Chapter Text
one by one we will call for a ceasefire
Billy sat at the dining room table in the Hargrove house, leaning against the back of his chair with his arms crossed over his chest.
Max sat across from him in a similar position, her lips pressed into a firm straight line and her arms over her chest.
It was the first time since everything had happened - since she had snuck out with Sinclair, since he had laid Harrington out for hiding her from him, since Harrington had knocked him against the Byers' fridge and that monster stored in the freezer had tumbled out at Billy's feet, since Billy had spent the night using a crowbar to fight monsters with Harrington and a bunch of thirteen year olds while his mind screeched 'what the fuck' - that the two of them had been alone.
Neil and Susan had gone out for dinner, though not before Neil had made sure Billy knew what would happen if he found out Max had snuck out again while Billy was supposed to be watching her. Usually Billy would have said something, but he was still dealing with the bruises from his fight with Harrington as well as the beating he'd taken from Neil when he'd finally returned home with Max. He couldn't take much else without ending up in the hospital, trying to come up with a story to fend off the questions of the nurses who had seen him a few too many times, a little too often.
Silence stretched between the two of them.
Billy thought, just for a moment, about reading stories last year on the demilitarization zone they had set up on the Korean peninsula.
It was a ridiculous enough thought that it had him pushing himself forward.
"Alright kid," Billy said. He put his hands on the table, spreading his fingers out. "Let's talk."
"About what? You saw what's happening. I can't just leave my friends in danger."
"You absolutely can." Max's face hardened. Billy forced himself to take a deep breath, trying not to grow angry with her. He felt like he had been angry since the very moment they had left Santa Monica's city limits and he was growing tired of it. "Okay, you want to help your friends. Fine. Whatever. But you can't just run off like you did before."
"What else was I supposed to do?" Max asked. "Ask you for a ride? You wouldn't have taken me."
He wouldn't have - because he was getting ready for his date, because he'd already warned her not to hang out with Sinclair, because Neil might not have been as angry if he'd at least known where Max was but he still wouldn't have been pleased at Billy having just dropped her off at someone's house.
"Okay. Then next time you ask me for a ride to hang out with your friends, I'll try not to be such an asshole about it. In exchange, you have to stop sneaking out," Billy said. He could see Max tensing up, like she didn't quite believe the words coming out of his mouth. Billy didn't really give a shit about what she thought - just knew that he was sick of his dad kicking the shit out of him and he's doubly sick of getting the shit kicked out of him because of this kid. "That's the deal kid. I'll drive you around as long as you stop fucking disappearing on me, you got it?"
Max watched him suspiciously before saying, "That's all?"
"Nope," Billy said. "But that's part one of this peace treaty. You want rides than you tell me where you are."
Max was quiet for a moment, considering him.
Then she leaned forward, suspicion giving way to seriousness.
Billy found himself grinning as she did. For all that Max seemed to be unable to put together what the constant bruises on Billy's skin meant or what her role in them was, she wasn't a stupid kid.
The look on her face meant they were in business.
sisters made of sugar spice everything nice
Billy was sitting on his bed flipping idlely through his physics textbook and wondering if Hawkins had updated their shit in the last century given how old it seemed when his bedroom door slammed open.
His heart jumped into his throat as he whipped around, already running through what he had done that day and what might have set his father off enough for him to bother Billy. Usually Neil waited for Billy to come out of his bedroom to get at him, but it wasn't completely unprecedented for Billy to be barraged in on either. After all, it was a moment like that which had led to them leaving California - Billy's wrist wrapped in a black cast and Neil muttering about California faggots.
It wasn't his father that he found in his doorway, though.
"Billy! Can you take me to the mall?" Max said.
Heart beating hard in his chest, Billy was tempted to tell her to go fuck herself.
But their peace treaty was new, just shy of two weeks old, and he didn't feel like rocking the boat already. Not when he was finally starting to feel truly normal again after the beating Neil had given him for her going missing.
Tossing his textbooks aside and shifting to climb out of bed, he asked, "Why?"
"Mom said that since we don't have money for a new dress, I could get earrings for the Snow Ball."
Billy had been looking around the floor for something to wear - he liked to look nice, but he didn't think he needed anything more than a tee-shirt and his jacket for a trip to the mall. It wasn't like he was going to get to the opportunity talk to anyone, not when Max would end up telling someone about how he had ditched her. "Really? You don't even wear the ones you have."
Max's face flushed. Her arms came up over her chest, crossing defensively.
Ah, Billy thought as he took in her embarrassment, this was about Sinclair.
He still didn't want her hanging around the kid, not when anyone in town could tell Neil about who they'd seen Max with and Billy would end up getting blamed for letting her hangout with a black boy as if it was his job to vet her friend's rather than Neil's or Susan's, but he'd agreed when they'd called their ceasefire that he'd leave her friends out of their shit.
"Whatever," he muttered, turning away from her. "Get out of my room so I can get dressed. I'll take you when I'm ready."
He heard her groaning as bent down to grab the white shirt laying on his floor and brought it to his nose. He'd been at a party the night before, but as far as he could tell it didn't smell like weed or alcohol. "You take like thirty minutes to get ready, Billy!"
"Then you better scram now, huh?" he said. "You hanging around is only going to make me take longer."
Billy was looking at a display of dangling black, silver, and gold earrings, debating whether or not to buy himself a new one, when he saw Max approaching him out of the corner of his eye. She'd been looking at a section a little ways away from him, a column filled with the colorful studs that her mother always bought for her.
"You find what you wanted?" he asked, looking over at her.
"No." There was something disgruntled in her eyes, an unhappy and frustrated downturn to her lips. "Their all too girly."
"Sucks." Billy hummed a bit, looking away from her to examine the ones he was considering. The fact that they had come to get her something that she hadn't found didn't mean that he couldn't get what he wanted. He was trying to decide between two designs - one was like a diamond with a small circular disk between the two spikes while the other was a small golden cross. He took another moment to look at them before reaching out for the diamond. He turned away from the shelf afterwards, looking down at Max against. "Alright, you ready to go then?"
Max was quiet for a moment, staring at the shelf Billy had just grabbed his earrings from.
He was about to ask her again if she was read to go when she turned her gaze up at him, saying, "I want earrings like yours."
Billy quirked an eyebrow. "You sure? This isn't really your style."
"Why?" Max said. She crossed her arms over her chest, something defensive in her stance. "Because I'm a girl?"
"No." Billy could practically hear Neil's words behind her own - all of the times he had told Billy to stop acting like a girl when he took too long getting ready, the way he had called Billy a pussy when he'd first seen his pierced ear, the way he sneered that Billy had better stop dressing like a faggot and start dressing like a man. Neil encouraged the fire in Max, but only so far. She might not have gotten called any of the names Billy did, but he always frowned when she didn't like the pretty dresses Susan bought her or when she came home with knees just a little too dirty from playing with the boys. "Because you rarely wear earrings and you've never worn anything other than studs." When she just continued to stare at him, defensive and disbelieving, Billy let out a small huff. "I really don't give two shits what you wear or do, Max. You say you're a girl? Then you're girl. And that doesn't change just because you don't like dresses and skirts or because you wear earrings like mine."
There was another beat before she asked, voice quieter, "Really?"
"Yeah." He shifted out of the way so that he wasn't blocking her from the display. "Go ahead and find a pair you like. Just try not to get anything too big. You aren't used to having something heavy on your ear."
For a moment, her gaze flickered between the him and the display.
Then her shoulders relaxed just a fraction of an inch. "I don't know what looks nice." She focused her gaze on the display as she asked, "Would you help me pick a pair?"
Billy felt a flash of surprise at the request.
He twisted the earrings in his hand around in his fingers, considering blowing her off to go pay for them himself. But then he thought about the look in her eyes as she asked if it was because she was a girl, thought about how Neil made him feel for his appearance and how he wouldn't wish that on anyone - much less Max, thought about how she had closed off as though Neil wasn't the only one parroting these things at her.
"Yeah, sure."
It took them a couple of minutes, but in the end they decided on a pair of little black triangles. Max had wanted something similar to the long, thin golden spike that Billy had been wearing the night of his fight with Steve, but Billy had convinced her that something smaller was probably better until she got used to something dangling from her ear like that.
He had surprised both of them by offering to bring her back in a couple of weeks to get a pair like his if she decided that she wasn't bothered by the dangling.
He felt a little awkward about the offer after, so he ended up snatching the earrings she picked off the shelf and power walking towards the counter without bothering to see if she was following.
When they left afterwards, Max walked next to him instead of in front of him like she had a tendency to do any other time they were together. And instead of ignoring him as they left, Max tugged on the sleeve of his jacket and asked if they could get smoothies from the food court.
And later, when the two of them are walking out of the mall with their smoothies in their hands and Billy is threatening to make Max walk home if she spills her mango shit all over the camaro seats, he wonders just for a moment if maybe she's not as bad as he thought she was.
brothers made of frogs snails and puppy dog tails
Max's hand shook as she lowered the brush to her thumb, tongue peeking out from between her lips as she focused.
This was something her mother usually helped her with, putting on some soft music when Billy and Neil were both out of the house and having Max sit on the living room carpet with her crossed legs under the coffee table while her mother dipped the brushes and drew them across Max's nails, but her mom was busier nowadays - with work and Neil and finding footing in their new town - and she had less time to spend alone with her daughter.
Max was trying to be understanding of the whole thing, which was why she was sitting at the kitchen table attempting to paint her own nails for the first time.
Her mom was supposed to help her paint them the previous day in preparation for the Snow Ball, Max didn't paint her nails often so she'd asked her mom to do them early so she'd be sure that she actually liked having them colored, since she'd had time off but Neil had ended up getting home early and her mom hadn't ended up having the time to do them like she'd promised.
"If you don't get your hands steady, you're going to make a mess." Max jumped at the words, swiping the brush in her panic and ending up leaving a streak of polish across the dining room table. "Jesus christ, Max, really?"
She looked up to find Billy standing in the entry way separating the dining room and kitchen from the rest of the house. He wasn't dressed up for the day, just wearing a pair of loose jeans and a white tank top. There was a cigarette hanging loosely from his mouth even though he wasn't supposed to be smoking in the house.
"You scared me!" she said. Something rose up in her chest, guilt at the mess she had made as well as anger at him for acting as though she'd made a mess on purpose. Billy had been nicer to her recently, taking out less of his anger out on her than he used to, but he never really stopped teasing her and she found it infuriating. "And I haven't done this before! It's hard to keep my hands straight."
He crossed the room, peering down at the table when he drew closer to her. "You've never painted them yourself?"
"No. Mom always helps me."
Billy was quiet for a moment before taking a drag of his cigarette.
When he was done, he snubbed the bud out in the cigarette tray that Neil kept on the table. As he did, he told her, "Go to the bathroom. Grab some cotton swaps and the nail polish remover."
"Why?" She moved to dip the brush back in the polish bottle so that she could gather more and try to do her thumb again. "I'm doing something."
"All your doing is making a mess, shitbird. Go grab what I told you and I'll do it for you myself."
Max looked up at him, surprised. "You know how to do nails?"
"Mmm. I did it a couple of times back in California." Max thought about their time at home, dragging up memories of Billy holding cigarettes with nails painted jet black when he had just gotten back home from a night out or seeing him duck into the bathroom the morning after a party with colored nails scratching at his stomach. "If you don't do what I told you, I'm not going to help and I'm going to make you scrub the table once you finish."
She thought about it for another second before figuring that Billy couldn't possibly do any worse than she would and pushing her chair back. "Okay! I'm going!"
Max ended up making a second trip to the bathroom immediately after the first, because Billy took one look at her nails once she came back with the remover and decided that she needed a manicure if he was going to do this.
She couldn't remember a time when she and Billy had touched without it being rough, without him grabbing her or her punching him.
But he was careful with her that afternoon. He held her hand gently in his own as he clipped her fingernails for her, promising that it wouldn't matter that much when she objected. His grip on her wrist was loose as he showed her how to dip her hands in the large mixing bowl that he'd filled for her to soak her hands in. And when he finally got to covering nails in the dark blue polish she had chosen, his fingers were feather light against her own as he held her and place, working with focused eyes and an unlit cigarette dangling from between his lips.
When she was sitting at the table afterwards, under strict instructions not to move before they dried because he wasn't going to redo them for her, she watched as he cooked lunch for them. He usually complained about having to do it, but this time he asked her what she wanted and didn't object when she requested something slightly more involved than a can of soup from the shelf.
And afterwards as the two of them sat at the table eating their grilled cheese in companionable silence, Max wondered if moments like these were why Mike loved his sister despite all of his complaints about her, why Will was always so excited when Jonathan decided to spend some time with him instead of going out with his friends, why Lucas could argue with his sister all day only to puff up the second he heard one of the kids in her class had been mean to her.
She wondered if moments like this were why her friends liked their older siblings so much, because in a moment like this she didn't really mind that Billy was her big brother.
suck the poison out (and we'll be okay)
Billy pulled the camaro into the middle school parking lot, letting the wheel slip from between his fingers, with it's engine roaring and Michael Jackson playing just a little too loudly on the stereo.
The drive had been quieter than had become the usual - Max wasn't giving him directions to one of the other brats houses or talking about the plans she had for once he dropped her off or complaining about the music and begging him to let her listen to something else.
He slid the camaro into park, choosing a space closer to the door than he usually would given the snow covering the ground, and then turned it off.
"Alright," he told her. "Go to your thing. Dad pushed your curfew back to eleven, right?" Max nodded, looking out the window instead of at him. "Alright. I'll be here at ten-thirty then. You better be out here waiting, because I'm not going in there to find you."
Her voice was quiet as she said, "Okay."
She reached for the door handle, but she didn't pull it or move to get out.
Billy let her sit for a moment, waiting to see if she was going to grow confident enough to get out of the car without his help.
It was so unlike Max to worry about things like this - about dances and how she looked and whether boys would like her - that something in his chest ached with it. He knew that part of it was just because she had finally grown old enough to notice handsome boys and that she had finally found one specifically that she liked being around, but he also knew that part of it was the way that Neil made her feel terrible for not being girly enough, for not being enough of the little princess he clearly wanted.
It was the same way that Billy had felt so unsure of himself when he had been her age because of Neil - back when he had been wisp thin instead of sturdy and muscular, back when his hair had first been growing out, back when his face has been too round and his skin too pale even despite the California sun. Of course, Billy's confidence had been dropped in the form of fists against his ribs until he bulked up enough to take them and being called a faggot while Neil used his hair to shove Billy's face into walls rather than the thinly veiled disapproval rather than the snide comments and side long looked that Neil gave Max.
But this was the thing that Billy had been realizing in the weeks since they had called their ceasefire - that when Max wasn't sneaking around and getting him in trouble, she was a pretty cool kid. She was funny and quick witted when she wanted to be, gave as good as she got until they were both smiling as Billy ruffled her hair or she was punching him in the arm. She wasn't nearly as annoying about him taking her places when he didn't make every request a fight, asked if he was okay with taking her some place before asking Susan and Neil if she could go somewhere and promised to be home by the time he needed to leave if he told her he was planning on going out. He didn't hate spending time her when she was around the house either. He didn't mind the few times they'd sat at the dining room table together, eating ice cream while they each tried to get their homework done before Neil came home. He didn't mind when she flopped down on the couch with him while he was watching a movie, even when his movie finished and she asked him to watch something that she wanted to see with her. He didn't mind the afternoons when he spent a couple of minutes in the arcade with her because she was the first of her friends to arrive and didn't want to be alone.
This was the thing that Billy had been realizing in the weeks since they had called their ceasefire - that Billy didn't really mind having a sister if Max was the sister in question.
And Billy wasn't going to just sit here while Neil made his sister hate herself as much as Billy hated himself.
"You look nice, you know," Billy told her.
Max's hand tightened around the camaro handle. There was a moment before she said, sounding unsure, "You really think so? Even though I'm not wearing a dress or anything?"
"I'm not really the type to lie to a girl about whether or not she looks good." Billy sort of ached for a cigarette, for anything to keep him busy. "And who cares if you wear a dress not? You don't like dresses, Max. You'd just be uncomfortable and that's not a very attractive look on anyone."
There was a moment before she said, "You think I look nice enough that boys will want to dance with me?"
"I'm pretty sure Sinclair will want to dance with you."
Max's face flushed, but she didn't try to deny that it was his attention she wanted.
Instead, she finally pulled on the handle and popped the door open. "I'm going now."
"Alright. Ten-thirty, okay?"
"I got it!" She hopped out of the car. For a moment it seemed like she was going to dart away without another word, but instead she poked her head in and said, "Thank you, Billy." She didn't wait for a reply before shutting the door and darting away.
Billy watched until she disappeared into the school's double doors before turning away.
He was about to reach for his keys to start the car back up when he noticed something out of the corner of his eye - Steve Harrington's BMW parked a few spaces away. It was dark and there was snow making it difficult to see, but Billy was relatively sure he could see Harrington in the car talking to one of Max's friends.
He stared for a long moment before sighing and dropping his hands away from his keys.
Pulling his jacket tighter around himself, he reached the handle and pushed the car door open.
He was already getting weirdly emotional with Max - he might as well get the apology he owed Harrington out of the way now.