Thank you for reading and reviewing, Guest! I couldn't agree more about Hyde and that damn storyline.
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He understood that they couldn't move forward until they dealt with the hurt of the past.
He didn't understand why he wanted them to move forward.
He understood that she had undergone a substantial amount of bullying in the last year of the nineteen seventies and that he, for some reason he couldn't logically explain, had done most of the bullying.
He understood that suggesting she sleep with the milkman hadn't been his finest hour. He understood that marrying Sam in Vegas and then continuing to stay with her even after he learnt about Larry had truly turned him into the dumbass Red always accused them of characterizing.
He didn't understand why Jackie wanted to rehash the past in a hospital cafeteria, of all places, whilst they waited for news on their mutual friend.
He didn't understand why, when she accused him of lying about his old feelings, his primary response was to begin making out with her in a hospital supply closet which would've undoubtedly led to more if the orderly hadn't appeared.
And he really didn't understand why he ached to follow through next time - if there was a next time.
He detested emotions, those elements that obliterated the soul. Emotions led Edna to drink. Emotions led Bud to leave. Emotions led to Michael Kelso sobbing over Brooke Rockwell's lifeless body. Emotions led to Jackie Burkhart bawling in a hospital chapel over the critical condition of her best friend. When it came to emotions, Steven Hyde normally had a firm control. At the first sign of emotion, he would whip out his sunglasses and hide his unwanted reactions from the world.
When it came to the emotions he felt towards Jackie Burkhart, however, he couldn't control a damn thing.
Never had been able to control it. He left that up to the glasses.
The truce was shot to hell, he knew that much. If he had believed things to be awkward when they were first forced back together, they would be a hell of a lot more awkward now.
He wondered if she could love him again. He wondered if he loved her. He wondered if he would have to move to Tinsel Town, or, as he called it, "the city worse than church."
He enjoyed St. Louis, but he didn't have to stay in St. Louis. He wondered if she would consider moving to New York.
He wondered if she would end up leaving him when her life didn't turn into the perfect fantasy she dreamt of, just like Bud and just like Edna.
He wondered why the hell he wondered any of that and then tried to figure out what the hell he was going to do about his awkward situation with Jackie Burkhart.
Jackie, who currently ignored him while she held Betsy and spoke with Kitty Forman.
He had to admit that it did something to him every time he saw her hold their goddaughter - something he didn't like, or maybe something he did.
Kelso had practically lived in Point Place General for the past week, refusing to leave without his wife and sons. The situation wasn't looking good for Brooke, whom they found out had suffered cardiac arrest during the delivery of her second boy, but Kelso continued to hold onto the hope that Hyde himself had never understood. Donna initially volunteered to watch Betsy. Jackie had said she would do it, instead, because that was her goddaughter and because Donna would probably combust any day. Fez had pointed out the incivility of her comment, but the redhead had let it slide due to Jackie's fragile emotional state.
Jackie had never been able to control her own emotions, but none of them had ever seen her that fragile, either - not even when Kelso cheated with Pam Macey, Hyde cheated with the nurse whose name he failed to recall, or when her father was hauled off to jail and Jacqueline Burkhart the Rich Cheerleader became Jackie Burkhart, the cheerleader with the frozen assets.
Right about the time she had become his chick.
Right about the time he had begun to understand the concept of love.
If Edna and Bud had ever loved each other, he never saw it. If Edna had even been capable of love, which he doubted, she had hidden it well. Until he met the Formans, he thought love was one of those abstract notions invented by the bigwigs in the greeting card industry to trick gullible people into accepting consumerism.
Then he saw the way the Formans loved.
He saw the sweet little moments between Red and Kitty when Red believed no one else to be looking. He saw Eric with a lunchbox full of his mother's home cooked food. He saw Red's belief that Laurie could do no wrong, even when Laurie's fifth grade teacher pulled out the evidence to convince him otherwise.
Edna had always accused her son of doing something wrong.
He had proven her right when he came back to Point Place with a wife from a drunken tryst.
He had proven her right again when, in his jealousy over Jackie's growing feelings for Fez, he had uncharacteristically shamed her.
He feared he was more like the Hydes than he thought.
He didn't want to be like the Hydes. He had never wanted to be like the Hydes. Since the first day he had met the Formans, he had aspired to be more like them.
Red, more so than Eric. He did have some standards.
He saw the way the Pinciottis loved, too, before Bob and Midge had gone their separate ways. He saw Bob attend all of the elementary school basketball games, either to cheer on Donna or to sit beside her as they cheered together. He saw Midge's and Bob's public displays of affection, back when they couldn't keep their hands off of each other. He saw Midge comfort Donna during her first losing game.
And he saw the love of the Kelsos, however chaotic it was.
Eight Kelso children, four of whom always ended up in detention. Hyde had been in detention once. He saw Kelso's mom Summer come in to speak with the teacher regarding her youngest son Jamie, attempting to work out how she could help Jamie to avoid detention in the future. He, on the other hand, had been yelled at by Edna for being just like his father.
He saw Kelso's own father, Winston, trying to help one of Kelso's brothers, Elliott, with a difficult math problem, before Kelso solved it for them both.
Back when he hadn't been determined to hide his math skills. Back when he hadn't been concerned of being considered a math geek.
If Hyde had been more of a Forman, a Pinciotti or perhaps even a reckless Kelso, he wouldn't have driven off to Vegas. He wouldn't have accepted a lap dance from Sam; he certainly wouldn't have married her. He wouldn't have hurt Jackie. He would have talked out the mess in the Chicago motel room with her, the way Eric did with Donna when he came back from Sudan. He would have been able to share his feelings, the way Kelso had confessed his to Brooke during her brief relationship with another guy the year that Kelso had moved to Chicago and realized that he wanted Brooke in his life as more than just his daughter's mother.
But he had been a Hyde.
And Hydes screwed up.
He had screwed up - royally. He had abandoned Jackie the way his parents had abandoned him, the way Jackie's parents had abandoned her.
That was what it all came down to.
He had acted the part of a Hyde and a Burkhart.
Bud would have been proud.
He didn't want Bud to be proud.
The worst part was, it had taken him until Jackie spoke up in the hospital cafeteria to realize how badly he had hurt her.
And it took their kiss in the supply closet to realize he wasn't as over her as he had originally thought.
Perhaps he had never been. Perhaps he had coaxed himself into believing a lie.
She would never take him back.
Maybe he didn't want her to take him back - not if he was capable of playing the dual role of both of their families.
She lived halfway across the country. She worked in Studio City. He worked, ironically, in Hyde Park, on the northside of St. Louis.
Two hundred and ninety-seven miles away from Chicago, where he had seen a half-naked Michael Kelso gleefully announce that his tryst with Hyde's then-girlfriend could not be seen from the parking lot. Where he had chased Kelso around that parking lot, before jumping into the Camino and taking off for whichever bar caught his eye first.
Then he just kept driving, straight on to Vegas.
Where he met a blonde exotic dancer named Sam, who had never caused him to feel anything even somewhat close to what he had felt for Jackie.
He had never even slept with her, only allowing his friends to think that he had. Sam had tried, once, but his body couldn't react to her the way he and his friends would have expected.
He had never slept with her and he had never held the slightest inkling of love towards her.
But because he had hurt Jackie, because he allowed envy to get the worst of him, because he had acted as Bud taught him to act, Jackie believed that he had.
She had hurt him, too, every time she let Kelso come between them despite assurances that she no longer carried romantic affection for her ex.
Kelso, who had done everything possible to tear them apart and get Jackie back for himself; yet, in the end, it had been Hyde himself who had torn them apart - first with the nurse and then with Sam.
Kelso, who had gone to he and Fez with the repulsive notion of marrying Jackie, a proposal which Hyde had been forced to bear whilst standing next to Sam. He had attempted to not show his utter relief when Jackie thankfully said no - relief he knew he didn't have the right to feel, but felt in spades regardless.
Kelso, who sat by the bedside of the comatose woman he married instead whilst his little girl sat in the Forman home, being spoon fed scoops of chocolate chip ice-cream by Jackie.
Jackie, whose life on the West Coast had matured her greatly from the girl Hyde once knew, from the chick who had once been his, to the point that she had taken an interest in someone other than herself.
"Mrs. Forman," he tuned in to her conversation, "I met this gorgeous guy named Keshawn at your party who says he's the stepson of your Chicago high school principal? You grew up in Chicago?"
Hyde wondered if the comment on Keshawn's supposed attractiveness had been necessary to Jackie's inquiry.
"Oh!" Surprised, Kitty emitted a nervous giggle. "Why, yes, yes, I did."
"I'm just a little confused why you never told us that when Michael moved there or when I took that job in Chicago."
The job in Chicago that had caused her to give him a difficult ultimatum: marry her or she would leave him for Chicago. The job in Chicago that resulted in his telling her to have a good trip after she pretended to leave for the city before she had, when what he had initially planned to tell her was that he would marry her.
They had been too young for marriage, he had told himself whilst nursing a foaming mug of beer in a Vegas strip club - only to come back married to a Vegas stripper at nineteen years old.
He had never planned to marry. But if he had, he wanted Jackie Burkhart to be the first and, if they were luckier than their parents, the only.
Instead, it had been Sam.
It didn't matter that he had never truly been married to Sam, since she had been married to Larry. By trying to not be like Bud, by trying to stick to his vows, he had watched Jackie slip closer and closer to Fez, until Hyde had indeed said exactly what Bud would have said.
He had heard Bud suggest to Edna during one of his more drunken tirades to screw the mailman, the way Hyde had suggested Jackie embark on a fling with the milkman.
Hyde knew that he had never become an exact replica of Bud, as Edna always claimed he would. He never did time in prison. He never committed arson in a state park. He never tossed his television against the glass pane of a window when his team lost. He had quit drinking, unlike Bud. He had entered a career with a steady income, unlike Bud. If he had a wife, he would never abuse her. If he had a child, he would never walk out like Bud had.
But in nineteen seventy-nine, standing near a car on the Formans' driveway with his old employee Randy Pearson's words of Jackie's crush on Fez mentally mocking him, he uttered a sentence that sounded exactly like Bud.
And he hadn't even realized it, until it was far too late.
Until Jackie no longer wanted to be his.
Until after she had given her heart to another.
Compared to Adam Han, the successful broadcast journalist who Brooke had raved about, Hyde knew he didn't stand a chance - if he wanted one, which only provided him with more confusion.
He and Jackie had a history. They barely had a present. He didn't know if he wanted them to have a future.
But he did know that watching her hold Betsy made him imagine, just for a moment, Jackie's lap holding a different little girl.
Their little girl.
Which, thanks to his moronic actions, they would be unlikely to ever have. He would hear of Jackie's marriage with the next Adam Han, his punishment for turning towards Vegas and his vices instead of making a U-turn back to her.
The vices that he continually reached for every time he had seen Jackie look away from him and towards Fez, until he had burned out and attempted to quit alcohol and drugs.
The first time, when his friends told him he had changed.
And he had, but not by temporarily quitting the Circle; by speaking the words of Bud Hyde that he had vowed to himself to never speak.
All because Jackie had been drawn to Fez - which Hyde had caused, when he chose to let her go to Chicago.
He should have let her stay in Chicago. He should have never gone to that damn motel.
"I'm not sure," he heard Kitty respond, interrupting his brewing inner conflict, "I guess I figured you kids wouldn't be interested. Only Fez had ever asked me about my life before meeting Red and it got to the point where he lost interest in my stories, too, when he started working at that hair salon."
"I'm sorry I wasn't interested before, Mrs. Forman, but I'm interested now."
Jackie Burkhart had apologized.
He sat, stunned.
Jackie Burkhart never apologized. Jackie Burkhart was unapologetic in who she was and the actions she took, a trait that had both annoyed Hyde in the beginning of their acquaintance and that he had admired later on.
The one time she had apologized to him, it had prefaced her determination that they break up - over Prince Eduardo, also known as Fez, who took her to the wedding that then created an ultimatum. He had hated that ultimatum with every fiber in his being, which had snowballed into fury at her for enacting said ultimatum.
Which had spiraled into Vegas, his personal hell.
"You are?" Kitty looked equally as shocked.
"Yeah." Jackie set the side of her face on Betsy's hair. "I mean, I never told you this, but you know I never had much of a mom. So I've always thought of you like one and I'm curious why you would give up a life of endless wealth in a glamorous city like Chicago for," she paused, evidently choosing her words carefully, "for a town like Point Place."
Kitty appeared on the verge of tears, touched by Jackie's admission.
"Well, that's easy, honey. It's the age-old reason. I gave it up for love. Love and nursing."
"You gave up money for love?"
Hyde didn't miss Jackie's eyes momentarily flick to his spot on the piano bench.
"My favorite cousin, Kenny, enlisted in the Marines. I was engaged to be engaged to one of the richest, most handsome men in Wicker Park, the son of my Grandfather Sigurdson's business partner - a boy who was more handsome than Cary Grant," she giggled, "when I heard that Kenny was killed in Korea."
She sombered. "I knew that what happened to Kenny would happen to my brother or to the suitors or brothers of my girlfriends, that we would lose more men we knew in a war which the elites of Chicago preferred to not dwell on." Kitty stood, tracing the stairwell. "I couldn't stay in my role as the Sigurdson socialite. I had to do something. I wrote to my great-aunt Aliza, a nurse in the Swedish Red Cross effort. She told me that the American Red Cross was recruiting for the Korean front. Grandmother Sigurdson wasn't too happy when she found out I had applied."
She turned back to face Jackie.
"Neither was Freddy, the boy I was supposed to end up marrying to merge our family fortunes." She laughed. "Or my mother, for that matter. It was the fifties, Jackie. Women weren't supposed to have careers, not like they did in the forties during the war. This newfangled notion of having it all - a career and a family - was practically unheard of back then."
"What happened?" Jackie breathed, the sparkle in her eyes indicating to Hyde that she was as entranced as he in Kitty's tale.
He had always believed Kitty Forman to be an inspiring woman who took in five teenagers that weren't her own and decided they were, but he had never known that she had been an inspiring girl, too.
"I told my best girlfriend Daisy that I was planning to join the Red Cross and she said that first, we needed to see the kind of men that I would be encountering. Daisy was single and looking. I decided to go along with it for her sake." Kitty's gaze moved to a picture frame in which a twentysomething Red, clad in his military uniform, had kissed her seemingly unreservedly.
It was a picture that Hyde had never seen before, undoubtedly unearthed by old friends during the Forman's anniversary party.
"Well, we heard about a USO dance in Milwaukee. I had been arguing with Grandmother, Mother and Freddy for days and strongly desired a night out. Daisy, our friend Lucy, and myself all headed up to Milwaukee, where a certain Navy man on leave from Korea appeared the same night."
"Mr. Forman," Jackie realized, her own gaze skimming over the Forman family photos set in a row upon the bookcase.
"Exactly, Jackie," Kitty's smile could undoubtedly be seen from the galaxies above. "Reginald Albert Forman, better known as Red, who I had a wonderful conversation with and then never expected to see again."
"Did you end up joining the Red Cross?" Jackie asked, reaching to the table to grab a napkin for the ice-cream stained Betsy.
"Unfortunately, no. Grandmother intervened," Kitty frowned, appearing wistful. "She warned the president of the Red Cross that allowing me to travel with them to Korea would result in dire ramifications. The Sigurdsons were substantial patrons of the local Red Cross effort and she threatened to pull the plug on their benefits and donations. When I found that out, I was furious. Freddy didn't understand. I didn't understand how he couldn't understand. That night, I received a phone call from a Red Forman, who had been slipped my phone number by Daisy without my knowledge."
"Good 'ole Daisy," Hyde murmured, receiving a warm smile from Kitty in response.
"Mother was furious. Grandmother was furious. I was very much still furious. At the time, Red lived with a friend in Kenosha, who took a keen interest in Daisy. She and I took her brother's car up to meet with the boys that weekend, the following weekend and the weekend after that."
"And Freddy?" Jackie inquired, setting the antsy Betsy to her feet.
Hyde watched his goddaughter scamper off up the stairs, where she would undoubtedly crack open another picture book and mold her already active imagination.
Much like Kelso when, at eight years old, he announced that he would become an astronaut and, rather than scoff at the idea, Summer Kelso brought in a NASA astronaut recently back from a space exploration to the conference room at her news studio to speak with her son about the job's details.
If Hyde had told Edna he planned to become an astronaut, she would have told him to come back down to earth and remind him that all he would become was another number in the prison system - as she had often reminded him when he did something she considered disrespectful.
"I told him that I had taken a job in Kenosha, that I was to be a nurse. He said he couldn't marry a nurse. I told him if he couldn't marry a nurse, then I couldn't marry him. I didn't tell him that I had developed feelings for a Kenosha boy. But it didn't matter because to Grandmother, entering the nursing field and rejecting Freddy was taking a dagger to her heart. She ensured I was cut off from my inheritance. She never spoke to me again and you know how my relationship with Mother is. For the first couple of years, only Daddy acknowledged my existence. He and my siblings were the only Sigurdsons who attended our wedding."
"Your mother didn't go to your wedding?"
Kitty shook her head.
"But I didn't care. I had a job that I was passionate about. I was madly in love with a man who supported my career and I was actually able to have a career, unlike Mother and unlike Grandmother. Playing the part of Freddy's dutiful wife was never for me. By the time Mother decided to speak to me again, we were expecting Laurie and had moved into Point Place when Red started his job at the factory."
"What happened to Freddy?"
"He actually ended up married to Lucy, before he was drafted into Vietnam. They never found his plane."
"I can't believe you gave up money for love," Jackie murmured.
Hyde again saw her eyes briefly glance in his direction.
He wished he could hear what she was thinking.
He wondered if she, too, thought of a cheeseburger wrapped in tinfoil.
"What's wrong with that?" Kitty asked briskly.
"No, it's just," Jackie took her hand, "Mrs. Forman, my mother used her money to go after cabana boys and tequila shots. Daddy used his to get into legal trouble. I always thought wealth was important. My parents, my grandparents, my great-grandparents, they all taught me that I would never make it in life if I didn't marry rich." She squeezed Kitty's hand. "But you have made it in life, Mrs. Forman. You have a husband and two children, three counting Steven, who adore you. We all adore you, the woman who raised us as her own. For the longest time, I just figured that you had always pinched pennies in Point Place. But you - you gave up enormous, guaranteed wealth for nursing and Mr. Forman. You inspire me. I'm sorry if I ever let you think otherwise. I'm sure I must've said awful things about your finances once or twice."
"Oh, Jackie, sweetie, you don't have to apologize." The tears shone in Kitty's eyes as she embraced the woman who had amazed Hyde even more than Kitty Sigurdson.
Jackie Burkhart was the complete opposite of her flighty mother and her conceited father.
Jack Burkhart never apologized.
Pam Burkhart never apologized.
Jackie Burkhart had apologized, twice.
If Jackie could find it in her to apologize for the childish words of her adolescence, words that held far less sting than the words that had been thrown at her, then Steven Hyde determined he could do the same.
Bud Hyde never apologized.
Edna Hyde never apologized.
But Steven Hyde, the son of William Barnett and Red Forman, would.
-x
Trying to recall what exactly I had planned for the rest of this story...
Thank you to those of you still reading it!