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ihni · 7 months

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Bubbles the fish

My last fill for the Short fic challenge ("That emotional moment that you can’t find a plot for"), as well as written for day 13 (yeah I know, I'm a little late ...) of Angstober, prompt: "From childhood".

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Jim Hopper is not what you would call a people’s person. He knows how to do his job and he’s good at what he does, but there’s a reason why he most often makes his deputies or Flo deal with the more emotional people – and contrary to popular belief, only part of that reason is that he dislikes it. The main reason is that he’s simply not good at it. Angry people, he can deal with no problem, because Jim is big and imposing and does not back down, but the sad ones? The crying ones, the ones who are silent and hurting? Jim is not the right person to deal with those people, and he knows it, so he usually lets someone else do it.

So when he walks into Billy Hargrove’s hospital room, two months after Starcourt, and finds the kid hugging his own knees, shoulders shaking with silent sobs? A big part of him wants to turn right back around and walk out, pretending he didn’t see anything.

But. The kid looks so small huddled up to the headboard of the bed, scarred forearms wrapping around scrubs-covered legs. And just like every other time Jim has been visiting, no one else is here. It doesn’t sit right with him, because he knows that the doctors lifted the ban on visitors as soon as they were certain that the kid would live; as soon as they knew that he didn’t pose a threat to anyone. Yet every time Jim stops by on his way home after work – spurred on by El, who keeps asking about the boy who saved them – no one else has been around. The doctor said that the kid’s sister – El’s friend Max – has been by a couple of times, but there hasn’t been a word mentioned of his parents, or friends.

Kid must be lonely, Jim thinks and steels himself against the discomfort that emotional people cause him. He will go in there, because the kid got between Jim’s daughter and an otherworldly monster – saved her life when Jim wasn’t there to do it – so the least Jim can do make sure the kid is okay. Or as okay as one can be while recovering from being shish-kebabed by said otherworldly monster.

But hell, Jim is not equipped for this.

He takes a breath and knocks on the doorframe. The kid flinches and looks up, eyes wide, and then grimaces as if he’s in pain. He probably is. He’s got more stitches in him than Jim’s best suit.

“Hey kid,” Jim says, voice gruff even though he’s trying to soften it. “You okay there?”

The kid looks away, frantically – and futilely – wiping at his face as if it’s not obvious to anyone with eyes that he’s been crying. His hands are shaking, and so is his voice when he says, “I’m fine.”

“Hate to break it to you, kid, but you don’t look fine.” Entering the room fully, Jim spots an opened parcel on the floor on the other side of the bed. It’s just a cardboard box, looks to be empty. “You in pain? Want me to get a nurse?”

“No!” the kid says, and it’s too fast and too loud. He’s trying to hide something under the blanket, as if he doesn’t want Jim to see whatever it is.

Alarm bells go off in Jim’s head. The doctors had mentioned that they’re making the kid talk to a shrink, that he sometimes hasn’t seemed all that interested in recovering. That he, at one point when he’d just woken up, grabbed a syringe from a nurse and tried to stab himself with it before they could wrestle it away from him. And now the kid is crying, doesn’t want the nurses to come in here, and is trying to hide something?

It all adds up to nothing good, and Jim is the Chief of Police. He is very familiar with ‘not good’.

“What’cha got there, kid?”

The kid in question shakes his head, and – hell – his eyes well up again. Jim’s got a bad feeling about this, so he strides up to the bed and ignores the hands trying to stop him when he reaches down under the blanket to fish out …

A fish. Literally. A stuffed animal in the shape of a fish, and by the looks of it, it’s been well-loved over the years.

Confused, he lets the kid yank the fish out of his hand, and feels a twinge of guilt as he can’t do anything but watch as the teen shuffles his way painfully to the other edge of the bed, as far from Jim as he can, while clutching the stuffed animal to his chest. His head is turned down, but Jim hears his hitched breath and knows that he’s crying.

And great, now Jim feels like an asshole.

“Uh,” he says, and then quiets. Because what do you say to a teenager who’s been traumatized beyond belief, and who is now desperately clinging to a stuffed animal like he’s five instead of eighteen? “Sorry, kid, I …” He trails off. Doesn’t know what to say. Considers going to fetch the doctors – maybe they can give the kid some sedatives or something – when he looks down and sees something else on the floor next to the empty box. A piece of paper with hand-written text on it.

The kid is not looking at him, so Jim bends down to pick it up. It’s a letter. Or, more of a note, really.

Dear Billy, it says, in loopy handwriting.

I heard about the fire. I’m glad you’re okay, and really proud that you saved those kids. It’s strange to think of you all grown-up and saving kids, since you were just a kid yourself the last time I saw you.

I went through some boxes recently and found your old friend Bubbles. Do you remember him? You used to take him with you everywhere you went. I thought he should be with you, now.

I’m also sending a photo of the two of you. I hope he can bring you some comfort now, as he did when you were younger.

I hope this finds you well.

Mom

Jim looks from the note in his hand, to the boy in the bed who has curled up with his back to Jim, shoulders shaking with silent sobs. Then he looks at the note again, and frowns. He read through the kid’s file after the incident at the Byers’ house back in November, and he knows that the kid lives with his father. That his mother is not in the picture. Max once let slip that Billy hasn’t had any contact with her in years.

Bending down again to pick up the box, he sees another piece of paper on the floor, having ended up halfway under the bed. It’s a photograph. A polaroid, of a blond little boy, no more than seven, in a hospital bed much like this one. His arm is in a cast, and he’s sleeping, curled up around a purple plush fish that looks much bigger than the one the kid is clutching now – but of course, the boy in the picture was much smaller back then.

“Please leave,” the kid says, voice muffled. “Please.” He can’t suppress his sobs, and the part of Jim that can’t handle it when people are crying wants nothing more than to do what the kid asks.

But the part of him that is a father hates watching a child hurt – because eighteen might be an adult in the eye of the law, but no one who saw the kid curled up and hurting like he is now would consider him anything but a child.

So he doesn’t leave. Instead he turns the box over to examine it, and as he does, his heart sinks. Because Jim is a cop, and he’s damn good at finding clues and coming to conclusions. So when he looks at the box and the note, he sees beyond the brown cardboard with its carefully scrawled delivery address (addressed to William Hargrove at this specific hospital – they sender even got the room number right), and sees what the kid must have seen, too.

The address shows that his mother knows where he is, and that she could have contacted him this whole time, but chose not to. The lack of a return address means that Billy can’t contact her back.

The fact that she mentions the fire – the official story that the media ran with, when Starcourt was destroyed – shows that she knows that he got injured. That she’s writing it now, a couple of months later, and addressing it to a hospital, means that she must know that he was badly hurt, and still on the mend. But instead of showing up herself, or contacting her son or the hospital staff to get updates on his condition, she sends an old toy, a photograph and a note.

A note in which she writes I hope this finds you well. Not Love, not Hugs, nothing that can be interpreted as personal in any way.

“Aw, hell kid,” Jim says quietly and drags a heavy hand down his face.

The kid sobbing in the bed has been through hell and back, only to get slapped in the face with the reminder that his own mother does not want him in her life. The woman might have thought she was doing a good thing, but Jim looks at the kid now and thinks that it would have been better if she’d stayed gone.

“I’m sorry,” Jim says, and finds that he is. He’s sorry that the kid got dealt such a shitty hand in life. That he got involved with all the Upside Down bullshit in the first place, that he got hurt saving the kids, that he’s got a shitty dad who never visits his own kid in the hospital and that he’s got a shitty mom who sends a shitty kid’s toy instead of showing up in person when her son almost died.

And he’s sorry that he’s the only one here now, when the kid so obviously needs someone else; someone who could help him, or comfort him, or make him feel better. Jim is woefully ill-equipped to provide any of that.

No wonder the kid is inconsolable.

#billy hargrove #jim hopper #stranger things #bubbles the fish #ihni writes #short fic challenge #angstober

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