Thread: Coffee and Contemplation | tempted halo

Everyone wears masks. Some are more thoughtful, some are more sturdy, but no one is who they seem at all times. That the human mind was capable of building such masks, recognizing them in others and in oneself, was precisely the kind of testament to human thinking that made humans very, very good about patting themselves on their back about how very clever they are to be the only animals smart enough to construct different versions of themselves to present socially to one another. This is because few individuals ever stop to wonder if their dogs act differently around different groups of people, or other dogs, because they're just as adept at adapting to situations as necessary. Nobody except those specifically looking for the answers ever questions whether or not trees might grow in different directions for reasons reaching beyond the shortest path to sunlight. Humanity's egotism toward humanity allowed only the possibility of ultimate thought and purpose, toward the concept and malleability of identity, to exist in humans. It was beyond consideration that the world they inhabited might be nothing more than the mask it chose to present, and what madness could lurk in the minds of those pierced the veil. Humanity wasn't ready to consider that they might be just as susceptible to the lies, tricks, and masquerades of anything that didn't look and act like they did as they were to one another. When friend or foe looked like you, two arms, two legs, one head, whether it was true or not it was all too easy to believe that you at least had a common base of knowledge with which to make your next decisions. The residents of Hawkins, Indiana might have discovered the outline of a mask that sat over the only world they knew, but even those who might have glimpsed the string that held it together were ill prepared to truly internalize what it meant when one's entire world wasn't a lie , but could nonetheless choose how it wanted to present itself under different circumstances. A portal to another world and the tell tale proof that you'd only been seeing a single color in the entire prism of possibility wasn't the completeness of understanding. It was only the beginning. The two plus two equals four of advanced calculus. Discovering who somebody was behind the masks they chose to wear couldn't begin and end at the realization that there was a mask at all -- it required questioning, investigation, interest. It could take vast loathing or all-consuming compassion. Learning who someone else really was could be a messy, dirty business that dragged everyone involved through a darkness they had never before imagined until at long last they emerged on the other side of it, and whether or not everyone came out for the better .. Well, that often depended on just how much was truly being hidden. The small handful of citizens of Hawkins who internalized the theory of the flea and the acrobat might have come to understand that there was another side of the rope, but truly internalizing just how far reaching the rope itself might have been was another step entirely. It was difficult enough to imagine that there was another Hawkins, a city shrouded in shadow and drenched with the growth of a world they couldn't understand. It took another level of desire to understand entirely to consider what it meant for there to be an entire other world that didn't care for a small town's problems, or for the gaps between them that could be wrenched forth in the basement of an insidious research facility or in a cheap, dis-repaired television set perched in a squat little house on the edge of the lake. How much fortitude would it have taken, then, to make the other place your home? To lift the mask the world presented itself in and attempt to understand what lay hidden beyond the surface? Madness wasn't a risk. It was an inevitability. Just as you could never find true empathy for another person without compromise and readjusting expectations, how could anyone accept that there was another world like the Upside Down without changing their own way of thinking to include its existence in every consideration they made? Someone who understood it, empathized with it, evolved in it -- Would they still be human? Hopper's hand sunk into the mud, the heel of his palm digging a furrow among sparse and stamped down grass. Twisting his body to one side didn't entirely throw him into the pooling muck that once, on a far brighter and sunnier day, might have been recognizable as his lawn but it did keep him just off balance enough that the sliding of his hand against the shifting earth beneath him nearly sent him further back down against the ground. Getting dressed this morning, much less getting into the shower, seemed like a fool's errand that had been rightfully chastised for thinking that waking up at an ungodly hour was the same as a cue to actually try to begin the day like it was any other one. The world turned white and negative, the pallid grey flesh of otherworldly creature that bore the tattoo that belonged to a young girl turning to horrific silhouette. There was no way to describe it but a waking nightmare. The thunderous clap that reverberated around them in time with Elle's shoulders squaring and her body lunging upward accompanied motions that seemed to come not from a living creature, but through the filtered lens of a movie. Twenty four frames per second of motion in a world that didn't rely on the shuttering of a camera, her ascension to the bowed curve of a harp made her a thing every bit as monstrous, unknowable, and wrong to the eye as the carnivorous 'Demogorgon' that had stalked the town mere months before. Where its flesh might have peeled away to reveal the sickly sweet rot of prior meals olfactorily clinging to its jagged maw, this eleven opened as wide as something that belonged flickering on a seedy theater screen. Eroticism and horror, femininity and destruction. Jim could scarcely make sense of it, his own eyes betraying him in the slight slide of his weight in the mud, even as she erupted as though the detritus ejecting from her lips wasn't just making room for the oxygen she so dearly needed. The willowbranch tautness of her spine and hunched, silent scream to the sky reversed the rain itself with ink pouring forth, a fountain from a deranged landscaper dreamt into horrific existence. With every cleansing wave of water so oppressive as to try to force them down into the muck anew, one plus one seemed determined to equal something he had never seen before. One plus one . She wasn't Eleven. Not just Eleven. She was something else, some hand of another world entirely manipulating a puppet from within, holding her aloft and escaping into Hawkins as surely as she had clawed her way out of the portal opening in his own television. The gun. The gun was still in the house. Still somewhere on the floor. Protection or mercy? Which one would it bring? And then the moment passed. Whatever it was, it had escaped her, poured down her cheeks and into the mud, and it was so much rainwater and dirt mingling together. She twisted, not just to keep the brackish horror from returning to her lungs, but like something within her that had been holding her up was no longer present. She deflated as surely as any toy that no longer had its puppeteer animating it, and she was a girl again. Whatever she had been, whatever she might be, in the readjustment of the dark morning sky returning her from vivid beast to shivering body in Jim Hopper's focusing eyes she was just a girl, a sick, nearly drowned girl who needed someone to help her stay until the call of the blackness subsided entirely. It wasn't just the vulnerability of her posture, twisted onto her knees and bending her head, or the new violent expulsion of everything that remained in her stomach and lungs that began anew -- A girl who had drunk far, far too much at a party bent over at the side of the road while Hopper waited patiently, his arms folded over his chest, with the back of the car still open while he leaned against the hood. She wasn't going to run in that state. He wasn't going to get the back seat of his car in need of a good power wash, much less his uniform. Get her to the station, call her mom, and she'd have a talking to and a hangover the next day that were going to be worse than anything he could book her with. This was about as exciting as things got on the weekends in Hawkins. And as dirty as he'd ever get his hands, if he could help it. -- it was her hand grasping his, and his hand grasping her drenched hair, balling it up with easy, swift motions of his fingers to pull it back and away from her face. While her fingernails dipped into the muck where his hand had stuck fast, clenching around his hand and pressing her slender arm to the thick trunk of his own, he made sure she remained upright and free while she finished choking up the flood that the traversal from one world to the next had filled her small body with. Never mind whatever got on his uniform. Never mind if he ended up with fine, brown hairs twirling around his fingers even when he let her go. Six months ago, Hopper had finally had every reason to think of to get his hands dirty. He hadn't forgotten that already. That's it. Get it all out. For all the softness tempering the edge of his words, they were close enough together and far enough from the latest pounding of thunder that even through the sheets of water trying to return them both to the earth under the intensity of its pressure, he was clearly audible. Sympathy came easy to some, but even now, Jim managed to navigate it as deftly as a man of his size could navigate a waltz. He knew the steps, but it never seemed quite as though it was coming from a natural place or flow. Where to put his hands, how to reassure someone, it always took an extra second of thought that could be taken for hesitation. And it left him somewhat off guard when Eleven proved to have so little hesitation as to be running purely on instinct. For every second it might have taken him to focus his thoughts even to help her continue spitting up the last of the black lake that had taken her whole, she seemed to have borrowed it to simply move as she knew she needed to. To take his hand, to adjust her knees, and then to fall against him with a sinuous bonelessness that came from utter exhaustion. Something cold blooded seeking warmth didn't have to think about doing so. It simply did. And for all that it tried, no amount of city-drowning rain could entirely mask the furnace of heat that he managed to generate almost carelessly. But where he might have expected her to be the opposite, clammy and frozen to the bone for the way she trembled, she amplified his own heat. It was a wonder that the rain wasn't sizzling on her naked skin, shrouding her in a fog as otherworldly as the slime that had been steadily thinning out and dripping indistinguishably into the ground below. She was utterly, feverishly burning up in such a way that Jim nearly cursed himself for not throwing on his jacket when he'd gotten otherwise buttoned up, since now he had nothing to swaddle her in. And there were many reasons to do so. Her alarming temperature. Her teeth-rattling shuddering. Her exposure. Fathers were men. Men were fathers. A father who had lost his daughter didn't remove every prior mask he'd worn, but he certainly carried himself in a different fashion that he might have at a different age, in a different time, under different circumstances. There was genuinely no thought in Hopper's mind that wasn't relegated to helping the girl who clung to him like a rope in quicksand, but then, not every thought came entirely from the rational mind. It was hard to see how he had, even a minute beforehand, glimpsed her as something unknown and upside down when she was so clearly the girl that he had known six months prior, the girl who he might have never quite given up on even while he never quite entirely believed she was still around to be given up on. Schrodinger's survivor. And yet the line of her jaw, the way her eyes seemed to see a little more than they ought to when they finally opened in the dim of the morning and saw him in the same moment that he saw her, even the tension in her fingers against him, his soaked-through clothing all said she was no different than who she had been. And everything else whispered with insidious clarity how untrue that actually was. He couldn't sit up in the rain without feeling weight against him that shouldn't have been there. There was a little too much leg for his hand to move beneath in order to find the underside of her knees, far too much hair clinging to her back when his palm spread to support her shoulders. It wasn't as though he hadn't experienced change firsthand -- his knees wouldn't have popped and protested a decade ago when he bent them to stand up in the slippery mud the way they did now -- but everything that he felt completely contradicted the clear image he had in his mind of how Eleven ought to have looked. Even though her face was the same, months and years had gotten confused as to which one ought to have been passing for her. She'd vanished as a girl, and returned as a woman. .. or a woman, as a man might have seen her. As Hopper herself might have seen her, even a few years prior. But it was difficult to see her, trembling, malnourished, and feverish, as anything but a girl. Difficult. Not impossible. Not the time. Some aspects of him didn't care. It's still before dawn. You're still tired. That's what they said. You're just dreaming. Just go along with it. I'm Home. That's what she said. Come on, we need to dry you out, he murmured, jostling her in his arms as he turned to walk the small distance in the rain back toward the steps to his home, each wooden plank seeming to creak a little more loudly than it ought to have as he bore more than his own weight alone up them. He needed to stain his door with a stamp of mud to nudge it back open and get her over the threshold, worries about what he was tracking into the house about as far gone about any worries he'd have about dry-cleaning his pants or whether or not his coffee had gone cold. He set her on his couch, bending just at the knees after avoiding another painful collision with his shin on the table by sheer luck and the memory of his most recent incident, and then took a step back. The eerie, power-gone silence remained even while the intensity of the storm seemed to have grown so much lesser for not being directly in the center of it, the artificial pattering on the rooftop and odd, staccato comfort compared to being the center of the downpour. Hopper looked down at her then, beneath the tiniest veneer of moonlight that managed to escape the clouds and rain, leaving her as little more than a silhouette in the darkness. Not the demonic rise that she had been as she'd lurched out of unconsciousness, but as the girl she was. Elegance and vulnerability, and youth and maturation, a paradoxical whole out of parts his mind couldn't quite square the arithmetic of. Just as he, his clothing wrinkled and heavy and adhering to him like an impressionistic painting of clothing on a masculine frame and shadowed in the darkness until each line of him seemed to be constructed to suggest a man of his size rather than actually reveal one. Without any lights and little understanding, they might as well have been sketches of people. Nothing but their masks. Hopper found himself hesitating the single second. Just one. One second to look at her, for too many reasons to fit into just one second. Wait right here, I'll get you a blanket, he promised, even his careful steps seeming to tremble the floor beneath them in the small, well-worn solitude of his house. Joyce Byers might never have realized anything had happened at all had he not screamed first. Jonathan might have remained face down in his pillow, buried under his comforter, snoring through the storm. But the peace of their household was shattered with something that wasn't just a night terror, wasn't just a fantasy come to life -- Will screamed the scream that only someone like his family could truly recognize. It was a scream of seeing what shouldn't be seen, something the brought a little piece of what lay beyond the veil and introduced it into the world that they'd known. It was a maddened, panicked sound, clipped off at the end with a hard clenching of teeth. By the time she had burst into her son's room, followed by his brother barely two steps behind, Will had hit the floor, twisting violently to the side. By the time James Hopper lay Eleven down on his couch in his too-small, cluttered little home, the Byers were racing through the rain with nothing but the early hour and their own prayers keeping them from colliding with anything in the blinding torrent of water blanketing the city, Joyce desperately cradling one son while the other recklessly pushed the pedal still closer to the floor.