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Gotta stay cool, you know?

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Harringrove + Funny Cakes from Pintrest idk

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Robin: Took you two long enough

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after the night at the byer’s, billy and steve both sport the same bruises.

and it doesn’t make sense.

steve’s sure he didn’t get that many hits in, and even then, it wasn’t hard enough to give billy a shiner like his.

and the worst part is, he feels bad.

“Hey, man,” He starts, cornering billy after a particularly difficult basketball practice. billy was awful. he kept his shirt on, too, which was weird. steve was benched completely; he can barely see out of one eye, and the other is still swollen shut.

billy’s panting from practice, hunched over as if it hurts to breathe. facing his locker and not replying to steve.

“um,” steve continues. “i…feel bad about what happened this weekend. i was just looking out for the kids, y’know, and i didn’t mean to hit you that h-“

billy turns around, snarling. looking like a battered, cornered wild dog.

“oh fuck right off, harrington,” he spits, and shoulders his way out.

“dude,” steve says, curling his lip. “i’m trying to apologize to you, asshole.”

“i don’t need your apology,” billy replies, and it hurts a little.

“well maybe if you hadn’t been a racist asshole i wouldn’t have had to hit you in the first plac-“

billy seems even angrier.

“i am not a fucking racist, harrington,” he snarls, but it lacks the horror his voice used to hold because of the wounds on his face.

steve grimaces. “yeah, totally, you just attacked lucas because he happened to be the closest.”

billy looks around the locker room as if someone is watching him. nervous.

“it’s not because of that,” he mutters, chewing on his swollen bottom lip.

“then why?” steve presses. “because if i recall, he didn’t do a damn thing to you, billy.”

billy swallows and refuses to make eye contact.

“it’s my fucking dad, harrington. he finds out max is messing around with a black kid and all three of us get a shiner worse than mine. i couldn’t care less about what those little shits are doing, but he does.���

steve’s face softens.

“so you’re…taking the punches for max?”

“that’s a stupid way to put it.”

“i…” steve gapes. “why don’t you go to hopper or something? he could put your dad in j-“

“because, harrington, i’ve got nowhere to go and no one gives a shit anyway if a dad beats his son as discipline. but i can’t let him put a hand on max. she doesn’t deserve it. even if she’s a fucking bitch.”

billy shakes his head like he’s said something awful.

“now you know. congratulations, harrington. i spent all this time stealing your crown and now you know that i’m just a pussy whose dad beats him. have fun spreading that one around.”

billy turns to leave and steve catches him by the arm.

“i’m not going to tell anyone,” he says, and billy scoffs.

“i promise. i’m not like that anymore. like you said…turned bitch.”

billy laughs.

“so, what? you look at me like i’m a kicked puppy every time i come to school with my teeth knocked in? because i’d rather you spread rumors about me instead.”

steve shakes his head.

“i wont do that either. promise. i just…i dunno. can i help in any way?”

billy shrugs him off.

“do what you do, i guess. protect those little shits. i’m not as good with kids as you are, mama bird.”

steve flushed at that and grimaces.

“please do not ever call me that again.”

and they laugh. and it feels nice.

“hey, uh, are you doing anything this friday?” steve asks, and it feels natural.

“probably looking after max. parents like to go out a lot and leave me with her.”

“well, why don’t you and her come with me and we can catch a movie maybe? she can bring lucas and you two can patch things up?”

“are you asking me on a date, harrington?”

steve’s face gets even redder.

“no, i just meant-like y’know, it would be nice, and i could, um-“

“it’s cool. i’ll come by friday. 5:00? you get lucas, i’ll bring max.”

steve nods. “um, yeah. that sounds good.”

billy smiles softly. “good. and don’t pick some girly movie. max and i like slashers.”

“right. got it.”

“see ya, steve.”

billy nudges him before jogging off, undoubtably late to pick up max.

and steve is frozen. what started as an apology for his own moral compass turned into a date. steve’s going on a date? with a boy? no, it was just a joke. maybe. probably.

he hopes it wasn’t, though.

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rip

(x)

[more here]

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For @dragonflylady77 who mentioned Billy's reaction to Steve's hairy chest ...

(We all know that Steve being hairy and shirtless would have been enough for Billy to claw his way out of the Upside Down ...)

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was rewatching some stuff and noticed some things during the scene where neil hits billy:

1. billy becomes more defensive after neil calls him the f slur

2. neil makes billy apologize to SUSAN, who, afterwards, says “it’s okay, neil, really.” not even acknowledging billy, only neil

3. the delay in the door shutting and billy crying definitely means susan saw him cry

4. billy only cries after neil leaves

5. they were FOUR HOURS LATE and just expected billy to drop everything to continue watching max, further solidifying that neil really wanted him controlling her whole life

6. susan watches this whole thing go down. does nothing about it. who knows why! neil is a confirmed wife beater, so. idk. but it still irks me.

7. billy’s lack of eye contact and small tone of voice when first told max was gone, trying to soothe the situation “im sure she went to the arcade/she’s with her friends/im sure she’s fine”

the 80s were a time where kids ran off and did stuff like this REGULARLY. it’s not uncommon. neil is just strict and controlling as fuck and wants billy to do his bad bidding. anyway see ya

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Steve definitely thinks its a trap somehow.

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Steve: So anyway, that’s why I think he’s possessed.

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Lucas On The Line // “For instance, the clothes she's been wearing lately have been... unusual. Old and oversize, and not in a good way. They remind me of Will's clothes, how he was always wearing something of Jonathan's, or even Mrs. Byers's.”

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Actually, Dacre was right about Billy being a christ figure. Like, yeah. It’s bonkers. He’s right, though.

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There's this thing that, when I was coming up in fandom, we called The Gambit Problem, named for Gambit of X-Men fame.

It was this phenomenon where female fans would gravitate to a male character who (and this is the important part) the writers didn't intend for them to like.

The creators, baffled and resentful, would start writing worse and worse storylines for the male character to try to deter them, or just kill him off all together. They didn't understand. He wasn't written to be liked, he wasn't the hero they related to. He didn't deserve the attention! They'd talk about how weird it was that these girls were enjoying it wrong! They'd denigrate the character and his fans alike. Nice guys really do finish last *wah wah* I'm clearly jealous of a fictional character.

Anyway, Billy.

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𝐀 𝐡𝐨𝐮𝐬𝐞 𝐭𝐨 𝐜𝐨𝐦𝐞 𝐡𝐨𝐦𝐞 𝐭𝐨.                    Simon "Ghost" Riley x Reader

Summary: Simon returns home. Returns to you, but as always, it's only for a little while... but that doesn't mean you won't make it something special. Keywords: Bittersweet, romantic, SFW, soft, Simon is genuinely confused how he landed you, established relationship. Wordcount: 1402.

When Simon comes home, he does so silently. No extravagant entry, no warning. You knew this, of course. The least he could do when you got together, was inform you of his methods. When he had explained this to you, he purposefully made it sound so uninviting. A last ditch effort to change your mind. He wanted better for you. Something more fulfilling. But by God did he hope you stuck around. He remembers the moment well. His dismissive tone, the way he turned from you as he finished his sentence, not wanting to see the disappointment in your eyes… he also remembers the quiet sound of your footsteps inching towards him, arms slithering around his waist in a warm embrace. The familiar aroma of whatever perfume or cologne you were wearing that day. He couldn’t help but sigh pleasantly at the familiarity of it all. 

“Then I’ll be sure to make it a welcoming home every day, in case you return.”

Now, why’d you have to charm him like that? He was already yours. He turned in your arms, brow subtly arched at your expression. The cheek of you. You were smiling playfully at him, angling yourself to entice him for a kiss. Your hands slipping beneath the dark shirt of his, feeling the scarred muscle underneath. 

“... and I’ll be sure to return home to you,” he replied, leaning down to meet you halfway. 

You were smiling into the kiss.

… 

It’s a little past midnight. The early beginning of a grey Friday. 

Simon is exhausted. He feels empty. Drained. There is always a serpent’s whisper of doubt in mind. The smallest of mockeries in the back of his head, gloating that he had been gone too long this time. That you had enough. That he was right about one thing, that he was never enough for you. He rests his forehead against the door as the key slips into the lock. It fits. And even better, it turns smoothly. You’ve oiled it, he thinks. 

Sometimes, it pays to be in the military. His training allows him to manoeuvre the house he knows so well with absolute silence. Shedding his attire little by little. Heavy articles of clothing dropping one after the other. He will take care of it in the morning. Right now? He just wants to rest in your presence.  

The jokes on him though, cause you’ve been awake this entire time. Stubbornness has kept you awake, that is your guess at least. You’re facing an early weekend, and felt it appropriate to treat yourself to some truffles in bed. A warm thermos nestled against your side as you take in the freedom of having no alarm set. 

He leans in the doorframe leading into your shared bedroom. Your ears perk at the faintest creak of old wood. You had been surprised when Simon vouched for the rustic charm of an older house, but a part of you guessed that the noisy floorboards would soothe his worries regarding any attempts of a home invasion. You stare at each other. Your eyes comically wide as you look at him with an owlish expression. 

“Simon! You’re home!” Immediately you sit up, ready to toss both blankets and duvet across the room to rush to his side, but he stops you, almost startled that you would forsake the comforts of the bed.

You’re wearing his shirt. The half-tossed duvet reveals his shirt comes down to your mid-thighs, leaving little to his imagination. He swears his heart jumps a beat, a warmth spreading in his chest, as well somewhere a little bit lower (though he would let you find that out for yourself later). 

“Surprised?” He saunters towards you, whatever doubts he might have had outside the front door, have been discarded on the stone steps. Confidence evident in his posture; pride. Pride of being the one who comes home to you.

He leans in to press his mouth against yours. A mild gasp of surprise from you, as he drinks in the sounds. He missed this, missed you. You open your mouth, and now it’s his turn to groan when your tongue seeks to deepen the kiss. A callous palm squeezing the soft flesh of your exposed thigh.

You both come to the unspoken agreement that a shared shower can wait until after you’ve welcomed him home. 

…

The last night together, you wash his hair. Your hands gently massaging and caressing his scalp with an intimacy that makes Simon's heart aflutter. To be treated so carefully, with such love... it always catches him by surprise. A stoic military man like him, held in such high regards by someone as lovely as you? Unheard of. Your fingers thread through his hair as the silence mingles with the calming noise of water rushing over your bodies to pool at your feet. Your deft fingertips knead the hairs by his neck, and he does his utmost to suppress the shiver that follows. His body tingles. He manages to fight his heavy eyelids, and grasp some sort of coherency as he reaches for your hand. A callous and rough palm—a big palm—meeting yours as he intertwines your fingers. He presses a solemn kiss to your knuckles, and for the briefest of seconds, he imagines what it would look like if you were to wear a wedding ring, and him, a matching one.

"Love?"

His gruff voice makes you quirk a smile. It sounds like warm gravel. He almost fell asleep, you think humorously, squeezing his hand. The sound of your voice as melodious and hypnotising as the water. "Yes, dear?"

A pause. You pay it no mind, instead letting your thumb thrum against his knuckles. Simon is selective of his words. Always carefully planned out, as if he was saving his breath. It was jarring at first. Many times you were head over heels attempting to decipher his noncommittal grunts and scoffs, the one-liners... but little by little, you learned to understand him, and he, in turn, let you coax him into fuller conversations.

He wordlessly tugs you closer. Chest to chest. 

"Mmh?" you teasingly prompt, your voice soothing him more than you know, as you rub your hands along his arms, palms kneading the hard muscles.

A longer shower than anticipated follows.

…

Later, you’re snuggled up to your beau while his muscular arms encase you in warmth. He takes deep breaths. You know he’s thinking hard about something, and you have an inkling about the topic. But you also know him well enough to let him think. So you stay quiet, humming with satisfaction as his fingers trails down your scalp to the nape of your neck, only to repeat the motion. Much to your pleasure.

You press lingering kisses to his collarbone, to the underside of his jaw. His fingers twitch when you kiss a particularly sensitive spot, and you almost purr with satisfaction of having this big man under your control.

“Simon?” you call to him, voice quiet and peaceful.

“Hmm?” The man is at the brink of sleep. Too relaxed to even form a sentence. This moment is perfect. You are perfect.

“Sleep well, baby”-you stifle a yawn against his neck-“I love you.” You know those are most likely the last words he will hear from you before he leaves again, so you make it count.

A part of him feels guilty he won’t be fulfilling your wish. The final night is rough on him. He won’t have enough hours to properly sleep, and he’d rather bask in your presence anyway. 

“I love you, too.”

Silence follows, though you make sure to mutter a few extra ‘I love yous’ before finally submitting to your need of rest.

“I love you, too,” he repeats an hour later, quieter this time. You’re asleep, but he doesn’t mind. “I love you so much. Get enough sleep for the both of us, would you? Better make it good…”

Sleep never comes. Simon doesn’t allow it to.

…

When morning comes, and you rouse awake, you needn't open your eyes to feel his absence. You already know by the tell-tale way the mattress doesn't dip to one side—his side. No comforting breathing letting you know, the man you love is safe and sound beside you. You are alone, and you will be for some time. But Simon always returns, just as how Ghost must always leave. It won't always be like this, that you know, so until then, you do what you always do, and prepare yourself for the day ahead.

Alone, but with the memories to keep you warm.

[hopelessfanfic]

The primary scene in which people have used to justify calling Billy Hargrove a “sociopath” is the infamous confrontation with The Party at the Byer’s house where Billy becomes very erratic and violent. There are two major problems with this point of view. One, sociopath is not a real, clinical term. It’s a term specific to “pop psychology” that undermines the complexity of personality disorders and trauma. Two, there’s a logical escalation to the violence in that scene, stemming from a single triggering event. I am going to discuss this below. This is not meant to justify what he said or did. It’s only meant to explain why Billy reacted the way he did.

To preface this explanation, I am a high school teacher. ~98% of the students I teach have some form of trauma. For this reason, I receive regular training on trauma informed instruction. The model I am going to be using in my explanation is usually used to understand why violence can escalate within a classroom setting specifically. It is designed to help us understand how to deescalate violent situations or even prevent them altogether. However, I think it can also be used to explain events outside of a classroom. So, I’m going to use it here and hopefully it makes sense. (It’s also just good practice for me, so if you think I’m doing too much I’m really just helping myself.)

I also would like to state before I begin my explanation that while what Billy did was wrong, it pales in comparison to the kind of violence I see within a given school year. I hear slurs on a daily basis. I’ve been called every horrible name you can think of. I have been physically assaulted and my property has been destroyed at work. My safety has been threatened on many occasion. Murder. Stabbings. Gang violence. Domestic violence. Drug smuggling. I have seen cases of it all in my career. To call all of this behavior “sociopathic” though ignores systemic issues within their community that make it more likely for violence to escalate. So that’s why this is important.

This is going to be less about Billy’s experiences with Adverse Childhood Experiences, and more about his violent behavior and why people like him experience severe dysregulation that may make them seem “sociopathic” to the average person. If you want to read about his ACEs, you can check out my ACEs tag which I will include in this post.

In trauma informed education, there’s something called Therapeutic Crisis Intervention (TCI) that aims to identify how a crisis occurs and how best to respond to it. TCI was developed in response to a desire to understand how to work with abused and neglected children. It is not flawless, but they do attempt to understand why violence escalates in reaction to stress in people. They use a model called the Stress Model of Crisis to map this out. Here it is:

On the y-axis, you have the degree of stress. On the x-axis, you have time duration. The more stress builds up over time, the more likely a person is to become violent if there’s no intervention. I’m not really going to talk about the interventions themselves because they’re usually provided by trained adults and no one in that scene was an adult and no one in that scene was trained and no one in that scene should be expected to react to the situation like a trained adult would because they’re not adults and it’s not their fault.

There’s a “pre-crisis state” in which you can expect a baseline of behavior out of an individual. This baseline is based upon what is typical for that person. For Billy, he’s typically stressed because he lives in an abusive household. Before the “triggering event” that leads to the confrontation at the Byer’s house, Billy is preparing for a date that he seems excited about. Then his father and his stepmother step into his space with minimal warning to ask about Max’s whereabouts.

This transitions into the triggering event, where Neil and Billy argue back and forth. It doesn’t matter that his parents might also have access to a car and they are legally responsible for Max, Billy is made responsible for her which Billy thinks is unfair. This is actually not unreasonable even if you don’t like his attitude. Neil escalates the situation and you can tell Billy is becoming agitated. Neil responds to this by physically abusing and humiliating Billy in front of Susan.

So, in a state of agitation Billy is expected to go find Max. This becomes worse when after looking all night for her, he finds her at a stranger’s house with a bunch of boys including Steve who is an older teen around his pre-teen sister. Billy and Steve exchange words which escalate Billy from a state of agitation to a state of aggression. Once someone moves into the escalation phase, you can expect to see more aggressive behaviors including yelling and threats which is exactly what Billy does. This phase is marked by a failure to cope.

This culminates in the crisis outburst phase where Billy becomes a danger to other people and himself. Billy embodies his trauma through his violence. We see this in the way he mirrors his mother fighting his father while she was surviving his abuse by throwing a plate at Steve as well as in the way he says no one tells him what to do despite us knowing Neil has significant control over his life. This phase is marked by “uncontrollable” violence that can not easily be stopped.

The only thing that forces Billy into the recovery phase is “medical” sedation. While you should never stab someone in the neck with a sedative and we know this was just done for dramatic effect, people who reach this phase are regularly medically sedated professionally and sent away for emergency psychiatric care. It’s a traumatic experience in itself, and the fortunate/unfortunate thing is that the way in which the “recovery” phase happens influences the outcomes for that person.

If someone is allowed to safely calm down and learn from their behavior through intervention by trained adults, they are more likely to have better outcomes. They’re more likely to be able to cope with stress and avoid these other phases. However, if “recovery” happens within the context of an abuser’s consequences and continued trauma then they’re not likely going to learn how to cope healthily with stress. It’s why Neil disciplining Billy makes Billy worse.

TL;DR:

Billy is not a sociopath. Once again, he’s an abused teenager who embodies his trauma in his violence. It’s important to recognize this not to excuse the harm but rather to prevent harm from continuing.

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Chrissy: anything stronger than weed

Eddie, to a girl who’s literally never done anything related to drugs or alcohol: omg yeah let’s give you fucking ketamine

Everyone: omg that’s so sweet

Billy: hey why do you have my middle school sister out so late with only boys, by the way my dad is gonna beat my ass if I don’t bring her back that’s why I’m here

Everyone: literally fuck you

I’m not usually one to moralize about fiction but certain individuals in fandom love to play that game to make themselves feel sooooooo superior so let me just say this:

Eddie Munson sells drugs to kids and he’s not only enthusiastically celebrated but deemed as having done no wrong whatsoever

Billy Hargrove beats up the guy he thinks could be potentially victimising his sister and the entire Stranger Things fandom loses its collective mind

Worms for brains let me tell thee