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When Tommy starts to get real bad off, their mother’s jokes about the family curse take on a bitter, sharp edge that even Jax can feel the sting of. J.T.’s off in Ireland again, becoming a specter over the house, present only in postcards with strange stamps and static-punctuated phone calls.
Gemma wants him around more and more, and Tommy needs him, Jax knows that, but he still escapes whenever he can.
He tells Opie how it’s not fair. How J.T. gets to just leave, and not have to worry all the time and talk to Tommy like he’s fine, when they all know that he’s getting weaker and weaker. To pretend like every day might not be the last one he has a brother. It isn’t that Jax doesn’t want to see his brother, it’s just that… it’s all too much, sometimes, and he just wants to be a kid.
So he goes to Opie’s house, and lets his mom pile his plate high with lasagna that came out of the freezer, and then they go outside, and break shit in the empty lot down the road, and ride Opie’s dirt bike over wobby homemade ramps. Opie doesn’t ask about Tommy, probably because Jax has already told him everything there is to know.
Sometimes Piney’s there, and he’ll clap Jax on the shoulder and give him this sad look that makes Jax feel the same way he does when he’s standing by Tommy’s bed, watching his pale face as his chest rises and falls slowly.
*
J.T.’s back in time for the funeral.
He holds onto Jax’s shoulder throughout the burial, gripping hard enough at points to make Jax want to squirm. He doesn’t; there are Sons from every branch of the club in attendance and he’s going to show that he’s a man.
Gemma stares at the small coffin like she’s trying to memorize every detail. Jax doesn’t want to remember, doesn’t want to think about his brother inside that box, about to be lowered into the ground.
He knows that Tommy’s not there anymore, not the way it counts, but it doesn’t help. That’s all he has left of his brother, and he doesn’t want to remember the way that it hurts to breathe, the way that his throat feels raw, how he goes from feeling strangely numb, like he’s watching everything happen to somebody else, to feeling too much.
J.T. rides his bike back to the clubhouse, leading a procession of bikes. Jax climbs into the car with his mother, staring out the window and trying to ignore the tiny sobs that keep escaping her. By accident, he thinks, because when he catches a glimpse of her reflection in the glass, she’s staring stonily at the road ahead, eyes glassy but cheeks free of tears.
Tommy’s wake is the first real party that Jax attends at the clubhouse. His mother is throwing back whiskey like it’s water and she’s been lost in the desert, and J.T. is sitting at a table, looking numb as he greets the different factions of the Sons.
Jax doesn’t want to watch anymore, knows that he’s seeing his parents fall apart, so he goes to the only place he knows will be quiet.
Church.
He’s not supposed to go there, but he’s a Teller, and Tellers have never been particularly good at doing what they’re told. He’s been here before.
Last time, he remembers suddenly, had been a few months ago with Tommy. He’d dared his brother to go inside while they were waiting on J.T. to finish up at the garage, and Tommy had crept up to the door like there was a dragon on the other side, ready to swallow him whole for daring to go inside.
Jax had poked his brother in the side right as he had screwed up the courage to push the door open, and Tommy had yelped and then punched Jax in the shoulder. But Jax had broken the spell, and Tommy’d pushed the door open confidently and stepped inside, fear already spent.
Now, the door swung open silently, and Jax walked slowly around the table, tracing the carving in the redwood table with a single fingertip. It’s rougher than he would have thought, and he almost hopes that he gets a splinter. Something to pick at, something to send sharp jabs of pain that will distract him from the strange, hollow feeling in his chest.
He picks up the gavel, twists it in his hands. Sits it back down. He doesn’t dare hit it against the block. Even with the noise coming from the main room, someone would surely hear that. He scooches his way onto his dad’s chair, the chair that’s meant for the president and founder alone, and wishes that J.T. had been here. Somehow he thinks that he might have been able to help, might have been able to delay Tommy’s death.
Might have been able to save him.
He’s still sitting there, staring at the gavel, when the door swings open. Jax turns his head guiltily, and the man standing there is Piney.
Piney looks at him for a long moment, his expression sad but guarded, while Jax wilts under the stare. Then he sighs and says, “C’mere, boy.”
Jax fully expected Piney to cuff him upside the ear and send him back outside, but instead Piney clasps his shoulder, his hand squeezing too tight, and crouches down til he’s eye-to-eye. “You need anything, you let me know.”
Jax nods.
Piney loosens his grip on Jax’s shoulder, but doesn’t let go. He stares at something behind him for a minute. “Your dad… he might not be there as much for a little while. Grief is a powerful thing. Don’t… Don’t let it drive a wedge between you.”
Jax had a strange feeling in his belly, like he was being treated like a grownup. It was strange and uncomfortable and Jax didn’t like thinking that his dad was going to have an even worse time dealing with the absence of Tommy than Jax was.
Piney turns and leaves Jax standing in church, back pressed against the redwood table.
He doesn’t come out until he hears his mother’s voice, sharp with fear, calling his name.
*
He knows what’s going on. He’s not a kid, though his mother seems to have conveniently forgotten that. He knows that there’s no real reason for Clay to be over, not this late, not while J.T. is on another one of his business trips.
Clay smiles at him and calls him ‘son,’ the way he always has, but now it makes Jax want to punch him.
He knows better, though. He’s taller and stronger every day, but Clay’s mean as a rattlesnake, and Jax doesn’t doubt in the slightest that he would lay Jax out cold if he ever tried anything. That, or he’d just send Gemma in to look at Jax all disappointed and then start bitching at him about showing respect, that he’s going to be in the club one day soon and he doesn’t want them to think of him as some punk kid, but as their future president.
He doesn’t say anything to J.T. He thinks, sometimes, of slipping a note between the pages of J.T.’s journal, the one he spends more time with than he does his only remaining son, but he never does.
He just leaves the house, sneaks out through his window so his mother doesn’t know she’s alone with Clay, and wanders.
He misses his father.
*
Jax knows something’s wrong before the doorbell rings.
He took his time getting home from school, stopping to share a cigarette with Tara behind the bleachers. She coughed and tried to play it off, like she did this all the time, but he didn’t say anything when she dropped her cigarette mostly unsmoked in the dirt and awkwardly smashed it with unnecessary violence. She hasn’t let him kiss her, not yet, but Jax is pretty sure he’s getting close.
But then she had to go – a dark look in her eyes when she said her dad was waiting, and while Jax knows the kind of hole that a dead family member leaves, he knows that a brother isn’t the same as a mother, not when that means she’s left alone with him.
So he walked the rest of the way home, wondering if Opie was going to meet up with him later tonight so they could try to get the little Honda they had gone in on running. It wasn’t a Harley, wasn’t even really a decent Honda, but it’d been cheap and J.T. had already made it clear that Jax wasn’t getting handed anything on a silver platter, that he’d have to prove he could keep something running before he got a real bike.
When he pushed open the front door, his mother had looked at him with dead eyes from the couch. “Hi, baby. How was school?”
Her voice was ragged the way it was after she’d been crying over Tommy, but Jax knew it wasn’t one of the days she’d set aside for mourning. Wasn’t his birthday, wasn’t his deathday.
“Fine,” he says, because he doesn’t want to know. He doesn’t want to hear whatever news is coming.
“There’s some food in the oven,” she offers, and stares back at the television.
Jax hadn’t even gotten the oven open when the doorbell rang.
He stiffens. The doorbell only rings when there’s trouble; the guys from the club usually just rap once on the door before letting themselves in, as comfortable in their president’s house as they are in the clubhouse and garage. He hears Gemma take in a deep breath before standing.
He hovers in the doorway between the living room and kitchen and watches as the front door swings open to reveal the Sheriff.
“Gemma, sweetie,” the Sheriff says, “I’m so sorry. J.T…”
He doesn’t have to finish the sentence. Jax turns and walks out the back door, hearing his pulse pounding in his ears.
He’s been around long enough to know what that tone meant. What that look meant. His father was dead, and Jax doesn’t know if it was a bullet or a blade or the concrete that took him. It doesn’t matter, not really.
Not when that leaves their family sliced clean through in the middle, half stuck in Charming while the other half are somewhere the living can’t touch.
It’s bright outside, sunny and hot and Jax remembers walking down the sidewalk just a few minutes ago, thinking about Tara and the tricky valve on the carbeurator that he and Opie are rebuilding. And while he was thinking that his father was laying dead somewhere, in a ditch or maybe even the morgue. He pictures it, like an involuntary twitch of his brain, and he can’t even cry. Instead there’s a lump in his throat he can’t even breathe around, and everything had this strange, crystalline clearness to it, like he’s never seen the backyard or a fucking blade of grass before.
And he hasn’t, not as a fatherless son.
He hears the backdoor swing open behind him, and then his mother settles down on the grass beside him. Her feet are twisted at uncomfortable angles thanks to the high-heeled boots she’s wearing, but she loops her arms over her knees and stares straight ahead like she doesn’t even notice.
“It was a wreck,” she says. “He got tangled up with a semi. It was quick, and it wasn’t his fault.”
Jax thinks some mothers might have spared him the details, but Gemma doesn’t. In a cold, numb voice, she tells him the injuries that his father was likely killed by, tells him in an uneven voice that there’ll be a closed casket at the funeral.
Jax thinks of how many people showed up for Tommy’s funeral, and wonders if the clubhouse can even fit all the charter members that are going to show up for the sendoff of the club’s founder and president.
He hasn’t said a word.
“I wish I had the luxury of sparing you the details,” Gemma says after a moment. “But Jax, sweetie, you’re going to have to be a man about this. The whole club is going to be looking to you, and you don’t want them to see a lost little boy, not when you’re so close to joining. They’re going to be following your lead, and you have to be strong.”
Jax doesn’t want to be strong. He thinks of his father’s face at Tommy’s funeral and wonders if Gemma said the same thing to him then.
Then Gemma takes a gulping breath, like she’s just burst out of the water and is desperate for air, and she’s suddenly crying. Crying in a way he hasn’t seen since Tommy was in the hospital.
So Jax wraps his arm around his mother and sits in the grass, warm California sun on his face, trying to make sense of the fact that he’s never going to see his father again.
*
Jax survives the funeral.
Opie makes sure of it. He stays as close to Jax as possible during the graveside ceremony. He kicks at his chair when Jax starts to feel overwhelmed – he guesses it shows on his face – and whispers at him that it’s his turn, dummy, when it’s time for Jax to throw dirt on the coffin.
(His memory of this part of Tommy’s funeral is blurred, like the whole thing was a fractured series of images, and Gemma’s drawn into herself, hiding behind big dark glasses and defiantly big hair. Jax knows a mask when he sees one, and hopes that his mother can come through this okay. She’s already lost a son, and now she’s widowed. They’re left alone in this world.)
Everyone goes to the clubhouse afterwards, and Jax is clasped into more hugs and brusque shoulder-claps than he can ever remember receiving. He listens to the stories that the Sons tell about his dad, learning more and more new things until it starts to feel like he never actually knew J.T. at all. Like J.T. was a stranger to him, when he thought he knew him better than anyone.
So he slips away, out of the clubhouse and into the garage. The doors are shut down tight, but Jax has had a key since he was little, and he lets himself in. He sits in the garage bay his father uses -- used -- for repairs, on the same worn-out duct-taped chair that he’s spent countless hours in, twirling and dragging his feet and watching his dad remove parts and fit things back together and solve the puzzles that malfunctioning engines present.
He wipes the tears from his cheeks as he hears someone knock on the door, guiltily standing up until he recognizes Opie’s voice hissing, “Let me in. I stole some whisky.”
Opie locks the door behind him and doesn’t comment on Jax’s red eyes, doesn’t say a word about the funeral or J.T. He just sets two plastic cups down on J.T.’s workbench and pours a healthy amount of whisky in each one.
It burns going down and leaves a sharp aftertaste, nothing at all like the warm beers they’ve stolen from Piney, but Jax keeps sipping at it. Hopes it will dull the things he’s feeling, hopes it’ll give him distance from the lingering scent-memory of grave dirt.
Opie starts talking, nonsense things about how the teachers at school were being assholes and that he’d punched a kid for talking shit about the Tellers. Jax doesn’t do more than nod along and feel like he’s floating, disconnected from everything happening here.
“Tara wanted to come,” Opie says finally.
It draws Jax’s attention back, like elastic snapping back into place. “Why didn’t she?”
“Something about her old man,” Opie says. Jax understands; he and Opie both know what Tara’s living with. “But she said for me to tell you…” Opie pauses, like he’s not sure it will help.
“Spit it out,” Jax says after a second.
“She says it only feels like the end of the world, and that if you keep breathing, things will settle back into place.” Opie sounds doubtful, like he knows this is the last thing that Jax wants to hear.
He knows that Tara understands what if feels like, that she lost her mom and that she was left with even less than Jax is, because he loves Gemma, and he knows that the world kept spinning after Tommy died…
But he doesn’t know how to navigate the world without J.T. Doesn’t know what his future looks like, now that his father isn’t sitting at the head of the redwood table. Doesn’t know anything except that he’s alone now.
He silently takes another sip of Opie’s stolen whisky, and tries not to think about how empty tomorrow is going to be.
*
The next day comes, and with it, Clay.
He was at the funeral, but hasn’t been to the house since J.T. was alive. Now, he stands comfortably in the kitchen as Gemma pours him coffee. Jax glares at him from the doorway.
“Jax.” Clay’s voice booms through the room, disrupting the stunned silence that’s fallen over the house. “I came here to give you something.”
Jax realizes something’s different now. He looks Clay over, and almost doesn’t notice the change. It’s one letter, after all, but it means everything.
President.
Gemma catches Jax staring at the patch, the word that’s meant to be on his father’s cut, and says, “There was a vote last night after the wake. J.T. would have wanted his best friend to take over the club.”
She then gives Clay a look, like she’s angry with him. “But it’s too soon for that, Clay.”
“He’s practically old enough already,” Clay replies. He reaches into his cut and pulls out something. Patches.
Jax doesn’t reach out. He’s not old enough to prospect, and his father never really seemed eager for him to join up immediately. “See the world first,” J.T. had said, when Jax had asked when he would be old enough to wear a cut. “The Sons will always be here for you, after you find out who you are.”
Clay takes Jax’s hand and places the patches in it. Redwood Original, they say. They’re worn enough that Jax knows who they belonged to.
“For safekeeping,” Clay says.
Jax stares down at them, curling slightly upward in his hand, like the wilting petals on the roses on J.T.’s casket before it was lowered into the ground. He slowly tightens his fingers around them, and hears Gemma’s sigh, like she’s about to lose another son.
“For safekeeping,” Jax agrees, and doesn’t let them go.
*
He doesn’t see Tara until he goes back to school. The walk inside is difficult; Jax tries to use his usual swagger, like he knows something that none of the other kids know, but it feels stilted and he’s too conscious of every movement for it to be effective.
But he keeps his head up and doesn’t let on that anything is different, even though he sees pitying looks being shot his way, hears whispers, “That’s the kid with the dead dad and the dead brother.”
He makes it through English class okay, because the teacher knows him well enough to know he’s already finished the book they’re reading, but doesn’t push him to talk about it.
History is a nightmare of stares and the teacher being too warm and trying too hard to be solicitous, so halfway through Jax leaves for the bathroom and never bothers to return. He walks slowly past Tara’s class, meets her eyes through the window on the door, and waits for her in the back stairwell, the one the teachers never bother to check.
She doesn’t say a word, just sits beside him and wraps her arms around him, pulling him close.
“We should run away,” Jax says, resting his head against Tara’s shoulder and staring at the white cinderblock wall. “Go somewhere where no one knows anything about us.”
Tara doesn’t laugh, doesn’t play it off like a joke. Tara’s probably thought about it more than he has. “Sounds nice.”
Jax wishes he could, but he can’t leave his mother alone. Not with Clay circling around like a vulture. He meets Tara’s eyes and says, “We will, one day.”
“I’ll look forward to it.” Tara strokes his hair, and Jax tilts his head up and kisses her.
*
J.T. hasn’t been in the ground three months when Clay starts staying over.
Jax doesn’t creep off silently into the night like he used to. He waits at the breakfast table, glaring at Clay as he walks into Jax’s father’s kitchen wearing Jax’s father’s patch, after a night spent in Jax’s father’s bed.
Gemma is laughing behind him, until she sees Jax sitting there. “Shouldn’t you be at school?”
“Shouldn’t you at least pretend to be a grieving widow?” Jax shoots back.
Gemma recoils, shock in her expression, and Clay steps forward. “Don’t speak to your mother like that.”
Jax looks at the president patch, then says, “You’ll never be him, no matter how hard you try.”
He stalks out the back door, slamming it behind him. He thinks of the redwood patches tucked safely into his top drawer, and the fact that Clay, not his father will be his leader when he joins.
The Honda starts on the first try, shockingly, and Jax drives aimlessly off.
He can’t go to school, not today, and won’t go back to that house. Not til he’s sure Clay’s not there.
*
Jax spends more and more time at the shop.
It’s easy to avoid Clay there; Jax doesn’t go near the clubhouse, and he sets himself up in his father’s bay. He’s better at fixing bikes than he suspected, having seen his dad do almost everything already, and the new guy, Chibs, is next to him and helps him out when he’s stuck on something without too much fuss.
Chibs didn’t know J.T. as well as everyone else, so Jax finds it a lot easier to talk to him. He knows the guys don’t mean to, but the ones that have been around forever – the First Nine, and the ones who came right after that – look at him like they’re trying to see J.T. in him, and Jax can’t live up to that. Not yet.
Jax can’t stand seeing their expressions, like he’s lacking.
So he keeps his head down and works hard. Chibs tells him stories, wild ridiculous things that Jax can tell are hastily edited to keep out the felonies, and Jax doesn’t call him out on it, just enjoys them for the distraction that they are.
Clay sometimes stops by, stands in the open bay door and watches Jax.
Jax never starts a conversation, and keeps his replies down to as few syllables as possible. He shuts down completely when Clay starts to use the tone Jax is quickly coming to recognize as fatherly. He’s not going to let Clay replace his dad, no matter how close they were before J.T. died.
*
“I don’t want him moving in here,” Jax grits out. He can’t yell, not at his mother, no matter how much he wants to.
“Sweetie,” Gemma says, reaching out and touching his arm lightly before withdrawing. “Don’t you want me to be happy?”
“Where did you put Dad’s stuff?” Jax asks instead, because there’s no right answer to that question. If he says yes, his mother will do what she wants, carte blanche. It’s her way. And if he says no…
He can’t say no, he loves her too much.
“I got a storage unit,” Gemma says. “There isn’t enough room around here for everything.”
“There was when Dad was alive.” It’s petulant and Jax knows it.
“He’s gone, and we can’t stop living our lives.” Gemma doesn’t look him in the eye as she says it. She’s staring at the mantle, where J.T.’s picture is.
“You don’t have to replace him yet, either,” Jax says stormily.
Gemma doesn’t have a response for that.
*
Tara bringing up leaving Charming behind, always with hopeful eyes.
Jax knows he’ll disappoint her.
*
Gemma’s wearing a new ring.
Jax doesn’t ask about it, doesn’t want to know. It’s Tommy’s birthday and his mother is wearing an unfamiliar ring, and her wedding band is gone.
He leaves, kickstarting the Honda and driving out. He doesn’t realize it, at first, doesn’t make a conscious choice, but he finds himself on the highway where J.T. died.
It’s impossible to avoid the stretch of road, lonely as it is, and it’s not the first time he’s ridden his bike down the same path his father took before he died. Isn’t the first time he’s continued past where the skidmarks used to scar the highway and thought, he never made it this far.
It’s the first time he’s been angry, though. The first time that he shoves the visor up so the wind can lash at his face, can whip his few free strands of hair into his eyes, so he has to squint.
So he has an excuse for the few tears that slip out. They’re a result of dust in his eyes; they’re from the sting of hair lashing his face.
He goes faster and faster as he reaches the spot where J.T.’s bike was hit. Where his father was dragged, where he once found a piece of scrap metal from the bike that he keeps in his closet, shoved under outgrown sneakers.
Where his father died, bleeding and alone.
The speedometer creeps up and up, and it’s harder to hold the bike steady. He can feel every wobble, every slight imperfection on the highway beneath his wheels, and he knows that if he hits a rock, if his tires blow, he won’t walk away.
It’s Tommy’s birthday, and his mother is wearing Clay’s ring, and Jax twists the throttle even harder, white-knuckled and sweating.
When he reaches the curve in the road, his balance is off. He can’t (doesn’t) correct it, and he finally learns what it feels like when the world cuts out from under you as he flies off the edge of the road.
*
He lays in the dirt, staring up at the blue, blue sky.
He’s gasping for breath, loud desperate noises as he tries to re-fill his lungs. His breath has been knocked clean out of him. He aches all over, and there’s something wet running down his face.
He stays there on the ground until he finally gets his breath back, and reaches up. His hand comes away from his face red. His nose is the source, he determines, after running his tongue through his mouth and finding all his teeth solid and intact. Broken, most likely.
He tests his arms and legs, and thinks that he’s in one piece. Nothing feels particularly broken, but when he goes to push himself up, one of his arms dangles uselessly. His shoulder hurts, and he realizes his arm is dislocated. He struggles to his feet, staunching the blood flow from his nose with the edge of his t-shirt, and realizes how lucky he is when he sees how mangled the front of his bike is. He pulls off the helmet with his working arm, and stares up the incline at the road.
No cars.
He slowly moves up the incline, pausing again to wipe blood away from his nose, and waits. Finally a truck rolls by, and comes to a slow stop when Jax waves his good arm. The driver wants to wait, wants to call 911, but Jax insists he’s fine and dials Opie instead.
“Bring the truck,” he says, which makes the trucker look more comfortable leaving Jax there on the side of the road, bleeding.
Opie shows up fifteen minutes later in Piney’s old pickup, and it’s obvious from his expression that Jax looks as bad as he feels.
“You’re bleeding,” he says flatly.
“I think I broke my nose,” Jax explains. He doesn’t say anything about how his visor was up, about how his face slammed against the bike’s windshield. “And I dislocated my shoulder.”
Opie looks at the strange way his arm is hanging and says, “Yeah, man, I can’t fix that.”
“I can’t go to the hospital,” Jax says. He’s not letting Gemma find out about this. No matter how mad he is at her, he can’t let her know what almost happened to him. What he almost let happen.
Opie bites his lip, looks around. “We’ll load up your bike, and I’ll call Chibs.”
“No,” Jax says. He’s not dragging any of the club into this; they’ll tell Clay.
“He was a medic in the army or some shit, Jax,” Opie says. “He’ll be able to fix you up.”
Opie looks back down the road, and Jax realizes that from here, you can see where his father died. “What happened?”
“I lost control,” Jax says, which is as honest as he’s going to be. Opie knows him, though, and from his expression, Jax isn’t home free.
It’s still hard to breathe.
*
Getting the bike into the back of the truck would have been impossible with one arm, but Opie brought a ramp and is built like a brick shithouse, so he manages to maneuver the bike – Jax is dismayed to see how it wobbles; the frame is clearly busted – into the truck bed, where he lets it fall over with a clang.
“Piney’s at the cabin,” Opie says, “so I’ll take you back to my place. Hopefully Chibs will be able to come by, get you back into fighting shape.”
The ache in his arm is more and more noticeable now that the adrenaline from the wreck is fading, and Jax doesn’t argue Chibs’ involvement anymore. He thinks maybe Chibs will keep his mouth shut around Clay; he certainly doesn’t seem to mind talking to Jax even right after Jax has been an asshole to Clay around the garage.
Jax finds a bandana under the seat that seems mostly free of grease and wads it up against his nose. He thinks the bleeding is slowing down; the bandana doesn’t turn immediately red like his shirt did.
“So you lost control,” Opie says after a few minutes. They’ve left that damned stretch of highway behind them.
Jax is concentrating on breathing; every bump in the road sends a jolt through his body. “Yeah.”
“Is it going to happen again?”
Jax jerks his head over, staring. Opie’s eyes are steady on the road.
He doesn’t (can’t) answer.
*
“It’s dislocated, all right.” Chibs probes at Jax’s shoulder. “But I can get it back in. You sure you don’t want to go to the hospital?”
Jax shakes his head. “I don’t want Gemma to know.”
“Can I ask why?”
Jax is silent a beat too long, and Opie steps in. “He likes to protect her. And he’s also a moron.”
Chibs doesn’t push, doesn’t ask Jax if that’s true. He tells Opie how to brace Jax against him so that he can get the shoulder back in socket with the least resistance.
The least resistance still hurts like a bitch, but immediately after Jax can move his arm again, and it’s such a relief that he doesn’t even care about the pain. A few stitches on cuts that Jax barely noticed, distracted as he was with his nose and arm, and Chibs declares him patched up.
Jax sees the looks Chibs is giving him, and finally offers something that… it doesn’t explain anything, but it might justify his silence. “It’s Tommy’s birthday.”
Opie clearly hadn’t remembered. He looks at Jax like the pieces just fell into place, when he doesn’t know anything at all. Jax doesn’t explain it, he can’t.
“I see, laddie,” Chibs says gently. He knows about Tommy, though Jax never speaks about him. All the Sons know everything about the Tellers. Opie walks Chibs out of the room, and Jax finds that he doesn’t like the quiet.
Alone, his thoughts are too uncomfortable.
*
He gets up, looks in the mirror. Chibs says he has to take it easy for a little while, but most of the damage won’t be apparent. His nose is swelling, but he gets into enough tussles that Gemma won’t pay much mind.
He thinks of the ring on her finger and wonders why he’s so desperate to protect her.
“Stay here tonight,” Opie tells him. Jax sees him in the mirror, knows what he thinks will happen if Jax is left alone.
It won’t. At least, Jax doesn’t think it will, but the impulse hadn’t fully taken root in him until those last few moments.
(He wonders if J.T. had the same wild impulse; if he sought freedom.)
“Okay,” Jax says. Opie looks immediately relieved. “Love you, man.”
“Now I know you rattled your brain,” Opie says. He steps in close, wraps an arm around Jax’s good side before pressing a quick kiss to Jax’s temple. “Never do that again, okay?”
“I don’t want to taste gravel again,” Jax says. “Gonna help me fix up the Honda?”
“Maybe we should upgrade,” Opie says, which is his gentle way of telling him the Honda’s scrap.
*
He eventually goes home. Gemma finds him at the breakfast table, eating cereal like nothing’s happened.
“You’re more and more like your father every day,” she tells him, resting her hand on his shoulder.
He manages not to flinch.
*
At the garage, he gives a bullshit story about pulling back on a wrench wrong to explain his swollen nose. No one really questions it; they’re too entrenched in the life to worry about what a kid is getting up to.
Clay struts around like he owns the place; he disappears into the office with Gemma more and more. Jax spends a lot of time glaring at the closed door, which is just visible through the open door of his bay.
Piney seems to notice. He pauses on his way into the clubhouse, watching Jax for a moment before saying, “He’ll do right by her, you know. None of us would stand for anything else. Your mom, she’s as close to being patched in as you can get.”
Jax nods.
Piney pauses, looks like he wants to say something else, but then he just shakes his head and heads into the clubhouse.
Jax continues to work. He only flinches a little when he has to bang on some bolts to get the carburetor off the manifold, the reverberations sending a jolt of pain through his healing shoulder.
“Don’t push it.” Chibs’ voice startles him.
Jax sets down the ratchet he’s currently abusing. “I’m not.”
“Sometimes things take time,” Chibs says. “To heal.”
The pause is noticeable. Jax feels like pulling in on himself, but that’s never been his way. So he straightens his shoulders and says, “Yeah, well. I’m fine.”
“You’re tougher than you look, I’ll grant you that.” Chibs looks directly at him, and Jax has no doubt that he’s trying to convince Jax of the fact, more than he’s just observing.
He glances one last time at the office, thinks of Tara’s increasingly detailed plans to leave Charming after high school, and says, “I have to be.”
*
The open road calls to him, but he can’t lose control again.
(Won’t.)