the freak in the mirror

The house is empty when Beverly wakes up.

It's an eerie feeling, that stillness, like the air itself has gone out of the space. She's been home alone here plenty of times, everyone's schedules not always aligned, but it's different like this in ways she wouldn't know how to describe. There's no aroma of coffee wafting up from the kitchen, no sound but her own breathing, and then what she realizes is El's cat scratching at her door, meowing a demand to be fed. Maybe it's because she's been here so long and seen this before, or maybe it's something she dreamed, although she doesn't remember doing so. Either way, as she leaves her room and pads through the house as if on autopilot or watching someone else do these things, she thinks she already knows they're gone.

Soon enough, she confirms it. She calls Hop and El — her father and her sister — and both phone lines have been disconnected. She calls the station, and Hopper hasn't shown up for work or let anyone know he'd be absent. She texts some mutual friends, too, just to see if anyone else has run into either of them, hoping for some other explanation, and yet with each passing moment, that certainty grows. They've both disappeared. At least, she thinks, that means they were able to go together — but, fuck, that still leaves her here, in an empty house, without her family.

For a while, she continues going through the motions, still with that detached sense of observing someone else rather than actually doing things herself. She feeds the cat and makes coffee for herself. She lets Bill know that she won't be working today and why.

Everything is still so quiet and so still, which is maybe why she reaches a breaking point, unable to take any more. Standing by the kitchen sink and staring vacantly out the window, she nearly slams her coffee mug on the counter, desperate and angry and so fucking sad. She at least manages not to break the cup, but it's still not enough, and before she even has a chance to think it through, she's grabbing a nearby pair of scissors with one hand and gathering her hair into her fist with the other, cutting just above the line of her hand. It's a better cut job than the last time she'd done this, thirteen and terrified in her apartment back in Derry (and how the fuck had she forgotten about that before now?), but it still falls jaggedly just above her shoulders, the hacked-off strands left in the sink alongside dishes for one, because she's the only one here now.

Some time later, by afternoon, Beverly goes outside to sit on the steps leading up to the townhouse. Her townhouse now, she supposes, which is all sorts of fucking weird that she isn't prepared to deal with yet. For now, the most she can manage is to light a cigarette from the pack she's brought out with her — Hopper's, not hers, taken from his empty room. The first thing she said to him, the first day they met, was asking if she could bum a smoke. Somehow this feels right, except that nothing feels right. Her eyes unfocused and bloodshot, she stubs out the cigarette butt on the step beside her when she's smoked it all the way through, then with trembling hands, lights another one.

[ Timed to Wednesday afternoon-ish. Bev is... extremely going through it. If you know her (or Hopper or El), feel free to say that she called or texted with the news of their disappearances, or if you'd rather, it's reasonable enough that she might not have gotten to everyone! If you don't know her, anyone is still welcome to notice and come say hi to a chainsmoking mess of a 21-year-old. ST/LT welcome forever. ♥ ]