drownedindreams | a mother's hands are her comforts

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a mother's hands are her comforts

Her hair was still too short.

Jax was head-down in writing in his journal and it reminded Tara of JT's 'manifesto' that he'd left his son. That that's what started all of this, that and the letters. Until they'd seen those pieces of Jax's father reaching out from the past, there had been no questions or doubt.

Now her hair was a foot shorter than it should have been. It was all connected in a weird way, and she found herself staring in the bedroom mirror. She combed out her wet hair with her fingers, the towel wrapped around her as she dripped into the beige carpet all apartments seemed to have. She looked... tired, she felt. Tara didn't know when she'd become the woman in the mirror, but she didn't really like it. "I'm going to keep growing my hair out," she said quietly, without so much as a Hey to get his attention.

"D'you think that'd be good?" She eyed it for another second, before she looked at him over her shoulder even as she moved to pull clean clothes out of the dresser.

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"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."

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a mother's hands are her comforts

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