AN: The title of this story is taken from the song "Tie Me Up! Untie Me!" by mewithoutYou. Thank you for taking the time to read it.

Seventeen

"Hold still."

Jax hisses through his teeth. His skin is split above the eye, the delicate fibers of it burst cleanly apart, and the salt of his sweat and blood stings. He can taste it in his mouth too, metallic and sour, but the truth of it is that Jax has always liked the bleeding so he doesn't mind.

Tara is pressing gauze to the wound but she's not being very gentle about it. She's pissed. He doesn't know why—all he'd done is teach David Hale a lesson about talking to his girl.

He grabs hold of her wrist and stills it. Tara sits there with her hand suspended in the air, her eyes big and blinking at him.

"You're making it worse," he says. "I'm fine."

"Worse?" she repeats, and drops her hands.

"I don't like when he talks to you."

"I don't like when you assault my friends."

He snorts unkindly. "He doesn't want to be your friend."

Tara does that thing she does, where she doesn't fight with him, she just gets all closed up and tight and makes a sound of disapproval low in her throat. She throws the gauze on the ground and stands up, staring him down, although he can barely see her through the blood.

"I don't care what you like. He's been my friend since we were kids," she says. "And you can find someone else to clean you up."

She leaves, slamming the door behind her, and suddenly Jax doesn't feel as good as he did when Tara had pulled him off Hale and he'd seen his nose bruised and spewing blood. Right then he had felt like he'd proved something to that asshole, but considering how shitty he feels now that Tara's left, maybe it's only her he cares about proving something to.

And maybe he's fucked that all the way up.

Jax shuts his eyes and groans, but a minute later the door opens again and he sees Tara standing there. Just for a second, her pale face still furious, but she throws a bottle of hydrogen peroxide and Neosporin and a bandage at him. They hit him square in the chest, knocking the wind right out of him. Then she snaps idiot at him and leaves again, and even so Jax can't help smirking after her.

Nineteen

The light is harsh and painful and Jax groans, turning over on the uncomfortable old couch in Opie's living room to bury his eyes in the cushions. He's so hungover. He's never been this hungover.

"Late night?"

Jax turns his head just enough to drag one eye open and look at Tara. She's standing in front of the window, arms crossed and grinning. He vaguely remembers that she had left the party early the night before, which probably accounts for the damp hair and general freshly washed appearance.

"It was okay," he says into the couch, blearily.

"We were going to drive out to the park this morning," she reminds him. "Remember?"

"Right. Shit." Even though Tara sounds like she finds the whole thing pretty funny, he feels bad about it. He doesn't like disappointing her. He resolves then that he's going to give her the day he told her he would. Fuck his hangover. All he needs is to wash the grime of the night off. "Give me thirty, okay?"

Tara wrinkles her nose at him. "Jax, you smell like a distillery. I think you're actually still drunk."

"I'm not," he insists. "I'm fine."

To prove it, he pushes himself up off the couch. He's able to balance for about half a second before his head and stomach protest at the sudden movement and he tips forward, pukes on the floor, and crashes face first into the old coffee table. His lip busts immediately; he can taste the blood even through the vomit.

It's at that moment that Opie stumbles in from the hallway, sees Jax bleeding all over his floor, and says, "God damn it, Jax." Then the smell must get to him, too, because he turns away, dry heaving.

Jax musters up the strength to look at Tara and once her eyes lock with his, she can't help it: she starts laughing, almost hysterically.

"I'm sorry," she gasps. "I'm sorry. I'll go. You sleep it off." And she turns around and leaves him stranded, bleeding in a puddle of his own vomit.

Through the window he watches her all the way down the sidewalk to her dad's Cutlass. When she gets in she sits in the driver's seat for just a minute, and he can see her shoulders shaking with laughter, and even though he's pretty sure in about thirty seconds he's going to pass out and die some part of him still feels pretty content.

Twenty-nine

The day before his thirtieth birthday he hits the clubhouse for a party. He asks Opie to come, because he's fresh out of Stockton and Jax has missed his best friend like he's only ever missed one other person—the kind of missing where you feel an actual fucking ache, a void where your heart should be—but Opie is trying to make things right with Donna.

"Sorry, brother. Can't keep up with you the way I used to," Opie says, standing out in front of his house. Jax tries not to notice the peeling paint on the door, the shitty truck parked out front, his grown ass kids staring at the two of them from the yard like they're still trying to remember who their dad is.

Jax doesn't really know Opie's kids, which makes him feel like shit, but the truth is Donna had kept them away from the club while Opie was inside and maybe Jax didn't try hard enough to keep up with them. Ellie and Kenny were young went Opie was sentenced. Young enough that Jax hadn't really seen Opie as a father. He was still his best friend. But now—now he's afraid he doesn't know Opie anymore, just like he doesn't know his kids, because that's what Ope's all about.

Jax doesn't have kids. Doesn't think he wants them. He and Ope, they're in different places now, on the kind of separate roads that don't ever meet again in the middle.

So he's in a mood, even though he should be celebrating, and that's what gets him in the ring with Tig even though he's so drunk he feels like he can barely stand straight much less throw a punch. He doesn't really like Tig. He's his brother, so he loves him, but his commitment to Clay comes before his commitment to the club and Jax can't trust that.

It's a good fight, probably, at least if he judges by the furor of the people crowded up around the ring. They're just faceless, nameless shapes to him, but in the din all the voices are equal. So he's listening to them, caught up in the sound, when Tig catches him with a right hook that sends him tumbling to the dirty mat.

He falls on all fours, balanced on his knees and forearms, and while Tig is spitting blood over the ropes Jax is laughing. Fucking laughing, because it feels good, this pain; it's what he wants. What he craves. Blood on his hands or blood on the other's, it doesn't matter: This is the life he's chosen, and he is committed to it.

When the blood on his face doesn't stop its steady flow he concedes he might need stitches. Chibs isn't around to do his back-alley patch up jobs so Bobby takes him to St. Thomas in Piney's pick-up.

He's sitting on the end of the hospital bed, Bobby sprawled in a spindly chair that doesn't look stable enough to support his heft, when the curtain is drawn back and the soft voice goes off like a fucking gunshot in his heart—

"Hey, I'm going to take a look at those cuts and bruises—"

She stops short, and stares at him. It's three a.m. and there's not much going on in a small town ER so there's just the reassuring steady beep-beep of hospital noise, and the quieted footsteps of shoes on linoleum, and the silence between them, and that is it.

Behind him, Bobby mutters, "Holy shit."

He's seen her face in so many other women that at first it's not obvious it's really her or if he's just seeing the one thing that can always comfort him, but then everything settles, the haziness stops and he blinks through the blood and she is still there, older and with her still-long hair bound in a thick braid, in sea green scrubs that make her look like a different person entirely. Jax can't reconcile the memories of her that he's held onto for years with the girl—the woman—standing there in this place. He thinks dimly that there's hardly a place in Charming that isn't touched by her ghost but he has no memory of her here in St. Thomas to fall back on. It's all unfamiliar. It's all like a fucking dream.

"I'm going to get someone to take care of your stitches," she says.

She whips the curtain back in place so he can't see her as she leaves.

And that's how he learns Tara Knowles is back in town.

Thirty

There is blood on his chest—blood that's not his own, but the fireworks of bruises beneath the Kevlar are—and Tara is embracing him like she's pulling all the pain and uncertainty of Abel's birth into herself and leaving him with only her own strength and conviction. He holds onto her, feeling the innocence of this and greedily sucking it up like it will erase what he's done tonight. It's the desperate, wild part of him that still knows—despite their past, despite his marriage, despite his kid and despite that she doesn't even want him anymore—still knows to fall in love with Tara all over again on sight. And if Tara can love him too, if she can even stand him knowing what she knows, he can be more than he is.

(Gangbanger. Outlaw. Murderer.)

But then her hands are at his neck, on his chest, and with her hands under leather he knows she can feel the tacky wetness of the blood beneath the armor. Tara pulls away from him and there is blood on her too. The sight of it makes him sick.

She stares at him and he knows he's not strong enough to shoulder the weight of that disappointment.

"Clean yourself up, Jax," she says.

He stares after her, feeling mutinous, feeling such goddamn self-loathing he wants to finish the job the Kevlar had stopped. He wants her to come back, he wants her to wash the blood away.

He wants her to make him clean again.

Thirty-three

One.

Two.

Three.

In-out, in-out, in-out: the shiv slices through him in quick succession and, it seems, with little resistance. There's the shock of it first, and then the pain—exploding, white-light, knee-buckling kind of pain—and although Jax has bled a lot in his life he's never experienced it like this. The blue prison-issues go wet with blood immediately; his hands go to the wounds but they don't know where to cover. He hits the ground on his back and stares up at the Russian without really seeing him. The blood is everywhere, seeping through the space between his white-knuckled fingers.

In the background he hears—he hears nothing. There's no one in this darkened corridor, just him and the phones hanging off the hook. Jax doesn't know when help will come, or if it will.

In this moment, bleeding out in what he's certain is the shittiest prison in the state of California, Jax thinks only of the woman he will make his wife and her steady surgeon's hands, and he imagines that they are on top of his own—firm and strong and keeping the blood at bay.

Thirty-one

A run goes wrong and Jax almost catches a bullet.

He's staring practically down the barrel when pure self-preservation tells him to drop. The gunshot goes off loud in his ears and he feels the wind cut by the bullet's path above him, and then another and he thinks only: Fuck, and then he hears the thud, about what you'd expect from the weight of a man boring down onto unforgiving earth. He cuts his eyes up and sees Chibs standing there, his Beretta outstretched and still smoking, and then the dead Mayan at his feet.

Jax guesses it all ends up okay.

But in the chaos and the darkness he catches the wrong end of a chainlink trying to scale it, and he feels the metal drag jaggedly across his bicep. He doesn't really feel the pain though until he's split from the others on the way back to his place, when he has to pull over to the side of the road to tie a bandana around his sleeve.

It's pain he can deal with but still, he curses when he can't find the first aid kit he's sure his mom stashed somewhere in his house. The bleeding's stopped but he needs to disinfect it and slap gauze on it at least.

"Jax? That you?"

He whips his head around and sees Tara standing in the bedroom doorway in sock feet and wrinkled scrubs. She's been staying over with Abel a lot recently, in the weeks since Abel came home and Tara made it clear she was going to stay. There's a part of him that feels guilty for what his lifestyle has done to his old lady and his kid—he knows it's not really fair to ask her to wait around for him, to stay in the house he hasn't yet made it clear belongs to her too, to look after his son and stay the night with him when hours go by without a phone call and there's no sign of him. She didn't sign up to be Abel's parent, at least not this much and this fast (but, Jax knows, she likes it, and motherhood agrees with her).

So, yeah, he feels guilty, but the truth is every time he comes home and sees her curled up on the sofa by the crib, he falls a little more in love with Tara. He's just got to get around to asking her to move in.

"Sorry, babe," he says.

"Is that blood?" she asks him, suddenly alarmed.

He says, as if it's an adequate explanation, "It's nothing. I just got grazed. I'm looking for the first aid kit—"

"You idiot," she says matter-of-factly. "Sit down, Teller."

He obeys her, sitting down right there on the foyer floor and staring up at her with a smirk plastered firmly on his face. She gives him a look but he swears he sees her mouth twitch with laughter, and then she ducks down to the big duffel she keeps by the door and her hair falls in front of her and he can't see her face. But he can imagine her smile.

Tara pulls her kit out and pushes the short sleeve of his shirt up and gets to work. Even while she disinfects the wound and he hisses at the stinging pain, her hands are gentle, and he can't help but look at them in fascination.

When Tara had first come back to Charming, or at least when he'd first seen her in the ER, he had turned the memory of it over and over in his mind. He couldn't believe she'd gone and become a doctor. She'd never said anything about it when they were young. Shit, he's not sure Tara even knew what she wanted, besides out of Charming. So when he had seen her he couldn't help wondering what she was like as a doctor. He wondered if she was a surgeon, and how unflinching she had to be in the presence of guts and gore, and how smart she must be—he had always known she was smart, but shit, being a doctor was something else. He wondered how many lives she had saved.

And then she'd saved Abel's, and he knows that's the most important thing anyone will ever do for him. It's something bigger than mortal hands can repay. It's something exalted.

He had never seen one of Abel's surgeries, though. Never had the guts for it.

He guesses his fascination with her work has something to do with her being gone for so long. For eleven years he'd stay up nights thinking about Tara Knowles—where she was. What she was doing. He imagined he could get on his bike and ride out of Charming limits and right to her, even though he hadn't heard of or from her since she'd split from town early one July morning just weeks after she'd graduated. He was half convinced he could ride blind and find her in any city guided by desperation alone.

He still thinks of her that way, like she's lost to him when he's not looking at her. Tara is a different person in the walls of that hospital and part of him wants to bear witness to it the way he owes it to her to. The other part is scared, cowardly like he's nineteen again, that if he's confronted with that he's going to hate himself for the world he's dragging her into.

But right now Jax is glad they're in his house and not at TM because with her hands on his hot skin, his blood and her fingers kept apart only by the thin layer of rubber gloves, he's more turned on right now than he's ever been in his life.

He can tell Tara notices, because she pauses in cleaning the gash and says in a voice vibrating with restrained laughter, "Are you serious?"

"It's hot," he says earnestly. But it's more than that, even though he can't say it.

"Should have known you had a thing for naughty nurses," Tara snickers as she pulls the gloves off with a snap that he knows is for his benefit.

"Naw, babe," he says. "Just doctors."

"Oh, then you're going to love this." She pulls on a clean pair of gloves and shows him the suture kit, the curved needle and the sutures and the forceps. His breath rumbles in his throat when she starts threading through the skin, but something like euphoria has chased most of the pain away. He likes this, sitting here with Tara cross-legged beside him, worrying her full bottom lip between her teeth as she concentrates.

She only has to make a few stitches. She ties off the last one and fastens a gauze pad over it and looks up at him with a smile as she pulls the gloves off. "All done."

"Thanks," he says. And then, because he means it and because it seems right, he adds, "I love you."

"I love you." She pulls him to her by the back of his head, and he lets her. "Want to see Abel?"

"Nah, let him sleep." Tara nods and he captures her hands in his. She gives a peaceful little sigh and turns around, settling against his chest with his arms around her.

"Are you okay?" she asks, and he knows it's because it's a question that's easier to ask, and easier to answer, when they're not looking at each other. "Really?"

He buries his face in her hair. He is in love with her. He's so in love with her he knows at that moment he's forgiven her for leaving, for running, because look what came of it. He told her that when she came back it was like a sign, and he knows now that it couldn't have happened that way if she had stayed—she had needed to get out to save herself, and he gets that now, now that he's growing up like she has. He gets what it means to make the hard choice. Tara had known that at eighteen.

"Yeah. I am," he says, and puts his hand flat against her breast so he can feel the reassuring thump of her heartbeat. He feels it jump beneath his bones. "I'm glad you're home."