Note: Thank you for reading my story. I wanted to write a story where Rayna reacts to all the stress of her life by pursuing Deacon with a very narrow minded focus. She spends so much time in the show talking about how she wants to protect everyone's hearts and do right by Deacon that it makes me think that those are things she has to put a lot of effort into because they're not her natural reaction. I wanted to give Rayna some breathing room to act without thinking and then maybe see what kind of consequences have been stirred up.
Enjoy!
-Kristy
Teddy drove them all to the airport and had his arm around Maddie's shoulders as Rayna hugged Daphne goodbye last and walked towards the plane. Rayna turned back around every two or three steps to wave goodbye again and again to her girls and Teddy knew not a single one of those goodbyes had been for him. He and Rayna and said all their goodbyes the night before when he told her he wanted a divorce. Today they stood in the middle of an airstrip being parents, pretending everything was fine until they had a plan and answers for their daughters.
The three members of the family who were not heading out on a national tour waited in the terminal, not even considering leaving until the plane had taken off safely and was out of sight. The plane hadn't begun to move yet when Teddy turned to hear a door slam behind him. Deacon breezed by with a quick hello to the girls and was on the plane less than a minute later. Teddy didn't know whether to feel a twisted justification for asking Rayna for a divorce the night before or to feel crushed that he was sending her out on the road with him again, only without their marriage holding her back from his worst nightmare. He did the only thing he could; watched the plane take off, herded the girls into the car and felt both horrible feelings at the same time.
Rayna's great strength as a songwriter and performer was the fact that her passionate emotions were never more than a hair's width below the surface. She had tantrums aplenty ready to spark inside her on a bad day, bubbling joy evident on her face while on stage and a big gooey heart on her sleeve which made writing love songs flow like water back in the day. Still, you didn't grow up in the Wyatt house or endure her level of fame without developing a game face to get you through long dinners, business meetings or fawning fans when you were having a bad day. By the time Juliette's jet was in the air Rayna had a magazine open and a mask of indifference on her face that would put her teenage daughter to shame.
Deacon was on the tour. Deacon was on the tour with Juliette Barnes. She had fired Deacon but he had found a way back. She couldn't begin to figure out why he was on this tour. Juliette was certainly of the opinion that he was there for her and that she had won something. Maybe that was true, and the possibility was almost enough to make Rayna airsick. He had written a song with Juliette, had almost certainly slept with her at some point, might still be sleeping with her. The magazine in Rayna's hands inched up incase that horrible thought was visible on her face.
He was sitting there slouched in his seat with his sunglasses on, looking as unaffected and aloof as she'd ever seen him. She knew she had hurt him firing him from her band. She knew he still cared about her; the anger in his voice after their fight at his house had been the most recent proof of that. Was he on this tour because of her?
Well he was certainly trying to hurt her. That was another take away from their fight. He went digging back 14 years to find the biggest knife he could to stab her with, ripping apart every polite compromise they'd built their friendship on. She could have waited for him. He's been suffering for fourteen years without her and it's her fault. That's how he felt yesterday and that's how he's apparently felt for fourteen years being Rayna's without Rayna being his.
And today he walked onto a plane announcing that he was Juliette's.
Well he won. She was hurt.
And after half an hour of not reading that magazine and pondering the convoluted motivations of a guitar player's games, Rayna had a moment of clarity. Deacon may have been in Juliette's band and may have written songs with the pop tart, but he was on that plane because of Rayna James. There was no way he went from loving her quietly from afar for all those years to yelling at her yesterday to ignoring her today. Whether he was here to be close to her, to hurt her or both didn't particularly matter. He was there for her and he had no clue her marriage was over.
At that thought Rayna actually smiled. It wasn't a very kind thought but it was the first time since last night that the phrase 'my marriage is over' made her feel anything other than failure and dread. Her marriage was over and Deacon didn't know. She was walking around holding a winning hand she could play at any point and crush Deacon Claybourne's petty little games of 'you hurt me so i'm going to hurt you'. She could give them what she knew they both wanted. She could take him back from miss Sparklypants whenever she chose to because if there was one certainty that Rayna knew in her bones, it was that Deacon loved her, wanted her and had always been waiting for her. She'd spent fourteen years pretending that wasn't true. Now there was nothing actually holding them apart and she was the only one who knew it.
Rayna swallowed her smile and began to read the magazine properly now. She could wait, pick her moment and when she was ready she was going to rock Deacon's world.
Deacon looked like he might have been sleeping with those dark sunglasses hiding his eyes but he wasn't tired at all. He let himself watch Ray all he wanted, thinking to himself that she looked exhausted. Maybe she hadn't been able to sleep after their fight the day before. Maybe she'd been up late having sex with her husband before heading out for another month of touring. He let each thought feed his anger and felt a hell of a lot more in control of himself with that familiar emotion than he had with the despair and lack of direction he'd felt since he'd been fired from her band to save her marriage.
He was just about to close his eyes and drift into a nap when he saw Rayna flinch and her eyes flick up to him and right back down to the magazine he knew she wasn't reading. The corners of her mouth began to tilt up in a dangerous smile which she couldn't completely hide. He didn't know exactly what she was thinking but but he'd seen that expression before. He'd seen it anytime Rayna let go of caution and decided to take a chance on something. It was the face she made after tossing her hair and shrugging shoulders and having total faith that everything would work out simply because she wouldn't allow anything else. Deacon watched it all cross her face and had three simultaneous thoughts: She was beautiful when she took risks, he hadn't seen her with that look in quite some time and that maybe, he hadn't quite been prepared for the consequences of getting on this plane.