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[takecourage]

Her hands are trembling, a little, when she takes her phone out of her pocket. Kavinsky's altoids tin is still stuffed in the back pocket of her jeans, and she's still thinking about getting high. Eddie had refused to smoke a joint with her and, at the time, she'd been pissed but, now, she actually thinks she likes him more because of it. It would have been really easy, she figures. Kavinsky's dream weed is easily the best she's ever smoked.

She keeps thinking about the pills. She doesn't even know what all of them are, but she keeps picturing him rolling them between his fingers, all shapes and sizes and colours of the rainbow, any one of them enough to make her fly. She thinks Danny would probably let her get away with a joint - she doesn't think he'd be as quick to forgive the pills, though.

She fires off a text as she walks.

Need help. Coming over.

She doesn't wait for him to reply before she sets off in the direction of the town house, her hands thrust deep into the pockets of her coat. If he's not home, she'll just sit on the stoop and wait.

Comments

[something_incredible]

Once the pills are in the toilet, Hopper reaches out and hits the lever to flush and the water swirls, the pills dissolving and then swirling away down into the pipes. He should feel better now that they're gone and he does, a little, but he knows just getting rid of the pills doesn't always get rid of the desire.

"You okay?" he asks.

[takecourage]

The pills disappear and Alex feels her shoulders sag slightly. If asked, she couldn't actually explain what she's feeling in that moment. Other than a real and pressing need for a cigarette.

"I don't know," she says because, for once, honesty feels like the best possibility. "I really did want to take a few of those."

[something_incredible]

"Yeah, but you didn't."

He says it again because that's the thing she needs to remember. The want will never go away, it's something Hopper has heard over and over, between the AA meetings he goes to only sometimes and Dan, when they run into each other and inevitably get into the alcoholism of it all.

"You wanted to, but you didn't, and that's a good thing."

[takecourage]

"I didn't," echoes Alex, and she wants to feel proud of herself but, mostly, she just feels tired. She nods, though. She clicks the tin closed and reopens it, smiling when she finds a neatly rolled joint, three cigarettes and a lighter.

"See?" she says, showing Hopper. "Magic."

[something_incredible]

"No pills," he notes, which is good, even though it still makes him a bit nervous. Maybe the magic doesn't work like that all the time or works some of the time, he doesn't have any frame of reference for it.

"C'mon," he says. "We can sit out back, you can smoke. We don't have to say anything."

[takecourage]

"Thanks, Hop," says Alex, turning to leave the bathroom. Suddenly, she's bone-weary and unbelievably grateful. That he'd take care of her. THat he wants to take care of her. "He was like a brother, you know? I've never...had one of those before."

She thinks of Steve, of Eddie. With Steve, at least, it's the same.

[something_incredible]

They head out through the back door, into the little yard there, the chairs out back already swept clear of snow. The yard is sheltered from the wind by the fence on one side and the other townhouse on the other. It's not a big yard, but it's nice, and Hopper settles into one of the chairs.

"I always thought siblings would be annoying," he answers with a faint smile to make it clear he's only teasing her.

[takecourage]

Alex folds herself into the other chair, her legs drawn up, huddled in her coat. She opens the tin, slipping the cigarette between her lips and bending her head to light it.

"I don't know. It was kind of shitty, growing up on my own. Maybe I'd have stayed straighter if I'd had someone else around."

[something_incredible]

"Maybe," Hopper says. "But what if they'd been assholes?"

A lot of people have good siblings, but he knows plenty who have shitty siblings, too. Just because someone is related by blood doesn't mean they might not be an asshole.

Hopper is an asshole, he knows it, and he doesn't think he'd have made the best brother.

[takecourage]

"I'm an asshole," says Alex, and she actually manages to smile a little bit, bending her head to take a drag on her cigarette. "They'd have fit right in." She rubs her nose. "I don't know, man. When I was a kid, I didn't have...shit happened, and I didn't have anyone I could tell. I tried telling Mira once or twice, but..." She shrugs. "Drugs were easier."

[something_incredible]

He hadn't always been a perfect father, not even to Sara, but Hopper tried. He tried so damn hard and a lot of the time he thinks that matters more than being perfect in all ways. Mostly, he doesn't get not wanting to listen to your kids when they need help.

If he doesn't do anything else right, at least he can do that.

"Not anymore," he says. "I mean... shit, they might still be easier, but you've got folks who'll listen now."

[takecourage]

"Yeah, I know," says Alex, studying her cigarette for a moment. The smell is distinct from any brand she's ever come across, specific to Kavinsky, dreamed up just for him. She takes another drag. "Like...Things got bad...like I said, when I was thirteen...and then I fell in with a really bad crowd and. Shit happened. A lot of shit happened."

[something_incredible]

"You wanna talk about it?" he asks. If she wants, he'll listen. If she doesn't want to, he'll just sit here and smoke with her, letting the silence be the comforting thing between them.

Hopper is still learning, but having Beverly around has taught him how to be gentler in ways he'd sort of thought lost to him. After Sara died, the idea of being gentle seemed impossible.

[takecourage]

"Maybe," she says, and she stares off into space for a long moment, turning it over in her head before she takes another drag on her cigarette. "I ever tell you that I'm really scared of butterflies?" She looks at him. "I wasn't. Not before. Not until I was in Seventh grade, and we went to butterfly grove in Goleta. I got my first period that day and it was a whole thing. I was in the bathroom. And...there was a grey there. A guy your sort of age, maybe?" Bruises." She gestured to her own face. "All over his face."

She looks at him, her dark eyebrows drawn together. "You sure you want to hear this, Hop?"

[something_incredible]

"If you wanna tell, I'll hear it," he answers.

It doesn't sound good. The way the story starts, it's not so different from some crime scenes Hopper has attended and sometimes he thinks a lot of the people here in Darrow forget who he's been before. A soldier in Vietnam, where he did some awful fucking things. A homicide detective in New York during a bad time for that city.

A father who watched his daughter die in front of him.

What Alex has to say might be awful, but it's hard to scar him these days.

[takecourage]

"So, the thing with Grays is that you basically can't let them know that you see them," she says. "If you look straight at them, if you acknowledge them, they feed on it, and they won't leave you alone. And I knew that, even then, so I was just...doing my thing, you know. Washing my hands. Ignoring him. He shouldn't have been able to touch me. They'd never been able to touch me before." She looks down at her hands, tips her head to let her straight hair curtain her face for a moment. "But the next thing I know, I feel him touch the small of my back, and then I've got a faceful of mirror and he's got my shoved up against the sink."

[something_incredible]

"Jesus," Hopper says. If people are shitty in life, he guesses he shouldn't be surprised that they remain shitty in death. It still makes him sick to think about, the sorts of things people -- men mostly -- will do for a bit of power.

"What was different about this one?" he asks. "Why could he touch you?"

[takecourage]

"I didn't know. Still don't, really. But he could. Got me down on the floor, shorts around my knees and..." She makes a crude gesture with one hand. "It wasn't all the way or anything, so for a long time, I wasn't sure if it counted. There was...I'm still scared of butterflies, which sounds stupid, but..." She shrugs. "I stayed off school for a week, and then I went back and all the kids started calling me Bloody Mary, and..." She takes a drag on her cigarette. "It fucking sucked."

[something_incredible]

That's a line Hopper has heard before in his line of work. Women who aren't sure if it counts, because they didn't say no loud enough or the man is their husband or a thousand other reasons this goddamn world has given them. He's been a cop for too damn long to think any of them are remotely true.

"That's shit, kid," he says. "It's all shit. People can be really goddamn cruel."

[takecourage]

"Yeah," says Alex, picking at a shread of tobacco on her lip. It's easier if she doesn't look at him while she tells him about this, she finds. She's never really gotten over listening to Mira talk about it in hushed tones, make it the reason she was suddenly 'acting out', like she hadn't been screaming for help her whole life. "Kids suck. I made the mistake of trying to tell my friend -- my only friend, really -- about what really happened. About what I could see, what he did to me, but..." She shrugs. "She just, like, ran from me and told everyone, I guess. That was how I met Mosh. How I ended up in her crowd."

[something_incredible]

"And with this, uh... Mosh? Came the drugs?"

It's a weird goddamn name, but Hopper just leaves it. It doesn't matter, shouldn't matter. None of it should have ever happened. Someone should have believed Alex, but then he has to ask himself if he would have. Before the Upside Down, before all the shit he's seen, would he have believed her?

Probably not. As much as he hates to admit it.

[takecourage]

"Yeah. Her friends were potheads, mostly." She worries the edge of her thumbnail with her teeth. "And pot takes the edge off. But that's how I met Len, and...Len was into a lot of nasty shit."

She's mentioned Len to Hopper before, she knows. Some of it. Not all of the gory details.

[something_incredible]

"Yeah, Len always sounds like a real piece of shit when you talk about him," Hopper agrees. He doesn't have much room for judgment, but at least he never got anyone hooked on anything and at least he never hit anyone he loved.

"So he got you into the harder stuff," he continues.

[takecourage]

"He was a total piece of shit," says Alex. "And yeah. He got me onto the hard stuff. After we started screwing which was when I was...fourteen." She looks slightly ashamed of herself, hides behind her hair from him a little and takes a drag on her cigarette. "I was just...they were nice to me, you know? Nobody was ever really nice to me, not even Mira by that point."

[something_incredible]

Hopper could point out it's not really nice for an adult man to be fucking around with a kid, but he figures Alex probably knows that already. She doesn't need to be lectured.

"Yeah, well... she should've been there for you," he says with a disappointed shake of his head.