something_incredible | Entries tagged with bev

Hopper has tried counting the days. He's tried not counting the days. Neither one seems to give him more peace than the other, so mostly he's started to just focus on getting through a day. Each one at a time, which he's pretty sure is something they've said in the meetings he's still going to, even though he finds himself not listening half the time.

He feels like shit about that. These meetings are meant to help people, help him, but he still hasn't managed to say anything about himself beyond his introduction at the third or fourth meeting he had attended. He kind of feels like shit about that, too. Turns out getting sober leaves a lot of room for feeling like seven kinds of shit and Hopper understands more and more with each passing day why people slip.

He hasn't, though. He's trying really goddamn hard not to and the reason for that is sitting across from him in the living room, flipping through the channels on the TV without settling on anything in particular.

Right now he owes her more than just not fucking it up and so he crosses over to where she's sitting, his glass of soda in hand, and once he's set that on the coffee table, flops down beside her.

"Hey," he says, giving her a nudge with his elbow.

For two days now, he's been chain-smoking Beverly's cigarettes.

He hadn't meant to go through her stuff, but she hadn't woken up that first morning and after the paramedics had come to check her out, then told Hopper this shit was completely normal, he'd found himself digging through her bag on the hunt for her phone. At the time, he'd wanted to call her friends, he'd wanted them to know, but then he'd found her cigarettes instead and rather than being angry, he'd set to work methodically smoking them one by one.

A nurse had stopped by on the first evening to check Beverly's vitals, to make sure she wasn't dehydrated and she, too, had insisted everything was just fine. She'd given him a short lecture about smoking around Beverly and when he had tersely answered they were his daughter's cigarettes, the nurse had sniffed in annoyance and left abruptly.

The nurse who had come in the next morning had been nicer. Prettier, too. Hopper has plans to see her next weekend.

None of that is important right now, though. If Beverly doesn't wake up by next weekend, he sure as hell won't be going out on any dates. He'll be planted right here, same spot he's been for the past two days, smoking and drinking coffee and forgetting to eat. There's two days worth of stubble on his cheeks and dark circles under his eyes and every time he looks at Beverly lying there with an IV drip in her arm to keep her hydrated, he experiences the same gut clenching fear he had when Sara had finally slipped into unconsciousness.

This can't happen again. It can't happen again.

It's true Hopper has been drinking tonight, but he's not drunk. That's something he's been doing his best to keep from Beverly, getting drunk only when he's away from their apartment and only when someone else is going to be there with her, one of her friends or Steve, and he never takes any of the pills when he's going to have to look after her in any way. He's being responsible.

A responsible alcoholic, he's well aware of it, but responsible all the same.

So he's had a beer or two tonight, but nothing that's going to end with him face down on the couch, no matter how badly he might want to. Something's been going on with her anyway and that's the sort of shit he has to focus on right now instead of his own issues.

For as long as she's been living here, she's had nightmares. Hopper's aware of that and he figures, given the shit with her father, that makes sense. He's never known what to do with it, though. It's not like it happens every night as far as he knows, just some of the time, and it's not like she's the only person in the world who has nightmares now and then. Sometimes he dreams about Sara dying all over again, has nightmares about her teeth falling out along with her hair, but he doesn't talk about them and he figures Beverly doesn't want to either. If she did, she would.

But they seem worse lately. He's been waking up more often to find her already awake or he's heard her moving around in the middle of the night. He still doesn't know what to do about it, though, if there's something he should be saying to her, so he's going with the only thing he does know.

Offering her whatever the hell she wants.

"Hey," he says when she gets in from school. It's Friday, they've got the whole weekend ahead of them. "What d'you wanna do tonight? Anything."

Count this as one more thing he hasn't done in a long damn time.

The last time Hopper bought a Christmas tree, it had barely fit up the stairs of their apartment building in New York and now there are so many damn options he's not actually sure where he and Beverly are going to start. They've got a vague plan. Get a Christmas tree. Get decorations. Set up the Christmas tree.

But that doesn't even scratch the surface. In a place like this, the options are nearly endless. They can go down to the end of the block where a guy is selling nice looking real trees out of a small lot, which is what Hopper is used to, but then those die and shed needles everywhere and he's going to be shit about remembering to put water in the little reservoir at the bottom. So he's thinking about a fake tree, just going to the mall with Beverly and getting one that comes in a box, the lights already attached and ready to go. But that doesn't smell real, no matter what kind of scents they might offer in a spray bottle he can buy for just an extra ten bucks.

"Hey, kid," he calls, tapping a pen against one of the fliers he got in their mailbox for the store at the mall selling fake trees. "Fake or real?"

The rest they can decide when they're actually face to face with the decorations, but that's a question they need to answer up front.

Carnivals. Autumn carnivals, those are a thing he remembers from his youth, from his years with Sara, the sort of thing most kids like being taken to, and so without giving it a lot of thought, Hopper takes a Saturday off work, checks with Lucy to make sure she's free, too, then plans a whole day of it.

It's only once all the planning is done and the tickets are bought -- wristbands for all of them, so they can go on unlimited rides and play unlimited games -- that he realizes this is the sort of thing Beverly might want to do with her friends instead of a couple of adults. Looking down at the wristbands, he frowns at them, trying to figure out what to do, then shrugs. If she wants to go with her friends, he'll give her the wristbands to give to Eddie and Peter or something.

But when he floats the idea by her, she doesn't even ask to go with her friends and her boyfriend instead, there's not even a flicker of something that suggests she doesn't think it's a good idea. Hopper feels pretty damn good about that.

The weather the day of is nice. Still warm, warmer than it likely would've been in New York, and he arranges for Lucy to meet them at their apartment as he gets their stuff together. He's got some cash to buy dinner or any snacks they might want, plus a beer for himself a little later and wine for Lucy if she wants it, and he's holding Beverly's jacket by the door, waiting for her to finish getting ready.

This is the most normal thing he's done in a long damn time and he's really looking forward to it.

Jim Hopper is not an easy man to rattle.

He's seen shit. He was in Vietnam, he'd been a cop in New York, he lost his daughter, his family, he'd fought a damn monster and an evil lab while trying to save a bunch of kids, and that's all before being flung into this weird city he can't leave and where technology and time have both jumped forward thirty years. All of that, he thinks, is the sort of stuff that prepares a person to deal well with more weird stuff when it's flung their way.

But somehow he wasn't prepared for this.

He's sitting on the front stoop of the Bramford Building and he thinks he has plans to meet someone, but he feels like he's a million miles away. When getting his mail out of the box not ten minutes earlier, he'd shuffled through it all, most of it fliers for useless nonsense he's never going to buy and one envelope addressed to Former Resident. He was puzzling over that when he'd realized the next envelope was addressed directly to him.

It's official looking. Like it's come from the government. Or maybe some kind of lab.

He tears into it hurriedly and when the doctored birth certificate slips out, Hopper stares at the names for a long moment before he finds himself sinking down to the stairs. This was the plan all along. This was what he was going to ask Owens to provide him if he and Eleven made it out of that pit alive. A birth certificate that made him Eleven's father, something that couldn't be challenged, something no one would ever question. A way to give her a real life. A real family.

There's her name. Jane Hopper. His last name, his full name listed as her father. Theresa Ives listed as her mother.

He doesn't know what to think. His hand is shaking a little and Hopper pulls the birth certificate close, holding it against his chest with his eyes closed.

Ten days. He's been in this city for ten days and no route he's tried to take out of here has gotten him anywhere.

Anyone who's been here longer than a week had told him as much, but he figures he can't be blamed for not just blindly accepting there's no going home and at least giving it a shot. Nothing he does gets him anywhere, though, nowhere but here. It's strange, but he can deal with strange, somehow strange has become familiar in the past year and a half. It's not the strange that bothers him. It's not even that his apartment building is haunted that bothers him. (He's seen her only once, but he'd seen her. Clear as day.)

It's being without the rest of them.

Having Steve here is a comfort. It's another bit of familiarity, but the face he really wants to see is Eleven's. Or Joyce. At this point, he'd even be happy to hear Dustin talking about dragons or letting Mike punch him a few more times for having kept Eleven away from him. Anything if it meant a bit of home. The only piece of home he has now is the blue hairband around his wrist and even that isn't the home he'd left in Hawkins.

It's the middle of Tuesday, almost February now, and he's out in the bright, clear sun. The apartment is too empty, he doesn't know what to do with it or with himself when he's inside, so he goes out and he walks. Too many times already he's stumbled back to the apartment drunk, but he still looks at the clock on his phone -- that's about the only thing he uses it for -- and tries to decide if it's too early for a drink. Just after one. Too early.

So instead of a bar, he heads for one of the streets lined with shops and small cafes. Maybe if he gets himself a coffee he can convince himself to stay sober for just a little while longer.

Turning toward one of the coffee shops he actually likes, one that feels comfortable and simple instead of something daunting where he has too many options for something as easy as coffee, he spots a familiar head of red hair. Lengthening his strides, he catches up to Bev in just a few moments and he asks, keeping his voice casual, "Aren't you supposed to be in school right about now?"