Chapter Text
It’s strange, Joyce ponders as she plods up the porch steps, how much this little cabin in the woods is as much a part of her past as it is brand new in this moment. The many evenings she had dropped off dinner or spent time El when Hopper got stuck late at work. Or the times she’d spent here with Hopper himself. Magnets and missed Enzo’s dates and dried blood and bickering.
Not to mention the night that the whole room had felt like a suffocated rainforest as a demon was violently driven from her son’s body.
And there had been the weeks after Hopper’s death, or supposed death, Joyce mentally corrected. She and El and a pile of boxes. They picked through the home with attempts to decipher how to define value and how to discard the pieces of the life of someone they both loved.
The cabin wasn’t haunted, not like some pieces of their lives, but it didn’t call to Joyce as a place of comfort. There was too much past, an excess of history she didn't feel the need to relive.
Now there are holes in the roof, broken slats in the walls, and shattered windows halfway boarded. Inside isn’t much better. Water damage to the floor, dirt and leaves on the countertops. It was a home that was no longer lived in or loved.
This was all they had, though. It wasn’t like they could turn their backs on Hawkins at this very moment. Not with Max in a coma/body cast combo and actual hellfire streaming down Main Street. There were some slight issues to contend with here.
But there was a mass evacuation taking place in the town of Hawkins. Now wasn’t really the time for a family to reappear from the west coast…or a police chief from the dead.
Laying low was their only option. They needed time. They needed a game plan. They needed, well, they needed some damn sleep.
All Joyce wants to do is hold her children in her arms, to know that they are safe and healthy and here . But Will’s fingers keep lingering on the back of his neck, and El’s shaved head trembles something deep inside of Joyce, and Jonathan has circles so deep beneath his eyes she wants to order him to bed in the middle of the sunny afternoon.
Hopper is trying to pretend he’s not limping, not suffering.
Joyce is trying to pretend her grasp on reality is not tenuous. Like she might not just finally break. That this time is finally it. She has taken on all she can bear. She has reached the end of her rope, the maximum of her limits.
But it’s a few hours later when she walks past El’s room, the door cracked, and hears the muffled sobs filtering through.
That’s how Joyce knows. She’s not at the end of the line yet because there’s still more to be mustered up, more she can grasp ahold of to push through a little bit further for her children.
She knocks gently, nudging the door open just enough to slip in and shutting it behind her. “Mind if I sit with you, honey?”
El shrugs, swiping beneath her eyes.
Joyce feels her own vision going blurry, her heart aching with the reality of this new situation before them.
This is hardly the first time the two of them have bonded through tears.
Joyce sits beside her daughter, reaching out to pull her close. Often, especially when upset, El struggled to find the words she wanted. Sometimes she didn’t want to talk or even listen at all, craving the silence. But touch—hugs and back rubs and fingers running through her hair—that was the language she could speak when the grief was too heavy to hear through.
For once, Joyce is grateful to not need words. She has nothing to say right now.
There aren’t any promises of being okay to offer. No whispers of safety to volunteer. There is reality, fear, and the undeniable truth that despite everything, those horrible, evil people had gotten to her baby again. “I’m so sorry,” Joyce finally manages when she starts worrying that El will soon disentangle herself, wipe her eyes, and go seek out her dad. She’d only let him out of her sight when he’d mumbled something about taking his first hot shower in eight months.
“Sorry?” El pulls away abruptly. “Why sorry?” A shake of her head. “Why are you sorry?”
Joyce is supposed to be the adult here, and she can’t even say it. Her fingers reach up and run over the buzzed hair. El loved her hair. Protected it. There had been exactly one haircut over the kitchen trash can. The bangs were the only thing Joyce was allowed to touch. Otherwise, it was to keep growing. El didn’t care about split ends or frizz or uneven layers. She loved every strand of hair. Scrunchies, braids, the first time Argyle shows her how to pile all of it into a bun atop her head. And now…
“I’m sorry I wasn’t here.” The logical side of her knows, of course, she wasn’t here. There is no way to predict the future. The realistic side of her knows she couldn’t just never leave home again. The selfish side of her knows she might still choose to rescue Hopper anyway. And that is just the most horrible thought to have.
El shakes her head, eyebrows furrowing as she stares at Joyce. “You were saving…my dad. If you had been here, then he would not be…I should have been the one saving him.”
“Wh-honey, El, no.” Joyce takes her daughter’s face between her hands and holds her there until she can be sure that El is hearing her. That she is hearing through the sadness and the loss and the exhaustion. “Do you understand me? That was never your responsibility. That was not on your shoulders.”
“But if I had my powers-”
“No.”
The tears well back up again, breaking through almost instantly as El’s face crumples. “Then what is the point of me?” she asks, and it’s a lance to Joyce’s chest. “I cannot save anyone . Not Hopper, not Max, not Billy o-or Mama. Not the other kids.” A sob hiccups past her lips, snot mixing with the tears so she is reduced to a blubbering, wet mess. “I am nothing . Maybe I am not a monster, but I am a-a-”
“Stop.”
It’s like a dam has broken, though. All of the guilt that El has been piling upon herself comes spilling forth, an avalanche of remorse decimating the worth of her as her own person. “If I had my powers, Hopper would not have been there for eight months. If I was stronger, then Max would not be-” a sob interrupts, and Joyce attempts to cut El off again but doesn’t manage to get a word. “Why me? Why does it have to be me when I can’t even do anything right?”
She falls into Joyce, splintered and fractured and suffering. Tears soak the collar of Joyce’s shirt, sadness drenches the channels of her heart. “If I had called Murray and chartered a plane to a Soviet prison eight months ago, your dad would have been home that much sooner. If I had picked Will up from Mike’s on November 4th, maybe the Upside Down never would have taken him. If I kicked Lonnie out the first time he raised his hand to me, my sons wouldn’t know that trauma.”
“But-” El’s head snaps back up, ready to argue.
“If your mama hadn’t applied for a job at the lab, maybe they never would have taken you from her. If someone different had found you that first night out in those woods, maybe you wouldn’t be here with us.” Joyce shakes her head, finding that alternative too painful to consider right now. “Life is not about the choices we could have made, El. It’s about the ones we did make. It’s about where we are now and what we are going to do with it.”
A sniffle, a glance darting to the side before settling back on Joyce. “It is different.”
Joyce shakes her head. She could argue just as well as the teenager beside her. Maybe even better. “It’s not. The world isn’t for you to take on. Everyone is not, cannot be, your responsibility.” So unfair, how the world kept asking her to save it. Not right, how they kept putting her between them and the evil like it was her burden to carry. “We can never know what could have been in some alternate reality of life. Just like we can’t know what the future will bring.”
“They hurt him, didn’t they?” she asks, still stuck on what she could have prevented, how much she had failed at saving.
“Yes,” Joyce answers honestly. “And they hurt you. Didn’t they?”
El's eyes turn downward, and the shame rolls off of her body in waves. “I guess.”
Joyce tilts her chin back up. “Someone else’s suffering does not outweigh yours, El.” And it hurts, staring into her beautiful, intelligent, passionate daughter’s eyes and knowing just how much she needs to hear, “You matter too.”
It hurts that she doesn’t already know.
“Whatever happens next, I will be right here the whole time,” Joyce vows even though her eyes burn with exhaustion and her back aches with rigid muscles and all she can see ahead of her is more struggling, more fighting, more protecting. She won’t give up, not now. Not when her kids are concerned. “I will be right here.” Just try and stop her.