She had awoken in a cold sweat; one of a million different nightmares plaguing her short-lived rest. The first thing her dizzy eyes had seen through her lashes was the slightly open shades of the window. Right next to her bed, the droplets of rain pooled and fell down the glass, drenching the endless patches of grass in her backyard. 

She had trusted herself enough to wake up on time without an alarm. It had become a near-daily practice of being more self-governing. Even on her sleepiest days, the ones where she wanted to melt into the bed and stay there forever, she had retrained her brain well enough to know exactly when to wake up.  There were no alarm clocks in the cribs at the precinct, so she had taught herself to be more aware of time. 

It was four in the afternoon, and she knew that just by the direction of the sun through the rainy window. Her first thought was to reach over to the usually cold side of her bed and feel for Hopper's body. She had expected that he would've inevitably ended up beneath her sheets again, and that he would continue to do so until being alone wasn't so painful. 

But just as it always was, the opposite side of the bed was empty and cold. She rubbed her knuckles against her eyes as she sluggishly sat up. Looking over her shoulder, the sight of the empty spot had confirmed her suspicions. He was nowhere near her. 

With a surprising feeling of subtle disappointment, she slumped back down with her head against her forearm. She was retraining a lot of things about herself lately. Now, she had to train herself not to worry herself sick when he wasn't in her near vicinity. She tried to think back to the moments before her sleep had consumed her. She had made them lunch and then offered her empty half of the bed to him for his own rest. He had reluctantly agreed, telling her that he wanted to clean up from lunch first and that she should get a head start. Her plan was to wait up for him, but she was out before her head hit the pillow. Judging by the frigid and neat sheets next to her, he had declined to join her after all. 

She forced herself back up and out of the bed, knowing that she had a tight thirty minutes before she had to get El from tutoring and then get home in time to make dinner for everyone. While unraveling herself from the sheets, she tried to talk her worries down. He was fine, probably. Maybe he was in his room or in the living room watching television. 

With a quick stop by the mirror near her door, she fixed the fly hairs from her ponytail and grabbed her jacket. She quietly shut her bedroom door behind her, glancing down the end of the hallway to Hopper's bedroom door. She stopped to stare at it for a moment, weighing her options carefully in her head. The door was shut, maybe he was sleeping. 

The worry won the battle and she quietly crept down the hall, carefully twisting the handle to make the least amount of noise as possible. With the door open just a peek, she peered in and saw the untouched bed. As soon as she realized he wasn't asleep, she pushed the door open further to look around. 

He wasn't there... no need to panic though. 

She shut the door behind her and rushed down the staircase with her aim heading towards the living room. She tried to pretend that her racing heart was just because of the sudden speed but she knew it was from her worrying herself. 

She was met with the silence of the living room. No television, no radio, nothing but the wind whistling through the outside rain. "Hop?" she carefully called out, earning a reply of just more silence. "Hopper?" she tried again. 

Her feet carried more speed, nearly sliding on her socks as they hit the linoleum floor of the kitchen. His jacket was no longer hanging off of the kitchen island's barstool as it had been before. Out of the corner of her eye, she saw a scribbled piece of paper on the counter. 

Went out for a drive... need to clear my head. I'll be back soon. Please don't worry. 

   — Hop

Her fingers ran over the crooked edge of the torn piece of paper. Her eyes closed as she tried her hardest to exhale the stress, the endless worry that thrummed through her veins. She wasn't used to feeling this anxiety. It was lifetimes ago when it was a daily occurrence. Now he was back and the fear was reborn. 

His survival was proof that the universe was cruel. She had spent time trying to rebuild her trust in the world; that the hardest part was over. But in times of great stress, she was reminded of her vulnerabilities to fate. How anything at all could be ripped away at any moment, and she just had to wait for it to happen. 

His survival had thrust her away from the safety net she had woven for herself. If he could come back from the dead, it meant that anything was possible. Good... or bad. 

She released the death grip she had forced on the paper without realizing it. He needed space and she needed to trust. She talked a big game when it came to El needing to trust the fact that it would be okay for her to leave and know he would be back. But what about herself? Because now, the old Joyce was back in her head, painfully worried that she would never see him again. 

Oh, how she hated the hauntingly familiar sensation of vulnerability. Her gun and shield couldn't protect her against everything, even when she had tried so hard to convince herself otherwise. She ran away from the old life and everything that reminded her of it, barring only her children. That life of feeling no safety whatsoever, no security or consistency. But he was back and he had brought all of that back with him. A reminder that no matter how far she ran, her past would always be in the rearview mirror. 

She wanted to be able to miss the times she had with him where deadly dimensions didn't exist, yet she didn't have any memories with him without those circumstances. At least, not since high school. She wanted a memory of him without the poison; something to remind her that a life with him and without danger could be possible. 

But there was no proof, she had to make those memories.

The crack of thunder outside pulled her from her reverie, reminding her that she had to continue moving with time. She grabbed her jacket and quickly stuffed the note into her pocket, trying to avoid the possibility of her kids seeing it. Not that they would even understand the depth of her worry. Or maybe they would. She found herself underestimating them a lot. They had gone through the wringer just as much as she had. 

The traction on her shoes kept her steady even on the slippery steps of the front porch. She tried to cover herself from the rain with her arms but the speed of the wind blew the droplets directly onto her, saturating her clothes and hair. Even in the few steps that it took for her to get to the squad car, the rain had immersed her. As soon as she settled into the driver's seat, she quietly thanked God that her heater worked, unlike the busted system in the Pinto that would've had her frozen like a block of ice.

Her detective's instincts were pairing with her worries, as usual. Even in the midst of trying to fight her anxiety, she found herself studying every single car she passed, hoping one of them was Hopper. After reaching each mile closer to the school, she felt the worry beginning to build further and further as she passed without even a hint of his vehicle. 

He was fine. He was fine, just clearing his head. That's all. It didn't matter that it was storming outside and that he was clueless about his surroundings. He was fine.

She pulled into the school parking lot to see El standing with an umbrella over her head and disappointment in her eyes when she realized Hopper wasn't in the passenger seat. The teen sprinted through the rain, quickly slipping into the car to avoid the downpour. 

"He didn't... come with you?" she asked cautiously, her brown eyes blown wide with despondency. 

"I'm sorry, sweetheart," Joyce responded in a soft and low tone. She watched as El's eyes fell to her lap, mindlessly picking the blue nail polish off of her fingers. Her heart broke for the girl, and she knew that despite what she wanted to believe, the road ahead of them was a long one. Everyone was just so damn confused. He was there and then he wasn't and then he was again. An empty casket had been buried along with any hope they had and now that casket had been empty for a reason. None of their emotions were coming to them with ease. To understand what they felt didn't come as a second nature to them anymore. Everything was so knotted and twisted, their thoughts and feelings tangled like play-doh.

"Um... Will told me to tell you that uh — he took our car to go see David and Jackson for their science project and that he'll be home before dinner," El said, trying her hardest to hide the heavy lump in her throat and the unshed tears. 

"Okay," Joyce whispered, nodding her head as she began to pull out of the school's parking lot. She had learned a lot about El in their three years together. Despite what everyone believed, the teen coped with her emotions better when she had the option to deal with them internally. She wasn't exactly an open book, and Joyce had come to terms with that after a while. It just took convincing herself that she wasn't a bad mother, but that her daughter simply preferred to handle her pain on her own. Of course, Joyce had always been there to remind her that they could talk whenever she needed to. Sometimes, when the pain got to be too much, she took Joyce up on the offer. But nobody had really seen the things that El had seen. Joyce would understand to some degree, but never quite as much — or at least on the same level.

After a while, she started connecting with Will more. Once they were able to be around each other without having to fight over Mike's attention, they realized how much they actually had in common. They went from being strangers to being like twins. El confided most in Will, but nobody understood El's logic like quite like she did, especially if they hadn't lived through something similar as she did. If she had a problem, she sat on it for a while, letting it stress her out until her own logic was enough to provide herself with the proper answer. Will was the closest thing she had to someone who could understand how her mind worked. 

El had a pain inside of her, a deep pain. Most surrounding peers and citizens chalked it up to teenage angst but they weren't searching deep enough to be able to see what lied behind her eyes. Once she was old enough to understand the depth of what had happened to her in all senses, the pain grew. She had discovered that her biological father had died and Jane Rich became Jane Ives and Jane Ives became Eleven and Eleven became El and El became Jane 'El' Hopper and then the cycle repeated. Her biological mother was as good as gone, and then Hopper's death and the death of her childhood — she had every damn right to be in pain. 

The kid just wanted to love. Somebody, anybody, anything. She wanted to give what she had never received, but love became clouded with pain. Joyce had revived her a little, managing to bring out the happy El she had recognized from their time spent together after '84. She'd bring El snacks and games to the cabin, have girls' night when Hop worked late. She knew who El was in her core, but she couldn't deny that a piece of that girl had died right along with the supposed death of her adoptive father. 

"El..." Joyce started, staring at the rainy roads and the wipers that crossed her windshield every few seconds. 

"Just tell me that he's coming home later," El interjected, refusing to take her eyes off of whatever subject she had glued them to. Her words had ice in them, a frigidness that the teen had spent so much time trying to get rid of. But she knew just by looking at Joyce that Hopper had wandered off and that they were not off to a good start. "Please... just tell me he'll be back."

It broke Joyce's heart to hear the girl pleading with not only her, but God as well. "He just went out for a drive, that's all," she spoke carefully, each word curated to sit as comfortably as possible with the teen. "He used to do this all the time, sweetheart. And each time, he always came home after."

"Not always," El mumbled so quietly that Joyce would've missed it if the radio were up even one notch. 

Joyce closed her eyes for as long as she was able to without veering off of the road. All of two seconds away from the rainy world around her. She could feel the heaviness of El's heart — it poisoned the air. 

The heavy droplets of rain on the windows reflected with color; shades of Joyce's off-duty 'Illinois Police Dept.' shirt and El's black and white striped backpack. With the dreariness outside, even the deep green trees could barely bring color back to the world. But somehow, with both of them snug in the cab of her car, they managed to keep some of the colors in the world that were turning into shades of grey. How could Hopper's black hole be so close when everything was supposed to be okay again? The dark and hollow world around them wanted to swallow them up into the desaturation, but they were fighting it without even realizing it.

The rest of the car ride was spent in silence. As soon as they pulled into the wet gravel driveway, El had nearly flown into the house with the car door slammed behind her. Joyce stayed back for a moment, watching her daughter disappear into their home. The girl was grieving. She was always at least six degrees of separation away from grief. Now, she was right back to the famous second stage of grief; anger. Pissed off that the world was playing games with her; toying with her heart. 

El hated change after a while. For her entire life, all she had ever wanted was change. But now, every moment was cycling through different phases and all she wanted was some goddamn stability again. A taste which she had gotten for the three years of Hopper being gone, but those years felt empty despite being stable. 

After watching the front door shut and continuing to stare at it for a blank five minutes, Joyce turned the car off and forced herself to go inside and start dinner. She had expected things to be hectic after bringing Hopper home, but the house had gone still with an unfamiliar coldness. Jonathan was a few hours away in Chicago for college. Will was usually laser-focused on his schoolwork and grades, trying to get a scholarship into MIT. El was often with friends, trying to reclaim the childhood she had lost. Joyce practically lived at work, doing anything she could to avoid the silence. 

She had tried, but things had changed so much that it was impossible to label them a 'happy family' unconditionally. They survived, and they loved each other, but none of them would ever want to admit that their lives had been forever altered after Hopper's death. They wouldn't admit it because it was too terrifying to even consider that no matter what, a part of themselves would always be miserable. It was even scarier to make peace with the fact that the idea of being forever chained to that genre of pain was no longer necessarily true. 

Nobody could've prepared for what life would truly be like when he rose from the dead. Now, they had to figure out how to weather it. 

She didn't bother turning on the television or the radio to fill the emptiness of the kitchen. Instead, pots and pans clanking together disrupted the quiet every few minutes. Her eyes continued to dart at the clock on the wall, somehow hoping that time was going slower so she wouldn't have to admit that he was gone for longer than he actually was. 

Trying to cook dinner while simultaneously worrying about his every move was exhausting. She had barely gotten the food on the stove before she was ready to collapse. She was suffocating, feeling every atom of tension around her. She was worried about El, she was worried about Hop, she was worried about every little thing out of her control. After another thirty minutes had passed, she had put aside her attempts to let El cool down and found herself wandering towards the teenager's bedroom door. 

"Come in," she heard the tiny voice speak after she briefly knocked. El was sitting on her bed, hunched over her homework while pretending to read. 

"Hey, sweetheart. Doing some light reading?" she asked, cautiously perching herself on the edge of the bed. 

El nodded, pursing her lips as she kept her vision glued to the pages in front of her. Anything to avoid Joyce's sad eyes. 

"Well... you might be able to read it a little bit better if you turn the book right side up," Joyce chuckled softly, flipping the book that her daughter was so obviously not reading. El couldn't help but quirk her lip upwards before closing the book and tossing it aside. Another beat of silence passed them, El still refusing to look up from her lap. 

"Are you okay?" Joyce asked, her voice low and calm, her head turned to try to gain some eye contact. She watched as El heaved a deep sigh, picking at the seams of her clothing fabric. 

"No," she whispered, throwing her mother slightly off guard with an actual honest answer. "I feel like none of this exists, y'know? Like déjà vu or something. I thought he'd wanna see me but he isn't here."

Joyce frowned, giving a sigh of her own. "Honey, I have no doubt in my mind that he wants to spend every waking moment with you. But you know how sometimes you like to be alone when you feel sad or when you aren't really sure what it is that you're feeling?" El nodded. "Right now, Hop is trying to figure out what his thoughts are and what they feel like. It doesn't mean he doesn't want to be here with you." 

"I know," El said with a tone of protest. Slowly, her finger pointed to her chest and her wide brown eyes looked up at Joyce. "but... I have been through something similar to what he has been through. I can help him... I want to help him. I don't want him to run away from us. He missed so much, and so did I. But I can't help if he isn't here." 

Joyce sat quietly and listened, nodding at the teen's logic. She had a point — if anyone knew what Hopper had gone through, El knew it to the fifth power. "He's gonna come back. I promise. If he isn't home by tonight, I will go out and look for him. But El, he's stuck right now. He doesn't know what to think or feel. He's happy and he's sad at the same time. He's confused, and I think he might be scared to be around us when he's feeling that way."

El didn't move, she didn't even flinch at the words. "Why?" she murmured, feeling her eyes fill heavily with unspilled tears. 

Joyce sighed, readjusting herself to sit more comfortably on the bed. "Remember when I started my new job as a police officer?" El nodded. "And we talked about how sometimes people who go through something difficult or have something bad happen to them feel guilty about it, even when they have nothing to feel guilty about? If I had to guess, I'd say that maybe Hopper feels so many upsetting emotions that he doesn't want us to feel them either. Does that make sense?"

"Yeah, but it hurts more with him not being here than it does if he were here!" El cried, frustratedly shoving the rest of her homework out of the way. "It's gonna hurt every time he leaves now. Why doesn't he understand that?"

Moments like these made Joyce feel so small. Like she wasn't an adult mother who had grown up, but just a bare and stripped human being who couldn't find the answer to that question. Suddenly on the same wavelength of El, realizing that she didn't understand life despite how many years she had lived. 

"He will, sweetheart. Eventually, he will." 

"Will, honey. Can you pass the potatoes, please." Joyce asked quietly, taking the ceramic bowl that he handed over the round table. El was to her left, poking her fork at the broccoli on her plate without eating a single bite. Everyone kept their head hung low, except for the occasional looking up at the clock. He had been gone for almost three hours, and each second that passed was more excruciating than the last. 

Will had instantly read the atmosphere when he had come home. He went from bursting with the excitement of seeing Hopper to sudden silence and solemness. When El was distracted, he had quietly asked Joyce what was wrong and she explained that Hopper had decided to try to find his head somewhere else. After that, he had stayed quiet and helped set the table for dinner.

Neither of them wanted to stare at the empty spot across from Joyce and next to the teenagers. A full plate of dinner, silverware untouched as the meal went cold. 

She had stared at that chair a million times, praying that if she just closed her eyes that she could re-open them and he would be there; where he was meant to be. But on those days, she was busy coming to peace with the idea that he was dead and gone. She wasn't sure what hurt worse — him not sitting in the empty chair because he was dead or because he chose not to. 

"So... he isn't coming back for dinner?" Will asked, instantly causing Joyce to flinch. Within a fraction of a second, El had pushed her plate forward with a loud clattering noise and stormed off, followed by the sound of her bedroom door slamming shut. Will glanced at Joyce, looking beyond lost and confused. "It was a simple question!" 

She tried to contain her frustration, knowing that Will didn't mean it to come across as malicious or ill-natured. Still, sometimes her son's lack of finesse with his words caused a contained situation to turn into something much more. 

"I'm sorry," he muttered, averting his gaze back down to his dinner plate. The two of them finished their dinner in silence, following in suit by clearing the table and saran-wrapping the two unfinished dinners. Without saying much, Will had retreated to his room to work further on his science project while simultaneously removing himself from the tense environment. 

Joyce had tried to distract herself for the rest of the evening, attempting to finish up her and Ackerman's mountain of paperwork. Constantly glancing at the clock didn't help matters much. Four had passed to five and five quickly became half-past eight. She had been worried since she had woken up, but her worry had multiplied into so much more. Her pen had barely left any ink on her paperwork, and instead scribbled lines and circles on the notepad beneath her work. 

Watching the sun as it set had been excruciating. Each shade of color changing in the sky represented another minute he was gone. He had asked her one simple favor; not to worry. But worrying was her greatest nature. If she wasn't in a constant state of worry, then she was worried about why she wasn't in a constant state of worry. Being in Illinois, it calmed her more than she ever realized. But that worry would always be crawling beneath her skin. 

Every headlight that passed by was his for a split second, at least it was before it disappeared back into the night. She wanted to be angry. She wanted to throw that goddamn paperwork across the room and let the fury consume her. But she didn't, she stayed still with her eyes glued to the living room window's reflection. 

Once the sky had become drenched in true vantablack fashion, she had decided it was time to go looking for him. Of course, as soon as she had her keys in her hand, the familiar sound of crackling gravel hit her ears. Headlights shined through the corner of the window before reverting back to darkness. She heard him as he killed the engine and drug himself up the front steps. Even in her anger, the overwhelming relief had sated her anxiety. 

As soon as the door opened, she watched him enter with his head hung low. He smelled like shame and whiskey, and he didn't look too different from that either. She stood with her lips pressed shut, her face sparse of any convicting emotion. "I was just about to go out looking for you," she whispered, her deep brown eyes searching for a way into his. 

"Sorry." his keys clinked down onto the front hall credenza. "I uh — I lost track of time." It was a pathetic excuse and he knew that just as much as she did. 

"It's okay..." she exhaled. No, no it wasn't okay. It wasn't okay that his first real day home he had been gone for nearly five hours. Disappearing into a town which he knew nothing about; no known direction. Maybe that was his plan. To just drive completely directionless for the first time in his life. Wherever the roads would lead, he would go. But from the smell of it, it had led him right to a bar. 

"Joyce, you can be mad at me..." he said quietly, his eyes finally meeting hers. "It was shitty of me but I know you're trying not to be mad so just please be mad." 

He was pleading. The exact opposite of what she had expected to hear when he had walked in. But she couldn't bring herself to be angry, despite knowing just how angry she should be. He had scared her and his daughter more than he could ever know. 

She was too tired to be angry. Too relieved. 

"You needed your time alone. I get it." Now it was her turn to drop her eyes away from his and focus on the floorboards. "Just... can you stay here tomorrow? Please? I need to go into work for a little bit and El... she really needs you here." she wanted to tell him just how badly he had upset their daughter, but throwing fuel on the fire never helped her before. 

Slowly, he nodded. Standing across a room from her had never felt so volatile before. He wanted to reach between them and snap the tension with his bare hands. He could feel Joyce denying herself of her anger. Deep inside, he wished that she would actually act on it. He hated seeing her walk on eggshells for him, trying not to upset him in any way, shape, or form. She had become so tough in three years, yet she had never been so soft with him before. He barely recognized her anymore, but it wasn't like she really recognized him either. 

Her breathing picked up and before he knew it, her eyes had been drawn back to him. She was on the brink of saying something, analyzing her words carefully before they left her lips. He watched in agony as she opened and closed her mouth a few times, fighting herself to speak. "This is... uncharted territory for all of us, Hopper. And I know you need to be your own person again... but you scared the hell out of me."

He nodded quietly at the look in her disapproving eyes. He wanted to explain why he left, but he didn't really know either. The walls were closing in on him and he was suffocating when he was supposed to be breathing the fresh air of freedom — all while she was killing herself trying not to smother him. 

"I can't force you to do anything, be anywhere," she started again. "and I'm trying really hard to adjust to this alongside you. I'm trying not to hurt you and I know you probably don't like that, so I'll drop that for just a moment." she paused, taking a deep breath. "Do not leave your daughter. You can leave me, you can leave this house. Hell, you can leave Illinois and move anywhere except Hawkins, but you can not leave your kid like that again. Am I understood?" 

He nodded in return, and she wished that she could believe him.