A/N hello, I know that I have disappointed people with the long wait for updates on this story, as I said on another one I actually updated recently – work hell I'm constantly exhausted, also it continues to shock me that this one is so popular because it was one I posted on a whim that I honestly did not think anyone would like much, yet its gotten on of the most devoted followings? That and spur of the moment were ideas that I liked that I thought everyone would think were lame. So that's a constant source of surprise, I have another idea for a new story that I might try to start soon but I fear that if I do that before updating some of my existing ones I will upset people.

Il be honest that I never really had much planned after the point I stopped at so this coming chapter might really suck, but I'm going to push it through because sometimes that's what you have to do.

- Point place. Hyde's now livable apartment 7:00am –

The hot water poured over Hyde while his head rested against the tile wall, he hadn't touched the cold tap since his need was to feel clean and he never managed it no matter how hard he scrubbed. Part of him knew that what he was trying to scald off his skin was residual shame, he knew that it was probably crazy to stand in the shower for over half an hour because he regretted so many choices he'd made in the last few years, but he couldn't help it.

He'd come closer to being like his parents than he ever dreamed he would.

He'd married a stripper.

He'd grown a truly terrible mustache.

And those were just the most recent.

It was hard to even begin to start forgiving himself for those transgressions and even Jackie's patient understanding wasn't enough to make it seem ok yet. He had a lot to apologize for to a lot of people, the top of that list was a tie between Jackie and the majority of the Forman family. He scrubbed his face in frustration, it had all been so much easier when he was too wasted to see what he was doing to people, but he truly didn't want to go back to how he'd been.

But he also didn't know where he went from where he was.

Whenever Jackie talked it sounded so possible, so achievable to be a person again, well the sort of person who wasn't ashamed to wake up every day. But then his own thoughts sabotaged all the good she did, his brain started telling him he was exactly the sort of person he'd always been afraid to be.

But Hyde didn't know how to change how he identified himself, was he still the stand-up sort of guy under the dirt bag exterior that people used to naturally gravitate towards? Or was he the actual dirt bag that people still tried to put up with out of a sense of past loyalty?

He didn't know who he was anymore.

The Steven Hyde who had made a closet sanctuary for Jackie when her parents fought seemed light years away from the person, he saw himself as now. But he wanted to be that person again, even though she did not give off a 'need protecting' vibe anymore.

A ghost of a smile touched his lips as his mind turned to Jackie, she was something else man.

She'd always been smarter than people realized, and a lot stronger too, but now she was like a force of nature when she set her sights on something. His mind went back to her sudden and shocking appearance in the basement such a short time ago.

He'd been sitting in his chair watching the shapes move on the tv screen without any real knowledge of what they meant, Sam had been sitting on his lap and he recalled that even though he'd been pretty buzzed already he'd been leaning as far as he could away from her and the cloying smell of her cheep perfume. Voices had been talking in the background, but Hyde hadn't bothered to pay attention because he didn't care, he didn't care about anything at that point in his life.

He hadn't liked Sam sitting on his lap, but he hadn't cared enough about it to say anything, he hadn't wanted to hang out with his friends that day either but the effort to let them know he wasn't in the mood hadn't been worth it. he hadn't wanted to exist anymore but finding a way to stop was too much work.

Then the door slammed open with enough force to gain even his attention, and there she had been – Jackie Burkhart, the only person who'd ever totally wormed their way into his soul.

then she'd started yelling at him for being a fuck up and he'd felt the first sparks of life he'd felt in ages.

He'd watched in awe as she'd faced down Sam and Donna without blinking, she was so much smaller in body but so much stronger in everything else than both of them combined.

She was there to say something, and nothing was gong to stop her from that goal.

The moment he'd seen her and realized that it was not a drunken hallucination he'd gotten to his feet without being aware he had. She was there? he had pushed her away because of his own weakness but she was still there? after everything she still cared, and that was the most amazing thing to happen to him in his entire life.

And then he was hugging her with a desperate force he felt a little embarrassed about now that he looked back on it, seeing her again was past 'happiness', it bordered on euphoric even while he horrified and humiliated that she of all people was seeing him as he'd become.

He'd felt her arms slowly circle around him and all the parts of him that he'd pretended never existed, the ones that he'd pushed deep deep down inside of himself, rose to the surface.

In his arms was the person he loved the most deeply in the world, the one he had never thought he would see again in his poor pathetic life, but she had still cared enough about him to come back and tell him he was a loser who didn't have to be, and what was more she would help him put his life back together.

He trusted her as she stripped away all his excuses and arguments, Jackie wielded the truth like a club which she was perfectly comfortable to beat him over the head with until he accepted that one of them saw things clearly and it sure as hell wasn't him.

Now there were moments when he felt like the person he'd been before, but then the guilt of who he'd become would hit him like a brick.

"Steven! I know you relish your self-reflection showers but there's only one damn bathroom and I have to pee!" Jackie's voice yelled through the door before banging her small hand on the wooden door.

He couldn't help but smirk at her tone, she was close to frantic which meant she had been trying to wait him out for a while but couldn't anymore.

With a small chuckle he shut off the scalding water and wrapped a towel around himself before unlocking the door for her, she threw the door open and when he leaned in to give her a quick kiss she shoved him out the door.

"not now Steven!" she shrieked desperately as the door slammed in his face.

Hyde laughed softly to himself as he walked into his room to dry off and get dressed, he had just pulled on a clean if battered pair of jeans when Jackie walked in looking relieved. She walked to him and snuggled into his bare chest without a word.

"I like how you smell" she murmured softly

"how do I smell?" he asked with a grin, her answer could end up being anything.

"clean" she sighed happily.

As stupid as it was her answer made Hyde inexplicably feel like he'd washed away some of the crushing regret, like he was beginning to be who he used to be. He was aware there was really no logic behind the feeling, he knew that Jackie just meant soap and hot water, but still he felt like it meant more.

"glad the time in the shower wasn't wasted" he told her jokingly

"me too since there won't be any hot water for me until several hours from now" she teased

"we could always share to conserve resources" he told her with a suggestive look

Jackie rolled her eyes at his playful inuendo, they weren't there yet, and he knew it, but you couldn't really blame him for trying.

"not sure you're really up to that yet Steven, you've been under a lot of stress and a major shock could hurt you" she shot back with large concerned eyes he knew were to tease him.

"I am willing to take that risk" he assured her seriously

"are you now? Well ill take that under consideration" she told him with a grin and hugged him a little tighter.

He wrapped his arms around her and felt the peculiar sense of peace specific to her presence steal over him, he had thought about things a lot when he'd been detoxing and there was something he wanted to tell her that he wasn't sure he could put into words? At least not well enough that she would understand what he was trying to say.

"come sit with me a sec, I want to tell you something" he said softly

Jackie nodded and let him pull her onto his lap after he sat on the bed.

"I'm not sure exactly how to explain this so if it doesn't come out right let me keep trying ok?" he began quietly, Jackie nodded that she would be patient, she knew how hard it was for him to turn thoughts into words, she wasn't so sensitive anymore that she let words upset her needlessly.

"I didn't want to get better until I saw you again, but that doesn't mean that I want to get better for you…even though I want you to be proud of me and trust me again, I want to get better because there isn't anything about myself I don't hate anymore, and when you weren't here it was like no one saw the parts I hated about me, but you seeing them made them real, and now that they're real I feel so ashamed that they exist in the same world that you do and I want you to live in a world where I'm not a loser dirt bag, but I'm still not doing this all for you….but it doesn't feel like I'm doing it for myself either? But I'm still going to do it, I don't want you to feel like my recovery is hanging on your actions because even though I need you, its not about you and I mean that in a good way not the jerky way it came out. I don't want you to feel like you're responsible for keeping me from falling apart, there's no way for me to tell you how much I truly appreciate and need you, but I am responsible for myself" he told her in a low serious voice she hadn't heard in years and even back then it had been rare.

Hyde took a deep breath and surprised Jackie by continuing to speak.

"I need you to know that I will fight to keep myself on track with or without you, I need you to know that because I need to know that you're here with me because you want me not because you feel like you're obligated to be here or ill backslide, I need to know that you aren't here because you pity me, I need to know that you and me are because of us not because I have a problem" he tried so hard to put it into words when that was the hardest thing for him.

"and you don't know that now?" Jackie asked gently, she wasn't judging his feelings she was trying to understand what he meant through the tangle of words he used to tell her.

"no, not fully. There's this little voice of doubt that reminds me the only reason you're here at all is because Forman called you to help when I was so pathetic, I didn't see what I was doing anymore. You being near me again is a direct result of my problems, so it's hard to separate the two, and I know that its my fault we stopped talking, I'm not putting that on you jacks I swear, but sometimes it seems impossible you could still care about me after so long and after what a jerk I was to you in that letter" he admitted with a sort of vulnerability rare in him.

"did you mean what you said in that letter?" she asked like she already knew the answer.

"no, I said it because I missed you too much to only know you through letters, and I thought if I broke contact it would stop hurting, but it never did" he admitted what she clearly had already figured out.

"so since its share time I suppose I should be very clear about my motivations for coming back here, of course I wanted to help you after I stopped being pissed off that the first contact in years was eric calling because he was worried about you, I couldn't sleep after hearing what you were going through so I jumped on a plane before I could really think about it too much, but it wasn't long before I had to face why I did that. It was selfish really, selfish and simple – I wanted to see you again Steven" she told him with a small shy smile.

"since the second I saw you in class years ago I wanted to be around you, I wanted to be you're friend because when I first met you that was the only option I was aware of, but I know other options now and although I'm your friend always, that is not the driving need I currently have in concerns to you. I want to help you Steven, I truly do, but when I told you I'm not your crutch what I was trying to get through to you was that your recovery and our relationship are not the same thing" she told him firmly

"I hate that my problems take up so much space in my life, id much rather have a different focus" he told her with a sad tone tinged in darkness.

"you will, I promise Steven, I promise you with everything I have that it wont always be like this, I'm not saying it will ever be gone completely but I swear to everything I hold dear that it will not always be this way for you. So slow you wont even notice it happening things will get better, one day you'll wake up and you'll go about your day and out of the blue its going to hit you that you haven't thought about wanting a drink, one day your mind will classify all this as something you went through and not something you are. And it will be a slow painful process where for days on end you won't feel like you've made any progress or ever will, but you will have. This isn't like a bad flu where you'll come to the point of wanting to die, to waking up feeling better, the choices to change your life are a slow thing." She told him comfortingly, but he could hear the honesty in her words.

"I feel like I need to apologize every time I want to kiss you because I shouldn't be thinking of anything but fixing the mess I made of my entire life" Hyde told her in a pained whisper against her shoulder, as he held her tightly against his chest.

"that's completely ridiculous, you know that, right?" Jackie asked him with a raised eyebrow

"sort of, I know logically it doesn't make sense, but I cant help feeling that way about it" he explained.

"Steven" Jackie said with a serious voice "kiss me" she ordered

He blinked at her in surprise and confusion, but his instinct was to listen to her (he always had) so he did as she said and lowered his lips to hers. A small explosion occurred in the center of his chest, a spark igniting a chain reaction until it spread warmth through every cell in his body, a feeling he wasn't used to that he could only guess at the name of.

But it was too soon for that name.

Instead he relished the warmth and the peace, even while knowing he was in for an 'I told you so' from Jackie.

She pulled away after awhile and stared into his blue eyes with a look he couldn't decipher but wasn't afraid of.

"I am with you" she said simply, but it encompassed so many things to him. and it was enough in that moment to put his fears to rest for the time being even though he knew it was temporary. But he didn't want this fears to go away for good because it was the fear that kept him from backsliding into what he'd been until Jackie's presence bitch slapped him out of his self-induced haze.

There were so many things to say, so many feeling still to express to her, he felt an urge to say them all and let it wash over them like a storm.

"do you wanna go get breakfast?" he asked earning a smile from the brunette staring into his eyes.

It wasn't time for all the things he wanted to say to her, it was however time for hash browns.

Jackie hopped off his lap and ran to get changed leaving Hyde smiling in her wake. It was one of the brief moments where he felt sure he was going to be ok, by that evening he might feel hopeless again after all that was the nature of the disease, but in that moment Steven felt life was full of promise.

Jackie was so alive it was rubbing off on him and he couldn't help but smile.

"after breakfast we need to stop by the grocery store" she called to him form the living room where she was putting on her shoes.

"whys that?" he asked curiously, they had plenty of food as far as he knew.

"were going to have a house warming party for this place tomorrow evening and we need snacks and stuff" she tossed out casually.

Hyde tried not to sound as shocked as he felt when he responded.

"who all is coming to this?" he asked trying not to clench his fist as the reality of his life seeped back through the happy bubble Jackie had created for him.

"no one that you need to sound so tense about" she reassured him, of course she'd known he would start to freak out, she was too clever.

"so just you and me then?" he joked

"flattery will get you everywhere" she purred at him "except out of this party"

"well hell" Hyde sighed, he knew when it was time to give in, and what could he really say that didn't sound ridiculous.

It was time to face the rest of his life and prove he was strong enough to deal with the world on his own without drugs and alcohol. It was time to be around the people he knew and let himself be proud of his life and his choices, to show pride in his home and the person he'd chosen to spend his life with even if he hadn't actually mentioned the 'rest of our lives' part to her yet, but somehow he was confident she knew.

He was embarrassed that knowing his friends would all be coming over there made his stomach churn with worry, but then he looked at Jackie and thought of how she had handled herself when she'd first stepped into his life again, and he let his trust in her steal his nerves.

Jackie was a beacon and she would keep him on the path he'd chosen, all she had to do was be present and it gave him the strength to fight.