Author's note:
I've never written True Blood fanfic before, and I haven't written a word of anything in what feels like forever, but I got Bruce Springsteen's "Born In The U.S.A" for my birthday last night and this song screamed Jason and Sarah at me and begged me to do something with it. So I did. I would like to say that this is what I think should have happened after Hard-Hearted Hannah, not…the craziness that ensued. I hope you enjoy. The title is another Springsteen line, that one from Prove It All Night.
"There's So Much That You Want, You Deserve Much More Than This"
Hey little girl is your daddy home?
Did he go away and leave you all alone?
I got a bad desire, oh oh oh, I'm on fire
Tell me now, baby, is he good to you?
Can he do to the things that I do?
Oh oh, I can take you higher
Oh oh oh, I'm on fire
Sometimes it's like someone took a knife, baby, edgy and dull, and cut a six inch valley through the middle of my skull
At night I wake up with the sheets soaking wet
And a freight train running through the middle of my head
Oh you, you cool my desire
Oh oh oh, I'm on fire
~Bruce Springsteen, I'm On Fire
Jason knew it was wrong to want. She was married, after all, and Steve was his…well, he wasn't sure what to call Steve, exactly, seeing as how 'boss' wasn't exactly right and while he considered Steve his friend they didn't have a strictly friend relationship, either. The only word that Jason thought was fitting was 'leader', and in a way, it seemed to work. It carried a tone of both benevolence and foreboding, leader, at once bright and sunny, warm and brave and strong and dark and vaguely malevolent, almost dictatorial. And Steve was like that , too. He seemed so clean-cut, so All-American, and yet Jason (and Sarah, he strongly suspected), could see through it as though he was transparent, into the darker side of Steve. Jason had no idea what he was up to, but he knew that it could amount to nothing good.
Of course, these days, Steve wasn't the Newlin he was thinking of most of the time. Not that he hadn't found Sarah attractive before, but she was elevated to a whole other level of interesting after the bathtub incident and the…thing on the balcony, and there was something more involved than Jason's boyish fantasies now. She was something real, and solid, something that Jason had the potential to love, if he hadn't crossed that line already, and Steve was now nothing more than both a justification and a hindrance. Sarah was all bright light and honeyed Southern sweetness and a kind of innocence that some dark recess of Jason's brain found carnally sexy, made him want to pull her hair and ravage her until it was all fucked—literally—out of her and made him want to cradle her close and protect her from dark bad things that would corrupt her, all at once. And of course Steve was a dark bad thing. That man, Jason was sure of it, had the devil in him. There was no other explanation than that: he had the devil in him. He was one of those people who could look right into your soul, but the only problem was that after he looked into your soul, he stole it. Jason had to get her away from him, that was the only explanation he could come up with. Steve had fed into—nay, fed off of---Sarah's sweetness, and he was going to be the end of her. She was going to die like the rest of them, and Jason couldn't have it be like that.
He knew he should quit coming back to her, he knew that he should probably leave altogether because when you're fucking your pastor's wife and your pastor is probably working for the forces of darkness, because there's no fucking way he's on the light side of things anymore, Jason would kill his own sister—for real, he thinks wryly sometimes—if Steve was a good guy, that's how sure he is of Steve Newlin's evil purposes, but he couldn't leave her. He was too far gone now, what with her voice and her hair and her sweetness. He was in love with her, as stupid and disgusting as it was, because Jason Stackhouse didn't fall in love and especially didn't fall in love with married women, but he was in love with her and her husband was evil, and Jason knew what that meant, and if he could help it, Sarah wasn't going to be just another one of his vampire-munched sluts. Sarah was different. Sarah was special. Sarah meant something to him. And it scared the hell out of him, but it gave him a purpose and a sense of responsibility, so that wasn't so bad, right?
"We need to leave, like, imminently," Jason said into her hair, pulling her onto his feet and dancing her around the balcony like she was a little girl, making her giggle. "Imminently, huh?" she replied in a pretty good approximation of his accent, stepping off his feet and twirling herself around as Jason stood there and tried not to focus on how the skirt she was wearing moved on her hips.
"Listen, Sarah, every girl I ever slept with got killed, and that husband of yours is bad fucking news—" he took a deep breath and waited for her admonishing "Jason!" but it never came. "—and I ain't letting him get away with killing you."
She looked at him with round, serious eyes, biting her lip in a way that was, as she often was, both childish and incredibly sexy, and Jason cleared his throat, getting down on one knee and taking off the ring he wore, holding it out to her. "Sarah, I know I want to spend the rest of my life with you, and I wanna protect you, and we gotta get out of here if I wanna do that, so will you please do me the honor of not only accepting my marriage proposal but please, please coming with me?"
She tugged him up, kissing him deeply, biting at his lip ever-so-gently, pulling her hips to his with her hands on his sides, and nodded. When she pulled back, she breathed, "Tonight. We leave tonight."