@chiefhop.

[A] THE LAST OF US / TWD APOCALYPTIC. this is how we survive. ⁽ thread dependent.

when the world falls, sara hopper is already sick. containment is possible: for essential workers and first responders and their families to be moved into the quarantine safe zones, repurposed medical facilities guarded by military and local police. jim works inside the zone and is set among the teams that patrol perimeters, enforce rationing, stands night watch. however, the breach comes anyway. a failure in perimeter, panic spreading faster than the raiders and creatures themselves. the facility is overrun in pieces. jim gets his wife and daughter out. many don't. they fall in with a group of survivors afterward, but medicine is gone and the supplies are scarce. sara deteriorates rather quickly without treatment and the illness becomes something undeniable. so, they offer mercy. jim preforms it himself and diane does not survive sara for long. she continues on for a short while, long enough to offer sara a proper burial and long enough to ensure jim will not misinterpret what comes next. he returns to the camp from a supply run to find diane has chosen to silence her own pain. after which does jim leave alone.

[B] FIVE NIGHTS AT FREDDY'S. it's been so long. ⁽ film & game influence.

in june of 1985, a series of child disappearances occurred at freddy fazbear's pizza. around the same time, officer jim hopper's daughter's health had worsened. on her good days, she loved visiting freddy's the noise, the routine, the colorful animatronics. she would pass not long after, quietly and without many answers. jim hopper is assigned to the missing children's case early on, when it was still being treated as such unrelated disappearances. he recognized the pattern almost immediately same ages, same area. the name william afton surfaces more than once, when it was once politely said and never conclusively. will byers would vanish along with them. however, with no bodies and no evidence that could hold, the case eventually stalled and gone cold, filed away as unsolved. if the system was able to fail his child and other's so easily, he decided he could no longer rely on it. hopper takes to investigating freddy's on his own, off the books and after hours, following paper trails and witnesses.

[C] MODERN VERSE. end of beginning. ⁽ thread dependent

jim was born james hopper jr. in hawkins, indiana in 1979. he's raised in a home that valued discipline over tenderness. his childhood revolved around little league baseball, started as his father's insistence, where he learns fairness, endurance, and how to disappear into the outfield. after graduating high school in 1997, hawkins felt too small to hold him and money grew to tight and he enlisted, as many did, in the army. hopper would eventually serve overseas in a war defined by long stretches of waiting and instructions that didn't match the outcomes. hopper would eventually come home on medical leave and fled to join the nypd through his military service replacing college credits. in new york, hopper met diane miller, married her and become a father to their bright and brilliant daughter, sara in 2003. her illness would take a couple years to overpower her and the marriage unraveled right after. hopper learned the hardest lesson of life: sometimes there are no arrests or mistakes to correct, no way to stay ahead of loss. by the end of 2011, hopper left new york and returned to hawkins. he joined the local police force and rose rather quickly, eventually becoming chief of police blunt, thorough, and difficult to dissuade, the town leans on hopper. in 2016, comes the vanishing of will byers.

[D] DETROIT: BECOME HUMAN. this is our future. ⁽ thread dependent

jim is assigned to the android deviancy task because he's steady. he's been a cop long enough to know how to keep his opinions out of reports and his emotions out of sight. the department wants someone who will follow protocol, document cleanly. hopper fits the profile at least on paper. hopper doesn't despise the androids. he treats them the way the law instructs him to: as equipment, property, means to an end, as problems to be categorized and closed. they're machines. believing anything else would require emotional investment he learned to avoid so very long ago. he drinks too much, keeps his head down and does the job well enough to be trusted with such cases. however, deviancy does not behave the way the reports have written so: patterns emerge quickly with caregivers shielding children, androids absorbing such violence without retaliation, androids enduring inhumane abuse. it isn't rebellion. it isn't malfunction. it is loyalty and the fear that comes with it. as the city fractures, hopper becomes too lenient for command and too restrained for the movement. on paper, he's doing his job. unofficially, he's drawing invisible lines.

[A] 1939-1945. norma palmer had married james hopper young and quickly, the way most did at the time. she had a soft voice and a careful way of moving and james was quick to notice this the way men notice things that fit neatly into their lives. their courtship was SHORT AND PROPER, with norma charmed to james's decisiveness and james charmed to norma never asking him to explain himself. he was a dependable, serious man who believed in order more than goodness. love, if it were there, lived quietly in the cracks and was never truly indulged. A SON WAS CONCEIVED IN THE SUMMER OF 1941. that winter, james was sent off overseas prior to the events of pearl harbor. by the time norma had reached her third trimester, her husband was already gone. JAMES HOPPER JR. was born april 24, 1942 while james sr. was overseas, his earliest months spent in a house run by women and treading silences. norma raised him alongside her mother and sister until james sr. returned in 1945, hardened and even quieter than before. james jr. was three years old when his father came home: a stranger in a uniform smelling of smoke and staring a thousand yards into the void.

[B] 1945-1960. not long after his return, james sr worked his way into the hawkins police force. by the mid 1950s, he'd rose to chief of police and carried it like a moral badge. the suburban home reflected authority: clean, orderly and emotionally sparse. norma was the spitting image of a post-war housewife: polite smiles, pressed dresses, meals on time. she began to learn how to anticipate the comings. james jr. grew up witness to this dynamic and resenting it. JEANNIE HOPPER was born october of 1948 when james jr. was six years old. she softened the house in a way he never had. he adored her protectively and walked her to school, waited for her after class, took the fall when she broke the rules. somewhere in elementary school, “ jim ” stuck, in his young rebellion against his father. jimmy to his mother and sister, james to his father. with norma and jean, jim learned gentility. with his father, he learned how to brace.

james sr believed boys were better shaped by correction. voices, palms, rules. jim, messy and emotional, was everything his father believed deserved fixing. he tested boundaries regularly, especially his father's. where james valued discipline, jim valued loyalty. by junior high, jim was already a troublemaker, restless and reactive. he skipped class, smoked cigarettes behind the schoolhouse, fought boys who picked on smaller kids, talked back to teachers. he started working side jobs young, paper routes, car washes, anything that got him out of the house and put cash in his pocket. by high school, he was rarely home unless he had to be.

[C] 1960-1964. jim wasn't stupid, but he was impatient, for sure. he struggled with rote memorization and rigid instructions. he always did better in classes that allowed him to work with his hands. shop, civics, physical ed. anywhere effort mattered more than polish, jim found his footings. baseball became an outlet rather than a dream, playing not for attention nor trophies but release. these rules were fair and clear and the work was honest. sometimes, he'd offer to work on motor vehicles around the neighborhood out of his garage. WITH CARS, YOU FIXED A PROBLEM AND IT WOULD STAY FIXED. music was a private luxury, late-night radio of early rock, country, bluegrass. socially, jim was widely known but not necessarily celebrated. he had a few close friends and an even wider circle of people who trusted him to always show when things went wrong. girls liked him but the intimacy of it made him restless. college was never truly a part of the plan with money being so tight and jim not seeing himself fitting into lecture halls. trade school and the police academy crossed his mind occasionally, but mostly he assumed he would work and leave hawkins behind.

by the early 1960s, the vietnam war was beginning to surface in conversation. radio broadcasts, newspaper headlines, the mumbling of teachers. for jim, the idea of service felt inevitable. jim graduated high school in 1960, restless and unsure, and already half-gone. within a short time thereafter, he was called to serve in 1963. he tested well during intake, physically cable and emotionally closed off. he was assigned to the chemical corps, a placement framed as technical, controlled and necessary. JIM NEVER ASKED QUESTIONS AND THEY NEVER OFFERED. they told him the chemicals were not weapons and that it was safe. jim and his unit mixed 55-gallon drums of agent orange, sometimes cleaning out buffalo turbines caked with residue, and breathed in it without any protection. he saw things he never learned how to talk about. villages burned down to bone and quiet, boys dying even younger and louder than him. he learned how to compartmentalize it and stay alive by narrowing his world down to what was immediately in front of him. jim was injured more than once: shrapnel, concussions, his body failing in ways the army could no longer ignore. exposure symptoms and respiratory problems. in early 1969, jim was sent home on medical discharge.

[D] 1969-1971. not a hero's return. just paperwork and the understanding that whatever had been done to him couldn't be undone. norma had passed, his father had fractured and jeannie was grown enough now to see the cracks. jim didn't stay long after that. he couldn't. so there he left again. he moved to new york, to a small and shitty apartment in suffolk, long island that smelled like old carpet and salt air and joined the police academy, it all its irony. he did not talk to his family much during this, letters sporadic and phone calls brief. at some point, it was there in this in-between life, that he met DIANE MILLER.

DIANE WASN'T IMPRESSED BY HIM, REALLY. THAT WAS THE FIRST THING. they met through proximity, a shared bar and mutual acquaintance. she noticed him because he was quiet in a non new york, non performative way. he noticed her because she asked direct questions and didn't soften them to protect his pride. coffee and long walks. diane learned early that jim flinched at loud noises and did not like to be cornered. jim learned that she was patient and never passive, had her own life, her own opinions. when jim eventually asked her to marry him, it wasn't dramatic so much as it was the truth: to build something. and for a while, that worked. they were married in the spring of 1970, in a modest church not far from diane's childhood home. james and jeannie were in attendance, among many members of the academy, friends and diane's rather large family. the reception was held in her parents' home in gold coast.

[E] 1971-1980. for a while, jim hopper's life finally aligned into something that resembled order. he followed his father's path he'd once sworn he wouldn't and discovered, bitterly, that it fit him anyway. he advanced steadily, through the academy and through patrol and finally, made detective. and he was good at it. marriage steadied him. diane understood the hours and silences, settling at home once she'd fallen pregnant. THEIR DAUGHER, SARA JEAN HOPPER was born in april and arrived early. premature and impossibly small. she spent her first weeks surrounded by machines and quiet alarms, with jim hovering uselessly at her bedside. she grew stronger over the years, learned quickly, read voraciously and asked questions that startled adults. BY ALL MEANS POSSIBLE, SARA WAS TRULY BRILLIANT. and the light of jim hopper's life. though the light dims, her health beginning to decline again around 1976. at first it was small things: fatigue, lingering fevers, hospital trips in the dead of night. he learned which vending machines worked properly, which nurses spoke plainly and which would talk your ear off if given the chance. when the diagnosis came, jim didn't bargain: cancer. he blamed himself. the chemicals, the exposure, the things he inhaled and handled and trusted. everything he'd taken in vietnam played in his mind as evidence. sarah's illness felt like consequence, not chance. she fought longer than anyone ever expected of her, seven years of brilliance and stubbornness and laughter. JIM WOULD'VE TRADED ANYTHING AND EVERYTHING TO NEVER STOP HEARING IT. when she died, something in him did with her. his world didn't end loudly, it completely loses its center.

jim and diane unraveled slowly and painfully, grief entangling within their house like the weather. they tried for a while to hold each other up, but the weight was far too uneven. while jim withdrew entirely, diane mourned outwardly. neither was wrong and neither could reach the other. it was only later and far too late, that jim told her the truth about the risks he'd known. diane listened and understood. and then she asked for divorce. the death of their child hollowed the marriage beyond repair, their divorce not explosive but quiet and exhausted. jim never knew how to ask her to stay. at thirty-seven, in 1979, jim hopper left new york to return to hawkins, indiana and purchased a trailer on the outskirts of town. he had lived many lives already: a son, a soldier, a husband, a father. and now, stripped down to whatever part of jim hopper that remained, he was a man who stayed alive because he didn’t know how to do anything else.