skepticgirl_1 | don't get comfortable don't be sensible

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jim hopper

don't get comfortable don't be sensible

I have a sick feeling in my stomach. Like ate bad Chinese food sick to my stomach. Because Ben Beckman of all people has me cornered in an alleyway behind the malt shop.

"You gotta show me something."

"I told you I would pay," I insisted. I knew this argument would not go anywhere with Ben though. This was his m.o.: offer up a fake I.D. to a hot girl, volunteer a deep discount and then expect the exchange to be made along with a hook up. But I had underestimated him. Or myself? I thought I wouldn't be hot enough to earn this kind of attention from him, that I would just pay money. I had also thought that, were I hot enough, I could get away with a kiss or something. Apparently I wasn't quite right either way.

"That's not how this works. And you're not hot enough to get credit. Show me your tits."

This was so not what I had in mind.

I sighed, not having to play at being uncomfortable as my hands moved down to the hem of my shirt. Then I froze.

"Do you hear something?" Ben stiffened and looked to the mouth of the alleyway. Which gave me the opportunity to knee him in the balls. He was much taller than me though, and the shot wasn't clean. He stumbled back cursing but didn't fall and I booked it as fast as I could.

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"I like kids from home," Hopper answers with a soft smile. That's not always the case, a lot of the time he wants to smack some of the kids from home, but in this case he's grateful. Steve's not just any kid from home, he's someone who's seen the same weird shit Hopper has seen, someone who knows about Eleven, someone who was protecting her secret, too.

Maybe not to the same extent Hopper has been, but it's still something.

"I still don't think I've settled. I've got a kid back home, too. My kid. Even with a familiar face around, that's not an easy thing to forget."

I gasped softly and covered my mouth with my hand, hiding a tiny gape.

"Oh my gosh," I said. "That must be awful. I mean, I miss my parents and my little sister, but..." But at least I knew that Lucy was safe with Mom and Dad. At least I knew Mom and Dad were capable of taking care of themselves. This was different.

"I hear though that things sort of.. stop, back where we're from," I continued, trying to sound less startled and more confident. "I met a guy who was in Darrow and then disappeared and came back, with his memories. He said he showed up back home right where he had left off. So I'm sure your kid hasn't even noticed you're gone. Which is weird but... I think it's a little reassuring?"

It's one of those things Hopper has been told, but he isn't prepared to let himself believe, at least not yet and he smiles at her attempt to make him feel better. It doesn't do much to lighten the heavy weight on his heart, though, even if he'd never say it. She means well, after all, and in a lot of ways she's still a kid, too. He can be a dick, but not like this, not without reason.

"It is," he says. "A little.

Then his smile grows and he says, "Doesn't help me much, but I guess that's a little selfish."

I grinned slightly and shrugged my shoulders. "Yeah, well, I think we're all entitled to be a little selfish around here. Since, you know, this was completely not our choice and stuff."

I had been quite upset for a while after showing up here, and a little whiny. I looked back on it with some regret, but at the same time, I felt totally justified in wanting things to go a little bit my way for a change.

"So are you taking time to settle in before joining the force?" I asked. "Or are you going to try something else?"

It's actually a little tempting, the thought of trying something else, but Hopper, for all this shitty habits, knows himself pretty well. He knows if he doesn't go back to something structured -- and probably even if he does -- he's going to fall back into those habits with ease.

And from what he's learned about Darrow so far, it'll be a hell of a lot easier for him to get his hands on pills here than it had been in Hawkins.

"I... I'll probably end up working as a cop again," he says after giving it a moment of thought. "It's pretty much the only thing I know how to do."

I nodded. "Yeah, I know the feeling."

Well, that was probably a weird thing for a teenager to tell a guy who was in his forties and probably had decades of service to the badge under his belt. I wrinkled my nose slightly.

"What I mean is, I'm a reporter. I know I want to be a reporter. That's who I am. So once you figure out what you're meant to do, what you're good at, I figure it's hard to move on to something else, even if you can."

Hopper isn't so sure he's meant to be a cop, it had just seemed like the most logical step after coming back from Vietnam, soldier to cop, and he'd made the leap because it paid well and meant he could support Diana and Sara, even in a city like New York.

And then after Sara died, after he'd gone back to Hawkins, it had just been the only thing he had any experience with. Hawkins had needed a new police chief and it had just worked out.

"It's better if you know what you're meant to do," he says, giving her a smile. "That's a hell of a lot better than doing something just because it's what you've always done."

"Try telling that to my parents though," I said wryly. Convincing mom and dad that I was meant to be a reporter -- and that that was okay -- was difficult at the best of times. At the worst of times, I was destined for military school. If there was one thing to be said about Darrow, it was the freedom I got. I would not trade in Mom and Dad for that freedom, but it helped ease the sting.

"Anyway," I said. "If you do choose the force, ask to get partnered with Jake Vickers. He's pretty cool."

Plus, I thought it would be cool to have both of them as back up.

"C'mon, parents can't be told anything," Hopper says with a rough laugh. He knows that from experience, being one twice over now, because it had never much mattered what Eleven said to him, he always new best and he knows that stubborn attitude is part of what contributed to her disappearing in the first place.

Not that he thinks he's really learned. He's just aware of it now.

"Jake Vickers, I'll make sure to remember that," he says, then grimaces. "If I really can't leave here, I'm probably going back to police work, aren't I?" It just seems to be the only thing to do.

I grinned when he laughed. Even though he had a daughter, and probably would be just as furious with her as my dad was with me if she got up to my kind of no good, he at least had a good humor about it. Most people, I felt, would have sided immediately with my dad.

I shrugged. "Unless you want to do nothing," I said. "Think of it as a way early retirement." Honestly, he looked like he could be near to retirement age, but what did I know? I didn't want to make that mistake.

"Just take long walks around the city, protecting teenage girls from creeps. There are worse ways to spend your time."

"Retirement," he says, then groans a little. "Well, now I just feel old."

In Hawkins he would have been at least eighteen years from retirement, long enough for him to get a pretty decent pension, long enough for him to raise another kid, really, but now he's in a city where the kids think he's already old enough to retire. Even if she had said early.

"Are there a lot of creeps teenage girls need protecting from?" he asks in return. That's not something he'll ever just walk away from, that's for sure, but whatever her answer is might help him get a better sense of what Darrow is like in terms of crime.

"There are a couple," I admitted, wrinkling my nose to the subject. Ben, of course, was something that I had partially invited, but that didn't take away from his creep factor. There were run of the mill creeps at school, too. The types that wouldn't really make any moves that couldn't be fended off. It was the ones like Ben and Tad that I (and Betty) were on the watch for.

"Ben's not that bad but... I mean, you heard about the Purge, right?"

Hopper's brow creases and he says, "No."

Whatever the hell it is, though, it doesn't sound good. Anything called the purge isn't the sort of thing that makes someone feel hopeful about the state of things.

"Doesn't sound good, though," he adds. "I got a feeling you're not about to tell me it's some cheery celebration where everyone's kind to each other."

"Oh."

I winced uncomfortably. I didn't really want to be the one to explain this to him. But I had been the one to open that can of worms, so I had to help explain them.

Did that metaphor even work? Be a better self-editor, Lane.

"So, there's apparently one night every seven years where all the laws go out the window," I said. "You're allowed to do anything. Arson, breaking and entering, theft. ...Murder. Some people take it real far and turn it into a, uh..." I swallowed hard, the memories coming up unbidden. "Hunting sport."

"What the fuck."

The words just come out, he hasn't planned for them and it's not like it's her fault he's hearing this for the first time. She didn't plan the damn thing, but it sounds like a prank. Like some shitty thing a kid would tell him to get him to bring it up around someone else and look like an asshole, only he can see it in her eyes that she's not just yanking his chain.

"And cops just don't do anything?" he asks. He wouldn't have been able to do that, just sit by while people are hurt. Hopper might not be good for much, but he's a pretty decent cop.

I shrugged helplessly, then edited myself to add: "I mean, some of them tried. Like Jake. He went out to try and protect people. But it was the whole city and the whole point was that everything illegal was legal. They didn't have any power."

I started to mutter something else under my breath, then asked myself why I was bothering. Clearly Hopper disliked this as much as I did, but everyone native was so deadset on this being a good thing that I found myself watching my volume sometimes.

"Some of them definitely were in on it."

That doesn't surprise Hopper, as much as he wishes he could say it did, and his mouth twists into a frown. He'd worked in New York, he'd seen more than a few dirty cops during his time there and it's not like he himself is always a shining example of perfection, but he knows he never took a damn bribe and he knows he wouldn't just sit by while people get hurt during an event like the one Lois is describing.

"Yeah, some cops are shits," he agrees, still frowning. "But who the hell comes up with an idea like that in the first place? It'd have to be passed by government officials to get that kind of play in a city this size."

I wasn't at all surprised -- or particularly pleased -- that Hopper clearly found the whole thing disgusting. That was the proper reaction that someone should have to this kind of thing. It just assured me that he was a standard level good human being. Which was good.

"Exactly," I said, nodding. "It's like, a tradition. It dates back centuries. Which is weird in and of itself." For other reasons that I wasn't about to explain to him right now. The city was weird enough without taking into account the fact that it didn't really exist that many years ago.

"But, yeah, ask any Darrow native and they think it's completely normal. And good."

"Shit," Hopper says again. He's seen a lot of really weird shit in Hawkins, things he never would have imagined as accepting as being normal, but at least no one had been in the streets killing each other and getting away with it because some government official said it was okay to do that every seven years.

"I'm not sure if that makes me want to go back to being a cop more or less," he admits. Maybe he can help in the day to day, but if something like that comes around again and he's helpless to really do anything, he knows that's something he won't deal with very well.

"It's only every seven years," I said reassuringly. And then I realized that, when I said it, it was with the assumption that neither of us would be here in seven years. It would be someone else's problem, not ours. We would be gone.

Wouldn't we? Did people stay in Darrow for that many years?

"There's a lot of good stuff you can do in the meanwhile."

"Yeah," he agrees. "It's just trying to work out who the good cops are and who the bad ones are is a hell of a thing."

And he doesn't want to sound like a complete asshole, but he's tired. Maybe that'll change with a little bit of time, but right now, he barely gets through his days. He wants to drink, he wants to sit alone in the dark apartment he's been given and not think about anything, about everything he's missing. It would be good for him to go back to work, but he's just so damn tired of dealing with conspiracies and shitty people who can't get their morals together, who do bad things to good kids without even a thought. He's not sure he has the energy to do all that again.

"Maybe for the time being I just wander around the city and see who I find trying to give people a hard time in alleys," he says with a small smile.

I could hear how much he didn't want to go sorting through who was good and who was bad. I could probably insist that Jake was one of the good ones until I was blue in the face, but how much did that matter when you had to question everyone else you were working with? It had been tiring enough when I had thought The Third was against me, and that had been the opposite situation: all good people, one bad egg.

I didn't blame him for not being enthusiastic about his career choices right now.

I grinned at him. "Hey, I mean, I have no problem with that, on a personal, selfish level," I said. "Though I'm trying to do better about not making a habit of getting into trouble."

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don't get comfortable don't be sensible

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