Waking up is hard to do.

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Waking up is hard to do.

When Tara finally fell asleep, she started dreaming almost immediately. It was because she hadn't been sleeping, her brain was desperately trying to process all of the things she'd done in the last week. She awoke with a start and a gasp, completely disoriented. She had no idea what time it was, where she was - nothing.

She was curled up next to Jax who was on his back, and she pulled in a breath, her eyes searching in the darkness, looking to see if there were scars from when he'd been in prison or the myriad of scars he'd just picked up since he'd left Belfast. Featherlight fingers skimmed the skin that was smooth and even, and she pulled in a breath, and bent to press a kiss to his chest.

She pulled in another breath, and slipped from bed, padding to his dresser, and pulling one of his shirts over her head, and after a minute of searching she managed to find the bathroom, staring at herself in the mirror under the harsh lighting from the ceiling. Her eyes were swollen from crying, her neck reddened from the scrape of his beard from last night, and she washed her face, coming back to bed after she'd recentered herself.

She wasn't expecting him to be awake, and she slipped back into bed, her voice quiet. "Hey, I didn't mean to wake you." She knew that they needed to talk, and before they got caught up in the boys, they should take this time to do it.

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It was in the mundane that she found some sort of solace. She knew that she could take care of Thomas and Abel, she knew how to pack up for two kids, and she let Jax carry Thomas and she took Abel and the diaper bag - wearing the same clothes she wore yesterday, and it all went the way she'd assumed that it would except for when he slipped on his kutte. She'd frozen in the doorway from the bathroom, and she'd been about to get Abel from where he'd been set on the play mat on the floor, but she saw him out of the corner of her eye and there it was again, that reaction she was trying to stop.

It was fear on her face, and he could hear the indrawn breath before she ran a shaking hand over her face. She'd barely slept, and she was running on a deficit anyway - but right now, right now she could keep her shit together. Tara exhaled in a rush, and forced a smile as she grabbed the diaper bag and Abel, blowing a kiss against his cheek before they left for breakfast. She made sure to grab her purse and her phone - turned off in her bag from when she'd been travelling, only the burner had the power on.

The walk was a short one - one that had Tara looking around the town in wide-eyed awe, because she had no idea that this much was outside of the apartment she'd found herself in six hours before. "I don't even understand," she admitted, half-breathless.

They got to the restaurant, and they were sat, they ordered - and within short order, Thomas had a syrupless pancake to tear apart and Tara sat next to Jax, leaning against him with his arm around her shoulders, and she was holding a bottle and feeding Abel in her lap. "I can't remember the last time we did this," she confessed - it'd been a lifetime ago, before they were married, it seemed like.

"Could make this happen every week if you wanted," Jax offered. Fed, with Tara and his boys, so many of his needs were satisfied that the world seemed wide open and optimism came to him easily. It was so wonderfully easy to keep an eye on Thomas while grabbing baby cereal for Abel. Things could be good again; he knew it.

"This is the kinda thing I dreamed of, back when we were kids and anything seemed possible." It had still been his dream, even when shit got rough and the world went gay. At the heart of him, Jax's wants were simple and honest.

"So. You get an apartment assigned to you but my shit's all settled and we can get another crib for Thomas easy enough..."

Tara didn't have that sort of overarching optimism that he had, but she forced a small smile. She was glad to be with him, she needed to be with him, but that didn't mean everything was okay. That she couldn't get the little boy in that she'd left in the SUV out of her head, that there was another her somewhere that was trying to run with her boys and was very possibly lying dead in a ditch somewhere.

"That'd be nice," She said with a small smile, and she closed her eyes for a second, turning her head so that her forehead pressed against his shoulder, and she could feel the warmth of him against her skin. "I... Yeah," she said, not wanting to argue, because he was right. Back before she didn't have the tattoo on her back, when it was them making the most out of being sixteen and dreaming up the world...

But it wasn't like this. It wasn't with her hand smashed up, it wasn't with her being afraid of shadows and afraid of him. Not this man, not the one sitting beside her.... but the man he would become. The man she married. "When you got this place, what was in it? I was thinking, we could see what the new place looks like, if it's the same, we'll stay where you are, but if it's not, we can figure it out?" The apartment he lived in was fine, although small - she just had no idea what to expect from any of this. She took a deep breath, and looked down at Abel again, trying not to seem like this was as hard as it was. That her skin prickled whenever the door to the restaurant opened, and she was waiting for it to be one of the guys, for this to be some sort of fugue state and everything to come crashing down.

"What're we doing, Jax?" She asked it quietly, and it was clear that it wasn't about breakfast. They'd danced around everything except the fact that shit went bad and she'd gone to prison, and now it seemed to her like they were both just pretending everything was alright and normal.

"Two bedroom, Abel had a changing table and a crib, the basics. Couch and tables, the bed there," he explained. "The TV I bought. Toys and shit. Anything extra."

He could see those little flinches, the way that Tara's eyes darted from the door and back whenever the bell rang. Maybe she was tucked into his side, sitting there, but she was clearly still a million miles away. In her eyes, he could see the distance and it scared him. Tara had never looked at him like that. When they were sixteen and wild and back before Belfast, they'd always looked wholly into one another. Now, she was hyperaware of every voice and sound, ready to run at a second's notice.

"Tara," he said again, his voice low and unhurried. He leaned over and stroked a thumb across her cheek, leaning their foreheads together. "This is real. I'm real. I'm not gonna hurt you. I'd never do that."

"Maybe there'll be another crib that we can move over? And another dresser, so I'll have somewhere to put.... the clothes I guess I don't even own." She sighed, and that's when she curled closer to him, before he noticed her problems. Her issues, the way she was reacting to the door. To the people, the strangers. Abel'd fallen asleep in her lap, and Tara gently pulled the bottle out of his mouth, the cereal on the table for later, as she looked up at him.

"How do you know?" She said it softly, and her eyes searched his. It wasn't likely the question he was expecting, quiet and raw. "How do you know you'd never hurt me? You don't even know who I am, anymore. I've watched you-" And then she closed her eyes for a second, taking a deep breath before she exhaled, and shook her head slightly. "I know you're not... there, Jax. I do. I know that you don't look at me and see the enemy." But what she saw when she looked at herself... "I took your sons, Jax. I filed the papers for divorce, and made you sign a restraining order against your mother, and I had the papers drawn up so that you would be declared unfit so that I would get custody to save them from this, and-" The words just sort of poured out of her as her face lost it's color, and she felt like she was going to be sick, because why did she ever tell him? She remembered that rage, in him. Remembered the way he'd reacted when she'd talked about taking the boys, before they left for the restaurant. Tara pressed a shaking hand to her mouth, the other hand resting on Abel's head.

"I don't--" Jax started, but then all the words came pouring out of Tara and his words caught in his throat. It was all crashing over him like a wave as Tara poured out the mea culpa and told him everything that had happened, the lengths she had gone to take their boys away from him without even so much as a hope of ever seeing again.

Tara would have run and taken his boys, just the same way that Abel was taken from him before.

The Tara he'd left behind would never have done that. The man he was now couldn't conceive of things going so badly, nor of the man he'd become.

He drew back, running his hands over his face and closing his eyes, trying to figure out what to say.

Finally, he stood and blurted, "I gotta smoke."

She'd said it because she couldn't take it anymore, she couldn't take him saying that he wouldn't hurt her, that he wouldn't do what Jax had done, because she knew. She knew, deep down, that while she was doing the best thing she could for their boys, he would. Jax, in his heart, wouldn't ever be able to just sit an deal with it, and every time he said those words - I wouldn't hurt you, I won't hurt you, she could feel the weight of it heavier and heavier on her until she collapsed. She knew that what she did was a betrayal of him, at the root of him, and it was because whatever was her, it was gone. There was no hope for her, it was because of their sons. Their sons' future.

She nodded when he moved, a small nod that had nothing to do with how she was feeling or saying, because she felt like she was pulling the emotions in and in and in, like if she could shove them all back into the black hole inside herself and banish them, that she wouldn't care anymore. She knew it was bundling the good with the bad, that she was shoving away that hope that had just started to float at the surface, but he left and she shifted Abel up against her, and then pulled her phone out of her purse, turning it on. She'd have to find a charger at some point - she'd turned it off because she didn't want anyone to find her, but here.... she guessed it didn't matter, but she started thumbing through the pictures, and even as Abel drooled against her neck, she wiped her eyes with the edge of her brace, looking at the pictures of what their life had become, what'd happened over the last few years even as she rocked him slowly. Waiting for Jax to come back, because if nothing else, she was with the boys.

Edited 2014-01-29 18:12 (UTC)

Jax burned through two cigarettes, one right after the other, trying to decide on his emotional state. It was a maelstrom, somewhere between heart and gut, and he didn't know if there was even a harbor for him to seek within himself. There were some traitors that, to an extent, a man saw coming and there were some people from which betrayal came up on the blind side and left a man shattered in its wake. This was the second.

Tara, his mother, and Opie. Those were the people that he never expected to fail him. Gemma must have done something real fucked up to make Tara get a restraining order but it was equally fucked up what she'd just confessed to him. He was many things, Jax knew, and not all of them were good. He was not, however, a bad father, an unfit parent.

It was something else entirely too. Tara hadn't said it was just him or just Gemma. Over and over again, she kept saying "the club" like the whole damn thing had gone toxic. Despite all of his efforts, the club had festered and gone poisonous like a wound and Tara's only solution had been to amputate.

What had gone wrong there?

He began to light a third cigarette and then stubbed it out on the wall, putting it back into the pack. Again, Jax closed his eyes and tried to breathe and steady himself before he opened the door and looked at Tara.

Wordlessly, he sat down and put a hand on her shoulder, fingertips edging into her hair.

She was still flipping through the pictures when he sat next to her, and when she looked at him... there wasn't fear in her eyes, just this breaking, empty weariness that seemed to bleed into everything. "I'm sorry," she said lowly. "I just- I needed you- you can't say what you would or wouldn't do if you didn't know what I did." She was trying to explain, and she pulled in a little hitch of her breath, and then looked down at the phone in her hand.

"But I'm sorry, I shouldn't- it's not something I should have ever told you, here. In public, and- I mean-" Her brows furrowed together, and she looked back at him. "When I say that it got to you, and it changed you, and then it changed me... you may never be him, Jax. You're not in the club now, but me?" She shook her head slightly, and then looked back at the phone, and it was pictures from what seemed like a lifetime ago, pictures from when she was pregnant with Thomas, when Abel looked almost exactly the same way he did now. "I'm not this," she said quietly, and finally looked back at him.

He wished, desperately, that he knew what to say. That some platitude would rise up to solve everything with some kind of promise. Nothing came. He didn't have an easy solution and it was only now dawning on him that more had changed about Tara than just her hair. In some ways, he almost didn't recognize her.

"So how do we go back to what we were?" Not who. There was no undoing the people they'd become, even he knew that. But they could still live again. She could still trust him.

They could still be a family. He believed that, fervently.

She swallowed hard, and shifted as she turned towards him. Abel was still pillowed asleep against her as she looked up at Jax. Her hand found his chest, resting over his heart even as she felt the patches under her fingers. "We try," she said quietly with she still had that emptiness in her, the way she'd pushed away the fear and memories and reactions seeping into her like a blackness. "We try, and we be patient with each other, and we love our boys, and we try to love each other." Her brows furrowed as she swallowed hard.

"You are-" She had to pull in a breath as her eyes searching his. "You are the only man that I've really loved." She meant it, the words coming from some deep part of her that wasn't poisoned from that well of fear and pain that she carried. "You're a good man, you're the man I want to spend the rest of my life with. I'm different now, but- I still love you, Jax." She paused, and then spoke, very quietly. "Right now? You're probably the best thing that's happened to our boys. I'm not.... good, anymore." Her voice was low as she confessed before she looked away. She didn't want to see his face when she broke that constant hope he seemed to carry.

"So I guess that part's your choice. I'm not the woman you know anymore, and you have to tell me, if it's not.... enough. If I'm not enough. If you're not happy, or if you don't want this anymore." She knew the words she was saying were right, that she was doing the right thing even as everything inside her screamed for her to stop, because she was throwing away her chance to have him again, to have the man who she loved, back. "But I'll try."

Edited 2014-01-29 19:14 (UTC)

It stung to hear Tara say he wasn't good anymore. The Tara he knew was so motivated, so kind, and so inherently good that the difference was hard to reconcile to himself. The self-hatred she seemed to carry made it even worse. There was something broken in her and it was hard not to blame himself or maybe his future self. The seed of that man he could become lay in him. He could be the man that sent Tara running.

"I love you too, Tara. Some days, when everything else was about to collapse, I knew I could look at you and there was an anchor there," he said, making the words a vow. Tara had been the thing that had him looking back, looking outside of the club and trying to find that balance.

"We got love. That's a place to start."

She still had part of that - not all of it was dead and gone, but there was a point where you were up to your neck in the dark, horrible things around you, and they'd seep into your pores, your soul - and she knew it. She knew it, that she got too into the club, she tried, and it ate her up and spat her out. She couldn't be a surgeon, she couldn't save lives-- and it killed her, slowly.

But he could bring her back to life, maybe. There was a chance. "I will," she said softly, her hand still on his chest, "always be an anchor for you." Her eyes searched his. "If things happen again, I'll tell you, and we'll figure it out. We stopped talking, it... changed." Her brows furrowed. "But I won't stop talking, with you. Okay? It's... we have a place to start."

She took a deep breath, and shifted again, leaning back against him. "I want to show you these." She held Abel with her right hand, and scrolled through her phone on her left, even as her head leaned on his shoulder, stopping if he had questions, or said anything. Her, pregnant with Thomas, holding Abel. Him and Thomas, when he was a newborn. Jax was in orange, and Thomas was a tiny, tiny thing with a bright blue hat. Abel, growing up - and the club, the swingset.

It was all about the kids - she had a folder just for them, because she didn't want the rest of it to come up unless he asked, didn't want to talk about all the death that'd happened - especially not now. It'd come, some day, but now... it was the good things. She didn't realise there were things that would raise questions - like the pictures when Abel had a bandage on his head, the way it shifted abruptly from the clubhouse to the ice cream parlor, how there was a point that she stopped wearing scrubs and the massive cast on her hand with the pins in it - but she just showed him their boys, growing up, and both of them were there, too. You could watch, looking at it that way, as that happiness who made them who they were, drained out of them- but they always had their boys, and it was clear they were the center of their world. "We have love, and we have our sons," she said finally, turning her face to press a kiss to his jaw. "We can make it through this."

"Full disclosure," Jax agreed, going back to those early days when that promise had been ironclad. He would talk again, use all of his words even if it killed him. Tara was already burdened by the secrets and the future. He wouldn't add to her burden; he swore it to himself.

It was strange to see himself suddenly a few years older and Abel getting bigger, acquiring a real personality. Suddenly he was walking, running in pictures, getting brighter as he hammed it up for the cameras near all of his "uncles."

"Look at you, little man," he said to the drowsy Abel. "Look how handsome you get."

And look how much sadder Jax and Tara got. Look how arbitrarily they posed for the camera, touching because it was required, because that had always been the way they connected. Skin on skin. Only the connection was gone in those pictures, starting with Tara's smashed hand and only getting more distant from there.

The only time he saw a spark of the Tara he knew, it wasn't in pictures with him. It was when she looked at Abel and Thomas, away from the camera.

That was why she was curled against him now. It was why she'd clung to him, why she'd kissed him... it was the reason that even though she'd been exhausted and hurting, she'd desperately taken him to bed with her last night. She'd been so overwhelmed she'd ended up crying, even as she assured him she was alright. She needed that connection - both of them would die without it, they had died without it. A part of herself had withered and turned black, and now, with him... That's why she was curled as close to him as possible.

"He's brave," she said lowly. "Just like his daddy. And he's a good brother." She pulled in a deep breath, and she pulled back enough to look up at him. "It's going to take time, but- I'm going to go the hospital, see if they'll give me a job. I need to be a doctor, Jax, and I couldn't- with my hand, and then the pending felony charge, I couldn't do it anymore. I couldn't work, and-" She pulled in another breath. "I think that gave us... space. It seperated me from the club, a little, made it so that it wasn't my life, it was your life that I was a part of, but... but I think it would be good, for both of us. If they have daycare like St. Thomas, somebody can watch the boys during the day, and we can.... figure it out. Right?"

She didn't know what he wanted, but she thought she'd try. "I don't know if they'll accept me, but I mean, hell, I could be a nurse at this point and I'd take it." She missed helping people. She missed being a healer, instead of someone who brought pain. "So we can start again," she said, finally. They'd start again, and they'd do it right, this time.

Edited 2014-01-30 03:36 (UTC)

"That shit ain't gonna follow you here," Jax promised. "You can go to the hospital and show them what you're capable of. They'd be crazy not to take you." Even with her hurt hand, Jax was confident that she would still be a good doctor. Tara was one of the best, as far as he was concerned.

Slowly, he nodded, kissing her cheek and temple. "Blank slate, babe. We can start again and I swear, whatever's chasing you back there? It won't hurt you here."

And if they dared come and try and get in her way, Jax would make sure that didn't happen.

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Waking up is hard to do.

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