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fakingitfanfiction · 7 years

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Just For Me: Chapter 45

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Ten Years Ago

The first time Amy says those three little words, Reagan’s right there with her.

“I hate you.”

She isn’t actually next to Amy, at the time, or even near her, really. She’s in the back, by the pots of coffee - regular and decaf and something called half-caf that she’s not really sure she understands or wants to as, really, she prefers her coffee like her women: strong and rich and able to rev her engine with a single taste - but, for once, she doesn’t mind a little distance from Amy. She doesn’t even mind (much) that it's Karma next to Amy or even that it’s Karma who's holding Amy’s hand.

(OK, maybe that part bugs.) (A little.) (If, by ‘a little’, you mean a lot.) (Like all.)

But still, it's… OK. (And yes, OK is absolutely as far as she’s gonna go.) This is what Amy needs right now. Karma is what Amy needs right now and yes, Reagan’s sure that 'right now’ really means 'in this one very specific time and place’ and is not code for 'has secretly always wanted all along and will dump you and go running back to Karma as soon as she makes a pit stop at her house and pulls out the I Heart Karmy tee shirt she’s got hidden way in the back, under her suitcase.’

At least she thinks she’s sure and, really, she knows that means she’s not sure, like at all, but Amy told her and if there’s anyone’s word Reagan would take on how Amy feels?

It's not Amy.

But Lolo said it too, and she’s standing right there with her (her being Reagan) and that is good enough, or at least close enough to good enough - like good enough adjacent - to get the job done.

And, as she keeps reminding herself - and may soon resort to having Lolo remind her too - this whole mess was a mess long before her and long before Lolo and long before any thought of liking girls (or anyone, really) had even started to cross Amy’s mind. This is a mess, a fight, with history.

History, when it comes to Amy, equals Karma. At least, Reagan keeps reminding herself, for now.

So there she stands, in the back (said that), by the coffee (said that too), close by Lauren, which means close by Theo (which Reagan doesn’t really mind) and close by Shane (all good there) and that means close by Liam.

Wait. What now?

Yes, Liam. As in Booker. As in Asshat A#1, Duke of the Dicks, Sultan of Shit, King of the Fuckboys.

(She couldn’t come up with an insult that started with 'K’, though she tried, but that took more than like thirty seconds and that was far more time than Reagan was willing to give… him.)

She wasn’t sure why Liam was there, except that the new girl - the one she’d seen him and Karma with, right before Karma had gone all Mike Tyson on Jack’s face - was there and, it seemed, wherever she went, Liam was sure to follow. He was like a puppy.

It would’ve been cute if it had been, well… anyone else.

And so, yes, new girl was there too and yes, she did seem sort of, kind of, in ways Reagan didn’t really want to think about, less than new.

Reagan couldn’t remember the new girl’s name (liar) even though she knew she’d heard it, once, from Liam, and so, yeah, you might understand why she wouldn't want to remember,

why she’d be willing to do damn near anything to forget it, even though she knew she never ever would. New girl was a permanent fixture in Reagan’s brain already, she had herself a cute little cubbie, right in the center of brain town, just off to the left of the four story office building that was Amy and the slightly shorter tower that was Lauren, somewhere just behind the little collection of bungalows that were Shane and Theo and, God help her, Karma.

And if she was going to keep thinking in real estate metaphors, Reagan was going to need something a lot fucking stronger than coffee.

It wasn't just her name that Reagan remembered, even if she said she didn’t. It was her face. Reagan knew, from like the very first moment she saw her, she was never going to forget that face. How could she?

It was just like Amy’s.

Karma said once that the first time she saw new girl (oh, for fuck’s sake, Lucy) that she looked sorta familiar. Reagan said once that Karma was in fucking denial, cause saying Lucy looked familiar was like saying Lolo looked kinda like the girl from Bunheads and sure, she was probably like one of six people who ever even watched that, but come on.

It’s called Google. And IMDB. Look it up.

The point (she did have one) was that Lucy looked a lot like Amy. Like Amy, if Amy had Karma’s hair (the style, not the color, though Reagan had to admit, Lucy’s strawberry blonde dye work was on fucking point.) Like Amy, if Amy had a splash of Lauren’s cheekbones and like even one one-hundredth of Lauren’s skill with blush and shading. Like Amy, if Amy had just a bit of that impish smirk of Shane’s.

Assuming that imps were constantly looking at everyone they talked to like they were imagining them naked. And yes, she meant everyone.

It was all of that - the Karma hair and the Lauren cheeks and the Shane smirk - that unnerved the shit out of Reagan the moment she saw Lucy, all up close and personal and not just on a street corner. But she could get past that, even if she couldn't forget it. It was the just like Amy part she was having some trouble with.

Lucy looked just like Amy, or close enough. 'Just like’ adjacent. (Hey, it was a good line the first time, right?) Maybe close enough that you could tell they were related, that maybe you might think, at first glance, that Lucy was a slightly younger (six months and three days), a bit less infatuated with doughnuts (she prefers crullers) (whatever the fuck those are), and so much less weight of the world (read: weight of Karma) balancing on her shoulders version of Amy. But that was just it.

She was just a version. Amy was the original, the one and only, accept no substitutes.

Unless, of course, you were Jack. In which case, it would seem, you would just accept right the fuck away. Which was, obviously, the entire reason for those three little words.

“I hate you.”

(Remember those? We’re getting there. Promise.)

But still, Reagan couldn’t get past it. Her eyes kept drifting to Lucy. Not because she liked her or wanted to like her or was even thinking of liking her. No, it was because as just like Amy as she was… it was the differences that were like a fucking tractor beam, pulling Reagan’s eyes to her. Lucy seemed - right up until the moment Amy dropped those three little words - like she was happy. Relaxed. Easy going and carefree and untouched by anything. Except, you know, maybe, Liam.

Reagan refused to think about how that might make her even more just like Amy than she already seemed.

In general, she was trying - and mostly failing - to refuse to think about Lucy at all. She didn’t want to think about Lucy, cause that would mean thinking about Lucy and Jack and that would mean thinking about years.

Nine of them to be precise.

Nine long years when Amy had been with Farrah and failed marriages numbers one through Bruce. Nine long years when the closest thing Amy had had to a father was Lucas Ashcroft and, no offense meant to Karma’s dad but… well… he was Karma’s dad.

Not to suggest that his daughter’s shortcomings painted a failing picture of him as a dad but…

Where was she? Oh. Right. Nine years.

Nine years of Amy being alone in ways no one else could ever understand. Nine years of her trying to remember only the good times she and Jack and her mother had had - Farrah had assured Reagan that there actually were some - but all of those memories being drowned out, shouted down, buried every single time by that other memory.

Because of you. I’m leaving because of you.

The first time she met Jack, a week ago yesterday, Reagan punched him in the face. She spent the rest of that night wondering if maybe, just maybe, she was getting a bit too used to resorting to violence to solve her problems. First Liam, now Jack. And then she remembered that, she imagined a younger, weaker, more heartbroken and not tough enough to hide it version of Amy, sitting alone in her room, those words running over and over and over in her head.

And then, she thought, maybe she hadn’t been quite violent enough.

That’s the other reason, besides the whole history thing (and the fact that Karma nearly pushed her out of the way to be by Amy and Amy didn’t seem to be bothered by that) she’s back here, by the coffee. She’s afraid - like genuinely concerned - that she might punch the fucker again, the moment he opens his mouth.

Of course, had she realized what Amy was planning, Reagan might not have been so worried about that.

“I hate you,” Amy says. (Told you we’d get back to it.) “I don’t know why you’re here and I don’t really care, I don't want to know.” Reagan resists the urge to mutter a 'you go, girl’ (it’s not still 2003, after all) but she can see the Lauren’s blonde mane bobbleheading up and down, silently cheering her sister (and fuck DNA and biology and blood, she’s Amy’s sister) on. “Whatever it is that you think you came back here for? You can forget it. You can forget me.” Amy turns to go, but pauses, and turns back. “You did that for nine years. I’m sure you can remember how.”

Reagan’s impressed and she doesn’t impress easy and, yes, she knows that’s bullshit because when it comes to Amy she impresses oh so very easy, but you get the point. It (her speech) was short and sweet and to the point and didn’t give Jack any time or any chance to even say a single word -

Words he would, apparently, have to be saying through another bloody lip cause Amy takes all of two steps before pausing - again - then turning and delivering a right hook to her father’s face that makes even Reagan wince and, she’s pretty sure, draws a very not manly whimper of pain from Liam.

It’s all she can do not to laugh.

And then they’re off. Amy and Karma and Lauren and Theo and Shane, across the shop and out the door, the other customers parting like the sea. Lucy’s already by her father’s side and Liam… well… he’s just… there. He looks to the door like he wants to follow the others, but he knows he really can’t, and he looks to Lucy and Jack like he’ll stay there but there’s already a wall of sorts up around them, a circling of the Raudenfeld Lee wagons and he’s on the wrong side of that too. He’s stuck there, for a moment, lost and confused, until he finally just shakes his head and drifts off, seemingly headed to parts unknown and Reagan can only hope maybe he’ll stay there.

She almost feels sorry for him. Almost. After all, she’s still there too. She didn’t follow the train out of the station with all her friends. (And, you know, Karma.) But unlike Liam, that’s got next to nothing to do with her not knowing where she belongs. Quite the contrary, really.

She knows this is exactly where she needs to be.

Lucy glances back over her shoulder at her as Reagan slips down into the booth across from Jack, but Reagan pays her no mind. She’s not about to let herself get distracted by little Miss Almost-Amy, not right now. There’s a napkin and some silverware on the table and she - very nonchalantly - twirls the knife on the tabletop, spinning it with a finger.

“Round and round it goes,” she mutters, barely holding back a smirk at the way Jack flinches at the sight of the spinning metal, or at the way Lucy suddenly reaches out - far quicker than Amy ever could - and snatches the knife from the wood. Reagan looks up, locking eyes with Jack before she speaks again. “She doesn’t mean it, you know.”

“What?” It’s Lucy who asks and it’s Lucy who Reagan ignores, again.

Reagan repeats the knife act with a spoon, but that doesn’t elicit quite the same reaction as the knife. “You probably don’t know this since, you know, you don’t really know her, but Amy didn’t mean that. Any of it.”

“It sure looked like she meant it.” Lucy again. Reagan’s tempted to tell her to go chase after Booker and let the grown ups talk, but Jack beats her to it, resting one hand on Lucy’s, a silent father to daughter moment.

Nine years. They’ve had nine years to learn that. Nine years they stole from Amy.

Reagan sort of wishes she had the knife back.

“She wants to,” Reagan says. “She wants to hate you. Actually, she really wants to not give a fuck about you one way or the other. She wants your presence or, more likely, your absence, to not mean a thing to her.”

The 'but it does’, she leaves unsaid. Jack gets it, she knows that. But him, actually hearing the words… well, that might be just a bridge too far for Reagan right about now.

“But see, that’s the thing about Amy,” she says and even Jack, who doesn’t know Reagan from fucking Adam, can see the look in her eyes, can tell how much this 'thing’ makes her love and hate her girlfriend all at once. “She forgives. Always. Eventually.”

There’s a moment when Jack’s tempted to ask if this is about him or about that girl, the one he remembers all too well, the one that was holding his daughter’s hand. But he doesn’t ask cause he already knows.

And he’s not stupid.

Reagan drops a hand down on the spoon, stilling it in mid-spin. “She wants to forgive,” she says. “She needs to. It’s in her nature. Maybe not her DNA, but in her.”

Forgiveness is Amy. Even Farrah knew that.

Someday, Karma Ashcroft is going to come walking up to my front door…

It isn’t that Reagan doesn’t understand, cause she does. She gets it all too well. Amy’s spent years hating - or trying to hate - Jack. Hate him for what he did before he left and the way he left and for staying gone for all this time. She’s spent so very long trying to hate him for all of that and yeah, Reagan gets that, she knows a thing or two about how that feels.

“It feels exhausting,” she says, not realizing or caring how out of nowhere that might sound. “It wears you down, carrying that with you. That’s why people always say that forgiveness is really for you, not for those you forgive.”

Jack nods and Reagan wonders if there’s a step for that, if one of the twelve he’s supposedly on speaks about forgiveness.

Even for those who don’t deserve a lick of it.

“She wants to hate you,” Reagan repeats, you know, for emphasis. “And I do. And that is never going to change. There is nothing you can ever do that will make me…” she slowly shakes her head and pushes herself out of the booth. “Way I see it, Jack, you’ve got two choices. You can do what you do best, what you taught her to do. You can run. You can pack up you and your… Lucy… and leave the same way you came in, slipping out in the dark where no one can see.”

Jack nods again, finally speaking, his tongue slipping out between words to swipe at the blood pooling on his lip. “And my other choice?”

Reagan shrugs. “You can start giving her reasons to do what she already wants to do,” she says. “And maybe, one day, like ten years from now, you’ll wake up one morning to discover you’ve got an actual relationship with your daughter.”

The 'but I’ll be there, right there, watching every move and waiting, just waiting, for the inevitable slip’ she leaves unsaid too.

They both already know that.

“Amy came here today because she thinks, somehow, that you’re still worth a chance,” Reagan says, leaning against the edge of the booth and hating every word of it, even though she knows it’s all true. “If she didn’t, she would have just ignored you, kept right on pretending that you just don’t exist. She’s pretty good at that, you know. Must be in the genes.”

Jack doesn’t reply cause, really, what could he say?

Reagan runs a hand through her hair and she wonders, not for the first time, what might have happened if she’d just listened to the fucking GPS. “Amy thinks you’re going to stay,” she says, and a deaf man could hear the doubt ringing in her voice. “She’d never say it out loud, but she’s got just enough Karma in her that somewhere, way deep down, Amy honestly still truly believes in happy endings and that the good guys always win and that people… all people… they’re just inherently good.”

It is, in fact, one of the things Reagan secretly loves so very much about Amy. One day, like ten years from now or so, she might even tell her that.

It is, though, one of the things she and Amy don’t have in common and Jack has already picked up on that. “And what about you, Reagan?” he asks. “What do you think?”

It’s a loaded question and he knows it and she knows it and Lucy knows it, even if that’s just about the only thing she knows about any of this. Reagan sort of envies her for that. “I think that you and I both know better,” she says. “People aren’t inherently good or bad. They’re just people. And people do good things and people do bad things. And some people you can count on and others…”

She shrugs. Others, it says (screams) you can count on too. To let you down. Every. Fucking. Time.

“You don’t think Amy can count on me?” Jack asks her.

Reagan laughs. Like a legit laugh. “She counted on you to stay gone and you couldn’t even manage that,” she says. Her phone buzzes in her pocket and she doesn’t have to check to know it’s Amy or Lolo (she’d prefer the former but figures it’s more likely the latter) wondering where the fuck she went. “In the end, Jack, I think you’re just sober enough, just guilt ridden enough that you’ll try. You’ll do everything you can to make yourself believe that she’s actually right about you.” She leans down, pressing her palms flat against the table, so she can look him in the eye. “But in the end, I know she’s not.” She laughs again, before straightening back up to walk away. “Ten bucks says you don’t even make it to graduation.”

It’s not Jack, but Lucy who calls after her as she crosses the shop. “Ten bucks? That’s it? Not so sure of yourself after all, are you?”

Reagan pauses by the door. There’s a witty comeback, a razor-sharp line already poised and set, ready for her to let it fly. But that would keep her there, that would make her linger. Another second to turn, another three or four to say the words, another five or six to watch them land, to see if, maybe, Jack’s ego is as fragile as his face.

But see, her phone? It’s buzzing again. And this time, she does check, slipping it from her pocket even as she walks.

Shrimps: Where are you? I sent Karma and everyone else home. I need you.

And when Amy calls? When Amy needs her? Well, that math is the simplest there is. See, that ten bucks? It’s just like that one or two or six more seconds here instead of with her.

It’s all more than Jack’s worth.

Eight days after the fire

She’s drunk.

He doesn't need to be an expert on the subject to be able to tell that - not so long as he can see the way she’s staggering around and slurring her words, or the sounds he thinks are trying to be her words - but, it just so happens that, when it comes to being full on, sloppy as all fuck, you’d best be praying to whatever God you believe in that you don’t remember this tomorrow morning drunk?

Jack’s got a fucking Ph.D.

He supposes that’s why Amy called him. Or, rather, why she settled for him, why she realized maybe - for like the first time ever - he was her best choice. That, he knows, was just plain old dumb luck. Amy had called Lucy trying to find Karma and she did find Karma, she found the both of them, together - though Jack is pretty sure they aren't really together, not like that - with him, in his living room in his house, even if he was almost never there anymore and especially even if Karma had sworn never to take even one step over the threshold.

“I’ve spent enough time in your house over the years,” she said. “More than you have so, I’ll just stay on this side of your new door, thank you very much.”

Jack could be forgiven if he heard that as ’fuck you very much’. It was, after all, what she'd meant.

She’d stuck to it, even then, showing a bit of that famous Ashcroft stubborn streak, refusing at first to come inside. But after the fire and after the doctors finally let Lucy come home from the hospital, Jack refused to let Lucy out of his sight and, apparently, Karma did as well and, when neither one of them seemed inclined to back down in the slightest, Lucy sighed, walked over, and took Karma’s hand and led her inside and that was just the end of that.

And that was yesterday.

Still, twenty-four hours of house guests, is just that. Twenty-four hours and maybe he’s lost a few (or more than a few) brain cells along the way, but Jack’s not so stupid that he’s letting any of this make him think anything has really changed. Karma’s at his house and Amy’s asked him for a favor (and it was actually an ’ask’ and not a ’tell’ and yes, that was different) and that’s all well and good and progress and he knows the mantra: one step at a time.

But his next step? Yeah, that’s the tricky one. The one he’s stumbled on pretty much every day for the last seven years, the one that’s always there to remind him that progress or no progress he’s still him.

That next step is Reagan.

Once she, you know, notices him standing there and all. She’s still a bit too stagger-y and yell-y and clutching that bottle in her hand like it’s her life-y to have spotted him.

So, no, Jack’s got no illusions about anything. He knows this isn’t a total sea change, it’s not some seismic shift in his life, a massive one-stop-shop fix for his relationships with just about everyone (read: everyone who isn’t his daughter) (the daughter he came with, not the one he left) and he knows that none of this is about him or about him and Amy or about putting a few more planks into the bridge over the chasm between them (the one he made, the one nine years pretty much dynamited into permanence.)

Hell, this isn’t even about Reagan, not really. It’s not about who she is or what she’s doing or what she’s lost, even if all that is what got Amy on the phone and why she sucked up her pride and tucked away her resentment and anger and sadness and anger and frustration - and did he mention anger - and actually asked him for help.

“She hasn’t even cried,” Amy said. “Not since the funeral and I think she cried more at Liam’s than at…” Jack could hear it over the line, the ache and the empty and the powerlessness, the total inability to help the one you love.

He’d hoped to never hear that again. Not from her, not from Amy.

Hearing it from her mother - about him - had been enough of that for one lifetime.

Jack spares a moment to look away from Reagan - she’s less staggering and more leaning now, on a tree that doesn’t seem likely to let her fall any time soon - and glance up at what used to be his daughter’s home away from home, at least in the physical sense. He understands, so much more than anyone gives him credit for, that Amy’s real home stopped being a place a long damn time ago. It turned from a where to a who (Karma, at least at first) right about the time her other home - the real one every kid is supposed to have - disappeared into the Austin night, never to be heard from again.

Except here he is - that disappearing home - and never, apparently, is a fuckload shorter than the word suggests.

But now, that home - Amy’s home - isn't the girl sitting who spent all those years in the house Jack built and abandoned. It’s not the woman she's become either, the one silently watching over Amy's sister, much the way she used to watch over Amy, standing guard as Lucy sleeps fitfully, tossing and turning and crying out in fear as nightmares of flame and smoke and Liam’s ash and soot covered face dance inside her mind.

Amy loves Karma and everyone knows that and everyone knows she always will. But Amy's home is five feet in front of him, leaning against a tree, muttering under her breath, clutching to a bottle in way Jack finds both terrifying and oddly familiar - and yes, he’ll grasp at any straw of similarity when it comes to him and Reagan - and he knows he can’t ever undo the last sixteen years and, if the fire has taught them all anything, there’s not a single shred of a guarantee that there will be sixteen more.

But the here and the now? Maybe he can do something about that.

Besides, you know, fucking it up.

The building, such as it is, well… it’s not really a building anymore. There’s walls still standing, sure, and some of the roof and the insurance guy, the one Amy dealt with while Reagan lurked in the background, giving him a glare Jack had once thought was reserved for him, did say that it wasn’t a total loss.

Insurance guys, Jack thought (then and now) probably out to sit down and redefine 'total’, cause he was pretty sure no one he knew agreed with Mr. Insurance’s assessment in the slightest.

There was a booth left. One, from the back, as far removed from ground fucking zero as it could have been and still been in the building. It was… salvageable. A couple of semi-standing chairs, a light fixture or two. A stance of menus that had somehow been protected beneath the melted glass of the front display case.

“If you’re going to rebuild,” insurance guy had said, “it’s not much, but it’s a start.”

It had been all Amy could do to keep Reagan from punching him, a habit Jack had thought she’d finally outgrown. But tragedy, he knew, could make anyone backslide.

Anyone.

He thought about it now, about that word. Start. A start from an end. Two of them, really, and it was almost four. Jack doesn’t like to think about it, he’s spent almost every single minute of the last eight days actively trying to think about anything else. Trying not to think how close Jana came to not making it - it’ll be another week, minimum, before they send her home - and trying even harder not to think…

He’d almost lost her.

Sometimes, Jack knows, he focuses so much on Amy, on fixing or at least not worsening, things between them that he almost forgets Lucy. She says that she doesn’t mind, she says that she understands and she and Jack both let that be true.

He has a feeling that might not hold up anymore.

She almost died. Another minute, another two, maybe three, another two or three or four more breaths and she wouldn’t have taken any more. A little more smoke, a little more flame and those thoughts make Jack shut his eyes and try not to think about it and yeah, if that actually ever works, he’ll be sure to let you know.

In the end, Lucy escaped. And no, that’s not quite right. She didn't escape, she was saved, she was pulled, dragged, somehow carried to safety by a young man Jack had sort of come to think of as a son. And that, he knew was just more of his usual bullshit. It wasn’t 'sort of’ or 'kind of’ or a 'little bit’. Liam had been the first real friend Jack had made in years and yes, thinking of it, of him, in sort of’s and kinda’s and the like, it does help to stave off the grief and the guilt, at least for a moment or two.

And then it all comes roaring back and Jack remembers that he’s not supposed to be free of the grief or the guilt (especially not that) but just because he has to live with it… well…

That doesn’t mean she does.

He takes one step closer and thinks - remembering how Reagan hasn’t outgrown punching after all - that maybe that’s close enough. He stuffs both his hands in the pockets of his jacket, it’s unseasonably cool for a Texas night, and stares up at the not-a-building anymore.

“Karma’s acting like it’s all… I don’t know,” he says and yes, he knows how stupid it is to begin any conversation with Reagan by making it about Karma. But he’s much like his daughter, not in an obsessed with Karma way. He’s just a bit of a… round the way kinda talker. He’ll get there, he’ll settle on the point, eventually. You just gotta hang on for the ride.

“I’d forgotten how 'glass half full’ she could be,” he says. “She’s acting like it’s all going to be just fine, like Liam’s just popped on down to the corner store and he’s gonna be back any minute now.”

Karma and Liam. If he's looking to get punched, he’s on the right track.

Reagan doesn’t turn or look or otherwise acknowledge that she even hears him, if she’s at all surprised that he’s there. If she’s shocked that it’s him or that he’s talking about Karma and Liam instead of her father or the bottle in her hand, Jack can’t tell.

Spoiler Alert: she's not. Reagan knew someone would come and she knew it wouldn’t be Amy and - honestly - that it shouldn’t be. Not yet. And as for Jack talking about anything other than the giant fucking elephant in the room..

She’s been with Amy for seven years. She knows the drill.

“In some ways, Karma’s really grown up,” Jack says and he’s right, too, even if Reagan might not be at a point to admit that just yet. Karma has grown. She’s less all about her and more about others, less flighty, less prone to insane plans (future Harcroft spawn notwithstanding) and, in most ways, she’s got both feet planted firmly in the real world.

In most ways.

“Sometimes though,” he says, with a slow shake of his head. “She still slips back, you know? Back to her little house on the corner of Denial Ave and Fantasy Lane.” He leans up against a tree and turns, looking at her for the first time since he got there. “Must be nice,” he says, “but it doesn’t work for everyone, does it?”

“Fuck!”

It’s more of a scream than a yell, something guttural, something past pain, more bordering on desperation and it breaks Jack’s heart. Despite what Reagan thinks, he has come to love her and even if he didn't… no one would wish that kind of agony on anyone.

She hurls the bottle (a bottle) (she’s got another one in her hands already and he’s got no idea where the hell she had that hidden) across the caution tape border surrounding what’s left of what used to be her place, listening with something akin to satisfaction - or whatever’s close enough to that that could actually break through - as it shatters on the remnants of the front steps.

No. Denial doesn’t work for everyone.

She staggers a couple steps back and leans against another tree. It’s the first of the ones that aren’t scorched or burnt or still covered in a layer of soot and smoke. It hasn’t rained since the fire - the forecast calls for thunderstorms over the weekend, but Jack isn’t naive enough to think anything short of another Noah is gonna wash any of this away - and this is as close as she can get without getting into ash and soot and tangled in that tape and, he thinks, it’s funny the things you never realize about fire.

The distance, for one. The way it reaches out, its flickering fingers of flame touching everything, scratching and clawing and digging in, desperate for purchase, fighting to stay alive till their very last breath. Jack’s eyes wander over the wreckage and that’s another one: the remnants. You always think of the damage it does, of the things it burns and melts and destroys.

You don’t often think of what it leaves behind.

Jack’s surprised at that. He’d have thought himself an expert on things left behind.

Fire is those burned out husks, the buildings gutted, the belongings - the possessions - charred to ash. But it’s so much more. It’s the trees gone black, likely to be removed, maybe replaced and they’re not the only thing, but they’re the easiest, the least painful, one tree is the same as the next and oh, if that were only true for everything. And it’s the grass - right down to the tips of each blade - burnt like marshmallows sizzling at the end of a stick. It’s the coughs that linger for days, the dark grime under your nails that you can’t get out. The way your breaths catch in your throat and you’re not sure another one is ever going to come.

It’s the eyes of a woman who looks, for all the world, like she’s not sure she wants it to.

Not that he’d say it to Amy, but Jack would be more surprised if Reagan wasn’t drinking. She lost so much. A father. A friend - and Liam was that, in the end, Jack’s sure - and a building, a business, a home. Even if that had been all of it, the sum total of everything Reagan lost that night, it would still be enough to drive almost anyone into a bottle.

She still hasn’t acknowledged him, which is good, in a way. After all, that means the bottle is still in her hand and not yet flying by his head. It’s dark, too dark for him to see the label, to recognize her choice in poison, but, he supposes, what it is is considerably less important than that it is. It is what it is, Lucy would say. And what it is, right now, no matter the vintage or the malt or the label, is an escape. Trouble is, Jack knows all too well how easily, how quickly, how without warning, that escape from something can turn into a far more permanent trap. Not that he, or anyone else, thinks Reagan’s going to follow down his path. No, for him, that bottle was a life.

For her, it’s an excuse. A high proof, finely aged, burn the inside of your throat until it matches the scorched outside of your world, reason why she isn't picking herself up off the mat, why she hasn’t even started to get on with the getting on. But it’s only been eight days and she doesn't need an excuse. No one - least of all the woman she loves - expects her to be the old Reagan just yet, not now, maybe not ever. But Jack knows better. The excuse isn’t for all of them.

It’s for her.

“She send you?”

That Reagan gets the words out clearly and smoothly and correctly tells Jack that she’s either not drunk enough, or that she passed 'enough’ an hour or so ago and now she’s fully on the downward slope to a sober that will end up tipping that new bottle right down her throat, in a desperate attempt to stave reality off, even if just for five more minutes. Trouble is, that five is never enough. There’s always another five, another ten, another hour, another day.

Another nine years. Give or take.

“She sent you, didn’t she?” Reagan asks again, this time glancing at him over her shoulder, as she points and jabs at the air with one finger from the hand still death-gripping that bottle.

It’s Jack. The bottle.

The irony is strong with this one.

“Well, you can just go right back to her and tell her that I am just A-O-fucking-K,” Reagan says, turning her back to him and staring off into the dark. It’s a moonless night and Jack knows she can’t actually see the details, just the outlines, the shape of things. He also knows that matters very little, as in not at all. “I don’t need her sending babysitters after me. And, you know what? You tell her I’m a little hurt. I didn’t even rate Lolo? I had to get you?”

He could remind her that Lauren is still out of town, that she has been since the night before the fire, that she was the one who talked to her on the phone and told her it was 'fine’ and there was nothing 'she could do’ and she should finish up with everything with Theo’s sister’s wedding and then come home and that would be just 'soon enough’.

He could. But he’d prefer to not get bottle bombed just yet.

“She think you’re gonna scare me straight?” she asks. “That it? You hear to remind me of the dangers of alcohol? Show me what I might become?”

Jack shakes his head, not that she’s looking. “You won’t become me,” he says, silently leaving off the 'you’re far too strong for that’. “I think Amy just… she thinks maybe there’s something I can do for you that she can’t.”

Reagan wheels on him - as best she can - and Jack braces for impact but it doesn’t come, at least not physically.

“In the history of the world,” she says, “there is nothing… nothing… that you could ever do for me.”

She slumps back against the tree and, if he could see that well in the dark, Jack would know her knuckles have gone white around the bottle neck. Her legs give out beneath her and Reagan slides down the trunk till she’s on the ground, her head tipped back against the tree, her eyes squeezed shut against the dark.

“OK,” she mutters. “Maybe there is one thing.” She fumbles in her pocket, dragging her keys out and flinging them in Jack’s general direction. “I don’t want to be here anymore,” she says and yeah, Jack’s going to just go right ahead and assume she just means here, like the literal place and not the more… global here.

Reagan doesn’t strike him as the suicide type. No matter the hell she’s living in.

“I hate you, you know,” she says and yeah, he knows. But he still scoops her keys up off the ground, wondering which will piss her off more. Him driving her truck or her riding in his car. In the end, it’s six of one and a half dozen of the other and, he knows, by the time he’s done, she’s gonna hate him more anyway.

So they’ll take the truck. At least the windows all work.

They don’t go home.

“This isn’t home,” Reagan says and, clearly, being three sheets to the wind - though Jack suspects the cool night breeze and the lack of any further imbibing has made it a little closer to one and a half sheets by now - hasn’t impacted her firm grasp of the obvious. “This,” she says, staring out the open window, “is so not home.”

Jack slips the truck into park and stares at the wheel, collecting himself. This was his idea, and he still thinks it’s the right one - even if it maybe isn’t all that good a one - but that was, you know, before.

Before they got here and before he remembered and, in this case, remembering isn’t just a river in Egypt or a vague sense of recollection tickling at the back of his brain. It’s more like an ice cold hand, reaching up and squeezing his heart, slowly wringing the life out of it like water out of a sponge and he wonders, just for a second, if Reagan would give him that bottle if he asked.

It’s only a moment, but it feels like… well… it doesn’t feel like forever.

It feels a lot - like exactly - like a thousand and one moments he had over a thousand and one nights and Jack cringes, pinching the bridge of his nose and taking a long deep breath, at the thought of how many of those nights ended here, instead of at home. How many of them ended with him on the ground - his own holy ground, but still the fucking dirt - instead of safely tucked away in his bed, in the loving embrace of his wife.

“Do you know how many nights Amy’s crawled into bed with me?” Farrah asked him once, after he’d been gone for two full days. “How many nights she’s taken your place because she heard me crying and wanted to make it better?”

Jack didn’t know then and he still doesn’t know now, but he’s got the feeling she wouldn’t have asked if it had just been once, even if once was already more than too many.

He pulls his phone out and taps away as he kills the engine and yes, kills is probably a poor choice of words, all things considered, but if he’s lucky, nothing else will die tonight. Not him. Not his relationship with Amy, the one dancing on the thinnest of ices.

That’s the hope, but then hope doesn’t just spring eternal for people who make good choices and do the right thing.

It’s there for fuckups like him too.

“Why are we here?” Reagan asks and yeah, that is the million dollar question, but Jack’s got no good answer, at least not a good one he can say.

This, he knows, is more of a show than a tell kinda situation, so he says nothing as he taps out the last letter of his text message - like he’d have ever guessed that learning to do that would actually come in handy - and presses send before tucking Reagan’s keys into his pocket, a move she doesn’t miss.

“Making sure I can’t run?” she asks and Jack thinks - for like a hot minute - of pointing out that even only one and a half sheets pretty much guarantees she can’t actually run, but he’s not drunk (or stupid), so he just slips out from behind the wheel without saying anything, making his way around to the passenger side of the truck, tugging Reagan’s door open.

It sticks a little. Still.

Jack gets it on the second pull and Reagan’s still too confused - and she’s hurtling right past confused and straight on to pissed as fast as her soused brain can get her there - to actually notice, so at least he’s spared a bit of mockery.

“Come on,” he says, offering her a hand out (that he knows she’ll refuse.) “I want to show you something.”

She does refuse his hand - like that’s a shock - but she eyes it for a moment, in that way most people might eye a hissing cobra, her eyes tracking it’s every move (Jack’s holding perfectly still but Reagan’s a bit of a weeble at the moment), mesmerized but wary, before she finally slides out of her seat, stumbling slightly when her feel hit the ground.

“Lead the way,” she says, waving ahead of them and Jack knows full well she just doesn’t want him to watch her weaving and wobbling as she walks and, having been on her end of that deal more than… well… a lot… in his life, he politely nods and turns, walking ahead without waiting for her. She’ll follow, he’s sure enough of that.

He’s still got her keys after all.

She’s on his heels soon enough, as he crosses the small lot and through the old gate that creaks like bones as he pushes it open and God, could this get any more cliche?

Reagan pauses just on the other side of the gate, looking at the rusted plaque hanging to the left. “A cemetery,” she says, her eyes darting from the plaque to Jack’s back and then to the plaque again. “You brought me to a cemetery,” she says. “And it isn’t even the right one.”

Jack’s phone shakes in his hand, but he doesn’t look down, turning instead to face Reagan, still on the other side of the invisible line, the last barrier between the living and the dead, assuming you don’t count six feet of earth and pine boxes of varying quality and age. He knows what she means, knows full well that the 'right one’ - the one they buried her father in three days ago - is on the other side of town.

But it’s not her ghosts they’re here for.

“It’s just over there,” he says, nodding toward the back corner of the small lot before turning and walking ahead again, not giving her a chance to argue with him. He takes the chance to sneak a peek at his phone, the three words blinking back up at him giving him a sense of relief that’s wrapped up in an eggroll of dread.

On my way

Well, he’s all in now.

Reagan doesn’t move, not right away, but eventually the creepy of standing in a dark graveyard by herself outweighs (barely) the creepy of following Amy’s father through said dark graveyard and soon she’s right behind him again, so close he could reach out and take her hand before she’d even be able to stop him.

But he doesn’t. Jack’s got no interest in getting buried alongside his memories here tonight.

He comes to a stop at the far end of the cemetery, the most sparsely… populated… area, only two or three headstones within reach, nothing there but a tree. And, really, calling it a 'tree’ is sort of like calling him a 'drunk.’

The word’s right, by definition, but it somehow misses the scope by like a country fucking mile, if a country mile was the distance between here and the molten core of the sun.

More or less.

It’s huge and Jack swears it’s grown, even if logically he knows that’s not possible. It was old when he was last here - the day he left, the hour after he told Amy it was because of her - and he’s actually a bit amazed it’s even still here.

But of course it is. Some things - some pains - will outlive us all.

“Who?” Reagan asks, stumbling to a stop beside him. “Who’s buried here?”

Jack shakes his head slowly, not quite trusting his voice just yet.

“Come on, Jack,” she says, the drunk edge to her words fading and the old bitter blade he’s used to slicing through the air between them coming slowly back. “You brought me here for a reason, right? What is it? Who is it? What’d you do? Drink and drive and kill someone?”

He lets out a shuddering breath and, for a moment, Reagan thinks that might actually be it and oh, that's… well…

Fuck.

“No one’s buried here,” he says, not even noticing as he takes a couple slow steps back and leans gently against one of the few gravestones. It could be seen as rude or disrespectful but Reagan’s the only other living one here and her opinion of him can’t get any lower. He nods at the tree. “There,” he says, nodding again at a spot low on the trunk.

She looks between him and the tree for a second before, slowly, stepping closer, and kneeling next to it in the dark. She fumbles in her pocket for her cell phone, bringing the screen to life and shining the dim light on the trunk, the jaggedly carved letters highlighted in the faint glow.

KJR

Reagan looks back at Jack, the question written all over face, even as the light of her screen fades to black.

“Did Farrah ever tell you why I started drinking?” he asks. Reagan shakes her head no. She and Amy’s mother talked about him - more than she and Amy ever did - but that was the one subject she doesn't remember them talking about. Like at all. “Didn’t figure,” Jack says, “not that it matters. The 'why’ doesn’t excuse the 'what’ of it all. But…”

He runs a hand through his hair and then crosses his arms over his chest. For once, Reagan isn’t pushing - she’s not doing much of anything - and Jack’s grateful. This is hard enough at his own pace.

“I was always a bit of drinker,” he says. “And maybe 'a bit’ is underselling it, but it wasn't… I wasn’t a drunk, not at first, not in the beginning.”

Everything’s got a beginning, everything’s got a trigger.

“When Amy was two, Farrah discovered…” he trails off and laughs, a harsh bark of a thing, ripping through the quiet of the dark night. “Discovered makes it sound like she found it while exploring new trade routes to India or some shit,” he says. “When Amy was two, Farrah got pregnant. We got pregnant.”

Reagan’s eyes flick back to the tree and she wishes it was just the booze making her stomach roll.

“We never even told Amy,” Jack says. “We wanted it to be a surprise. We were going to tell her at her birthday party. Like it… she… was a present.”

If Jack thought that was going to slip past Reagan unnoticed… “She?” Reagan slumps back against the tree, her subconscious somehow, even drunk, making sure she doesn’t cover the letters. “Another girl?”

Jack nods. “Katharine Josephina Raudenfeld. After Farrah’s mother… Nana… and my gram.”

KJR.

Reagan pulls her knees to her chest and drops her eyes to the ground. She can’t - she won’t - look at him right now.

Jack stands, pushing off the gravestone, but he doesn’t otherwise move. “Farrah was three and a half months along when it happened,” he says. “Doctor said it was just a freak thing, was just nature. We didn’t do anything wrong, we didn't make it happen, it just… did.”

He takes a couple hesitant steps forward, kneeling near her and he wouldn’t even have noticed if she pulled away, but Reagan doesn’t move an inch. She watches his hand running along the trunk, so close but yet so far from those letters.

“There was nothing… we didn’t have a body to bury,” he says. “Couldn’t have a funeral, I mean, who does that for someone who was never really a someone, right?” His fingers shake as they drift ever closer. “She was never Katharine, she was never really real.” If he sounded any less like he believed that… “They say that you’ve lost the baby, but how do you lose something you never had, that you never held or touched or…”

Jack presses his palm against the aged bark of the tree, feeling the cracked and worn wood digging into his skin.

He was going to say 'or loved’. That you never loved.

But that would have been one lie too many, even for a Raudenfeld.

“I’m not surprised Farrah never told you when I started drinking,” he says and Reagan notices, not for the first time, the way her name sounds on his lips and it hits her then - and she doesn’t know how she’s missed it all these years - the simplest of truths about Farrah and Jack.

He left her. But she never left him.

“I imagine,” he says, “that thinking about that… it probably hurts her more than anything. That one day, it cost her so much.” She can’t see him clearly in the dark, but Reagan can feel his tears dripping down his cheek. “Fate took Katharine from her. And then I took the rest.”

Reagan hears the soft sounds of footsteps crossing the lot before he does, but she doesn’t look, an odd sense of… duty?… to Jack - or maybe to Farrah or the baby she never knew - keeping her there, in that moment.

With him.

Just when she thought her life couldn’t get any weirder.

“I’m not here to scare you straight,” Jack says, his hand still pressed… no… still clutching to the tree. “No one thinks you’re going to be me, Reagan, no one’s worried you’ll fall into a bottle and never be able… never want… to climb back out.”

The steps grow still, just behind them and Jack’s eyes flick that way in the dark. He can’t see her there, she’s swallowed up by the night, but then again, he’s never needed to see her, now has he?

“Everyone’s got it wrong, you know,” he says to Reagan - and yes, to her, too - slumping down, his head coming to rest against the rough bark of the trunk. “Everyone thinks my sin… that my addiction was the booze. That I got lost in the drink. And that’s just not right.”

Not entirely, at least.

He turns slightly, eyes seeking out Reagan’s face in the shadows. “Do you know why Amy’s not here?” he asks her, not surprised when the darkness shifts, swirling in space as she shakes her head. “It’s because Amy knows,” he says. “She knows my sin was never the drinking and that’s what scares her, Reagan. That's how she thinks you just might be me, after all.”

Jack tenses, stiffening even as the words tumble out of him. Comparing her to him, well, that’s a much deserved one way ticket to punch town, but Reagan doesn’t move and she doesn’t say a word and maybe, he thinks, that’s why she'll never be him.

“Amnesia,” he says. It’s almost a whisper, but it might well be the loudest thing he’s ever said to anyone. “That was my sin, my addiction. Forgetting. Forgetting her,” his hand slips down the trunk, tracing a slow path over the border of those letters he carved so many years ago. “Trying to, at least. But I never did. I never…”

Those steps again. Closer. But halting, holding their distance. But just barely.

Jack turns again, facing Reagan in the dark. “I never forgot her,” he says, “it didn’t matter how much liquor I tried to bury her under. And I know you’ll never forget him either, your father.” He reaches out, his hand finding hers and maybe it’s just because she can’t see it or maybe it’s, oh, who knows why, but she lets him take it. “But I did forget, Reagan. I forgot what… who I had. I forgot I wasn’t alone.”

Those steps again, not stopping this time. And why would they… why would she? Jack called her here.

Your daughter needs you. The one you chose. She’s with me.

With the one you lost.

“Amy’s not here,” Jack says, “because you know you have her. You know she’ll never go, that wherever you are, she’s…” He trails off, he doesn’t actually say it, but then he doesn’t have to.

Reagan hears it anyway. She hears it every day.

Jack squeezes her hand and then, slowly, deliberately, he lets go. “Amy needs for you to remember,” he says. “That it’s not just her. You lost a father and that sucks beyond sucking and there’s nothing that can ever bring him back. But you…”

“You still have a family.”

Reagan turns to those words, spinning in the dark, those steps finally breaking through, and she doesn’t need to see to know Farrah’s there, right where she always is. Waiting for her to slip out of the dark, to find her way.

Her way home.

It’s only three steps but it feels like three million before Reagan’s tipping and toppling into her arms… her mother’s arms… and maybe it’s the feel of those arms around her or the way she instinctively just knows they’ll never let her go, but whatever it is - and the what doesn’t really matter, not in the end - that’s when the dam breaks, when the rush of everything she’s tried to bury, just the way they buried him, comes hurtling out of her in sobs and heaves and, for just those few minutes, Reagan’s not sure it’ll ever stop.

But she’s sure - she remembers - that even if it doesn’t?

Her family is never far.

Three years from now

The last time Reagan ever says those three little words, Amy’s nowhere near.

It’s still so weird to her, being here - Farrah’s house - with him, with Jack. It doesn’t matter, not a whit, that Farrah is OK with it. And it somehow matters even less that Bruce says he’s just fine with it.

Fine. Fuck that. Reagan may not have invented 'just fine’, but she’s Goddamned perfected it and if you don’t believe that, well, you can go right ahead and ask Amy.

But probably do it… later. Amy’s time is something of a precious commodity just now.

“It feels like a betrayal,” she says, leaning against the kitchen counter next to her father-in-law, well, one of them, anyway. “Him being here. Him staying here. I mean, yeah, I know this was his house first -”

“And thanks for the reminder of that,” Bruce mutters and for a moment Reagan thinks she’s said the exact wrong thing and oh, like that would be a first. But then Bruce gives her a grin, that old goofy 'I'ma fuckin’ with you’ good old boy grin of his - the one she’s never quite squared with the man who spawned Lauren 'Satan’s ninja’ Cooper - and nudges her with his shoulder. “I get the sentiment, Rea,” he says, “and I certainly appreciate it, but…”

He shrugs and that’s only about the five hundredth time someone has done that in the last six weeks, it’s happened so often it’s become a part of their family’s unspoken language and yes, it’s nice that they have something like that - and that she gets to be a part of, rather than apart from it - but it still just pisses her off.

Like that’s a first, either.

“Believe me,” Bruce says, “I know how you feel. I know Jack makes you uncomfortable and trust me, having my wife’s first husband living here, it’s not my idea of a good -”

She cuts him off. Hard. “It was your idea,” she says, turning against the counter, and scooting closer so she can whisper, lest Lucy or Karma or - worse - one of the kids hears her. Reagan’s been down that particular road with both her sister-in-law and her bff-in-law, and she knows they absolutely hate it when she speaks ill of Grampa Jack in front of the children. “You’re the idiot who suggested it.”

“Because I knew Farrah wanted it,” Bruce replies, ignoring the 'idiot’ part, and lowering his voice as well. He smiles politely at Emma as she snags an apple juice from the fridge and makes her way back out of the kitchen. “And I knew Amy wanted it.” He shrugs, again and Reagan grips the counter to keep from smacking something. “And it’s not like he’s gonna be here that long.”

He’s right. He’s so very very very right. But all the rightness in the world, doesn’t do a thing to keep them both from freezing in place at his words, their eyes doing a slow pan around the kitchen, out to the living room, just to make sure no one heard that.

It’s horrible to speak ill of the dead. That’s one lesson - maybe the only one - Reagan got from her mother that actually stuck. And, she supposes, that probably should apply to the nearly dead too.

Or, it will, if either of the nearly dead’s daughters (or Karma) or his granddaughter (or Emma) (or even Luke, even though his father wasn’t the nearly dead’s kind of son, but both of them still call him Grampa Jack and no, that’s not weird at all and God, sometimes Reagan thinks this family of hers needs a fucking flowchart) heard them.

Bruce nods, mostly for lack of anything better to do - and at least it’s not another shrug - but when he leans back on the counter and waves to Farrah, out in the living room with her little Katie-did on her hip, the smile crossing his face doesn’t match his words, not at all. “You don’t like it and I don’t like it and Lord knows Lauren doesn’t like it,” he whispers softly, “but this? It isn’t about us.”

He pats Reagan lightly on the shoulder and heads out of the kitchen, ruffling Luke’s hair on his way as - not for the first time - Reagan wonders why he’s not Papa Bruce or some such homey shit and yeah, she gets it, Karma and Shane are closer now to Jack than they are to Bruce and yes, she knows that’s only logical (he’s Karma’s family now, after all) but it still just… bugs.

Some things, she thinks, really never change.

She sighs and fires off a glance down the hall, at the very closed door to the spare bedroom that Bruce and Farrah added on a few years back. It was meant, at the time, to be a room for Katie, a nursery of sorts, first, and eventually her own bedroom, so she wasn’t just fitting into her mom or Aunt Lolo’s old room. It was meant that way and, Reagan supposes, it might someday still be that. Maybe.

Or maybe, when it’s all said and done, they’ll bulldoze the fucker to the ground and start all over.

The door’s shut, like it almost always is. She wonders sometimes - always silently to herself and never out loud, especially not to her wife - if keeping it shut is more for Jack's privacy or their benefit. There’s something to be said for out of sight, out of mind, even if she knows full fucking well that Jack hasn’t been out of anyone’s mind in months.

Cancer has a way of doing that.

Death does too.

She doesn’t need to do another scan of the room to know exactly who’s MIA, who’s behind that closed door. She’d watched as Amy headed off that way almost as soon as they got here, not before handing off Katie to her Nana (and yes, Reagan knows that’s a family tradition and that’s who Farrah is now, and she’s fine with it but, to her, there will always be only one Nana) and she hasn’t been seen since.

If she sticks with her usual pattern - and Mama Amy is nothing if not a creature of habit and routine now - Reagan won’t see her again, at least not for another hour and no, that doesn't really bother her. It doesn’t bother her so much that she only brought it up once, wondering if maybe Amy was spending a bit too much time with Jack.

“He doesn’t have much time left, Rea,” Amy said, in much the same soothing voice she used to try and get Katie to sleep at three in the morning, and yeah, that probably had something to do with both being somewhat lost causes. It was Amy’s 'mama’ voice and, if it wasn’t such a sweet and oddly arousing thing, Reagan might have objected to being 'mothered’.

The fact that she was holding her daughter, who had finally fallen asleep, in the rocking chair in the nursery - the chair Jack fucking built - and it was just about the most perfect moment she’d ever experienced had absolutely nothing (read: everything) to do with it.

“I just worry,” she said softly, careful not to wake the sleeping beauty. “I don’t want you see you get hurt.”

Amy nodded and smiled and if it didn’t quite reach her eyes… well… they were talking about the death of her father. And that, more than anything, was precisely why she so easily humored her wife about it all, why she didn’t object or get offended any time Reagan brought it up. Younger Amy might have. Younger Amy would have probably agreed but then argued just on principle.

(Read: for the make up sex.)

(Mostly.)

But Mama Amy wasn’t younger Amy and Mama Amy had spent the better part of thirteen years with every version of Reagan. She knew her wife inside and out and she knew that every time Reagan mentioned her spending a little less time with Jack?

It was always about her wish to spend more. She knew that when they talked about it, like this, they weren’t always - or even mostly - talking about the death of Amy’s father.

So, Amy did what Amy always did and kissed her wife softly and pressed an even softer kiss to the top of her daughter’s head and gently reminded Reagan that she couldn't get hurt, not by him, not anymore, and that now was the time, the only time, because time was one thing Jack just didn’t have much of.

“You heard the doctors,” she said.

Yeah. Reagan heard them. She heard their words - stage four, lungs, and maybe six months (or weeks) (she heard that too) - and she heard Jack joking about always thinking it would be his liver but he 'must have pickled that bad boy’ just a little too well (and she was the only one who laughed) and she gets it. She really does.

Getting doesn’t equal liking.

And neither of those equals being comfortable - something she’s never been and never will be when it comes to Jack and his place in their family - and yes, Reagan's also heard every one of the lectures (from Karma) (no one else would dare) about how holding a grudge, especially one against someone who never, you know, hurt you, is probably a bad idea and definitely not what a mature woman trying to be a role model for her little girl would do.

“Katie's three months, Karma,” Reagan said (said, not snapped, and see? She's matured.) “By the time she’s old enough to know what a grudge even is, I’ll be over it.”

She left off the 'cause he’ll be dead and all’ and see (again)? So. Fucking. Mature.

But Reagan’s heard it all and she's tried, really she has. She keeps her comments to herself, mostly, or to Bruce. Sometimes Lauren. Occasionally Katie, but only during middle of the night feedings and never in front of her mother or her Nana, and so, most of the time, she falls back on that other old chestnut that Martin taught her, for dealing with her own mother.

If you can’t say something nice? Well…

At least have the decency to whisper.

So she keeps quiet (mostly) and even tries to not let it seethe inside her, to not let herself dwell on it - and that’s so obviously working, right? - and to try to see Amy’s and Farrah’s and Lucy’s side of it all. She tries and sometimes she even succeeds, a bit, but it still feels… wrong. It still feels like a betrayal, though not of her, not really. Of something bigger than just her, bigger than one or two broken hearts (even if one of those was her wife’s), something like…

Them. All of them.

See, the thing Reagan can’t get past is that she remembers. She so remembers that moment when Amy told her what Jack said, about why he left. And she remembers the first time Amy told Jack she hated him. She remembers the first time Amy punched him, the first time she did, hell, she remembers the first time Karma did - and yes, every one of those was a first, not a last, or an only - and she remembers how Farrah threatened him with severe bodily harm when she found out he was back and the way Shane glared and Lolo tensed every time he was near. It wasn't just her.

They all hated him.

And yes, Reagan knows that hate is a fuck all lousy thing for anyone to need to unify them, to bring them together and she gets it - she really does - that somewhere along the line, hating Jack got to be more work for them than it was worth.

You think she never had that moment? That she never once thought about him with something other than hatred and disgust and disdain and a few more synonyms she can’t think of right this minute?

Reagan looks out into the living room, smiling at the sight of Farrah and Bruce bouncing her daughter between them, laughing uproariously at her every smile and giggle.

Her daughter. Katie.

“Katharine?” Amy asked her, in the hospital, as they laid her daughter in her arms for the first time? “I love it,” she said. “But it wasn’t on our list. What made you think of it?”

Reagan just shrugged and smiled and said she’d always thought it was a beautiful name and that wasn't a lie. Not totally.

So, yeah, she’s had that moment.

And maybe now she's always having that moment, every time she talks to him, every time she sees him and she finds herself cursing him under her breath for making her heart break - hers, not her wife’s - and for confusing her, for making it damn near impossible for her to tell anymore why it breaks.

Why it's breaking.

If there’s one lesson she’s learned from Jack, it’s this: it’s so much fucking easier to hate.

She’s alone there, in the kitchen, and Reagan remembers standing right here, right next to this counter as Amy helped prep the meatballs and Farrah slapped Bruce’s hand to keep him from stealing any more of the garlic bread - Martin’s recipe - and Lauren looked on with a bemused look on her face, like she knew she was seeing the beginning of something special, and she remembers…

Candles. Trick fucking candles.

And fuck all… why did she have to remember that?

It takes her about half the steps to that closed door - fourteen, if you’re counting along - before Reagan realizes she’s even moving. But once she does, you might think she’d stop, you might think that the fact that she has never once set foot in that room since it became his room, would be enough to bring her to a screeching halt.

And you’d be right.

But, if you’d think she wouldn’t just shake it off, that she wouldn’t just put it aside and start walking again?

Well, then you’re clearly living in the past, which is something you and Reagan might have had in common until about forty seconds ago but see, there it is again. Time. Living in the past is keeping yourself stuck in time.

And ain’t nobody got time for that. Not Amy or Lucy or Farrah or - God, help her - not even Reagan. Not anymore.

She doesn’t knock and Amy’s not surprised it’s her when the door opens. Anyone else would've knocked, but Reagan's not anyone else. “Hey,” Amy says, not looking up from the spot on the bed where her hand is resting over her father’s, neither of them moving. Reagan can’t help but notice the stark contrast, the way Amy’s skin’s still suffused with pink, all the blood, the life still flowing freely, and Jack is so…

He’s pale. That’s the word for it. Pale. That’s all he is. But it’s not all he almost is and Reagan has a moment - just one - where she wonders if this is it, if that’s why she’s here, finally, after all this time, cause somehow she knows this is her last chance.

She’s not wrong.

Jack’s been stubborn and Jack’s hung on, months longer than he should have, and every day seems like maybe it's the day, but damn does he keep fighting and lingering and…

Waiting.

“Where’s Katie?” Amy asks, even though she already knows and Reagan suspects that her wife knows, as in knows why she’s here, in the doorway, unable - just yet - to take that one final step.

Again, she’s not wrong.

“Your mom and Bruce have her,” Reagan says and she knows she’s whispering and she knows that’s fucking pointless - Jack can’t hear and even if he could, what difference, really? - but she can’t stop. “We may have to fight them for her when it’s time to leave.”

A time, she thinks, that’s coming faster for some of them than others.

Amy nods and stands, her thumb ghosting one last time across Jack’s knuckles. “I’m gonna go see if I can steal a few minutes with my nephew then,” she says and Reagan doesn’t even think of pointing out that Luke isn't really related, cause he so is and none of that is even remotely the point right now. “I’ll be back in a little bit.”

She pauses, just for a moment, as if she’s waiting for Reagan to stop her, to tell her no, don’t leave, I’m not staying with him, what kinda cray cray talk is that? But when Reagan just nods and steps into the room, so that she can step out, there are tears in Amy’s eyes and, this one time, they're not about Jack.

The door shuts silently behind her and Reagan’s alone. Alone with him and that almost never happens but every time it ever has, she always says the same thing.

“I hate you.”

In truth, she’s lost track of how many times she’s said that to him over the years. She know that probably says more about her than it does about him, like, for instance, that she’s obsessive and possessive and vindictive and probably a few other 'ive’s she doesn’t know but she’s sure apply.

But still…

“I hate you,” she says again, settling down into the chair next to the bed, the one Amy was just in. There’s one on the other side as well, Lucy’s, and somehow Reagan doesn’t feel right in that one, as if this one is somehow perfect. “Always have,” she says, her hand resting on the bed, not on him. “Always will. Dying isn’t a get out of jail free card. Just so you know.”

There’s silence in the room and Reagan notices that she can’t actually hear anything on the other side of the door. She knows they’re out there.

But she's in here.

“Sometimes,” she says, “I wonder. I know it’s stupid and self-centered, but Lord knows I can be both of those from time to time.”

He doesn’t argue. He wouldn’t if he could. And not just because he learned not to argue with her - about anything - long ago.

Reagan scoots the chair a little closer, so she can rest her elbows on the edge of the bed. “I wonder… why? Why did you stay?” It sounds heartless, even to her, questioning an almost dead man’s motivations, but… “I know you say… I know you do love her. But, sometimes I can’t help wondering how much of it was about Amy and how much of it… how badly did you just once want to prove me wrong?”

Ten bucks says you don’t even make it to graduation

That was the first time. Jack learned not to argue and he learned that, no matter what he said and what she said, Reagan was always right.

Except when she wasn’t. And that was almost always about him and yeah, she suspects he took no small amount of joy in that. She would have, if she’d been him.

“I should have known,” Reagan says. “I should have seen it was a sucker’s bet. You're her father and you’re both living proof that stubborn is genetic.”

She hears the word - 'living’ - fall from between her lips and OK, maybe not the best choice there, but come on. It’s not like she can offend him.

“You made it to graduation,” she says, remembering him there, in the back, in the last row of the faculty. He was still the Hester art teacher back then, the cool Mr. Lee, even if, by then, they all knew that was really his middle name. “You didn’t cheer,” she says. “Not for Amy or Lucy or for Liam.” Her fingers clench and unclench atop the sheets “But I saw you. You didn't need to cheer, did you?”

He glowed. Fatherly pride and yeah, she spent most of the ceremony staring daggers at him and thinking how… wrong… it was that he got to feel even one shred of that. She was so busy staring, she almost missed Amy crossing the stage until Farrah almost toppled out of her seat from the sheer force of her whooping.

“I should have seen it then,” Reagan says, as she leans forward, letting her forehead rest on her upturned palms. “It should have been so clear, the way it all worked. I would figure zig, so then you’d zag. I’d think left, so you’d go right. I’d think gone…”

He’d do stay.

When they left for New Orleans, she was sure. Like 100% certain, like positive that there was a better chance Liam and Shane would end up a couple, than there was that Jack would still be there when they came back.

“Four years,” she says. “Four fucking years and nothing here for you the whole time. It was so clear, so obvious.” She shakes her head and almost smiles. “Amy actually considered staying, you know. In New Orleans. We’d made a life and a home and we were happy.”

She leaves off the 'without you around’. Maybe she can't offend, but there’s no need to kick a man when he’s down.

And who would have ever thought she’d pass up a chance to kick him?

“I convinced her to come back. I talked her into moving home with Karma and the whole time, I was so sure…” Reagan leans back in the chair, forcing her hands into her lap. “I knew that you hadn’t left yet, so I’d been wrong about that, but maybe it was just… timing.”

He’d hung on, waiting out the college years. Waiting for his daughter to come home so they could pick up where they’d left off - not that that was anywhere special - but Reagan was so very sure (yes, again) that seeing Amy, the grown up and fully adulting Amy, would do the trick, would make Jack feel useless and pointless and make him wonder just how long it would be before his very smart and now very independent and not scared of anything daughter cut him the fuck off. Like she should have, long long ago.

“You’d hightail it,” Reagan says. “Either out of town or into a bar and no, it didn’t really matter which. Same end result, you know?”

And he did hightail it, he did run. Right to the nearest bank, where he took out a loan so he could expand the coffee shop - his foothold, his foundation in Austin - and open a second location. Reagan fully expected it to fail.

She wasn’t wrong then either.

But when it didn’t do so well, Jack didn’t throw in the towel or throw back a bottle (or six) and stuck it out, waiting and working and doing all the little things until it did work and wouldn’t you know that everyone (read: Amy and Farrah and even Lauren) was suitably impressed and, yet again, Jack had zigged instead of zagged.

“You persevered,” she says and yeah, the word still tastes a little bitter on her tongue. “Just like you did with Amy. Except that was no coffee shop, was it?”

No. It wasn’t. And - again (sense a pattern, yet?) - Reagan thought that would be it, that the longer it took and the less progress he made with Amy, the more she made him jump through hoops and follow rules and the more nowhere he got for it…

“It would take a toll. It would drain and punish and hurt and you don’t deal well with that,” she says - and she’s not telling him anything he doesn’t know - and she was sure not dealing well would eventually translate into fucking up and, again, she wasn’t wrong. Not entirely.

Jack fucked up. The second shop thrived, for a bit, right up until it didn’t and then it sank like a stone and he almost lost everything. He tried dating one of his baristas but then he cheated on one of his baristas with one of his baristas and they both quit.

But he didn’t.

Reagan remembers more, the long catalog list of the fuck ups of Jack. “You argued with Lucy so much about college that she didn’t speak to you for three weeks,” she says. “You thought buying Planter’s was the dumbest thing ever and you begged Amy not to help me. You even went to Farrah, to try and get her to talk us out of it.”

Remember how those first punches weren’t the last punches?

Now, you know why.

Also, Farrah didn’t talk them out of it. She chipped in.

“Every time,” Reagan says. “Every time you could have… should have… just cashed out. Like when Lucy went to college and left you. You could’ve just moved with her, it’s not like nobody else tailed a Raudenfeld girl off to school.”

And even that wouldn’t have been wrong or enough. It wouldn’t have been leaving, yes, but not like that.

But he waited. He stayed. And then, when Lucy came back after graduation, they did leave. A two month trip to Brazil and they sent Amy pictures every day, Skyped twice a week, and Jack was as stone cold sober - with a nice tan and a new appreciation for spicy food - when he came back as when he left and yeah, Reagan hadn’t seen that coming.

“You came back with her number, too,” Reagan remembers, with a small smile that she can’t quite kill, cause damn did Jack still have some game. “That little cutie from the surf shop. Her number and her email, but you still managed to fuck that up too, huh?”

He did. But she doesn’t really remember how, but she does remember the way Jack shrugged it off when Amy asked him about it at her birthday dinner and - now - she remembers the way he was talking to her, but staring at her mother, and yeah, that probably explains all anyone really needs to know about the how.

Or at least the why.

He fucked up and he made messes and he ruined shit and any one or all of them… they should have been enough. They should have pushed him out of town, or out of his mind, or right into a scotch and soda - hold the soda - and every time Reagan was sure.

“I’m not usually wrong, you know,” she says. “Not that much. Not that often.”

Reagan sighs and tips back in the chair, her eyes falling to the nightstand beside his bed, to the frames sitting on it. They’re those clear acrylic ones you can get for like 99 cents and she sees her own face smiling back up at her from one of them, right alongside Amy’s and Katie’s. She’s all of three hours old in that picture and Reagan still remembers that Bruce had to take it cause Farrah couldn’t stop crying enough to focus.

Jack had asked for that picture, when he moved in, but Farrah wasn’t sure that was the one he really wanted. “I can get you a different one,” Farrah told him. “One of just Amy and the baby, if you’d like.”

Subtlety was never Farrah’s strong suit.

But Jack hadn’t liked. That one, he said, would do just fine. Reagan suspects he thought it would annoy her. Or that, maybe, he actually loved her too.

Yeah. No.

She plucks the frame from the table, cradling it in her hands. “Amy was three months along when the doctors told you,” she says. “Three and a half when you told everyone else. Six months away.”

Six months. For Katie. And for Jack.

They said it was a long shot. Six months was the outside, the far end of the scale, that anything past three… well… that was just Jack living on borrowed time. Maybe, with treatment, the most aggressive, they could… prolong things. Maybe. But he’d be in the hospital the whole time and his immune system would, basically, cease to be and sure, if he could last long enough, he’d be able to see the baby.

From behind glass and from a distance and that was only if he was lucky and the docs, they didn’t put all that much stock in luck. No matter what he did, it was going to be a race and it didn’t seem the odds were in his favor.

Not that Jack listened and oh, there’s a shock. “I’m going to hold her,” he said, even before they knew it… she… was a, well, she. “I’m not going to see her under glass, like some exhibit at the zoo.” Oh, he told everyone exactly what was going to happen, he’d tell anyone he could get to listen - and it’s probably not that surprising the number of people who suddenly listen when they know you're dying - that he was going to make it.

“With time to spare,” he said. “I’ll see her born. And then some.”

Reagan sets the frame back down, and scoops up the other one, staring down at it like it’s the first time she’s ever seen it, not like she’s the one who took it. “I remember,” she says, “when Amy suggested that maybe she get induced a little early. So you could 'beat the clock’.”

It was probably the only time Reagan can ever remember seeing Jack angry with Amy or raising his voice to her.

And it was definitely the only time she could remember agreeing with him. Or understanding why.

She stares at the picture. Jack and Katie, both as bald as can fucking be, both looking right at her, and Goddamn if her little girl doesn’t have her grandfather’s eyes. “You made it,” Reagan says, softly. “You made it. You got to see her born… and then some.”

She sets the picture back down, carefully, and turns to the bed and then her hand… it’s on his and he can't take it and, truthfully, Reagan isn’t even sure he’s still really there. But Amy is and Lucy is and she’s not going to take that from them.

She’s spent long enough trying to take Jack away.

“I hate you,” she whispers. “I hated you before I ever met you. Because you hurt her. Because you somehow got it in your stupid head that leaving her was better for her and I will never ever be able to understand how anyone could leave her. Ever.”

Her eyes flick to the picture. Her and Amy and Katie and no, she can’t ever imagine a time when leaving her daughter would be anything close to an option. But then, she doubts Jack ever could either. Not until he did. Not until the math just added up.

Because of you. I’m leaving because of you.

“You said it wrong,” Reagan says. “Not 'because of’. For. You left for her, before you and Farrah ruined each other and she had to watch.”

A little pain, Jack had figured, was worth it. A little hurt, a little loss… well… it was math.

Her eyes drift to the other picture, to his smiling face, and yeah, the smile is as big as the world, but his… he's…

“I remember when I took it,” she says. “I remember thinking you shouldn’t have been there. Not because I didn't want you to be, cause I did. But you should’ve been…”

Gone.

Until the day she dies, Reagan will never tell anyone, not even Amy, about the next few minutes, about the way she presses her cheek against his hand - so cold, already - or about the way she heaves and sobs, like she did in Farrah’s arms so many years ago. Those are the first and last tears she sheds over Jack.

And they’re just for her.

When they’ve passed, when she’s got herself back in one piece, Reagan stands, still holding his hand in hers. She leans over him, memories of a coffee shop table and a stupid fucking bet that she’d lost even before she made it, flooding her mind. She kisses him, one soft press of the lips atop his head, and she whispers.

“You left for one little girl, Jack. And you stayed for another. And I swear to you, I’ll take good care of them both for as long as I live.” She squeezes his hand one last time. “It’s OK,” she says. “You can rest now.”

Reagan walks from the room and down the hall and out the front door without a pause, without slowing or speaking to anyone. Lauren starts to follow, but Amy catches her arm and shakes her head. Reagan climbs into her truck - not Lightning, not anymore, cause some things do change - and she drives without thinking, though she knows where she’s going the entire time.

The text from Amy comes as she’s leaning over Martin’s stone, her fingers tracing the letters of her father’s name.

He’s gone.

“Take good care of him, dad,” she whispers. “He earned it.”

#faking it #faking it fanfiction #reamy #oc #update #submission #secretmonkey #Just For Me

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