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discodeviant · 1 year

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Not Duke, Not Prince - Part 6

Billy | Teen | 1.1k words Alternate Canon/Divergence

Made for @billyhargrovebingo!

It was a long conversation back in Hopper’s office. He said he wanted details, so Billy gave him details, down to the last shred of carrion stuck in his maw the day he ran off. “It was this… fat-fucking rabbit. I mean, like—“ He gestured with his hands to demonstrate its size. “And, no, it wasn’t a hare. Then, I don’t know… I fell asleep for a while…”

A long, long while in human standards, but for a cat that big, it was just long enough. He’d ambled and galloped for miles before hunkering down in the mouth of a cave near the foot of Sattler’s Quarry, cold and dark on a cold and dark night. He was thankful for the fur. The warmth he collected from his own body that kept in his mane and all up his limbs. The comfort in silence when there weren’t demands to be made and orders to which he bowed. The night sky that looked freeing for the first time since his mother left, full of stars and new promises.

Those weren’t details Hopper wanted to know about, however, and Billy didn’t tell him. Max and the stranger—she called him asswipe—sat to the side in folding chairs, listening in because they were a part of this too, for better or worse.

“They need to leave,” Billy said, not looking up from Hopper’s typewriter, and no questions were asked. Max looked a little hesitant to let Billy out of her sight, but Asswipe said there were peppermint sticks in the lobby, which she dragged herself out for anyway.

Then it was like the hospital again: Billy alone with Hawkins Police Chief Jim Hopper, only now he thought he might have been in real trouble. Aggravated assault, attempted murder, he couldn’t be certain; but anything looked better than going back to the house. The clean-trimmed moustache with a clean-shaven face and a spotless record to match. Hopper, at least, had something smug about him. “Okay,” he said to Billy, sliding the typewriter back where it was. “Well, I’ll start by asking about this Nina Herrera you were supposedly meant to go on a date with.” Billy’s fingers tensed around each other. “I’d like to believe you, but there is not a single woman in this city with that name, currently or in the records.” Hopper’s folded hands flattened on the desk. “Billy. You can be honest with me, alright? You don’t need to make up some girl—“

“I didn’t make her up, man. We dated back home. Sorta.” Hopper inhaled loud and deep as Billy shifted in his chair, watching him with a bored sheen in his eyes.

“But she’s still not here. So I’ll ask you again. Who were you going out with?”

“Man, why does it matter? She wasn’t even in the car—“

“Billy.”

“Wheeler! Okay? Wheeler.”

“Nancy Wheeler.” Hopper looked at him expectantly and kept a pointed gaze as Billy shook his head. He muttered inaudibly. “Speak up, Billy.”

“… Karen,” he said, and Hopper’s eyes blew wide open with his cheeks puffed out. He blew a long whistle and sat back in his rolling chair. “Shut the hell up, okay, I don’t need you ragging on me about that too.”

“Ragging on you?”

“Yeah, man. I get it, she’s married—“

“You’re a kid, Billy.”

He stared at the chief, taken aback, then said defensively, “I’m eighteen.”

Hopper told him again, “You’re a kid,” and there was a heavy silence between them that carried Billy’s beating heart with such care that he thought it just might have been safe. “We’ll talk about that another time, okay?” It was the softest Billy had ever heard him speak, and he wondered if fathers were supposed to talk that way. He nodded. “Okay. Right now, I need to know why you pounced on your dad so we can take care of this.”

Billy inhaled, hard and sharp, and twisted the ring around his thumb, unable to maintain eye contact. This was an interrogation, and he knew that, but it didn’t quite feel like one. There wasn’t a brooding figure standing ten feet above him. It was only Hopper, and, as far as he knew, Hopper was good.

“I didn’t want to let him do it first.”

What followed was a stiff, hour-long back-and-forth between questions and avoidant answers. Billy didn’t know how to talk about such things because no one had ever asked, and the truth was still too much to bear. He still wasn’t certain that Neil wouldn’t recover in less than a week and return to their status quo like nothing ever happened. He was waiting to find out that nothing happened at all; that he crashed and was comatose and in a deep, seedy kind of dream that he had yet to awake from. By the end of their conversation, with Hopper’s hand resting atop his own, he hoped he never would.

Max was called back into the room with Murray, as Billy learned his name was, who offered Billy his own bunker as a place to stay. Max tensed at the suggestion even though she knew it was likely their best option, and Billy assured her that he would be fine. “It’s only a few hours out,” Murray said. “And, clearly, I’m the only one even remotely qualified to keep you out of trouble.”

“What if it happens again?” asked Max.

“Well, I’d hope he knows I’m no longer a threat.” All eyes on Billy, who nodded quickly. “I also don’t have any fox-children to keep out of your teeth.”

Hopper all but growled himself. “Murray.”

“Do you really not think he has a right to know, Jim?”

Billy didn’t want to ask. “Know what?” They all looked at Hopper with their own expressions of curiosity and smug condescension.

“My daughter’s like you. I just don’t know how it works, and Murray’s got the”—he made a vague gesture with his fingers in Murray’s direction—“books and the doohickeys.” He sighed. “As much as it physically pains me to say this—I trust him. You’ll be fine, Billy. We’ll tell your dad that you’ve been taken into custody. You cool with that?”

Billy looked down at Max, who held his hands tightly in her own, and she looked back up with eyes just as piercing. This was one of those moments when she seemed more lion than he ever was, and he knew she would be fine without him for a while.

Not a long while. Just long enough.

So Illinois it was.

Sometimes all of your trauma spills out onto the police chief's desk without having to say a word, and you get to go on a road trip. Silver lining, right? :)

#.discowrites #stranger things #stranger things fic #billy hargrove #murray bauman #max mayfield #jim hopper #chief hopper #werelion #werelion au #werelion billy #fanfic #billy hargrove bingo

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discodeviant · 1 year

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Not Duke, Not Prince - Part 5

(POV Hopper) Billy | Teen | 2.6k Alternate Canon/Divergence

And this is where the initial cracky silly plotline went awry and turned into something that I will be elaborating on down the line lol. Please enjoy <3

Made for @billyhargrovebingo!

Prev. | Part 1

Hopper sat in his van with a blanket over his shoulders, clinging to the police radio that crackled in and out since before sunrise. He’d gone through three coffees and a whole pack of Camels waiting for a sign, a sound, a rumble in the earth. Nothing. Nothing yet, at least, so he waited a little longer.

Two weeks prior, a man arrived in the hospital’s intensive care unit after showcasing severe, presumed, stab wounds and bruising over his chest. One Neil Hargrove, one Hopper knew of because his son was in the hospital only days before that with similar injuries, though much less severe. Much less deliberate, if Hopper were to think so, which made him queasy to consider.

Once he was conscious again, Hargrove Senior claimed that his son had done that to him. Jumped on, scratched, bitten; “Stabbed?” asked Officer Phil Callahan, the regrettable choice sent along to question him, but Hargrove shook his head. “He didn’t have a weapon on him?” And again.

“Teeth… he—he wasn’t—wasn’t human.”

It came out on the very same day that there had been reports of an earthquake from neighbors, thunder or explosions or God-knew-what. Commies, yelled one old woman, or winter fireworks. Her husband said it was like a herd of angry buffalo. None of that helped, obviously, because neither buffalo nor such violent political expressionists existed in the quaint town of Hawkins. Neither of those things were what shook the town just further than its outskirts, a few miles in each direction from the Hargrove household on Cherry Lane. One neighbor reported unusual rustling in his bushes, but even that wasn’t very useful.

Despite the odds favoring against him, Hopper had instincts that very seldom disappointed when it mattered. Callahan said something about a cougar, and then it finally made sense—maybe, if Hopper was right.

And he had been right once before, one night when he went to his cabin for a weekend getaway on the anniversary of his first daughter’s death. Whiskey, cigars, the cheapest pizza Hawkins could offer—that was his plan, and it was underway. On his day of mourning, he sat on the porch in an old rocking chair, beer in his hand, air in his gut that refused to escape, a cigar in his shirt pocket that he didn’t get a chance to light before tiny headlights caught his attention. Only for a moment, a split second in time, and then they disappeared.

So, maybe they weren’t headlights. A trick of the eye, perhaps. He was drunk and fuzzy anyway, distrusting of himself to see anything clearly, so he pretended to forget about it. Finished his beer, smoked his cigar, stood up to go back inside and sleep the pain off until morning. Before he could, however, there was a disturbance in the trees just ahead of him, something running and hiding from him until he threatened arrest. Had it been some delinquent teenager, it would have run away. It would have listened. Instead, it waltzed up to him with a long, red tail swishing behind a lean body, dark eyes that glimmered in the light of the new moon.

It was a fox.

Moments later, a little girl stood before him, naked and trembling, patches of auburn hair all over her body until they shed away later into the night. Hopper thought he was hallucinating, that his cigars were laced with something more illegal than they already were. The girl challenged more than feared him. She needed to get inside.

Three years later, she remained with him. A tattoo behind her ear read 011, and she called herself Eleven—or, the bad people did. Hopper started calling her El, which she took to quickly. When, one day, Hopper asked if the bad people turned her into a fox, she said no, she had always been that way, and she may have been a fox first. She didn’t know or care. Papa was long gone, the doctor was dead, and her stories only ever got more grim.

So Hopper waited for another earthquake, and then his radio crackled again.

“Come in, Jim, do you copy?” It was Callahan.

“Loud and clear, Phil. Over.”

“There’s a guy here harassing me for you… Says his name is—what’s your name again?” There was a garbled answer before Callahan repeated it: “Murray Bauman—Over.”

Hopper’s eyebrows turned in. “That Chicago prick?” he asked, having read an article written about said Chicago prick and the outlandish conspiracies he journaled about. “He’s here? In Hawkins. Over.”

“Unfortunately. Over.”

“What the hell’s he doing here?” Silence. “Phil!”

“You didn’t say, ‘Over!’” Hopper rolled his eyes. “I don’t know. He won’t tell me. He’s requesting you directly.” He could hear the inattentive look on Callahan’s face even from the middle of an open field. “And he’s not leaving until you talk to him. Over.”

“Christ,” Hopper said, muttering to himself. Then into the radio, “Fine. I’ll be there in twenty. And I’m giving him five. Over and out.”

“All I’m saying is, I don’t think it’s a coincidence, and before you cut me off again, there is historical evidence of house pets turning feral and morphing into other biological orders entirely—“

“So you’re saying the kid’s a cat with a tummy ache. Okay.”

Murray huffed and rolled his jaw, having gone through similar conversations with Hopper before because Hawkins was a strange little town, and he liked to keep tabs on it. They sat in the chief’s office, Hopper with his boots kicked up on the desk, Murray with his hands folded in his lap and a flat line across his lips. The combover was looking extra sharp that afternoon.

“If you’d let me finish, you’d be hearing that there are cases in the last thirty-odd years of this happening as a result of chemical mishandling during the war, and said chemicals causing permanent and significant damage to the animal kingdom. Three years ago, a woman in Memphis reported a possum sneaking into her hamster’s cage and eating it”—Hopper laughed—“but she inspected it more closely herself and determined that it was, in fact, her hamster that had transformed, based on behavioral evidence and markings on its skin that Mister Cheesy had as well.”

Smoke plumed from a cigarette resting on Hopper’s ash tray. “Those are a lot of words for a small man,” he said, maintaining an expert pokerface so as not to give away the returning curiosity of his own daughter.

“It’s not just cute, fuzzy little animals, okay, it’s wolves—“

“Werewolves?” He couldn’t help himself now.

Murray continued without missing a beat: “—and coyotes, cattle, chickens, ducks, toads, foxes, humans—“ But the buzz of Hopper’s alarm clock went off right when he said it would, five minutes after his ass met the chair. Murray stopped, stood up, straightened his jacket and said, “Well, I’m afraid my five minutes is up.” That smile made Hopper want to punch him. “Call me if you change your mind—“

“Wait.” He stood from his own chair and walked around the desk, closed the office door, drew the curtains. “Sit the hell down.”

Four days later, Murray joined Hopper in his van to drive to the clearing a mile out from Brimborn Steel Works. Max was in the back seat after having a long conversation with Hopper some days before, wearing his blanket over her legs. Neil was in no position to stop her going along for the ride, not that he knew. Susan didn’t particularly care. She clutched onto her skateboard as Murray asked Hopper, “And you’re sure this is the exact location he was attacked?”

“Yes, I’m sure.”

“Okay.” He unbuckled his seatbelt and opened the door, pointed a stiff finger in Hopper’s face and said, “You stay here. You”—he looked at Max—“come with me.”

“Christ, she’s a kid, Murray. What the hell are you doing?”

“Let me handle this,” he said, and Max didn’t argue getting out of the car. Either she was eager, or her hair jumped up just enough to make her look it. That stiff grin on Murray’s face shut Hopper right up, and he pulled the blanket from the back seat to drape over himself.

From the van, he watched Billy’s little sister stomp over to the tree line and face the darkened wood with Murray. He looked so small, and Max looked even smaller. So clueless even though, by then, Hopper knew Murray was far from it. He had proved that he knew exactly what he was doing, but Hopper had trouble believing him anyway. After all, it was a lion they were looking for, and they were in its territory.

Both Max and Hopper laughed when the first roar came, more of a purr from Murray’s throat than something to fear or be threatened by. He did it again, pursing his lips, taking deep breaths in between each long, thick propeller-like mimicry. A few minutes of that, and Murray was off to the next sound: a raspy huff, complete with strained neck motions. It was primal, Hopper thought. And then Murray howled, and he rolled his eyes and got out of the van too.

“We’re not hunting werewolves, Murray!”

“Real lions don’t roar like the movies, Jim!” he said with outstretched arms and started up again, making faces towards Max like this wouldn’t have been embarrassing if he were anyone else.

They were breathy roars, not unlike Hopper’s groans when he sat in his lazyboy after a long day. It continued for a while, Murray adding heavy stomps into the mix that hardly made any noise at all—but he was the expert, as reluctant as Hopper was to entertain it, so there weren’t any more interruptions. Max crossed her arms and stood back; Hopper leaned against the roof of the van, blanket over him like a cape, and waited.

And waited.

And then it happened, the earthquake, the rumbling at the surface of his skin that made his hair stand up and his heart retreat into his chest. “What the hell…” He looked around, and everything rumbled again. Max’s eyes found his, frantic, excited, scared and confused all at once. Murray kept up the charade, and the real roaring got louder every few seconds, sending bass-heavy waves straight to Hopper’s bones and nearly knocking the girl to the ground.

From the trees, there were the headlights again, only now he knew immediately that they weren’t headlights at all. Trees rustled far in the distance, the light flickering as a heavy stampede started towards them, right in Murray’s path, but even that didn’t stop him. The lights shone brighter, earthquake growing more powerful with every leap over roots and creepers and bushes, and—

Silence.

Murray held a hand up in front of him, cautious but not afraid. Max was stiff as a board. Hopper’s eyes locked onto the animal, locked onto Max, hand tight on the door in case they had to haul ass out of there, but the lion was still as a statue. Striking eyes, white and blue and glimmering in the sun, only saw him for a time, and then they found Hopper standing far in the background.

“No sudden movements, Jim,” said Murray, still unafraid, still smart. The lion growled in his direction, huffed, roared something small and nonthreatening but… displeased, maybe. Like it had been tricked.

Hopper nearly had a heart attack when it kicked its feet up again to charge at Max, who Murray had stepped away from when she wasn’t looking. Hopper wanted to strangle him, immediately jumping to try and do anything to keep it from killing her, but then it roared at him, fully bared teeth, standing in front of her like a guard dog. Which, he supposed, it was. Maybe. If it was really Billy Hargrove under all that golden mane and fur, behind a sharp face with eyes just as determined as the kid he’d seen in the hospital.

“Billy, it’s okay,” Max said then, softly, like she still wasn’t certain that this was her brother. The lion huffed, roars shrinking back to the Volkswagen growl only Neil had heard before. Defensive, protective, like stay away from my sister. “They’re—they don’t wanna hurt you.” She reached a hand out to touch its back, which made it flinch but not enough to deter its attention from potential threat. Max continued with long, gentle strokes down its back, then up to the base of its mane which curled in loose, messy ringlets like Billy’s hair. It turned its head, sniffed Max’s own mane, rubbed a wet nose against her shoulder, and she burst into tears. “Shit, it is you.”

“Careful,” Murray said, warning. “He could still snap like he did to your dad—“

“Jesus, I don’t care!” She dried her eyes in Billy’s fur, then looked at Murray with a fury Hopper hadn’t seen on anybody since the war. “And don’t you ever call him my dad again, weirdo, do you hear me!” Small, nimble fingers gripped tightly to the mane, and Murray offered a quiet apology.

“Guess it’s a good thing we brought you along, huh…” Hopper said. Max just cried and cried and cried, and eventually they left her alone with him.

She sat with Billy on the grass for a long time, talking as if he could answer, curling into his side like she was his cub. In a way, maybe she was. In a way, she was all he had left.

Hours later, they remained. Hopper sent numerous radios back to the station that Max was safe, that he would keep them updated with any news—which he didn’t, because he needed a story that wouldn’t get picked up by the bad men. He knew they were out there somewhere, closer than he may have thought. So he and Murray got to talking, and Max was still oblivious as she held Billy close, assuring him more than herself that she was safe and still with him.

Then he exhaled, and kept exhaling for far too long, so she sat up from her position on his side and saw that he was changing back.

“Hopper!” she yelled, and it was hard for the chief to look as fur shed, muscle mass all but disappeared, bones returned to a human structure, and Billy was himself again. He blinked, stirring himself awake with a heavy groan, and slipped away from Max’s touch. “Billy, are—“ Their eyes met for the briefest of moments, and the question fizzled off of her tongue because the answer might have been obvious. It might have encompassed everything running amok in her head, every thought and worry and regret in thinking that she’d lost him forever.

Billy looked exhausted and worn dry. He leaned back on one arm, not bothering to cover himself up. “Why the hell am I naked?” he asked, grumbling, taking the blanket from around Hopper’s shoulders and shivering underneath it.

“Growth spurt,” Hopper said, which made Billy laugh.

“Shit.” He scratched his nose with a handful of blanket and yawned, then looked over at Max, already having forgotten about Murray’s presence. “Do we gotta go home?” She shrugged and looked up at Hopper for an answer. There was something dark in Billy’s eyes, then, that he recognized vaguely. Something akin to the way children pleaded for forgiveness after breaking something fragile; a scared, broken kid running from bad men in bad places.

Billy sounded like a kid too when he said, “Please don’t make me go home.”

Part 6

#.discowrites #stranger things #stranger things fic #billy hargrove #jim hopper #chief hopper #murray bauman #max mayfield #werelion #werelion au #werelion billy hargrove #fanfic #billy hargrove bingo

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discodeviant · 1 year

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Not Duke, Not Prince - Part 4

Billy | Teen | 1.9k words Alternate Canon/Divergence, Canon-Typical Violence (sorta)

This was a very cathartic part to write lol. Hope you like it 😈

Made for @billyhargrovebingo!

Prev. | Part 1

“Doc said you’re good to go.”

It had been a few days since Billy was admitted when Neil returned to see him again. He hadn’t since the first; Chief Hopper visited more often. Not that it bothered Billy all that much, because the drug tests came back negative after all, and there was nothing in his car to point the cops in that direction anyway. No documented hallucinatory mental illness or recent head trauma that anyone but he and his father knew about. He passed with flying colors.

The last time he saw Hopper was that morning when he’d come around with a cup of coffee from the office, a bagel in one hand because Flo said it was a compromise, whatever that meant. Billy ate half of it. They talked for a while. Hopper said something about Billy’s beard growing in like his own did in high school, and that he was impressed Billy bothered shaving at all. He didn’t tell Hopper that it didn’t usually grow in so fast, or that he only had to shave once a week. That his moustache was the strongest facial hair he had, and the rest was saved for his pubes.

He was reluctant to let Hopper leave even though he’d been there for an hour already.

Neil looked disgusted when he saw Billy then, with a face that said, let’s get you cleaned up. The nurses all but shoved him out, and he couldn’t pretend that he was broken again. Shaky as he was, he could recover at home, take some time off work if he really had to. Or, that was what they thought. He hated that he felt just fine. The lack of exercise made him want to run and jump through the dense Hawkins backwoods, a startlingly new feeling, but it was still too cold for that. Maybe in the spring, he would.

The ride home was agonizing—not physically other than the lingering ache in his lower back from laying down, not stretching like he usually did. He’d have liked to try once they got home, but he knew better than to think it would be so easy. Dread covered him in a suit of its own. He felt prickly all over, but it wasn’t sweat. The inside of his sweater aggravated body hair and caught it on its fibers; he guessed that made sense, having grown so long. In days, his face was scruffier than it had ever been, arms and legs with a darker hue so the hair was actually visible now. Maybe Neil noticed, but if he cared, he didn’t say anything.

The Dread Tie choked around his neck when they pulled up to the house, and Neil helped Billy out of the truck despite his rejecting the offer. It wasn’t a choice, Neil reminded him with another bruising grip to his bicep and a pace that should have been a little too fast, though Billy kept up with it anyway.

Max was still at school, Susan at work, and Billy knew—before they made it to the front door—why Neil chose then to pick him up. Neil knew that he knew. The silence made Billy’s ears twitch, the hair on his back stand tall into his overgrown mullet, pain from the accident only subsided enough to tolerate if he was left alone. Days-old bruises throbbed beneath his skin like they’d predicted this before existing at all. Scratches burned, fractures ached, and his head spun when Neil said, “Billy.”

They were hardly inside the house.

“Do you… have any idea… of the mess I’ve gone through this past week?” Neil spoke low, taking off his jacket and hanging it up, decidedly leaving his boots on, priming the worn canvas before him. “No, you don’t. Because you’ve been in the hospital, which I have to pay for.” He wrung his hands and straightened the dress shirt under his cashmere sweater. “Because you were driving like a maniac in that goddamn car after I’ve told you, time and time again, to be careful with it, because I’m not buying you another one.” Billy was no more than a statue of soft clay when Neil got closer, up in his face, towering like he owned Billy too. “And lying to the goddamn police. What do you have to say to that, huh?”

Billy’s jaw tightened, nostrils flared, back muscles tensed like he was trying to balance himself. “I didn’t lie to them,” he said, and his voice was paper thin.

Neil huffed, amusement quirking the hair on his lip, feigned or genuine, stinging nonetheless. “I wasn’t born yesterday, Billy.”

“I know.”

“I don’t think you do.” It hurt to look into Neil’s eyes for too long, so Billy focused on his angry, stiff bottom lip instead. The wrinkles on his chin as he waited for something. “Now, you’re gonna tell me the truth.”

And Billy was silent for a long while. Stood there while his legs and feet were going numb like they did in the snow, heartbeat climbing into a sort of tap dance from one side of his ribs to the other. The air was dry as Billy met his father in a stale mate, then promptly lost the game when he said, “I did.”

He was up against the front door without a second to brace himself, one heavy fist gripped tightly to his shirt, and the other hand pointing to his nose. “I am trying to protect you, Billy. Do you understand that?” There they went again, the same old carousel, the same skipping tape. “You could have killed somebody, driving like that.”

“I wasn’t dr—“

“Hey!” Neil’s voice was a violent clap of thunder in an empty desert sky. “You listen to me.” Billy swallowed hard. “Your ass wouldn’t survive a day in prison. You don’t need me to tell you that, which is why you don’t act stupid. You don’t act stupid in front of cops. You don’t lie to the fucking chief.”

“You’re a hypocrite.”

That was when the palm struck once, a bell chime, a ringing gong through the house. “You’re a goddamn brat.” Billy couldn’t help laughing, just a little bit, enough to earn him another slap across the face. He grunted hard, expelling a sharp breath through his nose that refocused his attention on Neil’s breathing. Still too quiet, too sinister, but deep and threatening when Billy’s started to match. “I thought I taught you to be grateful for what you’ve got,” he said, “but you still haven’t, have you, Billy?”

Inhale…

Exhale…

“Have you!”

Inhale…

“You really are your mother’s son.”

Like a taut wire, Billy snapped.

He didn’t know where it came from, the bout of strength that rumbled through his core, right to both arms that shoved Neil away until he stumbled against the dinner table. Billy saw rage flicker through his eyes, the same glint that turned deep brown to flaming red. For a moment he was still frightening: both fists clenched at his sides, in position to charge and deal the damage to Billy’s form and self worth all over again. For a moment, Billy thought he still lost, and then Neil’s face changed.

His eyebrows flinched with his neck, Adam’s apple jumping down low as his mouth remained closed. Billy felt it from his chest, heard the grumble of the old Volkswagen they had in San Diego. It was his mom’s until Neil took that and ruined it too, but now it returned and sat right where it had been all along in Billy’s heart. A piece of her still with him, a moment in time he’d never forgotten even when strands of gold through the wind were taken in a rough hand and pulled back inside. It came from Billy’s throat, deep and guttural, louder than the Camaro when it revved up and called for someone to take home.

“What the fuck?”

Now Neil whispered. Now he wanted to step away, but the coffee table blocked his path. The engine continued as Billy’s chest rose and fell with stiff gusts of wind making it into his lungs. There were endless things he could have said to Neil, that he wanted to say, but none of them would be enough to express the sweet, cold, tantalizing aroma of fear wafting from his father’s flesh and blood. It was apple pie and vanilla ice cream, chocolate covered strawberries, watermelon in the summer. It soothed the rising heat that made him bleary-eyed and fogged every window, every sheet of glass in the room. Billy wasn’t half conscious of what was happening anymore other than the simple fact that Neil Hargrove was afraid, and it was his doing.

“Billy?”

Still just a whisper, bordering a desperate plea for mercy, and while Billy wasn’t numb to the aches in his body, he was numb to the voice. His voice, Neil’s voice, they both degraded into rubble. Suddenly his name didn’t feel like his name anymore—Billy… Billy…

“Billy…”

Growling so loud that it shook the floor, the ceiling, the walls, and Neil right to his bootstraps, Billy kept his stance. Blinking endlessly into the void that lay before him, five feet and ten inches of dirt that he should have wiped off his shoe long ago. That he couldn’t wipe off his shoe until, suddenly, he didn’t wear shoes; until he was two heads shorter than Neil and leaping from across the room.

Billy roared a sound he’d never fathomed hearing so close, right from his lips and through the recesses of his flattened consciousness. He did what he’d always done best, apparently, according to Neil, and broke things. He broke the coffee table and the vase on top of it; he broke the lamp, though he swore he didn’t touch it; and he broke Neil’s collarbone with the impact of his weight. Not that he cared, because Neil never did either. If nothing else, Billy was exacting his revenge, teaching somebody, somewhere, something about standing his ground, rising against fists that had no place in his memory. He was going to put Neil in his place once and for all, grab him by the collar and prove that he was even stronger.

Neil didn’t stand a chance.

Not against claws marring his face, his neck and chest; not against four hundred pounds sitting on his sternum and sinking sharp nails into his skin. Punctured by long, thick teeth and soothed by an enormous barbed tongue, though it was only to sate Billy’s appetite until dinner. The taste of copper made his eyes cross, his stomach turn, his arms reach out for more blood as the seething hatred for his father all but blinded him.

So many words, so little control over his jaw and tongue, and his voice was a deep, bellowing roar that knocked Neil’s head against the wall. In that moment, when the light faded from those beady eyes, Billy calmed. He looked around, and everything was so much taller around him, but, for the first time, Neil was below. The predator was down, the territory had been fought over and reclaimed.

For the first time, Billy had won.

Part 5

#.discowrites #stranger things #stranger things fic #billy hargrove #neil hargrove #werelion #werelion au #werelion billy hargrove #fanfic #billy hargrove bingo

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