Chapter Text
The night of the Snow Ball was crisp and clear and meant only for the young, pulsing as it was with songs Hopper didn’t even half-recognize, and so he willingly accepted his banishment from the gymnasium after watching El mount the steps alone, a nod and an unspoken go get ’em, kid passing between them in the brief moment she had looked back for reassurance.
God, to be that young again, that bittersweet age when everything in the world seemed to hinge on being invited to the school formal.
He was not so old as to have forgotten what it felt like, that shivery-sick rush of asking a pretty girl to dance and knowing the soft touch of her hands over his shoulders, of being almost-caught kissing under the bleachers and rearing apart, breathless and heated, into the safety of the dark. But still, the advance of years had drawn a veil between then and now, and Hopper did not regret it, this mantle of adulthood and responsibility he had to wear, until nights like this one sent nostalgia bleeding in, however stupidly, around the edges of his life — then, yeah, he missed the days he had survived on something other than coffee and quiet fury and the terror of loss.
Goddamn lucky kids, he thought, perhaps unfairly (knowing what he knew), and shook his head as he rounded the building.
Most parents, and the few older siblings tasked with chauffeur duty, had simply dropped their kids off and retreated until they were summoned again, but he saw Joyce leaning against her car, something of their old teenage delinquency still apparent in her pose, and thought it only natural, laughably predictable, that they would be the two standing guard, such as it was, against any dramatics that might break out in a room brimming with adolescent hormones — and against worse things, the big end-of-the-world things that haunted them both for all they pretended to have moved on.
“Thought I might find you out here.”
It spoke to just how far they had already fallen into each other’s gravitational pull that he was no longer surprised when his feet unerringly guided him to Joyce’s side without his ever consciously seeking her out. They seemed to just… collide these days, fumbling together in the in-betweens, in the weirdly-liminal spaces of hospitals and underground laboratories and parking lots that always seemed half-steeped in nightmare, as they tried to slip back into the routines they had had before Hawkins had exposed its terrifying insides to them, leaving scars that were slow to heal.
Joyce was hugging herself against the chill in the air despite her ridiculously oversized coat (he called it ‘ridiculous’ with fondness, amused by the way it swallowed her up), but her face quirked, lightened just a fraction, at his voice, and it was enough for him, to pull her out of whatever dark passageways her mind had surely been traveling before he interrupted, if only for a few minutes.
She let him settle next to her against the car, and twisted a smile at his dumb joke, and she was no more surprised to be found by him than he was by the force that insistently drew their paths together as they passed a cigarette back and forth. The familiarity of the ritual, their practiced exchange between warming fingers and breaths, was a strange comfort: it meant something, for all that it was such an ordinary gesture, for all that in-the-grand-scheme it would have been nothing worthy of committing to memory.
And it felt right, this sharing — of the war they had been through twice now, of the small gains they had made, like this companionable vigil in the parking lot, lined up against immeasurable loss — but he knew the danger of needing, of letting the heart build its wants up to the heavens and then, suddenly, watching them catch fire and fall, endlessly, like that story of Icarus they had been taught in fifth grade.
(Except Hopper kept surviving the fall, and he wasn’t sure if that made the continued mess of his existence more of a comedy or a tragedy. It was probably better not to know.)
It felt right — she felt right, all soft angles fitting just-so against his side — but he was not a good man, and he would die before he let Joyce understand that, before she sowed her grief in him too deeply and mistook what he could give her for something else (not love, never that) and the black hole surrounding him burned the light out of her, too.
She had saved him, she had fought for him, when the not-earth had tried to claim him (Hopper remembered: her trembling voice, and her hands testing the reality of his face, and desperation in them both), and what had he done in answer but fail her, but stand by helplessly as others shouldered the burden of their survival?
The man he hadn’t saved — he couldn’t have, he told himself, but reason didn’t stop him from wondering at the truth of it, from seeing Bob reach toward them, still aware, as Hopper forced Joyce to flee to the other side of the glass — had been different. Sure, everyone had thought of Bob as kind of ordinary, a little dorky, but he had proved himself a better and braver human than the rest of them, even before the end.
No, Hopper was not good, not the way Bob had been, and not the way Joyce and her boys deserved, after everything that had happened.
She needed someone stable, and dependable, and without a history of ruining the wondrous things that came his way, and for that he would take these lonely parking-lot moments as the small, painful gifts they were (he needed them, and maybe Joyce did too, and that was enough to suffer the slowness of drowning) and never strain for anything more.
But then he foolishly stumbled into talking of grief, of things getting easier, because he thought she might find a tiny solace in it, and instead it mangled something inside them both, disturbing wounds that were happier laid to rest.
Joyce looked up at him with naked pain, all that she had been bearing alone seeming to break at once, and he recognized that look too well, had seen it in his own mirror an untold number of times (after… well, after ). She folded willingly into his chest, and his lips pressed into her hair, idling longer than necessary in a wordless communication of sympathy, and he cursed himself for having nothing more to offer than this meager physical support.
Her hand rose to overlap his, their fingers intertwining at her touch, even as Hopper turned his head away from her near-silent tears in respect — they were not meant for him — and lifted his eyes to the stars, to all the gods he didn’t believe in, and he found himself asking: to be allowed to give in, just a little, to what he needed, to what they both needed, without the promise of mutual destruction nipping at their heels.
Maybe if we just hold onto each other.
Maybe if I try this time — if I really try.
And still the intensity of everything he felt (her heart beating in perfect counterpoint to his) troubled Hopper, for all that Joyce seemed to be reaching for him with the same sense of compulsion. But, god, he wanted her, and he had spent a lifetime getting used to the mad descent from the heights of his own folly so that he sometimes forgot to fear the aftermath, to heed his own etched-deep warnings.
From all the laws of physics — velocity, and gravity, and a thousand others that Hopper had no hope of naming — he knew the profound truth of one: it wasn’t the fall that killed you.
(Maybe, this time, he could at least find some dearer place to break himself against when the impact found him.)