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THE POLICE STATION WAS STRANGELY quiet now, though she supposed that people would be calling in more when there were monsters running around town. But now that there was none of that, nobody going missing, nobody getting killed, there wasn't too much to do. She was back to filing a lot of papers and processing a lot of paperwork.
Which she didn't mind – tedious work like that always made the time go by pretty fast in her opinion. She had a goal and she could achieve that goal. She could work in silence or put on her headphones connected to her Walkman and listen to music while she did it.
Lexie was doing that very thing when Hopper approached the desk she was working at, looking over the moon. Flo was at the reception desk so Lexie had taken an empty one near the back by his office. She removed her headphones. He was practically giddy.
"What did you do?" she asked, looking him up and down.
"You say that like it's a bad thing," Hopper shot back defensively, yet still in a gleeful tone.
It took a few moments of her looking at him for him to crack. They stepped into his office and she sat in the chair across from his desk and he started to let loose. Why he was venting about his parenting problems to a seventeen year old girl still, not even he was sure.
"I did it," he said. "I took care of my little Mike Wheeler problem."
"Okay, what does that mean?" Lexie asked, a little bit skeptical. And a little bit scared if she was honest.
"That little shit," he began, referencing Mike, of course.
"Who I know you wouldn't kill," Lexie interjected, raising her eyebrows and remembering their previous conversation. Hopper scoffed like it still wasn't out of the question.
"I talked to Joyce and she gave me a, uh, script, kind of thing," he explained. "About how to talk to them both, set respectful boundaries, all that crap. But then the little shit starts whispering to her and I maybe said some things I shouldn't have said."
"Why are you so worried about this?" Lexie asked, truly fearing the worst at this point.
"I lied about his Nana," Hopper confessed, nodding like he was reminding himself that he had truly done it. Almost like he was convincing himself that the ends surely had to justify his means.
"You lied about his Nana?" she repeated, tilting her head in confusion. "What do you mean you lied about his Nana?"
Then Hopper proceeded to explain how, once he had gotten Mike outside and into the car under the pretense that something was very wrong with his Nana, things had blown up from there. Mike had quickly figured out that it was a lie and tried to leave the car, but not before Hopper locked him in. Repeatedly.
