something_incredible | (no subject)

It's Thursday evening, the weather is fine, and Hopper is just the right side of drunk. More often than not these days, he's been on the wrong side of drunk, and he's doing a good job of keeping it from Beverly, but he doesn't want to push his luck. She deserves a hell of a lot better than some useless drunk for a father figure and he wants to be better than that, too, but right now he's having a rough time.

It's shitty of him, but he blames Lucy. Blames her for disappearing, because it's a hell of a lot easier on him than shouldering the blame himself, which he knows is what he should do. But Hopper knows he should have done a lot of things in his life and one thing he's always been pretty good at is making a mess of things even when he knows he should be trying to get shit cleaned up instead.

Rather than figure out some way to just deal with all this, he's out again. Beverly's got some of her friends over and he's been checking on, but she's a good kid and he trusts her, even with boys at their place. Mostly because all her male friends seem to be into each other or little weirdos and he doesn't think they're going to be a problem. But because they've got music and the TV going and they're all loud because they're damn teenagers, he'd decided to slip out for a drink.

One drink had turned into a couple and now he's feeling good, sitting at the bar in just his type of place. The music is what everyone in this place calls 80s rock, which makes him feel old and out of touch, because for him it's all modern. But it's good and it isn't too loud, the booze is decent, and there's a couple of pool tables near the back where he thinks he might go play in another drink or two.

When a woman sits down next to him, he smiles at her, because she's pretty and he's not attached anymore and why the hell shouldn't he.

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"Fair enough. Number, no selfie," she agreed. When he asked if she was doing it out of pity, she shook her head.

"I don't do pity numbers. Either I want to give it, and then I do, or I don't, and then if you try to get it, we have a problem."

Men who tried to put hands in places they shouldn't or assume things they had no right to only did it once, if she was the one they did it to. And she didn't even really use violence, most of the time, or at least not beyond what any woman who'd taken a self defense class would.

Hopper's not a great guy. He knows he's not a great guy. He drinks too much and he's got a temper and he's impatient and demanding. There are a lot of reasons Diane left him in the end and as much as it had hurt him at the time, and still hurts on the right days, he gets it.

One thing he can say for himself, though, is that he's never tried to force a woman into anything. His father would have kicked his ass.

"Yeah, I sure as hell wouldn't be doin' that," he says. "And not just because I think you could make me regret it."

Alcohol meant people said things they didn't intend to say, but she thought he probably would have said the same thing in the same way even before however many he'd had tonight. It made her chuckle, which might not be the normal reaction to that kind of statement, but she wasn't entirely normal.

Jim might find out more about that at some point, if only because she had some interesting scars in various places.

"See? No problem then. Here, give me your phone and I'll put my number into it."

Shifting on his seat, Hopper digs his phone out of his pocket and then starts to hand it to Nikita. He thinks better after a second, realizing he has to unlock it first, which he does, then offers it to her again.

"Don't comment on the small, sad list of contacts," he says with a grin. "Most of them are kids, which makes it even worse."

He has Beverly in there and all of Beverly's friends, wanting to know where she is and wanting to be able to get in touch with her no matter what. His own contacts are pretty limited, even after all this time here.

She smiled when he handed her the phone, realized he needed to unlock it, and handed it to her again. Booze wasn't good for thinking all that well, but at least he'd figured it out before she had to say something. She wasn't Birkoff.

"You're a parent. If you didn't have your kid and her friends in there it'd be weird," she shrugged as she entered her name in under N. She never used a last name here if she could avoid it, and the city was surprisingly accommodating to that.

The number was of the cell phone she gave everyone. She had a second one that couldn't be traced back to her, but she didn't really use it anymore. She just had it in case she needed to disappear for a bit, though. That was always a possibility, considering the life she'd led and the things she'd done.

"There." She handed the phone back. "Call, text, don't call, don't text. It's up to you."