Disclaimer: None of the characters belong to me. The title comes from the movie Mystic River (or really, the book, which was written by Dennis Lehane)
A/N: Drabble, that's all I can really say. Everyone, hopefully, knows me as the psycho who always writes Sam and Laura but I loved the phrase (which is the title) so much that I really wanted to use it. And, of course, it only applied to Jack and Lucy. So, it's probably not my best work, and it's definitely not one of my favorite writings, but I loved the title so just go with it. Once again, it's complete drabble, it's a one-shot and that's all there is to it. Please review and I hope you enjoy.
Lucy Hall had never been the definition of a perfect wife, She had known throughout her entire life that she wouldn't make a good wife, never had the desire to be the doting, stay at home woman, without a life of her own, living only to serve her husband. This wasn't, after all, the fifties and she had better things to do with her time then cook dinner and make sure the house was immaculate.
What she had never counted on, however, was that her husband would have better things to do then force her to become the Stepford wife that she so dreaded becoming. Jack Hall had been the perfect man in college, smart and driven, handsome and clever and he loved her and that was enough for Lucy. She was young then and stupid, focused solely on being with Jack and making it through medical school. The latter had never been easy, the former was easier then that it was now and she always thought of herself as the girl from that old Jon Bon Jovi song, working in a dinner and living on a prayer.
Jack had proposed marriage shortly after she had gotten into medical school and Lucy would always wonder if it was a spur of the moment thing, another reason to celebrate. It was only later that she would wonder if he had proposed to keep from losing her to any possibly handsome future doctors that she might encounter while at school. She would always wonder this with an almost whimsical attitude; was there ever a time that Jack had been afraid of losing her? Lucy found it almost hard to believe, because he had become very good at losing her over the past ten years.
Lucy managed to pull herself through medical school while Jack pursued a career of his own and they began seeing less and less of each other. She had thought that would all change when their first and only son was born because then she still wanted to be a wife, back then she still loved Jack like a young wife should love her equally young husband.
Back then, love meant something, something entirely different then it meant now. Back then, she was young and stupid and still "living on a prayer." But shortly after Sam was born and Jack got his position at the NOAA, she began to realize that Jon Bon Jovi had been wrong, that the Beatles had been wrong. Love was not enough. Love was a stupid creation, the child of romantics who had little to lose and no one to care for. Fairy tale love did not exist and there was no room for passion when classes had to be attended, bills had to be paid and a child had to be taken care of.
For a while, Lucy realized the different meaning for love; to her, love meant being able to work together with her husband to get everything done, to make sure that her child was happy and healthy and to make sure that he was taken care of when she was on call and Jack was at the NOAA. And for a while, she and Jack wore only the title of marriage and stayed together only because that was what they were supposed to do. In sickness and in health, richer or poorer, 'til death do you part.
But work made them part, work and the realization that they're weren't stupid, young kids anymore, that they hadn't been for some time. And, though it killed Lucy to admit it, the only tears that were shed the day Jack had moved out had been Sam's.
However, at the moment, so many years later, Lucy came upon another realization. Standing in the middle of a slowly deserting hospital hallway, waiting for the world to end and praying for the safety of her child, Lucy heard the man who had been her ex-husband for nearly ten years say the words that everyone woman dreamed of hearing since she was old enough to desire love and safety. And when Jack said "I love you," from miles away, Lucy could tell that he meant it for the first time since they had gotten out of college.
And Lucy realized then that there was such a thing as love and that she happened to love perhaps the greatest man of all. This man was prepared to die for his son, this man had been prepared to die for millions of faceless others, this man had sacrificed his family to help others, to do the job and say the things that few others would say. This man was king; in his own way, he was a king.
It was then that Lucy realized that she loved this man, perhaps she always had loved him, loved him with that raw and real love that was rarely found in life. And so she told Jack, told him that she loved him and meant the words for the first time in years. It was so easy to say them now because she realized, realized what she hadn't known all a long, what she had been too blind to see.
Jack Hall was a king and, more now then ever before, she was proud to be the king's wife.