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In the hours after Bob’s death, he doesn’t know what to say.
The quiet moment in her bedroom has passed. The house is still in ruins and it feels smaller than ever, glass scattered across the floor and the fridge fit to burst open. He hasn’t moved since he brought the kid back from the lab, hasn’t moved since he tucked her into bed with Will, hasn’t moved since she started moving.
He’s been sitting in the stiff armchair for so long that it aches, his hands absentmindedly fiddling with his hat in his lap as he watches her pace. She’s been at it for nearly two hours now, her feet pattering against the floorboards eliciting the occasional sharp creak . To the unknowing eye, she’d be making herself busy with house chores, making herself busy with something : but he’s not the unknowing eye. He knows her too well like he knows the lines of his palm.
He, who can read her microexpressions like a musician reads notes, can see the subtle shaking of her fingers and the twitching of her lip, even in the shadows of midnight. It isn’t his Joyce, except it is: still the woman woven into his life like a patchwork on a pair of old jeans, still the woman who used to stick notes to his back in high school, still the woman he reached for when things got rough. But she’s so gaunt, cheeks hollowing before his eyes like gullies, almost unrecognisably so. She hasn’t been eating, he knows, and it’s only going to get worse now.
“Joyce?” He dares to call out, careful not to stir the three kids sleeping down the hall. She doesn’t look up, still busying herself with rearranging a shelf in the kitchen, hands frantically flying to just do something . But he catches the pause of her body, the almost imperceptible freeze and hears her suck in a sharp breath. Her tell.
“Joy,” he tries again, this time softer. The nickname is so familiar on his tongue and yet so foreign; he thinks, that if he were to recall the last time it graced his lips, he’d find himself on the steps of her parents' house telling her that he’d been drafted. He swears silently that he’ll never leave her again if he can help it.
“Just-” she finally starts, choking on her words. “Just go home, Hopper. El needs to get some sleep.”
“She’s out like a light already,” he opposes gently, slowly crossing the room until he’s hovering across the kitchen threshold. She doesn’t turn to face him, doesn’t acknowledge his new proximity- just keeps shuffling things about, keeps moving like it’s impossible to cease. “All the…closing the gate drained her, I think.”
Joyce hums non-committedly, stretching up to place a half-dead cactus on a high shelf. The movement makes her t-shirt ride up, exposing a slither of skin on her back, and he almost doubles over at the sight. She’s so thin, her spine jutting out like glass. He shouldn’t have let it get this bad. The stress of the last year has taken its toll.
“Have you been eating, Joyce?” He braves, taking a large step towards her.
Her body tenses, the muscles in her arms going rigid.
“I’m fine, Hop,” she says entirely unconvincingly. “You can go home.”
He takes another step forward. Slowly slides a hand onto her shoulder and pretends not to hear her ragged exhale. She can’t be alone. Not like this.
“I’m not leaving, Joyce,” he murmurs, smoothing his fingers across the jut of her collarbone. “You’ve had- we’ve both had a long day.”
The clock ticks and she breathes. He waits.
“I suppose we have,” she finally lands on, and turns to face him.
He wants to die when she does. He’s never seen her so incomplete, not since things got bad with Lonnie, not since her daddy died- her big brown eyes are absent, pooling with unexplored grief, and he doesn’t know what to do. He’s always known what to do before.
“I’ll take the couch.”
“Okay,” she confirms, barely above a whisper.
They’re dancing around the topic, he knows. She doesn’t want to bring it up and he doesn’t want to make her have to. Doesn’t want to see her cry. He hates it when she does.
He reaches his other arm out so both of his hands are anchoring her in place. “What do you need?” He says delicately; it isn’t breaching the elephant in the room, but isn’t ignoring it either.
She shudders beneath him, and he can feel how cold the skin of her swan neck is. It hollows out when she swallows, each of her tendons popping out like they could rip through.
“I…” She starts, not meeting his eye. “I’m stretched thin, Hop.”
When he sees the sheen of a tear in her eye and the tightness in her throat, he breaks and wraps his arms around her fully. Pulls her in tight until she’s flush against his chest, her nails clawing into the back of his shirt like he’s going to slip through her fingers, and holds.
He holds her while she snaps apart and her body heaves with shaking sobs. He swears he can hear the blood in her heart pumping, swears he can hear Bob being ripped apart in her mind, swears he can feel her reliving it. He stretches one hand up to cradle her head, and it goes lax in his palm.
It isn’t pretty when she cries like this: it’s no high school drama sniffle into his shoulder or the aftershock of an argument with Lonnie. He’s seen her cry a lot of times before, but never like this. This is different. She’s bending too far, and if he isn’t careful this will make her break.
“I need you,” she says through gasps. “I need you to hold me tonight.”
He’s murmuring of course into the crown of her head before he can even think about it. Under any other circumstances, he perhaps would’ve been more hesitant. But with her body trembling in his hands, her flesh melding into him like putty, it’s impossible to say no.
“Come on.” He slips a hand down her arm until it’s toying with her fingertips, seeing if they’ll flex into hers. Immediately they do, clutching tight enough to leave scarlet welts.
She drags her feet across the floorboards, leaning her entire weight into his side, knees ready to give out. He has to wrap a firm arm around her waist to keep her from toppling backwards onto the floorboards, all the while praying to god that The Kid doesn’t wake up from the noise. He couldn’t deal with any questions from her. Not now.
They reach her bedroom door and she lets go of him, all but stumbling across the threshold and onto the mattress. She pulls herself up onto the sheets and curls in on herself and turns away from him still fully dressed, and he’s never seen her look so small before, not even when she was a physically small little girl in the elementary school playground.
“Don’t hide from me,” he soothes, shuffling onto the bed to be next to her. It dips under his weight, and she involuntarily rolls towards him a little. “You don’t have to be strong.”
With one quick motion, he hurriedly shacks his boots off, throwing them into a dark corner. The room is warm and smells like her, like cigarette smoke and the same cheap cherry perfume she’s been wearing since she was sixteen, but there’s something else too.
There’s a far-away hint of another man’s cologne, one that he’s smelled on her before when he’s lingered closer than he really should: it’s in her pillows and her sheets and god, it’s in her hair too. It’s everywhere. He’s everywhere. He’s dead.
“God, Joyce,” he murmurs, his voice close to breaking, and shuffles close until he’s pressed against her. Wordlessly she coils around him, arms coming around to clasp his neck, legs wrapping around his to form a vice grip. He returns the gesture, moving to hold her once more, stroking his palm up and down her back.
She somehow moves ever closer, and he realises what she’s doing: trying to drown out his scent.
“It’s my fault,” she chokes out, each word muffled into his shirt. “It’s my fault that he’s dead. If I hadn’t-”
He presses a gentle kiss to her crown to stop her. “You can’t think like that.” He pauses to swallow before continuing. “After Sara, I…I spiralled. I thought if I had noticed sooner then I could’ve somehow saved her. That the sickness wouldn’t have taken her. It just about killed me, Joyce. You can’t think like that. You can’t. It’ll destroy you.”
“I just keep thinking that he was so happy ,” she sobs, her voice breaking on the last word. “He was so proud. To be with me. Did you know that he had a crush on me the whole way through high school, Hopper? I never even looked his way.”
“Just try and get some sleep for me,” he says into her hair. “I’ll be here when you wake up.”
She sniffles and he pulls her in tighter, engulfing her. He hasn’t held her like this for years; not since she used to come to his trailer like a ghost in the night, broken and bruised from Lonnie’s fists. He wanted to beat the shit out of him, then. Hell, he wanted to kill Lonnie for what he’d done. And now- just when she finally found Bob, someone good, someone deserving- she’d lost him.
He doesn’t know how long they stay that way before her breaths even out and her shuddering body stills. But he doesn’t let go, not even when his legs go numb, not even when the morning birds begin to rise.
Miraculously she doesn’t stir in his arms, apparently sound. Though he wishes he could see what was going on inside her head, to see if the harrowing grief has made its way into her dreams too. He stares at her until the sun comes up, unable to tear his eyes away as if he can will himself into her mind.
And it’s then, when dawn breaks, that it hits him.
It’s the wrong time for him to come to such a realisation. In fact, there couldn’t be a worse time. But when the sunlight flits through the blinds and lights up the contours of her face, every notch and mark in her skin standing out like a star, he knows that he loves her. He feels sick with guilt because she hasn’t even processed her grief yet. But he loves her, and he swears to himself then that he’s never going to leave her, ever. In the morning when reality hits again and she crumples, overwhelmed with grief, he’ll be there to pick up her pieces. To glue her back together. To hold her together until she’s steady on her feet again. And if she can’t, he’ll walk for her for the rest of his damn life.
His Joyce. Lost in grief, but still so beautiful.