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They are things they don’t teach you. They don’t teach you how it’s easier to love than to be loved. They don’t teach you how powdery someone else’s feelings are on your tongue, or how painful it is when you can’t taste them anymore. They don’t teach you that cutting your palms together on a first date will ruin you, though most people are smart enough to know. They don’t teach you that sex and milkshakes do not soulmates make, but in a sick twist of Fate blood and guts and anxiety do, all the bad things you never wanted comprising something good. They don’t teach you how salty other people’s tears are, not until you taste them. There’s so much they don’t teach you.
But you learn it anyway,
—
Hopper thinks the whole soulmate thing is stupid. He thinks it’s stupid, but he still thinks Diane is his soulmate.
Right up until his arm blazes with phantom pain as she’s standing right beside him, broad daylight in the middle of the park, smiling and carefree and holding their daughter against her chest.
“You okay?” she asks, as he clutches at his wrist and a hiss escapes his gritted teeth.
With an effort, he straightens out. Something in him knows he has to hide this. “Yeah, no, just got cramp.” He makes a show of flexing his arm and showing relief on his face, even though his nerves are still on fire.
She settles down easy enough. “Ah, painful. Shall we get milkshakes?”
It occurs to him later that she knew they weren’t soulmates all along. She would wince, randomly, and he’d do his utmost to ignore it (and nearly succeed). When she’d felt the first stabbing pains of labor he’d wanted to feel it so hard he almost did, so hard he ruptured a blood vessel in his nose and imagined that the pain of his nosebleed was anything - anything - like the agony of childbirth.
He doesn’t go to a doctor about his wrist, although it doesn’t stop hurting for days and soul-trauma is easily diagnosable. He doesn’t want a diagnosis. His life is fine. His life is great. He’s not gonna go anywhere near ruining his marriage for phantom pains that bring nothing but trouble.
When it all falls apart he doesn’t know what she’s thinking, That’s his next, undeniable clue. He arrives at their house one night after work to find it empty of everything but his own limited belongings, packed up in cardboard boxes and stacked in the hall, and he never saw this coming. She’d packed him lunch that day for work, even gave him a (now) rare smile, and now-
He doesn’t know what she’s thinking. Never did, if he’s honest. When all is said and done and he’s staring out at the lake in Hawkins sipping Schlitz by the gallon it’s Sara he misses, not Diane. He can’t feel Diane at all, not in the way he should, not in the way they talk about in the movies, in the psych textbooks. All he feels is his aching grief and loneliness and shame, a shame that he can’t quite understand, a shame that when he thinks about it, really thinks, isn’t his own.
Having one-time sex with random Hawkins women doesn’t ease the ache, because the shame never goes away. The loneliness eases but the shame- the pain-
Whoever this is, he thinks on one of his more lucid days, she’s a real bundle of joy.
Then he thinks, when he’s at the bottom of a bottle of whiskey and burns to consume more even though he knows he’s got none left and is too drunk to drive, at that awful nearly-there phase where he knows he’ll remember this in the morning with a lot of ache and regret, that her pain can’t be worse than his own. That maybe she wakes up in the morning and she dreads going to work not because of whatever’s gone wrong in her own life - which is clearly a lot - but because she’s feeling his feeling of being stuck at the bottom of a well, no way to go but down, trapped in the dark and the grime with nowhere to go and nothing to lose.
That morning he throws out his whiskey (though he’ll buy more, later on) and gets a prescription for Tuinal because at this point his demons are just too loud, it’s kind of ridiculous. Somewhere out there he’s ruining some poor woman’s life because she has the misfortune to be tethered to him by whatever mythic shit runs the universe, and she doesn’t deserve this. She doesn’t deserve him.
When he gets the job as Chief he doesn’t see a lot of pain. Hawkins is a nice town, a small town, a town where nothing ever happens. He bets its soul-pairs are happy, content, full of rosy-pink synergy on their neatly mowed lawns. This is the town he grew up in and he barely recognises it after New York. He barely recognises himself, all dead and blunt and freely giving out soulless smirks to women who aren’t unhappy, not really, they just think they are. They feel restlessness and they think it’s emptiness, loneliness, like that can fix him. Like Hawkins’ bored single (only ever once not, because he’s wise enough not to fuck with people’s marriages) women can fix him, and he doesn’t like it. He keeps talking to a minimum. But even just fucking, that doesn’t make him feel that much.
He’s a blank canvas, and he supposes he should have expected her emotions to come rushing in. (Whoever she is. She’s forever the vague feminine pronoun in his head. He pictures her, sometimes. The first time the image was tall and willowy blonde, Diane only softer, without that refined edge to her accent. The second time and every time since she isn’t blonde, she’s dark-haired, slightly blurry, wide-eyed and forgiving. Forgiving, he thinks and scoffs. Yeah, that would be his fantasy. Some men fantasise about big tits, but not him. He just wants someone to hold his hand without pitying him.)
There’s a lot of anxiety there. If he wasn’t on the Tuinal it would be serious, he knows that, and he wonders if she’s on medication. If maybe she should be. He tries to convince himself for a while that this concern is selfish: if she hurts, he hurts too. When her heart rate increases, he can feel his own speeding up. But it’s not just that, and that’s the fucking catch 22 of this whole mythic bullshit. Fate’s got a gun to his head, care about her or I’ll shoot, but Fate is grinning because Fate knows he has to care about her anyway.
Then one day - a completely normal day, the first snowfall of the season, Hopper’s been dealing with small-business owners angry that the roads weren’t salted early enough as his biggest problem of the year to date - it’s like the sun comes out. He’s in his office, listening to Donald Melvald making his chastening complaint over the phone, (“I had to close the store because my car went straight through the storefront when I tried to park!”), and then the room is trembling with sunlight and he feels a surge of something rise up in his chest, so strong, overwhelming, even, that he has to hang up on Donald Melvald and just stare into space as he feels something he hasn’t felt since the day Sara started coughing.
Hope.
--
Of course, as much as the shrinks like to say you shouldn’t “repress your soul-connection” (or as they call it in their fancy academic papers that Hopper hasn’t read, animae-iunctae), there are ways of doing so. Cases where people stopped feeling their soulmate entirely, on purpose. After seeing an interview with one such case on shitty late-night cable TV, Hopper immediately sets about pulling the plug.
It’s not that he doesn’t want her. Maybe he does. But right now-
She doesn’t deserve this, doesn’t deserve him. The miasma of pain he still lives in, even now, even working, even on the Tuinal. And if he is gonna be selfish, then she’s not exactly a barrel of laughs either. Being paired with her is no fucking walk in the park. He wakes in a cold sweat for no reason, sometimes, and finds his stomach turning at the prospect of the burger from Benny’s that he’d been drooling over only five minutes before. He paid good money for that burger, goddamnit.
So he gets very, very good at blocking it out.
So it’s only the most extreme of emotions that he feels; really feels, as opposed to just a mild, distant twinge.
So on one regular morning in November the massive spike of panic that cuts through him like a knife isn’t normal, not at all, and maybe he lets it get to him more than it should. Maybe he takes two Tuinal instead of one and sits for a moment in the Blazer outside the station, body thrumming with a tension that he doesn’t understand.
“Joyce Byers can’t find her son,” and he doesn’t really engage with that fact until hour six when he’s standing in her shed and he feels his own rushing, clawing unease, the first real emotion he’s felt himself in a real long fucking time. Then he looks at Joyce properly. Then he thinks about how good her skin tasted in high school, and then he thinks about how tired and small she looks now. He thinks about how the unease in her eyes is a mirror for his own.
“Alright,” he says, as Powell and Callahan go outside to the Blazer, “you might wanna make a missing poster, and we’re gonna organise a search party for as soon as we can.”
“‘As soon as we can’? Hopper, that’s not- he’s out there, somewhere, scared- alone- that search party has to be now.”
Is it him, or is her anxious defiance radiating through the air at him? She had this effect on him in high school, sure, but a lot of the time it went straight to his dick. It’s all emotions, now, the emotions of a parent worried sick about a child that might well be lost already-
When he’s back in his office he takes two more Tuinal and smokes with jittering fingers. He hates cases like this. He hates grieving mothers- hates the fear that’s crawled up his throat for no apparent fucking reason-
Only Joyce isn’t grieving, not just yet.
And maybe she won’t ever be, if he has something to do with it.
--
He doesn’t even consider the possibility until he’s getting burgers for the station at what was once Benny’s and he feels an alien spike of happiness spear him right through the chest, at the very moment he meets Joyce’s eyes over the tables and sees her laugh frozen on her face and directed at Bob ‘The Brain’ fucking Newby.
Happiness wars with jealousy, and the happiness slowly dies as her smile does and he feels nervous instead, nervous and jealous, and he really fucking hates coincidences. He turns away from her without so much as a wave and tries to think about what he was thinking about before: how the hell does he explain soul-trauma to a teenage girl who grew up in a lab? (The attempt at distraction doesn’t work, although his quandary is a real one. He makes the mistake of leading with personal experience and El is quick to jump on it – “Who is your soulmate?” – and the honest answer, I don’t know, doesn’t really satisfy her.)
On July 12th he bumps into Joyce - quite literally - in the doorway of the donut shop, him on his way in, her on her way out with a big white box that makes his mouth water. “Hey,” she says, brightly. She’s growing her hair out and she’s got rosy lipstick on, he notices, and then tries to forget that he notices.
“Hey,” he says, and it comes out more awkward than usual. “You feeling hungry?” He indicates the wide box that smells of dough and warm sugar.
She flushes and looks down at it with a flutter of her eyes, a flutter he’s been growing used to but that still makes his stomach flip. “Oh, no, it’s Jonathan’s birthday. He’s seventeen!”
“Wow,” he says. “Well, don’t let him eat them all at once.”
She grins, even as he begins to do some rapid and reluctant math in his head.
Shit.
--
On the 12th of July, 1967, he was lying in a field hospital screaming into a rag as a surgeon dug bits of shrapnel out of his stomach, because they’d run out of anaesthetic three days ago and he was the schmuck who stood on a Viet Cong landmine only that morning. It hurt, it really fucking hurt, and when his buddy Richards clapped him, half-healed, on the shoulder and told him you were a man about it it was definitely a lie.
It never occurred to him that maybe a few slices of shrapnel don’t send agonising shocks through your hips and your spine until you’re begging, begging whoever’s up there that you’ve never believed in to end it, please!, and that maybe you don’t feel floods of joy and relief that reduce you to tears when the last piece has been extracted, sans anaesthetic.
Until now, that is.
But July races past in a flush of dry heat and his job is reduced to breaking up fights between teenagers drunk on lukewarm beer, teenagers that are like mirrors but are foolish, more foolish than he ever was, because one night half of them have deep cuts in their palms and most of them are crying and all of them are single, now, because I thought he was the one, but he didn’t even flinch when I cut, not even a little bit, and I did it extra deep to make sure-
This whole soulmate thing is more trouble than it’s worth, he thinks. Someone could cut up every spare inch of skin they have left and still never find the one, and then they’re left a scarred husk who can’t feel anything at all.
August is stormy. One night he feels a flare of panic and he’s hovering by the phone before he even thinks about it, before it even rings. And then he picks it up without hesitating, and within just a second he’s rushing out the door with a note already pinned to the fridge and in five minutes he’s at her house, letting her lead him in, letting her grasp at his wrists with barely restrained panic.
“I can’t- I-”
He talks her down, lets her breathe into his flannel. It was the storm, she tells him. She’d woken with the usual nightmare but this time Will wasn’t in his bed for a reassuring glimpse and she knows where he is, he’s at the Wheelers’, his second sleepover since everything, but she just had to check, and she tried the phone, but the storm must have killed the Wheelers’ phones-
He gets the picture. He rubs a hand up and down her arm and absently wonders where Jonathan is. Not here, is the answer.
He makes her tea and watches her drink it, until the shaking in her hands has stilled and she can look him in the face again.
“I’m sorry,” she whispers, and he feels an aching rushing surge of affection, of protectiveness, of desire to see that she’s alright, and he has to tamp it down even as someone else’s anxiety and embarrassment threatens to flood in.
“Don’t be,” he says. Tearily she smiles at him.
When the door has closed behind him he considers the yard and then freezes. Right next to Joyce’s little Pinto is another car, only slightly bigger, a little battered but perfectly clean as he can see, and faintly red. Bob the Brain’s car.
Even as he feels slightly ill at the prospect, he also feels a sick satisfaction that she called him, even as Bob the fucking Brain was here the whole time. She called Hopper to talk her through her panic. Bob couldn’t help. Bob knows shit all about her, about her life. He can take some selfish satisfaction in that at least.
(It does rather tip his plans to sleep in the Blazer in her driveway on their head.)
--
Chicago is a mess, emotions-wise. When she asks him, fingers worrying at her sleeve, eyes cast at the floor, he doesn’t even need to look at these clues. He knows she’s nervous. He knows she hates this, hates asking for help. But he says yes even before she’s finished her sentence because once again-
He’s the one who knows her. He’s the one who drives her all the way there and lets her grip his hand tight as Will enters a room they’re not allowed to go in. Lets her transmit her anxiety through their conjoined fingers until they’re both thrumming with it, tightly wound like violin strings.
That night is a night spent in a motel, a night before which Joyce sweats herself into a fresh panic over the cost of a room and Hopper tells her he’ll pay for it – one, just one. He tells himself he’s being chivalrous. He wants to look after them. (It’s nothing to do with the endorphin rush of relief, with embarrassment and that goddamn shame as a bitter sort of chaser.)
A sofa bed and a double bed, that’s what they’re given. The sofa bed is less bed and more sofa, and Hopper gives it one look and knows he’s in for an uncomfortable night. Then Joyce looks at him, really looks at him, and smiles a little for the first time that day.
“Will’s small enough for the sofa bed. We can- we can take the bed, right?” Will is in the bathroom right now, out of earshot. “It’s not like we haven’t before,” (almost mumbled).
“Uh-” His voice is strangled. “Yeah- uh- yeah. Sure.”
To bed she wears plaid pyjama bottoms and a tank top that exposes more cleavage than he’s seen of her in eighteen years. Now’s the time all that weird shared emotion plunges straight downwards and this is the wrong time, because only half an hour ago she was on the phone to Bob reassuring him that everything was fine, Chicago was fine, (she definitely wasn’t sleeping in the same bed as her ex from high school), and her son is asleep on the sofa bed and she’s fucking gorgeous, for fuck’s sake-
She looks at him a little strangely, a little disbelievingly, in the halflight. “Okay?” she asks, and he swallows.
“Yeah. Lights on or off?”
The bed dips as she moves just slightly, and a dark lock of hair falls in front of her eyes. He has to resist the urge to move it away himself, but she just leaves it there like she’s taunting him, mocking him, come on, big ol’ Jimmy Hopper, you want a girl you gotta fight for her, but that’s not what she’s saying, not at all, because her shoulders have gone all stiff and without a word she flicks the lights off.
Their drive home, after two more unsuccessful appointments, is silent except for the radio. Joyce is riding shotgun, head resting against the window as another late-August thunderstorm pours down around them. Will is pensive in the back. Then the song changes and Hopper turns it up almost despite himself.
Well, no-one told me about her....
“...the way she lied,” Joyce half-mumbles, and meets his eyes with a wry look. He knew she couldn’t resist. The song of their senior year, this was. Too good to resist.
Well, no one told me about her…
“How many people cried.” Hopper’s grinning and so is she, begrudgingly, the smile almost forcing its way onto her lips. His happiness is catching, apparently. He thinks about her warmth the night before, the way he’d found her curled into him, asleep, that morning, and for some goddamn fucking reason he feels even happier.
“But it’s too late to say you’re sorry,” she smiles, sitting up and curving her shoulders to the beat just like she used to when they were young and tipsy and kissing every other word.
“How would I know?”
“Why should I care?”
He taps along on the steering wheel and imagines just driving on. On and on, past the sign for Hawkins, all the way down south until they reached Texas and made new lives as the least redneck rednecks in the state, making out and singing along to The Zombies every morning.
But he doesn’t. At the turning off the interstate he takes it, and feels a flash of disappointment in his chest at the sight of the Welcome to Hawkins sign that isn’t just his.
He’d never leave El, and she’d never leave Jonathan, but it’s easy to get carried away.
--
The months pass. Hawkins Lab is their last resort and one day when Joyce and Will have left Owens takes one look at Hopper and diagnoses him on the spot. “Soul-trauma, right?”
He grunts. “What d’you know about me?” It’s meant to be a rhetorical fuck-you; as it turns out, Owens knows quite a lot. Like how Joyce and Hopper used to have sex and then get milkshakes, which didn’t qualify as dating for some reason even though Hopper had really hoped it would. Like how Hopper is the one Joyce calls when she’s panicking, even if her boyfriend’s in her bed at the time. Like how Hopper’s medical records show soul-trauma alongside landmine-shrapnel and that’s why everyone treated him so delicately, in the end, not because he was a hero but because he was pathetic and lovesick and a father of kids he hadn’t sired. (Like how this happened twice, the second time in March of ‘71 when he got shot undercover because Fate is just that sadistic, apparently, and when cross-referenced his and Joyce’s files light up as bright as Christmas.)
“Chief-” Owens stops, like there’s something he wants to say but can’t quite get the words out. Hopper sincerely doubts this. Government people never fail to do anything they want to do. “Talk to her.”
She has a boyfriend, has Owens forgotten? Bob is very much there, even if it’s a dull, lumpy, irritating presence. He’s there and that’s who Joyce chose. If Joyce was Hopper’s- if he was hers- then she wouldn’t have done this. Would she?
They’re not soulmates. They’re not.
It’s just the universe, Fate, fucking him over as per usual. Handing him these little coincidences like small wins at poker or roulette, telling him go on, bet a little more, you can do it, but he can’t. He bets on this and he might well lose everything in one fell swoop.
--
The next time Owens looks at him with so frank an expression is when Joyce is sobbing into Hopper’s shoulder in the corridor of the lab, those awful teal scrubs crinkling as she moves and her shoulders shake, and he looks over her shoulder into Owens’ eyes and feels to his horror his own vision blurring too.
He’s not gonna cry over Joyce’s kid. He’s not gonna cry over Joyce’s kid. He’s not gonna cry-
But he is. He is crying, and when he looks up again Owens is gone and he and Joyce are alone in the corridor, with matching clothes and matching tears and this is all too much for him really, he doesn’t like having kids, he was bad enough at having one-
“Joyce?”
He feels her physically shrug off his embrace. He witnesses her straightening up, brushing away the tears, moving away from him like every step doesn’t drive a nail into his coffin. “Hey, Bob.” Her voice still soft, her eyes still teary.
“You okay?” Bob asks, and Hopper resists the urge to roll his eyes. Of course she’s not okay. Does she look okay? Does she sound okay? Does anything about this feel like she might think it’s fucking A-Okay, buckaroo?
But she nods. “Yeah, I-” Her head turns just slightly and then stiffens, like she’s trying not to look at him. It makes him want to cry again. “I’m okay.”
It occurs to him, as she and Bob disappear back into Will’s room where he’s clearly not wanted, not right now, that she makes herself strong for Bob. She’s always strong for Bob. He’s not who she calls when her anxiety gets the better of her. He’s not the one whose arms she cries into. She’s strong for him and maybe she likes that, the illusion. The feeling that she can just do that - be strong, on command.
Hopper’s tried that. He knows it doesn’t work.
A bitter feeling follows him all the rest of the day until things go to shit, and this time he can’t be sure if it’s his or not. But things going to shit is his most pressing issue until suddenly- suddenly-
It’s not a surge of emotion, like he maybe would have thought. It’s not like drowning. It’s more like the silent, numbing aftershocks of a landmine that goes off a few feet from you and sends shrapnel into your gut. It’s doubling over your gun and shooting blindly at the danger and the pain equally because they’ve become equivalent, equally deadened, equally numb. Joyce is screaming emptily by his side and when he wraps an arm around her waist and drags her back he feels the anguish of it come rushing in, feels it as she bucks against him and doesn’t breathe for a solid two minutes as she screams and sobs all at once.
He passes her into Mike’s arms; he gets her into the car. They drive off and he prolongs the numbness as long as he can in the passenger seat as Mike somehow talks down her gasping breaths.
When he knocks on her door, and goes in, and sits down opposite her on the floor, he lets her pain fill the space they’re in. Lets it swallow him up and bulge at the closed door and the window. “You’re okay,” he says, finally. He half hopes she’ll look at him with an expression of outrage - how dare you tell me what I’m feeling, you don’t know shit about me, why don’t you just- but she doesn’t. She just sits there, silent, numb.
When El closes the gate there’s so much relief it can’t just be his own, yet maybe it can. He holds his breath on that relief until they’re all back at the Byers’ and he finds Joyce and Will and Jonathan all curled on the couch, darkened with exhaustion and sweat but alive. Then he feels the relief and the weariness too, and his throat begins to sting with phantom pain.
Later, when he’s convinced her to go lie down beside her son, try at least to get some rest, he makes his rounds of the house. Passes the rest of the kids, tangled together on the living room floor, Mike reaching out in his sleep in El’s direction.
Will’s room. Will is on the side furthest from the door, Joyce curled protectively around him. They look peaceful, quiet for the first time in months- but as he’s moving to close the door, she stirs, turns over to face him with eyes bright in the gloom. “Hey,” she says. Voice painfully soft. He feels her jolting, fluctuating nervousness. The awareness that won’t shut off.
“Hey.” He inches forward despite himself. “You should be asleep.”
Instead, she sits up slowly. “I- I can’t. Will-“ She stops, glances back at her son. “Will’s sleeping the sleep of the dead, but every time I close my eyes for even a moment I feel like I have to- have to check on him-“
Almost unconsciously, he reaches out and touches her cheek. In the dark it’s easy to do it, and just as easy for her to lean into his hand. They’re both so tired it feels like a fever dream. Like it’s not real, like it’s not even happening. Maybe it isn’t. Maybe it’s all a dream and he’ll wake up never having touched her cheek, never having held her in the dark.
Because he does. He holds her as she holds Will and gradually, so gradually, he feels the tension in her shoulders, his own shoulders, ease. He feels her stuttering breathing slow.
She sleeps, and eventually so does he.
—
The morning is rough.
The morning-
It starts easy enough. He wakes to the scent of cooking bacon and sunlight streaming through the slight gap in the curtains. He has a blissful moment of dreamy oblivion, thinking of Sara in the room next door and rolling over to look at Diane as she sleeps-
Before he’s brought back to reality.
Joyce is gone, leaving a cold empty space on the mattress between him and Will, still asleep. Slowly he sits up and eyes the kid carefully. He looks better than he did, by miles and miles. Looks almost like the smart, happy boy he was a year ago. But still, there are dark circles under his closed eyes.
Hopper slides out of bed and smoothes down his rumpled shirt. Casts Will another glance before slipping out into the corridor, following the mouthwatering smell of bacon like a bloodhound. It’s Jonathan, leaning over a hissing pan on the stove. Nancy is sitting on the counter next to him and Steve has got another ice pack pressed to his swollen face, sitting at the table with a surprisingly cheerful expression. Joyce is nowhere to be seen - neither are the kids. Everything is veiled, numb again. He has to check on her.
“Hey,” he says. His voice is gritty with sleep. He digs out a cigarette and lights it. “You seen your mom?”
Jonathan looks at him like he didn’t expect to hear anything else. “Yeah, she- uh, she’s outside.”
His hesitation makes Hopper uneasy. The urge to go to her is almost overwhelming, but he forces it down. He has to give her some space. Instead, he sits down opposite Steve and tries to stop his fingers trembling around his cigarette.
“Hey.”
The soft utterance brings him sharply out of his thoughts. It’s Will. He’s pale, tired-looking in the doorway.
“Hey,” Jonathan responds, and all but forces a plateful of bacon into his hands. “Eat up.”
The kid sits down between Steve and Hopper and - unbelievably - tucks into his bacon and eggs with gusto. Getting possessed and then exorcised works up an appetite, it seems.
But then a floorboard creaks behind them and Hopper turns, instinctively knowing who it is.
She’s wearing just a bathrobe, shivering in the November cold, hands shaking as she clutches an empty pack of smokes. He thinks, as he looks at her, that she’s been outside for a while. Her lips are pale, almost blue, and he could swear that pack was full the night before.
She moves closer and he hears Will let out a horrified gasp - and true enough, Hopper’s heart sinks. Joyce’s throat is ringed with thunderous purple bruises. Handprints small enough to be her son’s but dark enough that they came from a being far stronger. Even as he looks at them he feels their ache.
“Will,” she says. Her voice is weak, raspier than it was the night before. Some combination of choking, screaming, and sobbing has rendered it all but useless. (The smoking can’t have helped either.) His own voice- it isn’t just gritty from sleep, he realises. It’s been choked into phantom submission.
“Mom,” Will says, then trains his gaze on his plate. Is that guilt in his eyes?
“You okay?” This is Jonathan. He plates up a fresh load of bacon and thrusts it before her. “You gonna eat some breakfast?”
She shudders. A tendon in her bruised neck jumps - perhaps with belated adrenaline. “I- I-“
Slowly, Hopper stands up and walks towards her, hands held aloft as if approaching a wounded animal. “Joyce?” She eyes him warily. He takes the plate from Jonathan and places it on the table. Then he takes her by the shoulders, ever so gently, and guides her into the chair. “There.”
Because he can feel her gnawing hunger. Because he can feel her silent refusal to eat. Because he knows she won’t unless he watches her-
The night of the Snowball he finds her in the parking lot because her grief is as dark and staining as a homing beacon in negative, and he offers her a cigarette and feels her grief thrum through his coat. “You’re okay,” he whispers into her hair again.
This time she looks up at him. “You don’t mean that,” she says, and she sounds so defeated that it takes a conscious effort for him to stay afloat in the sea of pain she’s swimming in.
“Maybe not now. But one day. Trust me, Joyce, I promise. One day, you’ll be okay.”
He knows this from experience. It’s also wishful thinking, because he can’t take a lifetime of her unabated agony.
--
Weeks later it’s Christmas and for once- for once- it’s a day of hope, of relief, of happiness. At lunchtime he and El drive over to the Byers’ and eat slightly overdone turkey surrounded by piles of crinkled wrapping paper, and for once there’s none of that anxiety. He meets Joyce’s eyes and she seems lighter. She even lets him lead her into a dance when Elvis’ Blue Christmas comes on the radio, laughing into his shoulder until he’s laughing too.
He could get used to this, he thinks as he twirls her under his arm, and then he freezes. Yeah, that’s not a thing that’s happening. No way. There’s too much damage here. Too much damage between them. Would someone whose soulmate was him feel the grief he feels pouring off her every morning? Would someone whose soulmate was him avert her eyes like that, and step out of his playful embrace like it’s burning her the moment his eyes turn soft?
Nevertheless, the hopeful glow follows him for the next few weeks. He can’t quite shake it, not that he wants to. El notices, and smiles at him when she thinks he’s not looking.
He lets her see Mike. He doesn’t want to, but he lets her anyway. They’re not soulmates, he’s adamant about that fact, but he can’t exactly stop her. Days turn into weeks turn into months and they see each other every day, every fucking day. Meanwhile he finds himself irritable for no reason, on edge for no reason, chain-smoking and eating saturated fats despite the way they sometimes make his stomach turn.
“It’s constant!” he complains to Joyce one hot day, as she’s pinning up a clearance sign in the window of the store. When he thinks about it later it’s staring him right in the face, the reason she turns him down. He’s so selfish. Complaining about his daughter sucking face (ugh) with this kid while she’s about to lose her job without the prospect of another one. (Because he’s felt her dread. He’s felt her exhaustion every evening after pulling double shifts in a desperate effort to save up. She doesn’t tell him, but he knows. He knows.)
Dinner’s a no today, but that’s fine. Bob wasn’t that long ago, he remembers, (feels), and the whole romance-y thing had her deer-in-headlights. But that’s fine. He just wants dinner, no pressure, no expectations. Just dinner. They can do dinner, right?
But apparently not.
When he’s sitting alone in the restaurant that’s full of people and smoking his lungs into ash he tries to feel her, the first time he’s really tried, the first time he’s even accepted that he can. He tries and all he gets is that same frazzled nervous energy; this is the one time he wished he could feel more, not less.
And then she’s at his cabin and predictably, as they always do, things go very quickly to shit.
When he wakes up covered in blood and bruises she’s looking at him with the shadows more deeply engraved than usual, but before he can feel some type of way about that he’s retching and he’s naked and they’re off to the Mayor’s office with anger instead of a plan, because anger is apparently where they live now.
He says some cruel things to her. She says cruel things back. She gets angry, instead of hurt, which only fuels his own anger because of course it does, that’s how this works. But she leans on him when they’re walking through the forest and she moves like she’s stiff and his thoughts still don’t get very far, not yet, but when she winces and clutches her side it’s in the same place he found a particularly purple bruise on his torso that morning.
That night at Murray’s he takes the tiny sofa-bed, and she the spare room. This time she doesn’t ask him to share.
At Alexei’s death the grief sinks between them like a stone. He’s already feeling heated and humiliated, after Murray’s thorough redressing of their relationship (which was completely off-base, by the way, since Joyce doesn’t need to be curious about what he’s like in the sack because high school was a thing, and he’s just thankful Murray didn’t touch on the soulmate category because that’s a whole can of worms he does not want to open right now, thank you), and the car is silent as they race towards the mall, Joyce’s foot on the gas pressed down to the floor. The loss is radiating around them and somehow it moves him to say:
“I’m sorry.”
She spares him a rapid glance, full of confusion.
“I- I’ve been an ass.”
She scoffs. “Uh, yeah. Yeah, y’have.”
“I just-” He wants to say something, anything. Something to the tune of Alexei died and it made me realise that any of us could die tonight and I really don’t wanna fucking lose you because I think it might literally kill me, so-
But Murray’s listening from the backseat and this isn’t the time. (Will it ever be?) So they drive on into the night and it’s only when she’s facing him down in the elevator that he wishes they had had that conversation, because he really doesn’t want her to die. Murray, he doesn’t really care about, but Joyce-
And then that conversation yawns before them as they’re sitting and waiting. She’s sitting there with something that tastes bizarrely like hope just radiating off her, and he can’t quite believe it. He can’t quite believe it when she asks him out. He can’t quite believe it when she smirks at him like he hasn’t been a complete ass this whole time. He thinks about telling her, then. Doing the first-date ritual of a slice in the palm, look, proof! but he doesn’t. If nothing else time is ticking down.
Time starts ticking down a lot faster when Joyce is thrown into the console and his head and ribs explode with phantom pain, and he grapples with the Russian to save both their lives. He ends up only saving one, though. He watches Joyce through the flaring lights of the machine and gives her a smile, it’s okay, even though it’s not. Even though they’re both crying. Even though if he’s right about this - and suddenly he doesn’t want to be - his soul will be ripped from hers with a force that will scar her for life.
He swallows the darkness as it comes and his last image is her face, tear-stained, bloody, and his last feeling is the pain of her fractured rib and the grief of watching himself die.
—
“I’m sorry,” she says, a year later, sitting beside him on the steps of the porch with her shoulder knocking against his. “I should’ve- I should’ve recognised it sooner. I don’t know why I didn’t.”
They’re both smoking into the cool summer night, passing one cigarette back and forth like they used to as kids. He smiles a little. “Hell, it took me long enough. They write books about this shit but it’s never gotten easier, has it? Century to century? It’s just more of the same. People hurting and being confused.”
She rests her head in the crook of his shoulder. He’s filled with warmth. “Guess humans are just a bit stupid, then.”
(When she finds him bleeding on the floor of his Russian cell it takes all of one look for those feelings, that soul-trauma, to come flooding back again from where they were stemmed and numb when the Upside Down swallowed him up. She gasps in pain as he gasps in relief and he can’t tell whose is whose, only that they’re theirs, and they fall into each others’ arms like a jigsaw.
“Joyce,” he whispers.
“God, I- I can feel you-“
She’s doubled over and it’s a reminder of the beating he’d received only that morning, the beating he’s all but forgotten. But as she winces she smiles through tears and they hold each other; for the first time it feels like she feels what he’s feeling and not the reverse. Like maybe they understand each other.)
“Yeah,” he says, “a bit stupid.”
—
“i wondered how anyone finds closeness when violence is so near to it.”
– jeanette winterson, the agony of intimacy