AN: I can't call myself a fan of Sons of Anarchy anymore, but as someone invested in Tara and her relationship with Jax, I needed some sort of closure that I'm suspecting the show won't give me. Here's my attempt at it. This is AU for seasons 5 and 6: for the sake of not having to work in so many convoluted plots it assumes that Tara took the job in Oregon and Otto never killed the nurse, hence, there is no jail or pending trial (or false pregnancy…). Other plot lines are mostly incidental to this story and thus remain unchanged. Thank you for reading!
Rest in the bed of my bones
All that I want is a home
And all you can do
Is promise me bold
That you won't let me grow dark
Or cold
As long as we both shall live
—"Rest in the Bed", Laura Marling
When Tara leaves, it is the same way she came home: quiet, without notice, a shadow passing from one life to another.
(It is sunny when she comes home to Charming. She slips into her childhood bedroom and lies on her bed in a patch of light; her eyes are closed and she is seventeen again, listening to her father rattle drunkenly around the house like a comet that's lost a planet to orbit. When she comes home she feels like a thief in this house, stealing memories from another girl—she doesn't remember who she was when she was here.
A few days later—all of them spent inside; she is too afraid to leave this house and find out what's changed, or not changed—she starts up her father's Cutlass and takes it the crematorium. She'd asked for her father's body burned. Her mother was ashes, too, spread somewhere in the waters off the coast of northern California. When she was young and still grieving that loss it had frightened her, to think of her mother lost in the crashing waves, but then she thought it's what her mother would have wanted: a respite from the prison of their home, a place where her spirit could be free and wild.
She thinks she'll put her father's ashes in the ground and maybe no part of him will touch her mother again.
She pays and leaves with the urn clutched in her arms. And then, because this is Charming, she hears the whine of motorcycle engines going dead, and when she rounds the corner around the building he is there.
Jax is beautiful in the sunlight, as he's always been, but his bright hair is longer, his skin darker, the cut on his shoulders rests easier than it did when they were young. She sees him before he sees her and so watches the slow drag of his eyes from his bike to the crematorium, the double take as he sees her standing in front of it.
"Tara," he says, and behind him his brothers' heads snap up.
"Hi," she says quietly, and then the urn drops from her slick hands—)
Tara doesn't know anymore who the man she married is. She knows she's not the same woman whose finger he slipped a ring onto.
Sometimes she wakes up in the middle of the night with her fists clenched to her chest and unable to breathe like her lungs are weighed down with cement, pushes the tips of her fingers into her flesh like she can reach in and pull her heart out whole. She wakes up and sees the splint on her wrist and the emptiness of their bed, and Tara wants so badly to cry but she doesn't.
One night Jax is there; he comes home in the early hours and she doesn't hear him because she's bent over the sink in the bathroom with her forehead against the cold porcelain and her fingers scrabbling against her sternum and she's choking on her own breath. "Tara," he says, and she hears it through a fog but then his hands are around her arms. She can feel the weight of them on her bones. "Jesus, Tara, are you okay?"
She turns to look at him and he is part of the shadows, all dressed in black: the reaper come calling to deliver her fate.
"I can't do this," she says, and hears the desperation in her own scratched-raw voice. "Jax, I can't stay here. I can't—"
He pulls her into his chest and muffles her pleading. "I know, babe. I know," he says.
He feels hot and unfamiliar and he smells like gunpowder and Tara finally cries.
It's mid-afternoon and the boys are at the hospital daycare and Tara is home alone.
She hasn't spoken to Jax in two days.
She tries pouring herself coffee with her bad hand—alone with no one to witness her weakness—but the nerves seize up and her hand goes dead. The pot slips and crashes and breaks at her feet. She jumps out of the way before the coffee can splash up at her ankles.
"God damn it," she says. The sound seems to echo. Emboldened, she says it again, louder: "God damn it!" and it's like a thunderclap in a home with no sunshine to beat back the storms.
Tara looks at her hand and she hates it. She feels the same way then that she did in the hospital when she smashed it up herself, when the tidal wave of grief at not getting better turned inwards and she wanted nothing more than to make herself suffer more, to punish herself for her own weaknesses. But she doesn't slam it against the counter this time: she walks away from the mess and locks the doors and retreats into the bathroom. Tara waits for the bath to fill and undresses methodically and when she steps into the water she doesn't even feel it.
She lets her head dip backwards until it rests against the tub's floor, until the water covers her, until the flood rises over her eyes and her nose and her mouth and she does nothing. Her hair twists around her neck like live things, like snakes.
Tara wonders what it would be like to die here.
Over the past few months, when she lets herself think about her future, this is what she has come to expect: a bullet in the back of the head meant as a message, Gemma's hands tightened around her throat, beaten and raped and left for dead and well, she's a biker whore, she was asking for trouble and no one remembering who she was before she came back here.
Or growing old and cynical in Charming, until the desire to get out twists itself up when she realizes she never will and she starts to whisper in Jax's ear, telling herself she is the moral compass he needs, fearing when he will stop listening to her—when regimes change and her word means nothing—when she is bitter and broken and her only option left is to survive because she's made too many mistakes for it to matter if she lives or dies—
This would be peaceful, here in her home, knowing her boys are if not safe then alive (what if she raises them in this club and they prospect at eighteen like Jax did—what if they come home bloody and it's her hands that fix the mess she made of her boys—what if she watches her children die—)
Her mind is hazy yet somehow resolute and she lets herself slip a little deeper under.
"Tara—Tara—Jesus, I'm sorry!"
She opens her eyes and bursts up from the water like a freed thing and although she sees Rat standing in the doorway she's too shocked to cover herself or feel much embarrassment.
He's standing there with his hand covering his eyes like a gentleman and she can't help but smile, even as she feels her heart racing with the secret of what she was prepared to do (was she prepared?—was it fleeting?—she doesn't know).
"Jax tried calling you," he says. "We're on lockdown. Need to get you and the boys to TM."
Her smile dims.
When things go back to normal she goes to Margaret Murphy and asks her to speak with the hospital administrator in Oregon.
(They hadn't had much time—or inclination—to talk the first time they'd seen each other again so when Tara runs into Jax in the halls of St. Thomas there are still things left unsaid.
"Everything okay?" he asks after they exchange greetings. There's a crease in his brow. She realizes there are so many things he doesn't know about her and wonders if there will ever be time enough to fill up the space between them.
"Yeah, everything's okay. I was finishing up my paper work here, actually." She holds her new ID badge up: proof, a shield. "I'm transferring from Chicago. Decided to move back home for a little bit. After my dad—"(after Joshua, after rose petals at her door, after her own boss inspected the methodical line of bruises down her spine, after work failed to be a safe place anymore)"—I thought I would take a minute to breathe. Slow down a little, get my bearings."
Jax nods and leans forward a little, squinting at her badge. Tara Knowles, M.D. A little smile breaks out across his face and when his eyes meet hers she's nearly knocked over by the pride in them. She remembers when she used to look at Jax that way and something in her heart sparks to see him now. When she was eighteen and told him she was leaving he had stared at her with wounded eyes; that's how she's remembered him for ten years.
"Holy shit," he says slowly. "You really did it."
"I wouldn't have left," she tells him, honest, "if I didn't think I would."
His eyes soften; his whole face changes. His hand drops onto her shoulder, his thumb pressed into her collarbone, his fingers playing at the back of her neck. "Always knew you could," he says, and then, playful: "Doc.")
He cheats on her.
She knows.
Tara remembers when she told him it was a deal breaker—but when she's standing in the smoking rubble of the clubhouse it seems a very small thing, to care about herself.
"I'm going to leave," she wants to say, but she sees the way Jax looks at her: bleary-eyed, half seeing her, trying to think where she fits in on his list of priorities. Her fears are petty things to the President, placated by sweet nothings that hold back the storm. Their marriage is a negotiation now. Tara is always trying to remember where they've drawn their territory lines.
Even at home she sees Jax with the gavel in his hand.
(It takes the bus pulling out of the depot for Tara to realize Jax is not changing his mind.
She cries all the way to San Diego.)
She wants to leave like a thief in the night but she knows she can't do that to Jax—or to her boys, either. They deserve more. So Tara sits on their bed and gathers her courage and when Jax walks in the door she says, "I got the job in Oregon. I want to leave this weekend."
He reels back like he's been hit.
"What?" he says. She knows the question he's asking and she ignores it.
"We'll stay in a hotel the first few days, but I've found a house. I'm closing on it when we get there." Then, because she knows it will hurt him, she says: "I don't need any of your money."
Jax is breathless, speechless, and as much as Tara hates what she's doing there's a perverse pleasure in it too: I've finally done it. I've surprised him.
"Why," he says finally. "Why now? I'm so close to it now, Tara."
"Once," she says, "you were so close to leaving Charming, too." He shuts his eyes and she presses her fingers against the thin skin of his eyelids and soothes the rapid movement beneath them. "I've realized that it's not the guns or the drugs. It's the club, Jax. Ever since Opie—"
He draws in a quick breath. "Don't."
"I'm sorry." Tara drops her hands. "But it's the truth. I saw what it did to you when Opie died. You can't—you can't give all of yourself to the club and have anything left over for your family. I'm not gonna make my boys grow up like that."
"They're my boys, too," he says quietly.
She gives him a sad smile. "If you think you can be their father, not their President," she says, and catches his hand in hers, "they'll be waiting for you in Oregon."
A few days later she gets the call.
The hospital rescinds their offer.
No opportunities available—so sorry, but we need surgeons more—to tell the truth, there were questions about your character—
She kisses her kids and drops them off at daycare and leaves a note for Jax on the kitchen table.
(When Tara thinks of what she likes the most about herself, they are the same things that professors tell her make her so well-suited for surgery: the steadiness of her hands, the steel of her spine, the straight line of her heart.
She's always had the ability to live outside of her own body—to view her decisions with impartiality, to analyze what they mean, to wrap up anything that doesn't work and put it away. She can forget, and go on living, and turn herself into someone new. But when she becomes a surgeon—
That is all she is.
Tara sees her own hands moving as if by grace and she knows she is here because she worked for it, and she is here because she is meant to be: a divine confluence of choice and fate.
She cannot imagine living without this, this feeling of rightness, the security of her heart and mind and hands all working together in perfect symphony.)
"Was this you?"
Tara is sitting in the bathroom, her back against the biting cold of the bathtub. She feels it through her thin shirt; it feeds the clamminess of her skin. On the phone she hears the static crackle and then the voice, unapologetic.
"You're not going to rip this family apart," says Gemma.
Tara stares at the phone in her hand and hangs up. She dials another number. She didn't think she would—she left him a note—but the moment is here and she doesn't want her last words to be to Gemma.
"Yeah?" Jax answers, his voice short.
"Gemma called the hospital, let them know about my ties to the MC," Tara says. She hears her voice as if from a distance, dull and quiet in the way only someone defeated by despair can sound. "I'm not going to Oregon, Jax."
There is silence on the other end. She knows what he's thinking: that he's gotten what he wanted, but the fragile thing between them has broken in the course of it. He has to know.
He heaves a sigh, and says, "Look, we'll talk about it when I get home—"
"There won't be time," Tara says softly, and stares at the red blooming beneath her on the white bathroom tiles. It is a field of poppies in the snow, bright and beautiful and violent. She has seen blood, she has seen it on her own hands—but it is surprising, still, to see it from her own body, leeched out of her thin wrists, ribbons and ribbons of blood.
"What are you talking about?"
"If you've ever loved me, Jax," she says, "you'll do what you promised me. You'll get those boys out of this life. Not just out of guns—you need to take them and drive them out of Charming and don't look back. Don't you ever look back." She pauses and stares at the shafts of light through the window; they make shadows on the walls that look like bars. "Don't let them live like this, Jackson."
"I'm coming home," he says sharply. "Tara, I'm on my way home, okay?"
"Okay," she says, and hangs up.
When Tara leaves, it's like this: midmorning on a spring day, with the light on her face.