Sunnydale Scooby gang.”

“Ok, but even they found actual ghosts sometimes, you know,” Billy says, and tugs up his sleeves, allowing that brief glimpse of his tanned arms, the leather cuff around one wrist. “Like, all of the movies have them find mummies and zombies and shit.”

“I may believe in this stuff,” Steve says frankly. “But I’d still prefer that we don’t stumble across the room in the basement with the chains and bathtubs full of blood. Okay?” Billy grins.

“I didn’t see much of that downstairs, I swear,” he says and then tilts his head up towards the ceiling. “Hey, where’s Robin?” Steve shrugs and looks up too. He hasn’t heard her footsteps for a while but maybe she stopped to film something.

“Dunno,” he says, and immediately hates that apparently they can’t be alone together without needing Robin around. “What do you want to do? Wait for her?”

“We don’t have to,” Billy says, pivoting to lean against the wall across from Steve. “We could film something. It’s been a while since it was just the two of us.”

“I guess,” Steve says vaguely, because a lot of that has been by design. He’s always been slightly worried that if he’s left alone with Billy for an unlimited amount of time he’ll do something stupid. He’s good at that, as his mother likes to remind him. He hops down from the table, intending to grab a camera. They might as well make use of the light. “I don't know why it turns out that way.”

“Well, that’s because you’re in love with me,” Billy says suddenly, like it’s obvious, and Steve stops dead.

“You…you knew?” he whispers, because oh God, Billy knew. Billy knew all of this time and he didn’t say anything. He probably just pitied poor Steve, the idiot with the crush. Everyone wants Billy. Billy could have just about anyone he wants. Steve can’t blame him for not choosing Steve.

“Not that subtle about it, Stevie,” Billy chuckles, folding his arms across his chest. There’s something not very nice about that smile. It’s not Billy’s real smile - it’s the one he uses when he thinks the middle aged women at the pool are getting too close, too handsy. It’s the one he used to use on the courts when some asshole from the rival team used to call him a fag. It’s all teeth and venom, badly concealed disdain hidden behind Billy’s bright pearly teeth. Steve’s known Billy long enough to know when he’s faking it.

“I didn’t want to ruin our friendship,” Steve says, crushed. He feels a little bit numb inside, a little bit stupid for expecting any other outcome. Admittedly, this is worse. He thought he’d just get the ‘hey, we can still be friends, but I just don’t feel about you that way’ speech, followed by an awkward arm pat. Not whatever this is.

“You’ve been in love with me since, what?” Billy asks, inspecting his nails like he has nothing else to do while he breaks Steve’s heart. “Freshman year? I mean, you’re not that great of an actor, Steve.”

“I…I don’t get why you’re being like this,” Steve protests, the sharp sting of tears coming to his eyes. He’s never known Billy to be so cruel and he doesn’t know what he’s done to deserve it. “I am in love with you and maybe you don’t feel the same way, but do you have to be such a dick?”

“You know I’m a dick,” Billy says bluntly. He’s still leaning against the wall, watching Steve with sharp blue eyes, as though this is just sport to him. “And yet you fell for me anyway. That’s the really stupid move on your part, Stevie. I’m a fuck up who’d rather screw half the basketball team rather than you and yet you love me anyway. You probably always will, which is the pathetic part. Did you honestly think that we’d stay friends?”

“We certainly won’t now!” Steve spits, taking a step back. But it’s no good because Billy follows, like a shark that has sensed blood in the water.

“Well, maybe you should have said something years ago,” Billy retorts, sticking his fingers through his belt loops. “Broken off the friendship after that night at Robin’s. Do you remember? We watched the first three Die Hard movies right after the other until Robin fell asleep. It would have been easier then. Repressing things just isn't good for you, Steve.” But Steve barely hears his last words, staring at Billy in absolute horror.

“No, but…how did you know it was that night?” he asks, something crawling up the back of his spine. He never told anyone it was that night. Not even Robin knows. Steve remembers every second of that sleepover, the one they’d had before they’d all been shipped off to different places for Christmas. It had been the night he’d looked at his best friend and thought that he wanted something more.

So how does Billy know?

“Steve!” The walkie barks furiously and Steve jerks his head down to the walkie still attached to his waist. The spell is broken, Billy looking startled as the voice continues to call for Steve.

Because it’s not Robin’s voice. It’s Billy’s.

Steve whips his head back up, terror killing the words in his throat before they can reach daylight. It’s not possible. Billy is on the walkie. Billy is in front of Steve. Which one is real?

Billy sighs heavily before frowning ruefully. “Shame. I was having fun.”

“You're…you’re not…” Steve stutters and in his haste to get back from whatever this…thing is, his foot catches on the edge of the rug. He loses his footing and falls backwards, the walkie skidding away as he crashes to the ground. The Billy clone looks dispassionately at him and Steve wonders how he missed it before. There’s nothing in this Billy’s eyes.

“No, I’m not Billy,” it says, sounding amused, and Steve had been correct in his assessment that it was all just a game. He just hadn’t known that it wasn’t Billy’s game. “But I had you going, didn’t I?”

“Steve!” Billy’s voice continues to shout down the walkie like a siren song but Steve can’t make himself move to answer it. All he can do is curl his fingers into the threadbare rug and stare at the entity stalking towards him.

“You made a mistake, coming into this house feeling like that,” the thing continues, dropping down into a crouch in front of Steve. Steve stares, open-mouthed, because every freckle, every dark lash, every curl in his hair is exactly the same. There was no way he ever could have guessed that this was merely a copy, even while this Billy spat poison at him with that cruel smile. He was expecting ghosts, see-through and wailing and rattling chains. He wasn’t expecting…this.

“I…” Steve starts but the words stop as the thing moves its hand up to stroke his hair back from his face. Its fingers dig into Steve’s scalp and Steve holds still as it turns his face up. He can feel a warm breath on his skin but it smells strange. Old, musty, metallic. Inhuman.

“Yes,” the creature murmurs, studying every inch of Steve’s face with an unsettling amount of interest. “Yes, you’ll do.”

And then the creature is gone, leaving Steve slumped against the wall like a puppet without any strings.

“Someone answer the fucking walkie!” Billy screeches down the receiver and Steve scrabbles to answer it. It slips from his cold, shaking fingers a few times before he can grip it properly.

“Billy?” he says, voice trembling, because he half expects this to be another trick, another Billy who will pull his heart out piece by piece, just to show him the tangled bloody mess of where Steve used to keep his love. But Billy just heaves a sigh of relief down the walkie, something ragged and familiar and human.

“Thank fuck, Steve,” he snaps, because that’s how Billy usually works. “I’ve been out of my mind. Shit’s weird down here. Are you okay?”

Steve pulls himself up and rests his back along the wall, just under the portrait. His heart is skipping in his chest, because they fucked up and ended up in the only actually fucking haunted house in America. With some shitty ghost who likes copying their faces and mocking their deepest insecurities.

But Billy doesn’t know. Billy didn’t just tell Steve that he was worthless for loving Billy. Everything is exactly the same as it was before.

“Yeah,” Steve says, hollowly. “I’m okay.”

Onto Chapter 3

@dragonflylady77 @cupc8keblonde @ihni

I genuinely can’t remember if anyone else wanted to be tagged for this specific fic so lmk!

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