something_incredible | (no subject)

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lucy

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Apparently in 2018, it's impossible to find anywhere that allows you to smoke inside. He could quit, like half the people he meets these days suggests he do, but Hopper doesn't really like the idea of giving up the one thing that's still familiar to him in this weird city.

He's not even a cop anymore. He could be. At least, he's pretty sure he could be, but this place seems to fall somewhere between New York and Hawkins when it comes to the level of crime he'd be facing and Hopper honestly isn't sure if he's ready to take a step back in New York's direction. Hawkins had been weird in recent years, yeah, but somehow facing down a bunch of monsters with heads full of teeth where their faces should be just doesn't seem as daunting as returning to cases of assault and murder and rape and abuse.

Shit like that's exhausting. New York had just about wrung every last little bit of good out of him and he can think of a lot better things to do with his time than going back to being a cop.

Like smoking. And drinking. And maybe taking a few pills to ease the pain. He hasn't, not yet, but he thinks about it every day. The only thing that keeps him from going back there right now is the thought that Eleven might show up here someday and he'd hate for her to see him like that, his eyes glazed over, just this side of high on whatever pain pills he was able to find. It had been fucked up before, but at least before there hadn't been a kid to worry about. The fact that there hadn't been was what took him to the pills in the first place, but now there is again. There's Eleven.

Maybe some other kids, too.

So right now he's huddled outside a bar, the collar of his Hawkins PD coat turned up against the cold wind, smoking the last cigarette in the pack he'd bought the day before. He's going through them too fast, but there's not much else here to distract him.

Another beer maybe. It's probably too early to get drunk, but just one more won't kill him. He takes one last drag from his cigarette before crushing it against the heel of his boot, then turns back toward the bar and nearly walks straight into someone.

"Shit, sorry," he says, lifting his hand to her shoulder to steady her.

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That's something he can't deny and he grins faintly and nods as they walk. It's true he's seen a lot of shit as a cop, but right now he's not much of anything and he's still not sure if that's for the best or not. It's only been two weeks since he got here and he feels like finding a job means he's accepting he's not going to leave and Hopper isn't ready for that.

Looking at Lucy, he says, "Yeah, it takes some doing sometimes. I haven't gone back to it since I got here and... are you one of those people who are from this place?"

He's only met one or two so far, mostly he's been keeping to himself.

"Oh no. No, I'm not from here," Lucy says immediately, shaking her head. "No. I got here maybe half a year ago? It seems like it's been longer but I don't think it has. I can't even imagine what it must be like to be from here."

How did you make sense of not being able to leave? Not everyone went on vacations, sure, but people had to suspicious when it came being able to drive to one specific place and going no further. How did people not question that? How did it not cause questions to be asked?

"No, I'm from the United States at around present day as far as I can ascertain," Lucy says. "I know most of the technology here well enough."

That's something of a relief, although Hopper doesn't know why. Most of the people from Darrow have been nice enough, they've just been kind of off. Strange in a way he just can't get comfortable with and that's saying something, given the past year and a half he's had.

"Does it get any less weird?" he asks, finally pulling open the door of a coffee shop. It's a quiet place, they don't seem to do as much business as the bustling shops he sees on every corner, but he likes this one better. Understands it more. "So far it hasn't gotten any less weird for me, but then this..." He pauses and pulls out his cell phone, although he's pretty sure the battery is dead. "This doesn't make any sense to me."

"It...doesn't," Lucy says which she knows is probably not helpful. While she doesn't have it as bad as he does considering she knows what a cell phone is and isn't confused by certain appliances or other gadgets, the fact that this place exists in the first place is confusing and unsettling.

"It gets easier though," she says, trying to be reassuring. "You'll learn what that is and this place is full of helpful people who will want to help you. That thing you're holding is just a handy way to call someone so you're not stuck waiting at home. It's convenient even if it can get...addictive."

"I don't think there's anyone I want to talk to that badly," he admits with a grin, then shoves the phone back into his pocket as he gestures for Lucy to pick a table. It's not as convenient as the other coffee places, but he likes that it's slower. More his speed, he thinks.

He can see how it would help with a kid, though, how it would be better to keep an eye on someone like Eleven. How it would have been better to call her whenever he was going to be late. Maybe he would have disappointed her less.

"I got a kid back home," he says, rubbing his chin as a waitress comes over. Of course he'd say it as soon as they're about to be interrupted. It keeps it from being too serious. "I keep thinking about her."

"Oh?" Now that has to be a difficult situation to be in, stuck in a city that you can't leave when you have a child. She's been having a difficult enough time with just knowing her sister and mother are back home. She doesn't know what she'd be feeling if her child was back home. What the heck does a parent do when something like that happens?

"How old is she?" Lucy asks, thinking too late that that might be a little too much information for someone that this man doesn't really know. "That must be hard, to be away from her. Unfortunately, not even a cell phone would help you in that situation. I've tried to call people back home and it does nothing but ring busy."

Hopper just asks for two coffees of the waitress when she comes to where they're sitting and she nods in response, going to get that for them and leaving a menu behind. Given that he's just been drinking -- not drunk, thank god for small favours, he thinks -- he's not in the mood for anything, but he pushes it toward Lucy in case she's interested.

"Thirteen," he says with a faint smile. Sara would be fourteen now if she'd lived, just a year older than Eleven. He thinks about that lot. More than he should, probably. "Her name's Jane. Her mother died a long time ago."

The lie is a hell of a lot easier to tell someone he's only just met than it had been to tell Eleven.

"Ah, single father," Lucy says carefully, quietly. "That has to be difficult especially for you now that you're...here."

No matter what people have told her about how she is still, somehow, back home, hasn't left, she can't help but think she's missing out on the opportunity to get her sister back or to spend more time with her mother. She's stuck in a city where she can do nothing for no one back home.

"I'm sure you miss her," Lucy remarks, tapping a finger against the table and smiling lightly. "That's one thing I really hate about this place, not being able to communicate with anyone back home. Not to even tell them you're alive."

"I do," he says, not quite looking at Lucy as he says it. It's still so damn weird sometimes, thinking about the world he's found himself in again, the things he never imagined he would be doing, not since Sara died. He hadn't wanted it. There hadn't been any real relationships since Diana left him because he didn't want them, because they just fell apart and people got hurt or they died and it was his fault. Somehow it came back to that.

But he hadn't had a choice with Eleven. He couldn't just leave her out there to fend for herself, not with the lab trying to find her, not with the things he knew they would do to her. He'd needed to keep her safe and now he misses her.

"Do you have a family?" he asks. "Kids?" Easier to deflect in that way a little, maybe find some way to commiserate instead of making it all about him.

"Oh no. No no no no," Lucy says with a laugh. She tries to imagine herself with kids, with people that she's in charge of and shakes her head, laughing again. "No, no children. I have a sister but my family is relatively small. My mother has lung cancer so in between teaching, I spend time taking care of her."

Lucy doesn't mention that her mother's not sick anymore but it's not because of cancer treatments. It's because time is wrong, off. Amy is gone, her mother's okay and she has no idea what to do to fix everything.

"I suppose I count my students as temporary children," Lucy remarks idly. "They're my kids for a few hours a day and then I send them home and I'm happier for it."

There's something about the way she so adamantly refuses the idea of having kids that makes Hopper grin. At one point in his life, he knows he'd been like that, too, he knows if any of the friends he'd made during the war had asked if he wanted children, he would have answered almost exactly like that. No. No no no. And he would have meant it, too, would have meant it with all his heart.

But everything had changed when he'd met Diane, even if he didn't actually know it until she was pregnant. There had been so much fear associated with that news, but at the same time he'd felt something change inside of him. He'd loved Sara long before she was ever born.

"I'm sorry about your mother," he says. "That's a lot of work, taking care of someone who's sick."

"I had help. Amy, my sister, we worked together to make sure she was as comfortable as she could," Lucy says, heart twisting once again. It was amazing to have her mother back on her feet, healthy and whole, but at the cost of her sister? At the cost of someone she loved so dearly, who had kept her sane and together, when all she'd wanted to do was fall apart?

It was her fault that Amy was gone in the first place and not being able to get her back is killing her. But, the guilt she feels at wanting that, at wanting her mother to go back to being sick is festering as well.

"I don't want to say you get used to anything like that because it sounds...cruel," Lucy says, frowning, "but it's true. We worked out a system and we still were able to live individual lives. I would make the same choice again if I had to."

It comes up all at once, everything about Sara, everything he and Diane had to do, the way they had done something similar, the way they'd worked out schedules to make sure someone was always at the hospital with their daughter. People in Hawkins knew, not because he'd told all of them, but because he'd told one or two and Hawkins was a small town and people liked to talk. It's still not something he talks about very often. He'd barely even told Eleven about Sara and he knows that's a mistake, but it's one he can't rectify right now.

He shouldn't say it now either, but for the first time in his life, he's sitting down with someone who's saying things he's been through, things he understands deeply. The sorts of things people only understand when they've been through the same thing.

"Jane," he says, looking down at the table top, at his coffee, at the blue braided hairband around his wrist. "She's adopted. I was never with her mother, but I used to be married. We had a daughter, too, her name was Sara. When she... I mean, I know what you're saying. We worked out schedules to make sure someone was always with her when she was in the hospital and it became almost... normal. For awhile."

There's instant sympathy, instant softening in her face, in her posture. It's not pity because she doesn't want anyone aiming that at her so she makes it a point not to direct it anyone else. It's compassion and empathy, the knowledge that only people with a sick family member understand. It doesn't matter the sickness, it only matters that when something like that happens to someone you're close with, you do whatever yo have to do to make it work, to make them your priority.

"You do what you have to do and you make it work," Lucy says, nodding. "It's never easy but it becomes normal, like you said. You put your own feelings into a box and just focus on what needs to be done. If they need to be cleaned up today, if they need another pillow because they look uncomfortable, if the light's too much, if the temperature's right. Small things that you and I would take for granted for ourselves but not for them."

That's exactly what it is. Everything went into a box until Sara died and it stayed there and it let him care for her in all the hardest moments, even if he knew he couldn't carry the burden for her. Hopper knows he's not always the best man, wasn't the best husband, wasn't even the best father a lot of the time, but when she had been sick, she'd been his priority. The only thing he cared about.

Maybe that's why he'd lost Diane, too.

Nodding, Hopper smiles faintly, a twisted expression, and says, "And sometimes things stay in the box even after everything's done." He'd cried for Sara, held himself, curled into a ball and cried, but even after the grief had run dry, he had hurt. And so he had medicated himself with pills and with alcohol.

"I haven't had to...face that yet when it comes to my mother." And she's been refusing to face it when it comes to Amy. She can get Amy back. She doesn't know how she's going to be able to fix time but she will make it her priority for the rest of her life. Flynn Garcia and Rittenhouse are dangerous but they are not Amy.

She needs Amy back for her own sanity.

"But, I've prepared for it," she adds after some thought. "And you're right. Sometimes the only way to...keep going is to put things like that in a box never to open them save for every once in awhile. Grief is debilitating. If you don't want it to sink you, you do what you have to do."

Hopper still isn't sure if what he did would be considered sinking into his grief or avoiding it. In a lot of ways, he thinks he was trying to do both, trying to numb himself to what he couldn't stop feeling and to pretend it didn't exist, but he's here now and he's mostly sober, though the temptation to hunt down pills gets stronger with each passing day.

That's not something he's willing to get into with Lucy, though. Everything he's told her already is more than he would have told most people and he's only said this much because he knows she can understand at least part of what he went through.

"You do what you have to do," he agrees with a nod, then give another faint smile. "And how's that for personal story time with near strangers?" Even people he'd known all his life had barely known anything about Sara and it's true he hadn't given Lucy a lot of details, but for awhile he'd outright lied about Sara's death, unable to face it. He had told people she lived with her mother, somewhere out of state, and he knows just how messed up that is.

Lucy snickers, ducking her head and shaking her head. She hadn't meant to share so much with someone she doesn't know but when you meet someone that can relate to a situation that you don't want anyone to know so well, it makes you a little more open because you want that connection.

"Well, I'll just take that as our very honest and brutal introduction to one another," she decides with a nod. "We've gotten the difficult stuff out of the way and now we can wander back to talking about the weather or something else superficial."

She reaches for her coffee, takes a sip. "Do you think you're going to join Darrow's police department?"

That's a loaded question, one he still doesn't have an answer to and Hopper exhales slowly, looking down at his coffee before he shakes his head.

"I don't know," he says. "The longer I'm here, the more I feel like I really am stuck, but getting a new job feels like the final nail in the coffin for me. If I do that, then I'm really doing it all. I'm here instead of home."

Then he smiles a little and looks at Lucy and admits, "I was Chief back home. It's a lot less difficult to rise up the ranks in a small town and I don't think they'll let me take over here. I was a beat cop in New York in the seventies, I'm not sure I want to go back to that."

"I thought the same thing," Lucy says with an understanding nod, "but I also found that without something to do, I had a lot of time to think. To overthink. To be bored. To wonder what I was missing so it might be a good distraction if nothing else and a paycheck can't be at all bad."

Money's never been one of those things that she's needed or wanted but it's nice to be able to buy what she needs. It still feels wrong that she's not using it on her mother, on her care but she's trying to be better about feeling less guilty. It's not easy.

"Maybe there's private security?" Lucy suggests, shrugging. "I have no idea because it's not my field but I'm sure there's gotta be something like that. Something where you don't have to work something you don't want to work."

"That's... that's something to think about," Hopper agrees, surprised by the suggestion. It's not something he would have come up with one his own, instead too focused on the idea of going back to what he used to be, which he's not. Maybe he can't. Maybe being a small town cop was what he was in Hawkins, but in Darrow it's got to be something different.

In Darrow, for one, he's without. Without Eleven, without Joyce, without the freedom to do whatever the hell he wanted when it came to police work.

"You're probably right," he adds. "Too much time to think ends in too many beers in my case."

"And too many beers is going to lead to you ending up in strange beds or, even worse, strange bushes. Not that I've ever done that or anything but I have imbibed a little too much wine and woken up in some uncomfortable positions on my couch."

Amy had typically taken care of her on those nights, putting a blanket over her or turning off the television. It wasn't a constant, regular things but some nights were harder than others.

"What would you like to do if it's not doing something in the law enforcement field?" Lucy asks. "Maybe you could try something new?"

Hopper has ended up worse places than a strange bed or two, especially since they're usually not that strange in Hawkins, where everyone around his age is someone he'd grown up with. Honestly, most of the time, he'd almost rather it be a stranger. Then he doesn't end up walking into the library trying to work a case and getting shit from the librarian for not calling.

"Hell, I don't know," he says honestly. "I graduated high school, fought in Vietnam, came home and was a cop. There wasn't a lot of time in there for figuring out what else I might be good at." He's not saying it for sympathy, he think that's pretty much how most people live their lives, even if they don't end up in a war.

"Would you do something else if you weren't teaching?"

"Author, maybe," Lucy says because she'd loved writing her one book even if it hadn't been widely read. She could see herself doing that as a full time job, loading herself down with research, taking notes, and editing something until her fingers were raw and the words started blurring.

"I love to read and sometimes things I would read would either strike me as wrong or not detailed and I'd want to change that. I've written one book but if I could really do it full time and make it work, I would. It's just a pipe dream. With everything else going on, teaching leaves me time to spend with my family, were I home, and to figure this place out. That is almost a full time job right there. There's a lot to take in when it comes to Darrow."

"You had that answer ready so fast I think that's probably what you should be doing," Hopper says honestly, giving a rough laugh. She had asked the same of him and he hadn't had the slightest idea how to respond, but she hadn't even hesitated and he thinks that probably says something.

"This place gives you money, right?" he asks. The way he's worked out the budget, the amount this place gives him is enough to cover his rent and bills and enough food. What he needs a job for is to drink too often and too much, but if Lucy's not worried about that, he thinks she'd be okay in the stipend from the city.

Quit teaching and spend your days trying to work this place out and writing a book," he says with a smile. "Why not, right?"