"No one can find the rewind button, boys."
The hard lumber of the living room floor sends an ache up Hopper's backside. He scoots forward, bony knees knocking into the coffee table and sending it askew before he stretches his throbbing leg out and tucks the other one in with a sigh.
He forgets, sometimes, the sheer amount of weight he's lost until something as simple as sitting on hardwood reminds him he lacks the "cushion" from before.
Before the explosion. Before Kamchatka. Before watery soup, maggots, and moldy bread.
(He has to be careful how he words these types of things. Joyce hates it when he refers to it as "weight loss.")
"You didn't lose weight, Hop," she'd grumble, probably nosing her way under his arm, "They took it from you." And he'd joke, "it's as good a diet plan as any. At least I swear by it." Then he'd spend the rest of the evening kissing the corner of her mouth just to make it up to her.
(It's all he can do in a cabin full of teenagers milling about at any given moment; all they've been able to do since returning stateside. He still curses that red phone, sometimes.)
Joyce emerges from the bathroom with a worried smile and gentle eyes before she settles on the couch behind him. She shifts forward as he scooches back, loosely bracketing his larger frame between her denim-clad thighs. Her warmth is small comfort that he finds himself leaning into.
He feels as she moves again, this time bending awkwardly to fiddle with the hem of his worn shirt; he feels drowsy and tongue-tied, but he manages to lift his limbs above his head just enough so she can pull the material up and over it.
His skin is sweat-slicked and clammy, a deep cold that always seems to settle in his bones after a "shell-shock" incident. But the cabin is blessedly warm, not overbearingly so, and he basks in the heat Joyce naturally emanates against his back.
Hopper's wound up tight, an old rubber band pulled taut, cracked and brittle, and ready to break.
He trains over-vigilant eyes on the blank screen of the TV, the spark that had ignited this most recent episode; he tries not to let his eyes stray to El's bedroom door.
"Relax," Joyce whispers, running cool hands up and over his bare shoulders. She presses a chaste kiss at his temple, little loose hairs fluttering down as her breath disperses them. He turns his head into the soft pressure of her lips. "They know not to come out. They're sorry."
"I know," he says back, but his voice is small. They shouldn't be. He looks down at his hands, resting in the space between his parted legs, and shakily exhales before facing forward once again.
He knows. He knows Will and El are in their own room of their own accord; he knows he doesn't want to see their misplaced guilt in their dark eyes, and they don't need to see the terror still receding in his.
He also knows this: he wouldn't be able to stand seeing their horrified expressions if they were to see him now, his body as it is; shallow furrows, raised fibrous tissue, divots in pale and pink membrane. They already know he wakes wild-eyed, fists clenched, barking hard consonants in a language they don't understand.
He knows they suffer too. Knows Will will wake with arms pinwheeling, fighting off shadowy tendrils in the dark; knows El wakes up cursing, spitting mad at an unseen force, nostrils slick with blood. Knows Joyce wakes with a sharp gasp, an outstretched arm, and the name of her dead lover on her lips.
Hopper knows all of this.
(He also knows the mottled bruises that once adorned his frame have long since faded, but not the stories that remain as flat, lumpy, sunken composition; a novel that needs no words, but one he isn't quite ready to share with his kids.)
The sound of a tin can being opened makes him start; the smell of menthol strikes him like a blow to the head.
"Phew."
He can't stop the fleeting, fond smile at her involuntary noise of disapproval.
"Gets you every time," he murmurs, then braces himself for her touch.
(She'll start off gentle, as she always does, smearing viscous ointment across the broad expanse of his shoulders until he quietly reminds her that she needs to apply some force for it to actually work.
And she'll always, inevitably, say, "I don't want to hurt you," with wounded eyes and a wobble to her lips.
"You're helping me," he'll return. Then, "Just do it, Joyce.")
She hesitates, then digs her thumbs into the base of his neck and starts working the stiff muscles with regretful force. He bows his head with a low grunt; he rolls his neck to the left and fights an involuntary wince as Joyce needles a particularly tender spot; she brushes against the sinewy cords straining against his skin.
The onslaught of pain can't be fought, but he tightly balls his fists against the meat of his thighs anyway; knuckles blanched against already pallid skin.
"Jesus," he groans, choking on a hard pant as he struggles to catch his breath; he starts to exhale forcibly through flaring nostrils.
(It could almost be foreplay if it didn't hurt so damn much.)
Joyce murmurs apologies and encouragement in spades, working liniment-slicked hands over pinched and puckered skin; his intermittent pained grunts are his only recourse in reply.
She can't see his expression, at least not directly, but the anamorphic reflection on the TV screen paints a distorted image of a man whose face is visibly creased in discomfort; she can see a tic in the muscle of his jaw as she digs just a little harder.
Then he heaves an audible sigh, nearly listing sideways as something evidently loosens within the tender tissue. She continues to run her hands down and over his shoulders, to the lower half of his back that she can reach when he obliges by leaning forward.
His breathing isn't as labored, though it isn't quite steady either. She pulls her hands away; he shudders at the loss, skin rippling into visible goose flesh.
"Need help with, uh-" she purses her lips as he plants his palms on the planks below and pushes himself up onto his feet. "Evidently not."
Hopper casts his eyes toward her wordlessly as he twists his back, sucking in a sharp breath that gets caught in his throat at the movement.
"Hopper?" She's on her feet too, now, hands hovering, wanting to help but unsure where the hurt is; fingertips ghost over gnarled skin.
"Spasm," he croaks with a vague motion toward his lower backside. He's bent at the waist now, lean form doubled over in the direction of their (their)bedroom.
Joyce huffs; she'd slug him in the shoulder if she didn't already know it would defeat the purpose of trying to make him feel better.
"I told you we should have down this on the bed."
"Stains, Joyce," he grits out between clenched teeth. He's already shuffling toward the bedroom. "Oily, hard to get out, stains."
She rolls her eyes at his innate stubbornness, her hands raised in the air in front of her chest, away from the cotton material of her sleep shirt. Well, he wasn't wrong. It annoys her.
With a noise of disgust that she doesn't actually feel, she throws her greasy hands up in the air and makes her way toward the bathroom to wash up. She squares her shoulders, steels herself to peer at her reflection in the toothpaste-flecked mirror.
Her hair is a wild, tangled mess and her eyes are red-rimmed, but Hopper loves one of these things about her; loves carding his large hands through the brunette tresses, gently pulling out knots with deft fingers to the music of her pleased sighs.
(If he's a novel made of ripped sinew and mangled skin, then she's a symphonic balm that glues his wrenched pages back together with merely a soft sound.)
Joyce scrubs her hands clean and takes a calming, steadying breath; places pinked palms on the porcelain basin before pushing herself away.
The next step is always the crash, a sudden nosedive into a lethargy that only a deep, hard sleep can cure.
If it's not interrupted by the nightmares.
Joyce quietly enters their bedroom, their bedroom, and meets his eyes in the delicate blue shadows; the sun is unable to reach them in the back of the cabin, not since he built the annex.
He's tugged on another ratty shirt, the cotton faded and the hem frazzled at the seam, but he looks looser and more relaxed.
"C'mere," he rumbles in the still air; the menthol isn't as offensive with the fabric barrier against the skin of his back. It helps that he's also lying supine, a single pillow beneath his head.
She closes the door, but not all the way.
(Three-inch minimum.)
She shucks her jeans, crawls atop the mattress, lies on her side, and places her head on the space next to his.
Hopper was never much for talking, sharing his feelings, for "heart-to-hearts." But since, well, everything he tried. He'd confide to her when the room is nothing but an inky black void, and he can't see her pity and her grief welling up in her eyes on his behalf – he'd tell her about Russia.
(The ever enclosing walls made of chipped and craggy stone. The persistent, unyielding bitter chill of a never-ending winter. The elephant.)
But, this early in the morning, he only smiles tiredly.
One hand rests atop his flat stomach (she frowns at that, misses him from before: before the explosion. Before Kamchatka. Before watery soup, maggots, and moldy bread.)
His other hand is palm down in the scant space between their bodies; she wiggles the hand not pinned beneath her own weight underneath his. He slots their fingers together and squeezes them gingerly before his eyes flutter close, and she loses him to the overwhelming pull of sleep.
She prays he gets some rest.
She prays the aches subside.
She prays the nightmares don't come.
(They always do.)
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