Time After Time (a Stranger Things fanfiction)

Safety Dance

"Safety Dance"

Say, we can act if we want to

If we don't, nobody will

And you can act real rude and totally removed

And I can act like an imbecile

- Men Without Hats

Hopper came awake faster than he would have liked to. One minute, oblivion; the next minute, everything hurt. He closed his eyes for a moment, assessing the damages, deciding nothing felt so badly injured that he was in immediate danger, and tried to remember what had happened.

As from a long way away, he heard a familiar voice saying, "Hey, careful", and opened his eyes to see a very blurry Joyce coming toward him. He was ... in his cabin? That was weird, because he could have sworn he was at the Hawkins Lab facility. How had he gotten here?

"Careful," Joyce said again, her voice echoing in his head.

"Hey," he managed to get out through swollen lips as she sat down next to him.

"Hey," she replied.

"Joyce." There might have been a moment there, despite the amount of pain his body was in, but his stomach chose that moment to rebel against the abuse he had taken.

She reached for a bowl sitting nearby and held it for him as he vomited.

He rolled onto his back, moaning loudly. God, that had hurt. Joyce poured a couple of Tylenol into her hand and held it out to him.

"How long have I been out?"

"A while. You've been ... drifting, in and out."

"Yeah, but how did I get here?" he asked around a mouthful of capsules, pushing himself up enough to accept the glass of water she held to his lips.

"Slowly," Joyce told him. "What's the last thing you remember?"

"Some thug attacked me." He managed to keep from shouting, cursing, or passing out from the pain as he sat up, but only just.

Joyce frowned at him. "Hey, you need to rest."

"No. Fine."

"No, you're not fine!" she protested.

He got up from the couch, realizing that he was naked under the blanket just in time to hold it in front of himself before it fell completely off. Joyce looked away, holding her hand up to avoid having certain of his parts a little too close to her face.

Hopper was pretty sure he'd been dressed when the guy attacked him at the lab. Matter of fact, he knew he had been. "Where are my clothes?" he asked her.

Still keeping her face averted, Joyce pointed over her shoulder at the porch. Holding the blankets around his waist, he went out, only to find them sopping wet.

"They were soaked," Joyce said unnecessarily as he dropped his shirt back on the railing with a loud splat.

Hopper frowned at the clothes, the sunny morning, and her, before grabbing his boots and turning to go back inside. It occurred to him that she had somehow managed to get him out of the lab last night, injured as he was, walk him to his car, get him to the cabin, walk him inside, one agonizing step at a time, and then take his clothes off and treat his wounds.

The Joyce Byers he'd met when he first returned to Hawkins could never have done any of that, he realized. Whatever else had happened over the past couple of years, she had turned into exactly the hell of a woman he had always thought she could be. He wished he had been coherent enough to appreciate it at the time.

Joyce followed him back in. "Did you recognize him?"

"Who?" It took him a moment to realize that she was still thinking about the details of last night's attack. Come to think of it, he'd like to know who the hell the guy was, too, so he could get another crack at him, if nothing else.

"The thug."

"Well, I didn't get a good look." He grabbed a can of beer out of the fridge and popped the top one-handed on his way to the bedroom.

"I mean, he's got to be government, right?"

"Yeah, but if he's government, what's he doing sneaking around? Why's he running? Why didn't we find anything down there?"

"Let's ask him."

Hopper turned around to see Joyce holding up a piece of paper with numbers and dashes written on it. "What is that?"

"His license plate."

"What are the dashes?"

"Well, they're blanks. There was, I think it was either an H or a P with the part rubbed off, and there was definitely a Y, for sure. And that I think was a B, but it could have been an 8." Her voice trailed off as he looked down at her, realizing that what she was handing him was really nothing more than wishful thinking.

Closing the curtain to his room, Hopper told her, "I think you should stick to sales."

"Can't you run a search or something?"

"I just think you have to lower your expectations," he called through the curtain as he started gathering his clothes. "I mean, this is a state government agency, it's going to take weeks before they find a match, and—"

"Weeks?"

"If we're lucky! And, I mean, what are the odds that this guy registers a car in his own name?" He grabbed the first shirt he saw, the one with the flamingoes, and shrugged into it.

"It wasn't a car."

Hopper yanked open the curtain.

Joyce stared at his shirt. "Uh ... what are you wearing?"

He ignored her. "What do you mean it wasn't a car?"

"I mean, it was a motorcycle. What is that shirt?"

"It's just ... something I was trying."

"Huh. So does that mean something, that it wasn't a car?"

"It might." He pulled the curtain again, reaching for his pants, a few things suddenly falling into place in his head. "Tell me everything you remember."