drownedindreams | (no subject)

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"Abel, honey, please don't play with Mama's files." It's odd, the things that echo the past.

Abel had been taken from home when he was too young to remember what he'd learned over the two extra years he'd had with Tara and Jax - and his grandmother - but he still had some of the exact same habits, like how he currently had managed to grab some of the manilla folders that Tara had stacked on the coffee table so she could do her paperwork and still be with her family.

Keira was on her hip, lunging for the pureed sweet potatoes that Tara was heating up, and she could hear Thomas 'reading' to himself in their bedroom over the sound of the TV.

"Jax, honey," Tara called over her shoulder, "could you give Abel a coloring book and put up my files? I need to feed your daughter before we go out to dinner." His daughter, said with good humor purely because in times like these, she'd sometimes say the kids were his, like she's avowing herself of responsibility.

The fact that the file Abel was currently scrawling all over wasn't one of her patients probably was worse than him drawing on them, but she didn't actually know that, yet. All she knew was that they were going out to dinner tonight - she was actually dressing up in a dress short enough that if they actually made it to the restaurant, it'd be a miracle, and Molly was watching the kids - he deserved a good birthday, and she'd do her best to make it happen.

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"Oh, she's my daughter now, huh?" Jax asks. He slips past her with a kiss first to Keira's forehead and then to his wife's cheek. "Maybe my memory's fuzzy, but you had a share in my daughter being in our lives." Delaying for a second, he moves around to fit his body against hers, chest to her back, just lingering for a moment. Just because he was here and they could.

Then he turns his attention to Abel, coming over to scoop his son into his arms. "Are you coloring on your Ma's papers? You know she's gonna get in trouble if you run around like a monkey," he says, scooping Abel into his arms to hear his son shout with delight. "So do you want to color with monster trucks or dinosaurs?" He's not surprised with Abel's shout of "Dinosaurs!" and takes down a new book they've been saving for a new distraction.

Abel's easily pleased and settles into scribbling across the more appropriate surface with gusto while Jax sorts the files into Tara's purse, lingering on one.

"Babe?" he asks. "Why do you have an autopsy report?"

"She's your daughter when I say she is," Tara says with a smile, turning to catch his lips for a short kiss. "And clearly your memory's faulty, I'm as innocent as the driven snow," she says with a barely contained laugh, snapping the food processor cup off of the machine and moving to sit in a chair that's in front of Keira's highchair once she'd put her daughter into it.

"What?" She's not looking at him yet because she's helping Keira not spit bright orange down her face with a bright yellow plastic spoon. After a few seconds, his question sinks in, and she pushes herself to her feet, spooning sweet potato onto the tray of the highchair so that Keira can play and try to feed herself while she comes to take a look. "It must be some sort of mistake, I had one of the nurses pull all my files together." Keeping half an eye on their daughter, Tara moves into the living room, and she takes the file, flipping through it.

It's not all that surprising that he didn't recognize who it was for - it'd been open to the state forms that are standardized medical examiner fare, not the pictures, or, really, the rest of the police report.

The amount that Tara had changed over the last year was clear when she just took half a bread, and folded the folder closed, sticking it under her arm. First, she ran her fingers along her eyebrow, and she took a deep breath before finally, quietly-- "So, we can talk about it tonight after Molly gets here and we go out, or we can talk about it tomorrow when she's here, and we'll go out. I'll take the day off, call in sick. It's your birthday, baby, so it's up to you."

The two things that haven't changed - she's not the color of a sheet, she's not crying, she's not unable to speak - it's just two things, and they're both small.

Her hand's shaking. Just a little, but it's the hand that used to wear a brace, when she first came here. It's that, and her eyes keep settling on him, then darting away, like somewhere deep down, right this second... she can't look at him for long.

A year removed from the club and Tara is still composed of pure, Old Lady steel. Everything about her posture is closed and dignified, only betrayed by the shaking of her bad hand. Immediately and without doubt, Jax knows that that autopsy isn't from the hospital but from Charming. It could mean the death of any number of them. Clay, Gemma, Tara, Jax himself...Every option, every possible nuance of death that might come from that folder performs as the city has surely designed.

"If we go out to dinner with that fucking thing on the back of my mind, I'm not gonna enjoy dinner," he says. Neither will Tara. Hell, even talking about it will probably ruined the night for him and that's a consequence that Jax just has to live with. Any option he takes ends in a ruined night.

Finally, he sighs and reaches out, his hands on Tara's shoulders. "Your call, babe." In this, he has to trust her. "I'm gonna heat up those chicken nuggets for the boys. You think it over."

Because her job is to be strong when he can't and Jax's job now is to be strong because he has no other option.

She'd slipped for a while, in the beginning. When she'd first ended up here she was rabbit-scared, jumping at every sound, every movement he made. She was crushed by guilt, by pain. The days had been a misery, that had eventually slipped to joy. It became living because dying was the worst that could happen, and it already had. It became their life here, their daughter, their sons.

She had healed, and that's why now she stood in front of him, on his birthday, and held the file that had his autopsy report, the criminal report, and she asked him what he wanted to do. She's got to be strong where he can't, and she's got that covered - and that's why she stuck it in her purse, and then moved to follow him into the kitchen, shifting to wrap her arms around him from behind, resting her forehead against his back. "I think," she said lowly, "that we should call in a favor and ask Molly to watch the kids for the night and pay her double, and then we should get a hotel, order in food, and go through it. Don't bring it into this house, don't bring the kids into it." She swallowed hard. "And then we'll know what it is, and we'll move on. It's back in California, not here, and it'll never be here."

It's the same kind of reassurance he'd offered to her a year ago. Whatever comes from home is happening in Charming, not to them, not really. Whatever level of truth is or isn't there in that statement doesn't seem to matter as much as whether or not they can believe it.

Tara's almost comically small with her arms around him and Jax breathes out a grateful sigh, nodding. She's so much stronger than Jax can be right now. The question keeps poking through his mind. Whose autopsy is it? What's the dark reality in that folder that Tara wants out of their house?

No matter now nicely they go about it, there's no denying that this is bad.

"God, yeah. Let's do that. Call her."

"Okay. I got it, baby. Don't worry." She presses a kiss to his back through his t-shirt, and slips away to move back to Keira, feeding her more sweet potatoes while she calls Molly one-handed.

It doesn't take long, and they're set for the night, smiles not really true as they kiss their children and thank Molly profusely for giving them a little time to themselves, like they weren't walking into a disaster.

It's not a long drive, her bag between them like a bomb, just waiting to go off. The closer they get to the hotel, the tighter her shoulders are. She's barely skimmed it; it's not a thin file, but she knows it's his.

Happy birthday.

"Jax?" She says his name once they've parked the SUV, once she gets out and has her bag looped over her shoulder. She's come around the SUV to him, to loop her fingers in his beltloops and tug him closer, her eyes searching his.

"I love you. And it'll be okay. Alright? I swear."

"I love you too," he swears. "And we're gonna be fine. We have to be." They have the boys and Keira, the dogs, their jobs. They have a whole life here that's blessedly a million miles away from who and what they are in Charming. His wife, standing in front of hi, will never be that puddle of blood in the kitchen. Whoever is in that autopsy file won't happen here. No matter who it is.

"Let's check in. Get the birthday champagne and strawberries shit." Or else a bottle of vodka and a pack of cigarettes. He has a feeling they're going to need something intoxicating and powerful to get through the night.

But they're going to be okay. Somehow.

"That's a good idea." She flashes a smile that's a little too tight because she knows what's coming, but the rest of it's easy. She's not in that dress - maybe that'll be in a week or two, when the stress of tonight's ended up in that mindless pit where they've put all of their other troubles. Still, she does want to do what she can so that his birthday isn't hopefully going to be ruined, to be remembered as the day he found out his own fate.

It's an hour later when they're in a pretty fancy hotel room with white comforters and bathrobes hanging on the door, with an ashtray on the bedside table and a room service cart holding their empty plates. She'd insisted on them eating before - mostly because she doesn't think she'll want to eat after, and there's just a certain amount with this that she's got to be practical. She's the anchor, right now. The foundation.

Finally, she leans over to kiss Jax, and it's still heavy in her eyes. "Hey - happy birthday." She wants him to know that, before he finally pulls the trigger, and says he just wants to know.

He feels out of place in this clean white hotel room, but Tara belongs in an instant. With her hair growing out, it waves along her back and curls into her forehead, bringing some softness around that steel core that she's got. Turning his ring along his finger, Jax glimpses his tattoo of her name peeping out under the metal.

It's hard to imagine that they'd do this kind of thing back in Charming. Back there, the only reason to get married was because you couldn't get a mistress if you didn't have a wife and he knows what kind of man he'd be. In this place, Tara's been able to raise her child without Gemma's prying fingers trying to turn them into the Club's children.

"Thanks, babe," he says, cupping her cheek for a long kiss. The other shoe has to drop sometime, but he keeps trying to push it.

She hates that they're dancing around the elephant in the room, the file in her bag. They both know it's there. They both know they've got to act like it's not in order to live, but until they deal with it, they'll always wonder. The kiss stretches on, until she shifts back enough that her forehead can press against his.

"We should get it over with," she says lowly, her hand moving to find his, to smooth over his knuckles with her thumb. "It's not going to disappear. I wish it would, but you know it's not."

"Whatever is in that envelope isn't real. Not for us," Jax says firmly. It's something he has to believe to get through tonight, this week, the months and years that might follow. Dwelling on what might have been is the kind of thing that sends a man astray or mires him in the impossible.

Kissing her hand, Jax nods. "I love you. I trust you. We'll get it over with."

Tara pauses, and she rakes her teeth over her lower lip before she shifts, reaching for it as her eyes flick to Jax's. "I love you," she says first, her voice low, and she presses a kiss to his shoulder, before she doesn't even open it just yet, because she knows. She knows.

"Jax," she says after a moment, and her voice has the weight of a thousand burdens, but it's steady and even.

"It's your file."

"I love you too," he says. He catches her hand and drops a brief kiss onto her thumb before letting Tara open the file. His file. His autopsy file, because he must have died there like any other Teller, bloody and hard.

Taking a cigarette, he can't even speculate how it must have gone. Too many opportunities for him to die have presented themselves by now. It doesn't even surprise him that he's dead in that world, not when it was just a matter of time.

"Christ." What else can he say.

She flips through it, practiced eyes skimming the form, the crime scene photos-- that's what this was, it was the file from his death, the autopsy was only part of it. She soaks it all in, but then she stops. She stops, and the way she pulls in her breath is anything but good, her brows furrowing as she flips it closed, running her hand down her face until she's rubbing her hand over her mouth.

She doesn't know how to say what she's got to say. What she's got to tell him.

"You're not him," she says first, her voice oddly faint. "He..." Not you. "Rode his bike straight into the path of a semi." Her voice cracks on the last word, and the file drops to the comforter, as Tara pulls in a breath. The man she left - the one who lost her, who lost everything -- he'd lose himself, in the end. More than she'd ever guessed.

"He decided to go out like JT did," Jax says. Because maybe JT was right, in those letters, when he implied that Clay and Gemma were going to fuck with his bike but Jax has read his manifesto too. He knows that at the end of it all, JT was tired.

Had that Jax been tired too?

"Without you. Without Opie..." He reaches out for her hand, already desperate for a center, needing her to hold him down to this earth. "We know what man I would've become."

She doesn't take his hand.

She doesn't, because she's moving, she's moving bodily on the bed so that she's pouring herself into his lap, her arms around his neck and her face buried against his jaw. "You're not him." The words are thick and pained, and she's mourning. She's mourning the man she'd left behind, who's only escape from the life he'd made was the same death as his father's. She's mourning their sons - their beautiful boys, and she knows he needs her to be strong for him, but she can't stop the tears that are slipping down her cheeks because of Abel and Thomas, because of her sons, not the boys here, not Keira, she doesn't weep for them.

She cries for the boys in Charming, who are going to grow up even worse than Jax, even more entangled in this life with no hope. Their mother murdered, their father commiting suicide-- not even choosing to live for them, but dying for them in a way they'd never understand.

She cries for the man she's loved since she was sixteen, the one who wasn't pulled away before he'd come home from Ireland, holding so tightly to her husband that she never wants to let go.

"I'm not," he promises. Jax's arms go tight around her too and they're clinging together like the old story about how humans used to have eight limbs and two faces until the gods split them apart. Tara is, undoubtedly, his other half and he clings to her like it can keep either of them from spiraling off. Like they can shove the broken pieces back together.

This isn't Charming. For the last year and a half, almost two, Jax has told himself that almost every day. This isn't Charming. In Charming, his life was outlined before he was born. In Charming, Jax doesn't really expect a reason for his life not to end under tires or a hail of bullets.

It's the fact of how many people he's taken with him or left behind. Holding her tight, Jax lets Tara cry because he understands what she's grieving.

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