The time jumps are kind of confusing this chapter, I know. Pay close attention to Veronica's age.

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Part Four

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It was four weeks later when Hyde came back again, and didn't leave right away, either. Eric answered the door this time and was struck momentarily dumb by the picture his once-best-friend made, standing at the door jamb, already in a defensive posture.

"Forman?" came the incredulous voice as expected.

He shook his head tiredly. Great, this was just what he needed. "Hyde," he said curtly. "Come in."

He stepped aside and let him come in, watched him eye the apartment warily, probably looking for Jackie. "So, when did you get back, man? Last I heard you were still in Africa."

"My mom didn't tell you?" Eric asked dryly. "I thought she might've, as you two seemed to have developed a sort of rapport."

Okay, that might have been a little defensive and bitter on Eric's part, but to his credit he was remembering the sick look of betrayal and fear on Jackie's face when she told him about Hyde's last visit.

Hyde shifted and looked uncomfortable. "No, I haven't talked to her since she told me about…you know."

Eric raised an eyebrow. "Duly noted."

There was an awkward pause. "What are you doing here?" Hyde finally burst out, and Eric applauded him for lasting even the short time that he did before voicing it.

"Here in Chicago, or here in Jackie's apartment?"

Hyde looked irritated. "In Jackie's apartment, you tool."

Tool. He's the tool now. Okay. "I live here."

"You…" Hyde trailed off, his face blank, then started to laugh. "You live here? Yeah, nice try."

"It's the truth, man."

"No it isn't," he replied, his smile fading.

"Yeah, it is."

"No. It isn't." His voice was serious and Eric tensed.

Just then, because she always did have quite perfect timing, Jackie came floating into the room. "Eric, have you seen my hand lotion? I swear I left it in the bedroom, but it's—" she came fully into the room and noticed Hyde, cutting herself off. Her eyes quickly assessed the situation, going back and forth between the two men in her foyer, and made a snap decision. "Eric," she switched tones. "Would you be so kind as to show our…guest…the door? It's late, we should be getting to bed."

Hyde's expression froze. "What the fuck?" he demanded.

Eric exchanged a long look with Jackie, then rolled his eyes and opened the door again. "You heard the lady," he said, motioning out to the hallway. "Skedaddle."

"Forman, what the fu—"

"Excuse me, could you please refrain from using such language in the same small apartment as my five-year-old daughter?" Jackie 'asked' tersely.

"Our daughter," Hyde managed to say.

"No, my daughter," Jackie snapped. "And if you think for one second that by coming back here than you're going to get custody or time or any say in her life whatsoever, you are sorely mistaken." Hyde glared at her ferociously. "Now, I believe that my boyfriend asked you to leave," she said, her eyes switching to Eric briefly, then back to Hyde, challenging.

Hyde fumed for a second, and then shot one last glare at Jackie before moving through the door. At the last second, he stopped and turned to Eric. "I thought you were my friend, man," he said. Eric said nothing, but thought of wedding announcements and pregnant cheerleaders and strippers and no contact for six years.

As soon as Hyde was through, he slammed and locked the door and turned to Jackie. "Did you do that to make a point?"

"Do what?" Jackie asked, bewildered.

"The thing!" Eric said, throwing up his hands. "The 'boyfriend' thing, the sultry voice thing, the 'let's jump into bed' thing!"

Jackie looked at him, stuck between worry and amusement. "Well…yeah," she said.

He sighed. "Jackie—" he cut himself off.

"Are you angry?" Jackie asked incredulously. "Eric, I was trying to get rid of him! I don't want him here, and I knew that he would get mad if he knew about us, so I told him. Or…showed him, more like." Eric was silent and his jaw tightened. "He would've found out eventually anyway," she went on. "What is so wrong with that?"

Eric shook his head. "Nothing," he said after a long, tense moment. "Nothing. I don't wanna fight."

"Neither do I," she said. Warily, she approached him and slipped her hands up his chest to rest on his shoulders. "Are we good?" she asked softly.

His hands smoothed down her back to rest on her hips. "Yeah," he murmured into her cheek.

"Good," she replied. "Now, I believe I ordered you to bed not just a moment ago."

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He was struck by how harsh everything was.

In Africa, things were hard, so hard that he had to look away to keep himself together at times. The memory of that first dead little boy stuck in his mind, overlapped with the memory of that first meaningful phone call with Jackie, the first stepping stone to the huge plateau that he was spreading himself out on with this woman and her child.

In Africa, there was death and suffering and things were never fair; but there was also hope and optimism. He looked into those kids' eyes and saw innocence and trust, and it was a beautiful thing because he never remembered anything but monotony from his childhood. And he knew for a fact that he never blindly followed like those kids did, never put his life in the hands of another because there was nothing else to do, because doing something else meant AIDS or starvation or poverty or death.

Here in Chicago, it was different. It was glossy and messy and dirty and fast and hard, and he never got used to it, not really. Chicago kids had it easier than Africa kids sometimes; sometimes they had it harder, but the difference was that these kids had no hope. No trust. No optimism. No future, people told them, and they believed it blindly. While in Africa he'd be able to teach a kid to read in a month, here it took him a year to convince him to open up a damn book. It was frustrating and hard and heartbreaking and he loved and hated doing it.

By the time Veronica was eight years old Jackie had bought the club and was running it with the help a few staff members, including Kelso as a silent investor. The money was good (finally) and allowed Eric to concentrate more on his students and Veronica (who was already a year ahead of her grade in reading material). Life was easy and comfortable, yet at the same time incredibly challenging and irritating; but it was real and there was laughter and sometimes crying, and he couldn't imagine himself anywhere else.

The only down point could that could be identified came in the form of Steven Hyde. He'd left suspiciously easily after that second visit to the apartment, which had mystified Eric, who'd been expecting at least one more outburst. Then, Grooves opened up a record store branch on Lake Shore Drive, so Hyde did come back to Chicago on a periodic basis, always with the human buffer of Samantha at his side. He never came to the apartment, never asked to see Veronica, only hovered on the edge of their lives, always a source of tension and always annoying the ever living holy hell out of Jackie.

"What does he want!" she'd rant to no one. "What the hell is he thinking he can accomplish? We have a good life, I gave my daughter a good life with no help from him, what the hell does he want?"

"He's just here for his job," he'd recite. Again.

When Veronica was nine, Fez called and said that the Point Place High's twelve year reunion was in a month, and that the whole gang was required to attend. Jackie had rolled her eyes when Kelso showed her the official invitation. "On threat of what? Is he gonna yell 'good day' at us over the telephone and hang up in a huff?"

"Either that, or send our kids porn," Kelso joked. Then that statement set in and twin expressions of horror appeared on every adult in the room. Brooke tightened her grip on her and Kelso's youngest, Daniel, protectively. "Damn!" he exclaimed. "Now we have to go."

Brooke agreed reluctantly, because everyone could plainly see the crappy job Kelso was doing to cover up his excitement at the prospect of seeing Fez again. While full-time fatherhood had matured the former stoner exponentially, he still had the air of innocent boyishness that had endeared him to both Jackie and Brooke, respectively, in the first place. Since Hyde had refused to keep in contact with Kelso or anyone (seems that he was still bitter about the fact that he had to hear about Veronica's existence from a slip up in a conversation with Kitty) he'd been disheartened, and Brooke confided in Jackie later on that she was hoping that the trip back home would bring back part of his spark.

Jackie seemed positively repulsed at the idea of going, but grudgingly agreed at the idea of cheering up Kelso. "Who has a twelve year reunion, anyway?" she grumbled.

"I heard that Lucy Kevins, the class president, had a nervous breakdown two years ago, so they had to postpone it to twelve years," Brooke replied. "I always knew that girl was whacked. One time she ranted to me for two hours because I sent my college applications all at once, instead of one at a time."

"Jesus. How do you think she would've reacted if she'd found out that you got pregnant a month before graduation?" Jackie asked.

"God forbid." She shook her head, looking horrified. "No one tell her."

So they all packed up and went home, for the first time in almost ten years, for some of them—and while Kelso had tried to get Jackie and Eric to take Veronica along in his van, they had adamantly declined, and so when they got there, Kelso and Fez were already talking and laughing, while Brooke was talking to some of her old classmates, balancing a sleepy Daniel on her hip.

Jackie shifted her weight nervously, looking around the slightly crowded gym in trepidation. Eric looked down at her fondly, her hair was pulled back in a loose bun and she was wrapped in a dark emerald dress with short heeled sandals—she looked tired and beautiful. Older and calmer. "What's wrong?"

"Ugh. This isn't my graduation class, Eric," she said. "I barely know anyone here." She was seized by a sudden thought and looked up at him. "What if Donna's here? She's gonna hate me."

"God Mom, she's not gonna hate you," Veronica said, rolling her eyes from her place at Eric's side. Then she looked up at Eric quizzically. "Who's Donna?"

Eric laughed. "She's just an old friend of ours."

"Friends? You have friends other than Uncle Kelso and Aunt Brooke?" she asked skeptically.

Jackie scowled at the mini-version of herself. "Ronnie, I see Betsy over by the food. Why don't you go visit with her for awhile."

Veronica scoffed. "Fine, fine. You guys are such dorks sometimes, I swear." She grinned at Eric surreptitiously in a 'Moms are so dramatic' way, then flounced off across the room, her dark ponytail bobbing in the air behind her.

"I'm so glad that she inherited my sarcasm," Jackie said sardonically. "It's really adding to my glowing mood."

Eric slipped an arm around her shoulders. "It's for Kelso and Fez, remember? And Donna doesn't hate you. She doesn't even know you anymore. It's not like she's gonna make a scene or anything."

Jackie leaned into him gratefully. "Yeah, I guess you're right. I'm just..." she shook her head, breaking off.

"Stressed," he supplied.

"Yeah."

He grinned. "Well, come on then, crazy girl. Let's go de-stress a little."

Jackie hid a smile. "I am not crazy," she said staunchly.

"Of course you're not, dear."

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Two hours later, maybe as a result of sticking pretty close to Brooke's side, Jackie surprisingly found herself having fun, or relaxing a little, at least. She'd found enough people who she at least recognized, or had recognized her, so she was feeling sufficiently less insecure. Not that it wasn't strange to be feeling insecure at all.

Glancing across the room, she caught sight of Eric talking to one of their old teachers, Veronica in front of him, her little feet balancing on Eric's. His arms were around her shoulders, and her small hands were gripping his belt, and it looked so natural that it almost made Jackie want to cry. I want to marry him, she thought, and it would've surprised her if she hadn't been thinking about it for the past five years.

She'd even thought about bringing it up, but the delicate balance that they'd established upon Eric's return from Africa still seemed like such a fragile thing to her, even after almost six years of living together, raising Veronica, both of them pretending in their own ways.

And though Jackie cursed herself for it, Hyde's rejection and the heartbreaking situation that he'd enforced upon her through Samantha still lingered strongly in her mind. While Jackie never regretted for even a split second the fact that she had Veronica, and she was grateful to Hyde for helping, even in the small way that he did, to create her, Jackie never forgot the circumstances that surrounded Veronica's conception. She still found herself frozen in panic and anxiety at the prospect of feeling that kind of pain again, and even though she knew it was irrational on a conscious level, there were times when she'd look over at Eric and wonder how much time she had with him before he left.

"Jackie?"

The soft, quizzical voice brought her out of her brood--er, musings, and Jackie jumped slightly, turning around. It so figured that it'd be the person that she'd been dreading running into all night, taking her by surprise.

"Hey, Donna."

Donna looked good, she'd grown into herself, even more so than she had back when Jackie had known her. Her hair was cut short, the styled waves barely brushing her shoulders, the color the same soft red that Jackie remembered. She wore little to no makeup, her nails were bare, and she wore a simple blazer and dark brown skirt, but she looked...comfortable. Her old self, the part that Eric liked to call her 'inner cheerleader,' started dissecting the outfit, pointing out places where it could be improved, where Donna could make a little more effort, but she quickly and ruthlessly quashed the urge to comment.

"Long time no see," she said awkwardly. She stood there, shifting her weight nervously.

After a tense moment or two, Jackie rolled her eyes and motioned to the empty chair across from her at the vacated table she'd been hiding out in. "Sit down already. It's hurting my neck to look up at you."

Donna gave a hint of a smile and accepted the invitation, sitting down and tucking her legs underneath the tablecloth demurely.

There was another prolonged moment of tension. "So," Donna finally said. "Veronica's adorable."

Ah, straight to the point. As always, Jackie thought. "Yeah," she agreed. "Too adorable for her own good, sometimes."

Donna chuckled. "Takes after her mother, in that, huh?"

Jackie laughed genuinely. "I guess."

Donna nodded, smiling, though once the moment of shared camaraderie passed, silence descended once more. Finally, Donna shook her head in annoyance. "Why didn't you tell me you were pregnant?" she asked bluntly. "Back in Point Place, I mean."

Jackie blinked, slightly blindsided. "I didn't tell anyone," she managed. "I didn't know how to deal with it."

"You told Kelso and Brooke," Donna said. "And Eric, apparently." The words were slightly bitter, but her tone was neutral. Not accusing, merely inquisitive.

Jackie winced. "I'm sorry. I guess I was...angry at you. I was angry at everyone." She sighed. "That wasn't exactly the highest point in my life."

"I know." Donna shrugged. "I wasn't angry, just...when I found out, I regretted...you know, not being there for you."

Jackie nodded and waved a hand. "Bygones. I did all right." Donna nodded and looked away, and Jackie followed her sight line to Eric, still swinging Veronica around on his feet. "I'm sorry about Eric," she blurted, not really realizing that she'd said it out loud until Donna swung her head back in surprise.

"Oh," she said, clearly not expecting the comment. "That's...that's okay."

"I didn't mean to steal him from you or anything. And I know it was kind of sleazy for him and me to take up with each other, I mean, you don't date your friends' exes and all that, but it just sorta...happened, you know?" Jackie's words poured out in a long, rushed flow. "I never meant to hurt you, or Hyde, or anybody." As soon as the words were out, Jackie felt an enormous sense of relief, realizing that she'd been needing to get this out for a long time.

Donna blinked dumbly for a second, then broke into a smile. "Jeez, Jackie, chill. It's not like Eric and I were dating when you two hooked up." She gave a small shrug. "In fact, I'm pretty sure that you two didn't get together until like, three years after he and I broke up, right?"

"Four years," Jackie said quickly, then blushed.

Donna laughed. "It's okay, really. No hard feelings." She tilted her head, looking over her shoulder back at Eric. "When he told me about you two, I admit, I was a little...jealous," she admitted. "But it was more...nostalgia, than anything else."

Jackie smiled, feeling her relief grow. "I'm so glad you're not angry," she said, then blew out a breath, laughing a bit. "Wow, I didn't realize how badly I needed to say that to you until just now."

Donna laughed along, and it was a good feeling, to be laughing with Donna Pinciotti again. "I know what you mean," she said. "We really lost touch, didn't we?"

Jackie nodded. "Uh-huh. I should've called," she admitted.

"I could've called too," Donna replied self-deprecatingly. "It's just been..." the redhead trailed off. "Life, you know?"

"Yeah." Jackie chuckled. "It's been a trip, all right."

Donna smiled, a little sadly. "He seems happy," she said quietly. "I'm glad."

Jackie shrugged. "He's really taken to Veronica," she said. "She loves him. And his job at the school--God, you should see him teach, Donna. It's so amazing." She shook her head.

"So you guys are doing okay?"

Jackie saw only curiosity and concern in Donna's gaze, and her smile faltered. "Yeah," she said hesitantly. "I mean, Hyde still comes to Chicago every once in awhile, and that's always a nightmare." She shook her head. "I dunno, Eric gets so distant whenever Hyde's in town, and he won't tell me why."

Donna shrugged, looking over her shoulder at Eric again. "Eric always was a little...stubborn," she said. "It was the little things that made him act like an idiot, but when it was big, he usually just clammed up until it exploded." Donna shook her head, her eyes distant. "You should talk to him. Trust me, the explosion is never fun."

Jackie's heart gave a painful thump. "You think so?" Donna nodded her head. "God, is this how you felt in high school? I mean, he's just so..." she trailed off, unable to find words.

"I know." Donna smiled fondly. "I remember."

Jackie let out a breath, shaking her head. "I'll talk to him," she decided. "You should, too. He'd be happy to see you again."

Donna shook her head, looking down at the watch encircling her wrist. "No, I shouldn't. I have to leave soon anyway. And Eric and I had our closure a long time ago." She stood up, pulling a white card from her purse. "Here. I work for a radio station in St. Louis. It's a ways away from Chicago, but there's always the telephone." She smiled, shrugging. "So we don't lose touch again?"

Standing up, Jackie accepted the card, feeling an unexpected wave of emotion wash over her. "I'm glad you came," she said. "We needed this, didn't we?"

Donna nodded, then pulled the smaller woman into a hug in a surprising display of physical affection. "I want pictures," Donna said. "Veronica's as cute as you, but when she's little, that fact is not nearly as annoying."

Jackie laughed. "Sure. Photos are something we have an abundance of." Pulling away, she smiled. "It was good to see you, Donna."

"Likewise." With a final wave and a look in Eric's direction, Donna left.

Jackie watched her go for a few moments, then turned back to the table. She sat down again, fingering the business card in one hand and taking a sip of her drink with the other. "Eric and I had our closure a long time ago," Donna had said, the words echoing in Jackie's mind.

Closure, she thought. The thought of Hyde rose up unbidden again, and she sighed, looking once again over to her daughter and Eric, suddenly realizing a little late what she had to do. Crap, she thought. Eric will not be happy about this.

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Yes, I'm back. Sorry for the long wait, but I kind of wrote myself into a corner. I'm slowly digging myself out. And I realize that everyone is a little out of character (Jackie especially) but keep in mind that ten years have passed. Eric is even pushing thirty. They've grown up a lot.

Also, I know I said this already, but I really think this is close to ending. Next will be the inevitable Hyde/Jackie confrontation, and I don't see the story lasting much longer after that.

Thank you for all your support, and the fact that there's still interest in this after so long with no update makes me feel very fuzzy inside. :)