Chapter Text
Uneasy silence lay over the Upside Down. Billy skirted the shadows of buildings, hopscotching over eerily still vines. He wasn’t sure how long he’d been here after his death, but it had never been like this before.
He hitched his backpack a little higher on his shoulders, hissing a little as the left one throbbed painfully. The bat bite was healing slower than he liked, which was why he’d ventured into the open. A little more food, some proper medical supplies, maybe that would help him recover.
It still pissed him off to remember how close the fight had been before the Mastermind sent the bats after him. A few more minutes and he would have killed the bastard. Of course, that was why he hadn’t fought fair. Billy probably would have done the same if their positions were reversed.
“Hey, help me,” croaked a voice from the shadows.
Lightning slithered through Billy’s veins as he shied away from the sound and leveled his spear at it. By and large, the monsters of the Upside Down left him alone, until he attacked them, but he had still learned to fear anything coming near him. To his knowledge, none of them could speak, though. Was this some new creation of the Mastermind?
A guy crawled into what passed for the light around here, looking up with enormous, dark eyes. His face was smeared with blood and long dark hair hung in damp strings around his neck. He looked vaguely familiar to Billy.
From the way his arms shook, he wouldn’t be upright much longer. If Billy left him here, the monsters would finish him off.
For a moment, Billy intended to move on and let the guy meet whatever fate was coming for him. Surviving in this hellscape was hard enough for one person; helping someone else would just make things harder for him. When that thought crossed his mind, Billy forced himself to bend down. He didn’t want to be that kind of asshole anymore; that was exactly the kind of behavior that got him killed in the first place.
Despite the blood covering the guy’s clothes and skin, his injuries weren’t going to kill him any time soon. Billy could fix him up with a little time, as long as he didn’t have to keep looking over his shoulder.
“Hold this,” he said, handing the guy his spear. Then he got an arm under his shoulders and knees and lifted him.
His shoulder burst into fresh, fiery pain, but Billy could manage. He hissed a long breath through his teeth, echoed by the guy he was carrying. Neither of them made enough noise to alert anything that might be nearby. Billy was grateful for that; he wasn’t up for a fight right now and dropping his new friend might finish him off.
He made his way back to the silent mansion he’d picked as his main refuge. There was something about the place that most of the roaming monsters avoided, which was good enough for Billy. Besides, the guy who lived on the other side talked to himself sometimes and it was reassuring to hear a human voice.
In the downstairs bathroom, only one light decided to come on when Billy flipped the switch. Under its dim light, he set the guy in the tub and pried the spear out of his white-knuckle grip. Shedding his backpack for later, Billy got to work peeling off bloodied clothes.
While he worked, he had to wonder what kind of person he was dealing with. He still couldn’t place how he knew this guy, but his fuzzy mental image didn’t match with the military surplus gear he was pulling off. It was starting to get frustrating that the memory wouldn’t fall into place.
The best he could do was lukewarm water, but Billy used it anyway. He needed the blood gone to see how bad the injuries were and it might help him recover from shock. Not to mention, he was crusted with goop from crawling on the ground, which couldn’t be healthy.
“Why are you helping me?” the guy asked. His eyes finally focused on Billy as he came out of the fog.
“Because I’m trying to be better,” Billy replied. “Don’t move around too much, okay? I don’t want you breaking these wounds open. You’ll bleed to death and the monsters will show up to eat me pretty shortly afterward.”
“Okay. Am I dead?”
“Probably. I can’t imagine that you could’ve lived down here for very long. It’s okay, though. I’m dead too.”
Interestingly, the guy had no objection to being naked. Apart from one glance down to confirm it, he didn’t comment on it at all. Billy chose not to make a big deal out of it either. Some of his best days had been spent around people wearing barely anything, so going all the way to nothing wasn’t a big step.
“I’m Eddie,” the guy said. “If we’re going to be dead together, we might as well be friends.”
“Billy and not necessarily. Friends haven’t really worked out for me.”
He’d never had a real friend. Not for longer than a couple of weeks, anyway. Either people who genuinely wanted to be around him figured out what a dick he was, or they were dicks in the first place who only wanted what they could get out of him.
“Billy Hargrove,” Eddie drawled in recognition. “I thought you looked familiar. Man, we’re a long way from Hawkins High, aren’t we?”
That jogged Billy’s memory. He could see it now: Eddie perched on a table in the cafeteria, making an ass of himself for attention, even as he pretended nothing bothered him. They had never interacted or even acknowledged each other. Billy had been the kind of dick in high school who would have seriously hurt someone like Eddie.
Funny how life was nothing like high school, he thought. Here he was, water tinged with Eddie’s blood tingling as it dried on his hands, trying to patch the guy up.
“It’s a decent hike that way,” he agreed dryly, gesturing in the vague direction of the high school. “I think that’s everything I can scrub off, so now it’s time to look at the damage. You need to stand up.”
Eddie’s weak giggle turned into a grimace, but he accepted Billy’s help to stand. Dried off and dressed in the bare minimum, he sat on the counter so Billy could see what he had to work with.
Predictably, the worst injuries were to his sides. Billy could vividly remember how the bats had tried to attack his core, thwarted by the armor he’d improvised out of a vest and metal plating from the hardware store. Eddie’s ballistic jacket had helped, but it was made for bullets, not claws. The bites ran up both sides to his neck, but the worst of them were just above his hips, where it would be easy for the bats to get at his internal organs.
“Good news: you won’t bleed to death,” Billy finally said, letting out a long sigh. “Bad news: this will take forever to heal. You’re not going anywhere. Looks like we’re stuck together for now.”
He rummaged in his bag and came out with the medical supplies he’d stolen on his trip out today. Eddie needed them more than he did right now. He got to work cleaning and bandaging, doing his best to be gentle. Eddie still hissed in a couple of places and once he groaned out loud.
“Shit, that sucks,” he complained. “Is there anything I can do to help? I hate the idea of sitting around while you do all the work to protect us.”
“I’ll come up with something useful. I’ve got some survivalist books we can go over; maybe there are trap components that don’t take much labor to make.”
He gagged involuntarily at the memory of the library and the corpses inside. It would take a hell of a lot to make him go back there.
“Okay, that should do it. Don’t twist your torso too much or bend over if you can help it. Don’t lift anything. We’ll change the bandages in a day or so, as long as there isn’t too much bleeding.”
He helped Eddie down from the counter and left to grab him some clothes that weren’t torn and bloodstained. Eddie tried to get dressed, but Billy ended up helping him to keep from straining his wounds too much.
“I didn’t know you knew how to do this,” Eddie commented, wincing as he pulled long hair from under the collar of his sweater.
“I picked it up here and there.”
Billy didn’t want to explain that one. He’d known basic wound care since before dying and ending up in the Upside Down. Neil had lost his temper and gone way too far on a number of occasions, all of which were memorable for how miserable they’d been. Billy had been forced to clean himself up afterward, which resulted in learning how to do it properly. The blackest of those memories was the time he’d needed Max’s help; the only time she had been around to witness it.
His stomach felt tight and it wouldn’t relax even when he took a deep, soothing breath. Hoping to distract himself, Billy shimmied out of the layer of sweaters and armor he was wearing to get a look at his own bat bite.
“Holy shit, dude,” Eddie breathed.
Billy couldn’t blame him for being surprised; the layers of scar tissue on his chest were pretty impressive, in a disgusting kind of way. Puckered, angry red spots marked where the Mindflayer’s tentacles had stabbed into him, with the biggest one in the center of his chest being the size of his palm. He didn’t like to think about them, so he focused on the inflamed, aching wound on his shoulder.
“Everybody said you died in the mall fire. What the hell actually happened?”
Billy didn’t want to talk about this. It made his head ache, remembering how the Mindflayer had howled in his mind while he fought not to obey it. His chest burned on the next inhale, making him clench his teeth.
“I’ll tell you later,” he managed to force out before his throat closed up.
Eddie met his eyes in the mirror and nodded. Silence fell between them. Billy’s hands were shaking too much, so he braced himself against the sink and waited to calm down a little.
“I’m really sorry,” Eddie said. “It’s so stupid to ask someone how they died. I wouldn’t have bothered you if I could think. This place is just super creepy and my head feels like it’s packed with cotton balls, you know? God, this whole situation is beyond messed up.”
While he spoke, he carefully spread antibiotic cream on the bite. Slowly, his voice and touch brought Billy back into the moment. He was safe, relatively speaking. The Mindflayer had less power here in the Upside Down; it couldn’t hurt him right now.
Embarrassingly, Eddie’s help did more than calm him down. It spread warmth across his skin, made a kind of shaky excitement grow in the pit of his stomach. He even felt a tiny stir of interest in his jeans. Billy leaned away the second he could.
“Thanks,” he muttered, and got his clothes back on. No matter how he tried, he couldn’t get the heating system to work, so it was always cold inside. It made a good excuse.
Eddie didn’t seem to notice; he was looking worryingly pale and shaky. With all the blood he’d lost, Billy knew he was going to need food.
Good thing he’d gone to find some.