It was three AM, and Jackie was still unable to sleep. It had been the single craziest day she had ever had in all 19 years of her life. She was back in point place, she had seen and touched and smelled Steven Hyde – something she never thought would happen again – and she could hardly believe it was real. Funny how when she had first answered the phone and spoken to Eric Forman she hadn't been inclined at all to go back to Wisconsin and try to help the boy who had hurt her more than anyone else ever had, but it hadn't even taken 24 hours for her to decide to come there to help him if she could.
A rushed packing of a suitcase and hours after she'd hung up the phone she was on a plane back to her childhood home and the best friend she'd ever had.
But Steven Hyde had been more than her best friend, he had been her family and then he'd dropped her like she was nothing. It had cut her open and never truly healed, she knew it had made her colder, more cynical but she didn't really care, in fact she didn't really care about anyone after his last letter.
Sure, there were people she spent time with in New York, people that she even referred to as 'friends' but she didn't actually care about them the way she remembered caring about people when she was younger, she was fine on her own. Or at least she liked to pretend she was.
But the truth was she hadn't been fine since they uprooted her and dragged her away from the only person she'd given a damn about, she had never been able to forget her best friend, no matter how much it pained her to think about him he was always there in the back of her mind each and every day. She would do her best to ignore the memories of him trying to break free when she saw or heard something that reminded her of him, but more nights than she cared to admit she would stare into the darkness of her room and let the memories of their time together wash over her, it was comfort and pain all mixed together.
And now there she was, laying in a double bed with scratchy sheets in the best motel point place had to offer, which was still pretty crappy, trying to figure out how she was going to help Steven?
Eric had been right – there were serious problems. She had been able to smell the booze on him, as well as more than one kind of smoke, his clothes had been rumpled like he'd slept in them, and he hadn't looked like he'd taken care of himself at all for who knew how long? The drinking worried her a lot, she remembered Edna vividly and shuddered at the thought of those genes kickstarting in him.
To be honest – all of what she'd seen worried her, and she wasn't sure where to start or how to approach it all? She only really knew two ways to accomplish things – talk until she got what she wanted or throw money at it – but something told her that Steven would be more complicated than anything she'd come up against before. He had always been able to see right through her methods, but she was going to give it everything she had this time.
She turned over and tried to get comfortable enough to sleep but her brain was still in overdrive trying to figure out what the best course of action was? It was tempting to just knock him out and drag him back to New York where there was no basement to help him hide from the world and no old friends to enable his bad habits because they couldn't see the forest for the trees.
Jackie sat up with a start.
"the basement!" she breathed out, it fell into place in her mind like a latch sliding home.
The first step was to physically remove him from that freakin' grimy basement.
Not back to New York, and not ban him permanently or anything, but he was a grown ass man who owned a record store, he could live in an apartment like an adult instead of remaining in the stasis he'd created down there.
Satisfied with the first step she'd decided on, Jackie finally fell into a deep sleep which brought dreams of her past in that very town.
Down in that same basement she'd been thinking of, Steven Hyde sat in the arm chair in his small bedroom, a single candle providing the only light. He had been getting ready for bed but had stopped in the middle and sat down in the chair in nothing but his second least decrepit pair of jeans. Even his shades sat on his dresser across the room from him. he knew he should finish changing and go to sleep, but all he could do was listen to the music playing softly from his old portable record player and try not to drown in the memories swamping his mind.
Jackie was back.
When she had first blown into the basement like the hurricane he knew she could be, he'd thought he'd finally lost it, one to many trips had fried his brain for real. But then she'd started yelling at him (and everyone else in her path) and he'd known then that she was real – only the real Jackie could hit that pitch. Eric and the others had found her and pleaded for her to come help with him, that alone was upsetting – that he'd gotten bad enough they had to go full on Columbo to have a hope of helping him – but the fact that she'd shown up was downright incredible.
After what he'd done he couldn't believe she would show up to help him straighten out, much less hug him with the expression he'd seen up close, she still cared about him even after he'd told her they weren't friends anymore.
"I'm such a tool" he muttered darkly when he recalled what he'd said to Jackie in that letter,
The candle flickered, making the shadow that fell across his bare torso twist and flutter, he badly wanted a drink but knew that had to end. He wasn't stupid even if he acted like it more often than not, and he was positive that his excessive drinking was not going to go over well with Jackie.
He could feel the pull of long-term habit clawing up in his chest and trying to dominate his mind, the more he told himself he didn't want to walk to the fridge and grab a beer, the more the urge to do so grew. He swallowed thickly and pushed the itch down. He would absolutely not meet Jackie again with a hangover!
Accept his leg was jumping with anxious energy, and his fist was clenched on the arm of the chair while the other propped up his head. It was going to be a long night.
The song ended for the tenth time that night, and for the eleventh time Hyde reached over and brought the needle back to the beginning, it had been years since he had been able to listen to tangerine and he was making up for that all in one night. Now that she was back in his life the song was soothing again instead of bitterly painful, he was dreading the questions that Jackie was sure to ask the next day when they met, there was no way for him to explain what he'd done to his life without having to tell her things he wasn't sure he was up to saying?
He was man enough to admit that part of why he didn't want to tell her the whole truth was because he was ashamed of a lot of the choices that he'd made, but another big part of it was he didn't want her to feel responsible for his bad choices, but he knew she would to a degree. Because there would be no way for him to tell the truth while also leaving her out of it all, she was a major factor in his existence even then after so many years apart, and he hated the idea that she would hear his deepest secrets and blame herself.
It wasn't her fault, he needed for her to understand that before he leveled with her completely, his bad choices were his own and even if some of them could be linked back to her it was still wholly on his shoulders. But Jackie didn't usually see things that way, she had always made up her mind about a situation and changing said mind was difficult to do.
He let out another heavy sigh and scrubbed his face with his palms, his entire being was exhausted and all he wanted to do was sleep, but he knew that was still far away from him. on the up side, he figured that if he was loopy from sleep deprivation maybe having an honest conversation with Jackie the next day would be easier?
Sadly, that was his first remotely hopeful thought in several years.
Jackie's internal clock would have put the finest swiss watches to shame, at 7am on the dot she was sitting up in her sub-par bed and rubbing the sleep out of her eyes. She may have gotten only a few measly hours of sleep under her belt, but Jackie Burkhart had energy to spare and this was one of the times it came in handy. She didn't feel near as horrible as most people would only sleeping for around three hours, she got up and stretched to ease the kinks in her back caused by sleeping in a strange bed and headed for the shower.
She was in no hurry that morning, she might not have seen or talked to Steven Hyde in years, but she was certain he hadn't magically become a morning person in that time. so, she took her time in the shower letting it gradually wake her up to a level of functional reasoning, when she was done she searched through her clothes carefully. She needed to appear in that damn basement again looking a certain part, too fancy and they would scoff at her as an outsider, too dressed down and she wouldn't command their attention the way she needed to.
Be cynical about clothes all you want, but Jackie knew that people's minds made connections and assumptions based on visuals, and she was a master of manipulating those reactions to make people see what she needed them to see. The problem with her mission that day was deciding what she wanted them to see?
Did she want to achieve the Florence nightingale effect? A caring nurturer of the sick and hopeless. Or did she want to intimidate those present into doing what she said? If she was being honest she wanted to scream at a few of her ex-classmates again, and then steal Steven away never to deal with point place again, but Eric Forman didn't deserve that treatment, he had cared when it wasn't easy, he had seen what so many others were happy to ignore, and he had taken the mother of all hail Mary's in tracking her down to help his friend, so unfortunately leaving wasn't an option.
Finally, Jackie decided on black jeans and tall black leather boots and a plain but well-made teal top, she wanted to come across as classy and put together without it being obvious, a carefully constructed messy updo completed the whole thing and it was only 9:30.
She knew Steven wouldn't be awake yet, but the same could have been said at noon so she wasn't too worried about it, she also had no problem waking him up unceremoniously, hell she'd dump water on him if that's what it took.
She grabbed her bag off the small table near the door and paused when something caught her eye, with a smirk she snatched a complimentary orange out of the bowel and tossed it in her bag, then headed out the door to deal with a situation she barely understood.
Jackie must have sat in her rental car staring at the house she needed to enter for close to ten minutes before she forced her legs to move and take her forward. She barely remembered most of the people that hung out there, and one of them was a total stranger, but what she did recall of Kelso and Donna wasn't good.
She remembered Donna as a stuck-up bitch who thought she was better than everyone because she wrote stories that the school paper published, Jackie could remember being impressed with that back then too, not the stories so much as the courage to put something you'd done out there for everyone to see. But she wasn't 14 anymore, and it took a lot more to impress her than it had back then. She also recalled that Kelso had been far too pushy when he had interest in her for no other reason than she was a girl in his immediate vicinity, but he had been part of the team to track her down, so she would be civil.
She took a deep calming breath before opening the door to the basement and having to face whatever she found down there. she wasn't afraid of his friends being jerks, she was expecting that frankly, she was afraid – down right terrified actually – that no matter what she did she wouldn't be able to help Steven turn his life around.
He was so much more than he'd let himself become, and it was about time that he changed that.
She stepped inside the basement and was hit with slightly stale air like she'd been expecting, she also saw four sets of eyes staring openly at her, also as she'd been expecting.
"good morning is Steven asleep still?" she asked politely if a bit cold.
"why are you here so early?" donna asked with a roll of her eyes "Hyde won't be up for hours and I'm sure we could have him call you when he gets up" she added in a tone that made it seem as if Jackie was an idiot for being there at all.
"I don't see how anything between Steven and I is any of your business really? He asked for me to be here and that's all that matters to me" Jackie informed donna evenly, she kept all emotion out of her voice as showing emotion to someone like donna was showing weakness.
Everyone watched as Donna began to draw herself up to give an angry retort, but it was Eric that cut it off in a rare moment of courage towards Donna.
"his room is in the back there, its not easy to wake him up but if you need water there's a bathroom across from his room" he told Jackie helpfully
Jackie gave him a small smile and thanked him with actual warmth before telling them all to keep their distance while she talked to Hyde.
If the air had been a bit stale out in the main room of the basement, it was downright oppressive in Hyde's tiny bedroom! It was a nauseating mixture of socks, sweat and something else her mind rebelled from putting a name to, forcing herself not to gag and run Jackie slammed the door behind her and walked to the cot Hyde was passed out on. He was on his stomach with one leg hanging off the edge and one arm over his head while the other was sticking out from under him at an odd angle.
When she sat on the edge of his cot to decide how best to wake him up, Jackie realized that the worst of the smell was coming from him and it wasn't just normal sweat, she felt tears prick her eyes when she realized that he was sweating out alcohol.
It was worse than she had thought.
"Steven, Steven wake up" she said with firm kindness and awkwardly shook him by the shoulder.
He didn't respond in the slightest.
Jackie sighed and tried again a little louder and with a harder shake to his shoulder – still nothing.
She didn't want to admit defeat or go get water to douse him with since it would be confirmation that she needed help, granted that was a ridiculous belief, but she would not give donna any ammunition to mock her or her presence there!
Crossing her arms, Jackie looked down at Stevens prone form and thought about her options. A devilish smile curled her lips and she reached out one long glittering fingernail to poked him in the one ticklish spot he had – the armpit.
His whole body jerked away as he grumbled something into his pillow, but she wasn't deterred and reached out again to tickle him mercilessly until finally a pair of ice blue eyes opened to stare accusingly at her, the accusation faded as recognition dawned on him.
"Jackie? Uh… hi?" he said, his voice still thick with sleep.
"morning'" she replied with a bright smile
Hyde just stared at her while his brain woke up fully, he half thought that she was a dream or hallucination (he'd hallucinated her once or twice on a bender) and it was hard for him to accept that she was really there in his dingy little room sitting on the edge of his uncomfortable cot.
She didn't belong in a place like that and he felt a surge of self-loathing that he had dragged her into such a crappy place,
"sorry the place is such a dive, I haven't gotten around to cleaning up in…awhile" he apologized while struggling into a sitting position.
"its fine, especially since I don't plan on having to come here again" she told him casually
"you're leaving already?" he asked sounding terrified and angry all at once.
Jackie raised one brow curiously at him "did I say that?" she demanded flatly "no I did not, so don't try to put words in my mouth Steven because I have enough of my own in there!"
"well, what did you mean then?" he asked greatly subdued by her anger
"I'm not leaving, but you sure as hell are" she told him bluntly
"huh?" was his articulate response
"you're a grown man Steven, you own a store, you own a car, you graduated high school, you shouldn't be living in a basement like a kid, I'm not trying to be mean – I really need you to understand that is not how I mean what I'm telling you" she told him seriously
"the foreman's- "he began to explain his reluctance to do what she was saying, but Jackie cut him off with a pointed look and a hand held up.
"the foreman's will be proud of you for growing up, they don't really see you that much right now anyway from what I've heard, maybe if you didn't live here you'd actually be compelled to spend time with them without the excuse of them being upstairs. Apartment hunting starts today" she decreed imperiously
"uh, about that" Hyde began hesitantly earning a suspicious look from Jackie "there's an apartment above grooves, its just not currently livable" he admitted
"like 'doesn't have running water' unlivable, or 'used for storage' unlivable?" she asked with narrowed eyes.
"more along the lines of needing a hell of a lot of work to be inhabitable, its dirty and run down and has been empty for a very long time unless you count a family of racoons?" he explained with a yawn, he really hadn't slept enough he realized, the foggy feeling in his head wouldn't go away.
"then after you shower and we get some coffee in you that's where were heading, we will find out what that place needs for you to move in, we will make a detailed list of every last thing you would need and then – we get to work" she told him with her arms crossed for emphasis to how serious she was.
"what about the rest of it?" he asked in a small voice that was surprising coming from him, he had always been so confident before.
"I'm afraid you'll have to be a little more specific than 'the rest of it' I don't want to sound cruel, but that encompasses a lot of things" Jackie said simply, she didn't want to elaborate and risk bogging him down in all his problems.
"when you've let your whole life turn to crap its kinda hard to narrow it down" Hyde told her wryly
"well how about the thing you'd like to deal with first?" Jackie offered kindly
"I didn't have a drink all night after you left last night…it hurt" Hyde admitted with difficulty, the shame evident in his voice and demeanor. He'd known he drank too much, he hadn't known he had let it get so far as to be painful not to drink.
"I wish that surprised me Steven, but it doesn't. I've listed rehab as an option, but the thing about those places is that they only work if you want them to work, if I got you into one against your will it wouldn't do a damn bit of good. Do you understand what I'm saying to you?" she asked softly, her face grave.
"that I have to agree to changing and mean it" Hyde responded just as softly.
"I have a plan Steven, its pretty good too as long as you're on board, but you have to really really want to do it. go take a shower and when you're out we'll go out and get started" she told him kindly and shocked the hell out of him by leaning in and hugging him tightly, then murmuring into his shoulder "god you smell awful" in a misty voice.
"it's a guy thing" he claimed with a smirk
"no Steven, that kind of smell is a hobo thing, go wash it off – lots of soap Steven, I paid a deposit on that rental car and I don't want to lose it because it comes back smelling like cooked garbage" she snapped commandingly at him.
Hyde just smiled at the bossy tone he hadn't heard in far too long.
He was a little queasy during his shower when he happened to glance down and see that the water had a definite beige tint to it, how long had he gone without remembering to shower? And why hadn't anyone else pointed out that he stunk?
Unfortunately, he knew the answer, those that would have noticed wouldn't have wanted to set off his temper, and those that didn't care about that weren't interested enough to notice. His head fell against the tiles of the stall with a dull thunk, in the clear light of day he couldn't believe he'd let things get this bad.
The simple fact that Forman of all people had braved rifling through his belongings in hopes of finding a way to help him spoke volumes about how pathetic he'd let himself get. He felt a slight tremor in his hands but shrugged it off as nerves at seeing Jackie again.
It took him a little while to find clean clothes, partly because he hadn't been doing his laundry regularly and Sam sure as hell didn't, and partly because when he went back into his room wrapped in a towel, he found Jackie still sitting in there but now in his less sweat soaked arm chair. He'd been expecting her to have left to the other part of the basement, but there she was reading a rolling stone he'd left on his table and looking severely out of place.
"uh, Jackie I kinda need to change" he pointed out awkwardly
Jackie simply turned her back to where he stood and continued flipping the pages of the magazine, she had no intention of leaving.
"I don't have beer hidden in the dresser Jackie" Hyde told her, half joking half trying to avoid being naked in the same room as someone he hadn't spoken to in years.
"if I go back out there ill probably slap the bleach blonde, its better I stay here so get dressed quickly ok?" she informed him darkly.
"what'd donna do to piss you off?" Hyde asked curiously, while trying to pull boxers on under his towel.
"not everyone gets along Steven, I didn't think much of her in junior high and time hasn't improved her, I'm also not to impressed with anyone that watched you spiral to the point of marrying a hooker without saying a word" she told him flatly, but it spoke volumes to Hyde – she was not going to allow any excuses for how he'd become, and she was going to call him out on all of it.
"she wasn't a hooker" Hyde pointed out absently while he dug through the pile of t-shirts mrs Forman had brought down a few days before.
"like I care" Jackie drawled contemptuously
Hyde didn't respond, which he knew was safer.
"so, uh, what have you been up to? Going to college and…stuff?" he tried to shift the conversation off himself for at least a few minutes, besides he was genuinely curious about what she'd been up to.
"yep, just finished my second year at Columbia" she said blankly
"do you like it there?" he asked like he figured normal people would
"it's a means to an end" Jackie replied shortly
"I get the feeling you don't want to talk about this?" Hyde said curiously
"I don't" Jackie answered simply, and even after so long apart Hyde knew when to not push the small brunette, she would tell him when she wanted him to know and she did not want him to know at that moment, whether because she didn't want to talk about herself while they set about getting him on his feet, or because she didn't want to talk about it in general, he didn't know.
Jackie didn't even stop to listen to the questions from his other friends about where they were going, and Hyde didn't want to have to chase her down again, so blew past them as well. He climbed into the passenger's side of Jackie's rental car, noting how similar it was to the foreman's Toyota while also how weird it was to not be the driver, while Jackie backed out of the drive and sped away towards downtown.
He decided to bypass grooves and take Jackie up to the apartment the back way, saying good morning to Leo could turn into a two-hour debate about what 'good' really meant and he just wasn't up to it.
Hyde already had a key to the place since he was the owner and opened the door while simultaneously bracing for Jackie's shriek of disgust, but it never came.
She walked inside past him and began looking around the decent sized room, the kitchen area was across from them, at least that's where you could make out the shapes of a fridge and a stove, apart from that it wasn't very kitchen-y. her expression was thoughtful as she perused the cluttered dusty and somewhat smelly room, against his advice she crossed to the door on the other end and opened it – this time she did shriek and Hyde had to jump out of the way of three plump racoons who were racing out of the nearest exit – the front door. He watched them with a grin as they scuttled down the staircase to the alley and disappeared.
"there were racoons Steven!" Jackie screamed from the doorway to what he figured was the 'bedroom'
"I'm pretty sure I mentioned that before" he pointed out mildly
"I thought you were exaggerating to make a point about how bad this place was! Racoons aren't the friendliest animals, one of them hissed at me!" she informed him furiously
He wasn't sure if the fury was to mask her fear, or because a racoon had to audacity to hiss at her?
"are there any more in there?" he asked while picking up a scrap of wood to shoo them out if there were.
"no, that was all of them, now its just us the spiders and the mice I'm sure live here too, when's the last time a human occupied this place?" she asked looking around with distaste at the piles of rubbish and dust covered boxes mixed with scrap.
"dunno? Something like three years" he said with a shrug,
"does your store have and office with a phone? I need to make a few calls to get this sorted" she told him seriously, she was on a mission, and he wasn't stupid enough to stop her.
Hyde took her downstairs again and shuffled through paper work while Jackie commandeered his phone, she called her school and told them in no uncertain terms that she was taking a leave of absence because of a family emergency and to put her on hiatus until she contacted them, she called her mom and made a few threats of blackmail after her mom ordered her home with threat of being cut off, Jackie was deadly serious when she informed her mom that if she tried to do that or really make any move against her, Jackie would tell her father a few things that pam really really didn't want to explain, her mother caved instantly.
After those calls, she grabbed his phone book and flipped to the yellow pages, Hyde got called to the floor to answer a question about when a new record was being released and missed what Jackie was calling them about, he returned for her happily telling them the time to arrive somewhere?
"what was that?" Hyde asked curiously
"I hired some people to come clear all that crap out of your new place" she explained absently as she scribbled on a pad of paper.
"you didn't have to do that Jackie" he tried to tell her, feeling again like he wasn't near good enough for a friend like her.
"don't mention it, besides, they're clearing all the junk out, but the cleaning is just you and me" she told him with a raised brow for any objections he may decide to raise.
"whatever you say jacks" he told her softly and followed her out the door when she decreed they needed to go pick out cleaning supplies at the store.
She wasn't wasting any time and he didn't want to argue.
A/N hello, I doubt anyone still remembers this story but I have a soft spot for it and finally had a vacation where I could write something, so here's another chapter, and there's still a bit more to come. Hope someone out there likes this chapter.
