drownedindreams | a mother's hands are her comforts

...I grew up learning certain, unalterable things about being a man. A man was the provider, failing to take care of his home, his old lady, his kids, and his bike made him insufficient. A woman was the caregiver, strong in her own ways, but that was strength channeled into the keeping of her home and her family.

There's an amazing woman in my life, but loving her asks for a paradigm shift. A change in everything I know about who I should...

He looked up at her, offering her an exaggerated leer as he saw her in nothing but the towel. "I always think you look good, babe," he said, standing up to kiss her. "But you didn't get that haircut because you chose it. You look your best when you're happy. And if long hair makes you happy, then that makes you fucking gorgeous."

Jax trailed fingers down her arms until he had a hold of each of her hand, thumb brushing against her scar.

Tara rolled her eyes at the leer, and she tipped her head back to look up at him. "It'll be nice not to have the reminder," she said as she raised her brows at him. "I was asking what you liked. I mean, yes, me happy, very sweet-" She grinned up at him. "-but do you think I'd look better with longer hair?" She squeezed his hand until his thumb smoothed over the mass of scar tissue, and she actually pulled back a little, looking down at her hand. "I forgot to put my wrap back on." Her brows furrowed, and she lightly tugged that hand from his - not because he hurt her but because she felt like it called attention to it.

The reason she wrapped it was more now because of what it looked like, mixed with needing to keep the fresh scar tissue out of the sun than anything else. It was an obvious reminder of her injury, and it made her on edge; especially given the talk they'd had a couple of days ago.

Tara was carrying a burden she didn't know if he could even remotely handle and she was scared about what his reaction would be.

"I still want to know, if you want to tell," Jax said, looking Tara in the eye. It was hard to know, sometimes, whether taking out the knife could start healing the wound or just start an unstoppable torrent of blood, draining the life and trust out of them.

"I love you, Tara. I want to know 'cause we're both carrying heavy shit, but if you let me I think we can share this."

He didn't move, but his arms were open, ready to embrace her.

Tara's brows furrowed at the looked down at the top of the dresser. "I, uhm." She looked back at him as she inhaled and licked her lips. "We- Uhm." She looked up at the ceiling - anywhere but his face. She was terrified to look at his face when she said it; she was afraid what she'd see.

She tried to start again, her voice low. "A van door rolled shut on my hand, Jax." She closed her eyes for a second, before she looked down at her hand. "We were... out, with the boys. And-" She stopped, and had to scrub her hand across her face as she shook her head. "You don't want to know this. You don't want to know any of this, because then you know how-" She stopped as she shook her head again, her fingers pressing against her lips. "You don't really want to know. I know you don't. You don't want to know what happened, what made me this.... this thing, this person that used to be your girlfriend."

She finally looked up at him as she felt the emotion as a ball of anxiety in her chest, threatening to rise and choke her.

"Tara. I am here with you. You are still my girlfriend and I'm learning you again." He wrapped her up into a tight hug, shaking his head as his fingers wound into her hair. "If it hurts you too damn much to say, then you don't have to."

Knowing wasn't worth the pain that ran through Tara with all her hauntings. He kept hoping, one day, that something would drive those ghosts out and make her smile again. They were still precious and rare, those moments when Tara was beaming and happy.

"You're not a thing, Tara. That woman I knew, maybe you're not her, but you got the same heart, the same love."

"This isn't about me hurting, Jax." She said it sharply - probably too sharply, but she was on edge as she talked to him, her voice raw and full of sudden, flaring anger as she pulled away from him. "This isn't about me. This is about you." She ran her hands up into her hair before she moved to pull on a pair of underwear. "This is about if you're just going to keep acting like this shit is going to go away. If I should be like- If I should just be like... Suck it up. Deal with it." She tugged off the towel, and moved to put on her bra as she looked at him over her shoulder.

The anger was entirely misdirected fear. It was her own fear about what it would do to them, about the giant void of three years between them. She was terrified that he'd look at her and realise that she wasn't the woman he'd loved since they were sixteen, that she would never be that person again - not realising that there were times when it was okay, again. That the two of them were whole, and that it may just take time.

He didn't jump or startle when Tara flared up, but Jax did step back, staying away instead of chasing Tara back into his arms. "I know it can't go away. And I know there's shit I'm better off not knowing!" His temper was flaring up; he could hear it in his voice and he had to bite down to try and stay calm.

"I know there's no going back to who we were. I'm not asking you to go back to the start. Right now, I just want to know what the hell happened to your hand 'cause that's a giant fucking scar!"

She yanked open the second drawer of the dresser and pulled out a pair of yoga pants. She tugged them on as she tried to figure out what she was going to say to him as he talked about the shit he was better off not knowing. "You're right! You're right, there's shit you should never know, and I get that. You do not fucking know just how much I get that, Jackson."

She stared up at him as her jaw tightened. "You want to know? You want to know what the hell happened to my hand?"

"What happened to my hand was that I was grabbed in broad daylight from a park with you and our sons, by men that Clay paid to kill me. The van door rolled shut on my hand. Three broken metacarpals, one severed nerve, and massive nerve damage. Are you happy, now? You know. You know, now." She yanked a tank top over her head. "How much do you not want to know, Jax? Because believe me, there's a hell of a lot more where that came from, and it's all shit you'd be better off not knowing but I don't have that luxury!" She's both so mad and scared that she feels like she's going to be sick, and she's staring up at him because she has no fucking idea what the hell he's going to say.

Tara hadn't touched him but the way that Jax stood there, bowled over and confused, she may as well have slapped him across the face. This wasn't her fear at the door that first night; this was an anger he couldn't ever remember Tara directing at him. That and the information she'd unloaded to him. Shock hit him like a truck and he couldn't even begin the formulate questions.

Clay. His mind and heart settled on that old wound. He'd closed it up for Gemma, for his mom's sake, but he remembered why he'd wanted to leave. Clay, who wanted to get rich at the expense of his father's dreams. Clay, who'd turned the club into an armed gang and driven them deeper and deeper into the arms of the Irish until they had KG-9's pressed up to their backs.

Clay. Who'd tried to kill his old lady

Tara. Who looked at him now with something close to hate.

"Jesus," he said, rubbing his forehead and dragging hands up into his hair. "Jesus fuckin' Christ..."

Every question meant diving further down that rabbit hole. If he asked why Clay had wanted her dead, he'd probably end up with more questions, end up with more of the dark truths that Tara had to bear up all by herself.

What could he even say?

She stared at him before looking away uncomfortably. "You need to know," she said quietly, "that all of the shit that happened- it's all this kind of stuff, Jax. It's all this heavy. And- I am doing my best... my best, to not dump it on you. Every day, I'm scared that you're going to say someone's name, and- you can read me like a book, Jax. You always have been able to, and..."

She sighed, running her hand over her face. "Maybe..." She paused and she lowered her voice. "Maybe this isn't right, anymore." She said it so quietly that she felt like she was breathing the words, and she looked down at her hands. "Maybe... it's a choice, and now I'm the one who's going to drag you back, like Charming can't let go of you."

Tara's eyes burned as she looked up at the ceiling for a moment. "You had a different life before I showed up here. You built something good and new and it wasn't the club, it had nothing to do with the club." And all she could remember was him showing up with that extra stack of cash. She couldn't believe what she was saying, but she didn't know what else to do.

"I love you, but I don't want to be a walking ghost for you. I'm not her, Jax. I'm not the person you left when you went to Belfast. She's gone, and there's no way to bring that back."

She had no idea how long she could keep it all a secret. Already, the cracks were beginning to show, and it'd only been a month. She didn't see what he did - and wasn't as brutally optimistic as he'd been.

Edited 2014-02-24 02:10 (UTC)

"Tara..." He didn't know how to answer the hard parts, so he started with the easy one first, shaking his head heavily. "My life before you got here was going to the garage and fucking around with cars. And then maybe fucking around with someone else, hoping for some kind of real connection, but none of them were you. Since you got here, that's when I finally started living. Started actually sitting down with my son and watching him grow, going out to shit and watching lanterns..."

He believed it, really did. Before Tara had showed, he'd dropped Abel off at daycare and then worked all fucking day just to pay for that daycare. If he had energy left, he spent it in someone else's arms because sex was like breathing, a comforting impulse while he hunted for some fucking meaning for himself.

"I don't expect you to turn back Tara. Jesus. That's...I'm not stupid. I know you can't just turn back time. I don't want to. That's like asking you to come back to Charming at 30 and go back to who we were at thirteen. It's fucking pointless. But you are still the woman I love and I want to know who you are now."

He sighed, dropped into the mattress, trying to find something optimistic and hopeful but even he couldn't bury his head in the sand that far.

"So things come out. We talk about what we have to or you say you don't want to. Not now, maybe later, not ever. Ain't gonna hold you down and force that truth out but I ain't gonna force it back down your throat until you explode either."

"Do we talk about them, or do I just tell you, and you tell me that everything's going to be fine and we're in a new place now?" She said it quietly as she looked at him, her eyes dull.

She shouldn't have been (and wasn't, when you got down to it) surprised that he'd found someone else. After Ima and Colette, she knew that faith was not something she would ever really get from him - and that was even when she was there. He'd married Wendy because he needed to have someone in his life.

"You keep saying it'll be okay, that it'll be better, Jax, and that- I don't know if it will. If I'm going to slip up and tell you something that you can't handle, and what then? You know what I am, without you?" Her eyes flicked to his. "When you aren't in my life, I feel like a robot. Like I go to work, I do my job, I come home, I go to sleep. I'm empty without you, but I already lost you once."

She hadn't told him about that, about what changed in him so that she'd greeted him with a gun. Yeah, she'd taken the kids, and that's a reason to be scared of him, but that they'd grown so far apart, how it had eaten at her the look on his face when she walked in on him at the brothel. She hadn't told him about those fourteen months alone, when she'd see him twice a week for fifteen minutes and had to act like it was the same as having someone there and she hadn't been pregnant and alone and with a newborn. She hadn't told him anything about any of it, about Clay and Piney and Opie. "How can I tell you when it's going to tear you apart?"

Jax exhaled slowly and opened his arms, offering Tara that little bit of haven if she wanted it. The way she was talking, even with her love and need, Jax was getting scared she was going to ask him to leave, give her a few days or weeks. He didn't know if he'd be able to do that right now.

"I don't know if it'll be okay. I don't even know what the fuck we can endure. But I gotta have faith that you and I are still something good. We've been through a hell of a lot, babe."

And had probably been through so much more, shit he could only imagine and didn't want to. All the little things she'd let slip, about how the club was cut in half, didn't indicate a good future.

"I'm tryin' to be better Tara. Be a better man to you and for those boys. And that means I can't trap that shit with you if it needs to come out."

"It's not about you being better." She moved to him then. Tara did something that was rare for her, and she folded herself against him, her face pressed against the crook of his neck as she let him hold her there. "It's not about you not being a good enough man or father. You get that, right? It's so far from being about that." She inhaled deeply.

"You're a good man. That's why I'm afraid." She swallowed thickly. "I told you- I told you about my hand, and... and it's already- I know you want to know why. I know you want to know what happened, what happened after, and I'm so scared, Jax. I'm scared it'll trap you or hurt you or... something."

Jax breathed out a sigh of relief as he molded around Tara, kissing her temple and running fingers into her hair. He tried to listen, to really hear what it was than Tara was afraid of rather than blanket her concerns with platitudes.

"I'm scared of that too, babe," he said honestly. It was near-paralyzing, that fear. "But this ain't Charming. People here are different. Clay ain't here. So it's not gonna play out the same. I gotta believe that for the both of us."

She actually pulled back just a little. "Are you scared of that? That it's going to be the same?" Her eyes searched his as she shook her head, and her hands - her hands, not the one hand and the other beige elastic - found his cheeks.

"Jackson, it's never going to be the same, and that's good. You don't have to worry, baby." Her fingers slipped up, to smooth through his hair, her brows furrowed. "I'm just worried that the things I have to say will eat you up, that you'll worry about history repeating, but this place isn't Charming, and it's never going to be." She leaned up to gently kiss him for only a moment.

"I want to tell you what happened," she said softly, still settled in his lap because that was where she needed to be - both of them, protecting each other from the world while they had this conversation. "With my hand. What happened after." Not about the letters. Not about Piney. Probably not what Clay did to Gemma, either. But she could tell him about Oregon; about him being there when she lost this job. About him being their son's parent while she'd spent weeks staring at nothing because her dreams were gone - but in a better way, obviously.

Jax exhaled, glad for Tara's warmth and love and the quiet strength that flowed from her. It filled up the weak parts of him like glue, making him whole and stronger for it. "Thanks babe," there weren't other words. Didn't need to be. The two of them felt whole. Solid.

"Tell me. Tell me what you can." Whatever would keep it from eating slowly away at her.

"Tell me what I need to know to keep it from happening here."

There was no rewriting that past but this future was still changeable.

Tara told him slowly, the words carefully chosen. Jax knew her well enough, she thought, to know that she was censoring what she said. Everything was sanitized, sort of.

But still, she told him things she hadn't before. "I had an interview in Oregon - you and me and the boys, we made it like... a little vacation," she said quietly. She didn't stop touching him as she told him, her hand smoothing against his neck, her fingers toying with his hair. "We stopped in a park for lunch, when all of that happened."

All of that - because she didn't want to say it again. She didn't need to. "You thought, at first, that it was because of the cartels, but I was in the hospital - You and Aleda and your mom took care of the boys. I couldn't do anything, Jax. I had... I had a lot of surgeries, to help fix the damage. That's why it's not just one scar." She paused. "You were there for me. You were there, even when I completely lost myself." She looked away, her brow furrowing.

"I totally checked out. Totally, and completely. I didn't care about you, or my job, or the kids, I just could think about my fucking hand, and how everything was over. And you-"

She looked back at him, her eyes finding his. "You pulled me back. You were the father that our boys needed, you made sure that they were loved and taken care of, and you put me back together, Jax." That was the important part, to her. But still... the rest did matter. "Your mom found Clay putting money back in their safe after they- uh. Botched the job." The last three words were said with her voice tight. "He- uhm." She actually stopped, then. "I had something he wanted, and I knew something-" She stopped again.

"That's it. Right now, that's it, okay?" She couldn't say more, couldn't talk about the rest without it becoming a flood of words, of deaths that just grew and grew. "You were there when I needed you."

Jax listened, tried to picture it. The first part was easy, the four of them bundled together. Thomas in his carrier and Abel in his car seat and bigger than Jax had seen yet. The park, in his mind, was wide and green, ready for them.

And then the van careened into his imagination and Jax went quiet again. If the scar on Tara's hand was hard to look at now, he could only imagine how scared and in pain she had been when it happened. Just imagining it made Jax hold her closer, try and fill the intervals with kisses and tiny physical reassurances.

"Cartels, huh?" Jax shook his head heavily. "Clay's bank account always held him more than any fucking sense. Stupid fucker."

Whatever Clay might have done for him before, it was all blown away in the face of what he'd fucking done to Tara.

"Guess we anchor each other huh?" It was the last puzzle piece, Jax realized. Why Tara wanted him to do the parenting. She'd stepped back and seen it and seen something in Jax that he'd never seen.

"I'll still be there, okay Tara? For you. For the boys. For anything or anyone else that comes along."

Tara paused before she spoke quietly. "Clay had you guys running coke, Jax." Her brows furrowed for a second before she nodded when he said they anchored each other. "If I didn't have you, I wouldn't have made it. The boys- they would have been even more messed up. You took care of us, and..."

She searched his eyes for the reassurance of what he was saying. "I know you'll be here. I know you'll always be here, I do. I just- I don't want to hurt you with the stuff I know. With the things that happened."

She's trying to be good, to him. With him. For him to not lay awake at night, wondering how the hell it got so messed up - but she was doing that, instead, which was just as bad.

"That ain't what hurts me," Jax said, trying to articulate what he felt. "Scares the shit out of me, yeah, that I'm gonna end up repeating your past."

He leaned back and ran his thumb over her lower lip, knuckles against her jaw. "I wanna make you happy. Make our boys happy. That's what keeps the hurts from coming."

No Clay. No coke. None of the bullshit that Tara was telling him about. They were going to start fresh here. Do shit right.

"I want to feel you sleep next to me. See you smile when you wake up. I want to be part of that."

Tara's brows furrowed when he said it's not what hurts him. It's the last thing she expected to hear from him, to be honest. "My past?" She doesn't get that he's sort of talking about their past. "It can't repeat, here. I- I thought that what happened, that it'd just... eat you up, Jax. To know that it went that bad." She's confused, now, because that's why she's been so worried about the whole thing.

About everything.

"I want that, too. I want our boys to be happy and safe, and you and me--" She leaned towards him, her forehead against his cheek as she closed her eyes, her hands on his neck. "When I left, it'd been months since we were like this." She's trying to tell him how bad it'd been. How alone she'd been - and he'd been, as well. It was the furthest and longest they'd ever been apart since he'd come home from Belfast.

"Yeah. God it would," Jax admitted. "I don't want to become the man you were fleeing that night. What if I do some little thing. Turn the wrong corner someday, and that starts off the whole wheel and suddenly I'm the man I was?"

Or worse. What if he had become like Clay?

"I never wanna stop being like this Tara. We grow, we change, but we don't lose each other. That's what I want."

And maybe, someday, they could grow their family and buy a house. But first, they had to work on the now. And, as if it was a way of sealing that promise, he raised Tara's right hand to his mouth and kissed her fingers and palm.

Tara paused, and then found the right words, she thought. The right words, when she tried to explain. "The man I was running from was changed from taking the gavel and having to try and get the club out of all of the shit Clay got it into, Jax. The death... every time it happened, it killed part of you. I could see it." Her hand found his cheek. "You won't be that man, now. You won't. This is a new life for both of us." Her eyes searched his even as he took her hand, telling her that he didn't want to lose her.

"I love you," she said lowly as he pressed his lips to her hand. "We'll talk. When these things happen, when they come up - we'll talk. I know you can't know it all, that it won't help you or me to say them, but... but if it comes up, we'll talk it out, I promise. I won't just... not tell you." It was important, to her. It was important that they stay honest. That they work together, and build a family.

"I will always be here for you," she said softly. "And I won't let it happen. Not again. I won't lose you."

a mother's hands are her comforts

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