AN: This isn't as polished as it could be, because truth be told I am still minorly traumatized, but I wanted to write it down and get it out of my head as soon as I could so I don't have to put myself in this headspace again. Who else needs a hug?

The only girl I've ever loved
Was born with roses in her eyes
But then they buried her alive

—"Holland, 1945", Neutral Milk Hotel

How much blood has his goddamn house seen?

Wendy had nearly bled out in the kitchen—Sack, died there—he didn't know how much blood he'd washed down the drain. How much he'd pumped through the pipes like he could scrub it from his soul, too. And now—

It's ten feet to the body.

The ease in his soul, the burden lifted, it all disappears in a second and everything goes dark and silent. When he'd been in prison and the Russians had stuck their knives up underneath his ribs like they were butchering a pig he had gone deaf and blind with pain, his vision a white oasis that stung his brain when he closed his eyes.

This is worse.

He can't reconcile this: in the short few breaths upon first witnessing her body his brain shuffles through everything he knows about Tara. Every way he's ever seen her. Tries to fight the shock and the strange aggressive unfamiliarity of seeing her this way, like seeing her in prison had been. Only then she had been the beacon in the darkness and now she is the darkness, she is the shadow in their warm home, the thing that doesn't fit and that he can't make sense of.

Naked in their bed—
Her dark, fathomless eyes wet with tears when they were nineteen—
Her face when he asked her to marry him—
A radiant spark against the gray prison walls—
Pale and terrified as EMS loaded her onto a stretcher—
A thousand memories of her in a hundred places—

But none of it looks like the picture in front of him; she is Tara, his Tara, but in the stolen-breath silence of death she is a stranger to him.

Even in the small, private moments when he'd allowed himself the vulnerability to fear for Tara's life—to accept that his consequences could be her consequences, too—he had never let himself see her like this. He had seen the coffin lowered into the ground, the headstone erected where the other testaments to his hubris lived; he had imagined telling their boys that Mommy was gone—and what he would say to them as they grew up, which stories he would give them to remember their mother by.

Jax had never let himself see her dead.

He should have prepared himself—

He barely sees Roosevelt. All he sees is her, dark-haired and pale, a statue in repose. The worry lines between her eyebrows are smoothed and she looks like she's sleeping. Like she's at peace.

But there's so much blood. How could it have been peaceful? There's so much fucking blood.

He leans on the table—

—the table they had sat at a few months ago—it feels like forever—when he had held her hands in his and cried as he told her to leave. But even as he'd said the words there was the dark part of him that cared more about his loneliness than her safety and that part had prayed Let her stay. I'll make her happy. I'll keep her safe. Don't take her away from me. When she told him she wasn't going anywhere he had been relieved. Exultant.

He should have made her leave.

He should have made her.

—and he stumbles over his gun and onto the floor. Tara is in his arms before he knows he's pulling her into them. There is blood on her face and her temples and her hair has dried sticky with it. He can't bring himself to look for wounds. He doesn't want to know.

He wants to remember her as he loved her—how she looked at him with knowing eyes—the quiet dignity of her set mouth and most of all how she had smiled at him and how he'd felt a thudding in his wild violent heart to know he'd put it there.

He doesn't know how she died but he thinks it would have been better if he had been here. When he stares at her now it's like his brain tries to fix the image of her, as wrong as it, fooling him into seeing breath where there is none, the fluttering of her eyes beneath her blue lids. He should have been here for that. Had she died alone?—she shouldn't have died alone. She shouldn't have died. Tara shouldn't be dead. But he should have been there; he should have held her and let her go loved, he should have been the peace she had always been to him, a compass pointing north, a comfort where he had only been the storm.

Jax holds her in his shaking arms now and in the deadened space of his mind he thinks that he should have done it more. Held her. Kissed her. Came home to her or gone away with her or made her goddamn dinner. He should have watched her in surgery, seen her the way other people saw her, a healer and a savior of so many more people than him.

Should've fucking talked to her.

And that's it, that's the avalanche: he can stare at her for hours and memorize the lines of her face, the things that haven't changed in death, but he's talked to her as much as he ever will. Tara will never talk to him again; she'll never wake him up in the morning with coffee, or pass one of their sons from her arms to his. He'll never come home to find her curled up with one of those medical tomes, the ones that he's still amazed and impressed she understands, or stitch up one of his brothers or let her fingers play in the scruff on his chin. And it's these things more than her dark hair or refined face, the spirit of Tara that inhabited that body: it's those things that are Tara, and it's those things that Jax loves, and it's those things that are finite in a way that the body isn't.

He holds her chin firmly in his hands and kisses Tara like he can will the life back into her but he can't, and Jax feels the only good part of him left slip out into the space between them. Without Tara there's no north. There's no home.

Without Tara there's nothing.

He hears footsteps at the door—Patterson coming to collect—and in a rushing moment he thinks of his sons, and how he's failed them and how he's failed Tara; he's going to go to jail or Patterson is going to level him and the club or his sons are going to grow up either in this violence or with another family, and everything is wrong; it's all twisted from how he told Tara it would be, the promises he made her he was finally man enough to keep—none of it matters—how can it matter with her cold in his arms?

Without Tara there's nothing.

Without Tara—