Fall Away (Billy)
Eddie stood in the doorway of the pool house, a cigarette dangling from his mouth, his forehead scrunched up in confusion. "What's he doing?"
"No idea," Billy said without looking. He turned side to side and looked at himself in the mirror, tried to decide if he looked cool or like a douche in Eddie's vest. Eddie looked like a damn rockstar in it, but Billy took it off once he decided he just looked stupid.
There was another thud of a shovel hitting something outside and Billy tried to tell himself that whatever Steve was doing wasn't his business, wasn't his fucking concern, except it kind of was.
Steve had been fucking miserable lately and it was making him act crazy.
Friday Steve started a home renovation stunt by trying to knock down the wall between his parents offices to make it one giant room. Billy stopped him just before he took out a fucking support beam and brought the entire house down on their heads. That was still a mess that Billy and Eddie were slowly patching up - Billy might have told Eddie that he could claim that room for himself if he helped him fix it all.
First thing Saturday morning, Steve woke up fucking insane again and while Billy and Eddie moved the furniture from the offices to the basement, Steve started painting. Not like Picasso or whatever, but painting the fucking walls of the living room. Billy passed by and smelled the paint, stopped to see Steve changing the clean white walls to some ugly shade of blue-gray.
"Dude! What the fuck?" Billy had to actually wrench the paint roller from Steve's hand to get him to look at him and then he wished he would look away. Steve's eyes were unfocused, dull. There was no expression on his face, it might as well have been a blank mask.
"Steve?"
The lights were on and nobody was home.
It made Billy uncomfortable, kind of sick too. He put Steve's ass on the couch then started cleanup on the whack paint job, bitching under his breath the whole time about Theo fucking Nott.
Eddie moved furniture, Billy painted, Steve had his episode on the couch where he couldn't start any more projects. Billy even made sure to move the sledgehammer, saw, paint rollers, and any other tools he didn't trust in Steve's hands out to his place.
He needed Steve to cut him a fucking break and let him finish fixing the shit Steve messed up before he started anything else.
Except Billy didn't consider a shovel to be a problem and when he joined Eddie in the doorway and returned his vest to him, he saw that everything was a problem in crazy hands.
Steve stood in the middle of the yard behind the pool going apeshit with the shovel. There was no chance he knew what he was doing, Billy couldn't even begin to guess. He just dug up a patch of grass, moved a few inches over, dug up a new patch. It wasn't hurting anything, but Billy didn't like how close Ziggy was to that shovel either.
"Think he's burying a body?" Eddie asked.
"Nah." Billy lit a cigarette and tried to guess what Psycho-Steve could be doing. Maybe he was trying to add on to the pool, Billy really had no fucking idea. As long as he wasn't digging too deep and getting near water lines then he wasn't hurting anyone but himself.
"Hey, go call Buckley, will you?" Billy told Eddie, watching Steve with his little digging routine. Billy had to finish painting the living room and paving down the wall that Steve tried to tear down. He couldn't do clean-up and babysit Steve. Buckley probably wouldn't care to watch Steve for him, they were all buddy-buddy lately.
Billy would rather have his fucking girl come over, she was good at babying crazy, but Steve's place had become a Potter-free zone lately and Billy wasn't going to push the issue yet.
"Yeah, will do." Eddie started to walk toward the house then spun around and grinned at Billy. "You want me to have her bring some of her clothes for you to try on too? I saw a bitchin' sweater of hers, you'd look great."
Billy grabbed a rock and launched it tossed Eddie, purposefully missing him. Eddie laughed and ran the rest of the way to the house with his arms over his head to protect all two of his braincells from more rocks.
"Fucking idiot," Billy muttered, shaking his head. How the fuck did he turn into the guy calling the shots when someone was clearly having a whole fucking breakdown?
If it wasn't Steve with his dumbass overly generous self… Billy might have just left. He could have said fuck it, went to find a place to crash while Steve tore down some more walls and dug all the holes he wanted. But it was Steve and Steve didn't fuck off when Billy was the one going through it.
Which meant Billy was damn well stuck there, dealing with it, until Steve made it out the other end of the crazy tunnel.
Eddie called Buckley and got her to agree to Steve-sit so Billy left him and Ziggy outside with Steve until she showed up. There was a ton of shit to get done inside the house and Billy didn't want to be working on it for the next month.
Tearing down a dividing wall was a lot more work than just hitting it with a sledgehammer. There were electrical lines that ran through it, a load bearing post that couldn't be damaged, and a ceiling that would cave if a wrong move was made.
Eddie moved the desks, bookcases, and other shit out the day before so Billy turned his radio on and got back to work. Billy had no experience with electric work, but it had to be mostly common sense.
Don't touch a live wire, don't cut the wires. The wires for the outlets that were built in the wall could be removed, slowly and carefully. The lines for the lights were on a different wall so Billy didn't have to worry about those. He had a fucking mess going in one of the rooms, a stack of boards he used the saw the neatly cut out, paneling from the walls, pieces of plaster when they fell.
Eddie returned to help him after about twenty minutes of Billy removing wiring from the mess and said that Buckley was there, helping Steve with whatever the fuck he was doing.
"I think it's a garden," Eddie said, grunting when he pulled away a board that Billy cut off the wall.
"It's fuckin September," Billy pointed out, figuring that logic wasn't a thing anyone was using anymore. It was too cold for a garden though, the ground would freeze before a single thing could grow.
"I don't think Stevie is exactly using any sort of logic," Eddie said, echoing Billy's exact train of thought. "Wizard Boy broke his brain."
Yeah, he fuckin did. And Billy wanted to smash his face for it, ask why the fuck he wouldn't choose Steve, but part of Billy kind of knew that he wasn't going to.
Harry had followed Steve around like a puppy for months while Steve worked through his ‘oh no I'm into dudes' crap. Harry tried, man, Billy had seen it while Harry sent Steve his little looks and half the time Steve returned them, the other times he ignored them.
There was only so much that someone wanted to be ignored or brushed off before they stopped being interested.
It still sucked though, Billy didn't like seeing Steve wandering around, breaking shit, and looking like someone knocked all of his lights out.
Billy and Eddie worked on the wall between the offices for a couple of hours, stopping a few times to smoke or grab a beer. When Billy had it looking as good as it could until he could grab some supplies from a hardware store, they started carrying the scrap out back.
Eddie didn't bitch much about the work, which Billy appreciated. The guy didn't seem like he had any idea how to use most of the tools Billy pulled from the garage, but he followed orders alright. They started a pile back behind the garage, far enough that Billy could burn it all without burning the house, and Billy took a second to check in on Steve.
The yard was fucked. Completely, totally, fucked. Whatever ‘gardening' Steve was trying to pull off had been a waste of time and only made the big area of picture perfect green grass look like an explosion happened about three inches under the ground. There were piles of dirt, a hole in the middle of the ‘garden' that Billy guessed had been Ziggy's contribution.
Steve clearly didn't know how to make a garden anymore than he knew how to make two offices one room or how to paint the living room. Why the fuck couldn't he take up fucking drawing or something that didn't make such a God damned mess?
Billy was not cleaning that mess up. It would get cold soon, the snow could cover it up and if Billy was there in the spring, if Steve hadn't gotten sick of him and kicked him out by then, Billy might try and fix it then. Until that happened? Billy had plenty of other shit to keep him busy.
Steve and Buckley weren't outside and so Billy let Eddie finish moving the boards and trash from the office wall so he could check on Steve, maybe get started on the rest of the living room walls. Billy did most of it the day before, but there was a wall with a bunch of stupid ass accent boards that he didn't want to fuck with at the time.
Billy paused in the kitchen, grabbed a cold beer, then stopped just outside of the living room when he heard Steve in there talking to Buckley. It sounded emotional, Billy didn't want to walk in while Steve was talking about his feelings.
"I don't know how to explain it," Steve said, frustration clear in his voice. "It's like I was there, I was right there, but I wasn't. I was just stuck outside of my body watching me scream at him and now - now I can't get back inside."
Billy took a silent swig of his beer, thinking hard about that. It should have sounded crazy, but it didn't. Billy felt like that before, usually when he was fighting with Neil. Billy would be screaming, running his mouth, unable to stop himself because it was like he wasn't in his body anymore - he didn't return to it until Neil finished what lesson he wanted to teach and Billy was alone again.
"Have you tried apologizing for the fight?" Robin asked. "Like told him your feelings were hurt and you didn't mean the shit you said?"
"No. Every time I see him I just feel sick - mad at myself, mad at him, and fuck I can't see him without Theo by his side or Theo's necklace around his neck."
"So… a garden is going to make it better?" Robin sounded skeptical, Billy didn't blame her.
"It was just something to try and stay busy," Steve said miserably. "But I messed that up too."
Yeah, he did. Steve fucked the yard up bad.
But… Billy sighed quietly and turned his ass around, walked straight back out the garage door to get to the back yard… Billy could probably fix that.
Billy couldn't fix the shit between Steve and Harry, he couldn't tell Steve the trick on how to get back inside of his own body, but fuck if Billy couldn't move the dirt around and square off the edges of the yard to make the mess at least look something like a garden.
Billy started off by squaring the edges, making the fucking mess a nice sized rectangle with even sides and crisp corners. Then he started actually using the shovel to try and till the dirt, making rows as he went, mixing all the dirt up into straight lines. He filled in the hole Ziggy dug and shooed him off when he tried to get right back to digging.
The sun was starting to set by the time Billy stepped out of the garden and wiped the sweat from his face to take a good look at it. It did look good, but it was still just fucking dirt that was going to freeze before Steve could grow a single thing.
Billy really didn't need to worry about it, he still had plenty of shit to do to fix, but… an empty garden was kind of fucking depressing, honestly. It was just dirt, plain and ugly dirt.
"Ziggy!" Billy whistled for his dog and pointed to the Camaro. "Come on, let's go rob a field."
Ziggy barked and his tail went wild while Billy mourned the interior of his trunk, knowing damn good and well that it was about to get trashed.
If it wasn't for Steve - stupid Steve who was too fucking generous and who did dumb shit like buying Billy blankets and stocking the beer he knew Billy liked in the fridge - then Billy wouldn't have done it. But Steve did a hell of a lot for Billy; hell, he let Billy move in his place and never once complained about any baggage Billy brought or burden he added to his life. Billy could muddy up his car for him.
It'd give him a good excuse to detail his car later anyway, if Billy felt like doing a single other chore for the next week.
Billy worked late in the night, fueled mostly by beer and cigarettes. He moved about fifty corn stalks and a dozen or so bushes of flowers that he dug out of the woods. It was a pain in the ass, replanting it all in the dark, but by the time Billy dragged himself inside his place and collapsed in his bed, a muddy nasty fucking mess, it was done.
It wasn't perfect and who the fuck had corn growing in their yard? But it was done.
Billy planned on sleeping late, skipping school so he could sleep, finish painting, go get the supplies he needed. Fucking Ziggy started whining right at six thirty though, the dog's bladder was more of an alarm than anything else and Billy bitched the entire way outside to let him piss.
The garden looked better in the sunrise than it did the dark. There were some places Billy could see that he'd need to fix, just some crooked edges and dirt lumped obviously, but it was a hell of a lot better than it had been before.
And Steve apparently agreed.
Billy had seen Buckley's car in the driveway when he had been moving plants to the garden; he figured she was staying the night to keep Steve company. Billy didn't worry much about it, there was almost always someone inside the main house. It made Billy's place more private, less open to any random stray that Steve gave a bed to.
Steve was the first one out of the house, walking out the garage door with his backpack on his back and a yawn stretching his face. He started to walk down to his car and Billy saw him actually stop in place and then spin around to gawk at the garden.
Billy smirked a little and continued to casually smoke as Steve dropped his bag on the drive to check out the fruit (vegetables?) of Billy's labor.
"Jesus," Steve said quietly, reaching out to touch one of the corn stalks with a small grin. "Freakin Billy…" he mumbled, shaking his head. When he looked up, looked directly toward Billy, Billy chuckled at the startled yelp he let out. Steve looked better - not great, but better. It looked like he slept, the lights were back on inside his head.
Steve rocked on his heels for a second and Billy could see the apology on the tip of his tongue, one he didn't need to give. Billy didn't mind clearing out the wall Steve wanted gone, he didn't mind painting the living room. Billy didn't mind the garden, for however long it would live. If that shit made Steve feel better about the shitty situation with Harry, then fuck it.
"You lost sledgehammer, paint roller, and shovel privileges," Billy told him breezily. "If you want a project, I'll buy you a fucking notebook and coloring crayons."
The smile that had slipped off Steve's face crept back up and for the first time in damn near a week, Billy got to hear him huff out a laugh.
"Will you finish the picture I start then too?" Steve asked, such a fucking smartass.
"Nope." Billy flipped his cigarette butt in the bucket he had by his door just for cigarettes and whistled for Ziggy to get his ass back inside.
"The next project you start, you finish," Billy warned Steve. "I mean it, pretty boy, I'll fuckin make you do every bit of the work until it's done."
Steve was still smiling and Billy wasn't a mushy idiot so he didn't think about how it felt good to put that smile back on Steve's dopey face. It did though, better than making a garden or renovating offices that hadn't been used in at least a year.
Some-fucking-how, Harrington had turned in Billy's closest friend and apparently Billy didn't like seeing his friends moping in their own misery.
"You'd help me," Steve said, too damn cocky.
"I won't," Billy said, narrowing his eyes so Steve took him serious. Billy had all the tools in the pool house, he really couldn't think of what Steve could use to start a new project. If he did though… Billy really might make him finish it himself.
"You would," Steve said.
Yeah, Billy probably fucking would.
Which made Billy the dopey ass sap out of the two of them.
"Fuck off, Harrington," Billy said, turning around to take his tired ass right back to bed.
Steve laughed again and Billy collapsed in his bed, rolling his eyes before he fell back asleep with a tired but pleased grin on his face.