Fooled around and fell in love [eng]

Bang bang

TW: Violence, guns, minors involved, season 2-4, not Flayed Billy

Neil had always had a strange obsession with guns, his mother was the complete opposite, Neil used to call her a stupid hippie bitch for it. Since he was a little boy his father wanted to introduce him to that world, he gave him toy guns and made him watch cowboy movies or movies with high violent content even though they were not recommended at all for his age, Neil told him to stop being a pussy and cover his ears every time there was gunshots, to be a man. When he turned 9 his present was to go to a shooting booth for the first time, now Billy was sure that it wasn't legal and that shit hole it was probably something clandestine, his mother strongly objected to it, not only because she hated guns, but because she believed it was not an activity at all appropriate for a child. Neil simply slapped her so hard she fell to the floor, Billy wanted to approach her but her eyes warned him, he and his mother had learned to understand each other just by a look.

It was an old and dingy place, full of mold and darkness, it smelled awful and Billy was sure that someone had had to die there, at least it looked like a typical horror movie set. The youngest clutched his mother's hand tightly, Neil had forced her to go so she could watch her son shoot, to torture her inside and silently. His father took the smallest and lightest gun available, putting it in his hands with a full loader, no headset to protect his ears because "there is no such thing in real life, you'll have to hear it and go on, be a man." Billy shivered as he looked at the gun and the target, it had a picture of a woman placed on top of it, it looked too much like his mother. Neil grabbed him by the shoulders and shook him, he was yelling at him incessantly, the younger boy wouldn't listen to what because he couldn't stop looking at that leaky picture, then Neil snatched the gun from him and got his attention again.


Billy always tried to forget that moment, to press that memory so deep in his brain that it would disappear, but he had never succeeded, it was too much. He still trembled when he remembered how Neil raised the gun against his mother, he kept shouting that he had to protect her, that Billy had to learn to kill those who wanted to harm his family, the blond thought for a moment that then his father would be the first one he would have to aim at. His mother was trembling slightly but held herself upright, she didn't want to give Neil the pleasure of seeing her weak and scared, Billy learned that from her. Then his father pointed the gun at him, pressed the barrel against his forehead, he kept screaming what was he going to do, would he be a man, how did he plan to save himself. Billy had never felt such terror in his life, his father pointing a gun at him would be something he could never forget, something that deeply marked the person he was.

So he would never understand why, after having managed to escape from Neil's clutches, his mother chose a town in the middle of the forest where there were many hunters, it literally went against the person she was, of course at the same time it seemed the last place where Neil would look for them. The house was small and in downtown, it was one floor and the backyard was a mess, but it would be just the two of them. At least until their mother met Susan, a woman who had just divorced and moved from California like them, then Billy became Susan's daughter Max's constant babysitter. And, not that he wants to blame a child for all the problems in his life, but it was because of her that he ended up at Jonathan Byers' house in the middle of the night, with a bunch of kids and Steve Harrington, chasing some ugly monsters through some subway tunnels and about to die.

That "we almost died" brought him together with the group of geeks that were Max's friends, their siblings, the police chief and Joyce Byers, and a strange girl with even stranger powers. But most of all Steve, Billy found himself eating more meals with him than with Tommy, sharing more time just chatting, smoking less and less because the brunet had quit and didn't want to bother him, spending nights at his house. The blond had always been someone popular but he wouldn't say he never had any real friends, yet Steve was, he was a friend he didn't have to look good and cool with, the one he could cry with in peace. God, Steve had hugged him so many nights when he woke up with night terrors, never asking what he was dreaming about, never asking about his father. Steve was all ears, he would listen to anything without judgment, but he would not ask, he knew how to respect Billy's privacy.