(no subject)

[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]

"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.

[takecourage]

"I was kind of a fucking nightmare," she says, a smile that's got nothing to do with anything being funny pulling at the corner of her mouth. "Did I ever tell you about the time she paid to have me like...kidnapped in the middle of the night? It was the first time I'd slept in my own bed in weeks. I was fifteen."

[something_incredible]

"What the fuck?"

It's blunt, maybe too blunt, but Hopper doesn't know what else to say. He's failed in a lot of ways in his life, many of them dramatic and awful and sweeping, but nothing like that. Nothing like that. The kind of awful person someone has to be to do something like that is beyond his scope.

[takecourage]

She loves him a lot all the time, but she really loves him right then. They're sitting in different chairs, so she just stretches out one leg and nudges her foot against his. "It was one of those...scared straight rehab things in the desert? So they yank me out of bed in my pjs, barefoot, zipties, the whole lot. I guess Mira had run out of other ideas. It would have cost her a tonne she didn't have." She takes a drag on her cigarette. "Len showed me how to snap zipties, so I...got out and walked. Seven miles. Couldn't go home, obviously, so I went to where Len was working, and..." She shrugs.

[something_incredible]

"Jesus Christ," he says. "I get wanting your kid to get sober, but that's fucked up."

It's awful. It makes something in Hopper's chest twist and tighten. He's seen kidnapping, he knows what it looks like from the outside, he's watched parents sob and scream and beg for their children back.

The fact that someone did that willingly is a goddamn mess.

[takecourage]

Alex shrugs. It's complicated. She loves her mom. She wishes that she didn't, sometimes. Mira wasn't a great mom. She tried. She twists her fingers in the straight strands of her hair.

"I didn't live at home again after that. I moved into Ground Zero with Len, and that was when I started getting into heavy shit. I experimented. Molly was a mistake."

[something_incredible]

The way Alex shrugs tells Hopper everything he needs to know about her feelings on the subject of her mother. He doesn't say anything else, he doesn't need to piss her off or hurt her over a woman who isn't even here.

He'd rather she keep feeling that she can talk to him when she needs to.

"Because you didn't like it or because you liked it too much?" he asks with a faint smile he knows she'll understand.

[takecourage]

"I could feel them all of a sudden," she says. "All their hunger. All their sadness. Just oozing all over me." She barely represses a shudder, slipping one hand under her hair to rub the back of her neck like it suddenly itches. "Never again."

[something_incredible]

A cold sort of shiver goes through Hopper at that, the thought of what she's saying settling under his skin in an oily sort of way. All the shit she's been through, it's pretty incredible she's here.

"Yeah, well," he says. "You're tough as hell. Proved that today, didn't you?"

[takecourage]

"I'm just a canonball, Hop," she says. Her cigarette's got one drag left in it, and she takes it and then makes sure it's properly stubbed out on the sole of her boot, holding the butt between her fingers. "I don't know how to stop."

[something_incredible]

Hopper looks at Alex and then reaches across the space between them and shoves her shoulder. "That ain't it," he says. "Take some of the goddamn credit for what you did today. You didn't just barrel through that shit, because if you had, you'd have taken the pills."

And instead they're dissolving somewhere in the pipes beneath Darrow.

[takecourage]

He shoves her and she smirks, small at first, but growing. She tucks her hair behind her ear.

"I almost took them," she says. "Danny's always terrified I'm going to overdose again." Her jaw works for a minute. "I fucking hate disappointing him."