The Best Is Over (The Worst Has Just Begun) for tokenblkgirl
Title: The Best Is Over (The Worst Has Just Begun)
Author: hitlikehammers
Recipient: tokenblkgirl
Pairing: Jack/Ana Lucia
Rating: Hard R (mostly for language, and brief instances of semi-explicit sexuality)
Warnings: AU.
Prompt: Jack/Ana Lucia - an alternate time line where he tries to save her at the airport. Angsty, dark Jack is a favorite of mine.
Summary: She told him that the worst was over.
Author notes: After trying each of your three prompts, I ended up going with the one I think I was (and still am) the least confident in having done well - *facepalm* - seeing as I’m not the best with these characters, and I’d never really written them before now. Plus, in the end, this turned more into angsty, dark Ana Lucia than angsty, dark Jack - hopefully, that’s not a deal breaker. Anyway, hope you enjoy, and Happy Holidays! :)
The Best Is Over (The Worst Has Just Begun)
There’s a reason. Of course there’s a fucking reason.
She’s drinking tequila and tonic with a wedge of lemon at ten-to-noon, because tequila’s the last thing she tasted before she gunned that fucker down, with his smug fucking smirk and the greasy curl at his forehead; s’why she cuts it with tonic, now - to dull the edge, the memories.
The lemon - the lemon smacks, pops against her lips when she sucks out its meat, its heart; and all she remembers is the pop, and then nothing.
Goddamn, she hates flying.
But this guy; he’s kind of gorgeous in that broken sort of way - keeping it together on the brink of falling apart, and there’s an echo there of the last man she ran into at an airport bar, only that one was all shadows and this one’s all light; and her name really is Ana Lucia, and she’s pretty sure, somehow, that his is Jack, and maybe fate had thrown them together, one way or another.
‘Same reason fate does anything, so we can help each other out.’
The phone interrupts her, but it’s a little thing. There’s a reason, of course; always a reason.
________________
Oceanic boards back to front, so her zone’s called first.
She doesn’t get up until he does, making for the restrooms and not the gate, catching his eye out of the corner of her own as he hitches his bag just a little further up his shoulder - cocking her head towards the ladies’ room door as it swings with its very last occupant; claiming the last of the luggage hastily lain at the entrance, unattended baggage like accidents, disasters waiting to ignite.
She doesn’t bother to look behind her, doesn’t check to see if he follows her lead - rests her weight against the line of sinks; her eyes are closed when she hears the door open, close, lock in place, and she grins to the darkness behind her lids before looking again.
He’s on top of her in the space between breaths; she snaps his belt off like a whip, tosses it against the opposite wall - the buckle clangs against a hand dryer, but neither of them pay it mind as he does away with her shirt, pulls the straps off her shoulders, but doesn’t get so far as unhooking her bra. Her hands are at his sides, tugging at his Dockers, his boxers - he’s taken care of her much the same, and the countertop is cool against the bare backs of her thighs. He hands her a condom that he wrestles out of the packet of his pants where they’re pooled at his knees - the generic kind they sell in restroom dispensers for a quarter, with the airline monogram all over the packaging, and she smirks - at least it hadn’t just been her thinking about this. She fumbles it onto him, the angle awkward, but the drive, the desperation enough to overcome it, to endure; he lifts her, bracing her against him as he slides into her without preamble, fucks her hard against the mirror behind them, her hand prints molded into the glass like an etching, a brand. His lips play at the line of her bra, greedy palms dragging one breast from its cup and tonguing wantonly at the nipple. She moans, and he comes inside her like the end of everything, hot and quick and excruciating until it all dies away, a cloud of fucking bliss.
She’s not that woman, and she suspects that he isn’t that man; but if every hookup in an airport bathroom turned out like this, well, then - fuck.
She washes her mouth underneath the faucet, lets the water run cool over her swollen lips; he pops a piece of gum, electric-blue between his teeth, while he smoothes out his hair. He exits behind her as nondescriptly as he can, but neither of them cares all that much - they’re not ashamed. There are more important things in their lives to be ashamed of than this.
They emerge just in time to see the plane pulling back from the gate, start taxiing towards the runway, leaving them behind.
Lust for the cost of a boarding pass, then. She glances into his eyes, though, and sees the way they shine, the way they gape like the Grand fucking Canyon; she reads them like a book in a language she doesn’t understand - she can see where the words end and begin, but what they mean eludes her.
But what she does know, what she can see, is the fist spark of something worth living for that she’s know in too goddamn long. So she flashes him a smile and walks up to the agent at the counter to rebook the next flight out; he follows behind her, three paces back, and she thinks that this time, traveling into the unknown might not be such a dead end.
________________
They fly back in Row 15, seats A and B on the right-hand side, filing in. The wheels are nowhere near her, not like his hand is at take off and landing, resting open and willing upon the armrest between them. She doesn’t take it, of course; digs her fingernails like harvest crescents into the heel of her palm instead - but the gesture’s there, and it’s nice.
_________________
They’re in the air before Flight 815 disappears; by the time they’ve landed, everyone’s as good as dead. And where anyone else would have looked at that, at the two of them missing their plane, and said “That’s God,” they don’t - never would; Jack, he just stares out the window of car that had been hired to follow the hearse as it pulls away, watching her with familiar eyes - dead eyes - where she sits on the curb, waiting for a cab.
And for her part, Ana - who hasn’t feared death in a very long time - only knows one emotion as she ponders the people she’d brushed shoulders with in an instant, only hours before, pickling now at the bottom of the sea.
She envies them.
So no - they don’t think God had anything to do with their missing that flight; they know that that’s not God.
________________
She doesn’t have anywhere to go, she realizes. There are places she can be. People she can call. But she doesn’t have anywhere to go, not anymore.
She remembers the name of the funeral home on the side of the hearse - and that, she thinks, is probably more coincidence than fate - so she tips the cabbie with a twenty before climbing out, wrapping her arms around herself like the cold on the inside of her’s trying to get out as she climbs the steps, not quite sure why she’s even there, why she came.
She mingles for a moment, grabs one of the little paper cards with the Blessed Virgin on the front, but doesn’t open it to read about the man who’d ultimately started this whole mess, who’d drawn her attention to the type of guy who’d fuck her in an airport bathroom and get them both to miss a flight that sank in the South Pacific - it feels somehow like an intrusion, a sign of disrespect for the dead. She helps herself to a cup of coffee and stays out of the way before the smell of formaldehyde is too suffocating, and she has to go back out the way she came.
She asks a cigarette off an elderly man in a suit jacket buttoned over the sea-foam green of his scrubs (barely begs a light from him, too, for the hurry he’s in), and the smoke hits her like a ton of bricks - she hasn’t smoked in for-fucking-ever, and it smolders in her lungs like hell on earth; and she lets it, savors it, breathes it out slow with eyes half-shut - rinse and repeat until there’s a shadow on her back, and body at her shoulder, a strong set of fingers commandeering her smoke and placing it between warm lips, too pale now - too thin.
Those lips had been full, flushed ruby-red under the fluorescents of the Sydney Airport.
He takes a drag, and the look on his face is like coming home; he flicks the butt and crushes it, demolishes it with the heel of his shoe before asking her, without provocation, whether she’d like to stay at his place tonight.
A doctor with a hero complex. Jesus.
But it’s not like she’s in a position to turn him down.
________________
One night turns into two, turns into three, turns into a routine between the two of them; she’s got money in the bank, and he’s not hurting - she goes back to her gig wanding random strangers at security, and she sleeps in a tank top and a pair of gym shorts next to Jack when he’s not working nights. He never asks her to sleep in the guest room, and she never suggests a more innocent arrangement - they fall into a rhythm, and they reach an understanding without words, and Ana thinks this might be exactly what she needs.
She calls her mother on the fifth day; tells her she’s alright, but that she’s going to be gone a while longer than she’d thought. Between the tears, though, she’s pretty sure her mom only got that she was alive, that she loved her, that she’d talk to her soon.
The most important parts.
She cringes, now, whenever she hears sirens. He doesn’t question it, doesn’t speculate when she stills beside him in the night; just holds her closer against his chest so that she can feel the way his heart beats too hard, too fast, so that she wonders what demons are fueling his fire, plaguing his dreams.
_________________
He has a gun, his daddy’s gun; he takes it out sometimes and runs his fingers up and down the barrel - she’s pretty sure he knows how to use it, but he never takes it in hand. She doesn’t know what it makes him think of; but whatever it is, she knows that it hurts, because it’s only after he looks at that gun that he kisses her, hard and deep, breathes her in and swallows until he drowns, and she’s never tasted desperation so bitter, nor confusion so sweet.
When he’s gone, when she’s not, sometimes she looks at his daddy’s gun, and ponders the obvious; wonders if that’s what Jack does, too.
It’d make sense.
_________________
It’s a Monday, the bleak kind, when she finds out that the father Jack’d just buried was the same son of a bitch she’d left to drown himself in shots down under.
It’s the luck of the draw, really - for all the nights she’d spent in his bed, she’d never had reason to look in his dresser drawers. But somehow, she’s turning domestic - domestic, for fuck’s sake; or else she’d just needed the washer, and it was already full of his whites. Whatever it was, the photo’s face down - it’s her own damn fault for flipping it over, for not letting sleeping dogs lie; from the wedding he doesn’t speak of, to the woman who broke his heart, those calculating, critical eyes stare back at her from the grave, and it all makes some twisted sort of sense.
That man could have broken the gods; poor Jack’d never stood a chance.
Her chest aches for him, and when they fall into bed, she pulls him towards her with a purpose, with a need - buries him in her chest and lets him breathe her, lets him fall into her heat. She rides him that night, lets him tremble under her; bareback like a stupid, horny kid, but it’s harsh and sweet and real in ways they’d both forgot existed; and they’re both still catching their breaths come dawn.
_________________
If he wasn’t much of a drinker before, he’s doing a hell of a job of it now, making up for lost time.
She knows it’s a long shot, but she doesn’t drink with him - she pours the same glass for him, though, over and over again because she understands what it’s like to need it, the numb; she needs it now, in fact, as she beats herself up over somehow managing to forget a fucking condom when her birth control prescription had run out in goddamn Australia - fuck all, but she needs it; can’t have it. Because as much as it terrifies her, as much as it’ll kill her if it’s true, she won’t go through losing it all over again. It’s a law of physics, practically; she can’t die twice.
And maybe it’s a little telling, a little revealing of things she’d rather ignore. He’s too drunk to notice, either way.
_________________
She’s on the brink of tears for three weeks and two days. When her period finally comes, she thinks her chest might crack with the weight of it, the relief.
And Jack, goddamn him; when he gets home, sees her - takes just one look at her - he gets it. She hasn’t fucked him since that night almost a month ago; tonight, though, is the first time they make love. And that’s weird, because Ana Lucia doesn’t think that she loves him, not exactly. But it’s more than sex, whatever happens when he rocks into her, when she comes hard around him until she shakes, until he can’t hardly breathe, until they’re both spent against the sheets. Whatever happens, it’s different; and it’s really fucking good.
Doctor with a fucking hero complex; she could’ve done a hell of a lot worse.
_________________
When he’s drunk, his eyes go wild, and he looks like Tom; Christian. When his eyes go wild, she often wants to run.
But the fact remains that he’s not his dad - not yet - and there’s a place in her heart that belongs to him now, a dead place that beats with his own as it spirals downward into the darker spaces, that follows as he starts to crash. So when he sobs, she holds him; when he shivers, she tucks him into bed; when he passes out, she turns him onto his side. When he stares into oblivion - eyes lifeless, unblinking, seeing the world as it really is, as you can only ever see it from rock bottom, looking up - she sits beside him, and stares, too.
Some goddamn hero; can’t save himself.
_________________
She’d learned early on in life that there are no fairy tales, no happy endings. She really wishes she would have remembered that.
In truth, there are no heroes, no damsels; just people. Just fucked up, twisted people with their own goddamned issues, and if anyone’s going to be saved, they have to man up and save themselves.
She’s got to be her own hero.
But Jack, though; he’s all hero-ed out, it seems, and she feels a little guilty for that. He tried so hard for her, like no one else ever had; his heart, his will, his motherfucking soul working overtime for two until the ground fell out from underneath his feet. He’s the one who needs, now - who’s sinking under the waves; so she pops a handful of his painkillers - triple the recommended dose, but only half of what he usually swallows with a bottle of Cuervo in his hands - and steels herself to ride out what’s coming, what was always going to come.
And maybe it’s fate, like the old man used to say; saving might be out of the question for two fuck-ups like them, but helping; helping she can do.
_________________
He doesn’t lose his license - not like his father, even if he comes damn close - but he loses his dignity, which is almost worse. He takes a leave of absence - from work, from his razor, from the real world; he’s a shell of himself, and she’s partially (mostly) to blame for it happening when it does, and not earlier.
She sits, propped against the dishwasher, her back sore as she reaches, strokes against the greasy strands of his hair on the head cradled in her lap, makes sure that he’s still breathing where he’s sprawled across the kitchen floor at her side; the putrid stench of vomit still heavy in the air, countered, aggravated by the fifth of tequila he’d shattered across the title, left to soak into the rug. She cups his chin with her palm, lets the sharp bristle of his beard cut across the skin; wonders whether this was inevitable - thinks that probably, it was.
Fate doesn’t change anything; it just brings people together so they don’t have to burn out alone.
_________________
The truth, in the end, is that you can’t save the damned, no matter who you are, no matter how hard you try. The best you can do - the best anyone can ever do - is to stick it out with the rest of the fallen, and try to make it out alive.
She’d told him the worst was over.
She’s a goddamn liar, and they both know it.
Author: hitlikehammers
Recipient: tokenblkgirl
Pairing: Jack/Ana Lucia
Rating: Hard R (mostly for language, and brief instances of semi-explicit sexuality)
Warnings: AU.
Prompt: Jack/Ana Lucia - an alternate time line where he tries to save her at the airport. Angsty, dark Jack is a favorite of mine.
Summary: She told him that the worst was over.
Author notes: After trying each of your three prompts, I ended up going with the one I think I was (and still am) the least confident in having done well - *facepalm* - seeing as I’m not the best with these characters, and I’d never really written them before now. Plus, in the end, this turned more into angsty, dark Ana Lucia than angsty, dark Jack - hopefully, that’s not a deal breaker. Anyway, hope you enjoy, and Happy Holidays! :)
The Best Is Over (The Worst Has Just Begun)
There’s a reason. Of course there’s a fucking reason.
She’s drinking tequila and tonic with a wedge of lemon at ten-to-noon, because tequila’s the last thing she tasted before she gunned that fucker down, with his smug fucking smirk and the greasy curl at his forehead; s’why she cuts it with tonic, now - to dull the edge, the memories.
The lemon - the lemon smacks, pops against her lips when she sucks out its meat, its heart; and all she remembers is the pop, and then nothing.
Goddamn, she hates flying.
But this guy; he’s kind of gorgeous in that broken sort of way - keeping it together on the brink of falling apart, and there’s an echo there of the last man she ran into at an airport bar, only that one was all shadows and this one’s all light; and her name really is Ana Lucia, and she’s pretty sure, somehow, that his is Jack, and maybe fate had thrown them together, one way or another.
‘Same reason fate does anything, so we can help each other out.’
The phone interrupts her, but it’s a little thing. There’s a reason, of course; always a reason.
________________
Oceanic boards back to front, so her zone’s called first.
She doesn’t get up until he does, making for the restrooms and not the gate, catching his eye out of the corner of her own as he hitches his bag just a little further up his shoulder - cocking her head towards the ladies’ room door as it swings with its very last occupant; claiming the last of the luggage hastily lain at the entrance, unattended baggage like accidents, disasters waiting to ignite.
She doesn’t bother to look behind her, doesn’t check to see if he follows her lead - rests her weight against the line of sinks; her eyes are closed when she hears the door open, close, lock in place, and she grins to the darkness behind her lids before looking again.
He’s on top of her in the space between breaths; she snaps his belt off like a whip, tosses it against the opposite wall - the buckle clangs against a hand dryer, but neither of them pay it mind as he does away with her shirt, pulls the straps off her shoulders, but doesn’t get so far as unhooking her bra. Her hands are at his sides, tugging at his Dockers, his boxers - he’s taken care of her much the same, and the countertop is cool against the bare backs of her thighs. He hands her a condom that he wrestles out of the packet of his pants where they’re pooled at his knees - the generic kind they sell in restroom dispensers for a quarter, with the airline monogram all over the packaging, and she smirks - at least it hadn’t just been her thinking about this. She fumbles it onto him, the angle awkward, but the drive, the desperation enough to overcome it, to endure; he lifts her, bracing her against him as he slides into her without preamble, fucks her hard against the mirror behind them, her hand prints molded into the glass like an etching, a brand. His lips play at the line of her bra, greedy palms dragging one breast from its cup and tonguing wantonly at the nipple. She moans, and he comes inside her like the end of everything, hot and quick and excruciating until it all dies away, a cloud of fucking bliss.
She’s not that woman, and she suspects that he isn’t that man; but if every hookup in an airport bathroom turned out like this, well, then - fuck.
She washes her mouth underneath the faucet, lets the water run cool over her swollen lips; he pops a piece of gum, electric-blue between his teeth, while he smoothes out his hair. He exits behind her as nondescriptly as he can, but neither of them cares all that much - they’re not ashamed. There are more important things in their lives to be ashamed of than this.
They emerge just in time to see the plane pulling back from the gate, start taxiing towards the runway, leaving them behind.
Lust for the cost of a boarding pass, then. She glances into his eyes, though, and sees the way they shine, the way they gape like the Grand fucking Canyon; she reads them like a book in a language she doesn’t understand - she can see where the words end and begin, but what they mean eludes her.
But what she does know, what she can see, is the fist spark of something worth living for that she’s know in too goddamn long. So she flashes him a smile and walks up to the agent at the counter to rebook the next flight out; he follows behind her, three paces back, and she thinks that this time, traveling into the unknown might not be such a dead end.
________________
They fly back in Row 15, seats A and B on the right-hand side, filing in. The wheels are nowhere near her, not like his hand is at take off and landing, resting open and willing upon the armrest between them. She doesn’t take it, of course; digs her fingernails like harvest crescents into the heel of her palm instead - but the gesture’s there, and it’s nice.
_________________
They’re in the air before Flight 815 disappears; by the time they’ve landed, everyone’s as good as dead. And where anyone else would have looked at that, at the two of them missing their plane, and said “That’s God,” they don’t - never would; Jack, he just stares out the window of car that had been hired to follow the hearse as it pulls away, watching her with familiar eyes - dead eyes - where she sits on the curb, waiting for a cab.
And for her part, Ana - who hasn’t feared death in a very long time - only knows one emotion as she ponders the people she’d brushed shoulders with in an instant, only hours before, pickling now at the bottom of the sea.
She envies them.
So no - they don’t think God had anything to do with their missing that flight; they know that that’s not God.
________________
She doesn’t have anywhere to go, she realizes. There are places she can be. People she can call. But she doesn’t have anywhere to go, not anymore.
She remembers the name of the funeral home on the side of the hearse - and that, she thinks, is probably more coincidence than fate - so she tips the cabbie with a twenty before climbing out, wrapping her arms around herself like the cold on the inside of her’s trying to get out as she climbs the steps, not quite sure why she’s even there, why she came.
She mingles for a moment, grabs one of the little paper cards with the Blessed Virgin on the front, but doesn’t open it to read about the man who’d ultimately started this whole mess, who’d drawn her attention to the type of guy who’d fuck her in an airport bathroom and get them both to miss a flight that sank in the South Pacific - it feels somehow like an intrusion, a sign of disrespect for the dead. She helps herself to a cup of coffee and stays out of the way before the smell of formaldehyde is too suffocating, and she has to go back out the way she came.
She asks a cigarette off an elderly man in a suit jacket buttoned over the sea-foam green of his scrubs (barely begs a light from him, too, for the hurry he’s in), and the smoke hits her like a ton of bricks - she hasn’t smoked in for-fucking-ever, and it smolders in her lungs like hell on earth; and she lets it, savors it, breathes it out slow with eyes half-shut - rinse and repeat until there’s a shadow on her back, and body at her shoulder, a strong set of fingers commandeering her smoke and placing it between warm lips, too pale now - too thin.
Those lips had been full, flushed ruby-red under the fluorescents of the Sydney Airport.
He takes a drag, and the look on his face is like coming home; he flicks the butt and crushes it, demolishes it with the heel of his shoe before asking her, without provocation, whether she’d like to stay at his place tonight.
A doctor with a hero complex. Jesus.
But it’s not like she’s in a position to turn him down.
________________
One night turns into two, turns into three, turns into a routine between the two of them; she’s got money in the bank, and he’s not hurting - she goes back to her gig wanding random strangers at security, and she sleeps in a tank top and a pair of gym shorts next to Jack when he’s not working nights. He never asks her to sleep in the guest room, and she never suggests a more innocent arrangement - they fall into a rhythm, and they reach an understanding without words, and Ana thinks this might be exactly what she needs.
She calls her mother on the fifth day; tells her she’s alright, but that she’s going to be gone a while longer than she’d thought. Between the tears, though, she’s pretty sure her mom only got that she was alive, that she loved her, that she’d talk to her soon.
The most important parts.
She cringes, now, whenever she hears sirens. He doesn’t question it, doesn’t speculate when she stills beside him in the night; just holds her closer against his chest so that she can feel the way his heart beats too hard, too fast, so that she wonders what demons are fueling his fire, plaguing his dreams.
_________________
He has a gun, his daddy’s gun; he takes it out sometimes and runs his fingers up and down the barrel - she’s pretty sure he knows how to use it, but he never takes it in hand. She doesn’t know what it makes him think of; but whatever it is, she knows that it hurts, because it’s only after he looks at that gun that he kisses her, hard and deep, breathes her in and swallows until he drowns, and she’s never tasted desperation so bitter, nor confusion so sweet.
When he’s gone, when she’s not, sometimes she looks at his daddy’s gun, and ponders the obvious; wonders if that’s what Jack does, too.
It’d make sense.
_________________
It’s a Monday, the bleak kind, when she finds out that the father Jack’d just buried was the same son of a bitch she’d left to drown himself in shots down under.
It’s the luck of the draw, really - for all the nights she’d spent in his bed, she’d never had reason to look in his dresser drawers. But somehow, she’s turning domestic - domestic, for fuck’s sake; or else she’d just needed the washer, and it was already full of his whites. Whatever it was, the photo’s face down - it’s her own damn fault for flipping it over, for not letting sleeping dogs lie; from the wedding he doesn’t speak of, to the woman who broke his heart, those calculating, critical eyes stare back at her from the grave, and it all makes some twisted sort of sense.
That man could have broken the gods; poor Jack’d never stood a chance.
Her chest aches for him, and when they fall into bed, she pulls him towards her with a purpose, with a need - buries him in her chest and lets him breathe her, lets him fall into her heat. She rides him that night, lets him tremble under her; bareback like a stupid, horny kid, but it’s harsh and sweet and real in ways they’d both forgot existed; and they’re both still catching their breaths come dawn.
_________________
If he wasn’t much of a drinker before, he’s doing a hell of a job of it now, making up for lost time.
She knows it’s a long shot, but she doesn’t drink with him - she pours the same glass for him, though, over and over again because she understands what it’s like to need it, the numb; she needs it now, in fact, as she beats herself up over somehow managing to forget a fucking condom when her birth control prescription had run out in goddamn Australia - fuck all, but she needs it; can’t have it. Because as much as it terrifies her, as much as it’ll kill her if it’s true, she won’t go through losing it all over again. It’s a law of physics, practically; she can’t die twice.
And maybe it’s a little telling, a little revealing of things she’d rather ignore. He’s too drunk to notice, either way.
_________________
She’s on the brink of tears for three weeks and two days. When her period finally comes, she thinks her chest might crack with the weight of it, the relief.
And Jack, goddamn him; when he gets home, sees her - takes just one look at her - he gets it. She hasn’t fucked him since that night almost a month ago; tonight, though, is the first time they make love. And that’s weird, because Ana Lucia doesn’t think that she loves him, not exactly. But it’s more than sex, whatever happens when he rocks into her, when she comes hard around him until she shakes, until he can’t hardly breathe, until they’re both spent against the sheets. Whatever happens, it’s different; and it’s really fucking good.
Doctor with a fucking hero complex; she could’ve done a hell of a lot worse.
_________________
When he’s drunk, his eyes go wild, and he looks like Tom; Christian. When his eyes go wild, she often wants to run.
But the fact remains that he’s not his dad - not yet - and there’s a place in her heart that belongs to him now, a dead place that beats with his own as it spirals downward into the darker spaces, that follows as he starts to crash. So when he sobs, she holds him; when he shivers, she tucks him into bed; when he passes out, she turns him onto his side. When he stares into oblivion - eyes lifeless, unblinking, seeing the world as it really is, as you can only ever see it from rock bottom, looking up - she sits beside him, and stares, too.
Some goddamn hero; can’t save himself.
_________________
She’d learned early on in life that there are no fairy tales, no happy endings. She really wishes she would have remembered that.
In truth, there are no heroes, no damsels; just people. Just fucked up, twisted people with their own goddamned issues, and if anyone’s going to be saved, they have to man up and save themselves.
She’s got to be her own hero.
But Jack, though; he’s all hero-ed out, it seems, and she feels a little guilty for that. He tried so hard for her, like no one else ever had; his heart, his will, his motherfucking soul working overtime for two until the ground fell out from underneath his feet. He’s the one who needs, now - who’s sinking under the waves; so she pops a handful of his painkillers - triple the recommended dose, but only half of what he usually swallows with a bottle of Cuervo in his hands - and steels herself to ride out what’s coming, what was always going to come.
And maybe it’s fate, like the old man used to say; saving might be out of the question for two fuck-ups like them, but helping; helping she can do.
_________________
He doesn’t lose his license - not like his father, even if he comes damn close - but he loses his dignity, which is almost worse. He takes a leave of absence - from work, from his razor, from the real world; he’s a shell of himself, and she’s partially (mostly) to blame for it happening when it does, and not earlier.
She sits, propped against the dishwasher, her back sore as she reaches, strokes against the greasy strands of his hair on the head cradled in her lap, makes sure that he’s still breathing where he’s sprawled across the kitchen floor at her side; the putrid stench of vomit still heavy in the air, countered, aggravated by the fifth of tequila he’d shattered across the title, left to soak into the rug. She cups his chin with her palm, lets the sharp bristle of his beard cut across the skin; wonders whether this was inevitable - thinks that probably, it was.
Fate doesn’t change anything; it just brings people together so they don’t have to burn out alone.
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The truth, in the end, is that you can’t save the damned, no matter who you are, no matter how hard you try. The best you can do - the best anyone can ever do - is to stick it out with the rest of the fallen, and try to make it out alive.
She’d told him the worst was over.
She’s a goddamn liar, and they both know it.