Work Text:
Temper your expectations.
Temper your expectations.
It’s what Joyce’s been telling herself since she and Murray have gone off on their little crackpot adventure to the Soviet Union. Hell, it’s what she’s been telling herself for years, honestly, about all kinds of shit. Temper your expectations, and don’t get your hopes up. Hope for the best but imagine the worst because that’s what you’ll probably get.
You see: catastrophic thinking has always been easier, ever since she was a little girl. She’s adept at picturing the worst case scenario and going from there: seeing the worst possible outcome and steeling herself against it. Hope is dangerous and beautiful and mean, and she’s had so many happy endings, even if they’re bittersweet in the middle. She lost Will and then found him — an honest to God miracle, her boy, again and again; she got Bob and then lost him too, didn’t get him back, but he’d saved her family and she knows he’d probably do it all over again if he was here, because that is just the kind of guy Bob was.
And Jonathan, her brave strong Jonathan who grew up way too fast because she asked him too, because she’d made him do it with her choices and her decisions and the town they lived in, and that’s something she’s not sure she’s ever going to forgive herself for. But he’s young and free and safe back in California this time, and so is El — another of her miracles, after so much loss, after, after — and she could give that to them this time. This time, she could fight the monsters, and leave the children to their childish things, the things they should always have been free to do and have and be.
She had Hop, when they were kids, and then she didn’t; she found him again, and then lost him in heat and fire and darkness, and there’s a chance for another miracle, and she’s had so many miracles now that she whispers her mantra over and over.
Because catastrophic thinking is easier, but hope is a thing with wings and she can feel it rising in her always, wanting another chance and another. Joyce wants; she thinks of the music Jonathan loves, and knows it’s not the first time she’ll get what she wants in her life, but maybe, she asks a god that’s harder and harder to believe in these days, if she can please, please, please get it one last time?
And now, standing in a Soviet gulag with Murray by her side, pretending, she wonders at just how hard she tempered those expectations, and if maybe she should drag the kids to Temple when they get back.
Joyce had been hoping for a miracle, and a ghost. Turns out, she got two of each.
She catches sight of Hop first, of course. He’s who she’s looking for after all; or, perhaps more accurately, she will think later, he’s the only one she thinks she’s supposed to be looking for in this moment. The way Robin Buckley had talked about what had happened beneath Starcourt that night — well, it had all just seemed so final, she’d thought, and truly she’s never been so happy to be wrong in her life.
So she’s only got eyes for Hop, standing there, in some terrible line up of men as they await some fate she can’t begin to parse out from the comings and goings around her, and she thinks she might start crying, for a whole host of reasons. She’s so worried, she’s so worried —
And then she clocks the smudge of shadow beside Hop, tucked closer to his side than any of the other men stand by each other. But it’s all happening so fast and there is a noise that sends remember terror clambering up the length of her spine, that tells her run run run, and she can’t quite tell what’s happening, beyond the obvious, as the men go for weapons and a nightmare she had thought finally over comes to call.
Below, Hopper is struggling to do something with the spear he’d grabbed and Murray turns his gun on the Soviet officer in charge, and the little shadow jumps fearlessly into the light, twirling a mace, and oh. Oh.
Joyce puts a hand over her mouth, wonders if she’s hallucinating, because it can’t be — it can’t be . That’s too many miracles, that’s too many chances, that’s too perfect an ending for the horrific hellscape they find themselves in.
Murray looks at her askance and then back down below. His eyes go wide, and her knees go weak.
Because it is Steve Harrington that had been tucked into the protection of Hop’s body and now he’s swinging an antique weapon like a memory from long ago. He’s got his teeth bared like a feral animal and men twice his age are scrambling, screaming, away from the monster he faced at sixteen in her living room with two other children, a canister of gasoline, and a hope.
He dodges under its reach, gets in a solid hit at its knees, skids out of range again. Hop gets his spear lit on fire just as it reels around, searching for what hit it, and Steve darts behind him as he jabs the flames towards it.
Indistinctly, she thinks, They hate fire.
Behind her, Murray starts marching their second captive Soviet forward and Joyce pivots to follow, praying, praying, praying —
After that, it’s all a bunch of shouting in Russian and then Murray shouting at her while Joyce frantically smashes buttons like the boys used to tease her for when she’d take them to the arcade and they’d bully her into a turn, while she watches as Hopper desperately holds the creature from the Upside Down off while Steve and some unknown Russian frantically try to prise the doors of their prison open, desperate for escape.
But just like it sometimes did at the arcade, the button mashing pays off. The unknown Soviet and Steve slip between the doors, the Soviet pushing the boy first, and Hopper follows. There’s a tense moment when the demogorgon grabs the edges of the doors as Joyce works to close them, holds them open, and she slams her hands on the console like it will help before the spear sails through the gap in the door and straight into the thing’s terrible, gaping maw.
They can hear the shrieks even where they are in the control room and Joyce watches on the screens as it spins away, grappling at its wound, furious.
Murray shouts a few things in Russian and then calls to her, gesturing, “Behind you!”
She pivots wordlessly, trusting he’ll follow eventually, and she runs to where he’d been pointing.
There’s something cage-like about it, the way that it’s built, the way that it’s sealed. But she can’t think about that; she doesn’t think about that. She reaches out with shaking hands, and the door to the cage opens. And in the darkness there, slowly illuminated by the light —
For a long moment, all Joyce Byers can do is stare up at Jim Hopper in wonder, in sorrow, in hope.
She collapses into his chest without a second thought, feels him take in a big breath when she crashes into him. She is on the edge of tears and wonders if he is too. God, she’d watched him nearly die; she’d thought she had. He was gone, and she had buried him, and now here he was, he was here, he is here.
Joyce pulls back, then presses her hands to his narrow, mustacheless face. She imagines the upkeep had been hard, too hard, not worth it to keep, and she misses it but not as fiercely as she missed him. She’ll get over it, she thinks, because there will be plenty of time — they’ve got so much time.
Someone clears their throat from the shadows, and Hopper’s head whips around so fast she thinks she hears something crack. She looks too, sees the Soviet prisoner with his shell-shocked grin first and then, oh then —
The tears spill over. She says, “Hi, honey.”
Steve steps out of the cage, as wide-eyed at the sight of her as she’d been of him, and Hopper keeps one arm around Joyce while the other reaches out to reel him in too.
They’ve got matching buzzcuts, Hop and Steve Harrington, though Hop’s more just shaved than anything and Steve’s got a peach fuzz that reminds her of a very small El; and they're both so, so skinny, in ways that are uniquely startling on their bodies. For Hop, for that absolute bear of a man he was, he’s no less powerful and broad, but he is diminished, hollowed out and carved empty from hunger and hard labor within her embrace; it reminds her of men come back from war, the vets after Vietnam, and she thinks maybe he looked like this then too. Some small part of her brain is already planning meals for him, thinking of the two of them across her scrubbed wooden table in Leonora, imagining the kids around them, laughing and joking, getting him back to the old shape and comfort she remembers.
The skinniness of Steve is like a neon light above his head proclaiming: This is a child! This is a child! She can’t stop thinking about how small he looks, how young he looks, because he’s a baby — they’d all been babies — he’d been a baby, and she’d not ever realized until it was too late. She could never bring herself to come to terms with it.
They buried him at seventeen in an empty casket, two days after they did the same with Hopper. She remembers getting hung up on his age, because it was easier to get hung up on that then the fact that his parents were sitting in the front pews, looking unaffected and bored, like they’d rather be anywhere else, and fuck you very much, Dan, because wouldn’t they all? And if she’d allowed herself the rage she’d wanted to feel, she would have burned the whole goddamn church to the ground and with the kids all spread out in a row between her and Claudia Henderson, crying and shocked and broken — they needed Joyce to keep her shit together.
So she’d looked at the little service flier, with its list of hymns and readings, and she read, Steve Harrington, beloved son, gone too soon, July 17 1967 - July 5 1985, and she’d done the math out of helpless habit because today was the thirteenth and Steve Harrington had died two weeks before his eighteenth birthday.
Joyce had bit back impotent tears; she’d thought he was older. She hadn’t interacted with him much, just a hi, how are ya Mrs B at the shop or when he was dropping Will off after DnD, always last, because they were closest to his house. Sometimes he’d end up at her breakfast table after he’d spent the night listening to music with Jonathan, but those were very rare days, the two of them trying to learn how to be friends around the shape of the children and Nancy Wheeler and their previous animosity.
He’d been in the class above Jonathan, she’d known that, and she’d thought he was older. He always carried himself older, like her Jon; and, sitting in her pew with Will under her arm, Mike and Max and Lucas and little Erica Sinclair spread between them and Dustin Henderson sobbing like he’d been shot into his mother’s shoulder at the other end, Jonathan and Nancy and their newest adoptee Robin Buckley behind them, she’d bit down on the tears, on the anger, and stared straight ahead.
Now here he is, eighteen and too skinny, all that pretty hair of his shaved off, and a vicious starburst of scarring on his left temple. Now here he is, eighteen and in a Soviet gulag, having just fought a demogorgon, again. Now here he is, eighteen and staring at her and alive, just like Hopper.
“Hi, honey,” she says again, fighting to keep her voice even. His eyes flick from her to Hop and back again.
“Hi,” he whispers.
“C’mon,” she says, “let’s get you two looked at,” and she starts to herd them back the way she had come, checking once to see if their new Russian friend is following. She hopes he’s a friend at least, but she reasons they were working together against the demogorgon, so the enemy of my enemy, she thinks, and that’s gotta be good enough so —
“He can’t hear you,” Hopper is saying softly as she sits them both down with an absent murmur. Now, it’s Joyce’s turn for her head to snap up with a crack. He’s not looking at her though, just at Steve, at that scarring at his temple. “He’d been losing it before, apparently, back in Hawkins, after Hargrove rung his bell but good. Little fuckin’ martyr didn’t tell anyone though, and all it took here was one solid crack from a rifle butt two weeks in, when I was in the hole and couldn’t look out for him and — sometimes, if I get the pitch right on a whistle, he’ll hear it. But mainly he can’t hear us. Getting real good at lip reading though, aren’t you, asshole?”
Steve, who had indeed been staring up at his mouth the whole time he spoke, smirks faintly. In a whisper again, just a little slurred, he says, “Yeah, pretty good.”
“But if you speak clearly and slowly he’ll understand,” he tells her and Joyce gives a sort of bracing nod and helps Hopper out of his jacket to look at his arm when she realizes he’s holding it funny.
On the other side of the room, Murray and the new Soviet — hastily introduced as “Enzo, no, shit, Dmitri, right?” — are working on interrogating the semi-conscious soldiers Murray’d left behind to figure out a way out of there. At least, that’s what she assumes all the rapid-fire Russian is about.
“Guess you got my message, huh,” says Hop after a moment. Steve sits under his good arm, tucked into his body, but his face is angled to watch him and Hop keeps his face angled back to him, even though he’s talking to Joyce, and it leaves something bittersweet and hurt under her tongue that she can’t investigate right now. Two weeks in, he’d said, and been losing it before.
She swallows roughly, says, “Oh, no, I just — I always wanted to visit the Soviet Union. With Murray.”
Both Hop and Steve snort. Hop asks, “You two getting along?”
“He’s the Starsky to my Hutch,” she informs him with an airy toss of her head.
Another moment passes. Hop taps Steve once on the leg, jerks his head towards the screens, and Steve stands and goes to them without another word.
“Thought you were dead,” he says roughly. “Thought I lost you.”
Joyce squeezes her eyes shut briefly. “I did lose you — for eight months. We had a funeral. Both of you had funerals.”
“Anybody show?”
“Are you kidding? You’re the hero of Hawkins.”
“Always thought I’d be easier to like dead.” Hopper snorts again and then he sobers. Looking uncharacteristically shy, he asks quietly, “How’s El?”
“She’s good. She misses her dad. We all do,” says Joyce. She glances over at Steve. “And the kids —”
“Hate to interrupt,” calls Murray from where he’s standing next to Steve, who is frowning at one of the video screens, eyes flickering between it and Murray, “but apparently they can climb too.”
They escape through the sewers beneath the prison, a little hatch discovered by Hopper and Steve’s Soviet co-conspirator. They emerge into the snow, steal a van and burst through the gated fences in a hail of gunfire and shouting, and drive to where their lunatic guide Yuri tells them to when Hopper and Dmitri finally get him to cooperate. It’s quiet, once they do, and Joyce is pretty sure she, Murray, Hop, and Steve are all trying not to think about what they discovered in that lab, the fast moving particles that Steve’s new, soft voice had called them over to inspect, that they’re all trying to not to think what it could possibly mean.
Nothing good, she thinks, and dismisses it from her mind best she can. They need to get the fuck out of dodge, and that’s what she needs to focus on, she tells herself quietly. Temper your expectations, Joyce.
Temper your expectations.
Will it work that way? If she thinks it’ll be terrible, will she get a softer ending? Will they get the endings they deserve?
They can’t rely on Yuri to get them out of there, so even while he works on his deathtrap of a helicopter, they make a second plan to try to contact Owens and his shady friends, see if they can get them out of there. At the very least, she and Hop and Murray all figure that the good ole US of A government is going to want to know the Soviets are still messing around with the Upside Down, and that intel has to be worth something.
Now, though, they’re forced to play some terrible waiting game, hoping and praying. She and Hopper find clothes that will fit all of them in and among the boxes of Yuri’s illicit goods, and distribute them accordingly. Murray waves off his change of clothes, and so does Dmitri, both content to keep an eye on Yuri instead for the time being.
Joyce and Hopper bring Steve with them to get changed. Hopper is clearly reluctant to let Steve out of his sight, and Joyce feels the same way about both of them. Still, she can’t imagine what it had been like for the both of them these last eight months: alone, trapped in a foreign prison, not knowing the language, not knowing what had happened after that night at Starcourt, if they were the only survivors. And then poor Steve, with all of that, and then his hearing gone too? Both of them, struggling to communicate in a foreign and hostile world, lost, with only each other.
On their van ride over, she had tried to convey to him that all the kids were alright, that they were safe in Hawkins (or Lenora), especially Dustin, Robin, and Erica, who she knew he had been with, who he’d been protecting, before he’d followed them back under and been taken when none of them had been looking.
He’d watched her lips carefully before glancing over at Hopper, who’d nodded, and so Steve had nodded too, thanked her in his soft, unsure voice before turning to look out at the passing snow.
Hop sets up in one corner with easy sightlines to Steve, who strips with the unselfconscious grace of an eighteen year old who’d previously spent half his life in locker rooms, and Joyce turns away from them both to change herself. But she can’t help glancing over her shoulders at both of them as she does, checking to make sure they’re still there, that they’re both real, watching as Steve jams a Thundercats t-shirt over his head before getting distracted by a jar of peanut butter. He smiles, silly and boyish, and she sucks at her own teeth so she doesn't cry as she watches him dip two fingers in.
“Easy with that,” calls Hop, tossing something small and knitted at him to catch his attention. “Don’t make yourself sick again.”
Steve flips him off with one of his peanut butter coated fingers.
Joyce snorts and Hop leans around to stare at her, affronted. She can’t help the gasp that escapes when she sees the marks on his chest and she says, helpless, “Jesus.”
He blinks and looks down at himself. “Yeah, I lost some weight. Not sure how I feel about it.”
She’s moving before she’s even particularly conscious about it, reaching to touch the scars. “What did they do to you?”
Hop shrugs. “Nothing I couldn’t handle.”
“Hop —”
“Joyce —”
“They —”
“I shouldn’t have sent you that message,” he tells her. “I — I knew it would have been dangerous.”
“You should have sent me more,” she says. “Why didn’t you mention him?”
He shakes his head. “If the messages got caught, I figured maybe they would only go after me. Stupid, I know. You know, the others all call him my boy, and I really started thinking — half the time, I think that’s why the guards would go after him —”
“Did they hurt him too?”
“No,” says Hop fiercely. “No, I never let them — not after that first hit. I’d kill them first, and they knew it. They would just, you know, threaten. But I don’t think — I ruin everything I touch, huh?”
“Jim,” says Joyce. “I should have come sooner.”
“You didn’t know sooner,” he says. “Trust me, I know you didn’t know sooner.”
“I know,” she says. “I just — I wish I could have been here sooner. I mean. I’ve got this hot date I’ve been wanting to get to, after all.”
The smile that stretches his face is blinding. “Yeah?”
“Yeah.”
“Cute guy?”
“The cutest. Funny, protective, way smarter than he gives himself credit for. Great dad.”
“Sounds like a catch,” says Hop.
Joyce steps closer to him. “Oh, he is.”
Behind them, the phone rings.
They go back.
Of course, they go back.
It’s their kids, Joyce thinks. What wouldn’t you do for your kids?
The final fight passes in a blur of panic, fear, and anger. Joyce is only really aware of it all being over — and her heart rate returning to something approaching normal — when they’re getting hustled into a strip of motel rooms by a bevy of folks in plain black suits. They’re back in Alaska; she has no memory of this, doesn’t think she’ll ever get it back and doesn’t care either. The Russians get shuffled into their own room with the promise that Dmitri’s family will be safely extracted from Moscow and brought to him as soon as possible, while Murray happily takes a room all to himself, gleefully shutting his door in the face of a “government stooge.”
She probably would’ve roomed with him once upon a time but instead she’s got Steve under her arm and Hopper at her back as he looms and glares and shakes so minutely. She doesn’t want to let anyone out of her sight, doesn’t think she can bear it, and she hasn’t heard from her kids, the agents all distinctly unhelpful on that front too, and she’s terrified, she’s so terrified, again, and —
“Breathe,” says Hop quietly. “Breathe.”
She does. One quick one in and out, then a slow one. She keeps breathing.
Joyce lets herself get steered to the bathroom first with yet another bundle of fresh clothes — these ones provided by the agents that had gotten them home — and closes the door as Hopper briskly helps Steve strip out of his Thundercats shirt so he can take a look at his broken ribs again from when the demogorgon caught him with a backhand and sent the poor kid flying. He’d gotten right back up though, spat out a mouth of blood, and dove right back into the fight. Both he and Hopper had grit their teeth, dug their heels in, and refused to give up; she can see why the other prisoners called them family.
Underneath the spray of water, scalding hot but the pressure weak, she lets herself cry for sixty seconds and no more. She keeps it quiet, one hand on the slick wall and the other pressing split knuckles to her mouth, and the water stings in her open cuts but it’s okay. She’s alive; they’re all alive. Everyone is going to be safe. Everyone is going to be fine.
Then she makes quick work of washing her hair with the motel-provided toiletries and then scrubs down her body as fast as she can too. She doesn’t want to use up all the hot water since Christ only knows when Hop and Steve had had a hot shower themselves. Joyce dries off, throws on her fresh clothes — and god do clean clothes feel even better this time around — even gets to brush her teeth, which that is so good she almost moans and starts crying again, and then cracks the bathroom door to peek out at the boys for a moment.
Steve is sitting cross legged on the bed furthest from the door with Hopper crouched in front of him. He’s poking at the kid’s torso, at the dark bruising in the front, because somehow he’d ended up as the worst hurt out of the bunch of them, and they move in such easy silence with each other as he gestures then for him to twist and turn with a little wince so he can take in the roadrash on his back. They’d looked at all his wounds briefly before they’d gotten airborne, wrapped his chest and given him some ointment, and it is awful looking, no denying the scrapped and torn and bloody flesh, but it’s not infected, she thinks, and if they’re lucky it will barely even scar.
Hop reaches up a hand, cups Steve’s jaw with it, and mouths something she can’t quite see. He bites his lip and nods.
Sitting back on his haunches now, Hopper says, “We’ll wrap you back up after your shower, okay, bud?”
He nods again.
Pushing the door open, Joyce exits the bathroom and asks, “Who's next?”
“Steve,” says Hop, moving to stand. “Did those government clowns mention anything about food? I tuned them out as soon as they said we’d get moving again in the morning.”
Joyce heads to the little credenza by the door while Steve gingerly jumps from the bed to head to the bathroom. The faucet turns on and she says, “They gave us some menus. Pizza sound good?”
“Pizza sounds great.”
Figuring she’ll shake down one of the agents outside for some cash when the delivery gets there, she orders a couple large cheeses on the off chance that maybe Murray and Dmitri would want to join them — not Yuri, she’s had enough of that asshole for a lifetime, she thinks — when she hangs up and notices Steve didn’t take any of the new clothes in with him, or even his bloody Thundercats shirt.
Hopper’s halfway to passed out on the motel bed closest to the front door now that there’s nothing keeping his momentum going, his body between them and the outside world, and she runs a hand across his left calf as she passes. She squeezes once and he grunts.
Grabbing the clothes they’d given Steve, she heads to the bathroom and nearly knocks on the closed door before she remembers the futility of that gesture. Instead, she cracks it open like she’d done for herself and sticks one hand through, waving the new shirt.
“You can come in,” he calls over the sound of running water, a little louder than she’s heard him yet but still much softer than she ever could remember Steve Harrington before. She wonders if he’d started speaking quietly out of fear of how loud he could be talking back at the gulag and she blows out a harsh breath, pasting on a smile.
In the bathroom, the shower curtain is pulled halfway but the shower isn’t going. Steve’s got the tub on, and she can see the top of his buzzed head just over the rim. His dark eyes track her carefully as she sets the clothes on the counter and perches on the closed toilet seat.
“Hotel tubs are pretty gross usually,” she tells him, “but I think you get a pass this once.”
His brow furrows and she repeats herself more slowly, trying to remember herself now that Hop wasn’t between them to do most of the talking. Then, he snorts, slides down beneath the water for a moment, before popping back up. He sits all the way up now and says, “I always liked baths back home.”
“Yeah?”
“Yeah.”
“Well, I imagine there'll be plenty more when we get back,” Joyce says.
He stares at her again. He says, “My parents think I’m dead.”
Mouth twisting, she says, “They do.”
Steve turns his face away from her. “Wonder if they sold the house. They were never home anyway.”
They had. A month after Starcourt, before she rented out her own house. She remembers how upset Dustin Henderson had been, and she remembers turning a blind eye to a hushed conversation about breaking in to get some of his things, pretending she couldn’t hear the voices from her living room over the water from the sink as she washed the dishes from dinner. Still, she’d seen suspiciously familiar polos on both Lucas Sinclair and Robin Buckley a few weeks later, a Members Only jacket on Dustin’s shoulders on the day they’d moved. Hell, there’s a baseball sitting on a shelf in Will’s room that she certainly never picked up for him.
It’s not the same, though, she thinks. She wishes it was, the fierce, unabiding love from those children, from his friends enough to fill the empty places where his parents should have been. She didn’t think Danny or Lane Harrington ever hurt their boy — too much gossip for that — but there were plenty of ways to be a shitty parent, she knew, plenty of ways to hurt your kid in ways people couldn’t see.
“Henderson will put me up, I bet,” he’s saying quietly, turning back to look at her.
“Pretty sure he’ll have to fight Jim for the honor,” she says. “Think you’re gonna have a hard time getting that man out of your shadow for a while. Anyway. You need any help with getting washed up, honey? I know those ribs are probably killing you.”
He blushes faintly but says anyway, “Thanks, that’d be great.”
Joyce stands from the toilet and goes to her knees at the side of the tub. She keeps her eyes mainly on his face, or his back, as she helps him clean up, but she thinks it helps that he knows she’s got two boys around his age and she’s seen it all before and she’ll see it all again most likely.
When he’s mostly clean, she turns around and busies herself with getting a towel ready so he can have a little privacy to finish up. Then she wraps him up carefully and dries him off before helping him step into his fresh clothes. He pauses in front of the mirror, staring at himself and running a hand over his fuzzy scalp.
She stands behind him and waits until he’s looking at her reflection to say, “Brings out your eyes.”
“You think?” he asks.
Nodding, she says, “I do.”
He watches her for a moment longer. “Thanks.”
“C’mon, now,” she says. “We ordered pizza.”
“I like pizza.”
“Good. Me too.” Then, loud enough that Hop can hear her from the other room and clear enough that Steve can read the words on her lips, she says, “And then we’ll see about getting you boys home, huh? I think a lot of people are going to be very excited.”
He asks again, “You think?”
Good times for a change, Joyce thinks, then:
“Yeah,” she says. "I know so."