26. Chapter 26

There’s a guy with a frankly hideous mohawk lying on a nest of bedsheets and pillows, doing his best not to breathe and grimacing every time he doesn’t quite manage it. His face is bruised, his nose broken, and he looks rather defeated where he’s sprawled across a Hello Kitty! comforter. He doesn’t move when Kali brings Billy and Steve to the little room, just cracks open one eye to glare at her.

“Who the fuck are these people?” he grits out, chest rising and following shallowly.

“Friends of Jane,” Kali says. “Billy says he might be able to help you, Axel.”

Axel takes one look at Billy, who’s already stepped forward to have a look, and snorts.

“You stay the fuck away from me, asshole,” he says, hissing through his teeth when he twitches too hard. “You and that mullet can go all the way back the fuck home to hillbilly land, you got that, faggot?”

Billy’s face hardens into a sharp, angry smile.

“Takes one to know one,” he says, kneeling down beside Axel. “I thought a punk was someone who took it up the ass.”

Rage flashes across Axel’s face, but Billy pays him no mind, pulling up the older boy’s washed out shirt and looking over the damage.

“How long you been like this, Axel?” Billy asks, looking over the ugly purple bruises with a wince. They’re… pretty bad-looking.

Axel doesn’t answer, so Kali does.

“Four days,” she says.

Billy tilts his head to look at Kali.

“And he hasn’t coughed up any blood?” he asks.

Kali shakes her head.

“Probably not broken, then,” he says, turning back to Axel. “But maybe cracked. Hold still, alright?”

Axel’s eyes dart over Billy’s shoulder to Kali, but he doesn’t move when Billy lays his hands across his skin, jaw clenched against the pain.

Billy touches each rib carefully, watching Axel’s face for any signs of more-than-acceptable pain. The punk goes very suddenly white when his hands move from the right side to the left.

“Cracked,” he says, sitting back. “Alright. You got any bandages around here?”

Kali shakes her head, and Steve speaks up.

“I’ve got a first aid kit in my car,” he says. “I’ve got ACE bandages in there.”

“Grab ‘em for me, will ya?” he says, then turns back to Axel. “I’m gonna wrap your ribs, and then you’re gonna sit under about ten bags of ice until you heal up. Got it?”

Axel just glares at him.

“Fuck you,” he says.

“Sorry, babe, you’re not my type,” Billy retorts, grinning a little bit when Axel just… stares. “Shut up and lemme do what I need, alright? You’re distracting me and Steve and Kali with you being all helpless and shit.”

“Distracting from what?” Kali asks over Axel’s squawk of anger. Her eyes have hardened with suspicion once more.

Billy sighs.

“Jane asked us to pick you up,” he says. “She said you were in trouble. So, we’re supposed to come and check on you, and if you want, we can take you to go hide with her until whatever shit you’ve gotten yourself into blows over.”

Kali goes silent, and Billy returns his attention to Axel. He immediately regrets it, because suddenly, Axel doesn’t just look pissed off and in pain, he looks… scared. Vulnerable.

“I’m not leaving Axel,” Kali says, and Billy’s heart constricts uncomfortably. “He’s all I have left.”

“He can come, too,” Steve says as he jogs back into the room, tossing the bandages at Billy. “There’s enough room for four in my car.”

Billy knows there’s some kind of a moment coming on— one that’s cementing Kali’s opinion of Steve and Steve’s opinion of Kali and Axel’s opinion of Billy and Steve— but he doesn’t care to add anything to the weird conversation they’re having, the one that’s touching uncomfortably close to home for Billy. So he snakes an arm under Axel’s shoulders and carefully pulls him up into a sitting position.

“Steve,” he says. “Hold him up for me, will you? I need to wrap him.”

Steve scrambles to obey, wrinkling his nose against the smell of unwashed punk but thankfully keeping his mouth shut as Billy unrolls the bandages and gets to work.

He wonders if Jane is watching. He also wonders if maybe she’s done something to let this all go as smoothly as it has.

*.*

It takes Kali minutes to collect her and Axel’s things from around the warehouse and throw it in the trunk of Steve’s car. They don’t have that much in the way of personal belongings, just clothes and notebooks and maybe (definitely) a gun.

Billy makes a note of the pistol sticking out of Kali’s backpack and knows he’ll make a point of stealing it before they make it back to Hawkins. He’s not sure he trusts these people with guns— not yet, at least.

Axel squirms for the first hour of the car ride back to Hawkins, shifting and groaning and hissing as he tries to find a comfortable position for both himself and the bag of ice Billy picked up for him when they stopped to tank up just outside of the city. Kali, annoyed by it all, drags his legs onto her lap and holds them there, forcing Axel to lean back against the window and hold the ice in place with the help of the Hello Kitty! comforter that he refused to leave behind.

He falls asleep pretty soon after that, which is… a blessing.

Steve takes the opportunity to tell Kali about what’s happened in Hawkins since Jane came back from Chicago.

“Hawkins lab was closed down before Christmas,” Steve says. “My friends managed to get evidence to some guy who leaked it to the press. Not the whole story, though— officially, they were experimenting with some kind of chemicals, leading to a few deaths and a cover-up. But it’s not active, anymore.”

“That’s… good,” Kali says uncertainly. “Did— I had other sisters. Were anymore found?”

Steve goes quiet for a moment.

“No,” he says.

“Unless they escaped, the project is still happening,” she says. “They’ve just moved it somewhere else.”

“Unless they killed them,” Billy says. “If they’re willing to kidnap and torture little kids, they’re probably willing to kill them, too.”

Kali shakes her head.

“We’re too valuable,” she says. “They wouldn’t kill us.”

Well, if that’s what lets her sleep at night, Billy’ll let it lie. He makes a small noise of understanding and reaches over to turn up the music.

Yeah, maybe it is Madonna, but right now, Billy is going to let Steve’s piss poor music taste go, because he doesn’t wanna think about little kids in sterile white rooms like he imagines Jane had been kept in.

Even Like a Virgin is better than that.