Jopper Oneshots

Broken [Angst]

Joyce and Hopper were both broken. They'd both been through so much.

All of her foundations had been so damaged that they had either been removed or had literally crumbled. Her main support, Hopper, was gone. She couldn't even think... she couldn't think that he was dead. She knew it was true, but it was too painful for her to actually admit. Some would say that she was in denial. El was struggling with this loss as much as Joyce was, if not more. Joyce would hear her daughter sobbing throughout the night, missing the man she called her father. Will started to space out, staying in his room doing god knows what, while Jonathon would would leave the house for hours. There was nobody for her to lean on, not anymore.

She kept everything inside, and the pressure of everything was really building up. The guilt of having killed Hopper, the stress of caring for three kids, the memories from a long time ago resurfacing and causing her more pain; it had been building up for three months, and she finally broke.

Unrestrained, broken Joyce wasn't a pretty sight. She would sob for hours, trembling, tears and snot mixing and running down her face. Everything pent up would flood out, leaving her a distraught mess. She wouldn't eat or sleep, wouldn't do anything other than simply exist in a state of constant sadness and depression. It seemed like there was nothing that could snap her out of it. She was just going through the motions, as if she was simply existing but not really there.

When she composed herself, got her walls back up, her eyes would be red and she would feel sick. She couldn't bring herself to eat, and sleep wasn't an option, the same thoughts from her breakdown whipping through her mind almost violently. She was tense, this cycle putting a literal strain on her body. But she wouldn't get help, and she would just stay broken. 

- 

When everyone was asleep, he was awake, thoughts racing through his mind, tears running down his face.

Everything he loved had been torn away from him; he had been left with nothing. Nothing except for the cold hell that was Kamchatka. Freezing cold conditions with nothing but a weak jacket and chains.

God. He missed his Hawkins PD jacket. It was so warm, and he wondered if it would be better than whatever the hell these Russians had given him.

He blinked back to the present. He wished he hadn't. But a few things had changed about him since he'd gotten detained. It wasn't the actual changes that surprised him, it was the severity of said changes.

He cracked his knuckles constantly, it was like a stress reliever, a bad habit. But he could deal with that. What was really driving him crazy- literally- was the disorganized thoughts he was having. He felt like he was going insane!

He was lost in the maze that was his mind. There was the present, and it seemed like nothing but the present, but sometimes there was the past too. There were good memories sometimes, and bad ones too. He stopped worrying about the future, stopped caring. Why should he? In a place like Kamchatka his fate had been determined long before that moment. He was going to die.

There was pain, but the line between physical and emotional was blurred. He couldn't tell what was what, it was just a dull ache everywhere, in his fingers and toes, in his heart and his mind. He felt numb right then, just for a moment. That was nice, for him. The moment of nothingness because he was simply numb to the world.

Then he was thinking about El. He had written in his letter to her that it was good to feel pain. He regretted those words. But he missed her with all of his heart. He wondered if she was alright, if Joyce was taking care of her.

'How would Joyce be holding up, by then?' He wondered with no way of getting an answer. The last he had seen, she was crying, torn between him and the children. A tear spilled from her eye and rolled down past her mouth and then he was suddenly daydreaming about her. He wished that he had told her that he loved her. He wanted to kiss her, to love her, to be with her. He couldn't stop thinking about her, and he didn't want to. She was his escape from this hell, the only way he could be let out.

His thoughts were scattered as he sat in the cold, his mind racing as he suffered through the ways that the prison Kamchatka had broken him.