Thank you all for your comments :) Just for the record, I am in complete agreement with the entire list terrible things that you guys wish inflicted on Jack, from having a cake slammed in his face, to being murdered, to being eaten by a polar bear. And more!

Days Like These, pt. 4

It's not like he wanted to be there for that conversation, okay? It wasn't like, his idea of fun, or anything. And he knew that Sharon didn't need... reinforcements, or a cheerleading squad or whatever. But if Jack was only gonna tell her more of what he'd told her that afternoon at the station, well, Rusty didn't think that was cool, either.

He closed the bedroom door behind him and went right back to the aimless pacing he'd been doing before.

He couldn't tell how things were going with Jack, but by the way Sharon had looked when he'd gone out into the living room, not well. He hated that she had to deal with that, too, on top of everything else – and although, technically, Rusty wasn't to blame for that bit, he still felt responsible. If he hadn't walked in on them earlier, at the station, and if he hadn't overheard Jack, then maybe Sharon wouldn't have gotten so mad and…he still couldn't believe she'd actually called her lawyer.

There was something scary about the whole thing.

He hadn't been trying to eavesdrop, earlier, but they'd been talking right in front of the break room, in the middle of the corridor, and their voices carried, okay? And he'd have turned back, except then he'd heard his name and why would he be the topic of Sharon and Jack fighting? He'd paused uncertainly in his tracks.

Do you really think you're doing the kid any favors? He'll turn eighteen eventually, and then what?

Sharon's reply had sounded pretty cross. By the time Rusty had gotten over his own churning anxiety enough to properly listen to what they were saying, again, the conversation had turned to … other things, personal things, things he definitely had no business listening to. He'd decided to make his presence known, then, because really, anyone could've walked by and heard the two of them, and he didn't think Sharon had realized that.

Propelled by the impulse to let her know he was there, he'd turned the corner just in time to hear Jack throw the most awful, wrong, stupid, awful thing at her, and then Rusty had wished that he could've just turned and walked away and pretend he'd never heard any of it. But by then they'd already seen him and it had been too late.

...look at Rusty, he left, too. Why do you think that was?

...probably gonna end up wishing that he'd stayed gone.

He'd never forget the expression on Sharon's face. The very next second Jack had spotted him, and then they'd both turned around, and Jack had just kept talking, even as Rusty had wanted nothing more than for the ground to open up and swallow him...

… you should prepare yourself for all the strings attached, kid.

...'cause you're just never gonna hear the end of it…

Rusty groaned at the memory, and emptied the entire water glass in one long gulp.

Sharon didn't think that, did she? She didn't think he was like that, she couldn't think so… could she? Because he wasn't, and he didn't think that way, and hadn't run from her, no matter what Jack said. Jack was wrong and it was really, really important that Sharon realize that... because for the first time, Rusty was maybe beginning to understand why she'd been having such a hard time forgiving him.

And it was possible that it wasn't entirely about him, at all.

Running away that day was possibly the stupidest thing he'd ever done, Rusty knew that. He'd known that from about ten minutes in, really, when the Greyhound bus had pulled out of the terminal and was about to merge onto the I-5, and Rusty's blind anger had faded just enough for him to process that he'd just boarded some random bus to he-couldn't-even-remember-where, and that Sharon was going to kill him.

He'd been a little conflicted, then, about what to do, because on the one hand he was still really angry and Sharon was being so unreasonable and you know what, he could totally take care of himself, okay? Maybe this would show her that he didn't need guard dogs, he could get around the city just fine on his own and if she liked that security detail so much, she could have them follow her around like a pair of overgrown, heavily armed ducklings!

On the other hand, random bus. Heading out of LA. And Sharon would kill him.

By the time they'd hit the freeway, he'd made a plan to get off at Bakersfield and catch a ride back. And if Sharon yelled at him when he returned, well, it wasn't Rusty's problem, because she was being totally unfair anyway, and like, maybe if she'd spend more time looking for the psycho who was sending him threat letters and less time trying to figure out new ways to ruin what little freedom Rusty had left, then they'd all be better off!

But also, he'd hoped that she wouldn't yell too much.

Either way, the bus wasn't stopping until Bakersfield, so it wasn't as though Rusty could have done anything about anything until then, so why bother worrying about it? That train of thought had calmed him down when he'd started to freak out about two minutes after leaving LA – secretly, he'd begun to hope that maybe Sharon wouldn't even notice that he'd left, and he could sneak back into the station and pretend like nothing had happened.

Well. Sharon had noticed.

Worse, he'd dozed off like an idiot and slept right through the Bakersfield stop, and the next two stops as well, and by the time he'd woken up the names on the road signs had been totally unfamiliar and he'd really freaked out, then. Having dumped his phone somewhere on his angry flight from the police building, he'd literally left himself zero ways of letting Sharon know where he was... and at that point, there had been nothing to do but wait until the bus reached its destination.

It had been almost one a.m. when they'd reached the Stockton terminal. He'd considered calling Sharon from a payphone, but it was one a.m., okay? And by then she'd definitely have noticed that he'd run off, and she was probably furious, and the least he could do was wait until the next morning to call at a decent hour.

(When he'd explained that, Sharon had actually let out a strangled, disbelieving sort of half-sob that was the saddest sound he'd ever heard her make. And he was an idiot.)

Stockton, it had turned out, was cold. Rusty had found a couple of uncomfortable plastic chairs near one of the gates and tried to sleep there until he could catch a bus back the next morning, but some stupid security guard had given him a hard time about it and honestly, Stockton people were like, not chill. So he'd ended up on the streets, and hungry too, and about ten minutes into trying to figure a way out of that, he was really missing Sharon. And his room. And like… not freezing.

In the end, he'd stumbled across one of those ancient all-night cinemas, and he'd bought a ticket for $7.50 and spent the night watching an Alfred Hitchcock marathon, which hadn't been the easiest thing to fall asleep to, but at least the movie theater had been warm. He'd holed up in the farthest corner seats, eaten a tub of popcorn that had done very little for his hunger, and tried to ignore the handful of couples making out in some of the other seats, as well as the two creepy guys who looked like they could be characters in the movies, themselves.

In the morning he'd discovered his next problem, which was that his remaining twenty dollars didn't cover a ticket back to LA. The lady behind the counter had been ridiculously unsympathetic to his problem, and she just had not seemed to get it that he had to get back to LA and didn't she understand that a major state criminal case depended on him? Didn't she like, watch TV?!

He'd called Sharon, then, around nine a.m. or so, but she hadn't picked up and he hadn't been able to figure out what to say in a voicemail because… well, he'd been in Stockton, broke and hungry and having spent the night trying to fall asleep to the sound of screaming and crows. He hadn't been sure exactly how to spin that into 'I can take care of myself, stop worrying' yet.

Plus, Sharon would've insisted that she come pick him up because security (ugh), and she'd have had to drive like, a million hours to get there and he'd already given her a lot more trouble than she deserved, probably… and besides, she'd have made him go to the police or something and wait for her, and then he'd have been stuck there for hours and… it was easier for everyone if he just found his own way back.

Only between the financial wrinkle and the fact that his stomach had been growling louder every minute – and damn it, why the hell was Stockton so cold, was it like, in Canada or something?! –, getting back had been… challenging. And miserable. And he'd kind of lost his handle on things just a little bit, ending up in a couple of different towns and why was no one getting that he had to get back to LA like, asap, and…

…anyway.

He'd been so happy to see Sharon again, he'd literally felt his entire face light up when he'd spotted her at that awful rest stop, and he'd jumped up from his seat and he might've run up and hugged her, honestly, (he'd been really hungry, okay?), if his brain hadn't caught up a second later and processed her expression. And then he'd remembered that she was probably going to kill him.

Well, she hadn't.

But she hadn't fully forgiven him, either, and the past couple of weeks had been pretty awful, and Sharon kept looking so sad and tired and he just didn't know how to fix anything anymore, and now she wanted to divorce her husband and Rusty wasn't entirely convinced that that wasn't his fault, too.

The bathroom door creaked open, and he could hear Jack heading back into the living room.

Sharon looked up at the sound of her husband's footsteps. Her hands automatically tightened around the glass of water in front of her on the table; it was too cold to the touch to offer any comfort.

"Jack –"

"Listen, Sharon –"

She inclined her head, a silent gesture for him to go first.

"I was thinking, in there," he started, sighing as he returned the toothbrush to his suitcase. "Maybe you're right. Might be better for both of us if I slept somewhere else tonight. It's early enough to find a decent hotel… or I suppose my brother will do, in a pinch…" Another sigh, and he lowered the top of the suitcase. "That way you can have your space and I can… think about things."

Sharon watched him pull the zipper shut. Her hands shook a little on the table top.

"I'm sorry we didn't get to have any of that cake…" he continued, "you can tell me how it was. Make sure the kid has some, maybe."

"Jack…"

He gave her that flat, demoralized look of his, the one that somehow managed to say 'I expect nothing at all from you', even though, Sharon had learned, it usually meant the exact opposite.

"I…" And damn it, she was feeling like the bad guy all over again. "Jack, I know this wasn't the best time, or the best way, to have this discussion," she admitted. "And I'm not… sure… how to do it better. I'm sorry."

And Jack looked at her again, all wordless disappointment.

"I know Sharon," he said dispiritedly, and picked up the handle of his suitcase.

She thought about telling him that he didn't have to go, but changed her mind. He was right: it was easier for both of them if he didn't spend the night. Not easier on her conscience, but then there was no way to appease that and stick to her decisions.

She stood up from the table almost automatically as he reached the door.

"Well…I hope you have a good night," Jack sighed one last time, glancing at her over his shoulder.

"Jack… we need to talk about this again," she asked tiredly. "Tomorrow, if you want, or the day after. But we'll need to have a proper conversation, work out the details…"

He gave her a long look. "Looks to me like you've got everything worked out already," he remarked.

"Jack –"

But he just shook his head. "Yeah… Whatever you say, Sharon." He reached for the doorknob, pulling the door open. "Guess I'll… see you later, then," he told her.

And with that he was gone.

Sharon leaned against the door for a long moment, shivering slightly, as the sound from the suitcase wheels faded down the hall and the apartment around her once again fell into silence. Her eyes closed briefly and she let out a slow, weary breath.

To her surprise, she didn't feel like crying.

Not much, at least. She was tired near to the point of tears, sure enough, but beyond that bone-deep exhaustion, beyond the pangs of sadness in her heart and the vague sense of guilt and unease and bitterness, there was a sort of relief inside her. The band-aid-ripping kind of sensation. It hurt, but at least she'd gotten the words out there. It was all she could have asked of herself tonight.

But yes, it did hurt. It was a dull pain, a familiar pain, that settled in the pit of her stomach and caused a bitter taste at the back of her throat. Once, in the beginning, it had been sharp enough to bring her to tears, but over the years she'd gotten used to holding it in, pushing it down until it dispersed to the sort of muted ache that she felt now. Even that had been enough to make her want to cry, sometimes. But not tonight. Maybe it was a sign that she was doing the right thing.

Or maybe she'd just cried all her tears two nights before.

Jack's arrival had filled her cup to the brim, too abruptly to leave her able to handle it. She hadn't meant to do it, but between her tiredness, the residual whatever-it-was from Rusty's running away, and her estranged husband's sudden reappearance, it had all been too much to deal with on the spot. She'd retreated, fled almost, to her bedroom, with barely a word spoken to either of them.

She'd retreated to regroup and process things, but instead, the second that the bedroom door had closed behind her, everything had caught up with her all at once.

In a way, maybe that had set off the chain of events that had brought her here, tonight, to the conversation that she'd just ended with Jack. Or maybe it had been the fight they'd had earlier today at the police station. Or maybe it was all of it, not just in the past two days, but everything before that, too, building up to the inexorable dissolution of the marriage that had – for better or worse – been a part of her for over half her life.

Sharon walked over to the kitchen and filled the kettle and set it on the stove with slow, economic movements. Then she leaned against the fridge and literally watched the water heat, her thoughts drifting back to that night, again.

Two nights before...

Even as she'd fled she'd told herself that she was too old for this, too old to run off to her room and cry, too grown-up and too old. But there was a part of her that had never felt 'too grown-up' for anything. The part that secretly wanted to go see silly children's movies when they premiered and pick her own apples and turn on her siren whenever some jerk cut her off in traffic, the part that laughed out loud when people were ridiculous and cared about matching earrings to her clothes and still got insecure when someone talked over her. That small part of her had always been there, timeless, ageless; that night, it had been that part that had caused her to slide down against the closed door and hug her knees to her chest, hide her face in her arms and cry.

She cried because she was so tired, and sad, and Jack's return was the last thing she needed and it was so unfair for him to be there, just then, in her home, and she hated how things were and she was just so, so tired. She was crying for all the things that she'd done wrong – because whatever she told herself, she must've done things wrong, there were two people in her living room right then and in some way both of them evidence of her failures. That thought tied her stomach up in knots and the tears just keep running hot down her cheeks.

There was pain that she'd thought she'd gotten over long ago, and fresh pain that she didn't even know how to get over, and an overwhelming, irrational fear that no matter what, she was doing everything wrong and how long before others she loved would leave her, too? It made no sense to think that, she knew, but knowing it in her head didn't stop the heartrending dread that coursed through her; she was already sitting on the floor but even so the pain was enough to make her want to double over. How, how had things gotten to this point? What had she missed along the way?

She was trying, trying so hard to bring things back to normal with Rusty, after his flight, and she knew that she was failing. More, the failure came entirely from her, because he wanted nothing more than to go back to normal and she just couldn't get over it, couldn't say or do things right and – the frustration of it wrenched silent sobs from her throat. And now here was Jack, living proof of so many of her other failures, and she was just completely unprepared to deal with him, too.

There was just no energy left in her to handle his return and whatever else he wanted from her this time. She was too exhausted to dance their usual dance. The mere thought of having to do that, too, made her want to scream at the injustice of it all.

But of course she couldn't, so instead she just sat there on her bedroom floor and let the weight of all sorts of things she hadn't even known she was feeling crash over her. She managed to make her way away from the door, until she found herself sitting in the far corner of the room, by the bed, her back against the wall. Pulling down one of the pillows, she hugged it to her chest and lowered her face against it, and gave up even trying to stop the tears.

Now...

She'd cried herself to sleep, that night – with difficulty, too, because just getting up from the floor and going to bed had been an effort; each time she'd wanted to lie down, her body had kept trying to curl up into a fetal position until Sharon had lost patience with herself and, wrapping her arms tight around body, forced the silent, racking sobs to subside.

It was possible that she'd felt a little better after all that, but if she had, she didn't remember, because by the time her mind and body had started cooperating again, she'd been left too exhausted to process much of whatever she was feeling. There had been anger, and indignation, and sadness, but maybe somewhere past all that she'd worked some things out, who knew? She did know that there had still been tears trailing down her cheeks when she'd woken up the next morning, and then she'd had to spend a long time in the bathroom trying to work some sort of magic with her make-up.

They hadn't talked about it – and it may have been because Rusty and Jack were trying to spare her dignity or respect her privacy, but more likely they just had no idea, and Sharon was fine with that. Maybe they credited her behavior to her being angry, or tired, or a little upset. Jack knew well enough that there were times when she wanted to be left alone, and she'd stopped giving him explanations a long time ago. Rusty knew well enough what it felt like to want to be left alone, and was generally disinclined to ask about these things anyway. And so neither of them had brought it up beyond some vague half-inquiries the next morning, and that had been that.

But even if she didn't talk about it, and tried not to think about it, maybe something had changed within her. Maybe crashing that hard had somehow made her more receptive to what needed to be done. Maybe it had opened her eyes to why she was having such a hard time getting over Rusty's runaway incident, and made her rethink some of her bigger decisions in life.

Or maybe it had just left her sufficiently drained and out of kilter as to act rashly, and she'd come to regret everything as soon as she managed to feel solid ground under her feet again.

It was hard to tell.

"Sharon…?"

She hadn't realized she'd closed her eyes until they instinctively opened again at the sound of Rusty's voice. She was still leaning against the fridge door; her foster son was standing a few feet away, giving her one of those slightly wary looks of his.

There was no point to chide him now for leaving his room again; obviously he wasn't interrupting anything. Instead she mustered up the most amused smile she could and asked, "Are you thirsty again?"

He cleared his throat, "No. I was just… uh…"

But he was saved from having to finish that sentence by the sound of the kettle whistling. Sharon walked over to the stove and turned off the heat, then opened the cabinet to get out a mug.

She looked over her shoulder to him. "Would you like some tea?"

Rusty latched on to the offer with an eager nod. "Yeah."

"What kind?"

"Uh… whatever… you're having…?"

Hardly a surprising answer, seeing as how his preferred kind of tea came in a bottle and was half lemonade.

With a half-smile, Sharon pulled a second mug out, then the first variety of herbal tea she could get her hands on. Chamomile. It would have to do. She took down the honey jar as well.

"So... uh…" Rusty watched her cautiously as she moved both mugs to the bar, "Jack…left?"

She met his eyes, and his shoulders tensed a little, as though he were expecting her to scold him. Far from her intentions; instead, she just mulled her answer over as she inhaled, then nodded once, slowly. "We…agreed," (not the best word, but what else to call it?), "that it might be…easier, if he found different sleeping accommodations for tonight." And presumably, for future nights as well, although that kind of thing was a little hard to predict, with Jack.

Rusty cleared his throat in some sort of acknowledgment. "And are you… okay with that…?"

This time she only glanced up briefly while pouring the water into each mug. "Jack sleeping on our couch was hardly an ideal arrangement for anyone involved," she replied, but the boy pressed on:

"No, but I mean… are you okay with him… leaving?"

Sharon smiled a little sadly. "Honey, Jack has been coming and leaving for a very long time. If anything, tonight is one of the few times that I've been a part of that decision, and more or less informed as to where he went." The humor in her voice held a note of wistfulness, but she gave him a warm look. "So…yes. Don't worry about me. I'm fine."

"Okay…" Rusty didn't sound too convinced, but there was nothing else for him to say. He sniffed at the mug of tea and tried his best to hold back a grimace, then surreptitiously poured about five teaspoons of sugar into it and continued to watch Sharon as she absently stirred the honey into hers with a distant, pensive expression.

Next up, we get to see what Jack does after the discussion he and Sharon just had. Also I *think* we might see more of Gavin. And finally, *finally* Sharon might start telling Rusty her story, which in theory was supposed to be the entire main plot of this, before I realized I want Sharon to divorce just as much as I want her to share more things about herself with Rusty! Don't we all want that?

Thank you for reading!