something_incredible | (no subject)

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lucy

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The morning after his bender, Hopper had woken up on Lucy's couch pretty damn embarrassed, some of his memories blurred to the point where he might consider it a black out, but he remembered two specific things very clearly. Lucy had been a hell of a lot kinder to him than he deserved, and he had decided, in his stoned and drunken state, that asking her on a second date at that moment had been appropriate.

But for some reason she had agreed to go with him.

Since then, it's been a lot easier to keep himself from drinking. That's down to Beverly, though, and he knows maybe it's not real recovery if he's not drinking because of a kid he's sort of looking after, but it's better than nothing. Those pills he'd bought, he'd held onto them for a few days, but after the first night Beverly had needed to spend at his place he'd flushed them down the toilet.

What he wants is to get back home. But maybe Darrow has a few things going for it, too, and somehow he's got a kid who trusts him enough to come to him when things get weird at the Home and a woman who actually wants to see him again after she finds him in a pretty goddamn terrible state and he thinks he should probably try not to mess any of this up.

So they're going bowling. It's a little cheesy, but Hopper likes cheesy and he likes Lucy, and when he shows up at her place to pick her up, he's bound and determined to do this properly. He's come up short of getting flowers, figuring a woman like Lucy would probably appreciate something a little more thoughtful than that, so he's going to leave gifts for a little later in whatever this might turn into.

But he does go up to her apartment to pick her up instead of waiting around outside and when he knocks on her door, he finds he's both excited and nervous.

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"I'm pretty sure that I'd end up sick or with the worst heartburn in the world if I even tried to eat even half of these nachos," Lucy says, taking a few of them and popping them into her mouth.

When his shot goes into the gutter, she stifles a giggle but it's quickly extinguished when his second ball knocks down every single pin. It's an impressive way to make up for the first shot. She has to stand up and clap while she's making her way towards the lane.

"I don't think I'll be able to do that," Lucy tells him, reaching up to pat his shoulder as she passes him. "I think you've been holding these bowling skills back."

"Or just riding a rare lucky streak," he says. Rare is the key word. Hopper has never had a great deal of luck and he thinks it probably figures that what little luck he does have will funnel itself straight into something like bowling.

"Thank you, thank you," he says, laughing as he returns to their seats. The last time anyone had applauded for him in regards to sports had been high school, when he'd played football. Even then, he hadn't been anything exceptional. They'd lost as much as they'd won, but football had been a big deal in high school.

"I'm still expecting you to show me up. I'm just trying to set a really high bar."

"You might be waiting a long while," Lucy says, grabbing her ball and swinging it a bit. "If you haven't already guessed, I might have spoken a little too highly of my bowling skills. Just a little."

Just a lot. She's glad to see she's not a terrible bowler but she doesn't think she's going to win unless he throws the game and tosses every single ball into the gutter from here on out. Maybe she'll get lucky, knock a few down but she can't see herself winning.

That's further demonstrated when her next shot consists of knocking four pins down and then two more after her ball nearly gets stuck on her thumb and flies down the alley with a loud thump when it lands.

"Oops," she says, shaking her hand a bit. "That wasn't supposed to happen."

He can't help the laugh at the sight of her ball thumping down on the alley, but when he sees her shaking her hand, he gets up from his seat and sets his beer aside. Going to her, Hopper takes Lucy's hand in his so he can check on her thumb. It's not broken, he doesn't think it's sprained either, but something like that might cause a bit of swelling.

"Need some ice?" he asks with a small smile. "Or do you think you'll make it through the rest of the game? Maybe you just need more nachos and beer."

He hopes she's not really hurt, it'd be too bad to put an early end to their night because of a bowling ball mishap.

"Just give me more nachos and beer," Lucy says with a laugh, giving her fingers a wiggle and shaking her head. "That was a ridiculously dumb thing to do and I blame the bowling ball and not myself."

She definitely hadn't been the reason why the ball had landed so horribly, of course not. Lucy glances up at the score and sighs though there's no actual hurt or depression in it. It's all for show.

"If I lose, I might use this thumb as an excuse, though," she admits with another laugh. "Just as a forewarning."

"I'll give you any excuse you want if it turns out you need one," Hopper says, giving her hand one last stroke with his thumb before he lets her go. "Who knows where things go from here."

Then he nods back toward their seats and their food and drinks. "Let's take a break. Have our drinks."

He's here to spend time with her, after all, for all he enjoys bowling. At this rate, he thinks he could do just about anything with her just as long as they were both there. It's a funny kind of thought. He hasn't cared about dating in so long.

"All right," Lucy says, smiling down at her hand, her thumb before taking a seat and sighing. She tries, for a second, to remember her last date. It had to have been months ago, maybe a year since someone had last asked her out and she'd agreed. It hadn't been a bad time either but she'd been busy and he hadn't been interesting.

Tonight is not like that. Tonight is better. He's better.

"I appreciate you letting me gather my strength and energy so I can try and finish out the game strong," she says, picking up her drink. "But, this is good too. I like just sitting here and talking too."

"I'll try to be a good conversationalist," he says, only half-joking. "Years of living alone sort of killed those skills and Jane wasn't much of one for talking either. She barely said a few words at a time when I first met her."

But Eleven hadn't been like any other kid he's ever met. Hopper doesn't want to say it was trauma, but he knows she had to have been changed by the way she was treated in the lab. The fact that she was kept away from most other people. Other children.

"We lived in this cabin," he says. "She was great about learning, but she never did talk much."

"A cabin?" Lucy repeats, tilting her head thoughtfully. "Was the cabin out in the woods? Or out in the country? That's where movies typically made it seem like cabins were. I don't know if I could survive out there."

While Lucy's not really one who needs to be around tons of people, she does like being near technology. She likes being near books. She likes being near her family and sequestering herself so far away seems like both a great thing if she wants to write but a nuisance if she needs to commute at all.

"What were you teaching her?" Lucy asks curiously. "Reading, writing and arithmetic?"

"Hawkins was pretty small to begin with," he says. "But yeah, it was outside of town. Out in the woods. And she wasn't... ready, I guess, for public school."

That's a lie he hates. Eleven would have killed to get to go to school with Mike and the others. Hopper is the reason she hadn't and he knows she'd blamed him, but he stands by the decision. Sending her out into public would have gotten her killed. The government agents would have found her in a second and they would have taken her without hesitation.

"She loves books. Words. She's a smart kid, so smart, but the way she was treated before, her vocabulary was pretty limited," he says. "She liked learning new words. Their definitions."

"She sounds like someone I would get along with," Lucy says, a smile appearing on her face. "I would have tried to stuff her head with history and forgotten to teach her anything else. She was probably lucky to have you to make sure she was well rounded."

She wants to ask about her previous treatment, get more details because it's hard to think about kids being treated that way. Her father had walked out on her but he'd left her and Amy with a good mother. They'd been okay. This girl of Hopper's hadn't been okay until he came along, it sounds like that.

"I would offer to send you home with some books for her but..." She trails off and frowns. "Who knows when either of us will be allowed to leave?"

Hopper has to laugh at that and with a mouthful of beer, he shakes his head. Eleven hadn't been well rounded because of him. Hell, she hadn't been well rounded at all. He'd been the wrong person to teach her, giving her TV to shut her up when she annoyed him and bribing her with waffles and sweets when she was angry. It had just been so long since he'd been responsible for anyone and he'd never done it on his own, it's like he'd forgotten how.

"No, she needed school," he says. "It just wasn't time."

Then Lucy talks about leaving, about whether or not they'll ever be allowed and his smile fades a little. She's right, they don't know anything, whether they'll be stuck here for years or just a few more months. He tries not to think about it, because he's not sure how the hell else to get through it all.

"And there I go, bringing the mood down," Lucy says with a roll of her eyes and a shake of her head. It's hard not to think about some of the more awful parts of this place. That they can't leave, that the people back home might not even realize they're gone, that they're unable to do anything about any of it.

"Sorry," she says, wincing. "I should probably just keep eating nachos so I don't say anything to ruin conversations. That or just take my mouth shut. Just seems like the safer bet when it comes to talking to me."

"No," he says with another laugh as he shakes his head. "No, it's not you, I was just thinking about what you said. About how we don't know how long we'll end up being here and have no control over that. It's just... you make a choice at some point, I figure. After being here for six months or a year, you end up making a choice and you settle and it makes me wonder if that's when people find themselves being taken away again."

He wants to go back. He wants to see Eleven again more than anything. But at the same time he can see himself making a life here. Bit by bit, it's crept up on him. There's Lucy and he knows this is only their second date, but he likes her, likes being around her. There's Beverly, someone who needs him in ways different than Eleven, but who needs him all the same.

He could find himself a place here. A life.

"Do you think you'll do that? Settle?" Lucy asks. She doesn't know if she's going to be able to fully settle down, accept that this is her life now, an that she needs to leave behind what she's done and face the future. She just doesn't think she can do that when there are so many loose ends, so many things floating in the air that she needs to fix.

"I don't know if I can," she admits, shaking her head and sighing. "This isn't my home. I know people who consider this where they want to be and that's completely fine but I just don't know if I can. Not fully. There would always be a part of me with my foot elsewhere and I don't know if there's anything out there that might change that. I just -- "

She rubs her forehead and brushes her hair back. "I don't know. I'm terrible at living an adult life."

"I don't know," he says. "I haven't been very good at settling since Sara died. Even in Hawkins."

And he'd grown up there. Hawkins is the place that's known him from the time he was born, the faces are familiar, the places are the same ones he'd gone to as a kid, as a teenager. If he could settle anywhere, it should have been there and he'd still felt lost. At odds.

"Nothing has really felt like home since then," he admits, then laughs softly. "Now who's bringing down the mood?"

"Well, I started it," Lucy says with a quiet laugh. "You were just following along, trying to keep up with the conversation. So really, it's still my fault. I'm the morbid, macabre one."

She wiggles her fingers at him and then sighs, shaking her head. Truthfully, she's actually a little glad that he is feeling similar to her. When she meets someone that's so comfortable here, so ready to accept their life and live it out, she feels both envious and confused. Envious that they can do that and confused on how they can just leave it all behind.

"But, it's good to know that I'm not the only one feeling that way," Lucy murmurs, nodding. "Makes me feel...not so strange."

"It seems weird," he agrees. "I mean, good for them, I'm glad they've found something here that they were looking for, but I can't just forget everything that's back there. Not that easily."

And maybe he's making assumptions, maybe it's not easy for anyone. Maybe they've been here for years and have struggled through this same thing they're talking about now, but Hopper just can't see it happening.

"I don't know how they do it," he says. "I just keep thinking about Jane."

"Yeah. I think about my sister. My mother," Lucy says, nodding. "I don't really think I'll be able to stop that anytime soon. Maybe there's a trick to it. Or maybe it's attached to a certain amount of time. Make it a year and you stop thinking heavily about home. Make it two and home just because a fuzzy memory."

Lucy certainly hopes that's not how it works. She doesn't want Amy, her mother, home, Rufus, and Wyatt to just become blurs in her head.

"Let's hope that what I said is a bunch of bull crap," she says with a nervous laugh. "Because if that happens, then I'm going to be upset and blame myself and never speak again. I will be a mute."

It's been five years since Sara died and she's still as sharp as ever. If he closes his eyes and concentrates, he can still hear her laughter, can smell that stupid pink bubble bath she loved so much, can feel her little hand on her cheek when she patted his beard and told him he was too scratchy and so he would shave it off just for her.

"I don't think that'll happen," he says. "So you got nothing to worry about there. I think we'll remember just fine. Maybe people just... get tired of waiting for something else."

"You're probably right. And I know there are some circumstances that make this place a better choice than where they came from."

She knows that some people have died, are dying, or will die if they stayed where they are. Getting to have more time, more life is a definite reason to be want to be here and Lucy absolutely doesn't want to take anything away from people in those situations. She knows they won't think any differently of her either.

"But, if I do end up going back tomorrow or in two years, I'm going to make sure I don't forget you either."

It's unexpected and because it's unexpected it makes Hopper smile suddenly, a rare genuine smile, and he looks down at his beer for a moment. He doesn't know how it works for people who end up leaving Darrow. He doesn't know what they remember, if this place comes with them, if they can take part of it home.

No one knows the rules of how it works. He hates that, but he can't do a hell of a lot about it.

"That's a nice thought," he says when he looks up again. "I sure as hell won't forget you either."

Lucy smiles at him, silent for a few moments before she dissolves into quiet laughter. "Look at that, we've somehow managed to turn the conversation around from the morbid to something pretty nice. At least, I think it's pretty nice."

They weren't talking about leaving, they weren't talking about death so they'd definitely recovered from the previous conversations about loss and homesickness and sadness.

"Probably more what a date should be," she quips, snickering. "Bowling and nice conversation."

"I expect you'd know better than I would what makes up a date," he answers with a smile. "Especially a good one. The last few I'd been on before this place..."

Well, they hadn't exactly been good, but that had been his fault and he knows it. There's so little he can give people a lot of the time, so little that he expects of himself or allows anyone else to ask of him. None of what he's done has been fair and he wants to be different, wants to be able to do something better for Lucy, but it's slow going. Figuring it all out takes time.

"It's probably my fault they weren't good," he says. "So you'll just have to tell me when I'm doing the wrong thing."

"I can't even begin to tell you the last time I went out on a date," Lucy remarks, shaking her head. "It's been a long, long time. I haven't even been on bad dates. I just haven't been anywhere period so I don't really know if I'm any kind of expert, honestly."

Sometimes, Lucy wonders what her dates with Noah had been like. They had to have been pretty decent considering they'd gotten engaged. But, she still has no memory. She still can't remember a damn thing about their relationship.

"So, I'm no expert. Neither are you, we can agree on that," Lucy decides. "But, so far, I don't think you're doing anything wrong. I'm having fun."