Chapter Text
Joyce had found, perhaps unsurprisingly, that things in Hawkins seemed to happen, by turns, all at once or not at all.
There had been the rapid corkscrew from summer into autumn, the waking up one morning to find a minor flood of fallen leaves in the street and the sharp burn of campfire in the air, and, before that, the slow-unfolding agony of the past year: a relentless worry and the sense of always looking over-shoulder for the slinking darkness beyond, the trips to the laboratory for tests, the nightmares (both Will’s and her own), the questions spoken into a void of doctors and scientists that never deigned to reply.
And then everything had struck together, in the span of a few days, with hardly a space to breathe between the gut-punches of watching Will succumb to that thing and watching Bob… she couldn’t bear to think the word, even now, couldn’t bear to feel it when she had Will and Jonathan and the others to train her attention on, to put her hands on each in turn and make sure everyone was safe as the world began to settle — much changed though it was — around them again.
Her house had become the meeting place, the headquarters of their ragtag resistance party, somehow, and so they all returned there once the Gate had been closed, drifting in from whatever scattered corners of the town they had been thrown to in a strange daze of weariness and exhilaration.
El had stepped immediately into the circle of her arms, and Joyce had murmured soothing things into the girl’s shoulder (all the thanks she could not put into words) as she exchanged a nod of recognition, of relief, with Hopper, stroking El’s hair and wiping away the line of blood beneath her nose when the girl finally pulled free.
The others stumbled in sometime later, considerably grimy (and considerably bloodied in Steve’s case, though he stubbornly waved off her attempts to tend to him) and breaking the calm with their boisterous voices and pats on the back. Hopper raised an eyebrow at them, at their defiance of his rules, but it wasn’t a night for yelling, for discipline, when they had all made it through the fire, when they were so vibrantly alive and carrying with them palpable energy and beautifully impossible — to any who hadn’t lived it — tales of war.
Joyce watched as Will and El were drawn back into the band of their friends, fitting into the places left open for them seamlessly, with easy acceptance, and she smiled tiredly at Hopper as he sidled over to her, hands sunk deep in the pockets of his coat.
“You had time to raid my closet while you were out there, huh?” he asked softly, eyes crinkling with amusement, and it was so far from anything she had expected him to say in that moment, when she still felt as though she were standing, weak-kneed, on some great boundary between reality and delirium, that all she could do was laugh.
Until she glanced down and saw the familiar blue plaid of Hopper’s favorite button-down with her own hands poking out of the sleeves, the hem of the shirt brushing low against her thighs whenever she moved.
Oh. Right.
She remembered shucking off her own coat and sweater in the unbearable heat of the cabin, and in the rush of their departure (in her overwhelming relief at studying Will’s face and once more seeing her boy — only her boy — looking back at her) she had clearly grabbed for whatever covering was most convenient rather than for what was hers, had thrown it around herself without a thought as they ventured back into the night.
“Sorry,” she said, warm with a clumsy sort of embarrassment. She reached to shrug the shirt from her shoulders. “I must have picked it up when we were leaving. My stuff is probably still on your floor somewhere.”
Hopper’s hands settled over hers where she struggled with the fabric, and his voice was gentle, insistent, as he urged, “No, no, that’s not what I meant, Joyce. Keep it.”
It was rare to hear him call her by name, particularly without the edge of irritation or panic they tended to use with each other (without malice, always, but the events that brought them together had little patience for that kind of intimacy), and the unexpected softness of his touch, of the way he half-held her, stilled her wholly. Hopper leveraged her hesitation against her and straightened his shirt over her frame anew, blanketing her in his twofold warmth.
“It, uh…” he started, then faltered, biting at his lower lip in a gesture that reminded Joyce of who they had once been, how young she sometimes felt when Hop passed her cigarettes and gave her that quietly conspiratorial smile, though the years had worked to harden them both. Thinking better of whatever he had meant to say, Hopper nudged his head toward the hundreds of drawings papering the walls around them. “It goes with the decoration.”
The intensity of the blues surrounding them, a fine maze of crayon and thread (and Hopper’s eyes, though she had never known it before) that pressed them near, really were strikingly similar, like sky and sea and shadow all overlaying each other. “It does, doesn’t it?”
Hopper had never quite released his hold on her, now moving to loose the strands of hair that had gotten trapped under the collar of his shirt during their negotiation and stopping, abruptly, with his fingers still resting lightly along the bend of her throat as if he had discovered something he couldn’t comprehend.
Joyce felt again the pressure, the immense strength of Will (not Will, but the monster that had taken up residence inside him) snaking up to strangle her, the colors leeching out of her vision as she fought for breath, but she hadn’t thought it enough to leave physical marks when the ache had dissipated, like the shadow vomited out of Will’s body, almost immediately upon release.
Hopper was still frowning down at her, a thin line of worry scrunching his forehead as though he feared he had hurt her himself. He didn’t press her, though, beyond asking “You all right?” in a way that managed to sound gruff and tender in one, and Joyce was grateful for it, for the distance they both kept from prying too deeply into each other’s wounds when they hadn’t yet had time to heal.
“I’m fine,” she said, and she meant it, as much as she could mean anything right now. She eased away from his touch, catching his arm before they separated completely and giving it a brief, reassuring squeeze. “It’s over, anyway.”
“Yeah, it’s over.” Hopper sighed, rubbing a hand over his face, and she knew that a shared uncertainty — an insidious for now, because it was entirely too simple to believe that the Gate was enough, that their sacrifices were enough to hold back the things crawling through Hawkins’ very nervous system forever — lay open between them, as it always had.
“I should get the rest of these kids home before… hell, I don’t know what day it is anymore, let alone what time,” Hopper groaned, though he remained planted solidly beside her, appearing reluctant to actually make much of a move.
“Go,” she said, not unkindly, and nudged him toward the others, whose conversations had also begun to stall, peppered with dramatic yawns. “I think we’re all about to crash, and there are so many better places to do that than on this floor.”
Hopper nodded, finally cracking a hint of a smile. “Okay, well… call me if you need anything. And I mean anything.”
Joyce looked to El, so changed, in some ways, from when she had seen the girl last, and cocked her head up at Hop knowingly. “You too.”
She had to help him wrangle the kids — like herding damn cats, he muttered to her at least twice, and she couldn’t argue with that — who, despite their exhaustion, seemed determined to extend their various adventures into a sleepover, more than willing to pile on her uncomfortable floor if they could stay together a bit longer. Eventually, Hopper charged Steve with ensuring that Dustin, Lucas, and a red-headed girl whom Joyce had never properly met got home safely, and he ushered the rest out of the door himself, calling a soft ’night over his shoulder as the latch clicked shut.
And, left in the sudden quiet, they did almost drop where they stood, Will and Jonathan and Joyce herself falling into the nearest available beds as the restless chaos they had been living for too long to number into days caught up with them. They ended up collapsed in the same bedroom, loosely connected through a sprawl of limbs as if they all needed to make certain of the others, needed the assurance of physical contact to find rest.
Joyce half-curled around Will, drawing the warm flannel of her shirt — Hopper’s shirt, her brain protested, and she wondered idly how it had taken her so long to notice that fact when the fabric smelled so like him, all coffee and wood and tobacco, and a layer of cabin dust, too — over them both.
She would put the shirt in with their laundry tomorrow, return it to Hop and collect her own discarded clothes from him with another sheepish apology, but for now it felt something like shelter, a softness that she desperately needed, and so she pulled the flannel (that steady blue, like she was still being held by the gentle waters of his eyes) to her heart and breathed in its richness and didn’t dream, blessedly, of anything dark at all.