#razbey rambles

Jonathan took a drag and coughed, smiling into his sleeve like he was embarrassed by it. Billy laughed—soft, surprised, nothing like the bark he used on the world—and reached over without thinking, steadying Jonathan’s wrist as he passed the joint back. Their fingers brushed. Barely. Just enough to notice. Billy didn’t pull away. Neither did Jonathan. The contact lingered, electric and stupid and loud in a way neither of them commented on.

They talked in half-sentences and pauses. About music. About nothing. About how some nights still felt wrong, like the dark was waiting for permission to crawl back in. Jonathan listened when Billy’s voice dropped, when the jokes fell away, when the silence stretched long enough to mean something. He didn’t flinch when Billy’s knee bumped his, didn’t move when Billy’s hand stayed resting there like it belonged.

The joint burned down to a roach between Billy’s fingers. Smoke curled around them, softening the sharp edges of everything that had happened before. When Jonathan reached over to flick ash out the window, his hand brushed Billy’s again—knuckles this time, deliberate or not, who could say—and Billy turned just enough for their shoulders to press together. The Camaro hummed beneath them, steady and warm.

Jonathan found him like that once—standing in the Byers’ driveway, cigarette shaking between his fingers, eyes glassy with something too raw to name. He didn’t say anything, just nudged Billy’s arm with a beer and sat down on the hood of his car. They didn’t talk much those nights, just passed the bottle between them, the silence thick but not suffocating.

It started small. Jonathan knocking on the door of Billy’s shitty motel room with a camera in one hand and a six-pack in the other. Billy showing up at Jonathan’s with bruised knuckles and a look that said don’t ask, and Jonathan never did. The way Billy let himself sleep on the Byers’ couch one night and woke up with a blanket he didn’t remember pulling over himself.

Hiding in the bushes with a camera, he should’ve been prepared for anything on the other side of the lens. That was the whole point, after all—to capture what lurked just beyond the surface, the things no one else noticed.

But no one could ever prepare for what happened between one shot and the next.

One second, the nerdy girl with glasses sat disheartened on the diving board, her fingers trailing patterns in the still, chlorinated water. The next—

A blur of dirty fur and shockingly bright blue eyes cut through the scene, moving faster than Jonathan’s shutter could keep up with. It slammed into the shifting, inky-black mass slithering forward from the shadows, the thing he’d thought—hoped—was just a trick of the night.

The shadow shrieked, but the beast attacking it only growled, low and rumbling. Jonathan felt his breath hitch, his fingers tightening on the camera. He should run. He should scream.

Instead, he pressed the shutter.

Click.

Because no way in hell was he imagining this.