Eddie didn't call.
D&D games had the bad habit of taking hours on end to actually reach a satisfying conclusion and use up the entire initially planned plots. Billie was aware of just how much Eddie had planned for this so she couldn't really let this gut feeling that the delayed call was a bad sign. Watching "The Return of the Pink Panther" with Sam while eating pizza certainly played a part in distracting her from watching the phone and hoping it rang.
Devin had refused entirely to give the family movie night a shot. He didn't even take the peace offering of his favorite pizza, meaning that Billie carried two boxes for nothing. One had been enough for her and Sam.
Fortunately, she did manage to calm her youngest brother down about their first night without their dad home. He fell asleep on the couch, towards the end of the movie, still dirty with grease around his mouth and snoring into her shoulder.
Billie left the side of the phone for only as long as it took her to carry the sleepyhead back to his room, upstairs. She left his door slightly open, then, returning to the couch, she cleaned up: stopped the movie, put the pizza in the kitchen for when Barry got back, then got her walkman out of the bag -previously deserted- to listen to some music which was supposed to keep her awake and ready to receive Eddie's call.
She left one ear uncovered and leant back on the couch, watching the phone beside it be as still as if time itself had stopped. Eventually, the defeated position turned into a self-hug... then the darkness of the house became a menacing swirl of hypnosis, forcing her eyes to flutter close to the first tones of a new song on her Michael Jackson cassette.
"It's close to midnight and something evil's lurkin' in the dark," she heard his suave and enjoyable voice from the flashes of light happening behind her tired and closed eyes. A mind driven past fatigue and still fighting to stay awake, drifted away into dreams by clinging to the irony of those lyrics.
Now, her brain fell into a trance and believed, with all its might and glory, that her idol began narrating her life through one of his most famous songs.
"Under the moonlight you see a sight that almost stops your heart," Michael dictated that the flashes should now catch more corporal forms and so, Billie witnessed them turn into the blurred depiction of a warm night falling over the imposing presence of a house growing ever closer to her perception. In a fragmentation of lucidity, Billie realized where she was: the place where all her nightmares happened, the original Carter home.
She tried to close her eyes and shake herself awake, but instead of jolting up in the living room in the heart of Hawkins, she woke up in the living room of her childhood, a chill running down her spine as she even pinpointed the exact date. By then, hearing Michael Jackson sing in the distance became an amplifier to her shivers, to that suffocating sensation that this was it. She was trapped again.
"You try to scream."
Timely, the action unfolded right before her eyes, the way she knew it happened: Sam ran down the stairs, hurried by Devin's excited exclamations that the game they were about to play would be twice as cool with the right snack. The youngest Carter wanted to go to the kitchen, but in order to get there, he had to pass through the living room, where horror awaited for him the dark corner of the unlit room.
At first, it was just a horrible scent, making Sam gag.
Billie shook her head. She didn't want to see this. Once again, her eyes forced closed and her teeth gritted until she heard them over the mockery of Michael Jackson's "Thriller", still playing.
"But terror takes the sound before you make it."
Sam's distant scream. Her and Devin's steps stomped down the stairs. Devin's heart wrenching cry accompanied the crack of two bones. Billie heard her own scream.
But, unexpectedly, that was the very last sound she heard.
Everything after that went quiet. The song turned to static noise, only gradually.
Hesitant, but able to feel the coldness of her skin now covered in sweat, Billie began opening her eyes. Relief took her off guard to see the new living room again. Only she fell asleep on her side and it wasn't until she sat up that an odd feeling occured: that good old human instinct, a bonus to our brain's embedded desire to survive...
She felt someone was behind her.
She heard their breathing too.
The heavy sighs, the hard inhales making their lungs sound like stones and their nostrils like uneven and nasty pencil punctures through cartons. Despite this, despite the fact that the static sound in her headphones was irritating her mind, Billie couldn't move an inch.
Her breath finally flinched to a stop when the bone chilling coldness of a dead hand grabbed her left shoulder. It was the sort of ice which burned. With the hiss of pain right on her lips, Billie turned around from a crazy instinct to get up and back away.
Instead, there was no one there, behind her couch and she stared at pitch black darkness. This infinity of nothingness scared her even more. The static noise in her headphones got louder and in it, a much deeper voice sneaked through, calling her name.
"No, no...," Billie chanted in denial and finally turned around with the single wish to run upstairs and make sure her brothers were safe. It all felt too real-
Blocking her way, having been right behind her all along, was a woman. Her eyes were missing, her gaping mouth bore no teeth, only gashing empty spots where blood clogged before pooling down her chin. Her hair, a color similar to Billie's, was long and dirty with what stained every spot of the floral dress in which she's been buried too.
"You start to freeze as horror looks you right between the eyes!" The lyrics screamed in her ears until they hurt. That very second, the woman's neck snapped to the side and the bones stuck out of her dead skin, releasing worms and spiders.
The clench in her jaw was gone and Billie thought she screamed from the top of her lungs, only to find out she only yelped and finally woke up, truly, from the nightmare she had from her couch nap. Her headphones were silent, meaning that the cassette was over and she's been sleeping for at least half an hour.
There were some sounds which had their specific meaning embedded into certain minds and some were more basic than forever recalling the creak of the old stairs in the home of horrors. For example, some could tell the steps of each family member apart. Without any superpowers, some people taught themselves to listen and observe the hints hidden in sounds.
Just then, fresh out of a sleep which left her with aches all over her body and a heavy breath to calm back down, Billie Carter was overtaken by the realization that the night was not quiet and in fact, the moving light on the wall right before he was from a car, pulling into her house's driveway.
It wasn't her dad's car. It couldn't be, since he was apparently in over his head with work. Her brother to be taken home...? Unlikely. Barry didn't have that many friends, last she checked. So the more she really thought about it, the stranger it got that anyone would be parking in front of her house at this late hour.
Billie shrugged her headphones off, then grabbed her jacket on the way out, to at least peek at the numbers if not fully open the front door.
"What the fuck am I doing?" Eddie Munson asked himself through gritted teeth. His hands were glued to the steering wheel and no matter how tightly he held on, the shaking never stopped. His knees were bouncing uncontrollably and the skin under his eyes was twitching towards the inside, every so often, reminding him with a poke to be wary, to be paranoid. He had no idea how he even drove in a straight line without crashing into anything after what he'd seen... what he ran away from.
But most importantly, he had no idea what in fuck's name was going on in his mind to drive to Billie's house. He was smarter than this, wasn't he? Or did the hint of intelligence just return to him after the fright of his life left him speechless and scarred like some dog which will never be the same after escaping a heartless bully.
He couldn't be there. He couldn't do this to Billie.
Eddie's right hand went back to the key in contact, ready to start the car again and pretend his first instinct of seeking safety was not beside the girl living in the house before him. A knock on his window froze him to death.
"Eddie?" Billie called. She recognized Eddie's car once she took a look outside and the nightmare was pushed far behind her almost as quickly as the fall's night chill made her shiver. By the time she reached his window, because oddly enough, he wasn't moving from the driver's seat, remaining completely still there, not even noticing her, Billie's shoulders were up to her ears, hoping to warm her up by shaking.
He didn't answer the first few calls, so she got louder and knocked too, thinking that perhaps... he was just high. Which meant that in the morning, he'll be getting a lecture from her about driving in this condition.
Once she got louder, Eddie's panic grew and he fumbled his hands away from the key and at opening the window. He failed to do that quickly enough to stop her from making any sounds that would maybe alert her neighbors, so he instead pushed the door open. Billie had to take a considerably big step behind not to get hit full on by that door.
"What the hell...?"
"Shh!" Eddie's hands came up to shush her. "Please, keep quiet," his whispers were desperate. He was looking around as if he expected a thousand eyes to be watching him. "And forget I was here. I should have never come here in the first place, I don't want to get you into trouble."
"What?" Billie questioned. She was willing to listen to his request to be quiet, but the mumbles and mutters which followed... they made no sense to her. "Are you in some sort of trouble, Eddie?"
It was dark outside, so the finesse details which she'd otherwise notice quickly were now kicking in with the necessary slow motion after a rocky sleep.
First, she noticed that he was shaking.
But then again, it was cold outside, she couldn't point it out yet. Instead, Billie took a step closer and Eddie took several steps back. Now that never happened before.
"Eddie," she called his name again, eyebrows furrowing down. "You're starting to freak me out, what's going on?"
The distance he put between them made her force her eyes to fight the darkness and notice more: his hands were nervously gripping his rings, he kept on gulping. Was all the looking around paranoia?
"I can't be here," he repeated himself.
Billie realized he was close to crying.
"Eddie, for fuck's sake, please talk with me!"
His head bowed, ready to distance himself from her again, but Billie was decisive and faster, catching his hands and stopping them from shaking. He wasn't shivering because of the cold... he was scared. With wide eyes, Billie searched to catch his gaze.
"Hey," Billie's voice hummed lowly, carefully. The only firmness was in the way she held his hands, keeping him from backing away. "I can't help you if you don't tell me what happened, babe..." She tried to control her tone and have it calmer, even though her insides were beyond boiling point from worry.
"You...," a hiccup interrupted him from speaking properly. He knew he screamed when those impossible, horrendous things happened to Chrissy right in his home, but Eddie didn't realize how much he wanted to cry until his Billie Jean started talking to him with her usual kindness.
She was too kind for her own good.
Eddie's head bowed in hopes to hide if any tears did bust out of his eyes.
"You won't believe me." Billie finally understood something coherent coming from him.
"Let's test that theory once we get you inside, okay?"
"No!" Eddie was the one who surprisingly broke their whispering vow. He focused on prying his hands away without being too brutal. "I can't stay-"
"Dad's out of town," Billie blurted out while he once again started looking around. She let her right hand out of the attempt to keep him still and instead raised it up to his face. The tips of her fingers barely grazed the side of his jaw and Eddie flinched. Tears glistened on his skin and her panic exploded off the charts.
Whatever happened to him that night left him a wreck.
Billie forced herself anyway, to take her right hand away from his face and not let her own overthinking get the best out of her before he even got a chance to explain all of this.
"Barry's not home," she continued, slow and quiet, even if he kept muttering things, intelligible, "my other brothers are sleeping and I have a basement with walls thick enough to withstand nuclear war with the Russians. Please..." Billie inevitably begged, "Please, let's just go inside."
"I need..." Eddie's words shook with the tremors of his body. "I need to hide the car..." He caught a moment of lucidity to think that much into it.
"Hide the car?" She swallowed her shock and nodded without another blink, "Fine, we'll hide your car then get inside. Don't let go of my hand until then."
Her head was buzzing. Billie Carter was running on thirty minutes of nightmares and worry, the sort of tension which made the pizza she ate feel a little acid in her twisting stomach already. But she helped, even if she could recall only a blur of it, until she got Eddie to the house's basement and under the dim light of the only lightbulb there, she watched him sit on the ground, drawing towards the nearest corner.
She followed his example and sat down too. "Talk with me," Billie demanded. "You're safe now, so please, just talk with me."
Billie thought she had already thought of all the worst case scenarios: a drug deal went wrong, bad people were angry with him, someone took a joke too far... The list went on for infinity and it wouldn't stop until she heard his voice again. Even without their usual eye contact, hearing him talk drew her whole attention to be present.
"I was supposed to sell drugs to Chrissy today," he sighed out. Somehow, he looked exhausted from simply remembering that, because as soon as the stone was thrown off his chest, his face contorted in the urge to cry again.
"Chrissy? Cunningham?" Billie asked, trying to keep the information flowing.
Eddie confirmed with a nod.
"I didn't know she was into that sort of thing..."
"I should have known something was wrong when she approached me after classes," he blurted out the words through which he beat himself up mercilessly. Billie didn't understand yet, but she didn't like where this was going already.
"Okay, so something happened to Chrissy? Something wrong..."
"She's dead."
Billie's eyes lost focus for a second. The food in her stomach agitated and he held it back only by the sensation of emptiness, of a thousand feet drop of her heart into a pit of despair. Chrissy Cunningham was dead?
"Did she overdose?" Billie thought, once more, that she imagined the worst case scenario in existence. If someone died because of Eddie's drugs, on his watch... that was a stain on his mind which would perhaps never leave him. He wasn't a cruel guy, he was in fact kinder than he realized and under his tough exterior, there was a gentle soul.
"I didn't even give her the drugs, Billie!" Eddie cried out.
"What?" Billie looked into his tear-filled eyes, watched helplessly how his hands rubbed up and down his own arms and his knees drew nearer and nearer, into his chest.
His bottom lip quivered and he looked down once more. "I was supposed to sell her the normal stuff, in the usual spot in the woods, but then we got friendly," hiccups kept interrupting, "and she said some weird things... then asked if I had anything stronger, ya know. So I wanted to help and I told her after my D&D game and her basketball game... I'd drive her to my place and give her the better stuff. Which I did."
Billie didn't even realize there had been a basketball game that night.
"That's when shit went... unnatural," Eddie's voice dropped a notch once again. His widened eyes found a spot on the ground and didn't move away from it, not even when his sight blurred it beyond recognition. "I left her alone to look around for what I was about to sell," the tempering of his own tone did not last. His voice fluctuated out of control. "Couldn't have been more than two minutes and when I came back..." His story halted to a hesitating delve.
Billie's right hand reached forward and grasped his knee, making him look at her at last.
"It won't seem real," Eddie whimpered a warning. It was no mystery that he was terrified to see Billie's reaction. He knew how everything would sound, but he was not ready to see the love of his life think he's crazy or worse... a deranged murderer.
"Just tell me what happened..."
With a gulp and an elongated blink, Eddie sighed out the beginning of the worst part. "She wasn't moving when I got back." If he closed his eyes just then, he was sure he could still see it all, too clearly. "Chrissy was standing there, perfectly still, not answering. Her eyes were white and... and, uh, trying to roll back into her head the whole time." When fear mixed through, his stuttering began, blurring between the details of what happened.
Billie felt she was living a nightmare still. Seeing Eddie like this... Hell.
"I tried to shake her awake, thought she's having a laugh or fuck, I don't know, but then she... she just, like, lifted up into the air and... and hung there. In the air." Eddie felt Billie's hand slide off his knee and he didn't dare break his heart further by looking at her face. The bandage was half off, so he kept on talking, as coherent as he could be.
"Then her bones..."
Billie Carter's gut feeling had been right.
The buzz of her thoughts turned into an acute headache. Eddie's voice, though still heard by her, was now an echo, guiding her mind down a path she didn't want to circle back on, she didn't want to spiral down into the pit of nightmarish memories again.
Billie started trying to stand, to take a step back from what Eddie's words reminded her of.
His voice hitched before it returned to his sentence, "Her bones started to snap."
Billie's knees hit the ground in a failure to stand up. The sudden nauseous sensation planted her palms on the ground and she vomited out everything she ate that night.
Vomit was not on the list of reactions Eddie thought he'd get, but Billie was not looking at him while she, herself, looked rather paler than usual. Her whole body was an outlet of shivers while she continued trying to get up after her system was damaged by losing vitamins and burning everything down her throat.
"Billie?"
"I need..."
He heard the beginning of a mumble from her. Her gaze was fixed on the exit and Eddie felt his chest form a gap: was she trying to run from him? The tears may have dried away, but they threatened to return right away, because... dealing with losing her tonight too?
"No," Eddie breathed out. Desperation took over. "Please don't... I didn't kill her."
"I know," Billie answered, but her words were too faint. "I just... I need to catch my breath..." With shivering hands, once on her feet, she collapsed into a pillar and grabbed hold of it. Her head was spinning. Billie felt it, with her every fiber, that she was feeling sick at the very thought of the nightmare she had just predicted this with.
Eddie's hand clasped over her left shoulder and Billie spun around almost fast enough to fall on the ground and be her own downfall. Thankfully, her back hit the pillar and she caught her balance while he was forced to dodge the flaying around of her arms, rather numb.
"Please," she raised her voice and closed her eyes. They started hurting. "Just wait here, I need... I need to calm down." Panic strangulated her usually so composed nature.
"Billie, I..." He didn't trust this. He didn't understand her reaction and having any overthinking triggered at a moment like this... it was beyond painful.
"I know you didn't kill her and I know you're scared, but please, Eddie, just wait a goddamn minute so I catch my breath!" Billie hurried words out of her mouth before taking a deep breath and opening bloodshot eyes to narrow them. With struggle and sheer force of will, she concentrated on getting out of the basement without falling over again. "I'll bring something to clean up with...," she also added a whisper of thoughtfulness.
As soon as she reached the bathroom though, she closed the door behind herself and looked into the mirror only to find the reflection to be the woman from her nightmare. Billie yelped. Her hand clasped over her mouth to slap that sound of her lips, but the movement already commenced and she jumped back, landing on the ground hitting her head against the wall.
"Fuck..."
Her heart was thundering in her chest.
"Fuck!"
She came there to get some cold water on her face, wake herself up to a reasonable approach, but instead, she rushed out of the bathroom, up the stairs she almost crawled and stumbled a bit too loudly first in the closest room: Sam's.
She checked on both her brothers, both of them safe and asleep and only then did she finally breathe out the accumulated stress and fright to leave room for a long inhale of reason.
Before going back to the basement and her boyfriend, currently into deep shit, Billie marched into her room. With closed eyes, averting her gaze, she walked to the mirror at the end of her bed and turned it around. Once that was done, she opened her eyes and found a bottle of water laying around -she had plenty to pick from. Some of the water had to be drunk in order to get that awful taste out of her mouth. Some of the water had to be poured into her right palm, with which she then tapped her face with. Coldness, at last, made her calm down.
However, Eddie's panic was the one only growing.
Billie returned to the basement with some paper towels to find him pacing, still shaking.
He got it: her reaction was out of the ordinary too.
"Look, I am good with descriptions, that's why I lead the Hellfire Club, but I am scared shitless right now, Billie, so it was not my fucking description which scared you, was it?" He fired all which has been flying around his head the second the door of the basement closed behind her. She sighed all the way to the last step and then, she stopped in front of him, looking up.
"I believe you," Billie said, loud and clear. "I believe that what you saw was real and I believe you are not capable of being guilty of anything violent. It wasn't natural what happened to Chrissy, I believe you on that too."
"Why does that...?" Eddie took a small step closer to her. The places changed... he now was the one trying to get the most out of her eyes and what they hid. "Why does that sound like you know what's happening?"
"Did you really never wonder why my family and I moved to Hawkins out of the blue?"
"You've seen this happen before," shock crippled him for speaking in any other way but slowly.
Billie talked with Eddie about anything and everything, but she never mentioned this. Scared that he'd think she's crazy, scared that it will bring them trouble... all of that was out of the window, at last and now, difficult times asked for her to look him in the eyes and be honest. "Are you familiar with the Arne Johnson case?"
Eddie's eyes narrowed. "The dude who said the Devil made him do it in court?"
"What if I told you a Devil did make him do it, Eddie?"
"Normally," his mouth dried, "I'd remind you I'm not into religion debates, but after what I've seen tonight, babe, I'd tell you to go on."
Billie gulped. Her shoulders tensed. "What you told me happened to Chrissy..." The very attempt to talk about this left Billie breathless. "It also happened to my mother. The summer before we moved to Hawkins."
author's note: 🎶it's thriller, thriller night🎶
billie really went out of her way renting a friendly, chill movie, but ther life said "lmao, no, this story is marked R for intense horror, babe"
i can't believe it took me so long to make the connection, but basically, this fic is here because my mind clicked: the warren's did exist, their cases are real.. set in america... where stranger things is set too. hMMMMMMM
so yeah, here we go 😂✌ bringing the carter's to hawkins changes a LOT
how was this chapter? Like, for real
hyped for what comes next?