egore draft

player info

NAME: emilia
CONTACT: mimsbee
AVERSIONS: N/A

character info

CHARACTER NAME: Billy Hargrove
CANON: Stranger Things
CANON POINT: End of season three, shortly after his untimely death
TOKEN: His Saint Christopher’s medallion on a silver chain, formerly his mother’s.

details

SUMMARY:

cw: references to domestic abuse and homophobic language
Billy Hargrove was born into a contentious home. We know that early on, his father, Neil, abused his mother verbally and physically, and that as a young child, Billy witnessed abuse, bruises, thrown plates, and was a victim of domestic abuse himself. We know that as a child, his father would get in his face, wrench his arm, and yell. We know that at seventeen, his father felt confident in throwing his son around, hitting him across the face, and calling him a faggot. We know from Billy’s and his step-mother’s acquiescence, that this was not unusual.

When he was nine or ten, Billy’s mother left. She wasn’t sick, she didn’t pass away, she left her abuser and her son behind, and while we know she and Billy spoke by phone for some time, by his late teens, his mother was no longer mentioned by him or the narrative. Billy Hargrove was left with his and his mother’s abuser, and grew up in the house of an angry man. This made him angry. He began acting out, and as he aged, bullying kids on the playground turned into staying out late, drinking, drugs, and fucking. When his father married a woman named Susan and brought along her daughter Max, Billy was pissed. He didn’t want anything to do with them — Neil hit him, he didn’t hit them, and Billy resented them in his life, especially once he was charged with minding Max.

When Neil Hargrove uprooted the family from California and moved them to Hawkins, Indiana, Billy blamed Max and Max blamed Billy. He was seventeen, less than half-a-year from adulthood, and he was ripped from his home to carry out senior year in the middle of bum-fuck nowhere. At home, he blamed Max. At school, he began laying seeds to capture social capital. He sniffed out Steve Harrington at a Halloween party and started taking his friends; it was clear he wanted something from Steve given the ribbing in the showers, whether it was his throne or allyship or friendship.

That went up in smoke when his step-sister escaped out her window and disappeared while Billy was getting ready for a date. When Neil discovered she was missing, he blamed Billy’s preening, “like a faggot,” for her being able to slip out. He shoved Billy, hit his face, and demanded he find her, and when he left, Billy’s armor broke. He cried. When he finally found Max at a stranger’s house with a group of boys, he intimidated them by physically shoving Lucas Sinclair. When Steve Harrington hit him, it kicked off a powder keg and vicious fight that ended with Steve’s face being turned to pulp until Max drugged Billy. Ultimately, she intimidated him by threatening his balls with a bat and told him to leave her friends alone. He seemingly did, ignoring her at home.

By the summer, Max was comfortable enough with Billy to joke with El about spying on him, but it was unclear how their relationship functioned daily, and equally uncertain why Billy was still living under Neil’s roof three months after turning eighteen. Did he not have the cash to leave? Did he wonder if his leaving would turn Neil’s fists on the girls? In the week leading up to July 4th, Billy was possessed by an interdimensional demon the kids referred to as a Mindflayer. He kidnapped fellow lifeguard Heather and allowed her to be possessed, as well as her parents and perhaps 30–40 other Hawkins residents. His possession granted him physical prowess, made him vulnerable to heat, and made his mission simple: kill El and her friends. He and the monster almost managed it, but El was able to enter Billy’s memories, reminding him of better times with his mother. Billy was able to regain control long enough to save El, and to stand up to the physically manifested and fleshy Mindflayer, which punctured and mangled his chest. Billy died nearly alone, without friends, coughing out an apology to his step-sister Max.

VALUES:

Power, pleasure, competency. Billy values power, after having very little power in his early life, and having had someone exert their power over him. In any situation, he aims to have influence on those around him. His primary goal is chasing pleasure and living for himself/no one else. He generally values competency, and has little respect for someone incompetent/who can’t back up their words with action.

DESIRES:

The keyword is freedom, but autonomy also does the trick. Billy craves freedom and his main goal was getting out from under his father’s thumb and hitting the open road. On a baser note, he wants sex, all kinds of it, both for his social capital, but also for the illusion of closeness. He has no close relationships. He secretly craves them. This speaks to an inner desire for connection and, related to sex, he wants the kind of sex he isn’t able to get easily in 1980s Reagan America. Kinky, queer, with power imbalances are a hidden desire, even to himself.

FLAWS:

Easily angered, Billy has a terrible temper. He can hold it in for a time, attempting to appear unflappable, but once triggered, he has a temper that comes out in words and fists. His pride is another flaw, and when besmirched, he’s easily triggered into anger, or, if done by someone like his father, driven to tears. Devastating. Billy’s vices are weed, alcohol, coke when he could get his hands on it in California, and the pleasure of getting ‘a rise’ out of someone.

FEARS:

He fears a loss of agency, in that he’s experienced many cases of being cut down/thwarted when trying to live his life. He also fears losing control or going too far when he succumbs to his own anger. It’s unclear if he would have stopped hitting Steve that night he wouldn’t stop hitting Steve — what would have happened? Would he have killed him? Would he have been arrested? What would Billy have felt afterwards? This haunts him. Newly dead, he also fears — death. The strident stench of chemicals makes him nauseous after being possessed by the mindflayer, and abject cold triggers him. He fears losing control, either over himself, or by something else taking control of him again. After his mother’s departure, he also fears abandonment, and he has no close connections to account for that.

MOTIFS:

Wind whipping through hair, waves pulling back, churning water that rears back, cresting up; that moment where metric tons of water hold still before flooding out, foam rushing and salt water stinging. Sweaty bodies, the squeak of thin-soled sneakers on polyurethane-coated wood, competition and peacocking, the only time you can touch a male body like this. Cherry-red glow from a lit cigarette, hot sun, cold night, colder steel of the Camaro’s chassis, metal medallion warmed by hot skin.

BONDS:

His mother - she left when he was eight or so years old. She was not sick, she left. They spoke on the phone until the calls petered out.
His father - Neil is important because Neil is the way that he is. Neil first abused his mother, then he abused Billy. After Billy died, he began taking his anger out on his second wife.
Maxine - the step sister. For a time, he thought she got it, then it was clear she didn’t. He hates her, he worries about her. Maybe she’s the reason he didn’t leave as soon as he turned 18. He knew she or her mother would get ‘it’ after he took off.
California - home, though his ‘actual’ home doesn’t exist anymore. After the move to Hawkns, California became an idealized goal.
Steve Harrington - Billy wanted him, his social status, his power, his attention when he moved to Hawkins. Not having it drove him nuts. Almost killing Steve also drives him nuts. Never speaking to him again makes him crazy.
The Camaro - Billy’s family doesn’t have money, but Billy has a spicy six-year-old Camaro. It was a gift for his mother from his father, after he kicked the shit out of her. When she left without it, it sat on the street until Billy got his license.

SERVITOR: The Gutless Beast

This Servitor embodies Billy’s fury, his angst, his desire to fill a hole in himself that can’t be filled, not when anything important slips away. When he’s pushed to anger, he can’t stop on his own, he can’t moderate himself.

Description: The Gutless Beast is a large, slavering wolf-beast with its guts torn out. Its fur is tawny, heather, golden and black, but you wouldn’t be able to tell from the viscera it's appeared to roll in. Its coat drips fetid rotted matter, and it carries a horrible stench with it. It’s rolled around in everything it’s wanted to keep.

Behavior: The beast rarely calms, though it occasionally has the wherewithal to stalk. Driven by an insatiable hunger and desire to find fullness, it stalks indiscriminately, though it’s drawn to those who provide comfort to others and those who lord their power over others. When chasing its prey, it’ll snap down with a brutal, steel grip, its teeth sawing through armor or bone, and it will swallow creatures whole. Though, once they travel down its esophagus, they’ll slip out from the beast’s open guts.

Abilities:

• Stalking & Shadow-stepping: When the Gutless Beast decides to find you, it will find you, hunting you down through corridor or forest, occasionally seeming to dive in and out of shadow while deep in its hunt.


• Razor Sharp Bite: These fangs are all the better to eat you with — sharp, cold, cutting. If you survive an encounter and a bite from the Gutless Beast, you may recover, but you’ll feel cold and hopeless, as if there were no escape. If not broken from your own malaise, you’ll shiver and waste away.


• Acid: When riled up, the beast’s stomach acid burns through its guts and foams at its gums. While you may slide from its guts onto the ground, the acid does its best to digest you before you slip free.

Weaknesses:
The gaping gut in the Gutless Beast’s belly is sore and inflamed, bright red with disease that makes it fever-hot. The beast can carry on with its guts hanging out, but it also provides a weak spot to rend it into pieces. The beast is also soothed by lullabies and music boxes. But who would know such a thing?