Warnings: Some language. Major Spoilers.
Companion piece to last night episode, "Burnt and Purged Away". For the most part, this entire season I watch these episodes with a sort of 'No way.. Did they just! WTF?' face, and last nights episode especially. As I much as I absolutley love the roller collester they have given use for season four, I still can't believe it... The inspiration bug bit me to write this, just to fill in the gap between when Opie leaves the crematorium and shows up at the clubhouse - something I feel should have been shown as well as what happens between Opie and Jax after Clay gets shot.
Enjoy and please review :)
I don't want to be a proud man, I just want to be a man
a little less like my father and more like my dad
I want to hunt like David
I want to kill me a giant man
I want to slay my demons
but I've got lots of them, I've got lots of them
I try to keep my conscience clean
- Noah Gundersen David [featured in episode "Burnt and Purged Away"]
Steps even and gentle, breathing steady and slow. Jaw rigid and fists clenched so tight they have long since lost feeling. Unblinking brown eyes and dried out lips.
The sight is all too familiar – a seething man stalking the shadows, seeking to collect on an injustice; on a quest to make right a wrong in a better late than never sort of fashion. But that's what revenge is at the heart of it, isn't it?
Is not the root of revenge trying to rectify something taken, something killed?
Opie is a man quicker with mercy than any of his brothers, even when doing so goes so far against the grain of what he desires that it physically hurts. He does not simply give in to the sociopathic voice whispering in the back of his mind, telling him to first react with a loaded gun – telling him that mercy is a lie created by the weak-of-heart . While he may be fully capable of the most horrendous of acts, it is almost never his preferred path.
He even let Stahl go… Well, the first time, any way.
Bitch didn't listen and got what was coming to her.
Just the fact that he once let her go when she was the very catalyst needed to set his wife's eventual murder in motion is something that should qualify him for sainthood. Imagine that – an outlaw canonized. Truly has there never been a man more suited to be so than Opie.
Even tonight, while watching his father burn to ash he spent the majority of his time contemplating and then inevitably planning. Behind those empty heavy brown eyes of his that watched the fires rage, he too raged. A controlled man, he reached the position he knew he always would just as there was nothing left for the ceramic pyre to burn.
Opie is a smart man; a methodical man… somewhat neurotically so. He plans. He calculates. He weighs and measures and then, only then, can the explosion take place. He's controlling, abiding by an internal set of unbreakable rules. Defiant he is not, specifically not towards his club.
A moral loop hole - Clay's actions were not club actions. Opie assasinating the seemingly untoucheable man has nothing to do with the club.
Walking through the front door and into an empty club house with his breathing calm but his posture intensely homicidal, Opie is fully determined to do what he should have long ago. Yes, Stahl may have been the reason behind Donna's death, but Clay was the one who ordered the actual event be put into motion. Judge, jury and ultimately executioner Opie finds Clay fully and unforgivingly culpable for not only Donna's but also undoubtedly for his father.
Somewhere in the back of his head where the evil voice inside of him bursts with exuberant glee, a different voice raises some sort of objection in a familiar rough tone but Opie's mind has already been made up.
There is no changing Opie's mind.
Especially not with his hand around that doorknob on the newly installed door between the main clubhouse and the chapel.
Clay is going to die. He is going to die sitting in his fucking throne, the king put up upon his pedestal only to be hung from it.
He pulls his gun out and up, holding the suddenly righteous weapon with unbreakable will to destroy the very man who so easily destroyed the two people in his life he doesn't know how to survive without. By killing the king and killing him in his throne he is taking the two things from Clay that he cares about most.
Poetic justice at its finest.
Bursting through the door, Opie fully gives into the insatiable, animalistic desire to watch Clay suffer at his making.
The gun in Opie's hand: $320.
The three bottles of Whiskey he drank since finding his fathers body stinking up the cabin: $62.
The look on Clay's face when he realizes Opie is going to kill him:
Priceless.
Bang. Bang.
Two quick taps. Two professional shots ring out through the night.
Frozen stiff, completely stunned, Jax does a double take between Clay slouched in his seat at the head of the table and the face of his best friend, wisps of gun smoke billowing up into his distant face. Opie does not wince. Gun still raised, he just looks at Clays limp body.
Jax hesitates, wanting to scream the words 'What the fuck?' but not having the mental clarity to do so.
So he rushes to Clay, shouting for someone to call for help. But the clubhouse is empty.
The only person around to hear the pleas for help is Opie and he sure as shit isn't going to be calling for an ambulance any time soon.
Pressing each of his palms into one of the bullet wounds, with warm blood bubbling up between his fingers, Jax looks up to his friend. Blue eyes watery and mouth agape, Jax begs Opie to do the right thing.
But not this time.
Opie shakes his head, turning away. He takes a step forward.
With Clay moaning beneath him, the last bits of living breath escaping his lungs.
"OP! You walk out those doors, you know you can't ever come back and we will look for you." Jax shouts.
Opie hesitates in the doorway, craning his neck over his shoulder.
"Come find me then."
He turns back around and walks away.
Jax stays behind, his hands shockingly red and a sinking feeling in his stomach.
Ever had one of those moment where you realize everything has changed for the worst? When reality hits you so hard that you are hurled dangerously low, left crushed beneath the weight of an epic paradigm shift.
Jax looks down at Clay, staring into the dead, cut-up face of his step-father and President.
"Shit." He hisses.
Fin.