Thread: Coffee and Contemplation | tempted halo

But what happened after that? I don't know, sweetheart. That's why it's the end of the book. We have to tell our own stories once one ends. But she didn't belong there . She made the island her home. Well even if being with people again was very different for her, and she didn't like certain parts of it, nobody deserves to be alone. Don't you think so? Jesus, Mary and Joseph. Hopper's curse was mild enough to offend none of them. The blinding instant in which the early morning darkness turned to the brilliance of day was enough to set anyone's eyes spotty, but it was the immediacy with which the thunder rolled in right after that set his whispered plea into the dulling deafness of the rainstorm beyond his porch. In that instant of light, everything became polarized. The dark became light, and the solid became ghosts, the innocuous nature of even the trees in question as their skeletal hands reached toward the rolling clouds high above. If lightning was coming down on his doorstep close enough that he could feel it rattling his bones and bracing his boots to the wood beneath him, that seemed a damn good reason to take his cup of coffee back inside. Above the oppressive familiarity of wet earth and grass, the crisp ionization of the lightning coming down managed to hint at its existence, whisked away in the lingering steam of a mug of coffee and of a bachelor's existence by the time the door had shut behind him again. Had he taken their names in vain even seconds before, maybe the lightning would've come a lot closer. But you can only see so many things in one lifetime before you begin to trade faith for coincidence and tell-tale signs as nothing more than delusions. Make no mistake, Jim had a good feeling that he'd pissed someone off just the same upon stepping back into his home only to learn that the light he'd left on in the bathroom had switched itself off. The clock was silent. Even the rumble of the air conditioner was dead and gone. In the teeth-clenching roar of the thunder that followed the lightning, the sound of a transformer going up in sparks and going still had been lost entirely, leaving the chief of police to get his news the old fashioned way. The rat-a-tat-tat of the rain on the roof, if you listened closely enough, might as well have been the sound of the wire bringing the breaking story to the news room. In it's own way, faith was like that lightning. It didn't create the shapes in the darkness, it merely revealed them to you as they may or may not have been. It was up to you and you alone to decide what you really saw in a world where there was, for that instant, nothing but black and white. Prayer wasn't the sort of thing that brought daughters back to their parents. Hawkins had learned that the hard way, even if they might have suspected it before. What twisted alchemy of God and Man had seen to it that a child who's funeral had been attended, witnessed, grieved over, and internalized should have returned mere days later as whole and hale as he had been before the town had turned out to discover whichever shadow he had disappeared into in the first place -- all while the Hollands grew increasingly desperate as their teenaged daughter remained missing? Chief Hopper had listened to Mr. and Mrs. Holland's prayers day after day. He had lived through their pleading, their grief, and their absolute certainty that if Will Byers wasn't really dead, then neither was their Barbara. The case was still open to this day, and when there was nothing more pressing demanding his attention at the station most days, then Jim had little choice but to try to track down another lead for her disappearance so that the Holland's would have one less avenue of hope that their daughter might have still been alive. He could only listen to them demanding to talk to the kids at the party so many times before he had to fall back on reminding himself that the truth as he knew it -- only a part of the truth, no matter how certain he might have been of it -- wasn't something that they would understand or find comfort in. That a monster had taken their daughter where it had spared Will Byers. And yes, Joyce had fought, and she refused to give up, and she had faith in things that no rational person should have had faith in, and she had prayed. But prayer wasn't the sort of thing that brought daughters back to their parents. Grief and desperation were salves for those who remained, not solutions to return those who were gone. And ways to step through those shadows, into the world of black and white where you could reshape faith to be what you wanted it to be, what you needed it to be, no longer existed in Hawkins, Indiana. Jim set his mug of coffee down on the end of the counter, the barest light from outside only just enough to work in tandem with his familiarity with the inside of his own house to let him avoid crashing hip first into the table near the door on his right or the television on his left. Enough time spent stumbling in without his proper cognitive faculties in place made it easier when nearly blind but stone-cold sober to not slam shin-first into his coffee table either. Maybe a year before, he would have had a lot more reason to curse than a startling bolt of lightning and a timelessness that only a power outage could truly summon. His legs still bore the minute scars to prove just how much damage a man could do to himself if he was confident there wasn't a table in his way before reality violently course corrected such foolhardy thoughts. He added another one as his shin began profusely bleeding just seconds later. Not because he had blindly wandered into his coffee table at full speed in the darkness, but because the deafening volume of the television almost physically pushed him to step away from it and straight into the piece of furniture that most deserved to be strapped to the bed of a pick-up and taken down to the dump. His curse was much less mild this time as he spun around, desperately grasping for the volume on the television with one hand and trying not to let his wounded leg buckle him down to the knees in the process. He managed to spin the knob hard to the left right before he fell to sit on the floor in front of it in a way he hadn't honestly watched television since he was a boy, the necessity of alleviating the pressure on his shin bringing him down. But despite the frantic twist of the knob, the volume remained deafening on the set in front of him, with the blinding light of the Oklahoma Ozarks nearly reflected across the police chief's face while he stared incredulously at the screen in front of him. It was a hard call between putting his hands over his ears and wrapping his palm around the space where he'd jammed his shin into the coffee table, but the ear-splitting volume of the television set ended up necessitating the former. It dulled the sound, but it was far from inaudible. Like the thunder, he could feel it in his bones. Every word. I'm pretty tired. Maybe we can read chapter two tomorrow? Of course we can. You get some sleep. The television remained dark and black, the haunting song still lingering in the air and the pain in Hopper's leg long forgotten. Over the course of two and a half minutes, the pain had subsided every bit as much as it had ripped into new and unseeable parts of him. It strangled him from the inside. The air tasted old and stale, the air of a hospital where no one ever went home. Even the bright scent of coffee still warm on the countertop above him to his left couldn't eradicate the oppressive sense memory of something that he could never truly forget. It had only been a fraction of the story, and then it was over. It wasn't going to be finished. Yet the television came back on. Just as Jim put his hand onto the cursed coffee table and hoisted himself tenderly up to his boots, testing his weight on his injured leg and finding it to be far less debilitating than it always seemed after the initial moment of impact, static erupted into the room while the knobs on the stereo began to twist wildly, the harsh click, click, click of the buttons hitting their physical limit and returning to try again creating a rhythm. It was like the beat of a heart, or the timing it took to make a breath. It was a machine, drawing up air, pumping it in. Click, click, click. The sterile white light painted the walls, stripping them of their cheap wood paneling and turning them into nothing more than the nightmares that Jim Hopper didn't have -- the nightmares that he couldn't have, because he'd had enough salve , enough time to know how little prayers ever worked. But then she began having trouble breathing, and his hands were on the radio. Sarah. He gripped it like it was his lifeline to a time that had already gone away a long, long time ago. He tried to keep the knobs still, trying to focus on the sound of wet lungs desperate for air, and it was seconds and it was hours before the broad end of his hand was slapping down against the top of the stereo in frustration to get it to stop going in and out. Sarah I know that's you, sweetheart, I know, I can hear you. I'm here. Belief and faith were very different things. And just because you lost one didn't always mean you lost the other. And sometimes losing something only meant it was going to turn up when you least expected it. He might have believed in Joyce Byers, and he might have done anything to support her own beliefs by the end of their hunt for her son, but empathy had its limits. You could never know what someone else really and truly felt until the instant that your circumstances aligned with theirs, and no matter how minuscule it might have been, you understood that there was some chance of returning what you'd lost. Just past four in the morning in the center of one of the worst May storms Hawkins had ever seen, Jim Hopper learned what had kept Joyce up at night, staring at her wall, stringing up Christmas lights. A single sound. A sound that no amount of prayers had been able to stop, until it had, and so had all others. Everything except a mechanical clicking, and the quiet, persistent, beeping whir, like static on a broken television. But hospitals were sterile, antiseptic places. Even when death came to them, you never smelled the way that one life passed on and others remained. The blooming of the rafflesia never touched even those closest to death in the clean, white walls of the hospital. In the basement of the Department of Energy, it had overwhelmed the senses even before you ever saw the portal. The stench of something that should not have been. It wasn't revolting in the same way meat gone bad or garbage lit aflame was. It was almost sweet, in every way that it wasn't, and it seemed to light up every flaming, angry warning light that the human senses had at its very first brush with another world entirely. And when it crept into Jim Hopper's little house, it took with it any misguided notion that his little girl had come back to him. His knuckles were white, he was pressing down on the stereo with such force, and the machine alone seemed to be keeping the tremble in his limbs from bringing him back to the ground again. Why? There was no question as to what , but after six months, why now? Why was the nightmare emerging into the ostensibly waking world that had pulled Hopper out of his sleep hours before his alarm was supposed to go off? Why was the sickly-sweet scent of a toxic mockery of Hawkins, Indiana not in a locked down facility where it could be studied, but in the center of his own living room? And what monster was it birthing to claim the man who had taken its rightful prize from it, the blood for blood that demanded something be returned where Will Byers had been stolen? The portal didn't answer. Jim didn't feel much like asking it any more questions that didn't end with something that anyone within earshot would simply assume was more thunder, and he turned to snatch his revolver off of the top of the coffee table. There was more than enough light to see the way the molding, creeping crevices of the portal overtook his television, but the way it bulged and distended outward, there was no shape or form to the thing that was emerging from the other side. There wouldn't be, either, as he took steady aim. The lie of his steadiness was apparent in his wrists even before the thunder once again followed the lightning so close as to be nearly simultaneous, and the shapeless took shape. It was almost human, and every bit Upside Down. Where there might have been hair, there was only the black detritus of another dimension. Where there might have been flesh, there was only the expunged remnants of something else, slick and wet and nearly personable. Jim twisted his hands down and took aim again, stepping back until his calves brushed much more gently with the coffee table than his shin had before, but still he didn't pull the trigger. The memory was too fresh in his mind, the sound of the suffocation. Sarah. It gripped his legs with an abrupt, angry surge of speed and strength, and in the flickering of the screen and the lightning, it seemed far more human all at once. Not just human, but feminine, the shapeless mass of its skin like a cocoon wrapped in a shimmering outline of what lay beneath, a chrysalis awaiting its eventual molting. Where there was webbing and the idea of arms there were truly arms, pushing against the interior of the suffocating surface and soaking bone-cold dampness through his trousers the instant the arms seized around him. It wasn't attacking him, it was desperate , shaking and twisting and trembling against his legs. The revolver found a home somewhere on the carpet, but Hopper had tossed it so quickly and with such little care that he wasn't going to be sure where until the lights had come back on. His fingers were too quickly buried in the mass of slime and overgrowth that was strangling the girl on the floor, sinking helplessly into the muck and finding it reabsorbing and shifting around his fingers rather than crumbling or tearing away. He clawed at the figure beneath, trying to remove the mess that was impairing her breathing, but made no headway, not even as her arm managed to come up and seize his wrist, the chilling effect of the slime like applying an ice pack directly to his skin. He shook his head, desperately sparing a glance at the grabbing wrist. I'm trying, I'm trying goddamnit, just hold on, he told them, whether they could understand him or not. Whoever she was, whatever she was -- The lightning clarified the world. The smell of crisp, clean ionization cut through even the sickly sweet corpse flower smell of the Upside Down just long enough for Jim Hopper's eyes to focus on the three little characters on the wrist clutching to his own. It was impossible. But so was hearing his dying daughter in the radio, and he had believed that as truly and sharply and briefly as the lightning strike itself. Hold on, hold on Elle, he muttered, the word sounding foreign and unpleasant against his teeth, in the same way that your eventual favorite song always did the first time you tested it on your tongue. He had to pry with as much strength as he could muster just to get out of her lingeringly slippery grip, to force himself up and away from where she lay prone before the portal that had once been his television, to stumble blindly yet knowingly into his bathroom. He jammed the knobs on the bathtub as hard to the side as he could, a torrent of water exploding onto the porcelain below. And then coming to an immediate stop, trickling, dripping, and nothing. Not nearly enough to submerge her, to dilute the slime or wash it away. For a moment, it was Chief Hopper who was unable to breathe, the oppressive reality of the past meeting the present putting him in the helpless situation of watching her die all over again for the first time. The doctors had done all that they could. But he hadn't. He didn't need the faucet. She was shockingly light. Alarmingly so. The clammy chill of the muck that covered her seemed like it went straight through him, from one side to the other, but it was almost like a warm hug compared to the bracing downpour of the torrential rain as he descended the stairs, his kicked open door still angrily complaining behind him by the time his boots touched mud and the overhang ceased to offer any protection. It was right there, down in the mud, that her shoulders met the ground and his hands began wicking away as much of the clinging slime as he could. He wrenched at the black roots twisting and wrapping around her neck and shoulders, trying to toss them to the side. It was then that Jim realized that it was her hair, and not some demonic kudzu from another world. Her hair, dark as to be black in the night, with so much of it that even down in the mud she'd never be as covered by the wet earth even if she came to life and rolled around in it. Elle with hair. That was nearly as novel as her erupting from his television. He had scarcely realized in the flickering of his home how her small body had not been of the same sort of smallness it had been before, because at his size, a certain range of height all seemed to be simply occupied in his mind as 'small'. It was a rude awakening when his palms brushed, knuckles still cold and white, back and forth across her shoulders and turned her chin toward him, and he kept pushing the slime away even as the pounding rain began to dilute, dissolve, and remove it with far more alacrity than his fingers alone were managing. He couldn't feel her breath, but he pinched down on her nose, leaned in, and placed his lips against hers. In. Out. His recently trimmed goatee would have itched terribly, a prickly, curious sensation, if she'd been awake. His hands slipped down, finding her breast bone after slickly sliding warm, steadied fingers between breasts -- novelty abounded -- and managed to avoid worrying about his own confusion for the simple act that separated heroes from bystanders. One acted, while the other worried. Hopper acted, compressing once, twice, his hands folded over one another as he knelt in the pouring rain. Fifteen. Twenty. Thirty. He leaned down, pinched her nose, and blew again. One. Five. Ten. Twenty. He said something, but over the rain, over his own heartbeat, over the oppressive blackness of a Hawkins that might still have been trapped in a nightmare, who was truly to say if the words mattered at all?