runtowardsomething | (no subject)

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jim hopper

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The apartment is empty when Beverly gets home, a fact for which she's more than a little relieved. As safe as she feels here and as grateful as she is for that, she isn't sure how much she'd be able to talk about yet. For one fleeting moment, she'd felt nearly invincible, knowing that what used to happen to her isn't anything she'll let happen to her again, or to anyone else if she can help it. She'd walked away with the upper hand. It's only since then that panic has started to set in, a residual effect that makes her feel like she's coming out of her own skin. By the time she locks the door behind her, then double- and triple-checks it, she can barely breathe for how tight her chest is, lightheaded and queasy and unable to shake the feeling that she'll never be clean again. She wouldn't be able to explain it if she tried. She doesn't want to have to try, at least not until she's pulled herself together a little. Hopper should probably know that there's someone at the Home who makes the girls uncomfortable enough to have earned the moniker Creepy Tim, but it isn't like anything happened. There's nothing so weird or wrong about touching her shoulder and her hair. He didn't look at her in a way she she hasn't been looked at before.

Maybe that's part of what's so unsettling. If it was nothing, as she feels fairly certain it was, then there's no reason she should be this upset about it.

Taking full advantage of being home alone, she grabs a towel and locks herself in the bathroom to shower. She doesn't know, then, how much time passes, only that she turns up the water almost as hot as it will go and stands under the spray, scrubbing her skin and hair, until it runs too cold to stand. It still doesn't feel like enough, doesn't erase the memory of Creepy Tim's fingertips against her ear as he pushed her hair back or her father's face hovering over her. She can't stay in the shower forever, though, as nice as the idea seems in the moment. Her skin is flushed and raw when she emerges, and she still feels sick, but she dresses in an oversized t-shirt and a pair of pajama pants and curls up on the couch, her knees held to her chest, until the front door opens. Her hair is still damp.

"Hey," she says, trying not to seem too obviously like something is wrong. "Do any exciting policework today?"

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By the time he locks the door behind him and starts to unhook his police belt and kick off his boots, he can tell something is wrong. Beverly's sitting on the couch, but the TV isn't on and she doesn't look like she's been doing homework or reading, and he doesn't think she'd only just gotten comfortable when he'd come through the door. Something about the way she's sitting makes him feel like she's been there a little while. Her hair is damp from the shower, but not wet, and there's something in her face, too. Something in her voice.

But he doesn't ask outright. Not straight off anyway.

"Oh, yeah," he says. "Bobby and I got to sit down and fill out a stack of paperwork relating to last week's robbery at the gas station. Then we called witnesses for a few hours. Bein' a cop is a rollercoaster of excitement."

Even with as shaky and detached as she feels, at once both too present in her body and not there at all, Beverly is struck for a moment by an odd, almost overwhelming sense of relief. Back home, she used to spend as much time as possible out of the apartment, dreading being within those walls when her father was. Here, though, she's safe. It doesn't negate what happened earlier or how fucked in the head she is over it, but it's still an unquantifiable improvement over the way things were before.

Without Hopper, she'd still be living at the Home, too. She would have to see Creepy Tim all the time, and she doesn't know if she could take that, but she also knows that no one would do anything about it when he hasn't actually done anything. They'd tell her he was just being nice, and if it made her feel uncomfortable, it was an accident. She knows better than that, though. She's seen that type of nice before.

"Sounds fun," she says, knowing full well that it does not, wanting to at least try to act normal as much as she can. A part of her kind of doubts it'll work, but not making the effort would feel too much like giving in. "Exactly what people become a cop for, paperwork and phone calls."

"That's what I got into it for," he agrees. "And to become a very rich man. Seems like I got kinda screwed over in that regard, huh?"

He goes to the bedroom first so he can secure his weapon and takes a few moments to change into something more comfortable, wanting to give Beverly a second on her own, too. Something is going on with her. He wants to ask, but he also doesn't want to rush her into anything either.

Coming out a few minutes later wearing jeans and a sweatshirt, he looks in on Beverly.

"You want somethin' to eat?" he asks. "Pizza?"

"Pizza sounds great," Beverly says, fidgeting absently with the hem of her shirt just for something to do with her hands. It's at least halfway true. Though part of her feels too sick to eat anything at all, and she really doesn't want to get Hopper to order out if she's going to wind up wasting it, the rest of her thinks junk food is pretty well in order right about now. She could definitely stand to eat her feelings by way of pizza. Besides, she tells herself again, it shouldn't matter. Nothing happened. There's no reason for her to be this thrown, not to go about her evening the way she normally would.

She repeats it in her head like a mantra: Nothing happened nothing happened nothing happened. While she believes it, though, she doesn't really feel like it, in a way she can't entirely make sense of.

"Maybe you aren't rich, but at least we can still have takeout." She's not sure how convincingly humorous she manages to sound, but fuck, at least she's trying. She used to be better at burying this, but she's had over a year now of relative safety. Some things can't be shaken off entirely, but she lost that particular habit.

Hopper orders the pizza, the same order they usually get, then gets himself a beer from the refrigerator and a can of coke for Beverly. Coming into the living room, he sinks down beside her and sets both their drinks on the coffee table, forgetting the coasters, just like he usually does. Diane would've given him hell about the inevitable rings, but the coffee table is the cheap thing that came with the apartment and he doesn't much care.

"So you wanna talk about it?" he asks once he's settled. He's on the other side of the couch, not too close to her, giving her space if she needs. There's room for her to flee down the hallway to her bedroom if she decided she needs to and he won't follow in that case. Not like he did with Eleven. They're not fighting right now anyway, he just wants to be there for her.

"Whatever it is that's buggin' you," he clarifies before taking a sip of beer.

It shouldn't be bugging her, Beverly thinks instinctively. The fact that that's the case, though, means that there is something, whether that should be the case or not. She still isn't sure how to talk about it. If nothing happened, it isn't worth making a big deal out of, and nothing did happen. Hell, she doesn't even live there. She might have heard stories about Creepy Tim being, well, creepy, and he is, but that doesn't mean there's anything to it but just a vibe and an excessive friendliness.

Besides, if she tells Hopper, then it's real, somehow. If she tells him, he might do something about it, and she doesn't know if she wants that. If she tells him, and he goes to Tim, then he might find out that she threatened to kill Tim, and she can't be totally sure how that might go over.

But she has to say something, and she doubts she could shake this off so easily, so she shrugs. "It's nothing," she says, and if she's still trying to convince herself of that, she sees no point in adding as much. "I stopped by the Home earlier to hang out with some people. This guy who works there now... I didn't like how he looked at me. That's all."

The second the words leave her mouth, Hopper is thunderously angry, although he does his best not to show it, taking another slow sip of his beer.

"On par with that gym teacher?" he asks. That's a pretty good metric, he thinks, given the uneasy vibe he'd gotten from the guy when he'd gone to talk with him. It's the same sort of scenario with someone who works at the damn Children's Home, someone around the teenagers there almost all the time, but somehow it seems worse, too. The Home is supposed to be a place where they can have their privacy and feel safe.

Maybe he won't say anything, but he sure as hell is going to keep an eye out for the next little while. Beverly might be more sensitive than others to men like that, but he trusts her instincts on the matter.

"I don't know," Beverly says, feeling a little sick when she does so. It's true, though. She can't be sure, not with the panic coursing through her veins, not with the way she keeps telling herself that nothing happened. In the moment, she'd been entirely sure of it. Now, it's too easy to second-guess herself. Maybe she's making too much of it. Maybe he was just being friendly.

Even when she thinks it, she doesn't really believe it, but she knows it's not exactly a subject on which she's capable of being impartial.

She takes a sip of her soda to buy herself a moment's time, still tense and drawn in on herself, not sure how to be or do otherwise yet. "He didn't... Nothing happened. Not really. But he touched my hair." She'd effectively shut down after that. Now, she barely even remembers leaving the Home at all or how she got outside, only that Jamie was with her and that she'd never been so grateful to see him.

While it's true this guy might not have any way of knowing how much that might set Beverly off, Hopper isn't prepared to give him the benefit of the doubt. Adult men don't walk around touching the hair of a teenage girl without it being inappropriate. There's no way around that, no grey area.

"Son of a bitch," he mutters and takes another sip of his beer. "You think you're okay to stay away from the Home for a little while? All your friends are welcome here, I don't care who it is, just... keep your distance. For awhile."

Long enough for him to do something about it.

"Yes," Beverly says, maybe just a touch too quickly, nodding emphatically. She can’t go back there, not anytime soon, not with the way she threatened Tim. That isn’t something she’s sure she should talk about — Hopper is more like a father to her than her own father ever was, but he’s also a fucking cop, and threatening to bash someone’s head in is probably something cops would frown upon — but walking back into the aftermath of that seems like a bad idea. There’s no telling how Creepy Tim might respond to that. If he’s as bad as all that, it might be better to give her friends a reprieve anyway, at least the other girls like Cosette and Eponine, whom she doubts would take much better to it than she did herself. "I can do that."

She forces herself to crack a thin smile, as much as she’s been able to manage since all of this happened in the first place. "As long as you don’t mind an apartment full of teenagers." Difficult as it is to get perspective, she thinks her friends are a pretty good bunch, anyway, not the type to throw wild parties or break shit in the apartment or drink Hopper’s beers.

"I'll manage," he answers in a dry voice, trying for a bit of levity even though he's still distracted. Doing nothing isn't an option. If this is an ongoing thing with all the girls who live at the Home, they deserve to have someone stand up for them, but Hopper also knows there's not much that can be done without some real evidence. He can threaten the guy and maybe it scares him off the Home, but that doesn't make him stop.

And if he's at the Home, Hopper knows where he is. That alone makes it worth it not to say anything just yet.

"I'll keep an eye on him," he promises quietly. "See what I can figure out and take to someone at work. Okay?"

Given that he'd taken Beverly in, the workers at the Home know who he is. He thinks he can get one of them in on this and make them see what's going on. Get them to watch out for the girls, too.

"Okay," Beverly says, nodding again. It's all anyone can do, really, and more than anyone back in Derry would ever have done, if they'd even believed her at all, which they probably wouldn't have. Unsettled as she might be, her skin still crawling despite her having showered, she knows she's lucky, too, and not just because of the voice in her head that keeps telling her that nothing really happened, that she has no reason to be so shaken by this. Only the other Losers ever had her back before. That's not the case anymore, and she knows that Hopper means it when he says he'll try to figure something out.

She should try to say so, but all that comes out instead is a quiet, if heartfelt, "Thanks."

"Yeah, of course," he says with a shrug, although he knows Beverly hasn't exactly been given a lot of reasons to believe anyone would be there for her. She has her friends and he's glad for that, but the adults in her life haven't proven to be of much use and while he knows he's got his own issues to contend with, at least he's better in that regard. He's not about to let her get hurt, no matter what it might cost him.

"You got much of an appetite?" he asks. "Or should we skip it and just go straight to turning on the TV?"

He should be asking about homework. Making sure she's eating even if she's not that hungry. He should be doing the things a responsible guardian is supposed to do, but right now the only thing he's really worried about is making sure she's comfortable. If that means skipping dinner and homework for one night, he doesn't care.

Beverly has to pause for a moment to consider that, not wanting to wind up with food she can't eat but not entirely wanting to give in to how off she feels. No matter how many times she keeps reminding herself that nothing happened, that she's fine, that he barely touched her, she can't shake this unsettled feeling, the way every muscle in her body seems tense like they haven't caught onto the fact that she's safe now. She is, of course, there isn't any question in her mind about that, but it's hard to entirely convince herself of that, too.

But she nods, figuring she can at least make an effort, and that Hopper will understand if she winds up not being up to it after all. He's only been understanding so far; there's no reason for her to believe that would change. "I could try to eat a little," she says. "I don't know how much, but..."

Hopper nods and says, "Tomato and cheese sandwiches sound okay?"

It's something small, something light, and if she can only eat half a sandwich, it's not the end of the world. He doesn't want her to eat nothing, it's his job to look after her, but he sure as hell isn't going to force a full meal on her if she's not feeling it. A sandwich had some of the food groups she's supposed to eat every day. At least he thinks it does.

"Find us somethin' to watch and I'll make the food," he says as he gets up from the couch. It's not much, he doesn't know how to properly comfort her at the best of times and right now he knows better than to try and touch her. All Hopper can do is hope he's not completely messing this up.

"Yeah," Beverly says, nodding again. "Yeah, that sounds good." It's something light enough that it should be fine, not enough to make her feel worse when she's already a little queasy. If she winds up not feeling able to eat, it won't be a big loss, either. Right now, though, the idea of something normal seems comforting, the best way to try to shake this awful sensation that's settled into her bones. She's safe here. She just needs to convince herself of that, to remind her body of what her brain knows and stop feeling so fucking freaked out over nothing.

Reaching for the remote, she turns the TV on, muting it as she starts to flip through channels. Some kind of crappy movie, she thinks, might be the best thing for both of them, and there shouldn't be any shortage of those to watch. "I bet I can find something amazingly bad."

It doesn't take Hopper too long to make toast and cut the cheese and tomato. He goes light on the mayo for Beverly's, just in case it's too much, then returns to the living room holding two plates. He's got a couple sandwiches on his, just one on hers, although he'll be happy to share if it turns out she's able to eat more than she thinks.

"So what'd you find us?" he asks as he sits down and puts the plates down on the coffee table. "Something with zombies? Vampires?"

He's not big on monster movies after all the shit he's seen, but he'll watch one if that's what Beverly wants.

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