Disclaimer-I do not own the Sons of Anarchy, but I do own No Other Man Alive, my original characters, and a raging case of hate for the idiot down the block who revs his Kawasaki for fun when he's drunk. My hetero lifemate's sewing machine has more testicular fortitude than your "motorcycle" so please stop playing with it at 2 in the morning.

Ace watched as Happy grabbed up his stuff, his movements were jerky and uncoordinated. His jaw was clamped down so hard that it looked painful. The muscles in his back bunched and rolled, and it made her sick that after everything they'd just said, all the damage they'd wrought, she still itched to run her hands over his skin, maybe press her cheek against the artwork.

He never even looked at her, even though her eyes never left him. The soft click of the door shutting sounded as loud as a gunshot and couldn't have been more final, even if he had slammed it.

Ace sat completely still on the bed, staring at the door, waiting. She waited for the tears and the devastation, but as the light changed from dusk to dark and her eyes stayed perfectly dry, Ace had to conclude that maybe she was finished with crying. Still, she didn't move from her spot, didn't sleep, just looked at the mess and thought about how that didn't even begin to compare to the path of destruction that had been following in her wake.

Happy had spelled it out for her before they'd gone to Tacoma, back when all of this seemed like an amazing adventure. He'd told her that she was a weakness, no a liability, and that he was fooling himself thinking that she wouldn't be used against him. She'd never known him to be wrong before, not about human nature and the lengths people would go to, to get what they wanted, so it didn't surprise her that he'd been right this time, too. It was her fault, the entire thing had been a chain reaction set off by Happy's shit timing. An hour later and she would have been able to deflect any of the normal probing questions he'd have had for her, and then after getting what he needed, Happy would have left. He could have gone back to the road he loved so much, and she could have finished handling her husband's debt, then gone anywhere in the world. She wondered if Happy would have tracked her down wherever she landed.

Happy's phone started ringing, somewhere in the debris on the floor. She thought about getting it, but the thought of moving from the bed was too much, so she just stayed there, and watched it light up every now and then. No one had come to the door, not that she would have gotten up for that, either. The ambient sounds from around the clubhouse died down, and the silence settled on her like a physical weight.

She remembered being in her driveway, thinking about how she'd be happy with however long Happy would give her, but she never saw this coming. He loved her, she knew that he did, and if that couldn't be enough, then nothing would. In a way, she felt bad for having accidentally put him in a position where he felt like he had to try to be something that he didn't want to be.

It was hours before it occurred to her to wonder if Happy had even left Tacoma. She'd assumed that he had taken to the road for solace, but he certainly could be holed up in someone else's bed. He'd lived here for years, probably had a number of regular fuck buddies he could call, and Lord knew that no woman would throw him out of bed. Ace hoped that whoever the nameless faceless cunt was, she was familiar enough with Happy's ink that the latest addition would be screamingly obvious. Further, she hoped the bitch asked him about it, and that he felt completely shitty about getting his dick wet as a married man.

Married. Shit, they were fucking married. Well, that could be fixed, and probably with very little trouble, it's not like she'd brought any assets to the table and there weren't kids involved. No, she wouldn't think about that now, that was something to consider in the daylight. Besides, if he'd stayed local, he would probably be back before morning. They could talk like grownups, figure out how to move forward, what the next step was. It didn't have to be all animosity and vitriol, people split up all the time without ripping each other to shreds. Definitely think about that in the daylight.

The phone started ringing again.

No Other Man Alive

Happy looked down at the speedometer and forced himself to let off the accelerator again. He'd already gotten a ticket crossing the border into Idaho, and he couldn't afford another one. He wished he could press the pedal to the floor and drive until the road ran out; it had been a lot of years since he'd been on the East Coast.

Ace hadn't ever been to the East Coast, hadn't ever been out of California, even. Shit. He couldn't even clear her out of his mind long enough to calm the fuck down before she popped back up. He used to be able to go months without thinking about Ace, and now his own mind kept betraying him by tying his every thought back to her.

There had been a moment after he'd gotten into the truck, but before he'd put the keys in the ignition, when he'd considered going back inside. Just heading back up the steps and kicking the door open, forcing her to see that with how badly he wanted her, the rest of this was all just noise. But he had no way to unsay the things he'd said to her, and it was just the last in an impressively long line of fuckups where she was concerned. Better for both of them if he didn't, there were still too many ways for them to rip each other to pieces.

Instead, he was tearing up the miles, headed absolutely nowhere. With no cut and no way to ride, it was the first time since he'd patched in that he'd existed outside the confines of duty and getting shit done. Sure, he'd had time off, but it was always with a purpose, taking care of his ma or riding out to a rally. All the wide open miles were supposed to be making the shit fall away, but instead, the further he got away, the heavier his burden felt, and the louder all the shit in his head got.

Happy was real tired of feeling like he didn't know what the fuck he was doing, where his boot was gonna land next. He'd prided himself on being level headed, on thinking around all the corners, and making decisions that were backed entirely by logic. Being with Ace, it went against everything he'd valued in himself, and judging by the way she'd looked at him when she told him to get out, words he hadn't thought her capable of, all the things he valued in her had been wrecked, too.

It was funny, when he'd found out what had been done to her, seen those goddamn disgusting pictures, he thought that that had been it. That no woman would be able to come back from where she'd been taken, but he'd been wrong. Sure, she wasn't the same woman she had been, but she'd still opened herself back up to him, clung to him and let him be her safe place. She'd already been damaged when he'd scooped her up in Fallbrook, completely lost and unsure of who she was, and Happy wished she'd found out what Tony had been up to before he'd offed himself. Ace said she would have killed him herself, but that wasn't in her makeup. She would have left him, and eventually, Happy would have come through for ink and he could have put things right, shown her that she was more than what her husband had done to her. Instead he'd been too fucking late, and too blinded by her to see how fucked up she'd really been. He'd forced her to trust him, engineered that shit, trading on their years and years of history and he'd never stopped to consider that he couldn't actually be the man he wanted for her, and wasn't that about as twisted as it got.

The darkness was just starting to lift, not nearly dawn, yet, but it was coming. Happy figured he should get off of the road, hole up somewhere for the day, maybe two. If he could get some sleep and some fucking peace, he might just be able to think through the noise enough to figure out where he the fuck he was running to.

No Other Man Alive

Ace watched as the last darkness of night bled out of the dorm room, replaced by the thin grey light of Tacoma's overcast morning. She'd held out through the night, thinking that there was the slightest sliver of chance that Happy might come back, but daylight wasn't how he'd ever come to her before and she knew it wouldn't be that way now.

Ace stretched carefully, her muscles tired and sore from sitting through the night unmoving. Her head ached with that half hungover feeling that hardcore insomniacs were intimately familiar with. Luckily she had an entire lifetime of experience pushing through it to fall back on. She threw her legs over the side of the bed and waited for the dizzy feeling to pass.

Happy's cigarettes and ashtray sat on his nightstand, and they looked kind of lonely waiting for him to come back, so Ace pulled one out and put it between her lips and lit it. Normally Ace only smoked on the rare occasions that she was so pissed that she couldn't see straight, and the smoke made her throat burn and her stomach turn, but she kept dragging on the Marlboro anyway. When she'd stubbed out the butt, Ace got up, tracking carefully through the mess all over the floor around to her nightstand. It took her one long stupid minute to remember where her fucking drugs would be before she headed to the bathroom.

Ace counted out the pills left in the bottle, relieved to see that she only had a couple days left on the antibiotics. She'd quit the painkillers almost two weeks ago, preferring the dull aches to feeling drugged all the time. It took her a second to remember which antibiotics were the ones she was supposed to take in the morning. Christ, Happy was right, she had been acting like a child.

Ace sifted through the wreckage, pulling on panties that she was pretty sure were clean, and then her jeans. She found one of the long sleeved shirts she purchased and ripped the tags off of it and put it on, not even bothering with a bra. She dug her hand into her jeans pocket and was relieved that the ring was still there. This time she slid it on, and just like she'd thought, the stupid fucking thing fit perfectly. Happy was good with details like that. The weight of it felt good, and she actually felt a little bad that she'd jerked him around about it. None of which mattered now anyway. She put it back in her pocket, the least she could do was keep it safe so that she could give it back to him.

With a sigh, Ace began picking up the stuff that littered the floor. The clothes and her sketchbook, the pencils were everywhere, having rolled under every piece of furniture in the room. She picked up Happy's phone, which hadn't rung in hours, and set it on his nightstand. Once she got cleaning, erasing the physical evidence of their end, she couldn't stop. When all the stuff was picked up, she emptied the ashtray and rinsed it out in the bathroom. Then she wiped down the sink, and the shower, and then moved on to dusting the top of the dresser and the nightstands.

Eventually, though, Ace ran out of things to put right, so she lay back down on the bed, trying to avoid the dizzy feeling. She buried her face in the pillow that still smelled like him and gave into the tears that finally, finally came.

No Other Man Alive

Happy groaned as he sat up on the shitty motel bed. He'd been too tired to care about closing the curtains when he'd fallen into bed earlier that morning, and now the sunlight was practically stabbing his eyes. His eyelids felt like sandpaper, and he'd smoked his throat raw the night before. Feeling like shit was a fairly accurate assessment of his situation.

"Fuck." He looked around the room, completely empty besides him, and for the first time that he could remember, he felt lonely. He'd spent a lot of time alone in his life, alone on the road, in prison, even in clubhouses he liked his own company better than anyone else's. Just one more way that his Ace had spun his head around. Fuck it all, he actually missed her. He used to think that he missed the peace that he felt at the other end of her needle, or the admittedly fantastic way her pussy wrapped around his dick, but he wasn't a stupid man, and he was done lying to himself. He'd told her he loved her, and he'd meant it, even though that was all wrapped up in hating himself.

If he had been a younger man, Happy figured he would have headed straight back to Tacoma, with the same plan of making her sense no matter the cost. He felt every day of his age today, though, and knew that no force on Earth could compel him to go back to her empty handed. He'd go back as a whole man, the man she deserved or not at all. Fuck if he knew where to start on that shit, though.

Happy lit a cigarette, grimacing at the burn, but it didn't stop him from smoking the Marlboro to the filter. He flexed his right hand, and tried to fist it, fighting the plaster as much as he could. It wasn't the first time cutting the cast off had crossed his mind, but it was the first time he'd had to actually resist the impulse. Seventeen days left, he could man up and deal with the cast, it was his best shot at riding again and he knew it. There was a lot of shit he could get done in seventeen days, too, and get back to Tacoma and back to Ace, and with any amount of luck, back to fucking normal.

No Other Man Alive

It was fully dark in the room when Ace woke up, and she yawned hugely, trying to figure out what had woken her. Happy's stupid goddamn phone was ringing again. Ace groaned, pulling herself up and swinging her legs over the side of the bed. She lit another cigarette, mostly just to spite Happy, not that he'd actually care. She opened the bottom drawer of Happy's nightstand and found the bottle of Jack she knew he kept there. He even had a highball, so she tipped the whiskey in, filling it to the rim. She made a face at the first sip, it definitely wasn't her Jameson, but beggars couldn't be choosers.

Sipping the whiskey, Ace got herself to a standing position, head spinning. Not really a surprise, since she couldn't remember the last time she'd eaten anything. The thought of venturing out of her hidey hole made her nauseous as hell, though, so she figured she'd check Happy's phone for unknown numbers on the off chance that he'd tried to call. She knew that he hadn't, but it gave her one more way to delay the inevitable.

Ace scrolled through the missed calls, if you set it to music, it would probably have a real nice beat. Kozik, Kozik, Tig. Kozik, Kozik, Tig. Quinn. Kozik, Kozik, Tig. Kozik, Kozik, Tig. Quinn again. She hated being right about Happy not bothering to check in. For a second she felt guilty about snooping through his phone, but fuck all that followed closely behind. She looked through his texts, not much there, just Club stuff. Exiting out of that she figured she should check and make sure he hadn't been storing dirty pictures of her.

She opened the gallery of saved pictures and dropped the phone like it had burned her. Ace stared at the open phone at her feet, breathing hard.

"I'm in Tacoma. I'm safe. Happy's…well, he's not there anyway." Her voice was louder than she'd expected, and she jumped a little. "Quit being a fucking pussy." She chided herself. "You were there, it's not like you don't know what the fuck happened."

Still it took her a long time to set her whiskey down on the dresser and pick up the phone. She spent a long time looking at each picture. She studied each image of herself with two and three men all over her, ruining her, with the kind of contained rage that led to arson. When she was done, she dropped the phone in the whiskey. But that wasn't nearly satisfying enough. Bad enough that she'd been raped, bad enough that so many people had been witness to it, what she couldn't swallow was that Happy, her man had kept these pictures. Here she had been doing everything she could to put it all behind her, behind them, and he'd kept some cocksucking souvenirs. Well fuck him if he thought she was going to sit around and wait for his ass. With a choked scream, Ace launched the glass, whiskey, phone and all at the wall as hard as she could. It shattered delightfully, and she smiled, a hard bitter grin. Happy would have recognized the look, he'd sported it often.

Her hand was on the doorknob before she remembered that she hadn't bothered with a bra, and the tight black shirt didn't leave much to the imagination. She fought the impulse to retreat back to the dresser and find a bra. Let his brothers get a good fucking look, most of them had probably seen her tits already from those fucking pictures and damn Happy if he didn't like it. If he wanted an opinion he should have stuck around.

Ace was in the hall and headed for the clubhouse proper before she noticed the glass in her foot. She leaned back against the wall and pulled it out, cursing in Spanish under her breath. When she looked up again, she had begun to attract the notice of the Tacoma Sons. She squared her shoulders and lifted her chin, marching barefoot through the entrance and into the melee.

"Ace high!" Kozik caught her attention immediately, and Ace was unexpectedly filled with gratitude that if nothing else, Happy had left her access to the best protection a girl could ask for. Kozik pushed his way through the crowd, it must be Friday, and Tig was right on his heels.

"When did you guys get back?" Kozik asked her, big goofy grin on his face, looking past her. Ace looked at him stupidly for a moment before the realization that no one here even knew what happened caught up to her. He hadn't bothered to tell his brothers where he'd disappeared to, either, or why. She watched as a loaded look passed between Tig and Kozik, and they closed in on her.

"Where's your Old Man, dollface?" Tig asked, but not in any way that made her believe that he really thought she knew.

"No idea." Ace smiled sweetly up at him, batting her eyelashes sarcastically at him. Tig grabbed her by the back of the neck and pushed her through the crowd and out the door. He stopped her on the landing, and between him and Kozik, Ace felt pleasantly crowded, just like old times.

"Talk." Tig ordered her, finger in her face.

"He left last night, didn't take his phone. I'm pretty sure we're done." It was actually a relief to say that out loud, even though Ace couldn't have explained why if there had been a knife at her throat.

"What doya mean he left?" Tig complained, hands fisting in his hair.

"He said he couldn't do this anymore, then took his keys and walked out. Honestly, I figured he told one of you where he was headed." Ace felt like apologizing, but she wasn't sure what to say, so she just pushed herself up to sit on the top rail.

"Wait." Kozik broke in as Tig started muttering to himself. "Have you been locked up in that room the whole time?"

"Uh, yes?" Ace answered uncertainly.

"He just left you in there? No cash, no car, no nothing?" Kozik kept pushing.

"Yep." Ace shrugged, since Kozik had managed to sum up her new circumstances pretty succinctly.

"What the fuck did you do to him?" TIg lunged at her, holding her off balance by her shoulders, leaning her back over the multistory drop to pavement. Ace didn't grab at him, just arched an eyebrow and sighed.

"I have no idea, Tigger." She told him, holding his gaze dispassionately. Kozik was at Tig's shoulders, trying to pull them both back, but Tig kept shrugging him off. Ace supposed that she should be worried that Tig might actually drop her, but it really just wasn't in her to care. Finally Tig gave in and set her on her feet.

"No, nah, Hap wouldn't just fucking bug out like that. You, yeah, he'd leave your ass behind, but not me." Tig was frantic, pacing the two steps back and forth. "That's not the way this shit is supposed to work. Why the fuck do bitches like you always fuck everything up?"

Ace shrugged, and leaned back to let Tig work himself out. Kozik was unnerving her with his scrutiny. Most of the time Tacoma's Sergeant at Arms looked like a big, goofy beefcake, but out here looking at her with that intense studiousness, Ace could believe that he was the enforcer Happy had assured her he was. She finally looked away, uncomfortable, because that knowing gaze was all too familiar.

"You haven't eaten." Kozik pointed out. "And your foot is bleeding."

"Yeah, there might be a little bit of a broken glass situation in Happy's room." She admitted.

"Who threw it?" Kozik asked, still staring her down.

"I did."

"Before or after Happy ran out on you?"

"After." She shot back, not sure what Kozik was getting from this line of questioning, but certain that he was learning more than she wanted him to.

"Hmph." Was all the answer that Kozik gave her.

"I need help." Ace finally told them, using her last dregs of courage to confess that. Tig finally stopped his pacing, and another one of those loaded looks passed between him and Kozik. "Are you allowed to help me? If that's against some kind of rule, I mean, that's fine."

"Depends on what you're asking for." Kozik told her cautiously. "Go put your boots on, Happy would beat me blue if he found out I didn't feed you."

"Koz, you really don't-"

"Shut up and do what you're told, Ace." Tig's voice was colder than she'd ever heard it, but she stayed where she was for one more minute before she shrugged nonchalantly and obeyed.

When she got back out to the parking lot, Ace almost lost her nerve and retreated. They were both geared up to ride, because obviously Kozik wouldn't have had his car for Church. She swallowed hard and silently told herself to man the fuck up. Tig and Kozik were her only shot at regaining any semblance of self respect. She approached with her head held high and waited until Kozik handed her his helmet.

"You're with me, Tiggy doesn't have a bitch seat. Mine's not much, not even a sissy bar, but we'll make do." Kozik told her, kicking out the passenger pegs and starting the engine. "Hop on."

It took Ace a few seconds to get her legs moving, but she managed to put a shaking hand on Kozik's shoulder to slide onto the back. With no backrest, she was forced into close, intimate proximity, wrapping her arms around his waist. She leaned her head on the back of his cut and shut her eyes, willing the sick feeling in her stomach down as Kozik took off into the moonlight after Tig.

**Thank you for reading and reviewing! Please feel free to follow me on Twitter (ShamrockJess)**