Disclaimer: I do not own any characters from "Sons of Anarchy." They are the property of Kurt Sutter and Fox Network. No money is changing hands in the writing, reading or distribution of this story.
Intended Part 4Tig was tired, but had managed to doze off throughout the night, awakening every half hour or so to throw another neatly packaged bundle of the secret he and Jocelyn now shared onto the fire. He'd stoke the coals, add more fuel, make sure everything was burning down to nothing, using the poker to smash up the larger masses of bone that burned white, but wouldn't crumble. He wanted nothing to remain, had been so much more meticulous than he ever had been before, going as far as to quadruple bag the lower jaw bone with teeth and bash it with a sledge hammer until it was nothing but a doughy lump inside the black plastic, something that would definitely never yield anything to a forensic odontologist looking to ID a body. Jocelyn had actually taken care of the upper jaw with the Beretta, that part of her father's face was gone, blown all over the wall, no dental evidence there either.
He'd been very strict with her in her cleanup too, inspecting everything she did, perhaps hurting her feelings when she'd shown off how white she'd gotten the carpet and wall when he took the claw end of the hammer he'd been using and popped the molding away from the wallboard, revealing more blood behind it. The look in her eyes was embarrassed dejection, but Tig didn't bend or go soft this time. "I said get everything! Even if you couldn't see it!" He'd growled, frustrated with her inability to know how important this was; he was trying to keep her out of jail, but he couldn't do it all by himself. Then he was frustrated with himself, for putting so much effort into protecting her. The tears that began to well in Jocelyn's eyes only made the whirl of confused feelings worse as she dropped to her knees by the bloody wallboard, picking up the sponge again. Tig sighed, the scene playing out inside him so much more off putting than what he'd been busy at in the garage with the rotary saw. He was being tough on her, she'd likely never need to draw upon this lesson again, but he wanted to know he'd taught her well; that she could carry on in his footsteps if ever she wanted to or had to. Tig leaned down, patted her shoulder as she scrubbed. "C'mon Joss," he encouraged softly, "make me proud, okay?"
She'd taken that to heart, cleaning behind the strip of molding with hydrogen peroxide, replacing the strip again, and then redeemed herself further when she stood in the doorway of the garage, couldn't bring herself to go in, but held up a bottle of drain cleaner. "I thought this might remove the skin from his fingers," she said as Tig looked at her and the bottle wondering what she was showing it to him for. "It's 95% sulfuric acid."
Tig had never known anyone with an IQ like hers, it shined at the oddest, most perfect of times. They'd made a good team, Joss had needed her share of direction and correction, but all in all, she'd come through better than he could have imagined a girl like her would have. He was beginning to see her differently, she wasn't the stuck-up, rich bitch, beauty queen he'd always thought of her as anymore, but she also wasn't like him, she was some atypical, bizarre amalgam of both, but was still a nice girl; a nice girl who hadn't slept all night; just sat there staring at the fire, saying nothing. He respected the isolation she seemed to need, but now in the twilight of morning, it was time to make her let go of this; people lived, people died, it was all inevitable, and fixating on what burned within the flames was pointless.
"He's not going to come crawling out of there, you know." He sat down beside her on the futon like cushion she hadn't moved from all night, contemplating slipping an arm around her if it would finally make her look away from the fucking fire. He was curious now as to her mood. Did she feel guilty? Was it remorse that wouldn't tear her gaze away from the pieces of burning flesh and bone?
Joss kept staring straight ahead though, the orange of the flames reflecting in her green eyes. Her stillness made him nervous, any other time when he'd moved beside her she became like a leach, trying to hang onto any part of him she could. Tig had always hated it, but at the moment, it would have made him feel better about where she was in her head. Well, maybe he should touch her or something? But before he had to, she spoke. "Have you ever killed anyone before?"
Wasn't that obvious? "Joss?" Tig laughed, giving her a shove with his elbow. "Stupid question." At least she was talking, though.
She nodded but kept her eyes on the fire. "How old were you the first time it happened?"
The question surprised him, he didn't want to answer, but sighed, just wanted her to loosen up for Christ's sake. "Twenty-six."
Her head jerked and she stared at him in some kind of new shock that seemed to stir something even more morbid inside her. "I'm ten years younger than you were the first time you—"
"Hey," he was defensive at first, but soon realized Joss wasn't trying to one up him, that she was horrified with herself, wondering what it made her if she'd killed someone so early on in life, younger than even he had been when he first took a life. Tig had tried so hard to not consider such things he barely knew what to say to her anymore. But if she wanted to talk about it, if she needed to talk about it, was there anyone better qualified than him to listen? "Why'd you do it?" As if he hadn't been able to put the pieces together when he'd moved her father's body; she'd emptied most of the clip into daddy's groin, literally shot his dick off. Even Tig had to admit her father had crossed the line, and he felt for Joss, would have pulled the trigger on her old man himself if she'd ever mentioned he was fucking her; Tig did have daughters of his own, after all.
Jocelyn swallowed hard and looked back at the damned fire again. He reached over and cupped her chin, turning her head back towards him sharply. "No, look at me." He demanded wanting to read her eyes and make sure she was really in there. They had a lot of riding to do as soon as the fire was out, and he wasn't taking some crazed bitch on his bike all the way across the state line…sure, that was why he wanted to see her eyes.
"I," Joss stopped, the words just not coming and she balled her hands into fists. "Have you ever been so afraid of someone that the only way to not to be was to kill them?"
Tig shrugged, but it was true. "In split second intervals, I guess." He said, feeling like he was about to say too much, because no one knew this stuff about him. "Never pulled the trigger with the intent to kill until Mogadishu."
Jocelyn cocked her head a little, old news clips no doubt playing in her head. "You were—"
"Tenth Mountain Division, US Army Rangers." It had been over a decade since he'd said the words, they were better off forgotten anyway, but now he'd gone and opened a Pandora's Box of questions she'd start asking. Better to nip this in the bud. "Look, I'm not getting into all of it with you. The guy that came home from Africa was a hell of lot different from the one they shipped over there. One forced retirement and a divorce later, I ended up on a crab boat in the Bering Sea for two years, made enough money to buy the bike, and I haven't looked back since, okay?" What the fuck was he doing? He didn't talk to women, not like this! But, maybe it helped her to know this…he needed her to be alright, they had that long ride ahead of them, right? Fuck it, stop babying her already, she should just get over it. He hardened his tone of voice. "That's what you need to do too, Joss. Don't look back!"
But she shook her head, her eyes dark again, looking like she might cry. "What if I can't stop, though?"
Tig wasn't hearing it. "If you want to, you can." He said, taking a quick glance at the fire himself and then looking back at her. "Trust me!"
She didn't seem to be listening though. She was drifting off into some place distant he didn't want to follow her to, but he was. "I should be dead, you know."
"Yeah? Well you almost were." Christ, was she upset about him holding a gun on her? That wasn't something he'd done intentionally.
She took no notice that he spoke at all, fear and anger twisting together over her features in a way he'd never seen before. "My mother left when I was six, I didn't understand why she did that then, but I know now." She was looking at the fire again, talking as if he wasn't even there, and while Tig had no patience to hear this, he for some reason didn't stop her. "It wasn't enough that he had to turn me into his wife, he had to do such sick stuff to me while he was doing it. All the stuff on the walls in my room, all the pageant stuff, the Mensa stuff, he put it there, not me, wanted to be able to look at it all while he was doing me so he could see what a wonderful piece of ass he was having, gave him some kind of superiority rush or something, made him feel like a real man." Joss paused, but her voice was growing angrier the more she spoke, and that was easier for Tig to relate to than the crying, but he felt himself wishing she'd just be quiet. Words hardly ever moved anything inside him anymore, but what Joss was saying just kept turning over and over again in a place that he wished would just go dead inside him. Fuck, why didn't she ever just say her old man was doing this to her? "But that was nothing compared to the other shit he was into. He used to fuck me with the barrels of guns! Shot me once by accident with his twenty-two when I was eight years old, tore me up so badly inside I'll never have kids. The actually thought I'd die, but I wasn't that lucky. He made me say I was 'playing' with the gun." She looked over at Tig again, tears falling down over her cheeks but her eyes were lit with fury. "And no one questioned it. Who believes that shit?"
"Yeah!" No one ever tried to help her? Not even after she almost died from a gunshot wound to her…Tig hadn't realized it, but he'd let out a gasp, closed his eyes and shook his head. He absolutely hated hearing about torturous shit he didn't think of first, and fucking a kid, no, a father fucking his own eight year old daughter with a gun, and then shooting her, was more than even he could fathom. His kids had been younger than eight years when his marriage broke up, and he'd said and done things that had scared them more than a few times, but at least neither Dawn nor Fawn could ever say he'd done half the shit to them that Joss had suffered. Okay, Joss had lived through some serious shit, but he had to snap out of this sympathy thing, act like this was nothing to him, not anything unusual or terrible…but it was…it was. No! Listening to her if she wanted to talk was one thing, but acting all effected by it and concerned, well, that wasn't who he was, and it wasn't who he wanted Joss to start seeing him as. He opened his eyes, slapped himself in the face mentally, but things only got worse. Joss was staring at him with burning green eyes, wanting to forget like he told her she had to, wanting to forget her father, but the bastard was still in front of her, still fucking her, and she didn't know how to make him go away, not yet.
Just then a pocket of blood inside moist flesh on the fire crackled and then exploded, sending bits of tissue across the coals that sizzled as they burned away. Tig felt himself lurch protectively towards Jocelyn at the sound, an overwhelming urge to have his cock as deeply inside her as he could get it coming over him, and before Tig knew it, he was kissing her, but not like he ever had before.
"Lay down," he whispered to her, cock harder than he'd have ever expected with so little sleep. Jocelyn was tired too, he could feel it in her body, but that was not the reason she wasn't resisting him as he leaned into her. She didn't wrap her arms around him though, her lips were all but still against his; she'd clearly taught herself not to even realize anything was happening as soon as a man pushed against her like Tig was doing now. He knew how to change that with patience and gentleness, at least, he did once, and that he wanted to be like that with her now disgusted him more than he could describe. And yet he couldn't stop, his mouth covering both her lips tenderly, coaxing her to open her mouth, to let him in, instead of barging ahead with what he wanted. "He's gone, Joss," Tig whispered, both his hands gently supporting her head and holding her stare level with his. The fire popped again, flesh sizzled; he imagined her father looked on jealously, watching what was once solely his slipping away, forever. Joss was limp, there was no fight in her, but her eyes were wide with fear, betraying her body's indifference. It didn't matter though, abused or not, scared or not, Tig wasn't taking "no" for an answer. "This has got to happen. I'm what has you now."