drownedindreams | (no subject)

"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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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.